This video from Wallstats demonstrates how a number that we glibly rattle off is far larger than we can even imagine. I mean, what can you do with 1,000,000,000,000? The animation is pretty cool, too.

This short video, made during the Educator’s Workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA), is a teaser/trailer for a paper on which I’m currently working. The paper is on Barack Obama’s rhetoric of “unity” as relying on an ironic sense of community and conflict in contemporary politics; it is also about the potential pitfalls and failures of such rhetoric, which we have seen strongly in the past couple of months in the most recent “debate” over health care reform.

This review of Robert Arp’s edited volume South Park and Philosophy (2006), which was the first book to appear on South Park, appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture, 40.4 (2007).

This review of Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion appeared in Cultural Studies, 23.3: 441.

Three Special Issues of Electronic Journal of Communication, Volume 18 (2, 3, and 4)

Co-edited with Megan Boler (Associate Professor, University of Toronto)

Panel Abstract: In the famous 1964 Jacobelis v. Ohio case, Justice Potter Stewart famously claimed to know obscenity “when I see it.” Like obscenity and pornography, transgression is often taken for granted as a cultural “given.” As we become increasingly surrounded by cultural productions that blur any sense of coherent mainstream, alternative, corporate, state, or independent images, videos, music, and writing, it seems harder and harder to understand what transgression really means. In an age of online communities based on a free exchange of personally videotaped, exhibitionist pornography, websites that post embarrassing or illegal acts by powerful corporate interests, networks of political blogs that rival even the best print journalism, and the circulation of incredibly popular short films that range from the horrific to the banal, by what means do we measure how and when something transgresses what used to be known as the “dominant” culture? Breaking away from discussions of the internet, digital culture, and networks as either positive or negative characteristics of the contemporary public sphere, Transgression 2.0 brings together a variety of perspectives and case studies to find contemporary locations of cultural opposition, both on and offline. It suggests that the “prurient interest” of a culture, to borrow Justice Brennan’s terminology from another obscenity trial, is in fact to seek out those places in which it is forced to evolve. Far from an easy process, in the digital age transgression becomes increasingly essential even as it becomes harder to define, discover, and protect.Panel Rationale:Despite the constant attention paid to defining and redefining the field of Communications, and in particular the “keywords” that form the focus of this process, the concept of “transgression” has been largely avoided.  There are many reasons for this; the term is often associated with particular movements (e.g. battles for recognition in gay rights movements), specific theories (e.g. Bakhtin), and an ambivalent politics centered more on opposition than on what is commonly considered to be a progressive agenda.  This panel will attempt to bypass these issues, as they ultimately limit the usefulness of the concept of transgression.  More importantly, it will question whether or not transgression can exist in the contemporary moment, defined by increased information flow, increasingly shifting terms of personal and social identification, and political and economic systems that seem to co-opt and reappropriate areas of what would formerly be considered to be transgressive even before they are fully formed.  Focusing on transgression not as a personal act, therefore, but as a social act mediated in large part by technology, the panelists will discuss the (im)possibilities of transgression and its place in communication theory.David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University (Chair and Respondent)Ted Gournelos, Maryville University of St Louis”Hacking the News: Transgressing Performative Control Systems”Rather than presuppose the desirability of sincere, cohesive, or “positive” communication, this paper will examine how ironic and dissonant cultural productions can redefine the limits of the public sphere.  In a conflict-based view of what Henry Jenkins has called “convergence culture,” I argue that, in the search for new areas of exploitation, systems of control within late capitalism often internalize transgressive culture.  Informed by new media scholarship, the paper analyzes three primary case studies, each a performance within U.S. news productions.  In The Yes Men’s “pranks,” news organizations are forced to operate outside of existing control parameters; in faux articles and internet broadcasts by The Onion, the process of news appropriation (and thus consolidating journalism in massive conglomerates) becomes an absurd spiral of self-referentiality; finally, the judicial furor over the wikileaks project exposes the difficulty in controlling iterative discourse, particularly when it has “real world” implications and consequences.  I contrast Couldry’s “media rituals” and McNair’s “cultural chaos” to demonstrate the need for alternative methods through which we might understand transgression, departing from Habermasian fantasies of an open, power-free public sphere in favor of multiple, conflicting, and nomadic communities.  The paper argues that a model in which community and social change are embodied in a series of ontological “hacks” allows a space for a new, productive ethos of change even while operating within oppressive or stagnant system.  It culminates by trying to answer whether or not performance disrupts the everyday conceptual stasis of the news, or whether it simply acts to spice up an otherwise incestuous regime.Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine”Attention will be paid. Social media and economy of distraction”"Social media,” heralded as web 2.0, pivot on rampant monetization of attention and distraction. It depends on persuading a mass audience that participation in that dual market is not merely serving them up to advertisers, but empowers them individually to become content generators. This paper will argue that this is the most serious transgression in new media culture; it has become “the only division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces to desecrate.” From the vantage point of a dialectic of attention and distraction, the bundling of otherwise splintered audiences into advertising categories is an ill-concealed attempt to divert your attention from something and onto something else - or inversely, to distract you into thinking what I want you to think about. If we live in an attention economy, it is paramount to protect our freedom of decision on how attention is “paid”, and to observe closely how manipulations of the parameters of memory aid a “culture” industry.Grant Kien, California State University East Bay”Global Capitalism as Art: The case of Brendan Lott’s non-memory”This chapter explores several case studies in which conventional transgressions serve as the starting point for an entirely new common-sense understanding of agency and self-identification. Recent online phenomena such as Wretch.com and Stickcam.com circulate self-exploitative images and videos that reestablish traditional notions of transgression in a consumer base, evacuating them of any self-conscious opposition. How then to identify transgression in a world rooted in the self-management of one’s own exploitation? The work of Brendan Lott’s installation  Memories I’ll Never Have born out of online images reveals the transgressive juncture, the point at which unequal relations of global capitalism are revealed for what they are. This critical analysis of online/offline behavior is rooted in ethnography informed by Actor-Network Theory, taking web sites and Lott’s installation as sources of found data treated as narrative texts.Richard L. Edwards”Breaking Conventions: Political Video Mashups as Transgressive Texts”Political video mashups are an increasingly important part of transgressive political discourse in a digital age. Video mashups combine pop cultural knowledge, avant-garde techniques, the latest digital DIY tools and remix aesthetics into a media practice that is also increasingly driven by Web 2.0 logics and user-generated content. Using key examples of popular video mashups, this paper will examine how political video mashups are being used to affect contemporary politics and how they can play a subversive role in political discourse.As opposed to earlier modes of video activism that sought to signal their difference from mainstream, dominant media forms, a political video mashup embraces popular culture as its starting point. The formal properties of a political video mashup—frequently in line with larger trends in remix culture—are inherently transgressive. Mashups take existing media texts (many of them copyrighted and used without permission) and re-edit them and recombine them into new texts. A political video mashup can subvert official campaign media, attack mainstream news reports, reconfigure or decode the meaning of a candidate’s speech, or extend unofficial meanings latent in a video clip.But key questions remain about their transgressive potential. Can any practice that firmly embraces popular culture, even if it is subverting it on some level, operate as an oppositional practice for real-world political change? Do mashups use of certain cultural texts undercut claims of alterity or political resistance? In this paper, several case studies—including examples from mainstream shows and user-generated content—will be explored in an attempt to answer those questions.presented at the annual Popular Culture Association conference, New Orleans, April 2009

