what spring break?....

not that i was able to do much, other than partake in much needed (deserved?) rest. watched quite a few films. had a few drinks. studied quite a bit, which is the reason i couldn't leave town. started my own wiki with some friends, which is going quite well. now to catch up with blogging and working with my project (project and presentation)...

so i'll be writing on this blog and the class wiki (i have a separate page: click here) simultaneously. it will be most of the same material. notes for my project. and some quick thoughts on wikinomics, which i have a strong distaste for thus far, though i think it's an important read. more to come.

project proposal....

Description of Artifact: “Broadcast Yourself” is the catch slogan of the widely popular YouTube website. Initially designed as a forum for amateur video producers, YouTube has become more of a search engine for image-related content (television programs, music videos, academic lectures...). However, its original intention is still being met by those who indeed “broadcast” themselves, their voices augmented by viewer feedback. Of particular interest are those videos where people confront their audiences directly, either discussing a single issue or representing a specific subculture. It has become, for many, an outlet for performing identity, often through cultural stereotypes, but for the most part with clear intentions of being “real.” The urgency by which they express and exhibit their identities, as if through necessity, gives these videos a quality quite similar to the confessional.

Other Attributes: The typical age group represented in these videos is around the late teens to early twenties. Topics vary, though sometimes there are several videos circulating around a single subject. They are primarily an exhibition of subjectivity, though they also seem to be means of attaining peer acceptance through (nearly anonymous) viewer comments. Topics are often suggested through viewer comments. The video is typically shot with a web-cam or a camcorder mounted near the self-subject’s workstation. The setting, therefore, is quite intimate, as it most likely mirrors the viewer’s own atmosphere. The “style” of the video could be informed by the “confession booth” segment typical of reality TV shows.

Potential: Videos which are more sophisticated (in a technical sense), reflexive, interactive, or essayistic. [What would my secondary sources suggest?]

Personal Investment in the Topic: The motive that underlies this inquiry is my profound interest in documentary films. In light of contemporary documentary modes of representation, these videos exemplify its current trends veering towards individual performance of subjectivity. The videos may be able to inform future documentary modes.

Primary Sources: Find at least three examples which exemplify this type of video. Also pay attention to viewer responses. [How does this change or subvert the video’s original intention? If the opinions of the video producer are intended by them to be subversive or controversial, how are institutional norms reestablished through viewer commentary?]

Secondary Sources:

1. Walter Benjamin – “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” What happens when the “masses” take technology into their own hands? The cult vs. the ritual object. Repercussions. [This source may work well to introduce the topic.]
2. Michael Renov – “Video Confessions” (published in The Subject of Documentary) Though Renov refers primarily to avant-garde video making, this source might be helpful in determining certain characteristics of the video confession. Ex: its therapeutic power. How does this relate or differ to video “confessions” on YouTube?
3. Michel Foucault – The History of Sexuality A sample excerpt: “(Confession is) a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession…”

[Of course, I’m open to any other suggestions.]

a word on filmed ethnographies....

I'm writing this as a response to bell hooks essay, which raises some important issues that pertain not only to literary discourse but to other media as well, of which i have an invested interest.

At the core of documentary film studies is the debate on how to move past the inherent problems that constitute the filmed ethnography, primarily the opposition between Self (the transference of the filmmaker's vision to the viewer) and Other (the subject). This debate has been informing documentary techniques for the past one hundred years. In response, some filmmakers have adopted a much more personal/reflexive approach. With Cinéma Verité, the director goes beyond mere observation to interact with her/his subject, exposing the limitations of the subjective eye/I. Recent "performative documentaries" (the central subject of Bill Nichols "Blurred Boundaries" or "Introduction to Documentary") have turned the lens inward to the actual performance of the filmmaker's own identity. In auto-ethnographies the subject is given the camera in order to record their own experience, however, the filmmaker still claims authorship through editing and presentation.

I agree with hooks that Cultural Studies is key to moving beyond these issues. Half the work of the text is executed by author and the other by the reader/viewer. The solution is to remove any and all "blindspots" so that the intentions behind the ethnographic text can be questioned less as a point of unfamiliar interest (gawking rather than seeing) and more of a harmonious engagement.

[see Agnés Varda's The Gleaners and I, a film that I believe is on the right path.)

Assignment: An Afrocentic Communication Theory....

Molefi Asante - "An Afrocentric Communication Theory"

First words: “I am concerned with nothing less than human maturity.”
A crisis in the field of social sciences? Depends on your faith in the system. However, for those that don’t believe in it, difficulties emerge (of course).

