stowaway

"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 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?

Author: joe
Categories: system:lectures, production, Karl Marx, creativity, poiesis, Martin Heidegger, Richard Dawkins, meme, memetics, representation, philosophy, Arthur C. Danto, map, translation, reproduction, parasite, Michael Serres, complexity, systems theory, Niklas Luhmann, marxism, Marshall McLuhan, Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, aura, authenticity, politics, fascism, art, aesthetics, technological determinism, place, space, Henri Lefebvre, Marc Auge, immaterial labour, material, industrialisation, resources, consumption, landfill, reductionism, science, knowledge, objectivity, instrumentality, teleology, simulacrum, Jean Baudrillard, Google Streetview, flâneur, Charles Baudelaire, DJ Spooky, remix, remix-culture, culture industry,
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[Cross-posted at CEMP]

Notes from the third keynote in the Narratives series. This lecture deals with rationality and inevitability, Aristotle and Brecht, structuralism and formalism, mimesis and alienation. Previous lectures: Introduction followed by Stories and Structures. Whoah… TL;DR? This week’s shoutometer (warning – may cause offence).

Doing it for effect

As I’ve pointed out above, the shoutometer for this lecture was a little offensive. I took that offence further. I told you all that you are pathetic, lazy and unimaginative. I accused you of having no ideas, and that all the work you submit is entirely derivative, unoriginal and, frankly, boring.

I don’t know how convincing you found my rant, but I did reveal my words were part of, in effect, a performance – one designed to alienate you. It was my intention to make you feel a little uncomfortable, to make you wonder why I was breaking the usual conventions of the lecture format and the traditional confidence and good humour of the teacher – student relationship.

I was doing it for effect, and ‘doing it for effect’ is the simplest way of thinking about the subject of this lecture.

Right to reply

I gave you the opportunity to tell me what was wrong with my introduction. You said:

• my words were demotivating
• I was being too general
• you also said I waste time at the start, and rush things at the end. This is quite true.

I had some prepared ideas about why my introduction was inappropriate:

• I was needlessly offensive
• I was over-generalising about individuals too much
• I broke the normal rules of the teaching situation, which require at least mutual respect

And it’s possible, (and this was my hope), that by ‘breaking the rules’ in this way, I was making you think about why I might be saying the words I was saying: whether what I was saying was true (do you contribute enough to your own learning, or do you expect teachers to inject knowledge into your heads?), but also I wanted you to think about the teaching situation. What should our situation be like? Why should it be like that? Why are things the way they are? And maybe, somewhat optimistically, I hoped that you might rise up against me, and rebel against my patronising rant – depose the tyrant teacher.

These questions are fundamental to the subjects of this lecture: the idea of alienation; Marxism and politically motivated thought in general; the agenda of artists and theorists interested (broadly-speaking, and at the risk of over-simplification) in formalism

Recap: science, structuralism and story

So let’s recap where we got to last time. We said that structuralists were interested in understanding the internal structure of story using what they thought of as a scientifically rigourous method. We can think of them laying out the entire diegetic story and looking synchronically at all of its components (diachronic and intertextual) as ranged around a set of binary oppositions such as good/bad, friend/foe, familiar/strange, etc. This analysis will surely tell us (so say the structuralists) what underlying logic ‘governs’ the story.

There are some very strong reasons for thinking that the structuralists’ approach is useful. Saussure’s analysis of language has bequeathed us with an entire discipline (semiotics) and a body of knowledge which looks in depth at how communication works, (though we should do well to remember that not everyone subscribes to the tenets of Saussurian semiology). But we can also note some problems with it. Structuralists have tended towards trying to ‘universalise’ their findings – this is a consequence of ‘scientistic’ thinking which can be criticised for its reductionism and positivism (recall last week’s man in the tree). Or, to put it another way, do we really want to risk going after one-truth-for-all ideas (structure), at the expense of forgetting to celebrate and explore the uniqueness of individual experience (texture)?

I’m just going to bang this point home a little harder: critics of adopting scientistic approaches to understanding human culture and human nature point out that things like eugenics, euthanasia, Nazi gas chambers, phrenology and anti-semitism have all found justification in science and rational thought. While scientists would argue that the knowledge they pursue is “value-free”, that doesn’t stop people with extreme values trying to co-opt scientific thought.

What story?

At a far more trivial level, we saw in the last lecture that the very subject which structuralists want to analyse disappears like mist dispelling before our eyes if we look at it too hard. Memento showed us that the diegesis is pure illusion. We begin the film, with Lenny, trying to piece together the puzzle of his revenge, and we assume that the story that we see, provided to us by the film camera, is reliable, and that at the very least, even if Lenny might be mistaken, we can still solve the puzzle. But the repetition of a scene in which we see, first, Lenny inject his wife’s leg with insulin, and then secondly, Lenny pinch his wife’s leg between his finger and thumbs, tell us that nothing we have seen is reliable. The entire ‘coherent diegesis’ of the storyworld we have seen may be nothing but hallucination. There is no ‘story’ independent of plot, available for structuralists to study.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. As viewers, we look for the ‘foundational’ diegesis. At first we think that maybe Lenny is a justified avenging killer. Then we suspect he may have been ‘played’ by somebody trying to persuade him to kill Teddy. Then we think that maybe he’s been fooling himself in order to give his own life meaning. Then we wonder if his wife really is dead and perhaps she survived? Then we wonder if Sammy Jankis really exists, and perhaps Lenny is actually Sammy Jankis? Then we wonder if, actually, maybe the whole film was a hallucination in an institutionalised man’s head.

This entire sequence of wonderings is a search for the foundational diegesis or ‘underlying’ truth. But even given the usual caveats that the film is supposed to be fiction, the storyworld presented by the film (a solitary hallucination) cannot possibly have any ‘foundational diegesis’ at all, since it can only be a contradiction (there was no hallucination for us to see in order to realise that it was all hallucination). There is no story!

There is no ‘story’ without ‘plot’.
Story is a function of plot.
Story is the product of plot.
We start with plot and we make story.
There is no ‘diegesis’ without ‘framing’.
Diegesis is a function of framing.
Diegesis is the product of framing.
We start with framing and we make ‘diegesis’.

To understand this problem more clearly we’ll try to use the idea of mimesis as a way to think about the storyworlds we experience. Mimesis is a key idea when considering what ‘story’ might do. In order for us to believe that a storyworld is possible, it must be believable – and mimesis capture this idea of believability.

Before we get to mimesis, though, we take a detour through this week’s screening, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A metaphor for what?

