Seminar Introduction: Media Theory Orientation
Following a Path to an Inclusive Complexity Model of Media and Visual
Culture
Learning Objectives and Discussion Questions: Introduction
The semiotics of everyday life: investigations into the conditions
for the circulation and transmission of meaning. The codes we live by:
photography, film, TV, YouTube, advertising, the whole gamut of visual
culture. The relationship between "media studies" and "visual culture studies." in the academic cluster of institutionalized disciplines.
Introduction to Theory and Conceptual Models (review first):
Readings:
Introductory Cases Studies: Damien Hirst [ 1 | 2 ]; film; television; Web
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| 2 Communication Theory |
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Overview of Essential Media & Communication Theory
Learning Objectives and Discussion Questions
Communication theory from the 1960s-80s provides some major common
assumptions that are assumed or critiqued in current media and information
theory. As models of the transmission of meaning, these theories
also inform how we think about visual culture as a language and set
of communications media. Consider the main assumptions, then ask
what is left out of the models? For example, transmission through
time, the limits of linear one-way models, larger questions about
production and receptions contexts that are more like networks than
point-to-point connections.
Become familiar with the Wiki Guide to
Key Terms and Concepts
Transmission Models of Communication
- Overview of communication-transmission models (David Foulger, Brooklyn College/CUNY)
- Note that some models come from rhetorical thought, more recent from engineering and and information sciences.
- The
Shannon-Weaver model of communication and information (Wikipedia)
- The
Laswell model of communication and information
- Critique
of transmission models
- Problems of linear, non-contextual models
- Need to consider all communication modalities: one-one, one-many, many-one, many-many, and dialog (one-other, mutually assumed)
The Legacy of Marshall McLuhan
- Marshall McLuhan, "The
Medium is the Message," (Excerpts from Understanding Media,
The Extensions of Man, Part I, 2nd Edition; originally published, 1964). (See
especially
Part 1, "The Medium is the Message," paragraphs 1-3.).
- Two reviews the critique of McLuhan's views in recent theory
by Nancy Shaw, Canadian
Journal of Communication, 24/1, 1999: Review
essay 1 | Review
essay 2.
- James C. Morrison, "The
Place of Marshall McLuhan in the Learning of His Time," Counterblast, 1 (2001), NYU.
- McLuhan
and Technological Determinism:
- Harold Innis on the "Bias
of Communication," from Empire and Communications.
Carey and Communication as Culture
Further Reading and Sources
Discussion:
Communication Theory and Visual Culture: Interpreting
Visual Media with Communication and Information models. What is useful,
what is left out in linear, signal-to-receiver models and "communication
effects" models (McLuhan)?
Student Presentations
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Discursive Practices and Paradigms: Models for Media and Visual Culture
as Discursively Constructed Objects
Learning Objectives and Discussion Questions
Media theory has been influenced by Foucault's approach to discourse
and the discursive objectification of objects of knowledge and interpretation.
Foucault also provides important models for the study of visual culture
in the way cultures construct media objects and genres in institutions
(for example, the entertainment industries, advertising, the art world,
fashion).
Kuhn's idea of "paradigms" is more cited than understood,
and is usefully compared with Foucault to disclose two different models
for how socially agreed upon objects of knowledge are formed. Since
so much of our information and knowledge formation comes visually today,
we should see how these models for thinking can be usefully applied.
Foucault's theory of discourse, objects, disciplines, and the circulation
of power through discourse can be seen as a "paradigm shift" in doing
history and cultural theory, both in its "Copernican Revolution" of
de- or re-centering discourse and sites of cultural power, and also
in the way his intellectual model has influenced the humanties and
social sciences more broadly as institutionalized disciplines.
Foucault on Discourse and Knowledge
Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm and "structure of scientific
revolutions"
Compare Foucault's model of discourse to Kuhn's paradigm: institutional
foundations of knowledge and formation of objects of knowledge (for us,
media, language, visual contents as objects of discourse and knowledge)
Lecture
Notes: Kuhn and Foucault Outline
Discourse and Knowledge Construction Issues in the Interdisciplinarity Debate:
Stanley Fish, "Being Interdisciplinary is So Very Hard to Do."
