March 07, 2006
More on Cigarettes and Condoms
Maybe the issue that the example of the Sartre poster brings up is that when an object in is deemed "bad" or "detrimental" then there is a perceived need to condemn the object in its totality - its symbolic value and all appearances or references to it. The sensory experience of the actual object itself can be lost as a result. Klein re-centers us on the sensory experience of cigarettes themselves. I can imagine that in a future world where no on smokes and people wonder what their predecessors ever found appealing about smoking Klein's work could provide an answer for them. So too probably could "Reality Bites" and other movies that capture the mystique.
Regarding condoms, I wonder if some of their mundanity has to do with their primary purpose. If I want to get a fashionable or designer purse I may not care how well made it is, especially if it is cheap, but I still want to feel assured that a condom is reliably made.
Posted by Leah Strigler at 09:17 AM | Comments (2)
March 06, 2006
In the Air
Klein’s elegant depictions of famous figures of earlier eras who were smokers seem quaint or perhaps even naïve: the sensual pleasure of the act of smoking is far more rich and satisfying than the threat to one’s health.
Klein’s elegant depictions of famous figures of earlier eras who were smokers seem quaint or perhaps even naïve: the sensual pleasure of the act of smoking is far more rich and satisfying than the threat to one’s health. I realized after a while that it may be that the focus on the object itself is what I found limiting. Klein does (of course) end his piece with a meditation on cigarette butts, the transformed and used-up object, but there is another extension of this object that is more important to understanding societal attitudes to smoking.
It seems to me that the focus on anti-smoking measures of various sorts have relied upon the development of an understanding of cigarette smoke, separate from the cigarette itself, as an object or certainly as a material that, although stemming from the smoking of a cigarette, can be independently identified and found detrimental. It has its own extended reach and ability to do damage in the environment and to other people. I am thinking of the concept of “second-hand smoke” and all of the bans on smoking in public places, from airplanes to bars. Cigarettes may be sublime, but cigarette smoke can kill even those who do not actually smoke themselves. The distinction is pertinent to thinking about current trends in societal attitudes (and some legal cases, although no broad legislation as of yet) towards fragrance: with the growing awareness of (and maybe the growing appearance of) allergies and sensitivities to fragrance similar campaigns have been launched to curtail or stop the use of fragrance in shared public and professional spaces. If your colleague is allergic to it, then your perfume could be deemed a harmful agent that you have introduced into the atmosphere. Both cigarettes and perfume contain substances that may be pleasurable or harmful. In the case of fragrance, the issue opens up into the world of chemically produced substances, since most mass-market perfumes today are made from chemical substances rather than natural ingredients. The phenomenon however is not limited to chemical sensitivities; the rise of peanut allergies, which can be fatal, has shifted the food offering practices in airplanes, schools and other institutions that service children. A wide range of food items now contain packaging that states whether its contents may have come into contact with nuts.
All of this has me musing on the ways in which objects are extended and transformed. I think that the term “prosthesis” is almost useful but not accurate. I thought of describing an object’s “reach” (thinking about how cigarette smoke diffuses and travels in the air) but that also does not quite feel right. Part of what interests me in both of these cases (cigarettes and perfume) is the ways in which elements that are invisible, even though stemming from concrete materials, can be found at fault and, by extension, those responsible for the proliferation of those elements can be determined to be liable. This is a level of relating to “objects” in the environment that has become very much a part of societal discourse, with terms determined by legal concerns and practices. In interacting with objects and with others in our world, and particularly in shared public spaces, there is a new level of attention to be paid (compared to when cigarettes were first invented) to how our use of objects affects others and the world around us.
Reading Saferstein after Klein made me wonder about the extent to which the experience of smoking cigarettes is shaped by the advertising used to sell it and the ways in which Hollywood has glorified smoking. Certainly, in an earlier era, the potency of advertising was deemed strong enough to cause a ban on the use of TV advertising to sell cigarettes. If Saferstein depicts the collaborative processes that create a TV show, I wondered what collaborative social process come together to create the chic, meditative, cosmopolitan film footage that begins to roll in my mind when I think of cigarette smoking in the ways that Klein describes? And then, who is responsible if I, as a smoker, develop lung cancer? What is the visible evidence for laying blame?
Posted by Leah Strigler at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)
March 05, 2006
smoking
I was particularly intrigued by Klein’s premise concerning the sublimitory potential of the cigarette. The cigarette can exist as an object on a spectrum of least to most sublime, where the hand-rolled version represents the most artistic, transformative and sublime in comparison to the pre-manufactured filtered type. Seeing the sublime as formless with the potential for maximum “mystic joy” (46) led me to think about the hand rolled cigarette as having the highest degree of transformative potential (via burning), where paper and plant go up in smoke. The cigarette can both be a magical object (converted to a higher degree of worth) and a mundane object.
The filtered cigarette, on the other hand, contains a high degree of chemicals and preservatives, requires more mechanization for production and retains its corporeal body (the butt) many years after it has been extinguished. Walking on a beach like Coney Island to the horizon of sunset may make one’s imagination turn towards divinity, but seeing discarded cigarettes butts in the sand is a footprint of human waste-making. Butts are here longer than the human lifespan, and are a reminder of the ordinary and habitual. In this way their presence in a natural setting is similar to seeing discarded condoms and used needles, where their potential for pleasure and transformation is transitory What is implicitly necessary is the next one – the next fix or orgasm or cigarette. The butt serves as proof of human need, of our tendency for addiction and consumption. It is the form of the cigarette that estimates its potential for formlessness and limitlessness. This I find fascinating.
I had a more difficult time stretching out a meaning for myself in the Saferstein essay, but his argument for using language and discourse as a way to structure authority and untimately collaboration was useful. He fixed his methodology at the level of the words and sentences spoken by his ethnographic subjects (those working in television production). This technique could be applied to many ‘worlds’ and sub-cultures as a way to see how humans organize what they consider important and where their areas of expertise may lie. I was not sure about the placement of the object in this essay, would that be the television show? In comparing a TV world with an art world, I wondered about the number of producers required for a completed ‘object.’ TV requires a large number of humans functioning to create a fifty-minute program, do the number of hands indicate the artistic worthiness of the product? A painting might be completed by one person (maybe the inclusion of assistants for large frescos and works), does this infuse the painting with more artistic worth than an episode of “Hill Street Blues”?
Posted by Pilou Miller at 07:22 PM | Comments (2)
i dont get it...
i have to apologize for missing class last week, but from what i'm told i read the wrong readings and my comment from last week is more appropriate for this week so i'm going to repost it:
after reading the gell and the klein pieces i couldnt help but think of the role cigarettes play in prisons and the agency they have as objects. they are the principle form of currency, where monetary exchanges are not allowed. having exchange value somehow gives them agency in that they cause prisoners to do all sorts of things to get them, trade them, and eventually smoke them. sexual favors are exchanged for cigarettes, violent assaults are committed over cigarettes, or to get cigarettes. they trade them for drugs, as well as for inocuous items like soap and toothpaste. but as an exchange item they have a curious quality, as klein pointed out, in that using them, smoking them, destroys them. it kind of gives the term "burning money" new perspective. they therefore confer power and status in that by smoking cigarettes, prisoners are destroying an object of great exchange value without exchanging it for anything which has some practical use value. then again the use value of the cigarette is in reducing stress, which is ever present in a prison environment. anyways, i feel a bit scatterbrained with this comment but i couldnt help but think about cigarettes in this way.
but in addition to that i want to say that i really didnt understand what faucconier and turner were talking about so maybe tomorrow someone could explain it to me. i dont get it...
Posted by Robert Weide at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)
Grad school = understanding little, writing much
I had some problems with the Fauconnier and Turner, and no, I am not going to take them on intellectually--but I was confused for a long time about why cognition is important for the discussion of objects. I wanted more about the way cigarettes (or anything else) can be all that Klein made of them. I don’t smoke but reading his article made me want to start, if only to experience the active embodiment of ephemerality that is the transferring of an object into smoke via the physical body. Sounds like magic to me: if not disappearing altogether than a damn good transformation from a tangible, solid, bought-by-the-carton object to a warm, scented, minimally hued gas. (I kind of like cotton candy, too, and for the same reason.)
Fauconnier and Turner write about blending spaces and Saferstein seems to be writing about the same sort of thing in an applied kind of way. For Safterstein the various individuals involved in creating a scene or effect all have some notion of the way the scene should be, what it still needs, what it already has, the best way to finish it. Were they to be acting alone, the translation of their desires for what the scene ought to be and what it is at any given point in the production process would require them to manipulate financial and mechanical resources in order to realize their intentions. They may not have the finances or the technical know-how to make what they would like to have happen, happen, but they are not in the business of having to re-present their imagined desires for other humans, at least not other humans with agency in the production process (presumably they are trying to communicate something to a viewing audience). In the case that Saferstein observed, television shows are not produced by a sole auteur but are created through a negotiated process that involves many individuals operating within a power structure. In order for them to jointly produce a coherent project they have to enter what I decided was a blend of their respective mental spaces in regards to the scene in consideration. What Fauconnier and Turner seemed to be trying to communicate was the way in which an individual creates a blend from two distinct mental units—Saferstein goes one step further to write about the process that multiple individuals engage in to produce a jointly identified and occupied blend. Fauconnier and Turner write about the process of mapping one mental space onto another mental space to come up with a composite space more appropriate for cognizing some otherwise disjointed cognitive project, in a nutshell. For their monk example, they are truly writing about spaces, but I think it is not such a bad idea to think about the individuals in the production of a television show as occupying particular mental spaces (inputs) that need to move through a process of mapping onto a generic space, the roughly construed version of the action and message of a particular scene, and beyond that to a final product containing emergent structure as distilled from the original mental spaces of the individual agents through the process of establishing the generic (shared) mental space and then some still fuzzy group decision making activity.
And so, why cognition and objects again? What are we after? At first glance there’s the obvious: every object in both it’s creation is experienced with more or less compliacted cognition processes. Simple cases may not required composite, blended F-and-T-esq thought processes. Meaning, I don’t need to have much of a “blend” created to use my broom and dust pan. But during the production process of the broom and dust pan, I would venture to guess that F-andT are spot on, people do have to perform that kind of mental gymnastics in order to translate the things they can cognize in one context, to things that enter a generic space into which other inputs can be applied, through to some “emergent” cognition. I just recently purchased a new dust pan (it’s an OXO, Harvey) and it has substantially different qualities than my previous dust pan. I can see that getting from “I want to make a dust pan that’s better” to “I want to make this exact dust pan” would have required significant employments of F-and-T cognition schemes. But did we have to go through all this to get to the idea that creation requires lots of symbolic interaction between individuals and some sort of deep, methodical mental process on the part of the individuals themselves? I still think I don’t quite see what F-and-T have to reveal about cognizing objects. I am not sure I know more about making the abstract tangible than I did pre-F-and-T.
I clearly missed the boat somewhere along the line…maybe it was the dreamy state Klein put me in, fantasizing about the reverse process, making the tangible disappear into thin air.
Posted by Laura Noren at 04:05 PM | Comments (1)
Cognition and beyond.
Being always at the edge of the deadline provides at least the opportunity to consider postings of other participants of the group. I discovered for this week readings that I share some of the concerns that have already been raised.
1. I struggle with „cognition“, a term thoroughly used by Saferstein and Fauconnier. My dictionary says „Erkenntnis, Kognition or Wahrnehmung (which can refer to perception)“ and these notions do not explain the same!
„Erkenntnis“ as Sarah points out, refers to the philosophical explanation of how an individual perceive the world, how the world is/ or is not intelligible to him/her and how meaning and knowledge is created. Sciences has always struggled with the fact, that they cannot explain consciousness and how matter and consciousness are related to each other. I am aware of the point that „consciousness“ is a s difficult to grasp as „cognition“, however, I attempt to explain my frustration with scientific textes like the one of Fauconnier & Turner. The authors do not restrain their model of „conceptual integration networks“, neither do they limit the explanatory power of cognition. Reading this text sociologically, i am forced to think of Latour and the permanent doubt of the visitor in the laboratory. Stubbornly, i would like them to answer the following questions: How do you measure cognition? How do you map it? What are the limits of your research methods? How do you relate your concept of cognition to „non-scientific“ approaches? I miss a good portion of self-critism, namely the awareness that sciences cannot asses without haviing subjective presumptions.
