Reconstruction 5.2 (Spring 2005)


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An Editorial Introduction to "Reconstructing Media"/ Markus Rheindorf

<1> Media [pl. of medium, from the Latin noun medium, meaning ‘the middle’ or ‘the public eye’]. Although no longer one of the top buzzwords in the humanities or cultural criticism, if you prefer, ‘the media’ are still around, in the sense of both an ever more elusive and ramified empirical reality and as a conceptual field marked by the theoretical debates of several decades. Whether dealing with synchronic analysis or historical change, a specific medium or the media in general, a singular text, a group of texts or genre, studies relying on – or should we say, invoking – mediality as a concept invariably trail a number of unresolved quandaries, some of them theoretical, some methodological. Having said that, one must of course hasten to acknowledge the many serious and inspired efforts to solve these quandaries in the past, whether the issue at stakes was that of media specificity, of the social or technological construction of media (or the media’s construction of the social and technological), the economic and judicial aspects of media, or the production of meaning in a more abstract sense.

<2> Regardless of the specific orientation of a given approach or its disciplinary framework, the problematics of ‘the media’ always seems to return us to questions of mediation. Whether these questions are framed in terms of ‘text’ and ‘context’, ‘meaning’ and ‘society’, or ‘effectivity’ and ‘conditions of possibility’, one might easily paraphrase them as concerned with the relation of one empirical reality to another. Although this relation can no longer be thought of as a unidirectional causality in the sense of one reality producing the other – texts procuring meaning, contexts producing texts, and so on – the notion of a determination or conditioning of effects, even if it is couched within a ‘soft determinism’ that views the relationship as reciprocally constitutive, seems to have remained a necessary support for much analysis. And while ‘the media’ remain nominally the locus of the process of mediation, their ‘agency’ has been fractured and dispersed into innumerable aspects. Those of us professionally and/or passionately invested in the analysis or theorization of one or another aspect of ‘the media’ have been left in a field of loose ends, an enormously rich hunting ground, open to any number of approaches.

<3> In recent years, the problem of mediation has increasingly been addressed in the form of inter- or transdisciplinary approaches to theorizing or analyzing the media. If this is to provide a workable solution, however, it cannot be taken to mean, as it is too often in the academy, that one continues to do basically what one has been doing all along but add some footnotes to sources from outside the discipline. Renouncing the power of the institutional boundaries of disciplines, the critic or analyst will draw on disciplines as needed, critically and reflectively appropriating the most useful perspectives and methods. However, the transdisciplinarity of cultural studies demands that one take the projects and questions of other disciplines seriously enough to do the work necessary to map out the connections of a given phenomenon, to truly enter the field of other disciplines rather than simply allude to them. In a sense, then, each of the contributions to this special issue of reconstruction can be read as an attempt to come to terms with one or several of the quandaries presented by “the media” by way of inter- or transdisciplinary study. They are, however, also intriguing case studies of media or media events in specific contexts, and can be read as such.

<4> Christine Scodari’s and Becky Mulvaney’s “Nothing’s Gonna Give? Age, Gender, and Cultures of the Screen” investigates the 2003 romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers as exceptional in its featuring a fifty-something woman as leading actress. Beginning with an analysis of the filmic text itself, the authors do not confine themselves to it, but go on to critically engage with its reception in both the press and academia. While the focus is thus shifted from the film to the “meta-“ and “para-texts” produced in the course of its reception and promotion, the underlying questions asked by Scodari and Mulvaney persist: What are the relationships between age, gender, and contemporary screen cultures? How are these relationships necessarily determined and by what agency? Acknowledging the many dimensions in which these questions have to be posed, the article continues by reporting the results of a series of focus groups taking the form of “casting” a hypothetical Hollywood Blockbuster. Again, the relationship between age, gender, and the hegemonic type of film narrative are approached from a number of angles, taking into account the demographic composition of the groups involved. The authors’ multi-faceted inquiry is rounded off with a survey of online discussion groups’ reception of Something’s Gotta Give and a conclusion bringing together the various perspectives taken in the course of the overall argument.

<5> In her essay on “Who Owns the Medium Owns the Message? The Ambiguity of the Right to Communicate in the Age of Convergence”, Aliaa Dakroury frames the issue mediation in terms of media ownership and control. The question asked in the title – “Who Owns the Medium Owns the Message?” – in its rhetorical rather than literal form, indicates the skepticism with which Dakroury approaches too narrow a vision of determination. In the terms of his case study, this means questioning the apparent incommensurability of the economic convergence of multi-national media conglomerates and the right to communicate. To do so, Dakroury offers substantial analyses of both the philosophical/judicial history of the right to communicate as a basic human right and the economic/regulative developments underlying the recent trend towards convergence in the media. Dakroury follows these theoretical explorations with a case study of CanWest Global Communications Corporation, Canada’s fastest growing media conglomerate, and its clashes with the Canadian Journalist’s for Free Expression (CJFE) over alleged infringements of the right to communicate.

