Meta Blog: Wordle conceptualises this blog

This is a wordle composition of this blog which shows the relative frequency of words used in these postings and so gives us a snap shot of the actual content of the blog far more effectively than a tag cloud could ever do.

Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the World of Tomorrow

Benjamin was very interested in culture and what it could tell us. Culture here does not mean 'high culture' (art, literature, opera, etc) but the more mundane artefacts of the quotidian; posters, prints and printing, cinema, TV, and everything that one encounters in daily life. Indeed all of the ephemeral and evanescent stuff that we could absent-mindedly throw away or forget about whether it be material or conceptual (i.e. small-talk or other conversation). Indeed Benjamin's most important work - The Arcades Project - is specifically concerned with what all of this seemingly throw away stuff could tell us about the history of Paris in the 19th century and thus about the history of the 19th century more generally.

For our purposes - the study of the media and of society more generally - this concern with culture is very useful (Benjamin's concern with culture prefigures Stuart Hall and the CCCS and is therefore an essential point of contact). Benjamin was a member of the Frankfurt School and so was also concerned with the role and function of power and domination in society. This can be most clearly seen in his critical analysis of the Haussmannization of Paris in his Paris; Capital of the Nineteenth Century. This 'renovation' (we would call it 'urban regeneration' today) of Paris in the period of the Second Empire was seen by Benjamin to be a means of controlling the urban space (the great wide boulevards that Haussman's project introduced were far harder to barricade) and of policing its people by forcing the poor from the centre into the periphery.

Benjamin's most famous essay - on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - helps us to think about and understand a lot of the issues involved in the current media landscape. Benjamin's argument in this essay is simple; the ease with which 'art' can be reproduced and disseminated is democratic.

This needs some expansion;

The ease with which 'art' (which we can take to mean cultural artefacts of any kind)

can be reproduced, either mechanically (printing, photography, photocopier, cd/dvd burner) or digitally (computer, digital photography, scanner, etc),

and disseminated, again either mechanically (post, courier, etc), institutionally (library, etc) or digitally (TV, Internet, BitTorrent, etc),

is democratic (benefits the people and breaks down the structures of domination in society).

Benjamin welcomed the very problem faced by contemporary media corporations whereby they spend a great deal of money creating a media artefact that then costs nothing to digitally reproduced & disseminate (given the existence of, and access to by the participants, the astonishing communications infrastructure we call the internet).

The current political problems around the Digital Economy Bill [here, here & here] are exactly concerned with the problems that Benjamin identified. The efforts of the Big-IP combines (the big four, the big six, the other big six, etc) to turn state power to the effort to control their property and thus defend their profits against the democratizing effect of the reproducibility of culture.

Basic Media Concepts List

BASIC CONCEPTS LIST

This list of concept areas and associated ideas is a useful checklist for any work one could be doing in Media Studies. It is just an outline intended to be used to jog your memory rather than a fully fledged plan or approach to essay writing or exam practice. However, whenever you write about Media and/or Culture you should use it as a framework for thinking and planning.

MEDIATION

Media & Medium

Mediation

REPRESENTATION

Representational Nature of the media

Stereotype

Hegemony

Realism

Reality

Modality

Reality Effect [Barthes]

Hyperreality [Baudrillard]{Post-Modernism}

Discourse of realism

IDEOLOGY

Marx

Base/Superstructure Model

'opiate of the masses'

Althusser

Ideology as 'lived experience'

Ideological State Apparatus

Interpellation

Gramsci

Hegemony

Use of representations as a means of ideological control

the 'manufacture of consent'

SEMIOTICS

Sign/Signified (referent)/Signification

Arbitrary nature of the sign

Ambiguity of the sign

Polysemy

Denotation/Connotation

Denotation is the surface meaning of the sign

Connotation is the wider world of signification that we bring to the sign

Connotive Communities: Audience groups with shared connotive standards

Myth (Barthes)

the rhetorical or propaganda use of signs

Modes of Signs

Indexical

Symbolic

Iconic

Metaphor

Metaphor

Metonym

Irony

Synecdoche

Metaphoric Communities (see Connotive Communities).

