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Self-Reference in the Media
edited by
Winfried Nth
Nina Bishara
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Introduction
culture: The irresistible force of reality, investigates the concepts of reality, ref-
erence, and self-reference against the background of Peirces 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 pic-
torial and verbal messages of advertisements of the print media. Siegfried J.
Schmidt introduces a systems theoretical perspective in his analysis of reex-
ive 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
Noth shows how pictures in advertisements have become pictures about pic-
tures, and Nina Bishara, in Absolut Anonymous: Self-reference in opaque
advertising, argues how and why opaque elements in advertisements, which
make their comprehension more difcult, evince a mode of self-reference in the
media.
Part III, on Self-Referential Photography, begins with Winfried Noths pa-
per 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 photogra-
phy, especially in art photography. Kay Kirchmann follows with the essay Mar-
ilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze, which studies Marilyn Monroes modes
of self-observation and self-presentation in photos for the media as presented
in the 1999 ARTE series Les cent photos du siecle / One Hundred Photographs
of the Century.
Part IV on Self-Referential Films is about the movies in the movies, lmic
allusions to other lms, quotations from lms in lms, and nostalgia created by
lmic self-reference. Gloria Withalm presents reections on The self-reexive
screen and draws the Outlines of a comprehensive model for the study of
many forms of self-reexivity and self-reference in the movies on the basis of
Rossi-Landis socio-semiotics. Andreas Bohns paper, Nostalgia of the media /
in the media, discusses nostalgia, memory, remembrance, and oblivion as forms
of lmic self-reference, and Jan Siebert, in his article on Self-reference in
animated lms, 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 self-
disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reexivity, Fernando Andacht presents
two studies, one of the television show Big Brother Brasil and the other of a
documentary lm by E. Coutinho, demonstrating the illusionary paradox that
self-reexivity 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
Introduction vii
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 Win-
fried Noth, 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 Sao 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Winfried Noth and Nina Bishara
The artist and her bodily self: Self-reference in digital art/media . . . . . . . 291
Christina Ljungberg
Metaction 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 Noth
activists who display their protest against the age of consumerism, globaliza-
tion, and social surveillance in public places and urban spaces in subversive
forms such as adbusting, grafti, ash 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 at-
tacks against the media.
Logic and the philosophy of language have given special attention to self-
reference with respect to tautology, the petitio principii (taking for granted
what should rst be proved), other semantic circularities (Myers 1966), or self-
referential 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; Schoppe 1995). Other philo-
sophical aspects of self-reference are philosophical reexivity (Nietzsche, Hei-
degger, Derrida: Lawson 1985), the phenomenology of the self and its identity
(Buttner 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-reection, self-
representation, autosymbolism, or the autotelic function in aesthetics (Shir 1978;
Luhmann 1984; Menninghaus 1987; Noth 2000a: 425, 432; Metscher 2003).
Literary studies are one of the elds of research (besides aesthetics) in which
the theory of self-reference has its longest tradition since the essence of liter-
ature has often been described in terms which imply self-reference. Key con-
cepts in this context are aesthetic autosymbolism (Shir 1978), self-representation
(Hempfer 1976: 70, 129; Jay 1984; Johansen 2002: 174288), literary autonomy,
autonymy, or the autotelic function of literature (cf. Noth 2000a: 458). While
most of these theories have been developed against the background of poetry,
often with reference to Jakobsons denition of the poetic language as a self-
referential language (Jay 1984; Whiteside 1987; Block 1999; Noth 2000a: 453;
Johansen 2002: 174182), self-reference in prose and drama is a more recent
topic. It has rst been approached in the 1970s under the heading of metalan-
guage (Smuda 1970), later as metatext, especially metaction (Waugh 1984;
Siedenbiedel 2005), or metanovel (Zavala 2000). In the study of narratives, the
topic has also been subsumed under the general heading of reexivity (Stam
1992), self-reexivity (Hempfer 1982; Scheffel 1997; Huber, Middecke, and
Zapf 2005), or self-reference proper (Wolf 2001; Krah 2005a, 2005b). Compre-
hensive surveys on the topic can be found in Scheffel (1997) and Wolf (2001).
Language about language, ction about ction, or the novel about the novel,
these are evidently topics which deal with self-reference at a very general semi-
otic level. The theory of intertextuality (Broich and Pster 1985) implies a sim-
ilarly 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. Metaction containing re-
ections about the text in which these reections 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.
6 Winfried Noth
Like literature, music and the traditional visual arts have had self-reference
inscribed in their canonical denitions since the classics of philosophical aes-
thetics. Lart-pour-lart, autonomy and autoreexivity have been key concepts
in this tradition (cf. Noth 2000a: 434, 426427). The new trend since post-
modernity has been that artists have begun to reect 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 artists
own bodily self in works of visual art (cf. Santaella 2004; Noth and Hertling
2005; Noth 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 innite 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 (Muller 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
Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework 7
refashioning of the traditional media in the digital media, are the topics of
research in self-reference in the media related to McLuhans dictum in one
or the other way. From various other perspectives, self-reference in the media
has been approached in the contexts of lm (Karpf, Kiesel, and Visarius 1996;
Kirchmann 1996; Paech 1998; Buckland 2000: 5376), television (Withalm
1995; Frieske 1998; Bleicher 1999), journalism (Marcus 1997; Blobaum 1999;
Kohring 1999; Weber 1999), and advertising (Schmidt and Spie 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 Schoppe 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 denes itself reexively only through itself, a system of signs deprived
of content but not of sense, a kind of machine to operate sense without ever
xing it with the only goal of making the insignicant signicant, 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 nd 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 self-
reference as a symptom of increasing critical consciousness in a world that
has lost its condence 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 nding themselves involved
in paradoxes as long as they are unable to explain the nature of those referents
whose loss they deplore (Noth 2001; Noth and Ljungberg 2003).
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 specied (see below on levels
and typology of s.-r.).
Self-reference in the broad sense adopted here includes a number of con-
cepts 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 re-
exivity (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: Reections on Reexivity. Some other terminological alterna-
tives are self-reexivity (Huber, Middecke, and Zapf 2005), self -representation
(Johansen 2002: 174288), or autoreferentiality (Pavlicic 1993).
Some authors distinguish these alternative concepts from the one of self-
reference. Connotations associated with such distinctions are the following:
reexivity and self-reexivity connote reections on the process of the au-
thors own writing or self-cognition and self-consciousness, for example, in
the philosophical tradition of the Romantics (Menninghaus 1987), the tradi-
tion of phenomenology (Lawson 1985), or anthropology (Babcock 1980); self-
representation is often preferred in the context of aesthetics (Metscher 2003). In
the context of literary semiotics, Johansen (2002: 174288) 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 Peirces theory of signs. Wolf (2001: 56) distinguishes between
self-reference as a noncognitive and self-reection as a cognitive process,
using the former term to describe textual recurrences and repetitions and the
latter term to designate reection on the writers self (for details, see Wolf, this
vol.). In Luhmanns systems theory no such distinctions are drawn; the general
term is always self-reference. Luhmanns 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. Noth 2000b).
Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework 9
extension, for example, and, or, what, whether, of, unicorn, or the rst 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 ig-
nored the theory of reference for decades (cf. Noth 2000a: 7475). 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, justies
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 signier/signied 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 rst distinction as
a starting point. That is why a theory of language constructed as semiotics
must relinquish the idea of languages external referent. (Luhmann 1993: 24)
A sign, according to its medieval denition, is something that stands for some-
thing else: aliquid stat pro aliquo (cf. Noth 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 denitions 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 denitions: the signier
is not the signied, 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 refer-
ence. Roman Jakobson, e.g., distinguished no less than ve 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.
Noth 2000a: 105106). 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. Peirces semiotics, and Peirce even considered substituting the con-
cept 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 fulll 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;
Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework 13
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 prole 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 self-
referential or (allo)referential. Consider advertising, lm, 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 fulll its commercial purpose of propagating a message about goods and
services. Nevertheless, advertisements make use of the creative devices of self-
reference to draw the consumers attention towards the message. Feature lms,
by contrast, which have both ctional 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 lms must have increased. In computer games
we are nally 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.
14 Winfried Noth
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 authors self-
referential comments on his or her own story are more (directly) self-referential
than reections 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, paradox-
ical and tautological sentences, and pragmatic or performative self-reference
in statements in which the speakers 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 ele-
mentary to the highest level of self-reference in the media. The rst three levels
are derived from Peirces trichotomy of the interpretant, which draws the distinc-
tion between the rheme, the dicent, and the argument (cf. Noth 2000a: 6567).
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 rst be proved) and similar argumentative circularities evince argumen-
tative 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 dis-
tinguished: intratextual, intertextual, and intermedial self-reference and enun-
ciative self-reference. While (intra)textual self-reference concerns the level of
an individual text, a single advertisement, lm, or computer game, for example,
Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework 15
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 afrms nothing but expresses a mere poten-
tiality, 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 afrms 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 specic. 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
16 Winfried Noth
being a cigarette. The conclusion only conrms what the general premise pre-
supposes: 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 syn-
tactic and semantic parallelism to the rst creates an iconically self-referential
circular argument: the dictionary must be good since it reects 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.
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 recur-
rence, 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. Noth 2005a). Self-
reference is particularly conspicuous in lmic loops (Manovich 1999: 187191)
in general and in the lm Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, D, 1998; http://www.lola-
rennt.de, 16.05.06), a lm 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 narra-
tive 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
lm 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 conict 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 inuencing the public for the
sole purpose of buying the product. Instead of saying (alloreferentially) Prod-
Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework 19
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 ef-
fects of simulation shatter the audiences belief in the communicative contract
between lmmaker and audience. Films deal with the premises and conditions
of this communicative contract as a result of a critical reection of this situ-
ation. It eventually becomes the subject matter of lmed representation itself:
lmmakers 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 effec-
tive 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 self-
reference are emerging with interactive lms 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. Play-
ers can interact with the program code and thus control the referential action,
and they can become producers of the text. In which way communicative self-
referential autonomy of the players is actually attained remains open for further
investigation.
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 ef-
fects. 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 op-
eras. 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 prin-
ciple of intertextual recurrence and hence intertextual self-reference with their
permanent return to the same scenario. Evidently, the Marlboro man does not
22 Winfried Noth
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 lms, 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 lms 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 rst Bond
movie Dr. No (1962) and props that played an important role in previous movies
reappear. Allegedly, each of the previous lms 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), Bonds
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 lm is the increasing possibility
of self-repetition in the form of loops, as in Run Lola Run, where several varia-
tions 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 predomi-
nates. 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: 170182).
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 exemplies 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.
Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework 23
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Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a
self-referential culture:The irresistible force of reality
Vincent Colapietro
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 reections on, mass media, is inseparably connected to the
forms of reexivity so pervasive in a culture so radically structured by such
media. The possibilities of reference and representation in anything approx-
imating a straightforward sense seem to be increasingly and paradoxically
(Noth 2003: 911) 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 Rortys 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 self-
referential media. For such selves, self-consciousness tends to assume a form
in which self-identication becomes increasingly problematic and awkward, but
at the same time a form in which self-estrangement does not ordinarily feel self-
lacerating. 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 in-
nermost selves. Indeed, our condence 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 condence, 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 com-
munal 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 efcacious) 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) illu-
sory character of the self. For this and other reasons, some of his most distinctive
Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a self-referential culture 33
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, ssured, 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 dened by a
commitment to open-ended self-criticism. To paraphrase Peirce, the idea of real-
ity is inseparably connected to not only the idea but also the reality of community.
A pragmatist is, according to the originator of this doctrine, a theorist for whom
the distinction of reality and ction 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 gment
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 ctions: 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 inuential theories
of radical constructivism (Colapietro 2000). For theoretical and practical pur-
poses, 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 briey 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 reexivity in the media, as illustrated in an editorial in the New
York Times (one wherein the world of politics is mapped onto that of lm).
In an editorial entitled The two wars of the worlds (New York Times, July
3, 2005), Frank Rich compares George W. Bushs speech at Fort Bragg and
Steven Spielbergs just released War of the Worlds.4 The premise of Richs
34 Vincent Colapietro
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,
prot, and possibly edication.5 Both are in fact reruns or remakes: Spielberg
is offering (according to the website for this movie) a contemporary reading
of H. G. Wellss 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 Bushs summer rerun however stands in marked contrast
to the excited response of audiences to Spielbergs remake. Much of this might
be the result of Bushs 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. Spielbergs movie illuminates [. . . ] how Mr. Bush has ubbed 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, youre with us or youre 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 nal battle. Thats 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 Iraqs
security and protect its borders; he has now dened 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 nal reel by Frank Capra.
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
Bushs 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 Bushs 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 ca-
pacity to thwart even our most strenuous endeavors or to disrupt our habitual
responses.6 Often, our present selves, as concrete representatives of the determi-
nate 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 signicance, 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-a-vis one another.
The real is that which brings to light unsuspected deciencies in the cumu-
lative 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, simul-
taneous 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 dis-
torted a form, its traces7 are innumerable and (to some extent) both discernible
and decipherable (both identiable and interpretable). This force is also such
36 Vincent Colapietro
that we can position ourselves to feel more fully and to discern more nely its
efcacy, 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 (Noth), though Hilary Lawson and others argue that
they contribute to the largely unacknowledged enhancement of critical con-
sciousness 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 (Noth). But, in addition to the ludic, aesthetic, and sub-
versive functions just mentioned, I take it to be important, even urgent, to stress
the critical function made possible by the open-ended reexivity so character-
istic 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 char-
acteristic of reexive 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 un-
predictable 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 accu-
rately as our nitude 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 pragmati-
cism. 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 self-
reference 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 reexive discourse. But it also generates the possibility,
however fragile and eeting, 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:
1415). More or less reliable disclosures of some facet of the world depend
Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a self-referential culture 37
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.
