Aram Sinnreich

MediaCon Panel with Trevor Pinch & DJ Spooky (audio)

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I. 

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

ExtendingPlay_Keynote_Sinnreich_Pinch_Miller

 

 

The dark side of D.I.Y. (and sustainability)

As any reader of this blog, or anyone who is familiar with me and my work knows, I am a generally a big cheerleader for the whole D.I.Y. ethic. User-generated content, peer production, craftiness, what have you -- I'm all the way behind it. My wife and I subscribed to both Make and Craft magazines. D knits and crochets like a dynamo, and I am in the process of publishing a book on how mash-ups betoken a new social epoch. We dig hacks, mods, machinima, anything that smacks of good-old-fashioned people power.

However, an unnerving thought has been playing around the corners of my mind for a while: What if the whole D.I.Y. ethic isn't (just) a strategic boon to collective agency, but something more sinister: a wholesale shifting of productive labor onto the backs of consumers, and a sign of the end of the bourgeoisie as we know it?

We generally think of D.I.Y. as (light, encouraging voice) "C'mon, kid! You can do it! Do it yourself!" But what if it's actually something more like (gruff, discouraging voice) "Get out of here, pal, I'm too busy. Do it yourself!"

There are certainly many signs that D.I.Y. production is supplanting traditional economic structures across many industry sectors:

• Fifty years ago, you'd go to a department store and purchase a bookshelf. Today, you go to IKEA, bring home a box of compressed wood chips, and spend hours at home with an allen wrench.
• Marketers are increasingly relying upon consumers to share the cost of advocating products and identifying markets. MySpace and Facebook can certainly be seen as vehicles for this trend, although it also applies in the mass media, such as the recent peer-produced Superbowl Doritos commercial.
• Fifty years ago, both local and national news events were reported and published by a corps of professional journalists. Today, an increasing percentage of the news and (especially) opinion we read comes from the peer-produced blogosphere.

The list could go on ad nauseum; these are simply the first examples I could think of. There are many competing potential explanations for this trend:

• Peer-production is killing traditional industry, (e.g. the much-maligned influence of blogging on the newspaper business).
• Big businesses are crassly appropriating the peer-production ethic to lower their costs and boost their margins, in the guise of consumer-friendliness.
• Everybody benefits from increased efficiency, with lower overall production costs being passed down to the consumer.

Unfortunately, none of these explanations appears to be true:

• In the case of newspapers, for instance, I would argue that Craigslist is far more devastating an influence than the blogosphere. Local and classified advertising have always subsidized print news journalism, and the Web is simply a much better platform for localized marketing and commece. If anything, the blogosphere provides much-needed credibility and readership for the newspapers' online editions.
• Far from maximizing their margins, many industries are now in the red, and we are witnessing the fastest growth of unemployment in American history, and one of the fastest rates of atrophied production on record.
• Consumers have hardly reaped economic rewards from taking on the burden of production. I did a little checking with the bureau of labor and statistics, and it turns out that the cost of furniture has escalated 300% (accounting for inflation) since the mid-1950s:

So if none of the explanations I cited above explain the D.I.Y. trend, what does? Is it just simply an accident of aesthetic and cultural history, a trend as shallow and temporary as pogo sticking or C.B. radio? Maybe. But I don't think so. My suspicion is that we, as a society, are primarily using the D.I.Y. ethic as a screen to hide our increasing poverty from ourselves -- both at the individual and the industrial levels.

One statistic that's stuck with me since i came across it a few years ago is that a double-wage-earner family in the 2000s has a lower standard of living, and less buying power, than a single-income family in the 1970s. Obviously, the continuation of this trend would be devastating: maybe we should expect to see polygamy legalized in coming years to functionally allow families to include three or more full-time wage earners. More likely, we'll see people staying with their parents longer, and the birth rate shrink, especially among higher-SES populations.

To put my premise simply: I think that the D.I.Y. ethic provides industries with a convenient way to hide the declining health and wealth of their sectors by cutting costs (both labor and capital) without cutting prices. And it provides individuals with a socially positive context in which to cut consumption costs, by buying raw or semi-raw materials, rather than finished products. Of course, neither of these trends can continue much longer; to combine metaphors, if D.I.Y. is an economic band-aid and craftiness is a cultural fig-leaf, the open sore of our festering economy and naked poverty of our middle classes cannot be hid much longer.

One final thought, generated by a masters student of mine as I was discussing the above in class last week: The whole green/sustainability movement may have powerful economic and altruistic roots, and may be socially beneficial in problematizing and solving the rampant excess of consumer culture, but it can also be understood as a fig leaf of sorts. When I was growing up, old people who saved string, tin foil, and paper bags seemed like damaged goods, crazy holdovers from the anomalous scarcity of the great depression. Today, it's becoming increasing hip and cool to do exactly these things -- in other words, we've developed a cultural mechanism couching the degradations of poverty in both the attractiveness of hipster culture and the admirability of altruism. Today's string-savers aren't a bunch of crazy old kooks; they're cutting-edge, avant-garde paragons of youth culture, and staunch defenders of our planet's future.

Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong...

The teen social networks gospel (according to danah)

My friend danah boyd, who recently received her doctorate from Berkeley's Information School, just made her dissertation available online. I haven't read it yet, but I've spent a lot of time reading her past work, and sharing panels with her at conferences, so I'm confident it's a doozy. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this will very likely emerge as the definitive academic work on social networks from the Web 2.0 era. I can't think of anyone else (except maybe her mentor, Mimi Ito) who's done so much solid ethnographic work on teens and online community.

I have a feeling I'll be assigning sections of this in many classes to come...

Here's the details:

"Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics"

http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

Color-coded politics

Color-coded politics
Originally uploaded by Aram Sinnreich

Just spotted this on the street in NYC's financial district. I'm no expert on the semiotics of baseball cap colors, but it's pretty clear to me that only women and art students would wear the Hillary hat, and only old guys driving big American-made sedans would wear the McCain hat. Whereas the neutral, patriotic white and blue Obama hats would probably appeal to a much larger segment of the population.

