On John Fiske: The Jeaning of America

University is finally inspiring me to write! Magic!

As this text is full with quotes marked by italics, I will, for once, use bold font to indicate key passages within my own text instead of italics. NOTE: Due to a real or perceived lack of time, I currently rarely manage to edit what I write, so most of the content which may or may not pop up within the next few weeks/months/life-times will basically be straight-draft, quick-shot format.

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We 'live' capitalism through its commodities, and, by living it, we validate and invigorate it. The producers and distributors of jeans do not intend to promote capitalist ideology with their product: they are not deliberate propagandists. Rather, the economic system, which determines mass production and mass consumption, reproduces itself ideologically in its commodities. Every commodity reproduces the ideology of the system that procuded it. a commodity is ideology made material.-- John Fiske, The Jeaning of America

This is the most fundamental tenet of America/Capitalism. It produces nothing but itself. America can reproduce it self ideologically through its commodities because it has no ideology. It does not concern itself with anything but selling. The medium is the message. (see also)

The text by Fiske is, in fact, quite an interesting read, despite – or even because of –  its relative age (1989), and punctuated by quite a few acute observations. His conclusions, however, are entirely the wrong ones.

 But more significant than any other possible meaning of ragged jeans is the fact that the raggedness is the production and choice of the user, it is an excorporation of the commodity into a subordinate subculture and a transfer of at least some of the power inherent in the commodification process. [...] Excorporation is the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system, and this is central to popular culture, for in an industrial society the only resources from which the subordinate can make their own subcultures are those provided by the system that subordinates them. There is no "authentic" folk culture to provide an alternative, and so popular culture is necessarily the art of making do with what is available. This means that the study of popular culture requires the study not only of the cultgural commodities out of which it is made, but also of the ways that people use themn. The latter are far more creative and varied than the former.

Here lie the fundamental mistakes. If one accepts that the system is one of self-perpetuation, one that is only concerned with selling, then none of these things matter. You can do whatever the hell you want with your jeans as long as you have bought them. (The only way to support and assert the authority of the system even more, would, ironically, be to steal them.) More importantly, however, is the nod towards the Frankfurt school - that there is no "authentic" folk culture. Because folk culture and mass culture are the same thing, or, at least, searching for meaning and identity through either is impossible. The Frankfurt school demands authentic folk culture to derive meaning from, and Fiske finds that reappropriating mass culture is good enough. (More on this in a bit). What both of these idea(l)s have in common is that they try to derive meaning/identity through consumption, which is why both are destined to fail. 

The vitality of the subordinated groups that, in various shifting social allegiances, constitute the people is to be found in the ways of using, not in what is used. This results in the producers having to resort to the processes of incorporation or containment. Manufacturers quickly exploited the popularity of ragged (or old and faded) jeans by producing factory-made tears, or by "washing" or fading jeans in the factory before sale. This process of adopting the signs of resistances incorporates them into the dominant system and thus attempt to rob them of any oppositional meanings. (emphasis mine)

Wrooong. The strategy of Jeans designers to co-opt/incorporate /adopting these signs was a ploy, a feint, designed to make the consumers think that the producers care about their dissent - the idea was not to silence dissent, but to further it, i.e. to force/encourage the consumer to come up with a new way of "ragging" the Jeans, thereby implicitly fortifying/confirming the worth of Jeans in the first place.

Popular culture always is part of power relations; it always bears traces of the constant struggle between domination and subordination, between power and various forms of resistance to it or evasions of it, between military strategy and guerilla tactics. Evaluating the balance of power within this struggle is never easy: Who can say, at any one point, who is "winning" a guerrillla war? The essence of guerrilla warfare, as of popular culture, lies in not being defeatable. Despite nearly two centuries of capitalism, subordinated subcultures exist and intransigently refuse finally to be incpororated - people in these subcultures keep devising new ways of tearing their jeans. Despite many more centuries of patriarchy, women have procude and maintained a feminist movement, and inidividual women, in their everyday lives, constantly make guerilla raids upon patriarchy, win small, fleeting vicotries, keep the enemy oconstantly on the alert, and gain, and sometimes hold, pieces of territory (however small), for themselves. And gradually, reluctanyl, patriarchy has to change in response. Structural changes at the level of the system itself, in whatever domain – that of law, of politics, of industry, of the family - occur only after the system has been eroded and weakened by the tactics of everyday life.

