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Adryan Contract Proposal

I want to do my dissertation on spectatorship as the post-Enlightenment model of subjectivity (Benjamin, Lacanian and feminist film criticism, even Levinas). Specifically, I want to trace how the technologies of spectatorship from perspective in art through camera obscura, films and shopping centers to the internet have changed what it means to be a subject. My intent for this class is to yet another dry run of this project either through avatars or, a more broadly-defined avatar model, the personals website, Myspace and Facebook. I might also do blogs or uses of webcams, but I'm not sure what the range of the inquiry for this class will be yet.

While this class is mostly launched from a production perspective, I want to look at how the internet conflates the roles of reading and writing to create less stable, more communally- and contextually-defined subjectivities/identities (I still don't know exactly what terminology is going to be appropriate). Perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve found in the poking-around this topic I’ve done over the past few months is that I’ve convinced myself that technology is responding to a less autonomous model of the self that seems to be the post-secular response to postmodernism. But that might just be crazy talk.

Submitted by Adryan on Wed, 2007-01-24 19:50.
Adryan's blog

The Visual Basis of Identification . . .
David Blakesley's picture
Submitted by David Blakesley on Thu, 2007-02-01 07:03.

Adryan:

In your second paragraph, you mention conflating "the roles of reading and writing to create less stable, more communally- and contextually-defined subjectivities/identities." That's a subject (I think) that I've been interested in for quite a while, so I'm eager to see where you take it. I've focused specifically on this question from a rhetorical perspective, thinking also about one of rhetoric's key terms (identification). What's the visual basis of identification? How does language/reading/writing invoke/entail identification, or the phantasy of shared subjectivities? I have this more carefully worked out in a couple of essays that I'll share with you later.

Here's one essay that you might find interesting for its integration of technologies into the subject of spectatorship (a la the panopticon):

Panoptic Mediation: From Bentham's Panopticon to the P-Chip
http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_2/craig/index.html


Interesting
Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:44.

This is extremely interesting, Adryan. I wish I had something more enlightened to say than that, but I'm not sure I do. I am reminded of Thomas Rickert discussing how the Big Lebowski is a postmodern film because things happen to a protagonist instead of the protagonist taking action. The thing on your proposal that baits my interest the most is the mention of shopping centers, because at first glance it would seem like these are active rather than receptive sites. I'm interested to see how you explore spectatorship as it relates to this arena. What sources are you thinking about using in this class to further along your work?


Benjamin, not me
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Thu, 2007-01-25 11:39.

Actually, my interst in shopping malls comes direct from Walter Benjamin's unfinished (and yet published) project: The Arcades Project. It's mostly just notes that were going to be a book, but there's been some scholarship built-up around it. Basically, the arcades the European proto-shopping mall where the mobilized gaze (the man of class standing) can wander and take-in pleasure wihout having a specific agenda. This man who had nothing btter to do and who enjoyed astounding class and gender priviledge expressed in his optic priviledges is called the flaneur. the flaneur was posited as the model of modernist subjectivity.

There is also the feminine, more contemporary version: the postmodern flaneuse. Unlike the flaneur, the flaneuse is object and subject of the gaze simultaneously. The shopping mall is also differnt from the arcade in that it attmept to confound and confuse the flaneuse so that this feminized model of subjectivity is still the victim of violence. I'll post the citation for an article that addresses this somtime later today.

So I guess what my project will be is to define the e-flan. I'm sure the Jenkins and, possibly, the Lanham books will be useful, even if only tangentally. However, most of this class, as we discuss the process of production (what's my avatar got to do with me) and the effects of the visual rhetoric (if it a/effects the audience, the creator is also a member of that audience), will be corruptable to my purposes.