Phenomenology and Structuralism

Skeptical Phenomenology: no access to truth, cannot understand objective reality as it is or the language that claims to construct it

Skeptical Structuralism: thought occurs after language, language is prior to and constitutive of consciousness

Combining the two cancels each other out by removing both our consciousness and access to reality.

Wittgenstein: “language games” – special languages of groups conflict with each other and no one language is better than the other

Manovich’s Logic of Selection

New media is often created upon pre-built objects. Composition of new media is more an act of navigating menus and filters rather than “original” creation.

Post-Structuralist Stuff

Deconstruction entails that language is sloppy and often contradicts itself. Manovich example?

Genealogy is the process of evaluating the history of an individual discourse to identify the meaning context of signifiers. What is the lifeworld of a sentence?

“cultural logic” – Frederic Jameson – “Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”

A broad pattern, set of practices or structures, or collection of rules that crosses many levels of a culture.

From Kayce: “Cultural Logic: How Individuals Combine Social Intelligence with Semiotics to Create and Maintain Cultural Meaning” http://cdy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/1/35

Baskin Robbins vs. Coldstone Creamery as example of varying types of cultural logic.

Barthes “death of the author” and “text is a tissue of quotations.”

Genesis of innovation occurs in the use of cultural logic to organize quotes into a text.

Foucault’s “discursive founder” – Marx, Freud and Darwin – Created rule systems which provide a clearing for other authors to move in and create new expressions. Created new language games.