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Umberto Eco lectures about New Realism in Philosophy and the differences with the Post-Modernism at Italian Cultural Institute of New York. ON THE ASHES OF POSTMODERNISM:
A NEW REALISM
NOVEMBER 2011
MON 7 9:50AM-7PM
An international conference on an
increasingly emerging dimension of
philosophical debate.
The recent years of economic crisis and
geopolitical transformations have led
post-modernism to a critical point. Tenets
such as the one that reality is socially
constructed and ceaselessly modifiable,
and the other that truth and objectivity
are untenable notions, are showing clear
signs of rejection by a growing number of
thinkers. The 'facts' cannot be reduced to
interpretations and strike back claiming
a 'new realism'. World-famous public
intellectuals
Umberto Eco and Hilary Putnam
DOC]
MODERNISM/ — Yimg
xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/19493185/795861948/name/brooker
автор: P BROOKER — Цитируется: 133 — Похожие статьи
Published in the United States of America by Longman Publishing, New York ... 1 GEORG Lukacs, from The Meaning of Contemporary Realism ... 19 UMBERTO Eco, 'Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable' ... The volumes in this series all attempt to dramatise the differences, not necessarily with a view to resolving them but ...
CORPORATE FASCISM: The Destruction of America's Middle Class КОРПОРАТИВНЫЙ ФАШИЗМ: Разрушение Среднего класса Америки
Published on Aug 30, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTbvoiTJKIs
OriginalIntentDoc"119 videos A new kind of fascism has taken over America: the merger of corporations and government whereby corporate power dominates. With the emergence of ever-larger multinational corporations — due to consolidation facilitated by the Federal Reserve's endless FIAT money — the corporatocracy has been in a position to literally purchase the U.S. Congress.
A James Jaeger Film featuring RON PAUL, Congressman/Presidential Candidate; PAT BUCHANAN, Author/Political Analyst; G. EDWARD GRIFFIN, Author/Producer; EDWIN VIEIRA, Author/Constitutional Attorney and TED BAEHR, Founder of MovieGuide and Christian Film & TV Commission.
A result of the corporate purchase of Congress is that many of the nation's "laws" have been re-configured to benefit WE THE CORPORATIONS, rather than WE THE PEOPLE. "Laws" like NAFTA and GATT resulted in the outsourcing of the U.S. manufacturing base and the destruction of the Middle Class. This is nothing less than the 1 Percenters abusing the 99 Percenters. Known as "monopoly capitalism," "crony capitalism," "mercantilism," "globalization," "the new world order," and/or "free trade" — this is NOT your Grandfather's capitalism.
If you liked this film, help us make our new film "MOLON LABE — How the Second Amendment Guarantees America's Freedom". See http://www.molon.us
Get this, and other James Jaeger films, on higher quality DVD at www.MoviePubs.Net/dvds. Donations and DVD sales are what make these films possible. If you can't afford a DVD, please at least refer this movie and its URLs to your list of family, friends and associates.
Steven I sort of agree with what you said about Dr. Paul. He says that corporations have the right to petition the government; what we need is congressmen that don't respond. I think this will never happen. Plus, given that corporations are NOT people ("natural persons") I do not see how they are qualified to petition the government in the first place. What we need to do is keep voting out all of the incumbents UNTIL a congress finally arrives that will enact term-limits. With THAT congress in place, we then enact laws to stipulate that corporations are NOT natural persons with the same rights of flesh and blood people and their money is NOT speech.
Steven Yourke
2 weeks ago
+KbcBerlin American democracy is a bad joke — two parties, a choice between arsenic and strychnine. Most of us do not even bother to vote at all. It is all just a lot of hypocricy — just look at Obama, the perfect con-man. The best book I have read about the present American political situation is by political scientiest Sheldon Wolin, called "Decmoracy, Incorporated" in which he argues that the U S is a modern form of totalitarian state in which the corporations completely dominate the political process. The thought control over here is simply amazing — Orwell would be impressed.
