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,
Comments: 0

[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.

Author: joe
Categories: system:lectures, media, participation, theory, education, learning,
Comments: 0

[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

Author: joe
Categories: system:lectures, narrative, form, structure, texture, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, diegesis, framing, story, plot, Memento, Christopher Nolan, structuralism, scientism,
Comments: 0

[Crossposted from CEMP - Lecture notes for Narratives Keynote Lecture 1 - Level C, BATV, BASW, BAIMP]

Too long, didn’t read – or – discuss

Introducing the Introductory Lecture about Introductions

We started with a version of the Shoutometer – this version showed you a clip of an animation of the Big Bang. What did this have to do with Narratives? Nothing at all, but it got us off to a blood-pumping start, and we have to start somewhere.

IMPS: suggestions please, for things to do with the Shoutometer.

Why do we tell stories?

I asked you why we tell stories: you suggested – entertainment, education, escapism, moral instruction, information, getting to know people, gossip, historical accounts, and egotism. This a good list, there are probably more things we could add, but it’s starting to look like stories do all sorts of things.

I suggested that story-telling is such a big subject that we could probably spend the whole year dwelling on it, not just the six weeks. Why? Well, perhaps because human beings are in some ways story-telling machines, pattern-matching brains, looking for structure and meaning in the world of existence. Yeah, a bit philosophical, srry bt tht.

This week’s key reading speaks to this subject:

“The gift of narrative is so pervasive and universal that there are those who strongly suggest that narrative is a “deep structure”, a human capacity genetically hard-wired into our minds in the same way as our capacity for grammar … is something we are born with” (Abbott, 2002)

Schedule

We looked at the schedule briefly.

We could use scary “-isms” to describe some of the theoretical currents in lectures as structuralism (lecture 2), marxism (lecture 3), ludology (lecture 4), psychoanalysis (lecture 5), post-structuralism (lecture 6). I could have planned the schedule more chronologically – marxism (3), psychoanalysis (5), structuralism (2), post-structuralism (6), and ludology (4).

I could have done separate lectures on adaptation and intertextuality, but instead it made sense to weave these ideas throughout all the lectures. Similarly the building block and ‘axes’ (listed below) recur throughout all of the lectures,

I suggested that, actually, creating a schedule of lectures is rather like constructing a narrative. You have to trust me that the structure I use is useful. Or critique me if you think it doesn’t work. Agree, disagree, respond, react, consider, mull. Leave comments, join the forum :-)

Musical interlude

Our first musical interlude of the series involved us firstly listening to a sound sample:

short sample audio clip

- which you said sounded ominous, redolent as it was of the Jaws theme tune, or some kind of fog-horn. It turns out it came from this snippet of music:

longer sample audio clip

- which you immediately associated with ‘The Apprentice’. We noted that this is how connotations work: associations get attached to ‘signs’ – and those signs can be images, words, sounds – anything that can be used to ‘signify’ meaning. You’re familiar with these ideas, since they come from semiotics. I wanted you to think about this piece of music in a different way, though, and played all six minutes of the piece.

The timbre and texture of the opening chord is indeed ominous – we probably expect Prokofiev intended to conjure the enmity between the Montagues and the Capulets. But there are all kinds of structural things going on in pieces of music such as this, which are analogous to narratives. This music has a ‘home’ key, which the melody moves away from, and to which we expect it to return. Themes and motifs appear and reappear. Keys change from minor to major, creating effects like melancholy and menace, or brightness and cheer. There is movement, development, contrast, resolution.

We also noted that music can be reduced to its structural components:

… musical scores are, of course, not the same as the music itself. We could probably feed a score into a computer, and it could reproduce the music. But would that reproduction satisfy us? Would it capture the spirit, the emotion, feeling and meaning of the music? Is structure the same as a set of instructions? What is music, besides the record we see on the score? Isn’t there more to it than that?

Semiotics & Structuralism

The analogy of music has returned us to the semiotics you met in the ‘Images’ unit. Recall: semiotics is the study of signs – specifically the structured nature of signification systems and codes.

Semiotics itself is an instance of ‘structuralism’ – the study of [x] as structure, where [x] can be things like:

• culture (semiotics, cultural studies, etc)
• human nature (structuralist anthropology)
• the subconscious (psychoanalysis)
• etc

We’ll return, in a big way, to structuralism next week.

Structure & Texture

In the meantime, we dwell on how to understand ideas of structure. We have said that by reducing music down to its minimal structure in the form of a score, it loses something. Scores are silent, for starters. If you were just such a wonderful musician that you could read the music and hear how it ought to sound in your head, what would you be bringing to that lifeless set of instructions? If an orchestra performs the score, what is it that is returned to the score that had been lost? I’m going to use the word texture to describe this thing that is lost.

The structure / texture dichotomy is often used in psychology, but less often in media theory. I’m using them, then, because I think we need them.

What is lost by reducing things (like cultures, brains, stories) to structural elements, is texture – the expression and richness of experience.

Some examples:

• a teacher often tries to bring structure to learning activities; hopefully, learners provide the richness of their own experiences to such activities. I hope that you will bring texture to the ideas we discuss in this series.

• in psychology, structures in the brain are thought to be universal, but the texture of individual subjective existence is experienced as unique.

• musical scores consist of structure; the live and rich performance of a score consists of the texture which makes it engaging, moving, dramatic, full of feeling, emotion and meaning.

• theories which generalise about reproduceable phenomena tend to be structurally focussed, and are less able to speak to texture, the uniqueness and richness of experience.

Comic Interlude

We looked at Rich Hall’s stand-up routine from Live at the Apollo to illustrate the contrast between structure and texture. Skip to the bit about Tom Cruise’s films at 3:01 …

So this is a good illustration of what it might mean to say that narratives might reduce down to structure. If you are a fan of any of the Tom Cruise films that Hall mercilessly ridicules, then what Hall ruthlessly discarded, and what you probably liked, is the textural uniqueness and charm of any of those films.

Snow White

We got down to business and watched the opening ten minutes of a couple of two films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney, 1937) and Snow White (Goodtimes, 1994).

Erratum: I incorrectly asserted that the second film we watched was a Disney film – it was a Goodtimes production, not a Disney remake.

You noted the similarities and differences between the two films: the characters, plot devices and developments were of course similar; while the aesthetic and ‘expository’ approaches and were different. The earlier film seemed richer in terms of visual detail, and dramatic appearance; the later film looked cheap. The earlier film used a book with ornate text to set the scene; the later film used a narrator’s voice. The earlier film left more to the imagination, where the later film told us who was dead, who was bad, who was good.

An important point here is that this kind of analysis – close reading, comparing and contrasting of different ‘texts’ – is the very stuff, the nuts and bolts of thinking critically about media and media theory. In a sense, we were trying to derive some general principles about fairy-tales and story-telling from the empirical evidence at hand – the films themselves.

It was this sort of thing that Vladimir Propp was doing when he wrote the book we turn to now.

Vladimir Propp

The Morphology of the Folk-Tale is Propp’s famous formalist work, analysing the structure of Russian folk tales. (We will explore differences between formalism and structuralism in the next lecture). Propp examined the breadth of folk tales and tried to list the structural units which they ‘reduce’ to – the irreducible narrative elements.

He proposed 7 ‘roles’ and 31 ‘functions’. The ‘dramatis personae’ could be interchangeable and variable, but their roles could always be reducible to 7 character roles: the hero, the villain, the donor, the helper, the father and princess (functionally indistinguishable), the dispatcher, and the false hero. Note that any character might fulfill one or more of these roles; not all roles were ‘compulsory’ – but there were no other roles than these.

Similarly the 31 ‘functions’ – leaving home, interdictions, villain reconnaissance, hero / villain combat, etc – are not all compulsory, but all story events are reducible to these 31 units.

Reductionism

The question is, does reducing stories down to these units help us? Well, check out the online fairy-tale generators which will generate fairy-tales using Propp’s structural units for you while you wait. What do you think? Can we reproduce the richness of a story, just by combining the different elements?

Maybe? Maybe not?

And what conclusion are we supposed to draw from this? That these 38 items somehow represent the gamut of human experience? Or at least the entirety of tellable stories? Or just the limitations of fairy-tales? Or even more narrowly, the pre-occupations of Russian fabulists? Or, at any rate, the workings of the mind of one V. Propp, late of St Petersburg? We will return to the subject of what formalists were trying to do later in the lecture series.

In the meantime, let’s try another approach.

Axes

I suggested we might think about examining narratives using other structure-based approaches, that might be a little less reductionist. So we looked at thinking in terms of tensions or axes. That is more than one axis, rather than more than one axe.

Some examples:

• Time and space – our existence is generally confined to these two axes in the physical world, M-theory notwithstanding.

• Present and deep time – we live constantly in the present – we cannot ever leave the present (since the present cannot be absent!); and yet we define ourselves by our consciousness of the past, our tendency to look to the future.

• Structure and texture – we’ve already met these bed-fellows.

• Building and embedding – an idea in education that what we try to do is construct understandings by building on foundations and then placing those understandings in a wider context.

• Kind and relation – I’ve struggled to find better words that reflect the sort of axes of tension that exist in metaphor and metonymy, syntagm and paradigm (see below). Kind and relation almost mean the same thing (kind, from kin, a blood relation), but these words also hint at different sort of tension. Your suggestions welcome if you have any.

Metaphor & Metonymy

These are figures of speech which use substitution. Metaphor replaces like with like, metonymy substitutes the part for the whole. Metaphor uses a substitution of kind, metonymy plays with substitutions by relation. William Blake’s Sick Rose is metaphorical; Dicken’s description of Pip and his environs uses much metonymy:

“… I found out for certain, that […] the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.”

[For some reason, some of you find it memorable that many swear-words are metonymic: if you call me an ‘arsehole’, then you have used a ‘part’ of me to refer to the ‘whole’ of me (no pun intended). Whatever works for you… ]

Syntagm & Paradigm

These axes refer to choices of kind, and choices of relation; there are syntagmatic relationships between elements which are present (e.g. the syntax of a sentence), and there are paradigmatic relationships between any individual elements present and the world of elements that are absent. Here’s a sentence constructor to help you think about syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships.

Synchrony & Diachrony

These are axes of time: the synchronic axis is a snapshot of any given moment, the diachronic axis is the movement of time. Think of events in stories – some events happen simultaneously, at the same time as each other: synchronically; other events happen at different times – diachronically.

Father

We paused to think about one of Propp’s ‘characters’ – the father. Philip Toledano recently created a beautiful photographic record of his father, and we looked at one of the portraits he took of his father, to help us to consider what these bits of vocabulary might bring to our understanding of this ‘irreducible unit’.

We decided that ‘father’ is metonymic because we are using a role or function (being a father, having children) to refer to the whole human being. We allow the enormity of a human existence to be represented by a specific part of that human’s life – his fatherhood.

But we might also consider that ‘father’ can be metaphorical too: father can be used to describe people who are old, kind, wise, (has Father Christmas got any children? does he need children to be a ‘father’?) – so ‘father’ here has metaphorical connotations which go beyond the role of having children, and extend into wisdom, authority, patriarchy, age, etc.

Similarly, we can think about ‘fatherhood’ syntagmatically and paradigmatically. Being a father involves being defined by your relation to others – so there is a syntagmatic relationship between a child and its father. The paradigmatic relationship is defined by gender (a father is not a mother), sometimes by profession (priesthood), etc.

The axes of time must also be important: fatherhood is not timeless – at any given moment, one may be a father, or not be a father; though one may become a father, having not been a father; and even if one is a biological father, one may still be accused of not being a father.

Tensions and relationships

So here we emphasise that by applying these ‘axial’ modes of thinking to concepts such as ‘fatherhood’, we find it can be very productive: instead of, like Propp, reducing a character to the ‘irreducible’ unit of ‘father’, we flesh out and texturise the unit of ‘father’ in different ways and in different directions.

In so doing, we develop – what? Narratives.

We continued with some more useful tensions…

Diegesis & Framing

Diegesis refers to the internal integrity of a ‘story-world’. Snow White doesn’t hear the non-diegetic soundtrack which we hear. The soundtrack which we are privileged to hear is a framing device. When diegesis leaks in and out of framing devices, strange things like alienation and estrangement and the breaking of the 4th wall occur (we come to these ideas in lecture 3). Narrators, reliable or otherwise, are framing devices who strive to conjure a diegesis.

Story & Plot

Story and plot: story is the integrity of diegesis, which we assume to be causal and chronological. Plot is the artificially constructed way in which story is revealed, not necessarily in chronological order.

This weeks’s screening is Memento (Nolan, 2000): look out for contrast and tension between the chronology of the story, and the way it is unravelled for us as audience.

Concluding remarks

Metaphor & metonymy set up relationships through substitution and association; syntagms and paradigms provide relationships between things; synchrony and diachrony highlight relationships in and over time; diegesis and framing give us boundaries and connections between things.

So relationships between things are important fundamental building blocks in narrative: relationships allow for change, breakdown, development, transformation, confrontation, and resolution. These things are the stuff of narrative which we’ll explore in the next 5 weeks.

Oh, and…

Things I intended to include but which we ran out of time for:

• Gilgamesh, one of the earliest recorded stories from 3700 BC
• the metaphor / metonymy of anthropomorphism (in Snow White and Gilgamesh)
• Georges Polti’s 36 dramatic situations (many of which nicely illustrate relationships rather than ‘units’), which we will return to next week
• a scene from Fight Club which nicely illustrates the tensions we’ve described here.

