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Overview
Berland explores how understandings of space and time, empire and margin, embodiment and technology, and nature and culture are shaped by broadly conceived communications technologies including pianos, radio, television, the Web, and satellite imaging. Along the way, she provides a useful overview of the assumptions driving communications research on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, and she highlights the distinctive contributions of the Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Berland argues that electronic mediation is central to the construction of social space and therefore to anti-imperialist critique. She illuminates crucial links between how space is traversed, how it is narrated, and how it is used. Making an important contribution to scholarship on globalization, Berland calls for more sophisticated accounts of media and cultural technologies and their complex “geographies of influence.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822388661 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2009 |
| Series: | e-Duke books scholarly collection. |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jody Berland is Associate Professor of Humanities at York University and the editor of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Read an Excerpt
North of Empire
Essays on the Cultural Technologies of SpaceBy Jody Berland
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4306-6
Chapter One
Writing on the Border
Culture is always an idea of the Other (even when I reassume it for myself). -FREDRIC JAMESON, "On Cultural Studies
Those who only know one country know no country well. -SEYMOUR LIPSET, "Pacific Divide
Crossing the Border
I was twelve when I first crossed the border from the United States into Canada. My American classmates viewed my family's departure to that country with a combination of envy and alarm. Like them I would not have been surprised to find igloos in the towns with the streets full of dog sleds. My ignorance about my new home was astounding. But it was commonplace.
I was reminded of this memory by a storyline featured in the CBC satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which ran through the late '90s and early 2000s. Each week featured an episode in which the comedian Rick Mercer interviewed Americans about Canada. Whether interviewing ordinary people on the street, Ivy League academics, political staffers, or a presidential candidate, Mercer's "Talking to Americans" segments turned his subjects' ignorance about their northern neighbor into ludicrous jokes. For several years, a growing audience witnessed friendly Americans congratulating Canada on the arrival of FM radio, personal fax machines, a second area code, and power steering. (Americans don't know that Canada houses the continent's largest automobile factories, generates significant innovations in communication technology, and remains their country's largest trading partner. But we do.) Interviewees sent cheery messages to "Canadian Prime Minister Tim Horton," congratulating him on his "double double" as though this was an appropriate prime ministerial accomplishment. (Tim Hortons, a popular doughnut shop chain named after a hockey star, was then running a TV ad campaign in which border officials distinguished returning Canadians from impostors by their knowledge of Tim Hortons. A "double double" is, of course, double sugar double cream. Subsequently purchased by Wendy's, Tim Hortons is no longer a Canadian company.) They begged the government not to close down Canada's last remaining university, Eaton's U. (Eaton's, a prominent, family-owned department store chain once identified with home catalogues, had just gone bankrupt. Universities are open for business.) They urged Canada to legalize VCRS (although a larger percentage of Canadians own VCRS, telephones, and computers than do their American counterpoints); allow the introduction of a daily newspaper (though Toronto, where I live, produces five dailies in English, four in Chinese languages, and as many again in other languages); and change Canada's clocks, which interviewees were ready to believe ran on a twenty-hour cycle, to avoid disruption with American schedules. A parade of camera-ready Americans congratulated Canada for officially joining North America, and urged the mayor of Toronto not to restore the Toronto Polar Bear Hunt, which, they insisted, would be a "naive and uneducated" act. (There are no polar bears in this bioregion outside the zoo, which may soon provide their only habitable place of residence.) Amicably ignorant of the social safety net of which Canada has been most proud, they signed a petition, on camera, urging Canadians to stop putting their elderly out to die on icebergs.
On the famous February 28, 2000, episode, Mercer interviewed the presidential candidate George W. Bush and the governor of Michigan (a border state), a key supporter of Bush's campaign. Pausing in the midst of a crowd of cameras and microphones, both men gracefully acknowledged the endorsement of Prime Minister Jean Poutine ("poutine" is the name of a popular Quebec dish of fries, gravy, and melted cheese curds) notwithstanding the fact that the then prime minister, Jean Chrétien, shares his surname with Canada's then ambassador to the United States, Raymond Chrétien, his nephew. By the time a compilation of the Talking to Americans segments was broadcast as a one-hour special in 2001, Mercer was Canada's most popular comedian. Talking to Americans was an iconic event in Canadian pop culture and remains unequaled in television ratings. In a January 2005 prime time broadcast, the fifth in less than four years on the public network, it drew just under a million viewers, surpassing ratings for CBC'S regular audience grabber Comedy Week by almost 300 percent. It is now the most watched single hour in Canadian television history.
