While many contemporary theorists and art historians draw on the insights of Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, language theory and vitalism, they argue that all lingering claims to ‘objectivity’ are misleading. Contemporary theory rejects belief in objective truth and the possibility of universal cultural narratives. It reflects the almost total collapse of belief in the possibility of a science of the study of culture – that is, that there can be an objective understanding of cultural development and change. Earlier methodologies, it is claimed, also failed to fully recognise the significance of the fact that visual artefacts are part of a much wider category of objects whose functions within society are closely aligned with political, economic, ethnic, psychological and gender issues.

It is understood that the nature of the arts and meaning in general is deeply embedded in mediating systems, and almost all areas of experience should therefore be seen to be like ‘texts’ to be ‘read’ and ‘decoded’. At the same time, these ‘texts’ are recognised as being more intricate and potentially more subversive than they might at first seem. Contemporary approaches therefore aim to show that paintings, sculptures and similar objects are not mysterious objects, and that it is misleading to think in terms of genius, inspiration, creativity or any other transcendental or non-material, non-socially-conditioned quality in the personality or soul of their maker. We are asked to consider that a visual artefact is determined in ways similar to those in which the production of Coca-Cola and washing machines is determined.

The general aim of theory is to be critical: to expose and demystify, and to continue the work of analysis by revealing the hidden ideological constructions underlying cultural forms. To this end, contemporary approaches shift the focus away from the maker of the visual artefact and onto the artefact or thing itself, and they analyse how it functions within the broader culture of man-made signs and languages. Stress is placed on language: representations use symbolic languages and so connect meaning to culture – that is, they are central to the ways society manipulates symbols in a structured format in order to produce a higher layer of meaning than the medium of the physical message. An important concept in postmodern semiotics, for example, is that signs and meaning are unlimited – one sign or set of signs can take the place of some other sign or set of signs in a theoretically infinite process.

The question ‘What is representation?’ therefore becomes central to the contemporary study of culture. The British theorist Stuart Hall identifies three possible approaches to the problem of language, ranked in increasing degrees of complexity. (1) Language simply reflects a meaning that already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events; (2) language expresses the intentions of the maker; and (3) meaning is constructed in and through language, and neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in the representation. This third position is the one taken by much contemporary theory. Meanings don’t mean: we construct meaning using representational systems of codes, concepts and signs. We must therefore not confuse the material world, where things and people exist, with the symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning and language operate. Thus contemporary theory stresses that it is not the material world that conveys meaning but the signs that society uses.

The focus in contemporary theory has shifted to reception – the conditions under which art is experienced – rather than looking at authorship or questions of expression. The emphasis is on the roles of language, power relations and economic motivations; in particular, contemporary approaches attack the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Visual artefacts are usually no longer regarded as inhabiting a special and detached field where they are considered autonomous and independent, or as possessing essentially non-practical purposes. Contemporary approaches are not concerned with visual artefacts as the expression of some sacred, spiritual or existential reality or experience. They are primarily carriers of meaning, vehicles for the distribution and reinforcement of cultural values. These theories are not primarily interested in visual artefacts as explorations and representations of beauty through style. On the contrary, it is important that artefacts are seen as symptoms of a deep social ‘crisis’. The notion ‘visual culture’ replaces what used to be called ‘art’ as a broad field of study, and ‘visual culture’ is more inclusive and less likely to rely upon value judgements. ‘Visual culture’ includes for study imagery in all kinds of visual media, such as comic books, electronic games, sports, cosmetics (and other fashion-related contexts) and politics, and imagery associated with leisure, travel, warfare, terrorism and so on.

It is also no longer so readily assumed that so-called radical or progressive art can be a potential zone of resistance. Instead, the complicit or collaborative relationship with power is emphasised. The essential recognition is that, while progressive art may hope to give form to the desire for release from social oppression, alienation and ‘false consciousness’, it is also a condition or cause of such problems. For example, as a necessary part of the production process, the arts participate in the injustices of the social and economic division of labour within capitalism. Much recent theory applies Marxism and Freudian psychoanalytic ideas to bring to our attention the relationship between consumerism – the social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts – and the realm of cultural production. In a consumer culture, an artist’s intended meaning is secondary to the meanings that the viewer/consumer perceives, which are driven by the release and manipulation of unconscious desires. Theories of gender point out that throughout most of recorded history men have imposed patriarchal (father-centred) social systems in which they have controlled and suppressed women; these theories also note, for instance, that in the dominant Western patriarchal heritage most artists are male, that art is made for male audiences and that art sometimes abuses or criticises women. Postcolonial theory addresses the cultural legacy of Western colonialism (the forced occupation and settlement by one nation of another), while multiculturalism, in postmodern theory, aims to broaden the range of cultures we attempt to study, in contrast to the prevailing traditional and narrowly Western-centred approaches that consider the great cultural accomplishments to have been made almost exclusively by males of European descent. Postcolonial theory urges people of every culture to recognise that they assess the qualities of other cultures through the eyes of their own culture and to remain open to the alternatives that are revealed. Contemporary theory also emphasises the transformative impact of new technologies and particularly how the information technology related to cyberspace has had an impact not only on the media but also on consciousness. Recently, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and other neurosciences have opened up the study of culture to the discoveries of research relating to the complex interactions between, on the one hand, aspects of consciousness that are ‘wired’ biologically and therefore closely linked to biological constants (that is, they are related to humankind’s permanent and unchanging biological make-up), and, on the other, aspects that are culturally conditioned and therefore related to the specifics of time and place. The field of neuroaesthetics, for example, signals a turn away from theories of representation and the social construction of signs towards aspects of image-making that are recognised to be precognitive and tied to a common ground of human experience.

Some general points can be made about contemporary theory, although, as we will see, there are many different approaches and no one theory agrees with all these points:

1. There is no objective, foundational, universal or absolute ‘truth’ or reality. Reality and truth are relative or contingent.
2. All meaning is only meaning in reference to, and in distinction from, other meanings. There is no meaning in any absolute sense, only ‘differences’ of meaning. Meanings are multiple, changing and contextual.
3. Values and identity are cultural constructs and not stable and objective truths or entities. The world we occupy is a construction of ideology – a false understanding of the way the world functions, a ‘false consciousness’.
4. Language and socially produced signs are therefore central to culture and meaning. Indeed, all experience can be viewed as representation. Culture is composed of a complex body of social ‘texts’.
5. Consequently, in contemporary theory the meaning that appears to be normal in our social life is exposed through identification within the ‘social texts’ of omissions, concealments, displacements, differences, misunderstandings and deceits.

The implications for art, media and design are:

1. Like all humanly made things, art, design and media are constructed. They are made up of historical references and practices, and characterised by the play of signs. Perception, for example, is understood to be socially constructed or determined and not ‘natural’ or ‘objective’.
2. All representations share common traits as they are all constructed from socially-agreed-upon conventions.
3. What we take to be the clear meanings of visual artefacts actually conceal other more complex and often repressed and/or repressive meanings.
4. The blurring of differences between art, design, literature and so on and other kinds of ‘non-artistic’ ‘texts’ makes the ‘high arts’ less privileged – they are socially produced signs like everything else.
5. Non-‘high’ cultural artefacts can be analysed in the same ways as art and literature: Coca-Cola can be open to the same kind of interpretation as Michelangelo.

