More on Naming

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I find the whole metadiscourse around branding to just sound patently absurd. Now, I’ll grant you that if a marketing exec were to have a look-see into, say, the “god is a lobster” discussion in A Thousand Plateaus, he or she might rightly feel that we humanities scholars really have no right to make fun of them.

But still. Here’s a quote from a Globe and Mail story about companies having to rebrand after court settlements, takeovers or failures. First up, Circuit City, which can no longer use Radio Shack’s name for their smaller stores in Canada:

“The [RadioShack] name itself sort of connotes an outdated sort of name. The idea of radios and shacks did seem a bit tired,” he said.

See what I mean? It’s some kind of mock profundity. Radios in shacks were really hot in . . . what year was that? Oh yeah, 1912!

Here’s another quote. It’s about rebranding toilet paper. Kimberly-Clark gets the name “Cottonelle” back in 2007 from Scott.

Ted Matthews, managing partner with Instinct Brand Equity Coaches Inc., said that by using a marketing campaign that positions Cashmere as a fabric that is much softer and more luxurious than Cotton — a sort of scorched earth rebranding, Mississauga-based Scott is making it harder for Kimberly-Clark to reignite the brand. “Scott has done a particularly good job of closing that door because now the high ground for softness is Cashmere. If Cottonelle showed up again, it would be the stuff that used to be softest,” Mr. Matthews said.

Is that linguistic determinism I see? Agency of the rhetor creeping out from behind the rocks? Reading the audience off the text? It seems the author is not dead after all. No, in 2005, he works for a company called Instinct Brand Equity Coaches Inc. I wonder which consultants they hired for their name.

Lost as Morality Tale

Spoiler Alert

So as you may know, I am a fan of Lost, an ABC series that’s been quite popular lately. On Wednesday’s episode, Shannon, an annoying white woman, sleeps with Said, a “strong silent type” Iraqui character. It’s network TV, so you just know because there’s a shot of them lying together in a state of undress, but when the deed happened, I said that one of them was going to be punished for the sin of what amounts to an interracial coupling (nb, “Arab” or “Iraqui” is not technically a race) as far as American television was concerned.

Sure enough, the episode ended with Shannon getting “accidentally” shot in the stomach.

And so, once again, we learn that sex out of wedlock, especially between people with different pigmentations, is a capital offense in the United States. Or on mysterious uncharted tropical islands in the Pacific. Certainly on television or in the movies.

A Theory of Academic Titles

Yesterday, a friend wrote to run some possible titles for his book by me. It occurred to me that I’d become somewhat opinionated about titles for academic books and articles. Since this is my blog, I’m going to share my opinions with you. All usual disclaimers apply and I realize this doesn’t work for all fields or all people, it’s my own opinion, etc. etc.

I basically subscribe to a modified C. Wright Mills theory of titles:

1. Make it sound as definitive as possible.
1a. If it sounds like a “classic” it might become one.
2. Less is more.
3. Remember, search engines are watching.

For books, the title before the colon should be as short as possible and as easy to say as possible. Convoluted or complex just cause problems. Even works of high theory written in French often have simple titles. After the colon, and there probably needs to be one more of the time, it’s best to avoid the “list of three things” if at all possible. As an undergrad, I entitled my senior thesis: “Muzak of the Spheres: Background Music – Social Space – Consumer Culture.” Since it was on Muzak, the front end of the title is fine, though the subtitle is exactly the kind of thing I’m railing against here. Sure, it’s suggestive like a 1980s Routledge book (and they did sell for academic titles), but it doesn’t actually give you much of an indication of what the thesis is about, how the terms relate, etc. However, a long winded alternative wouldn’t be any better. So sometimes you must compromise.

For articles and chapter titles, I like the Mills theory, but there are a few additional points:

1. Please don’t do that thing where there’s an incomprehensible and/or obscure reference before the colon and the real title after the colon (history articles tend to do this a lot).
2. Word play is almost never acceptable, and if you do it, make sure it’s not the same “clever” move that people have been making since 1982.
3. Sorry, but fun time with punctuation, e(special)ly parens, is just over.
4. Try and avoid a colon whenever possible.
5. Chapters of your own book can have cryptic titles if the book has a good title and there is a preview in the introduction.

Okay, since I’m not going to take anyone else to task, let’s see how I’m doing with this sort of thing.

Titles that work in the Mills+ model:
–The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
–Beyond Social Construction
–Digital Media and Disciplinarity
–Communication as Techné

Short, but ambiguous (close but no cigar):
–Dead Rock Stars, 1900
–Bureaumentality

Clunky but the best I could do under the circumstances:
–C. Wright Mills, the Bureau for Applied Social Research, and Meaning of Critical Scholarship.
–Television Under Construction: American Television and the Problem of Distribution 1926-1962 (extra points for sounding like a legitimate history of something for once)

D’oh! “Thanks for playing”:
–Headset Culture, Audile Technique, and Sound Space as Private Space.
–A Machine to Hear for Them: On the Very Possibility of Sound’s Reproduction (extra points for absurd ambition by using the word “very”)
–Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope, and the ‘Autopsy of the Living’: Medicine’s Acoustic Culture.
–Sound Out of Time/Modernity’s Echo

Really, I think it all comes down to “remember, search engines are watching.”

Profound Thought of the Night

Courtesy of Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, in his section “On the Eating of Meat”:

Although human phenomena–whether attitudes, wishes or structures–may be looked at on their own, independently of their connections with the social life of people, they are by nature nothing but substantializations of human relations and of human behaviour, embodiments of social and mental life. This is true of speech, which is nothing other than human relations turned into sound; it is true of art, science, economics and politics; it is true both of phenomena which rank high on our scale of values and other which seem trivial or worthless. But it is often precisely these latter, apparently trivial phenomena that give us clear and simple insight iunto the structure and development of the psyche and its relations which are at first denied us by the former.

