We began the
course by thinking about some recurring theoretical terms in discussions
of media: culture, technology, history, and "media" itself.
Brian Winston's book, Media Technology and Society: A History,
From the Telegraph to the Internet, served as an arc to the
course. Winston's argument is that the idea of the internet as some
sort of "technology revolution" is ahistorical. Winston
positions the nineteenth century as key to understanding the phenomenon
of global communication in the age of capitalism. Others will suggest
a much earlier time frame and, in fact, claim that globalization
is (like so many concepts) nothing really new and is quite simply
the successful enterprise of cultural imperialism. Susan Stewart,
Edward Said, and Paul Hirsch initiated our early discussions about
the workings of modern culture and its economic/ideological implications.
How does the political intervene in the everyday? Which media have
developed to inculcate the political and, in another instance, satisfied
human desire (materially)? How?
During the
lectures I entitled, Mediated Places: Concerns of the Body, we began
our investigation into the uses and emplacements of the body
in theories of media. In what way is the body articulated in the
public discourses and places of media? Through the body, we looked
to expand the concept of media. In other words, our theoretical
focus bridged architecture-as-media with the historical conceptualization
of the human body. Italian Renaissance architecture is informative
here in its emphasis on the body as a metaphor for the building
structure itself and its place in the community. From here our discussion
leapt ahead into an examination of Frank Lloyd Wright's late nineteenth-century
concept of "organicity;" organicity is a theory that converged
geographical place with architecture and body. With Wright
we considered what traditions have carried through twentieth-century
architecture from the Renaissance and in what ways architecture
mediates the concept of the body. Our readings in Stud: Architectures
of Masculinity further developed these contemporary architectural
places in relation to gender (for example: the design of a 1950s
penthouse in the pages of Playboy have particular implications to
its layout, as it were). Dennis Hollier's work helped to critically
think through the use of metaphor in architectural discourse.
My lecture,
Complicating the Media Set-Up, gave us some vocabulary for more
recent media. Pierre Sorlin's articles especially opened discussion
in this arena. Volosinov's essay on the sign and the meaning it
enables is a seminal Marxist work in the field of linguistics and
communications. Before Derrida's theories of play and the complications
of extracting meaning from the sign, Volosinov (who some argue was
actually Mikhail Bakhtin) had already shaken the premise of sign
as "true meaning." In any case, if we are to understand
media as a vital component of communication and a bearer of meaning
we need to theorize the complex cultural interactions triggered
by the sign.
The exploration
of the sign is key to the lectures I entitled, The Complexities
of Communication. Roland Barthes' writings ("Myth Today")
have been enormously influential and important in scholarly discussions
about the workings of media in popular culture. Advertising, fashion,
photographs, novels are endeared subjects for Barthes' interrogation
of the operations and dimensions of our own cultural myths. How
do they speak to and reinforce cultural ideologies? In what way
do these mediated events function in our cultural unconscious? Rebecca
Burns in this collection persuasively utilizes Barthes' theoretical
framework so as to identify the ideological mythology underscoring
New Zealand's (over)-earnest advertising campaign to promote the
nation as an ideal tourist destination.
Stuart Hall
of the Cultural Studies Programme in Birmingham, England (a.k.a
the "Birmingham School") is the founder of what we now
call "cultural studies" and "popular culture."
Hall develops Barthes' key ideas into a consideration of the function
of signs and codes in culturally specific and ideologically fraught
arenas (issues of race, class, and gender are an essential part
of Hall's understanding of cultural studies). Meaning is undoubtedly
a complex affair. Nonetheless, the field of cultural studies demands
that we explore the intricate and diverse ways media disseminated
information and how that information is received.
The emergence
of television in the twentieth-century has, if anything, allowed
for a rich and highly contestable forum for debate. With the domain
of the middle-class-family home settling into its own ideological
framework, television has contributed to both the security of that
ideology as well as its often painful and ironic dismantling (as
any good Douglas Sirk film brilliantly demonstrates). How might
we understand the intrusion of this particular medium into our home?
Is it simply an extension of our bodies similar to the lived experience
of that other medium architecture? Is television nothing more than
a conspiracy of capitalist propaganda that feeds political fodder
directly into our homes? Is channel-surfing nothing more than an
historical reprise of Roman activity at the Coliseum? Our readings
from Pierre Bourdieu and Samuel Weber offer two different ways of
thinking about our relationship to this peculiar box that transmits
sound and image into our everyday lives.
