Being relatable to the audience (in style, vernacular, and content)
Creating ways for the audience to respond to the text (either through independent actions or feedbacks loops)
Passion on the part of the speaker
Using prominent figure heads or styles to promote the message
having a distinct form of circulation (the internet seems to make this easier.)
However, we have not only seen presentations dealing with texts, but have seen 3 projects that deal with how symbols function and change in the public sphere, and we will actually see another one like this tomorrow. These texts have shown how racial slurs, the word retard, and the image of La Malinche have been used by various texts for various purposes. For example, when Benjamin Franklin was talking about how the ocean currents retard he was expressing something very different than when Jennifer Aniston referred to herself as a retard.
My question for you today lies at the intersection of these two concepts. I want you to pick a word/phrase from the text you discuss in your paper, and show how it helps to connect the audience to the speaker. Then, I want to you think about if the word/phrase would be received the same way, if it was used in a different context. If you were one of the 4 who are tracing symbols, just use a text that uses your symbol for this response. If your primary text does not have words, use scales, instrumentation, or something like that.
While these presentations have all focused on different pieces addressed to different publics, and each presenter focused their presentation differently, there are still a lot of similarities between the presentations. One of the common themes between all of these pieces, and one that I consider worth looking at more in depth, is their focus on why these texts have become popular. To an extent, all of these texts were created to be popular. The speakers fashioned their utterances to appeal not only to a specific subpublic but also to the mass public. In this class, in this blog, and in the presentations, we have discussed the various ways by which speaker's try to make their utterances appealing to the public. My question to you is: which of these texts do you believe to be constructed most successfully to appeal to both the speaker's subpublic and mass public? Please explain your opinion using different ideas that we have covered throughout the semester.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
For tomorrow we were going to read an article by Dominique Mehl titled, "The Public on the Television Screen: Towards a Public Sphere of Exhibition." However, since I pushed back the due date for the final draft of your paper, I decided not to give you the reading; my hope was that instead of reading you would spend this time doing what Ballenger terms "preparing the final manuscript" (211). Nonetheless, I think that any examination of the public sphere, especially any discussion that attempts to understand the essay's relationship to the public, needs to include the work of Mehl. If you are interested in reading the article you can click here.If you are not interested in reading the article, I summarize it below:
Mehl's thesis is most clearly stated at the end of her piece when she says, "Here [on the twenty-first century television screen] public discussion is sustained by private experience; learned arguments are replaced by the recounting of life histories; expression is as important as formulation; the witness takes the place to the expert; exhibition or display rather than demonstration takes pride" (27). What Mehl means in this quote is that television does not focus on rational arguments made by people like sociologists, historians, judges, or journalists; instead the lives of average people, which are given the status of arguments, are put on display for public consumption (22). The public empathizes with these "average people," who Mehl refers to as "witnesses," because they are either representative of the mass public (the average person) or representative of a group (couples in a sexless marriage, alcoholics, teenage mothers). If the audience is able to identify with the witness (perhaps they think that their marriage might be in trouble, were close to becoming a teenage mother, or have issues with addiction in a different form) then the rhetoric jumps from "me" to "us." The audience sees themselves as a part of the same public as the witness.
Mehl explores four interesting effects of this type of public discussion:
The loss of the expert: Since we are getting our information from the personal narratives of private individuals, we have little need for those who "devote their time to making presentation of their knowledge, involving their expertise, defending their ideas and making the case for their positions" (24). Mehl argues that these people take secondary roles to the witness. Further, she argues that since we are so focused on the internal, personal aspects of these arguments that the only experts who are really able to thrive in this environment are psychologists and pseudo-psychologists (think about Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, and Maury).
It is nearly impossible to argue against the witness: In the classical understanding of the public sphere, ideas, opinions, arguments, and ideologies confronted each other constantly. However, since the public sphere of personal experiences is based on (supposedly) genuine accounts, then it becomes difficult to refute these stories. Mehl shows that we lose rational argument to personalized stories; "'This is what I live' takes the place of 'This is what I think...'" (25).