The question is -- do the colors reflect anything meaningful about voter demographics? After all, the brilliant thing about the market (in theory) is that its foremost incentive is to match supply as closely as possible to demand. Were the pink McCain hats returned unpurchased to the manufacturer? Did the brown Obama hats connote too much racial affiliation? Or are the manufacturers just hedging their bets?

That High Lonesome Sound

Cohen, J. (Writer/Director). (1960/2002). That High Lonesome Sound [Motion picture].
United States: Shanachie Studios

A documentary film of black and white footage from small town life in the mountains of Kentucky circa the early 1960s; actually three separate films, each by Cohen but packaged together by the studio.

The lion’s share of the footage is devoted to portraying the struggles of life in this moment of history and spot of geography. Coal mining, Baptist religious observances and farming are prominent in the montages that separate the interviews, performances and narrated scenes. The film’s treatment of race, poverty, family and community implicitly reinforce the seriousness with which the documentarians make the claim that music “gives a way of making life possible to go on”.

The Narrator remarks that life in Hazard, KY in the 1960s is comparable to Depression era standards of living.

There seems to be an effort to represent both the serious and the lighter sides of life in these communities. The stern and serious church services are situated between footage of a man dancing to a banjo player’s tune and footage of young people learning to dance the twist to the radio and at a community dance. The relationship between seriousness and celebration and the relationship between work, spirituality and community are each affected through music.

The End of an Old Song

Cohen profiles Dillard Chandler and his neighbors. Chandler’s familiarity with traditional English ballads makes him a noteworthy figure in the music of this community. Chandler’s performances of the ballads demonstrate the degree to which European and African musical traditions interacted, influenced each other and contributed to all American musical forms from church hymns to rock and roll.

Sarah and Maybelle of the Original Carter Family

No attempt to document the music of Appalachia in the mid-20th century would be complete without a mention of the Carter Family. On-screen text in the film credits the Carter’s with a prominent contribution to the appearance of country music. The first performance of this segment of the film (???) makes clear the degree to which the Carter Family influenced Johnny Cash as it is almost identical in its arrangement to Cash’s Joe Beam.

Quotes

“Music is the celebration of the hard life here in Kentucky. The home music and the church singing are a way of holding on to the old dignity. Music is not a mistake. It gives a way of making life possible to go on. Life is hard here and music is the celebration.” (Narrator)

“Music, is its, it’ll. . ., its spiritual. You can take a small kid that can’t even sit alone - you pull the strings on some kind of instrument a fiddle or banjo or something like that and you watch how quick you draw the attention of that kid. It’ll do its best to hold that. It draws the attention of the whole human race.” (Interview with Roscoe Holcomb)

“The Shepard family, in Rosco, sings their music around the house. It is this music that joins them to the generations before. Their ballads and church songs are the old traditionals from which the new music has come. Now hillbilly, bluegrass, ‘country rock n roll’ - are heard along side of the old time music and are just as much a part of the mountain.” (Narrator)

“In 1916 the Englishman Cecil Sharp searched the southern Appalachians looking for English folk songs which had survived in America. He encountered a ‘community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking’. Today that society is gone and few are left who sing the old songs. Dillard Chandler is a descendant of that community. Perhaps he is the last one who can sing the old ballads with full intensity.”

Chang, J. (2005). Can't Stop Won't Stop. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Notes

The commercialization of rap (Sugar Hill Gang) instantly changed the aesthetic, producing a new passivity within hip-hop culture. It changed from a participatory ethic into a listener ethic.

Important observation – malcolm maclaren's uncredited use of groups such as the mahotella queens on the duck rock album, and ensuing lawsuits. Far from being easily slotted into the IP-bad/freedom-good dichotomy, it is worth considering that maclaren's use of the music in this case had as many imperialist overtones as it did insurrectionist/pastiche ones.

By achieving unparallelled crossover success in both directions, Def Jam achieved a racial reintegration of American culture interesting premise. I've always wanted to write something on the social implications of “crossover.”

fairlight sampler represented a big step forward in beats-production technology, early-mid 80s. More subtle beats >> more subtle rhymes parallels impact of vocal mics and overdubbing on singing styles

comparison of Eric B. & Rakim's style with Public Enemy's showcases the role technology plays in setting the locus of aesthetic possibility.

PMRC/parental warnings emerged 1985 – focus shifted from metal to rap ~1990. look for artists' response to this

1990 fundamentalist campaign against 2 Live Crew pre- or post-dates sampling lawsuit? How about the obscenity conviction? Need to look for relationship. Need to separate out political agendas – race issue vs. consolidation of power/restraining dissent – although obviously these issues are intertwined.

DC contextualizes the growth of The Source during the 1990s within the larger media industry shift from “broadcast” to “niche” model. This is a perfect example of configurable corporate architecture, independently pegged to what he calls “the archetypal story of the hip-hop generation” (415) – i need to look for other similar examples, but this is an excellent start. Also, need to remember to include focus on economic shifts in chapter on configurability

1990s – rise of independent hip-hop music and culture distribution networks. Grassroots promotion, zines, college radio, etc.

early commercial hip-hop radio (e.g. KMEL) appropriated both community radio's on-air personalities, and its business practices corporate reinvention based on community practices however telecom deregulation in 1996 eliminated this another example of imbalance stifling creativity audiences responded w/ boycotts in 2001.

nice little section on dwindling market diversity in the face of corporate consolidation – nothing revelatory, but well argued

posits neo-soul as a hip-hop feminist response to the exclusion of female voices from corporate rap in the 1990s aesthetic strategy to counter consolidation and exclusion

Quotes

“If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.” (13)

“reggae, perhaps more than any other music in the world, also privileged the invisible music men, the sonic architects – the studio producer and the sound system selector.” (28) producer as artist

