Cutural Studies: Postmodernism - Movie Review Example

"In postmodern thinking, consumption is not about buying objects, but about acquiring a new version of your self." Do you agree or disagree How and why The idea of selfhood, if taken from the context of postmodernism, would present to us of a version where selfhood is situated at the helm of one's mere rhetoric, fragmented by many ideologies that have sprung since the birth of skepticism that branded such school of thought. Jameson calls it the 'waning of effect' and the 'effacement of history'. He opines that "in the postmodern era, we no longer experience our lives with the same sense of intensity and individuality" (Fuery and Mansfield 2000). Sure enough, with the advent of new technologies that caters to the many whims of human beings and adversely transforms their idea of space and time--- the landscape to which they were born to and grew up with, their sociological imagination and the pattern to which they play out their lives become ravaged by the unnecessary, most of the time manipulated only by the latest trend in science and technology. Such happens in the movie I, Robot, which foretold the landscape of United States of America, some 30 years from today. The film takes place in Chicago in the year 2035, where humanoid robots are as common as cars. It centered on the story of homicide detective Del Spooner (Will Smith), who harbors an intense distrust for robots and their kind. His detestation with robots came from one experience when a humanoid robot picked to save him over of a ten-year old girl during a car accident. Though it wasn't against any logic considering he had the larger probability of surviving between them two, he reacted that the young girl would have deserved to be saved more than him because she would offer more hope for a life which she scarcely lived. His idea was that robots failed to feel this promising hope of youth because they were only heartless metals after all. The premise of the film was that it happened away in the future, in times beyond the achievements of science and technology of today and which antiquates today's idea of modernity. During that time, humanoid robots would have replaced skilled workers in domestic and service-oriented jobs. With the use of state-of-the-art research, the United States Robots (USR), a fictional company that specializes in robotic technology, aimed to 'humanize' the robots, designing them to be able to mimic human emotion and affection. Such grandeur goal of making metals able to feel something, or at least show humanly concern is not implausible with the use of technology. What is highly questionable is how to integrate these new, almost-human robots into the human society with out dismantling the basic institutions that govern the society such as law, marriage and governance. It has been shown in the movie how these new forms of citizens become law-resistant owing to the fact that no particular written law has served or protected them. Eventually, with the absence of faculty to comprehend hierarchical responsibilities and privileges, these robots resorted to overpowering human beings, believing that their governance would corrupt no power and is in-line with universal progress and preservation of human race. The movie wishes to show that the co-existence of human and robots is postmodern, on the same breadth that it never failed to show that such co-existence can be ravage and inauspicious for both parties. Robots, being cultural products of postmodernism as shown in the movie, issue an indomitable threat not only to the society at large, but also to the basic perception of one's identity as a human being for a human being, or a robot for a robot. Contextually, the idea of selfhood can be articulated by two stand points in the movie: first from the context of the robot, and second, from the context of human beings. Let me discuss first the idea of selfhood from the context of the robots. In the movie, 'Sonny', the robot specially designed by Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), inventor of the Three Laws of Robotics and co-founder of USR, epitomizes the end of a 'humanized' robot--- he can sleep and dream like human beings, he can summon anger and fear and be able to show them, he can feel the pain of rejection and can seemingly exhibit virtues like forgiveness. If one has to examine the quest of selfhood of a robot, one can easily see that it is founded in the same basic way that human seeks for personal identity and autonomy: the recognition first of one's actual existence. When 'Sonny' was unconsciously passed on by Detective Spooner as 'someone' instead of 'something', the robot instantly regarded it as a form of acceptance to the society of human beings. Although humanoid robots are designed to be logical, they are not blessed with the consciousness of their existence, in other words, they don't know that they are alive. Their life span is so designed that they live and die but only to serve yet not be able to conceive joy while at it. They could not infer history, or nostalgia, or at least weave the connection among their society of robots. But 'Sonny' was different, unique in a way that he has acquired the sense of his existence, and that his existence has derived