A mysterious monolith enters the diegesis at various times in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its first appearance occurs during the sequence called ‘The Dawn of Man’, in which we see ape-like creatures, whom we take to be the ancestor of homo sapiens, discovering this unfamiliar object. Immediately thereafter, we see one of the proto-human apes sitting and looking at a piles of bones. We see the outline of the monolith, and return to the ape, who continues to look at the bones, as the non-diegetic soundtrack of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathrustra plays, until eventually the ape grasps what looks like a femur and starts smashing the other bones with it like a hammer. Kubrick intercuts shots of a boar falling to the ground as the ape smashes the white bones and skull on the ground before him. Shortly afterwards, we see the first murder committed, as the apes who have learned to use bones as tools compete for the water resources with other apes. In a triumphant gesture, the victorious ape hurls his bone weapon into the air. As it falls back to earth, Kubrick makes one of the most famous cuts in film: from an image of the bone in mid air to a spacecraft drifting through space.

 

Of course, I would not wish to suggest that the interpretation I offer here is the only one, the best, or the right one. The only thing I will say about the interpretation I offer here is that it helps to illustrate some of our ideas in these lectures, and might help us to grasp some of the concepts.

The monolith is rather abstract in form. It seems entirely unnatural given its formal properties – rectangular, composed of sharp right angled corners, standing on its end as if painstakingly placed, indeed, as though it were man-made and carefully constructed. Given that the diegesis of the film tells us that we are observing the dawn of man, then clearly the monolith cannot be a man-made object. Alien then? Perhaps the monolith is an alien artefact, and Kubrick simply wants to tease us by not showing us the the aliens who placed it there as the apes slept. But in these sorts of assessments we are trying to assume that Kubrick’s story is figurative – that what we see on screen is supposed to be an accurate representation of some kind of coherent diegesis, when we might more profitably understand Kubrick’s story non-figuratively, abstractly – the very abstract nature of the monolith perhaps hints that it should be interpreted conceptually rather than naturalistically.

We might also read the monolith’s presence at the dawn of the apes’ use of a bone as a hammer and a weapon as being a causal factor. The figure of the monolith represents in this reading the evolutionary leap that has just occurred – from an ape which is prey to big cats and other apes, to an ape which has tools (and we should remind ourselves that, etymologically, the word ‘technology’ simply refers to the human acquisition of tools and crafts). The monolith is present at the dawn of man – when man ceases to be an animal, and becomes a reasoning, rational, thinking being. The ape’s intent staring down at the bones as he sits on the ground suggests precisely that these are the first moments in which what we could recognise as human thought occurs. The newly acquired ability to think leads directly to the killing of another ape, and then, in the cut from the bone-tool to the space-craft tool, perhaps we can read the utter inevitability of the technological future.

So if we grant that Kubrick is being free with the mixing of diegetic and non-diegetic material (the monolith is just as metaphorical and non-diegetic as the Strauss soundtrack), and we see the presence of the monolith as being causally related to the evolutionary development of rationality in man, then it seems reasonable to suggest that the monolith itself represents man’s newly acquired attribute: ration – the ability to engage in abstract reasoning, illustrated figuratively and metaphorically by the abstract form of the monolith. The advent of rationality in man leads immediately to murder (and by extension, war) and in the longer term, the inevitable and unavoidable technological extension of man into space. The dawn of ration in man sets in chain a sequence of events which inexorably propels mankind forward into his destiny.

Of course none of these interpretations necessarily discount other suggestions as to the meanings intended by the monolith – such as that it represents the cinema (having similar dimensions as a cinema screen turned on its side). Rather I just want to hold onto some thoughts about the problematic nature of looking for an internally coherent diegesis, and the notion of the apparent inevitability, the deterministic, technological inexorability of human ration. Meanwhile we return to our exploration of mimesis.

Mimesis

Let us consider notions of believability and mimesis. Traditionally, mimesis is what grants a story the ability to be believed – the audience agrees to suspend its disbelief in return for a few promises from the story:

• that there will be a faithfulness of representation, that the story will imitate real life in a believable fashion.
• this imitative contract demands that the diegesis should be coherent and self-consistent
• such coherence and self-consistence should be maintained by obeying the laws of a formal system (such as causality, chronological consistence, etc)

It is by adhering to these criteria that stories become susceptible to a rigorous structural analysis. Since structuralism assumes the fundamental explicability of narrative, so narratives must be coherent, rationalisable and explicable. Such assumptions can be said to flow naturally from an Aristotelian approach to describing narrative.

Aristotelian narrative

While much of the analysis of narrative (or narratology or narrative theory) that we encounter casts itself as a way of understanding the phenomenon of story-telling, there was a time when thinkers saw themselves as advising and prescribing the remit and practices of story-tellers, rather than simply analysing their products. Aristotle’s work makes sense if you consider that this ancient Greek philosopher saw his work as much more didactic than simply critical. Hence his writings on drama often read like rules for creating good drama, rather than just describing what dramatists produce.

Some of his key ideas include:

• unities of time, action and place: the drama should depict a single complete action, unfolding over a single time frame, usually of no more than 24 hours, occurring in one geographical location
• anagnorisis: recognition and identification of the audience with the characters, events and situations
• catharsis: literally, ‘purgation’ – pity and fear are aroused in the audience, tensions build up, and these emotional states are ‘released’ (or purged) by the resolution of the narrative
• mimesis: the imitative depiction of the unfolding storyworld is a key to Aristotle’s other criteria: the unities help to ensure the drama appears ‘realistic’; the audience identifies with characters and events precisely because they are ‘believable’; and catharsis occurs only if the audience can empathise and understand – project themselves onto and into the storyworld. Mimesis is thus the necessary verisimitude which enables the drama to work its purpose.

A key point Aristotle makes is that if the drama is not a complete unified whole, the work will be disjointed or ‘disturbed’.

Mimesis and diegesis

Clearly the Aristotelian view of the necessary unitary nature of diegesis relies on mimesis. So trying to think about a film like Memento in terms of mimesis may be illuminating.

Memento is an interesting case since on first viewing it is initially somewhat confusing – the opening scene disobeys the laws of gravity (it runs the recorded film in reverse), and the subsequent scenes undermine our generic expectations by overlapping and repeating, until we realise that the scenes are unfolding in reverse order, and the repetitions act as a formal part of the grammar of this particular narrative, signalling how we should be decoding its formal system.

Once we have worked out how the syntax of the film works, the story then becomes somewhat more transparent as we are able to piece together the narrative, and engage with the puzzles of the film. Once we’ve become familiar with the storyworld, though, confusion strikes again, since, as we’ve already seen, the diegesis disintegrates.

