Pravda Kid

2007-08-31T10:19:00.001-05:00

MORE ON COMIC-BOOKIFICATION

My most recent post concerned the fact that the comic book 'renaissance' that has happened since the 1980s can be linked quite directly to the development of a comic book specialty market. Thinking with this, we can see how other media change when they are filtered through a specialty market.

Some elaborations follow. In the first part, I respond to fellow blogger Bob Archambeau. In the second part, I apply this model of comic bookification to the world of music sales.

I. A REPLY TO ARCHAMBEAU

My fellow blogger Bob Archambeau, in a comment on this very blog, says:

Great post! But (as Columbo would say), there's just one more thing I gotta ask here: does the whole narrowcasting/cable thing really only lead to programming by and for a creative class? I mean, sure, it does. Right. And for all the reasons you describe. But what about all of the crappo cable? The Home Shopping Networks and Spike TV-style channels? I don't mean to knock Spike -- I like MXC as much as the next giggling idiot on the couch -- but you'd hardly call it highbrow.

I'll take these one-by-one. Think of it as a Deborah Solomon Q & A, like we see every Sunday in the New York Times, except not quite as full of shit as Deborah Solomon:

Q: Does the whole narrowcasting/cable thing really only lead to programming by and for a creative class?

A: No, it doesn't. Those outside of the creative class will still have programming created for them, and this programming will likely have the same problems (and promises) as before. Stick with the model of comic books. Are there still comic books made for kids? You betcha. The difference is that the market for comics now focuses not only on children, but also on well-educated adults (whereas, once upon a time, 'adult comic book reader' really did imply that the audience member was either mentally handicapped or in the military; I'm not making that up).

Q: But what about all the crappo cable?

A: It's still there. It's going to be there for a long time. However, if cable (and satellite) move more to a subscription-based model, there could be an even more dramatic divergence of the creative class's entertainment (made by and for the members of what Alvin Gouldner called the CCD, the culture of critical discourse). By buddy Mark Brewin pointed out on the phone the other day how, in 2002, James W. Carey described an encounter with a dude from Europe, who said something like: "You know, it used to be that all the interesting television was made in Europe [okay, probably an overstatement at best--ed.], and now the most interesting television is being produced and aired in the U.S." This is, I think, tied intimately to changes in how television organizes its creative labor given the realities of a relative surfeit of networks/channels.

II. I APPLY THIS MODEL OF COMIC-BOOKIFICATION TO MUSIC.

A friend of mine with contacts in the music retail world told me recently that there is much buzz surrounding what is going to change after the Xmas season of 2007. After that retail push, it seems, it will be likely that Barnes & Noble will give up on selling music in their stores. This means a few things. First, if you're going to do any holiday cd shopping, you might want to do it at Barnes & Noble, in January of 2008, when they will be liquidating stock. Second, this seems to be very much in line with the comic-bookification (okay, I'll never use this term again) model. The point: retail music is going to become even more of a specialty market, now more than ever. Of course, there are already specialty music stores, so this doesn't represent a sea change so much as a further adjustment. Still, once Barnes & Noble gives up on cds, others will follow, and we may see the kind of deep bifurcation between top 40 sales in stores and 'specialty' sales that we saw in the 1980s. It gets more complicated, of course, because music can easily be purchased online, and this alters the entire dynamic (here it's significant that comic books have yet to be successfully distributed as an online product). The question, which has hovered like a vulture over music for a long time, is this: can the largest corporations involved in music production and sales come up with a strategy to handle these shifts? Or will they continue to respond as they have for a while, with greater emphasis on generating a small number of mega-hits? We shall see... However, the culmination of factors that has created an arguable resurgence in comics and in television may lead the music industry away from the kind of 'creative class' approach that we have seen in these other media.

That said, there's a chance for the music industry to develop itself (and its listeners) by taking advantage of subscription-based services (satellite radio & webcasting seem like natural allies, though the industry often turns a cold shoulder to these new alternatives to broadcasting). Napster (i.e., the 'new' Napster) has already tried this, with little success. But this approach is not dead, yet.

2007-08-27T15:41:00.000-05:00

COMIC BOOK-IFICATION: A MODEL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE TREMENDOUS (OR NOT) IMPORTANCE OF HOW MEDIA CHANGE WHEN THEY ARE PRODUCED FOR SPECIALTY AUDIENCES.

McLuhan famously said that you know a medium has died when people use it to create 'art.' He was probably wrong to use the word 'dead', but as with much of what McLuhan said, it's thought-provoking.

For some time now, I have considered what this idea of McLuhan's means in terms of comic books. A very brief history of comic books goes something like this: In the 1930s, comic books were created largely for a juvenile audience. As comics became more popular during the 1940s, there came into existence a wealth of genres of comic books. These genres included: crime comics, horror comics, superhero comics (duh), kiddie comics, pirate comics, war comics, romance comics, and much else. Numerous producers (and a few distributors) of comics enjoyed the benefits of a robust demand for all kinds of comics. Of more importance here, the 'exhibitor/vendor' role for comic books was almost always played by supermarkets and drugstores (where comics were, of course, placed right next to the Pep cereal and the ointments). The Comic Book Code and competition from television in the 1950s began to eat away at the comic book market. The number of producers dwindled, as did the viability of the comic book market.

Cut to the 1980s, when a new way to sell comics came into its own. The comic book specialty store (exemplified perhaps by "the Android's Dungeon," of Simpsons fame) came into its own. As Amy Nyberg explains in her very good book on the Comic Book Code--"Seal of Approval"--the specialty store was unanticipated by the creators of the Comic Book Code, and gave comic book producers (including small, independently-run outfits) the chance to bypass the provisions of the Code, while also a) creating a market for adult comic books, and b) opening up a chance for autonomy on the part of comic book artists/writers/producers. By the late 1980s, specialty stores could be found throughout the suburban U.S. Journalists began running with the "comic books aren't just for kids any more" story. Long story short: a change in how comics were sold fed back into the system by which they were created and distributed. I would argue that this change in production also represented a new blooming of the comic book medium (albeit one that gets tremendously blown out of proportion).

Let's do what the title of this post suggests: let's use this as a model for other media. I'll start with television. Television was the definitive form of 'mass communication' for decades. The 3 big networks staked claims on very-large audiences. Think M*A*S*H. Think Cosby Show. Think They Honeymooners. Cable television comes along, and eventually, there is the opportunity to differentiate markets much more, creating the opportunity for something similar to the specialty sales of comics. Television has become increasingly unmoored from the "big 3" approach, and this has led to new specialty programming, including almost anything that tv critics hail as 'genius': The Sopranos is an obvious example, Deadwood goes right along with it, and let's also hear it for Turner Classic Movies. Much as when comics began to move into a specialty market, the production of television programming has been hitched to a creative class of writers, actors, and producers. At the risk of sounding like I agree with laissez faire apologists for the existing media structure (who get things precisely wrong on this stuff; more on that later), this new system is more supportive of experimentation with programming, and also more capable of supporting quality programming. This doesn't mean everything is okay now (far from it), but there are echoes of McLuhan here: just as 'television' as traditionally construed, seems to be dying, there's some really great stuff out there. In a sense, it's because the stakes have been lowered (because no one can expect the kind of ratings bonanzas that tv had in the 1970s) that creativity has crept in.

This argument I am making may sound elitist, and I'll own up to it. Opening up television to a creative class is something very different from handling it to 'the people'. But I'd rather have programming that comes from a creative class--in this case, people who have worked for years on their crafts--than solely in the hands of unresponsive plutocrats. Gramscians are rightly suspicious of manipulation of this creative class by the power-holders. Others (including Joe Turow) suspect that this breakdown of the mass audience may go hand-in-hand with the erosion of any common culture in the U.S., and that specialty audiences may represent the development of virtual gated communities. These suspicions are well-founded. Still, there is something to be said for expanding options from a surprisingly competitive marketplace. Now, the job is to make it both more competitive, more varied, and more responsive to the needs of the public. I'll try to get this done by Thursday...

The same changes that occur when a medium is hitched to specialty audiences can be applied to music, and to radio. More on that later.

2007-08-07T15:21:00.000-05:00

Fielding A Question Regarding Democracy:

Here at Pravda Kid, I try to be responsive to my readers. In this spirit, here is a comment from one Michael K, regarding my earlier post, involving the Horner/Baker study of Salt River Tickets in 19th Century U.S. elections. Says good Michael K:

Let me see if I follow you here. Schudson is right that there is too much emphasis on intersubjectivity in democracy studies; but Horner and Brewin are right that there isn't enough of it in contemporary democratic practice? Which of these theses seems more plausible to you? Or, is there a way to resolve the apparent contradiction and assert both?

I don't think there's much of a contradiction here, but I (think I) get Michael K.'s point. Some say Democracy could use some good ol' bodily involvement, some visceral punch, a forum where people get together, get drunk, party, argue, and vote. This approach finds its roots in Deweyan thought (sometimes dried up like a prune and turned into Habermasian thought). Meanwhile, an opposed camp tells us that this love of conversation/affiliation/intersubjectivity misses some important issues. Schudson, for one, tells us that conversation has all kinds of problems and should not be theoretically situated as as the 'soul' of democracy. Amongst other things, the well-nigh single-minded focus on conversation tends to undervalue the role of information in modern ('mass'?) democracies.

Fine. So, Michael K.'s question stands: How do I resolve this? To resolve this, I begin by pointing out something that may very well not be true: there is no zero-sum situation here. It is possible for a social polity also to be well-informed while also being engaged on the bodily level (showing up to rallies, arguing loudly, getting drunk on election day). So, let's go for well-informed people with strong community allegiances. An emphasis on rationality/information (in theory or in practice) is always going to be in danger of masking underlying interests that fuel politics (Chantal Mouffe makes this point much better than myself). An emphasis on bodily engagement--often exemplified by political rallies--is always going to be in danger of being fascist. Instead of having the poorly informed, uninterested (alienated) citizens (the situation in which 'information/rationality' and 'involvement' are both 'low' on the magical democracy-meter), why not have well-informed, involved citizens?

This is all kind of obvious. The bitter pill to swallow is that I'm not finding any way to get us to this dreamy synthesis of engagement and information. So, I conclude on the following note: hanging above all of this is the idea of social control. The fear of the masses (smelly, irrational, prone to bouts of genocide) pervades this debate, as well it might after the last 100 years. The call for rationality and an informed electorate have done duty as appeals for social control. In light of this, a warping of Michael K.'s question would be as follows: "Which option [information or involvement], if each is boiled down and opposed to the other, would be the most dangerous now?" I think we're living in a situation where the culture of journalism/politics (two institutions with a 'bureaucratic affinity' for each other, as the fella says) has leaned strongly in the direction of disengagement. We're paying the price for that in terms of alienated citizens, low voter turnout, etc. But (and I think this is largely consistent with Brewin & Horner's ideas) creating greater bodily involvement--making democracy literally more fiery--might simply embolden the trampling of reason that the Frankfurt school dudes (Horkheimer especially) feared so much. I bow to Schudson, who reminds us of the limits of conversation (which I'm extending into the world of 'bodily involvement' here), and of the not-so-terrible role played by information in politics. Once again, I seem to be taking the side of gesellschaft.

2007-06-28T11:27:00.000-05:00

In praise of gesellschaft: notes on the quiet glory of the bureaucrat.

So, I'm reading the Nation a few weeks ago and I come across this piece "In Praise of Red Tape," by Christopher Hayes. It's a smart little essay, I think. Hayes points out that bureaucrats in the U.S. government--normally a derided subpopulation whose machinations are thought to suck the life out of all that is good in the world--are to be praised for their insistence on following the rules and making things relatively difficult for the Bush administration. Because the Bush administration wants to break the rules, and because bureaucrats are all about minding the rules, this puts U.S. government bureaucrats in the role of button-down 'truth to power' types, unwilling to bow to the cult of Cheney that demands loyalty (a charismatic concept, after all) above all. Who stands in the way of the Bush administration's destructive swath? Midlevel intelligence professionals, State Department planners, scientists "in the bowels of the" EPA, and other clipboard-holding Bob Newhart types.

When thinking about this, I'm reminded of cinematic tributes to the low-level bureaucrat, and I think we see this kind of praise of the bureaucrat, or of rational-legal authority, in a few different movies: Hot Fuzz, Jaws, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

First, Hot Fuzz. The plot: a truly incredibly talented and successful cop (Simon Pegg) is determined by his supervisors to be an embarrassment to the London force, where his efficiency and results put his peers to shame. He's rather forcefully directed to become a cop in a small English town, where there is said to be the lowest crime rate in Britain. The plot thickens, and in time, the small town is shown to be a violent place where a cabal of city leaders exterminate anyone and anything that get in the way of their dreams for a picturesque, Village Green kind of place. Hilarious violence ensues. The upswing of this? The movie pits a supercop--a stand-in for the written law and for meritocracy--against the idyll of the small town. A lesser (and less funny) film would show the cop falling in love with the slower pace of the small town. But no, this gemeinschaft striver cop peels the surface off the small town, to show all the wriggly, evil stuff that goes on in the gemeinschaft-y little town. Without sermonizing, the movie suggests that the comfy small town has problems of its own (without getting into the very dumb American Beauty-like suburb-bashing that I'll take on some other time). The viewer is left with a sense that strong community bonds aren't all they are cracked up to be in our 21st century world.

A similar theme turns up in Jaws. For those who forget what Jaws is all about (except, one assumes, for the shark), it's really the story of a small town (on an island, no less) sheriff (Roy Scheider)--here it's easy to think that he might be the grown-up version of Simon Pegg's character in Hot Fuzz, after years in the small town--who keeps does his level best to face up to the challenge presented by a 25-foot Great White Shark that keeps on eating the visitors to his island. He struggles with bureaucrats who, like the town leaders in Hot Fuzz, keep on getting in the way, making his job impossible. He also faces off against a raft of amateur, self-appointed shark-hunters, who are portrayed as a bunch of drunken dimbulbs. But against the odds, he winds up joining forces with an ichthyologist and a whale-hunter to go out and kill the damn shark. Gemeinschaft rules. The villagers simply don't have the ability to do what needs doing (and many fight against the worthy goals).

