Literature Review: Global Media and Documentary Rhetorics
Hey everyone - Here's my literature review for this week. Let me know if there's any problem reading it, and I'd really appreciate your comments! Thanks!
Download file
Leora Fridman
3/6/2006
IR180.95
Literature Review: Global Media and Documentary Rhetorics
Although they come from distinct analytical perspectives, each of the readings on this week’s topic tackles the questions of media as it intersects with “the Real” and with “reality”. According to Jacques Lacan, “the Real” consists of that part of the outside world that resists description and compartmentalization through language. The documentary engages with the complications between the Real and reality as its makers and subjects struggle to intersect the written, the scripted and the filmed. Peter Steven’s The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media tackles these issues by defining in straightforward terms the power and effects of today’s globalized media. He highlights the political intersections of readership, ownership and manufacturing of knowledge through an explanation of conglomerates and summarized theories. Liz Stubbs’ Documentary Filmmakers Speak tackles several of Steven’s points more literally in a collection of interviews with contemporary documentary makers and their various techniques for handling objectivity, style, representation and the business of surviving on nonfiction film. Lastly, John Johnston’s collection of Friedrich A. Kittler’s essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems contextualizes Stubbs’ and Steven’s more economic and technical points in order to build a broader theory of screening, authorship and presentation in a mechanized age. I will proceed to summarize and analyze these texts further through the three central themes that I see running throughout; first, issues of objectivity, secondly, manners of authorship, and lastly, technology and its effect on representation.
Kittler uses the term Aufschreibesystem (translated as discourse network) to explain inscription by and on culture. This concept ties together some more diverse opinions on the handling of objectivity in media production. In the introduction to Literature, Media, Information Systems, John Johnston summarizes Kittler, saying,
“the notion of the discourse network points to the fact that at any given cross-sectional moment in the life of a culture, only certain data (and no other) are selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated, all else being ‘noise’…” (Johnston 9)
Johnston explains also that “in information theory ‘noise’ is precisely what disrupts a communication channel” (Johnston 9-10). In Kittler’s view we must then contextualize a documentary maker, who sees him or herself as a communication channel for a particular subject, as a filter for data within the discourse network, rather than a clear lens.
Stubbs’ interviews seem to fall relatively in line with this understanding. Albert Mayles highlights, “the problem we have in documentary in that it’s very difficult to film anything but what’s contemporary” (Stubbs 14). Mayles, like several of the other documentary makers in the book, does not downplay his personal role in filmmaking, but rather highlights the importance of empathy in gaining access to a story. He says, “There’s subjectivity and objectivity, and for me the thing that makes both possible is the affection, the empathy that you put into it” (Stubbs 6). This statement concurs with Kittler in some sense, by recognizing the fact that a story is brought out by an individual’s connection with it.
While there may be many levels of data, the documentary makers of Stubbs’ book admit that they can only represent one section of one moment if they hope to present a narrative. However, Kittler defines the role of film slightly differently than narrative, saying, “To presentify rather than narrate, simulate rather than verify –these are the maxims” (Johnston 98). The role of the filmmakers then, as defined by Kittler, would be to bring to light a particular moment’s presentness, rather than to narrate its existence. In turning a lens on one subject or element, film brings to light the responsibility of this element for allowing another object to present itself. Kittler, however, focuses on a general readership and general production rather than examining the intentions that come into play when individual creates a film. While they each express their goals differently, none of the interviewees in Stubbs’ book claim full objectivity. Bruce Sinofsky refuses to call his work “definitive truth,” saying,
I’m not one of those believers that you can ever have the definitive truth on film, because as soon as you edit one frame, what your cinematographer chooses to shoot…[has] an effect on the reality’s perception. I believe that it’s an impression, never the defined truth” (Stubbs 165).
The human voices of interviews like this one may be more difficult to condense into a theory, but they certainly present the individual aspect that Kittler neglects. D.A Pennebaker comments, “reality can mean so much to so many different people that I hesitate to even call our films reality films” (Stubbs 54). This comment also brings in the issue of multiplicity in filmic and genre interpretation, a theme, that is touched upon throughout several of the interviews.
