Search results for "art "
Production - [Critical Media Concepts and Contexts]
"All that is solid melts into air" (Engels, F. & Marx, K., 1848. The Communist Manifesto) This lecture explored the notion of production, and found that every attempt to pin "production" down ended in the pursuit of something disappearing.
Evaporation du lac by FrancoisRoche on Flickr
Introduction
The ideas presented can be summarised in any one of the following ways:
- an examination of how creativity and production are actually forms of translation and transformation: not making something from nothing (creation) but reworking existing things into new forms (reproduction)
- deconstructing the common perception that human civilisation, with its industrial and manufacturing superstructures which underpin commercial production, represent a form of progress towards an ever better future.
- suggesting that the human production of knowledge is inseparable from the practices and motives which underpin it: it is instrumental, not objective
- tracing the shift away from the object and its aura, towards experience and its commodification
We occasionally looked at the practice of mapping in order to illustrate some of these ideas.
Production as creativity
- Poiesis - production as it is expressed by philosophers like Aristotle and Heidegger. The latter's notion of poiesis is a bringing-forth, like "the bursting of a blossom into bloom" (Heidegger, M., 1954. The Question Concerning Technology) - not the magical creation of things that did not exist before: rather, a liminal, threshold experience which facilitates transformation.
March 19, 2006: Apple tree blossoms by Matt McGee on Flickr
- Memetics and memes - the notion that thoughts, ideas and units of cultural information as they are expressed in our conscious thoughts are transferred and spread from mind to mind as genes are spread from body to body via reproduction. As such humans are merely vehicles - for both genes and memes. The idea was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976. The Selfish Gene) and has been taken up by other commentators on cultural ideas.
- Representation - the basic problems of philosophy revolve around various configurations of three components and their relationships: the world, the subject and representation. Representation might be thought of as the image of the world in our conscious thought. Various different philosophical traditions might argue about the relationship between the world and our image of the world (i.e. the relationship between world and representation). See Arthur C. Danto for a good introduction to the problems of philosophy, (1997. Connections to the World)
Shadow Play by Swamibu on Flickr
We can think then of representation as a reproduction of the world - the image of the world as it appears in human consciousness. A map, too, is a representation of the world. Does conscious human thought "map" accurately onto the world? For that matter, do maps accurately represent the world (consider the reductionism inherent in portraying the multi-dimensional earth in the two dimensions of a piece of paper or a screen)? Representation is a mediated and interpreted image of what is given: a copy of the world, which may be subject to distortion through our imperfect human sensory apparatus. As Shakespeare intimates - we see through a glass, darkly.
The images we work and rework - such as poetry (from the same etymological root as poiesis) are not inventions of language, but the reimplementation and translation of language. Of course language mutates and evolves through use. The introduction of "newness" - variety, diversity, heterogeneity might be comparable to the evolution of new species: iterative mutation induced through erroneous copying. The "meme" is the cultural manifestation of the biological gene.
Creativity, then might not be about a godlike ability to conjure things into existence from nothing, but part of the work of constant change and transformation that human beings enter into. There is no production, there is only reproduction, and - thankfully - reproduction is given to error?
translation by Swiv on Flickr
Production as the material and immaterial means of production and reproduction
- The parasite - the parasite is an organism which exploits a host without returning any benefit. Michael Serres' philosophical work (1984, The Parasite) provokes the thought that reproduction is a parasitical process. We might note that our industrial production processes viewed at the planetary level might be seen as rather parasitical.
- Complexity and reductionism - trying to understand either the material or immaterial systems which encompass contemporary culture requires getting to grips with prohibitively complex networks of interrelated factors, so we take short cuts (systems theory, marxism, discourse analysis, etc). Niklas Luhmann's development of systems theory - especially his application of it to the mass media (1996. The Reality of the Mass Media) is instructive here.
- Mechanical reproduction - understanding reproduction (and what it is we are reproducing) is one of the ways which people (especially marxists) have used to try to analyse the relationship between 'production' and culture.
No471701 by . SantiMB . on Flickr
- Marxism - a inescapably important thread of cultural analysis for over 150 years. You can find more about marxism here and ideology here. A marxist analysis of production might lead us to conclude that our acts of production and reproduction are aimed at little more than the continual reproduction of the means and conditions of our being able to engage in acts of production and reproduction. This might help us to understand everything from the resilience of capitalism to Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" (1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man).
- Aura - the important and influential writer Walter Benjamin, who emerged form the important and influential Frankfurt School (who criticised the capital-oriented culture industry), analysed mechanical reproduction as leading to the loss of 'aura' of the work of art: the 'authentic' unique object of pilgrimage becomes the disposable object of consumption (1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Wither, and whither, the aura?
- Aesthetics, politics and fascism - Benjamin's sometimes equivocal essay (sometimes appearing to celebrate processes of democratisation and rebellion against the authority of tradition) also suggests that mechanical reproduction opens art up to exploitation for political purposes (i.e. propaganda); essentially, the co-option of art by those seeking power helped to facilitate the rise of fascism. He suggests that the aestheticisation of politics (in contemporary terms, this might be seen in the triumph of PR in politics) should be combated by the politicisation of art.
- Technological determinism - the suggestion that human lives are shaped by the technologies they invent. This idea is often ridiculed, since it is taken, in extremis, to argue that human beings have no freedom or agency. It is nevertheless a useful concept when thinking about how, for example, the built environment determines human behaviour: think about how the architecture of spaces like supermarkets and airports 'funnel' your movements. The argument here might be how much this is influenced by technology (which after all, human beings "create") and how much our behaviour is socially learned and constructed. See Henri Lefebvre (1974. The Production of Space) or Marc Augé (1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) on the way we make, and are made by, space.
Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology by gadl on Flickr
Imagine I create a web page with an interactive map. My act of production of this web-based product relies on a precariously constructed network of immaterial labour interacting with the material conditions which facilitate and shape it. I utilise APIs providing textually represented information to write codes implemented by browsers using interpreters based on formats produced by assemblages of people working commercially towards shareholder profit or in open source collectives for infinitely varied motives, using complex stacks of code layers whose material manifestations essentially consist of the configuration of magnetised atoms on slivers of semi-conductors, co-opted into the mediation and storage of binary digits.
labyrinthine circuit board lines by quapan on Flickr
As of November 2009, the internet weighs 498, 438,559,990 kg (2009. Slashdot, How Heavy is the Internet?). How does one begin to untangle the complex web of interactions which go into the production of something which has only existed for a few decades and yet has grown mind-bogglingly large? And what perspectives might we take on the partner to our exponential growth in material production and reproduction? The partner of production is consumption: what ways can we hope to make sense of the consumption of resources that our production necessitates? How many more internets' worth of plastic and metal waste do we dump in landfills every year?
Calgary NW Landfill - 3 by D'Arcy Norman on Flickr
The interactions between the many actors which constitute the material and immaterial nodes in the networks of production and reproduction which facilitate our work as makers of digital artefacts, writers of diegeses on paper, copiers of performances onto photographic film, are extraordinarily complex, and all mutually embedded in and amongst each other. To pull out nodes from the network is to inevitably foreground certain figures and to discount other grounds. Such disembeddings are reductive: they try to simplify and by doing so, exclude. Only with such caveats should we proceed.
Production as the narrative of human knowledge
- Instrumental reason - the idea that human knowledge strives towards ever greater objective truth is a problematic idea; we might wonder if human knowledge is much more instrumental - i.e. partially directed towards purposes and outcomes.
- Teleology - the idea of future purpose. Humans often behave teleologically - believing that we are making progress, that we are working towards purposes. Instrumental reason as described above is exemplary of telelogically directed activities. But we might also question whether 'progress' is inevitably towards better things.
![Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2787/4081543252_bf844a2e86.jpg)
Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham on Flickr
Consider maps and their relation to human perception and space and place to illustrate this. Early maps do not show aerial views, but human level perspectives. Naturalistic attempts at spatial and geographical "accuracy" (i.e. attempting to create spatially representative images of coastlines, cities and roads: "geography" literally means the drawing of the earth) is a late invention: earlier maps showed boundaries as perfectly circular, rivers as straight, important buildings as circles, etc. It is too simple to say that these early maps are "less accurate": actually they were trying to achieve something other than the naturalistic representation that we seek in maps.
Centro storico by zZeta on Flickr
Do maps get better as they get more naturalistically representative? Or, do they perhaps just serve different (rather than better) purposes? A contemporary geological map might be very useful to someone looking for minerals, but incomprehensible to most other people. Cook's mapping of the antipodes was as much a part of, and inseparable from, the practice of empire-building aided with ships and guns, as it was about charting navigable routes or creating disinterested representations of the natural world in order to have a more complete and objective understanding of it.
Some concluding remarks
- Simulacrum - Jean Baudrillard (1985. Simulacra and Simulation) imagined the world we inhabit as being a simulacrum - a 1:1 map of the world, rather than the world itself. The world of representation - that image world which humans construct around themselves, the world of mediation - is the world we inhabit. This world of experience is no longer "authentic" - its aura has withered as it has become an endlessly reproducible commodity. Experience has become the commodity produced for the purpose of consumption.
streetview by dq. on Flickr
Google Streetview is close to showing us the 1:1 map of the world - an external environment centred around the roads and commercial centres which structure our lives. Have we disappeared into that frozen mediated world in which nothing occurs but exchange, capital, and commerce? Are there no more geographies to explore or maps to produce, and are we now only left to consume the endlessly reproduced products of a culture industry? Have we disappeared into the map, or can we use the map to create authentic experiences? Perhaps we can escape the tyranny of consumption by becoming producers of our own experiences, using the resources of the given world: like the flâneur - the stroller and seeker of visions - of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin?
BlakeWalkers by joeflintham
DJ Spooky has likened DJs to contemporary "troubadours", and that the artistry of remixing "found" sounds and samples is part of a new digital folk culture. (Birringer, J. 2008. Performance, Technology and Science, New York: PAJ Publications). The direct comparison here is with oral cultures in which the same stories are used and retold, each telling generates new rhythms and themes, resonances and meanings. Traditional music lovers might long for "real" music - as though the sound produced by a bow on a cello is somehow more "authentic" than a sample of a sample of a sample. Where is originality, newness, creativity and authenticity?
Is the DJ a parasite on the creative work of artists nurtured by the culture industry? Or is industry capital a parasite on the productive work of the artist? Or are the works themselves, the audio ephemera, around which such praxis and commerce revolve: the memes - are these the real parasites?
Exhibit number 3: Second Salon
Imported from Hauntology
Wednesday was the launch night of Second Salon in which the hauntology project is currently being exhibited. This is the third time it has been displayed, following the two Screengrab09 shows in Brick Lane and Bournemouth. Each exhibition teaches me something new about this project, and the launch night taught me more about audience participation.
Draft review notes #1
Imported from Menticulture
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
In the early 2000s, following the dot-com crash, the press, the broadcasting, music and publishing industries reassured themselves that 'online' would never seriously encroach onto their activities.
