Ant Farm (group)
Ant Farm was an avant-garde architecture, graphic arts, environmental design practice, founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels. Ant Farm's work made use of popular icons in the United States, as a strategy to redefine the way those were conceived within the country's imaginary. Doug Michels and Chip Lord met in 1968, when Michels gave a guest lecture at Tulane University, where Lord was attending school; the two met again in August 1968 at an architecture workshop directed by Lawrence Halprin in San Francisco, It was here where the two founded Ant Farm. We wanted to be an architecture group, more like a rock band. We were telling Sharon that we would be doing underground architecture, like underground newspapers and underground movies, she said,'Oh, you mean like an Ant Farm?' and that's all it took. It was Ant Farm; the founding of the name was indicative of how Ant Farm worked: the right idea comes, everybody acknowledges it is the right idea and adopts it. The group's initial goal was to reform education, but with little funding and Lord relocated to Houston, where they both became visiting professors at the University of Houston.
It was in Houston where the group first began putting on performances, including their "inflatables." Lord and Michels were joined by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier. The group was a self-described "art agency that promotes ideas that have no commercial potential, but which we think are important vehicles of cultural introspection." In addition to their architecture works, the collective was well known for their counter-cultural performances and media events, such as Media Burn. Their installation, Cadillac Ranch, remains an icon of American popular culture. Ant Farm disbanded in 1978. Doug Michels went on to design the unbuilt statue The Spirit of Houston. Chip Lord retired from teaching in 2010. Although he is retired, Lord is continuing his work in film and digital media. Doug Michels died on June 12, 2003 at Eden Bay near Sydney, Australia due to an unfortunate accident—just 17 days before what would have been his 60th birthday; the free speech movement and the antiwar demonstrations in San Francisco influenced the group Ant Farm.
In 1967, the group partook in the Summer of Love in San Francisco. They embraced the youth cultures' communal living, sexual freedom, hallucinogenic drugs, utopian ideals. In addition, they adapted the do-it-yourself ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog in their work; the Bay Area became the center such as performance and video. Ant Farm began incorporated it into their work. Like many other avant-garde artists, the group was determined build outside of the conventional architecture. In the early years of their collaboration, Ant Farm out to create an alternative architectures suited to a nomadic lifestyle; the architects Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Solari, utopian Archigram inspired their early works of the giant inflatable structures. Ant Farm traveled America with a tour of "architectural performances" during which the group unfurled its anti-architectural Inflatables - inexpensive, portable shelters made of vinyl that provided the stage for lectures and "happenings." Anyone who wanted to make an inflatable could buy Ant Farm's Inflatocookbook.
The inflatables expressed the Ant Farm's ideals for freedom. Their "aim was to develop the perception of the body in space while working through the pleasurable and anxious feelings prompted by social interaction" In collaboration with architect Richard Jost, Ant Farm designed and built a Futurist ferro-cement residence; the house is noted for its curvilinear and organic shapes, inspired by the Apollo 11 lunar landing. In 2004, the group described the house as "a ruin", in 2006, Dwell architecture magazine stated that the house was "partially submerged in a Texas swamp", but Chip Lord corresponded that it was not, but was "undergoing a renovation supervised by Richard Jost, working with the owner"; as of 2009 it was still a private residence, reported as being somewhat overgrown, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. In Amarillo, Ant Farm half-buried a row of 10 used and junk Cadillac automobiles dating from 1949 to 1963, nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The installation is set up to the west of Amarillo near Interstate I-40 on the famous former Route 66. Ant Farm began planning Media Burn while in Houston. Michels and Lord were interested in having the event sponsored, first proposed Media Burn to the Walker Art Center. Planning for Media Burn lasted six months, because the duo wanted it to be "more than a spectacle." It was on July 4, 1975 when Ant Farm performed their "ultimate media event." This event involved crashing a modified 1959 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible—it sported Eldorado side trim, hence it is mistaken for an Eldorado Biarritz—known as their "Phantom Dream Car," through a pyramid of televisions in the parking lot of the Cow Palace in Daly City, bordering San Francisco. Prior to the main event of crashing the car through the stacked televisions, Doug Hall, whom was presented as President John F. Kennedy, gave a speech in which he presented the "Phantom Dream Car." Lord and Michels designed the Phantom Dream Car to appear futuristic, have an "Apollo element.
