Session III: "The concept of "Media" and "Mediation"
December 5, 1997
Session I: The Question of the Media and the Public Sphere: The Idea of the 'Public Sphere'
Session II: Media Systems and Technologies in History
Session IV: Types and Forms of Discourse
Today, we are very fortunate to
have three members from the New School for Social Research Media Studies
making presentations and their own choice was to have Paolo Carpignano
to present first, then Sumita Chakravarty, then David Slocum third. The
title of Paolo's talk is "The shape of the sphere: The medium and the materiality
of communication."
Paolo Carpignano:
I apologize for not having a paper in advance so they could be more timed, but this semester it was impossible for me to do anything better then this.
Let me explain first of all why a session on mediology, since I proposed it some time ago. The purpose is not simply to complement and parallel the initial session on the Public Sphere, with a general discussion on the very title of the seminar: Mass Media and the Public Sphere. The problem I felt was in that preposition "and" that connects the two, putting them side by side, leaving intact their conceptual definitions and seeing only how they add to or subtract from each other. So that, for example, for the public sphere it would be a matter of evaluating to what extent the media effect or distort the expression of free public discourse, or for the media to see what kind of public function it might be able to perform, as in the case of the unending discussion about the validity lets say of public versus private ownership of television (the discussion that we had last time.
Nothing wrong with that of course, but I think that a more productive approach might be to have the assumptions, methodologies and object of analysis of each domain work itself, so to speak, into the analysis of the other. So that one can, at least for heuristic purposes, look at the media as public sphere or conversely at the public sphere as a medium. In this way, the media can be looked at, not simply as a technology of communication, or as an institution that regulates communication, but as, itself, a social relation of communication, and that the public sphere can be analyzed, not only from the point of view of the formation and development of public discourse and actions, but also as the location where the material articulations, the technological mediations of social communication, takes place. What I am proposing, in other words, is to look at not only what is public in the public sphere but also at the shape of the sphere, which is the title that I have chosen for my presentation today.
What I would like to do is to mention some issues concerning the analysis of the medium and especially its more recent transformations, and see if they can be useful in understanding or revising the notion of the public. Not an easy task, because it is not at all clear what a mediological approach is. It is one of the paradoxes of what is usually referred to as media studies that over the years scarce attention has been given to the theoretical analysis of what constitutes its domain: the medium. This might testify to the fact that the discipline is fairly young or to the fact that its domain is by nature interdisciplinary, or maybe to an healthy skepticism towards theory in the field. Whatever the case, there is no question that the bulk of media studies today is still devoted to content analysis, to the effects of these contents on social behavior, to the analysis of the ideological, or institutional, apparatus: questions of ownership, access, concentration, censorship, propaganda, etc. or pressure, the word that Habermas used the other day in the conference that he gave, the pressure of the media and the public sphere. And of course all kinds of issues concerning the economics and technology of media. Not surprisingly, of course, because contrary to what happens with other disciplines, media studies looks at a specific industry and in fact operates within a specific industry; there is no philosophy industry, or sociology industry as far as I know, but there is a media industry.
More importantly, what I call the "forgetfulness of the medium" reflects the theoretical approaches that have dominated the field over the years. Take information theory for instance, and all the approaches that have moved in the same direction, what is usually referred to as process theories. According to this approach: communication is basically an itinerary from the sender to the receiver. What travels over the channel that connects sender and receiver is the message, and the message contains the intention of the sender. The success of communication is measured by the effect on the behavior of the receiver and the success depends on the functioning of the medium itself. The smaller the interference -- what is usually called noise -- the higher the rate of success of communication. So in this approach, the medium certainly plays a very central role in process theory. It is after all a set of theories that developed alongside the development of the mass media system in the second half of the century when the question of mass media was an urgent question to solve theoretically. And yet even though the medium plays an important part in process theory, it is reduced to a technical device. The proper technical functioning of such device is what guarantees in fact the success of communication.
It was at this approach that McLuhan directed his famous provocation: "the medium is the message." Turning the field on his head, McLuhan made the medium itself and not its functions, or its use, the center of mediaological analysis. The medium is not for MacLuhan a system of transportation nor a system of representation of a reality that precedes it, but an each time different material mode of perceiving that reality. The medium in other words plays a part, a significant part, in the process of signification, so that you can establish a correlation between media forms and ways of communicating, but also ways of perceiving and defining reality, ways of thinking. So that in his famous and provocative formulations, you can connect the phonetic alphabet to Euclidean geometry and the papyrus the Roman Empire. The problem with McLuhan of course is that his medium becomes a categorical absolute, whose genealogy is totally independent from social and power relationship, and it ultimately becomes a natural extension of the body, of the sensorial system or of the neurosystem, depending on the medium. If in process theories the medium are reduced to a technical device, in McLuhan it acquires an almost biological function.
At the other end of the spectrum, and in a way diametrically opposed to process theories, has been semiology. Where information theory is interested in the circulation and transmission of messages, semiology is interested in the formation of meanings. The sign becomes the general currency of communication, and meaning is the result of a social negotiation on the basis of the code. The code being the cultural context of all communicative transaction. But the primacy of the code in semiology is achieved at the expense of the medium. The materialities of communication are ultimately insignificant in the process of symbolic interaction. In that sense, semiology parallels information theory in the devaluation of the medium in the process of signification.
Going beyond the limits of semiology and restoring the preeminence of the materiality of the medium is the project of the most recent approaches to a theory of the medium. Inspired in many ways by the history of mentalities, by the new historicism, early deconstructionism, they have tried to tilt the balance, so to speak, on the side of the object, of the referent, what Derrida called the "exteriority" of language. But also giving visibility to the social process of material mediation.
It's the case of most recently Regis Debray, the most systematic approach in recent years; if not the most convincing, certainly the most ambitious, in that he proposes nothing less than a new discipline which he calls in fact "mediology." What is important for Debray, going beyond semiology, is not the meaning of sign but the power of sign. The question to pose is not what does it mean but what has this new information transformed in the mental space of this collective and its devices of authority. . . What is important is not the sign as much as the world becoming signs or what he calls the becoming material forces of signs. Mediology is interested in the study not of ideas but of the material traces of media. Because the dynamics of thought is not separate from the physical traces. But the material traces of meaning cannot be found in the medium as a system of representation but in mediation which is the actual use or the disposal of the resources. Medium and mediation in mediology, in his approach, cannot be separated, and mediation replaces communication. By paraphrasing McLuhan, Debray is saying that mediation determines the nature of the message. I am summarizing here some of the things that he is saying, a very complex concept which entails general procedure of symbolizing social code of communication supporting material devices and distribution networks and apparatus support. They cannot be separated from the social milieu that ultimately sets the horizon of the meaning of messages. So mediology ultimately studies the social, technological complex [of representation].
My interest here is not to evaluate Derrida's theory but to use him as an example of a tendency to reevaluate the materialities of communication within the processes of social mediation, and try to see what the implications are of a mediaological approach. Not only in terms of media analysis but more importantly in terms of our experience of a mediated society. What does the transformation of media do to the transformation of social experience is the question that I am most interested in. I want to focus here on three aspects, by no means exhaustive of what media does to social experience but certainly indicative of the changes in the nature of our experience and maybe useful for the implication they have for our discussion of the public sphere: the transformation of the medium in relationship to our experience of the object, of space, and of time. Actually rather than object I should speak of things, of the experience of things, and by that I mean in particular the variety of technological artifacts that constitute, today, the object of our experience. There is no question that much of the philosophical discussion, at least in this century, revolves around the being of things and the thingness of being, in an attempt to go beyond the metaphysical dichotomy between subject and object. It is certainly a central theme of Heidegger's meditation. His sensibility for the thingness of being is a way of overcoming the realist approach on the one hand, where the thing is merely the object of representation or it is the substance that exist before and independent from the subject. The search for the being of things is not guided by utility, possession, nor is epistemological in nature, objects of knowing subjects, but it is instead a new sensibility for an expanded notion of feeling and thinking. The being of things is felt and heard.
What I am suggesting here is that this trust in the thingness of being of our age, which substitutes the previous trust for the divine and the human, or to put it in another way, what Walter Benjamin calls using a more prosaic expression, "the sex appeal of the inorganic," is a reflection of the transformation of our experience of things, and it has to do with our experience of technological artifacts in general, but in particular it has to do with the presence of the media I think in the landscape of our experience. What is a medium in its materiality if not a thing that communicates, a thing that has lost its inertness, a thing that literally speaks?
The sex appeal of the inorganic is not a form of fetishism or necrophilia but a way of characterizing the experience of the new material composition of social relationships of communication. The idea of necrophilia came to me because I was thinking of Marx's definition of machinery as dead labor; in that case necrophilia would be an appropriate metaphor for the pleasure of technology. Actually, in Marx one might find a very pertinent, appropriate conception of this organic relationship between, not men and machine, but between machinery and social relations, in his notion of machinery as fixed capital. Especially in his unpublished preparatory writing for Das Kapital Marx expanded on the idea that at the highest stage of development, labor time becomes a very insignificant element in production and that instead the accumulated social knowledge becomes a motor force of production. Fixed capital is the embodiment of a general intellect that has become a direct force of production. Why not see the mediatic landscape of our experience as a further step in this mechanic embodiment of social relationships? Machines that embody labor, skills, scientific knowledge, but also social communication in general, down to the production of common sense. Isn't this the general intellect of our time? Isn't this the form that the social has taken?
