Newman

Paul Newman has died, and, with him, I think one of the very last of the Sixties rebels of classical Hollywood cinema. Sure, we still have some rebels around (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and Terence Stamp and Malcolm MacDowell and some others are still kicking, but they're really more of the '70s generation and are generally consistently making shit--check out the trailer for the television version of Crash, starring Hopper, and you'll see what I mean...), but Newman was the last of the truly iconic rebels of film in that period. He was every bit as much to '60s filmmaking what Brando was to the '50s and what Nicholson was to the '70s: and we know all to well what happened to Brando as he aged, and Jack is perfectly content to make crap like The Bucket List, totally complacent with his star persona, leaving us to ask (as his last decent character did), "What if this is as good as it gets?"

Walter Chaw over at Film Freak Central has an excellent appreciation of Newman which isolates what was so great about him as an actor:

Paul Newman’s death is shaking. I was more personally traumatized by the death of Roy Scheider, though, and I think that it has a lot to do with my not understanding Newman until I got a little older and got ahold of Hud and The Hustler and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - all those movies where he played fags and rapists and long-time losers that facilitate their girlfriend’s rape and suicide. Hardly matinee idol stuff, but that was Newman, right? One of the two or three most beautiful people to ever flicker on that luminous scrim and choosing to play assholes and miscreants (Cool Hand Luke, Hombre, and his Lew Archer and on and on and on) – that’s integrity. His films are the tumult and displacement of the sixties; he’s the sixties. Forget about bullshit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting - Newman was fucking steel, man, the s’truth unfiltered.

Got it nailed for Newman as an actor: I think it even holds for his later work. Even if The Road to Perdition is a little too sanctimonious for its own good, Newman exerts a kind of rakish charm that melds so perfectly with the world-weary cynicism his character embodies.

Great performance, but even greater when we consider that (at least in his public persona) Newman never seemed to succumb to that kind of cynicism himself. As many of his rebellious compatriots of '60s radicalism steadily settled into a compromise with the status quo, we saw as Newman transformed his image as the screen's favorite "assholes and miscreants" into someone who was too world-weary not to try to save the world in some small way (and, seriously, hundreds of millions of dollars donated to charity through his Newman's Own line is not exactly "some small way"). It's the perfect melding of an antiheroic politics of representation with a quietly and casually heroic politics of giving.

Roger Ebert (to whom I'm warming up--I think losing the ability to speak has somehow given him a different and interesting new perspective on how to mourn what the media do in our culture, but that's a different post altogether) writes about Newman as a star persona:

We linger on such moments because movie stars are important to us. They represent an ideal form we are deluded to think exists inside of us. Paul Newman seemed to represent the best of what we could hope for. He was handsome, yes. He had those blue eyes, yes. Helpful in making him a star, but inconsequential to his ultimate achievement. What he expressed above all was grace, and comfort within his own skin. If he had demons, he had faced them and dealt with them. Is this my fantasy? Of course. That's what movie stars represent, our fantasies. His wife, children and grandchildren knew him, and which of us would not hope to receive such a loving tribute after we're gone? ("Our father was a rare symbol of selfless humility, the last to acknowledge what he was doing was special. Intensely private, he quietly succeeded beyond measure in impacting the lives of so many with his generosity.")

What I've written about Newman's transformation across the screen from rebel with a cause to subdued defender of a cause is most certainly a fantasy, one to which I imagine many subscribe. I've grown cynical enough that this has become a very easily-deconstructible thing, but I'll let the last vestiges of my idealism shine through to mourn him a bit and check out some of those movies of his that I never saw (Hombre comes to mind).

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Incidentally, I've had a weird instinct to mourn lately in a manner that has never really been a part of my personality until now. David Foster Wallace was a young-ish writer with whose works I never got the chance to acquaint myself while he was alive, and now I'm tearing (slowly) through Infinite Jest.... There's sure to be a post about the work of mourning in culture coming up soon, but for now I have to perform that work myself in a more private manner.

"The Dude abides": The Big Lebowski and Politics as Tragic Farce

David Haglund over at Slate just posted a fascinating piece unpacking some of the contemporary political resonances that The Big Lebowski raises today. I have to admit, it was a ballsy choice to publish an article about a cult farce on Sept. 11, but it struck a chord in me in a way that nothing else on the net did yesterday, seven years after (or is it into) the national trauma that 9/11 marked. (Honestly, I didn't even see much online to mark the occasion, other than a few article-of-the-day postings on Wikipedia--perhaps it's because I look mostly at media sites... Although I did find the bottom paragraph of Jim Emerson's post strangely affecting also...). This has always been seen as the fluffiest of the brothers Coen's fluff pieces, a strange genre exercise that views film noir through a marijuana haze.

