Self-Reference in the Media (Approaches to Applied Semiotics)

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Author: Winfried Noth | Nina Bishara

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Self-Reference in the Media

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Approaches to Applied Semiotics 6

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Self-Reference in the Media

edited by Winfried Nöth Nina Bishara

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Self-reference in the media / edited by Winfried Nöth, Nina Bishara. p. cm. ⫺ (Approaches to applied semiotics ; 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-019464-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Mass media ⫺ Semiotics. 2. Reference (Linguistics) 3. Metalanguage. I. Nöth, Winfried. II. Bishara, Nina, 1977⫺ P96.S43S45 2007 302.230114⫺dc22 2007033759

ISBN 978-3-11-019464-7 ISSN 1612-6769 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Introduction Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara

Communication, the conveyance of messages, is the purpose of the media according to the self-professed ethics of the mass communicators. Messages and their communication imply otherness: they are about something other than messages and communication, something in some other place and time, addressed to others by a self. Nevertheless, despite their dimensions of otherness, messages, communication, and the media have always been about themselves, too – self-referential messages about messages, communication about communication, media about the media. Street criers who once called out their public announcements did not only attract the audience’s attention to their messages but also captured their imagination by means of their voices, rhetoric, gestures, and appearance. The newspaper in its competition with other media does not only inform its readers about the world of otherness, it also informs how and why it informs so well. The movies do not only bring ever new stories about heroes and heroines, they also raise an enormous interest and curiosity in the private lives of those who convey the messages about these heroes and heroines, i.e., the movie actors and actresses. The topics of the present volume are the ways in which the media have become self-referential or self-reflexive (as some researchers prefer to call it) and the degree to which they have ceased to mediate between the real or fictional worlds about which their messages pretend to be and their audience which they pretend to inform, to counsel, or to entertain. The self-referential networks in which the media and their audiences are caught up – indeed, by which we are all so significantly shaped – will be investigated in the following chapters. The papers are presented in seven sections. Part I on Theoretical Frameworks introduces two theoretical approaches to reference and self-reference inspired by the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. In his keynote paper on “Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework”, Winfried Nöth contextualizes the general topic in its cultural background in postmodernity, gives a survey of its transdisciplinary implications, and draws the outlines of a systematic framework for the study of self-reference in the media as a matter of levels and degrees. Vincent Colapietro, dealing with “Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a self-referential

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culture: The irresistible force of reality”, investigates the concepts of reality, reference, and self-reference against the background of Peirce’s realism and shows how media such as television, radio, and the world wide web constitute intricate and arguably insular networks of self-citation and self-commentary. Part II, Self-Referential Print Advertising, studies self-reference in the pictorial and verbal messages of advertisements of the print media. Siegfried J. Schmidt introduces a systems theoretical perspective in his analysis of reflexive loops in advertisements in their relations to other social systems, and he proposes a typology of “Modes of self-reference in advertising”. On the basis of a distinction between “Metapictures and self-referential pictures”, Winfried Nöth shows how pictures in advertisements have become pictures about pictures, and Nina Bishara, in “‘Absolut Anonymous’: Self-reference in opaque advertising”, argues how and why opaque elements in advertisements, which make their comprehension more difficult, evince a mode of self-reference in the media. Part III, on Self-Referential Photography, begins with Winfried Nöth’s paper with the metaphorical title “The death of photography in self-reference”, in which the author examines the so-called loss of the referent in digital photography, especially in art photography. Kay Kirchmann follows with the essay “Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze”, which studies Marilyn Monroe’s modes of self-observation and self-presentation in photos for the media as presented in the 1999 ARTE series Les cent photos du siècle / One Hundred Photographs of the Century. Part IV on Self-Referential Films is about the movies in the movies, filmic allusions to other films, quotations from films in films, and nostalgia created by filmic self-reference. Gloria Withalm presents reflections on “The self-reflexive screen” and draws the “Outlines of a comprehensive model” for the study of many forms of self-reflexivity and self-reference in the movies on the basis of Rossi-Landi’s socio-semiotics. Andreas Böhn’s paper, “Nostalgia of the media / in the media”, discusses nostalgia, memory, remembrance, and oblivion as forms of filmic self-reference, and Jan Siebert, in his article on “Self-reference in animated films”, presents examples from the cartoons offering insights into self-referential scenes and devices that testify to the close connection between humor, paradox, and self-reference. Self-Referential Television is the topic area of Part V. In “On the use of selfdisclosure as a mode of audiovisual reflexivity”, Fernando Andacht presents two studies, one of the television show Big Brother Brasil and the other of a documentary film by E. Coutinho, demonstrating the illusionary paradox that self-reflexivity is a means of the media to give additional evidence of the “real” reality in the presentations of these programs. In “The old in the new: Forms and

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functions of archive material in the presentation of television history on television”, Joan Bleicher shows how the visual language of television has become self-referential in its more and more frequent presentations of archive material recalling the history of television itself thus creating a collective memory of the medium. From the point of view of media economics, Karin Pühringer and Gabriele Siegert, in “There’s no business without show-business: Self-reference as self-promotion”, give statistical evidence of how self-promotion has become one of the most important forms of self-reference in the mass media. Computer games are the topic of Part VI, entitled Self-Referential Games. “Computer games [are] the epitome of self-reference” is Lucia Santaella’s argument in her paper putting forward a typology of seven types of self-reference in games. Bo Kampmann Walther proposes “A formalistic approach” to the study of self-reference in computer games, defining rules, strategies, and interaction patterns as their core elements and examining how and to what extent computer games can be defined as complex dynamic systems. Britta Neitzel, in her paper on “Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games”, shows that Gregory Bateson’s theory of play is fundamental to the study of games, and Bernhard Rapp, in “Self-reflexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples” concludes the section with exemplary analyses and proposals for future research on the topic. Part VII presents three papers on Other Self-Referential Arts in such diverse fields as web art, body art, and music. Marie-Laure Ryan contextualizes selfreflexivity in the history of literature since Don Quixote and gives evidence of the predominance of self-reflexivity in digital art on the Internet in her paper “Looking through the computer screen: Self-reflexivity in net.art”. Christina Ljungberg, in “The artist and her bodily self: Self-reference in digital art/media”, constructs a typology of degrees and forms of self-reference in digital art exemplified by multi-media works of visual artist and performer Laurie Anderson, video/digital artist Selina Trepp, and media artist Char Davies. Werner Wolf concludes the volume with his paper entitled “Metafiction and metamusic: Exploring the limits of metareference”. Based on a definition of meta-reference in contrast to self-reference and self-reflexivity in the narrower sense, Wolf presents new typological tools for the comparative study of meta-music and offers original proposals for a comprehensive program of future research on the topic. The volume is one of the main results of a research project on self-reference in the media with special focus on advertising, the movies, and computer games, carried out at the Interdisciplinary Center for Cultural Studies of the University of Kassel from 2003 to 2006. Supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the project was directed by Winfried Nöth,

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whose collaborators were Nina Bishara (Kassel), Britta Neitzel (now Siegen), and Karin Wenz (now Maastricht). With few exceptions, the papers presented here were contributions to the international conference Self-Reference in the Media organized in the framework of the aforementioned DFG project by Winfried Nöth, Britta Neitzel, and Nina Bishara at the University of Kassel in July 2005. Thanks are due to the DFG for their substantial support and encouragement of this volume as well as to the University of Kassel for unbureaucratically providing the necessary infrastructure. Especially worth mentioning is the DFG supported collaboration of the research project Self-Reference in the Media with the Postgraduate Program in Semiotics and Communication Studies of the Catholic University of São Paulo, whose immediate results presented in this volume are the contributions by Lucia Santaella, Vincent Colapietro, and Fernando Andacht. Thanks are also due to Dr. Renira Gambarato for improving several diagrams and to Diena Janakat for editorial assistance.

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara

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Part I: Self-referential media: Theoretical frameworks Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Nöth

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Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a self-referential culture: The irresistible force of reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vincent Colapietro

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Part II: Self-referential print advertising Modes of self-reference in advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Siegfried J. Schmidt

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Metapictures and self-referential pictures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Nöth

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“Absolut Anonymous”: Self-reference in opaque advertising . . . . . . . . . . Nina Bishara

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Part III: Self-referential photography The death of photography in self-reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winfried Nöth

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Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Kay Kirchmann

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Contents

Part IV: Self-referential film The self-reflexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model . . . . . . . . . 125 Gloria Withalm Nostalgia of the media / in the media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Andreas Böhn Self-reference in animated films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Jan Siebert Part V: Self-referential television On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reflexivity . . . . . . 165 Fernando Andacht The old in the new: Forms and functions of archive material in the presentation of television history on television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Joan K. Bleicher There’s no business without show-business: Self-reference as self-promotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Karin Pühringer and Gabriele Siegert Part VI: Self-referential games Computer games: The epitome of self-reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Lucia Santaella Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Bo Kampmann Walther Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Britta Neitzel Self-reflexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples . . . . . 253 Bernhard Rapp Part VII: Other self-referential arts Looking through the computer screen: Self-reflexivity in net.art . . . . . . . 269 Marie-Laure Ryan

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The artist and her bodily self: Self-reference in digital art/media . . . . . . . 291 Christina Ljungberg Metafiction and metamusic: Exploring the limits of metareference . . . . . 303 Werner Wolf Index of names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Index of subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

Part I. Self-referential media: Theoretical frameworks

Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework Winfried Nöth

1. Self-reference in postmodernity and in the media Self-reference is a much discussed characteristic of postmodernity (Lawson 1985; Nöth 2001; Petersen 2003). In an era in which everything seems to have been said, the “grand narratives” have lost their credibility, and representations can no longer represent (Lyotard 1979: 27). To escape from this dilemma, literature, the visual and the audiovisual arts and media have become increasingly self-referential, self-reflexive, autotelic. Instead of representing something heard about, seen, lived, or otherwise experienced in social life, culture, and nature, journalists, commercial artists, designers, and film directors report increasingly what has been seen, heard, or reported before in the media. The mediators have turned to representing representations. Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of filming, they film that they film the filming. The news are more and more about what has been reported in the news, television shows are increasingly concerned with television shows, and even advertising is no longer about products and services but about advertising. The messages of the media are about messages of the media, whose origin has become difficult to trace. In literature, fiction has become metafiction, novels have become metanovels, and texts are being discovered as intertexts whose reference is not to life but to other texts. Last but not least, art is now about art, and even architecture is about architecture. The digitalization of pictures and films, which has liberated the media from the bonds of factual reference to a world which they used to depict, has contributed to the increase of self-reference. No longer originating in a world which leaves its documentary traces on the negatives of a film, the pictures of the new media have become the result of digital imaging and art work, whose origin is in the software of the semiotic machines (cf. Nöth 2002) by means of which they are produced. One of the most striking symptoms of the current concern with self-reference in culture and in the media is probably the recent phenomenon of culture jamming (Klein 2000, chapt. 12), the critical transformation of media messages by

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activists who display their protest against the age of consumerism, globalization, and social surveillance in public places and urban spaces in subversive forms such as adbusting, graffiti, flash mobs, hacktivism, cybersquatting, or sousveillance (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org, 16.05.06), not without creating the self-referential paradox that they depend on the media in their subversive attacks against the media.

2. Self-reference as a multidisciplinary topic of research The study of self-reference and related phenomena, such as self-similarity, selforganization, autopoiesis, replication, or recursion is a topic of interest to various fields of research. Bartlett (1987: 10–24) gives a comprehensive survey of relevant topics and studies in no less than twenty-one fields of research, from mythology to neurophysiology, among them the following ones not dealt with in detail below: linguistics (reflexivity), space and time (loops, circles, Moebius strip), law (self-referring and self-limiting laws, mutuality of contracts), economics (business cycles), game theory (rules permitting self-modification), anthropology (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: culture determining language and hence culture), mythology (cosmic cycles), psychiatry (narcissism), psychotherapy (Bateson’s theories of play and double bind), neurophysiology (neuronal circuits), and general systems theory (see Nöth 1977). The following survey of more recent research in self-reference excludes systems theoretical approaches to self-reference which have been reviewed elsewhere with particular reference to semiotics (Nöth 2000b; Jahraus and Ort 2003). In the natural sciences, the theory of complex systems in physics and mathematics (chaos and fractals: Peitgen, Jürgens, and Saupe 1992), chemistry (dissipitative structures: Prigogine and Stengers 1984), biology (self-reference, selfdescription, autopoiesis: Hoffmeyer 1996: 39–51), and even meteorology (butterfly effect) are bringing more and more evidence of the omnipresence of selfreference and related phenomena in nature: self-observation, self-description, self-organization, self-replication, self-similarity, autopoiesis, feedback loops, iteration, replication, recursion, or downward causation (Andersen et al. 2000) are the key concepts in this context. In computer science, the recursivity of Turing machines (Winkler 2004: 170– 182) and the theory of autonomous agents (Pattee 1995; Nöth 2002) are relevant to the study of self-reference. The close affinity between recursion and selfreference, for example, is evident when we consider the mathematical definition of recursivity as a group “using the own group or function that it calls to the own function” (http://www.mind-graph.net/foundations/mathematical/ recursivity.htm, 16.05.06).

Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework

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Logic and the philosophy of language have given special attention to selfreference with respect to tautology, the petitio principii (taking for granted what should first be proved), other semantic circularities (Myers 1966), or selfreferential propositions that lead to antinomies and paradoxes. Much attention has been paid to forms of self-reference implied in metalanguage (Hofstadter 1979, 1985) and paradoxes (Whitehead and Russell 1910; Bartlett and Suber 1987; Fitch 1987; Bartlett 1992b; Scheutz 1995; Schöppe 1995). Other philosophical aspects of self-reference are philosophical reflexivity (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida: Lawson 1985), the phenomenology of the self and its identity (Büttner and Esser 2001), the problem of self-consciousness (Potthast 1971; Colapietro 1989; Kienzle and Pape 1991), also a topic of cognitive science (self-awareness: Brook and DeVidi 2001), and the topics of self-reflection, selfrepresentation, autosymbolism, or the autotelic function in aesthetics (Shir 1978; Luhmann 1984; Menninghaus 1987; Nöth 2000a: 425, 432; Metscher 2003). Literary studies are one of the fields of research (besides aesthetics) in which the theory of self-reference has its longest tradition since the essence of literature has often been described in terms which imply self-reference. Key concepts in this context are aesthetic autosymbolism (Shir 1978), self-representation (Hempfer 1976: 70, 129; Jay 1984; Johansen 2002: 174–288), literary autonomy, autonymy, or the autotelic function of literature (cf. Nöth 2000a: 458). While most of these theories have been developed against the background of poetry, often with reference to Jakobson’s definition of the poetic language as a selfreferential language (Jay 1984; Whiteside 1987; Block 1999; Nöth 2000a: 453; Johansen 2002: 174–182), self-reference in prose and drama is a more recent topic. It has first been approached in the 1970s under the heading of metalanguage (Smuda 1970), later as metatext, especially metafiction (Waugh 1984; Siedenbiedel 2005), or metanovel (Zavala 2000). In the study of narratives, the topic has also been subsumed under the general heading of reflexivity (Stam 1992), self-reflexivity (Hempfer 1982; Scheffel 1997; Huber, Middecke, and Zapf 2005), or self-reference proper (Wolf 2001; Krah 2005a, 2005b). Comprehensive surveys on the topic can be found in Scheffel (1997) and Wolf (2001). Language about language, fiction about fiction, or the novel about the novel, these are evidently topics which deal with self-reference at a very general semiotic level. The theory of intertextuality (Broich and Pfister 1985) implies a similarly general mode of self-reference since it deals with the way a text refers to a text instead of to the adventures of its protagonists. Metafiction containing reflections about the text in which these reflections are narrated may be described as evincing a higher degree of self-reference than intertextuality. Intertextual references also evince references to texts, but these references are to other texts.

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Like literature, music and the traditional visual arts have had self-reference inscribed in their canonical definitions since the classics of philosophical aesthetics. L’art-pour-l’art, autonomy and autoreflexivity have been key concepts in this tradition (cf. Nöth 2000a: 434, 426–427). The new trend since postmodernity has been that artists have begun to reflect programmatically about art in their art works, so that art has become art about art (Lipman and Marshall 1978) and even architecture has become architecture about architecture (Wittig 1979). A conspicuous symptom of the increasing concern with self-reference in the visual arts is the current interest in representing and exhibiting the artist’s own bodily self in works of visual art (cf. Santaella 2004; Nöth and Hertling 2005; Nöth ed. 2006; Ljungberg, this vol.). Media studies have discussed the argument that self-reference is at the root of every medium. Each individual medium has a historical precursor to which it refers back in media history. The more the media interact today and turn intermedial, the more they refer to the media in self-referential loops. These were some of the reasons why McLuhan (1964) declared that the medium is the message. The famous tenet expresses among other things the view that each message in the media refers both to its own medium and to other media, and thus characterizes messages as partially self-referential. McLuhan (1964: 8) develops this argument on the basis of his very broad concept of medium as an extension of man, according to which even light is a medium: The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?”, it is necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal”.

Notice that in this description of how the messages in the media circulate in a process of infinite semiosis which even includes thought as a content of a medium, the medium described as the most self-referential of all is light. A medium without a message which nevertheless conveys “pure information” can only be a medium that refers to nothing but to itself. All other media evince self-reference to the degree that they refer to other media, which implies a divided reference. To the degree that the media refers to the media, they are self-referential, to the degree that they refer to other media, it is (allo)referential (see below). Intermediality (Müller 1996; Paech 1998; Spielmann 1998; Helbig 2001; Rajewsky 2002), the media in the media (Liebrand and Schneider 2002), media change (Ort 2003), as well as remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999), i.e., the


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refashioning of the traditional media in the digital media, are the topics of research in self-reference in the media related to McLuhan’s dictum in one or the other way. From various other perspectives, self-reference in the media has been approached in the contexts of film (Karpf, Kiesel, and Visarius 1996; Kirchmann 1996; Paech 1998; Buckland 2000: 53–76), television (Withalm 1995; Frieske 1998; Bleicher 1999), journalism (Marcus 1997; Blöbaum 1999; Kohring 1999; Weber 1999), and advertising (Schmidt and Spieß 1996). For further references, see the papers of this volume. Various aspects of self-reference concerning other domains of culture are discussed by Hofstadter (1979, 1985), who has shown that self-reference is at the root of cultural creativity (see also Schöppe 1995), in particular of humor and paradox. Self-reference in popular culture from the comics to rock music and video-clips is the topic of the book on metapop by Dunne (1992). Among the topics of cultural semiotics with particular relevance to self-reference are the semiotics of mirrors (Eco 1984; Ort 2003) and the semiotics of fashion. It was Barthes (1967: 287) who described fashion as a “tautological system” which defines itself reflexively only through itself, a system of signs “deprived of content but not of sense, a kind of machine to operate sense without ever fixing it” with the only goal of making the “insignificant significant”, or, as Goebel (1986: 476) put it, a system that keeps conveying the same message for ever: fashion is hence “a language that consists of nothing but synonyms”. In the interpretation of the phenomenon of ever increasing self-reference in postmodern culture, we find the “apocalyptic” critics opposing the “integrated” ones. The former, among them Baudrillard (1976, 1981, 1991), deplore the loss of referents in a more and more self-referential world in which reality has degenerated to constructed, simulated or virtual reality. The latter interpret selfreference as a symptom of increasing critical consciousness in a world that has lost its confidence in ultimate truths (Lawson 1985). However, while the integrated ones may lack critical distance in face of the aporias of postmodern self-reference, the apocalyptic ones run the risk of finding themselves involved in paradoxes as long as they are unable to explain the nature of those referents whose loss they deplore (Nöth 2001; Nöth and Ljungberg 2003).

3. Self-reference and reference: Semiotic premises In the framework of the present research project on self-reference in the media (cf. Nöth 2005b), the concept of self-reference has been adopted in the very broad sense similar to the outline proposed by Bartlett (1987: 6), whose point of departure is the following reflection on self-reference in human thought:

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Winfried Nöth When we employ thought to understand the nature of thinking, when we seek to know the presuppositions involved in knowing, we define a task that essentially involves the subjects we would study. Reflexivities of this kind are widespread: sociology, anthropology, biology, and many other disciplines, as we shall see, exhibit varieties of self-reference. Attempting to understand reflexivity gives one the sense of trying to lift oneself by the bootstraps.

Our own point of departure is a semiotic one: any sign that refers to itself or to aspects of itself is a self-referential sign. Signs that do not refer exclusively to themselves but only to parts, aspects, constituents, or elements of themselves are self-referential to a degree that remains to be specified (see below on levels and typology of s.-r.). Self-reference in the broad sense adopted here includes a number of concepts which are sometimes used as synonyms of this term as well as certain concepts which some authors, in the context of media and cultural studies, explicitly distinguish from self-reference. The most frequent synonym is reflexivity (Whitehead and Russell 1910; Lawson 1985). Typically enough, both concepts appear in title of the book by Bartlett and Suber (1987), which is Self-reference: Reflections on Reflexivity. Some other terminological alternatives are self-reflexivity (Huber, Middecke, and Zapf 2005), self -representation (Johansen 2002: 174–288), or autoreferentiality (Pavliˇcić 1993). Some authors distinguish these alternative concepts from the one of selfreference. Connotations associated with such distinctions are the following: reflexivity and self-reflexivity connote reflections on the process of the author’s own writing or self-cognition and self-consciousness, for example, in the philosophical tradition of the Romantics (Menninghaus 1987), the tradition of phenomenology (Lawson 1985), or anthropology (Babcock 1980); selfrepresentation is often preferred in the context of aesthetics (Metscher 2003). In the context of literary semiotics, Johansen (2002: 174–288) avoids the concept of self-reference and uses the term self-representation instead (in opposition to other-representation). This terminological decision is understandable from the point of view of Peircean semiotics, since representation, and not reference is a key concept of Peirce’s theory of signs. Wolf (2001: 56) distinguishes between self-reference as a “noncognitive” and “self-reflection” as a cognitive process, using the former term to describe textual recurrences and repetitions and the latter term to designate reflection on the writer’s self (for details, see Wolf, this vol.). In Luhmann’s systems theory no such distinctions are drawn; the general term is always self-reference. Luhmann’s concept is very fundamental: it refers to the capacity and tendency of a living system to establish reference to itself in its interactions with the nonself, that is, its environment (cf. Nöth 2000b).


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The study of self-reference requires an elucidation of its opposite, reference. By definition, reference, in contrast to self-reference, means referring to something else. When the term is used in opposition to self-reference, it is also called alloreference, heteroreference (Wolf 2001) or other-reference, which comes closest to Luhmann’s German term “Fremdreferenz”. What is reference and what does it mean to refer? Despite much controversy over the “inscrutability of reference” (cf. Geach 1970; Evans 1991; Katz 2004), Bartlett (1987: 5) takes the concept for granted, when he considers reference as a necessary constituent of human communication, stating that “without a wide range of abilities to refer, we would be bereft of thoughts, memories, and sensations” and that “the world as we perceive it, remember it, and conceptualize it would, in the absence of appropriate referring capacities, collapse into impossibility”. However, is reference really a necessary ingredient of human communication and a necessary term in semiotics? Ferdinand de Saussure is known to have banned reference from linguistic semantics for decades, Peirce hardly uses the term, and the linguist Roman Jakobson, defines the referential function of language as only one of six functions of verbal communication all of which differ from the concept of reference although they do not exclude the possibility of the message being referential to a certain degree either (see below on the semiotic paradox and degrees of s.-r.). In English, the concept of reference has been introduced in its current sense with Max Black’s translation of Gottlob Frege’s dichotomy of “Sinn” vs. “Bedeutung” as sense vs. reference (Münch 1992: 385; Nöth 2000a: 152–54). In this tradition, reference is defined as the relation between a verbal expression and the observable things or qualities to which it refers; that to which it refers is called its referent, extension, or designatum. An expression that refers to a referent identifies it as an individual or a class of objects, actions, or events (Kempson 1977: 13). For example, the word king, at the turn of the millennium, refers to the present kings of Spain and Sweden and the past kings of these and many other countries. Sense or meaning, by contrast, consists of the ideas or concepts evoked in the mind of those who use or understand the word. The word “king” has the conceptual meaning “man who rules a country as a descendant of a royal family”. In this tradition of logical semantics, it is possible for a word to have meaning but no reference. In the year 2000, the expression “the present king of France” is meaningful and makes sense because we understand the ideas associated with its words, but the expression is without a referent because there is no individual in France to whom it might presently refer. Although there are even abstract objects, such as the object of imagination which refers to the class of all acts of imagination, some words have no reference, since they refer to nothing that has

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extension, for example, and, or, what, whether, of, unicorn, or the first woman to land on the moon. The logical theory of reference as something in the external world to which the sign refers, or points to, has not remained undisputed. In the framework of Saussurean structuralism, linguists developed a semantic theory which ignored the theory of reference for decades (cf. Nöth 2000a: 74–75). The semiotic structure of a verbal sign was sought in its meaning only, which was studied exclusively in its relation to other signs and not in relation to its referents. The same aversion against approaching the dimension of reference is characteristic of constructivism and systems theory. Niklas Luhmann, for example, justifies his exclusion of the referent from his theory of social and cultural systems as follows: There is indeed no reference for the sign as a form; which is to say: one can either make use of the distinction between signifier/signified or not. There is no “external” point of reference that would force one to select either option; neither is there any truth criterion for choosing a first distinction as a starting point. That is why a theory of language constructed as semiotics must relinquish the idea of language’s external referent. (Luhmann 1993: 24)

Nevertheless, despite this plea against the theory of reference, self-reference vs. alloreference is a fundamental dichotomy of his systems theory of communication, culture, the media, and the arts (cf. Nöth 2000b). Both concepts have to do with observation. While alloreferential observing is directed towards phenomena in the environment of a system (or an observer), self-reference is directed towards the observing system, the observer, the process of observation, or the process of communication (Luhmann 1995: 15, 28). Furthermore, quite against basic tenets of both the Peircean and the Saussurean semiotics, Luhmann (1993: 24) even defines alloreference as external reference, when he states that “an operationally closed, language-using system [. . . ] must distinguish between self-reference and external reference”. However that may be, the concept of self-reference can apparently be used without assuming the Fregean view of reference. Among the constructivists, S. J. Schmidt adopts a similar position. On the on hand, he argues that signs are not anchored in “a sphere beyond discourse”, hence, are not anchored in referents; on the other hand, he nevertheless uses the term of reference, albeit in a different sense. Reference, according to Schmidt, is not a matter of semantics, but one of pragmatics; it concerns the process of communication and not the relation between the sign and its referent. Reference, in this perspective, “is a renvoi from communication to communication which permits connections and relays” (Schmidt 1994: 145), while self-reference is


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a matter of how communication refers to communication (and hence to itself). Schmidt even goes so far as to postulate that signs and communication, being essentially about signs and communication, are always self-referential “in the first place”. Still other premises of a theory of self-reference derive from Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics on which this outline of a program for research in selfreference in the media and several papers in this volume are based. Peirce would never have subscribed to Frege’s theory of reference, nor does the noun reference or the verb to refer belong to Peirce’s basic vocabulary (Nöth 2006). Instead of the referent or extension, Peirce speaks of the object of the sign, and instead of saying that the sign refers to its object, Peirce says that the sign represents its object. The Peircean object, which a sign represents, does not necessarily have an extension, and it does not need to be a piece of the so-called real world at all, since signs or ideas can be the object of a sign. The object of the sign is something which precedes and thus determines the sign in the process of semiosis as a previous experience or cognition of the world (cf. Nöth 2006). Such an object of the sign can be a sign itself, and this is where self-reference begins with signs representing signs. Reference in the narrower sense of referring or even pointing to something else is a semiotic characteristic of only one of Peirce’s major classes of sign, the indices. For example, the deictic words you, there, or then refer to a person, a place, or a moment which is distal in relation to the speaker and the place and time of speaking. Indexical signs identify and in this sense refer to objects and events in time and space in many other ways, for example by means of adverbial descriptions or nonverbal gestures of pointing. However, indexical signs can also evince self-reference, namely in the case of proximal deixis in words such as I, here, and now, which refer to the speaker and the circumstances of the utterance. Symbols, such as cat or speaker, by contrast, do not refer in this sense; they represent general concepts with which our experience of these objects is connected. Even less so can icons, such as the speaker’s picture, be said to refer to their objects. Pictures represent or show; they do not refer to their object. In sum, instead of self-reference, Peirce would use the term self-representation, but out of consideration for the wider acceptance of the term self-reference in media theory, this term will not be adopted here.

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4. The semiotic paradox and degrees of self-reference in the media A sign, according to its medieval definition, is something that stands for something else: aliquid stat pro aliquo (cf. Nöth 2000a, 2000b, 2006). If we disregard certain problems associated with the verb to stand for and admit a broader range of relational verbs as its interpretation, such as referring to, representing, or evoking the concept of, the formula is reduced to a dyad which is considered in all definitions of the sign. Whether dyadic or triadic, the basic assumption of the difference between the sign and something other than the sign to which it refers or which it represents is a distinction drawn in all definitions: the signifier is not the signified, the sign is neither its referent nor its object, just as the map is not its territory, as A. Korzybski (1933) put it. Self-reference thus creates a semiotic paradox: the sign does no longer refer to or represent something else; it is its own object, a map that is its own territory. It is true that signs also have other functions in addition to the one of reference. Roman Jakobson, e.g., distinguished no less than five other functions of language besides the one of reference in the narrower sense: the expressive, the conative (appellative), the metalingual, the phatic, and the poetic function (cf. Nöth 2000a: 105–106). Some of them, for example the expressive, the poetic, and the metalingual function, indeed evince characteristics of self-reference since they are associated with messages about the sender of the message, or the message itself and its signs, but language without a potential of representing and referring to a world it represents and above all which is absent in time and place would fail its evolutionary, cultural, and social purpose. If it is the purpose of signs to represent or to refer to something else, this purpose should be no less characteristic of the signs in the media. After all, the concept of “media” implies mediation, and mediation is a process of semiosis, the action of signs. Medium is even a synonym of sign in the framework of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics, and Peirce even considered substituting the concept of sign for the term medium, when, in 1906, he exclaimed: “All my notions are too narrow. Instead of ‘Sign’, ought I not to say Medium?” (MS 339: 526). The media must be able to inform about, narrate or evoke events, persons, places, and messages from elsewhere in time and space. Their potential to do so has turned the world into a global village. Global communication without reference is unthinkable. To fulfill their function, the signs of the media must evince the potential of reference or representation. Any message from the mass media is referential by necessity as far as its enunciation is concerned, since it is a message from elsewhere, the radio station for example, about an event which happened or originated at still another place in the world. Even the music that we hear is not without elements of reference to other times and other places;


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jazz refers to New Orleans, samba to Brazil, and Bach to 17th century Europe, but music is essentially self-referential, in particular the art of the fugue which is highly recursive and in this respect self-referential (Hofstadter 1979). Reference and self-reference are thus evidently a matter of degree. Various degrees of self-reference can be distinguished, from the sign that refers to nothing but itself to the sign that refers only partially to itself and partially still to something else. No message in the media is completely devoid of self-reference. Even in everyday verbal communication, the speaker indicates himself or herself as a speaker, whether intentionally or unintentionally. A message in the NewYork Times refers self-referentially to the profile and status of this newspaper, and each television picture that shows the station logo in its upper left or right hand corner refers self-referentially to the station itself, but at the same time it is an alloreferential message which serves to draw a distinction to all other stations. A statement of the President of the USA about the Iraq is highly referential, since it concerns events in very remote places, but it is also self-referential insofar as it is a message referring to Bush, his own and the US politics as well as to his own language, the English language in which he transmits the statement. The media differ as to the degree to which their messages are typically selfreferential or (allo)referential. Consider advertising, film, and computer games. Advertising is referential at its roots, since it has the purpose of promoting and selling products or services. For this reason, genuine self-reference would be counterproductive; a genuinely self-referential message would be unable to fulfill its commercial purpose of propagating a message about goods and services. Nevertheless, advertisements make use of the creative devices of selfreference to draw the consumers’ attention towards the message. Feature films, by contrast, which have both fictional and aesthetic qualities, are referential and self-referential at the same time. While their narrative plot is referential or indexical (Bettetini 1971) insofar as it narrates events from the lives of its protagonists, their aesthetic devices are based on self-reference, and if Lyotard (1979: 27) was right when he proclaimed the end of the grand narratives, it is only natural that self-reference in films must have increased. In computer games we are finally faced with a medium in which alloreference has been secondary since its beginning, since playing and games create their own self-referential worlds apart from the world of referential facts and realities.

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5. Levels and typology of self-reference in the media Self-reference occurs at different levels of the media and the message in which it occurs. The degree of self-reference is related to the level in the hierarchy from the level of elementary signs to the one of complex signs and from the level of a text or message to the level of the media system as a whole. For example, a newspaper article (level: text) that criticizes the media in general (to which it belongs itself) is less self-referential than a newspaper article that criticizes only the newspapers and not the other media; and an author’s selfreferential comments on his or her own story are more (directly) self-referential than reflections of an author on the principles of narrating in general since these refer only partially to the story in which it is included. A distinction between different levels of self-reference is implicit in some proposals that have been suggested for a typology of forms of self-reference. Among other varieties of self-reference, Bartlett (1987, 1992a), for example, distinguishes between self-reference at the level of indexical words, paradoxical and tautological sentences, and pragmatic or performative self-reference in statements in which the speaker’s intentions are self-referentially involved. Scheutz (1995: 24) proposes a typology beginning with self-referential symbols, having self-referential sentences as its second, and self-referential theories as its third level. The levels of self-reference in the media distinguished in the following are equally inspired by the ambition of establishing a hierarchy from the most elementary to the highest level of self-reference in the media. The first three levels are derived from Peirce’s trichotomy of the interpretant, which draws the distinction between the rheme, the dicent, and the argument (cf. Nöth 2000a: 65–67). A rhematic sign or rheme is a verbal or pictorial sign at a level equivalent to the one of the word or concept in language. The above-mentioned self-referential symbols and indexical words are types of rhematic self-reference. A dicentic sign corresponds to the level of sentences or statements in language. Paradoxical and tautological sentences belong to this level of self-reference. An argument presupposes a sequence of sentences in which a conclusion is derived from premises. The logical fallacy of the petitio principii (the taking for granted what should first be proved) and similar argumentative circularities evince argumentative self-reference. In extension of these levels derived from the three Peircean categories of the interpretant, forms of self-reference at the following higher levels will be distinguished: intratextual, intertextual, and intermedial self-reference and enunciative self-reference. While (intra)textual self-reference concerns the level of an individual text, a single advertisement, film, or computer game, for example,


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intertextual self-reference concerns references from one text to other texts of the same genre or medium, e.g., from one to another advertisement or film or game, respectively. The term “intermedial” will be used to refer to the relation between different media or genre, for example painting and film, film and games, or advertising and cinema. In addition to these forms of self-reference distinguished according to the hierarchical order of signs in the media, three other forms of self-reference will be distinguished according to criteria which overlap or combine with the above hierarchical typology: enunciative, iconic, and indexical self-reference (cf. Nöth 2007). Enunciative self-reference involves the communicative situation and describes reference of the speaker, writer, composer, or producer of the sign but also the role of the audience or spectators. Iconic and indexical self-reference involves self-referential icons and indices. Self-reference that is not specific of the media, such as the elementary self-referentiality of communication (we communicate that we communicate), will not be considered in this context.

5.1.

Rhematic self-reference: Examples from advertising

“Maybe, just maybe” was the advertising slogan of the British national lottery of 1998 (Knowles 2004: 4) which illustrates well rhematic self-reference. The slogan is a verbal rheme, a sign that affirms nothing but expresses a mere potentiality, and the slogan is self-referential in its repetition to the same extent that any repeated form refers back to itself in an iconically self-referential way. Rhematic self-reference is a popular strategy in advertising. One of its most frequent forms is the advertisement that attracts the consumers’ attention to nothing but the brand name without saying anything about the product.A parallel strategy is the mere showing of the product in the form of a picture. In both cases, the message consists of a rhematic sign. Unlike a dicent, a rheme affirms nothing. Without a predication, a praise of its qualities, for example, an advertisement of his kind merely shows, and thus remains open to many interpretations. Like a word without context, e.g., “beer”, the rheme refrains from designating anything in specific. Its meaning is a mere possibility, and its context in time and space is undetermined. In advertising, the meaning of the rhematic message about a product is left to the consumers’ imagination, but their prior knowledge about the product is important. A new product cannot be introduced with rhematic advertisements. The prototype of a rhematic advertising campaign is the classical Coca-Cola sign at a countryside highway. It shows nothing but the Coca-Cola bottle with the name of the soft-drink as its label. “Coke, nothing but Coke” or “Coke

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forever” seems to be an implicit quasi-tautological message. Since it remains unsaid whether the drink is good, desirable, or unique it seems to be assumed that the consumer knows its qualities well enough. The tacit assumption is that it would be a tautology to repeat what everybody knows anyhow. However, not to repeat it makes the message equally redundant, for if it need not be said what else is the purpose of the advertisement? This is the circularity which constitutes the basic self-referentiality of these advertisements. Rhematic signs of a product that conveys no other message than the one of its name or picture have some affinity with signboards, for example, the pictorial sign of a shoe indicating a shoemaker’s shop. However, the difference between signboards and rhematic advertisements is semiotically important. The shoemaker’s shop sign is also a rheme since it corresponds to a mere word, but in contrast to the Coca-Cola sign, the shoemaker’s shop sign refers indexically to a specific place. It is a rhematic index, which conveys the alloreferential message: “Here is a shoemaker.” Rhematic advertisements which merely show the product, by contrast, indicate nothing. Without any reference to a specific object, they are rhematic icons, signs which evince qualities of their objects without any indication of it. Insofar as it shares the qualities of its object and insofar as it is tautological in its reference to the well-known and hence presupposed qualities of the product, the rhematically iconic advertisement is a self-referential sign. Self-reference of this kind is frequent in current print advertising for fashion labels which reduce their message to a mere showing of the clothes for sale with the inscription of the designer logo (e.g., Joop, Boss, Gucci, etc.; cf. Bishara, forthcoming). Without any further comment, the message suggests that neither the name nor the product need any comment since they speak for themselves. On its surface, it is an open and hence rhematic message, but in a certain way, advertisements are never open; their message always presupposes or takes for granted that quality and desirability are characteristics of the product. On this assumption, the rhematic sign disguises a dicentic message affirming that there is only one product that deserves consideration which is the best, the most desirable, and the one that must be bought.

5.2.

Dicentic self-reference in advertising

Dicentic self-reference can be illustrated with the famous German tautological advertising slogan for Persil washing powder “Persil bleibt Persil” [‘Persil remains Persil’]. Explicit tautologies, such as the one of this slogan, or quasitautologies are statements and hence dicentic signs. At first sight, the claim has the form of a predication. However, instead of a predicative and thus alloref-


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erential statement of the form “A is B”, we are confronted with a tautological and consequently self-referential statement of the type “A is A”. The rhetoric of tautology serves to remind of a quality that no longer needs to be stated. The advertising slogan simply presupposes the knowledge of the quality inherent to the product. In a more recent BMW campaign, the tautology is even a twofold one: “A BMW is a BMW is a BMW. . . ” Other popular kinds of dicentic circularities are created by means of elliptical constructions. A slogan for the detergent Domestos bleach of 1959 claims: “Kills all germs” (Knowles 2004: 4). To understand this message, the reader is obliged to fill the gap left by the ellipsis of the subject “Domestos” from the packaging of the product and to substitute the missing proper noun from the product which it designates. The product in its package utters, so to speak, the self-referential message: “I kill all germs.” Still another rather frequent kind of self-referential circularity caused by elliptical constructions at the level of the dicent has the form of an open predicate whose scope includes the argument from which it should differ. The slogan “Persil washes whiter” is an example (Persil washing powder, GB, 2006). The enigma is: “whiter than what?” The comparative clause left out at the end of this slogan seems to be “than everything”, and this interpretation does not exclude the paradoxically self-referential reading “Persil washes whiter than Persil”.

5.3. Argumentative self-reference in advertising Self-referential arguments in advertising occur in many forms of circular reasoning. Most of them are elliptical and oblige the consumer to substitute the missing links in the chain of arguments. In 2006, Unilever of Great Britain launched a new advertising campaign under the name “Dirt is good” (http:// www.unilever.co.uk/ourbrands/advertising/persil/persil dig.asp, 16.05.06). The paradoxical slogan “Persil – Dirt is good” can only be understood as an elliptical argument or more precisely pseudo-argument, whose pseudo-syllogistic line of reasoning must be: Premise 1: Dirt is bad. Premise 2: Good Persil removes bad dirt. Conclusion: Bad dirt removed by good Persil: how good! Implicitly circular or quasi-circular arguments are quite frequent in advertising. The quality of a product stated at the end of the elliptical argument is already presupposed from its beginning. Such a rhetorical device suffers from the fallacy of the petitio principii. “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” was a famous advertising slogan of the 1960s with a semi-circular way of arguing (cf. http://www.anagramgenius.com/archive/winsto4.html, 16.05.06). The reason for the alleged quality of this cigarette is already only implied in its mere

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being a cigarette. The conclusion only confirms what the general premise presupposes: all cigarettes (should) taste good, and therefore this cigarette tastes good, too. – “The world has changed. The dictionary also”, was the slogan with which Hachette launched a new dictionary. The two propositions of this slogan sound like the major and the minor premise of a syllogism (“All S is P” and “Some S is P”) calling for the conclusion that the new dictionary incorporates al recent changes of the world of which it is a part. The second premise with its syntactic and semantic parallelism to the first creates an iconically self-referential circular argument: the dictionary must be good since it reflects the changes of the changing world of which it is a part. Of course, the conclusion is not valid since the dictionary could have changed from good to bad, or it could not have changed at all. Furthermore, there is another circularity in the argument, since a dictionary, being a part of the world that has changed, must change in a trivial sense by necessity with every new edition.

5.4.

(Intra)textual self-reference: Cinema and advertising

There are two major sources of (intra)textual self-reference, poetic features and metatextual passages of a text about the text. As Jakobson has argued, poetic features draw the readers’ attention towards the text as a text by means of recurrence, symmetry, rhyme, loops, or stylistic and rhetorical devices. The former devices evince iconic self-reference since they are based on similarities and forms of sameness, the latter testify to indexical self-reference, insofar as style is indicative of an author, epoch, or otherness in general (cf. Nöth 2005a). Selfreference is particularly conspicuous in filmic loops (Manovich 1999: 187–191) in general and in the film Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, D, 1998; http://www.lolarennt.de, 16.05.06), a film that is self-referential already in its English title and which returns to its beginning and anticipates its end several times. Examples of metatextual self-reference are comments on the text, its narrative form, its content and its structure, its plot, previous or subsequent chapters, its beginning and its end. In the movies, textual self-reference occurs when the film begins and ends with a trailer marking its beginning by presenting its title and its end by concluding with the message THE END in writing. In advertising, the line Advertisement above the text refers to the text as a particular type of text (and not one that belongs to the news reports, for example).Textual self-reference of this kind in advertising runs the risk of being in conflict with the goals of the genre. The metamessage “This it is an advertisement” reminds the readers that the message is one-sided and pursues the goal of influencing the public for the sole purpose of buying the product. Instead of saying (alloreferentially) “Prod-


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uct X is good”, the advertisement says: “This message is an advertisement for product X”. Advertisements tend to avoid this kind of self-reference since the credibility of commercials is generally low, and the admission that the message is “only” publicity puts the efficiency of the message at risk.

5.5.

Intertextual and intermedial self-reference

Quotations, allusions, adaptations, influences, borrowings from texts, films, or any other medium are the sources of intertextual self-reference. When several media are involved, such as painting in the cinema, films in games, or novels in the film, there is intermedial self-reference. In a way, borrowings from other texts or media are certainly alloreferential, since there is reference from one message to another so that the object of the quoting sign is a quoted sign from which it differs. On the other hand, a film A that quotes a film B makes intertextual reference to its own medium and not to the world which both films represent, and the TV spot that quotes another TV spot remains within the world of advertising. These messages are intertextually self-referential to the degree that its quotations remain within their own world beyond films. Furthermore, every quotation presupposes repetition and sameness which is the source of iconic self-reference. There are several kinds of loops and circularities in intertextual and intermedial self-reference which have been studied elsewhere. One of them is the intermedial déjà-vu effect which has often been exemplified with certain side effects created by the news reports on September 11. In one of his “Essays on ˇ zek (2002: 17) writes: “The question we September 11 and related dates”, Ziˇ should have asked ourselves as we started the TV screens on September 11 is simply: Where have we already seen the same thing over and again?” In our ˇ zek is of relevance. context, only the aspect of self-reference addressed by Ziˇ ˇ zek reminds us of is that the TV pictures of the collapsing World Trade What Ziˇ Center on September 11 did not only arouse shock, horror, and despair but it also created some feeling of déjà-vu. In a way, the film reports of the September 11 catastrophe in the news media only seemed to repeat the scenarios which the genre of disaster movies had displayed for decades. The TV pictures seemed to lack absolute novelty because the viewers had been all too familiar with similar pictures of catastrophes, wars, destruction, and invasions by enemies and aliens, some of them even in New York City. As Tim Dirks’s (2006) list of the “Greatest disaster film scenes” demonstrates, the world’s highest glass tower building had been aflame before (although in a fictional version in which the towers were located in San Francisco), namely in the movie The Towering Inferno of 1974,

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and there are dozens of catastrophe film scenarios resembling the September 11 events with plane crashes, terrorists of many kinds, out for control fires, nuclear annihilations, and even end of the world scenarios. On September 11, the media had been ahead of the event; reality seemed to lag behind. In short, the déjà-vu effect on the screen accounts for a particular form of self-reference in the media, which consists in the repetition of the same scenario, whether fictional of nonfictional.

5.6.

Enunciative self-reference: Examples from the movies

Enunciation has been a key concept in film semiotics since Christian Metz (Buckland 2000; Buckland 1995). It pertains to the communicative situation of a message, the way the addresser interacts with the addressee of a message. In verbal communication, the study of enunciation is concerned with the many voices of the speaker, especially the narrator, their intentions and modes of manipulating the addressee (Santaella and Nöth 2004: 113–126). Enunciative (or communicative) self-reference occurs when the author, the narrator, the actor, the reader, or the spectator become the topic of the message. Instead of presenting or representing ideas or events in the world from elsewhere, the text deals with its own communicative context, its function, the presuppositions of its narration, and the text has thus its own communicative situation as its topic. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, leaves his place behind the camera to mingle with the actors on the screen, reminding the spectators of his permanent presence in his film, even when invisible. In a so-called screen passage, one of Woody Allen’s actors in The Purple Rose of Cairo (US, 1985) even steps out from his role as an actor on the screen to mingle with the audience. For decades, films used to conceal the traces of their production, for example the details of the film studio and the staff behind the scenes, as much as possible with the purpose of creating a perfect real-life illusion. Alloreference was on the agenda. Modern digital film technology has increased the potential for illusion and enables the alloreferential representation of previously impossible “realities”. The audience is no longer restricted to viewing the sinking Titanic above the sea level but can also participate in the drama below the water surface. As a result of the new possibilities of digital picture manipulation, it is no longer possible to distinguish real shots from digital additions (cf. Manovich 1999). The alloreferential perfection of this pictorial manipulation makes us forget its digital construction. More and more accurate representations and the increasing possibilities of representing the world in all of its visual facets create the illusion of a growth of alloreference of the medium.


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On the other hand, there are those new strategies and effects of illusion that conduce from a world of the “real” to the awareness of a world of simulation. The more the pictures distance themselves from reality, the more doubts in the authenticity and plausibility of the feigned worlds arise. The ever repetitive effects of simulation shatter the audience’s belief in the communicative contract between filmmaker and audience. Films deal with the premises and conditions of this communicative contract as a result of a critical reflection of this situation. It eventually becomes the subject matter of filmed representation itself: filmmakers appear on the screen in the role of actors, actors play the role of the producer, and last but not least, they leave the screen entirely in an effective screen passage to join the audience in the cinema (cf. Stam 1992; Karpf, Kiesel, and Visarius 1996, and Withalm, this vol.). New forms of pragmatic selfreference are emerging with interactive films in which the spectator becomes the producer of his own viewing. Enunciative self-reference is of a different kind in computer games. Not unlike other games, reference to the world is secondary in computer games. Games do not want to simulate real life. In contrast to other forms of play, the computer game offers still more possibilities for the creation of new worlds. Their virtual character is highly self-referential from the beginning on. Players can interact with the program code and thus control the referential action, and they can become producers of the text. In which way communicative selfreferential autonomy of the players is actually attained remains open for further investigation.

5.7.

Iconic self-reference: Loops, repetitions, and recursion

Among the most important iconic modes of textual, intertextual, and intermedial self-reference are recursion and recurrence. Recursion, the circular or loop-like return to an earlier point in the same text, in other texts, or media, is similar to recurrence, the principle of repetition. There are diverse functions and effects. In music, art, and literature, the nontrivial recurrence of varied forms is a source of aesthetic effects: repetitio delectat. As the trivial repetition of the same, recurrence and recursion are signs of the trivial, for example in soap operas. In games, recursion can even be a means of punishment, for example in the classical ludo, where the return to the point of departure can be an element of suspense, satisfaction, or disappointment. In advertising, repetitive campaigns a` la Marlboro exemplify best the principle of intertextual recurrence and hence intertextual self-reference with their permanent return to the same scenario. Evidently, the Marlboro man does not

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only refer alloreferentially to scenes of the myth of the Wild West but also self-referentially to the never changing world of the Marlboro posters. In the movies, too, we have become accustomed to intertextual self-reference. The most recent James Bond films, for example, are hardly discussed in terms of what they represent. Instead, intertextuality is the topic as public interest focuses on the question of how these films can be compared with those which preceded. Nina Bishara, in a comment on this paper, describes this form of self-reference in the most recent James Bond movie Die Another Day (UK/US, 2002) as follows: Not only are well-established and recurrent James Bond themes taken up (e.g. good against evil, the pre-titles sequences, “My name is Bond – James Bond” etc.), the 20th Bond movie also has strong allusions to the previous movies so that the real connoisseur can indulge in a guessing game. One scene with Bond girl Halle Barry resembles a scene with Ursula Andress from the first Bond movie Dr. No (1962) and props that played an important role in previous movies reappear. Allegedly, each of the previous films is included in the new Bond movie in some form or other. Moreover, cases of intermedial self-reference can be found in the product placements of cars (Ford, Jaguar, Aston Martin), Bond’s favorite champagne (Bollinger), spy tools such as the watch by Omega or the Ericsson mobile phone. Even print advertisements self-referentially refer back to these product placements, for example a BMW ad which advertises the fact that the new BMW model appears in the James Bond movie The World is not Enough (1999). Another intermedial form of self-reference can be observed in the video clip for the title song by Madonna for the 20th Bond movie which is also called Die Another Day and which re-enacts scenes from the movie. One of the characteristic features of digital film is the increasing possibility of self-repetition in the form of loops, as in Run Lola Run, where several variations of the same event are connected by means of time loops. There is no true beginning and no real end when this form of textual self-reference predominates. There is nothing but a sequence of recursive loops. Loops and recursivity, however, are not only modes of repetition; they are as well loci of variation (cf. Winkler 2004: 170–182). In computer games, recursion in the form of textual self-reference is still more advanced. For example, the player can chose a certain point of departure in the game and then try out a number of possible variations of the same strategy. Furthermore, the well-known order “Return to X” (i.e., to a previous position) clearly exemplifies textual self-reference. Textually self-referential recursion is probably the most characteristic feature of computer games, since the underlying algorithms are not only the basis of the production but also of the execution of the game.


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6. Self-reference between subversion, play, and art Self-reference in the media is hardly subversive, as it might seem when it results in paradox; its functions tend to be predominantly playful and aesthetic. Being directed towards itself without any ambition to represent, the world beyond the signs, a self-referential message cannot transmit a subversive message in the sense of a message that wants to undermine social or cultural values. However, a self-referential message can be subversive in the sense of breaking with the codes and conventions of the genre. In this sense, self-reference is most subversive in advertising, where the self-referential message is incompatible with the goal of advertising services or products. In films, too, self-reference has been a subversive device of the genre when it was first introduced as a stylistic device. Both media, however, have always shown self-referential elements in their poetic and aesthetic dimensions, since poetry and art are self-referential by nature. In games, by contrast, self-reference is not the exception, but the rule, since play and playful conduct have always tended to be self-referential. The values of chess figures, such as the king, the queen, the bishop, or the pawn, find very little correspondence in real life. Carnival seems to be revolutionary in allowing the peasant to become the prince, but carnival has never been suppressed by those in power, since they quickly recognized that playful conduct is self-oriented and cannot develop a revolutionary impetus. Computer games, however, have begun to create new realities and to simulate virtual realities which raise the question of subversion in a new way. Do they conduce to merely self-referentially playful activities, to play for play’s sake, as in chess, or do they create virtual realities with the potential to subvert the conventional values of culture and society?

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Lipman, Jean and Richard Marshall (eds.) 1978 Art about Art. New York: Dutton. Luhmann, Niklas 1984 Das Kunstwerk und die Selbstreproduktion der Kunst. Delfin 3: 51– 69. 1993 Zeichen als Form. In: Dirk Baecker (ed.), Probleme der Form, 45– 69. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Transl. M. Irmscher. 1999. Sign as form. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 6.3: 21–37. 1995 Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Lyotard, Jean-Fran¸cois 1979 La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. Engl. (1984). The Postmodern Condition, G. Bennington and B. Massumi (transl.). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. McLuhan, Marshall 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan. Manovich, Lev 1999 What is digital cinema? In: Peter Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectics: New Essays on the New Media, 172–192. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcus, Solomon 1997 Media and self-reference: The forgotten initial state. In: Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media, 15–45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Menninghaus, Winfried 1987 Unendliche Verdopplungen: Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Metscher, Thomas ¨ 2003 Ahnlichkeit und Selbstrepräsentation. In: Silja Freudenberger and Hans Jörg Sandkühler (eds.), Repräsentation, Krise der Repräsentation, Paradigmenwechsel, 271–299. Frankfurt: Lang. Müller, Jürgen 1996 Intermedialität: Formen moderner kultureller Kommunikation. Münster: Nodus. Münch, Dieter 1992 Referenz, Referenztheorie. In: Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Volume 8, 386–387. Basel: Schwabe. Myers, C. Mason 1966 The circular use of metaphor. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26: 391–402.

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Peirce, Charles Sanders 1931–58 Collected Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 7–8, ed., A. W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – Quoted as CP. 1963–66 The Charles S. Peirce Papers. 30 reels, microfilm edition. Cambridge, MA: The Houghton Library, Harvard University Microproductions. – Quoted as MS; see Robin, comp. 1967. Peitgen, Heinz-Otto, Hartmut Jürgens and Dietmar Saupe 1992 Chaos and Fractals. Berlin: Springer. Petersen, Christer 2003 Der postmoderne Text. Kiel: Ludwig. Potthast, Ulrich ¨ 1971 Uber einige Fragen der Selbstbeziehung. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers 1984 Order out of Chaos. New York: Bantam. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2002 Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke. Robin, Richard S. 1967 Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. (MS refers to the numbers of this catalogue.) Santaella, Lucia 2004 Corpo e comunica¸cao. ˜ São Paulo: Paulus. Santaella, Lucia and Winfried Nöth 2004 Semiótica e comunica¸cao. ˜ São Paulo: Hacker. Scheffel, Michael 1997 Formen des selbstreflexiven Erzählens. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Scheutz, Matthias 1995 Ist das der Titel eines Buches? Selbstreferenz neu analysiert. Vienna: WUV. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1994 Kognitive Autonomie und soziale Orientierung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schmidt, Siegfried J. and Brigitte Spieß 1996 Die Kommerzialisierung der Kommunikation: Fernsehwerbung und sozialer Wandel 1956–1989. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schöppe, Arno 1995 Theorie paradox: Kreativität als systemische Herausforderung. Heidelberg: Carl Auer. Shir, Jay 1978 Symbolism and autosymbolism. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37(1): 81–89.

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Siedenbiedel, Catrin 2005 Metafiktionalität in Finnegans Wake. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Smuda, Manfred 1970 Becketts Prosa als Metasprache. Munich: Fink. Spielmann, Yvonne 1998 Intermedialität. Das System Peter Greenaway. Munich: Fink. Stam, Robert 1992 Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Goddard. New York: Columbia University Press. Waugh, Patricia 1984 Metafiction. London: Methuen. Weber, Stefan 1999 Das System Journalismus: Oszillieren zwischen Selbstreferenz und Fremdsteuerung. In: Michael Latzer, Ursula Maier-Rabler and Gabriele Siegert (eds.), Die Zukunft der Kommunikation, 161–180. Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag. Whitehead, Alfred N. and Bertrand Russell (eds.) 1910 Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whiteside, Anna 1987 The double-bind: Self-referring poetry. In: Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff (eds.), On Referring in Literature, 14–32. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Winkler, Hartmut 2004 Diskursökonomie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Withalm, Gloria 1995 Fernsehen im Fernsehen im Fernsehen. . . : Selbstreferentielle Zeichen¨ prozesse. Vienna: OGS/ISS. Wittig, Susan 1979 Architecture about architecture: Self-reference as a type of architectural signification. In: Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco and JeanMarie Klinkenberg (eds.), A Semiotic Landscape, 970–978. The Hague: Mouton. Wolf, Werner 2001 Formen der literarischen Selbstreferenz in der Erzählkunst. In: Jörg Helbig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert, 49–84. Heidelberg: Winter. Zavala, Lauro 2000 Una tipolog´ıa estructural de estrategias metaficcionales en cine y literatura. Xochimilco: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. ˇ zek, Slavoj Ziˇ 2002 Welcome to the Desert. London: Verso.

Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a self-referential culture:The irresistible force of reality Vincent Colapietro

1. Introduction: The cultural frame Reflexivity has been taken to be a hallmark of postmodernity (Lawson 1985; Bartlett 1992; Dunne 2001; Nöth, this vol., Part I). There is unquestionably a warrant for doing so. For ours is manifestly a time in which self-reference, especially in its most intensified forms and paradoxical implications, is a pervasive and thus inescapable facet of our lives.1 The forms and effects of this reflexivity are far from superficial: they are, indeed, integral to the structures of our lives, including our modes of embodiment, engagement, and affectivity (Lenoir 2000; Gitlin 2002: 6; Santaella 2003). Arguably, our propensity toward irony, our incredulity toward metanarratives, our longing for immediacy, our ambivalence regarding authenticity, and various other factors are intimately connected to the reflexivity so characteristic of our time. Whether or not these connections can be established, there is little doubt about reflexivity being a hallmark of postmodernity. Though its character, forms, and significance invite numerous questions, this connection is itself beyond question. This is nowhere more evident than in the forms and effects of reflexivity generated and intensified by the interlocking networks of contemporary media, ranging from long-established ones such as newspapers to cutting-edge technologies such as computer simulation of war games (Lenoir 2000). The news being broadcast via such media as television, radio, and blogs on the world wide web (www) constitutes unquestionably intricate and arguably insular networks of self-citation and self-commentary. The news reports on the news as much as anything else. Individuals are celebrities for no other reason than being celebrated in the media. Popular entertainment constructs a world of complex allusions to the fabrications of the entertainment industry itself. Nowhere is intertextuality more manifest than, for example, in the structures of cinema. In light of all of this, we seemingly inhabit a world of our own making, one in which claims about reality are viewed with deep suspicion, if not outright dismissal.

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Even the character of the “real” world of global politics has come increasingly to take on that of the fabricated world of the entertainment industry (a point to which I shall return). The crisis of representation, insofar as it is generated by the inherent dynamic of, and theoretical reflections on, mass media, is inseparably connected to the forms of reflexivity so pervasive in a culture so radically structured by such media. The possibilities of reference and representation in anything approximating a straightforward sense seem to be increasingly – and paradoxically (Nöth 2003: 9–11) – limited to those of self-reference and self-representation. Indexical signs in their most rudimentary form are assumed at every turn, but theoretically erased. In an increasingly self-referential culture, the relationship of the self to itself paradoxically works to shatter the putative unity and stability of the self. The self is, on Richard Rorty’s account at least, a centerless web of contingent beliefs and desires (see, e.g., 1989: 10). Such an account seems to be tailored to the sensibility of those who are mobile nodes in an expanding network of selfreferential media. For such “selves”, self-consciousness tends to assume a form in which self-identification becomes increasingly problematic and awkward, but at the same time a form in which self-estrangement does not ordinarily feel selflacerating. The self is affectively attached to an identity or endeavor from which it can readily distance itself, very often through ironic self-commentary. In an increasingly self-referential culture such as our own, our relationship to a common reality is no less radically altered than our relationship to our innermost selves. Indeed, our confidence in our ability to refer to a shared reality tends to be deeply shaken, if not entirely undermined. Insofar as we (at any rate, you and I individually) lack such confidence, the reality of community itself becomes problematic.2 Our ever deepening skepticism regarding the ability to appeal to a shared understanding or to refer to a common reality is, at once, widely felt and communally debilitating.3 More and more of us feel this way and the more we actually do the less we are possible (i.e., the less likely communal norms and ideals are concretely embodied in shared habits, practices, and institutions). The solidarity requisite for political opposition grounded in shared concerns, grievances, and hopes can be, for example, more ephemeral (at least less efficacious) than the fabricated sense of national unity. Actual forms of solidarity are rendered more and more insubstantial and ineffective, while fabricated or, more precisely, fantastic forms of identity become more and more central and energizing. In the writings of C. S. Peirce we encounter a theorist who combines a robust sense of reality with an acute sense of the fragile and (in no small measure) illusory character of the self. For this and other reasons, some of his most distinctive

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contributions (above all, his doctrine of signs, his version of pragmatism, and more broadly his account of inquiry) seem especially relevant to the task of making sense out of our selves and our world, as both are encountered in an increasingly self-referential culture. For Peirce, the self is in no small measure a fabrication (CP 4.68; Short 1997: 307); and, in turn, our only access to reality is through the mediation of signs. Even so, a fragile, fissured, and fallible self, as much (if not more) illusory as real, might have adequate resources (if only barely adequate resources) to know reality. But such a self can do so only in conjunction with other such selves, forming thereby a community of inquirers defined by a commitment to open-ended self-criticism. To paraphrase Peirce, the idea of reality is inseparably connected to not only the idea but also the reality of community.

2. A contemporary example in light of Peircean realism A pragmatist is, according to the originator of this doctrine, a theorist for whom “the distinction of reality and fiction is naturally highly prominent. But I cannot see how such a mind can deny the reality of generals” (MS 313, p. 19). Though highly prominent the distinction between fact and fancy, reality and figment is continuous, such that the one shades into the other (facts always begin in some measure imaginative depictions and fancies real affairs). For a pragmatist committed to maintaining this distinction, however, generals are in countless instances no mere fictions: the reality of generals needs to be acknowledged along with the ubiquity of imagination and the otherness of reality. The mediated (or semiotic) realism of Peirce is able to do fuller justice to the complex actualities of contemporary culture than more influential theories of radical constructivism (Colapietro 2000). For theoretical and practical purposes, the language of disclosure must not be completely jettisoned in favor of the language of distortion or that of fabrication (or construction). One of the purposes of this paper is to make this argument as briefly and yet as pointedly as possible. Disclosure is inevitably partial, perspectival, and fallible, just as facts are (as the root of the word suggests) something wrought (facts being, in a sense, fabrications or constructions). Even so, our use of signs generates possibilities wherein some facets of reality are disclosed, are revealed often to our surprise and even frustration. I want to make this argument for Peircean realism in the teeth of hyper reflexivity in the media, as illustrated in an editorial in the New York Times (one wherein the world of politics is mapped onto that of film). In an editorial entitled “The two wars of the worlds” (New York Times, July 3, 2005), Frank Rich compares George W. Bush’s speech at Fort Bragg and Steven Spielberg’s just released “War of the Worlds”.4 The premise of Rich’s

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piece is that both the president and the director are aiming at inducing terror in their audience, Bush for the purpose of reversing the mounting skepticism regarding his adventure in Iraq, Spielberg for the purpose of entertainment, profit, and possibly edification.5 Both are in fact reruns or remakes: Spielberg is offering (according to the website for this movie) “a contemporary reading of H. G. Wells’s seminal classic”, while Bush was giving at Fort Bragg “almost the identical televised address, albeit with four fewer 9/11 references, at the Army War College in Pennsylvania in May 2004”. The “dazed response” of the military audience to Bush’s “summer rerun” however stands in marked contrast to the excited response of audiences to Spielberg’s remake. Much of this might be the result of Bush’s ineptitude in crafting a narrative. At least, Rich argues this point; and his argument is rich in allusions to the history of cinema and television. Mr. Spielberg’s movie illuminates [. . . ] how Mr. Bush has flubbed the basic storytelling essential to sustain public support for his Iraq adventure. The president has made a tic of hammering [home his points] in melodramatic movie tropes: good vs. evil, you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists, “wanted dead or alive”, “bring ’em on”, “mission accomplished”. When you relay a narrative in that style [Rich continues], the audience expects you to stick to the conventions of the genre; the story can only end with the cavalry charging in to win the big final battle. That’s how Mr. Spielberg deploys his platoons, “Saving Private Ryan”-style, in “War of the Worlds”. By contrast, Mr. Bush never marshaled the number of troops needed to guarantee Iraq’s security and protect its borders; he has now defined “mission accomplished” down from concrete victory to the inchoate spreading of democracy. To start off sounding like [General George] Patton and end up parroting [President] Woodrow Wilson is tantamount to ambushing an audience at a John Wayne movie with a final reel by Frank Capra.

The conclusion of Rich’s piece is also especially worthy of our attention, since he not only continues to frame his argument in reference to cinema but also casts Bush himself in the role of an alien. The “current war’s unpopularity now matches the Gallop findings during the Vietnam tipping point, the summer of 1968”. For a number of reasons, “it’s the Bush presidency, not the insurgency, that will [soon] be in its last throes”. The figure of a dying alien is, Rich implies, an apt image for this failing president: “Is the commander in chief so isolated in his bubble that he does not realize this [that he, not the insurgency, is soon to be in his last throes]?” He accordingly concludes with a piece of his advice: “G.W.B., phone home”. The cartoon by Barry Blitt accompanying Frank Rich’s editorial underscores the current war as a media event in which the significance of the event itself


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invites comparison to cinema. In this cartoon, “War in the Gulf: The Sequel” is being “Held Over” at Quagmire Theatre. But, in the course of depicting Bush’s speech as “a summer rerun” and media event (albeit one of lackluster quality), Rich asserts: Much of what Bush said in this speech “was, as usual, at odds with reality”. The comparison between “The Two Wars of the Worlds” is consequently intended not to erase the distinction between depiction and reality (much less that between fabrication and disclosure) but to highlight, in reference to Bush’s words, the clash between what has been actually asserted and what can be responsibly established. What Peircean realism tries to secure, above all else, is the colloquial sense of what is meant when a journalist or anyone else claims that an utterance, report, or other use of signs is “at odds with reality”. The very meaning of reality is partly derived from that which has the capacity to thwart even our most strenuous endeavors or to disrupt our habitual responses.6 Often, our present selves, as concrete representatives of the determinate past carried into and beyond the actual present (above all) by the tenacity of our habits, cannot effectively negotiate the scene in which we are entangled and, of greater significance, the one in which we will continue to be entangled. When effort and habit prove to be ineffective (when we cannot negotiate the scene in which we are entangled), we need to renegotiate the terms of our coexistence with the things and persons around us. Indeed, the metaphor that seems best to capture the complexity of this process is that of renegotiation. This metaphor suggests a political as well as communal process, one in which power is brokered and people repositioned vis-à-vis one another. The real is that which brings to light unsuspected deficiencies in the cumulative results of our ongoing negotiations. For the Peircean realist, however, the locus of the real is not so much at the origin of any process of renegotiation as at the provisional conclusions of an ongoing process (CP 8.12, 8.208, 8.284). The real is what the course of such renegotiations has forced us to acknowledge, above all, to acknowledge as what we would need to consider if the pursuit of our purposes is to be successful. Human purposes abound and extra-human factors are interwoven with what is, even in a seemingly simple, single deed, best seen as the dramatic, simultaneous enactment of multiple purposes. The multiplicity of our purposes and the complexity of our circumstances, the propulsive force of our present habits and the often upsetting presence of environing objects and their characteristic dispositions, all point to the abiding need to acknowledge real externality and to articulate in more concrete terms than we have thus a robust realism (Colapietro 2000). The irrepressible force of reality is such that, in however coded and distorted a form, its traces7 are innumerable and (to some extent) both discernible and decipherable (both identifiable and interpretable). This force is also such

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that we can position ourselves to feel more fully and to discern more finely its efficacy, but only to the extent we adhere to rigorous ideals of self-critique. We can observe, in the self-referential tendencies evident in various media, a multiplicity of functions. Such tendencies seem to serve “predominantly ludic and aesthetic functions” (Nöth), though Hilary Lawson and others argue that they contribute to the largely unacknowledged enhancement of critical consciousness in a world where ultimate truths and absolute certainty are so widely taken to be cultural illusions. Some theorists even take these tendencies to be inherently subversive, to carry by their own momentum the power to undermine the sanctity of traditional authorities and to disclose the historicity of allegedly timeless truths. Others (and I agree with them) contend that subversion is not so easily accomplished (Nöth). But, in addition to the ludic, aesthetic, and subversive functions just mentioned, I take it to be important, even urgent, to stress the critical function made possible by the open-ended reflexivity so characteristic of distinctively human uses of signs and media (a function distinct from that conceived by Lawson and others who seem to make critical consciousness an inevitable outcome of the inherent dynamic of subversive tendencies characteristic of reflexive media). Self-reference is a condition for self-criticism and, in turn, self-criticism is indispensable for responsibly establishing what is so. In some contexts, self-reference does not serve to enclose us in an ever more insular world, but rather works to expose us to an always somewhat unpredictable domain in which ongoing revision, and at least occasionally radical revision, of our habitual modes of description and explanation is the price to be paid for framing a reliable account of the world (for disclosing as accurately as our finitude and fallibility allow the contours, facets, and textures of reality). Such, at least, is the central claim of Peircean realism. As defended by Peirce himself, it is inseparably connected to his fallibilism, synechism, and pragmaticism. But rather than argue for this claim in a theoretical manner, I want now to illustrate it in a deceptively simple way. This illustration is, however, intended to have the force of an argument; it is offered as a means of showing how selfreference in the media can serve the ideal of self-criticism and, in turn, how the ideal of such criticism is vital to the disclosure of reality. Such reference serves a variety of other functions, ones often eclipsing and even counteracting the critical function of reflexive discourse. But it also generates the possibility, however fragile and fleeting, of self-criticism. Such criticism is, at bottom, the result of a moral stance, that of holding oneself accountable to others, to both what others have said and also what allegedly “mute objects” (Bakhtin 1981: 351) in effect say in response to our depictions of them (cf. Colapietro 2003: 14–15). More or less reliable disclosures of some facet of the world depend


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utterly upon such a stance. In the media as much as anywhere else, we discern just this possibility, along with countless examples of effective distortions and insulating fabrications. I now offer an example of this.

