Audiovisuality: The Public Senses
Comm / Clst 2227 – Fall 2000
Mondays 5:20-7:50 pm, 1128 CL
Jonathan Sterne
Office: 1130 CL (mailbox
in Department of Communication, 1117 CL)
Office Phone: 624-6797 (I
check once a day MW)
Email: jsterne+@pitt.edu
(I check at least once daily when I’m in town)
Office hours: by appointment
Required Books (available for this course at the Pitt bookstore):
Debord, Guy. 1983 (1967). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. (Avoid the Nicholson-Smith translation.)
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. and intro by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Recommended Books (sizable chunks are assigned and will be available as photocopies; you should consider seeking out and purchasing your own copy):
Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (trans. Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Ninteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jay, Martin. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Note: Although none of this book is assigned, it will be a useful supplement for many weeks.
Lastra, James. 2000. Sound Technology and American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Prospectus
This course will critique some ways in which hearing and vision have been constructed as objects of knowledge outside the behavioral sciences. In so doing, it will also acquaint students with some of the classic writings on sound and light in human experience, and explore new directions in this area. What does it mean to study the senses? What are the possible relationships among physiological capacities and modes of social and cultural organization? What are the possible relations among sensation, thought, and experience? How do questions of essentialism and antiessentialism play out when we consider phenomena that cut across physiological and sociocultural domains? How do theories and histories of sensory experience shape the ways we talk about media and mediation generally? Why have sight and hearing so often been singled out in social and cultural thought; is their differential treatment warranted? Is it possible to invoke a conceptualization of sensation apart from a conceptualization of linguistic sense?
Requirements
Etiquette:
1. Full and complete attendance, attention, participation, listening and reading.
2. Good faith and good humor toward your colleagues (and your teacher) in the classroom and on the mailing list. For both: disagreements are expected and encouraged. Feel free to get excited and even vehement, but keep nitpicking to a minimum. Personal attacks and rudeness are not acceptable under any circumstance.
Product:
1. Discussion Questions
Each week, you will arrive at class having at least one concrete discussion question for each assigned reading. Your questions should deal with specific passages in the readings, and may range from basic clarification (such as “what’s being said here?” “why is this important?”) to larger interpretive or thematic issues in the course (one author vs. another, the broad implications of an approach, etc.). Obviously, we won’t deal with all of everyone’s questions each meeting: if we do not get to your question in class and you really want to discuss it, it can be the basis of a response paper or you can try to start a thread on the class email list. I’m also happy to discuss readings and ideas outside class time, by appointment.
2. Response Papers
You’ll write three response papers, dealing with specific readings or issues throughout the semester. I expect them to be 1-2 pages in length (about 400-500 words). You might start by building off one of your discussion questions or something that happened in class.
3. Project Proposal
About halfway through the semester (though proposals will be accepted as early as the third week of the course), you will turn in a proposal for your final project. The proposal should be at least 5 pages and provide a detailed enough description of the work you plan to do that we can meet and talk about it. You are welcome to meet with me prior to writing your proposal as well. The exact nature of the proposal will depend on the option you choose for your final project; the details are below. Your proposal is not a contract, it’s a chance to figure out what you’re doing.
4. Project Presentations
At the final class meeting, each of you will make a 10-15 minute presentation of the arguments in your semester paper. I will provide very specific guidelines (that should make this easy to do) later in the semester.
5. Final Project
There are a number of options available. The earlier you commit to one, the better. All papers should be at least 20 to 25 pages in length, conform to a known academic reference system, and be carefully crafted, formal pieces of academic writing. They should advance a clear thesis or line of reasoning. Here are some suggestions for an approach. Feel free to mix and match.
a) The Standard Seminar Paper.
This paper will be the result of original, searching, creative, and sustained thought applied to materials discussed in the course. Additional outside reading is always encouraged, though it should not substitute for substantive discussion of significant issues covered in the course. Advancement of a cogent thesis is also of paramount importance.
Proposals for this option should include a clearly stated hypothesis, a rationale for your object of inquiry, a discussion of approach, and a line of reading that will facilitate further development and refinement of your ideas.
b) Revision:
Revision is not a skill often taught in graduate school, but it should be. This is your chance to take a piece of writing about sensation that you’ve already begun and revise it, using the course to refine your thinking about the material and develop your scholarly personality. Keep in mind that the purpose of this option is to facilitate extended reflection upon research you have already undertaken in light of the themes of the course.