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three pits two minor bureaucrats against a ring of international crooks, who have taken the titular subway train, and threaten to kill everyone on it if they don't get paid. It's the same thing: the mayor's a feckless boob who is concerned mostly with his television image, the regular folks mostly don't know what's going on, and it's up to transit sub-chief Walter Matthau and mid-level policeman Jerry Stiller to save the day. Using their expertise for how things really work, they do indeed save the day. Then the crooks' leader (played by Robert Shaw) kills himself by touching the third rail. Classic.

What am I trying to say here? I suppose I'm trying to bring out an apologia for the bureaucrat. While communication and other fields cling stubbornly to the idea that truth and value are excised somehow through the involvement of bureaucracy, a simple rejection of bureaucracy seems terribly wrong-headed. The critique of bureaucracy can often be traced to the ideas of Max Weber, but it is easily forgotten that his take on bureaucracy was far more complicated than the 'iron cage' imagery in some of his writing would suggest. Indeed, the problem he found in bureaucracy was that, because it worked so unbelievably well (I believe, at one point, he called it 'awesome,' but I may be making that up), it became difficult to notice some of the problems that it inflicted. Now, I think we face a different problem. We are so accustomed to bad-mouthing bureaucracy that we find it difficult to remember what it can do for us. Hayes' "In Praise of Red Tape," coming at about the same time as Hot Fuzz, seems to indicate that we may be starting to realize why clipboards and flow charts might do for us after all.

2007-06-21T11:16:00.000-05:00

INDIETORRENTS MEMBERS DISCOVER PRAVDA KID COMMENTARY, AMUSING PRAVDA KID.

So, some comments rolled in last night concerning my post last summer on Indietorrents, that very fascinating community of music-file-sharing folks. I described Indietorrents folks as rude and pretentious. The Indietorrents community has replied. Some comments on my comments:

You OBVIOUSLY don't understand a damn thing about us.

HEY MAN, YOU TALKING ABOUT MY INDIETORRENTS LIKE THAT? GODDAMN SON IF YOU WERE HERE RIGHT NOW I'D SLAP YOUR HONKY ASS THEN RIDE YOU AROUND TOWN WITH A BIG SIGN THAT SAYS "THIS HERE FELLER IS MY BITCH".

I wish you has an acoount so I could bring down the bannation hammer.

So, though I think Indietorrents is fascinating and terrifically important to understanding what's happening to music these days (many good things are happening, mind you), I may have emphasized the 'pretentious' and 'rude' (my terms) elements a bit too much. So, I now turn to my other dear readers, and ask: what's the deal with this response? It's hard not to feel for these folks. They're trying, and that's something. But their concern for distinctions between those in and out of their network (hence the itchy 'bannation' trigger finger here) seems to drive them more than anything else. A very glib, functionalist aproach would tell us that they have been alienated in the past, and now (return of the repressed) take a pleasure in applying the rules of alienation to their own interests. Here's lookin' at you, Indietorrents! You have spirit! And, in today's thin world, that really is something.

2007-06-13T11:23:00.000-05:00

"You Lose, Asshole," and other elements of democratic discourse.

I very much enjoy some of the research and theorizing that has addressed the issue of democratic discourse. One of my favorite articles to take on this topic is Michael Schudson's (in)famous "Why Conversation is Not the Soul of Democracy," in which he addresses the widespread assumption in communication research that interpersonal communication can be thought of as a necessary component of democratic functioning. This assumption runs through the work of Dewey, Tarde, Katz & Lazarsfeld (imho), Habermas, and many others. Schudson points out to all of us that democracy isn't just a bunch of people talking. Any reasonable definition of a working democracy today must address factors (e.g. information, news, structural elements, and much else) that cannot be found simply in a bunch of folks talkin' about stuff.

Another really great piece that addresses this larger issue is Carolyn Marvin & Pete Simonson's "Voting Alone" piece, where they examine the role of the body (ever undeniable) in democracy, particularly in the U.S. They remark on the seemingly long-gone tradition of treating elections, for example, as a kind of sociable event in the 19th century U.S. Want a functioning democracy? Put some booze, some sex, and some torch-lit rallies into it. That'll get people going. [yes, of course, Marvin & Peterson are aware that torch-lit rallies are also associated with some non-democratic events as well]

Along come my pals Jen Horner & Mark Brewin, taking on this very issue of embodied democratic politics with their new piece in Critical Studies in Media Communication, entitled "The Salt River Ticket, Democratic Discourse, and Nineteenth Century American Politics". In this article, they describe the tradition whereby citizens in the mid 19th century who voted for the winning candidates handed out what were called Salt River Tickets to those who voted for the losing candidates. What were Salt River Tickets, you ask? They were mock tickets to ride on a fictional steam boat up the Salt River (the place where losers went back then). Here's the copy from the Salt River Ticket Horner & Brewin quote in the beginning of the article:
Free ticket to the Saline Spring
For all 'Wooley Heads,' 'Nigger Thieves,' 'Underground R.R. Directors,' and 'Black Republicans.'
Pass the bearer through to Salt River on the Wooley Horse.
FREMONT, Captain; 'JESSIE,' First Mate; GREELY, Pilot; E. DOUGLASS, Mourner; 'ISMS,' Undertaker.
State rooms reserved for the col'd voters of New York
Reed, Gibbons & Co., will be provisioned on 'Wooley offal' and 'Fusion' Hash during the trip in consideration of their distinguished services during the campaign. Lloyd Garrison and Luc. Mott will lead the party to the storm scow 'Disunion.'

So, if you were a supporter of the Democrats, you would have done the following with this ticket:
a) find out who won the elction
b) get really freakin' drunk (Horner & Brewin don't theorize this as a necessary component, but it's easy to imagine it playing a major role)
c) pick up a bunch of Salt River tickets
d) hand these tickets out to the supporters of the Republicans
e) laugh your ass off

After an exhaustive analysis of Salt River Tickets as an example of Bakhtinian carnivalesque, Horner & Brewin conclude that "The ticket established a bond between winner and loser at the same moment it articulated the tensions that the election had introduced within the world of white masculinity" (p. 15). Horner & Brewin maintain a rather complete ambivalence here. I may be getting what they're saying wrong, but I think they admire the degree to which people got fired up about politics with these Salt River Tickets, while also realizing that these things were hardly some kind of 'democracy potion' that helped achieve any of the goals that we associate with democracy. Forms of political communication like the Salt River Ticket, they argue "can serve as useful corrective to the ponderous, guarded style of communication of established media channels and major political parties" (p. 15). They compare this to the blogs of today, noting that we see the same kind of "shrill character," "self-congratulation, disdain for compromise, and narrow-minded worldview" (p. 16) in blogs that could be found in the Salt River Tickets. This seems entirely right. Blogs are used to rehearse already-developed rivalries, to satirize (often with the kind of body-talk and inversion [i.e. fart jokes] that made Rabelais such a big deal), to spew vitriol, and to voice tensions.

Horner & Brewin see how this fits into democracy, and in this their work represents its own corrective to the tendency in communication research to focus too much on 'eat your spinach' journalism, or public sphere theory. Salt River Tickets did not create democracy. But the passions they stirred remain something to consider.

2007-06-08T13:31:00.001-05:00

Moral Panic and the City: Steve Macek is makin' 'em hurt!

I grew up in the far west suburbs of Chicago, IL, in a city called Geneva. Geneva was (and remains) a rather idyllic little berg, about 35 miles straight west of the big city. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I recall how Chicago looked from Geneva. Chicago seemed like a terrible place, full of drugs, crime, AIDS, and scary people.

Why might a dorky kid from the 'burbs get this understanding of the city? Steve Macek tells us exactly what time it is with his most excellent book on this very topic. The book in question is called Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. In this book, Macek shows us how the right wing in the U.S. did the ideological equivalent of turning straw into gold. The story works like this: because of a very large number of structural reasons (deindustrialization, changing ethnic face of the inner city, the expansion of the drug trade, the failures of public housing, and what we could generally call 'continued class warfare'), the inner cities in the late 20th century were facing some tough times. The right wing in the 70s and 80s took quick action, not to solve these terrible problems, but to sculpt a narrative whereby this urban catastrophe could be made out to seem like the active choice of the victims. Violent crime as a result of the drug trade? That's because inner city folk have chosen not to educate themselves. High infant mortality in the inner city? That's because the people in the inner city actively choose unhealthy ways of living. High divorce rates amongst the working class in the inner city? That's because the working class has chosen to ignore the family values that could save them. And so on.

Sometimes a book's quality can be gauged in part by considering how much pain the author must have withstood. Macek demonstrates real Herculean powers by reading, and explaining, the ideas of many of the most prominent conservative thinkers who stoked the flames of this moral panic concerning the city. He shows us the arguments of Gertrude Himmelfarb, Dinesh D'Souza, Myron Magnet, William Bennet, Charles Murray, Edward Banfield, Lawrence Mead, and others. Macek is most thorough. He demonstrates where these ideas come from (tellingly, many of them get tremendous support from right-wing think tanks), and contextualizes them in the all-too-real problems that the big cities face in the U.S. He uses the notion of 'moral panic' to explain this. The idea of a moral panic comes from Stuart Hall and Stanley Cohen, who examined moral panics in the UK. The idea was originally developed to explain how (in Cohen's words):

A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or...resorted to.

Macek does an expert job of applying this to the moral panic concerning the city. Succumbing to a right wing push, the media images about the city for years involved images of cities that fell in line with the moral panic frame of what cities had become. Magazines and newspapers reported about U.S. cities as if they were populated entirely by evil, thieving monsters. Movies made cities look like hell incarnate. And, of course, television shows (especially including the news) ratcheted up the drama even more. This could have been construed as responsible reporting, of course. If there were problems in the inner city (and, of course, there were, and are still today), then we should know about them. But the images in the media didn't just call attention to problems. With few exceptions, media outlets made the problems of the cities appear to be the result of moral decay, individual choice, utter depravity, or some kind of creeping spirit of evil. Mentions of structural problems, political processes, or anything else that pulled the emphasis away from the right-wing approach were few and far between.

One of my favorite chapters here involves how movies in the 80s and 90s cast a particularly grim light on the city. Macek provides a high level of detail to show us how movies like Seven, Mimic, and Grand Canyon portrayed the city as the kind of place you wouldn't want to go, on account of the evil, evil things that lurk there. Here I think he misses one thing. What's that one thing? It's the movie Adventures in Babysitting, starring a young Elizabeth Shue. This movie was about a babysitter and the kids she is watching over having to go into the big city (Chicago, incidentally), where (by the laws of stupid screwball comedies of the late 80s), these suburbanites get caught up in the things the movies made synonymous with the big city: organized crime, random street crime, and violent non-white people with knives and guns. Good lord is that a bad movie.

That said, Urban Nightmares is the best book I've ever read about media depictions of the city. Bravo, Steve. Keep hurtin' Bill Bennett.

2007-06-01T10:39:00.000-05:00

Fredric Wertham, Take Two

So, it's been a long time since I have blogged. There is no sufficient excuse, and I will simply get back to business...

During my absence from the blogosphere, I have developed a list of things to discuss, and it will be my pleasure during the near future to let you all in on these things.

At the very top of the list of stuff I wanna talk about is a recent book by Bart Beaty, entitled
Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. It's a pretty decent book, and it goes like this: For years, Fredric Wertham has been reviled as the psychiatrist whose expert opinion (expressed in his famous book, 1954's Seduction of the Innocent) concerning comic books and their effects on youth directly or indirectly resulted in the comic book industry's creation of the Comic Book Code, which was for years one of the most stringent censorship regimes imposed on the popular media in the U.S. The drama basically goes like this:
A) In the 1930s, comic books are invented/developed. They quickly prove popular (even during the Great Depression), attracting a large audience of moppet-like children to the adventures of Superman, Batman, and others.
B) Very quickly, a concern about the aesthetic standing of comic books prompts numerous commentators to express indignation that our youth so excitedly consume such drivel as the comic books. It should be noted that the 1940s witnessed a particular growth in the 'crime comic' genre, and genres dedicated to horror, lampoon, and war were not far behind. Significantly, the comics occasionally involved themes of graphic violence and sexuality.
C) Fredric Wertham, an established psychiatrist famous for his work as an expert psychiatric witness in criminal trials, for popular books and articles concerning psychiatric roots of crime, and for his saintly concern for the psychiatric well-being of the poor, enters the debate, supposedly blaming juvenile delinquency on comics.
D) The link between juvenile delinquency and comics is taken up by a Congressional subcommittee, headed by Robert Hendrickson, but more closely associated with Estes Kefauver, a U.S. Senator from Tennessee closely associated with investigations of organized crime, and with the wearing of coonskin caps. Wertham testifies at this subcommittee, as do numerous other figures of interest.
E) This Kefauver subcommittee ultimately recommends no legislation, but successfully prompts the comic book industry to engage in self-regulation, which took the form of the Comic Book Code.
F) Every comic book fan for years blames Fredric Wertham for the Comic Book Code, and the damage it did to creative comic book artistry.

Okay. So that's the received history. What does Beaty do with this? Quite a lot, really. Mostly, Beaty concerns himself with showing the reader how Wertham was never the kind of censorious fool he has been made out to be. To a great extent, Beaty does a great job. His weapon? That great tool of the historian: context. Beaty spends the first few chapters here showing the intellectual backdrop of Wertham's world, and emphasizing how Wertham differed from the New York Intellectuals of the mid-20th century. I think Beaty is at his best here, showing how the New York Intellectuals in many ways missed out on some of the important issues that Wertham pioneered. In particular, Wertham's concern for race and justice in the U.S. places him in stark relief against the relative ignorance (or worse) of the New York Intellectuals. Beaty's analysis here is fresh and well-supported. It's also consistent with his goal of rehabilitating the legend of Fredric Wertham.

I may as well focus on a point of disagreement between myself and Beaty. In his efforts to demonstrate the intellectual refinement and broad-mindedness of Wertham, I think Beaty goes a bit too far. For instance, Beaty observes that Wertham "never argued" that there was a causal link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Beaty is correct to point out that Wertham hedged his bets quite a bit concerning this link. But the assertion was still quite clear in Wertham's writing. At the Kefauver hearings, Wertham stated that "if it were my task...to teach children delinquency...I would have to enlist the crime comic books industry." In Seduction of the Innocent, he claimed that "our researchers have proved that there is a significant correlation between crime-comics reading and the more serious forms of juvenile delinquency." Certainly Wertham emphasized the whole environment of the child, and Beaty is right to link this to the 'social psychiatry' that Wertham practiced. Certainly Wertham's goals were not censorious, and his values were admirable. But I still don't think this gets Wertham off the hook. As an expert who testified to Congress about the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, he was naive to think that he could dictate (or even suggest) policy. He simply didn't realize his place in the drama that was unfolding, and he (I think foolishly) presumed that his expert opinion would be treated with more respect. For failing to understand the stakes in the game, I think Wertham deserves a small bit of criticism. His idealism remains an inspiration, but his understanding of the role of the expert in such a debate makes him deserve at least some small share of the blame for the Comic Book Code.