Copernican
Principle and Paradigm
Shift (Wikipedia)
Student Presentations
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4 Structuralism and Semiotics: Intro |
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Structuralism, Semiotics & Semiology for Media Theory
Learning Objectives and Discussion Topics:
Understanding the main assumptions and concepts of structuralism and semiotics
concerning language and signs. What is the significance for cultural theory
of the "linguistic turn," approaching all aspects of culture as
a language, a system of learned codes. How can the concepts and methods of
semiotics be extended to all forms of culture as multiple kinds of cultural
languages?
How does semiotics become a model for a "generative grammar" of culture, describing the rules for producing new cultural forms from our established base of meaning systems (in language, images, music)? Basic Readings: Structuralist models of language and the linguistic
sign
- Ferdinand de Saussure, selections from Course in General Linguistics (CT,
646-654)
- Further Reading: Paul Bouissac, "Perspectives
on Saussure," University of Toronto, 2003.
- Emile Benveniste, "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign" and "Subjectivity
in Language." (CT, 725-32)
- C. S. Peirce's Model: C. S. Peirce, "What
is a Sign," from The Essential Peirce, 2 (Indiana
U.-Purdue U. Press.).
Introduction to Semiotics
Examples from popular culture and media
- Advertising, popular TV genres, movies: some cases to illustrate "the
grammar of meaning" using semiotic concepts and methods of
analysis.
Begin Gibson, Pattern Recognition
- A novel about a "cool hunter" who uses (implicitly and explicitly) semiotics to code and decode corporate branding. Fun and very engaging. By the writer who coined the term "cyberspace."
Additional Resources
Case Studies: advertising and fashion
Lecture Notes:
Semiotic
Model of Interpretation (Fashion System as example) (Irvine)
Student Presentations
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Cultural Semiotics
Learning Objectives
Using the core theories of semiotics, how can cultural semiotics be applied
to all forms of cultural productions today? How does interpretation and
meaning-making work across media forms and genres (movies as "commentaries" on
books, TV genres, or comics) and cultures (cross-globalization interpretations).
How can we read new media and web sites like MySpace and YouTube? How do
we extend the theory to examples from both high and low culture?
Core Readings
Barthes and Semiology
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies,
1, "Myth Today" (trans. Annette Lavers, 1984) (pdf).
Also Visual Culture, 51-58. (An html
version).
- Note: One of Barthes' first descriptions of semiology,
the term adopted by French theorists. A source of confusion
may be his use of the term "myth," by which Barthes
means the second-order meanings and codes that we live by.
The higher-level social and cultural meanings that circulate
with images, media, and texts are not "fictions" but very
real and powerful ways of structuring the world.
- Tony McNeill, Overview
of Barthes' Mythologies
- Roland Barthes, Elements
of Semiology (1964; English edition, 1968): selections: read
sections: Intro through 1.1.4; 1.2.1-1.2.5; part II is an overview
of the Signifier/Signified structure.
- Yurij Lotman, "On
the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture" (CT
410- )
- Julia Kristeva, "On
Yury Lotman," PMLA 109/3, 1994: 375-76.
- Lotman's Journal, Sign
Systems Studies (Tartu University Press). See recent articles
for examples of applications of his methodology today.
- Hilary Clark, "The
Universe of Interpretations," Review of Lotman and Eco.
[Another copy here.]
Important Issues in Cultural Semiotics:
- Lotman's "Incompleteness Theory": all cultures experience
themselves as essentially incomplete, which is why we continue to
make new works, new interpretations, commentaries, additions to past
and current cultural productions.
- Cultural meanings function like a language, that is, they are learned
(not natural), rule-governed (multi-levels of "grammar"),
and collective/social (not private or individual).
- Lotman's corollary:
culture is the non-hereditary memory of a community.
