Dissertation

The historical moment is constitutive of artworks; authentic works are those that surrender themselves to the historical substance of their age without reservation and without the presumption of being superior to it. They are the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch; this, not least of all, establishes their relation to knowledge. Precisely this makes them incommensurable with historicism, which, instead of following their own historical content, reduces them to their external history. Artworks may be all the more truly experienced the more their historical substance is that of the one who experiences it. The bourgeois world of art is ideologically blind even in the supposition that artworks that lie far enough in the past can be better understood than those of their own time. The layers of experience borne by important contemporary artworks, that which wants to speak in them, are—as objective spirit—incomparably more commensurable to contemporaries than are works whose historico-philosophical presuppositions are alienated from actual consciousness. The more intensively one seeks to comprehend Bach, the more puzzling is the gaze he returns, charged as it is with all the power that is his. (183)

The misunderstanding of Adorno’s approach to popular culture is rooted in the idea that he idealized great art from the past, and lamented that it was no longer being produced in the contemporary moment. However, this quotation reveals a nearly opposite tendency in his theory. Whatever great art, like the music of Bach, may represent to us, it does not excite our critical capacities in such a way to enable us to develop a serious theory of aesthetics. In order to do that, we must approach all artworks as they appear to us in the contemporary cultural landscape, that is, what remains of Bach, as it is juxtaposed with the cultural reality of 1960s student activism. It is Adorno, rather than his detractors, who insists that it is unethical to worship great masters of the past, as if they could save us from our current situation.

To return to the Stan Lee example for a moment, it is not only that he appears in The Guild only for a few seconds in a single episode, thus representing a mere “blip” in the survey of contemporary culture depicted at the convention. It is that his cameo is one of so many in that season, all with equal potential to inspire excitement in the viewer, represented here by the fannish behavior of each member of the Knights of Good. It is not that this is a series about contemporary comics creators, in which Stan Lee appears to fulfill some particular dream of his latest generation of disciples. That said, because I read The Guild comics as representative of a particularly innovative fusion of underground and mainstream comic book aesthetics, the encounter between Lee and The Guild provides some satisfaction on that count. More importantly, though, there is the fact that Stan Lee, fantasy author Neil Gaiman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Eliza Dushku, Buck Rogers star Erin Gray, MythBusters star Grant Imahara, and Bonnie Burton, author of The Star Wars Craft Book, all appear at various points in the season as representatives of the media landscape in an era of “convergence culture” (Jenkins). In this moment, media consumption is driven neither by preconceived notions of who matters, or what medium matters, but rather by a reader’s own openness to the transmedia articulation of phenomena that speak to them.

Again, I turn to Adorno, who, while he was drafting Aesthetic Theory in the late 1960s, articulated this openness as a critical practice.

In art, development has multiple meanings. It is one of the means that crystallize in art’s autarchy; further, it is the absorption of techniques that originate socially, external to art, and that, because they are alien and antagonistic, do not always result in progress; and, lastly, human productive forces also develop in art, in the work of subjective differentiation, for example, although such progress is often accompanied by the shadow of regression in other dimensions. Progressive consciousness ascertains the condition of the material in which history is sedimented right up to the moment in which the work answers to it; precisely by doing so, progressive consciousness reaches out into the open, beyond the status quo. (192-193)

It is the work of the critic to tap into his “progressive consciousness” in order to face the contemporary work of art, and to make note of the human and historical developments articulated in it, and made possible by it. I refer to this consciousness as openness because it requires the critic to occupy a position that resembles the passivity of the consumer, a position he may fear, but is also the sole location from which one can access the pleasures and possibilities of the contemporary artwork. Openness is the first principle of the critical reading practice that I wish to use to read The Guild. As I interpret the transmedia unfolding of each character’s development of a critical stance toward the contemporary cultural moment they inhabit, I begin to see how they manage the contradictions of their lives. Simultaneously embodying overconsumption as a contemporary condition and rejecting the false totality of social normalcy, the characters navigate their world critically, holding onto their anchor of self-representation in the game.

There are other equally exciting Twenty-First-Century articulations of the contemporary media landscape that stand alongside The Guild as examples of innovative, theoretically sophisticated transmedia storytelling. One example is John Jennings and Stacey Robinson’s collaborative creation, the Black Kirby avatar, who appears in multiple visual media, including comics and other works on paper. These artists use an Afrofuturist critical sensibility to re-tell the history of comics imaginatively, from an Afro-centric perspective. This means not only that they imagine one of the star creators of mid-century comics, Jack Kirby, as having been black himself, but also that they infuse the works they attribute to Black Kirby with West African mythology, history, and aesthetics, rather than the Western ones from which Jack Kirby and others primarily drew.