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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, cultural theorist, political commentator, photographer. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality, he wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, social history, Western foreign policy, popular culture. Among his best known works are Simulacra and Simulation and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, his work is associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929, his grandparents were his father a policeman. During high school, he became aware of pataphysics, said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's thought, he became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. There he studied German language and literature, which led him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.
While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann. While teaching German, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology completing and publishing in 1968 his doctoral thesis Le Système des Objets under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching Sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become involved in the events of May 1968. During this time, Baudrillard worked with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary". At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant Maître de Conférences becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même. In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the United States, in 1973, the first of several trips to Kyoto, Japan, he was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan.
In 1986 he moved to IRIS at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline, after ceasing to teach full-time, he identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to academia. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity, being published in the French- and English-speaking popular press, he nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and collaborated at the Canadian theory and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited, he participated in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies from its inception in 2004 until his death. In 1999–2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.
In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts", at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany. Baudrillard's published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including: Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, he is seen as a part of the post-structuralist philosophical school. In common with many post-structuralists, his arguments draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning is created through difference—through what something is not. In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects and signs are situated in a web of meaning.
From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His writing portrays societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a "total" understanding of the world—that remains elusive. In contrast to Post-structuralism, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the subject may try to understand the object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies this never produces the
Leibniz Institute of European History
The Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany, is an independent, public research institute that carries out and promotes historical research on the foundations of Europe in the early and late Modern period. Though autonomous in nature, the IEG has close connections to the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 2012, it joined the Leibniz Association. Founded in 1950 on the initiative of Raymond Schmittlein, the head of the Direction Générale des Affaires Culturelles of the French military government, the new institution had the aim of helping to overcome the longstanding nationalist and confessional divides between the European states and their populations through “non-prejudiced” historical research and, in so doing, to support Franco-German reconciliation in particular, it was intended that research conducted at the Institute would assist a revision of the history books, enable the establishment of a “European history book”. This idea had surfaced in the late-1940s during dialogues between German and French historians in Speyer, which Schmittlein had set up in 1948/49.
It became mixed with concepts of a Christian, “Occidental” history which were prevalent among a group of German historians, which included the medieval historian Fritz Kern based in Bonn. He had headed the German delegation in 1948; the Catholic theologian and church historian Joseph Lortz had participated in these dialogues. The first plans for the foundation of an “Institute for cultural and religious history” were drafted by Kern, who – as the first director of the Institute – in addition to the didactic goal wanted to realize a multi-volume history of the world that would be based on religion and would adopt a universal-historical perspective. Lortz served as an additional founding director. In 1950, he took up an extraordinary professorship for western religious history, created for him in the philosophical faculty of Mainz University; these founding aims and history explain the structure of the research institute, established in 1950 under the title “Institut für Europäische Geschichte”, with its department of “Western Religious History” and its department of “Universal History”.
Both departments were headed up by a director. Today, the directors hold professorships at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; the IEG's research on the historical foundations of Europe considers both integrating and antagonistic movements and forces shaping the geographic continent as well as the cultural context of Europe over centuries and setting up its distinct characteristics in contrast to the other continents. Research at the IEG thus targets pan-European and European communicative connections originating in bilateral and multilateral transfer processes, their protagonists did not have to be aware of their taking part in "Europe-wide" interrelations. The religious and confessional developments of these transfer processes are one important focus of research at the IEG. Research on the foundations of Europe maps the history of conscious reflections on Europe and Europeans, analyses attempts at political unification, existing political plans for Europe, ideal conceptions and utopian visions of Europe – always including anti-European ideas in the picture.
An integral element of this approach is the history of historiography on Europe. This conceptual formulation includes a reflexion of theory and methods of historical research on Europe; the Leibniz Institute of European History questions the focus of interest of'European' approaches and reflects the underlying ideological propositions in historical research on the history of Europe. The Institute’s charter defines the primary goals of the IEG as follows: "Research on the religious and intellectual traditions of Europe, their development and crises, on religious differences, their effects and the possibilities of overcoming these differences", "Europe-focused fundamental research which assists the historical understanding of the process of the coalescence of Europe and the individual historical paths of the European states and peoples". In accordance with its charter, IEG pursues these goals through: its own research projects conducted by staff members individually or jointly with other academics from Germany and abroad the funding it provides to young postgraduate researchers from Europe and the other continents, who work on research projects on European history and who live at the Institute as fellows and scholarship holders collaboration with other institutions in Germany and abroad that pursue similar aims its own publications and the support it provides to other publications, in which contentious aspects of research on European history are discussed the transfer of knowledge to the wider society The Leibniz Institute of European History researches the historical foundations of Europe in the modern era.