These programs lead to the emergence of a particularly active public: Though there is little discussion about these personal experiences on the shows, the audience has a tendency to discuss the issues on their own after they turn off the television screen. In the workplace, the home, the playground, the nail salon, the gym, and an indefinite amount of other social spaces, the audience of the witness-based television program argues over the validity what the witness has said. Generally, the audience supports or refutes the values and decisions they have heard on television. Mehl argues that since there is not an absolute social institution forming our identities for us, these discussions of other's personal issues are one of the ways that we form our own identities.
The private/public sphere: Mehl argues that understanding public and private as separate spheres with distinct boarders is inherently flawed. Instead, she says that in the twenty-first century we should see publicness as processes by which people attempt to keep some things open and other things intimate. For Mehl, in the twenty-first century what an individual chooses to keep private and what one wants to keep intimate are completely up to his/her discretion.
My questions to you are these: Do you believe that "exhibition" is the new form of public discourse? Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or a mute point? Finally, if Mehl's model is how the public now communicates should experts/academics/intellectuals embrace this mode of discussion, push against it, or is there another option?
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Students,
I do not want to distract you too much from working on your paper. So, please respond to this post with your favorite color, and get back to working on that final draft.
-Mr. Harley
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
NOTE: THIS IS THE BLOG POST FOR THE WEEK TO BE RESPONDED TO BEFORE CLASS ON MONDAY. THE DAILY CLASSES WILL BE POSTED ABOVE BEFORE THEIR RESPECTIVE CLASS TIMES.
The essay we read for this week is particularly complex; Warner jumps from a discussion of stylistics (common language, defamiliarization, precision, and opacity), to a problematizing of the public intellectual (is the public intellectual actually a part of the public? ),to a description of three different types of discussions by which publics exchange ideas and ideals (polemics, problematization, and journalistic style), and finally ends by saying that changing how publics function is difficult because "it is a way of imagining a speech for which there is yet no scene, and a scene for which their is no speech."
While the entire essay is fascinating, I am realizing that I cannot, in one blog post, discuss all of the issue that he tackles in this chapter. Instead, I need to focus my efforts to one of the above sections, and since you are all burgeoning scholars (at the very least being doused into the academy for the next four years), I figured that a discussion of the function of the public intellectual might be the most beneficial to you.
Warner's discussion of public intellectuals begins with by showing the traditional understanding of the term, which he defines as a group of experts who reach a mass audience and guide their audience towards the right/just/prudent political path. For Warner, this conception is flawed. Warner argues that by virtue of their "expert status" (if they are in fact experts on the particular topic being discussed) intellectuals cannot be a part of the public.
Warner states that "expert knowledge is in an important way nonpublic: its authority is external to the discussion. It can be challenged only by other experts, not within the discourse of the public itself" (145). For Warner, experts work in a type of meta-public that is not really a part of the public (think about how in class we discussed scholarly secondary sources as existing in a meta-discourse, in which they write about what is being discussed in the public of which our primary sources are a part.) Finally, Warner asserts that even if public intellectuals could enter into public discussion, there is no reason to believe that they would be more effective than anyone else (147).
Of course, for intellectuals this is a scary proposition. First, in the type of publics that Warner describes the intellectual seems impotent. The intellectual has the ability to discuss political issues, but she is unable to influence the public discussion. Even if she could enter the discussion, there is no guarantee that her voice would be any more important than any other voice, since publics aren't based on rational critical debate but are instead based on "uptake, citation, and recharacterization" (145).
In class recently, we discussed the absence of intellectuals in the public sphere. However, we did talk about the diffusion of intellectual ideas through others in the public, which (when viewed from a certain light, while squinting) looks like intellectuals are actually influencing the public.
Of course, this entire argument really hinges on how the word intellectual is defined; a definition that Warner does not provide us with. Despite the unclear definition of intellectual, it seems that Warner uses the term primarily to talk about academics and those who work in think tanks--what he calls the "professional class of intellectuals" (147). I think it could be argued that there are other intellectuals who are reaching the public. As usual, lets explore this idea by looking at some music videos.