3. An example of journalistic reflexivity Thus, allow me to turn at this point to the task of reporting on a report about the activity of reporters working in the “mainstream media” in the United States (Gitlin 2005: 6). This might seem to be a case of hyperreflexivity or self-referentiality (terms I use synonymously here); moreover, hyperreflexivity appears to be characteristic of the very processes by which our relationship to reality becomes ever more attenuated, if not entirely severed. My purpose in doing so, however, is not to construct a hall of mirrors in which an endless multiplication of reflections frustrates the desire to locate the palpable source of those reflections. Rather my aim is to use this example of self-reference in the media as a way of bringing into focus the irreducibly complex relationship of reflexivity, rationality, and reality, though in such a way that emphasis on reflexivity is not allowed to eclipse rationality and reality.8 So, let us attend to a report in the media on the activity of those in the mainstream media in the U.S. More exactly, this report concerns less the activity than the failure of reporters, less what they did than what they have failed to do. It is a story about what until recently has been missing in the media and indeed who have been missing (in the sense of not reporting for duty, not doing what they have vowed to do). In a regular feature entitled “Press Watch” in an issue of The Nation (July 4, 2005), Todd Gitlin constructs a compelling case for the noteworthy failure of mainstream media simply to report a significant “fact”. The focus of his concern in the piece under consideration is, to repeat, what the mainstream media have failed to report. The title of his article makes this point immediately clear: “MIA: News of Prison Toll”. In this instance, the reporters are the ones missing in action (MIA). The news regarding the number of those who have died while prisoners of the U.S. under suspicion of terrorism is that this number has not been reported in the news. In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman (an opinion columnist, not a news reporter) declared, “the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks?” (May 27, 2005; quoted in Gitlin 2005: 6). In Gitlin’s piece, one member of the media is chastising other members9 and therein the media is exhibiting a seemingly irrepressible tendency to report on

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itself. One of the effects of this is, however, not to sustain an ever more insular network of self-reference (though one of the results is, arguably, to generate an ever more intricate system of such references). At any rate, reflexivity is not operating here in the service of insularity. Rather it is pushing to render a system vulnerable to the pressures – ultimately, the reality – of what this system has so strenuously tried to exclude. In other words, reflexivity here is operating in the service of registering a reality resolutely ignored. Reflexivity is fulfilling this function through a process of self-questioning: a representative of the media is questioning the media in the name of what they (the media themselves) promise to convey. In turn, such questioning is integral to our understanding of rationality. The acknowledgment of any complex reality (especially any controversial reality) is impossible apart from responsiveness to ongoing interrogations, often ones of an increasingly reflexive character. Whatever else we might mean by rationality, responsiveness in this and indeed other respects is central to the meaning of this word.

4. Conclusion: “Vision of the cobblestones” Allow me to draw these reflections to a close by recalling an arresting image offered by a contemporary author. In the Preface to The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz confessed about himself as a younger man, “Hitherto, I had had no strong political affinities and was only too ready to shut myself off from the realities of life. But reality would never let me remain aloof for long” (1953: vi). Later in this work he insists: “The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. Probably only those things are worth while which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.” He valorizes this decisive perspective in an unforgettable way when he writes: A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing straight up like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of the literary cafés, and wherever he went he was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems [or someone else’s theories], recalled in such a moment, suddenly seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally naked experience could possibly survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions. (1953: 39)


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At least one of the most critical tests of poetry and theories, news reports and presidential addresses, is their ability to appear other than diseased when exposed to such experience. Such experience might never be naked, in the sense of unmediated. The mediated yet direct encounter with the displaced and tilted cobblestones (or some analogue), however, secures in our experience a basis for maintaining an irreducible (if not necessarily “highly prominent”) distinction between reality and fiction, disclosure and fabrication. That the ongoing mediations of a self-consciously historical community of self-critical inquirers are required to ascertain the significance of these encounters is no argument against a direct encounter with the actual world; for Peircean realism insists that all our encounters with reality are direct yet mediated affairs (Smith 1992: 20–25; cf. Smith 1978: 87–95; Colapietro 1995: 42–44). The recognition of the ubiquitous thirdness inherent in experience does not require us to ignore or deny the salient secondness characteristic of experience (the direct confrontation with irreducible otherness). A nuanced understanding of human experience suggests rather the abiding need to accredit the disclosive potential of our direct encounters but also the equally persistent need to embrace the task of interminable critique (Bernstein 1981: 116–120). Reality is, as Peirce suggests, what inquiry would disclose in the indefinite long run (see, however, Smith 1970: 104–108). In the meantime, it is what the most reliable of our investigations have intimated, however revisable these intimations turn out to be (Colapietro 1996: 137–38). In this light, reality is at once frustratingly elusive, brutally insistent, and inherently intelligible. Reflexive rationality, especially in the form of reflexive interrogation (more simply, in the form of self-questioning), is required for disclosing the contours, facets, and dimensions of reality, insofar as this is possible. Self-referentiality in the media can be an instance of nothing less than such rationality. But, then, it also can be one of the principal forces by which an increasingly insular world of autotelic systems maintains itself. The markedly aesthetic dimension of contemporary existence is nowhere more evident than in the degree and manner in which the technological, communicational, educational, and other networks assume the character of autotelic systems. Even so, the marked presence of the aesthetic and ludic functions of increasingly reflexive media does not preclude the effective operation of a critical function, one operating often in the name of the strenuously repressed, the systematically ignored, and the grossly distorted. Such a function is necessary for disclosing the degree to which we humans and our uses of signs are so often “at odds with reality”. In light of the distortions and fabrications so vital to the maintenance of power, this everyday expression and its numerous equivalents in their colloquial sense are, in turn, vital to the ever unfinished work of humane critique (Bernstein 1981: 118–120). Is such critique

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truly rendered impossible or unnecessary in such a radically self-referential culture as our own?

Notes 1. This point is finely articulated by Winfried Nöth in his introductory chapter to this volume: “The visual, and the audiovisual arts and media have become increasingly self-referential, self-reflexive, autotelic. Instead of representing something heard about, seen, lived, or otherwise experienced in social life, culture, and nature, journalists, commercial artists, designers, and film directors report increasingly what has been seen, heard, or reported before in the media. The mediators have turned to representing representations. Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of filming, they film that they film the filming. The news are more and more about what has been reported in the news, television shows are more and more concerned with television shows, and even advertising is no longer about products and services but about advertising. The messages of the media are about messages of the media, whose origin has become increasingly difficult to trace. In literature, fiction has become metafiction, novels have become metanovels, and texts are discovered as being intertexts whose reference is not to life but to other texts, and in the visual arts, art is now about art, and even architecture is about architecture. The digitalization of pictures and films, which has liberated the media from the bonds of factual reference to a world which they used to depict, has contributed to the increase of self-reference.” In this essay, Nöth also carefully distinguishes the forms and means of self-reference. In addition, he helpfully stresses the point that there are degrees of reflexivity: “Various degrees of self-reference can be distinguished, from the sign that refers to nothing but itself to the sign that refers only partially to itself and partially still to something else.” Finally, he notes, “self-reference concerns different levels of the media and the message in which it occurs” (emphasis added). My own approach to this topic has been crucially informed by this paper and other writings by Prof. Nöth. 2. In one of the articles (“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”) in the series in which C. S. Peirce so brilliantly argued for a semiotic conception of cognition, consciousness, and selfhood, he stresses: “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information [i.e., experience, V.C.] and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge. And so those two series of cognition – the real and the unreal – consist of those which, at a time sufficiently future, the community will always continue to re-affirm; and those which, under the same conditions, will ever after be denied” (CP 5.311; EP 1, 52).


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3. An important practical question is whether such a widely felt matter can serve as one of the bases for the recovery – or reconstruction – of local sites of effective community. 4. Rich points out: “Ever since Jaws, a movie set on the July Fourth weekend, broke box office records 30 summers ago, Independence Day has come to stand for terror as much as for freedom” (2005: 11). 5. Rich reports that, in Spielberg’s movie, “Tim Robbins (who else?) pops up to declare that when aliens occupy a country, the ‘occupations always fail’. Even Tom Cruise’s doltish teenage screen son is writing a school report on the ‘French occupation of Algeria”’. I do not have to remind Europeans, as I would have to remind Americans, that Jacques Chirac told George Bush that Iraq will prove to be America’s Algeria, to which Bush responded, “I could not disagree with you more”. Perhaps the doltish adolescent in Spielberg’s terrifying thriller is, as a result of his research, in a better position than the adolescent President to appreciate the analogy. 6. This would be reality in its secondness, in the form of otherness, resistance, obsistence, or oppugnancy (CP 1.322, 1.324, 2.79, 8.291). But, in Peirce’s lexicon, reality is a subtle, nuanced term, and reality in its secondness is hardly exhaustive of its meaning. 7. The notion of trace is crucial to the argument of this paper. This implies that so too is that of index, for the trace in the sense intended here is an instance of indexicality. See Nöth, “The death of photography in self-reference” (this vol., Part III). 8. One of the most crucial aspects of the relationship between rationality and reflexivity is brought into immediate focus by Peirce when he suggests: “‘rational’ means essentially self-criticizing, self-controlling and self-controlled, and therefore open to incessant question” (CP 7.77). 9. The situation is even more complex than this since Gitlin is amplifying a criticism first voiced by Friedman in an editorial. He is also underscoring the fact that the news regarding the number of deaths was in effect reported in an editorial. At a time when the New York Times has made a renewed effort to draw “a sharper demarcation between news and opinion”, “the presumably hard side of the news” has, concerning “a stark and consequential matter of fact”, been missing in action (Gitlin 2005: 6). For news regarding the number of deaths of those detained by US as terrorists individuals in that country have had to rely on an opinion writer. Gitlin’s search on LexisNexis database of television news yielded these results: No report of this number on CSP, “one brief mention on NBC, another on ABC”, but nothing at all on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC; also nothing in either Time or Newsweek. On Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPC), under intense fire for allegedly “liberal bias”, Jim Lehrer in his “News Hour” did give the number of such deaths as 100, counting 20 as homicides.

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References Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Michael Holquist (ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bartlett, Steven (ed.) 1992 Reflexivity: A Source-Book in Self-Reference. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Bernstein, Richard J. 1981 Toward a more rational community. In: Kenneth L. Ketner et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress, 115–120. Lubbock: Texas Tech University. Colapietro, Vincent 1995 Immediacy, opposition, and mediation: Peirce on the irreducible aspects of the communicative process. In: Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew Smith (eds.), Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice, 23–48. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 1996 The ground of semiosis:An implied theory of perspectival realism? In: Vincent Colapietro and Thomas Olshewsky (eds.), Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs: Theory, Applications, and Connections, 129–140. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2000 Robust realism and real externality: The complex commitments of a convinced pragmaticist. Semiotica 130: 301–372. 2003 Signification and interpretation. Jornada CEPE [São Paulo] (October 30), 5–20. Dunne, Michael 2001 Metapop: Self-Referentiality in Contemporary American Popular Culture. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Gitlin, Todd 2005 MIA: News of prison toll, The Nation (July 4), 6–8. 2002 Media Unlimited. New York: Metropolitan/Owl Book. Lawson, Hilary 1985 Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. London: Hutchinson. Lenoir, Timothy 2000 All war is simulation: The military-entertainment complex. Configurations 8: 289–335. Milosz, Czeslaw 1953 The Captive Mind. New York: Vintage Books. Nöth, Winfried (ed.) 1997 Semiotics of the Media. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Nöth, Winfried and Christina Ljungberg (eds.) 2003 The crisis of representation: Semiotic foundations and manifestations in culture and the media. Semiotica 143(1–4). (Special Issue).


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Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1958 Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – Quoted as CP. 1963–1966 1979 The Charles S. Peirce Papers, 30 reels, 3rd microfilm edition. Cambridge, MA:The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Microreproduction Service. – Quoted as MS. 1867–1893 2003 The Essential Peirce. Ed. Nathan Houser. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Unversity Press. – Quoted as EP. Rorty, Richard 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rich, Frank 2005 The two wars of the worlds. The New York Times (July 3), 11. Santaella, Lucia 2003 Culturas e Artes do Pós-humano: Da Cultura das M´ıdias a` Cibercultura. São Paulo: Paulus. Short, Thomas L. 1997 Hypostatic abstraction in self-consciousness. In: Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster (eds.),The Rule of Reason:The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, 289–308. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, John E. 1970 Themes in American Philosophy: Purpose, Experience, and Community. New York: Harper & Row. 1978 Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1992 America’s PhilosophicalVision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Part II. Self-referential print advertising

Modes of self-reference in advertising Siegfried J. Schmidt

1. Media culture societies on their way to self-reference In recent decades, there has been a clear tendency in the development of media culture societies towards self-referential structures and processes. As far as I can see, there are three different reasons for this tendency: – Studies of the origin as well as of the functioning of communities and societies have revealed the crucial role of self-reference in terms of reflexivity. Today, reflexivity can be regarded as the fundamental process of generating social structures. The best example is communication. Communication relies on collective knowledge which bridges the gap between the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their necessary social orientation. Collective knowledge can be described in terms of reflexive loops of expected expectations in the domain of knowledge and imputed imputations in the domain of motives and intentions. As part of each individual’s stock of knowledge, it is more or less shared by all members of a society and plays an essential role in the coordination of their behavior and their communicative practice. – Self-referential reflexivity has become part of everyday experience in the last century through the development of a complex media system since media – conceived of as complex social systems – primarily serve the purpose of enabling specific self-observations of media culture societies. Furthermore, media increasingly observe each other. Accordingly, an immensely complex network or process system of observations has emerged, steered by the fundamental constructive processes of reflexivity in terms of self-referentiality. – The more societies increase the degree of their observability through the development of self-referential media systems, the more urgent becomes the question for the functional and integrative performance of culture programs1 for actors and social subsystems alike, since reflexive structures of observation inevitably lead to the experience of contingency. For this reason, societies whose models of reality and culture programs are a permanent subject of discussion in complex media systems automatically develop media cul-

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tures marked by a high level of plurality and a low level of compulsion in traditional problem solutions. In light of these considerations, it becomes plausible that advertising in media culture societies had to generate modes of self-reference, too. In this paper, advertising is conceived of in terms of a social system which can be characterized as a subsystem of the economic system, which follows its own system specific logic. The advertising system sells creativity for money. It aims at arousing attention for its media supply which is then transferred to the goods, services, persons, and messages to which it seeks to draw attention. In order to arouse attention, advertising must permanently translate changing social events and developments into communication contents and forms, into pictures and stories which promise economic profit. Since advertising appears in public in the form of expensive media supply, it is necessarily related to three dimensions, viz., economy (money), creative processes of advertisers and their target audience, and communication processes initiated by advertising activities. These systematic interrelations need to be taken into consideration when we talk about the media supply of advertising, which is only the final result of these interrelations and does not simply speak for itself. Today, advertising is not only an important economic sector but an influential instrument of socialization since it forms an integral part of our daily life. In 2002, for example, 2.6 billion commercials were shown on German television; the print media are full of commercials; internet, radio, or city lights confront us with hundreds of ads every day and everywhere. Furthermore, due to the increasing commercialization of communication, advertising has become an important power of motivation in the dynamics of the media system.

2. The semiotics of self-reference Before turning to a description of self-referential modes in advertising, I would like to clarify my concept of semiotic self-reference. I advocate a processoriented three-digit concept of “sign” which systematically combines (1) semiotic material, (2) the use of such material in accordance with the rules of a given language, and (3) the result of these processes. Semiotic material consists of structurally organized condensations of social experiences which can trigger cognitive as well as communicative follow-up processes. The arbitrariness of such triggering is kept in check by the fact that language-users refer to collective knowledge about semiotic routines as an efficient operative fiction, that is to say collective knowledge which is regarded to be mutually shared by all members of a society.

Modes of self-reference in advertising

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The use of semiotic material can be modeled as a context-bound process of referring to previous references or, in Charles S. Peirce’s phrase, as reference to previous experiences or cognition of the world. In using semiotic material, we refer to successful previous uses. In other words, we do not represent objects, events etc. but we refer to previous descriptions (of objects and events) we deem socially acceptable. Accordingly, these references mark a time difference between previous and actual descriptions, they occur in social contexts, and they necessarily rely upon collective cultural knowledge. In other words, signs do not present stable reference-relations, but are used by communicators in real situations to trigger follow-up operations in the cognitive or communicative domain of communication partners which happen according to the conditions of the respective systems. In and through using semiotic material subject-dependent cognitive processes are triggered. These processes result in self-referential constructions of ordered cognitive states that rely on culturally programmed knowledge about socially acceptable usages of the respective semiotic materials. That is to say, expected expectations or reflexive loops establish a socially successful relation between semiotic materials on the one hand and subjective cognitive operations on the other. Again – the point bears repeating – I do not model semiotic processes in terms of representations of items beyond language but in terms of references to previous references to cognitive processes and imputed collective knowledge. These considerations imply that self-referential operations presuppose second-order observation, the observation of one’s own or other people’s activities performed on a first-order level. This particular mode of observation is possible because of the time-difference between first-order and second-order operations, since the more or less automatic first-order processes have to be interrupted in order to impose on them various kinds of structures and postprocesses. In my view, this is the reason why semiotic self-reference and cognitive reflexivity both fall into the category of reflexive looping.

3. Modes of reference in advertising In accordance with its general aim – to produce maximum attention for the goods, services, messages and persons it advertises – the advertising system is distinguished by specific communication-processes or discourses; that is, by a specific macro-form of communication, which competes with other macro-forms of communication such as journalism, literature/art or public relations, each of which possesses a different mode of reference. Journalism, e.g., claims to re-

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fer to “the reality” in an objective, reliable and authentic way; literature claims to refer to a fictitious world according to aesthetic practices and expectations; and public relations claim to refer to wishful images of persons, institutions or firms which have been established by previous communications. Advertising, by contrast, refers neither to truth nor to objectivity but to brand values on the side of the consumers, hence to experiences, expectations, emotions, desires, needs etc. – and everybody in media culture societies can know that. Therefore, everybody is assumed to know that advertising does not and cannot lie, because everybody knows that ads are biased, one-sided and prejudiced in favor of the items advertised for. Ads have to touch people emotionally; they have to entertain. They tell what people want to believe and should believe in order to become happy. Fascination comes before semantic information. Accordingly, what matters in advertising communication is the meaning and importance of the promises ads make, not the truth of their messages. Social actors in the advertising system know that ads promise to solve insoluble problems here and now – you only have to believe their message and buy the product. In addition, advertising refers to collective knowledge in those domains which can be instrumentalized in ads: famous landscapes or buildings (the Riviera or the Eiffel Tower), stereotypes of professions or national characteristics (the doctor or the Frenchman) or well-known works of art (Michelangelo’s David or Leonardo’s Gioconda). Finally, advertising refers to collective knowledge about social practices regarding, for example, the interaction of genders and generations, the relevance of religious or political activities and the evaluation of the female and male bodies, of clothing, eating and drinking, of sports or trendy leisure-time activities. In sum, advertising selectively refers to collective mentalities, needs and desires of specific target groups.

4. Modes of self-reference in advertising Generally, it can be said that only owing to self-referential maneuvers of or in the advertising system we as the addressees of media supply are able to observe the advertising system at all. This general hypothesis will be explained in the following: (a) In his paper “Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework”, Winfried Nöth (this vol., I, 5.5) mentions self-referential practices in advertising which may be subsumed under the heading of intertextuality, such as citations, repetitions, recursions, or other kinds of reference to signs, texts, or other media.


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Such practices make use of what since the 1990s has been called recycling or sampling (Figure 1a/1b).

Figure 1a. Stiebel (1995)2

Figure 1b. Nirvana (1991) 3

In other words, media supply refers to media supply, and the efficiency of this strategy depends upon whether or not the addressees recognize the recycled components (Figure 2). According to Nöth (this vol., I, 5.1), another type of self-reference in advertising is tautology or quasi-tautology. A good example is the famous German slogan for Persil washing powder, “Persil bleibt Persil” (Persil remains Persil; Figure 3).

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Figure 2. Die Marke [the brand]

This slogan claims that Persil will remain the same regardless of what will happen in the future. This promise tames the paradox that on the one hand, Henkel, the producer of the washing powder, will and has to develop the new Persil (“das neue Persil”) as soon as possible, which of course has to be so much better than the present one but which, on the other hand, will still remain Persil and nothing else. In other words, as long as Persil is available, it will be of outstanding quality – a quality nevertheless to be always improved. In addition to this tautology, another kind of self-reference can be observed in this example, viz., reflexive stabilization of ad communication. Guido Zurstiege (2003) has


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Figure 3. Persil remains Persil4

pointed out that the highly emotional relation between brands and consumers is based on trust. Persil campaigns are famous for their repetition of the same advertising pattern: my grandmother and mother, says the pretty young lady in the TV commercial, have successfully used Persil, so I will continue this successful tradition. The message is clear: Persil’s customer-brand relation is defined by continuity in trust on both sides – this is the aspect of redundancy. At the same time, this trust is a challenge to the producer to improve the quality of the product in order to ensure this confidence by a continuity of successful applications of this washing powder – this is the variety aspect. Continuity and variety are reconciled by the self-referentiality in Persil’s advertising throughout the decades. Another good example is the exact repetition of a TV spot presenting an Audi Quattro on a ski-jumping platform on occasion of the 25th birthday of this car (Figure 4).

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Figure 4. Audi Quattro


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A genuine example of self-reference is finally exposed by the following Coca-Cola ad (Figure 5).

Figure 5. A Coca- Cola neon sign

(b) In another perspective of self-reference, advertising refers to the advertising system. This strategy is realized in the following ways: – Advertising advertises for advertising. Every advertising media supply advertises for the advertising system as such and as a whole and in so doing inevitably generates a public discourse about the pros and cons of advertising: it generates the topic advertising, which then allows for or provokes either approval or rejection (Figure 6). – Advertising has become its own best client. Today, the advertising system invests more money in advertising than the automobile industry does. – Advertising becomes a topic in advertising media supply: the advertising system demands attention for itself, in most cases in an ironical or humorous way, playing with the collective knowledge of the public (Figure 7).

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Figure 6. Hingerichtet [executed]

Figure 7. Lucky Strike (left): “Advertising gives a completely wrong picture, doesn’t it? – Lucky Strike. Nothing else.”

(c) Advertising observes its own practices by means of advertising research carried out by the advertising agencies themselves; for example, through targetgroup research and research into the efficiency of campaigns or social trends. For example, the advertising agency Grey has established a large archive in which journals and ads of the last thirty years have been and are being collected. It has also founded the so-called “Grey Academy”, a department for strategic planning, and the “Magic Lab”, an institute for research in communication


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and its development. This kind of self-reference qua self-observation has to be distinguished from the external observation of the advertising system by other social systems including sociological research and communication studies. (d) Another type of self-reference occurs in self-descriptive statements by advertising agencies concerning their own visions, missions, and philosophies. As the following examples will show, such philosophies tend to be extremely poor. McCann-Erickson believes in “truth well told” and in “total communication”. Scholz & Friends answer the question how people can be fascinated “by ideas. But then, what is an idea? An idea is new”. The DDB-Group promises: “We believe that brilliant ideas can achieve extraordinary results.” Springer & Jacoby follow the strategy: “simple, imaginative, exact”, and so on. (e) Finally, in recent years more and more “stars” of the advertising system have published books with their ideas about best practices in advertising. The majority of these books can be characterized as how-to-do-it literature but some of the advertising stars have developed a specific kind of self-reflexion – one that looks at the advertising system in terms of its present internal and external problems, the relation to scientific disciplines, efficient problem solving strategies etc. Relevant examples include Jean Etienne Aebi’s, Einfall oder Abfall. Was Werber warum erfolgreich macht (2003) [Idea or trash. What makes advertisers successful and why], Wulf-Peter Kemper’s Brandholdervalue. Was Auftraggeber zu mehr Werbe- und Markenerfolg beitragen können (2003) [Brand holder value. What customers can contribute to more success of advertising and brands]; and Holger Jung / Remy von Matt’s Momentum – die Kraft, die Werbung heute braucht (2002) [Momentum – The power advertising needs today].

5. Advertising as a mode of self-reference Until now the focus was on modes of self-reference in the advertising system. The final considerations will deal with the fact that the advertising system itself is the result of self-referential relations. The advertising system can be characterized as an instrument of observation and description; it is an instrument societies use for the purpose of selfobservation and self-description. Modern media culture societies can neither be observed nor described as a whole and from the outside, for every discourse is of necessity situated within this society; there is no social system which is not part of it. Self-reference therefore takes the form of partial observations and descriptions, which can be found in, among other things, academic disciplines,

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literature, and the advertising system. Advertising observes social phenomena according to the logic of the advertising system. That is to say, it observes both very precisely and very selectively. Observations have to be exact because only collective knowledge, mentalities of target groups, their needs, aims, and dreams can be detected and incorporated in ads, whose aim, after all, is to establish an emotionally persuasive connection between these components and the promoted item. Only in this way can advertising arouse attention for its message in the highly competitive media system. The selectivity of such observations has a double reason. On the one hand, only domains such as consumption, services, lifestyle, and taste are relevant to the advertising system in the economic respect which dominates its activities. On the other hand, as mentioned above, advertising exclusively tells positive stories about its promoted goods and services. Even Benetton’s advertising campaigns which focused on war, Aids, ecological pollution, and erotic relations between Catholic priests and nuns, turned out to be advertising for advertising. By breaking the iron rule of the advertising system – to exclude all negative components from the ads – and banning its products from these campaigns, it advertised for attention for advertising (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Benetton5


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In light of these considerations, it becomes clear that advertising cannot be a mirror of society, as has been assumed by many authors. Instead, I think it can be characterized as an indicator of those social phenomena which can be related to goods, services, messages, and persons for which advertising makes publicity. The advertising system may thus be regarded as an interface between the capitalist economy and the media or, as Michael Schudson (1984: 232) once said: “Advertising is capitalism’s way of saying ‘I love you’ to itself.” It provides the various groups of society with a self-observation of those needs which are deemed relevant by members of these target groups, and it publicly draws attention to the mechanisms of satisfying them. Advertising realizes a short circuit of needs and satisfactions. It promises to solve all problems by the mere consumption of goods and services. Thus, as Guido Zurstiege (2003: 77) has pointed out, the advertising of a society is at the same time advertising for a specific society.

6. Conclusion In this paper, I tried to describe different reflexive loops in advertising and in the relations between advertising and other social systems. It has become clear that advertising works primarily as an instrument of observation. The video artist Maciej Toprowicz has created a video in which he generates another interesting reflexive loop: he observes as an artist how advertising observes society, and confronts this type of affirmative observation with irritating similarities or contraries, irritatingly similar and dissimilar ways of acting and observing during the Nazi regime. Toprowicz deliberately counteracts the principles of the advertising system. In this way, he confronts us with what we see when we observe how advertising observes society.

Notes 1. By culture I understand the basic program for solving the essential problems of a society. 2. Figures 1a, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are from the author’s files of print, TV, and outdoor advertisements. 3. Nirvana album cover “Nevermind” (1991). 4. See Wolfgang Feiter. 1997. 90 Jahre Persil. Die Geschichte einer Marke, 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Henkel, p. 49. 5. See Lorella Pagnucco Salvemini. 2002. Toscani. Die Werbekampagnen für Benetton 1984 – 2000. München: Knesebeck, p. 104.

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References Schudson, Michael 1984 Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books. Zurstiege, Guido 2003 Zwischen Kritik und Faszination: was wir beobachten wenn wir die Werbung beobachten, wie sie die Werbung beobachtet. Cologne: Halem.

Metapictures and self-referential pictures Winfried Nöth

1. Pictures, signs, absent, and present objects Pictures are signs which represent the visual or visually imaginable world. Since the cave paintings of the Stone Age, pictures have represented by similarity. A drawing of an elephant, a painting of a landscape, and a photograph of Sir Winston Churchill are pictorial signs which evince similarities to the objects they represent. Pictures which are similar to the object they represent are iconic signs. Language, by contrast, consists of mostly symbolic signs since words usually evince no similarity to their objects but must be associated with what they refer to by learning, habit, and convention (cf. Santaella and Nöth 1998). Despite this essential difference between words and pictures, there are also fundamental similarities in their semiotic potential. Both words and pictures are signs which can evoke the image of, or refer to, absent objects. In his list of design features of language, Charles Hockett (1977) introduces the term displacement to describe the semiotic potential of language to refer to objects remote in time and space (cf. Nöth 1990: 236). Derrida (1972: 9) discusses this feature as an aspect of the sign in general when he states: “A sign represents what is present in its absence.” However, the generalization that all signs refer to something absent cannot be sustained since signs can also refer to something that is present. Mirror images and shadows, in spite of Eco’s arguments to the contrary (Eco 1986), are indexical signs, images which indicate the presence of their object, and, as we will see below, self-referential signs are also signs which refer to their objects in their presence. Despite the potential of pictures to indicate objects in their absence or in their presence, it would be wrong to say that reference to, or representation of, objects is necessarily their primary function. For example, prehistoric rock art most probably served magical and ritual purposes and not representational ones (Anati 1994), and paintings of the more recent history of art are not art because of what they show (referential function) but for how they show (aesthetic function). Nevertheless, from the perspective of present day media culture, displacement

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is certainly one of the most important features of pictures since it is evidently the prerequisite of global communication. Besides displacement, prevarication, the potential to deceive, is another semiotic feature which pictures have in common with language. Whereas displacement makes the representation of objects remote in time and place possible, prevarication serves the opposite purpose; a message which lies represents an object the temporal, local, or qualitative characteristics of which are not those which the sign indicates. Evidently, the feature of prevarication does not only enable language users and picture makers to lie but also to create illusions and fictions. The present paper is about another way in which a picture may be nonrepresentational; it deals with metapictures and self-referential pictures. Metapictures are pictures about pictures (Mitchell 1994: 35–82; Alessandria 1996). Instead of referring to the world of nonpictorial objects, they refer to other pictures. Self-referential pictures refer to themselves, that is, they have their object of reference inside and not outside their own pictorial frame. Self-reference is the opposite of alloreference or simply reference, in the sense which Derrida (1972: 9) has in mind when he writes about the absence of the object and how signs are traditionally defined as referring to, or standing for, something else, which is not the sign.

2. Pictures and metapictures Self-referential pictures are often metapictures, that is, pictures about pictures, but not all metapictures are self-referential. The two categories overlap, but the difference between them has often been ignored, for example by Mitchell (1994: 35) who defines “metapictures” as “pictures about pictures – that is, pictures that refer to themselves, pictures that are used to show what a picture is”. Let us try to distinguish between metapictures and self-referential pictures in analogy with the distinctions which linguistic terminology has established between metalanguage and self-referential language. The term metapicture is coined after the term metalanguage, which means language about language. Terms such as vowel, consonant, word, sentence, conjugation, or declension are metalinguistic words, verbal signs which refer to nothing but language. Metalanguage is the opposite of object language. Words that belong to object language are words that have their referents in the nonverbal world, for example, duck, love, or freedom. In analogy, the term metapicture should designate a picture about a picture or a picture of a picture. The term object picture may be useful to designate ordinary pictures which are not

Metapictures and self-referential pictures

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metapictures, such as the picture of a flying duck or a running cheetah. Instead of object picture we may simply use the term picture whenever there it is no risk of confusion. Examples of metapictures are the following: (1) a picture of a room with a framed painting hanging on the wall (2) a picture “quoting” a famous painting in a new style, as in Duchamp’s transformed drawing of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with the disrespectful legend “L.H.O.O.Q.” (3) a picture of a painter (not in a self-portrait) painting the portrait of a lady (4) a picture of a photographer (not in a self-portrait) taking photos (5) an ambiguous picture, such as the Necker cube (6) a picture of a room with a teichoscopic mirror, showing a scene from the otherwise invisible rear of this same room as in Brassa¨ı’s Au Bal-Musette of 1932 (cf. Machado 1994: 87) The criteria according to which these pictures are metapictures are the following: pictures (1) to (3) are pictures depicting another picture; picture (2) refers both to what and how the other picture represents; (3) is a pictures about painting pictures; (4) is not a picture of a picture but a picture about taking a picture; the difference between the metapictures of the kind (1) or (2) and (3) or (4) can be described with Mitchell (1994: 37) as the difference between showing showing and showing the shower; (5) is the case of pictures with two readings in conflict (rabbit or duck?; old woman or elegant lady? etc.; cf. Mitchell 1994: 47–57). Such pictures do not depict other pictures; they include a second picture as an alternative reading and thus create a visual dialogue between the two readings; Example (6) requires two additional comments. (a) Teichoscopic mirror is probably a new word coinage; teichoscopia is the ancient dramatic device of extending the limitations of the dramatic scenery visible to the audience by introducing a messenger who narrates what he, from his own privileged perspective (for example while standing on a wall), is discerning in the distance concealed to the audience. Analogously, a teichoscopic mirror is a mirror which extends the pictorial scenario by adding a view from an otherwise inaccessible perspective. (b) A mirror image is not usually considered to be a picture but it is not a “real-world” scene either; instead, it is the reflection of such a scene, and as such it is an indexical sign of such a field of vision which is not its own. Hence, a teichoscopic mirror is certainly a sign, and the picture of such a mirror (indeed of any mirror) is certainly a metasign. Let the depicted teichoscopic image thus be included in the category of metapictures even though, as mentioned above, a mirror image is not really a picture.

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Most metasigns in the context of pictures are verbal messages, but these are not the topic of this paper (but see Mitchell 1994 on “talking metapictures”; Santaella and Nöth 1999; Nöth 2003b). Typical examples of how words function as signs about pictures are the title of a picture, the painter’s signature, the caption of a press photo, or the body copy of an advertisement.

3. Self-referential metapictures Let us now introduce the term self-referential metapicture for those metapictures which refer to themselves in a narrower sense. Such pictures are self-referential because they are representations representing their own representation, that is, they depict a picture of what they depict, how they depict, or under which circumstances they came to depict. Usually, a self-referential depiction is only a partial representation of the picture it represents. Examples are: (7) a picture mise en abyme, i. e., one which represents a scene which contains a picture of this scene (cf. Owens 1978; Conant 2005) (8) a picture of a painter “quoting” an earlier work by himself (9) a picture of a teichoscopic mirror reflecting its own mirror image from another mirror (10) a picture of a photographer taking his own picture in front of a mirror (11) a picture showing a lady looking into a mirror, which reflects her own mirror image (12) a drawing of a hand (Escher) or a man (Steinberg) that draws itself resp. himself In contrast to the pictures (1) to (6), pictures (7) to (12) do not depict other pictures, but themselves; (7) contains itself in a smaller picture; (8) depicts itself in a picture by its own painter; (9) is a self-reflected mirror image; (10) is a selfreferential “showing of the shower” of his own picture in contrast to (4) which was the showing of the shower of a different picture; (11) is self-referential under the condition that the portrait of the person appears twice in a similar view (and not, e. g., once in a frontal and once in a dorsal perspective; (12) is self-referential in a metaleptic way (see below): the picture includes its own representation which seems to be the product of its representation. The preliminary definitions of metapictures and self-referential metapictures may profit from the comparison with the distinctions between metalanguage, object language, and self-referential metalanguage drawn in linguistics. For example, of the metalinguistic terms vowel, syllable, word, sentence or text, only the term word is a self-referential metalinguistic term, since only word is a word


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itself, whereas syllable is not one syllable but two, and the mere word text is not yet a text. At the syntactic level, an example of self-referential metalanguage in written English is: This senntence contains a mistake. It is not only an example of language about language (and hence metalanguage), but in addition, there is self-reference because the referent of the word senntence, namely a spelling mistake, is located within the very sentence that asserts the mistake it contains. By contrast, the sentence The preceding sentence contained a mistake is metalinguistic but not self-referential since it refers to a sentence other than itself. Metapictures thus give evidence of a semiotic feature which pictures have in common with language, the feature of reflexiveness, as Hockett (1977) calls it, that is, the potential of language to create its own metalanguage. However, there is an important difference between metapictures and metalanguage. While language has a particular class of signs which serve exclusively as verbal metasigns, pictures, with one exception, have no sign repertoire of pictorial metasigns. The exception is the picture frame, a topic to which we will turn below.

4. Iconic and indexical self-reference The vocabulary of metalanguage consists of symbolic signs; words such as “word”, “sentence”, or “preposition” are signs which designate by convention. Metapictures, by contrast, are essentially iconic; a picture can only depict another picture if it is similar to it. Self-reference, in language as well as in pictures, is iconic and indexical. The very term “self-reference” suggests both kinds of sign. While “reference” is essentially indexical, involving a mode of pointing (“referring”) from the sign to its object, self-reference, with its loop that suggests a return from the sign back to itself, implies iconicity; the sign that reappears in its own object is evidently an icon of itself. Despite this duality of all selfreferential signs, some are more iconic and others are more indexical. Let us examine more in detail the role of icons and indices first in self-referential language and then in pictures. The following words are iconically self-referential for different reasons: (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18)

cock-a-doodle-doo quick English longest black bold

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All of these words evince some similarity to what they refer. Cock-a-doodledoo is a sound symbolic word; its acoustic form is similar to the acoustic event it refers to. (14) to (18) are words that evince the quality they refer to, either in its phonetic or in its written form. The word quick is itself quick in its pronunciation, consisting of a single syllable with a short vowel. The word English is selfreferential in a metalinguistic way, both in pronunciation and in spelling; it is not only a word of the English language that refers to itself (English is evidently an English word), but it also sounds English and is English in its spelling. The superlative form longest is relationally (that is, diagrammatically) iconic. In English, the word is not really very long (in contrast to its Portuguese translation long´ıssimo, a word with four syllables), but the superlative longest is longer than the base form long. The written word black is self-referential in any type that is not colored, and the word bold is self-referential whenever it is written in bold type. Examples of indexically self-referential expressions are: (19) (20) (21) (22) (23)

I, me, we here, in this city now, today, this month I promise, I accept, I bet, I ask you to I am coming; we are arriving

(19), (20), and (21) belong to the so-called autodeictic expressions (cf. Harweg 1990). Such expressions refer to the circumstances of a speech act. The first person pronouns I, me, we are indices referring to the speaker, expressions such as here, in this city refer to the place, and now, today, this month to the time of the utterance at the moment of its utterance. Other modes of indexical self-reference occur in illocutionary speech acts such as I promise. The very utterance of a promise constitutes the obligation to which the promise refers. Finally, the I who speaks in the continuous form, as in I am coming, does not only refer to something that is being done but also to the simultaneity of the discourse about what is being done. The mother who says I am coming is not only coming, she also says (self-referentially) that she is coming. (Does the son who says I am listening speak self-referentially? Can he listen while he is speaking?)


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5. Iconically and indexically self-referential object pictures The criteria for distinguishing between iconic and indexical self-reference in language can serve to elucidate the nature of self-reference in pictures, in particular those which are not metapictures. Consider these examples of iconically self-referential object pictures: (24) (25) (26) (27)

a triangle in a geometry book a monochrome painting in red the picture of a symmetrical form, e.g., a butterfly a photograph of a photograph

A triangle in a geometry book does not only illustrate and hence represent the features of this geometrical figure; it is itself a triangle. For the same reason, a monochrome painting in red is self-referential; it represents a quality which it evinces itself, namely the quality of redness. Iconic self-reference is a characteristic of abstract art; deprived of the function of referring to something else, abstract paintings show only their own chromatic and geometrical qualities (cf. Nöth 2003a, 2004, this vol., Part III). All symmetrical forms are self-referential; the symmetrically reflected form is an icon of the reflecting form, which repeats itself. A photograph of a photograph is self-referentially iconic to a lesser degree; the representing medium is the same as the represented medium. There is indexical self-reference in a picture whenever it indicates the circumstances under which it was produced (where, when, how). In one respect, pictorial self-reference is weaker than self-reference in spoken language. The I, the now, and the here of a pictorial enunciation are in the past and not in the immediacy of the present, as in spoken language. However, this is not a categorical difference between verbal and visual communication, since pictures share their remoteness from their origo, as Karl Bühler (1934) called it, with written texts. Analogies between pictorial and verbal indices of self-reference must therefore be drawn from written language, for instance, documents which indicate their authenticity and are authentic, the handwriting which identifies a writer and in a way constitutes partly the writer’s identity, narratives which indicate their narrator who would not exist without this narrative, street signs which indicate and are at the same time the name of a street. Let us consider along these lines the following examples of self-reference in pictures (which are not metapictures): (28) a self-portrait (29) van Gogh’s self-portrait (30) an original Rubens

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(31) a Rococo scene painted by Watteau (32) my passport photo Any self-portrait is self-referential in the same way as any product is an index of its producer (28). A self-portrait “shows its shower” without being a metapicture about making pictures. In addition, van Gogh’s self-portrait (29) also “shows its showing” in a certain way; the portrait contains unmistakable indices of van Gogh’s way of painting; the picture indicates the painter and his style. The van Gogh self-portrait does not only depict van Gogh it is also a van Gogh (painting). An original style is always indexically self-referential; it identifies its own authenticity; the Rubens painting communicates “I am a Rubens” (30). In Watteau’s Rococo scene (31) there is a further index of selfreference. The Rococo painting depicting a scene with elegant ladies dressed in the fashion of the time of its being painted is not only a picture which depicts a Rococo scene; it is at the same time a Rococo picture. A passport photo (32) is in its origin simply an indexical picture like all photos are. However, when I use it to identify myself I use it in a self-referential way. I may say: this picture is a document of the light rays that once emanated from my body; hence it is an extension, maybe even part of, my body. In a self-referential loop, the picture which is in this sense part of my body refers back to the body from where it emanated. – Notice that from the opposite perspective, the one of the border official, my passport photo, may even constitute my identity: the picture is the legal document, and I should better look like my picture in the passport if I do not want to get into trouble. The border official who first looks at the photo and then at my face wants to check whether I, the person he looks at, am like (i.e., the icon of) the photo and whether I can prove the correspondence of my face with my photo. From this perspective, the passport photo is not self-referential at all. It is like an original (or even a piece of “reality”) of which I should be the picture and true copy. An indexical feature of pictorial self-reference which will be discussed in the next section is the frame. Is it a metasign or a self-referential metasign? The answer depends on whether the frame is considered as something that is part of the picture or whether it is considered as something external to the picture. In the first case, the frame is a self-referential metasign, in the second case it is a metasign, but not a self-referential one. The heading of the next section presupposes the first of the two ways of seeing a frame.


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6. Frames: Self-referential pictorial metasigns Every picture contains a self-referential pictorial metasign in the form of its frame, which is an indexical sign conveying a metamessage such as: “I am a picture” (and not, for example, a landscape seen through a window). There is an analogy between this metasign at the root of pictorial representation and a metasign that can be found at the root of verbal communication. Verbal messages, too, convey a fundamental message identifying the situation as a communicative one. Austin (1962) called the speech act in which such signs are produced the locutionary act. Its message is more or less, “I am speaking.” Prieto (1966), with reference to signs in general, called it the semic act. Roughly, the semic act identifies a message as a message and states “I am a message.” There are two fundamental ways in which a picture can be said to be framed. The first is related to the space a picture takes up in a visual field. Let us call it the spatial frame. Its message is basically: “The space I delimitate is a picture.” The second is a frame in a metaphorical sense. It refers to the circumstances which make pictorial information a message emitted by an addresser and addressed to an addressee. In analogy to the terminology introduced by Christian Metz (1991) in the context of film studies, this kind of frame will be called enunciative frame. The frame which delimits the picture in a spatial sense is either a material or an immaterial frame. The material frame does not only delimitate, it also occupies a space itself, situated between the picture and its visual environment. It may be a wooden or metal frame enclosing its margins or a pane of glass covering its surface. In printed pictures, it is the white or colored margin between the picture and the edge of the page or a white margin that separates one picture from the next on the same page. The material frame marks the boundaries between the picture and the visual field in which it is inserted. In one way, the material picture frame is part of the picture since it marks the picture as an object of a certain value that deserves to be preserved, exhibited, sold, or possessed. In another way, the material frame is not part of the picture. For example, it can be exchanged for a new frame, and the picture will remain essentially the same. This ambiguity of the material frame, which seems to be part of the picture and not to be part of it at the same time, ceases to be one when a framed picture is depicted and thus transformed into a metapicture. As part of the metapicture, the painted frame is clearly an object picture of a material frame. The immaterial picture frame is the frame which every picture has, whether it is materially framed or not. It determines the limits of the space available for pictorial representation. Every picture has an immaterial frame even though this frame may be vague, blurred, or otherwise difficult to determine. Sometimes,

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this frame is coextensive with the contours of a figure which emerges from a ground, for example, the figure of a political hero painted on a white wall. In this case, the contours of the figure constitute the immaterial picture frame; the ground of this picture is simply a painted wall and not a picture. Without an immaterial frame in the sense of a spatial delimitation of the picture, the picture would be coextensive with the visual universe and lose its character of being a picture. Even a picture cut out of a larger picture is immaterially framed. The enunciative picture frame identifies the addresser as a painter, a photographer, an advertising agency, an editor, or a publisher, and the viewer as an art connoisseur, a magazine reader, visitor of a museum, or as a consumer exposed to publicity. Perspective is a significant element of the enunciative picture frame. It shows whether the addresser took or painted the picture from below or from above, and it has to do with the addressee’s point of view in face of the picture. The theories of verbal and pictorial enunciation are closely related to the theory of narrativity with its search for narrative voices and their real or implied readers. Apart from its spatial frame, a pictorial message does not evince any other specific “segmental” sign repertoire to identify self-referential or metapictorial features of the picture. Unlike language, which has a rich vocabulary of metalinguistic terms and of deictic words to identify the addresser and the addressee in time and space, pictures are without a repertoire of metasigns, and indicators of self- or metapictorial reference must be inferred by the viewer from indirect evidence. Such inferences may be ambiguous or misleading, and the play with such ambiguities has been much used to create paradoxical pictures, for example, pictures depicting windows that look like painted on the wall or the opposite, pictures depicting pictures that look like windows with the landscape seen through them. We will return to such ambiguities between pictures and metapictures or between pictures and self-referential pictures below, after a brief exemplification of the analytical categories discussed so far.

7. Three cheetahs or one? Let us examine more in detail the features of metapictures and self-referential pictures in the pictorial message of the upper half of an advertisement for the Brazilian internet provider terra (Figure 1). While the lower part of this advertisement contains a verbal message with information about the services of this company, the upper half shows the picture of a cheetah. The only connection between both is the quality of rapidity which is ascribed explicitly to the internet services offered by the provider and implicitly or by presupposition to the


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Figure 1. A metapicture about the picture of a cheetah1

cheetah that is shown running at a high speed. The discrepancy between the semantic fields of animal nature and high technology leads the reader to the conclusion that the cheetah must be interpreted as a visual metaphor of rapidity. No other connection between the technology provider and the world’s fastest land animal seems plausible. As a visual metaphor, the picture of the cheetah

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is a metapicture, a picture that serves to illustrate something else, namely the idea of rapidity. In this respect, the cheetah picture is an alloreferential and not a self-referential metapicture. The pictorial message of this advertisement shows a stack of three overlapping pictures, each of them representing a cheetah. The picture on top is an incomplete instantaneous photo of a cheetah, taken in a shot whose focus cut off the cheetah’s head and tail on its right and left margins. Below, the other two pictures supplement the missing parts with their overlap, in a way that the missing head and tail of the first photo are complemented to result in a complete picture of the cheetah. The second picture in the stack is a charcoal drawing of a cheetah of the same size of which we only see the tail while its trunk is apparently hidden below the first photo which covers it partially. The picture below the first two pictures is an oil painting of a cheetah with the painter’s signature at the bottom right; it serves to supplement the head missing in the instantaneous photograph, while its rest is covered by the two other overlapping pictures. The visual message of this advertisement can be read in two ways. It can either be viewed as a picture of three pictures, or it can be interpreted as one picture made up of three partial representations of a cheetah. Read as a picture of three pictures, the message is interpreted as a metapicture in which each single picture contains a message concerning the two other pictures. For example: (1) the three cheetah pictures complement each other from the left to the right; (2) the first cheetah picture is on top, the second between, and the third is below two other pictures; (3) the third protrudes to the right, the second to the left, etc. Read as one (patchwork) picture of a cheetah, the pictorial message is viewed as a self-referential metapicture in two major respects. First, it is a picture about taking pictures. It shows what happens when the photographer fails in selecting the proper focus; it shows some of the specific differences between the three pictorial genres of color photography, black-and-white charcoal drawing, and oil painting; it shows three kinds of framing, framing by a white margin, by an immaterial frame, and by a wooden frame; it creates the mental image of three complete pictures of the same size, each of which are iconic signs one of the other, etc. Secondly, the photo on the top of the stack is self-referential in quite a different way. It is an instant photo, which means, a rapidly produced one. Furthermore, it was apparently taken too rapidly so that the result was unfortunately an incomplete picture. The rapidity of picture taking inscribed in the photograph with these faults is an image of the rapidity of the cheetah in fast motion. The picture that depicts rapidity in a metaphorical way evinces itself the feature of rapidity, and in this sense it is a self-referential picture.


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Of the three pictures, the instant photo and the oil painting are clearly marked by a material frame which is a white margin in the case of the photo and a wooden frame in the case of the painting. The charcoal drawing, by contrast, has only its immaterial frame, which is the edge of the white paper. In addition, the first and the second frames on the stack are marked by a shadow indicating the direction of their illumination, which comes from the top left. The enunciative frames indicate the first pictorial addresser as a photographer, the second as a draftsperson and the third as a painter. Considered as one picture, the addresser is the designer of the advertisement who integrated the three messages into one; it is the advertising agency addressing among others those by whom they were contracted; it is the internet provider addressing its potential clients, etc.

8. Illusionist and deceptive enunciative frames Let us now return to the enunciative picture frames and examine some examples that may better exemplify their relevance than the previous example in which its description lead to a somewhat obvious result. The relevance of these frames is most apparent when there is some kind of ambiguity with respect to the enunciative situation of the picture, an uncertainty as to its addresser, its addressees, or even its being a picture at all. Four examples will serve to illustrate such ambiguities, (1) photorealist paintings, (2) pictorial fakes, (3) Parrhasios’s super-illusionist curtain, and (4) Magritte’s anti-illusionist pipe. Photorealism. Can a picture also be a total self-representation, in which the representing picture is coextensive with the represented one? It seems as if it is impossible for a picture to be self-referential in its totality. Such a picture would be self-referential of itself, and how can we distinguish between the represented and the representing picture if both are coextensive? Nevertheless, approximations to the borderline case of total pictorial self-representation seem to exist. Consider a photo-realistic painting. Such a painting creates the illusion of being a photograph, but it pretends at the same time to be nothing but a painting. Being a complete picture of a picture, the photorealist painting is a metapicture as any copy is, but it is also self-referential. It is a picture which refers to two kinds of pictures at the same time which do not really exist as two separate objects. Many photorealist paintings are not even copies of existing photos, and even if they are, their reference to the photo of which it is a copy is quite marginal. Since the reference to the photo is only a mental one, the depicting and the depicted picture can be said to be co-extensive.

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Fakes. Copies and fakes are metapictures when it is known they are not the original. Both are pictures representing other pictures as faithfully as possible, but as long as they do not conceal what they are, their metapictorial designation as copy and fake emphasizes the difference between the representing and the represented picture. A copy so to speak conveys the message “I am not the original”. It thus refers to and at the same time emphasizes its difference from the original. With this distancing, the copy declares itself to be an alloreferential metapicture. The same holds true for the fake which is known to be a fake. A fake that is taken to be an original, by contrast, is viewed as an original, it is not a metapicture. Parrhasios’s superillusive curtain. In language, the enunciative frame is mostly a matter of who is speaking; rarely does the question arise whether someone is speaking at all. Situations are rare in which a speaker needs to signalize that he or she is speaking and not, for example, breathing, listening, watching, eating, or singing. While the question Do you hear me? is not unusual in everyday conversation, a situation is hard to imagine where one would have to ask a question such as: Are you speaking? Speech sounds do not compete with as many acoustic signals emitted in the environment of a speaker. Pictures, by contrast, are much more immersed in a visual field of competing nonpictorial signs, and it is no coincidence that the question “picture or not?” asked in the context of the visual arts as “art or not?” has been one of the great topics of the visual arts since Dada. This is why pictures seem to be much more in need of an analogously fundamental self-referential message of the kind “I am a picture”. The question was already raised in Greek mythology. Pliny tells the legend of two painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios, who competed for a prize for the best painting (Nat. hist. xxxv: 65). Zeuxis exposed a picture of grapes painted so well that the birds approached to pick them. Proud of having deceived the birds to take his picture for real, Zeuxis turned to his competitor and asked him to remove the curtain which concealed his competitor’s picture. Parrhasios was triumphant. The curtain was merely painted, and his work of art had not merely deceived birds but even his fellow painter, who took a painted for a real curtain. The legend is about the art deceiving by means of pictures (cf. Moeller 2003). Both painters succeed in hiding the basic self-referential message by which their paintings convey the message: “I am a picture.”


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Magritte’s anti-illusionist pipe. Magritte took the opposite road in questioning the enunciative frame message. In his famous picture of a pipe with the seemingly contradictory verbal legend Ceci n’est pas une pipe, his strategy was to destroy the pictorial super-illusionism a` la Parrhasios. Read as a comment on the enunciative picture frame, there is no contradiction at all in his verbal metamessage about the picture: the represented object must indeed not be confounded with the representing picture.

9. Verbal paradoxes and metaleptic self-reference in pictures Self-reference is one of the sources of paradox in language. Consider Epimenides, the Cretan, who says: All Cretans are liars. The utterance creates the famous paradox according to which Epimenides either says the truth and thus falsifies the statement that all Cretans lie, since at least one Cretan is speaking the truth, or he lies, like all other Cretans, but then his proposition would negate itself and mean: “It is a lie that all Cretans are liars”, which by double negation would mean the opposite, namely that no Cretan lies. The source of this paradox is in its self-referential nature: the speaker’s utterance refers to the speaker’s speech act, but the semantic level of the proposition enters into a conflict with the pragmatic level of what the speaker utters and the scope of what he refers to, which is partly what others say, partly what he himself says. The Epimenides paradox exemplifies a mode of verbal self-reference which is not metalinguistic in the narrower sense since the Cretan says nothing about phonemes, words or sentences nor does he say anything about the Greek or the Latin languages. It is true that the concept of metalanguage is occasionally also extended to a broader sense which includes also self-referential speech acts such as the one of Epimenides, and in this broader sense, one could argue that the Epimenides paradox is also a metalinguistic one. However, there is an important difference between metalanguage in the narrower sense and metalanguage in such a broader sense. While metalinguistic terms such as “word” or “sentence” always explicitly refer to language, the Epimenides paradox is only implicitly self-referential. The source of the verbal self-reference is in the unexpressed illocutionary act which can be made explicit in the form of the metalinguistic paraphrase: “I, the Cretan, say that all Cretans say untrue things.” There is a well-known parallel between Epimendes’s paradox and pictorial representation: Escher’s hand that draws itself. The kind of self-reference we are confronted with in this picture is metaleptic self-reference (cf. Ryan 2004). Metalepsis, a concept borrowed from rhetoric, is a narrative device by which a narrator begins to participate in the life of the fictitious persons who are nothing

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but his or her own creation, or vice versa, in which the characters of the author’s own narrative creation begin to enter into a dialogue with the author (as in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author). The self-referential nature of narrative metalepsis has its explanation in the enunciative frame: the addresser turns into a self-addressed addressee. The metaleptic element in the picture of the hand that is drawing itself consists in the transformation of the drawn hand into a drawing hand. Escher’s message seems to convey this paradoxical message: “I, the draftsman’s hand am drawing a hand that draws itself.” The device of pictorial metalepsis enjoys some popularity in the genre of the cartoons where figures of animals or humans occasionally begin to change their appearance because the drawn figure begins to change its own drawing by adding, deleting or changing the lines and shapes of its own drawing.

10. Conclusion and prospects The differences and overlaps between metapictures and self-referential pictures were the topic of this paper. Despite the many distinctions set up in this study, it remains to be pointed out there are still other forms of pictorial self-reference which deserve to be discriminated (cf. Nöth, this vol., Part II). Furthermore, the study of the categories established in this paper may reveal the necessity of admitting gradual transitions between metapictures, self-referential pictures, and self-referential metapictures. From a more general semiotic perspective, it may be even true that all metapictures evince some kind of self-reference and that all self-referential pictures may, in a way, be metapictures. After all, metapictures are pictures of pictures, which suggests a certain self-referential loop. Both metapictures and self-referential pictures invite reflections on the nature of pictorial representation. However, the very general common denominators of metapictures and self-referential pictures do not invalidate the more subtle distinctions that can and should be drawn between them.

Note 1. See Veja 38.33 [Aug 17], 2005, p. 140.


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References Alessandria, Jorge 1996 Imagen y metaimagen. Buenos Aires: Universidad, Faculdad de Filosofia y Letras Anati, Emmanuel 1994 Constants in 40,000 years of art. In: Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media, 385–403. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: University Press. Bühler, Karl [1934] 1978 Sprachtheorie. Frankfurt: Ullstein. Conant, Chloé 2005 Mise en abyme / mirror text. Dictionnaire international des termes littéraires. http://www.ditl.info/arttest/art2025.php (18.05.06). Derrida, Jacques 1972 Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit. Eco, Umberto 1986 Mirrors. In: Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld and Roland Posner (eds.), Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, 215–237. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Harweg, Roland 1990 Studien zur Deixis. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Hockett, Charles 1977 The View from Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Machado, Arlindo 1984 A ilusão especular. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Metz, Christian 1991 L’énonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film. Paris: Klincksieck. Mitchell, W. J. Thomas 1994 Picture Theory. Chicago: University Press. Moeller, Hans-Georg 2003 Before and after representation. Semiotica 143: 69–78. Nöth, Winfried 1990 Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2003a Photography between reference and self-reference – Fotografie zwischen Fremdreferenz und Selbstreferenz. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Rethinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography – Narration und neue Reduktion in der Fotografie, 22–39. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition.

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2003b

Press photos and their captions. In: Harry Lönnroth (ed.), Fr˚an Närpesdialekt till EU-Svenska: Festskrift till Kristina Nikula, 169–188. Tampere: University Press. 2004 Semiotic foundations of the study of pictures. ημειωτ ικ η: ´ Sign Systems Studies 31(2): 377–392. Nöth, Winfried and Christina Ljungberg (eds.) 2003 The Crisis of Representation: Semiotic Foundations and Manifestations in Culture and the Media. (= Special Issue of Semiotica 143.1–4). Owens, Craig 1978 Photography en abyme. October 5: 73–88. Prieto, Luis J. 1966 Messages et signaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004 Metaleptic machines. Semiotica 150: 439–469. Santaella, Lucia and Winfried Nöth 1998 Imagem: Cogni¸cao, ˜ semiótica, m´ıdia. São Paulo: Iluminuras. Trad. Roque Graciano. 2003. Imagen: Comunicación, semiótica y medios. Kassel: Reichenberger.

“Absolut Anonymous”: Self-reference in opaque advertising Nina Bishara

1. Referential and self-referential advertising According to the old AIDA-formula of marketing strategists, advertising aims at attracting attention, raising interest, creating desire, and initiating action. With these goals, advertising is a means to an end but never an end in itself. The means begin with attracting attention for a message which praises available goods or services for their alleged positive qualities. The end of “getting action” is to create consumption and profit. Both means and ends testify to the referential nature of advertising. Advertising wants to convey a message about something. As soon as we discover that we are confronted with an advertisement, we know that we are faced with a referential, or, more precisely, alloreferential message – a message referring to a segment of the market. Self-referential advertising, that is, advertising that refers to itself instead of referring to products and services, creates a paradox: since a self-referential message is one that refers to nothing but itself, how can such a message be about goods and services, and how can it result in economic action? Can such a message be an advertisement at all?

2. Opaque advertising as a form of self-reference The topic of this paper is opaque advertising, i.e., advertising in which the product or service, the trademark, the advertiser and the advertising message itself are disguised and can only be discovered through a special effort of advertisingliterate interpreters. Depending on the degree of the interpreters’ advertising literacy, such ads may trigger incomplete processes of semiosis as defined by Peirce: they may fail to result in the triadic process in which a sign, determined

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by its object, generates an interpretant. The object by which the advertisement is determined may remain opaque, without any indices, except for those which point back to the message itself. The object of the sign which pretends to advertise remains enigmatic, and the interpretant incomplete. The enigma, as will be argued, does not so much concern the identification of the text genre itself since formal indicators such as placement, layout, typography, and other graphic devices clearly distinguish the advertisement from its surrounding messages and so announce, in a first step towards semiosis, that “this is advertising”. However, in interpreting what has been identified as an advertisement, the readers may not be able to identify the real object of the advertising message without investing more time and effort in decoding it. The semiotic framework of this paper is Charles S. Peirce’s triadic sign model. What other semiotician’s have called reference is the relationship between the sign and its object, according to Peirce, while self-reference means that the sign refers to itself, instead of to an object which is elsewhere. Peirce distinguishes two kinds of objects, the immediate and the dynamical object, and he further differentiates three kinds of interpretants: the immediate, dynamical, and the final interpretant.

3. Semiotic premises “Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign” (CP 2.308). With these words, Charles S. Peirce describes the pragmatic and functional character of the sign process. A sign can be described as a mediator between an object and a mind. In advertising, this process, called semiosis, occurs as follows: potential customers must become aware of the advertisement (the sign) whose object is a product, a service, a market, a company, etc. The consumers’ minds must be affected by the message about the object and perhaps become motivated to buy or consume the product promoted by the advertisement. These are results of the sign which constitute its interpretant. The semiotic and economic process cannot be triggered if the potential consumers are unable to interpret the message successfully. According to Peirce, any process of semiosis involves the three universal categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Firstness refers to the mere “suchness” of still undifferentiated and independent possibilities and qualities. It is a mode of being without reference to anything else. An advertising message perceived in its mere firstness would not yet be a message at all since its verbal and pictorial elements would be perceived without being related to anything else. At the level of secondness, a first is related to a second. The first is the adver-

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tisement, the second the product, the service, etc. Secondness predominates in indexical advertising which points to the existence of the product or commodity and appeals to its purchase. Thirdness presupposes firstness and secondness; it is the category of mediation (between a first and a second), of meaning, expectation, and habit. In advertising, it is the phase of familiarity with the message and with the product. Thirdness is fully developed in an advertisement when it is anchored in memory and habit. For Peirce, signs constitute a triadic relation of a signifier, a thing signified, and an interpretant created in the mind of an interpreter. According to one of his most frequently cited definitions: A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea. (CP 2.228)

Applied to advertising, these three correlates of the sign are the sign, the object, and the interpretant. The sign (or “representamen”) is the advertising text as such, for example, a magazine advertisement or a TV commercial; elsewhere, Peirce calls it the “perceptible object” (CP 2.230) which functions as a sign. The object of the sign is essentially the product, the service, the “corporate image” of a company or an ideology which the advertisement conveys in its message. However, the sign cannot establish the recognition of the object by itself; it rather presupposes the acquaintance with its object. In semiosis, the object thus actually precedes the sign. Furthermore, Peirce distinguishes two kinds of objects, the immediate and the dynamical object: We have to distinguish the Immediate Object, which is the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign, from the Dynamical Object, which is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its Representation. (CP 4.536)

The immediate object is the object as it is represented by the sign whereas the dynamical object is in a way the reality from which the sign originates. However, the latter is inaccessible; it can only be indicated by the sign and requires for its recognition the interpreter’s “collateral experience” of this object (CP 8.314). According to Peirce, “no sign can be fully understood – unless the interpreter has ‘collateral acquaintance’ with every Object of it” (CP 8.183). This knowledge of the dynamical object, or, in Peirce’s terms: its reality is one

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which can only be apprehended by approximation. In their unlimited scientific research, scholars may approach the dynamical objects of the signs more and more.1 If, in advertising, the immediate object is that commodity or service as represented by the advertisement, then the dynamical object includes all the economic forces of the market, the most detailed product information, price regulations and mechanisms etc. – intricacies of which even economists or market researchers are never fully aware. The ideas, thoughts, conclusions, impressions, and actions created or triggered by the advertising text in the mind of an interpreter constitute its interpretant, which can in its turn become a new sign in the unlimited process of semiosis (CP 2.303). The interpretant of a sign is a sign itself. When the sign evokes an idea, for example, the interpretant is a mental sign, when it evokes a question or a reply, it is a verbal sign, and when it evokes an action, the interpretant is a nonverbal sign. Each sign thus becomes a new sign in an unlimited process of semiosis (CP 2.303). Peirce differentiates three types of interpretants: the immediate, the dynamical, and the final interpretant (CP 8.315).2 The immediate interpretant is any impression or feeling that may be produced by the quality of a sign (e.g., the color design of or the music in an advertisement). It is the first effect a sign produces but not yet any concrete reaction or direct effect produced by a sign, the latter being the dynamical interpretant, for example, to comply to the appeal “Come in and find out”, as the slogan of a perfumery demands. Among the effects of the dynamical interpretant are mental agitation and physical action, the consumer’s curiosity and his movement towards a shelf

Figure 1. The sign in advertising in a Peircean perspective


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in supermarket in order to buy a product. The logical interpretant is determined by law or habit. In science, it is the final result of research for which truth and consensus can (ideally) be claimed (e.g., a dictionary definition of a word). In advertising, it is the consumers’ habit to consume what the advertisement recommended. Figure 1 represents the three correlates of Peirce’s sign model as applied to the genre of advertising.