One way of thinking of these changes in the penetrability of the story of Memento could be to think in terms of mimesis: the mechanisms of the story are non-mimetic, anti-mimetic, non-imitative … whatever the opposite of mimesis is (and take a moment to think about what the opposite of mimesis might mean – is it ‘fantastic’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘non-sensical’, ‘illogical’, ‘unnatural’, or in the Aristotelian sense, ‘disturbing and distracting’?). Since we’ve already established that Memento‘s diegesis is unstable and logically incoherent, where does that leave us? Well, it tells us that at least in the case of Memento, focussing on the content of the diegesis in order to ‘comprehend’ the nature or meaning of narrative is counterproductive. The diegesis is an illusionary property of the act of story-telling – the plot.

Here we see an extremely good reason, then, to move our examination away from story and onto plot – the framing devices used to conjure and encircle the diegesis. This is exactly what formalism is all about.

Formalism

We’ve already encountered formalism in the shape (form?) of Vladimir Propp, who analysed folk tales and distilled them into their discrete essential and interchangeable components (or functions). Indeed, Propp, along with other influential thinkers like Saussure, are considered to be the ‘fore-fathers’ of structuralism, since the analytical approach to understanding story which structuralism adopts has inherited some of the methods of the formalists.

While formalism and structuralism sound as though they ought to be similar things (what is the difference between form and structure?), they are in fact focussed on different things. Historically, it is true that structuralist approaches to culture (language, story, the subconscious) followed from, grew out of, and owes a large debt to formalism which is precedes structuralism. The key difference (and remember that I’m simplifying and generalising here in order to make a point) is that formalism is interested in the mechanisms of representation (plot, sjuzet, framing, story-telling, practices and techniques) and how the content of representation (story, fabula, diegesis) is conjured, rather than the content of representation itself, and what the internal structure of that content tells us about universal truths.

 

In practice, of course, structuralists can very easily incorporate formalist ideas into their rationalised schematic analysis of stories, and formalists are often also concerned about the content of stories, which is precisely why they are keen to understand how those stories are told. The point for our purposes is simply to understand the different ways that these schools of thought have approached the understanding of story and narrative.

The tale and the telling

Let us remind ourselves of the distinction between what a diegesis ‘contains’ and how it is framed, through an example: in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a space hostess traverses a circular, cylindrical corridor in a space craft carrying a tray. She approaches the foreground as we view her, collects an extra tray from a dispenser, turns around and returns to the corridor entrance. Before she leaves the corridor by way of the entrance through which she entered, she turns to the side and starts to walk up the side of the corridor’s circular wall. The camera remains static throughout this sequence, such that the hostess eventually ends up upside-down as we view her.

In the next shot, we see the hostess reappear from the other side of the doorway. Just as we left her, she is upside-down as she enters the cabin to bring the contents of the trays to the pilots. As she enters, though, the camera itself spins around and ‘corrects’ itself so that the hostess appears to be standing upright on the floor, rather than walking upside-down on the ceiling.

 

We infer from this sequence of course that gravity in the space-craft is mutable enough that such bizarre contortions of space and shape can be connected together to form a liveable and apparently normal transport service. So far so good. What happens though is that our attention is drawn away from the diegesis to the presence of the camera. The divergence of the ‘gravity’ of the diegesis and the ‘gravity’ of the camera is the device through which Kubrick ‘tells’ us of the nature of the storyworld.

For just a moment the illusion is broken; the mimesis falls away; the diegesis is punctured. We are pushed away, distanced, estranged: alienated.

Formalism and anti-mimesis?

If, as we’ve seen from Aristotelian approaches to narrative, the believability and purpose of a story is best served through mimesis, then deliberately paying attention to the form (as formalist critics do) or experimenting with formal systems (as formalist artists do), must undermine mimesis, and believability. Why would we want to be suddenly pushed out of the storyworld? Let’s look at some examples from 20th century art history.

Cubism

Apollinaire said of cubism that “what distinguishes it from the former way of painting is that it is not an imitative but a conceptual art which aspires to raise itself to the level of creation”. What can he mean?

According to art C20 DVD (Hazan, 2005), cubism is a part of “the unending process of research by painters into space, perspective and the expression of volume on the two-dimensional picture surface”. In the act of pictorial representation, the three-dimensional world, moving inexorably through time, is fore-shortened and flattened into a snapshot in two dimensions. The cubist might argue that mimetic approaches to art which aim for ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ depictions of an external reality are actually attempts to disguise the manufactured nature and the actual process of artistic work – to encourage the suspension of disbelief, to make the spectator forget the artifice in the art. Such disguises and sleights of hand are literally and morally speaking – illusions.

Pablo Picasso, Trois Femmes, 1908

 

However, were a painter to attempt to capture something of the lost dimensions what might that painter depict? Multiple perspectives, and captured severally over different moments in time, forced together onto the same canvas? What jumble and confusion might arise? We would look at such depictions and wonder what they might mean, wonder what kind of creature could really look like that, perhaps even wonder what sort of lunatic might see and paint in such a way. Spectators entrenched in traditions, with interests in the status quo, and reputations built on the mainstream, might recoil and decry such works, proving themselves to be reactionary and conservative. More forward-looking progressives might think more about what such work might mean: their attention drawn to the form of the work, they question the nature of the work and the whole enterprise itself. Aren’t such people dangerous? The young thousands rising unremittingly from the fountain of youth with diamonds in their mouth, ready to throw over the old order?

Futurism

The futurist art movement which emerged mostly in Italy in the early 20th century was self-consciously forward-looking and overtly denounced tradition, prefering instead to celebrate modernity and the triumph of technology. According to art C20 DVD (Hazan, 2005), futurism reflected a “rejection of the past and the advent of a new aesthetic that suited the world of speed, machines and the modern city.” The anti-mimesis and formal experiments of the futurists was a conscious effort to capture modernity, with its speed and movement.

Fortunato Depero, Fulmine compositore, 1926
 

Once again, the avant-garde can be seen as politically oriented, but in the case of futurism the optimism and verve that came with embracing modernity, mechanisation and technology also had a nationalistic edge verging on supremacism. Some might say it was playing into the hands of fascist tendencies which became prominent in the ultimate clash of ideologies – the two world wars.

Surrealism

The surrealist trick was to experiment not so much with the signs of craft (as did cubism and futurism) but to push the suspension of disbelief in the opposite direction – rather than puncture illusion and estrange the spectator through drawing the attention to the artifice and mechanics of the work, they instead pushed realism to breaking point – to become, literally, more than real. Impossible and phantasmagoric dimensions not of space or time, but of imagination and hallucination, were depicted with the utmost verisimilitude – pseudo-photographs of the subconscious. This technique was designed “to liberate the mind by emphasising the unconscious mind and the attainment of a state different from, “more than”, and ultimately truer than everyday reality: the ‘sur/uber/super-real’.

