OUGD501 - Postmodernist Design Theory

Form (Female) follows function (male)

1960s Beginnings
1970s established as term (Jencks)
1980s recognisable style
1980s & 90s dominant theoretical discourse

Crisis where people aren't bonded together within meta-narratives anymore, people are in a stagnesis

Modernism, a story told primarily by men. Masculine, hosterity,
Post modernism adds a playful element to this rigid design. Breaking away from a series of doctrines.
Perhaps postmodernist philosophy was a way to question wether modernism was neutral as it claims to be. A bias within society.
Memphis group formed 1981 - diverse within their ethnicity and gender
This group is now being recycled 20 years later as just a style, being put on clothes and textiles for furniture. Buying the clothes without any concept of what this movement was supposed to achieve. Randomly cannibalising things from the past. A hyperreal of recycled images.

Patriarchal, a society perpetually progressed by men. Men hold the power and women are excluded by it. Subtle ideological ways which this is reenforced within todays society.

Derrida -
He argues that the entirety of history and western philosophy has been flawed as it has all been based on opposite binaries between things. Our own thinking is based on setting up opposites black white etc... Speaking is always subservien to writing as it depends on the stability of the inferior term. This makes it inferior as it depends on being better than the lesser one (deconstruction)
Exposing binarisations on binary, showing that it is false and attempting to deconstruct and play in the halfway point of these opposites
There is always one side which is privileged. It is the superior side of this dead.
Helene Cixous expands upon this by stating that all of the privileged concepts in a logocentric system are masculine. She calls this a phallogocentric society dominated by male values.
Edward Said expands upon this hy saying there not just male dominant but they are white western masculine values. He states this as Orientalism.
Justification for colonialism and it creates a system where we accidentally perceive this
Hegemony - patriarchy depends on women seeing themselves in a system of our own oppression. The system gets people to participate in their own oppression and recognise themselves within their binary.

Logocentrism - all of our thought is logocentric when setting up our thinking values.
The books structure is typeset to defeat logocentrism, it is anti structural. The reader is in charge of creating meaning instead of the author. Is the writer ever in charge of the meanings of their books?

David Carson - Because he couldn't be bothered reading the interview with Bryan Ferry, he decided to set it in windings so that nobody could read it.

Buried the clothes in his garden for 3 months and then sold them to rich collectors is deconstructive.