8 page essay due 4.13
Nancy 00001
week2.pptx
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Crisis Discipline
Do you believe human beings will address/solve climate change?
Yes – 0%
No – 53%
Maybe – 47%
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Post politics
Politics as the problem, not the solution.
TINA – There is no alternative
All we have now is bureaucratic and technical problems
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“What they should have sent was poets because I don’t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen.”
– Frank Borman, Apollo astronaut
Our Planet – Netflix
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Postmodernity and the image
Postmodernity and the “image”
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First photograph – 1826
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Stuart Ewen – All Consuming Images
Oliver Wendell Holmes: “We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” (p.25).
“Democratic choice, like grocery shopping, has become a question of which product is most attractively packaged, which product is most imaginatively merchandised.” (Ewen, 22).
Susan Sontag – On Photography
“The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.” Sontag, 1977: 178).
“The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.” (Sontag, 1977: 179).
Coca Cola Cares
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Encoding/Decoding – Stuart Hall
Dominant reading
Oppositional reading
Negotiated reading
“This is what climate change looks like”
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Coke bear. Greenpeace bear.
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“The earth as it really is” –Jim Lovell.
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Lunar Orbiter 1 - 1966
BREAK
In-class assignment
Describe the most powerful image that you have ever seen and why it moved you.
Did it change your life in any way? How?
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Public Sphere
Public spheres are “the forums and interactions in which different individuals engage each other about subjects of shared concern or that affect a wider community from neighborhoods to international relations.” (P&C, 20)
Based upon the premise of equality, autonomy, and reason.
Who are the voices?
Pezzullo and Cox describe ‘six voices’: citizens & civil society, nongovernmental organizations, politicians & public officials, businesses, scientists & scholars, journalists (P&C, pp. 22-26).
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Common Good
From Bocking, Nature’s Experts: The most important aspect of public deliberation “is its capacity to encourage people to consider not just their own interests, but those of others, and so develop and pursue a vision of the common good .... Since environmental issues relate so often to this common good, including the protection of common spaces – the atmosphere, the oceans, public land – that makes deliberation especially relevant, because [it] tends to encourage people to think in terms of the collective good ... to formulate a common interest in the environment that can transcend individual interests.” (p. 224)
Image Events – Kevin DeLuca
A staged or intentional activist or political action with the intention of creating or inviting an image that can then be shared through electronic media.
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“That was the moment that launched the modern environmental movement.”
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Public Opinion vs Public Sphere
Habermas defines ‘public opinion’ as very different from how we use the term today. It was much more than simply the aggregation of private opinion(s), and required public listening and public reasoning.
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Jason Kenney
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Deep Story and contested ideas of “Fairness”
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A new Canadian energy narrative
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Critical questions for all public spheres.
1. Who participates (and who is excluded) ...
2. Under what conditions ...
3. To what effect …
How these questions are answered/resolved shapes what the public interest is on any given environmental issue.
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BREAK
The environmental conflict “has become discursive. It no longer focuses on the question of whether there is an environmental crisis, it is essentially about its interpretation.” (Hajer, 1995: 13-14)
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Largest oil spill in human history – 3 million barrels
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The movie
BP and Oilsands
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Ideology versus Discourse
Noun versus verb
False consciousness versus power
Epistemology versus practical politics
Wrong ideas versus bad ideas
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Discourse
Pezzullo and Cox: Discourse is “a pattern of knowledge and power communicated through linguistic and non-linguistic human expression: as a result, it functions to ‘circulate a coherent set of meanings about an important topic’ (Fiske, 1987, p. 14). Such meanings often influence our understanding of how the world works or should work.” (p. 60).
John Dryzek: Discourse is “a shared way of apprehending the world. Embedded in language, it enables those who subscribe to it to interpret bits of information and put them together into coherent stories or accounts. Discourses construct meanings and relationships, helping to define common sense and legitimate knowledge.” (The Politics of the Earth, 9)
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Discourse as ideas and practices– Martin Hajer
“Discourse is then seen as internally related to the social practices in which it is produced.”
“One may also point to the content of what is said. A discourse is then seen as an ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations.” (Hajer, 1995: 44)
2) “Discourse here is here defined as a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities. As such, physics is an example of a discourse, but the radical environmentalists have their own discourse too. The former is produced, reproduced, and transformed through practices like academic teaching, laboratory experiments, and peer-reviewed journalist. The latter is produced through the actual practicing of an alternative lifestyle, independent protest meetings (instead of lobbying), reference to Walden or the noble savage, a specific myth about the nature of nature, and the negation of a culture of commercialism and consumption.” (Hajer, 1995: 44)
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Ducks on a pond
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Discourse as Story
Walter Fisher (communications theorist): When encountering new information, we assess it on the basis of narrative fidelity, rather than the quality of the information. “Does it hang together? Does it contain a linear sequence of events from past to future? Do the characters behave as we would expect them to behave, with clear and understandable goals and motives? Does it match our own beliefs and values?” (Cited in Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It, p. 106).
Compelling narratives have “cause, effect, perpetrator and motive”. Right-wing story: “Governments (perpetrators) justify carbon taxes (effect) in order to extend their control over our lives (motive).” Left-wing story: “Right-wing oil billionaires (perpetrators) fund climate change denial (effect) to increase their wealth (motive).” (Marshall, p. 106)
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Narrative Fidelity
“Do the characters behave as we would expect them to behave, with clear and understandable goals and motives?” (Cited in Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It, p. 106).
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Greta memes
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Discourse according to George Marshall
Cause
Effect
Perpetrator
Motive
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Cause, effect, perpetrator, motive
Frank Luntz, adviser to US Republicans: “a compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” (Cited in Marshall, p. 107).
Discourses are not only textual. They are always bound up with economic, political, social and cultural structures, as well as the practices of everyday life.
Critical analysis requires understanding how specific discourses articulate with existing institutions. Does it reinforce or challenge existing structures of power?
How discourses intersect with institutions will determine the resources that are allocated to developing, disseminating and promoting them.
