Last
week I attended a conference on “Adaptation, Perception, and Media Convergence”
in Mainz, Germany, and gave a talk on perception and metaphor. Although including some of the ideas – of mindfulness,
mesearch and psychology – that I have explored elsewhere, I felt that something
about this presentation was fundamentally wrong. I could not explain why at the time, but I
understood that I had not really put across what I wanted to say. The talk can be accessed at http://laurenceraw.blogspot.com.tr/2015/12/adaptation-perception-metaphor.html.
It
was only this week, four days after the presentation that I began to understand
what had happened. In advocating a form
of adaptation studies based on perception and self-reflection, I had gone too
far in the individualistic direction, and thereby abandoned the notion of a
community of purpose that I believe underpins all forms of adaptation
studies. It is all very well learning
how to reflect, but we need to shape our reflections according to the
communities we inhabit so that we can continue communicating – and thereby
adapting to new situations. This form of
work underpins all screenplay writing in the movies, as well as in the academic
field. In advocating a move towards
perception as self-reflection, I had ended up becoming dogmatic; a state of
being that is quite contrary to that which adaptation studies should
promote. We need to listen to others as
well as ourselves – as Jerome Bruner suggests in Making Stories (2002) – adaptation evolves out of reconciling the perpetual
tensions between individual and community values.
The
conference as a whole vividly illustrated the truth of this notion. While listening to and commenting on the
papers, I understood that “convergence” actually had two meanings. It not only referred to textual issues –
where media and other texts come to have shared purposes and shared meanings –
but it also described the ways in which people from disparate backgrounds come
together to discuss similar issues while acknowledging the presence of
different ways of thinking. Kamilla
Elliott’s talk on “Add-app-Tation” vividly illustrated the first meaning of “convergence”
as she showed how the creation of new apps helped to encourage a variety of
approaches to Shakespeare study that did not involve close textual
reading. This did not mean that textual
reading should be abandoned altogether; on the contrary Elliott showed how it
could be approached in a different way through visual as well as verbal
means. Some of the apps she showed might
have seemed childish to older academics; but they might prove exceptionally
useful to those encountering Shakespeare for the first time. The apps could thereby help to expand the
Shakespearean community of purpose across a wider cross-section of the people.
Heiko
Hecht’s presentation on the effects of furniture, lighting, and their
relationship to adaptation reinforced this notion. By presenting a series of empirical experiments
conducted within his department (of psychology), he showed how notions of color
and space invariably depended on perception rather than any objective
standards. Such perceptions might differ
across cultures – “redness” might signify something different in the Republic
of Turkey rather than Germany – but at the same time there existed a shared
meaning that could be considered transcultural.
The conflict between these two values of transculturality and
culture-specificity is what prompts individuals to adapt.
Rainer
Emig’s piece offered some interesting points for adaptation scholars to
consider. Is there such a concept as “authorship,”
or has it been superseded by “transmediality” or “convergence”? Does adaptation studies want to be
multi-disciplinary or does it aspire to become a separate discipline? And does there need to be an accepted body of
knowledge (which we might term “theory”) that separates adaptation studies from
other disciplines? As I listened to the
talk, I bore in mind a statement made during a coffee break by one of the other
participants: those academics who proclaim that their work is “original” or “ground-breaking”
might actually be working in a spirit contrary to what Emig suggests. If adaptation studies values convergence,
then it follows that any theoretical or methodological advances within the
discipline should evolve out of consultations between people. Maybe there’s
no need to go over old ground – for example, by asking “what adaptation studies
is” – but maybe we need to think more
carefully about how (or whether) the discipline needs to adapt theories
developed in other disciplines for its own particular purposes.
This
thought sprung to mind once more as I listened to Pascal Nicklas’s talk on
adaptation and neuro-cognition. He put
forward a model of cognition – developed by Arthur M. Jacobs of the University
of Berlin and adapted by Nicklas himself – proposing that the human brain works
differently when confronted with a literary as opposed to another form of
text. While we might be prompted to ask
basic questions as “what defines a literary text?” the model still goes a long
way towards explaining the pleasure we might experience when rereading a
literary text (as opposed to watching a literary adaptation). Put another way, Jacobs’s model might help to
justify in more empirical terms what Bruner says about the ways in which
individuals learn how to adapt to different cultures and different
situations. The fact that Nicklas
presented the model in such an accessible and enthusiastic manner suggested a
willingness to involve the community in re-shaping individual perceptions, and
thereby expand adaptation studies’ field of research.
Dan
Hassler-Forest’s talk made similar points through showing different forms of
video clip. While arguing – as I had
done – that adaptation creates its own forms of narrative he simultaneously
suggested that such narratives converged with other narratives so as to render
them comprehensible to others. The
authors of “new” narratives, so to speak, built on “old” values.
One
of the most interesting side-issues that emerged from the conference was to
learn about government policy as practiced in the United Kingdom, where
universities are expected to make an “impact,” through initiatives that help to
change (adapt?) existing policies. Other
initiatives, such as going out in to high schools and integrating with wider
members of the community, are described as “outreach,” which possesses lesser
value than “impact” insofar as it has no effect on government policies. The Mainz conference had both “impact” and “outreach”
in other ways; it made an “impact” in the way it brought people with different
approaches to adaptation studies together and made them reflect on what they
were doing, and how they could communicate better with each other. This was something I learned through painful
experience, even though it took four days to understand it. The conference’s “outreach” consisted of integrating
papers from different subject interests together – media studies, psychology,
cognitive studies, literature – and showing how they might collaborate more
closely with one another. At last it
seems that the discipline is beginning to move away from the
literature-film-media paradigm into other areas of research. That is not to say that everyone agrees with
what’s being done (there were several “full and frank” discussions throughout
the conference), but nonetheless they remain prepared to commit themselves to
an ad hoc, as well as transnational community of purpose dedicated to the discipline.
I
learned recently that consequent on my presentation, some colleagues believed I
was not in favor of adaptation studies.
Far from it: I think its emphasis on learning, shifting perceptions and
reflection (both individual as well as community) renders it one of the most
exciting places to be within the academic world. The Mainz conference admirably reinforced
this belief. For this, I’d like to thank
Pascal, Dan and Sibylle, as well as all the hard-working people who helped to
make this event such an intellectual eye-opener.