Draft review notes #1
Imported from Menticulture
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
Banksy and the institution
Imported from Menticulture
I know there is something in the Banksy exhibition at the Bristol City Museum that I have missed: some act of vandalism and subversion that I was not subtle enough to find, some artistic whim, antithetical to the institution of art, that was too discrete to find. The archetypal 'art terrorist' has committed some act of treason in the museum, somewhere, somehow, that none of us has found: I feel strangely comforted by the certain knowledge that there is something shocking, unsupportable, and offensive lurking in the gallery.
Being and Knowing: World as Diegesis
Imported from Menticulture
Another conversation, this time with Shaun, and more thinking through, thinking aloud, thinking thought. Shaun attended all the first year media theory lectures over the last academic year, including the six part series I delivered on narrative. So, he got to hear me rework and reiterate impressionistically over the same endless themes of diegesis and artifice, story and plot, world and representation which I surreptitiously pretended was an overview of narrative theory.
stethoscope - fragment
Imported from Menticulture
In discussion with Fran - we were going through a box of old and antiquated medical instruments he'd collected, objects of curiosity, memory and history - we noted how the stethoscope serves not only to provide a 'virtual world' as Jonathan Sterne puts it (an acoustical representation), but acts as a sort of 'distantiation device' - a prop which helps the doctor to adopt a role and enter into the performance in which the human body is objectified.
Communities of Practice: intersections between learning, fan-fiction and the institution
Imported from Menticulture
Yesterday I was in two unrelated seminars which struck me as having interesting resonances with each other. The first was a Learning & Teaching seminar I led about Communities of Practice and the challenges of pursuing a 'participatory pedagogy' in the constraints of an institution. The second was led by Richard Berger and Bronwen Thomas in the Narratives Research Group, who both talked about fan fiction and slash fic.
Wikipedian Palimpsest
Imported from Menticulture
Only those of us who like to live our lives inspecting the inner workings of the sphincters of camels will have failed to notice the sudden kerfuffle around Wikipedia Art - a project which is soon going to be so citable, the wikipedian deletionists will explode with reverberating feedback loops of infinitely regressing thought, their heads bursting as though they were apoplectic Victorian fathers confronted with Daguerreotypes of themselves masturbating.
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-02-17T13:45:52Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Rhizome | Wikipedia Art
they are deluded into thinking that they are achieving some sort of clinical objectivity via rational consensus (or that any such objectivity could ever be achieved).
Tags: wikipedia knowledge art epistemology net-art performance objectivity
- Creating Interactive Narrative Structures: The Potential for AI Approaches
Tags: narrative
On blogging
Imported from Menticulture
I was recently invited to say a few brief words about the value of blogging. The event was a conference of uni staff who are taking part in a 'research-enhancement' programme of activities with a view to developing their research careers.
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-02-08T22:34:17Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Rigas Makslas Telpa
Disobedience is an investigation into the practices of art activism emerging from the fall of the Soviet block and the events of the 9/11 that today are developing on a global scale
Tags: activism video art disobedience
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-01-24T15:16:49Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle
On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone... Now I know where she lives.
Tags: spatiality space surveillance location mobile privacy gis locative gps
- artcornwall
Tags: art shaughnessy
Serendipity
Imported from Menticulture
There are often serendipities (though I'm talking about reading theoretical works here, so when I write 'serendipity' you may read 'pain in the arse') in the way I discover new avenues of critical thought to pursue, though now I think about it, the serendipity probably resides in my limited ability to discern and decipher connections rather than the rarity, inscrutability - or even coincidence - of the connections themselves. Perhaps I'm like a half-wit, or at least the opposite of a Quasimodo, who given any chance sees the rightness and absolute simplicity of analogies and apposite moments as though they were the salty truth of the world. I, on the contrary, make hard work where there might be restful ease.
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-01-08T09:17:12Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Grand Text Auto >> Sentences in 1K
computer-generated poetry
Tags: poetry e-literature machine
- Skinny laMinx: Security poetry
funny machine security poetry
Tags: humour poetry e-literature machine
- Seed: The Biohacking Hobbyist
DIYbio is a group of people who are interested in doing amateur biotechnology
Tags: participation science engineering hacking DIY biology
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-12-07T13:14:50Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Mirko Tobias Sch"afer
In this extended culture industry participation unfolds not only in the cocreation of media content and software-based products, but also in the development and defense of distinctive media practices that represent a sociopolitical understanding of new technologies
Tags: media-participation participation culture
Intro to Media and Participation 2008 - 2009
[Crossposted from CEMP] Today we began the Media & Participation theory option. This post provides a brief outline of the session, and pointers to where we can go from here.
There are some things you need to do if you are doing this option. The first is to register in the CEMP forum, so you can contribute to this thread. The second is to go to this page in the wiki and add yourself. Finally, when you’ve read the rest of this post, you might want to sign up for one of the sessions here.
Just plain fun by sume
This year is different
I’ve taught the Media & Participation unit for two years now, and very rewarding it has been. There’s still something that bugs me about how units like this are structured. Every week I go away and find case studies and examples, I read books and think about how to present the arguments of theorists in ways that make sense. I create slides which hopefully present useful synopses of ideas, and to do this I must synthesise all the material so I’m quite sure I know enough to do a coherent lecture.
All of these activities ensure that I learn a lot about Media & Participation. In fact, it turns out that in research into how people learn, the most effective way to learn something is to be responsible for teaching someone else. It’s almost as though the university institution is set up the wrong way round – teachers do most of the learning, instead of the students!
