Tag: Shane Denson

Postnatural Clouds in a Postnatural Sky

In the future – at least if we believe the big media/tech corporations like Apple, Amazon, Google, and the rest – everything will be in “the cloud.” Physical media like records and CDs have already lost significance, but even having a local copy in mp3 format may become less important as we move away from click-wheel iPods to constantly connected devices that pull our music directly from the cloud – wirelessly, effortlessly, and without the need for ever-increasing local storage capacities. We’re not quite there yet, of course, and many of us have reason to believe that we never in fact want to get there. Intellectual property, digital rights management, surveillance, and the marketing of our virtual profiles indicate just a few of the challenges and worries that accompany the move to the cloud. Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, it is increasingly easy to at least imagine a future in which all of “our” media will one day reside in the virtual no-place place of the cloud. Not just music, but also films, games, and even books.

The e-book has of course long been a controversial entity – subject of fantasy but also of scorn. As academics, we have of course learned the advantages of searchable text, and yet many of us insist on the superiority of a physical book in a physical hand. Regardless, though, of what one thinks about efforts to digitize text and to make our primary channel of access to it the computer or some other electronic device, and quite distinct from reservations we may hedge about efforts to put all our books in the cloud, I would like to make a case for another book/cloud relation: in the future, whether or not every book resides in the cloud, a cloud should reside in every book! 

What I mean is this: the back cover and/or inside flap of a book’s dusk jacket has long been the place for a short summary, a teaser, for attention-getters, blurbs, and other textual snippets designed to give us an idea of what the book is all about. Why not add a cloud – of the sort we know from blogs as the “tag cloud”? I.e. an automatically generated representation of word or topic frequency which accords a larger font size to words appearing more often and smaller font to less frequently used words. As a machine-generated entity, the book’s cloud is a posthuman textual production – created without regard for what we, as authors or readers believe is most significant about a text, but instead offering an uncensored view of actual practice, based on the words that actually appear on the page, weighted according to their sheer frequency. With virtually all contemporary text “born digital” anyway, there’s nothing to stand in the way of generating this sort of cloud, and the results can be revealing for readers and authors alike.

Inspired by something I saw at Lance Strate’s blog, I decided to put the theory into practice. I opened a PDF file of my dissertation, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, hit “select all,” “copied,” and “pasted” all 400 pages of it into the free (as in beer) text-cloud making service at wordle.net. What you see here are the results. And, in some cases, these results are surprising to me. The importance (i.e. frequency) of “human” is greater than I would have expected. The size of the word “must” indicates the predominance of an imperative tone that is slightly embarrassing to me. And I would have expected “phenomenology” to appear more prominently in the cloud. But these surprises, I suggest, are significant. And they are the product of a confrontation of my human-centered expectations, values, and beliefs about the significance of my own work with the nonhuman agency of a machine: surprise – and also significance – result from a posthuman or postnatural production that deserves a place next to human-authored summaries and the like on the (virtual) back cover of any book – a postnatural cloud on every book!

And it’s easy to imagine going further, not only putting a cloud on every book, but also setting up a database of text-clouds of this sort for all books available in digital form – which now includes all the classics of literature and philosophy, and nearly any book published today. This would be a postnatural cloud in the postnatural sky.

Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface

[UPDATE: I have posted the complete first chapter at my academia.edu page: here.]

A while back, I posted a summary, in German, of my dissertation Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, which I submitted last year and am currently revising for publication. The dissertation was advised by Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Leibniz University Hannover) and Mark B. N. Hansen (Program in Literature, Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, Program in Information Science+Information Studies, and Visual Studies Initiative, Duke University). Anyway, the dissertation itself is in English, and since I’ve had a few requests from non-German-speakers, I thought I would repost the summary, but this time in English:

Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface

Shane Denson

In this dissertation, I argue that the filmic progenies of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein cast a special light on the historicity of human-technological interfaces—supposing, at least, that we approach the films in a vigorously historicizing manner. Seen in the context of the historical connections that obtain amongst their narrative contents, their social settings, and contemporaneous cultural conflicts; set in relation to media-technical infrastructures, innovations, and transitions; and located squarely in the material and experiential parameters of historically situated spectatorship, Frankenstein films reveal specific, changing configurations of human-technological interaction: patterns, tendencies, and deviations that mark moments in a richly variable history that is at once a history of cinema, of media, of technology, and of the affective channels of our own embodiment.