That said, I still think Beaty's book is quite excellent. Go buy it now.

I will take up another one of Beaty's theses regarding Wertham--the idea that Wertham's ideas and methods have been sandbagged out of the field of communication--sometime in the near future. It just feels good to be blogging again.

Excelsior!

2006-12-29T15:06:00.000-06:00

A SUITE OF ADORNO-RELATED IDEAS/RIFFS

It's been a while since I've posted, and even longer since I turned my attention to Adorno here. Allow me please to shock myself back into Aesthetic Theory with a suite of ideas. I have (as has been ordained by the Gods of well-organized ideas, capricious though they be) three ideas to pursue here:

1) "The Ugly, The Beautiful, and Technique". En Garde, Monsieur Scroggins!

The first thing I want to do here is to try to work more closely with one of my two partners in the Aesthetic Theory blogging. It just so happens that the section of Aesthetic Theory I read most recently ("The Ugly, The Beautiful, and Technique") seems redolent of some of the concerns often raised by poet, scholar, and blogger extraordinaire Mark Scroggins. Scroggins has been, and continues to be, concerned with what he calls "non-absorptive art". He is curious about how art can draw us in and/or push us away. And whaddyaknow? Adorno seems to deal with a number of issue relating to this issue of absorption in art in this section of Aesthetic Theory. Let's take a closer look...

As the title for this section indicates, Adorno concerns himself with the ugly and the beautiful. He addresses art's relationship to the 'ugly', which he situates as a more or less recent development. "The motive for the admission of the ugly," he claims, "was antifeudal. The peasants became a fit subject for art" (p. 48). And then he lays it down like Eddie freakin' Van Halen (a comparison I'm sure is causing fits to his undying soul...):

"Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer in order to integrate or mitigate it or to reconcile it with its own existence through humor that is more offensive than anything repulsive. Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with degradation" (p. 49).

So, here we see (in a very small slice of Adorno) an appreciation for a social function of art. Of course, Adorno avoids the use of the word 'function'. Still, a certain functional element comes through when he goes all Hitler on us (a move that he had unique authority in deploying):

"The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it. Hitler's empire put this theorem to the test, as it put the whole of bourgeois ideology to the test: The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure that the roof rested on columns."

Indeed. Here the 'ugly' gives art the power to show a society to itself, to block the tendency for an uncritical notion of beauty to become what it seems utterly impelled toward: a reification of the society's own need to forget, to deny, itself. It's significant that much of his language in this section concerns music. No doubt an oversimplified--if still useful--way to approach this would be to contrast the martial melodies preferred by Hitler youth (brassy, powerful, fitting for both the beer hall and the rally) with the modern compositions of Hindemith, Berg, and Webern. In their engagement with the ugly, the latter provided an aesthetic approach that avoided the programmed forgetfulness/ignorance of the former.

So, I pose the following question to Mark Scroggins, knowing he can answer it far better than myself: Do these categories of ugly and beautiful map onto the categories of absorptive and non-absorptive art? Might pushing the audience away (through syntax, composition, 'difficulty') with non-absorptive art be what Adorno is talking about here? If there is (as seems likely) some slippage between these two pairs of categories, what is it? And, of course, is any of this helpful for thinking about art?

2) A Response to Arnold of Brescia.

In an earlier post, I tried to find some overtones that pulled together the ideas of Adorno with those of Harold Innis, who was similarly concerned with how media of communication relate to the dimension of time. In a very thoughtful response, Arnold of Brescia observed that

i agree with Adorno on a lot but he often seems to ignore the fact that the art he loved was based on the exploitation of the masses. He often can't reconcile Adorno-as-Marxist and Adorno-as-ivory tower snob.

Right. To a great extent, Adorno is guilty as charged here. And this is one of the things that surprises me (and many others, I know) about Adorno. It's also one of the things that surprises me about reading Innis and early McLuhan. Adorno, Innis, and McLuhan were, in some ways, all conservatives. They all shared a concern that something (they varied on what the something was...) essential to the sustenance of the good was in danger of being wiped out by certain tendencies in modernity. This doesn't make exploitation of the masses a good thing in and of itself. I think Adorno might retort by saying that nothing would make the exploitation of the masses more inevitable and irreversible than the elimination of aesthetic autonomy. In the aesthetic, he saw a chance for liberation, spontaneity, true freedom. He was aware (though perhaps only occasionally aware) that Beethoven's works required somebody to mop of the floor of the concert hall. But to boil it all down into Marxian materialism would, I think, strike Adorno as a further (if strangely inverted) advance of capitalist reification. If Marx stood Hegel on his head, perhaps Adorno returned the favor...

3) Brother Archambeau Lays It Down.

In his most recent post, Bob Archambeau defends the very task of paraphrasing Adorno. So says Bob:

I know Adorno wants the kind of truth he wants to get at to be transcendent, above any commodification or reification. But I believe in the need to try to incarnate the transcendent — with the proviso that we make it plain to ourselves and others that these attempts will be innacurate — almost as innacurate as reverant silence.

As has been said so many times in discussions of how best to deal with Adorno: "I hear ya, buddy." But seriously. This is an issue that should matter a great deal to Bob, Mark, and myself. Are we in danger of being untrue to Adorno's aims if we try to pull out individual nuggets from his thought? I think we're more than 'in danger' of this. We're downright contradicting Adorno's approach, and as Bob points out, I think that's part of the value here. Perhaps if Adorno had wanted to be truly faithful to his own approach, he should have invented his own language for this purpose. Why didn't Adorno go the extra mile? Harry Partsch invented a new system of notation to get his own musical ideas into the world. I suppose the point I'll close with is simply this: Adorno (and many of his 21st century sequelae) was wisely uncomfortable with the communicative dimension of culture. He knew how easily reification could turn communication into an exercise in self-stultification. Let's not forget, though, that the avoidance of 'pure communication' (as Georges Gusdorf referred to empty verbiage) can also become a danger. At the end of the day, you gotta say something.

2006-11-29T10:29:00.000-06:00

DUCK HUNT: A METAPHOR TO HELP US UNDERSTAND HOW SCREENS ACT AS SENSORS.

I've spent the last couple weeks thinking about the video game Duck Hunt. I think Duck Hunt makes for a pretty good metaphor for what some parts of the new media environment are all about.

Duck Hunt appears, on the surface, to be simplicity itself. The player uses not a joystick, but a controller that looks like a rifle. Aiming this rifle at the screen, the player attempts to shoot a duck that flies across the screen. When a duck is successfully shot down, a hilarious-looking (and strangely gleeful) dog picks up the duck, retriving it for you. So far, so good.

Like any other twelve-year-old video game fanatic in the early eighties, the following question occurred to me: how the hell do the makers of Duck Hunt (Nintendo, I believe) configure a screen that is capable of registering the shots of the rifle? How does this screen know what is a hit and what is a miss? Is this some kind of special screen that can act as a sensor, as well as a monitor? This question became even more pressing when Duck Hunt was introduced as a home version, so that normal televisions could could 'register' the shots of the rifle on the screen. Were tv's suddenly made capable of acting as video game rifle-sensors?

Of course, the monitors/tvs never acted as 'sensors'. Instead, the process was the exact reverse of what I had assumed, and was the reverse of what shooting a duck is all about. The Staight Dope's Cecil Adams deals with this quite well:

You shoot at a duck, which appears on an ordinary TV screen. The gun is connected to the game console; pressing the trigger blackens the screen, then causes a duck-shaped white target to appear momentarily. If your aim is true, a photo sensor in the gun detects the shift from dark to light, and bingo--dead duck. In short, the TV emits the light pulse and the gun detects it, not the other way around.

So, what seems like a process of throwing out, or 'shooting,' information is actually a process of pulling it in. This leads me to the metaphor that's been haunting me for a couple of weeks. It goes like this: we think the media are only there as passive screens/speakers/whatever. But, much like the rifles in duck hunt, they're not just emitting information and culture. They're also collecting information, about us. So, as we consume media products, increasingly we find that information about us is being used to create algorithmic profiles of what we are like. This is then used to construct increasingly complex models of media consumption patterns. The process is described in detail in a number of newer sources in media studies. I think Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort (1993) and James Beniger's The Control Revolution (1986) were both prophetic in detailing how much this kind of process will come to matter. Many other scholars (too many for this very tired scholar to describe right now) have stepped in to apply similar ideas to the internet and to the information economy.

But for me it's still all about Duck Hunt. What we think is emitting, is in fact collecting.

2006-11-21T11:08:00.000-06:00

HUMOR AND IRONY IN ROCK AND ROLL: CRITICAL DARLINGS AND THE UNHEARD MUSIC

I've got a bunch more to say about Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, but today I'd rather talk about rock and roll. In particular, I have found myself spending a lot of time considering how surprised I have been with my own reaction to two albums that were released this fall: The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America & Boom Patrol, by the Slats.

I have been a big fan of the Hold Steady since my buddy Rob Sieracki burned me a copy of their first album, "Almost Killed Me." The Hold Steady's earlier incarnation, a band called Lifter Puller, is a deservedly legendary band, and Almost Killed Me struck me as an attempt to take some of the snide wittiness and riffage of Lifter Puller and apply that in the context of a kind of self-conscious classic rock motif. This album still knocks me out. At its best, it's downright hilararious, and the tunes benefit from a learned amalgamation of punk rock and early Springsteen. Their second album, Separation Sunday, was perhaps a bit too studied in its use of recurring characters and blues riffs, but I thought it was still an outstanding record.

This fall brought the third Hold Steady full-length, Boys and Girls in America. For the first time, the music, the lyrics, the timbre of the guitar, and the gestalt of the lp all strike me as underwhelming. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that this record has also been the subject of numerous fawning profiles of the band in middle-brow publications from coast to coast. Like the White Stripes, Wilco, and the Flaming Lips, the Hold Steady are one of the small number of bands that folks in their mid-thirties are told it is okay to like. Why is it okay to like them? Because, we are told, they are smart, and mature, and did we mention they were smart?, and they use irony (hmmm...), and their song-writing involves a mature synthesis of elements we thirty-something folks should get: punk, classic rock, new wave, and more.

But there's a problem, I think. I think The Hold Steady have gotten so self-aware that they've actually gotten hung up on themselves. Whatever edginess they may have had--in the form of riffs or in the form of sarcasm/insight--seems to have been replaced with the dull sense that they're simply putting together a classic rock album with quotes around it. The whole record (title included) seems to say: "Hey, this is like a classic rock thing, and you should enjoy it in the same way the hipsters at a dive bar enjoy it when a Meatloaf song comes up on the jukebox." It reminds me of the 'wink, wink' sarcasm that tv commercials developed after Letterman made irony safe in the mid-1980s. There's irony IN this stuff, obviously. However, the irony is so toothless and self-referential that it fails to serve any aesthetic purpose besides self-aggrandisement (or, even worse, populist audience-aggrandisement). The irony OF this album is that, by assembling an album of tunes that constantly allude to hook-filled, riffy, bluesy, exciting rock music, the Hold Steady have created a record that is smoothed over and boring. They have taken a long walk off the surprisingly short pier of irony in rock. I know they're creative enough to do better in the future; I hope they do so.

If the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America is my disappointment of the year, the Slats' Boom Patrol is my most pleasant surprise of the year. Like the Hold Steady, the Slats attempt to be funny, and they make specific references to existing genres. On Boom Patrol, they seem more than ever to be embracing their goal to capture the specific sound of new wave music in 1981 (seriously: they specify 1981 as the year they want to sound like). And, of course, it's worth pointing out that few people seem to take the Slats seriously. Perhaps this is because there's little reason to take them seriously at all. They're a jokey band, with a simple approach: poppy, anthemic songs, usually with some kind of humorous slant. They're from Iowa City and Minneapolis, hardly the centers of the rock intelligentsia. At WMXM (the college radio station where I have a show), the Slats record came to us from a promotional company called Pirate, who are not regarded as a likely source of quality music. So, I started with pretty low expectations with the Slats.

But man, this Boom Patrol album brings it. The fun thing (for me, and for this little essay) is how Boom Patrol mirrors some of the tendencies on the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America. Both bands try to be funny, both quote pop music history, and both relate to the tradition of punk rock. But whereas the Hold Steady seem to have attempted to swallow a dinosaur in order to sound like dinosaur rock, the Slats manage on Boom Patrol to be cocksure in their simultaneous lampooning of and tribute to cock rock. A great example is the song "Call My Telephone," which has every single element of 1981 power pop that one could imagine. First of all: IT'S ACTUALLY ABOUT USING THE TELEPHONE. Strangely astute, this observation: pop songs in the early 1980s were very much hung up on (pardon the pun) telephony (cf. "Call Me," "867-5309," and plenty of songs by the Cars and the Romantics). Secondly, the song involves the structure of a carefully-crafted new wave song. The introduction is ridiculously involved, the call and response between lead singers and backup singers is utterly anthemic, and the blunt directness of the whole thing puts one in the mind of Gary Numan on one of his rare happy days.

What does all this tell us about punk, about irony, about rock? Perhaps not much. But still, I think we have in these two records a good contrast between music that attempts to coast on irony that increasingly isn't there (Boys and Girls in America) and music whose unpretentious sense of humor reminds us why wit and irony aren't such bad things after all (Boom Patrol).

2006-11-13T10:15:00.000-06:00

ADORNO'S PLEA FOR TIME: ADORNO AND INNIS

In what remains a peculiarly Sisyphean adventure, allow me please to continue moving forward with some blogging notes on Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. First, I would like to address some tendencies that have already developed in the blogging on this (something I'm doing with Mark Scroggins and Bob Archambeau, poets both). Then, I'm going to move on with some notes on the second section from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, a section that is entitled "Situation".

