Tag: media theory

Multistable Frames

Stephanie Hoppeler, Lukas Etter, and Gabriele Rippl (whose research project “Seriality and Intermediality in Graphic Novels” is associated with the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Praxis”) have put together a workshop titled “Interdisciplinary Methodology: The Case of Comics Studies,” which will take place on October 14-15, 2011 in Bern. In the organizers’ own words:

“Our motivation for this event is to reduce what we see as a stark discrepancy between the popularity of Comics Studies on the one hand and the virtual lack of encompassing methodological reflection on the other.

We have planned one keynote speech for each of the two days: Dr. Thierry Groensteeen (freelance lecturer and curator; founder of www.citebd.org) will hold an introductory speech on Friday 14 October, and Dr. Roger Sabin (lecturer at Central St. Martins University of the Arts, London) will give a paper on Saturday 15 October. Each speech shall be followed by several thematic panels, in which researchers will present their papers and thereby introduce a broader discussion.

[Papers have been chosen that] include or stimulate reflection on the methodological issues Comics Studies and Intermediality Studies raise, as well as on possibilities to tackle these issues.”

One of those papers will be presented by yours truly. The paper develops the phenomenological approach to comics that was implicit in my paper at the DGfA conference this year in Regensburg, “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective” (screencast video here, in case you missed it). In particular, my talk in Bern will expand on the notion of the “multistable frame,” which I introduced as a way of talking about comics and their emergent serialities in the earlier paper. Here is the abstract for my presentation in Bern:

Multistable Frames: Notes Towards a (Post-)Phenomenological Approach to Comics

Shane Denson

“In the available accounts of the theories and methods of popular culture studies, phenomenology is conspicuously absent” (Carroll, Tafoya, and Nagel 1)—thus observe the editors of a volume meant to rectify that situation, published in the year 2000. But over a decade later their statement remains largely true. In the meantime, popular culture itself has changed, as have the studies devoted to it: new theories and methods have emerged, and different phenomena have come into view. Developments in and around comics and graphic novels are exemplary: comics themselves have been transformed through contact with digital media, their social status revised largely through the graphic novel, and they have come to exert an unprecedented influence on mainstream cinema and television. Today, comics cannot be ignored, neither in the broad field of popular culture nor in the more specialized realms of academic study: increasingly, comics are being researched with a great variety of methods by literary scholars, historians of art and culture, media theorists, and even philosophers. Looking back from this vantage point, we may find the absence of phenomenology among fin-de-millennium approaches to popular culture less surprising than the conspicuous absence of comics in a volume dedicated to Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture. Phenomenology and comics, or so it would seem, pass like ships in the night—and this despite the fact that the insights of some of the seminal works on comics, such as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, were arrived at through methods and means of looking at comics that were implicitly phenomenological in nature. It remains, then, to make these methods explicit, and to transform phenomenological insights into a genuine methodology available for the study of comics. As a first step towards this goal, I propose rethinking Eisner’s and McCloud’s classic contributions through the lens of categories and concepts developed by American philosopher Don Ihde for the phenomenological study of “mediating technologies.” Adapted to the medium of comics, and applied specifically to the central figure of the frame that, in various forms (e.g. panels, speech balloons, pages as meta-panels), dominates Eisner’s and McCloud’s analyses of comics as a sequential art, Ihde’s phenomenological categories lend greater depth to our understanding of comics as an experiential domain, throwing phenomena like the achievement of “closure” (as McCloud puts it) between panels into sharper relief, but at the same time revealing the requisite negotiations between and amongst frames and the internal and external spaces they define as a highly complex process. The apparently simple act of reading comics, that is, is revealed as a highly complex process, one involving a non-linear dynamics that can be traced back to the recursive nestings and reversibilities of frames as phenomenal objects. Ultimately, the multistability of comics’ framings, as revealed in a phenomenological analysis, points towards the logic of flickering oscillations that Derrida has exposed under the rubric of the parergon, and hence to a postphenomenological approach that destabilizes any categorical difference between subjects (or readers) and objects (or comics). Nevertheless, a phenomenological methodology may prove to be the only route to understanding the irreducible experiential entanglements involved in our transactions with comics as a medium of the multistable frame.

