Free Book Review On What Is “Flexible Accumulation” AND Who Is The Author Of This Term?

Film Studies

There is a huge difference in modernist and postmodernist approach to understanding the reality. While modernity usually incorporates single and unified idea, postmodernity often offers several. The modern utopia could be achieved because people shared a single idea what utopia meant. Postmodernity offers variety of options and views on the utopian and dystopia issues that makes their achievement impossible.
Postmodern city is attributed by time, fragmentation, decentralization, militarization and surveillance. Such global process as flexible accumulation has significant impact on the urban economy and environment. The whole philosophy of human life seems to be changing because people determine new priorities. The world becomes fragmented, making people more intolerant. Cities become centers of consumption full with trade centers and marketplaces that form new urban landscape. Advertising no longer functions as means to promote products, now it creates and manipulates desires. It is easier to practice mass urban segregation than to pay attention to the needs of individual.
The cyborg becomes a postmodern cinematic subject. The appearance of this category itself means a crisis in the definition of the living being. Life is not a result of biological processes, now it is only a matter of subjectivity. The abolition of usual values leads to “cyborgization” and appearance of “cyborg society”. The cinematic view on this problem is represented in such films as Blade Runner and Falling Down. Despite the fact that they have opposite approaches to the issue of the postmodern changes, they both focus on the effects of economic fragmentation on individual and society as a whole.
The main idea of this chapter is raising the issue of postmodern negative effects on societies and the problem of mass urban segregation. The author tries to attract attention to the inevitable negative global changes that will rock the world if the ongoing trend continues.

Questions

(The new mode of global economy renders fixity of capital, labor, and resources irrelevant Harvey has called this “flexible accumulation”).

How can you characterize a function that advertising plays in the postmodern society?

(Advertising, rather than fulfilling its original function of promoting products, is now largely concerned with simply creating and manipulating desires and tastes).

What common things can you see in Blade Runner and Falling Down?

(Economic fragmentation, social decay, replicants and postmodern cinematic Los Angeles).