Now this year is different because instead of lasting 6 weeks, the unit lasts 12 weeks. In the new year there are 5 more lectures, each a fortnight apart. A fortnight is either:
- long enough for us to forget everything we did in the last lecture
or - long enough for us all to collaborate on the contents of the next lecture
Red Pill Blue Pill
So I offered those of you who attended the lecture the choice between the red pill and the blue pill: red pill, I do 5 lectures as usual; blue pill you decide how to do the unit.
We had a very small majority in favour of the blue pill. Cue people waking up in pods of fluid, choking as a robot unplugs you from the matrix.
Your ideas
So, we broke into groups and I asked you to think about what you wanted to learn about; how you might want to learn it.
There were a number of different subject areas which came up, as well as a number of different formats. Some people wanted to have debates; others wanted me to talk for an hour, and then open up for discussion for a half-hour; some people suggested that you students should do research and provide case studies each week. I liked a lot of the ideas, but of course we can’t implement all of them.
My ideas
In return for sharing your ideas, I showed you the usual structure of the unit from previous years. Each week, I would ask students to do something in advance of the lecture, and I’d try to weave the student contributions into the subjects for each week. Invariably, students would post their contributions at about midnight the night before the lecture, so most of the time, I was totally winging it.
Now, the content from previous years is still available. The schedule is here, and you can see all of the weekly assignments and the lecture subjects.
- Culture & Anarchy – assignment thread and lecture notes
- Citizenship & Anarchy – assignment thread and lecture notes
- Ownership & Anarchy – assignment thread (no lecture notes because I was off sick, but I mostly covered the subject here)
- Truth & Anarchy – assignment thread and lecture notes
- Identity & Anarchy – assignment thread and lecture notes
Messy compromise
The solution we eventually agreed to was that in every ‘off’ week, a different group of students and myself would meet to plan the following week’s lecture. We’d all contribute to deciding who will do what – research, reading, case studies, etc. Of course, this will have to be elective – I can’t force anyone to ‘participate’ in each session. So the only way this will work is if you decide what it is you want to learn about media and participation, and volunteer to plan a session about it.
Lecture subjects
We can stick roughly to the themes from previous years for each lecture, or we can try to cover new ground, depending on what each group would like to do. The first thing we need to do is find out who wants to be involved in the first lecture of the new year, which is six weeks away, on Weds 14th January. I need up to eight people to volunteer to go first. We’ll meet next Monday at 3.30pm (venue TBC) to plan it. You’ll then have 5 weeks (count em! FIVE weeks!!!) to plan for that session. So please sign up for session one on this wiki page here.
Assessment
This unit has to be assessed by a 2000 word essay: that’s pretty much written in the law of the unit specification. What you can do is choose what subject to write your essay about. Probably it is likely to be a subject you’d like to do a lecture session on. That way the work you do to help prepare for the lecture can feed into your essay.
Learning
As I’ve tried to emphasise, I think the more you take control of what you do, the more you’ll learn. I’m not being original here, I’m shameless nicking from Mike Molesworth’s work in IMS. And David Gauntlett talks about similar ideas in his recent inaugural lecture at Westminster. Watch this video, because it’s good:
Fun
Most of all, participation should be liberating. It should be rewarding. It should be empowering. That’s the point. I think we agreed in today’s lecture that we’d all like to learn something and pass the unit. So let’s do it.
Narratives: Stories and Structures
[Crossposted from CEMP] Notes from the second keynote in the Narratives series. Post comments or use the forum if you want to clarify anything! Here’s last week’s introductory lecture. TL;DR? This week’s shoutometer – or suggest next week’s – or even write a story based on one of George Polti’s 36 situations.
We see the whole structure, and the man in the tree. We can see structure, but not texture. The man in the tree sees the texture of the tree, he is in close and intimate. But the man in the tree cannot see the whole structure of the tree, unless he leaves the tree. We cannot be in the tree and outside it at the same time. We can’t see texture and structure at the same time.
Is structure all-important?
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – here’s an interesting project which takles Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera and allows anyone to upload video clips as alternatives to Vertov’s original. A new ‘remake’ is made using software and the database of clips that people upload.
The project is very tightly structured around each shot from the film. In theory, the original and the remake should be structurally identical. So does this mean that the two films are the same?
Structuralism
The Stories and Structures lecture focussed on structuralism. Structuralism is the movement in intellectual thought which developed over the course of the C20th, mostly out of the work of Russian formalists like Vladimir Propp and the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure’s structuralist approach to linguistics led to what we now call semiotics, and is the study of the internal structure of language. He called a synchronic snapshot of language ‘langue’ and distinguished it from ‘parole’ – the diachronic utterances which ‘langue’ facilitates.
‘Langue’ is relationally structured and it is this relational structure which allows words to ‘have’ meaning. Every word is in a paradigmatic relation to every other word, and these paradigmatic relationships enable and define difference and meaning – different words, different meanings… This sounds complicated, but isn’t really: if we had only one word, we could only ‘mean’ one thing. We have lots of different words, and differences between them (the relational structure) are what create meaning.
Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss was the main player in this lecture. Levi-Strauss did to mythologies what Saussure did to language: looked for a relational structure in the myths and legends of various cultures. In his essay, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Levi-Strauss analyses the Oedipal myth. Interestingly, he emphasises that he feels free to take many different instances of the myth from throughout the ages, and combine them into the material to be analysed.