We’ll look at these and recap the fundamentals at the start of the next lecture.

Til then check out:

• the bibliography for today’s lecture
• the discussion forum for any questions

Too long, didn’t read

Narratives: we’re interested in structure, because narratives are all about structure; but we don’t want to lose texture – what makes every narrative unique and rich.

So Vladimir Propp’s reduction of folk-tales to list of components is interesting but we might find it worthwhile to explore more productive tensions and relationships: metaphor and metonymy; syntagms and paradigms; synchrony and diachrony; diegesis and framing; story and plot.

Author: joe
Categories: system:lectures, narrative, form, structure, texture, Vladimir Propp, Rich Hall, Snow White, metaphor, metonymy, syntagm, paradigm, synchrony, diachrony, diegesis, framing, story, plot,
Comments: 0

Cross posted from CEMP

This lecture is an exploration of the notion of the ‘writerly text’. The readerly and writerly texts were proposed by Roland Barthes – a critic and theorist who was concerned – as have we in the first few weeks of the course – with understanding the semiological basis of how communication works, and the role ideology (Barthes might say ‘mythology’) plays in the circulation and construction of meaning.

Expertise

We began by thinking about expertise. Here’s one of my favourite slides, a photograph by Leo Reynolds:

I challenged you by arguing that, since I’m an expert in a particular field (being a lecturer in a university presumably denotes my expertise), then what I have to say about that field is better, and more important, than what you, as students, might have to say. And of course, year after year, albeit with some reservations, you agree, instead of telling me to go screw myself. After all, why else would you pay fees?

So that’s me, there, at the front of the evolutionary curve with my mortarboard, standing at my lecturn. And in the lecture you mostly placed yourselves a bit further back in the queue, no longer monkey-like, having managed to stand up straight, but not yet qualified to hold forth at the lecturn. It is a wonder of our educational system that we manage to encourage such submission and servitude in our young people.

Preferred readings

What experts do is to produce preferred readings – sometimes called ‘dominant readings’. Here’s a picture produced by Badoak for the last unit, Images:

We asked Badoak to restrain any urges to tell us what he was trying to communicate with this image while we tried to analyse it ourselves. We had a variety of responses – it produced many different ‘readings’. I proposed a reading – that the image has a narrative arc which moves as it were from bottom to top: bird tracks at the bottom are mimicked by artificial, but otherwise meaningless marks, but as we look higher up the image, we see these marks begin to appear coherent, recognisable as human symbols; right in the top corner, we see 0s and 1s – binary notation. All the way up the picture, these ‘symbols’ are accompanied by human footprints – indexical signs of human presence. The image thereby communicates a narrative about human beings, their development of complexity over their evolution: the closeness to – and yet the ‘alienness’ from – nature, that human culture and technology embody. It is a story of eons within a few centimetres.

Badoak confirmed that this reading was what he was trying to achieve: so the author’s intention in this image was susceptible to interpretation by an informed reader. I found and identified the dominant reading of this image. This dominant reading was not universally shared amongst all of us though. Badoak confirmed that this was not disappointing – an author may not wish to be obvious, he might prefer for some work to be necessary to uncover dominant readings – after all without work, where is the art? The work of interpretation is what informed experts do.

Expert analysis

The expert might expound at length on the ways in which this image ‘produces’ meaning: it uses various signs, which in semiotic terms are indeces, icons and symbols: the footprints and bird-tracks are indexical – signs which are direct evidence of the ‘signified’; the artificial, mimicked marks which resemble the bird-tracks, but which are clearly copies, rather than indices, are iconic signs – they resemble the bird-tracks, and signify birds only to the extent that the mimickry has some kind of fidelity; and finally, the heiroglyphic and binary notation are symbolic signs – they signify things human beings recognise only because we have somehow grown to share understanding of these signs through custom and convention. Symbolic signs are arbitrary – which is to say that they ‘have meaning’ only through convention, not through physical relationship or resemblence.

Note, though, that we do not need to understand what the heiroglyphs and binary notation mean: this image plays on the connotations they carry, rather than what they denote; we do not know, or very much care, which words or numbers are represented here – rather they stand for something else – the very complexity of symbolic meaning which human beings utilise – so this image harnesses not only semiotic signs, but ‘figures of speech’ too: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – symbolic representations of how humans think. The binary ‘stands for’ advanced civilsation; the footprints ‘stand for’ the constant presence of human beings throughout the chronological story of the image. The image, in fact, is highly reflexive, since it uses signs to signify something about the very signs themselves. The co-evolution of the human and the sign are examined in the only way humans can examine them – through signs.

The expert utilises these specialised examples of vocabulary (sign, signifier, signified, index, icon, symbol, connotation, denotation, reflexivity, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche) in order to more precisely provide evidence for the preferred, or dominant reading; we need only to throw in ‘genre’ and ‘juxtaposition’ and we might have a whole academic essay on our hands.

Red Riding Hood

Let’s look at another example of an image. Prior to this lecture, you explored how to adapt the fairy-tale of Little Red Riding Hood by using other adaptations as a starting point. In the lecture we looked at this image, Little Red Riding Hood by John Wehr:

Some of you adapted the story based on this image as Red Riding Hoodie – a (carnivalesque!) inversion of the story, where Red Riding Hood is a dangerous, disaffected youth, and the wolf had better watch out. How is it that you were able to create such a subversive interpretation of the story? Where has the dominant reading in this image gone?

Look at the construction of the image: we assume it is night; is the face lit by a streetlamp? Look at the cropping: is Red Riding Hood moving? what is he looking at? what is he thinking? what is off-shot? These contextual necessities are absent, and so the meanings we want to ascribe in this image are absent – left to our imagination. The inscrutability of this youth’s face is just the starting point for constructing meanings – and the expert can use all the vocabulary they like, but cannot identify a dominant reading.

These imposed meanings – in this case the hoodie – come from somewhere in our imaginations, and are informed by our ideological concerns. What is a hoodie, with all its connotations, if not an idea we circulate, attaching implications to it as it goes? Where do those implications come from? Those implications are just snippets of our ideological hinterland which inform how we interpret the world.

Seeds of meaning

Here’s a famous phrase:

CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME

In the session, some of the resonances or meanings we coaxed from this phrase, on its own, included the archaic spelling of ‘child’ and the syntax (verb at the end of the sentence) which implied a kind of poetic discourse. The ‘dark tower’ connoted a sense of the Gothic, perhaps. These ‘hooks’ or ‘clues’ start to push us towards constructing or imagining possible stories, forms and genres which we might generate from this short phrase.

In fact, it is a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear, a fragment spoken by Edgar who is disguised as mad Tom. From this fragment, Robert Browning later constructed a poem in 1855 – from just a tiny fragment of meaning, Browning was inspired to write an allegory of knightly quest. From a few ‘seeds’ the creative imagination produces and transforms meaning.

Or consider this fragment:

COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY

We identified paradoxes and oxymorons here – mutually exclusive words joined together. The sentence is grammatically and syntactically correct, but implies nonsense, impossibility and paradox.

Actually, this phrase was used as an example by Noam Chomsky as part of his exploration of the relationship between language and human nature, and as an illustration of how meaning is created through more than simply grammar or syntax, since we can create syntactically correct sentences which are literally meaningless. (Incidentally, though not of direct relevance here, Chomsky argues that the ability to create syntactical structures necessary for language are hard-wired into human biology – a view shared to some extent by anthropological psychologist Steven Pinker).

Having seen Chomsky’s example, some people considered it as a throwing down of the gauntlet, and set about creating texts in which such a sentence, apparently absent of any possible meaning, would actually make sense. Here’s one of their efforts:

Behold the pent-up power of the winter tree;
Leafless it stands, in lifeless slumber.
Yet its very resting is revival and renewal:
Inside the dark gnarled world of trunk and roots,
Cradled in the chemistry of cell and sap,
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
In deep and dedicated doormancy,
Concentrating, conserving, constructing:
Knowing, by some ancient quantum law
Of chlorophyll and sun
That come the sudden surge of spring,
Dreams become reality, and ideas action.

Bryan O. Wright

See this archived thread
to see a few more examples of how people explored the prompts of their imaginations, fed with just an apparently dry and meaningless piece of academic cruft.

The instability of meaning

These examples illustrate how, when given the opportunity, the human imagination expresses enormous creativity. The power of the imagination allows us to create and produce meanings, which are simply not present, or intended, by an author. Meaning is not stable and fixed, it is produced, created and constructed, and it mutates under the pressure of usage by creative human imaginations. Indeed, reading any kind of text, whether this text you read now, or fragments of text such as Chomsky’s nonsense phrase, is not a passive, but an active activity.

Barthes’ Death of the Author

So: we must re-examine the relationship between reader and author: what an author ‘intends’, the meaning that we might call the ‘dominant’ reading, is not as easy to pin down as we might at first have thought. Barthes’ important essay The Death of the Author (1977), addresses this issue – let’s see what he has to say.

“The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions…”

So Barthes begins by framing the business of understanding culture as centred ‘tyranically’ around the author. The author has historically been the main focus of interpretation. This is borne out by a long tradition in academic fields such as English Literature, in which the ‘correct’ interpretation of a text is approached more closely by knowing more about the author and their biography. Or in art, the work of someone like Vincent Van Gogh can only be properly appreciated by understanding the contingent details of his life – the severed ear, the mental illness, the sojourn in Brixton, etc. Barthes continues:

“… there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism […] is today undermined along with the Author.”

Hand in hand with the concentration on the author – and the ever increasing detail one must know of the author’s life in order to ‘properly’ interpret the author’s work – comes the ‘reign of the Critic’, or the pre-eminence of the ‘expert’. Experts are the repositories of correct interpretations, because they are the ones who have taken the trouble to discover the ‘true’, intended meaning of the author’s text. Barthes also states that these privileges that have been granted the author and the critic are being eroded and ‘undermined’. How so?

Well… a detour into the details of post-structuralist thought is beyond the scope of this lecture. Suffice to say that with the advent of postmodernist thought, and the dissolution of faith in ‘absolute’ values, which require an ultimate author (say, a God), notions of truth, and the importance of ‘intention’ have come to be undermined. Barthes is applying his understanding of a general shift in cultural thought to a specific idea about meaning – that shift in cultural thought which occurs as modernism gives way to postmodernism, structuralism gives way to post-structuralism, and reason and concrete ‘evidence’ give way to desire and ‘contingency’.

Anyway: let’s continue with Barthes on the role of the reader.

“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination […] we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

Don’t look for ‘unity’ and meaning in the intentions of the author: meaning can only be created by the reader. The emphasis that we’ve seen on the dominant reading is essentially vain. It is part and parcel of the vanity of the author, seeking to control their reputation with posterity through their memoirs and diaries, and it is an expression of the critic’s desire to be legitimate – the business of academia and the ‘cultural industry’ ensuring that they are still important and necessary. After all, without experts, surely we’d sink into a morass of dumbed-down ignorance and anarchy?

Actually, Barthes argues, the reader creates meaning, not the author, and the reader is potentially infinitely varied: not every reader is an expert. So are non-expert readings less valid? Is an expert’s reading more valid? What is the point, or need, for such elitism? Is it anything but elitism?

Forget the author, Barthes says; who cares where he was living, what he was drinking, who he was seeing, what he was thinking, when he wrote the text? The text is all that exists, and what we bring to the text in our interpretation is what we should care about.

Outside the text

In part two of this lecture, we’ll look in more detail at Barthes’ complex but deeply stimulating book, S/Z in which he first describes the writerly and readerly texts. We’ll also see what relevance these conceptual propositions have to interactive media in particular; ways in which the writerly text can help us to approach many other theoretical models; and we’ll also consider the irony (if you haven’t already spotted it) in someone claiming to have expertise (like me) explaining what Barthes’ text means.

Author: joe
Categories: writerly, Barthes, semiotics, interpretation, active-reader, system:lectures,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted at CEMP

This is a synopsis of the sixth and final session of the Media & Participation unit: Identity.

The sixth session of the Media & Participation unit was concerned with ideas about ‘identity’ and ‘therapy’. The online assignment was:

• make something* that expresses something about who you are; and list the key points that have arisen for you over the course of the lecture series. These key points will be turned into essay questions in the lecture.

[* ‘make something’ – it would defeat the object of a participatory course to tell you what to make. It could be anything from a picture to a poem to a blog post to a video to a sound sample to a sculpture.]

Dancing Joe

In the spirit of fairness, I joined in this assignment – you can see something I made which expresses something about who I am here

The format of the session was the familiar one where we get our heads around some conceptual and theoretical ideas, and then examine the ‘primary evidence’ at hand in order to see whether those concepts, theories and models seem to help or hinder our understanding of the examples.

We focussed on ideas from Goffman, and Giddens to start with. Tim and others have said useful things about Goffman here while some useful notes on Giddens can be found here and here

In short, we’re interested in rejecting the idea that one’s identity is fixed, stable, continuous and unified. Rather, we’re interested in identity as something ‘produced’ and ‘performed’ – what Giddens might call the ‘reflexive project of the self’.

