Infectious media knowledge - Knowing Mass Culture/Mediating Knowledge conference

Afterimage, July-August, 1999 by Sarah S. Sharpe

Knowing Mass Culture/Mediating Knowledge Center for Twentieth Century Studies University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee April 29-May 1, 1999

"Knowing Mass Culture/Mediating Knowledge," a conference organized by Lynne Joyrich and hosted by the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, provided an examination of the complex interrelations between the media and the formation of knowledge. The conference asked not only how mass cultural forms may themselves create new ways of thinking, perceiving and knowing, but also how individual negotiations complicate meanings and significance. Bringing together scholars of film, television, music and new technologies with film and video producers and interactive media artists, the conference refused to allow passive detachment on the part of either participant or listener. Definitions of art, academia and the audience merged and reemerged, first to expose the need to redefine these categories and then to seize control of this new terrain.

In the opening panel of the conference, Constance Penley described a collaboration between the GALA Committee, of which she is a member, and the Fox network's evening drama Melrose Place. Over a period of months, the collective of artists designed paintings, sculpture, clothing, jewelry and countless other works representing controversial issues often ignored by broadcast television that were then incorporated into the program's set and storylines. While acknowledging that Chinese takeout containers imprinted with human rights symbols or a quilt with a pattern representing the chemical structure of the "morning after" pill may go unnoticed by viewers, Penley described GALA's strategic placing of controversial objects within what might be seen as the quintessential example of mainstream mass culture as a "nice virus" causing "good mutations." Inspiring by example, Penley's description of GALA's project offered an alternative to pessimistic scenarios of the futility of resistance to media culture, encouraging academics and artists alike to infect media messages from within the "belly of the beast."

Penley's creative tactics in the arena of mediating knowledge resonated through many of the panels that followed, both explicitly and implicitly. For instance, Rachel Adams's initially disheartening description of the media's construction of a flesh-eating bacteria as a "celebrity virus" exposed the malleability of celebrity roles and consequently an opportunity for academics to use this instability to create deliberately activist strains of academic celebrity. Within her larger discussion of the interplay of actresses' onscreen personas with their offscreen writing - such as a conduct manual published by Mae West, newspaper columns by Mary Pickford or a reference book of extraordinary and ordinary knowledge assembled by Marlene Dietrich - Amelie Hastie convincingly suggested that these stars' identities were "infected" by the works they created and that they were subjects who, in turn, themselves mediated audiences' knowledge of them.

Continuing the trend, Richard Dienst referred to the viewing audience's drive to construct personal meanings from the play and linkages between different channels on television as "contagious." He based his analysis on an intriguing experimental television program that aired in Germany in 1990 that juxtaposed images of elephants at a zoo with footage of student protests in order to encourage viewers to realize that connections exist even between subjects commonly considered unrelated. The specter of AIDS, figured by the media as perhaps the most frightening "celebrity" of all, haunted much of the work presented, from the films of Todd Haynes to John Di Stefano's installations and 1990 film, (Tell Me Why) The Epistemology of Disco, that pointed to the unifying space of the dance floor as crucial in fortifying the gay community in its struggle to raise awareness and avoidance of the disease.

With his most recent: film, Velvet Goldmine (1998), Haynes offered an insightful and thoroughly enjoyable perspective on the complex reciprocity between identity and media forms. The film - a story of a boy growing up told through the lens of his adulation of glam rock - is in itself a powerful statement on the ways that individuals can learn and grow in an environment suffused by mass culture. Haynes's comments after the screening and also in a panel with Joyrich titled "(Re)Producing Gay identities" provided fresh and clear impressions of the personal and theoretical issues addressed at the conference, emphasizing the role of media in individual negotiations with gender and sexual identity.

The myriad tactics used by conference participants to maneuver among media meanings often exposed a weaving of the speaker's own experience with complex analysis of social issues. One striking example of this was Patricia Mellencamp's discussion of her indoctrination into the world of Wall Street through her relationship with her mother, who was an avid investor. Despite proclaiming at one point in her talk, "That's enough scholarship and thought. Back to me," Mellencamp's ability to intertwine her own life with her analysis of the market was evocative and indicative of the inseparability of considerations of media and self. Bypassing the conventional view of the market as a coldly commercial force to be resisted, emotion pervaded Mellencamp's story of her family's love of the stock market, to the extent that her description of her mother's devotion to the market and Mellencamp's own reaction to her mother's death intermingled. Just as her paper challenged conventional boundaries between theory and narrative, emotion and logic, male and female, media and knowledge, Mellencamp's argument implied that it is in the intermingling of these issues that the promise of maintaining personal agency can be found.