I should note that I got this idea after hearing a talk by Mary Beth Oliver, whose work now represents to me what the empirical, quantitative study of art should do. You should dig up her recent work, if you have the means.

The typical like/enjoy graph would look like this:

The assumption here is that anything toward the bottom left is something you just don’t like much at all. I’d try to favor enjoyment, assuming that most people won’t choose media only because it’s “impressive” in some way, but I don’t suppose there’s much point in fundamentally weighting the graph to account for that.

Problems arise when we consider that “enjoyment” may be too much of a catch-all. What does it mean? Pure, narcissistic enjoyment? Favoring good things over bad is not the only kind of enjoyment there is. What of catharsis? Or sympathy? The enjoyment spectrum may warrant a graph of its own.

“Appreciation” here is still a visceral response. But it’s a response that allows for the idea that unpleasant things can make for viscerally enjoyable art. I enjoy Hidamari Sketch and appreciate Bokurano, but I consider both entertaining on an emotional level.

I don’t suppose this notion will shock many of you; I’m assuming you aren’t crusaders against television and video games as purely narcissistic media, if you’ve happened upon one of my blogs (you probably wouldn’t even consider pure narcissistic enjoyment necessarily bad, nor would I). We already pay some attention to the nuances of enjoyment when charting our responses. But it may benefit us to consider how these nuances interact with the spectrum of “liking.”

Today’s quotational magic comes from a 1980 article by the intriguingly-named Robert Zajonc:

• Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151-175.

Zajonc argues against an information-processing model that places cognition before affect (reason before feeling, in other words), positing that, regardless of whether affect literally, temporally precedes cognition, “affect is always present as a companion to thought, whereas the converse is not true for cognition” (154). That is, emotion and subjective judgment confound everything. While Zajonc is concerned mostly with decision-making and interaction, you might rightly assume that such a model (which, as far as I know, has more or less survived the thirty years since the article’s publication) has certain implications for the consumption of art — and for people who write about the consumption of art, i.e. you and I.

Quite often “I decided in favor of X” is no more than “I liked X.” Most of the time, information collected about alternatives serves us less for making a decision than for justifying it afterward. Dissonance is prevalent just because complete and thorough computation is not performed before the decision… (155)

It’s as if he peered into the future and saw the aniblogothing! Beneath oceans of vitriol lies the truth: ultimately we’re writing about how we choose what we like, and not about why what we like is better than what other people like.

But that’s a given, and not really worth going on about at length. What catches my attention here is the idea of dissonance. Certainly we’ve all struggled with shows we find meritorious but not fun, or vice versa. The terms I’ve been using lately are “impressive” and “enjoyable;” others have distinguished between “works one likes” and “works one enjoys” (recent bloggery by Ghostlightning and Digitalboy comes to mind). And this excites my interests in mechanisms and methods — how do we navigate the gulf between impressive and enjoyable? “Differently” would be the short answer, I suppose.

Once formed, an evaluation is not revoked. Experiments on the perseverance effect, the strong primacy effects in impression formation, and the fact that attitudes are virtually impervious to persuasion by communication all attest to the robust strength and permanence of affect. Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis… (157)

Hence, visceral enjoyment and nostalgia/love-remembering are serious business. I tend to rate those works I associate with a particular “moment” or “movement” in my fandom — Love Hina, Rozen Maiden, Last Exile, Elfen Lied, Haibane Renmei, Macross, even (dare I say it) Aria — higher than I might otherwise, even after repeated viewings. I suspect some of you might do the same.

When we evaluate an object or an event, we are describing not so much what is in the object or in the event, but something that is in ourselves. …Thus, affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment. (157)

We may think that, in our close-reading or sociohistorical interpretation of Pokemon, we’re uncovering the depth inherent to Pokemon. What we’re doing, really, is giving Pokemon depth. It’s worth remembering that textual depth comes from the reader’s depth of experience with the text. But now I’m just using Zajonc as yet more evidence in support of something I’ve been saying for a long time, so I’ll come at this a different way: why do we read anime blogs? I don’t know why you read anime blogs, but I don’t read them for their explications of art; I read them for their explications of their writers, as means by which to experience brief glimpses into how other people do anime, which is something that matters to me.

…[Liking] varies with the objective history of stimulus exposure. With recognition reduced nearly to the chance level, differential affective reaction to the stimuli is obtained as a consequence of mere repeated exposure. Random melodies presented five times were liked better than melodies never heard, even though the subjects could not discriminate the former from the latter for familiarity. (162-163)

This suggests something that makes a kind of sense, but that we don’t really think about: fandom is learned. If I sat my grandmother down in front of Gurren Lagann, she wouldn’t get it — and “getting it” here refers not to intellectual understanding, but to the simple ability to enjoy a thing. We don’t become anime fans overnight — or at least I didn’t. I’ve had to pass through a long series of gateway shows, starting with the Record of Lodoss War OVA, which I liked not because it was anime, but because it was high fantasy. I’d be interested to see how other bloggers evaluate their own acquisitions of fandom; some of that comes through in more nostalgic sorts of posts, but it isn’t always apparent when we look primarily forward.