Carroll, Michael T., Eddie Tafoya, and Chris Nagel. “Introduction: Being and Being Entertained: Phenomenology and the Study of Popular Culture.” Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture. Eds. Michael T. Carroll and Eddie Tafoya. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. 1-18.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 2008.
Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.
_____. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Adrian Ivakhiv’s ecocritical film-philosophy

Adrian Ivakhiv, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, maintains the excellent blog immanence, where he posts regularly on “the Form, Flesh, and Flow of the World : Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, Mediapolitics” (as he puts it in the blog’s byline).

Recently, he linked to a new article of his in the open-access online journal Film-Philosophy (published by the great Open Humanities Press), in a special issue on “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis.” Here is the abstract of Ivakhiv’s paper, which is certainly worth reading in full:

The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns.

Keywords:

Film theory; film-worlds; ecocriticism; ecologies; Tarkovsky

Beyond this paper, Ivakhiv is working on a book called Ecologies of the Moving Image, which I very much anticipate reading. Indeed, in many respects, Ivakhiv seems a kindred spirit of sorts in his process-relational philosophical orientation and his endeavor to formulate a non-anthropocentric philosophy of film. With his notion that the cinema is one of the places “in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming,” Ivakhiv’s views seem largely apposite with my own film-theoretical project, which, as I summarized (in German) recently, seeks a “rapprochement between the conflicting human and nonhuman agencies inhabiting [Frankenstein] films” and the cinema in general. As I outline it in Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, this “rapprochement […] consists […] of a recognition of the mutual articulation of experience by human and nonhuman technical agencies, whereby the affective and embodied experience of anthropotechnical transitionality is not arrested and subjugated to human dominance, but approached experimentally as a joint production of our postnatural future” (24). Ivakhiv’s proposal “that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds” seems, in my opinion, to point in the same – experimental and postphenomenological – direction.

Steven Shaviro on “the post-cinematic”

Steven Shaviro, probably best known for his now-classic book The Cinematic Body (an early but still one of the best explorations of the meaning of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory for embodied spectatorship; and one that Shaviro himself has critically reconsidered from a distance of 15 years in an essay called “The Cinematic Body Redux”), has recently published a book entitled Post-Cinematic Affect (Zero Books, 2010), which is summarized, on the publisher’s website, like this:

Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker’s music video for Grace Jones’ song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas’ movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly’s movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer.

Now, over at his wonderfully named and always intriguing blog The Pinocchio Theory (which you can also always find in the handy “blogroll” on the right-hand side of this very blog), Shaviro has begun outlining the meaning of “the post-cinematic” as it appears in that book. This is what Shaviro says about the purpose of his theorization of “the post-cinematic”:

The particular question that I am trying to answer, within this much broader field, is the following: What happens to cinema when it is no longer a cultural dominant, when its core technologies of production and reception have become obsolete, or have been subsumed within radically different forces and powers? What is the role of cinema, if we have now gone beyond what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production”? What is the ontology of the digital, or post-cinematic, audiovisual image, and how does it relate to Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image? How do particular movies, or audiovisual works, reinvent themselves, or discover new powers of expression, precisely in a time that is no longer cinematic or cinemacentric? As Marshall McLuhan long ago pointed out, when the media environment changes, so that we experience a different “ratio of the senses” than we did before, older media forms don’t necessarily disappear; instead, they are repurposed. We still make and watch movies, just as we still broadcast on and listen to the radio, and still write and read novels; but we produce, broadcast, and write, just as we watch, listen, and read, in different ways than we did before.

The full thought-provoking post, which is highly recommended, can be found here. Enjoy!

Shane Denson: Interview zu Frankenstein & Film

Neulich wurde ich vom Fanzine Zauberspiegel zu meiner Dissertation Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface und verwandten Themen interviewt. Die Dissertation, deren Cover man hier sieht, wurde von Ruth Mayer (Leibniz Universität Hannover) und Mark Hansen (Duke University) betreut und 2010 bei der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Hannover eingereicht. (Während eine überarbeitete Fassung für die Publikation in einem geeigneten Verlag in Vorbereitung ist, ist die als Eigendruck produzierte Dissertation jetzt schon von der Universitätsbibliothek Hannover direkt oder durch den interuniversitären Dissertationentausch erhältlich. (Datensatz bei der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek hier, bei GetInfo hier und im Online-Katalog der Uni Hannover hier.))

