The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com, but you can read my chapter below, or download it as a pdf.

The post Crises of Meaning in Communities of Creative Appropriation – A Case Study of the 2010 RE/Mixed Media Festival first appeared on Tom Tenney.

Before we look at the ways in which the Situationists appropriated and incorporated Huizinga’s theory of play into their practices, it’s important to first examine how, exactly, Huizinga defined play and its role in our culture. This can be particularly difficult to nail down because, as Francis Hearn notes, “play refers not to a set of specific activities, but to a context, a set of principles around which personal and collective experience is meaningfully engaged” (Hearn 1977, 150). Still, in the first chapter of Homo Ludens, Huizinga is quite clear about certain characteristics that a context or principle must have in order to be considered play. First, he asserts that play is fun. He also points out that several languages (including French) have no word that translates exactly to ‘fun’ but that nonetheless, it is precisely “this fun element that characterizes the essence of play.” However, despite this defining characteristic, he also states that, for some, it is also a quite serious pursuit. It is bounded by rules, and something that must be quite consciously approached. Another characteristic that is essential to play is that it is irrational and lies beyond morality. He tells us that “play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity, it has no moral function” (1980, 3-6).

Finally, a primary characteristic of play, and the one that is most appropriate to a discussion of the Situationists, is that play is free, that it is, in fact, synonymous with freedom itself. Play, Huizinga says, stands outside of the ordinary, outside “real life” (1980, 8). He goes on to say that the world of play is an aesthetic parallel world, which, through use of language and other playful activities, allows man to elevate things into a higher spiritual domain. In this way, play is endowed with an aesthetic quality that allows him to create “a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature” (1980, 4) Play, he says later, “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary [emphasis added], a limited perfection” (1980, 10). Play may anticipate an ideal social order (Smith 2005, 424) but it stands apart from that order, and should not be confused with it.

In my opinion, it is precisely in this distinction between play and “real life” that the SI loses much of the essence of Huizinga’s argument. As we’ll see, their goal is to create play as real life, as a way of transforming the everyday into a continual play that is seamlessly integrated with quotidian activities, not as something that stands apart.

Perhaps the concept of play extracted from Homo Ludens that was most meaningful to the SI’s theories and practices was that of play being equal to freedom. In ‘New Babylon,’ Constant Nieuwenhuys wrote that “the liberation of man’s ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being” (1957). The ability to play was an ability that Constant, Debord, and other theorists of the SI felt had been lost, and that the fact that “man has forgotten how to play” (Trocchi 1963) was directly attributed to his passivity in the face of the spectacle. The SI saw the social functions associated with play as “decaying relics” (Debord 1958a) and that these play functions are essential to the ontological freedom of the human being. In order to address this, they proposed that Homo Ludens become itself a “way of life” that would respond to this human need for play, as well as “for adventure, for mobility, as well as the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life” (Nieuwenhuys 1957).  In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raol Vaneigem discusses this playful instinct at length, asserting that it must be liberated from its “imprisonment in the categories of permitted games [which] leaves no place for the authentic game of playing with each moment of daily life” (Vaneigem 1965). It is precisely this reading of Homo Ludens as play providing a liberation of each moment of “real life” that I believe constitutes a fundamental misreading of the text. Early in the book, Huizinga is quite clear about his theory that play stands outside of daily life in both space and time, has the limitations of both, and in this way is able to construct its own meaning (Huizinga 1980, 9). In her excellent homage to Constant, Jan Bryant also concedes that this was a problem for the Situationists. She says,

“There was a problem for [the Situationists] in the way the play-mood was thought to be fragile and the way it sat in a separate sphere to the everyday. Huizinga’s thesis perpetuated the division of life in contemporary society, which the Situationists were focused on eradicating. Instead, for the Situationists, play was to flow spontaneously from the desires of each individual so that finally there would be no sense of boredom and no rupture between moments of play and non-play. Rather play and the everyday would move from one to the other in such a way that their separateness would finally disappear in a rich and poetic stream.” (Bryant 2006)

Another way in which I perceive the SI to have misinterpreted Homo Ludens is in the way they deny competition as an important aspect of play. For example, in ‘A Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play,’ Debord condemns the element of competition as a “manifestation of the tension between individuals for the appropriation of goods” (Debord 1958a). This may not be so much a misreading as it is a case of the SI cherry-picking those parts of Huizinga’s theory that suited their agenda. Huizinga’s theory states, fairly explicitly, that competition is part and parcel of play, in particular those romantic aspects that were so attractive to the SI. He says “virtue, honor, nobility and glory fall at the outset within the field of competition, which is that of play” (Huizinga 1980, 64)

Ultimately, Debord and the SI saw the concept of play as having been co-opted by consumer culture, and absorbed by the spectacle. This bastardization of play, they thought, had obviated the dichotomy of work/leisure (Andreotti 2000, 41), turning it into nothing more than amusement that carried the same forms that dominate the working life, and used only to alleviate the tensions created by a mechanized culture (Trocchi 1963; Hearn 1977, 155-156). “Only creativity is spontaneously rich,” Vaneigem wrote in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “it is not from productivity that a full life is to be expected” (1965). Similarly, Debord wrote that play was in danger of being eliminated altogether by functionalism, which he described as “an inevitable expression of technological advance,” (Debord 1958c) even though Constant would later advocate technology as a key component of his new society, as we’ll see.

Whether these problems are a result of a misreading of the text or simply an adaptation to suit the SI’s agenda, there are nonetheless several ways in which Huizinga’s theory of play was effectively utilized by the SI as a revolutionary praxis. Whether or not play is used to transform the “real world” as the SI wanted – or create an alternate, poetic one as Huizinga suggests, it seems as though the egalitarianism and freedom experienced in play have the power to challenge established forms and form a critique that may be interpreted as active resistance (Hearn 1977, 152). In the next sections, I will look at several of the practices utilized by the SI, and the ways in which they utilize the concept of play to advance their utopian vision of a world in which each individual is able to use the power of play to “create a truly passionate life” (Vaneigem 1965).

Dérive

Dérive is the situationist practice that fits most neatly into both Huizinga’s concept of play, and the situationist romantic ideal of play as a practice of adventure and discovery – the “playing at being heroes and warriors” (Andreotti 2000, 39-45). In the first International Situationniste, Debord defined the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances,” (1958b) an action that involved “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects” (1958d). It was an undertaking performed in the spirit of play, and aligned with Huizinga’s concept of play in several ways, not the least of which was the temporalization of a defined space. Huizinga wrote, “all play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand”, creating a separate temporary world within the “ordinary” one (1980, 10). Although the dérive allowed the player to create this playspace as she went along, it nonetheless adheres to Huizinga’s concept. Homo Ludens also describes 2 basic aspects of play “in the higher forms” – play as contest and play as representation. It is the second that is most appropriate to a discussion of the dérive. To Huizinga, display connotes a type of performance, a “stepping out of common reality into a higher order […] making an image of something different, something more beautiful, or more sublime, or more dangerous than what he usually is” (1980, 13-14). The dérive did just that, it was an exercise in playfully creating alternative modes of representation. Instead of passively accepting the traditional map, i.e. the social/political/economic boundaries and divisions created by the state – which to the SI implied an acceptance of its cultural domination – the dérive allowed one to chart the city based on affective criteria: ambience and mood, aesthetic, and a personal sense of play. In this way the dérive became a revolutionary praxis that began with liberating the playful spirit and engendering a sense of adventure. In fact, Vaneigem describes the dérive almost entirely in the language of play, saying that it “appropriates mankind’s ancient love of mazes, the love of getting lost solely in order to find one’s way again: the pleasure of the dérive” (1965, 134).

Détournement

“[Détournement is] The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.” (Debord 1958b)

While Debord’s 1958 definition may seem rather dry, the situationist concept of détournement – a recontextualizing of words and images in a way which subverts their dominant meaning – can be seen to be profoundly playful in a number of ways. In ‘A Users Guide to Détournement,’ written 2 years earlier, Debord and Gil Wolman liken the impulse to détournement to “the need for a secret language, for passwords, [which is] inseparable form a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite” (Debord and Wolman 1956). In essence, what the practice of détournement does, is create what Huizinga would call a “new poetic language” (1980, 134) which is parallel to our “ordinary” language, in same way that, as we’ve seen, play creates a separate world that engenders order using an alternative, irrational logic. In his chapter on “Play and Poetry,” Huizinga characterizes the language poetry as analogous to this kind of “secret language” mentioned by Debord and Wolman:

“It is based on a meticulous code of rules absolutely binding, but allowing of almost infinite variation […] When the poet says ‘speech-thorn’ for ‘tongue’, ‘floor of the hall of winds’ for ‘earth’, ‘tree-wolf’ for ‘wind’, etc., he is setting his hearers poetic riddles which are tacitly solved” (Huizinga 1980, 134).

This is just the type of play that’s at work in the practice of détournement. By recontextualizing words and images – removing them from their expected milieu and juxtaposing them in new, unexpected ways – détournement creates new meanings, a new “poetic” language endowed with new meaning, creating a kind of “riddle” for its audience to decipher. This type of play not only provides a new sense of agency for the artist who is being playful with these cultural relics, but also for the audience, who is allowed a new sense of freedom in that they are able to create a personal meaning which may or may not be the one intended by the detourner. In this way, détournement creates what can be considered to be a “ludic challenge to the meanings established by authority” (Smith 2005, 424). Additionally, the creation of this poetic language is tantamount to what Debord and Wolman called a “secret language” and this sense of secrecy, the sense of creating something that exists only for the initiated, is something that Huizinga considers to be a key aspect of play. He wrote,

“The exceptional and special position of play is most tellingly illustrated by the fact that it loves to surround itself with an air of secrecy. Even in early childhood the charm of play is enhanced by making a “secret” out of it. This is for us, not for the “others”. What the “others” do “outside” is no concern of ours at the moment. Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count. We are different and do things differently” (Huizinga 1980, 12).

Finally, it’s important to note that the concept of détournement did not limit itself to words and images alone, but could be applied to almost anything. In “The Users Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman are clear that the practice can be used to detourn clothing (1956), and in the events of May-June of 1968, it was used to detourn an entire city.

Situations

The creation of “situations” is perhaps the practice most commonly associated with the Situationists (in no small part because of their name, I would guess) one that can be considered an extension, of sorts, to the practice of détournement (Debord and Wolman 1956). Part of the SI’s credo was dissociation from the art world, which they felt had been too completely absorbed in the spectacle and dependent on commodity relations (Bryant 2006). Instead of the fixed forms of painting and sculpture, the SI believed that liberation would come instead in the performance of spontaneous situations, which, because of their existence ‘in the moment’ would jolt us into a state of awakening and mobility. “Our situations will be ephemeral,” Debord wrote, “Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else” (Debord 1957). In other words, situations were the SI’s way of providing creative resistance to the spectacle.

One of the most interesting distinctions Huizinga makes in Homo Ludens is one between the ‘arts of the Muses’ (music, poetry, and dancing) and the plastic arts. The former, he says, “have to be performed,” whereas “a work of art, though composed, practiced or written down beforehand, only comes to life in the execution of it, that is, by being represented or produced in the literal sense of the word – brought before a public,” and therefore, he concluded, did not fit into his concept of play as neatly as did music and poetry (Huizinga 1980, 165). This exclusion of painting and sculpture from the realm of play seems to be reflected, or at least play a part, in the SI’s antagonism toward the art world and their privileging of situations. Situations are, after all, performative, whereas painting could be more easily (and probably rightly) considered to be a ‘thing,’ a commodity, and thus a part of commodity culture. Huizinga emphasizes that the plastic arts have inherent “limitations of form” and that the artists “all fix a certain aesthetic impulse in matter by means of diligent and painstaking labour.” In other words, artists are laborers who make things, things are devoid of action and, according to Huizinga, “where there is no visible action, there can be no play.” (1980, 166) This is analogous to the situationist goal of re-imagining the world as poets rather than industrialists, privileging poetry over ‘information’ as Jan Bryant points out in Play and Transformation. “One [poetry] is formed on the logic of multiplicity and flow, of becoming, while the other [information] belongs to the deep cavern of fixed forms” (Bryant 2006).

Despite the SI’s theorizing about the creation of situations, it’s worth noting that they didn’t actually execute the practice often. One notable attempt was a project called Cavern of Anti-Matter in which artist Pinot Gallizio made “industrial paintings” using painting machines and sold rolls of them by the meter in the public market. The goal of the project was a merging of art and everyday life that provided a critique of the “professionalism [of the artist] and the sanctioned space of the art gallery” (Andreotti 2000, 49). Despite its reliance on painting as a key element, the whole ‘production’ of the event more resembled a performance than a static art object. The invitations to the opening event promised audiences an “encounter between matter and anti-matter,” and opening night audiences experienced explosions and pyrotechnics, as well as an interactive sound installation in which ‘sound machines’ would be activated as observers moved closer to the walls of the gallery (Andreotti 2000, 47-49).

It’s interesting to note that, even though the SI did not consider themselves to be performers in the theatrical sense, much of the language they use to describe situations uses nomenclature borrowed from the performance world. For example, in ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, Debord wrote, “during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of ‘director’ role” and should include “a few passive spectators who […] should be forced into action” (Debord 1958c). This latter concept of passive spectators forced into action would later be appropriated by Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal who, in his classic Theatre of the Oppressed would write,

“In order to understand this poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people – ‘spectators’, passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon – into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action.” (Boal 2008, 97)

Finally, it bears mentioning that the SI recognized that they were not the only contemporary avant-garde with an interest in creating playful situations towards revolutionary ends. They made occasional passing reference to other work being done in this area, particularly the ‘happenings’ in the artistic avant-garde in New York, but claimed that those were situations based on poverty (of material, of humanity, of philosophy) while those of the SI must be based on “material and spiritual richness” (Situationist 1963).

Unitary Urbanism

An analysis of the SI’s play tactics wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of one of its most legendary projects, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ work on ‘New Babylon’ – a series of architectural plans for creating a utopian social space which challenged traditional notions of urbanism. While Constant makes reference to Huizinga as a seminal influence on the project (Nieuwenhuys, 1974), there seem to be a number of incongruities between the New Babylon project and Huizinga’s theory. First, we must make a distinction between the work of the architect as play – which Huizinga clearly states it cannot be because “there the aesthetic impulse is far from being the dominant one, as the constructions of bees and beavers clearly prove” (Huizinga 1980, 168) – and the architect as the creator of works of play, as was Constant’s goal with New Babylon.

The decades-long project was a part of the SI’s concept of ‘Unitary Urbanism,’ a theory of reconstructing urban space based more on the dynamic concept of ‘ambiences’ than on commerce, politics, or fixed material environments. The concept, and Constant’s project, adopted the idea of a play-space on a grand scale. “The more a place is set apart for free play,” Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in Formulary for a New Urbanism, “the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater its forces of attraction” (1958).

Unitary Urbanism was a means to an end, a way of “discovering and activating the positive revolutionary potential” of a physical structure (Bryant 2006). New Babylon was an infrastructure for a permanent dérive, and the concept of ambiences allowed Constant to imagine a structure which could have changeable sectors (Andreotti 2000, 51-52), an idea that he believed would radically transform and sustain the subjective quality of life from one of boredom to one of play. New Babylon, Constant believed, would be an environment that would further adventure, where “play and creative change is privileged” (1974), enabling the coming together of “those who are capable of creating and directing their own lives.” Nowhere, however, does Constant allow provision for those who might not subscribe to the same theory of play, or think like a Situationist. In this way, and although Constant thought his vision was practical and achievable (Bryant 2006) we can call New Babylon a utopian ideal, with little grounding in the real world. It paid lip service to ludic theory, but ignored Huizinga’s key concept that play exists outside of ‘real life.’ Huizinga defined play as “an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives […] it adorns life, amplifies it” (1980, 9). As I pointed out earlier, play as an interlude or parallel world wasn’t enough for the SI, their agenda settled for nothing short of a ludic transformation of the real world itself. Like much of SI theory, it takes boredom as a first principle, and sets out to eradicate it by replacing it with play.

Huizinga is also very clear on the voluntary nature of play, going so far as to call it a defining characteristic. “All play is a voluntary activity,” he wrote, “play to order is no longer play (1980, 7). This contradicts Constant’s goal of placing citizens into a structure where ‘play’ is inevitable. Adam Barnard takes this critique even further, claiming that New Babylon simply recreates alienating conditions instead of practically supplanting them with something new. “[New Babylon] may have been big and futuristic,” he wrote, “but lacked a critical coherence and was not commensurate with social practices” (2004, 109).

New Babylon was also based on a certain amount of technical determinism, and the variable ambiences Constant imagined were technologically based. In ‘The Great Game to Come,’ he stated that “the investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends on a higher plane is one of the most pressing tasks required to facilitate creation of a unitary urbanism on the scale demanded by the society of the future” (1957). Technology, Constant believed, was a key factor in creating a ludic society of the future,as automation freed people from productive work, and thus enabled them to develop their creativity (Nieuwenhuys 1974). However, at least in ‘New Babylon,’ Constant never went into any detail about exactly which technology he was referring to, beyond the example of using air conditioning to vary the ambience, as well as the very broad category of ‘telecommunications.’ He was slightly more specific in ‘The Great Game to Come,’ citing the potential of “cinema, television, radio and high-speed travel and communication.” He calls for the “investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends,” (1957) but never elaborates on their specific use, or how they would contribute to the ludic nature of his society.

The Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle, written by Debord in 1967 is, of course, the de-facto flagship text of the Situationist International. In many ways, it seems as thought the text is Debord’s final grand détournement – a recombining and recontextualizing of all of the SI’s previous writings as well as those of their literary and intellectual influences. Although teasing out all of the elements of play theory that present themselves in Society of the Spectacle is beyond the scope of this paper, it’s interesting to consider the work in light of one of the recurring concepts of Homo Ludens – that of the “spoil-sport.” Huizinga defines the spoil-sport as one who refuses to play the game and, in so doing, “shatters the play world itself” (1980, 11). Considering this concept in relationship to Debord’s polemic, I wonder if we can begin to think of the spectacle itself as a kind of play, and the SI the “spoil-sports” of its game. Huizinga himself refers to the world of play as consisting of illusion, a quality which is robbed by the spoil-sport (1980, 11). In stanza 20 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord calls the spectacle, “the material reconstruction of the religious illusion […] the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond” (Debord 1967, 4). It’s interesting that Huizinga spends much of Homo Ludens situating myth and religious practices in the world of play, but it’s this particular play-world that Debord opts out of. Interestingly, Huizinga also states that spoil-sports are the world’s “apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc.” saying that these spoil-sports often go off and create a new community with rules of its own. This is certainly what Debord and the SI have done, what all avant-gardes do. Likewise, the SI had its own spoil-sports – the factions and individuals that disagreed with Debord and were summarily expelled from the SI’s game.

Conclusion

I hope that this paper has adequately demonstrated that, although the Situationists adopted Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as a primary text, their use of it to support their theories did not always conform to the rigorous logic used by Huizinga to craft his brilliant and complex theories of play. Partly as a result of this non-adherence, the SI created an ideal of a world so utopian that it could never be accomplished. In fact, many of their ‘practices’ could not be practiced, as there was no practical way to do so without falling into the catch-22 of having to practice them within a cultural milieu that they wanted no part of. An application of ludic ideals that adhered more closely to Huizinga’s theories may have allowed them to participate in practices that point the way to a more playful culture, without being burdened with the unrealistic demand that the culture change completely, immediately, and for everyone. One of a ways that some of these failures have ostensibly been corrected by such inheritors of the SI’s tradition – such as the ‘culture jammers’ of the 70s and 80s – is that these artists seem to have a more realistic understanding of how change occurs, and are able to work subversively within the system to create change that they know, from experience, is incremental at best. The refusal of the Situationists to allow the ludic any association with the spectacle is summed up concisely by Douglas Smith in his essay, “Giving the Game Away,” where he states, “Situationism views system and play as two diametrically opposed principles and refuses to engage with the complexities of their interdependence” (Smith 2005, 432).

References:

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Barnard, Adam. 2004. The legacy of the Situationist International: the production of
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Boal, Augusto. 2008. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. (Orig. pub. 1979)

Bryant, Jan. 2006. Play and transformation: Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Situationists.
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Debord, Guy. 1957. Report on the construction of situations and on the International
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— — — 1958a. Contribution to a Situationist definition of play. Trans. Reuben
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— — —. 1958b. Definitions. Trans. Ken Knabb. Internationale Situationniste 1 (June).
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— — —. 1958c. Preliminary problems in constructing a situation. Trans. Ken Knabb.
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— — —. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Ken Knabb.
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Debord, Guy, and Gil J. Wolman. 1956. A users guide to détournement. Trans. Ken
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Hearn, Francis. 1977. Toward a critical theory of play. Telos 30 (Winter): 145-160.

Huizinga, Johan. 1980. Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. London:
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— — —. 1974. New Babylon: A nomadic town. Exhibition Catalogue.
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Smith, Douglas. 2005. Giving the game away: Play and exchange in Situationism and
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The post (It Will) Never Work: A critique of the Situationists’ appropriation of Johan Huizinga’s theory of play first appeared on Tom Tenney.

click to play.  TRT ~33 mins 

Introduction

Radio began as a DIY endeavor, invented by amateurs and tinkerers – the hackers of the late 19th and early 20th century. The Radio Act of 1927 allowed the government to privilege certain groups, particularly the radio corporations, in the allocation of the radio spectrum, and effectively locked the amateurs out.  Since that time, unlicensed broadcasters – or pirates – have roamed the airwaves and tried to elude the FCC. Through a series of interviews, this 33 minute “broadcast” looks at some of the motivations of these radio hackers – why they started doing it, and why they stopped. It also takes a critical look at the recently passed Local Community Radio Act (LCRA) – legislation which intends to open the airwaves to broadcasters under 100 watts, but may not be able to accommodate broadcasters in the largest urban areas. Finally, the migration of many microbroadcasters from the airwaves to the Internet is examined, particularly how this move allows for broadcasts to proliferate, but may not serve the public in exactly the same way the traditional radio medium is able to.  It concludes that there still is much more work to be done towards equitable distribution of the airwaves, and that while Internet radio may be able to meet the needs of certain communities, its very distribution methods indicate a much different audience than would be served by local radio.

Concept & Methodology
The original idea of this project was to investigate the “disappearance” of pirate radio broadcasters from the airwaves over the past decade.  I had noted, observationally, that as Internet adoption grew in the United States and Internet technologies were better able to accommodate the transmission of live audio over digital networks, the “buzz” about illegal microbroadcasters I’d previously heard in underground performance and alternative media communities had diminished.  This observation was corroborated by other recent examinations of the pirate radio phenomenon.  For example, in a video entitled Pirate Radio Frequencies (2010), a short documentary produced by Vice Magazine on the London (UK) pirate scene, one DJ declares, “the Internet has killed pirate radio, and I don’t think it can come back.”  In this study, my intent was to investigate the phenomenon of pirate radio and DIY microbroadcasting in New York City specifically, whether the phenomenon still exists, whether the broadcasters have moved to the Internet and if so, why.  I also wanted to examine the Local Community Radio Act, new national legislation allowing the licensing of community stations of under 100 watts and what effect, if any, this might have on the future of microbroadcasting, pirate and DIY radio.

Instead of conducting and presenting my research in the traditional way, it was decided that it would be presented as a short “radio show” which could be played over the airwaves, on Internet radio, or otherwise distributed by means that were more relevant to the medium being discussed than they were to traditional academic methods of writing and submitting a research paper.  To this end, I conducted a series of five interviews with people who were involved in DIY radio and microbroadcasting in a variety of ways, after reading several essays and articles on DIY radio to familiarize myself with the territory.  I chose my subjects not only based on relevancy to the topics being explored, but according to accessibility within the time frame given to complete the project.   The five subjects interviewed for the project were:

• Hank Hayes:  Hayes was a pirate radio DJ that started in the late 70’s while he was still a teenager.  For over 30 years, Hayes and his partner, Jim Nazium, broadcast illegally in NYC – often moving to different spots on the dial in order to elude the FCC. In 1986, Hayes was a member of a loose coalition of pirate broadcasters that purchased – and operated from- a ship, The Sarah, in international waters off the coast of New York.  The ship was raided and shut down by the FCC after just five days. In the early 2000s, Hayes and Nazium went “legit” by moving their broadcasts to the Internet.
• Andre Alleyne:  Andre isn’t a pirate broadcaster, but hosted a pirate transmitter in his Brooklyn apartment for four days in 2009 for a friend of his brother’s, a young man who ran a pirate radio station broadcasting Caribbean and urban music to the community.  Despite his lack of meaningful involvement in the operation, the FCC raided Alleyne’s apartment, and he was fined $10,000.  I found Andre through an Internet search of public records of people in New York that had been cited by the FCC for illegal broadcasting.
• Candace Clement:  Clement is an outreach manager at Free Press, a New England based media advocacy organization that lobbied for the passage of the LCRA.
• Brandy Doyle: Doyle is the policy director for Prometheus Radio, a Philadelphia-based micro-radio advocacy group that was among the most outspoken lobbyists for the LCRA.  The organization started as a pirate radio station – Radio Mutiny – that operated out of West Philadelphia in the late 90’s before being shut down by the FCC.
• Katrina Cass: Cass is one of the founders of BBOX Radio, an Internet radio station that has been broadcasting from a 160-square-foot shipping container in Brooklyn’s DeKalb Market since July of 2011.  The station was set up after she and her friends won a contest sponsored by the market, which asked, “What would you do with a shipping container at the DeKalb Market?”  Along with the space, the group won $5000 in seed money, and recently raised an additional $15,000 through a Kickstarter campaign.

Hayes, Clement and Doyle were all interviewed via Skype, and recorded with Audio Hijack, software designed to record computer system audio. Alleyne and Cass were interviewed in person. The specific interview questions, listed in Appendix A, were tailored specifically to each interviewee’s area of expertise, but were all designed to answer the following fundamental questions related to DIY radio and microbroadcasting:

• How did pirate broadcasting come about – what were the motivations for illegal broadcasting?
• Where is DIY Radio happening today in New York City?
• Did the advent of the Internet cause DIY radio stations to move online, or are there still pirates on the airwaves?
• What are some of the economic considerations of microbroadcasting vs. Internet radio?
• How will the passage of the Local Community Radio Act affect microbroadcasting, particularly in cities like NYC?

Outcomes

The outcomes that were revealed through the process of interviewing the five subjects could be categorized under four broad topics: motivations, benefits, limiting factors, and economics.

Motivations

In her interview, Candace Clement stated that the motivations for all microbroadcasters, whether pirate or legitimate, could be summed up by stating that

“they see a need that’s not being met. They might not see that they’re doing it that way but that is ultimately why they’re doing it, because something doesn’t exist and they’re making it exist because it’s not there.” (Airwaves 19:30)

This conclusion was borne out by both my reading on microbroadcasting and the interviews I conducted.  For example, Mbanna Kantanko started pirate radio station Black Liberation Radio (now Human Rights Radio) in Springfield, Illinois because his community wasn’t provided an outlet by mainstream media to express the violence and inequality they experienced in their neighborhoods. He said that the FCC put radio broadcasting

“out of the reach of the people what we’re trying to reach – people who live in public housing…who have no hope at all… of ever achieving any economic success in this country.  That regulation [requiring a minimum 100-watt transmitter] systematically excludes the disadvantaged… When you’re facing the conditions that our community in particular is facing, you have a duty as a human being to do whatever you can to try to turn those conditions around.  And we feel that communications is one of the things that we have to take control over.”  (qtd. in Bekken, 1998)

By clearly perceiving his reality and creating a radio station as a way to overcome the oppression he perceived in his community, Kantanko’s creation of  BLR can be seen as a prime example of the use of praxis as a method for overcoming a “limiting situation” as described by Paolo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).  In that work, Friere wrote,

“In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action.” (49)

In a 1996 interview, Napoleon Williams – another leader of Black Liberation Radio – also spoke to the necessity of constructionist principals in education for teaching technology as a tool for liberation to children in oppressed neighborhoods, echoing the writings of Papert and Harel (1991).  Williams said,

“I don’t know why we are not taking technology that is at our disposal and running classes to teach our kids to read schematics. Give your child some kind of electronic intelligence.  You got to realize that technology exists to create a radio station almost on a matchbook, and our kids would be fascinated by that if we would direct them toward it.” (Williams 1996)

     Not all radio pirates were as political as Kantanko and Williams. Hank Hayes began pirate broadcasting because he felt that commercial broadcasters were destroying the “fun” of radio.  In my interview with him, he says that a primary motivation was a change in commercial broadcasting in the 70’s that emphasized

“the DJ not talking. And we liked the DJ. And what happened was, we said ‘well, if we can’t get it anymore we’re going to do it ourselves.  And that’s exactly what we did.” (Airwaves 05:49)

Whether the motivations for pirate broadcasting were political or not, I agree with Clement’s assessment that for microbroadcasters, a primary motivator is to meet a need that is perceived as “not being met” by mainstream media.

Benefits

Much of the discussion, with all of my interviewees, revolved around the benefits of microbroadcasting over Internet radio or vice-versa, depending on which side of the philosophical fence the subject happened to be on.   For Clement and Doyle, the prevailing opinion is that, when it comes to broadcasting that is able to serve local communities,  “radio offers something that the Internet just doesn’t at this time” (Doyle 22:55).  Neither argues against the inherent values of the Internet as a medium that can reach a mass audience, but their concern is more for providing a medium that speaks to a local audience in a

“globalized moment when people are really yearning for that local, and they’re looking for local food and local businesses and local artists, and a sense of being part of a local community at a time when that has been wiped out.” (Doyle 22:39)

Katrina Cass of BBOX Radio tends to disagree, and finds that the Internet is able to not only serve a local community, but provide a “local flavor” to a global audience and thinks that

“there will be an audience that’s interested in what’s happening locally here in Brooklyn.  I think people in Mississippi and California are interested in what’s happening in Brooklyn.  There are things that are different. And you might not be seeing that on the larger national networks.”

(Cass 24:03)

Cass raises an excellent point, in the fact that local broadcasting is not available on the “larger national networks” which is precisely why Clement and Doyle are interested in opening the airwaves to community broadcasting.

Regarding some of the other differences between radio and Internet broadcasting, one of the most salient ones that I tried to have each interviewee address was the concept of “discoverability” i.e. how one finds a broadcast without knowing about it and specifically seeking it out.  While both Clement and Doyle see this as an advantage of radio, both Cass and Hayes have been able to find an element of discoverability in their Internet broadcasts.  For Cass, the element of discoverability comes from the studio’s physical location in the Dekalb Market, with people literally stumbling upon the station.  For Hayes, he thinks that discoverability comes from being a part of a larger network of Internet stations (stickam.com) where people who listen to one show on the network are likely to check out another.  He also thinks that once people are exposed to his show, they hear something they’ve “never heard before” – which is the old school style of broadcasting that he and Jim practice.

Limitations

Through my interviews, I found that there are several limitations to microbroadcasting, particularly if one seeks to become licensed under the LCRA. First, the way the bill is written doesn’t allow for a set percentage of the radio spectrum to be allocated to low power radio, but only for community broadcasters to be able to set up shop in whatever portions of the spectrum commercial radio isn’t using.  Therefore, in large markets like New York City, there will be very little opportunity for community broadcasters to become licensed.   This is a limitation that is acknowledged by both Doyle and Clement, and a reason that Cass sees Internet broadcasting not necessarily as a solution to the problem, but as a necessary alternative.

Another limitation to microbroadcasters getting a license under the LCRA is the fact that all licensees must be non-profit corporations.  Given the amount of organization and paperwork this requires, not to mention the time it takes to be recognized by the government as a nonprofit, this places a serious limitation on DIY broadcasters who place a premium on getting things done quickly.  An example I raised in the interviews was the Occupy Wall Street movement, which emerged fairly rapidly and could have potentially benefitted by having a low-power FM station broadcasting to the protesters.  The licensing restrictions and nonprofit requirement, then, would effectively eliminate a movement like OWS from having legitimate low power broadcasting available to them as a viable option.

Finally, a limitation to legitimate broadcasting raised by Andre Alleyne, is that becoming licensed can be “price prohibitive.”  This was certainly true before the passage of the LCRA, when setting up for a station of 100 watts or more could cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.  Certainly the new bill will lower the economic barrier to entry for many, but compared to the Internet, setting up a terrestrial radio station can still be an economic barrier, and will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

Economics

The last outcome of the research I’d like to discuss is how the economics of local community radio compares to that of Internet broadcasting.  According to Candace Clement, local radio is more cost efficient in the sense that it places the economic threshold to entry for the average listener much lower than it is for Internet radio listeners. Her feeling is that with Internet radio, there are economic barriers for the listener such as equipment, access, and data caps whereas “broadcast radio is totally free.  You just have to get yourself a radio and you’re in, you’re all set, you’re good.” (Clement 21:50).

On the other hand, Cass sees the Internet as being more cost efficient, at least for the producers if not necessarily for the listeners.  She emphasizes that for her station, the startup costs were low enough that they could get up and running easily, and that BBOX started with only

“a small stipend that pretty much covered the insurance for [the studio] and everything else was coming out of our pockets. So if we wanted to try and go get a transmitter for a space that doesn’t even exist for us, it just didn’t make any sense.  A web server is like a hundred bucks a year at most.  It’s very reasonable.”  (Cass 25:10)

After listening to arguments about the economics of microbroadcasting vs. Internet radio from both perspectives, it appeared that an inverse relationship exists between the economics of each media.  On the one hand, participation in microbroadcasting is much more inexpensive for the listeners but more expensive for the producers, both in startup costs and time and energy involved.  On the other hand, Internet radio is very inexpensive for producers to get a station up and running, while access to listeners is limited by the availability of equipment such as smart phones and computers, as well as Internet access – all resources that are far more expensive than an average transistor radio.

Conclusions and Limitations

Although the topic requires more research, I was able to reach at least two conclusions from the outcomes of this project.  The first is that, while the passage of the LCRA is a step in the right direction, it isn’t a solution that works for everyone.  New York City, a city that could benefit from community broadcasting due to it’s several ethnic and cultural communities, will be eliminated from participation due to the fact that there is no room in the radio spectrum because of the space inhabited by commercial broadcasters.   It would seem to me that a more equitable solution would be legislation that ensures a certain percentage of the spectrum is guaranteed to be available to community broadcasters in any market.  This has precedent in the 1984 Cable Communications Act that required that all cable companies allocate a certain amount of their resources to community access television, and would certainly allow for a more equitable distribution of the airwaves.

Another conclusion is that, until allocation of the spectrum becomes more equitable, Internet radio may not be able to provide a solution to the problem, per se, but an alternative to those producers who want to get their message out in a way that is cost effective and has few barriers to entry.

