Media, Masculinities, and the Machine

F1, Transformers, and Fantasizing Technology at its Limits

Dan Fleming, Damion Sturm

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781623565114
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441156761
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media, Masculinities, and the Machine identifies a distinctive phenomenon in today's media culture - the contemporary male fantasy of 'suiting up' and pushing technology to its limits. The authors deconstruct this fantasy using two in-depth studies from American, British and global media: the social imagining of hi-tech in the long-running Transformers franchise and global Formula One motorsport, with links to numerous other areas of contemporary culture. By drawing on non-representational theory and the latest theories of affect while employing the method of autoethnography to explore what boys and men 'want' and say, the book offers a timely contribution to our understanding of contemporary cultural attachments. The book provides informative accounts of two instances united by their apparent gender focus and by their interest in ways of imagining high-tech. Tracking their theme through TV, cinema, toys, magazines, merchandising, and the culture of the gadget, the authors raise important questions about mediated masculinities today and propose a new theoretical framework for uncovering what is going on.

Chapter 1

The Android Imaginaire (Jacques, Move Your Body)

Things have found a way of avoiding a dialectics of meaning that was beginning to bore them: by proliferating indefinitely, increasing their potential, outbidding themselves in an ascension to the limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their immanent finality and senseless reason.

But nothing prevents us from assuming that we could obtain the same effects in reverse . . .

—Jean Baudrillard 1990a, 7

In order to explain why we want to look at Formula One (F1) racing and Transformers, especially in relation to the “things” that constitute them and what might connect them, we have to take a brief detour via Baudrillard. One does not want to be too interested in Jean Baudrillard these days. The once prophet of postmodernism had his supposed credentials as the most radical theorist of the postmodern debunked by the not unsympathetic Douglas Kellner (1989). After he left his full-time academic position at the University of Paris, Nanterre, in the late 1980s, his prolific theory-fictions became ever more wickedly self-referential, if not in fact self-defeating, and susceptible to easy dismissal as cynical reality-denying intellectual puffery. The membership of his 1966 doctoral dissertation committee—Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, and Henri Lefebvre—place him in a very particular moment of French intellectual life. As that moment has faded behind more apparently rigorous ongoing responses to it than Baudrillard’s, his highly eccentric response has come to seem considerably less interesting than it did for a while. But Baudrillard’s sympathetic presence in the sociology department at Nanterre in 1968 when the “March 22nd” student protest movement, having begun there, took over the University’s administration building (their manifesto calling for “outright rejection of the capitalist technocratic university”) is only one reminder of how unhelpful it has always been to reject Baudrillard’s intellectual project as reality-denying per se. In fact, of course, it was always a very particular reality that Baudrillard was denying (“Never believed in reality: I respect it too much to believe in it” (2006, 1)). The logic of Baudrillard’s response to that reality (to the accelerating object-saturated “real more real than real” as Douglas Kellner dubs it (1989, 156)) included turning his “theory” increasingly against itself, one last reversal in his project to “reverse” the objects that constituted a reality he wanted strategically to deny. Perhaps one does not want to be too interested in Jean Baudrillard these days, but his unsettling “fatal strategy” still channels potent echoes from the corridors of the Nanterre sociology department of 40 or so years ago. What happens when these echoes faintly reverberate in the pedagogical relationship around a doctoral project in cultural studies on the other side of the world so many years later, where interests in motor racing fandom and boys’ toys seem to tell a story, not just of the de-radicalized banality of the humanities in the technocratic university, but of how the field of cultural studies has eventually disappeared up its own trivia? This small book is what happens.

When a boy plays enchantedly with a new toy car that transforms into an alien robotic life-form in his hands and when a man watches on television with a pounding heart an F1 racer in a fast red car putting his life pointlessly on the line as he speeds to overtake another car at a gravity-defying corner, something beyond our older everyday notions of a consumer society is going on. The packaging on the floor beside the boy and the Ferrari-branded shirt the man is wearing (perhaps even in the privacy of his own home in front of the television) remind us of the commodifications involved, but the relative uselessness of these things insists also on their sign-value (as Baudrillard put it). We can almost map the tripartite membership of Baudrillard’s thesis committee onto these scenes. Lefebvre is telling us that the minutiae of everyday life and the ordinary spaces where it takes place are worth studying. Bourdieu is telling us that these acts of consumption do indeed carry value over and above any particular use that the object in question might have, and that there will be a socially determined “field” where this value gets constructed and even ranked. Barthes is telling us that such objects of everyday life function within systems of signification where their meanings depend on their positioning in the system, not on any inherent meaning. Older ideas, such as the view that some more straightforward gratification of needs is going on in these scenes, even if merely for entertainment, suddenly seemed incapable of capturing things in the way that these later perspectives did. If the man lifts the toy off the floor, when the boy has finished playing with it, and takes it to a toy collectors’ market, he will have entered a field in which, toy in hand, he has not just an easy fit but a “value.” If instead he is walking toy-in-hand down the corridor of a university, still wearing his Ferrari shirt, he will have (in the field of academia) a harder task to establish either fit or value, though these days not an impossible one. (If he takes the right turn with his toy into the Psychology faculty, or perhaps Education, he should be OK as play is a respectable object of study there, whereas he can always take his team shirt into Sports Studies.) Thus, something interesting starts to get exposed about the management of passions.

