I used some pictures in my paper and I’m not sure about the liscensing ramifications of publishing it, so I’ve posted it on our ning site:

http://eng742.ning.com/profile/NicholasJLearned

Thanks!

Admittedly, I feel a tad guilty that my project wasn’t as scholarly as others’. Of those, I was really impressed with the ways people employed things like video, powerpoint, and especially Prezi to impressive effects while still conveying things of scholarly value.

Origanally, my plan was to do a Prezi too, though I’m glad I didn’t because I could never have done so well as others did in theirs.

Instead I chose to get away from thigns like Prezi because I’d done them before, but also because in my project I didn’t just want to talk about my topic, I wanted to do it a bit, too. And so I chose to honor my appreciation for Chaplin’s work, Modern Times, by using it to illustrate the kinship I felt with his Tramp in my own life.

This decision affected how I was mediated by my project in many ways. First, I was beholden to the message, though that wasn’t a problem for me because my intention was to show how that message is relevant even though our current context looks so different.

But employing the message this way–drawing parrallels–meant that I had to first find those parallels. This required some interpretive work, first on Chaplin’s film, and then on my own life. His film became a heuristic for transforming my intuition that people still suffer in many of the same ways despite the change in landscape into more specific, citable examples.

I had to do this not only for intellectual reasons, but also because I was using the framework of the film, which then required me to stitch in moments similar to those in the film. Besides making for a weird day of walking around with my camera, getting bewildered glances from onlookers, this technique required that I spend quite a lot of time an energy editing Chaplin’s film and my own (though there’s room for plenty more editing!). This experience, working with the film so closely, doing things like nit-picking where to cut film and how to align the music to the best effect (apparently, Chaplin spend significantly more time on the score than on filming) had me interacting with the film on a level that is difficult to quantify, but that helps me percieve the effort that went into it’s production in a much more immediate way.

It is not very remarkable to muse on the value in engaging in the production of the things we study, however. Yet I think that as I move forward with the scholarly side of my project, I will do so with different eyes, and I think the experience will pay off as I investigate how humore engages the sorts of structures I see Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, and others engaging.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXQjmPxOxhw

More specifically, having to flesh out what I saw as a c0ncern for the way the critical operation of culture can be a function of media will help me in my final project. This is perhaps because it was what I had been working toward in the first place, but this developing the idea further on the side will come in handy when I go back to my paper and start revising it. It has also, helped me, I think, to see how several other readings bear on my project in ways I hadn’t yet noticed, and I think now that I will be able to work more into my final draft.

When I consider the term “media” now, it is not so much what is meant by the term itself that has shifted for me as the kinds of things we are concerned with, at least in the context of this class.

In terms of the object, media, I still see it as akin to medium—whether by media we mean text, film, or Morse code. In all cases, attention to the “media” aspect of media is like attention to form—there is a dialogue between medium and message in which each exerts its own agenda. Inquiry into media objects, then, can always take the form of trying to understand the dynamics of this relationship, but this is nothing new.
What is new from this class, for me, is the attention to the social context of media, to how medium inserts itself into cultural transactions through its mediation of the message, yes, but also through how users/viewers interact with that medium on both small and large—particularly large—scales. In this latter instance, how the nature of medium affects the way media organizes relationships between people and cultural forces seems most broadly significant, and seems to be the most common concern among media culture theorists. . For example, Benjamin was concerned with how the nature of a medium’s production affected the critical role of media and McLuhan looked into the varying degrees in which media make arguments about what is important in their use. Lastly, Acconci shows us how the object of media affects its use just as much as its content.
POST TWO
Imagine that you were to give a lecture on media culture to an undergrad
class. To work toward such a lecture, identify two or three repeated
themes that run through some majority of our class readings: in your
writing, identify the themes and trace each through the readings,
chronologically, identifying shifts and changes and contemplating why
there would be such shifts. Discuss why you chose the themes you did:
why does each theme stand out for you such that you think it should be
emphasized in a lecture to undergrads, and how should the theme shape
their thinking about (their engagements with) media?

