Plan for Today Presentation on Critical Terms Video

Plan for Today • Presentation on Critical Terms • Video Response Exercise • Finish Viewing Food, Inc.

Representation • The bringing of something into presence through some form of symbolic communication.

The Axis of Signification

Object, Means, Manner • What is represented (our food system). • The material or medium used to represent with its rules for combining and decoding signs (film). • The conventions (recurring figures), characteristic styles or genres of representation (the agrarian pastorale, ).

Two Meanings of Representation • Portrait (aesthetic or semiotic depiction) this dab of paint stands for that rock. • Proxy (political delegation) a speaking in the name of … • How does representation work ideologically? A relative, partial, positioned depiction of the real. It is never divorced from social struggles.

Homo Symbolicum • Humans have the unique ability to create and manipulate signs. • Signs are the medium through which we communicate about the world. • “Our concepts are the frameworks for our thought. ”

What Is a Sign? • Signs are things that “stand for” or “take the place of” something else. • A sign is a relationship between a signifier and a signified. • The problem of the referent. We can’t grasp it directly, except through thought, through the medium of the sign which is an articulation in meaning. • Both signified and signifier are immaterial. They are things of the mind.

Structures of Signification • Icon • Symbol • Index Motivated by Resemblance (Metaphor) Arbitrary Relationship (Sign) Motivated by Association (Trace, Metonymy, Synechdoche)

Icon • A principle of resemblance (metaphor). • One object is equated with another on the basis of a relationship of likeness. • Condensation in Freud’s dream logic (a layering of meanings through resemblance). • The grocery aisles in Food Inc. morph into the rows of a corn field.

Metaphor in Language • The sun is like a bright copper penny.

Metaphor in Magic • There is something “like” about a woodpecker’s beak and a toothache.

Metaphor in Film: The Revolving Door as a Metaphor for Regulatory Capture

Index • A principle of association (metonymy or synecdoche). The index finger is the one that points to a referent. • Metonymy is a relationship of close proximity (contiguity) between the representation and what is being represented. • Synecdoche is a part which stands for a whole that stands for a part. • Displacement in Freud’s dream logic eludes conscious censorship.

Metonymy in Language • • • Twenty sail set out from harbor today. The pen is mightier than the sword. By order of the crown! The White House said today… Trouble-and-strife = wife (Cockney rhyming slang)

Metonymy in film

Metonymy in film

Symbolic • An arbitrary relationship (similar to a linguistic sign). • A signifier stands for a signified, but there is no natural tie between them (It is unmotivated). • Meaning is conventional but not necessarily fixed (set through reiterative symbolic transactions).

The bald eagle is a symbol of the United States.

La Pensée Sauvage (Untamed Thought) • • Poetry (figures of speech, tropes) Myth (Levi-Strauss) Magic (Levi-Strauss) Dream Logic (Freud) Jokes (Freud) Slips of the tongue (Freud) The Figures of Rhetoric (the classical art of persuasive speech) • Even the scientific imagination (Watson’s model of the double helix model for DNA)

Ideology: As a Concept in Social Theory • A set of representations through which individuals are formed as social subjects who internalize a picture of their social world and their place within it as natural and right. • These “world pictures” are open to history and are changed through social struggle.

Subjectivity as a Critical Concept • The word subjectivity refers to the social determination of selfhood. • The insertion of oneself into the larger ideological world picture. • Individuals become “interpellated” (stitched into networks of meaning), they are “hailed” by ideology. You are called and you recognize yourself as being called. • Open to historical shifts and change. • Anthropological ways of seeing includes getting into the subjective experience of individuals within their cultural and historical context.

Psychoanalytic Theory and Film • Photography and film instantiate psychic processes. • Projection of desire or repressed emotions. • Film expresses subjectivity, a point of view. • The photograph is constructed through framing, focus, etc. • And the viewer is invited to take a position within an order of meaning. (The viewer in Food Inc. is positioned as pushing the shopping cart through the aisles of the supermarket.

Putting the viewer in the film

Sequencing and Montage

Short Films: The metaphor of the matrix (getting behind the veil) • The Matrix: What is Real? • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=VVr o 5 wxqh 4 U • The Meatrix • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=r. Ekc 70 zt. Orc • Ram Truck Commercial https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=H 7 y Zd. Ol_e_c&t=6 s

The agrarian pastorale

“Welcome to the desert of the real. ”

A Genealogy of Red Pilling: From the ancient Gnostics to Alice in Wonderland to alt. right • Online, “to red pill” is to learn that you’ve been defrauded and misled, that you’ve bought into a false and diabolical lie, and that your only way out is to obtain true knowledge about the way the world works. • Rampant among online conspiracy theories.

• “These days we’re mostly trapped in the clutches of a handful of opaque and unaccountable megaplatforms — vast systems exerting enormous power over us, but of whose workings we remain only dimly aware. Is it any accident that fables of secret and enlightening knowledge about the oppressive structures of reality are so potent? ” • Max Read, “How the Matrix’s Red Pill Became the Internet’s Delusional Drug of Choice. ” New York Magazine, Feb 8, 2019.

Basic concepts for critical viewing • Authenticity: What is the relationship of the filmic image and the “real”? • Evidence: What aural and visual material is assembled to tell a story? • Authority: How do documentaries ground their truth claims? • Responsibility: What obligation does the filmmaker have to his/her audience? To his/her filmic subjects?

Tips for Making Cellphone Video • Always use landscape mode. • A selfie stick or a tripod can help you keep the phone steady as you film. • If possible, make sure your subjects are facing the light. • Pay attention to framing! Don’t cut off the top of people’s heads if you can help it. • Use a clip on mike for audio clarity in interviews. • Try to avoid background noise if you can.

Group Meetings • Figure out a one-sentence statement of what you want to say with this film. • Set up some next steps and a target date to have them done by. • Identify times when you can go as a group to your filming site. • Or divide up the tasks: scoping out filming site, contacting possible interviewees, working on story board.

Fresh (dir. Ana Sofia Joanes, 2009) • https: //tubitv. com/movies/312588/fresh

Sympathetic Magic: Magic that works according to a principle of resemblance.

Metaphor in Magic • The use of a voodoo doll to place a hex.

Contagious Magic: Magic that works according to the principle of contiguity or association.

Metonymy in Magic • The use of fingernail parings or other bodily products to place a hex.