There is no independence between the subjective and the objective world.
2. Besides the critics of “Cognition”, the idea of conceptual blending is useful when pondering about how we think the object. F&T point out that the many material objects of everyday life are a result of creative successive blends. Blended space merges two successive events under compression of time and space, like their example of the mouse and desktop computer interface shows. In another paper Fauconnier sees material objects of everyday life as a result of creative successive blends evolved by culture over time. (see Fauconnier, p.5: http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/ailab/people/lunga/Conferences/EDEC2/invited/FauconnierGilles.pdf). Thus, a watch is a compression of outer space in linear successive order to inner space of cyclical ordering. The example refers to the material object as an anchor point of how we conceptualize, means: structure, our life/ world. It underlines the importance of the object insofar, that its function determines our way of thinking. If we change the “watch”, we change our concept of measuring time.
3. In this regard, Saferstein’s text is an extension of the F&T’s concept. Instead of taking one object, he attempts to explain the entire process of collaboration between different agents of a TV production. The writer as well as the director have to blend imagination and the constraint of the real setting by considering also the constraints of the other participants. Similar to Becker, who wants to raise awareness that the art world is not only the masterpiece but also the result of a collective activity determined by specific conventions, Saferstein speaks of constraints, which separate the possible from the impossible setting and foregrounds, the importance of collaboration. However, even by acknowledging the high capability of compromising with each other, I would emphasize the importance of the individual’s opinion/ vision. Even if collaboration is a necessary basis of the working relationships of the participants, ideas and visions of the director, the way the camera “perceives” the action determines a style, which might be more visible in documentaries or feature films. Furthermore, the director’s arguments might have more authority when it comes to a definite decision. I am not feeling especially comfortable with the idea of explaining creative production processes through cognitive models, which are mostly unconscious to the participants. I wonder, like Ashley, what the really new thing is that Saferstein puts on the table. Can we contrast Saferstein’s model with Foucault’s model of the power of discourse? Since the way we use language is never value-free; does this imply certain structures of authority, which Saferstein does not consider?
4. My favorite text of this week: Klein’s “Cigarettes are Sublime”. Favorite, because it offers a various possibilities of how we can link the performance of the cigarette to conceptual approaches (like Gell’s idea of second agency; Freud’s “pleasure principle”; Bourdieu’s habitus concept or Veblen’s idea of smoking as a principle of the leisure class who shows off with their potential of wasting amounts of money and time). The idea, that the cigarette is “a little work of art” (42) could also be a starting point to contrast smoking with Benjamin’s concept of the aura of art works to explore the aesthetic dimension of the cigarette. I would appreciate to discuss theses frameworks more in detail in class tomorrow, because they are the essential methods of dealing with my own object, the plunger.
Posted by Teresa Reiber at 03:57 PM | Comments (1)
I don't like it although I like it
I liked Saferstein’s piece a lot but I also disliked at least as much. Part of what he shows is how people get on the same page in a production process. He does a decent job at doing that although I think he didn’t really show the interplay between (Becker’s) resources of an actor and the relevant conventions of production. I like the piece because it points out the complexity of production and I dislike it because I think it does not explain it well.
For Saferstein once we account for how people get to interpret things the same way it seems like everything is explained, that is to say, once we explain what frame is operative we can stop since we will witness ‘concerted action’ on part of interactants. I agree that by doing this we explain order and emergence of structure but perhaps we, as sociologists, should go beyond that and differentiate different types of strategies employed, different types of structures, their properties, and substantive outcomes? There are variations of outcomes, some people do certain things better others worse, and we should be able to explain the differences. Although Saferstein discusses how hierarchies are mediated in world of local production we do not really see how (Becker’s) resources and goals of an actor interact with conventions of production of other relevant actors.
The structure is already there, preceding the situation, it is already sketched out and the actors need only fill in parts of the painting. The beauty and crispiness of the painting depend on the mutual paintwork of interactants. The outcome depends on relations between interactants (friendly-hostile, dominant-subordinate, etc) as well as their resources that each brought outside of situation.
Another thing I don’t like about such work is that we get a lot of description of empirical acts and not much of analytical description. To be fair at the end of the paper the author presents us with six stages of production process (p82) but there is very little connection between the stages (how people might have a vision of what final administration will be based on a mental model and how they might struggle already at the stage of a model to arrive at a desired administration of tasks). Throughout the paper we get a lot of this as an explanation of what is happening: complex cognitive and communicative processes. What are they?!! To say that things are complex is not acceptable! Either try to deal with it for 'real' like people in other sciences that are trying to deal with complexity or if you can’t than forget about it and try reduce the complexity and explain it any other way you can.
Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 03:24 PM | Comments (1)
Can bad objects be really good for you?
The performativity of the cigarette is what gives life to it, allowing for it to do certain things not simply through its use but also through the physical, transformational changes it undergoes. Klein resolves to the object/cigarette as having inherent qualities that allow for it to “do,” and in a sense perform, certain things via its use by the smoker. He notes that Sartre attempts to explain that attributes can be “objective properties of things” while not being inherent in the object, resulting in both the reflexive consciousness and the immediate consciousness of things. Using the example of countability, he notes cigarettes as unique in their object-ness in that they, unlike pipes, pouches of tobacco, etc., can be counted and accounted for. It is much easier to regulate and keep track of how much one smokes if there is a pre-existing number of cigarettes in a pack (usually 20), and one can countdown from the opening of the pack. The example of cigarettes is one used to explain this philosophical idea, but it also says something about the cigarette itself – that it is an object that is allowed to be understood both reflexively and immediately, depending on the amount of cigarettes discussed, distinguishing that the cigarette alone performs something different than the cigarette as a group.
Any smoker will tell you that smoking is in no way doing nothing, and Klein explicates many of the arguments in support of this idea – one of which being that the cigarette is like a clock, measuring time in relation to the disappearance of the object. However, the cigarette is often deprived of its performative nature while being regarded as simply an activity or a gesture that goes with an action but is not the action in itself. But Klein goes on to argue that perhaps the great writer smoking while typing his thoughts, or the great painter smoking while contemplating the canvas, could not have achieved the great work of art without the cigarette playing its role, “doing something” that allows for other things to occur. This seems a difficult idea to accept as the cigarette has been understood (here by Banville) to be impractical – it serves no useful purpose, and is a desire that can never be filled. Much like the very practice of art-making itself – performance included – it is an endeavor that offers no conclusion, and often no tangible object is found as remnant; only an ephemeral trace of what once was, and a burning desire to have or do more. The object performs it’s “purposefulness” in it’s eradication.
In his conclusion, Klein discusses the object as performing resistance, using the recent, fanatical “healthism,” in the U.S. particularly, as the force against which cigarettes resist. Klein points out that studies have shown that with the spread of anti-smoking information and education comes the rise of smokers themselves; that as smoking becomes more demonized, the more people want to do it. What the objective of healthism provides is unclear, aside from the accomplishment of living a longer life, which Klein implies as an unsubstantiated reason. He again questions the “use” of cigarettes, questioning that it is perhaps in their uselessness that they do provide a purpose, and in their transformation through use allow the object to perform actively.
Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 01:23 PM | Comments (1)
Cesi n’est pas une cigarette
Having never been a smoker, I found it rather difficult to find a way into any sort of dissection of Klein’s book. His polemical conclusion was too, um, polemical for my taste - it seemed to come from the John Stossel school of exposition. That said, the discussion of a cigarette as index was quite interesting, and ties in closely to the Fauconnier and Turner.
Through Sartre, the cigarette becomes an index of the existential life and a way to appropriate it. Granted, this makes it especially entertaining (or poignant, if you prefer) that a poster created by the French National Library for Sartre’s one-hundredth birthday airbrushed his cigarette out.
This provides a good segue into the Fauconnier and Turner (I hope). By airbrushing out the cigarette, those in charge of the decision attempted to remove a linkage between Sartre and cigarettes, and therefore keep any sort of conceptual blend from even taking place. Although the decision was explicitly made as a result of a law banning cigarette advertisements, what really seems to be at stake was linking the cigarette to Sartre and, more generally, the linking of the cigarette to a publicly funded institutional poster.
In the latter case, Sartre as Sartre is less important than the fact that some person is smoking on a poster, and people shouldn’t smoke, and therefore the cigarette must go. This blended conception relies on an ignorance of Sartre as a starting point. Someone familiar with Sartre would likely already be aware that he was a heavy smoker, and the cigarette would simply be one part of an already-existing conception of the person. The act of removing the cigarette attempts to both remove the connection between Sartre and cigarettes as well as to remove the connection between cigarettes and the National Library as an institution.
The de-linking of Sartre from smoking in the poster is an attempt to alter people’s blended spaces by controlling the inputs they have to work with.
On a mostly unrelated note, how do decorative cigarette lighters or containers relate to a cigarette? Are they an attempt to make the experience somewhat less ephemeral? What are their histories?
Posted by Mark Treskon at 11:54 AM | Comments (1)
Infelitious Cognition
“Cigarettes are bad for you, like all drugs, and that is what makes them so good to those who use them,” argues Klein in 1993. However, the anti-cigarette campaigns of the past decade succeeded in decreasing the pleasure of those who chose to continue smoking despite its harmful effects.
My father has suffered from severe panic attacks for fifteen years now because of being unable to quit smoking. Nobody ever understood the struggle he was going through day after day. Fauconnier and Turner finally offer a valid explanation for his sufferings: what we find in my father’s (and many other smokers’) conceptual cognition is the infelicitous ‘blend’ of two contrasting input mental spaces: input 1 is the pleasure, the appropriated and internalized habit of smoking, which Klein describes by quoting Sartre, while input 2 is the demonization of cigarettes mediated by mass mediums.
According to Fauconnier and Turner, the two input mental spaces are always projected to a third place, the ‘blend,’ which, in this case, is my father’s disturbed (un)consciousness vacillating between the pleasure and danger of cigarettes. In a “felicitous blend” (156), the input counterparts reconcile and melt into one ‘emerging structure;’ nevertheless, the demonizing and joyful inputs related to smoking will never successfully blend. The reason for this, in my opinion, is that the anti-cigarette campaign mediates a message (or in Fauconnier and Turner’s term conceptualizes an ‘input’) which does not acknowledge the smoker’s appropriation of cigarettes, the process Klein describes in chapter 1. Instead, it excludes the possibility of pleasure in smoking. Therefore, in the cognitive act of blending, two mutually exclusive inputs are projected into each other, resulting in an infelicitous blend or a “conceptual disintegration,” which is often more harmful to the smokers’ consciousness than the cigarette.
I have to admit that I felt rather frustrated when I noticed that the syllabus had changed and Fauconnier and Turner was only recommended, after spending long hours with trying to understand the “conceptual integration networks;” nevertheless, it did help me to recognize the relation between Klein’s and Safferstein’s texts. Safferstein demonstrates the felicitous ‘blending’ of different perspectives in the industry of television production: the final product (an episode of a television series) is inevitably a fusion of the different inputs of the collaborators. What Fauconnier and Turner calls a ‘input mental spaces,’ Safferstein describes as ‘mental models’ and demonstrates how diverging mental models interact with each other in the collaborative processes in a script meeting. Ultimately, Safferstein and Fauconnier and Turner both suggest that cognition is always constructed by blending different mental inputs or models; the object is always a bricolage of different perspectives.
The theory of mental inputs / models helps us understand how meaning and cognition are constructed in many spaces. If my father was more aware of the different input mental spaces which form his relation to cigarette, he could control the destructive effect of the counterforces of these competing inputs, and could choose between the pleasure or the rejection of cigarettes (instead of helplessly trying to reconcile the two).
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 05:20 AM | Comments (1)
March 04, 2006
Freedom of cognition
Richard Klein’s homage to cigarettes speaks to the issue of cognizing artifacts. For Klein, the cigarette provides a particularly compelling example because of its insignificance. It is so ancillary, so trifling, and yet we impute upon it so many different meanings. Klein states that cigarettes are “like all signs, whose intelligent meanings are elsewhere than their sensible, material embodiment: the path through the forest is signified by the cross on the trees. He subsequently delves into the various meanings of the cigarette and the myriad thoughts it allows us to think.
Clearly, for Klein, the cigarette has a certain property, a certain invisibility, that facilitates its role as a cipher. But I wonder how much flexibility we have I n cognizing objects? Are some objects more amenable to various meanings and symbols than others? Or do we have an almost unlimited freedom in imputing thought into and onto objects?
Klein offers little guidance toward generalizing his approach from cigarettes to other objects. (Perhaps he has been too seduced by making the trifling central, by elevating the vanishing to prominence. He can’t, or doesn’t care to, see beyond the butt of the cigarette). On the one hand, it is clear that for him the cigarette has special qualities. However, on the other hand, he claims that signs for which an object can stand does not reside in or is tethered to its material embodiment. So how much latitude do people have in imputing objects with meaning?
If we turn the question on its head, away from the freedom to cognize, toward the constraints imposed on individuals, we may be able to shed more light on the issue. Klein’s cigarette has material qualities that do not impose themselves on the senses. Cigarettes are small, ephemeral, white. The blandness of its material and visual qualities screams for meaning. Perhaps objects with more vivid qualities are less amenable. After all, a blank slate needs to be blank.
Or maybe Klein is right. Maybe the sign is unrelated to the material embodiment. Maybe constraints do not emanate from the object, but are imposed from the outside by culture. As living beings immersed in a social world, there is only so much flexibility our peers will allows us in interpreting things.
As you can probably guess, I’m swimming in confusion here. Maybe we can’t generalize about the flexibility of the object toward thought. Maybe we need to take each object in isolation, to look at its history, and how it fits in the world.
Posted by Owen Whooley at 07:09 PM | Comments (1)
Cognizing, or Just Thinking Out Loud?
An interesting task for the sociologist: to cognize artifacts. To put aside for a moment social context, contingent meanings, and institutional settings. To just get down and dirty with what the thing is, how it is thought about, how do we perceive it.
Klein wanders in this direction with an elegant ode to the cigarette, which he nails as sublime. The sublime's allure comes from its danger and taboo, embodied in those darkly, terribly beautiful smokes. The object itself is, of course, trivial, useless and vanishing as an individual thing. Cigarettes only make sense in in reference to a collective identity.
The thing itself cannot be appropriated; it’s just an ephemeral few puffs. But the consumption of it is our symbolic appropriation of the world. The cigarette is a portal we use to suck in an experience, to breathe in the moments of heartbreak, nervousness, relief, disaster... We take in the world around us through smoking, he says.
But this book reads like Klein’s symbolic appropriation of the cigarette. His writing borders on poetry, a smoky aesthetic that tries to recapture dandyism. Indeed, this might just be the perfection of something that is totally useless.
I’m searching for the take-away point. If it’s the seduction of a negative pleasure and the ironies of censorship, then I’d have to shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, yeah, sure.” But if the bigger point about locating objects as agents with social lives is our aim, you’re going to have to take me further into the political economy of smokes, and link the cognition of an object to the economic and social structures that sustain it (this would involve more than just a nod to Virginia Slims as the great equalizer of the sexes).
A quick note about the Saferstein, which explores how different levels of occupational expertise come together to fill in the blanks of “mental models” in the collaborative process: Shouldn’t this be subtitled, “The Effects of the Organization of Television Production on Cognitive and Communicative Processes,” rather than the other way around? Because aside from noting the "complexity" of the organization, it's unclear just how all these mental models actually have an effect on anything other than the product.
Was anyone actually surprised to learn that it takes a collaborative team to put together a TV show? Or that people with different occupational expertise have unique and sometimes conflicting concerns? Put them all together in a meeting room, they get on the same wavelength, and you get a product that meets practical, conventional, and aesthetic demands. Again, I'd have to shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, yeah, sure."
Posted by Ashley Mears at 06:46 PM | Comments (1)
Performing nothingness
This week’s theme “cognizing artefacts” regroups two texts that offer different approaches on analyzing how objects can illustrate the structure of human thought.
On one side we have what I believe is a very “Beckerian” research from Saferstein. In the opening he points that the creations that “own” television producers are not work that simply sprung from their minds, but are the result of a wide collaboration. What we could say he adds to what we have read from Becker, is the notion that this system of creation influences the ways in which the producers will think about their final object (though here not a tangible object.) All the participants involved in the creation have different tasks assigned and different skills related to them. However, their individual work has to take into account the exigencies of others’ work in the making of the collective product, which is done by communication. Therefore, conceiving the object is an act of collective cognition. What Saferstein wants to point out, is also that this collaborative approach influences the organization of production enterprises. His method is not to analyze how the final product represents the structure of thought of his creators and viewers; it is principally an investigation of the process of production.
On the other side, Richard Klein does not center his analysis of cigarettes on the cognitive process involved in their production, but on the thoughts that are produced by its use. Referring to history, philosophy, and art he explains how smoking cigarettes is a discursive performance, perhaps even a performative act, in an odd way. In fact, Klein will propose that the act of smoking a cigarette engages the individual in doing nothing, it performs nothingness. Cigarettes are tangible objects, but they are also indistinct, vanishing, and ephemeral: their consumption implies their disappearance. It is not like the pipe that is distinguishable, and that can be appropriated by its user. Smoking cigarettes is appropriating the dissolving quality of the “I,” it is a symbolic sacrificial ceremony, it is engaging oneself in the pleasure of activities that are worth nothing. The author suggests that smoking cigarettes is aesthetically engaging in states of reflexive consciousness, an exemplary act of entering the symbolical world, hence their sublimity.
