Laura Thain's blog

Texans Getting Campy

Laura Thain — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:33:56 +0000

Hey y'all, in case you haven't heard, we're electing a new Lt. Governor this year here in the great state of Texas. With four Texas Republicans competing for the position, a campaign is taking shape to see who can be the cowboy-iest candidate of 2014. With a fight like that, you might expect to see some campaign ads that border on self-parody. And what, my friends, do you get when sincerity fails? Well, of course, a whole lot of camp!

Incumbent David Dewhurst, who is (for real) a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, released an unusual campaign ad this week. Before we view it, let’s take a look at a more serious cowboy call from contender and current Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples:

Ok, so we’ve got some typical campaign rhetoric going on here with a little bit of cowboy flair, but nothing too unusual. Staples' team shows that our Texan values are threatened by the specter of the Democrats and big government (specifically, the evil Obama and his friend the state of California). And it’s no surprise that the ad finds a way to say “Todd Staples” as many times as possible while showing him practically BURST across a true Texan field on a horse. He’s a cowboy in shining armor. Let’s take this as an example of non-campy cowboy. There’s nothing particularly failed about the sincerity of this campaign video—its effectiveness rests firmly in the success or failure of its polemics. This is a candidate who’s clearly courting Tea Party conservatives and ready to toe the Republican party line, taking no prisoners. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s considerably behind the other three candidates in a recent poll.)

But here’s what happens when the cowboy antics get a bit more theatrical: check out a favorite of mine (courtesy of Cate Coleman here in the DWRL), from current US Senator John Cornyn’s 2008 campaign:

The particular kind of camp we see here is determined by the audience:

Image Credit: Screenshots form Cornyn's campaign video

It is the campaign’s attempt to be serious and the utter failure of that seriousness that makes this over-the-top cowboy spectacle campy—and it’s the risk that many conservative appeals to “traditional” Texan-white-rancher-values take.

How, then, might a conservative campaign make the same kind of appeals to individualism and masculinity without resorting to the cowboy cliché? Take a look at Dewhurst’s recent campaign video as a response to that kind of rhetoric:

That’s right, folks. No cowboys. No news coverage. No dark and foreboding shots of Washington or California. Just a simple, sustained (nearly twenty full seconds) demonstration of bodily masculinity. Contrast our TX t-shirt wearing SuperBeard with the California hipster literally fondling a shake weight. Could it be that, unlike John Cornyn’s campaign, Dewhurst is intentionally using camp in his campaign rhetoric?

Image credit: Screenshot from Dewhurst's campaign video

It’s a strange move that I think attempts to accomplish a few goals simultaneously. First, in response to radical right complaints that Dewhurst isn’t “Republican” enough (perhaps because he has on occasion dared to try and cooperate with Texan Democrats in the State Senate), Dewhurst’s campaign produces a video so machismo that you almost can’t help but laugh. The camp seems self-conscious—which we might infer from the heavily stylized camera filter and a variety of other formal elements of the film itself—but it is serious in its implications, that is, that the Texan economy is absolutely tied to strong, hyper-masculine leadership. Bigger is better. Bearded is best.

I dare say the video also makes sincere attempts to appeal to younger voters, although this might represent the limits of the campy aesthetic. The crude, Instagram-like styling of the film (which, upon further scrutiny, is most interesting because it appeals to nostalgia for a time that young people in Texas never experienced outside of The Wonder Years and photo filters) has the most potential, despite its sincere intent, to fail.

Perhaps this lesser-watched Dewhurst video can tell us more about the campaign’s strange appeal to a hipster aesthetic. Watch it and see if you think Texas is ready to “walk down the aisle” with Lt. Governor Dewhurst all over again:

Does it remind you, too, of a Royal Tenenbaums style narration? What do you think of Dewhurst's campaign rhetoric?

Documentation of Loss – Observing Failure in the Modern Olympics

Laura Thain — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:17:50 +0000

Olympic fencer Shin A-Lam of South Korea remains in the arena to contest an unfavorable ruling without the expected stoicism. Image credit: Korea Bang

What does it mean to document loss? What is its rhetorical function? Rhetoric of Celebrity student Iva Kinnaird assembles an archive of defeat from several Olympic games, tracing the intersections of celebrity and sportsmanship. The documentation of loss, she asserts, commodifies defeat and makes it available for public consumption. The result is a strange rhetorical landscape where the lines between winning and losing become less easy to determine.

“The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

- Pierre de Coubertin, Father of the modern Olympic Games

Photo Finish

With athletes seemingly nearing the uppermost limits of a performance asymptote, it is necessary to improve technology to measure these near indiscernible differences. When one hundredth of a second is the difference between gold and silver, the cameras must be able to record that highly precise moment.

Image Source: Openwaterpedia

Photographs tend to resist abstraction, non-figuration. Photography is unique in its ability to capture the image of something realistically. It can mechanically or exactly record things without the influence of a human bias, although man’s interpretation of said image is another story.

Voyeurism

Image Source: Undisputed Legal

Cameras measure success through the information that they record. With a broader definition how that can be measured, it could be said that an athlete’s strength in character (despite their athletic performance) is what makes them successful.

The emotional nature of some events has “raised spectator voyeurism to an uncomfortable level” (Williams). The viewers want to relate on an emotional level, and that involves seeing the joy or, in many cases, the disappointment in the eyes of the competitors. The close proximity of the cameras is a simple formal way of placing the viewer in the middle of the action, allowing them to more easily feel the weight of any given emotion.

Beautiful Losers

Image Source: Variations on Normal

The trend of honoring dramatic losses and idolizing athletes who lose heroically has not gone unnoticed.

A proposed fourth podium for “when an athlete is either extremely rubbish or gets an injury, but still finishes the race” seems to be an idea that is already metaphorically taking place (Wilcox). It is an occurrence which seems to elicit support from the crowd despite their differences in nationality.

Image Source: Ameblo

Derek Redman, a frontrunner in the 400m sprint at the 1992 Barcelona games is now famously an icon for perseverance and who defines “the essence of the human and Olympic spirit.” Despite coming in last, he provided the public with one of those moments that “remind us what the Olympics are all about” (Barcelona).

This is a problematic situation where the public has turned his devastation into an inspirational moment, denying him agency in the process. His heartbreaking loss is now our Visa commercial.

From a viewer’s perspective, limping across the finish line was a show of his grace in defeat. Interviews with Redmond reveal a different reason for his struggle: his “belief that if he limped fast enough he might still overtake four people and qualify for the final.” (Burnton). It was not heroic strength in character that drove him; it was his delusion acting as a shield from despair.

There is a noble thought that elevating these moments will act as some sort of consolation prize, but what it is really doing is trapping the athlete in that moment by limiting the public’s perception within the confines of a single memorable event. This stagnant image prevents them from moving on.

The video of the race on YouTube sentimentalizes the moment right up to the point of being mawkish. As if the raw footage of a man’s crushed dreams is not enough to convey the heartbreak of the moment, Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” is overlaid.

The footage is edited to elicit sympathy and admiration towards Derek. The video of the race is interlaid with text explaining each moment of the travesty. At the end the text reads “When you don’t give up, YOU CANNOT FAIL!” (Warning). This slogan, of course, is completely illogical; a person is perfectly capable of failing just as many times as they try*[1]. The inspirational message is understood nonetheless. The result of all this is a contrived sappy documentation skewing the memory of the event (Brackets).

When losing is losing

Image Source: Postgrad Problems

Winners who lose - McKayla

McKayla Maroney was the obvious favorite to win the gold in the vault competition. She was expected to win by a wide margin. But when it came down to her actual performance on the day, she faltered. Even in her failure we have elevated her to fame. She is famous for being disappointed with her medal. “She’s so good that she’s probably the only one who doesn’t even have to perform to win the gold” (Macur). An audience can become accustomed to an athlete’s high performance when they are consistently exceptional. Viewed individually, they would all be spectacular, but when seen one after the other they become desensitized to the awesomeness of their capabilities. We expect them to win by exceptional standards. It all goes back to a person’s expectations for their performance relative to others. As was the case with Maroney, one's expectations may be so high that anything less than gold becomes unimpressive.

When winning is losing

Image Source: Fit Sugar

One of the most famous moments in the modern history of gymnastics is Kerri Strug’s 1996 Vault. The defining moment of her career came down to her performing a gold winning vault with an injured leg. The moment of victory was replayed in a countdown of the “30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments” (Brackets). We are given these stories in the format of a countdown which attempts to quantify the weight of an emotional connection. The video documenting the event plays up Kerri’s struggle and the victory that it earns her and her country. The darker reality that is seldom talked about in relation to this moment is the implications of the injury Strug incurred. She snagged the gold in the team final but was unable to compete in her individual event.

It is replayed as a victory for the American team, and it was, in a way, but it was also a crushing defeat for the athlete on an individual level. At the bottom of the video “Due to her injury, Kerri Strug was unable to compete in the individual all-around competition and event finals, despite having qualified for both.” Once again, inspirational music is overlaid. With both this video and the Derek Redmond clip, the moment is sentimentalized to mask the disparity between what occurred to the athlete and the way an audience wishes to perceive that occurrence.

When losing is winning (maybe) - Badminton

Image Source: Yahoo! Sports

The Greeks aspired to win for the sake of eternal glory. “They were also given all manner of material rewards by the cities they represented, but the original goal was to establish everlasting fame on earth, the sure route to immortality” (Williams). In this case, competing well in their sport consequently proving their athleticism was the way to remain in the public’s consciousness. Now, with different modes of achieving longevity in the public eye through celebrity, there are different, less straightforward, ways of being remembered. This begs the question - do you have to win in your event if the goal is to be remembered? The answer, given the current climate of celebrity culture: of course not. People are remembered for anything seen as being an outlier in the traditional winner narrative. One major qualifier to the winner’s narrative is the basic requirement that they must win.

In the scandalous badminton tournament placement match which the Chinese and South Korean women’s teams both ‘threw’, the players became infamous for their strategy of losing. What infuriated viewers most was not that they lost, but that they did so without even trying to conceal their intent. It is rare for blatant misconduct to occur at this level, and “in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport” (Belson). The misconduct is “complicated by the fact that the rules of the sport seemed to give the athletes an incentive to lose” (Belson). Although the teams were disqualified for their actions, they achieved something that no other badminton teams ever have. They created a story interesting enough to live on in the memory of the viewer. The commentator said of the strategy during the match, “This, I’m very sorry to say, could be one of the biggest news stories of the games so far” The YouTube replays of the match in question revealed it was eighteen times as popular as the video of the final match in which determined the gold medalist. By the Greek standards of what is implicit with victory, it is arguable that, although the players lost, they still reached an early goal of the games, and therefore won. The idea of victory and of failure is relative and dependent on what makes up one’s own personal goals.

With the increasing capabilities to deliver information to an audience, there is a focus on reactions to loss and the sportsmanship that goes along with it. The myth of how an athlete won or lost overshadows their results. The Olympics has become not just about winning or losing--it is more about how that win or loss is recorded and repeated back to an audience .

[1] This is dependent on a person’s definition of failure. A quick Google dictionary search brings the result “lack of success” is broad enough to allow their use to be true.

Works Cited

"Barcelona 1992 ." Derek Anthony Redmond. Olympic.org, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Belson, Ken. "Olympic Ideal Takes Beating In Badminton." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Aug. 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.

Brackets, Joe. "30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments." N.p., 23 Apr. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Burnton, Simon. "50 Stunning Olympic Moments No3: Derek Redmond and Dad Finish 400m." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 May 0030. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Macur, Juliet. "American Slips at the Finish, Losing Her Grip on the Gold." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

"Pierre De Coubertin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Apr. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

WARNING: You Will Cry While Watching This. Perf. Derek Redmond and Josh Groban. YouTube. YouTube, 22 May 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Wilcox, Dominic. "Beautiful Losers." Variations on Normal. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Williams, Gregory. "Better Luck Next Time." Cabinet Summer 2002: n. pag. Cabinet Magazine. Web. 27 Apr. 2013.

Commercial and Cooperative Subjectivities: Does an Independent Lens See Differently?

Laura Thain — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:09:05 +0000

Image Credit: Hudson Valley Almanac

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."--Robert Capa, founding member of Magnum. d. 1954, landmine accident

Currently on exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center is a carefully curated selection of Magnum photos, drawing from the organization’s archive housed at the Center. Magnum, an elite professional photographic cooperative, brings together some of the world’s premiere photographers in a collaboration resistant to the commercial demands of photojournalism. This week on viz., we’ll feature the exhibit and explore issues central to visual argumentation and mass media. This post will explore what possibilities arise when photographers become their own producers and distributors—what influence do the conditions of production have on the genre of photojournalism itself?

AUDIENCE Many photojournalists speak of the “poster effect”—a bold, central image and a clean, contrasting background. The “poster effect” assumes a disinterested, distracted audience who must be coaxed into viewing the image amidst a complex matrix of visual competition. Below is an example of the "poster" effect. This image, taken by DC freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, was used by Shepard Fairey (without permission) in the iconic Obama HOPE poster.

Image Credit: The Online Photographer

The Magnum photos arguably make different assumptions about a general audience—at the heart of the organization's ethos is the belief that people are interested in the depiction of human experiences and events. Reading this audience in good faith, a condition which is possible only when we remove photography from its commercialized context, opens up artistic possibilities. Below, Inge Morath plays with the convention of "poster" photography by including a posed photograph alongside a boy cobbling shoes in Iran.

Image Credit: Perceptive Travel

I was struck by how seldom Magnum photographs relied on the conventions of high art to communicate their message. Instead, I observed tactics that subtly drew attention to photography as a medium rather than as an unmediated experience. These compositional techniques showed respect for a mass audience and assumed they wanted more than a photograph that exactly replicated experience. Rather, these photographs meditate on what it means to capture an experience at all.

From Henri Cartier-Bresson's series The Great Leap Foward. Image Credit: Personal Photograph.

COMPOSITION These photographs often resist the “poster effect” and instead include jarring edges, multiple centers of movement, and background that resists its position vis a vis the foreground. Below, Burt Glen plays with photographic convention to depict integration in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

TECHNIQUE Rather than creating “true-to-life” images, the Magnum photographs are often interested in using the camera lens to see beyond the naked eye. In so doing, they often highlight the limits of both the camera and of visual memory. Below, Erich Hartmann photographs data output of an IBM voice recognition study in an attempt to visualize sound.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

MEDIATION Unconventional cropping, composition, and photographic technique bring attention to the photograph as a medium, rather than a transparent window into experience. They challenge the idea that photography represents memory and suggest that our cognition, rather, has shifted with the advent of photography. While commercial photojournalism often capitalizes on the relationship between human memory and photography, presenting photography as an artifact of memory an therefore memory available for consumption, the Magnum photos challenge the assumptions underpinning “photorealism” (that is, that a painting of a photograph is as close to the real scene as a painting of the scene itself). By daring to bring attention to the medium of photography itself, the Magnum photos seem to suggest that the photographic has altered our perception of memory, rather than the other way around.