The body of this work is divided into three main parts, the task of Part One being to locate the experiential challenges posed by Frankenstein films. Towards this end, Chapter 2 develops a historically indexed “techno-phenomenology” of the dominant film-viewer relations under the paradigms of early and classical film; I then apply this perspective to the analysis of two Frankenstein films from the respective film-historical periods, each of which is shown to instantiate a vacillating destabilization of spectatorial relations, pointing to a volatile intermediate realm between the phenomenological regimes of early and classical cinema. In Chapter 3, I follow this cue to the transitional era of the 1910s, and specifically to the first known Frankenstein film proper: the Edison Studios’ 1910 production Frankenstein. As I argue in that chapter, the dualities of address exemplified in this film point to a broader experience of transitionality which, on the move between more determinately stabilized situations, presents itself negatively to phenomenological subjectivity—as an indeterminate gap.

It is in these gaps of transitionality that I locate Frankenstein films’ characteristic challenge, and in Part Two I take up that challenge by formulating a theoretical framework, that of postnaturalism, that would be able to answer the films’ provocations. Chapter 4 first circles around the gaps that feminist readers have located in the text of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel before diving into them to discover a theory of a pre-personal and therefore non-discursive contact between human embodiment and technological materiality. On the basis of this contact, as I argue, technological revolutions (such as the industrial revolution in the wake of which Shelley composed her novel) are capable of radically destabilizing human agency, causing us to draw experiential blanks and to produce textual gaps—which, however, are quickly filled in and forgotten in the process of novel technologies’ habituation and naturalization. In the techno-scientific interlude of Chapter 5, I trace these processes in the context of the industrial steam engine’s recuperation by thermodynamic science in order to uncover the postnatural historicity of natural science’s nature itself—i.e. the fact, not reducible to an epistemic phenomenon of discursive construction and projection on the part of human subjects, that material nature itself is constantly in motion, in transition, and that—due to the role of technologies in this history—nature has thus never been “natural.” Chapter 6 translates these findings into a specifically postnatural media theory, which pertains not only to empirically determinate apparatuses but to the very historicity of the phenomenological realm as it is co-articulated between human and nonhuman agencies; as a film-theoretical correlate of this theory, I put forward what I call a “cinematic double vision,” which alternates between a Merleau-Ponty inspired phenomenological perspective and a Bergsonian metaphysics to reveal film experience as animated by the interchange between human situations and technological displacements.

Part Three then returns to Frankenstein films to demonstrate the films’ special relations to the postnatural historicity of the anthropotechnical interface and, in effect, to execute a rapprochement between the conflicting human and nonhuman agencies inhabiting these films. In order to do so, Chapter 7 turns to the paradigmatic filmic progenies, James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, and, on the theoretical basis of postnaturalism, alternately illuminates the human and nonhuman perspectives that come together to animate the films’ central creature. In this confrontation—the staging of which is inextricable from the films’ historical moment and specifically from their relations to the then-recent transition to sound cinema—I seek a non-reductive means of apprehending the alterior agency that occupies the gaps in subjective experience provoked by Frankenstein films. Chapter 8, by way of conclusion, briefly pursues this line beyond the paradigm case, taking a more synoptic view of the continuing proliferation of the Frankenstein film; here I seek to illuminate the active role played by cinematic technologies in eliciting a fleeting experience of transitionality, which lies submerged beneath the weight of our habituated or “natural” relations to those technologies. The rapprochement of which I spoke consists, then, of a recognition of the mutual articulation of experience by human and nonhuman technical agencies, whereby the affective and embodied experience of anthropotechnical transitionality is not arrested and subjugated to human dominance, but approached experimentally as a joint production of our postnatural future. This is the ultimate challenge posed for us by Frankenstein films.