Some of the limitations of the research include the fact that, due to the temporal limitations of the project, speaking to listeners of both microbroadcasters and Internet stations was out of the scope of the project.  I believe that hearing the opinions of those who are actively engaged in these types of broadcasts would provide invaluable insight, and should be addressed in future studies.  Another limitation is that my roster of interviewees didn’t ultimately include microbroadcasters or pirate radio operators that are currently active.  One reason for this is that it can be extremely difficult to locate pirate broadcasters, if only for the simple reason that they don’t want to be found.  After all, if I can find them, so can the FCC, and they have a vested interest in remaining underground.  Ultimately, my hope is that if I continue this research in the future, I will be able to overcome these limitations.  Hopefully by that time, we’ll be able to better understand the effects of the LCRA on the state of microbroadcasting as well.

WORKS CITED

Bekken, Jon. “Community Radio at the Crossroads: Federal Policy and the Professionalization of a Grassroots Medium.” Seizing the Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook. Ron Sakolsky and Stephen Dunifer (eds.) San Francisco: AK Press. 1998. p 39.

Friere, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: Herder and Herder. 1970.

Papert, Seymour & Harel, Idit (eds). Constructionism: Research Reports and Essays 1985-1990.  Epistemology and Learning Research Group, The Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ablex Pub. Corp, Norwood NJ. Chapter 1: Situating Constructionism. 1991.

Pirate Radio Frequencies. Dir. Matt Mason. Palladium Boots. 2010.

Williams, Napoleon.  “A New Drum for Our People: An Interview with Napoleon Williams (Black Liberation Radio). Seizing the Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook.  Ron Sakolsky and Stephen Dunifer (eds.) San Francisco: AK Press. 1998. p 114.

APPENDIX A – INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Andre Alleyne (interview on 11/30/2011)

1. Describe the radio station you hosted the transmitter for.  What was the content of the broadcasts?  How often did they broadcast?
2. Who were the listeners?  Was there community involvement in the station?
3. Describe what happened with the FCC.  How did they first contact you?  How would you characterize their attitude towards you?
4. You said in your email you feel you’d been made an “example” of – can you elaborate on this?
5. Do you feel your persecution – and subsequent fines – by the FCC had a negative effect on other pirate broadcasters in NYC?
6. Has there been subsequent consideration of resurrecting the station?   Did your brother or his friend at any time consider trying to become licensed by the FCC?  Why or why not?  What do you consider the biggest obstacles to an individual obtaining a broadcast license?
7. Was there consideration given to broadcasting over the Internet? What effect, if any, do you feel Internet broadcasting has had on the state of community, low power, or pirate stations on the airwaves?
8. Do you consider yourself a political person?  How does community broadcasting fit in with your personal politics?
9. Last year, a bill was passed to allow FCC licensing of micro-power and community radio stations.  Do you think this helps or undermines the pirate radio movement?  Is it worth it to get a license?

Hank Hayes – Radio Free New York (interview on 12/1/2011)

1. Your story is incredible. You and Jim have known each other since childhood, correct?  How did you start getting into radio?
2. You’ve been shut down by the FCC several times, and yet kept coming back for more.  Why?  What kinds of penalties did the FCC impose on you guys?
3. It says on the site that you mainly started doing pirate radio because there wasn’t any good commercial radio on the air.  As you continued to do it, and continued to get harassed by the FCC, did political motivations, like free speech issues, come into play as well?
4. Did you have day jobs?  How did you guys make money?
5. I read on the site that your signal could be heard up and down the eastern seaboard.  That’s pretty impressive for microbroadcasters. Is that mainly because you were on the AM band? How powerful was your transmitter?
6. The story about RNI and the Sarah is amazing.  I was kind of horrified to read about the apparent violence of the FCC – smashing equipment, cutting wires, etc.   also the shotgun bearing Marshalls of 1989 bust.  Seems like a bit of overkill for a couple of radio pirates. What’s your take on that?
7. The case was dropped, so basically the message was “don’t fuck with us, because we’ll shut you down any time we want, right?”   So, why DO you think they shut down RNI?  or any of your other stations for that matter?
8. Did you ever consider getting licensed, as opposed to just leasing time?
9. I know you guys did radio because of the sorry state of radio at the time.  What do you think of radio today?  Has it gotten better or worse?
10. When did you make the move over to the Internet, and why?
11. What about this move from the airwaves to the Internet?  Do you feel like you’re accomplishing the same things?  How do you perceive the difference between Internet radio and microbroadcasting?
12. What advice would you give to someone today who’s interested in getting into microbroadcasting? Is it worth it to broadcast on the airwaves or would they and their listeners be better served on the Internet?
13. Last year Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act, which will allow licensing to microbroadcasters under 100 watts.    How do you think this will affect DIY broadcasters?  Is this a good thing, or is this just FCC’s way of getting microbroadcasters to play by their rules?
14. Talk about what you guys are up to now – anything else, etc.

Candace Clement – Free Press (interview on 12/1/2011)
Brandy Doyle – Prometheus Radio (interview on 12/2/2011)

1. What is LPFM and why is it important?
2. Last year Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act (LCRA).  Can you describe this bill and talk a bit about its importance?  Who will benefit most from this law?
3. Do you know how who gets licensed will be decided? It seems like this could be a big win for progressives, but only if the fundamentalist don’t swoop in and snap up all the licenses.
4. It seems as though, with the Internet, radio has almost become a “forgotten” medium.  Do you think the LCRA will change that?  How will it/could it affect the overall radio landscape in this country?
5. What do you see as the benefit of LPFM broadcasting over the airwaves vs. using the Internet?  How is radio different?
6. What about communities, urban diasporas, in big cities where spectrum space is scarce.  Will there be opportunities for them as well?
7. The FCC has up to 2 years from passage of the LCRA to start taking applications – any idea when that will happen?
8. I’ve heard that the waiting list could be up to five years after application. It would seem that this could be frustrating to those with an immediate need to get up and running.  It also seems like it would effectively put the kibosh on anyone whose intent is to use the airwaves for discussion of any current political events (OWS comes to mind).   Any thoughts on that?  Could this be a way of the FCC to gain even *more* control of the airwaves?
9. I understand that licenses will only go to registered nonprofits.  Doesn’t place even more restrictions on who can and cannot broadcast?
10. One of the most frequent complaints (or rationales) heard by unlicensed LPFM broadcasters in the past was that they couldn’t get a license from the FCC.  Now, if they become licensed under the LCRA, they will have to play by the FCC’s rules.  Is that a trade off you think will be worth it for them to make, or has the Internet effectively killed the pirate radio movement, rending the point moot?

Katrina Cass – BBOX Radio (Interview 12/4) /2011

1. Tell me the story of BBOX.  What’s your mission and how did you guys get started?
2. Did you or any of the other founders have a background in broadcasting?  What sparked this particular idea when you came up with it as your entry to the shipping container contest?
3. What do you see as the principal differences between broadcasting on the Internet vs. micropower broadcasting on the airwaves?
4. Do you think that the Internet has diminished the public’s interest in broadcasting on the air?  Is the Internet a competing technology or a complementary one?
5. Do you have any data on *how* people are listening to your station?  Do they listen at work on their computer with headphones? via Smartphone apps?
6. BBOX appears to be a very DIY effort – what have you found to be the biggest challenges in running an Internet radio station?
7. Aside from the Kickstarter campaign, what are some other ways BBOX is funded? Do you have sponsorships, lease airtime, or have other means of bringing in an income?
8. One of the reasons I find this project particularly interesting is that you’re doing something that’s very locally focused (community radio) on a decidedly non-local medium (the Internet).   How has the local response been to BBOX and how do you feel you  serve the local Brooklyn community?
9. What’s your process for selecting programming?  What criteria do you use?  Can anyone apply to have a show on BBOX?
10. Are all of your shows broadcast from the shipping crate studio, or have you done any remote/on location broadcasts from other places?
11. What’s the future of BBOX?  Are there any plans/desires to broadcast over the airwaves? What would be your advice to would be DIY broadcasters on the Internet?  What’s the best, easiest way for them to start?

The post We Want the Airwaves: An Investigation into Pirate and DIY Broadcasting first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In this paper, I will argue that artists calling themselves “cyborg artists” represent only a small fraction of the ways in which cybernetics has infiltrated art and ideas about art. I also hope to demonstrate that, in fact, their work often isn’t cybernetic at all, if we adhere to Norbert Wiener’s definition.  The “artist as cyborg,” I will contend, can refer not only to the materiality of the forms used to create art (i.e. machines and/or new media technology) but also to an aesthetic which is modeled on the core principles of cybernetics: negative feedback used within a system to achieve a goal.  Soraya Murray calls this “Cybernated Aesthetics,” and in her analysis of Korean artist Lee Bul, explains that “while [Bul is] calling upon an array of technologies that include (but are not limited to) media arts, [her works] are nevertheless fully engaged with cybernated life.” (Murray 47) This is a perceptual shift away from thinking of “cyborg art” exclusively as those that utilize new media technology, and towards a more holistic theory that situates art in Wiener’s more inclusive theory of cybernetics.

To this end, I will first examine the epistemological meanings of the terms “cybernetics” and “cyborg” as defined by Wiener, Haraway, Katherine Hayles and others. I will then focus on the process of creating art and cybernetics’ role in its evolution.  I will conclude by focusing on several “cyborg artists” and the way they are using technology in performance and new media art, and examine whether or not they are truly cybernetic or “cyborg,” either within Wiener’s framework or Haraway’s.

Defining Cybernetics, Cyborgs and the Posthuman

In order to discuss cybernetics in art or “cyborg artists,” it is first necessary to define what is meant by these terms.  In Wiener’s 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings, he defines cybernetics as classing “communications and control together,” (16) or, as Michael J. Apter has describes it, “the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine.” (257) For Wiener, the theory of cybernetics was meant to embody a complex of ideas that included communications theory (how messages are sent and received), systems theory (the complex entities in which those messages are sent and received), and well as control theory, i.e. the effects that those messages have in the system.  But Wiener’s theory was more than simply a sum of these parts; it meant to explain the relationships between them.  As Apter explains, “Underlying cybernetics is the idea that all control and communication systems, be they animal or machine, biological or technological, can be described and understood using the same language and concepts.” (257) Control theory is a cornerstone of Wiener’s theory and especially its two essential ingredients: feedback and goals.  “Negative feedback” is a process wherein a machine is controlled “on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance” (Wiener 24), or, as Apter explains, where “some part of the output of the system is fed back into the system again in a negative direction in order to control that system.” (258).  In order for this concept of feedback to be effective – or even relevant – it must have some sort of goal toward which this feedback, or corrective behavior, is applied. In homeostatic systems, this goal is often the maintenance of some desired state, such as a comfortable temperature in the case of the thermostat.  But whatever the goal is, the existence of one seems to be an essential component of control theory and therefore, by extension, of cybernetics as well.  In Wiener’s theory, feedback and goals work hand-in-hand.  As he says himself, “effective behavior must be informed by some sort of feedback process, telling it whether it has equaled its goal or fallen short.” (Wiener, 58-59)

Although the term “cyborg” didn’t appear until 1960 (Biro 2) the concept of a man-machine hybrid has been present in art and  sci-fi literature since at least the early 20^th century. It’s use by the Dadaists in 1920’s Weimar Germany anticipated Wiener’s theory (Biro 2) by their use of photomontage as a technique of exploring and blurring the boundaries between man and machine.  For example, Dada artist Raoul Hausmann’s depictions of the cyborg as a militaristic other “anticipated the uneasy play between friend and enemy, self and other, characteristic of Wiener’s account of early cybernetics.” (Biro 120)

Perhaps because of the various cultural contexts in which the cyborg has appeared, it is difficult to settle on a single definition.  One of these difficulties lies in the fact that, as Katherine Hayles says, “cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living being and narrative constructions.” (Hayles 114)  Matthew Biro agrees, stating, “the cyborg has long possessed a duel life as both an image and a concept.” (2) In her 1991 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway posits a theory that the cyborg is both a “creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” (Haraway 149)  She argues that the cyborg is a form of human identity that allows us to finally transcend gender, race and class and uses it as a model for contemporary feminism in a way that situates woman as an “other,” while at the same time operating “ beyond both the sex binary and the social realities that accompany it, [which] positions the cyborg as a possible metaphor for standing outside of phallocentric, rational thought.” (Murray 39)  Thus, by assuming the identity of cyborg – one empowers herself to transgress boundaries which may stand in the way of political work.  Compared to Wiener’s mechanistic definition of a system of communications and control, Haraway’s definition of the cyborg draws upon the cyborg’s presence in culture both before and after Wiener, and situates it in the realm of social theory.  While Wiener has been described as a liberal-humanist (Biro 2), Haraway’s cyborg theory is decidedly posthuman in that it “blurs several intermediary boundaries between the human and non-human.” (Garoian 336)  Katherine Hayles picks up on this idea of cyborg as posthuman and, in her 1999 book How we Became Posthuman, posits the characteristics of this posthuman condition that include thinking of the body “as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate,” and configuring the human being “so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” (Hayles pp 2-3)

While it’s beyond the scope of this paper to indulge in an in depth comparison between Wiener’s humanist theory of cybernetics and Haraway and Hayles’ posthuman concept of the cyborg, it’s my hope that this somewhat cursory look at the different ways of perceiving cybernetics and cyborgs will be useful when we examine the ways in which art and artists have utilized these concepts.

Cybernetics as a Model for Artistic Creation

Both Wiener’s cybernetic theory and Haraway’s concept of cyborg as discussed above have had significant impact in the arts and artists of the 20^th century.  Often, Wiener and Haraway’s concepts are both represented within a single artist or work.  For example, Apter’s comment that “the contemporary artist’s obsession with randomness may be seen as an attempt to increase the information he is conveying,” (258) could easily describe the composer John Cage and the way some of his works based on randomness utilized, intentionally or not, Wiener’s concept of information as “the negative logarithm of its probability […] the more probable the message, the less information it contains.” (Wiener 21)  At the same time, as Garoian points out, Cage was an artist who “[experimented] with the analog sounds and movements of machine culture” (334) which resonates with Haraway’s idea of the cyborg. Both of these concepts can be found in Cage’s 1952 composition Imaginary Landscape #4, a piece that calls for the “performers” to tune 12 radios to different random stations.   But cybernetics can be applied not only to experimental music, but to many, if not all, other forms as well.  Apter argues that, indeed, the whole process of art-making “is one which involves many feedback processes including those between the artist and the work of art he is in the act of creating, between the work of art and its audience, and between the audience and the artist through criticism in the short-term and, in the long term” (Apter 263) This is nowhere more evident than in the arts of theatre and live performance, which “functions as a closed-loop feedback system” whereby audience and performers provide an environment, or system, of stimulus-and-response that regulates itself via the feedback that an audience provides to performers and vice-versa. (Lichty 352)  Of course, this “system” of stimulus-and-response in the theatre existed well before the concept of cybernetics, but it’s just one example of the way in which Wiener’s ideas can be applied to the traditional arts.  It’s interesting to note that the rise in American theatre of theatrical improvisation – a form that further heightens and exploits the feedback loop between audience and performer, can be roughly mapped historically to just before the birth of Wiener’s theory.   Improvisational theatre as we know it today dates back to 1939 when Viola Spolin was at the Compass Theatre teaching what she was calling “Recreational Theatre,” or “Socio-Drama.” The forms she developed evolved into the improv theatre we know today, and is generally accepted as a viable art form. (Feldman)  This may serve as a reminder that, although we are trying to identify causal influences, every system exists within a still larger one, and similar ideas may be developed from the greater cultural zeitgeist.

While we’re able to establish that Wiener’s idea of feedback-and-response exists in a live performance space, what of other types of work wherein the artist and viewer are not together in physical or temporal space? Other types of art work – both static and interactive – are still conveyors of information, but the way the feedback loop works must be significantly different because the artist and viewer are not in the same space together at the same time.   In the case of interactive new media works, the feedback loop may exist, but there is a temporal disconnection between artist and audience.  In these cases, it may be the work itself that contributes to the cybernetic feedback loop. In Dan Graham’s installation, Time Delay Room, there are 2 rooms of equal size that viewers can move between, each is equipped with a surveillance camera at the point where the two rooms meet, and 2 monitors on the far wall.  As viewers move from one room to the other, the monitor they first encounter provides a live view of the room they just left, while the other provides a view of the room they just left, but with an 8-second delay. According to Gregor Stemmrich:

“The time-lag of eight seconds is the outer limit of the neurophysiological short-term memory that forms an immediate part of our present perception and affects this (from within). If you see your behavior eight seconds ago presented on a video monitor (from outside) you will probably therefore not recognize the distance in time but tend to identify your current perception and current behavior with the state eight seconds earlier. Since this leads to inconsistent impressions which you then respond to, you get caught up in a feedback loop. You feel trapped in a state of observation, in which your self-observation is subject to some outside visible control.”  (qtd. in Media Art Net)

One may question whether this installation is a truly cybernetic system and ask whether the work itself is a participant responding/adjusting to viewer stimulus.  However, I would argue that it does, in the sense that the machine provides “feedback” in the form of live and delayed projections in response to the viewers very presence and movement, which in turn affects the behavior of the viewers.