So, Dancing Joe is not merely fluffy fiction. Dancing Joe is a performance (literally and metaphorically) in which I can perform a different ‘front persona’ than the kind of performance I’m likely to produce in a lecture theatre, or a bank manager’s office. These different ‘stages’ may well determine the kind of performance I may be able to produce (and hence in each case I stick to a ‘script’ which is ‘normative’). If I were to stray too far off these scripts (by, for example wearing only pants to my lectures, and talking nonsense), then I might be considered deviant. Maybe Dancing Joe will make you think I’m deviant anyway. Can’t win. Hmmm

Who am I

James made a video, about his addictions. We can argue (we won’t) about whether James is ‘revealing’ aspects of his identity, but we can certainly claim that he is ‘producing’ aspects of his identity. His statements as to his values – more important things than sex, drugs, money – may or may not ‘map onto’ the ‘truth about James’. But they certainly do create in us, his audience, an understanding of what it is to be James.

I am what I consume

Chris chose to represent himself by using album covers to create a mosaic of himself.

Music seems to be an important and powerful resource by which (especially) young people create messages about themselves – asserting their allegiance to specific subcultures (in my day it was goths and new romantics). The way we dress, too, allows us to ‘produce’ in others an understanding of who we claim to be.

But allegiance to subcultures is inextricable with ‘consumption’: CDs and clothes are commodities, which are produced by an industry. Hence Marxist commentators have tended to assert that our use of commodities to signal our identity disguises the fact that we are victims of tyranny.

Baudrillard, in The System Of Objects describes the way that while we feel as though we have a sense of freedom to choose which commodities to buy, actually, our choice is no more than an illusion. According to Baudrillard, the commodities choose us. A pre-defined set of choices whose very existence is predicated on an industry which simply wishes to extract capital from us is no choice at all. Is it really possible to express our individuality through the consumption of commodities, which we only want because we’ve been skilfully manipulated into wanting them through advertising and peer pressure?

Fiske, on the other hand believes we can do exactly that: actually what the Marxists call the ‘culture industry’ is always trying to play catch up with what these young, cutting edge fashion-setters want. Buy Jeans – rip them. Buy ripped Jeans – sew them. Buy sewed up Jeans – fade them with bleach. Buy faded Jeans – dye them. Buy dyed Jeans…. and on it goes.

And in any case, is it more important to find some kind of semiotic system which we can use as a resource to form relationships and allegiances with each other and express our sense of ourselves, or is it more important that we become system-rejecting tramps just to please some jaded old Marxists? You decide.

I am someone else too

Vic drew a self-portrait.

Vic said he was surprised by how sad the portrait looked. Vic is generally a cheerful person. Perhaps the portrait adds depth to this cheerful persona – none of us are always in the same mood, always full of cheer? There is a sad Vic somewhere, whose existence has been conjured. Certainly, we agreed, the production of this portrait can’t be undone, and it will now form (however minutely) a part of Vic that will always be there.

Ur-student

Danda made a sculpture with utility. Some stolen traffic cones and a sign have been transformed into a coffee table. Danda says “everything I do is expressive of who I am in one way or another”.

Some of the semiotic codes in this image which seem to tell us ‘who danda is’ include the traffic cone – the stealing of which is a compulsory part of being a student; does danda seem to be saying yes, I am a student, but I am also a coffee-table maker?

Hoarder

Will took a photo of his notice board. His flatmate is extremely tidy, while Will likes some disorganisation. Will isn’t entirely sure whether his hoarding of paper-based messages is full of usefulness or not.

I too have friends who iron their tea-towels and boxer shorts. Unlike them, I have from time to time kept boxes of crap, which I periodically dispose of in one great cathartic spring-clean.

Aspirations

Dean sees himself more as the bird than the shitty post, obviously.

Snow-boarding artist

Carl likes to express his visual creativity in between snow-boarding breaks.

No man is an island

jimirich emphasises the importance of his friends and family to his sense of who he is.

Saturday Night Fever

wmjb is the greatest dancer. Or is he?

Here’s a question: if you persuade everyone that, on the dance-floor, you’re greased lightning, and everyone believes that, on the dance-floor, you’re greased lightning, doesn’t that mean that, on the dance-floor, you’re greased lightning?

Bricolage man

Patrick is made of Arsenal, web searches, Budweiser, funk, and sleepless nights.

Eraserhead

obourneo describes himself as a ginger-topped pixel man moving forward into something. He’s not sure what he’s moving into, but it feels right.

I am who I want to be

Certainly we concede that something outside of us, (our experience of the ‘exterior’), imposes on us a set of constraints which necessarily determine how we ‘perform’ our identities. We noted that many Marxist ideas tend to assume that we’re passive (and stupid) and therefore unthinking victims of these institutional state apparatuses.

However, a crucial thing to grasp is that ‘who we are’ is a collaborative project. These external constraints are our collaborators in the reflexive projects of our selves, resources that we utilise, play with, or reject, in order to achieve our sense of selfhood.

We noted the example of Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, who in an interesting piece in The Guardian described a difference between the Salam he believed himself to be, and the Salam whose persona emerged in the blog. We might argue, actually, the persona in his blog was produced by the ‘real’ Salam, and while this persona seems aspirational, perhaps by ‘producing’ this persona, the ‘real’ Salam becomes more like the aspirational Salam.

So instead of thinking of people who write blogs, or create Youtube videos, or just generally make things, as ‘revealing’ aspects of their identity, instead we might think of them as producing new aspects of their identity, consolidating performances they enjoy into their sense of who they ‘really’ are.

Technologies of the self

‘Technologies of the self’ is Foucault’s phrase and a nice set of descriptions of this idea can be found here

Participatory media increase the range of tools available to us to produce the identity performances (or provide opportunities for ‘identity-work’) that we want to engage in.

So, while Arnold and Keen wonder whether participatory media signal the end of culture, the significance of tools which allow us to explore who we want to be, and thereby become who we want to be, dwarves their parochial little concerns.

Rethink normality

silentmiaow made a video. Watch it, and she’ll tell you far more about self-hood and normality than I can begin to hope to explain.

M & P assignment

Here’s the brief for your assignment. Deadline: 12pm Thurs 21st February. We agreed the topics in the session, and I’ve since turned them into proper academic-looking titles. If you weren’t present and you don’t like the questions, email me with your alternative suggestion.

——

The main assessment for the Media & Participation unit is a 2000 word essay. Choose one of the 7 titles listed below, and use the title to explore the ideas discussed in the unit. You should utilise both primary evidence (examples of phenomena such as media artefacts or events, case studies, etc), and secondary evidence (conceptual and theoretical sources and ideas) in your analysis. Use the essay to communicate your ideas and opinions, and ensure that you demonstrate, in an analytical way, what evidence brings you to favour those ideas and opinions.

The secondary assessment for the Media & Participation unit consists of the online assignments for each of the unit sessions. Please submit, alongside your essay, a short document providing links (urls) to each of your online assignments. See the unit materials for details of all online assignments.

Essay titles

• “RL is just one more window, and it’s usually not my best one.” (Turkle, Sherry, Life on the Screen)
  What opportunities for identity work are offered by participatory media?

• Political systems, such as capitalism and socialism, often make claims about the relationship between human freedom and human nature. To what extent do you think that understanding the relationship between human nature and freedom is essential to the functioning of society?

• Foucault says Beckett said “‘What does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking.’” (Foucault, M., What is an Author)
  Our notions of authorship are inextricably entwined with notions of credibility and ‘authority’, while participatory media undermine the stability of authorship and expertise. What does it matter who is speaking?

• “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.” (Foucault, M., Truth and Power)
  Truth is not discovered, it is fought for, contested, won, and lost. Discuss.

• “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace… In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.” (Chomsky, N., & Herman, E., Manufacturing Consent)
  Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model outlines the limitations of traditional media. In what ways do participatory media exceed or adhere to these limitations?

• “Piracy is theft” (MPAA)
  Participatory media challenge the validity of current copyright laws. What are those challenges, and their consequences?

• “Property is theft” (Joseph Proudhon)
  What challenge do participatory media present to the current norms and practices of the commodity / ownership capitalist system?

I look forward to reading your work, and thanks to all of you for your contributions to the unit.

Author: joe
Categories: media-participation, identity, foucault, giddens, goffman, technologies-of-the-self, system:lectures,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted at CEMP

This is a synopsis of the fifth session of the Media & Participation unit: Truth.

The fifth session of the Media & Participation unit was concerned with ideas about ‘truth’. The online assignment was in two parts:

1: Select one of the suggested readings for this unit, and write a review or synopsis (tagged with media-participation) on biblipedia.net

2: Find two contrasting news reports – one of which was produced by traditional media sources, and one which was produced by a non-traditional source (eg a blogger or a ‘citizen journalist’), and explain how and why the perspectives within them differ (or not).

This session consisted of a very interesting discussion and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Language and substance

Let’s start by looking at some of Al’s observations. Al mentions the language that different news reports use. The news story produced by the traditional source uses ‘non-emotive’ language and thereby strives to seem to be ‘unbiased’. Meanwhile the blogger’s account is openly derisive – and is free to ‘openly show their opinion’.

This is a good angle onto the issues: we see a distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ (naturally), but also a stylistic difference. So we need to think about the relationship between the language used to describe an event and its ‘factual’ status. Are these things separable?

Vic’s contribution provides a good contrast here. Wikipedia (a non-traditional source, often tarred with the ‘unreliability’ brush of UGC and citizen media) provides a much more ‘factual’ account of the crash of BA flight 38 than did The Sun’s coverage. Rosie also found that the blogger’s account of gaming and violence was more formal and ‘evidence-based’ than The Guardian.

So it’s not enough for us simply to say that UGC permits opinion, while traditional sources must be more ‘factual’. Something else is going on. What is it?

What are facts?

If we are to describe a report as ‘factual’, then we need to know what ‘facts’ are. How do we know if something is true? One way of thinking about this is to think in terms of ‘brute’ and ‘social’ facts.

We might think of ‘brute’ facts as those which we can identify as having some kind of corresponding ‘objective reality’, independent of human beings. (This relates to the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ ). So, Earth is a planet orbiting the Sun; gravity on earth makes everything fall to the ground; this morning I had toast for breakfast.

‘Social facts’ meanwhile, can’t be said to have a corresponding ‘objective reality’. We can say it is true that it would be wrong for me to murder a student. If I did murder a student, then I should be punished. Such punishment would be a form of justice. These ‘truths’, or ‘facts’ are contingent – on society, on conventions.

So far, so good. The problems start to arise, though, when we look underneath this fairly common-sense approach to truth. We looked at OJ Simpson as an example.

We might say there is an objective fact ‘corresponding’ to whether or not OJ committed the murder of which he was acquitted. Alongside that, though, there is also the question as to whether people believe he committed the murder or not. What is significant here is that what people believe to be true is more important that what can be discovered to be an objective fact.

Now, we may argue that the whole point is that people who think OJ was guilty also think it is an ‘objective fact’ that he committed the murder. But if we really were such rational people that we put ‘objective facts’ first, then we would all say we don’t know whether OJ is guilty or not: the fact(!) is that many people believe OJ is guilty, despite being unable to determine the ‘objective reality’.

Note that we’re not getting into whether there is such a thing as ‘objective reality’ which we can describe using language in a ‘truthful’ way (that’s a philosophical debate for another occasion). We’re simply noting that while we pretend that ‘objective fact’ is important, we believe what we want to believe, and cite ‘objective reality’ as a reason for our belief.

Serious facts.

So much for OJ – but we might say that OJ doesn’t matter very much anyway. So we looked at a different, more controversial subject – the holocaust. We discussed the controversy around holocaust deniers – people like David Irving who are accused of denying that the holocaust happened, or at least that its magnitude has been exaggerated.

You noted that discussion of the holocaust brings with it certain requirements – we have to be careful what we say about the holocaust because it is a sensitive subject. It highlights the importance of language – Corin said that ‘holocaust’ is a hebrew word meaning ‘whirlwind’. According to Wikipedia, it’s a Greek word meaning ‘completely burnt’. The Nazis didn’t use the word – they called it the ‘final solution’ – a much more sanitised way of describing mass murder. You also noted that discussing the holocaust requires ‘respect’. It forces into the open ideas like ‘tragedy’ and ‘inhumanity’. The key point here is that ‘holocaust’ has a meaning and an effect on our behaviour and attitude, which is independent of its ‘objective reality’. ‘Holocaust’ means something more than the event itself.

Belief and appeals to objective truth

So, our thesis has become: what we believe to be true is far more important than what is we can state as ‘objective fact’. ‘Objective facts’ are merely things we use to justify what we believe to be true. The consequence of this is that it allows us to see the significance of ‘appeals to the objective truth’. When people claim to be stating facts, they are trying to persuade us of something – they want us to believe something.

Once again we examined the example of academic expertise to investigate this kind of persuasion.

We mentioned ‘scientific facts’ – science discovers certain ‘truths’ about the world, by ‘proofs’. Of course, the problem we have is that none of us are sufficiently qualified in scientific understanding to diagnose whether science deserves this kind of trust. None of us properly understand quantum mechanics, for instance, but I’m sure we all have ‘opinions’ on whether it is ‘true’ or not. Whether quantum mechanics is true or false, whether it ‘corresponds’ to reality or not, is immaterial to whether we believe it or not. We believe what we choose to believe, based on the persuasiveness of those whose arguments we encounter. Seen from this direction, ‘factuality’ is nothing but rhetoric – a means to persuasion.

