field notes two pages 1.5 space about the next lectures PHAEDRUS by PLATO (PAGES 68-75) "What is a social fact?” by Durkheim (pages 50-59) Participant-observation and Field-notes. CHAPTER 24. Melle
Page i
Page ii
Essays in Cultural Criticism
is Volume 11 in the series
THEORIES OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Center for Twentieth Century Studies
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
General Editor, KATHLEEN WOODWARD Page iii
edited by
Patricia Mellencamp
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
BFI PUBLISHING, London First published in the United States of America by
Indiana University Press
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and
Published in Great Britain by
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p. cm. ( Theories of contemporary culture; v. 11yf
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0 253 33617 1 (alk. paperyf ISBN 0 253 20582 4 (pbk.: alk. paperyf
1. Television broadcasting Social aspects. 2. Television broadcasting United States. I. Mellencamp, Patricia. II. Series.
PN1992.6.L64 1990
302.23'45'0973 dc20
1. Television services. Social aspects
I. Mellencamp, Patricia II. Series 302.2345 Page iv
© 1990 by The Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Logics of television: essays in cultural criticism / edited by Patricia Mellencamp.
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Logics of television: essays in cultural criticism ( Theories of contemporary culture v.2yf
ISBN 0 85170 278 3
2 3 4 5 94 93 92 Page v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
Prologue 1
Banality in Cultural Studies 14
Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics 44
Television: Aesthetics and Audiences 59
Television in the Family Circle: The Popular Reception of a
New Medium 73
The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers: The Public
Relations Crisis of US Television in the Late 1950s 98
Why We Don't Count: The Commodity Audience 117
Techno Ethics and Tele Ethics: Three Lives in the Day of
138
Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity 156
Superman and the Protective Strength of the Trademark 173 Page vi
An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the
Mall, and Television 193
Information, Crisis, Catastrophe 222
TV Time and Catastrophe, or
of Television 240
Representing Television 267
CONTRIBUTORS 303
NAME INDEX 305
SUBJECT INDEX 306 Page vii
This volume and a year's worth of research on television resulted from a collaboration with Kathleen Woodward, Director of the Center for Twentieth Century
Studies. At the Center, 1987/88 was referred to as "the year of television." All of our theories were beautifully put into practice by Carol Tennessen, Program and
Publications Coordinator, and Jean Lile, Office Manager. During the year, Patrice Petro, a fellow at the Center, provided consultation along with intellectual energy.
The research was orchestrated around a series of intensive seminars called "Television and ... Talk, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, Vietnam, Audience, Genre, Lw,
Body," with invited speakers who represented a wide array of approaches to television. In addition to the Center fellows who formed the nucleus of our audience
Roswitha Mueller, Rob Danielson, Barry Brumment, Arthur Seeger, Andrew Martin, Andrew Tolson, Peter Madsen, Joe Milicia, and Daniel Perkins we invited
regional scholars to become associate research fellows. This lively and impressive gang of inventive TV academics was composed of Mimi White, James Schwoch,
Pam Falkenberg, and James Collins. I am deeply indebted to them for their participation, which clearly upped the ante of the debates, encouraging participants to think
harder. I want to acknowledge the contribution of Modern Studies graduate students, particularly Sonja Rein, Aine O'Brien, and Connie Balides, and Henry Jenkins
from Madison, in addition to Center graduate project assistants Ed Schelb and Linda Geimer.
The list of speakers in these sessions of productive television scholarship, in addition to papers by the associates and fellows, included Sandy Flitterman Lewis,
Maureen Turim, Chris Straayer, Rick Altman, Julie D'Acci, John Carlos Rowe, Susan Jeffords, Don Le Duc, Robert Allen, David Marc, and Bob Thompson, along
with the crew of which left Mimi White's and my talks on the cutting room floor, thereby missing a big opportunity to include women's voices. A television
issue of , coedited by Woodward, Mueller, and Petro, suggests some of the exciting range of this research.
The presence of Meaghan Morris from Australia during the fall semester and the research and TV pedagogy of John Caughie in the spring enhanced the year to the nth
degree. We consider these exemplary scholars, like Stephen Heath, to forever be Milwaukee regulars; in fact, Morris has already returned.
The international conference, the scene that set the stage for this volume, took place from April 12 through April 15, 1988, at the Center for Twentieth Century
Studies; speakers not represented by essays in this volume include Lidia Curti (Italyyf 0 L F K q O H 0 D W W H O D U W ) U D Q F H \f, Jane Feuer, Ondina Fachel Leal (Brazilyf - D P H V
Collins, Andrew Tolson (Scotlandyf 0 L P L : K L W H , Page viii
Pamela Falkenberg, James Schwoch, Richard Campbell, Hilary Radner, Carole Anne Tyler, Connie Balides, Laura Goostree, Glenn Hendler, Ana Lopez, Brian
Nienhaus, Thomas Streeter, William Uricchio, Simon Frith (Scotlandyf D Q G 3 D W U L F H 3 H W U R R X U H Q H U J H W L F G L V F X V V D Q W V L Q F O X G H G % U L D Q : L Q V W R Q - R K Q ) L V N H + D Q V
Gumbrecht (Germanyyf ' D Q D 3 R O D Q D Q G 5 R E H U W ' H P L Q J 1 H H G O H V V W R V D \ J L Y H Q W K H F D O L E H U R I V F K R O D U V L W Z D V D O L Y H O \ D Q G V R P H W L P H V F R Q W H V W D W R U \ H Y H Q W R I Z K L F K W K L V
book is only a partial and idiosyncratic record.
I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded the segments of the event called "Guerrilla TV and Feminist Video," particularly because we
refused to change the title of the proposal to a less threatening one. Artists participating in these programs included Deedee Halleck, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Annie
Goldson, and Judith Barry. April 16 and 17 consisted of a video festival curated by Cecelia Condit and Rob Danielson; all of this video was technologically
orchestrated, to perfection, by Rob Yeo. With Danielson's coordination, for two weeks prior to the event, Paper Tiger tapes were broadcast on cable access; the
following Saturday, the Paper Tiger conference extravaganza, a production orchestrated by Danielson with the MATA staff and UWM video students, was broadcast
live. It is another record of this event. For his patience and attention to detail, I thank Thomas Piontek for his assistance in copy editing the manuscript, Suzy Michaels
and Barbara Obremski for their careful typing, and David Crane for indexing.
For exclusions and oversights either at the conference or regarding this volume, I express my regrets of unintentionality.
PATRICIA MELLENCAMP Page 1
This is not a proper introduction but rather a collection of impressions which begin and end with personal scenes across a generational divide. In the 50s, after the
Monday night broadcast of " " and with "Hound Dog" blaring from the radio, I drove to McDonald's, then a new teenage drive in hangout, for a cheap
hamburger, fries, and shake. To adolescent Elvis imitators with their hair slicked back, I gushed about Elvis's first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show
. Today not only can I watch Lucy cavort daily at 10:30 in the morning, or see her in primetime playing a seventy year old bag lady, watch my bootlegged tape
of Elvis's 50s TV stints, or say "Charge it to the King" with an Elvis Presley charge card, but I can have an Egg McMuffin, Chicken McNuggets, or upscale shrimp
salad in a neat, international, family oasis rather than greaser/hot rod milieu. Or, I can drive in and through. (Not a day goes by without a reference to Presley in the
media.yf
Along with taking 50s teenage culture into middle age, the postmodern will to power and desire for capital gains (called diversificationyf D S S H D U V R Q L W V G H V L J Q H U V X U I D F H
to complicate the modernized virtues of specialization. The rapidly expanding and profitable service industries are dividing and multiplying labor into discrete, timed
units. Local (all service garages or department storesyf L V V K L I W L Q J W R Q D W L R Q D O (local franchises of international monopolies for fast services like
Midas Muffler or McDonald's, which takes a 12yb F R P P L V V L R Q X Q O L N H 6 X E Z D \ Z K L F K J H W V \byf ) U D Q F K L V H F X O W X U H L U R Q L F D O O \ I U D Q F K L V H P H D Q V O L E H U W \ R U I U H H G R P I U R P
restriction or servitudeyf X Q L I R U P G R Z Q W R W K H S L F N O H L V W U D G H P D U N F X O W X U e a minutely disciplined culture (which has also taken Taylorism and Fordism into leisure along
with "professionalizing" the familyyf 7 K H J X D U D Q W H H L V W K D W W K H % L J 0 D F Z L O O E H the same in Moscow as in Washington. To purchase something in the USSR
entails standing in three separate lines to complete three separate transactions ordering, paying, and picking up. What will shock the Soviet sense of temporality will be
not product uniformity, so prevalent already in consumer choices, but rather the speed achieved with the system of incremental labor descended from Taylor's Page 2
1917 schema of timed ''scientific management" , however, its monetary incentives. For me, who as a child of Cold War paranoia and foreign policies of
defensive containment lived in Wisconsin when Senator Joseph McCarthy was wielding his list of "known Communists," standing some thirty years later in Red Square
was to experience disbelief and wonder. Seeing a Big Mac in Moscow is as logical and incongruent as Kuleshov's editing experiments.
Within the US television industry, a similar imaginary shift from centralization to internationalization has emerged from television (an amalgam of the local and
the national with regional differences, including accents, now vanishing, as are locally owned retail department storesyf W R and or
superstations which specialize in weather, prayer, shopping, movies, sports, news, medicine, and more recently, genres or styles. These services are picked up by local
cable franchises such as Viacom or Warner, which are national monopolies competing for markets, or cities. (Countries and perhaps even continents will soon follow;
for example, plans are complete for a European news cable channel that will operate over and above national boundaries, transmitting versions of the same news in
various languages.yf : K H Q D I L Y e minute segment like the weather (the weather is the most watched and hence most profitable segment of news on local stations; thus it
is placed in the middle of the program to prevent channel switchingyf W X U Q V L Q W R D Q D W L R Q D O D O l day channel, TV behaves overtly like the service industry it is.
Along with the presumed if not self proclaimed diversity, pluralism, and freedom of choice signaled by this new electronic/satellite constellation, this liberated
economics of broadcasting (broadcasting denotatively means disbandment, decentralization, and hence is accurate for television, but is now termed "narrowcasting"yf
can also be read as standardization and specialization (the twin principles of industrial, monopoly capitalismyf 7 K L V L V F H Q W U L V P L Q F O H Y H U D Q G H Y D Q H V F H Q W G L V J X L V H D V
intangible dispersion, occupying narrower bands of the spectrum but mimicking the networks just the same like Elvis, the return of David Sarnoff as Ted Turner or
Rupert Murdoch. Under the uniformity of local franchises, we are being rapidly disenfranchised of differences.
As Raymond Williams pointed out years ago, national transmission (and real estate by stations in major citiesyf D Q G F O H D U S U L Y D W H U H F H S W L R Q D Q G W K H V D O H R I 7 9 V H W V R U
"consumer durables"yf Q R W F R Q W H Q W R U S U R G X F W K D Y H D O Z D \ V E H H Q Q H W Z R U N F R U S R U D W H F R Q F H U Q V U H V H P E O L Q J Z K D W Y L G H R J X H U U L O O D V L Q W K H L U F U L W L T X H R I Q H W Z R U N R U E H D V W
television" as product culture, hailed in the mid 1960s as "process" culture. Although public debates and journalistic plaints centered on products and effects (we were
relieved to learn in December, 1988, that the millions of studies suggesting or demonstrating the harmful effects of TV on our children were absolutely wrong, that TV
has no detrimental effects and might even be a learning stimulusyf S U R J U D P Z D V W R D G H J U H H D V H F R Q G D U \ F R Q F H U Q R I W K H Q H W Z R U N V . Page 3
Albeit by regulatory decree which declared TV a service, not a product, networks jobbed out production to independent producers/creators like Desi Arnaz and
Lucille Ball, who retained ownership of tangible, filmed commodities which could be transported around the world. The more rapid internationalization of television via
the immediacy of satellites on a allocation of an electromagnetic spectrum never imagined as nationally determined, replicates this emphasis on transmission.
This is a revision of the noble, primitive dream of a global electronic community fostered in the 60s by McLuhan, Michael Shamberg, Nam June Paik, Gene
Youngblood, and other video visionaries.
However, the recent deregulation of international TV markets, permitting the televising of programs produced in the US, and the 1988 Writers' Guild strike for profit
sharing or "points" (opposed by the producers with the tricky claim that the money at stake was only minor, which is indeed true for the conglomerates who own the
studiosyf G H P R Q V W U D W H G W K H P L Q d boggling profits from the sale of TV series for national syndication and to international markets; TV series are and always have been
very hot properties. They are not owned by the networks as are soaps (and and other varieties of newsyf Z K L F K U H P D L Q H G R Q W K H D L U G X U L Q J W K H V W U L N H
While the scholarly analysis of TV representation is unfashionable if not disdained, series are circulating internationally, out of context, with a realignment of an
economic superstructure. The new media barons modeled on the Rupert Murdoch empire which in the US can outmaneuver federal courts and the FCC function
trans or supranationally, unrestrained, exempt from ordinary law or due process.
John Berger's assessment in 1972 of the replacement of political choice by a polynomial begetting of new and improved products their dizzying reiteration, an
endogamy of the same as innovative is right on the money. The difference is packaging. Tylenol sells "pain relief" as an aside: in the beginning, there were tablets, then
capsules, then caplets. Today there are "new extra strength , not capsules. It's not a capsule, it's better," says spokeswoman Susan Sullivan, the serious,
presumably smart, former star of . (Jay Leno scales his verbal register of incredulity: A ? Amidst all this infinitesimal , the political
concept of , along with meaningful choices, is arduous to maintain.
What is operative is the old structure of vertically integrated and horizontally divaricated monopolies, into competitive packaging, a refracted more the
difference we identify the perplexity of choosing among Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonald's, acclaimed as different and thus built on the same corner of the "strip
shopping" agglutination surrounding shopping malls. Like burgers, the packaging of television has been redesigned and recalibrated. There is infinitely more television,
available on seventy channels, for twenty four hours per day. However, in contrast to the quantum leap of theoretical physics which overthrew geometry along with
Newton's laws of motion, this is often more of the same, in Page 4
cluding the appeal to the new paradox of local, mass, subcultural (Taco Bellyf D X G L H Q F H V 6 X F K O R F D O L ] H G G L Y H U V L W \ L V L O O X V W U D W H G E \ W K H S U R O L I H U D W L R Q R I F X O W X U H D U W D Q G
politics magazines. The national scope of magazines divided and multiplied into and magazine, then and branched out
and were followed by magazine, which subdivided into , the , and the soon to appear Milwaukee version of the
. TV cable access local, unpolished, and unpredictable might promise more of the glossy same.
At the same time, the differences, albeit incremental and annihilated under the pressure of trend, are critical. While shares a glitzy, celebrity fascination with
, it is not New York. Paper Tiger TV, working (and networkingyf L Q D Q G Z L W K O R F D O S X E O L c access facilities and groups, has used the reluctant bribes of cable
corporations: The payoff for the city wide contract is a free studio, equipment, training, and a cable channel available to anyone. Paper Tiger is not PBS or a rarefied
art video scene; rather, in its structure, method, and videotapes, it critiques our mediated institutions, including television, all the while enacting an artistic, intellectual,
and economic model of collaborative work which has revitalized the early 1970s goals of and added women and race to the agenda.
Given commercial TV's (1yf U H O L D Q F H R Q S D U R G \ D Q L Q W H U Q D O U H I H U H Q W L D O L W \ W R L W V H O I D Q G W K H I R U P V V W \ O H V D Q G F K D U D F W H U V R I R W K H U P H G L D \f enunciation along a spectrum
of live/recorded, direct/indirect address, the presence of audiences and laugh tracks, (3yf U H F \ F O L Q J R I R O G D Q G I D P L O L D U I R U P D W V J H Q U H V D Q G V W D U V D V S U R J U D P P L Q J
techniques ( is a return of , with a feminist, working class, stand up comedy twistyf \f representation of motherhood, marriage, and the family home,
(5yf G R P L Q D Q F H R I Z K L W H P D O H F K D U D F W H U V R Q W K H Q H Z V L Q S D U W L F X O D U E X W D O V R L Q H Q W H U W D L Q P H Q W D Q G \f representation of women and race given all this, TV history (or
what Walter Benjamin might call "a tiger's leap into fashion"yf L V U H P D U N D E O \ F R Q V L V W H Q W R U E H W W H U I D V K L R Q D E O H ) R U H [ D P S O H Z K H Q Z R P H Q D Q G W K H L U L V V X H V D U H L Q V W \ O H
as they were in the early 1970s, we will, as with padded shoulders in 1988, see them on television. Women's "lib" was both joke and story on the old ;
in 1986 feminism is introduced into as issue or shocking event, then turned into gossip or scandal transformed into crazy idiosyncrasy and hence contained
like all the "strong,'' single professional women who were coupled to (imyf S H U I H F W P D W H V Z L W K D P D ] L Q J V S H H G .
However, the figures charting a severe decline in the representation of blacks and other minorities are very disturbing. From 1970 to 1980, (1yf Z K L W H V H Q K D Q F H G W K H L U
overall domination, (2yf E O D F N V K D G D U H S U H V H Q W D W L R Q R I R Q O \ W R S H U F H Q W D Q G \f other minorities were virtually excluded from portrayal. The study concludes that
the black female has become almost invisible, and appearances by other minorities have dropped in representation, while white women have increased their
representation. Page 5
The percentage of major roles for whites, both male and female, has increased, while those for blacks of both sexes have decreased. Granted that these figures are
pre Cosby (never mind their methodological limitationsyf W K H V H I L Q G L Q J V U H S O L F D W H D U H S R U W I U R P W R Z K L W H P D O H V Z H U H R Y H U U H S U H V H Q W H G I H P D O H V
underrepresented, and minority females almost invisible (p. 285yf 7 K L V W U D G H R I I R I H T X L Y R F D O \f gains for white women and losses for women of color, is a disconcerting
turn of events.
On the other hand, television is an oasis for white women when it is compared to the 1988 configuration of US cinema with its predominance of male buddy movies as
Christmas specials, the trend toward male regression in movies like and , and the dominance of male stars, particularly when serious issues were at
stake the stock market, the Vietnam war, or civil rights ( yf and with professional women as monsters ( yf P R W K H U V D V U H V L J Q H G
martyrs ( yf R U E L P E R V D Q G E R P E V K H O O V ( yf 2 Q W H O H Y L V L R Q Z H I L Q G who is independent, tough, beautiful,
funny, and professionally superior. does not play to or for men or represent the imaginary blissful, labor free joys of motherhood; more radically, she is fat.
talks about politics (and has been canceledyf $ O W K R X J K L W L V G L I I L F X O W W R L P D J L Q H & D Q G L F H % H U J H Q R U 0 D U \ 7 \ O H U 0 R R U H D V V S U R W H V W R U V E R W K R I W K H L U
1988 characters claim an activist past Murphy's Tom Hayden like ex husband appeared; their mutual instant lust was all that remained of their radical past. Annie and
Murphy both attended the 1968 political conventions as protestors. Bergen as Murphy states her forty year age, while Moore as Annie takes care of her aging
parents, and Barr as Roseanne complains about her children, her husband, and her overwork.
Thus, it is a serious oversight, which functions as a prohibition, to ignore the subject of representation in television (other than in its moment of subcultural receptionyf
claiming, as do many critics, that it is an "unmanageable" subject or that its significance is lost amidst the sway of flow. Equally delimited is a narrow notion of "text" that
ignores enunciation, address, in short, the audience, or its context and conditions of production history and the industry. The specific mechanisms, techniques, and
economics of exclusion and containment, the textual absences and contradictions that promulgate and cover up racism, sexism, and ageism, are not insignificant. In an
era of mass diversity of sameness, it is critical to identify differences and unravel the operations of contradiction rather than focusing on the manufacture of indifference.
Thus, this book is obliquely and directly concerned with representation not as a discrete, delimited, ontological object which can be "deconstructed" like a book or film
(although retaining the option of deciphering specificityyf E X W D V D , considering ways in which we can begin to think about "representing television" as it is
inextricably bound up with audiences and industry, and with libidinal and economic systems (and the politicsyf R I S U R G X F W L R Q W U D Q V P L V V L R Q D Q G U H F H S W L R Q ) R U H [ D P S O H
Eileen Meehan's Page 6
essay on the ratings system can be read as the industry's historical representation of an imaginary audience, simultaneously pitched to, and skewed for, advertisers and
networks. Lynn Spigel's analysis of the advertising campaign that introduced television into US homes considers the means by which the television industry, particularly
manufacturers of TV sets, represented its product as an "opportunity" for the nuclear family and in particular women to reconfigure and redecorate domestic space.
