To The Reader (Professor)

"We must invent a new language, a new form of writing..., a language of a new sensibility, a new reflexivity, a language which refuses old categories, a language which reflexivelyand parasitically, in a rhizomatic manner, charts its own course against. . . repressive structures of history, economy, religion,race, class, gender. This new language, poststructuralist to the core, will be personal, emotional, biographically specific, minimalistin the use of theoretical terms. It will allow ordinary people tospeak out, and to articulate the interpretive theories that they use to make sense of their lives. . . This language will be visual,kaleidoscopic, rhizomatic, rich and thick in its own descriptive detail, always interactive as it moves back and forth between lived experience and the cultural texts that shape and write that experience."
(The Lessons James Joyce Teaches Us, unpublished paper,1993, p. 17-18).
The above quote is the mission of this blog. While it likely doesn't succeed in every manner, there are certainly some aspects that were successful. You'll find some of these blog posts to be interactive, a new form of writing, reflexivity, personal, emotional, biographically specific, hopefully somewhat minimalist in the use of theoretical terms but likely not minimalist enough.
Much of the theories and readings are more covert than overt in the posts. Nevertheless, here's a "user's guide" of sorts on how to navigate this blog.
The first post was made back in November. To begin at the beginning, you must click on the "November 2006" archive on the right hand side under "archives" and then scroll down to the bottom. To read in the order blog posts were entered, you have to work backwards sort of, from the bottom up. Of course, you can choose to read however you want. But if you wish to follow in successive time order, you would go from bottom up, working backwards. After reading the November archive entries, you could go on to "December 2006" archive entries. Also, each hypertext link in the blog will take you to another site or another area. At least one link is to a powerpoint presentation (which you've already seen). Other links go to relevant sites pertinent to the posts.
There are other links on the right hand side independent of the blog posts which are relevant to the class and may be of interest. They are self explanatory by the name on the links. Although if I really wanted to follow Barthes and signifier/signified I could list words that don't correspond to the link. But I didn't do that.
Anyway, I think that's about it. Basically navigate this blog as you see fit. Hopefully it makes some sense. If not, feel free to write a post in the comments section. I guess that brings up one other point. Some of the posts have comments at the end of them. To my knowledge, no one outside of me has posted, but they might have. I didn't edit any of the comments. I believe one comment is spam in the form of an advertisment. Other comments are additions I made to the original post.
Class is now over but this blog will now remain (at least for awhile). In that sense, this is the unfinished... This end has also become a beginning...ENJOY!

-GG

More Strange Thoughts

I figured I'd do one last post before wrapping up this project for class. Right now is sort of surreal. I'm sitting in the Student Learning Center typing this entry, while watching cartoons on a digital screen in a hyperconnected classroom. I'm connected to a library of past Peabody entries and to a world of information and people. Yet I'm alone. I'm the only one in this room now. It's 2:27 a.m., but I have lost sense of time and place. I think of Lunenfeld, time and space, narrative, images, media, manipulation, celebrity. I'm not sure why but all these thoughts feel my head. This show is pretty funny. It's called Freakazoid. I think Spielberg did it. Right now, they're talking about "SCREAM-A-VISION." It's involving the audience, changing the narrative. That's all.

Academic Citations

Here's the poached list of readings from the class. There's a few not on here but more or less this is the class reading for the semester. It is from these works that many of the ideas in the blog posts are influenced from or referring to either overtly or covertly. It's listed in the order of time in which we read them:

Carey, James (1997). Afterward: The Culture in Question. From JamesCarey: A Critical Reader. Eds.: Munson and Warren. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. pp. 308-339.

Richardson, Laurel & St.Pierre Elizabeth A. (forthcoming). Writing: Amethod of inquiry. In Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln (Eds.),Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Barrett, Michelle (1999). Introduction: Culture, Theory, Writing.From Imagination in Theory. New York: NYU Press. Pp. 1-34.

Love, Lisa L. & Kohn, Nathaniel (2001). "This, That, and the Other:Fraught Possibilities of the Souvenir." Text and PerformanceQuarterly, 21:1, January 2001, pp 47-63.