‘Fact’ is a ‘social fact’.

Or take our own subject. When you read reviews or synopses on biblipedia, if you see different accounts about the same text, how do you choose which one to believe? Do you look to see if it is written by a tutor or a student? When you write essays, why do your tutors insist on you backing everything you say up with ‘evidence’ in the form of quotations and case studies?

On the surface, we might say that academic work is about developing ‘critical skills’ and the ability to engage with ‘evidence’. We could just as easily argue, though, that academic work is a way of universities ‘legimitising’ what they do. ‘Academia’ has a certain kind of status in our society. There’s certainly no incentive for universities to undermine this by saying that academic work is pointless. It is a ‘social fact’ that ‘critical skills’ and ‘evidence-based thinking’ are ‘good things’. The system of academic education which universities are a part of require students to do the academic tasks because if they didn’t, academia would lose its status. So in this light, the requirement that you all write essays with quotations and evidence is just a way of indoctrinating you with a set of ‘values’ which will help to ensure that the academic system perpetuates itself.

And in our discussion of Biblipedia, some of you admitted that you found the idea of writing your synopses and reviews in a public space quite daunting: is this fear a symptom of how well the education system and academia has already indoctrinated you into believing in its authority and status? How have you managed to be persuaded that what you think might be wrong?

Self-legitimisation

Regardless of whether we believe in facts or not, we should at least have started to understand many of the phenomena we can observe.

• Why would Britannica criticise Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia strive to appear ‘factual’?
• Why did the the mixing of factual and fictional generic conventions cause such a row at the BBC?
• Why do professional journalists emphasise the difference between what they do and what citizen journalists do?

Your next (and final) online assignment is here

UPDATE: interesting discussion about truth and power following the version of this post at CEMP

Author: joe
Categories: media-participation, truth, system:lectures,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted at CEMP

This is a synopsis of the third session of the Media & Participation unit: Citizenship.

The third session of the Media & Participation unit was concerned with ideas about ‘Citizenship’. The online assignment was to identify a media space (traditional or new) which allows members of the public to participate in political debate, and explain the extent to which you believe that space empowers people / influences decisions or fails to do so.

A Ladder of Citizen Participation

In the first session, we saw Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation. Do look at it again, and bear it in mind as we go through some of the theoretical ideas. Also, our theoretical focus will not so much be on very recent (breathless) accounts of how the internet is transforming participation, but instead tackle some hardcore theory heavyweights. Hopefully, you’ll find that Benkler , Rheingold , Weinberger , Trippi et al are more useful after considering Hobbes, Rousseau, Habermas, Bakhtin, Chomsky and Foucault.

Political participation

We began with a discussion about voting: the floor was divided between those who felt that not to vote was a waste, and that it isn’t really possible to make a persuasive criticism or contribution to political debate if you don’t even use your vote; and those who argued that choosing not to vote was the only way to express disapproval of the options on offer, even if it was formally indistinguishable from apathy.

We noted that something like a third of eligible voters aged 18-24 voted in the last election. Even of the entire eligible voting population of the country, only 61.3% of the electorate voted; and only 37% voted for Labour, the winning party. That means that less than a quarter of the UK electorate voted for the government.

We can perform a thought experiment here, and consider some of these numbers: 37% for Labour is considered a mandate for (effectively) minority rule; if we imagine we had all voted, there is no reason to suppose that Labour would have acquired more or less than 37%, because the vote is split between several parties (Conservative 33%, Lib Dem 22%, Other 8%).

This is one of the paradoxes of democratic systems – they are sometimes described as the least worst option, because they tend to result in minority rule.

So even if we addressed one of the central criticisms of our democratic process – there isn’t enough choice or difference between parties – by increasing the range of political parties we might vote for, the winning party might have even less share of the vote; and yet, is what we want majority rule? Surely that would require there to be less choice?

Or if we introduced proportional representation, as some of us suggested, mightn’t we simply end up with more people’s second choice than anyone’s true preference?

And finally on this, none of these figures (available here ) tell us why many people don’t vote, or whether the choices we have are enough, too much or too little. How would we know?

Political philosophy

Debates about political participation highlight one of the central tensions that result in lots of individuals all living together in a society: the limits of freedom and the necessities of law.

We can explore some of these tensions by going back to some historical big-hitters: Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

[Clay Shirky talks about Hobbes vs Rousseau as a way of thinking about the architecture of participatory websites here (and more on it here) for those IMPS interested.]

Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651. This text is old, long, and frankly pretty boring, but his main thrust as far as we are concerned is articulated by Garrath Williams here:

we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a ‘state of nature’ that closely resembles civil war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/hobmoral.htm

Hobbes’ argument, that we should submit to a sovereign who rules over us by the force of law, arises because he diagnoses human nature extremely pessimistically. Hobbes believed that without sovereign law, human beings will by nature violently compete for survival, fight each other out of suspicion, and seek individual power and glory through force. In effect, Hobbes believes that human nature – that is humans in a natural state unmodified by any kind of overarching social power or society – is base, animal, and tending to violence and war.

In order to guard against this brutal state of affairs, Hobbes argues that an unaccountable (i.e. non-challengable) sovereign should rule society, and expect total obedience – or members of the society should expect punishment for disobedience. This, he argues, is the only way to ensure that the unruly brutish animals that people are will live together with any kind of co-operation.

The Noble Savage

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing ‘The Social Contract’ a century later in 1762, is most famous for his aphorism – “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Richard Hooker explains it thus:

everything that civilized people have regarded as progress – urbanization, technology, science, and so on – has resulted in the moral degradation of humanity. For Rousseau, the natural moral state of human beings is to be compassionate; civilization has made us cruel, selfish, and bloodthirsty […] civilization has robbed us of our natural freedom […] the price of civilization is human freedom and human individuality.

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT/ROUSSEAU.HTM

So here we have a diametrically opposed view from that of Hobbes: it is the product of so-called civilised institutions that the moral degradation of humanity has occurred – war is a product of society, while individual human beings are naturally compassionate. Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage, although it has a problematic role in the history of European colonialism, argues that man’s natural state is co-operative, compassionate and noble.

Human nature

Faced with these opposing views of political philosophy we were forced to note that they require us to address what ‘human nature’ consists of – and given that we are familiar with arguments that human behaviour is culturally constructed (gender is socially constructed, cultural differences should be tolerated, etc) it is very difficult to resolve the question.

One issue that arose in our discussion was the inevitability of progress: faced with the hypothesis that there might be some kind of end-state, in which humans finally live in harmony, the response was that this could never happen because it is a part of human nature to constantly strive to know more, do more, achieve more.

These propositions relate to what is sometimes called the ‘teleological view of history’, or even ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ – that there is some utopian end-point to which humanity is striving, and that the course of history is the story of ever improving progress towards that goal. Thinkers such as Hegel and Marx might take this view (though we would probably want to hesitate before stating that Marx thinks that this progress is inevitable). But we might also see the constant forward striving as an end in itself – we do not strive towards a goal which we will ever achieve, rather we strive for the sake of striving – and we always will – and what’s more this striving will always bring us into conflict with each other. A deeper understanding of ‘dialectics’ might help us here, but we leave that for another time and place. In any case, there was not much consensus among us that people would ever be satisfied to live in an permanent social state of harmony, even if it were possible.

We could even draw parallels with debates in evolutionary science, where protagonists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins argue over whether evolution demonstrates ever-increasing complexity (as though life is ‘striving’ towards higher life forms), or whether evolution actually does not care whether the world is ruled by worms or clever monkeys and our proclamation of our species as the highest life form is inextricable with our ‘evo-eco-ego-centrism’.

More tensions

Some of the ideas you put forward were to think in terms of group associations, and our small understanding of anthropology and group psychology: we have loyalty to and co-operate with those close to us – family, kin, tribes, races, etc – our in-groups; while we may come into conflict with those in out-groups: strangers, other races, religions, aliens. So you argued that Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s fundamental positions ignore context – we co-operate with those we trust, we conflict with strangers.

One interesting facet here, though, is that those we consider to have shared interests with us change with context: family vs non-family is different to tribe vs non-tribe, etc. It implies some kind of concentric set of relations which overlap in ways which are negotiable: we can find things in common with people we wouldn’t normally, in different contexts. Now, let’s consider the ways in which communication helps us to negotiate those different realms.

Jurgen Habermas’ Public Sphere

Habermasdescribes what he calls ‘the public sphere’ – as distinct from the ‘private sphere’ which might consist of family and friends, where what we say to each other and what we think about things is retained in relative privacy. What’s particularly interesting to us is that his notion of the public sphere (the public discourses which occur in the wider realm of education, systematic religion, and of course, civil society) is specifically political: that is, concerned with how we communicate in a realm where differences are obvious, but not insurmountable, and how political decision might be influenced by public discourse and communication.

Here’s a useful synopsis from the University of Georgetown (Habermas is notoriously difficult to read, whether in the original German, or in translation):

In the public sphere […] discourse becomes democratic through the “non-coercively unifying, consensus building force of a discourse in which participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement (Public Discourse 315).” By looking to rationality, he hopes to produce democratic judgements which can have universal application while remaining anchored within the practical realm of discourse among individuals.

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/gaynor/publics.htm

So here we start to see some of the characteristics of ‘ideal speech situations’ that Habermas thinks are necessary for a vital public sphere to perform a primary role in the determination of civil society: competence, autonomy and rationality.

• Competence: participants should have communicative competence: the ability to use and differentiate between 3 different kinds of ‘positions’ – subjective, inter-subjective, and objective.
• Autonomy: participants should be able to contribute any ideas they have without fear of insult or reprisal, and their contribution should be able to take place without coercion.
• Rationality: participants’ contributions should conform to what Habermas describes as ‘rational-critical’ discourse.

In some respects, competence is fairly straightforward – it is characteristic of human beings that they are able to tell the difference between these three domains of reference. Humans can tell the differences between individual responses (“I wish I could fly”), shared values (“air travel is good!”) and apparently objective facts (“gravity is always present on earth”). Sentences such as the following might give us more problems, but we could extract the various different positions they consist of:

• “I’m afraid of allowing my children to have the MMR vaccine”;
• “We refuse blood transfusions because of our religion”;
• “Vaccination and blood-transfusions can have positive individual and epidemiological medical benefits”.

The situation becomes muddied, according to Habermas, because of predominant contemporary attitudes – different cultural and ideological contests within society. What appear to be objective facts may be simply socially constructed inter-subjective positions. Low-copy number DNA evidence is a recent example of ‘evidence’ whose status has recently shifted; juries of ‘peers’ – lay people, rather than experts – may have taken LCN DNA evidence to have more objective status than was merited. Similarly, how would we describe a statement such as ‘human beings are inhabitants of earth, rather than the owners’? In any case, it is a mark of our communicative competence that we can see the conflict between subjective, inter-subjective and objective positions, even if we cannot always clearly diagnose instances of them.

Such competence feeds into our ability to engage in ‘rational-critical’ discourse – since we should be able to recognise instances where we attach ourselves to ‘subjective’ positions, and tolerate and attempt to understand others’ subjective positions – and it is only through ‘autonomy’ that we are free to express our subjective positions at all. And if we are exposed to different subjective positions than our own, perhaps we move further towards a more ‘objective’ position?

So – in an ideal situation, a public sphere is a space where everyone can engage in communication with each other – but with a specific goal: of accepting each other’s subjective point of view, but striving through dialogue to reach some kind of consensus – not coerced or imposed, but reached through rational dialogue. This consensus should be considered the ‘formation of public opinion’ – which can then be acted on in a truly democratic fashion.

So having posited this ideal situation where we can speak freely, expect to be tolerated, be willing to accommodate diversity of opinion, and somehow, thereby, achieve a consensus which should determine public policy, let’s look at some of the examples you suggested, and see if they measure up.

Possible Public Spheres?

jimirich suggested that BBC1’s Question Time programme is an example of a space in which members of the public can participate in political debate, and his analysis implies that the extent to which influence is exerted on political decisions is largely one-way – the panel members may be able to persuade the public of their point of view. Note that we’re not saying that influence works in the other direction – indeed it is a major aspect of our party political system that being seen to change your mind as a party politician is a sign of weakness.

So, we decided that while QT may have some of the characteristics of a public sphere – it is generally non-coercive and ‘rational’ – the emphasis here is on politicians defending their policies, rather than any opportunity for ‘public opinion’ to sway those policies.

cboakes suggested the Labour Party’s website where members of the public can contribute to discussions, though he acknowledges that “it is unlikely that their comments will influence Labours actions”. The example discussion cboakes cites is quite instructive, since the participants descend to insults like “brown noser”, “moron”, and “thick white racist”. So this space (ironically provided by the party of government itself) fails either to exhibit ‘rational-critical’ attributes, or to encourage consensus-building.

Indeed, whatever institutions we care to look at, whether it is political debate staged by mainstream media, online fora, or even town-hall meetings, it’s difficult to not see Habermas’ prescription for public debate as far too idealistic. Perhaps he’s asking too much of us? Indeed David Gauntlett describes one of the problems with thinking of the Internet as a potential enactment of a public sphere – even if we did all engage in respectful dialogue, how would the formation of public opinion be measured? Some kind of voting system, presumably… not terribly different to what exists now.