Jane Gaines's history of the legal shift from copyright law to trademark cases (with legal interpretations swerving from consumer protection to defense of corporate
propertyyf G R F X P H Q W V D F X O W X U D O V K L I W L Q W K H Y H U \ W H U P V D Q G O H J D O F R Q G L W L R Q V R I U H S U H V H Q W D W L R n a move positively or negatively labeled "postmodernism." The theoretical
swirl around ''Baudrillard," addressed in detail here by Meaghan Morris and Stephen Heath, is a debate about the status of representation which is unwittingly
predicated on television as its model. The place of the real or the true in relation to simulation is at issue in William Boddy's analysis of the responses of the television
industry and critics to the quiz show scandals of the 50s a position of industrial cynicism (much like the position of the ratersyf .
In addition, critical to the context of this book is the awareness for film scholars of the misfit that occurs when the intricate methods of film analysis, including
psychoanalytic constructs of desire and disavowal, are superimposed on TV. The first realization of the difference between film and TV is often centered around
arguments regarding the difficulty in defining or locating the "TV text," the dilemma of finding the locus for research. Stage two involves questioning the intellectual's
relationship to the theoretical object, to television as a material artifact.
During an international conference on television in April, 1988 (the forum in which the majority of these essays were initially presentedyf W K L V V F K R O D V W L F G L V S X W D W L R Q
became more heated, momentarily dividing around the issue of pluralism (with an emphasis on the audience, and a move away from representation, with a celebratory
stance toward television and the people capable of subversive readings, with these intellectuals positing themselves as liking or respecting televisionyf Y H U V X V D 0 D U [ L V W
critique of "pluralism" and its concomitant notion of "popular pleasure." At moments it seemed that an old fashioned lefty condemnation of television as instrumentally
manipulative was being revived and enacted. The old debate of whether television was a good or bad object circulated here, and a certain tedium settled in during
arguments about whether the "people" were clever deconstructors or not. In the US, these divisions are currently, and arbitrarily, represented by those who focus on
the audience as the critical object of study, and those who view the audience as one relay within the textual and industrial process of television.
The question of the relation of the intellectual to TV emerges in these essays as a methodological issue. The scholar's relation to and involvement with the objects under
study becomes an issue of enunciation which in Page 7
scribes the author's historical relation to the texts. John Caughie, for example, suggests that "[a] television criticism which can identify with itself may avoid speaking for
experiences it isn't having." Morris points to the gap in variants of cultural studies between "the cultural student and the culture studied." Although not the theoretical
focus of his argument, the figure of the intellectual circulates throughout Boddy's paper in the form of Charles Van Doren, one of the rare scholars turned star on
television, and, ironically, TV's biggest scandal. By 1961, "cultural democracy," or giving the people what they want, had become the networks' reply to their critics, an
answer to deception and simulation, a virtual , and a tautological one at that. Meehan meticulously dissects the evidence, the basis for this claim by the
networks and scholars to television as pure democracy: the audience, historically constructed and traded as a commodity by the raters, its accuracy and existence as
the democratically plural argued through statistical science and technology. Meehan unravels this corporate practice and logic, and argues that the networks use the
false premise of cultural democracy against critics, labeling them elitists and thus squelching opposition. That this rhetorical syllogism, involving a sleight of its major
premise, is repeated in academia is not without interest. That the raters' audience is not representative is Meehan's premise and clearly documented conclusion.
Also at stake in the conference was "theory," and the value of "theorizing" television. For some of us, the notion of "text" partakes of audience representation
without the mutual exclusivity claimed by many scholars. And, this theorization of the text is not contextless. It includes the economic conditions of production, although
within television studies (particularly with those approaches derived from "the Birmingham School'' and transposed in "cultural studies"yf W K H P R P H Q W R I F R Q V X P S W L R Q R U
reception is the valued focus of research.
Morris, in a paper initially delivered while she was teaching in Milwaukee, directly addresses issues of this debate, along with the status of representation in the work of
Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau her critique being defined by feminism. Echoes of these issues, particularly constructs of Baudrillard, reverberate in a very different
way in Heath's concluding essay, which marks out the terrain of "representing television." Heath's location of representation within economic determinants and political
treatises is demonstrated in Meehan's history of the rating system passed on from the 20s to the present.
Andrew Ross (inyf G L U H F W O \ H Q J D J H V L V V X H V R I S R V W P R G H U Q L V P L Q U H O D W L R Q W R , with (politicalyf H F R Q R P L F V D F O H D U V X E W H [ W V S H F L I L F D O O \ W K H & R O D : D U V 7 K H
economics of the legal shift from copyright law to trademark law, which Gaines charts via court cases, along with her analysis of various texts, provides a
basis for rethinking postmodernism and is a legal explanation for what I call "franchise culture." Lynne Joyrich assesses the place of the female spectator or consumer
within postmod Page 8
ernism and television scholarship, and, with a nod to Baudrillard, detects what is called "hypermasculinity" in critical texts. Spigel sketches a historical consumer the
audience addressed by women's magazines of the 50s urging the buying and installation of TV sets as a solution to family/home dilemmas.
The necessity of analyzing the TV text is posed as an issue of value, perhaps even aesthetics, by Charlotte Brunsdon, who maps a brief intellectual history of British
scholarship on television which leads to the contemporary focus on the audience. Here she centers on representation. From the context of Scotland, displaced into
Milwaukee where he taught, Caughie addresses the theoretical tourist/scholar's dilemma (recalling Baudrillard and Disneyland, Barthes and Japan, Raymond Williams
and San Francisco as disparate examples of traveling academicsyf G H U L Y L Q J D P R G H O R I L U R Q \ I U R P K L V F X O W X U D O G L V S O D F H P H Q W D Q G I U R P W H O H Y L V L R Q 7 U D Y H O L Q J I D V W Z L W K L Q W K H
central city by car (unlike de Certeau's or Benjamin's pedestrianyf D Q G I D P L O L D U Z L W K W K H O D Q G V F D S H 0 D U J D U H W 0 R U V H H P S O R \ V D Q G X S G D W H V % D N K W L Q
V Q R W L R Q R I W K H
chronotope specifically freeways and malls as analogue models for television and its experience. Her reading of Walter Benjamin is elaborated by Mary Ann Doane's
and my essays in relation to TV time and catastrophe. Temporality is also a concern of Heath, and catastrophe is related as a "theoretical" anecdote of cultural
difference by Morris.
Central to many papers is a historical logic of contradiction. Gaines points to both trademark and copyright law encouraging and standing against a monopoly of
culture. The takeover of trademark law, with its emphasis on source, origin, and sponsorship as opposed to authorship, and with the character detached from the
work, snugly fits the development and marketing of television, a shift which begins in the post World War II period. Spigel, working with materials from the postwar
period, documents the contradiction of ad campaigns which depicted TV as simultaneously disrupting and unifying "the family circle." Boddy describes the network
circling of the wagons around the quiz show scandals in the 1950s. I locate my theory of contradiction and the postmodern catastrophic imagination in the same time
frame, specifically the postwar nuclear tests. I submit that contradiction is TV's , defining logic, hence the book's title.
Perhaps taken together, these essays suggest that a more satisfying model of postmodernism (a term which doesn't fit some of these authors comfortably, suggesting
that it either is out of style or perhaps is wearing outyf F R X O G E H D U J X H G I U R P W K H S R L Q W R I Y L H Z R I S R S X O D U F X O W X U H U D W K H U W K D Q D U W 7 K H O D W H V P L J K W E H D P R U H D S W
starting point for an exploration of postmodernism. Similarly we might shift our focus and perhaps our theories to include methods of mass production, distribution,
and reception, including standardization and specialization and their economic and electronic variants. In many ways, British cultural studies and US postmodernism,
mutually left positions, echo each other one placed firmly in the audience of mass culture, the other in the representation of art. The re Page 9
verberation of a cross cultural collision or collaboration might just result in a third term, a more satisfying entity which could consider representation along with its
audience, neither at the expense of the other (which is what the raters and networks argueyf .
Within the general terrain of postmodernism, Ross analyzes as both a critique of TV and a paradoxical but predictable enactment of containment.
Against "liberal" readings, he argues that audiences might have enjoyed the truancy of Max more than his militancy. Joyrich posits a postmodern feminist critique of
"hypermasculinity," while Gaines, in her "disjunctively ironic" examples of two Superman commodity experiences, suggests that perhaps the 80s are not so terribly
different from the 40s, that for actants within mass cultural experiences, postmodernism might be old hat rather than high fashion.
As I stated earlier, overlapping with the lofty question of the intellectual's relation to television is the more mundane terrain of method how should we look at television
and how should we contextualize it? Methodology is the organizing principle for the arrangement of these essays, more an arbitrary than an orderly principle. Thus,
placed first is Morris's general overview of the state of cultural studies and cultural critique. She suggests how academics might proceed, what questions might be
asked, and how our projects might be framed operating through a method of cultural sites as rhomboid intersections of textual practices, mediated by theories, and
carefully negotiated by the writer (Morris gives us anecdotes as allegories rather than as personal experienceyf 6 L P L O D U O \ & D X J K L H D V N V P R U H V S H F L I L F D O O \ K R Z Z H V K R X O G
study television as a cultural object without losing sight of its national contexts. He argues for local (rather than universalyf W K H R U \ Z K L F K U H V S H F W V F X O W X U D O G L I I H U H Q F H
seen, as with Morris and Australia, from his context, Scotland. Methodology is the terrain of Brunsdon's history, which is also set within the context of specific debates
around a dominant model of audience studies. The often covert differences among our theories, which circulate out of contexts that specify if not overdetermine our
arguments, begin to emerge. In 1988 cultural differences yield insights as critical as sexual difference did for feminist film theory.
Historiographic approaches to television follow in the cross media analysis of Spigel and the more traditional study by Boddy, which largely draws on journalism in the
trade magazines. Meehan's economic analysis, like Gaines's, is informed by an ideological materialist critique. Both essays elucidate the contradictions of late
capitalism whether corporate or legal. As Gaines writes, "the recurring dilemma is whether law asserts itself as material base or disengaged superstructure." Ross
echoes Caughie's call for "disjunctive irony," in an essay written with what Caughie notices is itself an attribute of television, its presumption of a "street wise
smartness," an "ironic knowingness,'' like, perhaps, the anarchy of the computer hacker. Postmodernism is a given, as it is for Joyrich, who draws on television
scholarship. Page 10
The next three essays assume that cultural criticism is the way to think about television. (That the models developed for film are not directly applicable is an
assumption loudly declared by their absence.yf 0 R U V H X V H V D P R G H O R I Q R Q V S D F H Z K L O H ' R D Q H D Q G , L Q G L Y H U J H Q W Z D \ V H P S O R \ D V \ V W H P R I W L P H 7 H O H Y L V L R Q E H F R P H V
emblematic of larger cultural issues for Doane, centering on information. While Morse's essay is to a degree dependent on the experience of Los Angeles, mine is
derived from my experience of anxiety TV, and domesticity. The last pages are given to Health, who returns to previous issues including representation, cultural
studies, and democratic pluralism taking them into theory and pedagogy.
It is the revelation of differences that is the most invigorating aspect of the recent cultural study of television. For this research, I asked participants to take
intellectual risks, to refuse either scholastic caution or repetition of old formulas. Some essays included in this book represent that kind of adventurous labor in which
the process of thought is almost palpable. The stakes in these debates in television studies are significant, given television's rearrangement of everyday life, politics,
culture, our imaginaries, and national borders, given its forty years of marketing which began in the US amidst Cold War policies, and given the current dispersal of the
networks and audience decline coincident with the end of the Cold War (its conclusion declared by the 1988 televised coverage of Reagan in Red Square surrounded
by smiling Soviet citizensyf : L W K R X W P R G H O V P H W K R G V R U L Q W H O O H F W X D O W D F W L F V Z H F D Q Q R W H I I H F W L Y H O \ F U L W L T X H W H O H Y L V L R Q E X W R Q O \ H Q G X S U H S H D W L Q J D U J X P H Q W V Z K L F K
unwittingly, overlap with network positions, for example, the relationship between "giving the audience what it wants" and the celebration of "popular pleasure."
As with television (and historyyf Z K D W L V D E V H Q W I U R P W K L V U H V H D U F K D Q G I U R P W K L V E R R N L V D O V R L P S R U W D Q W : K L O H , F R Q V L G H U W K L V F R O O H F W L R Q W R U H S U H V H Q W D Q H [ W U H P H O \ K L J K
stratum of inventive thought about television, providing invaluable and creative models for studying other cultural artifacts in addition to television, I anticipate negative
criticisms, including its emphasis on US network television. While it is presumed as axiomatic that television massively addresses women (for Adrienne Rich, this is
bad; for others, it is goodyf W K H W H U P V R I W K D W H Q X Q F L D W L R Q K D Y H Q R W E H H Q V S H F L I L H G R U W K H R U L ] H G L I W K H \ K D G E H H Q W K H O L E H U D W H G F R Q W D L Q P H Q W R I Z R P H Q W K D W L V W K H U H V X O W
would certainly raise a few eyebrows. In fact, even without deep thought or analysis, the raw data are unsettling. Women still are underrepresented on television (with
three male characters to every two females as the best assessmentyf .
Also absent is any analysis of the representation of race a scholastic oversight resembling the move of the Democratic party against the vice presidential candidacy of
Jesse Jackson in 1988 (illustrating that TV is about differentiation, not differenceyf $ F U X F L D O T X H V W L R Q R I R X U S U H V H Q W L V W K H S R O L W L F V R I F R O R Q L D O L V P R U E H Q L J Q L Q F O X V L R Q
and/or exclusion. The "special" Page 11
commercials inserted during the coverage of the Olympics, glaringly presented as "exceptional" just like the black athletes who the US, pointed to TV's
resolute exclusion of blacks and other minorities during their "regularly scheduled programming." Momentarily linked, for the world to see, were the concepts of
"Olympic," ''Nation," and "Racial Balance/Harmony." (Significantly, commercials and programs since January, 1989, are beginning to include images of African
Americans; and NBC premiered its soap opera in March, 1989, structured, as the aesthetic ads state, around "black and white."yf
Another absence is the lack of a critique of current manifestations of "familialism." More than anything else, US television in its commercials and its programs and its
overriding enunciation appeals to an ideology of familialism (and happy cleanlinessyf W R D P \ W K R I W K H P L G G O e class, happy family reproduced in sitcoms, local news
staffs, the show, a nuclear family which is in fact splitting in this society, creating a new class of the female poor at the same time that it is reconstituting itself in
newly married couples and what might become a new baby boom. Like working women in real life, including professional women, numerous female characters and
performers on television are pregnant. Daycare has become a political and Republican issue on television. Even the coverage of catastrophe is transformed into
personal family dramas of loss and separation. Think of the December, 1988, airplane crash in Scotland with the US college students returning home for Christmas
among the victims, Baby Jessica's rescue, John John saluting his father's coffin, and Christa MacAuliffe's parents watching the explosion.
More predictable is the lack of emphasis on alternative video practice. I structured the conference on "Television: Representation/Audience/Industry" to lead to and
conclude with sessions devoted to alternative video culture. The theoretical move of the three day format was deliberate from commercial representation, through
audience, to industry, and then to alternative politics, economics, and representations. These latter sessions included Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Judith Barry, and Annie
Goldson (and their work in videoyf D Q G ' H H G H H + D O O H F N Z L W K F O L S V I U R P 3 D S H U 7 L J H U S U R G X F W L R Q V ) R U D Q D O W H U Q D W L Y H D F F R X Q W R I W K H F R Q I H U H Q F H V H H 3 D S H U 7 L J H U
V O R F D O
TV production at MATA in which several speakers participated in their own parody (including Morse, Caughie, Goldson, and Hilary Radneryf D Q G Z K L F K L V Q R W D E O H
for Halleck's crazy and clever rendering of the "theory weather."
Some of us involved in film studies for more than a decade have shifted our attention to include television, which is set within the larger terrain of cultural studies. Given
that cinema does not divide easily into art versus mass culture, that its economic determinations and structures have been taken as critical, and that the conventions of
classical narrative function within contradictions and industrial practices, this interdisciplinary move is logical. For many film scholars, postmodernism was very familiar.
An Page 12
early harbinger of this shift to cultural criticism was Roland Barthes's "Change the Object Itself" (in yf D V K R U W U H Y L V L R Q R I K L V H D U O L H U H V V D \ R Q P \ W K
Barthes writes that our "operational concepts would no longer be sign, signifier, signified, and connotation but citation, reference, and stereotype." Rather than
separating signifier from signified, a step which any student now regularly performs, we should work on the sign, "widening the historical field." The critic must ask:
"What are the articulations, the displacements, which make up the mythological tissue of a mass consumer society?" In a culture of signs ''endlessly deferring their
foundation," the direction "of combat is not that of critical decipherment but of evaluation." The critic's task must be "to change the object itself, to produce a new
object, point of departure." For many intellectuals historically leery of entertaining machines of pleasure, TV is just too banal an object. Or, when faced with television,
their response is akin to Jack Gould's comment (quoted by Boddyyf W K D W D I W H U R Q H H S L V R G H R I D T X L ] V K R Z R U D : H V W H U Q K H K D G Q R W K L Q J H O V H W R V D \ 7 K H D L P R I W K L V
book is "to change the object itself," transforming TV into a theoretical object.
While the generational divide in many ways structures the relation of the intellectual to television and in fact has much to do with TV's enunciative strategies,
generational difference has worked to my benefit. My commitment to thinking about television came about for one very specific reason, and I am intellectually indebted
to that delightful circumstance of my life. I have two intelligent, independent children who watched television critically and parodically, and who loved Shakespeare,
calculus, and chemistry at the same time. It all began in the early 70s with amidst a liberal context of civil rights protests, debates about the Vietnam War
and violence, that resulted in most academics forbidding their children to watch television or play with toy guns and soldiers. (The old "effects" arguments, with statistics
wielded by philosophers and semioticians in heated debates, determined TV censorship by intellectuals and parents. Equally operative was the always/already
disavowal of the intelligentsia: "But don't watch [have a] television [set]."yf
When I would walk into the den and condescendingly trash that aggressive program, the favorite (or whatever happened to be onyf 5 R E D Q G ' D H Z R X O G
point out the knee jerkiness of my predictable and irritating response, largely based on lack of any knowledge of television. I appreciated TV, automatically, in a
glance, when I cooked, ironed, or performed other domestic tasks, and watched it gratefully whenever I was single parent tired. Gradually, I developed a critical
rather than dismissive attitude toward television. And, because watching TV (and studying all those episodes of Lucyyf P D G H P H D Q [ L R X V , Z D V I L Q D O O \ O H G W R ) U H X G
V
texts on anxiety. Rob and Dae are now at college, with no time for television, while I edit this book and watch the delayed 1988 TV season, fortunately not perversely
awaiting, as I did last year at the same time, catastrophes Page 13
to use as examples for my project. The new season is a massive return to sitcoms. I wonder. Is this the 80s? Or the 50s? Page 14
This paper takes a rather circuitous route to get to the point. I'm not sure that banality can have a point, any more than cultural studies can properly constitute its
theoretical object. My argument have a point, but one that takes the form of pursuing an aim rather than reaching a conclusion. Quite simply, I wanted to come to
terms with my own irritation about two developments in recent cultural studies.
One was Jean Baudrillard's revival of the term "banality" to frame a theory of media. It is an interesting theory that establishes a tension between everyday life and
catastrophic events, banality and "fatality" using television as a metonym of the problems that result. Yet why should such a classically dismissive term as "banality"
appear to establish, yet again, a frame of reference for discussing popular culture?
The other development has occurred in the quite different context that John Fiske calls "British Cultural Studies," and is much more difficult to specify. Judith
Williamson, however, has bluntly described something that also bothers me: "left wing academics ... picking out strands of 'subversion' in every piece of pop culture
from Street Style to Soap Opera." In this kind of analysis of everyday life, it seems to be that actively strives to achieve ''banality," rather than investing it
negatively in the object of study.