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 hyperreexivity or
self-referentiality (terms I use synonymously here); moreover, hyperreexivity
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 reections frustrates the desire to locate the palpable source
of those reections. 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 reexivity, rationality, and reality, though in such a way that emphasis on
reexivity 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 signicant 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 re-
porters 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 Guantanamo 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 Gitlins piece, one member of the media is chastising other members9 and
therein the media is exhibiting a seemingly irrepressible tendency to report on
38 Vincent Colapietro
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, reexivity 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, reexivity here is operating in the
service of registering a reality resolutely ignored. Reexivity is fullling 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 rational-
ity. The acknowledgment of any complex reality (especially any controversial
reality) is impossible apart from responsiveness to ongoing interrogations, of-
ten ones of an increasingly reexive character. Whatever else we might mean
by rationality, responsiveness in this and indeed other respects is central to the
meaning of this word.
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 ction, disclosure and fabrication. That the ongoing medi-
ations of a self-consciously historical community of self-critical inquirers are
required to ascertain the signicance 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: 2025; cf.
Smith 1978: 8795; Colapietro 1995: 4244). The recognition of the ubiqui-
tous 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 encoun-
ters but also the equally persistent need to embrace the task of interminable
critique (Bernstein 1981: 116120).
Reality is, as Peirce suggests, what inquiry would disclose in the indenite
long run (see, however, Smith 1970: 104108). In the meantime, it is what the
most reliable of our investigations have intimated, however revisable these in-
timations turn out to be (Colapietro 1996: 13738). In this light, reality is at
once frustratingly elusive, brutally insistent, and inherently intelligible. Reex-
ive rationality, especially in the form of reexive 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 con-
temporary 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 reexive 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
unnished work of humane critique (Bernstein 1981: 118120). Is such critique
40 Vincent Colapietro
Notes
1. This point is nely articulated by Winfried Noth in his introductory chapter to this
volume: The visual, and the audiovisual arts and media have become increasingly
self-referential, self-reexive, autotelic. Instead of representing something heard
about, seen, lived, or otherwise experienced in social life, culture, and nature, jour-
nalists, commercial artists, designers, and lm 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 lming, they lm that they lm the lming. 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 difcult to trace. In literature,
ction has become metaction, novels have become metanovels, and texts are dis-
covered 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 lms, 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, Noth also carefully distinguishes the forms
and means of self-reference. In addition, he helpfully stresses the point that there
are degrees of reexivity: 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. Noth.
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, con-
sciousness, and selfhood, he stresses: The real, then, is that which, sooner or later,
information [i.e., experience, V.C.] and reasoning would nally 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 denite limits, and capable of a denite increase of
knowledge. And so those two series of cognition the real and the unreal consist
of those which, at a time sufciently future, the community will always continue to
re-afrm; and those which, under the same conditions, will ever after be denied (CP
5.311; EP 1, 52).
Distortion, fabrication, and disclosure in a self-referential culture 41
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 ofce records 30 summers ago, Independence Day has come to stand for terror
as much as for freedom (2005: 11).
5. Rich reports that, in Spielbergs movie, Tim Robbins (who else?) pops up to declare
that when aliens occupy a country, the occupations always fail. Even Tom Cruises
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 Americas Algeria,
to which Bush responded, I could not disagree with you more. Perhaps the doltish
adolescent in Spielbergs 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, obsis-
tence, or oppugnancy (CP 1.322, 1.324, 2.79, 8.291). But, in Peirces 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 Noth, The death of photography in self-reference (this vol., Part III).
8. One of the most crucial aspects of the relationship between rationality and reexiv-
ity 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
rst 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. Gitlins 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 re for allegedly liberal bias, Jim Lehrer in his
News Hour did give the number of such deaths as 100, counting 20 as homicides.
42 Vincent Colapietro
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Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress,
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Colapietro, Vincent
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1996 The ground of semiosis:An implied theory of perspectival realism? In:
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2003 Signication and interpretation. Jornada CEPE [Sao Paulo] (October
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2001 Metapop: Self-Referentiality in Contemporary American Popular Cul-
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2005 MIA: News of prison toll, The Nation (July 4), 68.
2002 Media Unlimited. New York: Metropolitan/Owl Book.
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1985 Reexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. London: Hutchinson.
Lenoir, Timothy
2000 All war is simulation: The military-entertainment complex. Congu-
rations 8: 289335.
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1953 The Captive Mind. New York: Vintage Books.
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1997 Semiotics of the Media. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Noth, Winfried and Christina Ljungberg (eds.)
2003 The crisis of representation: Semiotic foundations and manifestations
in culture and the media. Semiotica 143(14). (Special Issue).
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Part II. Self-referential print advertising
Modes of self-reference in advertising
Siegfried J. Schmidt
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 soci-
eties have revealed the crucial role of self-reference in terms of reexivity.
Today, reexivity can be regarded as the fundamental process of generating
social structures. The best example is communication. Communication re-
lies 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 reexive loops of expected expec-
tations in the domain of knowledge and imputed imputations in the domain
of motives and intentions. As part of each individuals 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 reexivity 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 specic 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 fun-
damental constructive processes of reexivity 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 reexive structures of observa-
tion inevitably lead to the experience of contingency. For this reason, soci-
eties whose models of reality and culture programs are a permanent subject
of discussion in complex media systems automatically develop media cul-
48 Siegfried J. Schmidt
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 specic communication-processes or discourses; that is, by a
specic 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-
50 Siegfried J. Schmidt
fer to the reality in an objective, reliable and authentic way; literature claims
to refer to a ctitious world according to aesthetic practices and expectations;
and public relations claim to refer to wishful images of persons, institutions or
rms 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. There-
fore, 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 Riv-
iera or the Eiffel Tower), stereotypes of professions or national characteristics
(the doctor or the Frenchman) or well-known works of art (Michelangelos David
or Leonardos Gioconda).
Finally, advertising refers to collective knowledge about social practices re-
garding, for example, the interaction of genders and generations, the relevance
of religious or political activities and the evaluation of the female and male bod-
ies, of clothing, eating and drinking, of sports or trendy leisure-time activities.
In sum, advertising selectively refers to collective mentalities, needs and desires
of specic target groups.
(a) In his paper Self-reference in the media: The semiotic framework, Win-
fried Noth (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.
Modes of self-reference in advertising 51
Such practices make use of what since the 1990s has been called recycling or
sampling (Figure 1a/1b).
In other words, media supply refers to media supply, and the efciency of
this strategy depends upon whether or not the addressees recognize the recycled
components (Figure 2).
According to Noth (this vol., I, 5.1), another type of self-reference in adver-
tising 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).
52 Siegfried J. Schmidt
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., reexive stabilization of ad communication. Guido Zurstiege (2003) has
Modes of self-reference in advertising 53
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: Persils customer-brand relation is
dened 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 condence 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 Persils 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).
54 Siegfried J. Schmidt
Figure 7. Lucky Strike (left): Advertising gives a completely wrong picture, doesnt
it? Lucky Strike. Nothing else.
(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 major-
ity of these books can be characterized as how-to-do-it literature but some of
the advertising stars have developed a specic kind of self-reexion one that
looks at the advertising system in terms of its present internal and external prob-
lems, the relation to scientic disciplines, efcient problem solving strategies
etc. Relevant examples include Jean Etienne Aebis, Einfall oder Abfall. Was
Werber warum erfolgreich macht (2003) [Idea or trash. What makes advertisers
successful and why], Wulf-Peter Kempers Brandholdervalue. Was Auftraggeber
zu mehr Werbe- und Markenerfolg beitragen konnen (2003) [Brand holder value.
What customers can contribute to more success of advertising and brands]; and
Holger Jung / Remy von Matts Momentum die Kraft, die Werbung heute
braucht (2002) [Momentum The power advertising needs today].
Until now the focus was on modes of self-reference in the advertising system.
The nal 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 observa-
tion and description; it is an instrument societies use for the purpose of self-
observation 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,
58 Siegfried J. Schmidt
Figure 8. Benetton5
Modes of self-reference in advertising 59
6. Conclusion
In this paper, I tried to describe different reexive 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
reexive loop: he observes as an artist how advertising observes society, and
confronts this type of afrmative observation with irritating similarities or con-
traries, irritatingly similar and dissimilar ways of acting and observing during
the Nazi regime. Toprowicz deliberately counteracts the principles of the adver-
tising 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 authors les 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.
Dusseldorf: Henkel, p. 49.
5. See Lorella Pagnucco Salvemini. 2002. Toscani. Die Werbekampagnen fur Benetton
1984 2000. Munchen: Knesebeck, p. 104.
60 Siegfried J. Schmidt
References
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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: Ha-
lem.
Metapictures and self-referential pictures
Winfried Noth
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 ob-
jects 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 Noth
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. Noth 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 Ecos 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
62 Winfried Noth
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 denes 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, con-
jugation, 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 nonver-
bal world, for example, duck, love, or freedom. In analogy, the term metapic-
ture 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 63
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 Noth 1999; Noth 2003b). Typical examples of how words function
as signs about pictures are the title of a picture, the painters 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 reecting 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 reects 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-reected mirror image; (10) is a self-
referential 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 denitions of metapictures and self-referential metapictures
may prot from the comparison with the distinctions between metalanguage,
object language, and self-referential metalanguage drawn in linguistics. For ex-
ample, 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
Metapictures and self-referential pictures 65
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 met-
alinguistic 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 reexiveness, 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 lan-
guage 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.
All of these words evince some similarity to what they refer. Cock-a-doodle-
doo 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 self-
referential 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
longssimo, 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.
this frame is coextensive with the contours of a gure which emerges from a
ground, for example, the gure of a political hero painted on a white wall. In
this case, the contours of the gure 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 identies the addresser as a painter, a pho-
tographer, 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 ex-
posed to publicity. Perspective is a signicant 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 addressees 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
specic segmental sign repertoire to identify self-referential or metapicto-
rial features of the picture. Unlike language, which has a rich vocabulary of
metalinguistic terms and of deictic words to identify the addresser and the ad-
dressee 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 land-
scape seen through them. We will return to such ambiguities between pictures
and metapictures or between pictures and self-referential pictures below, after a
brief exemplication of the analytical categories discussed so far.
cheetah that is shown running at a high speed. The discrepancy between the
semantic elds 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 worlds fastest
land animal seems plausible. As a visual metaphor, the picture of the cheetah
72 Winfried Noth
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
rst 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 rst 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.
Let us now return to the enunciative picture frames and examine some exam-
ples 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 ad-
dressees, or even its being a picture at all. Four examples will serve to illustrate
such ambiguities, (1) photorealist paintings, (2) pictorial fakes, (3) Parrhasioss
super-illusionist curtain, and (4) Magrittes anti-illusionist pipe.
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.
but his or her own creation, or vice versa, in which the characters of the authors
own narrative creation begin to enter into a dialogue with the author (as in
Pirandellos 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. Eschers message seems to convey this paradoxical message:
I, the draftsmans hand am drawing a hand that draws itself. The device of
pictorial metalepsis enjoys some popularity in the genre of the cartoons where
gures of animals or humans occasionally begin to change their appearance
because the drawn gure begins to change its own drawing by adding, deleting
or changing the lines and shapes of its own drawing.
Note
References
Alessandria, Jorge
1996 Imagen y metaimagen. Buenos Aires: Universidad, Faculdad de Filoso-
a y Letras
Anati, Emmanuel
1994 Constants in 40,000 years of art. In: Winfried Noth (ed.), Semiotics of
the Media, 385403. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Austin, John L.
1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: University Press.
Buhler, Karl
[1934] 1978 Sprachtheorie. Frankfurt: Ullstein.
Conant, Chloe
2005 Mise en abyme / mirror text. Dictionnaire international des termes
litteraires. 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, 215237. Tubingen: Stauf-
fenburg.
Harweg, Roland
1990 Studien zur Deixis. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Hockett, Charles
1977 The View from Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Machado, Arlindo
1984 A ilusao especular. Sao Paulo: Brasiliense.
Metz, Christian
1991 Lenonciation impersonnelle ou le site du lm. Paris: Klincksieck.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas
1994 Picture Theory. Chicago: University Press.
Moeller, Hans-Georg
2003 Before and after representation. Semiotica 143: 6978.
Noth, Winfried
1990 Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2003a Photography between reference and self-reference Fotograe zwi-
schen Fremdreferenz und Selbstreferenz. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Re-
thinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Pho-
tography Narration und neue Reduktion in der Fotograe, 2239.
Salzburg: Fotohof Edition.
78 Winfried Noth
2003b Press photos and their captions. In: Harry Lonnroth (ed.), Fran Narpes-
dialekt till EU-Svenska: Festskrift till Kristina Nikula, 169188. Tam-
pere: University Press.
2004 Semiotic foundations of the study of pictures. : Sign
Systems Studies 31(2): 377392.
Noth, Winfried and Christina Ljungberg (eds.)
2003 The Crisis of Representation: Semiotic Foundations and Manifesta-
tions in Culture and the Media. (= Special Issue of Semiotica 143.14).
Owens, Craig
1978 Photography en abyme. October 5: 7388.
Prieto, Luis J.
1966 Messages et signaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Ryan, Marie-Laure
2004 Metaleptic machines. Semiotica 150: 439469.
Santaella, Lucia and Winfried Noth
1998 Imagem: Cognicao, semiotica, mdia. Sao Paulo: Iluminuras. Trad.
Roque Graciano. 2003. Imagen: Comunicacion, semiotica y medios.
Kassel: Reichenberger.
Absolut Anonymous:
Self-reference in opaque advertising
Nina Bishara
The topic of this paper is opaque advertising, i.e., advertising in which the prod-
uct or service, the trademark, the advertiser and the advertising message itself
are disguised and can only be discovered through a special effort of advertising-
literate interpreters. Depending on the degree of the interpreters advertising
literacy, such ads may trigger incomplete processes of semiosis as dened by
Peirce: they may fail to result in the triadic process in which a sign, determined
80 Nina Bishara
3. Semiotic premises
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 rstness and secondness; it
is the category of mediation (between a rst and a second), of meaning, expec-
tation, 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 signier, a thing signied,
and an interpretant created in the mind of an interpreter. According to one of
his most frequently cited denitions:
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:
4. Exemplications
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 fulll 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 identied as an
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.), specically 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.
