Gantis article points out that Bollywood filmmakers who see themselves as cultural translators assume a position of authority because they claim to be able to mediate between the Hollywood form and the desires of the local 'masses' while implicitly ranking themselves in a position of power, since they can appreciate both. This sounds similar to the power gained by Mazzarella's cultural mediators. The question I want to ask here is, how self-conscoius are powers that are held in these ways? To what extent does a power structure perpetuate itself (again, like Warner's public) in a way subtle and implicating, and outside the full self-consciousness of the individuals that speak it?
It reminds me of Sara Dickey's ethnography of domestic service in South India. Dickey found that both servants and employers had morally charged, oppositional identities and accused the other of creating conditions that caused their own behaviour. Servants accused employers of being not altruistic enough for instance, and employers of servants being too demanding. If both groups here agreed in some sense that it was the role of the employer to be paternalistioc and altruistic, and the role of th servant to be a humble beneficiary, this has disturbing implications for how hegemonies perpetuate themselves. For the people speaking they appear to be true, they cannot imagine life in any otehr way. They dont speak the discourse, the discourse speaks them, in Heidiggers terms, "Language Speaks Man".
How does social change happen then? I guess it happens because althoughn history is a myth it feels completely real to us. So when things change (do things always change? why do we only notice certain changes and not others?) we react and change the discourse. This is a good question for Warner. How do modern public discourses give up their power and adapt to change?
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and the perpetuation of class-marked identities.
Uberoi makes an argument in this articvle about the way in which HAHK played a key role in creating the neoliberal, business-minded upper-class Indian citizen as the safekeeper of Indian tradition, reconciling any contradictions posed by their transnational business involvements and elite social position with a type of intrinsic, from-the-heart Indianness. This speaks to Appadurai's arguement about the anxietioes posed by the era of globalization to ethnicity slipping in and out of national cracks, and the consequent need to create a new national ethnos suitable to the period of neoliberalism.
When I first read this article, I saw it as a hegemonic, oppressive attempt by the Upper classes to retain their dominance, as such I agreed with the kinds of NGO accounts that charge the 'upper classes' and governemnt with jointly victimizing the poor.
However, after re-reading Warner's article, I wonder if the process is as self-conscious as that. It is possible that the upper class discourse is generated out of particular constraints and a view of the public that it wholeheartedly believes, as a public discourse, it is generative of the conditions that produce it. Here both upper and lower classes are victims and agents of a mutually dialectic discourse. The forms of 'whole' and 'dialectic' are both crucial to modern ideology. What does one make then of a person who watches HAHK and leaves unaffected? Are they interpellated or can their conscious resistance to the totalizaing impulse of the whole help them to laugh it off and leave?
Uberoi makes an argument in this articvle about the way in which HAHK played a key role in creating the neoliberal, business-minded upper-class Indian citizen as the safekeeper of Indian tradition, reconciling any contradictions posed by their transnational business involvements and elite social position with a type of intrinsic, from-the-heart Indianness. This speaks to Appadurai's arguement about the anxietioes posed by the era of globalization to ethnicity slipping in and out of national cracks, and the consequent need to create a new national ethnos suitable to the period of neoliberalism.
When I first read this article, I saw it as a hegemonic, oppressive attempt by the Upper classes to retain their dominance, as such I agreed with the kinds of NGO accounts that charge the 'upper classes' and governemnt with jointly victimizing the poor.
However, after re-reading Warner's article, I wonder if the process is as self-conscious as that. It is possible that the upper class discourse is generated out of particular constraints and a view of the public that it wholeheartedly believes, as a public discourse, it is generative of the conditions that produce it. Here both upper and lower classes are victims and agents of a mutually dialectic discourse. The forms of 'whole' and 'dialectic' are both crucial to modern ideology. What does one make then of a person who watches HAHK and leaves unaffected? Are they interpellated or can their conscious resistance to the totalizaing impulse of the whole help them to laugh it off and leave?
My favorite readings for this class were Michael Warner, Arjun Appadurai, Tejaswini Ganti, Particia Uberoi, the article about the use of Muszak technology in malls, and Barry Dornfeld.
I think the Warner article was the most suggestive to me because his idea about the publics has very concrete implications, he suggests that public discourse doesnt just describe the world but create it, in line with a modern ideology. This is very suggestive, it makes me think twice for instance, before saying anything because of the formative power my words may have. In the context of our college campus this suggests that student discourse about the campus as a place where "Fun Comes to Die" actually creates those conditions, in the situation of postcolonies that continue to experience infrastructural breakdowns and bureaucratic delay, it suggests that the popular habit of complaint about these issues may have a role to play in creating their reality.
To use his own example of the 'Wassup' ad, while it appeared to describe a thing that people ssaid often, it had the effect of actually creating the conditions that it seemed to describe, because people began saying 'Wassup' all the time afterwards.\
The article 'Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy' was the first article of Arjun Appadurai's that I have read. It was extremely helpful for its brutal dismissal of old paradigms of thinking and its quick, imaginative sketching of the contours of a new way to think about social science research in the context of globalization and the kinds of multiplicities it produces.
The article about the music played in malls and its role in creating particular ways of being for the people that enetred the mall was useful for the same reason as Warner.
In general, the above articles provided paradigmatic frameworks and broad conditions to keep in mind when studying the social sciences in the time of globalization; as such they have a wide application and I will probably use them again in the future.
I think the Warner article was the most suggestive to me because his idea about the publics has very concrete implications, he suggests that public discourse doesnt just describe the world but create it, in line with a modern ideology. This is very suggestive, it makes me think twice for instance, before saying anything because of the formative power my words may have. In the context of our college campus this suggests that student discourse about the campus as a place where "Fun Comes to Die" actually creates those conditions, in the situation of postcolonies that continue to experience infrastructural breakdowns and bureaucratic delay, it suggests that the popular habit of complaint about these issues may have a role to play in creating their reality.
To use his own example of the 'Wassup' ad, while it appeared to describe a thing that people ssaid often, it had the effect of actually creating the conditions that it seemed to describe, because people began saying 'Wassup' all the time afterwards.\
The article 'Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy' was the first article of Arjun Appadurai's that I have read. It was extremely helpful for its brutal dismissal of old paradigms of thinking and its quick, imaginative sketching of the contours of a new way to think about social science research in the context of globalization and the kinds of multiplicities it produces.
