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.

What are these Technological Things?

Over at in media res, what promises to be a great theme week has just gotten underway on the topic/question, “What are these Technological Things?”

Here is the complete schedule:

Monday, January 16, 2012 – Kristopher L. Cannon (Georgia State University) presents: Technological#Failure

Tuesday, January 17, 2012 – Kris Coffield (University of Hawaii) presents: Can the Sub-Object Speak?: Siri and the commodification of things

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 – Ravindra N. Mohabeer (Vancouver Island University) presents: Believing is Seeing: Is technology the material of futures?

Thursday, January 19, 2012 – Paul Boshears (European Graduate School) presents: Machine Love: the companionship of technology

Friday, January 20, 2012 – Benjamin Thevenin (University of Colorado, Boulder) presents: Thing Power: recognizing our reflections (or not) in our tablets

Theme week organized by Kristopher L. Cannon (Georgia State University).

Image from Tech Cocktail via Flickr.  Used and altered under Creative Commons License permission.

Posthuman Play, Or: A Different Look at Nonhuman Agency and Gaming

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XAlSp838Y]

In his classic work on “the play element of culture,” Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga writes:

“Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.”

In the meantime, posthumanists of various stripes, actor-network theorists (or ANTs), speculative realists, and scholars in the fields of critical animal studies, ecocriticism, and media studies, among others, have challenged the notion that culture “always presupposes human society.” In these paradigms, we are asked to see octopuses as tool-users with distinct cultures of material praxis, objects as agents in their own right, and “man’s best friend,” the dog, as a “companion species” in a strong sense: as an active participant in the evolutionary negotiation of human agency. The reality of play in the nonhuman world, which Huizinga affirms, would accordingly be far less surprising for twenty-first century humans than it might have been for Huizings’s early twentieth-century readers.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLclGPr7fj4]

Still, the situation is not completely obvious. Consider Tillman the Skateboarding Dog (see the videos above) or his various “imitators” on Youtube. Can we say, with Huizinga, that Tillman “[has] not waited for man to teach [him his] playing”? Certainly some human taught him to ride his skateboard (and waveboard and surfboard etc.). Furthermore, the imbrication with human culture goes further as Tillman’s riding becomes a spectacle for human onlookers, users of Youtube, and viewers of Apple’s iPhone ads (in which he appeared in 2007):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qObhmS8zX8M]

And yet it’s not the genesis or the appropriation but the independent reality of Tillman’s play that’s really at stake, i.e. not whether he learned the material techniques of his play from humans or whether humans profit from that play in various ways, but whether Tillman himself is really playing, whether he is an agent of play, when he appears to us to be playing. Is there any reason to deny this? After watching several more clips of Tillman in action, I am inclined to think not. We might raise any number of ethical, political, or other concerns about the treatment of animals like Tillman (who do, after all, have to undergo some sort of training before they can play like this — and training of this sort is work, hardly just fun and games). But, regardless of these questions, these video clips would seem to serve an epistemological (evidentiary) function, as they attest to the factual occurrence of a state of play (and associated affects?) in the nonhuman world. They militate, that is, against the view that pet owners unidirectionally play with their pets (by throwing sticks for dogs to fetch, for example), instead granting to animals an independent play agency and distributing the play between human and nonhuman agencies.

Anyone who has lived with an animal might find all of this quite unsurprising, and yet Tillman’s feats would seem to have a philosophical, metaphysical relevance, as illustrations of a nonhuman agency in a robust sense — or as phenomena that are poorly accounted for (in the terminology of speculative realism) by “correlationist” philosophies that deny the possibility of any but a human perspective on the world.

In the realm of media, a non-correlationist view of play as distributed amongst human and nonhuman agents, enmeshed in ensembles of organic and machinic embodiments, has emerged in game studies, where Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s platform studies, Alexander Galloway’s algorithmic aesthetics, as well as various applications of posthumanist inflections of phenomenology and actor-network theory, to name a few, all unsettle the primacy and coherence of the human in the play of agencies that is the video game.

