Seriality – Page 6 – medieninitiative

Serial Figures and (the) Television

The new issue of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft is out now. It’s a special issue on “The Series,” edited by Daniela Wentz, Lorenz Engell, Jens Schröter, Herbert Schwaab, and Benjamin Beil, and among a great set of articles it includes a piece I co-authored with Ruth Mayer, entitled: “Bildstörung: Serielle Figuren und der Fernseher” [roughly: Image Interference: Serial Figures and the Television]. Here’s the abstract:

This article investigates the logic and aesthetics of popular seriality by looking at several exemplary moments of medial recursivity – which we identify as a ‘motor’ of serial narration and proliferation. Our focus is on the medial development of serial figures – figures that are firmly established in the popular imagination and which have undergone multiple media changes in the course of their careers. In their serial reenactments, these figures are able to shed light on the ways in which the structures of a medial memory are established and updated, and how medial acts of forgetting are operationalized in this context. Exploring three case studies – the figures of Fu Manchu, Fantômas, and Batman – this article in particular reflects on the function of television with respect to its influence on the medial positionings and self-conceptions of other serial entertainment formats (the novel, film). We set out from the hypothesis that television is in many respects privileged in this role as a medium of reference. Not only its propensity for serial forms distinguishes it in this regard, but also its contradictory attributes of immateriality (television viewing) and apparatic presence (the television set) contribute to making the medium of television appear as both the epitome of serial sequentiality and as a disruptive factor or instrument for arresting the flow of serial figures’ stagings – thus covering a broad spectrum of medial reference functions.

And in German:

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Logik und Ästhetik populärer Serialität im exemplarischen Bezug auf das Moment der medialen Rekursivität, das hier als ‚Motor’ der seriellen Narration und Proliferation ausgemacht wird. Der Fokus liegt auf der medialen Entfaltung von seriellen Figuren – also Figuren, die in der populären Imagination fest etabliert sind und im Laufe ihrer Karriere mehrere Medienwechsel unterlaufen. In ihrer seriellen Fortschreibung vermögen solche Figuren Aufschluss darüber zu geben, wie Strukturen eines medialen Gedächtnisses etabliert und fortgeschrieben werden und wie mediales Vergessen in diesem Zusammenhang operationalisiert wird. Anhand dreier Fallbeispiele – der Figuren Fu Manchu, Fantômas und Batman – erkundet der Aufsatz insbesondere die Funktion des Leitmediums Fernsehen in seiner Wirkmacht für die mediale Selbstverortung und das Selbstverständnis anderer serieller Unterhaltungsformate (Roman, Spielfilm). Er geht von der Hypothese aus, dass das Fernsehen in vieler Hinsicht für diese Rolle als Referenzmedium privilegiert ist. Nicht nur sein serialitätsaffiner Charakter zeichnet es hierfür aus, sondern auch seine widersprüchlichen Attribute der Immaterialität (Fernsehen) und Apparathaftigkeit (Fernseher) tragen dazu bei, dass dieses Medium gleichermaßen als Inbegriff der seriellen Sequenzialität und als Störfaktor oder Instrument der Arretierung im Fluss der seriellen Figureninszenierung erscheinen kann – und damit ein breites Spektrum an Referenzfunktionen abdeckt.

Out Now: Popular Seriality

Just got my copy in the mail today: Populäre Serialität: Narration — Evolution — Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Frank Kelleter and with contributions from members of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice” and others, including Jason Mittell, Oliver Fahle, Lorenz Engell, and more!

