Toward a Critical Theory of Advertising
By John Harms and Douglas Kellner

Very rarely have critical studies of advertising and mass communications adequately articulated the linkage between the macro political economic structure of mass media and the micro mass communication forms and techniques so as to reveal both the socio-economic functions of advertising and the ways that ads actually shape and influence perception and behavior which reproduce the existing social system. The failure to clearly and comprehensively articulate this linkage has often generated an implicit "conspiracy theory" suggesting that a few elites in control of the mass media consciously conspire to manipulate culture and consciousness. This deficiency has plagued critical analyses of advertising and communications which have generally failed to explain how mass communications in general, and advertising in particular, can exercise the power and impact that critical theorists suggest.

posted by neel master at 3:01 AM

Theodor Adorno and Heavy Metal

Whether or not Adorno had heard any late-60's proto-Metal before his death, he "surely would have judged" both the Heavy Metal phenonemon "and its audience negatively" (Weinstein 94).{7} Indeed, the genre's very name would have been anathema to Adorno's relatively technophobic attitude.{8} But our great critic of culture had more than a few disciples to continue his elitist work--rock music critics themselves who, while heaping praise on such popular icons/iconoclasts as Dylan and the Beatles, found at least in Heavy Metal an easy target for their displaced scorn and spittle. Thus The Rolling Stone Record Guide, written by supposed spokespeople of the anti-establishment, would characterize this genre as "Heavily, sluggishly rhythmic rock of the late Sixties{9} and early Seventies that relied heavily on technology and very little ontechnique. . . . All [of these bands] distorted the blues through heavy amplification, screaming vocals and rhythms of absolutely no subtlety" (Marsh 612). Led Zeppelin, for instance, was "a band that, when not busy totally demolishing classic blues songs," appealed only to an audience "drugged to the point of senselessness," playing as they did a "spaced-out heavy rock [that] drove barely pubescent kids crazy" (217). Black Sabbath, moreover, was a group of "would-be Kings of Heavy Metal [who] are eternally foiled by their stupidity and intractibility" (36). And Deep Purple, whose earlier, more "artsy" albums had been applauded by such critics, had their first Metal venture described as a "hodgepodge of power chords and psychedelic noodling" (98)--as if the phrase "power chord" itself were an epithet of musical inanity and incompetence.

posted by neel master at 2:53 AM

This story fills me with an rather uncontrollable glee:

On April 22, 1969, shortly after beginning a lecture in his course on dialectical thought before an audience of nearly one thousand students at the University of Frankfurt, the eminent Frankfurt School sociologist and Marxist cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno found himself in an unusual situation. A student in one of the back rows interrupted him, demanding that he engage in "self-criticism." Another student silently walked up to the blackboard and wrote the following words: "He who only allows dear Adorno to rule will uphold capitalism his entire life." After Adorno told the class that they would have five minutes to decide if his lecture should continue, three female students dressed in leather jackets rushed the podium. They showered him with roses and tulips, exposed their breasts, and tried repeatedly to kiss him. Incensed and humiliated, Adorno stormed out of the lecture hall.

This incident . . . came to be known as the Busenaktion ("breast action")

This is from a linguafranca article about the interactions between late-60s intellectual rebellion and the old guard of the Frankfurt School.

posted by neel master at 2:32 AM

Roland Barthes' entry at the k.i.s.s. of the panopticon

All that talk back there about realities vs. representations and methods of signification and whatnot reminded me of Roland Barthes. He's the godfather of cultural criticism; his 1967(?) book Mythologies was one of the first serious attempts to use literary methods to interpret mass cultural phenomena. Check out the above for a quick summary.
posted by neel master at 8:31 AM

All this talk about law and semiotics is making me sleepy. I'll post a picture of Roland Kirk, but then I'm going to bed.