Its research projects are developed in an interdisciplinary way by the sections "Abendländische Religionsgeschichte" and "Universalgeschichte". They span the historical periods from the beginning of the early modern period to contemporary history; the central theme of the current research programme at the IEG is "negotiating difference" – the ways in which difference is established and enabled in its religious, cultural and social dimensions. Together with the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the IEG runs the graduate project "The Christian Churches and the Challenge of'Europe'”, part-funded by the German Research Foundation
Torches of Freedom
"Torches of Freedom" was a phrase used to encourage women's smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the women's liberation movement in the United States. Cigarettes were described as symbols of equality with men; the term was first used by psychoanalyst A. A. Brill when describing the natural desire for women to smoke and was used by Edward Bernays to encourage women to smoke in public despite social taboos. Bernays hired women to march while smoking their “torches of freedom” in the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929, a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers. Before the twentieth century smoking was seen as a habit, corrupt and inappropriate for women. Dutch painters used cigarettes as a symbol of human foolishness in the 17th century and in the 19th century, cigarettes were perceived as props of “fallen women” and prostitutes. Women’s smoking was seen as immoral and some states tried to prevent women from smoking by enforcing laws. In 1904 a woman named Jennie Lasher was sentenced to thirty days in jail for putting her children’s morals at risk by smoking in their presence and in 1908 the New York City Board of Aldermen unanimously passed an ordinance that prohibited smoking by women in public.
In 1921 a bill was proposed to prohibit women from smoking in the District of Columbia. Some women’s groups fought against women smoking; the International Tobacco League lobbied for filmmakers to refrain from putting women smoking cigarettes in movies unless the women being portrayed were of “discreditable” character and other women’s groups asked young girls to sign pledges saying that they would not use tobacco. These groups saw smoking as a threat, yet during World War I as women took the jobs of men who had gone to war, they began smoking though it was still considered a taboo act. Cigarettes were a way for women to fight for equal rights as men. For women the cigarette came to symbolize “rebellious independence, glamour and sexual allure for both feminists and flappers.” Cigarette companies began selectively advertising to women in the late 1920s. In 1928 George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, realized the potential market that could be found in women and said, “It will be like opening a gold mine right in our front yard.”
Yet some women who were smoking were seen as smoking incorrectly. In 1919 a hotel manager said that women “don’t know what to do with the smoke. Neither do, they make a mess of the whole performance.” Tobacco companies had to make sure that women would not be ridiculed for using cigarettes in public and Philip Morris sponsored a lecture series that taught women the art of smoking. To expand the number of women smokers Hill decided to hire Edward Bernays, who today is known as the father of public relations, to help him recruit women smokers. Bernays decided to attempt to eliminate the social taboo against women smoking in public, he gained advice from psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who stated that it was normal for women to smoke because of oral fixation and said, “Today the emancipation of women has suppressed many of their feminine desires. More women now do the same work. Many women bear no children. Feminine traits are masked. Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.” In 1929 Bernays decided to pay women to smoke their “torches of freedom” as they walked in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York.
This was a shock because until that time, women were only permitted to smoke in certain places such as in the privacy of their own homes. He was careful when picking women to march because “while they should be good looking, they should not look too model-y” and he hired his own photographers to make sure that good pictures were taken and published around the world. Feminist Ruth Hale called for women to join in the march saying, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” Once the footage was released, the campaign was being talked about everywhere, the women’s walk was seen as a protest for equality and sparked discussion throughout the nation and is still known today. The targeting of women in tobacco advertising led to higher rates of smoking among women. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold, in 1929 that percentage increased to 12%, in 1935 to 18.1%, peaking in 1965 at 33.3%, remaining at this level until 1977. In the 1990s, tobacco companies continued to advertise cigarettes as “torches of freedom” as they sought to expand their markets around the world.