Wroooooong. First off, the only territory being fought over in this system is how much money you hand over, so guerilla tactics cannot win, they still tap into the system. Secondly, Note that "people in these subcultures keep devising new ways of tearing their jeans" – i.e. implicitly confirming the worth of Jeans in the first place. Thirdly, the example of feminism shows the exact opposite of what Fiske thinks it does. The end-goal of feminism must necessarily be the dissolution of feminism (and masculinism), that is to say, gender/sex needs to become, for all intents and purposes, in fiction as well as in reality, absolutely incidental to the story/life – i.e. whether a character in a novel has agency or not, whether a person gets a job or not, all of these things should cease to be seen in the light/from the perspective of gender. Fiske notes that a feminist movement has been maintained in spite of the patriarchy - but the patriarchy would be in favor of maintaining a feminist movement, because movement (without direction/end) equals self-perpetuation, which means that the existence of a feminist movements perpetuates the patriarchy, just as ragged jeans maintain jeans. Which is why more and more women "are allowed" by the system to become politicians – power has already moved on. 

Until recently, the study of popular culture has taken two main directions. The less productive has been that which has celebrated popular culture without situating it in a model of power. It has been a consensual model, which viewed popular culture as a form of the ritual management of social differences out of which it produced a final harmony. It is a democratic version of elite humanism, which merely resituates the cultural life of a nation in the popular rather than in the highbrow.

 The other direction has been to situate popular culture firmly within a model of power, but to emphasize so strongly the forces of domination as to make it appear impossible for a genuine popular culture to exist at all. What replaced it was a mass culture imposed upon a powerless and passive people by a culture industry whose interests were in direct opposition to theirs. A mass culture produces a quiescent, passive mass of people, an agglomeration of atomized individuals separated from their position in the social structure, detached from and unaware of their class consciousness, of their various social and cultural allegiances, and thus totally disempowered and helpless.

 Recently, however, a third direction has begun to emerge, one to which I hope this book will contribute. It, too, sees popular culture as a site of struggle, but, while accepting the power of the forces of dominance, it focuses rather upon the popular tactics by which these forces are coped with, are evaded or are resisted. Instead of tracing exclusively the processes of incorporation, it investigates rather that popular vitality and creativity that makes incorporation such a constant necessity,. Instead of concentrating on the omnipresent, insiduous practices of the dominant ideology, it attempts to understand the everyday resistances and evasions that make that ideology work so hard and insistently to maintain itself and its values. This approach sees popular culture as potentially, and often actually, progressive, (though not radical), and it is essentially optimist, for it finds in the vigor and vitality of the people evidence both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation todrive it. (emphasis mine)

The bolded part goes back to what I said about Ostendorfs text earlier: The inability of Americans to radically oppose America, their desire to fight "guerilla" style is why it will always stay the same, will always remain a system of self-perpetuation. As long as this remains true, being political in America is all but pointless (though such an attitude is just another reinforcement of the system), which is why I so often state the necessity of plugging out in regards to personal fulfillment/happiness. Which brings me to the second point, which I brought up at the outset of this text: Identity, Happiness, Meaning cannot be derived, cannot be gained through consumption, only through creation. What Fiske hails as the "vigorous [...] resistances and evasions [...] of the people" is still consistently consumption, not creation. 

Torn jeans were, perhaps, in the beginning, a sign to the self: A sign that allows the wearer to remember a certain episode from his/her life during which the jeans were torn. The sign of torn jeans was, however, commodified not by the producers; it turned into a commodity the second that this personal sign became a social one – in that second, the signified was turned empty. The producers contributed to this by making torn jeans a pre-made product, therefore making the semantic shift irreversible (as one could not longer use it as a personal sign connected to personal episodes), but the damage had already been done by then. As soon as it became a sign for others, it became an attempt to signify identity through consumption. Fiske says that "in an industrial society the only resources from which the subordinate can make their own subcultures are those provided by the system that subordinates them", but this is already the wrong approach. The only resources from which one make any culture at all are words, instruments, pigments, ink, wood, stone, cameras [...]. Facebook profiles most prominently display the shows you watch, the movies you've seen, the books you've read, the video games you play, the music you listen to, but none of these things can form your identity.

