I am no longer clear as to which type of "core" my posts are so we'll go with norm.

tl;dr Druids sacrifice humans because they are barbarians and because they are socialists, maybe?

In keeping with my interest in ideology, I wanted to quickly share a few thoughts about a show I started watching over the weekend called Britannia. A joint production between the British channel Sky and Amazon Studios, Britannia follows the first incursion of the Roman Army into the British Isles since Julius Caesar. The show is aesthetically very similar in tone to Vikings and portrays the Celtic druids as dark and ominous soothsayers/sorcerers, who listen to the voice of the gods in bacchanal, drug-induced orgies, with the occasional human sacrifice thrown in for good measure (and narrative convenience). The show very quickly falls into a rather banal rehashing of the good versus evil, demon versus god trope, with a mysterious prophecy, a little girl who is “The One”, and upon whom all hope rests. 

Now I should point out that I have been a hardcore D&D nerd for over 20 years, and absolutely love these kinds of shows, despite tired tropes and oversimple god/evil plot-lines. I must admit that I have always been that guy who complains about the portrayal of druids as ancient hippie eco-nuts, with magic thrown in as an afterthought. So seeing them portrayed as dark sorcerers who wouldn’t hesitate to rip out the still-beating heart of someone, should the gods demand it, made my little nerd heart swoon. On the other hand, some of the blatant historical inaccuracies tempered my nerdphoria, and in short order I found myself devouring Wikipedia for proof of said inconsistencies. To my surprise I discovered that the tales of druidic human sacrifice come entirely from Roman historians and contemporary historians have begun to doubt the veracity of those ancient claims, and that there is no archeological evidence to support them. They hypothesized that the historical claims were calculated “fake news”, as the Romans had a vested interest in portraying all non-Romans as barbaric so that they could rationalize conquering them.

Given this, the ideology of the show is very interesting. The Romans had a vested interest in portraying the druids as uncivilized savages to reinforce their power over them. The producers of the show have kept the portrayal, but its meaning has been inverted; modern culture fetishizes violence and sex, and thus the druids’ portrayal makes them popular anti-heroes and capitalizes on the success of shows like Vikings and Game of Thrones. Identification is also inverted: the Roman historians were capitalizing on a hegemonic ideology that privileges civilization, whereas our current hegemony privileges an ideology of male violence, fetishized and sexualized. 

In this inversion we also have an interesting representation of capitalism. The Roman general (who from the POV of the Celts is the literal manifestation of an earth demon) claims that Rome only desires peace and stability so as to facilitate the collection of taxes. All of the Celtic characters believe in the druidic prophecy that claims that Rome is a demon, and that the stated desire for taxes is a ruse. From their perspective (which the narration demands is our perspective) the Romans’ true goal is to murder the gods, somehow personified as a little girl, although the mystic nature of the narration obfuscates the exact nature of this relationship. There is clearly a relation here of capitalism as demonic, however it is very unclear what the alternative is (as embodied in the Celts). There is a great deal of tribalism and infighting (sounds like the Left to me all right), but the strange mix of hedonism, mysticism, and authoritarianism leaves me bewildered. 

What the hell was that Lisa Kudrow storyline on Grace and Frankie?

As a longtime activist for vibrators for the geriatric population and distant admirer of Sam Waterston's eyebrows, I was naturally attracted to the Netflix show Grace and Frankie. It's a not-so-guilty-if-someone-else-admits-to-liking-it guilty pleasure show for me. (I also just enjoy hearing Lily Tomlin's voice.) I proudly spent all of last Wednesday avoiding my readings for Nitin's 510 class and binge watching Season 4 in my bed. Season 3 ended on a nerve-wracking note: Grace and Frankie may split up so Frankie can move to Santa Fe with her Ghostbuster boyfriend, Jacob (Ernie Hudson). Right on the cusp of some major competition from the evil dynamic duo of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows! (Good lord this show is a treasure trove of powerhouse eyebrows!) Where do the ladies go from here?!

Enter: ... Lisa Kudrow??

As Season 4 opens, Frankie hates Santa Fe and Grace has a new roommate, her nail technician, Sheree, who has recently fallen on rough times with the passing of her husband. Essentially, Sheree's stepchildren took control of the house, changed the locks, and have left Sheree homeless. As Frankie returns to San Diego to attend the gender reveal party for her in-utero grandchild, Frankie begins to feel threatened by the relationship between Grace and Sheree because Grace will eat cheesy potatoes rather than her usual habit of sheer photosynthesis for energy. As Frankie snoops around her old studio, which is now Sheree's, she finds suspicious depositions which call Sheree's story into question. Grace and Frankie confront Sheree at first with doubt, then accept her story and enlist themselves to get Sheree's house back from her dastardly stepchildren. Appealing to their lawyer ex-husbands, Grace and Frankie learn that written proof must exist that stipulates that Sheree's husband wants her to have the house upon his death.

Good and narratively contrived news! Such a thing exists!!! In a love letter in a box in the old house!!!

