Mediation, Meaning and Representation

Discourse

Discourse is generally used to designate the forms of representation, codes, conventions and habits of language that produce specific fields of culturally and historically located meanings. [Read more...]

The Critical Media Project is a useful introduction to the politics of representation in contemporary media. The site contains a wide range of media artifacts that explore the politics of identity across issues of race and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.

 The simulacrum is never that/Which conceals the truth—it is/The truth which conceals that/There is none./The Simulacrum is true. Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

Three leading media voices explain what makes diverse representation a challenge. Some of the things we’re still discussing after The Ethics of Representation, featuring Marina Go, Peter McEvoy and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor.

Welcome to the semiotics and advertising web site. Click here for the basic tutorial on using semiotic techniques to analyze advertising and contemporary culture. For the hypertext essay on the male gaze, click here.

“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell”– Seth Godin

“The only way to truly grow in the marketing world is by creating meaning for people”– Seth Godin

As gaming technology continues to deliver us more human and realistic characters there is a still a distinct lack of diversity when it comes to racial representation in games.

Born in the year 1966 or 1973 or sometime in between,Of all the birthdates suggested - and generously substantiated - for postmodernism, 1966 is among the earliest and 1973 is among the latest. The first is put forth by Brian McHale in the mold of Virginia Woolf’s provocation dating (what we would later call) modernism’s onset “on or about December 1910,” though he fully acknowledges the contingent nature of gathering “punctual events” to mark what is essentially a transitional process (The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, 26-37). The second is put forth by Andreas Killen, who revises architect Charles Jencks’ similarly provocative pinpointing of postmodernism’s start up by one year (in the demolition of a major modernist landmark), and enumerates an array of world historical ruptures in support; 1973 is also the favored mark for Fredric Jameson, who, in his self-confessed “Americanocentric” account, similarly cites the “great shock” of a collection of crises all reverberating that in year (xx-xxi). the literary and cultural movement known as postmodernism, after a life of suffering at the hands of contemporary theory, died peacefully in the night, or violently during the day, sometime during the 1990s after the Wall came down and Beckett passed on,Federman meditates on Beckett’s “changing tense” at length in his essay for the Stuttgart seminar. or exactly on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

Under the guise of linguistic analyses in terms borrowed from the theoretician Ferdinand de Saussure, Barthes offers strangely simplistic accusations of what Marx called “false consciousness,” and, borrowing from Marx, he reveals the villain behind the curtain—it’s not a person, it’s a class. Perhaps no word appears in the book as often as “bourgeois,” and Barthes’s message throughout would be clearer if for every occurrence of the word “bourgeois,” a reader substituted “bad” and, for “petit bourgeois,” “very bad.” Given the metronomic predictability of the essays’ ideological framework and aims, it’s all the more fascinating to consider the circumstances under which the book came into being and why it is, and seems to have remained, so influential.

From the late 1980s onwards, novelists, artists, critics and art historians have foreseen the death of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon, in the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernism (2002), declared: “it’s over”. The contemporary period – starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and gathering momentum throughout the 1990s and beyond – is often said to have a distinct intensity, and thus feels like a moment in which, in the words of the narrator in Ben Lerner’s novel 10.04, we find “the world rearranging itself”. Postmodernism has taken various guises and, accordingly, there is no absolute consensus on what constituted it in the first place.

Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West. That is, whether postmodernism is seen as a new historical moment, a new sensibility or a new cultural style, popular culture is cited as a terrain on which these changes can be most readily found.