You can embrace popular culture (I do, I love drama series), or you can ignore it (I do, I don't watch or read the news). But you can't fight it guerilla style.

Short thought of the day: on themes

This misconception continues to puzzle me: that when talking about movies, or literature, or video games – Art, in short – a work is often said to deal with a certain theme or topic. But there is a difference between merely evoking or referencing a theme and actually dealing with, that is, having to say something about it. My issue, to be perfectly clear, is not with the word theme, but with potential verbs preceding it: For a work of Art to have, to possess a theme, it is enough to show, to reference. For a work of Art to deal with or to explore a theme, it needs to do more than that. 

 Of course, whether a work of Art needs to deal with – or even evoke – a certain theme in the first place, this is too rarely questioned. The joy of aesthetics, it seems, has been lost in our desperate, futile search for meaning. 

Addendum to 31st Century Schizoid Man: co-opting dissent

An addendum to my text on PostModernize.com, specifically part III. From Bernd Ostendorfs "Why is American popular Culture so Popular?":

[All] popular cultures [in the United States], whether counter-cultural, regional, ethnic, subcultural, middle class or hegemonic are bound up with existing power structures and tied into social and political struggle. [...] Dissent is a legitimate, even necessary part of a system of checks and balances. Indeed, the system's ability to learn from such dissent explains its stability. Any citizen may criticize the system from within in order to improve its problem-solving capactiy, but should not cross the frontier into a world of an 'alien' or 'un-American' disloyalty. [...]

I believe that Ostendorf in his text sees this as a positive or at the very least neutral aspect of American culture – yet, to me, this seems to be one the fundamental problems of America. Such an acceptance of dissent is ultimately a much more sinister form of silencing it. American (and thus, by extension, increasingly also global) culture, in the guise of legitimizing dissent, in all reality co-opts, subsumes, neutralizes dissent. The saying by Gandhi goes that "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." In post-modern America, first they respect you, and then you lose. They'll even bring out the cameras for you – and the second they do, it's game over. Americans may pride themselves for having had a constitution for over 200 years, while many e.g. the current German constitution is from 1949 and the Portuguese from 1976. But therein lies exactly the deeper problem – America cannot ever operate outside its system, which is why OWS has had such modest goals and why it failed. The revolution will not be televised because an American revolution is impossible. It is a contradiction in itself. 

Dissent needs to operate outside the system, or it is doomed to fail.

Brief thoughts on Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey | Brief thoughts on two antipodes of art: content versus aesthetic.

NOTE: Due to a real or perceived lack of time, I currently rarely manage to edit what I write, so most of the content which may or may not pop up within the next few weeks/months/life-times will basically be straight-draft, quick-shot format. This text specifically numerous faults, the largest of which is that it should be two texts in the first place. Luckily, no one reads this.
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I. It makes sense to think of Twilight and 50 Shades as a unit; they share the same readerbase (17-25 years old girls and 40-50 years old women), they are both badly written – and, considering the sales figures, it seems clear that these two series of novels might be the easiest door to analyse that very readerbase. With all literature*, one of the following things is more or less the case: One, a certain text is highly influential: influence meaning that this text actively shapes its readership, affects – infects – the society in which it was conceived. Two, a certain text is heavily drenched: it is being shaped – affected, infected – by the society in which it was conceived. Three, a text stands in opposition to its time, or is independant of it – a text that could have made its way into reality through a writer during any period, on any continent.

I do not have the inkling for this to become a long, detailed analysis. These are obviously only sketches, crude approximations**, not a detailed typology or anything of the sort. These three types might overlap (a three is usually also a two or a one) etc. But they should serve well enough. Note then, that two modes of literary criticism are roughly corresponding with these three types: Texts pertaining to the third option we usually call masterpieces, timeless classics, and as such, text-intrinsic approaches prove very fruitful here – we are trying to find out why this text is so universally enjoyable***, independant of sociological considerations. We are only concerned with what makes for a great text here – what makes for great art. A concern for aestheticism is found here. Texts pertaining to the first or second option, on the other hand, we often analyse context-oriented: We are interested in why these texts became so influential and/or what they have to say about their time. It should be clear that we are reading both Twilight and 50 Shades strictly context-oriented here. I simply assume that every reader will agree with me that these books are terribly written. 

