CULTURAL DISTINCTION
Excerpts from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of
the Judaement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)
CULTURAL ECONOMY:
"There is an economy of cultural goods but it has a specific logic.
Sociology endeavors to establish the conditions in which the
consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are
produced, and at the same time to describe the different ways of
appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a particular
moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the
constitution of the mode of appropriation that is considered
legitimate." -- p.l
"To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each
of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social
hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as
markers of 'class.' ...Even in the classroom, the dominant
definition of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and works
of art favors those who have had early access to legitimate
culture, in a cultured household." --p.2
CULTURAL COMPETENCY:
"A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who
possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it
is encoded....A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in
a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colors and lines, without rhyme or
reasons....Acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible
familiarization within the family circle tends to favor an
enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the
acquisition. The 'eye' is a product of history reproduced by
education." --p.3
TASTE:
"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social
subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish
themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and
the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar....The antithesis
between quantity and quality, substance and form, corresponds to
the opposition -- linked to different distances from necessity --
between the taste of necessity, which favors the most filling and
most economical foods, and the taste of liberty -- or luxury --
which shifts the emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving,
eating, etc.) and tends to use stylized forms to deny function." --
p.6
THE COHERENCE OF TASTE DISTINCTIONS:
"This transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and
evaluative schemes that are available for general application,
inclines its owner towards other cultural experiences and enables
him to perceive, classify and memorize them differently. Where some
only see 'a Western starring Burt Lancaster', others 'discover an
early John Sturges' or 'the latest Sam Peckinpah.' In identifying
what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are
aided by their whole social group (which guides and reminds them
with its 'Have you seen...?' and 'You must see...') and by the
whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce
legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily
accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name." -- p.28
THE POPULAR AESTHETIC:
"The desire to enter into the game, identifying with the
characters' joys and sufferings, worrying about their fate,
espousing their hopes and ideals, living in their life, is based on
a form of investment, a sort of deliberate 'naivety',
ingenuousness, good-natured credulity ('We're here to enjoy
ourselves') which tends to accept formal experiments and
specifically artistic effects only to the extent that they can be
forgotten and do not get in the way of the substance of the
work....Formal refinement -- which, in literature or the theatre,
leads to obscurity -- is, in the eyes of the working-class public,
one sign of what is sometimes felt to be a desire to keep the
uninitiated at arm's length, or, as one respondent said about
certain cultural programmes on TV, to speak to other initiates
'over the viewer's heads.' It is part of the paraphernalia which
always announces the sacred character, separate and separating, of
high culture -- the icy solemnity of the great museums, the
grandiose luxury of the opera-houses and major theatres, the decor
and decorum of the concert-halls Conversely, popular
entertainment secures the spectator's participation in the show and
collective participation in the festivity which it
occasions....They satisfy the taste for and sense of revelry, the
plain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the
social world head over heels, overturning conventions and
proprieties....This popular reaction is the very opposite of the
detachment of the aesthete, who, as is seen whenever he
appropriates one of the objects of popular taste (e.g., Westerns or
strip cartoons), introduces a distance, a gap -- the measure of his
distant distinction -- vis-a-vis 'first-degree' perception by
displacing the interest from the 'content,' characters, plot, etc.
to the form, to the specifically artistic effects which are only
appreciated relationally, through a comparison with other works
which is incompatible with immersion in the singularity of the work
immediately given." --p. 33-34
THE BOURGEOIS AESTHETIC OF CONTEMPLATIVE DISTANCE:
"The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude toward
the world which, as such, is a social break....Rejecting the
'human' clearly means rejecting what is generic, i.e. common, easy
and immediately accessible, starting with everything that reduces
the aesthetic animal to pure and simple animality, to palpable
pleasure or sensual desire. The interest in the content of the
representation which leads people to call 'beautiful' the
representation of beautiful things, especially those which speak
most immediately to the senses and the sensibility, is rejected in
favor of the indifference and distance which refuse to subordinate
judgement of the representation to the nature of the object
represented." -- p.32
"The aesthetic disposition which tends to bracket off the nature
and function of the object represented and to exclude any 'naive'
reaction -- horror at the horrible, desire for the desirable, pious
reverence for the sacred -- along with all purely ethical
responses, in order to concentrate solely upon the mode of
representation, the style, perceived and appreciated by comparison
with other styles, is one dimension of a total relation to the
world and to others, a lifestyle....These conditions of existence,
which are the precondition for all learning of legitimate culture,
whether implicit and diffuse, as domestic training generally is, or
explicit and specific, as in scholastic training, are characterized
by the suspension and removal of economic necessity and by
objective and subjective distance from practical urgencies....In
other words, it presupposes the distance from the world...which is
the basis of bourgeois experience of the world....Economic power is
first and foremost a power to keep economic necessity at arm's
length. This is why it universally asserts itself by the
destruction of riches, conspicuous consumption, squandering and
every form of gratuitous luxury....Material or symbolic consumption
of works of art constitutes one of the supreme manifestations of
ease, in the sense both of objective leisure and subjective
facility. " --pp. 54-55
THE POLITICS OF TASTE:
"[Taste] unites and separates. Being the product of the
conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of
existence, it unites all those who are the product of similar
conditions while distinguishing them from all others. And it
distinguishes in an essential way, since taste is the basis of all
that one has -- people and things -- and all that one is for
others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others.
Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation
of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have
to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the
refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere
else, all determination is negation and tastes are perhaps first
and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral
intolerance ('sick-making') of the tastes f others....The most
intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors
of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which
taste dictates shall be separated." -- pp.56-57
NATURAL VS. ACQUIRED TASTE:
"The ideology of natural taste contrasts two modalities of cultural
competence and its use, and, behind them, two modes of acquisition
of culture. Total, early, imperceptible learning, performed within
the family from the earliest days of life and extended by a
scholastic learning which presupposes and completes it, differs
from belated, methodological learning not so much in the depth and
durability of its effects -- as the ideology of cultural 'veneer'
would have it -- as in the modality of the relationship to language
and culture which it simultaneously tends to inculcate. It confers
the self-certainty which accompanies the certainty of possessing
cultural legitimacy and the ease which is the touchstone of
excellence. n _- p. 66
"Academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined
effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural
transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the
amount of cultural capital directly inherited by the family.
Through its value-inculcating and value-imposing operations, the
school also helps (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the
initial disposition, i.e. class of origin) to form a general,
transposable disposition towards legitimate culture, which is first
acquired with respect to scholastically recognized knowledge and
practices but tends to be applied beyond the bounds of the
curriculum. n --p.23
"The effect of mode of acquisition is most marked in the ordinary
choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing or
cooking, which are particularly revealing of deep-rooted and long-
standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the
educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by
naked taste, without any explicit prescription or proscription,
other than from semi-legitimate legitimizing agencies such as
women's weeklies or 'ideal home' magazines." -- p.77
AESTHETIC HIERARCHY:
"The effect of the hierarchies of legitimacy (the hierarchy of the
arts, of genres, etc.) can be described as a particular case of the
'labelling' effect well known to social psychologists. Just as
people see a face differently depending on the ethnic label it is
given, so the value of the arts, genres, works and authors depends
on the social marks attached to them at any given moment (e.g., the
place of publication). But the fact remains that the art-lover's
sense of cultural investment which leads him always to love what is
lovable, and only that, and always, sincerely, can be supported by
unconscious deciphering of the countless signs which at every
moment say what is to be loved and what is not, what is or is not
to be seen, without ever being explicitly oriented by pursuit of
the associated symbolic profits. n -- p. 86
AESTHETIC INVESTMENT:
"The more legitimate a given area, the more necessary and
'profitable' it is to be competent in it, and the more damaging and
'costly' to be incompetent....Those who owe most of their cultural
capital to the educational system, such as primary and secondary
teachers originating from the working and middle classes, are
particularly subject to the academic definition of legitimacy and
tend to proportion their investments very strictly to the value the
educational system sets on the different areas. By contrast,
'middle-ground' arts such as cinema, jazz, and, even more, strip
cartoons, science fiction or detective stories are predisposed to
attract the investments either of those who have entirely succeeded
in converting their cultural capital into educational capital or
those who, not having acquired legitimate culture in the legitimate
manner (i.e. through early familiarization), maintain an uneasy
relationship with it, subjectively or objectively, or both. These
arts, not yet fully legitimate, which are disdained or neglected by
the big holders of educational capital, offer a refuge and a
revenge to those who, by appropriating them, secure the best return
on their cultural capital (especially if it is not fully recognized
scholastically) while at the same time taking credit for contesting
the established hierarchy of legitimacies and profits. n pp. 86-87
~:
l: j~
MYTHS OF MEDIA: UTOPIAN FANTASIES ABOUT VIRTUAL REALITY AND
CYBERSPACE
Quotations from Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York:
Touchstone, 1991).
1) "Though much of what McLuhan wrote was obscure and arguable, the
sum total to me was a shock that reverberates even now. The
computer is a medium! I had always thought of it as a tool, perhaps
a vehicle -- a much weaker conception. What McLuhan was saying is
that if the personal computer is a truly new medium then the very
use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire
civilization. He had certainly been right about the effect of the
electronic stained-glass window that was television -- a
remedievalizing tribal influence at best. The intensely interactive
and involving nature of the personal computer seemed an
antiparticle that could annihilate the passive boredom invoked by
television. But it also promised to surpass the book to bring about
a new kind of renaissance by going beyond static representations to
dynamic stimulation. What kind of a thinker would you become if you
grew up with an active simulator connected, not just to one point
of view, but to all the points of view of the ages represented so
they could be dynamically tried out and compared?" -- Alan KRy,
"User Interface: A Personal View" 1990
2) "As an environmental simulator, the Sensorama display was one of
the first steps towards duplicating the viewer's act of confronting
a real scene. The user is totally immersed in an information booth
designed to imitate the mode of exploration while the scene is
imaged simultaneously through several senses. The next step is to
allow the viewer to control his own path through available
information to create a highly personalized interaction capability
bordering on the threshold of virtual exploration." -- Scott
Fisher, "Viewpoint Dependent Imaging," 1981
3) "VR is shared and objectively present like the physical world,
composable like a work of art, and as unlimited and harmless as a
dream. When VR becomes widely available, around the turn of the
century, it will not be seen as a medium used within physical
reality, but rather as an additional reality. VR opens up a new
continent of ideas and possibilities. At Texpo '89 we set foot on
the shore of this continent for the first time." -- VPL Research,
1989
4) "Cyberspace will not merely provide new experiences, like new
rides at a carnival. More than any mechanism yet invented, it will
change what humans perceive themselves to be, at a very fundamental
and personal level. In cyberspace, there is no need to move about
in a body like the one you possess in physical reality....You will
find that some bodies work best in some situations while others
work best in others. The ability to radically and compellingly
change one's body-image is bound to have a deep psychological
effect, calling into question just what you consider yourself to
be. n -- Howard Rheingold
l
ti(
9) "Computers are theater. Interactive technology, like drama,
provides a platform for representing coherent realities in which
agents perform actions with cognitive, emotional, and productive
qualities....Two thousand years of dramatic theory and practice
have been devoted to an end which is remarkably similar to that of
the fledgling discipline of human-computer interaction design;
namely, creating artificial realities in which the potential for
action is cognitively, emotionally and aesthetically enhanced." --
Brenda Laurel, ComDuters as Theatre, 1991
10) "Consider the feudal person, unaware that he lived on a planet
loaded with natural resources like fossil fuels, which could power
machines which would create more complex machines and produce
chemical-electrical energy....Today, at the end of the industrial
age, at the dawning of the cybernetic age, most digital engineers
and most managers of the computer industry are not aware that we
live in a cyber-culture surrounded by limitless deposits of
information which can be digitized and tapped by the individual
equipped with cyber-gear There are no limits on virtual
reality. It's all about access to information. The donning of
computer clothing will be as significant in human history as the
donning of outer clothing was in the Paleolithic." -- Timothy
Leary, 1990
.
- E
~ Anaeleo Wimeo
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1993
PERSPECTIVE ON COMMUNICATIONS
The Colossal Hold of E-Mail
consumes no paper, kills no
1993 was the year that ' trees, burns no gasoline in a
I computer messages in the mail represents the culmina
| service of work, play and tion of the de-materialization
l even romance molded of culture. First, we painted
i the real 'global village.' able stone walls of our caves.
I - Then, in a great leap forward
| By BRIAN STONEHILL we learned to engrave on
heavy clay tablets. Centuries
n uture historians of culture will
~1 surely regard 1993 as the Year of
_ E-mail. Nothing has so radically
changed the way that millions of ordi-
nary people can communicate with one
another since the telephone first en-
tered the home. Electronic mail enables
us to type and receive messages at any
computer screen and, thanks to the
Internet and other smaller networks,
have the message show up instantly on
the screen (or in the electronic mailbox)
of our correspondents, anywhere in the
world.
That's the big picture. And now, here
are the Top 10 features of E-mailÑthe
things that make it revolutionary: .
Z .*t.s..g,,4
No. 10: Its colossal holdin,a PoNr
People gladly spend hours each day
writing and reading at their screens.
They write to their friends and rela-
tives, they write to people they've never
met. E-mail usage is growing at more
than 300,000% a year. In San Francisco,
a dozen coffeehouses offer access to
computer networks at the rate of 25
cents for four minutes. Everydafy, peo-
ple reportedly spend $10 in quarters, not
playing sterile games but communicat-
ing with new friends.
No. 9: It is not generation-specific.
E-mail is not a gadget that appeals just
to the young. People of all ages are
logging on and if they're not members of
| institutions that subscribe to the Inter-
I net, they are subscribing (for less than
| the cost of cable TV ) to commercial
I services like CompuServe and America
! Online.
No. 8: It is an ecological dream. E-mail
. .
later, paper and printing made culture
hugely, historically portabBe. In the
1980s, faxes sped things up but still
consumed paper. E-mail is all about
spirit moving instantaneously about the
globe, inhabiting no matter at all and
using precious little energy.
No. 7: It's the ultimate instance of
swords beaten into plowshares. The In-
ternet began its existence as DARPA-
net, the Defense Department's research
link that enabled signals to be sent to
nuclear missile silos around the country.
Now that death-dealing technology has
been given over to humanists, artists,
gossipers, hobbyists, academics and
plain folks enriching their lives with
witty, trivial, informative and humane
banter.
No. 6: It's the ideal of democracy.
E-mail doesn't care what you wear,
what you drive, what pen you write
with or whether you speak with an
accent. As one canine is seen E-mailing
to another mutt in a recent New Yorker
cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody
knows you're a dog." If you're slow of
speech or talk with a stutter, E-mail
leaves that behind. Cyberspace does not
see physical challenges and is color-
blind. Our new electronic culture is not
about the body, it's about the mind.
No. 5: The instbnt you send your
message it's on your correspondent's
desk, not in some stack of envelopes.
People tend to answer their E-mail
immediately, so that business decisions,
editorial changes, travel plans, career
moves all get sDeeid up and made more
efficient by orders of magnitude.
No. 4: Offlce romances are muCtiplying,
The reason is simple: You can be locked
in an intimate E-mail conversation with
someone across the room or across.the
country, and it looks to everyohe else
like you are innocently working.