Where does this lead in terms of understanding the material process of social communication/mediation? At a minimum, to the repositioning of the subject of communication. The subject does not precede the act of communication, it does not exist only in its intentionality, it does not precede the use of the means of communication. This does not necessarily mean the death of the subject, and all that has been said about it, but certainly it does mean that, as the editors of Materialities of Communication are saying that those materialities have a "subject-effect", they are the conditions of its constitution; that is, subjectivity cannot be conceived outside of the material terrain of communication.
What does that terrain look like? What is the experience of space and time that media provide? As far as space, the relationship between medium and space is usually seen in terms of scale. The media expends the space of experience, because it makes possible a greater access to a variety of information's and places; and on the other hand, it reduces the world by bringing closer to local dimensions the vastness of a world, previously unreachable. It is basically the metaphor of the Global Village, so that the space of a mediated society is evaluated by distance, speed, acceleration, expansion and contraction. But this still doesn't say much about what the nature of mediatic space is, how it is constituted as the location of the subject-effects. I mean not just the dimensions but what the experience of space actually is. I think that this is particularly relevant to our topic because after all the public sphere is a metaphor of space, a spatial metaphor. Now, I think there is a profound difference between the notion of experience of space in common, in particular, that has informed the birth of the nation-state and the present experience of mediatic space.
It has been observed that it is not by chance that the development of the modern nation corresponds or coincides with the massification of a particular kind of medium: print. The rise of the book; book here means all the forms of print communication, newsletters, pamphlets, newspapers, and all the collateral activities related to print that Habermas describes in his genealogy of the public sphere. The rise of the book represents the consolidation of the transition between voice and language. Language as communication. Language as a body of tradition, of literary tradition for instance, to language as the expression of a people. Together with the new territoriality of the state and the market of commodities, the fixation of the language achieved with print, the new materiality of communication marks a new language of commonality expressed with the metaphor of the voice of the people. But the sense of belonging that results from this newly discovered commonality, is a belonging to what Benedict Anderson has called the "imagined community." The book, in this sense, mediates between the private lives and the common imaginary. The common space is ultimately a representational space. The nation-state is literally constituted in political representational forms, the representative and the represented.
The performance in the market place corresponds to the performance of political representations. Not by chance the rise of the market and of the nation state coincides with the birth of the modern theater of life, which is the dominant metaphor of the Renaissance. The genealogy of the modern nation is an experience of commonality based on a relationship of spectatorship. And this could be extended to the various forms of the modern state, the spectacular state, the propaganda state of this century in the forms of fascism, communism but also the welfare state. Here of course, in mediological analysis we would have to talk about film for instance and the role it had in the age of propaganda, but I don't think that is a substantial change with this idea of the relationship of spectatorship that I was just taking about.
My contention here is that, instead, the experience of space introduced by television for instance in the last four or five decades and by the most recent digital technology, is considerably different, and that this fact might explain the present crisis of the representational state and the public sphere. The difference I refer to is the one between what I would call a "space of representation" and a "space of inhabitation." I borrow from Benjamin the suggestion that the experience of mass media is more similar to the experience of architectural forms rather than to the experience of a painting let's say. That is, not a critical absorption of an observer but the distracted experience of a user, a walker-by. Rather than a representation to observe, it is a space to inhabit. Television is a medium that is constructed around that experience of inhabitation. But here it is also where the analogy with architecture ends. The technology of transmission as opposed to that of reproduction, which Benjamin was talking about, allows for the simultaneous presence of multiple places, a continuous relay of places that collapses the difference between the here and the there. Television not only deterritorializes previous spaces of representation but also reconstructs those spaces in new contiguities.
The experience of television can be best characterized as a form of monitoring a contiguous space, a space that does not exists as an independent narrative sequence, as in film for instance, a space that is not represented but presented, showed to our monitoring, a space that we scan through our new acquired capability of television, viewing at a distance. I don't want to minimize here the obvious institutional apparatus that frames, selects, ideologies, controls, imposes, and governs television, nor I want to imply that the televisual space exhausts the totality of our space, but I do want to suggest that that experience of space has a social resonance, it is the material terrain of a disposition towards social space, a space that we now feel we are invited to, a space of which we are inhabitants.
Now, the way in which we come to inhabit that space is defining the nature of that space, and here I want to come briefly to the third element of my presentation which is time. Both in the space of representation and in the space of inhabitation, space and time are ontologically inseparable. But in the first case that combination of space and time can be best described as spacialization of time, in the second it is best described as temporization of space.
A film for example is constructed on a sequence of moments, and takes, and shots, and a sequence of space constructions. The time of film is determined by the sequence and succession of spaces embodied in the editing process. Time of film is a narrative time at least in the classical Hollywood model. David, I think, will speak to that later on. It is sequential and chronological, it is linear time, it is the empty time of the representation. Time is literally projected, on the screen.
TV time instead is the time of the event, it is time that happens; here of course there is the huge problem of live programs, real time etc., in relations to other formats, but for the moment I take for granted at the risk of oversimplifying that the live transmission constitutes the defining feature of the medium of television even for programs that are not technically live, that the liveness of TV constitutes its "realism." The time of the event is singular, is out of sequence, is non linear, but most importantly the event is such to the extent that is an event of watching. TV does not come as a collection of discrete programs, it comes as an ever present flow, an always existing availability, an always accessible out-there. As viewers we don't look at individual programs, we watch television, and that word; "watching", as Samuel Weber has pointed out, implies a tension. It implies a watching for. We intrude in that always available flow with more or less control, depending on the variety of channels or the use of the remote control and so on, and in so doing we make that space happen. What we are watching is a situation, and that situation is such to the extent, I repeat, that it includes our watching, inhabitants as we are of that space but also participants to that event. In spite of all the horrible, trivial, barbarous things that we see on television, and instead of trying to separate the good programs to the bad programs, I suggest that this experience of space and time embodied in the medium of television is the most important form of a new sociability, a new experience of commonalty that has relevant consequences on the notion of public and on the conceptualization of the public sphere.
First of all, the present collective inhabitation of the media makes more problematic, if what I said so far is true, the distinction between audience and public, and all the attributes that go with it. The opposition between the inside and the outside, between activity and passivity. The fact is that television as a medium, for instance, is predicated upon the activation of the audience, the audience is solicited and provoked, and invited to develop a disposition for interactivity. Activation is not necessarily participation, not at least in the way we use to think of participation in the public sphere. But this only begs the question. What is participation in the age of interactivity? Whatever the answer and however participation can be redefined, it cannot be conceived, it seems to me, apart from the new social practices of communication.
Here I will mention only two aspects that have been discussed in reference to the crisis of the public-audience dichotomy. Only briefly and we might want to expand on that in our discussion. The first is the phenomenon of massive public performance, or performance in public of segments of society that were previously thought of as typical audiences, the recipients of public performances by entertainers, talking heads or public officials. Through a variety of formats, from reality shows to talk shows, news events, televised town meeting, not to mention what is going on today on the Internet, people are provoked into performing in public, as themselves, unscripted and unrehearsed, writers of their own texts and producers of their own public pronouncements. Rather than dismissing these performative practices as a massive addiction to exhibitionism, I prefer to look at them through the lens of what Benjamin called, in another context and in another medium, "the right to be reproduced," a shortening of the distance between the audience and the media apparatus. Informal, emotional, gossipy, trivial, entertaining as they may be, these discursive practices represent an unprecedented intrusion of civil society into the discursive apparatus of the media. And this intrusion accounts to a great degree for the very visible shift in the direction of the private, the intimate in fact, in the public debate. The crisis of the audience-public dichotomy corresponds to the blurring of the line between public and private, a phenomenon that has been widely noted in sociological and political analysis and that historically corresponds to the rise of social movements that have challenged that dividing line, most notably the feminist and gay movement.
The second phenomenon, and directly related to the first is the visibility if not demystification of the media apparatus itself. The involvement of the audience in the televisual text reveals the back stage quality of the televisual space. The televisual apparatus is visible, like no other media before, not only because literally the viewer is acknowledged, addressed, invited in, made an accomplice, if not protagonist, but also because it reveals the mechanism of publicity, the making of representations, whether they are politicians or celebrities, and it does that by making visible the circuits of exposure that makes them public figures. Public figures are such to the extent that they inhabit the mediatic space, but that is the same space that audience inhabits. This not only accounts for the demystification, irony, game playing with which public figures are dealt with, or subjected to, but it might ultimately account for the crisis of legitimacy of institutions of representation, from political institutions to the media themselves at least if one has to believe the polls that measure media credibility.