EXT - Sheree's House - DAY
GRACE and FRANKIE perform a B&E. Grace crawls into a doggy door that 5-year-old me wouldn't even have been able to fit into, screws up her knee, manages to unlock the door, and she and Frankie go on the hunt. Sheree's very anxiously looking stepson comes in, G&F pretend to be a realtor and prospective buyer, they finangle Sheree in, Sheree finds the letter and at some point the son runs out of the house and all is restored for Sheree.

Then we literally never hear about Sheree for the rest of the season and the only remainder from that entire two episode arc is Grace's injured knee which propels her into an existential crisis about dating a younger man. Both episodes could have been removed from the season and nothing would have been lost. If I wanted Sheree as a character, I'd have watched an episode of Friends, since Sheree is what I imagine Phoebe transformed into after nearly 15 years of being off the airwaves. The entire narrative dissonance bothered me, especially for a show made for streaming whereby futile narrative arcs are easily pinpointed and, in my personal view, "fluff" episodes are less tolerated because there are less restrictions for network seasons, etc.

WOW! That was a weird episode of Law and Order.

In short, if you have yet to start season 4 of Grace and Frankie, you can start at episode 3.

Softcore Post 3: TV Screens

This video is from a mall in Hong Kong.

I have an abiding interest in glitches and low-tech. I found this at a mall. When we had arrived, this was displaying some images--I think news. We went up the elevator to the rooftop, snapped some photos, and came down. When we got off the elevator, the 'recognizable' images had become this. I'm attracted to glitches in part for reasons that artist and scholar Rosa Menkman explains in her 2009/2010 Glitch Studies Manifesto; she writes,

The glitch is a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse. For a moment I am shocked, lost and in awe, asking myself what this other utterance is, how was it created. Is it perhaps... a glitch? But once I name it, the momentum—the glitch—is no more... (Menkman 5).

What actually happens when a glitch occurs is unknown, I stare at the glitch as a void of knowledge; a strange dimension where the laws of technology are suddenly very different from what I expected and know. Here is the purgatory; an intermediate state between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a possible continuation into a new form, a new understanding, a landscape, a videoscape… (Menkman 9).

Although Menkman points to the ways in which the glitch is recuperated by and assimilated into, for instance, dominant epistemologies (or epistemology at all) and capital, she remains nonetheless committed to a utopian vision in the "ruins of meaning" (5). I wonder to what degree someone like Gitlin's notion of hegemony might help us re-situate the glitched screen not as aberrant or essentially resistant or defamiliarizing, but re-enfolded into dominant ideology. I wonder to what degree glitches and noise are constitutive of the informational rather than something to be gotten rid of. I recall Wendy Chun saying something about this in Programmed Visions but I can no longer find it. ("making it difficult to separate error from answer" perhaps? [Chun 142]).


http://amodern.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2010_Original_Rosa-Menkman-Glitch-Studies-Manifesto.pdf

Core Response #1

Newcomb and Hirsh state, “the incidence of certain content categories may be cited as significant, or their ‘effects’ more clearly correlated with some behavior. This concern for measuring is, of course, the result of conceiving television in one way rather than another, as ‘communication’ rather than as ‘art’” (Newcomb & Hirsh, p. 562). This observation significantly resonated with me for several reasons. On the one hand I completely agree with this notion. As a doctoral student in communication who studies television, I am inclined to fully support the study of television within the communication field. Media effects is one of the main considerations for studying television within communication and separates it from an interpretive “close-reading” method. However, as my undergraduate degree is in drama, I want to push back against their idea that conceiving television as art eliminates the possibility of studying its effects and correlated behavior. Art is meant to inspire, provoke, challenge, change, and exist as medium for public debate (Campbell & Martin, 2006). Why then, should there be a dichotomy between communication and art? Cultural Studies is a prevalent subject within communication, and much of cultural centers on communities’ art. Therefore, I do not prescribe to the notion that art exists separately from communication and vice versa. I believe they exist and can be studies interdisciplinarily. That said, I appreciate the Newcomb and Hirsh article as an excellent foundation for how and why I have chosen to study television from the communication perspective.

Newcomb and Hirsh “suggest that in popular culture generally, in television specifically, the raising of questions is as important as the answering of them” (p. 565). Furthermore, “television does not present form ideological conclusions… it comments on ideological problems” (Newcomb & Hirsh, p. 566). I find this to be especially true considering the traditionally social nature of television viewing. Quite often, a television show I watch with friends or family, sparks a social or political discussion based on the varying view points presented in the episode. What the characters feel or how the plot resolves tends to be secondary to the discussion of the actual issues. However, I am in agreement with Gitlin, that the plot conclusion or character representations are a product of hegemony. Because it is often apparent that, “within the formula of a program, a specific slant often pushes through, registering a certain position on a particular public issue” (Gitlin, p. 261). Often times, particularly in regards to designing media for social change, there is this push to expose and upset the hegemonic powers. However, the Gitlin piece made me question (and I will need to research Gramci’s thoughts on this), what happens when hegemony is not only exposed but overturned. Is there always a new form of hegemony? And in regards to television, will hegemony always be inescapable?