Proposals for this option should include a discussion of the project as it currently stands; a substantive plan for further revision — especially in terms of philosophical, critical, and interpretive issues around sight and hearing; a discussion of other work that you need to do in order to be able to rewrite the paper (such as additional outside reading or revisiting source materials). You should also append a copy of the current version of the paper to the proposal.
c) Mapping a trajectory:
This is the standard “literature review” option with a few twists. In addition to characterizing the subfield that you wish to pursue (note that this does not mean simply summarizing others’ work), this project should include a discussion of how you intend to situate yourself in this field and how the range of philosophical positions it deploys relates to the philosophical stance you hope to embody or articulate in your own project (the latter should be defined positively). You may also choose to devote a section of this paper to the practical side of research: the mechanics of the research process as you imagine it, possible sites, collections, archives that will facilitate your research, grant monies available, etc.
Proposals for this option should include a description of your chosen subfield, a planned line of reading, and initial impressions of characteristics and problems in your chosen subfield or hypotheses that you want to advance.
d) Criticism (with a “meta” option):
This is the “application” paper, similar to the seminar paper in style, similar in the trajectory paper in direction, but differing in consistency. Here, you will focus on the characterization and critique of a very small sample of events, texts, or writing about the senses — ranging from a single work (image, event, text, book, article) to a very few — as the substance of your analysis, rather than surveying a larger field as a prelude to analysis (in contrast to option {c} above). Here the task is not merely a “close reading,” but a vigorous and thorough analysis of your object in light of issues we’ve discussed in the course.
Proposals for this option should include a discussion of what you intend to examine, your object’s significance, a planned line of reading, a discussion of your planned approach and any hypotheses you have.
e) I am open to other approaches. Please discuss your ideas with me prior to writing your proposal.
Course Outline
28 August: Statement of the Problem
The state of the field(s) of audiovisual studies; sensation as social, cultural, and philosophical question; the nature/culture problem; perception and intellection; the so-called hegemony of vision; and a hearing on other light matters.
Recommended:
Kingwell, Mark. 2000 (July). “Against Smoothness,” Harper’s 301(1802), pp. 15-18.
4 September: Labor Day, no class
11 September: The Canadian School: Communication and the Sensorium
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. “Introduction,” “Medium is the Message,” and “Media Hot and Cold,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 3-32.
Ong, Walter. 1981 (1967). “The Shifting Sensorium,” in The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-9.
_____. 1982. “Some Psychodynamics of Orality,” and “Print, Space and Closure,” in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, pp. 31-77 and 117-138.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1960. “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath,” in Explorations in Communication: An Anthology (ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan). Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 207-208.
Recommended:
Berland, Jody. 1992. “Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space,” in Cultural Studies (eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler). New York: Routledge, pp. 38-55.
Innis, Harold. 1995. The Bias of Communication, in Staples, Markets and Cultural Change (ed. Daniel Drache). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 325-349.
18 September: Phenomenology: Perception and Embodiment
Husserl, Edmund. 1999 (1927). “Phenomenology,” in The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology (ed. Donn Welton). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 322-336.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964 (1947). “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences” (trans. James. M. Edie), in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (ed. James M. Edie). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 12-42.
Young, Iris. 1990. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 141-159.
Recommended:
Idhe, Don. 1976. “Description,” in Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 49-113.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. “Sense Experience” in Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Colin Smith). New Jersey: The Humanities Press, pp. 207-242.
Berland, Jody. 1993. “Contradicting Media: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Listening,” in Radiotext(e) (ed. Neil Strauss). New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 209-217.
25 September: Competing Semiotics
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959. “Object of Linguistics,” “Nature of the Linguistic Sign,” and “Synchronic Law and Diachronic Law,” in Course in General Linguistics (ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin). New York: Philosophical Library, pp. 7-16, 65-71, 91-94.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. “The Principles of Phenomenology,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce (ed., intro by Justus Buchler). New York: Dover, pp. 74-97.
Turino, Thomas. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music,” Ethnomusicology 43(2), pp. 221-255.
Recommended:
Barthes, Roland. 1982. “The Photographic Message,” in A Barthes Reader (ed. Susan Sontag). New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 194-210
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce (ed., intro by Justus Buchler). New York: Dover, pp. 98-119.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. “587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs,” in A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 111-148.
2 October: Gazes
Mulvey, Laura. 1996 (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (ed. Philip Rosen). New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 198-209.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish (trans. Alan Sheridan). New York: Vintage Books, pp. 195-228.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1986 (Fall). “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39, pp. 99-141.
Recommended:
Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1996 (1970). “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (ed. Philip Rosen). New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 286-298.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings 1972-1977 (ed. Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon Books, 146-165.
Kracauer, Sigfriend. 1995. “Cults of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (ed./trans. Thomas Y. Levin). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 323-328.
9 October: Audition I: Voice, Sound, Space
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1993 (1936). “In Praise of Blindness,” in Radiotext(e) (ed. Neil Strauss). New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 20-26.
Schaefer, R. Murray. 1994 (1977). “Listening” and “The Acoustic Community” in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books, pp. 205-225.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. “The Voice that Keeps Silence,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (trans. David B. Allison). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 70-87.
