Apparatus Theory

APPARATUS THEORY

“Apparatus theory” is a term first used in film studies. It refers to the idea that that the specific delivery technologies of a medium (are you watching video on a computer, iphone, TV or film screen?) impact its potential effects on audiences in ways that interact with content but which might even supersede content.

How do you look at a family photograph? You look at it one way in a frame on the wall of someone's house. Another when it is stuck on the fridge with magnets. Another in a photo album, or a scrapbook with all the doodads, or from someone's wallet as they show you their family, or on their phone. And you look at it in a completely different way when anonymously browsing a website like Awkward Family Photos. The photo itself might be horrendously embarrassing, but you are constrained to look at it differently in the different situations. Only some people you know would be okay with you laughing in their face when they are showing off their family.

It is the same way with media. I will here give an overview of work in the areas of film, television, internet video, video games and music.

Film

Apparatus theory in film is developed by Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. Baudry (1987), argues that the film theater is like Plato’s cave, like Freud’s dream-state: “First of all, taking into account the darkness of the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects which result from the projection of images, moving images, the cinematographic apparatus brings about a state of artificial regression” (p. 219).

This state, Baudry argues, is one where the separation between our self and the world is less clear. This regression explains our intense pleasures in filmgoing. It is why the lure of this entertainment is so profound. It also means that we identify so strongly with the experiences in film that the process rebuilds our identities. It means that psychoanalytic effects and symbols have a heightened relevance to the audience and that our desire for the images and the narrative in the film is almost primal.

Popular resistance to pre-show advertising in the last decade is perhaps evidence of this. And attending films with heavy audience participation (like horror movies) or with a crowd of texting teens or families with crying babies certainly does seem to be a different experience. Watching a film at home, where you can pause it and rewind to catch missed dialogue or go to the bathroom is structurally a less intense experience. Many people have categories of film that they must see in the theater and some which are good “rentals,” “Netflix,” or “Redbox.”

Television

This is very different than the structure of television. For Raymond Williams (2003), television is defined by flow. We rarely watch individual programs. Typically people watch “television,” which means it is on as background, as a voice or a friend to stave off silence and loneliness. If one station is watched for hours, everything begins to flow together into a larger, odd meta-text, “a kind of frantic consumption of shadows and responses” (Williams, 1989, p. 134).

So the television text is more fragmented across weeks and reruns and different channels (which increase in number every year). DVRs presumably allow us to focus on individual programs, but they also allow us to fast-forward and watch whole programs in 10 minutes.

Television also offers a kind of gift economy. For Allen (1992) it is free (less so with cable and satellite, but we typically don’t place a price tag on individual programs). With commercials and promos for other programs, the television apparatus acknowledges the viewer and the viewer’s choices. Something is given to you and something is asked in return. This feels different, more social, and more friendly than the straight-up purchase of a movie ticket. Television becomes a part of our lives, intimate in a way.

Finally, television viewing, because of its domestic context (a shared media experience for families), often is implicated in family power structures (Fiske, 1992). Who gets the remote? When do we stop watching cartoons and turn on football, etc?

Internet Video

Watching television or movies or viral videos on the Internet is another different kind of apparatus. Turkle (1984) now seems prophetic when she argued that computers give us a kind of “second self” that is malleable and can morph into various provisional identities. The internet seems to allow and encourage that. Even if you aren’t posing as someone else or acting like an elf for hours a day on World of Warcraft, you are exploring different versions of your identity.

Internet video and general net surfing are a part of this. You can explore desires or kinds of entertainment that you might not feel free to in other media. You might not pay for pornography on cable, but you will find it for free on the net. You will watch strange and hideous and bizarre and funny things that you might not otherwise even know to look for. The experience of clicking on another YouTube video and then another for an hour or so seems fairly common. Because you can post comments or videos yourself it is even more interactive and friendly than TV, but questions about how this apparatus works are hard to answer.

Video Games

There is a longer history of apparatus work on video games. Although video games have an attraction because of the power there – you are the controller of the character, you make the decisions – this is too simple. Even as far back as games like Asteriods!, video games are more about frustrating that control than anything else. Turkle (1984) writes about a thirteen year old girl playing the game at a restaurant, telling people to “Get the fuck away from me!”: “The girl is hunched over the console. When the tension momentarily lets up, she looks up and says, ‘I hate this game.’ And when the game is over she wrings her hands, complaining that her fingers hurt. For all of this, she plays every day ‘to keep up my strength.’ She neither claims nor manifests enjoyment in any simple sense” (p. 64).

The popular notion that video games are addictive is too simple. But it seems to be a way of explaining Turkle’s classic example. Why does the girl play something so frustrating? Addiction would explain it. But it is more complex than that. Turkle argues that this “urgent and tense” pleasure is “a force at work, a ‘holding power’ whose roots are aggressive, passionate, and eroticized” (p. 65).