I want to conclude here but not without giving some very tentative, approximate, and general indications of what the mediological analysis that I propose might lead to. I hope it is clear from what I said that the present experience of mediatic space is not in itself conducive to more democratic practices or a more democratic attitude. Television is not democracy in the making. This is true, it seems to me, for television but also for the digital networks, in spite of all the talk that has been done recently about participation and interaction about the new forms of democracy that they supposedly engender. But at the same time, I don't want to imply that what I described can be read as a further refinement of the power of the culture industry, a culture industry that would trick audiences into the illusion of activity and participation while enforcing a more subtle regime of domination. I hope my distance from these kinds of analysis is clear from what I said.
What I am suggesting though and in reference to previous discussions that we had in the seminar is that the crisis of the audience-public dichotomy impacts directly on the notion of the political participation enhanced by the medium of talk, or on the dichotomy between deliberation and public opinion on which the notion of public sphere is founded, that defines its normative status in it. If that norm is largely counterfactual, as one of the papers suggested, it might have to do not with the fact that the media and TV in particular have eroded or destroyed the possibility of the participatory medium of talk, but the social practices constituted on that terrain (and I say constituted and not determined by the media, of the media) have found different forms of expression that cannot be reduced or transcended by privileging one medium over another or one better form of mediation over another. The old institutions that presided historically over the separation between deliberation and public opinion, the party, the union, the press, etc. are, well, old and I don't see any strategic need to revive them. Yet, they provided the institutionalization of critical judgment, functioned on the principle at least of the participatory medium of talk, but they also were founded on a hierarchical structure of authority, and a structure of representation, that as I have tried to demonstrate is unthinkable to repropose today at least in the mediatic space of communication. Deliberation is significant not as an end in itself but to the extent that it ignites a transformative process. A mediological approach today would emphasize transformative processes that do no necessarily require that deliberation. Transformative process in a mediatic space are not only made of strategic projects or institutional structures or social movements but also in media events, ephemeral and devoid of permanent sites, and yet resonant because imbedded in the sociality of the medium. A mediological approach today could make sense of forms of visibility, resonance, composition and recomposition of mediatic spaces and forms of commonality, collective experiences of media events, etc.
In short, what I am suggesting is that alongside the question of plurality and multiplicity of public spheres, and the question of equality of access, we have also to consider the significance of forms of publicness; in other words, we have to consider also the shape of the sphere.
Sumita Chakravarty:
I, like David and Paolo, am going to speak from notes because there really hasn't been time to write anything, even for myself. I'm calling this "Rethinking the Public Sphere: Notes on Popular Culture". Basically to piggyback on Paolo's work, or at least in terms of media studies, what I want to do is to speak of the intervention of cultural studies and its take on notions of the public sphere. Although the tone itself is not a privileged one within cultural studies in that literature. What I want to do is lay out three founding principles or propositions in cultural studies and to explain them by way of a brief historical look at the three corresponding historical moments in the development of cultural studies.
The three propositions are, one, culture as a whole way of life; two, cultural as a terrain of struggle; and three, cultural studies as a contingent, open-ended, ongoing project as it were. And these statements are located in the following historical moments. The first, what has been called the culturalist moment which roughly covers the period between the 50's and 60's. The second, the structuralist moment, which was dominant within cultural studies in the 70's and up to the mid-80's. And more recently what has been called the postmodernist moment current in the mid-80s to the 90's. I focus my remarks for these moments on a sort of representative text of figures, so for the culturalist moment I'm going to concentrate on Raymond William's founding text, Culture and Society. For the structuralist moment, I'm going to refer to Stuart Hall's work, and for the postmodernist moment to Angela McRobbie. So basically I'm staying within the British tradition in cultural studies even though it is widely used here as well. And, just to further focus, I suppose there are three keys terms which define these moments culture, for Raymond Williams, representation for Stuart Hall, and leisure/consumption for McRobbie.
To me, I think the great contribution of cultural studies, at least in the British variant, has been its insistence that the realm of culture is not divorced from or over and above social and political life. So in fact what Raymond Williams tried to do in his first book, Culture and Society, was to try to trace the idea of culture as it had developed in Britain in the late 19th to the mid-20th century. He tried to demonstrate that this tradition of thought is a deeply failed response to momentous social changes brought about by industrialism and by political, democratic movements. So what he says is that, and this is a quote, "the meaning of culture is a response to the events which are meanings of industry and democracy most evidently defined." In other words, culture is not this thing which is removed and apart from social life, political life, the public sphere as it were,but very much, I mean by shifting the focus to everyday culture or the culture of the people or a broad based notion of culture, he tried to incorporate various kinds of experiences which previous definitions or notions of culture had excluded. So it was not culture as the intellectual products of artists and scholars or whomever but more the practices of everyday people. The kind of tradition that he traced through the term itself and the development of the term he manifested, or he sort of demonstrated how it was very specifically linked to what people were experiencing in terms of industrial change.
By bringing together in other words this visceral type of response to everyday life is what brings notions of culture and the common life together, and so Raymond Williams is giving much more material cases to culture. He also, through the word communication, brings about the reintegration of art with the common life of society, so for instance he calls for the abandonment of the separation between public and private, individuality and community, culture and society, etc. And that has been the hallmark of cultural studies, the non-separation or the inability to separate these because these are so integrated.
To speak directly of the issue of democracy, he felt that the responses to the notion of culture had been related to the three issues of industry, democracy, and art. In terms of democracy he shows how the thinking shifts from a general suspicion of the power of the new masses, to an emphasis on notions of community and an organic society, to again a kind of renewed fear of the masses in the early decades of the 20th century. What he is trying to do in other words is to show how these terms, that were introduced or coming into use concurrently with industrialism, mass civilization, mass democracy, mass communication, how the notion of the masses was a kind of an association of the masses with mob or with basically a fear of the elite towards this kind of developing power of the masses. And so there is an association with notions of gullibility or fickleness, prejudice, of taste and habit. . .[tape flipping over] I think what is important to stress is that the book itself, which was published in 1958, was a response to what was then the new media. The impact of television particularly and the changing habits, during the post-war period, the changing leisure habits and activities of the working classes and just society in general, so in some sense that moment of a social transformation and the new power of the consumer or whatever is what prompts him to take this backward look into history and to try to trace the idea of culture and to then through that to incorporate what seems to me again as notions of public and participation and democratic life which is much more inclusive than what had been put in practice.
The structuralist moment, which is dated roughly from the early 70s, incorporates a whole lot of influence from the various structuralisms within cultural studies and I think basically again it was a response to the growing power of the media and notions of ideology and of representation in other words. There is for instance, Althusser's famous definition of ideology as the unconscious relationship of people to the real conditions of their existence. In other words, that there is this whole kind of unconscious level at which ideology works and the media is seen as a major component of ideological work, the site where that work takes place. So Stuart Hall's work has been trying to engage with that, trying to engage with processes of representation and to give a meaning of representation which stresses that it is not a presentation of what is actually out there, but representation becomes a part of the event itself so that election coverage for instance is not just that there are the elections and here is the coverage but the coverage itself becomes part of how we think about the political process or any kind of process. But the fact that broadly so much of the media are aware of the site, his major contention or axiom that the media are the site of struggle is that he is saying that the struggle, is taking place in and around media. So it is not as though the media are always dominant and coercive and manipulative but that much of the struggle is really around that, and so he brings in the notion of the public sphere and the dirtiness of the struggle and the work that is being done around the issues whatever they might be. But that the media is a site for that.
I don't want to suggest that these are cut-off points, I mean the notion of culture has been an on-going strain and Raymond William's effect or impact on the field itself, and similarly with Stuart Hall's work, it has gone through various stages. But all I was trying to do is to point to specific kinds of movements within cultural studies and how they are incorporative of concerns which are no longer about divisions but much more as they are contaminated or contaminate one another.
I think Angela McRobbie in terms of trying to look at or define what is happening now around the new technologies or around media or around people's participation or engagement with mass culture as it were. What this moment signifies is that, as somebody put it, it is actually Michael Denning in an article called "The End of Mass Culture," writes "We have come to the end of mass culture. The debates and positions which named mass culture as another have been superseded. There is no mass culture out there, it is the very element that we all breath." So the postmodernist moment signifies an acceptance of the fact that people watch television. That this has to be at the ground level from which you start out even talking about issues relating to culture. McRobbie also, in terms of postmodernity, I think she is trying to stress how this concept allows us to accommodate other voices, and other kinds of experiences and all of the pressure groups as it were that are vocal in these competing and various public spheres. She writes "that the term of postmodernity indicates something of the scope and the scale of the new global and local social relations and identities set up between individuals, groups and populations as they interact and are formed by the multiplicity of texts, images and representations which are a constitutive fact of contemporary reality and experience." So rather than having a view of the media as . . . I mean, even moving further from the notion of ideology, what she is stressing is the notion of the consumer or of the viewer taking pleasure in certain forms of media as part of the very experience that we have to start out with. So the fact that images and representations become really foundational in the way we apprehend contemporary experience. That's what she is stressing, and in cultural studies in the 90s, I think, there has been the ability to look at the sphere as much more diverse and open. In a sense moving away from any kind of linearity, media history, in terms of trying to think about history, but rather to stress the open endness, the contingency of history. That's what this particular moment in cultural studies tries to signify.
