Tag: seriality

Seriality and Media Transformation #GöSerial

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When this post goes online, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion (together with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sean O’Sullivan, and Ruth Page, and moderated by Jason Mittell) on the topic of “seriality and media transformations” at the workshop on Popular Seriality going on at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Each of the participants has been asked to prepare a five-minute statement to set the stage and get things rolling. This is what I’ll be saying:

Seriality and Media Transformation

Shane Denson

The topic of this panel, seriality and media transformation, names a constellation of processes that, as I see it, are perhaps not essentially or necessarily linked, but which are nevertheless bound together as a matter of historical fact. I’m tempted to say that seriality and media transformation are “structurally coupled” under conditions of modernity. My thoughts on this topic follow from research I’ve been conducting with Ruth Mayer, where we’ve been looking at popular figures like Frankenstein’s monster, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, or Batman – what we call serial figures, which proliferate across a range of media (but in a fragmented, plurimedial way, not by way of the more coherent, and more recent, transmediality that Henry Jenkins describes in terms of “world building”). In the context of this research, where we look at the way these figures jump from one medium to another, perpetually re-creating themselves in the milieu of a new medium, we are concerned with a nexus between seriality and mediality – a nexus where series are not just the contents of specific media (film serials, radio series, TV series, and the like), but where seriality is constituted as a higher-order medium, one in which the relations between and the transformations of first-order media (media as we usually think of them) are put on display, made visible, and negotiated. To make a big claim – because what else can you do in five minutes? – I would claim that it is the very hallmark of modernity to forge and reforge such a nexus of seriality and mediality; in other words, the articulation of seriality as a higher-order medium of media change is a central device for measuring, and indeed for constituting, the progression or forward march of a future-oriented modernity.

So we have to regard the media-historical function of the nexus: Because series unfold over time, they are subject to any changes that their carrier media may undergo. Not just passive receivers, though, series actively trace these transformations as they enact their own temporal unfoldings: the self-historicization by which series mark new installments against the old and in some cases stage qualitative transformations of their internal norms (as when Lost suddenly shifts from using flashbacks to flashforwards) – such processes of serial self-renewal and innovation can also serve as indexes of media change, and as the means for updating the idea of modernity in the process. Modernity itself is all about the update, and more often than not the update in question is all about innovations in media and technologies of mediation. So I’m suggesting that serial forms, which are inherently concerned with perpetually updating themselves, are the “natural” forms in which modernity would seek to stage itself.

Of central importance here is the medial self-reflexivity that serial forms are in various respects capable of instantiating. I’ll just briefly consider the example of Frankenstein’s monster, conceived as a serial figure (or a figure of serialization). Originating in a highly self-reflexive novel about (among other things) the experiential deformations occasioned by industrialization, the monster was serially replicated on the increasingly mechanized theater stages of the nineteenth century, before it became subject, in 1910, of a highly self-reflexive film by the production company of Thomas Edison, the wizard of modern media-technological innovation himself. In the film, as in all the Frankenstein films that would follow in the course of the next century, animation is both a diegetic and a medial process. In 1910, the term “animated pictures” was still used to describe film in general and to distinguish it from the still pictures of photography, so the creation sequence instantiated a sort of “operational aesthetic” in which, against the background of the familiar figure, film could stage itself as a figure of modern media fascination. Importantly, this is at the outset of the cinema’s so-called transitional era, which would radically change the phenomenological and industrial functions of film. Nor is it an accident that the still iconic image of the monster, embodied by Boris Karloff, was established (in 1931) in the wake of the cinema’s sound transition. Robbed of speech, a mute icon served all the better to foreground the fact of sound and thus to stage the self-renewal of film, the updating of the medium’s modernity, against the background of the flat figure’s serialized history. The figure of the monster, which exists not in a series but as a series, which updates itself in color and widescreen formats, in 3-D and CGI, in comics, on TV, and in video games, increasingly becomes a medium itself: a second-order medium of media change, and of modernity as the trajectory of media-technical innovation, updating, and transformation.

Transnational American Studies

I have yet to hear from anyone at the annual conference of the German Association for American Studies, which is going on now (May 31 – June 3, 2012) in Mainz, but the volume pictured above — Transnational American Studies, edited by Udo Hebel — was scheduled to make its debut there. (The Amazon page is up, but currently listing the book as not yet available.) In any case, I look forward to reading the contributions to the volume, which the publisher (Winter) describes thus:

Transnational approaches and theories have reshaped the interdisciplinary trajectory of American Studies since the turn of the millennium. The further extension of perspectives on the United States and North America to prominently include Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, and Pacific Studies has complicated long-standing notions of ‘American Studies’ and problematized concepts such as nation, identity, and American exceptionalism.