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 identied: one dent in the tiled oor 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 identication 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 everybodys 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 unidentied company was absolutely new to
the market, nobody could draw upon any prior knowledge about the rm 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 identied 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 par-
ticular in space or time leaves the advertising message open to and indenite
number of interpretations. The message is a rhematic qualisign, characterized
twice as a sign of rstness and mere suchness. A sign of this kind that remains
88 Nina Bishara
Germany literally saw red. After the company color was acquired, the secret
was disclosed.7 Red became a part of the companys corporate identity and is
still dominant in its advertising campaigns.
The examples of opaque advertising discussed so far were all classied as enig-
matic. Research in riddles has distinguished between true and false riddles such
as joking or wisdom questions (Abrahams and Dundes 1973). The latter, al-
though enigmatic, cannot be answered from the content presented in the ques-
tion, 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 re-
quired 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.
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 specic 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 mes-
sages 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 mes-
sage must refer to it. The referential function, a highly indexical sign process,
tends to be the primary function of advertising. However, creative advertis-
ers 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 counterpro-
ductive 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 ob-
ject 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
Absolut Anonymous: Self-reference in opaque advertising 91
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
References
Peirce, Charles S.
19311958 Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss
and Arthur Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quo-
ted as CP.
Part III. Self-referential photography
The death of photography in self-reference
Winfried Noth
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 pho-
tograph does not lie in the sense that the light rays emitted by the object are pro-
jected via the lens and registered by the lm in a process of optical and chemical
causality. In Mitchells words (1992: 24): A photograph is fossilized light, and
its aura of superior evidential efcacy has frequently been ascribed to the special
bond between gurative reality and permanent image that is formed at the instant
of exposure. It is a direct physical imprint like a ngerprint 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 Eugene Delacroix (17991863) praised the daguerreotype, the precursor
of the photograph, for the reliability of the picture in its faithful reection of the
object: Daguerrotypy is more than a blueprint, it is the reex of the object,
and Hypolyte Taine, in his Philosophie de lart 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 dened as primarily
indexical signs:
Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs are very instructive, be-
cause we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they
represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been pro-
duced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to corre-
spond 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)
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
The death of photography in self-reference 97
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 paint-
ing 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 les, 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 in-
dependent of referents in the real word (Robins 2007: 22). Although this
independence may enhance the artists 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 crit-
ical 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 ma-
nipulation 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. Noth 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 nave 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
98 Winfried Noth
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 reected 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 reected 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 photographers 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 photographers instrument of image mak-
ing, 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.
The third death of the photographic referent can be illustrated with Paul
Strands 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
100 Winfried Noth
afrms 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.
Under the inuence 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
Tabards 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 reects an impossible perspective of the real face, but
at the same time it is nothing but a photo.
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 exemplies our fth death of the referent in
photography.Arnulf Rainers 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
The death of photography in self-reference 101
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 fullling
its function of indicating its referent.
The sixth type of the death of the referent appears in the strategy of self-
referential photos in the photo (mise en abyme). The semiotic implications are
similar to the ones discussed in the case of double exposure. Consider the ex-
ample 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 self-
depiction. 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 ob-
structs 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 in-
visible. 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.
102 Winfried Noth
3.7. Self-obliteration
Despite the various forms of the disappearance of the referent in its seven self-
referential forms of death distinguished so far, traditional photography always
left some indexical traces of the referents which it depicted. The shadows which
The death of photography in self-reference 103
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
artists 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
artists image behind the glass by a process of visual inference, which leads us
back to the rst photo in the sequence, where we saw him fully.
Only in digital photography have photos entirely devoid of indexical an-
chors 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. Jager 2003: 178). In a manifesto about his own postphotography,
which can be exemplied with his black-and-white photographs on canvas of
1993 and 1995 entitled Sources (see Selichar 2003: 270), the Austrian digi-
tal photographer Gunther 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 gurative and the ab-
stract, which ultimately shows that categories like this have perhaps become
obsolete (2003 268).
The principal semiotic innovation of the postphotographic era is not the dis-
appearance of the object of the photographic sign, but the shift from indexical
to genuinely iconic pictures. The self-referential photos of Concrete Photogra-
phy, whose visual message is in their formal design only, are genuine icons,
according to Peirce (Noth 2003). A genuine icon does not depict in the tradi-
tional 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 rst-
ness, 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 represen-
tation. 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 rst meant a partial loss of the referent,
in digital photography we are faced with photos that have never had a referent.
We identied seven kinds of such losses of the referent in the history of pre-
digital photography. The postphotographic era is not the end of photography,
but the beginning of a new postphotographic photography. Pictures in Con-
crete Photography are signs without a referent in the real world, but not signs
without an object in the sense of Peirces denition of the sign. Although these
photographs represent nothing, they are nevertheless signs. Whereas the now-
defunct classical photography produced indexical signs, the postphotographic
art of Concrete Photography is a self-referential art of genuine icons.
The death of photography in self-reference 105
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ter, MA: Worcester Art Museum and Ghent: Snoeck.
Arrouye, Jean
1978 Semio-photo ou la mort de lanalogie. Critique 368: 7287.
Barthes, Roland
1980 La chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Cahier du cinema.
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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 dela de la photo positiviste: de la photo post-moderne a la post-
photographie. Visio 4(1): 6791.
Govignon, Brigitte (ed.)
2004 La petite encyclopedie de la photographie. Paris: Matiniere. Transl.
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Grundberg, Andy
2007 Photography in the age of electronic simulation. In: Bill Beckley and
Katherine Aguilar (eds.),The Death of Photography, 6168. NewYork:
Delano Greenidge.
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2003 Kunst und Fotograe: Floris Neususs und die Kasseler Schule. Mar-
burg: Jonas.
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2003 Abstract photography. In: Ruth Horak (ed.), Rethinking Photogra-
phy I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography, 162195.
Salzburg: Fotohof Edition.
Mitchell, William J.
1992 The Recongured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Noth, 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, 2239. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition.
2005 Warum Bilder Zeichen sind. In: Stefan Majetschak (ed.), Bild-Zeichen:
Perspektiven einer Wissenschaft vom Bild, 4961. Munich: Fink.
106 Winfried Noth
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 rst reality of the
mass media, in Luhmanns 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 rst introduced, an observation of the
rst order is sufcient, 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: 1415)
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
codiers (+/) 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 in-
evitably 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 Luhmanns (form/medium),
the medium itself is not accessible, it is only perceptible through the forms it
108 Kay Kirchmann
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 self-
observation. 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 gure of medial
media-observation that is, rst, necessarily selective and, second, oscillating be-
tween external- and self-observation. And, nally, 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 nd entirely different intentions and
functions.
I would like to consider these questions by looking at a paradigmatic exam-
ple: 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 siecle /
One Hundred Photographs of the Century (cf. Robin 1999). The series belongs
Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze 109
to a new sub-genre, the retrospective view of the century (cf. Filk and Kirch-
mann 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 reected 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 historys 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 per-
son photographed. Thereby history is interpreted as a contingent eld of eeting
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 denition of historical relevancy according to which the history of pop-
ular 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 Arnolds photo-
graph of Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Mists
110 Kay Kirchmann
series, this section does not set out to provide a contemporary reassessment of
signicant 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 lm 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 de-
veloping 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 lm 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 Lessings 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 inuence
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 ma-
terial 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-
112 Kay Kirchmann
dom, is herself a highly signicant example because already in her own lifetime,
she was a medial object embroiled in competitive struggles between photogra-
phy, 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 deal-
ing 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 cam-
era and against the lm camera draws implicitly on the popular understanding
that behind Monroes 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 lm career started (cf.
Arnold 2005: 2436). 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 gure as developed by television in her spe-
cic case. Again, having been trained in Luhmanns constructivism, the question
whether mass media products refer to reality can of course never refer to an on-
tological, 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 de-
liberate reference to the pertinent position that Eve Arnold takes. By virtue of
its rhetorical structure, Arnolds above quoted statement constantly brings into
play the opposition between photo and lm camera and joins it with an onto-
logical 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 lm 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
Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze 113
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 cam-
era. . . 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 be-
cause the pressure of shooting a lm, 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 Mists, to bear witness once more to
Marilyns 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 lm 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 inuenced their choice in making these specic
photos and this specic photographer the focal point of this episode.
Both in written statements and in the sound bites taken from the TV pro-
gram 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 actresss 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
114 Kay Kirchmann
The TV program leaves little doubt that this danger does indeed originate
from the medium lm. While the bond between Marilyn and the photo camera is
characterized, as we have seen, by a sense of passion and complicity, the actresss
interactions with a lm camera are dominated by such aspects as force, control,
and a lack of authenticity. These interactions cannot be characterized as a recip-
rocal 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 sen-
sible 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 nar-
rative, 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 fulllment and the silent suffering
of married life constantly regulated by the intricate mechanisms of patriarchal
domination. Since there is no way out of this conict, the only logical result
seems to be the untimely death of the woman.
This narrative frame changes our perception of Arnolds 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 Marilyns life, other and possibly even more famous photographs
would have been more than tting in the context of a short feature for example,
Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze 115
116 Kay Kirchmann
Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze 117
Figure 2af. Six photographs by Eve Arnold taken on the set of The Mists
118 Kay Kirchmann
one from the legendary last session with George Barris shortly before Monroes
death, or even the photo that Elliot Erwitt took on the set of Billy Wilders
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 Mists 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 2af), 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 lm
production (Figures 2a and 2e). Each element of the production, the battery
of lights (Figure 2c) just as much as the lm camera (Figures 2a), metonymi-
cally 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 specic combination of motifs. The
faint associations it carries of the Sword of Damocles or an executioners 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 Arnolds photography. The motive for
embracing Arnolds paragone in such an uncritical fashion is, of course, far less
altruistic. The gure 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: So-
cieties 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-
Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze 119
Again, the line of argument in our object under inspection is clear: while lm
seems to pose a threat to Eve Arnolds 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 reecting 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. Media-
referential 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.
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. Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp.
Filk, Christian and Kay Kirchmann
2000 Wie erinnerungsfahig ist das Fernsehen? Thesen zum Verhaltnis von
Geschichte, Medien und kulturellem Gedachtnis. Funkkorrespondenz
42: 39.
Marilyn: A paragone of the camera gaze 121
Luhmann, Niklas
1996 Die Realitat 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 Mists: Die Entstehungsgeschichte eines Films von Magnum-
Fotografen dokumentiert. Munich: Kehayoff.
Reck, Hans-Ulrich
1992 Der Streit der Kunstgattungen im Kontext der Entwicklung neuer Me-
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1998 Medien. Die Kopplung von Kommunikation und Kognition. In: Sibylle
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zen, 202226. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.
Part IV. Self-referential lm
The self-reexive screen:
Outlines of a comprehensive model
Gloria Withalm
In the movies, reference from the lm to the lm itself is as old as the history of
lm. The device can be found in all times, in all lm genres, and at several levels
of cinematic communication. There are many forms, functions, devices, and
textual strategies of self-reference or self-reexivity, for example, the strategy
of creating an ironic or critical distance or even a sense of alienation (in Brechts
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 pro-
posed to cover the entire range of self-reexive textual strategies and practices
and to relate them to the lm as a sociocultural and a sign system. A theory of
self-reference in the movies must provide a broader framework without restrict-
ing itself to the lm as a text. It requires an approach that is able to cover lm 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.
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)
In the middle of Rossi Landis model of social reproduction (Figure 1), ex-
change is shown as consisting of both external material exchange and sign
128 Gloria Withalm
In the Preface to the second edition of his Reexivity in Film and Literature,
Robert Stam discusses the various terms related to the key concept of his book
as follows:
The broad notion of reexivity has generated a swirling galaxy of satellite
terms pointing to specic dimensions of reexivity. The terms associated with
reexivity belong to morphological families with prexes or roots deriving from
the auto family, the meta family, the reect 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-reexivity 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, intratextu-
ality, and intermediality; self-reference or self-referentiality; self-reexivity or
auto-reexivity; self-conscious, self-begetting, or self-aware ction; metatextu-
ality, metaction; metalm, metacinema, metacinematographic; metareference;
metacodal or metacommunicative; foregrounding, the device of revealing; es-
trangement, deautomatization, or defamiliarization; mise-en-abyme, etc. In ad-
dition to this rst 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.
The self-reexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model 129
lmic texts. This schema of lmic self-reference (Figure 3) represents all do-
mains, phases, or states in the overall cycle constituting the lm, and it covers
all forms of self-reference and self-reexivity in individual lms as they have
occurred since the beginning of lm history.
However, the actual modes of self-reference that can be found in the movies
are not conned to forms of lmic reference to the lm in general. In addition,
the model also takes into consideration a special case of lmic self-reference
which I would like to dene as self-reexivity. A self-reexive lm is a lm
which focuses or reects on itself, that is, on the specic lm that is being
watched. Various cinematic devices are used to draw the spectators attention to
the lm itself in this sense: lines of the dialog, the materialization of lmic
means, and in some less frequent cases, to the showing of the dispositif, the
technical device of lm production and lm showing.
Although self-reexivity concerns primarily the lm as a product or, more
precisely, one actual product it focuses on, it cannot be reduced to this factor
since self-reexivity can also concern the three stages of the cycle production,
distribution, reception. Hence, the entire cycle is reduplicated, as Figure 3 shows.
However, self-reective reference to aspects of these phases is always more spe-
cic than in lmic self-reference; it is always restricted to the lm under consid-
eration. The following sections will present examples of lmic self-reference
and self-reexivity concerning all stages of the sociosemiotic cycle of lmic
reproduction.
The self-reexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model 131
The production of a lm 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.
Among the most popular motifs is the beginning of the career of a lm star, the
rst 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 nd work with Vitagraph Film Company. He starts to write screenplays,
and she soon becomes a leading actress. When her father nds out about her
movie career, he visits the Brooklyn studios, meets the companys 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 lm-in-lm movies: showing the studio premises (the actual
Vitagraph studios), cameo appearances of studio bosses (in this lm Albert E.