I would first like to look at "Prison Song" by System of a Down from their 2001 album Toxicity in which they criticize the war on drugs and the prison industrial complex:
Of course we can't just look at this utterance on its own, but should see this as a part of a public conversation, let's look at "Get By" by Talib Kweli from his 2002 album Quality. This song seems to deal with the same issue as System, but in a way that seems a bit more holistic:
Still, this does not exhaust the amount songs about the prison industrial complex and what many believe are the social problems that it attempts to sweep under the rug. The song "Money" by the band Choking Victim on their 1999 album No Gods No Managers. Is an interesting take on the issue being discussed. This song is particularly interesting because of the introduction by the famous public intellectual Michael Parenti:
So here we have three artists who, in the early 2000s, were discussing political issues in a very public manner, the question is: are these artists intellectuals? As an aside, I am also curious if you believe that the American academic still has a place in the public sphere.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
As I was reading the Ballenger text for this week, I began to realize that the skills required to make serious, meaningful revisions to our own texts are the same skills required to do serious, meaningful critical readings of the works of others. When we are looking critically at our sources, we are investigating what the purpose of the work is, why it matters, and what the thesis is. In short, the skills needed for good reading are the same skills needed for good writing.
Following our idea that we can use music as texts, I wondered if I could break down a song in the same manner that Ballenger tells us to break down our own essays. Here is my attempt with the song "We Used to Vacation" by the band Cold War Kids on their 2006 EP Up in Rags:
While I think that the song is up to personal interpretation, I would say that the purpose of this song, not explicitly stated, is to explore the painful effects of alcoholism on both the individual and his family. I would say that the song becomes relevant to me (has a "so what" as Ballenger would say) because it helps me see what I've seen before in a way that I haven't, and it moves me emotionally. However, I would say that the way this song is most interesting to me is because there are very few remorseful songs about alcoholism told from the alcoholic's point of view. Finally, I would say that the main point of this song is to show how addictive alcohol can be, through the narrator's constant want for a drink and attempts to justify his drinking.
I think I did pretty well using a song as a text, and critically reading it for global issues. I bet I could take this a step farther and explore the organization of the song, in the same way that you will be doing for your reverse outline. The song starts with a day in the life of the speaker in which we see him drinking and the negative effects this has on his family. The audience needs the description given in the first verse in order for the bridge, where the speaker attempts to play down the awfulness of the story, to make any sense. The refrain takes us away from the speaker's justifications, and focuses on his family, who is so hurt by his actions that they have made him promise to stop drinking. However, the end of the refrain, with the repetition of "this will all blow over in time," returns to the speakers attempt to downplay his actions. The second verse is the speaker again trying to justify himself as a good person, while simultaneously showing how normal his life is. We then go back to the refrain, but this time with the inclusion of the "accident" and the alcohol anonymous "meetings," which highlight the severity of the issue. I believe that the text is organized this way to make the audience slowly aware of the problems the speaker has caused, which makes the topic easier to deal with, and allows us to feel sympathy for the speaker and not just see him as a villain.
Here, using the same strategies Ballenger provides for revision, I was able to critically read a text. These skills are not only helping me to become a better writer, they are helping me to become a better reader as well. For this post, I would like you to exercise your critical reading skills. I will not ask you to outline a song, in the same way I did. Instead, I am asking you to choose one of the three songs below; show the purpose, "so what," and thesis of that song; and provide some justifications as to how you came to the conclusions you did.
Before I get into this post, I want talk about the expectations for this week's blog. Since we are on spring break next week, I do not expect you to comment by 3/18. Instead, you have until 3/25 to reply to this post. Also, as I promised, here is a link for the Radiolab episode that you are supposed to listen to for class tomorrow.
As for this week's blog post, I think the idea that publics create a worldview is fantastic. The reason I like this idea is because it goes farther than just the argument or purpose of a piece; this section of Warner's essay says that the terms we use, who we reference, the audience we address, how we circulate ideas, our style, and many more factors all come together to influence how we view our world and how we understand our place in it. Of course, I am using the word "we" here not just to refer to us as authors, but to us members of (a) public(s). For example, let's take the song "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore on his 2012 album The Heist.