Rather than presuppose the desirability of sincere, cohesive, or “positive” communication, this paper will examine how ironic and dissonant cultural productions can redefine the limits of the public sphere.  In a conflict-based view of what Henry Jenkins has called “convergence culture,” I argue that, in the search for new areas of exploitation, systems of control within late capitalism often internalize transgressive culture.  Informed by new media scholarship, the paper analyzes three primary case studies, each a performance within U.S. news productions.  In The Yes Men’s “pranks,” news organizations are forced to operate outside of existing control parameters; in faux articles and internet broadcasts by The Onion, the process of news appropriation (and thus consolidating journalism in massive conglomerates) becomes an absurd spiral of self-referentiality; finally, the judicial furor over the wikileaks project exposes the difficulty in controlling iterative discourse, particularly when it has “real world” implications and consequences.  I contrast Couldry’s “media rituals” and McNair’s “cultural chaos” to demonstrate the need for alternative methods through which we might understand transgression, departing from Habermasian fantasies of an open, power-free public sphere in favor of multiple, conflicting, and nomadic communities.  The paper argues that a model in which community and social change are embodied in a series of ontological “hacks” allows a space for a new, productive ethos of change even while operating within oppressive or stagnant system.  It culminates by trying to answer whether or not performance disrupts the everyday conceptual stasis of the news, or whether it simply acts to spice up an otherwise incestuous regime.presented at the annual Popular Culture Association conference, New Orleans, April 2009

