Introduction to Media Theory Spring 2013 B Hanrahan Syllabus

1 Hanrahan, Introduction to Media Theory, Spring 2013, PMA 4100, COML 4790, GERST 4115, VISST 4100

Introduction to Media Theory PMA 4100, COML 4790, GERST 4115, VISST 4100

Cornell University, Department of Performing and Media Arts

Spring 2013

Wednesday 2.30-4.25pm, White Hall 106. Instructor: Brían Hanrahan Office Hours: Tuesday 4:30-6.00pm and by appt. Office: 428 Schwartz Center Phone: 607 254-2791 Email: [email protected]

Here is the apparatus! Climb in! Bertolt Brecht, Der Lindberghflug

Course Description Through close reading and analysis of selected canonical and contemporary works of media theory, this seminar presents a cross-section of critical reflection on technologies, media and media systems ranging from the printing press to photography, from gramophones to radio technologies, from pre-cinematic optical devices to film and television, and from telephony to the Internet. Topics include the relationship between representation and technology, the history and the historicity of perception, the interplay of aesthetics, technology and politics, and the effect of the media environment on notions of imagination, literacy, communication, reality and truth. Familiarity with aesthetic and cultural theory and with the history of media is not assumed. However, both the sophisticated conceptual level of many of the readings and the substantial reading load make this course most appropriate for advanced undergraduates and those happy (happiest, even) working with dense theoretical material. Given the scope of what can be and have been considered “media” – from ancient inscriptions to smart phones, from language systems to cinema screens, from love to light bulbs1 – and the vast array of theories and approaches used to think about them, this seminar is necessarily selective, focusing on a small number of key issues and discussions. Although we will read numerous texts considered “canonical” in more than one discipline, “introduction” here is not meant in the sense of the transmission of a body of foundational knowledge. Instead, you might think of the course as “introductory” in the way that a short stay in a large, exciting and unfamiliar city is an “introduction” – a series of journeys, explorations and unfamiliar encounters, sometimes

1 On the last two examples, see Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität, (Frankfurt am M.: Suhrkamp, 1968/1994); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964], (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 8-9.


confusing and always partial, but which will nonetheless leave you knowing vastly more about the place. Required Texts

There are five required books, available at the Cornell University Bookstore. Ideally, you should obtain a copy of the editions listed, but if necessary, some other edition is OK.

• Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), ISBN: 978-

0374532338. • Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador, 2003), ISBN: 978-

0312422196. • Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, (MIT Press, 1994), ISBN: 978-0262631594. • Jonathan Sterne, MP3: the Meaning of a Format, (Duke U.P, 2012), ISBN: 978-

0822352877. • Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, (Minneapolis: Minnesota U.P.,

2011), ISBN: 978-0816670215.

All other required readings (listed below as “Read:”) – as well as occasional images, film clips, sound recordings etc. – will be made available on Blackboard as pdfs. I will try to make available as many of the suggested further readings (“Read More:”) on Blackboard as possible. Some of the readings were not originally written in English: if you can read the original text in German or French, you are strongly encouraged to do so – where possible, the originals will be made available alongside the English translation. Format and Requirements

The course will mostly be taught as a seminar: intensive discussion in a well-prepared, committed group. The course relies on your engagement with the material before class and with each other during class. Your regular attendance, thorough preparation and active participation are expected and will make up a significant proportion of your final grade, reflecting their importance for the seminar. Skimming or idly reading is not adequate preparation: while I do not ask you to complete formal reading responses, you must take time before class to properly engage with the assigned texts and to reflect on the questions raised. You should, in other words, come to class not only having read the assigned text, but prepared at every session to give a short resume of the principal arguments of the readings and – just as important – ready to pose questions about aspects which remained unclear and/or seem to demand further discussion. For most people, the process of engaged reading and understanding is greatly helped by annotating, underlining and abstracting the texts as you go along. As well as the set books, required readings will be available as pdf copies on Blackboard. You


