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Nele Noppe

popblog: Researching Polish Fandom - 0 views

  • one is addicted to foreign studies.
  • t is really hard to tell something specifically about Polish fans without comparing them to American or British.
  • Polish fans do not have the past described by Coppa. During the communistic period it was very seldom for people to organize themselves like the fans from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Poles were not prohibited to be fans and fannish behaviors were not restricted and prosecuted. Polish audiences simply did not have the need of being fans.
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  • In People’s Republic of Poland popular culture was in fact considered as high culture. People that were watching American movies and TV shows were in fact the elite with cultural competences superior to an average viewer (Kowalski, 1988) [2].
  • I must underline, however, that fan clubs were completely different from Western fandoms. Members of clubs were the elite in a different sense than fans. Sci-fi fan clubs were a window with a view on freedom, with a view on a completely different world – a capitalist world.
  • olish fans are “fans without the past”. Unlike their equivalents from the West they have no tradition or heritage. Therefore they do not realize they are a part of something larger, something that has a long history and has been a part of media consumption for a very long time.
  • Comparisons (with Western fans) that Polish researchers are bound to make seem to be methodologically unfounded. One cannot compare Polish fans with their Western equivalents. This kind of comparisons become inappropriate because of a completely different background of Polish fans (or I should say: lack of this background).
Nele Noppe

The Poetics of the Open Work By Umberto Eco - 0 views

  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
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  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,
  • the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece, w
  • the new musical works referred to above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements.
  • initiative of the individual performer
  • As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective. In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.
  • A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.
  • it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a far more tangible sense.
  • the poetics of the "open" work tends to encourage “acts of conscious freedom” on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations,
  • Instead nowadays it is primarily the artist who is aware of its implications.
  • However, in this type of operation, "openness" is far removed from meaning "indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions,
  • and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author.
  • It is not that the four solutions of the allegorical passage are quantitatively more limited than the many possible solutions of a contemporary "open" work. As I shall try to show, it is a different vision of the world which lies under these different aesthetic experiences
  • Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part.
  • the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.
  • W. Y. Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest modern literary works in order to test Valéry's declaration that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte" ("there is no true meaning of a text"). Tindall eventually concludes that a work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a continuous potentiality of "openness"-in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings. This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of modern work on "types of ambiguity" offered by poetic discourse.
  • Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an "open" mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world.
  • Here the work is "open" in the same sense that a debate is "open." A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the "openness" is converted into an instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.
  • the examples considered in the preceding section propose an "openness" based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance.
  • it is clear that a composition such as Scambi poses a completely new problem. It invites us to identify inside the category of "open" works a further, more restricted classification of works which can be defined as "works in movement," because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units
  • If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a work in movement," we are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarmé's Livre, a colossal and far- reaching work, the quintessence of the poet's production. He conceived it as the work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the world:
  • However, Mallarmé's immense enterprise was utopian:
  • In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.
  • Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the "open" work – and even less so in the "work in movement” – more or less specific overtones of trends in contemporary scientific thought.
  • The notion of "possibility" is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order, and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.
  • The two-value truth logic which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.
  • Here are no privileged points of view, and all available perspectives are equally valid and rich in potential.
  • This is not the place to pass judgment on the scientific validity of the metaphysical construct implied by Einstein's system. But there is a striking analogy between his universe and the universe of the work in movement
  • Therefore, to sum up, we can say that the "work in movement" is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author.
  • All these examples of "open" works and "works in movement" have this latent characteristic, which guarantees that they will al- ways be seen as "works" and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.
  • Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thou- sands of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work." The "openness" and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it
  • We have, therefore, seen that (1) "open" works, insofar as they are in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (2) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species "work in movement") there exist works which, though organically completed, are "open" to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range
  • of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance
  • The poetic theory or practice of the "work in movement" senses this possibility as a specific vocation. It allies itself openly and selfconsciously to current trends in scientific method and puts into action and tangible form the very trend which aesthetics has
  • already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer.
  • The poetics of the "work in movement" (and partly that of the "open" work) sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.
Nele Noppe

The Future of the Book - 0 views

  • The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer- oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
  • Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teenager
  • I am a rare-book collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some national or international endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry.... But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.
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  • The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere
  • the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus is a marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a satisfactory definition of electricity.
  • Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans jam session
  • The problem is in saying that we have replaced an old thing with another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an activity that has nothing to do with reading a movie
  • Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph has set painters free from the duty of imitation.
  • Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed literature from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like postmodern literature, it exists because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema. This means that in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else
Nele Noppe

