Professional Documents
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TV Through The Looking Glass
TV Through The Looking Glass
Thomas Elsaesser
To cite this article: Thomas Elsaesser (1992) TV through the looking glass, Quarterly Review of
Film & Video, 14:1-2, 5-27, DOI: 10.1080/10509209209361393
Article views: 51
THOMAS ELSAESSER is Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and Chair of the Department of Film and
Television Studies. He is the author of New German Cinema: A History (Rutgers, 1989), and editor of Early
Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (BFI, 1990).
5
6 T. Elsaesser
The looking-glass effect thus has two sides: television in love with television,
and supremely confident of itself as 'cultural form/ and television as a vernacular
into which everything can be translated, a paradoxical 'global demotic' which can
make much of our literary culture appear a mere mandarin ideolect. And precisely
because television now has its own self-sufficiency as a mode and a textuality, it in
turn not only changes the balance of power across the media as a whole, but brings
into being a new 'materiality.' This is what, among other things, I take to be the
sense of a passage by Fredric Jameson:
It is clear that culture itself is one of those things whose fundamental materiality is now for
us not merely evident, but inescapable. This has, however, been a historical lesson: it is
TV through the Looking Glass 7
because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always
was material, or materialistic in its structure and functions. We . . . have a word for that
discovery . . . and it is of course the word medium, and in particular its plural, media, a
word which now conjoins three relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific
form of aesthetic production; that of a specific technology, generally organized around a
central apparatus or machine; that, finally, of a social institution. These three areas of
meaning do not define a medium, or the media, but designate the distinct dimensions that
must be addressed . . . It should be evident that most traditional and modern aesthetic
concepts—largely but not exclusively, designed for literary texts—do not require this
simultaneous attention to the multiple dimensions of the material, the social, and the
aesthetic.7
the theories of signification and the image, of the cinematic apparatus, of spectator-
ship, gender and address, of pleasure and specular seduction—in other words, the
agonies and ecstasies of post-60s film theory—are any help at all in understanding
what is most distinctive and exciting about television. If film semiotics was
anchored in (and eventually impaled on) the supposedly iconic status of the image,
what status does the video image have, and by extension, any electronically
generated image, including that of television.10
The case of the cinema and television sharing a common destiny and yet being
fundamentally different is one that confronts us, regardless of whether we work in
film studies or television studies. It may even be that the process of how a medium
'inherits' another, or by its very existence changes another, needs a mode analysis
not found in either discipline. This could be the basis for the claim that cultural
studies is the true successor to film studies. With its emphasis on commodity
consumption under capitalism, Jameson's conjunction of the material, the textual
and the social is axiomatic to cultural studies' method. The focus on how individ-
uals (especially in sub-cultures and marginal groups) make sense of or draw
identity and pleasure from mass-produced objects and everyday life under capital-
ism has undoubtedly energized the field of media studies with new theories of
power, resistance and struggle. Cultural studies has tried to define for the popular
'an artistic mode or specific form of aesthetic production/ exploring subcultures'
relation to style, or returning to Levi-Straussian 'bricolage' and Michel de Certeau's
idea of 'tactical knowledge'.11
From the perspective of cultural studies, television has a rather weak claim to
being treated as an autonomous object, despite the fact that TV confronts us most
directly with evidence that materiality, textuality and apparatus belong together.
Yet TV is also too parasitic (on radio, cinema, show business, on events and
interests generated elsewhere) and too transparent (the way it blends with politics,
journalism, the advertising of goods and services, or functions as display case of
curios, artifacts and the national heritage) for it to appear as wholly distinct from
the rest of 'culture.' On the other hand, where cultural studies clearly score over
film studies is that, at its very inception, it took seriously the idea that cultural
production today is in large measure "post-production," the appropriation, trans-
formation, collage, montage and sampling of ready-made objects and discourses.
It takes as given what elsewhere is still contested territory: that capitalist econ-
omies today are organized around consumption, and less and less around produc-
tion. The advantage over an older critical paradigm—that of the Frankfurt School,
for instance, and its concept of mass-culture as mass-deception, of commodity
fetishism and false consciousness—is that cultural studies clearly show how much
these concepts were dependent on models of production: an ideal of material
production derived from a notion of non-alienated labor, and an ideal of aesthetic
production derived from the negativity and minimalism of high modernism, itself
a nostalgic-heroic evocation of a mode prior to the division between mental and
manual labor.