No. 3: E-mail lets you meet strangers
whose interests are yours, yet it protects
you from being bored by them. Thanks
to bulletin boards, you can tap into
ongoing conversations that are about
such specific topics as last night's epi-
sode of "Northern Exposure" or ¥ the
culture of Pakistan or what's happening
on laser disc or the latest news release
from the White House.
It's like walking into a room where
everyone is talking about the very thing
that you're most interested in. Stay 'if
you're learning something useful, leave
if you're not. This is the opposite-rf
sterile, isolated video games. It's social,
it's curiosity-driven and full of informa-
tion.
No. 2: E-mail is connecting the plunet-
into the gCobal viUage Marshall McLuhan
promised us 30 years ago. We can follow
events in Sarajevo more closely on the
Internet than in the papers or on TV. I
hear from people in Singapore and
Denmark more often and more interest- -
ingly than from people who live down-
the street. The world is becoming more
like a living critter with a working
nervous systemÑnot because we're all
watching the same pictures on some
global TV network, but because we are !
getting connected to something that
speaks to our individual interests and
curiosities. .
And the No. t feature of E-mail
(drum roll, please) is that, futuristic as It
sounds, it's happening right now. For
millions of users here and abroad, we're
not talking pie in the sky any moreÑ
we're talking pie a la modem.
Brian StonehiCI, who directs the media
studies program at Pomona CoClege, is
reachable on the Internet at:
bstonehiU @ pomona.claremont.ed u.
.. '~
Vivian Sobchack, "Phenomenology and the Film Experience."
1) The cinema is the expression of experience by experience.
"More than any other medium of human communication, the moving
picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the
expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing
that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard,
an act of physical and reflexive movement that makes itself
reflexively felt and understood."
2) Underlying Sobchack's models are two notions of communication
-- "wild" communication (i.e. the experience of experience itself)
and secondary significations (i.e. the mapping of meaning onto that
experience.) "Objectively projected, visibly and audibly expressed
before us, the film's activity of seeing, hearing, and moving
signifies in a pervasive, primary and embodied language that
precedes and provides the grounds for the secondary significations
of a more discrete, systematic, less 'wild' communication. Cinema
thus transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of
being alive and consciously embodied in the world that count for
each us as direct expeireince : as experience 'centered' in that
particular, situated, and solely occupied existence sensed first as
'here, where the world touches' and then as 'Here, where the world
is sensible; here, where I am."
3)The cinema's specificity lies in its ability to use both
modes of perception and structures of experience to communicate its
meanings. "Indeed, the cinema uses modes of embodied existence
(seeing, hearing, physical and reflective movement) as the vehicle,
the 'stuff,' the substance of its language. It also uses the
structures of direct exDerience (the 'centering' and bodily
situating of existence in relation to the world of objects and
others) as the basis for the structures of its languages. Thus, as
a symbolic form of human communication, the cinema is like no
other."
4) Our engagement with the cinema is directly felt through the
senses. One might contrast this with the way that meaning gets
expressed through the printed word, say, where the sense (i.e.
meanings we make) is divorced from our senses (i.e. sight, hearing,
etc.) Written language conveys secondary significance but not
"wild" meaning. "When we sit in a movie theatre and perceive a film
as sensible, as making sense, we (and the film before us) are
immersed in a world and in an activity of visual being. The
experience is as familiar as it is intense, and is is markedby the
way in which significance and the act of signifying are directlv
felt, sensuously available to the viewer."
5) The cinema invites us to share a moment of perception with
the filmmaker/film ("here, where we see"), but at the same time, as
we watch it, we recognize that it is someone else's perceptions of
some place other than the space we currently occupy ("there, where
I am not.") You might contrast that with Baudry's claim that we
confuse the filmmaker's perceptions with our own. Sobehack is
positing a more active and self-conscious spectator who may, never-
the-less, on occassion, choose to share perceptions with the film
and suspend distance. "The anonymous but centered 'Here, where eye
o
(I) am" of the film can be doubly occupied. 'Decentered" as it is
engaged by an other in the film experience, it becomes the 'Here,
where we see' -- a shared space of being, of seeing, hearing, and
bodily and reflective movement performed and experienced by both
film and viewer. However, this decentering, this double occupancy
of cinematic space, does not conflate the film and the viewer. The
'Here, where eye (I) am" of the film retains its unique situation,
even as it cannot maintain its perceptual privacy. Directly
perceptible to the viewer as an anonymous 'Here, where eye am'
simu~a"Wneously available as 'Here, where we see," the concretely
embodied situation of the film's vision also stands against the
viewer. It is also perceived by the viewer as a 'There, where I am
not,' as the space consciously and bodily inhabited and lived by an
'other' whose experience of being-in-the-world, however anonymous,
is not precisely congruent with the viewer's own. Thus, while space
and its significance is ultimately shared and lived by both film
and viewer, the viewer is always at some level a,ware of the double
and reversible nature of cinematic perceptton, that is, of
perception as expression, of perception as a process of mediating
consciousness's relations with the world. The viewer, therefore,
shares cinematic space with the film but must also negotiate it,
contribute to, and perform the constitution of its experiental
significance."
6) In cinema, perception is the stuff through which
expression/signification occurs.llA film is given to us and taken up
by us as perception turned literally inside out and toward us as
expression. It presents and represents to us and for us and through
us the very modes and structures of being as language."
7)In cinema and in the world, signification and perception are
not easily or totally seperable. "As two modalities of significant
and signifying existence, perception and expression are interwoven
threads, the woof and warp that together form a seamless and supple
fabric, the whole cloth of existential experience from which
specific forms of significantion can be fashioned to instrumentally
suit specific functions."
8) She identifies three metaphors that have dominated film
theory:
a)the picture frame (i.e. Eisenstein and Montage theory);
b)the window (i.e. Andre Bazin and realism);
c) the mirror (i.e Baudry and ideological analysis.)
Each focuses on the film as a viewed object, rather than stressing
the way the film functions as a "viewing subject." "The formalists,
seeking to transform and restrucutre the 'brute' referentiality and
'wild' meaning of cinematic images into personally determinate and
expressive signification (hence the metaphor of the frame),
acknowledge the camera's perceptive nature as they celebrate the
artist's triumph over it. On the other side, the realists, seeking
to reveal and discover the world's expression in all its 'wild'
meaning (hence the metaphor of the window) acknowledge the camera's
expressive nature in its selective and shifting vision, even as
they celebrate the medium's perceptual purity and openness."
9) Each of the metaphors focuses on only one aspect of the
process which Sobchack is describing:
a) The Frame results in "transcendental idealism" or
wexpression-in-itself";
b)the Window in "trancendental realism", or "perception-in-
itself";
c)the Mirror represents l'trancendental determinism" or
"mediation-in-itself."
10) We experience the cinema as a perceptual dialogue between
two viewing subjects (the film/camera/filmmaker and the spectator)
who sometimes share interests but can never fully share the same
experiences or meanings. "My experience at the movies is never
lived as a monologic one, however easy and even often lazy my
participation (or the film's) seems to be. There are always two
embodied acts of vision at work in the theatre, two embodied views
constituting the intelligibility and significance of the film
experience. The film's vision and my own do not conflate, but meet
in the sharing of a world and constitue an experience that is not
only intrasubjectively dialectical, but also intersubjectively
dialogical. Although there are moments in which our views may
become congruent in the convergence of our interest (never of our
situation), there are also moments in which our views conflict; our
values, interests, prospects, and projects differ; something is not
understood or is denied even as its is visible and seen. Cinematic
vision, then, is never monocular, is always doubled, is always the
vision of two viewing subrects materially and consciously
inhabiting, signifying, and sharing a world in a manner at once
universal and particular, a world that is mutually visible but
hermeneutically negotiable."
