COM 296A: Rhetoric and Popular Culture.

Course Discussion on Media and Violence.

Fall 1999.

When you see the Foot note link () follow it immediately to an elaboration on the subject matter being discussed.

Other links may be followed at your convenience.

The Issue.

When was the last time you tuned into media reportage of an "incident" of youth violence and heard a friend or neighbor say "Yeah, we were pretty sure he was going to snap at any moment." The perpetrator is always referred to as a "normal", "average" kid--the kid next door. We have, in fact, mythologized these acts so completely that we fail first to recognize and then to react to the underlying dynamics of the myth. For instance:

• What constitutes normal and/or average? Does the average "neighbor" actually make this judgment by imposing a standard of normalcy derived from contact with the individuals involved, or is the presumption of normalcy a defensive social construct employed by the individual in order to rationalize that nothing in his or her community needs "fixing" and by extension that he or she need contribute nothing to the solution? Do we, in other words still bother to know our neighbors well enough to judge their relative normalcy? If not, why not? If so, through what contexts and forums of interaction?
• The public response to rape, assault, intimidation and other forms of violence far more common--and in the aggregate, it can be argued, more detrimental to society than the occasional random shooting--seems dynamically different than that to school shootings and other related crimes. Sexual assault occurs with staggering regularity in and around our public schools. Intimidation and "bullying" are daily elements of the lives of many students (including many of those who commit the random acts of violence being discussed). Recently a number of well-documented and insightful analyses of the relationship between organized athletics violence have been made public. They have been marginalized by the major media and ignored by most of the general public. Why? Are the commercial ties between the corporations who provide professional sports (and rely on the collegiate "farm system" to boost profits) and the corporations that provide the news?
• Why do certain types of disenfrachisement relate so predictably to certain categories of violent response? From where does the motivation arise to attack an institution like a school in an all out weapons assault? Are there intermediate acts of violence? Property damage? etc? If the possession of fire arms is causative, why are these acts so infrequent in a country wherein there exist 220 million registered guns? If encounter with various popular culture texts is causative, does not the same question apply?
• Japanese audiences immerse themselves in programming which is far more gratuitously violent and imbicilic than ours, yet they seem to be able to employ those texts as means of ameliorating their violent urges, where they appear more likely to aggravate ours.

There are easy and obvious answers to these questions, but they do more to protect the commercial and political agendas of major interests and the cherished social isolationism of the average American than to actuall explain then state of American popular culture and its effect/influence on our behavior.

The project represented by The Home Page of that Quiet Guy Next Door is designed to teach the student how to interact meaningfully (and one hopes constructively) with wide scale communication phenomena. We will eschew the popular approach to cultural criticism--picking the explanation that best promises to enhance our professional reputations, tenures in office, and bank balances--in favor of a more methodical approach.

Step One: Terminology and Mechanics.

First we will address the vocabulary of the issue. What does it mean to cause a response as opposed to infuence , suggest, or promote? How do images, sounds, environments and other "vessels of meaning" differ, if at all, in their capacities to influence human activity?

Step Two: Theory.

What coherent explanations exist for why things work the way they do and are the way they are? Which explanations are sufficiently comprehensive and reliable to apply to specific texts and communication phenomena? How do concepts like quality and authenticity so often asserted by both the critics of and apologists for modern mass media texts invest themselves in the debate?

Step Three: Application.

Having established sufficient background for the elaboration of informed opinions, it will be time to generate some. How does the content of a given cultural text interact with the contexts into which it is introduced? How can a reasoning analyst test the emotional and/or propagandistic assertions of people who participate in the public dialogue?

If these categories appear to parallel the traditional three stage process of rhetorical criticism--describe, analyze, evaluate--it is because they are intended to. The purpose here, however, is not to arrive at conclusive answers. It is rather to give the student intense experience in the process of forming and asking the questions.

The Method.

In this model the Organism is any living construct. It can be a person, a plant or a system. It functions, in the systems view, by interacting with the other organisms (and conditions, but we are trying to keep this simple) in its environment. The classic grade school example is the relationship between the oxygen-breathing person and the carbon dioxide-breathing plant. A Stressor is a stimulus that threatens to damage or destroy the organism by attempting to interact with it. Sometimes those threats are intentional. They are called Direct Pathogens. Sometimes those threats are untintentional (Like when Aunt Sadie attempts to bond with you by squeezing your cheeks.). Those threats are called Indirect Pathogens. The organism responds in one or both of two ways. One way is the Syntoxic Response--the organism attempts to adapt itself and the stressor in ways that make their interactions healthier. Introducing alcohol into a tense social situation is a common example of this. Symbiosis is the strategy of readjusting the interacting between the two (e.g. establishing a common language). Tolerance is the strategy of adapting to the intrusion of the stressor so that it is less damaging. Catatoxic Responses are direct counter attacks. The organism attempts to fend off or destroy the intruder.