So Levi-Strauss’ snapshot of the mythic narrative is synchronic like Saussure’s analysis of language, but not in the sense that he examines a myth at one moment in time, but rather that he treats the entire myth as a system which can be laid out at a moment in time and surveyed as a paradigmatically and syntagmatically relational structure. He does exactly this, in the form of a table-like grid, into which he places the key components – or mythemes – of the story. He repeats this system in other works, such as those which treat native american myth systems. Again, his synchronic ‘snapshot’ of myth is not confined to one story, but to the entire collection of stories which a particular culture keeps in circulation.
The primary tool Levi-Strauss uses to define the components, the mythemes, which go into his table, are ‘binary oppositions’.
Binary oppositions
One of the keys to understanding structuralism is the notion of ‘dyads’ or ‘binary oppositions’. It may help to think of binary oppositions as fundamental categories of human thought. If we are born into a world of undifferentiated chaos (babies have to learn to make sense of the kaleidoscope of sensory information that bombards them from the moment of birth), then the development of mind in a human being must involve categorisation. In order to define something, you must also define what it is not. Every new definition can be further split into yet more categories, ad pretty much infinitum.
In the lecture I compared this to mitosis. For those of you yearning for more philosophical insight, if human analysis is rather like a knife, which differentiates the world into conceptually different things, then this is what we might call the origins of ‘dialectic’.
So anyway, pairs of such categories might include:
- Raw / cooked
- Friend / foe
- Kin / not kin
- Self / other
These binary oppositions tend to get paired up with another binary opposition:
- Good / bad
So raw is bad, cooked is good (if you don’t want to die of food poisoning); kin is good if you want people to co-operate with; but kin is bad when you want to reproduce and make healthy babies.
The structural law of myth
In the essay on the Oedipal myth, Levi-Strauss laments that various accidents in the field of anthropology have led to the undermining of prospects for the ‘scientific study of religion’. He goes on to say that analysing the instances of the Oedipal myth, what is aimed for is a ‘logical treatment of the whole’ that will lead to uncovering the ‘structural law of the myth’.
These descriptions of his programme start to outline one key aspect of what structuralists want to do: approach the object of their study scientifically. Levi-Strauss emphasises this by noting that when poetry is translated from one language to another, serious distortions of the original poem occur, but translations of myths do not suffer in the same way. He describes myth as ‘timeless’, and as something that functions at a ‘high level’, which ‘takes off’ from language. These are characteristics which make myths translatable, reproducible: they have ‘constituent units’ which are governed by laws in just the same way that particles have laws which are governed by the laws of physics.
Roland Barthes say something very similar in his essay, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ when he describes narrative as ‘international, transhistorical, transcultural’ – he even uses the U-word: ‘universal’.
Reductionist approaches to human culture
The logical conclusion of the emphasis on structural units which are universal, reproducible, predictable, translatable, international, transhistorical and transcultural is to to take a reductionist approach to human culture (see the notes on structure and texture from the last lecture). Indeed, it is the inevitable consequence of adopting a scientific method at all, which is certainly what structuralism attempts.
A classic method of structuralist anthropology, for instance, is to identify the ‘component units’ of human behaviour which can be observed in every known human culture. These include the telling of stories, taboos on incest, music, co-operation, war and hundreds of other ‘universals’.
This inevitably raises questions about human nature itself: if all human societies have wars, then is war a ‘natural’ trait of humans, etc? In some senses these questions are really very useful and we can the pursuit of knowledge addressing difficult ethical issues. However, we might also want to make some pretty severe criticisms of such ‘universalist’ approaches to human nature. It is one thing to link incest taboos to biological imperatives. It is another to impose ‘laws’ on human society because of particular interpretations of narratives such as religion and myth.
Scientism and Marxism
We will return to deal with Marxism and criticisms of scientism in future lectures. For the purposes of this lecture, we simply note that Marxists such as Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School regarded scientific, universalist approaches to culture as tyrannical; there are many ways in which we can note that rationalism contains self-contradictory problems (do something as simple as look for the square root of 2 and you have found what is called an ‘irrational’ number). But we end up confronted by a ‘representational fallacy’ – we can think that we are dealing with concrete reality, when in fact we are dealing with nothing more than mist conjured by our imagination: language, story, myth, narrative.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOkay
So much for the theoretical matters we were trying to nail down. We also tried to illustrate them. First of all, let’s think about Memento (Nolan, 2000). SPOILER ALERT!!! This film illustrates the difference between story and plot rather well. If someone asked you ‘what happens in Memento‘, you could well give two very different answers, both equally correct.
One of these is the story – the chronological story in which Leonard Shelby is an insurance claim investigator, whose wife is raped and murdered, and who ends up with anterograde amnesia, and repeatedly seeks out vengeance by tracking down and killing people called John G – either because other people set him up to kill them for their own purposes (Teddy setting Lenny up to kill Jimmy), or because Lenny himself sets himself up to kill them out of spite (killing John ‘Teddy’ Gammel) because that is better than admitting that he has become ‘no-one’, with nothing to live for.