Fandom is a field that recuperates these things in various ways, first as the field where boy and man can maintain enthusiasms around their objects: the boy can outgrow the toy as mere plaything but become a fan of Transformers (with its whole seductive meaning-making media system), and the man as “toy collector” or moviegoer can share that field. Second, as an overlaid field of academic studies: the man is even allowed to be a “fan-scholar” (a fan whose fandom absorbs scholarly perspectives on the object of fan interest) or a “scholar-fan” (a scholar who shares fan interests as a participant observer). The Ferrari shirt in the university setting may then become a statement of ironic self-knowingness. But Baudrillard resurfaces for us here in two ways: he was, for a while, one of those intellectuals who became themselves the object of “theory fandom” (of intense enthusiasm from his academic and artist fans) and, even as this was happening, he developed the cautionary fatalism that still has the potential to turn our sloppier thinking about fandom—and cultural enthusiasms generally—on its head.

From his early position of seeing consumer society as a Barthesian system of signs within which object consumption functioned as an induction into the system (which he did in fact view as a need, albeit no longer for the objects themselves), Baudrillard worked up his theory of symbolic exchange to the point where one key idea became increasingly dominant in his writing: the systemic impossibility of symbolic exchange in an object-saturated world. In relation to reification—the great theme of human subjects becoming things that has coursed through twentieth century Marxist cultural criticism—this idea got Baudrillard into some trouble. He offered, for example, the story of the male seducer who, asked by a woman what part of her he finds most attractive, says “your eyes,” and receives a bloody eyeball in an envelope the next day. The object, via this contaminative and invasive reversal, is exposed as dominant. As with most of these provocative scenarios, Baudrillard meant this in a deliteralized way. Not only does this very deliteralization somewhat privilege Baudrillard’s own abstracted knowing position and salve the rawness of the real relations momentarily if metaphorically glimpsed in the little horror story, but it describes an impossible exchange and therefore leaves those real relations untouched by the possibility of change, caught in stalemated histories and fixed object relations that fail to admit the unpredictable efficacy of real struggles. Baudrillard’s later theory-fictions chased this kind of exchange to and fro across the cultural landscape. All such instances of exchange are perhaps variations on those 1968 students seeming to return the “gift” of their university educations; and all such instances look increasingly impossible at the systemic level where nothing really (ex)changes, where even the real refuses to return anything to the sign, leaving us surrounded by “more real than real” simulations.

One does not want to be too interested in Jean Baudrillard these days, but his distinctive move toward the fatal strategy in response to all of this (“nothing prevents us from assuming that we could obtain the same effects in reverse . . .”) has, for us, been the single most potent counter force to the jauntily cheerful populism that infiltrated cultural studies over the same period. Meaghan Morris first raised the alarm about this back in 1990: “I get the feeling that somewhere in some English publisher’s vault there is a master disk from which thousands of versions of the same article about pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption are being run off under different names with minor variations” (1990, 21); she went so far as to question whether much of this was really even partially redeemed any longer by a populism that at least viewed any signs of life under particular reifying circumstances as a prototypically political thing in itself. There have been a lot of variations on the theme (of people making their own “resistant” meanings from what they receive) struck from this master disk—ranging from what Matt Hills calls variations on the “see-saw model” of decoding/reading cultural texts (2005, 64), through various invocations of transgressive pleasures and on to clever forms of cultural consumption as a potential tactic of empowerment or a practice of “poaching” across the cultural landscape under the noses of duped landowners, the old producers of culture whose big houses are crumbling as the poachers sap their strength. The new media landscape even seems to have reconfigured itself more around the activities of the poachers. The “see-saw model” makes it clear that an assumed exchange is taking place between given meanings, on one side, and negotiated (tipping . . .) or oppositional (tipping more . . .) meanings on the other side, whether these meanings reside in “readings” or other anti-gamekeeping practices. Cultural studies scholars (in Meaghan Morris’ “thousands of versions”) have proved adept at “finding” the elements in cultural texts that encourage the see-saw to tip and this (briefly specialized) ability has been increasingly projected onto people generally, the assumption being that they are doing much the same a lot of the time. So, two decades on from Meaghan Morris’ early moment of concern, one can randomly select an academic conference in this field, then randomly select an abstract from the conference papers, and find Lien Fan Shen’s paper about Japanese animations and comics (anime and manga) at MiT5 (MIT’s “Media in Transition” conference 2007), “Anime pleasures as a playground of sexuality, power and resistance.” This took us less than 3 minutes via Google. The abstract says:

This paper argues that . . . anime images embody the pleasure of evasion and the pleasure of transgression as a form of resistance . . .. Further, these evasive and transgressive pleasures empower anime otaku (commonly referring to obsessive fans . . .) to go beyond image consumption, actively and constantly changing, manipulating, and subverting anime images in their practices, such as creating amateur manga, peer-to-peer networks and websites, and anime cosplay (costume role-play).

The abstract goes on to say that these practices represent a “playful politics” in which identities and the social structures “in which they reside” are subjected to “deassurance.” The appearance of the last term here is interesting, as it was used by political scientists Karklins and Petersen in a 1993 paper to describe how in 1989 popular mass protests brought down the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, employing what they describe as a complex “deassurance game” in which instruments of state coercion were undermined. The mapping of “rebellious behavior” (Karklins and Petersen 1993, 588) from the situation of a populace under a repressive regime into the field of consumption of popular culture elsewhere and not under explicit repression is an interesting elision of differences in the real circumstances involved (hinging on a generalization of the word “game”) but is not untypical of how populist cultural studies has appropriated terms such as evasion, transgression, subversion, and resistance. (Lien Fan Shen does not cite Karklins and Petersen on “deassurance” as these kinds of term circulate freely in cultural studies.)

Now we are being very unfair here to Lien Fan Shen as a randomly selected example, since the point is that so much work in cultural studies is of this sort. Indeed playing the game of institutionalized cultural studies has often required generating this sort of material. But Jean Baudrillard is still capable, from beyond the grave, of “deassuring” this particular game. First, there are no “see-saw” models in Baudrillard’s vision of things: “The world is not dialectical—it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium” (1990a, 7). We take this, of course, not as an assertion of fact to be accepted but as a rhetorical counterblast to the easy optimism derived from the “see-saw” modeling that has insinuated itself, in a variety of forms, into the very logic of cultural studies as a field (where theoretical debates have been more about the nature of the “see-saw” than about its existence). Second, words such as evasion, transgression, subversion, and resistance in the “soft” arena of cultural consumption, apart from their dependence very often on “see-saw” theory and an increasing vagueness about their “other”—what exactly is there on the other end of the see-saw?—also imply that all the energy invested in these cultural attachments, practices, and enthusiasms develops some sort of negative charge or “critical” reflexivity (somehow knows or experiences itself as “resistant”). In response, we have Baudrillard’s reminder that there is “no longer any negative energy arising from the imbalance between the ideal and the real” (1996, 64). And again, we take this only as a reminder that “negative energy” is not to be so easily claimed. Except that, in our preceding half dozen paragraphs here, we want to point out one moment where some kind of energy may have been triggered. Ironically, it was when we were quoting Baudrillard himself.

That story about the eyeball in the envelope is the only moment in the preceding text that stood some chance of triggering an affective engagement with the words on these pages, a moment where a certain kind of energy made itself felt. Not only does the little horror story trigger this response but beyond it “Baudrillard” as a name does too, and this (positively) became the condition of his brief status within theory fandom, as well as (negatively) the dominant register within which much “Baudrillard” criticism took place (e.g., a revulsion rationalized as criticism of his “theory”). Baudrillard seems to offer us that scene as a representation, and within representational thought it stages one of those impossible symbolic exchanges as well as seeming to betray the efficacy of real struggles that do not resort to such nightmarish stagings (where “Baudrillard” seemed sinisterly complicit with so many contemporary nightmares in the end). However, there is another way of thinking about such moments—that is, moments rather than representational stagings—and this is to understand them as nonrepresentational stagings of affect. It is impossible not to think about how the woman felt when told that the man preferred her eyes, how she felt when she gouged one out and placed it in the envelope, how he felt when he opened it, and—most important of all—how we feel thinking of these things. If we can divest this latter feeling of its particular and antecedent representational details, what lingers is the feeling that we have grasped something.

