The new issue of Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaftis 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.
Issue #14 of La Furia Umanajust came out, and in it you’ll find a roundtable discussion between Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, and myself on the topic of “post-cinematic affect” — Steven Shaviro’s term for the contemporary media environment, following cinema’s displacement as the twentieth century’s dominant medium. This is the second roundtable discussion on the topic, the first (involving Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham) having also appeared in La Furia Umana (here). While the first roundtable focused on the first two Paranormal Activity films, the discussion this time around touches on District 9, Melancholia, and Hugo, among others, and reflects on “post-continuity,” the “irrationality” of contemporary cameras, and the uses and abuses of 3D. In my own responses, I also connect these things to the topic of plurimedial seriality. Originally, Steven Shaviro was also scheduled to participate in the discussion, but he unfortunately had to withdraw due to other commitments (you can get a feel for how busy he’s been lately from hisrecentblogposts). Nevertheless, I think the discussion worked out quite nicely, and a further collaboration between Shaviro, Grisham, Leyda, and me is in the works. More on that soon…
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.
Besides giving lectures and workshops, Mark Hansen has been taking his visit here as an opportunity to see a good deal of art. Last week I accompanied him to the documenta in Kassel, which is really excellent this time around. Lots of opportunities to aesthetically discorrelate and recalibrate — which happens to have been the subject of my “response” (partly synoptic, partly associative, and certainly highly inconclusive) to an article called “Ubiquitous Sensation” that we discussed at the workshop last Friday. Here are the notes I was working with:
Mediate. Discorrelate. Recalibrate. Or: How to Enjoy Impersonal Sensation. Or Yet Again: Having the Time of Your Life and Then Some.
A Response to Mark B. N. Hansen.
Shane Denson, Hannover, 6 July 2012
Mark Hansen’s “Ubiquitous Sensation or the Autonomy of the Peripheral” (forthcoming in Ulrik Ekman’s edited volume, Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing)seeks to make sense of the sensory impacts occasioned by computational technologies operating on microtemporal scales – and thus outside the scales proper to subjective perception. Ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, materially articulates this question, as it is by design “invisible” – which is to say, phenomenally and physically removed from the field of our perceptual attention. And yet, as Hansen shows by way of an exploratory engagement with several artworks, such technologies continue to exert an influence from a position that is radically and resolutely peripheral to perception. Against the claims of early ubicomp visionaries, who imagined this peripherality and invisibility as always ultimately serving the centered (perceptual) subjectivity of deliberate human action, Hansen maintains that because the microtemporal operations enacted by these technologies are categorically beyond or below the threshold of our perception, ubicomp must be seen as instantiating a level of material autonomy, the “autonomy of the peripheral,” that requires us to rethink media and their relation to human experience.
At stake, then, on one level, is a new conception of media, one that breaks with a long-standing tendency to correlate media with human sensory ratios, and to see media as vehicles for storing and reproducing human perceptual experience. Centrally, this tendency is related to Western thought’s privileging of the visual register, which itself can be seen as an exemplary means of constituting media as objects, locating them squarely in the purview of our subjective gazes, and thereby neutralizing any fundamental transformative potential that they might have if accorded autonomy from our perceptual control. It might be helpful here to recall Bruno Latour’s distinction between “intermediaries” and “mediators.” Intermediaries serve as channels that more or less transparently relay information or experiential content from point A to point B. Assuming that those points are people, or subjects, media as intermediaries offer perceptual objects that, because their contents are isomorphic with the contents of natural perception, can circulate in such a way as to expand the power (and life-span or historical longevity) of visual or other perceptual experience without thereby challenging or undermining the foundational stability and centrality of the subject. Mediators, on the other hand, are radically transformative; unlike intermediaries, they are not objects that pass neutrally between subjects but are instead what Latour calls hybrid “quasi-objects,” which articulate the very distinctions and relations obtaining between subjects and objects. By asserting the autonomy of the peripheral, by disconnecting ubicomp and related technologies from the narrow bandwidth of subjectively defined instrumentality, and more generally by discorrelating media from human perception, Hansen similarly breaks with the view of media as intermediaries, and – by positioning media as environmental factors – he shows them to be like Latour’s mediators in their ability to impact us materially, impersonally, and prior to the articulation of subjectivity.
