Pre-Break Stuff

During the last two weeks, I was really missing the sociability of a f2f class -- I think because that f2f sociability (in other theory classes that have been f2f) has helped me better understand the work my classmates are doing or preparing to do and to use that to work on my own stuff.  In other classes, at this point in the semester, where we're working-through initial ideas about seminar papers, I have found that f2f discussion has helped soothe my initial "I don't know what the hell I'm doing" panic and I haven't felt that yet.  It certainly helped to meet with Anne and talk-through my initial thoughts, but Anne is but one person and I have several other classmates who know about the stuff I'm interested in (because we've been in other f2f classes together) and they have been incredibly helpful...but I don't receive that in the on-line course.  Yes, I know I could organize a group discussion, but that's time consuming (the organization of it and then actually doing it) and in a f2f class, that time is already worked-in to class time:  It happens before, during, and after class.  It happens during class breaks.  It happens over drinks or coffee. 

Also, I've been thinking about the increased amount of time required to take this class online (vs f2f).  I don't think that its because its "theory" because I've had theory courses before this and they have not required this much time.  It simply takes more time to read the texts and to read everyone's (or many) posts (I want to *read* and not *skim.*)  In a f2f class, I'm not reading all (or any, for that matter) of my classmates' weekly responses -- that's the closest analogy I can make.  And, in a f2f post, besides *listening* to them talk in class and then having a f2f conversation, I'm not responding to my classmates' weekly responses.  The *work* (reading weekly responses and then responding to them) of the course is spread-out from the instructor to the class participants.  I don't have an answer for this problem:  I suspect that Anne has assigned fewer readings than she would if this were a f2f theory course to help account for this time consideration.  But, still. 

Paper Idea

I think my dissertation research will be focused on our uses of public databases and their technology and influence upon and place within our (U.S.) culture.  So, for this class, I’d like to take a step toward that research by writing about a couple of things:  

a/ the way that databases add to or a rea part of an information culture

b/ the way they create separation of emotion/affect and the technical with their operation. 

b/ the ways these media have become ubiquitous yet invisible in our culture (and the values and systems that are supported by these characteristics )

c/ the ways that databases reify a relationship between our private information and technology.

d/ their overall placement and fit within larger structures (economic, work, personal, leisure).

I don’t know (yet) which authors from the course I’ll be using.  I could use Adorno & Horkheimer to validate the database medium, when seen as a popular culture medium, are valid places of study.  I could apply Benjamin’s ideas about reproduction changing *everything* to private information that databases collect.  Or, I could write about specific databases or data elements or operations/functionality by using any of the authors we’ve read so far.  (This might be my best option.)   

I’m going to spend this week doing some reading of outside authors, including two from UW-M:  Sandra Braman and Michael Zimmer.  Then, I’ll make some specific decisions about proceeding. 

Week 6

I found McLuhan to be quite accessible -- not in the sense that his writing style is more *folksy* (many passages were, but some important ones were not) but in the sense that the basis for his argument makes sense to me.  Before reading these authors (and I've not read any of them before now), if pressed to describe the fundamental components/operations/nature of media, I think I would have said something along the lines of it functioning as a communication-like extension of individuals and the systems in which individuals exist.  I visualize media as extension-like, with some humanness in the middle, and cross networks of media extending from the humanness core (and then moving around a lot and being not linear or making sense).  And that type of visualization is what I took-away from McLuhan.  Also, the prevailing common-person view of technology as neutral is pretty important  to me because it drives us to ignore large and often invasive effects of technology and, just as important, to not capitalize on or under-utilize the human-building and democratic potential capabilities of technology.  (I wrote about this in my thesis.)  I  see McLuhan making a very strong and accessible statement about technology as not neutral and that gave me a "right on, bro" feeling whist reading him where I didn't have it before.  (Although, I thought Benjamin was rather inspirational in the brilliance and beauty of his argument and his writing.)  I was especially interested in McLuhan's basic premise that the medium/technology loses his ability to function as such when it is disconnected from (or, I suppose, are in conflict with) the systems that support it and that interact with it.  I don't know the art of rhetorical or philosophical *argument* or have it as a honed skill, but I think this systems theory basis (those are my words....I suppose there are academic systems theories) basis that McLuhan relies upon *proves* technology/medium cannot be neutral because those systems cannot be neutral by definition. 



Finally, as an assessment of the semester thus far, I'd really like to go back now and re-read Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, and Barthes and re-group and reconsider each in light of the other -- especially before I decide on my topic for the seminar paper arising from this course.  But, the moving forward basis for the calendar doesn't seem to allow this.  Or, does it?  (Yes, I know I could do this on my own, but the time to do so would preclude new reading.)

