HERE are the lecture slides for this week.
Again, I'd love to hear your thoughts about our lecture today. Here are our discussion questions:
1. What makes a narrative a counter-narrative?
2. Why study resistance movements? Why do we need to study the who and the what of representation in relation to resistance movements?
3. When the subaltern speaks, what does s/he speak about? When/how/why do "we" listen?
4. How should we regard jokes and their political potential?
5. How do we study the Internet critically in the context of globalization?
I'm also hoping that you post links to other "resistance" websites here.
Remember to photocopy Silverstone's Media and Morality Ch2 from the Reserve Section in the Library. And for those who borrowed my books the past weeks, kindly return them by Friday next week.
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3 comments:
i think that it is very difficult to say exactly what the counter-narrative is. it is said that the non-confirmity is the new conformity. it seems that everyone is always trying to go away from something dominant and solid and this says that basically, everyone is still doing the same thing: non-conformity.. which, if i understand correctly, makes non-conformity the dominant one and suggests that conformity is the counter-narrative. with so many things going on, it is difficult to pinpoint which one is which.
first of all sir jon, thanks for the pizza, it was so yummy :)
i apologize that i had to go all of a sudden coz i had other matter to take care of.
about the example of a "resistance" website, i was actually thinking of postsecret. (http://postsecret.blogspot.com)
it an online community that allows people to anonymously post their own deepest, darkest secrets. i was actually thinking about the internet, serving as the voice of the marginalized because the people who are usually posting at that site are either abused or has committed some sort of crime but is obviously too afraid to admit that it is them.
another interesting thing that i'd like to point out is the political potential of a joke. i think that these kinds of joke, especially those who uses elements of pop culture in it, very hegemonic, basically because to be able to understand the portrait of, for example yoda, one must understand the context of star wars. so by trying to be a counter-discourse, it basically turns itself to be "the" discourse that should be taken. jokes usually also because of the concept of "i-know-something-and-you-don't" and that of an "inside joke"...
1. This is more of a rant. I think trying to answer this question is akin to attempting to define who and/or what the Self and the Other is. Essentialist discourse lends itself to the construction of the field and the focus; the feature presentation and the intermission; the narrative and the counter-narrative. Admittedly, essentialism is a very potent (and often unavoidable) tool. But I feel that we must learn to veer away from the constraints of objectification and stringent identification. Power, as Foucault said, is capillary, dispersed. The minute a dominant narrative/discourse gets subverted or transformed into OR challenged by something else—jokes as commentary, citizen news, even domestication and appropriation of media technologies (on the part of the media audiences)—a counter-narrative is born.
But how exactly do we measure dominance? Website hits? People who react? Even media products are editable, fluid, re-“representable”. Counter-narratives can easily be codified as narratives, depending on who is looking at what. Thus, the blurring of lines, the non-linearity of power and information. In a way, we will always be/play hostage to the potentiality of change and movement, even (or especially?) within the milieu of media (representations and audience activity).
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