Rerun Nation

How Repeats Invented American Television

Derek Kompare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135877811
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Rerun Nation is a fascinating approach to television history and theory through the ubiquitous yet overlooked phenomenon of reruns. Kompare covers both historical and conceptual ground, weaving together a refresher course in the history of television with a critical analysis of how reruns have shaped the cultural, economic, and legal terrains of American television. Given the expanding use of past media texts not only in the United States, but also in virtually every media-rich society, this book addresses a critical facet of everyday life.

1
Industrializing Culture: The Regime of Repetition in the United States 1790–1920

Characterized less and less, then, by its organization into two distinct realms, that of manufacture and that of distribution, the nineteenth-century economy slowly began to take on the appearance of a single system of endless circulation.¹

Historians have long addressed the importance of industrialization to the nascent United States of America in the nineteenth century. Americans were a socially disparate people, spread over an immense, wilderness-filled space, yet national cultures were still effectively promulgated over the Republic's first century. While significant points of conflict simmered and boiled over at critical junctures (e.g., the moral and political standoffs that culminated in the Civil War, the ongoing war between capital and labor, the virtual extermination of the continent's original inhabitants, and the anxieties over immigration), a particular image of “America” still coalesced during this period, an image repeated in millions of mass-produced, mass-distributed cultural commodities ranging from dinnerware to sheet music. This image centered largely on the dyad of home and frontier: the reproduction of domesticity on alien terrain. “America,” as circulated through this mass-produced image, was a nation of (white) settlers building communities and sharing in the bonds of Home and Property. The simplicity of this image amplified its appeal, both in the United States and abroad (to actual or would-be immigrants), and its industrialized production seemed to offer voluminous evidence of its veracity. See, it suggested, America really is about turning the wilderness into home, reproducing the familial (and the familiar) in a New World. It is striking that this image, its visibility exponentially amplified through industrial repetition, prophecies the comforting characters, settings, and narratives of so many twentieth-century television reruns.

This opening chapter is concerned with the industrial and cultural roots of television reruns in nineteenth and early twentieth century mass-produced culture. Although, as Chapter 3 will examine, reruns appeared to be a novel concept to the television industry of the 1950s, the cultural, industrial, and legal frameworks of such mediated repetition were laid throughout the previous 150 years. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, secular culture, particularly in the United States, became truly “mass” in scale for the first time in human history, propelled by industrial capitalism, high technology, and tumultuous social shifts (e.g., the Civil War; the emancipation of slaves; waves of immigration; rapid urban growth; rising intellectual challenges to capitalism; the standardization of formal education; and the formation of industrialized working, middle, and upper classes). These factors, and others, helped shape repetition as a major principle of the industrial production of culture; that is, as a set of widely-held perceptions and practices that sustained the cultural presence of mass-produced cultural products, or returned them to the culture, instead of allowing them to fade into obscurity. Industrial repetition became a taken-for-granted approach to cultural production over the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, a way of thinking that stabilized particular cultural genres, forms, styles, and themes, and marginalized alternative modes of cultural production.

The very idea of culture was industrialized to an unprecedented degree during this period. In addition to the burgeoning commercial trade in mass-produced cultural objects, key social institutions increasingly adopted an industrial approach to the production of cultured citizens, utilizing modern practices of standardization, discrimination, and reproduction. For example, the concept of a “great books”-oriented English curriculum was promulgated in American secondary education in the last quarter of the nineteenth century largely as a form of social distinction: a mechanism with which to police access to the elite colleges.² The publishers who manufactured various “libraries” of “great books” facilitated this goal: all the “necessary” works of English literature made available in a standardized commodity form, sometimes complete with matching shelves. This highly organized social reproduction had largely been achieved through the mass reproduction of culture. Despite the noise and fleeting significance generally attributed to mass-produced culture by most of its critics over the past two centuries, the massive scale of its system of production has fostered a cultural terrain in which particular texts, genres, and themes have a longer and broader presence in the popular consciousness than was previously possible.

Culture became a form of renewable economic and cultural capital in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a status reached through the confluence of technological, legal, economic, and cultural forces. Three decisive factors stand out in this history. First, new technologies were developed and adapted to emerging forms of commodity production. Various printing technologies (e.g., stereotyping) greatly facilitated the extended commodification of existing works, reducing the labor and time required for reproduction. At the same time, the railroad enabled a broader, timelier geographical distribution of products, a key factor in the development and maintenance of a national culture across the expanse of the United States. Second, the complex and dynamic legal principle of copyright formalized the economic value of the cultural work, solidifying its status as capital, and assuaging the fears of entrepreneurial cultural producers and reproducers. Articles, stories, books, illustrations, musical compositions, films and audio recordings were all granted copyright protection in the United States by 1909, protecting their owners from piracy, and facilitating their proprietary reproduction. Third, the creation and expansion of markets for cultural works, and the development of new, reproducible forms and practices to serve them, greatly shaped the experience of industrialized culture for millions of readers, viewers, and listeners. Taken together, these forces had naturalized the products of industrialized cultural repetition by the early twentieth century.

These technologies and practices of repetition developed in the industrialization of two broad media forms between the 1790s and 1920s: print media (book publishing, music publishing, and newspaper content syndication), and audiovisual media (audio recording and film). While the works produced by these industries differed in significant ways, they shared key technologies; legal protections; production, distribution, and consumption practices; and even some aesthetic principles. Most critically, each industry was radically altered by industrialized cultural repetition: by successfully managing the mass reproduction and circulation of cultural works over space and time. I will explore these industries in a rough chronological order in this chapter (in keeping with the rest of the book), but divided into the broad areas of print and audiovisual media. They are separated here in order to distinguish the impact of each on the immediate cultural terrain of the twentieth century.

Since this is a book about television, the overview of earlier cultural production presented here is, by necessity, brief. More thorough investigations, from scholars more adept than I, can be found in the works I have consulted. This limited foray is only intended to broadly explore how the material and conceptual practices of mass, industrialized culture coalesced between the 1790s and 1920s, enabling the regime of repetition, and, ultimately, the culture and industry of television reruns.

Print Media

The eighteenth century ended not only with epochal political revolutions in Europe and North America, but also with the equally critical acceleration of industrialized capitalism. The nineteenth century would see the culmination of each of these processes, and their application to the production of culture. New modes of production (involving both the organization of labor and the impact of new technologies), new economic and legal concepts (statutory copyright protection, royalties, trade associations, etc.), new markets for commodities (not only larger numbers, but greater cultural, geographical, and social diversity), and new methods of marketing developed during this period. Economic historian Alfred P. Chandler notes that these innovations fueled the shift of the American economy away from single-owner enterprises and towards modern managerial capitalism, as “the visible hand of management replaced the invisible hand of market forces where and when new technology and expanded markets permitted a historically unprecedented high volume and speed of materials through the processes of production and distribution.”³

All of these changes factored into the development of the publishing industry,⁴ which grew from an intellectually substantial, if culturally and socially limited, creative and political endeavor, to become the center of mass-produced cultural expression. From its European inception in the fifteenth century through most of the eighteenth century, publishing had been a time-consuming, expensive process with little profit for publishers and authors. Indeed, authors themselves still typically paid most of the production costs of publication in the 1790s.⁵ However, changes in the organization and technologies of printing prompted an expansion of the scope of the publishing industry in the nineteenth century. As Ronald J. Zboray notes in his study of antebellum publishing in the United States, publication production began to be reorganized away from skills-intensive artisanal modes and toward more rationalized modes oriented around new technologies, “a reorganization that for the most part destroyed traditional work rhythms and relationships.”⁶ While labor was displaced because of these changes (and not for the last time), publishers reaped the benefits of much more efficient production processes, enabling faster production, and more standardized copies.

The most critical new production components were new forms of type that not only streamlined the printing process, but also represented fixed capital for their owners. With the right type, publications could be more easily reprinted, reducing or eliminating the labor necessary for resetting text on the press. Less expensive but more durable metal typefaces first became available to U.S. music publishers in the 1790s, greatly facilitating the production of “songsters,” widely popular and affordable collections of songs (lyrics and, in some cases, musical notation). Andrew and Daniel Wright's The American Musical Miscellany, a three-hundred-page collection of 111 songs, was published in 1798 with this new type; by 1825, over 400 such songsters had been published (often in several editions) in the United States.⁷ While such typefaces helped standardize the look and production of published works, an arguably more significant process was developed during the 1830s and 1840s whereby entire typesets could be preserved on sets of metal plates (instead of as collections of individual letters). We are familiar with the term for this process today—stereotyping—and its contemporary meaning stems from its earlier utility, i.e., as a shortcut to textual production. Prior to this time, books, articles, and musical compositions only generally existed through one print run, and had to be completely reassembled for subsequent production; stereotyping enabled publishers to preserve entire typesets for later reproduction. Accordingly, the stereotype plates themselves thus became significant physical assets: commodities sought and acquired by nineteenth-century publishers in much the same way rights to extant media properties are bought and sold today. As Russell Sanjek states in his history of the U.S. music industry, by the 1850s, “[a] publisher's true financial worth was best judged by the number of plates he owned, and they were the most important element in the acquisition of a music house going out of business or in the disposition of an estate left by a music publisher.”⁸

While stereotyping made the reproduction of text more efficient, lithography facilitated the reproduction of illustrations. In early lithography, images were indelibly drawn on a slab of limestone, which was then used to press highly detailed copies, fostering the trade in mass-produced illustrations as decorative prints, book illustrations, and sheet music covers. Like the printed word or musical composition, these reproduced images helped promote particular, standardized visions of American life to more, and more geographically dispersed, readers, fostering a national...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction and Acknowledgments
• 1. Industrializing Culture: The Regime of Repetition in the United States, 1790–1920.
• 2. Transcribed Adventures: Radio and the Recording
• 3. (R): Film on Early Television
• 4. Familiarity Breeds Content: Reconfiguring Television in the 1960s and 1970s
• 5. Our Television Heritage: Reconceiving Past Television
• 6. Old Wine in New Bottles: Broadcast Rerun Syndication since the 1980s
• 7. TV Land: Cable and Satellite as Boutique Television
• 8. Acquisitive Repetition: Home Video and the Television Heritage
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index