In his conclusion, Klein also proposes that it is the very harmfulness of cigarettes that makes them sublime. Cigarettes are anxious objects, paradigmatic items. They are the only pleasure that the modern world has brought (as he points in the first chapter), but they are also poisonous. Klein says that life itself is a progressive disease, and that living means choosing your poisons. In this sense, the cigarette represents the ambiguity of life’s pleasures and pains. It is a momentary relief from the pain of knowing our fatality, as it accelerates our decay. And in the midst of debates around cigarette use and public health, smoking is also a pleasurable irresponsibility, its countering the painful reality of having to deny the pleasure principle when entering the social world, as articulated by Freud.
Posted by Etienne Meunier at 04:45 PM | Comments (1)
Oy the Clothes!
I know we're not reading fashion until next week, but I saw this show last night and was amazed. If you go, don't go on a weekend. Avoid the crowds.
Fashion in Colors
December 9, 2005 - March 26, 2006
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
If you're planning on going, wait to read my blog entry until afterward.
Cold as fuck. Friday night, after work. Get off at six, slither down 90th Street in the dark, toward Fifth Avenue. Some noisy adolescents across the street seem ominous. They cross my path to walk up Fifth Avenue, and become more and more normal as they approach me. By the time they're in front of me, the smallest little dumpling of a girl seems cute.
Around the corner twice to get to the front of the mansion that houses the museum. Heavy wrought iron doors open easily. They've had work done to make them open so smoothly. The foyer of what was once someone's house is huge and heavy with dark carved wood up to and including the ceiling.
Check my coat in what seems like a comparatively overheated room. Pay my $7 student ticket, and walk into the first room to the left and gasp, "This is so cool."
To my right in a darkened room, the sign says, "the low light level is necessary to protect the costumes" and they don't add, "and to scare the shit out of you." The path curves right so my first sight is a black mannequin in a dress that is simply an enormous black bow, like the conventional multi-looped ones with a square stickered bottoms that you stick on the top of a gift. The light is dim, the walls black. (Only the second time through did I take in that she was wearing on her head a black shiny motorcycle helmet with a black visor, like a modern knight. The light is so low, and the dress is so amazing.[Victor & Rolf, 2005]) I look around against the darkness near high carved wooden arches to my left I see the room contains less than ten black mannequins dressed in black clothing. Set in a vignette to the left of my bow dress are three mannequins in Victorian black gowns with bustles--the women are as if walking away up a dark slope, into the darkness. The jet ornamenting a dress glints softly. Mysterious. To their left a woman in a black pants suit whose collar is a series of eight silk and cotton collars of different textures, ranging in color from brown to beige to white, each bursting out of the other like some strange night flower. There are no distracting placards describing the garments, only small numbers on the ground near each one. The guard discretely hands me a pamphlet guide that describes each dress.
This is a profound room. I do not know why. Two simple straightforward dresses long black (Balenciaga) in a corner one with a cascade of black ruffles down the front, and as I look to the fourth corner, I see two women in black victorian gowns, and I feel I have interrupted them in a grave, secret and wicked conversation, the contents of which I would never know. Only later do I notice that almost every mannequin has bare black feet, flat against the floor, and that some of the mannequins have black stockings over their faces--in the dim light it only adds to the poised silence of that room.
In the next room, the slightly raised platform on which the mannequins stand runs straight through, and they face me, these more modern women, a Dior, a Vionnet, a Chanel, Yohji Yamammoto, Rei Kawakubo (whom a guard says actually organized the exhibit, despite the credit going to the Kyoto Costume Institute.)
An arched white tent lit with ultraviolet tubes beckons me on on to the next not-visible room. On the floor inside the tent, in the ultraviolet light, is projected a rectangular rainbow of color. I turn left, walk out of the tent and into a multi-colored riot of clothing. For example, the red and white striped and polkadotted pantsuit by Rei Kawakubo with the camouflage green trim (the audio guide--a little hand held phone thing--politely informs me that the French invented camouflage for World War I. I think, whom else but the French would look at war and think, "What to wear?")
While looking at the Pucci cape in shades of purple and every other color, the audio phone informs me that before entering fashion, Pucci got a PhD. in Political Science. "Then there's hope for me," I think. I have no idea what that thought means. The dummies themselves are red, orange, yellow, blue and black. They wear 18th century french robes, an Armani strapless dress made entirely of woven velvet organdy ribbons, a Galliano one-shoulder silk taffeta dress trimmed with leather (again that green jungle camouflage pattern), so many dresses: polka dots, paisleys, Harelequin patterns, a simple short sleeveless Warhol movie-star faces dress in paper, and a sense of crushing disappointment when I realize this is the end of the show. I try to make the best of it as I walk down the hallway whose ceiling has been draped with multicolored fabric and multicolored lights change the mood of the hall.
And then I enter the main room again and see the sign, "Exhibition continues this way..." and an arrow up the great dark wood carved stairway. On the landing on a fifteen foot long hand carved dark wood bench sit two young Japanese men, slouched in such precisely stylized boredom, in clothes so organized and so clean that it is difficult to see that they are clothes I'd think of as ghetto thug clothes in any other context.
I continue up the stairs, under the giant streak of triangular white fabric that forms what is almost a hat for the staircase. At the top of the stairs is a white, tent-like structure, which prevents my going to the right (I have to go left into the next doorway.) However the tent draws me in with a small rectangular window at its center focussing my attention past all-white mannequins in white dresses who looking like they are facing eachother like maids in attendance to the queen, or as if for a Virgina Reel of the spirits, my gaze is drawn down the hall and through a dark hand-carved wooden doorway thirty feet away to a white mannequin wearing a parrot-bright red opalescent shining jacket, and a brilliant yellow pouffy skirt. I see her white legs and feet, she is on a high white platform. She is beheaded by the doorframe. So, red jacket, yellow skirt, white legs and feet on a white pedestal.
