Cultural Studies: Volume 3 No. 3 (Cultural Studies Journal)

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 3 Number 3 October 1989

CULTURAL STUDIES is a new international journal, dedicated to the notion that the study of cultural processes, and especially of popular culture, is important, complex, and both theoretically and politically rewarding. It is published three times a year, with issues being edited in rotation from Australia, the UK and the USA, though occasional issues will be edited from elsewhere. Its international editorial collective consists of scholars representing the range of the most influential disciplinary and theoretical approaches to cultural studies. CULTURAL STUDIES will be in the vanguard of developments in the area worldwide, putting academics, researchers, students and practitioners in different countries and from diverse intellectual traditions in touch with each other and each other’s work. Its lively international dialogue will take the form not only of scholarly research and discourse, but also of new forms of writing, photo essays, cultural reviews and political interventions. CULTURAL STUDIES will publish articles on those practices, texts and cultural domains within which the various social groups that constitute a late capitalist society negotiate patterns of power and meaning. It will engage with the interplay between the personal and the political, between strategies of domination and resistance, between meaning systems and social systems. CULTURAL STUDIES will seek to develop and transform those perspectives which have traditionally informed the field—structuralism and semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism. Theories of discourse, of power, of pleasure and of the institutionalization of meaning are crucial to its enterprise; so too are those which stress the ethnography of culture.

Contributions should be sent to either the General Editor or one of the Associate Editors. They should be in duplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors, available from the Editors or Publishers. They make take the form of articles of about 5000 words, of kites (short, provocative or exploratory pieces) of about 2000 words, or of reviews of books, other cultural texts or events.

CONTENTS

ARTICLES Watching ourselves watch television, or who’s your agent? Jim Collins

3

Television: a narrative—a history Mimi White

23

‘This time’s for me’: making up and feminine practice Hilary Radner

41

How to watch Star Trek Cassandra Amesley

63

KITE How I met Miss Tootie: The Home Shopping Club Jane Desmond

81

REVIEWS No sanity clause (beyond reception, the text inside out) Pamela Falkenberg

91

First citizen of the semiotic democracy? Jim Bee

97

ARTICLES

2

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION, OR WHO’S YOUR AGENT? JIM COLLINS

Post-Modernism and television share a rather bizarre relationship. Long an item in the gossip columns of contemporary theory, they are often depicted as an inseparable, but mutually destructive couple in which the sins of one are forever blamed on the inherent weaknesses of the other. Post-Modernism is allegedly what’s left of culture after television has gotten through with it, and television owes its superficiality and schizophrenia to the Post-Modern culture that produces it. Ironically, this notorious relationship has never really been consummated, theoretically. Few attempts exist to develop coherent definitions of Post-Modernism by television theorists, and even fewer instances of PostModern theorists exploring the complexity of television, either as a reflector or producer of Post-Modern culture. To complicate matters even further, the critics who have made the most ambitious attempt to bring them together theoretically have been Modernists at their most puritanical, anxious to condemn the wanton promiscuity of each member of the couple. My goal is not to prove their innocence, but rather to provide a theoretical framework for understanding not just this pair, but the role the critic plays in an even more mysterious triangle. But just what should a coherent theory of Post-Modern television hope to accomplish? Ideally such a theory should enable us better to understand how television ‘works’ and is worked over by its audience in the age of cable, VCRs and remote control. Attempts to situate the medium within larger cultural forces used to describe the Post-Modern milieu, context or condition have met with limited success largely because they remain circumscribed by the Adorno/Horkheimer theorization of mass culture as bad object; consequently, we are offered the same litany of sins with a few new buzz words to spice up the indictment. The two most frequently made criticisms of contemporary television— that it is pure commodification and mere simulacrum—come from critical positions obsessed with consistency, both in regard to their own continuation of the Frankfurt School approach and, following that work, the systematic homogeneity they attribute to the television apparatus and the behavior of its imagined viewers. While this consistency may make for theoretical tidiness, it renders such critiques antiquated, since precisely the inconsistency of contemporary television production and reception defines it as PostModern. The commodification/simulation critiques share their predecessors’ determination to present mass culture as a totalizable system, operating according to precise laws or logic. The main objectives of this paper will be to expose the limitations of such totalization scenarios by examining the complexities of television

4

CULTURAL STUDIES

discursivity(ies), and to demonstrate that the increasing sophistication of both the medium and its audiences necessitates different notions of subjectivity and agency. Since the source of these imagined totalities is the critic who constructs them, I will focus on the question of the intellectual or critical viewer vis-à-vis the average viewer because the unspecified distinctions between the two serves as the unspoken foundation of so much television theory. I concentrate on the relationship because notions of subjectivity are inseparable from commodification and simulation, and the way in which those terms are constituted depends fundamentally on the imagined differences between what the intellectual perceives and the average viewer misperceives. The ground-breaking work of Morley (1979), Ang (1982), and others has increased our sensitivity to how different groups of viewers actually watch television and give specific programs quite different readings. What has remained largely unexplored is the impact that television has on how we theorize ourselves as critical viewers, allegedly distinct and somehow more aware than other viewing formations. Reconceptualizing this difference involves considerable reformulation on two levels. On a macro-level we need to develop new models for describing culture that will allow us to escape the confines of the critical panopticon without running headlong into entropy and chaos. On the micro-level, a different notion of the individual subject who is neither prisoner nor schizophrenic must be constructed in order to account for the activity of the subject. Here I will briefly adumbrate how we might arrive at more satisfying spatial metaphors for television in relation to contemporary urban theory, but I will devote the majority of my attention to how the issue of television subjectivity may be considered in the light of these different spatial models. One of the central debates in urban theory over the past few decades has been over the question of centrality—how cities used to be centered, why they aren’t now, and whether they can and should be in the future. Colin Rowe, in his influential study Collage City (Rowe 1978) has argued that to envision cities, and by extension cultures, as one grand centered system is both utopian and archaic, and that urban design needs to acknowledge the presence of multiple enclaves seeking multiple centers. Rob (1979) and Leon Krier (see Jencks 1987) have likewise advocated designing cities that maintain the concept of centered space, but only by rejecting a unitary center, preferring instead to develop a cluster of centers spread throughout the city. Robert Venturi’s notion of the strip (Venturi 1985) as a basic architectural unit of contemporary space adopts in some ways the most radical perspective, arguing that piazza-based cities are a thing of the past, that the strip embodies the evolutionary, discontinuous, non-orchestrated nature of urban development and design. This notion of the city as decentered, heterogeneous space that still resists entropy and chaos as well as traditional, centered cities is particularly relevant to television study, since television, like the strip, but unlike the panopticon, is founded on discontinuity and the utter absence of a preconceived, orchestrated design. Both the strip and television exemplify culture as perpetual movement in regard to both stylistic evolution and to its inhabitants, and, like the strip, television seems to obey two systems of organization simultaneously, the code of the highway and the code of the individual structure or program. Finally, like the strip, television’s seemingly endless horizontal variety does not automatically produce a centerless culture, only the absence of a

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

5

universally accepted designated center, since individual stops along the television strip can become provisional piazzas, resulting not in the absence of centers, but their proliferation. Adopting non-centered spatial metaphors for conceptualizing the discontinuous complexity of television involves a number of ramifications, but none is more important than the issue of subjectivity that is produced by this discontinuity. The models of the subject that we have relied on in film theory for the past three decades were developed by Foucault, Althusser, et al. as a reaction against the Sartrean existential subject that made self-consciousness an object of knowledge, a self that could produce meaning in ontological rather than sociolinguistic terms (see Poster 1984). Foucault’s conception of the subject as an intersection of discursive practices necessarily led to a fundamental devaluation of the power of individual subjects, embedded wholly within specific regimes of truth. In demonstrating that meaning production originates not in consciousness, but in discursive formations, idealist notions of self, knowledge and power were effectively exposed, and the Sartrean subject was, for the most part, laid to rest. But in the process the question of individual agency, specifically ‘what is one to do after all?’, was often laid to rest as well. The question has remained bracketed or ignored primarily because agency has been made coterminous with collectivity, and the issue of individual response to the glut of signs produced by media-saturated cultures remains largely unexamined. If television theory is to come to terms with the complexity of Post-Modern cultures we need to develop not only a post-Sartrean, but also a post-Foucauldian notion of the subject—a subject who is neither pure existential presence, nor pure discursive construct. Despite the emphasis Foucault placed on discontinuity, the model of the Panopticon is appropriated most often in film and television study—a model that presupposes a supra-discursive formation leading to a notion of the subject that is, in its own way, just as idealized and transcendent as Sartre’s. A notion of the subject that acts as well as being acted upon is necessary, not because of the absence of discursive formations, but because of their surplus within the same culture, their inability to coalesce or sync up in a systematic way. The overload of discursive formations gives rise to a subject that is neither transcendent being nor transcendent construct. Paul Smith makes the crucial point that Dominated ‘subjects’ do not maintain the kind of control which the word ‘individual’ might suggest, but neither do they remain consistent or coherent in the passage of time…. The interplay of differing subject positions will make some appear pleasurable and others less so; thus a tension is produced which compels a person to legislate among them…. A person is not simply determined and dominated by the ideological pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology, but is also the agent of a certain discernment. A person is not simply the actor who follows ideological scripts but is also an agent who reads them in order to insert him/herself into them or not. (P.Smith 1988, xxxiv) Only a supra-discursive formation can guarantee the consistency of the subject as a construct, but television more than any other medium exposes only the discontinuity of

6

CULTURAL STUDIES

discursive formations within media-sophisticated cultures. While individual programs or networks may interpellate quite specific subjects, that very consistency is undermined by the medium itself in its ability to present them as simultaneous alternatives. Actors from Hill Street Blues may address us directly, extra-diegetically, urging viewers to call in and vote for our favorite all-time episodes, thereby positing not only a committed viewer, but one that has remained intensely committed for a number of years. But the VCR and remote control encourage us to treat various programs as interchangeable options, thereby contradicting the specific interpellative strategies of individual programs, whether they be ‘quality’ television, evangelical television, or music television. One of the most distinctive features of television as a medium, then, is precisely this contradiction in which the apparatus of the medium is founded on a notion of subject construction that often works in direct conflict with strategies of specific texts. The cinematic apparatus as described by Baudry (1985), Metz (1982), and others serves only to intensify the interpellative power of the individual text and the ideological demands of medium and text co-ordinate neatly. While the coalescence of apparatus and textual strategies may not be as strong as in novelreading or theater-going, at least they do not work at cross purposes as they so often do in television. Altman (1986), Feuer (1983), Modleski (1986), and others have already argued effectively that the apparatus—spectator relations may be similar in film and television, but for the most part the television apparatus and the ‘way of seeing’ it encourages are characterized primarily as diluted forms of the film-viewing experience. Recognizing differences in levels of attention, image size, soundtrack function, etc., are all crucial, but the difference that must be investigated more thoroughly is this contradiction between the exigencies of apparatus and text which may result not just in diminished interpellative power, but also in contradictory ideological values, conflicting ways of viewing that encourage viewers to treat one and the same message as both privileged text and just another sign on the remote-control strip that can be replaced instantly by another. This apparent contradiction between the text-specific and mediumspecific strategies reflects not just the radical decentering process at work in television that E.Ann Kaplan describes (Kaplan 1987), but rather television’s ability to decenter and recenter different audiences simultaneously by presenting programs that offer themselves as designated centers, while at the same time revealing that centrality itself is channel-sensitive. The complexity of this situation necessitates a notion of the television subject that is likewise both decentered and recentered, neither completely absorbed by all programming, nor entirely detached from all of it, a subject that is a construct acted upon by any number of discursive formations, but who also acts in making distinctions within the glut of those very formations. The activity of the subject in media-sophisticated cultures is not that of an existential subject whose ability to act is founded upon idealist notions of freedom and being, but a media-glutted subject whose ability to act and distinguish is founded on a profound cynicism that results from being hailed perpetually, by being offered ‘you’ identities that cannot possibly correlate. The viewer is not emancipated by his or her own will or the oppositional message of a specific program, but brought into an enlightened form of consciousness through no preconceived plan whatsoever, in spite, rather than because, of the exhortations of any one particular program or

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

7

institution. The attempts made to address this cynicism—specifically Baudrillard’s implosion model (Baudrillard 1980)—fail to account for this situation primarily because the cynical viewer is still conceived as an undifferentiated mass in which all signs are now just as uniformly ignored as they once supposedly entranced. Reception and production remain monolithic categories, and individual agency remains a non-issue (except of course for the agency of the critical philosopher as voice crying out in the media wilderness—but more on this later). The crux of the problem is that television is no more totalizable than technology, capitalism, or culture. Totalizing any or all of these is a marvellous tactic if the ultimate goal is to demonize them as bad critical object(s), but such essentializing can only be counter-productive if we hope to specify how television works and is worked over by its various audiences. The majority of apparatus theorizing done in film study was patently ahistorical; Baudry’s version of Plato’s Bijou, for example, provides an elaborate historical continuum that links classical filmmaking to the Quattrocento, but freezes the filmviewing situation in a kind of suspended animation, making it descriptive of the experience at any time from the 1890s to the present. In defense of this work one could argue that the film-viewing experience has remained fairly constant, but the television apparatus—both as machine and as a producer of particular ways of seeing and being— continues to change in such fundamental ways that the apparatus of the 1950s is not the same as the apparatus of the 1980s. Nor can we essentialize the apparatus of the present since that apparatus changes drastically when we use the VCR to watch a rented videotape or when we use the remote control just to cruise the channels. The former is founded on a film-viewing aesthetic that commands and centers our attention, the latter predicated on a kind of visual promiscuity that defies any such commitment of our attention or desire. The perils of the will to totalization are just as present in the commodification theories so often applied to television. One could argue, of course, that whether viewing intently or just cruising aimlessly the viewer is still constructed as a consumer, and that differences in programming, ways of seeing, etc. are just surface variations on a deep structure of commodification that invalidates all television as genuine artistic expression. But this line of argument falls victim to precisely the kind of deep structure as ‘natural law’ syndrome that Roberto Unger sees as the common failure of recent social theory. Unger argues that ‘modern social thought was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order’ (Unger 1987, 1). But the idea of society as artifact has never been taken to the hilt, because most of social theory continually undermines that original premise by constructing a ‘science of history,’ or a ‘science of cultural production’ that serves the same purpose as a natural order by providing ‘lawlike explanations that generate a particular sequence of particular frameworks.’ One of the most significant, self-imposed blind spots of such theorizing, according to Unger, is its failure to recognize the diversity and discontinuity of specific institutional structures, particularly those which represent radical decentralization that would undermine any notion of social organization as indivisible package. The greatest danger of this reliance on deep structure scenarios that would impose a script on all cultural life is that the script or short list of possible frameworks becomes a kind of selffulfilling prophecy that virtually precludes the possibility of radical transformation,

8

CULTURAL STUDIES

through the installation of reified laws made to appear ‘natural’ when they are themselves mere theoretical artifact. The application of a reductive ‘hegemony theory’ to television by Gitlin (1987) and others is a perfect example of such deep-structure theorizing that attempts to reduce all television messages to a single framework which serves as the lawlike explanation of why all television programming is necessarily evil because, ipso facto, it’s on television. Since the vast majority of American television is advertiser-supported, a critical awareness of the effects of commodification on both production and reception is clearly primary, but the effect of commodification theory on television analysis has been rather like that of any blunt instrument—dramatic but imprecise. The all-is-commodity denunciation of television is subverted by certain farreaching theoretical problems regarding historical context and imagined effects that have had profound ramifications for understanding (or misunderstanding) television subjectivity. The dismissal of the medium as mere commodity remains fraught with historical problems, primarily due-to the ill-defined idealist notions of the nature of pre-commodified art and the even hazier notions about when the great change occurred. Colin Rowe describes this confusion quite lucidly: Something went wrong in 1714 or 1750, or 1789, or 1804, with the beginning of the Georgian era or at its end, with the death of Queen Anne or the accession of Queen Victoria, with Andrew Jackson, with Ulysses S. Grant, with the discovery of Pompeii, with the emergence of the Roman Empire, with the collapse of the Roman Empire, with the decline of the Middle Ages, with the appearance of Brunelleschi, or Michelangelo, or Inigo Jones, or Borromini. One can rearrange the dates, rename the style phases, reidentify the personalities which decorate the scenario, but the basic structure of what, after all, must still be historical myth will remain surprisingly consistent and intact. At some moment there occurred a cessation of meaningful artistic production and a catastrophic decline in all sense of value. Standards of craftsmanship were abruptly terminated. Collective endeavor declined. Society became atomized and the individual alienated. (Rowe 1979, 1) To criticize the historical framework of commodification analysis is to question not the validity of its concerns, but the utility of its myth, its narrativization of the decline of Western Civilization in which there is always a Fall, after which the vast majority of cultural production is rendered at best invalid, and at worst destructive of the individual and artistic standards. The most damaging aspects of this myth in media study, though, are the accompanying myths of redemption which are either nostalgic—the lost Eden of ‘folk cultures’ can be regained—or hopelessly utopian—a non-commodified avant-garde Eden sits just over the horizon. While Unger’s work may provide us with the framework for a critique of such deep-structure theories, he omits any significant treatment of mass media, or, by extension, Post-Modernism. Arguing along similar lines, Ernesto Laclau rejects the ‘absolute essences’ or ‘fatality of history’ that serve deep structure functions and links his position to Post-Modernism quite explicitly.

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

9

The beginning of postmodernity can, in that sense, be conceived as the achievement of a multiple awareness: epistemological awareness, insofar as scientific progress appears as a succession of paradigms whose transformation and replacement is not grounded on any algorithmic certainty; ethical awareness, insofar as the defence and assertion of values is grounded on argumentative movements (conversational movements, according to Rorty), which do not lead back to any absolute foundation; political awareness, insofar as historical achievements appear as the product of hegemonic and contingent—and as such, always reversible—articulations and not as the result of immanent laws of history. (Laclau 1988, 21) If our recognition that the social as endlessly remakable artifact must be the basis for overcoming specific contexts that we have mistakenly believed to be founded on ‘natural laws,’ then television can play a pivotal role in bringing about that recognition, not through any preconceived agenda, but through television’s fundamental lack of internal orchestration of the messages it transmits. For Unger, the notion of plasticity in regard to both institutional frameworks and the theoretical frameworks we use to conceptualize them must replace the predictive ‘natural laws’ that have led to the worst sort of reification. Television, perhaps more than any medium, visualizes culture as artifact, as endlessly remakable construct, illustrating Linda Hutcheon’s observation that what postmodernism does is to contest the very possibility of there ever being ‘ultimate objects’. It teaches and enacts the recognition of the fact that social, historical, and existential ‘reality’ is discursive reality when it is used as the referent of art, and so the only ‘genuine historicity’ becomes that which would openly acknowledge its own discursive, contingent identity. (Hutcheon 1987, 182) This emphasis on the referent as it is textualized is a distinguishing feature of Post-Modern art, particularly Post-Modern architecture, which presents the accumulation and diversity of the already said within one and the same design project (see Eco 1983 and Jencks 1984). But one could argue that television can demonstrate this plasticity even more effectively than Post-Modern architecture, since James Stirling’s Stuttgart Gallery or Moore’s Piazza d’Italia can only present a diachronic history of the sedimented representation in which the building becomes the intersection of the ‘already said’ or ‘already seen.’ Cable television, however, in presenting programming drawn from the entire history of the medium, becomes the synchronic intersection of the ‘still being seen,’ providing a sense of immediacy while also drawing attention to the artifact status of the social as it is being transmitted. The dismissal of television as simulation depends upon the absence of a meta-discursive, ironic component in either images or their interpreters, yet the proliferation and recycling of the already represented produces a hyperconsciousness that makes a totalizing, seamless concept like Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ difficult to maintain. The omnipresence of the already said and seen leads to a process of televisual secondarization, often taking the form of parody, which explicitly acknowledges that the

10

CULTURAL STUDIES

text is a representation of another representation. Baudrillard condemns parody as a simulation of simulation, thereby ever-widening the web of the hyperreal that keeps us from confronting what he calls basic reality. But Post-Modernist parody is seldom the simple revivalism Modernist critics claim it to be. Hutcheon makes the point that parody depends on a process of transcontextualization that creates an ironic distance between the original and parodic texts, a distance in which the former is revealed to be mere representation, as is the latter. Rather than expanding the simulacra, the all-pervasive parody of Post-Modern textuality makes the hyperreal an impossibility, largely because of the the continual rearticulation of the already said from conflicting perspectives. What is so interesting about television in this regard—and popular culture in a Post-Modern context—is the simultaneity of the original and its multiple rearticulations. The original 1950s Superman series may be seen on one cable channel while the figure of the superhero is demythologized in the Batman series running on another, while the phenomenally popular ‘graphic novels’ (such as The Dark Knight Returns) that have emerged over the past few years present a re-mythologized super-hero, representing yet another transcontextualization of Batman in which the camp figure of the 1960s becomes the urban guerrilla of the not-too-distant future, an outlaw in a fascist police state, living underground, training an army of former street punks to be revolutionaries. This situation is further complicated by the simultaneous but conflictive re-presentation of early situation comedies on rival cable stations. Series from the late 1950s—early 1960s period are broadcast by the Christian Broadcasting Network as part of their larger ideological agenda, in which the earlier series serve as a model for family entertainment the way it used to be. The Nickelodeon channel, a station devoted to children’s programming during the daytime, presents a two-hour block of sitcoms from the 1962 season on ‘Nick at Nite,’ promising fun for the whole family—only here the premises of these programs are presented in parodic terms, the voiceover narration, super-graphics and re-editing of program material serving to produce derision at this quaint vision of American life. A more elaborate re-articulation of these same black and white family sitcoms was the centrepiece of the recent thirtysomething ‘holiday’ episode, entitled The Mike Van Dyke Show. The program begins with the major characters making fun of these old shows, laughing at what they consider their simplistic fairy-tale version of American family life. But as the plot thickens and the main character, Michael, begins to undergo a series of crises, he watches his own life turn into the old Dick Van Dyke Show. These fantasy sequences, all shot in black and white, feature the same sets and costuming as the older series, but with characters and situations drawn from his own life. The tensions between the frivolous high spirits of his sitcom existence and the problems he experiences in his actual existence come to a head in the final black and white sequence when the sitcom cannot absorb Michael’s anxiety, at which point he turns to color and walks out of the Van Dyke Show diegesis. Where CBN holds out the early sitcom as a model of what once was and ‘Nick at Nite’ ‘camps it up’ as what never really was at all, thirtysomething involves a more complex transcontextualization. Here television does indeed become a part of the family in that the intertextual referencing of thirtysomething functions as a comic ‘talking out’ process in which we confront our televisual past, our relationship to the medium being roughly analogous to that which many enjoy with their actual families; both are

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

11

characterized by the same ambivalence, the same sense of ironic denial of the absurd past alongside the recognition that, like it or not, these characters who wander through our unconscious have played a far too prominent role in the forging of our identity. The commodification/simulation critique of television may be useful, but only up to a point, because the majority of such critiques fail to acknowledge the self-conscious manipulation of both by television. Simulation is itself simulated by television, parodied in a reflexivity that now seems endemic to a system defined by the all-pervasiveness of the already seen as it is still being seen. MTV video jockeys already simulate their own simulation, introducing videos from within video monitors—sets within sets—and countless videos (specifically the Bangles’s ‘Hazy Shade of Winter,’ the Talking Heads’ ‘Wild, Wild Life,’ and the Hooter’s ‘Satellite,’ to name just a few) already foreground video monitors, remote control devices, cable boxes, etc. ‘Hazy Shade’ is exemplary in that the Bangles song (itself a cover version of the Simon and Garfunkel song from the 1960s) features footage from Less Than Zero, a film version of a novel that makes MTV emblematic of a voyeuristic generation. That footage is then incorporated within a video that appears on MTV and becomes popular, even while condemning the visual promiscuity that allegedly defines music video. More recently, one of the short films made by Robert Longo and other visual artists features a mother and teenaged daughter watching MTV. The latter complains about the inane sexist behavior of one of the women rock stars, only to have her mother ask, ‘So what do you want, more positive role models?’ In his novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Richard Powers describes PostModern hyperconsciousness in terms of Peguy’s trigger points, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system’s underpinning, its ability to change, is changed. Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, the tools become so adept at selfreplicating and self-modifying, that it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection. (Powers 1985, 98) Self-reflexivity as such is hardly new; a self-conscious textuality is one of the defining feature of modernism. But the kind of self-reflexivity that Powers refers to here, one that characterizes television in a specifically Post-Modern context, is not a formalist experimentation realized by an artistic elite, but rather a medium’s mode of operation, produced by the increasing sophistication of its technology and the hyperconsciousness of its viewers. A recent ad for Budweiser epitomizes this situation. Rather than featuring football players appreciating the product, the football game appears on monitors within a control room during its ‘live’ coverage, and a rapid-fire montage alternates between the studio monitors filled with the game action and the far more pressurized action within the control room as the director barks signals at his crew. When the ‘game’ is over they break for Budweiser, and while relaxing the director is asked what he’ll do that night, to which he responds, ‘Oh, probably watch television.’ The efficacity of a commodification/ simulation critique of television is undermined by its dependence on a mass-conspiracy

12

CULTURAL STUDIES

scenario predicated on the hidden motive of the producer of the message and the lack of awareness of its receivers. In other words, in failing to appreciate the self-modification/ self-reflection of television that foregrounds the hyper-awareness of its own simulated, commodified nature, these critiques remain founded on a pre-trigger point notion of textual production and the viewing subject that envisions the univocality of the former and the susceptibility of the latter. One could object that television’s self-reflexivity is only another form of mystification, that the mass conspiracy is still operative, but to accomplish its goals—to make viewers buy products by creating a falsified real—it resorts to increasingly sophisticated maneuvers. But even if we are to read this hyperconsciousness in terms of mystification, our understanding of mystification needs drastic reformulation according to quite different notions of signification and subjectivity. If mystification is most effective when it points to its own artifice, and the viewers’ awareness of (even saturation by) it, what does that suggest about the semiotic foundation of the television message and the individual’s attitude toward the bombardment of the already said? At this point the exchange of the television message illustrates Umberto Eco’s contention that Post-Modernism is a context in which it is impossible to make innocent statements; one can no longer say ‘I love you madly,’ but ‘as Barbara Cartland would put it, “I love you madly”’ (Eco 1984, 65–72). Television’s discursivity is not simply the direct, quasi-conversational register of the news anchor’s address to the viewer, but the I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know mise en abyme that is increasingly typical of television messages. This exchange involves not only a hyperawareness of the already said, but also of its impact on the formulation of the present message, producing an ironic discursivity that destabilizes the univocality of any sign. In Mythologies, Barthes makes a fundamental distinction between signs that invoke a simple signifier—signified relation and more complicated signs whose signifiers are already signs at another level. Within the exchange of the television message, we are dealing with, at the very least, a tertiary relationship, since the two initial levels of sign production are inserted within television’s own peculiar discursivity that either brackets the entire message ironically (I know that you know that I know) or historically (that was then, this is now, even if both persist in the still being said of the medium’s transmission). Mystification may still operate in such a situation, but as such it is founded on a semiotic sophistication that remains unimaginable according to the antiquated presuppositions of most television analysis. The relationship between television and its viewers depends upon a level of distantiation that is built-in for both parties. Jane Feuer argues quite convincingly that the differences between mainstream and subcultural activations of programs like Dynasty are not as distinct as we might have previously believed, and this congruity reflects the complexity of the ironic discursivity that exists between television and its viewers. Feuer stresses that the camp attitude toward Dynasty in both gay and mainstream culture does not preclude emotional identification; rather it embraces both identification and parody—attitudes normally viewed as mutually exclusive—at the same time and as part of the same sensibility. As Richard Dyer has written, the gay sensibility ‘holds together qualities that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