The article about the music played in malls and its role in creating particular ways of being for the people that enetred the mall was useful for the same reason as Warner.
In general, the above articles provided paradigmatic frameworks and broad conditions to keep in mind when studying the social sciences in the time of globalization; as such they have a wide application and I will probably use them again in the future.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
crtique of capitalism and the kinds of anxiety it raises
[Before reading this post, please be aware that before I have constructed a justified argument, based on carefully gathered evidence, I tend to express how I feel about an article by making overstated, randomly connected statements and suggestions. My posts probably seem self-indulgent, incoherent and just annoying to read. Then again, this is a blog, so I suppose that is to be expected.]
even in class, i feel that defensive tensions are raised if anyone makes a comment that appears to implicate some larger system such as the 'mainstream capitalist (sometimes white) culture'- there are immediately vehement counterarguments.
Such as: such experiences happen everywhere, to everyone, people dont intend it to be perceived that way, people possess the agency to remove themselves from the situation, and so on.
All of this presupposes that the person being blamed is the "white middle class" person. but this is not the case. There are arguments that even when "white imperialists" were writing "imperialist discourse" they themselves were the subjects of that discourse in a number of ways. Others (like Nadine Gordimer) have pointed to the ways in which class 'privileges' cause discomfort and limited, prescribed subjectivities for upper class people as well as lower class. We only need to think about the immense anxiety experienced by a "privileged" University of Chicago student walking down Kimbark avenue past 10pm to understand that 'privilege' contains contradictions of its own.
Its true that the way in which a system works or attempts to work can be at odds sometimes, in spurts, with individual desires, that people act in ways that the 'capitalist system' cannot predict. But this does not reduce the interesting point made about the 'contradiction of consumer capitalism' IS that it strives to produce particular subjectivities while making it appear as though those subjectivities are the person's individual choice. This could be extended as a description of the ambiguity of 'publics' in warnmer's sense, insofar as public discourse presupposes an indefinite audience.
I should be more clear about what exactly Im referring to. I really liked the article about the Mall that we read today (Sterne) as well as the one about Radio Texture by Tacchi.
In particular what stood out to me was Tacchi's point that 1. The woman, Trisha, experienced her relationship with the radio community as very real and the fact that they had no idea who she was caused dissilusionment and 2. her reiteration that this disillusionment was real, felt, tactile, part of Trisha's identity (p 255). Emphasising materialisty becomes a larger theme in tachhi's paper because she begins the paper too, with arguments about how "material culture" is particularly insidious because its materiality "belies its actual nature".
Moving on to the Sterne, Sterne suggests that this mall plays music in order to attract a largely upper-middle class white group of consumers, or at any rate is sometimes unfreindly to Black consumers, and has a highly ambivalent attitude towards the actual nature of the audience the mall attracts, which is ethnically diverse. This suggests the capacity of consumers to suprise, to be independent, the capacity for chance within the capitalist system. But Sterne is careful to mark out for us that "this is not subversion, this is contradiction" (p 339). I would argue that this contradiction is revealed here because it points to the impossibility of the imagined capitalist community, and points to the unpleasnt side-effects of capitalism that it finds painful to look at.
Now this may sound like a polemical argument about white capitalism vs black proletariat, or something overly dialectic and paradigmatic, out of Marx. Thats not what Im trying to say. Like I said above, this doesnt reflect on the white consumers in the store as the ones imposing something upon the black consumers. It suggests rather that BOTH black and white consumers are being influenced by the capitalist consumerist system to envision themselves with particular subjectivities.
In fact, capitalism is NOT interested in revealing the contradiction, in openly blocking the 'undesirable' consumers or in sounding 'racist'. the rhetoric of multicultural globalism (and the visual language of benneton and gap ads) would emphatically suggest that everyone is included. The contradiction is that they are included conditionally. everyone promises not to raise the uncomfortable topic.
As Sterne suggests, listening to music with "an ironic ear" never got anyone thrown out of a mall. So hipsters, sorority chicks, jocks, nerds, whatever other stereotypes subject-position exists can all go in the mall. If they are ironic about it to different extents, thats fine, they needsnt agree. In fact, their difference is good. Irony here becomes a safety-valve, a way to complain and mentally disociate oneself from the system and still buy products.
If they actually bring up race, or class, or start a fight (all phrases and activities that sound like 'reality') then they get thrown out.
As consumer subjects, we enter a contract. we are promised a part in the market if we promise to follow certain rules, and those rules include not questioning why we are not fully accepted in it, or accepted in it to differing extents.
people who try to disagree are reappropriated into the system.
maybe a good way to disagree would be to not engage in media practices. But this may not work either. interestingly, in a survey conducted by an Indian advertising agency about 'youth attitudes' the one kid who reported that he didnt watch TV was not included in the results (Mazzarella).
even in class, i feel that defensive tensions are raised if anyone makes a comment that appears to implicate some larger system such as the 'mainstream capitalist (sometimes white) culture'- there are immediately vehement counterarguments.
Such as: such experiences happen everywhere, to everyone, people dont intend it to be perceived that way, people possess the agency to remove themselves from the situation, and so on.
All of this presupposes that the person being blamed is the "white middle class" person. but this is not the case. There are arguments that even when "white imperialists" were writing "imperialist discourse" they themselves were the subjects of that discourse in a number of ways. Others (like Nadine Gordimer) have pointed to the ways in which class 'privileges' cause discomfort and limited, prescribed subjectivities for upper class people as well as lower class. We only need to think about the immense anxiety experienced by a "privileged" University of Chicago student walking down Kimbark avenue past 10pm to understand that 'privilege' contains contradictions of its own.
Its true that the way in which a system works or attempts to work can be at odds sometimes, in spurts, with individual desires, that people act in ways that the 'capitalist system' cannot predict. But this does not reduce the interesting point made about the 'contradiction of consumer capitalism' IS that it strives to produce particular subjectivities while making it appear as though those subjectivities are the person's individual choice. This could be extended as a description of the ambiguity of 'publics' in warnmer's sense, insofar as public discourse presupposes an indefinite audience.