The pleasure is inherent in the structure of games themselves. Provenzo (1991) points to video games’ internal reinforcement, embedded tutorials and the quickness and complexity of the games as the source of their power. For Turkle, you are in an “altered state” (p. 83). That altered state is what video game theorist Steven Jones (2008) calls a “possibility space” within a game. It is the space of actions possible within the code of the game and the narrative implications of those choices. It is that space we desire. He compares it to “an actual chalk circle drawn for a game of marbles” (p. 15).

What is desirable about a possibility space, though, it not just the freedom of a new world but its constraints. Kinder (1991) argues that many games are adolescent and oedipalized. The games involve struggle against a rule making father figure in the plot which mirrors the struggle of the player against the boundaries of the game itself (there are often tests of skill that require your character to, say, jump its maximum distance to finish the level).

So it seems all of video game apparatus is designed to provoke an experience of frustrated control (physical and social) coupled with the success in solving those frustrations. And that is why we play, even if it is the 19^th game we own about a plumber who likes to jump on turtles.

As video games evolve, there is no questions that the experience on a MMORPG, where you are pretending for hours a day with real people, is most similar to other MMORPG's (regardless of whether it is Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies or the Lego Universe) than it is to anything you might do in your living room with the Wii or Guitar Hero.

Music

Music is, in many ways, even more ubiquitous than television. Because it is always on (we all know someone who sleeps to music), it is even harder to say what its unconscious effects might be.. The difficulty here is that music is experienced though lyrics and through sound. Sellnow and Sellnow (2001) argue that the most important element of the music experience is the congruity of those modes. Do they reinforce each other (sad sounds, sad lyrics) or do they contrast (a happy sounding Ben Folds song with the chorus “Give me my money back, you bitch!”)?

There are additional elements central to the experience of music that work in specific ways. Music theory points to the differential cognitive effects of minor chords versus major chords, harmony and dissonance (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2001). Aaronsen (1999) argues that the biological apparatus of sound works in ways independent of culture. She further argues that pounding bass directly works the genitals. DeChaine (2002) describes “dissonant notes from a solo piano send[ing] shivers up my backbone” (p. 84). He ultimately argues that music is listened to because it creates that liminal (or in between) space between mind and body. It highlights that tension.

Experiencing music in a concert or in a group setting means that this operates in one particular way. But walking around listening to music creates something else. It is a literal version of the punk attitude Grossberg (1986) saw as a “bubble, a mobile environment surrounding its fans” (p. 54).

The difficulty with apparatus theory of any kind is that it wants to generalize these experiences across the differences of individual people, which is hard to do. How do we know that we all react to the dark or to the remote control or to the game controller the same way? Fletcher (2004) points out that today seventh and second chords are considered dissonant, but that thirds were also considered dissonant hundreds of years ago. What we presume to be biological or primal and simple is not necessarily so.

Yet no one would say that watching a film on your phone is the same experience as the one spent after waiting in line at the theater. There is something important here, but how much?

by Steve Vrooman, revised September, 2012

References

Aaronson, B. (1999). Dancing our way out of class through funk, techno or rave. Peace Review, 11(2), 231-7.

Allen, R. C. (1992). Audience-oriented criticism and television. In R. C. Allen (Ed.), Channels of discourse, reassembled (pp. 101-137). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

Baudry, J. (1987). Ideological effects of the basic cinematic apparatus. [and] The apparatus: Metaphyschological approaches to the impression of reality in the cinema. In P. Rosen (Ed.), Narrative, apparatus, ideology: A film theory reader (pp. 286-298, 299-318). New York: Columbia University Press.

DeChaine, D. (2002). Affect and embodied understanding in musical experience. Text & Performance Quarterly, 22(2), 79-99

Fiske, J. (1992) British cultural studies and television. In R. C. Allen (Ed.), Channels of discourse, reassembled (pp. 284-326). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

Fletcher, S. (2004). Preliminary notes for a semantics of music. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 61, 575-579.

Grossberg, L. (1986). Is there rock after punk? Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 3, 50- 75.

Jones, S. E. (2008). The meaning of video games: Gaming and textual strategies. New York: Routledge.

Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, television and video games. Berkeley: Universiry of California.

Provenzo, E. F. (1991). Video kids: Making sense of Nintendo. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Sellnow, D., & Sellnow, T. (2001). The 'Illusion of Life' rhetorical perspective: An integrated approach to the study of music as communication. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 18, 395-415.

Turkle, S. (1984). The second self: Computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon & Shuster.

Williams, R. (1989). Raymond Williams on television: Selected writings. London: Routledge.

Williams, R. (2003). Television: Technology and cultural form. New York: Routledge.