--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Justin:
> > poem of his) -- I think that the issue of whether
> you
> > can persude people through art is interest and
> > empirically testable. . . .
>
> A lot of such research has been done in media
> studies - what they usually
> find is no direct effect.
As I'd expect.
The effect that has been
> confirmed as "agenda
> setting" (i.e. media not telling you what to think
> but what to think about).
Chomsky & Herman, McChesney, Bagkidian, Norman Solomon and the FAIR/EXTRA people have been saying this too.
> Another outcome is the "uses gratifications" which
> emphasizes the fact that
> media contents is usually socially mediated and
> interpreted and as such
> beyond control of the original sender.
Ah, gimme dat ol time deconstruction. But of course this is true.
As a result
> the effect intended by
> the original sender is often diluted, altered or
> altogether lost.
Think of the fate of Springsteen's Born In The USA, which the Reaganites tried to appropriate as a patriotic anthem, or the recent use of Janis Joplin's Lord, Won't You Buy Me A Mercedes Benz as commercial for the car.
>
> While we are at that, my original master thesis idea
> involved an
> experimental research to test the hypothesized
> "learned helplessness" effect
> induced by the media. In psychology, learned
> helplessness denotes a
> situation in which repeated administration of
> aversive stimuli to
> "experimental" subjects (they've done with both
> animals and people) produces
> the absence of avoidance behavior to such stimuli in
> the future, together
> with other negative effects, such as depression and
> the impaired learning
> ability. I hypothesized that the media form
> (constant commercial
> interruptions) and contents (violence and gore)
> produce such learned
> helplessness,
Well, people do tune out commercials and there are machines that actually allow you to record programs without the commercials; they pay a premium to watch commercial free cable, etc.
Moreover, whether violence and gore are aversive in general (as a matter of fact) or even necessarily artistically bad is an open question.
As to the first, violence and gore have been entertainment both artistically and in real life and death time out of mind. The Illiad is full of graphic descriptions of horrible death: "And his teeth bit on hard bronze,m black blood came from his mouth, and hateful death misted his eyes," -- that's from memory, but that line or something like it must occur 100 times in the text.
As for real life, one thinks of public executions, both ordinary, as with your typical Tyburn hanging, and spectacular, such as the gruesome public end visited on the (would be?) regicide Foucault describes at the start of The Order Of Things. This was entertainment for millenia. See, e.g., Hogarth's brilliant (nongory) depiction of the crowd at Tyburn at the execution of the Wicked Apprentice. As Dylan put it, "they're selling postcards of the hanging. . . ."
> > Now, are people persuaded by art? W, you have
> > practically the entire weight of Western though
> > against you -- high and low. That's why Plato
> wanted
>
> I did not say that art has no influence, all I was
> saying that it is
> difficult to use art as a tool to achieve an effect
> that is desirable from a
> broadly defined left point of view.
It's difficult to do anything to achieve desirable left wing results.
More
> specifically, I was objecting to
> the proposition of using shock in art as the means
> to influence people.
Well, sort of depends. Sophocles wasn't trying to influence people in a left wing way, but the conclusion of Oedipus Tyrannos, where the self-blinded Oedipus appears on stage with his empty, bloody eye sockets, is shocking and necessary. I mentioned the Illiad, full of shock still (and I have a high tolerance), though again not left wing.
More recently, with an eye to influencing people in a left-wing direction, I think it sort of depends. I thought Three Kings with George Clooney was shocking and fairly effective as an anti-war movie. At least within living memory, shocking pictures of violence in Vietnam and the civil rights wovement seem to have had beneficial effects.
On the other hand my experience of the use of shocking art during the anti-nuclear campiagns of the 1980s (Atomic CAfe, Peter Watkins The War Game, the TV shwo The Day After), supports your doubts; ultimately I think it became too overwhelming and demobilized people.
But marketing also tells us that the most
> persuasive messages are
> certainly not the ones that are shocking and
> repulsive.
Like the famous Little Girl ad that many people credited wiuth winning the 1964 election for Johnson? Sort of depends on your goals, right? If you want people to buy your stuff, don't gross 'em out. If you want people to hate or fear something, maybe do. And there are things the left wants ordinary people to hate and fear.
>
> The ubiquitous and frivolous use of violence in
> pop-culture . . . . That prevalence of
overstimulation
> and attention grabbing
> in popculture, of which sex and violence are
> critical parts because we are
> biologically pre-wired to pay attention to this kind
> of stimuli all but
> killed any potential artistic value of sexual or
> violent contents (cf.
> Dali).
Well, sex and violence are different. I bet the research shows that sex still sells. And if it is shocking, it is so in a very different way than violence.
Now, artistic value is a different question. I thought we were talking about effect from a left wing pov. Whether an artistic creation, be it a commercial or a song or an epic poem, has value seems to be quite independent of whether it contains sex or violence. The Godfathers I & II are violent movies, but very great ones.
>
> As a result, I avoid any message that contains
> depictions of violence - even
> those in "lefty" publications intended to create
> moral outrage - because
> such messages only make me upset and obscure
> rational thinking.
I though we were all agreed that no one is persuaded by argument, that argument only serves to back up whatever views people have picked up in other ways. It is a very sweet and naive Brechtian notion that art can provoke rational thought. But I don't believe it. At the same time you may be right about overstimulation of shock value being decraesiungly effective to move people ina left direction.
The only
> effect of these messages is to make me inclined to
> avoid the subject
> altogether rather than trying to do something about
> it - which was supposed
> intention of the message.
Right, we saw that in the disarmament movement. But that may have had to do with the specific topic -- global annihilation. With Vietnam and Jim Crow, it was different.
>
> I also avoid any form of "in-your-face" message or
> artistic form.
Like what?
jks
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