"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door... You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."
--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Response: Debord and Baudrillard

This week I am responding to The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and “Requiem for the Media” by Jean Baudrillard.

First, some informal reactions:

I could not help getting really annoyed with Debord. First of all, he started out saying all these things about “the spectacle” without defining what exactly he meant by the term. Although I was sort of able to piece it together and figure out what he meant, it would have been so much easier for me to read and internalize his thoughts if I knew what he was talking about in the first place. Perhaps this was intentional (using the textual form to reflect theme and all that jazz) but it was still irritating. Secondly, his prose was so purple, and he seemed to delight in reversals of language (“the science of domination becomes the domination of science” and so on) that really meant very little. He seemed to take an obnoxious, gleeful pleasure in his own wit and eloquence; I could just seem him, as he writes, muttering to himself, “God, I’m good.” Really, I found all his little language flourishes distracting and meaningless.

His form was kind of interesting though. Like Twitter, only longer.

I found Baudrillard much easier to read, although pessimistic. It was nice reading this piece at this point in the semester, because of how he tied in and analyzed other thinkers we have already read in this class. It was a good review, and a good insight into how these various thinkers dialogue with each other.

The prompt:
[…] The big difference between the Frenchmen and McLuhan is that the former appear to be quite critical of these changes, whereas McLuhan was considerably more sanguine. What is it about the modern electronic media that so disturbs Debord and Baudrillard?

Debord seems to be concerned with a society obsessed with appearances to the neglect of meaning or thought. The spectacle, he says, is comprised of “images detached from every aspect of life [merging] into a common stream” (12). These images lose “unity of life” and create a world where appearance is all: “te spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance” (14). The pervasiveness, disconnectedness, and appearance-centeredness of the electronic media, especially the modern manifestation of the electronic media, render it the sort of entity that could quite conceivably promote this “society of the spectacle” that Debord so detests. Take for example the television: it transmits to the viewer a series of disconnected images (commercials which break up programs, programs of different sources following each other, or showing simultaneously on different channels), which the viewer often enters into without context. Those programs depicting some aspect of human life give a generally unrealistic portrayal of true social interaction, instilling in the viewer a conception of human life based more upon these images than upon actual observation of actual humans. Moreover, as Baudrillard also points out, the viewer substitutes the viewing of these images for actual social interaction. Finally, the system of advertising, especially the advertising of commodities, by which television is funded fuels the “pseudo-needs” people create to sustain the economy and the reign of the commodity.

Baudrillard seems less worried about the imagistic, spectacular society that may result from the electronic media, and more concerned with how these technologies may degrade true communication. It essential that communication be recriprocal. It is not enough, for instance, that all political parties have a news channel where they may air their respective opinions, because television is inherently a one-way medium, in which the viewer listens to what the broadcaster says, without being able to respond. No matter the content of the program, or how many different programs and different viewpoints the viewer chooses to view, the communication is still always one way. It is also not enough for Baudrillard that the transmitter and receiver reverse roles, because this only results in a one-way communication going the opposite direction. Any communication or media that is to be truly revolutionary must break down these barriers. He poses graffiti as one of these media, as it is inherently transgressive.

I wonder what he would think of internet forums or the comment sections on blogs. Although they are not inherently transgressive media, they do allow for greater reciprocal communication, and they allow readers to give feedback directly to the author of a thought, video, etc. However, I think even such communal internet media still pose some of the problems Baudrillard identified with the electronic media. He says in regard to television, “ TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself … it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other” (281). I think that same problem often proves true for the internet, even if many people mainly use the internet to “speak” to people. The problem with communications like e-mail, Facebook, and other social networks is that we are addressing ourselves to a cyber-persona of the person with whom we speak, in which such factors as body language, tone, and even oftentimes context are stripped away; we moreover present our own cyber-personas, consciously or not, to those with whom we speak. So by turning ourselves toward a screen and away from other flesh-and-blood humans, we engage in a type of social interaction that is built upon a great deal of illusion (hat tip to Debord). I think Baudrillard is quite prescient in his fear that the electronic media will stop people from actually talking to each other, whether it be because they are viewing various one-way media (TV, YouTube videos, internet articles, etc.) or they are only “speaking” with other people’s cyber-personas. It is not uncommon to hear statements like, “In an age where everything is so connected, why do we feel so isolated?” This degradation of human communication feared by Debord and Bauddrillard seems to have some foundation in reality.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Response: Barthes and Foucault

This week I will be responding to Mythologies by Roland Barthes and “What is an Author” and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault..