So I think just to try bring those
themes together, through this brief historical look, the points I wanted
to make are: one, cultural studies did not only break down the divide between
high culture and low culture; it refused the separation of culture from
everyday life and everyday life from politics; two, cultural studies provides
an alternative to conceptions of the media as monolithically powerful and
manipulative or as the realm of subversive play, because there is that
tendency to either see the media as all-powerful and manipulative or to
celebrate the media. Watching a TV show like Seinfeld is very empowering.
Rather than go with either of the [sides], the whole idea is that the idea
of media and meanings are struggled over and that the struggle is one without
guarantees, I think helps us to better understand why certain, what might
be called foolproof [causes] may fail, and that is something that cultural
studies kind of emphasizes. The third is the prominence that cultural studies
gives to subjectivity or experience in thinking about culture, and I think
that is a very key component within the whole project of cultural studies.
It's just that you don't leave your feelings or responses behind when you
think about politics or public issues in the sense of personal and subjective
and the public realm intersect. And by stressing contingency in postmodernity
cultural studies is able to make room for new experiences, new voices and
new presences within the public sphere. So in a sense it's rather than
guaranteeing in advance what the next step will be or the next stage of
social change is going to be, to stress contingency and open endedness
of these formations.
J. David Slocum:
"Mediating Modernity: Violence and Early American Cinema"
Thank you for the opportunity to present. I, like Paolo, want to apologize for not distributing a paper in advance. What I am going to speak about today is drawn from a larger project and I thought the best way to introduce that to you was to have you read from Miriam Hansen's book Babel and Babylon, which I think especially in its first three chapters does quite an effective job of summarizing not only much of what has been written previously about this period of early American cinema but also formulates I think quite a provocative thesis about how publics operates during that period. I would like to use much of what Hansen writes as background for a modest proposal about violence in early cinema and its relations to early cinematic publics.
A great deal of critical effort has recently been expended producing an understanding of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The most perspicuous of these studies have explored the manifold relations between cinema and modernity. Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, Ben Singer, and Miriam Hansen are among the writers whose inquiries into the institution and aesthetics of American film have pursued a sophisticated conception of the cultural changes that occurred from the mid-1890's to the mid-1910's. Rather than drawing straightforward parallels between the emergence of film-making norms, technologies, or industrial practices and the development of new social practices, their aim is to discuss cinema as a component of culture having multiple functions. Even more, their aim is to expand and complicate notions of modernity and publics relevant in the explanation of particular forms like film. Accounts of the shifting evolution of cinema and the modern or the public sphere thus become interdependent, having multiple relations. As Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz have posited, cinema serves as a "crucible of elements already evident in other aspect of modern culture" that eventually outpaced those other forms to become a central and exemplary modern form."
In the work of these writers, modernity denotes a complex of altered modes of perception and behavior, changed norms for representation and interpersonal relations, and transformed dynamics for social experience and economic exchange. For this seminar group, a summary list of some of these changes will suffice. Perception became in increasingly mobile and fleeting experience guided by sensation and distraction. From technologies like the railroad and the assembly line to productions like the detective fiction and the department store, ephemeral responses to multiple phenomena became definitive. Such mobility also characterized a different mode of behavior, one in which individuals were subordinated in their continuous movement to the dictates of the urban crowd, the burgeoning marketplace, or whatever source of stimulation, be it Coney Island or the perambulating prostitute. That stimulation often emerged from representations that were privileged over the "real"; photography, mass-produced posters, and literary "entertainments" transfigured the ambiguities of everyday life into new forms that, emphasizing the visual, balanced the order of narrative and the thrill of spectacle. Interpersonal relations were likewise transformed. The sensory excitement of the crowd, whether among department store consumers or museum audience members or anonymous actors in the street, constituted a new social norm in which the mass took precedence from the individual. Impersonal and undifferentiated, the experience of the crowd epitomized a social dynamic of evanescent sensation and endless circulation. That dynamic was, crucially, economic as well as social, and forms like the mail-order catalog and ubiquitous public advertising reiterate the centrality of consumerism and the marketplace to the larger cultural changes taking place.
The modern city, or metropolis, was a central locus and setting for these many changes. New York and later Chicago became sites for examining the multiple changes wrought by the emergence of modern life: sustaining attention to the brake between premodern communities and modern urban society, many American social thinkers also sought to link abstract theories with studies of the actual experiences of individuals, families, and neighborhoods. One of the results was a persistent appreciation for the diversity and irreducibility of everyday lives. Another was a set of illuminating intersections with the developing film industry, which as an institution typified the expansion of modern technology and the production of a mass audience, and in its stories began to represent the restless energy of everyday life. Those intersections between cinema and the modern city run through the complex of transformations outline above and endure to varying degrees in the production of movies up to the present day.
Those intersections, furthermore, help to orient Miriam Hansen's book Babel and Babylon. This work on spectatorship in early American film is layered and complex, integrating the moral and political, cognitive, and socioeconomic concepts implied by the term "modernity." Hansen engages these multiple aspects of modernity in formulating an alternative public sphere strongly inflected by gender and legitimated by the new mass medium of cinema in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. And while the starting point of that formulation is unavoidably Habermas, she relies on the notion of an oppostional -- or, to be precise, proletarian -- public sphere posited in the more nearly contemporary writings of Negt and Kluge. I hope we can talk about Hansen's work later, especially in light of Paolo's remarks, but for reasons of time I want to survey some of the individual productions of early American cinema as well as some of the historical terrain of that cinematic culture which in combination, I think can usefully serve as a starting point for discussing the public sphere that arguably emerged in relation to that cinema.
The first motion pictures were known as kinetoscope films for the exhibition cabinet that ran film on a continuous loop for viewing through a peep-hole on its top. Typically lasting less than twenty seconds, kinetoscope films presented a variety of simple subjects whose requisite component was motion. Technology limited the subjects of the earliest films to those individuals, or animals, who could fit and move within the confines of the small Edison studio, in West Orange, New Jersey. Dances, vaudeville numbers, slapstick turns, animal acts, and performances by contortionist, wrestlers, and strongmen were among the familiar theatrical routines filmed against the black tar paper walls of the studio. Brief scenes of blacksmiths and Chinese launders at work afforded simple glimpses of frontier and city life. Viewing these images through the kinetoscope peep-hole was an individualistic, voyeuristic, and, initially, largely male experience that emphasized the spectacle of motion and the novelty of exciting, often indecorous images.
From the beginning, violence was present and even prominent in kinetoscope films as a source of stimulation and a cause of controversy. Some films, like those of wrestling matches and animal fights, straightforwardly relied on moving images of physical conflict to represent violence and most provoked reformers critical of early cinema. Other motion pictures were less explicit; they portrayed incidents, stories, or characters that were emblematic of contemporary or recent violent action. Members of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show visited Edison's studio in 1894, for instance, to film images that invoked the frontier bloodied by violence. In one of the films, Indian War Council, Indians worked themselves into a frenzy preparing for battle, suggesting to audiences familiar with popular frontier narratives the threat of their savagery. Still other productions provided images that, through various depictions of the period's changing social, racial, and economic formations, betray instances of what today we might term institutional, structural, or systematic violence. Thus, while the depiction of a Chinese launderer at work may have appeared at the time as mundane, in retrospect it may be used to demonstrate how the images were inscribed by social relations based on violence.
Projection of commercial film began in New York City in early 1896, exhibiting images that were more nearly life-size, compelling, and realistic, and making the viewing experience in vaudeville theaters more communal. Film historian Tom Gunning has argued that contemporary audiences had different expectations of this early cinema and were little concerned with the creation of a coherent narrative world: what he terms "the cinema of attractions" directly solicited "spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle -- a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that was of interest in itself." And while the exact conceptualization of early cinema as based in non-narrative "attractions" is subject to debate, as I'll get to, stimulation, shock, and surprise were undeniably among the frequent aims of that cinema. This of course riled polite society, progressive reformers, and religious groups, who quickly moved to criticize the excitatory effects of the medium and many of the subjects it provocatively displayed. Their concerns were both that the theatrical experience itself was unhealthy and that the suggested general correspondence between images and the world outside the theater would affect behavior in everyday life.