13

authenticity…intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a deprecating sense of its absurdity.’ (Feuer 1989) The source of the ambivalence expressed by subcultural groups has generally been attributed to cultural dissonance, specifically the discrepancies between the messages produced by ‘mass culture’ and those produced by the institutions, customs, rituals, etc., that give a particular subculture its distinctive contours. The ambivalence of mainstream audiences may be attributable to another type of dissonance, namely the discrepancies between mass cultural texts and the subjects they construct. That such an ambivalent sensibility, once reserved for oppositional groups, might now characterize ‘mainstream’ decodings as well suggests a significant degree of fluctuation in the viewer’s response to the television message at hand, which further suggests, at the very least, the viewer’s ability to step inside and outside the television address at will, alternately interpellated and actively ‘abducting’ signs for their own entertainment. The crux of the matter is not just the variability of viewers responses to television entertainment, but the increasing awareness (apparently on the part of creative personnel and advertisers) that television entertainment consists of both involvement and distantiation, that messages might interpellate, but also meet with simultaneous or eventual abduction by their viewers. The now famous Isuzu ads that featured a shamelessly lying pitchman may be considered paradigmatic of contemporary television, both semiotically and ideologically, in its reliance on a two-tiered or double-voiced discursivity. The pitchman offers the commodity to the viewer, speaking directly to them as implied viewers who will accept his message, but the sub-titles contradict his message, telling another implied viewer (ostensibly the one addressed by the pitchman, but wiser and more cynical, having been bombarded by such messages for years) that the pitchman is lying. The subtitles function as an explicit indicator of an increasingly prevalent form of television discursivity that is always subtitled in a sense, an exchange between a medium that knows that innocent messages are impossible or duplicitous, knows its viewers know that, and therefore addresses itself to a viewer who is enmeshed in the already seen as it is still being seen. This is not to say that all television programming is founded on this double-voiced discursivity; the internal dissonance that produces such distantiation and ambivalence is the result of the simultaneity of different discursive/interpellative appeals, ranging from the more ‘innocent’ single-voiced address of 1950s sitcoms, evangelical television, and shopping channels to the more explicitly double-voiced address of MTV, advertising, late-night comedy, and ‘quality television’ (particularly the Paltrow/Bochco combines). Television, then, not only offers conflicting subject positions, but presents them in different registers, in varying degrees of sincerity and irony, thereby throwing into question accepted notions of involvement, identification and entertainment. Television theory has not as yet come to terms with this double-voiced discursivity, not because such ironic discursive structures are so uncommon—irony has been a prevalent feature of Modernist and more especially Post-Modernist textuality. The kind of selfreflexive, self-distantiating form of address is, however, foreign to the traditional notions of ‘mass culture’ which has hitherto been characterized as straightforward, and if it has an ulterior motive, its assault on the unknowing viewer remains univocal. The standard mass

14

CULTURAL STUDIES

culture-avant-garde dichotomies that were a staple of film theory in the 1960s and 1970s have, within the past few years, been subjected to closer scrutiny, and any number of popular film and television shows are now read as ‘progressive’ in their ability to expose cultural contradictions, a function once reserved for the radical avant-garde. But the double-voiced discursivity of contemporary television presents an even more serious challenge to those binary distinctions for two interrelated reasons: 1) The complexity of this form of ironic discursivity reveals a degree of sophistication in both the encoding and decoding of popular texts that suggests that such sophistication is now commonplace, that the impact of the already said has produced a hyperconsciousness in what are allegedly the most banal texts, the least educated viewers; 2) Such ironic discursivity is specifically not the creation of specific auteurs, but apparently the direct result of the way the medium has functioned as an anonymous, amorphous ‘author’ in the past, which is now being ironically rearticulated in the present, just as anonymously, just as ubiquitously. In other words, irony has traditionally been considered distinct from ‘common speech,’ coming from a more refined sensibility, defining itself over and against those common exchanges (of which mass culture was a shining example). But the ironic forms of address found in contemporary television demonstrate quite clearly that the commonplace may become ironic when the conflicted, heteroglot nature of the already said/still being said renders innocent statements no longer viable. This perpetual variation in the forms of discursivity encountered along the televisual strip is what distinguishes Post-Modern television, not just the stylistic features of any one channel or program. The self-modifying, self-reflexive nature of television that allows it to simulate its own simulation is indicative of it having reached a trigger point, when the hyperconsciousness of both the medium and its viewers is ubiquitous. But what makes television perhaps the quintessential Post-Modern medium is not just that hyperawareness, but its own inconsistency, its lack of overall orchestration that might coordinate its internal differences according to one master system, its transmission of so many of its different layers simultaneously, with earlier programs bracketed as historical according to different ideological gendas, its constant variation in discursive address due to varying levels of impact the already seen/still being seen has on different modes of programming. One of the most important tasks for television theory that attempts to come to terms with the complexity of this hyperconsciousness should be a re-evaluation of the way the average/critical viewer dichotomy has been constructed. The contention that ordinary viewers are dupes inside the system and the enlightened critic stands somewhere outside it now seems, in the face of this hyperconsciousness, rather quaint and selfcongratulatory. The standard opposition advanced by the Althusserian critics of the 1960s and 1970s that the ideology offered by the text could be countered only by ‘scientific criticism’ has, fortunately, undergone serious reconsideration. The simplistic category of the dominant ideology now no longer seems quite so convincing, and the scientificity of the critic has likewise been treated to far closer scrutiny. Unfortunately, that dichotomy often remains solidly ensconced in the attacks on television and Post-Modernism. The category of the author as enlightened transcendent sensibility has been laid to rest by PostStructuralist theory, but all too often that category is revived and given over to the

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

15

enlightened critic. If Post-Structuralists could pronounce ‘the author’ dead, perhaps it is time for a similar post-mortem on ‘the critic’ as the lone visionary in a sea of passive subjects. The applicability of the Plato’s cave metaphor—once so prevalent in film theory—to television has already been questioned by Stam (1983), Flitterman-Lewis (1987), and others for various reasons, but its most pernicious dimension involves the relationship between the chained prisoners and the critical philosophers, and this dimension serves, implicitly or explicitly, as the foundation for a great deal of television theory. The cave metaphor restricts consciousness to a group of gods and/or critical philosophers, since only these select few realize that the shadows are mere images rather than the real. Television viewers’ hyperconsciousness of the already said, of the still being said that the televisual apparatus does everything to encourage, makes the images on the wall readily recognizable as images. At this point hyperconsciousness, particularly hyperconsciousness of the various forms that visual representation may take, can no longer be restricted to these critical philosophers. This hyperconsciousness has been, for the most part, either ignored, or denigrated as schizophrenic, and it is only quite recently that Kaplan (1987) and Fiske (1987) have come to acknowledge the difficulty of doing ideological analyses of texts that are, in a sense, always already so self-conscious about the production of images. The inability of contemporary theory to deal with this unmanageable hyperconsciousness in both the production of television images and the activity of the subject on those messages is most obvious in the determination to write both as schizophrenia. What is most amusing about this insistence that television and the ‘image culture’ it has allegedly produced signal the end of civilization is that it bears such an uncanny resemblance to the hysterical response of the intelligentsia to the widespread dissemination of popular literature at the end of the 18th-century. Martha Woodmansee, in her study of the great reading debates that occurred in Germany in the 1790s, details the fear that conservatives and liberals alike had of the emerging mass culture in the form of lending libraries and reading societies (Woodmansee 1989). The liberal denunciation of popular literature in the 1790s and the Post-Structuralist denunciation of television as schizophrenic in the 1970s and 1980s are remarkably similar in that they both fear the unmanageability of mass culture that can no longer be controlled, or at least circumscribed by the discursive authority of the intelligentsia. This approach, whether articulated at the end of the eighteenth century or at the end of the twentieth century is founded on a cultural conservatism that seems most concerned about the destabilization of one cultural institution—that of the intellectual-as-outsider, who can be a subject that acts, while everyone else is acted upon. The dissolution of traditional distinctions between intellectual and ordinary subjects has led, more often than not, to a kind of nihilistic hysteria in which the elimination of those distinctions is made to appear part of a broader cultural entropy in which all critical distinctions are necessarily abandoned. Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues, in reference to this questioning of the critic’s authority that, It seems that wherever systems of more or less strictly segregated hierarchical strata begin to break down and differentiations become more numerous, rapid,

16

CULTURAL STUDIES

complex, less predictable and less controllable, the resulting emergences, mixtures and minglings will look, from the perspective of those in the historically upper strata, like flattenings, falls, and collapses—in short like losses of distinction. (B.Smith, 1988, 77) But to reconsider the intellectual/ordinary subject relations is not to eliminate the necessity of critical distinctions, only to question the ideological foundations on which such distinctions are founded. Contrary to popular opinion, the question of value does not disappear in Post-Modernist criticism, but instead becomes one of its central obsessions (Fekete 1987), primarily because as a category ‘value’ emerges as a genuine question, an area of debate rather than an automatic given of a critical language. Meaghan Morris, for instance, admits to being profoundly troubled by the recent emphasis placed on the potentially subversive effects of popular culture by the British culturalist school, as well as their supposed adoption of the distracted, passive viewing habits of average television viewers since such gestures threaten to eliminate the critical dimension that cultural theory must maintain (Morris 1988). The alternative that she offers—the maintenance of a dialectical tension between what de Certeau calls the polemological and utopian perspectives on cultural life—is a persuasive argument provided that the critical position from which we might launch our attack is not a simple retreat back to the worst excesses of the Frankfurt school. The key issue here is not the avoidance of a critical perspective as such, but rather the necessary rejection of any critical perspective founded on absolute truth values, on natural laws that deny the radically contingent nature of all cultural phenomena and the discourses we use to understand them. To return to Smith, Perhaps ‘the possibility of critical theory’ must be abandoned: that is, that insofar as ‘critical theory’ is understood as any analysis that strives and claims to expose ideology…to reveal the true, underlying, actual workings of the present state of affairs or ‘system’ (capitalism, post-modern industrial society, patriarchy, and so forth) it is problematic in itself. It is most obviously problematic in that it presupposes an asymmetric epistemology and posits a sharply stratified and polarized collectivity with, on the one hand, those who already know the objective truth and, on the other, those so captivated by the system in question that they cannot recognize their own interests or desires. Within such an approach, ‘the critical theorist, in his effort to explain how we, the enlightened, know that they, the unenlightened, really do desire the radical tranformations that for which they seemed disinclined to agitate, will always move, in strict accord with axiological logic, to the creation-by-invocation of just the necessary human universals’ (B. Smith 1988, 173–4). If a provisional theory of Post-Modern television must recognize the hyperconsciousness of both the medium and the audience that necessarily problematizes the standard distinctions between intellectual and ordinary viewers, it should lead to a direct confrontation with the problem of agency. But the kind of ‘critical theory’ that

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

17

Smith describes here must be rejected because the foundation of such a critique precludes the possibility of agency beyond a select few, which inevitably renders agency a non-issue. A more viable conception of agency in Post-Modern culture should be grounded not only in a theory of conflictive representation but, just as importantly, in a theory of critical evaluation that recognizes the necessity of individual subjects being able to make distinctions within an ever-shifting system of cultural differentiations. Post-Modernism has allegedly eliminated the ‘decidability of effect,’ but what it has thrown into question is decidability according to truth values founded on a binary opposition that restricts the ability to decide to a special caste. The proliferation rather than restriction of decidability must be the foundation of any notion of agency. As Laclau has argued, But if we consider today that all truth is relative to a discursive formation, that all choice between discourses is only possible on the basis of constructing new discourses, ‘truth’ is essentially pragmatic and in that sense, becomes democratic…. Intellectual activity cannot be the exclusive hunting ground of an elite of great intellectuals: it arises from all points of the social fabric…. In this general movement of the death of gods, ideologies of salvation and high priests of the intellect, aren’t we allowing each man and woman to fully assume the responsibility of their own contingency and their own destiny?’ (Laclau 1988, 27–8) Laclau’s question crystallizes the interconnectedness of decidability and agency. His advocacy of an increasing organicism à la Gramsci, Paul Smith’s determination to use successful contestatory discourses like feminism as a model for empowering individual subjects, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s replacement of absolute truth values with the ‘local figuring/working out, as well as we, heterogeneously, can, of what seems to work better rather than worse’ (Smith 1988, 179) are all essential ‘first principles,’ prefatory distinctions for a theory of agency that begin to define a range of possible activity no matter how tentative they might appear. They clearly lack the systematicity and cohesiveness of traditional critical theory, but then their very resistance to a new mode of totalizing cultural phenomena based on a new, improved set of universal laws must be seen as their greatest virtue, their insistence on their contingency their greatest asset. If there is a problem with the ‘first principles’ it is not that they don’t go far enough, but rather that they aren’t preliminary enough insofar as they don’t confront one of the most fundamental questions—specifically, whether a discriminating individual subject, capable of making distinctions between the authentic and the bogus, ironic and straightforward, is necessarily an ‘agent.’ The former involves problems of evaluation and interpretation, while the latter is usually thought of in vaguely ‘political’ terms. The relationship between semiotic discrimination and political effectivity (more specifically, how one leads to the other) has been central to media theory since the late 1960s, but the inability of modernist film theory to construct satisfying models for this relationship is largely due to the absence of the category of individual subject and/or agent, and to its definition of political action according to a static, non-contingent set of values that conflate agency and collectivity. The reliance on predictive ‘natural laws’ to characterize ‘capitalism’ also undermined the characterization of political effectivity, which more often

18

CULTURAL STUDIES

than not was conceived in nineteenth-century terms, e.g. critical awareness of how mass media works is effective only if it leads to taking control of the means of production, as in Born in Flames, otherwise everyone remains the atomized passive subject in the clutches of the culture industry. The other alternative that was sometimes offered—becoming aware of the ideological trap set for us by the mass media might allow some hope of liberation— made connections between semiotic awareness and political liberation under the general category of ‘consciousness’ and thereby made semiotic awareness a vital pretext to any prospect of political change. While this was clearly a positive development, the goal to enlighten consciousness still relied on the dubious presuppositions concerning what constituted Enlightenment devised by the Frankfurt School, and consequently distinctions between reactionary and subversive were made according to transcendent values that maintained the asymmetrical epistemology and polarized collectivity that Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes. The problem remains the same—one group speaks for the hidden desires of a collectivity, producing a systematic theory, but only a limited appreciation of individuals’ ability to discriminate or their need to assume responsibility for their destinies, which inevitably still leads to an impoverished notion of agency. But how are we, as intellectuals, to enhance this ability to discriminate without resorting to transcendent truth values or any other critical strategies that so radically foreclose the range of possible actions that might be deemed responsible or significant? Just how are we to encourage this assumption of responsibility, especially since that process of assumption is no more natural or universal than any other traits attributed to individual subjects by earlier cultural theory? The assumption of responsibility is a critical process in which distinctions concerning one’s cultural life are fashioned, not simply ‘felt’ or intuited. In order to develop a more productive, specifically Post-Modern notion of agency vis-à-vis the individual subject, perhaps the best way to avoid the limitations of earlier critical theory is to stop speaking for those subjects and to emulate the kind of participatory design methods used by Post-Modern architects like Charles Moore, Ralph Erskine, and Lucien Kroll, in which the opinions of individual inhabitants and users of buildings were actively solicited and integrated into the production of final design. The architect’s refusal to prescribe or impose a transcendent set of design principles on specific semiotic communities was founded on the belief that structures that might encourage personal freedom, meaningful senses of identity and community are best conceived by the actual members of that community. The architect’s gesture here is extremely relevant to the situation of the cultural theorist. To suggest such a participatory approach to television production beyond the level of local access channels, of course, borders on the ludicrous, but the adoption of such a strategy for the teaching of media criticism, in the classroom, where ‘meaning’ is also produced is not quite so far-fetched, especially since concepts like ‘personal liberation,’ ‘significant choice,’ and ‘agency’ are perhaps best defined by the individuals for whom those categories are supposed to be meaningful. This would entail the same sort of ‘sacrifices’ that go with such participatory projects in architecture: throwing into question the ‘authority’ of instructors (or, more precisely, the authority of the critical discourses they use), the refusal to rely on transcendent notions of good taste and political effectivity, giving due consideration to opinions the instructor

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

19

might find trivial, and so on. What I am advocating here might sound like standard reception-oriented pedagogy, but the issues at stake are not limited to interpretations or activations of specific texts, but instead involve the reformulation of the fundamental theoretical categories that we use to make sense of all cultural phenomena, including value, identity, and social change. Such participatory theorizing does not entail a critical evacuation on the part of architects or instructors, both of whom bring a refined knowledge and range of experience to bear that might be lacking in the other participants; but it is crucial to recognize that those participants also have a cultural knowledge and range of experience that can no longer be discounted, particularly in the realm of popular culture, where they might well enjoy a more informed position than the intellectual who ‘leads’ or directs them. If Post-Modernism as a critical term and as a movement is to have any hope of retaining its legitimacy, it must be through exactly this sort of activity that does not simply point to the discursive nature of all cultural phenomena, but tries to make that knowledge the basis for further action, for the re-structuring of the discourses we use to organize cultural life by challenging in fundamental ways just who we think is entitled to formulate those discourses. In the latter half of the 1980s, the call for a more ‘secular’ criticism has become increasingly widespread as theoreticians from a number of disciplines try to situate their analyses in broader cultural arenas. In the October 1988 issue of the Voice Literary Supplement, for example, a number of well-known critics—Edward Said, Stanley Aronowitz, Catharine R. Stimpson—were asked ‘Where do we go from here?’ Several common threads emerged in the responses, which emphasized the need for secularity: the distrust of high theory, the desire to investigate the social dimensions of meanings, the need for more accessible critical languages, a greater sensitivity to popular culture. This secularization of critical theory would appear to necessitate an ethnographic dimension, but just how we conceive of ourselves as ethnographers/critics vis-à-vis our ‘field subjects’ is itself a pivotal issue. In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford argues that a key development in the history of ethnography is the recognition that the cross-cultural relationship between ethnographer and foreign culture is far more complex than previously imagined, which has led to a reconsideration of what constitutes ‘ethnographic authority.’ What Clifford says about cross-cultural interaction is particularly relevant to the ‘cross-cultural’ relationship that exists between television theorist and viewing publics since it involves a confrontation between subjects from supposedly distinct cultures, formerly separate, but now completely intermingled. Just as the opposition between familiar and exotic has largely collapsed due to the impact of mass media, the relationship between the intellectual and a different ‘exotic’—the masses—has likewise been destabilized. The viewing public, like ‘the Orient,’ resists essentialist definitions by ‘outside’ authorities, no matter how benign or well-intentioned. While the work of the British culturalists very self-consciously tried to avoid such essentialism, the vast majority of theorizing done on Post-Modern television depends precisely on this kind of essentialism, founded on the worst sort of invented ‘natural’ laws that allegedly explain how viewers act, or fail to act, as the case may be. Clifford’s argument could hardly be more pertinent;

20

CULTURAL STUDIES

Twentieth Century academic ethnography does not appear as a practice of interpreting distinct, whole ways of life, but instead as a series of specific dialogues, impositions and inventions. ‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown into doubt. (Clifford 1988,14) A coherent theory of Post-Modern television, then, must not only specify its discursive features and in the process examine the changing relationship between theorist and ordinary viewers—it must begin to examine how television, as the quintessential form of Post-Modernist cultural production has altered our own ethnographic/critical authority and changed forever what can and cannot be said, about whom, from what position, in which cultural model we envision as we write and teach. References Alman, Rick (1986) ‘Television Sound.’ In Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski, pp. 39–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ang, Ien (1982) Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Methuen. Baudrillard, Jean-Louis (1980) ‘The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Implosion of the Social in the Masses.’ In The Myths of Information: Technology and Post-Industrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward, pp. 137–48 . Madison: Coda Press. Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Eco, Umberto (1983) Postscript to Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic. Fekete, John (1987) Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture. New York: St Martin’s Press. Feuer, Jane (1983) ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.’ In Regarding Television, ed. E.Ann Kaplan, pp. 12–22 . Frederick, MD: University Publications of America in conjunction with The American Film Institute. Feuer, Jane (1989) ‘Reading Dynasty: Television and Reception Theory.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 88:2 . Fiske, John (1987) ‘British Cultural Studies and Television.’ In Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert Allen, pp. 254–89. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (1987) ‘Psychoanalysis, Film and Television.’ In Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert Allen, pp. 172–210 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gitlin, Todd (1987) ‘Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment.’ In Television: The Critical View, 4th edition, ed. Horace Newcomb, pp. 507–32. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1986) ‘The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History.’ Cultural Critique,5 (Winter): 182. Jencks, Charles (1984) The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London: Rizzoli. Jencks, Charles (1987) Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Kaplan, E.Ann (1987) ‘Feminist Criticism and Television.’ In Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert Allen, pp. 211–53. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Krier, Rob (1979) Urban Space. New York: Rizzoli.

WATCHING OURSELVES WATCH TELEVISION

21

Laclau, Ernesto (1988) ‘Building a New Left: An Interview with Ernesto Laclau.’ Strategies 1 (Fall): 10–28. Modeleski, Tania (1983) ‘The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work.’ In Regarding Television, ed. E.Ann Kaplan. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America in conjunction with The American Film Institute. Morley, David (1979) The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding. London: British Film Institute. Morris, Meaghan (1988) ‘Banality in Cultural Studies.’ Discourse X.2 (Spring-Summer): 3–29 . Poster, Mark (1984) Foucault, Marxism, and History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Powers, Richard (1985) Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. New York: McGraw-Hill. Rowe, Colin and Fred Koetter (1978) Collage City. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rowe, Colin (1979) ‘Introduction.’ In Rob Krier, Urban Space. New York: Rizzoli. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1988) Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, Paul (1988) Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stam, Robert (1983) ‘Television News and Its Spectator.’ In Regarding Television, ed. E.Ann Kaplan, pp. 23–43. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America in conjunction with The American Film Institute. Unger, Roberto (1987) Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task . New York: Cambridge University Press. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour (1985) Learning From Las Vegas. Cambridge: MIT Press. Woodmansee, Martha. Forthcoming. ‘Toward a Genealogy of the Aesthetic: The German reading Debate of the 1790s.’ Cultural Critique.

22

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE—A HISTORY MIMI WHITE

I. What is History? There are itinerant, ambulent sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’ (problems). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, 37) Even the most casual of television viewers has probably noticed at one time or another that television has a peculiar relationship to—perhaps even an infatuation with—the notion of history. For most of the audience this awareness may remain a vague impression, only dimly acknowledged. But if we push ourselves to consider the question of television and history systematically, focusing on how the medium produces ‘history’ as a conceptual category, it may be possible to theorize the dynamics of this process. What, for example, is the relationship between the ‘history’ in the historical mini series and the ‘history’ at stake when I hear that a historical confrontation between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Mets will start in a few days? What of the history of the Red Sox—a constant theme of 1986 World Series reporting—as a team fated to lose the World Series, a historical destiny confirmed with yet another loss? How does the World Series as a historical confrontation (which is also an annual event)—which will take place, is taking place, and is finally ‘history’—compare with another contemporary, historical confrontation cast in the same series of tenses, this time between Mikhael Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik? In this context how are we to understand the references to a history extending back to the 1950s on Late Night with David Letterman, when we know that the programme has only been on the air for several years (and this knowledge is explicitly avowed in Late Night anniversary specials still numbered in the single digits) ? At first glance such questions might seem trivial, even prosaic, But the very fact that one can pose such questions about the ‘history’ produced on television on the basis of random viewing has crucial implications. Across an array of genres and events of different orders, television invokes ‘history’ as a meaningful term. Yet it is obvious that the result of this process—of imputing historicity as part of a signifying operation—is not homogeneous or

24

CULTURAL STUDIES

unified, and indeed hardly conforms to the most common uses of the term ‘history.’ In particular, in the above examples television designates events as historical without regard for the temporal order, grammatical tense, and/or referential weight (which is not to say a ‘real’ order of reference) that guide conventional assumptions about history.1 Rather, television generates a dispersed discursive field, subsumed under the label ‘history’, which is fragmentary, multiple, and contradictory. In its insistent (one might say persistent) invocation of the term, television promotes history as a crucial conceptual/experiential category. At the same time television would seem to drain history of its specificity as a term of linguistic/temporal distinction, as it is dispersed through multiple temporal and narrational positions. Any event—past, present, or future—can be qualified as ‘historical’ or given a ‘history,’ fictional or otherwise. Moreover, this is not a hypothetical potentiality that we might attribute to any history (as a linguistic construct, a narrative, or a subject-effect), but an initial description of how history is expressed/signified through the material that constitutes television as a textual system. In this sense, television’s production of history can be characterized as an overproduction, or a hyper-history.2 The question of television and history is thus posed in relation to the problematics of post-Modernism, which has been characterized in terms of simulation, pastiche, schizophrenia, non-meaning, the absence of master narratives, and even a ‘fundamental wierdness’ (Baudrillard 1983; Jameson 1983; Lyotard 1984; Polan 1986; Huyssen 1986). In this context the invocation of ‘history’ as a persistent term of reference is significant. It can be seen as an anchoring point of television discourse, one of the mythic concepts through which the concatenations of a culture in transition are expressed. Perhaps it is not fortuitous that a medium of electronic signals and ‘instant’ transmission strives to situate itself and its texts in, and as, history—with all its associations with the weight of social, political, and cultural tradition—however unstable the results. This paper offers a representation of the fragmentary dispersion of history in television in the form of partial tracings, following some of its trajectories through the television text: history as a term of intertextual flow. These include the status of ‘liveness’ in relation to history, the representation of history by the medium in programming practices (a self-representation), and the production of the subject of history. II. That is now, this was then: liveness and/as history Discourse credits itself with an authority which tends to compensate the reality from which it is exiled. If this discourse’s assertion is to speak in the name of that of which it is deprived, it is because it is separated from it. At first glance the authority appears to cover the loss and then, to avail itself of this loss to exercise power. This authority is the prestigious substitute which plays with something it will not deliver. But in fact it is the institution which fills the ‘nothing’ of knowledge with this authority. This institution is the articulating force between authority and nothingness. Hence, the

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

25

institutional machine affects and guarantees the partly magical operation which substitutes authority for this nothingness. (de Certeau 1986,29) The relationship between ‘liveness’ and ‘historicity’ offers an overdetermined locus for examining what I have termed the overproduction of history in television. Liveness, presence, and immediacy, in most conventional senses, are implicitly opposed to history as closed, absent, or past. (Feuer 1983; de Certeau 1975, 63–120.) This is the case not only in the common sense of experience and temporality but also in the linguistic distinction between histoire and discours. (Benveniste 1971; Metz 1976; Silverman 1983.) Yet in a variety of ways television correlates paradigms of liveness and historicity in the form of equivalence, alibi, reversal, or identity. The signifying opposition between liveness and historicity (and between histoire and discours) plays across television in a constant, but variable collapse and reinstatement. The concatenations of liveness and historicity are particularly evident in the practices and rhetoric of news and public affairs/ documentary programming, and also emerge in the very writing of the history of television itself. Television news and public affairs The production of news has always been the pre-eminent focus of television’s ‘social contribution’ as well as the arena in which liveness and being up to date (even up to the minute) are valorized.3 The popular ideology of broadcast journalism is an unstable conglomeration of realism, liveness, personality, and immediacy. The discursive strategies that support this conglomerate (one might say hodge-podge) ideology are themselves multiple and unstable, as the viewing audience is set in a relation of variable proximity to and distance from events represented in mediated and shifting terms (Morse 1986; Stam 1983). Events thus represented are both past and present, there-then and here-now, ended and open-ended; they are already historicized as stories, and yet to be finalized. As a medium of recording and transmission, television positions itself to subsume these alternatives as simultaneous perspectives. In the context of television news it is not unusual to hear that something that occurred today—or is in the process of occurring—is ‘historic’ or that we are witnesses to ‘history in the making’. Of course we understand that these invocations of history signify the import of such events in the present: they are momentous rather than historic. But the slippage here, in one sense an innocent colloquialism, is symptomatic of the collapse of the distinct temporal and discursive orders that have conventionally distinguished history as a mode of narrative discourse. More importantly it suggests that what is most unpredictable (because it is not yet a closed sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end—one of the traits of histoire) can be—must be—‘historic’ if it is in the process of being recorded by television. The institution of television itself thus becomes the guarantee of history, even as it invokes history to validate its own presence at an event. (The very existence of the Vanderbilt Television Archives, which preserves taped copies of all network news broadcasts, re-enacts and confirms this logic.) At an extreme ‘history’ becomes a signifier

26

CULTURAL STUDIES

of authority and social responsibility, simultaneously validating the speaking subjects and the spoken subjects of television’s news discourse.4 The interplay between liveness and historicity is equally apparent in advertisements for news broadcasts (network and local) which variably stress traditions of journalism, historic events at which the news was present, and an ability to cover breaking events at a moment’s notice—sometimes in conjunction with one another. The implication is that television news is here, now—where things are happening, so that it will have been there, then—where history was made. Or, conversely, because the news has been then and there, we can rest assured they will be here and now, as needed. In either case history and current events, the past and present become mutually supporting frames of reference, the one serving as the alibi and guarantee of the other. This logic is not restricted to news programming, even if it is most fully and consistently expressed in this context. It impinges on all aspects of programming and promotion in which historical value—expressed as longevity—and innovation are correlated. For example, the campaign promoting Miami Vice for syndicated rerun sales stresses innovation and enduring values as coextensive characteristics of the show. ‘Everything About Miami Vice Is New. Nothing About It Is Temporary.’5 The text that follows this advertising headline elaborates on this. Miami Vice is the most innovative series on television. But viewers watch it not only for what’s new, but for what’s permanent. Viewers keep tuning in because it’s got the staying power of classic entertainment. Our research shows conclusively that what holds viewers are the enduring qualities of superb action, suspenseful plots, the ingenuity of the heroes, and the irresistable chemistry between them. Someday, in the future, Miami Vice may not be innovative. But what it will always be is watched. (my emphasis) (Broadcasting 1987, 43) Being merely new or innovative is on the one hand desirable, but is not enough, because it is a transient status. Newness has to secure itself in relation to something else. The threat of evanescence is countered by the guarantee of longevity, and affiliation with the history represented by ‘classic entertainment’. Television history and the tradition of ‘live’ production The unstable, but self-validating relay among positions of contemporaneity, liveness, tradition, and history has pervaded broadcasting from the very start, and fully informs the very writing of the history of the medium. In particular this is inscribed in the designation of the 1950s as the ‘Golden Age’ of live television production. The era of broadcasting thus named (roughly 1948–58) includes dramatic fiction programming and the tradition of news and public affairs. In both popular cultural memory and in many academic accounts, this period is held up as an era of high quality production that was all too quickly supplanted by mindless, standardized, taped programs.6 As the putative origins of television, the Golden Age is also characterized in terms of innovation, experimentation and even innocence (Kerbel 1979).