I move to the left through the next doorway, into a serene blue-violet room--the light is blue, the floors, blue, the dresses are blue and violet, the windows are pale blue rectangles. The 1850s pouffy gowns with well-defined waists surround a 1950s Christian Dior dress whose silk fabric is painted to look like water in the sunshine. Strapless, just below the knee, fitted to the waist, with a skirt that flows outward as if in waves.... She is, as almost all of the models are, barefoot. The path through the blue room is curving (the shape of the islands on which the mannequines stand.) And there is a lip under each side of the path that's lit from underneath. There is a pale aqua satin Dior evening coat that pours to the ground. Which allowed me to say sotto vocce, "In-fucking-credible," an expression I rarely get to use in admiration.
There is an aqua dress by Junya Watanabe (2000) of polyester organdy which makes the dummy look as if she's wrapped in, embraced by a sorbet sea sponge. Like a fluffy honeycombe that somehow met a 1920s fur coat worn by college kids... Impossibly lovely, irresistable and so strange. The audio guide informs us that Watanabe "always retains an element of organic warmth" while using synthetics. We see early dresses made from the analyine dyes first sythesized from coal tar by a british chemist in 1856--so purple, so plum, so mauve! An evening dress of elaborate rococo denim ruffles worn over jeans (Watanabe 2002)
And so into the red room. One of the striking things about this show is the livelieness of the dresses. Usually in a dress show at F.I.T. or at The Met, the dresses look both dead and forlorn, as if they're hopelessly waiting to be re-animated by a wearer/lover who will never again walk this earth. These dresses have lift, life, a feeling of fullness I have never seen, and which seems preternatural. According to the guard, the Kyoto Institute people set up the dresses. So, if you're coming with me to Kyoto on my "I've got my PhD, let's go to the flea markets in Kyoto" weekend, remind me, we're going to visit the Kyoto Costume Institute...
My favorite dress in the red room was made of giant stiffened pink ribbons, curling in poofs around the dummy, with a giant bow at the breast. OK, there were also cream and peach and salmon ribbons too (Viktor & Rolf 2004). I also loved the red corset bustle and petticoat (19th Century), and the red Fortuny caftan, hand stencilled in slate green, with the salmon pleated undersilk beaded dress thing.
To get to the yellow room, I pass--up close--that radiant red jacket and yellow skirt concoction which I saw from a great distance through the tent window earlier. Love is not too strong a word. I find out from the audio guide that Watanabe makes the polyester organdy honeycomb efect by using heat, not by sewing. The fluffy sea-creature sheen of this thing is unbelievable, inviting. My notes say, "amorphous fluid sponge." Do with that what you will.
The yellow room relaxes me. Many 19th century gowns, and I notice for the first time how abstract the dummies are. They're painted, of course, yellow. All yellow: hair, eyes, toes, everything. A little bit of sunshine before my egress down the walk of white dressed white ladies. Something creepy about that. I don't stay to study. They are lit by spotlights from underneath an oval panel the width of each dress, against the dark brown carved ornate wood of the museum all this white is quite something. The final dress, on its own in a room to the left, is a
woman draped in silk, like a nun's habit, like Wilkie Collins' woman in white, creamy, flowing, only her nose, and her lips and barely her eyes peek through the opening, held together with a pearl brooch at her chin. It could be contemporary or a 100 years old. The guide tells me it's a wedding dresss by Vionnet (1937). It is deeply scary, like the beginning of the show.
I go through the show two more times.
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 03:10 PM | Comments (1)
Collective Cognition at Museums
Saferstein’s article reminds me of my own experience dealing with collaborative works in museums. I work at the New York Public Library’s registrar office (Rm 56). Here, all objects being loaned out or coming in from other institutions are processed. When the library is getting ready for an exhibit all the objects go to Rm 56 where they are held until they are sent away for conservation, framing, matting ect. Before the exhibit all peoples working on putting together the exhibit come to Rm 56 and participate in what they call a review. At the review, the curator of the exhibit is joined by the registrar, designers, PR, marketing, graphics, researchers, conservator and the objects.
Together they go through the whole exhibit, laying out objects, listening to the narrative the curator wishes to tell. Everyone at the review is invited to weight in. The designers may mention restrictions due size of display cases, layout of objects is their main focus. The narrative may have to change due to physical restrictions. The conservator may comment about light levels or the way a book may or may not be opened. Does anything need to be repaired? Graphics need to know what it being labeled and how. What kind of font is wanted, color, size. The review is where PR, marketing and graphics first get to hear about and see the objects going on display. They in turn have to relay the idea of the exhibit to potential visitors. This is where, as Saferstein says “participants develop and communicate their mental models of objectives, constraints and opinions” of the exhibit.
I feel that in museums this process can have effects that go well beyond mere comprehension of a scene in a TV show. Museums are places where people go to learn about the world around them. Objects are displayed due to their significance in our material world. Their importance my come from being in a museum or they are in a museum because of their importance. Either way, when objects are arranged in such a way, labeled, and incorporated into a story or narrative they have been subjected to collective cognition. Not only are they the product of collective cognition, but become the basis of the publics collective cognition of the individual objects on display and the larger story as a whole.
When these narratives are displayed in a public museum, they are technically the possessions of the ‘people’. With these objects and the narratives, the visitor can “project themselves beyond the present moment, towards possibilities that reduce the present to insignificance” (Klein). I understand that this is a very existentialist view of a museum experience, but it is one, I believe, that all curators wish for their visitors. Because this is my first reading of Klein I am not comfortable with the terms ‘appropriative possession’ or ‘crystallization’ and am unsure of how to apply them to my example. Through visiting the exhibit people can appropriate the experience, but do they do this through “continuous destruction”?
I hope we can work through these terms in class.
Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 01:38 PM | Comments (1)
on visibility
Richard Klein, talking about Sartre’s smoking habit, uses the phrase “smoking like a Turk” (25). It is true that Turks seem to smoke a lot.
One of the differences I realized between U.S. and Turkey was about the visibility of smoking in public spaces. There seemed to be more people smoking on the streets in Istanbul than there were in New York or DC. But another thing that took my attention was that while it is very rare to see women smoking “outside” in Istanbul, it was much more common in the U.S. Klein, in his conclusion, gives some statistics about the practice of smoking cigarettes among women in several countries in Europe. It did not surprise me to see that Greece and Portugal has the lowest percentage of women smokers (189).
