Textual Interference

I’ve just started Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (McSweeney’s Books, 2005) and parts of it are reminiscent of Danielewski’s House of Leaves in terms of layout and design, especially the use of text boxes throughout the novel. Whereas Danielewski’s text boxes contained, well, text...

Plascencia’s are black, blotting out the text proper...

They also vary in size...

(There are also a few instances where individual words are cut out from the page, leaving little holes.) There are similar textual strategies in Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

This sort of textual interference is like a novelistic equivalent of what Godard did in some of his films, especially My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders, where the sound cuts out. You think know what’s there, beneath the silence, but you just can’t be sure. It seems that when novelists attempt these self-conscious strategies that foreground the apparatus of narrative, they are still frequently dismissed as “postmodern stunts” or further examples of crippling irony. I’m not sure why, though, especially since such strategies are very old (Shakespeare, Sterne) and also because such techniques have been so thoroughly absorbed into popular culture.

In the cinema classes I teach, it’s often true that students don’t view self-reflexivity as any sort of subversive strategy; the moment when Edward Norton addresses the camera/viewer in Fight Club might be viewed as “postmodern meta-cinema” in academia, but for many of my students this is part of the natural narrative dynamics of the film. Perhaps this has something to do with the confessional nature of so much pop culture, especially reality TV here in the States, which goes back to the original episodes of MTV’s The Real World (which premiered in 1992) and earlier, where the camera is always present, always acknowledged.

Is the very shape of contemporary media culture self-reflexive? Have the codes that were once invisible become so open, that self-reflexivity is a norm, not an exception? In a way, academics always depended upon their ability to “demystify” cultural codes for students; part of the allure of theory was precisely this function. But what if students, today, are not only media consumers, but media producers, as well, making their own websites, video games, digital movies, blogs, vlogs? Do students still need to be instructed in the art of deconstruction, of seeing through the culture industry? Does this even make sense today, when students—and maybe even the rest of us—are all our own culture industry?

If theory has lost its cache, its alluring refuse status, it's not because it’s irrelevant, but rather because media itself has adopted the very logic and playfulness of theory. Today’s media deconstructs itself. Our task, today, is the opposite of our theoretical forerunners such as Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Max Horkehimer and Theodor Adorno, Susan Sontag, Raymond Williams. Where they sought to demystify media, we must mystify it. Where they sought to pierce through the magical aura of media, we must re-create and renew this aura. In short, we must create videos and texts that demand to be answered by theory.

Comments

[Matt]

Two thoughts:

Firstly, Sontag is interesting in that she was demystifying media at the same time as she was calling for its mystification. "Against Interpretation" is a very schizophrenic essay for this reason, I think, with the piece's thesis and form ultimately cancelling each other out (though to spectacular and completely engaging effect). Remember, too, how in "Notes on Camp" she writes that "to talk about Camp is . . . to betray it." Hers is a writing poised between two disparate poles: the desire for an erotics of art and her inherently intellectual sensibility.

Secondly, I believe there's still one arena in which theory hasn't lost its cache and that's videogames. Sure, post-modern and deconstructionist chic can still be seen in a number of games, there's still a lot about videogames themselves as a form that theory's only just starting to get around to consideration...

[Stu Willis]

I'm right with you on video games Matt. I wrote an honours minithesis in 2001 on Deus Ex and I very seriously considered doing a PhD in the field. There's very few texts which address games with a strong critical apparatus imnsho.

But the industry itself is developing its own theory - sites like gamasutra.com and magazines like Game Developer have articles forming the basis of 'practical' videogame theory... ie stuff which helps game developers make better games. But to me this is no different from a lot of early film theory which was formed not as criticism but as a tool.

[Nick]

Hey Matt, Sontag's a great example of someone whose writing beautifully imploded on the very objects she was discussing. I also think Baudrillard, at his best, does this. His ideas are like fuses: follow them to their end, and they blow themselves--and you--up.

Stu's comment about the link between early film theory and videogame theory is well-taken. Theory as a tool--that's the best possible kind of theory. But I still wonder if objects today don't theorize themselves in ways that render obsolete a lot of theory. Even videogame theory--not necessarily the kind Stu's talking about at places like gamasutra.com, but rather in books like First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (MIT Press, 2004), which strikes me as sort of too little, too late.

[Stu Willis]

I'll have to hunt up that book. Videogame theory still interests me greatly. I think people tend to focus too much on the sotry aspects of videogames, rather than the very things which make games unique (ie the gameplay!)

I think videogames are -great- examples of objects that theorise themselves and, more importantly, teach their 'users/consumers/viewers' their theory. Someone at Bungie (on the Oni dev team, IIRC) once said that: "The best games teach the player how to play them". Its a great philosophy and reminds me of experimental filmmakers, like Ozu, whose films "teach the viewer how to read them".

I can't say what project I'm about to talk about, although it's not hard for people to find out, but....

We are doing a lead CGI character (an animal) in a big hollywood film due out next year. One of the key ideas the Supervisors have pushed to the animators is that we need to teach the audience how to read, the body language of this inhuman character. We aren't using human body language specifically, rather we're echoing and alluding to it, so viewers instinctively understand the emotions of this character. Its a fascinating process and indirectly addresses your ideas of (a) objects theorising themselves and (b) theory as a tool.

I need to read Sontag. I've had 'on photography' sitting on my shelf for some time, guess I should get around to it.