That being: pornography is “violent” media.

As the article in question deals with the effects of violent media generally upon consumer aggression, let’s get this out of the way: mass media affect consumers. They affect different consumers differently, and the most dramatic effects require consistent long-term exposure, and no social scientist worth his or her weight in grant money would claim that media consumption alone is likely to turn your kids into mass murderers…

…[T]he weight of the evidence indicates that violent actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior. Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is “the” cause of violent behavior. [Huesmann, L. R., & Taylor, L. D. (2006). The role of media violence in violent behavior. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 393-415.]

…And, anyway, given that “violent media” includes such necessities as newscasts, and encompasses countless artistic works, it’s better that we adjust to it, rather than impeding our own free expression…

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made. [Neil Gaiman, "Why defend freedom of icky speech?"]

…But we can at least say, with the weight of decades of evidence, that media have effects. As such, figuring out what those effects might be may prove worthwhile. Social scientists agree, and, as you may know, media violence is a pet project of many of those types.

Of course, “media violence” (or “violent media”) is about as vague a term as it could possibly be, and nearly every experimental study and literature review defines it differently. Some, it would seem, define it more loosely than others.

To quantify and analyze mass media reports of the effect of violent media on aggression and violence, we coded every newspaper and magazine article we could find on the topic. All forms of mass media were considered (e.g., television, film, music, video games, pornographic magazines, comic books). [Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477-489.]

You have to wonder how poor, delicate Drs. Bushman and Anderson would feel if they encountered, by chance or fate, an issue of Comic LO. But I digress (or do I?).

The authors take care to distinguish “pornographic magazines” as a mass medium distinct from other kinds of visual print media — “comic books,” for example, or newspapers, or non-pornographic magazines — and they make sure, via opportune parenthesis and an e.g., that we’re aware that the “medium” of porn belongs beneath that most convenient of blanket terms, “violent media.” Now, I may be pulling a bit of quotational trickery here; maybe I’ve misrepresented the authors’ intentions. Maybe they’re saying that porn is potentially a violent medium, and thus worth researching for that reason. But why distinguish it so thoroughly? Why make a point of searching news databases with the queries “pornograph*” and “erotic*” if those aren’t the sorts of things that fall particularly beneath your definition of violent media, at least for the purposes of your study?

I’ll note that this article was written in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and One, and not by some radical Christian lobby. These are, as far as I’m aware, legitimate researchers. Though, granted, they’re legitimate researchers with an agenda, legitimate researchers who make a point of testifying before government panels and so on. They aren’t wholly without zeal.

Why is porn specifically violent, or, in being porn, rife with violent potential? What is it about we Americans that makes us quake in our boots whenever sex looms on the horizon? Because, whatever it is, I imagine it’s related to that impulse of ours that sends us into a panic when an innocuous nerd looks at cartoon depictions of the deed.

First, a graphic. Fun!

This is (ostensibly) the reading process, as I see it thanks to people like Poulet, Iser, and de Saussure. There exists a physical text, of course, but all meaning-building must necessarily take place in the minds of readers, as that’s how meaning-building works; in this sense, the text is not only empty, but unfillable. What we “fill” with meaning when we read is an effectively infinitely large (or, more accurately, sizeless) construct of signifiers I’ve been calling the authorial shell (in reference to Poulet’s authorial consciousness, though “authorial” may just be verbal baggage by now). This shell is assembled by the reader out of their personal store of knowledge and the text-image, the mental “version” of the text the reader forms in response to the text’s linguistic/visual/aural cues. The text-image would include information such as “Gandalf wears a gray robe,” while knowledge/experience would supply what a gray robe looks like in the first place, if it can, as well as symbolic knowledge of the color gray which would enable the filling of the authorial shell with signifieds. Thus, we contribute to a text’s total meaning and help determine its place in the body of literature by hanging our corresponding authorial shells from it alongside the shells of those who have read before.

Certain problems arise from the simplicity of the above illustration. It’s possible that the text-image and knowledge/experience combine inexorably, or that the text-image is itself composed of knowledge and experience, and thus we can’t consider them to be separate things at all, or must think of them not as complementary parts of the authorial shell, but steps in the process of the creation of the shell. I keep these possibilities in mind as I throw sharp objects at my model to test its durability in various cases — such as that of Casshern Sins, which I want to use to look at the phenomenology of subversion, as soon as I think of a place to start.