Das Interview im Zauberspiegel, das einige allgemein verständliche Antworten auf die in der Dissertation eher technisch und philosophisch behandelte Fragen geben soll, findet man hier: “Shane Denson über Frankenstein, das Monster und ihre Beziehung in Film und Roman.”

Und hier, schliesslich, ist die deutsche Zusammenfassung der Dissertation, die ich der englischsprachigen Arbeit beigelegt habe:

In der vorliegenden Dissertation argumentiere ich, dass filmische Umsetzungen von Mary Shelleys gotischem Roman Frankenstein ein besonderes Licht auf die Historizität von Mensch/Technik-Schnittstellen werfen—zumindest dann, wenn man sich ihnen in einer konsequent historisierenden Weise annähert. Betrachtet man die verschiedenen Filme im Kontext der historischen Zusammenhänge, die zwischen ihren narrativen Inhalten, sozialen Umfeldern und begleitenden kulturellen Konflikten bestehen, setzt man sie in Relation zu medientechnischen Infrastrukturen, Innovationen und Transitionen und verortet man sie genau in den materiellen und lebensweltlichen Parametern des historisch situierten Zuschauererlebnisses—dann lassen die sogenannten Frankenstein-Filme spezifische Konfigurationen der Mensch/Technik-Interaktion erkennen: Muster, Tendenzen und Abweichungen, die die Momente einer von Umbrüchen geprägten Geschichte bilden, die zugleich eine Geschichte des Kinos, der Medien, der Technik und der affektiven Kanäle unserer eigenen Leiblichkeit ist.

Die Arbeit ist in drei Hauptteile gegliedert. Nachdem Kapitel 1 eine Einleitung in die Argumentation und die Begrifflichkeiten der Arbeit liefert, verortet der erste Hauptteil (bestehend aus Kapitel 2 und 3) eine Reihe experienziell-phänomenologischer Herausforderungen, die die Frankenstein-Filme darstellen. Dafür entwickelt Kapitel 2 eine „Technophänomenologie“ der dominanten Film/Zuschauer-Beziehungen unter den Paradigmen des frühen Kinos und des klassischen Hollywood Filmes; diese Perspektive findet dann in der Analyse zweier Frankenstein-Filme aus den jeweiligen filmgeschichtlichen Perioden Anwendung, wobei sich in beiden Fällen eine Destabilisierung zuschauerlicher Relationen zum Film zeigt, die auf einen unbeständigen Zwischenbereich hindeutet, der zwischen den phänomenologischen Regimes des frühen und des klassischen Kinos liegt. In Kapitel 3 verfolge ich diesen Hinweis in die Übergangsperiode des Kinos der 1910er hinein, insbesondere zu dem aus den Thomas-Edison-Studios stammenden Film Frankenstein aus dem Jahre 1910. Wie ich dort argumentiere, deuten die Dualitäten der Adressierung, die in diesem Film exemplifiziert werden, auf eine breiter gefasste Erfahrung der Transitionalität hin, die sich in Bewegung zwischen stabilen Situationen befindet und sich in negativer Weise zur phänomenologischen Subjektivität zeigt—in Form einer unbestimmten Kluft oder Lücke.