This week’s prompt is the following:
“[…]So, in some sense, both Barthes and Foucault argue (Barthes rather more directly), we get our sense of self through media consumption. In what sense do you think that who you are--your desires, your fears, your most fundamental beliefs about yourself and the world--could plausibly be attributed to the signs and meanings that you consume through our consumption of modern media messages?”

This semester I am taking a class about British Romanticism, so after a few weeks of studying the Romantics and their extreme emphasis on the individual, I was struck by the difference in this week’s readings concerning the individual. For Foucault and Barthes, the self seems to be the sum of the signifiers a person chooses to denote him-/herself, the signified, or, in Foucault’s case, the signifiers used to signify an author, whether the author chooses them or not. Barthes’s writing on semiotics may be applied to any medium we use to interact with the world and the people around us: the clothes we wear, the labels we give ourselves, that which we claim to like and to dislike. All these signifiers add up to create the mythology of self. This idea of self then becomes naturalized, and we perceive it as something that is (“That’s just how I function”) as opposed to something we construct. Foucault takes it a step further concerning authors, and how we retroactively construct their “selves.” In our conception of an author, it is the body of his or her published work to which we refer when we say his or her name. As Foucault points out, there are some pieces of information which learning will not alter our conception of that author, and some that vastly will—for instance, my conception of James Joyce was exceedingly altered when I learned of his erotic love letters to Nora Barnacle (the following comic quite appropriately expresses my reaction to said letters: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32). However, whatever my conception of James Joyce, it is a construction made from a variety of signifiers I have learned to associate with him. How many of t hose signifiers, though, would he actually have chosen? Probably, poor James would not have chosen to have his letters to Nora made public. For Foucault, then, the way one’s “self” is constructed is not even within one’s power to choose.

The prompt seems to be asking for our personal opinions, so I will give mine. I hesitate to call myself a structuralist, having only minimal exposure to the theory, but it makes a lot of sense to me that the way we conceptualize the world is formed by the structure of the language we speak. I find that whenever I really learn a new word, in the sense that I fully absorb and understand its meaning, I’m able to think about things with a liberating sense of greater clarity (one of my most recent lexical discoveries was “apotheosis”). Although I (and, therefore, I extrapolate many others, even if said extrapolation is somewhat hubristic) don’t necessarily think in words, but rather in abstract ideas or emotions, I find that I cannot fully process these ideas until I put them into words. That’s why talking something out with someone when I am upset is helpful, because it forces me to crystallize my random feelings into words. Further, as I explained in my blog last week, I think it makes a lot of sense that a culture’s language, or, on a smaller scale, a person’s language, could have a profoundly formative effect on that culture’s expression and development. Thus, a person’s or a culture’s contact with media messages, which are made up of signifiers such as words, must greatly influence that person or culture’s self-identity, because it provides a framework on which to build said identity. However, that said, I think there are some elements to human “selfness” that cannot be reduced to contact with media messages—primarily biological elements like hormones or basic necessities. Although how we confront these biological elements may be largely a construction built on the framework given to us by our culture and its mythologies (for instance, how one thinks about and responds to the drive for sex), I do think there is a sub-language or sub-semiological level to these biological elements which, though it may be expressed through the filer of semiology, exists outside of a semiological construction of self.

And now, for a bit of a tangent. This does not completely have to do with Foucault and Barthes, but I feel that it’s somewhat related. I took a class on the history of literary theory in the fall of 2009, and one of the first things we read about was the “The Intentional Fallacy,” by Wimsatt and Beardsley. This is an idea of New Criticism or Formalism that states that what the author intended to do with a text is irrelevant. We neither can know for sure what the author intended, nor does the author’s intent matter to the meaning of the text, even if the author has explicitly expressed his/her intent. Like Foucault’s idea of the author, the intentional fallacy divorces a text from any personal elements. I am unsure as to how much structuralism and formalism are related, but it seems to me that they at least share that impersonal element. What matters is the structure of the language or the structure of the text, not some sort of abstract idea of self and self-expression.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Response: McLuhan