Rene Magritte , The Double Secret, c1927
 

Ironically, given the surrealists’ revolutionist manifesto, their work is one of the avant-garde schools which has been most easily embraced by the mainstream, resulting in countless Dali prints adorning the walls of student accommodation, and Dali himself ending up as a pale caricature of the revolutionary vision which surrealism first embarked upon. Surrealism is quite normal, now – another indication of the way in which the mainstream of popular culture is as happy eating any challenges to it as capitalism is happy to co-opt any counter-cultural activist movement it encounters… embrace and extend, indeed.

Verfremdungseffekt

The idea of defamiliarisation, dehabitualisation, distantiation, ostranenie, estrangement and alienation – of seeing the world anew – can be traced back to Russian formalists such as Victor Shklovsky who wanted to ‘defamiliarise’ the products and techniques of art and culture. We could see Propp’s analysis of the folk tale as a way of making folk tales look unfamiliar: laying bare the device, because the device is ideological. The subject of ideology is explored in this online lecture.

Bertholt Brecht (1898 – 1956) was a profoundly influential German poet and playwright and a Marxist through and through. We might even see his entire body of work as directed, relentlessly, at furthering his political ideals. He’s particularly known for his theories of estrangement.

The German word “Verfremdungseffekt” is better than any of the English translations for it, which all carry negative connotations which aren’t necessarily appropriate: alienation or estrangement . It literally means: the effect of making something seem foreign or strange. Brecht used it in his theatrical discipline in a very specific way: to break the illusion of the diegesis, or draw the audience’s attention to the fact that they were watching a fiction.

Brecht’s biographer, Esslin, describes Verfremdungeffekt thus:

“the audience must be discouraged from losing its critical detachment by identification with one or more of the characters: the opposite of identification is the maintenance of a separate existence by being kept apart, alien, strange…” (Esslin, 1959, p115)

Brecht’s techniques to ‘make strange’ included informing the audience of the outcome or denouement at the start – thus shattering any chance of suspense; encouraging the actors not to act ‘naturalistically’; and structuring the play in an episodic fashion, rather than as one Aristotelian whole sweeping towards an inevitable climax:

“The construction of the plays […], which rejects the logically built, well-made play, is free from the need of creating suspense, loosely knit, and episodic, instead of mounting to a dynamic climax, the story unfolds in a number of separate situations, each rounded and complete in itself.” (Esslin, 1959, p118)

The normal, Aristotelian, emphasis normally placed on ideas of identification, catharsis, and mimesis, is repeatedly criticised by C20th Marxists like Brecht. Theodor Adorno was also critical of film for the same reasons: by immersing oneself in the illusion of fiction, and allowing oneself to be swept along in the diegesis of the story, one loses one’s critical faculty; one’s imagination is silenced; one is not able to question the actions and events that take place – they are inevitable. This is one of the key aspects of Brecht’s rebellion against the theatrical conventions that were traceable back to Aristotle: the rejection of inevitability.

Revolutionary Theatre

A key aspect of the kind of theatre that Aristotle described is the privileged position of the audience. Dramatic irony – when you know something a character in a narrative does not – depends on the audience’s ability to see all the action. The audience has the comfort of having a kind of omniscience – being informed of the disparate events that characters are not party to. Those events have causes and effects, which unfold as causes and effects do – and try as they might, the characters are unable to circumvent their fate: the outcome of the narrative is inevitable, inexorable – the way of the world or the will of the Gods.

So Brecht wanted his audience not to ‘immerse’ themselves in the diegesis of the story. Rather than avoiding ‘disturbance’ as Aristotle advised, Brecht wanted to encourage disturbance. He wanted his audience to retain their critical faculties, to retain their disbelief. This way, perhaps they might concentrate on why and how events unfolded before them, instead of blindly accepting them as the inevitable destinies of mankind. If destinies are not inevitable, then destinies can change; we need not look to the Gods or to fate to determine the future: we can act and make the future ourselves.

For a revolutionary socialist, these ideas are profoundly meaningful – Brecht, in short, wanted to make a kind of theatre that would foment revolution: by challenging preconceptions, complacency, ideology. More online lectures on Ideologies and Marxism, if you need them ….

Estrangement today

Of course, many of the techniques of estrangement end up being co-opted as normal dramatic techniques. The ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ in which characters address the audience directly are often used as another device in the story-tellers toolkit.

 

Tyler Durden looks straight at us, as the edges of the film quiver in and out of the scene behind him, and tells us we are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world. Indeed, Fight Club is full of classic estranging techniques, such as drawing attention to the ‘cigarette burn’ spot, showing us Ed Norton’s inner penguin, superimposing the Ikea catalogue onto the dream apartment. Hell, Fight Club even tells us a story about how we could destroy the entire vampiric capitalist machine without having to kill a single innocent human being. Clearly, though, despite being confronted with the possibility of changing the world, neither Brecht’s playgoers, nor the Fight Club audiences walk out of theatres and cinemas ready to start a revolution.

Understanding the world or changing the world?

I hope that what is starting to emerge here is a contrast between the goals of different kinds of theory. Structuralist theory, I have argued, assumes that human beings, culture, the subconscious, language, etc, are fundamentally explicable, and adopting a rational and scientific approach offers the promise of providing those explanations. Formalist thought, meanwhile, is concerned less with trying to explain the world, but more with trying to render it inexplicable or surprising, to demonstrate its malleability and ultimately to persuade us that we can affect and change it. Instead of a rational, deterministic universe in which outcomes are causally connected and inevitable, we are offered a world of potential, openness and possibility.

In the lecture I suggested that, for me at least, Brecht was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. I find his political approach to his craft inspiring. But I also think his intellectual ideas have a much broader relevance.

Puzzlement

If the politically committed artistic act of drawing attention to the artifice of representation might make us see the world anew, then perhaps one aspect of that process is puzzlement. When Brecht makes his audience think, when he pushes them out of the diegesis and forces them to wonder about the alternatives, he must puzzle them. “Why is this character breaking the fourth wall?” “What else might happen to avoid the inevitable tragedy of fate?” Why is the world the way it is?”

This act of ‘enpuzzlement’, the presenting of a puzzle*, is a nuance of narrative that provokes a host of new questions. Where does play fit into narrative?

‘Play’ will be the subject of the next lecture in this series.

• addle, amaze, bamboozle, beat, befog, befuddle, bemuse, bewilder, complicate, confound, discombobulate, disconcert, distract, disturb, dumbfound, flabbergast, floor, flummox, foil, frustrate, mystify, nonplus, obscure, perplex, pose, rattle, stir, stumble, stump, throw
  

Too Long Didn’t Read

Structuralists want to make the humanities into a science. Science deals quite well with material matters, but there are problems when it comes to imaginary things like minds, ideas and stories. Formalists want to understand the devices humans use to tell stories and communicate ideas about the world, and they often do this because they want to change the world. Aristotle prescribed techniques for story-telling that emphasise mimesis, verisimilitude and ‘suspension of disbelief’. Brecht prescribed techniques for story-telling that emphasise alienation, political action and suspension of the suspension of disbelief. Is being puzzled by a story a good thing or a bad thing? Tune in for the next installment to find out!!!!!