The main theme I see running through the readings is a concern with the critical function media plays or doesn’t play in relation to society. For Benjamin, the concern was that—and this sounds bad, I think—that mechanical production had stolen the production of culture from what he saw as the critical class and into the hands of more capitalist-minded producers, people who merely pandered to pleasure instead of concerning themselves with culture correctively. Adorno and Horkheimer were just as concerned with the critical role of culture, though they seemed less sure of deciding this matter strictly on the basis of production. McLuhan and Acconci, then, were concerned with the  role media plays in society more for its technical features, though what was significant about these features were whether the technologies engaged allowed for significant critical work to be performed through them. McLuhan, for example, preferred the telephone to television because the dominance of television over its content positions receivers as just that, passive receivers. A similar critique underlies Enzensberger, who was concerned that—in opposition to Benjamin—the potential to make cultural criticism lies only in the hands of the few who control production. Baudrillard’s concern was the impact exchange had on the use of media for critical purposes, and Raymond Williams was concerned that we are not critical of media themselves.

Sub-themes that run through this are an interest in the production/consumption binary—that is, to what degree are various media subject to the forces of production and consumption, and related to this, an interest in the way media organizes us or the way it inserts itself into our interactions, either culturally, spatially, or as producers and consumers.

POST THREE
What’s missing? By this, I mean both “what’s missing from the media
culture theories we have read?” and “what do you think is missing from
your understanding?” Look back over your media charts: what have our
readings encouraged you to add, shift, or resee since the beginning of
class — and what do our readings not encourage you to discuss? What
questions about media are still left hanging for you, and where do you
see gaps in your own understanding of the work?

This is a tough question. I’m defining media studies—or whatever we’re calling it—based on the interests of the readings, so when I ask what is missing my picture of the concerns of the field falls apart, if that makes sense—or maybe, I find it hard to say what media theorists should be interested in that they’re not because I’m defining them according to what they are interested in.

But, I can say that I think their method, while not faulty, leaves some significant holes in understanding the things they are interested in. They miss quite a bit, I think, because they tend to remain on a very broad, abstract level. I understand that this is so they can view the function of media from a distant, perspective-enabling vista, yet at the same time it produces a not very nuanced view of media, of the ways that media often defy in individual or more specific instances the broad generalizations that theorists are making.

Though of cousre, that is what I just did.

(and I want to put some Chaplin pics somewhere here)

Nic Learned

Eng 742

Prof. Wysocki

Final Paper

16 April 2011

Intro—the controversy on humor and structure

            There is something enigmatic about the way humor interacts with the structures around it that invites us to ask what its role is in relation to those structures. That is, it is difficult to say that humor is destructive, as some would contend—that it latches onto and exposes structures and thus liberates us—without inviting the response that in the act of this liberation, humor only sets us on a new path, according to a new structure. To put this another way: to work, humor must engage the status quo, must reveal some fault or absurdness about it, a fact that some find redeeming. Others, however, contend that once we have had this fault revealed to us, we have acceded to the opinion that the humor in question has offered us, and our fellows have laughed and acceded alongside us, and together we are thus now complicit in a new structure.

            For example, say you and I are watching the well-known Robin Williams film, Good Morning Vietnam. In this film, Williams plays real-life Air Force disc jockey Adrian Cronauer, known and widely popular for his irreverent and humorously critical take on the lives of soldiers fighting in Vietnam. While watching, we come to the part of the movie with Williams’ famous line: “Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn’t we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? ‘Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we’d all be put out in K.P.” You and I are probably familiar with the military’s habit of using acronyms; we might even be familiar with the commonplace that they are overused. In this case, the use of acronyms reveals a linguistic habit, a penchant to employ acronyms as often as possible. The repeated employment of some device or another, regardless of context, amounts to a predictable response—a structure. Williams’ quote is a caricature of this structure: he adopts and exaggerates it, over-using it to the extent that we see it as confusing and inadequate. And silly. You and I laugh (if you have a sense of humor), and together the military and its silly acronyms are diminished in our eyes. The structure is defeated to an extent—we are not likely to take it seriously after seeing it revealed in such a light. This is what some who would champion the liberatory capacity of humor would point to. They would say that the structure has been taken down, and that you and I laugh because we now feel free to speak in a more natural, situationally-appropriate way. But those who would refute the idea that humor is anti-structure would point to the fact that you and I, despite witnessing the downfall of the military’s linguistic structure, are now seeing the military in a similar light, that between you and I there is a tendency to agree that the military’s acronyms are goofy, and we will likely avoid using them seriously from here on out, which amounts to a new rule, a new structure.