This Week's Object Analysis Task

What did you learn from composing your analysis? What difficulties faced you in doing analysis of your media object? How might the approaches you chose for performing your analysis carry over to other media objects? What more would you have liked to be able to discuss about your media object?

Avery & I tried to use a semiotic methodology to analyze our objects.  We did so (use a method like this) because we’re both fairly comfortable, I think, in trying-out a specific methodology that has some structure more so/rather than trying to *apply* someone’s theory – which often feels nebulous and ambiguous and like guess-work to me.  (Perhaps this is part of the reason we’re both in Plan G rather than Rhet/Comp or Modern Studies.  Prof/Technical writing, I think, is more conducive to using specific, defined methods to specific situations.)   I don’t think we really faced any difficulties, but I know I felt that I/we could have keep going….doing more assigning of “signs” and “signifiers” and “signified” to protest signs.  Okay, perhaps the one difficult was that we chose to use a methodology that has “sign” as one of its primary vocabulary words and we chose to analyze protest signs using that methodology.  (Conspiracy theorists and Freud would see this as something other than mere coincidence, I’m sure.) 

I’m thinking about the ways to use this analysis task in writing my paper for this class.  As I said in the “current events media” discussion post, I want to write about the ways that the 14 Dem Senators are and are not experiencing the aura, the “mecca-ness” at the Capitol and the ways that their (mediated) experiences (and lack thereof) might be operating on this whole situation and the ways this whole situation is operating on them.  So, I’m wondering whether the application of semiotics is a useful thing to include in that analysis. 

Wow, what a day!

Tripping and Grasping Points for Barthes

After I read the Barthes text, I cut & pasted the places in the text where I had highlighted/outlined/noted something that I saw as pertaining directly to the way that he was defining myth and describing myth’s functioning.  Here they are:

·         Myth is tasked with giving an historical intention a natural justification and making contingency appear eternal.

·          

·         The life and death of mythical language is ruled by human history’s ability to convert reality into speech.

·         Myth is a type of speech chosen by history and defined by a constituent ambiguity (it is defined by its intention more than by its literal sense.)  

·         Myth is speech stolen and restored.

·         Myth cannot possibly evolve from a *nature* of things.

·         Mythical speech interacts with its subjects even as it is representing them.

·         Mythical concepts can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely.

·         Mythical concepts can be destroyed by history.

·         Does not hide the concept, the signification, signifier, or the meaning or form.

·         Distorts the concept, the signification, signifier, or the meaning or form but the distortion is not an obliteration.

·         A ubiquity occurs in myth:  its point of departure is constituted by the arrival of a meaning.

·         Myth requires motivated form/signifier.

·         In terms of motivation, myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images, where the meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for a signification, such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc.\

·         Myth can be received by:  focusing on an empty signifier, letting the concept fill the form without ambiguity (this is static and analytical and destroys the myth) or; focusing on a full signifier, distinguishing the meaning and the form and therefore focusing on the distortion and receiving it as an alibi (this is also static and analytical and destroys the myth) or;  focusing on the mythical signifier as on an inextricable whole made of meaning and form, therefore receiving ambiguity in the signification and living the myth as a story at once true and unreal (this is dynamic and consumes the myth).  

·         Myth’s function is to empty reality.

·         Myth is depoliticized speech in a bourgeois society but some myths are strong and some are weak and this level of strength/weakness and this level partly determines the fortitude and speed of the depoliticization

.

·         Myth is a value

·         Myth’s function is to talk about things (not to deny them) and to purify them and make them innocent, giving them natural justification.

·         The purpose of myth is to assign/give a natural justification to an historical intention.

·         Mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world.  Mythology attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept.  This unveiling (which is carries out) is therefore a political act.  

·         Our current alienation arises from our inability to achieve anything other than an unstable grasp of reality.  And yet this is what we must seek:  a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge. 

When I see his ideas/text listed this way, some seem contradictory.   Or maybe they “problematize” (I hate that word) the way we think about myth or provide entry ways to understanding the placement of myth, media culture, and the ways that media can operate. 

For example, “Mythology is certain to participate in the making of the world.  Mythology attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept.  This unveiling (which is carried out) is therefore a political act.”  This seems to bump up against Barthes statements about the depoliticized nature of myth as speech.  

Also, if “myth requires a motivated form/signifier,” how can a form/signifier have a motivation if it has been naturalized by myth and if it is devoid of meaning on its own?  Doesn’t the signification strip or cleanse the concept from the form as it naturalizes it? 