To be fully transparent, my work is directly influenced by my bias as both a feminist and acafan (Jenkins, 2008). I want to see race and gender equality in my favorite shows to help inspire race and gender equality in society at large. Last week, I was in debate with a friend about my content analysis work in crime drama television. His argument was that it is unfair to make judgments about the intention or social implications of isolated dialogue without asking the writers what they specifically meant by it. In regards to a Father Knows Best episode, Roz Rogers “said that the ending, which had been tacked on in order to reach a quick resolution, ‘did not ring true’ for him” (Hendershot, p. 205). This is interesting considering the scholarly reaction to abrupt and sexist ending of the episode. However, regardless of intention, the audience effects are real, and however the audience decodes (Hall) an episode can have a rippling influence.

My final thoughts are that each of these three readings hold weight. I ultimately disagree with Hendershot’s statement that, “the televisual cultural forum that Newcomb and Hirsch identified so long ago may not exist today, but Parks and Recreation suggests that we should respond to the issues it raises” (Hendershot, p.211).  I think it still very much exists today and can be identified in any number of television shows and genres far extending from Parks and Recreation.

This Post Isn't Core, It's Informal - Dan Lark, Week 3

Since my homework for this class has been to watch more TV (challenge accepted), last week I binge watched the fourth season of The Great British Bake Off. I really enjoyed the show and I thought I would try to highlight some of my observations:

GBBO is a good show to observe a ritual negotiation of British identity and family life in the United Kingdom. In the beginning of the series, we are introduced to the contestants, who in my understanding are supposed to represent the cultural heterogeneity of British society. The contestants come from a range of places within the UK, which is  noticeable through the linguistic diversity of the contestants’ accents - They don’t all speak the Queen’s English. The contestants are predominantly white, but in the fourth season, there are a few people of color, including a Sikh man and a Ghanaian man, and the class positions seems to run from working class to high class professional. Through the shared hobby of baking, the show displays an idealized version of British identity, where differences in British society might be both reflected and overcome through a wholesome domestic activity. An example of this can be found in the season finale showstopper, where contestants were asked to make a 48-piece picnic basket fit for the Queen.

The signature dish challenge often takes the form of a traditional English food, such as Yorkshire pudding or a Queen Victoria sponge. Through the baking of these dishes, traditional British food ways are reinscribed and potentially expanded. The Sikh contestant, Rav, would incorporate his own culturally specific foods and practices into the traditional English dishes, perhaps making these “foreign” spices and flavors palatable (pun intended) for an Anglo audience as well as elevating them to national prominence for a south Asian audience.  Here, we might see how former colonial subjects are able to be incorporated into broader British culture.

I like how this show takes a very hectic and stressful event and edits it to make it appear less stressful. The contestants and judges and hosts all seem to be kind and supportive and while the competition is evident, they aren’t competing for a cash prize or a chance at their own bakery or anything.  We are consistently shown the contestants encouraging each other and standing in awe at the talents of their fellow competitors. Compare to a show like Chopped, which uses a heavy amount of editing to heighten the sense of anxiety and competition. This isn’t to say that GBBO isn’t competitive, but that the show is deliberately crafted to spur a sense of unity through competition. This unity is also a distinctly “British” aspect of the show, contributing to its affirmation of British national identity and family life.

Core response 2 - Week 3

I really liked all the texts for this week, although I had trouble with some things. For example, Newcomb and Hirsch portray TV viewers as bricoleurs that make their own interpretation of TV content given what they bring to it (values, attitudes, personal experiences, etc), and discuss that altogether TV acts as a cultural forum rather than solely as a place of reproduction of hegemonic ideology. That is why they claim that just the raising questions in a show is important because audiences are introduced to social problems that way, despite whichever resolution the show presents to the issue (and indeed this was clear with both the examples we saw). This is all fine, but I am not that comfortable with their treatment of TV as a liminal space because one of the characteristics of liminality is a sort of suspended state where anything can happen, and so I find it kind of dangerous when it comes to TV. In other words, the authors state: “The skewed demography of the world of television is not quite so bizarre and repressive once we admit that it is the realm in which we allow our monsters to come out and play…” (p. 564). The problem I have with this is that that only works if we consider TV as a mere reflection of public thought, acting as a sort of cultural agora where things that inhabit people’s (or individuals’?) consciousness are enacted, but I think that TV also helps construct reality which means that those “fantasies transformed into plot structures” might be worth cautious analysis, particularly because it is not clear whose fantasies those are. Despite this, I do think that this text provides an important perspective that probably helped move the needle from more structuralist approaches, such as transmission models like “hypodermic needle” that assumed one passive, tabula rasa audience, without discounting the production end of this process. Given that the TV structure/broadcasting system in that text is radically different now, Hendershot’s piece was a great complement because it takes into account precisely those differences, particularly the contrast from “confronting your beliefs” through TV to the “filter bubble” of narrowcasting through TV in all its forms, although these more "general" notions of TV today could have probably been more fleshed out before jumping to the example of Parks & Recreation. 

