Scholars Program in Culture & Communication
SPRING 2012 - Visiting Scholars
JOHN CALDWELL
COMM -
Media Industries and Cultures of Production
Thursdays 5:00-7:00pm
This seminar examines various theories and methods for the study of the film/TV industry and the communities of workers and professionals that comprise it. Our focus is not on “the production of culture” (i.e., how film/TV produce mass or popular culture through their movies and series) but rather on “cultures of production” (i.e., how production worlds themselves function as cultural expressions, social networks, and communities). Traditional critical and cultural studies tend to focus on how entertainment, aesthetic experience, ideology, meaning, pleasure, hegemony, identity, etc. are produced or formed by film/TV’s onscreen products (films, series, video games). But this course turns the table and will investigate the ways that those same societal downstream “effects” can also be seen as generative forces that cultivate certain approaches to production over others; and certain kinds of organization and behavior at studios and production companies rather than others.
John T. Caldwell, is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. His books include: Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke, 2008), Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (Rutgers, 1995), Electronic Media and Technoculture (ed., Rutgers, 2000), New Media: Digitextual Theories and Practices (co-edited, Routledge, 2003), and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (co-edited with Vicki Mayer and Miranda Banks, 2009). He is also the producer/director of the award winning feature documentaries Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath (1989) and Rancho California (por favor), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002.
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JOHN TAGG
COMM –
Photo/Text
Mondays 4:00-6:00pm
In the 1970s, adding text to a photograph took on the mantle of a radical act, politicizing the image by undoing its autonomy and affirming its character as sign. Such claims consciously echoed those made in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin for the political force of the caption. Yet, historically, it was exceptional for a photographic image to be encountered free from the overdeterminations of writing. From Talbot’s Pencil of Nature to the illustrated press of the 1890s, from the archiving systems of the late nineteenth century to the picture magazines of the 1930s, the photograph never occupied a pristine space. What does this tell us about radical theory in the 1930s and 1970s? More broadly, what does it entail for our view of photographic meaning, the notion of the purely visual image and attempts to define the history of photography as the history of a distinct medium? This seminar will come at these questions backwards, moving from postconceptual practices back to those hybrid technological products that prompted exaggerated expectations but also exacerbated deep uncertainties about the status of the photograph that haunt us still, all the more in the age of the photograph’s digital dissemination.
John Tagg is Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. His books, which often focus on the relationship between photography and power, include The Burden of Representation: Essays of Photographies and Histories, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field, and The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Regimens and the Capture of Meaning.
