[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).
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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.
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