posted by neel master at 1:17 AM

Modality and Representation
By Daniel Chandler

The media which are typically judged to be the most 'realistic' are photographic - especially film and television. James Monaco suggests that 'in film, the signifier and the signified are almost identical... The power of language systems is that there is a very great difference between the signifier and the signified; the power of film is that there is not' (Monaco 1981, 127-8). This is an important part of what Christian Metz was referring to when he described the cinematic signifier as 'the imaginary signifier'. In being less reliant than writing on symbolic signs, film, television and photography suggest less of an obvious gap between the signifier and its signified, which make them seem to offer 'reflections of reality' (even in that which is imaginary). But photography does not reproduce its object: it 'abstracts from, and mediates, the actual' (Burgin 1982a, 61). Whilst we do not mistake one for the other we do need to remind ourselves that a photograph or a film does not simply record an event, but is only one of an infinite number of possible representations. All media texts, however 'realistic', are representations rather than simply recordings or reproductions of reality. As the film theorist D N Rodowick puts it, 'Rather than reproducing the "world" spontaneously and automatically, as the ideology of realism would have the spectator believe, the cinematic apparatus always operates selectively, limiting, filtering and transforming the images that are its raw material' (Rodowick 1994, 77).

posted by neel master at 1:02 AM

The Practice: Popmatters Television Review
By Michael Abernethy

Writer-producer-creator Kelley seems to want the focus of The Practice to be an in-depth analysis of how the justice system works, or, far too often, fails to work, despite the best efforts of all those involved. Kelley is no stranger to the courtroom drama, having worked as a writer on L.A. Law and as producer-writer on Ally McBeal and Picket Fences. But unlike these shows, The Practice examines legal strategies and rules of courtroom behavior that dictate the outcome of many cases, rather than the characters' personal lives. Watching the show over an extended period will definitely provide the viewer with an education about how justice is served -- or not. The case involving the nun-killer is a perfect example of how police inefficiency can allow a guilty man to walk. If the point isn't news, the detail is particularly repulsive, and so, jarring. We don't like to believe that men who rape and dismember nuns are walking our streets, free to kill again, thanks to the system designed to protect us. You'd expect that in the idealized world of television, such a man would get the punishment due him. But The Practice doesn't present that idealized world. Instead, it emphasizes the fact that the technicalities of justice apply to everyone.

If The Practice is not idealized, then I am a monkey's uncle. Donnell, Frutt, Dole and Young never lose; I wonder if our good friend Abernethy ever considered that. What is especially disturbing about this review is that it takes the show's portrayal of the American justice system as reflecting the real. The show is in fact a representation of a reality. This representation appears 'natural,' but it is really a specific construction occurring at a remove from the reality it describes. The way to understand The Practice cannot be to hold it up to reality and try to find congruences, but instead to describe how its techniques of representation present a reality that the audience is willing to accept. My take on The Practice (which, thanks to the f/x network and unemployment, I watch nearly every day) is that it legitimizes a dirty and hollow vision of jurisprudence. By presenting the legal process as one in which the formal rules that constitute law are as often a hindrance to justice as they are a recipe for it, The Practice makes the strategic extra-legal manipulation by lawyers seem more important than the law itself. The show also allows papa Bobby to prevail inordinately, both legally and morally. This maneuver encourages docility in viewers; since the lawyering of Donnell et al is vulgar but ultimately just, there is no impetus for protest.

This article is of uncertain origin. It appears on a fan site for The Practice and it is a discussion of the show's verisimilitude.

"The one thing that 'The Practice' gets right is that strategy often prevails over truth," says Richard Binder, a senior partner at Pasadena-based Binder & Norris. "Even when there is a client who is guilty, it's really about the tactics and the mistakes that opposing counsel makes. Unfair victories are a big part of this profession."