* I would go even as far as saying with all art, but there is a caveat: There are forms of art with heavy reliance on story/content, and forms which are almost purely aesthetic. Photography and music, for example, seem to me to be outside of societal considerations. While music might be going through certain phases, I don't see it as a reflection of its time. Such a ratio of concern for content / concern for aesthetic is not intrinsic within any medium; rather, it is socially or personally **** determined. Television, for example, has for the longest time given very little concern things such as camera movement; it was purely functional.***** If this hypothesis is accepted, interesting development to follow: will video games ever feature more meaningful stories / better writing, or will they remain a medium as focused on aesthetics (in this case, game mechanics/interaction******) as they are currently?

 

** Everything is only an approximation, of course.

*** Again, a gross simplification.

**** 2001: A Space Odyssey would be an example of a movie without too much concern for content (although there certainly is a lot) – it is spellbinding simply through the moving images it provides, i.e. the aesthetic.

***** Of course, e.g. Stanley Kubricks masterful camera movements are purely functional as well, only they function on a higher level, so to speak. I do hope that it is still clear what is being meant: that television historically often used its camera to simply show the actors speaking in flat, dull angles, while great movies employ camera angles to tell us something about a character or situation visually.

Furthermore, the aesthetic/content distinction is severely limited, as well. Another approximation of which this text seems to be full of.

****** Aesthetics being here used in the sense of "the most defining aspect of any given medium", e.g.:

photography/painting - visuals

movies - succession of visuals (which makes television=movies)

music - sound

video games - game mechanics/interaction

literature - text/symbols/signs

Literature here, is the hardest to define, as everything is a sign. Yet another highly approximate term which would not hold up to scrutiny

II. The thing to note about Twilight and 50 Shades is that they pretend to be sexy, but are not. They are using certain symbols, certain references to make you think that they are about sex. With Twilight, it's the vampire theme. Vampire fiction has historically always carried with it the connotation of sex and seduction. (Vampires are extremely attractive people who don't age and who want to suck your bodily fluids, you know.) Yet Twilight is ostensibly a Mormon text about not fucking before marriage. Huh. Weird. 50 Shades, meanwhile, pretends to be about BDSM, it has whips and chains and all. Yet it is harmless PG-13 porn. Huh. Weird.

The thing to understand is that this is not accidental/incidental. These texts would not have struck such a chord with women if they either 1) actually had lots of sex/BDSM sex

or 2) would not feint to be about sex/BDSM sex. In other words, the fact that they are faking it while insisting that it is real is precisely why these books are successful. Why that is, I am not sure. I am almost certain, however, that exactly zero readers of 50 Shades will ask their boyfriend "hey, should we have some different sex for a change?" – they will sigh "if only...", then have 15 minutes of boring, missionary style, Sex.

III. So what are these texts about? They are porn; but they aren't sex porn, they are relationship porn. Or, more accurately: Men, through porn, have fantasies about sex, but Women, through 50 Shades / Twilight, have fantasies about relationships. Which one is more troubling? Men worry more about the size of their penis now, constantly seeing well-endowed sex-machines in porn. Okay. Worrying. Women, meanwhile, now hold as the standard image for relationships vampires and billionaires, and the thing they have in common is that you won't meet them. And, importantly, the thing 50 Shades and Twilight have in common is that they are written for and by women. The most devious system survives not by turning complicit its’ beneficiaries, but rather those that it oppresses.

A re-evaluation of the term mass culture

NOTE: Due to a real or perceived lack of time, I currently rarely manage to edit what I write, so most of the content which may or may not pop up within the next few weeks/months/life-times will basically be straight-draft, quick-shot format.

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Within the definitional conflict of what exactly constitutes the term popular culture, the issue of mass culture often comes up, sometimes the two of them being used interchangeably. The term popular culture often carries the connotation of an inferior work. The problem lies in the conflation of two distinct ideas within the term mass culture; it stems from the industrial age and means two things: One, something made by masses – a production no longer by an individual, handcrafted by a single expert. And two, something made for masses – a product that is to be produced a thousand times a day, and every single product has to look identical. Therefore the connotation of inferior work.*