Such brands as Virginia Slims continued to put forward the idea of modernity and freedom in new markets. The use of this imagery when advertising the cigarette has been targeted at women in countries where women are gaining more equality and liberation; the images used in the advertising campaigns differ by region. In Spain they use images of women in masculine jobs, such as a fighter pilot, to appeal to young women-- and the smoking rates among young women in Spain increased from 17% in 1978 to 27% in 1997. Tobacco companies are using the cigarette as an image of emancipation in eastern and central Europe where cigarettes are shown as symbols of Western freedom. In the 1990s Germany was a focus for advertising, between 1993 and 1997 the smoking rates among women aged 12–25 in Germany went from 27% to 47% though the increase in men’s smoking for the same age group is much smaller. In Japan, various cigarettes advertised to women have encouraged women to be unique. A survey by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare showed that between 1986 and 1999 smoking among women
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retirement of William P. Sisler in 2017, the university appointed as Director George Andreou; the press maintains offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard Square, in London, England. The press co-founded the distributor TriLiteral LLC with Yale University Press. TriLiteral was sold to LSC Communications in 2018. Notable authors published by HUP include Eudora Welty, Walter Benjamin, E. O. Wilson, John Rawls, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Jay Gould, Helen Vendler, Carol Gilligan, Amartya Sen, David Blight, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Piketty; the Display Room in Harvard Square, dedicated to selling HUP publications, closed on June 17, 2009. HUP owns the Belknap Press imprint, which it inaugurated in May 1954 with the publication of the Harvard Guide to American History; the John Harvard Library book series is published under the Belknap imprint.
Harvard University Press distributes the Loeb Classical Library and is the publisher of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, the Murty Classical Library of India. It is distinct from Harvard Business Press, part of Harvard Business Publishing, the independent Harvard Common Press, its 2011 publication Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act by Joe Roman received the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Hall, Max. Harvard University Press: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-38080-6. Official website Blog of Harvard University Press
Crowd psychology
Crowd psychology known as mob psychology, is a branch of social psychology. Social psychologists have developed several theories for explaining the ways in which the psychology of a crowd differs from and interacts with that of the individuals within it. Major theorists in crowd psychology include Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Steve Reicher; this field relates to the behaviors and thought processes of both the individual crowd members and the crowd as an entity. Crowd behavior is influenced by the loss of responsibility of the individual and the impression of universality of behavior, both of which increase with crowd size; the psychological study of crowd phenomena was documented decades prior to 1900 as European culture was imbued with thoughts of the fin de siècle. This "modern" urban culture perceived that they were living in a different age, they witnessed marvelous experienced life in new ways. The population, now living in densely packed, industrialized cities, such as Milan and Paris, witnessed the development of the light bulb, photography, moving-picture shows, the telegraph, the bicycle, the telephone, the railroad system.
They experienced a faster pace of life and viewed human life as segmented, so they designated each of these phases of life with a new name. They created new concepts like "the Adolescent," "Kindergarten," "the Vacation," "camping in Nature," "the 5-minute segment," and "Travel for the sake of pleasure" as a leisure class to describe these new ways of life; the abstract concept of "the Crowd" grew as a new phenomenon in Paris and Milan, the largest city in the Kingdom of Italy. Legal reformers motivated by Darwin's evolutionary theory in the Kingdom of Italy, argued that the social and legal systems of Europe had been founded on antiquated notions of natural reason, or Christian morality, ignored the irrevocable biology laws of human nature, their goal was to bring social laws into harmony with biological laws. In pursuit of this goal, they developed the social science of criminal anthropology, tasked with the mission of changing the emphasis from one of the study of legal procedures to one of studying the criminal.
"Criminal anthropology," writes Giuseppe Sergi, "studies the delinquent in his natural place, to say, in the field of biology and pathology". The Italian Cesare Lombroso, professor of forensic medicine and hygiene in Turin advanced their agenda in 1878, when he published L'uomo delinquente, a influential book which went through five editions; the book, published in English in 1900 under the title "Criminal Man," solidified the links between social evolutionary theories and the fear of crowds with its concept of the "born" criminal as the savage in the midst of civilized society. The book influenced both European and American legal experts interested in assigning responsibility to individuals performing dubious behavior while engaged within a crowd; the first debate in crowd psychology began in Rome at the first International Congress of Criminal Anthropology on 16 November 1885. The meeting was dominated by Cesare Lombroso and his fellow Italians who emphasized the biological determinates. "Lombroso detailed before the first congress his theories of the physical anomalies of criminals and his classification of criminals as'born criminals', or criminals by occasion and mattoids.
