"A Christmas Trololo:" Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunities and Mocking Nostalgia (A Remix)

I just discovered the YouTube video, "A Christmas Trololo," which posits spatiotemporal critical opportunities in cyberspace through multimodal mashup. Completely subverting modern school-choir styling while aping mainstream Christmas aesthetics, "A Christmas Trololo" parodies the American tradition of teaching school children to sing pseudo-secular seasonal songs. (Try saying that five times fast.) The strange mixture of carnival masks, ironic choreography, deep internet literacies and references, a live pit band, and an audience of proud singing parents, works to conjure a mediated nostaligia while simultaneously exposing the way internet meme culture has affected all areas of American culture (and specifically within this example, Christmas and childhood education). The Gifford Children's Choir conjures a nostalgia that is directly tethered to American educational aesthetics, while simultaneously mocking the excessive work that parents and educators invest in holiday performance rituals and the overal cultural and economic currency in internet aesthetics. This kind of internet aesthetics reconstruction/deconstruction project raises the question of: what's the current relationship between aesthetics and content within American schools (be they public or private), and how does this relationship affect students' experiences? I find it really interesting how the spatiotemporal aesthetic underpinnings of internet culture in 2011 (and, by extension, Soviet Russian culture of 1976) are now having this kind of conversation with our educational system. In this shift we can see the way in which physical and virtual identities are substantially bound together in ways that were inconceivable in 1976, positing an understanding of aesthetics and content as not only bound together but almost indecipherable and absent of distinction.

On an aside, I've here remixed Jessica's blogpost from yesterday, "The Geocities-izer: Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunites and Mocking Nostalgia," in an effort to playfully gesture at the great conversations we've had this semester, and the way those conversations will continue to affect my thinking in a super great way. Too, I think Jessica's post can serve as an exemplar for how we might keep our class's conversation from trending too quickly and subsequently dying out equally as fast. In one sense, this kind of blogpost-remix points to the evolutionary speed of academic culture and aesthetics, as well as to the trending possibilities and detriments associated to this temporal understanding of academic consumption within cyberspace. In another sense, it points to something one might do, in the absence of assigned readings, if one were, say, a blogpost or two short for the semester.

The Geocities-izer: Spatiotemporal Internet Opportunites and Mocking Nostalgia

I just discovered the website The Geocities-izer, which posits spatiotemporal critical opportunities within cyberspace and web design. Completely destroying modern styling within web 2.0 design aesthetics, Geocities-izer makes "any website look like it was made by a 13-year old in 1996." It defaces web 2.0 CS5 and CSS aesthetics of clean, attractive design that yield a seamless user-experience. Try the New York Times newspaper website, for example. The reorientation of font, tacky GIFs, loud background colors, and the automated midi's version of British alt-rock band Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" playing on max volume (for best effect), works to conjure a mediated nostalgia of the 1990s while simultaneously exposing the heightened branding mechanisms that have entered current web design (and specifically within this example, in online newspaper branding). The Geocities-izer conjures a nostalgia that is directly tethered to 90s computer programming and internet aesthetics, while simultaneously mocking the excessive work that companies now invest in their correlative internet images and the overall cultural and economic currency in internet aesthetics. This kind of internet aesthetics reconstruction/deconstruction project raises the question of: what's the current relationship between aesthetics and content within internet identities (be it professional companies, individuals, etc.), and how does this relationship affect user-experience? I find it really interesting how the spatiotemporal aesthetic underpinnings of internet culture (and pop culture) in 1996 are now having this kind of conversation with contemporary web design and image. In this shift we can see the way in which physical and virtual identities are substantially bound together in ways that were inconceivable in 1996, positing an understanding of aesthetics and content as not only bound together but almost indecipherable and absent of distinction.

On an aside, the friend who shared this site with me, did so by intentionally posting it on my Facebook wall rather than posting it in his personal (and more public) feed. His reservations with public sharing of this site deal directly with his desire to save The Geocities-izer from trending too quickly and subsequently dying out equally as fast. In one sense, this kind of anxiety points to the evolutionary speed of internet culture and aesthetics, as well as to the trending possibilities and detriments associated to this temporal understanding of cultural consumption within cyberspace.

Outsourced Sex Education via Ouellette: revisiting Anna McCarthy's "Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering"

There’s a talk being held tomorrow at Annenberg, hosted by Laurie Ouellette, Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, that I find really relevant to our work during the week of November 14th on displaced civic support and responsibility from governmental programming to the private sector. Here’s the info on the talk:

Monday, November 28 at 12P in Annenberg Room 207 will be Laurie Ouellette, Professor in Communication Studies, University of Minnesota. Her topic: “It's Not TV, It’s Birth Control: Reality Television and the ‘Problem’ of Teenage Pregnancy”
>From Professor Ouellette:
"This talk considers the recent deployment of reality entertainment (Baby Borrowers, Dad Camp, 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) as “birth control.” Why have commercial television and cable networks taken up biopolitical objectives? What possibilities and contradictions emerge when sex education is outsourced to commercial media? I situate recent reality interventions within gendered circuits of post-welfare governmentality in the United States and show how they fit within a genealogy of thinking and acting on the “problem” of teenage pregnancy."