While Binder doesn't consider "The Practice" a totally accurate representation of the legal profession, he acknowledges that the series is more truthful in how the law is portrayed than earlier TV shows such as "Perry Mason," and even the more recent offering "L.A. Law."

posted by neel master at 12:57 AM

Christians and Postmoderns
By J. Bottum

There is thus a curious parallel of thought between premodern thinkers and postmodern prophets of modernity's destruction . . . The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong. Though they disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

By itself, this parallel between premodern and postmodern does us no good, for we cannot use it to return to the age of faith.

For more J. Bottum, scroll down a bit.

posted by neel master at 12:42 AM

Finding a picture of Mike Kinsley with a beard has proven much harder than expected. Maybe he suppressed the photographic record once he saw himself. For now, you can satisfy yourselves with this striking juxtaposition:


posted by neel master at 12:36 AM

Let's get a picture of Michael Kinsley up here. In fact, let's get two. One without the beard (the nerdish Michael Kinsley) and one with the beard (the owl-lookin' Michael Kinsley.) Sometimes, I irritate my father by calling him "mike kinsley" like I know him.
posted by neel master at 12:28 AM

The Soundtracking of America
By J. Bottum

This natural and probably healthy pattern of sophistication alternating with primitive rebellion has undergone an odd skew in the twentieth century. The invention of the phonograph may well have been the original cause. For the first time, performances of a successfully rebelled-against music could be preserved unchanged -- vastly increasing the range of music a listener might know.

"Concern with the social explication of art has to address the production of art," the twentieth-century philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno claimed in one of his most dated Marxist rants against the West's commercialized culture. In this case Adorno was right. The appearance of a huge industry seeking new products, trying to both predict and create shifts in popular taste, gave rise to a wild acceleration of the cycle of sophistication and rebellion. By now any musical form is overwhelmed by its counterform before professional musicians have made more than a gesture at giving the form real sophistication.

[..] Music's traditional defense against overelaboration has itself created a new kind of overelaboration. In all previous ages of music a new musical form succeeded by replacing its predecessors. But now each new form joins its predecessors in our endlessly expanding library of music. This is what Adorno missed when he claimed, in "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (1938), that Western pop songs make us "forcibly retarded," because they're so shallow and because we're compelled to hear the same ones over and over again. It's what the long-haired classical-music lovers and the culture warriors overlook, and what the nostalgic bemoaners of popular music's decline fail to grasp. We live in the most elaborate age of music in the history of the world. Ours is an extraordinary kind of musical sophistication that can never be rejected without creating yet more sophistication, shallower but wider, and yet another musical form to know.

When I chanced upon Christians and Postmoderns (see above entry), I was reminded of the last time I had read J. Bottum. "The Soundtracking of America" was published in the March 2000 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Bottum's above argument is so preposterous that I had to repeat it. In this article, Bottum seems blindly and somewhat hopelessly motivated to ignore the aesthetic possibilities presented by postmodernism and its concomitant recording technologies. But this technological condition also creates the conditions for truly awe-inspiring music. At the top of my list of recording-enabled master artists is jazz multi-instrumentalist (saxophone, flute, nose whistle, strich, manzello, and everything else) Roland Kirk.

Roland Kirk had what could be called an encyclopedic range. His compositions tended to take in the whole history of jazz; although he came around in the late 50s, he wasn't just another guy reacting to bebop and Charlie Parker. By the mid-sixties, Kirk had pushed harder than anyone in constructing a fully unique idiom that reflected all of jazz history. The only people that came close were the AACM in Chicago and Mingus' pianist Jaki Byard (with whom Kirk played on the Byard's The Jaki Byard Experience). I've often thought of Roland Kirk as one of the first formal postmodernists in jazz. He made a full and sweeping and sometimes ironic integration of elements as diverse as the jaunty bounce of stride and the expressionistic honkings and wailings of free jazz. (If Monk was the consummate stride piano modernist, check out Roland and Jaki Byard on "Memories of You" on the Jaki Byard Experience for some pomo bad-asstery.) Roland Kirk took it all in, and it is likely that this was enabled by the availability of a wide range of jazz recordings. Bottum wants to deny the possibility of an aesthetic that develops very quickly, right on the heels of its predecessor. The music of Roland Kirk is a counterargument to Bottum's notion that musical styles need some sort of hermetically sealed, two-hundred-year incubation.