1. Structuralism

The structural analysis of language is one of the dominant intellectual trends of the contemporary period. Interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture and experience focus on relationships and structures produced by language and symbols, and these are considered more important than function – that is, intended purpose. Structuralism is largely inspired by the work of Saussure (see above) and approaches human society as a timeless relationship of interacting binary – double or twofold – terms or codes. Structural methodologies developed in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, art and literature were chiefly characterised by contrasting the elemental or basic structures of the phenomena under study within a system of binary oppositions, such as man–woman, hot–cold, signifier–signified. In the arts, structural approaches could, for example, discuss how the use of clouds in painting – the depiction of vague, unformed shapes – functions in a binary visual code whose opposing term is line or form. Critics of structuralism point to its tendency to level societies to apparently timeless binary oppositions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

(1908–2009) described thought processes as a universal characteristic of the human mind that demonstrate recurrent traits through time and place, and his theory focused on the collective and unconscious properties of human culture. He argued that the construction or production of meaning is determined by the formal or rule-governed structure of language, and hence by the functioning of the brain, which deals in such basic binary oppositions. For Lévi-Strauss, social systems are a set of symbolic structures within the totality of culture – they are coded relations that can be decoded through structural analysis. The goal of the study of culture for Lévi-Strauss is to decode social systems through time based on the principle that humans tend naturally to think in binary opposites, and that living in social groups requires mediation between or balancing of such binary extremes.

Major works: Tristes Tropiques (1955), The Raw and the Cooked (1964), Structural Anthropology (1972)

2. Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a method or theory of interpretation, and focuses on the significance that an aspect of reality possesses for the subjects under study. The goal is to explore the shared linguistic meanings of representations or symbols, but also to acknowledge that linguistic meaning is open to infinite interpretation and reinterpretation due to the ambiguity coming from presuppositions, the conditions of usage that are different from authorial intention and the general evolution of words over time. Understanding is therefore always also interpretation and is not a merely reproductive but a productive process – that is, it is a creative act – and interpretations will always keep changing. In relation to the arts, hermeneutics suggests that even the creative act is first and foremost to be understood as an act of interpretation. Critics of hermeneutics stress that questions of interpretation should be related to broader questions of expression and to aspects of consciousness explored by more vitalistic approaches.

Paul Ricoeur

(1913–2005) rejected any claim that, when it comes to understanding, the subject or self is immediately transparent to, or fully master of, himself or herself. Self-knowledge only comes through a relation to the world, and to life that is experienced with and among others in that world. To properly study human reality, it is necessary to recognise that whatever is intelligible or meaningful is accessible to us only in and through language, and all use of language calls for interpretation, or hermeneutic analysis. Thus the arts’ role can be understood as a mediator or communicator of such self-knowledge gained through social forms.

Major works: History and Truth (1955), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981), Time and Narrative, 3 Vols (1983, 1984, 1985), Figuring the Sacred (1995)

Hans-Georg Gadamer

(1900–2002) argued that hermeneutics is not a method for understanding but an attempt to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place through the use of symbolic systems. Among these conditions are the prejudices and fore-meanings or social conditioning that are present in the mind of the interpreter. Gadamer applied a form of phenomenological hermeneutics to argue that truth is an event, and not something that can be affirmed relative to a set of fixed and discursive criteria. It is process. Language use involves an experience in which we find ourselves engaged and changed, and our openness to dialogue with others through art, for example, is the basis for a deeper sense of community, inviting us to remain open to process and change. In contrast to much contemporary theory concerning the arts that is influenced by Marxism, Gadamer took the experience of beauty to be central to any real understanding of the nature and continued significance of art, and he explored the close relationship between the beautiful and the true.

Major works: Truth and Method (1960), Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976), The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (1986)

3. Pragmatism

Pragmatism is guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory or ideology. This approach assesses the truth or meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application, rather than in relation to any abstract or detached criteria. Use is the main criterion in determining meaning, truth or value. In relation to the arts, pragmatism invites an approach that is sensitive to the way the arts are used and understood by a society within actual social contexts. Critics of pragmatism stress that theory and ideology play a major part in how social forms develop, as for example is emphasised in Marxism.

Richard Rorty

(1931–2007) argued that language should be understood as an adaptive tool used to cope with the natural and social environments in order to achieve a desired and pragmatic end. In line with many other theorists, he rejected the idea that there can ever be a narrative that has a privileged viewpoint and/or has the final say on ‘what there is’. His assumption was that in a foundationless world – one without essence or origin, and without traditional forms of authority – it is the role of creative, secular humanism to continue the quest for a credible external authority (God, nature, method and so forth), and to provide hope for a better future. He characterised this future as being free from dogmatic authoritarianism, which makes unprovable and arrogant assertions about truth and goodness. Unlike poststructuralist and post-Marxist thinkers, however, Rorty believed that such goals could be achieved within existing humanistic descriptions of the relationship between the human subject and symbolic structures, descriptions based on belief in tolerance and freedom and not on their deconstruction.

Major works: The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (1967), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty (2005)

Jürgen Habermas

(1929–) suggests that human competition, conflict and unresolved actions are attempts to achieve understanding that have failed because of confusions in meaning. Thus, coming to terms with how people understand or misunderstand one another will lead to a reduction of social conflict. Habermas differs from mainstream Marxism in that the latter claims that a transformed consciousness will lead to a predictable (deterministic) form of action – for example, the abolition of private property. Habermas, in contrast, sees no predictable outcomes, and addresses the relationship between social structures and the production of knowledge as open ended. He differentiates three primary areas in which human interest generates knowledge: work, interaction and power. (1) Work knowledge broadly refers to the way humans control and manipulate the environment. (2) Practical knowledge identifies human social interaction. (3) Emancipatory knowledge identifies ‘self-knowledge’. In this final context, knowledge is gained by self-emancipation achieved through reflection, and this can especially be expressed through the arts, where it leads to a transformed consciousness, which in turn prepares the way for a transformed society.

Major works: On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), Theory and Practice (1963), The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), The Divided West (2004)

4. Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism evolved in the late 1960s as a critique of structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism and psychoanalysis. Philosophically, poststructuralism critiques the ‘metaphysics of presence’, or simply metaphysics in general – the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles or causes of things, including abstract concepts such as being and knowing. It assumes that there is no ‘presence’ – no ‘first cause’, no ‘reality’. Language, codes and sign systems always come between people and their experience of reality. Poststructuralism aims to undermine the oppositional or binary tendencies that characterise the Western philosophical tradition, and that are still present in structuralism. While it emphasises the importance of language for understanding society, and questions the idea of the self-determining or autonomous individual or subject, poststructuralism also recognises the inadequacy of language as a symbolic system, and does not believe that people’s actions can be entirely reduced to the external structure of language codes. In relation to the arts, poststructuralism studies the ways in which aesthetic structures can be subverted, undermined and broken down through the analysis and exposure of their limitations – through, for example, ironic reinterpretation and reconfiguration, which change the shape or form of the structure itself, rendering meaning unstable and multiple. Critics of poststructuralism emphasise that it risks reducing reality to nothing more than a ‘free play of the signifier’. It fails to engage with any possibility of contact with a reality beyond the ‘prison house’ of signs. In emphasising ‘deconstruction’ as a goal, it also seems to reduce thinking and making to a process of parody, subversion and irony.