Shane Denson, “Media Crisis, Serial Chains, and the Mediation of Change”

Back in June, I posted a screencast video of “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective,” a presentation I gave at the German Association for American Studies 2011 annual conference in Regensburg. This got me thinking about making screencast versions of other talks I’ve given. Here is one for a talk entitled “Media Crisis, Serial Chains, and the Mediation of Change: Frankenstein on Film,” which I gave at the American Studies Association annual conference in San Antonio, Texas on November 19, 2010.

Multistable Frames

Stephanie Hoppeler, Lukas Etter, and Gabriele Rippl (whose research project “Seriality and Intermediality in Graphic Novels” is associated with the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Praxis”) have put together a workshop titled “Interdisciplinary Methodology: The Case of Comics Studies,” which will take place on October 14-15, 2011 in Bern. In the organizers’ own words:

“Our motivation for this event is to reduce what we see as a stark discrepancy between the popularity of Comics Studies on the one hand and the virtual lack of encompassing methodological reflection on the other.

We have planned one keynote speech for each of the two days: Dr. Thierry Groensteeen (freelance lecturer and curator; founder of www.citebd.org) will hold an introductory speech on Friday 14 October, and Dr. Roger Sabin (lecturer at Central St. Martins University of the Arts, London) will give a paper on Saturday 15 October. Each speech shall be followed by several thematic panels, in which researchers will present their papers and thereby introduce a broader discussion.

[Papers have been chosen that] include or stimulate reflection on the methodological issues Comics Studies and Intermediality Studies raise, as well as on possibilities to tackle these issues.”

One of those papers will be presented by yours truly. The paper develops the phenomenological approach to comics that was implicit in my paper at the DGfA conference this year in Regensburg, “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective” (screencast video here, in case you missed it). In particular, my talk in Bern will expand on the notion of the “multistable frame,” which I introduced as a way of talking about comics and their emergent serialities in the earlier paper. Here is the abstract for my presentation in Bern:

Multistable Frames: Notes Towards a (Post-)Phenomenological Approach to Comics

Shane Denson

“In the available accounts of the theories and methods of popular culture studies, phenomenology is conspicuously absent” (Carroll, Tafoya, and Nagel 1)—thus observe the editors of a volume meant to rectify that situation, published in the year 2000. But over a decade later their statement remains largely true. In the meantime, popular culture itself has changed, as have the studies devoted to it: new theories and methods have emerged, and different phenomena have come into view. Developments in and around comics and graphic novels are exemplary: comics themselves have been transformed through contact with digital media, their social status revised largely through the graphic novel, and they have come to exert an unprecedented influence on mainstream cinema and television. Today, comics cannot be ignored, neither in the broad field of popular culture nor in the more specialized realms of academic study: increasingly, comics are being researched with a great variety of methods by literary scholars, historians of art and culture, media theorists, and even philosophers. Looking back from this vantage point, we may find the absence of phenomenology among fin-de-millennium approaches to popular culture less surprising than the conspicuous absence of comics in a volume dedicated to Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture. Phenomenology and comics, or so it would seem, pass like ships in the night—and this despite the fact that the insights of some of the seminal works on comics, such as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, were arrived at through methods and means of looking at comics that were implicitly phenomenological in nature. It remains, then, to make these methods explicit, and to transform phenomenological insights into a genuine methodology available for the study of comics. As a first step towards this goal, I propose rethinking Eisner’s and McCloud’s classic contributions through the lens of categories and concepts developed by American philosopher Don Ihde for the phenomenological study of “mediating technologies.” Adapted to the medium of comics, and applied specifically to the central figure of the frame that, in various forms (e.g. panels, speech balloons, pages as meta-panels), dominates Eisner’s and McCloud’s analyses of comics as a sequential art, Ihde’s phenomenological categories lend greater depth to our understanding of comics as an experiential domain, throwing phenomena like the achievement of “closure” (as McCloud puts it) between panels into sharper relief, but at the same time revealing the requisite negotiations between and amongst frames and the internal and external spaces they define as a highly complex process. The apparently simple act of reading comics, that is, is revealed as a highly complex process, one involving a non-linear dynamics that can be traced back to the recursive nestings and reversibilities of frames as phenomenal objects. Ultimately, the multistability of comics’ framings, as revealed in a phenomenological analysis, points towards the logic of flickering oscillations that Derrida has exposed under the rubric of the parergon, and hence to a postphenomenological approach that destabilizes any categorical difference between subjects (or readers) and objects (or comics). Nevertheless, a phenomenological methodology may prove to be the only route to understanding the irreducible experiential entanglements involved in our transactions with comics as a medium of the multistable frame.