Of course there is a lot to say about this video, but I am just going to hit some of the highlights. First off the style sets Macklemore in the public of youth culture immediately. The dance beat and the standard hip-hop rhythms make this song seem really accessible via its style. Further, use of words like "pop some tags" and "come up" show him as part of this particular public. The references in this song are interesting because they are mostly set in the past, but for his audience this is a shared past. The idea is that his audience is familiar with what John Wayne looks like, remembers R. Kelly's sex scandal, and remembers a time when Velcro sneakers were popular. What's interesting here is that Macklemore uses his language very skillfully to set himself into a particular public and genre, but he then critiques that same culture in his song.
This song exemplifies how, even if the argument of a text is counter to the general consensus of a public, it can still demonstrate that it shares the worldview of that public. The idea that style is a self-created, unique expression of the individual that cannot be mimicked by buying expensive, brand named items flies in the face of artists like Gucci Mane (whose named after a brand), Nelly (who wrote entire songs about a type of shoe), and Kanye West (who doesn't rap "to push a fucking Rav-4"). Compared to these other artists, Macklemore almost seems like a Marxist when he says that buying a fifty dollar shirt is "getting tricked by a business." Despite this difference in his argument, Macklemore still shares the fun, care-free, confident worldview that says that young people can improve their station in the world (if not the world in general). In short, though Macklemore's argument might not seem to fit into the public, his worldview (as seen by his vernacular, medium, genre, and audience) does fit into that public.
In Publics and Counterpublics, Warner goes on to show that utterances in a dominant public can take this "lifeworld" or worldview for granted, "misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy" (122). This is different from counterpublic utterances "in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely" (122). In short, dominant publics can keep producing the same style because they want to keep the same general worldview; counterpublics use different styles because they want to see the worldview altered. To test this idea, let's look at a song from the number one selling record in the country: "When I was Your Man" by Bruno Mars off of his 2013 album Unorthodox Jukebox:
The issue of worldview gets a bit complicated when discussing these two songs because Mars' lyrics are focused on sense and Le Butcherrettes' lyrics are less so. What I mean is, as Warner would phrase it, Bruno Mars' lyrics can be "summarizable" (115), while Le Butcherettes are more focused on "the poetic-expressive dimensions of language" (116).
My questions to you are these:
1.) While it is obvious that the arguments of these songs are different, how are their worldviews different (or are they)?
2.) Which worldview can you relate to more?
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
As Warner discussed in our last reading: "In addressing indefinite strangers, public discourse puts a premium on accessibility. But there is no infinitely accessible language, and to imagine that there should be is to miss other important needs to publics: to concretize the world in which discourse circulates, to offer its members direct and active membership through language, to place strangers on a shared footing" (108). For Warner then, public speech uses language to show who is part of the discourse and who is not. Specific jargon, style, or reference allows for those in the public to realize that the strangers to which they communicate with all belong to the same discourse. They experience the world, and express those experiences, in the same manner, by their use of the same language. For an example of this, I would like to show the NOFX video for their song "Church and Skate" from their 2003 album The War on Errorism:
The style here is pretty obvious. The fast instrumentation and aggressive lyricism place the band squarely in the realm of punk rock. Further, the demanding tone of the refrain mimics the standard for the music. The band also uses common themes of "conflict," "descent" the "hatred of authority," and constant use of the f-word to show themselves as belonging to the genre. References to "Duane" Peters from the band U.S.Bombs and "Fletcher" Dragge from the band Pennywise demonstrate the bands connection to their genre. With these connections made through the language and music, the band shows itself as intimately acquainted with the genre in which it speaks, and the public in which that genre exists.
At this point in the semester, I am sure that you are all familiar with how language unites people together (while excluding other people). However, Warner goes beyond this point in this section to show that the language used not only references established relationships but also creates these relationships. According to Warner, "styles are mobilized, but they are also framed as styles. Sometimes the framing is hierarchical, a relation between marked and unmarked. Sometimes the result can be more relativizing. Quite commonly the result can be a double voiced hybrid" (108). In this section illuminates that these objects of language use can be used either in a manner to show who is included and who is not, to invite those not included into the fold, or to simultaneously do both of these things. The song "Punk Rock Song" from the band Bad Religion on their 1996 album The Gray Race illustrates this point rather well.