Jacques Lacan

(1901–81) applied structural analysis to the description of the human psyche as proposed by Freud. He argued that the mind functions on three levels. (1) The imaginary is the field of images, imagination and deception. The main illusions of this order are the structures of language, synthesis, autonomy, duality and similarity (the belief that things can be categorised into groups). (2) The symbolic is the linguistic dimension of society that channels the imaginary. (3) The real is everything that is outside language and that resists symbolisation absolutely. In arguing that speech originates not in the ego nor in the subject but rather in the ‘other’ – in a cognitive realm or location that is not centred on the subject or self – Lacan stressed that speech, language and art are beyond the subject’s conscious control: they come from another place, outside consciousness, and this place is considered to be a threat to the sense of the subject or a unified self built around the imaginary. For Lacan, what is interesting in the arts is always something other than what is their explicit or stated meaning.

Major works: Ecrits (1966), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973)

Roland Barthes

(1915–80) developed a theory that focused on the social phenomena of signs, emphasising how signs constitute culture and ideologies in particular ways. His analysis ranged from literature to politics and fashion, and his intention was to break the text or image into structural units, arguing that it is necessary to ignore the author of a work and permit the text (or image) to generate meaning. But, according to Barthes, signs or messages are constituted in two ways: (1) through denotation, or the literal meaning and reference of a sign, and (2) through connotation, the meanings that are suggested or implied by the sign. It was this second aspect that preoccupied him, and that led him to emphasise the many ways in which signs break free of the constraints of binary code and multiply in meaning. In his work on photography, for example, Barthes discussed the power of the image to become a ‘temporal hallucination’, and argued that intellectual analysis will never be able to fully account for the meaning of a ‘text’ in any form – visual, aural or verbal – as texts are open ended and dynamic entities.

Major works: Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), Elements of Semiology (1964), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Camera Lucida (1981)

Emmanuel Lévinas

(1906–95) addressed the problem of existence as posed already by Heidegger and phenomenology by investigating the ethical dimension of human life. The intersubjective or interactive origins of discourse, argued Levinas, can only be reached by direct phenomenological description but also require a detour through symbolic systems. He analysed the ‘face-to-face’ relation with the ‘other’ – someone who is not known or comprehended within symbolic systems and so calls into question and challenges the complacency of the self through the destabilising energies he or she brings – of desire, openness and ambiguity of language, the ethical concern for justice and awareness of the transcendent dimension of the sacred. For Levinas, the arts cannot be separated from this call of the ‘other’ or from ethics.

Major works: Time and the Other (1947), Totality and Infinity (1961), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974)

Maurice Blanchot

(1907–2003) consciously avoided a coherent, all-encompassing ‘theory’, since his work was founded on the conviction that thought must be true to the fundamental realities of paradox and impossibility. He explored the extremes of human experience, arguing that artists engage in constant inversions, negations and indeterminancies, and that their efforts to speak the truth necessarily reduce them to silence and extreme passivity, exemplified by death.

Major works: Thomas the Obscure (1941, a novel), The Space of Literature (1955), Writing the Disaster (1980)

Jacques Derrida

(1930–2004) developed the concept of ‘deconstruction’, which has greatly influenced contemporary literary theory, cultural studies, linguistics, feminism, psychology, sociology and anthropology. Deconstruction has at least two aspects – artistic and philosophical. The artistic aspect concerns interpretation, proposing that invention is essential to finding hidden alternative meanings in a work. The philosophical aspect concerns the main target of deconstruction: the ‘metaphysics of presence.’ Derrida argued that metaphysics affects the whole of philosophy from Plato onwards, creating dualistic or binary oppositions or dichotomies that produce a hierarchical system or organisation in which thoughts are ranked one above the other according to status or authority, privileging or giving positive value to one term of each dichotomy (‘presence’ before ‘absence’, ‘speech’ before ‘writing’ and so on). The deconstructive strategy is to unmask these ways of thinking, and it operates on them especially through two steps – reversing dichotomies (‘absence’ before ‘presence’, ‘writing’ before ‘speech’) and attempting to corrupt the dichotomies themselves (showing how ‘presence’ is mixed with ‘absence’, or ‘writing’ with ‘speech’).

Major works: Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Positions (1972), Glas (1974), Truth in Painting (1978), Specters of Marx (1993)

Umberto Eco

(1932–) argues that the meaning of signs, messages and signals is not necessarily determined or explicable by whether they refer to actual objects; the existence of objects to which signs may correspond is not a necessary condition for their signification or meaning. Within this fluid situation, Eco states that people do not just decode messages, they also make hypotheses. Any particular mode of sign-production is a matter of cultural convention, but, like Barthes, Eco argues that messages are not frozen and predetermined, but rather multilevelled discourses or texts.

Major works: The Open Work (1962), A Theory of Semiotics (1975), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1990); his novels include The Name of the Rose (1980; film 1986), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1995), Baudolino (2000) and The Prague Cemetery (2010)

5. Post-Marxism

Unlike traditional Marxism, which emphasises the priority of class struggle and the common humanity of oppressed groups, post-Marxism reveals that the sexual, racial, class and ethnic divisions within modern Western society are far more complex, and that outcomes are uncertain. For post-Marxism, present society, or postmodernity (identified as capitalism), is based upon the demise or fall from authority of all traditional belief systems and dominant social groups, and this has led to various specifically ‘postmodern’ pathologies, or to a general state of crisis. Post-Marxism proposes the need for a radical political act or revolution – one that will alter the conditions of postmodernity. In relation to the arts and media, post-Marxism provides a more complex analysis of the relationship between culture and power, but often focuses on the ways in which the arts’ complicity is masked or hidden and must be unmasked. Critics stress that post-Marxism, while abandoning deterministic aspects of Marxism, persists in its narrow vision of materialism, thereby failing to take into account other aspects of human consciousness. They also criticise the assumption that revolution is the necessary engine of social change.

Theodor Adorno

(1903–69) believed that society and culture form a historical totality, so that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture. A lack or loss of freedom in society – in the political, economic and legal structures within which we live – signals a similar failure in cultural enlightenment – in philosophy, the arts, religion and so on. The Nazi death camps for Adorno were not an exception but rather indicated that something fundamental had gone wrong in the modern West. The source of the modern crisis, in which all but the most avant-garde arts share, is a pattern of blind domination, argued Adorno. This domination takes three forms: the domination of nature by human beings, the domination of nature within human beings, and, in both of these forms of domination, the domination of some human beings by others. Adorno argued that a ‘culture industry’ has developed in which all cultural products, including art, have become commodities that possess little or no meaning and participate in these forms of domination.

Major works: Minima Moralia (1951), Prisms (1955), The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), Negative Dialectics (1966), Aesthetic Theory (1970)

Herbert Marcuse

(1898–1979) argued that the association of capital and technology was producing new forms of social control and domination that involved deep transformations in human consciousness. He described the emergence of what he called ‘one-dimensional man’, who is formed from a ‘one-dimensional society’ and framed by ‘one-dimensional thought’. The needs of the ‘one-dimensional man’ are preconditioned – not chosen but already given – and this preconditioning is controlled by a standardised media. Drawing directly on Freud, Marcuse attempted to reconcile the antagonism between human work in the ‘one-dimensional society’ with human psychic drives – especially with desire. For Freud, work necessitated repression and instinctual frustration, but Marcuse argued that, with the rise of material abundance and wealth and security, repression had reached a surplus level; it was no longer necessary for the survival of the species, and instead served to encourage the continuing domination of one class. Marcuse argued that it was the role of the arts to challenge the repressive capitalistic principle by going ‘beyond the reality principle’ – to show the entire personality of the individual as eroticised. The arts for Marcuse evoke a world that is dismissed by society as utopian and fantasy in the aesthetic dimension, but utopian longings, he declared, are also essential beyond art.