But I also think it was an effective choice. I have to admit that I never caught the political commentary that seems to frame the film the first (few) time(s) I saw it: George Bush's speech to open the film as The Dude chooses his Half-n-Half, Walter's comments about the "camel-fuckers in Iraq," etc. It's something that creeps up on you as you re-visit the film, and, I would argue along with Haglund, it only creeps up on you because of its nostalgic retrospective lens. Walter is a neo-con before the term even existed, Haglund suggests, and The Dude's pacifism is the yin to Walter's yang. There's a genuine sweetness in the relationship, an intimation of intimacy among folks so politically divided, a friendliness among the hawk, the dove, and the guy who is constantly "out of [his] element" and who doesn't fit neatly into the prescribed labels of red-state and blue-state. Haglund writes:

This gentle, comic conclusion came to mind while I watched the Coen brothers' new farce, Burn After Reading, which revolves around the misplaced memoirs of an ex-CIA analyst. The new film is a similarly sharp satire of American life, and there are parallels with the Lebowski plot: a greedy attempt at extortion, multiple schemes incompetently botched. The contrast in tone, though, is stark. There's no real friendship in the world of Burn After Reading, there's even less heroism, and paranoia abounds. No one mentions 9/11 or the war in Iraq, but these characters, like their audience, are living in a darker world. The cult of Lebowski, I've begun to suspect, has more than a little nostalgia in it—for a decade when one could poke brilliant fun at the national disposition and the stakes didn't feel so high.

I think it's a great reading of the film, but, more importantly, I think it articulates something deeper about how we relate to media, and particularly to representations of politics within the everyday (as crazy as the everyday in this film is). Haglund notes that the cult of Lebowski has a certain nostalgia for simpler times at the heart of it, but I would suggest that equally important to the nostalgia is the work of mourning that we perform as we watch something like this. I'm reminded of Marx's dictum that history happens first as tragedy and is repeated as farce, but this film seems to suggest that the reverse can be true as well. It would be reductive to suggest that the politics worked themselves on a completely passively ignorant audience when the film was first distributed, but I do think that there's a certain sadness in seeing the politics of it now that wasn't necessarily as present as it is when watching the movie today. The film itself even seems to anticipate this trajectory from farce to tragedy, as it manages to kill off the most likable character in the most over-the-top confrontation in the film. But the film also seems to contain that, to reign it in in a way that history can't, as the Cowboy slowly intones in his comforting drawl that he himself takes comfort from the fact that "The Dude abides."

But in this historical repetition--the repetition whereby we watch a film from two different vantage points, and the repetition that allows us to see Lebowski's Iraq I in the context of Iraq II--to what does The Dude abide? Seemingly, the answer is the intensity of affect that flows personally and politically from one moment to the next. Walter may be an overt neo-con avant la lettre, but The Dude is the one who finds the truth with his gut, the one who in the end realizes that the solution to the mystery really means nothing but its truthiness. He's a desiring-machine--caring only about sensations, like the movement of bowling, or being high, or finding a rug that nebulously "ties the whole room together"--who (despite a politically Leftist past) cannot connect to any politics in the present, but this only makes him resonate more tragic-comically as we move from one political moment to the next. He becomes a better signifier for the kinds of tragedy we live out in our less innocent world today.

I will say, every time I get stressed (and this is definitely true of several of my friends), my first instinct is to watch The Big Lebowski, to find solace in its utter silliness. The experience (for me at least) is becoming more and more bittersweet to me over the years, and this perhaps points to one reason why.

Small break

Hello, you dedicated few readers! It's been a while since my last post (well over two weeks). I was swamped with the end of the semester grading and other small hassles. I'll also be off for the next two weeks on vacation, so look for new posts by the last third of May!

Until then, I'll redirect you to probably the most interesting piece of political writing I've read in the past few months, a piece on the conversation about race in America as filtered through our hesitancy to comment on racial representation. Fittingly, it's written by Ed Gonzalez, one of the film critics that I admire most at least partly because of his consistent inquiry into the politics of representation and the larger social significance of media such as film. Most interestingly, I find his personalization of this issue especially disarming (in a good way) and appropriate: several theorists (D.A. Miller, Eve Sedgewick, etc.) have been trying to engage in a more personalized kind of theory and criticism, but they very rarely balance the personal and the political as precisely and as subtly as Gonzalez does here.

Enjoy, and see you in a few weeks!

Nostalgia and the Task of the Critic

I attended a colloquium given by my colleague Jason Sperb yesterday on images of Detroit and the kinds of nostalgia that articulate a really complicated racial politics (as a point of reference, he posted the first few pages of the argument here a few days earlier). It was an incredibly smart paper, well deserving of the awards it has received, and it left me with a few scattered thoughts about nostalgia and critical methodology.