First, some notes on the blogging experience. Scroggins, Archambeau, and I have quickly developed a pattern of simply going over what Adorno puts forth in Aesthetic Theory. What I think will develop over time will be a more gnarled and involved set of blogging strategies, wherein the three of us begin commenting not just on Adorno's writings, but also on each other's understandings of Adorno's writings. One hopes that Adorno's penchant for the dialectical insight could be burnished by an intertwining set of critical notes on Aesthetic Theory. Those who enjoy rhyzomic discourses should enjoy this, I think. But for now, I think it's reasonable simply to expect a few more weeks of trying to get a grasp on what Adorno is all about in this book, with a slowly emerging critical dialogue soon to come.

Now, let's get to the second section of Aesthetic Theory: "Situation". This section features more of an emphasis on instantiation than the first section, and Adorno's ideas here link up quite explicitly with those of Walter Benjamin and (I say) those of the great media theorist/historian/whatever Harold Innis.

Adorno begins this "Situation" section with a riff on the autonomy of art. He is concerned that the seeming autonomy of art in the 20th century is but an illusion, a vestige of the proper autonomy art once briefly had. What Adorno wants in art is more distance from the "viewer" (p. 16). Allow me please to start splitting hairs here. Adorno at times conflates all art into one category. Can all art be 'viewed'? I submit that music is not viewed, per se. Is this conflation a problem? Perhaps it will be, for Adorno. I argue that Adorno moves from artistic medium to artistic medium, and blows off some of the distinctions between them. If Adorno were only concerned with visual art, this would not be much of a problem. We would be able to bracket his insights as relevant only to the visual arts (what, after all, a lot of folks simply call 'art'), and move on. But let's keep in mind that Adorno wishes to address literature and music as much as any other arts. Are these media 'viewed'? I think that's a warping of the term.

This all becomes (I hope) something more than an exercise in 'gotcha' polemics when moving on to the broader question that is prompted by this: might the loss of autonomy that Adorno describes work differently in different media? This is Adorno totalizing a bit too much, I think. Adorno seems to argue that art in general is losing its autonomy because of the encroachment of the culture industry (significantly, a term he uses for the first time in this book just before this quote I'm dealing with). He does not allow that there may be some differences between different media in this. It's like some master switch has tied the essence of all art together, and ruined it all at once. I suggest that the process he describes--to the extent that it can be said to exist--is almost certainly more messy. Music, painting, literature, printmaking, cinema, photography, dance, and other media involve different phenomenological routines, and even if they were all undermined by the master switch of late/capitalist modernism, should we not expect that this effect would be differently timed or differently inflected across different media? Adorno seems to blow this off (so far...).

A much bigger idea in this section puts me in the mind of Harold Innis's "Plea for Time" in contemporary culture. Allow me please first to summarize some relevant bits of Innis. Innis addressed what he saw as two dimensions of media: time-binding and space-binding. The time-binding dimension is the dimension that allows certain message to reach out over time. Hieroglyphics (or any kind of symbol system carved into rock) was particularly time-binding, because it lasted for a long time. Wanna know what happened a very long time ago? Wanna know what the values are that are important to a society and have kept it together for hundreds of years? You'll want to look at what they've carved into rock. It's no accident that Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with a couple tablets of God's word (and not, say, a post-it, or a voice-mail). The space-binding dimension referred to how media move through space. Here a classic important development was papyrus (which could be moved very far, without much trouble), but electronic media (telegraph through internet) are particularly space-binding because they move messages everywhere. Want to expand an empire (be it the British empire or the image empire loosely associated with the U.S.)? Space-binding media can help you with that.

The almost-always pessimistic Innis (and the early McLuhan with him) was concerned that modern culture had lost touch with tradition, throwing time-bound ideas away in favor of the evanescent vagaries of electronic media. Why pay attention to the Ten Commandments when you've got this great YouTube video of some college sophomore lip-synching to 50 Cent while standing on his head? The culture of critical discourse (to write Alvin Gouldner onto Innis) disappears without some kind of time-bound grounding.

This idea can be quite easily compared to Adorno's concerns about art and tradition. Adorno tells us in Aesthetic Theory that "the experience of the modern...does not...negate previous artisitic practices, as styles have done throughout theages, but rather tradition itself; to this extent it simply ratifies the bourgeois principle in art" (p. 17). The emphasis on time becomes more clear later, when Adorno notes that

"it is not only reactionary rancor that provokes horror over the fact that the longing for the new represses duration. The effort to create enduring masterpieces has been undermined. What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place. There is all the less reason to call on tradition, in that retroactively countless works once endowed with the qualities of endurance--qualities the concept of classicism strove to encompass--no longer open their eyes" (p. 27)

So, some factors outside of art proper--like, society, man--have killed the potential for the kind of conversation over the longue duree that Adorno identifies as crucial to the sustenance of the autonomy of art. Here the parallel to Innis is (for a hack like myself) irresistable. Like Innis, Adorno charts a path by which ideas (in this case, art) has become much less involved with itself. Art that is informed by tradition, and uses tradition as a launching pad for its own revolution, becomes impossible because our society doesn't work that way any more. Innis and Adorno both identify modern capitalism as the culprit for this, and they both speak in the somber tones of the narrative of decline. Innis wanted a gyroscope to be installed in our society (I should point out that this metaphor is David Riesman's), so as to prevent us from losing our balance. Adorno wanted our art to maintain touch with the traditional because without it all art would become little more than the kind of carnival distraction that subverts the very potential of autonomy/creativity/spontaneity/individuality.

So, there you have it. What I find particularly enjoyable about the comparisons between Innis and Adorno is how well Innis fills in some of the gaps that Adorno leaves in here. Innis gives us a political economy and a media perspective that Adorno leaves out, in favor of a focusd discussion of the phenomenological and the historical.

Having done this, I find myself bummed out.

More soon on popular music, and probably something else.

2006-10-09T11:40:00.000-05:00

BROTHER THEODOR.

My brothers-in-arms (or, if you will, brothers-in-armchairs) Bob Archambeau and Mark Scroggins are blogging on the topic of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, and they have invited me to join them. I am, of course, honored by the invitation, and I hope to keep things lively in this difficult--even far-fetched--approach to blogging. Because Scroggins and Archambeau are both poets and aesthetes, and I am a social scientist, there is every chance that my responses to Adorno will be quite different from theirs. So be it, let strength be found in differences, eh?

Scroggins was the first of we 3 Musketeers to blog on Aesthetic Theory. Scroggins called careful attention to some of the basics of the first section of the Hullot-Kentor (U Minnesota, 1997) translation of Aesthetic Theory, entitled "Art, Society, Aesthetics". Scroggins notes that Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's last work, and calls attention to the absurdity of even trying to sum up this work. Trying to get to the topic sentence here puts one in the mind of the old Python gag, the 'Summarizing Proust' competition. Aesthetic Theory was written in manner that seems entirely consistent with its view of aesthetics. My attempts to cull main themes, arguments, and examples from the text will no doubt leave poor Theodor spinning in his grave. As I pore over Adorno's text, I fear I must be approaching it in a manner not entirely dissimilar from Karl Lazarsfeld, Adorno's one-time colleague at Columbia, during the exile years. My knee-jerk reaction to such a text is simply: 'Great. What are you describing here? What can one do with this?' It's not surprising that Adorno moved back to Germany...

I suppose the first thing to say about the opening section of Aesthetic theory is simply to call attention to a tendency in the field of communication (and, I'm sure, in sociology, as well; perhaps in English?) to ignore Adorno's writings on aesthetics. Scroggins is wise to point out that "Adorno's critiques of the 'culture industry,' for which he might be best known in some quarters of the American academy, are like a mouse to the elephant of his music criticism." This is right on. Though 'the culture industry' is but one chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is Adorno's writings on music that seemed to interest him the most. For this reason, I believe it is best to approach Aesthetic Theory as the ground on which any smaller works such as "The Culture Industry" could be fixed.

Aesthetic Theory features a number of features that frustrate almost any reader, and particularly frustrate the American reader: a steadfast dialectical logic, sentences long enough to break your arm, paragraphs long enough to act as mobius strips of neo-Hegelianism turned on its head two-times, and a devilish allusiveness that dates the text while successfully situating it in the 'big discourse' on aesthetics (overtones of Aristotle, Nietzche, Kant can be detected everywhere). Still and all, I'm reading it, and no one can stop me.

One good thing about a work so intransigent is the fact that, because of the intense filigree of verbiage, the commentator is allowed any number entries onto the text. There is a strange feeling of comfort that comes with allowing the text to flow over you, knowing that the dialectic will eventually work its way in.

Adorno's opening salvo is the "Art, Society, Aesthtics" section. Amongst other things, Adorno works with the idea of autonomy in art. He is no stranger to the irony of the workings of autonomy. This is particlarly apparent when he describes how "the autonomy [art] achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished by the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered" (p. 1) So, we're left with the idea of an art that briefly became autonomous, freed from the cultic demands and the courtier spirit. But before long, the very ideal of humanity turned art's autonomy into a mockery of itself. Because art reflects the society in which it is made (one gets the sense that Adorno hates even alluding to a fact so mundane), and because modern society lacks the very ideals that could potentially animate an art worth it's name, we get a self-avowed autonomous art that is really anything but.

But doesn't this doomy approach to art simply force Adorno to give us some kind of definition of art? What is art? This is an important question, and one that Adorno is willing to address (but not willing to answer). He says that "Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to whgat it is not" (p. 3). Again, note the dialectic logic at work here. What art is can be best understood through a thorough review of what it is not. Does this mean we get a couple hundred pages of Theodor giving yes or no questions to what art is NOT? (Here one might imagine Adorno being shown a chicken, and being asked, "How 'bout this?". "NO," says Theodor. "How 'bout this rock?" "NO," says Theodor. And so on...) Of course not. He's simply (or not so simply) trying to get to the notion of rejection that lies at the heart of anything as autonomous as the art he imagines to be worthy of the name.

As a communication theorist, much of this is fascinating. Adorno insists quite blankly that "The communication of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted" (p. 5). I might suggest that 'noncommunication' might be a bit much. He gets closer to le mot juste when he notes that "Artworks participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: they do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them" (p. 5). Their artifice, in other words, redeems them. Their existence in a system of art, their relation to other artworks, and the fact that this makes them non-transparent refractions of a social order, a means of production, and much else, gives them their value. Here we see a modernism that is such high modernism, one can barely imagine it. Art is not there to do stuff for us (give us pleasure, give us justice, help us find the elected official who will finally pick up all that trash that's getting piled up outside). Art's value comes from its autonomy, which Adorno seems to think can be found in its refractory powers. If it's communicating in a straight-forward way, it's not doing its job. Because the "unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form," (p. 6) we wind up with a vision of art here that is straight-forwardly difficult. The artifice in art can, at its best, seal it off from the heteronmy that is always ready to take over.

Art that demands to be experienced in an 'easy' or 'direct' manner has problems. As Adorno says,

While the artwork's sensual appeal seemingly brings it close to the consumer, it is alienated from him by being a commodity that he possesses and the loss of which he must constantly fear. The false relation to art is akin to anxiety over possession. The fetishistic idea of the artwork as property that can be possessed and destroyed by reflection has its exact correlative in the idea of exploitable property within the psychological economy of the self. (p. 13)

Hence, what Adorno seems to think of as a minor paradox: art that is alienated is often experienced as 'closer', as more direct; art that is autonomous ('serious music'?) is often experienced as 'distant'.

I often amuse myself when faced with difficult prose by imagining myself hearing some difficult chunk of prose being read to me, and then responding with a dismissive wave of the hand, and then saying, "Yes, well, this is all very interesting..." It's difficult to know what to say about this. What I would like to offer as a final thought here would be an appreciation of what all of this tells us about Adorno's other writings on communication processes, especially those writings in Dialectic of Enlightenment. What we find (so far, a mere 15 pages into the text of Aesthetic Theory) is an Adorno who is perhaps even more gloomy than some communication scholars are prepared to accept (excellent exception to this is John Durham Peters in Canonic Texts in Media Research). We find Adorno disappointed not just with mass culture (a term I don't think he uses here at all), but with art in general. This is not an instrumental, 'eat your spinach' approach to art, with Adorno advising to fortify our diets by listening daily to Schonberg (after all, this was a man who loved his joyous Mozart). Adorno has no problem with sensuous pleasure at all here. The problem comes from the encroachment of a dehumanizing social order onto a system of art whose ideal of autonomy no longer applies (except as a kind of crude self-ironizing mockery that apparently few can appreciate). In a sense, Adorno is so pessimistic about the prospects of a 'real' art that even 'lower' arts get off easy. If you think the whole world is lost, it makes little sense to single out any part of it.

More soon. I'll be trying to keep up with Scroggins and Archambeau as we all blog more on Aesthetic Theory. And, of course, there's so much more to talk about...

2006-09-21T13:24:00.000-05:00

THE VENTURE BROTHERS & KORGOTH: TOOTHLESS SATIRE SAVES THE DAY

This blog of mine has not dealt very much with 'media criticism' as of yet, and it's time to change that. I just got TiVo a couple weeks ago, and it has given me an opportunity to catch up on my television. This is, I think, a very good thing. Television is a "most wondrous" thing, to warp a quote from Dewey. To try to explain (to myself and others) why I enjoy the shows I do presents a challenge to my writing ability.

Much of my television viewing time is spent watching old movies. TiVo picks these up like crazy, and I love them. But talking about how I use TiVo to record old movies is only slightly less irritating than hearing others (especially academics) explain how (or, even worse, why) they don't watch tv.

So, let me address two programs that I truly love: The Venture Brothers and Korgoth of Barbaria. Both are featured shows in the Cartoon Network's famed 'Adult Swim' showcase. Both are clearly geared toward male audiences. Both take a spoofy nonchalance in their tweaking of the formulaic pop culture of an earlier time. Venture Brothers is, quite clearly, an updated Johnny Quest. Korgoth of Barbaria is a Frank Frazetta painting, put into motion, with a lot of Mobius-inspired art thrown in for good measure. There is a familiar (boring?) postmodern twiddling of the knobs to be found here. The Venture Brothers involves a more blatantly sexual, more blatantly violent, more blatantly stupid version of Johnny Quest. Jokes move quickly as Dr. Venture and his two sons (Dean and Hank), with the help of their bodyguard (Brock Samson), face the dangers inherent in the life of a super-scientist. Korgoth involves somewhat less of an alteration of the subject, with storylines that actually could have come right from the pages of Heavy Metal, or from EC comics in the late 1950s.