I should be more clear about what exactly Im referring to. I really liked the article about the Mall that we read today (Sterne) as well as the one about Radio Texture by Tacchi.
In particular what stood out to me was Tacchi's point that 1. The woman, Trisha, experienced her relationship with the radio community as very real and the fact that they had no idea who she was caused dissilusionment and 2. her reiteration that this disillusionment was real, felt, tactile, part of Trisha's identity (p 255). Emphasising materialisty becomes a larger theme in tachhi's paper because she begins the paper too, with arguments about how "material culture" is particularly insidious because its materiality "belies its actual nature".
Moving on to the Sterne, Sterne suggests that this mall plays music in order to attract a largely upper-middle class white group of consumers, or at any rate is sometimes unfreindly to Black consumers, and has a highly ambivalent attitude towards the actual nature of the audience the mall attracts, which is ethnically diverse. This suggests the capacity of consumers to suprise, to be independent, the capacity for chance within the capitalist system. But Sterne is careful to mark out for us that "this is not subversion, this is contradiction" (p 339). I would argue that this contradiction is revealed here because it points to the impossibility of the imagined capitalist community, and points to the unpleasnt side-effects of capitalism that it finds painful to look at.
Now this may sound like a polemical argument about white capitalism vs black proletariat, or something overly dialectic and paradigmatic, out of Marx. Thats not what Im trying to say. Like I said above, this doesnt reflect on the white consumers in the store as the ones imposing something upon the black consumers. It suggests rather that BOTH black and white consumers are being influenced by the capitalist consumerist system to envision themselves with particular subjectivities.
In fact, capitalism is NOT interested in revealing the contradiction, in openly blocking the 'undesirable' consumers or in sounding 'racist'. the rhetoric of multicultural globalism (and the visual language of benneton and gap ads) would emphatically suggest that everyone is included. The contradiction is that they are included conditionally. everyone promises not to raise the uncomfortable topic.
As Sterne suggests, listening to music with "an ironic ear" never got anyone thrown out of a mall. So hipsters, sorority chicks, jocks, nerds, whatever other stereotypes subject-position exists can all go in the mall. If they are ironic about it to different extents, thats fine, they needsnt agree. In fact, their difference is good. Irony here becomes a safety-valve, a way to complain and mentally disociate oneself from the system and still buy products.
If they actually bring up race, or class, or start a fight (all phrases and activities that sound like 'reality') then they get thrown out.
As consumer subjects, we enter a contract. we are promised a part in the market if we promise to follow certain rules, and those rules include not questioning why we are not fully accepted in it, or accepted in it to differing extents.
people who try to disagree are reappropriated into the system.
maybe a good way to disagree would be to not engage in media practices. But this may not work either. interestingly, in a survey conducted by an Indian advertising agency about 'youth attitudes' the one kid who reported that he didnt watch TV was not included in the results (Mazzarella).
Can indigenous media provide people with true agency or not?
To begin with, 'true agency' is probably an inadequate term, connoting some 'all or nothing' view of post-colonial subjects' life experiences. I seem to be stuck between two poles in my way of viewing such citizens- either as revolutionary individuals who appropriate colonial artifacts for their own purposes or as self-deluding individuals who speak the vocabulary of free markets and independent media and so on, but are really trapping themselves in what Ginsburg calls a 'Faustian Contract'. The reason is that I am personally vested in viewing bourgeois Indian citizens as the latter- less because of my academic background and more because I grew up in India.
This reminds me of Tomlinson- all leftists critiques and polemical writers have their own axes to grind. Being aware of it will hopefully prevent the bias from creeping too far into my papers and B.A.
I just read Prins, Ginsburg and Turner, about the indigenous media. Some notes on Ginsburg:
Ginsburg makes an argument that indigenous media for Aboriginal community leaders in Australia has been positive in terms of the agency felt by the group, giving them ways to reenvision their role in the community, and agitate for a stronger place politically. She suggests that newer Aboriginal films, by urban, sophisticated 'border crossers' like Frances Peters, have a political voice that resonates with existent Aboriginal notions of socially "embedded aesthetics". At the same time, such filmmakers have the knowledge of Western-based and mainstream media that enables them to frame their films in a way that white audiences can appreciate.
I dont really buy Ginsburg's argument.
1. I appreciate her decision to use Appadurai's model of a mediascape as a way to begin her analysis, it represents a refreshing break from older, linear, binary ways of thinking about globalization and indigenous populations.
2. I appreciate her assertion that there is something to be learnt from the activities, social organization, and conscious choices of the filmakers and production crew involved. These things make her argument stringer. However,
3. I dont understand how these producers are so successful in speaking to their communities as well as the broader national (white) culture. How can these two target audiences result in the same work being produced? Ginsburg says that this is exactly the challenge for producers (312). But the article does not explore whether these films succeed or not, they do not follow the films post-production into their interpretation and reception within these spaces.
Ginsburg suggests that they provide “complex commentaries” that resonate with white audiences and Aboriginals- but I think this is assumed, from the text and intention of the makers. Im not so certain it works in that way. This really raises a question Gorbman asks: Can you assume that x form of media will really speak to people that don’t have cultural knowledge about x? How can you control what it says to different people?
4. I think Ginsburg overestimates the possibilities of identity politics withoiut considering the limitations.
According to Frances Peters, she cannot remove herself from responsibility to represent a larger number of people. Ginburg points out further, that Peters' decision to use the ‘embedded aesthetic’ is strategic and consious (ie driven by agency and self-determination). We also know that Peters occupies an unstable realm in terms of Aboriginal identity as a 'border-crosser'. This choice hence, may serve to help her show her loyalty to an Aboriginal cultural ethos. Ginsburg describes this ‘responsibility to represent’ as a “complex and embedded sense that indigenous media producers bring to their work, never seeing it as existing apart from the mediation of social relationships”. It is partially un-understandable to the Western-trained mind and partially to be silently respected, even when confusing or obscure.