Ouellette’s look at how reality television stands in as “birth control” points to Anna McCarthy’s similar interest in locating the work that reality television performs upon the viewer in reiterating national values while activating the viewer in an illusion of participation and prevention within a specific value-set. McCarthy states that “...some aspect of the work of the state in the realm of social citizenship - work that may be reparative, in the case of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, or punitive, in the case of Judge Judy - seems to have been outsourced to the private sector, specifically television, and individualized in particular selves and experiences.” McCarthy’s notion of outsourced civic work can directly be seen in the influx of teen pregnancy reality programming that Ouellette cites in her research on outsourced sex education. As McCarthy recognizes with court television (but which can be applied in a larger context to reality television altogether), reality television is a space where “governance and entertainment blend together” (18). The ways in which teenage pregnancy reality television takes on the two disparate notions of ‘governance’ and ‘entertainment’ becomes highly problematic when recognizing their merge within the work of ‘sex education’. Questions that come up for me are: are the values within reality television of crisis, drama and shame - values that operate toward an entertainment value-set -- entering into the work of sex education for the viewer? How is relishing in the ‘mistakes’ of pregnancy operating toward a specific type of sex education? Does this perspective lean toward a more abstinence-based sex education, or an education geared more toward behavioral and preventative knowledge as well as awareness of public health resources and access? Also, looking at the ways in which women’s health and birth control resources are being pushed to the periphery within the last few months, significantly aligns with this influx of sex education programming within the televisual realm. This kind of governmental depletion of women’s health support directly feeds into the questions I raise above in terms of the specific type of sex education that reality television is producing.
Moreover, in considering teen pregnancy (and youthful pregnancy at large -- seeping into the early 20-something age range) within the realm of ‘celebrity’ as exhibited in other televisual and online/print media outlets, the work of reality television to this specific sex education end becomes extremely problematized. With news and entertainment televisual programming that takes up celebrity pregnancies (see Hillary Duff, Jamie Spears, Bristol Palin), the sex education premise seems to be diluted. These are not your common, anonymous, middle-class teens; they’re seamlessly having children, and can monetarily afford to take care of their children while maintaining their careers (or high school career?) with ease. Moreover, in light of their celebrity identities, these pregnancies are not necessarily deemed ‘mistakes’; the notion of ‘mistake’ leaks over from the reality television shows like 16 and Pregnant, but seems to be less prevalent within these examples of ‘successful youthful moms’. These archetypes of success in relation to the archetypes of disaster that both feed into the notion of youthful pregnancy share the same televisual space (and many times share the same televisual audience), which even moreso produces a flawed sex education program within realm of the private sphere of media.
I’m really looking forward to Ouellette’s talk, and thought I’d share this with you in the case that you missed the ZdC email update about the event! Seems like it’ll be really interesting and relevant to our work.

More Flashmobs -- Paper for Group Workshop

The on-going progress of this paper. Constructive criticism welcome, as always.... ---- “The Playful Politics of the Flash Mob”

Over the past decade flash mobs have risen as a global phenomena, temporarily transforming and transporting real spaces and people into a game-like space of “pretend,” and uniting communities across geopolitical boundaries through virtual media in the spirit of play. Though flash mobs can be games, with clear rules and uncertain outcomes (such as in the ‘Humans vs. Zombies’ game at the recent Indiecade convention in Culver City), as a matter of definition flash mobs are not strictly gamic--more often then not, though there are clearly defined rules and roles for every participant, the outcome of a flash mob is certain and predefined (ex. through the completion of a dance routine or other prespecified action). Yet, to anyone who has ever participated in or observed a flash mob, there is also something undeniably playful and game-like about it. The following flash mob video demonstrates this as participants slowly join in the Antwerp Station ‘Do-Re-Mi’ mob:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQLCZOG202k

This essential playfulness that is so akin to the reality of social gaming lies in the flash mob’s ability to create the “Magic Circle”--a term first coined by game studies theorist Johan Huizinga. Flash mobs offer a particularly useful demonstration of this concept as onlookers inevitably form a circular perimeter around the play-space (as seen in the video above.) In “The Definition of Play,” Roger Caillois elucidates on Johan Huizinga conceptualization of this magic circle and further defines it as a playful space that lies outside the traditional contexts of everyday reality:

In effect, play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and place. There is place for play... nothing that takes place outside this ideal frontier is relevant... The same is true for time: the game starts and ends at a given signal... In every case, the game's domain is therefore a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space. (Caillois 125)

To this end, though flash mobs are not in essence games, their playfulness still invokes the transient, ‘pure space’ of the magic circle. It is on this basis that this paper moves forward to examine how flash mobs use the safety of the magic circle to engage with the contextual, geopolitical realities of their physically occupied spaces.

We begin first with three basic understandings of the flash mob:
1) That flash mobs provide transient, suspended (playful) realities in otherwise socially, economically, and politically ‘landlocked’ spaces. In the example of the flash mob provided above, the Antwerp Station is a specific locale with ever present cultural, political, and socioeconomic ties and connotations, which are only temporarily suspended by the flash mob’s invocation of the magic circle. (As seen in the survey of participants who appear to be from varied demographic backgrounds that might in other case be completely removed from each other within the station.)
2) That flash mobs mobilize urban populations into these spaces via social media--Facebook and Twitter, predominantly.
3) That social media is the mechanism for mobilization as well as viralization, communicating with global populations beyond the extent of the flash mob and activating new bases.

Despite the playful departure from reality that flash mobs provide, they are also inherently locative, drawing the keen attention of the participants and the observers to the space of mobilization and the social, political, and economic context of the space that is both being engaged and ruptured by the flash mob’s act of play. As a result, flash mobs also offer an opportunity for populations to engage with their local identities, within the safety of a positive space that is temporarily disengaged from the socioeconomic-political ramifications of such discourse.

The following flash mob video from the 2011 Bayonne Festivals demonstrates this clearly as the chief organizer quickly describes the variables involved in creating a flash mob, with a particular emphasis on identity (as expressed through their chosen colors, which reflect both their identities within teams and nationalities) and space-placement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG24E0EbQ7E

This point becomes even clearer when considering flash mob videos--arguably the final evolution and maturation of this play form--from a semiotic perspective. Typically, the title of every flash mob video follows a generic formula: [song/content/activity] + [location] + [date]. Occasionally the date will be omitted, though its inclusion only further proves the ephemeral quality of the mob. Yet, the location is vital to its identification, as seen in the following flash mob video from the Piazza Duomo in Italy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7zvoM2Frko

A mob such as the one above inextricably links itself to the space it occupies, both in term of identity (as seen in the naming of videos) as well as engaging with it physically. In watching the above video, observers cannot help but associate the context of the Piazza Duomo--historically, politically, etc.--while watching the flash mob dancers. In doing so, flash mobs create a paradox within the magic circle; they create a positive, ‘pure space’, but at the same time still actively interrogate the contextual realities of the occupied space in which it occurs.

