Above, the program for the conference “It’s Not Television” in Frankfurt, where Florian Groß, Felix Brinker, and I will be presenting this coming week. (More about our talks — and links to our abstracts — here.)
Category: Theory
Post-Cinematic Affect: Theorizing Digital Movies Now — #SCMS13
At the upcoming conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (March 6-10, 2013 in Chicago), I will be participating in a panel on “post-cinematic affect” with Steven Shaviro (who, literally, wrote the book on the topic), Therese Grisham (who organized a great roundtable discussion on the topic in La Furia Umana, which I was also proud to be a part of — and which can alternatively be found here if La Furia Umana is down), and Julia Leyda (who also participated in the roundtable and will serve as respondent on our SCMS panel).
Here is a description of our panel, which is scheduled for Thursday, March 7, from 3:00 – 4:45 pm (Session H):
Post-Cinematic Affect: Theorizing Digital Movies Now
If cinema and television, as the dominant media in the twentieth century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the twenty-first century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? Continuing from roundtable discussions on “post-cinematic affect” in the online film journal La Furia Umana, this panel explores the emergence of a new “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams) or “episteme” (Foucault) in post-millennial film, one that is evident in new formal strategies, radically changed conditions of viewing, and new ways in which films address their spectators. Contemporary films, from blockbusters to independents and the auteurist avant-garde, use digital cameras and editing technologies, incorporating the aesthetics of gaming, webcams, and smartphones, to name a few, as well as Internet media. For this reason alone, we argue, the aesthetic boundaries between art-house film and blockbuster have become blurred. Moreover, the aesthetic elements of contemporary film do not just simulate the environments created by digital technologies and media, but break more radically with the geometry and logic of films in the twentieth century. In this way, they reflect or transmit the effects, not only of digitization, but also of economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. But these changes have only begun to be theorized. In this panel, we continue the work of theorizing a critical aesthetics of film culture today. The papers take as their critical starting-points David Bordwell on “intensified continuity,” Matthias Stork on “chaos cinema,” and Steven Shaviro on post-cinematic affect and “post-continuity.”
The papers explore key critical issues for analyzing post-cinematic affect, in terms of the ambivalent aesthetics of recent films exhibiting a longing for cinema as the lost object of desire (Therese Grisham on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo), post-continuity stylistics (Steven Shaviro on Tony Scott’s films, particularly his 2005 Domino), and philosophical and technological approaches to the contemporary camera (Shane Denson on images “discorrelated” from human sense ratios in a variety of recent films).
Bibliography:
Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3. (Spring, 2002), pp. 16–28.
Grisham, Therese, with Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro. “Roundtable Discussion on the Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2.” http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=385:roundtable-discussion-about-post-cinematic&catid =59:la-furia-umana-nd-10-autumn-2011&Itemid=61
Shaviro, Steven. “Post-Continuity”. Blog posting: The Pinocchio Theory, March 26, 2012, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1034
Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2010.
Stork, Mattias. “Video Essay: Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking.” IndieWire, Press Play, August 24, 2011. Retrieved on August 30, 2012.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video_essay_matthias_stork_calls_out_the_chaos_cinema
Finally, here are links to the individual abstracts:
Therese Grisham, “Martin Scorsese and Hugo (2011): Our Reluctant Contemporaries”
Steven Shaviro, “Angel of Fire: Post-Continuity in Tony Scott’s Domino (2005)”
Film & TV Reading Group: Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication
On December 5, 2013, the Film & TV Reading Group will meet (at 4 pm in room 613, Conti-Hochhaus) to discuss “The Ecstasy of Communication” by Jean Baudrillard (pp. 126 – 134 in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster). Julia Schmedes will moderate the discussion. As always, all are welcome to join us! (Feel free to contact me for more info — email address can be found on the “About” page.)
