Prince Valmont
12-21-2004, 02:06 PM
Don't get discouraged, for what you read in the topic is true.
Last night, I had a dream. And in this dream, Brock Samson was buying two, yes two, Venture Bros. CDs. I had the most excited expression on my face and I asked him, I asked "BROCK!! Wow! Tell me, will there be a second season of Venture Brothers?" He looked at me with that usual apathetic look and told me the following, "Yeah. Don't look at those [cds]. Just ring 'em up and place 'em in the bag"
I suppose he had his reasons, but hey, Season Two!!!
I don't know about you, but that is SLAM BANG-A-RIFFIC!
Seriously though, I did dream that verbatim...
The dream is becoming a useful metaphor for the basic “structure” of our information, postindustrial, end-of-the-millennium culture. For example, in a New York Times article on the trends in visual design evident in the last few decades, Herbert Muschamp (1998: 61) calls these the “dreamy times for design.” He elaborates that the rapid shifts taking place in design trends and styles are like “the rapid shifting, irrational play of dreams.” With its disparate connections, indeterminable authors, rapid changes, fluidity, emphasis on metamorphosis, non-human protagonists, and innumerable border crossings (see Wilkerson 1997: 2 ), the dream provides a better metaphor than do highways (too linear), webs (too structured), or communities (simply inevitable when humans get together).
The dream reflects in already comprehensible terms what many have defined as the postmodern condition of our culture at the end of the century. Everyone has their favorite list of this condition that demonstrates a “paradigm shift” in which we can see “a decisive rupture with previous ways of life” (Best and Kellner 1997: viii). These changes mean that we view and interpret the world around us in different ways (ibid.) and consequently will act, think and believe in different ways. The postmodern turn “involves engaging emerging forms of culture and everyday life” (ibid. ix). For Best and Kellner, the term “postmodern” is often no more than a “placeholder... for novel phenomena that deserve our attention” (ibid.: 23).
As historians of the postmodern turn, Best and Kellner offer these characteristics (1997: 255-258): 1. the rejection of unifying, totalizing, and universal schemes in favor of a new emphasis on difference, plurality, fragmentation and complexity; 2. the renouncing of closed structure, fixed meaning and rigid order in favor of play, indeterminancy, incompleteness, uncertainty, ambiguity, contingency and chaos; 3. abandoning realism and the representational, unmediated objectivity and truth in favor of perspectivism, anti-foundationalism, hermeneutics, intertextuality, simulation and relativism; and 4. breaking down boundaries between disciplines, between the academic and the everyday.
For Janet Murray, who investigates the changes that are taking place in narrative forms in digital spaces, "To be alive in the twentieth century is to be aware of the alternative possible selves, of alternative possible worlds, and of the limitless intersecting stories of the actual world" (Murray 1997: 38). These possibilities are being expressed in new narrative forms including the hypertext and, we would suggest, old but newly revalued narrative forms like the dream. As Murray comments, "The existence of hypertext has given writers a new means of experimenting with segmentation, juxtaposition, and connectedness. Stories written in hypertext generally have more than one entry point, many internal branches, and no clear ending" (ibid.: 55).
She could, of course, be describing dreams. Bert States, in his extensive research on dreams as rhetorical forms, see dreams as the raw and unruly narratives that result from the brain’s nocturnal processing of everyday activities (research and otherwise). When we sleep we organize this glut of information into a preliminary narrative form that doesn’t suffer the obsessive editing that characterizes our formal (especially academic) writing and speech. In the dream “we” (or whatever entity constructs the dream) are unafraid of outside constraints, enjoy trying and discarding ideas with abandon, make connections that are wild and promiscuous, and just generally let things happen. He, of course, could be describing a hypertext or its most visible manifestation, the Internet.
