MeCCSA 2003 Notes Hypertexts, virtual spaces and dance: producing cultural heterogeneity or world standards on the internet Pietrobruno, Sheenagh
ME: CONTACT GREG DOWNEY
Dances have been discovered, globalised or ‘established’ through Internet Salsa and Transnationalism – broader context
Case: Salsa
Dance is a lived corporeal expression – cannot be regulated by rules
Internet facilitates process of standardisation Previously, only as performances – not written down
Elizabeth Eizenstein
Internet displaces cultural links
Cultural globalisation
Airports, shopping malls, internet, etc – world spaces
Internet not really a space but a metaphor
Cyberspace as a global city
Internet as a city – Jennifer light
Global city as means of commodity exchange
Cyberspace absorbs urban and national expression
Way in which this takes place can be shown by development of salsa
Internet is city in miniature – real life cities becoming more dangerous – internet seen as safer, more comfortable city - ME: not sure….chatting to death, Pro-Ana, cyber-hacking, pornographic spam
In cyberspace, less sense of connectedness to others – less responsibility
How can internet be viewed as minature space, if so vast
REF: (see abstract) –
Virtual space of internet relates to thjis
David holmes – virtual spaces as phenomenological spaces
Fantasy and imagination – create the Internet as space - imagine we are connected to something vast and real
virtuality: Miller and Slater – Not an assumed feature of internet, but rather a social accomplishment
salsaweb.com - what is salsa? Mambo in disguise?
Torontosalsa.com - discussion about standardisation of salsa
imagining of cyberspace as global city contributes…
Pierre Levy – cyberspace returns us to preliterate, but at different level
As users in same space, no messages out of context
Encourage corporatisation
LeFevbre – space is result and cause – product and producer Cf. Internet produced by web naviagators Seeks revitalisation of cities
Since jan 2002, net users responded to debates of origin of salsa - whether north American styles can compare to ‘more authentic’ Cuban and Columbian salsa internet concretising debates that have previously been an oral discourse
but also records these debates
dissemination of discourse
ME: BUT THE INTERNET DEBATE IS A TEMPORAL DEBATE – IS THE WEB ARCHIVE SAFE? IS THE IMPORTANT FACET, THE CYBERSPACE OR THE COMMUNITY ENGAGED IN THE DEBATE?
Will dissemination lead to standardisation?
Computer games and female audiences. A study on the myth of the boy gamer Moschini, Elena
Background of research Myth of boy gamer Evidence of female and adult audiences How female audiences reinterpret t gaming experience End of the myth of the boy gamer?
Review of game magazines: edge, Games TM, Playstation 2 official mag, Moble games Review of official stats,by DRI, ELSPA, ESA, IDGA Revie of main online gaming resources: gamasutra.com, womengamers.com, gamegoddesses.com Academic literature Game design literature Interviewers with women game designers, producers, players
Game-based learning interest!
Why researching adult and female gamers? Lack of research on female and adult gamers Need of industry to expand t customer base Need to ustd audiences to design more inclusive games Future of women in game industry (now an opportunity for women to get into the community – ME: HOW EXACTLY? WHY NOW)
diff bw game audiences and game customers
huge presence of women players across platforms
industry bases its strategy on myth of boy gamer
audience is not primarily male, nor juvenile
Who Plays Computer and Video Games? - ESA survey dispute by some exponents - Chris Crawford: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - IGDA London many game designers have expressed doubts on existence or relevance of female audiences.
Myth of boy gamer - constructed and perpetuated by game industry and media via: o tone/style and content in game mags o game ads, commercial • e.g. difficulty of having a ‘game’ in Cosmopolitan magazine o representation of women in games o structure of game industry o representation of games in media Game Mags - survey published in 2003, Official Playstation 2 Mag – ‘unanswereable’ y number of femal readers - same magazine recently introduced t ‘rate your mate’ comp and awards ‘handbags’ to t worst reader letter - games mags often shelved alongside porn mags
Guild Riden ame Mom
“When I get to play, I feel guilty. I feel guilty about not spending t ‘available’ time with my children, on housework…even plucking my eyebrows…How come my husband doesn’t ffeel like that?” - http://www.womengamers.com
Represn of women in game - more adv games now feature strong female charcs - deisgned to attract male audience - many games do not represent women at all or relegate them to secondary or diminishing roles
Women reinterpet gaming experiences - women download or prod patches to change gender of characters - women create online femal only enviros - women play in groups (one controller, others advising; not all players) - women gamers exchange ideas, experience, and reviews on female gamers websites
Genderinclusive game design? - game designers and researchers divided on this issue - game deisgn for women reflect stereotype of women preferring non-violent co-operative games - hwr, certain games seem to attract stronger female audiences: Sims, strategy and adventure games, RPG o ME: AGAIN, WHAT ARE OUR PARAMETRES OF GAME HERE?