Cary Wolfe and Timothy Morton on Environmental Humanities
Out Now: American Comic Books and Graphic Novels
American Comic Books and Graphic Novels is a special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies (issue 56.4), edited by Daniel Stein and Christina Meyer (my co-editors on the forthcoming Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads), together with Micha Edlich from the University of Mainz. The special issue, which I just found in my mailbox, has turned out to be a very nice collection of essays, bringing together theorizations of comics and graphic narratives as a medium or medial form and close readings of specific case studies. Also included is an interview with David Mack, conducted by Henry Jenkins. Daniel Stein has posted the full table of contents at his academia.edu page (here).
My own contribution, “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures,” continues my recent explorations of the nexus of seriality and/as mediality. Here’s the abstract:
This essay argues that Marvel’s Frankenstein comics of the 1960s and 1970s offer a useful case study in the dynamics of serial narration, both as it pertains to comics in particular and to the larger plurimedial domain of popular culture in general. Distinguishing between linear and non-linear forms of narrative seriality—each of which correlates with two distinct types of series-inhabiting characters—I argue that Marvel’s staging of the Frankenstein monster mixes the two modes, resulting in a self-reflexive exploration and interrogation of the comics’ story- telling techniques. Furthermore, I contend that this process sheds light on the medial dynamics of serial figures—that is, characters such as the monster (but also superheroes like Batman and Superman or other figures like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes) that are adapted again and again in a wide variety of forms, contexts, and media. Though narrative continuity may be lacking between the repeated stagings of serial figures, non-diegetic traces of previous incarnations accumulate on such characters, allowing them to move between and reflect upon medial forms, never wholly contained in a given diegetic world. Accordingly, Marvel’s depiction of the Frankenstein monster leads to a self-reflexive probing of comic books’ forms of narrative and visual mediality, ultimately problematizing the very building blocks of comics as a medium—the textual and graphic framings that, together, narrate comics’ serialized stories.
Animation and the Delimitation of Cinema
What is cinema? This question has been posed innumerable times, and innumerable answers have been offered in response — some of them good, some less satisfying, but most of them in some way biased, partial, and in any case less than comprehensive. If I wager an answer of my own, it will surely suffer from the same incompleteness — and how could it be otherwise, unless the cinema had ceased evolving, been frozen in time, or superseded and relegated to the junk pile of “dead” media? This is hardly the case, I think, even if the material infrastructure of cinema has been radically transformed in its transition to digital production and playback technologies.
Nevertheless, attendant changes in the cinema, as part of the larger media environment in which we live and breathe, have been momentous enough to warrant discussion of “post-cinematic affect” (in Steven Shaviro‘s term) as the emergent episteme or “structure of feeling” informing life today. And the film historians of the past several decades (chief among them Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen) have demonstrated with sufficient clarity that early cinema, far from being a “primitive” version of “classical” cinema, was indeed a different beast altogether. Together, these perspectives suggest that cinema — classical (and post-classical) cinema: cinema proper as the dominant medium of the twentieth century — can be approached as a (relatively) bounded object, not neatly encapsulated but nevertheless defined by some fuzzy borders near the beginning and the end of “its” century.
In an attempt to understand this object better, we might consider that a wide variety of attempts to define cinema suffer from a common shortcoming: they marginalize or otherwise fail to account for “animation.” But perhaps there is something essential about this marginalization, and maybe we could say — knowing full well that any such categorical pronouncement is surely guilty of a similar selectiveness — that animation provides the frame within which cinema in its dominant form has been defined. In order to serve as such a frame, it would therefore not be by accident but indeed as an enabling condition of “cinema” that animation should be pushed thus to the margins. (In this context it is perhaps important, though, to recall Derrida’s meditations on the frame qua parergon…).