This only works, though, if the discorrelation of media from perception does not imply their complete removal from the domain of sensation. In other words, sensation itself must be seen as occurring outside of perceptual subjectivity, and this impersonal sensation will be the site of our primary, pre-personal interaction with technics. Through discorrelation, in other words, the impact of media is not at all diminished; on the contrary, its directness in fact becomes apparent for the first time. Moreover, perceptually discorrelated media do not remain disconnected but operate precisely by effecting various means and forms of recalibration. Thus, the central experiential impact of invisible computing is constituted by its capacity to recalibrate our microsensory (and thus sub-personal, unconscious) capacities with an environment transformed by the introduction of technologies operating on microtemporal scales – and indeed embodying, operationally, microsensations of their own. In comparison to Hansen’s insistence, in earlier writings, on the relative privilege of the human, here we see a flattening of the difference between humans and computational technics: not, certainly, the crude sort of flattening that posits our brains are “like” computers or, even more extremely, that proposes uploading consciousness into computer networks and leaving our bodies behind. Instead, the analogy between the microtemporal processing of the brain and the microtemporal processing of digital technologies is based, somewhat paradoxically, on a radical naturalization of sensation, one which corresponds to a recognition of our material existence and evolution as embodied organisms in the world, prior to our development of subjectivity. Quite simply put, this priority of the physical – which is both a logical and a temporal priority – requires a radical revision of subject-centered phenomenological accounts of time-constitution. If we are to take seriously the idea of a natural continuum that links the human with nonhuman animals and inanimate materiality as a fact of our embodiment, we must assume that time is in the world before it is in us. Temporal experience therefore arises from a domain of impersonal sensation, and it is here that brains and processors interface directly, materially, and microtemporally, to generate new forms of macroconscious experience, reflecting a new correlation of media and sensation.
It is only on the basis of seeing ourselves as part of the broader – independently temporal and impersonally sensory – world that we are able to appreciate the radical impact of technics outside our subjective experience. More difficult, though, than the theoretical grounding of such an appreciation is the question of how such impersonal sensation can be opened to experience in practice; or, as Hansen puts it more precisely, “how embodied human mind-bodies can enjoy such impersonal sensation” (81). I highlight this formulation because I want to pursue briefly the double meaning of our enjoyment of the impersonal and the microtemporal – not just how we partake of it and participate in it, but how we enjoy it in the sense of our contemporary entertainment industries, which are all highly dependent on the microtemporal processes of digital technologies. Contemporary cinema utilizes CGI both invisibly and spectacularly, and at times it seems to produce “discorrelated images” – images that insist on their excess with respect to viewers’ capacities to capture and process them perceptually. Perhaps more radically, the processual temporality of video games completely resists assimilation to Stiegler’s model of the industrial temporal object, as the medium’s defining interactivity works to ensure a future-oriented openness that is the very antithesis of media as tertiary memory. Moreover, as Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I have begun to explore, practical and formal experimentation with temporal processes in video games – ranging from user-initiated speedruns to computationally anchored phenomena like the ability to switch to a “bullet time” perspective – might offer a form of aesthetic mediation of impersonal, microtemporal sensation not unlike the artworks that Hansen mentions in his paper. As a popular negotiation of digital microtemporality, it would seem that this is how we “enjoy” impersonal sensation today.
And finally, here are some more (discorrelated/discorrelating) pictures from the documenta, featuring bees as sculpture and painted dogs. Enjoy!