The variation of answers in Stubbs’ book to the objectivity question indicates that different goals of media-makers can create different relationships with their subjects and societal contexts. In Global Media Steven explores this concept when he outlines three relationships of media and society; that in which media influence media, in which media reflect society, and in which media affect society (Steven 108). By engaging with these different categories, Steven is able to point at the subjectivity not only of the media itself, but of the audience, depending on what it hopes to receive from the media. For example, he discusses the pressure of business interests on journalists as media reflecting society and emphasized racial, ethnic and gender stereotyping as media affecting society. Steven’s outlook bears perhaps too heavily on the image of media as social control, but it does allow us to understand from a different perspective what documentary makers face in dealing in Kittler’s “discourse network.”
Stubbs’ focus on each documentary maker’s cutting and editing process forces her reader to look closely at the role of editing and self-editing in authorship. Though not all the interviewees agree with his statement, Joe Berlinger says, “The editing process, to me, is everything. That’s the equivalent of the script process, where you discover things you may not have noticed before…As a human being you can’t help but have some preconceived idea, but you have to be open to changing those ideas” (Stubbs 153). Ross McElwee also explains that he finds the structure of his film in the editing room that he many not have been completely aware of while shooting the footage (Stubbs 101). The documentary makers are aware of their own role in creating story. Some even speak of the pain of realizing that a scene has nothing to communicate. Many of the documentary makers in Stubbs’ book, however, seem to have escaped the larger ideological power conglomerations that Steven continually highlights, perhaps simply because of the marginal financial and power status that each one mentions in their interview.
In his reflections on editing, Steven emphasizes the fact that media communicates and emphasizes the legitimacy of those in power. However, when it comes to viewership he does admit that “not all texts are perfectly shaped vehicles for delivery of the dominant world view,” (Steven 100) and asks the reader about our own role in authorship by receiving media, particularly through the media of audience studies and broadcast rates (Steven 105). He differentiates between dominant, residual and emergent media, (Steven 93) each of which the reader understands and accepts at different levels.
Kittler, however, is much more unflinching in his approach to the godliness of the media creator, and cites the Bible and Koran as original texts of the storage of creation in writing. “…Writing stores only the fact of its authorization,” he writes, saying, “It celebrates the storing monopoly of the god who has invented it” (Johnston 37) and going on to detail the homogenization of the writing ability by state apparatuses. Kittler’s theory on inscription becomes even more relevant if we think of it in terms of a documentary maker like Ken Burns, who spends much of his films citing historical images and sources. Kittler declaims upon the “suspicion that all power comes from archives to which it returns,” (Johnston 35) pointing directly at the role of archival footage in films. Burns describes his work in the editing room as one with “all essentially detached static, moribund images. And we’re trying to tell a story. We’re trying to make the past come alive…into a moment where history is not was, but is, as William Faulkner says” (Stubbs 81). The story-making, then, comes about in the technology that allows for the cutting and re-forming of these images.
According to Kittler, the editing process and technology of film mimics human processes of perception. He writes,
Whereas the traditional arts treat orders of the symbolic or orders of things, film emits to its viewers their own process of perception—and this with a precision available only to experiment, which is to say, that it cannot be accessed either by consciousness or language. (Johnston 100)
Kittler is particularly fascinated by the contemporary shrinking difference between media through digitalization for the purpose of the viewer. He writes, “Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface, or, to put it better, the interface for the consumer” (Johnston 32). It is the process of readership then, that today’s technology serves. Even when there are incompatibilities between connected media, which he admits, Kittler says that it is the reader’s sense perception that “computes data” (Johnston 33).
