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.
Auf der Jahrestagung der Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien in Regensburg wird Shane Denson einen Vortrag über Comics am 18.06.2011 halten. (UPDATE: Mittlerweile ist eine Video-Version des ganzen Vortrags auch online: hier.) Hier das Abstract:
Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective
Shane Denson
In this paper, I argue that careful attention to some of the basic formal properties of comics calls not only for comparisons with analogous properties of other media, but for appreciation of the fact that comics themselves exhibit a strong tendency towards imbrication in robustly “plurimedial” contexts, such that comics as a medium must be seen as a nodal unit in larger, non-reducible networks of mediation. Setting out from a rather formalistic consideration of comics’ techniques of visual and narrative framing and sequencing, and drawing on observations made by Derrida and others, I identify a set of crucial liminalities and reversible oppositions—e.g. between the inside and outside of framed panels, between the temporal and spatial orderings of sequences—that are centrally at work in, and perhaps even partially constitutive of, the medium of comics. At the limit, this formal-phenomenological investigation suggests that liminality or marginality pertains not only to the “internal” relations or constitution of the medium, but that it is also a basic fact of comics’ “external” relations to other media. Above all the serial forms typical of comics’ narration witness the medium positioned in an emphatically plurimedial field, where boundaries are continually negotiated, annexes claimed, and permeable borders policed. The figures that populate comics series, in particular, move between diegetically closed narrative worlds, the integrity and continuity of which is often highly strained, and open multiverses that encompass not only alternative realities within the medium of comics but also alternative existences in other media as well. Attention to the way that serially and plurimedially instantiated figures (such as Batman and Superman, but also Frankenstein or Tarzan) negotiate the relations between diegetically open and closed serialities promises, finally, to shed media-theoretical light on the social question of the dynamics of comics’ transnational reception—which involves superheroes and other comic figures in both global and local contexts, in internationally standardized forms and national or regional adaptations. In a different context, Benedict Anderson has identified a competition between “bound” and “unbound” serialities at work in the modern constitution of nations as “imagined communities”—a competition, that is, between the totalizing closure of a territory and numbering of its occupants as effected by a national census, as opposed to the categorically open and ongoing iterability and reproducibility of events as modeled in the media of newspapers and photography. Refocusing Anderson’s perspective onto comics’ serial and plurimedial negotiations of “bound” and “unbound” formations—understood in relation to the marginalities and reversible boundaries that mark the frames, sequences, and media of popular culture—I aim to link comics’ plurimedial relations and their transnational imaginings through seriality as a locus of ambiguous intersection and border-crossing.
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.