4. Exemplifications The following examples of opaque advertising show how the object and the interpretant of the advertising message are not immediately apparent. Readers may even fail to be affected by the object and so create an interpretant unrelated to it when attempting to decode the advertisement. The semiotic process in opaque advertising may result in confusion, puzzlement, and astonishment since the sign seems to represent nothing at all. The sign does not fulfill its straightforward function of representing its object; instead, it refers back to the advertisement itself, thus coming close to being self-referential. Figure 2 shows an example of an (initially) self-referential advertisement in the form of a pictorial riddle. Whereas the text can clearly be identified as an

Figure 2. McDonald’s company logo in disguise3

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advertisement due to the contextual frame (here: a page in a magazine that is markedly different from the surrounding editorial texts), the product advertised for and the sender of the message remain opaque to the average recipient due to the apparent lack of verbal or pictorial cues. The immediate object of this message is an indefinable red background with a green sign depicting three white pictograms: the one of a running man, of an arrow pointing to the right and of an image resembling two arches or the capital letter “M”. From their world knowledge, “collateral experience”, as Peirce would call it, the readers may identify the green sign with the white pictograms as an emergency exit sign – this format being the international convention for emergency exit signs – and so may translate the pictograms to indicate one of the following messages as its interpretant: “In case of an emergency run in the direction of (a) . . . two arches (unspecified) / (b) . . . a meeting point (unspecified) / (c) . . . ‘M’ (unspecified).” It remains open in where one should run to in case of emergency. The reader can therefore conclude that the solution to the riddle lies in the identification of the unspecified destination. Recipients familiar with the advertising world and the world of company logos, that is, consumers for whom a prior “collateral acquaintance” of the object can be presupposed, will decipher the two arches as a stylized letter “M”, the symbol for the fast-food chain McDonalds which is usually yellow against a red background. By change of color, the advertisers have simulated an object of the sign which is difficult to access and they have created an interpretant which will mislead its readers for a while. Those recipients who succeed in recognizing the company logo will create an interpretant which relates it to their experience of those places in which they became acquainted with the fast-food company and its services, thus reversing the initial self-reference into reference to the world of McDonalds. Their prior acquaintance with the company logo has made its re-cognition possible. To those who recognize McDonalds’s message, the immediate object, the object as the sign represents it, is closer to the dynamical object of this message. Those who are misled – either because they fail to recognize the disguised company logo or simply because they are not acquainted with it as an established symbol – remain unaffected by this dynamical object. They must fail to recognize the logo for lack of sufficient “collateral experience” with it and can take the advertising message only as an incomplete rhematic sign whose message remains open. Their interpretation is restricted to the level of an immediate interpretant creating feelings of confusion, surprise, or lack of relatedness to anything. Figure 3 shows an advertisement that deliberately masks the identity of the product which it promotes by concealing the product name which is completely blurred on the label of the depicted bottle. Hence, the slogan beneath the picture of the bottle is nothing but redundant since it only repeats what we have already


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Figure 3. An opaque product name (Absolut Vodka)4

concluded from the blurred label: this message is “absolut(ely) anonymous”.The object represented in the sign remains enigmatic. Although the advertisement succeeds in attracting the viewers’ attention and maybe even in raising their interest, desire and action cannot be elicited as long as the identity of the product remains opaque and the advertisement only refers to itself.5 To avoid the complete failure of the message, the advertisement contains some clues which can help to decode its message. A first clue is provided by the slogan “absolut anonymous” which strikes its readers as grammatically incorrect and which should read “absolutely anonymous” since the word preceding “anonymous” should be an adverb (even in the form of an adjective it should be spelled “absolute”). The word “absolut” evinces a grammatical mistake which serves to attract the attention of its readers to this slogan. These might recall the name of the Swedish vodka called Absolut, and this piece of previous knowledge (“collateral experience”) allows a better interpretation of the advertisement. Those readers, however, who are unfamiliar with the brand name Absolut still face the riddle of a self-referential message. However, if they pay attention to the

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small print text on the label of the bottle, they will also succeed in identifying the product. This text informs them that the bottle depicted in the advertisement contains liquor (“40% vol.”), specifically “superb vodka” that “has been sold under the name Absolut since 1879”. For readers who do not participate in the search for the object, the message remains self-referential and lacks any indices that point to something other than itself.

Figure 4. An opaque brand (Volkswagen New Beetle) (bottom left reads: “Seen at the mall”, bottom right reads: “Drivers wanted – VW”)6

Verbal anchorage plays an important role in the advertisement depicted in Figure 4. At first sight, the advertisement seems to follow traditional advertising strategies. It shows a picture, albeit not exactly an attractive one, a company logo (VW), and an appeal in the form of the slogan “Drivers wanted” (bottom right). Consumers can quickly deduce that this is an advertisement for Volkswagen automobiles. The message fulfils the complete triad of a sign (the advertisement itself), its object (VW automobiles, available for purchase) and the interpretant (consumers eager to purchase VW cars and convinced of their unquestionable quality). A legend in the lower left-hand corner of the advertisement, however, gives rise to confusion. Its elliptical message is: “seen at the mall.” The statement arouses the readers’ curiosity: what was seen at the mall? The text can only refer to the picture depicting a tiled floor with some cracks in it and a shopping bag in


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its right-hand corner. There is no apparent relationship between this picture and VW automobiles. Nevertheless, the legend asserts that there is something to be discovered in the picture. At a closer look, the object of this pictorial message can be identified: one dent in the tiled floor is especially prominent; it has the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle. As in the other cases of opaque referents discussed so far, the dynamical object of the sign which seemed to be invisible was indeed present all the time. However, the identification of this cryptic object of the message does not only require the readers’ efforts to decode the advertisement. It is also necessary to bring in knowledge about the world of products, markets, and advertisements. Such knowledge necessarily precedes the sign and is determined by its dynamical object. In the VW example, consumers must be familiar with the form of the legendary Beetle car in order to solve the riddle. Readers who do not recognize the shape of this car will still be able to extract a very general message, namely that this is an advertisement for VW automobiles, but they would not grasp its additional ludic value. In other words, the self-referential feature of this advertisement is rooted in the legend and its comment on the picture “seen at the mall”. This comment remains enigmatic and self-referential as long as readers cannot identify the object that leaves its trace in the picture “seen at the mall”. Let us consider one last example. In the summer of 2000, a new energy provider on the German market began to make future customers aware of its existence by launching a campaign that attracted everybody’s attention. The campaign consisted of print advertisements, billboards, and TV commercials, all of which showed nothing but the color red, i.e., there was a completely red page in a magazine, a red poster, or, for a few seconds, there was nothing but red as a commercial on TV. As the name of the energy provider was not included in the campaign and since the unidentified company was absolutely new to the market, nobody could draw upon any prior knowledge about the firm and its advertising strategies. The consumers were faced with an utterly enigmatic and nothing but self-referential advertising message. Not a single clue as to the meaning, sender, or intention of the advertisement was provided on the red surface. Nevertheless, extratextual markers clearly identified the messages as advertisements: on TV, the red surface appeared during the commercial break; in news magazines, the headline “Advertising” distinguished the red page from its surrounding editorial texts, and posters were placarded on the appropriate hoardings for outdoor advertising. The mere presentation of the color red without reference to anything particular in space or time leaves the advertising message open to and indefinite number of interpretations. The message is a rhematic qualisign, characterized twice as a sign of firstness and mere suchness. A sign of this kind that remains

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without reference to anything else is self-referential in every respect. No object relation (secondness) can be established and no triadic process of semiosis can take place. Although consumers may identify the color red as the symbol of love, danger, or of the political parties of the left, there are no signs in this advertisement that indicate and support any interpretation of this kind. Reference to the tradition of monochrome painting, e.g., Monochrome Crimson by Claude Tousignant (1981), does not lead to any solution of this opaque message either. The consumers are confronted with a genuine riddle which, in contrast to the above examples, does not entail any stylistic or formal indices conducing to a meaningful advertising message. The object of the message must remain enigmatic, although there might be some kind of secondness in it based on the color red, e.g. attention, compulsion to act (red traffic light), etc. Figure 5 illustrates this with reference to Peirce’s categories of the object and interpretant.

Figure 5. Opaque object and enigmatic interpretant in a self-referential advertisement

What is the aim of such an advertisement? It certainly attracts attention by violating the conventional means of advertising. It also requires a follow-up campaign that offers a solution to the riddle. A few weeks upon appearance of the red-color-campaign, the red surface was complemented by the company name E.ON and the motto “Neue Energie” (‘new energy’). As the energy provider E.ON was new to the market, the advertisers wanted to achieve public awareness of the new company and to ensure future associations of the color red with E.ON. The company’s homepage commented on its advertising strategy as follows:


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“Germany literally saw red. After the company color was acquired, the secret was disclosed”.7 Red became a part of the company’s corporate identity and is still dominant in its advertising campaigns.

5. Riddles and opaque advertising The examples of opaque advertising discussed so far were all classified as enigmatic. Research in riddles has distinguished between true and false riddles such as joking or wisdom questions (Abrahams and Dundes 1973). The latter, although enigmatic, cannot be answered from the content presented in the question, the solution to joking questions being entirely arbitrary8 and the answer to wisdom questions depending on the riddlees’ general knowledge.9 True riddles, by contrast, although also designed for the purpose of confusion, are questions with descriptions or cues that allow the referent to be guessed. Riddles are required to use their wits and to interpret or “read” the signs correctly in order to arrive at the proper solution.10 Enigmatic advertisements which leave the object of their message opaque are like true riddles. A completely enigmatic advertisement incapable of conveying a message about its object must necessarily be unsuccessful. Advertisers cannot afford the risk of empty messages. They must incorporate reliable clues to help the consumers in the decoding of their messages. The consumers should get the message and are indeed prepared for it. After all, they have a clear notion of the aims of advertising and know its core message, which is the promotion of goods and services. They know that an advertisement is never without this purpose and will therefore be alert to discover the slightest textual clue of this intent. Riddles without a solution cannot be admitted. It is true that E.ON used this device for a time, but it was only a means of temporary suspense. The solution was ahead in the continuation of the advertising campaign.

6. Style and function of opaque advertising Enigmatic advertising is a stylistic device aiming at creating curiosity by means of deviations from the standard patterns of the genre which suggest to the consumers that they are faced with something different, worth their attention. Riddles have something in common with metaphors, as Aristotle observed. Both can be used with profit in the art of persuasion. The consumers are invited to invest an extra effort in the decoding of the message. However, the consumer’s willingness to dedicate time to solving riddles posed by advertisers is limited.

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If the message remains too opaque and turns out to be merely self-referential the purpose of the message will fail. A self-referential message that only points back to itself cannot convey any advertising message. Without a specific referent its message is open to many possible readings. Deviation from the standard patterns of advertising messages is a means of attracting attention. It is one of the strategies of poetic semiosis: not only does the advertising text which deviates from the conventional expectations about the genre attract the consumers’ attention; it also demands more effort in the process of decoding. Assmann (1988) has introduced the term “wild semiosis” to describe such processes of creativity: by violating the standard patterns of expectation something unexpected and unknown is being created which turns the viewers’ attention to the materiality and form of the text as such. Self-reference is one of the means of wild semiosis. In addition to its poetic quality and its potential to capture the consumers’ attention, opaque advertising is likely to create intellectual pleasure. Riddling is fun and makes the advertisement attractive as well as entertaining. Furthermore, it demonstrates the consumers’ competence and advertising literacy. Above all, opaque advertising, despite its risk of failing, is likely to contribute towards a higher memory value of the message and thus to the success of the advertising campaign.

7. Conclusion Advertising is essentially a means to an end but never an end in itself. The messages of the marketplace are signs whose objects are the products and services which the advertisers want to promote. In order to promote a product, a message must refer to it. The referential function, a highly indexical sign process, tends to be the primary function of advertising. However, creative advertisers have discovered the advantages of hiding their messages in the disguise of self-reference. Their messages are opaque and seem to point to nothing but to themselves. Such messages seem to constitute a paradox. Can they still achieve their purpose of promoting a product? Furthermore, they seem to be counterproductive to the primary aims of transmitting a message to the consumer. Opaque advertising contains indices of an object which remains concealed and creates an interpretant which is likely to remain incomplete. Its enigmatic message is self-referential as long as the consumers do not succeed in discovering the object of reference. However, opaque advertisements never remain truly opaque and self-referential. Consumers who pay attention to their message are bound to discover the referent in disguise. Enigmatic advertisements are thus likely


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to capture better the consumers’ attention, arouse their interest and desire, and implant their message better in the memory of those who have to pay for what they saw when they decide to purchase the product.

Notes 1. An example of an immediate and dynamical object given by Peirce is the statement “The sun is blue” of which the perception or sensation of the sun’s blueness constitutes the immediate object, while the physical phenomenon of wave lengths causing the blue appearance is the dynamical object (CP 8.183). 2. These terms are sometimes used synonymously with the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretant. Some scholars, however, understand the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretant as a subdivision of the dynamical interpretant, and for some it is a threefold subcategorization of the triad of the immediate, dynamical, and final interpretant (Nöth 2000: 65). 3. See Willi Schalk, Helmut Thoma and Peter Strahlendorf (eds.). 2000. Jahrbuch der Werbung 2000. Berlin: Econ, p. 144. 4. See Der Spiegel 46/2002, p. 62. 5. Advertising-literate recipients will of course immediately grasp the pun of this advertisement and will identify its referent since Absolut vodka has maintained its advertising style for several decades: depiction of the vodka bottle and a two-word slogan always beginning with “Absolut”. This repetitive style of advertising is selfreferential in a different way. 6. See Volkswagen Advertising Database, Nr. BE020USPR. 7. http://www.E.ON-ag.com/E.ON0493106069 (03.02.03). 8. Example: What is red and green and goes round and round? – A frog in a mixer. 9. Example: Which is the first book of the Bible? – Genesis. 10. It is interesting to note that the words riddle and to read are related etymologically.

References Abrahams, Roger D. and Alan Dundes 1973 Riddles. In: Richard M. Dorson (ed.), Folklore and Folklife, 129–143. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Assmann, Aleida 1988 Die Sprache der Dinge. Der lange Blick und die wilde Semiose. In: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialität der Kommunikation, 237–251. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Nöth, Winfried 2000 Handbuch der Semiotik, 2nd rev. ed. Stuttgart: Metzler.

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Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1958 Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – Quoted as CP.

Part III. Self-referential photography

The death of photography in self-reference Winfried Nöth

1. The death of photography and the birth of the postphotographic era The Death of Photography is the provocative title of an anthology with papers on the role of photography in the visual arts of the 19th and the 20th centuries (Beckley and Aguilar 2007). At the occasion of its publication, art critics, art historians, semioticians, and – ironically – also photographers (Bill Beckley, Samuel Jamier, Siri Hustvedt, Winfried Nöth, Max Kozloff, and Renee Cox) discussed the topic at a symposium in the Museum of Modern Art in New York on May 4, 2005. It was not the first time that the death of photography had been declared in face of the technological transformations of the medium since the advent of digital imaging. Ritchin (1990) foresaw a “revolution in photography” more than a decade ago, Mitchell (1992) announced the beginning of a “postphotographic era” in the 1990s (cf. Santaella 1997; Santaella and Nöth 1998: 166; Carani 1999), and David Acton (2004) even declared the “end of photography” in the last chapter of his book on Photography at the Worcester Art Museum. Ironically, photography itself had once been considered the cause of the death of another pictorial medium, namely painting. In 1839, after examining photography commissioned by the French Academy for Daguerrian photography, Paul Delaroche announced: “From this day on, painting is dead” (apud Weibel 2002: 611). It is, of course, a paradox when those who continue producing photographs and exhibiting them publicly declare the death of photography, but it is wellknown that we are merely confronted with a metaphorical death. The death which this metaphor evokes means the birth of the new digital technologies of image making and processing by means of cameras. Photography is dead, long live photography! But if photography continues to exist as a technologically and semiotically transformed medium, what is it that has died in postphotography?

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The now defunct photography is the one about which Roland Barthes (1980: 87) once said: “Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the nature of the thing, being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence.” The traditional photograph does not lie in the sense that the light rays emitted by the object are projected via the lens and registered by the film in a process of optical and chemical causality. In Mitchell’s words (1992: 24): “A photograph is fossilized light, and its aura of superior evidential efficacy has frequently been ascribed to the special bond between figurative reality and permanent image that is formed at the instant of exposure. It is a direct physical imprint like a fingerprint left at the scene.” The faith in the truthfulness of photography which derives from this natural causality is as old as the history of the medium. Early in the 19th century, the painter Eugène Delacroix (1799–1863) praised the daguerreotype, the precursor of the photograph, for the reliability of the picture in its faithful reflection of the object: “Daguerrotypy is more than a blueprint, it is the reflex of the object”, and Hypolyte Taine, in his Philosophie de l’art of 1865 praised the truthfulness of the new medium: “Photography is the art which imitates on a plane surface, with lines and tones, with perfection and without possibility of error the form of the object which it must reproduce” (apud Arrouye 1978: 74). The truthful photograph, causally connected to its referent and dying in the age of digital simulation, is that medium whose pictures, despite all their similarity to their referential object, Charles Sanders Peirce defined as primarily indexical signs: Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs [i.e., to the indexical signs], those by physical connection. (CP 2.281, circa 1895)

2. The loss of the referent and the crisis of representation Some have hailed the “revolutionary” changes which digital photography has brought about, while others have deplored the losses that the postphotographic media have been suffering with the “death of photography”. The praise of the new medium is for the expanded creative potential of digital image making. As summarized by Kevin Robins (2007: 22): “There is the sense that photography was constrained by its inherent automatism and realism, that is to say, by its essentially passive nature; that the imagination of photographers was restricted

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because they could aspire to be no more than mere recorders of reality.” From a historical perspective, the postphotographic era also leads back to the precursor of photography, painting, which it once seemed to have dethroned: Since captured, “painted”, and synthesized pixel values can be combined seamlessly, the digital image blurs the customary distinctions between painting and photography and between mechanical and handmade pictures. A digital image may be part scanned photograph, part computer-synthesized shaded perspective, and part electronic “painting” – all smoothly melded into an apparently coherent whole. It may be fabricated from found files, disk litter, the detritus of cyberspace. Digital imagers give meaning and value to computational readymades by appropriation, transformation, reprocessing, and recombination; we have entered the age of electrobricolage. (Mitchell 1992: 7)

Parallel with the praise of the enhanced potential of visual expression, the postphotographic era has brought about theoretical encomia of the new semiotic, aesthetic and even psychoanalytic horizons of digital image making, such as: “The certainties of the photographic era have been deconstructed, and we are now ready, it seems, to come to terms with the fragility of ontological distinctions between imaginary and real” (Robins 2007: 24). From the semiotic perspective, the most important revolutionary feature of the postphotographic era seems to be that the new images have become “independent of referents in the ‘real word”’ (Robins 2007: 22). Although this independence may enhance the artist’s creative potential, the ensuing “loss of the referent” has also given rise to discourse about a “crisis between reality and its image” in the “age of electronic simulation” (Grundberg 2007: 63). In a critical perspective, this loss of the referent can “disturb and disorient by blurring comfortable boundaries and by encouraging transgression of rules on which we have come to rely” (Mitchell 1992: 223). The new potential of absolute manipulation and simulation of merely virtual worlds seems to have “subverted traditional notions of authenticity and originality” (Robins 2007: 27). However, if the death of photography is the advent of pictures which have lost their referent this “death” must have occurred many times in the history of photography. The death of photography is a manifestation of the “crisis of representation” (cf. Nöth and Ljungberg 2003) whose roots in the visual arts are the roots of modernity with which we have been familiar since impressionism, pointillism, cubism, abstract painting, Dada, etc. It is indeed na¨ıve to assume that there has been an uninterrupted tradition of indexical photographs which point to a referent. The loss of such referents has begun early in the history of photography, and there have been many forms and modalities of this death, e.g., deletion or insertion by retouch with the purpose of

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deceit, defamiliarizing the referent by representing it incompletely, in a distorted way, by double exposure, or by abstraction from the referential object with an aesthetic purpose. The loss of the referent in traditional photography can have its cause in alloreference or in self-reference. Alloreference, that is, reference to something else, is the expected mode of reference of an ordinary photograph. The photo is an indexical sign of its referent, a person, a building, a landscape, etc. When this object disappears because it is distorted, fuzzy, hidden, unrecognizable, or falsified by retouch, the loss of the referent is an alloreferential one.

3. Seven self-referential deaths of the photographic referent A different kind of disappearance of the referent in photography is due to selfreference. Instead of being the indexical sign of a referential object, the selfreferential photo shows only itself, it draws attention to nothing but the photo, and invites the eye to get immersed in the forms and colors of the photographic composition. By negating alloreference, the self-referential picture negates the referent as such, either partially or entirely. Various forms and strategies of pictorial self-reference have been invented in the history of photography. In the following, we will discuss seven of them. 3.1. The negated self in a paradoxical self-portrait In 1839, the photographer Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1897) portrayed himself in a photo entitled “Self-portrait of a drowned man”. It shows him in a reclined position half naked and with closed eyes (see Mitchell 1992: 194). Like any self-portrait, the picture is to a certain degree self-referential: the sender of the message is part of the message himself so that the picture refers to the source of its own production. The self-referential message of this portrait is true and false at the same time. It is true that we see a picture of the photographer, but it is false that he is dead, as the title claims. The referent is thus partially hidden by the false claim of the title. Parallel with this false indexical message attached to the referent, we are faced with a logical paradox, as it often occurs in selfreferential statements. It requires no indexical reference at all to realize that the self-referential title which is supposed to identify its referent is false. It is a matter of logic that a dead man cannot portray himself. The solution to this paradox leads back to the photo, and we readily conclude that this photo is not a self-portrait of a drowned man.


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3.2. The camera in the picture About 1880, August Giraudon took the photo “Mirrors in Versailles Caste” (see Govignon 2004: 37). It is a picture of a large mirror in the Versailles mirror hall, which does not only show a highly ornamented wall reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall, but also, right in the center of the picture, the large camera on a tripod which is taking this very picture. Strangely, the photographer is absent in the picture. The self-referential aspect of the photo is evident. The camera, instrument of taking a picture other than itself, represents itself, but it shows only partially the referent it is supposed to depict. There is a loss of the referent, the mirror in the palace, insofar as the view of the reflected palace wall is obstructed by the camera. Again, the result is a paradoxical relationship between the verbal and the pictorial message. While the verbal message states “Mirrors in Versailles Castle”, the pictorial message is: “This picture does not (only) show mirrors in Versailles Castle, but it shows the taking of a picture of mirrors in Versailles Castle.” Furthermore, the photographer’s absence leaves the eye with the suspicion of a second paradox: can a photo be taken in absence of a photographer? The self-referential presence of the photographer’s instrument of image making, the camera in the picture, violates the ancient principle of ars est celare artem [art requires the hiding of art], which goes back to Quintilian and Ovid (cf. Wetzel 2003). The artist should show in an alloreferential way something other than himself. He should avoid self-reference by concealing any indices of his artistic doing. The violation of this ancient principle makes this self-referential picture a picture and metapicture at the same time.

3.3. Abstraction from the referent The third “death” of the photographic referent can be illustrated with Paul Strand’s “Abstraction. Porch Shadows” of 1917 (see Govignon 2004: 77). The picture shows an aesthetically well-formed pattern of parallel stripes of black and white, but it seems impossible to recognize the form of an object. Despite the indication given by the title, which tells us that we see porch shadows, the referential object remains indiscernible. It even remains unclear whether the enigmatic pattern represents shadows of a porch or in a porch. However, we are not disappointed about the absence of the referent since the aesthetic quality of the photo resides entirely in its material and formal qualities. Although we are informed that there is reference, the impression of a missing referent predominates. Once more, we are confronted with a paradox. The title

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affirms the existence of a porch, whereas the pictorial message is that there is none. The loss of the referent is total, but the self-referential gain in aesthetic quality compensates this loss entirely. 3.4.

Double exposure

Under the influence of cubism and Dada, experimental photography of the 1920s and 1930s discovered the technique of double exposure with the result of pictures which were indexical signs of two referents. Such double exposure seems to result in the opposite of the loss of the referent, since a photo exposed twice is a sign of at least two referents. However, the pictorial space of a photo is restricted, and the doubling of the referent can only be achieved at the cost of the pictorial space of one of the two overlapping pictures. The overlapping causes the disappearance of the part of the underlying referent that is hidden by the overlap. In this sense, there is a loss of the referent. Consider Maurice Tabard’s “Composition (Double Exposure)” of 1931 (see Govignon 2004: 277). It shows the lateral view of a face overlapped by the front view of the same face. The referent that disappears partially is the one of the face in its lateral perspective. The relation between the photo and its referential object is one of double indexicality insofar as the two views of the same face refer to its two perspectives seen at two different moments from two different points of view. Internally, however, the photo evinces the repetition of the same of the face from its two perspectives, which makes one perspective the iconic representation of the other and vice versa. This internal iconicity is a mode of self-reference. Once again, pictorial self-reference results in a pictorial paradox: the photo cannot be an indexical photo since it reflects an impossible perspective of the real face, but at the same time it is nothing but a photo. 3.5. Aesthetic deconstruction The partial destruction and similar forms of manipulation of the paper surface of a photograph for the purpose of its exhibition in an art gallery leads to another mode of self-reference, which exemplifies our fifth “death” of the referent in photography.Arnulf Rainer’s self-portrait of 1951, entitled “The empty painting” (see Weibel 2002: 598), shows the artist in a gallery between one of his paintings and two empty frames. In addition to being self-referential in the sense that every self-portrait is a self-referential message, the photo evinces a different kind of self-reference in so far as it was torn into two pieces by the artist himself, who


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put the fragments once more together to exhibit the fragmentary result as a new deconstructed whole. The photo is a photo and a metaphoto at the same time. On the one hand, it is a portrait of the artist, on the other hand, it conveys the message: “This is a photo torn to pieces and reassembled once more.” The paradox consists in two contradictory messages at the metalevel, which can be paraphrased as: “This is a photo and not a photo at the same time.” It is the destruction of the photo by the artist which conveys the message “This is no more a photo (but scraps of paper)”, whereas his gesture of putting it together once more conveys the opposite message: “This is a photo.” The loss of the referent occurs at the metalevel. It is the loss of the referent which results from the destruction of the photo, since a fragmented photo is impeded from fulfilling its function of indicating its referent. 3.6.

Mise en abyme

The sixth type of the “death” of the referent appears in the strategy of selfreferential photos in the photo (mise en abyme). The semiotic implications are similar to the ones discussed in the case of double exposure. Consider the example of the photo entitled “Kassel is everywhere or: Where am I?” of the Arbeitsgruppe Fotoforum of 1979 (see Heyne 2003: 53). A giant photo of a street is inserted in the picture of the same street taken from the same point of view. The method of insertion is not double exposure, but photographic selfdepiction. The group of artists appears in the photo carrying their giant photo of the same street. Everything except for the artists is represented twice, which constitutes genuine iconic self-reference. At the same time, the photo inserted by the artists in the foreground is hiding part of the background scenery. It obstructs the view of the street right in the middle of the picture. However, the resulting loss of the background referent can be recuperated from the scenery represented by the photo in the foreground which is the picture of what is invisible. Several paradoxes are involved. The photo is a photo, but at the same time it is two photos. The photo makes visible and invisible at the same time. Strangely, the two photos in one have one and the same referent. In their double reference, the two photos are indexical signs of their referential objects, in their mutual sameness, they are iconic and self-referential signs.

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3.7.

Self-obliteration

Photo-collage, photomontage, and intermedially hybrid photographs are paraphotographic genres which extend the method of photographic deconstruction considered above in the example of Arnulf Rainer’s self-portrait. While Rainer’s destruction of his own photo was only a partial one – after all, the pictorial loss by the tear in his picture is only a small impediment to our eye – Timm Ullrichs went all the way in the destruction of his own self-portrait with his “Self-effacement by painting” [‘Selbstauslöschung durch Malerei’] of 1973– 1976 (see Weibel 2002: 618). The technique by which this work was produced is described as “heavy paint-overpainting of a sheet of glass as a sequence in ten photos laminated onto cardboard” (Weibel 2002: 618). In the top left corner we see the artist’s complete photographic self-portrait behind a window-like sheet of glass. In the sequence of the ten pictures from left to right and top to bottom, Ullrichs’s portrait gradually disappears while the artist is shown in a sequence of photos in which he is overpainting the sheet of glass between himself and the camera with white paint, which makes him gradually disappear. The background behind the glass shows the artist in the different stages of self-effacement. Only the first picture is a full portrait. From the second to the last but one frame only parts of his body can be discerned while his body gradually disappears behind the painted portions of the glass. In the tenth picture, the portrait becomes altogether invisible. It is no longer a photo of the artist, but one of a sheet of glass painted white. Ullrichs’s metapicture abounds with self-references and paradoxes. Each of the ten pictures is a portrait of the artist, even the last one where the artist is invisible because he disappears behind the coat of white paint, which creates the paradox of a portrait of an invisible man. In the end, the self-referential gesture of effacing himself and hence making the referent of the photographic portrait disappear leaves us to solve the paradoxical doubt whether the last picture is a photo of a monochrome painting or a deleted photo, hence the mere negation of a photo? Furthermore another major paradox all the while is: How can an artist go on to produce a self-portrait while he himself disappears in the process of doing so?

4. Postphotographic pictures without a referent Despite the various forms of the disappearance of the referent in its seven selfreferential forms of “death” distinguished so far, traditional photography always left some indexical traces of the referents which it depicted. The shadows which


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we perceived as an abstract array of black and white stripes were really the emanation of sunrays in or of a porch captured by the lens of a camera, and the artist’s disappearance behind a white sheet of glass, left us not only with the indexical picture of this glass, but also with the possibility of reconstructing the artist’s image behind the glass by a process of visual inference, which leads us back to the first photo in the sequence, where we saw him fully. Only in digital photography have photos entirely devoid of indexical anchors in the visual world become possible. Being programmatically without any referent, they have become self-referential right from the beginning. Photos of this trend in postphotography did not lose their referent, they never had one. In contrast to Abstract Photography, which used to abstract from the referent, they have become Concrete Photography, which creates its own images without abstracting (cf. Jäger 2003: 178). In a manifesto about his own postphotography, which can be exemplified with his black-and-white photographs on canvas of 1993 and 1995 entitled “Sources” (see Selichar 2003: 270), the Austrian digital photographer Günther Selichar declares: “These images look like paintings, speak about new media and are photographs: reproductions of a ‘grammar of media’, located on the paper-thin boundary between the figurative and the abstract, which ultimately shows that categories like this have perhaps become obsolete” (2003 268).

5. Nonrepresentational photography as self-referential genuine icons From a semiotic perspective, the question remains to be answered whether such pictures without a referent can still be considered as signs. Does not the notion of sign require the correlate of a referent, and if so, can semiotics still contribute to the study of such signs without a referent? Is the concept of the nonreferential sign a contradiction in terms? In more detail, I have given answers to these questions from the perspective of Peirce’s semiotics elsewhere (Nöth 2005). In a very brief summary, signs do not require a referent in the sense of an object in the real world. Peirce does not even use the concept of the referent. The term that he uses instead of “referent” is the “object” of the sign, and the object of the sign can be something real, but also a mere thought, a concept, or an idea. Even in concrete photographs without any indexical anchors in the “real” world, the pictures are signs. Their objects are our previous experience of the visual world, of the forms, colors, and textures with which we have become acquainted in our pictorial culture.

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The principal semiotic innovation of the postphotographic era is not the disappearance of the object of the photographic sign, but the shift from indexical to genuinely iconic pictures. The self-referential photos of Concrete Photography, whose visual message is in their formal design only, are genuine icons, according to Peirce (Nöth 2003). A genuine icon does not depict in the traditional sense of mimesis. It refers to nothing but its own simple visual qualities of form, luminosity, contrast, or texture. The genuinely iconic sign constitutes a kind of degree zero of semioticity since it is reduced to the category of firstness, “the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else” (CP 8.328). Such an icon is a sign merely by virtue of qualities of its own, and since it is not yet distinguished from its object, it does not refer to or “stand for” it at all. Peirce says that the genuine icon “does not draw any distinction between itself and its object” since it is a sign by virtue of its own particular qualities: “[Genuine] icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them. [. . . ] The distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream – not any particular existence, and yet not general” (CP 5.74, 4.447).

6. Conclusion The “death of photography” began, and ran parallel, with the “crisis of representation”. It begins with the emergence of pictures which are losing their indexical reference to an object in the visual world. There are several forms and modalities of this death of traditional photography. Some are due to alloreference, some to self-reference. Self-reference in photos first meant a partial loss of the referent, in digital photography we are faced with photos that have never had a referent. We identified seven kinds of such losses of the referent in the history of predigital photography. The postphotographic era is not the “end of photography”, but the beginning of a new “postphotographic photography”. Pictures in Concrete Photography are signs without a referent in the “real” world, but not signs without an object in the sense of Peirce’s definition of the sign. Although these photographs represent nothing, they are nevertheless signs. Whereas the nowdefunct classical photography produced indexical signs, the postphotographic art of Concrete Photography is a self-referential art of genuine icons.


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References Acton, David 2004

Photography at theWorcesterArt Museum: Keeping Shadows. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum and Ghent: Snoeck.

Arrouye, Jean 1978 Sémio-photo ou la mort de l’analogie. Critique 368: 72–87. Barthes, Roland 1980 La chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Cahier du cinema. Transl. 1982. Camera lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Noonday. Beckley, Bill and Katherine Aguilar (eds.) 2007 The Death of Photography And Other Modern Fables on the Visual Arts. New York: Delano Greenidge. Carani, Marie 1999 Au delà de la photo positiviste: de la photo post-moderne a` la postphotographie. Visio 4(1): 67–91. Govignon, Brigitte (ed.) 2004 La petite encyclopédie de la photographie. Paris: Matinière. Transl. 2005. Kleine Enzyklopädie der Photographie. Munich: Knesebeck. Grundberg, Andy 2007 Photography in the age of electronic simulation. In: Bill Beckley and Katherine Aguilar (eds.),The Death of Photography, 61–68. NewYork: Delano Greenidge. Heyne, Renate (ed.) 2003 Kunst und Fotografie: Floris Neusüss und die Kasseler Schule. Marburg: Jonas. Jäger, Gottfried 2003 Abstract photography. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Rethinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography, 162–195. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition. Mitchell, William J. 1992 The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nöth, Winfried 2000 Handbuch der Semiotik. 2nd rev. ed. Stuttgart: Metzler. 2003 Photography between reference and self-reference. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Rethinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography, 22–39. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition. 2005 Warum Bilder Zeichen sind. In: Stefan Majetschak (ed.), Bild-Zeichen: Perspektiven einer Wissenschaft vom Bild, 49–61. Munich: Fink.

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Nöth, Winfried and Christina Ljungberg (eds.) 2003 The Crisis of Representation: Semiotic Foundations and Manifestations in Culture and the Media. (= Special Issue of Semiotica 143(1–4). Peirce, Charles Sanders 1931–1958 Collected Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 7–8, ed., A. W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – Quoted as CP. Ritchin, Fred 1990 In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography. New York: Aperture. Robins, Kevin 2007 Why images move us still. In: Bill Beckley and Katherine Aguilar (eds.), The Death of Photography, 21–44. New York: Delano Greenidge. Santaella, Lucia 1997 The prephotographic, the photographic, and the postphotographic image. In: Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media, 121–132. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Santaella, Lucia and Winfried Nöth 1998 Imagem: Cogni¸cao, ˜ semiótica, m´ıdia. São Paulo: Iluminuras. Trad. Roque Graciano. 2003. Imagen: Comunicación, semiótica y medios. Kassel: Reichenberger. Selichar, Günther 2003 Photography remixed. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Rethinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography, 248–287. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition. Weibel, Peter 2002 An end to the ‘end of art?’ On the iconoclasm of modern art. In: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Iconoclash, 570–684. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wetzel, Michael 2003 Artem celare – The cryptic mediality of the photographic. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Rethinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography, 58–81. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition.

Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze Kay Kirchmann

In his study The Reality of the Mass Media, sociologist Niklas Luhmann asserts a dual status of reality in the contemporary mass media. The first reality of the mass media, in Luhmann’s words its “real reality” (Luhmann 1996: 12), consists of its own operations, that is in the fact that there is printing, broadcasting, and reading, that programs are received, movies watched. All this is permeated and framed by pretexts and recursive elements, by “countless communications of preparation and talking about it afterwards” (Luhmann 1996: 13). This is why, according to Luhmann, “the real reality of the mass media has to be understood as the communications that exist within it and run through it” (Luhmann 1996: 13). From the point of view of systems theory, something else is far more important for the operative functionality of the media: One can also talk of a second meaning of the reality of the mass media, namely in the sense of what passes as reality for it and through it for others. [. . . ] This meaning implies that the actions of the mass media are not simply considered to be a sequence of operations, but a sequence of observations. [. . . ] In order to reach this understanding of the mass media, we have to observe it observing. For the meaning first introduced, an observation of the first order is sufficient, as if it were all about facts. For the second option of understanding, one has to take up the position of an observer of the second order – an observer of observers. (Luhmann 1996: 14–15)

However, it is well known that in his own theoretical work, Luhmann has kept a critical distance from empiricism, and in a very general sense his concept of observation only implies that distinctions are made according to the binary codifiers (+/–) generated in a system. His concept therefore cannot be equated with the act of (visual) perception as such (cf. Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997: 124). But in the context of (audio-)visual media observation, this term will inevitably take on this second meaning as well, since the differentiations at hand are also (though not exclusively) articulated in visual form. And it is only in this form that they, in turn, are accessible to us as observers of the second order – since, according to another famous distinction of Luhmann’s (form/medium), the medium itself is not accessible, it is only perceptible through the forms it

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generates (cf. Luhmann 1997: 195–215). Accordingly, to observe the observations of (audio-)visual media means quite literally to observe (audio-)visual forms; forms in which the distinctive systemic operations of the respective mass media are condensed into “objects of perception” (Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997: 58). What generally interests me in the following is not so much the theoretical edifice of systems theory as such: I am specifically interested in the figure of a medial function of observation implicit in it – and this only in the sense of a heuristic base category; a methodological starting point for concrete inquiries in the field of media analysis. In the context of a number of current phenomena of media reality (in the sense introduced above), the mode of medial self -observation appears to me particularly significant. Luhmann himself has conceded – with reference to the base dichotomies of system and environment, of external- and self-reference (cf. Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997: 128) – that as a system, the mass media can observe itself, albeit only through quite complex operations: A special case of self-observation presents itself when the observation is itself an operation of the observing system and takes part in its autopoiesis. By autopoiesis we do not mean an operation which observes itself while observing (something that is impossible), but rather an operation that observes something of which it is also a part (another operation of the system of which it partakes). (Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997: 127)

Even if the epistemological problems that come with such an operation are ignored for a moment, it remains worth considering whether “the” mass media can be taken so collectively as the subject, instrument, and object of such a selfobservation. After all, such an observation can only take place in one medium and through its instruments. In view of the multiplicity of contemporary media, it is highly unlikely that the self-observation of the medial realm could extend to all media – including itself. Hence one should rather speak of a figure of medial media-observation that is, first, necessarily selective and, second, oscillating between external- and self-observation. And, finally, one would have to investigate whether, as Luhmann thinks, such medial self-observation has already reached its purpose in causing a system to become auto-dynamic (cf. Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 1997: 128), or whether we can find entirely different intentions and functions. I would like to consider these questions by looking at a paradigmatic example: an approximately six-minute-long feature broadcast by the French-German television station ARTE in 1999 as part of the series Les cent photos du siècle / One Hundred Photographs of the Century (cf. Robin 1999). The series belongs

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to a new sub-genre, the “retrospective view of the century” (cf. Filk and Kirchmann 2000), which surfaced on diverse TV channels in the wake of the recent turn of the millennium. Other than most series in this format, the ARTE series approached history from the outset in a way that emphasized and reflected on the comprehensive saturation of our cultural memory by the media. Accordingly, the series did not even attempt to reconstruct a past that would be accessible without any recourse to media. Instead, it focused exclusively on history’s media documents; in this case, famous photographs. While individual episodes center on the history of production of individual photographs, the photograph itself is elevated to an object in which individual biographies randomly intersect at a particular moment in time, namely those of the photographers and of the person photographed. Thereby history is interpreted as a contingent field of fleeting events and of meetings that receive historic prominence only in retrospect. From a conceptual point of view, One Hundred Photographs of the Century draws on a wide definition of historical relevancy according to which the history of popular culture – and therefore also the mass media – is a constitutive element of history as well. For this very reason the series also includes an episode entitled “Marilyn 1960” that deals with the photograph shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The central photograph in the episode “Marilyn 1960”: Eve Arnold’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits

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Depending on a viewer’s pre-existing knowledge, this photograph, with which the episode opens, will call up different pretexts: all viewers will probably recognize Marilyn Monroe as the person depicted, which in turn will conjure up the much-publicized biography of the actress – her problematic personal life, her mysterious suicide, etc. A large section of the audience will also recognize in the mystifying apparatus on the left margin of the picture a boom, or they will at the very least associate it with cinematic recording technology – that is to say, they will properly place the photograph into the context of film production. Veritable film buffs, on the other hand, might immediately recognize the landscape and identify it as the setting of The Misfits, a John Huston picture Monroe shot in the Nevada desert in 1960. And they might furthermore remember that the film’s legendary status in the history of cinema partly derives from the fact that it was Marilyn Monroe’s and Clark Gable’s last film; that Marilyn Monroe’s then-husband, dramatist Arthur Miller, had written the film script for her as a birthday present in a final attempt to secure for her the “serious” role she desperately desired; that the marriage of the two had nevertheless suffered its final break-down during filming and that they shortly after divorced; that despite all the problems and personal crises on the set, the film would go on to win multiple Academy Awards, etc. (cf. Miller and Toubiana 2000: 49–96). Those who are also well-versed in the history of aesthetically ambitious press photography will furthermore know that the rights for all set photography on this film were given exclusively to the famous “Magnum” agency, which had dispatched some of its most highly-regarded members to the film set (cf. Miller and Toubiana 2000: 67–74), including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ernst Haas, Cornell Capa, and, last but not least, Eve Arnold, who is credited with having taken the picture under consideration here. The pre-knowledge called up by this opening is thus layered, and the layers correlate with the complexity of the attendant figure of observation: in this case, the medium television observes the medium photography as it observes a film production (in retrospect, a legendary one) and a celebrated film star who in turn is one of the most photographed people of the 20th century – and we find ourselves in the position of trying to observe this almost infinite regression. After the opener, the television episode deals with the multiple preconditions of the history of the photograph and the biographies of the protagonists tied to it, as it were, in fast forward mode. It dedicates a mere 45 seconds to the genesis of The Misfits, almost a full minute to the biography of Monroe, and 20 seconds to the importance of the “Magnum” agency in the history of photography. Clearly, the episode is not so much concerned with filling in substantial gaps in the pre-knowledge of its audience; it rather attempts to activate this pre-knowledge once more. In a marked difference to the other episodes of the


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series, this section does not set out to provide a contemporary reassessment of significant historical fragments included in this photography. This episode of One Hundred Photographs of the Century makes something entirely different the object of its observation of medial observations, and it is left to Eve Arnold, by now almost 90 years old, to provide the sound bites for this deeper theme: Marilyn loved the photo camera – just as she loathed film cameras. When she worked for the cinema, she had to put on make-up, prepare, learn her lines, be on time, and, above all, she had to listen to people telling her what to do. During a photo shoot, it was she who controlled everything. Her true profession was to have her picture taken. Photography was her toy. It allowed her to present herself as she really was. She knew without prompting to affect the appropriate look and how to achieve the result she wanted. She knew how to move her hands, how to throw back her hair, and how to make use of her famous pout, which made her appear even more sensuous. She was extremely gifted. She not only knew how to take in the photo camera but also, and in particular, the photographer. (Transcript of the TV program by the author)

Quite obviously, this medial media observation serves the purpose of developing a discourse about different kinds of camera gazes and therefore of different visual media, a discourse that clearly favors photography. Television here contends that photography – by contrast with the film camera – has passed down the correct gaze at Monroe. I will specify in more detail below how this theory is developed. For now, I would like to stress that the critical comparison of different camera gazes stays within a classical discursive tradition of European cultural history: the paragone. From the Renaissance to Lessing’s Laokoon, the paragone (literally “a critical comparison, often the result of an argumentative dispute”, Reck 1992: 120) served as a means to divide up spheres of influence between the arts themselves and between the arts and other social sub-systems, such as the sciences. Studying the aesthetic order of the semiotic material unique to them was an attempt to establish the distinctiveness of individual art forms. While, according to art historian Hans-Ulrich Reck, the historical paragone in the long run created “an awareness that the arts do not all deal with the same material or have the same meaning” (Reck 1992: 120), the paragone that resurfaces here is quite at odds with this option of shared labor within different, co-existing media. In the so-called media age, every object has to be potentially accessible and adequate to every medium. In the face of a highly competitive market and the bully mentality that comes with it, any notion of a co-existence or a careful discrimination of objects have long been superseded by claims for omnipotence and plain competitiveness of individual media forms. Marilyn Monroe, and in this respect the thematic choice of the ARTE short feature is anything but ran-

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dom, is herself a highly significant example because already in her own lifetime, she was a medial object embroiled in competitive struggles between photography, the print media, cinema, and – albeit in a weakened form – television of the time. Against this background, it is only logical that the paragone discourse of our example shifts from a semiotic onto an ontological level. We are no longer dealing with the traditional question of which medial sign system is the “proper” one for Monroe, we rather have to ask which amongst the camera gazes (all of them potentially relevant to the object in question) will be able to show us the “true” Monroe. The respective verdict of the ARTE episode in favor of the photo camera and against the film camera draws implicitly on the popular understanding that behind Monroe’s image on the screen hides a “genuine”, fragile, and lonely woman; a woman even who was victimized by being continuously typecast by a ruthless studio system as a blonde sex goddess, etc. However, this argument could just as easily be reversed – particularly in light of the pin-up photographs which had brought Marilyn Monroe fame even before her film career started (cf. Arnold 2005: 24–36). As observers of this medial media observation, however, we cannot simply focus on a question that must necessarily remain speculative, the question about the ultimate “truth” behind Marilyn Monroe. Rather, we must focus exclusively on the discursive figure as developed by television in her specific case. Again, having been trained in Luhmann’s constructivism, the question whether mass media products refer to reality can of course never refer to an “ontological, existing, objectively accessible, unconstructively recognizable reality” (Luhmann 1996: 20). It can only be: “How do the mass media create reality?” The construction affected by this TV program works in part through a deliberate reference to the pertinent position that Eve Arnold takes. By virtue of its rhetorical structure, Arnold’s above quoted statement constantly brings into play the opposition between photo and film camera and joins it with an ontological question. Let us consider the quote once more with a special focus on its rhetorical devices (marked by italics): Marilyn loved the photo camera – just as she loathed film cameras. When she worked for the cinema, she had to put on make-up, prepare, learn her lines, be on time, and, above all, she had to listen to people telling her what to do. During a photo shoot, it was she who controlled everything. Her true profession was to have her picture taken. Photography was her toy. It allowed her to present herself as she really was. She knew without prompting to affect the appropriate look and how to achieve the result she wanted. She knew how to move her hands, how to throw back her hair, and how to make use of her famous pout, which made her appear even more sensuous. She was extremely gifted. She not only knew how to take in the


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photo camera but also, and in particular, the photographer. (Transcript of the TV program by the author; emphasis added.)

These sound bites by Eve Arnold only paraphrase again what she reiterated before and after in the records of her work with Marilyn Monroe: “When you photographed her, she controlled and manipulated the whole set: me, the camera. . . She knew her way around cameras and enticed reactions from it like I have seen no other person do. In this set-up, she got whatever she wanted simply because the pressure of shooting a film, which would threaten to bury her, was missing” (Miller and Toubiana 2000: 71). Similarly, in another passage: “Having her picture taken was a safe way for her of being loved and admired” (Arnold 2005: 137). Arnold even calls upon her colleague at the Magnum agency, Inge Morath, who was also on the set of The Misfits, to bear witness once more to Marilyn’s entanglement with the two kinds of cameras: “She was in charge of the still camera – she was the animal tamer, the photographer was the beast. She fought constantly with film cameras, but in front of the photo camera, she was free” (Arnold 2005: 72). Because of the amount of printed and reprinted statements, the producers at ARTE presumably had to have been very aware of what they could expect Eve Arnold to say about Marilyn and photo cameras, and this awareness must have influenced their choice in making these specific photos and this specific photographer the focal point of this episode. Both in written statements and in the sound bites taken from the TV program under consideration here, the main argument always stays the same: Eve Arnold shifts the question onto an ontological level, and her comments locate the functional relation between visual image and visual object in a decidedly anthropomorphic dimension. In this dimension, cameras and actress interact against a backdrop of personalized, inter-human – and thus de-medialized and de-technicalized – patterns of action. A visual object is infused with the power to love or to hate cameras, to control them or turn them into toys, to manipulate them or force them into an unexpected reaction – and vice versa. In the process, the bond between Marilyn and the camera carries all the traits of an eroticized relationship; one in which the camera surrenders voluntarily and passionately to the actress’s art of seduction and manipulation. The stylized erotic pas de deux introduces a moment of secret complicity between Marilyn, the camera, and the photographer which neatly balances what has been conceded before – that Marilyn has control over the camera and the photographer. This complicity in turn allows Monroe to grant the photo camera – and only the photo camera – what seems to be a privileged glance into her innermost self. She does so by voluntarily choosing to concede control in order to display her “true nature” to the camera. It is this claim of a reciprocal willingness to be seduced that

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legitimizes a specific photographic gaze on a companion and friend – a gaze that seems not to be entangled in hierarchies and is therefore as appropriate as it is intimate. While making comments to this effect on Marilyn’s predilection for the photo, which the Magnum-photographer took in the Nevada desert, Eve Arnold also supplies pertinent instructions on how to make sense of it: This photo she [Marilyn] loved especially since it transmitted a sense of loneliness. [. . . ] When she is putting her hands to her face like this, you have a feeling that she cries for help. For me, the main point this photo is making is a cry for help. You can think she cries “Help me, I’m in danger!” (Transcript of the TV program by the author)

The TV program leaves little doubt that this danger does indeed originate from the medium film. While the bond between Marilyn and the photo camera is characterized, as we have seen, by a sense of passion and complicity, the actress’s interactions with a film camera are dominated by such aspects as force, control, and a lack of authenticity. These interactions cannot be characterized as a reciprocal bond between lovers: instead, they feature as the frightening suppression of a young woman who in her daily life is subjected to an uncomfortable but sensible arrangement – in short: we are witnessing the passion play of married life. What we can observe is a calculated transformation of a photograph into a narrative, complete with the established narrative topoi: the classic melodramatic narrative involving the plight of a blonde, beautiful, and suffering heroine who is caught between an understanding lover and a husband who tries to dominate her, between an erotic liaison that offers her fulfillment and the silent suffering of married life constantly regulated by the intricate mechanisms of patriarchal domination. Since there is no way out of this conflict, the only logical result seems to be the untimely death of the woman. This narrative frame changes our perception of Arnold’s photo and structures our reading of it. The program cuts to the respective photo again and again and favors, by means of selection and camera movement, the established pattern of meaning. This dramaturgy of repetition seems to demonstrate in actu, as it were, the change in perception mentioned above: the boom suddenly seems to turn into a frightening, almost animalistic instrument; a pensive and attentive Marilyn changes into a desperate one, the bizarre beauty of the desert landscape metamorphoses into a gloomy site of existential struggle. In retrospect, it becomes apparent just how much the selection of this photo (and this photographer) was owed to the cold rationale of dramaturgy. If this had been just about Marilyn’s life, other and possibly even more famous photographs would have been more than fitting in the context of a short feature – for example,


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Figure 2a–f. Six photographs by Eve Arnold taken on the set of The Misfits

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one from the legendary last session with George Barris shortly before Monroe’s death, or even the photo that Elliot Erwitt took on the set of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch which has since been reprinted countless times: Marilyn standing on a ventilation shaft, her white dress blown up into the air. But only in the photographs taken by Eve Arnold on the set of The Misfits was and is the paragone already implied which so obviously interested theARTE programmers. Therefore, the editorial decision in favor of the pictures of this photographer was anything but arbitrary. If you look at further pictures by Eve Arnold taken during the 1960 production (Figures 2a–f), the repetitive pattern of staging becomes fully obvious. These, by the way, are images that were not shown in the episode, probably so as not to subtly qualify the uniqueness claimed for the relevant photograph. Whether Eve Arnold takes photos of Marilyn Monroe preparing for her role and studying her text (Figure 2b and 2f) or whether she takes her picture as she listens to the instructions of the director, John Huston (Figure 2a) – Marilyn is always portrayed as suffering because she is caught up in the wheels of film production (Figures 2a and 2e). Each element of the production, the battery of lights (Figure 2c) just as much as the film camera (Figures 2a), metonymically functions as pars pro toto for a larger apparatus whose main message spells “force”. Arnold stages this apparatus with her photo camera, for example through her preference for mild low-angle shots, as a monstrous giant, complete with all threatening connotations. The same applies in no small measure to the boom (Figures 1 and 2d), which we have seen in the photo and which in itself does not appear to be particularly threatening. However, Arnold develops an obsessive-compulsive predilection for this specific combination of motifs. The faint associations it carries of the Sword of Damocles or an executioner’s axe may have motivated her choice. The fact that the pattern of motifs also very subtly plays with phallic connotations, however, adds yet another nuance to the sexual subtext of this discourse. In this respect, the TV program merely seems to voice once more the inherent structural feature and main topic of Eve Arnold’s photography. The motive for embracing “Arnold’s paragone” in such an uncritical fashion is, of course, far less altruistic. The figure of discourse is tied up with a well-established technique of reciprocal medial observations which for Siegfried J. Schmidt are a constitutive feature of the increasing complexity of highly distinctive media systems: “Societies that contain complex and open media systems expand dramatically their (partial) observability. Media observe everything and everywhere, they observe the fact that they observe, and they observe themselves observing” (Schmidt 1998: 68). These observations remain “partial” in that the objects of their gaze are usually only other media – which is not just owed to the basic epistemo-


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logical aporias of self-observation mentioned above. Another reason is the fact that such observations are never without purpose. In fact, such operations lend an air of “objectivity” to a medium that observes another medium. Therefore, the medial self-observation of (or within) a media system is always a calculated strategy to achieve believability (cf. Todorow, Grampp, and Ruhe 2004: 202–226). In a society suspicious of medial operations, it is designed to reintegrate these suspicions into the media system and thus reestablish credibility and legitimacy. In the case of our object of observation, the strategy works as follows: Just as TV readily observes the medium film and the medium photography and offers them to us for inspection, it takes care to avoid any form of self-observation; as a medium, it thrives to remain invisible. Just as photo cameras and film cameras become a topic for discussion, the TV camera remains an anathema. Anthropomorphizing the cameras of other media means turning them into subjects – and thus subtly but permanently discrediting them as objective instances of world observation. Conversely, TV presents itself as a medium that seems strangely devoid of both camera and gaze – as if there was no mediating, interpreting, and selecting instance between visual objects and their representations; as if the TV screen was a space of purely transparent manifestations. This way, television establishes itself as a kind of super-medium, and, at the same time, as a nonmedium; it pretends to be a neutral space of the paragone when it is de facto its silent partner – and even its secret winner. The apparent alliance between television and photography should not deceive us about the result of this paragone because for television, photography is no serious competition: photography always needs, as our example has amply shown, another medium to put back into motion and into a sequence the time it arrested in order to make readable and discoursifiable the fertile moment of a photo through a contextualizing narrative. The medium film could achieve all of this just as well as television, and television’s real combatant in this paragone, the one that needs to be discredited, is therefore film. In an interview in another section of the episode, Eve Arnold mentions, more or less in passing, that after the end of the production of The Misfits, it took her another ten years before she felt comfortable enough to watch the film in a cinema – the reason, she claimed, was that she had the best images of the film memorized on her “inner screen”. In the context of the episode as a whole, this statement may appear to be out of place, but it actually points towards the unique background of the paragone. Apparently her statement is not about the question of which medium can best transform photography into narrative. Instead, she raises a much more general question of what is the appropriate 20th -century medium for remembering – a pertinent comparative perspective given the sub-format of this episode, a retrospective view at the century.

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Again, the line of argument in our object under inspection is clear: while film seems to pose a threat to Eve Arnold’s memory images, television seems to be just the place to expand these individual memory images, make them speak and thus transfer them into the collective memory. The conclusion implied here is that television is the only medium capable of adequately storing contemporary history and reflecting on it (cf. Filk and Kirchmann 2000). An explicit paragone like the one portrayed here may be a special case in the spectrum of medial media observations, but it is by no means unique. Mediareferential genres and formats, currently in high demand in very many media, do not occur in a vacuum and are never free of both purpose and aim. They are symptoms of an increasingly competitive stance in a segment of the market that is still very lucrative. It may not be a coincidence that all of this happens at a time when the discourse on media attests to quite contrary tendencies. While catchphrases like convergence, compatibility, and multimedia promise a peaceful union of formerly discrete media (or at least their uncontested and uncomplicated dissolution in the all-embracing binary code of the computer), the individual media themselves seem less than willing to stand by and observe how their dramaturgies and programs, genres, and modes of reception and perception, all of them distinct and with their own histories, are simply smoothed over. The opposite seems to be the case: they seem to insist on a re-evaluation of their merits and competence, and it is no mere accident that they revive the tradition of the paragone, and with it a discourse whose historical achievement of providing levels of differentiation is perhaps too readily negated in the current state of multimedia euphoria. (Translated from German by Gerd Bayer and Christian Krug)

References Arnold, Eve 2005

Marilyn Monroe: Eine Hommage von Eve Arnold. Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel. Baraldi, Claudio, Giancarlo Corsi and Elena Esposito 1997 GLU: Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Filk, Christian and Kay Kirchmann 2000 Wie erinnerungsfähig ist das Fernsehen? Thesen zum Verhältnis von Geschichte, Medien und kulturellem Gedächtnis. Funkkorrespondenz 42: 3–9.


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Luhmann, Niklas 1996 Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. [The Reality of the Mass Media, translated by Kathleen Cross. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.] 1997 Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Miller, Arthur and Serge Toubiana 2000 The Misfits: Die Entstehungsgeschichte eines Films von MagnumFotografen dokumentiert. Munich: Kehayoff. Reck, Hans-Ulrich 1992 Der Streit der Kunstgattungen im Kontext der Entwicklung neuer Medientechnologien. In: Klaus Peter Dencker (ed.), Interface 1: Elektronische Medien und künstlerische Kreativität, 120–133. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Robin, Marie-Monique 1999 Die Fotos des Jahrhunderts: Das Buch zur arte-Serie. Cologne: Taschen. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1998 Medien. Die Kopplung von Kommunikation und Kognition. In: Sibylle Krämer (ed.), Medien, Computer, Realität: Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und neue Medien, 55–72. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Todorow, Almut, Sven Grampp and Bernd Schmid-Ruhe 2004 Medien unter Verdacht. Selbstreflexivität als Glaubwürdigkeitsstrategie. In: Aleida Assmann, Ulrich Gaier and Gisela Trommsdorff (eds.), Zwischen Literatur und Anthropologie: Diskurse,Medien, Performanzen, 202–226. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

Part IV. Self-referential film

The self-reflexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model Gloria Withalm

In the movies, reference from the film to the film itself is as old as the history of film. The device can be found in all times, in all film genres, and at several levels of cinematic communication. There are many forms, functions, devices, and textual strategies of self-reference or self-reflexivity, for example, the strategy of creating an ironic or critical distance or even a sense of alienation (in Brecht’s sense), the mere fascination with cinematographic possibilities, the device of creating emotional bonds between the audience and the movies or movie stars, the device of humor, or the attempt at attracting the attention of an audience sated with watching the media. In order to deal with the topic in a comprehensive way, a model will be proposed to cover the entire range of self-reflexive textual strategies and practices and to relate them to the film as a sociocultural and a sign system. A theory of self-reference in the movies must provide a broader framework without restricting itself to the film as a text. It requires an approach that is able to cover film in its entirety. A promising framework for such an endeavor can be derived from the work of the Italian philosopher and sociosemiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.

1. The sociosemiotics of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s position in semiotics can best be characterized by the term sociosemiotics. Rossi-Landi’s semiotics is rooted in a dialectic and materialist philosophy, or, as he himself characterized it once, a materialist, philosophical, and anthropological approach. Although he never explicitly dealt with film or cinema, the concepts Rossi-Landi elaborated can be used as the foundation for a semiotic reflection on the phenomenon film as a whole able to cope with the dual character of film as a semiotic and a sociocultural system. Despite the wealth and complexity of Rossi-Landi’s semiotics, only two aspects of his oeuvre can be briefly dealt with, his concept of sign system and his model of social reproduction.

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The key concept of Rossi-Landi’s semiotics is certainly work. Rossi-Landi conceives of work in an anthropological sense and with regard to both material and sign production. Thus, sign work is a special case of work as such. According to Rossi-Landi’s definition, work involves six characteristics combinable to a set of three which constitutes the “fundamental triad” of work: (1) the materials on which work is performed, (2) the operations, comprising the worker, the actual working operations, the instruments used, and the aims of work and (3) the product. This basic triad can be interpreted in a dialectical sense with the material functioning as thesis, the operation(s) as their antithesis, and the product as the synthesis (cf. Rossi-Landi 1985: 13). When sign work is just a special case of work in general, the product, which is the sign itself, is not only the result of working operations but also a dialectic totality of a particular kind, since “the sign is a synthesis of signans and signatum”1 and a “mediation between the material (in the usual sense of this term) and the social” (RossiLandi 1979: 30–31). In dialectic terminology, what happens when a sign is used is that a “social thesis” is mediated by means of a “material antithesis”. The signans as an antithesis has immobilized that social piece [pezzo soziale], and it has brought it at a new level as a signatum [. . . ]. The antithesis is a piece of matter which is used socially [. . . ] in order to identify the thesis as something which had reached the social level already. [. . . ] The signans imposes its own restricting power on the signatum as its opposite. The contradiction between two different levels of organization is overcome, and the provisional “peace” [pace provvisorio] of a synthesis is reached. This synthesis is the social result that we call “a sign”. (Rossi-Landi 1979: 30–31; cf. 1985: 165)

In his definition of sign systems, which is extremely fruitful with regard to complex media such as the movies, Rossi-Landi goes beyond the usual description in terms of set and elements. In a single paragraph, he demonstrates that the various concepts in his semiotics are not separate parts but interconnected elements of one integrated theory of signs and society. The premise of his definition is once again his concept of sign work with instruments and materials performed by a worker according to rules. A sign system must not be reduced to a mere code since it comprises also the semiosic context, the communicative situation including all those who actually exchange the messages: A sign system comprises at least one code, that is the materials which one works and the instruments with which one works; but it comprises also the rules to apply the latter to the former (the loci of the rules are two: in a sense they are in the code, but even more so, they are inside the one who uses them); it comprises the channels and the circumstances that make communication possible, and furthermore, the senders and receivers who

The self-reflexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model

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make use of the code. A sign system includes furthermore all the messages which are exchanged or could be exchanged in the universe instituted by the system itself. (Rossi-Landi 1985: 242)

Rossi-Landi then introduces his key concept of social reproduction, expounding the two theses that there is no social reproduction without sign systems and that no human sign system can exist outside social reproduction. In conclusion, Rossi-Landi argues that “a sign system is a slice of social reality and certainly not just a symbolic machine which stays there waiting” (Rossi-Landi 1985: 242). In another context, Rossi-Landi expresses this sociosemiotic principle in an even more radical way: “We must never raise the sign systems above the reality of social reproduction. Sign systems are not a sort of skeleton of social reproduction. Instead, they are social reproduction themselves” (Rossi-Landi 1985: 144). Social reproduction is a pivotal notion of sociosemiotics which refers to “the sum total of all processes by means of which a community or society survives, grows, or, at least, continues to exist” (Rossi-Landi 1985: 175). Rossi-Landi describes several factors and processes that constitute social reproduction, but only the most fundamental process, which will also serve as the basis of the model developed in this paper, will be presented as it is summarized in the Schema of Social Reproduction (Figure 1; Rossi-Landi 1975: 65, 1985: 38). It is a model of the cycle of production, exchange, and consumption, which are the “three indissolubly correlated moments” which social reproduction “always comprehends in a constitutive way” (Rossi-Landi 1975: 65).

Figure 1. Rossi-Landi’s schema of social reproduction

In the middle of Rossi Landi’s model of social reproduction (Figure 1), exchange is shown as consisting of both external material exchange and sign

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exchange or communication, and the latter as comprehending a threefold subdivision into the “indissolubly correlated” factors of sign production, sign exchange, and sign consumption. In its printed form, Rossi-Landi’s schema presents a two-dimensional diagram which presents triadic relations at two points. A representation of RossiLandi’s model in graphic form requires by necessity a triadic graph, and it is informative that the very term of triad occurs frequently throughout RossiLandi’s writings on social reproduction. The three basic factors of this dialectical triad are not only correlated but interrelated, “they belong to the same totality, one does not exist without the other [. . . ]. Their unity is dialectic” (Rossi-Landi 1985: 180).2

2. Self-reference and self-reflexivity: From shooting to showing In the “Preface” to the second edition of his Reflexivity in Film and Literature, Robert Stam discusses the various terms related to the key concept of his book as follows: The broad notion of reflexivity has generated a swirling galaxy of satellite terms pointing to specific dimensions of reflexivity. The terms associated with reflexivity belong to morphological families with prefixes or roots deriving from the “auto” family, the “meta” family, the “reflect” family, the “self” family, and the “textuality” family. (Stam 1992: xiv) What strikes the reader most in the literature on the topic of self-reference and self-reflexivity is the plurality of notions used to cope with the various ways a text can evince a relation to other texts, to the modes of text production, to the genre, to the medium, to itself, to its own discourse, etc. No less astonishing are the various relations constructed among the concepts adopted, either by strictly excluding certain textual modes or by adopting an umbrella term under which a network of different textual modes is subsumed. The most frequently used terms in this context are: intertextuality, intratextuality, and intermediality; self-reference or self-referentiality; self-reflexivity or auto-reflexivity; self-conscious, self-begetting, or self-aware fiction; metatextuality, metafiction; metafilm, metacinema, metacinematographic; metareference; metacodal or metacommunicative; foregrounding, the device of revealing; estrangement, deautomatization, or defamiliarization; mise-en-abyme, etc. In addition to this first unordered and by far not exhaustive list, another list of related terms describing particular modes of textual relations can be set up, such as allusion, parody, pastiche, quote, etc.


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Based on Rossi-Landi’s sociosemiotics, the model to be presented and discussed in the following tries to encompass all of these phenomena. As mentioned above, film, in the course of its history, has developed many ways of making reference to film. Film is characterized by its double nature of film as a text which is always and necessarily embedded in film as a sociocultural (and economic) system, and both aspects are the basis of self-referential and self-reflexive discourses and stories. First of all, it has to be clear that any film is subject to the fundamental cycle of production, exchange (or distribution), and consumption (or reception) as described by Rossi-Landi, both in the material (including the economic) and the semiotic sense. Hence, the triadic graphic representation of this cycle suggested above will be used as a model of this cycle (Figure 2a). The “three indissolubly correlated” factors can actually describe the various phases in the “life” of a film from “shooting to showing”.

Figure 2a and b. Cycle of production, distribution, reception, and the product

As mentioned above, the movies fulfill all criteria of Rossi-Landi’s definition of a complex sign system. This means that all materials and instruments, all messages as the products of sign work which are produced, exchanged, and consumed, received, or reproduced, and the entire communicative universe established by the system itself belong to the sign system. Accordingly, the discussion of self-referential texts created by and within the sign system film has to combine the cycle of production, exchange, and consumption with the factor of film as a product of complex sign work (Figure 2b). The combination of both models, the one of the fundamental cycle of production, distribution, and consumption (Figure 2a) and the one representing the product of sign work (and the sign system) (Figure 2b) lead to the model that will be used in the following for the discussion of self-referential processes in

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Figure 3. Cycle of production, distribution, reception, and the product

filmic texts. This schema of filmic self-reference (Figure 3) represents all domains, phases, or states in the overall cycle constituting the film, and it covers all forms of self-reference and self-reflexivity in individual films as they have occurred since the beginning of film history. However, the actual modes of self-reference that can be found in the movies are not confined to forms of filmic reference to the film in general. In addition, the model also takes into consideration a special case of filmic self-reference which I would like to define as self-reflexivity. A self-reflexive film is a film which focuses or reflects on itself, that is, on the specific film that is being watched. Various cinematic devices are used to draw the spectators’ attention to the film itself in this sense: lines of the dialog, the “materialization” of filmic means, and in some less frequent cases, to the showing of the dispositif, the technical device of film production and film showing. Although self-reflexivity concerns primarily the film as a product or, more precisely, one actual product it focuses on, it cannot be reduced to this factor since self-reflexivity can also concern the three stages of the cycle production, distribution, reception. Hence, the entire cycle is reduplicated, as Figure 3 shows. However, self-reflective reference to aspects of these phases is always more specific than in filmic self-reference; it is always restricted to the film under consideration. The following sections will present examples of filmic self-reference and self-reflexivity concerning all stages of the sociosemiotic cycle of filmic reproduction.


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3. Production – work and life in Tinseltown The production of a film in the “world of the movies” opens the entire cycle (Figure 4a). This stage covers the institutions of production and the people working in the movie business as well as the actual production which comprises preproduction, shooting, and postproduction.

Figure 4a and b. Self-referential and self-reflexive production

Making movies about movie making – often labeled film-in-film or Hollywood on Hollywood – is probably the most popular and certainly the most common, reference to film and cinema. Already in 1899, the audience could see what it looked like when a cameraman was shooting a parade of decorated cars (Concours d’automobiles fleuris, Lumière Brothers, FR 1899, n◦ 1009) or a group of people leaving a navy arsenal somewhere in Indochina (La sortie de l’arsenal, Lumière Brothers/Gabriel Veyre, FR 1899, n◦ 1279). Not only do the films show the scene filmed by an invisible cameraman, they show a second cameraman filming these scenes as well. Less than ten years later, the entire cycle of filmmaking from script to screen was depicted in Making Motion Pictures:A Day in the Vitagraph Studio (US 1908, Vitagraph). Soon, self-reference in the form of a look behind the scenes became a matter of course, as in the 1910s slapstick comedies mostly showing the havoc caused by a character on the set in the film, as Charlie Chaplin did in His New Job (Charles Chaplin, US 1915, Essanay). Following the ups and downs in the lives and careers of actresses and actors has always been a favorite pastime of movie fans. Accordingly, when it comes to the filmic presentation of movie people, the first and foremost genre is the one that deals with biography, nicknamed biopic. From the 1910s on, biopics have been part and parcel of Tinseltown’s self-portrait. The genre is most suitable to satisfy the fans’ desire for a closer look at the life of real or fictitious stars as well as to promote a particular inside look manufactured by the industry itself.