Another problem with this ideal public sphere, is that the logical conclusion is a ‘universal’ consensus – i.e. the ideal outcome of the dialogue within a public sphere is that we all come to the same point of view, think the same things, agree the same ways forward. At first glance this looks like a laudable, utopian ambition – but actually is it not indistinguishable from totalitarianism?

Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia

Heteroglossia is a useful idea which helps us to explore the differences between diverse kinds of discourses and ways of speaking. The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary theorist and critic, and it helps to remember that he was writing from the 1930s until his death in 1975 – that is, under the Soviet regime. Certainly, his career coincided largely with the rule of Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian dictator who stamped out dissent with ‘purges’; the number of his victims is debated, but the debate is over how many millions they number.

“[heteroglossia] represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form.”

(Introducing Bakhtin, p21)

It is instructive, then, to consider the importance of ‘heteroglossia’ – literally ‘diverse tongues’ or ‘differently voiced’ – as an idea born in the midst of censorship, and imposed conformity at pain of death. Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia refers both to the fact that language is created through difference (rather like the classically structuralist approach to language as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure – i.e. it is a formal characteristic of language itself), but also to what might be called ‘social heteroglossia’. ‘Social heteroglossia’ refers to the diversity of discourse that arises from social difference – the different classes within society, and the different situations which ‘frame’ the events in which discourse occurs.

Bakhtin’s work was focussed on the novel as a literary form (which achieved its greatest expression, in the works of, naturally, the great Russian masters like Dostoevsky) as opposed to epic and poetic forms. The novel achieves its most dramatic effects by capturing and expressing the diversity across social spectra.

Social Heteroglossia

The tensions we’ve seen expressed in ideas are also reflected in Bakhtin’s heteroglossia:

“Paradoxically, ‘speech diversity in class society indexes actual inequality’.”

(Introducing Bakhtin, p19)

The existence of social heteroglossia (the differences in the way people use language) only arises because of actual differences between people expressed in class, education, economic situation, etc. However, we might argue that suppressing heteroglossia through censorship is a worse evil than recognising it – it is therefore better to allow heteroglossia some kind of expression than to pretend it is not there. We might also think back to Habermas’ public sphere, and consider that if we are ever able to achieve ‘objective’ understandings, rather than simply our own subjective opinion, then exposure to the heteroglossia of the many is essential?

So we could interpret Bakhtin as celebrating the heteroglossia of the novel, even as he worked in an environment in which diversity of opinion was curbed with the threat of death. Though it is understandable that he could not explicitly say so, we can imagine that he would have like to go as far as to say that the freedom to express the diversity of opinions at large in a population would be a good thing elsewhere than simply in the form of the novel. Evidence for this can be found in his description of what he called the ‘carnivalesque’.

Carnivalesque

We met the carnivalesque briefly in the introductory session, as a way of understanding why so much of the use of participatory media is humorous and parodic. Given a webcam and a worldwide platform, more people tend to choose to mime ridiculously to disposable pop songs or pull stupid pranks on their friends who take MMORPGs too seriously, rather than engage in overtly political discourse. Carnival helps us to understand that perhaps such humour and parody is, actually, very political, even if unintentionally so.

Here we must be necessarily over-simplistic, and describe the carnivalesque as the kinds of discourse that arise where ‘ordinary people’ obtain the opportunity to laugh at and ridicule figures of authority. Bakhtin casts a historical eye over medieval carnivals in which performances could take place where the world is ‘turned on its head’ – the fools and clowns can have mastery over kings and rulers. The discourses of authority (such as, in literature, the epic form) can be appropriated and re-used for humour and parody. Bakhtin argues that in situations where ‘folk humour’ can occur, the carnivalesque will emerge – in market places, festivals and comic oral culture. The carnivalesque is grotesque, obscene and parodic. In the middle ages in which people’s experience of direct authority rested in the church, folk humour is a

“boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations [which] opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture”

and

“carnival allows ‘free and familiar contact between people’ who would normally be separated hierarchically, and allows for ‘mass action’”.

(Introducing Bakhtin, pp151-152)

Carnival is where folk (or popular) culture can make the sacred profane, the serious ridiculous, and the master a slave, and its medium is grotesque and obscene humour. Taboos can be broken, and censored ideas can be expressed.

Televised heteroglossia?

We should immediately be able to see that the examples we’ve seen so far can’t be described as including the full spectrum of heteroglossia. Television programmes like Question Time exact strict editorial policies which limit contributions to what we might describe as ‘rational-critical discourse’, but therefore exclude many kinds of contribution.

ro5iesuggested ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ as a traditional media space in which participation occurs. While Kyle’s show has been described by a judgeas ‘human bear-baiting’, and is often written off as trash TV along with Jerry Springer, et al, our new view of the desirability of heteroglossia might redeem these kinds of programme. ro5ie’s diagnosis does go to the heart of the problem, though:

this is a television programme made for entertainment and [the] extent of help that the contestants receive is debatable.

Online heteroglossia?

The Labour Party’s website’s forum also appears to exhibit a very narrow range of heteroglossia, consisting mostly of ‘flaming’ contributions. This might normallybe diagnosed as a consequence of the disinhibitingeffects of online interaction – we are distanced from the consequences our words when we talk online. But might there also be aspects of the carnivalesque to such trolling and baiting? When is it humorous, and when malicious? Must we always write off such behaviour, and is it not better that such discourse be possible, than that we should operate under censorship?

Meanwhile, Patrickidentifed the ‘rise of citizen media’ as a space where political participation occurs. Patrick notes the same argument which we saw in the last session, where increased participation by ‘non-professionals’ somehow degrades and threatens the contribution of non-amateurs. We might note that we have a new argument to use against Arnold, Keen, et al: excluding contributions from those who aren’t considered to be the ‘professionals’ decreases the heteroglossia we are exposed to – better to have increased participation, even if it is ‘crud’, than to supress the galaxy of possible contributions.

Patrick also identifies the fact that the traditional media do not always express the range of opinion that exists:

[blogging] has enabled people to go against the traditional forms of ‘mass media’ [and] publish their own views and opinions [but] at the same time allowing the freedom of discussion of others opinions, which the traditional media doesn’t.

Let’s consider some ideas about why traditional media only reflects a small range of the possible discourses that circulate in a society.

A Propaganda Model

As we’ve seen, traditional media forms do not necessarily reflect what we might think of as ‘social heteroglossia’. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman suggested a model for understanding why traditional media outlets inhibit certain kinds of discourse. In their book ‘Maunfacturing Consent’, they describe what they call ‘A Propaganda Model’.This should not be understood as the traditional kind of propaganda we may be familiar with, which is intentional and deliberately constructed to produce certain kinds of opinion – as we might understand the kinds of propaganda created by both sides during the first and second world wars.

Chomsky and Herman suggest that certain kinds of opinion are produced and perpetuated by the media, which are not necessarily deliberately deceitful or conspired, but nevertheless act as propaganda. This propaganda is an effective form of censorship, as there are 5 filters which limit the kinds of discourse which may emerge from traditional media. These filters are ownership (who owns the media); advertising (which sponsors subsidise the producers); sources (the kind of sources that can be regarded as ‘authoritative’); flak (the negative reactions that content may attract; and finally, ideology (the kind of hegemonic ideas or orthodoxies that prevail at any given time).

Ownership

The owners of any outlet decide what media will be created. Rupert Murdoch owns, amongst many other things, The Sun, The Times, Sky, Fox, etc. There is often much speculation as to which political party Murdoch will back in an election. We do not need to assume, however, that he tells his editors what to say. Since he owns the various media companies, he is able to appoint editors, and is likely, therefore, to appoint those who will take the kinds of line he supports. There might also be examples of more overt censorship, though: Murdoch owns the publishing house Harper Collins, who dropped plans to publish the book East and West, by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong. It also happens that Murdoch has a huge interest in being able to access the Chinese market as it opens to the West. This is, of course, possibly coincidental, though Chomsky and Herman’s model would imply otherwise.

Advertising

Commercial media outlets which depend on advertising for income cannot upset their advertisers if they wish to stay in business. If Coca-Cola is your sponsor, and you run a story about the potential carcinogenic ingredients of coke, you may well lose your sponsorship. If your major sponsors are members of the automotive industry, you may think twice before campaigning for higher petrol taxes. If your advertisers want high viewing figures, you’re likely to create populist programming, rather than produce ‘worth’ TV. Or, consider the challenge faced by a media sales agent selling advertising space to car and clothing manufacturers for slots around an anti-consumerist programme?

Sources

‘Sources’ refers to who has the authority to tell us what is true and what is not true. So for example, when you watch Newsnight, there are usually a couple of people asked to engage in some pointless argumentative adversarial debate to explore an issue. These people are usually ‘establishment’ figures who have some kind of ‘authority’ on a subject: professors, experts, police, politicians, lawyers, etc. None of these people necessarily have a great deal of interest in revolution and unpopular ideas. After all, when you’re an ‘authority’, why would you advocate ideas which undermine your authority? Why would Britannica praise Wikipedia? Why would politicians want young people to vote when most of them think middle-of-the-road politicians are wankers, and are therefore just as likely to vote Green or Monster Raving Loony?

If you do see ‘ordinary’ people asked for their opinions on current affairs, it is often in a series of vox-pops which illustrate how ill-informed or generally apathetic and stupid ‘ordinary’ people are. You and I are not asked to debate topics in mainstream media, unless we are there explicitly there as examples of ‘stupid, ordinary people’.

Foucault’s ideas about power and knowledge (below) will be relevant to the way certain kinds of people are considered to be authoritative sources.

Flak

Flak is a deterent. Flak is what you’ll get if you broadcast controversial material or opinions. The BBC got flak from the Christian right over Jerry Springer The Opera, and over their reporting of the Iraq war (the Hutton Report was a form of flak). Chris Morris’ spoof news show Brass Eye got a tonne of flak for its episode about paedophiles and its hoodwinking of celebrities. Theo van Gogh got flak and it cost him his life.

Broadcasters sometimes don’t like flak (might lose advertising revenue from one quarter), and sometimes do like flak (higher ratings and therefore more advertising interest from other quarters) – there is flak and there is flak.

Ideology

When Chomsky and Herman were writing in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, they called this last filter ‘anti-communism’. This filter refers to the orthodoxy that might not necessarily seem to be even open to question, or the prevailing hegemony that informs all the other filters. Do you ever see factual programming exploring economic alternatives to capitalism, or political alternatives to democracy? Have you ever seen a BBC documentary celebrating anarchists or advocating revolution?

What can be said and what cannot be said

So we’ve seen that Chomsky and Herman see the traditional media players as a part of a self-serving capitalist system which excludes competitive ideas, and leaves little room for dissent. Even if we accept that this is so, why would we think that allowing room for dissent, or increasing the heteroglossia expressed in media forms, might have any effect anyway? Just because the internet offers potential heteroglossia in a way that traditional media do not, does being able to ‘say things’ really ‘change things’?

Power / Knowledge

Here, we’re going to meet Michel Foucault briefly (we’ll return to him in the last session of the series too). Before we go on to Foucault, though, let’s look at what Allon White has to say about heteroglossia. Foucault is a tricky customer to read and understand, so White’s analysis of Bakhtin’s ideas here will help.

“As Allon White puts it, ‘because languages are socially unequal, heteroglossia implies dialogic interaction in which the prestige languages try to extend their control and subordinated languages to try to avoid, negotiate or subvert that control’.”

(Introducing Bakhtin, p19)

So in amongst all this heteroglossia, there are ‘prestige’ and ‘subordinated’ languages, which struggle for dominance. How is this so? Well consider medical langauge (one of Foucault’s favourite subjects). If I say I have a blocked nose, then I sound a little snuffly and pathetic. This assertion will not be enough for me to take prolonged sick leave. However, if my doctor writes on a piece of paper, ‘this patient suffers from post-nasal drip and caused by a compression of pus in the ethmoid sinus, requiring a submucous resection and functional endoscopic sinus surgery’, then my employers will pay me statutory sick pay for as long as the law demands.

On the surface, we might simply say that the doctor’s language is an expression of his expertise, while my language is simply a lay description of my symptoms. However, the point is that authority comes with expertise – or ‘power’ comes hand-in-hand with ‘knowledge’. Foucault argues that ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ are inextricable.

“…the production of knowledge and the exercise of administrative power intertwine, and each begins to enhance the other… This is the reciprocal nature of these two words that Foucault titled “power/knowledge” For Foucault, this is a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing relation between the circulation of knowledge and subsequently the control of conduct…”

http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Speech/rccs/theory54.htm

So here we see that our conduct (remember Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s positions on human nature were about what our natural ‘conduct’ is) is controlled by the total set of knowledge we have about the world – what we feel to be true. (E.g. we could say it is true that if I am diagnosed with ADHD, or bipolar disorder, or other mental health problems, then I have a pathology that must be treated, and my behaviour is therefore abnormal). And what we feel to be true is determined by those who are credited with knowledge: experts. And how are expertise circulated? Through discourse.

We’ll leave Foucault there for now, since we’ll return to him in the final session about identity and therapy. In the meantime, lets see him as another plank in our hope that increased heteroglossia is a good thing because it pushes much more ‘knowledge’ – and therefore ‘power’ – into everyone’s sphere.