Ludic Serialities @FlowConf2012 #Flow12

I am pleased to learn that my proposal has been accepted in a panel on “Game Studies as Media Studies” at this year’s FLOW Conference in Austin, Texas (organized biannually by graduate students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at UT). Interestingly, no papers will be presented at the conference — just five-minute statements followed by panel discussions. The preliminary schedule is now up at the conference website, and for the most part it looks great (though I do regret to see that my panel is scheduled to run concurrently with the panel on “Teaching TV” — I was looking forward to seeing Jason Mittell there, who left Germany a few months ago after his year-long stay in Göttingen; I guess we’ll just have to get a beer afterwards…). Anyway, my proposal is based on a project that I’m currently developing with Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (on “Digital Seriality: The Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games”). Here’s my short abstract:

Ludic Serialities

Shane Denson

In order to think through the affordances and consequences of conceiving game studies as part of humanities-oriented media studies – as opposed both to non-disciplinary approaches to games as focal objects for many disciplines, as well as to strong disciplinary programs following from “ludological” assertions of digital games’ medial exceptionality – I propose looking at a widespread but undertheorized aspect of video games: viz. the seriality that characterizes games at virtually every level of their material, cultural, and intermedial expression. Seriality informs gameplay through formal-algorithmic structures of repetition/variation and the intra-ludic seriality of progressive game “levels”; sequels, remakes, and other explicit serialization practices constitute inter-ludic serialities; finally, fan practices and transmedial phenomena beyond the games themselves instantiate extra-ludic serialities. Careful attention to serial structures offers both a broad basis for cross-media comparisons (from dime novels, film serials, TV series, etc.), as well as the means for identifying salient differences of digital interactivity.

Required Reading: Shaviro on Melancholia

I’m not teaching any courses right now, but if I were then Steven Shaviro’s “MELANCHOLIA, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime” would definitely be required reading! This is an important essay, and the new open-access journal in which it appears, Sequence: Serial Studies in Media, Film, and Music, is sure to establish itself as an important site of media research. Founded and co-edited by Catherine Grant (of Film Studies for Free fame), the peer-reviewed journal responds to the medial specificities of its digital environment in an innovative — but nevertheless quite “natural” — way: by structuring itself in terms of seriality. From the “About” page:

SEQUENCE will use its position outside of established academic publishing frameworks to work adaptively and responsively, using a sequential edited-collection format – its publication schedule set by its authors and readers, and their research and concerns. In other words, it will make an open-access virtue of its own low-fi, D.I.Y., modular blog format. It can only do this meaningfully, of course, because of the generous labour and research expertise of its authors, and of the editorial and advisory boards of its publisher REFRAME.

Each new scholarly SEQUENCE will begin with the publication of one valuable contribution to research in the fields of media, film or music – on a particular theme named in the issue title. But the editors of each individual SEQUENCE won’t necessarily know what the next in their series will be, or when exactly it will come. Each SEQUENCE could, theoretically, turn out to be ‘infinite’, or only as long as the first, self-contained contribution – a hopefully interesting and worthy, if possibly melancholic, kind of monograph.

In any case, each contribution to a SEQUENCE, and each evolving SEQUENCE as a whole, will go on to be published in a variety of electronic viewing and reading formats, with the web version only the first in a series of digital iterations.

Instead of regularity, we aim above all for spreadability and engagement. Readers will find out about new SEQUENCES, and new contributions and updates to existing SEQUENCES through the paraphernalia and pullulations of contemporary online serial publication: primarily, the project’s blog, its RSS feeds, and its Twitter and Facebook pages, and, hopefully, sharings on from those.

In this spirit, check out Shaviro’s excellent article, share it, and spread the word about this important new venue for online, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarship!

Seriality and Media Transformation #GöSerial

When this post goes online, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion (together with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sean O’Sullivan, and Ruth Page, and moderated by Jason Mittell) on the topic of “seriality and media transformations” at the workshop on Popular Seriality going on at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Each of the participants has been asked to prepare a five-minute statement to set the stage and get things rolling. This is what I’ll be saying:

Seriality and Media Transformation

Shane Denson

The topic of this panel, seriality and media transformation, names a constellation of processes that, as I see it, are perhaps not essentially or necessarily linked, but which are nevertheless bound together as a matter of historical fact. I’m tempted to say that seriality and media transformation are “structurally coupled” under conditions of modernity. My thoughts on this topic follow from research I’ve been conducting with Ruth Mayer, where we’ve been looking at popular figures like Frankenstein’s monster, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, or Batman – what we call serial figures, which proliferate across a range of media (but in a fragmented, plurimedial way, not by way of the more coherent, and more recent, transmediality that Henry Jenkins describes in terms of “world building”). In the context of this research, where we look at the way these figures jump from one medium to another, perpetually re-creating themselves in the milieu of a new medium, we are concerned with a nexus between seriality and mediality – a nexus where series are not just the contents of specific media (film serials, radio series, TV series, and the like), but where seriality is constituted as a higher-order medium, one in which the relations between and the transformations of first-order media (media as we usually think of them) are put on display, made visible, and negotiated. To make a big claim – because what else can you do in five minutes? – I would claim that it is the very hallmark of modernity to forge and reforge such a nexus of seriality and mediality; in other words, the articulation of seriality as a higher-order medium of media change is a central device for measuring, and indeed for constituting, the progression or forward march of a future-oriented modernity.

So we have to regard the media-historical function of the nexus: Because series unfold over time, they are subject to any changes that their carrier media may undergo. Not just passive receivers, though, series actively trace these transformations as they enact their own temporal unfoldings: the self-historicization by which series mark new installments against the old and in some cases stage qualitative transformations of their internal norms (as when Lost suddenly shifts from using flashbacks to flashforwards) – such processes of serial self-renewal and innovation can also serve as indexes of media change, and as the means for updating the idea of modernity in the process. Modernity itself is all about the update, and more often than not the update in question is all about innovations in media and technologies of mediation. So I’m suggesting that serial forms, which are inherently concerned with perpetually updating themselves, are the “natural” forms in which modernity would seek to stage itself.

Of central importance here is the medial self-reflexivity that serial forms are in various respects capable of instantiating. I’ll just briefly consider the example of Frankenstein’s monster, conceived as a serial figure (or a figure of serialization). Originating in a highly self-reflexive novel about (among other things) the experiential deformations occasioned by industrialization, the monster was serially replicated on the increasingly mechanized theater stages of the nineteenth century, before it became subject, in 1910, of a highly self-reflexive film by the production company of Thomas Edison, the wizard of modern media-technological innovation himself. In the film, as in all the Frankenstein films that would follow in the course of the next century, animation is both a diegetic and a medial process. In 1910, the term “animated pictures” was still used to describe film in general and to distinguish it from the still pictures of photography, so the creation sequence instantiated a sort of “operational aesthetic” in which, against the background of the familiar figure, film could stage itself as a figure of modern media fascination. Importantly, this is at the outset of the cinema’s so-called transitional era, which would radically change the phenomenological and industrial functions of film. Nor is it an accident that the still iconic image of the monster, embodied by Boris Karloff, was established (in 1931) in the wake of the cinema’s sound transition. Robbed of speech, a mute icon served all the better to foreground the fact of sound and thus to stage the self-renewal of film, the updating of the medium’s modernity, against the background of the flat figure’s serialized history. The figure of the monster, which exists not in a series but as a series, which updates itself in color and widescreen formats, in 3-D and CGI, in comics, on TV, and in video games, increasingly becomes a medium itself: a second-order medium of media change, and of modernity as the trajectory of media-technical innovation, updating, and transformation.

Populäre Serialität / Popular Seriality

An announcement has just gone up on the publisher’s site for Populäre Serialität: Narration — Evolution — Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert [i.e. Popular Seriality: Narration — Evolution — Distinction. On Serial Storytelling since the 19th Century]. The volume, which is set to appear in August of this year with the German publisher transcript, is edited by Frank Kelleter (speaker for the DFG Research Unit on “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice,” of which I am a part), and it contains — among many other interesting chapters — a piece co-authored by myself and Ruth Mayer, called “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel” [roughly: Border-Crossers: Serial Figures and Media Change].