However, to argue from the de-facto reversal of production and consumption in
societies which do not produce for need and use, but create need as desire and use
TV through the Looking Glass 9
as semiotic play, is a tactical advantage that may itself come to be seen as the blind
spot of cultural studies' critical system, as it comes up against two historical
changes: in Eastern Europe, the reshaping of both high and popular culture's role
in the struggle for national identity and social democracy in the wake of Stalinism,
and in Western Europe, where in the name of deregulation and harmonization, a
realignment of the production apparatus is proceeding apace, which models
culture (its objects and its forms of reception) on the commodity and the service
industries: no longer Adorno's Culture Industry, but the "culture industries"
dedicated to generating diverse forms of consumption (different material and
immaterial aggregates states of the 'work' or 'text': videos, CDs, T-shirts, badges,
toys), in order to sustain production.
One casualty of this process may be the various theories of spectatorship.
Cultural studies, aiming to rescue the popular-as-progressive from radical theory's
disenchantment with both high culture and mass-entertainment, has rightly
emphasized the sophistication and discrimination (the traditional hallmarks of
educated taste) of popular reading strategies, as well as their subversive, interven-
tionist and deconstructive potential.12 A deconstructive strategy also characterizes
the relation between film theory and cultural studies insofar as this focuses on
spectatorship: cultural studies, at least in Britain, conspicuously circumvented or
abandoned the psychoanalytic paradigm, stressing instead the openness of any
cultural text towards different meanings and pleasures, and the social, ethnic and
gender diversity of spectators, whose dynamics are often group-oriented, family-
centered or collective rather than involving the subject's (individualized) desire and
its fetishized symbolizations.13 As a result, when cultural studies looks at televi-
sion audiences, they appear in quite a variety of theoretical constructs and semio-
political categories: as if to compete with (and mirroring) the ratings companies'
own socio-economic categories.14 The fact that—despite notions of struggle and
contradiction—cultural studies lack a concept of the unconscious as an operative
term, may well be one of the reasons why it appears often in danger of becoming
entangled in the discipline from whose embrace it tried to free itself, namely
empirical sociology. At the same time, theories of film spectatorship developed
around the semiotic and symbolization as well as the psychic and the unconscious
(identification, subject, gender) have tended to be so heavily centered on the
specular that their relevance to television—a predominantly verbal and aural
medium, with its direct address, its performative modes, its multiplication of
voices, its manipulation of the image—has become too problematic to be ignored.15
Beverle Houston's work is at the very core of these issues, welcoming the
"strategies of reading that make it possible for the spectator to refuse dominant
codings."16 Yet she remained sensitive to the problematic that film theory has
bequeathed to television studies:
Television structures a very different relationship between the Imaginary of unconscious
longing and the language of the Symbolic realm of culture, between a dream of wholeness
and the lack, the fragmentation, that motors it.17
Beverle very much wanted to understand the television spectator from within
psychoanalysis: as a subject (still) driven by lack. Invoking the figuration of the
maternal in its plenitude ("with its 24 hour a day, uninterrupted filling of air-time,
10 T. Elsaesser
provide the single coherent articulation they used to give to film theory. At the
same time, with the collapse of socialism it is difficult to maintain a historical or
theoretical reference point from which capitalism could be named as the unified
symbolic, however much it continues to be our 'untranscendable horizon/ How,
then, to figure the relationship between a practice situated in the imaginary (say,
that of television, become total, global, self-referential and self-validating) and the
symbolic underpinning it, which may well be heterogeneous, fractured, but at any
rate, possessing its own materiality?
In order to frame this question more narrowly I want to go back to one of Nick
Browne's formulations on this topic, that of the 'supertext' and its 'political
economy/19 which Beverle frequently quoted. What is significant in Browne's
formulation is that the television supertext 'positions' the spectator not in relation
to a totalizing symbolic, but by virtue of different kinds of economy which have
different histories, intensities and different relations to demography, consump-
tion, and subjectivity. Beverle's 'response' to the television supertext was to posit,
in the face of the particular subject effects of television, a new symbolic—that of a
kind of 'Super-Mother/—gratifying and withholding at the same time, instituting
an oral fixation with all the attendant forms of dependence, aggression, and 'oral
rage' which psychoanalysts have identified.
Other formulations of this different symbolic are conceivable. One which has
some bearing on the imaginary of television, I take once more from Jameson.