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

27

The hallowed nostalgia cast on this period of network broadcasting is overdetermined by the relation of live television production to radio, the New York stage, and Hollywood film production. As a singular event the live production can be identified with theatrical performance; and even films are relatively singular in comparison to television series and serials. Liveness—construed in terms of standards of singularity and repeatability— establishes a hierarchy of cultural value to confirm the superiority of the relatively original or unique product. The promotion of television’s historic, ‘live’ productions affiliates the medium with the upper end of the cultural scale of value and confers on the medium an elevated, if lost, tradition of authentic creativity and aesthetic worth. This perspective includes the implication that television could be of higher social and cultural value if it returned to a version of singular or ‘live’ production, concomitant with a willingness to sacrifice ‘mass appeal’ and ‘mass production’ for individuated productions with smaller, and presumably higher quality, audiences. It is significant in this respect that most discussions of the Golden Age attribute the decline of live dramatic programs to the need for economic efficiency in production and the development of a mass television audience that did not sustain the ratings for anthology drama (Kerbel 1979; Leab 1983, 24–5). Here, business interests, recorded images, repetitive formats, mass audiences, lower taste, and lesser social value are all associated. In heralding the Golden Age as origin and aesthetic highpoint of the medium, this version of television history offers a view of temporal and causal development valorizing live production by the networks as the period of experimental innovation. In the process, earlier inventions and experimentation—including work in mechanical television in the 1920s and early 1930s, and the search for an all electronic system which began in earnest in 1930 (Udelson 1982)—are relegated to the status of ‘prehistory.’ But what if we include this period of technological innovation in the story of television?7 Technological experimentation in television significantly antedates the Golden Age, and the ability to record images for (re)broadcast informed this development from the very start. Even during World War II, often considered a ‘dormant’ period in television (pre)history, NBC commissioned studies on the possibility of filming ‘live’ programs.8 And while the programs of the Golden Age are relatively rare in comparison to contemporary taped television, they are also remembered precisely because they were preserved in recorded form at the time they were broadcast.9 From this perspective the ‘live’ production of the 1950s does not represent an originary purity in television. Rather it can be reconceptualized as a transitional moment in larger, ongoing economic, institutional, cultural, and technological stories, in which the establishment of a nationwide system of television broadcasting by the networks precedes the deployment of standardized, perfected methods of recording, even though recording and transmission were always combined at the level of aspiring invention/ conceptualization. In this light, to construe the ‘live’ productions of the Golden Age as an aesthetic ontology (and as the origins of television) fails to consider uneven developments in the innovation and diffusion of the particular technologies and discourses that comprise television. More specifically, to relegate the pre-World II period of technological invention and innovation to the status of ‘prehistory’ associates the history of the medium with the rise

28

CULTURAL STUDIES

of network television broadcasting. ‘Television’ and its history are thus identified with the network system as it developed out of radio, which is in turn positioned as television’s history, reinforcing the view that American television is the way it ‘had to be,’ predetermined as it was by an institutional and aesthetic base in radio.10 The Golden Age of television and pre-television radio can then be subsumed together in a generic media nostalgia. (This version of broadcasting history then displaces the ways in which television by and large has maintained the programming genres and formats developed during the 1950s, while radio has undergone a more thorough transformation in programming formats.) I am not proposing on this basis that we ignore the specificity of the 1950s as a moment within television history. Rather I am suggesting that the prevailing view of this era as the Golden Age is determined by an unthought priviledging of ‘liveness’ as an aesthetic ontology, which in turn follows the logic of particular cultural ideologies and is not ultimately at odds with industry interests. The discourse that promotes the Golden Age as the initiating moment of television history which is, crucially, characterized by liveness, experimentation, and innovation—and as a period of exceptional quality—functions as a retrospective myth of loss. It is a loss that confirms contemporary television’s ‘second class’ cultural status (because there is not enough ‘live’ production), while affirming the value of television’s institutional and economic base in the process of naturalizing it (because the networks did once promote ‘live’ production). In this history, ‘liveness’ becomes the alibi to assure that the system is not in itself bad, and in fact is based in the best cultural traditions. History and liveness (and history as liveness) authenticate the social truths and cultural value of television as a whole. The valued history of the medium is the story of its liveness, while the ongoing deployment of signs of liveness and immediacy confirm its social and historical value. Liveness and history thus emerge as equally mystified, but conflatable concepts. III. Living history I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. The informational

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

29

function of the media would thus be to help us to forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia. (Jameson 1983, 125) Television of course offers its own versions of history-as-presence in its flow of programming. History is evoked, rewritten, retransmitted, and reconstructed across television’s genres and modes, in the reruns, remakes, compilations, and historical fictions that coexist with—and as—the originals, first runs, current events, and contemporary fictions that comprise television programming. In this conglomerate simultaneity of copresent options, the historical determinations of individual programs and events are at once in full evidence and subsumed in an overwhelming ‘present text’ of television flow. Almost all forms of programming are subject to being rerun in their entirety or in fragments (as segments of another show), over the course of a single season and over time, a process extended with the growth of cable and the use of video recorders. History is thus preserved in forms of dispersal, as the specificity of temporal anchorage is relativized in the process of repetition. Programs from the 1950s air simultaneously, and consecutively, with shows from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. They are shown precisely because, or if, they are popular enough to draw an audience in the present, a ‘present’ which is constantly in the process of being rewritten and thus transformed. An array of formats hold forth the promise of ‘life after prime time,’ including syndicated reruns, revivals, remakes, and the made-for-TV movie. For example (one that encompasses several of these variations at once), the continuing popularity of Leave It To Beaver (one of the quintessential ‘old fashioned’ family sitcoms) in syndicated reruns led to reassembling the cast for Still the Beaver, a network made-for-TV movie that picked up the lives of the fictional characters twenty years later. The relative success of the movie in turn generated the renewal of the series, based on the movie, first by the Disney Channel (a cable service) and then in syndication. Many television series have been revived as remakes, with actors in contemporary situations assuming character roles familiar from previous incarnations of a program, or with new characters placed in a familiar context. These ‘new’ programs, extending a program’s history, often air while the ‘original’ still shows in reruns. These include The New Gidget, The New Monkees, The New Sea Hunt, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Gumby to name only a few. And it is not only ‘old classics’ that are subject to revival in this way, but also programs that have only recently been dropped by the networks, such as Punky Brewster and Fame. And in the admittedly extreme case of The Honeymooners the discovery of previously unseen (‘lost’) episodes allows contemporary audiences to see ‘new’ episodes of the infinitely rerun series. In the case of programs in syndicated rerun that are also still on prime-time television (or, especially in cable markets, syndicated on more than one channel), it is possible to see multiple stages of fictional development—multiple histories—on the same day (e.g. The Facts of Life, Knots Landing, M*A*S*H, and Magnum, PI, and so forth). Television represents its own history in this massive combination of texts that includes old and new, past and present, as equivalent choices. Yet in this equivalence, which is absolute as a homogeneous dispersion, the ‘historical’ differences among shows (as old

30

CULTURAL STUDIES

and new, classic and modern) are maintained. Television (re)produces a history that is readily present, but perhaps remains unthought in its historicity precisely because it is present.11 In the process television continually (re)constructs its own ‘tradition’ as an effect of complex temporal overdeterminations. This can be read (or reread) in a given market’s programming schedule, in an individual’s selections across a programming paradigm, and also may be enacted in the course of a single program. It is not uncommon for long-running series to periodically include ‘new’ episodes incorporating flashbacks. In some instances the diegetic past thus represented is reassembled from earlier episodes (which a given viewer, or any number of viewers, may have seen at another time), while in other cases a diegetic history which is not identical to the program’s history may be retrospectively constructed. Dallas: The Early Years, a madefor-TV movie representing the fictional past of the show Dallas, was made after Dallas had been on the air for seven years, retrospectively dramatizing the program’s diegetic history. The 1986–7 season of Knots Landing includes a series of flashbacks depicting a previously unknown ‘history’ for several characters as a motivating factor for narrative developments on the program. The retrospective reconstruction of a fictional past may or may not involve the re-presentation of a program’s history; and an individual viewer is not necessarily in a position to tell the difference.12 Programs may even engage in both practices over time, offering flashbacks that are recycled footage from previous episodes in some cases, and ‘new’ footage of the past in others. (For example General Hospital has used both approaches in representing its fictional history.) Anniversary and compilation specials offer yet another version of the medium writing its own history in the context of a single show. Programs of this sort celebrate past and present through the co-present assembly of ‘old’ and ‘new’, or recycled and original images, with an implied future if only of rebroadcast. Compilation specials have been devoted to particular genres, notably including commercials, sitcoms, and bloopers.13 An anniversary special for The Tonight Show or Late Night With David Letterman marks progress, highlighting previous seasons with the repetition of selected segments, thus defining a tradition. It is here, now in the anniversary show in the present because it has a past. The past guarantees the present which in turn surpasses it because it is, inevitably, more ‘contemporary’ (and ‘sophisticated’) than the ‘dated’ past on which it is built. Thus, for example, the hosts or guests in the relative present tense of recording such specials may joke disparagingly about the clothing and hairstyles they sport in a taped segment from the past. This mixed attitude, of a present superiority to a past which is nonetheless celebrated, is extended to embrace the larger text of television history when David Letterman makes (obviously ‘fictional’) references to Late Night’s origins in the 1950s. The self-conscious joke, shared by the audience, involves a complex set of assumptions about television and/as history. It contributes to Late Night’s perceived status as a parodic reduplication of The Tonight Show, which does have its origins in the 1950s. By implication it also affiliates Late Night with television’s Golden Age (a tradition of ‘liveness’), grounding the program in a tradition of innovation—if only by means of historical fiction. Through a play of association and disjunction this may reinforce the perception of Late Night as more modern, more hip than The Tonight Show precisely because it did not start in the 1950s; at

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

31

the same time it may imply that Late Night is the ‘true heir’ to this former tradition. Thus the ‘fictional’ history carried by the joke proposes a ‘real’ history to explain the joke, and any particular reading of the joke necessarily confirms the show’s status in the overall, present context of the medium. The very possibility of identifying or delimiting historical context becomes increasingly difficult, perhaps only a reassuring fiction. Historical specificity is redefined as dispersion, partiality, irregularity, and repetition, coalescing in an insistent ‘nowness’ which is continually retransforming and rehistoricizing itself. Rather than situate its texts/events in temporal categories of past and present, television asserts a distinction between things that are on the air and those that are not, and both of these categories include ‘old’ and ‘new’ programs, ‘historical’ and ‘current’ events.14 History as presence is constructed in direct proportion with a process of commodification, since being on the air is finally a function of saleability—to networks, to stations, to sponsors, and to viewers: history as negotiable tender. Anything that is not on the air in this context is not free of the force of commodification, but simply a potential commodity awaiting an opportunity to enter into this history. Our individual and collective memories offer a reserve of material with the potential to be re-presented. Thus it is not only in historical documentaries, news, docudramas, fiction dramas, and historical fictions that television writes a (its, our) history, but also in counseling, therapy, advice, and talk shows, with their reconstructions of personal case histories. This might even be extended to include the use of consumer video technology. Thus, for example, a story in the Weekly World News (1987) tells of a woman who videotaped her husband’s heart attack rather than calling an ambulance. (The ‘truth value’ of this tabloid story—an admittedly unorthodox source—is less important for my purposes than the symptomatic attitude it demonstrates regarding history and video; I invoke it as a contemporary allegory.) The woman is quoted as saying, ‘He bought the camera for me so we’d have a record of our family life.’ The article explains that she continued shooting as medics tried to revive her husband, and even attempted to follow him into the emergency room at the hospital. She is reported to have said, ‘My husband’s dying and I’ve got to get it on tape.’ The ‘present’ here is subjected to the scrutiny of a video camera with the record as the alibi—it must be recorded now so that in the future there will be a document, a family history. If history only exists in and as its realization in the present text of television, the present can only be realized in and as something which will be a historical document. In the process of rewriting history in the present—which is also a rewriting of the present as history—television can hold the most extreme, discrepant modes of representation in simultaneity within its boundaries. (It is only the complete absence of representation, video black and silent audio, which is unacceptable.) A striking example of this in the context of a single episode is offered by The Waltons. In the episode in question, John-Boy Walton is working as a journalist and travels to New Jersey to cover the landing of the Hindenberg. The story thus implicates a common strategy of historical narrative fiction, setting up a fictional character to be witness to a ‘famous’ historical event which the audience may be in a position to anticipate; historical retrospection generates prospective narrative anticipation.15 In this case, the viewer familiar with the Hindenberg explosion is

32

CULTURAL STUDIES

not disappointed. John-Boy arrives at the landing site just in time to witness the arrival and explosion of the dirigible. At this point in the drama, documentary film footage of the Hindenberg explosion is intercut with the characters in the fiction as they react to the horrific turn of events. As the scene develops the actors in the ‘present tense’ of the program’s historical fiction, in color, are matted in front of the black and white documentary footage. This marks the historic event within the fiction as ‘really having happened’; it was not contrived for the story, but actually did occur, confirmed by the old, black and white images. At the same time the discrepancy between the documentary footage and the program’s color images is jarring, to say the least. John-Boy, and the actor who portrays him, are obviously not present at the event, though the unity of the fiction purportedly requires that we take him to be an on-the-scene witness. This sort of representational melange, a pastiche of historical styles and modes of representation, has become a prevailing impulse in contemporary television production. Moonlighting, Magnum, PI, and Fame, for example, have all aired episodes with (at least some) footage in black and white, evincing the visual style and narrative conventions of old movies (film noir for Moonlighting, the detective film for Magnum, PI, and the backstage musical for Fame—thus confirming the programs in their ‘proper’ generic tradition). Simultaneously, black and white television series (Wanted: Dead or Alive, for instance) are being colorized along with the colorization of classic black and white films for television broadcast. New media history is hereby represented in the present rewriting of a textual past. Simply being old (historical) has no currency, thus ‘old’ movies and television programs are remade as ‘new’ products. But to simulate classic visual and narrative styles in this context becomes a sign of ‘quality’ and prestige. The contemporaneity of Fame or Moonlighting lies precisely in the self conscious remodeling of the classic movie genres of which they are the current expression. At the same time old movies and television shows can be revived—brought back to life as circulated commodities—not merely by situating them in current programming flow, but also, and even better (with presumably bigger audiences), by making them look more like current productions with the addition of color. Contemporaneity and historicity are thus imbricated and coextensive in the present formation of visual and narrative style. To be situated in history, and as history, in television requires this conflation of past and present, a conflation which is unpredictable in its very enactment, and which involves (re)historicization of the present as well as (re) presentation of the past. History in its otherness masquerades as something new, while the present simulates itself as history. This in turn has the effect of producing an unstable, dispersed subject of historical consciousness. IV Is it live or is it memory? This is not the world of personal phantasy (and neither, obviously, is it that of reality); this is an oscillating work, in which there is room for the play of forms, a field liberated by the reversal of phantasy, but which still rests upon

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

33

it. This has nothing to do with aesthetics and its does not necessarily produce hermetic works. (Lyotard 1984, 75) The dispersion of history as a process of rewriting in the present text of television impinges on all programs and implicates the viewer (all individual viewers) as an agent and effect of selective memory. One forceful expression of this—at once typical and exceptional—can be traced in the recent narrative development of Dallas. In the fall of 1986 at the start of the network, prime-time television season, Dallas premiered with an episode that immediately rewrote—indeed expunged—the whole of the previous year’s diegetic narrative. Pam Ewing awoke, apparently the morning after her marriage to Mark Graison (dramatized in the final episode of the previous season) to find Bobby Ewing, her believed-to-be-deceased ex-husband, in the shower.16 The shock of this discovery was eased by the explanation that Bobby had never actually died; his death as experienced by Pam in the fiction and by the viewing audience was only a dream. In terms of programming time the viewer was thus returned to the final episode of the 1984–5 season, to the moments before Bobby was leaving Pam’s house and was fatally hit by a car.17 Bobby’s death and burial were dramatized at the start of the 1985–6 season, providing significant motivation for new plot developments along with the continuation of several narrative strands carried over from 1984–5. Bobby’s ‘revival’—carefully anticipated and orchestrated in a massive publicity campaign18—signalled the eradication of an entire year of narrative progression on Dallas. In popular formulations, a whole season was dismissed as ‘Pam’s dream’.19 But if we take the program literally (which is perhaps no longer possible, given this turn of events) ‘Pam’s dream’ only explicitly includes Bobby’s accident, death, and (probably) her subsequent marriage to Mark Graison. What of the rest of the 1985–6 season, including major developments involving JR and Jack Ewing, Donna and Ray Krebbs, Cliff and Jamie Barnes, and Pam’s kidnapping in Columbia? These and a host of other subplots, culminating in an explosive season finale, were relegated to the netherworld of an unspecified memory. The events of the 1985–6 season persist. They are part of the program, if no longer part of its fictional continuity or diegetic history. Their status is that of a ‘memory-effect’, an unstable intersection among Pam’s unconscious (as parts of her ‘dream’ not brought to conscious recall), the program as a narrational source, and any number of individual viewers of the show who recall events of the 1985–6 season. This memory-effect also carries the potential to infect viewers of another prime-time serial melodrama, Knots Landing, in which one of the main characters is Gary Ewing, Bobby and JR’s brother. Bobby’s death provided the presumed motivation for a number of significant plot turns on Knots Landing during the 1985–6 season; and the program currently proceeds as if uninformed to the fact that Bobby never ‘really’ died. Dallas asserts its own version of narrative logic here, including as one possibility an interpretation of Knots Landing as the extension of ‘Pam’s dream’. Of course in relation to the genre with which Dallas is affiliated—the soap opera—none of this is surprising per se. The revival of deceased or disappeared characters—with the same actor resuming a role, or a new actor assuming the part of an established character—is commonplace in daytime serial melodrama; and the prime-time

34

CULTURAL STUDIES

soaps, including Dallas and Dynasty, have readily adopted this convention.20 By the same token the ‘revival’ of Bobby Ewing on Dallas offers a particularly extreme version of this practice. For it is not just the case that Bobby ‘returned’ having never really died. Rather none of the events of the 1985–6 season have the status of diegetic reality.21 This total rewrite goes far beyond the ‘reversability’ of the soap opera and allows us to characterize Dallas’ development as excessive in relation to (if exemplary of—as an extreme logical conclusion) the open-endedness of the serial form itself. A general, generically based narrative mutability and repetitiveness is recast as an absolute repetition of a diegetic time span in complete narrative difference. This excess may make more sense if we situate it in relation to television’s production of history as rewriting in the present. As a version of history which implicates fictional time and programming time in relation to the audience, it also offers a context for exploring the production of a historical subjectivity. For as Dallas rejects, via rewriting, its own fictional history, it simultaneously inscribes history as a space of meaning production specifically in relation to the perspective of the audience. The ‘new’ plot developments promote a forgetting of the previous season by offering a present, alternative version of the story. At the same time the ‘new’ stories exist in the shadow of events as they were previously played out, and as they may be variously remembered by individual viewers. Narrative history, dispensed with as a figment of a single character’s imagination (as a dream), is reinscribed as an amorphous imaginary (as memory) that lurks alongside the narrated events of the present season and may be activated by any regular viewer. Here programming history produces a body too much in the form of an ‘extra’ season of narrative.22 This logic is subject to extended reproduction in the context of syndicated reruns. To replay the series in continuity will repeat and exacerbate the terms in which it functions. One can imagine the possibility of suppressing (the desire to suppress) the 1985–6 season; it would be easy enough to slightly re-edit the scenes involving Bobby’s ‘death’ and reappearance, redefining continuity (rewriting the history of Dallas), especially since there are no end-of-season cliffhangers in syndicated rerun. But this fantasy of restored diegetic continuity is immediately contravened by economic considerations. To hold back a whole season of a series from reruns would represent a significant loss of profits for the producers. Thus in the context of a single program—in this example a contemporary, fiction melodrama—we can recognize the full force of television’s construction of history in relation to subjectivity as a process of imaginary reinscription activated by re-presentation and rewriting. The subject of this process is singularly indefinite, the effect of an unstable alliance of a fictional character, a (any) regular viewer, and Dallas as an impersonal narrating voice. In this overdetermined subjectivity no ‘one’ speaks the historical discourse, though everyone is potentially implicated in its reconstruction. It is produced in the interactions of individual fantasy and commodity circulation (the television program as commodity, the television star as commodity, and the television viewer as commodity; all three also the agency of fantasy), which cannot be collapsed as equivalents nor clearly differentiated.

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

35

The viewer’s historical knowledge here is delimited, but is not finally determined by the Dallas text, or by Pam Ewing as a functionary, and potential figure of identification, within this text. That is to say, I can only know the Dallas history to the extent that it has been represented by the institutional forces that produce and circulate it—not only in the weekly episodes of the show and Dallas: The Early Years, but also in the books licensed by the producers (including a series of fiction paperbacks rewriting the program’s serial episodes, and a volume detailing the history of the world and characters of Dallas as if it were ‘real’, represented as history).23 But the institution thus defined cannot control how much of this I know, or remember, how much of the 1985–6 season I recall and engage in my current viewing of Dallas, or even if I continue to watch at all.24 Television produces history in an ongoing process of displacements and reinscriptions, as the texts which may activate and engage individual and social memory are always ‘live’—in the signal flow made present by turning on the television or the video recorder—and yet passing, if not already past. History is represented and reenacted in the ongoing, present dislocations in time, space, and subjectivity continuously reproduced by the medium. It is not just that all history is fiction (Heath 1977) but also and simultaneously that all fiction is history. From the perspective of postmodern mechanisms of simulacral reduplication, television can easily be understood to participate in the dissolution of ‘history’ as a category of experience, of discourse, and of critical analysis. And yet history seems to haunt the medium; it is both nowhere and everywhere within the discourses that comprise television as a social and cultural apparatus. History is what it does not have, except by virtue of liveness, indeed what it cannot have it if it is to celebrate itself in terms of contemporaneity, renovation, innovation, and being up to date. History and tradition anchor this discourse of contemporaneity, endowing television and its electro-magnetic impulses with substance and weight, offering connections to the social and cultural milieu in which it participates. Within its multiple discursivity television repeatedly, if variably, invokes ‘history’ in what might be taken as a compensatory struggle to find conventional meaning and order in temporal/social experience, in the very process of revealing the impossibility thereof. A recent cartoon in TV Guide (1987, 43) shows three rows of bookcases in a library-like setting. One is labeled ‘History’, the second ‘Fiction’, and the third is identified as ‘Made For TV’. Here is a joke to be shared by the mass television audience, engaging a particular consciousness of history. It assumes that the distinction between history and fiction is clear, but it also acknowledges that television involves something else, apart from these familiar, conventional categories. There are various ways to interpret the cartoon. In relation to the dominant rhetoric of TV Guide the ‘Made For TV’ category should probably be taken as an aberration, needlessly and irresponsibly confusing or ignoring the longstanding meaningful distinction between ‘History’ and ‘Fiction’.25 But the cartoon nonetheless represents the ‘Made For TV’ category as equivalent to the other two; they stand together, each carrying the same potential to produce meaning. Television has not eradicated the signifying distinction of history as a category once and for all. It can still be, and is, differentiated from its ‘others’—in the case of the TV Guide cartoon represented as ‘Fiction,’ though a range of alternative ‘others’ propose themselves as possibilities. But within the current discursive formation which includes

36

CULTURAL STUDIES

television, the understanding of history and of its production cannot be confined to the ‘same old way’ of thinking, whatever that was to begin with. And it is this simultaneity of historical reconceptualization and productivity that the cartoon represents, intentionally or not. In this context, it is pointless to simply long for the distinctive clarity of a former signifying order (which is itself, possibly, only another retrospective myth). If we hope to intervene in the current social order and its modes of (cultural) production, we have first to construct an adequate theoretical and descriptive representation thereof, even if it requires a thoroughgoing reconstrual of the very categories that ground the aspirations of transformation—including history. This does not mean accepting things ‘the way they are,’ but starting out with an adequate perspective on the discursive strategies that comprise our ‘world’ and relations of knowledge within it. Television’s production of history and subjectivity, constituted simultaneously as past and present, old and new, here and there, live and preserved, ended and open-ended, is precisely one of the areas that allows us to initiate such a reassessment, rewriting itself even as we attempt to pin it down. Indeed if we were to return to the cartoon bookstacks in the TV Guide, and if we could get close enough to scrutinize the shelves, we might find that the individual volumes were not quite where we expected to find them. And if we were asked to catalogue books within this system, we might not even be absolutely sure how to proceed. Notes 1. A great deal of work has been done in a variety of theoretical and disciplinary contexts on the construction of history. It is impossible to offer an exhaustive account of this work. Some of the important influences include Barthes 1970; Benveniste 1971; de Certeau 1975 and 1986; Foucault 1972. In the context of film and television see Commoli 1978; Heath 1977; McCarthur 1978; Metz 1976; Tribe 1977–8. 2 I offer this term in relation to, and as an adaptation of, Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of the hyper-real in Baudrillard 1983. 3 For example, a recent TV Guide profile on ABC anchor Peter Jennings opens with a description of a post-air staff review of one evening’s broadcast, as executive producer Bill Lord discusses stories on which they scooped the other networks. (Kalter 1987). 4 This distinction involves subject positionality as a function of discourse. A lucid discussion is provided by Silverman 1983, 45–53. 5 The ad appeared in Broadcasting, 5 January 1987, 43. The cited text is the headline on the first page of an eight-page promotion for the series. 6 Although this version of television history is typical and dominant, it is not held by all scholars in the field. Indeed a number of people are currently involved in rewriting this ‘dominant’ history. (Allen 1983; Boddy 1986; Boddy 1979; Winston 1986) It is also fair to say that this revisionist history has not yet had a pervasive influence on how television history is conceptualized. 7 In asking this question, I take my cue from film studies which has typically included ‘pre-cinematic’ technologies as part of its historical perspective. Scientific and entertainment apparatuses involving illusion of motion projection, and so forth are acknowledged stages in the story of film. Crucially, these are not construed merely as points of technological

