Reading Into Cultural Studies

Martin Barker, Anne Beezer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134922840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

"Reading Into Cultural Studies" revisits a selection of key texts central to the formation of cultural studies as a discipline and as a project. These texts address questions of power, ideology and the possibilities and limits of resistance. Each of the eleven essays in the collection renews an early study in one area of cultural investigation, bringing such seminal texts as "Subculture" by Dick Hebdige, "Loving With a Vengeance" by Tania Modleski and "Bond and Beyond" by Tony Bennett back to the centre of attention, However the essays are not purely celebratory. Each study is critically examined in a number of ways - for its research strategy, its implicit theories of power and ideology, for the empirical evidence it draws on and its conceptual framework. Together, the essays provide an introduction to some of the central debates and issues in cultural studies.

Chapter 1
Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination

Susan Emanuel

Into the midst of the 1980s academic debate about popular media forms and the concurrent political debate about American cultural imperialism came a book from Holland about the paradigmatic series in both discourses, Dallas, which was by then successfully exported to ninety countries, and on its way to becoming the common currency of global television. In fact some would say that familiarity with the Ewings was virtually the only thing that viewers round the world had in common. But how could something so quintessentially American cross wide cultural chasms? While American communications experts used a content analysis of Dallas to take the temperature of the contemporary United States, others began to investigate how non-American viewers made sense of it.

Ien Ang, a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, has close ties to British cultural studies, and also affinity with both continental theory and American research in communications. Her study, published in Britain in 1985, was seminal in combining empirical work on viewer responses to the series with theoretical analyses grounded in key debates in cultural studies, keyworded in the titles of her four chapters: (1) reality and fiction; (2) the melodramatic imagination; (3) the ideology of mass culture; (4) feminism.

The preoccupation with television fiction succeeded an earlier period in cultural studies in which informational television was the object of study; news, current affairs, documentary are the objects of earlier publications by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Glasgow Media Group. There was a sense, by the early 1980s, that cultural studies scholars were finally acknowledging their own participation in the pleasures offered by the mass media; the issue became whether such forms could be studied by scholars without turning into rationalisations of their own guilty pleasures. There was a swing from the disdain of mass culture which had coloured the Frankfurt School position to its opposite, the populism of a ‘semiotic democracy’.

The empirical base of Ang’s book are the 42 letters she received in response to a small advertisement placed in a Dutch women’s magazine: ‘I like watching the TV serial Dallas, but often get odd reactions to it. Would anyone like to write and tell me why you like watching it too, or dislike it? I should like to assimilate these reactions in my university thesis. Please write to…’ (p. 10). Ang did not claim that this small sample was representative of even Dutch women’s reaction to this ‘present from a distant uncle in America’ (p. 24). Her sights are trained on the relation between pleasure and ideology, a topic long repressed in leftist thought. Her book more than any other signalled an important shift in critical theory from analysis of texts to a study of the audience, a shift in the intellectual paradigm away from a functionalist approach towards pleasure and towards an analysis of why and how audiences take pleasure from popular culture, and how that pleasure relates to ideology.

Like David Morley’s study of groups watching the BBC current affairs magazine Nationwide (see Chapter 8), Watching Dallas attempts to reconcile a structuralist perspective with the ‘uses and gratifications’ school of communications studies. As she put it in her Introduction: ‘… Pleasure must be conceived of as not so much the automatic result of some “satisfaction of needs”, but rather as the effect of a certain productivity of a cultural artefact’ (pp. 10–11). What makes Watching Dallas a key text in cultural studies is her success in rescuing critical theory from various impasses it had reached in the preceding decade— for example, the idea that mass culture merely mystifies, that texts determine their readings, that popular fictions aimed at female audiences are irredeemably patriarchal, and so forth—while remaining aware of her own status as a feminist and an intellectual, and of the political context of television studies.

What I propose to do is to look at Ang’s sources, her key concepts, and her influences on later work in the light of the four chapter headings she uses. I will go on to comment on her methodology, and on critiques of reception studies, a field which her book helped to inaugurate.