The thing is this: why would anyone (myself included) enjoy a parody of Johnny Quest or of Heavy Metal magazine? Why so many belly-laughs from a satire of two pop culture phenomena that almost no one remembers anyway? I think it all has to do with the enjoyment we get out of fluency in cultural codes. This is nothing too complicated. Both shows (correctly or not) interpellate the viewer as someone who can speak the language of Johnny Quest and Heavy Metal. References to these minor cultural touchstones ooze out of every second of each show. From the clothes that Dean and Hank Venture wear, to the design of the jet they use to cruise from adventure to adventure, to art design, to the (Jim Thirwell-composed) music that scores the show, The Venture Brothers invites us to recognize the authors' (and our own) fluency in the cultural codes of 'adventure' cartoon of the 1960s. Korgoth is equally-studied in its particular references to Heavy Metal. Sunsets and sunrises are blood-red. Women are all ridiculously curvy and they do not speak. The battle axe is the weapon of choice. Magicians keep a tight grip over their castles. And so on. Korgoth's creators' attention to detail demands to be respected.

What are we to make of this? I don't think I've ever convinced anyone that either of these shows is funny. I don't think I'm every likely to. When popular culture involves this much reference to pre-existing codes, it's unlikely to get much more praise than a Quentin Tarantino movie. Still, it's fun to see the play in all these cliches, even if, before long, it all becomes more like a game of cards than the kind of trmendously meaningful experience someone like Adorno would have preferred. The utterly pre-fabricated has a spontaneousness all its own.

OH, AND SPEAKING OF ADORNO:
In the near future, along with two other bloggers, I will be writing on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. That oughta be something. Stay tuned, web-slingers.

2006-09-15T15:00:00.000-05:00

CRITICAL STUDIES GETS CRITICAL, PART II.

A couple posts ago, I promised I'd say something about Sari Thomas' piece in the critical forum section of Critical Studies in Media Communication 23(2). Here goes:

Thomas addresses Matt Carlson's piece on journalists KIA in Iraq. She critiques what she seems to see as a broader theme in communication research. Working from Robert Merton's ideas regarding the attractiveness of 'middle range' propositions/theories, Thomas suggests that media scholars pay more attention to how theory is generated in the field. As Thomas puts it: "If theory is as important as we write and teach, it is ironic that it is the least overtly regulated aspect of scholarly inquiry--that it is the one activity in which everything seems to cleave to authorial and/or editorial choices."

I'm ready to stop right here and point out that I don't think "ironic" is the word for this. Indeed, it is the autonomy of the profession that encourages us to find new interpretations, to seek out theoretical approaches that do not line up so closely with what has already been established. Already, Thomas seems to be asserting a classic hypothesis-driven approach to comm research.

This idea that Thomas is doing battle for a hypothesis-driven approach is given further support by Thomas' next point, that 'progressiveness', as found in the sciences (Thomas provides the example of Kepler --> Galileo --> Newton --> Einstein), could be generated/mimicked/attempted in media scholarship by making sure that "contextualization includes all reasonable work challenging one's position." Thomas stops short of saying that media research should be as progressive as physics. But she wants an approach to the media that can at least establish what it is NOT saying. Makes sense to me.

Thomas' other rationale here is 'administrative'. She argues that media researchers would become stronger in academe if it could "develop whatever intrinsic strengths they can to remain as competitive as possible in the academic corporation." As she puts it, "the development of methodology for theory could be part of this process--if only because, again, it is something we can do. It has the potential to enhance our disciplinary oeuvre, in general. Moreover, extending our work to, or integrating it with, more established theory might help our literal 'corporate' extension." The point here is that we'll become an academic juggernaut if we bake our cookies the old fashioned way: with the kind of elbow grease the other disciplines will respect.

Thomas then goes on to show how Carlson's piece on KIA journalists lacks some of the things that might make media research more of a success. The criticism is measured, intelligent, and mostly persuasive.

Still, I challenge Thomas' critical standpoint. My first critique deals with Thomas' preference for more 'progressiveness' in media research. I will warn you: my critique will be weak, because I largely agree with her. However, it is a telling moment when she says that enhanced progressiveness in media research will "[throw] theorizing off the endless cycle of paradigm repetition." Here we see Thomas subtly asserting a social science identity for media research. In essence, the humanities would favor the kind of endless cycle (i.e. hermeneutic circle) Thomas describes. That's what humanities do well. In this sense, Thomas is subtly claiming all media research for the social sciences. Not an indefensible point of view, but let's keep in mind that this critical forum is printed in a publication of the National Communication Association, which has frequently been run/edited by rhetoricians. This is significant. Would all humanities-based media scholarship fail to advance media research? I'm not so sure.

My other critique addresses Thomas' peculiar belief that a more rule-oriented kind of theorizing would make media research a stronger discipline/field/whatever. I'm not sure about this. Thomas herself makes clear that the current predicament of media studies is what it is largely because of factors outside of the control of the field. Exogenous factors have been terrifically important to the contours of media research, and they will continue to be. More rule-directed theorizing will not change that. Additionally, I'm reminded of John Durham Peters' comments regarding the state of communication research when I read of Thomas' concerns for media research. Peters laments that communication is populated by so many priests, and so few prophets. Might not the prominence and autonomy of media scholarship be assisted employing BOTH a bunch of scholars who take Thomas' suggested careful approach to theorizing AND a bunch of more free-wheeling grand theorists who give 'em hell? I'm going to end on this not-very-controversial note.

2006-09-05T13:33:00.000-05:00

THE HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION RESEARCH: THE ESSENTIAL ONLINE RESOURCE

Some of you know that I am currently putting together a volume concerning the history of mass communication research. In this arena, I think I do pretty well. However, nobody has anything on (my co-editor for this forthcoming volume) Jeff Pooley. Pooley's a sharp guy, and he has done the field of communication a huge favor by creating an online resource dedicated to the history of mass communication research.

This resource, called historyofcommunicationresearch.org, is exactly what anyone looking into these histories would dare to hope for. It's a database, with an extensive bibliography of research on the history of the field. It's searchable. It's not ridiculously big, so you don't get the mere illusion of a helpful website. You get the complete (compleat?) list of the research on the history of the field.

I suppose the first question on my mind is the question that always occurs to engineers when they are presented with some new bit of physics or math: WHAT CAN I DO WITH THIS?

The first thing I've done with Jeff's invaluable resource is to see what I've missed by such luminaries in the field of the history of mass comm, including David Morrison, Bill Buxton, and J. Michael Sproule. In the future, this will serve as a guide to understand what parts of the history of communication studies have not been covered yet. It will also be an important tool for anyone hoping to assemble a lit review on any part of this field. Look no further for a starting place, young (and old) historians of the field.

Jeff has helpfully made the site RSS-enabled, so you can subscribe to it, and find out when he enters still more citations into this wealth of bibliographical work.

Thanks, Jeff. Keep up the good work.

Excelsior!

2006-08-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

Critical Studies in Media Communication Gets A Critical Forum, or "I Want To Get Critical"

What is still the most recent issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication features an article by the afore-mentioned Matt Carlson. Carlson's article addresses constructions of journalistic authority as found in news stories concerning the war-related deaths of David Bloom and Michael Kelly. The article itself is most excellent: there's a careful application of Barbie Zelizer-ian ideas of journalistic authority and a precise use of the texts under consideration. Bravo, Matt.

But the thing I want to talk about here is the critical forum that comes at the end of this issue of CSMC. After a short introduction by Jack Lule, Michael Schudson and Sari Thomas offer some critical insights about Carlson's article.

Having a critical forum was, I think, somewhat of a bold move on behalf of the editors of CSMC. CSMC began including critical fora in each issue when Linda Steiner took over as editor and Jack Lule took over as critical forum editor with the March 2005 issue. Clearly, the editors thought it was time to shake things up a bit. I think it's been a success, and has helped those who read CSMC to take a more careful view of their own field (and, let's hope, broaden their critical horizons).

This critical forum on Carlson's article finds Schudson being concise and precise,quick to bring up the difficult issue. He writes

I am persuaded by Carlson's work that the media's accounts of the deaths in Iraq of journalists David Bloom and Michael Kelly were rhetorical constructions that emphasized the valor and sacrifice of people who take it as their professional obligation to witness the events of war, on behalf of the broad American public and on behalf of the principles of democracy. Even so, I find myself impressed that these two men (and many others) who had already proved themselves, who were by no means forced or cajoled to put themselves in danger, chose to take the risks they did. Whatever the rhetorical work in which the media engaged, they had very solid materials to work with! Bloom and Kelly, by any conventional understanding of the term, were courageous.

The point, as I read Schudson here, is that it's not like Kelly and Bloom were schlub #1 and schlub #2 being turned into heroes of the people. Schudson seems to be trying to get to some of the epistemological presuppositions at work here, and hinting that the flexibility with reality that is implied in research into rhetorical constructions can be a bit off the mark. Some stuff, he seems to say, actually does happen, and we lose something (not sure what exactly) if we presume that our constructions of reality are entirely of our own making. He's picking away at the stubborn constructivst assumptions at the root of much current cultural work in communication. Schudson is a humble provocateur.

Sari Thomas writes the other critical reflection on Carlson's article. I'll post on that very soon.

2006-08-21T12:35:00.000-05:00

FIVE UNDER-NOTICED BOOKS IN COMMUNICATION.

I'd like to follow up on the call (from the International Journal of Communication) to identify five under-noticed books in communication. In a sense, this is not a very flattering category for these books. There is the danger of making it seem as if publishers had not done enough to promote the books, or as if authors had not done enough to make their ideas clearly relevant to the field of communication. That said, when I consider the neglect involved in these books' shared status as 'under-noticed,' I point the finger of blame not at publishers or authors, but at that ever-convenient bete noir: my field of study. 'Blaming the field' is a way to blame the victim and the perpetrator at the same time. So, I feel good and bad about it.

Without further ado, here is my list of five under-noticed books from the last decade (except for one from 1990). As with my top 5 books in communication in the last ten years, these are in no particular order.

1) Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Polity, 2005), ed. by Rodney Benson & Erik Neveu. I am an ardent believer in the proposition that Pierre Bourdieu's should be integrated more fully into media studies. It is gratifying to see an edited volume that picks up on this idea and runs with it. I think edited volumes are too often neglected when we try to identify important works in the field's past. And this one's a corker. Great chapters from French and American authors, including Patrick Champagne, Julien Duval, Dan Hallin, and Michael Schudson (who plays the familiar role of 'he who is not quite sure about all this hubbub' without being a stick in the mud). Journalism studies could use more theoretical armature (i.e. kill me before I have to read another straight-up public sphere article in journalism studies).

2) Redeeming Modernity (Sage, 1990), by Joli Jensen. An approachable and readable introduction to mass communication theory that serves double-duty as a subtly subversive reimagination of the field. Were Jensen less creative, she might have called this "What We Talk About When We Talk About the Media". It's from more than 10 years ago--thus outside of the 'last decade' stipulation--but still worth more attention.

3) The Digital Sublime (MIT, 2004), by Vincent Mosco. Solid new media theory, dealing critically and directly with how myths of cyberspace have quickly become installed as common sense. Much of this is meta-theory, but Mosco is too good a polemicist to allow himself to slip into navel-gazing. Fantastic.

4) CODE: Collaborate Ownership and the Digital Economy (MIT, 2005), edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. Perhaps a chaser of (relative) optimism after Mosco's critical perspective? This isn't all sunshine and happiness, but the authors here, at their best, capture some of what makes new media novel. The book covers a very broad swath: creativity, mechanisms for collaboration, and intellectual property are the big ideas. There's some real mind-bending stuff on how creativity operates in this volume. Admittedly, it's not that much of a 'communication' book (I don't think any of the authors are communication professors or grad students), but so what? The field can stand to learn from other disciplines.

5) The Audible Past (Duke, 2004), by Jonathan Sterne. This is the definitive cultural history of sound reproduction. It's a rich narrative here (perhaps in need of more trimming), with an abiding concern for what we construct as 'sound' and 'not sound'. I found it unsettling to realize how much history is embedded in my own near-constant experience of sound reproduction.

That's it for now. I don't think these five books have found the audience they deserve, yet. I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot.

2006-08-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

KIDS THESE DAYS: INDIETORRENTS AHOY!

One of the great things about studying the media (especially 'new media', as they are called) is the chance to see new uses for media develop over time. One new 'app' that I have experienced (vicariously, through one of my students) is a phenomenon called Indietorrents.

What is Indietorrents? Glad you asked. Indietorrents is a strangely functional (yet terribly rude) community of like-minded music lovers who have found a new way to engage in peer-to-peer file-sharing. This community uses bit-torrent software, which is a kind of peer-to-peer file transfer code. These bit-torrents are used to share full cds (usually) of music. Music is both uploaded (seeded) and downloaded (leeched).

What's totally fascinating here is the machismo that is involved in this. There is a maximum number of 10,000 members of indietorrents, making it a pretty exclusive group. As if they needed to make it more exclusive, membership is only extended to those who have been invited to join indietorrents by other members. That's impressive. Furthermore, once you are a member, it seems remarkably easy to be kicked out (instantly, and sometimes forever) due to a) failure to provide new music for other members, b) saying something stupid in the online chat interface that is part of indietorrents, c) not maintaining enough activity on an account, or d) any other reason that occurs to the sysop. The mood of this group strikes me as overwhelmingly male, educated, and pretentious. And, of course, that's fine. [note: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member]

Oh, and they come up with a relatively interesting way to protect themselves from record industry litigation. It seems that record labels (and artists? licensing companies?) can remove their artists from the indietorrents community. The question posed to the music industry here is: will indietorrents help or hinder them? I have no answer to this question (yet).

So, is this indietorrents thing interesting? I think so. I suppose what I find so interesting, after a few months of hearing about this, is how the community has survived through strict enforcement of a relatively elaborate (though clearly laid out) set of rules. It would be very much interesting to see what kinds of music becomes popular on indietorrents, and what flops entirely. Is this format supporting certain sounds/communities/regions/ideas more than others? And how does this shape relate to the structures set up by the indietorrents community? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also interesting is the idea of 'indie' to be found on indietorrents. It should strike most of you as familiar. As their FAQ states...

