Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Group Project on Postmodernism

For my group’s presentation we focused on the Postmodernism theory where I contributed by explaining Deleuze and Guatarri’s theory, we used media to show differences between Modernism and Postmodernism, and a fun group activity to help the class be able to understand this idea better. Modernism set the stage for what postmodernism would soon come to fully develop into. In saying that we did a brief overview of what modernism was and what it affected. The idea of Modernism affected identity, authority, unity, and rejected the Enlightenment thinking and existence of an all powerful creator. After giving a brief summery of what modernism was about we gave an example of modernism by showing a clip of the 1960’s version of Romeo and Juliet.

We introduced Postmodernism by explaining what the movement was all about and how it affected society. Complete beliefs of societies were questioned and everything was affected by this new idea of viewing the world. After we discussed modernism we explained the main ideas of what postmodernism is and what it affected in society. It displays rejection of objective truth, and the grand narrative. There is an emphasis or focus on linguistics and language. What used to be comfort in discovery or seeking knowledge became distrust of science, skepticism, and separation. Here’s a definition I found in the online dictionary of what postmodernism looks like for a little more in depth look, “any of a number of trends or movements in the arts and literature developing in the 1970s in reaction to or rejection of the dogma, principles, or practices of established modernism, esp. a movement in architecture and the decorative arts running counter to the practice and influence of the International Style and encouraging the use of elements from historical vernacular styles and often playful illusion, decoration, and complexity” (dictionary.com).
My contribution to the group was to explain how Deleuze and Guattari’s essay “A Thousand Plateaus” also emphasized these main ideas of eliminating the grand narrative and old forms that people would look to for models. He instead went into these ideas into more depth of describing the new way of looking at things, or rather through the postmodern lens. For example, “Deleuze and Guattari…describe a conflict between two modes of social organization that coincide with two models of reality. One is arboresque (treelike) and favors order and hierarchy. The other is rhizomatic (rootstalk) and favors an undoing of all such orders and hierarchies” (Rivkin 378). H took these analogies to help his readers to understand the idea he was trying to convey. The first model of reality being called arboresque or treelike because it has more of a hierarchal aspect or look to it, compared to the rhizomatic or rootstalk which grows horizontally and has its roots and shoots sent everywhere. For example, “A horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes” (dictionary.com). Which gives you not the hierarchal feel that you get from the arboresque mode, where there are people on the top and people on the bottom. The rhizome displays that that everyone’s equal and also that in the case of the grand narrative that there are many mini narratives instead. The other point that I talked about was this idea that much of what was in modernism had a fixed quality and there wasn’t a lot changing, which Deleuze and Guattari called territorialization. However, deterritorialization represented the postmodern view of constant deconstruction. The idea is that everything has already been constructed so we must work on new material by deconstructing. For example, “History…alternates between moments of fixity and power that they call ‘territorialization’ and moments of ‘deterritorialization’ or undoing, when fixed orders fall apart and are transformed” (Rivkin 378).
We also demonstrated this idea of postmodernism by creating an activity for the class by giving them construction paper and chalk to so that they could interpret the work painting “The Birth of Venus” that we displayed on the screen. It was very enlightening to see the variety of interpretation and deconstruction of the painting that everyone shared once they were done. Everyone had a different idea of what they believed the painting was trying to express. This coincides with the idea that I explained earlier of the rejection of the grand narrative and its new emphasis on individual experiences and voices. At the end of the presentation to sum up, we showed the postmodernist version of Romeo and Juliet that was made in the 1990’s, which was a perfect example of postmodernism at work in our society.

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