Perhaps the best example of early violence is the boxing film. Among the first films distributed commercially in the United States was called The Leonard-Cushing Fight, the recording of an exhibition match made in Edison's studio and shown in lower New York in August 1894. That Fall, heavyweight champion James Corbett knocked out Peter Courtney in another exhibition at the West Orange studio. Widely popular, Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph was also briefly subjected to legal investigation in New Jersey, where prizefighting was banned. Indeed, many reformers sought because of film to reconsider the legal and social status of prizefighting altogether. Committed to purifying American society of base behaviors and upholding the nation's spiritual and material progress, moralists and legislators decried the brutality inherent to boxing and, especially at the state level, achieved significant regulatory results. They alleged participants were criminals and immoral, and in their rhetoric unmistakably demonized ethnic and immigrant groups, like the Irish, and the urban working class, who with their lack of education in American values were deemed especially susceptible to such vice and physical distraction. When the boxing exhibition between "Young Griffo" and "Battling" Charley Burnett became arguably the first film projected commercially in New York City in 1895, advertising for the short emphasized the "life size of the living moving pictures" on screen and initial reports marveled at the realistic nature of the viewing experience. Cinema's power of realistic representation had coupled with the spectacle of prize fighting to produce films both popular with audiences and of great concern to social reformers.
The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was a landmark production that clarified some of the terms of that popularity and concern. Recorded on location in Carson City, Nevada, on St. Patrick's Day, 1897, the film spanned eleven reels and constituted a nearly hour-long motion picture program. Despite being subject to reformist outcries, it became a theatrical event that attracted both the expected audience of urban males and other, more genteel spectators, many of whom had not previously seen either a boxing match or a motion picture. Such attendance marked the continuing consolidation of a popular cultural medium that challenged the proscriptions of cultural elites by offering novel and accessible entertainment to diverse segments of the changing population. For women, especially, attendance was a statement of independence from traditional roles, greater involvement in the public realm, and fuller access to the predominantly male public world. Their presence also returned attention to the nascent medium itself. The motion picture was seen as very different, both legally and morally, for women to view images of boxing rather than the physical fight itself. That question of representation disarmed reformers briefly and cleared the way for The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight's lucrative success. By the turn of the century, however, legislators and moralists had resumed their crusade to regulate boxing and succeeded in reducing audiences of fight films to their male core. They also began to criticize movies themselves for their nearly narcotic effects on audiences, stressing the power of cinematic representations. Over the course of only a half-decade, boxing films had galvanized reform efforts aimed at the brutal and immoral nature of prizefighting while also focusing attention on the capacity of moving pictures to engage audiences.
Fight films identified images of screen violence with individual and predominantly white male bodies. On one hand, as just noted, they afforded women, immigrants, and more refined segments of popular society unprecedented access to a predominately male and public world. On another, they privileged that same world by featuring its individual members and their physical prowess. The ability of men to express themselves through the deployment of violence invoked beliefs in an energetic individualism and a vigorous American nation. In fact, a conjunction arguably existed between individual bodies on early film screens and the body politic in transition outside the storefront theaters. Images of physically capable and typically half-naked fighters emphasized masculine aggressiveness and unconsciously affirmed the predominantly male public world. Reformist crusades notwithstanding, the concatenation of male bodies, physical violence, and moving pictures in prizefight films confirmed the integrity of a nation and national ideology themselves regularly legitimated by violence.
Images of the Spanish-American War similarly shared grounding in contemporary cultural, ethnic, and political dynamics. Journalists and film makers flocked to Cuba in late 1897 and returned patriotic films, often only simple shots of flags waving or battleships sailing that emphasized the growing tension between Spain and the United States. When the U.S. battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbor during an ostensibly friendly visit in January 1898, Americans were outraged. Films exploited this violent attack and focused on its aftermath, documenting The Wreck of the Maine and the Burial of the Maine Victims, and setting an early precedent for representing violence through images of its effects. Partly this was due to the limits of cumbersome contemporary camera technology, which made filming of live incidents difficult and the recording of singular moments of battle improbable. It was also a pattern that allowed a fuller cinematic shaping of the meaning attached to violent events; images of destruction or death invited explanatory frameworks that played to their audiences' political and ideological beliefs. After the war in Cuba ended in August, re-enactments of battle scenes, many of them filmed on Long Island, continued to be produced and remained popular for months. In the Philippines, where American forces quickly routed the Spanish fleet and moved to assume imperial control of the islands, military action and attempts at political indoctrination continued through 1899 and 1900. Against this backdrop of military efforts against indigenous nationalists and campaigns conducted to indoctrinate natives, simple films like Repelling the Enemy -- in which a relatively undistinguished charge of riflemen is held off -- became forceful political expressions. They demonstrated that early film makers, exhibitors, and audiences could construct compelling ideological visions of violence using a variety of images ranging from the explicitly to what seemed at first glance benign.
Some films were produced from visions of violence already familiar to viewers. I'll mention quickly without elaborating early productions of the Passion Play in 1896-7 and Edwin Porter's 14-shot version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1902. These films and many others relied on foreknowledge of a range of subjects from novels, theatrical plays, history and the Bible to provide context and continuity of meaning to individual or serial shot films.
From overt depictions of physical action to visual cues for contemporary social and political concerns, in other words, representations of violence in early cinema regularly depended on audience recognition and familiarity. To put this another way, films representing violence along a range of visual explicitness required audiences to comprehend and construct primitive narratives so as to clarify the meaning of the violent images. Even from the brief survey I've just offered, we might usefully identify a number of types of these primitive narrative. First, even the simplest films, once they achieved coherent movement, arguably rendered mini-narratives through a succession of images in a single shot. These mini-narratives, with links to wide-ranging cultural myths and ideological beliefs, allowed cinema from the beginning to represent sustained movement, energy, and conflict. Second, prevailing cultural standards and beliefs about multiple forms of violence almost unavoidably inscribed the majority of early motion pictures. As I've tried to suggest, films representing physical or public or racial conflicts betrayed assumptions concerning the violence of individual men and the American nation, of distinct races and classes, and finally of developing technologies and growing cities. In foregrounding this violence, they also drew attention to images that were mainly absent. The insistent emphasis on male physical prowess, for instance, suggested a society exceedingly anxious about changing gender roles and, perhaps, eager to disavow the violence committed against women. Third, audience familiarity with or shared experience of specific narratives from history, religion, or other media afforded early cinema a tremendous narrative efficiency for presenting stories and violent meaning. Eventually, of course, a fourth type of narrative, complex and over determined, based on the succession and arrangement of shots through editing practices, emerged in the transitional years early in the twentieth century.
Back in the 1890s, though, the violence of early films did not only gather meaning from the consolidation of various imperatives toward narrative. The thrilling movement of the new cinematic medium marked sensational one-shot attractions and primitive multi-shot films alike. The cinema's "aesthetic of astonishment," to use Tom Gunning's arresting phrase, was largely new and crucial to the young medium's popularity. As Gunning writes, "a myth of initial terror defines film's power, its ability to convince spectators that the moving image was, in fact, palpable and dangerous, bearing towards them with physical impact." Such visceral, assultive experience marked cinema as a medium of excitement, stimulation, and even shock. In the concurrent evolution of its production and exhibition practices, cinema quickly transformed that potential for stimulation into popular spectacles of movement, energy, and conflict. And in the resultant tension between that spectacle and cultural narratives likewise appropriated and transformed by films, we can discern something of the heart of this historical moment of American modernity. Cinema served as vital medium through which traditions of violence and ideological order were transformed by new forms of social experience and representation.
I began my remarks with a survey of the moral and political, cognitive, and socioeconomic concepts implied by the term "modernity." Miriam Hansen's writing engages many of these multiple aspects of modernity in formulating an alternative public sphere strongly inflected as oppositional and bi-gender. I want to close with the suggestion of an additional conception of modernity that might be called "neurological." Such a formulation finds ready grounding in the theories of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, who variously insist upon an understanding of the modern based in a fundamentally different register of subjective experience, characterized by the physical and perceptual shocks of contemporary experience. And while this insistence can arguably be considered derivative of the socioeconomic conception of modernity, these thinkers stress the ways in which the broad range of changes related to advanced capitalism transformed the texture of lived experience. They conceived modernity, that is, in terms of stimulation and sensory phenomena.
The importance of that conception to our discussion here is, I want to propose, that any theorization of publics in the moment of early cinema must necessarily address the neurological basis of spectatorship and, indeed, everyday life. As Ben Singer has argued, "modernity transformed the texture not only of random daily experience but also synthetic, orchestrated experience." And while element of spectacle, sensationalism, and astonishment had already for over a century been crucial to popular amusements, the new prevalence and power of immediate, gripping sensation defined a fundamentally different epoch in popular entertainment. The result was a "commerce in sensory shocks" that bound the vision and desire of spectators in ways less discursive than those formulated by Hansen or certainly more traditional theorists of the public sphere. In reviewing some early violent films, I've tried to suggest that early cinema was marked by a negotiation between this commerce of sensory shocks and a more conventionally discursive economy based in cultural forms and practices. The publics that legitimated the cinematic medium as a cultural institution and were in turn legitimated by it required both these registers of experience. My contention, in sum, is that without recognizing the priority of the neurological to early cinema, we cannot fully comprehend the experience of its spectators or adequately theorize the publics relevant to it.
