"The state of sociology now is the same as physics when they believed the world was flat."Posting this ‘paper’ on the internet, as opposed to having you read a word document felt like a dense thing to do. And despite my semi-best efforts, it might likely play as a cheesy and unkempt move—a rather lazy way to cash in on novelty not unbecoming of Marshall McLuhan. This is graduate school, after all. Tricks like this are a thing of undergraduate self-indulgence. But, I intend(ed) this to be a piece on methods, on how we approach our work, and what technology is supposed to mean for us, on the constraints it places on what we create, and our interpretation of authority.
-katsi
It means something that I hesitated hyperlinking the hell out of some of these paragraphs. It also means something that I debased experimentation as a lower form of academic practice. This vague meaning should be clarified by the last period of this essay. At the very least, an internet post makes the point that there are no final drafts.
This piece is more or less a response to Elizabeth Daley’s article on expanding our definition of literacy, and the implications of moving research beyond the printed page. Her short and brisk meditation on the possibilities of new media is overzealous and at times approaches hyperbole, but grasps at important parts of Cinthia Gannett, Brian Street and Deborah Brandt. I place this piece at the center of the intersecting concepts of objectivity, ideology, discourse, and sponsorship. These concepts, finely intertwined with one another, make up equal parts of social science’s narrative. These four things aren’t everything, but serve as exposition for creating a distinctive new voice (genre) without looking like a spacey fad.
One of the first things we learn about narrative in elementary school is that we must have a protagonist, and the protagonist must face conflict in order to drive the story. So at the outset of this methodology, we should determine the characters, the swashbuckling action hero of social science, the genre in which this story is written, its context and point of view. The traditional hero, Reason, riding on his horse of Empiricism, faces off against the Kingdom of Irrationality and has often drawn his mighty sword of Objectivity, to vanquish the tyranny of Emotion. He frees the Rational Agent from their shackles of Faith and the Particular to live in the world of Truth and Abstraction, the Kingdom of Modernity. The printed word is God.
What about a different narrative—let’s take the heroine of Relativity. Einstein took quite kindly to her. True relativity, anyway, rather than the “everything-goes-pandemonium” that she is often taken to be. Time and space mean everything to understanding the world, because the world is not understood as a block of interacting equations and theorems. Local is the key to understanding local. Relativity is the Johnny Appleseed of the theoretical world. She (despite the giant body of postmodern work fighting in her name) suspects theory, as Appleseed suspected the natural world, and planted into the soil things that grow, that are vibrant at the molecular level, and, at the collective surface, build a new environment altogether. Kingdoms aren’t universal. We have communities. We don’t know who God is.
I hope that wasn’t too spacey. Or too linear.
The first vision is the vision of ourselves when we do research, or it’s the vision that socializes us. (Note the introduction of Brian Street’s ideological model of discourse here). There are other ways to approach the act of storytelling that is science, but they are often marginalized and take time to emerge into the accepted center. For example, constructing narratives, in a semi-diluted form has come to be a respected method for studying how law works when it affects real people. In Daley’s world, I would have animated the preceding paragraphs in a software program, mixed in some dialogue and premiered it on the department’s website. Would moving images and sound give a better understanding of the convoluted string of sentences? Is it necessary?
Would it be as odd if we had to ask if printed words are necessary for answering questions posed in our current forms of research? The “is this a trick question” answer is yes. We have no counter-example to prove otherwise. Even Daley’s ideas are presented to us in a written format. The computer programs are written in a language. The scripts for the multimedia presentation are written before they are spoken into the mixing board. Typing encodes the DNA of knowledge, whether it is eventually presented to us in pictures, video or sound. These files are still coded in binary, a kind of universal language.
Or maybe this is her point— that we build off the world we know now in order to understand the “rhetorical codes” of the screen. The central question to writing, to the way social science is produced, and the way it’s accepted, is why technological change is necessary. Scratch that. The central question is: what else we’re supposed to do with technology as it changes. Daley’s push to recognize images and sound as a literate medium for arguing complex thoughts, rearranges the production of knowledge so we may ask different questions and know different experiences.
The irony in the current praise of the printed word is that, in proper folklore, the enlightenment, the new age of reason, is said to have begun in a picture. According to Gerald Delanty, Da Vinci’s vanishing point on the horizon, his introduction of perspective into the world is said to have destroyed the omniscience of God (the Christian one), giving humanity their individual ability to see, to approach the world as an individual, subjective, agent. This is the story of modernity. Mankind frees himself through logical revelation. The image told the Truth. Spacey?
We’ve done one of the first things that Cinthia Gannett said the feminist scholars have been working towards—reorienting the perspective from which we work and the priorities that we have taken to be natural assumptions. Apply it to why I chose to make Reason a decidedly male character and code Relativity with some earth-mother genes. Gannett wrote on the ‘maleness’ of science, on its authority and its institution of assumptions as natural law. The sexist assumptions she points out are well-known to the combatants of history’s traditional discourse: the male as the point of comparison for language, the silencing of women’s perspective, the denigration of their role in public society. Gannett speaks of a world that thrives on the unbalance maintained by assumed binaries and dichotomies.
Academic discourse is created within these binaries, so the genres produced, the nature of the questions asked, are inherently ideological. Daley tells us that the opposition between emotion/subjectivity and reason/objectivity is null once we decide to step outside of text. The assumption in modernity is that people (in the abstract) will react to reason rather than emotion, that they can be separated from each other and one will prevail in making a choice. These concepts are tied down to linearity, the thinking that pumps blood through the heart of science—causality. Something happens, then something else happens. We have a reason for studying the things we do and a reason for people to give us money to study these things. Causality. Objectivity is needed to clearly, without impediment, state why something happened and we arrive at this conclusion through logical reasoning. It is not the role of the researcher to subvert objectivity. Research methods continue supporting assumptions.
Images lie, so the story’s told. Daley tells writes about the Kuleshov effect, where the same image is juxtaposed against different objects in order to project different emotions to the audience. Images lie, and if we listen to Cinthia Gannet, the same can be said of words. Lie—we’re getting farther and farther away from Truth the deeper we question assumptions. So let’s reorient our position again.
Images interpret reality, as do words. The authoritative voice of social science had interpreted males to be the point of comparison, the generic “he” in the text. Images, words, do not necessarily have to lie, but they are limited in their point of view, and a linear explanation for the world is as limiting as the perspective the author uses to approach the problem. We get away from truth and encounter perspectives. This is where the humanists, the protectors of voice, get a reputation for being mushy. Daley writes that the emotional life of a film portrayal of history is just as valid as trying to put together an accurate interpretation. The viewer just needs to be trained in these “rhetorical codes” to really appreciate them. Subjectivity is not at odds with objectivity but the two share the same relationship with reality.
Maybe this is what Avery Gordon means when she writes, “fiction is getting pretty close to sociology.” The story is not broken up into facts, but the facts are influenced by the story. She continues: “Social reality seems made-up and real at the same time. Lots of people claim to know this now; some people claim to have known it all along. But what do we know, really, beyond this abstract collective cognitive familiarity with the making, the making-up, of social facts?” If the story is not fully known, and may be half made-up, then linearity is bungled and knotted. Printed word doesn’t always reflect this.
Apocalypto, a recent film directed by Mel Gibson, was shredded by an anthropologist for presenting violent pornography in place of history. Others say that it is more of a morality play, with the Mayan civilization serving as metaphor for the decline of civilization. Film, if we take Daley at her word, is a discourse that can be argued with, in the same way that scholars contest each other within the journal pages of “normal” social science. The role of technology, its discourse and grammar, then, is something that needs to be mastered in order to be debated, as a Marxist would comb through the finer points of Hegel to build on the flaws of another Marxist’s research.
If we choose to accept her claim, that film is the new vernacular and the screen has developed as a new form for reality, we then have to ask when this new technology is an appropriate tool. It’s difficult to argue that screen isn’t the most pervasive and ubiquitous language, at least within American society, where many new memories have been created by cathode rays and silver screens. This was the base for Neil Postman’s mourning the loss of the typographical mind to one dominated by images. His objection was that the mind was becoming lazy and incapable of dealing with complexity, a charge that has not lost followers, and often accepted as commonplace.
Daley says that this is nonsense—film has the capability to be as rigorous as any journal article, the work, just like the task of research, needs to be commanded. Like the academic model of producing knowledge, this new media will have people producing knowledge with varying technical skills. We start to get into philosophical questions about what technology was “meant” to do. So we look towards the history of what was writing meant for, at least for the communities that practiced writing. For the empires around Mesopotamia, it was introduced as an accounting device. It’s still used as much for that as it is for a literary critic to cover the legacy left behind by John Steinbeck.
What were computers meant for? Their early ancestors were primarily introduced as industrial creations for warfare and cataloging Holocaust victims. Origins matter, but not as much as how we’ve come to use it, because this is where we get into maintaining responsibility, where science has had to face up to the duty coupled with technological change. We ascribe greater functions to the work we do as technology improves. Acknowledging this balance is the difference between creating social art and propaganda. That we have to keep aware that film is a deeply ideological model of discourse may seem like trite commentary, but, like other mediums, it is only when we are aware of its trappings that the medium becomes really interesting.
For instance*, the human rights group, B’Tselem, based in Israel, has taken the testimony of Palestinian refugees for the past twenty years. These reports are written, and are meant to document the abuses from Israeli settlers. Recently B’Tselem has begun giving the Palestinians video cameras in addition to trying to take testimony about their victimization. Oren Yakobovich talks about the change that film has brought into the grievance process:
OREN YAKOBOVICH: First of all, they do respond to reports, this I have to say. Every time we’re getting a report out, we’re getting back a reaction from the army, a letter written in reaction. And we publish it together with our report. It’s very important to have this and to make sure that it’s there, that we know how the army will respond to this report. The thing is that they’re asking us to film now. The army and the police are asking us to film. They’re telling us, “If you have things that’s happening, please bring us the video[.]”
Documentary evidence has become a vehicle for truth, or at least, being able to prove that something happened. The area we now approach is what this has to do with research as we know it and the transformation our work can undergo.
Using film, or any media beyond text, is a secondary acquisition, but any new skill gained has been traditionally applied only within the proper discipline. So sociology remains within its own theories, as does political science, economics, and education. True, there are inter- and multidisciplinary projects, but in order to be taken seriously, the researcher must establish themselves in their proper field. To take on this new genre is to take on its identity, its toolkit, and we can’t fool ourselves by thinking that using new technology doesn’t have these constraints. The new technology is a tool rather than a disciplinary orientation, but this doesn’t negate the fact that Daley’s use of media still rooted within film, a branch of aesthetics with a complex, if short, history.
This is a natural block to add to James Gee’s “discourse”—an identity tool kit that an individual uses to become part of that group. A change in identity, from the typographic agent to the multimedia rogue, carries new sets of knowledge, priorities and tools for chipping at the unknown. We don’t lose the old identity when we utilize images and sound rather than text, but gain the skills to tap into different parts of culture. This will naturally affect the kind of work we’re going to be able to do, the research we will be able to conduct. When you take on this identity it affects the kinds of jobs available for this toolkit.
So we enter the question of sponsorship. Whether it is published on the record or not, researchers have a good idea of the structure of the academic world and what their relationship to knowledge is constructed to be. The structure of academia, for all its claim to produce and share knowledge, is largely built around keeping outsiders from crossing disciplinary conversations, much less those outside of academia from entering the conversation. Deborah Brandt writes about the unconditional disparate relationship between those who sponsor literacy and those who benefit from the skills learned in the process.
These sponsors, the abstract institutional climate, the benefits rewarded towards people who abide by “publish or parish,” and the punishments doled out to those who don’t serve as the gatekeepers of social science’s discourse. Literacy, being able to enter into the academic world and play a role in its narrative is contingent on pleasing these gatekeepers. The availability of information is usually restricted, as when Journals and its Articles are subscription-based, available on an institutional basis, restricted for residents within gated community.
This set-up isn’t an arbitrary creation, but is vital to the funding of new research, where results can be had, where incremental nudges can push a particular theory into accepted social fact. Promising results are how grant applications get through committees and how universities keep their endowment. “If it’s not published in a journal, it doesn’t exist,” wrote Mitchell Waldrop. So, the new frame, the emerging question is whether theory can exist without journals, if there can be such a thing as an open-source social science. In this scenario, there wouldn’t be knights on a crusade, but people within a community, making ideas grow into some form of practice.
Drop “first author, second authorship” obsession in research and blend multiple viewpoints into a work, but pay attention to the fault lines between perspectives. The ownership of ideas isn’t on the verge disappearing and this isn’t the point of true collaboration or the community model of producing social science, but signals new ways to use citations. It’s the same model that Daley points out exists in filmmaking, where a movie is not made by one person, despite the “film by” credit. This particular model would just be more egalitarian, where participants push the project along in equal ways, receiving proper credit for their contribution. This could be something like a collaborative content analysis where images, text, are interpreted by a group of people. A series of texts can serve as a soundboard for interpretation, where the act of creating the interpretation is just as important as the final product. The social act as an important part of the social analysis.
The critics can brand this as a convoluted repackaging of “relativism,” the beast without edges, where we lose ground with reality, and therefore lose any chance for a practical application. Not to mention, that the traditional barometer for judging scholars gets thrown out the window. The only thing I can say in response is that imagination is a scary thing. Not the imagination that actively lies, or acts as a trickster, but the social imagination that can work beyond treating the individual as the final reducible unit.
Of course the relationship of these new technologies to its old mainframe is indefinite. The Journal is King, and serves as the primary mode for introducing new ideas and anything outside of it appears as a distraction. It’s a tweaked version of the narrative explaining the supposed collapse of the mainstream media in the midst of independent agents—diarists. The argument of the professional journalists is that these diarists—bloggers—wouldn’t be able to do the job of reporting themselves, and wouldn’t even be able to exist without the reporters it often criticizes.
The use of information has evolved to the point where the assumptions of the official storytellers have been questioned and the old models of news-making have changed. For better or worse, this fallibility has made reporters more reflexive of the work they do, and the use of doubt from the traditional bottom of the hierarchy— the masses— is the niche where Daley’s argument makes the most sense. Information, within the journalists' and the academic systems' narrative, is not spared from the forces of technological change. The more this becomes apparent, the harder it is for these sponsors to accept it.
Institutional change is built into any structure, despite the visible strains of conservative resistance. As in Deborah Brandt’s piece, the skills learned for a specific purpose can be useful for anything outside that purpose. Daley, while her argument would be far-out for the mainstream social scientists, keeps her appeal to the fence-sitters, those who don’t know if they should trust things not written.
These are the people who aren’t sure how seriously to take “multimedia” as a concept, or if devolves into just buzzwords on the disappearing edge of a fad. She insists that there can be rigor, and that the sites for these new representations begin in universities. These are restrictions to access, to be sure, but she tells us that students in the K-12 system are slowly getting the benefit, even if these resources aren't as readably available as a pen and paper. It’s the first inklings of a jailbreak, the margins inching out the mainstream center. The possibilities of actually pushing very far in this direction look bleak for the immediate future. Any academic who wants to work through a new genre won't be likely to do so soon, but this doesn't stop people from working with nonacademics outside of traditional circles of truth. This might be the first step to unfurling the edges of discipline on research.
With that stated, we have to ask if this all matters. Have we set any approach we can take within social science, within sociology as an undiscipline? Social science is an art and this is how we should ultimately apply Elizabeth Daley’s article. Science can be a complex art, and the brushstrokes we use, the medium, will paint vastly different pictures. Charcoal emphasizes shades in a way that pastels don’t, as linear perspective will emphasize depth while abstract art will be inclined to express contrast and difference.
We wouldn’t be confined to using one medium, as Dada wasn't just confined to using porcelain. The "vernacular of the screen" shouldn’t replace old methods, but work in collaboration with the traditional methods of storytelling. In the end, we can say that it’s all art, as we can say that in the end, it’s all research, but we must be conscious of why we’re using these tools in the first place and how our identity will change the nature of the questions we ask and the answers we find.