Two of my favorite theses served together like a confection of peanut butter and chocolate: 1) that speech expresses not interiority but exteriority–and thereby is properly the object of social analysis rather than metaphysical speculation (yes, I know he only says it as an aside); and 2) that the smallest, most banal and boring objects carry the possibility within them for the deepest social reflection. And thus Elias goes on to give a capsule account of modernity in his history of the preparation, presentation and consumption of meat. Sure, it’s audacious, but that’s the appeal of Elias.

This week is fashion and ritual week for my seminar, and it’s always a pleasure to read formative texts again in preparation for teaching. This is probably the third or fourth time in my life I’ve taken a complete set of notes on James Carey’s “Cultural Approach to Communication” (perhaps my own perverse enactment of his ritual model) but it’s interesting how in classic essays one sees things anew each time. This time I was struck but his discussion of programmes for action — communication — that immediately followed his discussion of maps. How very Bruno Latour of him.

Elias is formative in a much more proximate sense — he came into my life as I was revising my work on doctors and patients and dealing with questions of revulsion and disgust. But I am drawn in by the Weber-meets-Freud symmertry of his work even as I know if it weren’t for his charasmatic mode of presentation, I’d be having none of it. Oh well, I never did want to practice a science anyway.

I Like My Job Best

when it’s about all the stuff for which I got into this business: reading, writing, talking about ideas. Highlights of the week included teaching (which is always a highlight), meeting with students about their work. the meeting of an augmented reality working group yesterday (which basically functions like a reading group for the moment), and yesterday I headed over to Concordia to attend a symposium on the history of communication studies in Canada. Now, I confess that I mostly went to learn about the history the field in Canada, something I don’t know that much about. Highlights in this respect included Kim Sawchuck’s historical survey of feminist work and work by women in the Canadian Journal of Communication which was a real eye-opener. At dinner later, I also learned from organizer Charles Acland that the Canadian Journal of Communication was originally called — in inimitable 1970s McLuhanite fashion — Media Probe. MEDIA PROBE! I am so going to the library next week to see if they have any copies with intact covers. I would love a picture of the cover. Yes. “Communication Studies. We’re a serious field. Just check out our journal. It’s called Media Probe.” Too bad they had to change the name.

Another highlight was learning that there’s a letter out there somewhere from Marx to Engels that says “you know, Engels, we got our idea of class struggle from some French historians idea of ‘race struggle'”. I’ll have to track that one down, too. I’m told Bill Buxton gave a great talk on decoupling McLuhan from Innis (a great idea!) but alas, I wasn’t going to make a 9am panel across town after this week.

I cared less for the debate about disciplinarity and centers and margins at the conference. My opinions on these subjects are well-formed and in print here and there. I am coming around to the idea that this is the kind of thing that one speaks about to the dean, the curriculum committee, and on blue-ribbon panels on the “future of the field” at professional associations.

That said, another highlight of the conference for me was hanging out with retired faculty. Charles did a good job of making the conference a bona fide multigenerational event. One of the speakers knew C. Wright Mills as a grad student and prof and offered good stories on that. I also met Thelma McCormack, who was the keynote. She was one of the few feminists who publicly opposed Canada’s experimental Dworkin-MacKinnon-based obscenity laws in the 1980s. At the time, she caught a lot of crap for it, but I think history shows that she was on the right side of that debate. At 80, she’s still got a sharp wit and a clear critical sense. Of course, there are some serious generational differences in scholarship. But it’s also interesting and kind of inspiring to see how politicized scholars tell similar stories across generations. That kind of history of the field, though perhaps more “war story”ish, is what really intrigues me. That and in the case of Canada, institutional histories of the field, since I’m still learning that. I think I may have mentioned it before, but Gertrude Robinson’s history of the field in Canada is still one of my main resources for the time being.

I’m on a Hot Streak

With new music. I mentioned that I picked up a bunch of stuff while in Pgh. I am in love with the new Boards of Canada. I love the faux-vinyl distortion and studied detuning — they glitch it up and mess it up and it’s still beautiful. As for Pelican, I think I like Australasia better than the most recent one. The Arcade Fire and Explosions in the Sky were exactly as I expected.

Today, after discovering that the Frontenac Metro was closed in the middle of the week (despite the sign that said it would be closed on the weekend), I taxied over to Cheap Thrills on my way in to McGill and picked up four more: new ones from Metric, Sigur Ros, Death Cab for Cutie, and the LIfe and Times. A few words about the last, which I had to special order and which I’m currently auditing as I type (after tonight’s dinner, French lesson, and curriclum work). The Life and Times is one of those bands made up of members of other bands that I liked. Even the engineer, producer, and owner of the studio where it was recorded were in bands that I liked. You know this is a recipe for disaster, but for once, this combination of people doesn’t make it suck. It’s actually really good. In its own way. And it’s good in exactly the way I’ve been missing since leaving the midwest: big, overbearing, probably-too-earnest anthemic midwestern rock.

I love it when music is awesome.

Speaking of which, I must implore you to check out those singing mice in post below if you haven’t. They sound cool, even though they’re pitch shifted. The article to which I linked doesn’t mention it, but the Globe and Mail version had a little more detail. How did the scientists get the male mice to sing? By presenting them with q-tips that had been soaked in the urine of female mice. Lots of the articles reporting on this go off on the whole “if mice do it, then music must be a biological response designed to attract mates” which is silly because they’re not saying that about urine, are they?

That is all. Good night.