The collection gathers thirty original contributions to transnational American Studies from the fields of cultural studies, literature, history, politics, and media studies. Individual essays reassess the global role of the U.S. and its perceptions from within and without, discuss how transnational and comparative explorations emphasize multidirectional processes of cultural exchange and transfer, and show how paradigms of migration and cultural mobility have taken definitions and practices of American Studies beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary limits.

Oh, and did I mention that I have a chapter in the book? (Sorry for the self-promotion, but that’s what blogs are for, right?) Anyway, my piece is called “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective,” and it’s a reworking of a talk by the same title that I gave at last year’s DGfA conference. (In case you missed it but are interested, a screencast video of the full presentation can be viewed here.)

Populäre Serialität / Popular Seriality

An announcement has just gone up on the publisher’s site for Populäre Serialität: Narration — Evolution — Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert [i.e. Popular Seriality: Narration — Evolution — Distinction. On Serial Storytelling since the 19th Century]. The volume, which is set to appear in August of this year with the German publisher transcript, is edited by Frank Kelleter (speaker for the DFG Research Unit on “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice,” of which I am a part), and it contains — among many other interesting chapters — a piece co-authored by myself and Ruth Mayer, called “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel” [roughly: Border-Crossers: Serial Figures and Media Change].

Here, for readers of German, is the blurb from the publisher’s site:

Wie lässt sich die starke Verbreitung von seriellen Erzählungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert erklären? Welche neuen Erzählformate werden durch Serialisierung geschaffen? Wie beeinflussen populäre Serien unsere Wahrnehmung und Strukturierung sozialer Realität?

Die Beiträge in diesem Band gehen diesen Fragen nach und zeigen u.a., welche Wandlungen Serienfiguren durchlaufen, wenn sie in neue Medien übertragen werden, oder wie bei lang laufenden Serien die Übergänge zwischen Produzenten und Nutzern immer fließender werden. So ergibt sich ein facettenreicher Blick auf einen wesensbestimmenden Erzähltypus der Populärkultur.

The Conspiratorial Mode of Storytelling in Contemporary American Television Series

My colleague and office-mate, Felix Brinker, has just published an exciting article on what he calls the “conspiratorial mode” of storytelling in recent American TV series. This was part of a larger project — Felix’s MA thesis — so perhaps we can expect to see other aspects in the future (maybe also in connection with his PhD?). In the meantime, here is the abstract for the article, which appears in Aspeers 5 (2012): 87-109:

Hidden Agendas, Endless Investigations, and the Dynamics of Complexity: The Conspiratorial Mode of Storytelling in Contemporary American Television Series

Felix Brinker

Contemporary American television shows such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, 24, Alias, or Fringe construct long-running story-arcs around central narrative enigmas in order to inspire committed and regular viewing. In the unfolding of their central storylines such shows perpetually resist closure and defer the resolution of their central conflicts. The specific narrative trajectory of these shows, this paper argues, is best understood if viewed through the lens of conspiracy theory – or, rather, if these shows are conceptualized as conspiracy narratives: as crime fictions of a grand (and, at times, cosmic) scope, as stories that circle around a potentially endless conflict between cunning protagonists and nefarious hidden powers, between investigations and cover-ups. In such programs conspiracy is more than just a thematic preoccupation — it also functions as an organizational logic or structure that governs the way in which these shows tell their stories.

I argue that the success of such programs is indebted to this particular way of storytelling, which I call the ‘conspiratorial mode.’ This article sketches the narrative structure of conspiratorial programs, situates them in the context of post-network television, and considers their curious dynamics of narrative progression and deferral. Finally, it offers an account of the shared characteristics of shows that partake in the conspiratorial mode of storytelling and suggests reasons for the recent prominence of conspiracy narratives in American television beyond and apart from a paranoia that is supposedly widespread in contemporary American culture.

The full text of the article can be found here.

Batman Live?

