cultural distinctions remediated

Thank You

This is just a quick thank you note to everyone involved with last week’s two overlapping events: the theme week on “Popular Seriality” at In Media Res, and the conference we hosted on “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle.”

First, thanks to my co-curators at In Media Res: Frank Kelleter, Ruth Mayer, Jason Mittell, Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, and Daniel Stein. Because of them and the external commenters, the theme week — in addition to being a lot of fun — provided lots of food for thought and continuing conversations. Thanks also to Karen Petruska from In Media Res for guiding us through the process of setting up the theme week. And while the theme week is officially over, everything will remain online (here) and open for further comments and discussions. So if you’ve got something to say about the topic of popular seriality, it’s not too late!

Thanks as well to everyone who made the conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated” such a success: our keynote speakers Jason Mittell (who, in case you missed it, has posted his talk here) and Lynn Spigel; fellow speakers Regina Schober, Bettina Soller, Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Florian Groß, and Christina Meyer; my co-organizers Ruth Mayer, Vanessa Künnemann, and Florian Groß; and our great assistants Felix Brinker, Svenja Fehlhaber, and Hannah Pardey! Thanks also to our sponsors: the US Embassy in Berlin, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikaforschung, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Campus Cultur, and the Freundeskreis der Leibniz Universität Hannover. Thanks, finally, to everyone who attended, asked stimulating questions, and helped generate interesting discussions!

Cultural Distinctions Remediated

Our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” begins today, December 15, 2011. Jason Mittell will start things off this evening (6:00 pm in the Niedersachsensaal at Königsworther Platz 1) with a talk on “The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television” (see also here for a preview). Tomorrow, there will be six talks divided into two panels (see here for the full program, with links to all individual abstracts). And Lynn Spigel will wrap things up on Saturday morning with her talk on “Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America”.

Jason Mittell’s Third Way: A Preview

Television scholar Jason Mittell, who is currently spending a year in Göttingen as a fellow in the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice,” will–as readers of this blog will already know–be giving one of two keynote lectures at our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated,” December 15-17, 2011 (our other keynote speaker is Lynn Spigel).

Now, over at his blog Just TV, Jason has a new post on Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine’s new book Legitimating Television: Media Convergence & Cultural Status. And included in this “unofficial review” (as he puts it) of Newman and Levine’s book is also what would appear to be an (unofficial?) preview of Jason’s talk in Hannover. I recommend reading the review in full, but I wanted to highlight those points that give us an idea of what kind of ground we can expect Jason to be covering in his keynote, “The Complexity of Quality.”

Jason writes, “this response [to Newman and Levine’s book] will be part of a larger argument I’ll be making in a presentation next month at the conference Cultural Distinctions Remediated at University of Hannover, so I will point toward larger arguments still to come, and welcome feedback to help me craft that talk.”

So what can we look forward to in Mittell’s keynote? Jason identifies what he takes to be a central problem in Legitimating Television: namely, a “false dichotomy” that he sees Newman and Levine putting forward in their book. According to Mittell:

“The book links the discourses of legitimation to structures of gender and class, highlighting how television has traditionally been feminized and stigmatized as lowbrow, arguing that recent legitimation practices work to masculinize and “class up” television. While I think this is correct, I do not see it as a self-evident problem to be avoided at all costs like Newman & Levine seem to, as suggested by the book’s final words: “We love television. But legitimizing that love at such a cost? Paying for the legitimation of the medium through a perpetuation of hierarchies of taste and cultural value and inequalities of class and gender? No” (171). Implied in this conclusion and their analysis throughout is a choice: we (as scholars, critics and viewers) can either embrace legitimation and its concomitant reinforcement of cultural hierarchies, or we can reject it, with the latter framed as the more politically progressive choice.”

Later, and here’s where we get an indication of – some very interesting – things to come at his talk in December, Jason writes:

“What I wanted from the book that I did not get was a third way to discuss television’s cultural legitimation, moving beyond either accepting legitimation discourses of quality television and progress, or rejecting them as illegitimate or ungrounded. (In my talk at Hannover, I hope to offer such a third approach, specifically concerning cultural evaluation.)”

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that these are exciting prospects; I very much look forward to hearing Jason’s argument and his vision of/for this “third way.”

Conference Poster, Program, and Paraphernalia

Here is the final poster (above) that Florian Groß and I put together for our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle.” As mentioned before, artist James Hance graciously allowed us to use his “Dark Starry Knight” for our conference materials. For this we are very grateful. (And if you like his artwork, please consider making a donation to the fund that James has set up to help pay the medical bills for his daughter Maddy.)

Here (below) is the final program as it will be printed (as a 6-sided folded flyer):

And here’s the inside view:

Click to enlarge. (And see here for links to abstracts for all the presentations.) Finally, in case you missed it, here’s the unofficial promo video for the conference:

Conference Program: “Cultural Distinctions Remediated”

“Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle”

Leibniz Universität Hannover, American Studies, 15-17 December 2011

Like any discursive phenomenon, categories of cultural distinction (such as “high” art, “low” culture, or the less well-researched area of the “middlebrow”) require the substrate of some medium or medial field—be it language, mass media, or new media—in order to articulate the differences upon which they turn. Cultural clout or capital, for example, is accumulated, and the conditions of such accumulation are defined and regulated, in media ranging from the popular press to specialized academic and legal treatises. At the same time, the categories of cultural distinction not only take shape within media but apply as well to concrete media and media products. Individual novels, films, and music productions are classed according to oppositions such as high vs. low, art vs. kitsch, quality vs. trash, mainstream vs. alternative, while at times whole media are more generally relegated to a lowly status (such as was the case with “primitive” or pre-classical cinema or with the videogame in the eyes of many today) or, on the other hand, accorded a higher one (e.g. the “graphic novel” vis-à-vis the pulpy comics from which it evolved). Clearly, these examples attest to the fact that cultural distinctions are negotiable and historically indexed, but more importantly, they point to the role of media transformations in the historical revision and renegotiation of distinction categories. Notions of film-as-art, for example, first emerge (in the film-aesthetic writings of Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg) in the 1910s, amidst the sweeping and uncertain changes of the “transitional era” between early and classical cinema, and the aesthetic revalorization of the popular medium finds its most pronounced expression (with the likes of Rudolf Arnheim) in the wake of the film-technological transition from silent to sound cinema. Similarly, the rise of so-called “Quality TV” takes place at a highly overdetermined moment of media change, one marked by digitalization, convergence trajectories, the rise of alternative delivery media, and a general reorganization of the televisual landscape. The conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” aims to shed light on such processes of transformation, in which the medial “double articulation” of distinction categories—i.e. the fact that they are both articulated in media and apply to media—is most crucially at stake, by looking critically at what happens when existing media and attendant categories are “remediated” by newer ones: How are categories of cultural distinction transformed, or how do they relate to a transformed media landscape? These questions will be pursued across a wide range of media and from comparative (both cross-medial and historical) perspectives.

Program (links lead to abstracts):

Thursday, 15 December 2011, 6:00 pm (Niedersachsensaal)

Welcome: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)

Keynote I

Jason Mittell (American Studies, Film & Media Culture, Middlebury): “The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television”

Moderation: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)

Friday, 16 December 2011

Panel I, 10:00 am – 12:30 pm (Room 103)

Regina Schober (American Studies, Mannheim): “Imagining the World Wide Web: Cultural Constructions of Virtual Space across Media”

Bettina Soller (American Studies, Göttingen): “Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction: Collaborative Writing and the Solitary Genius”

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (Media Studies, Göttingen): “Desperately Seeking the Mainstream: Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction”

Moderation: Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover)