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?
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)