a purpose for him. He was able to identify that his life can end by decommissioning his brain and by such realization asserts that truly he owns a life. It is important to note that with the absence of human emotion or ability to feel, strict logic can beget realizations common to any conscious human being. Virtues like loyalty, veneration to life, forgiveness, or piteousness can be indoctrinated to virtually anything with the use of postmodern hypertext tools such as computer programming. But to actually seize these virtues, and distinguish them if they are mere virtual icons or real touches of human connection is now the quandary of human beings. This brings me now to the second examination of selfhood based on the movie, I, Robot: that on the quest of selfhood by human beings. Strikingly immortalized in the movie was the abhorrence of Detective Spooner to humanoid robots. From this reaction one can understand of how one person perceives his idea of society and its relations in the time of postmodernism. As Jameson would put it, "postmodern life is characterized by the quick transition of emotional responses that are themselves like commodities, not deeply felt, and not contributing to an intense individual response to the world." Such relation transpired between robots and Detective Spooner. Robots failed to qualify emotional responses to their owners, but rather commodified the virtues of loyalty and service. Robots have assumed humanly roles but they failed to deliver these roles in a humanly way. At some ripe time then, there is a possible threat that such commoditization would extend to other human necessities such as love, or companionship, thereby losing one's unified and meaningful capacity as reactive individual worthy of distinction from all other organic substances: "This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings... are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria (Jameson in Docherty, 1993:72)" With robots populating the futuristic postmodern era, one can exhume that they will mystify the real as 'unreal', forging the impossible as 'possible', exhort on the connectivity of myth and reality as interchangeable stand points from which can examine his or herself without contextualizing one's membership to a bipolar society. Along this course, human beings are relegated to the status of robots, which sense of self can be tweaked by mere replacement of bolts and computer codes. As if this is enough, 'robotization' would make up the human faade, in the same way that happened to Detective Spooner's left arm, owing to the perpetuity of metals than human body and the promise of a longer life expectancy. With this, humans would have more tendencies to abandon the depth model, which "assumes that the surface reality presented to us in our lives is a mere cover for our representation of a deeper structural truth within." With all of these, what would robots do then to our understanding of our identity as esteemed creations of the earth Clearly, postmodernism would abandon all hope of finding one's sense of self. In such a highly hysterical era where conventions are defied every so often, the capacity of a person to "locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world' (Docherty 1993), become a maze of uncertainty after uncertainty. For what then would be the path to learning one's identity when its entire course is tainted by external queerness and discrepancies forged in by the introduction of metal species which themselves have no idea of identity Coming vis--vis with the advent of new technologies that significantly change external landscape is the wrought effect and impact that such technologies cause on the internal landscape of every individual. Has postmodernism really produced skeptical quality of people or has it produced a rather confused flock of consumerist people Has postmodernism truly waged war on differences or has it only increased human indifferences "If realism was the dominant cultural mode of industrial capitalism, and modernism that of monopoly and colonial capitalism, then postmodernism is that of post-industrial or multinational capitalism (Fuery and Mansfield 2000)" Truly, the culture of capitalism has never died down where postmodernism stands. Postmodernism in fact has given it a face-lift, cloaking many of its products by sepulcra of only imaginable images bordering on the absurd. Humanoid robot for a nanny, a cook, a bar tender It suffices to say that with postmodernism, one losses the capacity to exalt human labor, instead bank it on to remote controls, hi-fi, to name a few. Postmodern people are made to own such amenities and make them unable to consciously choose and direct their needs. Their reliance to such products of postmodernism devoid them of logic to decide for themselves, backwardly protrude flawed virtues such as sloth, and arrogance. With postmodernism, it would be easier to consume rather than make. So why bother making a new version of one's self when you can buy it Bibliography Fuery, P. and Mansfield, N. Cultural Studies and New Humanities, Oxford University Press, USA, November 30, 2000. Docherty, T. Postmodernism. Columbia University Press , USA, April 15, 1992 Wikipedia. I, Robot, Date accessed: Aug. 11, 2007 Available at: Read More