On the occasion of our “Chaos Cinema” film series, where the topic yesterday was Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007), I gave a short talk on the notion of “discorrelated images” — an idea that percolates (though is not named as such) in my dissertation, emerging through conversation with a number of thinkers, ideas, and images: Deleuze (and Guattari) on “affection images” and “faciality,” Henri Bergson on living (and other) “images,” Brian Massumi on affect and “passion,” Mark Hansen on the “digital facial image” and “the medium as environment for life,” and others, including Boris Karloff and the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster. All of which are left out of the picture in yesterday’s talk — which was designed to set the stage for further thinking, to be suggestive rather than definitive, and thus serves more to raise questions than to answer them. In any case, I reproduce the text (and slides) here, in case anyone is interested:
Michael Bay’s 2007 film Transformers can be seen as an interesting case of transmedial serialization in the context of what Henry Jenkins calls our “convergence culture” — interesting because, reversing the typical order of merchandising processes, Bay’s film and its sequels are part of a franchise that originates with (rather than giving rise to) a line of toys. Unlike Star Wars action figures, for example, which are extracted from narrative contexts and made available for supplementary play, Transformers are toys first, and only subsequently (though promptly) narrativized. These toys, first marketed in the US by Hasbro in 1984, but based on older Japanese toylines going by other names, spawned several comic-book series, Saturday-morning cartoons, an animated film, novelizations, video games implemented across a wide range of platforms, and the trilogy of films directed by Michael Bay with backing from Steven Spielberg.
Despite such rampant adaptation and narrativization, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the toys, which continue to be marketed to kids today, nearly thirty years after they were first marketed to me and my elementary school friends: the toys themselves offer only the barest of narrative parameters (good guys vs. bad guys) for the generation of storified play scenarios. Transformers, in opposition to Star Wars figures, which always exist in some relation to preexistent stories, are not primarily interesting from a narrative point of view at all: Autobots and Decepticons are basically just two teams, and the play they generate need not be any more narratively complex than a soccer or football match (where tales are told, to be sure, but as a supplement to the ground rules and the moves made on their basis).
Instead, the basic attraction of Transformers is, as the name says, the operation of transformation. Transformers are therefore mechanisms first, and the attraction for children (mostly boys) growing up in the early 80s was to see how they worked. Transformers, in other words, are the perfect embodiments of an “operational aesthetic” in the original sense of the term, first introduced by Neil Harris to describe the attraction of P.T. Barnum’s showmanship against the background of nineteenth century freak shows, magic shows, World Expos, and popular exhibitions of the latest technologies. More recently, Jason Mittell has usefully employed the concept to explain the attraction of “narratively complex television,” but the operationality at issue here (i.e. in the case of the Transformers) is of a stubbornly non-narrative sort. Thus, consonant with a general trait of science-fiction film (with its narratively gratuitous displays of special effects, which often interrupt the story to show off the state of the art in visualization technologies), narrativizations of Transformers are inherently involved in competitions of interest: story vs. mechanism, diegesis vs. medium. The Transformers themselves, who are more interesting as mechanisms than as characters, are the crux of these alternations.
(On this basis we might say, riffing on Niklas Luhmann, that they embody an “operative difference between substrate and form” and thus themselves constitute the “media” of a flickering cross-medial serial proliferation. Butthat’sanotherstory…)
Let me go back to the idea of convergence culture, which I’d like to connect with this operational mediality. It’s important to keep in mind that our convergence culture, in Jenkins’s terms, is enabled by a different type of convergence with which it remains in constant communication: viz. the specifically technological convergence of the digital. Is it stretching things to say that the original toys latched onto an early eight-bit era fascination with the way electronic machines could generate interactive play? In other words, they spoke to an interest in the way machines worked — as the basic object of interactive video games — and promoted fantasies of artificial intelligences and robotic agencies that would be a match for any human subject (or gamer).
In any case, Michael Bay’s Transformers, along with the film’s sequels, would not be possible without much more advanced digital technologies; the films know it, we know it, and the films know we know it, so the role of the digital is not hidden but foregrounded and positively flaunted in the films. Typically for a transitional era of media-technological change, which, it would seem, we are still going through with respect to the digitalization of cinema (and of life more broadly), there is a fascination with medial processes that the films hook into. The result is that attentions are split between diegesis and medium, story and spectacle. The Transformers serve as a convenient fulcrum point for such oscillations, thus capitalizing on the uncertain valencies of media change while connecting phenomenological dispersal with a story that in some ways speaks to a larger decentering of human perspectives and agencies in the face of convergence and computation processes — to a feeling of contingency about the human that is related in various ways to digital technologies.