Women in game industry - few girls - few female role models - networking is imp, but industry is male-dominated - imp to be a gamer, possibly a hard gamer (PERHAPS ‘THE’ ISSUE)
Alternative game audiences? - v imp part of audiences missing -
Sat 9am
Towards an understanding of vernacular cinema Koven, Mikel
Italian giallo (yellow) films Disting Mass and popular cinema - 3 classes of cinema
unlikely to have heard of vernacular cinema – performed one night only would eventually get first class status – e.g. fist full of dollars
voodoo dolls (nb)
Armando Crispiano Macchie Solari (trans. Autopsy, 1973)
Ill Gatto…. Cat o’ nine tails – genetic and criminality
Four Flies on Grey Velvet Lewontin – claims about link to criminality and genes discredited Yet, the belief in this in Alien – penal coloney is for double Y chromosome inmates
New developments in the realm of the senses: film studies meets neuroscience Synmoie, Donovan
Cognitive Film Theory Philosophy Turn to neuroscience, concerned with m/b
Cultural and media studies tend towards popular forms
Brain being like a computer Cognitive turn interfaces with Bordwell and Carroll and need for more rigorous account for how people encounter moving image
Film theory allows productive interdisciplinarity. Meaning as negotiation rather than effect
Cinemergencies: Deleuze and machinic abstraction in cinemas Dowd, Garin
Politics take place in place : redistribution of the sensible
Abstract machine Techne
The textual engineering of ‘Zeitgeist Monstrosity’: appropriations of genetics in contemporary horror film Hills, Matt
Beginning with Jurassic Park, but earlier with The Fly, Species, Alien Resurrection, Mimic, Deep Blue Sea
Eugene Thacker – bio-horror - he includes GATTACA, but this doesn’t really fit
notions of species identity
rel bw generic and genetic meanings
genetic discourses are appropriate which partly disrupt horror, but also add to it
Noel Cowall And Barbara Creed’s theories of horror
Appropriations of genetic discourses pose problems
Carroll: The Philosophy of Horror (1990) - fusion and fision monsters: alter egos, or self-confrontation o 2 diff types of monstrous creature • appropriations of genetic, challenge this • visually and semiotically overlapping • transgenic monstrosity is about an unstable monstrosity
Creed: concept of abjection - abjection: protection of clean and proper body, boundaries of self - argues that horror genre presents many images of this abjection - approp of genetic discourses confuse this distinction
e.g. Alien – cloned riply doesn’t fit creed? No purification of abject
Species: Genetic becomes demonstrably Other
Contrast bw The Fly 1950 and 1980 - contrast monstrosity of 1958 to diff geneticised monstrosity in 1986 - in 1950, sense of atoms being mixed, denotative genetic discourse o miniaturised man’s hed on top of fly and magnified fly’s head on man • fits fusion idea • almost mythological notion of XXX • immediately coded, physically stable - fly of 1986, do not have that immediately visible fusion o move from mythological monstrosity (fitting with Carrol) to temporal and teleological – micro and macro levels of monster o molecular genetic level of seth brundel, this gap is gradually closed down as film progresses o implication of teleological, about macro level catching up with micro • perceptible monstrosity catching up with invisible genetic change
- fly 2 also does this o he has to turn into the fly, so is about temporal and teleological, notions of genetic determinism
abjection - some of these films contest gendering of abjection - monstrous feminine (species), but in the Fly, also monstrous masculine - fly 2 and species 2, also deal with paternal abject – what does it mean if you are the son of the Fly? Or character Patrick in Species 2 (national hero, rise to power, father wants his son to do well)
films drawing on genetic discourses in detail
they might get science wrong, but are trying to bid for forms of cultural value
Juarssic Park, not just about special effects, but plausibility of its use of genetic discourses - often correlated with other markers of quality o upmarket horror hybrid
genetics is drawn on partly in relation to quality horror
David Russell – cultural context of scientific represn of (genetic) scientific discourses - power natural monsters o but this imputes a passivity to popular culture o instead, these films are trying to construct themselves in specific ways these films also present themselves as current/cutting edge - using scientificity to construct alibi of cultural value
Judith Haberstam – overcoding of monster - start to draw 1:1 – cultural context – vastly reduces complexity of monstrosity, which tries to condense o e.g. species: fear of female biological clock, fear of accelerated growth (Selfish Gene idea – out-reproduce)