The first thing that came to mind as he concluded the paper is the manner in which his view of nostalgia is radically different than that of many people who study it. He embedded those critical views of nostalgia and its discontents that circulate in the academy into his argument, but his tone was much more personal, and, as a result, he was more willing to concede the point (so often ignored by other scholars) that, much as we want to critique the implications of nostalgia, it isn't going to go away simply because we're critiquing it. Such an argument would be the equivalent of Laura Mulvey's notorious claims from the 1970s that we as critics should actively work toward the destruction of cinematic pleasure. Not gonna happen. And, even if it could, that wouldn't be productive of any alternative affect that could take its place.

No, Jason highlighted for me (and, in the Q&A it became clear that I may be the only person to come away with this message, so he'll have to correct me if I've just radically misinterpreted his work) the ways in which nostalgia is an affect that actively produces things. It produces a complicated and potentially harmful racial politics, to be sure. But it also can be productive of a certain "humility," as he describes it, a humility to the power of the affect itself and to all that it represents on a purely non-linguistic level. Most importantly, he suggests (by his own example in this paper) that nostalgia can ideally be productive of its own critique. There is thus a productive capacity here (not in the standard marxist sense; I mean the term in the more Deleuzian sense of a kind of imaginative creation that is not really produced by anything other than pure affect itself) that often goes ignored in the academy.

This is especially important to realize since nostalgia (almost by definition) implies the fond remembrance of something that never actually existed. Nostalgia only ever refers to an idealized past, one that intrudes affectively into the present and thus determines present and future politics from a non-existent ground. (Brief aside: For an example of how this is even working in the election right now, compare Clinton to Obama in their appeals to the history of American politics. Clinton seems to promise a return to form before Bush, in other words a return to the Clinton years: Clinton, Part Deux, if you will. Obama uses the complicated networks of history to promote a change into the future. The politics of a productive nostalgia versus that of a presentist historian. What I find so interesting is that so few people have stopped to ask themselves, "What was so great about the 90s? Was that our Golden Age?!" This is nostalgia actively producing a movement into the future that is also a movement into a non-existent past. What we need to do is to allow nostalgia to produce its own critique, in the manner that Obama uses it fairly frequently.) But if we allow nostalgia to produce its own critique even as we are affected by it, we can use this nostalgia in an oppositional manner to produce a new ideal in the future. In some ways, this coalesces with how I discussed the Hitchcock images that only exist for the sake of nostalgia for a past that literally never existed (it is a past of Hollywood fictions): not a desire to produce something that moves forward, but to produce a fake past within the present. And this again provides another contrast with the Lohan/Monroe images: these are a brand of nostalgia that produces a criticism of its own nostalgic affect. It's something that requires more investigation in all kinds of facets of our collective nostalgic experiences, in any case.

The second thing that struck me was the personal tone of his paper. Not a minute passed in which he didn't use the personal pronoun "I" in order to define his own position in relation to the material. As a result, not only the tone but also the structure of the argument shifted: it was occasionally meandering into personal asides that became crucial to the overall argument a few moments later, an recursively worked backward at times to mimic the kinds of nostalgia he discussed. It resembled nothing so much as a blog (I mean this in the most affectionate way possible--I find I read much less "real" criticism ever since I set up my RSS feeds). What was so great about this is that it tended to foreground not only the mediating role of the critic in relaying this argument to an audience: it also foregrounded the contingency of that mediation. This argument could not have been delivered in the same way had Jason not given it; had he not lived in Detroit to get his MA; had he not randomly decided to indulge his nostalgia one day to watch a 46-second clip on YouTube. The same could certainly be said about all of us and what we do as critics, but we so rarely acknowledge that our understanding of culture and the politically-inflected arguments we construct around it are defined entirely by how we are affected by pure contingency. It's a lesson that should provide the scholar with some humility...

Open Secrets: Knowing and Unknowing

The conference this year focused on the theme of knowing, and it is no surprise that the resulting papers we received all either examined or themselves embodied allegories of epistemology. The projects this year all attempted to tackle issues of how knowledge is learned, how it is constructed, how it is retained, how it is mythologized, how it is kept away from people deemed undeserving, how it is kept secret even in open spaces? In our program for the event, we usually have a small blurb which tries in some way to add some sense of cohesion to the chaos of the conference. This year such a blurb was especially important since the topic encouraged papers from a variety of disciplines to wrestle with their own methodologies, their own theoretical assumptions, their own deployment of the knowledge they create. And, despite the disciplinary variety here (or perhaps because of it), our creative director Mica Hilson’s blurb (usually a shot in the dark that only hits some of the tone of the conference) really encapsulated many of the major ideas explored during that weekend:

The term “Open Secret” has always fascinated me – in part, because the meaning of the term is itself something of an “open secret.” An “open secret” could be the “elephant in the room” – an obvious piece of information which gets willfully ignored. Or an “open secret” could be more like Henry James’ “Figure in the Carpet” – something obviously coded, but frustratingly difficult to decode. The academic papers and creative presentations at this conference tangle with both meanings of the “open secret,” and many also raise provocative questions about the relationship between knowledge and power: How are some forms of knowledge (or some secrets) privileged over others? How is knowledge – and, for that matter, how is ignorance – disseminated and deployed? Who wants to know? Who doesn’t?

Written before the event itself, this does a remarkable job of capturing the main concerns of many of the papers and presentations. What he could not have predicted, perhaps, is how these concerns were often directed back at the kinds of knowledge produced by academic discourse. So many of the papers presented pointed out the kinds of impersonations and improvisations of power that we take on methodologically as we engender new knowledge’s or revise old ones.

Some of the standout papers in this regard – that spirit of methodological self-reflexivity – included, perhaps appropriately, an entire panel devoted to “History and Timelessness.” Andrew Fiss of IU’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, encapsulated all of the concerns of the entire conference in his examination of the term “situated knowledges”: those knowledges which are entirely situated in a particular space and time and to which we can never have access. In other words, it will eventually become something of a paradigm of how we see all knowledge, locked in sites which are privileged only to some. Maureen Hattrup offered a historical allegory of how (dis)avowal of knowledge’s situatedness becomes performed by historians. In her unpacking of Carlyle’s use of the “open secret” as a matrix through which all knowledge gets distributed with diminishing returns through different social classes, she provided an important example of the kind of powerful position we as critics place ourselves in, impersonating/performing knowledge in a way that actively produces further social stratification. Meanwhile, perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum of how these concerns operate, Laura Ivins-Hulley explored what could be described as the apotheosis of situated knowledge in her examination of the dreamwork and “inner speech” in the Quay Brothers’ short films.

Underlying all three of those papers was the will to question exactly how situated knowledges get performed as a kind of methodological impersonation by historians (like Carlyle as Hattrup examines him, or Judith Butler as Fiss describes) or performed by oneself and for oneself through dream or film. Clearly the performance of mysterious power that these folks analyze hasn’t disappeared from our academic discourse, and a panel on “Documentary Evidence and Activism” earlier that same day examine and embody this kind of performance within the disciplinary narratives that we form even more explicitly. Kyle Denison Martin of Michigan State offered a brilliant examination of the different narratives (epidemiological, illness, etc.) that characterizes the response to the historical trajectory of AIDS in Haiti and its effects on the phenomenological, social, and political bodies of the people involved. In his examination of the forms of evidence used to biographize Laurent Clerc, Pierre Schmidt (a visiting scholar at Purdue originally from Marc Bloch University) examined ho biography can transform into mythology in ways that are both productive and damaging for the people for whom this narrative purportedly speaks.

In other words, the panel attempted to grapple with the ways in which our methodology in constructing narratives of the culture around us have material ramifications for the bodies we tend to appropriate while “forging” them. Forgery is the appropriate word here, because I think it captures the obsession during this conference with the manner in which our non-fiction cultural narratives and analyses are still fictions to a large extent. Not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, but both of the above panels demonstrate a new awareness of how our academic narratives (previously thought to be safe within the walls of the ivory tower) are actually having real effects as they permeate everyday social reality. As Martin noted, it was in fact university scientists and sociologists who constructed the narratives that have damaging effects on the social policy toward how we treat AIDS in Haiti.

It’s no surprise then that two papers (not in the same panel) actually performed this kind of narratological anxiety in complementary ways. Fredericka Schmadel of the IU Folklore department examined “The Six Publics of Hugo Chavez” by acting as a mediator who could speak from these six different perspectives “in their words.” The result was a literal impersonation of several different figures with different narrative vantage points of how they see Hugo Chavez from the realm of everyday life. From a vantage point traditionally diametrically opposed to such anthropological detail, Elizabeth Hoover, an MFA in the IU English Department, also recreated the perspectives of a cultural event through the voices of those who participated. In this case, the event was a lynching at the close of the nineteenth century, and her poetry captured the voices of those who performed the lynching. While the two methods of narrativization seem to be wholly opposed from one another, this conference revealed that they are in some ways inverse methods of performing exactly the same concerns. When asked why she chose to craft dramatic monologues from the voices of lynchers, Hoover responded that constructing the master narrative of the lynching from an “objective” perspective (the first poem in her series) was the easy part: it also engages in the spectatorial pleasures of the lynching without really critiquing it or revealing anything new. Schmadel had similar things to say about her own mediation of these “real” voices: the goal was to critique the very process of mediation which so easily crafts a master narrative while ignoring the voices that compose it in the first place.