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

37

progress with cinema as the telos, but as the constituent elements of an ideological history of vision, perception, and representation in which the cinematic apparatus figures prominently. While I cannot offer this sort of ‘story’ for television, I do hope to underscore how and why this sort of questioning can be important. The papers of John Royal (NBC vice-president) hold the correspondence of one such study commissioned in 1944. Papers of John Royal, Box 111, Folder 24, NBC Collection, Mass Communications History Center of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. In NBC and You (New York: NBC 1945), an employee handbook, the network describes how they expanded their broadcast hours during the war years, from one to four evenings per week. This was the culmination of two decades of work towards developing an adequate system of program preservation. (Udelson 1982; Biel 1977; Winston 1986) Some examples of early recordings include the Francis Jenkins ‘radio movies’ from the 1920s in the Library of Congress, and the John Logie Baird disc recordings at the British Museum. Both of these, processes represent low-definition, small-image television based on mechanical systems. They have little in common with today’s standards and technology for image reproduction. There is a fair amount of documentation from the 1930s about the development of television. In 1933, radio columnist Russell Nye saw a demonstration of the Don Lee TV system in Los Angeles with ‘all seven reels’ of The Texan, reporting he could distinguish Gary Cooper from the leading lady. (Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1933) In the same year ‘What Is This Thing Called Television?’ (Los Angeles Times, 2 July 1933) included a range of Hollywood opinions. The Marx Brothers responded with (1) Chico, ‘Television? Is this vision a blonde or a brunette, and what am I supposed to tell her?’ (2) Zeppo, ‘How big of a set will I have to buy to get Kate Smith? The only kind I could afford now wouldn’t be big enough to get anything but Singer’s midgets,’ and (3) Groucho, ‘Just think, when television is perfected, you’ll be able to sit in your own home and watch a ball game, but until they invent a way of transmitting hot dogs with mustard through the air, it’ll never mean a thing to me.’ Allen (1983) discusses a variety of potential avenues for television development advanced in the 1930s, and how and why the medium assumed the form it did in relation to these possibilities. In this sense history can be read as a symptom. ‘The indexicality of a text constitutes it as a symptom (a history) which is total and present, but unthought. This is the text of the unconscious, which is timeless, yet rendered present in representation, historicized in another time, the time of analysis, which restores a real time to the past.’ (Falkenberg 1987, 46) The distinction I am making between program history and a fiction’s history is crucial here. The former designates the ‘actual’, realized history of the series as it has appeared in its sequential episodes. The fiction’s history, always subject to retrospective (re)invention includes the whole of the diegesis thus constructed. In a sense this is similar to the difference between plot and story, but is extended to account for a collectivity of episodes rather than a single episode. Blooper shows, comprised largely of out-takes and on-air ‘mistakes,’ began as specials. For a while both ABC and NBC ran weekly shows that included bloopers as part of their regular fare. Many pilots are made that do not actually get shown on the air, thus the principles of inclusion and exclusion are not related to how ‘old’ or ‘new’ a series is. Moreover, pilots

38

CULTURAL STUDIES

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

and short-run series that do not air in network prime time are not forever relegated to the category of exclusion: they are often available on cable stations. The use of fictional characters as participant-observers at major historical events is a convention of historical narrative films. (White 1982; White 1985) I discuss the use of historical retrospection as a means of generating prospective narrative anticipation in relation to Swing Shift in White 1985. The time sequence is a bit more complicated than the description allows. Bobby Ewing/Patrick Duffy appeared in Pam’s shower in the last 30 seconds of the final episode of the 1985–6 season. Pam awoke, went into the bathroom, and he turned around and said, ‘Good morning.’ This (his sudden appearance in her bathroom, apparently the morning after her marriage to Mark Graison) was the ‘cliffhanger’ that generated extensive media publicity during the summer hiatus. This publicity focused on how Bobby’s return would be resolved by the narrative—including the possibility that it was a Bobby impersonator. The program resumed at this point in the season opener in the fall of 1986. Pam’s half-sister Katherine was driving the car and aiming at Pam. She hit Bobby instead when he pushed Pam out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. This was the resumption and culmination of plot developments from the previous seasons dealing with Katherine’s attraction to Bobby, and her collusion with J.R.Ewing to secure Pam and Bobby’s divorce. In the episode in which Bobby was hit, at the end of the 1984–5 season, Pam and Bobby had just reconciled and were planning to remarry. By winter 1987, those plans had been fulfilled. This included columns in newspapers, TV Guide, People, Us, and the tabloids discussing why and how actor Patrick Duffy was brought back to the series, and how he would be narratively reincorporated into the program as a fiction character, beginning in the spring of 1986 and continuing through the fall of that year. Reference to ‘Pam’s dream’ became a running media joke. For example, on Late Night With David Letterman, comments on previous shows as dreams were common. A TV Guide article on outlandish plot developments in daytime soap operas concluded with the following observation: ‘And, lest we forget, even in soapland there are lines you don’t cross. For in the convoluted history of daytime drama, no exhausted writer has ever been so stupid as to have a character wake up and find out that the last 52 weeks were simply a bad dream’ (Kellogg 1987, 38). Rosalind Coward (1986) develops a perspective on the prime-time soap using the practice of character substitution by multiple actors as a starting point, specifically the year in which Miss Ellie on Dallas was played by Donna Reed instead of Barbara Bel Geddes. We should recall, however, that prior to this instance of actor substitution for an admittedly major character, Dallas had employed multiple actors for the (then minor) roles of Gary Ewing and Jenna Wade. This was exacerbated by the publicity that accompanied Patrick Duffy’s departure from the show at the end of the 1985–6 season. In particular, this publicity stressed the actor’s desire for departure to be final, and not to have Bobby portrayed by another actor. In the publicity this desire by a major figure in the show resulted in the scriptwriters killing off the character of Bobby Ewing. Perhaps the publicity surrounding his return to the show, and the narrative explanation of his resumed fictional presence were necessarily extreme to counterbalance the previous narratives of his departure. The idea of an ‘extra body’ of knowledge posed by historical representation, and the potential threat it constitutes to the unity and coherence of the representation and attendant identification, is developed in relation to acting in Commoli (1978).

TELEVISION: A NARRATIVE

39

23 To say nothing of the rewritings (anticipatory and retrospective) in popular, mass-market magazines and tabloids dealing with the show and the actors involved in its production. 24 Of course this raises the whole question of ratings. In general Dallas and the other prime time soaps have slipped in the ratings during the 1986–7 season. Dallas, in particular, had regularly been in the top ten rated shows for a long time, usually in the top five. During the 1988–9 season it has usually been in the top twenty rated shows, still the mark of a very large audience. It consistently was the highest rated prime time soap in the 1986–7 season. 25 Articles appear intermittently, but nonetheless regularly, on historically based movies and mini-series, as well as on made-for-TV movies based on real events. They tend to assess television’s ‘fidelity’ to reality in these dramatic formats, raising questions about dramatic license, entertainment versus instruction, the distortions of the medium, the excitement of the ‘reality’ which is ignored in television’s dramatizations, and so forth. According to these articles, when it comes to historical fiction (as opposed to documentary and compilation films, in particular), television drama almost always emerges as a lesser version of the ‘real story’ it represents. Larry King (1987) commented on a movie about President Lyndon Johnson ‘I don’t know what it cost to make, but in terms of its historical accuracy it’s worth about 15 cents.’ Curiously enough, TV Guide itself tries to correct the historical inaccuracies on the made-for-TV movie in question by calling upon Theodore White to discuss the ‘real LBJ’ in the same issue (White 1987).

References Allen, Jeanne (1983) ‘The Social Matrix of Television: Invention in the United States,’ in E.Ann Kaplan (ed.) Regarding Television . Frederick MD: University Press of America, pp. 109–19 . Barthes, Roland (1970) ‘Historical Discourse,’ in Michael Lane (ed.) Introduction to Structuralism, New York: Basic Books. Baudrillard, Jean (1983) Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). Benveniste, Emile (1971) ‘The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,’ Problems of General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, Fla: University of Miami Press. Biel, Michael (1977) ‘The Making and Use of Recordings in Broadcasting Prior to 1936.’ PhD dissertation, Northwestern University. Boddy, William (1986) ‘“The Shining Centre of the Home”: Ontologies of Television in the Golden Age,’ in Philip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds) Television in Transition . London: British Film Institute, pp. 125–34 . Boddy, William (1979) ‘The Rhetoric and the Economic Roots of the American Broadcasting Industry,’ Cinetracts (Spring), pp. 37–54 . Broadcasting , 5 January 1987 , ad for Miami Vice syndication package, p. 43 . Comolli, Jean-Louis (1978) ‘Historical Fiction—A Body Too Much,’ trans. Ben Brewster. Screen 19 (Summer), pp. 41–53 . Coward, Rosalind (1986) ‘Come Back Miss Ellie: On Character and Narrative in Soap Operas,’ Critical Quarterly 28 (Spring-Summer), pp. 171–8 . de Certeau, Michel (1975) L’Ecriture de l’Histoire, Paris: Gallimard. de Certeau, Michel (1986) Heterologies, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e).

40

CULTURAL STUDIES

Falkenberg, Pam (1987) ‘The Text! The Text! Bazin’s Mummy Complex, Psychoanalysis, and the Cinema,’ Wide Angle 9 . Feuer, Jane (1983) The Concept of Live Television: Ontology As Ideology,’ in E.Ann Kaplan (ed.) Regarding Television . Frederick MD: University Press of America, pp. 12–22 . Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Basic Books. Heath, Stephen (1977) ‘Contexts,’ Edinburgh Magazine 2, pp. 37–43 . Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Frederic (1983) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,’ in Hal Foster (ed.) The AntiAesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture . Port Townsend: Bay Press, pp. 111–25 . Kalter, Joanmarie (1987) ‘ABC Anchor Peter Jennings,’ TV Guide, January 3, p. 27 . Kellogg, Mary Alice (1987) ‘She Told the Gorilla Her Troubles And He Carried Her Off To Safety,’ TV Guide, January 17 . Kerbel, Michael (1979) ‘The Golden Age of TV Drama,’ Film Comment 15 (July-August), pp. 12–19 . King, Larry L. (1987) ‘Is It the Real Lyndon Johnson We See in “LBJ”?’ TV Guide, January 31, pp. 2–4 . Leab, Daniel J. (1983) ‘See It Now: A Legend Reassessed,’ in John E. O’Connor (ed.) American History/American Television . New York: Ungar. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984) Driftworks . New York: Semiotext(e). Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984) The Postmodern Condition . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCarthur, Colin (1978) Television and History . London: British Film Institute. Metz, Christian (1976) ‘History/Discourse: A Note on Two Voyeurisms,’ trans. Susan Bennett, Edinburgh Magazine 1, pp. 21–5 . Morse, Margaret (1986) ‘The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition,’ in Tania Modeleski (ed.) Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 55–79 . Polan, Dana (1986) ‘Brief Encounters: Mass Culture and the Evacuation of Sense,’ in Tania Modeleski (ed.) Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 167–87 . Silverman, Kaja (1983) The Subject of Semiotics . New York: Oxford University Press. Stam, Robert (1983) ‘Television News and Its Spectator,’ in E.Ann Kaplan (ed.) Regarding Television . Frederick: University Press of America, pp. 23–43 . Tribe, Keith (1977–8) ‘History and the Production of Memories,’ Screen 18 (Winter), pp. 2–22 . TV Guide, Cartoon, January 27 1987, p. 39 . Udelson, Joseph (1982) The Great Television Race: A History of the American Television Industry, 1925–1941 . Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Weekly World News (1987) ‘VCR Addict Tapes Husband’s Heart Attack,’ February 10, p. 5 . White, Mimi (1985) ‘Rehearsing Feminism: Woman/History in Rosie the Riveter and Swing Shift,’ Wide Angle 7, pp. 34–43 . White, Mimi (1982) ‘The Birth Of A Nation: History as Pretext,’ Enclitic 5, pp. 17–24 . White, Theodore H. (1987) ‘Background: LBJ,’ TV Guide, January 31, pp. 6–8 . Winston, Brian (1986) Misunderstanding Media . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

‘THIS TIME’S FOR ME’: MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE HILARY RADNER

Mieux vaut investir dans sa garde-robe que dans sa vie privée. (Caroll)1 A number of ads broadcast during the 1985–86 season suggest the possibility of a feminine pleasure that is not grounded in heterosexuality: Oil of Ulay, a face cream that says, ‘It’s my time’; Maybelline Mascara that announces, ‘This time’s for me’; or L’Oréal hair products that proclaim, ‘I’m worth it.’ The French post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari suggest that an economy of desire, a generative mechanism that functions as a formation of pleasure, that they term ‘rhizomatic’ is becoming increasingly dominant (1983, 13). This libidinal economy is characterized by a schizophrenic semiotic structure based on a multi-branched, interconnected dynamic economy of associations. In contrast, a phallocentric libidinal economy is hierarchical and fixed, grounded in the threat of absence rather than the promise of presence. Nowhere are these two libidinal structures more crucial in western European culture than at that point of adhesion or struggle through which gender is defined as the founding difference in an Oedipalized symbolic. These ads suggest the possibility not of a rhizomatic discourse but of what I will call a rhizomorphic discourse. I use the term rhizomorphic as opposed to rhizomatic to distinguish between the properly ‘rhizomatic’ and that which bears an isomorphic relationship to the ‘rhizomatic,’ the rhizomorphic. The rhizomorphic marks the impossibility of the ‘free’ libidinal economy of the schizophrenic—but also the possibility of a rearticulation of this economy within the constraints of the logic of consumer capitalism. Marketing strategies have recognized and legitimated this regime of pleasure, which is not articulated through the masculine gaze, by invoking a feminine position in which she is the subject of her own pleasure. As a rule, semiotic theory places the woman as the object of the masculine gaze (Mulvey 1975). She serves to reflect and represent desirability for the masculine subject. Her desire is represented as the desire to represent and articulate his desire. From the perspective of a traditional semiotics, the female consumer initially might be conceptualized as representing the projection of the masculine desire to be nurtured (a maternal, domestic image) or to be narcissistically gratified (an overtly heterosexual image).2 Both these positions have in common that the female consumer is defined in terms of her relationship to other people.3

42

CULTURAL STUDIES

A shift in the conceptualization of women took place within the advertising milieu in the late 1970s.4 This shift is most clearly articulated through new demographic categorizations of women as a consumer market. One of the first products successfully marketed in the 1970s for career women was the fragrance Charlie. The resulting popularity and high visibility of the product proved the importance of a new consumer group that Rena Bartos (1982), marketing researcher for J.Walter Thompson, identified as the ‘career woman.’ The advertising campaign that launched Charlie, an eau de cologne distributed by Revlon, exploited, but also popularized, the image of an independent woman. The vice-president of Revlon comments: The women’s movement idea of doing things for your own satisfaction and gratification rather than just to attract a man contributed to the achievement of the marketing goal’ (qtd in Bartos 1982, 165). Bartos described this new advertising approach as a shift from ‘raw sex’ (appeal to men) to something she calls ‘ego-sense’ (165).5 Within this approach, grooming and clothing are articulated in terms of the woman as subject (rather than in terms of a masculine subject as other). Thus, Bartos commented on the results of focus group research: ‘A common theme running through all of the career women’s discussion of clothes and grooming was that grooming is an expression of their [my emphasis] perception of themselves’ (173). Furthermore, many women who did not work but who planned to do so indicated that buying clothes, makeup, etc., was a prime incentive (173). In advertising, women sought to define themselves, and by extension a new consumer market, by positing an autonomous feminine subject defined through an economy of pleasure in which ‘she’ was articulated as the subject of her own pleasure.6 In this sense, the woman in advertising had an agenda that corresponded to a meta-critical position.7 Women in advertising were not simply selling products, but were formulating within the discourse of advertising a position in which their femininity worked for rather than against them.8 The most marked transition in the representation of women in advertising was from the portrayal of the domestically oriented woman to a woman who sought to please herself. Femininity was no longer exclusively defined through the representation of male desire, in which feminine desire was figured as the desire for masculine desire. Femininity began to be formulated as the construction of a feminine subject that, as a woman, wanted and desired like a man, but not as a man. The biggest of the female-headed agencies, Advertising to Women, made its reputation on presenting women as ‘strong but sexy,’ in such campaigns as ‘Take charge of your life’ (Jean Naté), ‘a woman driving alone at night “having too much fun to marry”,’ (Rive Gauche) and ‘It’s going to be an Aviance night’ (Aviance perfume) (qtd in Fox 1984, 323). Lois Geraci Ernst, the head of the agency commented: ‘it took seven to eight years…for them to figure out that women aren’t home polishing their floors any more’ (qtd in Fox 1984, 323). ‘It was from the magazine advertisements that we really learned how to be truly American…. How a home should look. How a table should be set. How to dress. How to be well groomed,’ commented Shirley Polykoff, the creator of the Clairol ‘Does she or doesn’t she’ campaign (qtd in Fox 1984, 293). This self-consciousness suggests that women in advertising did not act as the blind pawns of ideology; their choices were made

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

43

with the same sense of social imperatives that informed the academic scholar, although their goals differed radically. In advertising, the new sensibility was used to open and exploit new markets, to target a specific type of consumer, which the ads themselves helped create. The techniques and technology of representation, the vocabulary and syntax of the field of advertising did not change, rather they were displaced, articulated in terms of another subject. Though the representation of the feminine was directed towards different goals—for example, she wanted power and pleasure, rather than a man—the codes through which femininity was represented remained very similar. Nonetheless, the purpose of this marketing strategy was to disseminate what in psychoanalytic terms might be conceptualized as a non-oedipal libidinal economy as a means of creating new markets but also as a means of responding to changes in existing markets.9 The specific discourse engendered by the cosmetics industry offers a concrete example of the construction of this libidinal mechanism as a generative formation of pleasure. In addition to the obvious symbolic function of making up within an oedipalized regime, making up also functions as pleasure within an economy that I will designate as ‘simuritual.’ Simu-ritual I introduce this new term, ‘simu-ritual,’ in order to suggest a possible relationship between the specifics of a textual process and the global effects of this process. The simu-ritual depends upon formal syntactical structures; it, however, functions as an ‘effect’ rather than as representation. The term simu-ritual distinguishes this activity from ritual proper (Victor Turner 1977) with which simu-ritual has, nonetheless, much in common. Though making up is grounded through the phallocentric order in which the feminine is defined in terms of its representation of masculine desire, it corresponds to a rhizomorphic mechanism in that its pleasure also derives from a non-oedipal libidinal articulation of the feminine subject. Thus, the notion of the simu-ritual stresses both the continuity and the historical specificity of cultural practice. The choice of making up as a prototypical simu-ritual is not entirely arbitrary. Traditionally, makeup has been analyzed as having a ritual function.10 Mass culture texts, defined as such through mass production, mass marketing, and mass consumption, have been frequently analyzed as ‘ritual’ forms (Fiske and Hartley 1978, Newcomb and Alley 1983, Schatz 1981, 1983). This analogy has encouraged careful analysis of mass culture texts, revealing a semantic and syntactic richness too often effaced in analysis done from a traditional Marxist perspective or a sociological perspective; however, as a rule this approach has failed to fully articulate the specificity of the ritual form in a secular society regulated by capital.11 Rita Freedman (1985), practicing psychologist, comments on the secular ritual function of makeup: Cosmetic rituals are…valuable in legitimating the purchase of human touch. Chimps groom each other for hours for the simple pleasure of physical contact. We have few rituals that encourage body contact in American culture, but manicurists,

44

CULTURAL STUDIES

hair dressers, and body groomers are permitted to lay their hands on us…. Beauty rituals often become ‘functionally autonomous.’ This means that the process takes on more importance than the end product. Like other daily habits, these rituals prove satisfying through mere repetition. (48–9) Freedman also voices concern about the construction of the ritual instances governed by a consumer regime. The daily beauty fix can be as addictive, compelling, and expensive as some drug habits, and the withdrawal process just as painful. (49). This issue of pleasure is too complicated to be dismissed summarily. The problem centers around the formulation of a feminine identity. If the feminine is defined in terms of the masculine position (it signifies only through its relationship to that position) how, then, can a specifically feminine pleasure be situated as autonomous?12 One of the governing strands in the discourse of the women’s magazine is an attempt to negotiate the demands of feminine pleasure and the economic necessity of feminine autonomy. The formulation of a new libidinal economy that conflates the two seemingly contradictory demands of feminity and autonomy is one of the primary articulations of this discourse. Here making up, as it is formulated within the women’s magazine and as a cultural practice, offers an exemplary instance of this contradiction. In an article in Vogue magazine, Freedom comments that historically the role of fashion has been to emphasize the distinctions between men and women (Vogue 175). Artifically red lips, for example, are culturally defined as a ‘female’ characteristic, signaling to the male the availability and ‘otherness,’ the femaleness, of their owner. In terms of an affective relationship that I will refer to as ‘feminine narcissism’ the red lips figure less importantly for the male than for the female herself. The function of the red lips as a sign is no longer, at least exclusively, directed towards the other of a masculine gaze. Wearing lipstick is rearticulated as something the woman does for herself. This affective economy has manifested itself recently, for example, in the series of cosmetic ads cited above that emphasize the process of making up as libidinal affect—ads such as Maybelline’s ‘This time’s for me,’ or Oil of Ulay’s ‘It’s my time.’ The dominant economy predicated on feminine narcissism as a reconstitution and objectification of the male look has not been replaced; rather the two exist alongside each other. This new libidinal economy would be one of affect rather than representation (as in an oedipalized regime). The pleasure is in the instance itself rather than evolved through a process whereby the instance stands in for something else. Making up constitutes an important junction between these two economies of pleasure (oedipalized and nonoedipalized). As an industry, it has flourished, its significance increasing with the rise of the consumer society.13 The women’s magazine devotes a great deal of attention to skin care and makeup in editorials (the makeup worn by the cover girl is always listed in detail), in articles and in ads. The importance of skin care and makeup as an advertising category is overwhelming.14 Thus, making up presents an important aspect of the confluence of

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

45

consumer culture and feminine identity for the women’s magazine, and, I would suggest, for United States culture at large. Making up: the process For those unfamiliar with the process of making up, let me first describe the larger syntactical formation of the event. These processes are usually designated as systems by the companies that market the products that constitute the crucial elements in the process (Lazlo, Clinique, Lancôme, Elizabeth Arden, to name but a few). All follow the same basic format, pioneered by the more expensive lines, and gradually adopted by the less expensive lines. Often a single company will have a variety of lines, each targeted for a different consumer group. For example, Revlon, Ultima II and Borghese (each with its own system) are owned by a single parent company as are Estéee Lauder, Clinique, and Prescriptives. Each line of products, however, targets different consumer groups, offering the appearance of different procedures. The procedure itself can be divided into two parts: upkeep and makeup. Upkeep or skin care rituals are the necessary prerequisites to making up. To wear makeup without performing the requisite cleansing procedures would be considered an instance of pollution signified through the threat of bad skin. The dangers of pollution have two sources—external such as the environment and internal such as ‘dehydration,’ from which the observance of proper procedure protects the participant.15 A version of the process is repeated in the evening.16 Upkeep can be summarized as a three-step process; cleanse, tone, and moisturize. Makeup is organized around three basic territories: face/eyes/lips (in that order). Both magazine editorials and consultants emphasize a system of products as a prescribed chronology of activities. Thus it is not merely the product itself but a regulated discipline that is crucial to the process. Upkeep Upkeep takes place twice a day, before and after makeup. It consists of three basic steps that must occur in the following order: cleanse, tone, moisturize. Before make-up, usually in the morning, moisturizing is light, providing a base for the makeup. In the evening, after makeup, the process is similar though often a heavier cream is used, in addition to various specialized lotions for specific areas. These processes can be more or less complicated but the component stages remain similar. Women may formulate their own variations, but once formulated, the chosen order is rigidly respected in the sense that a deviation from the norm is recognized as such. Makeup Makeup application follows a prescribed format that again can involve more or less complications, but depends on the following three component territories.17

46

CULTURAL STUDIES

1. Face:

the application of base, concealing, contouring, highlighting, and finally, the application of ‘blusher’—in that order. 2. Eyes: shadow, pencil, eyeliner, mascara—in that order. 3. Mouth: lip liner, color (lip stick), gloss (shine)—in that order. Variations are common, but again follows the prescribed format. For example, often, for day wear, the prototypical woman will apply only concealer, blush, powder, and gloss. In the evening, additional items, such as glitter or eyeliner, etc., are frequently introduced. The focus of these systems is nonetheless to establish a regime that will be followed conscientiously by the consumer. Goals The ostensible goal of this process is to render the practitioner more attractive, closer to a prototype of feminine beauty. This assumption has been called into question by new marketing techniques evoking ‘ego sense.’ The effect of the simu-ritual, in this context, would be an affectivity grounded in the recognition and confirmation of ‘ego sense.’ The notion that women purchase if not beauty, then a better approximation of it than that which nature had accorded them, relies on the notion of a rational exchange. The marxist assumption that women are deluded into thinking that they are buying a piece of glamor—that women are ‘cultural dupes’—is predicated on the logic of exchange— something for something—and concludes that women are somehow being cheated.18 If we, on the other hand, consider that women are also buying an activity—the means of participating in the simu-ritual, then the issue of duplicity is irrelevant. The goal is not an exchange of material goods or attributes but the creation of an affectivity of effect. If a woman takes pleasure in making up, she receives the product for which she paid.19 As a well known feminist scholar commented: ‘I do it—the 3-step method—to pamper myself. I feel I deserve it.’ Before continuing this line of thought let me lay out the stakes of this particular simu-ritual. First of all, the notion of simu-ritual implies that the woman is not trying to buy a resemblance to Cheryl Tiegs, Isabelle Rossellini, etc., when purchasing a specific line of makeup. By using the same makeup as Tiegs, the purchaser establishes that she has something in common with the imago, the prototypical practitioner. Makeup marks the equivalent of ‘mythic-ritual’ categories, in the terms of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which define age groups and class groups in a pre-industrial society (1977, 165). As such, ‘the taxonomies of the mythico-ritual system at once divide and unify, legitimating unity in division, that is to say hierarchy’ (165). In this instance, making up, the constitutive classes are defined solely as consumer groups, that is to say in terms of a flexible rather than a fixed hierarchy, without reference to a legitimating whole. Making up does not reconfirm the woman within the communitas; it signals her position within a specific consumer category, simultaneously, in a contradictory move, marking her autonomy, her right to act as an agent of her own desire.20

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

47

These groups are organized around icons that I will call simu-totems, most obviously in the form of a specific model under exclusive contract to a company, who formally represents a specific line. Lauren Hutton for Ultima II targets older women: Isabelle Rossellini, for Lancôme the 30–40 set, etc. These industry-established icons are associated with less specific images borrowed from the environment, such as animals, landscape, weather, from nature, or more recently, cars, citiscapes, the scientific experiment.21 The ad The defining mechanism of the ad as the invocation of the practice is always similar. Initially, it affirms a desired effect. A high saturation print ad for lipstick circulated during the 1986 spring season in Condé Nast publications reads: ‘Quencher. It’s color that moisturizes. Protects. Smooths. And cares for your lips. Beautifully.’22 In addition, certain abstract qualities are attributed to the product through repetition and association. In the above ad, the name ‘Quencher’ is tied into the image of rippling azure water over which the linguistic message is superimposed. The face of Priscilla Presley is framed by this more abstract image. Here, Presley functions as a simu-totem, but somewhat differently then the models cited above who are exclusively associated with one product and who usually acquired their status as media stars through their function as cover girls. Presley’s status as a media star was initially derived from other associations: her marriage to Elvis Presley, and then through her acting career, perhaps most notably her role on the television show Dallas. The semiotic categories that she mobilizes are widespread and complicated. The use of Presley represents another marketing strategy, which ties the simu-totem into a much larger cultural arena than that of fashion, but which functions similarly in creating an instance of identification. The danger is that not all the categories activated by the media star encourage use of the product. Similarly, the image of the simu-totem could overwhelm the product altogether. By and large, it is the less expensive products that exploit existing media images. Conceivably the amount of exposure necessary to render the simu-totem familiar to the reader is much less with an already recognizable figure than with the cover girl. In the long run, however, the identificatory strategy is similar. A certain relationship of intimacy is established between simu-totem and product user through the communality of the product itself.23 The model, whether media celebrity or cover girl, is always tied to other types of imagery, here the water. This ‘water’ theme is the leitmotif of the ‘Quencher’ campaign. The imagery invokes chains of unregulated responses, underlining the polysemy of the image, which are nonetheless tied to the simu-totem (Priscilla Presley) through an association that is in and of itself an effect of the materiality of the image, blue, white, black. The beauty ceremony This description of the simu-ritual corresponds closely to the patterns of beauty ceremony observed by Malinowski (1929) among the Troibriander Islanders. The following

48

CULTURAL STUDIES

Figure a

incantation is used to charm the coconut fibre in a cleansing ritual in which gestures and participants (an old woman and a young boy) are rigidly prescribed: Polishing, polishing off, Cleansing, cleansing off, There is one piece of fibre,