Cultural Encoding and Decoding: Semiotics and Cultural Studies
Gibson, Pattern Recognition (discussion): semiotics at work
in a novel
Further Cases Studies and Examples (TV, film, advertising, art)
Student Presentations
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| 6 Deconstruction
and Expanding Semiotic Theories |
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Readings:
Important Background Reading
Some videos of Derrida discussing his work
Seminar Discussion and Presentations:
Deconstruction at Work, Formal
and Informal
Today's blogs, video sites, and comedy shows like the Daily
Show and
Stephen Colbert often rely on a strategy of deconstruction:
exposing false assumptions and revealing contradictions for parody and
satire. In understanding how deconstruction can be applied to reading
heavily encoded ideological messages, analyze a recent political speech
or written discourse to discuss assumptions, unacknowledged binary
oppositions (false binaries when choices or realities are multiple
or complex), taking certain views as given or natural when they are
in fact cultural and social. Much of popular discourse in politics
(on sex, war, religion, marriage, racial and national relations, etc.)
recycles buried, suppressed, and unacknowledged assumptions that need
to be proved, shown, or demonstrated. Find some examples to discuss
in the seminar.
Student Presentations
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| 7 Intertextuality,
Semiosis, Cultural Encyclopedia |
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Intertextuality, Intermediality, Semiosis, Cultural Encyclopedia
Media and cultural theory today assumes the concepts of dialogism and intertextuality as foundational ideas. Intertextuality should
now be redefined for contemporary media studies as intermediality, or
the ongoing dialog among many kinds of cultural expressions in any medium.
A new work emerges within a network of prior and contemporary works, and we
interpret expression in a variety of genres that cut across our popular media--TV,
Web, books and magazines, art works, music.
The power of this concept extends both to our ongoing interpretations of existing cultural expressions (texts, images, film, TV, web sites), and also to the generation or production of new works or expressions that are possible from the producer-communities' access to a cultural encylopedia of contents, relationships, codes, and rules of formation.
The concepts of intetextuality/intermediality and cultural encylopedia usefully merge together the idea of unlimited semiosis in semiotic theory (expressions are always interpreted through addition expressions with no final closure), and Derrida's idea of the supplement, the necessary structure of meaning systems that always attempt to disclose meaning by supplements to expressions that present themselves as the "inner" meaning contained in a prior expression.
A cultural extension of unlimited semiosis is found in Lotman's incompleteness theorem: every cultural experiences itself as incomplete and continually generates new supplements, commentaries, new expressions, new statements, new works, that extend the fund of possible cultural meanings.
Intetextuality/intermediality and the cultural encylopedia are thus useful concept to explain how any interpretation is possible and how new works a generated from the internalized rules and codes of a cultural system.
- Barthes, "From
Work to Text" (1971; trans. 1977)
- Bakhtin, "Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the Novel." (CT,
669-674 [to end of second column)]
- Kristeva, excerpt from "Word,
Dialogue, and Novel." From Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva
Reader [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986]).
- Eco, Umberto. "Metaphor,
Dictionary, and Encyclopedia." New Literary History: 15:2
(1984): 255-71.
- ----. "The
Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader." [see
especially section III]
- ----. "Greimassian
Semantics and the Encyclopedia," New Literary History:
20:3 (1989): 707-21.
- Gary Radford, "Eco
and the Model Reader." Paper. Fairleigh Dickinson University.
- Daniel Chandler, "Intertextuality." [Overview]
- Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence," Harpers Magazine, Feb. 2007.
Seminar Resources
Seminar Discussion
Applying theories of intertextuality and the cultural encyclopedia to
visual culture examples: TV, film, Web, visual art.
Student Presentations
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| 8 Cultural Theory: Medium / Artwork / Image/
Spectacle / Simulacrum: Benjamin, Debord, Baudrillard |
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Learning Objectives:
One view of the transition from the modern to post-modern era is about
the problem of representation, the status of images, the cultural, ideological,
and technical function of media, the new role of photography and film,
and the mass mediation of life in general. The statements by the writers
in this unit--Benjamin, Debord, and Baudrillard--are often considered
as a chain of arguments, each presupposing the earlier, and adding analyses
and observations from the media of their era and schools of thought
that each theorist participated in. What are the main issues? How are
they being played out today?