Between the methodologies of knowledge production and the end narratives that have socio-political ramifications, the conference also obsessively examined how bodies either could or could not speak for themselves, how bodies are co-opted to stand in for some knowledge narrative or are rendered unspeakable. Thus, we had Courtney Wennerstrom and Jeff Sartain’s examination of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts”; Laura Bivona’s analysis of the Body Worlds exhibition; Elizabeth Melly’s examination of how Lavinia’s body stood in as poetic knowledge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; Emily Houlik-Ritchey’s look at female dismemberment in Spanish sonnets; Chris Harvey’s look at the dismembered female bodies of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut; and Mica Hilson’s provocative look at depictions of straight men in gay porn.

(Incidentally, I haven’t had a chance to discuss how these issues get translated into projects on a grander scale, having unfortunately missed the panels devoted to national and global issues.)

This is just the work done by grad students: I haven’t mentioned the exciting work discussed by our keynote speaker, Melissa Littlefield of the University of Illinois. Her keynote lecture was titled, “Guilty Knowledge: Unlocking the Suspect Brain through fMRI and Brain Fingerprinting,” and it nicely mapped the trajectory of the entire conference that I’ve traced, from a critique of metholodologies of knowledge production to the narratives those methodologies produce, mediated in turn by a body thought to be readable by “experts” and “professionals.” Part of her larger project (a cultural history of lie detection), Littlefield sees the use of fMRI mapping and brain fingerprinting in a post-9/11 climate as yet another way of shifting an ideologically loaded understanding of “guilt” onto a biological entity (falsely) perceived to be beyond ideology. Scientists who develop this technology ignore that their methodology entails the construction of a “biological mind” and assumes the existence of a literal “nature of Truth” that can be decoded with the proper equipment. Nevertheless, such narratives constructed out of such seemingly academic assumptions have widespread ramifications on the politics of detainment and justice in this environment.

In some ways, her paper taps into what I feel is actually the dominant theme of the entire conference, in that her investigation into this scientific method reveals the desire to produce a kind of plausible deniability in how certain types of discursive and bodily knowledges are read and deployed on a larger social level. Plausible deniability seems to be a missing element in how we conceive of the power/knowledge nexus: not merely disavowal of particular knowledge, but the construction of an entire knowledge system to make such disavowal seem justified under public scrutiny. Certainly this is what Carlyle was constructing when he refused to reveal the open secret of history except to privileged audiences; certainly the kinds of situated knowledge that characterized the performative impersonations in much of the work here was trying to react against that plausible deniability. This conference was an invigorating attempt to allow us to peel away at our own disciplinary assumptions about how knowledge is deployed, and it hopefully bodes well for the future of these fields that we’re becoming ever more self-reflexive about how knowledge is kept secret even out in the open.

Belief in the Everyday on the Blogosphere

People may have stumbled upon the 90DayJane blog in the past couple of weeks, in which an anonymous young woman claimed that she would commit suicide online in 90 days. The blog was something of a phenomenon, with people immediately jumping into the comments boards with many different kinds of reactions, from empathy to encouragement that she do the deed.

Unsurprisingly, the whole thing turned out to be untrue, and she’s now taken the site down. Reactions to the fact that the site was a lie have been interesting: Kim Voyner at Cinematical reports parenthetically of the “personal art project,” “that’s ‘hoax’ to you and me,” and the Defamer piece that initially broke the story is filed under “Webtards.”

More provocatively and productively, Voyner frames the entire incident as an example of the manner in which mediated versions of the “everyday” have penetrated into how we actually live in the everyday:

Jane certainly isn't the first person to document her troubles, real or imagined, on the internet. I remember several years ago, back when the word "blog" was not yet a buzzword, happening across the website of a young man purporting to be documenting his sucky life, which largely consisted of being poor and miserable (but not too poor to afford a computer and internet access, apparently) and popping his mean, bitchy grandfather's boils and carbuncles. Thankfully, he was not documenting that experience on video for the world to see. Point is, between Google Video, YouTube, and blogs that make it easier than ever for the average Joe -- or Jane -- to put videos out there, anyone can become a documentarian of his or her own life, however exciting, mundane, depressing or asinine it may be.

The claim here is the somewhat familiar one that the public forum constructed through the internet and convergence video technology have encouraged an unprecedented interest in the workings of everyday life. While popping boils was not on the menu for this particular site, the implication is that people still would have tuned in to see it. This thankfully isn’t the standard argument about the lack of privacy that this encourages, but instead poses the interesting suggestion that the glut of the everyday seems to eliminate its overall impact, that we are no longer able to use mediated narratives of the everyday as a legitimate investigation of its functions.