Henry Jenkins
TWO THEORIES OF HOW WE PERCEIVE CINENATIC SPACE
Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus"
1) The camera obscura (and its production of artificial
perspective) had a paradoxical effect: first, it allowed Galileo to
"decenter" the human universe and second, it created a human
"subject" as "the active center and origin of meaning. N
2) The technical nature of the optical instruments serves to
"conceal not only their use in ideological products but also the
ideological effects which they themselves provoke." Their
scientific base assures them neutrality and prevents them from
being questioned.
3)Any claims about the accuracy or inaccuracy of such
representations hinges on the assumptions we make about reality and
about how human beings come to know the world around them. Such
claims can not, then, be easily separated from the ideological
purposes which shape them. Here, Baudry adopts what Terry Lovell
would call a "conventionalist" epistemology.
4) "Between 'objective reality" and the camera, site of
inscription, and between the inscription and projection are
situated certain operations, a work which has as its result a
finished product. To the extent that it is cut off from the raw
material ("objective reality") this product does not allow us to
see the transformation which has taken place." [Compare this
conception of the photographic process with Bazin's "Ontology of
the Photographic Image"]
5) "Equally distant from 'objective reality' and the finished
product, the camera occupies an intermediate position in the work
process which leads from raw material to finished product." Baudry
makes a distinction between decouDage (the breaking down of shots
prior to shooting) and montaae (the editing process completed after
shooting). The camera stands between the two processes. Similarly,
he distinguishes between the completion of the film and the moment
of his consumption. Mediating that relationship is the projector.
So we might diagram the production process as:
Decoupage -- Camera --Montage -- Projector -- Consumption. All of
this is referred to as the apparatus.
6) The work of the film is this process of transformation of
basic materials. Baudry advocates a mode of filmmaking which makes
this work visible, so that the spectator knows what has occurred.
He considers classical filmmaking deceptive in so far as it
conceals the work. Specifically, he wants to look at the way that
the instruments -- the camera and the projector -- involved in the
work may have "specific ideological effects" which are determined
by "the dominant ideology." If this is right, then, the concealment
of the work will have ideological consequences, rendering the
operation of the dominant ideology invisible.
7)The camera depends upon "the construction of an image
analogous to the perspective projections developed during the
Italian Renaissance." (Different lens may distort or alter that
notion of perspective, but Renaissance notions of perspective are
the norm against which the deviation of other lens are read.)
8)The advent of Renaissance perspective resulted in a shift
from a scene organized around multiple points of view towards a
centered space with the center of the space corresponding with the
eye of the subject. In other words, perspective organizes the
space for the benefit of a seeing eye which stands outside that
space looking in and which develops a kind of mastery or possession
through vision of that space. When we stand at the vantage point,
we substitute our vision for that perspective built into the
painting. We occupy a subject position, which leads us to confuse
our act of seeing for the painter' B act of creation.
9)The movie camera differs from the still camera (and by
extension, the easel painting) in one particular: it does not
generate a single image; it produces a series of images. It thus
poses a threat to the unity or coherence of the subject position
created by the lens, recreating the multiplicity of points of view
of earlier modes of representation. Baudry is interested, then, in
how the cinematic apparatus at various levels works to close down
those differences and produce a unified image of time and space.
10) The projector turns the succession of images into a
perception of continuous motion. The individual images have
"between them differences that are indispensable for the creation
of an illusion of continuity" but these differences create an
illusion of continuity by effacing their own difference. "Film
lives on a denial of difference: differences are necessary for it
to live, but it lives on their negation."
ll)The consequence of this is to produce a conception of the
seeing subject which is more powerful in cinema than in any other
form of representation. It "transcends" physical limitations
experienced by actual eyes, creating the "transcendental subject,"
which he describes as a "fantasmatization of objective reality. n
"the eye which moves is no longer fettered by the body, by the laws
of matter and time....there are no more assignable limits to its
displacement." As a result, "the world will not only be constituted
by this eye but for it." tHere, he sees Vertov's celebration of the
Kino-Eye as really a celebration of the cinema's ability to create
a transcendental subject which believes it enjoys the freedom to
see the world, but in fact, sees only what the filmmaker wants us
to see.]
12)This transcendental subject position depends on deception.
It masks the fact that someone else has constructed that image and
that the image already comes with certain meanings attached to it.
As Baudry writes, "the image will always be an image of something;
it must result from a deliberate act of consciousness...For it to
be an image of something, it has to constitute this something as
meaning." When we look at the image of the world, we no longer
enjoy the freedom as perceivers that we enjoy in relation to the
world itself, yet, in cinema, we perceive ourselves as possessing
greater mobility and knowledge that we would if we actually found
ourselves within the situations depicted on the screen.
13) Continuity is "an attribute of the subject. It supposes
the subject and it circumscribes its place." If the perception of
apparent motion through projection effaces the differences within
the strip of images, the problem of difference resurfaces in the
relations between multiple shots, "giving rise to effects of
r;~ --~|!Ñ
rupture disturbing to the spectator. n Cinema has thus sought
conventions for resolving that disturbance, for preserving our
transcendental relations to the images on the screen. Baudry argues
that there is a specific ideological project behind creating such
a strong sense of continuity -- "preserving at any cost the
synthetic unity of the locus where meaning originates."
14) Properties of the projection process reinforce this
construction of a transcendental subject: the darkened room, the
screen bordered with black, the isolation of the space of
projection from the real world, the immobility of the spectator,
the masking of the projector from the viewer's vision. These
conditions duplicate the "mise-en-scene of Plato's cave" and the
Lacanian Mirror stage. [One might compare this account with
McLuhan's myth of Narcisus.]
15) In Lacan, the mirror stage refers to the moment where
one's sense of one's own identity is initially formed. The scene
occurs when the mother holds the baby up to the mirror and it sees
its own reflection. For Lacan and Baudry, this moment of self-
awareness is based on some basic misperceptions: the child mistakes
its reflection for itself. The mirror stage thus represents a myth
not only about the origins of identity but also the origins of
identification (that is, the misperception of an other as one's
self.)
16) The cinematic projection, in some senses, duplicates that
situation: we look at the screen and identify with the characters
(secondary identification.)
17) However, for Baudry, the real power of the cinema comes
through operations of primary identification -- i.e. we look at the
cinema as if we were looking directly at the world; we mistake the
camera's look for our own freedom of vision; we forget that the
camera's presentation of the world comes to us with meanings
attached, and so we accept its vision for our own. In Baudry's
words, "the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the
spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it
seen, obliging him to see what it sees: this is exactly the
function taken over by the camera as a sort of relay."
18) "Just as the mirror assembles the fragmented body in a
sort of imaginary integration of the self, the transcendental self
unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena, of lived
experience, into unifying meaning. Through it each fragment assumes
meaning by being integrated into an 'organic' unity."
19) "The ideological mechanism at work in the cinema seems
thus to be concentrated in the relationship between the camera and
the subject....Ultimately, the forms of narrative adopted, the
'contents' of the image, are of little importance so long as an
identification remains possible."
20) "Everything happens as if, the subject himself being
unable -- and for a reason -- to account for his own situation, it
was necessary to substitute secondary organs, grafted on to replace
his own defective ones, instruments or ideological formations
capable of filling his function as subject. In fact, this
substitution is only possible on the condition that the
instrumentation itself be hidden or repressed....Both specular
tranquility and the assurance of one's own identity collapse
simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism, that is, of the
inscription of the film-work."
Edward Branigan, "The Spectator and Film Space -- Two Theories"
1) Branigan's model depends upon an active and knowing
spectator rather than a passive and misperceiving spectator (a la
Baudry). His approach is cognitive rather than psychoanalytic.
2)Branigan assumes that our relationship to the text is not
fixed (as it is in Baudry), but is constantly shifting in response
to cues which shape our understanding of the filmic space.