Another phenomenon worth considering when examining the relationship of cybernetics to art is that of art-making machines, or the machine-as-artist as opposed to the artist-as-machine. In 2007 Perry Bard, a NYC-based visual artist and filmmaker, created a conceptual work entitled Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake.  The concept of the project was to solicit a global audience, via the Internet, to remake scenes from Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary, Man with a Movie Camera. The scenes are then uploaded to a database and matched to the corresponding timecode in the Vertov film. A software program then “constructs” each iteration of the film by randomly selecting one user-version of each scene. The resulting work is then screened side-by-side with Vertov’s original.   Examples like these clearly raise questions of authorship – who is the author in this case?  Is it the artist, the machine, or the audience?  Further, the very concept of a machine that makes art would seem to run directly counter to Dewey’s aesthetic theory, specifically his notion that an art object must be created using the artist’s “images, observations, memories and emotions.” (Dewey 74).  Certainly those human qualities were used by the artist and the participants, but not by the machine that actually constructed the piece. This is an example of where it may be helpful to turn our thinking from the notion of art-as-object towards one of art-as-process, and how that concept may relate to cybernetics.  Apter says,

“The emphasis of cybernetics on process and change may have been one of the factors generating an increasing feeling among artists that art should be regarded as a process rather than as the production of static objects. This feeling has manifested itself in a number of ways including the production of works of art which are impermanent, the advent of the ‘happening’ as an art form and the deliberate and creative utilization in some works of kinetic art.” (263-4)

Bard’s project may not be a “happening” or kinetic art, but I think there are parallels in that the emphasis is placed on the process of collaboration itself.  Meaning is created not only by the art-object but also – but perhaps more importantly – by the way in which it’s created. It is this emphasis on process that Murray refers to when she writes, “this turn from discrete singularities into spaces of flows, information patterns and data clouds, this is the mark of a cybernated aesthetics.” (43)

In each of the cases mentioned in this section, artists have utilized the cybernetic concepts of feedback and response, and can be understood as a part of an integral system.

Cyborg Artists

We now come to the difficult question of cyborg artists and whether, in fact, the artists that make this claim are truly utilizing the principles of Wiener’s cybernetic theory of communication and control, or if they perhaps represent the cyborg as defined by Haraway and Hayles. To attempt to answer this, I will examine two artists who have identified themselves as “cyborg artists”: Stelarc, an Australian performance artist that uses his body connected to various forms of technology as a medium; and Orlan, a French performance artist who, through extensive use of plastic surgery, creates a ‘body’ that serves as both vehicle and medium.

When discussing Stelarc, Charles Garoian claims he “raises the issue of the history of our cyborg identity…. [Stelarc] argues that humans have always been cyborgs through their connections to technological devices and that a reconceptualization of technology in contemporary culture suggest that we interiorize technology rather than locate technology outside the body.” (340) In 1993, Stelarc created a piece entitled Stomach Sculpture, in which he lowered a small camera into his stomach that moved about, lit by tiny diodes. The image was then projected onto a video monitor.  In describing the piece, Stelarc said, “The idea was to insert an artwork into the body – to situate the sculpture in an internal space.  The body becomes hollow, with no meaningful distinctions between public, private, and the physiological spaces.” (qtd. in Asma).   While this piece certainly speaks to the way we relate our bodies to technology, and perhaps creates dialectic between the two, I question whether this can be considered cybernetic in the Wienerian sense strictly because he uses technology.  In order to be truly cybernetic, according to the definitions established at the start of this paper, the artist must enter into a relationship, either with his audience or with the technology used, which establishes a negative feedback loop to regulate behavior towards a desired goal.  Perhaps the piece could be better understood as “cyborg art” if we consider it vis-à-vis Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a transgressor of natural boundaries – after all, he is inserting an unnatural element into a natural, private space for public consumption. But I would argue that, unlike Haraway’s cyborg who transgresses physical and social boundaries as a way to move beyond gender and race, Stelarc’s insertion of a camera into his stomach does nothing to blur the boundaries between the human and non-human. The camera does not become part of him, so the question of identity – critical to Haraway’s metaphor – is not present.

One of Stelarc’s most well-known performances was a 1994 piece entitled Ping Body.  In this piece, an audience on the Internet was able to access a network of muscle-stimulation electrodes on the artist’s body.  A person participating on the Internet could activate a node on Stelarc’s body that would cause an involuntary muscle spasm.  As James Geary described the performance, “[Stelarc] wired himself to Internet. His body was dotted with electrodes – on his deltoids, biceps, flexors, hamstrings and calf muscles – that delivered gentle electric shocks, just enough to nudge the muscles into involuntary contractions.” Each time a node was activated, a photo of the artist was uploaded to the website. In this way, the audience did receive a measure of response correlating the stimulus they were providing.  While this performance comes closer to Wiener’s concept of cybernetics, there is a feedback loop, it still falls short of being truly cybernetic.  First, while the audience’s behavior does create a response from the artist, this response is not one that creates a corrective behavior from the artist, or vice versa. In other words, since there is no goal that is trying to be achieved through this system other than, perhaps, an aesthetic one, then it falls short of being truly cybernetic.  In considering this piece as “cyborg art” as it relates to Haraway’s definition of the cyborg, Stelarc does create a system in which human boundaries are transgressed but the performance still doesn’t manage to blur the boundaries between “natural” and “unnatural” technologies of the body which is an important component of Haraway’s manifesto: “Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms.” (Haraway 165)

Orlan is another single-name artist who has been characterized as a “cyborg artist” in that she utilizes medical technology as her method and her body as her medium. In other words, she uses plastic surgery as performance.  Her most famous work, officially entitled The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan, was an ongoing performance piece in which she transformed herself, via plastic surgery, into a feminine “ideal” based on various art works.  For example, in one surgery she had a facial alteration so that her forehead would be exactly like the forehead of the Mona Lisa. In this way the artist makes a social commentary on transmutability of the human body; but the question arises, as it does for Stelarc, as to whether these performances are truly cybernetic, or cyborg, in nature. While the technologies and artificialities she employs (the implant in her forehead, for example) do arguably “become” her in ways that Stelarc’s stomach-camera do not, there is still the question of how, or whether, they are integrated into her bodily “system” in a way that utilizes Wiener’s negative feedback loop.  The surgeries are, after all, “cosmetic,” in that they don’t communicate with the organic elements of her body in a way that creates a system of communication and control.

On the other hand, I concede that Orlan’s work fits a bit more neatly into Haraway and Hayles’ concept of the posthuman cyborg. The very nature of plastic surgery does begin to blur the boundaries between “natural” and technological objects. In her article, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” Carey Lovelace notes that “it was first assumed that Orlan’s plastic surgery epic was a feminist polemic dramatizing the unimaginable lengths women will go to achieve an ideal of beauty defined by men. However, after some contact with the piece, one began to realize, slowly, uneasily, that this was not the case. In fact, after hearing a few words from Orlan it became clear that not only is she not against surgical interventions to alter appearance, she seems veritably positive on the subject: [Orlan says]  ‘In future times we’ll change our bodies as easily as our hair color.’”(13-14) This seems to be right in line with Haraway’s rejection of the “natural” woman in favor of one that is empowered to transform herself at will.  Therefore, Orlan’s performance may not be truly “cybernetic” but aligns itself with cyborg theory from a feminist perspective.

Conclusion

We have seen that, while it can be problematic to define exactly what we mean by “cybernetics” or “cyborg,” undoubtedly Wiener’s 1948 theory of cybernetics has had an impact on not only new media art, but traditional arts as well.  The idea of art as self-regulating “system” of communication and control has influenced not only the way we create art, but how we think about it as well.

While this essay does not examine the entire body and breadth of work that the “cyborg artists” in the final section have created, the works I have presented raise important questions as to whether they can truly be considered cybernetic or cyborg at all.  Both Stelarc and Orlan fall short of Wiener’s definition of cybernetics, although it can be fairly stated that they come closer to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Neither, however, has transformed into a truly man-machine hybrid that exists as a holistic system wherein both technical and organic elements communicate with and regulate each other.

That isn’t to say that these artists are entirely devoid of a cybernetic sensibility. In this essay, we’ve hopefully seen that there are many ways to view cybernetics and its impact on art.  I don’t think that cybernetic art needs to necessarily be technological or digital.  I agree with Murray when she says that cybernated aesthetics are “in conversation with electronics and the digital, but not bounded by them.  Cybernated aesthetics reflect the impact of cybernated life, though they may not take digital or electronic form.”  (Murray 48)

Works Cited

Apter, Michael J. “Cybernetics and Art.” Leonardo. Vol. 2. Pergamon Press. 1969. pp. 257-262.

Asma, Stephen T. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Work in Progress.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 47, Issue 19. January 19, 2001.

Bard, Perry. “Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake.” Accessed 16 December 2010. <http://dziga.perrybard.net/>

Biro, Matthew. The Dada Cyborg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. 1980.

Feldman, Lee Gallup. “A Brief History of Improvisational Theatre in the United States.” Yale-Theatre. 1974 Mar 01.  Vol. 5, Issue 2.  p.128

Garoian, Charles R., and Yvonne M. Gaudelius. “Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance in the Digital Age. Studies in Art Education. 2001. 42(4). p. 333-347.

Geary, James. “The Body Electric.” Time Europe. Vol. 159, Issue 10.  March 11, 2002.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 1991.

Hayles, N.K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago. 1999.

Lichty, Patrick. “The Cybernetics of Performance and New Media Art.” Leonardo. Vol. 33, No. 5. 2000. pp. 351-354.

Media Art Net. “Dan Graham Time-Delay Room” <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/time-delay-room/> Accessed 15 Dec 2010.

Murray, Soraya. “Cybernated Aesthetics: Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. PAJ 89. Vol. 30, No. 2. May 2008. pp. 38-50.

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. New York: Anchor Books. 1954.

The post Cybernetics in Art and the Myth of the Cyborg Artist first appeared on Tom Tenney.

How do changing copyright laws and a participatory media landscape impact the fitters theorized by Chomsky two decades ago? To try to answer this, I will look specifically at Chomsky’s ideas of media ownership and examine how they may be challenged by contemporary media practices.  I will examine not only the concept of content ownership, but also ownership of the media companies themselves and try to discern how interactive media both challenges Chomsky’s theory, as well as how it has created an environment in which new censorship filters have emerged, and whether it’s possible for old economic models to survive in the digital age.

Content Ownership

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman present a critique of corporate ownership of media, showing that consolidation of ownership arose due to the “increase of capital costs […] which was based on technological improvements, along with the owners’ increased stress on reaching large audiences.” (3-4) In other words, it simply became too expensive for independent producers to create content and compete with large corporations.  As a result, the major producers of media today are owned by wealthy people with a vested interest in preserving their wealth.   The remainder of Chomsky’s arguments about media ownership (relationships with banks, deregulation, ties to government) is dependent on this basic assumption that a wealthy power elite owns media content.

Partly due to the rise of interactive technologies and the way they allow content to be extracted, appropriated and recontextualized by consumers, there are two ways to consider ownership of media today: ownership of content, and ownership of the media organizations themselves.   For the former, the concept of content as property depends on the metaphors we use to describe it, and it’s important to take a look at the history of copyright before we examine how it has been transformed in the 20^th century by metaphors of physical property.  Copyright began in Britain in 1710 with the Statute of Anne, conceived as a contract that allowed publishers a limited monopoly on the copying of books.  As such, it had nothing to do with “property,” but existed as a way for authors and publishers to profit from their work for a prescribed time period.  It wasn’t until 1967 that the term “Intellectual Property” came into popular usage (Lemley 1003 n.4) and became the dominant metaphor for copyright.   Clearly, this isn’t the kind of “ownership” that Chomsky was referring to in Manufacturing Consent, but the current battles around copyright protection are important to consider and play a role in shaping how we think about corporate ownership of media.  With the rise of interactive and media sharing technologies, consumers can easily appropriate media created by corporate producers and use it to create transformative works that are critiques or commentary on the original, and that make potentially subversive statements about our culture.  This presents a challenge to Chomsky’s ownership filter in that, while corporations may still control the output of content, their grip on its distribution and how that content is “read” is diminishing.  Through the recontextualization of corporate content, remixers have the ability to re-examine and critique the content and redistribute it in such a way that it provides consumers with an alternate, often critical reading of the original.  This loosening of “control” of their brands and messages has spurred a backlash among corporate content creators, which has led to copyright infringement litigation against consumers who reuse their content.  While such transformative use is legally protected under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law, the usual result of corporate litigation of individuals is that the consumer, due to the inability to pay legal costs, will back down and the litigator will have won by default.  Thus, we can think of this tactic of using the market to achieve dominance over independent producers, as another kind of “filter” in the Chomskian sense.  While it pertains directly to ownership of content, this tactic is akin to Chomsky’s filter of “advertising” in that, like the use of advertising to subsidize media, it forces smaller players out of the market, effectively silencing them.

Media Ownership

Enforcement of copyright protection can also be seen as having led to a deterioration of discourse in the public sphere.  In 2008, The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported the removal of the presidential debates by corporate broadcasters from the video sharing site YouTube, which points to a critical failure of copyright protection – the censorship of political discourse from publicly available resources.   This indicates not only problems with content ownership, but refers directly to Chomsky’s critique of corporate ownership of media organizations.

On one hand, it can be said that Chomsky’s filter of media ownership is not only still in effect, but perhaps even stronger than it was 20 year ago in that the number of controlling corporations has now dwindled to six: NewsCorp, GE, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom and Bertelsmann. In a statement that reinforces Chomsky’s view of media ownership as a propaganda filter Amy and David Goodman wrote in the Seattle Times, “These are not media that are serving a democratic society, where a diversity of views is vital to shaping informed opinions.  This is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is repackaging government spin and passing it off as journalism.”  However, in a networked society where information can so freely be copied and distributed, large news organizations are facing a crisis of ownership. Thus, when considering corporate ownership of media organizations themselves, it is useful to look at news organizations and the economic troubles they are currently facing, largely due to the ubiquity of free news enabled by interactive distribution technologies.

According to Keiyana Fordham, there are three ways interactive technologies have disrupted the news: 1. They can freely distribute news at zero cost; 2. They have greatly increased competition since anyone can distribute news; 3. They have changed consumer behavior so that buyers and sellers can connect directly, making advertisers increasingly irrelevant. (944) These disruptions have forced corporate news producers to not only reexamine their business models, but also to file suits against bloggers, aggregators, and search engines as a first line of defense. Aggregators like Yahoo News argue that what they do, i.e. excerpting headlines and linking back to the source, is fair use and should be protected (980-981).   In 2006 Field v. Google a federal district court upheld Google’s claim to fair use, citing the enormous public benefit that search engines offer.  Thus, it remains unclear where lines of ownership can be drawn, and news organizations continue to fight for control of their content, the loss of which threatens to obviate their businesses.

However, some entrepreneurs and scholars are positing solutions to save the news industry that would mitigate the problem of corporate media consolidation while at the same time allowing the industry to endure.  In a 2009 presentation to the Duke Conference on Nonprofit Media, Penelope Muse Abernathy put forward several options for the New York Times that entailed bringing the organization into the nonprofit sphere, including: establishment of an endowment, foundational support for certain of the Times’ journalistic endeavors, and purchase of the paper by an educational institution. (Abernathy 7-10)

Conclusion

Because interactive technologies radically change the way content, particularly news, is delivered, it will be necessary for the concept of ownership, both of content and the media themselves, to change along with it. In the 80’s, when Chomsky wrote his critique of media ownership, electronic mass media entailed the necessary licensing of airwaves by private companies.  Today, the Internet, which is available to private citizens with a computer and a connection, is one of the primary ways that information and media is distributed.  It can be likened to telephone lines, which are free for all to use.  When AT&T, in the mid-20^th century, attempted to place a ban on technologies that utilized this network in a nondestructive manner.  This ban was overturned in 1968 and paved the way for devices like the modem, without which the Internet never would have come about. (B. Herman 272)    Now, in the 21st century, there are lobbies to place the same types of bans and restrictions on the Internet – such as those opposed to Net Neutrality who would allow corporations to become the gatekeepers of content.

Constitutional Law professor Lawrence Lessig and other free culture activists call for a preservation of the commons, which are public amenities free for all to use such as parks and streets.  It is their view that media content should be a part of this, free for artists and scholars to use for the betterment of society.  Can this metaphor also extend to concepts of ownership not just of media content, but of media organizations as well?  Given the importance of the media to governmental and private interests, it seems unlikely that the media will become a public utility any time soon, but there are steps that can be taken in the meantime to insure that Chomsky’s idea of media ownership as a propaganda filter isn’t simply replaced by another set of filters applied to new technologies.  First, there needs to be a reversal of the copyright extensions applied over the past half-century that have served the interests of corporate media creators, and stifled innovation by mitigating opportunities for citizens to access their culture in order to build upon it. To do this, it’s imperative that we re-examine the discursive metaphors we use to define copyright – and begin to see it is what it was originally intended to be, i.e. a monopoly granted to artists and publishers for a limited time, after which the work falls into the public domain.  It’s also essential we re-examine the importance of news and information to the public sphere, and develop protocols to determine what kinds of content can be privately owned and which must be ceded to the public for the sustainability of a democratic society.  Most importantly, we need to recognize the importance of individual media producers who are using new technology to add their voices to public discourse.  Only by doing so can we begin to eradicate the first filter of Chomsky’s propaganda machine, and work towards a free and open culture.  But there is a battle ahead on all these fronts – as professor Henry Jenkins wrote in his essay on the cultural logic of media convergence in 2004, “In the new media environment, it is debatable whether governmental censorship or corporate control over intellectual property rights poses the greatest threat to the right of the public to participate in their culture” (40)

Works Cited

Abernathy, Penelope Muse. “A Nonprofit Model for the New York Times?” Duke Conference on Nonprofit Media. 4-5 May, 2009.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. “TV Networks Must Stop Blocking Election Videos on YouTube.” 2008.  http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/20. Accessed October 17, 2010.

Fordham, Keiyana. “Can Newspapers Be Saved? How Copyright Law Can Save Newspapers from the Challenges of New Media.” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. Spring 2010, v20 i3, p939-990.