Zizek ref: high theory, low content of film knowl
The lesbian and gay magazines of 1980s Carolin, Louise
Subscribe
“To the journal for contemporary perverts”
borrowed from ‘The Face’ imagery, high fashion
Shocking Pink
14-23 target, 1987 mag: radical alternative to ‘my guy’ socialist worker press central books distributer 2 distinct groups of women as membership ‘subversive sister’ (Manchester), bad attitude (London)
shocking pink - anti-abortion
Sue Johnson as support (Barbera from Royle Family)
‘there’s more to love than boy meets girl’ - from Jimmy Summerville song
Quim magazine - product of lesbian sex wars, ideological turf war - debate: whether certain sex practices were authentic lesbian behaviours - first british mag to put lesbian sex on printed page - (really 2 people working on this)
The Manconian Gay’ Manchester based mag - later renamed ‘Gay Life’
why has nth similar emerged since?
Charles Landry – What a way to run a railroad - been able to promote these marginalised voices
square peg suffered from glamour role
Transgender and the internet: global movement or casualty of globalization O’Riordan, Kate
Re-contextualise trans activism in terms of global politcs
Internet as actualising agent, alternative media, plurality and conflicting voices - site of subjectivity - role in challenging hegemonic notions of gender/sexuality
Female to male transgender (identity)
Draft Gender Recognition Bill 2003-12-20 Maintaining a sense of difference and allowing concrete political change
Diff accounts from different countries
Naomi klein – no logo - identity politics contribute to feeding XXX?
Cybercultural theory and transgender are incoherent
Random (or Brandon?) exhibition at Guggenheim, NYC
Tension bw virtual and - e.g. AR. Stone: symbolically correlated to the Brandom exhibition
Internet can facilitate ustdg of - Bornstein
Virtual ontology and XX
David Silver: 2nd generation cyber identity
Cybecrultural theory in: identity could be detached from body - but has v little to nothing to offer in terms of political agenc o .e.g transgender – body centred
beyond representation - from subjectivity to identity
use of internet described by trans individuals is used to negotiate identity - Sally hines, Kathy Johnson - Access to info about drugs, prosthetics, etc
Not about subjective moment of being online, but how online materials contribute to identity
Alternative media produced in circulation is essentially webbased
Individual homepages - activist/artist, everyday people (setting up info for others) Local support groups - maling lists
National orgs - gender pack (US)
international orgs
what happens when brought together, have completely contesting discourses - can say that some fall to individual rights based issues and thus, connected to revolutionary discourses - alternatively, more human rights based discourses based around ordinariness and invisibility. (many transgender indivs do not wish to be visible)
Pharmakon – the future as supplement
Plenary on Future of fIlm (second speaker) Malady and Treatment – Pharmacia and Oreithyia - rape or impregnation
past as origin/ the future as supplement
final speaker – Film Institute? role of cultural policy in film
Frankenstein returns: visual politics and the GM debate Murdock, Graham
GM food not about science alone - belief systems and world trade
It is about - science: complexity/uncertainty (Postscience) - risk: contradictions of ‘progress’ (entered modernity from ‘fate’ to ‘risk’) - marketisation: corporate capture (political system, food chain, funl knowl,incorporation of indigenous knowl) - Globalisation: autonomy/annexation - Government: erosion of public trust o Habermas ‘public sphere’” 2: political public sphere (broadsheet and coffee houses, rational deliberation), literary public sphere (where people go to grapple with fundamental issues of life, death, morality) • Doesn’t mention the ‘visual’ - Political Argument: from rhetoric to imagery o In governmental imagery (PR), and social movement, primary weapon is a symbolic weapon (staging theatrical event) o ‘Tony don’t swallow Bill’s Seed’
Basic Classificatory Schema: human/vegetable - (boundary crossing is what people find disturbing Christian Iconography: grim reaper The Frankenstein Story - beginning of 19th century, surge in technology - coming to terms with blowback of science - progress has a dark side (can never control) modern myrh
Science fiction: Alien invasion/abduction
Nuclear Power: destruction/contamination - clean machine going awol
Food Scares: BSE - framed t way in which people ustd food modification
Image of the vegetable
Blair as the vegetable
Grim Reaper (includes letters GM)
Private eye no. 971, 5/3/99, p.22 – image of grim reaper in GM crops
‘It came from the grocery store’ – image of woman, Monsanto ref.