            For theorists of humor, this is a fascinating, if not an endlessly circular problem. Only their imagination limits the ways they engage it: somewhere in the back and forth over humor’s relationship to ethics, power, social hierarchies, cognition, language—the list is nearly endless—the question of how humor engages the structures in is always lurking. In ethics, for example, Berys Gaut wonders whether laughing at something is a violation of our principles, an act that frees us from a moral structure, or whether in finding something funny we are passing judgment on it thus producing a new moral structure, or tweaking an old one at the very least. Gaut concludes that the collective nature of laughter amounts to complicity, that collectively we are passing judgment, and our group judgment will here on out remain an aspect of our communal ethical structure. On the other end of the spectrum lies people like Dianne Davis. She sees the world as a fluid, constantly-shifting and self-negating place upon which we impose structures such as language in order to carry on with our day to day operations—to know how to behave, for example. Davis sees these structures as imposing at times, and she sees them as coming between us and the dynamic world in which we live. When we laugh, Davis argues, we are freed from structural oppression and allowed to come into contact with what Nietzsche calls, “the great sweep of life,” a pleasurable, hilarious experience. Other theorists lie somewhere in between, if you can imagine what that might look like. More intriguing, however, is the fact that buried in the perspectives of those who would identify themselves with one camp or another lie elements that support the converse view. It was Henri Bergson, after all, the original champion of the humor’s chaos-loving habits who famously observed its power to unite people under a single view.

            Such an occurrence is predictable in a binary, however, where the definition of one position relies upon that of its opposite, so even though I am personally susceptible to getting swept away in such conversations, making further sense of this binary is not what I’m setting out to do in this paper. Instead, I wish to take the view that while from a theoretical perspective we can debate such a matter endlessly, there is headway to be made when we are concerned with individual or individual groups of objects. That is, while I don’t believe we will ever solve the issue of whether humor is chaos or structure-inducing (because I believe it is in fact both), I think we can look at individual instances of humor and decide where on the spectrum they lie. Though, because I believe that the chaos and structure-inducing aspects of humor are endemic to it, I don’t believe that the deciding factor in the chaos/structure debate lies so much in the humorous object as in the context of how that object is received. That is, it is not so much the object itself as how we use the object that decides whether it favors structure or chaos. In fact, to be more specific, we might say that any instance of humor engages multiple structures, defiling some while erecting others, so what matters for us about this issue is a function of which structures matter for us.  For the military brass who had to deal with the rebellious and critical Cronauer, it was not whether Cronauer’s tactics were inherently, generally chaotic or order-inducing that mattered, it was that there was chaos where they wished order, or perhaps, a new order that no longer worked in their favor.

What about this debate is important for media studies

            In the context of media studies, some little bit has been made of whether humor can hold a meaningful place in a critical culture, due in large part to the issue I’ve been discussing here, though media theorists are employing different terms. These theorists are not so much concerned with the inner-workings of humor as they are with humor’s role in relation to people and culture. Or I should say, they are concerned with media’s role in relation to people and culture, and humor matters as one aspect or type of media. When Walter Benjamin, for one, raises concerns over the effect that mass production can have on media, he is concerned that capitalist-minded interests will replace the artistic-minded interests of pre-capitalist culture producers. The trouble with this for Benjamin is that artists, who once performed the role of culture critics, whose purpose was to be there with an intelligent, self-conscious critical awareness to intelligently nudge culture in directions that are most valuable to humanity, come in the age of mechanical reproduction to be replaced by culture producers who look to market forces—not critical consciousness—for thoughts on what kind of culture to produce. The former, artists, look to the trends and structures of society in critical fashion, and their mission is corrective. The latter, market-driven producers, look to the status quo, to the pre-existing tendencies of their audiences so that they can exploit an already-existing desire. Benjamin’s complaint is that there is no critical function to this latter type of producer. Humor, for its capacity to disrupt and/or establish existing structures—the status quo—has the potential to function as an instrument of either type of producer, and from the perspective of the concerns Benjamin raises, I think the intricacies of this process are worth looking into.