Below, Paul Fusco depicts Robert Kennedy's funeral train by using an unconventional f-stop setting to depict the movement of the train.

Image Credit: Agnostica

THE PERSISTANCE OF THE COMMERCIAL Despite all the ways in which the Magnum photos resist the conventions and assumptions of commercial photojournalism, the commercial persists. Magnum's experiments in the digital acknowledge competitition from new media as a driving inspirational force. And human experience itself cannot, of course, avoid the commercial as a formative part of cultural experience. Magnum photos often play with commercial conventions in order to make subtle statements through the photographic medium itself. For instance, Muhammad Ali's fist here is the real celebrity. Its owner is merely relegated to the background.

Image Credit: Roberta Cucchario

We hope you will enjoy the rest of the week's post on the Ransom Center's exhibition and offer us your own thoughts about the intersections between photography, visual rhetoric, and the digital age.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Laura Thain — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Geoff Hargadon

This week on viz. we'll be exploring graffiti culture in Austin and beyond, beginning with an interactive graffiti map that we'll use to begin archiving graffiti in and around the community in which we live. Please visit and contribute!

In this post, I'd like to introduce some issues central to reading graffiti as both a performative and political act. I take as my primary examples the HOPE Outdoor Gallery on 11th St. and Baylor in Austin's Clarksville neighborhood and graffiti from inside a now-demolished bicycle shop that once operated in West Campus. Using these examples, I'd like to explore definitions of graffiti and raise questions of property and ownership in public spaces. Join our interactive mapping project and follow our posts this week as we take a closer look at Austin graffiti.

The HOPE Outdoor gallery was founded 2011 on the site of an abandoned condominium construction site. At 2011’s SXSW festival, Shepard Fairey, renowned street artist and creator of the iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign, contributed the first murals, pictured above. The project hopes “to provide muralists, graffiti artists and community groups the opportunity to display large scale art pieces driven by inspirational, positive and educational messaging.”

Most people in Austin, however, refer to the installation as the “free wall” or the “Baylor street art wall.” Within weeks, Fairey’s mural was tagged by local graffiti artists, and the HOPE foundation began to lose control of the mural. Although both the property owners and HOPE make consistent attempts to control contributions to the site, its current façade is a constantly-rotating parade of vibrant Austin graffiti culture alongside (and often, on top of) commissioned art.

The remains of Fairey's mural, late 2011 Image Credit: Super Sonic Electronic

Such political battles represent a larger discussion of “street art” vs. graffiti. “Street artists” often cite their desire to escape the negative connotations attached to graffiti and those who create graffiti, who go by a variety of names (tagger, bomber, writer, or simply artist). The editor of a LA street art blog Melrose & Farfax represents this point of view. She explains, "Both graffiti and street art use the re-appropriation of public space. But with graffiti you are limited to what you can do with a spray can on the spot. Street art might employ some of the application techniques, but most often, it is a finished product that is brought ready-made to the location, so the artist's message is much more developed. Street art is not so much about making a name and leaving a mark as it is getting people to interact with and view something in a new way, and that is a big difference."

Current state of Fairey's mural as of Sept. 2013. Image Source: Personal photograph. Click to enlarge.

Street art, at least, in the case of the "free wall," represents the commissioned, publicly-sanctioned offspring of graffiti culture. And the battle between graffiti and street art on Austin's Baylor St. represents a larger battle over ownership of public spaces. That conversation often revolves around aesthetic value--that is, that public art is of higher value to the community (and, less abstractly, the surrounding property) if it comes from a commissioned artist. Differences in quality are difficult to determine and always rely on subjective aesthetic criteria, though attempting to set out those criteria clearly demonstrates that the aesthetic and the political go hand-and-hand in public spaces. Often, the "quality" of an art installation relies heavily on our ability to name the artist. It is anonymous or psuedonymous art that holds less aesthetic value. Graffiti shows us in clear and interesting ways the connection between art and power.

Issues of ownership influence indoor spaces as much as outdoor ones. I'd like to close by raising some questions about ownership as well as definition. The images below come from the shop bathroom and workspace of one of the oldest bicycle shops in Austin which closed in May of 2013, citing high property taxes in West Campus. The building that once housed the shop was demolished within days to make room for a student-housing high rise.

Image Credit: RED

Unlike most photographs of graffiti, this documentation represents not a stage of graffiti production on a particular architectural object but the final stage of graffiti in this place. Rather than reminding us only of the ephemeral nature of street art, it points to the temporality of urban landscapes, as well.

As far as I know, this is the only surviving photograph of this graffiti--a lone entry in an archive. Bathroom graffiti is a peculiar example of public art. It holds a particular type of captive audience, but exists in a private space within the public (that is, the public space of the restroom itself.) This particular graffiti came from a bathroom that was used exclusively by bike mechanics and perhaps a few special regulars, but like most bathroom graffiti, still functions on some level as an insider text.

Image Credit: RED

I'd like to close with this image in the hopes that it can help us both expand and refine a definition of graffiti. This is the mechanics' bathroom door, heavily decorated with objects removed from punctured tires over the course of many years. Like the bathroom wall, it is an ever-changing landscape that documents specific events and experiences to a larger audience. If graffiti is collaborative, largely anonymous or pseudonymous inscription geared toward communicating presence and experience in a public space, the nail wall certainly qualifies--it in fact goes beyond the experience of the mechanics and additionally documents the experience (and presence!) of the cycling community of which they are a part.

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

Graffiti? I'll Know It When I See It. Or Not.

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

Who Wore it Better? Kimye Edition

Laura Thain — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:33:04 +0000

Image Credit: Entertainmentwise

Celebrity fashion is a no-holds-barred spectators’ sport, and, like the fashion industry itself, it features and targets women as its primary audience. Free Thought blogger Greta Christina described the language of fashion succinctly in her recent post “Fashion is a Feminist Issue”, arguing that if we interpret fashion as a “language of sorts…an art form, even,” we can begin to view fashion as “one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men.” But, she continues, “it’s [no] accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.”

This post seeks to read the rhetoric of celebrity fashion coverage in light of remarks like those of Greta Christina. How can we read celebrity fashion as an arena that in principle grants women more freedom than men, but in practice consistently limits the freedom of both men and women to express themselves? How do the voyeuristic, hypercritical impulses of celebrity media intersect and inform the world of fashion, particularly women’s fashion? I take as my case study here the much-photographed couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, sometimes known as a couple by their nickname “Kimye.”

Image Source: Kendall and Kylie

I’ll begin my examination with a convention of celebrity fashion coverage—the “who wore it better” genre. In its most serious iteration, the formula encourages competition among fashionable women of means by enlisting an audience of fashionable women without means as judges. Most often, the comparison is inspired by two celebrities wearing an identical piece of fashion, usually from a premiere designer’s current season. In the race to consume runway fashion, celebrities are pitted against one another to not only be the first to sport a fresh-off-the-runway look, but to also wear it better than the competition that will inevitably follow. And anyone who’s done their homework on fashion marketing knows that, while the choices offered by mass-market or “commercial” fashion are vast, high-end designers promote their brand by strategically limiting supply and in order to create an illusion of exclusivity. Celebrity stylists must compete viciously to bring the runway to the red carpet as quickly as possible, but because of the particular way in which exclusivity and reproduction oppose each other in the market of high-end fashion, repeat-fashion choices are granted to audiences to sort out—a mechanism that also helps assuage the ordinary audience’s feelings of exclusion. Only one woman can “own” the look—so who wore it better?

Image Source: Us Magazine

Of course, as much as tabloids present photographs as hard evidence, many factors matter in how an audience responds to the choice between two celebrities in the same outfit. Besides the unstable nature of the content itself (lighting, pose, position, composition, etc.), context also matters. Kim, for instance, is often matched up against one of her sisters (as are Kylie and Khloe in the larger spread above), making an intertextual argument about Kardashian fashion and celebrity status as a separate category from other A-listers. Kim is paired with her sisters to highlight behaviors that exclude them from mainstream celebrity status: they (gasp!) share clothes; they are reality show stars and not movie stars; they prefer Louis Vuitton and Gucci to Marchesa and Chanel.

Tabloids don’t only use Kim’s fashion choices as evidence that she doesn’t belong with other A-list celebrities. Tabloid media often uses them as to openly mock her, as well.

Image Source: We Know Memes

Image Source: College Humor

Image Source: Robin Williams' Twitter

All of these examples lambast Kim for her weight gain during pregnancy or her refusal to wear conventional maternity clothes. Kim’s signature, curve-hugging style becomes the greatest source of tabloid fixation and ridicule, rather than praise. Because Kim’s curvy body can no longer be sexualized and consumed, she becomes as a ridiculed, mocked commodity instead.

Interestingly, we can trace this shift well before Kim’s pregnancy. When the reality star began dated Kanye West in March of 2012, celebrity media speculated over how Kanye’s reputation for dressing his girlfriends might affect Kim, who rarely strayed far from her signature, curve-hugging, leather-and-spandex style. Kardashian’s reality show even featured an episode in which West loaned Kim his stylist and gave her closet a makeover.

As soon as Kim started stepping out in looser, more daring, more “editorial” or “high fashion” clothing, she received harsher criticism in the fashion press than ever before. Kim had made her mark by wearing body-conscious status-designer clothes (that is, mass-marketed and expensive but readily available designer fodder like Vuitton, D&G, Gucci, Versace); her transition into high-end, couture fashion (like the Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy dress above) was met with resistance by tabloid press and audiences alike. What was sexy, leather studs-and-animal print Kardashian doing trying to wear sleek, demure French designers?

But Kim can’t win no matter what she wears--if she meets expectations in hip-hugging, cleavage-bearing LBDs, the tabloids commodify her sexuality but call her trashy or tasteless; if she defies expectations in loose silhouettes or bolder colors, the tabloids instead portray her as inauthentic, posturing, a parvenu.

Image Source: NY Daily News

Image Credit: Loop 21

Now that I have demonstrated some potential strictures placed upon women in an arena that claims to privilege expression and artistry, I’d like to extend those arguments to Kanye West and suggest how issues of class and gender affect men’s forays into fashion, as well.

Kanye West, the self-proclaimed “Louis Vuitton Don”, is himself no stranger to fashion controversy. But while, as I’ve argued above, Kim struggles against classicism in her efforts to establish a powerful fashion ethos, Kanye must battle much more stringent gender norms in his pursuit of fashion superstardom.

Image Source: Red Carpet Fashion Awards

Below, Rihanna wears a mensware jacket to the notice of no one but a minor fashion blog. Women wearing menswear is about as subversive as a puppy in a kitten costume—far from the controversial political and anti-establishment statement androgyny made in the fashion world of the 1960s, elements of menswear in women’s fashion are accepted and, to an extent, expected in 2013.

Image Source: The Telegraph

Not so for men's fashion. When Kanye West donned a kilt-style skirt for a Hurricane Sandy benefit concert last fall, he received so much flack from both the press and fellow hip-hop artist and MC Lord Jamar that he asked that Getty Images remove all photos of him performing in the skirt. Lord Jamar released a biting criticism of West’s dress in the song “Lift up Your Skirt,” which he heavily annotated on the rap annotation site RapGenius.

Verse 1 from Lord Jamar's song. Image Source: Screencapture from Rap Genius

Lord Jamar's personal annotations on Rap Genius. Image Source: Rap Genius

It’s not only Kanye’s fashion choices, but his interest in fashion, that feminizes him in the eyes of elements of the hip-hop community and the fashion tabloid media. Yet, just as Kim’s recent fashion choices increasingly buck her “bod-icon” status and experiment with self-expression, Kanye asserts his interest and his choices subversively, even when (or especially when?) those fashion choices fail to enhance his reputation as a fashion icon. I’d like to close with one last “who wore it better?” to drive this point home:

Image Source: Fashion Bomb Daily

Kanye West may be wearing the same women’s wear shirt as Jessica Simpson, but damn it, he’s wearing it better!

Sources of Fame: Photographer or Subject?

Laura Thain — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 21:47:13 +0000

An Arnold Newman "selfie" from 1987. Image credit: The Jewish Museum

One of my favorite parts of the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibition on Arnold Newman is the way it resists chronology. Newman’s photographs are organizes by particular attention to one of ten elements of Newman’s photography as artistic practice: “searches,” “choices,” “fronts,” “geometries,” “habitats,” “lumen,” “rhythms,” “sensibilities,” “signatures,” and “weavings.” What results is an exhibit that resists a notion of Arnold Newman’s transformation over time. Instead, the exhibit suggests, audiences might read Newman by his unique manipulation of photography’s formal elements throughout his entire career.

The resistance to chronology is apparent, too, in the weaving, wandering nature of the physical exhibit. Temporary half-walls throughout the exhibition space designate no beginning or end point for audiences. Instead, the exhibit inspires audiences to accept Newman’s particular artistic practice across ten themes as definitive criteria for photographic excellence, and therefore evidence for celebrating the photographer himself.

Such a construction has encouraged me to think about the relationship between celebrated photographer and celebrated subject. Are there ways that these two categories inform each other in the case of Arnold Newman? Can we trace, even amidst the Harry Ransom Center’s achronological curation, a chronological shift in fame from photographer to photographed? How does fame work as a mechanism for those who garner fame by representing it and perhaps cultivating it? Can those who represent fame create it as well?

To accomplish such a task, I’d like to begin by examining some of Newman’s early portrait subjects. I’ve limited myself to what the Ransom Center has included in their exhibition in the exploration below. Each portrait contains a “fame ratio” rating, which I’ve calculated by dividing the amount of google hits the portrait subject and the search term “Arnold Newman” receive by the amount of google hits the portrait subject alone receives. The closer the fame ratio gets to one, the more, we might infer, that the fame of the portrait subject from a 2013 perspective depends on their portrayal by Arnold Newman.