Many of you have wondered what the indie stands for? I must admit originally it was intended to imply indie as in the indie rock genre. That was way back in the beginning days of this tracker. Since then we have grown significantly and with that we have somewhat changed what we think the indie stands for. We think of indie as in the term independence. Independence from the big corporate record labels. Independence from the commercialization of our music. Independence from the corrupting metality of the corporate marketing assholes. Be it doom metal, indie pop, grindcore, world beat or experimental noise, keep that indpenendent spirit and you are what we call indie. Keep it off a major record label and your indie can be shared here.

This is about enough to make any good media researcher's bullshit detector go off loudly and visibly. The glib division of music into 'indie' and 'corporate,' the cloying presumption that there is a wide variety of music here ('doom metal...experimental noise') that probably hides a certain tendency (or two) in the music that actually is downloaded (as boring and pretentious as those people who say they listen to 'everything,' which is always a dodge), and the presumption that 'corporate' music actually does something bad to people are all familiar tropes.

But what is this "independence" described here? Of what are they independent? And in what manner might this independence matter to them, or to anyone else? This is a question facing indietorrents and just about everyone else who proclaims to be part of a 'diy' or 'independent' cultural formation. For those (like me) who believe that independence is indeed worth something, it is frustrating to see it spoken of in such a pretentious manner. Can we do any better than this?

2006-08-11T16:37:00.000-05:00

FIVE BOOKS OF NOTE

Larry Gross, once my advisor at Penn, now my enduring sensei, posted to the cultstud listserv recently. In this post, Larry announced the coming of a new online journal of communication. It will be called the International Journal of Communication (one is to be thankful for unpretentious journal names), and it looks like the official launch will be this fall. They're looking for review and manuscript submissions now. I'm sure the IJoC will be worth watching. Larry's editing with Manuel Castells, and it's a stellar board of editors (and advisory board). So, good.

As editor of the IJoC, Larry invites communication scholars to "send us brief [or longer] notes on the following two topics: the five most important books in your area in the past decade...; and/or the most important but overlooked books in your areas of interest." Never one to fail Larry in his hour of need, I offer my list of what I think are the most important books in my area (call it 'media studies') in the last decade. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Speaking Into the Air, by John Durham Peters (1999).
This book has the kind of breathtaking scope you wish books actually had when you read reviews that describe 'breathtaking scopes'. Peters holds a huge houserockin' party in the run-down shack that is communication theory, and he invites everybody: Adorno, St. Augustine, Derrida, Emerson, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Josiah Royce, William Blake, and geez, all kinds of other folks. But this is not just some name-check jamboree. Peters has a quill full of arguments, and he's out to slay a number of dragons (and perhaps bring others to life). Great quote: "that we are destined to interpret, and that interpretation will always involve our desires and their conflicts, does not signal a fall from the supposed grace of immediacy; it is a description of the very possibility of interaction." Yup.

2. The Media and Modernity, by John B. Thompson (1995).
Thompson offers us, with this book, a very successful attempt to reconsider all of modernity in terms of media processes. He takes a multi-perspectival, but recognizably socoiological, approach to communication, and he throws a mean old knuckleball (not fast, but curve galore) at some of the more faddish approaches to media theory. Thompson integrates tremendous variety of social scientific perspectives on communication. There's a lot in this book that isn't very surprising. But in its own way, it re-shapes what can be thought of as figure and ground in media theory and research.

3. The Good Citizen, by Michael Schudson (1998).
Schudson's writing style is quite recognizable. Effortlessly intelligent, pugnacious without being snotty, surprisingly controversial, Schudson here traces the history of "american civic life". We've seen this kind of thing before, of course. But Schudson's not interested in the dime-a-dozen narrative of civic decline. The book is hopeful about civic life, and remains steadfast in the most Schudsonian mode of all: skepticism about the great promise of 'dialogue'.

4. Canonic Texts in Media Research, ed. by Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Tamar Liebes, and Avril Orloff (2003).
This is a rather widely-read collection of chapters concerning what could be taken as the canon of media research. The volume gives us truly thouhtful reconsiderations of works that are sometimes thought to be too dusty to be worth it. We get Peter Simonson and Gabriel Weimann on Lazarsfeld & Merton's "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action"; John Durham Peters's subtle take on Horkheimer & Adorno's "The Culture Industry"; and Menahem Blondheim's altogether brilliant reflections on Harold Innis's notion of the bias of communication. This book raises more questions that it could hope to answer (questions about canonization's desirability and pitfalls, the field of communication's frustrating lack of concern with its own history, and much else), and one hopes that that is the point.

5. Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins (2006). It's a Henry Jenkins book, and it concerns new media and old media being pulled together. I rarely agree with Jenkins entirely (and, of course, he should not care whether I do or not), but he's a great writer, and he gets his fingernails dirty with what it is that interests me about current directions in popular culture. His understanding of convergence is very well-grounded in much time spent looking at things from the audience's point of view. I think this will be essential reading for some time.

I'm likely to revise this list. More on unheard-of stuff soon.

2006-08-07T10:15:00.000-05:00

AUTONOMY AND HETERONOMY: ANXIETY RECONSIDERED

After my last post, an attempt to apply the notion of 'the aesthetic anxiety' to communication studies, I realized I'd largely ignored some of the major differences between how poetry and communication studies operate. I would like to address this with a typology.

It is possible to imagine that the strategies employed by a range of actors in a discipline will be shaped largely by the structural position of that discipline within the larger social field. I suggest that we can understand some of these strategies in terms of heteronomy and autonomy, and in terms of high stakes and small stakes. It's a classic 2x2 grid, for those inclined to think in Robert Mertonian terms.

So, I'm sayin' this: communication has, as a field, largely been identified with what could be called high stakes heteronomy. It is heteronomy because, instead of defining its own terms, the field is much more likely to fit itself into existing institutional structures. The field's successes have largely involved institutional accomodation. Whatever successes communication has had, they have largely come from high-stakes heteronomy. I think this is what leads the field to define itself institutionally, as John Durham Peters describes in his still-relevant 1986 article "Sources of Intellectual Poverty in Communication Research." It's what communication has done well. We have done a good job of finding the needs for our own discipline. The question is whether or not the field will ever parlay this increasingly prominent institutional standing into something more intellectually challenging and cohesive (and some would argue that cohesion may be the enemy, anyway).

Poetry, meanwhile, experiences the aesthetic anxiety because it involves low-stakes autonomy. Poets have a tremendous amount of freedom to say whatever they want. There is a substantial amount of autonomy. It is 'low stakes' because this freedom does not translate into power. They have been granted an island, and though they have free range on this island, they have few inroads to the high stakes games of centralized power. To be blunt, they own their own irrelevance.

2006-08-04T15:18:00.000-05:00

ANXIETIES AESTHETIC (AND OTHERWISE)

Bob Archambeau is a colleague of mine here at Lake Forest College. He's a poet, critic, and man of letters. He's also the creator of the blog Samizdat, which is always worth checking out. Bob has shared with me his essay entitled "The Aesthetic Anxiety," and it's pretty good stuff. The essay addresses avant garde poetry, and the hopes that some poets write onto the avant garde (and other seemingly autonomous forms). I think that much of what he has to say can be applied to the social sciences. Let's take a peek...

In "The Aesthetic Anxiety," Archambeau posits that "many poets have felt the allure of the radical freedoms of an entirely autonomous art." This leads them to face "the anxieties that such autonomy seems, inevitably, to create: fears of losing their readerships, theis social roles, and their political utility." How do they resolve this anxiety? They claim that "a commitment to aesthetic autonomy can, in and of itself, be a form of political action." One imagines a conversation going something like this:

POET: Regard my poems. They're far-out and freaky. They totally re-sort all of the categories of thought that, you know, hegemony has forced on you rubes.

RUBE: God, that's a weird poem. I don't understand it. What's the deal? I've got a second-grader who can put poems together that rhyme. You seem to have become so autonomous that it would be accurate to say that avant garde poets are just talking to each other, in a language nobody can understand. You are, sir poet, politically and socially inefficacious. You do nothing for anybody, except yourself.

POET (shocked): No! You just don't get it, man. These poems are revolutionizing the world. There are whole systems of thought that these poems are altering. The political effect of these poems is not to be found in some ballot measure. The political effect of this stuff--REAL ART, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD--is to revolutionize everything. You can't even handle how revolutionary this is. Ahem: revolution!

RUBE: [disappears into thin air, upon suddenly discovering that rubes and avant garde poets never talk to each other]

This interaction provides a succinct caricature of Archambeau's argument. But Archambeau is much more thorough. He traces the roots of aetheticism to the "alienation from the powerful classes of those committed to imaginative expression." He examines the aesthetic anxiety one finds in Algernon Charles Swinburne's writings. He traces this aethetic anxiety at work in Arthur Symons 1893 essay, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," and in W. B. Yeats' poems. Then he moves into the twentieth century with riffs on Peter Burger, the Surrealists, and the language poets (Charles Bernstein Ron Silliman amongst them). It's a very careful analysis, and fun to read. It should be a book before long.

But heck, I'm no poet. I'm a social scientist. What does this have to do with the stuff that media researchers do? Well, I'm going to go ahead and say it has something to do with us. There's a common theme to be found in the social sciences and in modern poetry. This common theme is autonomy/professionalism, and while social scientists may escape the aesthetic anxiety (as Archambeau describes it), there does seem to be a professional anxiety at work.

Okay, Pravda, you say. What is this professional anxiety? Well, I'm glad you asked. In the social sciences, the anxiety about the autonomy provided by professionalism often involves the public. Professionalism often progresses in a manner that enhances the autonomy of those within the profession (cf. Eliot Freidson, Magali Larson, Andrew Abbott). Professionalism is classically thought of as inward-looking. Professionals look not to the public, but to their peers, for professional validation. The social sciences, though less 'professionalized' than, say, medicine, still work in a roughly similar fashion. We use jargon, we look to each other for validation, and we establish networks within our disciplines/fields.

But surely we social scientists don't have an avant garde that casts its own autonomy as a blow for the revolution, right? Well, I suppose not. But we do have anxieties that arise from our own professionally-derived autonomy (to the extent that it exists). We often deal with issues that are blatantly relevant to the public, and yet we just as often remark how little the public cares about it, or how sad it is that it is all written in a jargon that does not lend itself to the sustenance of a non-expert audience.

As a grad student in communication, I recall many discussions ending in an ironic appreciation of how little our work mattered to the outside world. But instead of spurring those in communication to become more autonomous, and to make the (let's call it gutsy) argument that being crazy and drenched in theory would revolutionize THE WORLD, instead communication seems to be in a position where those who feel this anxiety are give up on communicating with the public (which is too bad, I suppose) or find a way to muster some sense in which their research can be thought to actually matter. Frequently enough, this latter option means sacrificing intellectual autonomy to those who actually do have power. This can involve simply fitting research interests into the pre-existing interests of funding organizations. Christopher Simpson's famous book Science of Coercion provided a well-known and important demonstration of how some of the 'founding fathers' of comm research hitched their methods and some of their ideas to the interests of the CIA and other groups. To a great extent, the supposed successes for the field of communication (as detailed every month in the National Communication Association's Spectra) have come from capturing grant money. I believe this indicates a lack of structural autonomy in the field of communication. We feel the anxiety of autonomy/professionalism, but our response is not to come up with some claptrap about the revolutionary value of 'out there' theory, but to get busy and figure out how to fit our intellectual interests into the needs of those around us. And I think that's too bad.

2006-08-03T11:09:00.000-05:00

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND THE MEDIA.

As I have pointed out before in this very blog, I am quite interested in the issue of the public intellectual. In particular, I find it frustrating that discussions of the public intellectual so often involve the same basic themes. To a great extent, the debate about public intellectuals (since Russell Jacoby's 1987 book, The Last Intellectuals) has involved a persistent attention to features of professionalism. Most of us are familiar with the argument that Jacoby makes. It goes something like this: it used to be that we had truly public intellectuals, but the increasing professionalization of academia has made it so that our intellectuals are our professors, and these professors have been programmed by their graduate schools so that they are totally unable to write in a clearly legible prose. Also, they're a bunch of sellouts more interested in tenure (and brandy, easy chairs, beard grooming...) than in doing anything for the public.

Well, I'm happy to say I have a lot of problems with this narrative of public intellectual decline. And whaddyaknow, I've got an article out in a recent issue of the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics that deals with this issue. I won't re-write the article here, but I will just go over the big point: little can be said about the public intellectual without attending to media processes. In particular, it's worth pointing out that public intellectuals aren't all that different from journalists. And, of course, we media studies folk have said a lot (some would say too much) about journalism. Why not apply this to public intellectuals? I realize there are some differences between public intellectuals and journalists. However, when the best known definitions of 'public intellectuals' (those of Russell Jacoby and Richard A. Posner) are examined, we find that these definitions bring us closer to journalism than we might have expected.

Of course, I've got a bunch more things to say about the connections between media studies and the issue of the public intellectual. But one point worth making now is simply that a more multi-dimensional sense of the public intellectual would result from looking at how media processes have been part of the role of the intellectual for pretty much as long as the word 'intellectual' has existed (this point can be read from much of Robert Darnton's excellent work on French media history). Instead of focusing just on 'great' public intellectuals of the past, and the supposedly compromised public intellectuals of today, why not focus on the background that makes these roles possible and sustainable? Blaming professionalization in academia for the death of the public intellectual is probably part-right, but academia doesn't have as much power over who is and is not a public intellectual as, say, Time-Warner does.

I'm sure I'll return to this issue again. It's going to take a long time to work this out.

2006-07-27T14:10:00.000-05:00

MEDIACOMMONS APPEARS ON THE HORIZON

The other day, my pal Jeff Pooley pointed out to me a new project that is being assembled by the good folks over at the Institute for the Future of the Book. They're putting something together that should be of interest to media scholars and, to a lesser extent, everyone else (oh, them). Here's the deal: the Institute for the Future of the Book is going to introduce a project they call MediaCommons. On July 17, the IFB's Kathleen Fitzpatrick announced the MediaCommons project, and the online discussion boards have been filled with commentary ever since.

MediaCommons, says Fitzpatrick, will be a "new model of academic publishing." It will be less of an "electronic press" than a "scholarly network." I must say, they really do seem to be thinking in a constructively broad manner about this. MediaCommons will indeed be dedicated partially to online publications. Instead of being tied to a traditional model of peer review, it will involve "peer-to-peer review, in which texta are discussed and, in some sense, 'ranked' by a committed community of readers." Instead of determining whether or not a text will be published, these readers will simply rank texts, with comments. This focus will allow MediaCommons to make "the process of scholarly work just as visible and valuable as its product." Sounds good.