Author: joe
Categories: system:lectures, narrative, form, structure, texture, diegesis, framing, story, plot, Memento, Christopher Nolan, structuralism, scientism, Vladimir Propp, Victor Shklovsky, Bertholt Brecht, formalism, marxism, ideology, alienation, verfremdungseffekt, estrangement, distantiation, 2001, Space, Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, cubism, futurism, surrealism, avant-garde, Picasso, Depero, Dali, Magritte,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

So many of the ideas about the media that theoreticians talk about, revolve around Marxism. Marxism revolves around Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. ‘Capitalism’ is a flavour of Political Economy. See Key Concepts: Ideologies for some context.

Political Economy

At the heart of Marx’s political economy lies the idea of value.

• Marx believed that the base determined the superstructure – i.e. the way we operate ecomonically determines the values that are propagated in our society, in the interest of those economic operations.

Marx initially distinguishes between two types of value: use-value and exchange-value

Use-value:

• the utility of a commodity – that is how it fulfills human needs:
• a pen has use-value because we write with it;

Marx’s examples are linen and coats:

• linen has use-value because it can be made into clothing;
• a coat has use-value because it can be worn to fend off cold and allow us to present ourselves in public with decorum.

Exchange-value:

• can at first glance be thought of in terms of price,
• although Marx has a few things to say about exchange-value before it becomes equated with price.

Exchange-value is the relationship of value:

• 20 yards of linen has the same exchange-value as 1 or 2 coats, rather than 5 or 10 coats.
• Not just because of the amount of linen required to tailor a coat, but the fact that labour is expended in manufacturing linen and tailoring coats.
• Similarly, 1 tonne of gold has a greater exchange value than 1 tonne of iron – because more labour must be expended in mining gold than iron because of gold’s relative scarcity.

Exchange-value, then, is created by the expenditure of labour.

• In theory there should be no clear reason under these circumstances for one person to acquire more power in exchange-value (ie acquire more commodities, have greater wealth) than any other person, except for the amount of labour they expend.
• In theory, those who work most, become the most wealthy.

Surplus-value

Of course, in practice, Marx noted that the reverse was true, and it is the translation of labour to money – the transition from labour-value to monetary value – that creates the inequalities.

• If a man sells a commodity for a price and generates a profit – where has this profit come from?
• This profit, or surplus-value is at the heart of the capitalist economy, and it essentially boils down to middle-men taking a slice. [This is why brokers are rich.] Middle-men can only take a slice because they own the ‘means of production’ (the factories, the land), and they can only own things because capitalist systems are based on the primacy of private ownership and property. As Joseph Proudhon said, “Property is Theft“.

If the exchange-value of a commodity is generated by the labour in its production, but the monetary value realised is greater than the labour-value, then there is a natural imperative which arises to ensure that more and more commodities are made for less and less cost.

• This imperative gives rise to separate classes – the bourgoisie and the proletariat, the employers and the employed.
• The employers seek greater surplusses and exploit the employed who labour more and more for less and less of the pie.

The Economy Gives Rise to Ideology

The Marxist discourse, and ideas about political economy, then, stem from Marx’s analysis of how the exploitation of working classes arises. Of course, there are many other aspects to Marx’s ideas of political economy, but we don’t need to go into all of them to see the centrality of these concepts of value.

By extension we can also see why the ‘values’ of a society might be very useful to vested interests:

• values such as:
  • competitiveness,
  • value for money,
  • having a work-ethic,
  • productivity,
  • a flexible workforce (a euphemism for a ‘sackable workforce’)
  • get on yer bike and get a job.

The Division of Labour and Alienation

Marx’s emphasis is on the worker, the proletarian.

• We said that the more productive labour becomes, the less value it has – Marx calls this a moral inversion

In his essay, Estranged Labour, he describes this as alienation, isolation, and estrangement. He argues that the consequence of this is that:

“man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions – eating, drinking procreating, or at most in his dwelling and dressing-up, etc; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

(McLellan, 1977)

In the same essay, Marx argues that the worker becomes the ‘object’ – he is objectified, in fact, turned into a commodity, become sub-human.

From his “Communist Manifesto”,

“These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

(McLellan, 1977)

• The capitalist system objectifies a whole class of society and turns their existence into a commodity to be bought and sold.
• This is a kind of slavery, whence the famous phrase, “the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”.

We might like at this point to reflect that what enables barbarous acts to be committed in a society is the objectification of human beings, whether they be Jews in Nazi Germany or Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Marxism != Communism

We should not take Marxism and Communism to mean the same thing.

• Marx’s idea of communism sprang from the idea that a society could operate through shared ownership: instead of some individuals accruing capital through surplus-value, all individuals share in the products of the labour of society as a whole.
• Of course, everyone would still need to expend labour in order for the needs of the society to be met, but the labour would be equitable, and the products shared:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

You have to go a long way from these ideas to explain the nature of totalitarian regimes such as that that arose in Communist Russia under ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin.

Readings:

McLellan, D. (ed.), 1977. Karl Marx: Selected Writings Oxford: Oxford University Press

Marx, K., 1954. Capital, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Engels, F. & Marx, K., 2004. The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin

This post was brought to you by Joe – reading Marx, so you don’t have to. :)

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, lecture, system:lectures, marxism, political economy, ideology,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

This lecture started to develop ideas about the relationship between media and society. A key concept in understanding theories about the media, and the influence of media on society, is that of ‘ideology’. This lecture looked very broadly, and therefore very selectively, at the history of our ideas about ‘ideology’ over the last 150 years.

We looked at the Berlin Wall and its fall in 1989 to illustrate some of the ideas; we explored ‘Marxism’, because Marxist ideas have been an incredibly important part of the foundations of our ideas about media and ideology; and so therefore we saw a long procession of dead white men.

 

PART ONE:

In part one of this lecture, we looked back at important Marxist ideas about ideology and society.

 

The Berlin Wall is a joke.

Holy Moly have a website and weekly email which take an ‘irreverent’ and foul-mouthed take on celebrity gossip. A couple of weeks ago, on 28 Sep 2007, they listed the following item in their email:

Nasal Herr

Welsh acting scarecrow Rhys Ifans, the man who is in no way sleeping with Sienna Miller, was once asked to house-sit for friends and enthusiastically agreed, having recently been evicted from his latest hedge.

On their return, the homeowners were greeted by an extremely apologetic Ifans who confessed immediately that he’d been a naughty boy. Returning from a drunken night out while they were away, he’d noticed a small box on the mantelpiece with a lump of cocaine inside. Rhys being Rhys, he promptly crushed and hoofed the lot.

