Television as culture, communication and Inquiry

1. Television as culture, communication and Inquiry COMN 3393, Jan 20,2012

2. Agenda • Lecture: Cultural Reproduction • Paper Assignment: Final (in lecture) discussion

3. Cultural Reproduction • Production: the way something is made • Reproduction: the way something is remade • Agricultural Model • Biological/Sexual Model • Industrial Model • Mythic Model

4. Cultural Reproduction • Agricultural Model: Metaphors/Motifs: • Cultivation: Preparing soil, Tilling, Planting seed, Watering, Harvest • Resources: Elements –water, air, ground, sun, Sabbath (rest) • Roles: Gardener, Harvester, Supplicant, Protector, Parent • Vulnerability and dependence on nature translated into • symbolic systems: designed to support these • Earliest cultural reproduction systems around these would analyze culture in relationship to such motifs: Ancient culture might think: We are experiencing cultural upset because we failed to garden our culture properly: care for the poor as an example

5. Cultural Reproduction Ancient culture might think: We are experiencing cultural upset because we failed to garden our culture properly: care for the poor as an example

6. Cultural Reproduction • Biological/Sexual Model: The way in which an organism reproduces a species, keeps the species going • Genetic codes • Genes replicate • Genes pass on codes • Genes pass on reliable codes • Genes pass on unreliable codes

7. Cultural Reproduction • Biological/Sexual Model: The way in which an organism reproduces a species, keeps the species going • Genetic codes • Genes replicate • Genes pass on codes • Genes pass on reliable codes • Genes pass on unreliable codes Culture (like cells) is reproduced by codes that can create agile/vital/flourish structures or brittle/defective/dysfunctional/viral/cancer structures

8. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: • Mechanisms of culture can be analyzed like machines • There are assembly lines – patterns of construction that we all participate in that “assemble culture” over and over, and reassemble its patterns • Designs might change, technologies improve designs • but certain basic assembly lines and their rituals remain in order to reproduce: example “economics” • Human culture is penultimate ordered around such key mechanisms (scarcity, money, financial flows, capital)

9. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Culture is reproduced by mechanisms of capital, and distribution based on geographies of scarcity: capital tends to reproduce its self through assembly lines in which capital is embedded mechanistically in role, hierarchy and thus power

10. Cultural Reproduction • Mythic Model: • Story is a key structure for reproduction • Story is a complex structure of meaning that is multi-modal and amenable to human sensory configurations and human communal configurations; as both natural and as augmented through characters, pictures, images, poems, songs, dances, objects, actions- it mines aesthetic structures, rituals, performances, identities, and semiotic codes • Story is at once received/and performed • Story is at once situated in its immediate meanings/but also its larger complicated ‘universe or multiverse of meanings” • Mythic model is ultimately modeled on a cosmology Cultural reproduction is the result of labyrinth of stories which situate the found world against the possible world; these are situated in containers which outline boundaries of that which will keep the world the same/stabilize/but also in this sameness collapse it – against the boundaries of that which as the new will either de-stabilize world/ or be that which will fulfill/ transform/and renew the world.

11. Cultural Reproduction • Agricultural Model: Various • Biological Model: SutJhally (using Irving Goffman) in Codes of Gender • Industrial Model: Marx + others… • Mythic Model: Gebner (The Electronic Storyteller, and the Killing Screens)

12. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • Marx comes to maturity as a thinker writer across the 1800s. • He receives the optimism that is part of rationalism, the infectious idea that we as humans can think our way forward, and are making the world better with each generation… • In particular he receives the influence of Hegelian optimism; Hegel being a thinker influential in western culture whose rationalism whose writing seemed to argue that positive human evolution was inevitable

13. Rationalism/Surrounded by beautiful Pictures

14. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • For various reasons, Marx one of many key thinkers who in the 1800s are beginning to find cracks in the optimism of rationalism. • By this time the effects of industrialism are very evident in the suffering, sewage, pollution and poverty that are created as industrialism gathers urban capital and pulls agrarian orders in to its orbit. • The honeymoon of the machine is over – its capacity to run-over human society is visible

15. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • The honeymoon of the machine is over – its capacity to run-over human society is visible

16. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • The honeymoon of the machine is over – its capacity to run-over human society is visible

17. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • The honeymoon of the machine is over – its capacity to run-over human society is visible

18. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • The honeymoon of the machine is over – its capacity to run-over human society is visible

19. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • The honeymoon of the machine is over – its capacity to run-over human society is visible • Many thinkers begin to critique rationalism through philosophy • Marx however is located in a world where the cultural suffering produced by industrialism is unable to be relegated to the margins • He starts with the machine: the machine of capital • He uses metaphors of production to critique this machine • His argument is basically that capital (and its systems) are basically a technology; like a train moving forward will run over the human standing on the tracks, this technology like any technology – is affected by humans but in the end is not keyed to creating best for them – it will simply do its technological job, and if humans are run over in the process –capitalism does not care –it is a technology (a complicated social technology, for sure) - is interested in one thing and one thing alone – capital –it is about reproducing capital – it is an assembly line for capital – it is a factory for capital.

20. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • As culture and capitalism entangle: • Capital as that which is identified as penultimate through its congruence with Value • Becomes that which culture calibrates itself to. • Human suffering and other phenomenon can only be recognized as they are reappear as VALUE • Human suffering is only on the assembly line for capital if it can be found to be valuable, as such it is useful… • As labor, or as product (medical good) or • as watched as entertainment…

21. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • Media as a category not full recognized by Marx due to historical location…he does however speak of opiates and religion • Religion is that which keeps pictures going such that the physical conditions of suffering caused by capital do not have to be faced and dealt with • It is the structure that through various mechanisms appears to be calibrated to something other than capital • But under further inspection proves in fact to be strangely useful to capital, serving as a means to divert and redirect social orders from dealing with actuality and the suffering that the system of capital creates. • Instead of becoming a means of remembering, acknowledging, changing and addressing human cost of industrial era – it instead curiously becomes a means of forgetting and accepting this cost…

22. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial Model: Marx • Media as a category not full recognized by Marx due to historical location…he does however speak of opiates and religion • Religion is that which keeps pictures going such that the physical conditions of suffering caused by capital do not have to be faced and dealt with • It is the structure that through various mechanisms appears to be calibrated to something other than capital • But under further inspection proves in fact to be strangely useful to capital, serving as a means to divert and redirect social orders from dealing with actuality and the suffering that the system of capital creates. • Instead of becoming a means of remembering, acknowledging, changing and addressing human cost of industrial era – it instead curiously becomes a means of forgetting and accepting this cost…

23. Cultural Reproduction: Marx & duGay • Industrial Model: Marx + Dufay

24. Cultural Reproduction: Marx & duGay • Industrial Model: Marx + Dufay

25. Cultural Reproduction: Marx & duGay • Industrial Model: Marx + Dufay How does one interrupt these mechanisms of production and reproduction

26. Cultural Reproduction: Marx & Dufay • Industrial Model: Marx + Dufay How does one interrupt these mechanisms of production and reproduction

27. Cultural Reproduction • Industrial model: • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity?

28. Cultural Reproduction: Paper • Industrial model: • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce masculinity?

29. Cultural Reproduction: Paper • Industrial model: • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce masculinity? • How does the show “So you think you can dance Canada produce and reproduce masculinity

30. Cultural Reproduction: Paper • Industrial model: • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce masculinity? • How does the show “So you think you can dance Canada produce and reproduce masculinity 1st Lens: Cultural Reproduction

31. Cultural Reproduction: Paper Guidelines • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce masculinity? • How does the show “So you think you can dance Canada” produce and reproduce heterosexual masculinity? 2nd Lens: Looking at dominating cultural motif from stand point of non-dominant concern or interest

32. Cultural Reproduction: Paper Guidelines • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce masculinity? • How does the show Does “So you think you can dance Canada” reproduce an over sexualized femininity ? 2nd Lens: Looking at dominating cultural motif from stand point of non-dominant concern or interest

33. Cultural Reproduction: Paper Guidelines • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce feminine power? • How does the show How does “So you think you can dance Canada” reinforce femininity as empowered only when it is hyper -sexualized 2nd Lens: Looking at dominating cultural motif from stand point of non-dominant concern or interest

34. Cultural Reproduction: Paper Guidelines • Questions you might ask: • How does television reproduce masculinity? • Narrow it down: How does Canadian television reproduce feminine power? • How does the show How does “So you think you can dance Canada” interrupt normative race configuration in reality television. 2nd Lens: Looking at dominating cultural motif from stand point of non-dominant concern or interest

35. Cultural Reproduction: Paper Guidelines • 1st critical lens: cultural reproduction • 2nd critical lens: : Looking at dominating cultural motif from stand point of non-dominant concern or interest

36. Cultural Reproduction: Paper Guidelines • 1st critical lens: cultural reproduction • 2nd critical lens: : Looking at dominating cultural motif from stand point of non-dominant concern or interest • CSI: How does this series use crime violence as a motif? • Narrow: CSI How does this series use crime violence as a motif for racial empowerment and disempowerment • Narrower: Is stereotyped identity an issue for CSI NY versus CSI Miami: Or is a non white female only a victim, can she also be the boss?