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Among the most popular motifs is the beginning of the career of a film star, the first steps into motion pictures in the “Hollywood Cinderella” story, but also the downfall in a career due to personal problems or to the drastic changes in the business, such as the radical changes from silent movies to the talkies. The success story of a girl making it is in the center of the early one-reelerAVitagraph Romance (US 1912; Vitagraph). Against the will of her father, a Senator, a young woman elopes with the man she is in love with. He is an aspiring author, and both find work with Vitagraph Film Company. He starts to write screenplays, and she soon becomes a leading actress. When her father finds out about her movie career, he visits the Brooklyn studios, meets the company’s heads (played by the actual executives), and is reunited with his daughter. Apart from the plot, this early example has several ingredients that reappear in many other film-in-film movies: showing the studio premises (the actual Vitagraph studios), cameo appearances of studio bosses (in this film Albert E. Smith, J. Stuart Blackton, and William T. Rock), and the tension between the star and the role of the star, intensified by the spectators’ interest in the star’s private life. Clara Kimball Young, the female protagonist, was actually the daughter of Edward Kimball who played her senator father in the film. The latter form of filmic self-reference characterizes one of the most famous examples of fictional biopics, Sunset Blvd. the film on the aging silent star Norma Desmond (Billy Wilder, US 1950). The star is played by another silent star, Gloria Swanson, and when playing bridge with old friends, her partners are the real life aging movie stars Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner. Self-reference in biopics is not confined to fictional or real-life actresses and actors. In addition to the many examples of films on the life of stars, for example, the films on Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, or Rudolph Valentino, there are also movies focusing on members of the crew, for example, writers (Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen, US 1991; Adaptation, Spike Jonze, US 2003), set designers (Good Morning, Babilonia, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, FR/IT/US 1987), or producers (The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli, US 1952; The Player, Robert Altman, US 1992). The second category of films whose self-referential features pertain to the production phase are those offering a glance behind the scenes of moviemaking, allowing us to watch fictitious or real film directors during their work. Well-known examples of films showing the actual shooting phase are Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, US 1952), La nuit américaine (Fran¸cois Truffaut, FR 1973), or The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, UK 1981). Other films that are self-referential with respect to its production focus on the phase of preproduction including the planning and writing of a film, the preparations before shooting (Otto e mezzo, Federico Fellini, IT 1963),


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or the first rehearsals with the actresses (Répérages, Michel Soutter, CH 1977). Postproduction is in the focus of self-referential films which deal with synchronizing, as in Blow out (Brian de Palma, US 1981) or the actual editing and even what can go wrong in this phase, as in Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat (G 1925).3 Finally, there are films that fictionalize the shooting of really existing films, for example, Shadow of a Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, US 2000) on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (G 1922) or also some scenes of Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, US 1985) which relate to Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (US 1955). As discussed above, self-reflexivity unfolds along the same phases “inside” the overall cycle (Figure 3). Hence, there are also self-reflexive films focusing on production aspects (Figure 4b). In contrast to self-referential films which deal with the production phase, self-reflexive films related to the same phase do not merely present the production of just any movie, but the production of the very film which represents the production of this film. One of several possibilities of filming the production phase self-reflexively is to show parts of the studio and/or members of the crew, as is the case at the end of E la nave va (Federico Fellini, IT 1983). The device is not restricted to feature films. There are also examples from the genre of video clips. Genesis’s I Can’t Dance (Jim Yukich, US 1991) shows not only Phil Collins in the filmed story but also how he is prepared for the shooting getting his face powdered and his hair combed. It goes without saying that even if the crew members are “real” professionals, this make-believe glance behind the scenes is staged just like the rest of the film. Another group of self-reflexive films related to the production phase has its focus on the shooting camera. Against the tradition of the invisible camera in the classical Hollywood style, these scenes draw attention to the circumstance that it is due to a camera that we are able to see this scene and the entire movie, as is the case in La tarea (Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, MX 1990). Examples of films showing the shooting camera are The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, SU 1929), or Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, FR 1988). In Boogie Nights (US 1997) Paul T. Anderson lets us literally look into the camera. There are even scenes in which the shooting camera gets in direct physical contact, or rather confrontation or collision, with the characters or other crew members. There is a very early example of this plot element in How It Feels to Be Run Over (Cecil M. Hepworth, GB 1900) in which the camera filming a car is apparently run over by this automobile. The climax of self-reflexivity with regard to the production phase is a film shown in the process of its own production. The subject matter of these films is to show a film in the process of its own production. Among the narrative strategies is one that could be labeled “When words turn into moving images”. The movie unfolds simultaneously with the telling of the story by a character, like in Never

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Give a Sucker an Even Break (Edward F. Cline, US 1941). A further device is to show interventions in and changes of the film in the phase of its production made by the participating characters, as in Spaceballs (Mel Brooks, US 1987) or Comicalamities (Pat Sullivan, US 1928, animator: Otto Messmer).

4. Distribution: Movies on the marketplace The second phase of the sociosemiotic cycle of filmic reproduction concerns the film in its phase of distribution (Figure 5a and b). In relation to other phases of the cycle, such as production or reception, the examples for the distributive field are relatively rare. Whereas the production aspect is easy to mystify by means of a “glance behind the scene” strengthening the bonds between films, film stars, and spectators, and whereas the reception phase, that is, “going to the movies”, depicts an experience with which the audience is very familiar, the distributive field is the least known phase. Their marketing and promotion strategies constitute a topic which the film business is not too eager to disclose in detail. The topics to be addressed include the institutions dealing with the actual distribution, the diverse marketing and advertising campaigns related to movies and film stars, the documents necessary to promote a film, such as trailers, film magazines, reviews, fanzines, posters, etc., and the various forms of critical evaluation of the film, from praise at a film festival to censorship.

Figure 5a and b. Self-referential and self-reflexive distribution

The earliest example of a film focusing on its own documents is the film Les colleurs d’affiches (FR 1897, n◦ 677) by the Lumière Brothers. In this film, we see posters announcing the proper Cinématographe Lumière being pasted on top of other posters advertising the films of a competitor called Cinématographe Grand Four. As far as Hollywood marketing strategies are concerned, there are


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films in which Hollywood itself and its landmarks can be found at the center of the activities of promotion agents. One of these landmarks which can be seen rather frequently in Hollywood films is Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with its famous forecourt in which all the famous Hollywood stars have left their imprints in cement. The first and the last scenes of A Star Is Born (William A. Wellman, US 1937), show this location. The domain of assessment and evaluation ranges from festivals as in Cannes or Venice and great awards like the “Oscar” to self-regulation and censorship. There is also a self-reflexive (Figure 5b) variant of the censorship motif in combination with the motif of on-screen messages from the media institutions, e.g., the movie theater “management”. In Hellzapoppin’(H. C. Potter, US 1941), for example, the possible use of four-letter words by the characters is stopped with the projectionist’s verbal reference to the Hays Office and an inserted title card that reads “censored”. A further case of self-reflexivity in the distributive stage is the on-screen presentation of (real and fictitious) companies in different varieties. The Pathé trademark, the rooster, applied on every set to prevent illegal copying, is an example of an early and rather useful variant that began to appear in the 1900s. Another strategy is to let the opening company logo, for instance the mountain in the Paramount logo, segue right into the movie, as in the beginning of all three Indiana Jones films. The well-known brand images are also subject to parodies as is the case with the MGM logo. In two very different, though equally selfreferential, television series, the roaring lion is replaced by a meowing kitten, in Mary Tyler Moore Show (US-CBS 1977–76) and several episodes of the Austrian cop comedy series Kottan ermittelt (Peter Patzak, AT–ORF 1982). Finally, all the TV characters who talk about their own show and particular features of their network belong to another subcategory of self-reflexive films. A striking example is the 1980s ABC series Moonlighting with Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis. The last episode even ends with the characters talking about their show being cancelled.

5. Reception, or: A film is shown The third domain in which self-reference and self-reflexivity can be found in the sociosemiotic cycle of film concerns the consumption or reception in the “world of the audience” (Figure 6a and b). The stories focus on the one hand on people watching a film either in a cinema or at home and talking about movies, and on the other hand, on the movie theaters as such, the people working there, the showing of a film.

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Figure 6a and b. Self-referential and self-reflexive reception

Since the very beginning of film history, films have shown the audience. As early as 1896, L’Entrée du cinématographe (Lumière Brothers, n◦ 250) shows the crowd leaving Empire Theatre (on London’s Leicester Square) after a movie show. Only five years later, films such as The Countryman and the Cinematograph (Robert William Paul, UK 1901) or Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edward S. Porter, US 1902) let us step inside the movie theater and watch the show in the show. The plot’s starting point is the depiction of the strange behavior of spectators who are unable to distinguish real events from those presented on the screen. Jean-Luc Godard quotes the scene in his Les Carabiniers (FR/IT 1962). In the second group of self-referential films dealing with reception, there are many films which do not only depict movie theaters and people working there but pay homage to the bygone days of cinema, as in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, US 1971), Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, IT 1989), Splendor (Ettore Scola, IT 1989), or The Majestic (Frank Darabont, US 2001). As to self-reflexivity (Figure 6b), the audience related motif of addressing oneself to the screen, like spectators applauding in a theater, is extended to spectators actually communicating with the screen and with on-screen characters. Such interactions culminate in the temporary dissolution of the barrier separating the spectators from the cast, the fourth wall, in the so-called screen passages. The first film character who entered the screen in this way, although only in a dream, was the projectionist in Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, US 1924). More recent examples of such transgressions are Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, US 1984), Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, US 1993), or Pleasantville (Gary Ross, US 1998).


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6. The film as the product The result of the sociosemiotic process of filmic work and sign work is the film as a product. It is situated at the core of the entire cycle of production. Self-reference with regard to the product (Figure 7a) occurs in a relatively small group of movies presenting filmic film history as well as in its most frequent and most conspicuous form constituted by the various procedures of intertextuality. Examples of intertextuality are the play with film genres, such as in parodies, allusions to famous scenes, citations of music and dialog lines, or the actual and material (or today digital) quotation of other films.

Figure 7a and b. Self-referential and self-reflexive aspects of the film as a product

A subcategory of films relating self-referentially to the film as a product makes a very particular use of the device of filmic citation. The scenes inserted as a quotation are combined with the new scenes in a shot and reverse shot montage creating the illusion that the two characters separated in time are directly interacting. Film examples are The Last Remake of Beau Geste (Marty Feldman, US 1977) with Marty Feldman talking to Gary Cooper (William Wellman, US 1939) or Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (US 1982) using clips of almost twenty movies to show Steve Martin in interaction with almost everybody once famous in the genre of film noir of the 1940s, from Humphrey Bogart to Lana Turner. In these films, the quoted characters and the original characters can only interact because of the spectators’ ability to read the editing in such a way that their imagination places the characters in shots and reverse shots in the same space and time. The progress of digital editing has brought fundamental changes in this context. Nowadays, filmmakers can combine old and new footage within one and the same shot. Even characters who could never have met in their lifetime can

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now be represented side by side. Examples of this relatively new practice of digitextuality range from the ad for Diet Coke teaming Elton John with Louis Armstrong (Night Club, Steve Horn, US 1991) to feature films such as Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, US 1994). Self-reflexive discourse concerning the film as a product (Figure 7b) can be exemplified with films focusing on the cinematographic codes. In order to qualify as self-reflexive, the use of the various stylistic devices has to be related to the film in which it is self-reflexively applied. Extra-diegetic elements, such as the credit lines, the end title, or subtitles, become part of the filmic narrative, visible to the characters who then comment on something they are usually not supposed to be aware of. Sometimes, the devices even materialize and are suddenly physically present within the diegetic universe of the characters. In Volunteers (Nicholas Meyer, US 1985), two characters bend over to read the subtitles at the bottom of the frame, and at the end of History of the World, Part I (Mel Brooks, US 1981) “The History / of the World Part I / The / End” appears in chiseled letters on a mountain. Such discursive strategies of materializing also appear in transition devices, such as the device of iris-out in scenes in which the characters try to keep open the iris diaphragm of the camera, as done by Felix in Comicalamities (Otto Messmer, US 1928), or Digby Geste (Marty Feldman) who is almost choked by the diaphragm in Last Remake of Beau Geste (Marty Feldman, US 1977). The textualization of certain physical properties of the film strip, the integration of the film in its material sense, for instance, when parts of the film strip such as frame borders or sprocket holes enter the world of the characters, is another mode of self-reflexivity concerning the film as a product. Examples are the scene in Hellzapoppin’when the film seems to run through the projector and suddenly a group of characters is separated by the horizontal border lines between the frames, or the Wolf in Dumb Hounded (Tex Avery, US 1943) who runs beyond the sprocket holes of his own film into the white nowhere (of the projector light?). The climax of self-reflexivity focusing on the film’s own materiality is certainly to show how the film strip as such breaks, as in a Popeye cartoon entitled Goonland (Max Fleischer, US 1938), or even starts to burn as in Persona (Ingmar Bergman, SE 1966). One of the most striking self-reflexive forms of a film representing itself as a film is the film that makes use of the device of the recursive loop, for example, by returning to its beginning at its end. The film narrative that is about to end transforms itself into another film narrative, as in the films Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton, US 1986) or in Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, US 1995), and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, US 1994). Pee-wee’s Big Adventure ends in a drive-in theater during the screening of a movie narrating


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the protagonist’s own adventures during the search for his bicycle shown in the preceding film. In Get Shorty, the story of the gangster Chili Palmer (John Travolta) and the film director-producer Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) is about to reach its climax with its last scene, when, without any prior notice and without any transition, this finale turns into a movie scene in the course of being shot, and the film ends with the wrap of the production of Chili’s movie. Finally, at the end of the movie Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, it turns out that it was the movie itself, via its protagonist Wes Craven, that wrote the end of its own script of the last Nightmare installment. After having defeated Freddy Kruger, Heather (Heather Langencamp) finds a copy of the script with the following dedication by Wes Craven, “Heather – | Thanks for having the guts | to play Nancy one last time. | At last Freddy’s back | where he belongs | Regards | Wes”. When she starts reading the first page of this script to her little boy, the scene repeats exactly the opening scene of the film which is about to end.

7. The full cycle, or: “Who says there’s nothing good on TV?” Since the phases of the sociosemiotic process of film are interlinked and sometimes even overlap, there are examples of self-reference and self-reflexivity that can be attributed to more than just one of the phases. Moreover, some films deliberately go full circle covering many, if not all, aspects of the process (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Self-reference and self-reflexivity in all phases of filmic reproduction

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One masterpiece of this kind was already mentioned, The Man with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov (SU 1929), but there are also less artistically renowned films that fulfill the criteria in question. Among them is a 60 second commercial for Pepsi Cola directed by Joe Pytka, under the title Set Piece (US 1995; BBDO, New York). The spot opens with a view over a TV control room in which the crew is busy with the broadcasting of a basketball game. During a time-out, the producer starts a Pepsi commercial. The basketball star Shaquille O’Neal,4 presented in a close-up on one of the monitors, looks up and turns his head towards another monitor at the other side of the room where the ad appears as if he had heard the theme music and the fizzing of the soda. Shortly after, Shaq O’Neal leaves his (profilmic) world, the basketball playground, and also disappears from the screen on which he and the game are being presented. In a continuous screen passage, he is shown striding through a dozen films and TV programs. Right in the middle of this circuit, he enters the scene of the Pepsi ad, grabbing a Pepsi Cola. Then, he is back on the court to sink a perfect shot, which allows him finally to have a break, drink his Pepsi, and exclaim “Who says there’s nothing good on TV?” This last example combines almost every form of self-reflexivity discussed so far, and it even goes beyond, creating further innovations. The phase of production is self-reflexive since it shows a team doing their job in a control room of the television network. It is self-reflexive as to its phase of distribution in two respects. Like in all live television shows, production coincides with distribution, so that the show shows its own distribution. In addition, however, this commercial evinces self-reflexivity as to its distribution since it shows an ad aired during a commercial break which is itself broadcasted as an ad during a commercial break. Furthermore, the spot is also self-reflexive as to its phase of consumption. The television crew is watching their own program, not only because it is their job to do so but also because the broadcast they are producing is a basketball game. Finally, there is self-reflexivity in the form of the digital quotations of the movies and TV shows which we see during the protagonist’s circuit and in the form of a hitherto unseen screen passage of the basketball star.

Notes 1. Rossi-Landi uses the “recently revived Augustian terms” signatum (plural: signata) and signans (plural: signantia) reintroduced by Jakobson for the two constituents of the sign in order “to avoid the mentalistic ambiguity of Saussure’s signifié ” and signifiant respectively (Rossi-Landi 1979: 21).


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2. This relation was already discussed by Marx (1961: 623) in his characterization of consumption as giving the product the “finishing touch”: “The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity” (Marx 1961: 630). 3. In this film, a splicing girl has to finish the editing of a film by the evening. She completes it in the last minute, takes a cab to the movie theater, delivers the film, and sits down in the audience. But after the title card “Lil Dagover at Breakfast”, she realizes that something went terribly wrong: instead of the well-known movie star, a black woman with bare breasts appears on the screen playing with the child in her arm and drinking from a calabash. 4. In 1995, Shaquille O’Neal, the famous basketball player and long-term spokesman for Pepsi, still played with Orlando Magic. When it was first aired, the spot got an extra reflexive twist because of the context in which it was presented, the NBA 1995 playoffs. The effect of this context was uncertain because it depended on the success of Shaquille O’Neal’s team in the playoffs but, as Gary Hemphill, then manager of public relations at the Pepsi-Cola company, stated: “We couldn’t have been more fortunate that Magic made it so far, it literally looks like the commercial is part of the game. They’re playing, and then it segues right into the spot” (quoted in Winters 1995).

References Marx, Karl 1961

¨ Einleitung [zur Kritik der Politischen Okonomie]. In: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Werke, vol. 13, 615–642. Berlin: Dietz. Engl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin 1973, transl. by Martin Liclaus. available online at: Marx & Engels Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ download/Marx Grundrisse.pdf, 20–36. (31.01.03). Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio [1975] 1977 Linguistics and Economics, 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton. 1979 Towards a theory of sign residues. Versus 23: 15–32. 1985 Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni. Nuovi saggi sul linguaggio e l’ideologia. Milan: Bompiani. 1995 Work, time, and some uses of language. In: Jeff Bernard (ed.), Zei¨ chen/Manipulation, 141–159. Vienna: OGS. Stam, Robert 1992 Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Winters, Patricia 1995 Vodka marketers from overseas are partying it up here on American soil. Newstimes [source: New York Daily News, AP-NY-06-19-95]. http://www.newstimes.com/archive95/170/bze.txt (06.12.01).

Nostalgia of the media / in the media Andreas Böhn

The media have always been a means of bringing back memories, but they have also become the object of memory. The cultural and technological development of the media has brought about great changes; some of the media have even disappeared. As a result, the media of the past become objects of cultural memory. The way the media were in the past and how they have changed has become represented and reflected in the media, and this is where self-reference comes in. Media can refer to themselves as they exist in time and how they have changed in time. More and more, they do so in rather nostalgic ways, or they reflect a nostalgic way of looking at the media as it can be found in our society.

1. Nostalgia and the paradox of memory Nostalgia seems to be a feature of our time, but neither the concept nor the phenomenon is new. The word “nostalgia” first appeared in 1678 as the title of a medical dissertation by Johannes Hofer (Fischer 1980: 268, ref. 8). It derives from the Greek words nostos, ‘coming home’, and algos, ‘pain’. In the word “nostalgia”, the general sense of longing for something lost, or at least not at hand, is expressed by means of a spatial image. Nostalgia is considered as a disease caused by being away from home. Quite early, for example in Rousseau’s correspondence, the role of symbols is mentioned as a cause of nostalgia. The Swiss soldiers abroad hearing a Swiss melody were reminded of their native country and became nostalgic; therefore it was forbidden, on penalty of death, to play this melody during their service (Fischer 1980: 12). However, what we currently understand by the concept of nostalgia is a predominantly temporal notion which cannot yet be found before the 1970s (Fischer 1980: 15–16). Since nostalgia has come to mean the ‘longing for something far away, not necessarily in space, but in time’, symbolic representation and objects as mediators between the past and the present have gained more and more importance. Nostalgia has to do with what can be called the general paradox of memory. On the individual level, our consciousness consists of immediate states, each of

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them dissolving into the next in the course of time, but each state of consciousness is also related to the preceding and the following state. Husserl (1893–1917: 28, 43) has described the two directions in which consciousness extends as “retention” and “protention”. The associated temporal processes determining our consciousness allow us to construct our personal continuity and guarantee our identity as conscious beings in time; each immediate state becomes transformed into a representation of itself, and by the retention of this representation in the following state of consciousness we are enabled to operate with it. On the collective level, there is no such automatically functioning device of memorization. Humans, social groups, and societies had to develop other strategies of creating memory to make social continuity and identity possible. But such strategies have always been endangered by the possibility of failure. Time is a constant threat to social stability, the more so when a society changes rapidly and when its members are conscious of the changes. One of the strategies of creating collective memory has been the attempt to eliminate time, to relate the present very closely to a past which is held in great social esteem.An example is the glorification of a “heroic age” as a phase of social and cultural foundation of the present. The paradox of such strategies of glorification of the past lies in the circumstance that memory would not be necessary if the past were not absolutely gone and that memory tries to represent the past as something which is still present. Cultural strategies of dealing with the past can emphasize either side of this paradox. Rituals which re-enact scenes from the past and have us participate in by-gone events show the past as something which is still there; mourning over the dead, by contrast, does not prevent that the mourners remain conscious of the death of the deceased.1 At a higher level of reflexivity, of course, cultural ways of representing memory can also deal with many other kinds of events. Nostalgia as a relation of pain and longing for the past at a mainly personal and emotional level is directed towards objects which cannot only represent but also evoke the past. It is directed towards objects which allow, at least for a certain time, for a lustful revival of this past in a process which can be seen as a first of three steps. The second step is taken at the collective level where cultural objects are produced that serve in an analogous way for larger sections of the population. The third step is the reflection on these tendencies in advanced cultural discourse, be it in a theoretical or an artistic way. Nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon has become a topic of research, which has gained more and more attention since the 1970s. It has often been linked to postmodernism in general, and more specifically to ways of getting in touch with the past. For example, period pictures in the field of the cinema, remakes, quotations, re-adoptions of seemingly outdated film genres, etc. Whereas a pe-

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riod picture refers to a bygone world at the level of representation, a remake refers to a previous movie and implicitly or explicitly to a past of the mediating film. Thus, some of the strategies of nostalgia obviously evince aspects of self-reference, too, but they are self-referential to a much higher degree when the object of nostalgia is a specific medium or when the medium itself is used for representing nostalgia.

2. Media, memory, and musealization The media participate in an expanding culture of memory evincing traces of “musealization”, like the objects in a museum which have lost their use value having become mere signs of their former use values (cf. Böhn 2005), and nostalgia, which can be regarded as a counterpart to the process of modernization. In the process of modernization, the media have been influential instruments of social change not least because they have altered the techniques of cultural memory. Drawing and, even more so, writing were the first methods of exteriorizing memory in an enduring and sustainable manner. The modern audiovisual media, such as photography, the phonograph, and the film, have extended cultural memory to bring back also sensual impressions, which individuals in earlier times had difficulties to remember and to pass on to the next generation. The timbre of the voice, the typical gestures, facial expressions, and body movements are hard to remember if you met a person only once or twice; in words and sentences, such impressions cannot be evoked in a way that others can fully imagine what the description is about. However, when we see a historical film, for example, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s movie Der Untergang (English: Downfall, G 2004), we cannot only compare Bruno Ganz’s impersonation of Hitler with our personal memory of the dictator (which not many people still have of Hitler), but we can also compare it with original audiovisual documents and with our personal memory of the externalized cultural memory of Hitler’s last days. Important elements of our personal memory are such memories of cultural memory which have become part of our own biography. Even the time, place, and circumstances of the situation in which we had the knowledge or experience that became remembered can itself remain associated with the memory of it. When did we first see our favorite movie, in the cinema, on TV, on video, etc.? When did we first hear a recording of a certain piece of music which impressed us deeply? Was it a live or a studio version, which orchestra was it, which conductor, from which year was the recording? Did we hear it from an old and scratchy LP which made an ugly noise or from our MP3-player while jogging through a park? The circumstances of the moment of our first hearing will often be remembered when

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we hear the same music again. The examples show that media experiences tend to go together with the circumstances in which we acquire the memory of them. Since the media belong to the world of everyday life, they are also the object of our personal memory. Evolving and transforming themselves in the flux of time, they are no longer what they used to be in a former stage of our life. Some of us still remember the time when cinemascope was new and astonishing. A friend of mine once told me what an erotic disturbance it caused in his adolescence when he first saw “I Dream of Jeannie” on color television (after his parents had substituted the old black-and-white television set) because now he found Jeannie so much sexier. Media products have become the object of nostalgia because they are linked to so many personal memories and biographies or, more precisely, to individuals’ constructions of their personal biographies. Whereas younger people are eager to see new movies on TV, older people are happy when movies from the past are shown which remind them of their youth. The tendency to their own musealization which the media have developed is as much a reaction against the rage for the new as it gives an additional impetus to it. In an exhibition on the topic of the history of computer games in the year 2002 in Kassel’s Museum for Sepulchral Culture, visitors became really sentimental when they saw the computer model of the old days when they played their first computer games. Since computer games have not yet been on the market for a long time, such nostalgic reactions may seem to come very early but they are understandable since things have changed so rapidly. Nostalgia seems to depend not only on the period of time between the event and the moment of its nostalgic recollection but also on the amount of change. The change can be so great that people are simply unable to cope with it and search, instead, for a withdrawal into an artificial world of nostalgic remembrance. As Gottfried Fliedl (1990: 171) has pointed out, situations of abrupt political change, combined with the destruction of former social structures and hierarchies, have always favored nostalgia and musealization (cf. Fliedl 1996). Wolfgang Becker’s movie Good-Bye, Lenin! (G 2002) draws on this tendency with respect to ostalgia or eastalgia, the nostalgia for the good old days of the GDR (Böhn 2005). The tendency towards the musealization of the GDR in this film does not only extend to material culture, but also to the media. With the help of his friend Denis, a would-be movie director, the protagonist Alex gathers recordings of GDR television, such as recordings of the daily news program “Aktuelle Kamera” or the political magazine “Schwarzer Kanal” which they use to produce their own news programs. Alex’s mother, a staunch follower of the communist regime, recovering from a heart attack, has to be prevented from receiving the news that the GDR has collapsed during the time when she was


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in a coma. The old lady has to stay in bed unable to move. In this position, she can see the outside world only through her bedroom window. This situation, not unlike the one of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, makes it easy for the two friends to withhold the ongoing political transformations from the bedridden mother. But when she watches television, another window to the world is open which has to be manipulated. First, Alex and Denis simply show her old programs, but then they begin to experiment themselves with montages of old with new scenes of their own production. In the end, they even create an alternative history of the German unification in which they fictionally make come true a “third way” of a German republic between former socialism in the East and capitalism in the West. The reasons why all this became possible are partly in the media politics of the former GDR, as Pflaum has pointed out in his following assessment: Good Bye, Lenin! demonstrates, in an excellent and clever way, the compliance of pictures and tones. The film goes beyond its own story. The fake succeeds all the better considering that the GDR, in the course of its forty years of existence had been in a habit of self-glorification which made the falsification of alleged documents easy enough. (Pflaum 2003: 12)

3. Nostalgia of/in the movies After this little example of TV in a film in a nostalgic reproduction of GDR culture, let us now consider more specific examples of nostalgia concerning the medium of film itself. A movie can create nostalgia by means of film history in general, certain periods of film history, or by making use of old-fashioned genres. An example of the latter would be the film musical, which has been readopted recently in several productions differently but always with a look back in nostalgia. Fran¸cois Ozon combined his retrospective whodunit in Huit femmes (F 2002) with elements from the musical tradition. Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (US 1997) with a dozen songs and several dancing scenes gives the impression of a musical from the beginning to its end. In fact, it is a compilation and adaptation of material from the classical era of the film musical. The score has been arranged by Dick Hyman, the songs are performed by the actors themselves. Especially the dancing scenes are full of parody. In the opening sequence, the song “Just You, Just Me” performed by two young lovers is accompanied by a choir of three women with baby carriages, an elderly lady with a nurse, a beggar, and a ballet of three dummies in the shop-window of an Yves Saint-Laurent shop. There is a highly exalted dancing scene in a hospital with the song “Makin’ Whoopee” by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn

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taken from the Busby Berkeley movie Whoopee of 1930, and there is a ballet of ghosts in a funeral chapel singing “Enjoy Yourself”. Near to its end, the movie makes direct reference to its precursors, the Marx Brothers and their absurd choreographies, with the song “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby from Animal Crackers (US 1930). Later, “I’m Through with Love” is taken up for the third time as the tune of a dancing scene with slowmotion effects. The ease of Fred Astaire’s style in his famous scenes with Ginger Rodgers and others is imitated and exaggerated as Woody Allen is doing nearly nothing and his partner Goldie Hawn is literally floating in the air. The title song “Everyone Says I Love You” by Kalmar and Ruby from the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers (US 1932) accompanies the finale. Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You holds the balance between parody and homage evincing elements of irony and parody in the tradition of the classical American film musical itself. These elements can be found in the early musical comedies of the Marx Brothers or also in Hellzapoppin’ (US 1941), which is quoted in the hell scene of Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (US 1997). These early examples were more direct parodies than the more recent ones. Woody Allen’s film uses elements from the musical to characterize persons and situations and to borrow tunes and moods. Emotional qualities are presented by means of wellknown expressions from the history of the film musical. On the one hand, they seem to be perfectly natural as expressions of emotions, on the other hand, they are obviously not spontaneous expressions of genuine feelings, but stereotypes which, used as quotations, create an ironic distance. There is a shift from the expression of an emotion to the mere mentioning of its precursor, which attaches a historical marker to this expression. The nostalgic undertone or mood results from the feeling that those expressions are no longer useable except in an ironic and distanced way or as a quotation. In On connaˆıt la chanson (F 1998), Alain Resnais, who had already used musical elements in La vie est un roman (F 1983), borrows songs from the tradition of the French chanson instead of taking them from musicals (Ochsner 2004). At the formal level of the combination of story and music, the deviations from the originals are even greater than in Allen’s movie. The songs are borrowed in the acoustic form of their original performance with the voices of well-known singers like Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Gilbert Bécaud, or France Gall. The actors in the movie apparently do not sing with their own, but with someone else’s voice. With a different voice, they “sing” songs in a voice recorded from entertainers of the past according to different technical recording standards. Sometimes a man even sings in the voice of a woman and vice versa. For example, in the opening sequence, the commanding officer of the German occupation forces, having just received the order to destroy Paris, sings the song “J’ai deux


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amours, Paris et ma patrie” in Josephine Baker’s voice. Though the songs go very well with the situation in which they are sung, they create an ambiguous effect. By themselves, they aim at enacting certain affections in order to express and to intensify the emotions. Using these songs as elements of a narration could serve the same purpose as in an opera or in a classical film musical. However, the aforementioned ruptures and divergences between story and song, actor and voice are incompatible with the traditional purposes of combining a narrative with music. Emotional intensification and historical distance are in an unstable balance, which makes it very difficult to concentrate on one of the two and to forget about the other. However, as much as these discrepancies may be an impediment to our identifying with the protagonists and getting emotionally involved in the story, it gives us the possibility of concentrating on the songs and of remembering the possible emotional importance they may have to us. The movie turns into a sort of “living museum” of French chanson culture, with Everyone Says I Love You as its counterpart in the classical American film musical. Maurizio Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette (IT 1988) does not only quote a specific form typical of a genre of film history but a whole set of formal characteristics of a historical period, the style of Italian postwar neorealism. Neorealism is not simply a period style among others. It was intended and perceived as a counterpoise against fascist monumentalism and distraction by means of glamorous settings and sceneries. The neorealist movies tell stories about people in a humble social environment, stories about the living conditions of ordinary people, about moral values, and matters of conscience. The neorealist movies construct the image of new nonfascist Italy, and this new image was not only highly esteemed in postwar Italy, but also internationally well liked and honored. The title of Nichetti’s film is a reference to Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (IT 1948), the most famous example of this style, which won an Oscar in 1949, already the second for de Sica. The change of its title is indicative of what is happening in the film. Saponette are the commercials for soap, washing-powder, etc. which rudely interrupt the movies shown on TV. Nichetti’s film begins with a TV presentation of a film in the neorealist style, paying homage to neorealism in black and white. The commercials in the breaks are, of course, in color. There are elements of parody in both the film and the commercial. At a certain point the film gets mixed up with the commercials when a figure in color from a commercial enters the movie and the black-and-white scenes now have one of its actors in color. At this point, the forms of neorealism and current television advertisements are in direct confrontation. Film and commercials are no longer separate. They are both integrated within the one diegetic framework of Nichetti’s film in which they

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nevertheless remain clearly marked as two different modes of representation. The combined scenario now evinces divergent goals for the narrative personae in their respective stories, such as preservation of basic moral principles under difficult circumstances, family values, or modest prosperity in the frame of neorealism versus consumerism in the frame of the TV commercial. The mixing-up of the two frames has effects on the narrative plot, too. The postwar neorealist family wants to escape their misery and live in the consumer’s paradise of postmodern advertising. In this way, the anachronism of neorealism in the eighties becomes evident but also the lack of realism and morals of the commercials. Both worlds operating separately in the peaceful coexistence of the usual TV program with the movies, but they shatter into pieces when they clash, as in Ladri di saponette. The quasi-neorealist film-in-the-film is in itself, like the movies it imitates, highly sentimental. By means of its nostalgic touch it is able to involve the viewers emotionally with the values it promotes. At first glance, the arrangement of feature film, TV studio scenes, commercials, and TV viewers at home is clearly committed as to its values: the good old times of the feature film versus the contemporary perversion, but this initial emotional orientation of the spectator gets more and more into trouble. It ends up in an utter boundary crossing at different levels, a crossing that finally erodes the moral hierarchy and the affective structures established in the beginning. The result is mixed emotions and a sense of affective ambivalence on the side of the viewers who have followed the development of the filmic narrative.

4. Nostalgia and self-reference The analysis of the above examples has shown that besides the ongoing production of genre films and the continuous modification of genre rules, and besides the nostalgic imitation of historical styles, for instance in period pictures, there are other ways of incorporating genre traditions and elements of style into a film. Quotations of formal elements can be used to play with the emotions associated with these forms or to create a historical distance from them which may cause a nostalgic longing for their restoration. These are some of the means of the cinema to reflect on its own history. The tendency of the film to deal with itself and reflect on its impact on its viewers has even been passed on to television. Pleasantville (US 1998), directed by Gary Ross, is a movie about a boy who loves certain old TV family series from the 1950s (Dika 2003: 201). His nostalgia is represented like the nostalgia for neorealism in Ladri di saponette. Both movies leave us with the impression that the past is much better than the present


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because it is past and we do not really have to live it any more. The protagonist of Pleasantville is nostalgic for the world of the 1950s family series, which is not only fictitious but was already outdated when he first saw it, apart from the fact that he never knew the society and the state of mind that produced it. The only thing he knows are the episodes from the series which are repeated on TV and that they are old because they are coded with “past”. Not only does the cinema serve as a cultural archive for television and has become a source of nostalgia, but also has the reverse become true. The above discussed On connaˆıt la chanson does not only refer to the tradition of the musical but also to the French chanson and its phonographic recordings. Other media can be added, for example, the radio, as in Woody Allen’s Radio Days (US 1987), a film that associates nostalgic reminiscences of the radio as it was before the advent of TV, with personal memories from the narrator’s childhood. In a similar way, movies such as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo cinema Paradiso (F/US 1989) or Ettore Scola’s Splendor (F/IT 1989) intermingle the recollections of an individual life (in the former case beginning with the protagonist’s childhood) with the personal memories of a particular movie house, the films shown there, the technical equipment which was used etc. Rather differently, in Agnès Varda’s Les cent et une nuits (F 1995), the history of the film is narrated to a young woman from the memory of an allegorical Monsieur Cinéma. In Tornatore’s and Scola’s movies, general history, personal history, and media history are interrelated, as Splendor is with the end of World War II, the protagonist’s return, and the showing of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (US 1946). At the moment when the owner of the cinema enters it for the first time after the war, the final scene of the movie is presented. It is Christmas, the community and the protagonist are reconciled, and everybody sings “For Auld Lang Syne”. The tune is taken up at the end of the movie when the village community gathers to defend the old cinema which is in danger because it is no longer profitable. The movie changes from color to black and white, and although we are in the middle of summer, snow begins to fall. Few people nowadays remember this, but Christmas in its ritual essence is a means of recalling something from the deep past to the present in order to share its effects. The Christmas scene taken from It’s a Wonderful Life associates the demise of the cinema in a small town with the powerful history of the medium in order to convey the message of its endurance and resistance against current transformations. However, as the film Splendor demonstrates, that which is “greater than life” works only in the movies. In this respect, Splendor is the most nostalgic of all films dealing with the film culture of the past; it is self-referential with regards to the medium which it represents and of which it evokes the feelings of nostalgia.

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5. Conclusion In this paper, the focus was on examples from the film which do not only follow the trend towards nostalgia but also reflect it in a rather complex manner. Below the surface of the current trend towards media nostalgia, there is a broad current of musealization to counterbalance the hype about progress which the new media cause. Even among those who are euphoric about the internet or even addicted to computer games, nostalgia can be found, for example, nostalgia for floppy disks, which seems to be the most recent manifestation of media nostalgia. The nostalgia of the media does not only extend to the material remains which have been collected in media archives, personal collections, or which have been exhibited in museums and cultural centers. Media nostalgia is also apparent in the way the media represent the media and in the way they let us see the world narrated by them. More and more, the media devote themselves to media nostalgia, relying on different historical ways of positioning themselves in relation to other media. Media nostalgia in the media is a manifestation of self-reference in the media because the media refer to themselves, show how they have been the source of entertainment, how they have been subject to historical changes or even destruction, and how they have been remembered or consigned to oblivion.

Note 1. In this context, Boym (2001: 41) distinguishes between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia: “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.”

References Böhn, Andreas 2005

Boym, Svetlana 2001

Memory, musealization and alternative history in Michael Kleeberg’s novel Ein Garten im Norden and Wolfgang Becker’s Film Good Bye, Lenin! In: Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.), Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity, 245–260. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

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Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film. The Uses of Nostalgia. Cambridge: University Press.

Fischer, Volker 1980 Nostalgie. Geschichte und Kultur als Trödelmarkt. Luzern: Bucher. Fliedl, Gottfried 1990 Testamentskultur: Musealisierung und Kompensation. In: Wolfgang Zacharias (ed.), Zeitphänomen Musealisierung. DasVerschwinden der Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinnerung, 166–179. Essen: Klartext. Fliedl, Gottfried (ed.) 1996 Die Erfindung des Museums. Bürgerliche Museumsidee und Französische Revolution. Vienna: Turia & Kant. Husserl, Edmund [1893–1917] 1969 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstesens, ed. Rudolf Boehm (=Husserliana X). The Hague: Nijhoff. Ochsner, Beate 2004 “J’ai deux amours: la musique et le film . . . ” Intermediale Verschränkungen von Musik und Film in On connaˆıt la chanson (1997) vonAlain Resnais. In: Susanne Schlünder and Scarlett Winter (eds.), Körper¨ Asthetik-Spiel. Zur filmischen “écriture” der Nouvelle Vague, 157– 182. Munich: Fink. Pflaum, Hans Günter 2003 Der diskrete Charme der Ostalgie:Wolfgang Beckers Good Bye, Lenin! konkurriert noch um den Berlinale-Bären und kommt schon ins Kino, Süddeutsche Zeitung 36 (February 13, 2003), 12.

Self-reference in animated films Jan Siebert

1. Introduction If we look at the nature of animated or “drawn” films1 , we can often find traces that point to the artificiality of the images in a number of ways, thus enabling the filmmakers to inscribe themselves in the story of the film. It seems that these filmmakers have an attitude towards filmmaking that is different from the view taken by live-action directors. To a much higher degree, animated films give their creators the freedom to experiment with physical and biological laws and to adopt new perspectives on reality in ways impossible in live-action films. This becomes most obvious when animated films use animals as protagonists to tell a story from an alternative point of view. On a more general level, animated films often include a comment on the borders between the individual media which are being crossed again and again, since drawn films show influences by comic books, literature, paintings, computer games, and (classical) live-action films. Methods of disillusioning the viewer are pointing to other media, letting the actors address the viewers, or pretending that the film is in the making at the moment the viewer is watching it, to mention only a few.2 When the first animated films were produced, the illusion of moving pictures was far from perfect. For example, the animators did not always cut out every frame in which their hands accidentally got photographed while adding another stroke. They were probably even proud to present themselves as the creators. It is part of the charm of the very early animated films that from time to time a finger here and there shows up for a millisecond. It is interesting to see that although new technology can provide perfectly rendered images, animators today in continuation of the tradition of their predecessors still think of ways of including self-referential effects.

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2. References to the paper medium in old and new films One of the most successful animated films from the era of silent films is a series of films with the remarkable title Out of the Inkwell (USA 1918ff.). This film is about its own making, full of indices of how it was produced. In every episode, the protagonists climb out of an inkwell, and they go back inside after the story has ended, just like the opening and closing of a book. Another highly appraised series from that time is Felix the Cat (USA 1922). Whenever Felix is in a difficult situation, a thinking bubble with a question mark appears above his head. Felix then grabs this question mark and turns it into an object useful to help him. This is a reference to the paper medium comic book that preceded the moving images. In the era of silent movies, the presentation of devices such as speech bubbles etc. can be described as a creative replacement for the words coming out of the characters’ mouth. Until today animated films use stars, bubbles, and bouncing letters surrounding a character. In the German film Werner – Beinhart (1990), for example, the protagonist gets so angry that his words come out of his mouth in huge red letters traveling through corridors (Figure 1). Since the animated film very often uses the aesthetics of the comic book (and this film is an adaptation of a highly successful German comic book), this usage does not seem out of place.

Figure 1. Comic book aesthetics in Werner – Beinhart (G 1990)

Many years later, when the animated film had sound and color, a similar reference to the paper medium was used to create comical effects in the animated film Flatworld (GB 1997). This film features the perfect impression of two-dimensional cut-out objects; even the markings on the paper can be seen. Flatworld creates its own rules, and its cut-out forms dominate the narration and influence the action. It allows the protagonist sitting in a car to slide slantwise beneath another car during a wild chase (Figure 2). Holes in the street are repaired with a stapler – which is also used as a weapon!

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Figure 2. Two-dimensional paper objects in Flatworld (GB 1997)

The film Felix the Cat and the Out of the Inkwell film series work in much the same way. The protagonists react to their special environment, and the story explicitly crosses borders to other media and becomes bizarre, even abstract. Many animated films use this flexible interpretation of media borders and distort the realism that most live-action films are based on. Generally speaking, animated films have never been able to challenge the authenticity of the images of live-action films. Instead, they seek to create a different atmosphere and a world with its own rules in which not only the characters are very flexible by using the squash-and-stretch-animation but also the borders of the media can be stretched to a very high degree. The protagonists are not tied to the physical laws of gravity; they do not die, not even if their body is filled with bullets. As we learn in the live-action-animated film-mixture Who framed Roger Rabbit (USA 1988), animated personnel can in fact die; they just have to be erased.

3. Interactions with the viewer The talkative Bugs Bunny character is highly self-referential mainly because of his many contacts and pacts with the viewers. Even in the middle of a typical chase scene, he might pause and talk to them. For example, Bugs Bunny might be unhappy with the story because it uses a gag for the second time. This inclusion

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Figure 3. The spectator included in the film Daffy Duck and Egghead (USA 1938)

of the viewer is another way of creating a self-referential effect. In another very early Warner Brothers film, the viewer is not only suspected somewhere among the audience, but actually plays a part in the film: Daffy Duck and Egghead (USA 1938) includes a scene that shows a duck hunter (later known as Egghead) who is irritated by a spectator from the audience moving through the rows (Figure 3). The spectator’s whole body almost blackens the scene and the hunter is afraid the spectator might chase his prey away. Since the spectator does not go away, the hunter finally shoots him dead, he stumbles and falls. The bullets have struck through the “fourth wall” of the film and have deployed their effect on the “other side” of the screen.

4. A product in the making Very often, the film presents itself as a product that is still in the making when it is presented to the audience, so we can see parts of the film crew or the creator’s hands etc. Sometimes we can even see parts of the material of the films itself. In Tex Avery’s Dumb Hounded (USA 1943), one character is moving so fast that he ends up running out of the frame and even the holes of the film reel become visible. After having realized this, the character quickly turns around because there is nothing but a white background – obviously the white projection screen (Figure 4). Of course, this consequence lacks any logic because the character’s picture could not be projected had it run out of frame. Nevertheless, the gag works despite its lack of logic since, as Lindvall and Melton (1997: 210) observe, animated films “do not need the consistency or internal logic of a realist film; [. . . ] the super-textual can break into the text at any moment”.


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Figure 4. Cartoon character leaves the film frame in Dumb Hounded (USA 1943)

The same is true of a seemingly never-ending chase scene in Lucky Ducky (USA 1948). The characters are running past a road sign, and, all of a sudden, they find themselves in a black-and-white scenario. The music stops as they look at each other, turn around, and then notice the road sign, which says: “Technicolor ends here.” As soon as they re-enter the world behind the road sign, they are colored again, and music continues. This is a brilliant comment on the endless chases so typical of the animated films of that time; this one has gone on for so long that the story loses its color and its sound. The protagonists have reached the end of their (animated) world.3 Each time filmmakers have their protagonists turn to the camera or have them think about their status as an integral part of a film, they bring them a bit closer to the audience. The drawn characters move out of the diegetic frame, and when they address their creator, the viewers get the impression of a live broadcast, with the screen turning into a theater stage. The film seems to be in the making. Space Jam (USA 1994) shows children watching a classical TV series with Warner Brothers characters. Suddenly the two protagonists are stopped in the middle of a fight by a third who asks them to join him to a conference of actors of animated films. They all leave, and the scenery is completely empty. This suggests that all Warner Brothers characters have a job in endless re-runs. In Space Jam the viewer can actually see what the characters are doing in their spare time. They even complain about not getting any money from the merchandising campaigns that use their names and faces.

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5. New developments During the last decade, many computer-generated films have been released that have succeeded in pushing the genre to new heights. Toy Story (USA 1995) was the first feature film to be entirely produced with a computer, and other very successful films like A Bug’s Life (USA 1998), Shrek (USA 2001, 2004) and Finding Nemo (USA 2003) soon followed. A new and most interesting development is that we are now being better informed about what the filmmakers think in relation to the device of self-reference and its comical effects in their cartoons, since the DVD versions of these highly professionally produced films bring us relevant interviews in “making-ofs”. Since DVDs are on the market, out-takes, making-ofs, and trailers have become part of the medium. Out-takes typically show scenes originally taken out for various reasons, for example because actors forgot their texts, slipped, or failed in other ways. The DVDs of Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Shrek are among those which include out-takes, which are mere fakes or just copies of the way live-action films are presented. “Out-takes” from animated films are by no means bad material, nothing “taken out”. They are special productions which provide the spectators with bonus gags. In A Bug’s Life we can see a “baddy” who is worried not to create the impression of being a tough person. In another scene the filmmakers borrow the protagonist Woody from Toy Story, the first successful film produced by the same company. Woody wants to help directing the film with the result that other parts of the filming material become visible (microphones, a camera, etc.). The characters in these mock out-takes act as if they were humans of flesh and blood. At one point, a gigantic, intimidating bird can be seen, spreading its wings that must look enormous to the small bugs. All of a sudden, the bird’s movements come to a grinding halt accompanied by the noise of an old, malfunctioning machine. The contrast between the perfection of the computer-animated surroundings and the archaic aura of the machine age is an explicit reference (or even homage) to a time when live-action images had to be created without blue-screen techniques and without the computer-aided postproduction process. In recent DVDs of animated films one can occasionally find not only fake outtakes but also mock interviews with actors. This is not an entirely new device; since the early times of the medium, the makers of animated films have been using it much more frequently than the directors of live-action movies. However, the more recent implementation of self-referential effects seems to express in a kind of tongue-in-cheek attitude: “Yes, we all know that we are dealing with highly artificial images. Our protagonists can do impossible things, so let us comment on these flexible interpretations of the world. Let us experiment with ways of crossing the borders of our medium with the medium of the comics and


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cartoons, or with live-action films to make the viewers aware of the processes of the many possibilities involved. Even the animated characters are aware of these processes and make use of their knowledge.” – Films like Who framed Roger Rabbit? even feature animated characters who meet “real” persons and both learn from each other. In The Mask (USA 1994), a live-action film based on a comic book hero, a bank clerk puts on a mask and turns into a creature half-way between human being and animated character. He can benefit from the most important features of a comic book hero; he is invincible, his body can deform and adapt to each new situation. We can see that it is not only the animated film that learns from the predominance of the live-action films but also vice versa.

Notes 1. “An animated film is one that is created frame-by-frame” (Stephenson 1973: 14f) in contrast to live-action films that are recorded live action in front of the camera. In this essay, I will concentrate on those animated films which dominate the genre: those that are based on drawn images (hand-made, also computer-assisted) in contrast to sand or clay animation etc. 2. These are only a few examples of the ways animated films use self-referential effects in order to create comedy. See Siebert (2005) for a detailed description. 3. It might also be the painter who is fed up with providing more and more scenery, which would be an ironic remark about the practice of using the same scenery over and over again.

References Lindvall, Terrance and J. Matthew Melton 1997 Toward a post-modern animated discourse: Bakhtin, intertextuality and the cartoon carnival. In: Jayne Pilling (ed.), A Reader in Animation Studies, 203–220. London: John Libbey. Siebert, Jan 2005 Flexible Figuren: Medienreflexive Komik im Zeichentrickfilm. (Kulturen des Komischen 2.) Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Stephenson, Ralph 1973 The Animated Film. London: Tantivy Press.

Part V. Self-referential television

On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reflexivity Fernando Andacht

1. On the use of reflexivity in the documentary genre The present study is part of an ongoing research on some contemporary media representations of reality1 , such as documentary film and TV reality show, which are genres based on the predominance of indexical signs.2 These two kinds of nonfiction are characterized by their opposite though complementary use of reflexivity: in the case of the documentary film, reflexivity is a selfconscious, earnest, and explicit strategy with the aim of making the viewers aware of the illusory nature of the reality effect created by the very film they are watching, in a way akin to the epistemological core of many studies in social constructionism (Hacking 1999). In the case of the TV reality show, which will be studied on the basis of the successful format of Big Brother, reflexivity is also crucial for its normal functioning but it works in a self-mocking, mundane, and ostensive manner to enhance the entertainment value of this television program. Based on Lynch’s (2000) carefully argued critique of the use and abuse of reflexivity as a methodological tool in the social sciences, I will argue that the emancipatory use made of reflexivity in the quality documentary film genre with its ethical concern is ultimately related to dualism as its metaphysical ground. This paper posits an analysis of a kind of media reflexivity that corresponds to what Nöth describes as “communicative self-reference” (see I.5.6.). It involves the ethically and aesthetically justified inclusion of scenes of the making of the documentary in the film itself. Self-disclosure of this kind is a key feature of the poetics of reflexivity in artistic documentaries such as those by Coutinho in Brazil and Comolli or Rouch in France. Allen (1977: 37) defines this practice as follows: Self-reflexivity is defined here as any aspect of a film which points to its own processes of production: the conceptualization of a film, the procedures necessary to make the technology available, the process of filming itself.

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Fernando Andacht [. . . ] By presenting them self-reflexively, a documentary film can make an audience aware of the processes of production as a limitation on the film’s neutral stance, its ability to document objectively. In doing so the film draws attention to the process of selecting and reconstructing events to convey meaning. Self-reflexivity becomes then a reaction against or a way of countering the traditional mode of the documentary which emphasizes verisimilitude.3

The documentary Edif´ıcio Master (Brazil, 2002, henceforth EM ) sets off with scenes of the laborious arrival of the film crew led by director Eduardo Coutinho (São Paulo, 1933- ) in the Master building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Three sets of cameras are simultaneously at work in the film, only two of which are visible: those carried by the main crew, the electronic cameras that survey the building and, last but not least, the reflexivity creating cameras which are filming the film making activity itself but which, of necessity, must remain unfilmed. This multiplication of perspective is distinctive of the documentarist’s cinematic style, as film critic Mattos (2003) describes in his study of Coutinho’s work: “Part of that person-to-person cinema is the exhibition of the process of documenting inside the very film. The arrivals of the camera crew which are always documented by a supporting camera which duplicates the axis of the main camera have become a trademark since Cabra marcada para morrer”. The audience gets to see some crucial moments of the actual backstage of the film, of its material production, e.g., the negotiations made to be admitted inside the apartments whose inhabitants are invited to participate in the film. It soon becomes clear that several attempts end up in failure. Thus, film viewers join the research crew in their strenuous efforts to visit many of the 276 flats which finally result in 35 interviews of which only 27 were kept in the edited film, as the director comments in an initial voice-over sequence. In the documentary, reflexivity is also implemented during the encounters when the auxiliary camera switches from the dwellers, who do most of the talking, to their engrossed interlocutor thus enabling the viewers to catch a glimpse of the director and of the camera crew behind him. In the intellectually informed practice of the quality documentary genre (e.g., cinema vérité), reflexivity of this kind results in acts of self-disclosure which will be defined as self-critical reflexivity. My analytical aim is to relate this mode of media reflexivity with two different postulates of the representation of the real. Although documentary makers are not semioticians, their implicit metaphysical views do exert a key role in how they proceed in their creative tasks. The documentarists’ use of reflexivity owes much to an unwitting belief in the doctrine of dualism, the kind of thought which, in the words of Peirce (CP 7.570), “performs its analyses with an axe, leaving as the ultimate elements

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unrelated chunks of being”. My critique is an attempt to disclose a fallacy at the heart of the poetics of reflexive documentary which is characteristic of postmodern anti-objectivistic thought.4 The nondualistic premise defended here is that there is no unbridgeable gap between reality and its representation, be they qualitative, factual, or general. Such is the upshot of Peirce’s formidable critique of Cartesian reductionistic dualism which is inseparable from his semiotic and which implies “an alternative method based on an absolutely original concept, the concept of thought as a sign”, as Santaella (2004: 24) explains. What makes something a sign is not material;5 it is a capacity, since its “essential function is to render inefficient relations efficient” (CP 8.332). A sign can do that on account of its “power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind” (CP 6.455). This is the synechistic way of all signs, which results in the continuous “growth of reasonableness” (CP 5.4). Thus, it may not be inappropriate to add to these examples proposed by Peirce, which include “a daily newspaper” (6.455), a TV reality show. To close this introduction, I bring in the voice of an important, unwitting contributor to self-critical reflexivity in the media, namely William James, a life-long friend of Peirce and a not too felicitous interpreter of his doctrine of pragmatism. Concerning the question of the possibility of a reality independent of human thinking James wrote: We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it, which some previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption.6 If so vulgar an expression were allowed us we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already faked. (James 1963/1906: 109, emphasis in the original)

The metaphysical basis of self-critical reflexivity lies in a nutshell in James’s peculiar account of representation: James states that what signs do with the real – as it is apart from its being represented – is to distort it to the point of dissolution, like enzymes do with the food we eat, to extend his digestive metaphor. Although no actual, historical influence may be claimed, there is enough intellectual kinship in James’s assertion to construe it as a virtual philosophical basis of self-critical reflexivity such as it is embodied in the melancholy poetics of contemporary documentary. James’s image of irrecoverable loss, of a radical change for the worse – the use of the word “faked” at the climax of his account – entails the impossibility of ever beholding reality face to face. This deficit-like conception of representing the real entails our falling prey to an ersatz, a faked version of reality, thus becoming helpless dupes while trying to represent it, since we have nothing else to go by. From the self-critical reflexive viewpoint, all a documentarist can do is struggle against the illusion of the reality they

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inevitably help to create with their films about an ever elusive real. This hopelessly Sisyphean task will be illustrated below with the work and thoughts of the Brazilian director Coutinho. James’s construal of representation is the very opposite of Peirce’s (CP 5.607) proposal, which involves a direct and mediated way of perceiving the world, one which Ransdell (1986: 68) calls the “doctrine of representative perception”. In the same year in which James (1906) gave his above quoted lectures on Pragmatism at Boston’s Lowell Institute, Peirce addressed himself to a gifted British correspondent to explain his mature conception of signs as elements which are in contact with the outward clash, with the real as it is when it is not being represented and which do bring such an acquaintance effectively to us interpreters. In a letter dated March 9th, 1906 we find the sketch of a synechistic theory of signification according to which inner and outer world are not separate but in a living communi(cat)ion: “Sign” [is] any medium for the communication or extension of a Form [. . . ] In order that [a form] be extended or communicated, it is necessary that it should have been really embodied in a Subject independently of the communication [. . . ] The Form, (and the Form is the Object of the Sign), as it really determines the former Subject, is quite independent of the sign; yet [. . . ] the object of a sign can be nothing but what that sign represents it to be. [T]o reconcile these apparently conflicting Truths, it is indispensable to distinguish the immediate object from the dynamical object. (Hardwick 1977: 196 – my emphasis)

What James described as the unavoidable degradation of reality on account of its representation is the paramount instance of communication, of contact with ourselves and with others, i.e., “with reality independent of the sign” according to Peirce’s realist, synechistic semiotic. The distinction between two kinds of semiotic objects is the technical solution to the supposed dilemma faced by documentarists who pursue reflexivity: they can never grasp the entirety of the real which they fallibly and partially register in their films, regardless of their editing or reconstructing. The actual limitation has more to do with the Heraclitean nature of reality and with the fallible way of signs. Through their evolving nature, signs manage to depict and portray, albeit imperfectly, enough of the real for viewers and documentarists alike, to do more than just glimpse the real. We are able to grasp enough of it to criticize whether a documentary is doing its job well or not and how it fails, if that is the case, to fulfill its “indexing” (Carroll 1996: 238). A solution to the riddle posited by our limited, human way of cognizing the world out there is offered by Peirce by means of the rainbow image (CP 5.283): the metaphor shows how the world outside, i.e., “everything which is present to us” is both “a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves”, –


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and the manifestation of something external, that lies outside of signs, i.e., its object. The world works its dynamic, forceful limits through signs. Peirce has bequeathed us a realist analysis of representation, in stark contrast to James’s dualism, which involves our giving up any hope to grasp the real which is forever “faked” by our signs. In conformity with Peircean synechistic semiotic, I argue that you can have the real thing and represent it too. Curiously enough, the excruciating self-doubt of the ethically and politically conscious poetics of reflexive documentary finds a positive resolution in the TV reality show. This is so because life involves the steady growth of meaning, which occurs every time reality is represented, no matter in how artificial and biased a manner (Andacht 2005). The indexical ground provides the main input for the symbolic production of the two audiovisual genres and the public meaning generated and consumed as their public meaning. The ambivalence at the heart of the self-critical documentary – its aim to represent faithfully what these directors believe its representation cannot but miss – is contrasted with the jolly assurance of the reality show – everyday life is both real and represented in a flow of signs of ever increasing complexity. This does not imply an ethical or aesthetical judgment of either genre; instead, I attempt to give a semiotic account of media reflexivity based on its general consequences according to Peirce’s pragmatic maxim (CP 5.8–9). What makes the quality documentary fascinating to its audience is precisely what makes its poetics of self-critical reflexivity flawed. In the case of the Big Brother reality show, which stands in the opposite aesthetic pole of the indexical range, what accounts for its popularity is the continuity between the signs which are closest to our complex human and animal nature, namely, the indices emitted by our bodies and the elaborate symbols into which these indices are incorporated and permanently transformed for the sake of entertainment. This is so in life as it is on the television or movie screen.

2. Self-critical reflexivity: Melancholy over peptonized, documentary reality Let us consider two approaches to self-critical reflexivity in documentaries. The first extends a critique of methodological reflexivity in the social sciences to this genre, the second is a semiotic discussion of the oral poetics of reflexivity as practiced by the contemporary documentarists Coutinho and Comolli. We will first approach reflexivity from the viewpoint of James’s dualistic account of representation as a peptonizing agent which paradoxically undoes what he aims

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to convey. We will then contrast this approach to Peirce’s synechistic construal of signs as fallible but powerful and, in the long run, reliable media for reaching the real, both in life and in film. Adopting the latter approach, we hope to be able to undo the ambivalence at the heart of self-critical film reflexivity and of its doleful, self-appointed Sisyphean task of grasping what these documentarists say cannot be grasped. In a paper on reflexivity as a method in the social sciences, Lynch criticizes the excesses to which an infatuation with this procedure may lead, particularly in constructionist analyses: Like any other effort to expose, uncover, reveal or disclose surprising, counterintuitive, and potentially unsettling matters, a reflexive analysis must be entrusted to an uncertain fate. There are no guarantees of success and no inherent advantages to “doing” reflexivity or “being” reflexive. Consequently, a project that deconstructs objective claims should be no more or less problematic, in principle, than the claims it seeks to deconstruct. [. . . ] There is no particular advantage to “being” reflexive, or “doing” reflexive analysis, unless something provocative, interesting, or revealing comes from it. (Lynch 2000: 42 – emphasis in the original)

Lynch (2000: 34) acknowledges that the remarkable academic success enjoyed at present by reflexivity is “indebted to the Enlightenment conception of self-reflection as a uniquely human cognitive capacity that enables progressive understanding of the human predicament”. This is a timely caveat against the risks involved in any contribution to scientific knowledge: an excessive reliance on reflexivity may involve a displacement from the fourth method, the scientific one, which follows the other three ways of fixing belief in Peirce’s classic epistemological statement (CP 5.358–387). In such cases, inquiry is no longer determined by the object itself, “by some external permanency, by something upon which our thinking has no effect” (CP 5.384), but by a priori convictions, by fashionable theoretical trends, or by sheer tenacity. When this happens, the outcome is no longer a scientifically valid procedure for advancing from doubt to belief. Naturally, such scientific rigor is not a requirement for documentary making, not even of the self-critical kind. Still, there is more than a passing resemblance in the procedure of these film directors to justify an analogy with scientific inquiry. Documentarists are concerned with the methodological matters involved in their work, which they make explicit in their self-critical statements on their films. Thus, I propose a partial parallelism between the reflexive methods used by social scientists and the poetics enacted by reflexive documentarists both in their films and in their reflection thereupon. From the extensive list of “variants of methodological reflexivity” drawn by Lynch (2000: 29), I will consider three reflexive methods and examine their


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approximate cinematic counterparts in the self-critical documentary EM. The parallelism brings to light a procedure which enjoys great favor in postmodern culture and in the media (Nöth 2001). First, there is the method of “philosophical self-reflection”, it is similar to Cartesian introspection, and it makes the director Coutinho ponder on his own identity as he is meeting and filming the participants of his documentary. Who am I, who are they, my film subjects, as they are talking to me in the way they do? These are some of the questions involved in this reflexive methodology, and Coutinho deals with them by attending to what he calls his “ethical problem” (cf. Caldeira 2001). He tries to resolve these doubts by becoming what I would like to describe as a caretaker or curator of the self of the Other: “As I deal with helpless people, my ethical problem in editing [this film] is the following: ‘Will I harm the life of this person?’ This is my concern. The film does not make things any better, but it can make them worse” (Caldeira 2001). Next in Lynch’s (2000: 29) taxonomy there is “methodological self-consciousness”, a common strategy in qualitative studies, which “has become a canonical feature of participant observation”. It tries to undo the distortions introduced by subjective bias in observations of reality. This is a central concern for Coutinho as he reflects on his own middle class, intellectual origin and ideology, when he sets out to film the Other, typically the underdog of shanty towns (e.g., in Babilonia 2000 or Santo Forte) or the even more destitute folks of Boca de Lixo, a film which takes place in a garbage lot where people make a living by scavenging. Coutinho’s reflexive self-consciousness manifests itself in strong self-doubts, as he reflects on the risks which haunt his filming of the real as he finds it, but not truly as it is (outside his gaze). In an interview, he explains how he takes pains not to include “picturesque images” (Caldeira 2001) in his work or how he avoids presenting the filmed materials in such a way that a common theme, a funny or a sad effect, may emerge (e.g., two or more successive episodes in which people sing, or talk about having tried to commit suicide, in EM ). As an antidote against the temptation of cinematic commonplaces, Coutinho submits himself to a strict, frugal economy of signs, and he willingly sacrifices any possible attention grabber in the final version of the film. With this aim, the director suppresses pictures which, in his view, would make his film similar to a normal TV interview as it occurs in the news or in a talk show. Neither does Coutinho allow the insertion of any extra evidence which was not originally present during the actual filming of “the encounter”, as he chooses to describe the central goal that he pursues in his films. Given that it is so simple nowadays to insert an attractive picture or sound at the editing stage, he makes a point of telling how he has to fight against this impulse.

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For example, Coutinho relates that he decided to omit pictures that two of the women in EM found significant because he had not reacted quickly enough, and had not included them at that particular point in the filming process. In allusion to the utter simplicity and care deployed by the German photographer of the 1920s famous for his “natural portraits which show the depicted people in an environment which corresponds to their individuality”7 , I have called this procedure the “August Sander effect” (Andacht 2005: 113). According to this frugal, reflexive film poetics, any later accretion does not pertain to the Other’s individuality but is a sign of the director’s will, of an arbitrary, subjective choice, and not the result of the filmed interaction between the director and the film participant. The third reflexive mode is “methodological self-criticism”. According to Lynch (2000: 29), this mode of self-criticism “often seems to follow naturally from self-consciousness and is not limited to ‘confessional’ ethnography”. In Coutinho’s poetics, this reflexive method manifests itself as a relentless selfcritical gaze which can be traced back to an influential figure in European documentary and whose importance for the ideology of the genre is acknowledged by the Brazilian director, namely, the French film critic and documentarist JeanLouis Comolli.8 In a long interview Comolli, the former editor in chief of the Cahiers de Cinéma, eschews the presumption of voyeurism for documentary art by giving a detailed account of a method which I find remarkably akin to methodological reflexivity and which also fits nicely Coutinho’s own cinematic practice: There is always voyeurism in the operation of filming. But I wouldn’t speak of voyeurism in this case. The word does not seem adequate. I’d rather say there was a great force of listening [une force d’ e´ coute]. What you can feel in that film is not just that people talk (as in television) – but it is rather that we feel the listening of someone. [. . . ] To listen is labor, it is something which involves us and transforms us as well. There is an analytical dimension in the film because the analysis is likewise the place of listening. When I say analysis, I am also speaking of transference [. . . ];9 things happen between those who are filmed and the one who is filming, and this pertain to transference, which is possible through an act of listening [écoute]. (Comolli 1995: 68)

Similar to Coutinho who rejects as a subject matter for his films the cunning talk of the bourgeois class, of those who know only too well what they are about but also what they do not want the Other to know about them,10 his ideological French mentor Comolli expresses an eloquent critique of the frightening and deadening effect of generalities, of the commonplaces of a social class, of its certainties, of the dead semiotic weight which prevents the documentary from


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exploring untrodden ground. Evidently, Comolli does not only mean that those with material and symbolic capital should be shunned as film participants but anyone who lacks spontaneity in front of the camera. The French director explains why he omitted from his 1993 documentary on office life and work11 the scenes which featured a union worker, “one of the very few men who appear in the film”. The reason was the high risk of inserting a ready-made speech into his film which would have altered the overall quality of reflexive inquiry for the viewers and for himself: “We realized that there was a ready-made discourse, a sort of wooden language (because wooden language, unfortunately, is not only with the powerful), a discourse in which there was no tremor, in which one could not feel the crisis of a subject through which one could have tried to put in crisis the one who is watching” (Comolli 1995: 78). There is still a further instance of reflexivity in Comolli’s interview. After his remarks that “listening constitutes the center of the film” (1995: 78), Comolli proposes a different, more radical kind of self-knowledge which for him is the natural upshot of the reflexive documentary genre: What I find interesting in people is that they bring me not just what had attracted me in them but also what I did not know before, what I am discovering while filming them and which is their way of thinking the film. [. . . ] Film functions always as a kind of revealing agency [une sorte de révélateur]. Cinema is not an image of things; it creates an image different from the image which you had before. That is what happens to the people who have seen and heard themselves as they had never observed themselves before. (Comolli 1995: 66, 70)

This view of the reflexive documentary as a privileged semiotic agency brings to bear a different kind of reflexivity, namely, metatheoretical reflexivity, which Lynch (2000: 29), following Berger (1963), described as “a matter of ‘stepping back’ from full engagement in cultural activity, and which is said to be emblematic of the sociological attitude”. The French and the Brazilian film makers agree in that they both seek to make a discovery, to pursue an earnest audiovisual inquiry which they pit against the already known and the already said and which they believe to be characteristic of TV news interviews. This commercial format seeks only to confirm what the journalists know well or think they know. The Interviewers only have to repeat, after some rehearsal, what is expected of them, in each situation. No epiphany may be envisaged the, and this lack, according to the documentarists, is caused by the absence of reflexivity in commercial TV, of a method which runs upon the very work that is being carried out by the camera, whose aim ought to be to problematize what otherwise threatens to become a routine, production format.

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3. On the anguish of peptonizing reality in the self-critical documentary Let us consider once more the dualistic metaphysics underlying the poetics of documentary representations of the real. William James’s approach to reality will help us to understand the remarkable ambivalence, even contradiction, between the film-makers’practice – in their films with their reflexive strategies – and their reflections on their own production. The forlorn sense of lack at the kernel film poetics derives from a basic misconstrual of the way in which representation works. When asked whether the essence of a documentary is in “very act of documenting” (Figueirôa et al. 2003: 216–17), the reply that Coutinho gives deserves to be part of any future manifesto of reflexivity since it contains the warrant of the film maker’s inclusion of the process of filming in the final documentary: We are always filming encounters. [. . . ] It is the verbal act which is extraordinary, an act provoked, catalyzed, by the moment of filming without a conscious deliberation neither from me nor from the person. To film is [. . . ] to provoke, to catalyze that moment. It is in the interaction that takes place in the filming process that a great character is born.

Just before that statement, the film director had spoken about the reflexivity of his films, which “always tell that they are films, always reveal, somehow, to the spectator, their own conditions of production” by “revealing the presence of the camera filming that encounter” (Figueirôa et al. 2003: 215). Coutinho also posits a critical contrast between his reflexive method and the one of a related but nonreflexive audiovisual genre, the TV interview: A [TV] interview tries hard to seem objective and supposedly to show the “real”. The documentary, on the contrary, is shaped by the questioning of that objectivity, of that possibility of dealing with the real. The great documentary is not only based on this presupposition but it has also the very impossibility of dealing with whatever might be called real as its issue. Faced with this “real”, every documentary, deep down, is precarious, is incomplete, is imperfect, and it is precisely from that imperfection that its perfection is born. The documentary is always a subjective view. The documentary is the very act of documenting. (Figueirôa et al. 2003: 216)

How can one of the most private human relations, namely face-to-face interaction, the “encounter” which Coutinho turns into the centerpiece of his art, be not an experience of the real? Why does Coutinho speak of a “character” to refer to the person who accepts to part of the filmed representation of life as it takes place, whether it becomes the subject matter of a documentary or not? Is the


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real indeed something alien, something that is doomed to remain incompatible with a faithful representation of it? Is the destiny of outward reality to be sadly peptonized by its representations, to be altered so that all we can hope for is only a meager, faked version of the real? The tentative answer I offer to this apparent dilemma echoes in many respects Lynch’s (2000: 42) critique of the excesses of reflexivity in social constructionist analysis. In view of its relevance to the poetics of self-critical documentary, I now propose to analyze the notion of encounter through its semiotic effects, or interpretants, which are both verbal (the reflections of the film-makers) and audiovisual (the film scenes). An example of the former is Coutinho’s description of his role as a “catalyst” of the interaction with the film participants. The latter may be exemplified by the opening pictures showing the arrival of the camera crew as an intrusion led by the director himself, at the moment when they all enter the building where they are going to live and film for a month. All interpretants of encounter construe this event as a shaping influence. However, two kinds of encounter must be distinguished on the basis of the ethical outcome of documenting the real, encounter as interference, and encounter as shock. Encounter as interference is the one which undergoes a negative evaluation; it is the uncanny echo of the Jamesian concept of representation as the peptonizing of the real. In the construal of the documentary as a mildly negative interference, encounter is the upshot of the intervention of a foreign presence which sensibly and irreversibly alters an environment, namely, the “pro-filmic” (Souriau 1953) material of the documentary. In this perspective, there is the suspicion that the filming of the real and thus the representation of the real, might peptonize it, dissolve it, so that the real can no longer be grasped as it truly is. Such is the forlorn outcome of making a documentary, according to the self-critical tradition, regardless of how honest and respectful of the Other the director may be. This filmic representation is conceived of as a construction, a frustrating substitution of the real “out there”, which the film only seems to show objectively, but which it cannot but fake, as James stated in 1906. This is the kind of encounter that Comolli has in mind, when he comments on the work of the founding father of the documentary, Robert Flaherty, the director of Nanook of the North (USA, 1922). Comolli (1995: 54) voices a skeptical, anti-objectivist view typical of the self-critical reflexive approach: “The film really produces the reality, which it seems to show by legerdemain. But it is a red herring, the bait of fiction [. . . ] in the documentary; the viewer’s belief is somehow warranted by the idea that reality exists.” In contrast to the dysphoric interpretation of the filmed encounter, the second interpretation of encounter as “shock”, as described by Comolli, evaluates the encounter as the most sought after achievement of this reflexive genre. In his

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semiotic, Peirce (CP 8.266) has employed the notion of “shock” to account for the experience of reaction, of the semiotic object, as that which offers resistance or sets limits to the tasks of the interpreter. In conclusion of his construal of the genre of the documentary as a powerful act of listening to the Other, Comolli (1995: 71) says: “As long as you listen to someone with intensity, there is always a shock. To be shocked in a film is therefore something positive. A film is made to destabilize the viewer.” Comolli also speaks of the importance of the “energy” which comes from “the real people” with whom the documentarist comes into contact. This second interpretant of encounter fulfills a goal of the documentary which does not belong to its symbolic but to its indexical dimension: “It is not what is said that touches; it is always the presence of a subject within his own utterance which will reach the other subject who is watching the film” (Comolli 1995: 76). In this interpretation, the documentary encounter functions as a record of a unique and authentic contact with the participants. What is pursued in the filming act is the shared “here and now” which engrosses the maker and the participants of the film. The purpose of the genre is to furnish a public trace of the resistance, a “shock” which the encounter with another person inevitably brings about. The two distinct interpretants of the filmed encounter are the source of an essential contradiction in the poetics of self-critical reflexivity, which documentarists are trying to resolve by means of their self-referential practice of self-disclosure through filming the act of filming and giving it a place of honor in the final work. The following reflection may illustrate their self-conscious ordeal. Coutinho recalls an occasion when he sat among the public in a rural town in northern Brazil as he watched one of his documentaries. The film was Santo Forte which includes a scene of the payment of its participants. The director tells us a revealing anecdote: “There was a young woman, who came to talk to me afterwards [and said:] ‘I enjoyed it very much. When I saw the payment scene, I thought it was all staged.’ I told her: ‘If I was able to find people who said those things for that money, I would be a genius!”’ (Caldeira 2001). Coutinho justifies the inclusion of the payment scene as follows: “For some people, it takes away a bit of the poetry, of the poetical atmosphere of that encounter. It is rather tough but real to say of that man, who was wonderful, that he was paid but not to say that he was paid to talk in front of the camera.” By the inclusion of what is normally unseen, the director has self-referentially exposed part of the backstage as a way of disclosure of the film’s influence on its subject. It is ironical, though symptomatic, of our indexical audiovisual age that the voiced suspicion of that viewer of Coutinho’s film brings out an unexpected but undeniable kinship between the earnest, self-critical reflexivity of documentaries and the light, facetious reflexivity of TV reality shows. A typical suspicion about


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what is going on, e.g., in Big Brother, is the following: all that transpires there – in both senses of the word, namely, the overall activity, and the index appeal that generates a number of existential signs in connection with the confined bodies of the participants – all is based on a pre-arranged, secret script so that nothing that is said or done in the house of the TV format ought to be taken as the real thing. Documentarists found their way out of the dilemma of their reflexive genre: the crux of the matter is not a choice between a faked represented real and the pure facts out there. It is the wholehearted dedication to the Other, the heartfelt attempt to become a curator of the Other’s self which distinguishes the indices recorded in a film in a self-critical way from those gathered by the 24/7 observation TV program: “When I am there filming, I am totally available, the people feel it. At last they will be listened, [. . . ] but they don’t even know me; when they look at me, they just see someone there who has only eyes and ears for them” (Coutinho in Figueirôa et al. 2003: 226). The fear of altering the real which the documentary seeks to represent by peptonizing or faking it is unfounded. There is no more reliable albeit fallible contact with the world than that which we attain in truth representations of it. The people whom we watch and listen to as they are passionately being listened to in Coutinho’s or in Comolli’s films do not become characters, fictional beings due to their appearing in the documentary. This representation is but one more relationship, albeit a very special one, in which the self evolves and reveals certain of its aspects whose authenticity it is our endless task to find out, as we must in our everyday relations, wherever meaning grows.

4. Conclusion: Documentary reflexivity in the age of mass indexical representation Reflexivity has been hailed as a noble component of high culture and equally as a valuable method of high theory. In the realm of culture, reflexivity serves to make explicit and to explore artistically the self-consciousness that a creators put into their works of representation. EM, for example, begins with the pictures and the noise of the film crew entering the building. In the director’s view, this moment of interference entails an irreversible alteration of normal life, an alteration hard to gauge but definitely transforming what is to be represented audiovisually. Self-critical poetics assumes that what is jeopardized by the act of filming is the objectivity of what is represented, i.e., the dwellers of the building Master and the life stories they willingly offer. Reflexivity is also part and parcel of an indexical genre placed at the aesthetic antipodes. In Big Brother, the purpose

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of self-referential practices is not to dispel the illusion of reality fostered by this program of 24/7 electronic surveillance but to enhance the entertainment value of the format. Reflexivity is central in a TV program that makes much of the opposition between what is faked or a mere self-enactment and what is the authentic semiotic transpiration given off by the bodies secluded in a social space without almost any backstage (Andacht 2004: 126). Distinct as the two are, indexical signs are at the basis of the aesthetic effect of both documentary and reality show, and this semiotic ingredient is what motivates the practices of reflexivity in them. The strategy of reflexivity used by self-critical documentarists as a way of dealing with the paradox of authentically depicting the Other by means of what they deem to be a device of falsification, namely, representation, reveals indeed the fallacy at the heart of their dualistic metaphysics. In the reflections on their own work, there is a serious, albeit theoretically flawed, attempt to destroy the illusion of the reality in their filmic representations and the narratives of everyday existence. Far from demonstrating that documentaries depict nothing but staged stories enacted by characters drawn from life, the careful work of these artists reveals, like the Peircean rainbow image, that the signs they use are a manifestation of both their producers and the shock of otherness. Once again, Lynch’s critique of unfounded uses of reflexivity falling prey to the reductionistic trap of dualism is relevant: “If reflexivity shines for nobody in particular and its illumination is controlled by no special theory, method, or subject position, it loses its metaphysical aura and becomes ordinary” (Lynch 2000: 48). Hopefully, this journey through the mirror-like land of media reflexivity that now ends has shown that relevant and valuable as reflexivity certainly is qua analytical tool in the sciences and in the arts, it is only reliable to the degree that it helps us to understand the growth, complexity, and the dynamics of sign action. If reflexivity is used simply as one of the other three ways of fixing belief described by Peirce (CP 5.377), i.e., as a means of establishing its own, self-willed superiority to other methods of understanding reality and its representation, then it will only perpetuate some current fallacies such as the impossibility of reliably representing the real in the genre of the documentary. The attempts at representing the Other do not necessarily peptonize the real, let alone fake it, as William James would have it. Instead, the indexical genre discussed here endlessly translates the aspects of the reality which it represents in qualitative, factual, and general ways. Thus, documentaries do reveal aspects of the real in a way still little understood but which should not be obscured by a reflexive analyses which accounts for everything which is shown by these kinds of representation as a fiction or a mere fabrication.


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Notes 1. The present work was done with the support of a Research Grant of CNPq in Brazil and is part of the ongoing research “A representa¸ca˜ o do real na e´ poca de sua espetaculariza¸ca˜ o midiática”. 2. For the basic analytical notions concerning these indexical genres see Andacht 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005. 3. For simplicity’s sake and to avoid a certain redundancy in Allen’s notion of “selfreflexivity”, I will refer to this phenomenon throughout this work as reflexivity. 4. See Colapietro (1998) for a fine account of this position in postmodern thinking as opposed to Peircean semiotic realism. 5. Every mention of sign in this work should be taken as synonymous with representation. 6. According to a 1912 edition of the Webster Dictionary to peptonize is a transitive verb which means “To convert into peptone; to digest or dissolve by means of a proteolytic ferment; as, peptonized food”. 7. August Sander, in The Encyclopedia of Photography (1984). http://www.masters-ofphotography.com/S/sander/sander2.html (01.12.04). 8. There is a reference to Comolli as an authority figure for Coutinho in an interview (2003: 217). 9. Reference is made here to Comolli’s 1993 film La vraie vie (dans les bureaux). 10. “I don’t make films on the rich, middle class, because one can’t do that. They defend themselves, they are the specialists. I’m not interested in talking to a specialist, because they have an image to defend. Then the specialist will certainly not say things which may cause trouble for him, every specialist is boring in that sense” (Coutinho in Caldeira 2001). 11. See note 10 above for full reference.

References Allen, Jeanne 1977 Self-reflexivity in documentary. Ciné-Tracts 1(2): 37–43. Andacht, Fernando 2002 Big brother te está mirando. La irresistible atracción de un reality show ´ global. In: Paiva Raquel (ed.), Etica, Cidadania e Imprensa, 63–100. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad. 2003 Uma aproxima¸ca˜ o anal´ıtica do formato televisual do reality show Big Brother. Galáxia. Revista Transdisciplinar de Comunica¸cao, ˜ Semiótica, Cultura 6: 245–264.

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Fight, love and tears: An analysis of the reception of Big Brother in Latin America. In: Ernest Mathijs and Janet Jones (eds.), Big Brother International, 123–139. London: Wallflower Press. 2005 Duas variantes da representa¸ca˜ o do real na cultura midiática: O exorbitante Big Brother Brasil e o circunspeto Edif´ıcio Máster. Contemporânea: Revista de Comunica¸cao ˜ e Cultura 3(1): 95–122. Caldeira, João Bernardo 2001 Entrevista a Eduardo Coutinho. Curta Ocurta, http://www.curtaocurta.com.br/entrevista 0201.asp (03.06.01). Carroll, Noël 1996 From real to reel: Entangled in nonfiction film. In: Noël Carroll (ed.), Theorizing the Moving Image, 224–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colapietro, Vincent 1998 Natural processes and historical practices. Semiotica 119: 105–55. Comolli, Jean-Louis 1995 Les questions de cinema de Jean-Louis Comolli. (Interview by René Prédal, Youri Deschamps, and Delphine Goupil). CinémAction 76: 48–79. Figueirôa, Alexandre, Cláudio Bezerra and Yvana Fechine 2003 O documentário como encontro. Entrevista com o cineasta Eduardo Coutinho. Galáxia. Revista Transdisciplinar de Comunica¸cao, ˜ Semióti-ca, Cultura 6: 213–232. Hacking, Ian 1999 The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardwick, Charles S. (ed.) 1977 Semiotic and Significs: Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, William [1906] 1963 Pragmatism and humanism. In: Pragmatism and Other Essays, 101–117. New York: Washington Square Press. Lynch, Michael 2000 Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. Theory, Culture, and Society 17(3): 26–54. Mattos, Carlos A. 2003 Eduardo Coutinho. O homem que caiu na real. Santa Maria da Feira: Edi¸coes ˜ do Festival de Cinema de Santa Maria da Feira. Nöth, Winfried 2001 A auto-referência na perspectiva da teoria dos sistemas e na semiótica. Revista de Comunica¸cao ˜ e Linguagens 29: 13–28.


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Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1958 Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – Quoted as CP. Ransdell, Joseph 1986 On Peirce’s concept of iconic sign. In: Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld and Roland Posner (eds.), Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, 51–74. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Sander, August 1984 The Encyclopedia of Photography, http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/sander/sander2.html (01.12.04). Santaella, Lucia 2004 O método anticartesiano de C. S. Peirce. São Paulo: UNESP. Souriau, Etienne 1953 L’univers filmique. Paris: Flammarion.

The old in the new: Forms and functions of archive material in the presentation of television history on television Joan K. Bleicher

In my research on the history of self-representation in the media, I have studied self-reference with respect to genres, modes of representation, and sign systems, and I have shown that self-reference is relevant to media reception. Television tends to present its own history in its own programs. By means of its specific visual language, the medium passes on its own history to the memory of its audience.

1. The construction of collective memory by the media Long before the present strong impact of the media, history and narration had been interconnected as collective memories. Historians such as Reinhart Kosselleck (1990) and Hayden White (1990) have argued that history must be transformed into stories to be transferred to individual and collective memories. Television has been able to make use of a long tradition of visual and narrative presentations of history. By means of stories, individual memories are connected to the collective memory of social groups. The strong visual impact of the blockbuster movies testifies to the re-shaping of individual and collective memories of historical events in the media. In contrast to film, television is much more concerned with constructing social relations between the individual and society. Gerbner et al. have described this social function of television as follows: Television is a centralized system of storytelling. Its drama, commercials, news, and other programs bring a relatively coherent system of images and messages into every home. [. . . ] Television has become the primary common source of socialization and everyday information (mostly in the form of entertainment) of otherwise heterogeneous population. (Gerbner et al. 1986: 18)

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Self-reference is closely related to, and intertwined with, intermediality. One of the strong points of television in its competition with other media is in its ability to visualize history. In contrast to books, which lack pictures and the auditory channel, and unlike the way archive material is presented on the internet, television can transform history into stories which convey a live experience of past events. The role of the media in society is constructed by the media system itself. By continuously referring and adding to the world view of others, the media centralize such perspectives and are at the same time the source of emotional experience.

2. The influence of television modes of presentation on individual and collective memory One of the functions of language is to create memory. Television makes special use of its visual language to create its own collective memory of media imagery in combination with traditional methods of story telling.The story telling devices of television serve to organize historical events along a chain of actions guided by the intentions of special persons. Media theorists such as Jan and Aleida Assmann (2003) have shown that the concepts of “monument” and “repetition” are fundamental to the construction of historical consciousness. Monuments serve to visualize history in architectural space; repetition is a method of memorizing events which are narrated again and again. Both methods of historical memorization are used to construct history in the current formats of historytainment. Monuments are visual landmarks, signs of historical significance, which make use of the principle of repetition in space. Their everlasting visibility marks their cultural relevance. The historical event or personality is represented by the monument to be anchored in the collective memory. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, is an example of how a monument can represent history. The scene has become an integral part of many programs dealing with the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nostalgic television shows make use of fragments of narratives to create pieces of memory. Short film strips open time windows on television history without any relation to other genres, programs, contents, or other developments in media history. Such fragments, sometimes combined with slow motion presentation, serve to highlight the significance of a specific historical moment, which may thus be presented as a scenic monument in the long sequence of past events. The principle of repetition guides the viewers’ orientation, and the

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unwritten rule of the program, “seen forever, known forever”, seems to serve as the key to effective communication. Historytainment shows make use of fragments of historical memory by focusing on everyday objects popular in the past, such as cars, toys, furniture, or clothes. Various discourses of national history are combined. In its shaping of the history of the GDR, for example, sports events of the past are used as elements in the creation of a GDR identity, and winners of past Olympic Games, such as Katharina Witt, are stylized as national heroes. The focus is on popular culture, not on politics, and the past is used as a source of present entertainment.

3. General modes of representing history in television genres It’s all about entertainment, and you know it. (Tom Kummer) The representation of history on television involves self-reference insofar as the means of presenting history are historical television documents and history includes the history of television. In the evolution of narrative media, television, especially the documentary genre, has emerged as the predominant format of visualizing history since it is able to use its own archive material in repetitive presentations. Documentaries dealing with historical topics combine elements of visual presentation with forms of oral narration which include commentaries as well as personal observation. The messages from archive material of diverse origins are presented as “viewing strips”, a term coined by Horace Newcomb (1994) to describe the visual fragments which television makes use of. The construction of history on television follows a stereotypical pattern which can be found in documentaries as well as in show formats; it is characterized by the stereotypical sequence of the following four elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

viewing strip from archive material with voice-over narration, oral narration by eye witnesses, comments by eye witnesses or experts (historians), viewing strip from archive material.

In general, documentaries use this stereotypical sequence in their presentation of history as television history, the history of daily life, and of pop culture in new formats. Recently, diverse program formats of historytainment have grown in popularity in German television. A typical example is “Die Burg” [The Castle],

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ProSieben, in which well-known or less well-known celebrities are obliged to live a medieval lifestyle. Many formats have made use of fragments of archive material to convey nostalgic memories, especially in shows involving the history of the GDR.

4. Narrative presentation of history in information formats My studies of TV programs have revealed that narration has become increasingly relevant as a means of presenting history on television (cf. Bleicher 2003). Since the 1990s, documentaries on episodes from the history of mankind or documentaries dealing with epochs such as the Third Reich in Germany have been included in the news and magazine formats in charge of presenting current events. In addition to documentaries, there are the so-called “living history formats”, in which television uses its own forms of narration in the presentation of history as the present-day experience of a serial world. Docutainment formats present episodes from natural history such as the genealogy of the dinosaur. In such documentaries, information is conveyed by means of narration, and history is presented as a construction which can be segmented into chains of events connected by the principle of cause and effect. Historical facts and elements of fiction are continually mixed up. In this way, new documentary formats do not focus on what actually happened but on what could have happened in the past. The result is counterfactual history as Guido Knopp, editor of the history department in the CNN network has called it, the presentation of “what we have been spared”. Archive material is used to represent what did not happen in order to convey a sense of collective relief to those who imagine themselves victims of history. On December 1, 1998, for example, the German public television network ZDF aired the documentary “The Third World War”. Real pictures of real events related events which had never taken place. In this fictional presentation pseudo-historical monuments were set up as props to convey the impression of historical authenticity, and facts were used to stage fiction. Such are the mixtures of information, parody, and entertainment in diverse formats of historytainment which testify to the general shift from fact to fiction on television. Not only has the borderline between fact and fiction become blurred but the differences between television genres are also disappearing. Various “live history formats” have been using features of film and television genres as props or structural elements in their presentations of real-life stories. In diverse entertainment programs, staging is assuming the role which archive material used to play in documentaries. Similar to the aforementioned documentaries, the

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show formats of historytainment make use of elements of personalization. A frequent device is the palimpsestic overlay of pictures of media stars featuring as commentators on strip scenes running in the background of the television screen. By such means, the past is represented in a subjective and occasionally even nostalgic light; sometimes, there is even some ironic distancing when new perspectives on well-known material are presented. In Germany, public television has offered a mixture of documentaries with traditional film genres, like heimatfilms, the sentimental film genre in idealized regional settings of the 1950s, or series such as “Das Schwarzwaldhaus 1902” [The Black Forest House 1902], “Abenteuer 1900 – Leben im Gutshaus” [Adventure 1900 – Life in the Manor House], both ARD, or “Die harte Schule der 50er Jahre” [Tough School of the 1950s], ZDF. Reality show formats such as “Die Alm” [The Alpine Pasture] or “Die Burg” (see above), have presented a mixture of movies, shows, and computer games in which the viewers could participate via telephone to substitute members of the cast like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. By such devices, television transmutes into computer game and can also meet the demands of the new competitor in the media system, the internet.

5. The influence of television on social discourse Television discourse is in many ways related to other modes of discourse in modern society. In television archives, many kinds of discourse of all periods of the history of the medium are assembled. From the perspective of discourse theory, such archives can be described as systems of forming and transforming existing assertions (Foucault 1981: 188). How does the highly influential medium of television influence its audience when presenting its archive material from the past? Television programs aim at mirroring the present-day world in a complex system of narratives, and its never-ending flow of narration keeps transforming the present into past and the past into the present.

6. Time spheres of history on television The presentation of history on television concerns two time spheres, the shortterm history of very recent events and the long-term history of events of past decades. Examples of short-term historical shows on German television are “The Best of. . . ”, “Zapping”, “Switch”, “Kalkofes Mattscheibe” [K.’s Tube], or “TV Total”. Among the long-term historical shows are “Die 100 nervigsten TV

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Shows” [The 100 Most Annoying TV Shows], ProSieben, even though this show mainly focuses on more recent shows, “Kenn ich – die witzigste Serienshow” [I Know – The Funniest Series Show], Kabel 1, “Schwarzwaldhaus 1902”, or “Abenteuer 1900 – Leben im Gutshaus” (see above). Short-term history is evidently presented in show and reality formats, whereas long-term history appears in hybrid formats of reality and fiction genres such as the live history series.

7. Self-presentation of television and the collective memory of society Based on the above observations, let us now reflect on the difference between self-presentation and reality presentation on television. Luhmann (1996) has agued that entertainment programs construct a limited world of its own existing apart from the so-called objective reality while the program is on the air. Baudrillard (1978) went further with his claim that media reality creates a separation between the individual and the so-called objective reality. The visible reality of the shows implies the invisibility of the objective reality. Thus, it seems to be an important task for media research to analyze the principles on which media reality is founded. According to Foucault (1981), archives create world views from existing resources of collective memory. Archive material presented on television staging history certainly shapes the collective memory of our times. Television has assumed the role of a collective archive of society. Against the threat of its most recent competitor, the internet, television is trying everything to maintain its central position in the media system.

8. Contexts and economic strategies The presentation of history on television can be studied in three respects, (1) economic contexts and strategies, (2) general modes of presentation, and (3) programming trends, especially in program formats such as nostalgic shows or ranking shows. As far as the economic contexts and strategies are concerned, the numbers of channels in the German media scene have been increasing since the 1990s, climaxing in an excess of verbal and pictorial content. In order to attract and keep the viewers’ attention, network marketing has to develop unique selling propositions, for example by promising experience values in slogans such as “Powered

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by Emotion”, Sat.1, or “Total Entertainment”, ProSieben. For the realization of the goals of such slogans, programs are needed to fulfill the expectations they create. From the perspective of media companies and networks, archive material is a source for the reproduction of existing programs with material almost free of charge. One market-orientated form of reproduction is the presentation of network history in documentaries and shows. Television past is used as a brand image to sell the present programming to advertising companies as well as to the viewers. Program history and program marketing are closely interlinked in a process of telling and selling.

9. The archive as the source of self-reference on television In my recent research, I have been investigating the relevance of self-reference in the domain of television entertainment. One of my special interests has been to study the strategies and forms of self-reference as methods of reproducing and hence renewing existing entertainment values. The present article focuses on the archive as the source and material basis of these various formats. The archive as the collective memory of television is used both for the reproduction and continuous flow of attractive images. But there are many other functions.

10. Looking back in anger: Short-time TV history as a form of media criticism The comedy shows “Kalkofes Mattscheibe” [K.’s Tube], premiered in 1994, and since 2002 “Kalkofe Sport” (ARD, since 2003 ProSieben) present highlights of the worst moments on television programs during the past few weeks. The television studio is used as a stage for television criticism. “Kalkofes Mattscheibe” mainly presents and restages original viewing strips. Oliver Kalkofe, dressed in the same costume as the original television announcer, reporter, or show master, steps forward and parodies, by exaggeration as well as commentaries, what has been shown before on television. In this way, he generates a palimpsest rewriting the old visual material with his verbal attacks and his impressive body. Combining archive material with his own comments, Kalkofe uses elements of humor known from television comedy as well as the aggressiveness of his critical comments to reveal the absurdity of the situation he satirizes (cf. Lambernd 2000: 37). His acting and talking inserted into the original scenario is in

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sharp contrast with the message of the program he satirizes and its original production values. The recycling of the original material deconstructs its intended meaning by means of the critical comments which served to replace it. Similar forms of combining archive material with critical comments characterize the comedy shows “TV Total”, ProSieben, and “Krüger sieht alles” [K. Watches/Sees Everything], RTL. Viewing strips have their origins in diverse formats of different networks. In their commentaries, the comedians Stefan Raab and Mike Krüger criticize and sometimes even insult the original programs from which their viewing strips are taken. Such viewing strips function as quotations in a more general television scheme of self-criticism (cf. Bleicher 2005). Considering the current phase of transformation of television, such forms of critical presentation may mark the end of an old, and the hailing of a new kind of program. Kalkofe’s criticism of traditional show formats has prepared the audience for new kinds of reality shows, which have meanwhile become a new focus of Kalkofe’s critical eye.

11. Program history as network history? From the perspective of media economy, nostalgic shows serve the purpose of constructing a memory network related to the collective memory. The principle of chronology of program history is abandoned in favor of a system representing isolated moments of specific emotionalized event as well as experiences related to a network. Such emotions are essential to a network marketing based on slogans like “Powered by Emotion” (Sat. 1). Networks create their own canons of what they consider to be the important events in television history. Even the time of the event presented in a program is closely related to the history of the network presenting the program. Self-reference in television is not restricted to the presentation of television history on television. In all historytainment shows, television uses its own archive, its own modes of presentation as a rich source of collective and individual memories. In this way, television tries to establish itself as the collective memory of society.

12. Forms and functions of nostalgic show formats The presentation of history in new entertaining formats overwrites traditional construction forms of objective history with its entertaining reproduction of historical events of daily life. History is evaluated in terms of nostalgia or also in negative terms, as in “Die 100 nervigsten TV Shows” (see above).

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Nostalgic show formats, which started to spread in diverse programs during the last decade, create a connection between the collective memory of television with the viewers’ subjective memory. The additional element of interactivity created by cross-media relations is of special importance. On the webpage of the network ProSieben, for example, viewers can vote for the most annoying TV show. Such forms of connecting the two media to create interactivity allow the extension of the specific media aesthetics of television with the one of internet. Francesco Casetti and Roger Odin (2002) have described interactive show concepts as the essential difference between the old and the new television. Traditional forms of intentional communication have been replaced by the introduction of interactive processes: In paleotelevision, the program flow [. . . ] presents itself as a continuous sequence of programs each of them functioning according to a specific communicative contract. [. . . ] Neo-television breaks with the educational communication model of paleo-television. One of the most obvious aspects of this change is the explicit refusal of all forms of intentional communication as well as the introduction of interactive processes. (Casetti and Odin 2002: 312–14)

The shows that present history in negative terms evoke elements of both visual and verbal memory in a nostalgic vein accompanied by ironic commentaries. The commentators are voice-over narrators, VIPs shown in a blue screen studio while watching the archive material that is being presented, or host in dialogue with prominent guests in front of a studio audience.

13. Strategies of creating humorous effects There are various devices of creating humor on self-referential television. Parody creates humor by exaggerating the messages of everyday television programs. In “Die 100 nervigsten TV Shows”, for example, commentaries are substituted by verbal description of the visual material being presented. Redundancy caused by a host is another source of humor. The contrast between the content of the original message and its actual presentation with ironic comments is the source of humor in historytainment. VIPs chatting about old TV shows fraternize with the audience in their nostalgic reminiscences of past times on television, selfironically in mutual agreement about the missing quality of the television shows of former times. Self-evaluation is a popular variant of humorous self-reference. In “Die 100 nervigsten TV Shows”, television history is evaluated by jurors in the guise of the choir of ancient Greek drama. Its members are VIPs known from

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other television shows of the same network. The presentation and criticism of “bad shows” in the past suggests news about what will be a “good show” in the future. Using ranking numbers, subjective comments of the past are changed into objective evaluations. Archive material acquires new meaning when old pictures are accompanied by funny or ironic commentaries. The resulting contrast between the original meaning and the message of its ironic commentary is another source of humor. Quite often, such ironical commentaries serve to distort the original message, for example, by offering a sexual reading of the viewing strip completely absent from the original. By such means, new meanings are generated for no other purpose than attracting the viewers’ attention.

14. Conclusion The trends in the development of contemporary television formats described in this paper can be related to general changes in programming which date back to the 1990s. Television, which used to present itself as a window to the world in the 1950s, has gradually transmuted to a mirror of its own world construction during the past decade. The events presented in the programs are no longer sought in the world outside the medium but taken from the world of television itself, and instead of supplying forms of knowledge, television is supplying forms of experience in programs offering emotional involvement. Self-reference on television is of special relevance to the theory of media effects. Faced with the uncertainties of current social transformations, the audience demands paths of nostalgic escape into a safe past. This public demand is met by the offer of media formats relating the past to the present. History as a way of conveying meaning and form to bygone events is used as a source of orientation in the past and in the present; it is a way of structuring the present which offers orientation in many spheres of life. References Assmann, Aleida 2003 Erinnerungsräume. Formen undWandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnis. Munich: Beck. Baudrillard, Jean 1978 Agonie des Realen. Berlin: Merve. Bleicher, Joan Kristin 2003 Darstellungsformen von Mediengeschichte im Fernsehen. Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 51(3–4): 366–281.

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Grenzgänge zwischen Kritik und Humor. Fernsehkritik im Fernsehen. In: Michael Beuthner and Stephan Weichert (eds.), Die Selbstbeobachtungsfalle. Grenzen und Grenzgänge des Medienjournalismus, 127– 146. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Casetti, Francesco and Roger Odin 2002 Vom Paläo- zum Neo-Fernsehen. In: RalfAdelmann, Jan-Otmar-Hesse and Judith Keilbach (eds.), Grundlagentexte zur Fernsehwissenschaft. Theorie – Geschichte – Analyse, 282–311. Constance: UVK. Foucault, Michel 1981 Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. – Engl. 1990. Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli 1986 Living with television: The dynamics of the cultivation process. In: Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (eds.), Perspectives on Media Effects, 17–40. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kosselleck, Reinhart and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (eds.) 1990 Geschichte, Ereignis und Erzählung. (Politik und Hermeneutik 5.) Heidelberg: Fink. Lambernd, Jochen 2000 Die sieben “As” humoristischer Attraktivität. Grimme 1: 35–38. Luhmann, Niklas 1996 Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Newcomb, Horace and Paul Hirsch 1994 Television as a cultural forum. In: Horace Newcomb (ed.), Television: The Critical View. New York: Oxford University Press. White, Hayden 1990 Die Bedeutung der Form. Erzählstrukturen in der Geschichtsschreibung. Frankfurt: Fischer.

There’s no business without show-business: Self-reference as self-promotion Karin Pühringer and Gabriele Siegert

In this paper on self-reference as self-promotion in the media, we are not arguing from a linguistic point of view but rather from a communication studies, or more precisely, from a media economics perspective. Our interest is not only to determine the many forms and varieties of self-thematization in the media but also to examine the responsible economic agents and their motives in this context. Our characterization of the media is a classical one. The media are the journalistic output providing topics for public communication. We agree with Siegfried J. Schmidt (1996) that the concept of media comprises a variety of phenomena, such as materials of communication and information (e.g., newspapers), organizations producing, supplying, and distributing the media (e.g., publishing houses or broadcast stations), and often also this media system as a whole. According to this concept, thematization occurs in quite different domains of the media. Thus, self-reference or self-thematization in the media concerns media organization, that is, the newspapers or journals, the radio or television stations and programs, as well as the media system as a whole, and these various manifestations of the media mean rather different forms and formats.

1. Background The media have become increasingly self-referential. In advertising, for example, self-thematization and self-promotion are constitutive elements of the medium. Media pages in newspapers, commercial spots or ads for media products, TV parodies, and more and more program trailers testify to the omnipresence of self-reference in the media. It is a commonplace that we live in a media and information society. Hence, the media (and its supply, i.e., programs and actors) are significant in all spheres of social life. If it is the function of the media to monitor society and to reflect this task, self-thematization is a direct consequence of this function because by observing themselves, the media observe a significant sector of social life.

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With their critical eye, the media strengthen the decision-making skills and the citizens’responsibilities. In many important ways, the media act as mediators for authorities by informing the population about what is happening in the world. In his study of recipient-ratings on media coverage, Thomas Quast (1999) found out that 96.5% of the persons asked quote audience-oriented media as their source of knowledge and 63.7% report them to be their primary source. In other words, almost everything we know about the media, we know from the media. Different forms of self-reference evince different possibilities of development on the market. Promotional types of self-thematization, especially in the form of house ads (see below), benefit from the current general conditions of media markets. As far as media firms are concerned, the much discussed economization and commercialization of the media entail a general engagement in activities aiming at profit and profit-orientation. The media want to make money in the first place. Return on investment (ROI) measures how much profit an owner makes relative to the amount of investment required to make that return. Firms seek the highest possible return on investment. Thus, when a media company compares two competing investment options, it usually invests in the one with the higher ROI potential. Furthermore, media firms are highly competitive about audience favor and advertising investments. Although strong competition cannot be found at all levels, economic pressure has consequences. Media firms do not only want to produce economically; they also tend to be active as to marketing measures. The cost orientation calls for selfreference. Using archive materials, for example, is a means of cost saving, since the pictures need not be bought elsewhere (cf. Bleicher 1994, 1999 and this vol.). Even though media companies make great efforts to distinguish themselves from their competitors and communicate in which respect they differ from them, it is not easy to express these differences, especially when products and performances are very similar. Furthermore, media companies are often accused of differentiating their own products insufficiently from other products. When media companies evince too little product differentiation, only the strategy of communication remains as a means of accentuating the existing distinctions in programming and the resultant added value for the consumers. Brand identification is another important potential for differentiation. Consumers tend to develop brand loyalty over time, and therefore, having a clearly defined brand is a long term advantage. According to Jacobs and Klein (2002), media managers began only in the mid-1990s to develop distinct brand identities in order to differentiate their stations, networks, and publications from those of their competitors. Due to the information overload in present-day information society, attention has become a rare commodity, so that it is decisive for the survival of competitors to attract as much consumers’ attention as possible. The situation is further

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aggravated by a basic media economic principle: media products are experience and credence goods. Therefore, the recipients’ possibilities of evaluating media supply are restricted.The quality of an entertainment show, for example, can only be assessed after watching the program; the evaluation of the quality of a news program is practically impossible as long we know nothing else about the events reported in it.Thus, the consumers’experience of the product gives only a limited possibility of deciding which channel or program to select. For this reason, media organizations offer, as an alternative, information about the quality of their products, for example by signaling and creating expectations, trust, and credibility. To sum up, due to the economic circumstances and the professionalism in the methods of media marketing, it has become crucial for media companies to introduce a mix of communication instruments including direct advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, trade fairs, or exhibitions as well as sponsoring and event marketing. Our interest in this study lies in widely used formats, such as media house advertising (see below), cross-promotion, media PR (public relations), or editorial references. These formats are not always clearly defined and they differ considerably as to their levels and strategies of self-thematization. Figure 1 represents these levels, in the form of a scale extending from low to high degrees of self-reference (Siegert and Pühringer 2001: 255).

Figure 1. Self-thematization in selected instruments of communication

Depending on the stage of the development of the station and its programs, the instruments of communication vary. In the company’s phase of foundation when its brand is still relatively unknown, more external media will be used. In subsequent phases of development, the company tends to use more frequently house ads or editorial references. In its period of consolidation, advertising spending can be reduced because the company can use its own media as vehicle for advertising. Branding, a key concept in media economics, is used by the media companies as a way of creating identity awareness in connection with the content of the products. Most audiences and most advertisers recognize brands, and for this reason, larger media companies have invested billions of dollars to develop and acquire the different brands on the market (Albarran 2004: 300).

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House ads are advertisements which the company positions in its own media supply, in spots for its own brand, programs, shows, titles, stars, show masters, or news casters. House ads are self-referential insofar as advertisers, the advertising vehicle or medium, and the object of advertising are, or belong to, one and the same media. As Karstens and Schütte (1999: 109) demonstrate, television is both a media product and a media for advertising this product. The same can be said of most other media. Among the various forms of self-reference by means of house ads, two types can be distinguished, the more informative ones and the more manipulative ones. Station promos evidently have a strong promotional character, but it is more difficult to describe, for example, the forms of self-reference of trailers and teasers. Their function, by the way, is similar to newspaper editorials. Trailers, teasers as well as newspaper editorials inform and give orientation, and they are also rather manipulative. According to Siegert and Pühringer (2001: 261–262), two subtypes of house ads can be distinguished, house ads with program-reference and house ads without program reference. Forms of house ads with direct program reference are: – teaser before and after commercial breaks; references to the following program, to commercials, or to other forms of intermission – teaser in split screen, e.g., during end titles; visual/verbal (voice over) reference to next, daily, monthly, or other programs – episode or serial trailer: reference to next serial or next newscast – traditional program announcement (separate from the program) – trailer: has replaced traditional program announcement announcing daily or weekly program – horizontal trailer: weekly or monthly thematic orientation (no particular program) Forms of house ads without direct program-reference are: – passage: separates program from commercials before and after breaks – station promos: image advertising to create awareness, identity, and relationship – merchandising spots: advertising for articles or services of the broadcast station – event advertising for organized or co-organized events of various kinds (e.g., cultural or sporting events) – consumer invitation for consumer participation: “give us a call”, “visit our website”, etc.


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2. Research questions According to the results of previous studies, it remains unclear to which degree house ads lead to a fragmentation of the TV program in which they are inserted. Our studies are hence guided by the following research questions: RQ1: Which house ads are presented by the different broadcast stations? RQ2: To what extent are house ads introduced on daily TV program? RQ3: Did the frequency and features of house ads change between 2000 and 2005?

3. Methods of Study 1 and Study 2 Study 1: In 1999/2000, in a first content analytic study, we examined approximately 240 hours of TV program of twice 24 hours from a midweek day and a weekend day of the following television stations: ORF 1, ORF 2 (two Austrian public-service broadcasters), ARD (Germany, public-service broadcaster), RTL and ProSieben (two German commercial broadcasters). Study 2: The second study of 2005 was a 250 hour content analysis study of the program of eight Swiss TV stations, the public-service stations SF 1 and SF 2 (German), TSR 1 (French), and TSI 1 (Italian), and the commercial stations Tele Züri (German), Leman Bleu (French), Tele Ticino (Italian), and Sat.1 Switzerland (from Germany with Swiss license). This research was commissioned and financed by the Swiss Federal Office for Communication (BAKOM).

4. Findings of Study 1 In Study 1 we found 1,365 units of content with self-referential features outside the actual program, which can be divided into units with and units without program reference (Figure 2). The self-referential breaks and intermissions in commercial broadcasters are between two and three times as many as with public-service broadcasters (ORF 1, ORF 2, ARD). However, there is no major difference between public-service and commercial television stations as far as the use of form of self-reference without program-reference is concerned. In all of the TV station analyzed in this study there was a high frequency of program related forms of self-reference. The reason behind these findings is the stations’ increasing effort to attract regular and loyal costumers for their programs in the future.

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Figure 2. Self-referential units with and without program reference (n = 1,365)

Based on the distinction between self-reference in house ads with and without direct program reference introduced above, the study adopted the following coding categories in its analysis of the units of self-reference: trailer and teaser, trailer and teaser in split-screen, opener (the former program announcement), passage, image and media spot (station promo), merchandising spot, and consumer invitation (cf. Figure 3).

Figure 3. Dimensions and frequencies of self-referential house ads (n = 1,365)

As shown in Figure 3, the most frequently used types of self-referential house ads are the trailer and teaser forms, followed by the passages. The frequency of the indirectly program referential teasers and trailers reflect the stations’ efforts to address the recipients’ memories and develop their program loyalty. The frequency of the directly program referential passages reflects the (still)


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high number of commercial breaks of the traditional kind whose beginning and end the passages indicate. The number of almost every type of self-referential house ads is significantly higher for commercial television stations. For example, RTL broadcasts nearly four times as many teasers and trailers than ORF 1 (240 to 67) or six times as many passages than ORF 2 (132 to 21).

5. Findings of Study 2 In Study 2 we found 2,713 units of content with characteristics of self-reference outside the actual program. The results are similar to the findings of Study 1, but Study 2 also investigated television broadcasts themselves. We found 1,039 selfreferential units within the television programs but for reasons of comparability with Study 1, the diagram of the frequency of the self-referential units in Study 2 (Figure 4) excludes the latter instances of self-referential advertising within the programs. With the exception of SF 2, the second German speaking public-service broadcasting channel, the results of Study 2 show that there has been a reversal of the trend documented in Study 1: In 2005, seven of eight stations show a higher frequency of self-referential units of content without program reference and a lower frequency of units with program reference, with the peak of Tele Züri, the commercial local TV station in the Zürich region.

Figure 4. Frequency of self-referential units with and without program-reference (n = 2,713)

The programs of the commercial television stations evince 583 units with program reference and 876 units without program reference. The public-service

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stations evince 519 units with program reference and 735 units without program reference (Figure 4). Distinguishing the same coding categories as Figure 3 (of Study 1), Figure 5 shows that the most frequently used types of self-referential house ads found in the sample of 2,713 units are once again the trailer/teaser and the passage.

Figure 5. Dimensions and frequencies of self-referential house ads (n = 2,713)

Figure 6 shows the development in the frequency of the use of the various forms of self-referential and self-promotional house advertising and allows the comparison of the frequencies of Study 1 (1999–2000) with those of Study 2 (2005). The data concerning the relative frequencies testify to a decrease of the trailer and teaser type of self-reference and an increase of the passage type of self-reference or self-promotion without program reference from 2000 to 2005.

Figure 6. Types of house ads in Study 1 and in Study 2

What are the answers to our three research questions in the face of these findings? RQ1 raised the question which types of self-referential house ads are used by the different broadcast stations. Answers are given in Figure 3 and Figure 5


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where eight different types are distinguished, trailer and teaser, trailer and teaser in split-screen, opener (the former program announcement), passage, image and media spot (station promo), merchandising spot, and consumer invitation. Answers to RQ2 concerning the frequency according to which the house ads are introduced in daily television programs can equally be found in Figures 3 to 5 and in the ensuing comments. Let us now propose answers to RQ3 concerning the development of the features of self-reference in the house ads between 2000 and 2005. Despite the differences in the development of the self-referential house ads between 2000 and 2005 in the stations investigated in both studies, the similarities remained relatively stable as far as the comparison between public-service and commercial broadcasters are concerned. Our findings indicated a number of interesting new trends in the use and the structural features of house ads of 2005 as compared to those of 2000. For instance, the types of house ads changed from 2000 to 2005. In 2000, trailer and teaser was the most frequent format. In 2005 it was displaced by the passage type, and this development confirms, as discussed above, the trend to a more segmented and structured television program. Overall, there has been a significant increase in the form and frequency of self-referential house advertising with the purpose of self-promotion. In 2000, an average of 5.7 units were identified in any of the 240 hours of broadcasting investigated in Study 1. In 2005, the weighted average rose to 10.3.

6. Conclusions The media play an important part in our society, addressing citizens as consumers and customers and providing a major source of knowledge. The media compete for the audience as well as for advertising investments, and the resulting pressures, among others, have consequences for the structures of the daily program. The two studies presented in this paper have given evidence that the pressure for commercial television stations is stronger than the one for public-service stations. For this reason, commercial stations have a more fragmented program structure and there has been a significant increase in their self-referential promotional content with the goal of creating brand awareness to make brands distinctive. Study 2 has also shown an increase in the frequency of program-integrated forms of self-reference for the purpose of self-promotion. Like in similar general trends in advertising, this increase reflects the great efforts made to attract the consumers’ attention and to avoid their channelhopping during program breaks. The two studies presented in this paper do not pretend to give a complete picture of the many ways in which broadcasters have become self-referential,

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nor do they claim to offer conclusive evidence about current and future trends in television, not even as far self-promotional house ads are concerned. Nevertheless, the paper may have given an instructive example and informative empirical evidence of the role and the increasing importance of self-reference in the media.

References Albarran, Alan B. 2004 Media economics. In: John D. Downing, Denis McQuail, Philip Schlesinger and Ellen Wartella (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies, 291–307. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bleicher, Joan Kristin 1994 Das Fernsehen im Fernsehen. Zur Rolle von selbstreferentiellen Sendungen im Programm. Medien + Erziehung 36(5): 295–299. 1999 Unterhaltung in der Endlosschleife oder wie das Fernsehen mit sich selbst spielt. In: Michael Latzer, Ursula Maier-Rabler, Gabriele Siegert and Thomas Steinmaurer (eds.), Die Zukunft der Kommunikation. Phänomene und Trends in der Informationsgesellschaft, 115–128. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. Jacobs, Ron D. and Robert A. Klein 2002 Cable marketing and promotion. In: Susan T. Eastman, Douglas A. Ferguson and Robert A. Klein (eds.), Promotion and Marketing for Broadcasting, Cable, and the Web, 127–151. Boston, MA: Focal Press. Karstens, Eric and Jörg Schütte 1999 Firma Fernsehen. Wie TV-Sender arbeiten. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Quast, Thomas 1999 Reflexive Medienberichterstattung in der Legitimation und Selbstregulation des (Systems) Journalismus – Selbstreferenz oder Selbstreverenz. In: Kurt Imhof, Otfried Jarren and Roger Blum (eds.), Zerfall ¨ der Offentlichkeit?, 208–223. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Schmidt, Siegfried J. 1996 Die Welten der Medien. Grundlagen und Perspektiven der Medienbeobachtung. Brunswick: Vieweg. Siegert, Gabriele and Karin Pühringer 2001 Programm- und Eigenwerbung – Narzissmus im Fernsehen. In: Julia Neissl, Gabriele Siegert and Rudi Renger (eds.), Cash und Content. Populärer Journalismus und mediale Selbstthematisierung als Phänomene eines o¨ konomisierten Mediensystems, 255–301. Munich: Reinhard Fischer.

Part VI. Self-referential games

Computer games: The epitome of self-reference Lucia Santaella

Until recently, computer games used to be considered a vulgar kind of popular entertainment. The only topic worth being discussed was the aggression or even violence games were supposed to instigate in children. Today, computer games have become the success of the market and a topic of media studies. The growth rate of the games industry is astounding; it represents the thirdlargest branch of industry in the world right after the war and the automobile industries. The growth of this market is due to the wide appeal that games exert on their players, mostly boys and young men, although in recent MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online-Role-Playing Games), a remarkable increase in the percentage of female players has been observed. Games are greatly responsible for the technological development of the whole entertainment business. The games industry pioneers the use of advanced technological research, and it is the first to make these advances available to the public. In fact, the last decade has been one of enormous creative experimentation and innovation in the games industry (Jenkins 2004: 120). As a reflection of these indicators of their increasing cultural relevance, games have become the topic of multidisciplinary research, in particular in media and cultural studies. One of the first places to embrace game design and game culture as a subject of scholarly study was the MIT, where the first computer game, Space War, was created as an independent hack by computer science PhD students. In a recent interview with Cicero Ignacio da Silva, which circulated in the Rhizome site, the game researcher Wardrip-Fruin declared: Although I think this is changing, there is a sense that games were a kind of Other, the separate thing in digital media. Games were very successful commercially, but very uninteresting from an artistic or scholarly point of view. So I also wanted to challenge that a little bit and say: “Yes, games are one of the most popular forms of digital media, but they are also interesting art work, interesting writing, and this is happening and is related to games, and I think that scholars and artists have to contribute to our discussion about making and criticizing games.” (Wardrip-Fruin 2005)

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According to Henry Jenkins’s January 2001 presentation at the occasion of a conference at the University of Southern California on Entertainment in the Interactive Age, “the most significant evolutionary leap in the film craft occurred when people started writing about it” (Pearce 2004: 143). This is exactly what we can expect to happen with games. One of the major topics of current theoretical discourse on games has been the dispute between the ludologists, who focus on the mechanisms of game play, and the narratologists, who declare that games should be studied in the context of other storytelling media (Jenkins 2004: 118). Even authors who do not side with any of the two theories cannot escape from participating in the discussion. The present paper, however, is deliberately decentralized and peripheral as far as the dispute between ludologists and narratologists is concerned. The argument to be discussed is that self-reference is important to the understanding of the semiotic processes involved in playing computer games. The argument to be developed is that in computer games, self-reference is taken to its extremes: computer games are the epitome of self-reference.

1. The increase of self-reference in digital culture Self-reference occurs when a text or a sign process, in some respects, refers to itself instead of referring to something beyond the message it conveys. In Roman Jakobson’s well known theory of language functions, the metalinguistic, the poetic, and, to a certain extent, also the phatic functions of language evince elements of self-referentiality, each of these functions in its own way. Selfreference has not been invented in contemporary literary discourse, although it has been considered a characteristic feature of postmodern culture. A wellknown classical example of literary self-reference is the play within the play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, since the advent of mass media culture with the phenomenal growth of the print media, the rise of mass advertising, followed by the invention of photography and the movies, radio and television, the occurrence of diverse types of self-reference in the media grew considerably. The more the media multiply, the more the interaction among them increases. The proliferation of the media tends to accelerate the dynamical interchange among them, resulting in a myriad of quotations, repetitions, intertextuality, and mutual references generating the phenomena of intermediality and hybridization, that is, mixtures of texts, discourses, and sign processes, which constitute one of the characteristics of postmodern culture.

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With the rise of the information society, hybridization has reached its climax with cyberspace. The most prominent semiotic concomitant of cyberspace is media convergence. Distinct from the mere coexistence of media, media convergence implies the integration of all kinds of individual media – sound, image, text, informatics programs – within one and the same universal language, the digital language. The result is in the convergence of the four main modes of human communication media, the print media (such as newspapers, magazines, books), the audiovisual media (such as television, video, cinema), telecommunication (such as telephones, satellites, cables), and informatics (computers and software) in a new complex media, the hypermedia. In this new space of interchange between and overlap of media and sign processes, self-referential sign processes proliferate, leaving the impression that the media do nothing but talk about media. As Nöth states in the beginning of the introductory chapter to this volume (paragr. 1), the mediators have turned to representing representations. Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of filming, they film that they film the filming. The news are more and more about what has been reported in the news, television shows are increasingly concerned with television shows, and even advertising is no longer about products and services but about advertising. The messages of the media are about messages of the media, whose origin has become difficult to trace.

The three media in which self-reference is most prominent are undoubtedly film, advertising, and computer games.According to Nöth’s introductory chapter (paragr. 4), the media differ as to the degree to which their messages are typically selfreferential or (allo)referential. [. . . ] Advertising is referential at its roots, since it has the purpose of promoting and selling products or services. [. . . ] A genuinely self-referential message would be unable to fulfill its commercial purpose of propagating a message about goods and services. [. . . ] Feature films, by contrast, which have both fictional and aesthetic qualities, are referential and self-referential at the same time. While their narrative plot is referential [. . . ] insofar as it narrates events from the lives of its protagonists, their aesthetic devices are based on self-reference, and if Lyotard [. . . ] was right when he proclaimed the end of the grand narratives, it is only natural that self-reference in films must have increased. In computer games we are finally faced with a medium in which alloreference has been secondary since its beginning, since playing and games create their own self-referential worlds apart from the world of referential facts and realities.

A further aspect of the self-referentiality of computer games is addressed by Azevedo, who points out that each new computer game tends to refer to the

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previous ones: “Nowadays when a new game appears, it is almost impossible not to compare it to other games to explain some of its characteristics, since games are referring to each other all the time” (in: Santaella 2005). A good example is Matrix, whose games are a complement to the film, expanding certain scenes which were not explored in the film (cf. Azevedo in: Santaella 2005).

2. The rules of the game Without rules, no game is possible. Every game begins with a set of rules to guide the players throughout the game in all its different states towards a goal. Rules are the foundation of the meaning and structure of a game. A game has to be self-explanatory; its rules are the elements that guarantee this requirement. Rules are at the core of the design of a computer game. This implies that all “subject matter of a game has to be formalized and created as rules before the game can start” (Juul 2004: 141). “The main difference between the computer game and its nonelectronic precursors is that computer games add automation and complexity – they can uphold and calculate game rules on their own, thereby allowing for richer game worlds” (Juul 2004: 140). All games obviously develop in time, but the electronic ones do so in a way that their rules do not have to be necessarily explicit from the start; they can be homeopathically inserted in the course of playing and with the players’ increasing experience. In modern games with cut scenes1 such as American McGee’s Alice, every mission that is accomplished by the player is rewarded with a cut scene which gives the player information about the next task. In storytelling games, Celia Pearce (2004: 145) has identified six different narrative operators that can exist in a game. One of these operators is a rule based story system, a kit of generic narrative elements which allows the players to create their own narrative. Story systems can exist independently of, or in conjunction with, a metastory. Metastories are obviously one of the types of self-reference since they are stories about stories. They are rather frequent in games, as we shall see later on. In the MMORPG genre, players take actions that construct their character on the fly. [. . . ] These games, because they are highly improvisational in nature, require constant attention from their operators. EverQuest, for example, has a Command Central at its San Diego headquarters where its customer service staff wanders about the virtual game world assisting the players, and creating narrative events, conflicts and missions for players to engage in. They carefully watch what players are doing and constantly evolve the game, the game rules, and the game narrative accordingly. [. . . ] The result is an emergent


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narrative, a story that evolves over time as a result of an interplay between rules and players. (Pearce 2004: 149)

A game genre in which rules are presented in another interesting way is The Sims, designed by Will Wright of Maxis. The Sims is a simulator game of a psychological kind: Rather than employing purely player-inhabited characters or purely autonomous characters, the game puts the players in the role of influencing semiautonomous characters.They are semi-autonomous because while they have their own innate behaviors, they depend on player influence to dictate their actions. The view-point is isometric rather than first person, allowing players to have a God-like view over the game terrain. (Pearce 2004: 150)

The story system of this game is a kind of narrative Lego. The Sims has now spun off into a variety of add-ons and enhancements, but the original game was basically a domestic drama, a sitcom. The players create a family, The Sims, and place them in a house that must then be enhanced and furnished with a variety of domestic items to improve the family’s standard of living and their level of comfort. In addition to the story system, there is a built-in descriptive component which allows players to take snapshots of their game whenever they wish. They can then make descriptive storyboards and post them together with the snapshots on the Sims’ website for others to view and participate. Players can also upload their games onto the site so that other players can continue playing their game. In this way, multiple versions of a player’s family story may come into existence with developments leading into different directions according to the various players. The story system “lets the player drive the story experience within a set of carefully crafted rules, processes, and constraints” (Pearce 2004: 151). Such rules guarantee that a socialized fictional construction with an open-ended framework does not degenerate into chaos.

3. Internal indexicality of games Associated with the rules is another important aspect of self-reference in games which may be defined as its internal indexicality. The consecutive moves of a game in their rule governed sequence are mutually connected in a way that each present move or state of the game indicates the actually preceding and the possibly or probably subsequent states of the game. Juul (2004: 132) describes these determinants of the development of a game as follows: “The more fundamental part of games is a change of state, the movement from the initial state (the outcome has not been decided) to another state (the outcome has been decided).”

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If the initial or any other state of the game anticipates the following state and the following state retains the memory of the previous state, each of the states in this sequence contains an index of the preceding and the following states which it indicates, and since all of these indexical signs imply reference from one state to another state of the game, these indices are self-referential. In the course of the game, a continuous, not necessarily linear, set of indexical interconnections is created. The process is similar to the effect of the constraints which the grammar of a language creates in the process of speaking. For instance, in the utterance “The boy whom you see over there is my brother”, the relative pronoun “whom”, before indicating the “boy over there”, indicates the antecedent word “boy” in the main clause of this utterance, and the former indication is linguistically selfreferential insofar as it is a reference from words to words, and not from words to objects or persons. A move is a transition from one to the next state in a game. A move is hence a change of state. To extend the conception of the game as a sequence of states, Juul, adopting the terminology of computer science, interprets the computer game as a state machine: “It is a system that can be in different states, it contains input and output functions and definitions of what state and what input will lead to what following state” (2004: 133). Juul concludes that playing a game means interacting with the state machine of the game. In a board game, each state between two moves consists of the present position of the pieces on the board; in sports, the game state is the players’ and the ball’s position in the playing field; in computer games, the game state consists of the of data presently stored in the machine and the form of their representation on the screen. To play a game, a player must be able to influence the game state to perform a move, and in some games, the player is even obliged to do so without risking a penalty. According to this difference between games that do not restrict the player’s freedom to move or not to move and those that require action in a predetermined time frame, Juul (2004: 133) distinguishes between turnbased and real-time games. In turn-based games, “the game state only changes when the player takes a turn. In a real-time game, not doing anything also has consequences”. In sum, playing a game means interacting with the game state.

4. The immersive and interactive conditions of games The concepts of immersion and interactivity, relevant to the study of any game, have become the focus of attention in the context of cybercultural studies. Immersion seems to be a magic word able to explain everything that goes on in cyberculture. Elsewhere, I have distinguished four forms and degrees of im-


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mersion (Santaella 2004: 46–47). The first degree, experienced in virtual reality (VR) environments, is the one of perceptive immersion. VR gives the participant the sensation of being inside the environment and of acting within the virtual scenery. The second degree is telepresence, which is mediated by robotic systems conveying a feeling of presence in a distant location. The third degree is representative immersion; it is obtained in environments constructed by means of the VRML language. In representative immersion, the participant, mostly by means of an avatar, is represented in the virtual environment of the screen. The fourth and most frequent degree of immersion occurs when the user is connected to the web. To get into the web means to navigate in an immaterial parallel world which consists of bytes of data and particles of light. In computer games, the most frequent mode of immersion is representative immersion, but other modes of immersion are also involved in games. In a general psychological and perceptual sense, not exclusively in the cybercultural sense, immersion is a requirement of any kind of game. Players must concentrate on the game, be absorbed in action and the planning of moves, be immersed in the states of the state machine of their game. This means that the playing of computer games involves two kinds of immersion operating simultaneously, a deeper psychological and perceptive absorption, like in any other game, and the immersion in the environment of a cyberworld. This double involvement increases the player’s subjective sense of immersion and is probably one of the reasons why computer games are so overwhelmingly attractive or even hypnotic. The high concentration required by the players of computer games results from the circumstance that players, as soon as they begin a game and become its agents, enter a parallel, self-sufficient world whose sufficiency increases with the self-referentiality of its rules. The notion of parallel world does not necessarily mean a world that is of an entirely artificial design, as in computer games, whose virtual environment is of a completely new design. What it means is that the player has to enter another plan of reality, a fictive plan involving the pretense of being a character in a story. Even the players of checkers, tennis, or of the computer game Tetris are immersed in an autonomous world, a self-referential parallel world, and even in a realistic computer game with a design imitating the real-life environment of our everyday world the players are faced with a parallel and self-referential world. What matters in a game is neither the realism nor the fictionality of its scenario. It does not matter whether it is a science fiction story or as trivial as a cartoon. Games do not have to make sense at all; they have to be enjoyable and make fun. The more the players are immersed in their game, the more enjoyable they will find it. In fact, the immersion of players in their game is much deeper

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than the one of the movie spectators or novel readers because only games project their players interactively into their world. Interactivity is another term that has been much used in cyberculture studies. The word is quite appropriate in this context since every computer interface is an interactive program and to work with a computer requires by necessity interactivity. Like in immersion, from which it is inseparable, interaction is present in any computer game as well as in man-machine interaction in general. Hence, there is a double interaction. It is not by chance that a great part of the present discussion about computer interactivity involves the comparison of game interactivity with the philosophical and anthropological notions of playing (see Neitzel, this vol.). As in all games, a requirement of interaction is that the players perform an act, such as moving a piece on a board or pressing a key on the keyboard with which a specific meaning in the game world is associated. The performance involves the players’ interaction with the game state in a process in which one state refers to the next and so on.

5. Seven types of self-referentiality in games After the discussion of the general framework of self-reference in computer games, we will now propose a typology to distinguish seven types of selfreference in games. 5.1.

Commands, missions, and discontinuities

The first and rather common type of self-reference in games occurs in the form of commands. Commands may be considered a rudimentary version of the rules of a game. They are indexically self-referential insofar as they are in a way self-addressed. In contrast to a command such as “Ground arms!”, in which a soldier is addressed by a superior, his corporal, who has a real authority over him, the players, who are themselves the readers of the command directed at them, are not really addressed by anybody form outside the game. In a game, the order in a way, is given by the players to themselves, since they have submitted themselves voluntarily to the rules of the game. In modern pinball games, for instance, the basic rule is expressed in the imperative form “Hit all the flashing things!” Such orders may also be given in indirect or nonverbal ways. In Star Trek: Next Generation (1993), for example, the order appears in the form of a small display telling the player to “destroy the asteroid”, which threatens the ship, by hitting a flashing object with a ball


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(cf. Juul 2004: 140). As Juul points out, modern adventure games basically follow the model of the detective game. There are “not only cut scenes, but also artifacts in the game world (event time) that tell the player what happened at a previous point in event time” (2004: 136). Hence, the “discontinuous times and worlds” of these games “point strongly to themselves as being games rather than believable fictional environments” (2004: 140).

5.2.

Metagames: Games within games

Another elementary type of self-reference can be found in games within games (cf. Rapp, this vol.). The embedding of a game within a game is iconically self-referential like a picture in a picture, the device of mise-en-abyme. The embedding game framework refers to the embedded framework and vice versa, but since both frameworks are game frameworks, there is self-reference insofar as a game refers to a game. A simple example can be found in Eraser Turnabout, which is based on a film of the same title. In some of the phases of the game, the player has to solve puzzles in order to be able to continue playing. In The Sims, one of the possible entertainments of the avatar is to play with a computer.

5.3.

Metastories: Stories within stories

One of the most famous metastories of world literature is certainly A Thousand and One Nights, the story of Queen Scheherazade who prevents her cruel husband, King Shahryar, from killing her by amusing him with a different story every night for a thousand and one nights. As in the case of games in games, the self-referentiality of this framework story is an iconic one: A Thousand and One Nights is a story about story-telling. The framework story with an outer narrative frame of the Queen telling stories to the King in order to save her life and an inner frame with 1,001 stories have the structure of a mise-en-abyme, in which the outer narrative frame is an icon reflecting its own inner narrative frame. In classical games, a good example of a story-in-a-story scenario can be found in chess. As Pearce (2004: 147) observes, chess has a “metastory of two battling kings with their armies and minions”. The outer framework of this game is the story of the players from the first move, whose meaning is “attack”, to the last move, whose meaning is defeat or victory; the inner narrative framework of chess is the one of the battle between the black and the white king and their armies.

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In story telling computer games, the device of stories within stories is rather frequent. Pearce (2004: 148–49) gives the example of the MMORPGs. There is “metastory, primarily in the form of a predesigned story world and various plots within it, with a story system that allows players to evolve their own narratives within the game’s story framework. [. . . ] Most of the original MMORPGs’ metastories focus on medieval fantasy/Dungeons and Dragons style themes, although more mainstream themes are forthcoming.” 5.4. The personalization of games “Mods” are modifiers which allow expanding the possibilities of a game. By means of this device, the source code of a game is altered, and a new version of the game is implemented. Mod packages of game expansion allow players to personalize their game just as they like. The self-referential nature of a mod consists in this device of personalizing the game. A game personalized by the player is indexically self-referential to the degree that the personalized game evinces traces of the player’s participation. Some games have been developed from mod versions of previous games. For example, the action game Quake Rally is a run game derived from a mod of Quake, or Half Life, a game about modern life, allows a journey to the Second World War thanks the mod Day of Defeat. 5.5. The game’s own materiality A fifth type of self-reference can be found in games which give evidence of their own materiality. This type evinces hence again indexical self-reference. In more recent games, such as Quake III or Counter-Strike, there are jumps between different levels of the game which remain unexplained but are indicated by a display referring to the digital processes going on in the game at the present moment. For example, the display indicated “loading” goes on, or the display indicates “awaiting game state”. Such messages are self-referential insofar as they indicate what the machine is doing and not what is going on in the game world. 5.6.

Intermediality

The sixth type of self-reference can be found in games which are related to texts (films, novels, advertising, music, etc.) in other media which, for their part, also


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refer to the game.The dialogue of games with other media, especially the movies, is rather frequent. Many game designers have drawn plots or story elements from existing films or works of literature. Games are apt to tap those media since they share with them the genres fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war, etc. All games on the theme of medieval fantasy represent the evolution of about forty years of popular culture converging on the computer. Semiotic translations of works of literature are also frequent (Jenkins 2004: 122). These are cases of semiotic translation because the games do not only retell a film story but expand our previous experience of a story and the way to interpret it. Especially the interaction between films and games is thriving. Not only the marketing campaigns of films and games but also their production and development are becoming more and more interconnected and interdependent, as Jenkins (2004: 124) points out: Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy. [. . . ] One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the story world, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.

A good example is Matrix, whose games are a complement to the film and expand certain scenes which were not explored in the film (cf. Azevedo 2005). 5.7. A game theory of games The seventh and last case of self-reference in games has been described by Celia Pearce (2004) in her paper “Towards a game theory of game” in which she develops a play-centered theory of games. Nothing could be more telling of the argument of our own paper that computer games are the epitome of selfreference than a game theory that is a theory of games.

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Note 1. Editors’ note: According to Wikipedia, “a cut scene is a sequence in a video game over which the player has no control. Cut scenes are used to advance the plot, present character development, and provide background information, atmosphere, dialogue and clues. Cut scenes can either be animated or use live action footage” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut scene, 26.04.06).

References Jenkins, Henry 2004

Juul, Jesper 2004

Pearce, Celia 2004

Game design as narrative architecture. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, 118–130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Introduction to game time. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, 131–142. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Towards a game theory of game. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, 143–153. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Santaella, Lucia 2004 Navegar no ciberespa¸co: O perfil cognitivo do leitor imersivo. São Paulo: Paulus. 2005 E-mail interview with Theo Azevedo (July 7, 2005). Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 2005 Games-language. An Interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin by Cicero Ignacio da Silva, http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=17835&page=1#34108 (26.04.06).

Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach Bo Kampmann Walther

1. Introduction As its title indicates, this chapter is about self-reference in computer games, and a primarily formalistic approach will be adopted. I shall argue that computer games can be self-referential in at least three ways. On a fictional or content level, games often refer to other games or other types of media. The monsters in Doom 3 pay tribute to the original scary polygon creatures in Doom. Villains and good guys in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas refer more or less to actual, present-day characters in mass mediated pop culture. Plots and key actors in Myst IV: Revelation fit nicely into the overall cosmology of the much celebrated adventure game Myst. However, when we move beyond the sphere of narrative, plot, and vast game worlds, we find that computer games by themselves, on a structural or formal level, are inherently self-referential as to their ontology. To put it bluntly: games are games because they are fundamentally self-referential. To eliminate or fail to recognize this highly specific – and, to a large extent, technological and scientific – feature of computer games is to ignore the invariant base of the computer medium. This is intimately correlated with the important concept of recursivity (Nöth, this vol., Part I) which explains computer games as mutually dependent linear and circular systems. It also alludes to the fact that all games are dynamic and temporal systems evolving, among other things, about the tension between rules and strategies. In the following, the purpose is first and foremost to investigate this innate feature of self-referentiality in computer games.1 The method derives from economic game theory, computer science, and systems theory. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first defines and discusses the core elements of any game, namely rules, strategies, and interaction patterns. The second will examine how and to what extent computer games can be defined as complex dynamic systems. The argument is that gaming is a higher level

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activity incorporating the act of playing (hence the term “game-play”) into its very structure. This second part draws on some previous work on the philosophy of games (Walther 2003). According to Espen Aarseth (2003), there are three components of games in virtual environments: game play is about the player’s actions, strategies, and motives; game structure contains the rules, including simulation rules and physics; and game world includes fictional content, level design, textures, etc. All three aspects will be covered as they are intimately interwoven, but special emphasis will given to game structure. First, the ontology or “gameness” of games will be defined. Secondly, an explanation of the epistemology of games (and play) will be given which pretends to zero the distinctiveness of game play. Thirdly, the chapter will seek to set out to illuminate the level of self-referentiality in the form of recursivity in computer games by paying attention to the relationship between rules and game world. Before embarking on the formal journey into the heart of games, it should not remain unnoticed that games are clearly self-referential also on a broader cultural level2 which constitutes the third sense of self-reference in computer games. Not only do games point to other more specific games while borrowing themes, characters, plot, and back stories. As modern leisure artifacts and carriers of intellectual value, they further subscribe to a wide ranging bricolage culture in which texts, images, motion pictures, games, commercials, and brands cite each other at a rapid pace. This citation praxis arises horizontally through the instantaneous replication across the borders of various current media and vertically through the reshaping of the “old” media. The former mode of citation may be called transmediality, while the latter may be referred to as remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999; Walther 2005a). A nice example of this dual mode of cultural self-reference in the present-day media landscape is the television series 24 by the American Fox channel, starring Kiefer Sutherland. Clearly, the series points towards a number of “classic” issues and plot configurations imported from the history of television drama and cinematic entertainment. This is remediation, old media rethought, reconfigured, and, in a sense, made new again. In addition, however, 24 tells the story of the way in which new media (TV, web, games, chat, etc.) “speak” to each other along a synchronous axis, constantly pushing and blurring the demarcations which used to define the specificity of media and their contents hence offering a rich platform for the user’s cut-paste-and-consume approach to media (Walther 2005b). This is hence transmediality. To come to a partial conclusion, computer games are self-referential in three ways: (1) Semantic self-reference: games refer to other content matter or fictional elements in games and (new) media.

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(2) Formal self-reference: the dynamics of recursivity is part of the genuine, formal nature of games. (3) Cultural self-reference: games can be self-referential as they point to a surrounding culture of transmediality.

2. Rules, strategies, and interaction Economic game theory is a set of mathematical methods of decision making in which a competitive, “risky” situation is analyzed to determine the optimal course of action for a “player”. John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern were the founders of game theory. According to von Neumann and Morgenstern, a game consists of a set of rules governing a competitive situation in which two to n individuals or groups of individuals choose strategies designed to maximize their own winnings or to minimize their opponent’s winnings. The rules specify the possible actions for each player, the amount of information received by each as play progresses, and the amounts won or lost in various situations. Neumann and Morgenstern restricted their attention to games in which no player can gain except at another’s expense (so-called zero-sum games). Later, John F. Nash revolutionized game theory by demonstrating that in noncooperative games there are sets of optimal strategies (so-called Nash equilibria) used by the players in a game such that no player can benefit by unilaterally changing his or her strategy if the strategies of the other players remain unchanged (Nash 1997). Drawing on economic game theory we can now define games as complex, rule based interaction systems consisting of these three key mechanisms: absolute rules, contingent strategies, and possible interaction patterns. Game rules are absolute in the sense that while the players may question the rationality of the rules at hand, they are nevertheless obliged to obey, to “play by the rules”. Rules are therefore absolute commands (Neumann and Morgenstern 1953) and unquestionable imperatives. They transcend semantic issues, cultural signification, moral agendas, etc. This does not, incidentally, preclude the fact that game rules are discussed in a cultural or ethical milieu. In contrast to rules, strategies are contingent, nonabsolute entities since they count as the more or less detailed plans for the execution of turns, choices, and actions in the game. Other strategies than the ones actually carried out could have been outlined and performed. Both in the shape of short term tactics and as long term schemes, strategies are contingent. In economic game theory, a strategy is an overall plan for how to act in the assembly of different states that the game may be in (Juul 2004: 56). Game theory studies the affiliations of the rules and the strategic behavior in competitive situations (Smith, 2006).

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Finally, interaction patterns are the moves and choices which become part of the game being played, thus interfering with the restrictions and options of the game. As the implementation of game strategies tend to cluster in selected regions of the possibility space of the game (in approximation of what is known as the “dominant strategy” in game theory) forming a path through the game space, we may even insinuate that the interaction patterns, taken as a whole, are the game itself – especially if we view it from the perspective of the player (Holland 1998). Interaction patterns are the possible as opposed to necessary combinations or the emergent outcome of rules and strategies. This differentiation can be listed even more briefly: – Rules are commands. – Strategies are plans for game executions. – Interactions patterns define the actual path through the game and specify the topography of human-computer (or player vs. rule) dynamics. Clearly, the interaction patterns work as “middle ground” as they occupy a domain located between the machine that upholds the rules (the computer) and the human player who has to find and optimize the best way to accomplish the goal of the strategy (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The relation between rules, interaction patterns, and strategies

The notion of game play, which we shall pursue in depth in the subsequent section, involves all three levels of a game, which also explains the difficulty in defining the concept properly. Game play is the actualization of a specific stratification of rules, strategies, and interactions as well as the realization of a certain amalgamation of commands, plans, and paths. For a player, a successful game play means a delicate balance between knowing the rules and mapping one’s strategy in accordance with both rules and the possible actions of opponents. Games should be equally challenging and rewarding, hovering between boredom and anxiety hereby assuring a space of flow through the network of choices. For a computerized game system, a successful game play implies a balance between fixed rules and the control of player input in variable settings.


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3. Rule system and interaction system What defines a rule? A rule, being algorithmic in its core design, consists of a simple, unequivocal sentence, e.g., “you are not allowed to use hands while the ball is on the pitch”. Hereby, a rule constitutes the possibility space of a game by clearly stating limitations (not use hands) as well as opportunities (the ball is on the pitch). It is always possible to define a game both in negative and positive terms: rules limit actions; they determine the range of choices in the possibility space; they encircle the arenas to be played in; yet they also frame what can be done. At this point, I am speaking of all games, i.e., both traditional games, including sports, and computer games. Heroes of Might and Magic rests on rules stored in and processed by a computer. Chess or Monopoly, by contrast, rely on rules not accumulated in the database and algorithms of a computer but written down on paper and stored in the player’s mind during the play. In a game of soccer, for example, such rules are administered by a referee. Implicit rules that are normally considered exterior to the “real” rules (e.g., clock in chess matches) must be engaged explicitly in digital games. These rules have to be programmed as well. Weather conditions or the general physics of a soccer game are usually taken as “out-of-game” features in the real world. When we simulate a soccer game in a computer, however, the rules of soccer and the general physics (including random variables such as surface granularity, crowds, time of day, etc.) must be built into the rule algorithms and the input-output control of the computer. Rules specify the constitution of the playing “deck” or, more broadly, the playing “field”.3 In games, behavioral patterns inside this field are limited, constrained, and highly codified (Huizinga [1938] 1994; Caillois [1958] 2001; Walther 2003). Rules are guidelines that direct, restrict, and channel behavior in a formalized, closed environment so that artificial and clear conditions inside the “magic circle” of play are created (Salen and Zimmerman 2004). The outside of this circle, reality or nonplay, is essentially irrelevant to game play. Confronted with unambiguous rules, strategies (or tactics) might entail best practice solutions variable to the given rule constraints. Hereafter, interaction patterns map the various player interventions and can hence be viewed as a texture of moves and choices overlain on top of the possibility space of the game. Furthermore, interaction patterns can refer to the social and competitive intermingling of players during the fulfillment of the game. In that respect, the patterns correspond to the outcome of absolute rules and social dynamics.

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Rules have the following qualities: – They limit and restrict player action. Thus, they tell what can be done and what cannot be done with the objects associated with the game. – They are unambiguous, explicit, and finite (which is why they are easily incorporated in computer algorithms). – All players of a game must share them. – Rules are fixed, i.e., unchangeable (if they do change, we rather refer to local or “house” rules). – They are binding, i.e., nonnegotiable. – They can be repeated, which means that they are portable and work independent of technology platform or fictional representation. The formal organization of games can be regarded as a parameter space. In this space, the current state of the game counts as a point and ultimately a dimension in the parameter space. A played game has therefore n possible state dimensions. In Tic-Tac-Toe, for instance, the nine squares constitute the parameter space of the game and thus the possibility domain for the arrangement of the board pieces. The rules of the game define the possible edges in the space connecting states. Rules define the possible game, whereas a particular game is a path through the state space. The crucial factor is that there can be no variability or multiple paths through the possibility space of a game without the compulsory parameters of the game. Hence, the parameter space constitutes the transcendental level of the game, whereas the particular game path expresses the contingent realization of the space.4 This dialectic between parameter space and actual game path also sheds some light on why games are complex; basically it is because there is an uneven relation between the unchanging set of rules and the actual and changing realization of a particular game. This asymmetrical tie between rules and realization (or rules and strategies) can be termed game emergence. Most often it is impossible to predetermine the actual moves and outcome of a game only by knowing the set of rules.5 Also, most games are games of imperfect information (Nash 1997). At the outset, the rules of chess are simple, and yet the wealth of distinct chess playing tactics is enormous. A child can memorize chess rules, but to master all grand openings in the actual game is probably a lifetime achievement. When it comes to computer games we must be careful not to confuse two distinct yet closely associated levels of rules. One level, which is the algorithmic source code of the game, consists of an unambiguous list of specifications for what can be done and what cannot be done, i.e., what counts as edge in the parameter space. On another level, rules designate the ability of the computer to keep track of the player’s interaction with the different states that the game


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system can be in. We can specify the former level the rule system of the computer, and we will name the latter level its interaction system. While the rule system contains the data structures that enable the initial set-up of the game as well as determine the constraints and possibilities of the game, the interaction system evidently operates in a dynamic framework whose prime function is to control the executing of new outputs relative to the player’s real-time inputs. Another way of explaining the difference between the two levels is that the rule system is responsible for the initial framing of the game by setting up the possibility space for the game and for the player’s actions and choices, whereas, in a slightly different way, the interaction system links to the actual game play. The latter is the realization of, or a given path through, the possibility space (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Rule system and interaction system imply a combination of linear and circular movement, i.e., recursivity

Furthermore, we can model the relation between rule system and interaction system by considering also the machine domain and the player domain (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Computer and player overlap in the interaction domain as a kind of middle ground

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4. Rules and recursivity The movement from rules to interaction occurs in the medium of time. However, for this forward processing to be effective, the system needs to perform backward or looped executions as well. The events occurring in the possibility space of the game have to be measured constantly against the initial rule system (see Figures 2 and 3). In order for the computer to respond adequately to player inputs (which derive from the player’s strategy) it has to “check” the viability of input in accordance with the specified rule set.This rapid intersection of forward linearity and backward loop circularity defines the elementary recursivity function of a computer game. A recursive system, such as the computer, is thus a dynamic system consisting of both linear and circular operations. The computer handles progress because it also has a memory. We may further refine the concept of recursivity by comparing it with what is known in computer science as the state machine (Selic, Gullekson and Ward 1994: 223ff.; Juul 2004: 57ff.). A state machine is a computing device designed with the operational states required to solve a specific problem. Automatic ticket dispensing machines are state machines, and so are computer games. There are several aspects of a state machine but we need only consider two for our present purpose, state transition, and output function: – The state transition function maps states and inputs to states. This function defines, limits, and makes possible what happens in response to a given input. – The output function maps states and inputs to outputs. This function defines the machine outputs at a given time. Y is thus a function that maps states and inputs to outputs (S × I → O). When we look at the game as a state machine we find that the machine (i.e., the game) consists of an array of “cells”, each of which can be in one of a finite number of possible states. The cells are updated synchronously in discrete time steps according to a local and identical interaction rule (which we identified above as the interaction system of a game). The state of a cell at the next step in time is determined by the current states of a surrounding neighborhood of cells. The transitions are usually specified in the form of a rule table that defines the next state of the cell for each possible neighborhood configuration.6 According to Juul (2004), the concept of rules corresponds to the notion of the state transition function that determines what will happen in response to a given action at a given time. The transition function is thus a specification of a set of deep rules, i.e., algorithms that determine the possible output relative to the current game state and the current player input at time t. Next, the output function sends a specific view of the game state to the player; a view or a piece


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of information that is mediated through the interface of the computer (e.g., a specific screen image, a textual message, etc.). However, all this clearly involves rules that attest the capacity of the computer for response or adaptiveness in a variety of settings and a number of game states. Thus, the state transition function and the output function relate strongly to the computer interaction system whose primary function, as stated above, is to control the execution of new outputs relative to the player’s real-time inputs. When viewing the computer as a state machine, we can further identify the rule system (see above) as the possible input events, which the machine accepts and at this level, the machine determines the constraining elements of the game (the edges in the possibility space) specified by the rules; in short: – Input events → rule system – State transition function and output function → interaction system The recursivity of digital games therefore implies a linear as well as circular relation between input events, state transition function, and output function. Phrased differently, recursivity results from the complex intersection of the parameter space (input events and possibility space) of the game and its interaction system (output function). Traditionally, the notion of recursivity is used in group theory, where it designates a group that is defined as using the group itself or a function that is called to its own function. Furthermore, the term is used in certain programming languages (such as C++) where recursivity is the property that functions have to be called by themselves. Here, however, we will stick to the broader and more general definition of recursivity indicative of systems that entail a dynamic oscillation between linearity and circularity. My point is that this general classification of recursivity is indeed a formal or structural definition of self-reference. We could say that self-reference, for example, in literature operates in the form of codified or semantic relations between possible input events and output function. However, for the input events to be functionally effective, they have to be stored and made actively operational in the reader’s (player’s) mind so that they may act as base for the current output function. This means, in essence, that the mind corresponds with the memory of the computer as well as it resembles the state transition function of a computer. The analogy is this: I stumble across a character in a novel and think that this character is somehow connected with a character or a situation in another novel; or I may begin to wonder whether the entire design of a given novel might not be implicitly allegorical of some textual element from elsewhere. More advanced, I might postulate that the novel I am reading (as a series of mental outputs that

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determine my “path” through the narrative) on a deeper, hidden level invokes the transcendental conditions of its own “being-narrative”. Whether I am concerned with identifying passages linking fictional characters, or whether I am trying to demonstrate the particular poetological modality of self-reference of a novel, I always link possible input events (what is referred to) to the current output function (i.e., what is considered to be signs of selfreference). However, in the case of reading a novel and scrutinizing its complex web of reference, this procedure needs to be implemented in a purely hermeneutic framework; self-reference in nondigital media does not possess an automatic state transition function that maps states and inputs to states. In nondigital media, a response to a given input (the state transition function) belongs neither to the rule nor to the interaction system. Rules formulated in and controlled by computers always hinge on algorithms that only react to very selected aspects of the world, e.g., the state of the system or the well-defined inputs (Juul 2004: 61). A game thus has a predefined and finite number of input events whereas the input events that act as referential “markers” in the self-referential circularity of a novel are clearly infinite in number. The computer controls the finiteness of algorithms and output functions using a necessary decontextualization, which means that no element or only a restricted number of elements of a given context is relevant to the game system. On the contrary, the human interpreter controls the relation between input event and output function by deploying a potential contextualization that allows for a principally infinite number of parts of a given context to be relevant for an understanding of the system.7 This allows for the following definitions: – Computerized “game” recursivity implies an automatic, cybernetic process in which only a finite number of input events are accepted as base for possible output functions. The dynamic system therefore presupposes a trivial relation between the initial possibility space and the information (or output) shown to the player in a given game state. – Hermeneutic “fiction” recursivity implies a nontrivial process in which an infinite number of input events (which together form the possibility space of referentiality) can be potentially linked to a likewise infinite number of output functions (which are the self-referential signs). It is vital to be aware that this double definition could have been made without inducing any content or fiction oriented phenomena. Any mention of “novel”, “text”, etc. was only provided for exemplification. The difference lies solely in the formal nature of computer games vis-à-vis nondigital media such as codex literature and cinema. We can illustrate the concept of recursivity as in Figure 4.


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Figure 4. The recursive system depends on an oscillation between linearity and circularity

5. Game epistemology: Game play and recursivity In the previous section, we saw how rules and interaction system together define the “gameness” of games. Now we will enquire more deeply into the logic of game play, the playability or ludic structure of gaming. Using Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as well as George Spencer-Brown’s (1969) form theory, I have tried to categorize and reflect on the difference between “playing” and “gaming” (Walther 2003). The trick is to view gaming as something that takes place on a higher level, structurally as well as temporally. When it comes to play, the installation of the form of the play world vs. nonplay world distinction must performatively feed back on itself during play, continually rearticulating that formal distinction in the play world so as to sustain the internal ordering of the play world. However, in the game mode, this rearticulation is already presupposed as a temporal and spatial incarceration that protects the rule binding structure of a particular game from running off target. In other words, games should not be play; but that does not imply that they do not require play. This means, in effect, that in the play mode the deep fascination lies in the oscillation between play and nonplay, whereas game mode presses forward one’s tactical capabilities to sustain the balance between a structured and an unstructured space. In the play mode, one does not want to fall back into reality (although there is always the risk of doing so). In the game mode, it is usually a matter of climbing upwards to the next level and not losing sight of structure. Play is about presence, while game is about progression. In play, the deep fascination therefore lies in the oscillation between play and nonplay, which is the “other” of play usually considered to be “reality”. In the playing of games, we are more fixated on progressing in the prior structure which is the game (Kirkpatrick 2004: 74). Gaming presupposes the tension, or

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the initial transgression, in which we constantly resist falling out of the fantasy context of play, and gaming presupposes further focus on a second, higher transgression in which success and failure is measured against our achievement of defined objectives. Thus, in playing a computer game, we work in a second simulacrum, an “as if structure” overlain on top of the first initial transgression that makes play possible in the first place. Two things are particularly important with respect to our investigation of self-reference or recursivity in computer games. First, we can note that the act of gaming or game playing involves the fabrication of willed illusions that support the progress from initially stepping into the magic confines of play and, subsequently, trusting and acting in accordance with the fixed rule set and structured topology of games. Second, as Kirkpatrick writes in his interpretation of my research in these matters, it also involves a certain self-understanding; players know that they are responsible for maintaining the illusion that is the game world and the sense of play that supports it. This knowledge ultimately threatens the game and play itself, giving it a kind of ontological insecurity. This is why play is often repetitive, since repetition reinforces the reality of the game world. However, this same repetitiveness results in a kind of disenchantment for the player [. . . ] and an inability on her part to continue “foregrounding” the game play experience. (Kirkpatrick 2004: 74f.)

In systems theoretical terms, this self-awareness of ontological insecurity translates into the players’ ultimate understanding and therefore constant handling of the other-reference in the game itself which is simultaneously part of the self-reference of the game. It is a fundamental sign of the game itself that the threat of a “nongame” domain or a “nongaming” situation is forever intrinsically tied to the construction of the game itself, and the players have to be aware of and even stay alert to this fact. Thus, a certain level of self-referentiality or, at the very least, a minimal awareness of the logical organization of play and nonplay is required. Game play requires reference to the way in which a game feeds from its own negative preconditions; this reference is obligatory for any actualization of a game. In psychological terms, when a game becomes uninteresting it is probably because the player fails to sense a presence from the inside of deterritorialization of the presence (Walther 2003). The player “falls out” of the constraints and the negatively defined territory that is the game. In the terminology of systems theory, to play means to engage in a dynamic oscillation between levels of transgression without getting caught in the ontological uncertainty that is part of the set-up of the game. To play also means to master the critical coincidence of reference and self-reference, that is, the ability to toggle between what the game is about and what it takes for the game to come about.


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A certain, although not always explicitly articulated, level of self-referentiality is hence an essential element of game play. The success of transforming games (e.g., board games) into computer games might stem from the fact that a digital computer is a discrete state machine. It thus bears, in its very design, a strong resemblance to formalized game systems, most notably rules for discrete sequential operations. In contrast, play seems to focus on investigations of semantics, since the task is not only to measure its space but also to elaborate upon its modes of interpretation and means for reinterpretation. Not only do we explore a world while playing. Its potential meaning and the stories we can invent in that respect also drive us. Play spaces tend to expand, either in structural complexity or in physical extent. This expansion is further reflected in the praxis of play, for instance when players argue over the exact thresholds of a play domain (Tosca 2000). Again, this must be understood in a double sense of both the physical closure and the mental activities attached to it. Why is this simultaneous division between an intermingling of play and games important for the study of computer games? – Because it touches upon the concept of game play. One can get immersed in the playing mood that is needed to get into the game in the first place (the first distinction that enables one to identify with an effective killer) but one can also be caught up in a certain area of the game where one begins to question its criteria for structure (the second distinction that focuses on transitions). Too much self-reference spoils the game play! The plot is exactly to balance playing and gaming while gaming. One must hold on to the initial distinction (otherwise one is swallowed up by the other of play), and one needs constantly to accept the organization, the rule pattern, of the game. When one disregards this complementary balance, a flow is interrupted. Then one begins to speculate: why am I playing; and what exactly is the objective of the game? A game play works precisely to assure this flow by serving as a potential matrix for the temporal realization of particular game sequences. A game sequence may lead to wondering how one got into the game in the first place (this is to observe the first transgression, and to be in the play mode), or the actual sequence might force one to reflect upon the criteria for the design of the spacetime settings (this is to observe the second transgression, and to be in the game mode).

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6. The recursivity of rules and game worlds: A kind of conclusion I began this chapter by pointing out that self-reference in computer games splits into three distinct forms: (1) games can be self-referential as part of the way in which they handle import and export of content or fiction related elements; (2) games refer to a larger and immensely complex horizon of cultural bricolage, a kind of cut-copy-and-consume culture; and, finally, and most importantly, (3) the intrinsic fabric of computer games points to an all-necessary level of self-reference or recursivity without which games, both ontologically and epistemologically, would simply cease to be “games”. Next, we found that formal recursivity in computer games can be linked to two different modes: – On the level of game ontology, there is a recursive dynamic between rule system and interaction system, i.e., between the possibility space or input events and the actual path through the game states. – On the level of game epistemology, we ascertained a recursive dynamic between the transitional differentiations of play mode and game mode that both together make up game play. The fact that there is a dynamic (temporal as well as logical) relation between “playing” and “gaming” also indicates a certain level of recursivity mandatory of game play. Furthermore, we must be aware that there is a vital discrepancy in the concept of “self-referentiality” when we regard it as an intrinsic constituent in the workings of the computer as opposed to the idea of a hermeneutical relocation of “input” references and “output” signs of self-reference. In the former case, self-reference is something that is performed and trivially executed, while in the latter case, self-reference is something that needs to be perceived and actively interpreted. Actually, things are very simple. All digital games are naturally cybernetic, self-referential systems (Kücklich 2003) whereas all nondigital media, including fiction and cinema, are basically semantic, referential systems that can be perceived as self-referential entities. This does not exclude the subtle fact that digital games in addition to being formally self-referential may be self-referential on a content related or cultural level, too. However, what can be said about the game world? What is the relation between game rules and fictional representation? As a kind of conclusion, let me briefly show how the formal requirements of a game may be inscribed in the fiction of the game and perhaps vice versa.


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Many games seem to disrupt the unfolding of narratives in game worlds in order to assist the player in how to control the keyboard, how to set up the buttons on the joystick, etc. One example (Juul 2004: 158f.) among many is the GameCube game Pikmin in which our avatar is a scientist stranded on an unknown planet. In the course of game play, the scientist takes notes in a diary that is displayed on the screen and includes notes about the handling of the controller. According to Juul, there is nothing “artistic” about this deliberate mix of fictional representation and game control commands. In fact, this confusion even strengthens the fiction: since the player “is” the avatar, notes about the controller are “exactly the kind of thing we would write down if we were to take notes about our playing of the game” (Juul 2004: 159).

Figure 5. Max Payne realizing he is, horrifyingly, a character in a computer game

Another example, however, tells us that the reference system of games is not always that straightforward. In the adventure based first-person shooter Max Payne (Figure 5) we are, as noted by Søren Pold (2005), caught in a stratified maze controlled by drug lords and corrupt police on the level of the plot and the cybernetic game engine on the structural level. More than allocating the in-game story as a motivation for game play, which is typical of the genre, Max Payne designates the narrative as a cliché; the Hollywood signs “point towards narrative structure in general rather than support the particular narrative” (Pold 2005: 16). Pold continues:

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Bo Kampmann Walther The game could be interpreted as a self-conscious intervention in the ongoing debate about the roles of narrative in computer games. Narrative becomes an effect that the game self-consciously alludes to and puts on but does not fulfill in the deep Aristotelian way imagined by the proponents of interactive narrative. This is narrative surface or skin that does not attempt to become hegemonic, covering all aspects of the game, but like postmodern novels and cinema alludes to narrative, quotes it, without fully enacting it. (Pold 2005: 16)

In a graphic novel sequence in the drugged opening of the third act, Max Payne finally realizes and reveals to the player that he is nothing but a pixilated avatar in a computer game (Figure 5). Suddenly, Max Payne, as a precondition for the game plot, questions the initial and vital transgression of play. Consequently, through the metafictional confession we are thrown into play mode. Why play if the character that is supposed to glue together playful praxis and structured game space is genuinely untrustworthy? Payne’s existence serves only the endless repetition of the game which is the at once dull and sophisticated blend of “realism to the max” and “max pain”, advertised through the graphical user interface with its weaponry, red bar, and bullet time on-off button. Pold concludes by categorizing Max Payne as “illusionistic media realism” (Pold 2005: 20), a realism that simultaneously engages in illusion and can be viewed as a self-reflexive exploration of its own representational techniques and media. In light of the findings of this article, we may further hypothesize that Max Payne knows and plays with its own recursive dynamic and places it amidst the fictional elements as a self-conscious cue to its own rule structure and level of progression. Games like Max Payne therefore ironically mock at, yet at the same time celebrate, a self-awareness of how the necessary recursivity of all games (not just the intentionally artistic ones) gets immersed into the “fiction” while clearly belonging to the trivial, nonsemantic level of “rules”. Notes 1. This emphasis on the formal side of games and game theory is definitely not constructed so as to denounce any kind of study that enquires into the fictional or intermedial self-referentiality in computer games. Readings of self-referentiality of the latter kind, on the contrary, will provide us with much knowledge of the culture of narrative “transfer” in the contemporary media system. However, it is my genuine belief that the initial distinction between structural and fictional self-reference in games as well as in other types of media clarifies discussions that otherwise tend


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to obscure the levels of analysis: computer games are by necessity self-referential (or recursive), dynamic systems; yet not all of them need to be self-referential in a fictional sense. What does the game Tetris refer to? Nothing really, unless, that is, one would claim that the image of falling polygons in a vectorized field is an indicator of a cultural dynamic (“text”) of some sort. I say advisedly “cultural” and not “sub cultural” since games nowadays are the norm of mediated communication and not just a more or less esoteric sub-branch that connects to the entire media ecology. The notion of deck and field also alludes to the common sense comprehension of games – board games and sports count as archetypes. Here, we may note that the game in itself is set in a spatial realm. The nature of the spatial structure pre-determines the organization of edges in the topology. Contrary to this, the particular playing of a game is functionally operative solely in the domain of time. A game exists; but a game also evolves. This does not mean that the player is incapable of optimizing his or her strategy by knowing and, essentially, anticipating the rule-based responsiveness of the computer. In the game Need for Speed awareness of features such as “catch up effect” and “spawn” mechanisms effectively aid the player in obtaining the primary objective of the game – to win. Thus, we could formally define a game as the sum of all states of cells at time t, which, in turn, is a function of the state of a finite number of cells called the neighborhood at time t-1. I guess this is another way of claiming that the mind works in mysterious ways and that a computer operates in entirely pre-determined ways.

References Aarseth, Espen 2003

Playing research: Methodological approaches to game analysis. Proceedings from Digital Arts and Culture (DAC), Melbourne 2003, http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Aarseth.pdf (18.01.06) Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin 1999 Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Caillois, Roger [1958] 2001 Man, Play, and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Holland, John H. 1998 Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huizinga, Johan [1938] 1994 Homo ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

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Juul, Jesper 2004

Half-real. Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The IT-University of Copenhagen. Kirkpatrick, Graeme 2004 CriticalTechnology:A SocialTheory of Personal Computing. London: Ashgate. Kücklich, Julian 2003 Perspectives of computer game philology. Game Studies 3.1, http://www.gamestudies.org/0301/kucklich/ (18.01.06). Nash, John F. 1997 Essays on Game Theory. London: Edward Elgar. Neumann, John von and Oskar Morgenstern 1953 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pold, Søren 2005 Interface realisms: The interface as aesthetic form. Postmodern Culture 15.2, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern culture/v015/15.2pold.html (01.09.05). Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmermann 2004 Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Selic, Bran, Garth Gullekson and Paul T. Ward 1994 Real-Time Object Oriented Modeling. New York: Wiley. Smith, Jonas Heide 2006 The games economists play: Implications of economic game theory for the study of computer games. Game Studies 6.1., http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/heide smith (01.04.07). Spencer-Brown, George 1969 Laws of Form. London: Allen & Unwin. Tosca, Susana Pajares 2000 Selbsreferentialität in Computer-Spielen. Dichtung Digital, October, http://www.dichtung-digital.com/Forum-Kassel-Okt-00/Tosca/ (18.01.06). Walther, Bo Kampmann 2003 Playing and gaming. Reflections and classifications. Game Studies 3.1, http://www.gamestudies.org/0301/walther/ (18.1.06). 2005a Konvergens og nye medier [Convergence and New Media]. Copenhagen: Academica. 2005b A hard day’s work: Reflections on the interfacing of transmedialization and speed in 24. In: Klaus Bruhn Jensen (ed.), Interface://Culture – The World Wide Web as Political Resource and Aesthetic Form. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur Press/NORDICOM.

Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games Britta Neitzel

It has often been argued that play and games are in a way self-referential.1 According to Friedrich Schiller ([1801] 1967), play drive creates an autonomous aesthetic domain with its own living forms (lebende Gestalten) which are in themselves both eternal and transitory.2 Following this line of thought, Johan Huizinga ([1938] 1994) argued that play takes place in a realm of its own, separate from the rest of the world because of its own rules and boundaries. Hans Scheuerl ([1954] 1990) introduced the concept of circular movement to describe the nature of play, while Roger Caillois ([1958] 2001) established the criterion of separation in space and time as a distinctive feature of games. Boundaries and frames which separate games from their social environment and establish a world in which play activities have only a meaning in themselves seem to be an important attribute of games. Gregory Bateson ([1955] 1972) has given convincing evidence that communication between players is self-referential in another respect. In his Theory of Play and Fantasy, Bateson describes play as an autonomous sphere of human and animal behavior which differs from nonplay by the feature of metacommunication. Communication in play is a form of communication about communication, and the circularity which is apparent in such communicative processes evinces a mode of communicative self-reference. Bateson’s theory of play as metacommunication is of great interest to the emerging research field of computer game studies (cf. Salen and Zimmerman 2004). Although his theory only focuses on play and Bateson restricts himself to stating that games are more complex than mere play, we will consider games, too, in the present article. The hypothesis will be developed that games differ, among other things, from play with respect to metacommunication. The paper studies metacommunication and various forms of framing in play, games, and digital games.

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1. Metacommunication in play according to Bateson Inspired by his observations of monkeys in the San Francisco zoo, Bateson put forward the hypothesis that play behavior is accompanied by metacommunicative signals which are noticed and interpreted both by players and observers: I saw two young monkeys playing, i.e., engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat. It was evident, even to the human observer, that the sequence as a whole was not combat, and evident to the human observer that to the participant monkeys this was “not combat”. Now, this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message “this is play”. (Bateson [1955] 1972: 179)

Bateson distinguishes between metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages. Metalinguistic messages refer to language. An example of a metalinguistic message is the sentence: “The word ‘cat’ has no fur.” A metacommunicative message, on the other hand, refers to the communicative situation in which a speaker and hearer (or players) are involved. According to Bateson, the metacommunicative message “This is play” establishes a paradox of the kind which is also known as Russell’s paradox or Russel’s antinomy.3 The formula which defines this paradox is: M = { A | A ∈ / A }. This formula, in which A designates a set and M “the set of all sets that do not contain themselves as members” states that A can only be an element of M if A is not an element of A. Now, if M , the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, contained itself, M , by definition, could not be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves since it would contain itself despite its claim to the contrary. However, if M did not contain itself as one of its elements, M could not be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. This is the paradox: on the one hand, the set M must include itself as one of its elements; while on the other hand, it must not contain itself. The set M would paradoxically contain itself and would not contain itself at the same time, which would assert that the self-contradictory statement A and not-A is true despite its being incompatible with the principle of the excluded middle, which postulates that only A or not-A can be true. Hence, A is an element of M if and only if A is not an element of A.4 The logical problem underlying this paradox has been known since antiquity, which discussed it as “Epimenides’s paradox”, derived from Epimendes, the Cretan, who came to Rome and declared self-referentially that “all Cretans are liars”. The rule which Russell established against paradoxes of this kind postulates that sets (or classes) and their elements must be strictly kept apart since they cannot be dealt with at the same level of argumentation.

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According to Bateson, the message “This is play” implies a negative metastatement such as “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (Bateson [1955] 1972: 180). Since “standing for”, according to Bateson, is a synonym of “denoting”, the sentence may hence be paraphrased as: “‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote”’, and. hence, “The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (1972: 180). Since the underlying paradox evinces the logical contradiction that “this is a bite and not a bite at the same time”, we are faced with an infringement of the law of the excluded middle. But on which level does the paradox emerge in play? Consider the example of two girls boxing in play. The bodily actions may be quite the same as in a real fight; nevertheless, the girls are not fighting at all, even though their fists may be clenched and they may even hit each other. Playful boxing is an iconic sign of real boxing with the difference that players in contrast to fighters will not end up with a bloody face or a broken nose. Evidently, there is a difference concerning the consequences of the two modes of behavior. The agents’ motives and intentions differ, too. While a real fight is carried out because of anger, fear, or hatred, a playful fight has no such causes. Playful fight can hence be interpreted as a sign of real fight. Signs of action differ from the action they refer to especially in their pragmatic dimension, which concerns the effects on our lives. For example the statement “Smoking 30 cigarettes daily will cause lung cancer” can be used to frighten people, but it cannot cause lung cancer; only the actual act of smoking may do so. Only performative speech acts of the subtype of the declaratives (as Austin called them) do more than refer to an effect; if uttered appropriately, they are able to cause the effect which they refer to. The utterance “I herewith declare you man and wife”, spoken by a registrar, really makes the couple husband and wife. As long as we do not confound signs with their objects there is no paradox. Words and utterances can mean objects and actions, but they do not exert the same influence on our lives as the objects and actions they refer to, and they do not have the same consequences. Signs and their objects are of a different kind or, as Bateson put it with reference to Alfred Korzybski: the map is not the territory. In play, the distinction between the map and the territory is not as radical as in geography. The two levels of play and “serious” life are marked as different by metacommunication. The iconic representation of the bite in play does not mean the same as a real bite, but the playful bite does not simply negate the real bite. Signs in play communication negate their objects through affirmation. A merely playful act denotes and at the same time it does not denote the “real” action to which it refers since it differs in meaning and in its consequences. The

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action to which the player’s iconic nonverbal sign refers is really performed, but the meaning which this action has in a nonplay context is negated with the performance of this action. In this sense, there is a paradox. For this reason, Bateson argues “that play marks a step forward in the evolution of communication – the crucial step in the discovery of map–territory relations. In primary processes, map and territory are equated; in secondary processes, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and discriminated” (Bateson [1955] 1972: 185). Both in therapy and in play, metacommunication is part of communication: As we see it, the process of psychotherapy is a framed interaction between two persons, in which the rules are implicit but subject to change. Such change can only be proposed by experimental action, but every such experimental action, in which a proposal to change the rules is implicit, is itself a part of the ongoing game. It is this combination of logical types within the single meaningful act that gives to therapy the character not of a rigid game like canasta but, instead, that of an evolving system of interaction. The play of kittens or otters has this character. (Bateson [1955] 1972: 192)

In play, participants have to be aware of this paradox, which is especially evident when we consider role play or acting. Actors have to play their roles as convincingly as possible, but at the same time, they have to be aware that they are just playing their roles.5 (The audience, too, must be aware of this fact; there is the well-known example of illiterate audiences yelling at the hero to warn him of the hidden aggressor.) An actor or actress who fails to realize the difference between theater and life is no longer an actor or actress. They behave like a schizophrenic who actually believes to be another person. The connection between play behavior and psychiatric anomaly is apparent, as Bateson has shown. In sum, Bateson considers play to be metacommunicative because of the self-referential way in which the players signalize that they are playing. Their metacommunicative message “This is play” is inherently paradoxical since it affirms and negates at the same time what the players are doing. Metacommunication in play is self-referential communication. Players perform actions and simultaneously they refer to the way they perform these actions, affirming that what they are doing is “just play”. In the context of the semiotics of pictures, Nöth (this vol., Part II) distinguishes between metapictures and self-referential pictures: a metapicture refers to another picture, for example, by alluding to it or by quoting it, whereas a self-referential picture is a picture that refers to a specific picture, namely to itself. Every self-referential picture is hence also a metapicture because it is a picture (or a pictorial element) about a picture, but not every metapicture is self-referential since a metapicture can also be a picture about another picture.


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In analogy to the distinction between metapictures and self-referential pictures, the message “This is play” can be defined as both metacommunicative and self-referential: it is metacommunicative since it is about play, which is a form of communication; it is self-referential since it refers to the very situation in which this message is conveyed. We can even go one step further: play activities (not framed by games) must be self-referential; otherwise play cannot take place at all. There is no play without self-reference. Metacommunicative self-reference sets the frame of reference for play. Bateson argues that play involves a further paradox which is due to the fictionality of play behavior: Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but, in addition, the bite itself is fictional. Not only do the playing animals not quite mean what they are saying but, also, they are usually communicating about something which does not exist. (Bateson [1955] 1972: 182)

However, from the perspective of Peirce’s semiotics, it is evident that this Batesonian paradox is not a paradox at all since the object of a sign, according to Peirce, must not necessarily be a “real” object but can also be idea, an imagination, or even a “mere fiction” to which a sign refers (cf. CP 4.531, 8.314). Neither play nor sign behavior presuppose any “real” object of reference; both can also refer to previous knowledge or experience in the realm of imagination or fiction. The potential for creating and referring to fictional events is common to play and other modes of fictional communication. According to Bateson ([1955] 1972: 181), “histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in response to threat, histrionic threat [. . . ] form together a single total complex of phenomena”. Games of adults such as gambling or playing with high risk have their roots in the combination of threat and play. Bateson also considers the affinity of play with art and rituals. All these modes of communication do not refer to “reality” in the sense of something really existent but to possible worlds, be they alternative, imaginary, impossible or perhaps in some indefinite future. Games certainly belong to this complex of “play and fantasy”. In the following we will examine how both metacommunication and self-reference is characteristic of games.

2. Metacommunication in a card game The distinguishing feature between games and play is that games are played according to rules, whereas play is spontaneous and has no previously established rules. The rules of a game determine the range of the players’ possible

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moves and in some games, their temporal and spatial order. According to Salen and Zimmerman (2004: 125), game rules limit the players’ actions; they must be explicit and unambiguous, shared by all players, fixed, binding, and repeatable. While in play, every single action must give evidence that it is play, games have rules that set a frame for all activities. It is not the players who establish the sphere of the game but the rules, which create a “magic circle”6 in which all and only game actions take place. Game actions are thus dispensed from metacommunicative and self-referential discourse, whereas play is not. Is there metacommunication or self-reference in games at all?7 I will try to answer this question by means of the example of a popular German card game called Skat. Skat is usually played by three players with a pack of 32 German or French cards. Let us imagine that three girls have decided to meet for a game. Each of them receives a hand of ten cards from the dealer; two cards remain in a stack on the table. To begin with, one of the players turns to her neighbor to the right and begins to negotiate, in a dialogue, the value of their hands. Since each player may profit from not announcing the real value of her cards immediately because the risk of losing (and winning) increases with each value, the first negotiator will begin with the lowest possible value, 18, and continue in the sequence of the next possible values, that is, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27. . . , up to the highest value at the risk of which she is still willing to play. After each number proposed by the negotiating party, the co-player answers “yes” or “no” according to her calculation of the value of her hand. When no player is willing to take a higher risk, the negotiation ends and the two parties are determined: the player who declared the highest value has to play against the two co-players who form a team against her. The single player has the right to substitute the two remaining cards for two cards of her hand and to discard the cards with the lowest value. She announces which suits will be trumps, and the player who sits on the left hand side of the dealer leads with the first card, the others will follow in playing their cards in clockwise direction. Each party tries to win the cards on the table by playing a card of higher value. The single player has to obtain at least 61 of the 120 possible points to win the game, otherwise she loses. According to the above description, there is self-referential communication about the game before the game begins, i.e., when the players arrange to meet to play the game. The rules of the game exist before the actual game is played. They are constitutive rules, which are valid independently of whether the game is played or not. The game situation is completely framed before the players begin to play. Players who know the rules well need not discuss these rules in any metacommunicative discourse during the game, but the rules as such are metacommunicative in a way, since they determine what the players may or may not do.


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In Skat, they even contain a constitutive procedure to determine the formation of the two teams of the game. Neither the agreement to play nor the rules as such are self-referential. The rules of the game are unquestionable instructions determining the players’ permitted and the prohibited moves. They have no reference to themselves but they refer to all games that will and have been played.8 The individual moves and the initial negotiation of the teams are neither metacommunicative nor selfreferential. Insofar as they are rule-governed activities, they are alloreferential, having reference to conventions established long before the game begins. Such alloreference at the level of the individual moves does not preclude that the game as a whole might not be nevertheless a self-referential activity. Games, unless played for money, have no purpose beyond the game itself. This is what they have in common with poetry whose self-referential nature has been emphasized by Roman Jakobson, among many others. Games are as selfreferential (and alloreferential) as poetry is. Furthermore, other forms of self-referential metacommunication take place when a game is played, for example, when players change their communicative role from ally to opponent and begin to speak like friend or foe, flattering each other or using playful verbal injuries against the opponent. Metastrategic discourse of this kind is not prescribed by the rules of the game; hence it is not part of the game although it is still a mode of play. Play has a very fragile communicative situation because there is always the danger that playful rudeness or simulated verbal injuries might be taken seriously as a personal offense. Thus, games evince a kind of double framing. First, the game is framed by its own constitutive rules. Secondly, but only optionally, a game may also be framed by play accompanying the game. In addition to the constitutive rules, which define the game, play may thus introduce additional regulative rules, which determine the players’ activities in various, mostly ad hoc, ways. For example, the atmosphere of the play regulated by its social setting as informal, relaxed, funny or competitive and even professional. The social setting is an important incentive to the players, but it is not constitutive of the game.9 In sum, playing and gaming must be distinguished. A game is not play, but play tends to occur concomitantly with games. Games differ from play with respect to the features of metacommunication and self-reference. Game activity or gaming is a rule-governed activity guided by the intention to win.10 “Play activity” or “playing”, by contrast, refers to an activity not framed by constitutive and fixed rules but by metacommunication. It is unavoidable that the expression “playing a game” also contains the verb “play” which should theoretically be distinguished from the concept of “game”.

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3. Rules, communication, and metacommunication in computer games Let us now turn to computer games, which are essentially games according to rules since, with each move, the players have to follow a rule established by the game, and these rules are unambiguous, repeatable, fixed, and binding. Furthermore, the player must give unambiguous commands, and, as in other games which allow only a limited number of moves, computer games permit only a restricted range of commands; a player’s shouting at the monitor, for example, will not make a computer react since it is programmed to input from its keyboard.11 This situation differs from the one of play, which is based on ambiguity, the frame of play being fluid because it is only established in the course of the play. There are two basic types of computer games, multiplayer and single player games. In how far and to which degree is communication self-referential in these two types of game? The social frame which characterizes the situation of players playing a game comes to existence whenever players meet for a game, not only in a game of Skat, but also in multiplayer computer games. Digital games evince a kind of framing similar to the one of nondigital games. They can be played by two players on one console, in LANs12 , or via internet. Played on one console, the framing of the game is not unlike the one of Skat. The players do not only play against each other on the console, for example in a racing game, but also together. The setting may also be one of small LANs in which the game is played in the presence of the players who can communicate with each other. The players’ verbal comments may also have support via the chat function which allows the use of written messages. Online games in which direct oral contact is not possible have chat functions for written messages. Some games also include the so-called teamspeak function for oral communication via an internet telephone device. With these characteristics, multiplayer computer games, even when played in the bodily absence of other players, fulfill the prerequisites of metacommunicative and self-referential play. Single player computer games, by contrast, have only one player. There is nobody with whom the individual player can discuss his or her moves so that no metacommunication can be expected unless the player assumes two selves in a soliloquy. Can there be metacommunication and self-reference when singly players interact with their computer games in the absence of other players at all? Indeed, textual strategies have been devised in such games which simulate metacommunication even in single players’ games. They can be found at various


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levels of the game and involve the single participants in their different roles as gamers or players. The game situations in question are either self-referential or metacommunicative or both. Let us examine two such strategies in the computer games Zork and Metal Gear Solid. Can there be metacommunication or self-reference when players interact with computer games in the absence of other players at all? Indeed, textual strategies have been devised in such games which simulate metacommunication even in single players’ games. They can be found at various levels of the game and involve the single participants in their different roles as gamers or players. The game situations in question are either self-referential or metacommunicative or both. Let us examine two such strategies in the computer games Zork and Metal Gear Solid. The strategy of fictional metacommunication can be traced back to the early times of computer games; it can be found in text based games such as Zork (Infocom 1977), which is a so-called text adventure. As the genre name suggests, Zork operates with written text only (cf. Rapp, this vol.). The game starts as follows (player input being marked as > and lines added for further reference): 1 West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox there. >open mailbox 5 opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet. >read leaflet leaflet, taken “Welcome to Zork” Zorkis a game of adventure, danger and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the 10 most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one. >go north North of House You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all the 14 windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees. 15 >go east Behind House You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar. >open window 20 With great effort, you open the window far enough to allow entry. >enter Kitchen Score: 10 You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark staircase can be seen 25 leading upward. A dark chimney leads down and to the east is a small window which is open. On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers.

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A bottle is sitting on the table. The glass bottle contains: 30 A quantity of water >open sack Opening the brown sack reveals a lunch, and a clove of garlic. >eat lunch (Taken) 35 Thank you very much. It really hit the spot. >open bottle Opened. >drink water You have to be holding the glass bottle first. 40 >take bottle Taken. >drink water Thank you very much. I was rather thirsty (from all this talking, probably).

The player can navigate through the fictional Zork territory by typing twoword commands, which make the program reply with a verbal description of a state, an event, action involving the player, a command, request, or comment addressed to the player. This resulting sequence of orders and responses evinces self-reference at different levels. In the beginning of the dialogue (line 9), the player reads the line “Zork is a game”. This self-descriptive statement is already part of the game; it does not belong to a pre-text that precedes the beginning of the game like an imprint precedes the beginning of a book. Hence, the text begins with a self-referential metatextual statement. However, this first sentence is not metacommunicative since it does not concern the relationship which the text establishes with its player in this game. The usual way of navigating through the Zork world is by typing orders, such as “go north” (l. 11), which are given to an unspecified addressee in the world of Zork. In such moves, the player is an addresser who utters the order, and there must also be an addressee to comply with the order, but who is this addressee? Since the player is faced with nobody else, the commands seem to be addressed to a fictional character in the game world by the mediation of the computer, but the answer which appears on the screen conveys a different impression. An unknown voice writes back: “You are facing the north side of a white house” (l. 13). This time, the addressee can be nobody else than the single player, that is, the same person who gave the previous order. Apparently, the computer refuses to become the addressee of the player’s order and returns this role to the addresser, the player. As a result, the single player turns out to be both addresser and addressee and is entangled in a self-referential communicative loop. As a result, the player is both inside and outside the game. As the participant who gives the order, the player is outside, as the one who is addressed by the text of the


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program, the player is inside the fictional game world. In terms of systems theory, the player is an observer who is observing him or herself. This textual strategy introduces an element of play into the game since the self-referential system of address exemplifies well the dilemma which characterizes play according to Bateson, the dilemma of being and not being in a given role at the same time. On the operational level, the commands of the player and the answers of the program can be compared with performative speech acts, even if they do not have the form of a statement but of an imperative. The imperatives typed by a player do not operate like commands but immediately have factual results in the fictional game world. Typing “open window” means that the “you” in the fictional world is opening the window. However, at the level of the players’ interaction with the machine, there is no self-reference. As far as the computer is concerned, players who type orders such as “go north” actually produce a sequence of electronic signals whose effect it is to trigger a sequence of digital operations which function like commands to the computer and hence have an utterly alloreferential semiotic effect. A new communicative scenario begins with the kitchen scene (l. 22). The programmed addresser now speaks in the voice of a counselor thanking the player (l. 35, 44) and giving advice (“You have to. . . ” l. 39). In line 43, with the remark “I was rather thirsty (from all this talking, probably,)” the addresser’s voice assumes the new role of a personal speaker who does not only refer to his own bodily needs (“thirst”), but also turns self-referential and metacommunicative with a comment on his own “talking”. There is hence a situational catachresis, a break in the continuity of the participants’ roles. Now, the addressee is no longer the same as the addresser, and the player, no longer isolated in soliloquy, is faced with an addresser who seems to be a true interlocutor.

4. Metalepsis and fictional metacommunication The strategies of metacommunication in the game of Zork, in which different diegetic frames are manipulated against all conventions of narration, are wellknown from literature. In literary theory they have been described as metalepsis. Metalepsis is a narrative device that manipulates the level of narrating with the level of the narrated events. As Marie-Laure Ryan (2004: 441) puts it: “Metalepsis is a grabbing gesture that reaches across the levels and ignores boundaries, bringing to the bottom what belongs to the top or vice versa.” Examples are fictional characters who address their author or their readers or also narrators who enter the world of fiction created by themselves. Ryan distinguishes between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis:

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Britta Neitzel Whereas rhetorical metalepsis maintains the levels of the stack13 distinct form each other, ontological metalepsis opens a passage between levels that results in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination. These levels, needless to say, must be separated by the type of boundary that I call ontological: a switch between two radically distinct worlds, such as “the real” and “the imaginary”, or the world of “normal” (or lucid) mental activity from the worlds of dream or hallucination. (Ryan 2004: 442)

In rhetorical metalepsis, the levels of narrating and the narrated world remain distinct, although there is some rhetorical reference from one to the other. In line 8 of the Zork excerpt, this was the case. An unidentified addresser uses the medium of a leaflet in a mailbox to greet the player with the words “Welcome to Zork”. Who is this mysterious addresser? Was the message sent by mail from an agent outside of the game, or is there some addresser within in the Zork world who sent this message? In the latter case there would be no metalepsis in this message, but apparently there is no mysterious addresser in this world of fiction, and the former case is more plausible. The addressers of the message are really the authors and the publishers of this game who interfere in the world of fiction with self-referential product placement. Ontological metalepsis, which results in real life interferences from the world of the narrator to the narrated world or vice versa, is even at the root of Zork as well as of many other computer games. The player who, at the desk in front of a home computer, types orders such as “open window” (l. 19), “open sack” (l. 31), or “open bottle” (l. 36) is rewarded with immediate obedience not only of undisclosed agents but also of inanimate objects, such as windows, sacks, or bottles. Players of computer games thus seem to have the power of metaleptic interference into the world of fiction that, in principle, should exist independently of the world of their own social environment. Metacommunication which is the basis of play and which can also be found whenever people play together is integrated in single player computer games by the textual figure of metalepsis, which can be called a simulation of metacommunication or fictional metacommunication. Fictional metacommunication cannot only be found in verbal but also in visual messages of computer games. Instead of typing “open window”, for example, the player may simply have to press a button on the keyboard or use a game controller to open a window. Recent examples of fictional metacommunication in single player computer games can be found in games which contain so-called training missions. Training missions are game scenes designed for the purpose of getting players acquainted with the rules of the game and the way it operates. They serve to make them familiar with the use of the avatar of the respective game world and want to teach the basic commands of the game. In Tomb Raider I (Eidos 1996), for example, the player has the opportunity of


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practicing with Lara Croft in a special training mission to Lara Croft’s house before the adventure starts. In Metal Gear Solid I (Konami 1998), the protagonist receives a “virtual training” on the way to his mission. In Half Life (Sierra Online 2001),14 the players experience how the newly employed protagonist becomes familiar with the security requirements of his enterprise. In training missions, the players are not addressed directly but through the protagonist of the game. The games conceal their training purpose by creating a fictional learning environment. Instead of letting the players know that they are being taught to press a button for the purpose of becoming acquainted with a new type of game, the illusion of the training for a more important mission is created. The fictionalization of the rules to be learnt also makes use of the device of ontological metalepsis for which the Metal Gear Solid series (Konami 1998–2004) is a good example. The Metal Gear Solid games belong to the genre of Stealth Shooters or Sneakers. The protagonist, whose role the player assumes, has the task to conduct important secret missions in foreign territories while avoiding contact with the enemy. To obtain the goal of the mission – rescuing an ally or destroying the enemy’s weapons – the real gamer has to save the game occasionally.15 In the series, this game activity is integrated in the game’s diegesis. The fictional and the operational levels are thus interconnected. At the fictional level of all the games of this series, Snake, the protagonist, has to sneak into buildings of the enemy all alone, but he remains connected with his headquarters and also with a paramedic by radio. The headquarters advise him how to find his way through the enemy’s territory; the paramedic keeps Snake’s state of health under surveillance. Shortly after the beginning of the mission, Snake receives a call from the headquarters. In addition to information about the mission, Snake and the gamer who has assumed his identity are advised how to ask the headquarters for help or information: “Press the select button of your controller.” Of course, Snake, the protagonist, has no select button to press, so that the advice is evidently directed at the gamers with the controllers in their hands. Snake is addressed, but the gamers are the real addressees. After having learned how to make a phone call, Snake can ask the paramedic for a report on his health. When the paramedic complies, the game is saved. The action of saving the game by recording the state of health has two addressees, the fictional character Snake and the gamer who wants to have control of the game. The paradox created by the metacommunicative message “This is play” in play is particularly evident at the operational level of the game: addressing the gamer means addressing the protagonist, and addressing the protagonist means addressing the gamer, while recording the state of health at the fictional level actually means saving the game at the real world level.

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5. Résumé Bateson’s paradox, according to which play simultaneously affirms and negates, can account for the manifold shifts between communication, metacommunication, and self-referential communication in computer games. In play, the borderline between real life and its negation in the sphere of mere play must be explored since there is no distinct marker to distinguish between play and nonplay. According to Bateson, playing involves permanent self-referential metacommunication, which sets up a frame for play and occurs simultaneously within that very frame. More clearly than in play, this interpenetration of frame and content of the frame can be observed in role play or acting. Games mark their boundaries very distinctively by their own rules which determine what is allowed as a game activity and what not. Rules are metacommunicative but not self-referential. The rules of a game set game activities free from set up a play sphere by metacommunication. They make game activities possible at a functional level whose aim is to win the game. Games can go parallel with play. Nevertheless, there are also game activities that have a symbolic meaning in addition. For example, placing a piece of a board game on a certain field of the board can mean buying a street or occupying a city. Gaming – a term that can be used to describe playing a game with respect to its pure functionality – is almost always accompanied by play that uses the game only as starting point for play amongst the players. Single player computer games do not require, but the may simulate metacommunication by the device of metalepsis. Some single player computer games set up a fictional play situation in which metacommunication from the fictional level to the player world can take place.16 The difference between this kind metacommunication and metacommunication in play as described by Bateson is due to the fluid frame of play. While play is only established in the process of playing, being constantly subject to possible changes, metaleptic metacommunication is part of the game program and a central issue of computer games.

Notes 1. For a survey of the history of the theories of play and games from various perspectives and disciplines see Sutton-Smith ([1997] 2001). 2. Schiller’s approach to play is strongly connected with his aesthetic ideal and can be associated with Kant’s notion of beauty as evoking disinterested benevolence. But Schiller’s influence is not restricted to aesthetics. His idealistic notion of play had an influence on the conception of kindergarten by Friedrich Fröbel (cf. Scheuerl [1955] 1964: 57).


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3. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell’s paradox 4. We find the same problem in Epimenides’s paradox. And an example of the paradox closer to real life is the one of the barber who shaves all men of a village that do not shave themselves and none else. If he did not shave himself he would be a man who did not shave himself and therefore would shave himself. If he shaved himself he would not only shave the men who do not shave themselves but also a man who shaves himself (namely himself). 5. The concept of mimicry, as described by Roger Caillois ([1958] 2001), is very similar to Bateson’s concept of metacommunicative play. 6. Cf. Huizinga ([1938] 1994); Salen and Zimmerman (2004). 7. Bateson (1955: 182) argues that games are constructed around the question “Is this play?” 8. On the other hand, there is self-reference at a higher level of any game design. Games are based on constitutive rules. This means that they owe their being played exclusively to the rules which the players follow and which have no existence independently of the game. The kind of self-reference which becomes apparent at this higher semiotic level is the kind of self-reference which any sign evinces as a token that refers to its own type of which it is but an instantiation. 9. In surveys dealing with the reasons for playing digital games, “playing with others” has often been given as one of the main reasons, see, e.g., the English summary of Ermi, Satu, and Frans (2004). 10. The term “gaming” is usually a synonym of “gambling” or “playing for a stake”. It is also used by players of digital games to describe their hobby; they even refer to themselves as “gamers”. In gaming, usually a certain amount of money is at stake. In the sense it is used here, only winning the game is at stake. Gaming can describe the seriousness of a player who wants to win a game. 11. Of course, there are attempts at broadening and multiplying the input mechanisms for computers, but they are still very limited. 12. LAN = Local Area Network. 13. In her discussion of metalepsis, Ryan (2004: 439) uses the metaphor of a stack, “a multileveled data structure whose components are processed in an order known as LIFO: last in, first out”. 14. I am referring to the Play Station 2 version. 15. The goal of a computer game is usually not attained with the first try. On the contrary, gamers have to try to master certain tasks along the way to the goal again and again. To avoid the repetition of the many moves each time they replay the game, gamers can save the state of the game they have reached in the previous game, which spares them having to start again from the beginning and allows them to proceed from the save point. 16. This is not the case in all computer games but only in games that create a game world and do not merely show objects on the screen which can be moved around by the player. The latter, which do not create a fictional world, have been called games with an opaque interface by Bolter and Grusin (2000).

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References Austin, John L. 1970 How to do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press. Bateson, Gregory [1955] 1972 A theory of play and fantasy. In: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 143–153. New York: Ballantine Books. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin 2000 Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Caillois, Roger [1958] 2001 Man, Play, and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ermi, Laura, Heliö Satu and Mäyrä Frans 2004 Pelien voima ja pelaamisen hallinta – Lapset ja nuoret pelikulttuurien toimijoina, Tampere: Hypermedia Laboratory, http://tampub.uta.fi/tup/951-44-5939-3.pdf (02.01.06). Huizinga, Johan [1938] 1994 Homo Ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1958 Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. – Quoted as CP. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004 Metaleptic machines. Semiotica 150(1/4): 439–469. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman 2004 Rules of Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Scheuerl, Hans [1955] 1964 Beiträge zur Theorie des Spiels, 4th ed. Weinheim: Beltz. [1954] 1990 Das Spiel, 11th ed. Weinheim: Beltz. Schiller, Friedrich [1801] 1967 On the Aesthetic Education of Man – in a Series of Letters, ed. and transl. by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon. Sutton-Smith, Brian [1997] 2001 The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Self-reflexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples1 Bernhard Rapp

This paper will present examples and specific forms of self-reference in computer games. The first example is from Monkey Island 4 – Escape from Monkey Island (LucasArts 2000), a typical Graphic Adventure. In the scene shown in Figure 1, the player has assumed the role of a pirate who has to persuade other pirates to join him as the crew of his (still unmanned) pirate ship. Challenging two uninterested adventurers playing darts in a bar room, the player in the role

Figure 1. Screenshot (PC) from Monkey Island 4 – Escape from Monkey Island (LucasArts 2000; German version): The protagonist pirate challenging two other pirates

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of the pirate addresses one of the rogues as follows: “I bet you won’t hit this guy up front”, with a look in the direction of the barkeeper in the background of the room with whom the pirate player himself is faced. The rogue, however, is faced in the opposite direction and apparently understands the opposite of what the pirate player means. Accepting the challenge, he throws his dart not towards the bar keeper in the background but in the direction of his own line of vision, which is the direction where the real player is sitting in front of the monitor. He throws, and all of a sudden it seems as if the dart were hitting the real player’s screen from within the monitor, dashing through its glass (Figure 2). The dart seems to leave the fictional Caribbean game world and to enter the real world of player’s family home. Of course, the breaking of the glass of the computer screen remains fiction, and the player is not “really” impeded from continuing the game.

Figure 2. Screenshot (PC) from Monkey Island 4 – Escape from Monkey Island (LucasArts 2000; German Version): Smashing the screen from within the game scenario

In this surprising way, the fictional and the real frames of the game and of gaming become the topic of gaming: The player in front of the playing device manipulating the virtual world2 is all of a sudden affected by, and seems to

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become the victim of, actions that originate in the fictional world “behind the screen”. The pirates that the player should be able to command by his moves attack their commander in the other “real” world of the player’s private home “in front of the computer screen”. The director of the play is directed by the characters of his creation. This fictional device is known as metalepsis (cf. Genette 1994: 168–69; Ryan 2004 and this vol.).

1. Self-reflexivity Players of games have always been confronted with self-reference. By defining space, time, and types of action of the “magic circle”, as he calls the game, Huizinga ([1938] 1980: 11) reminds us that the rules of a game generally refer back to the game as a game. Many other game theories show how playing games involves reflection and permanent self-reflection. Bateson (1983), e.g., described how games constitute a “framing” of the players’ minds (cf. Neitzel, this vol.), and Niklas Luhmann (1996: 96–97) has focused on self-reference in games from the perspective of systems theory. Players are permanently called upon to reflect their status as players in the course of the game, which testifies to a feedback loop at the roots of gaming. In the context of video and computer games, the (somewhat problematic) notion of “interaction with the game” suggests a self-referential dialogue of the player with the game played by the player. These are some of the basic forms and categories of self-reference which have been issues of theoretical research in games. The present paper is less focused on the fundamental categories developed in game theory; its topic are rather certain selective and explicit forms of self-reference popular in the computer gaming community which may be more specifically described by the concept of self-reflexivity as developed by Kirchmann. Self-reflexivity (or simply reflexivity) in the movies, according to Kirchmann (1996: 76), occurs when the medium film becomes the topic of a film, and the filmic narrative no longer represents the world existing beyond and apart from the film. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate various forms of self-reflexivity in games in which playing games is the topic.3 The following examples were chosen as typical of self-reflexive strategies in computer games. They should reveal a good variety in terms of period, genre,4 content, aesthetics, and function.

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2. Advertising the game to the game world: Zork I Our second example is from Zork I (Infocom 1982). This game is an early, almost archaic example of a computer game. It belongs to a genre which is probably best known under the label of Interactive Fiction or Text Adventure. Such games consist only of writing and for this reason literary scholarship has shown interest in them (cf. Aarseth 1997: 97–128). The player is faced with the typographical text of fictional content on the screen (Figure 3) and interacts with the game world by typing instructions such as “go west” or “open door”. These commands are then translated and processed by the parser (a special part of the program). The parser changes the text and develops it in response to what the player typed into the machine. The player, or rather his (unspecified) game representation in writing, moves through a literary world that emerges with the flow of the written text. According to the player’s instructions, a story about the search for treasures and their defense against thieves, robbers, and other villains unfolds.

Figure 3. Screenshot (PC) from Zork I (Infocom 1982): Plugging the product

In the actual in-game situation shown on the screenshot of Figure 3, we find ourselves at the very beginning of the game. Lines 1 to 4 show its title, the


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copyright and trademark notes and its serial number. These are the paratextual elements of the game, as Genette (1993: 11–13) has defined such elements in literature. Beginning the game in this way apparently imitates the beginning of a book with its impressum page. Lines 5 to 8 describe the scenery, which is “West of House” and includes a “mailbox”. The diegetic5 space is being unfolded. As the player interacts with the text, the story develops. In line 9, the curious player is opening the mailbox in front of the house and finds a “leaflet”. After following the instruction to “read it” (l. 11), however, the reader finds nothing of narrative interest, no information about the fictional world of the game, nor any advice that might help to survive the player in the enigmatic literary environment. Instead, the message from the mail box is “Welcome to Zork” (l. 14), followed by further lines advertising this “game of adventure” (l. 15). All this might look quite simple at first: the game contains an in-game advertisement for the game itself. However, from a metaperspective, we are faced with a paradox: an element of the diegetic space (the message in the letter box) refers to something not situated within but rather outside of this space, but in a space nevertheless essentially connected with the game space, viz., the space in which the device of the computer creates the text of the game. The inner space of the game refers so to speak to its outer space, or its “outside” appears in the “inside”. Indeed, the paradox cannot become reality. The player experiences the world of Zork as a closed space whose boundaries are the one of fiction. There is no way out of fiction into reality for fictional characters. But then, how did this advertising message get into the letter box? How can the inventors of Zork become fiction?

3. The end of the game in the game and paradoxical self-advertising: XIII XIII (Ubisoft 2003) is a so-called Ego- or First-Person-Shooter (FPS). This subgenre of the action game is currently highly popular, but it is being discussed very controversially in the media.6 The players experience the game world through the eyes of a character whose role they assume. The complete body of this selfguided character remains invisible like the body of a real person remains partly invisible to the seeing self. On the screen, only a hand is visible which carries a weapon. The aim of this kind of game is mainly to kill opponents or to avoid them in order to reach a goal or achieve some other mission. The aesthetics of XIII is the one of a comic book design, and the narrative subject is the one of a “secret agent”.

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Figure 4. Screenshot (PC) of in-game advertising in a scene from XIII (Ubisoft 2003)

In the scene shown in the screenshot in Figure 4, the player has just successfully killed or beaten up a guard who lies dead or perhaps only knocked out on the floor in an office room with two computers on a table. At this very moment, the screen saver function appears on the two computer screens in the fictional office. The screen to the right shows the publisher’s logo Ubisoft while the one on the left confronts the player with a message well-known to everyone who has played computer games: “game over”. With this kind of product placement in the computer game, the player is faced with a threefold paradox of kind with which the players found themselves confronted at the beginning of Zork I. “Game over” is a message about the end of a game, but the game is not over; it continues. Read as a message about this game itself, the announcement of its end in the in-game action is only the first paradox. Read as an advertisement, the message (the publisher’s logo) implies a second paradox, for consumers of a game need no advertising of this game. (Books occasionally have pages with advertisements, but never advertise the book which the readers are reading.) Thirdly, “game over” is also and ironical or even cynical metaphorical comment on the guard’s death whose life ended through the players action, but how can a machine comment on such an event even though it occurs in the very room in which the machine is set up?


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4. Played player scolding: Barbarian Barbarian (Palace Software 1987) is a fighting game of the Beat-’em-up type. Designed for the Commodore 64 home computer in the 1980s, it was banned in Germany by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften because of its “realistic” and brutal display of violence (Wirsig 2003: 49). In the scenario of an ancient arena, two warriors are dueling with swords. The game requires dexterity and quick reaction if the players want to be successful in their strikes or counterstrikes against their enemies. Figure 5 shows the screenshot of a scene in which the players did not interact with the game for some time. It was taken in the double player mode at a moment when neither player players was interacting with the game. At this moment, the two warriors on the screen address the “real” players in front of the computer to blame them for their lack of participation. The warriors directed in their actions by the players’ playing seem to be conscious of what the players do (or fail to do while leaning back). The creatures of fiction are beginning a double play. They do not only play against each other in their fights they also seem to play against the player who plays them when directing their actions on the screen.