Ifans did wonder aloud why it was grittier than most coke he’d had before, and immediately offered to replace the stash.

“Better fuck off to Germany then,” said the homeowners. “That was a piece of the Berlin Wall that we got in 1989.”

In the lecture this got a little titter, and it has a mixture of absurdity and horror about it. Why have a piece of the Berlin Wall as a souvenir? Crushing and snorting it seems almost a sacriligeous act – reducing the icon of 20th century conflict to celebrity decadence. [It’s worth pointing out at this point that we have no evidence that any of this is true :) – we merely quote Holy Moly for the interestingness of their email]

We asked what does the Berlin Wall mean to us? Some suggestions were: “Freedom”; “reunification”; “the end of communism”. These ideas all help us to think about ideology.

 

The Berlin Wall on YouTube

Here’s a clip of some of the history of the Berlin Wall that some random person has put on Youtube:

So the key point is that the wall represented the divide between two different ideological and economic systems: capitalism in the West, and communism in the East. The contest between capitalism and communism is a good way to approach ideas about ideology.

So let’s go back to the source – communism as an economic and social system evolved from Marxism; Marxism is what we call that set of ideas (ideology?) derived from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism.

 

Karl Marx 1818 – 1883

So here’s the beardy guy who has influenced so much of every aspect of human life today.

 

Karl Marx – key facts

• Marx was a champion of ‘socialism’
• He was author of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (with Friedrich Engels, 1848)
• He wrote a critique of ‘capitalism’ in ‘Capital’ (1867)

In a capitalist society, we have to go to work and earn money, in order to buy the stuff we need. It is based around property, ownership and money. Marx argued that this will always lead to exploitation and inequality. He proposed that ‘socialist’ societies would be fairer. Instead of property and private ownership, everyone has shared ownership of the products of their labour, and so everyone works, not for money, but for the good of society and for satisfaction, brotherhood and comradeship. Marx was nothing if not compassionate.

 

Base and superstructure

Let’s look at Marx’s analysis of society. Marx split ‘society’ into two parts: the base and the superstructure.

 

So the ‘base’ refers to the ‘political economy’ – that is, whatever economic system a society is based on – such as capitalism, or socialism, or feudalism, etc. This defines how economic relationships work; so in capitalism, you have private ownership, commerce and currency, employment with employers and employees, people who own corporations, and people who work for them.

The ‘superstructure’ refers to the social institutions in a society which play a part in spreading cultural values: the family, religions, the educational system, and, crucially for us, the media. Of course, the media was a very different thing when Marx was writing in the 19th century – no TV or cinema existed. The place of the media in the superstructure has grown to prominence over the last 150 years.

 

The base determines the superstructure

To say that the ‘base’ determines the ‘superstructure’ is to say that our economic systems are the main driver for the cultural values we have. Here’s how Marx and Engels put it The Communist Manifesto:

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”.

Engels, F. & Marx, K., 2004, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin, p30

Our ‘intellectual production’ – that is, the cultural ideas and values of society – change as ‘material production’ changes. In a capitalist society, the ‘material production’ is based on working to earn a living, in order to participate in the ownership of private property. Hence, the cultural values in a captialist society reflect the needs of that economic system: having a work ethic; valuing private property; aspiring to acquire more money; etc.

Here’s a diagram to illustrate:

 

A Communistic Revolution

Marx analysed capitalism, and argued that it inevitably created inequality, resulting in the exploitation of the workers. Working classes, whom he refered to as ‘proletarians’, give their labour for wages, but the fruits of their labour are enjoyed by the owners (employers) of the factories and workhouses.

See Marxism 101 for more detail on how the capitalist system drives inequality, and ideological values.

Here are Marx and Engels again:

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Engels, F. & Marx, K., 2004, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin, p52

Marx’s project was to encourage the working classes, or ‘proletarians’ to overthrow their masters, the ‘bourgeoisie’ in a revolution. Nothing short of revolution would do.

 

Who are the bourgeoisie?

So, these bourgoisie, why do we call them this ugly French word? Broadly speaking, we might refer to the ‘middle classes’ as the bourgeoisie. Here’s a clip of Stephen Fry on Room 101. The second item, in which he chooses souvenir plates as a candidate for Room 101, is worth watching – look out for how he describes the Daily Mail…

 

Fry has infinitely fascinating things to say about aesthetics and beauty, but we’re interested in his description of the Daily Mail as a symbol of all that is ‘bourgeois, defensive and aggressive’.

Today, the middle class is a slightly different animal than in the 19th century. Today the middle class is huge – most of us in this university get to call ourselves middle class. We don’t have to engage in hard labour. We still have a working class – we often call them ‘chavs’ – and when we do we’re effectively expressing our contempt for another class. The idea, much touted, that we live in a classless society today is sadly untrue.

In the 18th century, the middle class was a slightly different thing. In ‘Capital’ Marx charted the change from a feudal society to a capitalist society. According to Marx:

• In a feudal society (as in the middle ages), an aristocracy owns the land, on which the peasant, working class must live and work, subservient to the aristocratic rulers.

• In a capitalist society, a new ‘middle class’ emerges who are wealthy, own the economic powerhouses of factories and land. This ‘middle class’ or bourgeoisie, though still relatively small, become effective rulers, by virtue of their ownership of the ‘means of production’.

• Who are the ruling classes today? This is a rather muddy question, which we leave open for now…
  

   

Bourgeois and proletarian ideologies

Marx argues that these two different classes have different ideologies – or sets of values. The proletarians must be subservient, while the bourgeoisie believe themselves to be superior. The proles must have a work ethic, while the borgeoisie are entitled to a life of luxury by accident of birth. The proles are commoners with no rights, no votes, no say, while the bourgeoisie are ‘genteel’, better, and in charge. These things appear to be natural and true – the way of the world.

So when we say that the base determines the superstructure, we mean that these different sets of values come about because of the underlying economic system. These values help to reinforce the status quo – which is exactly, of course, what the borgeoisie would like to see continue. After all, why would they willingly give up their privileged position in society?

 

False Consciousness

So, if Marx wanted to foment a revolution, in which the workers took control of the ‘means of production’, he believed it was necessary to inform the proletariat of their condition. He thought that once they realised how they outnumbered the borgeoisie, and how they were being mercilessly exploited, they would throw off the shackles and revolt.

This begs the question – why didn’t they realise it already? What stops the working class from realising they are being unfairly exploited?

Marx’s answer was ‘false consciousness’ – the idea that the workers are decieved about their own powerlessness. The ideological values that operated in society kept the workers from understanding their potential. Once they were informed, and told of their unfair exploitation, the scales would fall from their eyes.