All this says something about Canada. After all, it was Canadians who were watching, laughing, scripting the questions, and piling the cameras on the planes to fly home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 22 Minutes is produced. You don't have to be Canadian to get the joke, but you might not otherwise understand its ironic complexity. What made these interviews work so well for their viewers was the shared implicit understanding that "getting it" did not require them to combat the invisibility so caustically mocked, except ironically, amongst themselves. Canadian comics are expected to be ironic, politically astute, and adept with play on televisual conventions. This formula depends on three essential assets: the ability to work collectively and individually in a small ensemble; a good working relationship with a video camera; and a sharp intellectual critique of contemporary media culture. Often associated with television programs like 22 Minutes and its famous forerunner, SCTV, these assets were first and perhaps most brilliantly joined by the three Toronto artists who exhibited, performed, and published together as General Idea (1969-94). Before elaborating on the subject of irony, however, we need to approach this much-publicized romp on a more obvious level. To represent or reflect on Canada is to write to, about, and across the border. Scholars claim that "Canada is unthinkable without its border with the USA," and they agree that its symbolic status has no parallel in American consciousness. This is the truism north of the 49th: Canadians live and write as though the border is everywhere, shadowing everything we contemplate and fear, while Americans live and act as though there is no border there at all. Americans visiting the country like to say that Canada is "just like home," congratulating their hosts for their apparent sameness on the basis of a day of ethnographic experience of hotels and airports. Their relief from anxiety about language or primitive conditions is palpable. This friendly gesture enables the visitor to seize control of his ignorance and offer it to his listeners. This behavior confirms his listeners' beliefs.
Dissimilar social constructions of the border pinpoint a fundamental difference between these countries which provokes us to think about narrative and power. History has produced diverse relationships to what borders themselves define: the social habitation of space and the self-delineation of collective subjects in relation to others. "The longest undefended border in the world" produces radically different meanings to the territories it divides. This border topos involves two protagonists, an attentive one and an inattentive one, which is not unusual in a close partnership between two unequal powers. "The beauty of being a ruler," comments Terry Eagleton, "is that one does not need to worry about who one is, since one deludedly believes that one already knows. It is other cultures which are different, while one's own form of life is the norm, and so scarcely a 'culture' at all." This comment conveys the taken-for-grantedness of an imperial culture such as England, which assumes its right to bring its civilizing mission to distant parts of the globe. It assumes that it is the powerful who register, assess, and forgive the "difference" detected in the less powerful. But United States culture reverses the imperial gaze. Other cultures must pay attention, and Americans memorably fail to know back. Staunch exemplars of what Georg Lukács called "power-protected inwardness," or what Lipset describes as "American exceptionalism," they may glance; they may master expensive observational technologies to study and observe; but like Mercer's informants, incapable of imagining their listeners, they do not see.
The idea that relationships of unequal power involve a one-sided window surrounding the imperial center is brilliantly conveyed in Mercer's performance. His interviews interpellate Canadians as the more attentive and knowledgeable audience. They remind Canadians that we know more than we want to know about American politics, social problems, entertainment, and gossip, and that this knowledge gives us a special edge as we traverse invisibly through their midst. As the historian Kenneth McNaught wrote in 1976, "It is sometimes said that Americans are benevolently uninformed about Canada while Canadians are malevolently well-informed about the U.S." The proliferation of media spaces has done little to counteract this pattern. "Talk-show hosts are the worst," one Toronto journalist exclaims:
with everybody from Leno to Letterman to Kathie Lee and Regis displaying the utmost arrogance and ignorance about Canadian geography and history. When Céline Dion told Rosie O'Donnell she was from Canada, O'Donnell blurted out, "Canada! Do you know what I have to say to Canada? Get a climate." This is ironic coming from a woman who lives in a country constantly buffeted by tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Hey, Rosie, get an atlas!