Readings:
- Walter Benjamin, The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. [Another copy.]
(1936) (Selections only: Focus on sections: Pref., I-VI, and XII)
- Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle (1967) [Another copy.]
(Selections: Sections 1-6, 10-11, 17-18, 24-30)
- Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra
and Simulations." From Simulations, 1981; English
trans., 1988.
Theory Backgrounds
- Douglas Kellner, "Cultural
Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Studies," (UCLA paper)
- Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, "Debord
and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle."
- Douglas Kellner, "Media
Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle," (UCLA paper)
- Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, "Debord
and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle" (Illuminations,
UCLA)
- -----. Preface
to Kellner's new book, Media Spectacle.
Student Presentations
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| 9 Postmodernism: Overview of Postmodern
Theory and Issues |
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Learning Objectives:
What was postmodernism? Distinguish between "the postmodern," "postmodernism," and "postmodernity." How
much of postmodern theory from the 1960s-1990s is relevant for thinking today?
Where are we now in both cultural assumptions and ideas and practices that circulate
with or without self-consciousness or intention? What are some good examples
of the "post-postmodern" in popular and high culture today? Music,
media, film, TV, video, art, photography, web? How is the current use of hybrid
media doing "theory by other means"?
Overview Sources and Introductions:
Readings:
Postmodern Works and Artists:
Film and Popular Culture Examples:
- Blade Runner
- Japanese manga and anime: Ghost in the Shell
- The Matrix trilogy
Student Presentations
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Introduction to Mediology: Media and Institutions of Mediation |
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Is Mediology a Form
of "Wittgenstein's Ladder"?
"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on
them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has
climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the
world rightly." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.54)
Mediology and a synthesis of theory:
With the two major criteria toward using theory we have practiced in the
seminar, how do you see mediology in its heuristic and self-reflexive or
self-critical potential? Does the approach lead to new discoveries, even
about theory itself, and what happens when we use some of the concepts to
critique questions of media, mediation, and transmission? How does mediology continue, extend, or critique other theory traditions
we have examined: communication theory, semiotics/semiology, post-modernism?
Readings:
- Regis Debray, "What
is Mediology?" Le Monde Diplomatique, Aug., 1999.
Trans. Martin Irvine.
- Jean Gagnon, "Introduction to Mediology," The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art,
Science, and Technology, Montreal.
- Interview
with Debray, Wired Magazine, Jan. 1995.
- Debray, Media Manifestos, pp. 1-40; 69-79; 97-107; Tables,
171-174. Chap.
1 in pdf.
- Debray, Transmitting
Culture, trans. Eric Rauth. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000, (excerpts).
- Review of Transmitting Culture: Constantina Papolias, "Of
Tools and Angels: Regis Debray's Mediology," Theory,
Culture & Society, 21/3 (2004): 165-70.
- Daniel Chandler, "Processes
of Mediation." Background to the issues
that Debray is attempting to think beyond.
- Media Present and Future:
EPIC 2014
Resources and Sources
Working with Mediology
What questions to ask?
- Missed institutional embeddedness of media?
- Institutions of transmission?
- Media as memory systems?
- Mediaspheres and total, reconfigurable systems of media at any given
cultural moment?
- Hierarchies of media and technologies, cultural significance of various
media before content or information is conveyed?
- Is the technology of the medium separable from the meaning of the
content transmitted?
- Are ideologies separable from the material means (mediums) of transmission
(for example, religion, politics, class structures, identities, subjectivities);
that is, how is ideology interdependent with the material means of
communication, information, and transmission?
- What information is transmitted in the medium itself by its form
and social function?