Reworking the concept of 'cultural hegemony/ Jameson rejects both cinema and
television as a vantage point for theorizing media hegemony. Intriguingly, he
chooses boredom as the zero degree of his reflections on the televisual, thus
implicitly hinting at an aspect which makes television perhaps even more distinct
from earlier media than expected: namely, that its engagement with the spectator
implies a temporality that differs radically from that of the cinema.20 And, one
might add, it introduces into TV a category of empty time neither psycho-
analytically insignificant, nor economically neutral, for in its aggregate state of
'leisure' it is crucial to the entire economy of commercial television. Boredom might
be defined as the medium's 'raw material/ that which is its function to transform
and work on. A different but related analysis can be made about film spectatorship,
in order to understand both the centrality of narrative, and the level of aggression
and frustration subtending the viewing situation.21
But first I want to come back to the kind of symbolic/imaginary relation sug-
gested by Beverle Houston's "Metapsychology of Endless Consumption." One of
its values, I think, lies in the way flow and interruption are dialectically intertwined
as necessary constituents of TV's spectatorial regime, making desire once again
crucial, but a desire which—as feminist theory has taught us—must not be
confused with 'pleasure/ Just as Jameson posits boredom as crucial to a materialist
theory of the audio-visual media, so Beverle's theory posits unpleasure as a crucial
part of TV viewing. Where I differ from Beverle's approach is that, instead of
returning to Freud, Melanie Klein or object relations, I want—for reasons that I
hope become apparent—to return to the semiotic paradigm that film studies has
made productive by its reading of Lacan. However, I would not want to ground this
in the concept of suture or specular seduction. Such a theory is, perhaps rightly,
open to Baudrillard's charge that, from the psychoanalytic perspective on the
12 T. Elsaesser
seemed to sustain (British) television studies at some level was the belief that just as
print culture changed the way we think about the world and our place in it, so
audio visual culture had changed us, and that, as usual, there was a trade-off of
gain and loss, that one needed to take the longer view. In which case, a certain logic
became apparent whereby the public spheres, the social worlds which the great
bourgeois revolutions had passed on, were being transformed by this new cultural
modality, for which TV could stand not only as the central metaphor, but as its
living form and embodiment.
Put perhaps more cynically: democracy, welfare, education, information, enter-
tainment, history, popular memory, the arts were all safe and well, because on TV.
TV had become the glue that still held it all together, while a large part of the
population was un- or underemployed, while the inner cities decayed, while the
developers disfigured the countryside, while the public services broke down,
while the education system ground to a halt, while health care was bankrupted
and the utilities such as gas and electricity were sold off at bargain basement prices
to financial speculators. A new articulation of the interplay of the media and social
life gave rise to the idea of television as a stand-in and stand-for society, as the
storage medium and storage modes by which to pass on cultural capital and
socialize future generations. One defended television—government controlled as
well as commercial—as in its own way a great historical achievement, a very British
institution, deeply imbued with the ethos of the welfare state, in the triangle made
up of what was most at risk under Thatcher: the Health Service, the Education
System and the Freedom of the Press.
Of course, other formations into which television inscribes itself (that of the
shopping center, the theme park and the film and music industries), are present on
British TV too: many of the quality programs are actually made for export and in
order to boost tourism; conversely, British television depends on a large number of
US imports, on game shows and quiz shows, American football and Australian
soaps, on reruns of Hollywood movies and international entertainers. But this
happens under the heading of diversity and representativeness, popularity and
demand. It does not stop British TV from legitimating itself as the social bond, in
its programming and scheduling for instance. Much of British TV still modulates
the times of day, while simultaneously conjugating the generations, the classes, the
social groups, their interests and pleasures. Television sees itself in its own self-
definition as the microcosm of society. It constantly reinvents this society, and even
though it does so in its own image, this is the mode and model according to which
it operates, and therefore one on which it can be challenged and held accountable.
American TV from this perspective appears not as a stand-for television but
perhaps a stand-by television, like the musak one gets when dialing a WATS
number and is kept on hold. It is "event-driven" insofar as a Challenger disaster,
the Ollie North hearings, an Earthquake in San Francisco, the Fall of the Berlin
Wall, a Gulf war or Presidential Elections are needed to make the beast spring into
action, to make it deploy the "electronic sublime" of global omnipresence.27 One is
reminded that the history of television as inheritor of cinema and radio, as the great
entertainment medium has imperceptibly merged with that other history—of
aerial photography, spy satellites, of bank and supermarket surveillance cameras:
TV through the Looking Glass 15
all on stand-by, modelling "empty time" (marking another link with Jameson's
concept of "boredom" as the zero-degree of an audio-visual medium).28
Of course, US network television, from "Good Morning America" to "Nightline"
still pays attention to the temporal environment of the viewer. The question is
whether this is at all comparable to the social as outlined above, or whether it is in
fact one possible way of modelling empty time. If empty time is television's raw
material, broadcast TV organizes it by segmenting the televisual flow around a
temporality which mimics the presumed time experience of its preferred or
targeted addressees. But as cable TV proves, modelling the temporality of lived
experience is not the only way to program TV On the contrary, the channel-
hopping couch potato as well as the CNN addict cultivate a TV experience in direct
opposition to any naturalized temporality. Such a perspective might allow us to
understand how it is that the viewer is able to tolerate the level of frustration,
interruption and deferred gratification so central to Beverle's theory of televisual
spectatorship. Yet her notion of American TV functioning as mother surrogate
would appear to belong to the "British" paradigm (TV as stand-in and substitute)
rather than to the 'American" paradigm of the "stand-by."
