CAT 1: Media Seductions
Global Media and Public Outrage
Elizabeth Losh
http://losh.ucsd.edu
How’s My Driving?
Don’t forget to complete the CAPE survey!
Science
Studies
How is CAT 2 different from CAT 1?
• Even more writing intensive
• Focuses on the present of culture, art, and
technology rather than the past
• Curriculum focuses on arguments: explicit
and implicit
Special Guest Professor Gerald Doppelt
Explaining the Controversy
May Involve Getting Beyond It
Getting beyond simple pro and con positions
Is it really just about free speech vs. religious
tolerance?
Thinking About Layout
Visualizing Your Exhibition
What themes does the book explore other
than media influence & blasphemy?
How Do We Finish the Book?
How do we understand Rushdie’s ideas
about “imaginary homelands”?
Thinking some more about media
about media
How do we think about media and
deceit?
Understanding the Iago story:
narratives of temptation
Understanding “blasphemy” in context
Chamcha’s Predicament
‘When you’ve fallen from the sky, been
abandoned by your friend, suffered police
brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost
your work as well as your wife, learned the
power of hatred and regained human shape,
what is there left to do but, as you would no
doubt phrase it, demand your rights?’ (416)
A Symbol of Hybridity: The Chimera
195 “the avatar of a
chimerical archangel”
207 “the chimera of renewal”
311 “the effort of raising him .
. . fully persuaded her that
he was no chimera.”
382 “chimeras of form,
lionheaded goatbodied
serpenttailed
impossibilities”
420 “a chimera with roots”
477 “a garden of dense
intertwined chimeras”
A Book about Media
Tabloids (422) -- earlier we hear about “papers full
of kinky sex and death” (354)
Gibreel as a medium “scrawl his name in Gibreel’s
flesh” (448)
Art cinema vs. Indian cinema (454)
Television cameras capturing the Club Hot Wax raid
(469-470) “A camera requires law, order, the thin
blue line.”
“Film instead of human beings” (527)
“A book is a product of a pact with the Devil” (474)
Writing and Deceit
After that, when he sat at the Prophet’s feet,
writing down rules rules rules, he began,
surreptitiously, to change things.
‘Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in
which God was described as all-hearing, all-knowing, I
would write, all-knowing, all-wise. Here’s the point:
Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I
was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway
polluting the word of God with my own profane
language.’ (379-380)
People write to tell lies. (398)
Speech and Deceit
Chamcha’s telephone calls 457-461
‘The archangel sings to me,’ she admitted, ‘ to
the tune of popular hit songs.’ (512)
Useful and well-timed revelations (377)
The Iago Story in Othello
“worth the total output of any other
dramatist” (412)
“the enigma of Iago” (439)
“that’s a fable” (481)
Religion and Blasphemy
Why do variations of the word “blasphemy”
keep appearing?
Inversions of brothel and religious space (394,
396)
2005 Jyllands-Posten Controversy
about “the face of Muhammad”
How did images in one Danish newspaper affect the
world?
How do political
cartoons influence?
Piss Christ (1987)
Andres Serrano
Caused controversy for the National
Endowment for the Arts
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Martin Scorsese
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toe-rDrS_Gw&
Rushdie as Public Intellectual
Comments after 9/11
Arguing against
Samuel Huntington’s
1993 “Clash of
Civilizations”
argument in an
October 4, 2001
article in The Nation
“The Clash of Ignorance”
The basic paradigm of West versus the rest
(the cold war opposition reformulated)
remained untouched, and this is what has
persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in
discussion since the terrible events of
September 11. The carefully planned and
horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide
attack and mass slaughter by a small group of
deranged militants has been turned into proof
of Huntington's thesis.
Who represents Islam?
“Let’s Get Back to Life”
The Guardian, October 6, 2001
The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing.
In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while
we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him
wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must
agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon
sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion,
literature, generosity, water, a more equitable
distribution of the world's resources, movies, music,
freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our
weapons. Not by making war, but by the unafraid way
we choose to live shall we defeat them.
“Let’s Get Back to Life”
The Guardian, October 6, 2001
The terrorist wraps himself in the world's grievances to
cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying
to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better
world was part of it. The fundamentalist seeks to bring
down a great deal more than buildings. Such people
are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech,
a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage,
accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's
rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing,
beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants,
not Muslims. .
Imaginative Acts of Response
“how different bits of the world join up”
Pseudo-Interactivity
Rushdie’s Criticisms of Clicker Culture
His was a generation that believed in skipping life’s
boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fastforward from one action-packed climax to the next.
(416)
. . . what a leveler this remote-control gizmo was, a
Procrustean bed for the twentieth century; it
chopped down the heavyweight and stretched the
slight (419)
No wonder we are unable to remain focused on
anything for very long; no wonder we invent remotecontrol channel-hopping devices. If we turned these
instruments upon ourselves we’d discover more
channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever
dreamed of (534)
For Next Time