This song simultaneously creates a binary between those who "can see somethings wrong," which seems to mean people who listen to punk, and those "small in vision and perspective" who are characterized as "robots" and "insects." There is an obvious distinction created by those in the know and those who are out of the loop. However, the lead singer uses the word "we" to invite the listener into the punk community. He offers to save them from what he has characterized as a lesser existence and into what he has characterized as a morally superior public conversation. In short, the song creates (1) an "us" verses "them" hierarchy (2) a way for people in the genre to understand themselves as united to the band, and (3) an invitation for others in the audience to join the community.
Of course, sometimes using this type of "vernacular performance" can go too far and make the speaker seem ridiculous. As Warner shows, "Too obvious parroting of a catchphrase . . . can mark you in some contexts as a square, unhip, a passive relay in the circulation" (102). The song "Punk Rock Girl" by the Dead Milkmen off of their 1988 album Beelzebubba demonstrates how one can become ridiculous when they get too excited about this type of performance.
While I believe that the song is meant to be satirical, it illustrates how the over reliance on themes such as shouting anarchy, slam dancing, and a devotion to obscure music seem ridiculous if over discussed, done at inappropriate times, or done simply for the sake of being able to talk about it later.
My question to you is whether or not these principles of "vernacular performance" manifest themselves in the academic essay. Here are some points for consideration:
Does academic language create a heirarchical structure, a relativising structure or a double voiced hybrid?
Can academic language make someone seem ridiculous either to others in the academic audience or to a regular audience?
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
This week's Warner reading was all about how a public acts historically according to the "punctuality of its own circulation" (96). In short, a public can only really influence its own time period, but the utterances of a public can be politically important for as long as they are circulated. It's an interesting thought. The founding fathers are long dead, but they still have relevance through the importance the general public places on their documents.
Warner goes on to say that public texts create feedback loops so that people can respond to them, articulate themselves in a particular vernacular to show a relationship to their audience, and use intertextual reference to keep themselves bound together.
These are some of the reasons that I have been using music to talk about publics. Music can be made quickly (at least quicker than books) so it can keep up with politics. Music uses a particular vernacular to show a relationship between the artists and the audience; conversely, it can get stuck in people's heads so that the audience adopts the vernacular of the artist. Music pulls on events that are common to the public so that the audience feels connected to the peice. Finally, music is relatively cheap to make (especially in the digital age) so people are constantly talking back to one another (occasionally this happens directly, but more often than not it happens indirectly.)
I think one of the historic instances were we can most easily see how music functions as a public utterance is in the year and a half between September 11, 2001 (the attack on the World Trade Center) and March 20, 2003 (the beginning of the Iraq War). My goal here is not to discuss the political decisions of the Iraq War, but to discuss the public rhetoric of private, music making citizens during that time period. The first musical selection is Darryl Worley's 2003 song "Have You Forgotten."
The rhetoric of this piece is strong. The song came out 10 days before the start of the Iraq war as the justifications for war were being debated in the public, which made the message very timely. The use of the phrase "Have you forgotten" mimics the posters, bumper stickers, and other paraphernalia at the time that read "Never Forget" with pictures of the towers. The video uses footage and events that were familiar to all Americans at the time. Finally, the lyrics are directly inserted into the debate at the time and acknowledge the arguments of those who disagree with Worley.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we have the song "Boom" by System of a Down released November 6, 2002:
The visual rhetoric here is interesting, but the lyrics have a fair amount of rhetorical strength as well. The video was released the same day that America went to war, and shows its ability to contribute to public political debates through the images of the protests. The lyrics build off the work of notable public intellectual Noam Chomsky, and the visuals represent a situation still fresh in the public mind in response to an even that was still unfolding. The signs about greed and money allude to what the artists believed to be the motives of those on the other side of the political argument.
These two songs reflect the ability for the public utterance, especially in the form of music, to enter into meaningful, political discussions. It makes the whole idea of entering the public sphere seem important. My questions to you are these:
Can the academic essay enter into the public sphere?
If not, why not? If so, what strategies can we as authors use to make sure that we are staying as relevant as possible?
