The Race of Time: The Charles Lemert Reader (Paradigm Publishers, 2009) is finally out. My good friend Daniel Chaffee and I select key writings of Lemert, who some have called “the pre-eminent social theorist in America today.” We select writings from his long, illustrious career ranging from his early writings on religion to his recent writings on the “new individualism.” Also, we have a lengthy introduction to frame Lemert’s thought in the context of American sociology.
As students of Charles, Daniel and I are especially proud of this work. Paperback edition will be out soon.
This is a paper that I presented at a graduate student conference at Brown University on “the intellectual and history” in 2007. It was actually a great panel and conference. But I discovered that I was really the only one talking about media at all, which I found to be bizarre.
I’m painfully aware that many of my posts are responses and reactions to The Medium blog at the New York Times Magazine. I should probably cut them a check if this blog made any money (or had any readers…HIYOOOO). But until that happens, I’ll keep linking to it.
At any rate, Virginia Heffernan has posted a piece on YouTube and the avant-garde, where she contends that YouTube has not only created a new genre of video but also has forced us to reconsider what avant-garde means. At the heart of her position is the way that YouTube has “facilitated” (not sure what the right word is here) a formal shift over time.
Hit videos by amateurs in the site’s early days tried to produce the recognizable short-form genres that existed on TV: music videos (“Numa Numa”) and sketch comedy (“MySpace: The Movie”). But uploaders since have drifted from known forms, contributing entries now known only as “YouTube videos,” because it’s not clear what they would have been called before the advent of the site.
This is a great point. Short-form video that was neither “a short” as many film-makers call short films (which can be as long as 30 minutes) nor a television commercial, was basically an anomaly(with the obvious exception of video art). YouTube has not only found a home for this kind of thing, but more importantly, as Heffernan seems to be arguing, birthed it.
But what’s surprising is how little the homemade videos resemble the pro goods. Sure, there are parodies of mainstream clips here and there, but mostly the amateurs are off on their own, hatching new genres. Consider “haul” videos, in which people show off the stuff they recently bought, or the popular “fail” videos, which show all manner of efforts gone wrong. Individual haul and fail videos often attract 100,000 views or more — and no one had even imagined such genres until recently. At the same time, no one at any production company seems to be struggling to serve the haul-fail audiences (or combine them?).
Additionally, what’s so great about the genre of “YouTube videos” is that it decouples the avant-garde from class, allowing for access to the avant-garde for those without cultural and technological capital.
In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde. For years, I have believed this, and for years people have warned (or promised) me that any day now the heterogeneous site would be steamrolled by commercial forces that would wipe out the indigenous flora and fauna. But not only has the weird, small stuff hung around — out of sight of the home page, in many cases — but it also continues to be found by its audience. YouTube may not be making money as efficiently as Google once hoped it would, but it’s still incubating novel forms of creative expression and cultivating new audiences.
However, the question that remains is whether the “vernacularization” of the avant-garde leaves us…well…without an avant-garde. Inevitably, a critic like Frederic Jameson would argue that once there is a “massification” of formal techniques once associated with an auteur such as Godard or Sheeler and Strand, the “social mission” (aka its politics of resistance) of the avant-garde is stripped away. For instance, when pastiche, the technique utilized by many avant-garde movements across a variety of arts, is incorporated into a shampoo commercial, according to someone like Jameson, the antagonistic relation is gone. It is, in effect, a “blank parody,” as he once called it.
Now, I strongly disagree with Jameson’s assessment. It is at once utterly austere and reactionary. Further, it is also a position that is complicit, at worse, and indifferent, at best, regarding the relationship of art and class. Indeed, as Jameson has noted himself, the avant-garde had to come out of the upper classes, as it was their own bourgeois lifestyle that they were critiquing. (A great example of this would be Luis Bunuel’s comical film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), which is highly recommended.) So, are the working class and the poor relegated to politically unmotivated folk art, and emancipatory aesthetics left to the elite? It seems that Heffernan’s thesis raises a clear division in the debates surrounding aesthetics and politics, of which the Jacques Ranciere is a critical voice.(See a great interview on this very issue.[pdf])
Does one side with the “resistance” as an abstraction or does one side with “democratization” of technique?
Bonus: The trailer for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”
I’ve changed themes for the blog, as well as the header image. Not sure how I feel about it just yet. So if the header image changes back to the eBOY image, don’t be surprised. I changed it back. LOL.
I’m putting this up at the risk of vulnerability.(Vulnerable to suckiness that is.) This is a paper that I presented in 2007 at the Critical Themes in Media Studies conference at the New School, and I’m not sure how good it was/is. I was attempting to provide a critique of the concept of the “civil society” and what I believed to be a tendency among certain media scholars to view the Web as a simply an electronic civil sphere, using Michael Hardt and Bernard Stiegler, chiefly.