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

49

My own, a keen fibre, a buoyant fibre, One which is as the morning star, Which is as the full moon. I cleanse his chest, I improve his head, I improve his chest, I cleanse his head, They climb up a pole (to admire), They bind the flattery bond round his knees. (352) The formula cited above coupled with a product and regulated activity might serve as a treatment for a television ad for ‘coco-coap,’ etc. Malinowski’s analysis of the formula isolates the strategies that could also apply to the ad as well as the ritual. It (the formula) contains, as with most magic, the affirmation of the desired effect. It begins with a simple statement of the action of cleansing, and then extols the value of the coco-nut comparing it to the morning star and to the full moon. The quality thus charmed into the coco-nut fibre will, it must be remembered, be later on transferred by friction to the skin of the bather.24 The idea of a light color as an attribute of beauty is clearly expressed. The formula closes with an exaggerated statement of the ef fect to be produced by the magic. (352) Syntactically, in terms of formal structures, the beauty ceremony ritual and the beauty ad, attached to a specific beauty system appear to have much in common. The distinguishing features of the ritual form and the simu-ritual form are suggested only within the context of a larger social articulation. In fact, the two practices function very differently. For the Troibriander, the beauty ceremony ritual is part of an integrating centripetal system that Durkheim sees as characteristic of a society that he terms ‘mechanistic.’ In the mechanistic society, its members are united by their sense of identification as the same, as the replication of the collective consciousness (Aron 1965, 11). The beauty ceremony ritual, more specifically the cleansing ritual, is part of a rigid, unified and prescribed process that regiments social life as a whole. For example, a ‘flattery-bond’ refers to the custom among the Troibrianders: to remove a piece of decoration from the body of a dancer or, in the case of people of high rank, to tie string around his leg or arm, in order to express admiration. This is done with the words Agu tilewa’i, ‘my flattery bond,’ and has to be redeemed by the admired dancer with a suitable present, which is also called tilewa’i—flattery gift. (Malinowski 1929, 352) Thus the formula is connected with other ritual practices reproduced in a hierarchy of fixed social relations and symbolic exchange that refers to the whole. Making up or the simu-ritual is grounded on the other hand in a process of fragmentation and disenfranchisement (as characteristic of a rhizomorphic formation), rather than through

50

CULTURAL STUDIES

engagement in the social order as a fixed hierarchy. This process of disengagement is effected at several levels that might be characterized as transmission, exchange, and practice. Disengagement The process of transmission is disengaged from practice, involving distinctly different arenas of social interaction. The media are the primary sources of information and regulation. Thus, beauty simu-rituals are only marginally grounded in tradition. Though young girls acquire the concept of makeup from mothers and older sisters, the process and products are generationally distinct.25 In addition to fluctuating from age group to age group, the makeup process must be constantly renovated and improved, the newer the better.26 As such, simu-rituals are not a source of stability and continuity but are formed by the need of capital to engage in a never-ending process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Last season’s makeup is illegitimate, ready for the waste basket. This season’s makeup may prove to be only marginally different; however, these differences are crucial to the legitimation of the process and become the minimal but necessary difference that fuels the circulation of capital in a consumer economy. The process itself is further legitimated by instruction and apprenticeship. It can take place in department stores where experts help the subject negotiate the confusing array of beauty implements, or through editorials and articles, as opposed to advertisements, in women’s magazines.27 This type of instruction, which regulates practice, is disengaged from the apprenticeship—print ad, television ad—that regulates the symbolic or metaphoric regime produced by the cosmetics industry. The ad, divorced from the practice of making up, produces a free play of figuration. The simu-totem does not provide a grounding, a point of adhesion for the collective consciousness, but a synaptic connection for an ever-expanding grid of connections that traverse larger semantic fields such as sexuality, violence, nature. These fields or global sememes are only tenuously rooted in a defining cultural representation as fixed identity. The defining instance of making up is not representation but exchange, here exchange of capital. It is crucial to spend money on makeup.28 This expenditure is pleasurable precisely because it is excessive, without any ‘real’ purpose. Of course, women must live up to the standards of good grooming, but the makeup process goes far beyond these minimal requirements in terms of expenditure and affective investment. The results of this process are usually imperceptible to anyone but the practitioner herself. Though the consumer may realize that the tangible or visible physical results are negligible in comparison to the investment entailed, it is this investment that makes the process signify differently, through an economy that is not grounded in rational equivalence though regulated through the exchange of capital. The exchange of capital as the determining instance of the practice further fragments the symbolic process. The money sign functions as the universal signifier regulating a flow of figuration without representation. The system of capital as flow cuts across the symbolic connection of the incantation (the ad) and practice. The purchasing of the product defines the split between incantation as a media form and the actual practice of

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

51

making up. The process of making up takes place in the bathroom, an arena of private yet necessary activities—the locus of repressed cathexis, as opposed to public celebration. Almost completely absent from making up as a quotidian activity is ‘the pleasure of human touch,’ as discussed by Freedman (1985). Except for the wealthy, regular beauty rituals are performed by an individual on herself. The thrust of most major cosmetics companies is, in fact, to systematize the type of personal care that wealthy women would receive weekly at Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door, for example. The approach has resulted in what might be optimistically termed a democratization of beauty rituals but also a depersonalization, an increasing self-absorption, on the part of the practitioner who purchases goods rather than services. The personal relationship between masseuse and client is replaced by a rubber glove that the woman applies to her own body, which she typically buys in a department store.29 The exchange of capital as the founding instance of investment physically engages the various loci of the simu-ritual as distinct and separate. The incantation, exchange of capital between advertiser and broadcaster, recreates an imaged or figured space that interpenetrates the private space of the practitioner, but remains distinct. The purchase, exchange of capital between practitioner and producer, designates the public space of the store, distinct from the private space of the practitioner, the bathroom, which constitutes a disengagement from this process of exchange. This private space becomes the occulted locus of symbolic exchange, or affectivity. The process of fragmentation is overdetermined by technology, economics, and social practice. This fragmentation must be seen as one of the pertinent features of the simuritual that distinguishes it from the ritual proper. This disengagement permits making up to function as an immediate effect and not solely as a component in a fixed symbolic structure. The simu-ritual is an activity that justifies itself as an effect. Making up as effect The effect of makeup is described by recent converts (Bernikow: 1986 189, 236) and confirmed users (Egan: 1988 15, 16) in articles appearing in women’s magazines (here, Mademoiselle and Ms.). These articles form part of the subject formation that functions in the place of tradition as a means of fixing the simu-ritual as an intertextual rather than a traditional practice. An article in Mademoiselle (Bernikow 1986) takes the form of a confession that chronicles the author’s initiation into ‘real’ makeup—as opposed to the outmoded process—outmoded because of age (the author’s age, as a young woman vs adolescent) and fashion.30 This initiation process is offered to the reader as a model for her own practice, a technology for reclaiming an arena of pleasure for herself. The author starts out with a makeup process that she presents as inadequate: I have been using it the way I brush my teeth, unthinkingly, unchangeable. A little liner, as little mascara, always the same shade of blush and lipstick. (189) The expert gives her a new regime;

52

CULTURAL STUDIES

She moisturizes, Then she comes at me with a sponge. I get concealer under my eyes…. Another sponge, and golden beige foundation. I am covered…I get Natural Glow on my cheekbones and…Impatience on my lips. (189) The importance of the process is emphasized: ‘How will I ever remember the sequence. She gives me a chart and a numbered list’ (189). Once the process is established, the author justifies the process by answering the question: ‘Why do I want to wear makeup?’ Discarding the idea that makeup renders the wearer more attractive, the author underlines the playful quality of the activity itself. The tongue-in-cheek style of the article rearticulates the playful qualities of the process. Bernikow confesses: I envy women who actually take pleasure in making themselves up. I even like the sound ‘making yourself up.’ It seems inventive, playful, nearly existential. Anxietyfree, certain women know how to have fun with makeup. All those little pots of color and collections of brushes represent to them, opportunity…they fool around with color, in the pink family one day, redder the next, dipping in and out of the purples the way I used to play with finger paints. Once this kind of primping seemed merely neurotic to me…. The idea of having a good time in this context never occurred to me. A cosmetically confident friend set me straight: ‘my makeup,’ she said, ‘usually takes three minutes to put on, but it can take forty-five. I like to ritualize [my emphasis] it.’ (189, 236) In Ms. Irene Egan (1988), a longstanding practitioner, elaborates on the notion of ritual: Applying makeup is like meditating. My mantra just happens to be ‘Maybelline.’ I like to do it real slow. I line up all my stuff on the kitchen table, just so. I prop my broken mirror against the fruit basket that has everything but fruit in it, lay out my cotton balls, sponges, wands, and brushes, and then I put the coffee on. Four cups of Colombian Supremo is part of my ritual. One cup to wake up, two cups to makeup, and the last to get me out the door. (15) Egan embraces the ritual without reservation, or if she has reservations they are revealed only in the playful ironic tone of the piece. Bernikow (1986), on the other hand, takes her instructional role seriously, in spite of her comic tone. She rejects both compulsive involvement and the notion that makeup entails a change in position for its practitioner, that she is rendered essentially more attractive vis-à-vis an objectified masculine look. On the other hand, like Egan, she emphasizes the pleasure in the process, the ritual, as the crucial effect of making up. Ultimately this position, which legitimates making up, is reinforced by the editorial note that closes the article. ‘Louise Bernikow has been wearing a lot of makeup on the publicity tour for her latest book, Alone in America (Harper & Row, 1986)’ (239). The author herself has emerged as a happy consistent and autonomous participant in the simu-ritual. She is entertained by the process. She recognizes it for what it is: fun. She offers a template of well adjusted behavior. Groomed, successful, witty, and

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

53

cultured, with a devoted male lover (he is mentioned several times in the article), the authorial voice invites the reader to become like her, to identify with the practice as an emblem of the successful new woman—a woman who is energetic, playful, and heterosexual. It would be a mistake, however, to view this quality of free play as providing a unified discourse for the practitioner. Bernikow (1986) was clear in her articulation of other less desirable trajectories (neurotic self-obsession, compulsive behavior) that overdetermine the discourse, of which she is understandably suspicious. The occulted discourse—the one ‘misrecognized’ by the author/subject as of least importance—is that founded in the exchange of capital. The primary contradiction involved in making up in fact centers around the exchange of capital.31 Capital The actual markings, as opposed to the process, the makeup as the traces of making up, reproduce class categories in which the flow of capital becomes the regulating mechanism. In the United States, where the role of cultural capital has been largely subsumed by capital, a woman inscribes on her face her bank balance, or that of her husband, though increasingly it is her own. Or perhaps, more accurately it is her credit rating and available credit line that she announces. In addition to this libidinal economy based on the free circulation of capital, other forms of cathexis, noted above, remain as traces, as points of adhesion that still reproduce the hazy narrative of a fixed subject, which is a gendered subject. Yet this new gendered subject is produced as figuration—rather than as representation. This shift is manifested in Bernikow’s rediscovery of making up and the contradictions that this rediscovery evokes. Bernikow (1986) must come to terms with a sense of guilt she has about her own pleasure in a feminine identity. Women who grew up with conventional ideas of femininity—it is not only important but desirable to care about things like clothes and makeup—are free of the guilt that grips me. (239) Bernikow replaces her guilt about femininity, about implicating herself in the masochistic regime whereby women are constituted as images for masculine consumption, with the recognition of a pleasure in the free play of figuration of femininity as ritual process (‘… the way I used to play with fingerpaints…’). The position now taken by Bernikow formulated through the simu-ritual is not femininity in the patriarchal sense, in which the feminine represents masculine desire, or in the sense of the opposition passive/feminine, active/masculine. It becomes primarily an ‘effect of pleasure’ in which the feminine is situated as a subject of her own pleasure—in which affect is displaced along a rhizomorphic trajectory that is reproduced through repetition as simu-ritual. To what extent does this free play of capital articulate a moment of resistance? Is the rhizopmorphic a capitalization of the rhizomatic? It seems clear that dismantling heterosexuality as the dominant regulatory mechanism of libidinal investment does not

54

CULTURAL STUDIES

Figure b: representation of pollution from (Estée Leuder)

necessarily affect the role of capital as the primary structure of exchange. Yet it is also evident that through the tension between standardization and differentiation as an instance of irritation, capital may open up moments of personal resistance as pleasure. In another turn of the screw it is perhaps the pursuit of the instance of pleasure that may close off these same possibilities at the institutional level, at the level of global politics and world economy. Significantly, on February 15 1989, the Media Business section of The New York Times reported that Rena Bartos had published a new book: Marketing Around the World. Seven years ago, Rena Bartos shook up the advertising world with a book describing how the surge of women into jobs shattered the notion of a monolithic female consumer market. In a new book,…Ms. Bartos…widens her scope to encompass the global female market. ‘Although women have a great deal in common around the world,’ she said…, ‘the advertiser must be aware of cultural nuances and differences, or they will fall prey to a cookie-cutter approach to markets….’ In the same issue, on the same page, The Times reported ‘…the opening of the Soviet Union to market researchers,’ notably through a joint venture between Vneshtorgizdat, a Soviet publishing organization, and MD Enterprises, an Austrian communications

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

55

Figure c: an example of a skin care ‘system’ from clinique

company, who will be providing ‘psychological profiles’ of the Soviet population to both western and eastern businesses. The researchers anticipate no problems in ensuring the cooperation of the Soviet people. ‘Why should they be frightened?’ asked Michael Dichand, president of MD Enterprises, referring to Soviet citizens’ reactions to a researcher’s knock on the door. ‘We will not be asking political questions. These will be pure economic questions.’ The question, then, we must ask ourselves, is what is the investment (the return) within a libdinal trajectory that is articulated as purely economic? What is the relationship between pleasure as resistance and politics as contestation? Notes 1 Trans: It’s better to invest in a wardrobe than a love life—taken from an ad for the clothing line Caroll displayed in the window of a woman’s speciality boutique in a gentrified section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Winter, 1988. 2 These two positions correspond loosely to Freud’s notion of two types of object choice, anaclitic and narcissistic. 3 See Decoding Advertising by Judith Williams (1978) for an intelligent and useful example of the semiotic approach. 4 Interestingly enough, this period also marks a transitional period in feminist theory. Feminists as well as advertisers were rethinking the feminine position. (See the work of Janice Radway (1982, 1983) in the early 1980s as an example of another way of articulating feminine pleasure.)

56

CULTURAL STUDIES

Figures d and e: examples of skin care ‘systems’ from Estée Lauder

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

57

Figure f: product specialization (from Shiseido) 5 The term ‘ego-sense’ should not be confused with the psychoanalytic term ‘ego.’ Perhaps the most accurate translation of the marketing concept ‘ego-sense’ within a psychoanalytic framework would be to say that ‘ego-sense’ implies the articulation of a feminine subject position in which she is posited as subject of her pleasure. 6 This is not to say that there are no historical precedents to these strategies of pleasure as resistance and irritation. For example, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen (1982) explain the consumerism of the immigrant daughter in the first decades of the twentieth century as founded at least in part in mother-daughter relations: The price of admission to the new culture was the negation of old-world notions of womanhood; ‘needs’ arose for clothing, hairstyles, and cosmetics to create the external appearance of an ‘American’ and for other forms of economic and sexual independence from maternal authority. (86)

It is more accurate to say that we are just beginning to understand the very complicated relationship between consumerism and the feminine subject within United States culture. 7 This process recalls the production of belief as described by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) in the context of the artistic avant-garde. Here, the production of belief

58

CULTURAL STUDIES

would seem to function as the expression of the interests of a dominated segment (middle-class, educated women) of the dominant class in its struggle to accede to and ultimately maintain legitimacy. 8 One might say that women’s studies represented a new consumer market in the academic arena in much the same way that ‘ego sense’ ads developed new consumer markets in the culture at large. In both professions, women created areas of expertise grounded in a specifically feminine experience. Significantly, women did very well in the advertising profession (Fox 1984, 321–2). 9 I use the concept non-oedipal to suggest a libidinal economy in which the phallus is not inscribed as the transcendent signifier that grounds signification in a patriarchal symbolic order—privileging masculine desire, as desire, masculine pleasure as pleasure, and the masculine gaze as the look. 10 Robert Brain (1979), anthropologist, comments: body decorating is concerned with the question both of self-identity and group identity: ‘Who am I and who are we together?’ Cosmetics are more than simply a decorative mask, they imprint on body and mind the traditions and philosophy of the social group. (9) 11 John Fiske’s analysis of the game show offers an excellent example of how ritual forms are re-articulated in terms of the demands of a capitalist ideology (Television Culture 1987, 265–80). This analysis suggests yet another way in which ritual activity reconfigures (and is reconfigured by) the historical specificity of an ideological moment. 12 This issue is crucial; thus, many women will preface their demands for autonomy and equality with ‘I’m not a feminist but….’ Popular wisdom would seem to suggest that to accept feminism is somehow to relinquish femininity. 13 Lois Banner (1983), United States historian, comments in American Beauty: ‘It…remains clear that, since the 1920s, to be beautiful has involved the adoption of artificial means, whether cosmetics, hair curling, hair coloring, or even plastic surgery’ (274). Similarly she remarks: ‘As early as the 1920s cosmetics companies ranked second behind food companies in the amount of money spent on advertising’ (273). 14 In May, 1987, among eight women’s magazines surveyed, from 16.8 to 31.4 percentage of all ads in each magazine featured products related to skin care or making up (Radner: 1989). In the May, 1987 issue of Vogue, 21.4 per cent of all ads were devoted to skin care and makeup products (Radner: 1989). 15 See figure b, for an example of a description of the dangers of pollution. 16 See figures c, d, e, for descriptions of the various procedures or ‘systems’ offered the consumer. 17 This topology of the face, which is increasingly broken down into specific areas, each with its array of products, is symptomatic of the privileged relationship between commodification and the feminine that Mary Ann Doane (1987) points out in The Desire to Desire: Commodification presupposes that acutely self-conscious relation to the body which is attributed to femininity. The effective operation of the commodity system requires the breakdown of the body into parts—nails, hair, skin, breath—each one of which can constantly be improved through the purchase of a commodity. (32)

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

59

Over the past ten years, the female consumer has been confronted with a proliferation of products designed for more and more specific areas of the face and body. For example, the Estée Lauder line currently offers several different cremes for the different areas of the face (throat, face proper, eyes, and lips) in addition to specialized products to protect against the environment, in which the product for the eye area is different from the product for the general face area. A slightly more expensive line, Prescriptives (also owned by Estée Lauder) offers as one of its selling points that its products can be used safely on all areas of the face. (See figure f, for examples of product specialization.) 18 A writer for Ms. concludes an article describing her makeup ritual: ‘And then I sit back and admire my handiwork? Am I beautiful? No, not really. But boy do I have a good time’ (Egan 1988,14). This article is an example of the confessional genre popular in (but not restricted to) the women’s magazine. In this type of article a fairly well known female writer, or less commonly some other professional woman, details her method of coping with feminine problems such as shopping, dating, dieting, etc., usually from an ironic position. Here Ms describes the author of the article: ‘Irene Egan is Massachusetts-based poet and playwright’ (16). A woman who writes this type of article claims that it is crucial that the authorial voice speak from a position of authenticity. The writer cannot assume a nom de plume; the better known the writer, the more feminist her position, the more expensive the piece. This authenticity of voice distinguishes, the confessional mode from the interview mode in which a writer reports the experiences and insights of another female or male celebrity. Occasionally, the women’s magazine includes a confessional article written by a man; however, these articles are always marked as a deviation from the norm. It is significant that the above article appeared after Ms. was purchased by Fairfax Publications. 19 Sandra Lee Bartky (1988) argues that though making up may be described as ‘an aesthetic activity’ within magazine discourse, its function is primarily regulatory or disciplinary largely because its practice is rigidly prescribed (70–1). Her argument fails to consider the possibility of an economy of pleasure articulated as repetition—that the very pleasure of making-up is produced by the strict formulation of its practice. By privileging the ‘novel’ and the ‘imaginative’ Bartky evaluates making up according to the norms of masculine practice within a high modernist context, ignoring the specificity of feminine practice. 20 Irene Egan (1988) comments again in Ms.: ‘In a Catholic school so rigid it required all girls to wear uniforms that pressed us breastless, my first makeup ritual was born in retaliation’ (16). 21 The shift from nature to technology is associated with the image of the independent woman. 22 See fig. a. 23 The importance of this relationship has been emphasized by controversy over the degree to which the endorser must use the product in order to legitimately appear in an ad featuring the product. Interestingly enough, this problem has never been an issue in the big cosmetic campaigns featuring a single cover girl, who has no other professional identity—so much so that Isabelle Rossellini (the Lancôme woman) can confess with impunity that she never wears makeup when she is not working. Magazines frequently publish model’s beauty tips—inevitably underlining the gap between the image they represent and their own practice. This gap suggests that the fictional nature of the model’s participation in the ritual practice is always recognized as such. 24 Similarly the qualities of the lipstick are transferred to the lips of the woman who wears it. Thus the linguistic message of the ad details the virtues of the product: ‘Emollients to moisten.

60

CULTURAL STUDIES

25 26

27 28

29 30 31

Allantoin to help relieve cracking and chapping. Paba to screen ultra-violet rays. Wheat Germ to nurture and protect. Humectants to keep vital moisture on your lips.’ The ad concludes with the remark: ‘Some women just color their lips,’ followed by (set off from the rest of the linguistic message) a direct invocation of the simu-totem’s subject position through the use of the first person, ‘But I say, ‘Color me Quencher ’. This use of the first person invites the reader to situate herself in the simu-totem’s position, not as Priscilla Presley, but as subject of enunciation. Thus the conjunction of third person and first person replicates the simu-totem’s role, offered not as a moment of narcissistic identification (a misrecognition) but as the invitation to participate in a specific practice. The absence of second person address, or direct address, in the final remarks ruptures the identificatory moment set up by the first ‘stanza’ of the linguistic message (‘Quencher. It’s color that moisturizes. Protects. Smooths. And cares for your lips. Beautifully.’) Pleasure is relocated elsewhere as practice. The contrast between the pencil thin plucked eyebrows still maintained by certain grandmothers with the bushy post-Brooke Shields look of today illustrates this distinction. Egan (1988) comments: ‘Over the years the ritual has changed Sometime during the 1970s, I traded Major Lance for Ravel, and gave up false eyelashes entirely. I stopped wearing pancake makeup, and discovered the ecstasy of whipped-to-a-frenzy foundation’ (p. 16). See figs b, c, d, e and f for examples of instructional materials distributed in department stores. As a noted American studies scholar explained about her own practice, part of the pleasure of makeup derives from the fact that it signals the ability, the power, the right, to spend money on oneself. A significant number of ads in the fashion magazine are sponsored by both a product and one if not more department stores. See note 18 for a description of the confessional genre and Egan’s article. Egan does not misrecognize the role of capital in the ritual process; but rather she sees it as the measure of her worth, as worth it: ‘I…discovered the… foundation that went on like beige shaving cream, with a two-week supply costing 30 bucks or your firstborn child, which ever you could come up with first. Cost, of course, has never been an object—can anyone put a price on her best friend? Make-up has always been there for me’ (1988, 16).

Appendix The following charts and images are excerpted from promotional pamphlets distributed as instructional material at the makeup counters of large department stores. References Aron, Raymond (1965) Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. R.Howard, H.Weaver, New York: Basic Books. vol. 2 . Banner, Lois (1983) American Beauty, New York: Knopf. Bartky, Sandra Lee (1988) ‘Foucault, Feminity, and Patriarchal Power’ in I. Diamond and L.Quinby (eds) Feminism and Foucault, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 61–86 . Bartos, Rena (1982) The Moving Target: What Every Marketer Should Know About Women, New York: Free Press.

MAKING UP AND FEMININE PRACTICE

61

Bernikow, Louise (1986 May) ‘Lipstick Kisses: Close encounters of the Cosmetic Kind,’ Mademoiselle, 188–89, 236, 239 . Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R.Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods’ in R.Collins, J.Curran, N.Garnham, P.Scannell, P.Schlesinger, C.Sparks (eds) (1986) Media Culture and Society: a Critical Reader, Beverly Hills: Sage, 131–163 . Brain, Robert (1979) The Decorated Body, New York: Harper and Row. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1983) On the Line, trans. John Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e). Doane, Mary Ann (1987) The Desire to Desire, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Durkheim, Emile (1984) The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W.D.Halls, New York: Free Press. Fox, Stephen (1984) The Mirror Makers: a History of American Advertisers and Its Creators, New York: Vintage Books. Freedman, Rita (1985) Beauty Bound, New York: Lexington Books. Freedman, Rita (1987 April) ‘Looking Good: the Double Standard,’ Vogue, 357, 359, 396, 397 . Egan, Irene (1988 January) ‘Ode to Makeup,’ Ms., 14,16 . Ewen, Elizabeth and Stuart (1982) Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness, New York: McGraw-Hill. Fiske, John (1987) Television Culture, London: Methuen. Fiske, John, and Hartley, John (1978) Reading Television, London: Methuen. Freud, Sigmund (1955) ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ in James Strachey (eds and trans.) (1955) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, Vol. XIV, 73–102 . Lyotard, Jean-François (1974) Economie Libidinale, Paris: Minuit. Lyotard, Jean-François (1977) ‘Energumen Capital,’ Semiotexte 2:3, 25–36 . Malinowski, Bronislaw (1929) The Sexual Life of the Savages in Northwestern Melanesia, New York: Eugenics Publishing. Mulvey, Laura (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16:3, 6–18 . Newcomb, Horace and Alley, Robert (1983) The Producer’s Medium: Conversa tions with Creators of American TV , New York: Oxford University Press. Radner, Hilary (1988) Shopping Around: locating a feminine subject of enunciation through textual practice, unpublished dissertation, Austin, Texas. Radway, Janet (1982) ‘The Aesthetic in Mass Culture: Reading the ‘Popular’ Literary Text,’ The Structure of the Literary Process . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 397–429 . Radway, Janet (1983) ‘Women Read the Romance: The Interactions of Text and Context.’ Feminist Studies 9:1, 54–77 . Schatz, Thomas (1981) Hollywood Genres, New York: Random House. Schatz, Thomas (1983) Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Turim, Maureen (1984) ‘Desire in Art and Politics: The Theory of Jean-François Lyotard,’ Camera Obscura 12, 91–106 . Williams, Judith (1978) Decoding Advertising, London: Boyars.

62

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK CASSANDRA AMESLEY

Fan culture at science fiction conventions (‘cons’) is, for much of the United States, exotic. People’s costumes are chosen more for the idealized possible than for the rules of fashion. Games played reflect the specialized knowledge available to fans. Writers are often featured, although at Star Trek cons actors and producer Gene Roddenberry are the largest draw. Commodities for sale, besides the usual food and drink, tend to be products closely associated with particular narratives, so that one can buy photographs of favorite scenes cut from a calendar, autographed pictures, insignia, roleplay games, and all the paraphernalia one might imagine a 15-year-old boy hanging from his walls in his parents’ basement. Speakers provide insider knowledge of production—how things were written, drawn, etc.—but also how to do it yourself; writers’ workshops are common. An innocent bystander who is not oriented to science fiction could perhaps be forgiven for finding fans both esoteric and obsessive. Only years of living in proximity to fandom could explain why one feature at a con might be a ‘superfan’ such as Jerry, who publishes a zine about other fanzines.1 But most fans are invisible. Their enthusiasm only shows when their special subject is available for discussion. That enthusiasm makes Star Trek fans easy to find if you look for them. I found that a Star Trek calendar on the wall elicited a great deal of response. Even casual conversations would yield yield fans. For example, at the library when I was checking out the Star Trek Concordance, the librarian and I began to discuss Star Trek, and the man next in line told a story concerning a fake button for his car dashboard that was supposed to ‘engage warp drive.’ He had taken the car to a mechanic, and on his bill was noted, ‘Warp drive could not be fixed; Scotty unavailable.’ Obviously, not only was it easy for me to meet someone mildly interested in Star Trek, but the mechanic had taken an unusual step in investing that amount of labor on the work order for a joke. Another time, I was reading a Star Trek comic book in an Iowa City cafe when the waitress engaged me in conversation about the book. When she found out that I was interviewing fans, she (without my solicitation) went on her break, sat down at my table, and told me what she thought in an extremely productive and entertaining interview. I have gotten free cable movies from talking about Star Trek to the man installing my cable, gotten astonishing turnouts from undergraduates to early morning convention papers on Star Trek theory, and had fans show up to my classes the day I lectured on their community. Star Trek fandom is much larger than its central group of convention goers, or even fanzine writers.