What has been missing up to this point, though, is a consideration of nonhuman animals in relation to games’ technical agencies. This is understandable, of course, as most game controllers are designed for primates with prehensile thumbs, and many house pets seem not to understand the basic conventions of — an admittedly anthropocentric — screen culture (I’m thinking of Vivian Sobchack’s cat in The Address of the Eye).

Leave it to Tillman the Skateboarding Dog, then, to point the way to a new field of inquiry — a thoroughly posthumanist field of game design for gaming animals, or a critical animal game studies (which might be critical of the role of animals in games culture as well as recognizing animals themselves as critical gamers):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdgO3cEYYTw]

All jokes aside, though, Tillman’s virtual skateboarding raises some interesting questions for game studies by reframing familiar topics of immersion and identification. Surely, we will not want to impute to Tillman an Oedipal conflict, lack, or any of the other structures of the psychoanalytic apparatus that (as a carryover from film studies) is sometimes invoked to explain human involvement in onscreen events, and yet some form of embodied identification is clearly taking place here. What lessons should we draw with regard to our own gameplay practices?

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!

Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Memes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4

Over at her blog Judgmental Observer, Amanda Ann Klein has a great post up about Internet memes, their workings, and their humor. In addition to the central themes of “cruelty” and “self-loathing” that she sees at work, Klein points to two formal aspects of successful memes: “recognizability” and “repetition.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRXKL3fmlnc

This reminded me of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of media, itself a sort of “remediation” of psychologist Fritz Heider’s distinction of medium vs. thing, which comes down to a distinction between a “loose coupling” and a “tight coupling” of elements of a given sort (see Heider’s Ding und Medium). For Luhmann, mediality consists in the relation between a loosely coupled “medial substrate” and the tightly coupled “forms” that it is capable of assuming — or, in other words, in the “operative deployment of the difference of medial substrate and form”  (Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft 195; my translation), which is itself relative to an observer or system.

(For more on Luhmann’s theory of media, see Chapter 3 (165-214) of Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (translated as Art as a Social System). See also Chapter 2 (190-412) of Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft.)

The connection with Klein’s notions of “recognizability” and “repetition” as formal elements of memification comes when Luhmann, on one occasion, notes that one way to elaborate his distinction of medial substrate and form is “by means of the distinction between redundancy and variety” (Art as a Social System 105). He explains:

The elements that form the medium through their loose coupling—such as letters in a certain kind of writing or words in a text—must be easily recognizable. They carry little information themselves, since the informational content of an artwork must be generated in the course of its formation. The formation of the work creates surprise and assures variety, because there are many ways in which the work can take shape and because, when observed slowly, the work invites the viewer to contemplate alternate possibilities and to experiment with formal variations. (105)

“Variety through repetition” is the formal basis of the Internet meme, as well as being a principle of seriality and a formal description of mediality itself (following Luhmann). As I recently argued for Lady Gaga, Nyan Cat can also be dubbed a “serial media remix”: Nyan Cat is the instantly recognizable, iconically redundant substrate out of which ever new forms are produced; these forms become available, in turn, for sampling, and they serve as the substrate of a higher-order mediality, thus proliferating in a (non-linear) serial explosion.

Long live Nyan Cat: memifier of Internets, proliferator of serial forms, and media remixer extraordinaire! All your substrate are belong to us!!!11!

Works cited:
Heider, Fritz. Ding und Medium. 1926. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005.
Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
_____. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997.
_____. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995.

Techno-Phenomenology and TV

Recently I posted about a paper of mine coming out in the open-access journal Phenomenology & Practice, entitled “Faith in Technology: Televangelism and the Mediation of Immediate Experience.” Now, my article, along with the new issue of P & P, has gone online (the entire contents can be found here), and I hope that you’ll take a look.

Anyway, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I think that the “techno-phenomenological” approach I have taken towards the topic of televangelism may also be adaptable to fictional narrative television, and that it might thus provide a complement to — not a replacement for — more traditional (narratological-formal and industrial-social-contextual) approaches to television studies. This remains to be seen, of course, and I look forward to hearing your comments on the text itself and on the prospects of adapting its methodology to other sorts of projects.