Major works: Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978)

Guy Debord

(1931–94) developed Marxist theories concerning ‘false consciousness’ and ‘reification’, and through the movement known as Situationism he addressed the changing relationship between direct, lived experience and the mediated representations (life experienced indirectly through an intermediary, such as the mass media) that surround us. He argued that everything that is directly lived has become representation, calling this new reality the ‘society of the spectacle’. This society is not made up of a collection of images but is an alienated kind of social relation among people that is always communicated by images. Thus, Debord saw the spectacle as possessing reifying capacities, which serve to justify society as it is, and in the contemporary world there is no separation between material ‘real life’ and the false represented one – the spectacle. The spectacle’s capacity for domination lies in its self-containment; it aims at nothing other than itself, and it also has a ‘religious’ or ‘transcendental’ aspect in that it is the technical realisation of the exiling or limiting of human powers into a non-physical dimension. Debord’s judgement of contemporary society was thus both pessimistic and apocalyptic, and in this context the arts have a very limited capacity to challenge the ‘society of the spectacle’, as they are a significant part of it.

Major works: The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Louis Althusser

(1918–90) developed Marx’s understanding of the relation between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ by adding the concept of ‘ideological state apparatuses’. He explored the ways in which ideology was more pervasive and more ‘material’ than previously acknowledged, and moved away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology in which it was believed to create ‘false consciousness’. In contrast, Althusser connects ideology to Lacan’s understanding of reality, by arguing that the world we construct around us after our entrance into symbolic systems represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. Althusser emphasised the ‘materiality’ of ideology – its embodiment or presence in institutions and people’s everyday practices and lives. Thus, ideologies are political discourses whose primary function is not to make correct theoretical statements about reality (as Marx’s ‘false consciousness’ model implies) but rather to direct the lived relations of individuals to and within this reality. For Althusser, the arts are part of a community’s cultural practices that involve what he called ‘inherent transgression’ – practices sanctioned by a culture that nevertheless allow subjects some experience of what is usually exceptional or prohibited in their everyday lives as ‘civilised’ political subjects.

Major works: Reading Capital (1965), For Marx (1965)

Michel Foucault

(1926–84) looked at the history of Western societies and emphasised the disciplinary technologies that have come to dominate. For Foucault, ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’. Power is a major source of social discipline and conformity, and goes beyond politics. It is an everyday, socialised and embodied phenomenon. Foucault pointed to a new kind of ‘disciplinary power’ that could be observed in the administrative systems and social services created in eighteenth-century Europe, such as prisons, schools and mental hospitals. These systems of surveillance and assessment no longer require force or violence, as people have learnt to discipline themselves and to behave in expected and acceptable ways. Foucault’s special focus was on the targeting of the body within regimes of power and knowledge. He argued that human identity is not a fixed thing within a person; it is a shifting, temporary construction, and people do not have a ‘real’ identity within themselves – this is just a way of talking about the self. In reality, the ‘self’ is produced through systems of power, and these often seem to be either ‘natural’ or imposed from above, but this ‘self’ is really a ‘text’ or a discourse – it is the result of language rather than something natural or absolute. ‘Technologies of the self’ are the specific practices by which subjects produce themselves. The arts are both sites of resistance and complicit in various discourses of power.

Major works: Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), History of Sexuality (1976)

Pierre Bourdieu

(1930–2002) was influenced by traditional anthropology, sociology and Marxism, and argued that judgements of taste concerning the arts are related to social position. He analysed how everyday practices of behaviour and belief become part of a society’s structure when the original purpose of that behaviour or belief can no longer be recalled and is no longer conscious and instead has become socialised into individuals so they are no longer aware of it. Symbolic systems play an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. The development of aesthetic dispositions or tastes is therefore very largely determined by social origin, but Bourdieu criticised the importance given in Marxism to economic factors, and also stressed the capacity of members of society to actively impose and engage with their cultural productions.

Major works: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984), The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (1991), The Field of Cultural Production (1993), The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996)

Fredric Jameson

(1934–) developed Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism’ and Freud’s theory of the unconscious to argue that the consumer in a postmodern commodity-based society gives to the commodity immense psychic value and feels satisfied both materially and spiritually by owning it. Jameson thus explores consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas of social production, investigating the ways in which the structural features of late capitalism or postmodernity – particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form – are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating. Culturally, argues Jameson, postmodernism has led to aesthetic populism – the breaking of the boundaries between high art and popular culture – and to a general devaluing of aesthetic experience.

Major works: The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Jameson Reader (2000), Valences of the Dialectic (2009)

Jacques Rancière

(1940–) developed and critiqued Althusser’s analysis of capitalist society, challenging the assumption that the working class (as a unified entity or single group) exists, questioning the limits of philosophers’ knowledge with respect to this proletariat. Rancière is particularly influential in relation to the question of the relationship between the arts and politics, identifying an ‘aesthetic regime of art’ that breaks down the various hierarchies of traditional culture by asserting the independence of art and at the same time destroying any way of securing this independence. He argues that such artistic freedom and equality is equivalent to the undermining or destruction of real social and political hierarchies, and that new kinds of artworks create new communities and ways for people to relate to one another. This offers a possible relation to politics, a model for real political liberation. Thus, the ‘aesthetic regime’ has potential that escapes oppressive political power and control.

Major works: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), The Aesthetic Unconscious (2001), The Future of the Image (2007)

Immanuel Wallerstein

(1930–) developed ‘world system theory’ by building on Marxist analysis. He identified a core dynamic system that changes over time, arguing that it can be divided into (1) a ‘core’ – Western Europe and the US; (2) the ‘semi-periphery’, or regions of the ‘core’ in decline or attempting to improve their relative position in the world economic system by moving from regions lacking strong central governments or controlled by other states; and (3) the ‘periphery’. There are also areas that manage to remain outside the world system, such as Russia. The relationship between the core and its periphery and semi-periphery remains relative, not constant. Technological advantages, for example, may result in an expansion of the world economy overall, and cause changes in some peripheral or semi-peripheral areas. Wallerstein asserts that an analysis of the history of the capitalist world system shows that, rather than providing prosperity for all, it has brought about uneven development in which economic and social differences between parts of the world economy have increased. He focuses on the process whereby the disintegration or collapse of the modern world system in the contemporary world has led to the emergence of the dominant ideology of liberalism and its embrace of capitalism. In relation to the arts, he points out that what we call ‘mainstream culture’ tends to be limited to the ‘core’, and ‘semi-peripheral’ and ‘peripheral’ cultures are judged in the context of this ‘core’ rather than on their own merits.

Major works: The Modern World System, volumes 1–4 (1974–2011), After Liberalism (1995), The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (1999), The Essential Wallerstein (2000), European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (2006)

Giorgio Agamben

(1942–) rejects the Marxist view of the state as superstructure, and does not see power as hidden behind or operating through cultural forms. Rather, state sovereignty operates directly on life, reshaping it according to the state’s perspective or way of seeing. The state is authoritarian command and requires submission to its command; it is not founded on mutual recognition, equality or reciprocity, as is argued in liberal (humanistic) theories of the state. Agamben proposes a theory of the arts that sees them as concerned not with the transmission or communication of any particular content but rather with the task of transmission itself. It is the potentiality of the event of language in art, or of a kind of pure communicability, that is the potential ground for common belonging in the world.