Die charakteristische Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme verorte ich in diesen Lücken der Transitionalität, und im zweiten Hauptteil der Arbeit versuche ich, ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk—nämlich den „Postnaturalismus“—zu formulieren, das den Provokationen der Filme eine Antwort liefern kann. Kapitel 4 kreist zunächst um die Lücken, die feministische Lesarten von Mary Shelleys Roman an den Tag gelegt haben, bevor ich in diese Lücken eintauche, um dort eine Theorie des prä-personellen und daher nicht diskursiven Kontaktes zwischen menschlichen Körpern und der technischen Materialität zu entdecken. Auf Basis dieses Kontaktes, so mein Argument, sind technische Revolutionen (wie die industrielle Revolution, in deren Gefolge Shelley ihren Roman schrieb) in der Lage, die menschliche Handlungsmacht radikal zu destabilisieren, so dass wir experienzielle Lücken erfahren und textuelle Lücken produzieren—die allerdings rasch aufgefüllt und vergessen werden, wenn wir uns an neue Techniken gewöhnen und sie so „naturalisieren.“ In Kapitel 5 widme ich mich diesen Prozessen im Kontext der Aneignung der Dampfmaschine durch die Thermodynamik, um damit die postnatürliche Historizität der naturwissenschaftlichen Natur selbst aufzudecken—also die Tatsache, die sich nicht auf ein epistemisches Phänomen der diskursiven Konstruktion oder Projektion reduzieren lässt, dass sich die materielle Natur in konstanter Bewegung befindet und dass—aufgrund der Rolle von Techniken in dieser Geschichte—die Natur noch nie „natürlich“ gewesen ist. Kapitel 6 übersetzt diese Ergebnisse in eine postnatürliche Medientheorie, die nicht bloß empirisch individuierte Apparate, sondern auch die Historizität des phänomenologischen Raums betrifft, wie er von menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren zusammen artikuliert wird; als filmtheoretisches Korrelat schlage ich eine „kinematische Doppelvision“ vor, die zwischen einer von Merleau-Ponty inspirierten phänomenologischen Sichtweise und einer Bergsonschen Metaphysik pendelt, um die filmische Erfahrung als Produkt eines Wechselspiels zwischen menschlichen Situationen und technischen Verschiebungen zu zeigen.

Der dritte Hauptteil kehrt dann zu den Frankenstein-Filmen zurück, um die besonderen Beziehungen aufzuzeigen, die zwischen ihnen und der postnatürlichen Historizität der anthropotechnischen Schnittstelle bestehen, und eine Art Rapprochement zwischen den konfligierenden menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren, die den Filmen innewohnen, zu bewirken. Kapitel 7 folgt diesem Ziel, indem es sich den paradigmatischen Frankenstein-Filmen—James Whales Frankenstein (1931) und Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—widmet und die menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Perspektiven alternierend aufzeigt, deren Zusammenkunft die zentrale Kreatur der Filme animiert. In dieser Konfrontation—die unentwirrbar im historischen Moment und besonders im Kontext des Übergangs zum Tonfilm eingebettet ist—suche ich eine nicht-reduktive Weise, um die andersartige Kraft zu begreifen, die die durch Frankenstein-Filme provozierten Erfahrungslücken besetzt. Schließlich bietet Kapitel 8 eine synoptische Sichtweise der weiteren Entwicklung der Frankenstein-Filme; hier versuche ich, die aktive Rolle der kinematischen Techniken in der Produktion kurzlebiger Erfahrungen der Transitionalität aufzuzeigen, die unter dem Gewicht unserer habituellen und „natürlichen“ Beziehungen zu jenen Techniken begraben liegen. Das von mir anvisierte Rapprochement besteht also darin, eine Anerkennung der gegenseitigen Artikulation der Erfahrung durch menschliche und nichtmenschliche (technische) Akteure zu fördern, wodurch die affektive und leibliche Erfahrung einer anthropotechnischen Transitionalität nicht arretiert und der menschlichen Dominanz unterjocht wird, sondern experimentell als gemeinsame Produktion unserer postnatürlichen Zukunft angenähert wird. Dies ist die eigentliche Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme.

