Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 15, July 2003
Rosemary White
Television at a Distance:
Corner's _Critical Ideas in Television Studies_
_Critical
Ideas in Television Studies_ Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999 ISBN 0-19-874221-5 hb;
0-19-874220-7 pb 139 pp. While television
production grows ever slicker, the production values of
critical works about television remain stubbornly prosaic.
The Oxford Television Studies series, while undoubtedly
providing an invaluable collection of writings on this
visual goliath, have cover designs reminiscent of school
textbooks circa 1975. Fuzzy black and white photographs
coupled with a single, 'vibrant' colour (turquoise for
Corner's book; scarlet for Brunsdon, D'Acci, and Spigel's
1997 collection _Feminist
Television Criticism_)
recall the early days of colour television in Britain, where
skin tones were liable to turn blue or green if you
attempted to adjust your set because the reds had turned
day-glo. These designs imply that academic work is perceived
by its publishers to require creaky cover design in order to
signal its 'serious' content. Yet this idea is confounded by
the output of younger publishing houses such as Tauris or
Manchester University Press, who at the very least provide
full-colour covers with a range of (usually) appropriate
images. Naturally, beginning a review of a book about
television with a critique of the cover design plays into
the hands of those readers who still harbour a grudge
against the superficial depthlessness of television as a
medium, compared to, say, the academic validity of cinema.
Television has been the cheap and cheerful cousin of film
studies -- or literature or cultural studies (depending on
the history of particular institutions). This series, in all
its seriousness, is clearly an attempt to confirm the status
of television studies as an increasingly valuable part of
any curriculum within the humanities and social sciences.
Television studies is eminently attractive as a degree
programme or as a component of a degree programme; not least
because television *sells* in the new market of student
recruitment and retention. This is one of the tensions which
John Corner's study is implicitly and explicitly addressing:
both the magnetic attractions of television studies for
students, and the suspicion amongst some academics that
television is not a subject worthy of study. Much of this
tension is concerned, on both sides, with the pleasure
element of television: pleasure draws students but also
leads some academics to question whether something so
pleasurable can, indeed, be good for us. The Oxford Television
Studies series provides invaluable material for teaching and
research in this burgeoning field. John Corner, like other
contributors to the series, has a history of publication on
television and his writing speaks of a continuing enthusiasm
for the subject. In this volume he takes a step back from
detailed analysis of the various components of television,
to consider what these components entail in critical,
theoretical, and philosophical terms. At times this can be
frustrating, as it is tempting to demand specific examples
of the general cases cited, but this approach also forces
the reader to consider television in new ways, and to think
about television and the study of television from a more
distant perspective. This approach can occasionally have an
odd effect on the writing, or the process of reading, as the
language appears to come from an alien perspective; one
which is both distant and alienated in the Brechtian sense.
Corner considers television as a strange object, a peculiar
pastime, a perverse practice, and this perspective produces
a defamiliarizing effect which leads this reader, at least,
to reconsider how, and why, we study television. Corner's knowledge of the
field is evident from the Introduction, which gives a
usefully concise account of the problems with 'television
studies'. Not least of these is the question of what
constitutes 'television' as an object of study; technology,
public policy, cultural production? Corner's response to
this is neatly divided into the social sciences approach to
television as an object of research, and the humanities
approach to television as a subject of criticism (a
distinction employed with the caveat that it is not a hard
and fast divide -- nor should it be). As a technology,
television is no longer new when measured against the last
twenty years of computer and digital innovation, but as an
academic subject it is barely out of its teens and, as
already mentioned, often seen as trailing on the coat-tails
of films studies, etc. This book works hard to assert the
specificity of television studies, while problematizing the
either/or choices presented by approaches from the social
sciences or humanities. Consequently, this volume has its
work cut out: as the Introduction argues, television studies
is not a discrete discipline or a unified body of work. This
is both its strength and its weakness; and the latter is
visibly problematic when it comes to writing about
television from a distance. Corner's style is precise and,
at times, frustratingly even-handed. Nonetheless, even some
of his most apparently straightforward statements about the
medium can be illuminating. One example of this is the
statement that: 'Television is an industrialized way of
managing time and space in the production and circulation of
recorded images and sounds.' (4) Clearly this statement also
applies to cinema and to forms of new media, but it is most
useful when applied to television because it defamiliarizes
the normalizing invisibility of television's structures.
