Opening Address
W.J.T. Mitchell (Professor
of English and Art History, University of Chicago) | bio
Addressing Media, or Why We Shout at the Television
Set
Thursday, October 27, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue (580 West Hastings Street),
Asia Pacific Hall
I had hoped to present in this lecture an incisive analysis of the deplorable condition of the mass media in the United States at the present time: its lack of independence and investigative aggressiveness in the face of government manipulation; its reduction of crucial political debates to clichés and sound-bites; its complicity in leading the U.S. into Iraq; and its utter failure to tell the truth about the disastrous consequences of the war there. But I suspect that you already know all about that, and that you are, like me, also screaming at your television sets, or throwing thenewspaper across the room.
So instead of ranting about media bias, I want to investigate the impulse to rant in the first place. Is this a case of “blaming the messenger”? Are we mis-directing our rage? How could we think of media in a way that allowed us not to get mad, but to get even—that is, to reverse the tide of political manipulation of the media which seems to be flowing so steadily toward right wing control and a decline of professional journalism? Could we imagine a “general theory” of media that might give us a more complex and systematic overview of these tendencies?
I want to suggest an approach to media grounded in “metapictures” of media—scenes in which media show or expose themselves to view as faces or places, personal avatars of media, on the one hand, and locations or environments on the other. My hope is that these two kinds of metapictures will help us to “address media” (in the double sense of hailing or “addressing” it, and locating or placing it). This may not give us a general theory of media, but it might lead toward something I call “medium theory,” a practice of reflection immersed in the middle of a variety of media institutions.
