Week 3 Sound and Vision Criticisms Pt1

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A paradoxical state -

a pivotal moment of flux, rupture, change, speed, and

decentralisation AND consolidation, entrenchment,

centralisation and slowing down

Digital Culture – A paradigm shift?

Sunday, 7 October 2012

“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald


http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3190.F_Scott_Fitzgerald

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3190.F_Scott_Fitzgerald

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“There is a shadowy ambition behind the concept of the virtual world -to have everyone safely confined in their homes, hooked up to sensory feedback devices in an enclosing, interactive environment which will be far more powerful a tool of social control than television”

• Julian Stallabrass quoted in New Media A Critical Introduction pg. 287


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The horror of the TV aerial

Technology and Moral panics


“We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline: that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago…I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period of some duration, of which is possible to say that it will have no culture. “

T.S.Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture, quoted in Greenberg. ‘The Plight of Culture’.


The Assault on Culture with a Capital C - The Barbarians are at the Door

“to know the bestthat has been said and thought in the world”Matthew Arnold


Responses - The Culture Industry

• Culture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973).

• The idea that the factory style production of popular culture produces standardised products that manipulate and seduce the consumer (or masses) with quick,easy gratification that leaves the consumer passive and ultimately unhappy.

• A central idea in Adorno and Horkheimer critique of mass culture is that it creates false needs - needs which are manufactured and of course satisfied by capitalism


“The effectiveness of the culture industry depends not on its parading of an ideology, on disguising the true nature of things, but on removing the thought that there is an alternative to the status quo. “

Theodore AdornoThe Culture Industry


‘something is provided for all

so that none may escape’Adorno, T & Horkheimer,M, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Verso, 1997) p. 123


Society of Spectacle• “spectacle was a spectacle, a

circus, a show, an exhibition, a one way transmission of experience. It was a form of ‘communication to which one side, the audience, can never reply; a culture based on the reduction of almost everyone to a state of abject non-creativity, of receptivity, passivity and isolation.’

• Christopher Gray ‘Everyone will live in his own Cathedral”: the Situationists 1958-1964


• “The Situationists [..] applied the Marxist conception of alienation to every area of everyday life and argued that the development of capitalism entailed the extension of the means, the objects, and the intensity of alienated experiences. For the Situationists, no area of experience is free from the permeation of capitalist relations of production and consumption; the members of capitalist societies are reduced to the level of spectators of a world which precludes their participation.’

• Sadie Plant, ‘What is Situationism? A Reader’ editor Stewart Home


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SUMMARY OF MASS CULTURE CRITIQUES

• The debasement of authentic, organic folk culture

• The erosion of high cultural traditions.

• The erasure of a critical reflective dimension to culture

• The indoctrination and manipulation of the public by market forces and political power for profit and gain


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• ‘there is a specific conception of the audience of mass culture , the mass or the public which consumes mass produced products . The audience is conceived of as a mass of passive consumers...supine before the false pleasures of mass consumption...The picture is of a mass which almost without thinking, without reflecting,abandoning all critical hope, buys into mass culture and mass consumption. Due to the emergence of mass society and mass culture it lacks the intellectual and moral resources to do otherwise. It cannot think of, or in terms of, alternatives.’

• Dominic Strinati 1995, ‘Mass Culture and popular culture and The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industry’


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–“the concept of the spectacle flattens distinctions with polemic intent.’

• Jorg Heiser, ‘Things that matter in contemporary art’


Critique of mass culture critique

• Agency: How contemporary consumers in a digital culture use, interact, respond to and with, the products of our consumerist society, are, as research has shown far more complex, contradictory and varied than the spectacle critique allows for.


• Agency vs Determinism


Agency vs Determinism


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Bruno Latour

• Critiques the notion of the separation of nature and society (a very modern concept)

• Latour attempts to reconnect the social and natural worlds (arguing they exist in what he refers to as a a parliament of things).

• Latour view is that humans and non humans form hybrid entities by virtue of the networks their share

• Nothing is no longer purely human, not because humans have changed but because the environment they inhabit has.

• We live in a biotechnological world where we are networked with other things.


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The Shuffling, stumbling Zombie


The feverish, running Zombie


“most human

sufferings nowadays tend to grow from a

surfeit of possibilities , rather than a profusion of

prohibitions (as they used to be in the

past)”

Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Passions, pg. 94


• 'the essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blurring of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money'.

• George Simmel quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming LIfe


‘sense the infinity of connections, but be hooked up to nothin”g’.


•icase study - ipod


•Reynolds is interested in how technology like the ipod has changed the economics and business of music.

•He examines this from the perspective of the consumers acquisition of music and their listening habits.


•Reynolds sees the technology of the ipod as replicating and reinforcing central core ideas within neoliberalism - the cult of the narcissitic self , of the privatised, atomised individual and of creating an increasingly nostalgic, slowly ossifying ‘dead’ culture


I Me Mine - No Surprises – Flat Culture

• ‘ the ipod may be a memory box but it is not a memory maker: it is hard to imagine the device playing the same kind of role as the radio did in the past , in terms of entwining music with everyday life, especially as it often involves the use of music to screen out the outside world and avoid unwelcome social interactions’

• Simon Reynolds, pg 117


•“the commodification of music meant that investing one’s cash and investing one’s emotion became totally wedded. When music came clad in a cherishable husk of packaging and the recording medium itself had a material heft, it asserted itself as a tangible presence in your life. It was easier to form an attachment to music when it was a thing”

• Simon Reynolds, Retromania, pg. 126


For Reynolds, it is the shift for a culture of scarcity to one of plentitude that has resulted in a radical transformation of our relationship with music.

He contrasts the change from an either / or mentality (you could afford one record instead of another) and the tribal, partisan attitude that came with this, to one of ‘plus/and’.

“Plus/and means that you don’t have to choose, because you can choose both; you don’t have to take sides, because everything has its point and its positives” Reynolds, pg. 126


•“Unfortunately (or is it in fact fortunately?) life remains subject to the rule of ‘either/or’. Life itself is a scarcity economy: you only have so much time and energy. What’s missing from all the techno-utopian scenarios of access and choice is the reality of limits -on resources, on an individuals time, on our brains ability to process information beyond a certain speed. To the extent that plus/and is becoming the dominant principle of culture (so many options, so much information, so much entertainment), it could be that it is actually killing music, because its ultimate tendency is towards a kind of indifference” Reynolds, pg. 127


Criticisms of:

Old fogeyism

Self serving, selective historical blindness

Underplays the return to the ‘live event’

Eurocentrism


Week 3 Sound and Vision Criticisms Pt1

Documents

Transcript of Week 3 Sound and Vision Criticisms Pt1