Mills, C. Wright (1959). "On Intellectual Craftsmanship." TheSociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.195-228.Week 2SEP 11

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 3-32, 308-337.

Tichi, Cecelia. (1991) Electronic Hearth. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. pp. 3-41.

Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of theSign. pp. 164-184.

Stevenson, Nick. (1995) Understanding Media Cultures: Social Theoryand Mass Communication. pp. 114-143.

Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and Cultural Forms.London: Fontana. pp. 7-77.

Weinstein, Deena and Weinstein, Michael A. (1993). Postmodern(ized)Simmel. London and New York: Routledge. pp. vii-x, 203-226.

Baudrillard, Jean. (1988). Simulacra and Simulations. From: JeanBaudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press. pp. 1-9, 166-184.

de Certeau, Michel (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley:University of California Press. pp. Title page - 42, 165-176.

Lefebrve, Henri (1971). Everyday Life in the Modern World. Trans: S.Rabinovitch. Allen Lane The Penguin Press: London. pp: 64-85,143-93.

Morris, Meaghan (1990). Banality in Cultural Studies. From Logics ofTelevision: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed.: Patricia Mellencamp.Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 14-43.

Agamben, G. (2005). Intersections and Divergences in ContemporaryTheory: Baudrillard andAgamben On Politics And the Daunting Questions of Our Time--Form ofLife...(g.agamben...with introduction by g.coulter)http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/agamben.htm

Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1991). "Yellow Sprouts" and "Cotton and Iron."From When the Moon Waxes Red. London and New York: Routledge. pp.1-28.

Tomaselli, Keyan (2001). Contradictory Subjectivity: Movies,Apartheid, and Postmodernism. Cutural Studies\u003dCritical Methodologies,1:2, November 2, 2001, pp 139-156.

Appadurai, Arjun (1993). "Patriotism and Its Futures." PublicCulture, 5: 411-429.

Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. London and New York:",1]

Baudrillard, Jean. (1988). Simulacra and Simulations. From: JeanBaudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press. pp. 1-9, 166-184.

Cixous, Helene (1994). Helen Cixous Reader. Ed: Susan Sellers.London and New York: Routledge. pp. xv-xxxiv, 37-45.

Auletta, Ken. (1998). "In the Company of Women." The New Yorker,April 20, 1998. pp. 72-78.

Prose, Francine (2000). "A Wasteland of One\'s Own." The New YorkTimes Magazine, February 13, 2000, pp 66-71.

Butler, Judith P. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the DiscursiveLimits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 121-140, 223-242.

Auletta, Ken (2001). "Battle Stations: How long will the networksstick with the news?", The New Yorker, December 10, 2001.

Kellner, Douglas (1995). "Reading the Gulf War:Production/text/reception." From Media Culture. London and New York:Routledge. pp. 198-228.

Virilio, Paul (1989). War and Cinema. London and New York: Verso. pp. 61-89.Virilio, Paul (1991). The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York:Semiotext(e). pp. 9-39.

Baudrillard, Jean (2003) The Violence of the Globalhttp://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id\u003d385

Denzin, Norman (1993). "The Lessons James Joyce Teaches Us." Unpublished Paper.Denzin, Norman (1997). Interpretive Ethnography: EthnographicPractices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks: Sage. pp. 199-227.

Kohn, Nathaniel (19980. "Wonder Never Seizes.""Routledge. pp. 1-18./vol1/Iss2/articles/kohn/kohn.htm

Chow, Rey (1995). Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality,Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press. pp. 176-202.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1996). On Television. Trans: Priscilla ParkhurstFerguson. New York: The New Press. pp. 1-67

Andrews, David (1998). "Excavating Michael Jordan: Notes on aCritical Pedagogy of Sporting Representation." In Rail, Genevieve,Ed. Sport and Postmodern Times. New York: SUNY Press. pp. 185-220.

Kohn, Nate (1995). Exposed and Basking: Community, spectacle, and thewinter Olympics. The Journal of International Communication, 2:1. Pp.110-119.

