I found one of the central questions of Liz Canner’s video on police brutality in LA most engaging: How does one include those marginalized by the mass media?

Interestingly she must answer this question through innovation and creating new methods of production and distribution. One of her problems with traditional documentary making is that the filmmaker already knows the issues to be discussed and often the conclusion to be drawn as well. So, even if she produces work on police brutality, housing and the indigenous she must create ways to not preemptively exclude her subjects from the media output. One way she goes about this is to poll community groups on issues to be discussed and subjects to wear cameras. She admits that this is still problematic because it doesn’t guarantee all sides of the issue will be discussed. At times, but still not unproblematically, she gives her subjects control over narration, whether the camera is on and what they do when wearing the camera. Her ambitions to leave much of the footage unedited would also, if fulfilled, leave the content of her work to her subjects. Finally, projecting work in public space circumscribes the mass media by giving a voice to the marginalized in new places.

I believe relating these attempts to interrupt mass media, by finding ways to include those marginalized by it, to Dienst’s discussion of ideology and mass media might be very fruitful. Dienst writes, “Ideology must be conceived as a mass of sendings or flow of representations whose force consists precisely in the fact that they are not perfectly destined, just as they are not centrally disseminated. Far from always connecting, ideology never does… ideology requires a short circuit between the singular and the general, so that the reception of a representation becomes a sending back- a representation of a reception” (141-2). Not perfectly destined to one person, the mass media does not address itself to the “normal” person or the marginalized. A subject then cannot identify his/her position in society perfectly and so not identify the marginalized perfectly and ideology flows through all of a person's representations of others in society. Canner’s inclusion of the marginalized, even if problematic, then disrupts the normal flow of the mass media by peculiarizing a person’s position in society. One can then recognize where they can be an actor and effect positive change for the marginalized and oneself.

Also, Canner’s use of projections creates previously unknown destinations to transmit ideology through. This eruption of new destinations then intensifies awareness of sendings, where they pass over us and thus how they fit into the ideological matrix. It stands as reclamation of ideology and the space it is transmitted through to include the marginalized and thus fuel our ability to discuss and effect positive change
posted by chr15 at 6:51 PM

all the postcards we need -- http://postsecret.blogspot.com
posted by josh_g at 1:58 PM

I'm confused about this notion of "the world of mass media" as "a nightmare regime of 'calculable and representable subjectivity'..." (Dienst quoting Derrida, 140). Dienst writes of how subjectivity, inserted within the order of representation, causes a doubling back of the notion that "representation makes objects visible to subjects," leaving the subject "in the 'open circle of the representable,' in a 'shared and public representation'" (140). Dienst: "Thus a subject is defined as 'what can or believes it can offer itself representations,' that is, as something formed by the imperative to be an image, in order to receive images" (140).

So, the subject loses her/his position as subject, and is downgraded, as it were, to the level of an image - or must make this change her/hisself - so as to operate within the order of representation. This is the price, so to speak: "Any kind of response... will require another payment, another stamp, a reinvestment in the process" (139)?

In order to receive an image (or message), one must relinquish her/his independence from the medium, becoming in a sense visible to "the object", or perhaps the medium itself - to the image? - and therefore actively disrupting her/his position as subject. The dual vectors of enunciation & perception. Or something.

Heidegger: "... in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself, i.e., be picture" (132).

What's all this about calculation, though?
"...[R]epresentation is organized through subjects, rendering each series of images limited and calculable" (Dienst, 140).

"Television's 'calculation' does not consist in the perfectibility of its programming but in the thoroughness with which it translates values into representational terms, so that all traffic... passes through the televisual post. Television makes representations visible and accesssible to each other and makes a profit only when that visibility can be approximated, calculated, programmed" (Dienst, 140-1).

So tv is operating as an exchange post, of sorts, allowing for the representation of both performance/enunciation of subjectivity, and the consumption/perception of subjectivity... ??

Heidegger: "But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable" (135).

thoughts?
posted by josh_g at 4:33 PM