“The sound systems democratized pleasure and leisure” (29)

original bronx hip-hoppers: “they shared a revolutionary aesthetic. They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful” (111) revolutionary aesthetic

“'Graffiti writing is a way of gaining status in a society where to own property is to have identity.' Your name was your currency, and you created value by making your mark in the niches or getting into mass production. Here was the logic of reverse colonization...” (118) reverse colonization

“Graffiti writers had claimed a modern symbol of efficiency and progress and made it into a moving violation . . . subway trains were merely the beginning of the daily circuit of alienating labor. . . . The writers replaced the circular logic of trains with their own. . . . . This was style as confrontation.” (122)

“Politicians and bureaucrats played an unwitting role in the development of style. . . . graffiti's inherent risk and its perpetual removal catalyzed innovation and ingenuity; its countless deaths generated countless, more magnificent rebirths.” (122) political and technical intervention drives aesthetic innovation

“At the bottom of its economic torpor, city officials rallied to attack the problem again, unleashing a new creative spirit among the writers. Subway graffiti's most influential period of style began.” (123) adversity >> innovation

“Ironically, the Sugar Hill Gang helped revive the dying Bronx club scene. But club-going turned into a more passive experience than ever.  The b-boys disappeared...” (132) Mass production >> passivity

“For the length of 'Superappin',' the tension between what rap was – a live performance medium dominated by a DJ – and what it would become – a recorded medium dominated by the rappers – is suspended.” (133)

“The tension between culture and commerce would become one of the main storylines of the hip-hop generation. . . . The other was between youth and authority.” (134)

“Once cloaked in secrecy and code and executed under the constant threat of violence, graffiti suddenly became a very public performance, for the consumption of high society.” (152)

“Not only was “The Message” another boost for the rapper over the DJ, the crew itself became a dramatic casualty of rap's realignment towards copyrights, trademarks, executives, agents, lawyers and worldwide audiences. . . . From this point, questions of ownership and authorship would become hip-hop generation obsessions.” (178-9) although rap's use of remix technology arguably begs these ontological questions.

“The album was delayed as Bambaataa's and Silverman's lawyers tangled. 'The record companies would try to tell us what we should make, what we should do,' Bambaataa says. . . . Out of this tension, Afrika Bambaataa would create another manifesto.” (190) label demand for homogeneity drives aesthetic innovation by artist

“Hip-hop had been reduced [by Hollywood] to a kid-friendly Broadway production, scrubbed clean for prime-time, force-fitted into one-size-fits-all. . . . but the spitshined thing only increased the craving for the real thing.” (194)

“The only thing that put a stop to [breakdancing] was marketing overkill.” (203)

“Rap proved to be the ideal form to commodify hip-hop culture. It was endlessly novel, reproducible, malleable, perfectible. Records got shorter, raps more concise and tailored to pop-song structures. Rap groups shrank. . .” (228) aesthetic changes to rap from commodification

“DJs no longer enjoyed the eminence or the central musical role that their billing implied. When drum-machine and sampling technology were turned into hip-hop tools, the record producer filled that space.” (229) new technologies enabled shift from DJ >> producer as sonic architect

“[Straight Outta Compton]'s runaway success signaled the beginning of a sea-change in pop-culture tastes. . . . Straight Outta Compton democratized rap and allowed the world to rush in.” (320-1)

“By attacking hip-hop, conservatives could move their culture-war agenda out of obscure Congressional debates and campus Academic Senates into the twenty-four hour media spin cycle.” (392-3)

“In just a decade, major labels had gone from playing catch-up in a musical genre they had once pegged as a passing novelty to signing every rap act they could to shaking out large numbers of rappers because of their political beliefs.” (399)

“[Chuck] Brown short-circuited the rise of the disco DJ by reinventing the dance band format with go-go music.” (408) go-go's live breaks preempted DJ music

“Broadcast culture was too limiting. [Audiences] weren't interested in being 'programmed' or hard-sold into the mainstream. They wanted control over their pop choices; they wanted to define their own identities” (416) 'niche-model' configurability as political self-efficacy

“Hip-hop had reached the point where it was ready to flow out of its niche into the mainstream. The only question left was whether reaching market potential and fanning potential militancy could remain consonant goals.” (423) 1990s tension between mainstream economics and subversive cultural goals

“Once, there had been a creative tension between hip-hop's role as a commodity in the global media industry and as the lifeblood of a vast vibrant network of local undergrounds. But during the mid-'90s, the power shifted decisively in the direction of media monopolies.” (440) centralization/decentralization dialectic shifts towards oligarchs in 1990s – imbalance undermines creativity

“just as hip-hop was now crucial content for the consolidated media, media consolidation also affected hip-hop's content.” (445)

“Media monopolies favored artists who did not merely produce hits, but synergies of goods. In this new corporate order, a song could become a movie could become a book could become a soundtrack could become a music video could become a videogame. Here was the media monopolies' appropriation of dub logic, profits stacking up with each new version.” (447) excellent quote – perfect statement describing the integration of configurability into the corporate ethos

“'Political rap was defanged as 'conscious rap,' and retooled as an alternative hip-hop lifestyle.” (447) corporate appropriation undermines political power of music

Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia.

Notes

‘versioning’ – Jamaican term for innovation based on the musical commons (e.g. adding new vocals to a hit record). Hebdige uses it as a blanket term to represent the spirit of pastiche at the heart of all Afro-diasporic musics.

Survival and growth of Jamaican music is based on grassroots – e.g. sound systems. Reggae sound system operates as a local conduit for news and opinion. Much like rap (“the black man’s CNN” – Chuck D)

Dub and talk over emphasize power of producers (rather than performers) ahead of its time

Sound systems traveled to Britain with West Indian immigrants in 1960s. White youths who lived adjacent to the West Indian nabes soon caught the bug.

- British rude boy cult evolved. Soon, there were more whites than blacks at the clubs.