Connection bw notion of contamination and GM
‘The Prime Monster: Fury as Blair…’, The Mirror
what does this tell us?
If we want to understand political discourse
What’s the problem with GM food, the prob is that it is like these other, deeply embedded cultural anxieties
Led to arguing that we are moving into an age of visual politics Meaning of image is fundamental part of persuading process
Politicians need to know how these chain reactions of image work
If so, then need to think about public sphere as space of deliberation but also a cultural space, which are not always argumentative or rationale, but which provide resources we draw on to imagine something you haven’t yet experienced
How do we imagine something, when we do not have the evidence?
Discourse is only half the story, the visual must also be noticed
People are not anti-science, they are anti-corporate science - Science used for the wrong purposes is what is alarming - Capture of scientific agenda
The crisis of information age journalism: isolated, international or imaginary? Campbell, Vincent Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, De Montfort University
KEYNOTE: ‘The Nature of Culture’ Elizabeth Grosz
Forthcoming books: ‘The nick of time’, politics evolution and the untimely time travels: feminist essays on temporality
organisation of matter shapes human life
biological evolution and becoming, influ how we understand and conceptualise culture and its products, technology and media
not a new socio-biology: i.e. model of social that reduces it to biological
biological bases of rape or war
instead of reduction of culture to nature
interested in ways in which nature incite and produce culture - ways in which biological conditions enables, rather than limits and directs cultural ilfe
not reduce to binary nature vs. nurture rather natural invigures cultural variation perpetual transformation time, movement, change, and irresistible push to future, affect culture and technological
uncontrolled becomings
nature encourages culture to transform
not t natural that limits t Cultural natural produces rather than inhibits
attempt to redress foreclosure of ontological or metaphysical and thus, ironically, of materiality in its most complex forms
focus on cultural construction rather than the natural
era of constructionisms of various tytpes
culture as artifice product of communities and their interests institutions as means by which these constructions are produced - while ustod as cultural constructs
constructionism as reaction to prevailing forms of naturalism (division of labour as natural order) - enable us to consider change/upheaval, revolution in new ways - understanding of radical politics - culture as equivalent of changing
nature is fixed and unchanging - background against which culture elaborates itself
culture tames nature
culture writes on nature
culture scripts the natural and manufactures it
hunt for incriminating traces of naturalism …relentless anti-essentialism
essence/fixity/nature/biological – ahistorical and biological - raw material for culture
what is regarded as living/human is on other side of this distinction
Hegel and dialectical models
Givenness of nature is to be overcome by human labour
Model of inertia of nature enthuses Marxist writings
Labour for marx is t historical rather than inherent transformation of a collective
Politics consists not in ways in which nature is transformed but in social structures
Notion that nature is a passivity, evident in structuralism and phenomenology
Kinship system – strauss
Satre’s account of nausea
Lacan’s understanding of the real (given as outside symbolisation and outside of culture)
From psych – feminst – to class and racist theory, view that nature must be overcome appears to be ubiquitous
Exception of ecologist movement
All forms of contemporary politics continued contempt with body
Nature/culture opposition seems foundational to cultural analysis
Can we consider rel between natural and cultural in different terms?