In terms of the broader picture, as a result of this space entanglement, flash mobs also engage with the concept of global citizenship at a viral level. As an organism, a flash mob is born within virtual media, as the mobilizing call ventures forth through Facebook or Twitter, and then later returns to the Internet via Youtube or other video sharing sites, fully developed and executed, where it then spawns, its footage posted and reposted hundreds or thousands of times, and inspires half a dozen more flash mobs across the globe. The memorial flash mobs for Michael Jackson demonstrate this point particularly, as one tribute video from the Netherlands surfaced on the internet, it inspired a new flash mob in Sweden, which inspired one in San Francisco, which inspired a massive one in Mexico, and so and so on to the point where the Cebu prison in the Philippines--famous for its prisoners’ Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ tribute several years before--produced its own Michael Jackson memorial tribute (with extremely high production values) weeks later. To be a part of a flash mob is to claim both local and global citizenship, as the mobs coalesce around ideas and events that flow across boundaries and through social media.

San Francisco MJ Tribute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gHnZJTs8K4
Mexico MJ Tribute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7z8ZiRcQ9Q
Cebu Prison MJ Tribute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZC6JuTlOVM

As a result of this global-local engagement, the previous observations about flash mobs need to be revised:

1) Flash mobs are not entirely removed from their social, political, and economic contexts, but rather create positive, ‘pure spaces’ through the invocation of play, which are not denuded of context but rendered harmless and safe within the transience of their space.
2) In offering this positive space, flash mobs provide populations the opportunity to engage with ideas of global-local identity as well as the social, economic, and political contexts of their spaces through the act of mobilization.
3) That flash mobs are inherently products of social media and global communication, thus flash mobs also offer crucial intersections for engaging global-local citizenship.

Yet, within all flash mobs there is the tacit threat of “real” urban mobilization--a threat that we have seen play out in real time increasingly over the past year. Returning to the idea of flash mobs as play, Gregory Bateson theorizes both play and games as forms of metacommunication; what is demonstrated, acted out, or “played” with inside the playful space gestures towards another action or communication that exists in external reality. In flash mobs, the underlying metacommunication is that of urban mobilization--a potential threat that is continually rendered harmless through the flash mob’s playfulness and transience. The current fascination with flash mobs has as much to do with the idealistic, “spaceship earth” mentality that they can engender as it does with their implicit dark side: every flash mob holds the potential to become an angry mob. The Cebu prisoners’ Michael Jackson tribute is particularly haunting for this reason; though the intent is to invoke community and solidarity, a video of several hundred mobilized prison inmates shouting, “they don’t care about us” gestures a little too far towards the aggressive and destructive potential of the flash mob.

These videos of recent protests around the globe are the realities behind the threat of the flash mob:

Egypt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xWiBCIxjIk
London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhmF5p2Z7Ec
California: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy6LQlpemiw

What is particularly noteworthy in each of these videos is that they all show the extreme ramifications of urban mobilization and assemblage within geopolitical contexts and without a pure space--in short: reactionary police and government action. When the bubble of suspended reality and positive space around the flash mob ‘pops’, the mob becomes politicized, sometimes aggressive, and lingering. Such a threat is particularly pertinent at this moment, in the wake of the London riots as well as the ongoing evolution of both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Each of these instances has relied upon the same social media resources to mobilize urban populations--some violently, some not--yet each of these is a flash mob after the “play” gets taken away; the people remain, still engaging with their global-local identities and their political, social, and economic realities, but the safety of a positive, playful space has disappeared.

Interestingly, though the safety of a play-space disappears with these mobs, many of them still gesture towards the playful spirit of flash mobs, as though to mitigate the tacit threat of urban mobilization. We saw this frequent in the (mostly) peaceful revolutions and protests across the Middle East and Africa in the past year as many participants in the non-violent protests often referred to their assembling in terms of a “flash mob,” despite their political motivations. More recently (and still on going), we see this in the Occupy movement across our country. Though some violence has erupted--predominantly around forced or poorly coordinate dconfrontations between police and demonstrators--the Occupiers have remained peaceful (if stubborn) and, more often then not, playful. We see this best in their picket signs:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/fjelstud/the-best-signs-from-occupy-wall-street

Most of them are ironic, some of them are outright angry, but many of them draw on a sense of humor and even a dark playfulness that gestures back towards the fun and toothlessness of the flash mobs and the playful space.

Revised Paper Abstract

I'm writing on filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary series, specifically situating her project as reflective of her anxiety associated with the United States national historical erasure that marks Korean transnational adoption, which is an erasure that has led to a subsequent Asian adoption movement that has increasingly become globally popular since the Korean War. I am positioning Deann's media project as reflective of her ultimate concern for the repercussions of history-unwritten or forgotten --- repercussions embodied by the contemporary televisual representations of Asian adoption within American contemporary culture, specifically within the show Modern Family.

For me, what makes Liem’s personal story and her overall project of rewriting the Korean adoption experience and the ‘adoptee diaspora’ so interesting, is the way in which she takes up the documentary form in a serial model, and the way in which her historical rewriting project evolves within this serial model. She introduced her personal story with Third Person Plural (2000), where she maps out her journey as a Korean adoptee in realizing and accepting her three separate identities, bringing together her American and Korean families in an effort to write and validate her personal history as well as come to terms with her notion of ‘home’ and homeland. She then produces a sequel documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2009), which serves as her journey to find the girl whose identity she assumed throughout her adolescence. Deann is now developing a less-personal, more comprehensive documentary called Geographies of Kinship - The Korean Adoption Story, which follows six Korean adoptees from the U.S. and Europe who trace their diverse experiences with identity. Deann takes up the documentary form in order to validate her experience and a ‘history untold’, while using it in a serial and seemingly obsessive way that reflects her anxieties associated with the histories-unwritten and subsequent misrepresentations/partial representations that she has personally assumed within her identity as well as that mark Asian adoption altogether. Deann’s documentaries take up the fact that the Korean model of adoption has permanently influenced and changed the way adoption is performed on a global scale, and subsequently raises questions about the familial, assimilation, and identity.