We might speculate whether, if Marx were alive today, might he see the all-pervasive media in our society, as part of the way that this ‘false consciousness’ is perpetuated?

 

The failure of Marx’s project?

No matter how much we may be persuaded by Marx’s arguments, some facts are rather awkward as we look back on history:

• The West almost entirely resisted socialism.
• Except in some small pockets, the workers did not revolt.
• Perhaps ‘false consciousness’ is a little too simplistic?

Although the 20th century saw more carnage, butchery and murder than at any other time in human history, and some of the participants were communists, the fact is that the two world wars were largely a fight between capitalism and fascism. The communists indeed, were fighting on the same side as the ‘allies’ of the West.

So what went wrong? Is something more complex going on?

 

The Frankfurt School

We leap to the 1930s and 1940s. Marx’s ideas have been very influential. Bastardised versions of his ‘socialism’ have been implemented in Russia and elsewhere. Fascism rises in Europe. A group of intellectuals based in Germany are convinced that Marx’s ideas were too important to reject, and set about re-examining his arguments, and trying to account for the world they found themselves in.

The stakes were extremely high. These intellectuals were based in Frankfurt, and they were mostly German Jews. They had everything to lose, and as we know, being a Jew in Germany in the 1940s was usually fatal. Among their number were Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and others. They witnessed the rise of totalitarianism and fascism in Germany – which had hitherto been a capitalist democracy.

A key idea they proposed was that fascism was the logical consequence of capitalism: capitalism run wild leads to monopolies; when the state takes control of the monopoly, you have totalitarianism. They saw the ‘political economy’ changing before their eyes, and yet still the workers did not take control, and bring about a glorious socialist revolution.

So they re-examined the base and the superstucture, and switched the causal relationship about: they argued that the superstructure determines the base:

 

The superstructure determines the base

To say that the ‘superstructure’ determines the ‘base’ is to say that the cultural life and values that operate in society are what permit and perpetuate the economic means of production.

This effectively places ideology right at the centre of all social relations: social, political, economic, technological, etc. It is because the culture we live in reinforces certain sets of values that the economic relationships we have continue.

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote an important essay in 1944 called ‘The Culture Industry’. By this time the cinema was established, and they were deeply critical of the films that were shown. The film industry was just another part of the capitalist means of production, churning out mass entertainment, which the workers watched willingly. After expending their hard labour in the day, they relaxed by watching movies which were characterised by escapism and romantic shlock. The masses, they argued, were stupified and pacified by these films. Their imaginations were numbed, and any thoughts of the discomfort of their lives, or chances to revolt, were stamped out by this entertaining drivel. They really were quite disparaging. Poor old Hollywood.

 

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Let’s look at another clip about the Berlin Wall. This is a news item produced by ABC.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall is an important moment when peoples in several countries that had been under communist regimes really did revolt. We might think of the rise of the media in the latter half of the 20th century, especially Television, as playing a part in ensuring that the populations were exposed to the values of the consumer society, just over the wall. Why should these people, having seen the glorious bounty of the West and its capitalist mode of production, put up with their masters, whose political leadership had led them to live in comparative poverty?

This clip shows some of the Graffiti from the Wall. You can see at one point, trees on the western side of the wall, with lovely, juicy consumer goods hanging from their branches…

 

It is a rather cruel irony, that the best illustration of how exposure to alternative ‘values’ and ‘ideologies’ might be a factor in leading to revolution – the Marxists’ best hope – is actually a moment when it is communism that is overthrown, rather than vice-versa.

The Frankfurt School were onto something when they stressed the importance of the superstructure. But where communism did take hold, it slid into totalitarianism, and nearly everywhere, it has collapsed. Cuba and China are amongst the few places where communist regimes still hold on.

 

The Ideological State Apparatus

The Marxist project to diagnose and fight capitalism continued, even as capitalism entrenched itself ever further into the fabric of the West. Louis Althüsser (1918 – 1990) a French Marxist, published a paper in 1970: ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses‘.

The Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) is Althüsser’s attempt to account for how members of a society are inculcated with the values necessary for the status quo to be reinforced.

A rather caricatured view of the ISA can be seen in this clip from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a film directed by Alan Parker (1982).

 

Note how the boy dreams of revolt, and burning the school and the teacher – but of course it is just a dream, which will never be realised – the ISA sees to that.

The educational system is characterised in this film as a machine for producing the drones necessary for the continuation of the capitalist system. Stamp out creativity and individuality, and ‘socialise’ people into functional members of society.

 

Interpellation

Althüsser’s ISAs work through ‘interpellation’ – the idea that the ISAs are there to determine us as individuals. The idea is similar to what sociologists call ‘socialisation’, or even ‘structuration’ when they want to sound scientific. As we are born into the world, we are exposed to ISAs such as family, religion, education, and of course the media, all of which determine what we think of as normal.

We might think of this as the most extreme manifestation of a desperate Marxism… and it really highlights one of the key weaknesses in the ideas we’ve seen so far.

 

Stupid passive masses

Many of the ideas we’ve encountered share a problem: they try to deal with human behaviour at a macro-social level, from the rarified air of intellectual mastery, and in so doing, they treat the rest of us human beings as stupid, passive masses. Interpellation is a ‘passive’ device – you are interpellated, or determined, by your environment. You have no choice, freedom or agency of your own. The Frankfurt School, too, assume that the masses watching those Hollywood films, are being made stupid, and are somehow entirely passive – they absorb the ideological values of their society as though they are sponges. And the very idea of false consciousness requires that people are, frankly, stupid.

Indeed, it is another cruel irony that the hectoring of the Frankfurt School and other Marxists scarcely sounds any different to that symbol of all that is ‘borgeois, defensive and aggressive’ – the Daily Mail – yelling from the sidelines about how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and the poor stupid masses can’t be bothered or are too stupid to do anything about it.

Perhaps this is where the Marxist project to understand ideology failed to bring about the dream of equality that characterised its inception?

 

PART TWO:

In part two of this lecture, we looked briefly at (possibly?) more helpful ways of thinking about ideology in contemporary society.

 

Determinism is too simplistic

The idea that ideology is something that happens to us, either because of the economic system, or because of the superstructural elements like education and the media, or even because of the great clunking hammers of ISAs, is too simplistic, because it forgets that human beings are imaginative, choice-making creatures with almost unbounded ingenuity.

We need something a little more complex to help us. Enter Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937).

 

Hegemony

Gramsci was not just a Marxist intellectual – he was also a revolutionary, who led the Italian Communist Party and fought against Mussolini’s fascists.

He’s one of those very few people we could pick out, like George Orwell, who not only wrote and intellectualised about the injustices of life, but also put their money where their mouth was and tried to do something about it. Orwell didn’t just write newspaper articles and books, he got a gun and went to Spain and fought the fascists. Gramsci spent the last 11 years of his life imprisoned by Mussolini.