What would it mean, though, and what reason is there to say that cinema is “framed” by animation as a border condition? The idea, in short, is that “cinema” (a normative construct historically instantiated in both discursive and material forms) is bookended, delimited historically and conceptually by an initial and an ultimate indistinction of animation and live-action film — such that cinema is defined not as live-action film, narrowly and in exclusion of animation, but on the grounds of the distinction between, or via the more basic distinguishability of, animation and live-action film. For it is precisely (though not solely) this distinction that is at stake in the transition from early to classical and again from cinematic to post-cinematic forms or regimes.
We must recall that it remained common, until well into the 1910s, to refer to film generally as “animated film” — in distinction to static photographs, which had become associated in the nineteenth century with death (an association that was not purely philosophical but practically instantiated in the Victorian-era memento mori). The movies brought these images back to life — animated them: an idea that motivated corporate names such as Biograph and Vitagraph (while the connection might seem even more palpable to us today in a hand-cranked flip-book machine like the Mutoscope). And it was the camera/projector apparatus itself — the main “attraction” of early cinema — that was the life-giving force: “animation” was thus an apparatic spectacle, something that inhered in the very machinery of the movies, not in a certain type of film (see also Paul Ward’s instructive article, “Defining ‘Animation'”).
This is not to say, of course, that early audiences were so bedazzled by moving pictures that they couldn’t tell the difference between live-action sequences and “animation” in its narrower (and later) sense. Rather, the point is merely that this distinction was relatively unimportant in the “cinema of attractions” — where “enchanted drawings,” trick effects, and stop-motion spectacles were widespread. The meaningfulness of the distinction, which emerges in the transition to classical film, depends on the marginalization of animation, which is no longer seen as the essence of film but as an exceptional kind of it. The trick effect becomes a “special effect.” More generally, “life” is no longer given by the apparatus but is merely recorded, witnessed by it in the case of live-action filmmaking, which it now makes sense to distinguish from animation; life, in other words, is located in front of the camera, as a pro-filmic property of actors that filmmakers can at best harness and pass on to their diegetic characters. The once central operation of film — animation — henceforth occupies a subordinate position as the apparatus of classical cinema undergoes its disenchantment.
Again, though, it is less this subordination than the sheer separability of animation that I think might be seen as a defining factor, a framing condition, of cinema in its dominant or proper form as the central medium of the twentieth century. And one of the key developments marking our transition to a post-cinematic era is precisely a reversal of this process: most obviously, CGI and digital compositing render the distinction between apparatically animated and pro-filmically animate images again indeterminate. (But surely the anima at stake is not just a narrowly technical agency, but also the life we call our own, the parameters of which are radically revised by global communications technologies, through microtemporal encounters with the digital, and in the imbrication of our affective lives with the algorithms of global finance). Such indeterminacy, the indistinction of animation, therefore constitutes the initial and the ultimate state, while the cinema is defined in/as the space between.
Seen from this (undoubtedly biased, partial, and perhaps even perverse) perspective, Winsor McCay — whose comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland premiered 107 years ago today, on October 15, 1905, in the pages of The New York Herald — was not only a pioneer of animation (as it is more conventional to claim on the basis of his filmic work with Nemo and the later Gertie the Dinosaur), but in fact a pioneer of cinema proper, which he helped to define by wresting it from animation, from an indistinction of life — from an indistinction into which we plunge again today…
Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect
[UPDATE March 7, 2013: Full text of the talk now posted here.]