But that's just the potatoes. Here's the gravy: MediaCommons is going to be more than just online publishing. It will involve electronic monographs, electronic casebooks, electronic journals, electronic reference works, and electronic forums. I would explain all of these, but you should really just check out Fitzpatrick's description.

Much of this project seems quite excellent. The creators of MediaCommons claim that this will lead to new forms of and opportunities for collaboration. This seems likely. More dramatically, they also claim that this will help to change the relationship between the academy and the public. They say that, although scholarly work is "often...defined as a public good...much academic discourse remains inaccessible and impenetrable to the publics it seeks to serve." They believe that "the lack of communication between the academy and the wider reading public points to a need to rethink the role of the academic in public intellectual life."

This is where I think they start misfiring a little bit. Note a few of the assumption in this. First of all, it's probably a bit much to presume that MediaCommons will re-shape the relationship between the academy and the public in any dramatic fashion. I find it unlikely to imagine that MediaCommons will be particularly interesting to members of 'the public' (that amorphous group that everyone wants on their side). Just because something is available online and is written/voiced in an easy to understand language does not mean that anything dramatic is going to change in the relationship between the public and the academy.

It's also worth pointing out that this argument partakes of an assumption that is common to academics who deal with the question of public scholarship. The good folks at the IFB seem to presume that the public is being served by this. That may very well be true in this case. However, it's worth reminding ourselves that academics often flatter themselves by presuming that their work is in the public interest. Is there an audience clamoring for this? Will the world be saved if only our insights could be distributed to a broader public? In essence: does the public want this? My answer: maybe. But remember that just because something has been put together for an audience does not mean that it serves that audience's interests. Those are two different things. I'm probably going too far here. Addressing the public on crucial issues of the day (as many issues relating to the media are) is a laudable activity. Much contemporary academic scholarship does have a ridiculous level of impenetrable jargon. It would help to create a sense of renewal of professional purpose if there were a go-between linking scholars and the public. But it still seems to me as if MediaCommons is more likely to function as a broad scholarly network than as a medium for public intellectual work. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that.

2006-07-24T11:11:00.000-05:00

WATCHING US CONSUMING THE MEDIA.

A recent pair of posts by Dana Polan and Mark Andrejevic on FLOW touch on an issue of supreme importance to scholars of the media. Polan's article in Flow 4(7) dealt with an episode of The West Wing that featured a shot of Foucault's 'Society Must Be Defended'. Polan riffed on this a bit, describing how this kind of name-drop tv works to appeal to a creative class. But Polan reserves his best point for the end, when he addresses the situation of the media theorist attempting to incorporate Foucault in descriptions of how the media operate. Says Polan, "one fundamental problem is that Discipline and Punish is about citizens being looked at while television is about them looking: how to get from one to the other?" This strikes me as exactly right. The point is not that Foucault is worthless to the media theorist. The point is that application of Foucault's ideas to media theory is probably best done through use of a theoretical pirouette, whereby we move from 'being looked at' to 'looking'.

Polan makes his point artfully. But I don't think he's the first to make that point. John B. Thompson's "The Media and Modernity" makes a similar--if less Foucault-friendly--point. Thompson opines that

"If Foucault had considered the role of communication media more carefully, he might have seen that they establish a relation between power and visibility which is quite different from that implict in the model of the Panopticon...[T]hanks to the media, it is primarily those who exercise power, rather than those over whome power is exercised, who are subjected to a certain kind of visibility."

I think the word 'primarily' is debatable here, but the general point is most consistent with Polan's musings. We watch tv, read, the paper, surf around on the Web, and we see stuff. Since the advent of print (if not before), culture has operated very much through this kind of visibility (broadly defined), which differs in some important ways from Panopticism.

The thing is, this understanding of the limits of the direct applicability of Panopticism to media processes often takes the act of consuming the media as a one-way flow. Along comes Mark Andrejevic in FLOW 4(8), who reminds us that commercial surveillance is and has been a major part of the mass communication. Andrejevic voices his argument as a rejection of some tendencies in cultural studies. As he puts it,

"Cultural studies of TV have spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about the messages: the programmers and advertising with which broadcasters saturate the airwaves. They have spent much less time on what remains of central concern to media producers: the flow of information in the opposite direction."

Of course, this touches on the kind of audience surveillance that was the topic of my previous post regarding TiVo. Andrejevic tells us that commercial broadcasting involves a "two-way flow", as we viewers emit information about our own viewing habits. He describes the Portable People Meter that Arbitron has developed for measuring audiences with a truly impressive level of detail. Basic point here: If you didn't think Panopticism was relevant to media studies, these Portable People Meters will convince you that it is. Think we're not being disciplined through our own oft-unnoticed visibility? Well, you're kind of wrong.

The thing is, I still walk away unsatisfied. I think it makes sense to apply the idea of Panopticism to the increasingly involved process whereby audiences are monitored and measured. But the Thompson/Polan dissatisfaction with this--the fact that visibility operates in ways that Foucault didn't quite get, and that the media are a big part of this--seems entirely right. Media visibility plays a crucial--and still under-theorized--role in contemporary culture. It is through being watched that power can become legitimated, naturalized. And I'd sure like to hear more about this part of the equation.

2006-07-20T13:53:00.000-05:00

NET NEUTRALITY: SOME ARE AGIN' IT

As promised, here are what I think are the main arguments against net neutrality. Some of them overlap quite a bit, but I'm trying to go for full coverage here, so please do bear with me.

ARGUMENT #1: The government should not be involved in any "heavy-handed regulation" (Ted Stevens quote) before the need for such regulation becomes obvious.

ARGUMENT #2: Broadband network providers have built much of the existing backbone of what we call the internet. If we want something even better, someone's going to have to pay for it. Broadband network providers will create the next-generation internet if we let them finance it through a tiered system.
Addendum: this will hit rural and low-income citizens hardest, as they continue to wait for the full benefits of the internet. The improvements our low-income and rural friends want so much will be delayed all the longer, because the process of improving the internet will be bogged down by net neutrality requirements.
Addendum: if net neutrality is established by the government, big content providers will occupy many of the resources of network providers. This will push the expense of broadband rollout to the consumers (paraphrase from letter to NY Times editor by Mike McCurry and Christopher Wolf)

ARGUMENT #3: The free market will solve a lot of problems that net neutrality advocates say will occur if net neutrality bills don't pass. Consumers simply won't tolerate the doomsday scenario of tiered service. The market will find a way for us to continue accessing all that we want to access. The market for internet connections is sufficiently competitive to respond to consumer demand.

ARGUMENT #4: The defeat of net neutrality will make it so that the market continues to offer incentives to develop new forms of high-speed content delivery. The material that is clogging up the 'series of tubes' (video and audio streams, in particular) will be delivered more efficiently if there is a market-derived impetus to support video and audio streams. Net neutrality would prevent such an impetus from forming.

So, there you have it. This is why some folks say net neutrality won't work.

What do I think? I think it's a good idea to pay attention to the interests involved in any policy debate. The interests in this debate work to pit the network providers against the content providers and consumers. I can't find any consumer groups that take up the cause of the network providers. Though I think it's naive to presume that content providers are acting in the interests of 'freedom,' I do think net neutrality is workable, appropriate, and generally a good idea. But, you know, I'm far more fascinated with the arguments of those with whom I disagree.

2006-07-13T14:30:00.000-05:00

ARGUMENTS AGAINST NET NEUTRALITY

By now, many have seen, heard, or read Senator Ted Stevens' (R-AK) opinions about net neutrality. He is against the proposed net neutrality act currently being proposed in Congress. To a great extent, commentary on Stevens' opinions has focused on his seeming lack of *any* understanding of how the internet works. If you would like to hear his full statement (it is worth it), publicknowledge.org has done a good job of archiving it for all to hear.

I admit that Stevens' opinion is hilarious. However, there seems to be a tendency in the press (and now the Daily Show is part of this) to cover the issue as if it's simply a case of Stevens being a nut. What we're not getting is a decent sense of what arguments are involved in all sides of the net neutrality dispute. Stevens doesn't really make arguments, but he does allude to arguments. Having read about this issue for a while, I'm struck by how rarely one comes across any carefully assembled arguments against net neutrality. I've heard decent arguments about how difficult it might be for the Federal Gov't to implement any kind of net neutrality. There's also the notion that net neutrality will undermine the companies that supposedly built the information superhighway. I think internet service providers are unwilling to use this argument too much, because they know they're piggybacking on public spending as it is, what with the infrastructure and software having come largely out of research institutions and the military.

In a weird way, I'm frustrated by this. I would love to hear a good argument against the idea of net neutrality. I'm finding nothing terrbily compelling, yet. Let me know if I'm missing something. Please. Until then, we're left with Stevens 'series of tubes' reasoning.

2006-07-07T12:35:00.000-05:00

THE GREAT FRONTIER OF TiVo

Whilst perusing a recent issue of New Media & Society, I was pleased to come across a dandy little article by one Matt Carlson, entitled "Tapping Into TiVo." Carlson provides a surveillance-by-way-of-political-economy riff on the structure of transactions that shapes how TiVo operates. As those who know me will attest, I am perpetually on the verge of getting TiVo at home, and I read this piece with particular interest.

The nutshell of Carlson's argument concerns the fears and advantages that face the existing advertising/media industry. It works like this:
WHAT TiVo MIGHT DO TO UNDERMINE EXISTING PROFIT MODELS:
1) "Networks lose the prolonged attention of their audiences."
2) TiVo jeopardizes "the practice of using program time to entice viewers to sit through commercial time that provides the primary base of television economics"
3) The ratings system is not designed to deal with time-shifted programming. "If the trust in the reliability of ratings...begins to vanish, networks and advertisers will be forced to find alternative methods of audience measurement"
4) "As interactivity and broadband internet resources continue to expand, content providers fear that it will grow easier for individuals to redistribute, without permission, their content."

So, as many have pointed out, TiVo may enhance the "sky is falling" mentality in the broadcast biz, as the the promises of a more user-centered medium threaten the core assumptions that sustain the advertising/ratings axis.

Of course, the plot thickens, as Carlson reminds us that TiVo is not just a giant-killing, "prosumer" tool. TiVO also offers advantages to advertisers and to broadcasters. The points:
HOW TiVo WILL PRESERVE THE EXISTING STRUCTURE OF THE MASS MEDIA INDUSTRY (KIND OF!)
1) "Widespread time-shifting would add value to the midnight to 6 am time slots since a DVR will search through the entire day for programming".
2) "DVR users watch more television than they did before owning a DVR."
3) "DVRs offer new potential spaces for advertisers, such as within EPGs." (EPGs = electronic programming guides)
4) "Content providers and advertisers are also interested in interactive ads, such as a 'showcase' for programs that the user clicks on to record the show or contests that users can enter with a click of the remote."
5) AHEM: "The greatest potential benefit of DRRs, and one stressed by TiVo, is the creation of a two-way flow of information that facilitates the collection of viewer data and ultimately addressable programming and marketing."

Carlson helpfully notes that, with the advent of TiVo, control (in the James Beniger sense of the term) has shifted from "scheduling to surveillance". This is how viewing will be patterned/disciplined in the near future.

Carlson is to be thanked, I think, for not going with the tiresome prediction that "It used to be that we watched TV. Now....TV IS WATCHING US". TV has been watching us for some time. It's just that there have been adjustments in the process by which we are monitored, and this system of surveillance has been made (dramatically) more detailed.

What Carlson doesn't do--because he's a responsible scholar trying to be careful--is try to predict how programming will change as a result of these changes. It's fun to imagine a world where Arrested Development would have been saved because TiVo allowed advertisers to gaze into the viewing habits of that show's (relatively well-educated and well-off and young) audience. I'm not so confident about this. An easy prediction to make would be that TiVo may simply be the next step on the road to a 'pay per' approach to television. TiVo is already conditioning viewers to look at their viewing habits as a queue/menu. This is the kind of a la carte (or 'disaggregated' or 'unbundled') programming that broadcasters feared for a long time. But it's possible, from Carlson's vantage point, to see how broadcasters aren't facing massive dispersion of the audience so much as they are dealing with a (perhaps dramatic) change in how audiences are to be disciplined. In other words, TiVo may not be the end of the mass audience, but the beginning of a new technique for creating new kinds of mass audiences. Not all roads lead to audience fragmentation, but many of the roads we're on right now seem to go through it.

2006-06-28T11:25:00.000-05:00

THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, AKA ONE OF THE WORLD'S MORE ANNOYING TOPICS (AND ONE OF MY FAVORITE).

Sometimes it is the things we find annoying that compel us to study them. This is certainly the case with me and discussions of the 'public intellectual'. As is widely known, the issue of the public intellectual was spurred largely by Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987). Since then, there has been a more or less regular attention to the issue of the need for scholars to act as public figures. I will not attempt to map the entire issue here, but as I track the vagaries of the public intellectual debate, I have run across Charles F. Gattone's altogether acceptable book The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual: Critical Reflections in a Changing World, just out from Rowman & Littlefield this year.

Coming in at a slim 146 pages, Gattone's book charts a history of how social scientific thought has understood the public role of the intellectual. I admit that I initially came in wanting to hate this book. We've had plenty of books and articles that attempt to tweeze out how social scientists (and playwrights, and fiction writers, and poets, and painters...) have constructed their own public role. Is there anything new to say about this stuff? I mean, I get it. In one camp, you've got the intellectuals who chide other intellectuals for not being public enough. In the other, you've got some grumblers who problemetize this. It's like a double play: Benda to Gramsci to Said.

Thankfully, Gattone is thoughtful. Though The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual is not ground-shaking in its conclusions or its methods, it is a solid review of how major social scientists have approached what the question of public scholarship. Gattone's chapters each deal with one or two sociologists. It goes like this: St. Simon/Comte --> Weber --> Veblen --> Mannheim/Schumpeter --> Mills/Galbraith --> Bourdieu. It's always easy with a book like this to suggest other authors who could have or should have been included. Here are my suggestions, none of them surprising: Marx, Gouldner, Benda, Dewey, Lippmann, and Shils. And, of course, it would have been interesting to have seen something on more contemporary figures, like Henry Giroux, or Richard Rorty. Still, suggesting other possible chapters is the weakest kind of potshot. What matters is whether or not the author has pulled together a cohesive set of ideas. This Gattone does.

