Tele-ology

Studies in Television

John Hartley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134916542
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Teleology brings together John Hartley's work on television. The book draws on current critical theory in cultural studies to develop a wide-ranging and thought-provoking view of television broadcasting in Britain, Australia and the USA.
Neighbours, Hancock's Half Hour, Dallas, Monty Python, Miami Vice, Beverly Hillbillies and Bonanza are among the examples of TV art that are discussed in Hartley's exploration of cultural politics. He takes in TV truth and propaganda; populism in the news; mythologies of the audience; TV drama as a `photopoetic' genre in the tradition of Shakespeare; Kylie Minogue, Madonna and gardening shows.

Part I
Television theory

Chapter 1
Tele-ology

Readers of this book may be familiar with the term ‘teleology’ as a theological or philosophical concept. It denotes the doctrine of final causes, as in the Day of Judgement, which (it is said) won’t happen till the end of human history, but which is nevertheless deemed to explain retrospectively all that has gone before. Teleology is cause after the event, a doctrine of knowledge with which neither science nor TV executives are very comfortable. However, whatever scientists might like to think, television executives are right to feel uncomfortable; for them the final cause is after the event, the day of judgement does determine every action they take. In deference to the poor benighted television executive, then, and taking last things first, I open Tele-ology with a quotation from the Dies irae (‘day of wrath’) of the Requiem Mass:

Judex ergo cum sedebit	When therefore the judge takes his seat
Quidquid latet apparebit,	Whatever is hidden will reveal itself,
Nil inultum remanebit.	Nothing will remain unavenged.

The biggest and brassiest rendition of this excerpt must be that of Hector Berlioz, so let it play in the background, TV-style, while I point out that for TV executives there are indeed judges who take their seats every day and night and who reveal to themselves what is hidden inside that TV screen; the audience sits in judgement over all the economic wheeling and dealing, the artistic blood, sweat, tears and compromises that have led up to this one moment. If all’s well that ends well, then everyone is blissful, but if not, nothing remains unavenged for long; shows are thrown into the abyss, executives are fired (though not literally these days), whole TV channels lose their livelihood. Teleology is not a doctrine of foregone conclusions; some shows are damned and some are saved, but no-one knows which is which until after they’re screened.

We, the public, are the final cause whose judgement determines the very survival of the TV executive and the entire world of television. In front of such judges, it is now in fact the case that:

Mors stupebit et natura	Death and nature shall be astonished
Cum resurget creatura	When all creation rises again
Judicanti responsura.	To answer to the judge.

Television, the medium of popular entertainment, does nothing less than recreate the world of nature, and of death too, in both actuality and fiction, for our astonishment, for us to judge.

Tele-ology is a set of essays on television as a cultural, aesthetic, political, textual, industrialized medium. Its aim is not to sit in judgement over television, but to contribute to television studies (tele-logos), an academic discipline which does not in fact exist, and which Aristotle, who first pondered such matters, would have been hard put to classify into any of his classical branches of knowledge; in Greek, telelogos might mean distant-writing or distant-truth, which is an agreeable metaphor for TV if you’re already familiar with it, but not one that would conjure up to an uninitiated Athenian the image of a little black box of Japanese manufacture that lights up the corner of several billion living rooms around the world. So, for the moment, since there’s no such thing as television studies, this is a contribution to the un-discipline of tele-ology.

As befits its status it is not a standard academic study; it makes no attempt to present a comprehensive survey of all published studies of television, though a surprising number of these exist; it does not develop a linear argument about one specific topic in the field; and it does not confine itself to traditional academic styles of writing. Instead of comprehensive linearity and plain style, these essays offer polemic, rhetoric and an approach that works on rather than through contemporary critical theory, in an attempt to provoke new ways of thinking about an all too familiar cultural phenomenon.

The essays have appeared over a period of a decade in a variety of journals, books and magazines, many of which were hard to get hold of at the time, never mind later on. Their publication was dispersed over three continents and over several different types of writing—some were intended as scholarly papers, some as topical criticism, while others were addressed to specific readerships, from independent filmmakers to English teachers. However, partly because they do range across time, space and genre, they represent an approach to television that is appropriate both to the peculiarities of the medium itself and to the need for a flexible and responsive analytical apparatus by means of which some sense can be made of it. At the very least I can take comfort in the fact that the chapters that follow are like television shows that were tried out on a minority channel before getting the chance to be seen by a wider audience; re-runs yes, but new to some readers, and for others, repackaged into what tactful TV announcers call a second chance…

