The Routledge Companion to Global Television

Shawn Shimpach, Shawn Shimpach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351755153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Featuring scholarly perspectives from around the globe and drawing on a legacy of television studies, but with an eye toward the future, this authoritative collection examines both the thoroughly global nature of television and the multiple and varied experiences that constitute television in the twenty-first century.

Companion chapters include original essays by some of the leading scholars of television studies as well as emerging voices engaging television on six continents, offering readers a truly global range of perspectives. The volume features multidisciplinary analyses that offer models and guides for the study of global television, with approaches focused on the theories, audiences, content, culture, and institutions of television. A wide array of examples and case studies engage the transforming practices, technologies, systems, and texts constituing television around the world today, providing readers with a contemporary and multi-faceted perspective.

In this volume, editor Shawn Shimpach has brought together an essential guide to understanding television in the world today, how it works and what it means – perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in television, global media studies, and beyond.

PART I

Objects and Ideas

This section explores approaches to defining television as an object of study and to delineating current ways of thinking about television in a global context. This is not always a straightforward undertaking in an era marked by rapid transformation, where the definition of television changes seemingly before our eyes and is marked by stark differences at various places around the world. Chapters here offer and examine current critical theories of global television, its meaning, and its implications. Tellingly, television in the digital age is rather consistently defined here beyond or in excess of any single object. For John Hartley, television is best described not in terms of what it is, but instead in terms of what it is used for. His answer to “what is television?” leads to a consideration of technologies for the production of the modern subject. Purnima Mankekar agrees that we experience television in excess of specific material objects and, indeed, may best understand it in terms of the intersubjective relations and affect it produces and facilitates. Jorge A. González is similarly less interested in the material object of television per se and much more so in the technogenesis, or co-evolution, of human societies and screen technologies. The stakes, for him, are clear, as these technologies are produced through a global economics of inequity that positions Mexico with limited access to its own ecologies of symbolic meaning and exchange. Stuart Cunningham and David Craig define contemporary global television in terms of practice as much as object by tracing the use and circulation of moving image media produced and experienced on social media at key places in the world right now. These analyses are grounded in the history of television as an object and an idea. Indeed, history is critical to our understanding of global television. Timothy Havens, therefore, explores the historical tensions between disparate broadcast systems around the world, each of which has reflected a different ideological relationship between television and the state. Lothar Mikos examines a history of international cooperation and arrangements that demonstrates that the production, programming, and audience for television have been transnational (if not global) from the beginning. Toby Miller concludes the section by diagnosing television as an object and an object of study in order to identify important areas for action through which we may work toward addressing what television might ideally become and how we should study it. Throughout this section, theories, histories, and definitions of television intermingle, producing a fascinating, nuanced, and compelling portrait of the objects and ideas that animate television scholars today and inform the meanings of television in the sections and chapters that follow.

1

WHAT IS TELEVISION?

A Guide for Knowing Subjects

John Hartley

Nothing to See Here?

When there’s a commotion on the street, people stop to watch. A crowd gathers. Bystanders get involved. But then the security authorities show up. “Nothing to see here.” “Move along.” Same applies to TV. It gathered quite a big crowd; people stopped to watch; got involved. But now, we’re told by the relevant authorities (Buonanno, 2016; Katz and Scannell, 2009), it’s (nearly) over. Nothing to see here. Much ado about nothing. Move along: to “platform capitalism,” if you please (Srnieck, 2017), where “the stack” (Bratton, 2016) will supply all your gawping needs. But, even as we’re shoved further into the technological sublime, let’s ask whether hanging around to watch is itself the thing to see. More formally: is there one thing that justifies television as an integrated object of study? The question is inevitably about knowledge (how we know) as much as it is about phenomena (what we know). TV’s characteristics are multifarious, as are the disciplinary or scientific methods used to study it, as well as the critical positions from which it has been assessed. TV resists a singular ontology; and to watch it is to think with it – it’s a site of everyday, practical epistemology, logic, metaphysics and aesthetics. If television does affect knowledge, do philosophers, guardians of ontology and epistemology, welcome it? Or do they react like security guards, protecting their stretch of the long road to knowledge?