Smith, J. Stuart Blackton, and William T. Rock), and the tension between the star
and the role of the star, intensied by the spectators interest in the stars private
life. Clara Kimball Young, the female protagonist, was actually the daughter of
Edward Kimball who played her senator father in the lm. The latter form of
lmic self-reference characterizes one of the most famous examples of ctional
biopics, Sunset Blvd. the lm 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 conned to ctional or real-life actresses and
actors. In addition to the many examples of lms on the life of stars, for example,
the lms 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 lms whose self-referential features pertain to the
production phase are those offering a glance behind the scenes of moviemak-
ing, allowing us to watch ctitious or real lm directors during their work.
Well-known examples of lms showing the actual shooting phase are Singin
in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, US 1952), La nuit americaine
(Francois Truffaut, FR 1973), or The French Lieutenants Woman (Karel Reisz,
UK 1981). Other lms that are self-referential with respect to its production
focus on the phase of preproduction including the planning and writing of a
lm, the preparations before shooting (Otto e mezzo, Federico Fellini, IT 1963),
The self-reexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model 133
or the rst rehearsals with the actresses (Reperages, Michel Soutter, CH 1977).
Postproduction is in the focus of self-referential lms which deal with synchro-
nizing, 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 lms that ctionalize the shooting of really existing
lms, for example, Shadow of a Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, US 2000) on F. W.
Murnaus Nosferatu (G 1922) or also some scenes of Insignicance (Nicolas
Roeg, US 1985) which relate to Billy Wilders The Seven Year Itch (US 1955).
As discussed above, self-reexivity unfolds along the same phases inside
the overall cycle (Figure 3). Hence, there are also self-reexive lms focusing
on production aspects (Figure 4b). In contrast to self-referential lms which deal
with the production phase, self-reexive lms related to the same phase do not
merely present the production of just any movie, but the production of the very
lm which represents the production of this lm. One of several possibilities
of lming the production phase self-reexively 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 lms. There are also
examples from the genre of video clips. Genesiss I Cant Dance (Jim Yukich,
US 1991) shows not only Phil Collins in the lmed 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 lm.
Another group of self-reexive lms 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
lms showing the shooting camera are The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga
Vertov, SU 1929), or Jane B. par Agnes V. (Agnes 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 lming a car is apparently
run over by this automobile.
The climax of self-reexivity with regard to the production phase is a lm
shown in the process of its own production. The subject matter of these lms is to
show a lm 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
134 Gloria Withalm
lms 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 lms is Graumans Chinese Theatre with its
famous forecourt in which all the famous Hollywood stars have left their imprints
in cement. The rst 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-reexive (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 projectionists verbal reference to the Hays Ofce and an inserted title
card that reads censored.
A further case of self-reexivity in the distributive stage is the on-screen
presentation of (real and ctitious) companies in different varieties. The Pathe
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 lms. The well-known brand images are also subject to parodies
as is the case with the MGM logo. In two very different, though equally self-
referential, television series, the roaring lion is replaced by a meowing kitten,
in Mary Tyler Moore Show (US-CBS 197776) and several episodes of the
Austrian cop comedy series Kottan ermittelt (Peter Patzak, ATORF 1982).
Finally, all the TV characters who talk about their own show and particular
features of their network belong to another subcategory of self-reexive lms.
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.
Since the very beginning of lm history, lms have shown the audience. As
early as 1896, LEntree du cinematographe (Lumiere Brothers, n 250) shows
the crowd leaving Empire Theatre (on Londons Leicester Square) after a movie
show. Only ve years later, lms such as The Countryman and the Cinemato-
graph (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 plots 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 lms dealing with reception, there are
many lms 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-reexivity (Figure 6b), the audience related motif of addressing
oneself to the screen, like spectators applauding in a theater, is extended to spec-
tators actually communicating with the screen and with on-screen characters.
Such interactions culminate in the temporary dissolution of the barrier separat-
ing the spectators from the cast, the fourth wall, in the so-called screen passages.
The rst lm 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).
The self-reexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model 137
The result of the sociosemiotic process of lmic work and sign work is the
lm 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 lmic lm 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 lm 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 lms.
the protagonists own adventures during the search for his bicycle shown in
the preceding lm. In Get Shorty, the story of the gangster Chili Palmer (John
Travolta) and the lm 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 nale turns into a movie scene in the course of being shot,
and the lm ends with the wrap of the production of Chilis movie. Finally, at
the end of the movie Wes Cravens 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) nds 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 Freddys back | where he belongs | Regards | Wes. When
she starts reading the rst page of this script to her little boy, the scene repeats
exactly the opening scene of the lm which is about to end.
7. The full cycle, or: Who says theres nothing good on TV?
Since the phases of the sociosemiotic process of lm are interlinked and some-
times even overlap, there are examples of self-reference and self-reexivity that
can be attributed to more than just one of the phases. Moreover, some lms delib-
erately go full circle covering many, if not all, aspects of the process (Figure 8).
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
lms that fulll 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 ONeal,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 zzing of the soda. Shortly after,
Shaq ONeal leaves his (prolmic) 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 lms 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 nally to have a break, drink his Pepsi, and exclaim Who
says theres nothing good on TV?
This last example combines almost every form of self-reexivity discussed
so far, and it even goes beyond, creating further innovations. The phase of pro-
duction is self-reexive since it shows a team doing their job in a control room
of the television network. It is self-reexive as to its phase of distribution in
two respects. Like in all live television shows, production coincides with distri-
bution, so that the show shows its own distribution. In addition, however, this
commercial evinces self-reexivity 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-reexive 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-reexivity in the form of the digital
quotations of the movies and TV shows which we see during the protagonists
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 Saussures signie and
signiant respectively (Rossi-Landi 1979: 21).
The self-reexive screen: Outlines of a comprehensive model 141
2. This relation was already discussed by Marx (1961: 623) in his characterization of
consumption as giving the product the nishing 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 lm, a splicing girl has to nish the editing of a lm by the evening. She
completes it in the last minute, takes a cab to the movie theater, delivers the lm,
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 ONeal, the famous basketball player and long-term spokesman
for Pepsi, still played with Orlando Magic. When it was rst aired, the spot got an
extra reexive 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 ONeals team in the playoffs but, as Gary Hemphill, then manager of
public relations at the Pepsi-Cola company, stated: We couldnt have been more
fortunate that Magic made it so far, it literally looks like the commercial is part of
the game. Theyre 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, 615642. Berlin: Dietz. Engl. Grund-
risse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Pen-
guin 1973, transl. by Martin Liclaus. available online at: Marx & En-
gels Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
download/Marx Grundrisse.pdf, 2036. (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: 1532.
1985 Metodica losoca e scienza dei segni. Nuovi saggi sul linguaggio e
lideologia. Milan: Bompiani.
1995 Work, time, and some uses of language. In: Jeff Bernard (ed.), Zei-
chen/Manipulation, 141159. Vienna: OGS.
Stam, Robert
1992 Reexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc
Godard, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
142 Gloria Withalm
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 Bohn
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 mem-
ory. The way the media were in the past and how they have changed has become
represented and reected 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 reect a
nostalgic way of looking at the media as it can be found in our society.
Nostalgia seems to be a feature of our time, but neither the concept nor the
phenomenon is new. The word nostalgia rst 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 Rousseaus
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: 1516). 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
144 Andreas Bohn
them dissolving into the next in the course of time, but each state of conscious-
ness is also related to the preceding and the following state. Husserl (18931917:
28, 43) has described the two directions in which consciousness extends as re-
tention 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 glorication of a heroic age as a phase of social and cultural foundation
of the present. The paradox of such strategies of glorication 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 reexivity, of course, cultural ways of representing mem-
ory 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 di-
rected 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 rst 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 reection 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 specically to ways of getting in touch
with the past. For example, period pictures in the eld of the cinema, remakes,
quotations, re-adoptions of seemingly outdated lm genres, etc. Whereas a pe-
Nostalgia of the media / in the media 145
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 ux 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 rst 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 individ-
uals 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 Kassels Museum
for Sepulchral Culture, visitors became really sentimental when they saw the
computer model of the old days when they played their rst 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 recollec-
tion 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
articial 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 Beckers 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 (Bohn 2005). The tendency towards the musealization of the GDR in this
lm 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. Alexs 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
Nostalgia of the media / in the media 147
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 Platos 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 unication in which they ctionally 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 Paum has pointed out in his following assessment:
Good Bye, Lenin! demonstrates, in an excellent and clever way, the com-
pliance of pictures and tones. The lm 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-glorication which made the
falsication of alleged documents easy enough. (Paum 2003: 12)
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, Im Through with
Love is taken up for the third time as the tune of a dancing scene with slow-
motion effects. The ease of Fred Astaires 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 oating in the air. The title song
Everyone Says I Love You by Kalmar and Ruby from the Marx Brothers lm
Horse Feathers (US 1932) accompanies the nale.
Woody Allens 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 lm 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 Allens Deconstructing Harry (US 1997). These early
examples were more direct parodies than the more recent ones. Woody Allens
lm uses elements from the musical to characterize persons and situations and
to borrow tunes and moods. Emotional qualities are presented by means of well-
known expressions from the history of the lm 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 connat 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 Allens 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 Becaud, or France Gall. The
actors in the movie apparently do not sing with their own, but with someone
elses 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 ofcer of the German occupation
forces, having just received the order to destroy Paris, sings the song Jai deux
Nostalgia of the media / in the media 149
The analysis of the above examples has shown that besides the ongoing produc-
tion of genre lms and the continuous modication 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 lm.
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 reect on its own history. The tendency of the lm to deal with itself
and reect 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 nostal-
gia 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
Nostalgia of the media / in the media 151
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 ctitious but was already outdated when he rst 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 connat 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 Allens Radio Days (US
1987), a lm that associates nostalgic reminiscences of the radio as it was before
the advent of TV, with personal memories from the narrators childhood. In a
similar way, movies such as Giuseppe Tornatores Nuovo cinema Paradiso (F/US
1989) or Ettore Scolas Splendor (F/IT 1989) intermingle the recollections of an
individual life (in the former case beginning with the protagonists childhood)
with the personal memories of a particular movie house, the lms shown there,
the technical equipment which was used etc. Rather differently, in Agnes Vardas
Les cent et une nuits (F 1995), the history of the lm is narrated to a young woman
from the memory of an allegorical Monsieur Cinema.
In Tornatores and Scolas movies, general history, personal history, and me-
dia history are interrelated, as Splendor is with the end of World War II, the
protagonists return, and the showing of Frank Capras Its a Wonderful Life (US
1946). At the moment when the owner of the cinema enters it for the rst time
after the war, the nal scene of the movie is presented. It is Christmas, the com-
munity 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 prof-
itable. 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 Its 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 lm Splendor demonstrates, that which is greater than life works only in
the movies. In this respect, Splendor is the most nostalgic of all lms dealing
with the lm 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.
152 Andreas Bohn
5. Conclusion
In this paper, the focus was on examples from the lm which do not only follow
the trend towards nostalgia but also reect it in a rather complex manner. Below
the surface of the current trend towards media nostalgia, there is a broad cur-
rent 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
oppy disks, which seems to be the most recent manifestation of media nos-
talgia. 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 his-
torical 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 reective
nostalgia: Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild
the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reective nostalgia dwells in algia,
in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.
References
Bohn, Andreas
2005 Memory, musealization and alternative history in Michael Kleebergs
novel Ein Garten im Norden and Wolfgang Beckers Film Good Bye,
Lenin! In: Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.), Memory Traces: 1989 and
the Question of German Cultural Identity, 245260. Frankfurt: Peter
Lang.
Boym, Svetlana
2001 The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Nostalgia of the media / in the media 153
Dika, Vera
2003 Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film. The Uses of Nostal-
gia. Cambridge: University Press.
Fischer, Volker
1980 Nostalgie. Geschichte und Kultur als Trodelmarkt. Luzern: Bucher.
Fliedl, Gottfried
1990 Testamentskultur: Musealisierung und Kompensation. In: Wolfgang
Zacharias (ed.), Zeitphanomen Musealisierung. DasVerschwinden der
Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinnerung, 166179. Essen:
Klartext.
Fliedl, Gottfried (ed.)
1996 Die Erndung des Museums. Burgerliche Museumsidee und Franzosi-
sche Revolution. Vienna: Turia & Kant.
Husserl, Edmund
[18931917] 1969 Zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstesens, ed. Rudolf
Boehm (=Husserliana X). The Hague: Nijhoff.
Ochsner, Beate
2004 Jai deux amours: la musique et le lm . . . Intermediale Verschran-
kungen von Musik und Film in On connat la chanson (1997) vonAlain
Resnais. In: Susanne Schlunder and Scarlett Winter (eds.), Korper-
Asthetik-Spiel. Zur lmischen ecriture der Nouvelle Vague, 157
182. Munich: Fink.
Paum, Hans Gunter
2003 Der diskrete Charme der Ostalgie:Wolfgang Beckers Good Bye, Lenin!
konkurriert noch um den Berlinale-Baren und kommt schon ins Kino,
Suddeutsche Zeitung 36 (February 13, 2003), 12.
Self-reference in animated lms
Jan Siebert
1. Introduction
One of the most successful animated lms from the era of silent lms is a series
of lms with the remarkable title Out of the Inkwell (USA 1918ff.). This lm 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 difcult 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 lms
use stars, bubbles, and bouncing letters surrounding a character. In the German
lm 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 lm very often uses the aesthetics of the comic
book (and this lm is an adaptation of a highly successful German comic book),
this usage does not seem out of place.
Many years later, when the animated lm had sound and color, a similar
reference to the paper medium was used to create comical effects in the ani-
mated lm Flatworld (GB 1997). This lm 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 inuence the action. It allows the protagonist sitting in a car to slide slant-
wise 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!