However, while reading the first chapter, what I had in mind was just about this point: About how, in Istanbul, Turkey, it seemed as if women did not smoke cigarettes when actually this scene did not directly reflect what went on in the private sphere. It is very common among women, especially among the married, to get together at a friend’s place, usually once a month, and not surprising to find these “non-smokers” smoking cigarettes on these days. They “appropriate the world…by destroying it” (38) in these occasions. We might say that they destroy the public sphere in their private sphere. It is interesting to realize what an “intimate” and a taboo practice this is, considering the (gender) difference between the private and the public sphere. But thinking about the practice of cigarette smoking by group of women at home might be helpful in questioning the difference between public and private: it might be taken as the regeneration of the public at home or the realization of another kind of space within home as what is called “the space of appearance”.
On the other hand, what makes someone a smoker anyway? Are these women (who, I think, practice an action, not only an activity) smokers or not? What defines you as a smoker? Is it the amount and/or the regularity, or is it possible that it also depends on the “audience”? That is, whether you are seen with the object of your practice or not.
Posted by Ilgin Yorukoglu at 09:39 AM | Comments (1)
March 01, 2006
The Cigarette as Performer
When I entered university and started to encounter philosophers’, aestheticians’ and various social thinkers’ ponderings about various social things, I was confronted with my lack of ability to understand what the fuss about “cognition” is all about. Since I did my undergrad in Denmark, “cognition” was not really the term we dealt with. Rather is was the Danish version ‘erkendelse”, which we spiced up with the German words “erkenntnis” and “erfahrung” as well as the French “connaisance” and “experience” - just to add a little to the sophisticated confusion of it all. Still I remain incredibly puzzled about “cognition”, realizing that whenever I think I have got it down, I loose grasp of it. When seeing the title of our seminar on Monday, however, I found that my cognitive troubles were pushed off in a different direction than usual: it is not flighty and big concepts like “truth” and “reality” that BKG and HM suggest we talk about in relation to cognition. Rather it is “artifacts”.
Being a non-native speaker I had to look up “artifacts” to see what exactly it means, and also because I presume there is a reason why BKG and HM chose this word in lieu of “objects”, which usually seems to be the crux of all our mental wanderings. Below is what I found at answers.com:
1 An object produced or shaped by human craft, especially a tool, weapon, or ornament of archaeological or historical interest.
2 Something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element: “The very act of looking at a naked model was an artifact of male supremacy” (Philip Weiss).
3 A structure or feature not normally present but visible as a result of an external agent or action, such as one seen in a microscopic specimen after fixation, or in an image produced by radiology or electrocardiography.
4 An inaccurate observation, effect, or result, especially one resulting from the technology used in scientific investigation or from experimental error: The apparent pattern in the data was an artifact of the collection method.
I don’t know if these definitions make it any clearer what “Cognizing Artifacts” implies, but in my opinion this multiplicity of meanings is incredibly interesting in terms of discussing the texts by Klein and Saferstein.
Since Klein, like Gell in his writings about the artwork (which I guess is also an artifact), chooses to employ “the index” to describe the cigarette, I would like to recapitulate how the latter sees the index fit into the larger scheme of things. As far as I understand, Gell says that indexes or artworks motivate us to infer something about social agency. Thus, objects can be said to have secondary agency (I realize I am making it a bit trite here, but bear with me).
Klein, talking about the cigarette in the picture of Brassai, says that “The cigarette is an index – not a symbol but an entity that is what it is”, but correlatively it is “a sign for the general category of things it is. The index of the cigarette points to itself to indicate that it is an instrument of the photographers’ trade” (24). Later he contends that the cigarette is “like a sign”.
On the basis of this I wonder about the distinction between “symbol” and “sign” (and I have Peirce’s distinctions in the back of my mind too, which adds a little to my confusion), because it seems that “the cigarette as sign” or the “cigarette as index” not only exists “en-soi” (i.e. as “an entity that is what it is”), but also “pour-soi” (i.e. as something almost reflective, as something that is able to “point to itself”). In other words, does Klein, like Gell, suggest that cigarettes have (secondary) agency, whereas “the symbol” does not?
I think it is interesting to note how he goes from paying a lot of attention to the cigarette per se, and then on to the act/non-act of smoking. It is as if he by suggesting that smoking oscillates between an “act” and a “non-act”, is implying that even though smoking is an instrument for appropriating the world symbolically, the cigarette, as we vented about the Miller chair during last class, “performs on the smoker”, and not vice versa.
Going back to the definitions from the web, I find it relatively unproblematic to acknowledge that the cigarette is an object produced and shaped by human craft. So far so good. The second definition I find more interesting, as it is saying that an artifact is “something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element”. In other words is seems to allows us to recognize that, as Klein puts in his conclusion, “smoking is not only a physical act but a discursive act” (182). And likewise one might add, the cigarette is not just merely a physical object “en-soi”, but also a discursive one, “pour-soi”…. Oooo, I’m not on solid terrain here. Not quite sure where I am heading with this. Well, well…
And now to Saferstein who perhaps sees the collaborative work of television production as an artifact? I don’t know If him trying to hard here, but the second and third definition, although dealing with “the artifact” in relation to science, seems like possible inroads to say something interesting about it, just don’t know what. Because, the article is quite straight forward I think, but I want it to make sense in relation to the “Cognizing Artifacts” and not least Klein and the cigarette.
This leads me to a question about American grammar. When you say “Cognizing Artifacts” are you thereby implying that the one cognizing is the actual artifact or rather that “a subject is cognizing an artifact”? Because in relation to Saferstein’s piece, it seems that one could suggest that the collaboration between participants yields a “communal objective” or a “communal mental model” that has an agency of its own. An artifact, which is characterized not only by Sartre’s “immediate consciousness” but also the "reflexive consciousness".
Posted by Sarah Carlson at 08:23 PM | Comments (1)