Jason Mittell has reduced the object of study to six “functions” for television: it is “a commercial industry, a democratic institution, a textual form, a site of cultural representation, a part of everyday life, and a technological medium” (2009: 2). Concentrating on what TV is for is a good move, but can we go further? This chapter pursues the idea that what unifies and justifies television as an object of study is its cultural function, which is, I argue, the making of the modern subject. This is not to dismiss but to explain these industrial, institutional, formal, representational, quotidian, and technological functions at macro-system level, where TV has been used:

• to translate modern life into a shared, imagined, meaningful universe (Lotman, 1990)
  • for a given we-community or “deme” (Hartley and Potts, 2014),
    • by creating (making; representing; distributing; modelling; motivating; adjusting)
      • the modern subject (an unprecedentedly knowing subject).

That meaningful modern universe is both parochial, expressive of “our” group identity, especially in contrast to “they” – adversaries (internal and external) – and, at the same time, universal, capable of facing any uncertainty or problem: from daily surprises (news, sport), through abiding challenges and conflicts (drama, comedy), all the way up to myth and law-affirming events (ritual, festival). Meanings are made and marketed, shared among unprecedentedly large and heterogeneous populations, such that the personal act of enjoying fictions is also a group action, constituting the group’s identity at macro-scale, as another of humanity’s determining “fictions,” in Yuval Noah Harari’s sense (2015). Television is not an object in nature but is constituted in discourse, realized in social arrangements, and reconstituted over time. The TV audience is also a discursive “fiction” (Hartley, 1992: 101–18). The sense of co-subjectivity among millions who share a program or live event is imagined (Dayan and Katz, 1992). You can’t meet the audience. But imaginary doesn’t mean illusory. Harari argues that “fictions” are humanity’s distinctive mode: by means of language and stories (Dor, 2015), Homo sapiens creates entities (systems and groups) that don’t exist in nature – e.g. the law, religion, firms, money, rights, nations – and uses these to ensure cooperation in the growth of knowledge. The television audience is the largest such fictional group ever imagined, often thought of as coterminous with the species as a whole. Stories about it abound, but you’ll never meet it face-to-face; and television is the most complete story-telling machine ever invented.

Meanings are carried to all quarters by what I’ve called the “twin energies” of modernity: freedom (intellectual emancipation, both individual and social) and comfort (material wellbeing, both household and market) (Hartley, 1996). These aspects of modernity have evolved and embedded themselves since the Renaissance and Enlightenment, taking the fruits – bitter and sweet – of Western expansion to the wider world: industrial capitalism, imperial and colonial power; struggles with persistent problems of identity, equality, mobility, and opportunity; never able to extend the mantle of modern freedom and comfort to all human agents or systems, even as the idea of it was globalized along with trade.

Television has globalized ahead of both freedom and comfort for most. Nevertheless, it’s the fiction that binds: television has the knack of seeming to address and to include all of us (however construed); and when it doesn’t, as inevitably will be the case, audience members may aspire to join the club, or they may protest at being neglected (or both). For all its fictional make-believe and uneven representational accuracy, we want television to be true about who we are. What makes television compelling as an object of study is not any particular textual or industrial forms (which come and go), intriguing as these continue to be, but the one thing that makes them all dangerous, risky and attractive: television’s popularity (its population-wide reach). Its most important invention is the audience, this being the locus of the entire system’s cultural functionality.