Last, back to the portion of the text that says:  “Mythology attempts to find again under the assumed innocence of the most unsophisticated relationships the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept.”  At the end of the text, when Barthes says “Our current alienation arises from our inability to achieve anything other than an unstable grasp of reality.  And yet this is what we must seek:  a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge,” isn’t he saying (with the first quote) that the reconciliation can’t actually be reassuring because the alienation is purposefully attempting to make us the alienation? 

I do, however, feel pretty comfortable with my summary of the way I’m seeing Barthes, posted on Ning: 

I’m understanding Barthes to say that cultural myths are constructed by the bourgeois –via its production and its use of cultural phenomena (e.g., artifacts, objects, ideas, messages) – and for the bourgeois – in that it serves as a foundation for its ideology and is a basis of the power of its ideology to transform the “reality of the world into an image of the world” (16).  And, “because the structuring of language enables the structuring of ideologies in any kind of media” (to quote Anne Wysocki), other social structures and systems that have power could be substituted for this example of the bourgeois.  They also can be seen as constructing cultural myths to support and communicate and perpetuate their ideology as transforming the reality of the world into its own image of the world. Barthes defines myth as a pure ideographic system of communication (i.e. it is a message) that transforms history into nature…. that naturalizes the concepts about which it communicates.

Barthes uses semiotics as his methodology to track and explain both the operations of this production and use and the after-effects of this production and use.  (He uses a lot of the text’s early real estate to flesh-out, define, rationalize, and explain the effects of using semiotics and the role of the mythology reader.)  I understand Barthes to be saying that myth is both mediated and acts as a highly-influential mediator and that the bourgeois has successfully exploited this nature and abilities of myth to mediate so that it can self-perpetuate itself. Barthes says that the production and use of cultural phenomena to construct cultural myths in support of this ideology is accomplished by exploiting certain characteristics of myth and by myth’s operations and functions, including by: distorting the underlying concept; transforming history into nature; and its fundamental nature wherein it naturalizes the concepts about which it communicates. 

Avery & Deedee's Analysis of Some Objects

Do you want the National Guard inserting your foley catheter?

Signified-- Foley Catheter sign- the explicit signified would be that a soldier, probably male, would do the job of a nurse, implying a lack of certification, qualification, and sensitivity.

signifier- “Sign that says, Do you want the National Guard inserting your foley catheter?” and the women, who are presumably nurses, holding the signs.

The sign (the way the signifier and the signified are correlated and what we grasp from this correlation). The implicit sign is the male fear of castration and male, militaristic crudeness, in other words you have a male, military guy messing with your junk.

Walker Cheating at Marquette Sign

Signified-- Walker failed to complete college because he cheated and had a 2.3 GPA.

Signifier-- Sign that says, “Walker was asked to leave Marquette University for cheating with a 2.3 GPA” held by darker-skinned person and written on a pizza box.

Sign is-- Draws on values of the certain voters that our leaders will not cheat, will finish what they start and finish well. This also draws on the problems many voters had with G.W. Bush, that he too had a low GPA, drawing a connection between Walker and Bush. The correlation of the signified and the signifier too points to the idea of once a cheater, always a cheater and that the cheating would continue from Marquette into the present.

Saint Ronald Reagan Sign

Signified-- Sense of irony and use of sarcastic tone in calling Ronald Reagan a saint, that trickle-down economics has been/ should be discredited, proven to be harmful.

Signifier- Sign that reads “Saint Ronald Reagan/ Thanks for the lies!/ Trickle down my ass!” and the person that is holding the sign is blue collar, typical union guy, with a Navy hat.

Sign is-- This sign connects Walker to Ronald Reagan, that Walker is trying to make himself a national figure, to connect himself to Reagan. This also points out the historicity of the conservative movement, the longevity of the bad feelings, that the anger is deeply felt, for the working man, the average joe.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,

Skip out for beer during commercials,

Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox

In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.

The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon

blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John

Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat

hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the

Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie

Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

The revolution will not make you look five pounds

thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May

pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,

or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.

NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32

or report from 29 districts.

The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down

brothers in the instant replay.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down

brothers in the instant replay.

There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being

run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.

There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy

Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and

Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving

For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville

Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and

women will not care if Dick finally gets down with

Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people

will be in the street looking for a brighter day.

The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock

news and no pictures of hairy armed women

liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.

The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,

Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom

Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.

The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message

bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.

You will not have to worry about a dove in your

bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.

The revolution will not go better with Coke.

The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.

The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,

will not be televised, will not be televised.

The revolution will be no re-run brothers;

The revolution will be live.

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the 
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.