These developments are not related, let alone opposed (as, say, pessimistic and optimistic approaches to popular cultureyf 7 K H \ D O V R L Q Y R O Y H G L I I H U H Q W N L Q G V R I
events. "Baudrillard" is an author, British Cultural Studies is a complex historical and political movement as well as a library of texts. But irritation may create relations
where none need necessarily exist. To attempt to do so is the real point of this paper.
I want to begin with a couple of anecdotes about banality, fatality, and television. But since storytelling itself is a popular practice that varies from culture to culture, I
shall again define my terms. My impression is that American culture easily encourages people to assume that a first person Page 15
anecdote is primarily oriented toward the emotive and conative functions, in Jakobson's terms, of communication: that is, toward speaker expressive and addressee
connective activity, or an I/you axis in discourse. However, I take anecdotes, or yarns, to be primarily referential. They are oriented futuristically towards the
construction of a precise, local, and discursive context, of which the anecdote then functions as a . That is to say, anecdotes for me are not
expressions of personal experience but allegorical expositions of a model of the way the world can be said to be working. So anecdotes need not be true stories, but
they must be functional in a given exchange.
My first anecdote is a fable of origin.
TV came rather late to Australia: 1956 in the cities, later still in the country regions where the distance between towns was immense for the technology of that time. So
it was in the early 1960s that in a remote mountain village where few sounds disturbed the peace except for the mist rolling down to the valley, the murmur of the
wireless, the laugh of the kookaburra, the call of the bellbird, the humming of chainsaws and lawnmowers, and the occasional rustle of a snake in the grass the
pervasive silence was shattered by the voice of Lucille Ball.
In the memory of many Australians, television came as Lucy, and Lucy television. There's a joke in where the last white frontiersman (Paul
Hoganyf L V P D N L Q J I L U V W F R Q W D F W Z L W K P R G H U Q L W \ L Q K L V 1 H Z < R U N K R W H O D Q G K H
V L Q W U R G X F H G W R W K H 7 9 V H W % X W K H D O U H D G \ N Q R Z V 7 9 , V D Z W K D W W Z H Q W \ \ H D U V D J R D W V o
and so's place." He sees the title, " ," and says, "Yeah, that's what I saw." It's a throwaway line that at one level works as a formal definition of the ''media
recycle" genre of the film itself. But in terms of the dense cultural punning that characterizes the film, it's also, for Australians, a very precise historical joke. Hogan was
himself one of the first major Australian TV stars, finding instant stardom in the late 1960s by faking his way onto a talent quest show, and then abusing the judges.
Subsequently, he took on the Marlboro Man in a massive cigarette advertising battle that lasted long enough to convert the slogan of Hogan's commercials ("Anyhow,
have a Winfield"yf L Q W R D S U R Y H U E L Q V F U X W D E O H W R I R U H L J Q H U V 6 R + R J D Q
V S H U V R Q D D O U H D G \ L Q F D U Q D W H V D S R S X O L V W P \ W K R I L Q G L J H Q R X V $ X V W U D O L D Q U H V S R Q V H W R / X F \ D V
synecdoche of all American media culture.
But in the beginning was Lucy, and I think she is singled out in memory since obviously it was not the only program available because of the impact of her voice. The
introduction of TV in Australia led not only to the usual debates about the restructuring of family life and domestic space, and to predictable fears that the Australian
"accent" in language and culture might be abolished, but also to a specific local version of anxiety about the effects of TV on children. In "Situation Comedy, Feminism,
and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy," Patricia Mellencamp discusses the spectacle Page 16
of female comedians in the American 1950s "being out of control via language (Gracieyf R U E R G \ / X F \ \f." In my memory, Lucy herself combines both functions. Lucy
was heard by many Australians as a screaming hysteric: as ''voice," she was "seen" to be a woman out of control in both language body. So there was concern
that Lucy television would, by some mimesis or contagion of the voice, metabolically transform Australian children from the cheeky little larrikins we were expected to
be into ragingly hyperactive little psychopaths.
My own memory of this lived theoretical debate goes something like this. My mother and I loved Lucy, my father loathed "that noise." So once a week, there would be
a small domestic catastrophe, which soon became routinized, repetitive, banal. I'd turn Lucy on, my father would start grumbling, Mum would be washing dishes in the
next room, ask me to raise the volume, I'd do it, Dad would start yelling, Mum would yell back, I'd creep closer to the screen to hear, until finally Lucy couldn't make
herself heard, and I'd retire in disgust to my bedroom, to the second best of reading a novel. On one of the rare occasions when all this noise had led to a serious
quarrel, I went up later as the timid little voice of reason, asking my father why, since it was only half an hour, did make such a lot of noise. He said that the
American voices (never then heard "live" in our small townyf U H P L Q G H G K L P R I W K H 3 D F L I L F Z D U $ Q G W K D W V X U H O \ D I W H U D O O W K H V H \ H D U V W K H U H Z H U H V R P H W K L Q J V W K D W L Q W K H
quiet of his own home, a man had a right to try to forget.
Looking back from the contradictions of the present, I can define from this story a contradiction which persists in different forms today. On the one hand, Lucy had a
galvanizing and emancipating effect because of her loquacity and her relentless tonal insistence. Especially for Australian women and children, in a society where
women were talkative with each other and laconic with men, men were laconic with each other and catatonic with women, and children were seen but not heard. Lucy
was one of the first signs of a growing sense that women making a lot of noise did not need to be confined to the haremlike rituals of morning and afternoon tea or the
washing up. On the other hand, my father's response appears, retrospectively, as prescient as well as understandable. The coming of Lucy, and of American TV, was
among the first explicit announcements to a general public still vaguely imagining itself as having been "British" that Australia was now (as it had, in fact, been anyway
since 1942yf K R R N H G L Q W R W K H P H G L D Q H W Z R U N R I D G L I I H U H Q W Z D U P D F K L Q H .
My second anecdote follows logically from that, but is set in another world. Ten years later, after a whole cultural revolution in Australia and another war with the
Americans in Asia, I saw a TV catastrophe one banal Christmas Eve. There we were in Sydney, couch potatoing away, when the evening was shattered by that
sentence which takes different forms in different cultures but is still perhaps the one sentence always capable of reminding people everywhere within reach of TV of a
common and Page 17
vulnerable humanity "We interrupt this transmission for a special news flash."
Usually on hearing that, you get an adrenaline rush, you freeze, you wait to hear what's happened, then the mechanisms of bodily habituation to crisis take over to see
you through the time ahead. This occasion was alarmingly different. The announcer actually stammered: "Er ... um ... something's happened to Darwin." Darwin is the
capital of Australia's far north. Most Australians know nothing about it, and live thousands of miles away. It takes days to get into by land or sea, and in a well
entrenched national imaginary it is the "gateway" to Asia, and in its remoteness and "vulnerability," the likely port of a conventional invasion. This has usually been a
racist nightmare about the "yellow peril" sweeping down, but it does also have a basis in flat map logic. There's no one south of Australia but penguins.
So people panicked, and waited anxiously for details. But the catastrophe was that there was . Now, this was not catastrophe TV like the
explosion of the space shuttle but a catastrophe of and TV. There were no pictures, no reports, just which had long ceased to be coded as
paradisal, as it was in my fable of origin, but was now the very definition of a state of total emergency. The announcer's stammer was devastating. He had lost control
of all the mechanisms for assuring credibility; his palpable personal distress had exposed us, unbelievably, to something like a . When those of us who could
sleep woke up the next day to find everyday life going on as usual, we realized it couldn't have been World War III. But it took another twenty four hours for "true"
news to be reestablished, and to reassure us that Darwin had merely been wiped out by a cyclone. Whereupon we went into the "natural disaster" genre of TV living,
and banality, except for the victims, resumed. But in the aftermath, a question surfaced. Why had such a cyclone sensitive city not been forewarned? It was a very big
cyclone someone should have seen it coming.
Two rumors did the rounds. One was an oral rumor, or a folk legend. The cyclone took Darwin by surprise because it was a Russian weather warfare experiment that
had either gone wrong or in the more menacing variant actually found its target. The other rumor made its way into writing in the odd newspaper. There had been
foreknowledge: indeed, even after the cyclone there was a functioning radio tower and an airstrip which might have sent news out straight away. But these belonged to
an American military installation near Darwin, which was not supposed to be there. And in the embarrassment of realizing the scale of the disaster to come, someone
somewhere had made a decision to say nothing in the hope of averting discovery. If this was true, "they" needn't have worried. The story was never, to my knowledge,
pursued further. We didn't really care. If there had been such an installation, it wasn't newsworthy; true or false, it wasn't catastrophic; true or false, it merged with the
routine stories of conspiracy Page 18
and paranoia in urban everyday life; and, true or false, it was compared with the Darwin fatality count and the human interest stories to be had from cyclone survivors
just too banal to be of interest.
My anecdotes are also banal, in that they mark out a televisual contradiction which is overfamiliar as both a theoretical dilemma and an everyday experience. It is the
contradiction between one's pleasure, fascination, thrill, and sense of "life," even birth, in popular culture and the deathly shadows of war, invasion, emergency, crisis,
and terror that perpetually haunt the networks. Sometimes there seems to be nothing more to say about that "contradiction," in theory, yet as a phase of collective
experience it does keep coming back around. So I want to use these two anecdotes now to frame a comparison between the late work of Baudrillard and some
aspects of "British" (or Anglo Australianyf F X O W X U D O V W X G L H s two theoretical projects that have had something to say about the problem. I begin with Baudrillard, because
"banality" is a working concept in his lexicon, whereas it is not a significant term for the cultural studies that today increasingly cite him.
In Baudrillard's terms, my anecdotes marked out a historical shift between a period of concern about TV's effects on the real which is thereby assumed to be distinct
from its representation (the momentyf and a time in which TV the real to the extent that any interruption in its processes of doing so is experienced as
more catastrophic in the lounge room than a "real" catastrophe elsewhere. So I have simply defined a shift between a regime of production and a regime of simulation.
This would also correspond to a shift between a more or less real Cold War ethos, where American military presence in your country could be construed as friendly or
hostile, but you thought you should have a choice, and that the choice mattered; and a pure war (or, simulated chronic cold waryf H W K R V L Q Z K L F K 5 X V V L D Q F \ F O R Q H V R U
American missiles are completely interchangeable in a local imaginary of terror, and the choice between them is meaningless.
This analysis could be generated from Baudrillard's major thesis in (1976yf 7 K H O D W H U % D X G U L O O D U G Z R X O G K D Y H O L W W O H I X U W K H U L Q W H U H V W L Q
my story about Lucy's voice and domestic squabbles in an Australian country town, but might still be mildly amused by the story of a city disappearing for thirty six
hours because of a breakdown in communications. However, where I would want to say that this event was for participants a real, if mediated, experience of
catastrophe, he could say that it was just a final flicker of real reality. With the subsequent installation of a global surveillance regime through the satellization of the
world, the disappearance of Darwin could never occur again.
So Baudrillard would collapse the "contradiction" that I want to maintain: and he would make each polar term of my stories (the everyday and the catastrophic, the
exhilarating and the frightful, the emancipatory and the Page 19
terroristicyf L Q Y D G H D Q G F R Q W D P L Q D W H L W V R W K H U L Q D S U R F H V V R I P X W X D O H [ D F H U E D W L R Q 7 K L V L V D Y L U D O U D W K H U W K D Q D Q D W R P L F P R G H O R I F U L V L V L Q H Y H U \ G D \ O L I H , I I R U $ Q G U H D V
Huyssen, modernism as an adversary culture constitutes itself in an "anxiety of contamination" by its Other (mass cultureyf , the Baudrillardian text on (or ofyf P D V V
culture is constituted by perpetually the contamination of one of any two terms by its other.
So like all pairs of terms in Baudrillard's work, the values "banality" and "fatality" chase each other around his pages following the rule of dyadic reversibility. Any one
term can be hyperbolically intensified until it turns into its opposite. Superbanality, for example, becomes fatal, and a super fatality would be banal. It's a very simple
but, when well done, dizzying logico semantic game which makes Baudrillard's books very easy to understand, but any one term most difficult to define. A
complication in this case is that "banality" and "fatality" chase each other around two books, (1979yf D Q G (1983yf .
One way to elucidate such a system is to imagine a distinction between two sets of two terms for example, "fatal charm" and "banal seduction." Fatal charm can be
seductive in the old sense of an irresistible force, exerted by someone who desires nothing except to play the game in order to capture and to immolate the desire of
the other. That's what's fatal about it. Banal seduction, on the other hand, does involve desire: desire for, perhaps, an immovable object to overcome. That's what's
fatal for it. Baudrillard's next move is to claim that both of these strategies are finished. The only irresistible force today is that of the moving as it flees and
evades the subject. This is the "force" of the sex object, of the silent zombie masses, and of femininity (not necessarily detached by Baudrillard from real women, but
certainly detached from feministsyf .
This structure is, I think, a "fatal" travesty, or a "seduction" of the terms of Althusserian epistemology and theory of moving objects. In , the
travesty is rewritten in terms of a theory of global catastrophe. The human species has passed the dead point of history: we are living out the ecstasy of permanent
catastrophe, which slows down as it becomes more and more intense ( , slow motion, or slowing motion catastropheyf X Q W L O W K H
supereventfulness of the event approaches the uneventfulness of absolute inertia, and we begin to live everyday catastrophe as an endless dead point, or a perpetual
freeze frame.
This is the kind of general scenario produced in Baudrillard's work by the logic of mutual contamination. However, an examination of the local occurrences of the terms
"banal" and "fatal" in both books suggests that "banality" is associated, quite clearly and conventionally, with negative aspects of media overrepresentation, excessive
visibility, information overload, an obscene plenitude of images, a gross platitudinousness of the all pervasive present.
On the other hand, and even though there is strictly no past and no future in Baudrillard's system, he uses "fatality" as both a nostalgic and a Page 20
futuristic term for invoking a classical critical value, (redefined as a senseless but still rule governed principle of selectivenessyf ) D W D O L W \ L V Q R V W D O J L F L Q
the sense that it invokes in the text, for the present, an "aristocratic" ideal of maintaining an elite, arbitrary, and avowedly artificial order. It is futuristic because
Baudrillard suggests that in an age of overload, rampant banality, and catastrophe (which have become at this stage equivalents of each otheryf W K H O D V W 3 D V F D O L D Q Z D J H U
may be to bet on the return, in the present, of what can only be a simulacrum of the past. When fatal charm can simulate seducing banal seduction, you have a fatal
strategy. The animating myth of this return is to be, in opposition to critical philosophies of Difference (which have now become identicalyf D P \ W K R I that is,
Destiny.
So read in one sense, Baudrillard's theory merely calls for an aesthetic order (fatalityyf W R G H D O Z L W K P D V V F X O W X U D O D Q D U F K \ E D Q D O L W \ \f. What makes his appeal more
charming than most other tirades about the decay of standards is that it can be read in the opposite sense. The "order" being called for is radically decadent,
superbanal. However, there is a point at which the play stops.
In one of Baudrillard's anecdotes (an enunciative of his theoryyf V H W L Q V R P H Y D J X H F R X U W O \ F R Q W H [ W Z L W K W K H D P E L H Q F H R I D P L d eighteenth century
French epistolary novel, a man is trying to seduce a woman. She asks, "Which part of me do you find most seductive?" He replies, "Your eyes." Next day, he receives
an envelope. Inside, instead of the letter, he finds a bloody eye. Analyzing his own fable, Baudrillard points out that in the obviousness, the literalness of her gesture, the
woman has purloined the place of her seducer.
The man is the banal seducer. She, the fatal seducer, sets him a trap with her question as he moves to entrap her. In the platitudinous logic of court liness, he can only
reply "Your eyes" rather than naming some more vital organ which she might not have been able to post since the eye is the window of the soul. Baudrillard concludes
that the woman's literalness is fatal to the man's banal figuration: she loses an eye, but he loses . He can never again "cast an eye" on another woman without
thinking literally of the bloody eye that replaced the letter. So Baudrillard's final resolution of the play between banality and fatality is this: a banal theory assumes, like
the platitudinous seducer, that the subject is more powerful than the object. A fatal theory knows, like the woman, that the object is always than the subject ("
..."yf .
Nonetheless, in making the pun "she loses an eye, but he loses face," Baudrillard in fact enunciatively reoccupies the place of control of meaning by literalizing the
woman's gesture, and returning it to figuration. Only the pun makes the story work as a fable of seduction, by draining the "blood" from the eye. Without it, we would
merely be reading a horror story (or a feminist moral taleyf 6 R L W I R O O R Z V W K D W % D X G U L O O D U G
V I L J X U D W L R n Page 21
is, in fact, "fatal" to the woman's literality, and to a literal feminist reading of her story that might presumably ensue. In the process, the privilege of "knowing" the
significance of the woman's fatal banal gesture is securely restored to metalanguage, and to the subject of exegesis.
Recent cultural studies offers something completely different. It speaks not of restoring discrimination but of encouraging cultural democracy. It respects difference and
sees mass culture not as a vast banality machine but as raw material made available for a variety of popular practices.
In saying "it," I am treating a range of quite different texts and arguments as a single entity. This is always imprecise, polemically "unifying," and unfair to any individual
item. But sometimes, when distractedly reading magazines such as or from the last couple of years, flipping through ,
or scanning the pop theory pile in the bookstore, I get the feeling that somewhere in some English publisher's vault there is a master disk from which thousands of
versions of the same article about pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption are being run off under different names with minor variations. Americans and
Australians are recycling this basic pop theory article, too: with the perhaps major variation that English pop theory still derives at least nominally from a Left popul
attempting to salvage a sense of life from the catastrophe of Thatcherism. Once cut free from that context, as commodities always are, and recycled in quite different
political cultures, the vestigial force of that populism tends to disappear or mutate.
This imaginary pop theory article might respond to my television anecdotes by bracketing the bits about war and death as a sign of paranoia about popular culture, by
pointing out that it's a mistake to confuse conditions of production with the subsequent effects of images, and by noting that with TV one may always be "ambivalent."
It would certainly stress, with the Lucy story, the subversive pleasure of the female spectators. (My father could perhaps represent an Enlightenment paternalism of
reason trying to make everything cohere in a model of social totality.yf : L W K W K H ' D U Z L Q V W R U \ L W Z R X O G L Q V L V W R Q W K H F U H D W L Y L W \ R I W K H F R Q V X P H U V S H F W D W R U D Q G P D \ E H
have us distractedly zapping from channel to channel during the catastrophe instead of being passively hooked into the screen, and then resisting the war machine with
our local legends and readings. The article would then restate, using a mix of different materials as illustration, the enabling theses of contemporary cultural studies.
In order to move away now from reliance on imaginary bad objects, I'll refer to an excellent real article which gives a summary of these theses Mica Nava's
"Consumerism and Its Contradictions." Among the enabling theses and they been enabling are these: consumers are not "cultural dopes" but active, critical users
of mass culture; consumption practices cannot be derived from or reduced to a mirror of production; consumer practice is "far more than just economic activity: it is
also about dreams Page 22
and consolation, communication and confrontation, image and identity. Like sexuality, it consists of a multiplicity of fragmented and contradictory discourses."
I'm not now concerned to contest these theses. For the moment, I'll buy the lot. What I'm interested in is first, the sheer proliferation of the restatements, and second,
the emergence in some of them of a of the ideal knowing subject of cultural studies.
John Fiske's historical account in "British Cultural Studies and Television" produces one such restatement and restriction. The social terrain of the beginning of his
article is occupied by a version of the awesomely complex Althusserian subject in ideology, and by a summary of Gramsci on hegemony. Blending these produces a
notion of subjectivity as a dynamic field, in which all sorts of permutations are possible at different moments in an endless process of production, contestation, and
reproduction of social identities. By the end of the article, the field has been vastly simplified: there are "the dominant classes" (exerting hegemonic forceyf D Q G W K H
people" (making their own meanings and constructing their own culture "within, and sometimes against," the culture provided for themyf \f.