Image Credit: Chris Beetles

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 1941 [Fame ratio: .46]

[Google search results in 55,300 results]

[of those results, 25,600 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Without doing further archival research, I can say little about Kuniyoshi other than to assert he was an arguably minor figure in the New York art scene, especially in 1941, ten years after producing his most well-known works. Newman’s portrait of Kuniyoshi was probably mutually beneficial for Newman early in his career and Kuniyoshi late in his; now, evidence from Google suggests that Kuniyoshi is more reknowned for being Newman’s photographic subject than for his own innovating work in photography and lithography.

It is no coincidence that Newman was interested in Kuniyoshi; the two shared a similar interest in employing the naturalistic tradition in urban spaces.

Other portraits included from 1941:

Image Credit: iCollector

Raphael Soyer [Fame ratio: .22]

[Google search results in 77,500 results]

[of those results, 16,800 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Phillip Koch Paintings

Edward Hopper [fame ratio: .03]

[Google search results in 1.76 million results]

[of those results, 49,200 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Artnet

John French Sloan [Fame ratio: .02]

[Google search results in 300,000 results]

[of those results, 5,000 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

The trend of this data suggests that during 1941, Newman was able to establish a presence in the New York art community and transition from photographing minor figures to more major ones. However, the more famous the artist at the time Newman captured his photograph, the less their fame (present and future) depended upon their role as Newman’s photographic subject.

The exhibition also suggests that Newman’s 1941 photographs had a dramatic effect on the demand for his portraiture. Having achieved a reputation with his iconic 1941 photos, by 1942, Newman was no longer photographing minor figures. His subjects included arguably the most popular artists of the mid-century: Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.

Image Credit: Anthony Luke Photography

Marc Chagall, 1942 [Fame ratio: .01]

[Google search results in 4.2 million hits]

[of those hits, only 65,700 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Rice Cracker

Max Ernst, 1942 [Fame ratio: .004]

[Google search results in 2.34 million hits]

[of those hits, only 9,800 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

By 1946, Newman was photographing the likes of Igor Stravinsky (perhaps Newman’s most iconic photograph) and Gore Vidal; figures of such fame seem to indicate that Newman’s portraiture had, by the mid 1940s, become an emblem or indication of celebrity, rather than a component in the creation of celebrity for the photographic subject.

This is not to say that Newman lost interest in photographing people who did not enjoy mass fame. Over the course of his career, Newman continued to photograph subjects whom he thought were influential or significant to modern life. Not all of those figures were vindicated by the test of time.

I would like to close, however, by suggesting that Newman’s own work enjoys an iconic status in its own right, even when the significance of the photographic subject has been forgotten. (We might, for instance, return to my first example of Yasuo Kuniyoshi.) Newman often insisted that his photographs must speak as both textually (that is, technically) and contextually competent objects. This is how we might define “iconic” in the case of Newman. The object must communicate meaning both in its composition and in its subtext. As Newman argues, "Successful portraiture is like a three-legged stool. Kick out one leg and the whole thing collapses. In other words, visual ideas combined with technological control combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold its own." In this way, a viewer might experience the lesser-known figures of the Newman exhibit as a sort of “death of the subject” akin to Foucault’s “death of the author.” In relieving the subject as the primary element of a photograph, we might, in the case of Newman’s archive, let the photographer speak.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Violent Encounters

Laura Thain — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:39:42 +0000

Louisville Cardinal players react to Kevin Ware's leg injury during March Madness. Image Credit: Yahoo Sports

I’ll admit, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night listening to the Boston police scanner, following as closely as I could the developments in the Boston Marathon bombing. In the wee hours of this morning, I thought about documenting the dozens of news items (as well as widespread speculation across message boards and social media) to take a tally of how much of the information proliferating in the uncertainty of Friday morning would be disproved by Friday afternoon.

As I began the project, it soon proved futile—there was far too much information and I ran into (as I might have anticipated) problems discerning journalistic fact from fiction right from the get go. It was only when I stopped documenting and trying to quantify the evidence that I began to think about the relationship between violence and speculative practice and assemble a quite different archive. [GORE WARNING: the images beyond this cut are NSFW and may shock and disturb some viewers. Discretion is advised.]

What appears here is a somewhat experimental exercise in assembling and reading images of violence and gore. The images below all represent some intersection of sport, violence, and speculative practice. Let me explain why I’ve picked them.

Image Credit: Tumblr

Sporting events are ritualized violence.

Sporting events contain and set limits on the violent impulses of society, translating violence into spectacle for mass consumption and participation. It is for this reason that when violence occurs outside of the set script of the sporting event, the results are often traumatic for both the participants and the audience. Non-scripted displays of violence bring attention to the unstable nature of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” displays of violence. They also cause us to question the ethics of our consumption of violence by juxtaposing structural and non-structural violence; the pleasure of one is interrupted by the horror of another when we witness violence on the playing field.

Let’s look at an example of unscripted violence before the age of the internet:

The video above shows goaltender Clint Malarchuk during a 1989 Sabres game against the St Louis Blues. In a freak accident, the Blues’ right wing slashes Malarchuk’s throat with his skate, severing his jugular vein and very nearly killing him.

Note that the announcers demand the camera pan away from the accident and immediately begin to play a radio ad for Buick over the noice of the crowd’s reaction. Those present in the stands witnessed “many spectators physically sickened by the sight [of Malarchuk’s injury]. 11 fans fainted, 2 more suffered heart attacks and 3 players vomited on the ice.”

Present-day broadcast media is far less likely to pan away from injury in this manner. Kevin Ware’s NCAA March Madness injury, for instance, was replayed several times as they carried Ware away in a stretcher. How can we account for the dramatic difference in the way violence is portrayed and mediated now?

Speculative practice can help assuage anxiety about the unstable line between scripted and non-scripted violence.

When audiences engage in speculative practice about violence that occurs outside the realm of accepted social practice, they are asserting their own boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate engagements in violent behavior. In this way, speculative practice can help create a crowd-sourced discursive boundary where institutional boundaries fail—that is, these institutional boundaries are either inadequate or are subverted by violent offenders.

Speculative practice in response to violence is multi-faceted; it can pursue a variety of solutions to the breach of the code of institutionalized violence.

Tactical approaches can seek to bring violent offenders to justice, but they just as often can seek to levy judgment and punishment independent of institutional authority (i.e. vigilantism). Speculative practice is not, however, always tactical. Speculative practice can happen in sustained, maintained alternative media outlets (reddit, 4chan, conspiracy theory hubs, etc.). Often, speculation serves as a tool to process trauma among online communities that have established relationships with each other (reddit), although it can also happen in settings in which users operate in anonymity (4chan).

With these three principles in mind, let’s turn first to the case of Kevin Ware, the Louisville guard who suffered a dramatic compound leg fracture during March Madness.

Note, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the repeated replay of the injury, as well as the announcer’s focus on the absolute horror of Ware’s Louisville teammates. Spectators reported seeing his teammates vomit and other audience members lose consciousness at the sight of Ware’s injury.

Image Source: Imgur

High-resolution pictures of Ware’s injury were posted to Reddit immediately after Ware sustained his injury, and in a 2,000 long comment chain, redditors weighed in on the injury.

The top-ranked comments on Reddit regarding Ware’s injury were, strangely, not the ones that relished/disgusted in the gore of the injury. Instead, the top comments speculated on Ware’s medical prognosis. Redditors with a wide variety of medical experience made predictions about Ware’s ability to play again, why the wound bled so little, how the wound might be best healed, etc. Commentors also praised Ware for remaining stoic—for “performing” away the injury.

Though the image was clearly posted and became viral because of its gruesome nature, we can see from the example of Reddit that the audience’s speculation attempted to “heal” the wound discursively. The practice of speculation also helps us understand the extreme viral interest in and disgust about Ware’s wound as somehow reflective of a hierarchy of trauma. In general, as exhibited in the case of Ware, twisted or maimed bodies, especially limb injuries, rank higher on the gore scale than mere blood, head injuries, or dead bodies. Why? Because while we might reconstruct a maimed limb with speculative practice—be disturbed by its “inside out nature,” but comforted by the ability to right the inversion—we cannot repair blood spilt or life lost. The horror of seeing a body disarticulated from itself is more immediate but less final than a whole body stripped not of limbs but of life.

The extreme reaction to a Ware’s ghastly injury resembled a similar discussion on Reddit about the following victim of the Boston Marathon bombings:

Image Credit: Imgur

The disarticulation of this man’s legs became the most viewed and commented on image from the carnage following the bombing. And although photos in the same series (also posted to the same /wtf/ board on Reddit as the Ware photos) capture dead or nearly dead bodies, viewers find the spectre of dismemberment far more disturbing.

Image Source: Hug-a-Leg

Again, the top comments speculate on healing—they individualize each victim and speak of their chances for survival, the techniques they hope the paramedics used, the treatment they hope the victims are receiving, etc. In displaying medical knowledge (credible or otherwise), users attempt to, from their computer screens, heal the broken bodies of the victims of the bombing.

Speculative practice can also have very real effects on how a population deals with the aftermath of a trauma. On Thursday, 4chan’s /b/ board released detailed interpretations of FBI-released footage and claimed that the board on the whole had identified the “most likely” (that is, “99% confirmed) suspect. 4chan’s attempt at vigilante justice arguably created only more chaos (as parodied by The Onion here) and, despite claims of 99% accuracy, it took only 24 hours for the /b/ board’s claims to be disproved.

Perhaps I can end by suggesting that 4chan’s speculative practice may demonstrate an important issue for further discussion: that while a shift in the distance between violent act and viewer might result in different responses to that violence, the only way to decrease violent acts in society is to address candidly the disjunction between what constitutes state sponsored, socially-sanctioned violence and non-state sponsored, non-socially sanctioned violence.

Image Source: Designation Systems

Maybe we can start by ditching the drones.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 2

Laura Thain — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:58:53 +0000

Image Credit: Deeras23

In my previous post, I outlined DeCordova’s arguments about the emergence of a discourse on acting in the early 20^th century, and the contributions that discourse made to modern conceptions of celebrity, beginning in silent film. In this post, I’d like to translate those arguments into a discussion of 21^st century media and attempt to outline a discourse on “gifing,” and what that can tell us about the intersections of gifs and celebrity in the 21^st century public sphere.

I ended my post with the suggestion that the embedded “meme” or mimetic function of gifing was the essential element of gifing as a medium that allows for a conception of gif celebrity. Here, I’d like to explore the early stages of that celebrity in the predecessor to the gif: the “meme” itself.

Early this year, Business Insider published a puff piece of “What 6 Viral Internet Meme Stars Look Like in Real Life.” Most of this content was pulled from the popular internet archive Know Your Meme, which more fully documents who ascertained the true identities of these “meme stars,” and how. (A large portion of the investigative activity took place on the message boards of the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit, which has been much discussed as a source of controversial tactical media.)

Image Source: Know Your Meme

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

The public’s interest in the real identity behind these “meme stars” has two important implications in the rhetoric of the meme. First, it privileges the “real” or “authentic” person behind the meme as the ultimate site of authenticity by identifying it as the meme’s point of origin. (This is the implicit reason archives like “Know Your Meme” seem interested in the “real” image of the speaker in the meme—it is the point of origin from which all “memeing” springs.) This particular privileging of the authentic persona of the meme star as the site of authenticity signals a shift from meme “fame” to meme “celebrity”—much as DeCordova describes in early 20^th century film.

Second, this interest in attaching the meme to an “original” speaker gives us a way to tie the discourse on “memeing” to linguistic and rhetorical conceptions of the “utterance” as a basic linguistic unit. As I’ve previously discussed, the meme is a unit of cultural transference, usually in the form of a compressed emotion or attitude. We can understand this in terms of “utterance” as a theoretical term beginning with Saussure, who defined the utterance as the most basic unit of signifying, and thus, the most basic unit of language.

But Saussure’s conception of the utterance gives us a very particular way to consider context, and therefore intertextuality, as a network of social convention in which the identification of a point of origin, no matter how artificial, is of no use. By Saussure’s structuralist approach, the signified is an abstract, intangible object; we can approach, but never reach it, by examining its signifiers. Because the utterance is the most basic form of communication, to break it down further would be to enter the realm of pure language, which only exists in abstracts. (In short, it’s just turtles all the way down.)

Bahktin, however, considers the utterance to have a dialogic quality—utterances are by nature responses to previous utterances. An utterance, then, can be broken down and linked to a previous utterance. As Bahktin argues, utterances cannot be “self-sufficient,” and they rely on intertextuality (what Baktin calls “the dialogic”) in order to render meaning. In “Speech Genres,” he affirms

The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects… Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.

If we consider a meme a type of utterance, Bakhtin’s account of the function of the utterance helps us to understand why the discourse on memeing is so invested in identifying a point of origin of a meme’s unit of speech. Audiences are compelled to attach the utterance to a speaker when faced when an intertextual network of constantly shifting meaning attached to a single object (the meme); by identifying the original “speaker,” each variation of the meme attempts to counter the uncertainty of speech and assert the power over their own reading of the significance of the utterance vis a vis the “first” utterance. By this means, meme “stars” become meme “celebrities.”

But gifs function as memes too, although they draw from pre-established sites of celebrity as often as they create celebrity by means of repetition. And while the meme offers meaning by swapping out a distinctive white block text, the gif either appears without text at all, allowing gestures to function as utterances (as is the case of the archive RealityTVgifs) or is attached to a text related to personal experience (in tumblrs like OfficeHoursAreOver, WhatShouldWeCallMe, AllMyFriendsAreMarried, etc.).

Perhaps the reason gifs tend to rely on pre-established celebrity more often than they create fame from scratch is because the lack of text and the emphasis on gesture makes assigning the utterance to a speaker all the more crucial to the gif’s memetic function. However, as any gif proliferates, its intertextual dialogue creates a space that is distinct from, and often nearly independent of, the gif’s original context (usually, a scene in a television show or movie). The origin of the utterance becomes as inconsequential to the gif’s meaning as the meme’s “actual” identity—it becomes a site of authenticity only as much speakers recall it to establish their own ethos. However, as I’ve pointed out earlier, knowledge of the meme’s origin is often inconsequential to understanding or proliferating it.