Henry Jenkins recently returned from the DYI Video Conference at USC in which precisely these kinds of issues about the mediation of the everyday were posed. Not surprisingly,

I find myself taking a different perspective, drawing on the old feminist claim that "the personal is political" and thus that many of the films about "everyday" matters might still speak within a larger political framework. A case in point might be a disturbing video shown during the youth media session (which was curated by young people from Open Youth Networks and Mindy Farber): a young man had been filming in a school cafeteria when a teacher demands that he stops; when he refuses, she leads him to the principal's office, berating him every step along the way, and then the two of them threaten to confiscate his camera, all the time unaware that it is continuing to film what they are saying. The young man distributed the video via YouTube, thus exposing what took place behind closed doors to greater scrutiny by a larger public. Read on one level, this is a trivial matter -- a misbehaving youth gets punished, rightly or wrongly. But on another level, the video speaks powerfully about what it is like to be a student subjected to manditory education and the strategies by which adult authorites seek to isolate the boy from any base of support he might have in the larger community of students and feels free to say and do what they want behind closed doors.

For Jenkins, even the most mundane documentations of the everyday can become an overtly political act, even if he’s still wary about the individualized focus of these forays. But it may be instructive to think of other media at the moment which offered new potential for a collective (re)experience of the everyday and which threaten constantly to disengage the individual from the collective, thereby taking the critique out of the documentation of the mundane. For instance, for decades now, critics have opined how movies had started out as a collective experience with genuine potential for social change and has increasingly become individualized and alienating (a process increased by the rise of home entertainment and digital formats for distribution). But if we stop our nostalgia for a moment and examine the medium itself (and, in turn, the internet as well), we can still find a productive power that is immanent in the kinds of networks it creates. In Cinema II: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze writes of the invention of new worlds through the documentation of the everyday: “[I]t is because the world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality. Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped” (170). In this manner, for Deleuze (and this is implied in Jenkins as well), the purpose of art is to construct an idea of “the people” in which we can believe:

Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The moment of the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute. (217)

It is the purpose of all art, of all media, whether film or the internet or the new digital convergence of the two, to play not toward a preconceived understanding of the masses, but to invent an idea of how people should live in the world. It’s idealistic as hell, an ardent plea for a genuinely productive power that can have the power to create new networks of people in which to live and die together.

At least superficially, Jane claims that the goal of her blog was to create this kind of network, to create a “people” in which her death would leave a void. In her final farewell (for the blog, not her life), she writes,

I thought this mirror might reflect the isolation everyday people feel and the lack of true human connection on the internet.

It is my feeling that the internet is the best and worst example of human interaction. This was painfully proven to me by reading every comment and every email. I believe I owed that to everyone. I know we all saw the dark side of the reactions in the blog comments. There was so much hate, immaturity and apathy. But, I truly wish everyone could see the beauty and honesty in the emails; many people feel like Jane (me). People have been more real and heartfelt than I thought was possible. I owe them a debt of gratitude for showing me the difference between people's reactions and their true feelings. I understand.

She frames the site as a kind of artistic investigation of the effects of a media formation’s impact on how people relate to one another, on how they’re “networked,” if we’re using the language of the medium itself. But the results of her own “art project” are kind of unsurprising: people can be hateful, people can be helpful. This is really where I feel that she falls short and where the label “webtard” may be fitting: it fails to dig deeper beyond the purely superficial. She scratches our collective skin but refuses to dig her nails under it, to penetrate the everyday and to produce the everyday as a kind of allegory in the manner that Deleuze envisions: Jane’s journey is cut short artificially once it gets too “real” and, rather than allowing the blog to persist as a forum through which a “people” could genuinely emerge, the forum is closed down with a kind of smug self-satisfaction that borders on an exploitation of those who genuinely either believe in the power of art to produce or in the tragic deaths that can be a real result of our hyper-mediated age.

To close this media sermon, I’ll let Deleuze have the last word, both because (unlike Jane) he saw a real glimmer of hope in how we interact with media art and because, like so many people, he was also so overwhelmed with his pain in the world (from lung cancer) that he actually took his own life. He wrote:

Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. . . . Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). . . . . Because the point is to discover and restore belief in the world, before or beyond words . . . . It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named: the ‘first name’, and even before the first name. (171-2)

The necessary question to pose here is, when we’re mired in the insincere, sensationalistic, exploitative world of “artists” like 90DayJane, in our current transition into a new kind of convergence technology, what kind of a belief do we have the ability to produce? What kind of people will we create to populate our brave new world? What kinds of bodies will we construct, and what names will we eventually give them?

Let us hope that they are not given the name "webtard".

Politics of Consumption ... Literally

Okay, so this isn't (strictly speaking) about "film, media, and culture," but I think it's a relevant item in looking at the turn in our cultural politics.

