DISQUS

gossettphd · 5 months ago

Wow, I have to say I never thought I'd agree with anything Bauerlein said either!

Skydaemon · 5 months ago

Part of it, I think, is that the disciplines have no way of separating honest revelations from analysis as superficial entertainment. And rather I think certain Studies have devolved into mostly entertainment forms rather than meaningful work. There is a problem with developing a particular brand of circular thinking which renders the entire form of analysis ridiculous.

I vaguely remember taking an elective in U to do with analyzing advertising communications or something. I think the course was part of the communications field as it certainly wasn't the business department. Anyway, the course looks at the negative effects and messages of advertising and it relies on several planks for its self-justification. Naturally there were heavy overtones of womens studies abounded in the course (aka, how advertising oppresses women), though whether that came from the materials or the prof I'm not entirely sure.

The basic premises that held up the whole course were:
1) The analysis wasn't about what the creator intended, it was about what the viewer could receive. Note, not what they actually do receive, but what they _might_ receive... hypothetically.
2) Obviously any negative images must be worthy of condemnation and society should be free of such things, and it would be, if only everyone recognized the value of this form of analysis. Thus the analysis is valuable as it leads to solutions.

So there's one exercise in the course where the ridiculousness of the whole thing is just laid plain. You pick up a series of ads and describe how they might be oppressing women. For the sake of clarity, ignoring all the shapes you can project on the ad and just look at colors. Well at first it seems like wonderful analysis, how red is the color of lipstick and other things and is a color associated with women, hence it naturally implies that any object of that color must symbolize the commercialization and exploitation of women in general, or even worse the association with any perceived negative or subjective trait the picture, object or positioning might be made to suggest.

Then you look at the color blue, and it suggests maybe intelligence or something (it really doesn't matter what you say it means, it can mean anything you could potentially perceive you see). Hence if it is shown in contrast to anything that could be associated with women, it is therefore highlighting how women are made to feel as if they cannot be intelligent. Worse still if the product is blue, since that implies they can only become intelligent by purchasing said product.

To make a long story short, every color in the rainbow oppresses women in some direct or indirect manner, and there is no possible arrangement of colors or shapes that could possibly not oppress women in some way. Yes, even a completely black page could be a reference to a marginalization and a deep internal emptiness longing for the evils of commercialism to fill it and thus achieve a sense of wholeness and sense of belonging in the world.

At some point you realize the whole thing is just bunk. It's not really analysis at all. Rather some cross between creative rationalization and analysis-as-entertainment. After all, in order for something to be used as an implement of oppression, it would kind of suggest that something might exist where that was not the case. If you get to a point where no such other can exist, can you not say the whole exercise is a waste of time and a creative form of circular thinking?

Anyway, it seems to me that both the core assumptions underlying the course were wrong.
1) The analysis must be about the creator or the intentions thereof, and not the receiver in order to be non-circular analysis. To focus on the possible receiver is to engage in a new act of creativity which has nothing to do with the original work at all. The original work is simply filling the role of a muse, it is not actually being analyzed. If you are going to analyze the receiver, then you must analyze an actual receiver, and thus provide meaningful boundaries, and not use all hypothetical permutations that you can imagine.

2) Once it becomes an act of creative rationalization and analysis-as-entertainment, it ceases to be a criticism of the original work. This renders the purpose of the field and original justification for the analysis moot. The point of analysis is to arrive at answers. If the analysis becomes circular, it undermines it's purpose. Indeed, one of the tasks of any real world analysis, is to identify and omit the erroneous peripheral "noise" and get to the core of the issue. That is the only analysis with meaning. The periphery is often circular, and cannot lead to solutions. That way lies madness.

I guess you could say, any field which is primarily composed entirely of analysis, yet cannot arrive at solutions because it is open-ended enough to always become circular, might be classified as an exercise in madness.

digital_sextant · 5 months ago

In Film Studies, I'd say there are two answers to that problem. On one side, you have David Bordwell, who prods us to return to the archive. We're not to ask what Citizen Kane means, but why/how Welles managed to use rack focus to such effect. On the other side, you have Robert B. Ray and friends (bias exposed -- RBR was one of my profs and on my diss committee) who turn Barthesian, looking for new ways to understand cinema in the poetics of personal experience. We're to write about the magical moment when Bogey strides across a room.

I find myself, as someone who can't help but write as if assembling a database, doing both simultaneously.

I like the new layout, btw.

digitaldigs · 5 months ago

Skydaemon, I appreciate the problem you describe. I think the value of teaching undergraduates about cultural studies (and I would put the feminist analysis of advertising images under that larger umbrella here) ought to be to provide them with methods for understanding the complexity of communication. For good or bad, such analysis does not result in absolute, verifiable, repeatable results. Sounds like you may not have had the greatest of classes on the subject though.

I've been giving more thought to this. And I think one of the difficulties Bauerlein opens up has to do with the issue of "returns." How do we measure returns to know if they are indeed diminishing? What returns could we ever ascribe to humanities research? In the quote I use from Bauerlein, he mentions Hamlet, so I'll stick with that for a moment. I suppose we could say that if one believes that Hamlet is an important literary work in our culture, then one would also value research that helps us to better understand the play. There are a lot of ifs and judgments in there. Perhaps the average man in the street would accept those premises, at least not to the point of paying people to do this work. But that's probably been the case for many decades.

So who gets to make the valuation of research? Academic freedom suggests that faculty do. That if something gets accepted for publication then it is valuable. But that freedom comes with responsibility. If we can't responsibly recognize that we have exhausted the useful study of our subject matter (and I'm not necessarily saying that we have), then perhaps we do not deserve the freedom we are given.

However, I actually think the question of "returns" is not the best frame. Because you could say that the primary return for research is tenure. And people keep doing research and keep getting tenure. So in that sense the returns are not diminishing. Of course the returns implied by Bauerlein are more intellectual and abstract. However those are much more difficult to measure by this economic analogy.

I think it might be more useful to think about this situation in terms of an information-network problem, where the situation in the humanities is an extension of the larger media network challenges we face. In short, we are buried in data. We produce far more than we can seem to consume. And there are two reasons for that.

1. Our motivation for publication comes from the material rewards we receive in tenure and promotion more than it does from a recognition of a real exigency for communication. We have to publish. We have to publish in a particular venue.

2. The "long tail" distribution of readers. Let's say there are 3000 specialists in a field. 500 of them write articles in a given year. Let's say you could read one article a week. That would give you an average of 300 readers. But it doesn't work that way because of the 80/20 rule, which means that articles in one or two main journals will be read by almost everyone and the rest of the articles by very few people. And you might think that's because those main journals have the best articles or the ones most relevant to the reader's particular concerns. But I think that's highly unlikely. It's more of a network effect than a rational process.

So I think the real question is how do we expand the readership for humanities research? In a historical moment of globalization, information explosion, and communications revolution, it ought to be a no brainer that the humanities can provide insight into our changing historical, ethical, aesthetic, and rhetorical contexts. These are forces that have brought us into war, shaken our economy, and shaped presidential elections. They are important. On a more personal level, they will shape the work we do and the communities in which we live.

And I don't think it is our job to pass judgment on these matters. But the humanities research can provide broader contexts to people as they make these decisions. Our research can offer a range of methods to people so that they can approach issues from different perspectives. And we can help people understand how to use the communication technologies that are available to them.

We can do this in the classroom. We can do it in the workplace. And we can do it through media networks.

These are rhetorical challenges, and we ought to rise to meet them. We can still write to each other in our journals, but we also ought to be reaching out with our writing more.