The Scientific Object of A New Kind Of Public: Reflections on Theory and Method

Abstract

This response to commentaries from Richard McIntyre, Karen Miller, and Kellie Hay clarifies the scientific object of A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935–1948 (Haymarket, 2015). For the study of cinematic cultural artifacts, the author proposes neither an audience-response theory of meaning nor an auteur conception of individual intention and cinematic mastery. Films do have intentions, but those intentions are an assemblage of conscious and unconscious significations generated by the film’s producers (in the larger sense) and by the film’s imagined audience. In that sense, every film carries context and the imprint of its origin. The author’s method is not a means to decipher audience reaction, much less to offer causal explanations for historical events, but it aims to measure, partially, the impression those events leave upon an artifact.

Key Words:

• Cultural Sociology
• Interpellation
• Labor History
• New Deal Cinema
• Semiotics

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Chizu Sato for all the hard work that made this symposium possible.

Notes

1 I am grateful to Karen Miller and Kellie Hay for pointing out gaps in my literature. Several chapters discuss the social transformation of gender relations and its depiction in cinema. In Riffraff, the gendered division of labor and women's role as household economic providers draws sustained attention. In My Man Godfrey (1936), the title character crosses genders (at least in terms of labor and uniform) on the path to a Hegelian transcendence. In the chapters related to these, the arguments and themes resonate with queer theory, and yet only a few citations to queer theory and sociological gender theory occur. While I use feminist labor historians to situate the “gender troubles” of the 1930s and 1940s, these discussions would have benefited from the further intervention of queer theory and sociological gender theory (see Butler 2006).

2 See “Catalog of Feature Films,” AFI website, http://afi.com/members/catalog.