According to a recent article in Scientific American, a new Mississippi law mandates that restaurants refuse to serve customers falling within the legally prescribed limits of what the legislature deems "obese":

We kid you not. The controversial measure (state House Bill 282) would prohibit eateries from serving food to "any person who is obese based on criteria prescribed by the state health department." The department would monitor compliance and have the power to revoke violators' permits. (Pity the poor waiter with the thankless task of denying corpulent customers service, leaving them with the humiliating dilemma of either twiddling their thumbs as their less hefty chums chow down or slinking (storming?) out and slogging to a supermarket or over the state line for sustenance.)

I find it appalling on a number of levels. The most obvious implication to me is that this is an extension of the kind of legislative policy dictated by concerns for "public health" that have been cropping up everywhere. When a smoking ban was enacted on campus at Indiana University, for instance, it made me wonder whether this was indicating a fundamental change in how our legislative policy would be dictated: after all, if even the existence of smoke on a public university campus could be a health hazard, then wouldn't the existence of Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Chik-Fil-A on the same campus pose a similar (and less scientifically suspect) health threat?

The other destructive implication, hinted at in the article itself, is the manner in which this law targets specific kinds of consumers. According to the article, the law has already drawn protest from the Coalition of Fat Rights Activists as discriminatory against larger folks. And while it undeniably is discriminatory in that manner, I'm more concerned with the shift in the manner of legislating consumption. In the past, laws like this would target the product (Prohibition, although not really justified by heath concerns; laws in cities about the use of butter in restaurant kitchens; even local or statewide smoking bans). But the Mississippi law targets a specific set of consumers of indistinct products. The laws of consumption have evolved from a supply-side to a demand-side legislation, meaning that our laws have finally undergone the kind of shift in attitudes toward consumption that corporations have by now exhibited for several decades. In this sense, this one law (if it becomes representative of a general trend) signifies a shift from a government that recognizes the so-called "culture industry's" exploitation of a monolithic public to one that recognizes how corporations are dividing up the public into particular audiences with specific social identities through particular kinds of consumption habits.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. In some ways, if we're assuming that a government's role is to protect its citizens from certain kinds of exploitative behaviors domestically or abroad, this is a good development: it can operate as a counter-measure against the kinds of narrowcasting enacted by corporate logic. However, the more likely possibility (and this particular law seems to embody this problem) is that legislation which operates on this kind of logic merely reinforces the kinds of social identity created by corporate logic in the first place, and continues to allow the most culturally disadvantaged categories among them to remain culturally disadvantaged in legally sanctioned ways.

Fandom and Industry: The Educational Model of Culture

Nancy Baym over at Online Fandom recently discussed a quotation in which Dr. Who executive producer Russell T. Davies argues that American sci-fi producers "are way too engaged with their fandom. They all need to step back." What's interesting is the commentary that follows. Suppressing the initial knee-jerk reaction against such a statement (one that I shared, actually), Baym begins to explain that producers' over-engagement in fans' discourse (and vice versa) really benefits neither party. For instance, on the part of fans who are overly invested in the forums provided for them by producers, they become merely a subsidiary of the industry itself.

One of the key points I find myself coming back to repeatedly is the importance of letting fandoms have their independence — providing enough information, goodies, and attention to nurture it, but letting it belong always to the fans who create it. When fandom is a subsidiary of the production company it sets everything up for power struggles, for self-censorship, for legal-enforcement dilemmas, for feelings of accountability and betrayal that are beyond the bounds of duty on both sides. Fans need their own spaces to do their own things.

This is something like the party line in fan studies these days. More surprising is how this formulation gets reversed:

Fandoms can’t operate as though they belong to and are supervised by artists and producers. By the same token, artists can’t operate under continuous supervision (even internally imposed) of the most active fans any more than I, as a teacher, can forget about the students who aren’t as into my classes or the content of what I know and believe needs teaching and just teach what they want to hear to the ones who love me most. I’d be negligent and odds are my classes wouldn’t be as good. The fans who get into fandom may be more important than other fans in terms of the promotion, spearheading, and enthusiasm they provide. They may provide the most trenchant critiques and hence are usually worth listening to. But they are still a small segment of the audience, and producers need to think audience as much as they think fandoms. But even more than that — producers and artists need to operate first and foremost under the guidance and supervision of their own muses. It’s their creative process, just as fandom is ours.