Jean Cohen:
I want to address Paolo's presentation. In a way, what I would say that the discourse, whether you call it oppositional, Negt & Uluge, counter, Fraser, Cohen and Arato public spheres, is basically still using and bound up with Habermas's category. In fact the bourgeois public sphere itself was all of those three at certain points so that is fine. That is what it does and it is not moving to an alternative framework or a framework that challenges the concept of publicity. But Paolo's intervention certainly means to do that and does it. It does it by historizing the Habermasian and our concept. I don't know if it is right but it is interesting. So it is related to a concept of technology, print and, which goes together, with a certain notion of deliberation, a certain community, nation-states, certain level of capitalism, whatever, and ideas of representation and certain, more specific types of dichotomies, public or private audiences. I'm sure there are lots more. It seemed to me what you were saying is that that framework, the media and the communication was basically hierarchically structured, not everybody participated in this in the same way. On the other hand, there was this deliberative stuff. It seems to me that you are claiming that with the new or contemporary media, basically TV, that there are shifts in all of these levels, new interpolations to use a notion of Althusser which I think is fine. A new kind of interactivity, you get horizontality, if that is a word, but what we don't get is deliberation. So in the first, hierarchy causes deliberation and then in the second. . . My question is this, at some point you seem to say "I don't want the cultural history stuff and I also don't want to say that I'm going to have this happy consciousness and apply that this isn't now horizontal possibility that everyone participates in, that this is democracy or even deliberation. But my question to you would be the following: If it isn't democratic and it is not deliberative, isn't that using anarchistic criteria? In other words, the criteria of deliberativeness and, well, I don't know how you feel about democracy, but this is associated with the concept of and potential for Habermas, implies a mode of participation which seems to go with an historically, on your analysis, I'm asking you is this a problem for you. It seems to go with an historically specific shape of media and global experience. Is it possible to frame it in that way, on the historical-theoretical conceptual basis in which you present your argument?
Andrew Arato:
Maybe because of the problem of time, maybe it would be good to collect at least two or three questions but with the proviso that people should try to stay, if they can, on the same topic.
Jeffrey Goldfarb:
Mine is exactly on this point. I am impressed by the presentations and, especially if I use Paolo's as a key for an interpretation of himself and the others, deeply distressed by the presentations, challenged by the presentations. I mean this seriously. As I thought about this seminar, as I think about my own work over my professional life, the kind of centrality of talk is key. If I think about the Enlightenment, and not only the Enlightenment but the kind of democratic, republican dreams about the relationship between the participation of people and the possibility of good governance and self-governance, it seems that it is all contingent upon some idea of deliberation. And it probably has involved in it the idea that there is a space where you meet and a space in between people. When I think about this I don't think about Habermas, I think about Arendt. But it is the same set of problems. I want space between people, where in their differences they can speak and act in the presence of others. That it is not completely rational is not quite as disturbing to me as a student of Arendt as it might be; last night Haraszti was speaking over and over again about the public and he became an orthodox student of Habermas. There is a kind of sensuality and some sense of emotion is not so disturbing. But the fact that am I right that in this conclusion that Paolo points to in his conclusions when I think are key to understanding all of the presentations that the outdatedness or the historicity of deliberation. I also think of Bill's [Hoynes] work on public television and the way he thinks about the issue and you said in your paper some months ago and I wrote back that you are talking about access. And I asked, okay, access, that's important, who's there, but what's happening between the people and you didn't write about that and I think that maybe it's because it is what he is observing about the new media itself. Am I right to be so distressed?
Richard Kaplan:
Well, I'm not sure I heard things right but I have a small question. What forms of the public sphere, something about the nation and print, as the print is the central medium. That there is an express of commonality based on relationship of spectatorship and that you often use this to characterize the very idea of public sphere but certainly that would seem to me to contradict Habermas's own understanding of what the public sphere was about. Which is that it was a decentering of politics and affording a space of deliberation but that it couldn't be disconnected from the very idea of representation. I'm not really the right person to speak about these things but how some aspects of representation are necessary for the possibility of mass deliberation and participation so that on the one hand to just characterize the public sphere as a relationship of spectatorship seriously would be a distortion of what Habermas was saying, but also that it is necessary to think about the idea of representation in the modern era and see how they are conjoined. Then secondly, you were trying to describe TV as a space of inhabitation versus print as a space of representation and I think there is an ontological trait of the two mediums should be understood as analytics that describe both. In the article I presented, I tried in some ways to say that print, at least at the early public sphere time, understood as the self as the space of inhabitation as the process of dialogue and in the context of reception as were often barbs or feudal or public places where there was some dialogue of that print was not just a statement of authority of events or facts to a passive audience. So I don't really understand how spectatorship could adequately describe print either. Those are my issues.
Arato:
That's quite enough. I'll open up the floor to the panel and I think there are all interested in answering these questions.
Carpinango:
Let me start with talk. It seems to me if talk is taken as the medium, then everything else that happens with talk, any form of mediation that is not talk, is there only to be eliminated. The only way an issue can reach a true democratic, participation and deliberation, whether you reach the point where all the possible influences and distortion that any kind of medium, everything that exists apart from oral kind of relationship is eliminated.
Goldfarb:
That's too strong.
Carpignano:
I do the same thing that you do, making it an extreme. That is the first concern. Then how does media account for it if not in a negative sense. So that historically. . .[change tape over] or the development of the bourgeois public sphere. You might not have the before in the Middle Ages but certainly you do have a public sphere which comes about precisely because the form of talk, not only the form of talk, a form of mediated communication that allows precisely for the establishment of that democratic terrain of deliberation of it. That would be my answer to that. The other thing is that if talk is in itself a form of purer form of communication, the ultimate medium, providing that talk can be called a medium, then television it might be argued, is precisely the kind of medium as opposed to print that reintroduced the kind of morality that print has eliminated. It is not in the collective aspect of print which is getting into the salon and the coffee houses and talk about print and the material that print itself had produced. And this is also a way an answer to you. Yes, it is obviously because the way that [. . .] described it. It is of course a form of habitation but not of the medium itself. The medium becomes only an instrument through which you and around which you create forms of habitation. Whereas television is the medium in which habitation is the nature of the medium, is the nature of communication itself. That habitation in television is an habitation that is almost exclusively the space based on talk, on morality. Now, if that is the case, then television will be the most democratic form of medium, media, because everything they do on television is talk. And the argument has been made in fact that television is a form of secular morality because it reintroduces forms of talk that were basically eliminated by print and therefore these are all kinds of consequences in terms of self-identity.
The question might be that there is a lot of talk but there is no deliberation and in that sense it is not democratic. Or is it not a medium that allows for a full development of the public sphere unless it is a media that is used in the way of fostering that kind of forms of deliberation or institutions in which talk becomes the primary medium and television and the other mediums do what? Are they forms of dissemination really? In the best possible way if they are not that form of access. If they are not they are supposed to be transformed in terms of making them more accessible and more disseminating the kinds of plural public spheres or alternative public spheres. Well, my point is that I cannot limit talk as the only and ultimate form of social practice of communication that has some kind of transformative value. Unless, we understand that the medium is not simply a tool for the expansion and propagation of talk but that the media and whatever it is, and I think for Habermas I think you are right in saying that. To me the validity of Habermas's analysis is precisely the fact that he makes that historical connection between a particular type of medium and a particular type of public sphere. And if that is the case then why not try to understand what the significance of a different type of medium and not just an instrument of publication, but as an actual terrain that changes even not only the way that we talk but talk itself as a form of communication. In the sense, that whatever television does is that apart from all the talk that is done, is just the fact that you transform your connection to the space that is surrounding. And to me that is something that as a material foundation that it can transform your own identity and therefore is an identity that you bring to talk when you reach talk but that you have created on the basis of the new terrain of mediation and not expecting an internal body that talks and the only way to find the media that expresses better that the original, universal quality of being human.
Jean Cohen:
But you use the criteria. That is my part. I am standing on that terrain. And then the question was, you use, not me, and I didn't ask Jeff's question. I didn't privilege talk. Assume I said everything you say, then why would you use criteria for evaluating. You used the words deliberative and democratic and you use these as potential evaluative of what the effects, constituted effects of such a media are and my question to you is . . .
Carpignano:
No, I did the opposite.
Goldfarb:
It's not talk itself, it's deliberation.
Slocum:
I just wanted to respond briefly to your [Goldfarb's] distress. I in fact find at least some of this encouraging. I don't go as far as Paolo does in terms of this suppression or this evolutionary notion of media. But I guess I wasn't modest enough in trying to present a modest proposal because in terms, I guess in terms of my own presentation I was indeed trying to present violence with this neurological, shared experience as something in addition to something more traditional basis for locating the public sphere. So I see that as a good thing because it is an opening out. I would not want to go as far as some who would want to locate all and everything in the body but I think that it is an addition that amplifies our understanding of what was going on at that time. In a way, I see what I am doing as a footnote to Hansen and what she is doing as a footnote to Habermas.