Carroll, Michael T., Eddie Tafoya, and Chris Nagel. “Introduction: Being and Being Entertained: Phenomenology and the Study of Popular Culture.” Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture. Eds. Michael T. Carroll and Eddie Tafoya. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. 1-18.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 2008.
Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.
_____. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

Shane Denson: Interview zu Frankenstein & Film

Neulich wurde ich vom Fanzine Zauberspiegel zu meiner Dissertation Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface und verwandten Themen interviewt. Die Dissertation, deren Cover man hier sieht, wurde von Ruth Mayer (Leibniz Universität Hannover) und Mark Hansen (Duke University) betreut und 2010 bei der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Hannover eingereicht. (Während eine überarbeitete Fassung für die Publikation in einem geeigneten Verlag in Vorbereitung ist, ist die als Eigendruck produzierte Dissertation jetzt schon von der Universitätsbibliothek Hannover direkt oder durch den interuniversitären Dissertationentausch erhältlich. (Datensatz bei der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek hier, bei GetInfo hier und im Online-Katalog der Uni Hannover hier.))

Das Interview im Zauberspiegel, das einige allgemein verständliche Antworten auf die in der Dissertation eher technisch und philosophisch behandelte Fragen geben soll, findet man hier: “Shane Denson über Frankenstein, das Monster und ihre Beziehung in Film und Roman.”

Und hier, schliesslich, ist die deutsche Zusammenfassung der Dissertation, die ich der englischsprachigen Arbeit beigelegt habe:

In der vorliegenden Dissertation argumentiere ich, dass filmische Umsetzungen von Mary Shelleys gotischem Roman Frankenstein ein besonderes Licht auf die Historizität von Mensch/Technik-Schnittstellen werfen—zumindest dann, wenn man sich ihnen in einer konsequent historisierenden Weise annähert. Betrachtet man die verschiedenen Filme im Kontext der historischen Zusammenhänge, die zwischen ihren narrativen Inhalten, sozialen Umfeldern und begleitenden kulturellen Konflikten bestehen, setzt man sie in Relation zu medientechnischen Infrastrukturen, Innovationen und Transitionen und verortet man sie genau in den materiellen und lebensweltlichen Parametern des historisch situierten Zuschauererlebnisses—dann lassen die sogenannten Frankenstein-Filme spezifische Konfigurationen der Mensch/Technik-Interaktion erkennen: Muster, Tendenzen und Abweichungen, die die Momente einer von Umbrüchen geprägten Geschichte bilden, die zugleich eine Geschichte des Kinos, der Medien, der Technik und der affektiven Kanäle unserer eigenen Leiblichkeit ist.