64

CULTURAL STUDIES

To understand Star Trek culture, then, it’s first necessary to understand the periphery: those who would not call themselves ‘hardcore’ fans (because I asked them if they would) but who include Star Trek as an important text in the construction and maintenance of their social world. I talked to fans intensively for six months, and have done follow-up interviews since then. Fans cheerfully spent hours talking to me about their viewing habits, sorting cards with characters’ names on them into categories, watching episodes I selected to provide glosses on interactions, and writing letters with self addressed stamped envelopes for me to ask them more questions. From these interviews and observations, I have developed an account of the evolved agreements on how one watches and interprets Star Trek. I will call these viewers a ‘proprietary audience.’ I define proprietary audiences as those viewers—or readers—who appropriate the primary elements of a mass-mediated narrative and actively rewrite it. Such an audience acknowledges and responds to elements in a particular text or set of texts, but develops its own interpretive relationship to it, separate from—although often overlapping with—the equally mass-mediated intertexts so lovingly described by Bennett and Woollacott (1987). In other words, attempts to commodify the text and associate it with particular attributes may or may not be successful, but proprietary audiences will have somewhat different ways of approaching the text than the overtly intended ones, and will grow to view the text not as external to their construction, but within it. So, for example, a Star Trek fan will without hesitation write the producers of a film and advise them what plot actions should be taken, viewing this act as part of a negotiated process rather than as a plea from an undeserving outsider.2 Producers will often foster this myth of fan negotiation, as The Making of Star Trek amply demonstrates. This book, ostensibly a ‘factual’ report on production of a particular television show, emphasizes and celebrates fan participation in the (limited) success of the series. It also rhetorically constructs the producers as allied with fans against the ‘big business’ mentality of the networks, eliding Roddenberry’s own interest in making money. But the results of an appropriation myth are not especially controllable. The fans of Star Trek are particularly proprietary. And some—such as the ‘slash’ writers described by Henry Jenkins (1988)—view the division as not between producers and network, but rather between legal owners and morally justified appropriators. Most viewers are introduced to Star Trek through the episodes, or at least the films.3 The first line of appropriation tends to be the act of viewing. It thus seems appropriate to commence my ethnography at this level. I will give an account of an actual viewing event with three of my informants. This taped event will show the existence of a set of tacit rules concerning viewing and interpreting which I will then unpack, based on prior and subsequent interviews. It’s Friday night in Iowa City. Four people, three women and one man, gather around a large television screen. On the screen, a group of actors in bright colors anxiously watch yet another large screen, in which stars flicker. The round set occasionally trembles. Dialogue reveals that the characters are experiencing ripples in time. ‘Aha!’ says one of my companions. ‘It’s the giant space doughnut.’ ‘There’s a yeoman we’ve never seen,’ another observer reports. One of the actors jerks backward from the instrument panel where he has been seated, now sparking and

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

65

smoking. The woman in red hurries over and raises the actor’s head from the floor. ‘That’s what she’s there for—to hold Sulu.’ A man in a gold tunic orders medical aid. A watcher remarks, ‘I’m a captain, not a doctor.’ ‘I’ve never understood why they don’t buckle themselves in.’ An accident occurs: the doctor injects himself with a drug identified as dangerous, throws off restraint, and leaps through doors that have swished open to receive him. ‘He’s suddenly stronger than Kirk and Spock together.’ Music, and voiceover:—Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Her five year mission…— Attention wanders in the room, then returns to the screen as several actos appear on a barren outdoor set in a shower of glitter. ‘Count how many are beaming down.’ ‘Six.’ ‘Okay, just remember that.’ The large, rounded prop begins to glow and pulse, and then speaks. The voice reverberates. ‘Why does your voice echo?’ ‘It’s a superior thing. Superior things have echoey voices.’ ‘Why didn’t they just get McCoy with a phaser?’ ‘They get him, but he wakes up.’ The superior thing remarks upon the inferiority of the beings interrogating it. One, a tall man wearing a blue jersey and pointed ears, frowns. The shorter, blondish figure identifed by the watchers as the captain, asks: —Annoyed, Spock? ‘No, just a little pissed off, captain.’ The doctor leaps through the doughnut, and it develops that as a result the Star Trek past has been changed. As the guardian explains, the watchers recite along:—Everything you ever knew is gone. ‘Wow! Existential crisis!’ The scene shifts. ‘Accoutrements.’ Gold shirt and blue shirt are on a 1930s set, attracting some attention from passersby. Gold shirt steals some clothes from a clothesline, and is brought up short by a man in the costume of a 1930s police officer: —I recognize the traditional accoutrements,—says gold shirt. ‘Nice word.’ ‘They’re not just accoutrements, they’re traditional.’ ‘That’s the same music as in Shore Leave.’ ‘It’s surprising how well the clothes fit for stolen clothes.’ ‘They stole them off their doubles.’ An actress enters the room where the two men have changed. ‘Cue the violins.’ ‘It’s Alexis.’ ‘There’s the love music.’

66

CULTURAL STUDIES

More scenes.—I find her…most uncommon.— ‘Yeah, we know, Kirk. Pick your tongue up off the floor.’ ‘We have a flop.’ The character obligingly echoes: —We have a flop.— The story unfolds. The captain informs his pointed-ear friend that he believes he is falling in love with the young woman. ‘So what else is new?’ ‘The doctor is found, raving and paranoid. ‘I’m a doctor, not a psychiatrist.’ ‘So how come he can give psychiatric reports then?’ In the end, history is saved. The three in the past return to the barren set, and all disappear in a shower of glitter. Credits. ‘So how many are beaming up?’ ‘Seven.’ ‘All at the same time. But there are only six transporter pads.’ ‘They just keep one in transit.’ The observers have been watching with some approval and much commentary: this is an episode of the show they consider ‘all right.’ The next is one they all dislike, agreed to be one of the worst Star Trek episodes ever shown: the captain of the Enterprise switches bodies with a woman he used to be involved with, against his will: she wants to be a starship captain. ‘Bet she has a good time when she goes to the bathroom.’ Giggles. —It’s better to be dead than to be alone in the body of a women.— ‘Just because you couldn’t deal with it…’ The actor playing the captain, now playing a wicked woman in the captain’s body, confers with ‘her’ lover. ‘Talk about a wimpy guy.’ ‘Yeah.’ Discussion picks up when the main characters are all imprisoned, under sentence of death. ‘She’s got Simon Van Gelder disease.’ ‘What’s that?’ I ask. ‘When/you/talk like/THIS.’ ‘If they can’t break out of their own brig, they’re in trouble.’ ‘Every other prisoner has broken out of there.’ They watch a third episode, one they all like. When the ‘engineer,’ in clear defiance of enemy dialogue, orders a subordinate:—Open a channel to that ship—one of the observers adds in a similar tone, ‘Spit on it while you’re at it.’ ‘It’s the Romulan Commander.’ ‘Have we ever gotten a name for her?’ ‘No, and we never do. Spock does when she nibbles his ear.’ ‘Vulcans have taller ears than Romulans do.’ Time passes. ‘That’s the second time he’s killed him,’ one observes, as the blue-shirted pointed-ear actor stands over the body of the gold-shirted captain.

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

67

A contretemps is taking place between two of the characters. ‘Oh, just hit him.’ She slaps him. ‘Thank you.’ We have by now uncovered two senses of the term ‘audience’: that of an interpretative community which exists in time and over distance, and that of an interpretative community which is in direct and immediate contact with each other as the text is being viewed. There are agreements, of course; the historical development of Star Trek interpretation has created the myths through mass mediation. The texts develop a culture into which the fan moves, maintaining a set of tacit agreements on what Star Trek is and is not, and arguing over another set of not-so-tacit disagreements on Star Trek boundaries. Moreover, even when viewers are directly interacting with the original episodes, rather than producing written texts, the attraction of Star Trek does not lie wholly within the structure of the show itself. This is not surprising; watching a show fifty times must ultimately yield diminishing returns, if no other factors enter the picture. But viewers in this oral medium, while sometimes acting on the information from the rapidly-expanding body of critical interpretation of the canon, have developed a particular approach. In this paper, I will take the viewing process recorded above and analyze it as a textmaking event. I will unpack and propose the rules tacitly agreed upon by fans. By focusing very narrowly on the actual interactive viewing process itself, it becomes possible to see that the audience develops a particular relation to the text and becomes a creative part of the communication process. I will argue that what Star Trek fans have is a subtle and sophisticated way of reading text as simultaneously constructed and real. They have developed a method of reading television which exploits the intense involvement in and commitment to Star Trek by maintaining affection and loyalty to events and people in the Star Trek universe, while providing ironic commentary on its creation. The result appears to be a wealth of interpretation which makes every Star Trek text open to rewriting as it is aired. Thus, Star Trek cultural participants can enjoy new texts developed from familiar ones, favorite parts of the original, and the satisfaction of shared understanding and agreement from like-minded individuals all at once. In short, Star Trek audiences are creative users of the original text who recognize the contradictory interpretative stances possible and take advantage of them in sophisticated ‘implicature.’ On the other hand, since the received notion of interpretation denies that implicatory flouting is possible without violation of the original text, Star Trek fans are at the same time apologetic and slightly reticent about their activities. Before I show how this is done, I had better lay the groundwork on which implicature takes place: the basic ‘grammar’ of Star Trek interpretation on which agreement rests. I will therefore first show the understandings concerning predictable behaviors, attitudes and characteristics for the primary characters in the show. I will then discuss the area of agreement which corresponds to sociolinguists by showing what behaviors are appropriate for interacting with Star Trek. Fans begin with character, rather than situation, problem, or some other variable. Captain Kirk is in charge; he is innovative, guided by instinct, and the ultimate decision maker for the crew. Kirk is complemented by Mr Spock, who is from the planet Vulcan but has a human mother, and as a result reacts calmly and logically but is ultimately flawed, or at least challenged, by emotion. Dr McCoy is the ship’s doctor, Spock’s

68

CULTURAL STUDIES

opposite, highly emotional though very competent in medical matters and committed to bickering with Spock. As one informant put it, ‘The central part of Star Trek are the Big Three—you know, Spock, Kirk, and McCoy. Spock’s the logical machine with a touch of human, and Kirk and McCoy are more all human. Each of them is so different. It’s how they interact; they play off each other so well.’ The relationship among these three is agreed to be central to Star Trek. But other characters are also necessary. The most cited is the engineer, Scotty, but generally conceded are bridge officers: Uhura, Sulu and Chekov. Two or three recurring characters are rejected as inessential or even undesirable; notably two women, Yeoman Rand and Nurse Chappell. ‘Their main job is to lust after the men,’ one of my informants put it, and it is generally agreed that they exist primarily as sexual decoration.4 When any of the main three are seen to be acting out of character, disapproval is immediate. This particularly is true of Spock, who is condemned as ‘not acting like himself when the various chemical and hormonal dangers that infest the Star Trek universe result in his becoming vulnerable to his emotions. While fans concede that the plot explains the deviations, they do not generally accept all explanations as justifications. They like him to act the way he is supposed to act, although some enjoy certain exceptions, such as Amok Time, where Spock becomes victim to a mating urge and reverts to a savage, nearly mindless state. Significantly, not all characters have been identified as ‘not acting natural.’ In fact, the only ones directly cited for this were Spock and Kirk. Of the others, only McCoy and Scotty would likely ever be viewed as deviating from character. No one would be in a position to say, for example, ‘Uhura wouldn’t do that,’ as a person in the same way Kirk and Spock are people, although they could appeal to the construction of the kind of person someone like Uhura the communications officer would have to be (for example, drawing presumably from their own gender identifications, women fans generally depict Uhura as loving and competent, while male fans when they notice Uhura tend to focus on her sexiness). In this sense, only the main characters are three-dimensional enough for one of their dimensional facets to somehow appear false. As there are typical aspects to character, so there are predictable plot lines. Most fans could find quite large groups of stories which belonged together, and all identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stories as appropriate differentiating categories. They generally agree that bad stories are those which can’t be believed. Plot, for Star Trek fans, appears to be subordinate to character, for what makes a story unbelievable is almost always someone acting in a way he5 wouldn’t ordinarily act. ‘It’s no good when it’s stretched too far; when it’s not natural for them,’ one informant explained. As an example, he cited The Immunity Syndrome, where Kirk kept asking for more stimulants to remain alert as the crew’s life energy was being sucked from them. ‘That much weakness isn’t in his character,’ he said. There are occurrences, as well as characters, which mark a typical episode, fans agree: the arguments between Spock and McCoy, Kirk’s romantic involvement with a woman, Scotty’s attempts to maintain shields or other energy levels,6 and Spock’s calmness under pressure. Equally part of typical episodes are a series of lines that fans readily recognize: some that are favorites in particular episodes (such as the

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

69

‘accoutrements’ cited in the beginning commentary) and some which are closely identified with characters: Dr McCoy says, ‘He’s dead, Jim,’7 and ‘I’m a doctor, not a —;’Spock remarks ‘Fascinating’ to occurrences which appear likely to kill or maim the crew; Scotty says things like, ‘One more hit and the shields will be gone’ (in Scottish dialect); Kirk advises, ‘Phasers on stun.’ Not all of these ‘typical’ occurrences are viewed with approval. Several fans objected to McCoy’s constant baiting of Spock on the grounds of unacceptable xenophobia; all disapproved of what one fan from India referred to as Kirk’s ‘constant smooching.’ ‘[These occurrences] get old,’ and another fan conceded, ‘but it wouldn’t be Star Trek without them, I suppose.’ In short, every plot has the potential of being ‘bad’ Star Trek or ‘good’ Star Trek, based primarily on how the characters act in them, although there are plots that seem to be bad simply because they are dull. However, that an episode is ‘bad’ does not mean it will not be watched, or even enjoyed in places. In every episode, no matter how bad, there are favorite lines or scenes. It may seem obvious to those trained in literary criticism to assume that character would be a primary determinant, but in fact it’s rather surprising. First, Star Trek was originally conceptualized and packaged as action/adventure, focusing on events and experience for plot, with characters’ reaction to the problem, rather than to each other, as the first consideration. Second, inconsistent characterization in literary criticism tends to be viewed as the mark of a bad character or of bad writing—that is, a textual problem. The fan’s complain is not, ‘That’s an inconsistent characterization’ (or some folk category parallel) but ‘Spock wouldn’t do that.’ In other words, the implicit assumption is that a persona like Spock ‘exists’ and that this particular representation deviates from his reality. Let me examine for a moment alternative possibilities for reading television characters besides dismissing them as flawed writing. 1 The audience could focus off character and onto believability of action. That is, the character could simply be an index to ‘real’ behaviors of others, and so long as it fit archetypes, would be acting acceptably. (I use ‘archetypes’ here not in the strictest mythic sense, but as a term for character types whose conventions are familiar to a particular audience.) Therefore, the audience might on occasion say, ‘A good guy wouldn’t do that,’ or ‘A doctor wouldn’t do that,’ but would not be inspired to say, ‘Allie wouldn’t do that,’ or ‘Fiscus would do it differently’ except as those names stand for particular sets of characteristics viewed as archetypal. 2 The character could be viewed as inherently flawed and inconsistent. For example, people could accept the show as ‘story,’ and then characters would merely be devices to further the plot; it would be perfectly acceptable for characters to switch from unlikable to likable, a frequent occurrence on afternoon soap operas. 3 The character, conversely, could be viewed as inherently ‘real;’ that is, deviations from a predictable norm would have to be explained in some way to achieve a higher consistency.

70

CULTURAL STUDIES

This last point does seem to be occasionally manifested in Star Trek; for example, in the magazine Trek one writer produces a column, ‘Trek Mysteries explained,’ which attempts to explain inconsistencies. However, she primarily deals with technical inconsistencies generally related to continuity lapses or such details as how fast the Enterprise can go without exploding. One fan says ‘hardcore’ fans try to explain everything in a story and make it fit; again, all her examples were technical rather than characterological. On the other hand, I have found some explanations of inconsistent character that work within the Star Trek universe. Several accounts state that there have been attempts to explain why the ‘Number One’ of the first pilot and Nurse Chappell of the series look so much alike (which from an external standpoint would not be difficult to explain, since they are played by the same actress). A fan and fellow Star Trek investigator finds in his research that fans explain Spock’s more emphatic actions and emotional behavior in the episode ‘The Cage’ by theorizing that he was in an experimental stage, trying out human behavior. Again, the external standpoint simply needs to refer to the series’ history, since Number One was supposed to be cold and unemotional and, when the character was dropped, these attributes were transferred to Spock. But these choices are deceptive, since they appear to be mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the best explanation requires a move from the traditional separation of ‘character’ and ‘person’ into an elision of categories. Therefore, I suggest: 4 The story is a story, but it is also real and happening. It was constructed by people for a particular reason, but it is also occurring as we view it. This of course resonates with the traditional ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ which is not entirely a false description. However, disbelief is not suspended, it is merely maintained at the same time as belief. Fans have a sense of what counts as ‘real’ Star Trek (their term) which always includes the original episodes. Part of the confounding of traditional critical understandings includes the confounding of genre. In this context, genre would predictably be divided into technological distinctions—visual media vs print, or more complexly, television vs film vs stories. However, fans organize along lines that are named, when they are named at all, as ‘real’ and ‘not real’ Star Trek. The original television episodes are always real Star Trek (although some fans distinguish the third season as different from the others, and do not always acknowledge the events of those episodes as really occurring). Fan-generated and published fiction is always peripheral. Somewhere between lie the films and the animated episodes (one or the other usually specified as closer to real), fictionalizations of the film and television shows, fictionalizations of the animateds, and mass-published novels based on Star Trek characters. In short, first and always, whatever happened in the original television episodes happened to the characters. Some fans cite events occurring in the films as happening to the characters, while one or two commented that what was read in fan-generated manuscripts influenced their reading. ‘Real,’ however is a relative term after the original episodes are accepted. One fan complained about the films in the same way fans complain of ‘bad’ episodes—that the

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

71

characters weren’t themselves: ‘The characters had lost their hard edges. Kirk was softer, and not so much a paragon of virtue, and Spock was more emotional.’ The problem as she sees it is that the characters are identifiably different from each other in the episodes, and become less distinct in the films. Here, it becomes clear that the expectations for the character are not that they be subtle or complex, but that they be recognizably themselves and distinguishable from each other. Another informant told me that she enjoyed the novelizations because ‘I found out things I didn’t know before.’ Material concerning the characters, then, exists and is available to be known, which is rather the way one views ‘real people’; one can’t generally comment on reading most fiction that one ‘learned’ things about those people. Part of the sense of construction that continues in fan viewing is the knowledge that the show was produced by Gene Roddenberry. Almost every fan was knowledgeable of his name and of the fact that he was not involved the third season (a fact, by the way, that is not identifiable by the credits; he is listed as Executive Producer-for all three seasons). The ‘third season’ is the last season Star Trek was on the air, 1968–9, and the myth constructed around it is that the shows this year were not as good. Explanations for this vary, ranging from less funding for special effects to people ‘just not caring’ any more. In fact, when fans are asked to identify their favorite and least favorite episodes, it emerges that both categories cut across all seasons and only those who actually pay deliberate attention to the dates—which many, but not all, of the fans do—can easily identify which season a show was first aired.8 So far, I have discussed what the basic understandings of and expectations for Star Trek are, and where violations of expectations occur. But related to such violations are the ways fans deal with them. It is at this level that the Star Trek fan discourse which creates what I will call ‘double viewing’ emerges. I define double viewing as watching and interpreting with two sets of interpretative rules, seemingly in contradiction but demanding no synthesis. I take the term from Dubois’ ‘double vision,’ which in his terms is the perspective acquired by blacks who live in white society. Since blacks are always outsiders to white society and yet must be fully aware of what occurs within it, they see the world with two visions: that of the white and that of the black outsider. More recent essayists have expanded this term to include the points of other minority groups, particularly women. While Star Trek fans do not constitute a subordinated group per se, they exist separately from the academic definition of what constitutes the ‘appropriate’ way to understand or interpret a text. They view it neither completely as an artifact to be studied, nor as a piece with which to fully identify. The term ‘double viewing’ does not therefore seem wholly inappropriate. How does this double viewing manifest itself in practice? Since characters are accepted as ‘real,’ deviations from character have to be explained, as I discussed earlier. Fans refer to construction of Star Trek text for explanation. For example, one fan was deploring the fussing of the engineer, and explained, ‘It isn’t Scotty’s fault he’s irritating, it’s the scriptwriters.’ Clearly, Scotty exists in a separate cateory of reality: he is not wholly a creation of his writers, but has a life separate from them; yet, in some way, he is subject to their whim. In a sense, his existence is not in question, but his utterances are dependent on the writers, producers and network executives who fence him in—as are

72

CULTURAL STUDIES

the other characters.9 Again, when particularly bad shows are on, the explanation ‘third season’ is raised for why such a good phenomenon can produce such terrible work. While I have done no comparison research, my everyday experience with people who watch and talk about television is that a constant sense of a show as constructed is most unusual outside the academic critical community—particularly when the show itself does not call attention to its own construction.10 As with many popular shows, fans know the names of the actors who play the characters and occasionally mix them up; for example, one group gives ‘Willies’ (for William Shatner) to the most obvious case of chewing the scenery in an episode, and another fan referred to Captain Kirk as ‘not a very good actor,’ and when asked if she meant Kirk or Shatner, replied ‘Both!’ However, the discourse concerning production is much broader than simply the elision of character and actor. Most of the fans produced the ‘third season’ explanation for particularly-disliked episodes, and many referred to writing, to acting, and to production as sources of dissatisf action. The problem with all of these seemed to be what one fan called ‘stretching it:’ pushing the identified problem characteristic beyond an acceptable range of probability as the fan sees it. Character probability, then, is simply one manifestation of the larger set of rules. Much has been written about the ideology of texts which are based on ‘tricking’ the reader into feeling that the narrative is actually occurring. For example, Baudry (1986) argues that cinema has a particular ‘apparatus’ which constructs subjectivity in the viewers. Although films are made up of many discontinuous moments, shot out of sequence and not innately sequential, the ideological goal of the cinematic apparatus is to conceal its own construction and to create the impression of continuity: Thus on the technical level the question becomes one of the adoption of a very small difference between images, such that each image, in consequence of an organic factor, is rendered incapable of being seen as such, in the sense we could say that film—and perhaps this instance is exemplary—lives on the denial of difference: difference is necessary for it to live, but it lives on its negation (290–1). Baudry argues further that this technological requirement makes the subject sense itself to be transcendent, no longer fettered by time or space, and sensing that the world was made for it; the subject loses its place in the world because materiality is denied, although not objectively eliminated. The viewer thus becomes the constrained subject of an Imaginary continuity inherent in the narrative: ‘Everything happens as if, the subject himself being unable—and for a reason—to account for his own situation, it was necessary to substitute secondary organs, grafted on to replace his own defective ones (295).’ This constitution into a subject position is connected with Lacan’s mirror stage, where the child seeks itself in a mirror, constituting its own move into the ‘imaginary,’ that stage where it relates to itself as symbol (294). In short, radical textual criticism typically concentrates on the way text forces (or cajoles) the reader into a particular mindset. It is true that Star Trek viewers object to commentaries on the show in progress that directly draw attention to its construction. On the other hand, they are always aware that Star Trek was manufactured. And recognizing

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

73

Star Trek as constructed makes it possible to intervene in the construction; to take an active role in appropriating new texts or commenting on old ones. For Star Trek fans, the way the text is constructed is part of the discourse. Thus an ethnographic investigation into Star Trek viewing casts doubt upon theories based on textual analysis alone. For example, some fans at The University of Iowa write notes to each other about Star Trek on the MUSE Parti line, a computer program where fans do not necessarily know each other personally. (I am told many of them have in fact never met in person.) A large part of the discussion is ‘critical,’ in the sense of taking the text apart, i.e.: Now that everyone has seen IV [Star Trek IV] what was the general thoughts about it? Too funny? Not serious enough? Was Spock too slow at becoming human? Should Kirk have married Gillian? and some space is dedicated to passing on whatever gossip is available about production: For those looking for comments/feelings of the ‘true’ Star Trek crew, check out this month’s Starlog, on sale at B.Dalton’s…they don’t really like the idea [of STTNG, then upcoming as a tv show]. There are also some discussions of the tactics and strategies of getting access to texts: Let me be the first one to thank you for informing us that Star Trek was on again-I would’ve never guessed because it wasn’t in the TV Guide…. I think we should all write a letter thanking KCRG. Maybe that’ll make them think twice about taking Star Trek off the air again! Such discourses are commonplace, and they suggest that recognition of the text as constructed and reconstructed and deconstructed is not limited to academic pursuits; nor does it destroy pleasure, judging from the number of fans who are actively involved in talking about Star Trek. In fact, talk about the moments of pleasure increases and guides the experience. I call this discourse that opens the possibility of an ironic stance ‘double viewing.’ Double viewing suggests that it is possible to maintain and understand two divergent points of view at once, and use them to inform each other. In this way identification and distanciation may occur simultaneously.11 The double view explains and helps interpret the scene I described earlier. To explain the rules determining what is said, I will first unpack several types of commentary being offered in the case study I showed earlier. ‘The space doughnut’ comment is a typical phrase used to identify episodes, which are identified by particular indices to the scene rather than recaps of occurrences. So, for example, when I gave titles of episodes, fans would generally say, ‘the cloud thing,’ or ‘the spores,’ rather than ‘The one where Kirk goes crazy,’ or ‘The one where Spock falls in love.’ Moreover, it is a tradition of fans to attempt to identify the episode as soon as they can. ‘Hardcore fans,’ it is said, claim to be able to recognize the episode by the first word.