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
As I was reading the Ballenger that was assigned for Wednesday's class, my curiosity was piqued by the quote from Deborah Tannen's article "I Heard What You Didn't Say." While discussing the importance of communication within families, Tannen says, "...no utterance stands alone. Every remark draws meaning from innumerable conversations that came before" (qutd. from Ballenger 104). This quote made me think about how public utterances function. When a person speaks in the public she is not simply saying what she means, she is building off of every utterance that has been spoken in the public sphere, whether or not she realizes it.
For example, when we read Warner we are reading his ideas. However, Warner's ideas have been influenced by the ideas of others. Some of these sources we see; they are the sources he cites, refers to by name, or explicitly discusses. Some of these ideas,on the other hand, he may have heard off hand, been birthed in discussion with others, or been conceived of while he was answering questions after a lecture. Further, after reading this text you might have a conversation about publicness with a friend. Perhaps you mention Warner, perhaps you don't. Either way the information is moving throughout the public. I think this uncertainty of how knowledge circulates itself through the public is what Warner is getting at when he says, "public discourse...goes far beyond the scale of conversation or discussion to encompass a multigeneric [remember this means many genres] lifeworld organized not by a relational axis of utterance and response but by potentially infinite axes [plural of axis] of citation and characterization" (91). Let's break that apart a bit.
The public is not simply one person speaking and another responding. It is a multitude of voices speaking, responding, imitating, referencing, and summarizing. We are all listening and talking. We all (theoretically) hear what is being said in the public--through different media and genres--though we certainly cannot hear each independent utterance. Instead, utterances are made to a public audience, who then reiterates them in a different public forum, and so on and so forth. In this way knowledge and concepts diffuse throughout the public. They seep into our minds, often without our awareness.
Here's an example of this concept from the postpunk band Titus Andronicus. I will mention here that there is an actual video for this song (with some interesting visual rhetoric), but I chose this version because of the quote at the beginning:
Ok, so this song is full of references and allusions, most of which should speak to the general listening public (especially those listening in New Jersey). For instance, the quote at the beginning comes from Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address. The line "if I come in on a donkey, let me ride out on a gurney" is a reference to the Christian holiday of Palm Sunday. The line "tramps like us, baby, we were born to die" references Bruce Springsteen's song "Born To Run." Finally, the song ends with a quote from the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Of course, there are a many references in this song, but those are just a few.
What I like about this song is that it embodies the public nature of how we know information. The information veers from regional dialect, to national history, to artistic, to geographical with little consideration for where the information came from. Further, this song embodies how reference and citation are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. What I mean is that those who understand the reference are made to feel like they know something about the song and those who do not understand the reference are left to feel like they are in the dark. The song simultaneously unites some of its listeners by referencing things they are familiar with and pushes away other listeners who do not "get" the references.
Nonetheless, I feel like this conception of public knowledge is problematic. If we know things without being certain as to where they came from, then why does it matter whether or not we cite sources in academic papers? Is the system of citation arbitrary? Perhaps citation helps to not only give credit to our ideas but also to make the utterance more inclusive. Maybe, by showing where our references are coming from, we are making our utterances more inclusive than those of Titus Andronicus. This leads me to my questions:
Do you agree with the argument that publics are created by what Warner calls "the reflexive circulation of discourse" (90)?
why or why not?
Does citation make the academic utterance more or less inclusive than other types of utterances?
Are there ways to make the academic essay more inclusive?
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Hello, Before we get to this weeks blog post, I want to show you the e.e. cummings poem "Grasshopper." Two weeks ago we were talking about breaking rules in writing and I said something akin to "You don't break rules to break rules, you do it for an effect." I cited this poem as an example:
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
In this poem we see e.e. cummings breaking all sorts of rules for notonly poetry but also for language use in general in order to convey a specific meaning.