I really liked Gitlin’s piece and I will mention it more when I present, as I hope that the example I bring forward in my presentation for this class will make clear some of his points in this article. Although I wish he had mentioned Adorno a bit more, especially when describing “format and formula”, I found his breakdown of the ways in which hegemony is reasserted really helpful. Overall, I thought that his discussion of hegemony was very well informed, not just because it follows in the Gramscian tradition, but because while he clearly states that the hegemonic process frames social conflicts into compatibility with dominant systems of meaning, he also asserts that hegemonic ideology of liberal capitalism is essentially conflicted.

Core Response #1: My Issue with Hendershot's Understanding of 'Niche' (Phil Miller)

While reading the Heather Hendershot document, I was bothered by one of the claims that she mentions about niches and the concept of a cultural forum that she seems to understand in only a network broadcasting context.  During the article, she states that "Confrontation was central to the cultural forum model and, thus, specific to the network era; in a niche-viewing environment, however, viewers tend to gravitate to content that matches their preexisting interests.  Narrowly targeted niche TV thus provides “Self-confirmation,” leaving little room for the old cultural forum ideal of ideas in conflict" (Hendershot 205-206). I do agree that we’re in an age of where the consumer has a greater agency where we can choose content based on our personal experiences and tastes.  However, I have an issue with Heather's statement of the cultural forum in a niche dynamic for a couple of reasons.  

First, there’s been problems when it comes to the idea of ‘niches’ as a method of marketing content that has created in-group conflict.  One example is the LGBTQ community as further elaborated by Anthony Freitas.  In his article “Gay Programming, Gay Publics” he writes a convincing argument addressing the benefits and pitfalls of niche cable content to the LGBTQ community. Many argue the content of such cable channels views such a group as white, cis-gendered, male, and middle to upper-class.  Freitas argues that “the representation of a unitary lesbian and gay market niche erases much of the variation within and between these communities” (Freitas 225).  The representation itself manifests in the lack of addressing Transgender issues, class discrepancies, and sexualized racism of queer people of color within the community.  
Second, the utilization of social media has allowed for various interest groups to participate in the process and conflict of ideas within niches even resulting in changes of particular programs.  One example is the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race where online activists such as Kat Blaque and Jayson Flores have all provided quality critiques of the program.  They both make the point, and to which I agree with as a fan of the show, that even though they appreciate what RuPaul has achieved and they love the show because it provides queer programming that is lacking, they still notice problematic elements. Both have discussed the appropriation of class-specific blackness by contestants of the show to help with their progression through the run of a season and the racism that is rampant on social media by the fans themselves.  An example from the reality show where internet backlash contributed to the changing of the structure within the show is a mini-challenge that used the term ‘Tranny’ in a derogatory sense.  So while I appreciate the article by Heather Hendershot I couldn’t help but express my frustration from how I think the original ideal of the cultural forum has not disappeared, but much more prevalent now than ever.

Work Cited

Freitas, Anthony.  “Gay Programming, Gay Publics: Public and Private Tensions in Lesbian and

    Gay Cable Channels.”  Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, edited by Sarah

    Banet-Weser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, NYU Press, 2007, pp. 215-233.  

Hendershot, Heather.  “Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum.”  How to Watch Television,

    edited by Jason Mittel and Ethan Thompson, NYU Press, 2013, pp. 204-212.  

Core Response Week 3

In one way or another, all of this week’s authors present television as a medium that depends on ambiguity as part of its governing logic, and they all seem to agree that understanding this ambiguity is key to positing television’s role in shaping ideology. They diverge, however, in their outlook on the social potential of this ambiguity, as well as in their understanding of the televisual “text” as it pertains to their areas of inquiry. While Newcomb and Hirsch, as well as Hendershot in reanimating their essay thirty years later, render ambiguity in television as formative of a cultural forum in which the representation of a multiplicity of viewpoints contributes to productive discussion, Gitlin assumes a more shrewd perspective, conceiving of televisual ambiguity as part of the “hegemonic commercial cultural system” (Gitlin 251). Ana Paula points to several reasons to doubt Hendershot’s optimistic reading of Parks and Recreation, and I believe Gitlin’s take on ambiguity can also call into question some of the contentions made by Newcomb and Hirsch.

Within his discussion of “solution” as a form through which hegemony operates on television, Gitlin points to several programs (including All in the Family) and films in which individual action cannot neatly solve a social problem, and that these messy endings can fragment audience responses. He points to the potential commercial value of these endings: “In this situation, commercial culture succeeds with diverse interest groups, as well as with the baffled and ambivalent, precisely by propounding ambiguous or even self-contradictory situations and solutions” (263). The examples that he cites, despite deviating from the conventional, neat solutions and returns to normalcy, can be incorporated into the hegemonic system via their ability to speak to, if not cater to, viewers of diverse political and moral interests. To test out Gitlin’s understanding of ambiguity on “Betty, Girl Engineer,” I imagine he’d agree with Newcomb and Hirsch’s reading of the episode as raising questions of gender identity and discrimination, and that these questions are not completely subordinated by the apparent “answer” offered by the ending. But while Newcomb and Hirsch use this episode as evidence of their slightly utopian notion that “the rhetoric of television drama is a rhetoric of discussion,” Gitlin might interpret the episode’s ambiguous, contradictory messaging as a marketing strategy, or “responses to the restiveness and boredom of the mass audience, or the emergence of new potential audiences” (Newcomb & Hirsch 566, Gitlin 257).