Branigan's model depends upon our recognition that we are watching
a movie which was shot by a camera and our ability to make fine
grained distinctions about the meanings ascribed to specific filmic
spaces. (Baudry is less interested in the specific content or
formal properties of individual films than in basic properties of
the cinematatographic apparatus.)
3)Branigan distinguishes between narration (the telling of a
story) and narrative (what is told). Narration depends upon a
"process of exchange whereby the author constructs an imaginary
reader in the writing while the reader constructs an imaginary
author in the reading. n
4)Branigan is interested in how we recognize and distinguish
between different levels of narration in watching a film.
Specifically, he wants to know how we tell spaces constructed
through the subjective vision of an individual character from
spaces presented from the vantage point of an objective narrator.
5) Branigan proposes two different theories to account for
this process: a)through error and b)through hypothesis. The two
theories he argues have important consequences in how we
conceptualize the camera and the "story space" (i.e. the diegesis.)
6) Given a situation where a shot believed to be subjective is
later revealed to be coming from an objective source, the error
approach posits: a)we initially misread or misperceived the image;
b)the image may now be correctly understood as objective rather
than subjective. The Reading Hypothesis approach sees the initial
understanding of the shot as cued by features of the text and as
central to the process of reading and comprehending the image. Our
"misunderstanding" was, in some sense, built into the text.
"reading includes making mistakes, even forgetting. Reading is a
process of 'I name, I unname, I rename.' It does not settle a text
into truth, error, or author." Branigan supports the "reading
hypothesis" approach.
7) Branigan defines the camera "not as a real, profilmic
object....but as a construct of the reader -- a reading hypothesis
which seeks to make intelligible the spaces of the film."
(Profilmic refers to the situation at the time the film was made;
profilmic reality would be the reality which stands in front of the
camera at the moment of the recording process, while a profilmic
camera would be the actual material camera which records the
image.)
8) Space is defined as "the placement and displacement of
frame lines....The frame is a perceptual boundary which divides
what is represented from what is not represented: here it is, and
not there." The frame line can be displaced in many ways: camera
movement, zooms, rack focus, split screens, animation, optical and
special effects, etc.
9) The reading hypothesis is not purely subjective (i.e. "not
just anything a reader may conceive") but textually determined
("must reflect shared assumptions/expectations of a community with
respect to a set of texts.") The text may withhold information, may
create intentionally "ambiguous, misleading, multiple,
contradictory, undefined, hidden or inadvertent" understandings of
represented spaces.
10) "According to a reading hypothesis theory, then, the
camera is not a profilmic event which is shifted from place to
place, but a construct of the spectator, a hypothesis about space -
- about the production and change of space. The camera is simply a
label applied by the reader to certain plastic transformations of
space. n He notes that the camera, per se, does not exist when we
watch animation, yet we respond to animated images as if there was
a camera present. In that case, the camera is purely a reading
hypothesis. Though an actual "profilmic" camera exists in other
kinds of films, we do not see the camera; we can not know its
properties or movements accurately; we simply imagine a camera
which could have recorded the space in certain ways, though our
awareness of the camera is central to Branigan's account of
narration (while Baudry's depends on our forgetting that a camera
stands between us and the represented space.)
11) "To say that a particular narration is diegetic is to
assign a source to the space....of a film on the basis of whether
(and how) one or more elements are within or outside story space.
More specifically, the diegetic in film comprises those elements
which give rise to the fictional world of characters, landscapes,
and events. The diegetic is the implied spatial, temporal and
causal system of the characters."
12) Branigan discusses the error and the reading hypothesis
accounts of narration as they relate to our understanding of
diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The advantage of the reading
hypothesis approach is "that it maps a process of reading --- a
sequence of hypotheses made by the reader -- and it preserves the
fact that inferences have been made," while the error account
"seeks to assign an absolute division between diegetic and non-
diegetic without taking into account the position of the
viewer....The error theory relies on a formal definition
independent of the act of perceiving."
13) The reading hypothesis account "tends to emphasize the role
of a perceiver...actively labelling spaces and speculating about
the relation of character and sound according to that perceiver's
acquired principles and habits." The error account assumes "the
viewer is a passive receiver of stimuli.
The essay goes into a sustained discussion of empirical vs.
rational conceptions of narrative comprehension, drawing on
analogies to Chomsky's linguistics to explain how the same basic
ideas may be communicated through multiple formal practices and the
ways that we acquire competence to make sense of a diverse array of
films. This material is useful, but not directly relevant to the
contrast we are drawing between Baudry and Branigan.
CULTURE, MASS CULTURE, POPULAR CULTURE
BASIC DEFINITIONS
1) "Enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by
intellectual and aesthetic training; acquaintance with and taste in
fine arts, humanities and broad aspects of science as distinguished
from vocational and technical skills."
2) "The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and
behavoir that depends upon man's capacity for learning and
transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; the customary
beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or
social group. n __ Webster's Dictionary
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"This new conception of culture seeks to do away with classes; to
make the best that has been thought and known in the world current
everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and
light....This is the social idea and the men of culture are the
true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who
have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying
from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best
ideas of their time, who have labored to divest knowledge of all
that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional,
exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique
of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best
knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of
sweetness and light."-- Matthew Arnold
"Through culture seems to lie our way, not only to perfection, but
even to safety."-- Matthew Arnold.
THE ARNOLD TRADITION TODAY
"The first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence
of a director as a criterion of value....The second premise of the
auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as
a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must
exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as
his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some
relationship to the way a director thinks and feels....The third
and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with
interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art.
Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a
director's personality and his material."-- Andrew Sarris
"Classical music is dead among the young....Classical music is now
a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology,
not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological
shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some
of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they
liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids.
University students usually had some early emotive association with
Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their
makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their
lives... Many, or even most, of the young people of that generation
also swung with Benny Goodman, but with an element of self-
consciousness -- to be hip, to prove they weren't snobs, to show
solidarity with the democratic ideal,of a pop culture out of which
would grow a new high culture. So there remained a class
distinction between high and low, although private taste was
beginning to create doubts about whether one really liked the high
very much. But all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned
and unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few
have any acquaintance at all with classical music....tRock] has
raised to its current heights in the education of the young on the
ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no
intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest
passions....Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to
sexual desire -- not love, not eros, but sexual desire, undeveloped
and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children's
emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them
and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully
tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers but as the real
thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the
public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their
parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they
grew up and would understand later....In alliance with some real
art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the
taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex,
providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious
appetites." -- Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)
THE FRANKFORT SCHOOL
"In popular music.... every detail is substitutable; it serves its
function only as a cog in the machine. n _- Theodor Adorno, "On
Popular Music"
"The assembly line that produces the standardized automobile also
produces a bored, numbed and passive consumer. Workers are as
customized by the capitalist production system as the commodities
they are hired to produce. Industrial standardization in the
culture industry both satisfies the consumption needs of bored,
passive workers and contributes further to their passivity. Bored
consumers need constant stimulation; therefore, the industry
creates pseudo-individualized hooks in music and the constant
illusion of novelty. Benumbed as they are, the workers have neither
the inclination nor the capacity to struggle intellectually with
the cultural products they consume. The products must come to them
completely predigested. This need is met by musical homogeneity and
part interchangability; however, this uniformity must remain hidden
if the illusion of novelty is to be sustained. But the stimulative
power of each record palls very quickly, recreating the condition
of boredom it was meant to relieve. The only antidote is the
constant production of new recorded sounds." --Bernard Gendron,
p.23.
l -: s y
"Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing
their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for
its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they
listen to is already listened to for them, or 'pre-digested."' --
Theodor Adorno, "On Popular Music. n
"Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its
promoters but, as it were, by the inherent nature of the music
itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to
the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society....The
composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music
divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned
reflexes. Not only does it not require his effort to follow its
concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything
concrete still remaining must be subsumed. The schematic buildup
dictates the way in which he must listen while, at the same time,
it makes any effort in listening unnecessary. Popular music is
'pre-digested' in a way strongly resembling the fad of 'digests' in
printed material." (Adorno, "On Popular Music," p.305)
THE BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL
"Culture is a description of a particular way of life, which
expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning
but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. The analysis of
culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the
meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of
life, a particular culture....Such analysis will
include...historical criticism... in which intellectual and
imaginative works are analyzed in relation to particular traditions
and societies, but will also include analysis of elements in the
way of life that to followers of other definitions are not
'culture' at all: the organization of production, the structure of
the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern
social relationships, the characteristic forms through which
members of the society communicate." (Graham Turner, p.56)
"The general idea is that of a shared set of ways of thinking and
feeling which, displaying a patterned regularity, form and are
formed by the 'whole way of life' which comprises the 'lived
culture' of a particular epoch, class or group."-- Tony Bennett
"Pop music was a manifest and ever present part of the environment
of the motorbike boys: it pervaded their whole culture. In simple
qualitative terms, there was a massive interaction with pop music.