Goodman, Amy, and David Goodman. “Why Media Ownership Matters.”  Seattle Times.  3 April 2005. <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002228040_sundaygoodman03.html>

Herman, Bill D. “Breaking and Entering on My Own Computer: The Contest of Copyright Metaphors.” Communication Law & Policy. Spring 2008, Vol. 13 Issue 2, p231-274.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. 1988. New York: Pantheon. 2002.

Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 7(1): 33-43. 2004.

Lemley, Mark A. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83.4 (2005): 1031-1075. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 17 Oct. 2010.

The post The Impact of Digital Technologies on Chomsky’s Media Ownership Filter first appeared on Tom Tenney.

The above statement, taken from the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group (81) written after their first meeting in 1961, is telling.  In the late 50’s and early 60’s, independent and experimental filmmakers, frustrated with the predictable commercial formulae of Hollywood cinema, began aligning themselves and what they were doing with the art and performance world, where they saw exciting changes taking place.   The original intent of this essay was to attempt to answer the question: How does what was happening in independent and experimental film in the late 50’s and 60’s compare to what was happening in art and performance at the same time? What were the common influences and how did they influence each other?   As I dug into the research, it became obvious that trying to create clean lineages and clearly drawn cause-and-effect statements would be impossible.  Attempting to define cultural influences is like trying to bottle smoke – there are simply too many artists and too many elements contributing to the cultural zeitgeist to confidently make such black and white statements.  The alternative seemed to be the much easier task of making broad generalizations like the late 50’s and 60’s were “when the American avant-garde began to define itself, in opposition to European modernism and to post-war American society,” (“Ages” 10) or that the cultural influences had to do with the ascendance of youth culture, largely due to the popularity of rock n’ roll.

Instead of relying on such generalizations, I decided instead to hone my research to focus on three representative independent filmmakers of the time – John Cassavetes, Bruce Conner, and Andy Warhol – and examine how trends in art and performance influenced their works in particular.  In this way we can hope to extrapolate a larger view by looking at a small cross-section consisting of three artists who, while working in very different ways from each other, all contributed to the changes that took place in American Independent Cinema.

Before looking at the influence of the other arts, it’s worth taking a short look at the technological developments and ideas about media of the time and how they affected each of our filmmakers, for these, perhaps more than any other cultural influences, allowed for the emergence of independent cinema. By the late 50’s, film equipment had become cheaper and more portable – allowing for greater spontaneity in filmmaking.  Cameras and recording equipment were far easier to take on location and do fast guerilla street shooting without the need for long set up times or permits.   As Steve Erickson wrote in Cineaste, “The Nagra tape recorder, which weighed only five kilograms, and lightweight Camiflex and Arriflex cameras made location shooting and hand-held shots much easier. Innovations in film stock enabled directors to work at night and with natural light.” (Erickson 63) These innovations were especially important for an artist like Cassavetes whose style – especially in his film Shadows (1958) – relied so heavily on a spontaneous and improvisational style that caught ‘real’ moments as they happened.

Bruce Conner also exploited this plethora of new technology, but didn’t, however, depend as heavily on the availability of portable shooting equipment since so many of his best known works were created solely from found footage for which he never picked up a camera at all.  He did depend on technology, though, and referred in his work to specific ideas about the media that were prevalent at the time.  1967, the year Conner created Report (1967), one of his most important works, was the same year Marshall McLuhan published The Medium is the Message, and campuses and intellectual circles were buzzing about media effects. Report, a film which is critical of contemporary media while at the same time relying on it, conflates the effects with the media itself, creating what Moritz and O’Neill call “a hypnotic vortex” where there is “no separation possible between a public event and the media through which we come to know of it.” (Moritz and O’Neill 40)

Andy Warhol, primarily known as a painter, also utilized technology and ideas about the media in his films.  Jonas Mekas, an important filmmaker and critic of the era, and known in both independent cinema circles and the avant-garde art/performance scenes was a proponent of “auteurism” in cinema: an “individual controlling sensibility” which defines the work. (Ruoff 6)  Warhol certainly fell into this category although through creative use of modern media technology, Warhol and other filmmakers moved from the role of auteur into what Roy Grundmann calls the “emcee” of the film (48). An example of this is his film Chelsea Girls (1966), in which two different films are shown simultaneously side by side on a wide screen. (Battcock 363) This method came be known as ‘Expanded Cinema,’ which Sheldon Renan coined in 1967, calling it “cinema expanded to the point at which the effect of film may be produced without the use of film at all.” (Joseph 95)  For the next two years, Warhol would continue to experiment with this idea of Expanded Cinema, carrying it into the live performances of his multimedia event,  “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” in which 3-5 films were projected at the same time, often before or during performances of The Velvet Underground, creating “a dislocating, environmental montage where different media interfered and competed with one another, accelerating their distracting, shock like effects to produce the three-dimensional multimedia equivalent of a moiré. (Joseph 81-97)

Art

Cinema, considered by many, if not most, to be an art on par with painting and music, has a long tradition of being influenced by other visual media, and often by the avant-garde or experimental arts of the time.  Writing in Film Culture, Parker Tyler reminds us that “it is important to remember that the phenomenon of the moving photograph appeared at a moment when there took place a radical change in aesthetic taste on a high level: when the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Expressionists and then the Cubists and the Futurists appeared in the visual medium of painting and early films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Passion of Joan of Arc.” (Tyler 48).  In the 50’s and 60’s, the avant-garde film community was a subset of the larger art world.  In New York, this world was unofficially led by Jonas Mekas, mentioned earlier, who can be thought of as the “glue” that held the art and independent film worlds together, at least in New York. His friends and collaborators came from all disciplines: Lou Reed, LeRoi Jones, Stan Brakhage, Norman Mailer, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, and Yoko Ono, just to name a few.   This diverse community created a synergy between disciplines in which each creatively fed the others.   Consequently, visual artists and filmmakers alike were all influenced by changes and developments in the art world.   Willie Varela, in The Journal of Film and Video, reports that “filmmakers who started working after World War II constituted a movement as powerful and significant as the abstract expressionists in painting.  And the abstract expressionists changed painting and shifted the center of the art world from Europe to America.”   Regardless, he continues, these new filmmakers “would not receive, with a couple of exceptions, the same level of recognition and support that the abstract-expressionist painters received.” (Varela 4).  In addition to this parallel between new independent filmmakers and the abstract expressionist, there were plenty of other art world influences that fed the new generation of filmmakers.   One of these was Fluxus, “the New York based avant-garde group of the mid 1960’s, [who] used the streets as a stage, offering concerts, improvisations, happenings, poetry readings in public monuments, areas designed for transit or in dead, unused spaces like empty lots.” (Suarez 30).  This guerilla style had important influences on the new generation of filmmakers, in particular on Cassavetes who, although it’s claimed that he did “not get along with the New York avant-garde,” (Maslin 17), was certainly not immune to its influence.   But perhaps the most important influence of Fluxus on the Independent Cinema scene was it’s defiance of convention.   Having their roots in Dada and artists like Duchamp and Cage, Fluxus artists challenged all conventions whether they were of definitions of art or the relationship between art and audience. (MacDonald 3)

When speaking of Fluxus, artist Allan Kaprow described them as, “relatively free of ego.  There was a tendency to avoid stardom or cameo performances; anyone was free to interpret them as she or he wished.” (“Ages” 54).  These words could also be used to describe Cassavetes films, particularly Shadows.   Carney reminds us that “the narrative even-handedness prevents any one figure from ‘starring’ or relegating the others to merely ‘supporting’ status.” (Carney Shadows 54).  In a piece in the Kenyon review, Carney also states “all of [Cassavetes’] films are about finding possibilities of emotional spontaneity and susceptibility in a world which relentlessly mechanizes behavior.” (Carney “Adventure” 117).  In this way, Cassavetes also aligns himself somewhat with the aesthetic of the abstract expressionist movement of the late 50’s, which prioritized a “primordial experience through the gestural amorphous qualities of paint on canvas.” (Rorimer 12)

Conner’s work, which is often described as collage, also has parallels with abstract expressionism.  Although it’s one of his films for which he actually shot the footage, his short film The White Rose (1967) has been described by Greil Marcus as “almost as a collage of still photos.” (64) The film is a 9-minute documentary of the removal of Jay DeFeo’s 2000-pound painting, The Rose, from the artist’s apartment.   Conner, a friend of the artist, described her construction of the painting: “As she did the painting she would take the paint off – this combination of black paint with white and red. The footstool that she worked on – standing up – was covered with this. The entire place was the same color and the floor was covered.  She’d take off lumps of this paint, and throw it on the floor.” (Marcus 64).  This description sounds similar to the way Jackson Pollack – arguably the most famous of the abstract expressionists – worked; and the creation of the DeFeo work as been described as “more ritual than art – an enactment of truth.” (Marcus 64-65).  In “Fallout,” Moritz and O’Neill call out Conner’s relationship to expressionism explicitly, claiming, “Conner’s art has defined a trend in American expressionism” (39).  Indeed, when one compares the works of Bruce Conner to the iconoclastic collagists such as Rauschenberg – the influence is undeniable.

The films of Warhol must be differentiated from his pop art painting, as the two different media in which he worked reflect two sets of influences.  As with Conner and Cassavetes, we can see expressionist influences – Gregory Battcock specifically calls out his “travelogue-y” color combinations and says of Chelsea Girls, “the most important feature differentiating it from other inter-media operations (including those of Whitman, Ranier, Cage, Paxton, and Rauschenberg) is probably that The Chelsea Girls takes place in a movie theater.” (364) Another main influence of Warhol’s films was minimalism, which can be seen in Empire (1964), an 8-hour film of a single fixed shot on the Empire State Building, and Sleep (1963), a 5-hour document of a man sleeping.  As Amy Taubin wrote, “the minimalists were making very large paintings and sculptures; Warhol made very long films.” (22)

Performance

When one considers the underground performance scene of the 50’s and (especially) the 60’s – two ideas can be considered to represent the radical happenings of the time: improvisation and ritual.  Allan Kaprow, a pioneer of early performance art in New York, describes the scene as “a loose group of artists sharing for a few moments a kind of blissful energy which welcomed an opening up of art to the everyday environment, and to the use of throwaway garbage found on the streets at night.  We liked the idea of brevity, of the spontaneous.” (“Ages” 54)  This description has resonance especially in the films of Cassavetes and Conner – Cassavetes because of his use of improvisation, and Conner through his reassemblage of the detritus of media and culture.   Whether or not Cassavetes’ actors actually improvised on camera, his use of improvisation and spontaneity as a method of creating the narrative, as well as presenting the effect of improvisation in his films, is a defining characteristic of his work.   To Cassavetes, the act of creating art and the act of living were one in the same. (Berliner 9)  In his films, we see the characters themselves not conforming to a Hollywood convention of reality but instead throwing away “all of the preformulated scripts of life and [becoming] improvisers of their own identities and relationships.” (Carney “Adventures” 117) According to Carney, making meaning in the moment “could be said to be the masterplot of all Cassavetes’ films.”  (116)

One of the New York theatre troupes that were doing pioneering work in improvisation as performance in the 60’s was The Living Theatre, founded in 1947 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, an abstract-expressionist painter of the New York school.  The Living Theatre used the philosophy of the French dramatist Antonin Artaud as the basis of much of their work, much of it largely improvisational, such as Paradise Now, and Tonight, We Improvise.  Much of Artaud’s philosophy, which the Living Theatre espoused, was based in the idea of theatre-as-ritual, meant to reinforce the notion of art-as-experience, and reintroduce the sacred into an art that had become mundane.   There was a fair amount of intermingling between the avant-garde film scene and that of the Living Theatre, with the latter often providing their theatre space for screenings.  In fact, in 1965, Mekas made an award-winning film, The Brig (1965) based on one of the Living Theatre’s original performances (Stoller 38).   The idea of ritual and art-as-experience bled into the film scene as well.  Some critics even considered this idea of ritual as essential to avant-garde film.  In a Film Culture article, Parker Tyler wrote, “the chief problem of film experimentalism is to find in ordinary behavior…those prime sources of ritual and myth where humanity refreshes and revitalizes itself as in a mystic bath.” (Tyler 50)  Even John Cassavetes, who denied any involvement in the avant-garde at the time, allows that his films break from the Hollywood tradition by creating film-as-experience, rather than entertainment.  He said, “People have said that my films are not easy, that they are not ‘Entertainment,’ but experiences you are put through.” (Carney 113)  Compare this with Julian Beck, co-founder of the Living Theatre, in his book The Life of the Theatre:  “To observe only and not to act: to be reduced to less than life:  naturally the linear reading society would tend this way.  It is time to move on.”

Conner, as well, can be seen to espouse an experiential philosophy in his films.  In Report, he all but dispenses with narrative altogether and instead creates a collage that manipulates our senses, creating a modern ritual that plays with time and affects us in a way that transcends reason.  Greil Marcus has commented that, in Conner’s films, “sometimes the pileup of images creates a sense of no-time, of time suspended, and this is where the sense of religious ritual takes place.”  (65) In looking at the films of Warhol under the lens of ritual, we can certainly surmise that his intermedia event, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable – in which his films played an important part – is a ritual of sorts.  In the case of the EPI, the performances seems to have been meant to short circuit the rational mind and play directly to the senses by combining film, live music and performance (there were often ‘dancers’ on stage while the Velvet Underground played facing away from the audience.)

Conclusion

By no means is this essay meant to represent the full spectrum of influences that led to the movements of Independent Cinema or avant-garde film – those are far too numerous and outside the scope of this paper.  Any comprehensive examination would need to include a response to the French New Wave; the political, social and intellectual climate of the time including Vietnam, civil rights, and the rise of Marxist theory; and the artists’ reaction to the conventions of Hollywood cinema, among many others.  Here we have examined only two aspects of the American cultural landscape of the late 50’s and early 60’s and the effects those may have had on only three individual artists.  As we’ve seen, each has been influenced by similar phenomena, but often in very different ways.  While Cassavetes may have extracted value from the improvisational aspects of Fluxus, Conner may have been more aligned with expressionism and Warhol with minimalism.  And this is only one way to connect the dots, for culture doesn’t follow such clear patterns; theories of influences are always shaky and can only be made in hindsight.

Works Cited

“Ages of the Avant-Garde.” Performing Arts Journal 16.1 (Jan, 1994): 9-57. Print.

Battcock, Gregory. “Notes on The Chelsea Girls: A Film by Andy Warhol.” Art Journal 26.4 (Summer, 1967): 363-365. Print.

Berliner, Todd. “Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the ‘Real Realism’ of John Cassavetes.” Film Quarterly 52.3 (Spring, 1999): 2-16. Print.

Beck, Julian. The Life of the Theatre. San Francisco: City Lights. 1972. Print.

Carney, Ray. Shadows. British Film Institute. 2000. Print.

Carney, Ray. “The Adventure of Insecurity.” Kenyon Review 13.2 (1991): 102-121. Military & Government Collection. EBSCO. Web. 25 Apr. 2010.

Erickson, Steve. Rev. of Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties by Peter Cowie. Cineaste 30.1 (2004): 62. MAS Ultra – School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 25 Apr. 2010. Print.

Grundmann, Roy. “Masters of Ceremony: Media Demonstration as Performance in Three Instances of Expanded Cinema.” Velvet Light Trap No. 54 (Fall, 2004): 48-64. Print.

Joseph, Branden W. “My Mind Split Open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Grey Room 8 (2002): 80-107.Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 25 Apr. 2010.

MacDonald, Scott, and Yoko Ono. “Yoko Ono: Ideas on Film.” Film Quarterly 43.1 (Autumn, 1989): 2-23. Print.

Marcus, Greil. “Ritual in Transfigured Time.” Film Comment 41.1 (2005): 62-66. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 25 Apr. 2010.

Maslin, Janet. “Cassavetes, A Model of Defiance.” The New York Times 19 Feb. 1989: Page 17. Print.

Mortiz, William, and Beverly O’Neill. “Fallout: Some Notes on the Films of Bruce Conner.” Film Quarterly. 31.4 (Summer, 1978): 36-42. Print.

Rorimer, Anne. New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality. London: Thames and Hudson. 2001. Print.

Ruoff, Jeffrey K. “Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World.” Cinema Journal 30.3 (Spring 1991): 6-28.  Print.

Stoller, James. “Beyond Cinema: Notes on Some Films by Andy Warhol.” Film Quarterly 20.1 (Autumn, 1966): 35-38. Print.

Suarez, Juan A. Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960’s Underground Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1996. Print.

Taubin, Amy. “My Time is Not Your Time.” Sight and Sound 4.6 (1994): 20-25. Print.

“The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Cooper Square Press. 2000. 79-83. Print.

Tyler, Parker. “A Preface to the Problems of the Experimental Film.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Cooper Square Press. 2000. 42-51. Print.

Varela, Willie. “We Will Not Go Quietly: Some Thoughts on the Avant-Garde, Then and Now.”  Journal of Film and Video 57.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 3-8. Print.