There are two points of interest here. The first is the suggestion that artistic productions will somehow deteriorate over time if the producers are overly concerned with the needs and desires of their biggest fans. It intuitively recaps the time-worn logic that fans don't always know what's best for the objects of which they are fans. But the statement also counter-intuitively reframes this in terms of a mass audience: producers can only recreate the magic of their television series (or whatever) if they try to appeal to the larger audience that they were initially targeting. This seems to reverse the logic that so many people assume (in an equally knee-jerk manner as my initial reaction to the quotation above) when they discuss mass audiences: this old logic asserts that appealing to the mass audience means appealing to the lowest common denominator, something that ultimately ruins the cultural object. (This latter is always couched in some equally ugly and elitist assumptions that anything bound within a commercial logic is necessarily invalid as art, an assumption that many scholars, including myself, have devoted their careers to debunking.)

And this reversal of the usual logic of the marketplace leads me to the next startling point about Baym's analysis: the pedagogical analogy that she draws to illustrate fan-industry relationships. The classroom image is an incredibly loaded one, as she seems to be drawing upon the image of pedagogy as medicine for a majority of students and as candy to a devoted few. This necessarily creates a kind of power dynamic in which the teacher is deciding what is "best" for students, using the validations and critiques of the best and the brightest as a kind of support for these choices as they turn against the resistant students. It's not a dynamic that I necessarily disagree with (it's something with which I have become all too familiar as an instructor in certain classes in the past): it's just an interesting dynamic to apply to fan-industry relationships. Where does one isolate the power in this kind of dynamic: certainly the instructor has the most power, and this is reinforced by the "good" students who encourage the teacher to push further into territory that may not be entirely comfortable for "resistant" students, who will then attempt to subvert the instructor's authority in various ways. What happens when we apply this model to fandom? To me it gives almost too much power to the producers, but it does chart an important distinction between the super-fans who clearly have a hand in how the object turns out and the casual viewers who get boned in the end.

Even more evocative to me than the power relationships is what happens when we take the analogy literally and suggest that cultural objects really are instructive in very real and powerful ways and that fans and casual viewers alike are merely students in the cultural classroom. Not a huge leap to suggest that culture teaches us particular attitudes, strategies for social living, and identities to perform: Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe have discussed this manner of "cultural pedagogy" in the introduction to their edited volume Kinderculture (a must-read for anyone interested in issues of cultural politics that are imparted to youths through mass culture). However, if we add these bizarre power dynamics into the mix, one is left with the impression (if we follow the example set in this analogy) that the "bad" students or casual viewers end up learning more in a cultural sense than those "good" students or rabid fans: they are challenged more by the culture surrounding them. And since, as many before me have said, there's no way outside of the game of culture, they learn better to adapt to the rules of the game. Does this suggest a paradox about power in culture: that those who seem most at the disadvantage in the ways of cultural politics are actually in the best position to resist?

Best Films of 2007 #7: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

As one of the few people on the planet who hasn't read any of the novels (yet), I was completely blown away by this film. Order of the Phoenix is probably the first movie in this list that starts the trend of an achingly melancholic meditation on our current state of affairs (this trend will not let up throughout the rest of this countdown), constructing a world in which our hero's sense of being alone becomes thoroughly palpable (the absence of his parents has never seemed so present, and this is emphasized even more as he loses his last real relative) even as he surrounds himself with an admiring group of proteges with whom he can face his personal demons. But this is also a film that realizes that a genuine politics emerges from personal relations (that theoretical mantra about the personal being the political all too often misinterpreted in the reverse manner, that politics impinges upon the personal, only reinstating a destructive desire to separate the two). After all, throughout the course of the film, we see a government official respond to a personal grudge by constructing a security state at Hogwarts, using controversy around this kind of domestic threat to encroach unjustly on lands that fall under the sovereignty of other peoples seen as sub-human (the entire centaur sub-plot). All this in a children's movie!

It's dark stuff, in other words, and a (good) sign of the times that we're educating our children in the often subtle and insidious ways in which our global and domestic politics actually operates. And in the image of our lonesome hero and his friends flanked by rows and rows of prophecies of the future (that resilient image of the crystal ball) as he steps up to fight wraiths who emerge from the shadows and yet who are all too familiar, we have a much more positive and complex image of conflict than is offered in some of the more deliberately "subversive" or "topical" films this year (see, for instance, the execrable The Kingdom, although more on that later). In the final reel of the film, Harry holds in his hands a prophecy which promises to unlock all of the epistemological problems and gaps that have led to this conflict, but he wisely tosses it aside in the realization that it is precisely the attempt to seal all knowledge and foresee the future in a single-minded way that gives strength to his enemies. That this happens just moments before a devastatingly brief death scene only punctuates how complicated this politics within the nexus of power and knowledge can actually get. In other words, the film offers an excellent example of a lonesome young hero, navigating the dark, labyrinthine depths of the current political climate, and making some of the ultimate sacrifices while doing so. In this sense, Harry Potter is not only a wonderful role model for children, but one to whom we can all look for guidance.