- Mods + rudies = skinheads (late 60s)

- Skinheads >> punks (late 70s)

- Reggae artists also embraced punk to an extent.

- Punk died down, ska/skin/mod revival (early 80s)

Record charts don’t adequately reflect reggae popularity because they sample the wrong stores and because sound system pre-releases undermine retail market

(79-81) Two tone = wedding of fashion to attitude (esp. re: race)

- elements of 60s op-art

- a brand of multiracialism both essentialist and integrationist

Two Tone records initiated practice of giving artists their own labels, thereby (a) accelerating process of grassroots >> commercial and (b) shifting some of the risk of innovation onto the artists themselves. Music business org innovation

Social message of two-tone was implied rather than stated outright

Shift to video in 80s worked against reggae because of high cost to compete.

In Jamaica, shift from 70s socialism under Manley to 80s market economy under Seaga also changed local culture and music.

- rise of “slack” style reggae (e.g. Yellowman) – all about sex and money

- preeminence of DJs over live performers

- decline in Rasta culture

whole section on eek-a-mouse hurrah

lover’s rock = soul-reggae fusion. Chance for female reggae performers to come out of the shadows.

Whole section on old-school Bronx hip-hop

Uses Smiley Culture’s Cockney Translation to discuss how new generations of British reggae artists are (humorously) approaching hybridity in language, fashion and music. Ali G took this even further…

Pirate radio stations played an important role in blurring soul and reggae in England importance of public access to airwaves. This begs the internet question.

Quotes

Versioning is “a democratic principle because it implies that no one has the final say.” (14) pastiche << >> politics

“In effect, Marley was making the Western world dance to the prophecies of its own destruction.” (81)

“there has always been a relaxed attitude to musical ownership and copyright in Jamaica.” (86)

“The sound system provides an opportunity for the grassroots people to talk back, to respond, to choose what they like and don’t like.” (87) community + choice

“In dub the skill of the record producer and the studio engineer in using the electronic medium is so great, and so crucial, that they have become genuine artists in their own right.” (89) Producer = artist, studio = instrument

“records have always been at least as important as live music in Jamaica” (92) gracyk

“The punks talked about Britain’s crisis in much the same way as roots reggae artists dwelt on the decline of Babylon.” (96)

“When dealing with the popular music industry, the important issues for the artist have less to do with staying ‘honest’ and ‘authentic’ and refusing to ‘sell out’ than with grabbing and retaining control of the product at every stage and in all its forms.” (107) relates to Stuart Hall. Important quote.

“Behind the fusion of rock and reggae lay the hope that . . . a new, hybrid cultural identity could emerge along with the new music” (109) aesthetics >> identity >> social change

two tone = “culture clash converted into fun” (110) directly relates to mash-up paper

“that restless urge to violate existing musical categories and audience expectations which has marked most forms of British rock and reggae at least since punk and 1976” (113)

“Reggae would only be renewed and refreshed if it was combined again with other forms of music.” (127)

“Rap did for poor blacks in America in the 1980s what reggae had done for the ‘sufferers’ in Jamaica a decade earlier. It got them noticed again and it helped to forge a sense of identity and pride within the local community.” (136) rap-reggae connection

“The cut ‘n’ mix attitude was that no one owns a rhythm or a sound. You just borrow it, use it, and give it back to the people in a slightly different form. To use the language of Jamaican reggae and dub, you just version it. And anyone can do a ‘version’.” (141) reggae and hip-hop as MUSICAL COMMONS

“When taken to its logical conclusion in rap, cut ‘n’ mix suggests that we shouldn’t be so concerned about where a sound comes from. It’s there for everyone to use. And every time a new connection is made between different kinds of music, a new channel of communication opens up.” (146)

Morley, D. & Chen, K.-H. (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Notes and Quotes

Hall - The problem of ideology (1986)

Ideology defined as “the mental frameworks – the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation – which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.”

Marx developed no general theory regarding social ideas. His definition of ideology varies between a specific indictment of bourgeois thought and the broader sense defined above. However, he is clear on these points:

1. Ideas are directly related to material conditions
2. Ideas are dependent effects from dominant social formations
3. Material dominance >> ideological dominance

This is viewed as reductionist for obvious reasons.

Marx: ideas of freedom, equality, property are extensions and justifiers of the market system. These ideas hide the reality of exploitation, etc. that characterize capitalism’s darker side.

SH’s reinterpretation of Marx: false consciousness is not a lie cut from whole cloth, but a half-truth based on limited understanding of the system

Even if we can’t assign fixed relationships between class and ideology, we can observe tendential relationships.

Hegemony for Gramsci = “process by which a historical bloc of social forces is constructed and the ascendancy of that bloc secured”

CONCLUSION: material conditions are the “net of constraints, the ‘conditions of existence’ for practical thought and calculation about society”

Constrained agency. This still doesn’t explain:

· how some of us have a better vantage point, or a more complete understanding, than we believe others to have.

· Can some people intellectually transcend the constraints imposed by their material conditions?

· If so, why and how?

· How can anyone have a better or deeper understanding of social conditions if there are no fixed meaning, relations, or identity?

Colin Sparks – Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies, and Marxism

New left/CS focus on creative processes was a reaction against Stalinist thought

Also a reaction to the changing nature of the working class, and the growth of consumerism

Marxist legacy was not explicitly present in the founding of the Birmingham centre.

After 1968, CS shifts from “culturalist” (emphasis on experience) to “structuralist” (emphasis on cultural forms) – experience is no longer the starting point, but rather the consequence of political and economic forces

but I am personally attracted to the study of experience, a la Dewey. Is there perhaps a model in which experience and social forces reciprocally affect one another, and neither is the “starting point”?

Eventually (1973) ideology becomes the central focus of Marxist cultural studies. They adopt structuralist Marxism, a la Althusser.

Althusserian Marxist cultural studies disintegrated after about 10 years, in the 1980s, with an inability to use structuralist methods for a subject initiated with culturalist thought.