Looking at Deann's documentary series with these specific lenses will yield insight on the necessity of her mission as both a personal and historical rewriting project as well as a gesture to fill historical gaps within the United States imaginary. Moreover, I position her project as reflective of her anxieties associated with a tenuous identity crisis that is both private and public, reflected in global and local paradigms, as well as an identity characterized by affective and capital labor (with specific psychological, cultural, and gendered implications and effects). I will be looking at the ways her three films articulate her identity crisis within the context of rewriting her history untold, specifically addressing the constitutions of her personal history, as well as the history of transnational Asian adoption. Lastly, (as stated above) I am suggesting that Deann’s fears associated with the historical erasure of Korean transnational adoption are materialized in contemporary televisual representations of Asian adoption within American culture, specifically within the show Modern Family. Evidence of Deann’s anxieties associated with historical and cultural misrepresentation and erasure, manifest in the character Lily, daughter of gay couple Cameron and Mitchell. It’s in Lily’s vacant and mute demeanor (specifically in Season 1), that reveal a national erasure of history that Deann cannot seem to overcome.

Bibliography:
1. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
2. Richard Fung, “Seeing Yellow: Asian Identities in Film and Video”
3. Ali Behdad : A Forgetful Nation - On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the US
4. David L. Eng, Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
5. Haile Gerima “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs Lucy*”
6. Andreas Huyssen Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia

Any bibliography recommendations are absolutely welcome!

"The Republic of Tyra"

A follow up to the McCarthy reading...

McCarthy on this issue on Flow in 2005:

http://flowtv.org/2005/04/reality-television-political-economy-neoliberalism-american-idol-americas-top-model-government/

Ayn Rand was on the radio this morning

Or at least archival recordings of her were. Absent context, I imagine she might well have resented such 'public' (scare quotes intentional) coverage, but as it was a piece naming her the ideological darling of conservative Congress, she might have appreciated the publicly-sponsored radio piece, if not the taxes responsible. 

What struck me, as John Boehner and Republican Congress Inc. waxed poetic about her prescient treatment of Occupy Wall Street's and others' witch hunt of the country's beset and atrociously victimized job creators in Atlas Shrugged, was how the issues of scale and agency were variously treated in The Corporation and Couldry's article. The former contends (and I think we all agree) that transnational corporations benefit from all the might associated with international scale, along with all the protections conferred upon an individual agent, minus a moral compass. Ira Jackson avers, capitalism is "amoral" (The Corporation); it is just a system. Milton Friedman asserts it makes no more sense to expect a corporation to act ethically than a building (The Corporation). Cute. Only a cursory examination of a building or a plan for a building tells us volumes about the political economy and social considerations (or lack thereof) constitutive of it, so we can rightly expect to look at corporations for cultural reflections (or lack thereof) and make normative assessments. Neither Friedman, nor any of the CEOs interviewed in the film, and certainly not any of Congress's Ayn Rand Reading Club devotees, seem the least bit preoccupied with the paradox of crying, "You hurt our corporate feelings," given the fact that the only human qualities inherent to a corporation are its individual rights and the shareholders that drive its increasingly immoral actions. 

Couldry's interest in scale is different, certainly, but he understands what the defendants of capitalism won't. "Scale is always a social construction" (28). Economic processes are not an inevitability. When we say that something is "too big to fail," we must first agree what "failure" means. Because at this point I think we can safely say that the only people in this recession that have gotten jobs are bankers. . . who have done a terrible job with their probationary extension. This is not Couldry's vantage point, but his call for "a more improvised microfocus" (28) is well-taken. The "too big" agents have obscured our possibilities for possibility, for a world where we really do look first to Sen's capability theory, knowing and not proposing that social and political values are more important than are economic ones. Moreover, and this is something I hope to speak about a bit more tomorrow, I feel as though Couldry might have written this piece with the Out the Window project in mind. (It's not my project, I'm just the researcher, so I really don't flatter myself by making this connection.) It is at once a hopeful expression of local possibilities and innovations, where people are generating "new contexts of public communication and trust, whether as frameworks primarily for consumption or for citizen participation (or both)" (26), as well as an institutional learning moment. Wuthnow's emergent "institutional frameworks" and "action sequences" abound, more successful at the grassroots level and increasingly complicated, almost stymied, as we approach the institutional scale. 

Occupy Zizek

Slavoj Zizek's essay, "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'" (1998), is in many ways a call to occupy the notion of Eurocentrism itself, to lay claim to a historical re-reading of Eurpoean political thought as a means of redefining and reclaiming what it means to be "Eurocentric." This reclaimation involves setting aside "the assertion of one's particular identity" (1006) and instead claiming universality through this subjectively occupied Eurocentrism, by presenting it as an identity, as a metaphorical self (990), and as a representative or stand-in "for the whole of society" (988). To subjectively self-identify as Eurocentric, in this context, is both to abandon the particular as a place of resistance to globalization (1009), and to reject the disembodied heights of tolerance, compassion, and multicultural understanding (1002). But more than that, it is to explicitly reassert the value of Europe as a universalizing ideal, in the context of globalization and transnational capital. Thus, Zizek's plea to reclaim Eurocentrism is, in short, a plea to occupy the word "Europe".