It follows that the development of an argument about television in Tele-ology is not one of linear progression across a known countryside in pursuit of a predetermined quarry. The relationship between chapters might better be seen as something like that between individual floes in an icefield; they’re connected but independent. The explorer will find that it’s quite easy to jump from one to the next, but sometimes they may look very similar in appearance. A position arrived at in one paper forms the starting point for another, though sometimes the direction of progress may not be obvious. Matter that is dealt with in one context may need reiterating in another, and the same material may be put to different uses, just as a floe might rotate after one has landed on it, causing a different orientation to the landscape to be established. Needless to say, this approach does leave a fair amount of work to the reader; progress towards landmarks may be swift, or it may necessitate some agile leaps, or it may not be seen as progress at all. Certainly the book as a whole does not lead the reader by the nose towards a teleological final cause; much of what appears here was written in an exploratory, experimental mode, without the least suspicion that the final point of arrival would be somewhere in the vicinity of Kylie Minogue.

INTERVENTION ANALYSIS

While the landscape may change and the route taken might be discontinuous, it is possible to suggest that more than mere leaps of faith link the various essays in this book. As a whole, it is dedicated to what may be termed ‘intervention analysis’. That is, integral to it is the contribution its individual parts might make to the field of study that they have helped to constitute. Intervention analysis seeks not only to describe and explain existing dispositions of knowledge, but also to change them. This is an inescapable aspect of these studies because, at the time I embarked upon them in the mid-1970s, an adequate approach to television as a textual-cultural object of study was not fully developed within existing critical discourses, so it had to be constructed out of them. In particular, a textual-formal (semiotic) and socio-political (cultural) approach to television as an instance of cultural production within the context of contemporary, urban, democratic popular culture is constructed out of materials borrowed variously from linguistics, anthropology, literary theory and criticism, sociology, political theory and journalism, as well as certain metadiscourses like structuralism (and its intellectual successors), semiotics and cultural studies. Out of such rich resources what I hope is a useful and accessible theoretical model of television is constructed, in which full account is taken of its textuality, while simultaneously that textuality is seen not merely as a formal apparatus but as grounded in a cultural context which may determine what any given text might mean.

While meaning may easily be determined by cultural contexts, it is far less easily determined by cultural analysts. However, there is one aspect of its determination which informs much of my work and which is at least easily stated: the determination of meaning is a creative act performed by readers, not by texts or contexts as such. The so-called consumers of meanings cannot be thought of as passive or as powerless. On the contrary, everyone performs creative critical work in relation to popular textual forms. This book is therefore dedicated to making the existing practices of reading and understanding television better informed, less unselfconscious and more systematic. It does not determine meanings on behalf of an incapacitated audience, but it does develop readings which are intended to intervene in the way people might want to watch television. Its perspective is that of the audience; it claims no special knowledge of technical or production processes, and does not explain television’s cultural form by reference to the industry’s point of view. Nor does it explain audience practices by reference to psychological or behavioural criteria. Since the act of reading cannot be observed directly, the practice of reading television is not susceptible to explanation by scientific means, unless one wishes to propose a modification of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that an observer can determine the position or the velocity of subatomic particles, but not both at once. Similarly, the cultural ‘scientist’ can observe people watching television or watch television, but not both at once. Audience practices and textual phenomena can be isolated and described, but what happens when they fuse together cannot be observed without changing the circumstances of fusion. This is a position tele-ology shares with contemporary theoretical physics.

Unlike theoretical physics, however, tele-ology asserts that there is a position beyond the uncertainty principle to which readers can go, equipped with critical discourse, in order to perform their own acts of creation. To understand the act of reading one must do it, and doing it is creative of new meanings. Understanding a cultural practice by doing it is intervention analysis, and understanding the cultural practice of reading television is what the analysis herein seeks to do.

The first intervention that needs to be made is to justify (i.e. construct) television as an object worthy of study as a textual-cultural phenomenon. However, using textual and cultural theory to account for a medium which is all too often ignored or undervalued by the most influential theorists, also means intervening in intellectual culture in defence of popular representations. Thus TV can be used to test textual and cultural theories just as they can be used to understand popular TV.