Borrowing from his set of critical tools, I refer to Adorno’s critical model for engaging with contemporary culture as “sedimented history,” that is, looking at artworks in the present as the top layer of sediment, through which the critic must sift in order to stage his full encounter with the work. Like sedimented history, Afrofuturism looks at the present, which, in a Twenty-First-Century context means looking at a world infused by technology and media experimentation, and sees in the black experience the most concentrated articulation of broader cultural trends. Mark Dery, who coined the term Afrofuturism, writes in “Black to the Future” that:

African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies. (180)

The Black Kirby avatar project depicts this insight beautifully and compellingly, using visual media to showcase the connections the artists perceive between the desires that were once excited in them by classic comic books and the politics and aesthetics they have developed as contemporary practitioners. Black Kirby shares much in common with The Guild in terms of media experimentation, but its Afrofuturist inspiration and tactics set it apart from The Guild by establishing a connection with living politics, something The Guild constantly fails, or refuses to do.

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that I find it easier to stage an encounter between The Guild and the reading practices of Theodor W. Adorno, who, though innovative in his ability to articulate a critical practice for reading contemporary popular culture, is often rightly condemned for careless social politics, especially in his representations of gender and race. Adorno’s own theoretical practice asks us to be critical of our desire to locate definitive origin points for contemporary phenomena, and asks us instead to look for the series of sedimented insights by which the artwork reveals itself to us. And therefore, as I take in The Guild, I find that, at first, gestures towards Afrofuturism seem absent from within the storyworld; however, in the first comic that depicts the perspective of a non-white character the need for this critical sensibility arises. Thus, I stage an encounter between The Guild: Tink and Audre Lorde’s time-bending Zami: A New Spelling For My Name. The Guild: Tink represents the moment in which the vast critical sphere represented by the comics first touches the sphere of Western intellectual history from outside of it, and forges a transformative connection to it. But to get there, I must first use sedimented history to take me on a survey of The Guild storyworld, in order to reveal the scope of this transformation, enabled by contemporary acts of creative self-representation.

It may be the case that The Guild is a work whose greatest tangible influence will always be contained to the years immediately surrounding its serial publication, from 2007 to 2013. Undoubtedly, it served during those years as a direct inspiration to many other Web series and transmedia storytelling experiments, even creating a coterie of Web series creators. In 2009, the first year of the Streamy Awards for online video, The Guild won in two high-profile categories, best comedy series, and best comedy actress, for Felicia Day. Three more awards, best comedy actor, best directing in a comedy, and best writing in a comedy, went to Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon’s Internet musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which Whedon claims he was inspired to create after watching The Guild (Vary 1). Whereas Day acted professionally before turning to the Internet, a slightly younger generation has begun to take the opposite approach. One notable example of this phenomenon is Issa Rae, who began to post installments of her first series, Dorm Diaries, on YouTube in May of 2007. That series explored her experience as an African American woman at Stanford. In 2011, Rae created The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, which has since become one of the most popular Web series on the Internet, and led Rae to collaborative work with television producer Shonda Rhimes (Gopalan 1).

These lines of direct influence, and my examples only skim the surface of the Web series as an industrial phenomenon, have been comprehensively chronicled by Web series expert Aymar Jean Christian, both on his blog, Televisual, and in his dissertation, “Off the Line: Independent Television and the Pitch to Reinvent Hollywood.” Because, in this project, I offer a sustained reading of a single Web series, I propose an approach that is complementary to Christian’s—and I hope that others will do the same, lending their focus to the many other brilliant Web series, including Awkward Black Girl, Dane Joseph’s Drama Queenz, a series about black gay life in New York City, and Carmen Elena Mitchell’s The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else, a series about queer female community and transnational feminism. Like The Guild, all of these shows merit sustained critical attention, alongside credit for the fact that women and queer producers are at the vanguard of this dominant strand of media innovation in the Twenty-First-Century.

My task in this project is to adapt Adorno’s approach of sedimented history to a Twenty-First-Century transmedia narrative, the first of its reach authored by a woman, in order to arrive at a new sense of how to interpret popular culture in times of rapid media change. Such times provide the context for the series’ production, as well as the content of its story. Indeed, by the final season of the Web series, Day and her team had developed the budget and knowledge to depict extended scenes of in-game action, in the underwater environment that was that season’s in-game focus. Such scenes were unimaginable during the first season, which was fan-funded, and relied on its improvisational comedy-inspired banter between the actors, as they performed Day’s witty script on simple sets. Already, the fact that Day alternated between her webcam monologues and the group scenes represented a storytelling innovation particular to the series’ home on the Internet, but it was unclear that she and her team had the potential to turn the series into such a fully-realized transmedia experience, which fulfilled its early promise to capture online life as it is experienced by women and queer subjects.