For example, there’s a sense of powerlessness with respect to digitally automated finance, which employs robotically operating algorithms to expedite the process and efficiency of transactions, splitting major operations into distributed micro-scale packet transfers that occur faster than the blink of an eye, and at truly sublime scales — both infinitesimally smaller and faster than human sensory ratios and with the potential to produce cataclysmically large results. The entire realm of human action, which exists in between these scales, is marginal at best: the machines originally meant to serve the interests of (some) humans end up serving only the algorithms of a source code — with respect to which, we are perhaps only bugs in the system. It is easy to extrapolate sci-fi fantasies: for example, the emergence of Skynet — or is it Stuxnet?
But the decentering of the human perspective through digital technology is taking place in much less fantastic manners, and in ways that do not support any kind of humans-first narratives of heroic reassertion: global warming, which is revealed to us through digital modeling simulations, points not towards our roles as victims of a pernicious technology of automation, but shows us to be the culprits in a crime the scale of which we cannot even begin to imagine. Categorically: we cannot imagine the scale, and this fact challenges us to rethink our notions of morality in ways that would at least attempt to account for all the agencies and ways of being that fall outside of narrowly human sense ratios, discourses, cultural constructions, senses of right and wrong, the true and the beautiful, the false and the ugly…. Through digital technologies, we have found ourselves in an impossible position: our technologies seem to want to live and act without us, and our world itself, ecologically speaking, would apparently be far better off without us. We are forced, in short, to try to think the world without us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdRC4iP6cNw
“Without us” can mean both “in our absence” or “beyond us” — outside our specific concerns, attachments, and modes of engagement with the world. The attempt to think, in this sense, “the world without us” characterizes the goal of “speculative realism,” a recent tendency in philosophy defined by its opposition to what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism,” or the idea that reality is exhausted by our means of access to it. Against this notion, which correlates human thought and being on a metaphysical level, the speculative realists challenge us to think the world apart from our narrow view of it, to renounce an essentialism of the human perspective, and to escape to the “Great Outdoors.”
What does this have to do with Transformers and so-called “chaos cinema”? I’m trying to suggest something about the affective state, the structure of feeling, that produces and is (re)produced in and by our media culture today — a structure of feeling that Steven Shaviro calls “post-cinematic affect.” This broader context is largely ignored in Matthias Stork’s conception of “chaos cinema,” which is defined narrowly and technically, in terms of a break with classical continuity. These breaks do occur, and Stork has demonstrated their existence quite powerfully in his video essays, but they are only symptomatic of larger shifts. Shaviro has put forward a seemingly related notion of “post-continuity,” but he is careful to point out that continuity is not what’s centrally at stake. Post-cinematic affect is not served or expressed solely by breaking with principles of continuity editing; rather, continuity is in many instances simply beside the point in relation to a visceral awareness and communication of the affective quality of our historical moment of indeterminacy, contingency, and radical revision. The larger significance of a break with principles of classical continuity editing — rather than just sloppy filmmaking, as Stork sometimes seems to suggest, or quasi avant-garde radicalism — has instead to do with the correlation of continuity principles with the scales and ratios of human perception. Suture and engrossment in classical Hollywood works because those films structure themselves largely in accordance with the ways that a human being sees the world. (It goes without saying that this perceptual model is one that has as its touchstone a normative model of human embodiment, neurotypical cognitive functioning, and relatively unmarked racial, class, and gender types.) And while it has long been clear to feminist critics, among others, that the normative model of (unqualified, unmarked) humanity to which classical film speaks was in need of problematization, I would argue that the human itself has become a problem for us, and that “our” films have registered this in a variety of ways. The momentary breaks with continuity that Stork singles out as the defining features of chaos cinema are just one of the ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeyLHPg6ft4
