... and it all comes through in the Coda.

Thanks, first, to Dave for making me read the Coda: I realize we weren't actually instructed to read the Coda to Paul Starr's Creation of the Media, but I think it warrants particular relevance to our cultural studies mindset, and to our previously expressed anxieties about Starr's position in this work.

Starr's rather telling use of scare quotes on page 400 with reference to "critical theorists" (apparently a label worthy of some dispute) helps to illuminate his own "liberal" (itself a more vastly disputatious term) position. His generalizations in this section -- highlights include "Critical theory is a cartoon of culture" and "The Frankfurt School critics, of course, ... objected to the conversion of the public into 'mere media markets'" -- solidify a feeling I've had all along: that Starr's position in The Creation of the Media is not only uninformed by cultural theory, it is in fact anti-theoretical. He caps this section off with a terse appreciation of the pure perfection that is American capitalocracy: "Our public life is a hybrid of capitalism and democracy, and we are better off for it" (402).

Clearly. We are clearly "better off" as the result of all that this marriage has wielded in American society, including (but not limited to) the still-persistent lunacy of Comstock laws, a democratic belief in censorship by members of moral marginalia, commercial competition for the benefit of the corporate sphere and at the continued expense of the consumer, and the suspension of First Amendment rights when the function of such speech is deemed "mere entertainment".

And, one more thing: he's totally wrong about Adorno. Adorno did hate jazz, but the object of this hate was the mechanized "swing" jazz of the 30's and 40's, built on the back of the African American musical tradition and popularized by the likes of Paul Whiteman. He wasn't talking no Charlie Parker. And anyone who doesn't see me eye-to-eye on this can go ask Dan Markowicz.

“Public Sphere, This One’s Going out to You”

I wasn’t satisfied with Starr’s treatment of the “public sphere” vis-à-vis the emergence of radio. I kept hoping that he’d talk about how radio shaped the public sphere or created its own public sphere(s), but he never really went there apart from talking about how radio served political ends. Instead of just bitching about it, however, I’m going to try to lead us toward the kind of discussion that I wish Starr would have undertaken.

First I want to begin with a pretty obvious point: radio, like any kind of media, targets a particular market or audience. A college hip-hop station will target a different demographic than a station that specializes in adult contemporary, which will target a still different audience than an AM “talk” station will. In this general way, I think it’s fair to say that these different audiences constitute different publics. What’s to follow is a consideration of how radio programming establishes and shapes its publics.

I’d like to turn to an interesting essay that I read last week for Jeff Williams’s LCS I class (which Gavin and Thomas are in, too) called “Housewives and the Mass Media” by Dorothy Hobson. Hobson talks about how housewives in the British 1970s listened to radio during the day in order to feel less isolated. The DJ, Hobson suggests, plays a big role in this phenomenon: “[. . .] the disc jockey can be seen as having the function of providing the missing ‘company’ of another person in the lives of the women who listen” (107). Hobson talks particularly about radio personality Tony Blackburn (the sexy bloke in the above photo), who, she tells us, “knows who his audience is” (108). What’s interesting to our thinking of the public sphere is Hobson’s assertion that the DJ “links the isolated individual woman with the knowledge that there are others in the same position [. . .] – in a sort of ‘collective isolation’” (108). This language is rather reminiscent of the segment in Bernard Anderson’s Imagined Communities where he explains that novels and newspapers suggested simultaneity and, in turn, a public sphere/nation/community. To sum up, it feels as though Tony Blackburn’s radio program gave rise to a public sphere—thousands of isolated housewives—and shaped the community by providing “company” and by, of course, providing that group with news, popular music, etc.

Also worth thinking about here is the role of radio during the early rock ‘n’ roll era. Here is an arena in which radio programmers and DJs were explicitly targeting youth while simultaneously introducing a new music genre and, thus, a new culture (even if they didn’t know it). In his book All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America, Glenn Altschuler explains that “After school and late at night, radio ‘narrowcasted’ to teenagers, who used car radios and portable transistor radios to take the music wherever they went. Rock ‘n’ roll DJs became powerful figures on radio, commanding high salaries and the loyalty of listeners as arbiters of musical taste” (131-32). This “narrowcasting” that Altschuler talks about is interesting; as in the case of Tony Blackburn, Altschuler suggests that many other DJs and stations knew who their audience was. This discussion makes me think of George Lucas’s film American Graffiti. All of the kids in the movie drive around their small town while listening to DJ Wolfman Jack—they’re united through his program, and, if you’ll forgive the tiresome cliché, the music he plays is their soundtrack. In the context of the film, Wolfman Jack’s program threads together all of the various characters’ actions and plots, suggesting a particularized public sphere: “cool” teenagers.

These are just a few prompts to get us thinking about this. What other examples can we cite that might illustrate how radio programming created a public sphere or multiple public spheres?

Sexy Librarians

In his discussion of censorship, Paul Starr spares a paragraph to illuminate us on the function as libraries as de facto censors of books. He says, "Donors sought to make books available for free in a controlled environment under the authority of a librarian with sober and refined taste [my emphasis] . . . The purpose of libraries, in [the American Library Association's] view, was not entertainment but education and self-improvement" (249). I feel like this perspective of libraries persists, although, from my 5 years of experience working in a sizable-but-struggling public library, it is not entirely accurate anymore. I don't mean to criticize Starr's information. Instead I'd like to elaborate upon it in our current historical context.

While around the turn of the century, libraries censored (by excluding them from their collections) books based on their lack of information and inability to educate, the current trend is quite the opposite. The librarians that I knew (none of which were sexy or "sober and refined in taste," unfortunately) ordered books instead on the ironic combination of entertainment and popularity. As the only means by which a patron could "check out" items, I handled everything (along with my coworkers, obviously) that legally left the library, and the bulk of what I checked out were DVDs, VHS, and CDs. The audiovisual department was by far our busiest, rivaled only by Children's books, which I'd attribute to the fact that one parent would get 50 books at a time. People were especiallymanic to get their movies and some would be legitimately angry when I had to tell them that they couldn't get more than 10 each of DVDs and VHSs. That library was a hub of entertainment, and I was rarely, although pleasantly, surprised when a patron actually wanted to read a novel. Librarians ordered items to meet this demand.

Yet they also met the demand with another perspective in mind: popularity. As an institution that was having trouble passing regular operating levies, the library tries to justify its operations and catalog by "giving the people what they want," as the the aphorism goes. Librarians would search Amazon.com and the NY Times bestseller lists for input. The strategy seems to work, but it also leaves the library with an excess of copies after a book's star has faded. Librarians have sexed up the catalog, but this diverts funds from diversifying the library's catalog and also curtails the purchase of more perennial materials. It also means that more obscure titles stand little chance of becoming available to that public.

What this amounts to, in my opinion, is commercial censorship. In this model, if a book isn't profitable for the publishers, then it probably won't be accessible to the general reader. I can't help wondering what books this has barred from the public, and I've noticed already that I've had to rely in Interlibrary loans to order even my pleasure reading over the past year (which, admittedly, isn't very popular). The point is, and this can probably be historically as well as statistically substantiated, that the popularity and sell-ability of a book does not determine its merit in a given field. While I can't argue that a public would even notice if more of these books were in its library, I would argue that they should at least have the access to them. That is why commercial censorship seems to be just as much as a restriction on information as legal censorship, especially in a country currently so moved to privatization and deregulation.

In class on Tuesday someone (can't remember who, sorry!) brought up in relation to Courtney's presentation the dichotomy between Starr's presentation of a really rather open, transparent public sphere with real interest in and access to the workings of government, and the type of mass obfuscation we've seen over the past several years from the Bush administration and the DOD, etc. We all wondered whether Starr's portrait was somewhat inaccurate, or if the sort of coverups we're used to really didn't go on then, and I think that in the reading for today we see perhaps a bit of an answer emerging--and it's an interesting one.