Following our recent roundtable discussion in La Furia Umana (alternative link here), Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Steven Shaviro, and I have submitted a panel proposal on the topic of post-cinematic affect for next year’s conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. If the proposal is accepted, I hope to develop in a more systematic way some of the thoughts I put forward in the roundtable discussion, particularly with regard to the role of the “irrational” camera. Here is the proposal I submitted for my contribution to the panel:
Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect
Shane Denson
Post-millennial films are full of strangely irrational cameras – physical and virtual imaging apparatuses that seem not to know their place with respect to diegetic and nondiegetic realities, and that therefore fail to situate viewers in a coherently designated spectating-position. While analyses ranging from David Bordwell’s diagnosis of “intensified continuity” to Matthias Stork’s recent condemnation of “chaos cinema” have tended to emphasize matters of editing and formal construction as the site of a break with classical film style, it is equally important to focus on the camera as a site of material, phenomenological relation between viewers and contemporary images. Thus, I aim to update Vivian Sobchack’s film-theoretical application of Don Ihde’s groundbreaking phenomenology of mediating apparatuses to reflect the recent shift to what Steven Shaviro has identified as a regime of “post-cinematic affect.” By setting a phenomenological focus on contemporary cameras in relation both to Shaviro’s work and to Mark B. N. Hansen’s recent work on “21st century media,” I will show that many of the images in today’s films are effectively “discorrelated” from the embodied interests, perspectives, and phenomenological capacities of human agents – pointing to the rise of a fundamentally post-perceptual media regime, in which “contents” serve algorithmic functions in a broader financialization of human activities and relations.
Drawing on films such as District 9, Melancholia, WALL-E, or Transformers, the presentation sets out from a phenomenological analysis of contemporary cameras’ “irrationality.” For example, virtual cameras paradoxically conjure “realism” effects not by disappearing to produce the illusion of perceptual immediacy, but by emulating the physical presence of nondiegetic cameras in the scenes of their simulated “filming.” At the same time, real (non-virtual) cameras are today inspired by ubiquitous, aesthetically disinterested cameras that – in smartphones, surveillance cams, satellite imagery, automated vision systems, etc. – increasingly populate and transform our lifeworlds; accordingly, they fail to stand apart from their objects and to distinguish clearly between diegetic/nondiegetic, fictional/factual, or real/virtual realms. Contemporary cameras, in short, are deeply enmeshed in an expanded, indiscriminately articulated plenum of images that exceed capture in the form of photographic or perceptual “objects.” These cameras, and the films that utilize them, as I shall argue in a second step, mediate a nonhuman ontology of computational image production, processing, and circulation – leading to a thoroughgoing discorrelation of contemporary images from human perceptibility. In conclusion, I will relate my findings to recent theorizations of media’s broader shift toward an expanded (no longer visual or even perceptual) field of material affect.
Bibliography:
Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.” Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 16-28.
Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward: The “Future” of 21st Century Media. Unpublished manuscript, forthcoming 2013/2014.
Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990.
Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2010.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
(PS: The crazy mobile camera collection pictured above, the “cameravan,” belongs to one Harrod Blank, whose website is here. The image itself was taken from a website (here) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.)
Ludic Serialities and the “Parergodicity” of Game Studies as Media Studies — #Flow12
Here’s my position paper for the “Game Studies as Media Studies” panel at the FLOW Conference 2012 in Austin, Texas (November 1-3).
Ludic Serialities and the “Parergodicity” of Game Studies as Media Studies
Shane Denson, Leibniz Universität Hannover
The topic of this panel, “Game Studies as Media Studies,” challenges us to stipulate relations (however tentatively) between two fields of study that are themselves in many ways intersectional, cross-disciplinary, and thus to a certain extent undefined. Indeed, by broaching this topic we are returned to the (self-proclaimed) inaugural moment of game studies: to the debates raging as Espen Aarseth famously announced, in 2001’s premiere issue of the online journal Game Studies, “Year One” of computer game studies. In his attempt to stake out the terrain for “a new discipline” and protect it from “colonising efforts” from film and literary studies, Aarseth declared games’ independence from “old mass media, such as theatre, movies, TV shows and novels.” Already eleven years ago, then, Aarseth rejected the idea of game studies as media studies, writing: “Some would argue that the obvious place for game studies is in a media department, but given the strong focus there on mass media and the visual aesthetics, the fundamentally unique aspects of the games could easily be lost.”