REALITY AND FICTION

In this section, which considers Dallas as television entertainment and as a text with identificatory mechanisms which obviously succeed in binding Dutch (and even more sociologically remote) viewers into the world of J.R. and Sue Ellen, Pamela and Bobby Ewing, Ang poses the question of how a serial which is on so many levels patently fantastic can nevertheless maintain the realistic illusion. Film theory had for years been elaborating a theory of classical realism (derived from the narrational paradigm of the novel) to show how spectators are bound into, and manipulated by, texts. The construction of an illusory reality, this theory argued, produced a comfortable, transparent access for the viewer into the narrative. S/he would be borne away on the ideological stream through which the narrative craft moved—in the case of Dallas, presumably, the white waters of capitalist relations. By the time of Ang’s book, the notion of an all-embracing classical realism had been discredited. (In one of many useful footnotes, she refers to the most trenchant critiques of that theory.)

The world of Dallas is patently not realistic to its viewers; they are well aware of its fictional excesses. But does that mean they are distanced from the values and ideas embedded in it? Ang cuts through this contradiction between reality and fiction, using the analytic distinction between denotation and connotation to demonstrate that Dallas does not have empirical but has psychological reality. One of her breakthroughs is to identify a level of understanding she calls ‘emotional realism’, a subjective experience of the world which may be more akin to the effect of myth. She then turns to Raymond Williams’s idea of a ‘structure of feeling’, but now applied not to a society but to a genre, and concludes that ‘at least for these fans, it is a sense of emotional realism that appeals to them. More specifically, this realism has to do with the recognition of a tragic structure of feeling, which is felt as “real” and which makes sense for these viewers’ (p. 87). It arouses our awareness that happiness is precarious, that even the most perfect romance will end in tears. But Ang believes that our indulgence in oversized feelings is a game played with reality, not an escape into fantasy. Her application of the slippery idea of structure of feeling to a television genre became one of the more controversial aspects of her book, because of the essentialism it implies.

A number of cross-cultural audience studies have since been done comparing Dallas with domestically produced serials, which find that audiences tend to judge the latter more in terms of realism. What the Dallas formula offers, then, is perhaps primordial story material which is articulated in such a way as to be open to multiple levels of understanding and emotionality (cf. Katz and Liebes).

THE MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION

Ang classifies Dallas generically as a ‘prime time soap opera’: like the daytime serials in its open-ended narrative, but like film melodrama (the woman’s picture of the 1940s and 1950s) in its glossy visual style and sensational plot developments. Ang’s book is part of the critical rehabilitation of melodrama as a mode of popular fiction which in its strong emotional appeal and moral dualism often underlies seemingly masculine genres like the Western and adventure films. It is the principal vehicle for the tragic structure of feeling in contemporary culture.

The theoretical analysis of film melodrama in Britain was substantial in the 1970s, notable for seminal essays by Laura Mulvey and Thomas Elsaesser, originally printed in Movie and Monogram respectively. Melodrama was the genre in which the crossover from film to television was most closely examined, and became a test case for the applicability of film theory to television studies. (Work on film melodrama would later be collected by Christine Gledhill in Home is Where the Heart Is, and she consistently argues for the different specificities of film and television melodrama.)

Soap opera was quickly ‘colonised’ by feminist critics moving into the study of popular television. In the USA and France there had been little-known pioneering essays on television melodrama, by David Thorburn and Jean-Marie Piemme respectively. A number of British serials beginning with Coronation Street had been the subject of monographs by people in the cultural studies movement, but much of the work did not specify the differences in form between these serials and prime-time soaps.

Ang takes from film analysis of melodrama such features of her discussion of Dallas as the use of metaphor (alcoholism, illness), the centrality of family relationships (Gillian Swanson’s Lévi-Straussian analysis of Dallas made the family a key binary term), and the ironic use of mise-en-scène. ‘The sun-drenched prairie around Southfork, the luxurious swimming pool, the tall, spacious office buildings, the chic restaurants and the elegant women and handsome men—they seem rather to belong to the optimistic image world of advertising, an optimism that does not fit in with the pessimistic world of soap opera, so that the misc-en-scène in itself produces a chronic contradiction’ (p. 78). A similar claim has been made for Hollywood directors of 1950s melodrama like Douglas Sirk.

