Core post #4

To get a little self-indulgent for a moment, it seems that this is the semester where, whether I am expecting or meaning to or not, I cannot help but becoming preoccupied with those elements of various scholarly texts that engage with that big, hulking thing of a concept that is “postmodernism.” Caldwell’s delineation of “convergence TV’s” six “textual augmentations” offered a number of engaging moments along these lines, though I suppose I should have been expecting this what with words like “reflexivity” showing up in the title of his most recent single-authored book. For example, in Caldwell’s discussion of branding/marketing forms, he offers the example of ABC’s mid-1990s “yellow campaign,” with its “Pavlovian” signature branded hue attached to ironic statements that played on, for instance, the “exaggerated claims of mental decline (that TV is mind numbing and lowers literacy)… attributed to television by concerned consumer advocacy groups and liberal watchdogs” (54). For Caldwell, this advertising scheme enabled ABC, a relatively conservative legacy network, to compete with the “true postmodern irony” cultivated by its hip cable competitors (MTV, VH1, Fox) by “making irony and pastiche a part of… institutional and promotional self-reference” (54).

While it is often easy to default to noting the ways that postmodernist aesthetics/logics flare up in such superstructural, textual things as TV programs and advertisements, Caldwell’s emphasis on “cultures of production” helps us understand the ways in which these texts (or televisual “flow” more broadly) are shaped by groups made up of individuals, these groups’ professional rituals and embedded institutional logics, competing interests among producers, etc. This intervention acknowledges the ways in which political economic and technological change-based explanatory frameworks can help us understand the workings and “evolutions” of institutional logics and textual production. But, like Jenkins, Caldwell wants to complicate assumptions that change (or convergence) is “determined” by any primary causal factor (or field of factors) or that influence/power works in any one direction.

Jenkins’ essay likewise works through issues surrounding conflicting and competing forces that will have a hand in shaping the unfolding process of media convergence. His self-described “sketchy” approach to this topic opens up questions, not prognostications or extended demystifications. Conversely, Caldwell’s much longer piece winds up in demystifiying move that might make one cringe about all the ways in which one cannot help but be tickled by TV’s success at making its whole flow seem like a universe of deftly reflexive iterations of brand identity and cleverly interpenetrating diegeses. That is, like many of our readings from previous weeks, Caldwell points us to the extent to which the apparent triumph of multiculturalism and racial minority “representation” in the mainstream cultural sphere (in this case in television specifically) really just masks other logics—imbricated, as ever, with a post-Fordist economy. Foregrounding the continued moves toward corporate conglomeration and proliferating channels since the 1980s, Caldwell notes that while television programming may now be more “diverse” and demographically “representative” when taken in total, television has nonetheless “resegregated itself by the very tiering and conglomeration that the new multichannel landscape has legitimized. Yes, images of color [exist], but not on the still-very-white worlds of NBC, CBS, and ABC programming” (68). TV executives, producers, and brands themselves can now tout their achievements in “diversity,” but this ultimately serves to deflect criticism, shore up conglomeration as the new, best-of-all-possible-worlds reality, and promote the idea that the industry needs no regulation because the free market “naturally” favors diversity. In Caldwell’s words, “the de facto goal of each new conglomerate is to have within the walls of its extended corporate family a programming niche for every taste culture and social identity” (69). So, we might prognosticate that TV’s mastery of such postmodern tropes as intertextuality will just wind up bringing us closer to the hyperbolic logical conclusion of convergence: everything under one giant conglomeration of all corporations ever… but then that level of prognostication would be missing the usefully anti-determinist dimensions of Caldwell’s argument.