Althusser: ideology = uniform and w/o history

Laclau: ideology = contingent, specific to cultural context (echoed in Hall)

Hebdige: move beyond structuralism to postmodernism. style = free play of indeterminate signifiers.

Willis: retrograde. Aesthetic = sensuous/cognitive aspect of experience.

uh-oh. I’m part of the recidivist faction.

CONCLUSION

- after all this forward motion, contemporary cultural studies has regressed to textual interpretation. he doesn’t adequately describe/explain this part

Slack – Theory and method of articulation

Articulation = “thinking relations and connections as how we come to know and as creating what we know”

Marx: mode of production creates ideology. Static, based on class.

Gramsci: hegemony supported through ideology.

Althusser: totality of complex power relations

Laclau: contingent power relations, complexity – explicit theory of articulation as unifying force. Everything is discourse.

Hall: actively construct articulations to achieve political aims

“identities, practices, and effects generally constitute the very context within which they are practices, identities or effects.”

Hall – What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture? (1992)

Cornel West – present is marked by 3 trends:

· waning of European Cultural influence

· shift to American (mainstream) cultural dominance

· decolonization and awakening of (black) diasporic consciousness

SH: qualifications of the above

· American relation to European high culture is ambiguous

· American culture contains a fundamentally black vernacular

· Postmodernity has disproportionate effects on the powerful and powerless

· Postmodernism loves the ‘other’ – echoes of modernist ‘primitivism’ and all its attendant problems.

“This decentring or displacement opens up new spaces of contestation and affects a momentous shift in the high culture of popular culture relations, thus presenting us with a strategic and important opportunity for intervention in the popular cultural field.” (466) shifting field >> opportunity for intervention

“Within culture, marginality, though it remains peripheral to the broader mainstream, has never been such a productive space as it is now.” (467)

“What we are talking about is the struggle over cultural hegemony, which is these days waged as much in popular culture as anywhere else.” (468)

“Cultural hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination” (468) contrast to Althusser, Foucault

SH berates American cultural studies for assuming that “nothing changes,” hegemony always wins.

Postmodern decentring of Western narrative is matched by a strong backlash Bush – culture is always dialectical, and it’s dangerous politically to forget that.

“The important point is the ordering of different aesthetic morals, social aesthetics, the orderings of culture that open up culture to the play of power” (469) similar to Bourdieu

popular culture is simultaneously:

· Populist assertion of validity in the face of high culture classism

· A dominant global commercial culture, homogenous, stereotyping, industrial power

· “this is necessarily and inevitably so” (470)

black popular culture is similarly contradictory as well.

· style becomes substance (this is positive) put another way, aesthetics matter

· music becomes center of culture, due to exclusion from linguistic dominance musical expression as self-determination

· bodies become central source of cultural capital – and are hence worked on like an art

this might be the most interesting analysis of Hall’s I have read

thus, black culture is simultaneously a derivation of its African origins and an appropriative diasporic riff on dominant European culture

strategic essentialism – black popular culture could never have carved out its own space without essentializing blackness to a degree contrast to ‘strategic anti-essentialism’ in Lipsitz

SH questions whether this strategic essentialism is still necessary

· prohibits dialogic strategy necessary to a diaspora

· reinforces racist categorization

“The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and de-historicizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic.” (472) dangers of essentialism

“it is to the diversity, not the homogeneity, of black experience that we must now give our undivided creative attention.” (473)

for instance, black men need to decouple their (successfully) resistant masculinity from the hegemonic baggage that’s attached to it – e.g. misogyny, homophobia.

Parting thoughts:

· popular culture is mythical, not authentic

· binaries do not really apply to culture

Class Notes on Hall

In speaking of racism as a byproduct of colonial and postcolonial practices, Hall identifies the project of cultural studies as the empowerment of groups on the social “margins.” Actively construct articulations to achieve political aims

Hall: Why does cultural studies/theory matter? Because it gives people the tools to change society in a way that directly changes our lives (i.e. AIDS activism’s use of cultural theory)

Morley lecture: following Stuart Hall’s lead, “taking the best of the theoretical resources and seeing what happened if I put them together in a way that made the different voices speak to one another”

Hall takes Althusser’s structuralism + Marxism, brings in his own elements…

Hall (like Butler) posits territory between Foucault and psychoanalysis (discursive construction vs. interiority) Hall’s agency is the middle ground between the tyranny of structure and the tyranny of the subconscious

Hall: Identity = ‘suturing’ of subject to position.

· this has some agency, but not much. We are limited in our range of potential subject positions constrained agency

· positions that subjects are “obliged” to take up

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Notes

This is a big, big, important book, and I’ve spent only a little time notating it – so if you’ve come across these notes somehow, don’t take them to be in any way comprehensive.

Cultural taste is created by upbringing and education. Its primary function (“consciously and deliberately or not” (7)) is as a marker and legitimator of class distinction.

Upbringing becomes a more powerful determinant of taste the less ‘legitimate’ an area of culture is.

Cultural consumption is a communicative act, in that it is an act of interpretation based on knowledge of a code. Shades of Gross here

No such thing as ‘pure’ aesthetic experience – it’s all acculturated and thus historical.

This is increasingly true of modern art, which prioritizes form over representation. It’s art-about-art, not art-about-life.

‘Popular aesthetic’ [working class] marked by subordination of form to function. In other words, popular aesthetics are anti-Kantian. this is a logical impossibility, if his other argument is true – namely that there is no pure aesthetic experience

aesthetic distance = the luxury of detachment from life’s hardships

aestheticization of daily life = the ultimate act of class distinction, and an affront to the working class. This is 180-degree opposite of Dewey. I side with D on this one – aestheticization of daily life seems to be the historical rule rather than the exception

aesthetics must be considered within the context of ordinary life, not as a separate, rarefied sphere of experience. I agree with him here – as would Dewey and Williams

the book’s findings are based on survey research conducted in the 1960s. his survey is similar to one I have wanted to field – about the ways in which people understand the role of aesthetic practices and products (specifically, music) in their lives. However, one variable he doesn’t seem to have considered is access to information about cultural forms, as distinct from preference for cultural forms.