Tokenism

Finally, let’s worry about increased participation in political discussion being nothing more than tokenism. Recall Arnstein’s ladder, in which limited participation is described as tokenism – where a population may be ‘informed’ of policy, even ‘consulted’, but ultimately, merely ‘placated’. Bucy & Gregson put it this way:

“…civic engagement through media, even if only symbolically empowering for the citizen, contributes substantially to legitimising the political systems of mass democracies…”

Bucy & Gregson
Media & Participation, New Media & Society, 2001

So our big question, ultimately, is not so much, ‘what is human nature’, but rather, ‘does increased participation result merely in legitimising the orthodoxies in society, rather than changing them’? We’ll leave this question open…

The next online assignment, on ‘Property’ is here.

References

Bucy, E., & Gregson, K., 2001., ‘Media Participation – A legitmising mechanism of mass democracy’ in New Media & Society, Vol 3, No 3, pp 357 – 380 [Online (Athens required): http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Article.asp?ContributionID=5114780 ]
Vice, S., 1997, Introducing Bakhtin, Manchester: MUP

Photo Credits

The Social Contract, psd
Leviathan, senorwences
Jean Jack Rousseau, topsy
Democracy of few, Disgrace of many, ledpup
Unisphere, wallyg
Postmodern Dialogues – Round One, huxleyesque
Powertools as a pasttime, lachlanhardy

Author: joe
Categories: media-participation, citizenship, Hobbes, Rousseau, Chomsky, Habermas, Foucault, democracy, totalitarianism, system:lectures,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

Today’s session was the second in the Media & Participation unit, and the first of 5 sessions dealing with specific conceptual areas – in this case – ‘Quality’.

Your online assignment was to identify a media artefact produced outside the traditional mainstream media and explain what ‘qualities’ it has / does not have.

(Incidentally, ‘a media artefact’ is a catch-all phrase which gives you as much freedom as you need to choose pretty much anything at all.)

Also incidentally: last year 25 students took the M&P unit, and 15 of them completed the first online assignment in time for the session, which 19 attended at 9am. This year there are 40 of you, 9 of you completed the first online assignment, and 18 of you attended at 9am today. Hey, I’m just stating statistical facts.

Music and Poetry

I played you about 8 minutes of part of Verdi’s Requiem; I then read you Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach. These are two pieces of 19th century work which I consider to be amongst the finest examples of artistic expression.

I did this deliberately for a few reasons: they throw into sharp relief what we might consider to be the ‘qualities’ of the artefacts you suggested; and classical music and poetry are rather old-fashioned and unfashionable things to enjoy.

Matthew Arnold

Here are the slides on Matthew Arnold that we looked at:

One reading of Dover Beach is the mourning of the passing of uniting, shared values that Arnold foresaw. Indeed, the clashing of ‘ignorant armies’ might be a very good (albeit negative) description of post-modernity, and which Arnold might see as a vindication of his pessimism. He might also see the blankness at references to Sophocles as a manifestation of his worst fears.

We might argue with Arnold, and accuse him of elitism in the same way we accuse Marxists with their false consciousness and false needs, the stupefaction of the masses etc. But we start with Matthew Arnold because in some ways he is the father of cultural studies, and he forces us to wonder what culture is, what it does, what it stands for. Does it civilise us? Do we pursue perfection? Does culture reach out across the centuries and unite humankind? Does our contemporary culture do that? Does even our mainstream culture do that?

The Cult of the Amateur

And just as Arnold saw the rise of a mass, popular culture as catering to the lowest common denominator, rather than elevating the masses to the civilising force of the great poets that a good classical education should bring, so the same arguments play out today, albeit with a different context. Andrew Keen is the current proponent of the argument that participatory media will destroy all that is good about our current cultural life. He argues that file-sharing, blogging, wikis and UGC will damage the industries which provide ‘professional’ music, journalism, knowledge and content. Different context, same argument.

• See Kevin Kelly vs Andrew Keen on jewcy.com
• and Henry Jenkins’ In defence of Crud

So: was Arnold right? Is consumer society culturally barren? And is Keen right? Is the grating roar of UGC the end of the professional industry?

Participatory media

The artefacts you identified were often things that you didn’t think were very good, or that you hadn’t personally experienced. Noisy experimental sound, ARG games which are just technologically advanced versions of Treasure Hunt, etc. So – what do you think? What does ‘quality’ mean? What is culture?

These are not easy questions to answer, but neither are they easy to avoid. And some of the questions that emerged in our sessions today were:

• what is the place of craft and skill in the production of media, culture and art? (there were divisions, for instance, on the merits of Tracey Emin and Mark Wallinger’s Turner-prize-winning piece.
• should creative industries lobby for and obtain special regulatory provisions (in terms of copyright protection, or in order to capitalise on secondary sales of concert tickets)?
• will people listen to Busted in 150 years’ time? will people be making their own content?
• what is so bad about culture and art existing purely for pleasure?

For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman’s right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy;

Matthew Arnold, Culture & Anarchy, 1882

Finally

Next week’s session is on citizenship, and your online assignment is here

Author: joe
Categories: media-participation, Arnold, Keen, culture, quality, UGC, system:lectures,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

In part one, I argued that a popular way of thinking about creativity stems from the Romantic era. The act of authorship is an almost magical process, in which artists – who are better at accessing the subconscious and transforming it into the stuff of creative works – demonstrate their genius and giftedness. I also noted that this also happens to be one of the ways in which industries in the creative fields justify copyright law and the ‘war’ on piracy. Copyright, they say, is a tool which ensures that those gifted artists are adequately compensated for their work.

Part 2: The History of Copyright

In this, part two of the lecture on “Ownership of Ideas”, we will examine the history of copyright law over the last 600 years, and look at some of the justifications for its development and implementation, with particular emphasis on the Enlightenment values that shaped parts of the legislative process. We will look briefly at telescopes and poetry as forms of creative work which will help to illuminate ideas. And in the tradition of ancient epic poetry, right the way through to contemporary story-telling in filmic and televisual narratives, we will begin in media res.

The Founding Fathers

As we saw in part one, the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution saw themselves as in the business of creating a nation on Enlightenment principles – reason, fairness, equality, freedom and the rejection of absolute power in the form of monarchy, religion or monomaniacal men.

It is worth taking a moment to conduct a thought experiment – to place yourselves in the mindset of those Founding Fathers, who had the opportunity to design a world to live in.

Imagine that before you are born, you are given the chance to choose the world in which you want to live. Do you want to be born into a world in which the accident of birth determines your place and chances of happiness in the world, given that you have a slim chance, statistically speaking, of being born into privilege, and a much greater chance of being born into the underclass of society, who are more numerous, living in poverty and more likely to suffer misery? Or would you choose to be born into a world where all men and women are equal, where everyone has an equal chance of happiness and prosperity?

Leaving aside for a moment that your choice here might determine whether your natural political inclination might be liberal and right-leaning if you choose the former, and socialist and left-leaning if you choose the latter, we might briefly note that a Marxist point of view would probably attempt to design a system which made perfect, reasonable sense in an ideal world of good-natured human beings. However, George Orwell in 1945 illustrated extremely well in his novel Animal Farm, that perfectly reasonable and rational approaches to designing social systems cannot account for the vagaries of what human beings will do.

A Constitution based on Enlightenment principles

In this light, we might concede that the American Constitution is possibly the best attempt that any group of people have ever produced that strove to shape a society that would reward merit, protect freedoms and limit the power of the state. There is much evidence that Franklin, Jefferson and the other Framers of the Constitution considered the real-politik of human behaviour, economics and idealism and strove to write a document that outlined a way for people to live freely, but as part of a society working to the benefit of all.

The Constitution separated the church from the state, limited the power of the president, and gave men the right to speak freely, and bear arms as a defence against state-armed militias. This measure, while it may have given rise to what is called the gun-culture in the USA, was intended as a mechanism to ensure that free men could defend themselves against an oppressive state – an obvious and pressing need in the view of those who had just fought for their independence form Great Britain in the American Revolution.

Jefferson on Intellectual Property

So in this climate of reason and social engineering, what was the attitude to copyright and intellectual property? Jefferson is very clear on the point in a letter to Isaac McPherson, written in 1813. He states:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

And here, crucially, Jefferson makes his assertion:

“Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.”

Here then quite clearly we see that the view of the law-makers at the start of the 19th century saw the granting of intellectual property rights as a specifically ‘social law’ (as opposed to a self-evident ‘natural law’), which a society chose to do purely on the basis that the ability to gain financial benefit was an incentive to intellectual production; and that intellectual production was of value to the ‘moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition’. In short, intellectual property is a gift of the state, an incentive for people to share their ideas for the benefit of society, rather than a natural right of the author.

In this same letter, Jefferson refers to the situation in England (whose imperial rule America had just successfully fought):

“It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs […] generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.”

England, then had a longer history of copyright and intellectual property law, so it’s worth examining that history and the subsequent development of the body of law that covers intellectual property.

A History of Copyright Law: 1557 – 1862

1557: UK: London Stationer’s Company

In 1557, the ‘Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers’ (now a conference venue) were granted a royal charter. The printing press had emerged as a powerful mechanism for the printing and dissemination of ideas. The royal charter granted the Stationer’s Company the exclusive right to print and publish books, pamphlets and papers – the ‘right to copy’. Such a monopoly ensured that there was only one legal route to printing and spreading ideas, and the Company also had the right and responsibility to seize any materials which did not conform to the requirements of Church and State. It is worth noting that this charter recognised and empowered only the publisher – the bottle-neck through which all material passed, rather than the author of a work.

Clearly, the first establishment of copyright, then, was an attempt to control the flow of information, in response to the rise of a new technology.

1709: UK: The Statute of Anne

The monopoly previously given only to publishers is in 1709 transferred to the authors themselves, for a period of 14 years. Where under the Stationer’s Company’s charter, the publisher had a monopoly ‘in perpetuity’, the author is now given the monopoly for 14 years, and thereafter, the work may be reproduced by anyone else.

This is the first evidence that copyright law seeks to reward authors, and that the monopoly is granted only for a short term, after which the materials may be used and reproduced by others – the germs of Jefferson’s idealistic vision of ‘pursuing ideas which may produce utility’.

1734: UK: Engraving Copyright Act

Copyright law is extended to cover engravings – the first legislative protection given to ‘artistic’ works.

1787: UK: Fabric designs are included in new statutes.

It’s worth noting that the industrialisation of textile production occurs in the last half of the 18th century.

1790: US: 1st US Copyright Act

3 years after the signing of the American Constitution, America, as in England, recognises the copyright only of works produced by its citizens.

1798: UK: Sculptures included

Might this provision coincide with the rise of the middles classes to municipal power, and their expression of this power though the built environment – and hence for the first time, sculptors are working for profit in the service of the nouveau riche in their show-towns? Did it coincide with the new ability to mechanically reproduce and therefore industrialise sculpture? Did the ‘craft’ of the stone-mason-worker transmutate into an ‘art’ practised by the gifted?

I leave you to decide… mostly because I haven’t had the time to do the research to assert any of these hypotheses :) In any case it is worth noting that scuplture is one of the oldest known practises in artistic expression, only recognised as copyrightable work at the turn in the 19th century.

1852: UK: Lithography and other mechanical processes included

Note, once again, the response of the law to technological progress.

1862: UK: Paintings, drawing and photographs – term extended to author’s life plus 7 years

The first example of copyright laws being extended to beyond the author’s death.

Social and Natural Law

We’ll pause in the middle of the 19th century to assess what has occurred so far, and examine two important events: a court-case in London in the mid-18th century, and a debate in the British Parliament in the mid-19th century.

Clearly, Jefferson’s criticism of English copyright law has some basis: its trajectory begins as a mechanism of censorship and control over emerging technologies and means of information production and dissemination. Over the course of the 18th century, though, we might argue that copyright law begins to recognise the author rather than the publisher, and widens its scope to include art forms. There is a very noticeable trend, however (which will continue throughout the 20th century) for copyright law to react and respond to technical developments – fabric printing, lithography, photography, etc. This is often seen as a feature of ‘social’ law, as opposed to ‘natural’ law – social laws cannot account for future developments precisely because they are constructed in response to social trends. So-called ‘natural’ laws, however, such as the criminalisation of murder, are arguably self-evident, and unlikely to need amendment. Indeed the exception to the outlawing of murder – war and capital punishment – requires ‘social’ law to legalise state-sponsored slaughter.

And if we cast our minds back to Jefferson’s letter, he states, of property in general:

“no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.”

This is rather at odds, then, with the sudden introduction in 1862, of an extension of the copyright term to 7 years after the author’s death, exploitable by the author’s family and estate.

The Achromatic Telescope Doublet

Earlier in 2007, Lewis Hyde gave a talk at the 5th Media in Transition conference at MIT. In it he described a court case in London which illuminates the instrumental purpose of copyright and patent law.

In 1733, Chester Moore Hall invented the achromatic telescope doublet – a device which helped to eliminate lensing effects. This invention was a trade secret – optical manufacturers knew of Hall’s design, and with him, they enjoyed the effective monopoly of the design they were able to exploit, as no-one else knew how to make such a device. 25 years later, John Dolland ‘reinvented’ the same device, reverse-engineering it, and then filed a patent for the design. Being granted the patent allowed Dolland to demand royalties from those manufacturers who had already been selling these lenses. Obviously outraged by this cynical manoeuvre, they pursued Dolland in the court, basing their rejection of his demand for license fees on the fact that they had already been making this device for some time.