It is clear, however, that the significance of this relationship
went very much further than an arbitrary or random juxtaposition.
The motorbike boys had very specific tastes that were not part of
the current pop music scene and were not catered for in the ongoing
mass media sources. They liked the music of the early rock'n'roll
period between 1955 and 1960. By current standards of the
commercial market and the pop music provided by mass media channels
their tastes were at least ten years out of date. By deliberate
choice, then, and not by the accident of passive reception, they
chose this music. This alerts us to the dialectical capacity which
early rock'ntroll had to reflect, resonate and return something of
real value to the motorbike boys....The bike boys' musical
preferences, therefore, were objectively based on the
identification of fundamental elements of the musicals style. The
music did have a distinctiveness, a unity of construction, a
special and consistent use of techniques, a freshness and
conviction of personal delivery, a sense of the 'golden,' 'once and
for all' age, which could parallel, hold, and develop the security,
authenticity, and masculinity of the bike culture....One of the
most noticeable things about the music they liked was the
prominence of its beat. It is music for dancing to, for moving to,
and clearly has the ability to reflect, resonate and develop in a
particular way a lifestyle based on confidence and
movement....Their preferred music, therefore, was clearly
answerable to the restless movement of the bike boys' lives.
Musical discrimination was based essentially on the displaced
category of social and physical movement. The musical quality they
universally disliked was slowness and dreariness. The quality they
prized was fastness and clarity of beat."-- Paul Willis, Profane
Culture (London: Routledge, 1978)
PAGE 54
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THE THREE ERAS OF CIVILIZ~TION
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It has been argued that
postmodernism is nothing more
than the Current pllase of a
modernist traditi I
nearly a century old
| skirt, and black tights
ACItdemy Editlon,, L(ndo~st M r~in ~,,hNtro~ye,,*60s0lt~ Ph~t~is Posr-Mori~rni5m? ;CUsxyrigj P ¥ed
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Postmodernism defined,
at last!
TODD GITLrN/DISSENT
~'
Journals, conferences, galleries, and coffee-
houses are spilling over with talk about post- I
modernism. What is this thing, where does it l
come from, and what is at stake? If it is noth-
ing more than chat to keep the cocktail par-,
ties humming, why the volume, why the I
heat? True, in literature as in art, fashion, architec- l
ture, etc., style always attracts interest. On matters of I
style careers turn and cease to turn; commentators |
and consumers alike "position" themselves to be a la [
mode. But what is striking in recent years is that ele- l
ments of a postmodern style have attracted such at- l
tention (and dismay) in field after field, genre after
genre that it is reasonable to surmise that a general
sensibility is among us.
This phenomenon cannot be explained by the l
aesthetic problems and history of any particular art
form. Postmodernism in the arts corresponds to post- l
modernism in life. French theorist Jean-Francois Ly- l
otard describes the scenario: "One listens to reggae,
watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch l
and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in [
Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong." To argue
about postmodernism, therefore, is to argue about l
more than postmodernism. Postmodernism is more Z
than a buzzword or even an aesthetic; it is a way of l
seeing, a view of the human spirit, and an attitude
toward politics as well as culture. It has precedents, |
but in its reach it is the creature of our recent social '
and political moment. In style, more than style is at
stake.
To get beyond vague talk and knowing genuflec-
tion, it is never a bad idea to start by deciding what we
are talking about. We can get a rough fix on postmod-
ernism by contrasting it to its main predecessors, re-
alism and modernism.
In the realism that rode high in the 19th century, a
u the realism that rode high in the 19th century,
work of art was supposed to express unity and con- l
tinuity. Realism mirrored reality, and criticized it.
The individuals portrayed were clearly placed in so-
ciety and history. High culture was just thatÑhigher,
l more valuable, than popular culture.
w In modernism, voices, perspectives, and mate-
rials were multiple. The unity of the work was assem-
bled from fragments and juxtapositions. Art set out to
I remake life. Audacious individual style threw off the
s dead hand of the past. Continuity was disrupted, the
I individual subject dislocated. High culture quoted
I frompopularculture.
l Postmodernism, by contrast, is completely in-
| different to the questions of consistency and continu-
S itv. It self-consciously splices genres, attitudes, styles.
{ It relishes the blurring or juxtaposition of forms (fic-
j tion-non-fiction), stances (straight-ironic), moods (vi-
a olent-comic), cultural levels (high-low). It disdains
I originality and fancies copies, repetition, the recom-
l bination of hand-me-down scraps. It neither em-
t braces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly,
f with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and com-
I mitment into irony. It pulls the rug out from under it-
ff self, displaying an acute self-consciousness about the
8 More than anytlõing else,
l postmodernism is a reaction
j to the 1960s.
| work's constructed nature. It takes pleasure in the play
{ of surfaces, and derides the search for depth as mere
l nostalgia.
l One postmodernist trope is the list, as if culture
I were a garage sale, so it is appropriate to evoke post-
s modernism by offering a list of examples, for better
l and for worse: Michael Graves' Portland Building,
{ Philip Johnson's AT&T, and hundreds of more or less
l skillful derivatives; Robert Rauschenberg's silk
l screens, Warhol's multiple-image paintings, photo-re-
I alism, Larry Rivers' erasures and pseudo-pageantry,
! Sherrie Levine's photographs of "classic" photo
"WHO'S ON FIRST": AUTHORS, CRITICS, CONSUMERS
by Henry Jenkins, Ast. Prof., Head of Film and Media Studies, MIT
1) "Who's on First, What's on Second, I Don't Rnow's on Third." --
Bud Abbott
2) "[The mirror and the lamp identify] two common and antithetic
metaphors of the mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of
external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a
contribution to the objects it perceives. The first of these was
characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to the eighteenth
century; the second typifies the prevailing romantic notion of the
mind....Though most of the eighteenth century, the poet's invention
and imagination were made thoroughly dependent for their materials
-- their ideas and 'images' -- on the external universe and the
literary models the poet had to imitate: while the persistent
stress laid on his need for judgement and art -- the mental
surrogates, in effect, of a cultivated audience -- held the poet
strictly responsible to the audience for whose pleasure he exerted
his creative ability. Gradually, however, the stress was shifted
more and more to the poet's natural genius, creative imagination,
and emotional spontaneity, at the expense of the opposing
attributes of judgement, learning, and artful restraint. As a
result, the audience gradually receded into the background, giving
place to the poet himself and his own mental powers and emotional
needs, as the predominant cause and even the end and test of art. n
-- M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theorv and the
Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).