Self-reference in animated lms 157
The lm Felix the Cat and the Out of the Inkwell lm 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 lms use this exible interpretation of media borders and dis-
tort the realism that most live-action lms are based on. Generally speaking,
animated lms have never been able to challenge the authenticity of the images
of live-action lms. Instead, they seek to create a different atmosphere and a
world with its own rules in which not only the characters are very exible 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 lled with bullets.
As we learn in the live-action-animated lm-mixture Who framed Roger Rabbit
(USA 1988), animated personnel can in fact die; they just have to be erased.
Figure 3. The spectator included in the lm Daffy Duck and Egghead (USA 1938)
Very often, the lm 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 lm crew or the creators
hands etc. Sometimes we can even see parts of the material of the lms itself. In
Tex Averys 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 lm 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 characters
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 lms do not need the consistency or internal logic of a realist lm;
[. . . ] the super-textual can break into the text at any moment.
Self-reference in animated lms 159
Figure 4. Cartoon character leaves the lm frame in Dumb Hounded (USA 1943)
5. New developments
During the last decade, many computer-generated lms have been released that
have succeeded in pushing the genre to new heights. Toy Story (USA 1995)
was the rst feature lm to be entirely produced with a computer, and other
very successful lms like A Bugs 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 lmmakers
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 lms
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 Bugs Life and Shrek are among those which include out-takes,
which are mere fakes or just copies of the way live-action lms are presented.
Out-takes from animated lms are by no means bad material, nothing taken
out. They are special productions which provide the spectators with bonus gags.
In A Bugs Life we can see a baddy who is worried not to create the impression
of being a tough person. In another scene the lmmakers borrow the protagonist
Woody from Toy Story, the rst successful lm produced by the same company.
Woody wants to help directing the lm with the result that other parts of the
lming material become visible (microphones, a camera, etc.). The characters
in these mock out-takes act as if they were humans of esh 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 birds 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 lms one can occasionally nd not only fake out-
takes but also mock interviews with actors. This is not an entirely new device;
since the early times of the medium, the makers of animated lms 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 articial images. Our protagonists can do impossible things, so let us
comment on these exible interpretations of the world. Let us experiment with
ways of crossing the borders of our medium with the medium of the comics and
Self-reference in animated lms 161
cartoons, or with live-action lms 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 lm 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 benet 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 lm
that learns from the predominance of the live-action lms but also vice versa.
Notes
References
Fernando Andacht
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 nd it, it has been already faked. (James
1963/1906: 109, emphasis in the original)
inevitably help to create with their lms about an ever elusive real. This hope-
lessly Sisyphean task will be illustrated below with the work and thoughts of
the Brazilian director Coutinho. Jamess construal of representation is the very
opposite of Peirces (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 Bostons 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 nd the sketch of a synechistic
theory of signication 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 conicting 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 Peirces realist, synechistic semiotic. The distinction between two kinds of
semiotic objects is the technical solution to the supposed dilemma faced by
documentarists who pursue reexivity: they can never grasp the entirety of
the real which they fallibly and partially register in their lms, 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 fulll 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,
On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reexivity 169
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 Jamess
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 reexive documentary nds
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 articial and biased a manner (Andacht 2005). The indexical
ground provides the main input for the symbolic production of the two audio-
visual 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 ow 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 reexivity based on its general
consequences according to Peirces pragmatic maxim (CP 5.89). What makes
the quality documentary fascinating to its audience is precisely what makes its
poetics of self-critical reexivity awed. 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.
For example, Coutinho relates that he decided to omit pictures that two of the
women in EM found signicant because he had not reacted quickly enough,
and had not included them at that particular point in the lming 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 individuality7 , I have called this
procedure the August Sander effect (Andacht 2005: 113). According to this
frugal, reexive lm poetics, any later accretion does not pertain to the Others
individuality but is a sign of the directors will, of an arbitrary, subjective choice,
and not the result of the lmed interaction between the director and the lm
participant.
The third reexive 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
Coutinhos poetics, this reexive method manifests itself as a relentless self-
critical gaze which can be traced back to an inuential gure in European doc-
umentary and whose importance for the ideology of the genre is acknowledged
by the Brazilian director, namely, the French lm critic and documentarist Jean-
Louis Comolli.8 In a long interview Comolli, the former editor in chief of the
Cahiers de Cinema, eschews the presumption of voyeurism for documentary
art by giving a detailed account of a method which I nd remarkably akin to
methodological reexivity and which also ts nicely Coutinhos own cinematic
practice:
There is always voyeurism in the operation of lming. But I wouldnt speak
of voyeurism in this case. The word does not seem adequate. Id rather
say there was a great force of listening [une force d ecoute]. What you
can feel in that lm 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 lm 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 lmed and the one who is lming,
and this pertain to transference, which is possible through an act of listening
[ecoute]. (Comolli 1995: 68)
Similar to Coutinho who rejects as a subject matter for his lms 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
On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reexivity 173
exploring untrodden ground. Evidently, Comolli does not only mean that those
with material and symbolic capital should be shunned as lm participants but
anyone who lacks spontaneity in front of the camera. The French director ex-
plains why he omitted from his 1993 documentary on ofce life and work11 the
scenes which featured a union worker, one of the very few men who appear in
the lm. The reason was the high risk of inserting a ready-made speech into
his lm which would have altered the overall quality of reexive 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 reexivity in Comollis interview. After his
remarks that listening constitutes the center of the lm (1995: 78), Comolli
proposes a different, more radical kind of self-knowledge which for him is the
natural upshot of the reexive documentary genre:
What I nd 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 dis-
covering while lming them and which is their way of thinking the lm.
[. . . ] Film functions always as a kind of revealing agency [une sorte de
revelateur]. 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)
Let us consider once more the dualistic metaphysics underlying the poetics of
documentary representations of the real. William Jamess approach to reality will
help us to understand the remarkable ambivalence, even contradiction, between
the lm-makerspractice in their lms with their reexive strategies and their
reections on their own production. The forlorn sense of lack at the kernel lm
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 docu-
menting (Figueiroa et al. 2003: 21617), the reply that Coutinho gives deserves
to be part of any future manifesto of reexivity since it contains the warrant of
the lm makers inclusion of the process of lming in the nal documentary:
We are always lming encounters. [. . . ] It is the verbal act which is ex-
traordinary, an act provoked, catalyzed, by the moment of lming without a
conscious deliberation neither from me nor from the person. To lm is [. . . ]
to provoke, to catalyze that moment. It is in the interaction that takes place
in the lming process that a great character is born.
Just before that statement, the lm director had spoken about the reexivity
of his lms, which always tell that they are lms, always reveal, somehow, to
the spectator, their own conditions of production by revealing the presence of
the camera lming that encounter (Figueiroa et al. 2003: 215). Coutinho also
posits a critical contrast between his reexive method and the one of a related
but nonreexive 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. (Figueiroa et al. 2003: 216)
How can one of the most private human relations, namely face-to-face inter-
action, 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 lmed representation of life as it takes
place, whether it becomes the subject matter of a documentary or not? Is the
On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reexivity 175
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 lm is therefore something positive. A lm 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 fullls 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 lm (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 lming act is the shared here and now which engrosses the maker and
the participants of the lm. 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 lmed encounter are the source of an
essential contradiction in the poetics of self-critical reexivity, which docu-
mentarists are trying to resolve by means of their self-referential practice of
self-disclosure through lming the act of lming and giving it a place of honor
in the nal work. The following reection may illustrate their self-conscious or-
deal. 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 lm 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 nd people who said
those things for that money, I would be a genius! (Caldeira 2001). Coutinho
justies 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 lms inuence on its subject.
It is ironical, though symptomatic, of our indexical audiovisual age that the
voiced suspicion of that viewer of Coutinhos lm brings out an unexpected but
undeniable kinship between the earnest, self-critical reexivity of documentaries
and the light, facetious reexivity of TV reality shows. A typical suspicion about
On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reexivity 177
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 conned 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 reexive
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 Others self which distinguishes the
indices recorded in a lm in a self-critical way from those gathered by the 24/7
observation TV program: When I am there lming, I am totally available, the
people feel it. At last they will be listened, [. . . ] but they dont even know me;
when they look at me, they just see someone there who has only eyes and ears
for them (Coutinho in Figueiroa 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 Coutinhos or in Comollis lms do not become characters, ctional 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 nd out, as we
must in our everyday relations, wherever meaning grows.
Reexivity has been hailed as a noble component of high culture and equally as a
valuable method of high theory. In the realm of culture, reexivity 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 lm crew entering the building. In the directors view, this moment
of interference entails an irreversible alteration of normal life, an alteration hard
to gauge but denitely transforming what is to be represented audiovisually.
Self-critical poetics assumes that what is jeopardized by the act of lming is
the objectivity of what is represented, i.e., the dwellers of the building Master
and the life stories they willingly offer. Reexivity is also part and parcel of an
indexical genre placed at the aesthetic antipodes. In Big Brother, the purpose
178 Fernando Andacht
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 representacao do real na epoca de sua espetac-
ularizacao midiatica.
2. For the basic analytical notions concerning these indexical genres see Andacht 2002,
2003, 2004, 2005.
3. For simplicitys sake and to avoid a certain redundancy in Allens notion of self-
reexivity, I will refer to this phenomenon throughout this work as reexivity.
4. See Colapietro (1998) for a ne 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 represen-
tation.
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-of-
photography.com/S/sander/sander2.html (01.12.04).
8. There is a reference to Comolli as an authority gure for Coutinho in an interview
(2003: 217).
9. Reference is made here to Comollis 1993 lm La vraie vie (dans les bureaux).
10. I dont make lms on the rich, middle class, because one cant do that. They defend
themselves, they are the specialists. Im 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-reexivity in documentary. Cine-Tracts 1(2): 3743.
Andacht, Fernando
2002 Big brother te esta mirando. La irresistible atraccion de un reality show
global. In: Paiva Raquel (ed.), Etica, Cidadania e Imprensa, 63100.
Rio de Janeiro: Mauad.
2003 Uma aproximacao analtica do formato televisual do reality show Big
Brother. Galaxia. Revista Transdisciplinar de Comunicacao, Semioti-
ca, Cultura 6: 245264.
180 Fernando Andacht
2004 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, 123139. London: Wallower Press.
2005 Duas variantes da representacao do real na cultura midiatica: O exor-
bitante Big Brother Brasil e o circunspeto Edifcio Master. Contem-
poranea: Revista de Comunicacao e Cultura 3(1): 95122.
Caldeira, Joao Bernardo
2001 Entrevista a Eduardo Coutinho. Curta Ocurta,
http://www.curtaocurta.com.br/entrevista 0201.asp (03.06.01).
Carroll, Noel
1996 From real to reel: Entangled in nonction lm. In: Noel Carroll (ed.),
Theorizing the Moving Image, 224252. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Colapietro, Vincent
1998 Natural processes and historical practices. Semiotica 119: 10555.
Comolli, Jean-Louis
1995 Les questions de cinema de Jean-Louis Comolli. (Interview by Rene
Predal, Youri Deschamps, and Delphine Goupil). CinemAction 76:
4879.
Figueiroa, Alexandre, Claudio Bezerra and Yvana Fechine
2003 O documentario como encontro. Entrevista com o cineasta Eduardo
Coutinho. Galaxia. Revista Transdisciplinar de Comunicacao, Se-
mioti-ca, Cultura 6: 213232.
Hacking, Ian
1999 The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Hardwick, Charles S. (ed.)
1977 Semiotic and Signics: 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,
101117. New York: Washington Square Press.
Lynch, Michael
2000 Against reexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged
knowledge. Theory, Culture, and Society 17(3): 2654.
Mattos, Carlos A.
2003 Eduardo Coutinho. O homem que caiu na real. Santa Maria da Feira:
Edicoes do Festival de Cinema de Santa Maria da Feira.
Noth, Winfried
2001 A auto-referencia na perspectiva da teoria dos sistemas e na semiotica.
Revista de Comunicacao e Linguagens 29: 1328.
On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reexivity 181
Peirce, Charles S.
19311958 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 Peirces concept of iconic sign. In: Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld
and Roland Posner (eds.), Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture,
5174. Tubingen: 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 metodo anticartesiano de C. S. Peirce. Sao Paulo: UNESP.
Souriau, Etienne
1953 Lunivers lmique. Paris: Flammarion.
The old in the new: Forms and functions of archive
material in the presentation of television history on
television
Joan K. Bleicher
Long before the present strong impact of the media, history and narration had
been interconnected as collective memories. Historians such as Reinhart Kossel-
leck (1990) and Hayden White (1990) have argued that history must be trans-
formed 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 con-
nected to the collective memory of social groups. The strong visual impact of
the blockbuster movies testies to the re-shaping of individual and collective
memories of historical events in the media. In contrast to lm, 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:
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 fo-
cusing 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.
The presentation of history on television concerns two time spheres, the short-
term 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
188 Joan K. Bleicher
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 evi-
dently presented in show and reality formats, whereas long-term history appears
in hybrid formats of reality and ction genres such as the live history series.
Based on the above observations, let us now reect 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. Bau-
drillard (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.
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 tele-
vision 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. Lam-
bernd 2000: 37). His acting and talking inserted into the original scenario is in
190 Joan K. Bleicher
sharp contrast with the message of the program he satirizes and its original pro-
duction 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 char-
acterize the comedy shows TV Total, ProSieben, and Kruger sieht alles [K.
Watches/Sees Everything], RTL. Viewing strips have their origins in diverse for-
mats of different networks. In their commentaries, the comedians Stefan Raab
and Mike Kruger 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. Kalkofes criticism of traditional show formats has prepared
the audience for new kinds of reality shows, which have meanwhile become a
new focus of Kalkofes critical eye.
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 specic 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 televi-
sion history on television. In all historytainment shows, television uses its own
archive, its own modes of presentation as a rich source of collective and indi-
vidual memories. In this way, television tries to establish itself as the collective
memory of society.
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.
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
References
Assmann, Aleida
2003 Erinnerungsraume. Formen undWandlungen des kulturellen Gedacht-
nis. Munich: Beck.