In my interpretation, and I am not alone in this reading, cummings
rearranges the words because, by making the poem seem undecipherable, the poem more closely resembles what it represents: a jumping
grasshopper. Just as the grasshopper is difficult to comprehend when it
is in mid-jump, so to is the poem difficult to comprehend while it is depicting the grasshopper's jump. If you are interested, the following is a type of standard "translation" of the poem, though I never understood where the "himself" comes from: g-r-a-s-s-h-o-p-p-e-r whoas welook now up gathering intohimself leaps! arrivingrearrangingly to become grasshopper. Anyway, now that we are done with that brief aside, let's move on to the purpose of this post. This week's post is going to begin by talking about how publics are amalgamations of strangers united (even if loosely) by texts. I think that this Yeah Yeah Yeah's video is a good visual representation of how this concept works:
What do little children from Mill Valley, California; adolescents from Brussels, Belgium; people from Girat Shmuel, Israel; and individuals from Sopot, Poland all have in common? Apparently, the answer is enough interest in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to want to be in their music video. There is nothing else, as far as I can tell, that unites these people besides a willingness to play dress up and make a homemade video for their favorite band. If we accept the premise that publics are made up of people united by a text (or multiple texts), then it makes sense that to demonstratethemselves as part of a public, authors use reference. Authors show that they know the same texts that the public knows and, by doing so, show themselves to be a part of the same public as the audience. I think this video by Rage Against the Machine shows this concept quite nicely:
Now, it is arguable that Rage Against the Machine does not belong to the public in which they are trying to place themselves. It could be argued that the band is hijacking the credibility of these other artists/revolutionaries in order to make themselves appear to be in a public in which they really do not belong. However, whether they belong to the public or not is inconsequential to the fact that they are trying to show themselves as part of the public. Sometimes artists reference people who seem obviously detached from the public that the original artist is speaking in. For example, in the following song Teri Genderbender of Le Butcherettes references the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth century writer, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an eighteenth-century philosopher:
What is Le Butcherettes trying to accomplish by referencing Wollstonecraft?
Is the use of references in either song effective, and how so?
What does any of this have to do with writing papers?
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
This week's classes have all been about how publics are self organized. On Monday we discussed that this means a public is, as Warner points out, "a space of discourse organized by discourse" (68). On Wednesday we will discuss what this means for us as participants in public(s), what it means for us as the writers of research essays, and how we can understand publics by understanding the texts that they generate. On Friday we will discuss how this makes the argumentative research paper (particularly the thesis) overtly political (in the broadest sense of the term).
The reason that the thesis is overtly political is because, by creating a public utterance, we are changing the texts that define that public. We are creating a change in how that public looks at the world. This thought made me think about how people manipulate language to create different meanings. For example, in 1896 Ernest Dowson wrote this poem about the brevity of life and, it seems to me, the brevity of happiness.
The famous line from this poem "the days of wine and roses" was then used in the creation of the song "Days of Wine and Roses" by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer in 1962. The song uses the same language as Dowson's poem, but I think the emphasis has shifted. Below is Frank Sinatra's version of the song recorded in 1964:
So here we have a literary piece that was a part of the public sphere that had its language used in a song that presents a different argument (or at least emphasis). However, this is not where the story ends.The famous line was again used in the 2004 Lars Frederickson and Bastards song "Wine and Roses." Again we see an emphasis shift in the meaning of the famous line.
My questions to you are: (1) Does the language used unite these artists, (2) If these artists have some common ground what is it? (3) What does any relationship, or lack of relationship, between the artists do for the messages of the songs? (4) What does this have to do with how publics are self organized?