The other answer is the plot – what we ‘experience’ as we watch the film. Lenny Shelby kills a man, and we gradually learn through a series of flashbacks that Lenny is seeking to avenge his murdered wife. We learn that he uses tattoos and polaroid photographs to keep a record of what he knows, so that he can piece his life back together every time he ‘wakes’ into a present with no context. He stresses that he goes on ‘facts’ – but as each scene unfolds, our trust in Lenny’s ability to record facts erodes, until we realise that the so-called facts that he uses to direct his actions are actually little more than the subjective expressions of momentary emotions (such as his trust of Natalie) or even the result of his own malice (his mistrust and murder of Teddy). In the final scene of the film, we discover not only that Lenny has killed at least two ‘John Gs’ before killing Teddy, but we are also provoked into worrying that the entire ‘story’ we have just witnessed may have been an entire fabrication: that Lenny is in fact, Sammy Jankis; that he unwittingly killed his wife using repeated insulin injections; and that he, not Sammy Jankis, has been institutionalised, and that we may be watching nothing more than a phantasm, a momentary hallucination.
Structuralism vs formalism
Structure and form sound like very similar things. In some contexts, they can even mean the same things. But they are quite different things when it comes to narrative theory, so let’s try to pull them apart a little.
I suggested a massive simplification here, which we may use provisionally to better understand structuralism and formalism. Let us think of structuralism as interested in story, the totality of the diegesis. Formalism on the other hand is interested in plot – the framing devices through which we learn the story.
I emphasise that this is an exaggerated simplification, simply to help us get the idea.
So structuralism wants to map out the whole of the diegetic story – the fabula, rather than the sjuzet, and understand its structure. Story can be plotted in many different ways, and this need not alter the story. Levi-Strauss even says that we can use the many different instances of the Oedipal myths together to understand its ‘laws’.
So to the extent that this simplification is useful, formalism is interested in the artifice of representation – that is the devices that we use to tell these stories – the form they take (which is quite different from the ‘structure’ of the story). We’ll be placing our emphasis more on formalism in the next lecture.
Analysing stories
We created an example of a story by using a fairly common structure which we then dressed in the texture of your own narratives. The structure took the form: a protagonist; who encounters and obstacle; then overcomes the obstacle; and there is a positive outcome. Your stories looked like this:
A science teacher is trying to teach a class. A monster enters the class and makes teaching rather difficult. The teacher destroys the monster using their well-established and well-founded scientific principles and understanding. And the class can continue as normal.
A penguin wants to go into the sea. Unfortunately there is an apple in the way. So the penguin kicks the apple, which skittles away, leaving the way open for the penguin to get to the sea.
A student has crippling dyslexia; he is helped by his teacher, enabling him to write a novel which makes his fortune and he becomes extremely rich.
An alcoholic cowboy wants to drink himself to death. He walks out of a bar, and encounters someone who gets in his way. He shoots them, and is able to carry on his way, and drink himself to death.
All of these stories can be expressed in terms of a simple binary opposition: complete / incomplete. The teacher is incomplete, because he is unable to fulfil their role of teacher; destroying the monster allows them to perform their role, thus achieving ‘completeness’. The penguin wants to feed in its natural milieu, but is unable to do so – it is incomplete; it achieves completeness by kicking the apple and getting to the water. The student is incomplete, because he is unable to write his novel; the teacher’s help complete him, by allowing him to fulfil his dream. The alcoholic cowboy is incomplete because he desires to kill himself, but his way is barred; being free to do so makes him complete.
Being able to see stories in this way gives us a way to analyse structure of the narrative. Sometimes it is very easy, as in Hollywood blockbusters, when there are easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. Such obviously binary structures are Manichean, as was George Bush’s famous line, ‘you’re either with us or against us’.
Limits of structure
While these structuralist ideas are undoubtedly appealing and powerful in many ways, they also have shortcomings. We will return to how structuralism becomes post-structuralism in the final lecture of the series.
For now I just want to think about how Memento parallels the rational approach to making sense of the world that structuralism attempts. We watch Lenny relying on things that seem to be very clearly facts. Polaroids document facts. Lenny tattoos ‘facts’ on his body, and as we begin our journey with him, we trust him – we feel sure he must be a just avenger of his wife’s murderer. But this fact-based approach deteriorates into wilful self-deception.
In fact, it we can even read Memento as having no story at all: the chronological story we witnessed becomes indeterminate, as we see one event multiple times (such as Lenny pinching his wife leg, but later the same event is shown as Lenny injecting his wife’s leg with insulin). What we thought was the internally coherent diegesis of Memento is really a hall of mirrors, where we cannot be sure that anything we have seen is not an illusion, a hallucination. Memento has become pure plot – a trick or an artifice, an illusion created through the device of story-telling.
Next time
Next time in Narratives, we’ll turn to formalism, and examine the artifice of plot. We’ll take in some Marxism, and we’ll also consider mimesis.
Invitation to a structuralist experiment
George Polti described 36 dramatic situations. If we write lots of stories based on the situations, we can analyse them to see if the structuralists are right. Here’s a website where you can add a story based on any of the 36 situations. We’ll look at the stories there ate the end of teh Narratives series and see what sort of conclusions we can draw…
Too long; didn’t read
An important school of theoretical thought in the C20th wanted to systematise cultural study. This was the structuralist movement, and it aimed at adopting a scientific approach to the analysis of myths, narratives and language.
Structuralism has some strengths and some weaknesses: narratives certainly have internal structures, and structuralism certainly helps us to understand how language works; however, whether it is a good idea to think of narrative structures as producing ‘universal’ human laws is a different question entirely.