One always has to represent something, there is no way to go ‘unmarked’. Representation already indicates the white audience who must understand her work, since political power is at stake. And here if it is not one trapping dialectic of consumer capitalism (where the subject always wants something of the modern they can never fully have), its another type of problem- that of a minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari) or author-functioon (Foucault). The counter-argument is that powerful discourses still have a way of classifying indigenous media production as inextricable from its historical circumstance of subject position, in a way that reiterates that subject position as the “other”, because this has value for the Western notion of the self.
I would suggest that it is this desire to go 'unmarked' as a postcolonial 'spokesperson' that motivates authors like John Coetzee to refuse to discuss their work. This also reminds me of Fanon’s issues with Negritude- that embracing 'Blackness' was still entrapment, because they were using the vocabulray of the modern imperialist project. It is this contradiction that Charles Taylor points to in “The Politics of Recognition.”
So she says that the Western obsession with self-expression counters this type of community identification and political expression. However she emphasizes that the decision to be 'political' and 'community oriented' is a conscious, intentional one for people like Frances Peters, so she is leaving the door open, even within an identity-politics-riddled world, for individual identity and satisfaction.
This reminds me of Tomlinson- all leftists critiques and polemical writers have their own axes to grind. Being aware of it will hopefully prevent the bias from creeping too far into my papers and B.A.
I just read Prins, Ginsburg and Turner, about the indigenous media. Some notes on Ginsburg:
Ginsburg makes an argument that indigenous media for Aboriginal community leaders in Australia has been positive in terms of the agency felt by the group, giving them ways to reenvision their role in the community, and agitate for a stronger place politically. She suggests that newer Aboriginal films, by urban, sophisticated 'border crossers' like Frances Peters, have a political voice that resonates with existent Aboriginal notions of socially "embedded aesthetics". At the same time, such filmmakers have the knowledge of Western-based and mainstream media that enables them to frame their films in a way that white audiences can appreciate.
I dont really buy Ginsburg's argument.
1. I appreciate her decision to use Appadurai's model of a mediascape as a way to begin her analysis, it represents a refreshing break from older, linear, binary ways of thinking about globalization and indigenous populations.
2. I appreciate her assertion that there is something to be learnt from the activities, social organization, and conscious choices of the filmakers and production crew involved. These things make her argument stringer. However,
3. I dont understand how these producers are so successful in speaking to their communities as well as the broader national (white) culture. How can these two target audiences result in the same work being produced? Ginsburg says that this is exactly the challenge for producers (312). But the article does not explore whether these films succeed or not, they do not follow the films post-production into their interpretation and reception within these spaces.
Ginsburg suggests that they provide “complex commentaries” that resonate with white audiences and Aboriginals- but I think this is assumed, from the text and intention of the makers. Im not so certain it works in that way. This really raises a question Gorbman asks: Can you assume that x form of media will really speak to people that don’t have cultural knowledge about x? How can you control what it says to different people?
4. I think Ginsburg overestimates the possibilities of identity politics withoiut considering the limitations.
According to Frances Peters, she cannot remove herself from responsibility to represent a larger number of people. Ginburg points out further, that Peters' decision to use the ‘embedded aesthetic’ is strategic and consious (ie driven by agency and self-determination). We also know that Peters occupies an unstable realm in terms of Aboriginal identity as a 'border-crosser'. This choice hence, may serve to help her show her loyalty to an Aboriginal cultural ethos. Ginsburg describes this ‘responsibility to represent’ as a “complex and embedded sense that indigenous media producers bring to their work, never seeing it as existing apart from the mediation of social relationships”. It is partially un-understandable to the Western-trained mind and partially to be silently respected, even when confusing or obscure.
One always has to represent something, there is no way to go ‘unmarked’. Representation already indicates the white audience who must understand her work, since political power is at stake. And here if it is not one trapping dialectic of consumer capitalism (where the subject always wants something of the modern they can never fully have), its another type of problem- that of a minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari) or author-functioon (Foucault). The counter-argument is that powerful discourses still have a way of classifying indigenous media production as inextricable from its historical circumstance of subject position, in a way that reiterates that subject position as the “other”, because this has value for the Western notion of the self.
I would suggest that it is this desire to go 'unmarked' as a postcolonial 'spokesperson' that motivates authors like John Coetzee to refuse to discuss their work. This also reminds me of Fanon’s issues with Negritude- that embracing 'Blackness' was still entrapment, because they were using the vocabulray of the modern imperialist project. It is this contradiction that Charles Taylor points to in “The Politics of Recognition.”
So she says that the Western obsession with self-expression counters this type of community identification and political expression. However she emphasizes that the decision to be 'political' and 'community oriented' is a conscious, intentional one for people like Frances Peters, so she is leaving the door open, even within an identity-politics-riddled world, for individual identity and satisfaction.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Barry Dornfeld: notes
In his study of the PBS documentary Childhood, Dorfeld raises interesting new ideas for the methodologies involved in usefully analyzing a text and drawing conclusions from it about a cultural space. In particular I like the way he suggests:
1. particular inadequacies and suggested new areas of study for media anthropological theory itself, that are more holistic, and include production, text and viewership all together.
2. the usefulness of considering the production process in a way that links it essentially to both text and viewer. Mazzarella does this really well in "Shoveling Smoke," relating the prodcution of an advertising image not just to consumer experience but also to the industry discourse, the advertising meetings, and the interactions between clients and agency, 'creatives' and account managers.
3. the way that debates and decisions over what will be popular, and the ultimate verdict- whether it was popular or not, point to the very interesting contradictions that put the producers in such a tight bind in the first place. His view of the production process of Childhood reveal the ways in which the producers themselves were in argument about how ‘highbrow or lowbrow’ its content should be, and their disagreements about the capacities of the ‘average viewer.’ The difficulty of mediating between “education and entertainment” here, he feels, reflects particular divisions and in deed, hostilities between groups within the U.S, directed towards “cultural elites” from the Northeast. Just in everyday conversation at the University, these kinds of tensions are evident, just in the way people make embarrassed jokes about the “Midwest.” It is great that he takes this seriously as something to be studied, worth bringing out in an academic paper, not just, uncritically, as a ‘fact of life.’
4. the refreshing idea that answers to tough questions may be found by an analysis of the surface of people’s debates and speech, that they are obvious, and even the obvious conclusions can be useful.