Ultimately, the “origin” of the gif—its original context—becomes the site of authenticity in gif celebrity much as the personal, private life of a movie star is the site of authenticity in film celebrity. It stands in as legitimate, original context that presents itself as objective or “real,” but is just as available for response and reinvention as the gif itself (that is, that the gifs context is still a subjective category). This layering is ultimately a result of gif’s reinvention of older media forms and its marriage with a distinctly new media characteristic. Thus, examining the relationship between gif celebrity and early film celebrity demonstrates productive points of intersection, but the divergence of these intersections is crucial to understanding the gif as a mechanism of new media and Web 2.0.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 1

Laura Thain — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:30:10 +0000

Image Source: Gorgonetta

As gifs begin to occupy more and more space in internet discourse, I’ve been contemplating the various ways they reinvent older media forms. New media theory tells us this is an inevitable historical trajectory; it is not just a characteristic of post-broadcast media but embedded in mediation as an ideological concept. What I find particularly interesting about gifs is not just how they remediate the television shows, films, Youtube videos, and memes from which they derive meaning, but also how they relate to a much older form of media: silent film. And in such a reading, the overlap between the production of fame and celebrity in the silent film tradition and in current gif discourse is remarkable—and worth discussing.

In order to describe such a relationship, we might first turn to scholarship on the production of celebrity in the realm of silent film. A problem we must account for in exploring this topic is that, while mass-produced and marketed motion pictures begin at the turn of the 20^th century, no form of cinema stardom existed in mass media until at least 1910, if not later. One common historical narrative argues that celebrity resulted from the battle between actors/actresses and film production companies. Although audiences wanted to know the names of performers, production companies resisted billing their actors and actresses in order to maximize their profit margins. It was not until the breakup of Edison’s Patents Trust by anti-trust legislation and the victory of independent film studios that the “star system” emerged as the direct result of specific shifts in production.

Clippings of Florence Lawrence, Biograph Picture's first leading lady, "obituaries" after her death was faked as a pubicity stunt by her agent, Carl Laemmle. Note the anonymous poem referring to her as the actress "whose name we've never known"--before her fake death, Lawrence was known only as "Biograph Girl." Image Source: 11e14thstreet

Richard DeCordova’s Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Illinois, 2001) provides a productive counter-narrative. De Cordova argues that celebrity cannot be accounted for by examining shifts in production alone—we must understand its development as a discursive category. “The star system,” he argues compellingly, “is not simply the creation of one person or even one company; nor is the desire for movie stars something that arose unsolicited [among audiences].”

Instead of focusing solely on the development of film production, DeCordova describes a larger phenomenon: the emergence of a “discourse on acting.” A precondition of this discourse was the separation of the actor from the film itself. As the public began to understand moving pictures as a remediation of theatre, conceptions of the actor in the filmic space developed to account for the role of the actor and the actor him or herself. A difference between on-screen and off-screen presence was established. The result of such a distinction is what DeCordova calls a “picture personality.” Audiences traced these “personalities” across films, producing a discursive space in which actors and actresses were recognized intertextually and the role of an actor in one film was associated with the character he played in others. (In this sense, all actors and actresses of early film became recognizable to the public as “character” actors and brought with them from film to film assumptions about the dramatic space they inhabited. Mary Pickford was the ingénue, Douglas Fairbanks the swashbuckling hero, Charlie Chaplin the tramp, etc.) Still, picture personalities were associated with the films in which they appeared, not their private lives.

Mary Pickford in a 1920 publicity still. Image Source: Library of Congress

DeCordova concludes by arguing that the term “star” (a true film celebrity) can only be applied when an actor’s personal life is available for public consumption. The personal (“off-screen”) life of the actor becomes the new center of truth and authenticity. Only then can we consider actors in films true “celebrities.”

What does any of this have to do with gifs as a medium? Like early film, gif fame depends on intertextuality. The discursive space occupied by the gif strongly resembles the discursive space DeCordova gives to the “picture personality.” Gif fame is not located in an interest in the personal lives of the characters it adopts, but rather in the proliferation and reproduction of images that continue to reinvent meaning. Like silent film, gifs have an embedded “meme” function. If we read memes as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation” (OED) we can see the meme in silent film—how it communicates cultural concepts through characterized gesture and intertextual association, through the actor, in some sense, “miming” him or herself. The gif accomplishes this function by reproducing the same gesture to respond to different contexts. In this way, gifs divorce themselves from the realm of celebrity created after the “picture personalities” of early silent film, even as they rely on that celebrity to creative enough traction to hedge out their own ideological space. One need not, for instance, be familiar with the TV show or film from which a gif is extracted if one is familiar with other intertextual applications of the gif as an ideological concept (its embedded function as “meme”). For example:

Audiences need not watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta to interpret the signature gesture of Nene Leakes here.

Image Sources: RealityTVGifs

This Harry Potter-inspired gif can be coupled with a variety of captions--it captures an emotion, rather than a specific narrative.

Image Source: WhatShouldWeCallMe

This happens in terms of both a gifs adherence to and defiance of its own “meme” function. In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore the “meme” function of both silent film and gif culture, drawing parallels between the two in order to further demonstrate how gifs reinvent old media not only in terms of discursive space, but in the formal characteristics of the medium itself.

For Part 2 of this post, click here.

Reading Django Unchained as Camp

Laura Thain — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:13:13 +0000

Image Credit: Vanity Fair

Although it’s been two months since its initial release, the internet is still abuzz with social critique of Tarantino’s newest film Django Unchained. Roxane Gay, a staff writer for Buzzfeed, argues that rather than encouraging a national discourse on slavery, slavery is instead “the movie’s easily exploited backdrop.” The movie functions instead as “a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Finally, she concludes, “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”

Many of Django’s critics couch their arguments in similar terms—that is, that while Tarantino claims to reignite a discourse on slavery in Django Unchained, he in fact privileges genre over content in a way that dangerously decontextualizes our most central national trauma. I have argued in an early post that privileging medium over content can function as a form of censorship. Here, I want to discuss how the same aesthetice practice can simultaneously suggest and defer engagement with tragedy and trauma.

When Django Unchained was in the drafting stage, Tarantino hinted at his new project to The Telegraph’s John Hiscock:

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done. I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it…But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it."

In trying to find a way to engage with Tarantino’s claims—his claims to authority, his privileging of genre--I found DD’s argument on WhitesEducatingWhites the most provocative. In his article entitled "Whiteness Unchained: When A National Shame Becomes Camp," the author argues that although “[the] movie supposedly centered around a slave turned bounty hunter in pursuit of revenge,” it “stars white people with Black people in supporting roles.” Although DD never unpacks his claim that Django Unchained is campy, it struck me that reading Django Unchained as camp is key to deconstructing some of its problematic relationships to slavery, race, violence, and history. I refer here to Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” for some basic definitions of the form and its mechanisms.

First, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp depends on hyperbole and in always privileging form above content. Second, camp requires rhetorical distance: “Things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” Third, camp is a comedic form, it “proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.” Following this, it requires aesthetic engagement in the act of detachment: “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” The aesthetic experience in camp is formed with a sensual engagement with the artifice—the genre, the medium, the act of mediation—itself, rather than, as in tragic forms, the content of that artifice. And, as Sontag notes, “Detachment is the prerogative of an elite.” Finally, its “essential element is seriousness.” Camp is earnest, even when that seriousness fails. Camp cannot be ironic.

Image Credit: Chief Crew

“Campifying” violence and tragedy becomes especially problematic because earnestness is the defining element of camp. There is no room for irony, critique, or satire in camp as a discourse; rather, respect for the artifice or mediation itself is the militant narrative force. If, as Northrup Frye argues, irony is the central discourse of satire, then sincerity has the same function for camp. The moment campiness attempts irony, it becomes satiric. This is why a movie like The Producers draws on elements of camp but is not campy itself—it instead implements elements of irony to levy critique against the “producers” of Broadway performances specifically by way of aestheticizing the public’s near-universal disdain for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The moment The Producers ridicules Nazism through camp, it becomes satire.

For Tarantino to claim the rhetorical distance that irony provides in addressing the national shame of slavery would be problematic from the onset, but in privileging genre over content, he extinguishes even this possibility. Instead, the film functions to aesthetize a violence so terrible that, as Tarantino notes, we as a nation struggle to “deal with,” especially in filmic depictions. By doing so, he creates rhetorical distance from the content itself. He does not campify the experience of slavery so much as he avoids its portrayal, which exists little outside of highly-mediated (i.e. highly aestheticized) depictions of violence. It is the “campification” of this violence that is so dangerous, because it encourages the reader to indulge in the violent fantasy from all angles—that of the slaver, that of the slave—without interrogating it. In operating on the assumption that slavery is universally rejected by the contemporary American audience, Tarantino defers engaging with violence in an immediate sense. Rather, he hypermediates and hyperaestheticizes violence at the cost of content—and in the case of Django Unchained, that content is any substantial character development for the people of color within the film, as well as any depiction of the actual practice of slavery.

Image Credit: Wondersinthedark

What we receive instead is proto-Klansmen who are humanized through the demotic language that distracts from the intent to commit unspeakable violence. We see women slaves sauntering the plantation grounds or dining aside their masters in the garb of the aristocracy. And we see Django himself executing his first act of revenge in emasculating, Fauntleroy garb. (Sharen Davis, the film's costume designer, designed the valet "uniform" after Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy".) The lives of slaves themselves are mythologized—most explicitly, Django and Broomhilda as Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Nibelungenlied—while the white characters are humanized, individualized, and given complex characteristics. Because of this dynamic, King Schulz leads the film, acting as its primary agent.

Image Source: Think Progress

Finally, I would like to suggest that the film’s Academy Award nominations serve as further evidence for the dangers of camp and Hollywood’s complicitness in this sort of problematic and incomplete engagement with slavery. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Picture are all accolades that belong primarily to Tarantino himself and show the Academy’s admiration for Tarantino’s vision, and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing rely heavily on the film’s engagement with the genre of the Spaghetti Western. All of these nominations demonstrate the Academy’s deep respect for the bare-bones aesthetic of the film itself. But Christoph Waltz’ nomination and win for Best Supporting Actor implies complicitness even with the false premise (of engagement with national trauma, of engagement with slavery) of the film itself. Although Christoph Waltz has the most lines, the most screen time, and the most character development—criteria that in virtually any other film would qualify him as the “lead”—his nomination for Supporting Actor is necessary to support the films’ other Academy-nominated accolades. We must believe that Waltz supports Jamie Foxx as lead to believe in the film. But this is one final fantasy that collapses under scrutiny.

Reading Crowdsourced Justice: The Case of Fitness SF

Laura Thain — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:46:37 +0000

Image Credit: Passive Aggressive Notes

Last Friday, the DWRL hosted an RSA webinar featuring Dr. Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English and the University of California Santa Barbara. The webinar, which was broadcast over Google Hangouts thanks to our audio/visual team here in the DWRL, encouraged interactivity via social media and generated a lively discussion. I wanted to follow up on Dr. Raley’s talk about tactical media as speculative practice with an example from this week’s headlines: the “hacking” of a San Francisco based gym’s website by the site designer himself.

Fitness SF contracted Frank Jonen, an independent web developer, to design their website in May of 2012. On February 15, after nine months of non-payment, Jonen took action by re-claiming the website he designed as a means to “out” Fitness SF for non-payment.

His letter alleged, in part, that “Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them” and that “[a]s a result [Fitness SF’s] is no longer operational.” Jonen might have left it at that. Instead, his letter issued a call to arms. Under the heading “Do you hear the people sing, who will not be paid again,” Jonen appealed to other freelancing developers, designers, and journalists, saying, “I am also writing this on the behalf of the tens of thousands of freelancers and small businesses out there facing larger corporations who can afford to starve them out. In the movie/visual effects business this is already prevalent. Large studios awarding work to smaller studios or freelancers in the hope they won't stand up to them when it comes to loads and loads of unpaid work.” Finally, in a call to action, Jonen made heavy gestures toward solidarity among “the little guys” of the digital world: “An injury to one is an injury to all of us. We need to make a stand against crooks like this. If you'd like to join us in this fight, cancel your gym memberships, post on their Facebook pages, Tweet about it or even pass this on to a journalist.”

Image Source: Twitter

Hundreds, if not thousands, of users did just that. The story was picked up by several online national news venues, as well as other kinds of digital media. A Passive-Aggressive Notes subscriber, for instance, submitted the letter as an artifact of her own experience.

Simultaneously, Fitness SF crafted their own response via Facebook.

Image source: Fitness SF Facebook page

As the negative press poured in, the page’s moderators could hardly delete comments as fast as they were posted. Rather than angering posters, those sympathetic to Jonen’s plight interpreted the move as Fitness SF’s white flag of surrender. In short, all of Fitness SF’s attempts to defend themselves were ill-received and rhetorically ineffective on the large scale. As a direct result of these ill-advised PR moves, Fitness SF’s Yelp ratings took a nosedive.

Image Source: Google Search for Yelp ratings

And what were commenter’s major grievances? The vast majority of the conversation’s participants expressed disgust at Fitness SF’s inability to handle a simple billing dispute privately and called the gym out for unprofessionalism and image mismanagement.

Image Source: Screen Captures from Facebook

More than one commenter expressed displeasure at the gym’s use of the word “hacker,” interpreting it as a sign of additional ineptitude.

Image Source: Screencaptures from Facebook

The vast majority of Jonen’s supporters aligned their interest with his through the language of commerce, whether or not they themselves openly identified as small-business owners negotiating an increasingly-corporatized world. Although Jonen’s complete letter makes significant gestures toward anti-capitalistic attitudes, his internet audience sanitizes these claims by identifying Fitness SF as a “rule-breaker” rather than an emblem of systemic disadvantage. In short, audiences saw the relationship between corporations and small businesses as characteristic, not a flaw, of modern capitalism, and defended common business practice as the chief arbitrator of such disagreement, rather than the source of it.

In staking such claims, audiences also tended to place their faith in the court of public opinion, rather than a court of law, as the ultimate arbitrator in such a case. The frequency of comments identifying a “public relations” blunder exhibit audience awareness of content manufactured exclusively to manipulate them and a distaste for instances in which corporations unsuccessfully do so. In a strange rhetorical twist, those who participated in the debate often cited Fitness SF’s public airing of grievance as the most egregious event in the conflict, ignoring the fact that it was actually Jonen’s letter that launched the dispute into the public sphere. Commenters sent a distinct message to corporations: “Don’t, as a rule, expose me to or consult me about your private disputes—I am not interested in an ethics of disclosure. But if you do, expect me to disagree with you.” Similarly, audiences were much more like to agree with an individual’s complaint against a faceless corporation when the individual, as Jonen did, unmasks himself. But from such internally inconsistent rhetoric, it seems such audiences can hardly be counted on to take action outside of digital environs; their activism begins and ends in a brief digital moment that claims “going viral” as its chief mode of social change.