Die Arbeit ist in drei Hauptteile gegliedert. Nachdem Kapitel 1 eine Einleitung in die Argumentation und die Begrifflichkeiten der Arbeit liefert, verortet der erste Hauptteil (bestehend aus Kapitel 2 und 3) eine Reihe experienziell-phänomenologischer Herausforderungen, die die Frankenstein-Filme darstellen. Dafür entwickelt Kapitel 2 eine „Technophänomenologie“ der dominanten Film/Zuschauer-Beziehungen unter den Paradigmen des frühen Kinos und des klassischen Hollywood Filmes; diese Perspektive findet dann in der Analyse zweier Frankenstein-Filme aus den jeweiligen filmgeschichtlichen Perioden Anwendung, wobei sich in beiden Fällen eine Destabilisierung zuschauerlicher Relationen zum Film zeigt, die auf einen unbeständigen Zwischenbereich hindeutet, der zwischen den phänomenologischen Regimes des frühen und des klassischen Kinos liegt. In Kapitel 3 verfolge ich diesen Hinweis in die Übergangsperiode des Kinos der 1910er hinein, insbesondere zu dem aus den Thomas-Edison-Studios stammenden Film Frankenstein aus dem Jahre 1910. Wie ich dort argumentiere, deuten die Dualitäten der Adressierung, die in diesem Film exemplifiziert werden, auf eine breiter gefasste Erfahrung der Transitionalität hin, die sich in Bewegung zwischen stabilen Situationen befindet und sich in negativer Weise zur phänomenologischen Subjektivität zeigt—in Form einer unbestimmten Kluft oder Lücke.

Die charakteristische Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme verorte ich in diesen Lücken der Transitionalität, und im zweiten Hauptteil der Arbeit versuche ich, ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk—nämlich den „Postnaturalismus“—zu formulieren, das den Provokationen der Filme eine Antwort liefern kann. Kapitel 4 kreist zunächst um die Lücken, die feministische Lesarten von Mary Shelleys Roman an den Tag gelegt haben, bevor ich in diese Lücken eintauche, um dort eine Theorie des prä-personellen und daher nicht diskursiven Kontaktes zwischen menschlichen Körpern und der technischen Materialität zu entdecken. Auf Basis dieses Kontaktes, so mein Argument, sind technische Revolutionen (wie die industrielle Revolution, in deren Gefolge Shelley ihren Roman schrieb) in der Lage, die menschliche Handlungsmacht radikal zu destabilisieren, so dass wir experienzielle Lücken erfahren und textuelle Lücken produzieren—die allerdings rasch aufgefüllt und vergessen werden, wenn wir uns an neue Techniken gewöhnen und sie so „naturalisieren.“ In Kapitel 5 widme ich mich diesen Prozessen im Kontext der Aneignung der Dampfmaschine durch die Thermodynamik, um damit die postnatürliche Historizität der naturwissenschaftlichen Natur selbst aufzudecken—also die Tatsache, die sich nicht auf ein epistemisches Phänomen der diskursiven Konstruktion oder Projektion reduzieren lässt, dass sich die materielle Natur in konstanter Bewegung befindet und dass—aufgrund der Rolle von Techniken in dieser Geschichte—die Natur noch nie „natürlich“ gewesen ist. Kapitel 6 übersetzt diese Ergebnisse in eine postnatürliche Medientheorie, die nicht bloß empirisch individuierte Apparate, sondern auch die Historizität des phänomenologischen Raums betrifft, wie er von menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren zusammen artikuliert wird; als filmtheoretisches Korrelat schlage ich eine „kinematische Doppelvision“ vor, die zwischen einer von Merleau-Ponty inspirierten phänomenologischen Sichtweise und einer Bergsonschen Metaphysik pendelt, um die filmische Erfahrung als Produkt eines Wechselspiels zwischen menschlichen Situationen und technischen Verschiebungen zu zeigen.