Major works: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1982), The Coming Community (1990), Homo Sacer (1995), State of Exception (2003), The Signature of All Things (2008)

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt

(1933– and 1960–) argue that the decline in nation-state sovereignty is directly linked to the increasingly globalised world, giving rise to what they define as a new form of sovereignty called ‘empire’. Following the poststructuralist model set by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the ‘empire’ is characterised by flexible, mobile boundaries and hybrid identities. It is a decentred global network and a dynamic pattern of breaks and flows. In this network of coordinated collaboration, no nation-state is really sovereign any more, and even the most powerful nation is not able to control the global order. But, according to Negri and Hardt, the potential for resistance is much stronger than we might think, and the arts can play a central role in bringing about real change.

Major works: The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Negri, 1989), Art and Multitude (Negri, 1988), Empire (Negri and Hardt, 2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Negri and Hardt, 2004), Commonwealth (Negri and Hardt, 2009)

Slavoj Žižek

(1949–) draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and adapts the Freudian psychoanalytic notion that individuals are always ‘split’ subjects who are divided between levels of conscious and unconscious awareness. He argues that, for the postmodern subject, the lack of the prohibitions once enforced by traditional authority reveals itself in attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism. He challenges the Marxist ‘false consciousness’ model of ideology, but insists that we are not living in a post-ideological world. Instead, in order to understand today’s politics and culture, we need a different notion of ideology, one that recognises that cynicism concerning the post-ideological age in fact indicates a deeper success of political ideology. Ideology has succeeded in passing itself off as something else. Žižek argues that it is a mistake to think that, for a political position to win people’s support, it needs to effectively brainwash them into becoming thoughtless automatons. Rather, he proposes that any successful political ideology always allows subjects to have and to desire a conscious distance from its explicit or obvious ideals and prescriptions. In this context, the arts serve both to explore the ‘masks’ produced by ideology and to subvert or challenge them.

Major works: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), The Ticklish Subject (1999), The Fragile Absolute (2000), On Belief (2001), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), Living in the End Times (2010)

6. Gender studies

Gender studies rejects the idea that biology is destiny, and aims to understand the nature of gender inequality in society. Theories of the body are particularly important because historically (in the humanities) the body has been denigrated as weak, immoral or unclean, and has been associated with the feminine, the female, woman. In relation to the arts, gender studies has focused on the ways in which symbolic systems conceal and reinforce gender inequality. Some feminists argue that language and culture are essentially patriarchal – conceived, governed and controlled by men – and therefore must somehow be abandoned. Critics draw attention to the fact that gender studies can reduce the interpretation of complex cultural phenomena to single issues posed in terms of binary oppositions.

Simone de Beauvoir

(1908–86) introduced the distinction between gender and sex: while sex constitutes a biological difference, gender is a ‘socialised’ difference that is the result of ‘nurture’ (social conditioning) instead of ‘nature’ (biological determination). De Beauvoir, following the existentialist notion that experience precedes essence, argued that a woman is not born but rather becomes a ‘woman’ through socialisation. Furthermore, she argued that, throughout history, women have been defined as ‘the other’, as a deviation from the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ male, and inferior members of society. Because women were always considered to be different from the ‘normal’, and were always busy trying to emulate or copy ‘normality’ (i.e., males), they were constantly subjected to oppression. Only by abandoning this basic assumption of inequality, so de Beauvoir believed, could women move forward.

Major works: The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), The Second Sex (1949)

Luce Irigaray

(1930–) has developed de Beauvoir’s insights, but argues that sexual difference is a product of language and linguistics, not anatomy, and that true sexual and gender differences do not exist because sexual difference would require that men and women could achieve the same subjectivity or sense of self. In Western culture this subjectivity is ‘phallocentric’ – or based on a repressive male ideology – making it impossible for females to exist separately. While Irigaray has employed psychoanalytic theory, she argues that female identity has yet to be established as an identity independent of male-centric ideas. She regards the arts as sites for the reconfiguring of ideas about gender relationships within society.

Major works: Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), This Sex which is Not One (1977), The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980), An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (1990), Between East and West (1999)

Judith Butler

(1956–) analyses historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation between socially constituted or constructed subjects in specific contexts. Rather than being a fixed attribute in a person, she argues, gender should be seen as a fluid variable that shifts and changes in various contexts and at various times. Butler argues that society is structured so that sex (male, female) causes gender (masculine, feminine), which causes desire (towards the other gender). Butler’s approach – inspired in part by Foucault (see above) – is to deconstruct these supposed links, so that gender and desire are repositioned as flexible, free-floating and not ‘caused’ by other stable factors. Thus, she is interested in the concept of ambivalence, or mixed, unclear, contradictory or unresolved feelings or emotions, because such characteristics offer the potential for subversion, and the arts are a key site for such actions.

Major works: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Undoing Gender (2004), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009)

7. Postcolonial theory

Postcolonial thought involves a radical rethinking of knowledge and social identities from the perspective of colonialism and the legacy of Western domination. Important contributions to such critiques come from Marxist thought, where the focus is on colonial exploitation as a category of class oppression. Postcolonial theory is also influenced by psychoanalysis, showing how the pre-conscious forces shaping the self are organised around race as a founding category. Postcolonial theory thus addresses the totalising, hierarchical world-view of the West, studying the power and the continued dominance of Western ways of knowing and intellectual inquiry. The goal is to undo ‘Eurocentrism’. Postcolonialism also studies the means through which a nation should modernise itself on the way to becoming a developed country in the Western (developed world) style, and how this relates to cultural development. An important question posed is whether the modernisation of an underdeveloped or developing country, and the symbolic or cultural forms it produces, should follow the path to modernisation taken and established by the developed countries of the West, where ‘modernisation’ is characterised by free trade, open markets, the capitalist economic system, a democratic system of governance and a theory of art based on the idea of the oppositional avant-garde and the principles of contemporary critical theories. A central critique of mainstream postcolonial theory is that it is itself too dependent on such Western poststructuralist theories of representation as an effect of language, and so it serves only to continue the very domination that it claims to undermine.

Frantz Fanon

(1925–61) combined Marxism and phenomenology to develop a critical race discourse that explored the existential challenges faced by black people in a social world organised by and for white people. He addressed the roles ‘hybridity’ can play in forming humanist, anti-colonial cultures. Hybridity is seen as a counter-hegemonic opposition to colonial practices, a non-assimilationist (rejecting the idea that people of different backgrounds must come to see themselves as part of a larger national family) or non-conformist strategy, building instead cross-cutural connections that draw attention to the oppression of colonised peoples.

Major works: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Edward Said

(1935–2003) used the term ‘Orientalism’ to explain how the Eurocentric perspective leads to the domination of the non-Western ‘other’. Before their exploration of ‘the Orient’, Said pointed out, Europeans had already created an imagined geography comprising predefined images of savage and monstrous places that lay beyond the horizon of the known world; during their initial explorations of non-European lands, and then during the period of colonial exploitation, these mythologies were reinforced, and the ‘difference’ and the ‘strangeness’ of the Orient were continued through the mass-communications media. Through discourses both visual and verbal, perceived differences between the Orient and the Occident were reinforced, and an ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary division of social relations was established within which the West defined itself as superior and imposed this view by means of colonialism, which was therefore both political and cultural. This process, Said emphasised, is ongoing.