In the realm of tangible objects, these two meanings form a symbiosis; they basically entail one another, they are one and the same concept. But in the realm of the digital, the second meaning is... meaningless, i.e. it does not exist anymore: the very proposition does not make sense anymore, because in the digital, identicalness is always a given. Mass produced clothing is of inferior quality to a hand-tailored suit because the mass production process has to be accomodated towards producing identical pieces. In the digital, this is no longer the case – which means that the only part of the concept mass culture that continues to make sense when describing the production of Art within the digital is the first: it is produced by masses. Take a look at the credits of, say, 2001. Mass culture has become an endeavour of hundreds, thousands, and one that builds upon every piece of technology and culture the human race as a whole has produced in its time has created. The most impressive singular artist may have been Da Vinci or Michelangelo, I do not know, but I do know that no singular artist can produce as impressive an artwork as the efforts of 200+ people. Or, to stay even closer to the example of 2001, perhaps Richard Strauss has more ingenuity than Stanley Kubrick on his own, but it is in the realm of digital mass produced art, the music of Richard Strauss can simply be reappropriated, can be absorbed into 2001.

For Star Wars: Episode III, for example, seventy-thousand man-hours were allocated to produce 49 seconds of special effects. To say that the film is still terrible would be to miss the point – it is precisely more terrible than any work by a single person could ever be. That is to say, a movie produced by such an incredible amount of man-hours has always more potential than one that is not. And potential is, by definition of the word, bidirectional.

* The one aspect left out of this text is of course the matter of the taste of the masses - "mass produced" also usually carries the connotation of something that is produced with the lowest common denominator in mind, which might result in either extremely simple - or worse, incoherent and internally inconsistent (subscription required, will be re-uploaded to this blog in a few months) works. However, this is outside the scope of this text.

The garden of fucking paths

NOTE: Due to a real or perceived lack of time, I currently rarely manage to edit what I write, so most of the content which may or may not pop up within the next few weeks/months/life-times will basically be straight-draft, quick-shot format.

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On my way to the city a few weeks ago, I walked past the botanical garden and, on a whim, decided to go through the door, as I had never been there before. Something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it for a second, despite the fact that it was blindingly obvious.

It looked utterly desolate. And, to be fair, how could it not; it was barely spring, and it was freezing cold. The garden, thusly, was sorely lacking in flowers and plants, it was basically barren. It looked like an aliens' reconstruction of earth society, with the alien landing in a botanical garden, looking at it for ten minutes, and then flying back to his home planet and trying to copy what he saw from memory.
 

Only... there were still people there, visiting it. Why? What wass wrong with them?

It's because of the design of the paths. There may have been nothing to look at in there, but the way the paths are designed, they still make you feel the way you are supposed to. They are signs; traversing these paths set off in you the emotion of every previous botanical garden, of a proto-garden. It is like a museum with all the masterworks replaced by infantile drawings - or emptiness -, only you still feel that "Museum"-feel because the museum feels museumish.

This is the crux of our society*. We have replaced things with signs that stand for them. Or rather, we have conflated the two. The botanical garden is the story, and the gardens' paths are the discourse, and we have come to see the discourse as the thing that matters. There may be nothing here, but the nothing comes to us in just the right way.

Seeing people walk through a sterile, desolated botanical garden is humorous, but there is a darker side to it – ten minutes away from my flat, in the opposite direction, lies a beautiful hill with ten times as much nature** to look at, and the only people who see it are dog owners who have to walk an hour a day with their pets.

A botanical garden is, of course, a nice example of the more general phenomenon of a "tourist attraction". 

Tourist attractions always meet with the ire of the locals. "Hey, have you been to the berghain?" - "Hah", scoffs the hipster, having lived in Berlin for 3 years already and therefore considering himself basically native, "the Berghain is just for tourists nowadays, all the real parties are in the DARKSWAMPYHOLE#58. You probably haven't heard of it."

The problem is that neither side has it right, both follow a code, and the two codes are only the negatives of each other. The Parisian might rightfully scoff at the Eiffeltower, it is a boring, well, tower***, but guess what, some of the pictures in the Louvre are actually pretty damn nice. Whether you use the tourist-code or the anti-tourist-code, you're still going for discourse over story, you're going to places based on what the paths look like, not the flowers.