Der dritte Hauptteil kehrt dann zu den Frankenstein-Filmen zurück, um die besonderen Beziehungen aufzuzeigen, die zwischen ihnen und der postnatürlichen Historizität der anthropotechnischen Schnittstelle bestehen, und eine Art Rapprochement zwischen den konfligierenden menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren, die den Filmen innewohnen, zu bewirken. Kapitel 7 folgt diesem Ziel, indem es sich den paradigmatischen Frankenstein-Filmen—James Whales Frankenstein (1931) und Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—widmet und die menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Perspektiven alternierend aufzeigt, deren Zusammenkunft die zentrale Kreatur der Filme animiert. In dieser Konfrontation—die unentwirrbar im historischen Moment und besonders im Kontext des Übergangs zum Tonfilm eingebettet ist—suche ich eine nicht-reduktive Weise, um die andersartige Kraft zu begreifen, die die durch Frankenstein-Filme provozierten Erfahrungslücken besetzt. Schließlich bietet Kapitel 8 eine synoptische Sichtweise der weiteren Entwicklung der Frankenstein-Filme; hier versuche ich, die aktive Rolle der kinematischen Techniken in der Produktion kurzlebiger Erfahrungen der Transitionalität aufzuzeigen, die unter dem Gewicht unserer habituellen und „natürlichen“ Beziehungen zu jenen Techniken begraben liegen. Das von mir anvisierte Rapprochement besteht also darin, eine Anerkennung der gegenseitigen Artikulation der Erfahrung durch menschliche und nichtmenschliche (technische) Akteure zu fördern, wodurch die affektive und leibliche Erfahrung einer anthropotechnischen Transitionalität nicht arretiert und der menschlichen Dominanz unterjocht wird, sondern experimentell als gemeinsame Produktion unserer postnatürlichen Zukunft angenähert wird. Dies ist die eigentliche Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme.

“To be continued…”: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective

Now online:

Shane Denson, “‘To be continued…’: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective.” (Conference Proceedings of: “What Happens Next: The Mechanics of Serialization.” Graduate Conference at the University of Amsterdam, March 25–26, 2011.) In: JLTonline (17.06.2011).

URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/conferences/article/view/346/1004

PDF: here.

“Frame, Sequence, Medium”: Vortrag in Regensburg

Auf der Jahrestagung der Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien in Regensburg wird Shane Denson einen Vortrag über Comics am 18.06.2011 halten. (UPDATE: Mittlerweile ist eine Video-Version des ganzen Vortrags auch online: hier.) Hier das Abstract:

Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective

Shane Denson

In this paper, I argue that careful attention to some of the basic formal properties of comics calls not only for comparisons with analogous properties of other media, but for appreciation of the fact that comics themselves exhibit a strong tendency towards imbrication in robustly “plurimedial” contexts, such that comics as a medium must be seen as a nodal unit in larger, non-reducible networks of mediation. Setting out from a rather formalistic consideration of comics’ techniques of visual and narrative framing and sequencing, and drawing on observations made by Derrida and others, I identify a set of crucial liminalities and reversible oppositions—e.g. between the inside and outside of framed panels, between the temporal and spatial orderings of sequences—that are centrally at work in, and perhaps even partially constitutive of, the medium of comics. At the limit, this formal-phenomenological investigation suggests that liminality or marginality pertains not only to the “internal” relations or constitution of the medium, but that it is also a basic fact of comics’ “external” relations to other media. Above all the serial forms typical of comics’ narration witness the medium positioned in an emphatically plurimedial field, where boundaries are continually negotiated, annexes claimed, and permeable borders policed. The figures that populate comics series, in particular, move between diegetically closed narrative worlds, the integrity and continuity of which is often highly strained, and open multiverses that encompass not only alternative realities within the medium of comics but also alternative existences in other media as well. Attention to the way that serially and plurimedially instantiated figures (such as Batman and Superman, but also Frankenstein or Tarzan) negotiate the relations between diegetically open and closed serialities promises, finally, to shed media-theoretical light on the social question of the dynamics of comics’ transnational reception—which involves superheroes and other comic figures in both global and local contexts, in internationally standardized forms and national or regional adaptations. In a different context, Benedict Anderson has identified a competition between “bound” and “unbound” serialities at work in the modern constitution of nations as “imagined communities”—a competition, that is, between the totalizing closure of a territory and numbering of its occupants as effected by a national census, as opposed to the categorically open and ongoing iterability and reproducibility of events as modeled in the media of newspapers and photography. Refocusing Anderson’s perspective onto comics’ serial and plurimedial negotiations of “bound” and “unbound” formations—understood in relation to the marginalities and reversible boundaries that mark the frames, sequences, and media of popular culture—I aim to link comics’ plurimedial relations and their transnational imaginings through seriality as a locus of ambiguous intersection and border-crossing.