Here, for readers of German, is the blurb from the publisher’s site:

Wie lässt sich die starke Verbreitung von seriellen Erzählungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert erklären? Welche neuen Erzählformate werden durch Serialisierung geschaffen? Wie beeinflussen populäre Serien unsere Wahrnehmung und Strukturierung sozialer Realität?

Die Beiträge in diesem Band gehen diesen Fragen nach und zeigen u.a., welche Wandlungen Serienfiguren durchlaufen, wenn sie in neue Medien übertragen werden, oder wie bei lang laufenden Serien die Übergänge zwischen Produzenten und Nutzern immer fließender werden. So ergibt sich ein facettenreicher Blick auf einen wesensbestimmenden Erzähltypus der Populärkultur.

Batman Live?

Several weeks ago, my family and I were able to catch a performance of the touring stadium show Batman Live (English site here, German here) in Hamburg. All in all, it was lots of fun. And it also happens to tie in with my current research on plurimedial serial figures. I had planned, therefore, to write a sort of review of the show, but as I can’t foresee finding the time to do so anytime soon, here are a few scattered thoughts.

As the title Batman Live indicates, the show is all about “liveness,” but the cultivation of the latter, which might be said to constitute the show’s main conceit, involves the performance in all sorts of paradoxes. One might, of course, say (with reference to Derrida, perhaps) that all performance, insofar as it involves the iteration of a script, renders “liveness” problematic, as the present is bound up in the pastness of the patterns and discourses that it repeats. But the paradoxes of Batman Live are much more concrete than all that…

By what means does Batman Live contrive to make Batman live? Naturally, by employing a live actor to embody the figure on a physical stage. “Live” is here contrasted with “recorded,” and it would seem that film, which also employs live actors (at least sometimes) but preserves their actions for later playback, is the particular medium of reference here. (Incidentally, film serves a double role here, as the show undoubtedly seeks to profit from the popularity of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, while defining itself against them with the implicit claim that “more live” = “more real” or more spectacular.) But, at least, in the German-language version I saw, this claim to liveness is undermined with the very first words uttered on stage, as the actors quite clearly lip sync a pre-recorded soundtrack.

Furthermore, the stage/screen dichotomy as a basis for the claim to liveness is unsettled by the presence of a gigantic digital display behind the stage. We’re used to this, of course, from big-budget musicals and, increasingly, even smaller-budget theater productions, but the backdrop in this case is used to make constant reference to other media (especially to comics and video games), the pre-existence of which must be seen to complicate the purported “liveness” of the performance.

For example, when Batman and Robin race away in the Batmobile, exiting the stage through one of the many discreet passageways that open up when necessary to allow traffic onto or off of the stage, their high-speed journey to Arkham Asylum is continued onscreen, framed quite obviously in the visual forms typical of digital racing games. (The layout of Arkham Island and the interior of the asylum, as depicted on the screen, in fact seemed to be pulled directly from the console game Batman: Arkham Asylum; an uncanny sense of recognition, an identification of the digital backdrop with my own TV screen hooked up to a PS3, transported me momentarily out of the arena and into my own living room.) The backdrop is also used for the purpose of narrative ellipsis, as a means of summarizing the events that occur between on-stage scenes; significantly, this takes place in the idiom of graphic narrative: we see digitally animated comic book pages flipping, the virtual camera zooming from panel to panel, revealing what happens “in the meantime.” Indeed, one might claim that the “meanwhile” is the temporal register that superhero comics in particular have perfected more than any other medium; such direct recourse to it, though, radically unsettles the here and now of the “live.”

On the other hand, though, we might say that these intermedial references are not so much at odds with, but in fact an integral part of the performance’s cultivation of “liveness,” which consists not only in the present-ness of the actors and their actions in a physical space shared by us, but precisely in the act of “bringing to life” the places and events depicted in film, video games, and comics — effectively imbuing these media with life by expanding them onto the stage, where Batman, Robin, the Joker, and others relate to the (intermedially determined) screen as part of their (diegetic) world.