Incidentally, though, since the time of suggesting that such adaptation might be possible, it has occurred to me that I once undertook a very cursory attempt at doing just that: in a very short essay, entitled “Techno-Habitats and Media Habits: Reflections on Contemporary Children’s Television” (originally published in Philament 12), I implicitly assumed a techno-phenomenological approach to young children’s TV shows like Teletubbies, Bob the Builder, or Lunar Jim. That paper, roughly contemporary with my initial work on the televangelism paper, just sketched out some ideas, presenting them in a literally essayistic manner, while the theoretical and methodological underpinnings were not explored. Now, with the publication of the televangelism paper, the methodology in particular has become available for inspection (the deeper theoretical implications, on the other hand, remain buried in the media-philosophical Part Two of my dissertation, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface). So please take a look and let me know what you think about the prospects for a techno-phenomenological form of television studies.

Popular Seriality

Just a quick reminder that the theme week on “Popular Seriality” is underway over at In Media Res. The first two posts are up, and there’s been some lively discussion. So check it out and spread the word!

Here, again, is the lineup of presenters/curators for the week, along with our titles:

Monday, Dec 12Frank Kelleter
“That Soothing Balm of Latent Discontent: MAD MEN Unstresses the 21st Century”
 
Tuesday, Dec 13Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer
“Plurimediality and the Serial Figure”
 
Wednesday, Dec 14Jason Mittell
“Serial Characterization and Inferred Interiority”
 
Thursday, Dec 15Andreas Jahn-Sudmann
“TV Series, Metaseriality and the Very Special Episode”
 
Friday, Dec 16Daniel Stein
“Authorizing Alternative Authorships: The Popular Serialities of Superhero Blockbuster Spoofs”

Faith in Technology: TV Studies and Televangelism

Lately, there has been a lot going on around here in the area of TV studies: the Film & TV Reading Group recently discussed Jason Mittell’s work, and we are preparing to discuss that of Lynn Spigel; moreover, these two scholars, Mittell and Spigel, will be giving keynotes at the “Cultural Distinctions Remediated” conference, which is being co-organized by the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research. Also, Jason Mittell is giving a series of workshops in Göttingen, in association with the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice.” And in Hannover, Florian Groß has been teaching a seminar on Mad Men, while a number of interesting student projects are currently dealing with a variety of contemporary television series. In this context, and against the background of discussions of “Quality TV,” “narrative complexity,” and, more generally, of narrative TV, I’d like to point to some alternative avenues that I’ve been exploring — avenues that, while in no way opposed to the type of work that’s been going on of late, might enrich TV studies through a very different set of emphases, objects, and approaches.

The background for this post is that I have just received final confirmation that a paper of mine, “Faith in Technology: Televangelism and the Mediation of Immediate Experience,” has been accepted and will be appearing soon in Phenomenology & Practice. The paper, which attempts a “techno-phenomenology” of faith-healing televangelism and the call to “touch the screen,” has its origins in a collaborative effort between myself and Christoph Bestian, formerly a sociology grad student here in Hannover. Together, we sought to synthesize our areas of expertise in, respectively, phenomenological approaches to media and the sociology of religion in order to forge a type of media analysis that would be more robust than either of the individual approaches in isolation — a polyvocal approach able to draw strength from interdisciplinary dialogue and differences of perspective. Of course, I take full responsibility for any shortcomings in this product of our collaboration, but I am grateful to Christoph for challenging my views and placing them alongside a very different tradition of inquiry. What I’d like to suggest is that perhaps a similarly productive encounter is possible between the phenomenological perspective that I outline in the paper on televangelism and the topics and approaches of TV studies; especially studies that emphasize the self-reflexivity of contemporary television stand to profit, I believe, from a detailed phenomenological analysis of embodied reception — not as a replacement for, but as a complement to, the more standard narratological perspectives.

