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Introduction
 


by Dr David Gerstner

All Rights Reserved © David Gerstner and Deep South
Deepsouth v.6.n.3 (Spring 2000)

 

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Theoretical Models and Critical Intervention

 

We began the course by thinking about some recurring theoretical terms in discussions of media: culture, technology, history, and "media" itself. Brian Winston's book, Media Technology and Society: A History, From the Telegraph to the Internet, served as an arc to the course. Winston's argument is that the idea of the internet as some sort of "technology revolution" is ahistorical. Winston positions the nineteenth century as key to understanding the phenomenon of global communication in the age of capitalism. Others will suggest a much earlier time frame and, in fact, claim that globalization is (like so many concepts) nothing really new and is quite simply the successful enterprise of cultural imperialism. Susan Stewart, Edward Said, and Paul Hirsch initiated our early discussions about the workings of modern culture and its economic/ideological implications. How does the political intervene in the everyday? Which media have developed to inculcate the political and, in another instance, satisfied human desire (materially)? How?

 

During the lectures I entitled, Mediated Places: Concerns of the Body, we began our investigation into the uses and emplacements of the body in theories of media. In what way is the body articulated in the public discourses and places of media? Through the body, we looked to expand the concept of media. In other words, our theoretical focus bridged architecture-as-media with the historical conceptualization of the human body. Italian Renaissance architecture is informative here in its emphasis on the body as a metaphor for the building structure itself and its place in the community. From here our discussion leapt ahead into an examination of Frank Lloyd Wright's late nineteenth-century concept of "organicity;" organicity is a theory that converged geographical place with architecture and body. With Wright we considered what traditions have carried through twentieth-century architecture from the Renaissance and in what ways architecture mediates the concept of the body. Our readings in Stud: Architectures of Masculinity further developed these contemporary architectural places in relation to gender (for example: the design of a 1950s penthouse in the pages of Playboy have particular implications to its layout, as it were). Dennis Hollier's work helped to critically think through the use of metaphor in architectural discourse.

 

My lecture, Complicating the Media Set-Up, gave us some vocabulary for more recent media. Pierre Sorlin's articles especially opened discussion in this arena. Volosinov's essay on the sign and the meaning it enables is a seminal Marxist work in the field of linguistics and communications. Before Derrida's theories of play and the complications of extracting meaning from the sign, Volosinov (who some argue was actually Mikhail Bakhtin) had already shaken the premise of sign as "true meaning." In any case, if we are to understand media as a vital component of communication and a bearer of meaning we need to theorize the complex cultural interactions triggered by the sign.

 

The exploration of the sign is key to the lectures I entitled, The Complexities of Communication. Roland Barthes' writings ("Myth Today") have been enormously influential and important in scholarly discussions about the workings of media in popular culture. Advertising, fashion, photographs, novels are endeared subjects for Barthes' interrogation of the operations and dimensions of our own cultural myths. How do they speak to and reinforce cultural ideologies? In what way do these mediated events function in our cultural unconscious? Rebecca Burns in this collection persuasively utilizes Barthes' theoretical framework so as to identify the ideological mythology underscoring New Zealand's (over)-earnest advertising campaign to promote the nation as an ideal tourist destination.

 

Stuart Hall of the Cultural Studies Programme in Birmingham, England (a.k.a the "Birmingham School") is the founder of what we now call "cultural studies" and "popular culture." Hall develops Barthes' key ideas into a consideration of the function of signs and codes in culturally specific and ideologically fraught arenas (issues of race, class, and gender are an essential part of Hall's understanding of cultural studies). Meaning is undoubtedly a complex affair. Nonetheless, the field of cultural studies demands that we explore the intricate and diverse ways media disseminated information and how that information is received.

 

The emergence of television in the twentieth-century has, if anything, allowed for a rich and highly contestable forum for debate. With the domain of the middle-class-family home settling into its own ideological framework, television has contributed to both the security of that ideology as well as its often painful and ironic dismantling (as any good Douglas Sirk film brilliantly demonstrates). How might we understand the intrusion of this particular medium into our home? Is it simply an extension of our bodies similar to the lived experience of that other medium architecture? Is television nothing more than a conspiracy of capitalist propaganda that feeds political fodder directly into our homes? Is channel-surfing nothing more than an historical reprise of Roman activity at the Coliseum? Our readings from Pierre Bourdieu and Samuel Weber offer two different ways of thinking about our relationship to this peculiar box that transmits sound and image into our everyday lives.

 

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