Only as creators! — This has given me the greatest difficulty and goes on being my greatest difficulty: to recognize that unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are. The fame, name, and appearance of a thing, what it counts as, its customary measure and weight — which in the beginning is an arbitrary error for the most part, thrown over things like a garment and alien to their essence, even to their skin — due to the continuous growth of belief in it from generation to generation, this gradually grows, as it were, onto and into the thing, and turns into its very body. The initial appearance almost always becomes the essence in the end and acts as essence! But only a fool would think it was enough to point to this beginning and to this misty mantle of illusion in order to destroy the world that counts as essential, so-called "reality"! Only as creators can we destroy! But we should also not forget this: creating new names and assessments and apparent truths is eventually enough to create new "things". - F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, second book, #58

* or possibly embedded into our nature - See placebos, which work as a medicine through pure discourse, and which work on animals as well.

** Note that "nature" is in itself just a sign, a discourse – what precisely it is doesn't matter as much as the image of "something nature-like". Habitualization, Institutionalization always works through the exchange of means and ends, of signifier and signified, of story and discourse.

*** It's actually quite an achievement, but I doubt tourists enjoy it for the impressive piece of construction that it is. It just happens to be a place you go to when you are tourist.

The Fallhöhe of art

An addendum to Creation in art means selection  (subscription required)

The difference between the numerous artforms can perhaps also be explained by the amount of work that is left to the recipient. With books, so much more is left to the imagination (which romantics and nostalgics always see as a positive thing); the reader has to translate the words into worlds – a translation process involving multiple steps, in fact. And an aspect whose importance one might neglect: the eyes have to move across the paper. With movies, there is not much left to translate, and the eyes are fixated. Again, the romantically inclined see this as intrinsically negative, but it has to be said: If I trust an artist to create a world better than I do (as it is his job, and perhaps not mine), than I would like to leave as much of the creation to him, NOT to myself. From this point of view then, the more control the artist has over what my synapses receive, the more potential there is.

It is, though, in the nature of things that potential runs in both directions. In drama, the fall of a king is more dramatic than that of a simple farmer – for the fall of a king might implicate the fall of an empire. This is the concept known as Fallhöhe: the bidirectionality of power potentials. And this bidirectionality is apparent in a comparison of the different mediums of art as well: No bad short story will evoke the amount of vitriol of a bad novel, and no great short story could aspire to the greatest novels; and no book could bore my senses as much as a terrible movie: the movie leaves my senses and mind with nothing but the movie itself. We usually find the nerve to finish a boring short story; but make me watch an appallingly bad movie and I will walk out within half an hour.

The greatest heights are surrounded by the deepest rifts, and the greatest works of art would, if made by lesser hands, inevitably have been the worst.

the future of television

I've had some thoughts in regards to the way House of Cards was released by Netflix. Multiple reviewers noted how the approach changed their behaviour as viewers (e.g. this piece on AV club). They make some important points, but I believe there is something more important to realize here, and that is how the Netflix approach might potentially change the production of television. Up until now, the underlying structure of TV drama was principally limited by this:

Schedule.

If you watch an episode of The Sopranos, you know that it will be roughly 53 minutes long. By necessity. But this is a conceptional limitation of television. It means that the plot has to move in a certain way. Some things cannot happen at the 30 minute mark because the viewer knows that there are 23 more minutes to fill. As a result, the pacing has to be accommodated. And what if I just need 30 minutes for one episode, but 83 minutes for another one? Well, now it is possible.

Furthermore, the viewer knows that there will be more episodes. There are press releases for that. The viewer will know three months in advance which episode will be the finale. We never seem to think about this, but this is actually pretty serious. Try writing the protagonist into a hazardous situation in the sixth episode when the viewer knows the season has 13 episodes. Yeah, he ain't gonna die, I don't think. This kills potential for suspension.

The Netflix approach might change this. It might allow the producers to obscure the length of individual episodes and of seasons in order to create more suspense, to actually make the viewer care for every scene because every scene might be the last. (*)

Consider the analogy of literature. Movies are akin to short-stories. They usually focus on a smaller group of characters and follow a single plotline – maybe two or three. A popular, if very vague definition of short-stories is that they can be read in a single sitting, just like movies. Television shows, then, are novels. A larger breadth of characters, potentially many concurrent plotlines, and good luck consuming it in one evening. Novels, in fact, carry the same problem: you kinda know when you're at the end, because there are fewer and fewer pages in your right hand and more and more in your left. eReaders would probably do us a service if they obscured page numbers. And Television would do us a service if we didn't know what is hiding behind the corner.

(*)Of course, this probably will also result in episodes featuring cheap fake-outs every single episode. Then again, these shows already exist, they are called Procedurals.