For if in Britain the notion of television as a more or less adequate representation
of the social imaginary, as a cultural form and a "service" to the viewer still has
some semblance of plausibility, American TV appears in the business of producing
a commodity: but what is it, apart from shows and formulas that can be syndicated
or sold to (inter)national markets? For these markets it is capable amongst many
other things, of producing and delivering TV as cultural value (on PBS), cultural
memory (the Movie Channel, Discovery), as the surrogate public sphere (60
Minutes, Nightline, etc.)—provided unit cost, price, distribution, unrestricted
access to foreign territories are right. In a sense, American TV is superior to British
TV, because it already contains within itself, as one of its aggregate states, that
particular use which I have called "stand-in TV," which—if it was profitable—
American TV could "customize": it does so, at the local or regional level. Dick
Cavett as talk show host was already the staging of a television genre (debate and
argument about politics and current affairs) rather than the stand-in for the social.
By staging the happy consumer of TV dinners he is merely the professional he has
always been.
What in the "old" model of TV as substitute for the social appeared as the
signifier of urbanity, of a sociability, of shared knowledge evoked by allusion,
indirection and wit, can at the same time be read as the very sign of its new
ontological status: the staging of "urbanity." From this apparent paradox one could
thus develop British TV's specific textual unconscious, whereby quality TV—say,
in the form of documentaries or current affairs—does not bring a social discourse
(political awareness, informed choices) to audiences, but audiences to a social
discourse, not interpellating them as subjects, but coaxing them as willing partici-
pants.
To take a specific example. In November 1989, a cultural magazine called The Late
Show ran an item called "Happy Birthday, Walkman," to coincide with a decade of
walkmania. At one point we see an expert from an advertising agency say: "maybe
Sony should have called it the Walkperson in order not to give offense," whereupon
16 T. Elsaesser
Thanks to Dick Cavett's TV Dinner then, the "stand-in" model now seems to me
as untenable as to defend "quality television" on the grounds of discrimination,
taste and morality: in either case one speaks from a position that risks mistaking a
set of subject positions and recognition effects for an objective representation of
the social, be it consensual, militant or multi-cultural. To hold up quality TV as
social bond and cultural memory may invert the "critical" paradigm of TV as an
ideological state apparatus, but it may end up identifying as the effects of a
symbolic (the profit motive) what is in fact another imaginary, whose symbolic is
not the commodity, but a historically specific capacity to mobilize: TV's power to
gather audiences, whether mass-audiences or target audiences, whether audiences
as consumers or audiences as sophisticated postmodernists, whether "minority"
audiences or multi-cultural audiences: irrespective of this gathering happening via
network TV or cable TV, broadcast or narrow-cast TV, of its being financed by a
license fee or from advertising.
On the other hand, since the power of gathering audiences is always a political
power before it is an economic one, it is perhaps "the market" which ensures that
this political power is not outright totalitarian.34 The increasing concentration of the
ownership of television in the hands of already very powerful media conglomer-
ates, such as New International, and the political pressure to which publicly
funded broadcasting is subject, suggests, however, that the market cannot be
regarded as safe-guarding democracy,35 in a system fundamentally and neces-
sarily based, as I would argue, on a set of structural relations organized around
miscognition and uneven exchange.
This miscognition would be two-fold; firstly, in the way viewers relate to
programs as if their function was to entertain them or to provide information, that
is as if they were meant for them, when programs are more like devices: meant to
identify, deliver and consolidate audiences; secondly, miscognition characterizes
the nature of the contract entered into by the viewer with the program maker or TV
channel. Instead of paying for the screening of a film, or the rental of a video, we
know that we pay for television in a more general way: in the form of a license fee,
or by being solicited by commercial breaks and the sponsor's message. This too,
however, misconstrues the relation; license fee television is as much a prisoner of
the ratings as commercial television, while advertisers do not pay for programs,
they pay for time (quantity of time and location of time, e.g., prime time), they pay
for status of viewer (in terms of disposable income),36 and for the accuracy of a
program in identifying this status (the often quoted example of Hill Street Blues or
the MTM Company).37
Assuming that television's political and economic conditions can thus be called a
"symbolic," they would allow one to see its different articulations correspond to
historically specific "imaginaries": ways in which the television spectator engages
not so much with the individual text but with the institution television as a whole.