A 1994 survey found that 25 percent of Canadians agree: they object to the "superior attitude" of Americans, while Americans find nothing objectionable in their Canadian neighbors, who are characteristically more reticent with their opinions. Mercer's Talking to Americans breaks this silence and broadcasts the joke across the country. It plays with Canada's sense of superior knowledge and its underlying connection to an equally powerful sense of invisibility. Invisibility is a concise term for describing a situation in which Americans see igloos, Mounties, cold fronts or wilderness, but certainly not Canadians, 80 percent of whom live in cities and over 98 percent of whom (at this point you have to laugh) have routine access to fm radio. Knowing observers are ready to be consternated and amused by Americans. Thus viewers and producers arrive at a delicious moment of strategic complicity. The mirror-wall they invoke together refracts two sides of the border, one gullible and myopic and the other wily and well versed. While critics remark on the smugness of this consensus, they overlook its cunning play on televisuality, and in particular its merciless unmasking of the average Americans' willingness to unburden themselves to anyone holding a television microphone. Sharp observation of American television culture has long been a central motif in Canadian satire. In the 1985 Genie Award-winning mock documentary The Canadian Conspiracy, coauthored by Mark Achbar (the coauthor of the films Manufacturing Consent [1992] and The Corporation [2003]), a terrified journalist (Eugene Levy), hiding in a motel room with the shades drawn, exposes a conspiracy of Canadians trained by state-owned institutions such as the CBC and the National Film Board (NFB) to infiltrate and take over the American entertainment industry undetected. In this shadowy light, a parade of popular Canadian performers are revealed as secret saboteurs of the American way of life. Confronted by cameras, each suspect ostentatiously denies acquaintance with the other. "Never heard of him," Dave Thomas repeatedly insists from the back of his limousine when asked about fellow Canadian actors we know to be his creative collaboratos. Because their racially and ethnically unmarked bodies permit them to "pass" as Americans, their difference is invisible, but not (in this satire) insignificant. Their presence as undetected aliens is hazardous to the entertainment industry and to the political stability of the country as a whole.
The SCTV "mockumentary" "exposes" Canadians as saboteurs the way American fundamentalists have long sought to expose communists and terrorists. The portentous male voice-over, the black-and-white photography, the hands covering the face, the closed blinds, the denial of friendships and abruptly refused interviews, all echo true-crime and propaganda conventions of the Cold War, when Americans let their anxiety about hidden enemies run amok. In paying homage to this history, this satire is indebted to the actors' work in weekly SCTV parodies of American television and film produced in Toronto between 1976 and 1983. There is a harsher relevance behind this satire, for Americans were not always subtle in their suspicions of Canada's "socialist" leanings. Aggravated by terse policy negotiations between the two countries, officials in the United States have labeled Canadian films as "government propaganda," cultural policy as "government subsidy," and protectionist measures as "unfair trading practices." During the Cold War, U.S. government officials accused "Canuckistan" of being soft on communism and drove one high-ranking diplomat to suicide with their denunciations. Canada's Medicare system, foreign policy, gun legislation, former energy and agricultural policies, public broadcasters, and social policies smell like socialism to some American observers, whose strong patriotic rhetoric of differentiation and defense against the hidden enemy isolate ideas that in Canada have stood squarely in the mainstream.
The knowing play with invisibility reappeared in the summer of 2000 in an unprecedentedly popular television commercial for the beer brand Molson Canadian (the company subsequently merged with Coors). In this commercial, "Joe," standing in front of a large screen projecting iconic images, emotionally proclaims the unrecognized virtues of being Canadian. "I don't know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy," he proclaims (addressing the strange but commonplace idea that Canadians all know one another), "though they are probably very nice people." We don't own igloos or dog sleds. We believe in peacekeeping, not war; "diversity, not assimilation"; our national animal is the beaver, a "noble animal"; in sum, Joe refuses to be or speak "American." His crescendoing "Rant," supported by the exultant swell of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance," culminates with the heroic proclamation "I Am Canadian!" followed by a polite, apologetically mumbled, "thank you."
In the Rant "Joe" simultaneously performs a patriotic tirade and mocks the rhetoric of patriotic declamation. Critics who argue that no self-respecting identity defines itself in terms of what it is not seem to miss the affective undertow of the Rant, together with its playful continuity with a long history of Canadian prose. The Rant identifies patriotism with the declaration of the right to be recognized by the "other" against whom Canada struggles to define itself, but pairs this with an ironic distancing from such declarative acts. "Joe" speaks with increasing passion, but allows his words to be hijacked by ambivalence. Not surprisingly, the writer of this script had just returned to Canada after working in New York and was ready to unburden himself of his experiences. Not surprisingly, he does so by saying several things at once. We must defend our identity with patriotic declarations; blustering patriotism is a characteristic of the "other" against which we must defend ourselves. I wish to make a heroic statement; modesty is preferable to dangerous heroism. I speak on behalf of all of us; all of us are already laughing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from North of Empire by Jody Berland Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiIntroduction: Mapping North of Empire 1
1. Writing on the Border 29
2. Space at the Margins: Colonial Spatiality and Critical Theory after Innis 65
3. Spatial Narratives in the Canadian Imaginary 98
4. Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space 130
5. The Musicking Machine 165
6. Locating Listening 185
7. Weathering the North 210
8. Mapping Space: Imagining Technologies and the Planetary Body 242
9. Cultural Technologies and the "Evolution" of Technological Cultures 273
Postscript 300
Notes 309
Bibliography 341
Index 369