The defence of the popular is strategically important in certain contexts, but it has to be set within limits, too. For instance, racist and sexist attitudes are undoubtedly ‘popular’ in one sense of the word, but they are not to be defended for that reason. Similarly, intervention analysis cannot proceed on the Popeian assumption that ‘whatever is, is right’, simply asserting that anything with a large audience is OK because ipso facto it must be popular, and even if its ideology is unspeakable, its mode of address demeaning and its production values woeful, well, that’s OK too because the audience is free to negotiate with it or resist it. Such an approach is unable to conclude for itself what is worth defending and what needs to be criticized. Intervention analysis certainly needs to take popular television more or less as it finds it, without high-culture fastidiousness or right-on political squeamishness, but it needs to intervene in the media, and in the production of popular knowledges about them, to show where aesthetic or political critique is appropriate to popular representations; it needs to analyse television in order to be clear about what is worth defending and why. The defence of the popular is not the same thing as populism, for it seeks not to follow and trade on but to shape and invigorate what Trevor Griffiths has called ‘the popular imagination’, in an enterprise which is perhaps best thought of as a dialogue with the popular.

Intervention analysis is not confined to critical or scholarly writing; it is also conducted on the margins of popular television by creative producers working with (and against) the medium itself. Hence avant-garde art and independent production are by definition outside the domain of the popular, but still they have something to offer it, both aesthetically and in the way they organize the relations between textmaker and audience (i.e. politically). However, neither radical production nor critical theory can achieve their full explanatory leverage without taking account of what is going on within the domain of popular representations. It still amazes me that many people who embark on the formal study of the media, or who make video, or who comment on television in society, are not only relatively ignorant of mainstream television, but seem to regard the whole of popular culture as something to avoid like the plague. Instead of such fear of contamination, I’d argue for an understanding that includes a thorough knowledge of popular television in its own terms, if only to be better equipped to challenge or change it.

Intervention analysis can thus be seen as a strategy for interrogating various centres, whether intellectual, aesthetic or political, from their margins, seeking to interconnect the domains on whose margins the analysis stands, but not, be it said, to propose a new centre in opposition to those observed and criticized. In other words, the resources from which a critical discourse about popular television can be created, including radical politics, critical theory, avant-garde art and independent production, are marginal to the mainstream practices of popular culture, but their value consists in their marginality—and so it is with this book.

One of the margins upon which it stands is the theoretical one between discourse and reality. The position adopted is precarious—an uneasy balancing act with one foot on a floe called reality and one on a floe called discourse, with nothing more to connect them than the muscular energy of the analyst, whose intervention is always jeopardized by the fact that the two floes are always drifting apart as well as touching. Preoccupied with keeping one’s feet together in conditions where any observer can see that sooner or later there’s going to be a nasty accident is the occupational hazard of the intervention analyst. But such an undig-nified stance may be instructive. Choosing to avoid the customary scholarly practice of grounding one’s theory firmly, and choosing instead to go out on a limb, is a risky enterprise. Even now I can feel my legs beginning to drift apart on the shaky grounds of this slippery metaphor. But it is worth the risk, if only for the amusement and edification of the onlooker, who will be able to tell where the ice is thin simply by watching what happens when I skate on it.

In common with all those who had the ground taken from under their feet by the structuralist enterprise, I was unsettled but thrilled by the discovery of the constructed nature of the real. However, it soon became clear that it is equally important to hang on to the material reality of the resulting constructions. Just as in contemporary physics subatomic particles (matter) are also waves (non-material), so in the discursive realm it is necessary to imagine reality as material (beyond discourse) and as textual (produced by discourse) at one and the same time. For instance, news is a discursive construction of the real, but its texts are themselves real and can be used to reconstruct extra-discursive reality, most obviously on spectacular or charismatic occasions, like the bombing of Tripoli to coincide with US prime-time, or the staging of media events, from elections to the America’s Cup.

Given this stance in relation to discourse and reality, the methodologi-cal implications are that in this book evidence takes the form of texts which can be recovered and scrutinized; discourse in real, material form. For instance, ‘the audience’ is accepted as evidence not in the form of individual behaviour (except where such form is itself textual, as in behaviour which is statistically reduced to the textual form of ratings), but in the form of real discursive constructions which are produced and circulated for various purposes by various agencies. The ‘text’ that constitutes the object of study for tele-ology is thus not confined to what is on the screen, but includes the discourse of television wherever it is deployed. And, as I hope will become clear from some of the essays in this book, one of the more weird and wonderful fictional creations associated with popular television is not to be found on...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: TELEVISION THEORY
• PART II: TRUTH WARS
• PART III: PAEDOCRACY
• PART IV: PHOTOPOETICS
• PART V: THE ART OF TELEVISION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY