I Want My S(t)imulation! MTV, Representation & Desire
February 4th 2007 03:56
In early 2004 I was flipping through my fellow Buffyologer James South's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy and wondering - hey, why don't I edit a book of collected essays as a way of introducing myself to the wacky world of publishing?
I came up with the following CFP (call for papers), as something of an experiment:
MTV and Philosophy
Do the philosophical implications of MTV really get you going?
If so, you are invited to submit an abstract for a collection of essays on 'MTV and Philosophy'. I seek to obtain the permission of Open Court Books in publishing the result as part of their trendy Popular Culture and Philosophy series. The series has spawned six successful volumes since its 2001 debut with 'Seinfeld and Philosophy', including the best-selling 'The Matrix and Philosophy', and is noted for revitalising philosophical narratives through
its celebration of pop culture as worthy of in-depth analysis.
Ever since 1981 MTV has functioned as a status symbol in its own right, quickly capturing the imagination of numerous audiences, a figure of controversy in the (post)modern world it informs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to decide what MTV does for your philosophical imagination, and stun me with your creative genius. Any philosophical approach is permitted- if your topic requires an inter-disciplinary examination then this will be respected, provided that philosophy remains your key disciplinary outlook.
Please submit an abstract of roughly 500 words, keeping in mind a 4000 word limit on all essays. It's strongly recommended that you are familiar with the style of 'Popular Culture and Philosophy' series. Topics may be informed by, but certainly not limited to, the following:
Aesthetics, appropriation, Barthes, Baudrillard, cable TV, censorship, commercialization, community, consumption, eastern philosophy, Eminem, epistemology, ethics, existentialism, fashion, Foucault, fragmentation, gender, genre diversifications (e.g. mutation of 'pop' and 'rock' categories over time), globalization, high culture vs. low culture, identity, image,
'iMitation TVs', innovation, intertextuality, live feeds, Lyotard, Madonna, mainstream, manufactured music, mash ups, metaphysics, mixes, 'MTV Generation', multi-modal texts, phenomenology, pastiche, postmodernism, programming, race, sampling, sexuality, simulation, status quo, sub-cultures, synaesthesia, status, trends, youth culture, Weber, visual culture, Zen.
Please email both your abstract and a copy of your CV to crispyclouds_at_hotmail.com. The current deadline is 5/30/04, which may or may not be extended at a future date.
I am also currently searching for an assistant editor to aid me in this project, so if you have a genuine desire to participate, email me with the reasons why are the ideal person for the job, along with a copy of your CV.
Sincerely,
Epiphanie Bloom
I wasn't sure anything would happen, but I received four or so abstracts in the next few days... along with an email from the editor of the PC and Philosophy series kindly informing me that Open Court wasn't planning on publishing a book on MTV and Philosophy at this time, and that I really should've contacted them first.
I was a bit intimidated for a few days, but the abstracts I'd received had whet my appetite and I came up with another CFP a week later:
I Want My S(t)imulation!" MTV, Representation & Desire
Abstracts are sought for a postmodern collection of intellectual works based upon MTV and the space(s) it may have created in your mind. Often celebrated, blamed or categorised as the epitome of this, that or other, MTV could be described a status symbol in its own right... Using a disciplinary approach of your choice (a multiplicity would do!), and a great deal of self-reflexivity and imagination, I'd like you to indulge in your MTV-inspired processes by engaging with the following:
1. Simulate your MTV:
Investing to some extent in Baudrillard's reference to the term `simulation', expose your audience to your self-conscious grappling with the acronym of MTV, and whatever numerous implications of that you consume. (Baudrillard needs not be addressed in your
work, and you may work around the term `simulation' if you desire.)
2. Stimulate your MTV:
If the simulating your MTV doesn't work for you, perhaps stimulation ought to do it: how you are able to `stimulate' MTV into working for you? While the above is oriented towards the `postmodern', this option engages a dialogue with the `avant-garde'. [Epiphanie's note: Lol, that was great - "You don't like postmodernism? "Fine"." ;o) ]
Your work may be inspired by, but certainly not limited to, the following list of key words:
- Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard
- Madonna, Eminem, Nirvana
- Jackass, Newlyweds, Made, The Real Word, The Osbournes
- MTV2 (& other MTV-affiliated networks), Channel V, MusicMax, etc
- pop, rock, hip-hop, techno
- gender, genre - hopping and diversification
- mixes, mashes, sampling, censorship, authorization
- mainstream, alternative, status quo, subversive
- consumption, capitalism (, schizophrenia)
- post-anything
- psychology, philosophy, politics, programming
- mass media, marketing, moral ambiguity
- visual culture, youth culture, postmodern culture cultural studies
- controversy
- MTV Generation, anthropology, sociology
- race religion ethnicity gender sexuality it's up to you
While the traditional essay format will be accepted (grumblingly), I encourage abstract artists to pitch a more subversive work, experimenting with genre and/or visual presentation. Let `the MTV style' be your muse. Creative, analytical, and under 4000 words are the only preliminary requirements.