This week I am responding to Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, chapters 1-4, 9, and 31

McLuhan starts out with the idea that media is an extension of self (7). Although he later elaborates on this idea with the Narcissus metaphor, he starts off without defending this idea, as though he felt it were a given. Although I found this to be somewhat annoying, the definition intuitively makes sense to me. McLuhan later goes onto define media as something that “eliminate[s] time and space factors in human association” (9). This makes sense in terms of what Wiener said about humans being the only animal “in whom this desire for communication, or rather this necessity for communication, is the guiding motive of their whole life” (Wiener 3). Communication may be understood as the process of making something known—some idea, concept, emotion, event, etc. Since no two humans have the exact same experience or perception of existence, any act of communication closes the gap, thereby “eliminat[ing] time and space” factors, between the experiences of sender and receiver. So by decreasing the gap between the experience, or self, of sender and receiver, the sender has extended his/herself such that it is closer to the self of the receiver. That got a little rambly, but to sum up what I was trying to say, an act of communication is an attempt to help another person—another self—better understand the self of the communicator, in terms of allowing the receiver to vicariously experience the thoughts, actions, or emotions of the sender. Therefore, the media through which a person him/herself known to another self is, necessarily, an extension of self.

However, McLuhan broadens his definition of media to include things we wouldn’t normally consider to be acts of communication, like tools or cars or clothing (although, in the case of the latter, fashion could be considered the imposing of meaning onto clothing). A tool like a hammer becomes an extension of self in a corporeal rather than metaphysical sense. It extends the hand and magnifies the strength to accomplish a specific task. So while this type of media is not a communicative medium in a person-to-person sense, it is still a medium in that it acts as a channel through which a person interacts with his/her environment. Further, if we think of a “message” in terms of a signal sent to effect a certain end, as Shannon and Weaver defined it, the hammer can be considered to communicate a message between person (sender) and nail (receiver).

Moving on …

Being the language person that I am, I was fascinated by McLuhan’s discussion of how the development of the technology of the phonetic alphabet created the individualist culture of cultures that use such an alphabet. Although I think he is being perhaps a little too categorical in his treatment of the issue—all cultures seem to fit in one box or another for him, without leaving room for grey areas or middle-of-the-road cultures—and he uses very charged terms like “civilized” in a somewhat too nonchalant manner, I think his discussion of how a technology like a phonetic alphabet can revolutionize cultural structure is really interesting. I have always been interested in how the brain uses language to conceptualize the world. Language is both a great tool for making ourselves known to others, and a crutch, in that we begin to rely on it to the extent that it is difficult for us to conceptualize the world outside of the set of grammatical structures and vocabulary presented to us. That’s why, when I read 1984, I found Orwell’s dystopia so terrifying; an effective deconstruction of language such as the Department of Truth was attempting would truly deconstruct people’s ability to even think revolutionary thoughts, because they would have no words for such thoughts.

That was a tangent. Anyway, if language can have such a formative effect on the mind, it makes sense that it should have a similar effect on a culture. The idea that a phonetic alphabet allows for a greater degree of individualization in a culture makes sense because it provides all speakers of the language with the ability to pronounce and look up any word they encounter, even a new one of which they do not know the meaning. Studying Chinese, if I come across a character I have never seen before, there is no way for me to look it up, unless I can input it into an electronic pinyin converter (pinyin being the transliteration alphabet developed for Chinese). I can’t even pronounce a new character without asking someone who knows what it is. So such a language would reinforce communal settings, in which a person must rely on others with superior knowledge to increase his/her own knowledge. With a phonetic alphabet, as long as one knows the phonetic rules of the language, one can easily pronounce a new word or look it up. As such, one can rely on other written media to increase one’s knowledge, and as long as one has access to said media, one does not need other people for this pursuit.

A phonetic alphabet also a more individualist nature than a character-based language in the sense that each letter is itself, and only itself. It corresponds to a sound (or maybe two or three, depending on the phonetic rules of the language), and that is all. In Chinese, there are several basic characters, and then characters made by combining basic characters into more complex characters. So if one recognizes a component in a complex character, one can guess the meaning. This sharing of character components creates linguistic webs of association that mimic the tribal relations McLuhan writes about.