Goldman, R & Papon, S. (1998). There are many paths to heaven. FromNike Culture. London: Sage. Pp. 146-167.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1991). "The Totalizing Quest for Meaning" and"Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity" FromWhen the Moon Waxes Red. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 28-62.",0]
http://acjournal.org/holdings/vol1/Iss2/articles/kohn/kohn.htm

Chow, Rey (1995). Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality,Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press. pp. 176-202.

More Binaries

Yesterday was also a day confined to "binaries." In some cases, I suppose binaries were broken.
I arrived to class a few minutes late and found some classmates laughing.
"Speak of the devil," Matthew says. "We were just talking about you."
"Oh really? What were you saying?" I reply.
"We were just saying how 'that bearded fellow' is missing," Matthew replies.
"Oh. OK." I respond.
"We're confining you to the binary," Kimberly interjects.
OK so I'm now officially "bearded guy."
When I shave will I be "clean shaven guy?"
It's funny to think of binaries in this regard, this desire to categorize.
Later, the binary continued.
After class I went to the computer lap to post yesterday's blog post.
While there, I ran into some classmates. When I left I told them I was going to Atlanta for a concert.
"Who are you going to see?" Judith asks.
"Robert Randolph and the Family Band," I reply.
"Must be white people music," she replies.
"What did you say?" I asked my African American friend, somewhat dumbfounded.
"I've never heard of them," she says. "They must be white people music."
"Umm...actually the lead singer is black and much of their music is influenced by black gospel," I reply. "It's sort of gospel-funk-rock-R&B-fusion."I say.
"Oh. I feel ignorant," she replies.
"You should check out their website and see what they're about," I tell her.
That discussion got me thinking more about binaries.
What is "white music" or "white person music"? What is "black music"? What is "black person music?"
Three of the four members of Robert Randolph and the Family Band are African Americans. The music is heavily influenced from black churches and the gospel tradition and other black musicians. Yet, much of the audience is in fact white.
Even the music itself somewhat refuses to be confined to individual "binaries" or categories if you will. This whole idea of "fusion" and blending different elements into a unique and distinct sound. Even more ironically perhaps is the group's latest album is called "Colorblind" which would imply a shattering of racial binaries.
As I was at the concert, which was a fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity Atlanta, I looked around at the audience. It was unlike any audience I had ever been to a concert with before. At least it was unlike any other Robert Randolph audience I had been with. I think the fundraiser nature influenced the crowd.
There were a lot of older people in the audience, which is ironic given the youthful nature of the band's namesake, who I think is in his mid-20s.
Nevertheless, it was an odd experience- this coming together of people from different backgrounds, cultures, musical interests (binaries?) to groove to the sound of music.
It was sort of like being at a wedding, dancing around with people of all ages, many of which you don't know.
Nevertheless, yesterday was a day of binaries. It made me think about these categories and also everyday life and how our everyday life differs depending on these binaries. It also made me realize how difficult it can be to break these binaries and how music and entertainment are distractions (albeit for me, enjoyable distractions) from the stress, rigors, and cruel realities of the world we all live in.