Several weeks ago, my family and I were able to catch a performance of the touring stadium show Batman Live (English site here, German here) in Hamburg. All in all, it was lots of fun. And it also happens to tie in with my current research on plurimedial serial figures. I had planned, therefore, to write a sort of review of the show, but as I can’t foresee finding the time to do so anytime soon, here are a few scattered thoughts.

As the title Batman Live indicates, the show is all about “liveness,” but the cultivation of the latter, which might be said to constitute the show’s main conceit, involves the performance in all sorts of paradoxes. One might, of course, say (with reference to Derrida, perhaps) that all performance, insofar as it involves the iteration of a script, renders “liveness” problematic, as the present is bound up in the pastness of the patterns and discourses that it repeats. But the paradoxes of Batman Live are much more concrete than all that…

By what means does Batman Live contrive to make Batman live? Naturally, by employing a live actor to embody the figure on a physical stage. “Live” is here contrasted with “recorded,” and it would seem that film, which also employs live actors (at least sometimes) but preserves their actions for later playback, is the particular medium of reference here. (Incidentally, film serves a double role here, as the show undoubtedly seeks to profit from the popularity of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, while defining itself against them with the implicit claim that “more live” = “more real” or more spectacular.) But, at least, in the German-language version I saw, this claim to liveness is undermined with the very first words uttered on stage, as the actors quite clearly lip sync a pre-recorded soundtrack.

Furthermore, the stage/screen dichotomy as a basis for the claim to liveness is unsettled by the presence of a gigantic digital display behind the stage. We’re used to this, of course, from big-budget musicals and, increasingly, even smaller-budget theater productions, but the backdrop in this case is used to make constant reference to other media (especially to comics and video games), the pre-existence of which must be seen to complicate the purported “liveness” of the performance.

For example, when Batman and Robin race away in the Batmobile, exiting the stage through one of the many discreet passageways that open up when necessary to allow traffic onto or off of the stage, their high-speed journey to Arkham Asylum is continued onscreen, framed quite obviously in the visual forms typical of digital racing games. (The layout of Arkham Island and the interior of the asylum, as depicted on the screen, in fact seemed to be pulled directly from the console game Batman: Arkham Asylum; an uncanny sense of recognition, an identification of the digital backdrop with my own TV screen hooked up to a PS3, transported me momentarily out of the arena and into my own living room.) The backdrop is also used for the purpose of narrative ellipsis, as a means of summarizing the events that occur between on-stage scenes; significantly, this takes place in the idiom of graphic narrative: we see digitally animated comic book pages flipping, the virtual camera zooming from panel to panel, revealing what happens “in the meantime.” Indeed, one might claim that the “meanwhile” is the temporal register that superhero comics in particular have perfected more than any other medium; such direct recourse to it, though, radically unsettles the here and now of the “live.”

On the other hand, though, we might say that these intermedial references are not so much at odds with, but in fact an integral part of the performance’s cultivation of “liveness,” which consists not only in the present-ness of the actors and their actions in a physical space shared by us, but precisely in the act of “bringing to life” the places and events depicted in film, video games, and comics — effectively imbuing these media with life by expanding them onto the stage, where Batman, Robin, the Joker, and others relate to the (intermedially determined) screen as part of their (diegetic) world.

Furthermore, this permeability of the screen, which alternates between embodying an expansion of diegetic space and an extra-diegetic, specifically narrative function (with concrete references to the narrative/representational techniques of other media) is caught up in paradoxes much like those informing the deployment of 3D techniques and technologies: they, too, oscillate between a) claims of establishing an intensified immersive experience that would bring represented characters and events to life for us in an unprecedented manner, and b) an emphasis on the unprecedented nature of the whole affair, a celebration of the technological infrastructure that enables such spectacles, and hence a foregrounding of the event itself in a manner that is radically at odds with the notion of “immersion.”

Indeed, the discourse of “immersive experience” is referenced in the video clip embedded here, where the “physicality of the stage” plus the awe-inspiring technology are foregrounded, but purportedly “wrapped up” in an immersive “package.” I am inclined to believe that this kind of equation never adds up — and that it’s never in fact meant to: from the “sensational melodrama” of nineteenth century stages and early-twentieth century screens (as explored by Ben Singer) to 3D techniques and “immersive” video games today, the attraction of all such spectacles consists in the maintenance of tensions between realism and a feeling of awe at the sight or spectacle of realism (itself no longer beholden to the impression of realistic-ness), for example, or between immersion and amazement at the power of a medium to involve us (recognition of which takes place outside the space of immersion). Batman Live is above all a spectacle of this sort, and the paradox of its “liveness” is — for those who take pleasure in such paradox, at least — not so much a shortcoming as a productive element of the attraction, which itself is inextricably bound up with the fragmented dispersal and plurimedial lack of coherence that characterizes Batman qua serial figure.