CFP: Traffic–Media Transatlantic IV

Harold Innis taught us to look at the media as a form of traffic. Media products/signs travel just like things and people; constantly flowing, they overcome space and time, partly on communal and partly on dedicated networks.
Traffic is the sum of its parts, made up of an infinite number of acts of transport and transfer. It is, however, more than that, because traffic has its own logic and forms its own structures and rules.
Traffic is frequently compared with water: it finds a way, forms trickles, raging currents and dissipative structures. In certain places it collects, accumulates, stands still; or seeps away. Traffic and sign traffic cannot be stopped: they overcome any obstacle, penetrate everything and
wear away anything fixed: one can plan, steer and direct them, but probably not control them.
Sign traffic poses a particular problem when it comes to observation. There is no “royal overlooking position” from which there would be a view of the entire proceedings; it is difficult to describe in qualitative terms, while empirical approaches must rely on counting.This conference is intended to take up the image proposed by Innis and view the media as a form of traffic. To this end, the following questions, for example, are of relevance:
• Which media phenomena can be described in traffic terms more accurately than in another perspective? Is it just a metaphor, or more?
• Which conceptions of traffic are represented in which fields of knowledge? Which of them are viable in an analysis of the media?
• Is a comprehensive traffic science, encompassing the traffic of commodities, people and signs alike, conceivable?
• Would this be identical to a kind of media ‘logistics’? Or to a theory about society on the whole, if Marx speaks of ‘forms of intercourse’ and Luhmann of ‘communication’?
• Which associations do the different connotations of the term entail? In English drug traffic, illicit transactions und air traffic control, in German communication in general, and sexual intercourse…
• What is the relationship between traffic and infrastructure? Is traffic only possible on the basis of established infrastructures, or does infrastructure come as a consequence of traffic’s requirements? What is the relationship between traffic and technology?
• Are there specific economic rules that steer the flow of traffic?
• Does traffic –as an adaptive system– allow for a bridging of media theory, fluid dynamics and the analysis of complex systems?
• What do network theories contribute to the understanding of sign traffic?
• What role does storage –Innis refers to staple production– play in relation to flow and traffic?
• Are there also traffic accidents, tail-backs or blocks in the media sphere?The scheduled conference continues a series of events, which started in 2007 and aim to bring together media scholars from the USA, Canada and Germany:

  • Re-Reading McLuhan:

An International Conference on Media and Culture in the 21st Century,
Feb. 14-18, 2007, Schloss Thurnau, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Hosts: Klaus Benesch, Kerstin Schmidt, Martina Leeker, Derrick de Kerckhove
Publ.: de Kerckhove, Derrick; Leeker, Martina; Schmidt, Kerstin (ed.):
McLuhan neu lesen. Kritische Analysen zu Medien und Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript 2008

  • Media Theory on the Move.

Transatlantic Perspectives on Media and Mediation
May 21-23, 2009, University of Potsdam, Germany
Host: Dieter Mersch

  • Media Transatlantic

Media Theory in North America and German-Speaking Europe
April 8-10, 2010, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Hosts: Norm Friesen, Richard Cavell

The Media Transatlantic IV – Traffic conference is organised by the Graduiertenkolleg “Automatisms” (Research Training Group) at the University of Paderborn, Germany www.upb.de/rtg-automatisms .

The Research TG will cover part of your travel expenses.
Please send your title and an abstract of about 500 characters to:
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Winkler [ winkler@uni-paderborn.de ].
Deadline for submissions is July 31, 2011.

“To be continued…”: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective

Now online:

Shane Denson, “‘To be continued…’: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” (Conference Proceedings of: “What Happens Next: The Mechanics of Serialization.” Graduate Conference at the University of Amsterdam, March 25–26, 2011.) In: JLTonline (17.06.2011).

URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/conferences/article/view/346/1004

PDF: here.

CFP: Literary Theory and Media Change (JLT)

Call for Articles: Journal of Literary Theory, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2012)

Literary Theory and Media Change

Submission Deadline: January 15th 2012

CALL FOR ARTICLES

Literature is part of a media world that does not only change the physical aspects of reading by introducing e-books, audio books and other formats, but which links literature to the realms of movies, hypertexts, social media and other phenomena, where different hierarchies of aesthetic objects and their evaluation apply. How do these changes affect concepts and theories of literature?

Papers are welcome that systematically analyze the changing attitudes, terms and concepts of literary theory provoked by recent (or not so recent) shifts in (digital) media environments.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to the discussion of changes in reading habits, possibilities opened up to research by digital corpora, aspects of media competition, convergence, and combination in relation to literature, aspects of the history of media or literature studies.

Contributions should not exceed 50,000 characters in length and have to be submitted until January 15th, 2012. Please submit your contribution electronically via our website www.jltonline.de under ‘Articles’.

Articles are chosen for publication by an international advisory board in a double-blind review process.

For further information about JLT and to view the submission guidelines, please visit www.jltonline.de or contact the editorial office at jlt@phil.uni-goettingen.de.