Chakravarty:
I just wanted to say that in our discussions prior to these presentations I think what our concern is that the media or our thinking about the media is sort of an addendum. So there is this functionalist kind of approach. I think that my own work in cultural studies, and in media studies generally what we are trying to look at is how the media reorients the space around us. And therefore it sort of changes the questions. I don't know of course what new forms are being unleashed constantly, whether those are ultimately going to lead to democracy or the opposite. But I think the contingency, the focus on contingency kind of leaves that, you know we are not second guessing all the time, we are trying to give the space for these forms to come through.
Jose Cassanova:
Maybe this is a continuation. I think that I would understand your thesis and certainly your concerns of the others if, lets say, this new shape of the sphere will be the only shape there was. Let's say television has superseded print, all that there is in the public sphere today is television, then of course I would be similarly concerned. The question is what is the relationship between, obviously there is deliberation going on right now, what we are doing right now is a form of deliberation. There is still electoral politics going on. Now, of course we know that television effects extremely--well is that all there is? Is really the thesis that all there is to electoral politics is TV? Then indeed we have to abandon traditional conceptions of democracy. What are the claims vis-a-vis, I mean what are your claims concerning what these-because it is one thing to analyze the medium of television itself as an additional media which affects politics and the public sphere. . . So what are your claims concerning this media vis-a-vis other forms of media or simply the very shape of politics today?
Carpignano:
Well, what I wanted to say is much more modest than that, in the sense that I would never claim that television has changed the world to the extent that it has eliminated not only the possibility to talk in a nonmediated form, but also it has eliminated other forms of media, and what other forms of media, and what other forms of media, have produced in terms of social communication. So what I was trying to say, that in spite of the fact that we know that television represents much more than point of view and maybe the internet and digital network are taking over the same kind of function that television had in the past 30-40 years. Certainly, considering that television had in effect an impact today that has been quite extraordinary, but in spite of that I wouldn't say that that is what television has done, has changed the world or eliminated other forms of media. But it seems to me that it has done something that I call it a sort of disposition. Not everybody watches television and not everybody is effected in the same way and not everybody inhabits television in the same way obviously. But the question is if you want to relate it to historical periods that have to do with what Debray calls the "media spheres" and if for the sake of comparison you compare one media sphere with another media sphere and try to understand in general the categories which of course will have to verified and these are a part in other words of this which one might be working. That television has created a different disposition that for instance makes more problematic the existence of institutions that are based on representation. Which doesn't mean that elections are eliminated; but what it means is that the crisis of representation, the crisis of institutional representation that today we are facing. Either you say that they are like that because television has made impossible for people to think and talk and therefore television has to be eliminated, or at least the bad aspects of television have to be eliminated to regain the possibility for talking and deliberating. Or you are saying that in fact television has operated in different types of dispositions that makes those representational institutions problematic in terms of the way people organize themselves and view their life and choose their leaders if that is the case. What comes next of course I am not capable of doing or saying, in other words how you substitute that. But it seems to me that what I am sure of is that you cannot simply say that television has to be eliminated and something else has to be reconstituted. What has to be found out on the basis of television is what it means to have democracy, if it means anything or does it make sense to talk about forms of representation, or forms of organization of the public sphere in the way that they have insisted up to now concretely.
The debate about, well, the only way that we can really organize ourselves and create alternative projects is to recreate some formal party. The party form, it seems to me. So that every time we have to have a new party, or everytime we have to recreate a democratic party or everytime we have to recreate the union and so on. Those forms, those institutional forms, that to me represent a particular sort of social communication. Those are forms that are not viable anymore and the question is how to operate within a media terrain in which, yes, those forms of deliberation, those forms of projects, those formal platforms are not valuable anymore. And instead a Million Man March for instance might be much more significant in terms of the resonance and the ultimate transformative power than the party convention. And don't accuse me of defending the Million Man March.
Robin Wagner:
Yes, I just want to bring us back to an attention to language itself because I think there has been a kind of simplified understanding of language itself here today. I would just say that I think the analysis of contingency and changes between temporal and spatial orientations, dispositions, are very compelling and important and true, but I think one abandons an analysis of the distinct language forms in which an old fashioned form of deliberation is presented. And I am even thinking of something as old fashioned as content analysis because I think that we have to hold onto or we can't lose site in our own analytical process of the differences in content between one speech act and another and one discursive formation and another even as this terrain shifts and our sense of time and space begin to be transformed because I don't think that talk is pure. I think that language itself is absolutely mediated. Everytime you open your mouth you have to say things that come packaged already in the forms of language that you have available to you. So I would really want to, just as an admonition against an abandonment of an analysis of the content, I would just want to insist that this alternative form of analysis is very, very easily compelling as a supplement to this sort of hard work of what many call now old fashioned content analysis informed by this transformative understanding of the terrain.
Martin Plot:
It is just a small commentary on what you said, Jeff, and we have been talking about that. I am really not so sure that Arendt's normative understanding is on this point so similar to the Habermasian or the tradition of Enlightenment perspectives. I would make only one point because you relativize at the end of your presentation those differences of rational argumentation and the other point in between the showing and acting and talking in front of others which is the normative perspective. The commentary is just that both of course both normative models have an historical location, historical inspiration better. There is the small city-state in Arendt and small public space where citizens can meet and there is the rational deliberation around the print which inspires the Enlightenment model. But if we see how difficult it was for Arendt to find her model in contemporary, but how strongly she fought to do that, we can see something that Paolo is speaking about the TV relationship with the public that I think was always present in Arendt's analysis. In Arendt finally, deliberation is not only spatial, it is also temporal and if deliberation is temporally located at least the discussion of the common fate around meaningful events. Is deliberation so absent in the TV era? I'm not so sure that it is more absent than in any other era, perhaps it is the contrary, but at least we have something to think about that. Is the coverage of political events and even actions, not just the election of representatives but as a periodical moment where democratic political society chooses to discuss in the contemporary conditions the common fate? Is TV disturbing or encouraging deliberation? That is to talk about the common fate.
Goldfarb:
I will say that this is the way I mean to formulate it. The way it was presented. There were a couple of key phrases in Paolo's presentation which concern me, especially your move from deliberation to transformative capacity or something like that. I really agree with you, I think we agree. I think the possibilities of television, television is not this great evil. There maybe still room for representation and there is a challenge for institutional innovation. Even thinking about Arendt, there are marvelous pages at the end of the "Imperialism" section in the Origins of Totalitarianism where she talks about essentially the socially constituted way of deliberating in different types of political formations. She was reflecting upon what Edmund Burke had to say about political parties and she contrasts European or continental conceptions of what representation ought to be with Anglo-American, or Anglo-Saxon conceptions of what representation should be. Which was about this concern with somehow of innovating ways for creating space for this deliberation other than nostalgic fashion wanting to simply recreate the polis. That is what I am looking for. I don't want talk to rule. Is there any room for talk? I take it as not simply a question posed by your presentations but by what I am observing as well. Not that talk should dominate, but is there a place as in the cafe in Habermas's time for supplementing the types of communication which occur through the media. Or do the media themselves provide it?
Chakravarty:
But I think it started taking place around the water coolers: talk. Is it consequential?
Goldfarb:
I'm talking about deliberation actually.
Heloisa Pait:
In the cafes there was no deliberation. It was a space for public discussion but not for deliberation which was done in the state. Or am I mistaken?
Cohen:
I think we should address Paolo's, I mean take it more on its own terrain. I mean we keep pushing for something, that we thought some normative ideal that seemed to go along with something but I think it would be fruitful to bracket that. Let's worry about the normative question later on and pursue that later on, and pursue this on its own terrain because I think there is a real point to it. It is unclear yet for me what, I mean, it could sound like a real technological determinism for all of that. It doesn't have to, but I don't know how you set this up and how you interface with a thing. So that is one [problem] I see. So that is one set of issues. Then the question would be on the terrain, just within it, of course we still write books I don't think TV is the threat, it is the internet. There is still talk and there is still books and all of this stuff. But there is certainly the question of the impact of television on politics. That is the main point. This is undeniable. Although it is also, the Million Man March didn't start with a million men. Movements, and attempting to use the media, after all Todd Gitlin describes the 60s this way. Even though I'm not quite sure that we ended up even doing this, but nevertheless there are actual repertoires that match or, really, could we figure out how to make strategic use of not only media but what they call opportunity structures. As long as elections matter there will be. . . So there is the media but not only there are other things that shape the possibilities of action. But my question would be this: why don't you talk in the old way, it is rather, if you go really far along the lines that we've gone, then it is in a way what would the questions be that you could pose because in a sense maybe you are historizing too much the categories, that you loose concepts and we can't really speak. It's like what's been done sometimes with the concept of equality. Equality is sameness, assimilation, etc. So the question is, I don't know how much we should historize the categories or whether we should talk about concepts and various conceptions of these concepts. So that democracy and deliberation, there might be a conception of it that matches the Greek polis or print and maybe another conception that would be appropriate, and it is a good warning. I agree with you that we shouldn't apply the wrong conception but so I guess that is another question. What categories do we use?