Even film tastes (e.g. for certain directors), which are not taught educationally, co-vary with more established aesthetic tastes, because they are obtained and communicated through social groups.

Art which prizes form over function categorically demands a purely aesthetic disposition in the viewer. Extreme of this is ready-mades, in which the artist demands that the viewer reject the use-value of a ‘purely’ useful object, thus addressing the entire world with an aesthetic gaze.

Art museum = institutionalized aesthetic disposition. Prior contexts evaporate.

Aesthetic disposition is incommensurate with immediate feeling of sensory pleasure because it interposes cognition. Not sure I buy this. The human mind can operate on several levels at once – it’s not a linear process.

Popular culture aesthetic – anti-Kantian simple, straightforward, unambiguous isomorphic with reality, consumed with a willful naïveté and direct engagement with spectacle. This description insults ‘common’ people by assuming that reality as they perceive it is unambiguous. Maybe instead the desire for unambiguous representation is a reaction against the ambiguity of daily life. (cf. Radway)

High culture aesthetes, by contrast, are detached, disinterested, indifferent to content – form is everything. The price is that they do not engage life. Moral agnosticism. Aesthetic disposition implies symbolic competence.

Artistic competence can be acquired either through institutional learning or through regular contact with works of art (especially within a context that focuses on form over content, e.g. museums).

Connoisseurship – unconscious mastery of aesthetic codes based on prolonged exposure.

Apparent ‘naturalness’ of tastes hides the social mechanism of taste acquisition and naturalizes/normalizes class distinctions.

Cultural capital can only be acquired outside of economic necessity not necessarily

Habitus = the classist systematization of taste, that both generates and verifies judgments.

Quotes

“To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class’.” (1-2) thesis statement

“A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.” (2) true to an extent, but there are major exceptions – i.e. alternate codes, self-contained codes, reader-defined codes.

“The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural competence.” (4)

“Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation – literature, theatre, painting –more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe ‘naively’ in the things represented.” (5) intellectuals vs. people. his class-determinism is a theoretical weakness.

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” (6) THE MONEY QUOTE – thesis statement.

“Illegitimate extra-curricular culture . . . acquired . . . outside the control of the institution specifically mandated to inculcate it and officially sanction its acquisition . . . is only valorized to the strict extent of its technical efficiency, without any social added-value, and is exposed to legal sanctions (like the illegal practice of medicine) whenever it emerges from the domestic universe to compete with authorized competencies.” (25) institutional legitimation of culture. Very relevant to musical practice.

“If the work of art is indeed, as Panofsky says, that which ‘demands to be experienced aesthetically’, and if any object, natural or artificial, can be perceived aesthetically, how can one escape the conclusion that it is the aesthetic intention which ‘makes the work of art’, or, to transpose a formula of Saussure’s, that it is the aesthetic point of view that creates the aesthetic object?” (29) aesthetic view >> aesthetic object. True, but we can still recognize intended aesthetic meanings in manufactured objects. PB disagrees, arguing that we can never know ‘scientifically’ whether an object was intended to be aesthetic. But I think this argument only works if you assume a strict, Kantian binary between ‘art’ and ‘non-art.’ If, instead, you assume that all human-created objects have a combination of aesthetic- and use-value (albeit at differing ratios) then PB’s objection evaporates.

“It must never be forgotten that the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated ‘aesthetic’ which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics.” (41)

“The definition of art, and through it the art of living, is an object of struggle among the classes.” (48)

“the aesthetic disposition is one dimension of a distant, self-assured relation to the world and to others which presupposes objective assurance and distance.” (56) aesthetic experience << >> social relations

“Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent.” (56) ain’t that the truth

“The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.” (56-7) mash-ups!!! Power of pastiche.

“As for the working classes, perhaps their sole function in the system of aesthetic positions is to serve as a foil, a negative reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by successive negotiations.” (57)

“The habitus is both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification of these practices.” (170) habitus defined

Other Notes

Here are some apt reflections from former classmate Daniel Chamberlain:

Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction and the Aristocracy of Culture" effectively deconstructs an approach to appreciating art and culture that relies on aesthetics.  He does this by theorizing how a 'specific logic' is at work in the 'economy of cultural goods.' (431)   In the subsection entitled Distinction, Bourdieu suggests that art and culture is not inherently good or bad in an aesthetic sense, but that these distinctions are produced by social hierarchies.  He specifically states that taste is not a natural gift, but instead that "cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education." (431)  His argument is basically that social hierarchies work through institutions and social formations to give certain individuals (and indeed classes of individuals) access to the cultural codes that allow for the understanding and appreciation of certain types of art.

inherent in this analysis is the idea that everyone can appreciate certain forms of culture and art, regardless of social hierarchy - in these sections about the natural I picture landscapes and rainbows and such.  The idea is that even the most basic viewer can appreciate a decent representation of a beautiful object.  Beyond this simple art lies much more complex manifestation of art and culture.  In order to appreciate these pieces, one must begin to value form over function.  Bourdieu refers to this as the 'pure gaze', and suggests that it is a radical break with an ordinary attitude toward the natural world - the interest in the representation is separate from and valued apart from the interest in the object represented.  The ability to decode these forms and complex aesthetic practices only comes with training, and this training is a form of "specific cultural competence" available only within certain social formations.  In the later section on Aesthetic Disposition, Bourdieu digs into this distinction between form and function and lays the groundwork for the consideration of producer v. beholder's intention.

