[-empyre-] context is everything, metadiscourse more?

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

> 
> At 20:48 +0000 21/6/02, Lachlan Brown wrote:
> >Vertov?! Why so much Vertov?! Patrick references Vertov, you reference Vertov,
> >Lev Manovitch cites Vertov. October #100 references new media's 
> >citation of Vertov
> >to bemoan the 'obsolescence' of Psychoanalytic Film Theory. Studies 
> >of Cinema began
> >a couple of generations after the emergence of the cinema. Scholars and theory
> >>preceded hypermedia. There's no correlation at all.
> 
> >can speak for the others. for myself it is that in "man with a movie 
> >camera" vertov has let himself be explored by the process of being 
> >cinema, or being in cinema and so a machinic vision emerges. i tend 
> >to think all the work on the film that emphasises its self reflexive 
> >modernism sort of misses the point, at least to the extent that it 
> >gets grounded in vertov. so for me 'man with a movie camera' is more 
> >like the child's story where the baby duck walks around askig 
> >different things "are you my mother?". 
> 

I'm sure that many women in Film and Video would love to be Mother to
the man with the cam, and its probably quite wise of you (you'll want a career 
in academia I suppose) to provide the analogy for generational affinities
online for the Women.

It's certainly a more preferable similie than Jill's thoughts on emergence and us
being like ants thinking the same thing (Zamyatin's WE is a good
text imagining such a future, 1922), can't agree with the ant or the bee plan 
myself, sounds appalling, but must we employ similies and metaphors from the 
world of fauna - insects and birds, brainstem and R-Compex faculties, to explain social and cultural phenomenon and behaviour among humans?

I mean, aren't we people, social beings, cultural beings? The sum 
of a set of natural, social and cultural contracts? I can see how the use 
of Vertov appeals to a prevailing (if obviously temporary, roll on August) power economy in  Screen Studies as mediator of new media 'technology', and I see the empires of career interest built like a house of dominos (thanx Patrick) but 
perhaps Vertov was filming to a different cultural context and most definitely a 
different scholarly and artistic economy?
 
I wonder why we need to reference Vertov and priviledge filmic disourse
over the cultural contexts of new media? To my mind the social and cultural geographies provide greater purchase on the matrices of production, 
distribution, consumption, regulation and governance of 'technology' 
(if you want 5 [arbitrarily Barthian] precepts for a new media though we could chuck 'representation' in too and make it 6) that help to define the new sets of relations of mediation as well as communicative behaviour.

The blog + video links are great. Particularly http://www.solublefish.tv/blog/index.html,
particularly the triptych '11/02/01 ALL THIS'.



lachlan



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