Cultural studies for Fiske aims to understand and encourage cultural democracy. One way of understanding the is " " finding out what the people
say and think about their culture. But the methods cited are "voxpop" techniques common to journalism and empirical sociology interviewing, collecting background,
analyzing statements made spontaneously by, or solicited from, informants. So the choice of the term "ethnography" for these practices emphasizes a possible "ethnic"
gap between the cultural student and the culture studied. The ''understanding" and "encouraging" subject may share some aspects of that culture, but
is momentarily located outside it. "The people" is a voice, or a a voice, cited in a discourse of exegesis. For example, Fiske cites
"Lucy," a fourteen year old fan of Madonna ("She's tarty and seductive ... but it looks alright when she does it, you know, what I mean ..."yf D Q G W K H Q J R H V R Q W R
translate, and diagnose, what she means: "Lucy's problems probably stem from her recognition that marriage is a patriarchal institution and, as such, is threatened by
Madonna's sexuality" (273yf .
If this is again a process of embedding in metadiscourse a sample of raw female speech, it is also a perfectly honest approach for any academic analyst of culture to
take. It differs from a discourse that simply appeals to "experience" to validate and universalize its own conclusions. However, such honesty should also require some
analysis of the analyst's own institutional and "disciplinary" position perhaps some recognition, too, of the double play of transference. (Lucy tells him her pleasure in
Madonna: but what is his pleasure in Lucy's?yf 7 K L V N L Q G R I U H F R J Q L W L R Q L V U D U H O \ P D G H L Q S R S X O L V W S R O H P L F V : K D W W D N H V L W V S O D F H L V I L U V W D F L W L Q J R I S R S X O D U Y R L F H V W K H
informantsyf D Q D F W R I W U D Q V O D W L R Q D Q G F R P P H Q W D U \ D Q G W K H Q D S O D y Page 23
of between the knowing subject of cultural studies and a collective subject, "the people."
In Fiske's text, however, "the people" have no necessary defining characteristics except an indomitable capacity to "negotiate" readings, generate new interpretations,
and remake the materials of culture. This is also, of course, the function of cultural studies itself (and in Fiske's version, the study does include a "semiotic analysis of the
text'' to explore meanings are made [272]yf 6 R D J D L Q V W W K H K H J H P R Q L F I R U F H R I W K H G R P L Q D Q W F O D V V H V W K H S H R S O H L Q I D F W U H S U H V H Q W W K H P R V W F U H D W L Y H H Q H U J L H V D Q G
functions of critical reading. In the end they are not simply the cultural student's object of study and his native informants. The people are also the textually delegated,
allegorical emblem of the critic's own activity. Their may be constructed as other, but it is used as the ethnographer's mask.
Once "the people" are both a source of authority for a text and a figure of its own critical activity, the populist enterprise is not only circular but (like most empirical
sociologyyf Q D U F L V V L V W L F L Q V W U X F W X U H 7 K H R U L ] L Q J W K H S U R E O H P V W K D W H Q V X U H L V R Q H Z D y in my view, an important way to break out of the circuit of repetition. Another is to
project elsewhere a misunderstanding or discouraging Other figure (often that feminist or Marxist Echo, the blast from the pastyf W R Q H F H V V L W D W H D Q G H Q D E O H P R U H
repetition.
The opening chapter of Iain Chambers's provides an example of this, as well as a definition of what counts as "popular" knowledge that is
considerably more restrictive than John Fiske's. Chambers argues that in looking at popular culture, we should not subject individual signs and single texts to the
"contemplative stare of official culture." Instead, it is a practice of "distracted reception" that really characterizes the subject of "popular epistemology." For Chambers,
this distraction has consequences for the practice of writing. Writing can imitate popular culture (lifeyf E \ I R U H [ D P S O H Z U L W L Q J W K U R X J K T X R W D W L R Q V D Q G U H I X V L Q J W R
"explain ... references fully." To explain would be to reimpose the contemplative stare and adopt the authority of the "academic mind."
Chambers's argument emerges from an interpretation of the history of subcultural practices, especially in music. I've argued elsewhere my disagreement with his
attempt to use that history to generalize about popular culture in The Present. Here, I want to suggest that an image of the subject of pop epistemology as casual and
"distracted" obliquely entails a revival of the figure that Andreas Huyssen, Tania Modleski, and Patrice Petro have described in various contexts as "mass culture as
woman." Petro, in particular, further points out that the contemplation/distraction opposition is historically implicated in the construction of the "female spectator" as
site, and target, of a theorization of modernity by male intellectuals in Weimar.
There are many versions of a "distraction" model available in cultural studies today: there are housewives phasing in and out of TV or flipping through magazines in
laundromats as well as pop intellectuals playing with Page 24
quotes. In Chambers's text, which is barely concerned with women at all, distraction is not presented as a female characteristic. Yet today's recycling of Weimar's
distraction nonetheless has the "contours," in Petro's phrase, of a familiar female stereotype distracted, absent minded, insouciant, vague, flighty, skimming from image
to image. The rush of associations runs irresistibly toward a figure of mass culture not as woman but, more specifically, as bimbo.
In the texts Petro analyzes, "contemplation" (of distraction in the cinemayf L V D V V X P H G W R E H W K H S U H U R J D W L Y H R I P D O H L Q W H O O H F W X D O D X G L H Q F H V , Q S R S H S L V W H P R O R J \ D
complication is introduced via the procedures of projection and identification that Elaine Showalter describes in "Critical Cross Dressing." The knowing subject of
popular epistemology no longer contemplates "mass culture" as bimbo, but takes on the assumed mass cultural characteristics in the writing of his own text. Since the
object of projection and identification in post subcultural theory tends to be black music and "style" rather than the European (and literaryyf I H P L Q L Q H Z H I L Q G D Q
actantial hero of knowledge emerging in the form of the as bimbo.
However, I think the problem with the notion of pop epistemology is not really, in this case, a vestigial antifeminism in the concept of distraction. The problem is that in
antiacademic pop theory writing (much of which, like Chambers's book, circulates as textbooks with exam and essay topics at the end of each chapteryf D V W \ O L V W L F
enactment of the "popular" as distracted, scanning the surface, and short on attention span, performs a retrieval, at the level of practice, of the
thesis of "cultural dopes." In the critique of which going right back to the early work of Stuart Hall, not to mention Raymond Williams the project of cultural studies
effectively and rightly began.
One could claim that this interpretation is possible only if one continues to assume that the academic traditions of "contemplation" really do define intelligence, and that
to be "distracted" can therefore only mean being dopey. I would reply that as long as we accept to restate the alternatives in those terms, that is precisely the
assumption we continue to recycle. No matter which of the terms we validate, the contemplation/distraction, academic/popular oppositions can serve only to limit and
distort the possibilities of popular practice. Furthermore, I think that this return to the postulate of cultural dopism in the of writing may be one reason why
pop theory is now generating over and over again the same article. If a cultural dopism is being enunciatively performed (and valorizedyf L Q D G L V F R X U V H W K D W W U L H V W R
contest it, then the argument in fact move on, but can only retrieve its point of departure as "banality" (a word pop theorists don't normally useyf L Q W K H Q H J D W L Y H
sense.
For the thesis of cultural studies as Fiske and Chambers present it runs perilously close to this kind of formulation: people in modern mediatized societies are complex
and contradictory, mass cultural texts are complex Page 25
and contradictory, therefore people using them produce complex and contradictory culture. To add that this popular culture has critical and resistant elements is
tautological unless one (or a predicated someone, that Other who needs to be toldyf K D V D F R Q F H S W R I F X O W X U H V R U X G L P H Q W D U \ W K D W L W H [ F O X G H V F U L W L F L V P D Q G U H V L V W D Q F H
from the practice of everyday life.
Given the different values ascribed to mass culture in Baudrillard's work and in pop theory, it is tempting to make a distracted contrast between them in terms of elitism
and populism. However, they are not symmetrical opposites.
Cultural studies posits a "popular" subject "supposed to know" in a certain manner, which the subject of populist theory then claims to understand (Fiskeyf R U P L P L F
(Chambersyf % D X G U L O O D U G
V H O L W L V P K R Z H Y H U L V Q R W D Q H O L W L V P R I D N Q R Z L Q J V X E M H F W R I W K H R U \ E X W D Q H O L W L V P R I W K H which is forever, and actively, evasive. There is
a hint of "distraction" here, an echo between the problematics of woman and literalness and mass culture as bimbo which deserves further contemplation. A final twist
is that for Baudrillard, the worst (that is, most effectiveyf H O L W L V P R I W K H R E M H F W F D Q E H F D O O H G S U H F L V H O \
W K H R U \ 7 K H R U \ L V X Q G H U V W R R G D V D Q R E M H F W L I L H G D Q G R E M H F W L I \ L Q J
(never "objective"yf I R U F H V W U D W H J L F D O O \ H Q J D J H G L Q D Q H Y H U P R U H L Q W H Q V H S U R F H V V R I F R P P R G L I L F D W L R Q / L N H G L V W U D F W L R Q L W L V G L V W L Q J X L V K H G E \ W K H U D S L G L W \ R I L W V ,
rather than by a concentrated pursuit.
However, it is remarkable, given the differences between them and the crisis ridden society that each in its own way addresses, that neither of the projects I've
discussed leaves much place for an unequivocally pained, unambivalently discontented, or momentarily subject. It isn't just negligence. There is an active
process going on in both of discrediting by direct dismissal (Baudrillardyf R U F R Y H U W L Q V F U L S W L R Q D V 2 W K H U F X O W X U D O V W X G L H V \f the voices of grumpy feminists and cranky
leftists ("Frankfurt School" can do duty for bothyf 7 R G L V F U H G L W V X F K Y R L F H V L V D V , X Q G H U V W D Q G L W R Q H R I W K H L P P H G L D W H S R O L W L F D O I X Q F W L R Q V R I W K H F X U U H Q W E R R P L Q F X O W X U D O
studies (as distinct from the intentionality of projects invested by ityf 7 R G L V F U H G L W D Y R L F H L V V R P H W K L Q J Y H U \ G L I I H U H Q W I U R P G L V S O D F L Q J D Q D Q D O \ V L V Z K L F K K D V E H F R P H
outdated, or revising a strategy which no longer serves its purpose. It is to character ize a fictive position from which anything said can be dismissed as already heard.
Baudrillard's hostility to the discourses of political radicalism is perfectly clear and brilliantly played out. It is a little too aggressive to accuse cultural studies of playing
much the same game. Cultural studies is a humane and optimistic discourse, trying to derive its values from materials and conditions already available to people. On the
other hand, it can become an apologetic "yes, ..." discourse that most often proceeds admitting class, racial, and sexual oppressions finding the inevitable
saving grace when its theoretical presuppositions should require it at least to do both simultaneously, even "dialectically." And in practice the "but ..." that is Page 26
to say, the argumentative rhetoric has been increasingly addressing not the hegemonic force of the "dominant classes" but other critical theories (vulgar feminism, the
Frankfurt Schoolyf L Q V F U L E H G D V P L V X Q G H U V W D Q G L Q J S R S X O D U F X O W X U H .
Both discourses share a tendency toward reductionism political as well as theoretical. To simplify matters myself, I'd say that where the fatal strategies of Baudrillard
keep returning us to his famous Black Hole a scenario that is so grim, obsessive, and, in its enunciative strategies, maniacally overcoherent that instead of speaking, a
woman must to be heard the voxpop style of cultural studies is on the contrary offering us the sanitized world of a deodorant commercial where
there's always a way to redemption. There's something sad about that, because cultural studies emerged from a real attempt to give voice to much grittier experiences
of class, race, and gender.
Yet the sense of frustration that some of us who would inscribe our own work as cultural studies feel with the terms of present debate can be disabling. If one is equally
uneasy about fatalistic theory on the one hand and about cheerily "making the best of things" on the other, then it is a poor solution to consent to confine oneself to (and
inyf W K H G R X U S R V L W L R Q R I U H E X N L Q J E R W K .
In , Michel de Certeau provides a more positive approach to the politics of theorizing popular culture, and to the particular problems I
have discussed. One of the pleasures of this text for me is the range of moods that it admits to a field of study which surprisingly, since "everyday life" is at issue
often seems to be occupied only by cheerleaders and prophets of doom. So from it I shall borrow in a contemplative rather than a distracted spirit two quotations to
modify the sharp oppositions I've created, before discussing his work in more detail.
The first quotation is in fact from Jacques Sojcher's . De Certeau cites Sojcher after arguing for a double process of mobilizing the "weighty
apparatus" of theories of ordinary language to analyze everyday practices, seeking to restore to those practices their logical and cultural legitimacy. He then uses
the Sojcher quotation to insist that in this kind of research, everyday practices will "alternately exacerbate our logics. Its regrets are like those of the poet,
and like him, it struggles against oblivion." So I will use his quotation in turn as a response to the terrifying and unrelenting coherence of Baudrillard's fatal strategies.
Sojcher:
And I forgot the elements of chance introduced by circumstances, clam or haste, sun or cold, dawn or dusk, the taste of strawberries or abandonment, the half understood
message, the front page of newspapers, the voice on the telephone, the most anodyne conversation, the most anonymous man or woman, everything that speaks, makes noise,
passes by, touches us lightly, meets us head on. (xviyf Page 27
The second quotation comes from a discussion of "Freud and the Ordinary Man," and the difficult problems that arise when "elitist writing uses the 'vulgar' [or, I would
add, the 'feminine'] speaker as a disguise for a metalanguage about itself." For de Certeau, a recognition that the "ordinary" and the "popular" can act as a mask in
analytical discourse does imply that the study of popular culture is impossible except as recuperation. Instead, it demands that we show the ordinary
introduces itself into analytical techniques, and this requires a displacement in the institutional practice of knowledge:
Far from arbitrarily assuming the privilege of speaking in the name of the ordinary (it cannot spokenyf R U F O D L P L Q J W R E H L Q W K D W J H Q H U D O S O D F H W K D W Z R X O G E H D I D O V H P \ V W L F L V P \f,
or, worse, offering up a hagiographic everydayness for its edifying value, it is a matter of restoring historicity to the movement which leads analytical procedures back to their
frontiers, to the point where they are changed, indeed disturbed, by the ironic and mad banality that speaks in "Everyman" in the sixteenth century, and that has returned in the
final stages of Freud's knowledge. ... (5yf
In this way, he suggests, the ordinary "can reorganize the place from which discourse is produced." I think that this includes being very careful about our enunciative
and "anecdotal" strategies more careful than much cultural studies has been in its mimesis of a popular voice and their relation to the institutional we may
occupy as we speak.
In spirit, de Certeau's work is much more in sympathy with the impulse of cultural studies than with apocalyptic thinking. The motto of his book could be the
sentence "People have to make do with what they have" (18yf , W V ) U H Q F K W L W O H L V arts of making, arts of doing, arts of making do. Its project, however, is
not a theory of popular culture but "a science of singularity": a science of the relationship that links "everyday pursuits to particular circumstances." So the study of how
people use mass media, for example, is defined not in opposition "high" or "elite'' cultural analysis, but in connection a general study of cooking,
walking, reading, talking, shopping. A basic operation in the "science" is an incessant movement between what de Certeau calls "polemological" and "utopian" spaces
of making do (15 18yf D P R Y H P H Q W Z K L F K L Q Y R O Y H V D V P \ T X R W D W L R Q V P D \ V X J J H V W E R W K D S R H W L F V D Q G D S R O L W L F V R I S U D F W L F H .
The basic assumption of a polemological space is summed up by a quotation from a Maghrebian syndicalist at Billancourt: "They always fuck us over." This is a
sentence that seems inadmissible in contemporary cultural studies: it defines a space of struggle, and mendacity ("the strong always win, and words always deceive"yf
For the peasants of the Pernambuco region of Brazil, in de Certeau's main example, it is a socioeconomic space of innumerable conflicts in which the rich and the
police are constantly Page 28
victorious. But at the same time and in the same place, a utopian space is reproduced in the popular legends of that circulate and intensify as repression
becomes more absolute and apparently successful. De Certeau mentions the story of Frei Damiao, the charismatic hero of the region.
I would cite, as a parable of both kinds of space, a television anecdote about the Sydney Birthday Cake Scandal. In 1988, governments in Australia spent lavish sums
of money on bicentenary celebrations. But it was really the bicentenary of Sydney as the original penal colony. In 1988 "Australia" was in fact only eighty seven years
old, and so the event was widely understood to be a costly effort at simulating, rather than celebrating, a unified national history. It promoted as our fable of origin not
the federation of the colonies and the beginnings of independence (1901yf E X W W K H L Q Y D V L R Q R I $ E R U L J L Q D O $ X V W U D O L D E \ W K H % U L W L V K S H Q D O V \ V W H m and the catastrophe that,
for Aborigines, ensued.
A benevolent Sydney real estate baron proposed to build a giant birthday cake above an expressway tunnel in the most famous social wastage and devastation zone
of the city, so we could know we were having a party. The project was unveiled on a TV current affairs show, and there was an uproar not only from exponents of
good taste against kitsch. The network switchboards were jammed by people pointing out that, above the area that belongs to junkies, runaways, homeless people,
and the child as well as adult prostitution trade, a giant cake would invoke a late eighteenth century voice quite different from that of our first prison governor saying,
"Here we are in Botany Bay." It would be Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake." There was nothing casual or distracted about voxpop observation.
The baron then proposed a public competition, again via TV, to find an alternative design. There were lots of proposals: a few of us wanted to build Kafka's writing
machine from "In the Penal Colony." Others proposed an echidna, a water tower, a hypodermic, or a giant condom. The winner was a suburban rotary clothesline:
Australia's major contribution to twentieth century technology, and thus something of a symbol for the current decline in our economy. But in the end, the general
verdict was that we'd rather make do with the cake. As one person said in a voxpop segment, "At least with the cake, the truth about the party is all now out in the
open." So had the cake been built, it would have been, after all that polemological narrativity, a wildly utopian popular monument.
No monument materialized, and the story died down. However, it reappeared in a different form when an extravagant birthday party was duly held on January 26,
1988. Two and a half million people converged on a few square kilometers of harbor foreshore on a glorious summer's day to watch the ships, to splash about, to eat
and drink and fall asleep in the sun during speeches. The largest gathering of Aboriginal people since the original Invasion Day was also held, to protest the
proceedings. The party ended with a fabulous display of fireworks, choreographed to music progressing Page 29
"historically" from the eighteenth century to the present. The climax was "Power and the Passion," a famous song by Midnight Oil (Australia's favorite polemological
rock bandyf Z K L F K L V X W W H U O \ V F D W K L Q J D E R X W S X E O L F D V Z H O O D V
S R S X O D U F K D X Y L Q L V W F X O W X U H L Q X U E D Q Z K L W H $ X V W U D O L D 2 Q O \ W K R V H Z D W F K L Q J W K H F H O H E U D W L R Q V R Q 7 9 Z H U H
able to hear it and to admire the fireworks dancing to its tune. The day after, a slogan surfaced in the streets and on the walls of the city and in press cartoons: "Let
them eat fireworks."
For de Certeau, a polemological analysis is entailed by "the relation of procedures to the fields of force in which they act" (xviiyf , W P D S V W K H W H U U D L Q D Q G W K H V W U D W H J L H V R I
what he loosely calls "established powers" (in opposition not to the "powerless" but to the nonestablished, to powers and possibilities not in stable possession of a
singular of their ownyf 7 K L V D Q D O \ V L V L V D Q D F F R P S D Q L P H Q W D Q G Q R W D Q D O W H U Q D W L Y H R U D U L Y D O W R X W R S L D Q W D F W L F V D Q G V W R U L H V 3 R O H P R O R J L F D O D Q G X W R S L D Q V S D F H V D U H
distinct, but in proximity: they are "alongside" each other, not in contradiction.
These terms need clarification, since it is not just a matter of opposing major to minor, strong to weak, and romantically validating the latter. A strategy is "the calculus
of force relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institutionyf F D Q E H L V R O D W H G I U R P D Q
'environment'" (xixyf 6 W U D W H J \ S U H V X S S R V H V D S O D F H R I L W V R Z Q R Q H F L U F X P V F U L E H G D V S U R S H U D Q G V R S U H G L F D W H V D Q H [ W H U L R U D Q R X W V L G H D Q H [ F O X G H G 2 W K H U D Q G
technologies to manage this relationshipyf 7 D F W L F V K R Z H Y H U D U H O R F D O L ] H G Z D \ V R I X V L Q J Z K D W L V P D G H D Y D L O D E O e materials, opportunities, time and space for action by
the strategy of the other, and in "his" place. They depend on arts of , a seizing of propitious moments, rather than on arts of colonizing space. They use "the
place of the other," in a mode of like the street slogans in my example, of course, but more exactly like the mysterious appearance of "Power and the
Passion" in the festive choreography of State.
The "miracle" created by the appearance of this heretical song did not necessarily derive, unlike the graffiti, from a deliberate act of debunking although it's nice to think
it did. While Midnight Oil's public image in Australia is unambiguously political, it is just possible that for the ceremony planners, the reference may have been more like
Ronald Reagan's "Born in the USA": a usage crucially inattentive to detail, but functional, and not inaccurate, in mobilizing parts of a resonant myth of how Sydney feels
as a . But the intention didn't matter: the flash of hilarity and encouragement the song gave viewers otherwise mortified by the Invasion festival would be, in de
Certeau's terms, a product of "tactical" use of the show, their insinuation of polemical significance into the place of programmed pleasure.
It is in this sense of popular practice as a fleeting appropriation, one which diverts the purposive rationality of an established power, that de Certeau's theory associates
consumer "reading" with oral culture, and with the survival skills of colonized people: like dancers, travelers, poachers, and Page 30
short term tenants, or "voices" in written texts, "they move about ... passing lightly through the field of the other" (131yf , Q W K L V P R Y H P H Q W S R O H P R O R J L F D O V S D F H L V
created by an "analysis of facts'': not facts as objectively validated by a regime of place, but facts produced by of another place, and time spent on the
other's terrain. Polemological analysis in this sense accords no legitimacy to "facts." "They always fuck us over" may be a fact but not a law: utopian spaces deny the
immutability and authority of facts, and together both spaces refuse the fatality (the , "what has been spoken," destiny decreedyf R I D Q H V W D E O L V K H G R U G H U .
This general definition of popular culture as a rather than as a set of contents, a marketing category, a reflected expression of social position, or
even a "terrain" of struggle is at once in affinity with the thematics of recent cultural studies and also, I think, inflected away from some of its problems.
Like most theories of popular culture today, it does not use "folk," "primitive" or "indigenous" cultures as a lost origin or ideal model for considering "mass" cultural
experience. Unlike some of those theories, it does not thereby cease to think connections between them. Global structures of power and forces of occupation
(rationalizing time and establishing placeyf G R Q R W G U R S R X W R I W K H D Q D O \ W L F D O I L H O G 2 Q W K H F R Q W U D U \ L P S H U L D O L V P D Q G L W V N Q R Z O H G J H s ethnology, travel writing,
"communications" a field in which analysis of popular culture becomes a tactical way of operating.
De Certeau shares with many others a taste for "reading" as privileged metaphor of a . However, the reading he theorizes is not a figure of "writerly"
freedom, subjective mastery, interpretive control, or caprice. To read is to "wander through an imposed system" (169yf a text, a city street, a supermarket, a State
festivity. It is not a passive activity, but it is not independent of the system it uses. Nor does the figure of reading assert the primacy of a scriptural model for
understanding popular culture. To read is not to write and rewrite but to travel: reading borrows, without establishing a "place" of its own. As a schooled activity,
reading happens at the point where " stratification (class relationshipsyf D Q G operations (the practitioner's construction of a textyf L Q W H U V H F W 6 R D U H D G H U
V
autonomy would depend on a transformation of the social relationships that overdetermine her relation to texts. But in order not to be another normative imposition,
any "politics" of reading would also have to be articulated on an analysis of poetic practices already in operation.
In this framework, popular culture does not provide a space of exemption from socioeconomic constraints, although it may circulate stories of exemption denying the
fatality of socioeconomic systems. At the same time, it is not idealized as a reservoir or counterplace for inversions of "propriety" (distraction vs. contemplation, for
exampleyf $ V D Z D \ R I R S H U D W L Q J W K H S U D F W L F H R I H Y H U \ G D \ O L I H K D V Q R S O D F H Q R E R U G H U V Q R K L H U D U F K \ R I P D W H U L D O s Page 32
transcendental entity; it is the discourse's mode of relation to its own historicity in the moment of its utterance."
In the quotations with which I began my discussion of , the "regrets" of research involve a moment of remembering "the element of
chance introduced by circumstances ... everything that speaks, makes noises, passes by, touches us lightly, meets us head on." Since these fugitive encounters with the
other are also the very object of analysis, remembering entails not only a poetics of regret but also a history of forgetting, a "struggle against oblivion." If the taste of
strawberries or abandonment can "alternately exacerbate and disrupt our logics,'' it is not because of some essential inadequacy of "thought" (analysisyf L Q U H O D W L R Q W R
"feeling" (the popularyf D V , D L Q & K D P E H U V
V P L Q G E R G \ G X D O L V P L P S O L H V Q R U L V L W E H F D X V H R I D W D Q W D O L ] L Q J J D S L Q founding the subject's pursuit of its objects (that
famous "lack" still assumed, if parodied, by Baudrillard's theory of fatalityyf , W L V U D W K H U W K D W Z K D W P D \ W U D Q V I R U P D Q D O \ W L F D O S U R F H G X U H V D W W K H L U I U R Q W L H U V L V S U H F L V H O \ D
"banality" of which the repression has constituted an enabling, even empowering, condition for the study of popular culture.
This is a large thesis, which rests on several distinct arguments. I can mention only two, in drastically simplified form. One is a historical account of how French
scholarly interest in popular culture emerged during the nineteenth century from projects to destroy or "police" it, and how this primary "murder" inflects procedures still
used today: for example, that play of identification which leads cultural historians into writing, in the name of the "popular," other effacing forms of intellectual
autobiography. The second argument takes the form of an allegory of the relationship between European writing and "orality" since the seventeenth century. It
combines a history of a socioeconomic and technological space ("the scriptural economy"yf Z L W K D Q L Q W H U S U H W D W L R Q R I W K H H P H U J H Q F H R I P R G H U Q G L V F L S O L Q H V D Q G R I W K H
birth in death of "the other." The work of Charles Nisard ( , 1954yf L V W K H I R F X V I R U W K H I L U V W D F F R X Q W D Q G ' H I R H
V
(1719yf L V U H D G D V D Q L Q D X J X U D O W H [ W I R U W K H V H F R Q G .
They are linked by a claim that the scriptural economy entailed for intellectuals a "double isolation" from the "people" (in opposition to the "bourgeoisie"yf D Q G I U R P W K H
" " (in opposition to the "written"yf + H Q F H W K H F R Q Y L F W L R Q W K D W I D U W R R I D U D Z D \ I U R P H F R Q R P L F D Q G D G P L Q L V W U D W L Y H S R Z H U V
W K H 3 H R S O H V S H D N V
1 32yf 7 K L V
new "voxpop" (my term, not hisyf E H F R P H V E R W K D Q R E M H F W R I Q R V W D O J L F O R Q J L Q J D Q G D V R X U F H R I G L V W X U E D Q F H 7 K X V 5 R E L Q V R Q & U X V R H P D V W H U R I W K H L V O D Q G W K H Z K L W H
page, the blank space ( yf R I S U R G X F W L R Q D Q G S U R J U H V V I L Q G V K L V V F U L S W X U D O H P S L U H K D X Q W H G E \ W K H F U D F N R U W K H V P X G J H R I 0 D Q ) U L G D \
V I R R W S U L Q W R Q W K H
sand a "silent marking" of the text by what intervene ("a marking of language by the body"yf L Q W K H I L H O G R I Z U L W L Q J 4 55yf . With the figure of Man
Friday appears a new and long lasting form of alterity Page 33
defined writing: he is the other who must either cry out (a "wild" outbreak requiring treatmentyf R U P D N H K L V E R G \ W K H Y H K L F O H R I W K H G R P L Q D Q W O D Q J X D J e
becoming "his master's voice," his ventriloquist's dummy, his mask in enunciation.
If this is a large thesis, it is also today a familiar one, not least with respect to its form. Defining the "other" (with whatever value we invest in this term in different
contextsyf D V W K H U H S U H V V H d and returning in discourse has become one of the moves most tried and trusted to (reyf J H Q H U D W H Z U L W L Q J U H P R W L Y D W H V F U L S W X U D O H Q W H U S U L V H
inscribe signs, maybe myths, of critical difference. De Certeau admits as much, describing the "problematics of repression" as a type of ideological criticism that doesn't
change the workings of a system but endows the critic with an appearance of distance from it (41yf + R Z H Y H U K L V R Z Q H P S K D V L V L V R Q U H V W R U L Q J K L V W R U L F L W \ L Q R U G H U W R
think the critic's in the system, and thus the operations that may reorganize his place.
If the other figures mythically as "voice" in the scriptural economy, the voice in turn discursively figures in the primary form of quotation a mark or trace of the other.
Two ways of quoting have historically defined this voice: quotation as , using oral "relics" to fabricate texts, and quotation , marking "the
fragmented and unexpected return ... of oral relationships that are structuring but repressed by the written" (156yf ' H & H U W H D X J L Y H V W K H I L U V W D Q H L J K W H H Q W h century
name, "the "; the second he calls ''returns and turns of voices" (" "yf R U V R X Q G V R I W K H E R G \ "
The science of fables involves all "learned" hermeneutics of speech ethnology, psychiatry, pedagogy, and political or historiographical procedures which try to
"introduce the 'voice of the people' into the authorized language." As "heterologies," or "sciences of the different," their common characteristic is to try to the
voice, transforming it into readable products. In the process, the position of the other (the primitive, the child, the mad, the popular, the feminine ...yf L V G H I L Q H G Q R W R Q O \
as a "fabe," identical with "what speaks" ( yf E X W D V D I D E O H W K D W G R H V Q R W N Q R Z Z K D W L W V D \ V 7 K H W H F K Q L T X H H Q D E O L Q J W K L V S R V L W L R Q L Q J R I W K H R W K H U D Q G W K X V W K H
dominance of scriptural labor over the "fable" it citesyf L V the oral is transcribed as writing, a model is constructed to read the fable as a system, and a
meaning is produced. John Fiske's "ethnographic" fable of Lucy's response to Madonna provides a step by step example of this procedure.
The "sounds of the body" marked in language by quotation reminiscence are invoked by de Certeau in terms strongly reminiscent of a thematics of Woman
resonances, rhythms, wounds, pleasures, "solitary erections" (the of the voice, says de Certeau, makes "people" writeyf I U D J P H Q W D U \ F U L H V D Q G Z K L V S H U V
"aphasic enunciation" "everything that speaks, makes noise, passes by, touches us lightly, meets us head on." Necessarily more difficult to describe than the science of
fables, these returns and turns of voices are suggested, rather than represented, by examples: Page 34
opera (a "space for voices" that emerged at the same time as the scriptural economyyf , Marguerite Duras's "film of voices," but also the stammers,
voice gaps, vague rhythms, unexpectedly moving or memorable turns of phrase that mark our most mundane activities and haunt our everyday prose (162 63yf .
Perhaps these are the sounds that are banished from Baudrillard's story of the eye or rather by the "scriptural labor" of his subsequent exegesis. Baudrillard finds a
triumph of in the woman's substitution of an eye for the letter. So, in the manner of the science of fables, he specifies a meaning for the fable that suits the
antifemin discourse for which it acts as a pretext. However, he does this not by trying to "write" the woman's voice (bodyyf E X W R Q W K H F R Q W U D U \ E \ U H S K U D V L Q J D Q
extremist bodily gesture as an urbane triumph of writing.
But we could say instead that a rejection of is the primary reversal on which the story of the eye depends. The "translation" of the letter as body is precisely a
refusal of "literal ness." The woman sends the eye as commentary (metadiscourseyf D V % D X G U L O O D U G Q R W H V K H U J H V W X U H F L W H V D Q G P R F N V W K H V H G X F H U
V F R X U W O \ S O D W L W X G H
But the ''blood" in the envelope is also a reminder of the gap between the rhetorical promise of seduction and its material consequences, in this social code, for women.
In the epistolary novels to which Baudrillard's fable refers (see, for example, , by Crébillon filsyf W K H X V X D O
outcome is death, often by suicide, for the female co(ryf U H V S R Q G H Q W 6 R W K H H \ H V O L G L Q J R X W R I W K H H Q Y H O R S H F K H D W V G H D W K D V Z H O O D V F K H D W L Q J W K H V H G X F H U R I K L V S O H D V X U H V
He loses face, but she merely gives him the eye. And it cheats on literary narrative; the eye in this fable is the mark of a high speed, fast forward reader who tears to
the end of the story without submitting to the rituals of "writing." Something in this fable perhaps a shudder leaps from a woman to man in the circuit reserved for the
letter, but it doesn't take the form of a pun. It has a historically resonant to which Baudrillard's discourse, even as it tells the story, remains resolutely deaf.
It is crucial to say, however, that in de Certeau's framework both of the major forms of quoting are understood positively as capable (when their history is not
forgotten and the position of the "scribe" not deniedyf R I O H D Y L Q J Z D \ V I R U W K H R W K H U W R V S H D N , W L V S U H F L V H O \ W K L V F D S D F L W \ Z K L F K P D N H V S R V V L E O H D I H P L Q L V W U H D G L Q J R I
Fiske's and Baudrillard's stories, and which can enable feminist cultural criticism to resist, in turn, its own enclosure as a self perpetuating, self reiterating academic
practice.
The science of fables uses voices to proliferate discourse: in the detour through difference, quotation alters the voice that it desires and fails to reproduce, but is also
altered by it. However, unlike an exoticism which multiplies anecdotes of the same, a "heterological" science will try to admit the alteration provoked by difference. Its
reflexivity is not reinvested in a Page 35
narcissistic economy of pleasure, but works to transform the conditions that make its practices possible, and the positioning of the other these entail.
Quotation reminiscence "lets voices out": rather than generating discourse, the sounds of the body interrupt it from an "other" scene. As "letting out," this kind of
quotation seems to be involuntary: memories rush from that nonplace conveniently cast beyond the citing subject's "domain" of responsibility. However, it is in a
" '' of reminiscence that the body's sounds can interrupt discourse not only in the mode of event but as practice. De Certeau sees this "struggle against oblivion" in
philosophies which (like Deleuze and Guattari's , Lyotard's yf V W U L Y H W R F U H D W H D X G L W R U \ V S D F H D Q G L Q W K H U H Y H U V D O W K D W K D V W D N H Q
psychoanalysis from a "science of dreams" toward "the experience of what speaking voices in the dark grotto of the bodies that hear them" (162, emphasis
mineyf .
So while both of these "ways of quoting" belong to the strategy of the institution, and define the scholarly place, each therefore can be borrowed by tactical operations
that like the recognition of alterity, the labor of reminiscence change analytical procedures by "returning" them to their limits, and insinuating the ordinary into
"established scientific fields." The event of this change is what de Certeau calls "banality": the arrival at a "place," which is not (as it may be for populismyf D Q
initial state of grace, and not (as it is in Baudrillardyf D Q L Q G L V F U L P L Q D W H L Q F K R D W H F R Q G L W L R Q E X W R Q W K H F R Q W U D U \ W K H R X W F R P H R I D S U D F W L F H V R P H W K L Q J W K D W F R P H V L Q W R
being" at the end of a trajectory. This is the banality that speaks in , and in the late work of Freud where the ordinary is no longer the object of analysis but
the from which discourse is produced.
It is at this final point, however, that my reading can fellow travel no further, and parts company with de Certeau's "we."
A feminist critique of would find ample material to work with. De Certeau's Muse the silent other to whom his writing would strive to
give voice is unmistakably The Ordinary Man.
My problem here, however, is specifically with the characteristics of the "place" of enunciation from which the notion of banality is constructed, and for
which it can work as a myth of transformation. For to invoke with de Certeau an "ironic and mad banality" that can insinuate itself into our techniques, and reorganize
the place from which discourse is produced, is immediately to posit an awkward position for "scholarly" subjects for whom might not serve as well as "
" as a fable of origin, or indeed as a myth of "voice." For me as a feminist, as a distracted media baby, and also, to some extent, as an Australian, the
reference to (and, for that matter, to Freudyf L V U D W K H U D U H P L Q G H U R I W K H S U R E O H P V R I G L V H Q J D J L Q J P \ R Z Q W K L Q N L Q J I U R P S D W U L D U F K D O D Q G ( X U R F H Q W U L F \f cultural
norms. Page 36
The analytical scene for de Certeau occurs in a highly specialized, professional place. Yet in contrast to most real academic institutions today, it is not already
(rather than nomadically "crossed"yf E \ W K H V H [ X D O U D F L D O H W K Q L F D Q G S R S X O D U G L I I H U H Q F H V W K D W L W F R Q V W L W X W H V D V R W K H U 1 R U L V L W V T X D U H O \ , rather than
"disrupted," by the ordinary experience encountered at its frontiers. It is a place of knowledge secured, in fact, by precisely those historic exclusions which have made
it so difficult to imagine or the possibility of a scholarship "proper'' to the other's "own" experience except in the form of an error (essentialismyf R U D S R F D O \ S W L F
fantasy (rupture, revolutionyf & R Q V W U X H G I U R P G H & H U W H D X
V K H U H W K H R W K H U D V Q D U U D W R U U D W K H U W K D Q R E M H F W R I V F K R O D U O \ G L V F R X U V H U H P D L Q V D V D J H Q H U D O U X O H D
promising myth of the future, a fable of changes to come.
In other words: in this place, the citing of alterity and the analytical labor of reminiscence promise something like the practice of a "writing cure" for the latter day
Robinson Crusoe.
This is a "fate" all the more awkward for me to assume in that for de Certeau, "place," "the proper," and even "closure" are not always necessarily , but
modes of spatial and narrative organization everywhere at work in everyday social life. It is the primary function of any , for example, to found a place, or create a
field that authorizes practical actions (125yf 6 R W K H U H L V Q R V X J J H V W L R Q L Q K L V Z R U N W K D W W K R V H Z K R K D Y H E H H Q P R V W L Q W L P D W H O \ P D U N H G L Q K L V W R U \ E \ 0 D Q ) U L G D \
V
Alternative (the cry, the impersonationyf V K R X O G Q R W Q R Z L Q Z U L W L Q J W K H L U V W R U L H V W K H U H E \ O D \ F O D L P W R D S O D F H 7 K H X W R S L D Q G H I H U U D O R I D Q R W K H U Q D U U D W L R Q L Q G H & H U W H D X
V
theory occurs, like the apotheosis of banality as the Ordinary , because the "place" of the other may never coincide with that of any subject of a discourse (nor, of
course, the subject's with that of an actual speakeryf 7 R G U H D P R W K H U Z L V H L V D I D O V H P \ V W L F L V P " longing for Presence, denial of History, nostalgia for God.
Unfortunately, since the other here is also "the discourse's mode of relation to historicity in the moment of its utterance" (emphasis mineyf W K L V D U J X P H Q W
encourages us to conclude that scholarly knowledge in the present must continue to be written, and transformed, from Crusoe's place. In practice, of course, de
Certeau drew no such conclusion, writing that "the history of women, of blacks, of Jews, of cultural minorities, " (my emphasisyf S X W V L Q W R T X H V W L R Q W K H V X E M H F t
producer" of history and "the particularity of the place where discourse is produced." But the " " points to a problem with the rhetoric of otherness that
lingers when the epistemology that sustained it is apparently revised. "Etc." is Man Friday's footprint: a unifying myth of a otherness Black, Primitive, Woman,
Child, People, "Voice," Banality deriving its value only from its function as negation (polemological challenge, utopian hopeyf I R U W K D W V D P H V L Q J X O D U Z U L W L Q J V X E M H F W R I
historical production.
I am skeptical that a theory grounded on (rather than tactically usingyf W K H F D W H J R U \ R I R W K H U Q H V V F D Q H Y H U H Q G X S D Q \ Z K H U H H O V H . However, in Page 37
the context of cultural studies, the immediate practical disadvantage of this construction of analysis is to reinscribe from everyday life as a constitutive rather
than contingent feature of the scholar's enunciative place. An old pathos of separation creeps back in here, of which the polarities (elite/popular, special/general,
singular/"banal"yf P D U N Q R W R Q O \ W K H V H P D Q W L F R U J D Q L ] D W L R Q R I G H & H U W H D X
V G L V F R X U V H E X W W K H Q D U U D W L Y H W K U X V W R I K L V W H [ W 7 K H P D L Q O L Q H R I
moves from its beginnings in "A Common Place: Ordinary Language" to "The Unnamable," a meditation on that absolute other, ultimate frontier, and final banality,
Death.
Rather than venturing any further on to that forbidding theoretical terrain, I shall shift the scene of my own analysis to a more congenial place.