            From the perspectives of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the capacity of humor to both disrupt and establish structures ought to be even more striking. In a preface to assigning Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment for a grad-level class she was teaching, Anne Wysocki explains that Adorno and Horkheimer were responding to concerns that the dialectic process, which ought to ultimately produce the best, most useful knowledge, must evidently have failed or the travesties of World War II would never have come to be. Adorno and Horkheimer respond to this dilemma by pointing to the binary structure of the dialectic, by explaining that for every positive, righteous aspect of knowledge, there is exists one that is negative and evil—the two positions, as a binary, cannot exist without one another and are in fact two sides of the same coin. If they had a sense of humor, Adorno and Horkheimer might say that in World War II we got Hitler because that coin came up tails.

            In any case, Adorno and Horkheimer alert the Benjamin-minded of the dialectical nature of critical processes. They might observe that for us to define some media as performing a critical role, we are defining that object against media that is not. To this I am inclined to stipulate that we cannot even say so much. I am inclined to stipulate that in a Burkeian sense, we what define as critical is a rhetorical matter. That a humorous object, like any other, can be perceived and interpreted in numerous ways, or perhaps, that we can identify a humorous object to be performing numerous kinds of work. Whether we define that work as critical, I think, tends to be a matter of whether it is engaging the structures we’d like it to. What we define as “Critical,” then becomes evaluative and subjective. For Benjamin, “critical” was mostly a matter of production. For the audiences pandered to by mechanical reproducers, however, the “critical” that mattered most likely had more to do with something more meaningful to them than the intricacies politics behind how art is produced. Even so, Adorno and Horkheimer’s work with dialectics lays the foundation for us to perceive the media as having different outcomes in different occurrences, outcomes that I think we evaluate as much as a product of their relationship to our values or our gaze as by anything endemic to media themselves.

            Still, I think it fair to concede that media producers, whether consciously or no, fix their productions on specific structures or ideas, and so when we take into account the products of their labors and how those products are received, we can distinguish media objects that do critical work that is meaningful to us from objects that do not. What I mean to do here is disrupt the charges mostly of Benjamin, but also of Adorno and Horkheimer, to show that where an individual media object is concerned, we must add careful consideration how we value the structures that an object engages to our list of concerns, that when we weigh the critical value of media, we must take the Sophists’ advice and do so on a case by case, contextualized basis.  

            In what follows, I plan to take a closer look at Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times, to see what about it might be valuable to people who share the concerns of folks like Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer. All three have made general charges against the medium and mode of production employed by this film, so my doing so will demonstrate that a more nuanced, contextualized process is necessary if we are to evaluate media in the ways they recommend. Concomitantly, this analysis will produce the same conclusion of the humor structure/chaos binary, which echoes so closely Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment.

Modern Times

Summary and analysis of Modern Times to follow. Sources specifically about the film also to be taken up here.

This section needs a heading

Here I plan to discuss Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer’s projects on more detail (and possibly McLuhan?) through issues raised in/by the film.

Conclusion

They have always been good, but they’ve been better of late for two reasons:

1) People have been posting shorter posts (as they were encouraged to), and this has made it a lot easier to get a sense both of what individuals are saying as well as how the conversation in general progresses. It also makes the process of posting less arduous, which leaves me more juice to read others’ posts more carefully.

2) The discussion questions have been more pointed, of late, and this both makes them easier to respond to while also keeping conversation more focused. Instead of walking away from dicussions with a cacaphony of ideas that soon becomes chaos in my head, I now feel a better sense of understaning some aspect or other of the reading, even if I haven’t grasped it in its totality.

So, yes, discussions have been good.

I’ve also found the charts to be fun and productive. Though, I could wish they were posted on the ning instead of our blogs, which seem more isolated and more work to access (even though this is just an illusion, I think).

What I’d find most useful as we wind down (that is, what I’d find most useful in addition to what we’ve read), is some more explicit, more direct treatment of the method that is appropriate here. I realize, however, that this may not be possible–there ought not to be a manual, after all, of how to conduct ourselves in writing about media culture (if there was, everyone would only problematize it, I’m sure). But, while the texts we have read all serve as good examples, when it comes time to write my project, I’m not as confident at extrapolating some common method and then adopting it. I want to reiterate, however, that I have realistic expectations when it comes to this sort of thing (and that trying to figure it out on my own could be a worthwhile thing to do).

Re: Workshopping? I’m not sure. Groups, maybe?