This has been lauded as a useful philosophy for anthropology in general. It reminds me of Dale Pesmen’s ethnography, Russia and Soul. Pesmen immerses herself in the poetic figurations and contradictions that her informants use to describe the concept of Russian ‘soul.’ She then uses the emergent complex data to reflect on the way in which theories that seek meaning in ‘depth’ can be reductionist and too paradigmatic. By choosing to see the contradictions, she problematizes the way we, as theorists, are always out to find “wholes”: “Despite strong theoretical arguments against “essentialization" and classical social-scientific categories, including "culture," our descriptions of individuals and groups often continue to be shaped by normative expectations of the visual and static and systematic, especially when we are talking like people and not like scholars, [Russia and Soul, p. 301]
5. In his conclusion then, his refusal to settle for easy connections between the program and the ‘national imaginary’ allows him to redress some of the classical theories of public culture. He suggests first, that in the midst of conflicted and socially disjunctive forces in the United States, theories that describe “monolithic national identity” are inadequate. This implicates Anderson’s Imagined Communities right away: though this (imagined) community aspires to some shared national participation, in the end it remains…(largely based in) exclusions…”
6. My only point of confusion was when he claimed that his study of the program did not just reflect the tensions in public culture but actually produced and reinforced them. How? Because the production team came from different places? Because by trying to do two things at once, the program would inevitably anger someone or the other?
1. particular inadequacies and suggested new areas of study for media anthropological theory itself, that are more holistic, and include production, text and viewership all together.
2. the usefulness of considering the production process in a way that links it essentially to both text and viewer. Mazzarella does this really well in "Shoveling Smoke," relating the prodcution of an advertising image not just to consumer experience but also to the industry discourse, the advertising meetings, and the interactions between clients and agency, 'creatives' and account managers.
3. the way that debates and decisions over what will be popular, and the ultimate verdict- whether it was popular or not, point to the very interesting contradictions that put the producers in such a tight bind in the first place. His view of the production process of Childhood reveal the ways in which the producers themselves were in argument about how ‘highbrow or lowbrow’ its content should be, and their disagreements about the capacities of the ‘average viewer.’ The difficulty of mediating between “education and entertainment” here, he feels, reflects particular divisions and in deed, hostilities between groups within the U.S, directed towards “cultural elites” from the Northeast. Just in everyday conversation at the University, these kinds of tensions are evident, just in the way people make embarrassed jokes about the “Midwest.” It is great that he takes this seriously as something to be studied, worth bringing out in an academic paper, not just, uncritically, as a ‘fact of life.’
4. the refreshing idea that answers to tough questions may be found by an analysis of the surface of people’s debates and speech, that they are obvious, and even the obvious conclusions can be useful.
This has been lauded as a useful philosophy for anthropology in general. It reminds me of Dale Pesmen’s ethnography, Russia and Soul. Pesmen immerses herself in the poetic figurations and contradictions that her informants use to describe the concept of Russian ‘soul.’ She then uses the emergent complex data to reflect on the way in which theories that seek meaning in ‘depth’ can be reductionist and too paradigmatic. By choosing to see the contradictions, she problematizes the way we, as theorists, are always out to find “wholes”: “Despite strong theoretical arguments against “essentialization" and classical social-scientific categories, including "culture," our descriptions of individuals and groups often continue to be shaped by normative expectations of the visual and static and systematic, especially when we are talking like people and not like scholars, [Russia and Soul, p. 301]
5. In his conclusion then, his refusal to settle for easy connections between the program and the ‘national imaginary’ allows him to redress some of the classical theories of public culture. He suggests first, that in the midst of conflicted and socially disjunctive forces in the United States, theories that describe “monolithic national identity” are inadequate. This implicates Anderson’s Imagined Communities right away: though this (imagined) community aspires to some shared national participation, in the end it remains…(largely based in) exclusions…”
6. My only point of confusion was when he claimed that his study of the program did not just reflect the tensions in public culture but actually produced and reinforced them. How? Because the production team came from different places? Because by trying to do two things at once, the program would inevitably anger someone or the other?
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Michael Warner
Publics and counterpublics
Michael Warner writes a very thoughtful piece about the meaning and connotations of the word ‘public’ in our lives. Unpacking the term, he suggests that the ‘public’ has its power just because of the anonymity implied in the term, the ‘strangerhood’, and our inability to point to any specific people and name them as a ‘member of the public.’ It is true that the second a person knows somebody else by name, by face, even as an acquaintance- they bring to the conversation an element of camaraderie, familiarity, community, the ‘vast nameless ocean of faces’ dissolves.
He suggests that the concreteness of the ‘public’ and our ability to imagine it as a ‘real’ entity- is due in large part to the mechanics and punctual rhythms of print and media circulation. This idea is extremely suggestive. It is true that when a person is out of touch with the news, or has no access to television or newspapers, they can describe themselves as being ‘cut off’. It is worth asking here: cut off from what, from their membership of a public? Even when people disagree with the news or see themselves as simply watching CNN coverage, say, with the intention of mocking it, it is the imaginary public they are mocking, not the newscaster. They show contempt for the imaginary ocean of faces that believe the news, and define themselves in relation to this ocean. “A public may be real and efficacious but its reality lies just in this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (Warner, 51).
The public itself, in ‘real life’ as it were, is changeable and extremely fuzzy around the edges. The concreteness, its illusion as a ‘social base’ arises from the discourse that exists to give it existence. His project of analyzing issues of the ‘Spectator’ magazine to speculate on the kind of public it conjures is very interesting. He would suggest then that it is not a ‘readership’ that a magazine caters to, rather, it prints what it wants and thereby creates the illusion of a particular type of readership: “The idea of a common interest, like that of a market demand, appears to identify the social base of public discourse, but the base is in fact projected from the public discourse itself rather than being external to it” (Warner, 53). This raises a couple of problems though: how does one explain the way certain publications or goods fail, or are widely disliked, if there is no public opinion independent of the unpopular piece of print? Why do advertising agencies perform market research on focus groups if they are not trying their best to measure some coagulating, shared ‘public opinion’? When a nation goes through an upheaval of some kind, doesn’t the historical circumstance create a particular common cultural feeling that is at least partly independent of the media? That the media is dependent on? For instance, if films about aliens invading America were popular during the Cold War: were the films creating public anxiety, or was existing public anxiety the reason for their popularity? He uses the word reflexivity repeatedly in relation the public, and reflexivity connoted just this kind of circularity. According to wikipedia: “In sociology, reflexivity is an act of self-reference where examination or action 'bends back on', refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. In brief, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting each another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects. Reflexivity is related to the concept of feedback and positive feedback in particular.”