Furthermore, this permeability of the screen, which alternates between embodying an expansion of diegetic space and an extra-diegetic, specifically narrative function (with concrete references to the narrative/representational techniques of other media) is caught up in paradoxes much like those informing the deployment of 3D techniques and technologies: they, too, oscillate between a) claims of establishing an intensified immersive experience that would bring represented characters and events to life for us in an unprecedented manner, and b) an emphasis on the unprecedented nature of the whole affair, a celebration of the technological infrastructure that enables such spectacles, and hence a foregrounding of the event itself in a manner that is radically at odds with the notion of “immersion.”

Indeed, the discourse of “immersive experience” is referenced in the video clip embedded here, where the “physicality of the stage” plus the awe-inspiring technology are foregrounded, but purportedly “wrapped up” in an immersive “package.” I am inclined to believe that this kind of equation never adds up — and that it’s never in fact meant to: from the “sensational melodrama” of nineteenth century stages and early-twentieth century screens (as explored by Ben Singer) to 3D techniques and “immersive” video games today, the attraction of all such spectacles consists in the maintenance of tensions between realism and a feeling of awe at the sight or spectacle of realism (itself no longer beholden to the impression of realistic-ness), for example, or between immersion and amazement at the power of a medium to involve us (recognition of which takes place outside the space of immersion). Batman Live is above all a spectacle of this sort, and the paradox of its “liveness” is — for those who take pleasure in such paradox, at least — not so much a shortcoming as a productive element of the attraction, which itself is inextricably bound up with the fragmented dispersal and plurimedial lack of coherence that characterizes Batman qua serial figure.

Well, in any case, it was all good fun…

Networks of Mediation

This is the abstract for a talk I’ll be giving in Mannheim, at a conference entitled “Networks in American Culture/America as Network” (16-17 March 2012):

Networks of Mediation: Serial Figures as Mediators of Change

Shane Denson

Series, in a wide range of forms, constitute not only the “contents” of various media (television, film, literature, etc.), but might also might be conceived as media in their own right—though in a somewhat unorthodox, non-apparatic sense of the word. Here “medium” is related to “milieu”: environment for expression, articulation, action, or agency. Conceiving media this way means seeing them not simply as channels for communication between pre-existing agencies, but as co-constitutive of the agential potentials that can be realized in a given environment; in Bruno Latour’s terms, media and media-technologies are not mere “intermediaries” but active “mediators” that themselves enable distinctions between subjects and objects and thus play a radically non-neutral role in constructing networks of communication and interaction. Clearly, narrative television series, as one example, can be said to constitute the milieux in which their characters live and act; but to position series as media in a strong sense is to suggest a perspectival inversion of form/content relations, i.e. to see the framing medium of the televisual, filmic, or other apparatus as, in a sense, framed (or re-framed) by the series conventionally taken as that medium’s content. This reversal, I contend, is not arbitrary, but instead effected from within series themselves; the agents behind such inversions are those serially instantiated figures (e.g. Frankenstein, Tarzan, Batman, or Dracula) that populate series and move between a range of media, thus serving as loci for the proliferation of plurimedial networks. Such figures lead a double existence, at once anchored in the linear chains of ongoing monomedial series and also living in the interstices between (apparatic) media, forging decentralized or distributed nets or meshes among them. And particularly the interchange between linear and non-linear serial forms sheds light on transformations in the apparatic and discursive media that carry (and are carried by) series as mediators of media networks.

Object-Oriented Gaga and the Nonhuman Turn

A while back, I posted the CFP for a conference on “The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies” to be held at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, May 3-5, 2012 (the original announcement is here). The lineup of invited speakers, in case you haven’t seen it, is very impressive:

Jane Bennett (Political Science, Johns Hopkins)

Ian Bogost (Literature, Communication, Culture, Georgia Tech)

Wendy Chun (Media and Modern Culture, Brown)

Mark Hansen (Literature, Duke)

Erin Manning (Philosophy/Dance, Concordia University, Montreal)

Brian Massumi (Philosophy, University of Montreal)