Its most obvious—because most discussed—imaginary is that of the family, and
television studies has made it its task to analyze both texts and audiences in terms
of the family as the social and psychic identity around which programming policy,
mode of address and programming content cohere. If there is debate, it has been
primarily about the class nature, the ethnic representativeness and patriarchal
ideology of family television, and secondly, as to whether this imaginary is
constructed by the genres and texts or by the viewing situation and domestic
context.38 Into this debate I see Beverle Houston's notion of an archaic mother
image introduce a radical or more dramatic alternative. And it was in this spirit
that, earlier on, I tried to suggest that under pressures which might be enlightened
and liberal but which might equally be "merely" economic, the imaginary of the
family in British television, in the shape of Channel Four, has been supplemented
(though not displaced) by a different "simulation of the social." Less oppressively
consensus-building around the white middle class family and more multi-cultural,
stand-for television suggests a mobile and less monolithic imaginary, but also one
more likely to deliver differently-packaged audience segments.39 At the other
extreme, the part television is said to have played in the revolutions in Eastern
Europe can perhaps best be understood as having generated "imagined commu-
nities"40 which, for a brief time, coincided with geographical-national ones.
Yet precisely because of shifts in the "symbolic"—i.e., the structures that secure
TV through the Looking Glass 19
Figure 5. Betty Thomas and Ed Marinaro, Hill Street Blues (NBC), 1981. Terrence OfFlaherty
Collection, Special Collections, University Research Library, UCLA.
20 T. Elsaesser
the television apparatus' functioning in the economic and political world (deregula-
tion of the broadcasting industries and mass-market availability of satellite televi-
sion in Europe or of cable TV in the United States)—neither the family nor a
generalized idea of sociability continue to function unproblematically as the
dominant imaginary around which viewers construct their spectator identity. A
historical line of development is beginning to become apparent about how to
understand television spectatorship within the overall history of the audio-visual
media and their audiences. Involving similar variables of time advantage and
location advantage as were used to segment cinema audiences, TV's symbolic
imposes on program makers choices between "open texts" (allowing "dominant"
or "deviant" meanings to be made at the point of reception) and "restricted texts"
(addressed to the viewer-in-the-know). Both kinds of texts are nonetheless compa-
rable in that they require a high degree of (cultural) intertextuality and (media) self-
reference: TV through the looking glass.
What I am arguing, then, is that the crisis in film and television studies is
connected to a double loss: the loss of a unified symbolic (which, as formulated by
Screen theory, made film studies productive) and the loss of a unified imaginary
(which focused on the representation of the family inspired television studies). The
bored couch potato watching everything on offer, the restless "prospector" zapping
through the channels "in search of gripping images,"41 or the viewer hooked on
Miami Vice, Neighbours and Twin Peaks are ultimately a challenge to the industry
(but also to the discipline of TV studies) not only because of "guerilla raids" on
diegetic coherence and narrative closure by spontaneous sampling and montage
techniques, or because such viewers "activate" texts with subversive or aberrant
readings, but perhaps because it is not altogether obvious what kinds of imaginary
identities, if any, the relentless search for cohesive (as opposed to quantifiable)
audiences actually produces.
"Television," one of my students once rebuked me as I speculated on the pre-
oedipal and post-oedipal personality of the TV spectator, "is not about fantasy at
all, it's about detail." This acknowledges that television allows for more diverse
subject positions than filmic theories of spectatorship had led us to assume:
accommodating the causal viewer, the tele-addict, the remote-control junkie, the
family audience and other fantastical beings42 . . . including not needing any
viewer at all (in the stand-by mode I alluded to earlier on). But television is about
detail also because it thrives on the fragment, the perpetual combination of isolated
elements, the ruthless metonymization of everyday life, the sheer semiotic power
of decontextualization and recontextualization.43
Finally, and maybe most crucially, my student may also have wanted to insist
that the fan, the addict, the aficionado represent typical ways of engaging with
television texts, based not on those shared imaginaries of the family, of oedipal
identity, oral rage or social cohesion, but requiring and gratifying the ability to
focus on the part at the expense of the whole, to deploy intimate knowledge, to be
an expert—of maybe nothing more nor less than television itself, its genres, its
codes, its manners and modes. No longer viewers driven by lack, but by redun-
dancy and plenitude44—manageable and meaningful by making specialists of us
TV through the Looking Glass 21
by Dave Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon52 can cope with such forms of spectator-
ship.
There is undoubtedly much work to be done on the textual implications of these
subject positions and reading strategies emerging around the fan, the expert, the
viewer in the know, all attending to detail at the expense of closure, grasping the
rules that obtain without the need to be immersed in diegetic worlds, and thus
without the need to experience the kind of gendered subject coherence tradi-
tionally attributed to the cinematic text. Perhaps one of the most interesting
rhetorical strategies to study in this context is not irony, excess, pastiche or parody,
but that of complicity, first suggested by John Ellis as typical for television.53 It may
well prove capable of further theoretical elaboration, as a splitting of the subject not
along the dual Lacanian lines of the mirror phase, but in terms of the triadic yet
constantly shifting relation between viewer, presenter and event (where direct
address or the laugh track mark the ghostly but palpable presence of an other).
However, if the presenter is the event, the viewer is confronted with an impersona-
tion, while an event without a presenter requires a viewer in the know—the
complicity consisting in the credibility gap maintained between presentation and
representation, each calling attention to the other as a performance, and visibly
pleased with it.54 Against the specular, fetishistic mode of cinema, televisual
complicity might function as a form of self-reference, but also like the Freudian
joke, told at the expense of someone else: a latent structure of aggression, an
uneven distribution of knowledge, a mechanism for inclusion/exclusion.
This suggests a final thought. Since program makers only appear to be looking at
the audience eyeball to eyeball, but have their sights fixed behind and beyond the
viewer on the advertisers, it is possible to see a curious analogy between the
cinematic apparatus as described by Baudry or Metz, and the televisual apparatus,
at first sight so different from the basically C19th optico-mechanical projection
machinery mimicking Plato's cave. Yet if we think of the TV apparatus not only as
an electronic ensemble but as the dispositif I have been sketching, in which the
triangulation of desire is not organized along the path of light beam, screen and
lens, but via a kind of cognitive double-bind, such as "I know that you know that I
know," then the mise -en-abyme of Dick Cavett impersonating Dick Cavett, or
Judith Williamson participating in her own construction/deconstruction as a TV
personality would appear to repeat, in its mode of address, the structure of any
program as it looks at us, while secretly making signs at the sponsor.55 One is
reminded of the famous scene in Hitchcock's Rear Window, when Grace Kelly,
caught in Thorwald's apartment, tries to stare out Raymond Burr, while trium-
phantly flashing Mrs. Thorwald's wedding ring behind her back in the direction of
James Stewart's window. Will we television viewers ever get as angry as Raymond
Burr and confront the sponsor? Probably not, at least not as long as we are led to
believe that we are in on the joke.
NOTES
1. Beverle Houston, 'Television and Video Text: A Crisis of Desire," in Resolution: a Critique of Video Art,
ed., Patti Podesta (Los Angeles: LACE, 1985), p 110.
2. Ibid.
TV through the Looking Glass 23
Bowman, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott, eds., Popular Television and Film (London: BFI Publish-
ing, 1981), pp. 270-82.
22. Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum implies that TV cannot, like cinema, produce coherent
subject positions on the basis of the absent/present status of the image. Hence, within the
Saussurean/Lacanian formulation, TV does not involve signification either, since the TV signifier is
not defined negatively in relation to other signifiers (as in psycho-semiological film theory, where a
signifier is a presence signifying an absence), but in terms of its own materiality: this is for
Baudrillard the move from representation to simulacrum (to which neither signification—
something standing for something else—nor any referent corresponds). For Baudrillard, TV is
literally "meaningless," which of course also implies that it does not participate in a regime of
desire. It is on the basis of this reductio ad absurdum that we can begin to reinvestigate the theory of
subject construction in both film and TV See also Jim Collins's "Postmodernism and Cultural
Practice" Screen 28/2 (Spring 87), pp. 12-13.
23. An adaptation of Richard Serra's 1973 Television Delivers People, it is used by Nick Browne in "The
Political Economy," and quoted by Beverle Houston, "Television and Video-Text," p. 112.
24. For a historical account of the cinema as commodity, see Charles Musser, "The Nickelodeon Era
Begins" in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, pp. 256-273. For a theoretical discussion of desire and
commodity fetishism, see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987), pp. 22-25.
25. When academic visitors from Britain (or France) come to the United States, they often experience a
surge of critical insight, a brief but often violent defamiliarization, which sometimes results in a
kind of productivity I attribute to the culture shock. Raymond William's "television as flow", an
axiom that proved to be so influential, was conceived, as Williams tells us, during a sleepless night
in a Miami Hotel after a sea voyage across the Atlantic (Television: Technology as Cultural Form, p. 92).
Then, there is Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, or Louis Marin's visit to Disneyland, which
changed the author's perception of the Court of Versailles under Louis XIV. One could also cite
America, where Baudrillard, with some anxiety, tries to recover the founding moment of his own
immensely productive theorizing about media culture, only to encounter his own concepts staring
back at him. Finally, it could be argued that Wim Wenders's most popular films—Alice in the Cities,
The American Friend, and Paris Texas all record the reverberations of carefully nurtured culture
shocks—occasioned by, respectively, American television, by the Hollywood film industry, by an
American marriage.
26. Someone once referred to this as "honest American bullshit." Perhaps this is what Larry Grossberg
means when he says television "presents images of the indifference of meaning, fantasy and reality"
or talks of David Letterman's "pose-modernism" and quotes a Jules Feiffer cartoon of a woman in
front of the set: "Ronald Reagan talks to me on television. No nonsense . . . and sincere. Who cares
if he's lying?" Larry Grossberg, "The Indifference of Television" Screen 28/2 (Spring 1987), pp. 42-43.