Anyway, these questions recall Tomlinson’s emphasis on how necessary it is to more closely study the process of mediation and the ways in which media weaves in and out of people’s lives, their ‘world-making’ capacities and their images of themselves.
‘Public’ then, for warner, is constituted by its impersonal, nebulous, vague, imaginary, self-organized, stranger-oriented character. It is a projection of discourse and therefore can only exists in this form, so that it can reflect immediately whatever the discourse requires it to. This is why: “A public is a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” In any case, discourse is independent of the public but the public is dependent on discourse. Yet both exist together. I am confused about which is the essential one and which is the follower.
Back to the question of how publics can behave historically if they are just an imaginary: “Publics act historically depending on the temporality of their circulation”. Is this what it means when someone says “The invention of the printing press and its introduction in India, along with the widespread network of railways, contributed to building the nationalist movement in the early 1900s”? Maybe. Did people revolt because of the media? Or was the media a catalyst that worked because some kind of discontented feeling was present already?
Discourse bridges the gap between strangers by including particular stylistic affinities. A key way to be a counter-public then, is to mess with stylistic affinities, as in satire, farce, comedy, and so on. I am reminded of an ad campaign by activist group “Think again” which mimicked levis campaigns but in place of the Levi’s slogan, in exactly the same style and font, had slogans about the sweatshop manufacture of jeans.
It is exactly in the presentation of stylistic affinity that the connection between impersonal publics and my personal relationship to a style come into play. Take, for instance, the ‘wasaaaaap’ Budweiser ad. If a white male from say, Switzerland saw it and thought it was funny, can he say ‘wasssuuuup’ in America and be accepted as someone who has the right to use the term? Maybe. The superfriends commercial was funny because of the tension of not knowing whether or not superwoman fro example, was allowed to say ‘wasssuuuup’ in the same way as the black man in the ad. I am reminded of a friend who explained to me once why he thought it was okay for black men to address each other as ‘nigger’ under particular circumstances, but when he had a friend from Korea do the same it made him very angry. The style of public discourse orients itself towards a particular public, but because of its impersonal, indefinite nature, it can be picked up, related to, by anyone. Here the slippages begin to occur and the fictional projective public has to organize itself as a real, addressable community of flesh and blood people. Then the question of who gets included and who doesn’t becomes a sensitive issue.
Another interesting question is: if the discourse can effectively form publics, where does the discourse get its power from? I’m reminded of Foucault here, and a paper of his I recently read, about ‘author-function’. In brief, he writes that when an author produces a work, the dominant discourse categorizes him as a particular kind of author with a particular history, and leanings, and so on, and uses this classification of him to explain and reconcile contradictions in his work. So when I read a book by J.M. Coetzee, I think “Oh, as a South African colored writer in the 1990s etc, of course he would write about this topic, etc etc.” My imagined familiarity with him, me presumption that I can understand his affinities, community orientation and motivations to write, stem from a power loaned to me by the dominant discourse that contains within it particular ideas of what a South African colored male in the 1990s should be concerned about. Or is it the other way round: am I constituting the discourse? I return repeatedly to the circular question of how the power circulates between individual and discourse, personal thought and shared, power-laden language.
Michael Warner writes a very thoughtful piece about the meaning and connotations of the word ‘public’ in our lives. Unpacking the term, he suggests that the ‘public’ has its power just because of the anonymity implied in the term, the ‘strangerhood’, and our inability to point to any specific people and name them as a ‘member of the public.’ It is true that the second a person knows somebody else by name, by face, even as an acquaintance- they bring to the conversation an element of camaraderie, familiarity, community, the ‘vast nameless ocean of faces’ dissolves.
He suggests that the concreteness of the ‘public’ and our ability to imagine it as a ‘real’ entity- is due in large part to the mechanics and punctual rhythms of print and media circulation. This idea is extremely suggestive. It is true that when a person is out of touch with the news, or has no access to television or newspapers, they can describe themselves as being ‘cut off’. It is worth asking here: cut off from what, from their membership of a public? Even when people disagree with the news or see themselves as simply watching CNN coverage, say, with the intention of mocking it, it is the imaginary public they are mocking, not the newscaster. They show contempt for the imaginary ocean of faces that believe the news, and define themselves in relation to this ocean. “A public may be real and efficacious but its reality lies just in this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (Warner, 51).
The public itself, in ‘real life’ as it were, is changeable and extremely fuzzy around the edges. The concreteness, its illusion as a ‘social base’ arises from the discourse that exists to give it existence. His project of analyzing issues of the ‘Spectator’ magazine to speculate on the kind of public it conjures is very interesting. He would suggest then that it is not a ‘readership’ that a magazine caters to, rather, it prints what it wants and thereby creates the illusion of a particular type of readership: “The idea of a common interest, like that of a market demand, appears to identify the social base of public discourse, but the base is in fact projected from the public discourse itself rather than being external to it” (Warner, 53). This raises a couple of problems though: how does one explain the way certain publications or goods fail, or are widely disliked, if there is no public opinion independent of the unpopular piece of print? Why do advertising agencies perform market research on focus groups if they are not trying their best to measure some coagulating, shared ‘public opinion’? When a nation goes through an upheaval of some kind, doesn’t the historical circumstance create a particular common cultural feeling that is at least partly independent of the media? That the media is dependent on? For instance, if films about aliens invading America were popular during the Cold War: were the films creating public anxiety, or was existing public anxiety the reason for their popularity? He uses the word reflexivity repeatedly in relation the public, and reflexivity connoted just this kind of circularity. According to wikipedia: “In sociology, reflexivity is an act of self-reference where examination or action 'bends back on', refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. In brief, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional; with both the cause and the effect affecting each another in a situation that renders both functions causes and effects. Reflexivity is related to the concept of feedback and positive feedback in particular.”