“…we must demonstrate a more righteous way to explore human issues. It is therefore, the purpose of this present enterprise to present a clarifying portrayal of human beings, in the generic sense, as they exist in contemporary society” (552).

Social science is rooted in materialism. Material consciousness led to the compartmentalization of social sciences into various other fields (sociology, psychology, economics, political science….). These have had a stronghold over human studies.

18^th century: the discovery of “society.” Ironic, due to the fact that organized groups of people have existed for…well…as long as there have been people.

The emergence of the “free” (white European) societal “man.” Scholars attested to this freedom, though many of them held indentured servants or slaves. The term “society” held two meanings: Eurocentric (stick the word “high” in front of it) and The Others. This ambiguity informed academia a great deal.

“Social science cannot be separated from political science, but neither can it be separated from communication, either as art or science. Indeed the very gluon of society is communication” (553).

[page 554] COMMUNICATION CHARACTERISTICS: 1. A systematic understanding of human interaction across cultures is basic to an effective critique of societies. 2. The potential of human communication resides in the creative development of personality. 3. Communication is itself the new social environment. 4. A social situation that distorts human development is illegitimate. 5. The communication person is holistic.

Informed by Afrocentric scholarship (Appiah and Nhiwatiwa): The Okyeame, neither state nor people, functions as an integrator of both. Communication, the source and end of interaction, creativity and collective production, holds the society together (reiterates "holistic" and adds "personalism").

The social science model, characterized by fragmentation and particularization is incapable of this, in part because communication is not at its core. Studies are focused on a specific topic, or one part of a whole discipline, a specialty. "Unfortunately this means that you probably know very little about the nature of humankind" (555). The Afrocentric attempt must locate the proper place for integrative knowledge and then position ("enthrone") the communication person here.

NATURE OF HUMAN BEINGS: What is lacking in Western communication studies is a concept of Humanity. "To maximize human recourse, a theory of communication needs to break away from the boundary of specific social or political systems and reach for universal assumptions..." (556). Eurocentric communication theory has stressed the value of psychology. "Historical pressures" coincided with this development, however theorists have ignored certain "revolutions in consciousness (occuring) in the classrooms and in the streets." Instead they invented various models in an attempt to define human existence. The end result: Frustration.

More on the communication person (557): "(A)n organizer of messages...responsive to images, sights and sounds...addicted to urban settings...comfortable with electronic media...untrapped by any one political doctrine but open to all human possibilities...checked by a creative belief in the human personality...you may even be one of them." This theory is in opposition to standards of normality.

(558) Media industries have had an impact on communication as a field of inquiry. "Students in universities want to learn..."

NEW PERSPECTIVE (559): "The methodological posture which the communication field must take is that all sectors of a society and all societies can be explored, analyzed, and questioned on the basis of their contribution to the human personality." This begins with self-examination, finding the source of one's own message contradictions.

It is important to know that other cultures/societies have different ways of expressing themselves (561).

Summations: "Put simply, the communication person, as reflected in the best thinking of the age, is now closer to the African than at any other time in history. This is because of the congruence of African society with the demands of a person's inner-self for harmony...we have emerged and will emerge more concretely as keepers of the society."

Crit. and Theory.......

Attending a party this weekend, i ran into a couple of philosophy students. Both grads, one is (or was) a teacher's assistant for a 'philosophy in film' course (which unfortunately was never offered when i needed credits for my minor). Upon questioning him on assigned viewings, the words "film theory" came out of his mouth. I inquired more, stating my personal investment in the subject. However, he never spoke beyond this term, as if film theory was a definable practice that could be imparted in fifty words or less, rather than an ongoing discourse. Merely alluding to it, in my mind, conveyed nothing. Now, keg parties are not the kind of venues where one should be confrontational, nor does one have the mental capacity to deliberate, let alone construct a coherent sentence, (groups of drunken studious types tend to speak in maxims whilst grinning at one another) so I let it drop. [I was annoyed anyway, hearing how they spoke about their undergrads.]

I was considering, in agreement with Eagleton's essay, if film theory, like literature, is merely (to quote Barthes) "what gets taught." Thinking about it further, I can't get the assumption out of head that what this philosophy student was really talking about was "film criticism" (in his case, critics citing continental philosophy and applying it to particular filmic texts) and not film theory at all, of which there is also, like literary theory, no "pure" form. That is, any argument on how the medium functions nor how it is interpreted gets sidestepped by theories circulating outside of the medium, in part because there are so many strategies that can be applied. [sociology, anthropology, physics, optics, historical, socio-historical, psychoanalytic, feminist, gender, race and post-colonial theories, semiotics...............................]