Tim Morton (English, UC-Davis)

Steven Shaviro (English, Wayne State)

In addition to these speakers, there will also be several breakout sessions at the conference. And, as luck would have it, I will be presenting in one of them, as the paper I proposed on Lady Gaga and the role of nonhuman agency in twenty-first century celebrity has been accepted by the conference organizers! I am honored and excited to have the chance to speak in such distinguished company, and I very much look forward to the conference. In the meantime, here is the abstract for my talk:

Object-Oriented Gaga: Theorizing the Nonhuman Mediation of Twenty-First Century Celebrity

Shane Denson, Leibniz Universität Hannover

In this paper, I wish to explore (from a primarily media-theoretical perspective) how concepts of nonhuman agency and the distribution of human agency across networks of nonhuman objects contribute to, and help illuminate, an ongoing redefinition of celebrity personae in twenty-first century popular culture. As my central case study, I propose looking at Lady Gaga as a “serial figure”—as a persona that, not unlike figures such as Batman, Frankenstein, Dracula, or Tarzan, is serially instantiated across a variety of media, repeatedly restaged and remixed through an interplay of repetition and variation, thus embodying seriality as a plurimedial interface between trajectories of continuity and discontinuity. As with classic serial figures, whose liminal, double, or secret identities broker traffic between disparate—diegetic and extradiegetic, i.e. medial—times and spaces, so too does Lady Gaga articulate together various media (music, video, fashion, social media) and various sociocultural spheres, values, and identifications (mainstream, alternative, kitsch, pop/art, straight, queer). In this sense, Gaga may be seen to follow in the line of Elvis, David Bowie, and Madonna, among others. Setting these stars in relation to iconic fictional characters shaped by their many transitions between literature, film, radio, television, and digital media promises to shed light on the changing medial contours of contemporary popularity—especially when we consider the formal properties that enable serial figures’ longevity and flexibility: above all, their firm iconic grounding in networks of nonhuman objects (capes, masks, fangs, neckbolts, etc.) and their ontological vacillations between the human and the nonhuman (the animal, the technical, or the monstrous). Serial figures define a nexus of seriality and mediality, and by straddling the divide between medial “inside” and “outside” (e.g. between diegesis and framing medium, fiction and the “real world”), they are able to track media transformations over time and offer up images of the interconnected processes of medial and cultural change. This ability is grounded, then, in the inherent “queerness” of serial figures—the queer duplicity of their diegetic identities, of their extra- and intermedial proliferations, and of the networks of objects that define them. Lady Gaga transforms this queerness from a medial condition into an explicit ideology, one which sits uneasily between the mainstream and the exceptional, and she does so on the basis of a network of queer nonhuman objects—disco sticks, disco gloves, iPod LCD glasses, etc.—that alternate between (anthropocentrically defined) functionality and a sheer ornamentality of the object, in the process destabilizing the agency of the individual star and dispersing it amongst a network of nonhuman agencies. As an object-oriented serial figure, I propose, Lady Gaga may be an image of our contemporary convergence culture itself.

Bowie Turns 65: Pop-Star Iconicity and the Serialization of Self

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBvR08RD_-I]

David Bowie turns 65 today, and among the various birthday tributes and other pieces written for the occasion is this article by David Hudson, appearing in mubi.com’s “The Daily” column: “Bowie @ 65“. Most interesting, to me, is Hudson’s identification of “Bowie’s #1 lesson in staying power: Create a persona and then kill it off with the next one.” Hudson is right, I believe, to single out what amounts to a principle of seriality as the open secret of Bowie’s success — a principle taken up, as Hudson also correctly observes, by Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince in the 1980s. As I’ve recently argued, it’s precisely this principle — with Bowie as a direct influence, no less — that Lady Gaga has begun adapting to the changed medial parameters of twenty-first century convergence culture (see here for a summary). I’ll have more to say about this sort of serialized celebrity soon, but for now: Happy birthday to one of the original progenitors of pop stardom qua serial media remix!