Starr's discussions in chapter 8 of early restrictions on civil liberties--particularly media and postal censorship and the ways in which seemingly benign laws were interpreted to lead to jail time for radicals--gives the impression that although "when free expression came under attack, the judiciary generally failed to protect it" (268), no one was really thinking about the things that weren't allowed to be said or that the government wasn't saying, and that it was only in the buildup to the first World War that people started to take notice as a result of frustrations not only with the Comstock legacy but with the growing suppression of radical ideas. If that's accurate, I'm really curious about his sort of equation of this kind of censorship of alternative political ideologies (and the subsequent coverups, i.e. the fact that it apparently took months for the Palmer raids to be come common knowledge, which is what got me thinking about Tuesday's discussion in the first place) with the censorship of "obscenity" discussed in the chapter earlier (and in Thomas's prior blog post).

So, if I'm reading this correctly and provided I'm not missing earlier examples, government coverup as we understand it now could almost be read as arising almost simultaneously with Victorian social mores, and censorship both political and moral is a sibling of government opacity?

Sweet Seductions

In case you needed some enticement to start the reading sooner than later, the first dozen pages or so involve some discussion of pornography amidst censorship. Whether you think it's great, awful, or not all that useful, I think in general what could be considered the lowest of the low-brow is likely to present a more interesting political/social "problem" than some of the things we've encountered in the text, something along the lines of the Freeman's Oath. (That right there is my rationalization for this post, my way of feeling less like a skeevy dude for porn being my blog topic of choice.)

My initial reaction is that I'd like a little more about the social implications of pornography for end of the 19th century America and Europe. The extent to which pornography equals sexual freedom equals radical politics provides one perspective for why pornography would be dangerous, but I think there is more to it that might fit into Starr's story. And if it doesn't fit into Starr's story, perhaps it fits into the combined story of the three texts we have thus far been reading.

Starr lays out the explicit (har har) connection between pornography and birth control in Victorian law, but there is no explicit connection between social perspective and object/activity. Is the problem the sex? Probably not in and of itself. Is it the masturbation that comes with the product? I believe Starr dedicates a sentence to that effect, but not much more. Is it the lack of reproduction? There is no direct connection made to reproduction. The connection that I found in the text is the connection to Christianity, and that connection is made through the role of censorship granted the Christian vice societies, whose name sounds a lot more wild than the groups seem to have been, and women's groups.

The connection is understandable, but it doesn't fit the rest of the text. How is Christian morality working toward the American spirit? I think it's too easy (and yet problematic) to say that Christians took a moral high ground and imposed something on the country that did not really align with th national ideal that Starr posits as the root of all media development. Surely censoring pornography fits in with the rest of the American doctrine, otherwise it could not really have been justified. What follow are some of my ideas/questions/concerns related to how this might fit into the American story:

• Pornography's then-connection to abortions and contraceptives makes me think that masturbation was scary because it would lead to fewer children and either that's a.) against God, which I don't think was that persuasive an argument then (as it is now for much of the country), or b.) bad for our growing country. Is it a population issue?
• But then the initial reaction against pornography (and vices) solely for the lower classes, while it was enjoyed by the upper classes, makes me wonder if the vice societies worried about the opposite effect of pornography - perhaps the upper classes worried that porn would (through increased and uncontrollable working class libido) lead to an increase in the population of poor people. Is it a class issue? (There's a hint of an immigrant/native issue toward the end of this section, where native-born women are targeted in anti-contraceptive measures and immigrants are targeted for obscenity measures, which informs, but does not address, the next point.)
  
• Taking a different tack, pornography and masturbation require/promote isolation. Is it a community issue?
  

This last point is something on which I find it most interesting to focus. I have read about (or heard about from a teacher in high school or a professor in college) the promotion of pornography in Nazi-controlled populations as a method for controlling that population. I have no citation for this and a poor recollection of it, so it could all be a lie, but the way that I understood it was that pornography, presumably being used for masturbation, leads to isolation, both in the practical sense of what's being done with the material and in the ideological sense of creating impossible fantasies that keep one from fully enjoying one's partner or delaying the "need" for finding another partner. Isolation eventually leads to less care for neighbors, concern with governmental initiatives, and (potentially) unnecessary breeding (e.g. miscegenation in Aryan terms). (I'm sure when it was explained to me/I read it, there was a much more thorough progression and I'm sorry for the enormous leaps. If you know it, please comment, because I've clearly forgotten it.)

Whether you agree with pornography's correlation to isolation(s), I wonder what role isolation plays in this history we're exploring. Did Victorian Americans fear the isolation pornography might encourage? I would say that they might have had reason to fear isolation relatively shortly after a rather divisive civil war. If we think back to the problem of nationalism and how America had long worked to create a sense of nation, pornography (if it leads to isolation) could be seen as really detrimental. I think along similar lines it makes sense that we see other "vice societies" pop up throughout US history (e.g. Prohibition). Let's be honest, morals aside, vices are not particularly productive. Certainly the appearance of vice societies throughout history is complex, but I don't think that prudish morality is the root, I think it's only the superficial message.

The Telectroscope

The most recent blog posts and today's class discussion both exhibit a sense of nostalgia for bygone media: the telegraph, the teletype, and (if I may introduce another) the telectroscope. The telectroscope was conceived of as a means to transmit an image, optically, to a distant receiver through a series of mirrors and lenses. It functioned on the same basic premise as a periscope. Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors held patents in the field of telectroscopy and the achievements of one of these inventors, Jan Szczepanik, was featured in a short story by Mark Twain. However, the telectroscope never actually existed, at least not until earlier this year.

In spring 2008, the citizens of New York and London woke to find large iron, drill bores punching through the pavement of their respective cities which, several days later had been replaced by large, fanciful "telectroscope" lenses which linked the two cities visually. Standing in front of the telectroscope in New York, one was visible to someone standing before the telectroscope in London, and vice versa.

If this sounds all too wonderful, it's because it is. The telectroscopes were part of an art installation by interactive video artist Paul St. George. That's right, video, not light and optics. What is unusual about this installation piece, however, is that it comes with an elaborately fabricated back story involving the artist's fictional ancestor, Alexander Stanhope St. George. In fact, I find the false back story of the telectroscope to be more interesting than the installation itself. Take, for instance, this photo of the world famous industrialist Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing before the launch chains of the Great Eastern (mentioned in Starr, one of the only ships large enough to lay a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable) which has been doctored to include the fictional St. George as a child. This insistence on an historical link which never existed is almost more troubling to me than the fact that the installation "cheats" by using video instead of mirrors and lenses. Don't get me wrong, the piece is a beautifully executed parable of human achievement and globalization that succeeds in being interactive, aesthetically arresting, and "feel-good" all at the same time. What it fails to do is actually pay off the nostalgia it stirs up. We want Brunel to be a character in the narrative which includes Twain and Alexander Graham Bell (to whom the telectroscope was falsely attributed in the late 1870s) like the plot of an E. L. Doctrow novel. The truth is, without Photoshop and digital video, the telectroscope is impractical, nigh impossible.

Briefly, here is my take on what this actually means. In the twenty-first century, the development of media technology proceeds at such a dizzying speed that very few people actually understand the mechanics and processes which go into a text message or a YouTube video. I have little to no impact on how this technology is developed, how it is disseminated, and how it infiltrates my life. Standing in front of the telectroscope, I am a person visually interacting with another person. Even if this never progresses past waving or making faces, I have a distinct sense that I am participating actively in my interface with not just the person, but with the technology. The fictional back story makes the telectroscope simple, not just in the sense that it purports to function using something as elementary as a mirror, but that it aesthetically references another time, a simpler time. It is at once novel and antiquarian.