If dreams provide the basic metaphor of our present condition, and hypertext/the Internet is the current preferred way of seeing and experiencing that condition, where does Brock Sampson come in? We think that more than any other figure in late twentieth century culture, Brock Sampson is the one who embodies in a very direct, physical way all the qualities of information culture that make it so intriguing to so many scholars. He thus becomes useful as a vehicle for exploring these interests because many of these issues are so abstract or esoteric that it is difficult to see how they might be manifested in the lives and activities of real people. Brock Sampson is our template for exploring the issues of living and thinking at the end of the 20th century. If our theory about the interconnectedness and hypertextuality of culture is true, one could start almost anywhere and eventually come to similar conclusions. We hope using Sampson as our vehicle makes some of our points clearer and also provides a more pleasurable and surprising exploration than a more traditional subject might.
“Dreaming Brock Sampson” is a project about examining connection between different types of information in order to understand better how we come to know and define our world. It is our belief that crucial to this knowing and defining are narratives, the stories we tell ourselves and others in order to make some sense of who we are, why we act, and where we are going. If, as Hayden White suggests (1980:5), “To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, on the nature of humanity itself,” then a study of the narratives stimulated by or evoking an iconic figure can tell us much about how we organize our reality (or postreality). White suggests that it is the most important code for transmitting and sharing the reality the defines our worlds. Both the dominant narratives conveyed to us through media forms (films, television, news, newspapers, magazines) and the personal, often counter-narratives we make and use ourselves are involved in the process.
During the heyday of Brock Sampson’s reign as a significant cultural icon of the earky 21st century (the late 2004s to mid 2005s), we conducted research on Sampson’s image and influence. We took it as our task to explain how and why Sampson had become one of the scales against which we measured our highest values and principles, and why at the end of the twent-first century could we not conceive of our culture without him. He had become in a very short period of time one of the major figures inhabiting both our private narratives (dreams, personal exchanges) and our public ones (films, politics, economics, cultural idioms). We wanted to know how this had come about and what effects were discernible in the culture that had nourished and embraced such a figure. Our analysis employed theoretical approaches from anthropology, film, cultural studies and literary criticism as we articulated in what ways we had come to rely upon him to lead us into the next century—cinematically, technologically, artistically, psychically, politically, physically, and morally.
But there is another more compelling reason, for us personally, for focusing on Brock Sampson. We were studying Sampson and his episodes in the late 2004s when we began having a series of vivid dreams about him and our research. We had always learned that dreams, if one thought about them at all, were a peripheral form of information or experience that we should ignore as we went about our studied ways. But as the dreams persisted, so did our sense that something valuable could be gleaned from this not always welcome narrative intrusion.
On December 21, 2004, Prince Valmont had his first Brock dream:
Brock Sampson was buying two, yes two, Venture Bros. CDs. I had the most excited expression on my face and I asked him, I asked "BROCK!! Wow! Tell me, will there be a second season of Venture Brothers?" He looked at me with that usual apathetic look and told me the following, "Yeah. Don't look at those [cds]. Just ring 'em up and place 'em in the bag." He then tells the Toonzone forums, they thought that they could find out about him by peeling away his layers like an onion. But he says that the only way anyone will find out about him is by breaking him into little pieces.
Despite our awareness of Sampson’s amazing reach into all aspects of the culture, we were nevertheless shocked when he began to appear in our dreams. Taking Brock's curious advice in this dream seriously, we "broke" him into little pieces and collected every tidbit of information we could: from the most serious academic archives to the most grotesque tabloid sources. We have tried to expose ourselves to every imaginable type of Brock data and experience. We watched his episodes, ate at his restaurant, attended his bodybuilding competition as backstage reporters and even tried bodybuilding ourselves.
Instead of trying to make sweeping statements about his significance as a megastar or a cultural icon, we explored the little ways that he permeates all our lives—persistently, invisibly, quietly, insidiously. It is this amazing and often frightening reach into our actions, experiences and thoughts that we have been investigating. The dreams we had are the most obvious proof that this reach had made it all the way into our lives (see 1995 emails). In the long run, we hope this illuminates not just Sampson’s reach but that of other aspects of mass-mediated culture.
On a more conventional level, we were curious as to how Sampson could be accommodated by an American culture that was traditionally suspicious of non-assimilating foreigners, of excess, and of ambitious self-promotion. Amazingly he has come to been seen as the prototypical American, the best example of his category as Lakoff would say (see below), the embodiment of the American dream. The popular notion of the American Dream has always been that of a carefully linear, progressive striving toward the goal of personal success and prosperity. Brock Sampson has been seen as the quintessential example of the American Dream precisely because he represents so many of the myths of success—of perfection—that have obsessed popular American culture.