Here, I am committing the error that Newcomb and Hirsch signal – that “any emphasis on individual episodes, series, or even genres, misses the central point of the forum concept” (566). They point to Raymond Williams’ concept of “flow” as an antecedent to their notion of the forum as the definitive televisual text. Gitlin likewise prioritizes structures and patterns over individual programs and content. In focusing on one series, and largely on two episodes within the series, Hendershot does not fully realize the potential of Newcomb and Hirsch’s framework. Would her analysis of Parks and Recreation as cultural forum change if she read the show in relation to NBC programming overall, or to other thirty-minute comedies, or (to fully deploy Williams’ conception of “flow”) to an entire block of broadcasting, commercials and all? Perhaps her emphasis on the “atomized constituencies” of today’s TV audiences justifies her decontextualized analysis of the show, but I cannot help but wonder how her contentions might refract if her scope of analysis were to flow a bit more loosely.

Request: Notetaker

Hello! I will not be in class this upcoming Tuesday, January 23, and I am hoping that someone would share their notes w/ me in my absence. I'm happy to buy you a coffee or arrange whatever feels a fitting recompense! Thx ~ harry

Second Core Post

My post this week is responding Hendershot's article, specifically her somewhat overly positive interpretation of Parks and Recreation. While Hendershot chooses to write her analysis of the show in conversation with Newcomb and Hirsch, I found that Giltin's arguments offer an interesting angle in considering how the show portrays civic engagement, liberal/conservative ideologies, and "middle of the road" solutions to controversial issues. Gitlin's arguments would ask us to question how a show like Parks and Recreation reinforces hegemony by, as he states, "domesticating opposition, absorbing it into forms compatible with the core ideological structure" (263).

If we are to agree with Hendershot's argument that the show "is a retort to the rising tide of right-wing, anti-government sentiment" (211), then what Gitlin's arguments tell us is that Parks and Recreation is merely an acceptable (to larger hegemonic structures) retort because it does not condemn them outright. Instead, the show's middle ground ideology reinforces hegemonic ideals because even as it points out the contradictions and conflicts of liberal/conservative characters, it does not deviate from the ideals of a liberal capitalist society. As much as I think Hendershot wants to present Parks and Rec as a show who's centrism is a response to religious conservatives, its existence on NBC, it's comedy format, and its resolution of controversial topics follows Gitlin's argument more closely in that it merely presents us with a product that falls in line with hegemonic ideals. In Hendershot's arguing how political forums are a space for reconciliation I think Harry points to how these spaces are also reproductions of a neoliberal hegemony that the show in turn replicates.

With this in mind, I also question how shows with a more explicit position as a political response to the current resurgence of the alt-right and religious conservative values (thinking here of The Handmaid's Tale) fall in line with hegemonic ideals. What does it mean that the show has become a popular symbol of "resistance"? More generally, do we consider shows that have been accepted by the neoliberal structure of the entertainment industry to be revolutionary? Or do they replicate an already existing ideology even if they are marketed otherwise?

Wikipedia and The Crown

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/01/04/do-you-fall-down-a-wikipedia-rabbit-hole-after-each-episode-of-the-crown-youre-not-alone/?utm_term=.154984981e88

It’s fascinating how The Crown has unanimously ushered this wave of Wikipedia-ing. I thought I was alone in not being able to put my phone during an episode because you want to ‘fact check.’ It’s a good lead in for shows that want to inspire more interaction, that could possibly be the next trend (probably already?). It also brings us around to some of the points McLuhan states; TV as a “cool” medium that is consequently an interactive platform where the audience has to participate (in this case, fact checking). What speaks more for the series is its skill in narrative disclosure despite spoilers and events being out there and publicly known.

Non-Core T.V. Post: "Wormwood"

Recently I have been watching the Errol Morris led T.V. miniseries Wormwood, and what follows is my ambivalent feelings about the show, which might be relevant to thinking of T.V. as a cultural forum. Though it does do some interesting things formally, Wormwood for the most part follows the familiar Netflix formula of True Crime/Docu-dramas. Like most shows in this genre, the "truth," in this case involving several layers of a CIA cover-up, is slowly peeled away for the viewer. The ending of these types of shows, I find, is always dissatisfying. Because they rest on a "truth" that can never actually be revealed, they always seem to lead to a dead end, one that makes me feel cheated (I haven’t seen the last episode of Making a Murderer for this very reason).

Morris remarks towards the end of Wormwood that not telling the story is still part of the story, and this might be taken as a structuring device for all shows in this genre. A certain story has not been told, and now it will be told, but it will also not really be told, because it can't be told (because there's still (and never will be) enough evidence to tell it). This makes me think of those “scientific” ghost hunting shows, in which a lot of work goes into never actually seeing a ghost. In the case of Wormwood, and shows like it, a social or political problem is raised, but no solution is given. There's something of a spectral (?) modernism here: art and its forms can guide you, but it can't give you the answers. Yet, this is also disturbing (again, spectral), because it forces us as viewers to a precipice where we can either pursue "truth" on our own terms (which is much harder work and less entertaining than when Errol Morris does it for us) or we can give up and forget, which I think is what most of us do, until some other program lures us in with the promise of secrets to be revealed. Perhaps these shows show us that truth is negotiable (though that sounds exactly like what we don’t need nowadays), but I’m mostly inclined to be suspicious of them. I’m curious what you all think. 

Core Response 1, Week 3: Talk that Talk?

For the purposes of this response, I will think through two moments from two of the texts (Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch’s “Television as Cultural Forum” and Heather Hendershot’s “Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum”) assigned for week three. Although I think these moments could be said to be inter-related insofar as these texts both demonstrate investment in the Tocquevillian (and, as such, I would say: distinctly white U.S. Anglo-American) ‘commons’ and the efficacies of (political) communication, I will treat these moments separately.

Nearing the conclusion of their chapter, Newcomb and Hirsch lay out what Hendershot will later describe as a possibly obsolete, at least anachronistic (Hendershot 205), framework by which the “radical extreme” of atomistic “individual interpretation” can be/come sublated into into distinct and identifiable zones of shared meaning, represented by and representing themselves as “special interest groups” in the field of the political (Newcomb and Hirsch 569); this scheme is both a research observation and a methodological heuristic. While I find it curious that Newcomb and Hirsh are not interested in the constitutive disconnections, mis/disidentifications, and (im)potentialities of “the (special interest) group” as they could be said to be of the media text in their approach laid out and exercised in their chapter, and while I find it ironic that Hendershot describes the former essay as “dated” (205) when her contention that it has become more difficult to “spot controversy” in the age of “hundreds of channels” seems (unevenly) surpassed by the affordances of the accelerationism of Twitter critique and its capacity for emergent and provisional solidarities, I don’t necessarily want to address those here (although I think the latter gestures towards my point). Rather, I am piqued by Newcomb and Hirsch’s contention that “[w]e see these groups as representative of metaphoric ‘fault lines’ in American society” (569). I wonder if these groups can be taken as “representative” of already existing fault lines, or if these groups, some marked by the endurance of institutionalization, others by nascence, all dynamically in-between the two, are (re)made through televisual media such that they are discontinuous with those “fault lines.” In other words, those presumably always already existing, albeit slowly changing, fault lines that are situated by Newcomb and Hirsch as anterior to the lobby just might not look the same, or be constituted in the same way, and, indeed, this might trouble any notion of anteriority and its assurances. In saying this, I’m grounding my argument in comments made by Dr. McPherson regarding her in-progress work around contemporary fascist and white supremacist groups on the Internet, and in an extension of Amit Rai’s notion of “race racing” (see: Amit Rai, “Race Racing: Four Theses on Race and Intensity”) that “tracks the insistent becoming of race, the way race—‘lack[ing] any resemblance to itself’—is always mutilating and mutating […] its form in order to resituate and revive its capacitation within biopolitical fields” (Puar, The Right to Main, 59). Could this too be said of “the (political interest) groups;” if it can or should be said, are Newcomb and Hirsch’s arguments in any way (dis)generatively “mutilated;” and if Rai via Puar provides any sort of clarification, does it suggest to us anything about the “essential” racialized genderings of “the (special interest) group” form?

Second (and my wordy tendencies have got the better of me, so I’ll be quick lol), I’m interested in the ideological groundings shared by both Newcomb and Hirsch and, for the purposes of this point, represented by the explications from Hendershot. I wonder to what degree we find the “forum,” the vaunted hellenistic form, to be a social-political ideal. I wonder whether the “inherent” “violence wrought by the contractarian belief in a public consists in the imagined public’s foundational premise: that it’s a neutral sphere, ensuring that governance is void of any particular conception about what is good” (see: https://waakoodiwin.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/in-lieu-of-justice-thoughts-on-oppression-identity-earth/). Hendershot’s narrative of the threat of “right-wing resurgence” to government(ality) follows a common “trend in contemporary scholarship on neoliberalism and governance, which sees all institutions as submitting to the normative reason of financialization [and] the undoing of democratic political life by neoliberal reason” (http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-institutionality-making-melamed/). Here, we might attenuate “neoliberal,” as it always already is, by “(neo)conservative” and “fascist.” In any case, this spatiotemporal schema is compelling, but, following Jodi Melamed, how do we square “inequality rather than equality as the natural state of things—treating persons as capital, truncating freedom and social being to comport with accumulation… Doesn’t this describe the long arc of racial capitalist colonial modernity’s shadow rationality?” (Melamed, see above). Perhaps I’m being too harsh on Hendershot; I do find it difficult to map her investments. In any case, I wonder if her conclusion that Parks and Recreation’s “insistence upon keeping its politics understated, couple with its insistence upon the humorousness of extremism” (211) which creates a forum for spectator's civil civic engagement (206) as it models it only takes us back to the very conditions of possibility of the fascistic and hegemonic. (Likewise, I don’t find comfort in Newcomb and Hirsch’s redemptive observation that “In MASH, we are caught in an anti-war rhetoric that cannot end a war. A truly radical alternative, a desertion or an insurrection, would end the series. But it would also end the ‘discussion’ of this issue’ (567). I suppose I don’t see the figure of ‘discussion’ as that far from the actual waging of colonial war itself.) What might this means for epistemologies and methodologies of TV theory and critique?  