3a) "Author and criticism have developed together over the last
hundred and fifty odd years until the achieved situation of today
when the institutionalization of 'literary criticism' (in
faculties, journals, newspaper reviews, etc.) in replacement of the
discipline of rhetoric (founded not on the 'author' but on the
orders of discourse) depends on and sustains the author (enshrined
in syllabi and examinations, interviews and television portraits).
The task of criticism has been precisely the construction of the
author. Style in this perspective is the result of the extraction
of marks of individuality, a creation of the author and the area of
his value. Criticism, in short, is the modern hermeneutics; the
passage from God to Author. n __ Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman:
A Study in the Practice of Writina (London: Elek Books, 1972).
3b) The most sustained criticism of the links between academic
authority and authorial authority can be found in Michel de
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984). "The fiction [of authorial meaning as the
only preferred meaning in the process of interpretation] condemns
consumers to subjection because they are always going to be guilty
of infidelity or ignorance when confronted by the mute 'riches' of
the treasury thus set aside....The text becomes a cultural weapon,
a private hunting reserve, the pretext for a law that legitimizes
as 'literal' the interpretation given by socially authorized
professionals and intellectuals. n
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4) Michel Foucault tells us that authors serve three basic
functions in our cultural economy: they allow us to group artworks
together in meaningful and coherent ways; they demark the value or
worth of artworks; they provide a simple and readily accessible
explanation for causation. Consider how these factors work together
to separate high culture (which is valued because we can identify
and examine the author), folk culture (which is separated off
because we do not know an individual author and therefore it must
be treated as an artifact), and mass culture (where authorship is
ascribed to a corporation rather than an individual). See Michel
Foucault, Language. Counter-Memory. Practice (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1977).
5)For many critics of mass culture, what is most frightening about
the culture industries is the loss of individual expressivity, the
depersonalization of the creative process. The dependence upon
formula, the creation of artwork; based on standardized parts, for
many writers in the Frankfurt School tradition, allowed for no
marks of authorship. Mass produced artworks are frightening to
these critics because of their anonymity. See, for example, Andrew
Arato and Eike Gabhardt (Eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader (New York: Urizen, 1978).
6) For many early film historians, authorship existed at the
expense of larger historical explanations, almost as a denial of
history in favor of a Zeus-like myth of individual invention and
innovation. See, for example, how David Cook describes the role of
D.W. Griffith in the development of film style: "Griffith
established the narrative language of the cinema as we know it
today and turned an aesthetically inconsequential medium of
entertainment into a fully articulated artform. He has been called,
variously, and for the most part, accurately, 'the father of film
technique,' 'the man who invented Hollywood,' 'the cinema's first
great auteur,' and 'the Shakespeare of the screen.'....He was
unquestionably the seminal genius of the narrative cinema and its
first great visionary artist."
David Cook, A History of the Narrative Film (New York: W.W. Norton,
1981).
7)Academic acceptance of Cinema Studies as a legitimate discipline
arose in response to two factors: the emergence of the Auteur
theory (transplanted from the French Cahiers du Cinema to the
United States by American critic Andrew Sarris), a theory which
allowed us to discuss even studio-era Hollywood film as an authored
artwork and the rise of European art cinema, which foregrounds
authorial intent as the point of intelligibility for understanding
an ambiguous artwork. Only by evoking the identity of the author
could film move from a cultural commodity into an artform. See
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985); David Bordwell, Making Meaning
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Janet Staiger,
Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of the
American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
8) wAuteurism shares certain assumptions: notably, that a film,
though produced collectively, is moRt likely to be valuable when it
is essentially the product of its director ('meaningful coherence
is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings.,
Sarris); that in the presence of a director who is genuinely an
artist (an auteur) a film is more than likely to be the expression
of his individual personality; and that this personality can be
traced in a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all (or
almost all) the director's films. Most auteurist critics made a
distinction between the auteur and the (mere) metteur en scene: the
one consistently expressing his own unique obsessions,t he other a
competent, even highly competent, film-maker, but lacking the
consistency which betrayed the profound involvement of a
personal ity .... Each seemed to assume that, if film were to be
considered an art, as it quite generally was, then what they were
urging inevitably followed: film is an art, and art is the
expression of the emotions, experience and 'world-view' of an
individual artist." --John Caughie (Ed.), Theories of AuthorshiD
(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
9) "The auteur theory values the personality of a director
precisely because of the barriers to its expression. It is as if a
few brave souls had managed to overcome the gravitational pull of
the mass of movies." -- Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions. 1929-68 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968).
Genre, in particular, emerges as an undesirable term within this
theory, the conventions or constraints on individual expressivity,
the marks of the studio executives and commerce on the artform.
Critics learned to filter out the genre in order to focus on the
distinctiveness the director added to it.
10) Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judaement
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) who argues that the
imposition of the category of the author onto popular culture is
one way in which bourgeois taste makes a space for its own
expertise and cultural capital, while popular taste is based on a
more immediate engagement with the characters and the narrative.
11) The author of auteur theory is a wholly critical construct. It
ignores historical questions of control and authority which are
vexing ones in a mode of production where: a)the director often is
unable to make the basic decisions which constitute the artistic
process -- project initiation, scripting, casting, editing,
scoring, etc. and b)all aspects of production depend upon
collaboration within a strictly policed division of labor.
12) The Author has often been constructed by the studios for
commercial reasons, as an exploitable trademark which bestows
particular qualities onto the artwork. The names of Frank Capra,
Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, or Alfred Hitchcock, were printed
over the title because they could attract stable audiences to their
films. Authorial personality was created through promotional
materials to insure the public interest in these directors which
could be transferred from film to film.
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13) In the post-classical Hollywood cinema, directors, who were now
free agents and not under studio contracts, had to sell themselves
as skilled and specialized labor rather than commercial hacks. As
a result, directors such as Robert Altman, Martin Scorcese, or more
recently, Spike Lee and David Lynch, have developed idiosyncratic
styles and thematic concerns which made their works distinguishable
from that of studio contract directors. The auteur theory provided
critics with a vocabulary for describing, appraising, and defending
these idiosyncratic styles in terms of the marks of the director's
personal visions.
14) In an attempt to appeal to up-scale markets, other commerical
arts, which once depended upon more or less anonymous production
staffs, have begun to create space for the demonstration and
promotion of the marks of authorship. See, for example, the new
stress placed on authorship within the comicbook industry or the
role which David Lynch's reputation played in the presentation of
Twin Peaks as an example of "Quality Television. n See Roberta
Pearson and William Urrichio (Eds.), The Many Lives of the Batman
(New York: Routledge, 1981).
15) "All words have
of a profession, a genre, a
tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a
generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the
context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged
life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual
overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in
the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as
heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness,
lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in
language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when
the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent,
when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and
expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the
word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is
not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his
words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other
people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: It is from
there that one must take the word and make it one's own. And not
all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this
appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private
property: Many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound
foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now
speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall
out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks
against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium
that passes freely and easily into the private property of the
speaker's intentions; it is populated -- overpopulated -- with the
intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to
one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated
process. n M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imaaination (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981).
16) The filmmaker, like the writer, then works with "borrowed
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language," struggling to activate desired meanings, to rework and
appropriate established conventions, to use old terms in new ways,
while closing down unwanted associations. For the filmmaker in the
studio system, these would include generic conventions, filmic
norms, censorship standards, star iconography, studio style, etc.
17)The filmmaker exists in a dialogue with his or her culture. This
perspective invites us to focus on convention as well as invention
as both qualities contained in all artworks, as both enabling
conditions for the work's reception and appreciation by a
historically specific audience. The meaning of the work is thus not
innate and universal, but context specific, and the author does not
exist sui genre but as p
_ larger cultural community.