Well, in any case, it was all good fun…

Meanwhile, in Hannover…

An interview with me on the subject of memes, conducted by Manuel Behrens, appears in today’s Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung as part of a full-page spread on Boromir, Philosoraptor, Admiral Ackbar, and Rage Comics. True story! Check it out here: Was sind eigentlich Memes? (The interview, “Jeder kann mitmachen,” is at the bottom of the page.)

Networks of Mediation

This is the abstract for a talk I’ll be giving in Mannheim, at a conference entitled “Networks in American Culture/America as Network” (16-17 March 2012):

Networks of Mediation: Serial Figures as Mediators of Change

Shane Denson

Series, in a wide range of forms, constitute not only the “contents” of various media (television, film, literature, etc.), but might also might be conceived as media in their own right—though in a somewhat unorthodox, non-apparatic sense of the word. Here “medium” is related to “milieu”: environment for expression, articulation, action, or agency. Conceiving media this way means seeing them not simply as channels for communication between pre-existing agencies, but as co-constitutive of the agential potentials that can be realized in a given environment; in Bruno Latour’s terms, media and media-technologies are not mere “intermediaries” but active “mediators” that themselves enable distinctions between subjects and objects and thus play a radically non-neutral role in constructing networks of communication and interaction. Clearly, narrative television series, as one example, can be said to constitute the milieux in which their characters live and act; but to position series as media in a strong sense is to suggest a perspectival inversion of form/content relations, i.e. to see the framing medium of the televisual, filmic, or other apparatus as, in a sense, framed (or re-framed) by the series conventionally taken as that medium’s content. This reversal, I contend, is not arbitrary, but instead effected from within series themselves; the agents behind such inversions are those serially instantiated figures (e.g. Frankenstein, Tarzan, Batman, or Dracula) that populate series and move between a range of media, thus serving as loci for the proliferation of plurimedial networks. Such figures lead a double existence, at once anchored in the linear chains of ongoing monomedial series and also living in the interstices between (apparatic) media, forging decentralized or distributed nets or meshes among them. And particularly the interchange between linear and non-linear serial forms sheds light on transformations in the apparatic and discursive media that carry (and are carried by) series as mediators of media networks.

Object-Oriented Gaga and the Nonhuman Turn

A while back, I posted the CFP for a conference on “The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies” to be held at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, May 3-5, 2012 (the original announcement is here). The lineup of invited speakers, in case you haven’t seen it, is very impressive:

Jane Bennett (Political Science, Johns Hopkins)

Ian Bogost (Literature, Communication, Culture, Georgia Tech)

Wendy Chun (Media and Modern Culture, Brown)

Mark Hansen (Literature, Duke)

Erin Manning (Philosophy/Dance, Concordia University, Montreal)

Brian Massumi (Philosophy, University of Montreal)

Tim Morton (English, UC-Davis)

Steven Shaviro (English, Wayne State)

In addition to these speakers, there will also be several breakout sessions at the conference. And, as luck would have it, I will be presenting in one of them, as the paper I proposed on Lady Gaga and the role of nonhuman agency in twenty-first century celebrity has been accepted by the conference organizers! I am honored and excited to have the chance to speak in such distinguished company, and I very much look forward to the conference. In the meantime, here is the abstract for my talk:

Object-Oriented Gaga: Theorizing the Nonhuman Mediation of Twenty-First Century Celebrity