Baudrillard, Jean
1978 Agonie des Realen. Berlin: Merve.
Bleicher, Joan Kristin
2003 Darstellungsformen von Mediengeschichte im Fernsehen. Medien &
Kommunikationswissenschaft 51(34): 366281.
The old in the new 193
1. Background
With their critical eye, the media strengthen the decision-making skills and the
citizensresponsibilities. 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 develop-
ment on the market. Promotional types of self-thematization, especially in the
form of house ads (see below), benet from the current general conditions of
media markets. As far as media rms are concerned, the much discussed econ-
omization and commercialization of the media entail a general engagement in
activities aiming at prot and prot-orientation. The media want to make money
in the rst place. Return on investment (ROI) measures how much prot 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 rms are highly competitive about
audience favor and advertising investments.
Although strong competition cannot be found at all levels, economic pressure
has consequences. Media rms do not only want to produce economically; they
also tend to be active as to marketing measures. The cost orientation calls for self-
reference. 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 per-
formances are very similar. Furthermore, media companies are often accused
of differentiating their own products insufciently 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 identica-
tion is another important potential for differentiation. Consumers tend to develop
brand loyalty over time, and therefore, having a clearly dened 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 competi-
tors to attract as much consumers attention as possible. The situation is further
Theres no business without show-business: Self-reference as self-promotion 197
Depending on the stage of the development of the station and its programs,
the instruments of communication vary. In the companys 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).
198 Karin Puhringer and Gabriele Siegert
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 Schutte (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 difcult 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 Puhringer (2001: 261262), 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 pro-
gram, to commercials, or to other forms of intermission
teaser in split screen, e.g., during end titles; visual/verbal (voice over) ref-
erence 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 relation-
ship
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.
Theres no business without show-business: Self-reference as self-promotion 199
2. Research questions
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
Zuri (German), Leman Bleu (French), Tele Ticino (Italian), and Sat.1 Switzer-
land (from Germany with Swiss license). This research was commissioned and
nanced by the Swiss Federal Ofce for Communication (BAKOM).
4. Findings of Study 1
Based on the distinction between self-reference in house ads with and with-
out 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 con-
sumer invitation (cf. Figure 3).
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 signicantly 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
The programs of the commercial television stations evince 583 units with
program reference and 876 units without program reference. The public-service
202 Karin Puhringer and Gabriele Siegert
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 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 (19992000) 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.
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. An-
swers 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 ndings 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 conrms, as discussed
above, the trend to a more segmented and structured television program.
Overall, there has been a signicant 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 identied 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 signicant 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 reects the great
efforts made to attract the consumers attention and to avoid their channel-
hopping 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,
204 Karin Puhringer and Gabriele Siegert
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. Neverthe-
less, 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
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Part VI. Self-referential games
Computer games: The epitome of self-reference
Lucia Santaella
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)
208 Lucia Santaella
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 con-
vergence 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), telecommu-
nication (such as telephones, satellites, cables), and informatics (computers and
software) in a new complex media, the hypermedia. In this new space of inter-
change 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 Noth states in the beginning of the introductory chapter to this
volume (paragr. 1),
the mediators have turned to representing representations. Instead of nar-
rating, they narrate how and why they narrate, instead of lming, they lm
that they lm the lming. The news are more and more about what has been
reported in the news, television shows are increasingly concerned with tele-
vision 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 difcult to trace.
The three media in which self-reference is most prominent are undoubtedly
lm, advertising, and computer games.According to Noths introductory chapter
(paragr. 4),
the media differ as to the degree to which their messages are typically self-
referential 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 fulll its
commercial purpose of propagating a message about goods and services.
[. . . ] Feature lms, by contrast, which have both ctional 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 lms must have increased. In computer
games we are nally 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
210 Lucia Santaella
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 lm, expanding certain scenes
which were not explored in the lm (cf. Azevedo in: Santaella 2005).
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 increas-
ing experience. In modern games with cut scenes1 such as American McGees
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 identied 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 y. [. . . ] 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 wan-
ders about the virtual game world assisting the players, and creating narra-
tive events, conicts 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
Computer games: The epitome of self-reference 211
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 self-
referential 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 denitions 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 balls position in the
playing eld; 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 inuence the game state to per-
form 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 re-
strict the players freedom to move or not to move and those that require action
in a predetermined time frame, Juul (2004: 133) distinguishes between turn-
based 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.
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. Im-
mersion 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-
Computer games: The epitome of self-reference 213
mersion (Santaella 2004: 4647). The rst 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 sys-
tems 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 players 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-sufcient world whose sufciency increases with the
self-referentiality of its rules. The notion of parallel world does not necessarily
mean a world that is of an entirely articial 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 ctive 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 ctionality of its
scenario. It does not matter whether it is a science ction 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 nd it. In fact, the immersion of players in their game is much deeper
214 Lucia Santaella
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 specic 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.
The rst 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 ashing 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 ashing object with a ball
Computer games: The epitome of self-reference 215
(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 ctional environments (2004: 140).
In story telling computer games, the device of stories within stories is rather
frequent. Pearce (2004: 14849) 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 games story framework. [. . . ] Most of the original MMORPGs
metastories focus on medieval fantasy/Dungeons and Dragons style themes,
although more mainstream themes are forthcoming.
A fth 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
(lms, novels, advertising, music, etc.) in other media which, for their part, also
Computer games: The epitome of self-reference 217
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 lms or works of literature. Games are apt to tap those media since they
share with them the genres fantasy, adventure, science ction, 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 lm story but expand
our previous experience of a story and the way to interpret it.
Especially the interaction between lms and games is thriving. Not only
the marketing campaigns of lms and games but also their production and
development are becoming more and more interconnected and interdependent,
as Jenkins (2004: 124) points out:
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 self-
reference than a game theory that is a theory of games.
218 Lucia Santaella
Note
References
Jenkins, Henry
2004 Game design as narrative architecture. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and
Pat Harrigan (eds.), First Person. New Media as Story, Performance,
and Game, 118130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Juul, Jesper
2004 Introduction to game time. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan
(eds.), First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game,
131142. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pearce, Celia
2004 Towards a game theory of game. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat
Harrigan (eds.), First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and
Game, 143153. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Santaella, Lucia
2004 Navegar no ciberespaco: O perl cognitivo do leitor imersivo. Sao
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 ctional 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 t 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 nd 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 specic and, to a large extent, technological and scien-
tic feature of computer games is to ignore the invariant base of the computer
medium. This is intimately correlated with the important concept of recursivity
(Noth, 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 rst and foremost to inves-
tigate 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 rst denes 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 de-
ned as complex dynamic systems. The argument is that gaming is a higher level
220 Bo Kampmann Walther
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 players
actions, strategies, and motives; game structure contains the rules, including
simulation rules and physics; and game world includes ctional 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 ontol-
ogy or gameness of games will be dened. Secondly, an explanation of the
epistemology of games (and play) will be given which pretends to zero the dis-
tinctiveness 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 specic games while borrow-
ing 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, star-
ring Kiefer Sutherland. Clearly, the series points towards a number of classic
issues and plot congurations imported from the history of television drama and
cinematic entertainment. This is remediation, old media rethought, recongured,
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 dene the specicity of media and their contents hence offering a
rich platform for the users 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 ctional
elements in games and (new) media.
Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach 221
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 re-
gions 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 combina-
tions or the emergent outcome of rules and strategies. This differentiation can
be listed even more briey:
Rules are commands.
Strategies are plans for game executions.
Interactions patterns dene 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 nd and optimize the best way to accomplish the
goal of the strategy (Figure 1).
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 difculty
in dening the concept properly. Game play is the actualization of a specic
stratication 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
ones strategy in accordance with both rules and the possible actions of oppo-
nents. Games should be equally challenging and rewarding, hovering between
boredom and anxiety hereby assuring a space of ow through the network of
choices. For a computerized game system, a successful game play implies a
balance between xed rules and the control of player input in variable settings.
Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach 223
What denes 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 dene 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, in-
cluding 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 writ-
ten down on paper and stored in the players 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 simu-
late 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 eld.3 In games, behavioral patterns inside this eld are limited, con-
strained, and highly codied (Huizinga [1938] 1994; Caillois [1958] 2001;
Walther 2003). Rules are guidelines that direct, restrict, and channel behav-
ior in a formalized, closed environment so that articial 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, interac-
tion 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 fulllment of the game. In that respect, the
patterns correspond to the outcome of absolute rules and social dynamics.
224 Bo Kampmann Walther
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 players 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 players 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 interac-
tion 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
226 Bo Kampmann Walther
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 players strategy) it has to check the viability of input in
accordance with the specied rule set.This rapid intersection of forward linearity
and backward loop circularity denes 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 rene 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 specic 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
denes, limits, and makes possible what happens in response to a given input.
The output function maps states and inputs to outputs. This function denes
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 nd that the machine (i.e., the
game) consists of an array of cells, each of which can be in one of a nite
number of possible states. The cells are updated synchronously in discrete time
steps according to a local and identical interaction rule (which we identied
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 specied in the form of a rule table that denes the
next state of the cell for each possible neighborhood conguration.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 specication 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 specic view of the game state to the player; a view or a piece
Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach 227
Figure 4. The recursive system depends on an oscillation between linearity and circularity
In the previous section, we saw how rules and interaction system together dene
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 Luhmanns systems theory as well as George Spencer-Browns
(1969) form theory, I have tried to categorize and reect on the difference be-
tween 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 inter-
nal 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
ones 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 xated on progressing in the prior structure
which is the game (Kirkpatrick 2004: 74). Gaming presupposes the tension, or
230 Bo Kampmann Walther
the initial transgression, in which we constantly resist falling out of the fan-
tasy context of play, and gaming presupposes further focus on a second, higher
transgression in which success and failure is measured against our achievement
of dened objectives. Thus, in playing a computer game, we work in a second
simulacrum, an as if structure overlain on top of the rst initial transgression
that makes play possible in the rst 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 connes of play
and, subsequently, trusting and acting in accordance with the xed 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 han-
dling 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 intrinsi-
cally 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 uninter-
esting 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 dened 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 uncer-
tainty 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.
Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach 231
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 ction related elements; (2)
games refer to a larger and immensely complex horizon of cultural bricolage,
a kind of cut-copy-and-consume culture; and, nally, 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 epis-
temologically, 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 con-
cept 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 (Kucklich 2003) whereas all nondigital media, including
ction and cinema, are basically semantic, referential systems that can be per-
ceived 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 be-
tween game rules and ctional representation? As a kind of conclusion, let me
briey show how the formal requirements of a game may be inscribed in the
ction of the game and perhaps vice versa.
Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach 233
In a graphic novel sequence in the drugged opening of the third act, Max Payne
nally 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 metactional 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?
Paynes 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-reexive exploration of its own
representational techniques and media. In light of the ndings of this article, we
may further hypothesize that Max Payne knows and plays with its own recursive
dynamic and places it amidst the ctional 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 ction while clearly belonging to the trivial, nonsemantic
level of rules.
Notes
1. This emphasis on the formal side of games and game theory is denitely not con-
structed so as to denounce any kind of study that enquires into the ctional 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 ctional self-reference in
games as well as in other types of media claries discussions that otherwise tend
Self-reference in computer games: A formalistic approach 235
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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 commu-
nication 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 metacommunica-
tion. 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.
Batesons theory of play as metacommunication is of great interest to the
emerging research eld 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.
238 Britta Neitzel
Inspired by his observations of monkeys in the San Francisco zoo, Bateson put
forward the hypothesis that play behavior is accompanied by metacommunica-
tive 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 mes-
sages. Metalinguistic messages refer to language. An example of a metalinguis-
tic 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 meta-
communicative message This is play establishes a paradox of the kind which
is also known as Russells paradox or Russels antinomy.3 The formula which
denes 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 denition, 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 Epimenidess
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.
Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games 239
action to which the players 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 evo-
lution of communication the crucial step in the discovery of mapterritory
relations. In primary processes, map and territory are equated; in secondary
processes, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and dis-
criminated (Bateson [1955] 1972: 185). Both in therapy and in play, metacom-
munication 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 exper-
imental 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 be-
tween 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
afrms and negates at the same time what the players are doing.
Metacommunication in play is self-referential communication. Players per-
form actions and simultaneously they refer to the way they perform these actions,
afrming that what they are doing is just play. In the context of the semiotics
of pictures, Noth (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 specic 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.
Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games 241
The distinguishing feature between games and play is that games are played
according to rules, whereas play is spontaneous and has no previously estab-
lished rules. The rules of a game determine the range of the players possible
242 Britta Neitzel
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, xed, binding, and repeat-
able. 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 circle6 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 prot from not announcing the real value of her cards immediately because
the risk of losing (and winning) increases with each value, the rst 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 rst 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 meta-
communicative discourse during the game, but the rules as such are metacom-
municative in a way, since they determine what the players may or may not do.
Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games 243
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, xed, 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 players 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 uid 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, fulll 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
Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games 245
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 ctional 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 eld 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 leaet.
>read leaet
leaet, 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.
246 Britta Neitzel
program, the player is inside the ctional 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 exemplies 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 ctional game world. Typing open window means that the you in the
ctional 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 pro-
grammed 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 addressers voice as-
sumes 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.
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 unidentied addresser uses the
medium of a leaet 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 ction,
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 ction
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 undis-
closed agents but also of inanimate objects, such as windows, sacks, or bottles.
Players of computer games thus seem to have the power of metaleptic interfer-
ence into the world of ction 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 gure of metalepsis, which can
be called a simulation of metacommunication or ctional metacommunication.
Fictional metacommunication cannot only be found in verbal but also in
visual messages of computer games. Instead of typing open window, for ex-
ample, the player may simply have to press a button on the keyboard or use a
game controller to open a window. Recent examples of ctional metacommu-
nication 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
Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games 249
practicing with Lara Croft in a special training mission to Lara Crofts house
before the adventure starts. In Metal Gear Solid I (Konami 1998), the protago-
nist 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 ctional 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 ctionalization of the rules to be learnt also makes use of the
device of ontological metalepsis for which the Metal Gear Solid series (Konami
19982004) 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
enemys weapons the real gamer has to save the game occasionally.15 In the
series, this game activity is integrated in the games diegesis. The ctional and
the operational levels are thus interconnected.