Kittler meets Steven again here in the idea that though media’s forms converge in the personal computer, all this technology serves not only writerly, but readerly needs. Steven breaks these needs down into solutions to problems; as needs for realism, for spectacle, for privacy, for crowds, for consumption, for surveillance, for war, for globalization, and for democracy (Steven 69). Steven follows his familiar pattern in breaking down technology into the many different industrial forces that view for power on the viewer, but reminds us that, “to see technology as all-powerful…leads us into the conceptual trap known as technological determinism” (Steven 64). This is the point at which he differs from Kittler, who holds;
Film is total power…Mechanical media and strategies of shock…are triumphant precisely because of their self-exhibition. That is to say, how could a simulacrum of the central nervous system—and that, after all, was at one time phrased ‘of the Spirit’—be subject to further analysis? (Johnston 98)
To Kittler, it is the fact that we can see conceptualize a film is made that most tempts us to believe in its ability to capture reality, or even the Real that cannot be captured by other more language-based forms of media.
We can see in Stubbs’ interviews that the more her subjects are able to utilize technology, the more they feel able to program, or create, a film that closely aligns itself with their reality. Many address the beauties of a small camera that is less obtrusive during conversation or verite shooting, or the ease with which digital footage can be edited. In his introduction to Kittler’s essays Johnston summarizes that behind all of Kittler’s ideas “lies the recurrent specter of a totally programmable world” (Johnston 25). As a critical reader, one has to question the innate dangers of programming if film’s “presentifying” programming allows for the communication of unfamiliar or innovative stories, as in the cases of the documentary makers in Stubbs’ book.
Works Cited
Johnston, John, ed. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Friedrich A. Kittler Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997.
Steven, Peter. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2003.
Stubbs, Liz. Documentary Filmmakers Speak. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.
Comments
Christina Koningisor
Literature Review
The title of James Der Derian’s Virtuous War is a play on the homographic nature of the word “virtuous,” examining these dual interpretations in the context of the modern age of warfare. Der Derian employs “virtuous” as a single modification of the two root nouns “virtue” and “virtual,” and in the age of smart bombs and guided missiles, these dual interpretations should, theoretically, act as complements. Advances in technology, it is argued, have allowed armies to fight a safer, more sterile, and even a more just war. Der Derian’s book, however, demonstrates that the attempt to create a more humane form of warfare has instead produced a collective loss of humanity—a marginalization and even an elimination of the human element in warfare.
This “de-humanizing” process is most evident in the way in which modern warfare has led to a disappearance of the human body—especially those of the enemy dead. Der Derian argues that the body has historically given war its “special status,” and thus the disappearance of the body leads to the “aestheticizing of violence, the sanitization of war.” (166) Virtuous wars, “fought in the same manner as they are represented, by real time surveillance cameras and TV ‘live feeds, promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars.” (xvi) In an age in which the media has near-omnipresent capabilities, the war images of today consist not of its human victims but of long-range explosions and fierce, impressive machinery. While the low American casualty rates of recent “prototypical virtuous conflicts” like Gulf War I serve to impress a casualty-sensitive public, the number of enemy dead, of Iraqis, Somalis, and Serbs is not reported—are perhaps not even known.
Thus, as the “real” enemy disappears, a virtual enemy has emerged in its stead. In this type of virtuous war, the enemy is defined not by what is, but by what might be. The dangers of such a tendency are many, for through this process the military assumes the power not merely to predict, but to actually shape, the nation’s future. Der Derian discusses the way in which the military’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which provides a comprehensive analysis of potential future enemies and conflicts, “effectively maps, in both the digital and cartographic senses of the word, the operational requirements and global contours of virtuous war.” (109).
