Postmodernism Lecture 2 - Word defintiions

• Enlightened means a moment when things become clear - transparent.
• Ahistorical - outside of history, it cannot date.
• Irreducible it cannot be reduced any further.
• Objective - outside of personal experience.
• Transparent - clear, truthful, reliable.
• Universal - experience understood by everyone worldy/universally. 
• Definitive - the last word, no more versions after that.
• Fixed - this is thee answer, this is the best version, irreducible and fixed. Quest for one size fits all, a utopian ideal.
• Structuralism - Attempting to find meaning which exists prior to history and the social structure of the human mind (e.g. religion, uneducated facts, behaviour etc). It will enlighten and explain, basically trying to find a one size fits all - one universal principle, that form a structure and connects everyone no exceptions.
• Modernism: Modernists like structuralism, transparency and certainty. Modernism is the deliberate departure from tradition and history. e.g. Science over Religious faith.
• The Enlightenment Project 1668 - 1789 was when science started to emerge and traditions began departure, some people stopped looking to god and started looking to man for answers. Man steps out of the darkness and into “enlightenment”, if we look hard enough we can find the truth and make everything transparent. 
• Poststructuralism: Is the opposite to structuralism, it has a problem with structuralism’s one size fits all - it goes against it. Structuralism tries to control all where as poststructuralism tries to liberate individuality not reduce everyone to one size fits all.
• The Unreliable Narrator: A narrator is someone who tells the story in the film, an unreliable narrator is known to be compromised (weakened or made to be less effective). It is also known as a narrator who doesn’t give the audience all the information they need to know so our point of view of a conclusion are altered based on what we see and what the narrator has given us.
• Reflexivity: Is the act of self reference, it is about understanding our own self in order to understand the "other" in society. Reflexive sociology is closely tied to conflict theory as it asks us to be skeptical of our own views as we are also skeptical of others. Reflexivity bends back on itself.