However, it is not antiquarian at all. In reality I can do the same thing from my room with iChat, with the added benefit of audio. Thus, the insistent appeal to history for a sense of legitimacy, without which the installation is nothing special. Still, it's hard not to feel cheated when you realize that's not real polished brass and walnut grain. Either way, I invite you to judge for yourself. The telectroscope is no longer on display, but the official website has some pretty neat pictures, including some of the Queen's visit, which is great it you want to talk about nostalgic reverence for something obsolete and impractical.

I vote we bring back the teletype machine. Hailed by many as the first computer terminal, this nifty gadget allowed typed messages to be sent over electrical communications networks. From what I understand, however, the Telex and TWX networks that carried teletype messages are now defunct. Thinking about all these abandoned networks (like the incompatible, independent phone networks Starr describes) is a little bit creepy. I'm sure that once a company gets bought up or bankrupted by state-sanctioned monopolization, the wires aren't dug up and recycled. How many millions of miles of defunct, silent cables stretch across the nation? Will we someday need these simpler technologies, when we achieve the post-apocalyptic status implied by recent economic catastrophe?

Also, there's a teletype in my grandma-in-law's basement back in Boston, and I always wanted to get it running. The basement hobbyist, by the way, is a character that needs more attention in these histories. The rise of these technologies spawned a vast do-it-yourself movement, the uses of which ranged from entertainment to anarchism. Now that the HAM radio and the CB have gone the way of the internet and the cellphone, it's a lot harder to build your own machines or have a separate channel just for you and your pals. How does this solidify state control? Is there a contemporary equivalent to the basement communications hobbyist?

RIP The Telegram:1844-2006

Here follows a short, well-intentioned treatise on the telegraph:

"In the rise of any new medium," Paul Starr tells us, "a key factor is its relationship to the dominant technology of the day" (193). The telegraph, and the powers-that-be that largely controlled its use and prominence in American society, hung on for dear life once Bell and others appeared on the scene with their new challenger, the telephone. What I think is even more impressive about this historical narrative, though, is the extent to which, even after the "rise" of the telephone and its twentieth-century introduction into domestic and commercial spheres alike, the telegraph continued to serve an unrivaled function. Though Starr largely abandons his treatment of the telegraph once its sexier younger sibling is thrown into the mix, the telegraph -- as many, including Tom Standage, author of The Victorian Internet and previously cited by Starr, demonstrate -- continued to play an important role for Americans up until even the 1950s since telegrams were, until this point in time, much cheaper than long-distance telephone calls. In the end, it was not the telephone that finally brought about the telegraph's ultimate demise but, perhaps, the email, which replicated both its format (text) and function (able to cheaply cross large distances). Likewise, Standage reports, the modern marvel of the cellphone text message now largely stands to fulfill the same function the telegram once satisfied -- short messages, sparse punctuation, and adapted media-specific slang.

On February 2, 2006 -- a scandalously recent date in cultural memory, if you ask me -- National Public Radio ran a story announcing the official death of the telegram. Western Union, on the previous Friday, had sent its last telegram ever, and was to then permanently discontinue this service. I have been, ever since, dying to know what the last telegram in all the world said, and to whom, but, as it happens, these things are still protected by the Fourth Ammendment, and by the 1877 Supreme Court ruling cited by Starr (187). You can read all about the last telegram, as well as several "famous" historical telegrams, on the NPR site:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5186113

I'm assuming this means my dream of receiving a singing telegram is also off the table.

Nostalgia for the "Progressive Era"

The uneasy relationship between regulation and the free-market plays a center role in Paul Starr's telling of the "wiring of America". In the age of News Corp., Clear Channel, and the Comcast/Verizon domination of broadband Internet, any talk of government regulation is market socialism, despite the hypocrisy of the "small government" coughing up trillions of dollars of bailouts for hemorrhaging mortgage banks and unfirm insurance firms. But anyway, the so called Progressive Era, which Starr defines from the turn of the century until the end of WWI, in comparison, seems to be a time I wouldn't mind living in.

Starr "constituent" historiography speaks directly to a claim that Prof. Newman has mentioned a few times in class: the Internet as the perfection of Häbermas's public sphere. The friction between the market and regulation in the 19th century transpired at a time before "broadcasting". The potential for "grassroots" media is larger than ever the same time as airwave domination across many paradigms is the also greater than ever before. Nonetheless, the anecdote about the DIY, indie development of rural telephony was an inspiring complement to Progressivism. Starr narrates "Rural telephony became a genuine grassroots movement. Governed by elected board, the rural co-ops made telephone service available at a cost they were determined to keep at a minimum" (Starr, 201). Even in at a Progressive time, people needed to make media work for themselves. At times, Starr seems to argue that the very fact that there is inevitably a new technology that will come to dethrone the old medium which, more likely than not, has become a monopoly. Research and development emerge from this equation which is beneficial for all, as he explains "In a purely competitive market, AT&T would have been too concerned with its short-term survival to invest in new knowledge potentially convertible into profitable innovations only many years later" (Starr, 221).
Obviously research spurs innovation, and this falls into the middle ground between technological determinism and ideological determinism which we talked about on Thursday.

Still though, Starr will not allow demand for communication account for the history of the medium(s). The nation-state's interests are a major bulwark for/against innovations at every step in the story:"The new networks [of telegraph and telephony] depended, therefore, not just on 'demand' in the conventional economic sense, but also on whether the state and other dominant institutions would allow that demand to be fully expressed" (Starr, 191). Starr is almost progressive, in the modern sense, himself in his optimistic portrayal of competition vs. regulation, and this lesson points the dangerous collusion of media and state in the 21st century.
If innovation and change, in the narrowest sense of the word, is our goal, we need to start thinking about anti-trust legislation and localized more than globalized media.

Campus Event promotion

All, here is the information on the discussion series I briefly mentioned in class on Tuesday.

SPEAK YOUR MIND (a weekly Tuesday dinner and discussion series at 5PM)

Political Humor/Humorous Politics
Tuesday, Sept 23 at 5:00PM
Danforth Lounge, UC

There's a reason elections are a joke.

Join Professor Scott A. Sandage of the Department of History for a discussion of the American tradition of writers and performers using humor as a mode of edgy political commentary and critique.

RSVP to hft@cmu.edu to get a count for food and for the short PDF pre-read.

http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/student-development/multicultural/dialogue/speak.html

Capitalism and/in the Classroom

All in the midst of discussing the rise of the institution of American public education, Starr mentions -- almost begrudgingly -- the idea offered by some "Marxist historians" that "the growth of mass public schooling ... served the particular interests of industrial capitalism ... Schools did not teach valuable cognitive skills so much as the compliant behavior required by factories" (106). He does not so much as pause, however, to consider the concept seriously, or its implications on his own argument: instead, he immediately jumps to what he calls the "overwhelming difficulties" of this theory, citing school enrollment rates, school expenditures in relation to industrialization, the "choice" of public education, and the fact that other capitalist countries had not witnessed the development of a similar system of public education (107).

I find his judgment -- and rationale -- here to be a bit hasty, though. Immediately following the paragraph in which he issues his dismissal of this notion, he admits that "American education left much to be desired ... although [it] was more practical and more broadly disseminated, than education in Europe, it lacked depth and richness" (107). Although Starr fails to explain what, exactly, might be implied by the terms "depth" and "richness", his comment here appears to corroborate the very claim he had been so eager to reject: that American education, in many ways, paralleled processes of industrial capitalism, if not authorship and formation, then certainly in content. The lack of "depth and richness" in American education, and it's substitutive emphasis on standardized output and models of measuring efficiency, have, in fact, figured prominently in the critiques of many. Richard Ohmann, for example, in works such as English in America (1996) and The Politics of Knowledge (2003), has emphasized the relationship between mass education and standards of complicity under industrialization. And I, for one, can't help but see Starr's last-minute admittance serving to corroborate Ohmann's ideas.