Please send an abstract of roughly 500 words to Epiphanie Bloom, along with a CV. The current due date for abstracts is []. This may be extended in the light of the responses
received.
I wasn't sure where I was going with this. It was pretty funky for a cfp but was I really prepared to compromise in order to create a volume that would be 'marketable'?
It was worth it for the abstracts alone - here's a few:
In the Shadow of MTV - The Constructed Imitation of Western Culture in
Central Anatolia (by Geoff Bowe)
One of the most popular western pop music bars in Turkey's capital, Ankara, is aptly named Golge (Turkish for "Shadow"). Its sister bar, with the English name "Shadow" also serves up western food and music. The appropriateness of the name works at several levels. Every weekend huge crowds of would-be alternatives got to hear their favorite MTV-fuelled thirst
for covers of Western music - Placebo, Nirvana, Green Day, Offspring, etc. Plato's remarks on imitations of imitations in Republic X seems a particularly poignant description here, as does Husserl's notion of sedimented meaning, and Barthes' approaches to signs and signifiers. The imitators of western popular culture have limited conversational English, yet they conviviate with each other via MTV supplied English music and MTV generation fashion. One might call this version of Western culture a kind of reverse Orientalism, whereby the West is a construct of MTV.
Song lyrics - the heart of alternative culture since Bob Dylan brought folk and rock together to show that popular music could say something - have faded into the background. Club goers happily repeat the refrain of Offspring "you can always go on Ricky Lake" with no idea where Ricky Lake is (grin).
The paper would investigate both the construction of Western culture in Asia through MTV, the notion of sub-culture inclusion based on knowing the songs and the station, the dual nature of exclusion, based on not knowing the references in the songs, but knowing who does not know the songs, and the Platonic notion of artistic imitation as several removes from the truth.
My own perspective as author of this piece is an accident of the occident - I am not supposed to be here, in the Shadow, and this is not intended for me. At the same I am welcome, even happily included in the Shadow. My own skepticism of the art of Turkish imitation is tempered by a ready reply to any fan of Turkified western culture. Turks will readily say, "we don't imitate, we adapt the west to our own tastes, giving it a uniquely Turkish feel".
Similar things on a smaller, microcosmic scale might also of Turku bars, where the baglama and other village instruments are plugged in for urban performance of traditional Turkish and even Kurdish music. This too is an adaptation, and imitation of village songs adapted for an urban audience. Much more than western bars in Ankara, Turku bars are distinctly male, and
one will not find there, as one does in the Shadow, the sexual revolution or a sense of equality and freedom that both liberates and constrains a nation seeking an identity and place in the European Union.
Remember me, I'm on MTV & my name is...: Eminem's hybrid identity Show and carnival laughter (by Christina Szvetivanyi)
I would like to propose reading Eminem's fame and iconic media presence as the white rap-artist – a modern day Elvis, no less – as interconnected to the infamy of his lyrics, shows and media-persona due to their alleged racist, homophobic and misogynist content insofar as they are part of a hugely successful multifaceted image. It is created in part by the artist and his work as well as his management and in part, and this seems interesting to me, it comes into being via media and viewers who not only passively perceive what they see or hear but actively and creatively decode Eminem's performances, books, videos and CDs according to their own parameters of interest and sense-making. This newly produced meaning is in turn encoded in diverse forms such as language, TV-features or music which also undergo
the same process.
`Meaning', a Cultural Theorist Stuart Hall states, cannot be viewed as a natural act but has to be regarded as an arbitrary one, an act of invention that challenges everyone to be a `fantastically codable encoding agent'. The scholar views the media as an apparatus that simulates reality by constantly reproducing socio-culturally dominant ideologies and at the same time offering "a field of ideological struggle". E.g. on the one hand MTV claims to depict reality – which has to be considered the most dominant as well as most basic ideology in media history – by constantly offering news on stars and showing features about their lives and homes, not to mention the huge success and ideological content of reality shows and their titles like The Ozbournes, The Simple Life, The Real World. Thereby they contribute to the
so-called `reality effect'. On the other hand that perpetuated belief is constantly contested in the same media.
A prime example of an artist, whose work issues constant challenges to the reality-claim, is rap-artist Eminem. In the arena of high-sale Hip Hop, where discourses of credibility and authenticity have to be considered a central art- form, his work utilizes hybrid concepts of authenticity and identity articulated through his performances of various media-related personas. His lyrics in `Superman' point out that their listeners generally `know no Marshall', but none the less he has published the `Marshall Mathers LP'. Furthermore Eminem is renowned for the highly personal content of his work, the song `Cleaning out my closet' is considered to be a premier example of that. But the title of the CD `The Eminem Show' points towards a performance aspect and contextualizes the biographical element as part of a public staging of facets, that draw in more than equal measure on artistic ability; Eminem's art is not literal, but a work of fiction. It's authentic because it proudly affirms that it's a simulation. One that is not limited as monologic sense-production by the artist but part of a world of sign systems and an on-going dialogue, to introduce Bakhtinian terms, in which media and audience participate.
It depends on a hybrid concept of identity that does not view identity as an unique whole but rather in the postmodern tradition emphasizes aspects of play, intertextuality and the harmony of unmerged voices. This diversity is not limited to Marshall Mathers, Eminem, Slim Shady and Rapboy, to name the most prominent characters, it is also present in the staging of viewer reactions. I find it interesting to note that MTV-specials as well as videos like
`Sing for the Moment' specifically include footage of picket-lines as well as of eager teenagers screaming for their idol; these pictures point without fail towards the aspect of varying frames of interpretation that include dominant and negotiated as well as oppositional readings (Hall).
`I am whatever you say I am / if I wasn't then why would I say I am / in the paper, the news, everyday I am / I don't know it's just the way I am', Eminem's lyrics explicitly point towards the role of reality effects and interpretation that proves ungovernable by authorial control. The apparent pluralization of cultural codes and hybrid identities contradicts traditional concepts and picks out the interconnectedness of media, representation and power as a central aspect that necessitates the focusing on a politics of the image.
But aside from preferred readings, multiple and contradictory meanings are simultaneously communicated trough diverse sign-systems such as language, images, gestures, music and fashion. Eminem's work is laced with comical elements, cross-dressing, carnival imagery and grotesque representation of bodies, virility and desire that create space for what Hall terms `ideological struggle'. This aspect is of particular interest to me as a female pop-culture-scholar who is not in favor of revering chauvinism, violence or gun possession but nevertheless enjoys listening not only to Missy Elliott but also to Eminem. In my negotiated reading I would therefore like to focus on performance facets which actively reveal identity, street credibility and authenticity as well as gender, class and ethnic stereotypes to be ideological constructs. Through putting them on a carnival stage they are celebrated as well as dethroned – leaving room for a diverse and possibly critical audience and offering a ongoing subtext of subversive cultural commentary.
I would like to propose viewing carnival laughter as a connecting factor that claims audience participation and allows the temporal usurpation and subversion of ideologies of identity and authenticity and inversion of power structures in Eminem's performances. The grotesque allows viewer's to participate through laughter in preferred or negotiated readings, what is
generally taken seriously is now debunked. On the other hand opposed literal readings of the carnival account for much of the negative reactions.
In my paper I would like to analyze diverse material such as samples of lyrics, videos, recordings of live-performances and media-features as well as other commentaries in various subsections focusing on the one hand on the aspects of performance and representation in relation to discourses of ideology, identity and authenticity as well as on the other hand on the role of the decoding/encoding agent in connection with the temporal usurpation of socio-culturally dominant ideologies through carnival laughter.
By Sayandeb Chowdhury:
The philosophical implications of MTV are perhaps nowhere more profound that in the ways in which MTV has reproduced, often unwillingly and within its iconoclastic format, various deficiencies that any popular productive mechanism has to negotiate. In India, where it made its debut in mid 90s, MTV, like everywhere else has come to be associated with a lifestyle.
However its philosophical implications lie elsewhere. India's divergent nationhood has stood guard to one unifying mechanism- Bollywood. Which can be loosely defined as a popular celluloid culture effectively driven by a self-assuaging economy of cultural reproduction. The
hyperbolic projections of Bollywood (along with Cricket) as the greatest coloniser of India's collective imagination might be part of Bollywood's self-fashioning, but even with a deep sense of scepticism it's impact cannot be denied.
MTV's arrival in post-liberalisation India was almost an analogue to the latter's ambition to be inculcated into a global meaning making process. Of which MTV was both a part as well as a product. Moreover, Bollywood became one of India's most potent exports in its global remaking. MTV, apart from airing its staple music videos took upon itself to launch a series of
humorous attacks (which still continue, though sparsely) on the various stereotypes that Bollywood has successfully and endlessly reproduced.
Through a series of intelligent episodes it came up with a mode of critique that can be loosely termed deconstructionist. The cult Bollywood texts were read from within and its unmaking rendered to a generation which only retroactively received Bollywood's best preserved clichés. In doing so MTV had successfully recreated within its format a change in popular expectations just as they were able to establish themselves as forerunners of that change.
In western democracies, MTV is known for its irreverence, if not total abjection towards expected and established norms. This disengagement with hegemonies of cultural reproduction is rare in most popular cultural forms. As I said, this was precisely where MTV began in India. In India, the `establishment' it decided to hit the hardest was Bollywood.
However it is Bollywood to whose economic and promotional desires MTV has ultimately
surrendered itself. Increasingly it has become Bollywood's most visible, drawing-room facsimile and its most faithful cultural collaborator. Bollywood in the process has been able to extend its infinite resources to incorporate an MTV style of choreographed celluloid output. But MTV has not been able to retain its stature. It has ended being within the co-optive simulacrum as a critique of which it located itself initially. In other words, it has given in to the territorializing claims of Bollywood's effective reproductive apparatuses against who's colonising facilities and modes it had set itself against. MTV India, is hence a failure of its own making. A classic deconstructive desire, which unable to locate itself outside the Text has only found refuge in it.
By Jennifer Fischer:
In the true style of this generation that follows X, MTV has left introspection behind in order to unsuccessfully search for its own identity in places where it does not lie, such as in fashion, fiction, fads, and all that collectively becomes pop culture. This has been true of MTV and its peers. It seems almost as if MTV has been trying to emulate Madonna, a long time friend of the confused music network. This emulation becomes apparent as we see the two jumping
from identity to identity over and over again. From the outside, it appears that MTV may never see its own true colors. However, it is not just this lack of self knowledge that plagues MTV, it is also haunted by a past riddled with the deaths of close friends, plagued by the same pursuit for excess that MTV had often sought. MTV was obviously concerned that it had unintentionally killed the radio star, but I think that it remained in denial when eventually a
friendship arose with an ex radio DJ turned Vee-jay, which made it quite clear that MTV was pushing away its past. However, before MTV could admit to itself what it had done, it lost many friends. None was more painful than the loss of Kurt Cobain in 1994. To this day, it is uncertain to most of us what actually happened to Kurt. Many still hold that it was not a suicide, but the official report declared the front man of Nirvana, after years of a heroine
roller coaster, ended his own life with a sawed off shot gun's bullet to the head.
MTV was devastated and confused. With Kurt's death, Grunge Rock also died. At first, MTV would just incessantly complain about its "so called life", but then the situation worsened as MTV began to create simulations of life in what it liked to call `the Real World', which was a quite obscene and obscure interpretation of the life that it was actually living. In reality, MTV was turning away from its past and away from itself. It made a new friend in Carson Daly
and turned to pop music for comfort, because pop music is supposed to be harmless and relatively devoid of the rock and roll lifestyle. It seemed safe, but it wasn't, not this brand of pop music. MTV's transition into pop music began with an involvement with many scantily clad underage girls. MTV's behavior became dangerously sexual. In its denial of self, MTV had become all party and exploration, simulation and stimulation, while mistakenly leaving
its true self behind. MTV was supposed to be all about the music, at least that's what it had promised, but somewhere in all the debauchery, the music was lost. While MTV loses more and more of itself everyday, its old friends become more and more worried, as its new friends bring it further and further away from progress. Even its biggest competitor, VH1, is trying to help. By showing the `I love the 80's' and `I love the 90s' specials, VH1 is trying to
remind MTV about its past, hopefully to trigger the repressed memories whose repression is preventing MTV from getting back the life that it once had. In attempt to help MTV with this healing process, I would like to examine its life and confront that which it is trying to forget. With some intense sessions and some hefty research into repression and youth psychology, perhaps MTV can get the music back into its life.
"It's my [S(t)imulation!]" by Epiphanie Bloom
Why is it, wherever in the world I go, people seem to chase after a notion of `full stop'? With so many a film-based material sponsored by the subscription to one (Lyotardian) metanarrative or another, how does MTV offer me a uniquely pleasurable viewing experience? Why do I, indeed, desire the presence of this "ambiguous" cultural force in the re-image-ining of my conceptual landscape? Can I integrate MTV as part of my project in developing postmodern theory as my self-help practice of choice?
Prior to my problematic 24/7 access to the Viacom channel, I became familiar with such `iMitationTVs' as Channel V and MusicMax for Australia... I had no shortage of enlivening moments with Channel V, as its steady flow of narrative fragments caressed the sides of the TV screen in my parents' sparsely decorated living room, illuminating it with one singularly irreplicable combination of images after another... I wonder who else had their screen tuned into `Video Surveillance' on Channel V in the hour I flickered my gaze over the TV screen and happened to see the name of the show appropriated into the V slogan in the corner, and how this would have affected them? I had never wanted to read Foucauldian theory more urgently…
Excited by my relationship with the music networks at my disposal, I became increasingly intrigued with the 'actual' experience of the network that `started it all'. I wondered what notions of authenticity / authorial multiplicity I might consume while eyeing the screen, and what would it mean to be watching MTV? (Had I ever been doing anything else?)
It was in the interior of a Bulgarian apartment while I was recovering from a nasty case of bronchitis that I was unexpectedly provided with a TV which channeled MTV. This text is a response to the questions I had about my viewing experience at the time, informed by my present context and some specific texts such as No Doubt's "It's My Life" video, MTV Europe's "MTV Mash" segment, Madonna's 'Love Profusion' video clip and others...
From here, how might I describe the s(t)imulations that the space of Santorini
inspired in me on the way back to Sydney?
"The Stimulation of Simulation" by Louise Tyler
I am a prop. A caricature of the real. A stimulated simulation of black
femininity.
"Give you ice like Kobe wife...We sort of like goldie right... Tha way we mold
m right.... I can make you a celebrity overnight."
Dwelling in my existence as portrayed through fantasy I live complacently in the dark. The images, 30 seconds, one minute, four minutes of video representation smoothly interfaced with music stimulates a reality I know to be true.
"Still sexy when you smoke that flame, jerkin like a chicken when you throw that
thang, She got be hotter than an oven tha way that she talk, twitchin and freaky so I'm
loving tha way that she walk, You lookin so good girl you oughta be in picture..."
Scratching and crawling I emerge from the dark only to discover that the images so vividly displayed are not such a clear representation of myself. In the light of day my hair isn't long and straight, neither is my nose, my features are not a pale representation of the dominant paradigm... they are a shadow of what the images say I should be.
"I can see yo beauty on a big screen...I can see you on stage at the awards, wit a dress better then Jennifer's and doin big things, Kick it wit me I can mold yo life, you lookin good girl show you right, Dre told me you tha poder type, I can make you a celebrity overnight..."
We have reached a curious post modern time when it is cool to be black...in white face. The mirror phase of self-identification has turned into the fun house mirrors. Identifying oneself with blackness has taken on a broader meaning now that this particular form of blackness is simulated in technicolor 12 hours a day at 4 minute intervals. The masses are stimulated by the simulation of black womanhood as personified by the videos on MTV.
This paper attempts to look at the representation of the black female as a prop for MTV videos. As Gramsci relates, the reality of hegemonic representation rests on institutions of inequality, the struggle of these groups to reshape the boundaries requires challenging the foundations of societal institutions. But you see if I challenge the fundamental inequity of having to exist as a prop, I risk the result of not existing at all. Jay-z may have 99 problems but a bitch ain't one but this bitch has one. The images tell me not only that I am the bitch, but that the pleasure the male gaze derives is for a particular type of bitch and if I want attention, want to be, I must conform to that image.
This treatise hopes to illustrate that the virtual land of no borders in video representation
defines me, the black female through four minute visual bites in my technicolor ass. This
representation a projection of the self sublimates itself to the Lacan subject in a two dimensional form. I am being told, to accept my projected image or risk not being at all. I am as Lacan describes a subject that is quite literally, a hallucinatory, imaginary semblance of coherence, a mere pretense of imaginary identification upon which my self-identity depends.
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Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Perhaps MTV was too broad -- have you thought about proposing a different topic to Open Court?
Comment by postmoderncritic
Postmodern Critic
Daily Inspirations
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
You can check out their entire range here (I searched for 'philosophy' so there's some other volumes in the results)... some of the other titles have included 'Baseball and Philosophy', 'The Sopranos and Philosophy' and 'Bullshit and Philosophy' so I don't think it was too broad, but Bill Irwin receives a lot of proposals (and wasn't expecting to see a CFP for a PC and Philosophy book that he hadn't personally approved of)... Most presses only accept offers at certain points in the year, and are often booked out a year or more in advance. Also, you need to have a degree in Philosophy (possibly at graduate level, but don't take my word for it) to be considered because apparently the ppl in charge have pretensions to caring what reactionary academics that find pop culture analysis threatening think.
If I wanted to edit a collection of essays, I would do something very similar to this, but I realised in trying to organise S(t)imulation! that I just wasn't willing to go through the crap currently associated with publishing back then. Maybe I'll give it another try sometime in the future... It was lovely to find out that there were such original thinkers out there.
Epiphanie