More generally, I suggest, we witness the rise of the discorrelated image: an image that problematizes, if not altogether escaping, the correlation of human thought and being. The teaser trailer for Transformers (also integrated into the film itself) uses nonhuman subjective shots — images seen through the eyes of a robot, the Mars rover Beagle 2 — to promote its story about an intelligent race of machines. In a somewhat different vein, The Hurt Locker opens with images mediated through the camera-eyes of a robot employed for defusing bombs from a distance. The Paranormal Activity series employs a variety of robotic or automated camera systems. Wall-E, Cars, and a host of other digital animation films are all about the perceptions, feelings, and affects of nonhuman machines. Of course, there’s nothing new about such representations, and they are highly anthropomorphic besides. But what if these are just primers, symptomatic indicators, or gentle nudges, perhaps, towards something else? (Significantly, both Jane Bennett, in the context of her notion of “vibrant matter,” and Ian Bogost, with regard to his project of “alien phenomenology,” have argued for the necessity of a “strategic anthropomorphism” in the service of a nonhuman turn.) In fact, what we find here is that the representational level in such films is coupled with, and points toward, an extra-diegetic fact about the films’ medial mode of existence: digital-era films, heavy with CGI and other computational artifacts, are themselves the products of radically nonhuman machines — machines that, unlike the movie camera, do not even share the common ground of optics with our eyes. Accordingly, the supposed “chaos” of “chaos cinema” is not about a break with continuity; rather, it’s about a break with human perception that materially conditions the cinema (and visual culture more broadly) of the early 21st century. Again, in Transformers, the process of transformation is the crux, the site where discorrelation is most prominently at stake as the object of an operational aesthetic. The spectacle of a Transformer transforming splits our attention between the story and its (digital) execution, between the diegesis and the medial conditions of its staging, which are in turn folded back into the diegesis so as to enhance and distribute a more general feeling of fascination or awe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKfYrPU0CQ
What do we see when a Transformer transforms? What we don’t see, necessarily, is a break with the principles of continuity editing. Instead, we witness a discorrelation of the image by other means: we register the way in which our desire to trace the operation of the machine is categorically outstripped by the technology of digital compositing, which animates the transformation by means of algorithmic processes operating on the scale of a micro-temporality that is infinitesimally smaller and faster than any human subject’s ability to process or even imagine it. These images, I contend, are the raison d’etre of the film itself. But they are not “for us,” except in the sense that they challenge us to think our contingency, to intuit or feel that contingency on the basis of our sensory inadequacy to the technical conditions of our environments. A hopeful story, complete with adolescent love interest and other minor concerns, counters this vision of our own obsolescence. But the discorrelated image of transformation is the aesthetic crux of the film, quite possibly the only thing worth watching it for, and perhaps even the bearer of a (probably unintentional) ethical injunction, beyond the rather flimsy human-centered narrative (and the clearly conservative politics, militarism, and apparent misogynism): the discorrelated image, in which the process of transformation can only be suggested to our lagging sensory apparatuses, challenges us performatively, by confronting us with an image of our own discorrelation; viscerally, it asks us to attune ourselves to an environment that is broader than our visual capture of it, faster than our ability to register it, and more or less indifferent to our concernful perception of it. Materially, medially, and ontologically true to the 1980s tagline, the discorrelated images of Michael Bay’s Transformers are indeed “More than meets the eye!”
Above is a screencast of my talk, “Object-Oriented Gaga: Theorizing the Nonhuman Mediation of Twenty-First Century Celebrity,” which I am giving right now (that is, simultaneous with this posting, at 2:30 pm US Central Time on May 5, 2012) in the panel “Queer/Feminist/Gaga” at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
(For a larger view, click here to go straight to the video on YouTube.)
An interview with me on the subject of memes, conducted by Manuel Behrens, appears in today’s Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung as part of a full-page spread on Boromir, Philosoraptor, Admiral Ackbar, and Rage Comics. True story! Check it out here: Was sind eigentlich Memes? (The interview, “Jeder kann mitmachen,” is at the bottom of the page.)
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.