The post The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of American Independent Cinema first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In David Holzman’s Diary, Jim McBride creates a “mockumentary,” a parody of the so-called vérité documentaries that had begun to appear at the beginning of the decade, first in France and later in the United States.  Through parody, McBride accuses these films of not only taking themselves too seriously, but of actually obstructing the truth rather than exposing it. Cameras may be mechanical, he seems to be saying, but they are also subjective and all is subject to a documentarian’s bias. The film begins with the fictional filmmaker David Holzman pretentiously quoting Godard: “Film is truth 24 times per second,” and thus begins down a road that he hopes will reveal the “truth” about his messed-up life.  Almost everything he does for the rest of the film reveals to the audience (if not to himself,) in scene after scene, that personal redemption through trying to capture the truth is simply not possible.  Shortly after he “introduces” his camera, David effuses “I can stop it when I want to” and almost in the same breath, “I can get it all [on camera],” never realizing the contradiction (i.e. that if you can “stop it when you want to,” you are not “getting it all,” but editorializing.)  David is almost childlike in his obsession with his camera, and one incongruous scene is devoted entirely to him showing off and playing with his new fisheye lens.  In this scene, McBride, the real filmmaker, points out the masturbatory narcissism of documentary filmmakers by presenting the fictional filmmaker (Holzman) as childish and self-indulgent.  Later in the film, McBride makes this analogy to masturbation quite clear by having David sitting on is bed telling his camera/audience that (actual) masturbation is “the real stuff…you can thing of anything, trains, bagels.”  The filmmaker seems to be saying that in the end, most documentary films that purport to reveal a “truth” is all masturbation and only one version of the truth is revealed, usually one revealing the filmmaker’s narcissism.Perhaps the most interesting scene in David Holzman’s Diary is the one in which David’s friend scolds him for thinking that he could ever reveal the truth in a documentary.  This seemed like a moment in which McBride was dropping the veil of satire and speaking directly to the audience.  Holzman’s friend calls the script “bad” and both David and his girlfriend Penny “boring.” “You’re not going to understand your life better by putting it on celluloid and looking at it over and over,” he says to the camera.  This seems to be the crux of what McBride is trying to get at with David Holzman’s Diary – the fact that, by definition, a film can only record “half-truths, and that may be worse than a lie.”

In Report, Bruce Conner uses a tactic very different from McBride’s.  Instead of revealing truth by constructing a fictional narrative that pokes holes in the very idea of truth, Conner inundates us with media reports of the Kennedy assassination, using radio reports and clips of the Zapruder film, which I imagine audiences in the 60’s had seen ad nauseum.  Report exposes media representations of official truths for what they are – constructed narratives.  He achieves this by juxtaposing news reports and shots of the presidential motorcade with clips that represent heroism (a bullfighter riding into the ring), middle class complacency (ads for brand new refrigerators,) and through repetition designed to recontextualize the reports in a way that will jar us from the way we habitually see them and allow us to see them anew.  Conner’s film is less a straight narrative, and more the work of a visual artist – like a painting that has come to life.

In terms of their methods, the two films may seem almost to stand almost opposite of each other – David Holzman’s Diary uses satire and fiction to expose a truth about “Truth,” and Conner reveals the fiction of “Official Truth” by recontextualizing real news reports and found footage.  But the ultimate messages of the two films don’t seem so different – both encourage a healthy skepticism of what is presented as truth, encouraging audiences to think critically about both the messages they are being fed by the media, and just as importantly, the media through which the messages are delivered. The two films also use related, if dissimilar methods of storytelling.  It’s been said that parody, the technique used by McBride, is a dialogue between two voices – that of the parodist humorously questioning the second voice, the “original” it mocks (Jones 130) – in this case documentary film.  While Conner’s film certainly isn’t a parody, it also speaks with two voices – that of the artist who is commenting on the material he presents, and the voice of the media itself.    The two filmmakers also employ similar techniques to accentuate the “truth” or authenticity of the film.  In both films, film leader shown in the middle of the films reminds us constantly that we are watching a media representation, or an interpretation of an event, not the event itself.  In the case of David Holzman’s Diary, this technique seems to be one employed by David – perhaps even in a way that mocks artists like Conner – not by the actual filmmaker.   Also, both McBride (or, Holzman) and Conner use the method of displaying a blank screen while only the audio is heard, making the audiences focus on what is being said, as opposed to the audio being simply a narration of the visual images.  Again, while in McBride’s film this technique has the desired effect, it’s possible that this, too, is simply an element of the satire.

Having been made in the same year, both films emerged from and reference a similar cultural context. Post-Kennedy trauma, anxiety about Vietnam, and a nation in cultural crisis are all themes that add texture to both David Holzman’s Diary and Report via representations of media reports of the day.  As David takes us on a tour of his Upper West Side neighborhood in David Holzman’s Diary, we hear strains of The Doors, juxtaposed with news reporting deaths in Vietnam and New Jersey.  Similarly, Conner employs radio reports of the Kennedy assassination, adding to the feeling of immediacy in the film, as well as demonstrating the dramatic arc this story took – juxtaposing live-coverage of the shooting with the more somber aftermath.

The role of the camera – and technology in general – is critical to the idea of truth telling in both films, each emphasizes and anthropomorphizes technology in different ways.   In David Holzman’s Diary, David almost fetishizes his camera, his first love, which he introduces before even his girlfriend, calling it “my friend… my eyes” (by contrast, he introduces his girlfriend as “vain, dirty and sloppy.”)  In this one line, he defines his camera as both a discrete character and an extension of himself.   Throughout the film, the camera continues to act as a “character,” one that watches, pries and intrudes.  By the end of the film, David has lost the differentiation between technology and humanity altogether as he shouts at his camera, “YOU made me do things,” and “YOU haven’t told me anything!”   Despite his reliance on the camera to reveal the truth about his life, it only ends up getting in the way.   David’s girlfriend Penny is extremely uncomfortable on film, despite David’s admonishments to “ignore the camera.”  As a result, in this case the camera has actually disrupted the telling of truth, as we never get a “true” picture of Penny at all.  Finally, in his exploitation of the movie camera as his “eyes,” David reveals an often-disturbing voyeurism.  He secretly films the girl across the street through her window, records Penny as she sleeps naked on his bed (a reference to Warhol’s 1963 film, Sleep?) and in one scene “the camera” follows a strange woman out of the subway until she turns around and tells him to “beat it.”   The truths revealed in this way are not the ones David intends, but disturbing truths about himself and about the nature of filmmaking.

In Report, a film in which the filmmaker never “filmed” at all, the role of the camera still has a voyeuristic aspect, but in this case the voyeur is the audience, the American public, not the filmmaker.   Conner repeats a single image of the Kennedy motorcade passing several times, which not only divorces the image it from its habitual, expected context, but also seems to reference America’s voyeuristic fascination with the event.  Not having lived in 1963, I can only imagine that the media coverage following the assassination was much like watching CNN in the months following the 9/11 tragedy.  After the latter event, we were inundated with the same photos and videos of the tragedy over and over again.  The media weren’t entirely to blame for this – we wanted to see those images, and some of us sat in front of the TV ingesting them for days, weeks, and months at a time.   Instead of the camera being the eyes of the filmmaker as is McBride’s fictional artist – Conner is the “eyes” of his camera – he, the artist, decides what you see, crafting a new story out of the very same images from which, originally, a very different story was told.

Both films also portray television images as a means to tell their stories. In Report, TV images are virtually the only ones we see.  The bulk of the film is a presentation of television images that were actually broadcast by the media during the Kennedy assassination, juxtaposed with other media representing the cultural zeitgeist of postwar, space-age America. In this way, Conner tries to expose a greater truth (albeit a subjective one) that probes deeper than anything reported by the media, which he uses as source material.  McBride’s use of TV is limited to one scene in which he presents an entire evening of TV watching in 2 minutes by recording a single frame from each shot on the TV, giving us an almost psychedelic cross section of the day’s media.   Aside from this scene, in David Holzman’s Diary, radio and TV are bit players while in Conner’s film they are the stars. Both however, make powerful statements about the media.  Both films utilize advertising as well, providing a cultural reference in which to embed their messages.

Both David Holzman’s Diary and Report represent the unique methods of two filmmakers used to expose their personal ideas about truth through very different methods.  While McBride’s film is mainly a commentary on the idea of truth itself, Conner’s is trying to uncover a truth that he feels certain is hidden beneath the artificiality of the media.  To me, however, it’s the similarities that are the most striking.  The artists both succeed in making their points by creatively using the same technology that they criticize, showing us that technology and media are a double-edged sword, and in both cases the warning is clear: be wary, and critical, of what you see, and what you believe to be “the truth.”

Works Cited

Conner, Bruce. Report. 1967

Jones, Jeffrey P.  Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005.

McBride, Jim. David Holzman’s Diary. Perf. L.M. Kit Carson, Eileen Dietz.
Paradigm Films, 1967.

The post Telling the Truth in ‘David Holzman’s Diary’ and Bruce Conner’s ‘Report.’ first appeared on Tom Tenney.

True electronic democracy consists in using the possibilities for interactive and collective communication offered by cyberspace to encourage the expression and elaboration of urban problems by local citizens themselves, the self-organization of local communities, the participation and deliberation by those directly affected by them, the transparency of public policies and their evaluation by citizens.

The idea of new technology affecting a change in the way Americans see and “do” democracy has also been applied to a broader range of technologies such as fax machines, call-in talk radio shows, and cable television (Jones 40-48).  15 years after its introduction into mainstream culture, has the Internet – or these other new technologies – really had a profound impact on the level of political participation engaged in by average citizens?  Specifically, I would like to focus on whether the political late night talk shows, or “New Political Television” (NPT) as coined by Jeffrey Jones, is actually causing its audience to become more politically active, and if so, how and to what degree.  By surveying a sample of The Colbert Report audiences, I have tried to determine whether satirical political comedy is providing audiences with tools or incentive to act politically, or whether these shows are seen simply as entertainment with little or no resulting political action.  While merely thinking more about politics can be seen as a positive result of these types of shows, it is only through the political participation of informed and engaged citizens that a healthy democracy can be restored.

In “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu,” Peter Dahlgren examines the charge that media are major contributors to the cynicism and stagnancy that seem to characterize contemporary American democracy.  He notes, however, that many critics of mass media are more optimistic when discussing the Internet and digital media, suggesting that they see these technologies as having the capacity to jump-start political participation and breathe life back into democracy (151-152).   Dahlgren proposes the idea that “civic culture” – a process consisting of a series of cultural practices whereby people become citizens – is a prerequisite to democratic participation, and absolutely essential to the survival of democracy itself (152-153).   These attitudes, practices, and conditions that comprise civic culture, he says, are not “political” themselves, rather they exist at the level of everyday experience.  They can, however, lead to political action, and should be thought of as preconditions for democratic participation.   He models civic culture as “a dynamic circuit” to which he assigns six discrete dimensions: values, affinity, knowledge, practices, identity, and discussion – each providing an important condition for the health of democracy (156).   For the purposes of this study, I’d like to focus on the modalities of knowledge and discussion, as these are the two with the most relevant application to the examination of the relationship between NPT and political action.  Knowledge, Dahlgren says, is indispensible to a healthy democracy, as it provides citizens with skills to communicate effectively.  He claims that there is an ongoing evolution of the “modes of knowledge” enabled by new technologies like the Internet, which allow for new methods of thought and expression.  However, he offers a caveat that these new modes “may not be politically effective” (158), a warning it will be helpful to keep in mind when we analyze the results of our audience research.

Discussion is the dimension that Dahlgren describes as being “the cornerstone of the public sphere” (159), and the one he claims has moved, to a great degree, onto the Internet.  Dahlgren dismisses the claims of critics that the Internet is at best having a negligible effect on democracy, and argues that although only small minorities of people are participating in online democratic and civic activities, that “in the margins, may be something profound that is beginning to take shape in how democracy gets done. If we switch the lens and look from this alternative view, there is evidence that speaks for a much more robust contribution.” (165).  Disappointingly, Dahlgren’s evidence consists of a number of websites – alternative news portals and discussion forums – but very little in the way of empirical evidence to counter Margolis and Resnick’s claim that political life on the Internet is simply an extension of life off the net (164).

Andrew Kohut, on the other hand, citing a 2000 Pew Research study, offers evidence showing that people who get their news online are only slightly better informed than those who get it through traditional sources.  Kohut reports that although online users may be consuming more news, they generally are only looking for stories on topics they are interested in, and that this specialized news consumption is not enhancing or increasing public participation in politics or democracy.   This idea is reinforced by more recent studies by Tolbert and McNeal (2003) and Nisbet and Scheufele (2004).  In the former, Tolbert/McNeal conclude that although the Internet has potential for opening new avenues of political discourse and communication, the new technologies may –as Kohut suggested – narrow exposure and exclude differing viewpoints, thus engendering a “bonding” among like-minded citizens, rather than “bridging” experience, which fosters tolerance for social, cultural and intellectual diversity (184).  The 2004 study conducted by Nisbet/Scheufele finds that the Internet has only had a modest effect on public life, and that the effect is most profound where it is aided by the support of traditional media.  Like Margolis/Resnick, Nisbet/Scheufele assert, “the Internet’s effects are strongly linked to an individual’s ‘real world’ social environment” (891).

In Entertaining Politics, Jeffrey Jones adopts Dahlgren’s model of the six-dimensional circuit, but instead applies each of the modalities to New Political Television (NPTV), and argues that NPTV exhibits each of these conditions, and is thus creating a fertile ground for greater political and civic participation (Jones 187-196).  Citing the example of how the Howard Dean 2004 presidential campaign broke new ground in use of the Internet as a communication tool, and mobilization of a constituency using interactive technology – he makes the claim that NPTV similarly creates a public space where meaningful civic discourse overlaps with popular culture and everyday life (188), creating a precondition for political participation.   Understanding the ways that Jones applies NPTV to Dahlgren’s model will help us construct a definition of audience “participation”, the degree of which I will try to determine from the interviews with The Colbert Report audiences.

For the modality of Discussion in Dahlgren’s model, Jones makes the claim that NPTV contributes to this practice though its “role as an instigator of discursive activity outside the act of watching television” (190).   This is a claim that can be easily measured through our research, and will therefore contribute to our definition of participation.  Dahlgren defines the second modality, Practices, as recurring daily activities – the routines that make up our everyday lives.  Here, Jones contends that television is a “ritualized practice, and politics is one of many topics that audiences interact with on a daily basis” (191) and also that NPTV creates an overlap between politics and our “affective relationship to popular culture” (191). While it may certainly be true that this may engender a mindset necessary for participation, it connotes no specific action on the part of the audience, and will therefore not contribute to our definition of participation.  Similarly for the third modality, Values, which Dahlgren argues is necessary for a citizenry to share in order for democracy to exist.  Jones claims that NPTV provides a public forum where shared values such as honesty and accountability can be “mulled over” (192).  Again, this neither requires nor implies any explicit action on the part of audiences, and so cannot be used in our definition of participation. Additionally, the very terms “honesty” and “accountability” are subjective and open to multiple interpretations, further hindering any kind of empirical measurement.  Knowledge (the fourth modality), however, can be more easily demonstrated.  Both Dahlgren and Jones agree that an informed citizenry is a sine qua non of a healthy democracy.  While it is difficult to ascertain the level or depth of knowledge through an audience interview, we can determine if an interviewee takes certain actions in order to “keep informed” – such as watching the news or reading the newspaper.   Affinity, the fifth modality, is described by Dahlgren as “a sense of commonality among citizens […] that they belong to the same social and political entities” (Dahlgren 157).   Jones argues that both the humor of NPTV and their representation of common sense ideas serve to create this type of affinity among audiences (194).  He also contends that the last modality, Identities, is engendered by NPTV by allowing audiences to think of themselves as citizens by aligning their citizenship with their affective relationship to humor, entertainment, and popular culture (195).  Again, these last 2 modalities are problematic from the standpoint of empirical measurement, and do not require specific action on the part of the audience.  Therefore they, too, will be excluded from our definition of participation.

From Dahlgren and Jones’ discussion of civic culture, we can extract 2 ideas that help define political participation: discussion and knowledge.  We can further determine what other kinds of action audiences take either as a result of, or ancillary to, viewing The Colbert Report by asking about the audience members’ online and political activities.  Therefore, I will attempt to determine participation using the following questions:

1. How often do you consume the news? (Knowledge)
2. Do you discuss the content of the show with friends or co-workers? (Discussion)
3. What kinds of topics come up? (Discussion)
4. Have you ever posted a comment on the website? (Discussion)
5. Have you ever shared a video clip? (Discussion)
6. Is The Colbert Report an informative show? How so? (Knowledge)
7. Has the show’s coverage of a specific topic (in this case, the economic crisis) taught you something? (Knowledge)
8. Has The Colbert Report gotten you more involved in politics? (Political action)
9. Do you participate in online discussions or groups? (Discussion)
10. Do you vote? (Political action)

To conduct this research, I used a sample of 16 interviews with audiences waiting to see a live taping of The Colbert Report.  The sample consisted of nine men and seven women, 56% of whom were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, 25% between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and 19% between the ages of fifty and sixty.  38% of the sample declared a college degree as their highest level of education, 31% are currently attending college, 25% have post-graduate degrees, and 6% (1 respondent) claimed high school as his highest level of education.

In order to facilitate discussion as it relates to the ideas of Dahlgren and Jones, I have categorized my findings into three areas: Knowledge, Discussion, and Political Action.