The court upheld Dolland’s patent, and according to Hyde, their judgement was that “the commercial advantage that you get for having a patent is a reward not for having made the invention, but for having disclosed it to the public, so that when the limited period of the patent has expired, the public has the free access of this idea in perpetuity…” Indeed, quoting from the court ruling, Hyde says:

“It was not the person who locked up his invention in his writing desk that ought to profit from such an invention, but he who brought it forth for the benefit of mankind.”

There is a clear sense, here, that intellectual property law is an incentive or reward for the sharing of knowledge, and this of course is in-keeping with the framing of intellectual property that we’ve seen from Jefferson.

A Necessary Evil

In 1841, Mr Serjeant Talfourd, a member of the British Parliament and as it happens, an author, supported by the lobbying and petitioning of some of those very Romantic poets we met in part one – Wordsworth, Southey and Carlisle – put forward a bill which would extend copyright terms to 60 years beyond the author’s death. Thomas Babington Macaulay made two famous speeches in response to the bill, in which he characterised copyright as a monopoly – a necessary evil – and argued instead for a fixed term of the author’s life or 42 years, whichever expired first. The basis for Macaulay’s support of the 42-year extension was simply that authors might be recompensed for the continued consumption of their work while they lived. The bill was rejected at least partly on the strength of Macaulay’s argument.

Here are some of Macaulay’s key points. We should not rely on men of means to supply society with good literature, only “from persons who make literature the business of their lives.”

“It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.”

Macaulay dispenses with patronage as an adequate reward for pursuing literature, as he could conceive of “no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles”. Instead, it must be copyright; but of copyright he says:

“It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

The Apotheosis of Enlightenment Ideals

In part one, we examined the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and it should be clear now that that tension is also clearly expressed in the contest over copyright law: The Romantic emphasis on the author is put in the service of lobbying for copyright extension, while the benefit of society is seen as a priority by lawmakers from the mid-18th to mid-19th century.

We might reasonably say, then, that the Enlightenment-driven approach to permitting intellectual property law to flourish merely to benefit society, reaches its zenith, or indeed, apotheosis (or entrance into heavenly gates, and hence-forward its inevitable decline) in the 100 years surrounding the start of the 19th century.

The eventual success of the Romantic lobbyists is exemplified by the extension beyond the author’s death from 1862 onwards. And as we continue our history of copyright, we’ll see that the benefit of society is a declining priority.

A History of Copyright Law: 1886 to 1998

1886: The Berne Convention

The Berne Convention was the first international treaty recognising the copyrights originating in other countries. In 1886, this was an agreement between a few European countries. The Berne convention was the first to recognise (after the French tradition – and not the English tradition) the author’s ‘moral rights’ to be recognised as the owner of the fruits of their intellectual labour. America refused to join the Berne convention, because (they argued) they did not recognise the ‘moral rights’ of the author, merely the incentive for intellectual production for the benefit of society.

1911: UK Copyright Act

Sound recordings added to the provision. Term extended to author’s life plus 50 years.

1956: Cinematic works added

As you can see by the date, this was again a reaction to technological developments, so the law was altered to provide for new cinematic works.

1974: WIPO moved under the auspices of the UN

The World Intellectual Property Organisation, formed in 1967 as the offspring of the Berne Convention, is incorporated into the UN. WIPO is explicitly set up to ‘promote intellectual property protection’.

1988: The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

The UK recognises the authors’ ‘moral rights’ legally. Unpublished works protected for life plus 50 years. America signs the Berne convention – 102 years later.

1993: European harmonisation

Term extended to life plus 70 years.

1998: DMCA

The American government enacts the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which (among other provisions) allows copyright holders to demand that potentially copyright infringing material be removed from the Internet.

There are subsequent acts, provisions and statutes, as well as others I’ve missed from this history. The selected events in this history, though, represent the general thrust of the development of the law. However, IANAL :)

Today, the copyright terms have been extended to:

• Broadcasts: 50 years from the making of the broadcast
• Sound recordings: 50 years after the recording is made
• Films: 50 years, but determinable by the principle director
• Computer-generated artistic works: 50 years from creation
• Literary, dramatic, artistic and musical works: life of the authors + 70 years
• Unknown copyright holder: 70 years after publication

I’m sure you’ll be reassured to know that if no-one knows you created something, they still won’t be able to steal your income for 70 years, even though, since no-one knows it is your work, you cannot claim any revenue anyway.

You’ll also see the heirarchy of value in the different forms here, since of course, you have less right to exploit your copyright after your death if you’re a CGI artist, than, say an oil-painting artist.

The Contemporary Justifications of Copyright Law

In this history we should be able to see the logic behind the 3 main defenses of copyright that have emerged:

• The Moral Rights of the Author
• The Economic Incentive
• The Benefit of Society

However, we can note that the moral right of the author, as the Romantics may have argued, has only been widely legally recognised in the last few decades. The Enlightenment ideal of the benefit of society may have had an early emphasis, but this has arguably declined. And we have yet to see in the context of this lecture whether the economic incentive is a good reason for people to engage in intellectual production.

A Victory for Romanticism?

It can be tempting to see this history – the late recognition in 1988 of the author’s moral rights, the extension of the copyright terms to benefit the estate and heirs – as a victory for the Romantic idea of the author and their unique creativity, at the expense of the Enlightenment ideal of intellectual production for the improvement of society.

However, in the third and last part of this lecture, we’ll try to examine whether copyright law does, as its defenders claim, incentivise and protect the author’s interests – and whether the law-makers still see intellectual property law as operating in the interest of society at large.

The Commons

Some hippy folky trotsky stuff:

This history of intellectual property law is sometimes called the ‘Second Enclosure Movement’ – after the first movement (obviously) which saw the appropriation of common land into the hands of property owners. The common land was available to all for the grazing of livestock. A land-grab occurred in the late 18th and early 19th century where much common land was taken into private ownership by established land-owners. An anonymous poem from the time offers a pithy condemnation of the double standards at work in the movement:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, system:lectures, copyright, lecture, ownership, history,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted to CEMP

This lecture takes a historical view of laws relating to copyright, and locates it in differing approaches to creativity; it examines the extent to which copyright protects, as its proponents claim, the livelihood of authors and creators, and the extent to which copyright damages, as its detractors claim, the fertility of the public domain. It takes a detour into the modern ages of man, and looks at Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernity and postmodernism. It also examines some poetry as primary evidence, alongside more vernacular forms of cultural production, on the basis that poetry might help us to illuminate the extremes of human creativity, in order to look again at the more demotic (commonplace) things we encounter.

This lecture is split into three parts: PART 1: The Romantic Author; PART 2: The History of Copyright; and PART 3: The Contemporary Author. By the way, this lecture is best consumed while listening to The Kleptones, Dean Gray or Bootie.

PART 1: The Romantic Author

The author

We begin by looking back to the 19th century. In 1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his poem Kubla Khan after consuming some opium. Coleridge famously stated that he fell asleep after medicating himself with an ‘anodyne’, while reading the following sentence from Purchas’s Pilgrimage:

“Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.”

Upon waking, he says, he immediately wrote down the poem, but was disturbed by “a person on business from Porlock”, and “to his no small surprise and mortification”, found on returning to the poem that the vision had departed. Thus Kubla Khan is the fragment that remains.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail :
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Creative Genius

Coleridge’s poem is often interpreted by scholars of literature and the Romantic era as an analogy of the creative process; a ‘deep romantic chasm’, which is savage and wild, and which may represent the human psyche or subconscious, at times thrusts up a fountain into the overland wood and dale of our consciousness. The fountain forms a river which is sacred – the precious outpourings of the creator – before it plunges once more into caverns measureless to man, and the magical access to that hot creative process is gone as quickly as it came.

This Romantic (note the capital R) vision of creativity is a notion that remains with us today. The creative act is a mystical, ungovernable ability – the gift of the creative few who are better able than most of the rest of us lesser mortals, to access that resource from which creativity is borne – the human subconscious, formed as it is from the sacred river ‘Alph’ – a cipher for the beginning, the alpha, the original – the source.

And of course, if we accept that only a few of us are gifted enough to access the wild and savage human psyche, the numinous and the mystical, and ‘momently’ force it into consciousness and create beautiful ‘sacred’ things with it, then those lucky few ought really to be protected by copyright law and adequately compensated.

What is Romanticism?

So we’ve said that Coleridge’s poem expresses a Romantic view of creativity, but what do we mean by Romantic? The Romantic period refers to the 19th century and its tempestuous outpourings in literature and the arts. It is the period of poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge, who placed man in a landscape of spiritual intent. It is the era of the pre-Raphaelites, who painted unapproachable ideals of beauty and innocence. It is the era of a Victorian return to morality and Christian values in the shape of poets like Chistina Rossetti (the pre-Raphealite Dante Gabriel’s sister) whose poetry captured the stifled suppression of sensuality, but also the wayward ‘new-morality’ of William Blake and his naturism and visions of worlds beyond the senses. It is the era of Beethoven and Brahms, and their swelling and tumultuous innovation in bending the rules of composition, and their blasting of polite, courtly music right out of the water. It is also the era of the Gothic in literature – of Emily Bronte’s Heathcliffe and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is, in many ways, the age of the genius, the magical, the era of awe and the ‘awful’ in the original sense of the word, where one is ‘in awe’.

W.B. Yeats, often thought of as one of those seminal poets who straddle ages (in his case, Romanticism and modernism), and whose poetry therefore gives great insight into the shifting ground beneath society and its culture’s feet, wrote to his friend in 1892, that –

“I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance – the revolt of the soul against the intellect – now beginning in the world”.

Sadly for Yeats, he was always looking idealistically at things fading, and thinking of things very old as very new, so his prognostication was a good 90 years late. Only when he looked ahead at the looming of the 20th century and the death of his ideals did he really hit upon the heart of the matter, in poems such as ‘Sailing to Byzantium‘ and ‘The Second Coming‘ in which the second coming brings not a new Jerusalem, but apocalypse. The two great wars of the 20th century are as close to apocalypse as you might care to get, and his refrain that ‘the centre cannot hold’ has been taken up by many late modern (and postmodern) thinkers to characterise the babel of contemporary humanity.

However, his point still holds good for Romanticism. Whence, then, this revolt against the intellect? In what ways did Romanticism revolt against reason?

What is Enlightenment?

This is the name of a famous piece written by Michel Foucault, in response to Emmanuel Kant’s piece, also by the same name. However, the substance of their pieces is not of concern here – indeed if you read either Foucault’s reflexive meanderings or Kant’s metaphysical musings, you’ll probably end up thinking: “no, but really, what is it?”

When we speak of the Enlightenment we tend to mean a period roughly spanning the 18th century, in which we might argue the birth of ‘science’ as we know it took place. As clever men (and it was men) peeped out from the receding gowns of the clergy and the Church, they started to attempt to analyse the world from ‘first principles’ – from the evidence of their senses. Instead of accepting that the world was made by God, they were curious enough to reject ‘argument from authority’ and to attempt to understand the world using reason.

Indeed the century preceding the Enlightenment (C17th) is often known as the Age of Reason precisely because, following the Renaissance (rebirth or rediscovery), in which western Europe emerged from the Dark ages by rediscovering the (literally) monumental achievements of the ancient Roman and Greek civilisations, scholars began to attempt to piece together the world that was forming in the shape of the rise of the nation state, the emerging body of knowledge made possible by the printing press, and the increasing prominence that ‘ration’ seemed to have in the destiny of man. All these things began to militate against the authority of the Church, God’s institution on earth.

So we might say that the Enlightenment was a fruition of the rise of reason and rationality, of investigating the world as evidence. Institutions such as the British Museum were formed in this period as explorers ‘civilised’ savage countries, and brought home their antiquities and plunder. The American Constitution was written at the end of what we call the Enlightenment, and the writers of that constitution, the Founding Fathers, were keen to base their dream of a modern, democratic, egalitarian nation on the Enlightenment principles of equality, fairness and reason, which were quite vehemently in opposition to previously traditional, even feudal, ways of seeing the world as framed by the absolute power of God, the absolute power of the Monarch (God’s representative on earth) or the absolute power of the Church, which held the keys to eternal damnation, and thereby maintained a tight grip on permissable behaviour.

Romanticism vs Enlightenment

So, since the Romantic era follows the Enlightenment, it might make sense to think of it as a reaction and revolt against the rise of rationality and reason. The Romantic poets were deeply interested in the idea of pantheism – an adaptation of religiosity which saw God as the breathe of life in the world, the player of the ‘The Aeolian Harp‘ of both mankind and his natural world. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often interpreted as a fore-warning of the arrogance of the rational man who takes it upon himself to play God by harnessing the forces of life itself. Yeats later on became interested in mysticism and automatic writing (where one writes without conscious thought in order to become a medium for the numinous forces at work in the unseen world around us). Keats the poet was even very explicit about it by speaking of the ‘unweaving of the rainbow’ in his long poem, Lamia, which base fellows like Newton were attempting by splitting light into its components hues:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow…

It’s worth noting that this common interpretation of Keats’s ‘unweaving the rainbow’ is disputed.