Anyway, these questions recall Tomlinson’s emphasis on how necessary it is to more closely study the process of mediation and the ways in which media weaves in and out of people’s lives, their ‘world-making’ capacities and their images of themselves.
‘Public’ then, for warner, is constituted by its impersonal, nebulous, vague, imaginary, self-organized, stranger-oriented character. It is a projection of discourse and therefore can only exists in this form, so that it can reflect immediately whatever the discourse requires it to. This is why: “A public is a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” In any case, discourse is independent of the public but the public is dependent on discourse. Yet both exist together. I am confused about which is the essential one and which is the follower.
Back to the question of how publics can behave historically if they are just an imaginary: “Publics act historically depending on the temporality of their circulation”. Is this what it means when someone says “The invention of the printing press and its introduction in India, along with the widespread network of railways, contributed to building the nationalist movement in the early 1900s”? Maybe. Did people revolt because of the media? Or was the media a catalyst that worked because some kind of discontented feeling was present already?
Discourse bridges the gap between strangers by including particular stylistic affinities. A key way to be a counter-public then, is to mess with stylistic affinities, as in satire, farce, comedy, and so on. I am reminded of an ad campaign by activist group “Think again” which mimicked levis campaigns but in place of the Levi’s slogan, in exactly the same style and font, had slogans about the sweatshop manufacture of jeans.
It is exactly in the presentation of stylistic affinity that the connection between impersonal publics and my personal relationship to a style come into play. Take, for instance, the ‘wasaaaaap’ Budweiser ad. If a white male from say, Switzerland saw it and thought it was funny, can he say ‘wasssuuuup’ in America and be accepted as someone who has the right to use the term? Maybe. The superfriends commercial was funny because of the tension of not knowing whether or not superwoman fro example, was allowed to say ‘wasssuuuup’ in the same way as the black man in the ad. I am reminded of a friend who explained to me once why he thought it was okay for black men to address each other as ‘nigger’ under particular circumstances, but when he had a friend from Korea do the same it made him very angry. The style of public discourse orients itself towards a particular public, but because of its impersonal, indefinite nature, it can be picked up, related to, by anyone. Here the slippages begin to occur and the fictional projective public has to organize itself as a real, addressable community of flesh and blood people. Then the question of who gets included and who doesn’t becomes a sensitive issue.
Another interesting question is: if the discourse can effectively form publics, where does the discourse get its power from? I’m reminded of Foucault here, and a paper of his I recently read, about ‘author-function’. In brief, he writes that when an author produces a work, the dominant discourse categorizes him as a particular kind of author with a particular history, and leanings, and so on, and uses this classification of him to explain and reconcile contradictions in his work. So when I read a book by J.M. Coetzee, I think “Oh, as a South African colored writer in the 1990s etc, of course he would write about this topic, etc etc.” My imagined familiarity with him, me presumption that I can understand his affinities, community orientation and motivations to write, stem from a power loaned to me by the dominant discourse that contains within it particular ideas of what a South African colored male in the 1990s should be concerned about. Or is it the other way round: am I constituting the discourse? I return repeatedly to the circular question of how the power circulates between individual and discourse, personal thought and shared, power-laden language.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Post #1
I think that Harindranath makes an important and valid counter-argument to Tomlinson in the essay, "Reving Cultural Imperialism".
Tomlinson argues quite rightly that much of the argument of cultural domination- the complaint that "The West dominates the Rest"- has gotten stale, and is outdated and oversimplified. He unpicks the term 'cultural', as used by critics like Schiller, and unpicks the way an anti-imperialist critique of the Disney comic Donald Duck "assumes that reading American comics...has a direct pedagogic effect." He suggests that a closer examination of the "relationship between text and audience" will probably reveal that the viewer has more agency and creativity in his self-construction, he is not mindlessly brainwashed into worshipping the 'West'. His analysis of the show 'Dallas' shows just this- that a viewer can disagree with the values of a show and still enjoy watching it without too much inner conflict.
This point about agency is a good one, and it has been stressed by many thinkers in the post-colonial era, who wish to give agency to the post-colonial 'subject'. For example, Jean Comaroff criticises just this "West dominates the Rest" story when she writes, “such binary contrasts…are a widespread trope of ideology-in-the-making; they reduce complex continuities and contradictions to the aesthetics of nice oppositions…(colonization) had unforeseen outcomes…societies were never simply made over in the European image despite the persistent tendency of Eurocentric scholars to speak as if they were.” (Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents, 251). Ashish Nandy writes about the Indian situation in particular, and suggests ways in which a certain group of Indian 'colonial subjects' found ways to creatively weave 'Western' and 'Indian' influences into their identities in ways that allowed them to sidestep the hegemonic ideals of 'modernity' posited by the colonial ideology.
While it is true that individuals certainly possess agency in the process of defining themselves, it becomes difficult to posit either 'agency' or 'emulation' or any emotional experience into a population, because such an experience can only be located in the lived expereince of people. For example, Nandy's claim that Indians resolve their colonial past by forming themselves as 'happy hybrids' has no meaning if an Indian citizen living today experiences themself as unequal or dominated by some Western structure of values.
Tomlinson acknowledges this, he admits that certain forms of hegemony do exist, but he questions if it can be blamed so easily on media. He suggests that people's 'lived experience' takes place in a number of different spheres and questions whether we have the knowledge to so easily give media a privileged position among them.
The question then becomes: Does media influence the way we experience ourselves? This was the topic of a lot of class discussion the other day.
Harindranath accepts the validity of some of Tomlinson's argument but tries to reinstate a case for aspects of the 'Cultural Imperialism" hypothesis. His retort is about economics: he suggests that we look at the "essentially unequal relations that underpin the global capitalist system" to begin defending the validity of fears of "cultural imperialism".
Another place to look for the validity of the argument is in the "social lived realities" of people; he accompanies this with a picture of an Indian family watching Tony Blair on the BBC. If families still look to the west as a site of desire, instruction, aspiration and greater potential, then there is something unequal there. What matters whn we begin to look at people's 'lived expereinces' is their perception. If I think that American bodies are more attractive, or American clothes more desirable that Indian ones, there is an unequal relationship already, in my mind.