Mediology Case Studies for discussion:
- The
Internet and Mediology: A Look at Our Current Mediasphere
- TV Culture and Institutions
- The Fashion World and the Art World: institutions of transmission,
codes, mediation and media channels
- The Museum
- The University
Student Presentations
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Visual Culture and Mediology |
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Learning objectives: Does the trend for "visual
culture studies" make sense in the context of interdisciplinary theory that
we have studied so far? Is there an emerging "field" or discipline of "visual culture studies"? Compare theories and descriptions of mediation, representation, and
the crisis of the real: the image, the artifact, the photo, painting. The consequences
of photography for contemporary visual culture. The era of post-photography and experience of images presented with photographic realism but digitally produced without a camera.
Readings/Orientations (read in this order):
- Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader: 1, 3-13; Intro
to Part One, 37-59
- Roland Barthes, "The
Rhetoric of the Image," from Image, Music, Text,
1964.
- W.J.T.
Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity
and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin, 78/4, Dec. 1995.
- Visual
Culture Studies: An Inventory of Definitions (Irvine)
- Visual Semiotics and Pictorial
Semiotics: Overviews of Theory (University of Lund, Semiotics Encyclopedia)
- Soren Kolstrup, "The
Semiotics of Visual Communication."
- Definitions
of Visual Culture from the University of Wisconsin program on Visual
Culture
- Visual
Communication/Visual Rhetoric Site (U. Iowa, Visual Communication Studies)
- Note the range of subject matter included in the academic study of the field in this department.
- Kevin Bamhurst, et. al., "Mapping
Visual Studies," Journal of Communication, Dec. 2004.
Further Reading (Recommended)
Seminar Notes (Irvine)
Media/Advertising/Visual Culture Sites
Student Presentation
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| 12
Working with Mediology: Popular Culture, Visual Culture, Art |
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Case studies from movies, television, advertising, modern and contemporary
art:
working with visual culture studies and mediology
Think of ways to merge and combine the core theories in mediology and visual culture studies for investigating contemporary visual media (TV, movies, video, photography, computer graphics, Web site design).
Practicing Mediology for Visual Culture: What are the Questions to Ask?
- The Institutional Context: cultural and political-economic conditions
of the medium and the message. What social structures enable the transmission of content over time?
- Cultural Capital and Symbolic Capital: Bourdieu's' theories
- Post-postmodernism: remixing, hybridizing, artist as DJ and encyclopedia
sampler (Paul D. Miller)
- Dialogic (Intertextual) relationships: what prior and contemporary
cultural works and similar genres are presupposed? how is the work part
of a "dialogue already in progress"?
- What is the physical medium? what is its history? The materiality
of the medium, the social status of the technology.
- What are the hierarchies of value and significance for all the visual media? HOw is "high art" or "fine art" defined in distinction to popular media? Hierarchies in movies, TV, websites?
Readings:
- W. J. T. Mitchell, "Showing Seeing: a critique of visual culture," Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2, (2002): 165-181.
- Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Contents and chapter 1 (in pdf).
- This book attempts a synthesis of views from the art history field.
- James Clifford, "On
Collecting Art and Culture," from Simon During, ed., The
Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993).
- Note the description of "culture" and "art" as
categories intelligible within a semiotic grid or square
of differences.
- How art becomes a cultural category.
- Pierre Bourdieu, "The
Forms of Capital" (1983). How symbolic value is created and circulates.
Orientation to Contemporary Visual Art
Recommended Additional Readings and Sources
- Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science.
- Hybridity and the recombinant DNA of culture. Note how Miller's views can be applied to visual media beyond music remix culture.
Hirshhorn Museum: Art and institution as case study
Assignment for seminar discussion:
Choose a current television program, movie, or works of art for analyzing
through the the theory methodologies we have studied. Consider the facets
and layers of the composite theory
model. We will have an open group discussion of ways to the theory
methodology to a popular culture media form.
Tying it All Together:
Revisiting the
Applied Theory Model (.jpg) | Powerpoint
slide
Possible case study: The Matrix movies
Visual Art Case Studies:
Group discussion and update of final seminar projects
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Discussion of Research Projects |
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Presentations of seminar projects |
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In-class presentation of seminar projects.
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