For my paper, I’ve narrowed down my topic, but only slightly. I want to discuss silent humor (Charlie Chaplin was my first thought here, but I’m trying to expand to a genre) and how it uses the body to make points about human behavior, mores, conditions, etc. It is worth noting, I think, how this sort of humor reminds us of the body at the times when we tend most to forget it.

So far, however, I’m struggling to find much scholarship on silent humor, though to be fair, I haven’t yet spent too much time looking. This blog assignment, then, is a good kick in the pants for me (sorry).

As for what kind of project I might develop from this sort of paper, I’m even more clueless there. My first instinct is to try making some silent humor flick of my own, but I’m definitely not up to that task. Instead, I’m thinking of putting together a video of others’ more current attempts at the sort of thing Chaplin and company did so well  (though I have to admit that Buster Keaton is pretty terrible).  And while I’m on that subject, if anyone knows other silent comics that could be useful here, I’d be happy to hear about them.

742 assignment 1 diagram2

And this was my revision, which takes a more broadly-based, cultural view, with Marxist elements:

Revision of Media Diagram

So for my seminar paper for this class I want to get back to humor, if possible. The trouble is how–I don’t want to try to shoehorn a project into this class that doesn’t belong.

But I think it does belong for several reasons.

First, under the broad scope of media culture, humor certainly deserves  a place. In terms of culture alone, humor figures especially large. In some cases, humor is only an aspect of some artifact–in drama, for example, there are still likely to be humorous bits. In other cases–some movies, for example–humor is the whole point.

But these examples do not do humor justice in the sense that we are concerned with media culture, which I see as concerned with films and the like, but which I see as much more concerned with media as it is transacted in society in much more timely ways. So while film is a transaction, it is a transaction over a relatively long time span. Things like daily talk shows, on the other hand, tend to trade on current events–thus playing a more timely and sensitive role in their cultural context–and it is here humor looms largest, a fact that says something, I think.

Of course, for my project I want to get away from films and TV alike. I only mean to point to humor as playing a large role in the most lively and current cultural contexts.

But it is really the nature of that role that interests me the most. Here, I’ve done some research already. Namely, I’m up on the most prominent theories on humor, and while I am far from an expert, I thought and written them through in a variety of ways. Plus, I’ve run into a bit of a dead end, research wise, so I think it’s time for me think about humor in some other way. I think that approaching it in the context of media culture could liven things up for me a bit.

 As for how, I’m not entirely sure. First off, I think that for a project on humor in this context I will have to discard much of the humor theory I’m up on and focus on just one area. There are two areas that might be relevant: one examines humor in terms of how it engages power; the other finds humor in the revealing of the kairotic inadequacy of structures.

The one that is concerned with power—superiority theory—might appear relevant to the work of people like Benjamin, A & H, Debord, etc, but I think not because most of the theory in this line examines power exchanges on a very specific, small-scale level.

Instead, because we find structures in both small and large scale, I think there is room to engage Incongruity Theory—which figures humor as what happens when the inadequacy of structures is engaged or revealed—in the context of the readings we’ve done so far.

As for those readings, I’d have to go back to them to say anything smart-sounding, but for Benjamin, humor could perform the sorts of critique he cherishes in non-commercial art; for A & H, we might seem humor’s revealing power as a way to enlightenment (though there might also be some interesting complications when thinking of the high and low, which is not necessarily unrelated), and from Debord, we might look at humor as a critique of the spectacle (though now that I think about it, humor might also be guilty of its own spectacle. Or, given the Debord’s critique of non-physical representation, there might be room to introduce some of the humor theory that is concerned with its more bodily aspects).

I think that looking at all these writers would be too much for a project of this sort, so the first thing I’ll have to do is pick one and pursue it a bit further. Coming up with connects and constellations won’t be difficult here, I think, though sorting through them all and making sense of them might, given the very abstract nature of this sort of thing.

And given this abstract nature I think this project will need what Benjamin, A & H, and Debord’s projects lack: a solid, contextualized analysis of an example. This should not only make my project easier to organize and to comprehend, it should better square it with the methods of media culture study.

Here is where I am most stuck: for examples of humor I’ve got my favorites, of course, but none of these seem fit for this particular theoretical perspective. For this, I’ll have to do some searching outside my conventional stomping grounds and hope for the best.