The background, of course, was the so-called narratology-versus-ludology debate. And though that debate has since subsided (to the point, even, that some question whether it ever took place at all; cf. Frasca 2003), many of the central points of contention inevitably arise again when we undertake to reassess the relations between game studies and media studies. The crux, of course, is the ludological idea that the defining feature of games as a medium, and hence the core concern of game studies, is the interactive or, in Aarseth’s (1997) term, “ergodic” situation of gameplay – where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. From a ludological perspective, narrative then appears as marginal, subordinate, or at best supplementary or parallel to gameplay – hence para- or “parergodic,” as I propose calling it. And not just narrative, but many of the aspects that might interest media scholars occupy this marginal or framing field of parergodics: from visual forms on screen, for example, to the social and cultural formations they give rise to in the wider world, outside the games themselves.
But parergodicity, a term which combines Aarseth’s “ergodics” with Derrida’s (1987) “parergon,” is not clearly distinguishable from the core of ergodics; on the contrary, the parergodic enacts a logic of supplementarity, a multistable oscillation such as Derrida ascribes to the picture frame: standing outside the work and serving as its background, the frame can also shift and become part of the figure when seen against the background of the wall. Parergodicity, I propose, defines a broad space for media studies research on games, allowing us more generally to rethink the relations between media studies and game studies so as to avoid both extremes of incommensurability and of colonization: “game studies as media studies,” conceived as a field of parergodic inquiry, aims at once to acknowledge the medial specificity of games, their resistance to paradigms established by studying dominant media like film and TV, without thereby ignoring the many empirical and conceptual points of contact that exist.
A key field of parergodic phenomena that demonstrates this potential is the widespread but undertheorized seriality that characterizes games at virtually every level of their material, cultural, and intermedial expression. While the serialization practices that generate ever new iterations of Mario, Zelda, or Lara Croft might seem to be clearly extraneous to the ergodic activity of gameplay, this is far from obvious. In the context of a joint project entitled “Digital Seriality: The Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games,” Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I have identified three levels across which seriality can be seen to resonate. Most basically, seriality informs gameplay directly through formal-algorithmic structures of repetition/variation and the intra-ludic seriality of progressive game “levels” (which often repeat, and vary, the basic representational but also actional structures established in earlier levels, thus establishing both episodic closure and continuation). Sequels, remakes, and other explicit serialization practices constitute inter-ludic serialities that are operative between games, but not without consequence or relation to gameplay proper and its infrastructure (the modularity of game engines promotes inter-ludic serialization, for example, essentially repeating the serial patterning of intra-game levels). Moreover, fan practices and transmedial phenomena beyond the games themselves instantiate extra- or para-ludic serialities, which tie gameplay into larger networks of media consumption and exchange. As parergodic phenomena, ludic serialities therefore cut across the divisions that were taken to separate narratological and ludological positions. Finally, then, these serial structures offer both a broad basis for cross-media comparisons (from dime novels, film serials, TV series, etc.), as well as the means for identifying salient differences of digital interactivity, thus articulating a field of parergodics as the site of overlap, complementarity, and mutual advantage for game studies and media studies.
Works cited:
Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Aarseth, Espen J. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1.1 (July 2001): <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html>.
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Frasca, Gonzalo. 2003. “Ludologists love stories, too: Notes from a debate that never took place.” Level Up Conference Proceedings. Utrecht: University of Utrecht. 92-99. <http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05163.01125>.