Der Derian argues that the disappearance of a physical, contemporary enemy in a virtuous war is dangerous not merely for the power this imparts to the military, but to the power gained by the state, as well. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the author argues that the United States now chases an “elusive peer enemy,” and thus the natural conclusion is that “our ability to foresee, perhaps even forestall danger, requires vast expenditures on technologies of surveillance, simulation, and speed which can oversee everything and everybody.” (108)
Virtuous War was written (I believe), prior to 9/11, and thus in today’s world it could be argued that 9/11 provided a contemporary enemy; namely, the terrorist. Such an enemy, however, is still “elusive,” less easily identified, located, and even defined than the enemies of the past. Certainly, the fear that the state will be endowed with high levels of power in the fight against such an enemy has proven true in the aftermath of the September attacks. The expansion of the state is highlighted in the current debate over President Bush’s domestic surveillance program, in which the public is currently divided over what they fear more; an all-knowing, all-hearing state, or that of an elusive and unidentifiable terrorist threat. Timothy Druckey, in CTRL [space], argues that “as a frenzied surveillance industry mobilizes to provide services across the board to an anxiety economy whose reluctance to disperse with constitutional guarantees to rights to privacy is now willingly abandoning constitutional guarantees like ‘no unreasonable’ searches and seizures.” (CTRL [space]151) Similarly, in Virtuous War, Naval War College Vice-Admiral Cebrowski described his “worst-case scenario” as when people start to surrender civil liberties in exchange for order and security. (142)
Virtuous war serves not only to eliminate the enemy, but also to initiate a dehumanizing process through an elimination of the individual; in a phenomenon long predicted by science fiction writers, virtuous war has the effect of replacing man with machine. As an example of this, Der Derian describes a power-point presentation he attended which outlined a hypothetical war scenario, and out of the 80 images flashed to the audience just two contained images with humans in them; the rest were ships, missiles, tanks, and aircraft. (126) He further illustrates this de-humanizing trend with the invention of new “smart ships” that used extensive high-tech equipment to essentially replace the sailor; “amidst all this enthusiasm for techno-solutions,” he describes, “no one seemed to be looking at the end point of the trajectory: a battlefield in which networks, systems, robots, and smart weapons target each other, and all damage measured in flesh and blood becomes collateral.” (148)
The technology employed in modern warfare has created a disconnect between the soldier and his surroundings; whereas the man with the gun witnesses the blood he shed, a smart missile has no such recognition or capacity for empathy. In addition, Der Derian argues that this distance is compounded by the way in which virtuous war eliminates the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is simulated; simulation practices assume an element of reality, while real war becomes indistinguishable from the numerous simulation exercises that preceded it. While Francis Bacon touts the power of simulation, digitized war games “take us from Bacon’s world of strategic levels of deception to, once again, Baudrillard’s fractal turf of the hyperreal, where distinctions between the simulated and the real begin to break down.” (116)
In an example of the dangers of this phenomenon, Der Derian describes the USS Vincennes, in which months of computer simulations had left the crew unprepared for an Iranian Airbus that flew overhead one day. “They didn’t believe their eyes,” he describes, “They believed their computer simulations and training, and shot it down.” (138)
Der Derian’s grave portrayal of the implications of virtuous war are brought even more sharply into focus when placed within the context of Thomas Keenan’s essay on the relationship between the media and humanitarian intervention. Advances in technology have allowed for images to be relayed instantaneously around the world; Kennan describes how early human rights groups looked forward to this future, for “the creation of a rich and increasingly robust global network of human rights monitors, and the ability to relay acts of witness and evidence around the world in real time,” would serve to eliminate atrocities and human rights violations.
With the outbreak of war in Bosnia, however, such hopes were quickly dashed. Images of war and strife were flashed across the Western world, and yet prompted very little in way of a rapid response. “The surveillance,” Keenan describes, “was as complete as the abandonment,” and Bosnia was “a brutal combination of overexposure and indifference.” (554) Such commentary provides additional evidence to prove the dehumanizing effect of virtuous war.
The campaign slogans of modern warfare have an eerie, Orwellian feel to them; “bombing for peace,” seems counterintuitive—as does the very concept of a humane war. Der Derian and Keenan demonstrate that, rather than eliminate the horrors and injustices of war, today’s “virtuous” war merely masks them, and that through the elimination of the body, the enemy, the individual, and the ability to perceive what is real and what is not, virtuous war acts a dehumanizing process.
Posted by: Christina Koningisor | April 19, 2006 01:35 PM