Knowledge

When asked about news consumption, most (81%) claimed that they consume news on a daily basis, with the other 19% receiving their news “sporadically.”  When asked where they get their news, online sources were mentioned the most frequently (18 times) followed by print  (11 times), television (10 times), and radio (2 times).    While this indicates that audiences of The Colbert Report keep themselves at least moderately well-informed, it’s impossible to tell whether their high level of news consumption is in any way a result of watching the show, or whether, perhaps, The Colbert Report simply attracts more well informed people as its audience.  In other words, there is no way to make a causal connection between watching The Colbert Report and increased news consumption.   A more telling metric in this regard lies in the responses to the question: “Is The Colbert Report an informative show?”  To this question, we received exactly the same percentage as in the previous question, with 81% saying they find the show informative, and 19% saying they do not.  However, it’s important to note that only one of the respondents answered that he consumes news sporadically and does not find the show informative.   One avid consumer of the news who did not find the show informative answered that “if you don’t know what he’s talking about, you wouldn’t get the jokes.”  Another audience member gave a qualified “yes” when asked if the show was informative, but added, “if you don’t know what’s going on, you might not really get it.”  These responses lend credence to the idea that The Colbert Report attracts a well-informed audience.   Other responses indicated that audiences were, in fact, learning something from the show.  One woman told us that “I read a ton of online news but I still find that the show will either occasionally break something new or mention an aspect of a story that I haven’t come across yet.”  Another woman who reads the news everyday, indicated that while the show might not be informative for her, it may be for others, stating, “maybe for people who don’t keep up as much with the headlines they could learn something about politics or just news in general.”

The idea that respondents believe others may be informed by the show without being informed themselves, is reinforced by the responses to the question “Has the coverage of the current economic crisis taught you something you were previously unaware of?”  To this, only 12% (2 people) said that it had, and only 6% (1 person) indicated that their perception of the crisis had been changed by something they saw on the show.

Based on the answers to these questions, it would appear that while The Colbert Report certainly attracts a well-informed audience, the program might not increase their level of knowledge in a meaningful way.  There may be some evidence, also, to indicate that they feel as though they are participating in a forum that increases the general knowledge of the audience, even if they do not consider themselves the beneficiaries of such knowledge.

Discussion

The first question that was asked on the topic of discussion was simply “Do you discuss the content of the show with friends or co-workers?”  To this, almost all (94%) answered in the affirmative.  However, when asked what kinds of topics come up, only 63% said that it often or sometimes leads to political discussions.  The topics that were specifically mentioned included electoral politics, “issues that we care about that come up in context”, NASA, and how the show “exposes politicians and media for the fools they really are.”

While these responses suggest a high level of face-to-face discourse as a result of watching the show, the picture is a bit different when it comes to online discussion and participation.  Not a single respondent said that they had ever posted a comment on the website, either in response to a video clip or in the discussion forum, and 81% said that they do not participate in discussions, groups or forums on the Internet.  2 respondents (12%) said that they “occasionally” participate, and one indicated that she is more of a passive participant, i.e. she reads the discussions but does not contribute to them.

It is interesting to note that an large majority (88%) has watched either a video clip of the show or a full episode online – in fact 3 people said that that’s exclusively how they watch the show – and of those that have, 36% say they have shared a clip with someone else.   In a recent article, Professor Henry Jenkins discusses the phenomenon of online sharing of parody videos, and how this is an example of the participatory culture in which we now live.   This culture, Jenkins says, is “shaped by increased contact and collaboration between established and emerging media institutions, expansion of the number of players producing and circulating media [emphasis mine] and the flow of content across multiple platforms and networks” (189).  In short, Jenkins suggests that this type of sharing constitutes a new language, a new mode of discourse that transcends traditional notions of “discussion.”    If this is true, then The Colbert Report audiences are certainly participants in a form of online discussion as a direct result of watching the show.

Political Action

To the question, “Does The Colbert Report get people more involved in politics, the majority (75%) said that they thought that it did, 12.5% said no, and 12.5% said they don’t know.   When asked who was getting more involved, 42% (of those that said they thought it got people involved) specified “younger people” explaining that The Colbert Report makes news “more fun,” that it is “not as stuffy” as other news programs, or expressed a hope that younger people “will get angry and inspired.”  One 20-year-old man said, “I just think people my age are more inclined to get entertained, and if you can get both, they will take both [sic].”

In the above section on Knowledge, we identified a potential disconnect between audiences thinking the show made people more informed, and the fact that it doesn’t feel as though it makes them more informed.  When asked if the show gets them more involved in politics, we witness a similar phenomenon – only 19% claimed that it got them more involved.  One man in his 50’s with a post-graduate degree told us “I have always been informed, and vote.  [Stephen Colbert] just validates what I believed all along about politicians.”  Once again, these results suggest the possibility that The Colbert Report is simply attracting audiences that are already informed and politically engaged, and that the show reinforces their beliefs without affecting a significant change in their political behavior.

In terms of political participation in the voting process, 100% of the respondents claimed to be registered voters, and all but one voted in the last election.  Only half said that they voted in the election before that, but this was likely due to the age of the respondents, over half of which were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and thus ineligible to vote in the 2004 election.

Conclusion

While Dahlgren’s six-dimension model of civic culture is useful in understanding the ways in which it may be possible to become active participants of democracy, they do not, in and of themselves, provide any assurances that this will occur.  Through close examination of two measurable modalities, Knowledge and Discussion, and the resulting Political Action, I found that audiences of The Colbert Report are certainly well informed and engaged enough with the content of the show to bring it into meaningful discussion, especially with their friends and family.  However, there seems to be a lack of evidence that the show encourages these audiences to participate in political or civic discourse beyond their familial and social circles.  While virtually all respondents in the sample participate in the voting process, only a tiny minority participates in online groups and discussions, or comments on the show’s video clips and message boards.  In the cases of both voting and online activity, it’s difficult to tell whether there is a causal relationship between The Colbert Report and this participation, or whether their civic engagement is a precondition of both their online participation and their involvement with the show.

This is not to say that The Colbert Report does not create a vital forum with the potential for all six of Dahlgren’s conditions and practices to be realized.  Perhaps it’s too early in the evolution of both the Internet and NPTV to be able to determine how these new spaces for thought, humor, critique and participation will open up into the public sphere and create room for a transformation in the way citizens “do” politics.   Perhaps, as Dahlgren, Jones, and Jenkins suggest, this is already happening – that a revolution is underway “in the margins” (Dahlgren 165) and that it is this small minority of engaged and intrepid participants that will lead the way into a future participatory culture that will engage us all.

Works Cited

Dahlgren, Peter. “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu.” Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism.  Ed. John Corner and DickPels. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003. 151-170

Jenkins, Henry.  “Why Mitt Romney Won’t Debate a Snowman.” Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era.  Ed. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson. New York: NYU Press, 2009. 85-103.

Jones, Jeffrey P.  Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005.

Kohut, Andrew. “Internet Users are on the Rise; But Public Affairs Interest Isn’t.” Columbia Journalism Review. January/February, 2000. 68-69.

Lévy, Pierre, and Robert Bononno, trans.  Cyberculture. 1997.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.  166.

Nisbet, Matthew C., and Dietram A. Scheufele. “Political Talk as a Catalyst for Online Citizenship.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Winter, 2004. Volume 81, Number 4. 877-896.

Tolbert, Caroline J., and Ramona S. McNeal. “Unraveling the Effects of the Internet on Political Participation.” Political Research Quarterly. June, 2003. Volume 56, Number 2. 175-185

The post Tracking Political Participation Among The Colbert Report Audiences first appeared on Tom Tenney.

Before attempting to answer this question, I will first examine the rise of new political late night television, especially The Daily Show, and its role in providing a public mouthpiece that speaks “truth to power”.  I will then look closely at how it accomplishes this through the use of parody as tool of political and social critique.  My aim is to show that it has been well established that The Daily Show speaks truth to power before presenting my research, which will examine whether and how this may have changed since the inauguration of Barack Obama.New political talk as a mouthpiece for truth

In order to understand the ways in which The Daily Show speaks “truth to power”, it’s important to look closely at how parody as a tool of social and political critique has become a mainstay of political entertainment on television.   In his book, Entertaining Politics, Jeffrey Jones explains that the rise of what he calls “new political television” (Jones 5) began as a populist movement in the 1980’s, and was largely inspired by Ronald Reagan who positioned himself as an everyman, an “outsider” to the Washington establishment (40). Assisted by the rapid development of new media technologies, in addition to fierce competition among cable networks for audience share, a new style of entertainment soon proliferated such as call-in talk radio and political talk networks on cable TV – many of which positioned themselves as speaking with and for a voice that existed outside the establishment.  This new entertainment had a profound effect on politics, particularly in the 1992 election with Ross Perot positioning himself as a political outsider (Jones 40-42), and Bill Clinton appearing on late night talk shows to bolster his populist appeal.  The new types of entertainment eventually evolved into late night political satire / talk shows, beginning with Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central, and Dennis Miller Live on HBO (Jones 43).  Jones argues that this type of programming provided exactly what was missing from contemporary politics – a voice that is honest and real, and that, through its use of satire and parody, speaks truth to power (6).

One of the ways that Jones claims these new political talk shows speak truth to power is as a forum where voices of ordinary people can be heard, and where the average citizen is better represented than he is in the political arena (11).  This is consistent with Liesbet Van Zoonen’s notion that the melding of politics and entertainment is a result of our culture’s crisis of representation, a phenomenon similar to what America experienced in the 1960’s with culturally and politically under-represented groups such as homosexuals, minorities and women making their voices heard.   Today, Van Zoonen maintains, our politicians are so internally focused on consensus among other politicians and Washington insiders that the voices of the people they are supposed to represent are not heard. This crisis may be exacerbated by the fact that politics today is such a specialized field requiring special education and socialization, something that most citizens are not able to relate to.  That politicians must distinguish themselves as dissimilar to others in order to stand out in a crowded political landscape further adds to the problem.  She argues that the way we “revolt” against this type of stranglehold politicians have on politics is not only through apathy and anti-political attitudes, but also through cynicism, jokes, and satire  (Van Zoonen 4-7).

The view that the function of satire is not only to say what may otherwise go unsaid, but to say it for a public who may otherwise go unheard is shared by Megan Boler who argues that Stewart’s influence as a representative of an unheard populace extends beyond The Daily Show, citing the example of his appearance on the CNN talk show, Crossfire on October 15, 2004.  As a guest on this program, Stewart dropped his comic persona and critiqued the show’s hosts directly, accusing them of “hurting America” through “partisan hackery.”  Through analysis of online discussion occurring after this broadcast, Boler found that “thousands of viewers [were] keenly grateful that Jon Stewart had the status and authority to represent the ‘average citizen’ and broadcast their views.”

Parody, clowns and kings

The main way that The Daily Show speaks truth to power is through parody and satire – setting itself up as a “fake news” show.  As such, it adopts the style and rhetoric of the genre of commercial news, but uses the style to poke fun at not just the genre of television journalism, but also the political leaders that the genre supposedly brings us the “facts” about.   What makes parody a more effective method for speaking truth to power and expressing discontentment than other genres of comedy?  Jones defines parody as a technique that speaks with two distinct voices, that of the parodist and that of the object being ridiculed.   The former speaks with a “higher semantic authority” because its is the voice of reason, one that appeals to our common sense (Jones 130).   In Jones’ analysis, parody is a dialogue between these two voices, where the voice of the parodist questions the sense and validity of the voice of the original (128-138).  Geoffrey Baym agrees with this analysis, stating that while contemporary television news tends to be a monologue, it is the dialogue inherent to parody that allows The Daily Show to turn the conventions of media and politics upside down, resulting in a “subjective interrogation” of power (Baym 265) and exposing a greater “truth” than can be gotten from the monologue of straight news.  This, Baym claims, is the predominant method of what he calls “discursive integration” – i.e. the new genre of political talk characterized by a “fluidity of content” between news and entertainment (262)– and is the primary strategy of The Daily Show.  It is precisely through this dialogue, Baym contends, that the show literally speaks truth to power, using satire to hold our media and our political leaders accountable to both their words and actions (267).

While one of the main targets of The Daily Show‘s parody is the media, Jones points out that the harsh criticism of our public leaders also plays a major role (Jones 126). He has likened Jon Stewart’s role as host of the show to that of a “court jester” who sits in a corner and simply points out the failings of our leaders and lets the absurdity speak for itself.   This role was crystallized, Jones argues, after the events of 9/11 when the media went overboard with visual spectacle and the Bush administration instituted inane policy and employed tactics that could easily be described as surreal (107-108).   This concept of the “wise fool”, Jones points out, is centuries old, citing King Lear as a popular example. Traditionally the “wise fool” has always been the one who is able to talk back to power with immunity, and Jones argues that the new breed of political comedians (and Stewart in particular) now fulfills that role in our culture (93).   He contends that The Daily Show can ridicule power because, like the jester or the fool, it is what is expected and therefore doesn’t suffer the same kinds of persecution that a more serious show might.  “The court jester recognizes his special license to speak,” he says “and understands that he will probably keep his head when others will roll” (116).  In fact, William Willeford’s examination of the role of the fool in history finds that it is just such tolerance of the fool by the king that affirms the royal power at which the jester pokes fun.  This type of rebellion was even encouraged by royalty because its permissibility reinforced the notion that the king was strong enough to tolerate it. (Willeford 155).  If Stewart fulfills the role of jester in our society, this historical precedent may illuminate a reason that he is able to speak truth to power without fear of persecution.

In his exploration of the role of parody in creating a public sphere, Jonathan Gray also employs the metaphor of the fool. He argues that the genre of television news is in “dire need of fools”, for the simple reason that if that genre can successfully win our trust, then, as we would a king, we grant it a great deal power over our imaginations (Gray 97-98).  He claims that it is always the genres that claim to have “the truth” (i.e. advertising and television news) that provoke the weapons of the fool – parody and satire (98).   Parody, he claims, challenges Habermas’ notion that the public sphere must always be entirely rational.  Parody and humor use a more absurd type of logic and are the realm of the irrational – but can often be used to empower the public sphere by inspiring rational thought (Gray 104).  Gray’s model of parody speaking truth to power is the animated TV comedy, The Simpsons, which uses parody to deconstruct the genre of TV news.  Gray demonstrates how, through parody, The Simpsons exposes the rhetorical and editorial failings of the news media, along with their over-the-top production values and pandering attitudes toward owners and advertisers (99-101).

Amber Day, in her recent article on The Daily Show, argues that Jon Stewart is not simply a “joker on the sidelines,” but someone whose work affects political discourse through its function as political speech (Day 98).  She agrees with Jones that the parodic technique is utilized skillfully by Stewart and his writers to interrogate power, and adds that these techniques often reveal an even deeper understanding of the issues than do the mainstream news sources (89).  She cites a particular broadcast on which Stewart juxtaposes 2 clips of Vice President Dick Cheney – one of the Vice President emphatically denying he ever made a certain statement, immediately followed by a clip of Cheney making the very statement he denied giving.  In this way, The Daily Show varies from its use of parody as a method of speaking truth to power, and instead uses pure juxtaposition to expose official lies, which then become part of the political record and add to the public debate. (91-92).  In this example, the technique results in not only a critique of the politician, but of the media that – although they certainly had access – refused to show the two clips together.

Finally, one important point made by Gray is that a defining characteristic of parody is the setting up of what he calls “outside” and “inside” positions. The “inside” position is one of comfort– the common sense voiced by the parodist. The “outside” is that which is ridiculed – the king who, through the logic of the jester, becomes the fool.   Gray points out that this technique of creating outsides and insides allows humor to become a potent tool for speaking truth to power, because it exposes the “rational” (i.e. the news media, and those in power) as irrational (Gray 106-107).  Jones also explores the idea of outsides and insides, but applies the metaphor to the players themselves.  Throughout his book, Jones speaks of politicians, news media, and pundits as being political insiders, and the hosts of new political talk and their guests as providing the voice of the “outsider”, or the common man.   Thus, in setting up alternative outsides/insides through parody, what these comedians achieve is the turning of this paradigm inside out, allowing common sense to become the insider and political insiders are cast out.  In the 2008 election Barack Obama positioned himself, as did Reagan 28 years before him, as a Washington outsider, a candidate for change.  For 8 years, The Daily Show and Jon Stewart in particular, also positioned themselves as outsiders, shooting proverbial spitballs at the Republican leaders.  Now that Obama is himself the establishment, does this mean that Stewart will be as relentless a critic as he was to Bush in order to maintain his outsider status, or will the show’s parody find a new target such as the media, or the corporate leaders whose actions led to the downfall of the American economy

Object of analysis & methodology

In my analysis of the content of The Daily Show I looked at 33 comedy segments in the 12 episodes airing every Monday and Thursday between January 26 – March 9, and March 19, 2009[1] – shows broadcast within the first several weeks after the Obama inauguration.  In my research, I only included the segments that comprised the non-interview portions of the show, which occur, generally speaking, in the first 15-20 minutes of the program.

Because The Daily Show is only aired on Monday-Thursday each week, I chose shows at the beginning and end of this cycle in order to have my sample as evenly distributed over time as possible. One reason for this was to avoid “clumping” of running jokes, which frequently fall on consecutive days.  While it could be argued that the fact of The Daily Show presenting running gags may suggest saliency of the issues they examine, it was my goal to obtain a representative sample by choosing episodes that were as evenly spaced as possible over the chosen period of time.

I defined each of the “segments” analyzed as portions of the show that adhered to a single topic of discussion – such as Hillary Clinton’s trip to Asia, or the Blagojevich impeachment.  Each of these could run several minutes and contain several jokes within it.  Fortunately, The Daily Show often has titles for each of their segments (such as “Asian Provocateur” or “Scumdog Million-Hairs” in the examples above), making it easier to differentiate between segments. I coded each of these segments into one or two of the following categories:  a) critical of the Obama administration, b) supportive of the Obama administration, c) critical of Republicans (individuals, or as a party) d) supportive of Republicans, d) critical of Democrats, e) supportive of Democrats, f) critical of mainstream news media, g) supportive of mainstream news media and finally, h) unrelated to partisan politics or news media.

Findings

One of the first things that becomes obvious by looking at the results of the research is that parody, as defined by Jones and others as a method of political and social criticism, does not lend itself well to being particularly supportive of anything, at least directly.   As seen below, none of the 33 segments could be considered to be supportive of Republicans, Democrats, or the news media.