What's Gattone's point here? To a great extent, it's about how sociologists have become more skeptical of the public role of the social sciences since St. Simon and Comte. St. Simon and Comte believed that social scientists would (sooner or later) be able to set the rules by which society operated. Steady improvement would result from the implementation of the objective, positive knowledge that flowed from the social sciences. This was the beginning of one part of the modernist project in the social sciences, and many of the assumptions that St. Simon and Comte shared can be found (unacknowledged) in the public intellectual debate today.

Since St. Simon and Comte in the 19th century, sociologists have generated more complicated models for how public intellectual work can operate. Weber famously called into question the scholarly impulse to push one's moral sentiments on others. Veblen was characteristically thorny on the topic, outlining pitfalls and potentials of the public role. Mannheim and Schumpeter are portrayed as traumatized by the Great Depression and the spread of fascism/communism. Mannheim worried that if scholars failed to do something, to speak out, fascism would reign. Schumpeter worried that publicly involved scholars might be effective only at making the iron cage of modernism more constraining, more centrally planned. C. Wright Mills and John Kenneth Galbraith are twinned around hope more than fear. Mills placed great hope in the role of the public intellectual, whom he saw as able to redeem the promise of the social sciences. Galbraith hoped that intellectuals might prevent Western culture from becoming stagnant. Bourdieu outlined (but never fully implemented) a plan for intellectuals to organize themselves so as to stand up to the numerous competing interests that threaten intellectual autonomy.

So, fine. Gattone pulls together a good narrative, and revisits the issue of public intellectuals without getting stuck in one of the usual question-begging quagmires. However, allow me to raise a grander point here: there's more going on in the issue of public intellectuals than any of these (great) theorists seem to notice. What's missing? The media. Like much scholarship on public intellectuals, Gattone's book involves attention to three categories of social actor: the intellectuals themselves, the public, and political elites. Though there are occasions when intellectuals interact directly with the public or with political elite, it seems to me that these interactions are almost always carried out through the media. In other words: there is a major part of the structure of the role of the public intellectual that has been left out of this scholarship. Of the sociologists Gattone includes in this book, Bourdieu was the most concerned with the media (Mills might have been, if he had lived to write his next book). Gattone mentions Bourdieu's concerns regarding intellectuals and the media, but the underlying sense that direct contact with the public is characteristic of public intellectuals remains.

Perhaps I'm simply committing the sin of wanting an author to write a different book. The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual raises some excellent points, and will serve as a solid background for the issue of 'public sociologies' (more on that later). But for those hoping to see the sociology of intellectuals incorporate more of a concern for the media, there's a lot more to do.

2006-06-21T14:16:00.000-05:00

JAMES W. CAREY (1934-2006).

As most who read this already know, James Carey died almost a month ago. I don't have much to add to the appreciations that have been published and posted so far. It is, however, worth pointing out that Carey was and remains a great inspiration to me. I have one recollection of Jim that seems worth posting, and it (oddly enough) comes from a meeting of the National Communication Association. In 2003, NCA met in Miami Beach, and I had a pre-conference set up on the day before the convention began. After the pre-con, I was pretty much alone in Miami, bumming around looking for a sandwich. I took a long walk down the boardwalk, which was all but deserted. After about fifteen minutes, I was lost in thought, and utterly alone. One person came upon me, walking the opposite way. It was Jim, and he was at least as lost in thought as myself. We exchanged a wordless glance, and he quickly got back to thinking about whatever it is that occupied him that night. Three nights later, I dined with him and some other folks, and he held court on topics as various as: Bob Newhart, beachfront property in Rhode Island, James 'Scotty' Reston, internet usage in South Korea, and the skills involved in flying small aircraft. I've been around really smart people who lacked spark. Jim was not one of them. He was a firecracker, and he will be missed.

I'll be back with more soon.

2006-06-15T14:31:00.000-05:00

THE FIELD'S THE THING. MORE ON CULTURAL STUDIES.

My pal Jen Horner offered some helpful commentary regarding yesterday's post. As usual, she's got more interesting things to say than me. On the topic of 'cultural studies,' she says:

I wouldn't say that these projects are necessarily the right way to go about social change but it is striking how strongly they create a sense of identity, purpose, and community among those groups of students and researchers who do them, and basically serve as a foil (Death Star) against which cultural studies people define themselves.

Right. So, in the field of communication, this 'cultural studies' thing is functional, if only in the sense that it gives those outside the administrative/dominant/effects paradigm a sense of identity, purpose, and community. I guess one thing that makes me so frustrated is the degree to which this identity is constructed largely in the negative: those who do cultural studies use the label to mean that they do work that is NOT a bunch of "ginormous grant-funded projects" (Jen's term, and a good one). Cultural studies in communication cannot be understood without understanding its marginal place in the field. Still, simply doing work 'outside' the dominant effects paradigm Dark Star doesn't give us much to go on. Those in cultural studies are the more reflexive scholars, but this reflexivity seems only to go halfway. Cultural studies has a reflexivity foisted upon it, by virtue of its place in communication. But this reflexivity seems to flag when it comes time for self-critique (admittedly, not as much fun, and almost certainly harder to find in other parts of comm than in cultural studies).

One of the big problems facing the entire field of comm is the inescapable fact that the field lacks autonomy. Granted, professional autonomy is threatened in all academic fields. Still, in the context of the academy, comm has been particiularly likely to give itself up to pressures to raise grant money and/or respond to enrollment pressures. That's been a big part of the growth in comm in the last 50 years. As a marginal operator in this, cultural studies has been left to pick up the crumbs. This leaves many in cultural studies with an overly romantic notion of their own work. Some might say it's just romantic enough. I don't agree with them.

Next post should be on differences in US vs. UK cult studies, and images of them. I think I botched my earlier discussion of that. I'll be doing a lot of botching in all of this...

2006-06-14T14:01:00.000-05:00

WHEN I HEAR THE TERM 'CULTURAL STUDIES,' THAT'S WHEN I REACH FOR MY REVOLVER

What IS cultural studies in the field of communication these days? The fact that this question has been asked numerous times in the past provides some hints about the status of cultural studies within the field. To be blunt, you know you're dealing with a marginal practice when the practitioners keep on being prompted to try to understand how their sub-field fits in. Cultural studies in communication suffers from a kind of marginality that is, in some ways, productive. At the same time, this marginality also creates a kind of self-glorifying narrative for cultural studies, one in which cultural studies represents the peoples' work, and the 'dominant paradigm' in media studies can be understood as a kind of Death Star, poised to destroy Alderaan.

One question worth asking (if only because it seems ready-made for glib replies) is this: do practictioners in other parts of the field of communication ask themselves the same worrisome questions as those in cultural studies? Do interpersonal communication researchers ever feel that their approach to the field is threatened, or at risk? Do those in organizational communication lose any sleep about their 'project'? Do rhetoricians ever entertain the idea that they may be drummed out of the field of communication? I think the answer to all of these questions is a (measured, boring) 'yes'. So, let's make the first casualty of this debate the notion that cultural studies is the only part of comm that concerns itself with its own place in the field. Still, I think that cultural studies is in a dominated position in the field of communication, and its position within the field gives those in cultural studies a certain tendency to (quite rightly) wonder if they're about to be kicked to the curb.

A few months ago, I was part of an e-mail interchange with my pals Emily West, Jen Horner, and Louise Woodstock. Emily began the discussion, asking us what kind of distinctions between "American" (read: work along the Durkheim/Dewey/Geertz/Carey axis) and "British" (read: work along the Williams/Hall/Birmingham axis) still exist. It's a great question, and it's difficult to answer. Certainly, the traditions have been conflated in graduate education in communication, which tends to lump the two approaches together in coursework in cultural studies. It's not uncommon for graduate courses to involve a (perhaps productive) broadly 'cultural' approach, with no particular American or British emphasis. Published work, however, seems more likely to adhere to these traditional variations on the cultural studies approach.

Still, I think this concern for British vs. American cultural studies makes it seem a bit too much as if 'cultural studies' is something that is practiced solely within the terms of discretely-divided intellectual camps (quick: when was the last time you heard anyone say they did "American Cultural Studies" when asked their specialty?). To praise and criticize cultural studies in communication at the same time, one thing that always struck me was how meaningless the term 'cultural studies' becomes in comm. The appellation of 'cultural studies' is attached to a laughably broad amount of work, from journalism history, to ethnographic approaches to television viewing, to grand theory. This turns cultural studies into something that is interdisciplinary at best, and at worst, something more like a catch-all for ALL work in media studies that doesn't concern itself with short-term media effects.

I fully realize that I'm far from the first person to raise these issues, and I also realize I'm nowhere near settling them. However, I will conclude with something resembling a conclusion. As someone whose work has been classified as 'cultural studies,' I sicken of the term. 'Cultural studies' is a label that, at this point, is so weighted down with connotations (many of them mutually contradictory) that it does little good to describe anything as cultural studies in communication. This is too bad, I suppose. Perhaps someday I'll have a solution for this. But not today.

2006-06-07T11:06:00.000-05:00

WHERE DOES THE CAMERAMAN FIT IN?: GOULDNER AND MEDIA STUDIES

Few will be shocked if I suggest that the field of communication has neglected some important ideas from other social sciences (and, indeed, from 'inside' the field as well). In some ways, the pursuit of a distinct canon in communication has stemmed from an impulse to keep communication separate from other fields, to prevent the field from becoming a handmaiden to other fields/disciplines. This is, of course, a fine motivation. But whom are we kidding? We in communication can use all the ideas we can find. In a perhaps laughable attempt to broaden the spectrum of ideas we can poach for our own work, allow me please to point your attention in the direction of Alvin Gouldner, whose writings on intellectuals, Marxism, and social theory frequently touch on themes germane to the study of the media.

Gouldner is rarely considered a communication theorist of any kind. Sociologists work with his ideas a great deal, of course. His "Coming Crisis of Western Sociology" remains an important moment in sociology, and my experience with sociology and sociologists leads me to believe that he remains a source of important debates within that field. (Perhaps he's still given short shrift. Charles Lemert has written persuasively that Gouldner is often ignored even by sociologists, who are more likely to look to C. Wright Mills if they're doing the critical theory thing). Of course, this means that the ideas of Gouldner's that get preserved are those that have struck sociologists as useful. We wind up with little sense of Gouldner's frequent attention to media processes, in part because sociologists are not as interested in the media as one might wish them to be. Sociology more or less forgot about the media by mid-twentieth century (this is, I admit, a debatable point, to be pursued later on).

What did Gouldner have to say about the media?, you ask. Well, thanks for asking. In The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner off-handedly remarked that "One is not supposed to ask the television audience, 'Where does the cameraman fit in?'" He was addressing the awkwardness that arises when Marxists are asked to address the position of intellectuals in their whole scheme. I suggest that we bring a different frame to interpret this remark. Specifically, I think the question of "where does the cameraman fit in?" can be posed to those who study intellectuals in general. Those who study intellectuals, in a sense, suffer from a problem that is very much the opposite of the problem with Marxists. Instead of a lack of wilingness to be reflexive--to study their own social category--those who study intellectuals tend to focus too much on intellectuals themselves, to the neglect of the systems (media systems) that have made the emergence of the intellectual role possible and sustainable. I take the question 'Where does the cameraman fit in?' more literally, and I ask, where do the media fit into these themes that are often left on the doorstep of sociologists?

Thankfully, Gouldner was up to the task of accounting for the media much more than other sociologists who addressed intellectuals. Even better for someone in the field of communication, he points to the centrality of communication, then stops, as if waiting for someone in media studies to pick up the slack. With few exceptions, media studies scholars have not been up to this difficult task.

So where do we see communication in Gouldner? I'm finding it all over the place in the first two volumes of his Dark Side of the Dialectic trilogy: The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology and the afore-mentioned Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. Gouldner traces the development of what he calls the Age of Ideology to the 'communications revolution,' and in particular to the advent and spread of printing technology. He's no soft-boiled McLuhanite, mind you, he's just lining up much of what Habermas had already said with a differently-inflected vision of ideology. [his blunt--even brutal--smack-down of Habermasian approaches to ideology is worth the price of admission alone]

For Gouldner, as I understand him, it is the development of two institutions that creates the Age of Ideology: the modern education system and the means of mass communication. For a sociologist who never did media research per se, he was remarkably frank about the centrality of the media to this. Of particular note is how, with the coming of the Age of Ideology, what begins to matter are not 'commands', but 'reports'. Feudal styles of authority no longer stand up to scrutiny, and to make things even more complicated, we now have a ruling class that has out-sourced its own ideological work. So, bang! We're in a very Gramscian situation where authority is not so much something possessed (or a fait accompli, as Parsons might have presumed), but is instead something that involves interaction between social agents, and therefore, all kinds of structural and cultural contradictions. This makes culture a very complicated thing indeed, and something well-worth studying in media studies. Too bad we didn't listen to him very much when he lived. It would be fitting for us to pay more attention to what he had to say. It's not like communication studies is drowning in good ideas as it is.

2006-06-06T11:56:00.000-05:00

UNLEASHED! THE COMMUNICATION RESEARCHER.

Greetings, all, to the inaugural entry in the Pravdakid blog. After months of pondering the idea of starting my own blog, I have decided to take the leap. I have avoided blogging for some time, largely because I regard blogs as something akin to tattoos: I'd be perfectly interested in getting a tattoo, but not until I find something worth inking on my body. And, you know, I just don't have the certainty about indelible marks on my body that this involves. Blogs are like tattoos because they are closely linked to self-revelation, and because they last a long time. Sure, they can be edited much more easily than the fairy/devil/mother's name/girlfriend's name we see on so many young people's bodies today. Embarrassing comments can be wiped out very quickly. Still, I think I can learn much more if I decide to leave in all the idiotic crap I come up with, and learn from my mistakes.

So, fine. But what will I address in this blog? For the most part, I will address the issues that consume me: research and theory in media studies. I make no claims (yet) about the quality of any of my future posts, but I can promise that I will try to keep things thought-provoking.

My friend and colleague at Lake Forest College, Bob Archambeau, inspired/irritated me until I started this. I can only assume that more inspiration and irritation will continue. That's what it's all about. His blog--samizdat--is in many ways the model for what I'm going to try to do here.

My first 'real' post should come soon. Hope you're along for the ride.