In any case, this is work that remains to be done. My paper on televangelism does not engage directly with work in the field of TV studies, but it might be seen as laying a foundation for that sort of encounter. Here is the abstract for the paper:

This paper seeks to illuminate the experiential structures implied in the viewing of televangelistic programming — with particular focus on programming of the charismatic faith-healing variety that culminates in the televangelist’s appeal to viewers to “touch the screen” and consummate a communion that transcends the separation implied by the televisual medium. By way of a “techno-phenomenological” analysis of this marginal media scenario, faith-healing televangelism is shown to involve experiential paradoxes that are tied to processes of social marginalization as well. Thus, it is argued, faith-healing televangelism functions as a call to viewers to mount a head-on confrontation with the technological infrastructure of secular modernity and thereby to effect a specifically material negotiation of evangelical culture’s precarious balancing act between an entrenchment in and a self-marginalization from the secular mainstream.

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And here is the original introduction to the paper, which has now fallen to the cutting-room floor, but which gives an idea of the paper’s approach and the scope of the argument:

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Faith in Technology: Televangelism and the Mediation of Immediate Experience

Shane Denson

What is it like to watch televangelism? For many late-night channel surfers, televangelism occasionally provides a form of entertaining diversion unsurpassed on the fringe-media landscape of infomercials and call-in astrology consultations for its ability to render parody superfluous. If, however, the spectacles of mass-mediated religion offer amusement to the unbeliever, they can as readily generate an unsettling experience of disbelief: how can anyone, such a viewer may ask, take these transparent displays of charlatanry seriously? Watching televangelism as unintentional comedy is therefore a short-lived entertainment, for its pleasures are both predicated upon and potentially undermined by a distanced attitude, one that implies a critical difference from, and thus also a particular reading of, what it must be like for true believers to watch the shows. Thus, entertainment easily gives way to a form of armchair sociology or media psychology, and the humor of a televangelist asking us to put our hand on the screen to feel the power of the holy spirit becomes diluted by a concern for, or a disdain of, the “other” viewer: one naïve enough to buy into the promises of spiritual fulfillment and worldly prosperity that are peddled like so much snake oil. Like the promised rewards, the investments being solicited are both spiritual and material, and the spectacular lifestyle enjoyed by some televangelists, flying in private jets from one engagement to the next to spread the gospel to an audience that includes some of the poorest members of society, attests both to the existence of the true believer and to the dishonorable motivations of many TV preachers. Indeed, perennial sex and fraud scandals have made it common knowledge that televangelists don’t always practice what they preach, thus making it hard for our late-night ironic viewers to sympathize with their exploited counterparts.

Interpreting televangelists’ praxeological inconsistencies not just as typically human failures but as straightforward hypocrisy, the increasingly cynical viewer may detect broader contradictions in the televangelistic enterprise. The conservative theology espoused on the airwaves often seems quite at odds with the modern secular world, and yet televangelism is inextricably tied up with modernity. TV ministries often engage directly in worldly politics, lending their support to causes ranging from anti-pornography crusades to the waging of mechanized wars on foreign soil. Even more centrally, religious conservatives never tire of condemning “the media,” not just for the perceived liberal slant or indecency that characterizes mainstream media contents but also for the isolating effects of modern technological forms of mediation; paradoxically, though, televangelism is dependent for its very existence on precisely these technologies of mass communication.

However, focusing on these apparent contradictions fails to capture some of the most significant paradoxes of televangelism. Certainly, part of the reason is that the perspective outlined above — that of “the cynic” — is based on simplifying stereotypes of televangelists, their modes of address, and their audiences. Not only is there a wide range of theological content represented in today’s religious programming, but also a variety of styles and formats employed in televangelism (religious talk shows, alternative news programs, infomercial-type paid programming, issue-based fundraisers, preacher-centered motivational shows, and televised congregational church services, among others). Accordingly, it is impossible to identify a singular implied viewer or a coherent audience base of televangelism. The supposed contradictions with which televangelism is charged, it might be argued, are partially generated by lumping these differences indiscriminately together. Nevertheless, the cynic’s view does touch upon one of the central issues that any analysis of televangelism must confront—the tension between conservative evangelical theology and the mediating technology of television. But we fail to appreciate the tension’s true import so long as we reduce it to a competition between an anti-modern message and a modern channel of dissemination. At stake is not a message per se at all, I suggest, but an experience that is seen as immediate — the direct communion of the holy spirit with a believer’s body and soul. The question, then, is this: how can an inherently immediate experience be communicated through electronic media?