Carpignano:
Let me say a few things about that because your concerns are my concerns. There is no question that the danger of technological determinism or the danger of historical relativism . . . are there. I think there are no easy answers to that. On the other hand, I am afraid that at the same time and that is why I am trying to figure another way out. I am afraid that the other solution which is the media, whatever media is used, in different ways of course because of different historical circumstances, but is used and is only there as the technology that is used one way or another whether by a movement in the 60s or by the Million Man March. The point to me is to try to find out if that use of the media, if nothing to use, but in fact the development of a discourse that can only exist on the basis of that mediatic relationship. And that to me is where the term doesn't work. In other words, it is easy to accuse MacLuhan for instance of technological determinism because there it is very clear. You change the medium and then you see things differently and you then have a different perception of the world. Therefore you think . . .you are not clear where this media is coming from. What are the social, historical and political circumstances that has made that media come into being? Well, that is precisely the point. What is that medium? If it is a technology then it is a matter of using it, but if it is a machine in the sense that it embodies social relationship of communication and social relationship in general, in a way that I was trying to say, for instance the old Marxist machine. So that the fact that there is a movement in the 1960s or even more, a movement, but I think it should be expanded also to discursive forms which don't take the shape of the movement. But even in the case of the movement, the movement is not what develops and tries to wrestle names by using or appearing on television or by doing the Abbey Hoffman kind of thing which was a very skillful way of doing things, since we are referencing our times. But that you can identify, it seems to me, already in the 1960s, that the fact that that movement is a televisual movement. So the formal discourse becomes embodied to the medium itself. No just the technology, but again, as a social relations about communication. So the media is not something that you use but something that is already expressing the kind of social relations, the kind of discourses as the movement you have embedded into that technology. For instance, and maybe on a level that is not so [end of tape] not a talk show but a talk show format. If for instance we can say that the talk show is not simply a place of perfect democratic deliberation because everybody is allowed to go and everybody is allowed to talk and so it is a perfect form of deliberation. Or the opposite is a total destruction of our capabilities to think because it is trivial entertainment, it is stupid, it is all these things that William Bennet says about the talk shows. But if we look at the talk show as a format, as a format in the sense that it has developed this embodiment of forms of social communication into the terrain of television so that you can say that as any kind of embodiment of social relationship it is contradictory. Because it reflects a kind of relationship of power. The talk show is the talk show produced by ABC, CBS and all the rest, but at the same time it is representative of a practice of social communication that tries to define precisely the kind of representation that the news are institutionally there to provide. So in a way the talk show is a format and not just the technology, but a format that embodies that kind of contradiction, and it embodies the power of the institution and the apparatus, but in the same way empowers forms of social discourse that are going, because of the experience of the disposition that was created, they are going beyond those forms of presentation that instead historically I have provided. I don't know if it is a correct example but it seems to me that it is a way to try to understand television again as not simply an instrument of contents and not as a technology or diffusion of communication, but something that embodies a type of sociability, it seems to me. A type of social relationship of communication in its own working, in its own format, in its own development, in its own development of the format.
Goldfarb:
It reminds me of the importance of trying to keep it to our format, even though I understand the practical extingencies, but it is obvious that we should preserve some space for talk and excitment for talk, I think, it is apparent in what we have been doing for the past 45 minutes. Let's try to finish up. Luckily Josh Gamson is going to talk to us about talk shows in a little bit and raise some issues. We will be able to finish our discussion then. But a couple of last comments and then we will reconvene in a couple of weeks.
Josh Gamson:
I'll make my comments brief because I think in your example things are starting to get more complicated and actually are beginning to answer a question that I was going to ask. What I thought was really interesting in your presentation and in the Debray book that I was reading on the train on the way over here is the notion of mediation and trying to complicate things by replacing a notion of communication with a concept of mediation and considering what happens to the public sphere with the mediation of television. Certainly it is clear in things that have happened but I also noticed in your talk that there is a rhetorical move that I think you made in your presentation but not in your example. So you consider for instance that in the TV age, talk becomes mediated, print becomes mediated, that television still seems to be communication. So when we kept talking about television you kept talking about communication instead of talking about television itself as mediated. I'm wondering that certainly television is mediated by talk, certainly it is mediated by print and it may be in fact mediated by some of these normative traditions of Anglo-American civil society theories. So I'm wondering that when you talked about the shape of the sphere and incorporate television, what does television look like relative to these other spheres, these other media, these other forms of mediation?
Carpignano:
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying.
Goldfarb:
The water cooler. I think that is what you mean.
Gamson:
And also for instance people who work in television, people who consume television are also still engaged in these other forms of communication. It's not that this technology kills that technology. I know that is not what you are saying, but it seems like you are complicating print and talk a lot more than you are complicating television. There seems to be more fully a two-way direction in these older forms of media than in these newer forms of media. So I'm just curious how television itself is complicated itself by forms of print mediation and verbal mediation. I don't know if that is fair but. . .
Carpignano:
Well, I think I said that before that I don't think television is the only and the decisive, especially now in view of what is happening. Television is easily transforming, rapidly transforming into something else because of the digital network are become television and vice versa. So it is a new ballgame and I understand the difficulty of making this generalization. In fact one of the problems that I have with Debray is precisely that then he comes to these beautiful tables of media spheres in which everything is solved because there is one media sphere here and one media sphere there and everything is perfectly organized. But it is never like that and you point out quite clearly that television coexists with print and coexists with all kinds of talks. The question though, is there a possibility of identified for the sake of historically constructed but also for the sake of understanding those concepts that allow us to formulate for instance what is a public sphere, or is it necessary to have a public sphere or are there forms of representation that are necessary for democratic government and so on. Trying to isolate, is an approximation, is a generalization, is a theory, nothing more than that. Is it possible to say that the age of television is different from the age of print? Even in the age of print during the time that Habermas is describing, print was not everything, in fact print was a very small amount of what the world was at the time, extremely small. Even more so than what television is today. In a way we can say that television is a totalizing medium today because it has reached everybody, but during that time it was quite different. But having said that, with all the difficulties I still think it is possible to talk about a television age and try to understand the elements of this age in relationship with what, for instance, what print is. And in the same way that Habermas can make those generalizations in terms of what the effects of print is or what the kinds of circumstances in terms of social relations that print has established. The same way you can do this with television in spite of the fact that yet television is not alone, television has print, television is within a context which is hard to get out of.
Kaplan:
My question is related to Slocum in that you try to respond to Paolo. Is there, was there an age of cinema that there might be some constitutive traits which identify with cinema? It seems to me that you were in some ways saying that cinema was the paradigmatic institution of modernity. In other words, some kind of time periodization you were saying and you also seemed to speak about some kind of logic that was intrinsic to the new media, neural, physiological reception, but on the other hand your own assignment of Hansen where she describes the massive transformation in the institution of cinema and the types of spectatorship and the types of contextual strategies embedded in narratives of film, suggest that there is more than one cinema and that it might be impossible to locate any such thing as the apparent traits intrinsic to cinema. I was just wondering how you would respond to these kind of ideas.
Slocum:
I think, following from Paolo's last remarks, I would try to assemble some general characteristics of what I would call an age of cinema. I would probably, in terms of boundaries for that include, the period that I spoke about, that is the end the last decade of the 19th century and perhaps the first two or three decades of the 20th century. I don't want to generalize too much because obviously in proposing cinema as somehow paradigmatic I don't want to exclude the others. As I said before I think there is a great deal of media activity and production during those years and even as I tried to say each of these traits of modernity, if you want to identify them, has perhaps better examples to be applied. Whether again it is Coney Island or department stores or whatever the case. I think in terms of Hansen, I would probably agree with her that there is no magic formula for describing cinema event period. And it would probably be more difficult to try to do that for this early period before various aesthetic institutional practices had been codified than later years. Nevertheless, I see myself as a bit more ambitious than she is, and I think especially in retrospect that what she was attempting to do in this book was to use the specific theory of an oppositional or alternative public sphere to get at certain relations that occurred at that time. I would try to, and I think I did try to here, get at something a bit more general. Again I would never suppose that it is the trait of the moment but I think it does apply a bit more generally to various studies like Hansen's that endeavor to understand different sorts of audiences or publics like that existed at that time. I don't know if you know just as she privileges a gendered public there are those who look at working class or look at the bourgeois and their respective importance to early cinema. My hope in bringing up the neurological is to suggest something which maybe more overarching.
Chakravarty:
Just as an addendum. I think that our own focus of media or what may come across as the technological apparatus or whatever certainly does not at all suggest that historization can be put aside because for instance, in relation to your question, Raymond Williams wrote a book, one of the first books on television called Television and Technology as Cultural Form, where he precisely charts what television as a cultural form takes from all of the previous media. So it is this kind of creative, shapeless creature as it were that each medium for even the internet is full of graphics and text, so we have to keep this in mind.
Goldfarb:
Thank you very much.
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