Anyway, read about Roland Kirk some.

The Rahsaan Roland Kirk Website

The Whistleman

This whistleman of Columbus turned the international jazz world upside down, and anyone who knew his music has never listened to jazz the same way again.

His name was Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He was born Ronald Theodore Kirk on August 7, 1935, in a Columbus neighborhood called Fly Town, near and around what’s now the Short North.

A short bio

[a]dream led to his adding the name "Rahsaan" around 1970. Rahsaan was an activist in getting support for what he termed "Black Classical Music." He participated in several takeovers of television talk shows during which he would demand more exposure for black jazz artists.

discography. My favorite album is Volunteered Slavery although Domino is really growing on me.


The Jiveometric Genius of Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was one of the most charismatic performers to grace this planet. He was a dynamic musician, a provocative raconteur, and a rhyming fool. The man was blind and played music which brought on The Light.

posted by neel master at 12:17 AM

Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic
By Ted Friedman

But if Milli Vanilli's songs have been expunged from the collective memory, their disgrace remains a critical episode in the narrative contemporary popular music tells to explain itself. That 1990 press conference came in the midst of crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music. A New Jersey congressman was proposing a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts. The cross-over of hip-hop represented by Milli-Vanilli's pop-rap fusion was introducing Top 40 audiences to remixing and sampling strategies that called into question assumptions about songs's originality. Synthesizers, originally exploited for their plastic, unnatural sound in the early 80s, had become the sonic norm, as familiar as amplified guitar strings. And sophisticated recording techniques had emerged which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument.

Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians, edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers. But while most viewers recognize the complex division of labor in moviemaking--nobody gets upset that actors don't do their own stunts--pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity. They were the recording industry's sacrifice meant to prove the integrity of the rest of their product--as if the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN'T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched the faces in the videos.

posted by neel master at 11:04 PM

An oil company has no more right to poison a town of innocents than a gang member has to avenge the murder of his comrade or than a wife has the right to end the life of her abusive husband. Our rule in these matters is that no one can ever have the right to kill another person; I think it's a good rule. That it's always wrong to harm another person is a good rule.

However, this does not prevent us from understanding and identifying with the wrong-doer. Narratives can either embrace or ignore this responsibility. A film that portrays the murderous battered woman as a dangerous hysteric is guilty of omission. The film that ignores the bonding between members of a gang is guilty of omission. And a film that ignores the powerful social processes (including the normalization of deviance, the development of a goal-sharing community, and the relationship between compliance and individual economic and social viability) at work in a corporate entity like PG&E is guilty of omission.

In Erin Brockovich this omission seems quite intentional. It serves the film's larger narrative purpose: the villainization of corporations. This strategy is an explanatory copout; it substitutes the vague national antipathy toward corporations for real analysis.

You might now object that it doesn't matter; these people still did harm, so we have no need to understand them. I think this would be a grave error. Each of us has the potential to commit bad acts. As decent people, we must confront the paradox of decent people doing bad things. Making decisions with consequences for other people is something we do quite regularly, and something that art can prepare us to do. Films like Bonnie and Clyde, say, or The Sweet Hereafter show us social processes at work. They invite us to identify with both the good and the bad; this identification forces reflection. Films like Erin Brockovich shield us from reflection. They utilize manipulative narrative conventions to force a conclusion where reflection should go.
posted by neel master at 4:16 PM

I just watched The Contender on dvd, and I'm hopping mad. I would gladly pilot the garbage barge that hauled this film and its ideologically bankrupt cousins (Erin Brockovich, Boys Don't Cry, and The Insider) to sea. Jesus H. Lord! Films like these make me embarassed to be a liberal. If I may step onto my arrogant soapbox for a moment: I learned liberalism from Foucault and Goffman and Diane Vaughn, people who see that integrity is often more than simple integrity, that morality is more than simple morality, and that these qualities often coexist irreconcilably with their opposites.