One of the enduring lounge room "institutions" of Australian TV is Bill Collins, host of an ancient show that was once , but is now just
a time slot for . A former teacher, Collins has spent twenty years using his "place" to define what counts on television as knowledge of cinema history. He now
has many competitors and probably not much power, but for years he had a monopoly years when there were no old films in theaters, no video chains, and no
systematic study of media in schools. So it is no exaggeration to say that Collins was one of the founders of Australian screen education.
His pedagogy has changed little with time. Collins is a trivia expert, respectful rather than mocking in his relentless pursuit of the detail. His address to the audience is
avuncular, his construction of film auratic. Never raucous or unkind, rarely "critical," his scholarship is a perpetual effusion of an undemanding love. Usually placed in a
"home study" decor with posters, magazines, and books, Collins represents knowledge as a universally accessible domestic hobby. It is from his enthusiasms, rather
than any formal training (which in this "place" is rather despisedyf W K D W K L V D X W K R U L W \ G H U L Y H V + L V K L V W R U \
L V D O D E \ U L Q W K L Q H Q H W Z R U N R I P L Q X V F X O H D Q H F G R W H V L W V J U D Q G
theme is less the rise and fall of famous careers than the ebb and flow of fortune in the lives of the humbler figures near the bottom of the credits, or toward the edge of
the frame. His own image expounds his theme: plump, owlish, chronically middle aged, unpretentiously dressed, Collins has one eccentricity, a voice just a little bit
pompous and prissy.
While I was working on this essay, he showed two films that seemed chosen to stimulate my thinking. Both were fables about "proper" places (malign in one case,
benign in the otheryf D Q G D S U L Q F L S O H R I I D W D O L W \ D W Z R U N L Q H Y H U \ G D \ O L I H .
David Green's (1984yf F R X O G K D Y H E H H Q V X E W L W O H G . Martin Sheen plays the white husband and father worried about the security
of his apartment block, invaded by junkies from the street. After a murder and a rape inside, he persuades the other residents to hire a guardian (Louis Gossett, Jr.yf
Tough, streetwise, and black, the solitary Page 38
"John" moves in and makes the place his own. A sinister conflict emerges. Sheen wants a flexible frontier: residents inside, desperados outside, ordinary peaceful
neighbors moving in and out as before. Gossett demands strict closure, total control: he bashes visitors, kills intruders, and polices not only the building but the
residents' everyday lives.
At last, the sleeping liberal awakens in the would be white vigilante. Too late: charging off into the night to tackle Gossett , Sheen falls afoul of a ghetto gang.
Pulverized by terror, he is saved at last by Gossett to suffer the ignominy of his own abject gratitude for the guardian's greater violence. Back at the ranch, the two men
lock gazes in the final scene of the film: black guardian standing triumphantly inside, undisputed master of the place; white resident creeping furtively outside, insecure
and afraid between the zones of home and street in each of which he will henceforth be but a tenant without authority.
The structural reversal is complete, the moral ambiguity of the moment absolute. Was Sheen's first mistake to accept violence by inviting Gossett in, or was it to deny
the implications of this action and, by dithering, lose control? Either way, dramatizes with white and black simplicity a problem besetting any thematics
of place primarily articulated by binary oppositions between "haves" and "have nots," self and other, propriety and mobility. In such a schema, the drifter's desire is
colonized as the settler's worst nightmare. The 's desire for a place can be represented only in terms of a choice between the (critique of property,
romance of dispossessionyf R U D V D Y L R O H Q W U H Y H U V D O R I U R O H V W K D W L Q W H Q V L I L H V W K H S U H Y D L O L Q J V W U X F W X U D W L R Q R I S R Z H U V 7 R W D O L W D U L D Q Y L R O H Q F H L V L Q W K H H Q G W K H W U X H V X F F H V V R U W R
Sheen's liberal paranoia and it is the only image that the film can admit of what "a room of one's own" for the (blackyf X U E D Q S R R U P L J K W P H D Q .
If provides a sophisticated attempt to undermine the fatality of this kind of system by introducing nonsymmetry to its terms theorizing
difference rather than contradiction between them, refusing to assign a negative value to either side it nevertheless leaves us stranded when it comes to
developing, rather than arriving at, the critical practice of a feminism (for exampleyf D O U H D G \ V L W X D W H G by knowledge and social experience of insecurity and
dispossession, by a politics of exercising established institutional powers. Similarly, this aspect of de Certeau's work may not be of much help with the problems of
an emerging cultural criticism which is equally though not indifferently "at home" in a number of sometimes conflicting social sites (academy, media, community group
as well as "home" and "street"yf P R Y L Q J E H W Z H H Q W K H P Z L W K D Q D J L O L W \ Z K L F K P D \ Z H O O R Z H P R U H W R L P S H U D W L Y H V G H U L Y H G I U R P W H F K Q R O R J L F D O F K D Q J H V D Q G I U R P V K L I W V L Q
employment patterns, than it does to transient desire.
Bill Collins introduced with a promise that it would unsettle Page 39
anybody who lived in an apartment. Screening Alfred Hitchcock's (1955yf I R U W K H I L U V W W L P H R Q 7 9 K H V D Y H G K L V O H V V R Q W L O O O D V W .
provided the perfect counterpart to the pure polemological message ("they always fuck us over"yf R I Subtle, elusive,
hilariously amoral in its utopian treatment of death, it also promised a perfect ending for my essay. For in this film, one day in a quiet mountain village where few sounds
disturb the silence except for the drifting of autumn leaves, the bird song in the valley, the honking of an antique car horn, the popping of a shotgun, the call of an
excited child, and the occasional rustle of a rabbit in the grass the pervasive calm is shattered by the appearance of a corpse.
Harry is a strange body, in more ways than one. He is a foreigner to the valley: the curious insignificance of his death, the incongruity of his presence there, is
established by repeated shots of his feet sticking up as he sprawls headfirst down the hillside. But as the locals begin to arrive, it seems that there may be more trouble
in paradise than the mere apparition of Harry. One by one, the adults respond with astounding banality: they talk of blueberry muffins, coffee, elderberry wine,
lemonade; a reader trips on the corpse and ignores it, going straight on with his book; a tramp steals Harry's shoes; an artist sketches the scene. The initial suspect,
watching from the bushes, mutters: "Next thing you know they'll be televising the whole thing!"
As the mystery of these responses begins to be dispelled, another takes its place. The inhabitants of this tiny village barely know each other, and coexist in an anomic
isolation far exceeding small town discretion. This may be a not quite innocent paradise, but it isn't really a ; a utopia, but not a community. But when the truth of
Harry's death starts to emerge from a casual chat about destiny, new relationships swiftly develop. During the ensuing narrative play between deception and detection,
the corpse shifts repeatedly between temporary homes in the ground, on the hillside, in the bathtub. Only when the full story has been told does Harry find his proper
location (where he was in the beginningyf D Q G L G H Q W L W \ D V D E D Q D O Y L F W L P R I D I D W D O K H D U W D W W D F N \f; couples are formed, first names exchanged, histories shared, community
established; and, when the founding of a place is complete, "the trouble with Harry is over."
Grasping something like this in my first viewing, thrilling in an allegorical sensitivity to each phrase, every scene, that echoes , I resolved
to do a reading of the film forgetting that to retrieve a given theory of popular culture from a text framed as an of both would be to produce, at the end of
my trajectory, precisely the kind of "banality" I was setting out to question.
I did not long enjoy the contemplation of my intention. "Did you notice," asked Bill Collins in his meditative moment, "how everyone in this film seems to to feel
guilty?" " " I told the television, Page 40
ready with my counterthesis. "Well," declared that irritating voice, "there's a Ph.D. in that!"
In a fascinating essay on the figure of the speaking voice in the work of Rousseau and Plato, Michèle Le Doeuff points out that this voice (indefinite, uncertain, irrational
in its effects, " "yf P D \ I X Q F W L R Q L Q S K L O R V R S K \ Q R W R Q O \ D V D Q H P E O H P R I W K H R W K H U E X W W K H U H I R U H D V D Q
instrument of demarcation whereby a theory can speak obliquely not of voices but of philosophy itself its limits, its failures, and its problems of legitimacy.
I suspect that in cultural studies, its function is rather the opposite. Parasitic on philosophy as cultural studies has been, it is perhaps today the discipline most at odds
with the historic, self legitimating dream of philosophical autonomy analyzed by Le Doeuff in . Careless about its own epistemological
grounding, its theoretical integrity, and its difference from "other" discourses, cultural studies has been more concerned (and, I think, rightly soyf Z L W K D Q D O \ ] L Q J D Q G
achieving political effects. It may be for this reason, then, and along with the historical determinations that de Certeau describes, that the "banality" of the speaking
voice becomes in cultural studies a way of the question of legitimation, and all the problems that question entails.
"Banality," after all, is one of the group of words including "trivial" and "mundane" whose modern history inscribes the disintegration of old European ideals about the
common people, the common place, the common culture. In medieval French, the "banal" fields, mills, and ovens were those used communally. It is only in the late
eighteenth century (and within the "scriptural economy''yf W K D W W K H V H Z R U G V E H J L Q W R D F T X L U H W K H L U P R G H U Q V H Q V H R I W K H W U L W H W K H S O D W L W X G L Q R X V W K H X Q R U L J L Q D O .
So if banality is an irritant that repeatedly returns to trouble cultural theory, it is because the very concept is part of the modern history of taste, value, and critique of
judgment that constitutes the polemical field within which cultural studies now takes issue with classical aesthetics. "Banality" as mythic signifier is thus always a mask
for questions of value, of value judgment, and "discrimination" especially in the sense of how we distinguish and evaluate (rather than cultural "products"yf
legitimate our priorities, and defend our choice of what matters.
This is a debate which has barely begun, and which is all the more complex in that the professional protocols inherited by cultural studies from established disciplines
sociology, literary criticism, philosophy may well be either irrelevant or contentious. If I find myself, for example, in the contradictory position of wanting polemically to
reject Baudrillard's use of "banality" as a framing concept to discuss mass media, yet go on to complain myself of a syllogistic "banality" in British cultural
studies, the dilemma can arise because the repertoire of critical strategies available to people wanting to theorize the discriminations that they make in relation Page 41
to their experience of popular culture without needing to defend the validity of that experience, still less that of culture is still extraordinarily depleted.
And there is an extra twist to the history of banality. In the Oxford version of this history, it has a double heritage in, on the one hand, old English, to summon,
or to curse and a Germanic to proclaim So banality is related to banishing, and also to wedding In other words, it is a figure inscribing
power in an act of In medieval times it could mean two things besides "common place." It could mean to issue an edict or a summons (usually to waryf
That was the enunciative privilege of the feudal lord. Or it could mean to proclaim under orders: to line the streets, and cheer, in the manner required by the call "
" To obediently voice a rhythmic applause is the "banal" enunciative duty of the common people, the popular chorus.
This two sided historical function of banality lordly pronouncement, mimetic popular performance is not yet banished from the practice of theorizing the popular today.
It's very hard, perhaps impossible, not to make the invoked "voice" of the popular perform itself obediently in just that medieval way in our writing. However, when the
voice of that which academic discourses including cultural studies constitute popular begins in turn to theorize its speech, then you have an interesting possibility.
That theorization may well go round by way of the procedures that Homi Bhabha has theorized as "colonial mimicry," for example, but may also come around
eventually in a different, and as yet utopian, mode of enunciative practice. However, I think that this can happen only if the complexity of social experience investing
our "place'' as intellectuals today including the proliferation of different places in and between which we may learn and teach and write becomes a presupposition of,
and not an anecdotal adjunct to, our practice.
For this reason, I think that feminists have to work quite hard in cultural studies to become subjects of banality in that old double sense: not to formulate edicts and
proclamations, yet to keep theorizing, not to become supermimics in the Baudrillardian sense of becoming, by reversal, the same as that which is mimicked, yet to
refuse to subside either into silence or into a posture of reified difference. Through some such effort, pained and disgruntled subjects, who are also joyous and inventive
practitioners, can begin to articulate our critique of everyday life. Page 44
Playing at being American. There's a kind of impudence here that pulls in two directions:
First: there's a conscious and deliberate echo of Venturi's ; the sense of an objectification, from the outside, of a mental landscape which
has a special status in the cultural imaginary. But whereas Venturi may appeal to the democracy of the vernacular, my sense of this objectification is that what it in fact
does is to confer on the observer a token of superiority, the "distant distinction" which Pierre Bourdieu sees as the distinguishing, aesthetically "ennobling" mark of the
owner of cultural capital. "Nothing," says Bourdieu, "is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal, or
even `common.'" In the context of a "media imperialism'' which has America as its center, this impudent objectification of an imaginary America which can be played
at and with, claims such a distinction, seeking to reverse the current of imperialism. The empire strikes back at its center, the "colonized unconscious" its
colonizer, the periphery creates the core as other, the subaltern attempts speech. The rhetorical "tactic," then, is one of empowerment.
Second: if sarcasm is indeed the lowest form of wit, it may be because it's the last resort of the powerless. The cheekiness of the "Kynic," which Peter Sloterdijk
traces in the heirs of Diogenes as a defense against the cynical reason of a decaying Enlightenment, offers a certain satisfaction rudeness rather than rationality as the
rebuttal of idealism, farting in the face of the Platonic dialogue but the carnival of fools happens only under license, and it's business as usual next day. Impudence
may confirm rather than subvert the "normal" relations of power. So the insubordination of playing at being American may, in fact, be nothing more than a licensed
game, one of the permitted games of subordination. Page 45
Tactics of empowerment and games of subordination: a play of subjectivity and identification reminiscent of the oscillations of women's identification discussed by
Laura Mulvey in her afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" or, perhaps more exactly, with the process of ''double identification" subject and
object, seer and seen, both inextricably at once argued by Teresa de Lauretis in . I want to suggest that this play of subjectivity, oscillation or doubling,
with all the sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful contortions which either process involves, is a more adequate way of understanding the "colonized unconscious"
than the simple and singular positioning which theories of media imperialism usually allow.
Imagine, if you will: a remote village, high in the Spanish Pyrennees; on one side of the single unpaved street, a cluster of buildings, on the other side, fields; in the fields,
women and men, scything, forking over the hay, raking with wooden rakes; in the very center of the village an open cow barn; immediately beside the cow barn, a
cantina, bead curtained and stone floored; inside the cantina, a woman behind the bar, a girl (could she be barefoot?yf V Z H H S L Q J W K H I O R R U D Q G D W H O H Y L V L R Q V H W , W L V
A.M. on Wednesday 23 July, 1987, and the television is on.
We (mountain walking, non Spanish speaking "enlightened tourists"yf G U L Q N & R N H D Q G J O D Q F H D W W K H W H O H Y L V L R Q , W L V W Z H Q W \ P L Q X W H V E H I R U H H L W K H U R I X V U H D O L ] H V W K D W W K H
person we are glancing at is indeed Joan Collins, and that this is indeed , almost more realistic in Spanish, the melodramatic legitimized as foreign, other,
operatic. The cultural anomaly outside, there are cows in the main street, inside, the world of isn't enough to hold our interest for long, but our moves to leave
are met with some kind of anxiety. By this time, half the population of the village seems to have congregated to watch television; there is anticipation of something big
about to happen which we, particularly, should be witness to, and so we stay politely. finishes, and on comes, sure enough, to communal delight and
recognition, the English Royal Wedding: Fergie and Andrew (Nancy Reagan, Princess Di as bit playersyf D O R Q J Z L W K D O O W K H S D J H D Q W U \ D Q G W K H F H O H E U D W L R Q R I ( Q J O L V K
nationhood and identity, which makes us, in our "distant distinction" (and our Scottishnessyf V H H N R X W R W K H U Q H V V D Q G G L I I H U H Q F H L Q W K H I L U V W S O D F H .
The story is nothing special. Most of us probably have a version of it. It's the kind of story that we bring back in our luggage and drop into conversation to illustrate the
thesis of cultural homogenization: there is no difference, the media have made it all the same out there. But if it's to be circulated as anything other than a cute epiphany,
its meaning cannot be self evident.
First, there's an appropriateness in these particular programs which gives Page 46
some specificity to the kinds of marketable images which the US and UK now sell, images which come to define them in the international imaginary, and which secure
their places in the international image markets. (with the two, "Dallas n' Dynasty," as Richard Collins points out, become shorthand, a codeword for
the moral panic generated by the American penetration of the European psyche and the European marketsyf V X U H O \ E R W K F H O H E U D W H V D Q G F D V W L J D W H V D G Y D Q F H G F D S L W D O L V W
structures and relationships, offering desires and their punishments in the same movement, short circuiting guilt, giving us things to wish for and rewarding us with
confirmations of our own superiority because we don't have them: a playful mode, available to more than one reading. The Royal Wedding (an episode in a continuing
seriesyf P D U N V R X W Z L W K Z R Q G H U I X O S U H F L V L R Q Z K D W L W L V W K D W % U L W D L Q F D Q V W L O O V H O O H D V L O \ R Q W K H L P D J H P D U N H W W K H S D V W W U D G L W L R Q W K H V S H F W D F O H R I Q D W L R Q D O S D J H D Q W U \ W K H
costume dramas of a simpler class hierarchy, the nostalgia for a lost aristocracy: ,
"Masterpiece Theater'' even the soap operas for all their qualities of recognition and familiarity in the home market, enter the US market as a mild
nostalgia for a lost community. So if Britain and America are indeed the exporters in the international dream market, they may be marketing dreams which are dreamed
in quite diverse ways, a fantasy of the other as quaint, perhaps, rather than as compelling object of desire.
Second, and consequently, is , dubbed into Spanish, watched by Spanish men and women in a Spanish village, still, only and simply, an American text (with all
that textuality has come to meanyf " , V W K H ( Q J O L V K 5 R \ D O : H G G L Q J in Catalonia, the most fiercely independent region in mainland Europe outside the Basque
territory? How can it mean the same thing in Spain, with that country's intensely contradictory history of monarchism and republicanism, as it does in the shires of
Southern England, which may contain, albeit in isolated pockets, the only audience that is decoding it "correctly" in the way it was encoded?
The seduction of the thesis of homogenization and the eradication of cultural difference is hard to resist, and can continually be supported by empirical data on
ownership and distribution. But at the level of theory (and experienceyf L W V H H P V F R Q W L Q X D O O \ W R I D O O E D F N R Q W K H E H O L H I L Q W K H S D V V L Y H O \ U H F H S W L Y H G X S H G F R Q V X P H U W K H
always obedient subject jumping into line at the call of interpellation. If we revise that view in favor of a more complex and various view of reading relations for the
theorized domestic subject (female or male; audience, viewer, readeryf Z H
U H F O H D U O \ J R L Q J W R K D Y H W R U H W K L Q N L W I R U W K H F R O R Q L ] H G V X E M H F W D V Z H O O .
A depressingly familiar scenario, then: the "enlightened tourist" seeking to penetrate the other without penetrating its otherness; in search of the virgin unknown, and
constantly disappointed by its loss of innocence. This is the twist that makes travelers' tales, and it's founded on the same old paternalism: the owner of cultural capital
laments the corruption of the Page 47
other, who knows no better, despite our warnings, than to want to own the goods too.
The question of locality seems to me to have a particular urgency for television. It's increasingly accepted that theory and critique become most material when they are
localized rather than universalized. For any film and television theory which has been attentive to feminism, the universal, neutered subject (the "it" that always
concealed a "he"yf P X V W J L Y H Z D \ W R D V X E M H F W L Y L W \ O R F D W H G Z L W K L Q V S H F L I L F D Q G O R F D O
I R U P D W L R Q V R I J H Q G H U D Q G V H [ X D O L W \ , Z D Q W W R V X J J H V W W K D W R Q H R I W K H O R F D O L W L H V I U R P
which theories can be materialized is the embarrassingly persistent category of the nation.
