Core Post 5 - LeMaire

This week, I was especially drawn to Kumar’s closing discussion, in which he calls for a deconstructionist approach to “global television studies”—and more broadly, any academic “discipline”—in order to validate the notion that scholars can and should be both disciples and critics of his or her respective disciplines. He presents a familiar version of what this could look like in the classroom, arguing that classes should focus on a dialogical strategy “á la Derrida,” in which any given discipline is treated as a “signifier” which has innumerable functions and limitations (150). Here, I was reminded of our first meeting, when we were asked to define TV, an impossible task that has since established a theme throughout our course. I believe that by aligning with this strategy, rather than any particular set of disciplinary practices, we have been able to approach each week’s reading with a healthy amount of skepticism. Last week, for example, turned out to be a controversial set of readings because of our immediate attention to two of the authors, who more blatantly align with a particularly narrow view of TV (i.e. a socio-political industrial history). Kumar, citing Derrida, calls for scholarship that always exists “at the limits of disciplinarily in the modern university and in modernity at large” (151). Thus, we experienced the reverse of our observation about industry studies scholars during our week on TV & Genre, when it became apparent that the scholars were situating themselves at the boundaries of cultural studies (i.e. Jane Feuer’s and Jason Mittell’s surprising attention to textual readings).    

For Kumar, the real motive for deconstruction is to draw scholars’ attention to the “incommensurability” of any given discourse, particularly in relation to Western-Eastern discourse. I had never before really considered Western theory’s hierarchical dominance over Eastern scholarship. In true deconstructionist fashion, Kumar finds that even our attempts to generate a discourse about hierarchical structures in global media is itself an act of cultural dominance: “any global discussion of television in the current geopolitics of international communication necessarily means an unequal discourse” (151). This is not to say that we should abandon our disciplines, but rather examine its limitations, which for me, has been a big part of this class, and works as a fitting concluding thought, as our meetings begin to come to an end.