74

CULTURAL STUDIES

While remembering the title may or may not be a point of honor, knowing the show somewhat better than the less initiated is a matter of pride. ‘I’m a captain, not a doctor,’ is a direct reversal of McCoy’s traditional comment, ‘I’m a doctor, not a—.’ Its humour as commentary obviously depends on the assumption that everyone knows the original, as is true for most of these comments. ‘Count the number beaming down,’ presumes language knowledge of the phrase ‘beaming down’ (the most common means of transport in Star Trek) but also displays concern for a technical problem that will occur later. Fans are aware, or quickly become aware, of the number of pads in the transporter room, where people beam up to the Enterprise or down to the planet. There are no episode-acknowledged rules dictating that only so many people may beam in or out at a time, and so it is an interesting matter for debate: can the transporter room take more than six? And if not, what happens to the extra person? If so, why are never more than six showed beaming down or up? It would be inappropriate during a show to distract attention from an episode for the length of time necessary to debate this question fully, but it indexes discussions several fans in different cells had that week.12 ‘Just a little pissed off, captain,’ is the imposition of dialogue for a character reflecting his or her projected inner state, of a kind none of the scriptwriters would provide. It seems to function as a combination of entering into the dialogue and underlining a particular interpretation of a character perception. Note the similar interjection for Scotty later in my description, and of course the earlier ‘I’m a captain, not a doctor.’ ‘Wow! Existential crisis!’ Here, a direct commentary on the problem of the occurence satirically raises the tone of the show to a metaphysical one, rather higher than would be reasonable for the average television show. The result is to make fun of the problem at the same time it is agreed that the problem could not be a very pleasant one to have. A precisely reverse commentary occurs in the ‘Bet she has a good time when she goes to the bathroom,’ where the issues of the show focus on power and the question is dragged to a practical level that the show not only never addresses but, in the conventions of the 1960s, never could address. ‘Accoutrements’ is again an index to a scene: the scene in which this word occurs. This is a kind of reverse echolalia, dependent on utterances within the text but so familiar that it can predict. It also occurs with the ‘We have a flop,’ spoken just before the character speaks it. ‘Have we ever gotten a name for her?’ offers at least two points of interest. First, ‘we’ refers to the viewing group, which has created itself, so that members presume that all information is shared; what one knows is available to all. The question concerning McCoy answered by another viewer demonstrates that this assumption is a valid one. Second, the question both refers to the viewing past—other times this episode was watched and known—and to the viewing future—later in the episode, when the giving of her name might/might not occur. The response, that Spock will be told her name, is given in the present tense, avoiding issues of both past and future, and placing the occurrence within the episode, rather than within viewer time. ‘It’s Alexis’ refers to the actor, Joan Collins, who twenty years later will be famous for portraying a conniving woman in Dynasty. Other comments on her sexual proclivities

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

75

ensued when this conversation was being recorded, providing a strange conflation of her Star Trek missionary role with the Dynasty evil woman role. Clearly, Bennett’s construction of inter-textuality and its influence on reading describes precisely this sort of re-writing of character. Again, note that awareness of the actors as actors is built into the text and is a legitimate part of the commentary. ‘That’s the second time he’s killed him’ refers to another Star Trek episode, ‘Amok Time,’ where Spock ‘kills’ Kirk (who, naturally, turns out to be alive). Comments are often intertextual, directly referring to other episodes. In this way, Star Trek takes on a ‘once and future’ aura where everything has happened, is happening, and will happen. At first it appears that in commentary, anything goes: comments to the character, for the character, and about the character. But, in fact, within each are appropriate and less appropriate things to say. All my informants agree that some commentary is entirely unacceptable. One said, ‘I hate people talking about what’s going to happen.’ However, she had cited This guy’s dead meat,’ as an acceptable thing to say about security guards. (It is a fan tradition that all unfamiliar redshirted people will die quickly in an episode.) It developed that within the tradition of Star Trek ‘essence,’ one could predict certain re-occurences. One could not, however, baldly state, ‘In this episode the Klingon kills that guy.’ Others cited, with some disapproval, non-Star Trek fans who watched an episode, remarked that it looked like a submarine movie, and then began to discuss its similarities. ‘You just don’t do that while it’s happening,’ one fan explained. In this case, metacriticism of the Star Trek fiction was unwelcome. Another informant, one of the viewers in the scene I described, explained that her questions concerning the reasons things happened in certain ways, amounting to ‘workshop’ kinds of criticisms, were borderline. The friends she watched with wouldn’t entirely approve. It emerges that you can say anything to or for characters, since that maintains a sense of events occurring as you view. However, speaking directly to other viewers is strictly limited. Partly, of course, long interactions distract from the actual viewing of the episode, since they demand response, while interactions ‘with’ the characters may be listened to but don’t demand the same kind of attention. There is, however, another reason why adherence to the rules is fairly strict. What you can’t say about an episode is anything that takes it out of its ‘always-already’ existence and puts it into a point in time, which is what critiquing it must necessarily do. For that reason, code words, indices to themes and images, and ironic commentaries are acceptable and in fact desirable, but any position that requires directly and propositionally distancing oneself from the action and recognizing it as narratively framed is suspect. Since saying ‘This guy’s dead meat’ fits into the shared agreements of what’s likely to happen to security guards, it violates nothing. On the other hand, direct prediction in a particular episode is unacceptable. This probably explains why episode themes are indexed by image rather than occurrence: identification of an image does not give away the episode as inevitably moving to one end and no other. Hence, the use of terms which index rather than identify: ‘space doughnut’ rather than ‘time portal.’13 The irony adds commentary but avoids belaboring the already familiar plot: those who know the

76

CULTURAL STUDIES

episode well have a new point of view; those who do not will not have the narrative sequence revealed in advance, destroying the fiction of unfolding action. What are the consequences of this rule? First, of course, the original text remains untouched by history; it is always occurring, unbroken by the imposition of commentary which directly states that it has happened before. Second, a new discourse emerges from the viewers which exists as counterpart to the original text, playing off it but providing creative pleasure for its participants, who are also its audience. This new text is regenerated with each episode, so that it doesn’t repeat as the original does, although salient comments and particularly amusing ideas may be played with from viewing to viewing. Even the worst episodes contain points which may be enjoyed for their own sake. These points may be improved—and the duller moments rewritten—by audience participation, just as the best can be embroidered. In short, Star Trek provides a basic medium which the audience then uses to create its own metatext. Creativity and critical analysis challenge each other, however. Invention of new text is not the same practice as commentary on the old. To resolve this contradiction, commentary becomes an art form of its own, defined by an ironic stance, forbidden to speak directly, embedded within the fictional ahistoricity of Star Trek and so contributing to its perpetuation. These interpretations are then disseminated via small fanclaves of viewers and writers. Fans develop a new genre of ephemeral art built upon original episodes and whatever else they view as ‘real.’ This suggests that Fiske’s construction and celebration of viewers as reading according to experiential and sensemaking categories (1987) needs to be expanded to account for cult phenomena such as Star Trek. Equally or more significant is the fact that social viewers actively create meaning as they watch, every time they watch, and that meaning is not so much negotiated between text and audience as it is among audience members and text. Culture is constantly constructed and rewritten, and the reader is not especially powerful as an interpreter of her own text—but readers are. The construction of the reader as ‘coming to’ a viewing event with pre-existing categories is dangerously structuralist, for it suggests that although the categories are socially constructed, the event itself is somehow experienced individually. While this may be true for events where the viewer sits in silence (as is supposed to be, and too often is not the case, for cinema) it cannot be true for many television viewers. The social arrangement develops a set of sociolinguistic rules for interpretative talk which are subject to adherence or violation, and it is within these rules that interpretative communities develop. Watching Star Trek, then, is the basis for creating Star Trek discourse, which in turn reinforces/recreates the meaning of Star Trek to its participants. With these understandings, there is no such thing as ‘the same episode’ in the company of others. Since there are so many fans to draw on, different readings can emerge all the time, as different questions raised outside a particular viewing can be developed in different forms during it. These rules develop among friends or acquaintances; they are not automati cally assumed to exist among other fans. For example, three different informants who did not know each other all confessed to ‘making fun’ of the episodes while they watched them, and expressed their belief that ‘hardcore Trekkies’ would be shocked. One said she’d never say these

HOW TO WATCH STAR TREK

77

things aloud, for example at a convention, for fear of offending others, although she’d probably whisper them to her friends. I have yet to find a self-identified ‘hardcore Trekkie.’ Whether fans watch the show every night, miss other events to come home to watch, go to conventions, participate in contests, collect the novels, or study Klingon, they always know others who, unlike them, are ‘really hardcore.’ The idea of a’hardcore trekkie’ influences their beliefs concerning their own behavior, but does not, except in theory, exist. In this, at least, that mythical being is very like the discourse s/he is purported to ‘live and die for,’ the ‘real’ Star Trek which changes every time it is watched. Notes 1 Zines are the Publishers’ Row of fan fiction, poetry, criticism, etc. They tend to be sold not much over cost, and have traditionally been mimeographed but more recently have been photocopied. Some have circulations of hundreds, some of eight or ten. 2 It is not the purview of this paper to discuss what kinds of audiences might exist which are not proprietary. For all I care, all viewers could be proprietary audiences. But I sincerely doubt it. 3 I am an exception to this. Although I had been dragged to Star Trek: the Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan by friends who were fans, the story had not particularly registered with me until I read all the Star Trek novels one week when I was sick and had no other light reading available. It was only after reading them all, and writing one of my own, that I went to the student union to watch an episode and see what everyone was writing about, and therefore found Star Trek viewing culture. But this is, to date, a very unusual occurrence. 4 One of my readers pointed out that since the women are considered sexual ornaments, it seems inconsistent for a fan to say they ‘lust after men’ rather than the reverse. While I have no definitive explanation of this, I think it has to do with narrative construction. The text constantly constructs resistance to temptation, particularly sexual temptation, as loyalty to the task, and so the women’s constant emphasis that they are attracted to the men, and the men’s resistance to their overtures, is embedded in many stories. 5 This ‘he’ is obviously not a false generic. 6 The ‘shields’ are protection against enemy fire of various kinds; the ship is also equipped with phasers and photon torpedoes for offensive action. 7 I was told by one fan that the group he watched with in college would make bets on where and how many times in one episode McCoy would say this; I’m not sure if the story is apocryphal, but whether it is or not it marks the ubiquity of the phrase. It seems to parallel other group watching game stories; for example the ‘Hi Bob’ drinking game, where viewers have to drink a glass of beer whenever a character on the Bob Newhart show says, ‘Hi, Bob.’ 8 I should acknowledge here that the two episodes fans generally cite as ‘worst’ are ‘Spock’s Brain’ and ‘Turnabout Intruder,’ both from the last season. Both are pretty awful. 9 This is beyond the purview of this paper, but that may explain the struggle of the fans to participate in the dialogue as separate parties, like interested third parties in labor disputes: those who write criticism and fan literature may view themselves as ‘liberating’ the essential character who otherwise is restricted to being spoken by commercial writers. The K/S erotic literature in particular bolsters this possibility.

78

CULTURAL STUDIES

10 Shows that do ‘break the frame’ include Moonlighting and The Monkees, and, interestingly, many Looney Tunes cartoons. A study of the interpretations of fans of these shows would be most interesting: do they discuss the characters in the same ‘double-viewing’ way, or adopt a generally-in or generally-out point of view? Moreover, I do not want to make it seem that I believe everyday viewers never double view; television is very often watched with conversation about and to the characters, simply not with the same degree of critical awareness. Film, of course, has even less critical commentary during the show, many viewers willingly putting themselves into the frame who are actively resentful of any commentary from those around them. 11 A similar phenomenon to what I call double viewing has been noted as a response to Dynasty (Feuer, 1989); and also as an aspect of the camp sensibility (Dyer, 1986). 12 I call clusters of fans ‘cells,’ since each tends to know other Star Trek fans in different contexts; and so their information system resembles the famous political party cell system, where each is connected to a different cell; although the connections are obviously not political in effect (except as much as everything is political) but instead explain the rapid transmission of information and ideas. For instance, in this case one of my informants was on the MUSE Parti line and watched Star Trek with a particular group. He therefore raised the question in both places; it will presumably be raised by those he talked to with others when they watch ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ with them, and become embodied in fan criticism. 13 Such indices also demystify technology, again making fun of the very science fiction format that they also appreciate. Nor do all trekkers do file in the same way; two of my informants (themselves technological specialists, one in computers, one in industrial engineering) tend to file episodes more by title than occurrence.

Bibliography Baudry, Jean-Louis (1986) ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,’ in Philip Rosen, (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology . New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, Tony and Woollacott, Janet (1987) Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero . New York: Methuen. Dyer, Richard (1986) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society . London: British Film Institute. Feuer, Jane (1989) ‘Reading Dynasty: Television and Reception Theory.’ South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring . Fiske, John (1987) Television Culture . New York: Methuen. Jenkins, Henry (1988) ‘Star Trek: Rerun, Reread, Rewritten.’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Spring . Whitfield, Stephen E. and Roddenberry, Gene (1968) The Making of Star Trek . New York: Ballantine.

KITE

80

HOW I MET MISS TOOTIE: The Home Shopping Club JANE DESMOND

First, a confession. The first time I tuned in to the Home Shopping Club, I couldn’t get out of my chair for three hours. I sat stunned, mesmerized by the parade of neckchains, earrings, china birds, barstools, flashlights, dolls, microwaves, music boxes…. It took every ounce of my will power not to pick up the phone and dial. (1–800–284–3200) Jane, I said, remember the anorexic state of your checking account. Still—two teak serving trays for only $10, minus my first-time-shopper rebate of $5 equals only $5! I didn’t exactly need teak trays—(2)—but then, who does? They were a bargain. I am a capitalist. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven. At last, I thought, the PBS slogan running through my mind, ‘TV worth watching!’ What it is The Home Shopping Club is ‘America’s original, live, shop-at-home TV service.’ Beamed live, twenty-four hours a day, from Clearwater, Florida, it is the leading contender in the race for teleshopping dollars. Initiated as a local program to sell merchandise closeouts in Florida, HSC expanded nationwide in July 1985, and issued its first public stock on May 13 1986. Expansion was rapid. By February 1987, Forbes Magazine reported that the HSC has a ‘market capitalization greater than McDonnell Douglas and about equal to CBS’ (2/23/87, pp. 40–2). Now seen in more than 60 million homes nationwide, the Home Shopping Club epitomizes communications recombinantrix: a potent mixture of cable television, UHF broadcasting, telemarketing, and computerized ordertaking, shipping, and inventory control. Such success breeds imitation, and recently other companies have been entering the game, trying to differentiate themselves by offering higher priced merchandise and celebrity guests. But despite the competition, the HSC retains its premier position, with sales of 1 billion dollars in 1988 (figure quoted by CBS News, December 18 1988). The HSC formula Buying in bulk from closeouts, bankruptcies, and liquidation sales, HSC offers bargains in a format that combines the chattiness of a radio talk show with the evangelical fervor and celebration of a Billy Graham crusade. Youngish, attractive, and perenially smiling male and female hosts hawk the merchandise in three-hour stints around the clock. Making

82

CULTURAL STUDIES

expert use of TV’s ‘liveness’ they punctuate a seemless flow of goods with ‘spendable kash’ giveaways, and ‘countdown clocks’ which put the pressure on the impulse buyer to make up his or her mind. A great bargain is always just around the corner, or just about to be whisked off the screen, perhaps never to be seen again. Since you can only order when the item is actually being shown, a constant state of urgency pervades the program. HSC promises: ‘good deals, great shopping, and lots of fun…that’s what we’re all about’ (on air quote, 4/23/88). Or are they? First the deals. Goods are almost always sold at below half-off the retail price, which is provided for comparison. While the quality of some goods may be uneven, the prices per gram for gold and silver jewelery did yield a substantial savings, as a comparison shopping spree at Connecticut Post Mall revealed. Granted then, there are bargains to be had, but how about the second part of the claim: ‘great shopping and lots of fun?’ Clearly, to find out, I needed to participate in the shopping experience. I made the necessary logistical arrangements: pulled the phone over right next to the chair in front of the TV. Placed my credit card, every-ready, just beside the phone. Set my parameters of consumption: something nice in the $10 range… But first, a confession: buying isn’t as easy as you’d think…. You have to be fast—quick reflexes, split-second decision-making, and above all: a touch-tone phone. The first time, my call got through, but was left in limbo on hold. Too late, the item sold out. The second time I was faster. I got through to a network representative, but TOO LATE! The item was pulled off the screen as we spoke. My operator commiserated, but nevertheless, I was disappointed. I vowed I’d wait for the Sunday sellathon, the monthly jewelery clearance sale. Then I’d really get a super-bargain. But on Friday, I flipped the set on, just casually as I’d begun to do whenever I was in the room, and there it was. An Italian sterling silver neckchain, serpentine twist, 24-inch length for only $9.50! Minus my $5 first-time-shopper-rebate, how could I miss? I didn’t even LOOK at the retail price. I dashed to the phone and started dialing. I got through but the woman kept asking too many questions—my credit card number, was I married?, my birthdate, did I watch on cable or regular TV? The address, the zip code, was that ‘C.A.’ or ‘C.T.’?—I didn’t know if I’d gotten the item or not. When did the purchase clear—at the beginning or end of the conversation? My necklace was still on the screen, but hundreds had already been purchased. I eyed the ‘quantity sold’ counter. It was ringing up sales so fast it made me dizzy. Finally, I heard the words ‘…will be arriving in seven to ten working days.’ I’d made it, and not a moment too soon. I put down the phone. Five minutes had passed— 462 necklaces sold, for a total of $4,389. Thirty seconds later—SOLD OUT!! Off with the necklace and on with the Capodimonte china figurines. My initiation was over. I was shopping in my pajamas and loving it. HSC emphasizes its convenience, and it’s true that it does allow one to shop at any time without leaving the home, an advantage for shut-ins, the elderly, mothers caring for small children, and women working in the home. Shopping can easily be integrated with other domestic activities. But if the domestic sphere is thus commercialized, the commercial sphere is simultaneously domesticated, as the act of shopping unites all of the consumers into a ‘family of club members’ and merges these with the first-name basis of the host and crew. This confusion of the familiar with the familial is heightened as the hosts, crew, and shoppers

THE HOME SHOPPING CLUB

83

share their personal likes, dislikes, and familial events with us. Callers ask about the hosts’ sick children, and send in birthday cards or their own children’s drawings, which are acknowledged on the air. Callers also provide testimonials on the merchandise, thereby functioning as a central component in the success of the show. As host ‘Bubbling Bob’ notes: ‘We really don’t sell, the people sell. There’s always the chance for them to be a star for the one moment when they’re on the air. And they feel they can tell you things. We have people on the air that say things to us that they probably wouldn’t even say to their best friend’ (CBS News, 12/18/88). The hosts are unfailingly cordial and sympathetic when personal difficulties are discussed. For example, one man, calling to give a testimonial on an exercise bike, dialed in two days in a row when the bike was on, each time reciting the sad story of his wife’s recent blood clot and how this exercizer had improved her health. But if the public/private and domestic/commercial are intertwined on HSC, some conjunctions are importantly torn apart. While bargains are the focus of the show, money, and the act of its exchange for the ownership of a product, is effaced. Once the first purchase is made, and a membership number assigned, it is no longer necessary to talk to a live operator or even to use your credit card. Instead, for speedier results and a better chance of getting through the phone circuits on bonanza items, you can use Miss Tootie, the automatic computerized order-taking service. With Miss Tootie, you just dial through, punch in your membership number and the quantity you are ordering, and the purchase is automatically billed to your credit card on file and shipped to your home address. The price, the added charges for shipping and handling, and the actual credit card are never mentioned during the transaction. Money has magically been subtracted from the equation of ‘bargain plus desire equals ownership.’ Automatic ordering is heavily encouraged. The viewer is constantly invited and often implored to ‘use Miss Tootie.’ Tooting horns serve as punctuation for each caller’s chat with the host, viewers request a toot for their spouses, or children, and hosts ask if they can ‘give them a toot?’ Some guests even press their children’s bicycle horns into service so they can toot back. Occasionally the level of personal involvement can get out of hand. One woman recently called in to ask for a ‘toot’ for her deceased husband. She said he’d always loved that horn (CBS News, 12/18/88). Classy killer bargains It is at the intersection of the discourses of luxury and killer bargains that the program reveals its secret. HSC sells ‘class’ at bargain basement prices in the form of imitation diamonds and rubies, and heavy gold neckchains meant to proclaim prosperity. But even second-class ‘class’ doesn’t always come cheap. The average clubmember spends a substantial $500 per year, usually by credit card, on at least fifteen purchases (U.S. News and World Report, 12/8/86, p. 60)—that’s a lot of clay pigeons, crystal clowns, and cubic zirconia pendants at an average cost of $33 per item (Time 10/20/86, p. 68). Who is buying all this stuff, and why? As Bourdieu discusses at length in his book Distinction, ‘things,’ their acquisition and use, are always more than themselves. They are ‘objectively and subjectively…

84

CULTURAL STUDIES

opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept’ (p. 57). Every object, and our experience of it, from a Renoir to a clay pigeon, is situated in the ongoing symbolic struggle for dominance among the social classes. Bourdieu characterizes these struggles as ‘symbolic struggles over being and seeming…’ (p. 252). Looking at HSC, we can see through its choice of goods and its mode of presentation that the show is targeted mainly at the lower middle class, analogous to what Bourdieu would term the ‘petite bourgeoisie,’ and whom he characterizes as having a ‘propensity to accumulation in all its forms…’ (p. 331). Such conspicuous consumption demonstrates the ability ‘to keep economic necessity at arm’s length’ (p. 51), a demonstration no longer necessary for the upper classes who value instead exquisite restraint and ‘ostentatious discretion’ (p. 57). Bourdieu notes that what the upper classes learn through absorption in the home at an early age, the petite-bourgeoisie must gain access to through ‘the cult of auto-didactic effort’ (p. 351). Whereas the upper classes value and demonstrate the attributes of ‘ease,’ assurance, and ‘the aesthetic disposition’ in their everyday choices, the ‘entry of the petite bourgeoisie into the game of distinction is marked…by the anxiety of exposing oneself to classification’ on the basis of personal taste in clothes, home furnishings, etc.’ (p. 57). A key to HSC’s success lies in its ability to cater to both the fears and desires of its target audience through a televisual style that is sophisticated in its construction but seemingly simple and straightforward in its ‘democratic’ accessibility. Televisual style In many ways, HSC epitomizes some of the most prominent features of television. Rather than offering ‘entertainment’ programs as the bait to hook viewers for the commercials which finance the medium, HSC inverts the formula. It foregrounds the selling as the main entertainment, linking the constancy of televisual flow to the liveness of the programming as a stimulus for buying. While there are regularly scheduled ‘programs’ on the HSC, (for instance, early mornings feature a women’s clothing show, while Sunday afternoons are reserved for jewelery bargathons) one never knows exactly what specific goods will be offered at what price at what time. The viewer gambles his or her time in the hopes of hitting the jackpot in a continual but unpredictable flow of big bargains. As a form of electronic windowshopping, enhanced by the human interest drama of testimonials and the lure of the jackpot, the act of viewing becomes entertaining in itself and often leads to impulse buying. The show’s sense of liveness is enhanced by an emphasis on the construction of the show itself. Each segment opens with a wide shot of the combined studio and order-taking room from which the show is broadcast. Telephone salespeople are seated in expansive rows of cubicles facing toward the staging area. Cameras and lights are visible, as is the headsetted crew which sets up each object for display. The crew and sellers wave happily at the camera. Seated at the front of the room by an American flag is the bouncy host for

THE HOME SHOPPING CLUB

85

the show, and the camera zooms in on him or her as the catchy HSC theme tune fades down. This self-reflexive shirtsleeve style of presentation is an essential part of the class-specific viewer address of the show. It emphasizes the labor involved in production, with a humorous and unembarrassed acceptance of crew gaffs, such as toppling over merchandise. Above all, it implies a ‘no frills’ straightforwardness and honesty which frames and underwrites the glittering presentation of the merchandise itself. This discourse of unpretentiousness serves as a foil for the complex visual construction of the merchandise, especially of luxury goods like jewelry and collectables. What is most striking is the way the merchandise is both objectified and dematerialized through an interplay of camera-shot syntax. Medium shots, which reveal the whole object (usually in relation to the body of a model) as a product to be consumed, alternate with extreme closeups which emphasize the color, shape, and glitter of the piece as one which connotes beauty, glamour, luxury and aesthetic appreciation. Sometimes this is carried to an extreme, so that the specificity of the object all but vanishes during the presentation. For example, a wide metalic cuff-like bracelet is shown on a rotating mirror with some colored fabric in the background. A double overlay shot gives us two images of the revolving silver tube, eaching turning in the opposite direction. A dissolve leads gently into an extreme close-up in which the vertical ribs of the bracelet fill the screen completely. The polished-metal inside surface of the object refracts the light into a glittering cascade of sparks, while the outside surface glints and turns. The bracelet-ness of the object is completely overridden at that moment by the pure play of light on spinning metal. It would be very difficult to identify the object from this shot of it. Slowly the camera pulls out to reframe the object in its entirety. It looks large and luminous, and is now invested with the patina of pure aestheticism. These moments of erotic fetishism are often enhanced by the rhythmic caressing of the object by a feminine finger. The ‘insinuating’ touch of the finger (Kruger 1987, p. 11) in the frame, which constructs the object as one of sexual desire, even one of autoerotic desire, is counterposed to the impenetrability of the TV screen which prevents touch even as it invites it. Even more than the act of ownership, it is this metasexuality, this constant stimulation of desire as commodity which provides the pleasure for the viewer. A discourse of connoisseurship Through a discourse of connoisseurship which peddles ‘quality’ and ‘knowledgability,’ the show assuages the anxiety of the petite bourgeois consumer through autodidacticism while extolling the ‘timeless’ values associated with the upper classes. Not only does the show provide viewers with objects to buy, it tells them in great detail why they should buy them, and just what the intangibles are that they have purchased along with the commodity. The discourse of connoisseurship operates through the rhetoric of hyperbole, in which the item and the attributes it possesses are related like the two ends of a telescope. In considering a modest $40 ring, for example, we find that its ‘Marquise’ cut is the most

86

CULTURAL STUDIES

difficult for the jeweler to achieve. Its high ‘Tiffanay’-style setting allows the light to shoot through the stone activating each of the facets. A similar emphasis is placed on uniqueness—a three-tier placement of stones for example, or a silver and diamond zirconia ring in the shape of a bow. (‘You won’t see this coming and going.’) After a few hours of watching the jewelery clearance bargathon I knew the difference between the (basic) herringbone neckchain, the figaro style, the 3-and-7 link pattern, the satin C-link with star, crescent cut, etc. I realized that bevelled edges (‘which the jeweler didn’t have to add’), were important because they meant the chain wouldn’t snag my clothing. Knowing how to recognize the quality of their purchases, viewers can wear them with the confidence that they reflect ‘good’ taste. Moreover, once all of these distinctive features and their meanings have been pointed out, the consumer can more easily find it necessary to buy one of each kind, and many callers relate that they already have a drawer full of neckchains, but have been waiting for a particular design which they have luckily just snapped up. In this way, the purchase becomes akin to collecting butterflies or baseball cards, with each unit valued for its minimal difference from the others of its set. This illusion of meaningful choice, and its corollaries—constant restimulation and incessant differentiation, are, of course, the marks of successful capitalism in full bloom. Along with ‘knowledgability,’ the presentations stress the ‘quality’ of the merchandise, as evidenced by the attributes of ‘handcrafted-ness,’ European origin (Austrian crystal, Italian sterling silver), or a ‘lifetime guarantee’ which allows the consumer to start a tradition of ‘heirlooms’ in her family, even if that ‘heirloom’ only costs $29.95. And for the lower classes, as Bourdieu has noted, the final guarantor of ‘quality’ is often the measurement of quantity. On the HSC close attention is always paid to the size of an object, its weight in grams (for jewelery), and the karats of gemstones involved. For example, a neckchain may be described as a ‘mountain of molten magic’ and displayed as a pulsating mound of metal on a mirrored plate. A final intangible for sale is the confirmation of a job well done, of having made a smart purchase or even an investment. While showing a small diamond ring, for example, the host may remind us that ‘many people advise putting 10 per cent of your portfolio into gemstones.’ The successful consumers are congratulated for ‘getting in on the deal,’ and each purchase is touted (tooted) in a celebratory mode. The consumer comes away from the show with a feeling of accomplishment, and of savvy fiscal decision-making. Mass class transit In the end, what HSC is selling is not just cubic-zirconia rings and music-box clowns, but the illusion of upward mobility. People who will never have a portfolio can invest 10 per cent of their money in HSC’s ‘gems.’ Those who have in the workplace limited opportunity for or recognition of their ‘success’ can experience a feeling of competence well-rewarded just by picking up the phone. And of course there’s the feeling of envy that the visual markes of success, can inspire. (‘Imagine the look on your boss’s face when you hand her a memo with this five-karat sparkler on your finger.’)

THE HOME SHOPPING CLUB

87

The popularity of HSC is facilitated not only by the nexus of telecommunications which inspired it, but also by the abundant and expanding lower and under-classes whose real possibilities for upward mobility are increasingly lessened by the growing gulf which separates the prosperous from the poor. That so many of these targeted consumers are women is not surprising. Not only have women been the traditional buyers of domestic goods, but they also have less chance than men of accumulating capital substantial enough to buy big-ticket items like cars and houses. Instead, they make innumerable acquisitions of small luxuries. There are moments in the broadcast when the veneer of illusion cracks to reveal the contradictions which fuel the show’s success: the tensions between fake and real, and between ‘spending’ money and having it. Occasionally, lesser-quality versions of real gemstones are offered. And here the patter must tread a narrow line. It must extoll the superiority of the real, without denegrating the limitations which make up most of the inventory. To make the fakes more attractive, nature’s mistakes (real rubies are often cloudy) are pitted against the wonders of the imitative (C-Z rubies glow like a fire from within.) With the ‘real’ items the word bargain is never used. Price, we are told, is not the important thing here, but rather ‘timeless elegance’ (i.e., true class). ‘Nothing’s quite so elegant as a diamond ring on your lady’s finger.’ At these moments the desire for true access to the province of the upper classes seeps through, for through a CZ-ring may be elegant, it is never really quite so elegant as the real thing. Similarly, the tension between saving money by spending it and not having it to spend in the first place sometimes comes dangerously centerstage, focusing the contrast between reality and illusion. Mary from Detroit gushes ‘I just love HSC. I’ve been a member for two years, and I bought so much my credit cards are all over their limit. (ha, ha) My husband’s just about ready to kill me if I buy any more! (ha, ha).’ ‘Yeah,’ says the host, (hee, he), we all know how that is,’ and quickly turns the attention back to the goods themselves. At those moments when reality threatens to intrude, remember host Jim Gretcher’s advice: ‘Until tomorrow, God Bless, and Keep Shopping!’ Note Thanks to Craig Owens for reading an earlier version of this essay. Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. CBS News (1988) 60 Minutes, ‘Homeshopping,’ Produced by Norman Gorin, aired Dec. 18. Koepp, Stephen (1986) ‘Can You Believe This Price?’ Time Magazine, October 20 p. 68 . Kruger, Barbara (1987) ‘Remote Control.’ Artforum, January, p. 11 . Morgenson, Gretchen (1987) ‘Fabulous Fads that fizzled?’ Forbes Magazine, February 23 pp. 40–2 . Reed, Julia (1986) ‘Hitting the Public Where It Lives.’ US News and World Report, December 8, pp. 60–1 .