<6> Kim Blank’s “CNNing and Showdown Iraq”, too, provides an innovative model for the interaction and mutual transfusion of case study and the work of theorizing. Although the backdrop to Blank’s essay is CNN’s cultural significance and the programming it ran under the “SHOWDOWN: Iraq” banner, it repeatedly returns to the busy intersection of media, technology, popular culture, and mass culture. Characterized by its author as “restless”, the piece strategically employs a non-linear discursive strategy deliberately mimicking the practices of channel surfing and the constant interruption of the commercial break. It re-contextualizes, in other words, the critical perspective by re-inventing it through the habitual practices of popular or mass culture. The vision of ‘CNN’ which emerges out of this strategy is that of a signifier established by means of the network’s practices reproduction, self-representation, and self-promotion, and of its saturated presence in hardware, software, and various conduits of transmission.

<7> Markus Rheindorf’s contribution offers some reflections on the critical potential of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “uebersichtliche Darstellung” or “concise presentation”, his self-consciously employed method of philosophical writing in the 1930ies, and explores its theoretical and methodological potential for the practice of cultural history. In so doing, it articulates a substantial critique of conventional disciplinary historiography, taking as its case in point the history of (early) film theory. Rheindorf then takes up the suggestions gained from juxtaposing Wittengstein’s method with conventional accounts of the history of early film theory and suggests concrete ways in which these might be put to practical use in the form of a cultural history of film theory.

<8> David R. Cole’s “Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet” locates the literacies of the internet – itself read as “the end game of western technology” or the Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere – in a contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an “unlimited realm of resource” and the site of a brand of “western nihilism containing a sense of relativism, collapse of meaning and cultural schizo-cynicism”. Remarkably, in the course of his argument, Coles does not appropriate the internet, does not simplify it according to his own vision of its potential or mission – but allows it to remain a place of cultural schizophrenia, to be navigated only by means of the corresponding learning, acceptance, and practice of “schizo literacy”.

<9> In engaging with the “culture of filth”, Marisol Cortez’s “Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com” questions contemporary cultural criticism’s emphasis on shit’s textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of “filth” and “waste” through an ecocritical reading of the scatological – the meeting of brown and green – performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective on shit as a familiar and knowable part of symbolic systems is instantiated by Cortez in her study of a website dedicated to the “(relatively) intellectual appreciation of poop humor”. As such, PoopReport.com realizes a remarkable thread of nascent political self-consciousness which Cortez identifies, investigates, and develops further as the concept of “shamelessness”. It is in its relation to such open shameless as practiced on PoopReport.com that the scatological, read from an ecocritical point of view, may open up alternate ways of conceptualizing bodily and social economy, for agency and connection to place.

<10> Many of the theoretical issues raised by the papers included in this issue of reconstruction, whether individually or in concert, are taken up by Judith Reitstaetter and Markus Rheindorf in their interview with Theo van Leeuwen. The piece that grew out of the initial interview, “Media discourse: Social Semiotics and the study of multimodal discourse”, is a collaborative effort of the interviewers and van Leeuwen, having circulating between the three for an extended period. It has, however, retained the structure of an interview framed by a brief survey of van Leeuwen’s contribution to the fields of social semiotics and visual analysis. The questions it poses are balanced between a more general take on semiotic theory and analysis (as well as their reciprocal relationship) and a more detailed interrogation of the intricacies of van Leeuwen’s theoretical practice. In particular, it seeks to open up the potential of bringing together cultural studies and the kind of semiotics that van Leeuwen has been promoting: aligned with a critical agenda and embracing a view of discourse as social practice that entail a theoretical and methodological openness to the contributions of other disciplines.

<11> In her essay on “Fractured Identities: Siblings and Doubles in Video Games” Laurie Taylor explores how certain norms of video game design – originally derived from technological constraints of code space and processing speed – continue as the narrative parameters of many if not most contemporary video games. Synthesizing approaches from literary studies and narratology, Taylor offers an innovative angle on the fractured identities of doubles and siblings as the narrative correspondence to now largely obsolete technological constraints. Game-play, related to but nevertheless distinct from the literary type of narrative, as Taylor insists, is a key factor in determining what might be called the identity politics of video games. Shifting her perspective to include a Deleuzian point of view, the author goes on to argue that such structures as created by mirroring characters and/or game worlds effectively remove parental figures from power. What appears as a mere aberration within conventional psychoanalytic terms thus takes on the quality of a utopian family as it installs the sibling/double relation, i.e. the relation between equals, as a radical alternative to traditional familial structures.


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