Reflecting on current readings (Bill Nichols' Blurred Boundaries, in particular) there are times when i have to discern between theoretical and outright polemical statements, or rather, distinguishing between expert knowledge and educated opinion. This leads me to certain questions: Understanding that there is hardly a sharp difference, what are the key distinctions between "doing theory" and "doing criticism"? Is it simply a question of magnitude?

Let's discuss.

R: Serious Man vs. rhetorical man....

In this argument between homo seriosus and homo rhetoricus, i tend to veer towards the latter. (As a forewarning, this is where sore feelings surface.) However, I'm also beginning to see the correlation between two statements: "Of all things the measure is man, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not," written by Protagoras and re-interpreted by Plato; and Alain Badiou's comment - "Ontology is mathematics." From Protagoras' maxim, so it has been explained to me, is derived the fundamental principles of epistemology and ontology. What Plato, as a(n) (elitist) revisionist, attempted to do was separate rhetoric from truth procedure, and transpose it upon an ideal "State" of being. However, by limiting "humanity's" subjective nature, Plato incited a division between the retrieval of knowledge and heightened awareness (of being), intended by the Sophists to be wholly foundational. Hence, we have an epistemological infrastructure that feigns to be objective, able to hide quite securely behind the facade of scientific method. [According to Badiou, mathematics, which extends from human beings much like language, can only prove the predominance of "infinite" possibilities rather than concrete solutions, an unending chain of whole numbers. Analogous with the philosopher's attention to awareness and being.]

Assignment: Stanley Fish on "Rhetoric"....

The struggle between rhetoric and the anti-rhetorical stance falls under three basic binary oppositions: 1. Truth that exists independently of perspective OR Truth that emerges, precisely, from an established point of view. 2. True knowledge that exists apart from a system of belief OR True knowledge which is “incomplete or impartial” because it is derived from another system of belief. 3. Self or self consciousness turned outward, attaching itself to an ideal truth or true knowledge OR Self or self consciousness turned inward, towards the prejudices which inform every thought, word, or action.

The history of Western thought, stemming from these binary oppositions, and which continues today, is the result of a particular disagreement. “The quarrel between rhetorical and foundational (an anti-rhetorical stance) is itself foundational,” in that it is a debate over the “nature of human nature itself.” What are the integral constituents of all human activity? The debate boils down to this (terms and definitions borrowed from Richard Lanham): Serious Man vs. rhetorical man (note that in the second, neither word has been capitalized in this instance).

Serious Man:
The “self” is irreducible.
Society, for humans, is a referent reality.
Physical nature, which contains society, is also referential, and (“out there”) independent of humans.
Language was invented to communicate facts about both nature and society. However, there is a third category of response: emotion.
The success of communication can be measured and monitored (key words: clarity, sincerity, faithfulness to self).

rhetorical man:
An actor, whose identity depends on the reassurance of daily reenactments.
The lowest common denominator: the social situation.
Dwells in various value structures, which change constantly, and is uncommitted to any single construction of reality, of which she/he is prone to manipulate.
An explorer of resources.
“Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful.”

Fish offers many instances of this "same argument": Donald McCloskey’s analysis of the economic method, which exposes the personal conviction behind that which is normally deemed scientific (fiercely objected); Thomas Kuhn’s insistence that science is motivated by persuasion rather than verification (to be truly objective would require a “neutral observational language”); J.L. Austin exposes the performative function of language; Derrida and deconstruction (inspires the quote below).

“…Rhetorical Man (now capitalized), teeming with roles, situations, strategies, interventions, but containing no master role, no situation of situations, no strategy for outflanking all strategies, no intervention in the arena of dispute that does not expand the arena of dispute, no neutral point of rationality from the vantage point of which the “merely rhetorical” can be identified and held in check.”

The ways that other critics and theorists (Terry Eagleton, Robert Gordon, Jürgen Habermas) have sought to resolve the “dangers” of rhetoric have only sufficed in manifesting the same old argument. The discovery that all knowledge is rhetorical leads them to adopt a method in order to counter, and hence liberate us from, the distinct power of rhetoric, to “use the insight of partiality,” Fish criticizes, “to build something that is less partial.”

[link to other articles by Stanley Fish: http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/kniemela/fish.htm]