Underlying all of this is Bourdieu's concept of the habitus.  As I understand it, this is how he directly links taste with class.  He directly refers to habitus as 'the systems of dispositions characteristic of the different classes and class fractions." (435)  I think that this is the most engaging and insightful aspect of his article, as it is here where he goes beyond the social hierarchy/institution argument to suggest that the individual is in part determined by her taste.  That is, taste is not an external or objective competency that can simply be deployed, but instead that taste reflects on the individual and helps to situate (and represent as situated) the person deploying their taste.  Of course all of that was just clunky way of rephrasing Bourdieu's claim that "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier."

This argument really aids an understanding of how people act in certain ways and respond to certain cultural forms.  While this is an argument clearly mobilized by the distinction between 'high culture' (opera, modernist art, etc.) and 'popular culture', it suggests something similar to nearly all of the other pieces we read this week - de Certeau's tactics and poaching can be understood as a means of distinction for those without power; Hebdige's concept of subculture is a clear example of classifying the classifier; Jenkins' textual poachers.  While these articles are generally concerned with marginal cultural activity, they all suggest that the making of cultural distinctions is an important aspect of creating a sense of identity for the self. 

What all of the work we read today has in common, moreover, is a distinct move toward investing individual social agents with a degree of power that is absent in more determinist models.  Although this opening of spaces for resistance can often seem too optimistic, it is nonetheless a welcome recognition that there is a space for individual actions even if these actions are constrained by larger social, cultural, and political formations.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage.

Notes

Late 18^th/early 19^th centuries – paradigm shift in penal codes, modernization. From public torture and execution to institutionalized work, rehabilitation, and total management of time.

- Public >> private

- Physical pain >> loss of liberty

- justice system abdicates responsibility for violence inflicted on prisoners abu ghraib, outsourcing of prisons.

- public emphasis shifts to trial/sentencing

- however, a trace of torture still remains hidden within the system

the shift in punishment is matched by a shift in the definition of crime – from physical to mental/spiritual/psychological. In other words, sex criminals are punished for perversion, violent criminals are punished for aggression.

This shift had political purposes. In analyzing it, it’s necessary to shed the “illusion” that the primary purpose of penalty is to reduce crime.

“political technology of the body” = control over body using knowledge and institutionalized force

penal system is not a product of state vs. people or class vs. class, but rather a confluence of diverse ‘micro-powers’ that flow, converge, and conflict within the network of society.

SOUL = site of power relations regarding a body.

Public executions provided an outlet of direct conflict between king and subjects. This was politically dangerous.

Reform movement was conducted in the name of the ‘humanity’ of the prisoner. However, this was due not to increased empathy but to regulate the effects of power.

Prior to reform, shift in crime from physical violence (often rights-oriented) to property theft. paralleled rise of bourgeoisie, increase in standard of living

Reform movement was not just opposed to torture but also reacting against inefficiency, chaos and consolidated power of old (monarchical) system

Crimes of property vs. crimes of rights – mimicked class divisions.

Old calculus – severity of punishment must match severity of crime.

New calculus – one must punish exactly enough to prevent repetition of crime.

In order to reach this new calculus, crimes and punishments needed to be quantified, taxonomized, and matched with certainty.

Late-18^th C.: three ways of organizing the power to punish:

1. monarchical: ritual vengeance of king on condemned body (ceremony)
2. reform: punishment produces a juridical subject through a public imposition of signs on his soul (representation)
3. institutional: reprogram body and behavior in prisons (exercise)

MC asks: Why was model #3 adopted?

Technologies of discipline:

- distribution

o enclosure

o partitioning

o functional sites

o rank (as unit of arrangement)

- control of activity

o time-table

o temporal elaboration (applied to individual acts)

o correlation of the body and the gesture

o body-object articulation

o exhaustive use

- organization of geneses

o evolutional model

o ‘seriation’ of activities

- composition of forces

o e.g. separation of military troops into units with different sizes and functions

o mechanical model of organization

o precise system of command

Training – the creation of ‘individuals’ who can interoperate in complementary fashion from a formless mass of humanity – is another central element of discipline. The instruments of training are:

- hierarchical observation

- normalizing judgment

- the examination (combines previous two) this sheds a little light on the qualifying exams process…

o turns visibility into a power relation

o uses documentation to fix individuality

o turns each individual into a ‘case’

feudal society et al: the powerful are more individualized

disciplinary regime: the powerless are more individualized

makes me think of marketing evolution: shift from brands to direct marketing

so, basically, MF is saying that the post-enlightenment individual is tantamount to (and defined as) a powerless subject. Very counterintuitive.

Bentham’s Panopticon – the prisoners are completely visible from the central tower, and they are aware of their visibility. The prisoners can see the tower, but they cannot tell whether they are being watched at any given moment. Thus, they internalize the watchful gaze of the guard, and essentially become their own guards. One important aspect of the Panopticon which MF doesn’t explicitly state: the danger of surveillance must be backed up by a real threat of punishment. Surveillance alone has limited effect.

- automatizes and disindividualizes power

- can be integrated into any organizational or institutional function

- became basis for “disciplinary society” in which we live

Processes of social change >> disciplinary society

- functional inversion of disciplines.

o From neutralizing threats to creating useful individuals.

- Swarming of disciplinary mechanisms.

- State-control of mechanisms of discipline

Rise of disciplinary society is linked to other historical processes:

- Economic: rise of capitalism

- Juridico-political: rise of representative democracy

- Scientific: industrial revolution

Quotes

“The body as the major target of penal repression has disappeared.” (8)

“From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.” (11)

“the judges have gradually . . . taken to judging something other than crimes, namely, the ‘soul’ of the individual.” (19) modernity >> individualism

“Regard punishment as a political tactic.” (23)

“try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations.” (24) statement of purpose

“one might say that the definition of offences and their prosecution are carried out in turn in order to maintain the punitive mechanisms and their functions.” (24)

“The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.” (26)

“power and knowledge directly imply one another . . . there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” (27) Knowledge << >> Power. This is one of F’s MAJOR THESES.

