Reading + New Pub + Meditations on Communication Studies

This week’s reading for my Repetition seminar was particularly easy (compared with the thicker theoretical stuff we’ve been doing), but I found it quite refreshing, actually. Probably because the authors are quite clever. Anyway, this was a good thing, because next week we’re going to slog through Derrida’s differance essay. That should be fun in its own, perverse way.

In the meantime, I head off tomorrow for Milwaukee for a few days. My copy of My Freshman Year just arrived, so that should make for some good gossipy, and somewhat cheeseball airplane reading. I also finally bought a copy of Shaping Technology/Building Society which I have perennially checked out from the library. I also think I still don’t own Steve Waksman’s Instruments of Desire which is weird since I cite it a lot, teach it, and have about half of it photocopied. I have a whole list of books I love but don’t own. Which is weird, because I’m not exactly shy about buying books.

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My latest publication to appear is my first to appear in French. “Pour en finir avec la fidélité (les médias sont des instruments),” Mouvements #42 (November/December 2005): 44-53. Pretty cool. I wonder what I said.

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I didn’t actually mention the intellectual content of NCA in my last post. I served on two panels. I was a respondent for a panel on eBay, which had only two authors, but both papers were great and are part of a forthcoming book called Everyday eBay It’s so odd that there hasn’t been much cultural work on eBay and online auctions in general (though one can find endless business analysis and writings by philosophers about “online trust” which is really just a form of administrative research). I also chaired a panel of highly-ranked student papers, which is always cool. They were all well done.

But the thing that struck me was the number of conversations I found myself in about Communication Studies. What it is, why it matters, what’s special about it, how it differs from the other humanities. I think the answer is sociological, rather than substantive (as it is for all disciplines: try making a purely analytical distinction between the domains of anthropology and sociology — you can’t do it!). But so many people are so caught up in this, and I guess the question matters, since it was posed not only at panels I attended but also at lunch with an editor from a major university press. My least favorite solution, though it is favored by several constiuencies in NCA, is a subtractive model, a situation where scholars distinguish Comm Studies from other humanities and social sciences by showing how it’s not history, sociology, literature, anthropology, etc. through rejection of the ideas and methods of those fields. It’s motivated by a kind of shame, since Comm Studies is a less prestigious field (at least in the US; I can’t quite clock its place in the hierarchy of fields in Canada) than other traditional humanities. The effect of this shame is to reproduce itself, since it discourages students and young scholars from pursuing erudition so that they might remain certain that their work is “inside” the field. As I explained to the querying editor, our field is at its best when it goes in the opposite direction, when people take chances they couldn’t take in other fields, and where happy accidents occur in interdisciplinary collisions that are the direct result of the fact that the Comm Studies is unable to police its borders as effectively as more traditional “disciplines” like history or sociology (recognitizing that they too are complex and heterogenous as well). If you look to the best work that Comm Studies field calls “its own,” much of it bears the stamp of that peculiar situation.

A Few Quick Thoughts Before Collapsing

— The first half of the Indy-Cincinnati game today was the best 30 minutes of football I’ve seen all year. Absolutely astoundingly good.

— My hotel in Boston was located near two stores I really wanted to visit, the Hello Kitty Store and Daddy’s Junky Music. The former, well, the less I say about that, the better. The latter is one of the best used music equipment stores in the United States. Used to be “used gear by mail.” It’s right across from the Berkeley School of Music (famous for producing amazingly technically proficient musicians who are sometimes also quite musical), so you can imagine where the nice used stock comes from. But I already violated my moratorium on new toys (before the lo-boy CD is finished this winter) once for that phaser pedal in Pittsburgh, so it’s a good thing I didn’t do it again.

–NCA was the best ever, probably because it was mostly about seeing friends. I also found out from Routledge that the contract for The Sound Studies Reader is apparently in the mail. Or so I’m told.

–I know I mentioned a site overhaul once before, but I now know what I’m going to do, and it’s going to actually happen because I’m going to hire someone else to do it. As part of the overhaul, this blog is going to divide like an amoeba sometime in early 2006, with a “gentle” decoupling of the personal and the professional. And a new content engine will help me revise the music page more easily and more often, and expand the “joblinks” stuff to a broader professionalization site with resources for faculty and academic couples. There is also going to be audio content, though not all of it will appear under “sterneworks” per se. Since I moved to Canada and got a domain under my own name (before, there was no blog and it just lived on my Pitt server space), this site has been an experiment in having all the aspects of my online life tightly linked, or at least proximally linked, but I am beginning to understand the value of compartmentalizing just a little bit.

Big Day

Okay, it’s not really that big of a day. I go to a faculty meeting with this huge pile of proposed courses and chaanges to the grad curriculum and hopefully they all get passed.(1)

Then Carrie and I get on a plane to Boston for a conference–the National Communication Association (U.S.). It’ll be nice to hit a conference together, for a change. By the way, the “US” isn’t part of their name, but I’ve added it, since Quebec calls their provincial library the “National Library” and there’s a bunch of “national” stuff in Ottawa, I figured it’s time to indicate which nation NCA is the Communication Association of. Then again, the fact that it doesn’t indicate a nation probably indicates automatically that it’s from the United States. Remember the fur flying about the name of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)? (2) No? You can probably guess.

As usual, no promises about conference blogging, but you never know. I think I’m taking my laptop.

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1. The dept meeting is actually the easiest part of the process. It could take a year or longer for the whole approval process to work itself out.
2. I think “Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)” is actually the official name.

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.