I personally believe Haridranath's argument because I know attitudes exist that think the 'West' (Europe and America) is a better place to live and promises a highly desirable lifestyle. Millions of Indian kids are writing their SATs and getting in lines miles long at consulates, for a chance to come to an obscure American college and gain access to the golden pool of international eliteness that their peers in India are missing. It does not matter if this is objectively true or not, what matters is that I expereince it this way. Several of my freinds have used the words "dump" and "garbage" to describe India and everyday search online for American University degrees to apply to. I like Haridranath's article because aspects of it ring very true for me.
So people do have agency, of course, everyone has agency. The danger in overemphasizing agency is that it obscures the other ways in which power can work. Power here works not through a governmental structure, but through imaginaryu ideas that people develop of the 'West' and the ways those ideas create desires in them. Desiring another, being dissatisfied with oneself, these are ways that power promulgates itself.
Is the media an apt place to lay the 'blame' for this if blame must be laid at all? Tomlinson is right that we dont know enough about reader-audience relationships to say for sure. It cannot be denied that people's imaginaries are shaped in part by images shown on the media. For example, in India there are ideas of America as a place where women can wear miniskirts and not be hooted at (greater sexual freedom), a place where popular music artists and performances are easier to access (closeness to a cultural center) or as a place where food, luxury and entertainment are more available. There are even ideas of American bodies as being healthier, stronger, better-fed, and cleaner. I'm generalizing, and maybe we shouldn't be so quick to call this 'imperialism,' maybe the blame cant really be placed at all. But there are things going on here and 'agency' readings are dangerous because they ignore these processes.
Tomlinson argues quite rightly that much of the argument of cultural domination- the complaint that "The West dominates the Rest"- has gotten stale, and is outdated and oversimplified. He unpicks the term 'cultural', as used by critics like Schiller, and unpicks the way an anti-imperialist critique of the Disney comic Donald Duck "assumes that reading American comics...has a direct pedagogic effect." He suggests that a closer examination of the "relationship between text and audience" will probably reveal that the viewer has more agency and creativity in his self-construction, he is not mindlessly brainwashed into worshipping the 'West'. His analysis of the show 'Dallas' shows just this- that a viewer can disagree with the values of a show and still enjoy watching it without too much inner conflict.
This point about agency is a good one, and it has been stressed by many thinkers in the post-colonial era, who wish to give agency to the post-colonial 'subject'. For example, Jean Comaroff criticises just this "West dominates the Rest" story when she writes, “such binary contrasts…are a widespread trope of ideology-in-the-making; they reduce complex continuities and contradictions to the aesthetics of nice oppositions…(colonization) had unforeseen outcomes…societies were never simply made over in the European image despite the persistent tendency of Eurocentric scholars to speak as if they were.” (Comaroff, Modernity and its Malcontents, 251). Ashish Nandy writes about the Indian situation in particular, and suggests ways in which a certain group of Indian 'colonial subjects' found ways to creatively weave 'Western' and 'Indian' influences into their identities in ways that allowed them to sidestep the hegemonic ideals of 'modernity' posited by the colonial ideology.
While it is true that individuals certainly possess agency in the process of defining themselves, it becomes difficult to posit either 'agency' or 'emulation' or any emotional experience into a population, because such an experience can only be located in the lived expereince of people. For example, Nandy's claim that Indians resolve their colonial past by forming themselves as 'happy hybrids' has no meaning if an Indian citizen living today experiences themself as unequal or dominated by some Western structure of values.
Tomlinson acknowledges this, he admits that certain forms of hegemony do exist, but he questions if it can be blamed so easily on media. He suggests that people's 'lived experience' takes place in a number of different spheres and questions whether we have the knowledge to so easily give media a privileged position among them.
The question then becomes: Does media influence the way we experience ourselves? This was the topic of a lot of class discussion the other day.
Harindranath accepts the validity of some of Tomlinson's argument but tries to reinstate a case for aspects of the 'Cultural Imperialism" hypothesis. His retort is about economics: he suggests that we look at the "essentially unequal relations that underpin the global capitalist system" to begin defending the validity of fears of "cultural imperialism".
Another place to look for the validity of the argument is in the "social lived realities" of people; he accompanies this with a picture of an Indian family watching Tony Blair on the BBC. If families still look to the west as a site of desire, instruction, aspiration and greater potential, then there is something unequal there. What matters whn we begin to look at people's 'lived expereinces' is their perception. If I think that American bodies are more attractive, or American clothes more desirable that Indian ones, there is an unequal relationship already, in my mind.
I personally believe Haridranath's argument because I know attitudes exist that think the 'West' (Europe and America) is a better place to live and promises a highly desirable lifestyle. Millions of Indian kids are writing their SATs and getting in lines miles long at consulates, for a chance to come to an obscure American college and gain access to the golden pool of international eliteness that their peers in India are missing. It does not matter if this is objectively true or not, what matters is that I expereince it this way. Several of my freinds have used the words "dump" and "garbage" to describe India and everyday search online for American University degrees to apply to. I like Haridranath's article because aspects of it ring very true for me.
So people do have agency, of course, everyone has agency. The danger in overemphasizing agency is that it obscures the other ways in which power can work. Power here works not through a governmental structure, but through imaginaryu ideas that people develop of the 'West' and the ways those ideas create desires in them. Desiring another, being dissatisfied with oneself, these are ways that power promulgates itself.
Is the media an apt place to lay the 'blame' for this if blame must be laid at all? Tomlinson is right that we dont know enough about reader-audience relationships to say for sure. It cannot be denied that people's imaginaries are shaped in part by images shown on the media. For example, in India there are ideas of America as a place where women can wear miniskirts and not be hooted at (greater sexual freedom), a place where popular music artists and performances are easier to access (closeness to a cultural center) or as a place where food, luxury and entertainment are more available. There are even ideas of American bodies as being healthier, stronger, better-fed, and cleaner. I'm generalizing, and maybe we shouldn't be so quick to call this 'imperialism,' maybe the blame cant really be placed at all. But there are things going on here and 'agency' readings are dangerous because they ignore these processes.
Friday, September 28, 2007
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