To realize online life fully required a two-fold approach to storytelling innovation: on the one hand, the budget and special effects to build fictional parallels to digital phenomena; on the other, the moment of transmedia expansion, when the first comic was published. In The Guild: Codex, Day and the artist Jim Rugg translated the YouTube aesthetic onto the printed page, in order to tell the story of what drew mousy Cyd Sherman to spend her days talking to a webcam, and portraying a made-up character in a virtual environment. From there, the series revealed the many different directions in which it could expand, that is, its ability to live, thrive, and reveal new aspects of its creator’s vision in print as well as online, or in any art world that intersects with digital-era subjectivity. This storyworld seemed, in that moment, capable of broadening its conceptual focus and expanding at a speed that reflected the reader’s own sense of the expanding virtual sphere at her fingertips. Something larger had to be at stake in that parallel potential.

For me, that something larger has to do with the series’ authorship by a woman, and its savvy articulation of the landscape of women’s self fashioning, both as it stretches horizontally across media, from webcams to social networking sites, and as it invites us back in time, to the history of women’s autobiography as a way into understanding the development of women’s consciousness over time. Again, one might wonder why I wish to ask a contemporary, socially influenced question about women’s self-representation in transmedia storytelling, and its origins in women’s autobiography since counterculture, by way of Adorno’s sedimented history. The answer is that his interdisciplinary theory offers a rare flexibility that is required by the nature of my materials, which do not fit neatly into a major academic field, whether by constraints of medium, degree of respectability, or by strict constraints of periodization. That said, all my works are undoubtedly contemporary, in the sense that Adorno articulates it.

It is important to note that, just as I am not the first to recognize the importance of the Web series or transmedia storyworld as a contemporary form, I am also by no means the first person to perform women-centered criticism with the inspiration of Theodor Adorno.² As Renée Heberle writes in her introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno:

His context is not ours. However, he predicts and speaks directly to many questions that go to the heart of contemporary feminist theory, including questions about interpretation, the relation between theory and practice, representation, identity, and historical memory. The chapters that follow keep the faith with Adorno’s attunement to historicity and offer some insight into how we might continue to think about those questions through the prism of his thought. (19)

Heberle’s collection showcases a series of innovative uses of Adorno for advancing questions of feminist theory and philosophy, ranging from a sedimented Marxist-feminist analysis of the gendering of the commodity fetish, to a new examination of Adorno’s uneasy relationship with his students, as they became feminists and activists during the 1960s.

As Lisa Yun Lee describes in her contribution, “The Bared Breasts Incident,” much of Adorno’s unpopularity today can be traced to certain legends about his personal inability to embody the radicalism that he espoused in his theoretical writings. According to one such legend, when his radical students bared their breasts to him during a lecture, he was so shocked by the sheer presence of their femininity that he had the heart attack that would lead to his death. Although it’s true that his students disrupted his lecture, and frustrated him with this action, it is certainly not true that he was annihilated by its sheer embodied authenticity; in fact, it led him to write the response essay “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” which Lee analyzes for the majority of her chapter, suggesting that it articulates those insights of Adorno’s cultural theory that speak most profoundly to enduring feminist questions. In her reading, he articulates his own theory of embodied thinking in opposition to the feminist essentialism articulated by his students.

Lee drew this work from her larger work on Adorno, Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T.W. Adorno. In this book, Lee takes a brilliant theoretical turn, which will by necessity inform my project, too. At first, she extracts a theory of the body from the work of a man who rarely referred to it specifically. She argues that the body represents a dominant theme throughout Adorno’s writings, especially those he produced in exile, when he experienced firsthand the necessity of protecting his body from the physical violence that would otherwise have been inflicted on him by the Nazis. This experience had a lasting effect on his philosophy.

Adorno is perhaps best known in English departments for his statement in “Cultural Criticism and Society” that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). But this statement is often misinterpreted as representing a damning cynicism, which is too extreme to take seriously. In this misinterpretation, Adorno offers the contemporary world nothing, and only catalogs its failures. While it is true that he keeps a catalog of the many moments in contemporary culture in which utopia fails to materialize, it is not true that he offers no program for the humanities other than to condemn poetry and American popular culture. Rather, he offers the following, as Lee writes:

Adorno writes in the final section of Negative Dialectics that after Auschwitz, the categorical imperative has been replaced with the moral imperative to think bodily (leibhaft). This somatic moment is described by Adorno as the only possible way to approach “unimaginable physical suffering.” At the same time, Adorno does not attempt to rescue an authentic body, or a naturalistic body that is unburdened by and free of socio-cultural affects. The assumption of “givenness” upon which a simple materialism of the body is based proves to be a problem for Adorno's philosophical modus operandi of mediation. He rigorously extends this practice of eschewing immediacy and the notion of “first principles” to his reflections on the body. (7)

In other words, redemption cannot, for Adorno, be found in poetry, as we had once understood it, or in the body, where we might reconnect with our humanity on an individual level. Rather, given the ethical imperative to take bodies seriously in a world in which they suffer, and given our cultural landscape, in which our thoughts, experiences, and self-representations are increasingly manipulated by a complex culture industry, it is our task to interpret this world dialectically, taking account of what seems to be embodied, what seems to be thought, and what seems to be presented to us that complicates this dichotomy in the cultural artifacts we encounter.