- write a story based on the 36 situations
- the bibliography for today’s lecture
- the discussion forum for any questions
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-13T12:40:13Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- *** PIKSEL08 ***
Abstract code is a connection to parallel worlds, a poetic formula dealing with outer forces. Code is art, its action is subtile, effective, magic
Tags: code art exhibition
- *** PIKSEL08 ***
Tags:
- Liberal Pranksters Hand Out Times Spoof - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com
NY Times repsonse to hoax edition
Tags: spoof satire politics parody nytimes news
- Self portraits in cyberspace | Arts | The First Post
Robbie Cooper's portraits of gamers and their avatars
Tags: first-person-media identity performance avatar
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-10T15:03:55Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Crossing the digital divide
The most frequently used health IT functions are online peer group support bulletin boards and disease self-management tools
Tags: cewqol
- art & commerce essy competition: competing ideas
10000 Euros to answer the essay title "Rethinking the social and economic conditions of art: Toward a new status of art questioning twentieth-century conceptions."
Tags: art commerce economics competition
- Of Atavism and Enlightenment
a whimsical squib about the future
Tags: future science-fiction Wikipedia knowledge truth relativism community
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-09T20:04:14Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- /Message: Reflections on Social Media's Next Phase
control is precisely what is sacrificed in a medium that conflates means of production and consumption; a medium we sometimes call an "echo chamber" because there's no telling where the noise is coming from
Tags: marketing commerce branding social-media media-participation
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-06T10:24:10Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- PressThink: Assignment Zero, Updated. With Initial Results...
Wired / PressThink Crowdsourced Journalism Experiment: Wikipedia vs Citizendium
Tags: wikipedia wiki media-participation crowdsourcing social-software collaboration
- Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness
Wired / PressThink Crowdsourced Journalism Experiment: Wikipedia vs Citizendium
Tags: wikipedia wiki media-participation crowdsourcing social-software collaboration
- Structures of Participation in Digital Culture
the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume
Tags: media-participation participation sociology technology theory
- codedcultures.net
Tags: imported
- CBC Radio | Ideas | Features | How To Think About Science
Tags: imported latour science
- >> Destroy All Rational Thought
an account of the Here to Go music and art festival created to celebrate the life and works of beat poets William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin
Tags: beat torrent
- Military: US Army to Push X-Files Tech Development, Invade World of Warcraft
The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files making science fiction into reality
Tags: imported science military technology army development research videogames
- CIA Director Hayden: Promoting an Effective Transition - Central Intelligence Agency
CIA: "Through expanded access, greater than what he had in his briefings as a candidate or as a Senator, he [Obama] will see the full range of capabilities we deploy for the United States"
Tags: CIA spooks intelligence
- Guy Fawkes' blog of parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy: Not Nihilistic, Realistic
Blears vs Bloggers
Tags: media-participation bloggin UK politics msm
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-04T03:04:37Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Maps for Advocacy: An Introduction to Geographical Mapping Techniques | Tactical Technology Collective
using maps in advocacy. The mapping process for advocacy is explained vividly through case studies, descriptions of procedures and methods, a review of data sources as well as a glossary of mapping terminology
Tags: mapping geo advocacy participation media-participation cartography spatiality space place map geotagging
- The Valve - A Literary Organ | Three Very Short Kurmanji Stories
a way of interpellating a whole country, a whole people, as violent and barbaric
Tags: imperialism colonialism
- Photojojo >> Day of the Dead: Memorial Photography
the process of dying was ultimately all about understanding and appreciating life
Tags: death photography history
- A List Apart: Articles: Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript
useful tips on implementing progressive enhancement
Tags: javascript programming ajax
- DIYcity
DIYcity aims to accomplish [the goals of making cities more efficient, more effective, more sustainable, better able to respond to problems, friendlier and generally more accessible to the individual user] with user-built applications created on top of existing web technologies
Tags: city urban activism sotware smart-mob
- City of Transformation Paul Virilio in Obama's America
your LOLquote: "dromology has no real meaning outside of logics of capture and endocolonization and predation"
Tags: virilio capitalism economics theory
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-03T00:43:10Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- SitePoint Blogs >> 7 Places to Find the Code You Need
code search engines and snippet libraries
Tags: code programming archive development
- Code: Flickr Developer Blog >> The Shape of Alpha
Interesting map / place / shape data API from Flickr and their geodata
Tags: geotagging mapping maps spatiality space place photography api shapes
- New evidence for homeopathy
An open assessment of the current evidence suggests that homeopathy is probably effective for a number of conditions including allergies, upper respiratory tract infections and 'flu, but more research is desperately needed
Tags: homeopathy medicine research trial
- Granum :: Book information
The Internet is viewed as a tool, channel and forum enabling citizens to make an impact on social, cultural and political change. Civic empowerment through the Internet emerges in people's everyday life. Big politics is broken into pieces to become a multitude of small, more personalised political engagements. The Internet is a powerful medium for gathering coalitions and organising mobilisations of all kinds. It also transforms political styles and types of activities
Tags: politics media-participation participation book internet activism engagement
- Air Force Aims to 'Rewrite Laws of Cyberspace' | Danger Room from Wired.com
..." upcoming Air Force doctrine calls for the service to have the 'freedom to attack' online. A research program, launched in May, shoots for 'gain access' to 'any and all' computers"
Tags: technology military security internet surveillance
- #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet - CNN.com
" the dark side of communication" ... "Kids don't realize that one post can destroy somebody's life forever"
Tags: psychology anonymity public-sphere anger trolling abuse
- Home - FOLDED-IN
"Folded-In is a 3D multiuser online videogame, which attempts a detournement of the representational space of YouTube, by transforming it into a gamespace, and by respectively turning the selected videos and the tags into game elements"
Tags: remix participation game youtube web2.0 mashup
- Nation Institute
Tags: for:saraha_3
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-10-26T21:57:54Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Journalism.co.uk :: Media industry on 'brink of carnage', says Guardian digital chief
please please please make this true :-)
Tags: journalism media industry participation media-participation commerce business model
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-10-13T10:45:06Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Inspired Stories TV
Promoting mental wellbeing through storytelling
Films by and for people with lived experience
Tags: media-participation therapy video film
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-10-06T21:52:31Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- The Pinocchio Theory >> Blog Archive >> Issue #1
Early-20th-century Dadaist stunts raised meta-questions about art, about what could be considered art, etc. But such meta-questions have long since been so well assimilated into our culture (both artistic culture and commercial culture) that they scarcely raise an eyebrow any longer.