Chion, Michel. 1994. “The Three Listening Modes” and “The Audiovisual Scene,” in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (trans. Claudia Gorbman). New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 25-35, 66-94.
Recommended:
Altman, Rick. 1992. “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” and “Four and a Half Film Fallacies,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice (ed. Rick Altman). New York: Routledge, pp. 15-45.
Silverman, Kaja. 1988. “Body Talk,” in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 42-71.
Smulyan, Susan. 1994. “The Urge for Distance,” in Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting 1920-1934. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 13-20.
16 October: Audition II: Music and Communication
Keil, Charles and Steven Feld. 1994. “Motion and Feeling Through Music,” “Communication, Music, and Speech About Music,” and “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” in Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 53-108.
Attali, Jacques. 1985. “Listening” and “Representing,” in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (trans. Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3-20, 46-86.
Corbett, John. 1994. “Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object,” in Sounding Off: From John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham: Duke University Press.
Recommended:
Meyer, Leonard. 1956. “Theory” in Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-42 (“The Theory of Emotions Related to Musical Experience” and “The Meaning of Music,” pp.22-42 are the most central for understanding his argument).
McClary, Susan. 1991. “Introduction: A Material Girl in Bluebeard’s Castle,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3-32.
Chanan, Michael. 1994. “The Inner Fabric of Music,” in Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chants to Postmodernism. New York: Verso.
23 October: Reification and Spectacle
Lukács, Georg. 1968. “The Phenomenon of Reification,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (trans. Rodney Livingstone). Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 83-110.
Debord, Guy. 1983 (1967). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red.
Recommended:
Attali, Jacques. 1985. “Repeating” in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (trans. Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 87-132.
30 October: Reproducibility
Benjamin, Walter. 1968 (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn). New York: Shocken Books, pp. 217-252.
Rothenbuhler, Eric W. and John Durham Peters. 1997 (summer). “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,” in Musical Quarterly 81(2), pp. 242-264.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990 (1969). “Plato and the Simulacrum,” in The Logic of Sense (trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale). New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 253-266.
Recommended:
Schwartz, Hillel. 1996. “Discernment,” in Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facimiles. New York: Zone Books, pp. 321-380.
Lastra, James. 2000. “Sound Theory,” in Sound Technology and American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 123-154.
6 November: Intercultural Sensation
Taussig, Michael. 1993. “A Report to the Academy,” “In Some Way or Another One Can Protect Oneself From Evil Spirits by Portraying Them,” and “With the Wind of World History in Our Sails,” in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, pp.xiii-xix, 1-18, 70-87.
Marks, Laura. 2000. “The Memory of the Senses,” and “Conclusion: The Portable Sensorium,” in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 194-247.
Carter, Paul. 1992. “Introduction,” and “Spirits of the Dead: A Sound History of ‘Cooee’,” The Sound In-Between: Voice, Space, Performance. Kensington: New South Wales University Press, pp. 11-51.
Recommended:
Schwartz, Hillel. 1996. “Second Nature,” in Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facimiles. New York: Zone Books, pp. 143-174.
Smith, Bruce R. 1999. “Listen, Otherwise,” in The Acoustic World of Early-Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 287-341.
Carter, Paul, in Op. Cit., “Travelling Blind: Notes for a Sound Geography,” pp. 117-138.
13 November: A Modern Sensory Complex?
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. and intro by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
20 November: Media Prehistories/Histories of the Senses
Crary, Jonathan. 1990. “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer,” and “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 1-67.
Lastra, James. 2000. “Introduction – Discourse/Device/Practice/Institution: Representational Technologies and American Culture,” and “Inscriptions and Simulations: The Imagination of Technology,” in Sound Technology and American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-60
Recommended:
Crary, Op. Cit. “Techniques of the Observer,” pp. 97-136.
Lastra, Op. Cit. “Performance, Inscription, Diegesis: The Technological Transformation of Representational Causality,” pp. 61-91.
27 November: Change, Construction, Digitization: Some Resources for Thinking Through What’s Happening Now
Hacking, Ian. 1999. “Why Ask What?” and “Too Many Metaphors” in The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-62.
Stafford, Barbara. 1996. “Display and the Rhetoric of Corruption,” “Desperately Seeking Connections: Linking the Internet to Eighteenth Century Laboratory Life,” in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 42-53 and 90-111.
Theberge, Paul. 1997. “Conclusion: Toward a New Model of Musical Production and Consumption,” in Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 242-256.
Recommended:
Crary, Jonathan. 2000. “Introduction,” in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 1-10.
Mitchell, William J. 1992. “How to Do Things with Pictures,” in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 191-224.
Robbins, Kevin. 1996. “Will Images Move Us Still?” in Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision. New York: Routledge, pp. 147-168.
4 December: Presentations
11 December: Finals week!