Lee suggests that Adorno’s theory of the body offers a compelling ethical challenge to contemporary queer and feminist theories of the body, which tend to celebrate the utopian possibilities represented by creative gender performance, as in the theories of Judith Butler, or queer sexual activity, as in Gayle Rubin. It is worth noting that Lee produced this work a few years before disability theorists like Tobin Siebers and Michael Davidson began to produce theories of complex embodiment,³ which one might find easier to align with Adorno’s notion on vulnerability as a (potentially universally) shared state. However, her particular intervention offers a sustained focus on women and consumerism that is particularly generative for my analysis of women-authored transmedia and other experimental works of self-representation because it represents where Adorno’s theories continue to feel necessary in the de-politicized sphere of contemporary interdisciplinary theory. Lee writes,

As the site of pleasure, lust, desire, passion, and the erotic, the body is a marketer's dream: easily sensationalized and readily commodified...How can we explain this rapid proliferation of work on the body? If it is true that the body is a site of resistance, as so many academics...have claimed, surely the revolution should be just around the corner! Terry Eagleton has observed, in what he reproachfully calls the “body shop” of the academic left, a profound sense of apathy that accompanies the intense scrutiny of the body. Eagleton notes that in the mass production of academic work on the body, generated mostly within the discourse of post-structuralism, there is a loss of the political significance of the body. (124-125)

In other words, what Adorno experienced as a profoundly political embodiment, that of exile in the United States, which led him to experience the cultural landscape in a way that involved near-constant dissonance and discomfort, seems in the Twenty-First-Century to emerge only in the context of pleasurable insight and the differentiation of experience, rather than as pain that could be articulated as shared vulnerability, or some kind of solidarity.

Lee continues, referring, presumably, to the rapid expansion of queer studies to subsume all other forms of politically necessary solidarity,

According to Eagleton, this is precisely why work on the body is so popular today. It is not necessarily anti-capitalist. The politics of postmodernism, according to Eagleton, have moved from a radical politics of the body that revolved around questions of sexuality to a displacement of politics to questions of subjectivity and pleasure, which is often configured as a form of “consumerist hedonism.” “The body...is currently en route to becoming the greatest fetish of all.” (125)

And indeed, this critique speaks to one aspect of my project, namely, the fact that, in my attempt to locate surprising and generative insights in my archive of women’s experimental autobiography, especially The Guild, I sometimes veer toward celebrating what might appear to another reader as memoirs of overconsumption, or depictions of tasteless excess. However, I argue that it is only The Guild’s top layer that represents each character’s characteristics as a consumer, and that, beneath this layer, the reader has the opportunity to uncover the complexity of their particular constellation of excesses, and thus what kinds of thinking subjects they might become in time. Ultimately, The Guild represents as detailed a map toward embodied thinking in consumer capitalism as Adorno’s Minima Moralia, or the many women-authored autobiographies I examine in this project.

The most pronounced feature of The Guild’s concept of embodiment is the relationship between human gamer and in-game avatar, that is, between author and self-representation. Just as Adorno found that he had to address the minute details of mid-century American popular culture in order to understand his own damaged life, the members of The Guild find that they must invest their lives in their avatars in order to understand why they have been rejected by the social worlds they knew before. The reader must begin there, where they are, in virtual space, and observe the characters’ backwards trajectories from their world of reflections, back to the world of their social origin, whose deficiencies we can now see more fully. And so I begin with their individual consumption practices including the social practices that sustain these, and then allow these to lead me to each character’s self-realization as an individual in the world, whose behaviors inevitably exceed what was forecast both by the designers of their virtual world, and by the designers of their world of origin, who failed to predict their widespread dissatisfaction. It is each character’s sustained relationship with her avatar, which reveals this dissatisfaction, and which enables her to navigate the contemporary popular culture landscape critically. To put it in a different critical context, the subject-avatar relation enables the characters to become fans, that is, thinking subjects, rather than mere consumers. Their “excess” is, in this interpretation, no longer one of material over-investment, but rather of critical capacity.⁴