His intellectual contribution was the idea of hegemony. So far we’ve seen that perhaps there might be two ideologies (one proletarian, one bourgeois), or just one big ideology, encompassing our entire society like a wet blanket. Neither of these ideas explains how ideology changes or evolves – which of course it must, since our cultural values and our political systems do change and evolve.

Hegemony is the name Gramsci gives to the notion that cultural values are constantly being fought, contested, and won, and in the process, they change. A ‘spontaneous consensus’ emerges as this process goes on. So whenever there is ‘unrest’ amongst the workers, the ruling classes must somehow meet that ‘unrest’, not just through brutal repression (because that didn’t work for the Communists when the Berlin Wall fell), but also by persuasion, giving an inch here, taking an inch there.

The useful thing about the idea of ‘hegemony’ is that it acknowledges the place of dissent, negotiation, and contest. This forces us to think a little harder about how these contests occur. A useful way to think about this is to drop the whole ‘ideology’ business and think about ‘discourses’ instead.

 

Discourse

Our world is filled with discourse – the ability to say things. Media-makers get to make a lot of discourse and reach large numbers of people with it. I get to make a lot of discourse by being a lecturer standing in front of 150 people and telling them stuff. We all get to make discourse every time we say things to each other. Graffiti artists make discourse on train stations and Berlin Walls.

We might think of hegemony, then, as the resultant – and ever-changing – outcome of the product of all of these discourses. Some of us have more influence on it than others, but none of us are ever out of the loop.

Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to place our emphasis on ‘discourses’ instead of ‘ideologies’. We might even go so far as to say that our contemporary, media-saturated society is dominated by discourse.

 

Simulation

Another key idea, another Marxist. Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) contributed a key, complex, controversial idea to the debate about ideology, discourse, and the values that operate in a society.

You may be familiar with Baudrillard’s work from the following shot from the Matrix:

 

Baudrillard’s suggestion in Simulacra and Simulation, which he developed in other essays such as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is deliberately provocative and controversial: there is no real world out there any more… there is only a simulation.

It would be wrong to think that Baudrillard means that the world is really like The Matrix film. Rather, we might think that what he’s getting at is that our experience of the world is now totally mediated, or simulated – it consists only of discourse.

Our knowledge and understanding of wars, for example, at least for those of us who don’t have to die in them, is indistinguishable from video-games. We can switch off the war, and forget about it, just by switching from the news to Who Want to Be A Dancing Celebrity Not Me Get Me Out of This X Factor, or logging onto www.facemybebospacebook.com

More than that – we consume discourses too. We consume media commodities, just like we consume clothes and cars and music and sex and food.

 

The Consumer Society

Here’s an old clip, again featuring the Berlin Wall:

 

Perhaps it is indicative of the cosumer society in which we live that a corporation can quite happily co-opt the events of the collapse of communism, the ‘liberation’ of East Germany, and the conflict of the Cold War, and just add their logo to it in order to add value to their brand, and sell us some telecommunications.

 

The End of History

That the huge significant events of the 20th century can be condensed to a 60-second ad, and that we can countenance the idea that our lives are mere simulations constructed out of discourse, is perhaps what has led to the ability to think that we have reached the ‘End of History’.

Francis Fukuyama (1952 – ) is a political economist and has been influential in the development of Republican politics in America. In 1992, he suggested in his book The End of History and the Last Man that it will no longer be possible for alternative systems to capitalist liberal democracy to ever arise again:

‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such… That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

Fukuyama, F., 1993. The End of History and the Last Man, London: Harper

This is an extraordinary idea, and it presents us with some problems.

 

Post-ideology?

We’ve seen that ‘ideology’ as an idea has been almost used up – it seems to have meant anything from ‘common sense’ to ‘the way of the world’ to ‘any political system’ to ‘a shared set of values’… indeed we live in an age which is often called ‘post-modernity’ in which no ideologies bring us together any longer. Religion has declined; the family has broken up. Perhaps the only things which truly bring us together any more are the soap episodes we discuss around the watercooler, the meaning of ‘Lady Di’s last smile’.

And since ‘ideologies’ have lost their notional grip on our shared cultural lives, perhaps it is possible that we forget to worry about the rise of fascism or totalitarianism. When we vote, if we vote, we choose between the leaders of political parties, with no ideological or ‘policy’ difference: we vote on whether we like them; whether their PR works for us; whether, as consumers, we feel happy ‘buying into’ them. If we can be bothered.

 

The Wall

And finally, perhaps Baudrillard and Fukuyama give us salutary warnings by proclaiming the end of history, the triumph of the mediated world: perhaps we should not be complacent about the triumph of the liberal capitalism of consumer society:

The wall, built in the last few years, separating Israel from Palestine. Banksy – graffiti artist at large – turns yet another manifest barrier between opposing ideas and peoples into a site for discourse.

Go Home

As reported by The Guardian

Banksy also records on his website how an old Palestinian man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told: ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.’

Readings and Further Resources

You can flesh out some of the simplifications in this lecture by reading:

Strinati, D., 1995. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London: Routledge, chapters 1 to 4.

Bignell, J., 1997. Media Semiotics: An Introduction, Manchester: Manchester University
Press

Gripsrud, J., 2002. Understanding Media Culture, London: Arnold, chapter 2.

See also: UK Media Culture and the Media Timeline

Finally, at the start of the lecture, I asked you to write down a few key words that summed up your ideas about ‘ideology’. What I forgot to do was ask you to do the same at the end! If you had, would those key words and ideas have been different, the second time around? If so, perhaps you’ve just witnessed the power of discourse – my power to influence the way you think about ideas – or my part in the ISA that is the machine of education…. Power will be one of the themes to which we’ll return in this lecture series.

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, system:lectures, ideology, marxism, media, discourse, hegemony, ISA, Berlin Wall, Marx, base, supstructure, communism, bourgeoisie, Frankfurt School, false consciousness, Althusser, interpellation, Baudrillard, simulation, consumerism, Fukuyama,
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Imported from Menticulture

Is Adam Curtis secretly a Marxist of the purest form, who believes like Marx that the political economy determines the cultural values that circulate in society? His portrayal of the relationship between democracy and the free-market (what Marx might call the 'base') and their effect on society (what Marx might call the 'superstructure') is pure determinism. At times he seems to imply that the influence of a few back-room economists on the policy of Clinton inevitably lead to cultural changes which the rest of us cannot escape. Is he in danger of reproducing the classic Marxist mistake of assuming that people are stupid?

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Author: joe:menticulture
Categories: system:imported:menticulture, adam-curtis, freedom, genetics, game-theory, political-economy, marxism, market, humanity,
Comments: 0