Non-Core Response Week 2: The West Wing and an Aesthetic of Liveness

After today’s conversation about liveness as ontology vs. liveness as ideology, I was reminded of a strange bit of live television from a few years back – the live debate episode in season 7 of The West Wing. The episode starts with traditional Sorkin walk and talks as the candidates take the stage, but for the remainder of the episode, the camera angles and cuts replicate those of an actual presidential debate. A bona fide broadcast journalist, Forrest Sawyer, moderates the event. Clearly, the “liveness” of this episode served as a nifty gimmick, and this episode was accordingly one of the most widely viewed of the season, but I’m curious about the other ramifications of the effect of liveness here. There’s an aesthetic of liveness that the episode depends on for its intended effect; the stationary cameras and flatness of the images set this episode apart from the show’s overall rich, single-cam aesthetic, and heighten the stakes by adopting the formal conventions of an actual debate. I’m interested in the affective power of “live” aesthetics – lacking the familiar polished look and swelling score that typify the series, this episode taps into a certain anxiety produced by live political theater. I find myself skipping over this episode when I rewatch the series. Perhaps I want to be lulled into complacency by glossy imagery and the sweet sounds of W.G. Snuffy Walden’s scores. Perhaps those live debate aesthetics are too traumatic after the 2016 election. I’m wondering whether anyone can think of other examples of fiction shows that capture a “live” aesthetic, and whether we can determine where this aesthetic fits into the ideological effect of “liveness.”

A random clip from the episode...it's on Netflix if you're interested in the whole thing. Season 7, Episode 7

Response Week 2 - Technological Determinism and Mass Communication is Really About Class

It is easy to dismiss McLuhan as a pop-theorist whose aphoristic rhetoric is unconvincing, especially when contrasted with Raymond Williams concise prose and elegant argument about the social underpinnings of all technological advancements. McLuhan’s technological determinism is not as easily dismissed as I would like to think, however. Just today I was having a discussion with a friend about the undesirable social changes that social media technologies have brought, and now in retrospect I realize I had fallen into the same deterministic trap that McLuhan fell into. 

It is easy to get caught up in the frenetic pace of technological change and to blame technology for the problems in society, and it was a good reminder that societies privilege certain areas of technological research for a reason. To assign technology the agency to corrupt society robs us of the agency to improve society, and can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, for who are we to stand in the way of scientific progress? Sarcasm aside, I think it is important to think about who benefits from this ideology of technological determinism? Certainly the military industrial complex who, as Williams notes, funded the initial research into radio, television, and the internet.

Another thing that struck me in Williams’ book was the observation in Chapter 1 that: “‘Masses’ had been the new nineteenth-century term of contempt for what was formerly described as ‘the mob’. The physical ‘massing’ of the urban and industrial revolution underwrote this. A new radical class-consciousness adopted the term to express the material of new social formations: ‘mass organizations’. The ‘mass meeting’ was an observable physical effect. So pervasive was this description that in the twentieth century multiple serial production was called, falsely but significantly, ‘mass production’: mass now meant large numbers (but within certain assumed social relationships) rather than any physical or social aggregate” (16). I think it is interesting to conceive of Television specifically, and mass communication broadly, not only as a principle site of class conflict, but as something which defines “the masses,” from the point of view of societies elites. It is only “mass communication” to those who control the means of content production and broadcast  facilities. From the point of view of the masses, it is more aptly described a “mass reception.” Williams goes on to demonstrate that even the semi-public broadcasters operate in close proximity to the State and while not overtly controlled, the decision makers are appointed by the State, chosen from a pool of State functionaries. I am reminded of Chomsky’s propaganda model from Manufacturing Consent, which argues that while individuals may genuinely believe themselves to be operating independently and objectively, they were selected to be in their position because their world view aligns with the interests of the corporation and the State.

I am really excited to be diving into the political economy of Television from the very beginning, and I hope to continue to think about these things as the semester progresses.

Core Response, Week 2

Feuer discusses the interaction between television’s assumed ontological state, particularly ‘live’ broadcasts, as a metadiscourse often enacted to generate (or satisfy) viewership. With the help of Raymond Williams’ concept of flow, she is able to analyze the apparent fragmentation in a superficially ‘live’ program like, Good Morning America. Rather than perceive these various segments as parts of a whole, the article aims to point out the fragmentation that is created within the telecast, and how it (David Hartman) anchors the show’s ‘live’ slant. In arguing the show packs both ideology of ‘live’ coupled with unity of the family and nation, she explores its methods and concludes with questions and topics that preoccupy her research, but is still unsure of what these questions or topics even are.