Photographie als Kunst

Die Photographie ist heute im Großteil der Bevölkerung mit einem großen, unsagbar traurigem Irrtum verbunden. Hier wird die Photographie, um es kurz zu fassen, langweilig gemacht. Durch die maßlose Verbreitung des Photoapparates ist das Photographieren für jeden möglich geworden. Das wäre nun prinzipiell kein Problem – Bei gleichbleibender durchschnittlicher Qualität (wenn wir also davon ausgehen, dass den Menschen, die sich früher keinen Photoapparat leisten konnten, genau so viel Talent beschieden ist) würden wir, absolut betrachtet, mehr wertvolle Photographie ansammeln.

Doch im Zuge dieser Demokratisierung ist es stattdessen zu einer Regression gekommen. Ich benutze das Wort Regression deshalb, weil das derzeitige Photographieverständnis tatsächlich dem ähnelt, das mit der Entstehungszeit der Photographie einherging: dem des Photoapparates als eines Objektabbilders. Zu Beginn, wir können uns es leicht vorstellen, war die Begeisterung an der Technologie als solche unermesslich; Die neue Möglichkeit der Realitätsabbildung beeindruckte die Menschen. Und analog wird dazu das Photographieren auch zur Zeit hauptsächlich als eine Möglichkeit gesehen, auf etwas anderes zu zeigen: Urlaube, Freunde, besuchte Orte, Besitz. Das einzige Interesse liegt hier auf dem Objekt; Belichtungszeit, Schärfe und Komposition werden überhaupt nicht oder nur rein funktional betrachtet. Natürlich gibt Situationen, in denen dies angebracht ist. Das Photo, dass ich von meinem Apartment mache, um einen Nachmieter zu finden, sollte funktional sein. Doch diese Funktionalität hat derart Überhand genommen, dass viele sich heute gar keine andere Photographie mehr vorstellen können. Dabei verliert eben dadurch die Photographie ihren künstlerischen Wert.

„Wenn Kunst die Produktion einer Illusion ist“, könnte man darauf antworten, „dann ist eine solche Funktionalität doch durchaus wünschenswert, möchte sie doch lediglich ein möglichst nüchternes Bild produzieren.“ Aber Kunst ist eben nicht Realität, und das kann sie auch nie sein. Und diesen Mangel versucht die Kunst stets auszugleichen, indem sie an anderer Stelle größer wird als die Realität selbst. Jede Kunst, das wurde bereits gesagt, kompensiert zu aller erst durch Auswahl. Die „Objektphotographie“ ist aber eben eine häufig schlechte, da mundane Auswahl: Alltagsgegenstände, Alltagsmenschen, Alltagsurlaube (Als ob wir derartige Bilder nicht schon dutzende Male gesehen hätten). Und auch die häufig mundane Komposition in dieser Objektphotographie ist natürlich ein Mangel der Auswahl.

Zudem findet dieser Ausgleich der Kunst auf dem ästhetischen Feld statt. Die Literatur kompensiert nicht nur durch inhaltliche Kondensierung (Auswahl der Handlung), sondern auch durch sprachliche Deviation, durch Abgrenzung von der Alltagssprache (Selbst die absichtlich alltäglichen Romane der Moderne und post-Moderne). Der Film? Man schaue nur, als lediglich ein Beispiel – um die Vielzahl stilistischer Methoden im Filmbereich nicht alle aufzuzählen –, das Genre des Film Noirs an: Hier wird die Belichtung und Kontrasterstellung mit einer derartigen Detailliebe vorgenommen, die gar nicht mehr dazu dienen könnte, das Bild „realistisch“ zu gestalten, sondern es wird geradezu eine Superrealität, eine mehr-als-Realität versucht. Das Kunstwerk gesteht seine illusionäre Natur ein und kompensiert gleichzeitig für sie.