At the ctional 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 nd his way through the enemys territory; the paramedic
keeps Snakes 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 ctional 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 ctional level
actually means saving the game at the real world level.
250 Britta Neitzel
5. Resume
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. Schillers approach to play is strongly connected with his aesthetic ideal and can be
associated with Kants notion of beauty as evoking disinterested benevolence. But
Schillers inuence is not restricted to aesthetics. His idealistic notion of play had an
inuence on the conception of kindergarten by Friedrich Frobel (cf. Scheuerl [1955]
1964: 57).
Metacommunication in play and in (computer) games 251
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, 143153. 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, Helio Satu and Mayra Frans
2004 Pelien voima ja pelaamisen hallinta Lapset ja nuoret pelikulttuurien
toimijoina, Tampere: Hypermedia Laboratory,
http://tampub.uta./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.
19311958 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): 439469.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman
2004 Rules of Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Scheuerl, Hans
[1955] 1964 Beitrage 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-reexivity in computer games:
Analyses of selected examples1
Bernhard Rapp
This paper will present examples and specic forms of self-reference in com-
puter games. The rst 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 (Lu-
casArts 2000; German version): The protagonist pirate challenging two other pirates
254 Bernhard Rapp
of the pirate addresses one of the rogues as follows: I bet you wont 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 under-
stands 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 players screen from within the monitor, dashing through
its glass (Figure 2). The dart seems to leave the ctional Caribbean game world
and to enter the real world of players family home. Of course, the breaking of
the glass of the computer screen remains ction, and the player is not really
impeded from continuing the game.
Figure 2. Screenshot (PC) from Monkey Island 4 Escape from Monkey Island (Lu-
casArts 2000; German Version): Smashing the screen from within the game scenario
In this surprising way, the ctional 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
Self-reexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples 255
become the victim of, actions that originate in the ctional 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 players private home
in front of the computer screen. The director of the play is directed by the
characters of his creation. This ctional device is known as metalepsis (cf.
Genette 1994: 16869; Ryan 2004 and this vol.).
1. Self-reexivity
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: 97128). The player is faced with the typographical
text of ctional 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 (unspecied) game representation in
writing, moves through a literary world that emerges with the ow of the written
text. According to the players 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
copyright and trademark notes and its serial number. These are the paratextual
elements of the game, as Genette (1993: 1113) has dened 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 nds a leaet. After following
the instruction to read it (l. 11), however, the reader nds nothing of narrative
interest, no information about the ctional 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 rst: the game contains an in-game ad-
vertisement 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 ction. There
is no way out of ction into reality for ctional characters. But then, how did
this advertising message get into the letter box? How can the inventors of Zork
become ction?
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 suc-
cessfully killed or beaten up a guard who lies dead or perhaps only knocked
out on the oor in an ofce room with two computers on a table. At this very
moment, the screen saver function appears on the two computer screens in the
ctional ofce. The screen to the right shows the publishers 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 place-
ment 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 rst paradox. Read as an advertisement,
the message (the publishers 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 guards 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?
Self-reexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples 259
Figure 5. Screenshot (C 64) from Barbarian (Palace Software 1987):A protest movement
against lazy players
260 Bernhard Rapp
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 ofcial
successor of an extremely popular Graphic Adventure of the 1980s, Maniac
Mansion (LucasArts 1987). In Maniac Mansion, the players 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 scientists 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 scientists son, the character to the right who looks
like Frankenstein. Among various items we notice an old home computer in the
background. To the players 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 rst 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
Self-reexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples 261
6. Findings
Let us conclude with the proposal of some guiding questions for the future study
of self-reexivity in computer games.
(1) What is the subject of a self-reexive strategy? The parallelisms with the
medium lm in this respect suggest the relevance of a typology of interest
to both media (for the lm, see Withalm 1999: 149 and this vol.).
(2) How is a self-reexive strategy enacted? Again, the parallelisms with the
movies promise to be of relevance. A pertinent example from the lm 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-reexivity 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-reexive strat-
egy occur? What has, or must have, happened just before a self-reexive
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-reexivity appear in a computer game? How much
space does a self-reexive 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-reexive strategies be described?
(5) What are the functions of self-reexive strategies in the game; are they
intended or can they occur otherwise? What do self-reexive 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? Self-
reexive 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, self-
reexive 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.
Self-reexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples 263
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 Sonys Playstation 2, Microsofts Xbox or, in the 1980s, Nintendos 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, simplications had to be made and other forms of
self-reexivity had to be excluded.
4. The term genre is used here not as a xed 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 inuence 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 infor-
mation where to nd 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 Robinetts game Adventure of 1978 (Atari) is seen as the rst game that con-
tains a kind of a self-reexive 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: 5054) and, in a more detailed way,
by Newman (2004: 7190).
264 Bernhard Rapp
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, 241261. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Eskelinen, Markku
2001 The gaming situation. Game Studies 1.1,
http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen.html (02.01.04).
Genette, Gerard
1993 Palimpseste: Die Literatur auf zweiter Stufe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
1994 Die Erzahlung. 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 Selbstreexivitat und Selbstreferentialitat. In: Ernst Karpf
(ed.), Im Spiegelkabinett der Illusionen: Filme uber sich selbst, 6786.
(Arnoldsheimer Filmgesprache 13). Marburg: Schuren.
Luhmann, Niklas
1996 Die Realitat der Massenmedien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Neitzel, Britta
2000 Gespielte Geschichten: Struktur- und prozessanalytische Untersuch-
ungen der Narrativitat 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, viixix. New York: Routledge.
Rouse III, Richard
2001 The console and PC: Separated at birth? Computer Graphics 2: 59.
Ryan, Marie-Laure
2004 Metaleptic machines. Semiotica 150: 439469.
Self-reexivity in computer games: Analyses of selected examples 265
Wirsig, Christian
2003 Das Groe Lexikon der Computerspiele: Spiele, Firmen, Technik,
Macher von Archon bis Zork und von Activision bis Zipper In-
teractive. 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: Phanomene und Trends in der Informa-
tionsgesellschaft, 147160. (Beitrage zur Medien- und Kommunika-
tionsgesellschaft 4.) Innsbruck: Studien Verlag.
Part VII. Other self-referential arts
Looking through the computer screen:
Self-reexivity in net.art
Marie-Laure Ryan
1. Types of self-reexivity
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 denition 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 ction,
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 users 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 terri-
tory. Most net.art is indeed created by artists with an extensive knowledge of
programming, or alternatively, by teams that include both artists and program-
mers. 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 cliche art for arts sake to its full meaning. Its spirit is gen-
erally subversive, if not destructive, and its aesthetics tends to sacrice pure
beauty to conceptual interest. The vast majority of the works reproduced in
Rachel Greenes 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 reect 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 applica-
tions, 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-reexive. 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-
Looking through the computer screen: Self-reexivity in net.art 273
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 Powerss novel Galatea 2.2 (1995) deals with articial intelligence
and the Turing test, and Plowing the Dark (2000) with virtual reality. Powerss
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 reection
on the technological medium with a more individuated form of self-reexivity:
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 rst open (or rather, execute) the text we are faced with a dis-
play 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 users agency is limited to reading the in-
box, and in keeping with the theme of the story, the ctional system is unable
to lter out the junk. The spam letters run the familiar gamut of pornography,
drug offers, and investment opportunities. Iris Suarez peddles a catalog of sin-
gles available for dating, Cora Triplett advertises http.//naughtygowild.info,
Christian Mortgages USA tells the user Jesus loves you renance now!,
Candrgs sells 6000 medicines at substantial price savings, Evidence Elim-
inator warns the reader that he is in serious trouble its a proven fact, but
offers an absolutely safe protection against this danger, and I leave the mes-
sage of Manure E. Griddlecake to the readers 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.
274 Marie-Laure Ryan
Figure 1. Screenshot from Richard Powerss 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 med-
itation 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, theyre 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 well be whatever comes after people. And puzzled by the hunger
that weve nally outgrown. (Letter 4)
Looking through the computer screen: Self-reexivity in net.art 275
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 rst girl he loved at age fteen, 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 conrmation
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 bafement at the passage of
time.
This sentence foreshadows the reversal of times 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 benets. 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 conrmation
e-mail shortly.
The real e-mail sent to the user consists of a link to an Adobe le that can
be downloaded and then printed. This le 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 nal delivery invites the reader to reect
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 le 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 Powerss achievement lies in the complementarity of
the comic experience of the screen version and of the lyrical experience of the
276 Marie-Laure Ryan
print version. In its play with two media, the text is truly more than the sum of
its parts.
4. Codework
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 itselfin realtime.
If the hybridization of human subjectivity and computer intelligence proph-
esized 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 com-
puter 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 com-
mands that underlie a text. This was the purpose of CODeDOC, an exhibi-
tion organized in 2002 by Christiane Paul at the Whitney Museum of Ameri-
can 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 in-
terpreted either literally or guratively. The exhibit inverted the usual hier-
archy between code and output, by making visitors (as well as users of the
Web site where the project now resides) scroll through the code le, until
they reached a button at the bottom that triggered the execution of the pro-
gram.
The projects vary widely in their faithfulness to the given theme, and most of
them limit self-reexivity, 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 le. But two of the
projects carried self-reexivity beyond telling us look, Im made of code by
creating an individuated connection between the code and its output.
In the rst 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 fullled 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).
278 Marie-Laure Ryan
In contrast to standard computer games, the user cannot use the keyboard
to control the characters, but he can inuence their movements indirectly by
assigning values to a number of variable parameters: the choice of a Chau-
vinist or Feminist attitude decides which character is ahead of the other; the
assignment of an intensity value to Jacks and Jills desire controls the speed at
which the characters climb the hill (with a low desire, they never get to the pail);
and the specication of pail allure (which gives a choice of repulsive, moder-
ate or undeniable) dictates the magnetic force exercised by the pail. To win the
game, the user must nd 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 nar-
rated 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:
Looking through the computer screen: Self-reexivity in net.art 279
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 opera-
tors. While the operators are expressed through a xed vocabulary of reserved
words specic 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 Tum-
blingAfter, 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
Paleys Codeproles 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 fullls 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 le:
// 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. //
280 Marie-Laure Ryan
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
rst to the last line, and then returns to the top, simulating the reading of a stan-
dard print text. If the user moves the cursor on one of the lines, it is magnied 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 pro-
gram jump across computer memory, where the instructions are stored before
being brought to the processor to be executed. When I captured the program, ex-
Looking through the computer screen: Self-reexivity in net.art 281
ecution followed a loop represented by the triangle between the rst and second
columns.
Though Codeproles takes self-reexivity further than any of the other
projects of the CODeDOC exhibit, the author claims in a discussion of the pro-
gram available on the exhibits Web site that it was not written to be computer-
clever, nor postmodern reexive, but to compare and contrast three modes of
parsing: the laymans, who is tempted to read the le linearly, like an ordinary
text; the programmers, who composes the code module by module in a rela-
tively free order; and the computers, 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 reection on code into a humorous piece of dysfunctional soft-
ware. Auto-illustrator (Figure 4) mimics graphic programs, such as Photoshop
or Corel PhotoPaint in the same way Richard Powerss text mimics e-mail, but
with the signicant difference that the interface is actually operative: you can
produce your own artwork by using the program, and you can even buy a li-
censed 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 sufcient need for
Auto-illustrator to pay to $100 for it. But dont expect to enjoy the program for
a long time if you dont 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 turn-
ing 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,
282 Marie-Laure Ryan
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 dont like the result, a tool will let you exterminate the creatures.
The parody of serious art programs extends to the systems 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 dont push this button. If she suc-
cumbs to the temptation, the programs 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.
Looking through the computer screen: Self-reexivity in net.art 283
6. Mapping
distinct pages on the Web; but many IP addresses are not claimed, and attempts
to reach them leads to the message: cannot nd server, or DNS error. Other
addresses are claimed, but the user is not authorized to access them.
7. Conclusion
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-reexivity of Don Quixote was a warning against
the tendency of readers to immerse themselves in the world of chivalric nov-
els, and to mistake these ctional worlds for reality. In the nineteenth century,
the development of the powerful illusionist techniques of realism led the novel
away from self-reexivity, and steered it back toward immersion, until postmod-
ernism 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 re-
quires a highly active involvement of the imagination), replacing transparent
windows into imaginary worlds with the mirrors of self-reexivity is a proven
key to artistic respectability. It is indeed by developing self-reexive 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
reection on the role of digital technology in our lives, net.art lls 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, reecting on its supporting medium is not a search
for identity, it is identity.
References
Cramer, Florian
2002 Concepts, notations, software art. Auto-illustrator Users Guide: 101
112. Downloadable from http://www.Auto-illustrator.com/ (08.02.06).
Dillon, George
2002, 2003 .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 Sys-
tems.
Jakobson, Roman
1960 Closing statements: Linguistics and poetics. In: Thomas A. Sebeok
(ed.), Style in Language, 35077. 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 c/facti-
ons online,
http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/34arc.html (08.02.06).
Looking through the computer screen: Self-reexivity in net.art 289
Murray, Janet
1997 Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New
York: Free Press.
Paley, W. Bradford
2002 Codeproles,
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 Litera-
ture 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 ction. Style 38(3): 32551.
The artist and her bodily self:
Self-reference in digital art/media
Christina Ljungberg
1. Introduction
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. (Noth, this
vol., I.3).
In other words, in this way, the signs referent can be another sign, and self-
reference can be a chain of signs referring to other signs.
292 Christina Ljungberg
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 ow of life through space and time
(Davies 2004: 70).