Analyzing a show like Good Morning America is a smart choice in its overt interest (also ABC as a network) for a particular audience, and thus, advertising. David Morley’s use of Steven Neale’s “ideological problematic” and “mode of address” is useful in identifying ideological interests of news formats. For a show like Good Morning America, these interests match up; the ideological problematic is its mode of address (family and national unity). While reading I wondered how much Good Morning America has changed since Feuer wrote this article (seems awhile since Hartman was on ABC), and how we can look at ABC’s morning line up as a whole to further interpret the flow, how it’s expanded and how ideology has changed or stayed the same. Today, Good Morning America is in its first hour a straight news hour similar to what would be seen on World News Tonight, followed by a second hour that more closely fits segments described in Feuer’s article. Broadcast then begins to shift to more popular news headlines, including “how to’s,” spotlights on current trends (both domestic and celebrity), health trends, etc. This is an easy lead in for the next show, Live with Kelly and Ryan (entirely entertainment), with brief discussion of popular headlines from the hosts, while interestingly enough, carries the headline of ‘live’ and a kind of familial unity through its hosts and the audience (phone calls to fans). Finally, before ABC switches to local news, there is an hour of The View, another ‘live’ broadcast (I’m not sure if this is always done live), which combines discussion of news topics with an emphasis of familial cohosts (The View “family”). Deeper analysis of these three hours of broadcasts boasts ABC’s intent for the same ideological points Feuer discusses, with further revelatory aspects ripe for exploration.  

Core Response, Week 2

This week's readings seem preoccupied with determining what exactly television is. Williams and Feuer attempt to methodically break television down into its constitutive elements of programs, institutions, and time, while McLuhan does his signature style of broad, but provocative generalizations. What each have in common, however, are their attempts to figure out what exactly television does as a technology and cultural form. For Williams, the development of television is not a single event, but the result of a series of separate developments in electricity, radio, cinema, and telegraphy. This resembles the development of film technologies, which also relied upon a series of technological developments in the 19th century, like intermittent mechanisms and slide projections. Williams is interested in the interplay between technological needs and desires and existing social formations, where he seems to understand technological developments like television as a "response to the development of an extended social, economic, and political system and a response to crisis within that system" (14).

Feuer is also interested in this interplay between technology and culture, where television's own self-referential discourse of liveness is used to obfuscate the medium's ideological functions. For Feuer, Williams notion of flow ("series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organization is something other than the declared organization" (Williams 93)) reveals not the essential qualities of television, but its set of historically situated practices that are shaped by various institutional, commercial, and cultural factors. Here, flow becomes not an essential quality of television, but a part of a "dialectic of segmentation and flow" where television constructs an image of itself as a unified whole (16).

Two words that kept popping up in the readings are privatization and family. In Feuer's article, we see how Good Morning America constructs an ideal notion of the nuclear family and filters its discursive elements through the figure of the host (father). It seems that television is intensely imbricated in the codification of the "self-sufficient family home" (Williams 19). Indeed, the proliferation of television sets into American homes maps onto the proliferation of all sorts of labor saving devices that (were supposed to) reduce the amount of housework done by women. It would be interesting to explore further this relationship between the proliferation of TV and notions of social mobility and gendered labor in the household, a connection that Soledad also noted in her post.

I think this notion of flow is still relevant today, even among cord-cutters and streamers. We can see this, as Megan notes in her post, in how episodes flow into one another on Netflix (has anyone else noticed that Netflix now often lets you skip opening credits?). In addition, ads no longer flow only in linear segments. Now, flow can be measured in "impressions" as the eye jumps around the visual space and contemporary viewing practices are oriented around capturing fleeting attention. Perhaps contemporary flow is modular instead of linear? I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this.

Semi-short Response Week 2: Nam June Paik does McLuhan, + Feuer

I want to use this post to invite you to check out “Waiting for Commercials,” a 1972 piece by video artist Nam June Paik. “Waiting” starts at about 22:45 in this “Videofilm Concert” and is kind of delightful. It also, among other things, makes interesting use of Marshall McLuhan’s televised image and voice.

The McLuhan segments are not unlike the interviewee-in-box segments of Good Morning, America (GMA) detailed in Feuer’s article, wherein we see footage of an interview subject who is visible only via the intermediary of a television monitor, located in a space (and in the case of “Waiting,” time) that is clearly distinct from that which the interviewee inhabits. But where Feuer reads these GMA segments as producing a kind of spatiotemporal confusion which may or may not be opaque to the viewer, in “Waiting,” the McLuhan-in-a-box segments are all about messing with the television monitor – in terms of its location in time and space, its screen content, and its internal technology – to produce peculiar formal effects (18). Confusion of different mediated spaces (as well as of cathode ray beams, the legibility of images and discourse, the aesthetic situation of advertisements, etc.) here becomes subject matter rather than, as it is with GMA, a smoothly integrated formal component.

A question that I’m left with about “Waiting” is: To what extent does Paik take McLuhan seriously? (And do I arrive at this question simply because I personally find it difficult to take McLuhan seriously?) From my cursory understanding of Paik, I know that he, like McLuhan, was interested in issues of points of contact between “Eastern” and “Western” societies. Paik is also associated with the phrase “electronic super highway” (more commonly rendered as “information superhighway”), which tinges of a McLuhanite enthusiasm for connecting disparate social locations via media/technology. But that “Waiting” allows us to engage with McLuhan only at a remove might point to another line of analysis…