Mediatization and Serialization

Am 18.05.2011, im Rahmen der Initiative für interdisziplinäre Medienforschung an der Leibniz Universität Hannover, hielt Shane Denson den Vortrag “Mediatization und Serialization.” Dies war seine zweite Auseinandersetzung mit dem Begriff der Mediatisierung, nach seinem Vortrag “Mediatization, Techno-Phenomenology, and Popular Serial Entertainment” auf der Tagung “Mediatized Worlds–Culture and Society in a Media Age,” die am 14.-15.04.2011 in Bremen stattfand. Hier ist ein Abstract für den Vortrag in Bremen:

Mediatization, Techno-Phenomenology, and Popular Serial Entertainment

Shane Denson

This paper looks at the preeminently mediatized worlds of modern popular entertainment and sets them in relation to debates over the apparent centrality of media in the articulation and execution of contemporary human agencies. Theorists of mediatization have argued that “the mediation of everything,” as it is implicitly or explicitly postulated in recent media studies research, both captures something essential about our changing lifeworlds but, because of a latent determinism, also stands in the way of countenancing these changes rigorously and responsibly (Livingstone, Hepp). Recent suggestions to the effect that analyses of mediatization processes require a non-media-centric media theory (Hepp, following Morley) seek to counteract deterministic tendencies by highlighting the extra-medial (e.g. social and cultural) forces that increasingly situate media at the center of mediatized lifeworlds while, at the same time, demonstrating that these media retain a high degree of flexibility with regard to the variety of contextual logics and implementations that they can accommodate. Drawing on the work of American philosopher of technology Don Ihde, I would like to propose “techno-phenomenology” as a tool for conceptualizing the mediatization of lifeworlds in this paradoxical or “de/centered” sense. This approach shows technologies as possessing “telic inclinations” or logics that can invisibly transform perceptual and actional agencies and the lifeworlds in which they are embedded, while comparative analyses demonstrate that these tendencies are far from absolute: technical logics are emphatically plural, for intentionality-modulating technologies can occupy a variety of positions within the basic intentional relation. For example, media can be either transparent or opaque and ostentatious, thus instituting a space for reflection on their role in the lifeworld that they in part structure. In the sphere of modern popular entertainment, a techno-phenomenological approach reveals that reversals and variations of a medium’s position and significance within the intentional relations between audiences and the entertainments they consume are an integral part of these entertainments themselves. In other words, the mediatized world of popular entertainment is characterized by repeated interrogations of its own mediatization processes and their larger place in the modern world. Mediatization itself is problematized and put on display in popular media, e.g. when new media emerge or existing media are transformed. This is nowhere more evident than in serialized forms of entertainment, which, due to their development over time, are capable of tracking mediatization processes in the very act of their unfolding. Self-reflexively de/centering the media involved, popular serial forms tell stories that are as much about media as about the contents they mediate; and in the feedback loops that emerge between producers and consumers of popular series, media centrally structure both the form and content of communicative interaction, establishing a dynamic of self-propulsion that is nevertheless not strictly deterministic. Serial forms of popular entertainment therefore both display and enact the de/centerings that constitute a central paradox of our mediatized worlds.

Hepp, Andreas. “Researching ‘mediatized worlds’: Non-mediacentric media and communication studies as a challenge.” Media and Communication Studies Intersections and Interventions. Eds. Nico Carpentier, Ilija Tomanic Trivundža, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Ebba Sundin, Tobias Olsson, Richard Kilborn, Hannu Nieminen, and Bart Cammaerts. Tartu: Tartu UP, 2010. 37-48.

Ihde, Don. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.

_____. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Livingstone, Sonia. ‘On the Mediation of Everything’, Journal of Communication 59.1 (2009): 1-18.

Morley, David. ‘For a Materialist, Non Media-Centric Media Studies’, Television & New Media 10.1 (2009): 114-16.

_____. Media, Modernity and Technology. The Geography of the New. London: Routledge, 2007.