More Self-Reflexivity

I returned to North Carolina today.
Well, not really.
But in several ways I sort of did.
North Carolina emerged in class.
Several times.
I'm a Tar Heel born and bred.
That means I'm a North Carolina native.
I lived in North Carolina for 27 years before moving to Georgia in the fall.
Today in class, while watching a clip from Home and Garden Television of all things, the couple on the show was from Cary, N.C.
I had an internship at the Cary News many years ago.
My late grandparents lived in Cary for half their life.
It's funny how academia becomes personal.
If I've learned nothing else from this course, it's that the Self can be important. The Self is important.
I write about myself. It's what I know best.
Later in the class, we watched several clips from "Junebug." This was a contrast to the image of the south shown in "Sweet Home Alabama."
I really want to watch Junebug.
Junebug is set in- you guessed it- North Carolina.
"Ryan" from "The OC" plays a character in the film. He's wearing the Carolina Panthers hat in the scene we watch.
I have a Carolina Panthers hat similar to that. I'm a Panthers fan.
I'm from Carolina.
Junebug is set in North Carolina, filmed in North Carolina, maybe even written by a North Carolinian?
From what I saw it seemed to be a realistic portral of my homestate and its citizens.
I could relate to this film.
This course on postmodernism, critical studies, the binary, the matrix, deCerteau and Foucault in some odd way took me back home.
The scenes showed the family gathered in the kitchen. I flashbacked to my mom's kitchen, or more importantly my mom's mom's kitchen. My mother's mother and father, my grandmother and late grandfather, encapsulates The South to Me. They're from Warrenton, N.C., a small town of now about 800 people.
It's Southern through and through. Family and Place are important.
Another Junebug scene shows the characters at the church at a supper. The church supper reminded me of my father's mother's funeral. Her church prepared a feast for our grieving family in the church supper hall.
I associated food, big meals with death. But really it's more about hospitality and looking out for one another.
Church is also important to me. My family prays before meals, at least on big occasions such as holidays. Just as the Junebug characters did.
I really want to watch that film.
The other aspect that struck a nerve with me, that resonated was the educated one from Chicago trying to fit in in the South.
I'm not ashamed of my roots. I'm proud of where I'm from. But language also plays a role in the South. Language and cultural norms I guess is what you'd call them.
As far as I know, I'm one of the first ones in my immediate family to study in graduate school. I can't talk about what I'm learning without sounding like an ass.
I don't want to drop names of some of these philosophers or talk about scientific research terminology like reliability and validity. I don't want to sound like a pompous person who is educated.
I don't want to sound like an educated elitist.
I'm not. Not by any means.
I'm not smarter than many of the rural folks that are my kin. There are different levels of sophistication and intelligence. It's just different knowledge bases and ways of life. It doesn't make one better than the other.
I personally rail against the language that is academia.
As a newspaper reporter, I sought to tell the story to the everyday man. In common everyday language. Keep it simple. Keep it real.
I wish academia allowed for simplicity.
These sentences are short. They are simple.
I hope one can understand what I'm saying.
Sometimes I don't understand what i'm saying myself.
This very style is different. This blog is different.
But this is academic. At least that's what I tell myself.
This has also turned into self consciousness, train of thought flow.
I will stop now. I've become lost. I forget why I chose to write to begin with. I was moved to write, compelled to reflect on class and what it has meant. What it means.
I was on the third floor of Grady in the Peabody suite today.
But really I went home.

Daring to be Different

It's sort of wild to think how far we've come in terms of technology. It's also wild to think this is a final paper. It's definitely different.
The last time I did a unique paper for class was seven, almost eight, years ago at UNC-Wilmington. Like this class, that class very much fostered creativity and allowed a great amount of flexibility in terms of the final project. That class was on French poet Charles Baudelaire and as I've mentioned in a previous post the professor believed that "everything connects." As some of the readings this semester have mentioned Baudelaire, I really wanted to find that old paper and post it on here.
But I can't find it. It's lost in technology. It's probably saved on a floppy disk or some device no longer compatabile with high-tech computers. That or it's saved on an old Compaq laptop that I used back then. It's so "ancient" that it requires a telephone line to DIAL up to the Internet. No wi-fi, no wireless, no broadband, limited connectivity. It's a strange interconnected digital world we're living in.
Anyway, for this particular class, like I said, a great deal of latitude was granted. If you so desired you could write a traditional academic paper. Or you could make a movie, write a poem, do performance art, make a painting. Do whatever. One guy did paint instead of write a formal paper. I wrote a paper but it was different.
For that class, I compared modern pop/rock singer Dave Matthews with Baudelaire. That my sound ludicrous on the surface, but in terms of their work there were surprisingly quite a few similarities. At least in terms of the themes. Much of Matthews' work at the time focused on death, dying, time as the enemy and even people and people watching. Likewise, Les Fleurs du Mal focused on many of the same concepts in Baudelaire's poems.
I forget the length but it was somewhere between 12 to 20 pages long, which I considered quite a feat.
I wish I could find that paper. I want to "publish" it on this blog.
I was proud of that paper because it was creative. It was different. It was an attempt to forge a new writing style far before I ever read some of the pieces in this class encouraging the same thing.
It was a cultural study of sorts, kind of a postmodern piece, long before I knew what postmodernism or cultural studies is/was.
I'm still not entirely sure but at least now I have more of an idea.
In short, I can't write an academic final paper without injecting myself. My whole experience with this class has been subjective. My view of the class has differed from my classmates and vice versa.
This blog, like that Baudelaire paper, represents my views, my take on the "reality" of the project. There was a reason I chose Dave Matthews as a comparison. I'm a fan of the singer, obviously. You know that from previous posts too where I saw him in concert in Vegas.
But I also became a fan of Baudelaire.
And now, I'll forever associate Baudelaire with Barthes, Baudrillard, postmodernism, cultural studies, Richardson, Kohn, others. But not The Other.
Everything does connect. And now with this it hyperconnects too.