Thirteen years later, this plea for a linguistic reclamation of Eurocentrism can read as a problematic gesture, especially when read alongside the xenophobic rhetoric spewing forth from the mouth of today's European Union (e.g., footnotes 1 and 2). Eurocentrism is a word inexorably bound to a violent history of exclusion. One could easily say the same of "Los Angeles," two words tied to a problematic history of violence and exclusion. So it's no surprise, then, that Occupy Los Angeles has had some difficulty occupying the words "Los Angeles" in the way Zizek might want. Many people at City Hall are rightly hesitant to set aside the particulars of their experiences, in service to some overarching symbolic fiction (995). Perhaps Zizek had forgotten that, as in Plato's Republic, the people are not supposed to be aware of the lies which enable their universalizing truths.

But perhaps Zizek simply lacked the language to express his "new mode of repoliticization" (1009). Such language is found, in part, through the rhetoric of occupation, of squatting temporarily on space--real or virtual--as an exercise in political redefinition. As when Native Americans occupied Alcatraz for nineteen months (Nov. 1969 to June 1971), the rhetoric of occupation relies on neither symbolic fiction nor historical ignorance. Instead, occupation constitutes a collective gesture of (re)interpretation, presented as spectacle, both against and within an existing social hierarchy and structure of power. This linguistic gesture can be self-aware of its own limited truth claims and yet still afford the possibility for collective political action, precisely because occupation relies upon the particular identites of specifc people in specific places.

Perhaps the best contemporary example of the language of occupation is the phrase, "We are the 99%," which is the central rhetorical gesture of the Occupy Movement as a whole. In the strictest sense, this phrase is logically impossible: for it to be "true" it would have to be spoken simultaneously by roughly 310 million Americans (many of whom cannot or would not agree with those speaking the phrase). But this phrase was not designed to be true. Instead, it was designed by people who were and are excluded from any "firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice", to connect to other similarly excluded people by falsely "present[ing] themselves as representatives [and] stand-ins... for the true universality" (988).

What differentiates this rhetorical gesture from Zizek's is simple enough: instead of appropriating the already existing discourse surrounding nationhood (Europe, America), the Occupy Movement is forcibly inserting new language into our political discourse. This insertion is not occuring through representation (reading), but by inspiring acts of representation (writing). It is not an occupation of a word, but of a page.

When Zizek spoke at Occupy Wall Street, just a month ago, he told those present an old joke. (see footnote 3 for the video.) Here's how the New York Observer's Aaron Gell summed it up:

He told... an old Eastern Bloc joke... about a dissident who’s about to be sent to a work camp in Siberia. Since he knows his letters will be censored, he tells his friends he’ll write to them using a simple code: Blue ink for the truth, red ink for lies. His first letter arrives, and it’s a glowing report of life in the camp—a lovely apartment, great food, beautiful women. Then he concludes, 'The only thing we can’t get is red ink.'

After Zizek tells the joke, he says to the occupiers: "You're the red ink."

The Occupy Movement is about expanding political discourse in a way that allows people to talk about lies. This kind of thing doesn't necessarily require the substitution of one lie for another; it merely requires the use of appropriate tools. Supposedly, those tools are available to all Americans, waiting like pens on a dusty table. Whether or not this is true--whether the ink is blue or red, whether the paper is actually there--will depend upon the American, the table, the chair.

This is to say that, for all his merits, Zizek's essay (and his joke) misses the mark. The Occupy Movement is not red ink, nor is it a ghastly severed hand rewriting "Europe" in another color. The Occupy Movement is the American Bodies Politic, beginning to return home and finding... something... sleeping in their beds. It is not a person, it has no body, but there it is, sleeping peacefully. Zizek has seen that something, has witnessed its snoring, and so have the occupiers at Zuccotti Park. "We can see," Zizek said to them, "that for a long time we allowed our political engagement... to be outsourced. We want it back."


- - -
(1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1321277/Angela-Merkel-Multiculturalism-Germany-utterly-failed.html

(2) http://www.whatsonxiamen.com/news15201.html

(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEUZNfOtPlE

Revisiting Morley (Chapter 7) in looking at the failure of the Ellen series

In CTCS 500: Film Theory, we looked at the Ellen sitcom as part of our introduction to television theory. I’d like to revisit David Morley’s Home Territories in order to address the Ellen sitcom and its failure. Specifically, I’d like to address Ellen’s queer historical significance and problematic temporality of queerness as raised by Anna McCarthy in her article Ellen : Making Queer Television History, while bringing the discussion into a larger arena of temporal significance and subjectivity for mediated Othering that David Morley addresses in Chapter 7 of Home Territories.

Ellen as a failed sitcom produced the opening for ‘queer’ to enter mainstream television, and achieved this by accidentally rupturing network television’s system of ‘Othering’. McCarthy, in part, takes up the notion of the historicized queerness that Ellen’s producers adopted for its palatable eventfulness in the context of the serial program. Ellen struggled with the ‘uneventfulness’ of queerness, insofar as this uneventfulness signifed to the viewer that queerness is now part of the homogeneous primary demographic (i.e. the portrayal of Ellen’s queerness in an everyday, normative sense in every episode as part of the serial model), which is an assertion that the major network, ABC, felt uncomfortable making in 1997. Morley raises the issue of how spatially and temporally television relegates ethnic Others to the periphery (i.e. 10 oclock news, public programming, Logo, etc.). Moreover, within the spatial and temporal designations of certain demographics, he addresses the subjectivity that is granted to certain ethnic and racial demographics and denied of other demographics within different types of programming. Morley states, “Centrally, Hargreaves’ point is that, because of their confinement to ‘problem’ genres and their exclusion from light entertainment (and, on the whole, from television advertising), ethnic minoritiy and immigrant groups “are simply not represented as part of everyday life” (Morley, 164). Morley addresses issues of systematic Othering that is enacted by the media, issues that Ellen accidentally avoids and complicates throughout its serial lifespan.
How did a show about a lesbian protagonist live within the homogenous primary’s visibility on primetime ABC? Ellen shape-shifted during its lifespan and thus threw off all traditional efforts of relegating the show to a televisual sphere of the Other. McCarthy’s look at the way in which the ‘uneventfulness’ of queer became a formula that ABC could not effectively deliver, reveals the ways in which Morley’s discussion of a subjectivity played out during the Ellen series as the sexual orientation of the protagonist shifted from a heteronormative representation to a categorical Otherness. At the mid-series point of Ellen’s coming-out, her subjectivity could not be denied at this point during the series as the protagonist was already fixed, which gave way for visible problems in story arch and issues with the ‘uneventfulness’ of the protagonist’s identity.
Let’s consider, then, the series’ context in failure. While the show ended up failing the battle for continued visibility (and continued series) in 1998, Ellen won in terms of unveiling the problematics associated with visibility of homogeneous primary and periphery Other that the television networks staged in their narrative confusion and ultimate serial murder. Ellen and Ellen represent the lapse in the network’s process of Othering, in that they offered of subjectivity to a queer person by accident, thus working to perminently rupture and complicate notions of queerness as a designated Other for the primetime viewer.