Now, clearly, nationalism has not had a particularly good press in the twentieth century; so it's important to say that the nation I'm talking about has less to do with the
"nation state" of nineteenth century nationalism, a legal and political "ego" presumed to function as a concrete subject, and more to do with the "imagined community"
which Benedict Anderson describes, this "imagining" qualifying in complex ways, rather than simply disqualifying, its subjectivity. (Parenthetically, the condensing
image for me of this "imagining" is the road signs, encountered when driving through Arizona, that mark out tribal land "Entering the Navajo Nation," "Leaving the Hopi
Nation": a nationhood apparent less in its legal or economic status, which may be formal, and even derisory, than by the affective, subjective, and political aspiration
which transforms as well as transcends its physical landscape.yf 7 K H Q D W L R Q D O L W \ L Q Z K L F K ,
P L Q W H U H V W H G W K H Q D Q G I U R P Z K L F K , V S H D N 6 F R W O D Q d in relation to the US a
periphery on the edge of a periphery, a community which has often suffered from too much imaginingyf L V Q H Y H U J L Y H Q Q H Y H U D O U H D G \ K D V S U L G H R I S O D F H E X W L V X Q F H U W D L Q
tentative, wary of its own double edges.
Clearly also, even this tentative, marginalized nationality as locality cannot smoothly be expropriated from feminism as locality. Although nationalism conceived in this
way seems to resonate in important ways with feminist theory and experience (the pressure to smile complicitly at our own humiliation, the marketing of the images of
our own subjection, landscape as body, excessive identification national dress and the tourist trade "double identification" and the masquerade precisely "playing at
being American"yf W K H U H O D W L R Q W R S R Z H U U H P D L Q V G L I I H U H Q W W K H L G H Q W L I L F D W L R Q P R U H D E V W U D F W W K H R S W L R Q s to play or not to play more open.
Nevertheless, despite the dangers, it's this subjectivity, with those resonances, that is the context here for a way of thinking the subjectivity of television from a local
perspective. Much television writing, while it is sensitive (sometimesyf W R V \ V W H P V R I J H Q G H U L V V W U L N L Q J O \ L Q V H Q V L W L Y H W R W K H V S H F L I L F L W L H V R I Q D W L R Q D O V \ V W H P V D Q L Q V H Q V L W L Y L W \
which drags it toward universal theories and descriptions of television that ignore the extent to which viewing is formed within particular national histories and localized
broadcasting systems. Paradoxically, this universality is most apparent in those rhetorical Page 48
celebrations of television as the quintessence of postmodernity which, while proclaiming the end of grand narratives and universal theories, simultaneously universalize a
local, national experience the US experience as the essence of television, thus marginalizing all other experiences, and confusing the effect of a particular commercial
arrangement with an inevitability of nature. For the record, I would argue that British television, and much European television, is still rooted in modernity, the concept
and practice of public service broadcasting part of an unbroken tradition of "good works" dating from the administration of capitalism in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. While that tradition is clearly under threat from the readministration of capitalism and the redistribution of power in global markets, nevertheless the scenario of
magical transformation the marvelous vanishing act of deregulation: now you see "quality," now you don't in both its optimistic and its pessimistic variants seems naive.
More likely is a scenario in which transformation is uneven and diverse, continually modified by local conditions, local demands, expectations, resistances, and
compromises, the future still bearing the residual traces of the way it always was. This diversity and local specificity seems important, not as a point of national pride, or
nationalist pique, but as a challenge to notions of the in difference of an essentialized and universal television.
So: playing at being American. In general terms, the question of how US television and the discourses which surround it figure in the empire of signs and
representations and critical and theoretical practices that constitute television and our various relationships to it inside and outside America is clearly very important. I'm
interested, generally, in the assumptions that ground the commonsense notion of the colonization of the unconscious or the imaginary, a notion which informs quite
persistent national anxieties about the seductiveness of American popular entertainment, and about the dependency on US production within the schedules of popular
television. These anxieties surface at a number of levels from the genuinely political to the cynically populist. I'm interested in this from a Scottish or British or possibly
European context, and have no real sense or experience of what it might mean in the context of the more specialized forms of economic and mental subjection involved
in the exploitation of so called Third World markets. But here, in this essay, at a more particular and fundamental level, I'm interested in the extent to which the desire
to locate television within local perspectives complicates assumptions and theoretical formulations about reception and representation and interpellation and
identification in quite significant ways.
As a slight detour, in the context of an American conference and an American publication, it may be useful to continue the objectification of the American experience
as other, and to identify, very loosely, some of the Page 50
And the relative absence of like against like scheduling organizes the movement from program to program in what seems like more structured, rational choices. The
regularity of American television time, the opposition of like against like, dissolves my loyalties and draws me to the jumpy, nervy, mosaic gratifications of sampling.
There's no need to insist on the generality of my secret practices and domestic rituals: the point is in the differences.
Third, and most important, the breaks and interruptions. For all the preparation that one receives from conventional wisdom about the annoyance of the commercial
interruptions on American television, their effect still catches me a little unprepared. It is much less the regularity of the interruption, or the wonderful blatancy of their
placement, more the specific way they interrupt, their effect on (or, more exactly, inyf W K H W H [ W , Q % U L W D L Q F R P P H U F L D O V L Q W H U U X S W S U R J U D P V E X W L Q S D U H Q W K H V H V D O R J R R U D
caption , or "End of Part 1" signals the suspension and resumption of the program, bracketing our disengagement, demarcating the adjustments in the
form of our attention. On American television, Cagney looks out of frame, and the answering reverse field is a commercial for Mack trucks. The space of the
commercial is continuous from the space of the fiction: a split second of cognitive dissonance, but, for the unhabituated viewer, enough for a lurch in attention, a hiccup
in the mental logic. Added to this, on the local stations, there are the breaks just before the final coda, or the station announcements over the credits, or station
identification superimposed on the image. At one level, these are simply irritations of commercialism. At another level, though, they can be read symptomatically as little
contests between commercial logic the need to deliver audiences to advertisers and narrative logic the need to hold audiences in identification. What is so striking to
someone raised in the protective shelter of public service is the visibility of the contest. I the effect which I had always known in theory: a quite radical
destabilizing of the text as an autonomous and logical fictional space complete within its own boundaries. For a still "foreign" viewer, the experience of watching
American television is never simply the experience of watching programs as texts in any classical sense, but is always also the experience of reading the specific forms
of instability of an interrupted and interruptible space.
Part of the force for me of these banal reflections comes from the experience of teaching a television course, using largely British material, for American undergraduate
students, and finding my assumptions about what television is and what the experience of viewing is in tension, albeit productive tension, with assumptions structured by
a radically different economy of viewing and the televisual. There is a real risk in the theorizing and, particularly, in the teaching of television of opening up a gap
between the television which is taught and theorized and the television which is experienced. Teaching seeks out the ordering regularities of theory. A television is
constructed which is teachable, but may not be recognizable.
But another part of the force of this different watching is that of an Page 51
estrangement effect, a seeing "as if for the first time," in which television viewing appears as a specific procedure, necessarily learned in response to specific textual
practices. Each of my banal reflections crystallizes (for meyf D V S H F L I L F X Q F H U W D L Q W \ D U R X Q G W K H W H O H Y L V L R Q W H [ W W K H S D U W L F X O D U V W U D Q J H Q H V V R I $ P H U L F D Q W H O H Y L V L R Q J L Y L Q J
that uncertainty a peculiar sharpness. Nothing theoretically new in the problem of textuality except the force of experience, which opens the suspicion that a television
theory which has still to find its own way of understanding textuality is not yet adequate to the difference of the television text, and the particular forms of its uncertainty
and instability.
In theory and in criticism, what I'm suggesting as the instability of the television text, the blurring of its boundaries, the erosion of its integrity and its autonomy, are
features completely familiar to poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism, not at all specific to television. The integrity of the autonomous text exists, at the theoretical
level, only in formalist nostalgia (although in theoretical and critical practice the yearning for an isolation ward for critical cases still seems quite frequently to have
material effectsyf $ O O , Z D Q W W R V X J J H V W K H U H L V W K D W W K H V \ V W H P D W L F T X D O L I L F D W L R Q V D Q G L Q W H U U X S W L R Q V D Q G H U R V L R Q V R I W K H W H [ t as program, the text as unitary, build
contingency into the structure of viewing in a way which faces the securities of the theoretical landscape with quite hard edged problems. It may not be enough to
qualify or even reverse the terms in order to accommodate television, sailing on a different part of the ocean of discourse but steering by the same stars; it may be that
the metaphors which frame our theoretical discourse have to be checked for their continuing adequacy. I've suggested elsewhere, in the context of theories of
popular culture, that the economic metaphor, rooted in a nineteenth century industrial economy, often brings with it a discourse of struggle which can be both romantic
and virile, creating a romance of titanic forces. In its duality of production and consumption, it stabilizes the system, one term always already valued over the other,
allowing a pendulum swing of critical values, but still swinging along the same axis. Here, in the context of thinking about television, I want to suggest that the spatial
metaphor also distance, positionality; a metaphor which can also be used to stabilize relationships in a diagrammatic geography is, at the very least, up for review.
The spatial metaphor of position has been foundational for much film theory, either implicitly or explicitly. It allowed us to think not only positions but opposition, not
only identification but distance, founding not only a textual economy but a politics of textuality: a kind of political geography whose orientation can be detected in the
fact that while distance has been constantly recharted detachment, distraction, passionate detachment, relaxed detachment, decentering we seemed always to come
back to the same old home port of identification, the wrong place to be. Politically, identification was passive, on the side of the consumer, where distance was Page 52
active, on the side of production, and the simple pleasures of consumption were rejected in favor of the romance of radical resistance.
In his book , Alan Wilde distinguishes, very provisionally "an ad hoc short hand,"
he calls it, "deliberately 'inadequate'" three divisions of what he calls the "ironic imagination": "mediate irony,'' "disjunctive irony," and "suspensive irony." "Mediate
irony" is the mode of satire, essentially, Wilde argues, a premodernist mode. It "imagines a world lapsed from a recoverable norm." "Disjunctive irony" Wilde
associates with the heroic agonism of the high modernists, fashioning meaning out of the fragments. "The ironist confronts a world that appears inherently disconnected
and fragmented. ... Disjunctive irony both recognizes the disconnections and seems to control them." Finally, perhaps most appropriate for a consideration of
television, is "suspensive irony," which Wilde associates with postmodernity:
Suspensive irony ... with its yet more radical vision of multiplicity, randomness, contingency, and even absurdity, abandons the quest for paradise altogether the world in all its
disorder is simply (or not so simplyyf D F F H S W H G $ P E L J X L W \ D Q G S D U D G R [ J L Y H Z D \ W R T X D Q G D U \ W R D O R w keyed engagement with a world of perplexities and uncertainties, in which
one can hope, at best, to achieve what Forster calls "the smaller pleasures of life," and Stanley Ilkin, its "small satisfactions."
The interest of Wilde's work in the present context is not simply to discover three more terms we can happily instrumentalize for television studies, inaugurating debates
on whether was disjunctive or suspensive, or discovering the mediate irony in . Wilde himself is careful to insist that he is not constructing a
teleology or even a rigid critical taxonomy, but that each of the ironic modes may be present in any text or any author in particular but shifting configurations and
hierarchies. The classifications are intended to enjoy, he says, "a strictly performative function as discriminating and temporary instruments ..., a 'truly empirical'
sounding of the movements and sinuosities within the concrete appearances of single or grouped phenomena."
In the context of the development of television studies, what I find attractive in Wilde's "sounding" of irony (while reserving judgment on the "assent" of some of his
conclusionsyf L V Q R W V L P S O \ W K H I O H [ L E L O L W \ Z K L F K K H S U R G X F H V E X W U D W K H U W K H H [ W H Q W W R Z K L F K K L V I R U P X O D W L R Q R I W K H L U R Q L F L P D J L Q D W L R Q H F K R H V 3 H W H U % U R R N V L Q K L V
formulation of an earlier "melodramatic imagination," offering a way of thinking a historical consciousness in which subjects do their imagining a set of
determinate textual conditions and practices. Thus it's possible to argue that some kind of ironic imagination, an ironic "suspensiveness" perhaps, or what Sloterdijk
calls "enlightened false consciousness," is something we increasingly Page 53
bring to television, an ironic sensibility already formed outside the space of television, a function of our local histories of modernity and postmodernity, within or against
which television always has to play; and, at the same time, to argue that the specific practices and procedures of television the de textualizing which it performs on its
texts, the snaps in consciousness, the distractions, the physical rather than metaphorical spatial configurations of our rooms, the dipping in and out provide very
particular material and textual conditions for the production and play of an ironic imagination.
The irony which I'm talking about, then, has very little to do with authorial or institutional intention, and more with historical and textual condition. Such a concept of
irony offers a way of thinking about dissociation and engagement as simultaneous or, at least, temporally connected activities, a knowing play in the "movements and
sinuosities" of television, outside the spatial metaphor in which texts assign us to a position. In the sense in which Michel de Certeau elaborates the terms, it allows us to
think of viewing practices and relations as "procedures" rather than as places. It allows us, that is, to think of the possibility of negotiating two (or moreyf F R Q G L W L R Q V
at once (in such a way that the metaphor of boundaried place becomes inadequateyf R I K R O G L Q J V X E M H F W L Y L W L H V L Q V X V S H Q V L R Q R U G L V M X Q F W L R Q R I N Q R Z L Q J E X W D J U H H L Q J Q R W
to know, of a play of irony, of playing at being. ...
This attention to irony, then, whether it be to ironic forms of attention as a principle of modern or postmodern readership or viewership, or to forms of television
address which constitute the conditions of ironic suspensiveness, is intended simply to open up within theory and criticism a more complicated, shifting, and sensitive
way of thinking about how we might be relating to the appeals of television than is offered by the metaphors of place and position. It is emphatically not intended as a
new methodology which can instrumentally be "applied" to television; nor am I suggesting that irony is a property of the television text, or that every television text is
ironic, or that every television moment is a moment of play; nor, finally, am I suggesting that irony is an exclusive property of the televisual, although I am suggesting that
the specific conditions of television produce the possibility of more ironic forms of attention than the conditions of, say, the cinematic. Less intensely fascinating in its
hold than cinema, television seems to insist continually on an attention to viewing as mental activity and "knowingness" (almost a "street wise" smartnessyf U D W K H U W K D Q W R
the obedience of interpellation or the affect of the "always already.''
The implications of an attentiveness to this ironic imagination might be traced in distinct ways in analysis, and in theory and criticism. At the level of analysis, the
question can be asked: If an ironic imagination is a characteristic mode for television, is there a way of identifying a characteristic figure within the routines of television
rhetoric which supports it and puts it into play? I am thinking of the various ways in which the point of view Page 54
shot has been used to figure out notions of cinematic identification. As a possible line of inquiry, if the point of view shot (which for various historical and practical
reasons is relatively weak in televisionyf L V D I R X Q G D W L R Q D O I L J X U H I R U F L Q H P D W L F L G H Q W L I L F D W L R Q F R X O G L W E H W K D W W K H U H D F W L R Q V K R W I R U P V D Q H T X L Y D O H Q W I L J X U H I R U W K H L U R Q L F
suspensiveness of television? As it has been argued, the point of view shot centers knowledge within the narrative space by identifying the look of the spectator with
the look of a character. The reaction shot, as it is characteristically used in television, disperses knowledge, frequently registering it on the faces of a multiplicity of
characters whose function may only be to intensify the event, to charge it with the emotional excess which Jane Feuer identifies in primetime melodrama, but without
the centered identification of the point of view shot: reaction without identification. Soap opera and melodrama may represent privileged instances here, but at the
same time, a similar process can be detected in the cutaways to audience or panelists in studio discussions, game shows, or talk shows, or to spectators or managers in
television sport. There isn't space here to develop the point, but in that gap between reaction and narrative identification may lie one of the ways in which irony is
figured within the specific textual practices of television.
At the level of theory and criticism, it seems endemic to television writing that whereas film theory is marked by a sense of people trying to come to terms with their
own, almost perverse, fascination what Paul Willemen calls "cinephilia" television theory always seems to be written by people who can see the seduction but are
not seduced. The critic's fascination with the audience in television writing may be due, at least in part, to a lack of fascination with the texts. An effect of this is that
television viewers always risk being constructed as the determinate or indeterminate "other," reified as an object of investigation or special attention in roughly the same
abstract, and even cynical, way in which election campaigns construct the housewife, the farmer, or the consumer. One of the things that attract me about the concept
of an ironic play, of a kind of suspensiveness of knowing and not knowing, being and not being, is that it seems to identify the most characteristic way in which I
respond to television, the "small pleasure" that I use television for. Even if this is simply the superior and privileged response of the intellectual, the owner of cultural
capital, it is at least worth acknowledging. A television criticism which can identify with itself may avoid speaking for experiences it isn't having.
The argument, then, is that television produces the conditions of an ironic knowingness, at least as a possibility, which may escape the obedience of interpellation or
cultural colonialism and may offer a way of thinking subjectivity free of subjection. It gives a way of thinking identities as plays of cognition and miscognition, which can
account for the pleasures of playing at being, for example, American, without the paternalistic disapproval that goes with the assumption that it is bad for the natives.
Most of all, it Page 55
opens identity to diversity, and escapes the notion of cultural identity as a fixed volume for which, if something comes in from the outside, something from the inside
must inevitably go out. But if it does all this, it does not do it in that utopia of guaranteed resistance which assumes the progressiveness of naturally oppositional readers
who will get it right in the end. It does it, rather, within the terms hung in suspension at the beginning of this essay: tactics of empowerment, games of subordination,
with neither term fixed in advance.
For this continual return to suspensiveness is, in every sense, double edged. With one edge, it opens closed systems and dispenses with guarantees; with the other, it
lays waste solid ground and exposes ideals, objectives, and aspirations to a sceptical or cynical paralysis. It echoes those familiar terms of postmodernity ambivalence,
indeterminacy, paradox which challenge the accustomed systems of rationality that founded "enlightened" theory and politics. This challenge is common to much of
contemporary cultural and social studies. But for a television studies which is still looking for a definition, however indefinite, and which, imbricated in every way with
contemporaneity, cannot avoid the implications of the analysis of postmodernity, the "quandary" seems to represent a particularly numbing critical impasse.
The terms of the impasse can be indicated very schematically: value, politics, the text. What are the terms of decidability by which we can argue for or against values
when indecidability is the rule of the game? How do we measure progressiveness without the certainty of the linear narrative of progress? And, underpinning all this,
what is the television text anyway? Within the impasse may lie a certain discomfort in television studies on the part of the radical/popular/academic intellectual (for
whom impasse and crisis are, of course, terms of self dramatizationyf ) R U P D Q \ R I X V I R U P H G K L V W R U L F D O O \ L Q W K H R U \ D Q G L G H R O R J \ F U L W L T X H L Q D S R O L W L F D O F R P P L W P H Q W W R
popular culture, and in a belief in our special (and "subversive"yf S O D F H D W W K H F X W W L Q J H G J H R I W K H O L E H U D O D F D G H P \ W H O H Y L V L R Q D Q G S D U W L F X O D U O \ W K H W H O H Y L V L R Q W H [ W Z L W K R X W
the proper sanctification of a theory, may still be an unworthy object, the clarion call to "take television seriously" still a little desperate. The result is a series of
displacements. The privileged objects of much television studies the audience, the institutions, the market are effective ways of displacing the theoretical problems of
values, politics, and texts onto empirically testable bodies. Which is not at all to devalue such studies, but simply to remind ourselves that the question of television's
textuality untestable, uncertain, repressed will keep returning.
The attempt to rediscover irony may be to contribute as much to the problem as to the solution. In its suspensiveness, or disjunction, its play of being and knowing, its
ability to go either way, the ironic imagination may simply play out the amused quandary which dissolves held positions of value, principle, or politics. Attractive
because it holds open the possibility Page 56
of a "difference" which can play with an objectified dominance without being subjected to it, suspensiveness may also conceal the smile of an indifference to which
nothing much matters anymore.
In trying to bring irony as a term of analysis, theory, and criticism into some kind of conjunction with nationality as a term of culture and identity I'm trying to ground
the one in the other precisely as a way out of that quandary of in difference. Irony not as a universal theory but as a various and local "tactic"; nationality not as an
always already but as a set of aspirations. If irony is a useful concept, even if only to hold at the back of the mind, it is not because it offers a guarantee of the
resistance which John Fiske discovers everywhere in television viewing, or even the romance of the guerrilla tactics of counterproduction and refunctioning which de
Certeau finds in "consumer practices." It is not a universal category, and its inflection depends on local conditions. The claims to usefulness would be much more
modest. Simply, irony seems to me to offer a neglected aesthetic category which might bring together textual practices which could be identified by analysis, the
peculiar disidentificatory of television as discursive practice, and a possible historically formed disposition of locally constituted audiences. It recognizes
distance, but also the "incorrect" "small satisfactions" of being superior being the dupe. As an experiential category, it seems to me to avoid the well meaning
cynicism of the audience as the intellectual's other, and implicates the critic in his/her own discourse as a material, rather than a transcendent, subject.