Perhaps I might, in closing, examine the digital artifacts this brief flurry of activity leaves behind. The news articles might be permanently linked to the gym as a Google search result, but Facebook comments will either eventually become buried under new material (as Facebook is notoriously difficult to navigate chronologically) or perhaps deleted all together. The longest-standing artifact that testifies to the controversy’s existence is the reviews of the business itself, now permanently tainted by the reduced average the complaint has brought to review pages like Yelp, despite these kinds of comments and ratings being in clear violation of Yelp’s policies against hearsay (“We want to hear about your firsthand consumer experience, not what you heard from your co-worker or significant other. Try to tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations”). It is no coincidence, then, that a site that operates on a logic of consumer empowerment and crowd-sourced value judgments to cloak business promotion in democratic election will probably testify longest of the freelancer’s struggle against corporate America.

Remediation, New Media, and “Lorem Ipsum" as Censorship of Transparency

Laura Thain — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:54:01 +0000

Image Credit: Per Erik Strandberg

“Lorem ipsum” has been recognized by publishers and graphic designers throughout the 20^th century as the industry standard text by which to mock up text layout, thanks to a small UK company called Letraset, which mass-manufactured dry transferrable lettering from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the advent of digital media and desktop publishing, the first two words of the ubiquitous sequence have become recognizable to the population at large. It appears in markup templates almost universally across publishing platforms. Templates in word processing, presentation software, and web design all bear the mark of their print forbearers. Thus, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, a scrambled copy of an excerpt from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (“of the ends of good and evil”) has entered into popular discourse as a recognizable placeholder, as Wikipedia says, “used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation…by removing the distraction of meaningful content.”

This post would like to explore lorem ipsum as an ideological concept in both print and digital media. In part, this exploration will question what it means to view text itself as visual rhetoric. How can text draw attention to or defer attention from itself as a visual object? How can conventions of representation make text, like lorem ipsum, disappear? Might we view such disappearance as a sort of censorship? If so, how can we describe the internal logic of such censorship as an ideological trend in the digital age?

Lorem ipsum corresponds to a larger concept in mass media—that of transparency and immediacy. According to Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, modern society exhibits a dual impulse regarding media representation. On the one hand, audiences demand multimodal approaches (the multiplication of medium), but they also demand hyperrealistic representation. In such hyperrealistic representations, the medium becomes transparent, delivering the message it carries with as little perceivable mediation as possible. “Our culture,” Bolter and Grusin argue, “ideally…wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” Society’s demand for “invisible” mediation leads to medium transparency and immediacy—the medium delivers an object that seems immediately present because the medium focuses attention on the object, not the delivery of that object. Virtual reality, hyperrealism in film, and reality television are all examples of immediacy because the medium’s internal logic “dictates that the medium itself should disappear,” condensing the distance between the imagined and the real.

Lorem ipsum itself represents a conundrum, because as a text, it exhibits transparent qualities. But this strategy is designed to draw attention to the medium in which it appears—the very opposite of the relationship Bolter and Grusin describe between hypermediation and immediacy in Remediation. In the case of text as a visual object, then, we must amend the terms Bolter and Grusin give us to account for text as a form of mediation. When text appears contentless, it calls attention to the medium that contains it, rather than to itself. This relationship denies text as a medium in itself, rendering it an object of visual rhetoric used to display the mediating power of the medium in which it appears.

What ideological corollaries to the concept of lorem ipsum can we identify and digital and print media? Where can we see this phenomenon replicated? One clear example is in internet advertising. As we read, we consistently “filter out” the content of advertisements using recognizable advertisement form, interpreting the object only as an “ad” without paying any attention to its content. Take, for instance, this example:

Image Credit: Screencapture from CNN.com, as captured by LT

Because audiences familiar with current modes of internet advertising have become accustomed to the disruptive ad, in most cases they feel the immediate impulse to “skip” or exit the ad. The same is true of timed advertisment—attention is more likey to be placed on the “skip ad” countdown than on the advertisement itself, even as it briefly forces itself upon the viewer.

Image Credit: Screen capture from Youtube, as captured by LT.

Streaming sites abound with a manipulation of this effect, disguising advertising with the mask of what the viewer is actually looking for. As consumers adapt to strategies implemented by ad produces and producers revise their strategies according to those adaptations, the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, and news media blur considerably. Which of these, for instance, represents the actual link to download the desired object?

What arises is a form of self-censorship. Audiences constantly filter their line of vision, giving attention to what they are looking for and ignoring or willing transparent the constant web of distraction that surrounds it. Perhaps this—the interpretation of a media object as unimportant or ignorable—has always been the most insidious form of censorship.

As Bolter and Grusin point out, the 20^th century has no monopoly on hypermediation. 18^th century print culture exhibited a mass market that demanded consumers make calculated choices about what they consumed; these choices multiplied exponentially in the 19^th century. But never before has hypermediation existed across so many media simultaneously, making a transition between self-“filter bubble”-censorship and external censorship, whether on moral, political, or ethical grounds, possible.

I would like to suggest that we can see examples of this external censorship capitalizing on established, cognition-oriented modes of self-censorship in play in multiple arenas. For example, Managing Director of the Mormon Family and Church History Department Richard Turley responded to John Krakauer's controversial investigation of violence in the Mormon faith in Under the Banner of Heaven by arguing that "...[a]lthough the book may appeal to gullible persons who rise to such bait like trout to a fly hook, serious readers who want to understand Latter-day Saints and their history need not waste their time on it." Here, Turley criticizes Krakauer's book using language that differentiates the elite, skeptical, knowledgable reader from ordinary mass-readership (for him, "gullible persons"), and, by such a logic, condemns Krakauer's text for its content by means of its medium; that is, pop journalism. In this portion of his critique, he censors by rendering the text itself irrelevent or, perhaps, invisible.

This highlights a larger trend in modern acts of censorship, broadly defined: popular culture is often degraded as not worthy of attention due to its mass appeal and ordinary audience. The most effective critiques of mass-market literature, such as the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Gray, for instance, often hang a banner above these works declaring them “unworthy of attention” rather than immoral or distasteful; the latter labels often prove to evoke more, rather than less, interest in a work, whereas declaring them “wastes of time” has a greater affect on deterring particular readers.

As literary or media scholars we tend to exhibit great skepticism toward censorship that denies audiences the ability to, to put it simply, “think for themselves.” We decry modes of censorship that oppose audience agency in negotiating semiotic systems and cultural, ethical, or moral codes. We should, then, be equally vigilant against this “lorem ipsum” censorship. It is a censorship that attempts to ascribe and emphasize medium (that popular culture is synonymous with discardable literature; that challenges which question the terms of an argument exist outside the realm of civil discourse) at the expense of content; it asks us to interpret text itself as transparent; contentless; uninteresting. Such arguments ask us to ignore “the man behind the curtain,” rather than blindly opposing him; it is these arguments that may be the most dangerous of all.

Archiving the Past, Archiving the Future

Laura Thain — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 21:25:38 +0000

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Archives are by definition past-oriented. The very act of “archiving” renders an object an artifact of a specific past, although its orientation within that past depends on the disciplinary practice of the archivist. 20^th century archival studies have made considerable movements toward standardization, and alongside this standardization of archival methodologies comes an expansion of that which we consider worthy of being archived. Thus, we no longer operate under the assumption that 20^th century archives will be composed exclusively of objects from a distant, exclusively white Western patriarchal past—we compose queer archives, postcolonial archives, feminist archives, and, perhaps, in the case of Bel Geddes, even archives of the future. Join me as I explore the idea of a future archive and its relationship to the archival ethos of the Harry Ransom Center, in part by exploring exhibition visitor’s own “visions” of the future.

The push for expansion of Western archives in the 20^th century operates at least in part on a simple premise: that those who write the past control the present. As the old saying goes, “history is written by the victors.” This implies a causal relationship in which the privilege of history writing is the purview of the dominant cultural force, but we must realize that power transfers both ways here—the very act of writing history can transform an underrepresented body into a powerful voice in the public sphere. So if the composition of the archive determines the perspective of the present, where can we place the future in such a schema? What place do imaginations of the future have in this archive? And how much can these imaginations serve as self-fulfilling prophecies, transforming futuristic visions into powerful agents of change?

Image Credit: Laura Thain. Click for larger image.

The court of public opinion can help us here to determine how the idea of “the future” figures into public imagination. The Center ends the Bel Geddes exhibition with a display of Bel Geddes’ 1930 predictions of 1940. On either side of the display, there is space for viewers to make their own predictions about “the near future.”

The submissions generally break down into three categories: optimistic/utopic, pessimistic/apocalyptic, and neutral/technological. The optimistic responses reveal what viewers wish for in the future, often against the historical trajectories of the present: “nobama,” “astros win world series,” “less die,” “ Hispanic gay president,” “blending of races,” “no war or hunger,” “North/South Korean peace,” or “more pie.” As one submitted emphasizes, “HOPE! The future is now!” These optimistic views of the future make claims about what viewers desire in the present.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

In the pessimistic/apocalyptic responses, viewers reveal problems the claim exist in the present which can only become more dramatic in the future: “robots will complete their domination,” “civil war,” “our plan[e]t will be really polluted,” “more wildlife species go extinct,” “war in the Middle East,” “zombie apocalypse,” and “less pie.” Although some of the responses take their apocalyptic claims less seriously than others, all use the “future archive” to levy complaints against past and present.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Finally, there are those that, like Bel Geddes, make technological predictions that contain no value judgments. Technology is synonymous with progress in these sorts of claims, but all base their notions of future developments on the present “frontier:” “flying cars,” “materials and engineering will be based on [natural phenomena],” “everything [will be a] touch screen,” “personalized medicine using genetics,” “cheaper printers so civilians can make their own products,” “self-repairing materials,” or “deep space exploration.” These comments define what, among the current cutting edge technologies, constitutes “the frontier” and make inferences based on these assumptions, a style of futuristic archive that resembles Bel Geddean futurism more strongly than the optimistic or pessimistic visions of the future.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

I’d like to suggest that this neutral ethos is strongly related to the ethos of the Ransom Center’s archival practices in general and the role of critical distance in the process of archival acquisitions in particular. Although the Center has invested considerable resources in acquiring sources of importace to traditional notions of the Western Canon, its pre-20^th century sources often do not compare to those of older, more heavily endowed archives. Instead, what distinguishes the Center’s archive is its eagerness to extend archival resources to 20^th century materials and its attempt, most notably under Tom Staley, to acquire on the literary “frontier.” By making smart bets, or, we might say, futuristic prophesies about the future value of present literature, the Harry Ransom Center’s archival ethos shares much of the futuristic vision that its Bel Geddes exhibition celebrates.

Image Credit: Laura Thain. Click for larger image.

One final note on “archives of the future”: the rapid technological innovation the exhibition’s audiences foresee (and not without good reason) also implies that as the rate of such innovation increases, so too does the process of archaicizing older technology. But while this translates to uselessness of futility in the world of technology, archaic or the past-oriented attributes in the literary world are a precondition of canonical status. As this canonical process becomes increasingly compressed, I’d venture to predict (perhaps optimistically?) that the canon of the future will expand even further.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Negotiating Modesty: Reading Mormon Fashion Blogs as Visual Rhetoric

Laura Thain — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:22:32 +0000

Image Source: Clothed Much

Fashion blogs have proliferated the internet since its inception; the rhetoric of the genre is as multifaceted as its participants, most of whom are women. Daily fashion blogging, in which the blogger takes regular photos of the outfit she assembles each morning, is a popular iteration of the genre. Obviously much of the blogger’s value systems is exhibited through the personal ethos she cultivates on these blogs; the way the blogger frames the narrative of the outfit in terms of its relationship to her day-to-day activities reveals much about these value systems, as well. An interesting subculture has received a substantial amount of attention in the fashion blogging community recently, and that is modesty blogging. All the modesty blogs I’ve come across are motivated by religious restriction; the vast majority of these base their definitions of modest clothing upon the tenets of the Mormon church. Of course, the situated ethos of modesty blogging must negotiate an inherent contradiction between two competing definitions of modest: the function of modest dress as a physical representation of religious belief and the concept of modesty as the quality of being unassuming, scrupulous, and free from presumption. What does it mean to take pride in modest dress, to wear it as a badge of individualism and difference? And how can we read these modesty blogs in terms of visual culture? Join me as I take you on a journey into another strange corner of the internet: Mormon fashion blogging.

Image Source: Cats and Cardigans

We might make a few generalizations about popular fashion blogs: most successful blogs attract their audiences with an ethos that exhibits an internally consistent personal style (what we might call a “style narrative”) that is accomplished by innovative pairings. Thus, the blog initially attracts an audience with the familiar—a “style narrative” of, for example, grunge, retro, hipster, or editorial—and keeps their interest with the unfamiliar—a scarf made into a bolero or a vintage headband woven into a punk outfit. We might, then, loosely read the ethos of these blogs as “text” in terms of Barthes’ conforming/cutting edge dichotomy in The Pleasure of the Text. This makes the case of modesty fashion blogs especially interesting, because the “cutting edge” component of these blog’s ethos is, in fact, a conservative reaction to counterculture—it operates on the fantasy of return to a dress standard of the past (although its location in the past is certainly ambiguous). The familiar, plagiarizing edge is, in fact, the way that these modesty blogs attempt to participate in mainstream discourse—a discourse that is often countercultural (hipster, grunge, retro). Their popularity comes in large part from the way these blogs resemble in their formal elements many other successful fashion blogs, but are able to translate their audience’s desire for surprise and innovation into a restricted code of dress.

Image Source: Cotton and Curls

Most Mormon fashion blogs define immodest clothing as anything low-cut, sleeveless, backless, or too short—some combine a series of positive descriptions along with the negative (for instance “long skirts” or “skirts below the knee” rather than “no skirts above the knee”). Most do not address fit but instead warn against “revealing” clothing. Concrete restrictions almost always regard coverage, rather than the tightness or fit of clothing. This ethos in general is oriented around fulfilling a minimum requirement of modesty, and the boundary of that minimum requirement is represented physically by the temple garment, an undergarment standardized and manufactured by the central Church. Women begin wearing this garment daily when they receive their endowment, which for most coincides with their marriage. We can reasonably assume that most of these bloggers wear temple garments, as they advertise their status as Temple-married women, but it is worth mentioning that almost none of these bloggers mention the temple garment or the way it might restrict their code of dress; rather, these women speak of their restricted dress as a lifelong commitment predating their temple endowment, and a code of modesty that is self-defined and self-enforced. (Many of these blogs begin their "about me" with some variation of “Modesty means ____ to me…”).