Another problem, which will be further explored in the discussion, is that although there were segments that, at least indirectly, supported the Obama administration, these were often contained within the very segments that, at the same time, criticized Republicans.  Often the support of Obama became evident through Stewart’s criticism of Republican response to Obama’s policies. Such segments were coded as both critical of Republicans and supportive of Obama.

Criticism of Barack Obama’s administration

Only 2 segments could be considered at all critical of the Obama administration, and in neither case did Stewart make outright or implied criticism of the policies of the president.  The first, on the February 26 broadcast of The Daily Show, is not critical of Obama himself, but of Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State.  In the segment, entitled “Asian Provocateur,” Stewart makes fun of the fact that Clinton, in a recent trip to East Asia, mused on the definition of love in her speech in Seoul, and also that she downplayed the importance of human rights in China, giving priority to economic, climate change, and security crises.

In the second segment coded as critical of the Obama administration, Stewart once again makes no outright criticism of the president’s politics or policies, but instead ridicules the gifts to foreign leaders given by both Obama and Clinton.   The segment, “Brown in the USA”, exposes the fact that on a recent trip to the US, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave Obama a thoughtful, hand made gift with historic significance, and Obama gave Brown “Twenty-Five DVDs.”  He also finds humor in a superficial gift given to the Russian Foreign Minister by Hillary Clinton.  Clearly these instances, if they can be read as critical at all, are far less condemning and more superficial than The Daily Show’s scathing indictment of the Bush administration’s handling of the 9/11 tragedy or the Iraq war.

Support for the Obama Presidency

Even more problematic than finding instances of The Daily Show criticizing Obama was finding segments that outright supported him.   Parody, by definition, is a style of humor that engenders criticism, not support.  There certainly seemed to be evidence of support for Obama and his administration, but this support was never explicitly stated.  Instead, it was implicit within Stewart’s condemnation of policies and actions that oppose the president’s policies.  For example, in a segment entitled “Guantanamo Baywatch – The Final Season” on January 26, Stewart shows clips of a number of Republicans expressing their disdain for Obama’s order to close the facility at Guantanamo Bay, and mocks their suggestions of what to do with the prisoners (moving them to Alcatraz, for example.)  While the segment never openly expresses espousal of Obama’s order, Stewart’s extreme criticism of the president’s detractors makes his tacit support clear.   A second example of this phenomenon occurs just three days later, on January 29, in a segment documenting the Senate confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, Obama’s nominee for attorney general.  In it, Stewart describes Holder’s style as “straightforward” as compared to Bush’s nominee, Alberto Gonzalez.  Again, Stewart manages to criticize Republicans and support the Obama administration within the context of a single joke.  This occurs twice more on February 5^th, with one segment criticizing the Republican response to Obama’s economic stimulus plan, and another criticizing Dick Cheney’s condemnation of Obama’s policies of non-torture and due process for prisoners. These examples also posed problems in coding the segments, as they could be considered both critical of Republicans and supportive of Obama.   For this reason, they were coded as both.

A corollary to this assumption of The Daily Show’s implicit support of the Obama administration is its explicit criticism of Republicans.  In 9 (27%) of the segments analyzed, The Daily Show was critical of either individual Republican politicians, or of the Republican Party itself.  Although the GOP no longer controls either the White House or Congress, Stewart and his writers were still able to find a number of issues on which to attack Republicans.  In addition to their criticisms of Obama’s policies mentioned above, these included: Michael Steele elected as RNC Chair, Republican attack on the Economic Stimulus Plan, Republicans who didn’t accept money from the stimulus plan, and the hypocrisy of the party members who distanced themselves from former President Bush at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).   In contrast to these numerous examples of Republican criticism – and in addition to the 2 instances of critique of the Obama administration – I found only 2 examples of similar criticism of Democrats.  The first was a condemnation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, and the other a superficial criticism of Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle for his failure to pay taxes.   Clearly, The Daily Show is still finding plenty to critique among Republicans and conservatives, even though Democrats now hold the majority of political power.

Focus on News Media & The Economy

After Republicans, the group most often targeted by The Daily Show as the subject of critique was the mainstream American news media.   This makes sense, given that The Daily Show positions itself as a “fake news” program, and as we’ve seen, critique of mainstream news is a staple of the show’s humor.   It’s interesting to note, however, that of the 7 segments coded as media critical, 4 (57%) were critical specifically of Fox News, widely considered to be a conservative news network.    Because of this, it’s possible to interpret the show’s critique of these segments as also critical of conservatives, although they were not coded as such.  This interpretation would lend evidence to the argument that The Daily Show still considers the “power” to which it speaks truth to be the Republicans and conservatives, even though they are the political minority.

Finally, I’d like to briefly examine the largest group of segments, the 39% coded as non-critical of specific politicians, political parties, or mainstream media.    Of these 13 segments, 6 (46%) dealt specifically with the current economic crisis.  While these segments were not specifically critical of a particular party or of the media, many of them tended to be critical of either corporate (presumably conservative) CEOs, or of the Republicans’ negative response to Obama’s stimulus package.  Therefore, to connect the dots and conclude that some of these segments were at least suggestively critical of conservatives would not be entirely unreasonable.

Conclusions

While parody may not lend itself to support, we have seen that The Daily Show did implicitly support the president, on occasion, by criticizing his detractors. While the Obama administration was only (superficially) criticized twice, Republicans and the news media –specifically conservative media – remained the primary targets of the show’s critique. The economic crisis has also drawn focus, but the issue was used, in many cases, as a vehicle for the disparagement of Republicans and conservatives.   Perhaps it is too early in the life of the administration for Obama to have fumbled to the point of parody, but it’s clear that while The Daily Show may still speak “truth to power”, it continues to speak louder to Republicans than to Democrats, even though “power” is now solidly in the hands of the latter.

Works Cited

Baym, Geoffrey. “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of  Political Journalism.” Political Communication 22 (2005): 259-276.

Boler, Megan. “The Daily Show, Crossfire, and the Will to Truth.” Scan Journal of Media Arts Culture.  June 2006 Volume 3 Number 1.

<http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=73> , accessed April 5, 2009.

Day, Amber.  “And Now…the News?” Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era.  Ed. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson. New York: NYU Press, 2009. 85-103.

Gray, Jonathan. Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge,  2006.  94-116.

Jones, Jeffrey P.  Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005.

Van Zoonen, Liesbet. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.  1-18.

Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Northwestern. 1969

[1] Because The Daily Show broadcast of Thursday, March 12 was devoted entirely to an interview with MSNBC host Jim Cramer, I substituted this with the broadcast from the following Thursday, March 19.

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Twenty years after the publication of Manufacturing Consent, the world – particularly the media landscape – looks much different than it did in 1988.  The rapid rise of the Internet and the advancement of media technology have put tools into the hands of everyday citizens, allowing them to control their media in ways that were impossible 15 years ago.  Current technology gives us the freedom to watch television without advertisements on computers and DVRs, share digital music and movies freely on file-sharing networks, and even create new works, digital collages called “mashups” or “remixes” in the current vernacular, by superimposing different types of media on top of each other.  While media corporations have made claims that these types of sharing have caused significant damage to their businesses, government has been slow to respond to their appeals for broader legislation to protect their financial interests.  Instead, corporations have used other means to regulate the way media is shared and used.  In this paper I will explore the methods that content creators (i.e. media corporations) have used technology and other means to regulate and curb the spread of file sharing, paralleling and adding to Chomsky’s arsenal of “filters” used by corporations to control what citizens can and cannot read, watch, and listen to.  I will also examine the claims of big media that file-sharing, or “piracy” as it is sometimes called, infringes on their rights and harms their business – or whether, in fact, the abridgement of the right to share and remix media is a violation of the consumer’s constitutional rights and how this affects the political economy of media.  Finally, I will offer my own suggestions for actions that can be taken by individuals to become more “new media” literate and advance the cause of media sharing.

Alternate Methods of Regulation

The First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees that “Congress shall make no laws…abridging the freedom of speech.” In 1789, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, it was unlikely that there were many means of regulating expression other than passing laws.   In Free Culture, copyright attorney and activist Lawrence Lessig outlines four modalities of constraint that work together to “support or weaken the right or regulation”[3], they are: Law, Market, Norms, and Architecture.   Law is the constraint provided by legislation – it is the most obvious, arguably the most powerful, and the one that media companies are lobbying the congress to support.  Although the other three constraints act more subtly, they are nonetheless extremely effective when it comes to control, and have been used frequently in recent years by media companies in an effort to protect what they see as their rights as copyright holders, and the ones I will focus on here.

Market is the modality that regulates via price constraints, and is traditionally thought of as punishment by fines or monetary sanctions.  For example, it is assumed that one drives the speed limit not only to keep from being thrown in jail, but because one doesn’t want – or can’t afford – to pay a hefty fine for his actions.  It is also the modality that Chomsky refers to when he writes about advertising used as a filter used to control content.  He says, “an advertising based system will tend to drive out of existence or into marginality the media companies and types that depend on revenue from sales alone.”[4] This is the marketing constraint at work.   This constraint, however, has come into play in a different way in the context of copyright battles.  Over the past several years, media companies have gotten into the habit of suing private citizens over alleged copyright violations.  Since the plaintiffs have deep pockets, and the average American could never afford to defend against a lawsuit brought by them, they are able to force settlements, which may tacitly imply an admission of guilt by the defendant – even though no law may have been broken.  An example of this is the case of Jesse Jordan, a college freshman who built a website with a search engine that was able to index all the files on his college’s closed network.  The site “only allowed people to view the names of music files that other students were willing to share, but did not help them copy those files.”[5] Regardless, because some of these files happened to be music files, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued him for a sum of $15,000,000 [sic].  Jordan wanted to fight the case, but was told that it would cost at least $250,000 in legal fees alone.  Instead, he accepted an offer to pay a settlement of $12,000 and shut down his site in exchange for the RIAA dismissing the suit.  Big business had “won” without anything being decided as to the legality of his actions.  Still, even paying the settlement fee hurt Jordan financially.  When the case was over, his father said,  “Jesse’s worked very hard for three years, every summer, every weekend, to save up money for college. Now we’re in a bind. How is he going to have enough to pay for next year?”[6]

Norms are the constraints that keep people in line by imposing social sanctions for certain behavior, as opposed to legal or monetary ones.  Chomsky asserts that the filter of “anticommunism as the national religion” is an ideology that “helps mobilize the populace against an enemy” and “serves as a political-control mechanism”[7]. This idea has a parallel in the war on piracy in the aggressive PR campaigns waged by the recording, movie, and broadcast industries against file-sharing and remixing.  Posters declaring such slogans as “Piracy is Theft”, designed to make anyone who rips a song from a CD feel like a felon, have been ubiquitous since the late 1990’s.  Even celebrities have been recruited to exert influence over potential music downloaders. In 2000, the rock band Metallica filed a lawsuit against the file-sharing service Napster, stating that the practice of sharing music is “morally and legally wrong. The trading of such information — whether it’s music, videos, photos, or whatever – is, in effect, trafficking in stolen goods.”[8] In 2003, Madonna flooded peer-to-peer networks with spoof MP3 files – decoy tracks pretending to be tracks from her new album, American Life.  When played, the listener was greeted with the voice of Madonna saying “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” and then going on to chastise the downloaders for stealing music.[9]

Architecture is the modality of regulation that has no direct analogue in Chomsky’s model, but has become a pervasive method of control in the digital age.   The way something is built – a piece of software, a DVR, or even a discrete piece of media (CD, digital video file, etc.) – can dictate what can and cannot be done with that thing.  If a record company builds copy-protection technology into a music CD so that the person who buys it cannot create MP3’s from the music tracks, then they are building there own “law” right into the product itself.  Any arguments of “fair use” are irrelevant at this point, because it’s simply not possible to create digital files in the first place.  Lessig says, “Architecture is a kind of law: It determines what people can and cannot do.  When commercial interests determine the architecture, they create a kind of privatized law.”[10] Obviously, when corporations create this kind of “privatized law”, they are circumventing both law and the constitution, and the argument over whether this kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a constitutionally justifiable practice becomes an intensely political debate.

File-Sharing: Piracy or Free-Expression?

The “sharing” of media, whether it be its use in the work of another artist (“sampling” in hip-hop, e.g.) or simply its free distribution, has a long history in the United States as a method used by artists and others for both the creation of new works and the dissemination of information.  In 1928, Walt Disney created the first widely released sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie – a parody of a popular Buster Keaton silent film classic called Steamboat Bill, Jr.[11] This creation followed a long tradition of artists (also scientists, inventors, etc.) “borrowing” the work of others to build upon it and create something new.  In 1928, this was fairly easy to do – it was not only the “norm” of the time, but common law copyright statutes allowed a work to pass into the public domain after a period of 28 years.  With the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, corporate authorship of a work can now remain in copyright for up to 120 years. Today, it is virtually impossible for an artist to legally “borrow” a work to build upon it and create something unique.  These laws have created an atmosphere of restriction in this country that severely limits the ways in which citizens are able to express themselves by utilizing the artifacts of their culture.

With regard to file-sharing (i.e. the distribution of music and video files over peer-to-peer networks), I concede that musicians and artists should be compensated for their work.    But file-sharing services such as Limewire and Kazaa make media available that otherwise we wouldn’t have access to.  For example, my search for the song “Back When My Hair Was Short” by ‘one-hit-wonder’ 70’s band Gunhill Road yielded no results on iTunes.  My guess that the song is long out-of-print was confirmed by a visit to the music database website, allmusic.com.   If I wanted to listen to this song, even for my own personal use, I’d have no recourse but to download the file from a P2P network.  By doing so, I have, in effect, become a “pirate”, an outlaw.   Record companies have long maintained that such downloading is “stealing” and is killing their business, but is this really the case?  First, if they are not profiting from the sales of the song/album/video in the first place, then who is it I’m stealing from?  Second, the numbers don’t seem to support their claims that file sharing has a direct causal effect on declining CD sales.  According to Lessig, “In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free.  Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent.”[12]

An example of how the file-sharing issue is negatively impacting our political economy is the recent controversy surrounding TV networks and their demands that video files of the presidential debates and political ads be removed from video sharing sites, citing copyright infringement.  CBS, CBN, Fox and NBC have all issued takedown notices to YouTube, which they see as their right under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  This, clearly, is an abridgement of our rights as citizens to have access to the kind of political information that we need to thrive as a democracy.  In a statement issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, copyright attorney Fred von Lohmann says, “This is not piracy, but fair use, no different from what Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show do every night. Sending unfounded takedown notices is not only against the law, it also threatens to interfere with the vibrant political debate occurring on community video sites like YouTube. Remixing the news to make your point is what political speech looks like in the 21st century.”[13]

In summary, the ability to use and build upon previous works is essential to creating a culture of innovation and a democracy where ideas can be shared freely.  The restriction of this ability can be considered to be an infringement of our First Amendment right to free expression without governmental or private control of ideas.  In a 1996 article in the Yale Law Journal, Neil Netanel writes, “As all authorship involves a degree of borrowing from earlier works, an overly broad copyright represents an unacceptable burden on creative expression.”[14] In Free Culture, Lessig makes the point that permission to use works may still be granted, but that “it is not often granted to the critical or the independent.  We have built a kind of cultural nobility; those within the noble class live easily; those outside it don’t.”[15] Thus Chomsky’s idea of mass media being controlled by the dominant elite has firmly taken root in digital culture.

Solutions

Clearly, governmental and corporate response to new technology by means of copyright legislation and DRM is creating a climate in which media control is becoming ever more restrictive, creating “filters” that Chomsky couldn’t have imagined in 1988.   As citizens of a democracy, however, there are steps that we can take to mitigate the effect of these restrictions, and perhaps even reverse them.  Luckily, the same technology that corporations are attempting to control has also put tools of activism in the hands of everyday people.  The most important way that we can be “new media” literate is to be aware of our rights, know when they are being violated, and to do something about it.  Bloggers have gained much ground over the past several years, and have started to bring about a fundamental change in the way news is reported.  Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook can also be used effectively to disseminate ideas and spread news stories and viral memes that undermine the corporate agenda.    An awareness of existing alternatives to corporate control is another important means for bringing about change.  The open source software movement, which provides alternatives to commercially controlled technology, and the Creative Commons, which provides a new way for artists to assign their own “copy rights” to their work, are both excellent alternatives to the corporate agenda.  Remix culture is here to stay, and we owe it to our country and our culture to find effective solutions that allow us to remain free.

[1] Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 1988)

[2] Le Monde Diplomatique, Democracy’s Invisible Line, http://mondediplo.com/2007/08/02democracy; August, 2007

[3] Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Penguin Press, 2004) p. 121

[4] Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 1988)

[5] Amy Harmon, “Suit Settled For Students Downloading Music Online”, The New York Times, May 2, 2003

[6] ibid

[7] Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 1988)

[8] Christopher Jones, Metallica Rips Napster, Wired, April 2000

[9] Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (Free Press, 2008) pp. 68-69

[10] Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0 (Basic Books, 2006) p. 77

[11] See Lessig, Free Culture (Penguin Press, 2004); Chapter One: “Creators” pp. 21-30

[12] Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Penguin Press, 2004) p. 71

[13] Electronic Frontier Foundation, TV Networks Must Stop Blocking Election Videos on YouTube, http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/20, October 20, 2008

[14] Neil W. Netanel, “Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society”, Yale Law Journal 106 (1996); http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/ecohist/readings/ip/netanel.htm

[15] Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Penguin Press, 2004) pp. 10-11

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