2. Self-reference in multimedia
Figure 1. Scene from Laurie Andersons Songs and Stories from Moby Dick
mediality, in which the confrontation with hybrid forms of media increases the
degree of self-reference. Intertextuality would seem to be a dening 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 lms
and TV series, such as her famous performance White Lily based on Rainer
Werner Fassbinders 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 Melvilles narrative tour
de force and translates it into a multimedia performance that attempts to mir-
ror the complex encyclopedic structure of the work by creating several visual
levels working in counterpoint to auditory ones. According to Anderson, ap-
proximately ten percent of the show is actually Melvilles text: she nevertheless
faithfully retells the tale of Captain Ahabs monomaniacal pursuit of the white
whale. Some passages are quoted in their entirety, and in yet other ones the sense
of Melvilles words are rephrased. Since the major intertext of Moby Dick is the
Bible, Andersons intertextuality inescapably refers to the tropes, themes, and
gures derived from Melvilles 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 re-
fracted 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 re-
lationship 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 Andersons
The artist and her bodily self: Self-reference in digital art/media 295
Figure 2. Laurie Anderson performing Songs and Stories from Moby Dick against a
projection of quotes from Melvilles 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 Andersons music and visuals
do precisely that her quotations of other musical and visual works are self-
referential. 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/lms 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 lm 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 Noth
(this vol., I.5.5) calls an intermedial deja-vu effect it is self-referential. This
pertains to a high degree to Andersons work, too: not only does she constantly
296 Christina Ljungberg
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 Andersons performances, it is the various expressions of self-
reference that mark them as typically postmodern and contribute to their high
degree of self-reference. At the same time, the artists pervasive presence in her
work gives her performance a pronounced referential and indexical character.
Figure 3. Split screen video still from Trepps and Bitneys performance Spectralina
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- 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
Trepps work from the very start.
of various technical devices. But Daviess 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 pa-
pers 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 am-
biguity 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 ux [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 arti-
cial intelligence using technology to prosthetically blur the boundaries between
different realities,2 for example, the spherically-enveloping environment cre-
ated 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 oat by
breathing-in to rise, to fall and to lean to change direction. In addition, the
The artist and her bodily self: Self-reference in digital art/media 299
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
Figure 5. Char Davies, Body (Egg), Ephemere (1998), digital image captured in real-time
through head-mounted display during live immersive journey/performance
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 Trepps 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
Trepps 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 pre-
decessors 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 innitely repro-
ducible, 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 Noth 1998: 175).
2. One of the reasons why contemporary artists are fascinated with VR may be as a way
to confront the challenge identied 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-rst 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?
302 Christina Ljungberg
3. Davies (2004: 73) has repeatedly spoken out against conventional VR and its ten-
dency towards disembodiment: As a realm ruled by mind, virtual reality as con-
ventionally constructed is the epitome of Cartesian desire, in that it enables the
construction of articial 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, ixxiv.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Davies, Char
2004 Virtual space. In: Francois Penz, Gregory Radick and Robert Howell
(eds.), Space in Science, Art and Society, 69104. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Deikman, Arthur
2005 Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience,
http://www.deikman.com/deautomat.html (06.09.2005).
Machado, Arlindo
1993 Maquinas e imaginario. Sao Paulo: Edusp.
Santaella, Lucia
1997 The prephotographic, the photographic, and the postphotographic im-
age. In: Winfried Noth (ed.), Semiotics of the Media. State of the Art,
Projects and Perspectives, 121132. Berlin and New York: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Santaella, Lucia and Winfried Noth
1998 Imagem: Cognicao, semiotica, mdia. Sao Paulo: Iluminuras.
Trepp, Selina
2005 Email correspondence 3 and 4 July.
Metaction and metamusic:
Exploring the limits of metareference1
Werner Wolf
solely to literature and language3 (although these were the media in which it
rst received theoretical attention); and second, music appears to be somehow
located at the margins of the eld 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 eld of metareference, in
other words: whether there is such a thing as metamusic that could be regarded
as an analogy to literary metaction.4 For metaction can surely be said to be
located somewhere near the center of the metaeld, 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 connes of metaland.
Compared with this, my thesis is that under certain circumstances, music can be
positioned within this eld. 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 difculties than other media. The following contribution is thus
dedicated not only to an intermedial comparison between ction and music with
regard to self- and metareference, but also to the exploration of the limits of the
metareferential eld as a whole.
beyond mere self-reference in the above sense, the term self-reection 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 state-
ments. In order to elicit such semantic self-reection the aforementioned devices
of self-referential pointing at may be used and to that extent the border be-
tween self-referential pointing at and self-reection may appear fuzzy10
but other devices may also be employed. Following Scheffel (1997) one could
further differentiate according to whether such self-reection focuses on hetero-
referential 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 con-
centrate on the latter kind of self-reection for which the terms metareection
or metareference are appropriate.
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
(ve sharps), d sharp minor (six sharps) and g minor (two ats).
Figure 2 illustrates only a small part of the harmonic intricacies which oc-
cur 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 com-
position in the home key and returns to c major while the rst movement
(Introitus) ends on c minor and the second one (Centrum) on g major. In-
terestingly, 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 surpris-
ingly 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 rst
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 conven-
tions and are able to perceive modulations as something extraordinary (unfor-
tunately, 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 Bachs 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
312 Werner Wolf
the musical message. Here it is indeed true that the medium becomes the
message at least in the listeners mind.
In all of these cases, the problem is, however, where to draw the line be-
tween 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 metareexively foreground the through-
composed quality of a piece of music. As in verbal metaction, the implied
variant always poses difculties, and as with implicit metaction, 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 Bachs Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth: when such mark-
ers point to certain musical qualities we may feel justied 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: 165189), has been called music on music. The term sounds
remarkably analogous to one of the shorter denitions of metaction as c-
tion on ction which have been employed in literary studies (Hutcheon [1980]
1984: 1). Yet, curiously, in musicology it has rarely, if ever, acquired such meta-
connotations and has mostly been restricted to intermusical references or stylis-
tic imitations. It thereby apparently excludes such compositions as Kleines
Harmonisches Labyrinth, in spite of the fact that, strictly speaking, this com-
position 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 eld, at least in
musicology in German, as the recent publication of Schneiders Lexikon Musik
uber Musik: Variationen Transkriptionen Hommagen Stilimitationen
BACH shows. In many compositions mentioned in this encyclopedia the
quality of music on music is already indicated in the title, as for instance in
Brahmss Variationen uber ein Thema von Haydn (op. 56a).21 In spite of the
restriction in scope and a lack of explicit discussions of metamusic Schneiders
Lexikon22 is a unique tool for identifying potential examples of metamusic.
As the title of Schneiders book indicates, homages to other composers, no-
tably 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 individ-
ual 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 Pster 1985: ch. III.2]). For the
314 Werner Wolf
ness of the classical imitations. The ironic distance thus created correlates with
the cognitive distance that is always implicated in metareference. For the re-
sulting, 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 ssures, openly lays bare an aspect of its ctio na-
ture, 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 metactional forms: extra- and in-
tracompositional, 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 metaction: ctio vs. ctum metareference.All of the
musical examples mentioned imply a comment on some ctio aspect, yet none on
the ctum dimension (the ctionality or truth of an artefact). This is no coin-
cidence since music cannot create ctional, invented worlds like ction, painting
or lm. Therefore, all metareference in music must be restricted to questions re-
lated to the medium, its production and reception but cannot deal with questions
of real or ctitious reference, in other words, it can only be ctio metareference.
The preceding exploration of the limits of the eld of metareference has shown
that this eld 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 lm (cf. Stam 2000) and painting (cf. Stoichita [1993] 1997)
have met with various degrees of attention, this is much less so with respect
316 Werner Wolf
to other media such as comics, sculpture, and architecture. Indeed, the eld 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 typolo-
gies of self-referential and metareferential forms
exploring the connection between metareference and common forms of self-
reference 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 trans-
medial as well as a monomedial perspective)
exploring forms of marking, in particular, implied metareference (cognitive
framing of metareference)
Intensication of transmedial research on metareference:
expanding the perspective on areas (media and genres) that have hitherto
been more or less neglected, such as: lm (in particular animated cartoons
and animation lms), 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 eld)
Functional history of metareference:
exploring the functions of metareference as a phenomenon that, in the West-
ern world, has informed more and more works and media since the eighteenth
century as well as investigating the conditions that further (or hinder) an in-
crease in metareference
concerning metareference and postmodernism: research in this eld should
begin by relativizing this connection, which is frequently seen as too ex-
clusive; yet one should also attempt to account for the intimate correlation
which nevertheless can be observed between postmodernism and metaref-
erence; the fact that metareference has recently inltrated even popular
Metaction and metamusic: Exploring the limits of metareference 317
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 (Noth, this vol., Part I).
318 Werner Wolf
3. For the concept of transmediality see Rajewsky (2002: 206) and (2003: 362363)
and Wolf (2002: 18).
4. As opposed to Nunning, who distinguishes between metaction and metanarra-
tion (see 2004), I conceive of metaction in a broad sense, as detailed in Wolf
(1993: chap. 3.2.).
5. Scholars who have approached the eld mostly concentrating on music on music
include: Adorno ([1949] 1975: 165189; who introduced this phrase in his critique
of Stravinsky); Karbusicky (1986; who acknowledges the possibility of music pos-
sessing analytical metalanguages [analysierende Metasprachen, 21]); Danuser
(1996; who treats a part of the eld, namely homage compositions, albeit without
theoretical ambitions; 2001; one of the best discussions of self-reexivity 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 intracomposi-
tional metareference, is predominantly sceptical, but his whole enterprise also its
failures shows to what extent musicological reection could benet from narrato-
logical 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: 203205, who restricts Meta-Reection in Music [203] exclusively to the
verbal component of vocal music). All in all, musicological research in the eld (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 Di-
amond 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 composi-
tion 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 self-
reexivity. One should, however, mention that such self-reexivity is attributed by
Mittmann (cf. 1999: 236237) to another composition by Mauricio Kagel, enti-
tled Metapiece (incidentally, this title is identical to a piece by the Australian
composer Rainer Linz): in Kagels Metapiece Mittmann sees one of those com-
positions that constitute a metamusical reection on the performative act of music
playing (Kompositionen [. . . ], die den performativen Akt des Musizierens meta-
musikalisch reektieren).
7. Cf. also Wolf (2001a, 2007a).
Metaction and metamusic: Exploring the limits of metareference 319
8. I am here drawing on, but also modifying, Michael Scheffels research and a typol-
ogy which I have published elsewhere. Scheffel was among the rst to attempt some
systematic ordering in the vast eld of terms such as self-reference, autoreexiv-
ity, metaction etc. which had mostly been used as mere synonyms (see Scheffel
1997, notably 4649); in Wolf (2001a) I elaborated on Scheffels 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 signier and signied (as expressed in the title
Form Miming Meaning of Nanny and Fischer 1999), but also as a similarity between
signiers (form miming form) and signieds (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 self-
referential 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 intensication of hetero-
referential meaning and for metareferential purposes. A certain fuzziness could also
appear in the fact that Jakobsons denition 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 metareections. It should also
be noted that Jakobsons 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-reection (one should note
that the hetero-referentiality here only refers to the object or the signied of the self-
reference; 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 metactional 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 ction, may trigger metareections 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 Schuberts Die Winterreise (cf. Wolf 2001b).
16. For this opera and musical self-reexivity 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-reexively
shows, for instance, a painter at work.
320 Werner Wolf
18. Cf. Breig (1999: 631) and Keller ([1950] n. d.: 5657), who convincingly argues in
favor of Bachs authorship (which also seems to be conrmed 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: 122123). 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 justies Hofstadters 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
afrmation 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 specically, the
reference is to the Chorale St. Antoni from Joseph Haydns rst of the Sei di-
vertimenti 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 state-
ment 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 lis-
teners, 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 fullling the principal con-
dition 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 Bohns contribution to this volume.
24. The aforementioned virtuoso music provides further examples, as does Bachs
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.
Metaction and metamusic: Exploring the limits of metareference 321
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324 Werner Wolf
rules, 210211, 214, 221224, 226, in computer games, 13, 21, 209,
241244, 250 214217, 219220, 232, 253
Run Lola Run, 18, 22 263
in digital art, 291301
in digital media, 293296
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 4 in multimedia, 293296
Schwarzwaldhaus 1902 (Das), 187 in nondigital media, 228
188 in photography, 98104
screen passage, 262 in television, 189192
secondness, 41, 8081, 88 in virtual reality, 297301
self, 5, 3233 indexical, 15, 18, 6567
self-consciousness, 5, 8, 32, 172, 177 intermedial, 14, 19, 2122
self-criticism, 33, 36 intertextual, 1415, 19, 2122
self-description, 4, 57 intracompositional, 305
self-disclosure, 165166, 176 intratextual, 14, 18
self-effacement, 102 modes of, 5059
self-obliteration, 102 performative, 14
self-observation, 4, 108, 119 pragmatic, 14, 21
self-organization, 4 rhematic, 1415
self-portrait, 98, 100, 102 semantic, 220
self-promotion, 195, 202203 semiotics of, 7-11, 4849
self-reference, 311, 31, 36, 4749, typology, 1415
62, 108, 128-130, 183184, 270 with program-reference, 199,
271, 291292 201202
and nostalgia, 150151 without program-reference, 199
argumentative, 14, 17 202
as self-promotion, 195204 self-referential culture, 3133
communicative, 165, 237 self-referential metalanguage, 6465
cultural, 220221 self-referential metapicture, 64, 72,
degrees of, 1213 76
dicentic, 16 self-reection, 5, 170171, 306307
enunciative, 1415, 2021 self-reexive, self-reexivity, 5, 8, 165
extracompositional, 305 166, 255, 261262, 269272, 286
lmic, 13, 130, 132 287, 304
formal, 221 self-replication, 4
forms of, 189 self-representation, 5, 8
grammatical, 305 self-similarity, 4
iconic, 1819, 21, 67, 101, 291 self-thematization, 195197
in advertising, 3, 13, 1519, 50 semiosis, 6, 1112, 7982, 90
59, 7991 semiotic machine, 3
Index of subjects 339