INTERTEXTUALITY

Reference to and use of texts by texts

Genre, Narrative, Metaphor

intertextuality can provide a context for signs

Characters are intertextual, film stars are intertexual

Hypertext

Dimensions of intertextuality: Horizontal, vertical

Allusion

Barthes

From Work to Text

The Death of The Author

Narrative Codes

Post-Modernism

NARRATIVE

Elements of Narrative

Setting

Narration/Narrator

Plot

Characters

Focalization

Discourse

Structuralism

Structuralism

Propp

Levi-Strauss

Todorov

'Equilibrium' & ideology

Barthes

Narrative codes

Post-Structuralism

Barthes

The Death of the Author (again)

(Derrida etc)

GENRE

Codes & Conventions

what are the rules and regulations of belonging to a particular group of texts

INSTITUTIONS

Ownership and Control

'Propaganda Model'

AUDIENCE

Theory

Encoding/Decoding

Reception Theory

ambiguity and arbitrariness of signs leads to polysemy

Encoding/Decoding

What is the Audience?

Target Audience

Intended Audience

Accidental Audience

Total Audience

New student blog

A blog on culturejamming.

"Is that really true or is it just something theory dreamt up": The Death of The Author and Student Media Analysis

One of the key problems of teaching media studies is that to many students are naive and inflexible realists and intentionalists. That is to say that their first question of any media text is 'what did the author mean?'. This is understandable but irritating. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism tend to be some of the last things that students encounter because the more basic issues, concepts and theories have to be in place before they can start grappling with the denser theoretical issues.

The Death of The Author

One of the most important realisations necessary for media (& cultural) studies is that authors and their intentions are secondary concerns (or more likely utterly unimportant). There are several reasons for this but they are best (first) summed up by Roland Barthes (Foucault's analysis of the problem would be the next step).

For Barthes (and thus for us) the problem of the author emerges out of the great insights of Structuralism. Levi-Struass, Propp, Todorov, and Barthes himself (amongst many others) showed that there were deep underlying structures in human societies and cultures that were universal; they appeared every where there were humans. These universal structures were also present in narratives; plot elements, character types, discourses, etc, are distributed across and are to be found in all societies & cultures. It follows from this that 'authors' are everywhere only re-figuring and/or re-arranging pre-existing elements rather than creating 'new' things ex nihilo.

More importantly still it follows that the theoretical insights we apply - from semiotics, structuralism, etc, - are more important than authorial intention because they concern themselves with context and reception and 'authors' do not.

Convolute N: The Arcades Project & Method

James Kennell and I have started to post about Convolute N of The Arcades Project on our project blog. This Convolute is concerned with Benjamin's methodology and epistemology and is thus a central concern for us. We hope to post some more on it over the next little while.

Texts as 'surfaces'

In media studies we use the literary and cultural studies term 'text' to refer to the objects we study (e.g. TV shows, dvds, games, dress and its codes, fashion, adverts, photographs, websites and the internet, films, music, radio, newspapers & magazines, etc) because we approach them through 'reading' and because they possess the same 'woven' structure ('texture'?) of human construction as written texts (i.e. novels).  The problem arises from the metaphorical depth we ascribe to these objects.  We can talk of how something is 'embedded' in the text or 'projects' from it as though it was a fully three dimensional object with lumps and bumps.  This is of course not the case in reality (almost none of the 'texts' we study can be considered to have much in the way of actual physical depth to them) but this seeming paradox is easily removed when we remember that we are using these terms and ideas metaphorically.  The language of media studies (and of cultural and literary studies in general) is highly metaphorical and we need to get to grips with this often very loosely structured use of language.
The 'surface' metaphor is a useful place to start.  All texts have a physical surface (on which they are printed, projected or displayed or from which they are read or decoded; i.e. the difference between a page or screen and the media of a DVD) but that is not what we are concerned with here (although the shiny surfaces of modern media are interesting and have attracted attention) rather we need to deal with the metaphorical sense in which texts (another metaphor after all) are 'surfaces'.
Firstly, this metaphor reminds us that there is nothing behind the text.  The text is brought into existence by social forces and practices and through certain technologies but these are not its foundations or history.  Rather the text is an expression of these social forces and objects and they surround the text as a scaffold rather than buttress it from behind or found it from below.  Second, the metaphor is used to remind us that there are many intersections and points of contact between these surfaces - as there is between the surfaces of bubbles in a foam. Thirdly, the surface metaphor showes us that our relationship with the text as its audience is not really with the text but rather with the social forces and pattern of connexions that it represents and/or stands for.  Finally the idea of texts as surfaces indicates the representational nature of these objects.   All texts are built  up from and in a sense only consist of representations and by conceptualising texts as surfaces we bring paintings, photographs, screens and mirrors to mind when we analyse them.

Text, Media, Metaphor