Additionally, Starr states, when turning to a discussion of public education in the American South, that this region "deviated from this pattern [of increased public education] in critical respects .. all but one of the states in the South rejected common schools before the Civil War" (108). Could not this fact be rather logically attributed to a less advanced stage of industrial capitalism in the South, though, a topic already discussed by Starr? Since the South was, at this time, still largely agricultural, and since it was the North that contained America's early factories, it is not surprising, with this Marxist historical perspective in mind, that the South might then also fail to develop a system of mass education.

This isn't to say that Starr is completely off his nut: I think he adds some valuable complexities to the theories offered by folks like Ohmann. I was nevertheless perturbed by his unwillingness to entertain the idea for more than a second. There are some very compelling connections between the American system of public education in particular and the "skills" required, used, and disseminated by processes of industrial capitalism. Afterall, I believe it was public school that first taught me the lifelong skill of "looking busy".

Let's Go Jankes.

Since its inception American culture has been regarded as inferior to the European. Early in Chapter 4, Paul Starr takes some time to sketch the legal scene surrounding American publishing and its competition from foreign reprints noting that, " as late as 1820, British reprints still accounted for 70 percent of all titles published" (122). He represents this as a anomaly; despite a burgeoning newspaper business and an incredibly advanced postal system, American "literature" or any type of high-culture remains inert. Despite this representation of culture, Starr fails to mention any of the legal repercussions of this practice besides a gloss of the "courtesy of trade" and built in price-competition. This is really just a nice way of saying that the United States was a pirate nation.

In fact, one of the most famous symbols of American cultural imperialism, the New York Yankees logo, and the related national nickname derives from this thievery. Matt Mason explains in his 2008 book The Pirate's Dilemma that "American were so well known as bootleggers, Europeans began referring to them with the Dutch word 'Janke', then slang for pirate, which is today pronounced 'Yankee'" (Mason, 36). American lawless is well-documented, including by the copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, but it appears in a much more American-friendly view from Starr. It's ironic that this interconnection problematizes low-brow culture, a facet that I think is worth exploring, and it discussed at length by Starr himself.

It is no wonder that American "literature" as such had a hard-time developing when "American editions [of British works] sold at a quarter of the British price and in much larger quantities" (123). Art became a market like any other even from the beginning of American cultural production. As flawed as a system as European patronage of the arts was, there was a period of time where art was detached from the economic that seems to have never been possible for America. The New York Yankees logo can be purchased world-wide, on the the bridges of Venice, Canal Street, or even the fjords of Norway even though the sport they represent is only played in one country, but how man. American "high" culture with its intrinsic economic quality splintered into diverse markets without ever completely divesting itself of its European roots, a trope we will see throughout American literature: Whitman's desire for an American kind of poem, the Lost Generation's exile in Paris, and even foreign language requirements in Literature PhD programs. American culture could never be European high brow, it became its own lowbrow.

This economic wedge in culture could be one of the reasons why America has such a hard time understanding culture as intrinsically valuable. Starr explains the ambiguity in terms of the Bill of Rights protection of copyright as the protection of the Progress of science and the useful Arts" (115). Culture, let alone the study of it, is struggling to be deemed useful, with the exception of the global industries of Hollywood and American sport leagues. Mason goes on to argue that the failure to honor foreign copyright is one of the reasons why American could embrace the idea of revolution, citing Doron S. Ben-Atar, "Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle" (Mason,36).

American piracy helped create the desire and production of low-brow culture. Since European works were cheaper, there was limited need for American authorship. And, by the time it did come around, American had already embraced the nature of the market so fully, that good culture was sellable culture, or, should we say, the useful art of Industry.

Rural Capitopia

So the passage on 106-107 in which Starr scoffs at Marxist historians reveals some interesting assumptions in his argument. In response to a somewhat poorly rephrased argument about the role of public schools in training people for their future as producers in a capitalist system, he argues that "the rise of popular education in America preceded industrial capitalism" (106). So industrial capitalism is the only kind? That's not how I understand it - in Capital, Marx devotes significant portions of his thinking to pre-industrial capitalism, which - although it hadn't yet reached the awesome proportions of the factory system, turning humans into automatons in droves, still very much relied on the exploitation of labor. Also, it seems important to point out that the urban factory isn't the only form of capitalism. Industrial agriculture works on the same principles. Starr seems continually returns to a kind of idealization of rural, agricultural America that seems to want to set his America apart from those dark, backwards, industrial European states (thus the extreme overreliance on de Tocqueville). Why does he do this? Is it fair to question a historical text that invokes nostalgia for an unattainable historical moment? I think I brought this up befre, but it's still bugging me.

Oh, and the Marxist historians he cites are Bowles and Gintis, writing in 1976. A well-known argument, but one that's been thoroughly revised and developed in the last thirty-two years.

What a story

I was thrilled when I read in The Creation of the Media Starr's use of Rip Van Winkle (84) as a symbol of the changes within America, particularly within the realm of the public sphere. It is snippets like these that I've thus far missed from the "textbook" nature of our foundational readings, particularly these last two (Burke & Briggs of course mention numerous primary documents in passing). To see that, on some level, there was recognition of the speed at which things were changing for American society is really a great thing and I think we (I'm not sure who exactly this "we" is) can get lost in thinking that our current-day culture is moving too quickly. I guess it's been that way for some time now and I'll be interested to see if this is discussed in Starr's text the way that some histories of technology (particularly media technology) at least cursorily discuss.

I don't want to ignore the fact that Starr has previously used primary documents, such as the Freeman's Oath and Publick Occurrences, but Rip Van Winkle seems different to me. Because the document is a story, I see it as an adding another layer to the American media narrative. Fiction seems usually to be less about sending an overt public message (even if some could be argued as overt). What are the potential differences between putting forth a political document or a public newsheet and a piece of fiction? On the one hand, they are both texts and sometimes even both narratives. On the other, one is "fact" and the other"fiction," one "information" and the other "entertainment." Does one "type" of document inherently offer a better perspective of its time period? What does that "better" mean?

The Pen is Mightier than the Awl

I would like to correct something I said in class today. While discussing the 1798 Sedition Act, and the "innovative" notion that someone was considered "not guilty" of libel if their claim was true, I suggested this was indicative of a reversal of roles between those who govern and those who are governed. Upon further consideration, I think this view is a bit too rosy. It would be more accurate to say that those who govern and those who are governed come to be held to a congruent standard of truth, or perhaps honesty is a better term.

To begin, I want to pick up on the language of reading introduced in Kurt's post about Foucault in which the punishment for sedition "had to be legible for all," which is to say public, exhibited, displayed. This reminded me of a passage in Starr's book discussing the ways in which centralized state power allowed for improvement monitoring of the populace. This, in conjunction with what Starr calls an inexplicable "decline in the norms of political secrecy," meant that "Society did not just become more legible to the state; the state became more legible to the public" (45). Granted, the term "legible" is not being used in exactly the same way in both instances, but I think its appearance in both texts is more than just coincidence -- or mere playful punnery.

Punishing sedition means punishing behavior that incites discontent or insurrection, but as seen in the Zenger case and the "truth" defense against the Sedition Act, there was a growing sense among the people that discontent and insurrection were valid, and therefore not seditious, if their reasoning was based in fact. The focus of prohibition shifted from incitement to deceit. As a result, we see in the Continental Congress' 1774 "Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec," the assertion that freedom of the press facilitates public  discussion "whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated, into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs" (76). So in much the same way that the public pillory of seditionists makes their crime "legible" upon their "corrected bodies," freedom of the press literally makes legible the misdeeds of crooked leaders on the pages of newspapers and pamphlets. This is part of the cultural shift away "bodily correction" in the latter half of the seventeenth century and toward punishments of public scrutiny, to which anyone was subject, even oppressive officers.