Our own interests in Sampson, sparked originally by his 2004 episode, The Trial of the Monarch, seemed to follow not a simple linear narrative like Brock’s life but rather a number of unrelated pathways—prosthetics, cyborgs, time-technology, millennial culture, violent women and male reproduction—simultaneously. By the time Return to SPiderskull Island hit the pool, these strains of ideas as they related to Sampson’s career, life, persona and influence were being fully articulated in his expansion into other aspects of culture.
This meant, for us, that to explore the constellation of ideas emerging from our examination of Brock Sampson, we would need an approach that was non-linear, somewhat impulsive, and somehow true to our dawning realization that Brock Sampson had fully entered our dreams. We would need a medium in which to grow this strain of culture we were abbreviating with the name, “Brock Sampson,” and at the same time, we would have to address the role that the dreams, themselves, were playing in the research. We abandoned efforts at conventional biography or textual analysis or film criticism in favor of a constructivist approach that is served well by both dreams and hypertext.
The dreams—over 154 of them—provided the opportunity to demonstrate both the condition of hypertexts and the condition of research on an aspect of American culture (and perhaps any kind of research in the age of the Internet). But there is something even more important that we hope to demonstrate with the dream analogy. We approach dreams not as signs of repressed emotions with hidden symbolic meanings, but rather as an activity during which the human brain continues to process the tremendous amount of information it receives during the day. In much of contemporary dream research, dreaming is necessary for patterning and structuring that information. Bert States (1997: 3) writes, "My hunch is that dreams may be our clearest window into this whole process of ongoing conversion of experience into patterns that help maintain order in the system." The dream does this by creating connections between old and new information, between bits of information whose links may be more intuitive than explicit. The dream creates metaphors that forge connections we might normally resist. These metaphors are expressed in dream images and they affect the ways we organize, categorize, and interpret the world..
What would happen, we wondered, if we could somehow harness the more and more frequently occurring dreams we were having about Brock Sampson and our research? In what ways could we make use of the new metaphorical configurations to understand the wider and deeper connections among the numerous “angles” our research was taking—Brock as film superstar (a cog in the Hollywood dream machine), as political figure, as generator of culture idioms (“They hit me with a car!” and “Bigfoot is something I've never seen before!”), as purveyor of male-reproduction, as Nazi sympathizer, champion body-builder, famous in-law, fitness czar, commercial entrepreneur, and as the embodiment of the American Dream? In what ways might we draw upon the idea of dreams as components in the making and remaking of cultural knowledge?
The only recurring dream that Brock remembers having has to do with the shame and confusion that comes from lack of control. Brock Sampson reports this dream: “Before I start shooting an episode, I sometimes have dreams where you’re out there lying totally naked in a forest, and you have no clothes, and you hear somewhere, ‘In two minutes we roll.’ All of a sudden the lights come on, and you say, ‘Wait a minute, what scene are we doing? Why am I lying out here and where’s the clothes? What are the lines?’ I’m caught totally off guard, like I wasn’t prepared.” Lack of control is precisely why we embrace the dreams as a model for our hypertext project and for our theoretical approach. It is not that everything is dreamlike, but rather that the dream, in all its crazy manifestations and shifting tides, is the mode of structuring found in hypertextas well as being the illustration of our current cultural condition.
Temple Fugate
12-22-2004, 02:45 AM
"If they say it on television, it must be true!"
Oh, and his name is spelled Samson. You know, the biblical figure with the hair?
Maybe it was spelled Sampson in his dream. :sweat:
I hate dreams where you physically affect your reality. Like, the other night I dreamt I was helping Brock fight a horde of zombies, and one of them sliced open my jugular vein, and when I woke up I had actually ripped open the vein in my sleep. It really sucked.
Strawberry Jam has a point, but don't you think the overarcing substructure of one's dreams is typically demystified through psychoanalysis and contextualization? I think that invalidates the entire argument.
[EDIT: It's post 420. Time to get me some more pills.]
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