Thoughts on Genre

It seemed like several of us were working in our presentations to define the boundaries around genre. So I want to expand on the one minute of thoughts I had on genre in our presentation about selfies on Thursday …

Picking apart genre is a really easy target; it’s notoriously difficult to define and easy to critique, so I want to start with the way Hodge’s formulation of the selfie as genre is illuminating. Here’s Hodge’s definition of what the selfie as genre does:

“The selfie should be thought of not as a form of documentation, not as a picture of ‘self,’ but as a relational practice that defines a figure as distinct from a background…Such pictures grant generic form to bodies within networked spaces at the same time that they represent those same bodies as within and distinct from those worlds of hyperproximate plenitude. The gesture of the selfie cocoons its subject at the same time as it anticipates its online circulation” (Hodge, 11).

I think Hodge’s proposal of genre becomes useful in understanding the outrage around the Princess @ Auschwitz selfie I mentioned in our presentation (here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/24/auschwitz-selfie-girl-breanna-mitchell_n_5618225.html) – I was proposing that the mediascape’s outrage marks the place where Breanna Mitchell’s selfie broke genre; she broke a “tacit contract for how an encounter will proceed.” Under Hodge’s idea of selfie-as-genre, what seems to be wrong about Princess’ selfie is that she has broken the rule that the figure must exercise a relation to the ground. We can't see her simply as 'in a background'; the genre helps us understand that by making her post a selfie we understand her to be saying something about her background. Because, in Hodge’s understanding, the genre of selfie has taught us to read her photograph as saying something like “I am here”/”this is happening,” in other words, because we have implicitly learned to read it as an object coming out of the generic tradition of testimony, in which one reinforces the truth of a situation one is reporting by staking one’s reputation (not just “this is happening,” but “[I undersign that] this is happening”), what we read Breanna’s figure as saying about her background is a kind of mockery – a mockery all the more inflammatory given the robust tradition of testimony around the Holocaust.

So while I think a concept of genre, and specifically Hodge’s concept of genre, can lead to productive readings, I also worried about (or was confused about) its limitations: what does it mean to make the genres he discusses so self-referential, so that all the genres of digital media are all “about,” in various ways, the refusal of digital media? How is Breanna’s photo, to continue the example, “about” the too-much-ness of media? Does the too-much-ness of media explain how our reaction to her photo would have been different if she had simply posted a photo of Auschwitz, with the tagline that failed to perform the appropriately grieving emotions, without herself in it? And: if genre is a “contract for how an encounter will proceed,” how do we account for the difference that very different modes of circulation make to expectations about how the encounter will proceed? The way creators and audiences understand the encounter produced by selfies seems like it varies a lot across platforms: on Snapchat, the ephemerality of the photo leads it to be used in a way similar to the way Patrick described his friends using Skype – as a kind of check in, a mode of digital co-presence; over Instagram, the mechanisms of filters and liking seem to make the selfie a performative or declarative gesture (this is to say: how would we feel if Breanna had texted this photograph to her mother, and someone had simply re-posted it online?). It’s not that digital media genres are the only ones in which circulation has an influence on how the “encounter will proceed” – we think of a sonnet as a sonnet whether it’s written in a letter addressed to a lover or published in a book – and my objection is not to say that a selfie isn’t still a selfie whether it’s on Instagram or Snapchat. It is to question the usefulness of a genre defined in the way Hodge defines it – as opposed to a technical or purely formal definition of genre, the way we usually think of sonnet (“a sonnet is a fourteen line poem…”), or at least to question the way his different conceptions of genre fit together.