These films ignore these founding tenets of good liberalism, choosing instead to cling gladly and smugly to their own priveleged notions of integrity and morality. The liberalism in these films wants to efface its absolutism while it simultaneously celebrates and wields it. Thus, we get classic good guy bad guy nonsense: the corporate swine and the mulder-esque truth-lover; the noble pro-choicer and the rabidly megalomaniacal pro-lifer; the tolerant atheist and the bigot christian; the innocent transvestite and the violent intolerant sociopath. The former in each of these oppositions gets all of the exposition, and thereby all of the humanity, while the latter gets little or none.

This weakness is not limited to filmmakers; even certain academic liberals who have quite an easy time respecting these ambiguities when they study sexual minorities, criminals, and the questionable acts of faraway peoples still have great difficulty showing any tolerance for ambiguity in the positions of their political opponents (corporate fuckers, advertisers, republicans, christians, pro-lifers, gay-haters, misogynists, etc.)

Where is the film or study that suggests that pro-choicers and pro-lifers are both profoundly moral? Where is the liberal film that reveals the ugly, dishonest, and dangerous aspect of liberal dogma? Where is the liberal film that seeks to understand the social forces that shape corporate malfeasance and humanize its perpetrators? Where is the liberal film that treats its conservative viewer with fairness by calling its own assumptions into question as it forces him to do the same? After reading Foucault and others, a vexing problem began to dawn on me. The problem is that there are no real villains. Where, among all this propaganda, is the liberal movie that elides the opposition between hero and villain?

Stanley Fish on boutique multiculturalism and the trouble with principle.

Harvey Mansfield on Fish.

Sarah Baumgartner Thurow hones in on a similar problem in her critique of Gerald Graff's Beyond The Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education.

By proposing to "teach the conflict" through teaching of theories, Graff has already prejudged in favor of one side, the side that considers all claims to truth to be merely theoretical since truth either does not exist or is unknowable. There is not much to be hoped for from a conversation in which one side's language has been rendered unintelligible-or worse-judged to be baby-talk.

The idea that cultural differences can be adequately dealt with by teaching students to compare theories is connected with Graff's understanding of education in general. In a moment of autobiographical candor he describes how he came to value books. He could never really get interested in a book, he says, until he learned to approach it in terms of its cultural significance. Knowing where the book stood in the political contradictions of its time made it relevant to him and enabled him to relate it to real life. Such a double removal from reality bespeaks a serious kind of intellectual impoverishment.

Perhaps the most important motivation behind what might be called a natural relation to reading, in any case the reading of literature, is the desire to understand reality directly, especially oneself and one's own life.

Deconstructing Liberal Tolerance

Liberal Tolerance is perhaps the primary challenge to the Christian worldview current in North American popular culture. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that it is intolerant and inconsistent with the principles of a free and open society for Christians (and others) to claim that their moral and religious perspective is correct and ought to be embraced by all citizens. Liberal tolerance is not what it appears to be, however. It is a partisan philosophical perspective with its own set of dogmas. It assumes, for instance, a relativistic view of moral and religious knowledge. This assumption has shaped the way many people think about issues such as homosexuality, abortion rights, and religious truth claims, leading them to believe that a liberally tolerant posture concerning these issues is the correct one and that it ought to be reflected in our laws and customs. But this posture is dogmatic, intolerant, and coercive, for it asserts that there is only one correct view on these issues, and if one does not comply with it, one will face public ridicule, demagogic tactics, and perhaps legal reprisals. Liberal Tolerance is neither liberal nor tolerant.

Discuss.
posted by neel master at 2:33 AM