Tags: death-of-the-author authorship avant-garde literature poetry post-structuralism machine-art spam
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-09-30T13:42:22Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
Richard Rorty remembered... The nature of philosophy, conversation, language, and the dubious nature of universities
Tags: richard-rorty philosophy language literature pragmatism gadamer
- Sound:Space
spacial sound installations, audio and architecture projects, radio art, environmental sound interventions
Tags: sound art soundart sound-art
- Michael B'erub'e
The reason why Berube's return to blogging is excellent news: "I've come to think that it's intuition all the way down, and that we'd be better off without believing in the existence of moral bedrock, better off telling ourselves that it's simply a matter of trying to persuade people to pursue some intuitions and abandon others"
Tags: morality contingency philosophy anti-foundationalism
- Against Intuition - ChronicleReview.com
"intention" and "moral blame" cannot be neatly disaggregated without doing violence to the way the mind functions (as opposed to how philosophers think it should function). "From the beginning, your whole process of figuring out what is going on in the world is saturated with moral judgment,"
Tags: philosophy morality psychology empiricism
- MAGPIE >> IT BEARS REPEATING: Rushkoff on the credit crisis (Arthur Magazine, May 2008) - Arthur Magazine blogs for you...
Think small. Buy local. Make friends. Print money. Grow food. Teach children. Learn nutrition.
Tags: economics money credit economic-divide
- The Corrupter of Youth | The American Prospect
I honestly think that we-the parasitic priestly class which confers sacraments like BAs and PhDs -- are the best agency for social change on the scene. ... This ... requires the continuation of the same claptrap about contemplation we've always handed out, because without this mystique the society won't let us get away with corrupting the youth anymore.
Tags: philosophy richard-rorty contingency higher-education lol
- doomcount8
countdowns to apocalypses
Tags: eschatology countdown art
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-09-12T16:32:42Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Table of Contents, Dictionary and Thesaurus in Google Docs
Google integrates word tools into Google Docs. Your brain will be next
Tags: google web-app
- Slashdot | Google's Streetview Seen As Culturally Insensitive In Japan
Google's Street View mono-culture hits Japan
Tags: google streetview image maps mapping culture japan mono-culture
- Slashdot | Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Search
Google tests crowd-sourcing pagerank
Tags: google search participation crowd-sourcing
- Google Broadband << Tinder Blog
Google invests in infrastructure in Africa
Tags: google broadband
- SitePoint Blogs >> Google Working on Browser: What About Mozilla?
Orphans sent to heaven by Google
Tags: google chrome browser
- Slashdot | Chrome Vs. IE 8
Google chrome browser saves world
Tags: google chrome browser
- Slashdot | The Google Navy
All hail the victorious Google
Tags: google data-center
- Review: Google Chrome lacks polish under the hood
Goooogle Chrome browser review
Tags: google chrome browser
- Slashdot | Google Claims User Content In Multiple Products
Google Chrome EULA over-reaches decency and owns your children
Tags: google chrome browser
- Slashdot | Google Invests In Broadband For Poorer Countries
Google infrastructure to cure world's ills - I mean - bridge digital divide
Tags: google braodband digital-divide
- Slashdot | Google Turns 10
Google 10 years old but rules world
Tags: google power influence
- Slashdot | Google Chrome, the Google Browser
Google chrome frenzy
Tags: google chrome browser
- Resurfaced story raises questions on Google search
Google noos blooper
Tags: google news truth influence search
- Slashdot | "Google Satellite" To Be Launched This Week
Google and GeoEye-1 in Space
Tags: google satellite maps mapping
- Photoshop cloned trees in Google Maps - Boing Boing
google maps imagery cheat!
Tags: google simulation maps mapping
- Estonia, Google Help 'Cyberlocked' Georgia (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com
Google's servers better able to withstand Russian cyber-attacks during Georgia incursion
Tags: google cyber-war russia georgia war security media
- Slashdot | Reading Google Chrome's Fine Print
Google Chrome's EULA fine print
Tags: google chrome browser
- Slashdot | Google Chrome, Day 2
slashdot google chrome reviews
Tags: google chrome browser
- SitePoint Blogs >> The Future of Search According to Google
Tags: google search
- Satellite launches for Google hi-res imaging; can we track humans by shadows? - Boing Boing
Google can tell who you are from the sky. They also know what you are thinking.
Tags: google satellite surveillance mapping privacy
- YouTube - The story behind Google Chrome
Video on Google's Youtube Channel
Tags: google chrome browser
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-09-10T10:42:29Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Scientists' joy after world's greatest atom-smasher starts operations (Update 2)
Humans have "a quest for (knowing) where they came from and where they should go, whether the Universe will end, and where the Universe will go in the future,"
Tags: LHC large-hadron-collider particle-physics knowledge science
- dn14699-1_850.jpg (JPEG Image, 850x505 pixels)
one of the first images form the LHC
Tags: LHC large-hadron-collider particle-physics image visualisation