But what if playing at being American is the only game in town? Is there anything else we can play at being? The return, again, of the national question. The essay
comes to seem somewhat perverse and awkward in its desire to hold on, till the very end, to that conjunction of irony and locality, an aesthetics and a cultural politics.
Clearly, as an aesthetic category, ironic suspensiveness has very little to say about the economic and ideological power of the American film and television industries in
the international television market. Almost to the contrary, the ironic imagination, as a mere playing at being, might seem to dissolve the importance of that dominance
as a cultural issue. But the very difficulty of the conjunction seems to me to be important, setting up a number of resistances between the two terms. Irony, in the sense
in which I would use it, approaches viewing as a procedure rather than a place, giving a name to the play of identity and distinction sometimes pleasurable, sometimes
contorted; sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious; sometimes resistant, often compromised of subject and object, seer and scene. The insistence on the
national, or the local in any of its forms, prefers, if only as a possibility, difference and diversity to indifference and mere plurality. The continual return to locality,
whether it be of nation, race, class, gender, or generation, resists the easy rationality of a general category or a universal theory. It is conscious of a less systematic
specificity, to be determined by local readings of texts and conditions and histories and objectives, and it proposes a politics Page 57
which is not guaranteed by textuality or by natural resistance but is open to historical conditions. For television, these conditions are, in their turn, enmeshed in the
expectations, aspirations, and possibilities produced by particular histories of broadcasting and by particular legal, commercial, and political arrangements of regulation
and deregulation.
One of the things which make television writing so difficult, particularly at an international level, is precisely the absence of an "international standard," of the sort that
Hollywood's "classical cinema" has provided for writing about film. In that absence, general statements are always vulnerable to local and empirical knowledges and
experiences. But since these are the conditions, it may be as well to find ways of coping with them. In her essay "Feminism and Critical Theory," Gayatri Spivak takes
certain American feminists to task for their attitude to history: "As long as [they] understand 'history' as a positivistic empiricism that scorns 'theory' and therefore
remains ignorant of its own, the 'Third World' as its object of study will remain constituted by those hegemonic First World intellectual practices." It seems to me
that there is something for television studies in that warning, in its insistence on the need for empirical and local understandings of histories and practices, dispositions
and , which poses the resistance to imperial theory. Page 59
? This has not been a very fashionable question for television scholars in the UK. I want to think about some of the answers that have been
given to this question, and to query its continuing banishment. In this process, I will make a series of observations about the progressive valuation of the television
audience(syf R Y H U W K H W H O H Y L V L R Q W H [ W K R Z H Y H U F R Q F H S W X D O L ] H G \f since the mid 70s. I am not arguing that the emphasis of television studies should be evaluative rather
than analytic, but I am suggesting that there is something rather odd about the fascination with what "real" (i.e., other, nonacademicyf S H R S O H W K L Q N D E R X W W H O H Y L V L R Q Z K H Q
it is combined with a principled refusal to reveal what academics think about it.
This paper emerges from attempts to think through some of my own past practice I do not hold myself exempt from these criticisms. Also, the focus of my remarks is
on Britain. Apart from Janice Radway's work on the readers of romance fiction (which is in any case not about televisionyf W K H O R Q g term Katz and Liebes
project (which comes from a very different traditionyf D Q G W K H Z R U N R I W K H 7 E L Q J H Q 6 R D S 2 S H U D 3 U R M H F W , D P Q R W L Q D S R V L W L R Q W R F R P P H Q W R Q D Q \ 8 6 H W K Q R J U D S K L F
audience work.
We can start by outlining two traditional ways in which television has been seen to be good in Britain, both of which minimize its role or presence. The first draws its
legitimation from other, already validated art forms: theatre, literature, music. Television (by implication, not itself goodyf E H F R P H V Z R U W K \ Z K H Q L W E U L Q J V W R D Z L G H U
audience already legitimated high and middlebrow culture. In this mode (the contradictions of which I shall discuss lateryf W H O H Y L V L R Q F D Q E H J R R G D V D S R W H Q W L D O O \
democratic, or socially extensive, transmitter.
The other mode of legitimation, or set of discourses within which television is allowed to be good, poses a privileged relation to "the real." Although this mode does
reference specific qualities of broadcast media, the qualities concerned those facilitating the transmission of reports of live Page 60
events are precisely read as self negating. Thus sports, public events, current affairs, and wildlife programs are "good television" if we seem to get unmediated access
to the real world, and are not distracted by thinking about television .
The other term constructed in opposition to "good television" is not bad television; it is referred to as popular or commercial television, and its origin in Britain is usually,
casually, dated to 1955 and the start of commercial broadcasting. This bad television, which is where we find soap operas and game shows, has another name and
that is "American series." In reciprocal moves, US ideas of British culturalness are confirmed by the broadcasting of imported British programs to the small audiences
of PBS, while American vulgarity is confirmed to Brits by the popularity of , and imported game show formats. Dick Hebdige has discussed the
subcultural significance of the American, and particularly of the discriminations made about design details such as streamlining among British working class youth in the
1950s. Ien Ang has pointed to the significant anti American element in what she refers to as the "ideology of mass culture." There are two points here. One is about
the positive value, the appropriateability of American mass culture the way in which it has historically at certain points provided an escape route, a domain of cultural
expression, for those excluded from legitimate national culture. The other in some ways the same point differently inflected is about the derogatory meaning, within
legitimate cultural discourse, of ''American," particularly when coupled with "television."
So we have "good television," so far, constructed across a range of oppositions which condense colonial histories, the organizing and financing of broadcasting
institutions, and the relegitimation of already legitimate artistic practices. That is to say, the dominant and conventional way of answering the question "What is good
television?" is to slip television, unnoticeably, transparently, into the already existing aesthetic and social hierarchies. (And it is, of course, because of this that television
scholars within the culturalist tradition have eschewed judgment, but that is to open up another trail which I don't want to pursue at present.yf 7 K L V O H D Y H V R X W D O R W R I
television and, perhaps more significant, denies a great deal of the pleasure that people get from watching and talking about television. This other television, which is
endlessly produced and reproduced in the popular press but precisely as news and gossip; there is no such thing as an EXCLUSIVE critical insight reemerges within
legitimate cultural discourse in the use of metaphors of addiction, and in features such as "Schlockwatch" in the new . In this series, well known personalities
from within the high cultural field comment, usually in an unspeakably patronizing manner, on a popular television program they watch. The title of the feature says it all.
Only within a frame which designates the program as "schlock" can there be a discussion of it. Indeed, it is only within this frame that viewing can be admitted. To put
this another way, only when Page 61
somebody you wouldn't expect (for example, Paul Therouxyf Z D W F K H V D J H Q U H S U R J U D P , is the program interesting. And what is seen as
interesting is precisely how the author gets on with the not good program.
However, there is something else going on here which illuminates another way in which television exists in relation to/is constructed by/constructs the aesthetic field.
This something else is the newsworthiness of certain categories of persons watching television at all. So we have a double structure of distinction. First, we have the
way in which, in British critical discourse about television, good television is constructed through reference to that which is other than television already existing and
validated art forms or "the real." Second, and here it is pertinent to remember Bourdieu's argument that the aesthetic gaze is constructed in and through an opposition
to the naïve gaze, we have the way in which, in much contemporary cultural discourse, television is object of the naive gaze the aesthetic gaze is
constructed. Television secures the distinction of all nontelevisual cultural forms. At this deep level, there can be no answer to the question "What is good television?"
because it is founded on an oxymoron. Thus bad cinema or theatre is designated soap opera, while video art barely makes it to the Arts pages of newspapers. (And it
is here that we can find the source of the contradictoriness of the ''transmitter" model of good television. Is the "Ode to Joy" or "I Heard It through the Grapevine" quite
the same to the connoisseur if everybody sings along?yf
This constitution of television as the bad cultural object creates a critical abyss when we try to shift the gaze, to look at television, not through it to the Real or High Art.
To echo a formulation which has a different political and historical resonance to my own project, there is almost no elaborated discourse of quality, judgment, and
value which is specific to television and which is not derived from production practices or professional ideologies. That is, if we forget "Art Television" for the
moment, what are the terms we can use to talk critically about that other television, terms which neither collapse pleasure and quality into each other, nor constitute
quality as the ghost of class, gender, and national privilege? Can it be done, and should we, in this relativizing age, wish to do it?
The third answer to the question of what is good television takes a sideways step away from the question, and says: forget these value judgments, let's look at what the
people watch. I want to suggest that this sideways step is beginning to have the effect of merely inverting existing aesthetic hierarchy (the popular is goodyf O H D Y L Q J W K H
power relations in place.
? There are two main problems in thinking about a television aesthetic. The first, which I do not address
substantially but which informs the endeavor of this paper, is part of the broader problem of popular aesthetics in general, and particularly popular aesthetics of mass
cultural commodity production. This is to do Page 62
Horace Newcomb, writing in 1974, argued for the use of criteria of intimacy, continuity, and history in a television aesthetic, as well as for the importance of soap
opera in the development of television drama. Intimacy and continuity do seem important elements in characterizing what is specific to television in certain textual
modes. They are also, of course, characteristic of certain ways of watching television. The challenge of an adequate television aesthetic (if this is indeed what we should
wish to call ityf L V Q R W R Q O \ W K D W L W P X V W W D N H D S R V L W L R Q R Q W K H U H O D W L R Q V K L S V \f between what we might call the institutional and the program components of televisual
discourse, but that it must also address extremely variable and diverse ways of watching television.
By the former, I mean to indicate the critical and analytical importance granted to what we might temporarily call the television ness of television, which can be taken as
the dominant focus for analysis, as opposed to the more traditional concentration on single programs. The classical site within British cultural theory for discussion of
how the television text can be constituted as an object of study is the late Raymond Williams's formulation of "flow," taken up by John Caughie in analysis of "the
world" of television, and John Ellis with the notion of the segment. In the US, "the viewing strip" was proposed as the relevant unit by Newcomb and Hirsch in their
1983 essay. These attempts to theorize how we may both grasp the of television and integrate the of viewing into analysis can, I think,
be most usefully supplemented by the deployment of the notion of "mode of address," which allows us to specify, at a formal level, the way in which the television text
is always constructed as continuously there . The differing identities posed in these interpellations (child, citizen, hobby enthusiast, consumer, etc.yf D Q G W K H
overlapping and contradictory ways in which we are called to watch form one of many sites for further research. An insistence on the analytic importance of these
moments continuousness and mode of address gives some access to the inscription of television's institutional basis in its formal operations.
The difficulty of defining or constituting the television text is accentuated by the privacy of television usage and the absence of an academy concerned to regulate both
the production and consumption of television. These factors tend to privilege the perception of diverse modes of engagement with the television text as a specific and
defining feature of television view Page 63
ing. There are two problems with this view. As Paddy Scannell has argued, this is surely a feature of broadcast media rather than television as such. Second, we
should not forget that people have always engaged variously with all cultural texts. Many books bought are not read, many paintings in art galleries not looked at; much
music used as background but the institutions of high culture, the academy, the museum, patronage, the auction room, have historically codified, both explicitly and
implicitly, the proper mode of engagement with the text be it a (sublimeyf P R X Q W D L Q Y L H Z R U D O \ U L F S R H P $ O W K R X J K P D Q \ S H R S O H P D \ Q R W H Q J D J H L Q W K H V H S U R S H U Z D \ V
critical and aesthetic discussion is usually conducted on the assumption or negotiation of this type of engagement. This is not to polemicize for and against particular
ways of watching television. It is to point out that although the historical research of writers such as William Boddy and Lynn Spigel shows us that there was originally
considerable uncertainty about how to understand the place of television in the home, the institutions of television are primarily concerned with maximizing audiences
and revenue, not with the codifying of proper ways to watch.
An aesthetic of television would thus, in some ways, have to be an anti aesthetic to be adequate to its object and the practices constituting it. Engaging with the
popular, the domestic, and the functional, it undercuts the very constitution of classical aesthetic judgment.
The difficulty which I have outlined above of constituting the television text as an object of study is compounded by a series of critical shifts since the 1960s, which I
now want to sketch before returning to these problems. I am thus arguing that there are qualities of television as a medium (and these can be qualities of usage, rather
than essential qualitiesyf Z K L F K S U e dispose one to abandon text for audience, and that this tendency has been much facilitated by a range of different, but obviously
related, critical trajectories. The audience has come to dominance in Britain in five main ways: (1yf W K U R X J K W K H F K D Q J L Q J S D U D G L J P V L Q O L W H U D U \ V W X G L H V \f through the
growth of cultural, and particularly subcultural, studies, (3yf W K U R X J K S D U W L F X O D U O R J L F V L Q W K H G H Y H O R S P H Q W R I I L O P D Q G W H O H Y L V L R Q V W X G L H V \f through the increasingly
fashionable theorization of postmodernity, and (5yf W K U R X J K W K H L P S D F W R I I H P L Q L V W P H W K R G R O R J L H V R Q D F D G H P L F G L V F R X U V H , Z L O O G H D O Z L W K W K H V H I L Y H D U H D V P R U H D Q G O H V V
schematically.
I wish here to examine what has happened to the television text as an object of study in recent years. I want to trace,
very schematically, the different ways in which the television text as an object of study has been under assault, and to argue for the importance of retaining the notion of
text as an analytic category.
Literary studies, and my next category, cultural studies, I want only to reference. Catherine Belsey's 1980 (and indeed, to a certain extent, the
Methuen listyf 7 H U U \ ( D J O H W R Q
V , Page 64
and Raymonds Williams's 1981 and 1983 accounts of the crisis in Cambridge English provide, in their shared references (which is not to equate their argumentsyf D
patterning of the transformation of English and literary studies since the 1960s. For our purposes, what is most significant is not so much the assault on the canon as
the elevation of the act of reading, over the text, as the point of meaning production. The ascendancy of (differentyf W K H R U L H V R I U H D G L Q J D Q G U H F H S W L R Q K D V F R Q W U L E X W H G W R
a radical devaluation of the notion of the text.
Ethnographic sociology and the study of subcultures, perhaps best exemplified by the 1975 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' ,
Paul Willis's 1977 , and Hebdige's 1979 , also worked to validate the role of the cultural consumer in the
construction of meaning. The apparent, obvious or intended meanings of a whole series of commodities were revealed as transformed within subcultural practice.
In relation to film and television studies, I want to make my points through observations of trends at the two International Television Studies Conferences held in
London in 1984 and 1986. There are, of course, always ongoing debates in particular intellectual fields, which sometimes gel into apparently obvious sets of issues
and concerns at particular historical moments in the academy. There are also always more and less fashionable and attractive areas for research. Although not the only
shift in parameters of debate, there was, between the 1984 and 1986 conferences, a clear move in interest from what is happening on the screen to what is happening
in front of it from text to audience.
This is not in any way to underestimate the amount of research that has already been conducted into the behavior and readings of the audience, both in Britain/Europe
and in the United States. It is to suggest that the 1986 conference provides a convenient, if arbitrary, way of marking the entry of new and different interests into
audience research. The 1984 conference took place just at the very end of a period of ten years or so of British culturalist analyses of popular film and television texts.
These analyses had, in the main, what one could call a political motivation. For a range of quite complexly articulated reasons, including the (semi yf L Q V W L W X W L R Q D O L ] D W L R Q R I
film and television studies within the academy, the rightward shift in the British political scene, the aging of the generation radicalized in 1968, not to mention the
institutional convenience of textual analysis, we had in Britain the burgeoning of academic analyses of popular texts which sought to discredit both the left pessimist
despair over and the high cultural dismissal of mass and popular cultures. From the mid 70s onwards, "progressive" academics in these fields became increasingly
involved in the production of what could be termed "the redemptive reading." Film noir, 50s color melodrama, and television programs such as
, and were among the texts addressed.
The point about the "redemptive reading" is that it is not a simple populist embrace of the entertainment forms of late capitalism. The purely Page 65
populist moment although of course there has always been a straightforwardly populist strain contributing to the arguments for this sort of work comes at the end of
this period roughly contemporary with the shift to the audience which I am describing, and, in popular cultural terms, with Madonna's rise to stardom. The redemptive
reading is not populist in that it starts with an acceptance of the uncongenial politics of whatever cultural text for it is primarily a political reading and then finds, at the
least, incoherences and contradiction, and at the most fully articulated, subtexts of revolt. Partly because of the centrality of Hollywood to the constitution of Film
Studies as a discipline, it is here that this form of critical practice is at its most sophisticated and elaborated. The notorious category "e" of ("films
which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner"yf is of
course a category of reception ("If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms ...''yf X Q O L N H D O O W K H R W K H U F D W H J R U L H V L Q W K H L U L Q I O X H Q W L D O W D [ R Q R P \ 7 K H
famous account of reveals what was at stake for cinephiles when ideological correctness became the principal critical criterion. The loved object,
Hollywood cinema, which would have had to be jettisoned under the regime of the "right on," could be retrieved if its textual (here standing for ideologicalyf F R K H U H Q F H
could be demonstrated to be only apparent.
The redemptive reading frequently meets with a certain scepticism, a doubt that readers really read like that. The 1984 ITSC marked a suitable final appearance
for the dominance of this type of textual analysis the theoretical position had now to be supported by research into how nonacademic readers read. In the 1984 ITSC,
the conference strand that was bulging at the seams was that of "textual analysis." In 1986, submissions to this area were radically reduced, and there was increased
evidence of qualitative audience research. This "new" audience work, which comes partly from the necessity of testing the type of textual hypotheses referred to above,
and is often influenced by the ascendancy of reception theory in literary studies, met, often in ignorance, the older, more quantitative traditions of mass communications
research. As Jane Feuer observed in her 1986 paper, the television text has been displaced by the text of audience a much more various and diverse text and the
enormous conceptual and methodological problems entailed.
We are beginning to see a whole new body of research into how people view television, and this research functions to further disperse the text as an analytic category.
We can now, following the work of, for example, Peter Collett, Ann Gray, Dorothy Hobson, and David Morley (to take British examplesyf R Q O \ D U J X H W K D W S H R S O H
watch television in extremely heterogeneous ways. People watch alone, with intimates, with strangers. They watch while they're doing something else, even when
they're in another room. The notion of "flow," made less harmonious through practices such as channel zapping, has to be supplemented by the major variable of
audience presence for the text. But how can we theorize this in a way which Page 66
allows us to do more than accumulate an ethnography of particular practices?
With the "everything is everything else" of "postmodernity," we have also lost any innocent notion of what might constitute the television text through a recognition of the
proliferation, across different media, of potential textual sites. At one level, this is a phenomenon of marketing and product licensing, and of the international character
of image markets, to paraphrase Mattelart et al., at another, of the deep penetration of television into our daily lives. Thus we can buy videos of early episodes of
, read novels based on any of the soaps, overhear and join in conversations about soap characters, and read about predicted narrative events in
newspapers. Again, what is posed for us is the question of how we organize our perception of these issues rather than the self evident, textual destruction that some
have found.
Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott have done exemplary work on what they call "the Bond phenomenon," in which they examine the many moments, textual
existences, and transformations of James Bond. They set out "to demonstrate, in a practical way rather than just theoretically, that 'the text itself' is an inconceivable
object." Their achievement, I think, is to prove not that the text itself is an inconceivable object, but that the choice of what is recognized as constituting "a" text,
consciously or not, is a political as well as a critical matter. It is around this issue that the contemporary struggles to dominate the critical field will be fought.
Literary analysis has as one of its specialisms the identification of reference and allusion. Modernism was partly modern in its use of quotation and the assumed
knowledge of other texts. But the intertextuality of television is in some ways more radical, without the central, organizing drive of the author or, as I have argued
earlier, the specific hierarchies of form given by an established aesthetic. This quality, the promiscuous and nearly parodic self referentiality of television, is not quite
specific to television in a way that could define the medium. It is a quality along with others also attributable to television seen as characteristic of a postmodern era.
The recognition of television and video as major agents of our understanding of contemporary time and space, indeed, along with the computer, of the transformation
of these categories in everyday life, is essential, and potentially more useful than the analysis of single programs as if they were poems. Bu