So I don't want to say that in the two revolutions being discussed (the American and the print) caused a reversal in which the people stopped working for the government and the government started working for the people. Such an argument would be hard to make even today. Rather, I would argue that the two factions -- governors and governed -- found themselves interacting in, or sharing, the same public space, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes adversarially.

Mediating, bodily

[Like last time, my bolding will help your skimming.]

Like our old companions Briggs and Burke, Paul Starr talks a great deal in these chapters about the controversial status of print and free expression during those early printed centuries (17th-18th centuries, in particular). One thing that Starr mentions that particularly struck me was his description of the exacting, violent punishments that were meted out to those found guilty of “seditious speech” in the early American colonies. Starr explains that one such seditionist, Richard Barnes, had “his arms broken, his body beaten, and his tongue ‘bored through with an awl,’” and he suggests that “these penalties reflected the harsh practices of the time” (56). Starr concludes in his reportage of this era’s penalties, “Among punished cases of seditious speech in the 1620s, more than 50 percent involved ‘bodily correction’ [. . .]” (57).

This discussion of “bodily correction” brought to my mind Foucault, who is very much interested in the public, “spectacular” role that the punished body plays in his Discipline and Punish. Foucault explains that the visibly punished body in effect “confesses” the crime that the individual committed. If you’ll bear with me, two quick sentences from Foucault will prove instructive here: “It was the task of the guilty man to bear openly his condemnation and the truth of the crime that he had committed. His body, displayed, exhibited in procession, tortured, served as the public support of a procedure that had hitherto remained in the shade; in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all” (43).

Here Foucault, in light of Starr, carries some cool implications for our course. First of all, I want to suggest that, just as many of our authors have said that marked paper in the form of novels, newspapers, etc. helped to give rise to the public sphere, marked bodies played the same catalytic function. Foucault’s comment that the exhibition of such bodies “served as the public support” of the right to punish the culpable assumes a public sphere, I think. The question, however, could be whether or not such exhibition helped to give rise to a public sphere or whether a public sphere was necessary as a precondition for such exhibition to be truly effective (chicken and egg, anyone?).

Also interesting is the symbolism of punishing someone of “seditious speech” by driving an awl through his tongue. This purposeful punishment is clearly meant to serve a public role—to “broadcast” or “advertise” to the public the dangers of speaking incorrectly. For this reason we could say that Barnes’s body served a mediating function, boldly establishing judicial clout to instruct the public. In this way, maybe Barnes’s body did something that not even a well-phrased poster or pamphlet could have: it was, in Foucault’s words, “legible for all.” Starr himself notes that, outside Boston, most colonies had rather low rates of literacy. Well, I think we’ll agree that you don’t need to be literate to read the terror of an awl through a tongue.

To broaden this question, I wonder in what other contexts we see the body used for mediation. For instance, rhetoric about dating often cites the body as something that elicits an initial interest: usually we say that we first want to be attracted to someone, and then we want to get to know his or her personality or whatever. How else does the body serve as a cultural mediator?

A different view on the "print revolution"

It's really fascinating to me how I never bothered to really interrogate the narrative of the so-called "print revolution" before reading Starr's first chapter--the relationship between the development of print and the subsequent democratization of both religion and politics (reinforced by Briggs and Burke, at least in the general gist even though they complicate the sense of urgency typically associated with the word "revolution") always seemed to make sense to me until now; I never once thought to ask "where was the state in all of this?" The answer that Starr provides presents us with a view of the development of print culture and print capitalism that I think adds some interesting complications to descriptions of the same historical narrative by both Anderson and Briggs and Burke--descriptions where the consequences of state intervention and control so central to Starr's analysis are noticeably absent.

As a quick for instance, Starr writes that "when newspapers first appeared, they were heavily censored, if not shut down entirely; those that were permitted to develop were primarily court gazettes, founded to monopolize the news and to report and celebrate the ceremonial life of the court" (33). What an interesting addition to our discussion--through Anderson--of the role of newspapers and print media in the imagining of national identity! I'm almost tempted to say that looking at early newspapers in this way almost precludes Anderson's argument; while I still really want to latch on to his idea of newspaper readers imagining themselves as part of a broader community of readership, Starr leaves me not abandoning that notion but really somewhat skeptical of it. Since the newspapers were aligned with the state and state aims of censorship, doesn't it follow that the content of these papers forced a certain authorized imagined identity on readers? I guess the argument could be made that content matters less than the other factors Anderson brings up as contributing to the imagined community of fellow readers (linguistic uniformity, near synchronous experiences of reading, etc.), but I'm not sure I'm convinced.

Imagining Communities (Is Harder Than It Should Be)

Visiting my girlfriend's father is always a more trying time than it should be. I've become accustomed to how he berates me for reading Foucault - who he calls a "french fag" - even though he has no tangible reason for animosity against the French. And our discussions often devolve, in the span of seconds, into intellectual pissing contests that not even a dog would join. So this was my mistake. I thought when I brought up Anderson's Imagined Communities, it would be different.

After exclaiming ooo's and aaa's, he shot his drunken self up the stairs to retrieve his copy of the book. He told me about how some society that he is in keeps him up to date on what's new and important (for a book originally published in 1983...). He even flipped through the book to show me that he had highlighted passages. But then the venom returned: "This is a bunch of post-modern crap!"

Whatever the reason for his disdain, I realized that the notion of a universally applicable - if historically and spacially specific - nationalism was more controversial than we had discussed. Anderson is an American writing for an Anglo-phone audience, at times explaining how America's establishing of independence inspired many consequent revolutions. I thought this would go over fine - American-written is usually the path of least resistance when discussing books. But I forget sometimes that nationalism, as a political rallying cry, spearheads the legitimization of independence movements that have to emancipate themselves from the archetype itself: America. Now I wonder, if Anderson endorses nationalism, how does he feel about the collision of nationalisms? Are the claims just relative to each nation? If every nation can have its nationalism, to what extent can one be independent of another? I also wonder how this relates to globalism, as well as the contest between universal and particular ethics (for lack of better phrasing).

What would Anderson suggest for me if I've already been imagining a community with my girlfriend's father, even though he's shown no sign of ever granting me independence?

Shades of Gray

I had very similar feelings on the racism chapter. Anderson presents that argument in some of the boldest, broadest strokes in the whole book. For instance, when he argues that "the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation," he dismisses a long history of nationally sanctioned racism in times of war (Japanese internment camps, post-9/11 round-ups of Middle Eastern men, etc.). This is not to say that race and class within a nation are not bound together - in fact (and Matt points to this too), racism within a nation can play a major part in how the nation "imagines" itself. In fact, I think the census chapter supports this notion - the community is not a collective imagining, but one of a few imposed on the many. In other words, the reason it has been historically difficult for blacks, latinos, women, etc. to identify as unproblematically American is that the census, the newspaper, and other media are shaped by white dudes.

The idea deserves further exploration, though. There is, at least in our nation, a hierarchy of race/class/nationality that, for instance, makes a more feasible presidential candidate out of an African-American than, say, a Korean American. Various markings of not "white," or not male, or not middle class, position citizens in varying degrees of distance from a kind of central image of what is "American." (I know I'm generalizing and making a boatload of assumptions, but some of them were at least supported by conversations I had with my Interp class last semester). In any event, I think these gray ares are worth thinking about.

Oh and hymns of hate? How about the Marseillaise?

Aux armes, citoyens !	To arms, citizens!
Formez vos bataillons !	Form your battalions!
Marchons, marchons !	Let's march, let's march!
Qu'un sang impur	May a tainted blood
Abreuve nos sillons !	Irrigate our furrows!

And Anderson's mention of "God Save the Queen" reminded me of another anthem...

God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb

God save the queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
In England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future, no future,
No future for you

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves

God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade

Anderson on racism

I'd like to turn discussion for a minute away from the great stuff that's been going on in the posts prior to mine and make two quick comments about Anderson's analysis of the relationship between racism and nationalism, as the chapter devoted to it was the most problematic for me of the entire book.