27. One might venture the hypothesis that whereas texts produce subjects as viewers, events produce
audiences as viewers, which is to say, we may be in a historical transition between a text-based
model of TV and an event-driven model.
28. See, for a rapid overview, Paul Virilio, Logistique de la perception (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1985).
29. Quotations used in the program are taken from "Urban Spaceman." Consuming Passions (London:
Marion Boyars, 1986), pp. 209-12.
30. The Late Show (BBC2) is a good example of the kind of television which in its style is self-consciously
indistinguishable from the glossy and witty ads which so fascinate non-British viewers on a visit.
The sophisticated ad has in some sense become the stylistic norm for arts- and culture programs, as
they bleed into MTV type music programs. Thus even where advertising is not economically the
motor force, as in the case of the BBC, it effectively drives both the sign economy and the textual
economy of television. This can also be seen, for instance, by the trailers run by the BBC for its
programs, or by looking at its news broadcasts, punctuated by breaks, recaps, and intermis-
sions.
31. Horkheimer and Adorno, it will be recalled, already predicted in the 1940s that the fate of high-
culture would be to help segment and target markets more efficiently. "The Culture Industry,"
Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
32. The recent merger, in Britain, of two satellite operations, Rupert Murdoch's SKY TV and BSB, its
erstwhile arch rival, under economic conditions where both were incurring huge losses, might be
TV through the Looking Glass 25
an example of such a speculative viewer economy, especially in light of the truly byzantine financing
strategies of Murdoch's News International.
33. See "Global News" Media Show (Channel Four), 16 Sept 1990.
34. What the example of the fascist public sphere shows is that, as the Nazi regime knew, the mass
media can be used to gather audiences, consolidate ideological communities and generate desiring
power, without directing this power to commodity consumption regulated by a market economy,
and instead, towards a world war. I have tried to discuss this different desiring economy in
"Fassbinder, Fascism and the Film Industry," October 21 (1982), pp. 115-40.
35. That numbers per se are decisive neither to the market nor to parliamentary democracy can be seen
in British politics over the past decade where whole groups of citizens below a certain income have,
because of demographic factors, become irrelevant to the major political parties as voters to be
wooed, just as advertising is increasingly targeted only at those able to afford frequent changes in
life styles.
36. This is not altogether different from what we pay for in the cinema. See my discussion of this point
in T. Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Frame Space Narrative (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), p. 166.
37. Jane Feuer has introduced the term "quality demographics" which she defines as "the idea that
ratings must correspond to particular (high-consuming) audience segments rather than to the
amorphous mass audience . . . " Around the time that Hill Street Blues emerged as a "quality hit
program," this idea of demographics rather than numbers was refined even further. Certain
programs could become "quality" or "demographic" successes in that, although their overall
numbers were relatively low, both the demographics and the 'q' scores were compensatingly high
among those urban young professionals most likely to desert the networks for pay and cable TV."
Jane Feuer, "Producer/Industry/Text" in Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, Tisa Vahimagi, MTM: Quality
Television (London: BFI Publishing, 1984), p. 4.
38. For a full discussion of the domestic viewing context, see David Morley, Family Television, and Philip
Simpson, ed., Parents Talking Television (London: Comedia, 1987).
39. Channel Four is in the business of making TV, and it would be easy to confuse this function with the
ideology around which it was established: that of catering to minority audiences. For this ideology is
perfectly compatible with being popular (to a diverse but devoted audience not divided along high
culture/mass culture lines) and of delivering "imagined communities" which is to say fictions,
narratives, forms of entertainment and discourses that make groups of people identify with
certain life-styles and self-definitions (in turn associated with certain objects, activities, values
and tastes).
40. I take this phrase from Benedict Anderson, who sees the (European) nation state and nationalism as
the product of print culture. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.
41. D. Marc, Demographic Vistas (1984), quoted in John Fiske, Television Culture, p. 99.
42. A point also made by Dana Polan, in reviewing Ien Ang's Watching Dallas: 'Ang's study shows a
diversity of viewing practices ranging from identificatory immersion . . . to ironic distancing in
which the spectator makes the television show an object for parody and explicit commentary.
Moreover, . . . Ang suggests how this variety . . . can coexist, even in the same subject. In a spiral
of involvement and disavowal, the mass-culture spectator can move in and out of various positions,
suggesting perhaps that it is precisely this weaving of contradictory positions, rather than the
achieved assumption of any one position, that may constitute much of the power and pleasure of the
operation of mass culture." Dana Polan, "Complexity and Contradiction in Mass Culture Analysis,"
Camera Obscura 16 (1988), p. 193.
43. There may be a continuum, rather than a radical distinction, between MTV or CNN doing the
"zapping" for you, and your daytime soap invite you to "graze" with the remote control in hand, or
wandering off to the tea kettle or the telephone. Alternatively, one might argue that having control
over what to skip greatly increases one's cognitive pleasure of guessing or inferring the missed
parts.