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
In our reading for Monday we learned about counterpublics. On Wednesday we will cover that section of the text and discuss how counterpublics function as communities were ideas opposed to normal public conventions can be safely discussed. In various coutnerpublics, ideas that are not allowed in the regular public can be freely discussed--these may be identity issues, political ideologies, or moral discussions. Through their discussion, these counterpublics establish a way of viewing the world that is different from normal culture. This worldview is not only expressed in ideologies but also can be seen in the words participants use, their mannerisms, their style of dress, how they relate to one another, and the media they use. This creation of a worldview is the same thing that happens in the mass public and in subpublics. The basic idea is that the public conversation that a person is a part of helps to form how they participate in the world. What makes counterpublics unique is that they are opposed to a dominant belief. One way that we can see this is in the texts produce by the public or those who believe themselves to be in that public. In the following song we can see how counterpublics function:
The song openly argues against ideals of the dominant public such as peaceful governmental reform, patriotism, and elections. The song goes further and references dates and events that have specific meaning for the group, but may not have much importance for those in the mass public such as the Seattle riots in 1999, The Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the labor movements in America. The song also uses a specific vocabulary especially when the they say "They call it class war / I call it co-conspirators." They are referencing one idea (rioting) but from two different perspectives. One seeing it as the lower classes attacking the upper classes and the second seeing it as the upper class coming together to purposefully keep down the lower classes. The medium of music likewise has important implications, since the anarchists at the Seattle riots had met at a music festival to discuss their tactics. Further, the read and black have special significance to the anarchist movement. Finally, there is the very distinct possibility that this is all nonsense and was written by people who do not believe in anarchism, but just think that its cool; however, for the sake of this blog post, let's take the lyrics seriously.
Of course, one does not have to be a member of a counterpublic in order to critique the system. For example, Lily Allen is a pop singer in England, and she released a scathing critique of contemporary society in 2009 with a song called The Fear for which she won several major awards.
What I am interested in with the discussion of counterpublics is not only how a person speaking in them creates a sense of community or a worldview, but how such a speaker uses the same methods of creation as the research essay writer does. Just as Bruce Ballenger says that by "firing on four cylinders of information" writers are able to make writing that is "'authoritative' and convincing," songwriters use these forms of information to make themselves convincing. What I would like you to do is explain what modes of research were used in the creation of either song and how you can tell. Then, I would like you to tell me which song you find more effective and why.
Thanks,
Mr. Harley
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
On Friday we will discuss how Michael Warner views the feminist movement. For Warner, the motto of the feminist movement was that "the personal is political." By this he means that feminists were showing that what happens in our personal lives is controlled by systems of domination, that by advocating political change people could create changes in their personal lives, and that everyone's personal situation informs their political ideals. The goal of the feminist movement was to show the unfair dichotomy between the (masculine) public and the (feminine) private. The following music video should illustrate this point rather clearly. I have linked the lyrics to this song below the video if you are interested in exactly what is being said.
From the lyrics we see that the front woman, Karen O., characterizes her as a "poor little baby" which is important because it places her in a very private role. She is someone who does not have a role in the public or any sense of autonomy. We can assume that this loss of autonomy is caused by external male control over her life as expressed by the refrain "Y-control," which refers to the Y chromosome which only men have.
This song is in the genre of feminist postpunk, which owes part of its history to the 1990s Riot Grrl movement (if you want more information on that movement you can check out this wikipedia article or we can talk about it in class). Feminist postpunk is interesting here because it works as what Warner called "functional public[s] for women." This is to say that it is a private market that links women as readers and writers. Of course this assertion only half works because the music is available on stages that are not solely available to women--though so were the writings of Catherine Beecher.
The ultimate question regarding this song is if the private issues expressed by Karen O. have a public importance. Through creating this music, performing it in public, making a video it, and posting it on the internet she is making issues that seem private public. Further, she are not using a detached and rational based argument (which is the hallmark of the traditional public sphere), but instead shows herself as personally invested in the argument. My question to you is twofold: is it important for private issues to become public issues and would the argument be more or less effective if it were more objective and rational?
Thanks,
Mr. Harley
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Hello and Welcome to the ENG 123-039 class blog,
We have been studying Bakhtin's conceptions of the utterance as a unit of language that takes part in a chain of communication, and, since we are going to be looking at music as a form of public utterance, it would be good to start with a discussion of whether or not a song can be seen as an utterance in Bakhtinian terms. Remember that for Bahktin an utterance stems from a preexisting conversation, uses the forms of a specific speech genre, expresses a non-neutral sentiment, exhausts a theme, follows a "speech will" and invokes a response from the listener.
I am posting a song below, and I would like you to give a brief argument for why this meets the qualifications of a speech utterance or not. You do not need to cover all of Bakhtin's criteria for the utterance, but your response should demonstrate an understanding of the concept of the utterance. I have chosen a song with a light topic for this first post so that you don't get too bogged down in the content. Focus of whether or not this counts as an utterance.