From Tania Modleski, who studied women’s fantasies in fiction, Ang takes the prominence of the hermeneutic code in soap operas, with their deferral of meaning from episode to episode (Dallas turned the cliffhanger into a cliché), and their invitation to the viewer to shift identification from character to character. But Ang parts company with Modleski’s verdict (and that of others who have been depressed by women’s taste for melodrama) that this mode ends up belittling the significance of the individual life. Counters Ang: ‘The melodramatic imagination is therefore the expression of a refusal, or inability, to accept insignificant everyday life as banal and meaningless, and is born of a vague, inarticulate, dissatisfaction with existence here and now’ (p. 79). Her humility in explaining the affirmation it does offer is founded in her respondents’ own hesitant statements, such as ‘I find it really difficult to state exactly why I like Dallas.’ It may be difficult to account rationally for why you watch it, but that does not make it an escape from daily life, but the exercise of the ‘melodramatic imagination’, a term first used by the literary critic Peter Brooks (1976). Unlike him—and most of the film theorists I have mentioned—Ang does not draw on psychoanalysis to explain pleasure.

THE IDEOLOGY OF MASS CULTURE

Ang’s approach to her respondents’ letters is that of a ‘symptomatic reading’, meaning she treats their responses as symptoms of underlying ideologies. In a symptomatic reading, therefore, she must also account for some viewers’ vehement dislike for the series. She ascribes this boredom and/or irritation to the prevalence of an ideology of mass culture (particularly in Europe) which alleges that national cultures are being swamped by commercial American ‘trash’. In a section called ‘Hating Dallas’, she quotes responses like ‘I find it a typical American programme, simple and commercial, role-affirming, deceitful. The thing so many American programmes revolve around is money and sensation’ (p. 91). Commercial series like Dallas get labelled as ‘bad objects’, in comparison to which respectable, and supposedly more artistic, culture seems reassuringly superior. In a notorious speech to a gathering of intellectuals in Paris in 1983, the French culture minister made Dallas the Medusa’s head of American media imperialism; the television critic of the Financial Times put ‘wall-to-wall Dallas’ in the subtitle of a glum book on the future of television. The premise was that Dallas was carrying American and capitalist ideology into societies whose indigenous values bore no relation to those of mythological Texas.

There are a variety of defences against the threat perceived in mass culture. Ang was one of the first to note that it became socially acceptable to view ‘bad objects’ if one maintained a suitably ironical attitude to them. (This irony was later associated with Dynasty, which seemed to invite it.) As a person of taste, you can feel superior to other people who fall for them. A second defence is populism, the appeal to commonsense ideas like the arbitrariness of taste, which thumbs its nose at the ideology of mass culture. As she later noted in an article with Morley: ‘If Hollywood ever colonized the subconscious of postwar Europe then it was with the knowing complicity of a large number of Europeans’ (Ang and Morley 1989:140). She finds that hierarchies of taste had been so internalised that even those who liked Dallas apologised for the fact. High and popular art are in a dialectical relation with each other. Although insufficiently developed, her defence of the popular aesthetic (inspired by Pierre Bourdieu) is that it is more pluralist and open than the high art aesthetic. It also puts pleasure—not some formal or moral purity—at the centre. This line of thought has been taken even further in the work of John Fiske, who argues that people re-shape mass media materials to resist dominant ideology with almost unlimited latitude.

Ang cautions against this ideology of mass culture as an ivory tower disposition, as have many European media scholars who have taken up her work, looking at the dissemination of American serials in their native countries. Kim Schrøder, who has studied the reception of Dynasty in Denmark, is one of a number of scholars trying to redefine aesthetic quality in a non-hierarchical way, in order for television studies to have an impact on both schooling (where the curriculum is still dominated by high culture criteria) and on government policy (‘Quality’ appears in the title of the British White Paper on broadcasting, where it is assumed to mean diversity of provision). Schrøder’s model uses taste-related categories, intrinsic not to the text but to the experience of it, and which are relative, avoiding the pit...