Transnational Feminism in War

I was thrilled about this week's readings because I've been thinking a lot about how especially since 9/11 and in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, feminist discourses have been misappropriated by the American press and politicians to justify racist and imperialist actions in the Middle East. "We don't like how those Muslims treat women, so we need to overthrow their governments."

Doubtless, as noted by Aihwa Ong, there are some very real abuses against women that occur at the hands of (particularly more "extreme") Islamist governments. But the American rhetoric on the issue is troubling, particularly given the absurd prevalence of rape and other violence against women in the military, the institution given authority to carry out these actions "in defense of women's rights."

In particular, I was jumping up and down in my seat and grinning like an idiot while reading Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan's piece on transnational sexuality. Not only was it fantastic to see another rigorous dissection of the term "transnational," but their observation that "sexual politics [is] at once national, regional, local, even 'cross-cultural' and hybrid" hit the nail on the head. I'd love to talk more in class about the US anti-Taliban rhetoric as an example of "the old colonial project of saving the brown woman from her own kind," which Grewal and Kaplan address in the context of "Third World" sex trafficking. It seems to me that many of the same impulses are at play in the discourses of war and "the clash of civilizations" that we have witnessed over the last ten years.

Transnational Eats: A Made-Over Paper Abstract

Hi everyone! Here is my much more complete abstract. More apologies for my tardiness forthcoming this afternoon.
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I would like to examine the role of food in three examples of contemporary migrant cinema from Germany. In defining migrant cinema, I take my cue from Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg to include work from non-migrant and non-diasporic filmmakers who still have “access to the, nevertheless, shared history and memory of migration and practices, viewpoints and aesthetic strategies of those filmmakers who were, by and large, relegated to the margins of European film studies in the late 1990s.” As such, my paper will include films by the Hamburg-born, second-generation Turkish-German director Fatih Akin (Soul Kitchen, 2009), the Westphalian Christian Petzold (Jerichow, 2008), and the Bavarian Anno Saul (Kebab Connection, 2004). I would also like to include a bit of background on how the döner kebab, a Turkish sandwich, has become the “hamburger” of Germany.

All three films unfold against a background of the food industry—in the case of Jerichow and Kebab Connection, specifically the ethnic food industry. All three are also characterized by a multicultural, multilingual cast of characters who reflect the transnational state of Germany’s contemporary populace. I am interested in how food functions in each film as a commodity and industry, and also a symbol of cultural identity and value systems. Here is a brief summary of each film and some of the elements I would like to examine:

1. Jerichow. Of all the films, food is relegated most strictly to a setting in Jerichow, rarely a narrative device. A dishonorably discharged veteran of Afghanistan, Thomas (a white German) returns to Saxony intending to renovate his dead mother’s home. Hamstrung by debt and his lack of marketable skills in Saxony’s notoriously weak post-unification economy, Thomas ends up being hired by local business magnate Ali. Ali, who came to Germany from Turkey as an infant, runs 45 fast-food stands that sell different kinds of ethnic food to passersby (we see shops specializing in Turkish and pan-Asian food in the film). Ali is also an alcoholic, and has had his license suspended—enter Thomas, who becomes his driver and general assistant in running the food shops. The other player is Ali’s beautiful (white, German) wife Anna, with whom Thomas begins an intense affair. The story plays out against the backdrop of a food industry that incorporates both the matter-of-fact cosmpolitanism and the (forgive me) McDonaldization of the contemporary food landscape.

2. Kebab Connection. Co-written by Fatih Akin, Kebab Connection tells the story of Ibo, the young (early 20s-ish) son of Turkish immigrants who dreams of making the “first German Kung Fu movie.” He builds his reel by making extravagant commercials for his uncle’s döner shop. Upon finding out that his (white, German) girlfriend is pregnant, Ibo has to decide how many compromises he is willing to make. He is aided in his life decisions by friends, including the son of his uncle’s rival, a Greek immigrant who owns a taverna across the street from the döner shop. Much as Ibo has been disowned by is father for impregnating a German girl, his friend has been disowned by his father for opening a vegetarian restaurant. To add insult to injury, the main fare is falafel, an “Arab” food. While the restaurants play a stronger narrative role in this film, the main story is still about Ibo and Titzi, his girlfriend. There is a lot to be explored regarding food and national identity, tradition, and commercialism/commodification/consumption.