Steven Yourke
5 months ago
Here is the basic problem I have with Ron Paul's thinking — he says, and I paraphrase, "Let's have a government that does not cater to the corporations and their lobbyists." Sounds great, but the problem is that in order to achieve this goal, we will have to completely abolish corporations, something that appears to me to be next to impossible
POSTMODERNISM, FASCISM & THE CHURCH: Dr. Gene Edward Veith
ПОСТМОДЕРНИЗМ, ФАШИЗМ & ЦЕРКОВЬ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWGlEcgKkFw
Published on Feb 13, 2013 While fascism was militarily defeated in WWII, the ideology of fascism is alive and well in some of the most unsuspected areas of our society. Dr. Gene Edward Veith is Provost and Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College and author of Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview. Dr. Veith explores the fascist influences that continue to permeate postmodern culture and thought in atheistic existentialism (Martin Heidegger and his following), literary deconstructionism (Paul De Man and his following), Darwinian evolution, relativism, mass media culture, violence, abortion, environmentalism, and rock concerts. Veith even demonstrates how fascism, perhaps unknowingly, permeates the current thinking in the Church, especially the postmodern Church. This interview is sure to stir up controversy and, hopefully, a careful rethinking of the culture, politics and the Church.
This interview is in its entirety but will also be included in an upcoming documentary film from Holy Bible Prophecy on the same subject matter. For more information visit: www.HolyBibleProphecy.org
" [PDF] http://www.iicnewyork.esteri.it/NR/rdonlyres/02607E5B-3CF3-4D03-ADDF-89E728215032/88637/NewsletterNOV_2011_LR.pdf
november 2011 newsletter — Italian Cultural Institute of New ...
www.iicnewyork.esteri.it/.../NewsletterNOV_20...Перевести эту страницу
1 нояб. 2011 г. — MODERNISM: A NEW REALISM. An international ... post-modernism to a critical point. Tenets such as ... Umberto Eco and Hilary Putnam and prominent philosophers ... experience set at the confluence of different. European ...
Why are we in Decline — Cultural Marxism
Почему мы в состоянии упадка — Культурный марксизм http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VggFao85vTs
Published on Nov 25, 2013 This answers the question — Why we are in decline in so many areas.
Traveling Through Hyperreality With Umberto Eco http://www.transparencynow.com/eco.htm
An early description of the way contemporary culture is now full of re-creations and themed environments was provided by Umberto Eco. In a brilliant essay, Eco saw that we create these realistic fabrications in an effort to come up with something that is better than real — a description that is true of virtually all fiction and culture, which gives us things that are more exciting, more beautiful, more inspiring, more terrifying, and generally more interesting than what we encounter in everyday life. In his description of Disney, Eco also saw that behind the facades lurks a sales pitch. Put these ideas together and you have a succinct characterization of the age, which is forever offering us something that seems better than real in order to sell us something. That makes Umberto Eco one of the forerunners of contemporary thinking on this subject.
(One) of the early theorists of simulation was the Italian writer and literary critic Umberto Eco, who went on a tour of America to get a firsthand look at the imitations and replicas that were on display in the nation's museums and tourist attractions. The essay that he subsequently wrote describing his trip, bore the odd title "Travels in Hyperreality," which made it sound more like science fiction than the brilliant work of culture criticism it turned out to be. The essay, which is dated 1975, also had an anomalous quality to it. Looking at it, today, it reads like a strange combination of Postmodern philosophy and something out of the Sunday travel section, full of sardonic descriptions and exaggerated denunciations that focus on the cultural shortcomings of America.
In the essay, Eco plays the role of both social critic and tour guide, taking the reader across an American landscape that he says is being re-created in the image of fake history, fake art, fake nature and fake cities. Along the way, he examines a reproduction of former President Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office, and goes through a reconstruction of a Medieval witch's laboratory, in which the recorded screams of what sound like witches at the stake can be heard in the background. He travels to wax museums, where artistic masterpieces are re-created and, often, reinvented in unexpected ways, resulting in such cultural mutations as a wax statue of the Mona Lisa and a "restored" copy of the Venus de Milo, with arms. He also enters what he refers to as "toy cities," including Western theme towns, where the buildings are stage sets, and actors in costume, engage in mock gunfights, for the benefit of visitors.
As Eco explains it, his trip is a pilgrimage in search of "hyperreality," or the world of "the Absolute Fake," in which imitations don't merely reproduce reality, but try improve on it.
Not unexpectedly, it leads him to the "absolutely fake cities," Disneyland and Disney World, with their re-created main streets, imitation castles and lifelike, animatronic robots. Here, he takes a boat ride through artificial caves, where he sees scenes of pirates sacking a city, in the attraction, Pirates of the Caribbean, and he travels through a ghost story that appears to have come to life, with transparent, dancing spirits, and skeletal hands lifting gravestones, in the attraction, the Haunted Mansion.
It is in the two Disneys, where he finds the ultimate expression of hyperreality, in which everything is brighter, larger and more entertaining than in everyday life. In comparison to Disney, he implies, reality can be disappointing. When he travels the artificial river in Disneyland, for example, he sees animatronic imitations of animals. But, on a trip down the real Mississippi, the river fails to reveal its alligators. "...You risk feeling homesick for Disneyland," he concludes, "where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can."
He also discovers something else in Disney: a place that no longer even pretends it is imitating reality, but is straightforward about the fact that "within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced."
But, perhaps his most interesting perception occurs when he discovers, behind all the spectacle in Disneyland, the same old tricks of capitalism, with a new twist: "The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing," he writes. He similarly finds in Disney, "An allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, Disneyland is also as place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots."
But what is most remarkable about Umberto Eco's essay is that, in the two decades since it was published, many of its more extreme observations, if not all its attacks on America, have been confirmed, and, in some instances, surpassed. America, today, is in the midst of a building boom in fantasy environments far more elaborate than anything Eco described, which are giving us a fictionalized landscape and a culture, that has many of the qualities of theme parks.
It seems that wherever one looks in this new landscape, one sees exaggerated variations on Eco's fake nature, fake art, fake history and fake cities. There are now replicas of rain forests, for example, which have been re-created on a massive scale, throughout the nation, along with future cities, and Jurassic parks, with animatronic dinosaurs. Los Angeles, the city, now includes Los Angeles, the themed mall, with facades that re-create the city's famous neighborhoods. Even the movies, where America's love affair with illusion started, are beginning to surround audiences with electronic images and stage sets, in a new generation of special effects theaters, creating another kind of fantasy environment that is starting to look a lot like fake reality.
The two capitals of this new culture of illusion are Las Vegas and a vastly enlarged Disney World. In just the last few years, Las Vegas, with its Egyptian pyramid-hotel, reproduction of the Empire State building, and fantasy version of the Grand Canyon, has become the city of imitations, that is turning itself into the world's first urban theme park. Meanwhile, Disney World has expanded, in typically orderly fashion, one module of imaginary worlds, at a time, becoming not a city that is a theme park, but a theme park that has become a city. Disney World has even developed its own suburbs of fantasy, that are filling central Florida with theme park sprawl, as miniature and not-so-miniature attractions, featuring Medieval knights, re-created Chinese buildings, and an animatronic King Kong, spring up around its outskirts.
The Deconstruction of Reality:
What Modernism and Postmodernism
Say About Surface and Depth
by Ken Sanes http://www.transparencynow.com/decon.htm
Modernism
Modern philosophy and science are based on the idea that the world of appearances is an illusion that both reveals and conceals an underlying reality. In many instances, this idea has also been attached to mystical systems of thought, as in some Eastern philosophies that view reality as a play of fictions manifested by a universal mind. In the West, it has been the intellectual undergirding for rationalism and empiricism, which have given rise to modern science and social science.
Today, not surprisingly, this idea is the dominant element in most fields of thought. In the social sciences, for example, psychoanalysis sees our conscious ideas as disguises that hide our true fears and desires. The sociologist Erving Goffman, who helped shape contemporary role theory and the study of social interaction, went further and viewed the self as an illusion in which we mistake the role we play for a substantive personal identity. Still other sociologists and social critics describe moral systems as social constructions — fictions — that pretend to be objective realities, an idea which was expressed by the title of a famous book (famous in academia, at least) from the 1960s: The Social Construction of Reality.*