88

REVIEWS

90

NO SANITY CLAUSE (BEYOND RECEPTION, THE TEXT INSIDE OUT). PAMELA FALKENBERG

• Tony Bennett and Jane Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987) £33.00 and £9.95,315 pp. In the study of reception, reality returns both as the text and as the response of the audience, as the impossibility of the truth of the text and as the real context that supplements the text. Nevertheless, this real context remains distant; it does not speak directly to the analyst/historian, not even in a contemporaneous context, which instead is reconstituted as a hyperreading, the reading of a reading that is not directly available but must itself be traced, gathered in the form of evidence, reconstructed from documents, artifacts, records, case histories, surveys. The particular reality that is attained in this way is both derivative and unique: it is unique in that it is the only real reading of the text allowed to the reception analyst, and derivative in that the analyst has nevertheless been displaced, separated in the reading from the real audience and the real experience of the text, which can only be known by criticism second-hand. Thus the text is the intertext of a context whose reading is itself the intertext of the theoretical/critical text of reception. Reception theory in cultural studies is a critical response to the Screen paradigm, here conceptualized as the idealized subject-effects or spectator positions that limit textual and intertextual studies (here collapsed as the same), limits that can be surpassed only by supplementing the text, dissolving it into its real contexts, its reception history. I would argue instead for an extended understanding of text, intertext, and context, which cannot be delimited by constituting a theoretical divide between text and context; between the reading of the text by the analyst and the reading by the analyst of the text’s reception by its real audience. This false division between text/context and context/intertext, working actively despite being denied, constitutes the repression of textual analysis by reception theory, which inevitably returns as the repressed always does. Of course, the most sophisticated versions of reception theory, here represented by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond, also adopt the premise that text and context are inseparable from one another. Thus, what Bennett and Woollacott set out to analyze are reading formations, ‘sets of discursive and inter-textual determinations which, in operating on both texts and readers, mediate the relations between them and provide the mechanisms through which they can productively interact’ (263). Indeed, when they articulate their theoretical schema most generally, I can find nothing with

92

CULTURAL STUDIES

which to disagree: at the limit, textual analysis and the study of reception cannot be divided. However, in characterizing textual analysis as positing a shadowy, ideal text which is the source of a true meaning, and in arguing for the actual empirical reality of reader formations, they merely substitute one chimera for another, one that is both idealized (as the critic’s reconstruction of the actual reader formations for a given text over time) and characterized as true (as the historical, objective, real coordinates of an audience’s actual practice of reading). In order to distinguish textual analysis from the study of reading formations, it is necessary to maintain that a reading formation is not a text. For Bennett and Woollacott, the text that a reading formation is not is ‘the container of ‘fixed codes’ which, although they may be variantly decoded, remain unaffected by such different decoding practices’ (62). This very restricted understanding derives more from traditional communication theory, which does assume that messages somehow exist prior to their signification through encoding and decoding operations, than it does from the theory of the text, in which ‘the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest’ (S/Z, 5). This restricted understanding, which stabilizes textual analysis as a univocal and unitary entity, denies it the status the authors would accord to any other ‘text’, now conceived quite differently: ‘there is no place—no cultural space—in which…individual texts…can be stabilised as objects to be investigated “in themselves”, except by abstracting them from the shifting relations of inter-textuality through which their consumption is regulated’ (90). Nevertheless, if reading formations are not fixed contexts because they are historicized, changing over time, neither are they texts, since they are what specify and activate texts (at one remove), that which, in contextualizing them, allows them to be read. The reading formation is a concept ‘whereby the range of meanings that have actually been produced might be accounted for’ (63). At the same time, however, ‘at the best, the evidence relating to those is usually wholly indirect and, therefore, largely inconclusive’ (63). Of course, what stands behind the reading formation with its inconclusive evidence is another reading formation, the critic’s, which privileges the reading of the reading formation and separates it from the reading of the text, which is performed by real audiences rather than critics. Moreover, the reading of the reading formation cannot be a mere reading of a text, since that would privilege one set of text/ reader relations over others (the critic’s particular construction). This error is displaced in advance to textual analysis, here represented by Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (London: Hutchinson, 1981). (See Bennett and Woollacott, pp. 64–69.) Finally, to admit that the analysis of a reading formation is a mere reading of it would undercut its political claim to be a more historical reality and empirical objectivity. Here, one is in the realm of ideology. ‘None of this, of course, is to oppose the practice of arguing for certain readings and against others. To the contrary, this is necessarily the sharp end of any politically concerned critical practice…. To argue for certain readings and against others is to attempt to clear a space within which the former can become active; it is to mount a bid to shift the horizons of inter-textuality within which the texts concerned are read and, thereby, to modify their signifying function. It is, in short, an

NO SANITY CLAUSE

93

attempt to make ends mean some things and not others by organising texts, readers, and contexts into a particular configuration’ (265–6). Of course, in arguing for certain readings, ‘it may be necessary to represent such readings as textually “more adequate” than the contending readings whose social power they seek to displace’ (266). Moreover, this representation must be capable of rewriting the text in accordance with its own views: ‘such readings should be more adequate—but more adequate in relation to the text as an historically constituted object rather than as a metaphysical essence’ (266). The reading that for Bennett and Woollacott is most textually adequate is the one that has been most capable of reconstructing the text in its own terms. That is, texts are transformed only in accordance with their history (here, history is the metaphysical essence, the only truth of the text); or rather, texts and reading formations mutually reconstruct one another, neither of which are final or have a unitary identity. At the same time, truth and history are interchangeable with power (the social power of readings), and this book is a bid to modify the literary institution and its valorization of readings. To abstract for a moment from history, what Bennett and Woollacott mean to valorize can only be temporarily finalized as the empirical (historical) reality of an extended understanding of the notion of ‘the text’ (as text/context/intertext), a valorization that at best repeats the radical claims of textual analysis but in a different intertextual context. However, as we can see from history, which reception theory rereads as the container of fixed codes, it may be a reified objectivity rather than a radical extension that the literary institution reincorporates as the historical reality of the reading formation. On the contrary, I am arguing in this context for a different reading of Bennett and Woollacott: for a radical formation of reading—a radical theory of the text—that would reconstitute objectivity as a critique of objectivity.1 Here the radical politics of textual analysis and the reading formation of the reading formation join together in a different network. This rereading admits, however, that radical textual analysis and radical reception theory do not construct the same enemies. For textual analysis, the enemy was ‘old criticism’ (Barthes, Criticism and Truth, 24 et passim); for the analysis of formations of reading, it is textual analysis, here collapsed with old criticism. That textual analysis can be reconstructed by reception theory as the old dominant indicates a potential shift in the academic formation of reading, in which the true empirical objectivity of the reading formation may soon mysteriously replace the false objectivity of the text. This empirical objectivity is achieved by removing the analyst’s particular reading from the text. Instead, the analyst should seek out empirical evidence for the readings of others—evidence which, since it is unfortunately ‘wholly indirect and…largely inconclusive,’ may also represent the analyst in disguise. ‘By analogy, “the text itself” [the reading formation] is a mysterious thing because, in it, the social character of its resignification—of its incessant rewritings and reinscriptions in history—assumes the form of an objective character stamped on the product of that labor. Ultimately, to subscribe to such a view…is to be taken in by history—the whole ensemble of material, social and ideological relations—which, in conditioning the given form of the text, simultaneously

94

CULTURAL STUDIES

occludes itself (265). What is occluded here is, perhaps unfortunately, the recognition of the reading formation itself as commodity fetishism. Instead, one might well advocate Roland Barthes’ science of literature (writing, text): ‘If this science should come into existence one day, its object could not be to impose a meaning on the work, in the name of which it would arrogate to itself the right to reject other meanings: in so doing it would compromise itself (just as it has done up till now)….it is a mythology of writing which awaits us; its object will not be determinate works, that is to say works placed in a process of determination of which one person (the author [or the analyst]) would be the origin, but rather works traversed by that great mythical writing in which humanity tries out its meanings, that is to say its desires’ (Criticism and Truth, 73, 77).2 The point is that relationships between texts can only be established through a process of reading that remains partial, that cannot be totalized (except as the process of history, which perhaps marks the limits—the reification—of the current discursive formation). Moreover, this reading process entails a subjectivity that cannot be deleted from the system simply because it is socially organized. To do so would reify and totalize the construction and perspective of the system as a fixed text. This open-ended extension of textual analysis to reception theory (the dialectical return of the same) is, oddly enough, the objectivity of the subjectivity of the text within the reading formation of the reading formation. This is a productive reading practice—the study of reading formations as a radical psychoanalysis—in which, as in the Marx Brothers’ routine, the text/reader contract contains no sanity clause. Notes 1 Or, in terms of the theory of the text and its reading, This “I” that approaches the text is already itself a plurality of texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). Objectivity and subjectivity are of course forces which can take over the text, but they are forces which have no affinity with it. Subjectivity is a plenary image, with which I may be thought to encumber the text, but whose deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes which constitute me, so that my subjectivity has ultimately the generality of stereotypes. Objectivity is the same sort of replenishment: it is an imaginary system like the rest (except that here the castrating gesture is more fiercely characterized)’ (S/Z, 10). ‘The grouping of codes, as they enter into the work, into the movement of the reading, constitute a braid (text, fabric, braid: the same thing);…as soon as the hand intervenes to gather and intertwine the inert threads, there is labor, there is transformation. We know the symbolism of the braid: Freud, considering the origin of weaving, saw it as the labor of a woman braiding her pubic hairs to form the absent penis. The text, in short, is a fetish; and to reduce it to the unity of meaning, by a deceptively univocal reading is to cut the braid, to sketch the castrating gesture’ (160). See also ‘From Work to Text’ and Criticism and Truth. 2 Bennett and Woollacott make much in Bond and Beyond of their rewriting of the concept of the intertext, which they attribute solely to Julia Kristeva (clearly a limited and perhaps political reading of the theory of the text), with a new concept, the inter-text, the hyphen in which marks out the site of a real (radical) difference: ‘the conditions of Bond’s existence have been inter-textual. (We use the hyphenated form to avoid confusion with the concept of intertextuality associated with the work of Julia Kristeva…. In brief, whereas Kristeva’s

NO SANITY CLAUSE

95

concept of intertextuality refers to the system of references to other texts which can be discerned within the internal composition of a specific individual text, we intend the concept inter-textuality to refer to the social organisation of the relations between texts within specific conditions of reading.)’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 44). In a partial critique, this distinction could instead be posited within the theory of the text itself, between Julia Kristeva on one hand, and Roland Barthes on the other. In ‘From Work to Text,’ for instance, Barthes, like Bennett and Woollacott (see 65–9), argues against any final limit in the determination of a text’s reading by opposing the concept of the text to that of the work (155–64). The text is the extension of the work into a ‘network; if the Text extends itself, it is as the result of a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being [in this way, the text is connected to the current discursive formation]). Hence, no vital “respect” is due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts—Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy’ (161). Indeed, in Barthes, the inter-text and the intertext are interchangeable: on the previous page, Barthes argued, ‘The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text… The…text…can bring with it fundamental changes in reading…while the Marxist interpretation of works, so far resolutely monistic, will be able to materialize itself more by pluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist “institutions” allow it)’ (160). Here, as an intertext, Barthes describes in advance the work of Bennett and Woollacott, who are thus caught in the network of textual analysis.

96

FIRST CITIZEN OF THE SEMIOTIC DEMOCRACY? JIM BEE

• John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 353 pp. £25.00 and £6.95. IIn this substantial, useful and provocative book aimed at undergraduates John Fiske surveys contemporary theory and research on the analysis of television texts and fashions a general thesis about the nature of texts and the power of television in contemporary ‘Western’ cultures. He concentrates on popular television programmes, which, like the theory and research are mostly from Australia, Britain and the USA. His approach ‘derives from particular inflections of Marxism, semiotics, post-structuralism and ethnography’ and is “viewer centred’, which is to say that his interest is in how the texts are likely to be read by viewers and he draws on empirical audience research whenever possible. He insists throughout that viewers have power over texts and that different viewers can get different meanings and pleasures from the same texts. Television Culture covers a lot of ground. The blurb calls it ‘a comprehensive introduction for students’ and that seems fair. Topics covered include realism, subjectivity, audiences, intertextuality, genre, narrative, character, gender, pleasure, and the social power of television. Genres and programmes analysed included soaps, cop/adventure series, wrestling, music video, Miami Vice, quiz shows, news. It works hard to introduce terms carefully, draws on a large number of academic sources which are well referenced and has a good index. It provides pieces of close and often exciting textual analysis to illustrate many of the surveys and arguments. It think that Fiske has been successful in writing a book which will be accessible to readers who are relatively new to television studies. Television Culture is probably the single most comprehensive text in television studies. I think it is admirable in many ways and I shall be surprised if students of television fail to find it helpful. However, I have some reservations about the central thesis of the book and I would like to concentrate on these in this review. Three years ago Fiske declared ‘The next enterprise is, for my money, the crucial one: it is to discover and analyse just how a work of popular art can be other than reactionary.’ In Television Culture Fiske provides us with his conclusions from this ‘crucial enterprise’ and as such the book has to be read as a contribution to media/cultural studies as well as an undergraduate textbook. The book’s central thesis, which I find in important respects theoretically confused and politically disabling, is concerned with the relationship between pleasure, popularity

98

CULTURAL STUDIES

and ideology. Against arguments that popular television helps maintain the subjugation of the subordinate through hegemony it claims that popular television empowers the subordinate, produces a ‘semiotic democracy’, and threatens the dominant. The book ends with these words: Far from being the agent of the dominant classes, it is the prime site where the dominant have to recognize the insecurity of their power, and where they have to encourage cultural difference with all the threat to their own position that this implies. (326) Provocative stuff and a conclusion which may stick like a fishbone in the throat of many a cultural studies scholar. How does Television Culture arrive at such a conclusion? It begins by reviewing theories about texts and meanings (essentially Realism and The Subject) which reveal elements of closure, ways the text tries to impose meanings on readers. Concluding that we should be more circumspect about the power of texts it then produces empirical warrant for this by reviewing contemporary audience research which, in the words of Hodge and Tripp, ‘constitute a compelling argument for the primacy of general social relations in developing a reading of television, rather than the other way about’ (83). Having thus established that texts do not impose meaning on viewers the book then tries to develop a theory of the television text which Fiske calls the ‘producerly text’. This is characterised by forces of closure in tension with forces of openness. Features of the text which constitute its openness are irony, metaphor, jokes, contradiction, excess, heteroglossia, nowness, flow, segmentation, and intertextuality. He also claims that the producerly text has many of the features that Kaplan calls for in a radical text, notably these four (95): it draws attention to its textuality, it does not produce a singular reading subject, it plays with the differences between representation and the real, it replaces pleasures of identification and familiarity with the more cognitive ones of participation and production. The book’s central thesis requires that we accept this theory of the television text but I find it confusing on a number of counts. Firstly, the features which the ‘producerly text’ allegedly shares with the radical text are merely asserted: although there is evidence in the book for the second one, the others remain unargued, at least as generalized features of television texts. Secondly, the notion of the producerly text is not fully thought through. It is not clear if ‘producerliness’ is a feature of all tv texts. (Fiske proceeds as if all popular texts are ‘producerly’.) Nor is it clear if ‘producerliness’ is the same as ‘openness’. Further, I would be interested to know if ‘producerly’ is one pole of a binary concept like open-closed or readerly—writerly and if so what is the other pole? The account is also contradictory, or at least very ambivalent, in relation to exactly how open texts are. Fiske claims that the producerly text ‘treats its readers as members of a semiotic democracy’ (90). He suggests that texts have what Bakhtin called ‘heteroglossia’, which suggests that writers do not put meaning into texts so much as assemble a multitude of voices within them from which the reader ‘makes his or her text out of this “weaving of voices” by a process that is fundamentally similar to that of the writer when

FIRST CITIZEN OF THE SEMIOTIC DEMOCRACY?

99

s/he created the work out of the multitude of voices available in the culture’ (96). This means, says Fiske, that readers can listen to different voices in the text and that these voices cannot finally be pinned down in a hierarchy of discourses. Such an account appears to give viewers freedom to make what they will of texts but Fiske also wants to insist that texts are a structured polysemy where ‘all meanings are not equal, nor equally easily activated, but all exist in relations of subordination or opposition to the dominant meanings proposed by the text’ (93). Personally I don’t see how viewers can be members of a semiotic democracy if texts are a structured polysemy. As Television Culture moves its argument onto the terrain of pleasure more problems become apparent. Rejecting psychoanalytical versions of pleasure as of limited use for understanding television it draws heavily on Barthes to argue that television texts provide three kinds of pleasure: plaisir, jouissance and play. Plaisir is the relatively mundane pleasure of having our identity confirmed and is ‘probably more typical of television’ (228). If we are members of the subordinate then having our identity confirmed is not only pleasurable but also empowering and resistive of the dominant ideology. Jouissance is a pleasure of the body, ‘located in the body of the text and responded to by the body of the reader’ (228). This kind of pleasure is resistive because it evades meaning and ideology, and denies control. The pleasure of play is the exercise of freedom and control involved in creating a text from the weaving of voices: ‘Games and texts construct ordered worlds within which the players/readers can experience the pleasures of both freedom and control: in particular, for our purposes, playing the text involves the freedom of making and controlling meanings’ (230/1). Each form of pleasure, then, involves resistance and empowerment for the subordinate. ‘Popular pleasures are those that empower the subordinate, and they thus offer political resistance, even if only momentarily and even if only in a limited terrain’ (230). Again I find the thesis confusing and contradictory. Although the book claims that pleasure empowers the subordinate, as above, it also says pleasure can be hegemonic. The variety of pleasures, it suggests, is a function of the variety of socially situated viewers, and ‘For those in easy accommodation with the dominant ideology, this pleasure will be conforming and reactionary…. This, of course, is pleasure acting as the motor of hegemony’ (234). To some extent such confusion arises from a lack of analytical precision in the use of central terms. It is never clear how we are to draw the line between popular/not popular; gives pleasure/does not give pleasure; open/closed; hegemonic/not hegemonic; the subordinate/the dominant. Most incapaci tating however is Fiske’s vagueness around the terms empowerment and resistance. These are never adequately clarified. Empowerment, he asserts, is born of having one’s identity confirmed or of evading meaning, but what is the extent of this empowerment? What is its force and what is its social dimension if any ? It is curious that Fiske never discusses the Brechtian thesis that recognition without distanciation is simply confirmation nor Bourdieu’s observation that instead of celebrating jouissance we should regard it as ‘the enslaving violence of the agreeable’.2 In the final chapter Television Culture broadens its thesis about pleasure and empowerment and discusses the social power of popular television. It develops the

100

CULTURAL STUDIES

notions of ‘cultural economy’ and ‘popular cultural capital’ and rounds off with a discussion of ‘diversity’. Fiske’s theory is that popular television works to empower the subordinate and to maintain social diversity through the sustenance of ‘popular cultural capital’. This is a significant function in society and challenges capitalism because although maintaining subcultural diversity may not produce any direct political effect, at the more general level of cultural effectivity its power is crucial and ‘resistive reading practices that assert the power of the subordinate in the process of representation and its subsequent pleasure pose a direct challenge to the power of capitalism to produce its subjects-in-ideology’ (326). By the end of Television Culture some peculiar and ironic consequences of its thesis have become evident. It suggests that, despite a generation of television, ‘western societies have resisted total homogenisation. Feminists have shown that we do not all of us have to be patriarchs; other class, ethnic, age, and regional differences are also alive and well’ (324–5). This resistance to homogeneity flourishes because diversity is to be found at the point of reading rather than the point of production. It then claims that paradoxically ‘diversity of readings may best be stimulated by a greater homogeneity of programming’ (319). This is because homogeneity of programming obliges the manufacture of masspopular and therefore more open texts. A call for diversity at the point of production and texts addressed to specific minority or interest groups is misguided, the books claims, for two reasons. Firstly because ‘attempts to produce television by and for the working classes or other subordinate or minority groups, have only partially succeeded, if at all’ (322). Secondly because a greater variety of closed, readerly texts that impose their meanings more imperialistically may not be as desirable as a narrower range of more open texts. One irony of this position, so keen on the resistance of the popular, is that it ends up, from a British perspective, either supporting the status quo or, worse, inferring that the ideal moment of television was before the arrival of the minority channels BBC2 and Channel 4. Implicit in this argument about minority broadcasting is the conclusion that, for example, programmes by and for women would be closed texts, since there would be no call for them to be popular with men; this would alienate men and therefore reduce the empowerment of the text. But I would have thought that, whatever else, such texts could presumably be empowering the (gender) subordinate, developing female discourses and pleasures. How could women develop feminism whilst worrying about pleasing men? I doubt if many feminists will agree with this argument. As Coward has recently pointed out: The paradox is that in order for women to have any effect on mainstream television, it is necessary first to articulate the fact that women, in contemporary society, do have interests, different interests and priorities from those of men. It is only with specific programmes for women, with specific policies to cover women’s interests, and through encouraging women to put their point of view, that we will be able to prevent television from hiding the divisions between women and men.3 Now it seems to me that if feminists have shown that we do not all have to be patriarchs, this has not been achieved by waiting for popular television to lead the way but by some

FIRST CITIZEN OF THE SEMIOTIC DEMOCRACY?

101

women struggling to make interventions. The general political problem with the book’s position is that there really is no place for struggle and intervention: in the end, for all its rhetoric of resistance, it endorses a politics of quietism. In this television culture there is just no point in subordinate groups gaining more control over the production of culture or making demands on broadcasters. (The book does not even include a call for universal media education, which is strange given the emphasis on what viewers bring to television.) Clearly Fiske is working out of the problematic of hegemony theory into which he wants to incorporate a theory of television pleasure. The question of ‘resistance’ in popular culture is a defining characteristic of this problematic which sees popular culture as a force field of relations shaped by the contradictory pressures of the people’s deformation and self-affirmation. For Gramsci, the bourgeoisie can become a hegemonic, leading class only to the degree that bourgeois ideology is able to accommodate, to find some space for, opposing class cultures and values, and as Hall puts it: ‘In the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double-stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.’4 Where Television Culture parts company with most hegemony theorists is I suspect in his (non)definition of ‘resistance’ and his calculation of its force. Hall suggests that the study of popular culture has tended to oscillate wildly between the two alternative poles of the dialectic of containment and resistance. Fiske is probably as far over to the resistance pole as anyone could be, though he is not alone—Modleski has recently commented on this tendency: ‘In certain cases the insight that audiences are not completely manipulated, but may appropriate mass cultural artefacts for their own purposes, has been carried so far that it would seem mass culture is no longer a problem for some “Marxist” critics’.5 This now seems to be true of Fiske. In the end he wants to celebrate popular television so much that in effect his definition of popular culture slides from that of ‘liked, beloved or admired by the people’ into ‘belonging to the people or constituted by the people’. This is a shift from his earlier position which emphasized containment, of ‘resistance within acceptance’, where he saw popular art providing opportunities for resisting subord ination ‘by inverting, not rejecting, social relations, and thus oppositional meanings and subjectivities are articulated with and within the dominant frame’.6 He now wants the resistance of the popular to be constitutive of subordinate groups and have the force of threatening the dominant classes. Another place where Fiske parts company with many hegemony theorists is his lack of conjunctural analysis. Those for whom cultural studies is about articulating formal and symbolic structures with social processes and practices will be disappointed: the latter do not appear in Television Culture. There is no sense of any specific social formation. Australia, Britain and the USA, and by implication any ‘western’ nation, are assumed to be homogenous for Fiske’s analysis. There is no attempt to understand and intervene in a political conjuncture, a concern of many cultural studies researchers, who might ask for example what part the empowering pleasures of popular television have played in the growth of a new authoritarian consensus in Britain. Furthermore the insistence that all popular television generates resistance presumes an essentialism of textual effectivity. The

102

CULTURAL STUDIES

assumption here is that Miami Vice will be empowering whenever and wherever people find it pleasurable. I think we need to argue against this and insist that there is no general form of pleasure with ascertainable political and cultural effects. Television Culture works hard to bring popularity and pleasure into the centre of television theory. Surely this is a good move but it does present some awkward problems: we do not have a generally accepted theory of pleasure, or television pleasure: indeed the concept of pleasure challenges the ideology problematic. Mercer suggests the concern with pleasure gives rise to ‘a general unease that, within the plethora of ideology analysis which has emerged in recent years something has quite crucially been missed out’7 and he argues that what is involved here is a restructuring of the theoretical horizon within which a cultural form is perceived. I think Television Culture will take us some way in this restructuring but in the end it fails to provide an adequate critical theory of pleasure, one that will allow us to discriminate among television’s various affects, and along the way it loses some of the strengths of hegemony theory. Television Culture gathers a wealth of theory and research, useful surveys and often illuminating analyses. It weaves them with some dexterity, demonstrating relations and interconnections, which pedagogically has obvious advantages if the disadvantage that chapters are not always self contained. Personally speaking I think that for many students on many courses this book will be well worth the money. Notes I would like to thank Andrew Tolson for his comments on an earlier version of this review. Page references in the review refer to Television Culture. 1 J.Fiske, ‘Popularity and Ideology: A Structuralist Reading of Dr. Who’, in W.D. Rowland and B.Watkins (eds), Interpreting Television: Current Research Perspectives (London: Sage, 1984), 197. 2 P.Bourdieu, La Distinction (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1979), 570. Quoted in C.Mercer, ‘Complicit Pleasures’, in T.Bennett et al. (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 60. 3 R.Coward, ‘Women’s programmes: why not?’, in H.Baehr and G.Dyer, Boxed In: Women and Television (London: Pandora, 1987), 105. 4 S.Hall, ‘Notes on deconstructing “the popular”’, in R.Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 228. 5 T.Modleski, ‘Introduction’, in T.Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), xi. 6 J.Fiske and J.Watts, ‘Video Games’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 3:1 (1985), 103. 7 C.Mercer, ‘Complicit pleasures’, in T.Bennett et al. (eds) Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 54.

Notes on contributors

JANE FEUER is in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh…JIM COLLINS is in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame…MIMI WHITE teaches Film at Northwestern University…HILARY RADNER is in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame…CASSANDRA AMERLEY teaches at Drake University…JANE DESMOND teaches English at Duke University… PAMELA FALKENBERG is in the Department of Communications at the University of Notre Dame and JIM BEE teaches Communications at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh.

104

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS MEDIA AND CRISIS An international conference to be held at Laval University, Québec City, Canada, October 4 to 7, 1990

To mark the 20th anniversary of Canada’s “October Crisis” of 1970, the Département d’information et de communication of Laval University is organizing an international conference on the role of media in time of crisis. In the twenty years since the political crisis set off by two kidnappings and the assassination of a minister by the Front de libération du Québec in October 1970, other crises of various sorts have shaken different parts of the world: the British-Argentine war in the Falklands, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the IRA’s campaign in Ireland, the drought in the Sahel, the energy crisis, the drama surrounding AIDS, and the stock market crash of 1987 are some examples that come to mind. Each of these crises can be considered as events that upset the social and political equilibrium of the societies concerned, and raise the question of the role of media. The conference will examine the specific role of media in crisis situations. The organizing committee is taking a broad approach to setting the parameters of the theme, and will consider both case studies and proposals of a more theoretical nature in areas such as the following: • • • •

media and terrorism media and political upheaval media and economic crisis media and social crisis

This list is by no means exclusive, and proposals are invited on other sub-themes as well. In addition to traditional academic papers, the conference is interested in audiovisual material documenting specific uses of media in time of crisis. Prospective participants should send a detailed abstract of three pages (750 words), in French or in English, before November 15, 1989. Presenters will be advised in February 1990, and will be expected to submit complete papers (25 pages) by June 15, 1990. Address all inquiries to : MEDIA AND CRISIS CONFERENCE DEPARTEMENT D’INFORMATION ET DE COMMUNICATION FACULTE DES ARTS PAVILLON LOUIS-JACQUES-CASAULT

106

UNIVERSITE LAVAL QUEBEC, CANADA G1K7P4 Conference organizers : Bernard Dagenais and Marc Raboy Telephone: 418–656–5212 FAX: 418–656–7305 Electronic mail (Netnorth): MRABOY@LAVALVM1

INDEX VOLUME 3

Articles Cassandra Amesley How to watch Star Trek p. 61 Ien Ang and David Morley Mayonnaise culture and other European follies p. 133 Kerry Carrington Girls and graffiti p. 89 Ed Cohen The ‘hyperreal’ vs. the ‘really real’: if European intellectuals stop making sense of American culture can we still dance? p. 25 Jim Collins Watching ourselves watch television, or who’s your agent? p. iv Jennifer Craik ‘I must put my face on’: making up the body and marking out the feminine p. 1 Kirsten Drotner Girl meets boy: aesthetic production, reception and gender identity p. 208 Simon Frith Euro pop p. 166 Marie Gillespie Technology and tradition: audio-visual culture among south Asian families in west London p. 226 Jostein Gripsrud ‘High culture’ revisited p. 194 David Lee Discourse: does it hang together? p. 58 Hilary Radner ‘This time’s for me’: making up and feminine practice p. 40 Kevin Robins Reimagined communities? European image spaces, beyond Fordism p. 145 Sally Stockbridge Programming rock’n’roll: the Australian version p. 73 Jon Stratton Deconstructing the territory p. 38 Terry Threadgold Talking about genre: ideologies and incompatible discourses p. 101 Duncan Webster ‘Whodunnit? America did’: ambo and post-Hungerford rhetoric p. 173 Mimi White Television: a narrative—a history p. 21

Kites and reviews Jim Bee First citizen of the semiotic democracy? p. 95 Jane Desmond How I met Miss Tootie: The Home Shopping Club p. 78 Pamela Falkenberg No sanity clause (beyond reception, the text inside out) p. 87 Gabriele Kreutzner On doing cultural studies in West Germany p. 240 Martin Montgomery I spy fiction? p. 128 Len Palmer Some dominant myths of Oz? p. 256 Bill Schwartz Popular culture: the long march p. 250

107