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!
Your last questions point to the differing usefulnesses of theories, I think, Deedee. Precisely because what is going on with the 14 senators is an event rather than a discrete object (or "sign"), wouldn't applying Barthes's semiotics-based analysis be difficult? Or wouldn't you need to reconfigure either the event or the theory to make them fit each other?
ReplyDeleteAnd then, similarly, there's the interesting perspective you raise about the "aura" of the protests. Benjamin's original use of the term applied to discrete works of art rather than events, I do believe, and, so, again, you would need to make some interesting stretches in what Benjamin has written to make it cover what has been going on in Madison. The fact of the event in Madison being unique, though, and unreproducible in a way that paintings are not, seems to me a potentially productive entry into thinking about these matters.