Und eben dies geht nun vielerorts in der Photographie verloren. Die Objektphotographen möchten nur abbilden; doch dieser Versuch wird der Realität nie das Wasser reichen können. Die Photographie eines Museumsexponats wird nie so real sein wie das Exponat selber, und daher sollte das Exponat schlicht mit den eigenen Augen konsumiert (denn um nichts anderes als Konsum handelt es sich ja) werden. Interessanter wäre vielleicht das Photographieren der Museumsbesucher, liegt hier doch etwas, was sich tatsächlich dafür eignet, vom Photoapparat „eingefangen“ zu werden. Das wäre die Ebene der Auswahl. Und auf der ästhetischen Ebene? Nun, es sei nur als Anregung genannt, dass das menschliche Auge im Gegensatz zum Photoapparat nur beschwerlich einzelne Bilder mit einer Belichtungszeit von einer zwei-tausendstel Sekunde (oder andersherum mit einer Belichtungszeit von 30 Sekunden) produzieren kann. Der Photoapparat kann also beispielsweise, mit anderen Worten, Bilder produzieren, die unter (oder andersherum über) über unserer eigenen Perzeptionsreichweite liegen. Es kann eine, für das menschliche Auge unzugängliche, mehr-als-Realität produzieren, den Moment zwischen den Momenten einfangen. 

objective journalism isn't objective and it isn't journalism

credit: opensecrets.org

Thanks, media, how helpful! This is really stupid.

You think this graphic is designed to help someone decide who to vote for? It's designed to affirm the decision that was already made. The great (=terrible) thing about "objective" reporting is that it doesn't have to be partisan, it reaches everyone just the same. You can read this graph any way you want.

You like Obama? He's intelligent (universities) and forward-thinking (software companies). You don't like him? Universities are a code word, a flashing warnlight: dirty liberal, thinks he's better than you.

You like Romney? He's good with finance, "fiscally responsible", an image that has (without much basis) always been attributed to conservatives. You don't like him? He's corrupt and in cohorts with the dirty fatcats of Goldman Sachs et al.

Again, this isn't informative, this isn't helpful. It is image building. The recipient already knows where his allegiance lies, he just wants justification. This isn't relevant reporting, this is pandering to the longing for the Rauschen. It's emotional porn; reporting of this kind is designed to enable a personal political routine. Candidate 1 is stupid, candidate 2 is great. We get angry, we get happy, and by looking at this graph and reading the accompanying article by whatever newspapers it is we read, we now feel sufficiently informed about politics. The reason these things are news is that the recipients want something - anything - to be news, something that warrants attention. This is precisely what Marshall McLuhans "the medium is the message" meant , though he himself was needlessly obtuse about it. "Tuning in" is the important part; "staying informed" about anything, the process of reading the newspaper (or reddit, or [...]) is what matters. "Obama" and "Romney" are simply placeholders. The specific messages being read every day are not relevant. Quoth Baudrillard via Alexander Kierkegaard:

The answer comes from Baudrillard's early sociological analyses: The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society (1970), et al. What Baudrillard basically said is that in advanced capitalist societies what people increasingly come to exchange is not so much goods, as previously, but signs. Objects such as clothes, cars, homes, furniture, gadgets, and even wives and children (or even more abstract "objects" such as hobbies, holidays, life-styles, etc.) come to be prized not so much for what they are but for what they signify; not so much for what they mean to the individual, but for what they appear to be in the eyes of others; in more formal language, that the importance of an object's use-value comes to be increasingly upstaged by that of its sign-value. [...] No object is spared this passage into the dimension of sign-value, with for example university degrees being pursued not because one is interested in the subject, but because of the prestige that such a degree confers on him who has earned it, etc. Even the tiniest object can acquire this aura (in fact even non-objects such as ideas, but that's a subject for another essay): take for example glasses. Because it has been observed that intellectuals tend to wear prescription glasses (all the reading they do generally tends to lead to short-sightedness), we now have entire groups of people who, despite having perfect vision, will buy and wear prescription frames with blank lenses in order to appear to others as intellectuals. The use-value of the glasses, which is to enable people with bad eyesight to see, is upstaged by their sign-value: the appearance of intellectualism.

Knowledge of who contributed to whose campaign is 100% sign-value: Not only to others, but importantly also to the person itself, to the ego. "I have an informed opinion, the fact that I read the newspaper (or [...]) every day proves this." - Notice that the full report has numbers for all the minor-party candidates as well, but they're always hidden behind a "read more"-link. "There are a multitude of parties all of whom have varying amount of good and bad points" isn't quite as easy on the mind as "there are two parties and one of them is the devil and the other one is great." The story is Obama versus Romney because people want it to be. Minor parties? Knowing about them is not considered important towards "being informed".