The deferral of the issue of temple garments is not only a reflection of their sacred status among church members (it is in general considered inappropriate to speak about temple garments to non-members, and is considered offensive to display visual representations of them)—it is also indicative of these women attempting to find a place in mainstream fashion discourse; to not be noticed for their wardrobe restriction but for their good sense of style. The rhetoric of these blogs might be condensed as such: “I am reflecting an internal commitment to God in my physical appearance, but I do this so well that you would not notice unless I told you explicitly.” This rhetorical mechanism seems to operate to ease the tension between competing modesty discourses I have outlined above: these bloggers can take personal, inner pride in their commitment to modesty without bringing attention to their difference (and thus translating pride of self into the public sphere). Counterintuitively, this is accomplished by assimilating successfully into the fashionable discourse of the mainstream.

Image Source: wearing it on my sleeves

But there is a way in which this attitude can be read as subversive in terms of Church doctrine, especially when one considers the history of sumptuary laws in the Mormon Church. (There is a useful article in the Mormon periodical Dialogue that outlines the subject in more detail.) Though we might imagine the discourse on modesty to call back to the conservativism of the Einsenhower era, this is not the locus of the nostalgia for modest behavior—it is, in fact, its origin. The first explicit call to modest dress occured in 1951, when Church authority Spencer W. Kimball extolled young, unmarried Mormon women to distinguish themselves from their non-member peers explicitly through a more conservative code of dress:

"There is no reason why women need to wear a low-cut or otherwise revealing gown just because it is the worldly style. We can create a style of our own."

It is important to note that this address, given at a BYU devotional, was aimed mostly at unmarried young women. As Kimball argues,

"We knew of one mother who remonstrated with her lovely daughter who intended to buy a modest evening gown. The mother pleaded: 'Darling, now is the time to show your pretty shoulders and back and neck. When you are married in the temple that will be time enough to begin wearing conservative clothes.' What can be expected of the new generation if the mothers lead their own offspring from the path of right?...The fellows could show courage and good judgment if they encouraged their young women friends to wear modest clothing. If a young man would not date a young woman who is improperly clothed, the style would change very soon."

Kimball assumes that women who are married are already living the law of modesty because of the nature of their temple garments; here, as in most of the discourse that follows, the concern is that unmarried women might delay that sense of responsibility until after they take their temple vows.

The loose standards that Kimball sets out are a reaction against, rather than a return to, the styles of the 1950s—in fact, his distaste for revealing clothing resembles a return to the fashion of the 1910s, before hemlines were raised and bustlines lowered in the so-called Roaring 20s. And it is certainly of some significance that Kimball himself experienced adolescence in the 1910s—he is demanding, to some extent, a return to the conceptions of modesty that existed during his own days of courtship.

Yet Kimball’s call to arms is all very general. The restrictions that modesty fashion bloggers set out above—specific prohibitions against revealing this part of the body or that—are simply not extant in this early discourse. In fact, the next significant prohibitions against immodesty among LDS youth are even less specific than Kimball’s address above. Let us examine the 1965 iteration of a pamphlet still published today called “For The Strength of Youth,” which serves to outline the standards which young Mormons are expected to uphold.

Image Credit: Barncow

Note the text’s deferral of specific criteria (“it is difficult to make an over-all statement concerning modest standards of dress, because modesty cannot be determined by inches or fit since that which looks modest on one person may not be so on another…”). Instead, the text chooses to deliberately define modesty against the standards of the countercultural movements of the 1960s. It warns against “grubby” fashion, implores women to maintain traditional mores of femininity in their dress, and considers androgyny to be the greatest threat to the modesty of young women.

Image Credit: Barncow

The pamphlet also extols young women to “dress to enhance their natural beauty and femininity…Few girls or women ever look well in backless or strapless dresses. Such styles often make the figure look ungainly or large, or they show the bony structures of the body…Clothes should be comfortable and attractive without calling attention [to the body].” It is also careful to warn women against wearing pants outside of athletic activity: “Pants…are not desirable attire for shopping, at school, in the library, in cafeterias or restaurants.”

Thus we can see that in the 1960s, second-wave feminism and androgynous dress were the chief modes of discourse that the Church set to dress its women against. The letter of the law in these pamphlets is far less respected than the spirit of the law, and the “law” is an attractive but non-sexualized, and therefore sanitized, femininity. Counterculture was at the top of the immodest hierarchy.

Image Source: Haircut and General Attitude

Not so today. Mormon women increasingly define modesty in terms of explicit clothing guidelines (inseam lengths, coverage) rather than cultural association; no longer is clothing a statement of conservative reaction to the styles of counterculture but instead a playful interpretation of them. Cultural associates of modes of dress cease to be called into question within this dialogue; instead, the temple garment becomes the silent marker of how much skin is “too much.” Anything that covers these undergarments constitutes modest dress.

I see the discourse on modesty in the present day taking place, then, in two separate spheres. On the one hand, church-sanctioned periodicals continue to emphasize the function of modesty as a marker of difference against counterculture, although this is a trope that has all but lost its meaning. Meanwhile, fashionable young Mormon women often embrace an identity that is countercultural—they embrace their ability to participate in cutting-edge fashion while still adhering to the explicit restrictions of their faith.

It seems to me that one significant effect of this is, in fact, a return, in a sense, to Kimball’s initial exortations to unmarried women. To the insider Mormon community, these young married bloggers are in a sense instructing their younger or unmarried peers how to live the letter of the law of modesty before they take their temple vows and don their temple garments. For the fashion blogging audience at large, these women express their identity through their commitment to modesty by showing how easily the rhetoric of modesty can fit into the tenets of mainstream fashion; the commitment to coverage exists as a challenge or unexpected element in this endeavor that only enhances their ethos, rather than undermining it, in the mainstream. Modesty then ultimately exists as a function of creativity rather than restriction. And though most of these women are probably unaware of the complex rhetorical history that makes such an ethos possible, they are nonetheless operating in a space in which the definition of modesty has drastically shifted over time, making it possible for these women to, as Benjamin Franklin might say, take pride in their humility—to have no reservations in being immodest in demeanor about their modesty in dress. I will at the very least claim this: that the function of modesty as difference has taken a countercultural turn, and, if a woman being refused entry to a BYU testing center for wearing skinny jeans is any indication, the rhetoric of modesty within the Mormon community is very much a battleground in which the rules of engagement are still being hammered out.

The Secret History of Lines

Laura Thain — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:53:24 +0000

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

With 24 hours to go, media outlets projecting the outcome of election day are covered in geographical maps of states and counties painted starkly in red and blue. I’ve enjoyed the responses of armchair intellectuals like Randall Munroe, who playfully reinterprets the red/blue divide to create a complex and comprehensive visual history of the Republican and Democratic parties. The proliferation of regional and ideological divides across multiple media this week urged me to explore two important questions in visual rhetoric: What does it mean to visualize a geographical boundary? And what does it mean to visualize an invisible line? (I would be remiss not to mention the enormous amount of border studies that exist in postcolonial and Anglophone literature and criticism—but today on viz I will try to confine myself to a discussion of the visualization of intranational borders.) Here to help me is the photography of Colin Stearns, Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons. Stearns' current project is photographing the Mason-Dixon line in order to capture "this border of cultural distinction at the places of its occurence." Each of his photographs contain the invisible interstate line somewhere within their composition. I'll also put Stearns in dialogue with William Byrd II, the 18^th century commissioner of the colonial line between North Carolina and Virginia.

First, a bit about the Mason-Dixon line’s place in the historical record and in our national imagination. In his artist’s statement, Stearns recognizes the Mason-Dixon line as a “cultural barrier,” a particularly apt term considering the large discrepancy between the actual and the imagined political effect of the drawing of the line. Surveyed between 1763 and 1767, the line’s chief purpose was to settle a land dispute between the Penns of Pennsylvania and the Barons Baltimore of Maryland. The ensuing line established a firm boundary between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania and Delaware as a satellite colony of Pennsylvania with varying levels of independent government in the colonial period. (Delaware’s history of strong government influence from the dynastic governors of both Maryland and Pennsylvania no doubt contributed to the eagerness of its home-grown politicians to be the first to join, as an independent state, the newly formed United States in the 1780s).

Image Source: Wikipedia

But at no point during the colonial period did the Mason-Dixon serve as an actual dividing line between slave and non-slave colonies because there simply did not exist such a delineation. Laws explicitly prohibiting slavery, with the noted exception of Vermont, did not exist in the colonial period. (Vermont’s Constitutional Charter, which declared Vermont separate from New Hampshire early in the Revolutionary War, is one of, if not the first, abolishments of slavery among the British colonies of North America.) It was not until a full two decades after the Mason-Dixon was drawn that Pennsylvania outlawed slavery (1780); Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire did the same shortly after the recognition of the new Republic in 1783-1784. New York and New Jersey took decades to follow suit (1799 and 1804, respectively), and the line cannot be argued to have the smallest significance in slave/free state designations west of the Appalachians. Delaware, firmly north of the dividing line, did not abolish slavery until the 13^th amendment was passed in 1865. Clearly, the Mason-Dixon line had no correlation to the practice of slavery in the colonial period. It was not until the 19^th century—during Congressional debates culminating in the Missouri Compromise of 1820—that the Mason-Dixon line began to symbolize a politicized North/South divide that claimed slavery as its principle cultural difference.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

So how can we read the Mason-Dixon Line’s historical significance with more care? How can this reading help inform Stearns’ project and in general expand our conception of the visual representations of political boundaries? I answer this question by going even further back into the colonial 18^th century of America and examining the first significant commissioned survey of a colonial boundary—that of North Carolina and Virginia, led by failed governor hopeful and plantation aristocrat William Byrd II of Virginia.

Image Credit: UNC

Byrd published two histories of his 1728 excursion, both of which have become indispensible primary sources of both public and private life in the 18^th century colonial South. (Byrd’s secret diary, which was decoded only in the 20^th century, gives a particularly detailed glimpse into the private thoughts and cultural attitudes of a colonial husband, land owner, and slave holder.) The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina contains an official account of the survey, but the more interesting text is the semi-parodic and much more candid Secret History of the Dividing Line, which Byrd drafted for a small circle of political elite in England. It is of no small significance that it is in the Secret History, not the official account, that Byrd spends considerable time describing difference between the Virginians, who he saw as the gentile elite of the English colonies in North America, and the North Carolinians, who he describes as disorganized, uneducated, and culturally inferior. In addition, the Secret History also emphasizes that the initiative to survey the line originated within the councils of the colonies themselves, not from a royal entity. The importance of colonial sovereignty in the exercise of drawing the dividing line receives great rhetorical attention, and so the end result of these two conflicting impulses in the text is that while the North Carolinians are culturally discredited, their presence in the process of boundary-making is essential to the legality of the line formed. Byrd is thus able to legitimize the survey expedition both culturally and politically, strengthening his claim to the validity of its existence and the importance of the endeavor.

That Byrd considered these elements to belong to a “secret” history—that is, a suppressed or forgotten one—is in no small way related to the immense amount of cultural labor that surrounds the border-making project, and this is the same type of cultural labor that political factions exert and popular imagination perpetuates in the case of the Mason-Dixon line. The line became a crucial piece of evidence for both secessionist and unionist rhetoric during the various secession crises of 1820-1840, and of course, played a role in the ultimate dissolution of the Union in 1861. Beginning in the 1820’s, the survey stood no longer as a triumph of scientific instrumentation (Mason and Dixon’s survey techniques later led to the first accurate calculations of the earth’s density) in drawing an arbitrary geographical border or a legal precedent for settling land disputes between colonies and therefore states. Instead, the line was used to argue that political borders reflected an innate or organic cultural difference between each side’s respective constituents, and thus, strengthened the legitimacy of the artificial divide. And of course, unlike the lines drawn by the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Mason-Dixon line exists in physical representation, with a stone marker bearing the arms of both Pennsylvania and Maryland placed every 5 miles along the surveyed line.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

And it is artist like Stearns who reveal and interrogate the labor of creating these boundaries. Stearns’ photography does so by several means. First, he utterly avoids the iconic line-markers, choosing instead to allow a mixture of organic and architectural details to connect the physical composition of the photographs to the theoretical subject matter. In highlighting these two types of “line-drawing,” Stearns seems to emphasize both the political border’s reliance on a rhetoric of organic divide (that is, that the cultural distinctions between populations predate the proverbial drawing of a line in the sand) but its essentially constructed nature. Take, for example, this photo:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

Sometimes his photos make a primarily architectural argument:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

And sometimes they seem to make an organic one:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

But almost always, they combine elements of both.

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

If I can get away with making overarching aesthetic claims here, I would like to posit this: the audience, in the very act of viewing these pictures with the knowledge that they are visualizations of a geographical border, searches for delineation within them, even as they know those delineations are artificial. The audience thus becomes both aware of political boundaries as a cultural construction and aware of their own complicitness in creating them; the pieces no longer become a mere accusation of the stark black-and-white artificiality of manmade divides but an interrogation into the process by which we as members of society participate in the creation and perpetuation of those boundaries, even when they become oppressive.

Munroe's Complex Visual History of the US Congress. Image Credit: XKCD

The lines I’ve examined today helped to create and sustain a cultural and geographical border between the North and the South and designate them as opposing ideological spaces, creating a (bi)polarized and (bi)polarizing political rhetoric that has dominated American politics since the splintering of the Democratic Republican party and Jackson’s presidency during the aforementioned 18^th Congress of the 1820’s (but that’s another long story). Where might we go further with this investigation? Can we use extend these arguments to describe how political boundaries function in 21^st century America? Does, for instance, our current connection between political boundary and ideological identity depend less upon regional dichotomies (North/South, East Coast/West Coast) and more upon population density (urban/rural)? How does this change how we might read these invisible lines?

Girl Power: Taylor Swift beyond The Waves

Laura Thain — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar

This blog post started as a conversation in the break room here at the DWRL. After a discussion of the subversive, alternative female artists of the 90s—not only in band formulation like Riot Grrl or Bikini Kill but especially the singer/songwriters who dominated top 40 radio: Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple—someone mused, “Where have all the angry girls gone?”