3. Finally, I will look at Fatih Akin’s most recent film, Soul Kitchen. Unlike Head-On, Soul Kitchen is a light brother-comedy. Zinos, the son of Greek immigrants whom we never see, owns a greasy spoon restaurant in Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg’s most multicultural neighborhood (and also one that is rapidly gentrifying). His gambling-addicted brother Ilias gets a work-release from prison on the pretext of working at Zinos’s restaurant. Meanwhile, Zinos’s (white, German) girlfriend has moved to China to be a foreign correspondent, and he has to choose between his restaurant and moving to be with her in Shanghai. His restaurant undergoes a major facelift when he hires the volatile Shayn, a “gypsy” chef whose uncompromising dedication to haute cuisine and willingness to verbally assault unhappy customers lands him out of work. In the course of the film—which, again, is primarily a brother-comedy (and also a dual romantic comedy exploring both Zinos and Ilias’s budding relationships with (Turkish) Anna and (Italian-German) Lucia, respectively), food comes to embody at least two types of transnationalism: the McDonaldized, fast-food greasy spoon fare Zinos serves up at the beginning of the film, and the elite, cosmopolitan multinational “traditional” food that he offers after Shayn gives him a culinary makeover.

This is where I’m at right now. If anybody can recommend any sources that deal with food, consumption, and national identity, I’d love it. Thanks!

Play and Consumption

My apologies for the lateness of this blogpost. That is, assuming it is late; since time is a subjective and social construct, your forgiveness would of course reposition it temporally as right on time. Anyway, instead of presenting any coherent argument about this week’s readings, I’d like to gesture at what I see as a potentially fruitful relationship, between theorists of spatiotemporal consumption practices and the nascent field of game studies.

This week’s readings regularly made use of terms familiar to games scholars, such as play, game, ritual, avatar, simulation, competition, and rules. Urry described postmodern landscapes as “simulated spaces which are there for consumption” (21), a fitting description of videogames and virtual worlds. Bauman wrote about the social use of shared rules (21) and avatars (22), how society has become just another player, “as erratic as all players are” (23), and the desire of tourists to escape from the routines, hazards, confusions, and uncertainties of daily life (26); all of these themes are, in one way or another, familiar to game players and scholars. Canclini talks about how rituals and competition both help groups select and pin down the meanings that govern their lives (39), and how the thought-facilitating potentials of consumption often go unrecognized, due to the conflation of consumption and the “supposedly free… game of market laws” (45). And Ritzer and Liska frame contemporary vacations in a decidedly game-like way, as highly predictable, efficient, calculable, and controlled experiences (99-100), then discuss the social implications of “the coming of virtual reality,” and the increasingly common desire for simulation and the inauthentic in our tourist and leisure practices (107).

Games have lately become one of our most privileged leisure and tourist practices, and it’s no surprise that these theorists, to some extent, saw this coming. But it is a bit surprising that they so richly understood play and games. Though their discussions of play and games are certainly implicit and brief, undercurrents running beneath their theoretical foundations, they are nonetheless there, as decidedly current undercurrents. And I would argue that these currents need to merge more directly with games studies, and wash away some of the muddy thinking in games-related scholarship.

Games studies has, from its inception, neglected to deal with the practical implications of studying play—a radically subjective and free imaginative practice—and have instead focused upon specific aspects of commodity forms and consumable objects. Certainly, videogames are very often simulated spaces designed for consumption, and more specifically consumption distanced from its real world spatial analogues, so this focus is not inherently a problem. But as the readings from this week show us, consumption is itself an imaginative, playful practice, which necessarily involves critical thinking, subjective distance, and real freedom. It is because of this that (as several of the readings point out) we must constantly be trained and retrained, at great cost, to think and act like good consumers. To study games as commodity objects is, then, to misunderstand the nature of consumption.

If instead we could understand videogames as imagined spaces defined through consumer practices, we might then be capable of positioning play at the center of our analyses of games without subverting those analyses entirely. The potential for subversion is always a part of both play and consumerism, as our readers recognize. The question which follows such recognition, and which I'd pose to games scholars, is: where do we locate such subversion, in relation to the "videogame" as commodity form?

Abstract: Film Festivals as Producers: the Economics and Aesthetics of International Film Production

For my project in this class I would like to explore the international film festival as a site of film production. Film festivals are generating increasing attention due to their function as meeting grounds for creative individuals and investors, as well as their roles in defining and perpetuating certain styles and tastes in the content and form of international filmmaking practice. A special section in a recent issue of Cinema Journal addresses contemporary international film festivals from a variety of angles including the financial influence of entities that not only recognize achievement in completed international film work, but also work to produce new films as well. Most major international film festivals currently feature some type of film market, development program or production fund.

In my paper I would like engage with some of the current discussions about the roles of film festivals in production. My attention will be focused on entities within major international festivals like the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund which both provides funding to selected projects and serves as a platform for other producing-oriented services like matchmaking with additional financiers. Festivals of all varieties have increased in both number and size within the past decade while traditional types of film production that would have fed these festivals with content like the independent producer and the national cinema are finding ever increasing difficulty in operating according to their earlier models. My paper will explore the ways that international film festivals are both feeding themselves a steady supply of new films and simultaneously institutionalizing certain elements of form and content.

Very Abstract Paper Abstract

Like Sarah, I would like to apologize for my tardiness. Here's my belated, and still fairly formative, abstract:

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I would like to examine the function of food and cuisine in contemporary migrant cinema in Germany. I intend to look at food both as a representative of ethnic and national cultural traditions, and as a new global/transnational phenomenon, in part using the McDisneyization framework outlined by Allan and Liska. How can food function as a bridge between the migrant and the tourist? I am thinking specifically of the frequent pattern in Germany of immigrants opening a restaurant that serves their particular ethnic cuisine, which Germans in turn visit to satisfy a touristic desire to experience the exotic. I am also interested in the literal and figurative questions of consumption that surround the ethnic food industry.

Specifically, I would like to examine food as a trope in three exemplary films from contemporary Germany: Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, Christian Petzold's Jerichow, and Thomas Arslan's Dealer. All three films deal with German multiculturalism, but in a way that "backgrounds" political discourse. Akin's film is essentially a romantic-meets-family comedy, Petzold's a forbidden romance, and Arslan's a social realist urban drama about life on the margins and the slow drift into criminality. All three films, however, employ food--and, specifically, the immigrant-owned restaurant--in different ways that speak to the cultural flows and transnational impulses of contemporary German cinema, something I would like to explore and elucidate in this paper.