First off, I wholly understand that equating nationalism with racism is a cop-out; the line of thought that he's writing this chapter in response to is, I agree, quite incomplete. But his attempt to invert this argument seems to ring a bit false to me, too. While it's true (as he points out in a footnote on pg. 142) that it's tough to find "hymns of hate," or any token of nationalist discourse that is explicitly hateful towards others, isn't the vilification of everyone outside of the nation in question still part of the propositional content of any nationalist text? By praising the glory of/praying for the victory of/basking in the beauty of our nation, aren't we simultaneously putting down or wishing for the defeat of or implying a lack of, I don't know, aesthetic grandeur in everyone else's?

Secondly, Anderson writes that "on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination" (150). But, would we expect it to be different? I mean, within the national boundaries is the realm of control. Sure, anti-semitism in the USSR didn't prevent "a respectful working relationship between Brezhnev and Kissinger" (150), but Brezhnev wasn't really in a position to strip Henry Kissinger of his rights. And also, racism at home is still a way of imagining the boundaries of the community, right? As in, "those people live here but they don't fit the prototype I imagine for the members of my community."

So I guess I'm making the same root point with both of these examples: I don't see a lot in this text analyzing what I take to be the necessarily exclusionary consequences of imagining communities--not that there aren't positive consequences as well, as Anderson points out (although I'm not sure that inspiring countless self-sacrifices is necessarily one of them).

Is the tangent of a tangent actually the original circle?

(I'm sorry if this is exorbitantly long and potentially not on-topic, but I got real excited about it.)

It might be the codeine-laden cough syrup I've been taking or my having finished the final chapter in Imagined Communities, the icing on a cake I had a hard time swallowing, but I'm feeling a little feisty. As such I've been inspired by Kurt to go off-topic yet remain in context. Specifically, I would like to address (or, rather, raise) a different set of questions related to the "simultaneous" audience discussed in Anderson's book.

On page 26, Anderson writes,

An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.

And on page 33, he writes about news events that "disappear" in the papers over time:

if Mali disappears from the pages of The New York Times after two days of famine reportage, for months on end, readers do not for a moment imagine that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens.

Taking these two citations as a starting point, I would like to challenge Anderson on his assumption of simultaneous continuity. While it might have been true when Anderson first published this work, I think the issue of simultaneity has since become more complicated. Despite my dislike of this particular work, my challenge is not to argue his claim but to ask more from him than what he has given. In fact, from my admittedly limited understanding of globalization and transnationalism, I'm not sure we (at least in "the developed West") care as much about "nation" as we seemingly did even a few decades ago, so I wonder, would this potential lack of nationalism have similar roots as this potential lack of simultaneity I'm going to introduce.

When I first read page 26, my initial marginal note was "reality?" I wrote this because I and, anecdotally, many people I know were struck by the disturbing potential of 1998's The Truman Show. Now, film buffs and better-read folks than I can probably list dozens of fictional origins for the concept of illusory communities and life as an illusion. In fact, I can think of some that might count. But The Truman Show was popular and I saw it earlier than I saw anything else that might count, so it's my example. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey's character thinks he's living in real life but in fact is living his real life in a television show. He thinks the rest of the world's characters continue after they have left his view, but they don't, at least not in the way that he would expect. His is a fictitious case in which not only his community is imagined (or produced) but his understanding of the simultaneous, continuous existence of the rest of the world is also imagined (and only produced while he is awake and in a relevant scene). This, at least to me and many of those I know, was disturbing. We thought, what if we were Truman.

The following year came a similarly disturbing film with which I'm familiar, David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. For those who don't know, it's a (fantastic) film about virtual reality video games in which the characters enter numerous levels of game and ultimately are left questioning reality. While Cronenberg has had other films, some of which have been adaptations of or were inspired by earlier works by other artists, its timeliness strikes me. (In the same year, The Matrix came out and was far more popular and I'll take for granted you all know what it's about, but in short it also questions reality, although it does still offer some sort of "real" imagined community for those who have escaped.)

The year after that (2000) Maxis came out with The Sims, a life simulator, much to the adoration of many video game fans and newcomers to the video game medium. Following that in 2004 was The Sims 2, which took the first game even further into reality, with a full age cycle from birth through death of characters. And, again, while these were based on earlier simulators, their timeliness and the extent to which a.) they were popular, and b.) they were more true to the average American's lived experience (e.g. dealing with the dishes as opposed to managing a riot or war), I think makes a difference. In these three video games (eXistenZ is the name of the video game in the eponymous film), there is a life that more or less assumes a simultaneity that the player recognizes as being illusory. After all, it's just a video game.

This brings me to my final example of imagined simultaneity in media, 2007's The Nines, another (fabulous) film about multiple layers of reality. With this complexity of understanding reality, I'm not convinced that Anderson can make the statement that Americans unequivocably recognize that the rest of America keeps moving. Surely most do. But I think some of us (and I genuinely don't think we're psychologically damaged), at least those of us who have been confronted with the problem of an assumed reality, can't necessarily buy into (100%) the idea that the rest of the world keeps ticking in empty, homogeneous, continued time. I assume that you all are currently at home or in class or doing something, while I'm coughing away and typing in my living room. But deep in the back of my mind, because of these fictions I've consumed (and this relevant New York Times article) I think that there is a .0001% chance that you all might be in hibernation mode. I mean, I could be egomaniacal, but I think it's just postmodern anxiety.

So all of this rambling brings up some questions for me related to the first Anderson passage:

• 1.) Is there in fact much of an opinion out there regarding reality versus assumed reality that would caution an assumed simultaneity?
• 2.) If so, what are its roots and how might these be related to a dissolution of nationalist concerns in the face of transnationalist, globalist, or simply international concerns?
• 3.) As cyber communities (forums, multiplayer games, especially those like Second Life, even blogs) and virtual reality experiences proliferate, how might homogeneous time and simultaneous existence change?
• And to go even further science-nerdy than I have (and will in the post-script), 4.) How might something like infinite parallel universes (according to a 2005 Scientific American I read it's no longer a crackpot idea) tie in to the concept of homogenous time?

My reason for bringing up the second passage in the book is meant to be a little more light-hearted. I don't know about you but I know a great many people who would, if not assume that Mali had been eradicated by a famine, forget that Mali even existed if it wasn't mentioned with some regularity. Is that a more recent occurrence? A result of poor education standards? Previously, we didn't know certain countries existed, but now that we do and are so constantly "in the know," it seems so easy to forget. Or maybe we never really remember but are just constantly told/reminded? (And did I miss this part of "Memory and Forgetting?")

==
The Post-Script:
And speaking of simultaneous experiences and insecure realities, did anyone hear about the CERN experiment with the Large Hadron Collider? Stage 1 was successful, but I'm slightly concerned. Shouldn't we get to vote on whether we think it's a worthy endeavor (or a good use of resources) to potentially create black holes in Switzerland?

Television Textuality and the Imagined Community

[I've bolded important points for easy skimming]

Perhaps I’m drifting us away, but I can’t resist. Gavin’s post has made me think of television.

Actually, though, Anderson’s book made me think of television. Since I’m a LCS guy, I was most struck in Anderson’s text when he talks about the role of texts—in particular novels and newspapers—in representing “nationhood.” Anderson explains that part of acknowledging nation-ness is the awareness that there are countless other individuals anonymously going about their lives in simultaneity. He says, for instance, that although we don’t know all of the other Americans, we’re confident that they exist and that they are all off doing various things. Basically, he says that simultaneous activity suggests community.