Unweaving the Rainbow

Richard Dawkins in his book of 1998 later took up this phrase as his motif in arguing that science, far from wrecking our aesthetic appreciation and ability to have ‘awe’, actually inspires yet further awe as the terrible complexity and mind-exploding enormity of the universe and life within it emerge from the laws of physics – all the more awe-inspiring precisely because we need not look to some mischevious God to explain it all, and thereby belittle the infinitely aesthetically pleasing world around us which somehow managed to create itself from a primeval soup of crap…

However, that Dawkins felt impelled as late as 1998 to pick up the cudgels and defend the beauty of science tells us something important about the simplistic story of the ‘ages of modern man’ that we’ve seen so far.

The weaved, linear, rainbow of the modern ages of man

It is very easy to say that the Age of Reason and its child, the Enlightenment, are a reaction against the absolute authority of the Church, as though the 17th & 18th centuries were an antithesis to the Dark Ages; it is easy to say that the Romantic era was a reaction against the Enlightenment, as though everyone in the 19th century was fainting and waiting to be possessed by the spiritus mundi; it is easy to say that modernity is a reaction against Romanticism, in which everyone wanted to turn the world into a machine, and that the human self achieved its apotheosis in antithesis to its subjection to the forces of spiritualism and the occult; and that, finally, postmodernity is a reaction against modernism, in that we no longer want to mechanise the world, have given up on the dream of progress, and are happy merely to consume, rather than conquer.

It is, indeed, far too easy to think that each age is a (Newtonian) equal and opposite reaction against the former. Indeed, it is (to digress totally) a classically structuralist idea to think of the modern ages as such antithetical reactions. It makes much more sense (and is a usefully postmodern thing to do) to think of all these movements (Enlightenment, Romanticism, modernism) as movements in the last half of the last millennium which stay with us today.

Postmodernity is an unravelling and reravelling rainbow

Here’s an important idea: the definition of ‘ages’ – such as the Enlightenment, the Romantic era, ‘modernity’ – are recent and retrospective classifications which people in the 20th century used to describe a history of contemporary society. Postmodernism is the recognition that, far from these movements swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum over the people of the past, actually, we might think of them as currents in cultural thought that all remain with us today.

Hence it is that we can see that our ideas of creativity are still close to the Romantic notion – and that much of our popular culture is dominated with deeply Gothic trends such as the stream of horror movies in the cinema, the perennial remakes of Frankenstein, the presence of the emo-kid.

And hence, too, we see the influence of the Enlightenment today, the technocratic belief in science from some quarters, and the (Romantic) anti-GM movement in others. Hence, also, the continuing (‘modernistic’) mechanisation of all sorts of cultural processes such as media-making, war-mongering and urban-planning.

The Age of Reason, the Romanticism of the Gothic, the modernity of technocratisation are all still present and active in postmodernity. Not so much ‘anything goes’ as ‘everything goes’.

Erm, where are we going with this?

And, to finally return to the point, our Romantic ideas of what creativity and authorship are, are still used today by industries who defend copyright law as the justification for their maintenance and furtherance. In a contemporary society in which awe for genius does not pay for a starving artist’s food, the stalwart reliability of copyright law will protect the author’s freedom to pursue their gift.

The author, that rare and ideally gifted individual who is more creative than the rest of us, is protected by copyright law from merciless exploitation, and it is the role of industries such as the RIAA, the MPAA and the Author’s Guild, to ensure that those authors’ income is ensured.

Remember: God = maker = creator = author = authority

In part two…

In part two of this lecture, we’ll look at the history of copyright laws, and see if they measure up to this Romantic defence.

Author: joe
Categories: copyright, lecture, ownership, romanticism, enlightenment, postmodernity, system:lectures,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted at CEMP

Context: BA Interactive Media Production – Level I Authorship Unit; following on from some introductory ideas about Collaborative Authorship, we asked you to contribute to an online social space: http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/bournemouthsoundseeing/

Join in

Anyone reading this who wants to join in the collaborative audio – please do!

Bournemouth Soundseeing

The Bournemouth Soundseeing project is an example of a space which provides scope for user participation. Here we have an example of the kind of thing you might consider for your own project to make an online social space, and this mini-project was designed to give you something concrete to examine as you consider problems like:

• finding a balance between providing users with some freedom to participate, and the imposition of your own design constraints
• every design constraint you impose is a barrier to participation
• how even a simple practice project can throw up a lot of production issues
• the biggest problem: what is this stuff for?

We consider some issues regarding design, production, and feasibility; and then speculate as to how we’ll form the next $188b start-up (Google’s current market capitalisation).

Architectures of Participation

In this project, there is a set of ‘designed-in constraints’: contributions must be short audio files, in mp3 format, and somehow tied to a location. Besides that, the user is free to do anything they like. At first glance you might think that this allows for little freedom. However, you can over-anticipate what your users will do.

When we built this page we conceived of it as a way of painting an audio portrait of Bournemouth, where the portrait is built up by ‘people in Bournemouth’. It soon became clear, though, that users don’t do what you might expect them to do: if you zoom out, you’ll see that some users have added audio in Scotland, Guernsey and Sussex. Indeed, the functionality of the page allows you to add audio to the North Pole if you want to.

Also, not all contributions were ‘audio portraits’ of Bournemouth, even if they are located in Bournemouth; some examples play along with the ‘authorial intention’ of the site, such as the recording of the singing hobo, or the sounds of the sea; others, however, were tenuous at best: The Frosties rap is delightful, but a perfect example of how your users will do things you didn’t anticipate. I love this kind of unpredictability, but of course, designers (and advertisers) don’t, so much… :)

Some of you also decided to be deeply reflexive and contribute debates about Collaborative Authorship. Theory points go to you.

Barriers to Entry

So some things we can talk about include the fact that how the ‘architecture of participation’ is designed will impact on whether people will take part and join in. To join in this project, you have to get some device that records, find something to record, get it onto a computer, turn it into an mp3, and upload it to the site. It’s worth noting that if you can motivate your user to make the first step, there’s still – as you found – hurdles to leap (such as figuring out how to turn your mobiles phone’s .amr file into an mp3). So we might wonder why anyone would be motivated to add anything to this page? And for each hurdle that they must overcome to join in, what is their pay-off?

We might note that all of you who added content knew that your peers were likely to find it and listen, as they were hoping you might do the same? Did the fact that your clip might be played in the lecture influence your decision to contribute? How much of online participation is about performativity, knowing an audience somewhere will get an insight into your carefully controlled online identity? How much of that performativity can you capture and harness? We’ll come back to this later in the unit…

Production Issues

The technology used in this project includes:

• Javascript-based use of Google Maps API (Application Programming Interface)
• XHTML / CSS for serving documents
• FLASH audio player
• PHP4 to build a dynamic page / process data upload
• MySQL to store captured data

As mentioned in the lecture, those who contributed to this project were effectively beta-testing it. When this was built, it was tested by the person who built it. That person will never do all the things with it that your users will do with it. This is a very good illustration of some of the things you will need to do when you build your projects: testing it yourself will not do! You need to get other people to use it and see what happens. All sort of unexpected things will happen.

Some of the issues that have been found so far (don’t worry if you don’t understand the jargon here for now):

• incomplete uploads of mp3 files result in balloons without audio; some kind of file integrity test would be nice.
• on IE6 / PC / Windows XP: closing a bubble without pressing the ‘stop’ button fires the audio player again: a IE6 specific piece of Javascript code to fix this would be nice.
• the Google Maps bubbles render nastily on IE6 / PC / Windows XP: outside our control?
• Safari has caching issues, and a slightly different Document Object Model (javascript issues): complicated code to force reloads would be nice
• Firefox / Mac / OS X runs Google Maps like a dog: worth investigation (‘running like a dog’ is technical jargon for ‘performance issues :)

When you make your projects, we won’t expect you to have solved every one of these types of problem with your site; we would, however, expect you to identify them, by leaving some time for people to use and test your site!

Also, the focus of this project is PHP and MySQL, so you’ll almost certainly find that learning to use a third party API (especially if it is Javascript!) will be too much to conquer within the next 4 weeks… don’t feel you have to crack everything in your first iteration. Concentrate on the idea, the feasibility, and in technical terms, the practicalities of capturing, storing and retrieving data.

What is this stuff for?

And really, this is the hardest part of developing projects like this. In the lecture we discussed where we might go with an idea like ‘Bournemouth Soundseeing’. We considered the idea of targeting Bournemouth’s tourism industry as a way of making some money; you collaboratively suggested some problems and solutions in taking this approach.

The proposition

A set of information about Bournemouth might be useful to tourists visiting Bournemouth. Allowing people (and businesses) to add their own content might be a inexpensive way to populate the site with useful information. A popular site might attract paying advertisers.

Limited media types

Audio files are somewhat limited. We might expand the functionality by allowing the addition of images, videos, or just plain old text. Database complexity increases.

Vandalism

What if people add porn soundtracks? Irrelevant fluff? Solution: moderation. Except it isn’t really a solution, of course. We could add an RSS feed, and some poor bored person would monitor it, and ensure that vandalism is removed. The BBC spend more than £1m per year on moderation. Can you cover that with advertising revenue?

Copyright Infringement

This works both ways: copyright infringing material may get added: the moderator will have to remove it. But also, will people know whether they can use the material that is on the site? Someone might hear the sounds of the sea and use it themselves, having been inspired to be creative.

Flickr allows you to specify the ‘copyrights’ you wish to retain over your image, and we could do the same. Contributors specify whether people can reuse the audio.

We might even use Flickr’s API to allow people to upload images from there, instead of reproducing the fuctionality here.

Overabundance of information

The map could be overrun with information, and become bewildering. So we might add a tag cloud, or search facility. Contributers use keywords to describe their content, and users can filter out stuff they don’t want to see, or specify information that they do want to see.

Inappropriate use-context

While we might have thought our target audience were people planning to come to Bournemouth, advertisers might want to access them when they’re here. You don’t look two weeks ahead for a KFC when you’re going on holiday. Unless you’re a KFC freak.

One idea we had was to use the ‘iStations’ so people can access it in the street. However, what we really want is for them to have the info in their pockets.

We have one nice clean dataset, moderated by our tea-boy. Data is added via an ordinary browser, but we build a platform for a mobile phone. People searching for info stumble upon a nice French restaurant round the corner and take a detour.

Advertisers don’t like UGC

This is a constantly evolving problem. Before Google bought YouTube, there was (to my knowledge, and I’ve been using YouTube for at least 18 years) no advertising on there. The nut to crack was the fact that advertisers want to control what media their brand gets associated with. No brand wants to be associated with potentially offensive material…

Google have introduced advertising to YouTube, using their keywords / pay-per-click system. Perhaps a chink is opening here. But we’re still talking Pot Noodles, rather than banking.

Wold dominion

So we’ve figured out (at least in our idle daydreams) how to make the site a going concern. We have a clean, functional dataset, and we tick over some revenue.

Our plans for world-dominion now turn to mobile phone manufacturers, who will build better mobile phone services than we can. We started out as a service using a mashsup of APIs. We start providing an API to our own data, with geo-data, meta-data in the form of keywords, and license this data to third parties who want to charge people to access the data through their whizzy iPhone interface.

As the slashdotters often say:

• Get data
• Serve data
• …
• Profit!

Remix Culture

Next week we’ll go back to a slightly more theoretical context and investigate the ‘Remix Culture’ that pie-in-the-sky ideas like this are a part of.

Finally

I would like to thank the following people who collaborated in the authorship of this post: the students of BAIMP2; Annie Hunt; CEMP; the CEMP website team; Mike Molesworth; James Jordan; Hugh Chignell and MARP 06-07; Google; IT services and their maintenance of the impserver; Bournemouth University; the open source community responsible for developing Textpattern, phpBB, PHP and MySQL; the developers at Macromedia and Adobe for providing Flash; the developers of the mp3 audio format; the developers of the JPG image format; Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C for building and developing HTML; the CSS working group; Microsoft, Apple and the Linux community for developing www browsers; Marc Anderssen and the Netscape browser developers; the Unix community; the inventors of TCP/IP; the American military types who worked on the ARPANET; Charles Babbage; and Aristotle. Apologies to all those who contributed, who I haven’t mentioned. You know who you are!

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, system:lectures, lecture, collaborative, authorship, audio, mashup, google, map,
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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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This page contains resources supplemental to the Digital Media Lecture I delivered on 20 April 2005. The subject ranged over digital reproduction, controlling and distrinuting media, and some of the significances we can observe. We also talked about blogs, RSS feeds, Podcasting and intellectual property.

Here's the Powerpoint presentation on Digital Media

Here's a list of links to some of the things we looked at:

• Mushrooms: http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1461138,00.html
• Murdoch: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9071-1568961_1,00.html
• Benjamin: http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html
• Girl Blog from Iraq: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
• SharpReader RSS aggregator: http://www.sharpreader.net/
• BBC News RSS feeds: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm?rss=http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml
• iPodder: http://www.ipodder.org/
• Reith Lectures: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2005/mp3/podcast.shtml
• BluggCast http://www.blugg.com/cast/
• My Silver Mount Zion http://robular.libsyn.com/
• Radio Clash http://www.mutantpop.net/radioclash/
• EchoRadio http://radio.echoditto.com/
• Paticipatory Culture http://www.participatoryculture.org/
• Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/
• Creative Archive: http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/

Author: joe
Categories: system:lectures, digital media, HE, pedagogy, podcasting, intellectual property,
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