Television as a cultural form was established among the winners of World War 2. Now its audience is planetary, just at the moment when it is dawning on people everywhere, if not on their public representatives, that the planet itself is being shaped, possibly catastrophically, by our species’ methods of valuing, achieving, exporting and enjoying modernity’s fruits. What happens when everyone, everywhere aspires to modern freedom and comfort? What are the limits and alternatives to modernity? And how can we (audience, citizen, public, consumer, user, maker, species) decide what collective action is needed, and how do we know? Here, television lines up alongside other planetary communication systems (science, fiction, publishing, the press, social media) as both source of and solution to the problem: the very medium that brought us together in pursuit of the modern is – we must hope – the means by which we can learn its limits.

Popular broadcast television has been followed in turn by computational (digital) and networked (internet) forms, including apps, platforms and social media where, once again, the most important invention is not so much the technology, mind-boggling though that can seem, but the user, the metaphoric point of intelligibility and anxiety, around which technology, institution, and cultural function cohere. The user is routinely theorized as just another Homo economicus, that “self-contained globule of desire” (Veblen, 1919: 73) beloved of equilibrium economics, although “the user” (unlike “the audience”) is endowed with agency or expertise to produce as well as to consume. But this abstract figure (like the audience) is still only significant in the aggregate. Users attract the usual aura of risk, danger and attractiveness when they go viral. Popularity (the “fiction” of group scale) drives the system, not individual behavior or even technological change.

Whether user-based media count as “television,” or as something new, depends on whether the current decentralized, user-led but corporately globalized system of digital-mobile-internet connectivity is accepted as part of modernity, or as evidence of its demise. Television’s successes and failures will tell us much about the prospects for modern life in the global era.

“Round Up the Usual Subjects”?

One way of tackling a multivalent knowledge terrain would be to “round up the usual suspects” (Casablanca, 1942), not to constitute an object but a field of study. An iconic example of a literature review that constituted a new epistemological field is Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s anthropological survey of 164 different concepts of “culture” (1952). Since I’m searching for television’s cultural function, this seems a good place to start. Their effort to pin down what culture might mean in nature (as it were; i.e. not just in theory) was conducted in the post-World War 2 geostrategic context, just as television took off, where the newly dominant world power – the pax Americana – pursued global goals that were mutually incommensurable:

• egalitarian ideals (freedom for all);
• industrial ambitions (world markets);
• imperial responsibilities (world order).

US foreign policy operated across these contradictory objectives partly by trying to systematize knowledge of the cultures they encountered (a task of national intelligence that is still discernible in the CIA’s annual World Factbook),¹ partly by funding new transnational institutions (the UN, Peace Corps, CIA), and partly by fictionalizing the tensions involved and projecting them into imaginary worlds for this planet’s entertainment market, all the way from warmongering Casablanca to a prolonged reflection on the possibilities – philosophical rather than imperial – of non-lethal encounters with diverse others, as explored in Star Trek (Pearson and Davies, 2002: para. 10).²

Determining the “nature of culture” had been a perennial but parochial question for cultural critics for a century or more. It was made more urgent and more abstract by the times, because culture was not simply custom or national heritage but “live:” culture had played its part in totalitarian politics; culture was a constitutional issue for newly liberated, oppressed and self-determining groups; culture needed to be handled by policymakers, governors and occupation forces employed by the US Government, rendering it at once a universal experience and a source of local controversy. How should America behave in Europe, the Middle and Far East, and toward the so-called second world (Communist bloc) and third world (decolonizing and developing countries)? This question was political and strategic, of course, but it was also a question of culture: how far to rely upon, to respect or seek to change, the many conflicting cultures emerging from total war; and how far to continue to rely upon the informal entertainment market for strategic purposes, as had occurred systematically, and effectively, in “the Hollywood War” (Viotte, 2013).

Deciding what counts as culture could no longer be determined by magisterial readings, as had been the trend in European high literary and art criticism (e.g. Arnold, Ruskin, Burckhardt, Pater), whose purpose was to train discriminating judgement, especially among governing classes (Quiller-Couch, 1920), and whose values were thought to apply everywhere, at least by advocates. In a postwar, democratizing, pluralist, mixed economy, culture’s definition needed ...