Major works: Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1993)

Homi K. Bhabha

(1949–) emphasises the importance of social power relations in defining marginalised social groups as ‘oppressed’. He points out that the stereotyping of racial minorities is crucial to the self-definition of the majority group. As such, minorities are in a position to subvert the authority of the social group(s) that holds hegemonic power. Thus Bhabha stresses the interdependence of coloniser and colonised. Like Fanon, Bhabha developed a theory of ‘hybridity’ – the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonisation. The inherent purity and originality of cultures, Bhabha argues, are myths, and he theorises the possibility of an international culture that is based neither on ‘otherness’ nor on a simple multiculturalism grounded in the diversity of cultures, but rather on culture’s hybridity.

Major works: Nation and Narration (1990), The Location of Culture (1994), Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival (2011)

Gayatri C. Spivak

(1942–) applies poststructuralist theory to postcolonial conditions and focuses attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial ‘other’. She deconstructs the relationships in the ownership of discourse and representation regarding the development of postcolonial subjectivity, and she developed the theory of ‘translation as culture’. Translation has played an active role in the colonisation process and in spreading an ideologically motivated image of colonised people. Spivak has employed a metaphor of the colony as an imitative and inferior ‘translational’ copy, whose suppressed identity has been overwritten or erased by the coloniser. Like Bhabha, she argues that the postcolonial subject lives at the margins, and so cannot be known or represented in any straightforward way, but can be alluded to or suggested through the arts.

Major works: Death of a Discipline (2003), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (2012)

8. Postmodern vitalist theory

Postmodern vitalist theory addresses the levels at which thought operates beyond the hegemony or control of representations, symbolic systems and knowledge when it pushes towards the condition that Heidegger called ‘being’. Theorists influenced by vitalist thought challenge the Western emphasis on the supreme value of intelligence, and seek to explore forms of consciousness that have been considered irrational, marginal, aberrant or even pathological. Recent theory of this kind focuses on the recognition that unlike the world of representational signs – in which the subject constructs or produces as spectacle their access to a world – a transpersonal dimension, or one in which altered states of consciousness are experienced, comes through exposure. This exposure is also an opening up to the ineffable, or the unknown and unknowable ‘other’. Criticisms of such theories focus on the implicit return they seem to signal to ‘regressive’ metaphysics, irrationalism and semi-religious ways of thinking.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

(1925–95 and 1930–92) drew on psychoanalysis and focused on the colonisation of desire by various modern discourses and institutions, shifting analysis away from society to look at impersonal psychological and bodily forces, and addressing affects or the condition of being affected – that is, the ways in which the human subject generates and responds to pre-personal intensities corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and involving an increase or reduction in the body’s capacity to act. Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of the ‘rhizome’, which, unlike the metaphor of the tree, whose branches all grow from a single trunk, has no unique source from where all development occurs; instead, the rhizome promotes a non-hierarchical (without judgements to value or rank), heterogeneous (diverse), multiplicitous (having many parts) and a-centred (without one focus) approach that seeks to more truthfully reflect the energies released by thought processes and emotions. According to Deleuze, following Bergson, artists create affects and percepts, ‘blocks of space-time’, whereas science works with functions and philosophy creates concepts.

Major works: Bergsonism (Deleuze, 1966), Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1968), The Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972), A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze, 1981), Cinema, vols 1 and 2 (Deleuze, 1983, 1985), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze, 1988)

Julia Kristeva

(1941–) theorises the connections between mind and body, culture and nature, matter and representation by drawing on psychoanalysis. She insists that bodily drives are closely intertwined with symbolic systems. The semiotic element in language, she argues, is the bodily drive as it is discharged in representation, while the symbolic is the socially acceptable forms of language. Without the symbolic, all signification or meaning-making would be nonsense, but without the semiotic all signification would be empty and have no importance for our lives. In contrast to Freud and Lacan, Kristeva emphasises the maternal – mother – function within human consciousness and explores its links to the semiotic, showing its importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language. She also rejects what she sees as the second phase of feminism (e.g., Irigaray) because it seeks a uniquely feminine language, which Kristeva believes is impossible. She insists that culture and language are the domain of speaking beings (and women are primarily speaking beings), and she refuses to choose ‘identity’ over ‘difference’ or vice versa; rather, she explores multiple and marginal identities.

Major works: Language: The Unknown (1969), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1985), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987), New Maladies of the Soul (1993), The Severed Head: Capital Visions (1998), This Incredible Need to Believe (2007)

Michel Serres

(1930–) attempts to think outside metaphysical categories such as unity and rational order, and wants to make us hear the ‘noise’ that actually is in the background of life and thought. One of the most important tasks of thought today, he argues, is to acknowledge multiplicity over unity. However, such plurality cannot really be thought, Serres argues, but perhaps can still be sensed, felt and heard beneath the illusion of rational order imposed by civilisation. Serres warns us that the senses have been marginalised by the scientific age; indeed, through the domination of language and the information revolution, the metaphysical and philosophical systems of the scientific age have colonised or denatured our five senses. Serres explores the negative consequences of such powerful downplaying or marginalisation of the senses in the history of the philosophy of the West, and aims to locate areas of resistance and of potential hope for the future.

Major works: The Parasite (1980), Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (1982), The Five Senses (1985), The Legend of Angels (1993), Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour (1995)

Alain Badiou

(1937–) challenges the poststructuralist focus or fixation on representation, semiotics, sign systems and language. Like Deleuze and Guattari, he argues that this has undermined any notion of an autonomous human subject, and his work is an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy’s focus on the critique of ‘ontotheological’ (the linking of the study of human life (ontology) to a supreme being or first cause (theology)) symbolic systems, in which it is argued that truth is impossible, and language becomes the only possible site of philosophical thinking. Such positions, Badiou argues, are inadequate for dealing with philosophy’s true historical mission, which is to address ‘being’, the universal, freedom, revolt, logic and risk. The principle of the ‘event’ is perhaps where Badiou diverges the most from the majority of other modern theorists; the ‘event’ for Badiou is a multiple discharge of energies that does not make sense according to the rules of the ‘situation’. In other words, it goes beyond existence as it can be understood through analysis and symbols. Art, for example, is ‘event’; it is immanent in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy rather than through the mediation of thought, and it is singular in that its truth is to be found in the work and the work alone.

Major works: Theory of the Subject (1982), Logics of Worlds: Being and Event (1988), The Century (2005), Philosophy in the Present (with Slavoj Žižek, 2009)

Jean-Luc Nancy

(1940–) follows many contemporary thinkers in arguing that, because society is no longer governed by a metaphysical or divine order, we live in a world where we are exposed to a naked existence without the possibility of falling back upon any preceding fundamental cause of the world that might give it meaning. Whereas in a feudal world the meaning and destination of life is clear and fixed, contemporary existence can no longer refer to a general metaphysical framework, and this crisis is the challenge for our global existence today. Nancy argues that at the core of Western political thinking there is a longing for an ‘original community’ – for an immediate being-together – that arises from the idea that we once lived in a harmonious and intimate community that throughout history has declined or collapsed. Nancy often addresses the aesthetic, arguing that the arts do not aim primarily at the representation of the empirical world – understood in the metaphysical sense of some essence or timeless reality – but rather at immersion in a world of sense, and in existence.