Long Beach and the future of global music

I'm sorry for the lateness with this, guys, but here is my proposed abstract for our paper. I am hoping to send this for consideration to the EMP Pop Music Conference as well and could definitely use any feedback you may have! Thanks for reading!

Los Angeles is often discussed academically as the city of the future, a region of newly globalized madness where people from around the world intermingle in a postmodern landscape like never before. The sprawled out, self-segregated nature of this city creates a culture defined by detached nostalgia, distance and resistance and indeed this can be felt in the music created here from aggressive gangster rap beats to the whimsical anti-war songs of Laurel Canyon’s heydey. Only 25 miles to the south, however, the neighboring port city of Long Beach plays a different tune. Instead of music created by Los Angeles’ uniquely disparate-yet-global circumstance, Long Beach’s own density-defined urban dynamic allows the city’s global influences to come together in new and distinct ways. As the most diverse city in the country, Long Beach fosters a culture of forced collisions and creates a space that has been home to a slew of new global music forms that are as experimental as they are unintentional. Drawing on globalization theories surrounding both the city of Los Angeles and cultural production, this paper will analyze the new sounds produced throughout Long Beach music history as well as their global and glocal contexts. I will explain how the globalization of Long Beach has and continues to contribute its influence into popular music and why new sounds emerging from the city such as reggae-jazz-hop, Khmer-rap and emo-gospel, are being organically produced through the globalized nature of the city itself.

Thoughts on Consumption

Instead of writing a single, cohesive response this week, I wanted to instead present a few general points that surfaced in my mind as I went through the readings.

The first is tied to the film Kung Fu Panda, and the ways in which it was able to make a culture that has historically been presented as so undeniably foreign, seem foreign, but yet also, somehow, at the same time, American. Although DreamWorks rather than Disney produced this particular film, I think that the trend towards the ‘McDisneyization’ of culture is equally visible here.

For one thing, when I stopped to really think about what culture was being represented in the film, I found that I could only go so far as to say “Asian” or, perhaps even worse, “Eastern.” How was this possible? Well, for starters, I think the creators of the film were very careful to include only the most general cultural signifiers that are associated with “Eastern” culture, such as martial arts (Kung Fu in particular is Chinese, but it is often conflated with Karate or the less well-known Judo, which are both Japanese), vague references to Buddhism, and the blending of architectural styles. Although this may or may not have been a conscious decision (I would argue one can be careful to do certain things without necessarily having to be conscious of why one is doing them), the visible muddling of East Asian cultures present in the film further augments the problematic conceptualization and perceived “familiarity” of American audiences with East Asian cultures as “culture.” To solidify the perceptual transformation of these cultural products from “foreign” to “American,” which has already begun to occur as the result of our increased consumption of these products removed from their cultural context, the character voices and dialogue were also extremely important in solidifying the domestic feel of the film. What does it mean, if anything, that the voice of “The Dragon Warrior” was a white American comedian/rock musician from Santa Monica, CA? Is this film really intending to represent East Asian culture(s), or it is meant merely to recreate the American interpretation of it/them?

The second point I wanted to raise was also tied to the film, particularly as it relates to travel, journey and/or adventure narratives. The beginning of the Bauman article opened with reference to King Pyrrhus and his insatiable desire for new conquests. This immediately led me to reflect once again on Kung Fu Panda, although this time as a serialized narrative, or at least on the seeming inevitability of the sequel. Although I haven’t quite gotten around to seeing Kung Fu Panda 2 myself, over the summer I worked with a group of elementary and middle school kids, many of whom were extremely excited to report that, after seeing the film, they were sure there was going to be a Kung Fu Panda 3. Of course, from a corporate perspective the huge financial incentives for this trend seem clear. But these financial incentives are at least in part due to the willingness of the audience to return, once again, to see familiar characters go on new (or perhaps not so new) adventures. What is it about a story that makes us want to come back for more?

This question also surfaced again more broadly for me on page 11, when, engaging Kierkegaard, Bauman wrote that “[t]hey all wish to ‘constantly finish and to begin again from the beginning’ and so to forget about that end which is bound to finish it all and beyond which there would be no more new beginnings.” After I got over my confusion, I was instantly reminded of the feeling I get when I know I am nearing the end of a favorite movie, or the equally disappointing realization that there are only a few more pages left of a good book. Although I have been reading or watching hungrily for however long it has been, yearning to get to the end of the text, when I finally get there, is immediately replaced by a subtle sort of disappointment that I have actually arrived at my destination. What should be satisfaction has somehow already been replaced by a desire to consume more/again. Hoes does this fit into Bauman’s argument surrounding the need, desire, and wish?

Finally, and on an entirely separate note, I also found myself thinking quite a bit about the relationship between consumerism and academia. To what extent are we, as academics, being trained to be products or to market ourselves as such? Particularly with the heavy emphasis placed on publishing both books and articles, as well as presenting at conferences etc, I wonder how much of the current state of academia can be understood or explained as a result of our consumer culture. In addition, I also think about the importance of curating a professional identity as an academic, particularly online through websites such as academia.edu as well as personal WebPages and/or blogs. This in particular makes me think about consumerism as a hopelessly endless cycle, where we are not only required to maintain all of these different representations of our self as a product (which is exhausting and, at least for me, seems quite impossible), but then at the same time we are also expected to consume (and somehow keep up with) the products of others (i.e. reading/buying books, subscribing to professional groups like SCMS, reading articles, attending conferences, networking etc.). I am not entirely sure where I would like us to go with this last point, but because academia has (in my opinion) a tendency to situate itself outside the realm of such issues, I think it is even more important for us to consider it as a product of consumerism.