Drawing on analyses of two South Park censorship controversies, one surrounding the “Trapped in the Closet” attack on Scientology and Tom Cruise and the other inspired by the “Cartoon Wars” engagement of the Prophet Muhammad cartoon scandal, this chapter discusses the connections between religion and liberal state identity in the contemporary United States. These two case studies imply not only a close juridical relationship between religion and the state, in which each institution works to mask the other’s limit event (the breakdown of religious rhetoric in blasphemy and the breakdown of liberalism in censorship), but also the importance of new media in making that relationship evident, in which the self consciously new media focus of the show’s creators allowed them to publicize and attack what would probably have been hidden in residual media forms. Rather than separate discussion of religion and secular liberal identity, South Park relies on its own cultural capital and a close connection to independent new media producers to expose their symbiotic relationship in U.S. politics. Underscoring fights for free speech by highlighting the hypocritical rhetoric of blasphemy claims, South Park accentuates both. However, the iterative quality of viral media that made the show famous is what allows such a discussion to push past either the editing room or the board room, and begins to suggest possibilities for an “open society” beyond satirical popular culture itself.presented at the annual National Communications Association conference, San Diego, November 2008presented at the annual American Studies Associaiton conference, Albuquerque, October 2008

Drawing on analyses of two South Park censorship controversies, onesurrounding the “Trapped in the Closet” attack on Scientology and Tom Cruise and the other inspired by the “Cartoon Wars” engagement of the Prophet Muhammad cartoon scandal, this paper discusses the connectionsbetween religion and liberal state identity in the contemporary United States.  These two case studies imply not only a close juridicalrelationship between religion and the state, in which each institutionworks to mask the other’s limit event (the breakdown of religious rhetoric in blasphemy and the breakdown of liberalism in censorship), but also the importance of new media in making that relationship evident.  Blogs and video sharing communities like YouTube were essential for the discussion of and protests against Comedy Central’s censorship of South Park, and the self consciously new media focus of the show’s creators allowed them to publicize and attack what would probably have been hidden in residual media forms.Rather than separate discussion of religion and secular liberal identity, this paper will demonstrate how South Park relies on its owncultural capital and a close connection to independent new mediaproducers to reconnect the issues and expose their symbiotic relationship.  Underscoring fights for free speech by attending to the hypocritical rhetoric of blasphemy claims, South Park accentuates both.  However, the iterative quality of viral media that made theshow famous is what allows such a discussion to push past either theediting room or the board room, and itself begins to suggestpossibilities for an “open society” beyond the satire and irony of apopular culture production.

 “Boobs, Barf and Bloody Asses” charts the  changes in gender construction and performance in the television show South Park.  Over ten seasons, the show has methodically confronted and violated preconceptions and taboos regarding sexuality and gender, and has mounted a series of harsh critiques of neoliberal and neoconservative conceptions of identity and tolerance.  Through an examination of developments in the show’s rhetoric and a deeper textual analysis of two episodes in particular, this paper will discuss the ramifications of anarchic and aggressive critiques of reified gender identity.  The analysis draws primarily on Haraway and Butler for a theoretical backdrop, but engages gender precisely through its performative or blasphemous potentials for political activism and oppositional culture.  It suggests that scholars consider mass media as locations for hyper-allusive discourse and as transgressively polysemic, even in productions some would consider to be juvenile or “masculine.”  More importantly, it suggests ways in which radically (and institutionally) transgressive cultural productions can force open previously closed topics or rhetorical binaries, making room both for alternative discourses and for future exploration (i.e. the rise of youtube or Sarah Silverman).  The episodes discussed, “Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society” and “Marjorine,” demonstrate the possibility for a fluid conception of gender and a highly intertextual approach to gender development.  Rather than asserting a coherent worldview or political position, South Park examines and disrupts gender norms precisely through its multiplicity and fragmentation, and demonstrates an emergent paradigm for social activism.

presented at the annual National Communications Association conference, Chicago, November 2007