Figure 5. Screenshot (C 64) from Barbarian (Palace Software 1987):A protest movement against lazy players

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5. The game in the game: Day of the Tentacle The last example is from Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts 1993), an Adventure Game in which the player is faced with pictures and written messages. Usually, in this genre, the storyline develops as the players, in the guise of the in-play characters solve riddles, seek precious objects, combine pieces to a whole, etc. Day of the Tentacle, or DotT, as it is often called, is announced as the official successor of an extremely popular Graphic Adventure of the 1980s, Maniac Mansion (LucasArts 1987). In Maniac Mansion, the player’s task was to put together a group of kids to rescue a young girl held prisoner by a mad scientist. DotT follows this plot and develops it further. Again, the player has to enter the scientist’s house, and the same funny characters appear, heroes and villains alike. In the situation shown in Figure 6, the player has just moved his character Bernard into the room of the scientist’s son, the character to the right who looks like Frankenstein. Among various items we notice an old home computer in the background. To the player’s surprise, this computer in the game scene can be used by the player from “without”. Once turned on, the old Maniac Mansion game appears on the screen within the screen; the pictures shift completely from the DotT scenario to the Maniac Mansion scenario. Players unfamiliar with Maniac Mansion can play it now for the first time, while those who know it from their old home computer might be curious to play it once more.7

Figure 6. Screenshot (PC) from Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts 1993; German Version): A game in the game


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6. Findings In our examples, self-reflexivity appeared in a variety of forms. In Monkey Island 4, there was a metaleptic transgression from the level of the creatures of fiction to the level of their (co-)creators in which the former seemed to interfere in the life of the latter. In Zork I and XIII, we encountered metaleptic advertising: the creatures created by the designers of the software industry became the addressees of advertisements for the world of the games in which they acted and from which they could never escape to buy the product they were invited to buy. In Barbarian, the creatures directed in their actions by the players began to direct the players themselves. In Day of the Tentacle the players began to act like characters in the play starting a computer game within their game. Where does this predilection for self-reflexivity in computer games come from; when did it first appear; is it a specific of the medium? Self-reflexivity does not depend on a specific medium, period, or genre. There has been self-reflexivity early in the history of literature and the media in drama, narrative literature, and film, and thus it is not altogether surprising to find it in computer games as well. It occurs rather early in the history of the computer game in the late 1970s and early 1980s.8 Hence, one can hardly consider it an effect of maturity of the medium as it has been claimed for other media. Many self-reflexive strategies shown in computer games are well-known from literature and the movies so that influence from the literature and film is likely. In literature, film, and computer games, the medium in its material or technical possibilities and limitations as well as in its historical, cultural, and economic context have long since been the subject of self-referential reflections and allusions. A significant parallelism in the self-reflexive strategies of games and literature besides the one of metalepsis is mise en abyme (mirror text), which occurs in the form of the play in the play (Hamlet) or the movie in the movie (see Withalm, this vol.). An important source of self-reflexivity in games is the difference between the world of the players and the creatures of their games. To understand a selfreflexive strategy, the players must be aware of this difference between the two levels and interact accordingly. Essential to understanding self-reflexivity in computer games are the actions of the players, i.e. the configurative practices which determine the “gaming situation as a combination of ends, means, rules, equipment, and manipulative action” (Eskelinen 2001). Furthermore, self-reflexivity is much indebted to the devices of the fictional world of a game.

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Self-reflexive strategies in computer games offer a special bonus to the players. The close association between self-reference and paradox as well as between paradox and humor testifies to the comic potential of self-reflexive devices in games.

7. Perspectives for further research Let us conclude with the proposal of some guiding questions for the future study of self-reflexivity in computer games. (1) What is the subject of a self-reflexive strategy? The parallelisms with the medium film in this respect suggest the relevance of a typology of interest to both media (for the film, see Withalm 1999: 149 and this vol.). (2) How is a self-reflexive strategy enacted? Again, the parallelisms with the movies promise to be of relevance. A pertinent example from the film is the screen passage in which an actor or an object in a movie shown within the movie transgresses, or at least touches the screen. Another cinematic technique of self-reflexivity relevant to game studies is the device of facing the camera, which means, facing the audience. (3) When or in which situation of the gaming process does a self-reflexive strategy occur? What has, or must have, happened just before a self-reflexive scene began? Possible candidates for answers to these questions are missing player input, intense exploration of the game space, cul-de-sac situations, or critical situations of search for solutions. (4) To what extent does self-reflexivity appear in a computer game? How much “space” does a self-reflexive strategy occupy? Does it occur only once as a marginal joke; or does it extend over the whole game, as is the case of games in games? How can the relation between a computer game and its self-reflexive strategies be described? (5) What are the functions of self-reflexive strategies in the game; are they intended or can they occur otherwise? What do self-reflexive strategies mean for the computer game as a special form of communication? Can they help to keep up the “magic circle” of the game, as in the example of Barbarian in which the game tries to pull the player back into its spell? Selfreflexive strategies certainly provide extra motivation and entertainment for the players, but can they also help in building up coherence within an incoherent structure?9 In the study of the history of computer games, selfreflexive strategies are likely to function as some kind of remembrance of a hybrid medium that had, until the breakthrough of the internet in the late 1990s, almost no public, institutionalized memory.


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These guiding questions concerning the future study of self-reflexivity in computer games are far from delimitating the full scope of the research field, but they should be suitable as a first sketch of the outlines of the field of further investigations.

Notes 1. In this essay I use “computer game” as a collective term for all kinds of game software that has been developed for contemporary personal computers (PC) as well as older home computer systems, such as the Commodore 64 or Commodore Amiga. To delimit the boundaries of research, I decided to exclude video games. This term refers rather to the category of digital screen-games which run on consoles (for instance Sony’s Playstation 2, Microsoft’s Xbox or, in the 1980s, Nintendo’s Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)); they are usually played in front of a TV or in a living room environment. (For the differences between computer and video games, see Rouse III (2001).) Nevertheless there is certainly no clear-cut distinction between both types of digital games. Most observations and results presented in this article should be transferable to the sector of video games as well. 2. Neitzel (2000: 54) has commented on the characteristic feature of computer games (in contrast to all other sorts of games) to double the object of play. 3. For the purpose of this paper, simplifications had to be made and other forms of self-reflexivity had to be excluded. 4. The term “genre” is used here not as a fixed category but rather as a unit for basic orientation without any theoretical claim. 5. For space and time in the narrative universe, see Genette (1994: 313). 6. Since the mid-1990s, games such as Doom, Quake, Unreal-Tournament or the very successful Counterstrike made also FPS famous and notorious. The still ongoing debate concerning the influence of violence and brutality in computer games on children has focused on these kinds of games. 7. Actually, this is not exactly a hidden feature (a so-called Easter Egg) for the information where to find Maniac Mansion is provided in the DotT user manual. Even on the package, there is a sticker announcing that Maniac Mansion appears in the game. In this way, it becomes an economic incentive whose message is: “Buy this one – and get another free!” 8. Warren Robinett’s game Adventure of 1978 (Atari) is seen as the first game that contains a kind of a self-reflexive strategy. The programmer hid his name in a secret room of the labyrinth game world since “Atari was keeping us game designers anonymous, which I found irritating. Also, I was kind of proud of the game” (Robinett 2003: xvii). 9. The argument of the incoherent structure of computer games has repeatedly been brought forward, for instance by Poole (2000: 50–54) and, in a more detailed way, by Newman (2004: 71–90).

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References Aarseth, Espen J. 1997 Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Bateson, Gregory 1983 Eine Theorie des Spiels und der Phantasie. In: Gregory Bateson, ¨ Okologie des Geistes. Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und epistemologische Perspektiven, 241–261. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Eskelinen, Markku 2001 The gaming situation. Game Studies 1.1, http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen.html (02.01.04). Genette, Gérard 1993 Palimpseste: Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1994 Die Erzählung. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Huizinga, Johan [1938] 1980 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kirchmann, Kay 1996 Zwischen Selbstreflexivität und Selbstreferentialität. In: Ernst Karpf (ed.), Im Spiegelkabinett der Illusionen: Filme uber ¨ sich selbst, 67–86. (Arnoldsheimer Filmgespräche 13). Marburg: Schüren. Luhmann, Niklas 1996 Die Realität der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Neitzel, Britta 2000 Gespielte Geschichten: Struktur- und prozessanalytische Untersuchungen der Narrativität von Videospielen. Weimar: Diss. phil., ftp://ftp.uni-weimar.de/pub/publications/diss/Neitzel/ (16.01.05). Newman, James 2004 Videogames. London: Routledge. Poole, Steven 2000 Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing. Robinett, Warren 2003 Foreword. In: Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader, vii–xix. New York: Routledge. Rouse III, Richard 2001 The console and PC: Separated at birth? Computer Graphics 2: 5–9. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004 Metaleptic machines. Semiotica 150: 439–469.


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Wirsig, Christian 2003 Das Große Lexikon der Computerspiele: Spiele, Firmen, Technik, Macher – von ‘Archon’ bis ‘Zork’ und von ‘Activision’ bis ‘Zipper Interactive’. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf. Withalm, Gloria 1999 Der Blick des Films auf Film und Kino. In: Michael Latzer, Ursula Maier-Rabler, Gabriele Siegert and Thomas Steinmaurer (eds.), Die Zukunft der Kommunikation: Phänomene und Trends in der Informationsgesellschaft, 147–160. (Beiträge zur Medien- und Kommunikationsgesellschaft 4.) Innsbruck: Studien Verlag.

Part VII. Other self-referential arts

Looking through the computer screen: Self-reflexivity in net.art Marie-Laure Ryan

As a feature of period style, self-reflexivity is generally considered a sign of old age. When it runs out of stories to tell, of new territories to explore, of discoveries to make, thought can always turn back upon itself. The postmodern fascination with self-reflexivity can be attributed to the sense of pastness that permeates turn-of-the-century, or rather, turn-of-the millennium culture – a sense that will endure until the new millennium finds its own cultural identity. But self-reflexivity could also be a response to the curiosity aroused by the development of a new medium. A case in point is Don Quixote, the foundational novel of modern Western literature, whose subject matter is the danger of reading too many novels. Janet Murray (1997: 97) ascribes Don Quixote’s madness to the newly introduced practice of silent reading, which is itself a consequence of the invention of print and of the ensuing spread of the book. The insecurity of both old cultures and young media regarding their purpose or direction explains why self-reflexivity is such a prominent feature of digital texts. As part of an old culture, digital texts are caught in the postmodern episteme, and they participate in the ideological, political and aesthetic preoccupations of their time; while as part of a new medium, they are still unsure of their contribution to art, to thought, and to culture. Both factors lead to a quest for identity that takes the form of a playful interrogation of the technology that supports them. In the present essay I will focus on the patterns of self-reflexivity found in Web-based art (or net.art), arguably the form of new media that has pursued the scrutiny of its technological foundation the most persistently. To prepare, theoretically, the ground for this investigation, I will start by offering an overview of the various forms of self-reflexivity.

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1. Types of self-reflexivity The term “self-reflexivity” covers a wide range of phenomena diversified along three continuums: the continuum of explicitness, the continuum of scope, and the continuum of individuation. The continuum of explicitness runs from a strong pole of literal self-reference through an intermediary zone of self-reflexivity to a weak pole of artistic self-awareness. Literal self-reference is illustrated by the famous paradox-creating sentence “this sentence is false”. Genuine self-reference, as opposed to mere self-reflexivity, is a feature limited to semiotic systems capable of making propositions or issuing commands. Outside natural language, we find it in mathematics, for instance in Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of axiomatic systems, and in computer code, such as the recursive function that computes the Fibonacci number series by launching multiple copies of itself. Images cannot literally refer, since they lack the indexical power of language, but they can represent themselves through recursive self-embedding. The closest we find to self-reference in the visual domain are consequently pictures that contain copies of themselves, as in the heraldry figure known as mise en abyme, or on the box of the Laughing Cow brand of cheese, where we see a cow with earrings representing the Laughing Cow box of cheese. The middle of the spectrum of explicitness is occupied by works that present what I will call symbolic or emblematic forms of self-representation. Whereas the type of straight self-reference that we find in “this sentence is false” represents nothing outside itself, symbolic or emblematic self-reflexivity represents both the text of which it is a part, and something situated in the world created or described by the text. In a narrative text, for instance, the description of an object or a conversation between characters may both play a role within the plot, and tell us how the text should be read, and in a poem, a metaphor may both participate in the concrete thematics of the text, and offer an image of poetry. At the weak pole of the continuum of explicitness we find the self-awareness that Roman Jakobson (1960) calls the “poetic function of language”. Jakobson divides acts of communication into six parameters (the sender, the receiver, the message, the context, the code and the physical channel that puts the sender in contact with the receiver), and he associates each of these parameters with a specific function. Among these, the poetic function is the one that focuses on the message for its own sake. (Here message must presumably be understood as an inseparable union of form and content.) Verbal art, in other words, is language that attracts attention to itself, but it can do so in a subtle way, through either pleasant sound patterns or creative imagery, without explicitly taking itself as referent. The continuum of scope diversifies self-reflexivity according to how much of the text the self-reflexive elements capture in their mirror, and how dominant

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they are in the global economy of the text. Linguistic self-reference, as we find in “this sentence is false”, illustrates perfect scope, since the range of the indexical element “this” encompasses the entire sentence, and since the sentence does nothing else than reflect upon itself. Visual self-reference, by contrast, is always incomplete. An image can only show the image in which it is embedded if it also shows itself as part of the larger image; but for this copy of itself to be faithful, it must contain a third copy, and so on in an infinite regression. Whereas the Laughing Cow box illustrates explicit but incomplete self-reflexivity, the opposite situation is represented by an emblematic text that models itself entirely through symbolism, as is arguably the case with Mallarmé’s hermetic poems about poetry. A text may be self-reflexive throughout – in which case it becomes an allegory of itself – or blend reflexive and non-reflexive elements.The scattered reflexive elements may furthermore represent particular aspects of the text, rather than trying to mirror it in its totality. The third continuum concerns the focus of the reflexive activity. It runs from texts that reflect specifically on themselves, highlighting their distinctive features, to texts that include a broader class in their self-mirroring, such as their medium or their genre. I will call these two poles individuated and categorial self-reflexivity. As an example of categorial self-reflexivity, consider the lexia “This writing” from the hypertext Patchwork Girl, by Shelley Jackson (1995), which reflects on the difference between reading from a book and reading on a screen in a hypertext environment: When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now [reading hypertext]? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future. Or rather, history is only a haphazard hopscotch through other present moments. How I got from one to the other is unclear. Though I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete (and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without end, without story. Or with as many stories as I care to put together.

While these remarks outline a theory of hypertext that purports to describe the medium itself, rather than one of its particular instantiations, Patchwork Girl also includes self-reflexive elements that distinguish it from other works of hypertext fiction: for instance, the text map for the section “Crazy Quilt” is deliberately shaped like a patchwork quilt. This image alludes to the narrative thematics of the text, which describes how a fictional counterpart of Mary Shelley creates a female monster by sewing together the body parts of various women. The sewing

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activity of Mary Shelley functions in turn as an allegory of the writing activity of the author, Shelley Jackson, who stitches together the body of a text out of heterogeneous (and often recycled) textual fragments. In a movement leading from individuated to categorial self-reflexivity, the shape of the map allegorizes the particular story, and the story allegorizes the type of writing promoted by the Storyspace authoring system, with which Patchwork Girl was composed.

2. Net.art By net.art, I mean any artwork available for free on the World Wide Web that takes advantage of the computer, not only as a mean of production and dissemination, but also as a support necessary to the performance of the text. In other words, I restrict net.art to works that need to be executed by code. This definition excludes any artwork meant to be printed (such as Photoshop art or standard literary texts posted on the Web), as well as any work sold in CD form (hypertext fiction, computer games), but it accepts both works that can be run directly from the Web, and works meant to be downloaded and executed on the user’s computer. Net.art was born in the nineties, when the Internet developed from a resource mainly used by a technologically savvy elite into a widely accessible forum of mass communication, information, entertainment, and commercial activity. It represents the revenge of the hackers, who previously owned cyberspace, over the general public who now crowds (and spoils) the formerly guarded territory. Most net.art is indeed created by artists with an extensive knowledge of programming, or alternatively, by teams that include both artists and programmers. Fiercely anti-commercial – it cannot be sold to collectors and museums, hung on a wall, or placed on a bookshelf – and generally anti-utilitarian, net.art restores the old cliché “art for art’s sake” to its full meaning. Its spirit is generally subversive, if not destructive, and its aesthetics tends to sacrifice pure beauty to conceptual interest. The vast majority of the works reproduced in Rachel Greene’s book Internet Art (2004) give little pleasure to the eye, but the best of them stimulate the mind through the cleverness of their generative idea. While few of these works directly reflect about themselves, a very large proportion of them alludes to the features, protocols and utilities of the Internet: browsers, e-mail, and search engines. Others take shots at commercial applications, such as computer games or, as we will see, graphics programs. It could perhaps be argued that by commenting on other Internet applications, works of net.art direct reference away from themselves, and do not consequently qualify as self-reflexive. To this objection I reply that a net-supported work that takes as its subject matter a use of the Internet engages in a categorial form of self-


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reflexivity, since it is itself a product of the technological environment toward which it directs attention. In what follows, I will examine several of the original ways in which net.art comes to grips with the net: parody, codework, creative destruction, and mapping. Though I will classify my examples under one or the other of these headlines, they may participate in more than one category.

3. Parody My example of parody does not come from an artist who specializes in net.art, but from a distinguished novelist with a predilection for technological subjects: Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2 (1995) deals with artificial intelligence and the Turing test, and Plowing the Dark (2000) with virtual reality. Powers’s web-based story “They come in a steady stream now” represents for him an incursion into a new territory. A spoof of e-mail, the story combines reflection on the technological medium with a more individuated form of self-reflexivity: the text not only takes the proliferation of spam as its subject matter, it also mimics the interface of a standard e-mail program (Figure 1). When we first open (or rather, execute) the text we are faced with a display that looks like a mailbox with various folders: “inbox”, “drafts”, “sent”, and “trash”. As the reader clicks on a mail to read it, another message (or rather, its headline) appears on the screen. At the end of the reading process, there will be 17 mails in the inbox, but, ironically, none in the trash can, even though ten of them are spam: the user’s agency is limited to reading the inbox, and in keeping with the theme of the story, the fictional system is unable to filter out the junk. The spam letters run the familiar gamut of pornography, drug offers, and investment opportunities. “Iris Suarez” peddles a catalog of singles available for dating, “Cora Triplett” advertises “http.//naughtygowild.info”, “Christian Mortgages USA” tells the user “Jesus loves you – refinance now!”, “Candrgs” sells 6000 medicines at “substantial price savings”, “Evidence Eliminator” warns the reader that he is “in serious trouble – it’s a proven fact”, but offers an absolutely safe protection against this danger, and I leave the message of “Manure E. Griddlecake” to the reader’s imagination. In addition to the junk mail, the mail program is plagued by pop-up messages, which readers must close one by one before opening a new mail, and each screen contains a clickable animated ad. Both of these features promote obsessively (but rather refreshingly, given its non-commercial character) the literary Web site Ninth Letter of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the story is posted.

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Figure 1. Screenshot from Richard Powers’s “They come in a steady stream now”

Counterbalancing the humor of the junk mail, the seven “legitimate” letters, addressed to the reader by Richard Powers himself, contain a melancholic meditation on aging triggered by the spam letters’ incessant hawking of drugs that promise to reverse the damage of time. The narrator sees himself on the brink of a brave new world inhabited by a posthuman species that enjoys eternal youth, constant state of sexual desire, and perfect memory, but he realizes that, like Moses, he will never enter this Promised Land: Lifestyle drugs, they’re called: and who is going to argue? Not you, at 65, the last member of the last generation of humans still barred from returning to the garden, the last who will have to grow old, with nothing to look forward in retirement but Internet come-ons from the eternal future. . . What will it feel like, to be another species? Nothing that your species might compare it to. Soon we’ll be whatever comes after people. And puzzled by the hunger that we’ve finally outgrown. (Letter 4)


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While the spam outlines a dystopic future (at least for those who value our present condition of pre-posthumans), it also opens windows onto the past by jogging the memory of the narrator, not through drugs, but, quite inadvertently, though the randomly generated names of the fake senders. A mail reminds the narrator of the first girl he loved at age fifteen, and he wonders “whether she ended up as graceful as she began”, but unfortunately, “her name is too common to Google”. Another message – the sixth of the seven letters of the series – mentions a mail that bears the name of “a boy from your confirmation class, struck by lightening when scrambling out of a lake one summer”, but all the narrator remembers about the boy is his auburn hair, his kindness, and his “goofy smile that declared a standing state of total bafflement at the passage of time”. This sentence foreshadows the reversal of time’s arrow that will happen at the end of the story, but not before the reader submits to a common Internet ritual. In the last of the seven letters we read: “PLEASE REGISTER. The content you requested is available only to registered members. Registration is FREE and offers great benefits.” The user is asked to enter his e-mail address in a box, and to submit it by clicking a button. At this point I hesitated, wondering what kind of plague I would bring upon my system by following these instructions, but in the end, curiosity prevailed over caution. I was rewarded with a response in the best tradition of Amazon.com: “Thank you! You will receive your confirmation e-mail shortly.” The real e-mail sent to the user consists of a link to an Adobe file that can be downloaded and then printed. This file contains the text of the previous six fake mails, together with a very Proustian conclusion. In the new segment, the narrator recaptures the lost time with a glance outside the window that liberates him from the dystopic future of the screen, sends him back to the present, refreshes his memory (without drugs!), and eventually leads to an absorption of the past by the present, allowing the narrator to relive in its full intensity the glorious day at the lake before the boy was struck by lightening. By including all the previously read installments, the final delivery invites the reader to reflect on the difference between the print and the electronic medium. The text that came to us as a collection of fragments in the e-mail simulation achieves a closure and unity in the printable file that gives rise to an entirely new reading experience. Straddling two media, the text contrasts the continually interrupted reading that takes place on the screen with the appreciation of the poetic quality of its language that becomes possible when we hold the whole story in our hands. The originality of Powers’s achievement lies in the complementarity of the comic experience of the screen version and of the lyrical experience of the

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print version. In its play with two media, the text is truly more than the sum of its parts.

4. Codework Codework is a reaction to the so-called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) aesthetics that has dominated the design of software and operating systems since the Macintosh personal computer inaugurated the graphic user interface in the early eighties. Before that time, users communicated with the machine by typing instructions on the (infamous) command line of the DOS operating system. These instructions, which had to be memorized and typed exactly, could be regarded as a high-level programming language. It took some knowledge of its functioning to operate a computer, and the difference between user and programmer was much smaller than it is today. With the introduction of the graphic interface, all the user has to do is to click on an icon to launch an application, and anything resembling coded instructions becomes invisible. For the common user, this was a blessing; for the hackers, who saw themselves as the guardians of an esoteric knowledge, this was a profanation of the machine. Icons are perfectly opaque buttons, and clicking on them requires no more knowledge of the inner working of the machine than choosing an item on the touch-operated menu of your microwave oven. Codework is an attempt to restore the user’s awareness of the hidden layers of machine instructions that make it possible for data to travel from the depth of computer memory to the surface of the screen. The play with code in net.art takes various forms. The most superficial – with regard to the deeper layers of computer architecture – is a blend of typographical signs borrowed from human and computer languages. Here are samples of the pidgin languages invented by two practitioners of this technique, Mez (pseudonym for Mary Ann Breeze), and Talan Memmott: Mez: if: prealphanumeric//pre network n-cluded use ov com.put [ty/fillah]ers offline then: n-turr-rest in nework system[ic]z stemmed fromme a more organic base, collaborationz via real-time fleshmeat N n-stallation based Memmott: From out of NO.where, Echo appears in the private space of Narcissus.tmp to form a solipstatic community (of 1, ON) with N.tmp, at the surface. The two machines – the


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originating and the simulative – collapse and collate to form the terminal-I. a Cell.f, or cell. . . (f) that processes the self as outside of itself—in realtime.

If the hybridization of human subjectivity and computer intelligence prophesized by the theorists of the cyborg and the posthuman (Haraway 1989; Hayles 1999) ever becomes reality, this kind of language could develop into the literary idiom of the new species. But the use of typographic elements borrowed from computer languages will remain a purely cosmetic phenomenon as long as the text cannot be run by the computer. For a school of net.artists that includes Florian Cramer, Eric Andreychek, and John Cayley, codework should not only address human concerns when read as a text, it should also change the state of the system when executed as code; otherwise we could just as well read regular code as a literary text; or feed the binary version of a literary text to the computer as executable program and watch it cause the run-time error of “unknown instruction”. Yet another form of play with code consists of revealing the actual commands that underlie a text. This was the purpose of CODeDOC, an exhibition organized in 2002 by Christiane Paul at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Paul, the adjunct curator of New Media Arts, gave a dozen artists the assignment to write a computer program whose purpose was to connect and move three points in space, a theme that could be interpreted either literally or figuratively. The exhibit inverted the usual hierarchy between code and output, by making visitors (as well as users of the Web site where the project now resides) scroll through the code file, until they reached a button at the bottom that triggered the execution of the program. The projects vary widely in their faithfulness to the given theme, and most of them limit self-reflexivity, beyond the fact that the code is made visible before its output can be experienced, to the embedding of a description of the purpose of the program as non-executable comments within the code file. But two of the projects carried self-reflexivity beyond telling us “look, I’m made of code” by creating an individuated connection between the code and its output. In the first of these two projects, “Jack & Jill” by John Klima, the code produces an imitation of the low-resolution computer games of the eighties, such as Lode Runner or Donkey Kong. The task of connecting and moving three points in space is ingenuously and humorously fulfilled by turning the three points into the protagonists of the well-known nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”. The purpose of the game is to enact the plot of the nursery rhyme, by taking Jack and Jill up a slope to fetch a pail and by making them tumble down the hill, once the pail has been reached (Figure 2).

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Figure 2. Screenshot from John Klima’s “Jack & Jill”

In contrast to standard computer games, the user cannot use the keyboard to control the characters, but he can influence their movements indirectly by assigning values to a number of variable parameters: the choice of a “Chauvinist” or “Feminist” attitude decides which character is ahead of the other; the assignment of an intensity value to Jack’s and Jill’s desire controls the speed at which the characters climb the hill (with a low desire, they never get to the pail); and the specification of “pail allure” (which gives a choice of repulsive, moderate or undeniable) dictates the magnetic force exercised by the pail. To win the game, the user must find the proper combination of values for the parameters. The game is too easy to really challenge the player, but the real programming coup lies in the duplication of the game story by the text of the code. In other words, the story is both dramatically enacted on the screen, and verbally narrated in the code. In contrast to most of the other projects of the exhibit, “Jack & Jill” makes it rewarding, not only to look at the code, but to actually read it:


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Sub Main() The Story.Show While True If YourAttitude = CHAUVINIST Then If Fetch(pail, jack, jill) then GoUpHill jack, jill If FellDown(jack) and BrokeCrown(jack) then TumblingAfter jill, jack Else YourAttitude=FEMINIST Then If Fetch(pail, jill, jack) then GoUpHill jill, jack If FellDown(jill) and BrokeCrown(jill) then TumblingAfter jack, jill End if The Story.Draw Wend End Sub

What enables digital code to tell stories (or to produce poetry) is the fact that computer languages consist of two types of elements: names and operators. While the operators are expressed through a fixed vocabulary of reserved words specific to the language, the names (which stand for variables, constants, programs and subprograms) can be freely chosen by the programmer. In the Jack & Jill example, the story is suggested by the variables Jack, Jill and Pail, as well as by the subprogram names Fetch, FellDown, BrokeCrown and TumblingAfter, but the operators If. . . Then are detrimental to narrative meaning, because a story is a report of facts, and as such, it cannot be told, at least not literally, in the conditional mode (even less through embedded conditionals). The only operator that contributes to the narrative reading is =, which can be read as the verb “to be”. It would be an extraordinary achievement to enroll both names and operators in the production of a story, and Klima can be forgiven for not achieving what is probably an impossible feat. While in “Jack & Jill” the code mirrors the story told in the output, Brad Paley’s “Codeprofiles” performs the reverse operation: here the output of the program is an image of its own code. Not only does the program display a listing of itself, it also fulfills the requirement set by the organizers of the exhibit by moving three points across the display according to a logic described in a comment section of the code file: // This code reads in its own source and displays it in a tiny font, then // // It moves three points in “code space.” It essentially comments on itself .// // The white Insertion Point traces the code in the order it was written. // // The amber Fixation Point traces word by word as someone might read it. // // The green Execution Point shows a sample of how the computer reads it. // // The code lines themselves gradually get brighter as they execute more. //

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Figure 3. Screenshot from W. Bradford Paley’s “Codeprofiles” (detail)

Figure 3 shows a portion of the screen (three columns out of four). The amber point corresponds to the bright area in the left column. It runs linearly from the first to the last line, and then returns to the top, simulating the reading of a standard print text. If the user moves the cursor on one of the lines, it is magnified and made legible; if the user clicks, the execution restarts from there. The trajectory of the white point corresponds to the curved line that runs all over the image; at the moment shown in Figure 3, the point is highlighting text in the third column. Writing code is always a relatively linear process, because programmers must simulate in their mind the operation of the computer, which takes and executes the instructions sequentially, but a well-structured computer program consists of various self-contained modules, known as procedures or subroutines, which can be written in any order. This freedom explains the capricious arabesques of the white line. The movements of the green point trace the order of execution, whose sequentiality is frequently broken by commands implementing transfers of control, such as go-to statements and calls to subroutines that make the program jump across computer memory, where the instructions are stored before being brought to the processor to be executed. When I captured the program, ex-


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ecution followed a loop represented by the triangle between the first and second columns. Though “Codeprofiles” takes self-reflexivity further than any of the other projects of the CODeDOC exhibit, the author claims in a discussion of the program available on the exhibit’s Web site that it was not written “to be computerclever, nor postmodern reflexive”, but to compare and contrast three modes of parsing: the layman’s, who is tempted to read the file linearly, like an ordinary text; the programmer’s, who composes the code module by module in a relatively free order; and the computer’s, whose order of execution bounces back and forth between modules and travels “code space” in all directions.

5. Creative destruction There is perhaps no better way to make people appreciate what they have – or rather, what they had – than to take it away. Alan Liu (2004) suggests the term of “creative destruction” for the application of this principle in art. A practice that originated in Dadaism and Surrealism but exploded in new media, especially in net.art, creative destruction draws attention to cultural, commercial and technological phenomena by taking them apart. In Auto-illustrator, Adrian Ward combines the idea of creative destruction with parody and reflection on code into a humorous piece of dysfunctional software. Auto-illustrator (Figure 4) mimics graphic programs, such as Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint in the same way Richard Powers’s text mimics e-mail, but with the significant difference that the interface is actually operative: you can produce your own artwork by using the program, and you can even buy a licensed copy, which contains more features than the free demo version available on the Internet. The main reason for buying a license is to support the cause of net.art, for I cannot imagine that anybody would have sufficient need for Auto-illustrator to pay to $100 for it. But don’t expect to enjoy the program for a long time if you don’t buy the license: every time you run your free copy, its performance deteriorates, until you become unable to do anything with it. Auto-illustrator subverts the utilitarian spirit of commercial software by turning the graphic tools into autonomous agents with a will of their own. If you select the freehand pencil tool, the system does not use the position of the mouse cursor to draw a line, but rather follows its own rules, merely “taking clues from your mouse coordinates”. The exact nature of these clues remains a mystery: the line you draw stubbornly refuses to follow the line you wanted to draw. If you select the text tool, the system picks the letters, inventing nonsense words, and your control is limited to making a selection among the options “terse”,

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Figure 4. Screenshot from Adrian Ward’s Auto-illustrator 1.2

“verbose”, “creative”, and “slightly foreign”. The square and the oval tools let you draw regular geometric shapes, but it gives you a choice between “shabby” and “precise” shapes, as well as between “childish”, “artistic”, and “regular”. “Artistic” does not draw anything – there is no such thing as an artistic square or circle, according to the program – but “childish” brings delightful surprises: the circles will be funny faces, and the squares will be turned into the kind of houses that a four-year-old may draw (especially if you combine the childish and shabby options). As for the bug tool, it will place moving creatures randomly on your screen, and they will create art for you by crawling around and drawing lines. If you don’t like the result, a tool will let you exterminate the creatures. The parody of serious art programs extends to the system’s comments on the choices of the user (“this tool is boring”), and to the zany options offered on the “preferences” menu: here the user can click boxes labeled “Death penalty for poor designs”, “Exta-verbose KJX routines”, “Do cool things”. Her curiosity will be tested with a Pandora box labeled “don’t push this button”. If she succumbs to the temptation, the program’s behavior will become totally erratic, but fortunately, licensed users can undo the damage by hitting a certain key on the next run of the program.


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The rebellious behavior of the tools of Auto-illustrator reminds the user of the additional level of mediation that distinguishes drawing on paper with hand and pencil from drawing on a screen with computer software. In a graphics program, the hand does not draw, but rather activates a hidden code. The user of commercial, utilitarian software takes it for granted that the code listens to her input: if she selects the straight line tool, she does not expect the program to draw an arabesque. Auto-illustrator breaks this basic contract between the software designer and the user, and draws attention to the hidden code by complicating (rather than severing) the relationship between the movements of the hand and the behavior of the tools. The program does listen to the user, but it does so in an indirect, unpredictable way. This “disturbingly lively” machine – to paraphrase a much quoted formula by Donna Haraway (1989: 176) – does not produce a “frightfully inert” user, to conclude the formula, but on the contrary, distributes authorship among three agents: the programmer, who designs the code and invents imaginative new tools, the computer, whose unpredictable operation is regulated by random numbers invoked by the code, and the user, who retains modest control over the picture by choosing tools and colors, by letting the program duplicate or animate objects, and by deciding when the output is worth saving as an artwork. Auto-illustrator’s reflection on code does not take the form of making it directly visible, but rather, of asserting the artistic dimension of the programmer’s activity. In other words, it is not codework, but rather, what Christiane Paul calls “software art” (2003: 124). In an article included in the user’s guide to Auto-illustrator, Florian Cramer observes that in commercial applications, “programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota, coding slaves who execute other artist’s concepts” (2002: 102). Software art liberates programmers from the tyranny of corporate work by letting them express their own vision, using code as a meta-medium to control other media: language, sound, color, shapes, and animation.

6. Mapping The development of maps of cyberspace – by this I mean visual representations of the information contained in the Internet – is an area of teeming activity, both in net.art and in practical programming. The mapping projects inspired by the Internet (many of which are shown in Dodge and Kitchin’s fascinating Atlas of Cyberspace [2001]) range from purely functional navigational tools through projects that combine usefulness and artistic self-awareness to artworks totally devoid of practical purpose. Here I will discuss an attempt to map the Internet

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aimed at resolving a paradox that has fascinated authors as illustrious as Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges: the paradox of the map that achieves perfect self-referentiality by becoming indistinguishable from the represented territory. A fusion of map and territory would necessitate a complete image of a territory at a 1 to 1 scale that includes the map itself. Why 1 to 1? Because any reduction would require the omission of some features. And why should the map be part of the territory? Because if it weren’t, it would point to something external to itself: one can for instance imagine a complete map of the earth at a 1 to 1 scale spread out on another, larger planet. Both of these conditions lead to paradoxes. As Borges has shown ([1951] 1983: 195–196), if a map is part of the world, it can only represent the world completely by representing itself, which means that it must represent its own self-representation, in an infinite regression similar to the case of the Laughing Cow box of cheese. Moreover, if the map were at a 1 to 1 scale, it would cover the whole world, and according to Lewis Carroll this would lead to inevitable contradiction. A perfect map should contain an image of every blade of grass, but if it were spread out over the world, the sun would be blocked, the grass would die, the farmers would be mad, and the map would be unfaithful. And if the map were not spread out. . . it could not be consulted, and it would become useless. Carroll suggests, tongue in cheek, a luminously simple solution to this problem: “So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well” ([1893] 1982: 726.). But if we think of maps as navigational aides, this is a ludicrous proposal, because we would have to traverse the territory to see what its map looks like, when in fact the purpose of maps it to help us find our way in the territory. The digital artist Lisa Jevbratt proposes to reconcile functionality and exhaustive coverage of the territory with a mapping of the Internet appropriately titled 1:1. According to comments by Jan Ekenberg posted on the project’s Web site, 1:1 “becomes not only the map, but the environment itself”. Referring to Lewis Carroll, whose text is quoted in his commentary, Ekenberg concludes: “Let’s hope the farmers don’t object.” Jevbratt’s own on-line description of the project concurs with Ekenberg’s assessment: “The interfaces/visualizations are not maps of the Web, but are, in some sense, the Web. They are super-realistic and yet function in ways images could not function in any other environment or time.” The project that inspires such hyperbolic statements is an attempt to visualize the Web as a system of IP addresses. The IP address of a Web site is the numeric translation of its domain name; in other words, what is for human users www.selfreflexivity.org could be for the computer 217.170.37.221. Since IP addresses are made of four eight-bit words, for a total of 32 bits (or at least were made in 1999 and 2001, when 1:1 was created), there could be as many as 232


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distinct pages on the Web; but many IP addresses are not claimed, and attempts to reach them leads to the message: “cannot find server, or DNS error”. Other addresses are claimed, but the user is not authorized to access them.

Figure 5. Screenshot from Lisa Jevbratt’s 1:1 (detail)

The 1:1 project consists of five different visualizations, but I will limit my discussion to “Every”, the design that makes the strongest claim of being the Web itself (Figure 5). To produce her images, Jevbratt used Web crawlers – programs that search the Web address by address – to determine which IP numbers have active servers. The crawlers returned 186 100 active addresses for the sampled areas, and each of these addresses is represented on the screen by a distinct pixel. The pixels are color-coded on the basis of the numerical value of the address they represent, so that, by looking at the image, one can tell the “distance” (in numerical value) between occupied addresses: sharp contrasts in color mean that there are large intervals between active IPs, gradual contrast means that a region is densely populated. Each pixel is a hot link, and by clicking on it the user can reach the corresponding IP. This provides an interface to the Web radically different from the modes of navigation offered by standard browsers. As Jevbratt explains on the project’s Web site, “Instead of advertisement, pornography, and

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pictures of people’s pets, this Web is an abundance of inaccessible information, undeveloped sites and cryptic messages intended for someone else”. The user gets an idea of how small the proportion of the information stored on the Web is publicly accessible, and of how much the Web has changed since the creation of the project. I clicked about 20 times on the visualization, and my random selection yielded only one accessible web site: the home page of “Marjorie Orr, top international astrologer”. How should we understand the title 1:1? One obvious interpretation is that each unit on the screen corresponds to a distinct IP address, in a one to one relation. But this relation is very different from the scale of a map, where 1:1 means that a certain area of the map corresponds to the same area in the world. The units on the screen are made of one pixel, but they stand for addresses made of 32 bits. Nor can we interpret 1:1 as meaning that the design represents the information available on the Net in its totality. The image on the screen admittedly provides access to every active IP address, but we have to traverse the image to see the content of these addresses, which means that we cannot see all of this information in one glance, as a map would let us do. Nor does the visualization show what makes the Web a web: the complex system of links that interconnects its various elements. All this should make it clear that, while 1:1 could in principle be extended to cover the entire address field of the Web, it remains a long way from achieving the self-referentiality inherent to the claim that it is not a map of the Web, but rather the Web itself. By subjecting Jevbratt’s comments to a critical assessment, rather than accepting them at face value (as most commentators seem to do, with the exception of George Dillon), we learn that the tendency of conceptual art to produce auto-descriptions does not guarantee the validity of these descriptions. A representation of an artwork is liable to be considered inaccurate, whether it is contained in the artwork itself, or describes an external referent. But if 1:1 does not really fuse the map and the territory, it remains an impressive achievement in data visualization, not only because it reveals the hidden geography of IP addresses – in this sense it is truly a map – but also because its combination of representation and active interface to Web sites creates a type of image that could only exist in a digital environment.

7. Conclusion Let me return, in conclusion, to the question of what makes self-reflexivity so dominant in net.art. I believe that we cannot achieve a proper understanding of self-reflexivity in art in general, and in new media in particular, without


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taking into account the force that it is trying to resist, namely the immersive power of representations and their ability to create an illusion of reality (Ryan 2001; Wolf 2004). The self-reflexivity of Don Quixote was a warning against the tendency of readers to immerse themselves in the world of chivalric novels, and to mistake these fictional worlds for reality. In the nineteenth century, the development of the powerful illusionist techniques of realism led the novel away from self-reflexivity, and steered it back toward immersion, until postmodernism denounced any attempt to make the medium invisible (a prerequisite to immersion) as robbing the reader of his critical faculties. For those who regard immersion as a low-brow pleasure (unjustly in my view, for the experience requires a highly active involvement of the imagination), replacing transparent windows into imaginary worlds with the mirrors of self-reflexivity is a proven key to artistic respectability. It is indeed by developing self-reflexive features that computer games, a fundamentally immersive use of digital technology, have recently tried to promote themselves as an art form to be taken seriously. In contrast to the novel and to computer games, net.art never developed immersive features; what it is trying to undermine is not its own power to create illusion, but rather the kind of immersion in digital technology that limits our attention to the surface of the computer screen, and fools us into believing that we fully control this technology, when in fact our agency is restricted to what the system was programmed to let us do. As part of this attempt to provoke reflection on the role of digital technology in our lives, net.art fills the World Wide Web with images and inverted images of its own utilities. By inspiring, enabling, and hosting these multiple and varied images, the Web as a whole becomes a system that thinks about itself. Do not expect net.art to grow into an immersive art form any time soon: there are already enough of these in the media landscape. For net.art, reflecting on its supporting medium is not a search for identity, it is identity.

References Borges, Jorge Luis [1952] 1983 Partial magic in the Quixote. In: Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (eds.), Labyrinths, 193–96. New York: Modern Library. Carroll, Lewis [1893] 1982 Sylvie and Bruno. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. Ed. Edward Guillaro. New York: Avenel Books. CODeDOC exhibit. 2002. http://artport.whitney.org/exhibitions/index.shtml (08.02.06).

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Cramer, Florian 2002 Dillon, George 2002, 2003

Concepts, notations, software art. Auto-illustrator Users Guide: 101– 112. Downloadable from http://www.Auto-illustrator.com/ (08.02.06).

.Writing with Images: Toward a Visual Semiotics of the Web, http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/12.228.185.206/html/ (08.02.06). Dodge, Martin and Rob Kitchin 2001 Atlas of Cyberspace. New York: Addison-Wesley. Ekenberg, Jan 2001 Prologue to 1:1, http://128.111.69.4/∼jevbratt/1 to 1/jan.html (08.02.06). Greene, Rachel 2004 Internet Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Haraway, Donna 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine 1999 HowWe Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Shelley 1995 Patchwork Girl. Hypertext software. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Closing statements: Linguistics and poetics. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–77. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jevbratt, Lisa 2001 1:1, http://128.111.69.4/∼jevbratt/1 to 1/index ng.html (08.02.06). Klima, John 2002 Jack & Jill, http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/klima.shtml (08.02.06). Liu, Alan 2004 The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Memmott, Talan 2000 Lexia to Perplexia, http://www.uiowa.edu/∼iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan memmott/ (08.02.06). Mez. [Mary Anne Breeze] 2000 The Art of M[ez]an.ell.ing: constructing polysemic & neology fic/factions online, http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/34arc.html (08.02.06).

Looking through the computer screen: Self-reflexivity in net.art Murray, Janet 1997

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Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press. Paley, W. Bradford 2002 Codeprofiles, http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/paley.shtml (08.02.06). Paul, Christiane 2003 Digital Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Powers, Richard, Jenifer Gunji, Joseph Squier, Jessica Mullen, Lauren Hoopes, Chad Kellenberger and Val Lohmann 2004 They Come in a Steady Stream Now, http://ninthletter.art.uiuc.edu/FA/FA05/ (08.02.06). Ryan, Marie-Laure 2001 Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ward, Adrian 2003 Auto-illustrator 1. 2. Downloadable from Signwave: http://www.auto-illustrator.com/ (08.02.06). Wolf, Werner 2004 Aesthetic illusion as an effect of fiction. Style 38(3): 325–51.

The artist and her bodily self: Self-reference in digital art/media Christina Ljungberg

1. Introduction Questions of self-reference have always been fundamental to art. Iconic selfreference could even be said to be typical of the aesthetic sign, since one of its characteristics is that it calls attention to various aspects of itself, above all, its sensuous qualities and formal structures, actual materiality and rhetorical strategies. At least, this becomes evident and explicable if we approach selfreference in general and the self-referentiality in aesthetic signs in particular with the help of C.S. Peirce’s doctrine of signs. Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs (icon, index, and symbol), based upon the character of the relationship between a sign and its dynamical object, is especially illuminating here since it provides (1) a way of understanding reference in terms of indexicality (the indexical sign being defined as that in which there is a spatio-temporal or causal relationship between sign and object) and (2) a way of understanding self-reference (at least in part) in terms of iconicity. All iconic signs are self-referential, which could appear paradoxical since signs should really stand for something else. The reason why a sign can represent a sign is explained by Winfried Nöth in the introductory chapter to this volume: the Peircean object which a sign represents does not necessarily have an extension, and it does not need to be a piece of the so-called real world at all, since signs or ideas can be the object of a sign. The object of the sign is something which precedes and thus determines the sign in the process of semiosis as a previous experience or cognition of the world. (Nöth, this vol., I.3).

In other words, in this way, the sign’s referent can be another sign, and selfreference can be a chain of signs referring to other signs.

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Digital art is self-referential primarily because its images are mathematically generated. It is, put differently, a synthetic image presenting a numerically based reality that we can see on a computer screen only because the screen is composed of pixels, which are small discreet fragments that correspond to numerical values. These values enable the computer to appoint a precise position in a two-dimensional screen space within a Cartesian coordinate system to which chromatic coordinates are added. As anyone who has been working with digital photography knows, each pixel is a separate entity that can be fully controlled and changed. In digital art, the computer can even synthetically generate a picture; as Lucia Santaella points out, “the numerical image is under perpetual metamorphoses, oscillating between the image that is actualized on the screen and the virtual image or infinite set of potential images” (1997: 126). This image is highly iconic: there is no analogy between the algorithms that generate it and the image on the computer screen. In addition, as she notes with reference to Arlindo Machado (1993: 117), there are two keywords for synthetic images: “model” and “simulation”. A model is a diagram, which, in Peircean semiotics, is not only a subcategory of the icon, but which is also ideal for testing: a diagram or model can generate experiences that are not “real” but “formalized and repeatable [. . . ] calculations”. Therefore, in Santaella’s words, the “essential features of the synthetic image lie in its virtuality and simulation” (1997: 127). Another factor contributing to the self-referentiality of digital art is that artists working in digital media generally put an emphasis on the very process involved in the production of such art. This is something that digital art shares with other postmodern art forms. It becomes particularly evident when hybrid forms of art and media are used, which heighten the degree of self-reference: the switching between or among various media not only forces its viewing or, rather, participating audience1 to make comparisons among them but it also exposes the particularities of the various semiotic systems that each media embodies. In the case of virtual reality, the aids you have to use and your obviously technological environment make you aware of the necessary procedures that virtual reality still entails. In addition, there is increased self-reference since digital art often focuses attention on the artist and her bodily self, as both generating and participating in the work of art. At the same time, works of digital art have a marked indexical ingredient, too, in the sense of referring to other “real” works, contexts or bodies. Even in virtual reality, an awareness of the physical body is necessary for orienting ourselves in and understanding the particular digital work of art. Hence, there are varying degrees and forms of self-reference characteristic of various types of digital art and media. How can these various degrees of self-reference be determined? What are the kinds of self-reference typical of digital art and how can they be differentiated?

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That is what my contribution will attempt to chart, with the examples of artists working in various kinds of digital art and media: the multi-media works of visual artist and performer Laurie Anderson, video/digital artist Selina Trepp, and media artist Char Davies whose interactive installations immerse participants in an all-enveloping virtual reality in “the flow of life through space and time” (Davies 2004: 70).

2. Self-reference in multimedia Laurie Anderson is one of today’s premier performance artists. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist.

Figure 1. Scene from Laurie Anderson’s Songs and Stories from Moby Dick

Anderson’s performances show several forms of self-reference. There are those of intertextuality, in the sense of referring not only to works by other authors/artists and contexts but also in the form of repetitions and recursions in the text that refer back to the artist’s earlier work; and there are those of inter-

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mediality, in which the confrontation with hybrid forms of media increases the degree of self-reference. Intertextuality would seem to be a defining feature of her performances, which contain not only direct references such as Songs and Stories from Moby Dick or Home of the Brave (a late 1940s movie about a war veteran), but also explicit musical quotes (for example, from Hector Berlioz, Jules Massenet, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley or Dolly Parton); quotes from films and TV series, such as her famous performance “White Lily” based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz; literary quotes in abundance, for example, William Burroughs (who also has done the vocal part in several of her works); Italo Calvino, Don de Lillo, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kafka, Thomas Pynchon, William Shakespeare, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, just to mention a few. In Moby Dick (Figures 1 and 2), Anderson takes Melville’s narrative tour de force and translates it into a multimedia performance that attempts to mirror the complex encyclopedic structure of the work by creating several visual levels working in counterpoint to auditory ones. According to Anderson, approximately ten percent of the show is actually Melville’s text: she nevertheless faithfully retells the tale of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale. Some passages are quoted in their entirety, and in yet other ones the sense of Melville’s words are rephrased. Since the major intertext of Moby Dick is the Bible, Anderson’s intertextuality inescapably refers to the tropes, themes, and figures derived from Melville’s own intertextual universe. While Anderson closely follows Melville in terms of narrative and imagery, her performance also suggests certain ongoing thematic concerns in her work refracted here through her reading of the literary classic. Anderson (1993) has long explored the question that Melville raises concerning the human predicament and human values, which in her work manifests itself though her ambivalent relationship to the technologies she uses in her performances. In previous works, for example, she has created duplicates of herself – including a male video “clone” and a digital puppet – as if to suggest that the technology on which her work depends may ultimately usurp her own presence, transforming a real person into an “unnecessary duplicate” of different gender or into an inorganic replica. This ambivalence also includes her use of sound: the “talking stick”, an instrument she especially designed for the performance, is not only a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound but can also disassemble sound into tiny segments, called grains, and then play them back in different ways, on the principle of granular synthesis. The computer then arranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters which are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures, much like pixels. Quotations and allusions are generally considered referential, since they refer to something else, an object, in a different context. That would make Anderson’s


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Figure 2. Laurie Anderson performing Songs and Stories from Moby Dick against a projection of quotes from Melville’s novel

literary quotations referential and indexical since they have a special context in mind. On the other hand, when her music refers to other pieces of music, and the visuals to other visuals, and not to any world beyond the world of music or visual representation – and I would argue that Anderson’s music and visuals do precisely that – her “quotations” of other musical and visual works are selfreferential. In addition, her work is pervaded with repetitions and recursions of words, phrases or ideas which are typical and striking forms of self-reference – whether in music, texts or images/films – since they always refer back to the preceding instances. So are her reuse and the quotes of her own work, which make up much of her oeuvre and ought to be pure self-reference. But her work is also characterized by the use of different media, which would mark it as eminently intermedial. Examples of intermediality are a film referring to a book, or an opera to a theatre play, which has the quoting and the quoted sign differ in medium. As with intertextuality, intermediality can and often does refer to a different sign in a different medium; but when it functions so as to create a different dimension for those who recognize the quote – what Winfried Nöth (this vol., I.5.5) calls an “intermedial déja-vu effect” – it is self-referential. This pertains to a high degree to Anderson’s work, too: not only does she constantly

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quote from different media but her quotes also challenge her spectators to search for their original sources, which will give them access to the different levels of meaning. Therefore, in Anderson’s performances, it is the various expressions of selfreference that mark them as typically postmodern and contribute to their high degree of self-reference. At the same time, the artist’s pervasive presence in her work gives her performance a pronounced referential and indexical character.

3. Self-reference in digital manipulation What is the relationship between reference and self-reference in a performance that involves digital manipulation? In the case of Selina Trepp, for instance, a visual artist who uses a wide range of technology – film, video, computer animation – for her performances, the presence of the artist functions as a link to the indexical and referential while its digital manipulation would seem to determine its character as predominantly self-referential.

Figure 3. Split screen video still from Trepp’s and Bitney’s performance Spectralina

Trepp’s Spectralina (Figure 3) is a computer animation; its music and images were created in collaboration with the musician Dan Bitney of Tortoise and Trepp. The general tenor is sometimes abstract and poetic, sometimes political with inspirations from the artists’ life together. This declared autobiographical source of origin gives the performance a strong authentic and referential character from the start. The performance consists of Bitney playing several instruments, while Trepp is composing computer-animations utilizing Arkaos,


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a new video jockeying software which enables the creation of real-time and recorded visuals and offers an interesting way of editing and manipulating a visual performance while it is running. Using a video still, Trepp and Bitney are sitting in front of a video camera going through a video mixer (analog), creating a split screen (Figure 3). Then they move their heads in unison trying to create a seamless transition: a new face made up of half of each face, created by their looking into the monitor adjusting the position of their faces in real time as they see it in the screen merging into one. Trepp herself calls it “actually a really lo-fi real-time method of image manipulation” (2005). At the same time as the performance involves manipulation and distortion – which always involves self-reference (and iconicity) as it refers back to itself – there is still a relation of contiguity, an indexical correspondence between the signs on the screen and the objects they refer to, albeit a distorted one. One could even say that the image oscillates between the iconic and the indexical, or the self-referential and the referential, as the faces contort and change expression and shape. It is precisely this oscillation that gives the performance its particular tension, making it doubly self-referential: not only does it bring questions of authenticity and manipulation into play, as it refers back to the original, but also the relationship of art and representation to “reality” that has characterized Trepp’s work from the very start.

4. Self-reference in virtual reality Digital or postphotographic images belong, in the words of Lucia Santaella (1997: 130), to a both “individualized and, at the same time, global transmission of information”. This becomes nowhere more apparent than in virtual reality (VR), in which images can be both indefinitely stored and increasingly accessed from everywhere and at all times. In addition, these images only make sense in interaction in which those taking part can often not determine whether they are looking at an image, or whether the image is looking at them. A particularly interesting specimen of VR is the one created by the team headed by media artist Char Davies, who has also written an extensive amount of criticism on both digital art and media. Char Davies became well-known for her VR installations Osmose (Figure 4) and Ephémère (Figure 5) which challenge conventions about representations of artificial worlds and interface. In contrast toAnderson and Trepp, who are mainly performance artists, Davies works exclusively in immersive virtual space, a computer-generated artificial environment that one seemingly enters with the aid

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of various technical devices. But Davies’s synthetic worlds do not look like the customary polygon-dominated space of traditional 3-D computer graphics. They are populated with organic shapes that suggest plants, landscapes, body, and water. Similarly, the interface for navigating the world indicates the breathing and balance of the visitor. Why are so many artists fascinated with VR? Davies (2004: 69) calls her own work “a subversion of conventional approaches to VR on the basis that they reinforce an outdated dualist worldview”. She has written numerous papers and made several presentations on her particular philosophical focus on the experience of the physical body in cyberspace. In her work, she explores paradoxes of embodiment, being, and nature in immersive virtual space. She uses this new medium as a philosophical arena for constructing architectures of enveloping material form, working with transparency, luminosity, spatial ambiguity and temporality as well as a body-centered user interface of breath and balance, with the intent of emphasizing the role of the subjectively felt by a physical body in virtual space. In immersive virtual environments like those created by Davies, the agent of production is no longer an artist who leaves the mark of his or her subjectivity and ability on the surface of a support, nor a subject acting on reality, though he or she may transmute it by means of a machine. Digital images are above all interactive: they enable the creation of an almost organic relationship to those with whom they interact, in an interface that is both immediate bodily and mental. It is a communal activity; yet still deeply private, which is also what attracts artists. For example, Davies (2004: 73) says that she wants to “re-present the world – behind the veil of appearances – as immaterial, interrelated and dynamic flux [making] habitually perceived distinctions between things dissolve and boundaries between interior self and exterior world become permeable and intermingled”. Instead of a visually determined world, she creates a radically different spatiality in which normally perceived boundaries between objects and surrounding spaces are dissolved in light, disposing of the usual perceptual cues by which we objectify the world. In digital art, the abolishment of reference to the “real” world as we know it therefore also changes the role of the artist. The digital artist is, above all, a programmer whose visual intelligence interacts with the potentials of artificial intelligence using technology to prosthetically blur the boundaries between different realities,2 for example, the spherically-enveloping environment created through the use of HMD (head mounted display) that Davies designed for Osmose (Figure 4). Using transparency and luminous particles, Davies bases the interface on breath and balance to allow participants to simply “float” by breathing-in to rise, to fall and to lean to change direction. In addition, the


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hands-off interface frees participants from the urge to “handle” things and from habitual gravity-bound modes of interaction and navigation.

Figure 4. Char Davies, Forest grid, Osmose (1995), digital image captured in real-time through head-mounted display during live performance of immersive virtual environment

Davies’s longstanding career as a painter becomes particularly evident in her second famous VR installation, Ephémère (Figure 5), which she describes as “an exploration of the ephemerality of being and the symbolic equivalence of body and earth” (2004: 83). The work’s iconography is grounded in nature as metaphor: archetypal elements of root, rock, and stream recur throughout. Spatially, the work is structured into three parts: landscape, subterranean earth, and interior body.The body of flesh and bone functions as the substratum beneath the fertile earth and the natural seasonal processes of the land. The images in digital works of art in VR such as those by Davies are highly self-referential: they are all self-generated and, although they look like fantastic nature photography, they are infographic images, a numerically based reality. What is interesting is that, in her creating synthetic images, Davies’s goal is not to project artificial worlds but to “remind people of their connection to the natural (rather than man-made) environment not only biologically but spiritually and

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Figure 5. Char Davies, Body (Egg), Ephémère (1998), digital image captured in real-time through head-mounted display during live immersive journey/performance

psychologically, as regenerative source and mythological ground” (Davies 2004: 75). As she points out, her method “involves circumventing the conventions of linear perspective, Cartesian space and objective realism [. . . ] in order to collapse a culturally-created distance between subject-viewer and the world” (2004: 75).3 Accessing her VR installations, the participant or interactor first enters a three-dimensional grid (Figure 4), which then soon fades, leaving her or him in a non-Cartesian place where everything is dematerialized and semitransparent – there are no solid surfaces, hard edges, or separate objects in empty space. Davies’s images thus operate under the sign of metamorphosis as they open up a portal to new and virtual worlds to those participating. Put in a safe but unfamiliar environment, these virtual worlds allow participants (so far, more than forty thousand) to experience their bodies and their perceptual faculties in new ways, quite akin to meditation and mystic experiences. Common comments by participants are that it feels like “being in another place” or like “losing track of time”.4 The lack of reference that characterizes the virtual world would therefore seem to enable participants to cut loose their bearings and take part in an almost other-worldly experience. They nevertheless need a physical body for the interactive experience, which means that they need to be indexically, that is, referentially anchored. In putting on the HMD prosthesis – which is what allows her or him to enter the virtual world – the participant becomes, in so doing, a biocybernetic body, divided into two complementary media: one body which remains carnal and “real” in the environment in which it exists, and its avatar, which is the virtual, disembodied projection of the “real” body (Santaella 2003). Obviously, in Davies’s installations, we seem to momentarily lose ourselves in


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cyberspace – but once we take off the HMD, our physical body remains carnal and “real”. That is what makes it possible for us to maintain proprioception, the sensation of self from within the body. Although the medium of digital art is fundamentally self-referential and may seem virtually non-indexical, there must still be reference in order for us not to lose ourselves in cyberspace. To conclude, the degree of self-reference in the digital arts varies according to its mode of production and performance. Three ways of gauging self-reference can be discerned. In the case of Laurie Anderson, degrees of self-reference can be measured in terms of intertextuality and intermediality, including striking forms of self-reference such as recursion and repetition. In Selina Trepp’s digital manipulation, the degree of self-reference can be determined by the oscillation between the referential and the self-referential, the indexical and the iconic as Trepp’s subjects are both the role of representation and the role of the artist. Finally, the highly self-referential virtual reality created by Char Davies enables participants to immerse themselves in a virtual world functioning as a portal to other spaces and realities. In so doing, it not only challenges our habitual modes of perception, interpretation, and evaluation but also functions as a means to create an alternative awareness. The self-referentiality at the heart of such work overturns preconceived patterns of reference.

Notes 1. One major difference between digital art and other visual art forms (e.g., its predecessors painting and photography) lies in its means of transmission and how this affects the role of the addressee. Whereas objects of prephotographic art forms are mainly contemplated in special places designed for this purpose, e.g., museums, churches, and galleries, as unique pieces of art, photographs, being infinitely reproducible, belong to the space of mass media. In contrast, not only can digital art forms be accessed anywhere and at all times but they also demand interactivity on the part of the addressee (Santaella and Nöth 1998: 175). 2. One of the reasons why contemporary artists are fascinated with VR may be as a way to confront the challenge identified by Verena Conley (1993: xii) in the preface to her Rethinking Technologies, in which she asks how critics of culture, philosophers, and artists will deal with technologies in view of the menaces of the twenty-first century: “How do they contend with expansionist ideology, and the accelerated elimination of diversity and of singularities? How do they resist and act? [. . . ] Now, in a world where the notion of space has been completely changed through electronic simultaneity, where the computer appears to go faster than the human brain, or where ‘virtual reality’ replaces ‘reality’, how do philosophy, critical theory, or artistic practices deal with those shifts?”

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3. Davies (2004: 73) has repeatedly spoken out against conventional VR and its tendency towards disembodiment: “As a realm ruled by mind, virtual reality – as conventionally constructed – is the epitome of Cartesian desire, in that it enables the construction of artificial worlds where there is the illusion of total control.” 4. Davies draws on psychological theories of deautomatization (Deikman 2005) that suggest that destabilizing psychic structures can both achieve increased attention and “perceptual expansion”.

References Anderson, Laurie 1993 Stories from the Nerve Bible. New York: HarperCollins. Conley, Verena 1993 Preface. In: Verena Conley (ed.), Rethinking Technologies, ix–xiv. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Davies, Char 2004 Virtual space. In: Francois Penz, Gregory Radick and Robert Howell (eds.), Space in Science, Art and Society, 69–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deikman, Arthur 2005 Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience, http://www.deikman.com/deautomat.html (06.09.2005). Machado, Arlindo 1993 Maquinas e imaginário. São Paulo: Edusp. Santaella, Lucia 1997 The prephotographic, the photographic, and the postphotographic image. In: Winfried Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media. State of the Art, Projects and Perspectives, 121–132. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Santaella, Lucia and Winfried Nöth 1998 Imagem: Cogni¸cao, ˜ semiótica, m´ıdia. São Paulo: Iluminuras. Trepp, Selina 2005 Email correspondence 3 and 4 July.

Metafiction and metamusic: Exploring the limits of metareference1 Werner Wolf

1. Introduction: Metareference as a transmedial field and the apparent absence of music in it In reflections centered on “self-reference in the media” music is perhaps the medium which should come to one’s mind first. For – unlike literature and other representational media – music has only very restricted possibilities of pointing beyond itself. In other words, it has difficulties in engaging in “alloreference”2 or, as I prefer to term it, “heteroreference”. Instead, musical compositions abound with self-reference, at least in the Western tradition of art music, which will be in the center of this essay. Indeed, each repetition or variation of a theme within a fugue or a sonata can be regarded as an instance of self-reference, since a later occurrence of a theme points back to its earlier appearance or original form. As Jakobson’s “poetic function” reminds us (cf. 1960: 356), such self-reference can also variously be encountered in literature (e.g., in the recurrence of semantic isotopies and themes, but also in lyric rhymes and generally in parallelisms). However, in verbal texts self-reference hardly ever occurs with the same density or with such dominance as it does in art music. Yet in explorations of self-reference the focus is frequently not so much on such general self -reference as on a special variant, namely “metareference”. This is indicated in the current proliferation of terms such as “metatextuality”, “metanovels”, “metafilms”, “metapainting”, or even “metaarchitecture”, all of which were referred to in Winfried Nöth’s call for papers (this vol., Part I) of the symposium which forms the basis of the present collection of essays. Interestingly, in this list of potential metamedia music was conspicuously absent and only occurred in the context of “recursion and repetition”. All of this – the list and the absence of music in it – is no coincidence but indicative of two things: first, metareference is a transmedial phenomenon and by no means restricted

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solely to literature and language3 (although these were the media in which it first received theoretical attention); and second, music appears to be somehow located at the margins of the field of metareference – if not beyond its limits. In the following, I would like to explore these limits and see whether music occupies a place inside or outside the transmedial field of “metareference”, in other words: whether there is such a thing as “metamusic” that could be regarded as an analogy to literary “metafiction”.4 For metafiction can surely be said to be located somewhere near the center of the “metafield”, and I will therefore use it as a point of reference.The remarkably scant research concerning “metamusic”,5 indeed the all but absence of this term in musicology,6 leads to the expectation that music should be relegated to the area beyond the confines of “metaland”. Compared with this, my thesis is that under certain circumstances, music can be positioned within this field. I will argue that music is in fact able to approach the condition of metareference, albeit only to a limited and often debatable extent and with more difficulties than other media. The following contribution is thus dedicated not only to an intermedial comparison between fiction and music with regard to self- and metareference, but also to the exploration of the limits of the metareferential field as a whole.

2. “Self-reference”, “self-reflexivity” and “metareference”/“metareflexivity”: Terminological distinctions illustrated with literary fiction Discussing the metareferential potentials of music presupposes the clarification of the concept of metareference as opposed to self-reference.7 This will be done in this section, in which relevant conceptual and terminological explanations and distinctions will be illustrated predominantly with literary fiction as this is the medium for which theoretical investigations of self-reference are most advanced. The first distinction, “self-reference vs. its opposite”, is essential for any reflection on self-reference. However, in practice, it is less a strict binary opposition than a continuum with many gradations in between two poles: One of the poles, self-referentiality, can be defined as the quality of signs and sign systems that point to themselves or to identical or similar elements within one and the same semiotic system – in contradistinction to the opposing pole, heteroreferentiality, which denotes the normal quality of signs, namely to point to what conventionally is conceived of as “reality outside” semiotic systems. Of course, the term “system” also requires clarification in this context: in the case

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of literature, music and other media I propose to differentiate between a narrow and a broad definition of a semiotic system: in the narrow sense it would coincide with a given medial work (a literary text, a musical composition, a painting, a film). I call self-reference operating within these narrow confines intracompositional self-reference. In contrast to this, self-reference in the broad sense operates within the entire area of the media and arts. This variant, which I term extracompositional self-reference, includes “intermusical” references between different compositions as well as intermedial references, for instance the relation between literary texts and music embodied in verbal descriptions of musical compositions. Independently of the extension of the self-referential system which has just been outlined, self-reference can occur in basically two variants. This second basic distinction has rarely been made in research on self-referentiality but is crucial for interpretation from a functional point of view:8 “self-reference” can mean, first, the fact that a sign (system) merely points at itself or to similar (or identical) elements within the same system and, second, a signifying practice that creates a self-referential meaning, in other words, elicits a cognitive process or reflection on itself, on other elements of the system or on the system as a whole. The first case covers a vast field, namely all variants of self-reference that do not consist of, or imply, a self-referential statement. It comprises simple symbolic references, e.g., intracompositional grammatical self-reference (e.g., between noun phrase and related relative pronoun) as well as extracompositional intertextual and intermedial references (where a pre-text or another medium is merely identified or mentioned in a text, e.g., as a part of its fictional world). In addition, it is also applicable to all sorts of self-referential, extra- and intracompositional iconic references or similarities, for instance recurrences, intertextual quotations or imitations (as opposed to symbolic identifications of pre-texts) and the mise en abyme of storytelling in stories within stories.9 Part of these variants correspond to devices which Jakobson mentioned in explaining what he termed the “poetic function” of texts (cf. 1960). Moreover, mere self-referential “pointing at” includes devices that foreground the sign (sequence) in question through deviations. All of this, however, remains “mere” self-reference as long as it only serves to classify, e.g., a text as belonging to “literature” or “advertising” etc. and remains below the threshold of (intentionally) triggering certain reflections in the recipient: reflections that are centered on the medium and related issues. Triggering self-referential reflections on (elements of) the semiotic system under consideration, on other semiotic systems or on semiosis and the media in general is the characteristic functional feature of the second main form of self-reference, which I want to concentrate on here. For this variant, which goes

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beyond mere self-reference in the above sense, the term self-reflection should be reserved, as it bears the connotation of a cognitive activity. This activity is caused by implying – if not by explicitly containing – self-referential statements. In order to elicit such semantic self-reflection the aforementioned devices of self-referential “pointing at” may be used – and to that extent the border between self-referential “pointing at” and self-reflection may appear “fuzzy”10 – but other devices may also be employed. Following Scheffel (1997) one could further differentiate according to whether such self-reflection focuses on heteroreferential elements that happen to occur within the same system11 or on the medium as such and related issues. However, an exhaustive discussion of all the systematic intricacies is impossible within the framework of the present essay (for an overview see Figure 1); instead, the following remarks will concentrate on the latter kind of self-reflection – for which the terms metareflection or metareference are appropriate.