He gets to novels and newspapers by explaining that they suggest this simultaneous activity. In novels, Anderson explains, we get several—or even a host of—characters, some of whom are unaware of one another’s existence. In this way the novel conjures up the idea of nation-ness: “That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, byut by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds” (Anderson 29). In newspapers, likewise, readers get a number of stories regarding the affairs of a great many people. These stories are juxtaposed in a way that suggests the anonymity and diversity of the community that the newspaper represents. And, Anderson suggests, although stories and the people they’re about appear and disappear in the paper, readers have no doubt that the people continue their lives, the stories continue, and the issues endure, long after they’ve ceased to be newsworthy. It is this idea of simultaneous representation of individuals in media that I want to focus on here.

Reading Anderson’s discussion of simultaneity in novels and newspapers made me think of a really cool essay on television that I used to teach in one of my freshman classes at Ohio University during my adjunct year. It’s “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson. Johnson is interested in how television programs have “progressed” or “evolved” from the 1960s to today—you could say, rather aptly, that he’s interested in how the plot has thickened. In short, he argues that today’s television programs are significantly more complex and sophisticated than those of the past, and from this assertion he builds an argument that today’s television is “cognitively demanding” and hence, as the title suggests, can “make you smarter” just by watching. In particular, Johnson focuses on multi-threading, a term that simply means that the television show is made up of multiple, independent narratives involving separate characters that are threaded together with dramatic and artistic editing. He’s talking about shows like 24, Lost, E.R., The West Wing, and so on. Discussing The Sopranos, he says that the show “routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters” (173).

So here’s my question: If we grant Johnson his point, how does this newly multi-threaded brand of TV complicate the “imagined community” that Anderson explains was initially suggested textually through the simultaneity depicted in novels and newspapers? Now, instead of a few characters sneaking around anonymously in a Balzac novel, we’ve got a great number of characters, each with a thick plot, happening simultaneously. Does this simply make the community seem larger? Does this make us feel our lives are dull because they’re not complicated or fast enough? Does it suggest that the community has in other ways changed since the community of the novel? Does our community seem like a really “busy” or “dynamic” one?

I Love the 80s

What struck me most in chapter five of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities were the ways in which print and media propelled the shift toward comparative history, in which cultural conditions are examined in concert with the traditional names-and-dates brand of history. By its very nature, this was a self-concious project, always in some way or another occupied with the present, as it looked to times past. This was not an altogether new idea, Bede's teleological Ecclesiastic History of the English People certainly had in mind the political and religious issues salient in 8th century Northumbria. However, Early Modern comparative history, unlike that of Bede, was guided by the "sense that the events of classical history and legend and also those of the Bible were not separated from the present simply by an extent of time but also by completely different conditions of life" (Auerbach, qtd. in Anderson, 68). Anderson suggests this shift takes place within Walter Benjamin's concept of "homogenous, empty time," which is calendrical, linear. This disconnect between the cultural conditions past and the present, Anderson shows, contributed to the idea of the "modern," while simultaneously holding "antiquity" at arms length as an object of study, aestheticization, reverence and criticism.

Eventually, histories became an economically viable project, so that David Hume's History of England, published between 1754 and 1761, made him, in his own words, "not merely independent, but opulent." Historians, lexicographers, and a bevy of other academics produced research; printers published it; consumers bought it; and the machinery of print-capitlism hummed along accordingly. This new influx of information was instrumental in the formation of individual nationalist identities, but also opened up for investigation a range of identities in historical context. Thus, the student Adamantios Koraes can look with disapproval upon the state of Greece in the early 19th century, compare it to the prosperity and culture of the ancient Greeks, then have faith in a cultural recovery based on a shared (though completely imaginary) national identity.

So, where does this lead? I would argue that print capitalism played a large role in creating the market for historical cultural material, a market which did not exist before it was made possible by both the printing press and the shift toward "homogenous, empty time." Furthermore, print capitalism dramatically accelerated the process of distancing modern subjects from their historical objects of study by constantly demanding new material for marketing and sale to the consumer. To me, the best example of the display of an aestheticized and distanced object of past culture produced by the media for public consumption is VH-1's pop-culture nostalgia show I Love the 80s, which debuted a mere 12 years after the decade in question ended. For those unfamiliar, the program features a number of talking heads (anywhere from B-list celebrities to current comedians and culture critics) providing commentary on popular trends of the 1980s. More than anything, I Love the 80s is a testament to the pace at which humanity creates, discards and aestheticizes its culture, a pace which has been increasing ever since the media and comparative cultural history first made the process possible. Prior to the latter half of the twentieth century, there simply would not be enough material to fill all those airtime hours.

Anderson shows that standardization in the print media dramatically slowed the evolutionary change of language, so that I would have an easier time talking to Shakespeare than he would talking to Chaucer. But I would argue that print media, in congress with the myriad modern manifestations of media, has dramatically hastened the life-and-death process of cultural phenomena to the point that I have a hard time explaining Buffy the Vampire Slayer to my parents.

In 2004, VH-1 introduced I Love the 90s, which places me far closer to the ash heap of history than I am comfortable with. This leads me to wonder if the distance between the production of culture and its subsequent aestheticization and disposal is growing smaller. Is their relationship asymptotic? Is it possible that someday the latter might outstrip the former and we will find ourselves judging culture against a vague set of values which are not even established yet? I invite you to blog it out with me.

Print Capitalism vs. Print Culture

We've been working a lot -- thanks to Briggs and Burke -- with the notion of "print culture" (as originally termed by Elizabeth Eisenstein) and this concept's multifaceted impact on the development of "modern" societies. Eisenstein's use of this term (and you'll have to excuse my perhaps over-interest in this idea -- Jon Klancher has been poisoning my brain again) has kicked up a fair amount of controversy insofar as book historians are concerned. Benedict Anderson, I think, now puts a new wrinkle in the print culture debate in his insistence on a related, though not entirely synonymous term: "print capitalism".

Eisenstein, though careful in her own work to stress that the advent of print culture comes hand in hand with newly possible understandings of texts that render them reproducible objects (and, thus, commodities), never directly references the economic system by which this is made suddenly viable during the age of the "print revolution". (Her constant criticisms of so-called "inept quasi-Marxist social historians", though, may partially explain this reluctance.) Anderson's emphasis on the system of economic relationships which is made possible, in part, thanks to print, by contrast, makes a lot of sense to me. This is, after all, the system to which Benjamin points when he discusses the reproducibility of cultural objects -- a system motivated by the economic necessity of capital, and not simply by a scheme of social relationships which develops around reproducible texts, art, etc.

I would be interested in hearing what others think about distinctions -- if, indeed, you acknowledge any -- between these two concepts. How do you digest the term "print capitalism", and what connections surface between this idea of Anderson's and the chronology previously presented by Briggs and Burke?

Postproduction in a Culture of Commodity

I've been thinking a bit more about Benjamin's essay with relation to the current state of contemporary art. Sheila's post on capitalism and Kevin's reminder to us of Benjamin's statement: "war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system" have urged me to readjust my considerations, so allow me to come back to our former reading a bit.

This idea of "aura" is part of what was Benjamin was so taken with in the discussion of our old ways before film/photo -- and ability for a market to exist (a place for dissemination and commidification of art objects) is what seems to spring naturally out of the kind of reproducibility that Benjamin is suspicious of. However, self-referentiality within visual work and an in-house critique of what counts as art had been developing since DuChamp. Sol Lewitt's ideas about art laid a framework for the concept trumping even the making of the work, so that artists working today like Murakami can have a factory and be just as interested in the business aspect WITHOUT losing a side of Benjamin's aura. In fact, I would argue that the aura of this work is so much of what makes it successful -- but the context in time and place becomes something more about the artist making that piece in an art market.

For those of you who might not be familiar with Murakami, he is a great example of an contemporary artist who is using the market to both problematize our current art world's obsession with commodification while also cleaning up (finalncially) because of it. You may have heard of his Louis Vuitton store installed into museum spaces within his larger exhibition; Murakami sells products on an infinite scale, from figures you can buy in vending machines in Japan to paintings that go for millions.