“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.” (30)

public execution was “dangerous, in that it provided a support for a confrontation between the violence of the king and the violence of the people.” (73)

“The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.” (79)

“the economy of legalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society. The illegality of property [lower classes] was separated from the illegality of rights [bourgeoisie].” (87)

“A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.” (89)

“While jurists or philosophers were seeking . . . a primal model for the construction or the reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.” (169)

“in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.” (184) YES YES YES

“The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline.’” (194) individual as powerless subject

“power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.” Big part of MF’s theory. good quote re: power << >> knowledge

“‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of applications, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.” (215) discipline defined.

“The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses and institutions.” (221) capitalism << >> disciplinary society

“The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.” (222)

Additional Notes

This is an email conversation Daniel Chamberlain and I had about Discipline and Punish when we read part of it for a class last year:

Aram:

my instinct when reading a book like discipline and punish or the history of sexuality is to highlight every word and write:

yes
YES!
yes
oh yes

all the way down the margins. i'll confess i have read some foucault in the past, as an undergraduate, but at the time i found it extremely challenging, and didn't distinguish him too much from other french social theorists. however, as the years passed, i found that foucault was one of the few who stuck out in my mind and offered continuing value for understanding culture. this time around, the read was much easier.

i could write a laundry list of the things i like in foucault – his quasi-historical methodology, his first-principles approach to theory, and his brilliant articulation of power and knowledge are just a few – but instead i'll use my final paragraph or two to point out something important I think he got wrong.

in the panopticon chapter of discipline and punish (which seems to be a big fave with the whole class), foucault holds that "our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance. . . the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge" (p. 217). to my mind, this description does not adequately account for two of the most important communication media of our day -- television and the internet, which offer obverse counterexamples.

true, television is a centralized information medium, and this points to a centralization of power. however, although the medium offers us a kind of double consciousness, a vision of ourselves as we should be or fear we are, it can not be appropriately described as a widespread surveillance mechanism. rather, it turns its viewers into voyeurs. this is a very important distinction. a central facet of our enjoyment of tv is our presumed passivity and anonymity -- we are, at no point, afraid of being SEEN. in fact, most people, given the rare opportunity, jump at the chance to appear on television. this is also pathological, but quite distinct from foucault's point.

the internet, which didn't exist as a consumer medium in foucault's day, is another counterexample. yes, it serves equally (or more) as a surveillance medium and an anonymous/passive medium, but it isn't centralized – at least, not in the sense that television is. this may be changing -- the patriot act and the rapid consolidation of internet media ownership are certainly producing twin spectres of centralization online, but the medium as we have known it for the past 10 years is fundamentally decentralized and, in many important ways, democratic. as long as such media exist in our society, i think foucault's characterization remains incomplete and overly simplistic.

Daniel:

In the spirit of discussion I would like to (respectfully, of course) challenge Aram's critique of the panoptic potential of television and the Internet.  I should start by recognizing that he is certainly correct in pointing out the anonymous use of television and the decentralization of the Internet - these are certainly not panoptic devices in the same sense as Bentham's prison.

On the one hand, I think that each medium carries the potential for surveillance - on the one hand through actual, direct tracking and on the other through the reminder of the constantly-scanning and documenting nature of our visual culture.  Of these two, the possibility of out-and-out direct surveillance is clear: web sites leave cookies on computers; cable companies can determine when and how your cable box is being used; TiVo collects and compiles user data; Nielson directly invades thousands of homes.  While this is certainly not the same as constant, direct surveillance of every citizen, and this surveillance is being applied by corporations, it seems certain that these technologies can be (and are being) used for monitoring purposes. 

The argument that TV & the Internet also provide surveillance through documenting functions is a bit more precarious.  I would suggest that in addition to providing a vision of ourselves as we should be or fear we are, Television also reminds us that we could easily be the subject of its gaze - television news can turn its cameras on any subject; reality TV programs & talk shows create spaces in which 'real' people are the social agents; programs like Cops and Americas most wanted not only remind us of extra-televisual surveillance, they also directly ask for viewer input into the surveillance project. The documenting function of the Internet is possibly more pernicious, as the very fact of its democracy allows anyone with access to offer their life (or a portion of their choosing) up for surveillance, in the form of web pages, shared photos, blogs, Amazon wish lists, etc. 

It is this last example that I think is the most Foucauldian in nature. Through the positive provision of the technology of the Internet we have a means of opening ourselves to other's gaze and situating ourselves in fields of regulation and power.  The question of centralization is still difficult here.  In one sense, this information is dispersed in virtual space and on thousands of separate servers.  In another sense, this information can be thought of as being centralized through its very existence on the Internet as a system of discourses and a space of knowledge.

If it is true that TV & the Internet can work in this manner, I think that the next question to ask regards the relations of power.  Who is doing this surveillance and who benefits from it?  Does policing occur at the level of the individual (the argument from the panopticon), the state, or corporations that have an interest in these media?  I think that in some ways this gets toward Hall's critique of Foucault – is there an ideology at work? How is the state involved? Where is the opportunity for resistance?

Aram:

i agree in principle with everything daniel has said; the spirit of the panopticon does linger behind our media infrastructure, and both television and the internet offer an ever-richer treasure trove of "consumer data," available both to hegemonic interests and to other individuals. this is far truer today than it was in foucault's day, and there is no reason to believe the pace of data collection and analysis will slacken.

however, the internalization of surveillance is fundamental to the benthamite/foucauldian model, and this has not yet emerged as social norm, in my opinion. i used to do consumer internet research for a living, and one of the facts that perpetually amazed me was the degree to which online consumers are unaware of their own visibility. i noticed this last semester, as well, when my undergrad students -- kids who have come of age with the web -- were amazed to learn about cookies, data mining, etc.

thus, while a certain kind of surveillance is certainly happening (and i am much more afraid of echo/carnivore/patriot act than cookies and spybots, btw), it does not represent a panoptical phenomenon because the subjects themselves are blind to it.