must bring a copy to class – you should ideally print these out, even if you prefer to read and annotate on screen. Attendance policy is strict. More than two unexcused absences will mean your grade is lowered: each further absence after two will lower your final grade by one-third of a grade. Be on time – coming late to class is very disruptive, and substantial lateness will count as half an absence. Let me know ahead of time if you have to miss class, if you will be considerably late or if you need to leave early. Anyone using an electronic device for non-class purposes during class (e.g. Facebook) will be counted – accurately – as being half-absent for that session. Written work should be submitted punctually: for each day a paper is late, I will deduct half a letter grade – in other words, 5 percentage points, for example resulting in a downgrade from A- (91%) to B (86%). Assignments and Grading There are two writing assignments: the first is a short mid-term essay (c. 5 pages). The paper should use a concept or a thought or an idea from one of the readings in the first part of the semester as a tool or a lens in order to analyze something that particularly interests you. This “something” might be a film, an image, a text or a medium. Or it could be something less discrete and defined: a mode of behavior (the way people use their phones while waiting for the bus) or a media-aesthetic experience (why you like watching TV sports in HD, but hate watching other kinds of programming in that format). The “tool or lens” can be something explicitly named and foregrounded – “indexicality” or Williams’ “flow” or Barthes’ “punctum” or the “festive viewing of television” as outlined by Dayan and Katz. Or it might be some other thought, word or idea (e.g. Susan Sontag writing that “there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror” or the way W.J.T. Mitchell keeps coming back to the paradox of media). As long as its useful to you, it is OK – but you must briefly outline what this tool or lens is, where it comes from and how you will use it. The final assignment is a longer paper (approximately 10-12 pages) on a subject of your choice, agreed with me ahead of time, due on Monday May 13. This is an exercise in research, reflection and thoughtful writing – you need to start thinking about a topic at the latest by the end of March. On May 1, our last session, you’ll be expected to briefly present (1-2 minutes) your intended topic and argument in class. For graduate students, the final paper should be in the region of 15-20 pages. In addition, graduate students should meet with me at least once in the course of the semester to discuss how the content of the course and your intended paper topic fits with your broader program of study. You will give one in-class presentation in the course of the semester, introducing one or more of the day’s assigned readings: this should be incisive, analytical and to the point, never more than 12 minutes long. The presentation should be both a service and a gift to the rest of the class – make it clear, make it useful, make it good.


Due dates: Midterm paper Thursday March 14 Final paper Monday May 13 Grading Preparation, class participation 20% Mid-term paper (maximum 1500 words) 20% In-class presentation 10% Final paper 50% Academic Integrity and Plagiarism

Do not plagiarize – learn what plagiarism is and avoid it. On this and other questions of academic ethics and standards, read the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity, available here: http://cuinfo.cornell.edu/Academic/AIC.html

“The Medium Eva C.,” The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, (Metropolitan Museum, 2005)


Schedule

Any changes will be announced in class and confirmed by email. Week 1 Introduction – Reflecting on Media Wednesday January 23

Read:

• W.J.T. Mitchell, “Addressing Media” in What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 201-222

Listen/Watch [in class]

• Trumpeter Landfrey and the Bugle Sounded at Waterloo, Edison Records (August 1890) • Patti Smith, intro to “Hunter Captured by the Game,” WBAI, May 28, 1975. • Datenstrudel/Mark Formanek, Standard Time, film/application, 2008-2011.

SECTION 1: PHOTOGRAPHIC EFFECTS AND AFFECTS

Week 2 Punctum, Aura, Index Wednesday January 30

Read:

• Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

• Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign,” in differences (2007), vol. 18, number 1: 1-6.

• Walter Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography” [1931], in Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, ed. Brigid Doherty, Michael Jennings and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P, 2008), 274-299.

Read More:

• “Symbol-Index-Icon” in University of Chicago Keywords Glossary • Walter Benn Michaels, “Photographs and Fossils,” in (ed.) James Elkins, Photography

Theory, (London: Routledge, 2007), 431-450

Week 3 Auratic Analog, Dematerialized Digital? Wednesday February 6

Read:


• André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” [1945] in André Bazin, What is Cinema, vol. 1, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9-17.

• Lev Manovich, “Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 249-258.

• Tom Gunning, “What’s The Point of an Index, or, Faking Photographs?” in Still/Moving: between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 23-40.

• Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters. “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,” Musical Quarterly 81 no.2, (1997, summer): 242-264.

• Laura Mulvey, “The Pensive Spectator,” in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 181-196.

Read More:

• Philip Rosen, “Subject, Ontology and Historicity in Bazin,” in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3-43.

• Mary Ann Doane, “The indexical and the concept of medium specificity,” in Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (2007), special issue “Indexicality: trace and sign,” 128-152.

Week 4 Photographic Images – Ethics of Looking, Methods of Knowing Wednesday February 13

Read:

• Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York, Picador, 2003). • Errol Morris, “Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?” in Believing is Seeing:

Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (New York: Penguin, 2011).

Read More:

• Judith Butler, “Torture and the ethics of photography,” Environment and planning. D, Society & space, 25, no. 6, (2007), 951-966

SECTION 2: TELEVISION AND BEYOND

Week 5 What is Television? Where is Television? Wednesday February 20

Read:

• Raymond Williams, “Programming as Sequence or Flow,” in Television: Technology and Cultural Form. [1974]. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1992, 77-120, esp. 86-96.


• Samuel M. Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 108-128.

• Anna McCarthy, “Shaping Public and Private Space with TV Screens,” in Ambient Television (Duke U.P. 2001), 117-155.

• Daniel Chamberlain, “Media Interfaces, Networked Media Spaces, and the Mass Customization of Everyday Space,” in Michael Kackman, ed., Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 13-29.

Read More:

• Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” in Daedalus 111:4, 75-96 (1982).

Week 6 Screen Liveness, Broadcast Time Wednesday February 27

Read:

• Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, Hui Kyong Chun and Wendy and Thomas Keenan, eds., (London: Routledge, 2005), 251-264.

• Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Regarding Television: Critical Approaches--An Anthology, (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983), 12-22.

• Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility and the Web,” in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 458-470.

• Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, “Defining Media Events: High Holidays of Mass Communication,” in Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History, (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard U.P., 1992), 1-24.

View/Listen More:

• Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, The War of the Worlds (first part), [1938], 38 minutes.

• Marc Lee, TV Bot 2.0, 2010 http://www.1go1.net/index.php/Main/TV-BOT

Read More:

• Paddy Scannell, “Dailiness,” from Radio, Television and Modern Life (London: Blackwell, 1996), 144-175.

• Stephen T. Kern, “The Present,” in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), 64-87.


Week 7 Beyond Television? Channels of Convergence and Dis-Integration Wednesday March 6 Read:

• Henry Jenkins, “‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence’: A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change,” in Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Collide, (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 1-25.

• Jonathan Sterne, “Formatted to Fit Your Screen” and comments, Flow TV, January 28 2012.

• William Uricchio, “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau, (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 24-39.

• Bernard Stiegler, “The Carnival of the New Screen: From Hegemony to Isonomy,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars & Patrick Vonderau, (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 40-59.

Read More:

• Chuck Tryon, “Hollywood Remixed: Movie Trailer Mashups, Five-Second Movies, and Film Culture,” in Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 149-173.

• John Seabrook, “Streaming Dreams: YouTube Turns Pro,” The New Yorker, Jan 16 2012, 24-30.

• Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin, “Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation,” and “Mediation and Remediation,” in Remediation: Understanding New Media, (MIT Press, 1999), 20-64.

MIDTERM PAPER DUE 3/14

To be emailed by 3 p.m. EST, Thursday March 14 2013. Early submissions are welcome.


SECTION 3: MACHINES FOR PROCESSING

Week 8 Software/Hardware Wednesday March 13 Read:

• Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Hardware/Software/Wetware,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 186-198.

• Andrew Goffey, “Algorithm,” and Florian Cramer, “Language,” in Matthew Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: A Lexicon, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 15-20, 168-174.

• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 1-23, 73-109.

• Friedrich Kittler, “There is no Software,” Stanford Literature Review, 9,1, Spring 1992, 81-90

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18, Winter 2004, 26-51.

- SPRING BREAK -

No class March 20


Week 9 What are Computer Games For? Wednesday March 27

Read:

• Henry Jenkins, “Games: The New Lively Art,” in The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 19-40.

• Alexander R. Galloway, “Allegories of Control,” in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, (Minneapolis: Minnesota U.P., 2006), 85-106.

• Claus Pias, “The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports,” in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 164-183.

• Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), 3-7.

• N. Katherine Hayles, “Cybernetics,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 145-156.

Week 10 Processing Sound Wednesday April 3

Read:

• Jonathan Sterne, MP3: the Meaning of a Format, (Duke U.P, 2012), 1-128. • John Durham Peters, “Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History” in Memory Bytes: History,

Technology, and Digital Culture. Ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil. (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2004). 177-198.

Read More:

• Friedrich Kittler, “Introduction,” Gramophone Film Typewriter, (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1999), 1-19.

• Thomas Y. Levin, “‘Tones from out of Nowhere’: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archaeology of Synthetic Sound,” Grey Room 12.12 (2003), 32-79

• Mara Mills, “Deafening: Noise and the Engineering of Communication in the Telephone System,” Grey Room 43, Spring 2011, 118–143.

SECTION 4: HUMANS, MEDIA, HISTORY

Week 11 Image and History Wednesday April 10

Read:


• Walter Benjamin, “The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” [second version, 1935/36], in Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, ed. Brigid Doherty, Michael Jennings and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P, 2008), 19-56.

• Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” [1927] in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1995), 47-65.

Read More:

• Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamins Aura.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 336-375. • Samuel Weber, “Mass Mediauras, or, Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter

Benjamin,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76-108.

Week 12 Humans/Media Wednesday April 17 Read:

• Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man, [1924], (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 9-15.

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964], (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 3-73.

• Marshall McLuhan, “The Galaxy Reconfigured: or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society,” [from The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962], in Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 194-202.

• Friedrich Kittler, “The City is a Medium,” New Literary History 27.4 (1996), 717-729. • Vilém Flusser, “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31,

no. 2 (winter 2005), 320-328. Read More:

• John Durham Peters, “Introduction: Friedrich Kittler’s Light Shows” in Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 1-17.

• Raymond Williams, “From Medium to Social Practice,” in Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 158-164.

Week 13 Into the Universe of Technical Images Wednesday April 24

Read:


• Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, (Minneapolis: Minnesota U.P., 2011).

Week 14 Into the Future, Into the Past Wednesday May 1 Watch:

• Werner Herzog (dir.), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) • Chris Marker (dir.), La Jetée (1962)

Read:

• Peter Sloterdijk, “Actio in Distans – On Forms of Tele-Rational World-making,” in Garnet C. Butchart and Briankle Chang, eds., Philosophies of Communication, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 635-648.

Introduction to Media Theory Spring 2013 B Hanrahan Syllabus

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