Open-work: Dining at the Interstices - 0 views

  • In the New Millennium, the tradition that Judy Chicago pioneered of recognizing and celebrating women’s contributions continues in the vibrant new medium of the Web. Talan Memmott has suggested the term "Rich Lit" for the cornucopia of delights that this new "Dinner Party" offers.
  • The protest of the literati may be misguided, but it has enough nanograms of truth to prompt me to suggest a complementary term to Talan’s rich lit: open-work.
  • As a term, open-work calls attention to the fact that the craftwork of making has again become a recognized and important component of textual production. During the last several hundred years, the commodification of book production drove a wedge between authorial process and the hands-on labor of producing the book as a physical object. The complex history behind this separation has been documented by Mark Rose in Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, among others. Suffice it to say here that a constellation of economic, political and class forces was successful in promulgating the idea that what the author produced was an immaterial concept separated from and untainted by the commercial networks that brought the actual book into being.
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  • "work"--associated with the same male-centered world view that so enraged July Chicago-
  • The intelligence, knowledge, and creativity it takes to write and/or implement software for artistic purposes can no longer be separated from the work,
  • The open-work is open in the sense that it serves as a fluid space in which artistic intent commingles with technical expertise. At many levels and in many ways, the material basis for the production of the open-work interpenetrates the work as concept and cannot be separated from it.
  • rt itse
  • Especially illuminating in this regard are open-works that foreground the importance of craftwork by "treating" traditional texts so their concepts become literalized or materialized in new ways, thus opening spaces within the traditional texts where the fluid and hybrid nature of the open-work can asse
  • appropriation
  • Another aspect of the openness of the open-work is expressed in its fusion of text and image. With digital technology
  • The encoding of text into binary code allows fragmentation and recombination to operate in ways unthinkable with alphabetic language.
  • Finally, the open-work is open in the sense that it radiates out to a physically dispersed community, uniting together in collaborative projects women from different regions and countries, as well as bringing into existence an international Web community who can access and benefit from each other’s works.
Nele Noppe

Information Age Without Humanities = Industrial Revolution Without Steam Engine | HASTAC - 0 views

  • without the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened.  Steam powered everything.  What powers the Information Age?  It's not computation--that's a foundational component but we could each have a fabulous desktop or laptop or mobile device now that connected to some gigantic All Powerful centralized mainframe and we would not have the Information Age.  
  • It's not even the Internet. 
  • What is responsible for an Information Age, where all levels of habits and procedures of communication and interaction have changed dramatically in less than two decades, is the World Wide Web. 
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  • The World Wide Web is the steam engine of the Information Age.  And without the humanities, virtually everything about the World Wide Web is a muddle.  All of the key issues of how knowledge is exchanged, how it is created, what its role is in the world, how it functions and changes, how one kind of idea influences another, how knowledge travels, leads to a complex History of Ideas the likes of which we have not seen before.  
  • Dinner table conversation, Berners-Lee notes in his memoir Weaving the Web, often center on the key humanities question:  what it means to be human. 
  • everything that was constantly shaped by the environment and then constantly selecting environments associationally, driven by interest, pleasure, desire, fear, superstition, belief, understanding, and other deeply human conditions that had nothing to do with even the most powerful of computers.  These humanistic questions haunted the small boy; he wanted from earliest age to make a computer that could be like the human brain.   The World Wide Web approximated that because it is based on a human, social, interactive, creative, associational concept of thought and humanity. 
  • clearly universities under stress are finding ways to cut back courses and programs and are looking at the humanities as not relevant to the student of today.  They have it entirely wrong.  The humanities are the most important tool we have for understanding, with any kind of historical perspective and critical depth, all of the new arrangements of our world, precisely because those new arrangements of our world are rooted in an associational, interactive, qualitative humanistic concept of mind and society, not in a machinic, quantitative, linear, hardwired, fixed, or even measurable computational model.  
  • Of course, I have also spent the last decade arguing that the humanities are missing the boat by not claiming our centrality to the Information Age.   This is our age, I keep saying, if only we take responsibility for our role in its shape and its future.  That's the challenge, should we choose to accept it.  
Nele Noppe

popblog: Sex in Polish Sci-Fi Fan Fiction - Part II - 0 views

  • The goal of the study is to determine whether Polish sci-fi fan fiction is promiscuous or puritan. To what extent are fannish creations sexual – do fans write erotica?
  • When considering the topic in more detail one should begin with paying attention to a problem I have mentioned previously - the inability of Polish fans to describe what they created. As I have signaled fan fiction is not labeled in any way and Polish fans are not aware of the existence of specific terminology that would allow them to put their writing in order. Of course because of the specific history of Polish fandom we cannot apply Western rules to Polish fans. It is not my purpose then to compare different regions.
  • Does this indicate that Polish fans are puritan? Although an analysis of terminology is a good starting point it is definitely too soon to establish this. One cannot say anything about sex in fan fiction in Poland only on the basis of terms, especially because a comparison to Western fans is not recommended.
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  • 44,6 per cent of respondents have ever encountered erotic stories. This confirms that although in minority sexual sci-fi fan fiction exists.
  • Only 12,5 per cent of fans indicated that sex is the core of fannish fiction.
  • Results from Table 6 confirm this premise. Only 13 fans “strongly agree” or “agree” that fan fiction is highly erotic while 65 “disagree” or “strongly disagree”. 30,5 per cent of fans reject the possibility that fan fiction contains a lot of sex.
  • I have examined 51 stories
  • only few are sexual. One will not find any fan fiction that is solely erotic (“pwp”), which depicts sex without describing action or focusing on character development. Erotic scenes very often are just an extension of main plot. To sum up, in the case of Polish sci-fi fan fiction we are dealing with puritans rather than promiscuous fans. Erotica is rare, and although we can encounter stories that are sexual, they are in minority
  • What about homosexual fan fiction? Does it exist at all? Out of 50 fans that encountered erotic fan fiction, 22 did read Polish fan fiction that described sex between homosexuals (gay or lesbian).
  • Most writers of erotica are between 21 and 25 years of age. In fact there is only one fan who is less than 16. It is not true that erotic fan fiction is written mainly by men (that was a general tendency). 58,4 per cent of erotic fiction writers are females
  • One is obliged to say though that despite being puritans Polish fans are tolerant and open. For example they disagree that only heterosexual sex is accepted. They disagree even though they do not believe sexual content is an important part of fan fiction. It may be the case that they have the potential to become promiscuous. Who knows? Maybe some time from now Polish fans will become more sexual
Nele Noppe