Ferri expressed his view of crime as degeneration more profound than insanity, for in most insane persons the primitive moral sense has survived the wreck of their intelligence. Along similar lines were the remarks of Benedickt and Marro."A weak response was offered by the French, who put forward an environmental theory of human psychology. "M. Anguilli called attention to the importance of the influence of the social environment upon crime. Professor Alexandre Lacassagne thought that the atavistic and degenerative theories as held by the Italian school were exaggerations and false interpretations of the facts, that the important factor was the social environment."In Paris during 10–17 August 1889, the Italian school received a stronger rebuke of their biological theories during the 2nd International Congress of Criminal Anthropology. A radical divergence in the views between the Italian and the French schools was reflected in the proceedings. "Professor Lombroso laid stress upon epilepsy in connection with his theory of the'born criminal.'
Professor Léonce Pierre Manouvrier characterized Lombroso's theory as nothing but the exploded science of phrenology. The anomalies observed by Lombroso were met with in honest men as well as criminals, Manouvrier claimed, there is no physical difference between them. Baron Raffaele Garofalo, Alexandre Lacassagne and Benedikt opposed Lombroso's theories in whole or in part. Pugliese found the cause of crime in the failure of the criminal to adapt himself to his social surroundings, Benedikt, with whom Tarde agreed, held that physical defects were not marks of the criminal qua criminal." It is in this context that you have a debate between Scipio Sighele, an Italian lawyer and Gabriel Tarde, a French magistrate on how to determine criminal responsibility in the crowd and hence who to arrest. Literature on crowds and crowd behavior appeared as early as 1841, with the publication of Charles Mackay's book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; the attitude towards crowds underwent an adjustment with the publication of Hippolyte Taine's six-volume tome The Origins of Contemporary France.
In particular Taine's work helped to change the opinions of his contemporaries on the actions taken by the crowds during the 1789 Revolution. Many Europeans held him in great esteem. While it is difficult to di
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts and criticism and that marked a departure from modernism. The term has more been applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era. While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, postmodernism is defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality. Common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, truth, human nature, reason and social progress. Postmodern thinkers call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality and moral relativism and irreverence.
Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, linguistics, feminist theory, literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature and music. Postmodernism is associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson. Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, include assertions that postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture; the basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges.
However, most scholars today would agree that postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, film, drama, architecture and continental philosophy. Salient features of postmodernism are thought to include the ironic play with styles and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a "grand narrative" of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real and a "waning of affect" on the part of the subject, caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia. Since the late 1990s there has been a small but growing feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion". Structuralism was a philosophical movement developed by French academics in the 1950s in response to French Existentialism, it has been seen variously as an expression of High modernism, or postmodernism.
"Post-structuralists" were thinkers who moved away from the strict interpretations and applications of structuralist ideas. Many American academics consider post-structuralism to be part of the broader, less well-defined postmodernist movement though many post-structuralists insisted it was not. Thinkers who have been called structuralists include the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the semiotician Algirdas Greimas; the early writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the literary theorist Roland Barthes have been called structuralists. Those who began as structuralists but became post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze. Other post-structuralists include Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray; the American cultural theorists and intellectuals whom they influenced include Judith Butler, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Avital Ronell, Hayden White.
Post-structuralism is not defined by a set of shared axioms or methodologies, but by an emphasis on how various aspects of a particular culture, from its most ordinary, everyday material details to its most abstract theories and beliefs, determine one another. Post-structuralist thinkers reject Reductionism and Epiphenomenalism and the idea that cause-and-effect relationships are top-down or bottom-up. Like structuralists, they start from the assumption that people's identities and economic conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation, thus the French structuralists considered themselves to be espousing Constructionism. But they tended to explore how the subjects of their study might be described, reductively, as a set of essential relationships, schematics, or mathematical symbols.. Post-structuralists thinkers went further, questioning the existence of any distinction between the nature of a thing and its relationship to other things.
Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and ha
