His thoughts, influenced by Michael Chabon’s collection of critical essays on genre fiction, Maps and Legends and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
, come from his observations of the such classics as Dallas, The X Files and The Sopranos.He describes the influence of the short story on the form of the episodic drama and the evolution and eventual synthesis of "mythology" and "arc" episodes into a kind of "fractal drama" which displays some structural self-similarity at different scales (individual episode, season, full story arc).
From the House Next Door
"... Weiner has seen fit to fully embrace Chase’s vision and offer a sort of fractal drama--one that contains conventional continuity, to be sure, but also one where the narrative model is layered rather than strictly linear, and in which it takes quite awhile (unlike with B5 or The X-Files, which wore their complexity as a badge of pride) to realize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts."
Emily Zants points out other fractal properties of post-modern narrative structures in her book Chaos Theory, Complexity, Cinema, and the Evolution of the French Novel (Studies in French Literature)
2 comments:
Tropes, memes and McLuhan’s Archetypes.
Mad Men is a delicious example of the interaction between what culture analysts would call tropes and memes in a very post-post-modern Western culture. See http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Meme as a starting point, especially two little gem-like observations:
“a "meme" in Internet terms (PDE: as opposed to Dawkins’ original explanation) is any fragment which is easily memorable, easily recallable, and which drives out other competing frames of reference”
and
“A trope is a turn which recalls the original. This means that puns are one example of a trope, but plot ‘twists’ are as well. A trope in critical theory describes how different images or incidents are tied together. Most memes rely on a "trope" of discourse, a common pattern of turning.”
So how does Mad Men deal with tropes and memes? It uses tropes to recall and then reinvent memes. In other words, in Mad Men tropes (ironic re-enactments of culture-moments) become memes that replace the memories (real, virtual or imagined) of those who have any familiarity with a period, and become genuine fake memes for those too young – or too old – to know the original situations first hand.
Mad men is NOT nostalgic; neither does it re-invent the past to frame the past in terms of currently interesting issues, i.e. memes. A nostalgia series that is not sentimental about form, usually the easiest canard to entice the sentimental.
Rather it focuses on a period that is a cultural fractal boundary like one we are going through, as TV culture (the new medium, effectively only 8 years old as Season 1 opens) matures past its radio roots with advertising morphing alongside. We see a new meme factory emerging, the cultural analysis explained in Mad Men via ironic tropes that engage by being outrageous, comic book chiaroscuro, but, with repetition, tropes that galvanized, become a memetic reality. This is a series that uses the sleight-of-hand film noir employed to explore real issues while engaging an audience that, for the most part, didn’t care. (It also slips back into the late 40s occasionally to reinforce the connection).
Meanwhile, so much for adage (from the early 20th Century) that he who doesn’t know history is doomed to repeat it. Now that adage is only true offseason, or via Movies etc on demand. History is simply re-invented… constantly… via tropes that become memes.
McLuhan, of course, talked about tropes but not memes (he was literary, and memes are not a literary term, thank god), and his breakthrough work was “The Mechanical Bride” a corrosive love-and-despair filled analysis of advertising at the beginning of the cultural fractal boundary between print and real electronic media. Before post-modernists got into tropes, McLuhan had dissected, even vivisected, tropes and other literary devices to an academic audience ill-prepared for his Don Quixote thrusts.
Later, in the New Laws of the Media, he provided a tool for understanding what happens at what we would now call “cultural fractal boundaries”, especially the notion of ‘archetypes’ as the retrieval of old memes, often expressed via tropes and other literary devices.
So, at this new cultural fractal boundary, can we celebrate Mad Men as being the retrieval of McLuhanesque concepts of cultural and social change, set in the period when he became famous, focused on his bete-noirs, TV and advertising?
November 5, 2008 6:15 PM
Thanks for your comment, Paul. I've watched most of the series mentioned in the article but not Mad Men. I'm definitely going to check it out, I've always harboured a secret desire to be an Ad Man since watching Darren Stevens on Bewitched. Also, thanks for the link to The Daily Kos Wiki it looks like a great resource for political discourse (http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Meme).
Your writing seems to reveal a dislike for memes (or is it the concept of memes, or the popular use of the concept of memes, or is it the general mis-use of the memes themselves) but you like tropes. This seems strange to me; similar to liking reproduction but not liking genes.
Remember "trope", like the Greek root it comes from meaning "turn", is both a noun and verb. The object and the subject of that turning is the meme. In semiotics it is the "discourse" which colours the signs. In political discourse it is called "spin".
My understanding is that a trope acts on a meme to enfold additional meaning. So the Bush administration attempted to insert the meme "Mission Accomplished" into his appearance with the troops but Neil Young tropes Bush when he sings:
Back in the days of "mission accomplished"
Our chief was landing on the deck
The sun was setting on a golden photo op
Back in the days of "mission accomplished"
Young's irony spins the administration's inserted meme to depict it as "Rovian manipulation", in effect giving it the opposite meaning.
From a cybernetic standpoint this is feedback. From a political POV it is blowback.
Fractal facticity results from the unique combination of cultural baggage (tropes) that any viewer beings to a meme, fact or factoid. No two people will have the exact same perception.
Memetics is a convenient dynamic model for understanding the chaotic behavior of information. What's not to like?
Literature, political discourse and reality overlap each other, they traffic in and trope the same memes. These overlaps can be perceived as "fractal cultural boundaries", but you seem to use the term to represent a period in time. Please, could you elaborate?
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