In my work, I operate largely in two fields — media and cultural studies and translation studies. I frequently attend translation studies conferences where we talk about media, and the translation studies scholars often present things that appear new to them but represent controversies we resolved in cultural studies thirty years ago. I suspect the questions I’m posing here are analogous — they feel new to me, but only because the relevant literature is not well integrated into the scholarly touchstones that shape the subfield of cultural studies.

All that to say, if my questions appear naive, it’s because they are. Hence the value of your suggestions — I’ve got my reading set for winter break. (In many ways, I’m an odd choice to organize a series on aesthetics. I proposed it not because I have something interesting to say, but for more selfish reasons — I wanted interesting stuff to read, and this seemed like a useful approach.)

As for Peirce — it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve tried to fit a round peg in a square hole. But I’m not ready to give up on him yet, in part because he provides tools for answering other questions I ask, especially in relation to media and translation. I’m also not convinced that reading against his conclusions is a problem — there is a lot of potential in his work that went unrealized because of the intellectual environment in which he was working, in addition to his troubled personal life. What matters to me is that the potential is there, and it’s worth exploring.

I suspect, though, that it will be most fruitful to explore it in conversation with the people you mention in your post. I’m at that point where I’m feeling my way through an unfamiliar literature, which is what makes your insight so valuable.

(And don’t be surprised if you receive an email from me in the next couple of days soliciting a post in this series. I’m eager to hear more of what you have to say!)

Two more lingering points, and then I promise to let you off the hook…

First, Peirce seems like the wrong choice for your inquiry, being that he is more interested in the media (or mediating) object than he is in experience. Semiotics in general is too closely related to language-based approaches to offer a new means of unpacking the pre-linguistic components of media. When you are dealing with Peirce’s *firstness* or *qualisigns* you then seem to be trying to fit square pegs into round holes, for if Peirce can’t account for gut reactions then why use him? You may also run the risk of needlessly over-mystifying audience experience when drawing from literature that is already overly complicated and often incoherent.

When it comes to the question of experience, wouldn’t it be more helpful to begin with some definition of who it is that experiences, let alone basic conditions for how they experience? From a more sociological/theoretical perspective Julian Hanich’s ongoing work on the group dynamics of audiences might offer you a useful entry point as well as a decent lit review. And as you are likely well aware, there are an infinite number of academics who approach this issue from a psychological/theoretical perspective, many of whom privilege the very pre-linguistic emotional, intellectual, and physiological components of audience experience that you want to discuss. The cognitivists and the phenomenologists, for instance, offer practical terminology when it comes to dealing with matters like the ineffable, and there’s certainly no shortage of scholarship that have applied their concepts to questions of media and new media (such as Murray Smith’s work on the emotional responses to a German television series, or Diana Raffman’s work on the problem of separating qualia, schema, and language when listening to music). Of course, Torben Grodal’s Embodied Visions and fellow UW alumnus Carl Plantinga’s Moving Viewers are just two of the more obvious monographs which speak to your inquiries with greater clarity than might a semiotic approach along the lines of Peirce.

Second — and perhaps most importantly — I obviously recognize the limitations of this scholarship, and I definitely wouldn’t claim that the questions you are asking have already been answered. However, the questions you’ve posed in your two blog posts seem far from new enough to be characterized as the “aesthetic turn” in media studies. If there was a turn, then it happened several decades ago, if not centuries. Your claims that this aesthetic focus is just now happening seems to inadvertently (and wrongly) diminish the ongoing and important work of many of your colleagues — even if a significant percentage of media scholars have chosen to either ignore or disregard this area of scholarship.

These two points aside, I hope that your questions (and this blog series) are able to encourage many more scholars to reconsider the extent to which they’ve prioritized the role of language/readings in their study of media, a feat which others before you — for one reason or another — have only partially succeeded in accomplishing.

Thank you for your excellent questions. I think I tried to do too much in too small a space here, and your questions reflect that. This post began as a presentation with a performative dimension — the chase scene from Casino Royale played on a screen above and behind me as I read a version of what I posted here. Mine was one of a number of presentations with similarly performative aspects, and it benefited from that context. I think it suffered in the adaptation here.

I’ve been experimenting with form lately as I try to find ways to describe forms of experience that defy description. I rarely get to the objects I study or the approaches I use directly — I start with the question I think I want to ask and discover that, to ask it well, I need to work backward to something more fundamental. In this case, the initial question was about how viewers in different cultural contexts react to the same text. Tim Havens’s work on Cosby is an excellent example of what prompted the question, but I found I wanted to describe something more fundamental. The tools I’ve already got, especially related to translation, get me part of the way there, but only part.

One of my experiments with form involves finding ways to talk about dense and abstract concepts without using technical language. The semiotician I draw from most is Peirce, who raises obscurantism to a whole new level. What I want to do is describe experiences of “firstness” — signs that are unmediated and unreflected upon (qualisigns, if you’re familiar with Peirce). Such signs can exist only as an abstraction, because language (our main tool for describing them) operates on a plane of “thirdness” — signs are both mediated and reflected upon, and they constantly point to other signs (words are examples of “legisigns” while signs pointed to by other signs are “interpretants”). If you’re willing to go down Peirce’s terminological rabbit-hole, I want to describe rhematic iconic qualisigns but have only the tools of dicentic symbolic legisigns or argumentive symbolic legisigns. Those more complex signs pull us away from the unmediated nature of the simpler signs.

I think the last paragraph illustrates the problems with Peirce’s vocabulary. Another problem is that, even in using his terms, I have to read against his broader semiotic theory if I want to talk about what I called gut reactions in my previous post. Peirce was invested in an early 20th century notion of rationality that can’t account for gut reactions.

Hence my experiment here. I wanted to try to evoke the experience that I can’t describe. That approach raises another set of problems, one of which is that it breaks with expectations about conventional academic writing. I doubt you were the only one who found the post hard to follow.

Hence also my newfound interest in aesthetics. Part of the impulse for this series came from my desire to see how other people use what appears to me to be a promising vocabulary for tackling questions for which, simply put, I lack a vocabulary.

I don’t know whether I’ve answered your questions, but I wanted to say I found them valuable.

Maybe you can clarify the following:

1) How are you defining “sign,” is this Peirce’s definition, de Saussure’s, or something else entirely?
2) What specifically do you mean when you say that a gap opens up between a sign? What is this gap separating, and is the audience the entity that doubts when inside this gap?
3) Why is a chase scene a sign? How is this different than calling it a text?

I have other questions, but these three+ seem like a good place to begin. Again, I apologize for my confusion. I empathize with your struggle to find the right words to describe these matters, as obviously I find this discussion intriguing. However, I’m curious why you haven’t chosen to appropriate or build from the terms and concepts that already exist in the large corpus of aesthetic philosophy that deals specifically with questions of *experience* with respect to music, film/tv, theater, novels, and even painting. Perhaps that would be my 4th question for you.