I can’t say I like the answer. The angry girls have been billed as terrorists (MIA) or criminals (Fiona Apple). Some girls perform anger in a way that only weakly resonates with the general public (Miley Cyrus). But the angry girl has also been rebranded. The inevitable subsumption of alternative culture by the mainstream has cloaked our angry girl in airy dresses with flowing tresses and the voice of an angel to deliver the proverbial “fuck you.” I am, of course, referring to the girl who’s on the cover of every magazine this week as she promotes her new album Red. So hey girl hey, Taylor Swift—this week’s post goes out to you as I explore the paradoxical relationship between the underground and the mainstream, which emerge and subsume and emerge again in a cycle as endless as the couple on the verge of reconciliation (really! I think so!) in “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

So how do we get from Courtney Love to Taylor Swift? Perhaps we might take a look at one of my favorite pieces of concert memorabilia—the sparkly heart barrette sold during Hole’s Live Through This tour.

Image Credit: Tastingsin's Tumblr

Live Through This dropped merely four days after the death of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain, an event many music critics identify as crucial to Nirvana’s transition from underground to mainstream popularity. Certainly we can read Barthes’ Death of the Author into the cultural narrative here, but let us defer that question and focus on the larger movement of grunge and punk rock into what I will call the “stadium rock” sphere in the mid ‘90s—that is, that the initial countercultural impulses of grunge and punk become incorporated into the sphere of mass culture. Hole’s second album serves as an important piece of rhetorical evidence for this. It is drastically more accessible than the first and received acclaim from popular and alternative music critics alike.

There are two ways we might read the heart, which was sold in large quantities throughout the Live Through This tour. We might read it as an ironic statement on Love’s part; that is, that Love is attempting to show her distaste for traditional cultural mores of gender and femininity by expressing her identity in an exaggeratingly feminine object. (The more popular version of the barrette came in hot pink.) The cover of Live Through This seems to affirm this reading:

Image Credit: Amazon

But the mechanism is not purely ironic. As Erika Reinstein famously said in what has come to be known as the Riot Grrrl Manifesto (published in a ‘zine in ’92)

“BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit.”

Love’s incorporation of the barrette can be seen, I think, as a reclaiming of femininity on women’s own terms; that women should feel free to take back the domestic or the feminine as a willing and willful act, not as an act of subversion of subservience. The precondition for this, as Reinstein argues, is a self-designated, self-created feminine space.

But as that space became defined by powerful, “angry” female vocalists of the ‘90s, the line between ironic or self-designated participation in the feminine and the feminine space as inferior or restrictive (i.e. a patriarchally defined feminine space) became, in my view, increasingly blurred. Once female-defined, female-inhabited spaces became available for mass consumption, the mechanisms of popular culture transformed Hole’s barrette into a face-value gesture. The anger regarding and demand for social justice, especially for women, transforms into a more palatable “women scorned” motif. Thus, the danger of female anger is contained by means of isolation; by individualizing it (Swift’s endless parade of breakup songs) rather than generalizing it. A breakup, after all, is something we “get over.”

So finally, I’d like make some particular comments on Taylor Swift’s visit to Ellen:

The video has earned Swift some heat for being “humorless,” especially about the central theme of her songwriting—her breakups. (An ecard recently made the internet rounds, expressing “Taylor Swift, maybe you’re the problem.”) But as much as I might object to a particular brand of singer/songwriter that I think Swift represents—the woman who, despite the plethora of social injustices against women that exist, chooses to use her potentially empowering anger to wax generic on winning at breakups—the idea that Swift is obligated to make her personal life available for public consumption for daring to aestheticize her feelings is the worse offense. So although I think we might read Swift as complicit in a tired out old narrative that sanitizes “girl power” into something ultimately less threatening than the demand for social justice, complicit with patriarchal ideas of femininity or not, she can never deserve to be subject to them.

Sarah Palin, Hypermediated Celebrity, and Compressed Nostalgia

Laura Thain — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Source: Entertainment Weekly

I’m afraid I dare divert our attention away from the current Vice-Presidential debate this evening (as tempted as I am to address Paul Ryan’s recently released photos from a year-old Time shoot) and address the original celebrity VP with the limited rhetorical perspective that four years can give us. With the release of the HBO television movie Game Change in March of this year, the premiere of her daughter’s and grandson’s reality show Life’s a Tripp on Lifetime in June, and Bristol Palin’s return to the All-Star season of Dancing with the Stars just weeks ago, Sarah Palin has managed to pop up quite frequently in celebrity media even four years after her failed bid for the vice-presidency. Just this week in LA, a paparazzi photo of a much-thinner Palin made the internet rounds, prompting an investigation from People. (Surprise: in an exclusive interview, Palin translates her new, slimmer physique into an endorsement for a forthcoming fitness book that directly opposes Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which Palin openly criticized in 2010.) How can we explain this resurgence in public interest in Palin, especially in an election year? What can the public’s interest in Sarah Palin’s post-political life, as well as the eagerness of the media to portray it, tell us about political celebrity in 2012?

First, it’s important to define what I mean by “celebrity” here, and so I’ll borrow Graeme Turner’s definition. Fame can loosely be described as a person who garners public interest from their public deeds; celebrity, however, can only be ascribed to a figure when the public’s interest shifts from the figure’s public life to his or her private life, privileging the private as the site of authenticity. (In so doing, the public/the mass media might lose track of the source of fame and the figure might enjoy a celebrity status propelled and sustained solely by the public’s interest in his or her private life—in other words, that celebrity reaches a point of stasis in which they are “famous for being famous.”) Thus, modern celebrity is impossible in an age that lacks mass media and is essentially a 20^th century phenomenon. And, as many scholars have argued, the more hypermediated public figures become, the more frequently these public figures achieve celebrity status by such a criteria.

The move from public figure to celebrity in the political realm, however, has happened much more slowly than in popular culture for a variety of reasons—differences in cultural register, a multi-generational audience, the threat of exposure by rivaling political factions, etc. In general, paradigmatic shifts in the mechanisms of fame in the political realm trail behind those in the celebrity realm, even as they sometimes closely resemble them. Take, for instance, the famous example of Kennedy and Nixon—Kennedy was able to capitalize on Hollywood-esque charisma, but only after Hollywood celebrities themselves had maintained for several decades a high-culture status.

What I find intensely interesting about Game Change is that it addresses the translation of popular culture celebrity into the political realm directly. The movie frames Sarah Palin as the well-intentioned but ultimately doomed response to Barack Obama’s political celebrity (which is invoked specifically throughout). Although the movie’s message on political celebrity is nuanced, I think the more interesting issue to address is how such a movie could be produced less than four years after the failed McCain/Palin campaign. Rhetorically, it claims perspective and even capitalizes on some sense of nostalgia for the energy and fervor of the 2008 election on both sides of the fence as if this event were archived in our cultural past. But how can this be when we have yet to even finish out the term that this election decided?

While I think the movie was clearly released to encourage reflection about behind-the-scenes politics of the current election, I think a deeper reading is available. I’d like to suggest a logical turn from the mechanism of celebrity I’ve described above, and that is, that if hypermediation accelerates our processes of celebrity designation and, as many have argued, of celebrity consumption and disposal, that the process of returning to the lost celebrity object with sentiment and longing, that is, nostalgia, must essentially also be accelerated. I have claimed above that I think that political celebrity lags behind popular culture celebrity in several significant ways; I think that this, too, is important to the puzzle of the public and the media’s interest in Sarah Palin. It is the single most important factor in designating her as a past 15-minutes-of-famer worth remembering. The combination of the conservative, and occasionally recalcitrant, nature of celebrity in the political realm and the adaptive, dynamic nature of celebrity in mass media allow for a nostalgic experience in a compressed amount of realtime of a figure we might not otherwise remember. (No one’s making any movies about Dan Quayle these days, are they?)

I want to close by expressing that I do not in this discussion mean to discount Palin and her family as their own agents; although I’m much more interested in the public’s response to that agency as channeled through the media, especially as I investigate objects produced by the media and consumed by the public. I find that discussions that emphasize the agency of Palin herself run a high risk of getting, as Sam Baker would say, “judgy”—that is, that they often adopt a rhetoric of disdain for and suspicion of anyone who would purposely seek out and seek to maintain media attention, even as these rhetors themselves are complicit in that mechanism.

What Andy Cohen Can Tell Us About Jim Lehrer

Laura Thain — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:00:14 +0000

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

I’m weighing in late this week on last week’s first presidential debate. Jay has usefully analyzed several covers of The New Yorker and illuminated for us a particular venue’s take on the candidates, while Todd has collected “Big Bird” memes to demonstrate a variety of reactions to Romney’s attack on PBS. I’d like to pick up the popular culture trail where Todd has left off and discuss one meme in particular, posted by RealityTVGifs on October 4^th, the morning after the first debate. The gif depicts presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama superimposed on Real Housewives of New Jersey Jacqueline Laurita and Teresa Giudice, respectively, while Andy Cohen, Executive VP of Bravo, moderates. How can we read the comparisons this image invites—of the presidential debate to a Real Housewives reunion special? Though there is obviously the potential of productive discussion in the relationship between Romney/President Obama and Laurita/ Guidice, what if we examine the less obvious juxtaposition: how can Andy Cohen inform our reading of moderator Jim Lehrer?

First, some context for the source of the image: the GIF was taken from the RHONJ reunion special, Season 4 Part 1 of 3. In RHONJ, as in all of the RH franchises, each season ends with a reunion, filmed after the season itself airs, in which the stars of the show comment on the previous season and respond to viewer questions. Andy Cohen, the executive face of Bravo and a producer of all of the RH iterations, hosts each reunion. Typically, Cohen takes a moderating role—that is, that he is guides the participants from sequence to sequence in one of two styles—either by asking the housewives questions directly (through which we might read Cohen as an agent for the television audience) or by selecting pre-submitted viewer questions (through which we might read the audience acting as their own agent). In a particularly fraught reunion special (or at least, one which is presented as such), Cohen often finds himself breaking up unproductive ad-hominem attacks, even ones that result in physical violence.

When asked about the altercation on his nighttime talk show Watch What Happens Live, Cohen remarked “[Teresa’s] stronger than she looks.”

Cohen seems mostly interested in preserving conversational momentum, so while he usually tolerates (and in many cases, instigates) these personal attacks, he gives them a short leash; once the possibilities of confrontation exhaust themselves, Cohen reclaims authority over the pacing and content of the narrative being produced and makes a concentrated effort to shift the focus onto a more productive subject. The parallels between Cohen’s role as “drama moderator” and Jim Lehrer’s as debate moderator are clear here: they both act as agents of a television audience whose responsibility is to facilitate a dialogue that efficiently reveals information.

And, increasingly, we can see the overlap between presidential candidates and celebrity in these debates as news outlets evaluate performance based not just on the ways in which candidates address issues but on their “personality.” But personality has two prongs here in relation to a discussion on presidential celebrity: personality as the performance of charisma and personality as the performance of intimacy. Certainly, historians trace this trend to the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960, but it seems to me that charisma, rather than intimacy, is the overarching criteria of such discussions. The key factor in discriminating between the cult of presidential personality and the cult of presidential celebrity, I think, is that the latter requires conflation of the public and the private—a construction that depends upon constant cultural labor in order to maintain an illusion of intimacy surrounding the political figure. We can see the relation between charisma and intimacy rather neatly performed in the clip below from the Nixon/Kennedy debates, as Nixon responds to the moderator’s question about political experience much more specifically and with arguably greater rhetorical skill than Kennedy, but lauds the virtues of non-disclosure and closed-door politics (“The president has always maintained, and very properly so, that he is entitled to get what advice he wants from his cabinet…without disclosing that to anybody!”), while Kennedy adopts a strategy of broad, direct speech by reorienting the premise of the question: “The question really is, which candidate and which party can meet the problems that the United States is going to face in the ‘60s?”.

It is in the labor of cultivating intimacy that the role of the moderator in public discourse becomes crucial. The moderator becomes an agent of the audience who has the ability to manipulate rhetorical distance to reveal or conceal information about those he is moderating. Yet he does all of this in plain sight, presenting himself as a neutral, transparent entity, not an agent himself. So go ahead and pay attention to that man behind the curtain, because he’s really one of “us”!

The comparison of Lehrer to Cohen brings to attention our assumptions about a moderator’s neutrality, in part because in the hypermediated world of The Real Housewives, our attention is constantly drawn to medium. The housewives not only engage in metadiscourse about the show itself but also discuss their treatment and participation in tabloid culture and online blogs. In addition, Cohen’s role hardly remains passive. Take, for instance, the clip below:

Real Housewives of NY "Shut Up" Montage at Reunion from Shannon Hatch on Vimeo.

As Cohen claims, the behavior of the housewives (in this case, of New York) was so egregious and that they “broke [him],” that is, that they forced him to break character or face. Why? Because, as Cohen in his frustration articulates, it is his responsibility to maintain the conversation’s productivity, which relies utterly on constantly maintaining intimacy between audience and housewife. “Shut up and let me ask about it,” “We’re going to get to it,” “Let me keep going,” “Moving on,” and his constant plea to “Let her speak” all emphasize that conventional structure—the “ask and answer” confessional—is absolutely necessary to accomplish this intimacy, while his remarks about having lunch and “getting on with it” seem to emphasize the severity of its disruption. So of course, once Cohen regains control of the reins, without skipping a beat, he looks straight into the eyes of socialite Sonja Morgan and, in utter earnestness, asks, “Sonja, tell me about Guam.”

(Cohen’s “breaking point” has become its own gif, often implemented in topical tumblrs as a means of regaining control of a conversation from an aggressive adversary:)

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

Lehrer entered this round of presidential debates as a reluctant moderator, agreeing only to return to the hot seat after being promised that the format of the debate would differ from those of 2008. (He again, this year, claims it will be his last.) A long time contributor and advocate of public broadcasting, Lehrer on the surface couldn’t be more different than Cohen; he has long defended his exploratory, rather than pointed or aggressive, moderating style as the hallmark of enlightened debate. ““If somebody wants to be entertained,” said Lehrer after the 2000 presidential debates, “they ought to go to the circus.”

And while he might paint himself as reluctant, the media has blasted him as “the worst moderator in the history of moderation.” But, as our examination of Cohen’s moderation tactics show, Lehrer’s goal was not hypermediacy but immediacy. His support for an open debate format and his almost willingness to be talked over all serve as evidence for Lehrer’s desire to appear as a transparent mechanism in the debate proceedings. Ultimately, it seems for Lehrer, his job is done best when it is noticed least; a successful debate should appear as an intelligent conversation between the two candidates. In fact, in response to criticism of his performance, Lehrer asked, “"I was thinking, `Weren't you paying attention to what was happening before your very eyes?” (In other words, why disrupt the intimacy between the debaters and the audience by bringing attention to the moderator?) And, more significantly, Lehrer favored the new debate format, saying “I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

Ultimately, Lehrer’s tactics aided Romney’s victory, which political commentators across a variety of news media outlets have attributed to the strong, in-charge demeanor he was able to portray during the 90-minute debate. But the question on many analyst’s minds now is articulated nicely by Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: “Mitt Romney’s challenge, with less than five weeks until Election Day, is to convince voters that the steady, decisive, in-command competitor who showed up for the first presidential debate is the real Mitt Romney.” I’ll be interested to see how the dynamic changes in next week’s debate, and how much moderator Candy Crowley and the town-hall format will have an effect on that change.

