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?