Figure 1. Reference in literature and other media

Such metareflection always implies an awareness of the medial status of the work or system under consideration and thus also an awareness of a logical difference between a metalevel and an object level. This consciousness concerns the recipient as well as the author and the work. In fact, metareference – like so many other critical concepts in the field of the media – is actually a bipolar


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phenomenon: it is not restricted to simple “givens” within a work, text or artefact – these are mere potentials that may have metaeffects – but metareference also requires the actualization of such potentials by recipients who are willing and able to cooperate, for it is in the recipient that the essence of metareference, the eliciting of a medium awareness, takes place. Metareference can thus be described by the following three distinctive traits: (1) the existence of an intrasystemic reference (self-reference); (2) the semantic quality of this intrasystemic reference; in other words: the fact that it consists of, or implies, a self-referential statement and is thus self-reflexive; (3) a kind of medium awareness on the part of both producer and recipient which is implied or explicitly thematized in self-reflection and, thus, gives it a metadimension (this also implies the existence of a logical difference between the object level and the level of the metastatement). It should be noted that such metareference is first and foremost applicable to individual phenomena within certain works (“metaelements”). Yet, if metaphenomena become salient features of a work as a whole, one may speak – as has been done in the aforementioned call for papers – of a “metatext”, a “metadrama” etc., and if several “metaworks” exist within one and the same medium, they may even be said to form a metagenre. Thus, “metafiction” can refer to individual passages of a novel, to a novel as a whole or to a novelistic genre. Metaelements occur in a remarkable variety of forms, for which some typologies have been devised with reference to fiction. However, I would like to concentrate on only four pairs of oppositions, which I have derived from research on metafiction by Linda Hutcheon ([1980] 1984) and myself (Wolf 1993: chap. 3.2). In order to ensure the transmedial applicability of these forms, the original terminology shall, however, be adapted so that it avoids an exclusive reference to fiction. The four pairs of forms are: (1) intracompositional or direct vs. extracompositional or indirect metareference, (2) explicit vs. implicit metareference, (3) fictio vs. fictum (or medium- vs. reference-centered) metareference, (4) critical vs. noncritical metareference. Individual metaelements can, of course, be classified according to more than one of these pairs of categories. The first of these pairs has already been introduced in the discussion of the extension of self-reference. In fiction, intracompositional metareference can, for instance, be observed in metalinguistic comments by a narrator on his or her

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style, while extracompositional metareferences include parodies of preexisting texts, but also metaremarks that are not – or do not seem to be – immediately applicable to the work in which they occur. An example of the latter can be found in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, namely in the narrator’s complaint about readers who are eager to be let into the secrets of the story: “I know there are readers in the world [. . . ] who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last” (Sterne [1767] 1967: 37–38). Of course, such indirect metareference is frequently only a disguised form of the direct, intracompositional variant. Yet this indirection nevertheless merits a separate typological entry because it can trigger different responses in the recipients. The second opposition, explicit vs. implicit metareference, refers to the semantic distinctness of the metareference as a quotable or nonquotable element: Thus, the numerous discussions of storytelling in, for instance, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are all examples of explicit metareference, for they contain quotable metareferential phrases such as “my reader” or “my work” (Sterne [1767] 1967: 94–95). Such metareferential expressions are apt to remind the reader of the (print) medium as such. In contrast to this, there are more covert devices which may also elicit reflections on the ontological status of the text as a medium without, however, using explicitly metareferential expressions. In Tristram Shandy such implicit metareferences can, for instance, be observed in the manifold “typographical devices” which not only foreground the conventional symbolic use of novelistic language by deviating from it through the employment of iconic or indexical signs but also imply an awareness of the medial conventions as such.12 Implicit metareference shows the necessity of the recipient’s cooperation in a particularly clear way, for it is in principle possible to overlook the metaimplication of, for instance, typographical devices and consider them as a mere ornament or oddity.13 Consequently, markers are requisite in order to ensure a metareferential reception. Such markers can vary in their obviousness and can range from the foregrounding of medial devices to the supplementary employment of explicit metareference in the vicinity of implicit elements14 (the many metalinguistic and metafictional comments on the uses and abuses of language in Tristram Shandy fulfill this condition). The third pair of opposing terms, fictio vs. fictum metareference, uses the content of the metareflection as its criterion of differentiation. In all cases metareference per definition elicits the idea of mediality and of the ontological status of the work in question as an artefact. I have termed this medium centered facet of the “fictionality” which is thereby implicated fictio metareference in order to distinguish it from the special case of fictum metareference. In the latter, optional variant an additional facet of the term “fictionality” comes to bear, namely a certain relation to reality. As a rule, “fictionality” in this sense denotes


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a “negative” reference to “reality”, i.e., a merely imaginary quality. It should, however, be noted that the reference centered variant of metareflection under discussion can also extend to positive relations to reality (e.g., in suggestions of authenticity), although indications of a merely imaginary reference are perhaps more frequent, particularly in recent literature. A by now classic example of this can be found at the opening of the much quoted chapter no. 13 of John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where the narrator admits: “This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind” (Fowles [1969] 1977: 85). The quotation from Fowles leads to the fourth, also content related pair of terms, since it not only exemplifies fictum metareference but also self-critical metareflection. In the face of a tendency to overstress such critical “laying bare of the work’s fictionality” so often encountered in criticism (in particular on postmodernism) one should, however, emphasize that metareference can also be noncritical. Noncritical metareference can be used, for instance, for explaining aesthetic innovations but also in order to suggest that the story one is reading is authentic: such an assertion of the “truth” of a story would be a noncritical fictum metareference.

3. Applicability of metareference and its subforms to music: A case study In literary fiction, the application of the concept of metareference in all of its typological subforms does not present difficulties. In the realm of music, a comparable ease can only be found where music appears together with words. In fact, in all kinds of vocal music, metareference is not much of a problem either – thanks to the support of verbal language. Thus, songs can use explicit metamusicality by thematizing singing and music making,15 and metaoperas (such as Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg or Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos16 ) and metamusicals (such as The Phantom of the Opera) can comprise extensive comments on, and presentations of, musical and operatic activities. Yet as soon as we come to the field which will be in focus here, namely “pure”, instrumental music (mostly referred to in the following as “music”), metareference becomes quite problematic. Examples are rare, and the application of the metaforms outlined in the preceding chapter with reference to fiction becomes debatable. Indeed, before one can engage in a discussion about whether instrumental music can realize such metaforms, the question must be answered whether it is susceptible to metareference in the first place. As stated above, in the first chapter, music as such is certainly the most self-referential

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medium thanks to its ability to create intrasystemic similarities on the level of its signifiers. However, music is also the medium which has most difficulties in relating signifiers to signifieds. This holds true of hetero-referential signifieds but also of metareferential ones. Indeed, the virtual impossibility of explicit musical statements rules out at least one of the aforementioned metaforms, namely explicit metareference: music cannot explicitly and quotably comment on its own medium in the way fiction can.17 This leaves us with the variant of implicit metareference as the only one we can explore for metamusic. As stated above, this variant is by itself not unproblematic. Yet I would like to claim that under certain circumstances, music can in fact approach the condition of implicit metareference. An example may substantiate this: it is a short composition in three movements – probably for organ and attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach18 – entitled “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth” [Little Harmonic Labyrinth] (BWV 591). Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his once famous book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, used it as an, albeit abortive, illustration of musical recursivity.19 My thesis is that this composition is not so much an example of recursivity but of metamusic and that it implies a metareferential statement, namely: “listen to what extent and in what short time one can lose tonal orientation!” This idea is chiefly triggered by the device of salient deviations from the traditional style of baroque composition. These deviations playfully foreground an aspect of the musical medium as employed at the period, namely tonality. This is achieved by chromaticism and breathtaking modulations, in particular enharmonic ambiguities (chords that have an instable meaning because they can be conceived of as belonging to different tonal scales at the same time). According to the musical conventions of the period, compositions started in the key in which they were written, as a rule by opening with the tonic and often also by initially establishing the key through a full cadence, and they also finished on the tonic of this key. In between, modulations could occur, but were usually employed sparingly (in particular as long as well-tempered keyboard instruments were not yet in common use that solved the problem of older instruments, which in remote keys produced notoriously jarring chords). Thus, within the 52 bars that comprise the “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth”, contemporaries would perhaps have wandered off to no more than two or three related keys. Bach almost ironically overfulfills the convention of establishing his key. In our case, this is the key that can most easily be played on keyboard instruments, namely c major. Within the first six bars all Bach does is establish c major with one intermittent excursion into the neighboring key of f major. But from bar 7 onwards, he leads the listener astray in an incredible way into a “labyrinth” of foreign keys and ambiguous dissonances: until bar 10, where we arrive at a d


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minor chord, that is, at a chord that can again be formed in a c major scale, we are exclusively confronted with chords that can not be formed within c major. What is more, c major is left in the short time of only three bars and replaced by such remote keys as c sharp minor (notated with four sharps), g sharp minor (five sharps), d sharp minor (six sharps) and g minor (two flats).

Figure 2. J. S. Bach, “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth” (BWV 591), bars 1–11

Figure 2 illustrates only a small part of the harmonic intricacies which occur throughout this musical labyrinth from its entry (“Introitus”) to its center (“Centrum”) right through to the exit (“Exitus”) – until the last few bars. In his conclusion, Bach again obeys the rule that one ought to end the entire composition in the home key and returns to c major – while the first movement (“Introitus”) ends on c minor and the second one (“Centrum”) on g major. Interestingly, the salient deviation principle that operates in this composition as a marker of metareference can also be seen on the level of motivic coherence or rather in the relative lack of such a coherence. With the exception of the middle part, a fugato on a chromatic theme, this composition appears to be surprisingly heterogeneous with only very loose and unobtrusive motivic unity (in the “Introitus” the motiv f-d-e, which occurs in the soprano in bar 5 for the first time, is repeatedly varied, but there is no counterpart to this in the “Exitus”). So the focus is clearly not so much on the recurrence and variation of themes and motives as on the foregrounding of the musical system of tonality, which is metareferentially laid bare as such. Of course, all of this only works for listeners who know about the conventions and are able to perceive modulations as something extraordinary (unfortunately, owing to later, in particular Romantic, music both chromaticism and modulations have become such staples of musical composition and have been so exhausted by overuse that much of the startling effect Bach’s composition must once have had has worn off for us). Thus, as with literary parodies, which also heavily rely on contexts, the perceptibility of the implied metareference

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of “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth” depends on a specific context and the recipient’s ability and willingness to actualize it. However, as far as the recipient’s willingness is concerned, Bach’s composition contains powerful incentives: The extreme deviation from the traditional employment of tonality as a means of foregrounding this crucial element of the contemporary musical compositional system was arguably in itself a strong stimulus to trigger metareferential reflections. Yet, it is neither the only trigger nor the only metamarker: the unusual title must also be taken into account. As opposed to conventional titles such as “prelude and fugue” or “fantasy” it explicitly points to the “alienating” employment of tonal harmony. However, as a verbal text, this paratext already leaves the realm of pure music. The use of language arguably indicates a feeling, on the part of the composer, that a clear thematization of the metareferential content of his composition was perhaps necessary in order to ensure the establishment of a metalevel in the listener’s mind.

4. Further potential forms of instrumental metamusic The discussion of Bach’s “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth” has shown that metamusic is an option which is not restricted to vocal music but can in fact extend to instrumental music. As will appear, it even occurs in many, albeit not all of the subforms of metareference outlined above and in a surprisingly wide variety of compositions. Indeed, the “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth” with its intracompositional metareference is not a unique example of metamusic. Arguably, all kinds of compositions that are based on salient deviations20 and all compositions that sport some sort of virtuoso use of musical material and point to music as such are also, at least in principle, open to metareference. Thus, “theme with variations” is a well known form in which composers not only employ their professional skill but openly demonstrate it – thereby implying something like the following metacomment: “Listen, what I have made out of a simple tune (the theme)!” A similar metareference could be surmised not only with respect to the composing of music as a cognitive activity but also and perhaps foremost to some kinds of music as performance. Indeed, wherever composers or improvisers such as Paganini and Liszt – but also Jazz musicians – leave the constraints of, for instance, thematic work and formal conventions and engage in performances that explore the limits of what is still playable on a given instrument, we arguably enter the metadomain, for the focus of such activities is more on the medium as such (the instrument and its player as well as the musical system) than on


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the musical “message”. Here it is indeed true that “the medium becomes the message” – at least in the listener’s mind. In all of these cases, the problem is, however, where to draw the line between “real” metamusic and the usual kind of art music that frequently also employs unusual techniques and brilliant devices. Certainly, not all deviations are metareferences that somehow foreground the medium as such. Neither is all exquisite thematic work meant to metareflexively foreground the throughcomposed quality of a piece of music. As in verbal metafiction, the implied variant always poses difficulties, and as with implicit metafiction, metamusic – which is always implicit – also requires clear markers. As a rule, these markers are intermedial ones, that is, they are taken from the verbal medium, as is the case in the title of Bach’s “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth”: when such markers point to certain musical qualities we may feel justified in “suspecting” some kind of metaquality. This is also true of an area in which a search for metamusic may prove most promising, namely in the realm of what, following a phrase coined by Adorno (see [1949] 1975: 165–189), has been called “music on music”. The term sounds remarkably analogous to one of the shorter definitions of “metafiction” as “fiction on fiction” which have been employed in literary studies (Hutcheon [1980] 1984: 1). Yet, curiously, in musicology it has rarely, if ever, acquired such metaconnotations and has mostly been restricted to intermusical references or stylistic imitations. It thereby apparently excludes such compositions as “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth”, in spite of the fact that, strictly speaking, this composition is also “music on music”. Be that as it may, there nevertheless seems to be an emergent, as yet covert awareness of the richness of this field, at least in musicology in German, as the recent publication of Schneider’s Lexikon “Musik u¨ ber Musik”: Variationen – Transkriptionen – Hommagen – Stilimitationen – B–A–C–H shows. In many compositions mentioned in this encyclopedia the quality of “music on music” is already indicated in the title, as for instance in Brahms’s Variationen u¨ ber ein Thema von Haydn (op. 56a).21 In spite of the restriction in scope and a lack of explicit discussions of metamusic Schneider’s Lexikon22 is a unique tool for identifying potential examples of metamusic. As the title of Schneider’s book indicates, homages to other composers, notably to Johann Sebastian Bach, form an important part of “music on music”. We indeed approach the realm of metamusic to the extent that such homages not only refer to composers as human beings but to their styles of composition. This is particularly the case where recognizable references not only to individual works but also to stylistic features of a composer or even an entire musical epoch are discernible (in literary intertextuality theory this would correspond to “intertextual system reference” [cf. Broich and Pfister 1985: ch. III.2]). For the

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understanding of such compositions requires the awareness of a historical dimension of the musical system as such. A good example of such an “intermusical system reference”, which also involves a meta-awareness of music as a historically developing system and consequently also of anachronisms, is Prokofiev’s famous Symphonie classique. This work, composed in 1917, is, according to the composer, an audible reference to Haydn with some modern elements (cf. Schneider 2004: 154). The metafacet of the work is clearly indicated in its title, which points to the traditional nature of the work. If Prokofiev’s Symphonie classique is also a – perhaps somewhat nostalgic23 – homage to Haydn as well as to the classical symphony at large, this composition combines intracompositional metareference (its audible anachronism) with extracompositional metareference (the homage allusion to a system of the past). Owing to the positive nature of this allusion the Symphonie classique can at the same time be employed as an example of noncritical musical metareference.24 One may now ask whether metamusic – similar to metafiction – can also contain critical metareference. I think it can.25 One may think of carnivalesque musical pastiches in which the style or whole passages of usually classical music are playfully imitated and distorted in order to achieve a comic effect. One may also think of humorous self-critical devices in which musical conventions are too openly fulfilled or used as a basis for playful deviation. Haydn’s often selfironic music – as epitomized in the second movement of his Symphonie mit dem Paukenschlag – provides good classical examples in both respects, but one may also think of Mozart’s Dissonanzenquartett or Stravinsky’s backward-oriented “music on music”, which was, at least for the highly critical Adorno, an example of how music could be employed in a destructively parodistic way.26 As has already become clear, there is a whole range of possibilities between noncritical homage and the kind of destructive parody Adorno had in mind. In contemporary postmodernist compositional practice a brilliant example of a playful kind of metamusic which implies an ironic self-criticism that is more tongue-in-cheek than destructive is Friedrich Gulda’s “Concerto for myself” composed in 1988. The ironic distance which this composition creates towards itself is twofold: on the one hand – and this is the surprise at the beginning – Gulda employs the anachronistic language of classical art music and, in the course of the concerto, fascinatingly (and again nostalgically) imitates styles from Bach’s age up to the nineteenth century. In 1988, this anachronism was even more salient than in Prokofiev’s time. On the other hand, Gulda complements the external distance between his work and contemporary musical style by internal distance markers: these consist in the tensions created by the heterogeneous combination of classical elements and borrowings from twentieth-century popular music, in particular jazz, borrowings that audibly undercut the serious-


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ness of the classical imitations. The ironic distance thus created correlates with the cognitive distance that is always implicated in metareference. For the resulting, not quite neoclassical concerto for piano and orchestra may once again be said to presuppose a musical medium awareness, in particular a historical one, namely the competence of identifying the different compositional styles, forms and devices as well as their historical incongruity. This awareness is most powerfully activated in the remarkable transitions between different styles. It is here that the concerto most clearly reveals its truly metamusical nature: it is a composition that, in its fissures, openly lays bare an aspect of its fictio nature, namely its pastiche character. Yet, at the same time it is also a homage to concerto music of the past and an equally metamusical self-celebration of the compositional and performative skills of the man who played the piano part and had proudly referred to himself in the title, namely Friedrich Gulda. Thus, the ironic, metareferential distance which informs the entire concerto does not actually aim at self-destruction but is ultimately employed in a self-protective way which enables Gulda to once again revive old compositional forms without incurring the reproach of regressive restoration.27 To sum up, it has hopefully become clear that musical metareference can occur in some forms which are analogous to metafictional forms: extra- and intracompositional, critical and noncritical. As for the pair of oppositions “implicit vs. explicit metareference” it must be remembered that only the implicit variant can be actualized in music. This leaves us with the remaining pair of forms that are potentially analogous to metafiction: fictio vs. fictum metareference.All of the musical examples mentioned imply a comment on some fictio aspect, yet none on the fictum dimension (the “fictionality” or “truth” of an artefact). This is no coincidence since music cannot create fictional, invented worlds like fiction, painting or film. Therefore, all metareference in music must be restricted to questions related to the medium, its production and reception but cannot deal with questions of real or fictitious reference, in other words, it can only be fictio metareference.

5. Conclusion: Other neglected areas within the field of metareference and perspectives for further research The preceding exploration of the limits of the field of metareference has shown that this field also contains a medium which has so far been neglected in this context, namely instrumental music. Yet, music is not the only medium that has suffered from such neglect. While the metapotentials of literature and to some extent also of film (cf. Stam 2000) and painting (cf. Stoichita [1993] 1997) have met with various degrees of attention, this is much less so with respect

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to other media such as comics, sculpture, and architecture. Indeed, the field of metareference is by far not yet as cultivated as it deserves to be. There is even a whole range of issues that are still waiting to be discussed. Some of these are being treated in this volume, some have already found a certain amount of interest elsewhere (cf. Hauthal et al. 2007) but would merit more attention, while others must be left to future research. The following survey of perspectives for research on metareference may serve as guidelines: Formal problems, metareference, and related phenomena: – verifying and, if necessary, revising or elaborating on, the proposed typologies of self-referential and metareferential forms – exploring the connection between metareference and common forms of selfreference such as intertextuality, intermediality and mise en abyme – investigating metalepsis as a transgeneric and transmedial special case of metareference28 – examining strategies for the naturalization of metareference (from a transmedial as well as a monomedial perspective) – exploring forms of marking, in particular, implied metareference (cognitive framing of metareference) Intensification of transmedial research on metareference: – expanding the perspective on areas (media and genres) that have hitherto been more or less neglected, such as: film (in particular animated cartoons and animation films), the arts (including sculpture), architecture, comics, computer games and virtual realities – intensifying research on (instrumental) metamusic (my preceding remarks could be no more than an introduction to the field) Functional history of metareference: – exploring the functions of metareference as a phenomenon that, in the Western world, has informed more and more works and media since the eighteenth century as well as investigating the conditions that further (or hinder) an increase in metareference – concerning metareference and postmodernism: research in this field should begin by relativizing this connection, which is frequently seen as too exclusive; yet one should also attempt to account for the intimate correlation which nevertheless can be observed between postmodernism and metareference; the fact that metareference has recently “infiltrated” even popular


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media and genres such as comics and mainstream film to an amazing extent is of particular interest and in need of explanation (it may well be that the contemporary increase in metareferentiality is a symptom of a late stage in cultural development if not of “decadence”) – examining metareference in the literatures, arts and media across cultures (metareference as an object of comparative cultural studies) – exploring metareference in the context of other discourses such as the sciences, philosophy and epistemology – investigating the contents of metareference from a historical, monomedial as well as transmedial perspective – carrying out research on the relationship between metareference, rational and comic distance (the earliest as well as the most intensive forms of metareference occurring predominantly in comic genres and media) – continuing the research on the relationship between metareference and aesthetic illusion (cf. Wolf 1993) – providing a critique of metareference: the gains and losses of metareference (as opposed to hetero-reference) In literary studies, the history of “metaresearch” is at least half a century old (if we take Wayne C. Booth’s 1952 essay on the “self-conscious narrator” as a starting point) or even older (if we consider Russian formalism as the point of departure). But even after such a relatively long period, there is still much new ground for future research. This is particularly the case since Western culture – which, e.g., in philosophy and notably in epistemology, has shown marked metatendencies at least since the seventeenth century – seems currently to be engaged in a veritable “metaturn”, a genuine explosion of metareference in all kinds of media and discourses and on all levels, “highbrow” and popular. Investigating such cultural “turns” and trying to account for them is indeed one of the most fundamental tasks of the humanities.

Notes 1. My thanks are once again due to Ingrid Pfandl-Buchegger and Sarah Mercer for diligent proof-reading as well as to Ingrid Hable for expert assistance in formatting the essay. 2. This is the term used in the call for papers of the conference which led to the present volume (Nöth, this vol., Part I).

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3. For the concept of “transmediality” see Rajewsky (2002: 206) and (2003: 362–363) and Wolf (2002: 18). 4. As opposed to Nünning, who distinguishes between “metafiction” and “metanarration” (see 2004), I conceive of “metafiction” in a broad sense, as detailed in Wolf (1993: chap. 3.2.). 5. Scholars who have approached the field – mostly concentrating on “music on music” – include: Adorno ([1949] 1975: 165–189; who introduced this phrase in his critique of Stravinsky); Karbusicky (1986; who acknowledges the possibility of music possessing “analytical metalanguages” [“analysierende Metasprachen”, 21]); Danuser (1996; who treats a part of the field, namely homage compositions, albeit without theoretical ambitions; 2001; one of the best discussions of self-reflexivity in – mainly vocal – music); Mittmann (1999; his point of departure is linguistics; his attitude concerning what he has in focus, namely what I will term critical intracompositional metareference, is predominantly sceptical, but his whole enterprise – also its failures – shows to what extent musicological reflection could benefit from narratological investigations on metareference); Schneider (2004; a dictionary of examples of “music on music”, which does, however, not include the type of metareference to music as a system or medium which I think is particularly intriguing); Neubauer (2005: 203–205, who restricts “Meta-Reflection in Music” [203] exclusively to the verbal component of vocal music). All in all, musicological research in the field (to which Xenakis [(1967) 1971] does not belong in spite of the misleading title of his essay “Towards a metamusic”, where “metamusic” simply stands for “musicology”) appears to be largely untheoretical; “music on music” is mostly regarded as a mere intramusical reference (e.g., also by Dibelius [(1966) 1998]), without proceeding to the question of whether such intramusical self-reference in the sense of “pointing at” (see below) could also become metareference. 6. Entering the term “metamusic” into the internet search machine “Google” leads to several references to music therapy (e.g., as conducted by the jazz band “The Diamond Jubilators”, who advertise their services with the slogan “Metamusic: Life enhancement through music”, http://www.diamondcenter.net/jubilators/metamusic.htm) as well as to a composition by Valentin Silvestrov entitled “Metamusik”, in which this title is explained as being used “in the sense of ‘beyond music”’ (http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/e/ecm01790a.html; both accessed 07.02.05). All of this has nothing to do with metamusic as a form of musical selfreflexivity. One should, however, mention that such self-reflexivity is attributed by Mittmann (cf. 1999: 236–237) to another composition by Mauricio Kagel, entitled “Metapiece” (incidentally, this title is identical to a piece by the Australian composer Rainer Linz): in Kagel’s “Metapiece” Mittmann sees one of those compositions that constitute a metamusical reflection on the “performative act of music playing” (“Kompositionen [. . . ], die den performativen Akt des Musizierens ‘metamusikalisch’ reflektieren”). 7. Cf. also Wolf (2001a, 2007a).


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8. I am here drawing on, but also modifying, Michael Scheffel’s research and a typology which I have published elsewhere. Scheffel was among the first to attempt some systematic ordering in the vast field of terms such as “self-reference”, “autoreflexivity”, “metafiction” etc. which had mostly been used as mere synonyms (see Scheffel 1997, notably 46–49); in Wolf (2001a) I elaborated on Scheffel’s distinctions. 9. All of these cases are instances of iconicity in a broad sense, that is, iconicity that not only occurs as a similarity between signifier and signified (as expressed in the title Form Miming Meaning of Nänny and Fischer 1999), but also as a similarity between signifiers (“form miming form”) and signifieds (“meaning miming meaning” or “metaphorical iconicity”). In my previous research (Wolf 2001a: 57) I focused on the creation of self-referentiality through such iconicity as the only form of selfreferential “pointing at” and am here adding further possible variants. 10. This “fuzziness” can, for instance, be seen in the self-referential employment of the device of “foregrounding”, which can be used both for the “intensification” of heteroreferential meaning and for metareferential purposes. A certain fuzziness could also appear in the fact that Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function, namely to “focus on the message for its own sake” (1960: 356), may be said to imply a statement, too (for instance “this text is literature”). However, this would be a very “weak” statement, which is so frequently (if not always) encountered that it does make sense to set it apart from “strong” statements, in particular those that elicit metareflections. It should also be noted that Jakobson’s two other self-referential functions of language, namely the “PHATIC function” and in particular the “METALINGUAL [. . . ] function” (355– 356), would more often trigger such strong metastatements. 11. Thus, a narratorial evaluation of the actions of a character which have just been told would be an example of such “hetero-referential” self-reflection (one should note that the hetero-referentiality here only refers to the object or the signified of the selfreference; in our example this is a character who is regarded as a being imaginatively located “beyond” the text). 12. A famous example of such implicitly metafictional typographical devices is the black page inserted into chapter I/12, which comments on the death of parson Yorick and, by a highly unusual deviation from the traditional dominance of symbolic signs in the medium of print fiction, may trigger metareflections on the potential and limits of the medium as such. 13. In other cases (e.g., mise en abyme) implicit metareference may just be regarded as a form of self-referential similarity. 14. As a consequence, the implicit metareference will be noted with more or less intensity. 15. Examples of this kind would be the German hymn “Singt dem Herrn ein neues Lied” or the last song in Schubert’s Die Winterreise (cf. Wolf 2001b). 16. For this opera and musical self-reflexivity in Strauss in general see the excellent article Danuser (2001). 17. As music is also a nonrepresentational medium, it is unable to represent its medium or the creation of a composition in the way a painting may do which self-reflexively shows, for instance, a painter at work.

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18. Cf. Breig (1999: 631) and Keller ([1950] n. d.: 56–57), who convincingly argues in favor of Bach’s authorship (which also seems to be confirmed by the soprano melody in bar 30, which, in German notation, contains the “signature” B-A-C-H). 19. Hofstadter has his character “Tortoise” erroneously explain the g major chord on which the second movement, the “Centrum”, ends as a disorientation (cf. [1979] 1980: 122–123). G major, the dominant of c major, is, however, anything but unusual for the concluding (transitional) chord of the middle section of a composition written in c major, and therefore we are here, as justly remarked by Keller, actually near the “exit” of the labyrinth (cf. [1950] n. d.: 57). Apart from that, it is not clear what in “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth” justifies Hofstadter’s idea of “nested [. . . ] structures” (ix), for this would imply the existence of markedly different levels that are used for recursive devices; such levels, which instrumental music can hardly produce, are, however, not discernible in this composition. 20. See also Mittmann (1999: 236), who regards “defamiliarization” (“Verfremdung”) as one possible device of metamusic, yet remains highly wary of any undifferentiated affirmation of the existence of musical metareference. 21. This composition shows a clear intermusical self-reference, since it quotes a passage from a divertimento for wind instruments by Joseph Haydn (more specifically, the reference is to the “Chorale St. Antoni” from Joseph Haydn’s first of the “Sei divertimenti a due oboi, due corni, due fagotti obl. fagotto e serpent”). The step from intramusical self-reference to musical metareference is arguably made by the statement implied in this composition, “listen, how this old theme by Haydn can still be brilliantly employed at the end of the 19th century!”, or alternatively this statement may be paraphrased as a homage to Haydn, not the man, but the composer. In any case, Brahms may be said to presuppose a medium awareness on the part of his listeners, even a historically differentiated one concerning different ways of actualizing the system music in different epochs, and this indirectly implies a reference to the medium music as employed by Haydn and Brahms, thus fulfilling the principal condition of metareference. In this case, extracompositional metareference is combined with intracompositional metareference. Once again it must, however, be noted, that for most nonspecialists this metareference is, if at all, only discernible owing to the verbal title of the composition. 22. Thus, there is only one single instance in which the author, in his introduction, uses a collocation with “meta-” (cf. Schneider 2004: 7). 23. For further explorations of the relationship between nostalgia and metareferences see Andreas Böhn’s contribution to this volume. 24. The aforementioned virtuoso music provides further examples, as does Bach’s “Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth”, in which, as in his Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of the Fugue), the composer explores the potentials of the musical medium or compositional forms and at the same time sports his own expertise without any critical or self-critical intentions.


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25. For Mittmann (1999) a critical function – restricted to intracompositional metareference – seems to be the only form of metamusic, at least it is the only one which he discusses (thereby unduly restricting the realm of potential musical metareference). 26. Adorno speaks of a “Beschädigungsaktion” ([1949] 1975: 168). Incidentally, in Adorno’s view, which is as one-sided as Mittmann’s (see the preceding note), parody is the basic form of music on music (“Parodie ist die Grundform der Musik uber ¨ Musik”, 170). 27. For more details on this kind of “protective irony” see Wolf (2007b). 28. First explorations of this subfield have been carried on by Pier and Schaeffer (2005), and Wolf (2005).

References Adorno, Theodor [1949] 1975 Philosophie der neuen Musik. (Gesammelte Schriften 12.) Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Booth, Wayne C. 1952 The self-conscious narrator in comic fiction before Tristram Shandy. PMLA 67: 163–185. Breig, Werner 1999 Freie Orgelwerke. In: Konrad Küster (ed.), Bach-Handbuch, 613–712. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Broich, Ulrich and Manfred Pfister (eds.) 1985 Intertextualität:Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Danuser, Hermann 1996 Homage-Kompositionen als “Musik u¨ ber Musik”. In: Günther Wagner (ed.), Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 52–64. Stuttgart: Metzler. 2001 Musikalische Selbstreflexion bei Richard Strauss. In: Bernd Edelmann, Birgit Lodes and Reinhold Schlötterer (eds.), Richard Strauss und die Moderne: Bericht u¨ ber das Internationale Symposium München, 21. bis 21. Juni 1999, 51–77. Berlin: Henschel. Dibelius, Ulrich [1966] 1998 Musik u¨ ber Musik. In: Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik nach 1945, 607–628. Munich: Piper. Fowles, John [1969] 1977 The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Triad Panther. Hauthal, Janine, Julijana Nadj, Ansgar Nünning and Henning Peters (eds.) 2007 Metaisierung in der Literatur und anderen Medien. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

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Hofstadter, Douglas R. [1979] 1980 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hutcheon, Linda [1980] 1984 Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. London: Methuen. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Karbusicky, Vladimir 1986 Grundriß der musikalischen Semantik. (Grundrisse 7.) Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Keller, Hermann [1950] n. d. Die Orgelwerke Bachs. Leipzig: Peters. Mittmann, Jörg-Peter 1999 Meta-Musik: Zum Problem musikalischer Selbstreferenz. In: Christoph Asmuth, Gunter Scholtz and Franz-Bernhard Stammkötter (eds.), Philosophischer Gedanke und musikalischer Klang: ZumWechselverhältnis von Musik und Philosophie, 229–238. Frankfurt: Campus. Nänny, Max and Olga Fischer (eds.) 1999 Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Neubauer, John 2005 The return of the repressed: Language and music in the nineteenth century. In: Lilo Moessner and Christa M. Schmidt (eds.), Anglistentag 2004, Aachen: Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers in English 26, 199–209. Trier: WVT. Nünning, Ansgar 2004 On metanarrative: Towards a definition, a typology and an outline of the functions of metanarrative commentary. In: John Pier (ed.), The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology, 11–57. (Narratologia 4). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Pier, John and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (eds.) 2005 Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Rajewsky, Irina 2002 Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke. 2003 Intermediales Erzählen in der italienischen Literatur der Postmoderne: Von den giovani scrittori der 80er zum pulp der 90er Jahre. Tübingen: Narr.


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Scheffel, Michael 1997 Formen selbstreflexiven Erzählens: Eine Typologie und sechs exemplarische Analysen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Schneider, Klaus 2004 Lexikon “Musik uber ¨ Musik”: Variationen – Transkriptionen – Hommagen – Stilimitationen – B–A–C–H. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Stam, Robert 2000 The politics of reflexivity. In: Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 151–153. Oxford: Blackwell. Sterne, Laurence [1767] 1967 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Graham Petrie. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stoichita, Victor I. [1993] 1997 L’Instauration du tableau. Librairie des Méridiens. Paris: Klincksieck. Engl. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, Anne-Marie Glasheen (transl.). (Cambridge Studies in New Art History & Criticism.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Werner ¨ 1993 Asthetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. (Buchreihe derAnglia 32.)Tübingen: Niemeyer. 2001a Formen literarischer Selbstreferenz in der Erzählkunst: Versuch einer Typologie und ein Exkurs zur “mise en cadre” und “mise en reflet/série”. In: Jörg Helbig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, 49–84. Heidelberg: Winter. 2001b “Willst zu meinen Liedern deine Leier drehn?” Intermedial metatextuality in Schubert’s “Der Leiermann” as a motivation for song and accompaniment and a contribution to the unity of Die Winterreise. In: Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (eds.), Word and Music Studies: Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field – Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, 1999, 121–140. (Word & Music Studies 3.) Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2002 Intermediality Revisited: Reflections on Word & Music Relations in the Context of a General Typology of Intermediality. In: Suzanne M. Lodato, Suzanne Aspden and Walter Bernhart (eds.), Word and Music Studies: Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage, 13–34. (Word & Music Studies 4.)Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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2005

2007a

2007b

Metalepsis as a transgeneric and transmedial phenomenon: A case study of the possibilities of “exporting” narratological concepts. In: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, 83–107. (Narratologia 6.) Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen: Ein Systematisierungsversuch metareferentieller Formen und Begriffe in Literatur und anderen Medien. In: Janine Hauthal, Julijana Nadj, Ansgar Nünning and Henning Peters (eds.), Metaisierung in der Literatur und anderen Medien, 25–64. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. “Schutzironie” als Akzeptanzstrategie für problematische Diskurse: Zu einer vernachlässigten Nähe erzeugenden Funktion von Ironie. In: Thomas Honegger, Eva-Maria Orth and Andra Schwabe. (eds.), Irony Revisited: Spurensuche in der englischsprachigen Literatur. Festschrift für Wolfgang G. Müller, 27–50. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

Xenakis, Iannis. [1967] 1971. Towards a metamusic. In: Jasia Reichardt. (ed.), Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, 111–123. London: Studio Vista.

Index of names

Aarseth, Espen J., 220, 256 Abrahams, Roger, 89 Acton, David, 95 Adorno,Theodor, 313–314, 318, 321 Aebi, Jean Etienne, 57 Aguilar, Katherine, 95 Albarran, Alan B., 197 Alessandria, Jorge, 62 Allen, Jeanne, 165, 179 Allen, Woody, 136, 148, 151 Anati, Emmanuel, 61 Andacht, Fernando, 165, 169, 172, 178–179 Andersen, Peter Bøgh, 4 Anderson, Laurie, 293–296, 301 Andreychek, Eric, 276 Arnold, Eve, 112–114, 118–120 Arrouye, Jean, 96 Assmann, Aleida, 90, 183 Austin, John L., 69, 239 Azevedo, Theo, 209–210, 217 Aznavour, Charles, 148 Babcock, Barbara A., 8 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 13, 310–314, 320 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 36 Baraldi, Claudio, 107–108 Barris, George, 118 Barthes, Roland, 7, 96 Bartlett, Steven J., 4, 5, 7–9, 14, 31 Bateson, Gregory, 4, 237–241, 247, 250–251, 255

Baudrillard, Jean, 7, 188 Bayard, Hippolyte, 98 Bécaud, Gilbert, 148 Beckley, Bill, 95 Bernstein, Richard J., 39 Bettetini, Gianfranco, 13 Bishara, Nina, 16, 22, 79 Bitney, Dan, 296–297 Black, Max, 9 Bleicher, Joan Kristin, 7, 183, 186, 190, 196 Blitt, Barry, 34 Blöbaum, Bernd, 7 Block, Friedrich W., 5 Böhn, Andreas, 143, 145, 146, 320 Bolter, Jay David, 6, 220, 251 Booth, Wayne C., 317 Borges, Jorge Luis, 284 Boym, Svetlana, 152 Brahms, Johannes, 313, 320 Breig, Werner, 320 Broich, Ulrich, 5, 313 Brook, Andrew, 5 Buckland, Warren, 7, 20 Bühler, Karl, 67 Bush, George W., 13, 33–35, 40 Büttner, Stefan, 5 Caillois, Roger, 223, 237, 251 Caldeira, João Bernardo, 171, 176, 179 Carani, Marie, 95 Carroll, Lewis, 284

326

Index of names

Carroll, Noël, 168 Casetti, Francesco, 191 Cayley, John, 276 Chaplin, Charlie, 131 Churchill, Winston, 61 Colapietro, Vincent, 5, 31, 33, 35– 36, 39, 179 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 165, 169, 172– 173, 175–177, 179 Conant, Chloé, 64 Conley, Verena, 301 Corsi, Giancarlo, 107–108 Coutinho, Eduardo, 165–179 Cramer, Florian, 277, 283

Feiter, Wolfgang, 59 Figueirôa, Alexandre, 174, 177 Filk, Christian, 120 Fischer, Olga, 319 Fischer, Volker, 143 Fitch, Frederic B., 5 Fliedl, Gottfied, 146 Foucault, Michel, 187–188 Fowles, John, 309 Frans, Märyä, 251 Frege, Gottlob, 9, 11 Friedman, Thomas, 37, 40 Frieske, Michael, 7 Fröbel, Friedrich, 250

Danuser, Hermann, 318–319 Davis, Char, 293, 297–302 Deikman, Arthur, 302 Delacroix, Eugène, 96 Delaroche, Paul, 95 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 61–62 DeVidi, Richard C., 5 Dibelius, Ulrich, 318 Dika, Vera, 150 Dillon, George, 286 Dirks, Tim, 19 Dodge, Martin, 283 Dundes, Alan, 89 Dunne, Michael, 7, 31

Gall, France, 148 Geach, Peter T., 9 Genette, Gérard, 255, 257, 263 Gerbner, George, 183 Giraudon, August, 99 Gitlin, Todd, 31, 37, 40 Godard, Jean-Luc, 316 Gödel, Kurt, 310 Goebel, Gerhard, 7 Govignon, Brigitte, 99–100 Grampp, Sven, 119 Greene, Rachel, 272 Grundberg, Andy, 97 Grusin, Richard, 6, 220, 251 Gulda, Friedrich, 314–315 Gullekson, Garth, 226

Eco, Umberto, 7, 61 Ekenberg, Jan, 284 Epimenides, 75, 251 Ermi, Laura, 251 Erwitt, Elliot, 118 Escher, Mauritz Cornelis, 310 Eskelinen, Markku, 261 Esposito, Elena, 107–108 Esser, Andrea, 5 Evans, Gareth, 9

Hacking, Ian, 165 Haraway, Donna, 277, 283 Hardwick, Charles S., 168 Harweg, Roland, 66 Hauthal, Janine, 316 Haydn, Joseph, 314, 320 Hayles, N. Katherine, 277 Heidegger, Martin, 5

Index of names

Helbig, Jörg, 6 Hempfer, Klaus W., 5 Hertling, Anke, 6 Heyne, Renate, 101 Hockett, Charles, 61, 65 Hofer, Johannes, 143 Hoffmeyer, Jesper, 4 Hofstadter, Douglas R., 5, 13, 310, 320 Holland, John H., 222 Huber, Werner, 5, 8 Huizinga, Johan, 223, 237, 251, 255 Husserl, Edmund, 144 Hutcheon, Linda, 307, 313 Jackson, Shelly, 271–272 Jacobs, Ron, 196 Jäger, Gottfried, 103 Jahraus, Oliver, 4 Jakobson, Roman, 5, 9, 12, 140, 208, 243, 270, 303, 305, 319 James, William, 167–168, 174, 178 Jay, Paul, 5 Jenkins, Henry, 207–208, 217 Jevbratt, Lisa, 284–286 Johansen, Jørgen Dines, 5, 8 Jung, Holger, 57 Jürgens, Hartmut, 4 Juul, Jasper, 210–212, 215, 221, 226, 228, 233 Kagel, Mauricio, 318 Kant, Immanuel, 250 Karbusicky, Vladimir, 318 Karpf, Ernst, 7, 21 Karstens, Eric, 198 Katz, Jerrold J., 9 Keller, Hermann, 320 Kemper, Wulf-Peter, 57 Kempson, Ruth M., 9

327

Kienzle, Bertrand, 5 Kiesel, Doron, 7, 21 Kirchmann, Kay, 7, 107, 109, 120, 255 Kirkpatrick, Graeme, 229–230 Kitchin, Rob, 283 Klein, Naomi, 3 Klein, Robert A., 196 Klima, John, 277, 279 Knopp, Guido, 186 Knowles, Elizabeth, 15, 17 Kohring, Matthias, 7 Korzybski, Alfred, 12, 239 Kosselleck, Reinhart, 183 Krüger, Mike, 190 Kücklich, Julian, 232 Lambernd, Jochen, 189 Lawson, Hilary, 3, 5, 7–8, 31, 36 Lenoir, Timothy, 31 Liebrand, Claudia, 6 Lindvall, Terrance, 158 Linz, Rainer, 318 Lipman, Jean, 6 Liszt, Franz, 312 Liu, Alan, 281 Ljungberg, Christina, 6–7, 97, 291 Luhmann, Niklas, 5, 8, 10, 107–108, 112, 188, 229, 255 Lynch, Michael, 165, 170–173, 175, 178 Lyotard, Jean-Fran¸cois, 3, 13 Machado, Arlindo, 63, 292 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 271 Manovich, Lev, 18, 20 Marcus, Solomon, 7 Marshall, Richard, 6 Marx, Karl, 141 Matt, Remy von, 57

328

Index of names

Mattos, Carlos A., 166 McLuhan, Marshall, 6–7 Melton, J. Matthew, 158 Melville, Herman, 294 Memmott, Talan, 276 Menninghaus, Winfried, 5, 8 Metscher, Thomas, 5, 8 Metz, Christian, 20, 69 Mez (Mary Anne Breeze), 276 Middecke, Martin, 5, 8 Miller, Arthur, 110, 113 Milosz, Czeslaw, 38 Mitchell, W. J. Thomas, 62–64, 96– 98 Mittmann, Jörg-Peter, 318, 320–321 Moeller, Hans-Georg, 74 Monroe, Marilyn, 110–114, 118 Morgenstern, Oskar, 221 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 314 Müller, Jürgen, 6 Münch, Dieter, 9 Murray, Janet, 269 Myers, C. Mason, 5 Nänny, Max, 319 Nash, John F., 221, 224 Neitzel, Britta, 237, 241, 255, 263 Neubauer, John, 318 Neumann, John von, 221 Newcomb, Horace, 185 Newman, James, 263 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5 Nöth, Winfried, 3–15, 18, 20, 31–32, 36, 40, 50–51, 61, 64, 67, 76, 91, 95, 97, 103–104, 165, 171, 209, 219, 240, 291, 295, 301, 303 Nünning, Ansgar, 318 Ochsner, Beate, 148 Odin, Roger, 191

Ort, Claus-Michael, 4, 6–7 Owens, Craig, 64 Paech, Joachim, 6–7 Paganini, Nicolo, 312 Paley, W. Bradford, 279 Pape, Helmut, 5 Pattee, Howard H., 4 Patton, George, 34 Paul, Christiane, 276, 283 Pavliˇcić, Pavao, 8 Pearce, Celia, 208–211, 215–217 Peirce, Charles S., 8–12, 32–36, 39– 40, 49, 80–84, 88, 91, 96, 103– 104, 166–170, 178, 241, 291 Peitgen, Heinz-Otto, 4 Petersen, Christer, 3 Pfister, Manfred, 5, 313 Pflaum, Hans Günter, 147 Piaf, Edith, 148 Pier, John, 321 Pold, Søren, 233–234 Pool, Steven, 263 Potthast, Ulrich, 5 Powers, Richard, 273–275, 281 Prieto, Luis J., 69 Prigogine, Ilya, 4 Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeyevich, 314 Pühringer, Karin, 195, 197–198 Quast, Thomas, 196 Raab, Stefan, 190 Rainer, Arnulf, 100, 102 Rajewsky, Irina, 6, 318 Ransdell, Joseph, 168 Rapp, Bernhard, 215, 245, 253 Reck, Hands-Ulrich, 111 Resnais, Alain, 148 Rich, Frank, 33–35, 40

Index of names

Ritchin, Fred, 95 Robin, Amrie Monique, 108 Robinett, Waren, 263 Robins, Kevin, 96, 97 Rorty, Richard, 32 Rossi-Landi, Ferrucio, 125–129, 140 Rouch, Jean, 165 Rouse III, Richard, 263 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques, 143 Russell, Bertrand, 5, 8, 238 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 75, 247, 251, 255, 269, 287 Salen, Katie, 223, 237, 242, 251 Salvemini, Lorella Pagnucco, 59 Sander, August, 179 Santaella, Lucia, 6, 20, 31, 61, 64, 95, 167, 207, 210, 213, 297, 300–301 Satu, Heliö, 251 Saupe, Dietmar, 4 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 9 Schaeffer Jean-Marie, 321 Schalk, Willi, 91 Scheffel, Michael, 5, 306, 319 Scheuerl, Hans, 237, 250 Scheutz, Matthias, 5, 14 Schiller, Friedrich, 237, 250 Schmid-Ruhe, Bernd, 119 Schmidt, Siegfried J., 7, 10–11, 47, 118, 195 Schneider, Irmela, 6 Schneider, Klaus, 313–314, 318 Schöppe, Arno, 5, 7 Schubert, Franz, 319 Schudson, Michael, 59 Schütte, Jörg, 198 Selic, Bran, 226 Selichar, Günther, 103 Shakespeare, William, 208

329

Shir, Jay, 5 Short, Thomas L., 33 Siebert, Jan, 155, 161 Siedenbiedel, Catrin, 5 Siegert, Gabriele, 195, 197–198 Silva, Cicero Ignacio da, 207 Silvestrov, Valentin, 318 Smith, John E., 39 Smith, Jonas Heide, 221 Smuda, Manfred, 5 Souriau, Etienne, 175 Spencer-Brown, George, 229 Spielberg, Steven, 33–34, 40 Spielmann, Yvonne, 6 Spieß, Brigitte, 7 Stam, Robert, 5, 21, 128, 315 Stengers, Isabelle, 4 Stephenson, Ralph, 161 Sterne, Lawrence, 308 Stoichita, Victor I., 315 Strahlendorf, Peter, 91 Strand, Paul, 99 Strauss, Richard, 309 Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich, 314, 318 Suber, Peter, 5, 8 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 250 Tabard, Maurice, 100 Taine, Hypolyte, 96 Thoma, Helmut, 91 Todorow, Almut, 119 Toprowicz, Maciej, 59 Tosca, Susana Pajares, 231 Toubiana, Serge, 110, 113 Tousignant, Claude, 88 Trepp, Selina, 293, 296–297, 301 Ullrich, Timm, 102

330

Index of names

Visarius, Karsten, 7, 21 Wagner, Richard, 309 Walther, Bo Kampmann, 219–220, 223, 229–230 Ward, Adrian, 281 Ward, Paul T., 226 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, 207 Waugh, Patricia, 5 Weber, Stefan, 7 Weibel, Peter, 95, 100, 102 Wells, Herbert George, 34 Wetzel, Michael, 99 White, Hayden, 183 Whitehead, Alfred N., 8 Whiteside, Anna, 5

Wilson, Woodrow, 34 Winkler, Hartmut, 4, 22 Winters, Patricia, 140 Wirsig, Christian, 259 Withalm, Gloria, 7, 21, 125, 261– 262 Wittig, Susan, 6 Wolf, Werner, 5, 8–9, 287, 303, 307, 318–319, 321 Xenakis, Iannis, 318 Zapf, Hubert, 5, 8 Zavala, Lauro, 5 Zimmerman, Eric, 223, 237, 242, 251 ˇ zek, Slavoj, 19 Ziˇ Zurstiege, Guido, 52, 59

Index of subjects

100 nervigsten TV Shows (Die), 187, 190–191 9/11, see September 11 abstract, abstraction, 98–99, 103 Adaptation, 132 adbusting, 4 addressee, 301 advertising, 3, 7, 13, 15–18, 21, 23, 47–59, 79–91, 209, 257–258, 261 advertising system, 48–50, 55–59 aesthetic(s), 5, 8, 36, 39, 61 aesthetic illusion, 317 AIDA, 79 algorithm(s), 223 226, 228 aliquid pro aliquo, 12 alloreference, alloreferential, 9–10, 13, 20, 62, 72, 74, 98–99, 104, 303 Alm (Die), 187 alternative awareness, 301 American McGee’s Alice, 210 Animal Crackers, 148 animated film, 155–161 anthropology, 4, 8 architecture, 3, 6 archive material, 184–192, 196 argument, 14, 17 argumentative, see self-reference art(s), 3, 6, 23, 99, 104 art-pour-l’art, 6 attention, 48–49, 55, 58, 79, 85, 90 audiovisual media, 145, 209

August Sander effect, 172 authentic(ity), 296–297 autobiographical, 296 autodeictic, 66 Auto-illustrator, 281–283 autonomy, 5, 6, 21 autopoiesis, 4, 108 autoreferentiality, 8 autoreflexivity, 6, 319 autosymbolism, 5 autotelic, 3, 5 Bad and the Beautiful (The), 132 Barbarian, 259, 261–262 Barton Fink, 32 Best of... (The), 187 Big Brother, 169, 177 biocybernetic, 300 biology, 4, 8 biopic, 132 Blow out, 133 Boogie Nights, 133 bootstrap (phenomenon), 8 brand identification, 196 Bug’s Life (A), 160 Burg (Die), 185, 187 camera, 99, 102–103, 133 Captive Mind, 38 Carabiniers (Les), 136 carnival, 23 Ceci n’est pas une pipe, 75 censorship, 134–135

332

Index of subjects

Cent photos du siècle (Les), see One Hundred. . . cinema, 18–19 circuits, 4 circularity, circularities, 5, 14, 16–19 code, 126–127 – cinematographic, 138 – digital, 279 codework, 276–277 cognition, 49 cognitive science, 5 collateral experience, 81, 84 collective knowledge, 47–50, 55, 58 Colleurs d’affiches (Les), 134 comic book, 155–156 Comicalamities, 134,138 comics, 316–317 command(s), 214 commercial, 149–150 communication, 9–11, 15, 20, 47– 49, 197 communication studies, 195 communicative, see self-reference community, 32–33, 39–30 computer animation, 296 computer game(s), 13–14, 21–23, 208, 210, 212–213, 219–220, 224, 226, 231–232, 244–245, 248, 250, 255, 261–263, 277–278, 287, see also self-reference computer game studies, 237 computer science, 4, 219, 226 conative, 12 Concours d’automobiles fleuris, 131 Concrete Photography, 103–104 consciousness, 5, 7–8, 36, 143–144, 306 constructivism, 10, 112 consumer invitation, 198, 200, 203 consumption, 127–129, 135, 140, 142

convention, 61, 65 copy, 68, 74 counterfactual history, 186 Counter-Strike, 216 Countryman and the Cinematograph (The), 136 creative destruction, 281 crisis of representation, 32, 96–97, 104 critical function, 36, 39 cross-promotion, 197 cultural knowledge, 49 culture, 3–4, 7, 10, 33, 177 culture jamming, 3 cyberspace, 209 cybersquatting, 4 cyborg, 277 cycles, 4 Dada, 97, 100 Daffy Duck and Egghead, 158 daguerreotype, 96 Day of the Tentacle, 260–261 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, 137 Death of Photography (The), 95 Deconstructing Harry, 148 deconstruction, 100, 102 defamiliarization, 320 déjà-vu, 19–20, 295 depict, 63–65, 68 designatum, 9 diagram, 292 dicent, 14–15, 17 dicentic, see self-reference Die Another Day, 22 diegetic frame, 159 digital, 95–97, 269, 287 – art, 292–293, 298 – culture, 208 – game(s), 223, 227, 232, 244, 263

Index of subjects

– manipulation, 296 – media, 3, 7, 20, 22, 207 – photography, 96, 103–104 digitextuality, 138 disaster film, 19 discourse theory, 187 displacement, 61–62 documentary, 165–169, 174–178, 185– 186 docutainment, 186 Don Quixote, 269, 287 Doom 3, 219 double bind, 4 double exposure, 98, 100–101 downward causation, 4 dualism, 165–169, 178 dualistic metaphysics, 174, 178 Dumb Hounded, 138, 158–159 dyadic, 12 E la nave va, 133 economic strategies, 188 economic system, 48 economics, 4 Edif´ıcio Master, 166, 177 editorial reference, 197 encounter, 174–176 entertainment, 152, 185–186,188–189, 207 Entrée du cinématographe (L’), 136 enunciation, enunciative, 67, 69–70, 73–75, see also self-reference Epimenides paradox, 75 episode, 198 event advertising, 198 Everyone Says I Love You, 147–149 exchange, 127–129, 141 expressive, 12 extension, 9–11 extra-diegetic elements, 138

333

fact, 186 faked, 167, 169 fakes, 73–74 fallibilism, 36 fashion, 7 feedback, 4 Felix the Cat, 156–157 fiction, 39, 62, 186, 188, 248, 304, 307, 309 fictionality, 241 film, 7, 13, 18–23, 119, 125, 129, 147, 183, 209, 315–317, see also self-reference film camera, 111–114, 119 filmic citation, 137 film-in-the-film, 150, see also metafilm Finding Nemo, 160 firstness, 80 fixing belief, 170, 178 Flatworld, 156–157 foreground(ing), 305, 308, 310–13 Forrest Gump, 138 fractals, 4 frame, 62, 68–70, 74–75 Fremdreferenz, 9 French Lieutenant’s Woman (The), 132, 309 function (of language), see conative, expressive, metalinguistic, phatic, poetic, referential game(s), 208, 210–212, 219–224, 228, 237, 241, 243, 250 game epistemology, 229, 232 game ontology, 232 game play, 220, 222, 229–231 game structure, 220 game theory, 4, 217, 221 game world, 220, 230–233 games within games, see metagames

334

Index of subjects

gaming, 229–230, 243, 250–251 GDR, 146–147, 184–186 Get Shorty, 138–139 Good Morning, Babilonia, 132 Good-Bye, Lenin!, 146–147 Goonland, 138 graffiti, 4 grand narratives, 3, 13 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 219 habit, 61 hacktivism, 4 Half Life, 249 Hamlet, 208 Harte Schule der 50er Jahre (Die), 187 Heimatfilm, 187 Hellzapoppin’, 135, 138, 148 Heroes of Might and Magic, 223 heteroreference, heteroreferentiality, 9, 303–306 His New Job, 131 historical consciousness, 184 history, 109, 120, 183–187 History of the World, Part I, 138 historytainment, 184–187, 191 horizontal trailer, 198 Horse Feathers, 148 How It Feels to Be Run Over, 133 Huit femmes, 147 humor, 191–192 hybridization, 208–209, 277 hypermedia, 209 I Can’t Dance, 133 icon, iconic, 11, 16, 61, 65, 72, 100, 103–104, 291, 305, see also selfreference iconicity, 65, 291, 297, 319 identity, 5, 32, 67–68, 144

illusion, 20–21, 62, 73, 75 immersion, 212–214 index, indexical, 11, 13–14, 32, 65, 68, 96–98, 100–101, 103–104, 165, 177–178, see also self-reference indexicality, 41, 100, 291–292, 211 Indiana Jones, 135 infographic images, 299 Insignificance, 133 instrumental music, 309, 312, 315, 320 interaction pattern, 221–223 interaction system, 227–229, 232 interactivity, 212, 214 intermedial, intermediality, 6, 184, 208, 216, 293, 295, 305, 316, see also self-reference interpretant, 14, 175 – dynamical, 82 – final, 82 – immediate, 82, 84 intertextual, intertextuality, 5, 22, 50, 128, 137, 208, 293–295, 305, 313, 316, see also self-reference intratextual, see self-reference Iraq, 34 irony, ironic, 31, 148, 314–315 It’s a Wonderful Life, 151 iteration, 4 Jane B. par Agnès V., 133 Jaws, 41 journalism, 7, 49–50 Kalkofes Mattscheibe, 187, 189 Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth, 310– 313, 320 Kottan ermittelt, 135 Ladri di saponette, 149–150

Index of subjects

language, 5, 9–10, 12, 14 Last Action Hero, 136 Last Picture Show (The), 136 Last Remake of Beau Geste (The), 137–138 law, 4 linguistics, 4 literature, 3, 5–6, 21 live history format, 186, 188 locutionary, 69 logic, 5 logical semantics, 9 loop, 4, 6, 18–19, 21–22, 49, 59, 68, 76, 138, 246 loss of the referent, 96–101, 104 Lucky Ducky, 159 ludic function, 36, 39 magic, 61 Majestic (The), 136 Making Motion Pictures: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio, 131 Man with the Movie Camera (The), 133, 140 mapping, 283–284 marketing, 134 Mary Tyler Moore Show, 135 mass media, 12, 107–109, 112, 208 mathematics, 4 Matrix, 210, 217 Max Payne, 233–234 media, 3, 6–7, 12–14, 143, 145–147, 152, 183–185, 195–196, 203, 220 media borders, 157 media criticism, 189 media culture, 47–48 media economics, 190, 195, 197 media house advertising, 197 media observations, 108, 111, 118, 120

335

media PR, 197 media reality, 108 media studies, 6 media system, 47–48, 58, 118–119 mediation (mediators), 3, 12 medium, 4, 12 Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Die), 309 memory – collective, 144, 183–184, 188–191 – cultural, 143, 145 – paradox of, 143 – personal, 145–146, 151 merchandising spots, 198, 200, 203 metaarchitecture, 3, 303 metacommunication, 237–250 metadrama, 307 metafiction, 3, 5, 304, 307–308, 313– 315, 317–319 metafilm, 303 metagames, 215 Metal Gear Solid, 245, 249 metalanguage, 5, 62, 64–65, 75 metalepsis, 247–250, 255, 261 metalingual, metalinguistic, 12, 62, 64–65, 70, 75, 208, 319 metamusic(ality), 304, 309–316, 318 metanarration, 318 metanovel, 3, 5, 303 metaopera, 309 metapainting, 303 metaphor, visual, see visual metaphor metaphoto, 101 metapicture, 62–64, 76, 99, 102 metapop, 7 metareference, 303–313, 315–317 – critical, 307, 314 – explicit, 307–308, 315

336

Index of subjects

– extracompositional, 307–308, 314 – fictio, 308, 315 – fictum, 308–309, 315 – implicit, 307–309, 315 – indirect, 307–308 – intracompositional, 307, 312, 314 – medium centred, 307 metareflection, 306, 308–309, 319 metasign, 63–65, 68–69 metastory, 210, 215–216 metatext, metatextuality, 5, 303, 307 metaturn, 317 meteorology, 4 mirror(s), 7, 63–64, 99 mise en abyme, 64, 101, 261, 270 Misfits (The), 110, 113, 118–119 MMORPG, 207, 210, 216 mod, 216 modernization, 145 Moebius strip, 4 Monkey Island 4, 253–254, 261 Monopoly, 223 monument, 184 Moonlighting, 135 movies, see film movie theatre, 135–136 moviemaking, 132 multimedia, 293–294 musealization, 145–146, 152 music, 6–7, 13–21, 303–317 Myst IV: Revelation, 219 mythology, 4 narcissism, 4 narration, narrative, 119, 185–186 narratologists, 208 neorealism, 149–150 net.art, 272, 276, 281, 283, 286–287

network marketing, 188, 190 neurophysiology, 4 Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, 134 New York Times, 33, 37, 41 news, 31, 37, 40 Night Club, 138 nongame, 230 nonplay, 223, 229, 237, 240, 250 nonrepresentational, 62, 103 Nosferatu, 133 nostalgia, 143–150, 152 nostalgic show formats, 190–191 novel, 3, 5, 19 Nuit américaine (La), 132 Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, 136, 151 object, 9, 11–12, 16, 80, 96, 98–104 – dynamical, 81–82 – immediate, 81–82 object picture, 62–63, 67, 69 objectivity, 119 observation, 47, 49, 57 On connaˆıt la chanson, 148, 151 One Hundred Photographs of the Century, 108–109, 111 opaque advertising, 79, 83–91 origo, 67 other-reference, 9, 230 Otto e mezzo, 132 Out of the Inkwell, 156–157 out-takes, 160 painting, 95, 97 paradox, 5, 7, 12, 14, 23, 75–76, 95, 98–102 paragone, 111–112, 118–120 parody, 147–149, 273, 282 Parrhasios, 73–74 passage, 198, 200–203

Index of subjects

Patchwork Girl, 271–272 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, 138 peptonized, 167, 169, 175 Persona, 138 petitio principii, 5, 14, 17 Phantom of the Opera (The), 309 phatic, 12, 208 philosophy of language, 5 photo camera, 111–114, 119 photograph, photography, 95–98, 100, 102, 104, 109–110, see also digital – nonrepresentational, 103 photorealism, 73 physics, 4 pictorial, 14, 16, 20, 83–84 picture(s), 61–65 Pikmin, 233 play, 4, 21, 23, 237–241, 250 Player (The), 132 playing, 229, 232, 243, 250 Pleasantville, 136, 150–151 poetic, 5, 12, 18, 23, 208, 270, 303, 305, 319 poetry, 5, 23 popular culture, 7 postmodern culture, 208 postmodernism, postmodernity, 3, 6–7, 31, 144, 208, 269, 287, 309, 316 postphotographic, postphotography, 95–97, 102–104 pragmatic, see self-reference press photography, 110 prevarication, 62 print media, 208–209 program announcement, 198, 200, 203 program-reference, 198–199, 201 psychiatry, 4 psychotherapy, 4

337

Purple Rose of Cairo (The), 20, 136 Quake, 216 Radio Days, 151 rationality, 37–39, 41 real, reality, 7, 11, 20–21, 23, 32– 33, 35–39, 96–97, 107, 112, 188, 287 realism, 33–36, 39, 287 reality show, 40, 165, 169, 178, 187, 190 recurrence, 8, 18, 21, 305 recursion, recursivity, 4, 21–22, 50, 219–220, 226–229, 232, 293, 295, 301, 303, 310 refer, referential, 3, 8–12, 61, 294– 295 reference, 7–11, 61–62, 65 referent, 9–12, 96–103 reflexiveness, 65 reflexivity, 4–5, 8, 31–34, 47, 37–38, 144, 165–169, 177–178 – methodological, 169–172 – self-critical, 166–169, 176 remake, 144–145 remediation, 6 Répérages, 133 repetition, 8, 19–22, 50, 184, 230, 293, 295, 301, 303 represent, representation, 3, 8, 12, 23, 61, 69, 76, 96–97, 100, 104 representative immersion, 213 return on investment, 196 rhematic qualisign, 84, 97 rhematic, see self-reference rheme, 14–16 ritual, 61 rule system, 225, 227

338

Index of subjects

rules, 210–211, 214, 221–224, 226, 241–244, 250 Run Lola Run, 18, 22

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 4 Schwarzwaldhaus 1902 (Das), 187– 188 screen passage, 262 secondness, 41, 80–81, 88 self, 5, 32–33 self-consciousness, 5, 8, 32, 172, 177 self-criticism, 33, 36 self-description, 4, 57 self-disclosure, 165–166, 176 self-effacement, 102 self-obliteration, 102 self-observation, 4, 108, 119 self-organization, 4 self-portrait, 98, 100, 102 self-promotion, 195, 202–203 self-reference, 3–11, 31, 36, 47–49, 62, 108, 128-130, 183–184, 270– 271, 291–292 – and nostalgia, 150–151 – argumentative, 14, 17 – as self-promotion, 195–204 – communicative, 165, 237 – cultural, 220–221 – degrees of, 12–13 – dicentic, 16 – enunciative, 14–15, 20–21 – extracompositional, 305 – filmic, 13, 130, 132 – formal, 221 – forms of, 189 – grammatical, 305 – iconic, 18–19, 21, 67, 101, 291 – in advertising, 3, 13, 15–19, 50– 59, 79–91

– in computer games, 13, 21, 209, 214–217, 219–220, 232, 253– 263 – in digital art, 291–301 – in digital media, 293–296 – in multimedia, 293–296 – in nondigital media, 228 – in photography, 98–104 – in television, 189–192 – in virtual reality, 297–301 – indexical, 15, 18, 65–67 – intermedial, 14, 19, 21–22 – intertextual, 14–15, 19, 21–22 – intracompositional, 305 – intratextual, 14, 18 – modes of, 50–59 – performative, 14 – pragmatic, 14, 21 – rhematic, 14–15 – semantic, 220 – semiotics of, 7-11, 48–49 – typology, 14–15 – with program-reference, 199, 201–202 – without program-reference, 199– 202 self-referential culture, 31–33 self-referential metalanguage, 64–65 self-referential metapicture, 64, 72, 76 self-reflection, 5, 170–171, 306–307 self-reflexive, self-reflexivity, 5, 8, 165– 166, 255, 261–262, 269–272, 286– 287, 304 self-replication, 4 self-representation, 5, 8 self-similarity, 4 self-thematization, 195–197 semiosis, 6, 11–12, 79–82, 90 semiotic machine, 3

Index of subjects

semiotic material, 48–49 semiotics, 4, 7–12 September 11, 19–20, 34 serial trailer, 198 Seven Year Itch (The), 118, 133 Shadow of a Vampire, 133 Sherlock, Jr., 136 show(ing), 11, 15–16, 63–64, 68 Shrek, 160 sign(s), 8, 10–13, 48–49, 61, 63, 65, 80–82, 100–104 signature, 64, 72 similarity, 61, 66 Sims (The), 211, 215 simulation, 96–97, 297 Singin’ in the Rain, 132 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 76 Skat, 242–244 social system(s), 47–48, 57 Sortie de l’arsenal (La), 131 sousveillance, 4 Space Jam, 159 Space War, 207 Spaceballs, 134 speech act, 239, 247 Splendor, 136,151 Star Is Born (A), 135 state machine, 212–213, 226–227, 231 station promos, 198, 200, 203 storytelling, 183, 210, 217 strategies, 221–222 structuralism, 10 style, 18, 68, 89–90 subversive, subversion, 4, 23, 36 Sunset Blvd., 132 Switch, 187 symbol, symbolic, 61, 65–66 symmetry, 18 synechism, synechistic, 36, 167–170

339

system, 107–108 systems theory, 4, 8, 10, 107–108, 219, 229–230 Tarea (La), 133 tautology, tautological, 5, 7, 14, 16– 17, 51–52 teaser, 198, 200–203 teichoscopia, 63–64 telecommunication, 209 telepresence, 213 television, 7, 110, 119–120, 183–192, 198 television history, 184–185, 190–191 Tetris, 213 thirdness, 80 Thousand and One Nights (A), 215 Tomb Raider I, 248 Towering Inferno, 19 Toy Story, 160 trailer, 198, 200–203 transmedia, 217 transmediality, 220–221 triadic, 12, 79–81 Tristram Shandy, 308 Turing machine, 4 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, 136 Untergang (Der), 145 Vie est un roman (La), 148 Vietnam, 34 viewing strip, 185, 189–190 virtual reality, 7, 23, 213, 297–301 visual arts, 3, 6, 95, 97 visual metaphor, 71 Vitagraph Romance (A), 131–132 VR, see virtual reality

340

Index of subjects

Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat, 133 Werner – Beinhart, 156 Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, 138 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 157, 161

Whoopee, 147–148 XIII, 257–258, 261 Zeuxis, 74 Zork 245–248, 256–258, 261

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