The Fate of Arcimboldo; The Fate of the Book

Laura Thain — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 21:21:10 +0000

Image credit: Wikipedia

I'll test my art history chops today (no promises) as I explore the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), late Renaissance Mannerist and an artist of interest to everyone from the critic Barthes to the stadium rock band Kansas to the surrealist Salvador Dali.

The designer(s) of this year’s TILTS symposium flier chose an engraving after Arcimboldo’s The Librarian (1566). In investigating some context for the painting, I couldn’t help but notice the aptness of the image—not only, of course, because of TILTS’ ever-present commitment to textual studies, but because of the particular place Arcimboldo holds in literary and popular imagination in the Post-Renaissance world.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

“Fate” is a tricky word because it, in its very definition, denies agency. In its most general sense, it is neutral; in its most particular, it signifies destruction and certain doom. Fate implies an unarticulated threat, inalterable and unavoidable, existing always in negation of the object at hand. In its most classical sense, the hubris to resist it can propel fate, giving it wings, enabling it in its most monstrous form.

And so here we are, two years after TILTS’ “The Digital and the Human(ities)” Symposium (2010-2011), approaching the issue of the digitizing of text from a different perspective. While in broad strokes, TILTS explored the possibilities of the digital in 2010, in 2012, it seems to be exploring, at least in part, the anxieties surrounding this structural shift—anxieties which, as the title so aptly captures, center around “the book’s inevitable ‘death’.” How can we read Arcimboldo’s imagine in tandem with this approach to the discourse of the digital humanities?

To begin, we might read Arcimboldo as existing in a pivotal (fated?) moment, as well. Painting after the last greats of the High Renaissance but at the cusp of the Baroque, he reaches back to High Renaissance aesthetics in the composition of his paintings in his form of composition, even as the work contrasts Michelangelo and Raphael in his content. But Arcimboldo’s composition strives to integrate man with nature and to highlight the divine in the marriage of the two—a distinct shift from the Neoplatonism of the High Renaissance, which elevated man as the near-divine and instructed that art should seek inspiration from the aestheticized universals (“Forms” or “nature”).

Arcimboldo’s clever visual articulation of the intersection of man and nature attracted the attention of Roland Barthes in his Arcimboldo essays; Barthes fixates on the way the artist employs rhetorical tropes into his painting—metonymy and paradox, for instance. For Barthes, Arcimboldo is a “rhetorician and magician” because of the structural semiotics he represents in his paintings; each part of what we recognize as a face is a discrete element meaningless in isolate, but when assembled, the elements of his paintings produce meaning in a sum greater than their parts. While Barthes argues that these “puzzles” are a metaphor for language, they also strongly exhibit Arcimboldo’s debt to Florentine Neoplatonism in their commitment to displaying meaning only as a composite body. When dissected, they cease to speak.

Scholars read “The Librarian” in two distinct ways. The contemporary reading (which much subsequent scholarship has acknowledged or substantiated) argues the portrait was a personal attack levied at one Wolfgang Lazius, HRE Ferdinand I’s court historian in the Habsburg court at Vienna, for his vain and inaccurate scholarship. Yet K. C. Elhard argues instead that Arcimboldo’s painting criticized not poor scholarship but poor bookmanship—that is, it levied a critique against “materialist book collectors more interested in acquiring books than reading them.”

Interestingly, as many scholars of present-day book history have noted, this is exactly the type of behavior that publishers in a dying book market attempt to capitalize on today. The one thing digital books cannot provide is the pleasure of owning a material object; as the symposium’s blurb asserts, “any publishers in the print trade are turning to eye-catching design strategies, cover art, and innovative packaging, enlivening the book arts and emphasizing physicality just when they seem under threat.” Tonight’s opening lecture (5:30 pm in the Blanton Auditorium) by Nicholson Baker, “staunch defender of paper objects,” is sure to expand the discussion of materiality of text to further interesting places. Perhaps someone more creative than I wants to update Arcimboldo's painting for the digital age?

Image Credit: LT

A closing word on our Painter/Rhetorician/Magician: perhaps existing between two major movements of European art, fitting neatly into neither, sealed more than anything else Arcimboldo’s fate in the canon of the Early modern. Though he has received no small amount of attention, in comparison to the great Renaissance and Baroque painters he remains ever the side show: a curiosity and a puzzle, but one that keeps me interested for more than just a game or two.

“No phonetic pronunciation”—xkcd and Layered Aesthetics

Laura Thain — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:34:38 +0000

Image Credit: xkcd

I’ve been following the webcomic xkcd for the better part of my adult life, despite its warning that it may contain “strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).” (Clearly, I was always already a liberal arts major, any way you slice it.) Randall Munroe’s bare-bones aesthetic consistently privileges an idea above the attached illustration; each entry thrives on an invented ethos of the supremacy of text to convey this idea, rather than the illustration itself. This ethos is also heavily grounded in an empirical interest in physics, mathematics, and programming culture, and this empiricism translates quite cleanly into any comment the comic makes on the condition of being human; that is, that it is always based in lived experience, but that this experience is best crystallized in the juxtaposition of concrete, minimalist illustration and sparse but highly suggestive prose. Its only flourish is that each comic contains a “hidden” joke in the roll-over text—often one that works to undo the rhetoric of the initial panel.

Munroe set aside his reluctance to utilize the possibilities presented by a web interface on Wednesday, when he posted a toggle-able webcomic. Titled “Click and Drag” (but with no explicit instruction within the comic to do so), the final panel is navigable in the same fashion of Google Maps, which, in drawing on common procedural memory, brings attention to unnaturalness of the act of click-and-drag navigation. In short, while most of us consider navigating Google Maps to be intuitive, it is, of course, a learned motor skill.

The navigable panel is the last. Image Credit: xkcd

The landscape Munroe constructs if vast, and, of course, I took to exploring it. Within 10-20 minutes, I became curious as to how the interface was constructed and examined the script, looking for a way to view the toggleable-panel in landscape mode. For instance, did the navigable landscape exist as one large image within the frame? Could I access that image?

What I discovered was that the artist created the interface in java with a series of NSEW quadrants (again, much like Google Maps), and so I immediately started to try to assemble them.

An extremely cropped version of Munroe's js--Isn't it beautiful? Image credit: Screencapture from source code, xkcd

After an hour or so of this, I discovered that at noon, mere hours after the comic was posted, an ambitious blogger had already fully mapped out the “click and drag” universe and blogged about the process. As disappointed as I was to be scooped, the process of trying to construct that same map made me appreciate the aesthetics of this particular comic on an entirely different plane. The script’s construction and its seamless marriage with the visual material is a piece of art in itself—an additional layer, if you will, of the aesthetic experience.

Ultimately, having the complete landscape undermined my personal experience with the visual components of the webcomic interface, but the process of trying to construct it—of deconstructing (sorry, Randall), if you will, Munroe’s project, revealed another component of creativity, but one which I would still argue privileges language (that is, that "most horrible kluge," JavaScript). So I ask, how can a piece like this help us expand our boundaries of what constitutes language and reshape our concept of the interaction between the textual and the visual? What sort of media artifacts might we group with it? And how can these artifacts continue to change our notions of how multimedia works rhetorically, aesthetically, and cognitively?

Mitt Romney and the (Mormon?) Rhetoric of Philanthropy

Laura Thain — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:16:26 +0000

Image Credit: Huffington Post

At issue from the moment Romney stuck his neck out as a Presidential hopeful, his extraordinary personal wealth has become one of the primary issues covered by various news media as we march closer to the November election. Epitomized best, perhaps, by a cleverly Photoshopped image that initially made rounds as a campaign gaff, “RMoney” has anything but hip associations—rather, it has inspired vast discussion about the rhetoric of prosperity and philanthropy in the midst of economic recession, both real and imagined.

A less-addressed topic, I think, is how LDS-sponsored sources can inform this debate as it takes place in the mainstream media. Though Romney is not the first Mormon politician to garner national attention (most recently, Jon Huntsman achieved national recognition; former Michigan governor George Romney, Terrel “Ted” Bell, and Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson all held influential cabinet positions in the past), he is arguably the most successful. As such, there has been a resurgence of public interest in Mormonism. The constellation of this interest and the general discussion of the “cult of prosperity” as emblematized in the Occupy protests has resurrected the age-old stereotype of Mormons as wealthy white businessmen—and Mitt Romney, the unexpected champion with the potential of either salvaging or savaging the economy.

Serious discussions of Romney’s finances go as far back in the news archive as early this year, with no little attention paid to his philanthropic contributions, which are outlined to some extent here. Most critics of this breakdown cite the LDS Church as an artificial inflator and use this to deny Romney as a legitimate philanthropist. I’d like to suggest that we consider a different angle of this kind of rhetoric. Rather than addressing where philanthropic money goes, could we not equally question the rhetorical role of philanthropy in political discourse?

I’d like to cite here the search entry for “service” on mormon.org, a website designed for non-church members investigating Mormon belief. The rhetorical focus here is not necessarily on the benefit provided to those who receive charity, but those who give it—as the article asserts,

“Jesus Christ said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This doesn't mean we have to die to show our love for our friends. We lay down our lives every time we put someone else's needs before our own. These actions, whether great or small, let us feel the happiness of connecting with our brothers and sisters and remind us that God often allows us to be the answer to someone else’s prayers.”

The emphasis on first person pronouns—we and us—and the lack of third person pronouns create a philanthropist-oriented rhetoric—not one in which the philanthropist is repaying a tangible debt to society, but in which he is repaying an intangible spiritual debt and thus further securing his own happiness. This necessarily reorients the rhetorical situation outside of the immediate--concrete social and political dynamics--into a supernatural realm, even as the superficial rhetoric addresses the need for humanitarian aid. The less obvious implication of this, however, is the way it defines the humanitarian/philanthropist as a catalytic wedge. He is empowered to create and control change, but encouraged to do so on an individual level; thus, he satisfies his obligation to his fellow man but is not encouraged to contemplate the situations by which the imbalance is created.

In this way, comparing the private philanthropic contributions of Obama and Romney is a fruitless exercise when it is really the rhetoric of philanthropy—and I’ve quoted from informal Mormon doctrine above, but the principles are, arguably, extant in nearly every Christian denomination—that is itself the flaw. Without the power to enact systemic change, I would argue, it runs a great risk of further increasing the power discrepancy between the giver and the recipient. For me, there is no amount of philanthropy that can fully mediate wealth on either side, regardless of how it is distributed, as long as this power dynamic remains in play.

Gifs, gags, and digital nostalgia--the long wait for Breaking Bad season 5.2

Laura Thain — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:39:25 +0000

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

I simply cannot resist a good topical tumblr. Of course, the orienting rhetorical principle of tumblrs like textsfromhillary (inspired by a single Reuters photo of the Secretary of State checking her smartphone on a C-17) or geraldoinahoodie (created in response to Geraldo Rivera's comments on the Trayvon Martin case) is undoubtedly kairos, and, as we might expect, these sites are often abandoned as quickly as they are generated, leaving nothing but a flurry of self-referential entries that lose their meaning the further they become removed from their rhetorical moment. As the creators of textsfromhillary assert in their final post, "As far as memes go – it has gone as far as it can go. Is it really possible to top a submission from the Secretary herself?"

Image credit: Reuters

Still, the lifespan of many other tumblrs increases considerably as the content within expands its field of references—surisburnbook, for instance, has become a celebrity blog of sorts, and fakecriterions has grown into a community art project that has even been offered its own gallery showings. Tumblr itself is a more sophisticated iteration of its precursors (like the short-lived Pownce) that, by differentiating itself from social media giant Twitter in terms of the user’s ability to integrate the visual and the audiovisual, has come to occupy a distinct space in the digital world.

Image Credit: XKCD

The latter category—those topical tumblrs which expand, rather than exhaust, their own possibilities—are of greater interest to me, particularly because the ways in which such expansion happens are often unpredictable and usually collaborative. The television actor and comedian Paul Sheer began breakinggifs—gifs inspired by the AMC hit tv show Breaking Bad—in April of 2012 during the long interlude between the fourth and fifth seasons. Sheer’s 8-bit color palette simultaneously evoked nostalgia for a long-abandoned digital interface and, I’d like to suggest, a show that had been off the air (and perhaps, off of viewer’s minds) for over six months.

Image Credit: Breaking Gifs

The tumblr went viral, and within months Sheer was able to coordinate a further outlet for fan-inspired Breaking Bad art. Capitalizing on the fan anticipation for the long-awaited fifth season, in May of 2012 Sheer announced the Breaking Bad Art Project via Breaking Bad actor Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring). The BBAP featured and distributed limited edition prints of Breaking Bad fan art throughout the summer, culminating in a wildly successful art show in Los Angeles last month. The project was managed through breakinggifs.com, a new website Sheer launched to help a community of artists share in his newfound tumblr fame.

While the website adapts with little variation creator Vince Gilligan’s “dark chemistry” aesthetic, few of the featured pieces take such little creative liberty. Here is my favorite from the Gallery 1988 showing of all 17 pieces in Los Angeles:

Image Credit: Gallery 1988

What is it about Breaking Bad that inspires this nostalgic return to 8-bit graphics and Saturday morning television? On a very superficial level, it certainly qualifies as simple juxtaposition, that is, that the print represents the (arguably) darkest show on network television translated into the register of childhood. That kind of juxtaposition produces, of course, humor, as artist Ian Glaubinger and Paul Sheer certainly recognize. Part of that we might attribute to an internet audience constantly inundated with information—this creates a disinterested sort of hostility easily dispelled by humor. (To put it simply, funny stuff gets the most hits.) But in examining Glaubinger’s print and Sheer’s tumblr together, perhaps we can read this juxtaposition of childhood and Breaking Bad with a more careful eye—is there something about the show and its disturbing refusal to set limitations on the darkness of its own contents that can be read as a militant stance of the id over the ego? In such terms, might we more closely associate Walter’s role as the anti-hero with the impulses, psychoanalytically speaking, of our own childhoods?