Webster's World of Cultural Policy - 1 views

  • Facing the indifference and hostility of the vast majority of their populations -- sometimes referred to as "non-publics," to indicate their disinterest in establishment culture -- European policy-makers reinterpreted their own roles. They began to see themselves as needing to address the many cultures within their societies, not simply promoting the traditional "high art" culture favored by wealthy patrons in the past. Instead of focusing on how to lure people into established arts institutions, these cultural ministers turned to a set of much broader social questions: How can we begin to overcome the already-entrenched alienation of modernization? How can we retrieve and preserve relevant traditions? How might we facilitate cross-cultural communication, even cooperation? How can we help animate community life?
  • Among the primary means devised to realize the aims of cultural democracy is community animation.
  • What's most important for advocates of cultural democracy is to keep the big picture in mind.
Nele Noppe

Thought Police Can't Protect Real Children - 0 views

  • would have established the catagory of "nonexistent youth"
  • The banning of fictional depictions of child abuse would likely be as meaningless as the banning of fictional depictions of car chasing with the aim toward reducing motor vehicle accidents in real life.
  • If content alone was the issue, war footage and horror films should be banned as well.
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  • Content in itself is not the issue--Child pornography has been outlawed because the methods involved in production involve real children in possibly abusive circumstances. How the material was produced is what makes it criminal, not what impression it conveys on the audience. 
  • Child pornography involving real children being sexually abused is horrid beyond words. For that very reason, I find it reprehensible to mix together such acts of human misery and suffering with illusionary fantasy that exists only in the author's imagination. Widening the definition of child pornography to include fictional material belittles the gravity of real sex abuse.
  • Many convicted criminals also cite the Bible as their inspiration of conducting astonishingly savage acts, and yet few would attribute the Bible as the root cause of such criminal behavior. Why?--Because free societies accept the principle that people are responsible for their own actions.
  • It is very dangerous to restrict the actions and rights of citizens based on the principle that some limited number of individuals may act irresponsibly. This is the equivalent of removing knives from the household kitchen because someone used a meat cleaver to commit a crime. Again, this logic is unbelievably reckless as well.
  • Furthermore, crime statistics published by the Japanese police themselves show no causality between the proliferation of erotic material and sex crimes. The crime rate has dramatically decreased since WW2 while the availability of erotica and violent fictional entertainment has risen by leaps and bounds during the same period.
  • It is easily imaginable that an endless cycle of accusations and denials will unfold regarding establishing the "true age" of fictional characters. Authors and publishers will more than likely attempt to proclaim that the characters look young, but they are actually above the age of 18. Physical attributes vary between widely depending on race and ethnicity, not to mention fictional non-human characters.
  • Publishers and authors are extremely proficient in adapting toward new regulations. If graphical depictions are banned, then abstract or comedic depictions will increase.
  • Either an ever increasing set of symbols will be deemed to be inappropriate to be linked to a core human attribute--human sexuality--or the futility of the ban will lead the law to become impotent over all.
  • Even today, numerous adult manga publications have self censorship standards that are mind-boggling. Authors have complained about how some editors have insisted on having all female characters appearing in their works be endowed with large breasts because drawing women as they appear more like in real life was deemed "too childish looking." 
  • Banning the fictional depictions of minors involved in sexual situations will make a fundamental core human attribute taboo.
  • Such a ban will stifle creativity and impoverish the cultural landscape.
  • The value attributed to works of literature and art change over time. The works of modern art and literature from the last two centuries are filled with examples where they were deemed to be vile, corruptive trash by contemporary authorities, but now these same works enjoy high status as priceless cultural treasures.
  • A culture grows richer through addition, not by subtraction.
  • A ban on fictional depictions of minor engaged in sexual situations has the very real potential to brand individuals as sex offenders even though they have had no sexual contact with real people. I believe there could be no legal justification for destroying people's lives simple because they drew doodles on paper, but the proposed ban would create such a legal precedence. 
  • I am absolutely certain that history will not look back kindly upon such a ban, and it will join a long list of colossal failures of regulatory policy, such as the prohibition of alcohol in the US between 1920 to 1933, various sodomy laws, the comic book code, and bans on socialist literature in Japan during the prewar era. It is important to note that all these failed moral crusades were led by virtuous and diligent individuals intent on making the world a better place. 
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