Other artists are also painfully aware of the market - consider Damien Hirst's diamond skull (which he sold to a group of investors that included himself) or Jeff Koons, a former businessman turned artist sensation. It is an increasing theme in the art world, and I wonder how Benjamin might think about it in terms of evolution from his "property relations" theory.

In his post, Matt called our attention to questions about experiencial art and what actually constitutes the real work of art. I think of a French theorist who is writing about contemporary art named Bourriaud, whose last book Postproduction discusses the tendency for artists to use already made cultural objects and information to make new work. (His book prior, Relational Aesthetics, talked all about contemporary art that is not reproducible because the work exists only in experience and cultural exchange.) In a globalized culture of internet and international exchange, Postproduction suggests an emerging tendency for art to use pre-made elements (movies, cultural brands, images) to constitute a unique piece. This kind of appropriation and re-framing seems to openly acknolwedge this "aura" that Benjamin is so attached to, but remixes it and samples to make new meaning.

Social Commentary + Post-Ideological Art

"An absent minded aesthetics seems not to be entirely pejorative for Benjamin but almost a way to approach art unideologically, thereby depoliticizing art, undoing the conundrum of automatic war, for increasingly automatized societies." -Dave

I'd like to build off of Dave's post by segueing through Courtney's comment in class about how different Benjamin's Epilogue was from the rest of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
The Epilogue makes explicit the assumptions and goals underlying Benjamin's arguments about art. He indicates his Marxist position in the Preface, but these more obviously political passages bookend the essay, reflecting upon and emanating out from the philosophical content. The structure of the essay provides contexts - past, present (1936), and future (today) - for concepts such as "authority" and "exhibition value." This framework encourages a Marxist application of his concepts.
What probably most troubles Benjamin about art is that while "[t]he masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property." The new media of the first third of the twentieth century had the potential to be the "expression" of "the masses" under fascist rule, but Benjamin considered this expression to be neutered. This type of expression is unaware of its political potential.
An argument that Slavoj Zizek makes repeatedly is that when a society considers itself to be beyond ideology, it is really at its most ideological. The assumption that the mechanical reproduction of art is natural, or that deciphering the hero in war films (for example) should be obvious, is the epitome of ideology. Purely aesthetic expression or art, which lacks social consciousness, mediates the unacknowledged or unchallenged beliefs of society.
Benjamin indicates that media have a direct influence on ideology: "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well" (III). Ignorance of a perspective or lifestyle's (for lack of a better word at the moment) historical grounding is a consequence of naturalizing that perspective. Then that natural perspective prevents any other - Communist, in this example - from gaining legitimacy.
This is exacerbated by the reception that media such as film receives. Instead of experiencing live theater, "The audience's identification [in the twentieth century] with the actor is really an identification with the camera" (VII). Not only does the audience submit itself to the "perspective" - Benjamin's word has parallels to "ideology" - of the camera, but it is also created by the camera, as Burke and Briggs have indicated. While we are informed that the marketing of films pandered to various audiences, films also created a mass audience - everyone who watches movies uncritically. This audience was and still is unaware of its historically and politically specific perspective. It has naturalized the perspective of the camera, and it makes mechanically reproduced art purely aesthetic. That is the expression allowed under fascism.
The purely aesthetic, or post-ideological, path leads to war because it is consumed by the consequences of ignoring art's political potential. By choosing to ignore the political aspect of art, the artist does not create art for art's sake. The artist unwittingly reaffirms and legitimizes the state of things, the current hegemonic system. Even in the aspiration to avoid participation in politics, the work of art has political ramifications regardless. It is this non-participation (that Zizek advises, although I'm not so sure) that leaves politics in the hands of those already in power. When Benjamin says, "War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system," he is prophesying that the perpetual war of the twentieth century - what Philip Bobbitt (a conservative historian) calls "The Long War" and Gore Vidal disparagingly catalogs in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" - would proceed in the absence of sufficient resistance to such violence.

Music in the age of mechanical reproduction

Since class today, I've been thinking a lot about Kurt's choice of an LP(/CD/ringtone) as an example of the ways in which art can be reproduced into worthlessness, and the ways in which music speaks to Benjamin's framework, specifically the notion of "aura."

First off, where IS the aura of a piece of music, or what, really, is the work of art? I suppose it's a somewhat rockist idea, but it took me a while to shake my gut-level equation of composer and performer and realize that that characterization is (both synchronically and diachronically speaking) wholly inaccurate more often than not. Many modern pop stars obviously don't write their own material, to say nothing of performers in orchestras throughout history. So if artists or composers create works of art to be performed by others, and have historically tended to do so, isn't that a type of aural reproduction long before the technology of film and cinema brought it into the visual realm? Granted, it's not mechanical for two different orchestras to play the same piece. But they're reading copies of the same music with the same notes, dynamic markings, etc. Does it really make a difference if these copies were transcribed by hand or by a Xerox machine? This brought me back in a roundabout way to Benjamin's comments on stage/cinema and his claim that "there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction" (in section IX); I think we could set up a similar relationship between live musical performance and recorded music. But really, aren't plays and pieces of music made to be reproduced?

As I said above, what's at the heart of this tension clearly is the question of what exactly is the work of art. Is it the play/composition or is it the performance? I'm inclined to say "both," but Benjamin's commentary only seems to deal with the performance. So, am I off base here? If not, what of the aura of the piece, musical or theatrical, itself? If the aura of a work of art is based on "its presence in time and space" (II), does the aura of the artistic composition, as opposed to the artistic performance, survive mechanical reproduction intact because it's wherever it's being experienced by an audience?

Hamming it Up

Walter Benjamin's argument in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is clearly addressing the fluctuations in ritual, authenticity, and thereby, aesthetics in the field of cultural production after steam power and electricity. But the underlying stakes of the argument determine the possibility of a "mass art" under the looming threat of Fascism. The inevitable war Benjamin references in a sweeping, if not exaggerated claim, "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" seems to be a clash on the level of the cultural more than political or economic, which, in turn, renders the propaganda machine that cinema threatens to be an instrument of both enslavement and emancipation of, for lack of a better term, the masses. Cinema, as a market force and a proselytizing agent excites and terrifies him, but in either respect the model seems to reflect the top-down production of mass culture; government or corporation wealth usually allows this artform to exist, and a widespread audience is assumed throughout.

With this in mind, the naivety of Marconi's model of radio seems all the more glaring. Despite an inherently integrated form of production, Marconi's wireless was imagined as a bureaucratic tool and not a mediation of producer and consumer. My question here is: How would Benjamin's ambivalence towards the form of mass cinema play out in the realm of the disconnected voice of the wireless radio, since Marconi's vision lacks the widespread appeal for either pole of Benjamin's ambition.

The case of ham radio enthusiasts mitigates this tension somewhat as an example of what we may now call "grassroots" media consumption that expands the scope of audience while not necessarily creating a "war of art." With some amount of foresight, the Radio Act of 1912 restricted radiowaves to "200 metres of less" despite the pleas of the operators that "We have been brought up with the idea that the air was absolutely free to everyone" (Burke and Briggs, 157). The ability to forge a community of listeners still persisted which made these ham operators into the first radio "pirates", and in many ways this clash in still being played out today with the anti-copyright promotion of "net neutrality". But what really links Benjamin's dialectic and the hams is the apparent lack of context they brought to their hobby, being an audience for "who were totally uninterested in the the content of the messages picked up, radio was a sport" (Burke and Briggs, 162). Benjamin encounters this same uneasy middleground when answering critics of film as an art form: "Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise...[meeting] this mode of reception halfway" (Benjamin, 240). An absent minded aesthetics seems not to be entirely pejorative for Benjamin but almost a way to approach art unideologically, thereby depoliticizing art, undoing the conundrum of automatic war, for increasingly automatized societies.