If nature not the other of culture, but its condition, then rel is much more complex
Natural is not the inert, passive, unchanging element against which culture elaborates itself, but is the nature of culture
How we understand natural/cultural opposition relies on our notion of nature
Culture as remaking of culture
People in biological sciences, trying to elaborate on Darwin
Remains indebted to its particularieis, culture as gift of nature
If understand rel between nature and culture as rel of emergence or complexity, rather than opposition, then nature providing means and nature providing forces, then cultural studies cannot ignore inputs of natural sciences
Saussure: culture is self generating system, but cannot explain how it began
May be time to consider culture in terms of nature
Need to understand what is outside of culture
Understand, contra Derrida and following Deleuze, that culture and natujre have an outside - conditioned rather than conditions
models derived from natural sciences (non reductive evol biology) provide fruitful resource for understanding culture itself
culture is not what we add to natre, but what we subtract
culture diminishes nature, rather than makes nature over
nature should be ustod as perpetual evolution
Darwin: first great theorist of difference - eth living as a mode of differentiation
Bergson following Darwin is right to claim that human activities diminish rather than augment natural world
Culture not magnification of nature, but selection of only elements of natural - diminuition of natural order
Nietzsche – natural world of forces that provide energy to overcoming politics of life
Events generate problems
We have to address ‘events’ – they impinge on our daily lives
For Deleuze, this ‘outside’ is t force that induces thinking – shakes life from automatism
Outside, composed of competing forces, can call it outside by different name: nature, time, memory
Force of outside that insights culture and induces subjectivity
V feature that culture seeks o privilege – change , different – is charac of natural
Nature, since Darwin, cannot be seen as passive, inert, and unchanging
Why designate human sphere as cultural, but reluctant to understand animal sphere as culture
What we share in common with animals is capacity for self-overcoming
Cultural studies founded on rift between human and rest of natural life
Human stands outside natural order
But what if all those characs as uniquely human are all simply difc of degree, rather than difc in kind?
Instead of rift, there is a continuity?
How read culture’s immersion in nature as part of cultural analysis?
Virtuality of natural world
Culture not as completion of nature, but as natures open product?
Poss or productive to understand culture as way in which nature reflects on and articulates itself?
Is culture, nature’s way of thinking itself, of gaining consciousness of itself?
3 charcs that nature bestows on culture - ways in which the outside irresistibly impinges on life
1. forward pull of temporality a. compels acknowledgement fo human finiteness and mortality 2. gift tht nature bestows of force of variation/proliferation of natural difference a. how to live in world with its resources to provide resolution b. culture as varying innovative resources that nature poses to living c. biology construed as realm of generation of producing merely difc 3. biological .. of sexual difc and racial difc a. sexual difc is irreducible and if time always b. different between sexes grows over time c. every culture must address this in its own way d. rel between sexes and creation of family group networks is coidtion of racial and class difc (Irigaray)
no culture can solve these problems – there is no solution life is an elaboration of how we direct ourselves to these problems
must deal with each of these
these are non-normative imperatives must address them even if cannot control them trace of our debt to the natural natural incites the cultural by generating problems and events to be negotiated cultures disting selves from each other by questions most pressing, but also resources that each culture has to help with these problems
cultural identity linked to natural world
culture can be regarded, not as active agency it constructs, but that which slow down…
(institutions: fn is to slow down events)
nature is endless generation of problems
insistence of these intractable problems that generate living and the conditions for self-overcoming
cultural life does not assimilate natural, but expands it
culture as part of ongoing evolution of the natural
If nature is dynamic and active, not alien to culture, but ground that makes culture possible, then what would a new conception of culture refusing to sever it from natural, look like? What would study of culture look like?
Q&A
Racial difc produced by sexual difference - Darwin: racial difc, dominate theories of racial difc is that is result of natural selection (e.g. nature selects body types suitable for flourishing). May be a question of sexual selection that develops racial difc. Aesthetic taste dictates who one’s sexual partner is and this helps structure biological makeup of future generation o Aesthetics that have been augmented over time, form natural o Racial difc is founded on sexual difc o Aesthetics of Taste • Argument against quantitative analyses of difc in genetics
Status of conditionality? Pragmatism: sexual difc is a problem to stay, only q is how we live with it Scepticism of theoretical physics arriving in cultural studies Deleuzian trope works best with imagination.
A: dynamism of text is what they have extracted from world of forces
Ontological claim not a textual claim
Dewey, James, ..
Nietzsche
Interested in a Pragmatism of the future - ie. Darwin’s explanation of life
do not know conditions of our humanness, since are all in process of evolution