A Messy Text

In many ways, blogs sort of serve as a "messy text." Blogs are not a traditional writing style. It's informal, it's interactive. Links build upon links. It's not traditional academic writing style. It's different. This is my "messy text."...

Blogging About Blogs

I attended a lecture the other night on "Blogging Pros and Cons" here at UGA. Much of the discussion reminded me of the community and ideas of "withness" discussed in the Kohn piece and some of the technology concepts discussed by Lunenfeld.
"The great thing about blogging is everyone's all connected," said Lindsay Loughman, an undergraduate journalism student here at Grady.
She's a PR student. She spoke about "faux blogs" which touch on the concept of hyperreality and simulacra and simulacram. Captain Morgan had a blog on the life and times of Captain Morgan, but it became too difficult to do. This whole notion of a company creating a fake character with "real" life telling "real" stories to a true audience on the World Wide Web.
Wrigley Gum also tried to maintain a faux blog but it didn't have characters to center around so scrapped that idea.
According to Dr. Richard T. Watson, who holds a Chair for Internet Strategy in the Terry College of Business, people blog to document life, commentary, as catharsis, as musing, and as a community forum. Watson is head of the Global Text Project, whose goal is to create a free library of open content textbooks for students in developing countries.
"I'm trying to build a community," Watson said. Watson uses his blog as a way people can come into the community and find out what's going on.
Another panelist was "Laney," a fake identity of a real life copy editor/blogger at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Laney runs the "Misadventures in Atlanta" blog on dating for AJC.com.
The AJC even has an "interactivity editor" who oversees the blogs, etc.
Each blog site has a bunch of regular readers/users who interact with the blogger and with each other. They even meet in person. Some have gone on dates. Some become friends.
"These communities really do form," "Laney" said.
Watson said he viewed the "reinvention of newspapers", reinvented around informal communication as opposed to formal communication.
"Laney" acknowledged as much. Blogging is a much different writing style that goes against everything she learned in journalism school.
One person in the audience said that we're "HYPERCONNECTED." The problem she said is that through blogs and the connectiveness of the web it's like we're TOO CONNECTED.... Something tells me she probably didn't have this in mind.

December?!?!?!

It's December 1 and it's 70 degrees. That's wild. December should be "cold weather." Not hot. It feels like summer. In Georgia, December won't be confined to the binary of cold weather.