Serial Figures and (the) Television
The new issue of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft is out now. It’s a special issue on “The Series,” edited by Daniela Wentz, Lorenz Engell, Jens Schröter, Herbert Schwaab, and Benjamin Beil, and among a great set of articles it includes a piece I co-authored with Ruth Mayer, entitled: “Bildstörung: Serielle Figuren und der Fernseher” [roughly: Image Interference: Serial Figures and the Television]. Here’s the abstract:
This article investigates the logic and aesthetics of popular seriality by looking at several exemplary moments of medial recursivity – which we identify as a ‘motor’ of serial narration and proliferation. Our focus is on the medial development of serial figures – figures that are firmly established in the popular imagination and which have undergone multiple media changes in the course of their careers. In their serial reenactments, these figures are able to shed light on the ways in which the structures of a medial memory are established and updated, and how medial acts of forgetting are operationalized in this context. Exploring three case studies – the figures of Fu Manchu, Fantômas, and Batman – this article in particular reflects on the function of television with respect to its influence on the medial positionings and self-conceptions of other serial entertainment formats (the novel, film). We set out from the hypothesis that television is in many respects privileged in this role as a medium of reference. Not only its propensity for serial forms distinguishes it in this regard, but also its contradictory attributes of immateriality (television viewing) and apparatic presence (the television set) contribute to making the medium of television appear as both the epitome of serial sequentiality and as a disruptive factor or instrument for arresting the flow of serial figures’ stagings – thus covering a broad spectrum of medial reference functions.
And in German:
Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Logik und Ästhetik populärer Serialität im exemplarischen Bezug auf das Moment der medialen Rekursivität, das hier als ‚Motor’ der seriellen Narration und Proliferation ausgemacht wird. Der Fokus liegt auf der medialen Entfaltung von seriellen Figuren – also Figuren, die in der populären Imagination fest etabliert sind und im Laufe ihrer Karriere mehrere Medienwechsel unterlaufen. In ihrer seriellen Fortschreibung vermögen solche Figuren Aufschluss darüber zu geben, wie Strukturen eines medialen Gedächtnisses etabliert und fortgeschrieben werden und wie mediales Vergessen in diesem Zusammenhang operationalisiert wird. Anhand dreier Fallbeispiele – der Figuren Fu Manchu, Fantômas und Batman – erkundet der Aufsatz insbesondere die Funktion des Leitmediums Fernsehen in seiner Wirkmacht für die mediale Selbstverortung und das Selbstverständnis anderer serieller Unterhaltungsformate (Roman, Spielfilm). Er geht von der Hypothese aus, dass das Fernsehen in vieler Hinsicht für diese Rolle als Referenzmedium privilegiert ist. Nicht nur sein serialitätsaffiner Charakter zeichnet es hierfür aus, sondern auch seine widersprüchlichen Attribute der Immaterialität (Fernsehen) und Apparathaftigkeit (Fernseher) tragen dazu bei, dass dieses Medium gleichermaßen als Inbegriff der seriellen Sequenzialität und als Störfaktor oder Instrument der Arretierung im Fluss der seriellen Figureninszenierung erscheinen kann – und damit ein breites Spektrum an Referenzfunktionen abdeckt.
Post-Cinematic Affect: Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D
[UPDATE: It appears that La Furia Umana is down right now. In the meantime, you can find the roundtable discussion here as well: http://www.academia.edu/1993403/_Post-Cinematic_Affect_Post-Continuity_the_Irrational_Camera_Thoughts_on_3D_]
Issue #14 of La Furia Umana just came out, and in it you’ll find a roundtable discussion between Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, and myself on the topic of “post-cinematic affect” — Steven Shaviro’s term for the contemporary media environment, following cinema’s displacement as the twentieth century’s dominant medium. This is the second roundtable discussion on the topic, the first (involving Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham) having also appeared in La Furia Umana (here). While the first roundtable focused on the first two Paranormal Activity films, the discussion this time around touches on District 9, Melancholia, and Hugo, among others, and reflects on “post-continuity,” the “irrationality” of contemporary cameras, and the uses and abuses of 3D. In my own responses, I also connect these things to the topic of plurimedial seriality. Originally, Steven Shaviro was also scheduled to participate in the discussion, but he unfortunately had to withdraw due to other commitments (you can get a feel for how busy he’s been lately from his recent blog posts). Nevertheless, I think the discussion worked out quite nicely, and a further collaboration between Shaviro, Grisham, Leyda, and me is in the works. More on that soon…