Posing the question in this way requires that we go beyond the dichotomies of form/content or channel/message and focus instead on the embodied experience of viewing televangelism. Recognizing the variety of televangelism’s forms and modes of address, I seek not to reify one monolithic type of televangelistic experience but to address a paradigm case in which the tension between mediation and immediatism reaches its apex: the case of the televangelist faith-healer’s appeal to viewers to touch the screen and consummate a laying on of hands at a distance. As a preliminary step towards such a phenomenological analysis, we must contextualize televangelism historically and socially and reconsider the relations between conservative evangelicalism and modern processes of secularization. As I shall demonstrate, there is an inherent connection between the two that is obfuscated by emphasizing evangelicalism’s overt rejections of secular modernity. At the level of religious practice, conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism are less anti-modern movements than they are attempts to provide an alternative experience of modernity. As one field of such practice, televangelism is a decidedly modern phenomenon; it aims not to disseminate a pre-existing (and pre-modern) message but actively produces new constellations of discursive content and experience that are intrinsically tied to modernity and its technologies. Seen from this angle, the televangelist’s invitation to touch the TV screen is an invitation to confront modernity head on, to undergo not just a test of faith but to submit oneself to a technological ordeal in which a qualitatively new form of faith may emerge that is tuned to and inseparable from the technological conditions of modernity. Thus, rather than writing off viewers’ interaction with the screen as simple-minded naiveté that overlooks a damning contradiction, we must come to appreciate the dynamic, productive potential of the experiential paradox.

Jason Mittell’s Third Way: A Preview

Television scholar Jason Mittell, who is currently spending a year in Göttingen as a fellow in the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice,” will–as readers of this blog will already know–be giving one of two keynote lectures at our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated,” December 15-17, 2011 (our other keynote speaker is Lynn Spigel).

Now, over at his blog Just TV, Jason has a new post on Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine’s new book Legitimating Television: Media Convergence & Cultural Status. And included in this “unofficial review” (as he puts it) of Newman and Levine’s book is also what would appear to be an (unofficial?) preview of Jason’s talk in Hannover. I recommend reading the review in full, but I wanted to highlight those points that give us an idea of what kind of ground we can expect Jason to be covering in his keynote, “The Complexity of Quality.”

Jason writes, “this response [to Newman and Levine’s book] will be part of a larger argument I’ll be making in a presentation next month at the conference Cultural Distinctions Remediated at University of Hannover, so I will point toward larger arguments still to come, and welcome feedback to help me craft that talk.”

So what can we look forward to in Mittell’s keynote? Jason identifies what he takes to be a central problem in Legitimating Television: namely, a “false dichotomy” that he sees Newman and Levine putting forward in their book. According to Mittell:

“The book links the discourses of legitimation to structures of gender and class, highlighting how television has traditionally been feminized and stigmatized as lowbrow, arguing that recent legitimation practices work to masculinize and “class up” television. While I think this is correct, I do not see it as a self-evident problem to be avoided at all costs like Newman & Levine seem to, as suggested by the book’s final words: “We love television. But legitimizing that love at such a cost? Paying for the legitimation of the medium through a perpetuation of hierarchies of taste and cultural value and inequalities of class and gender? No” (171). Implied in this conclusion and their analysis throughout is a choice: we (as scholars, critics and viewers) can either embrace legitimation and its concomitant reinforcement of cultural hierarchies, or we can reject it, with the latter framed as the more politically progressive choice.”

Later, and here’s where we get an indication of – some very interesting – things to come at his talk in December, Jason writes:

“What I wanted from the book that I did not get was a third way to discuss television’s cultural legitimation, moving beyond either accepting legitimation discourses of quality television and progress, or rejecting them as illegitimate or ungrounded. (In my talk at Hannover, I hope to offer such a third approach, specifically concerning cultural evaluation.)”

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that these are exciting prospects; I very much look forward to hearing Jason’s argument and his vision of/for this “third way.”