Christina Riesenweber
Assistant Editor
JLT – Journal of Literary Theory
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Seminar für Deutsche Philologie
Kate-Hamburger-Weg 3
37073 Göttingen
0049 – (0)551 – 39 – 7534
 
JLT@phil.uni-goettingen.de
www.JLTonline.de

Mediatization and Serialization

Am 18.05.2011, im Rahmen der Initiative für interdisziplinäre Medienforschung an der Leibniz Universität Hannover, hielt Shane Denson den Vortrag “Mediatization und Serialization.” Dies war seine zweite Auseinandersetzung mit dem Begriff der Mediatisierung, nach seinem Vortrag “Mediatization, Techno-Phenomenology, and Popular Serial Entertainment” auf der Tagung “Mediatized Worlds–Culture and Society in a Media Age,” die am 14.-15.04.2011 in Bremen stattfand. Hier ist ein Abstract für den Vortrag in Bremen:

Mediatization, Techno-Phenomenology, and Popular Serial Entertainment

Shane Denson

This paper looks at the preeminently mediatized worlds of modern popular entertainment and sets them in relation to debates over the apparent centrality of media in the articulation and execution of contemporary human agencies. Theorists of mediatization have argued that “the mediation of everything,” as it is implicitly or explicitly postulated in recent media studies research, both captures something essential about our changing lifeworlds but, because of a latent determinism, also stands in the way of countenancing these changes rigorously and responsibly (Livingstone, Hepp). Recent suggestions to the effect that analyses of mediatization processes require a non-media-centric media theory (Hepp, following Morley) seek to counteract deterministic tendencies by highlighting the extra-medial (e.g. social and cultural) forces that increasingly situate media at the center of mediatized lifeworlds while, at the same time, demonstrating that these media retain a high degree of flexibility with regard to the variety of contextual logics and implementations that they can accommodate. Drawing on the work of American philosopher of technology Don Ihde, I would like to propose “techno-phenomenology” as a tool for conceptualizing the mediatization of lifeworlds in this paradoxical or “de/centered” sense. This approach shows technologies as possessing “telic inclinations” or logics that can invisibly transform perceptual and actional agencies and the lifeworlds in which they are embedded, while comparative analyses demonstrate that these tendencies are far from absolute: technical logics are emphatically plural, for intentionality-modulating technologies can occupy a variety of positions within the basic intentional relation. For example, media can be either transparent or opaque and ostentatious, thus instituting a space for reflection on their role in the lifeworld that they in part structure. In the sphere of modern popular entertainment, a techno-phenomenological approach reveals that reversals and variations of a medium’s position and significance within the intentional relations between audiences and the entertainments they consume are an integral part of these entertainments themselves. In other words, the mediatized world of popular entertainment is characterized by repeated interrogations of its own mediatization processes and their larger place in the modern world. Mediatization itself is problematized and put on display in popular media, e.g. when new media emerge or existing media are transformed. This is nowhere more evident than in serialized forms of entertainment, which, due to their development over time, are capable of tracking mediatization processes in the very act of their unfolding. Self-reflexively de/centering the media involved, popular serial forms tell stories that are as much about media as about the contents they mediate; and in the feedback loops that emerge between producers and consumers of popular series, media centrally structure both the form and content of communicative interaction, establishing a dynamic of self-propulsion that is nevertheless not strictly deterministic. Serial forms of popular entertainment therefore both display and enact the de/centerings that constitute a central paradox of our mediatized worlds.

Hepp, Andreas. “Researching ‘mediatized worlds’: Non-mediacentric media and communication studies as a challenge.” Media and Communication Studies Intersections and Interventions. Eds. Nico Carpentier, Ilija Tomanic Trivundža, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Ebba Sundin, Tobias Olsson, Richard Kilborn, Hannu Nieminen, and Bart Cammaerts. Tartu: Tartu UP, 2010. 37-48.

Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.

_____. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Livingstone, Sonia. ‘On the Mediation of Everything’, Journal of Communication 59.1 (2009): 1-18.

Morley, David. ‘For a Materialist, Non Media-Centric Media Studies’, Television & New Media 10.1 (2009): 114-16.

_____. Media, Modernity and Technology. The Geography of the New. London: Routledge, 2007.