44. "One of the great mysteries of life is why young people watch Neighbours until they pass out. In
"Soap Down Under" Barry Norman sought an explanation from a high-priced media consultant in a
stripy shirt. "Its greatest weakness," opined this cove, "is its greatest strength—which is that
nothing very much happens." This theory was confirmed by consumer interviews with Oxford
undergraduates. "One of the enchantments of Neighbours," said one, "is that you know exactly
what's going to happen next." (John Naughton, in The Observer 6 January 1991), p. 60.
26 T. Elsaesser
45. See Umberto Eco, "Strategies of Lying," in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On Signs (Oxford: Basil Blackweel,
1985), pp. 3-11.
46. Days after the resignation, the televisual highlights had already been set to stirring passages from
Shakespeare's histories and tragedies. A similarly potent imaginary is, I think, present in quality
news programs and in-depth analyses such as the "McNeil-Lehrer Report" or the BBC's "News-
night." They secure our attention for the most abstruse issues by making the viewer into an instant
expert: "Something should be done about amateur field marshals like Peter Snow of Newsnight,
whose gung-ho enthusiasm for discussing military tactics with superannuated brasshats has
become positively obscene. He was at it again last week, playing in his sandpit with Corgi tanks and
miniature mines." (John Naughton, The Observer, January 6, 1991). This jibe is reminiscent of a
famous 1989 "Spitting Image" sketch where another well-known British TV anchorman, Alistair
Burnett, in full combat dress, is shown orchestrating the invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939 from
his TV studio.
47. Dave Morley's Family Television represents probably the most complete and searching anatomy of a
specific use of television about to become marginal: family viewing which, as he shows, is
completely dominated by the uneven division of labor between the sexes and the male bread-
winner's increased amount of leisure time spent within the home. However, as among others, Dana
Polan (see note 42) points out, the channel zapper may be the more typical viewer of cable or satellite
TV.
48. The phrase is taken from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
(London: Verso, 1985). But what I want to suggest here is that the simulacrum of the social and its
history, as found on British quality TV, may indicate the imperceptible transformation of social
cohesion based on traditional, geographic or national references into the new model of the mobile,
transnational imagined communities held together by shared media references (watching Dallas,
the Olympic Games or the Gulf crisis), so important to advertisers. What Laclau and Mouffe have in
mind, of course, is that discursive formations will be important as the agency that mobilizes people
for any future socialist politics.
49. Although it may be true that "the only cultural heritage that the 321 peoples of Europe share is that of
America." (Kenneth Hudson, quoted in The Observer, 30 December 1990), p. 16.
50. What makes Dallas compulsive watching for many "sophisticated" viewers is its deadpan but
encylcopaedic playing out of dramatic or rhetorical cliches recognizable from classical Hollywood
film melodrama. The fact that Dallas takes itself seriously makes it available for camp appropriation,
which turns this lack of irony into pastiche.
51. I want to signal here in passing the attention cultural studies and film theory have in recent years
been devoting to the fan and cult audience, pointing to its elaborate, highly structured, ritualized,
self-conscious codes of behavior and differentiations. From a psychoanalytical perspective such
subject positions are also interesting, insofar as the fan "negotiates" identification differently from
the "ordinary viewer." While fandom may represent a much more direct identification with the
object of pleasure, an often vast and detailed knowledge about the program or performers also
ensures that "attention to detail," traditionally associated with high culture reading formations,
becomes a source of pleasure. However, fandom may also refer to anxieties at the extreme point of
spectatorial isolation, about being left out, or about peer-group pressure to participate.
52. See Everyday Television: Nationwide. In the light of a historical perspective on spectatorship generally,
which in the cinema was characterized by an increasing need to detach viewers from local or family
reference points, Morley's work constitutes one side of a dialectic, of which the other would be
fandom and cult viewing.
53. John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge, 1982), pp. 163-9.
54. "In commercial art, the personality portrayed, whether it be portrayed by a model, an actor or a gang
of vegetables, has to look pleased with itself, and especially pleased with its association with the
product. Pleased with itself means that the personality has a limit, a property and stays within that
limit, that property." Matthew Klein, 'And Above All, Do Not Disturb," in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On
Signs, p. 484.
55. What complicates this structure is the program maker's "pre-engagement" with the audience, a set
TV through the Looking Glass 27
of assumptions about the social and demographic consistency of this audience, but also their
values, sensibilities, politics and aspirations. These are said to "inform virtually every production
decision made by the producers," yet this audience is not an actual audience but a desired audience,
and desired in relation to the advertisers. For the notion of "audience pre-engagement," see David
Barker, "St. Elsewhere: The Power of History," Wide Angle Vol. 11/1 (1989), p. 33.