Only once did Baudrillard come close to being explicit about this in his own writing, and then only obliquely by quoting a modern translation of Chuang Tzu (or Zhuangzi, the fourth century BCE Chinese philosopher). This comes, without commentary, at the end of the essay “Objects in This Mirror” in The Perfect Crime. Baudrillard quotes the passage in full but we will briefly summarize it. Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu are looking at minnows darting about in a river when the former observes, “That is the pleasure of fishes!” Hui Tzu challenges him on how he knew this (“You not being a fish yourself”) and Chuang Tzu challenges Hui Tzu on how he could possibly know that Chuang Tzu does not know (“you not being I”). Hui Tzu retorts, “If I, not being you, cannot know what you know . . . it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know in what consists the pleasure of fishes.” Just as we start to feel that this exchange could go on for a very long time, Chuang Tzu says, “Let us go back . . . to your original question” and then: “Your very question shows that you knew I knew. For you asked me how I knew. I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge” (Baudrillard 1996, 88–9).

The sense of suddenly rolling back the representational schemas here to a specific affective moment of engagement is quite striking, not least when we go back to it in the context of Baudrillard’s book and discover that it is Baudrillard the photographer (a “thing among things” (ibid., 88)) who is writing at this point, the Baudrillard who “feels” an object world with a camera in his hands; who, as it were, is photographing the minnows. We intend to do several things from this point. We want to roll back to Baudrillard’s doctoral committee and, instead of following a “Baudrillard” forward again with his uniquely eccentric take on that moment, we want to follow our own minnows while (a) still avoiding the “see-saw” models of cultural consumption, (b) focusing on nonrepresentational theory, and (c) tracing the “energy” that surfaces in affective moments.

Deriving the notion of a fatal strategy from Baudrillard will allow us to pursue each of these aims while remaining “fatally” on the side of the object as it were. Indeed our chosen objects—Formula One motor racing and Transformers—are meant to elicit from the outset a certain jaundiced sense of their intractability when it comes to locating any promise of potential for “evasion, transgression, subversion and resistance.” There is a certain brutality to these things, a gross materiality, a lack of subtlety, a stubbornness, an obduracy, an inconsequentiality, and there is not going to be some clever sleight of hand two thirds of the way into the book where we reveal them as unexpectedly after all the vehicles of a “playful politics” as Lien Fan Shen put it. Nor will Baudrillard, or any other star from the pantheon of theory fandom put in another appearance two thirds of the way in to tie things up neatly for us. On the other hand, we do want to reengage the discussion with Bourdieu, Lefebvre, and Barthes, or more properly with the bodies of ideas those names represent, in order to develop our three aims in relation to ideas about fields, everyday sites of consumption, and systems of meaning. This reengagement will often be implicit in what follows, although from time to time it will become clearer that we are doing so, not least where there are nonrepresentational alternatives at stake in relation to the more dominant modes enshrined in representational thinking.

Nigel Thrift (1997) provided the first neatly organized summary overview of nonrepresentational theory: “a major change has begun to take place in the way in which the social sciences and humanities are being thought and practised—but no one has really noticed” (126). Thrift, who later wrote a book about nonrepresentational theory (2008), suggested that this emerging theoretical reorientation was about practices (rather than representation), about subjectification (rather than subjects), about spatiotemporal processes (rather than static forms), about material networks with hybrid constituents (rather than things viewed in isolation), and that these practices, subjectifications, processes, and networks involve specific forms of embodiment, spatiality, and temporality: they are lived and take place in everyday life in describable ways, not as theoretical abstractions. Thrift then returned to the question of “resistance” and linked it to play: but not in terms of a “playfully” struggling subject on one end of a see-saw and “oppressive” structures of power on the other so much as, drawing on Larry Grossberg, some other kind of play that is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1:The Android Imaginaire (Jacques, Move Your Body)
• Chapter 2:Intensities and Affective Labor
• Chapter 3:The Scene of Autoaffection
• Chapter 4:Containment 1: The Strategy-Intensity Field
• Chapter 5:Containment 2: The Companionship of Things
• Chapter 6:Containment 3: Boys’ Toys
• Chapter 7:Masculinities, Vitality, and the Machine
• Afterwords
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index