Major works: The Inoperative Community (1983), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (1996), The Muses (1994), The Ground of the Image (2003)

9. Technology, media and postmodernity

The development of communications media is an integral and dominant part of the rise of modern societies, and is interwoven with the general trend towards ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’. Thus, in order to understand the nature of the contemporary, some theorists consider it necessary to give a central role to the analysis of the development of communications media and their impact on society. There are broadly three main approaches: (1) the study of how audience members are conditioned and manipulated by media (the hegemonic model, as developed by Gramsci); (2) the study of how audience members can make meanings and understand reality through their use of cultural symbols (the negotiative model); and (3) the study of how audience members can actively reuse media within a critical framework (the oppositional model). The critique of technology lies at the heart of much modern theory that claims that contemporary ‘high-tech’ media society and emergent processes of change and transformation are producing a new society – a previously unknown stage of history and sociocultural formation that requires new concepts and theories. From phenomenological and Marxist perspectives, the dominance of technology and the modes of consciousness it promotes are seen to be in danger of imprisoning humankind within a false reality. Furthermore, technology is slipping from human control. These deep social processes are causing increased cultural fragmentation and changes in the experience of space and time, leading to new modes of experience, subjectivity and cultural interaction. Theorists claim that technologies such as computers and digital media, new forms of knowledge arising from science and changes in the socio-economic system are producing a radically different kind of art. Cybernetics – computers, telecommunication systems and the various associated disciplines of language and information-processing that result – become a central concern, showing that the boundaries of the human subject are constructed and not given. Criticisms of these thinkers focus on their tendency to overemphasise the extent of the transformations occurring – for example, shifting away from ‘book-based’ text culture to the ‘visual’ culture of the digital matrix.

Marshall McLuhan

(1911–80) argued that our way of looking at ourselves and our world is shaped not just by ideas but also by how we become used to perceiving the world through the use of technologies that alter the manner in which we process information. These technologies direct us more towards certain learning styles than others (depending on the technology). McLuhan argued that the ways in which we are affected by the medium of the technology itself are more significant that the content the medium carries – and for this he coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’. For example, he explained how the invention of the printing press revolutionised Western society by encouraging subjects to become visual and linear in their thinking. As a result, he argued, print culture has transformed society in the modern world into a fragmented collective of alienated individuals, disassociated from the deeper consequences of their actions. By contrast, pre-literate societies were auditory, spatial, kinaesthetic and holistic (seeing the whole in every part). Cultures that pass on their knowledge through oral storytelling encourage auditory learning that, in the era before audiotapes and radio, required the transmission of knowledge to be a social event. But through the use of electronic media and devices, McLuhan argued, human beings can now in part return to the experiences typical of the pre-literate society because these new media extend the nervous system via a global neural net, producing what McLuhan called the ‘global village.’

Major works: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

Jean-François Lyotard

(1924–98) drew on psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and believed that the fact that cybernetics has come to dominate society and economics since World War II means that the status of knowledge has changed profoundly. In a cybernetic society, knowledge is authorized by how performative it is – that is, by how effectively it minimises the various required inputs for the task and maximises the desired outputs. As a consequence of deep cultural changes, we have now lost the ability to believe in ‘metanarratives’ – or versions of knowledge that claim universality – and the major question that interested Lyotard was how in this situation contemporary society legitimates or gives authority to knowledge. Like poststructuralism in general, Lyotard’s thought sought to dethrone the idea of the autonomous, self-contained human subject from its organisational role by decentring it as a philosophical category. The arts have a privileged position in Lyotard’s philosophy since they call attention to the limits of knowledge and representation in general, and to the concept of this traditional subject. But it was not all kinds of art that Lyotard celebrated; he was particularly interested in the avant-garde, as this is where the representation of the ‘unrepresentable’ takes place – where cultural forms call attention to unresolved psychic and social conflicts, and to everything that is in excess of conventional social codes.

Major works: Discours, Figure (1971), Libidinal Economy (1974), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), The Differend (1983), The Inhuman (1988), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991)

Jean Baudrillard

(1929–2007) carried forward the Marxist critique of commodity production, adding to it by arguing that there is no revolutionary force waiting to destroy this system (such as the proletariat). For Baudrillard, modern societies were organised around the production and consumption of commodities, but postmodern societies are organised around ‘simulation’ and the play of images and signs. This is a situation in which codes, models and signs are the organising forms of a new social order in which simulation rules. In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, a ‘transaesthetic’ object – just as everything also becomes trans-economic, trans-political and trans-sexual. In this world, Baudrillard argued, individuals flee from the ‘desert of the real’ for the ecstasies of ‘hyperreality’ and the new realm of computer, media and technological experience. This ‘materialisation of aesthetics’ is accompanied by meaningless attempts to simulate art, to replicate and mix previous artistic forms and styles, and to produce ever more images and artistic objects.

Major works: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), The Mirror of Production (1973), Cool Memories (1980–2000), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Disillusion’ (1997), The Spirit of Terrorism (2002)

Stuart Hall

(1932–2014) drew on Marxist social theory and focused on the encoding and decoding of communications media. Following Althusser, Hall argued that, while the media appear to reflect reality, it is more accurate to state that they construct it. In contrast to other theorists who argued that communications media disempower audiences (e.g., Adorno, Althusser, Foucault), however, Hall proposes the idea that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts and therefore might be capable of changing messages themselves through collective action. He outlined four phases of media: ‘Production’, ‘circulation’, ‘use (distribution or consumption)’ and ‘reproduction’, or the stage after audience members have interpreted the message in their own ways. His model therefore claims that the audiences of television and other media are presented with messages that are decoded or interpreted in various ways depending on an individual’s cultural background, economic standing and personal experiences.

Major works:

‘Encoding/decoding’ (1980). ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”’ (1982), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)

Vilém Flusser

(1920–91) was indebted to Weiner’s cybernetics, Husserl’s phenomenology and McLuhan’s concept of the ‘global village’. He discussed the human migration from alphabetic codes and historical consciousness to binary computer codes, systems thinking and cybernetic consciousness, outlining a tendency for images to become electronic and for apparatuses to become smaller and cheaper. He used the metaphors of the ‘web’ and the ‘net’ to characterise what he called the ‘telematic society’, arguing that the culture of the written word has come to an end and that a new age characterised by the dominance of the image has dawned. Humanity now finds itself in a situation where what Flusser called ‘technical images’ – photographs, televised pictures, videos and, above all, computer-generated images – are transforming our existence.

Major works: Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Writings (2004), Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985)

Friedrich Kittler

(1943–2011) drew on McLuhan’s insight that media technologies are the most important factors within society. Kittler argued that technology should be understood as technical apparatuses and not, like Foucault, predominantly as a function of knowledge. He thus replaced language as the focus of study by technologies, and set about charting the historical evolution of technological media. Today, Kittler argued, in a society dominated by the universal language of the digital, distinctions between visual, audio and written data may still appear on a day-to-day level, but in reality, technology no longer speaks our language. Humanity, which is always only one aspect of the communications network, is now at the margins, as ever more powerful computers trade data with one another. Unlike McLuhan, Kittler argued that technology is no mere extension of the human, but rather that it causes its destruction, effacement or eclipse.

Major works: Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), Optical Media (2002)

Bernard Stiegler

(1952–) draws on Marxist thought but argues that Marxism failed to foresee that a new kind of economy would emerge in the twentieth century that is no longer centred around the worker as a labouring producer and instead focuses on the psyche of workers. This is what Stiegler calls the ‘consciousness industry’. The externalisation of knowledge in the form of memory, Stiegler argues, is an anthropological and evolutionary fact, but the production of memory through industry in the form of machines began to occur during the nineteenth century and has transformed consciousness. Technology has not only taken over the role of language (through writing, books, machines, computerisation, media, standardisations and so on) but also includes the whole psychic and sensory apparatus of humans: vision, auditory systems, touch, pain and so on. Today, digital and biotechnologies mean we have entered what Stiegler calls the ‘hyperindustrial’ period, in which cognitive and cultural industries control knowledge, and this knowledge is externalised in the form of digital media, biotechnologies and, more recently, nanotechnologies.

Major works: Technics and Time, vols 1–3 (1994–2001), For a New Critique of Political Economy (2009)

Lev Manovich

(1960–) explores the general principles underlying new media. He emphasises that, just as the content of newer media is adopted from old media (such as painting, film and print), new digital media are based on film but have very different qualities that push the content in new directions, such as numerical representation (it is programmable), modularity (different elements exist independently), automation (it can be created and modified automatically), variability (it exists in multiple versions) and transcoding (the logic of the computer influences how we understand and represent ourselves). Manovich argues that the computer format privileges database over narrative form, and allows for the emergence of new kinds of navigable space in a virtual reality. In the digital world everything is reduced to two kinds of software object that are complementary to each other – data structures and algorithms – and the computerisation of culture therefore involves the projection of these two fundamental parts of computer software onto the cultural space.

Major works: The Language of New Media (2001), Software Studies Initiative: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2007/05/about-software-studies-ucsd.html

10. Posthumanism and cyberculture

Postmodern life is so different from life in the past that it is as though an entirely new humanity is on the horizon that is self-creating through science and technology. This ‘posthuman’ may no longer comprehend, let alone experience, emotions that historically have been central to how humanity understands itself. In posthumanist thought, a major preoccupation is understanding the implications of this deep transformation. It criticises anthropocentric humanism and poststructuralism’s emphasis on language, and opens inquiry to non-human life: from animals to artificial intelligence and from spirits to aliens and other forms of hypothetical entity related to physics’ notion of the ‘multiverse’ – the plurality of universes or realities. These theories involve, above all, a movement away from the organic towards the technological – a redefinition of humanity’s place in a world understood as a technological and biological or ‘green’ continuum in which the ‘human’ is but one life form among many. In so doing, posthumanism and cyberculture studies reveal the conditions for a new epistemology or knowledge that is concerned with non-human experience as sites of knowledge. In relation to the arts, one of the most important concepts to emerge from cyberculture studies is that of the ‘mash-up’: the term originally came from pop music, where the seamless combination of music from one song with the vocal track from another using digital mixing technology or a DJ’s turntables created something new, but that still contained the traces of its sources. More broadly, ‘mash-up’ now refers to a distinctly contemporary way of organising information made possible by digital technology. Critics of these theories focus on the dangers involved in abandoning basic categories such as the ‘organic’ and the ‘human’, and the lack of verifiable evidence in relation to speculations about non-human knowledge, the plurality of universes or realities and so on.

Humberto Maturana

(1928–), initially working with Francisco Varela (1946–2001), draws on biology, systems theory and cybernetics to argue that cognition is a biological phenomenon and so must be viewed with respect to the organism whose behaviour makes that phenomenon happen. In other words, living systems are not just static structures and cognition is dependent on embodiment. The activity of the nervous system is thus a product of the structure of the organisation of the nervous system itself and not the result of the impact on it of external reality or symbolic systems. In ‘autopoietic’ theory, linguistic interaction, or any cultural activity, is a venue for action, joining the cognitive domains of two or more actors.

Major works: Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (with Francisco Varela, 1979), The Tree of Knowledge (with Francisco Varela, 1984), From Biology to Psychology (2004)

Paul Virilio

(1932–) argues that a logic of acceleration – of greatly increased rates of speed in all areas of culture – lies at the heart of the organisation and transformation of the modern world. Virilio’s cultural theory is concerned with what he calls the ‘transplant’ revolution – the almost total collapse of the distinction between the human body and technology. He suggests that modern vision and the contemporary city are both the products of military power and time-based cinematic technologies of disappearance. Furthermore, the military–scientific complex has developed technological substitutions and potentialities such as virtual reality and the Internet. The ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ is a form of aesthetics that Virilio argues is derived from the unprecedented limits imposed on subjective vision by this splitting and speeding up of modes of perception and representation. At the same time, unlike several other contemporary theorists, Virilio’s work remains true to the principle of hope with regard to making sense of history and the future of mankind.

Major works: Bunker Archeology (1975), Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1977), The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980), Open Sky (1985), The Information Bomb (1998), Art and Fear (2000)

Donna Haraway

(1944–) is interested in the breakdown between boundaries and borders. She expands feminism by engaging with theories of cybernetic code, describing a theory of the ‘cyborg’. The cyborg is a hybrid creature, with no parentage, and it is intended to reconceptualise a posthuman body as a passage, process, connection or bond. Hi-tech culture, she argues, challenges and breaks down the old dualisms of Western thinking such as the mind–body split, self–other, male–female, reality–appearance and truth–illusion. We are no longer able to think of ourselves in these terms, or even, strictly speaking, as biological entities. Haraway sees a deep social and cultural movement away from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system, which she has charted as a series of transformations that restructure webs of power created by the politics of science and technology.

Major works: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), When Species Meet (2008)

N. Katherine Hayles

(1943–) argues that, in the age of DNA computing and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied. It is like a bodiless fluid that can flow though various states without loss of meaning and form. Hayles distinguishes between ‘human’ and ‘posthuman’: ‘human’ refers to traditional notions of a ‘natural self’ and freedom of the individual, while ‘posthuman’ replaces ‘nature’ with technology – intelligent machines in which information dominates over materiality. For the posthuman, Hayles argues, there is no essential difference between bodily existence and computer simulation. In the arts, the ‘posthuman’ condition suggests the need for a radical rethinking of the role of art for society seen from the perspective of cybernetics and digital technology, especially in relation to basic categories such as ‘nature’, ‘originality’, ‘authenticity’ and so on.

Major works: How We Became Posthuman (1999), Writing Machines (2002)

Manuel Castells

(1942–) claims that we are passing from the industrial age into the ‘information age’. This historical change is brought about by the arrival of new information technologies – particularly those for communication and biological technologies. The Internet is a global network of horizontal, interactive communication, and offers the potential for communication that triggers enough understanding to produce a broader exploration of shared codes of communication. Society remains capitalist, but the basis of the technological means by which it acts has changed from energy to information. This information is of central importance in determining economic productivity. Communications technologies allow for the destruction of space and for globalisation, and the potential for rapid and instantaneous communication also changes the relationship to time. According to Castells, power now rests in networks, such as financial capital, that are global in scale but also exist within and between businesses, and one of the key spatial characterisations of the information age, Castells argues, is the ‘space of flows’: the placeless ‘site’ of networks – of capital, of information, of business alliances and so on. Castells argues that throughout the history of humankind the arts have always been vessels and expressions of shared emotions and feelings that reach far beyond the boundaries set by normal patterns of co-existence in specific societies; they communicate the pre-conscious brain, and so are the most powerful channel of intercultural communication and change.

Major works: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vols. 1–3 (1996–2000), The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society (2001), Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (2012)