Having GROSSLY oversimplified the process, we can now employ it to analyze public discourse.

Figure 2:

The employment of the stress model depends on two presumptions:

1. That the Organism either possesses or perceives itself as possessing the general capacity to decide its own fate. In most cases the Organism used here will be either a person, an institution of people or a "community" of loosely organized but co-dependent individuals.

2. That the Environment can be defined Relatively. This simply means that the labelling of any given part of the environment is the product of one's vantage point and/or agenda. Is the Christian Coalition a catatoxic and/or Syntoxic response to a stressor or a stressor itself. The answer depends on the objective of the analyst (you know, You!).

Symbolic messages are formed and disseminated to meet needs. They are, in the terms of our model, attempts to sustain balance with one's environment. The Public Dialogue is the default organism here, because usually it is the introduction into that dialogue (vaporous as it may be) of new symbolic messages by individuals and/or institutions attempting to "renegotiate" the terms of balance that create or at least illuminate meaning conflicts.

Because we have presumed the organism to be self-actualizing (that is, able to do what it wants), we are defining stressors as insinuations against that basic presumption. In other words, stressors are insinuations into the environment the result of which is the limiting of the individual's self-actualization. I have broken those insinuations into two categories:

1. Corporatization: The action of defining group interests as higher priorities than individual interests.

2. Bureaucratization: The action of defining rote, patterned behavior as superior to spontaneous behavior.

The remaining elements of the model--pathogens and responses--will clarify themselves as case studies evolve.

Some Reading.

Basic Concepts of the Systems Approach. This is a copy of the link above.

Memes. This is a notion that words themselves act like organisms. Once spawned, they fight to survive, attack, devour and mate just like any other living thing.

Humanism. This is an overview of the subject of self-actualization from one point of view. Rather than making the mistake of equating the two, you should read up.

The Audience Will. This is my online Public Speaking Text. Its early chapters give a pretty basic overview of what is referred to above as objective communication. The link above takes you directly to the relevant chapter. This link takes you to the front door, in case you wish to browse.

The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Here is another take on how language works. I'm not a member, but I have never really been a joiner.

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Pretty much what it says.

How Americans Communicate. A Roper Poll describing in a little more detail how that vaporous mass to which I earlier referred actually functions.

Social Theory. Here is an overview of some theories of society. Like any good critique of capitalism, it features ads.

Literary Theory. A Marxist view on the whole individuality thing.

The Project.

1. Perhaps part of the violence is in our semantic willingness to refer to these tragedies as "incidental." Whether we realize it or not, the language we employ to describe a phenomenon profoundly influences how we perceive and respond to that phenomenon. Whether incidence or incident, the phenomenon referred to becomes "minor or casual or subordinate in significance" (Websters) as a result of having been so labelled. Such symbolic outrages occur in our language with alarming frequency. Does MTV sabotage its good intentions by urging its viewers to "Fight" for their right to nonviolence? Before you retreat behind the simple answer, consider the ramifications of the terms we casually employ. Can one fight for nonviolence? May not the metaphor of struggle = fight be part of the problem? Do not let the over-zealous attempts by "extremists" nor the fashionable backlash against "political correctness" blur the issue. (Back.)

2. Remember that this model is being used as an organizing device, a loose analogy. When I employ words like strategy and attack, I am deliberately animating functions that in the vast majority of cases are not conscious and/or deliberate.

3. This is by no means a definitive presumption. The extent to which people are philosophically and biologically self-actualizing is probably the most hotly contested issue in the present milieu of the liberal arts. My justification of the presumption lies in one nearly indisputable fact--our public discourse, especially our popular art (the focus of the class), is inextricably founded in the presumption of self-actualization. It can be argued (IS argued ad nauseum) that economic and political forces nurture illusion of self-actualization which does not in any practical sense exist, but that does not alter the reality that the theme of self-actualization, illusion or not, is the predominant foundation of American social reality.