Shane Denson, Leibniz Universität Hannover

In this paper, I wish to explore (from a primarily media-theoretical perspective) how concepts of nonhuman agency and the distribution of human agency across networks of nonhuman objects contribute to, and help illuminate, an ongoing redefinition of celebrity personae in twenty-first century popular culture. As my central case study, I propose looking at Lady Gaga as a “serial figure”—as a persona that, not unlike figures such as Batman, Frankenstein, Dracula, or Tarzan, is serially instantiated across a variety of media, repeatedly restaged and remixed through an interplay of repetition and variation, thus embodying seriality as a plurimedial interface between trajectories of continuity and discontinuity. As with classic serial figures, whose liminal, double, or secret identities broker traffic between disparate—diegetic and extradiegetic, i.e. medial—times and spaces, so too does Lady Gaga articulate together various media (music, video, fashion, social media) and various sociocultural spheres, values, and identifications (mainstream, alternative, kitsch, pop/art, straight, queer). In this sense, Gaga may be seen to follow in the line of Elvis, David Bowie, and Madonna, among others. Setting these stars in relation to iconic fictional characters shaped by their many transitions between literature, film, radio, television, and digital media promises to shed light on the changing medial contours of contemporary popularity—especially when we consider the formal properties that enable serial figures’ longevity and flexibility: above all, their firm iconic grounding in networks of nonhuman objects (capes, masks, fangs, neckbolts, etc.) and their ontological vacillations between the human and the nonhuman (the animal, the technical, or the monstrous). Serial figures define a nexus of seriality and mediality, and by straddling the divide between medial “inside” and “outside” (e.g. between diegesis and framing medium, fiction and the “real world”), they are able to track media transformations over time and offer up images of the interconnected processes of medial and cultural change. This ability is grounded, then, in the inherent “queerness” of serial figures—the queer duplicity of their diegetic identities, of their extra- and intermedial proliferations, and of the networks of objects that define them. Lady Gaga transforms this queerness from a medial condition into an explicit ideology, one which sits uneasily between the mainstream and the exceptional, and she does so on the basis of a network of queer nonhuman objects—disco sticks, disco gloves, iPod LCD glasses, etc.—that alternate between (anthropocentrically defined) functionality and a sheer ornamentality of the object, in the process destabilizing the agency of the individual star and dispersing it amongst a network of nonhuman agencies. As an object-oriented serial figure, I propose, Lady Gaga may be an image of our contemporary convergence culture itself.

CFP: Contemporary Screen Narratives

Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts

Conference to be held on 17 May 2012

Hosted by Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham

Keynote speakers: Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell

This one-day conference looks to trace connections between the narratives of contemporary screen media and their contexts of production, distribution and consumption. We refer here to narrative as the presentation and organisation of story via the semiotic phenomena of image, sound and written/spoken word. We anticipate that speakers will explore ways in which stories and their on-screen telling are informed by contemporary industrial and technological conditions. We invite contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers working across screen-based narrative media, such as film, television, comics, literature, video games and other areas of new media. We are interested to receive all paper proposals pertinent to the conference topic, though we particularly welcome those that engage with the following themes and questions:

Industrial determinants. In what ways are stories and their telling contingent on the production cultures, distribution methods, revenue models and governmental policies that configure a given creative industry?

Digital Technologies. How has the construction and/or reception of narratives been influenced by digital production equipment, distribution tech, online platforms and consumer hardware devices?

Seriality and Transmedia: In what ways do serial narrative forms, whether disseminated within a given medium or across multiple media, reflect industrial and technological contexts?

Audio and Visual Styles: How are the sounds and visions of contemporary screen narratives informed by conditions of production and reception technologies?

Paratextual Surround: In what ways do promotional materials, practitioner discourses, fan cultures and critical/journalistic responses discursively frame screen narratives?

Send abstracts of 250 words to both:

Anthony Smith – aaxas4@nottingham.ac.uk

and

Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur – aaxac2@nottingham.ac.uk

Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length.

The deadline for proposal submission is Monday 13 February 2012.

Deadline for proposal submission is now: 4 March 2012.

(Original CFP here: http://contemporaryscreennarratives.tumblr.com/)

Bowie Turns 65: Pop-Star Iconicity and the Serialization of Self

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBvR08RD_-I]

David Bowie turns 65 today, and among the various birthday tributes and other pieces written for the occasion is this article by David Hudson, appearing in mubi.com’s “The Daily” column: “Bowie @ 65“. Most interesting, to me, is Hudson’s identification of “Bowie’s #1 lesson in staying power: Create a persona and then kill it off with the next one.” Hudson is right, I believe, to single out what amounts to a principle of seriality as the open secret of Bowie’s success — a principle taken up, as Hudson also correctly observes, by Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince in the 1980s. As I’ve recently argued, it’s precisely this principle — with Bowie as a direct influence, no less — that Lady Gaga has begun adapting to the changed medial parameters of twenty-first century convergence culture (see here for a summary). I’ll have more to say about this sort of serialized celebrity soon, but for now: Happy birthday to one of the original progenitors of pop stardom qua serial media remix!