18) This model shifts the focus away from legalistic notions of
intellectual property which are premised on some concept of
original creation and recognize instead the role of shared cultural
resources. In that sense, it harkens back to the mirror metaphor in
M. H . Abrams .
19) A model based on Bakhtin's Dialoaic Imaaination breaks down the
barrier between reader and writer. Both work with borrowed
materials. Both appropriate and rework them towards their own
interests. Both are involved in what De certeau would describe as
of "poaching" upon the "scriptural economy." This model
I space for thinkinq about the inventiveness and creativitv
opens a _r___ ___ _ _ _, ____ _ _ _ _ __ _ __ _ _ _ _ .
Of the audience. For an elaboration of this concept, see Henry
Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and ParticiPatorY
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).
20) Bakhtin's model also makes it possible to talk more
meaningfully about multiple authorship, not simply the
collaboration involved in the filmmaking process, but also newer
models of interactive fiction, such as role-playing games or
multiple authored worlds in science fiction (Wild Cards) or the
multiple reworkings of the figure of Batman in recent comic books
or.... Once we move beyond the notion of the author as a sole
creator and focus back on the interplay of the author with shared
cultural resources, we can start to talk in more complicated ways
about authoring as a process of shared creative responsibility
which exists in dialogue with larger cultural traditions.
21) This approach allows us to think about popular artworks not as
self-sufficient works but as gaining meaning and importance through
their dynamic interplay with a range of other works circulating in
the same historical and cultural context.
22) Bakhtin's model avoids the hierarchical treatment of different
aesthetic mediums and tradition, the schism of high art, folk art
and mass art. It allows us to think about a range of different
roles for authors in the creation of artworks. It allows us to
validate many different aesthetic traditions which provide the
framework for the creation and reception of artworks.
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23) This account allows us to talk more meaningfully about minority
writers who may enjoy a range of different relationships to their
cultural communities and to the dominant culture in which their
creative output occurs.
24) "Who's on First? . . . I Don't Know and I don't give a damn . " __
Lou Costello.
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological state Apparatuses"
1) "Every child knows that a social formation which did not
reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it
produced would not last a year. The ultimate condition of
production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of
production. "
2) What must be reproduced are: althe productive forces and b)the
existing relations of production.
3)This reproduction can not occur on an individual level but occurs
within an "endless chain" of productive relations with other
corporations. We are really talking about capitalism as a whole as
providing a system for production and reproduction of capital.
4)Similarly, the reproduction of labor power occurs largely outside
the individual company. Wages provide a basic motivation, but we
need to account for why workers continually accept a system which
provides lower wages than their productive labor is worth to the
company. A basic mentality or ideology must be produced outside of
the individual company which leads to a social consent to the
conditions of capitalism.
5)0ne place where this reproduction occurs is through the schools,
where children learn not only "know-how" (i.e. skills and practical
knowledge) but also "rules" of good behavoir ("i.e. the attitude
that should be observed by every agent in the division of labor,
according to the job he is destined for; rules of morality, civic
and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect
for the socio-technical division of labor and ultimately the rules
of order established by class domination.") The school insures both
reproduction of productive skills and reproduction of "submission
to the ruling ideology."
6)Each citizen has a relationship to that dominant ideology -- the
exploited (workers), exploiters (capitalists), exploiter's
auxiliaries (managers) and the "high priests of the ruling
ideology" (the functionaries.)
7) Marx proposes the structure of every society as constituted by
the infrastructure, or economic base (the unity of productive
forces and the relations of production) and the superstructure
(consisting of the politicio-legal and ideology). Marx believed
that the economic base determined the nature of the superstructure
(based on an analogy to architecture.) Althusser amends this notion
in two ways -- first, he argues that there is a 'relative autonomy'
between superstructure and base and second, he argues that there is
a "reciprocal action" between the superstructure and the base.
8)The state apparatus is a core factor in the superstructure. The
repressive state apparatus (RSA) refers to the police, the courts,
the prisons, the army, which rule society through force and threat
of punishment. All of this can be basically found in Marx. What
Althusser adds is the concept of the ideological state apparatus
(ISA), which includes religion, education, family, law, politics,
trade-unions, communications, and culture. The RSA constitutes a
single unified system which works in unison; the ISA represent a
"plurality" of relatively autonomous systems which never-the-less
re-enforce core ideological beliefs. RSA is almost exclusively
public, while the ISA includes much that is the private domain. The
core distinction is "The RSA functions 'by violence' whereas the
ISA function 'by ideology."' Actually. the difference is one of
emphasis since he later claims that the RSA functions predominantly
by repression but may also depend upon ideology, while the ISA uses
ideology as a first resort but may function secondarily by
repression -- even if it is only symbolic.
9)The control over both RSA and ISA resides in the ruling class.
"To my knowledge, no class can hold state power over a long period
without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the
state Ideological Apparatuses." ISA's thus form both the stake and
the site of bitter class struggle. More space for resistance within
the ISA than within the RSA.
10) Returning to his earlier question, Althusser concludes that the
reproduction of the relations of production occur primarily through
the ISA and RSA. THE RSA secures "by force (physical or otherwise)
the political conditions of the reprocution of relations of
production which are in the last resort relations of exploitation."
It is a "shield" protecting the ISA and the conditions of
production. Ideology provides for the "harmony" between the RSA and
the ISA and between the state and the ruling class.
11)In feudal structure, there was one primary ISA, the church,
around which all struggles for power were conducted. Althusser
believes that today, the central ISA is the educational system.
The schools "takes children from every class at infant school age
and then for years, the years in which the child is most
'vulnerable,' squeezed between the family state apparatus and the
educational state apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses
new or old methods, a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped in the
ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences,
literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state
(ethics, civic instruction, philosophy)." One's level in society is
determined by how much schooling one receives and hence, how much
ideological indoctrination one receives. Other ISA reinforce what
is taught in school, but no other ISA has "the obligatory (and not
least, free) audience of the totality of the children in the
capitalist social formation, eight hours a day for five or six days
out of seven." The reigning ideology of the school represents it as
"a natural environment purged of ideology (because it is ... lay),
where teachers respectful of the 'conscience' and 'freedom' of the
children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by
their parents (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their
children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and
responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge,
literature and their 'liberating' virtues."
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12) Ideology has no history. It is conceived as a "pure illusion,
a pure dream." Althusser argues that there is no escape from
ideology and indeed,' no way of understanding the world except
through the terms ideology provides, though ideology itself changes
in response to shifts in the base structure of society. The ISA do
not so much create ideology as reinforce it.
13)Ideology represents the "imaginary relationship of individuals
to their real conditions of existence. n "Ideology has a material
existence." "Ideology always exists in an apparatus and its
practice, or practices." Ideology both originates in the practices
of the ISA and results in the practices of ideological subjects. As
Althusser argues, his model makes the term "ideas" disappear and
replaces it with "subject," "consciousness,n "belief," "actions,"
"practices," "rituals," and "ideological apparatus."
14) Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. Ideology puts
us into categories and then teaches us how to make sense of the
world from the point of view of those categories (i.e. subject
positions). We enter into ideology at the point where we
(mis)recognize ourselves as fitting within the prescribed subject
position. Yet, he stresses, we are "always already subjects." There
is no point in our lives when we exist outside of ideology.
15) A key element of ideology is that it denies its own ideological
status, its own cultural and historical base, so that it appears
simply as common sense, as natural fact. Others have expanded on
Althussser's ideas here: Roland Barthes gives us the term,
"naturalization, to refer to the way that cultural values are
treated as natural facts and their historical origins are denied,
and "ex-nomination" to refer to the way that ideology does not
label itself but only attaches labels to those that it opposes or
which are made to feel marginal to its order.
16) When ideology fails, when people fail to accept their roles,
then various RSA step in to punish or isolate "bad subject_ _
most cases, however, the ISAs. are successful in creating "good
subjects" who help to reproduce the conditions of production.
1
Lenny Foner Last modified: Mon Dec 11 10:56:50 1995