Biz Culture

It's interesting to see "cultural studies" and many of the humanistic teachings applied to other fields where one might least expect to find them.
That was my experience earlier this week. For my "Media Management" course I read a journal article on organizational culture. Most of the piece was from a cultural studies perspective. Personally, I didn't think that Foucalt and Habermas would have anything to do with the world of business. But I was wrong.
The article, "Organizational Culture: Beyond Struggles for Intellectual Dominance" by Martin, Frost and Oneill, did a good job discussing management and critical theorists and summarizing the tensions that exist between the two methodolgical camps.
Here's some excerpts/summaries from that piece...
"Postmodern scholars argue that attempts to create meta-theories, or to establish any form of intellectual dominance, are futile because multiplicity will always find a way to flourish. If taken seriously, this postmodern critique challenges the premises of the competitive game. Although this post-modern position can be configured as the ultimate move in a game of intellectual dominance, it also can be interpreted as a call to stop participating in struggles for intellectual dominance." ...
"There is not just one postmodernism. It is not a unified theory, in part becaue it has attracted such a diverse group of advocates, including architects, philosophers and literary critics. In all its varieties, postmodernism challenges ideas that constitute the foundation of modern science: rationality, order, clarity, realism, truth and intellectual progress (e.g. Derrida, 1976; Foucault 1976; Baudrillard, 1983; Lyotard 1984; Marcus and Fischer, 1999). Postmodernism argues that any point of view carries the seeds of its own destruction. Some find this conclusion dangerous because it gives postmodernism the capacity to undermine the ideologies of opponents (e.g. Calas and Smircich 1990; Martin, 1990). In its relevance to cultural studies, perhaps postmodernism will offer more as an ideological and theoretical critique than as a theory of political action."...
"Truth therefore becomes a 'matter of credibility rather than an objective condition.' "....

"Many would not want to engage with postmodernism, asking, 'What positive contribution does it make?' In the 1990s, many dismissed it on grounds that it is esoteric, reactionary, a-political, too relativistic or nihilistic (e.g. Reed 1990). This reaction has been particularly strong among some empirircal, relatively positivistic culture researchers, perhaps because postmodernism represents a deep challenge to basic tenets of the scientific method." ...

The authors then state how many contemporary organizational cultural researchers have embraced postmodernism much like anthropology has done. ...

"Reflexivity is encouraged, researchers' and study participants' views can be contrasted, and multi-vocal texts can represent a variety of points of view." ...

The future?
"The types of organizations able to be examined as cultures grow to include even wired communities of people who meet only online, but nevertheless may have a discernible cultural identity. Such an expanded view will encourage us to ask not just what a culture is, but also what an organization is." ...

"We suspect, however, that regarding cultural studies as a conversation will be far more generative and perhaps, more fun."...

Sports and Stuff

Today's class presentations and discussions focused a lot on sports. The professor even remarked how many of our telecommunications programming analysis centered around sports content. One presentation today was about the performative discourse of Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC). We watched a video of Judy Butler text scrolling across the screen of a montage of fights with the "Love Me, Love Me" song from the Romeo and Juliet movie remake playing in the background. It was interesting to say the least.
Another presentation centered around the shows, "Friday Night Lights" and "Two-a-Days," both about high school football programs.
Sports and the media have become so intertwined it's scary. The athletes, the cheerleaders, even the fans are peforming for the TV cameras. Even those privileged few (thousands) who get to participate in the event in person still look for the video reaffirmation. They want to relive the moment on SportsCenter.
For example, this past weekend I attended the UGa-Ga. Tech game. I watched dumbfoundedly as Tony Taylor picked up a fumbled football from a heap of players sprawled on the ground and then ran into the end zone untouched for a touchdown, the Bulldogs' first score of the game, which ignited a comeback victory for the hometeam. Later, I watched "SportsCenter" to see if the play had made the Top Ten plays (it had). I needed reaffirmation of witnessing this spectacle.
As we talked in class today about sports, I couldn't help but think about an article we read by the professor.
The "Baring Withness" article talks about the magical shared experience of these old cinematic theaters, how coming together in these grand old theaters has a unique withness factor that unites the community.
The same could be said about sports. Many of these old football stadiums, baseball fields and basketball arenas have the same mythic, magical quality. There's something special about going to Fenway Park or Wrigley Field for baseball. There's a historic awe-inspiring feeling about watching college basketball at the Dean E. Smith Center in Chapel Hill. And Georgia fans certainly gush with pride about Sanford Stadium.
I've now lost my train of thought. Nevertheless, sports and media are intertwined. I can't wait to watch UNC play Ohio State in college basktball on ESPN on Wednesday night..... :)