Television, as a domestic object and as a way of organizing
information, has been so completely subsumed into 'everyday'
life that to consider it as an object of study involves a
shift in world-view. Nowhere is this more evident than in
the undergraduate seminar. Asking students to consider
television as a peculiar form of entertainment, as a forum
for culturally constructed forms of representation, can at
times seem to be asking the impossible. Television and the
media which surround and support it (television magazines,
for example) has successfully produced its own discourse of
self-analysis -- a discourse intimately tied to the
promotional needs of particular programmes and networks.
Such television 'chat' is what often emerges in seminar
discussion and even in written work. It is the task of the
lecturer as tutor to resist this largely uncritical
approach, and to attempt to expose it as a form of
commentary which works hard to deny or disguise the
assumptions on which its judgments are based. Like
television itself, such 'criticism' rests heavily on
unexamined assumptions about how the 'world' (meaning North
America and Western Europe) works. In this form of 'chat',
as in much terrestrial television, gender equality is
achieved, everyone is white (or at least not from any form
of ethnicity that might offer a viable alternative point of
view), and we are all wealthy, healthy bourgeoisie. Where is
the undergraduate essay on _The Simpsons_ that does *not*
propose the yellow family as the epitome of televisual
evolution, representing 'ideal' familial, intellectual, and
social values right back atcha? Work like this adds fuel to
the strand of academic television criticism that proposes a
breakdown in television between the fictional and the
factual, often citing docudrama and reality television as
the prime suspects. Corner, like Brunsdon et
al, works hard to make television strange. The statement
cited above, for example, indicates firstly television's
industrial identity as a product of consumer culture; that
it is above all a modern object, and that its content is
symptomatic of modern (and postmodern) cultural interests
and anxieties. Secondly, the statement indicates
television's artificiality; in particular the strange ways
in which it manages time and space both within programmes
and across schedules. Terrestrial programming provided a
conceptual clock for the late 20th century, regulated by,
and regulating, familial behaviour through such inventions
as the 'children's hour' and the watershed. In the 21st
century programming on the multitude of channels now
available still breaks up its twenty-four hours into
segments intended to attract a variety of audiences.
Thirdly, the end of the statement, asserting that television
is concerned with 'the production and circulation of
recorded images and sounds', indicates television's
remarkable facility for making and selling representations
of 'life' that we are invited to misrecognize as our own.
Television's familiarity, together with its use of realist
tropes across genres, has often allowed it to offer us a
form of heightened reality; in particular, to imagine that
there is an 'us' as such. Corner is careful not to
lean too heavily on approaches which celebrate television's
potential for diverse productions and diversity of reception
(cf. Fiske's _Television Culture_), or approaches which
treat television as, indeed, the opiate of the masses. What
emerges most convincingly from this even-handed approach is
the sheer difficulty of studying television. Moving beyond
the problem of defining the subject and the discipline, such
difficulty is evident even with terms which are often seen
as deeply rooted in the history of television studies. The
thematic chapters, covering Institution, Image, Talk,
Narrative, Flow, Production, Reception, Pleasure, and
Knowledge, provide evidence of complexity and absences
within particular areas, as well as indicating that each
area is not discrete. Corner is constantly cross-referencing
across the book, as issues raised in the chapters on
Institution and Image recur and connect with those in the
chapter on Knowledge. This thematic structure also lends
itself to an historical perspective on television studies,
as he deals with work that was to establish or provoke other
work in the field, such as McLuhan's _Understanding Media_,
as well as more recent studies. In such a multitudinous
field this overview provides a useful map for particular
areas. Corner's archaeology of 'flow', from its earliest
days in the work of Raymond Williams, through to the ensuing
debate in work by John Ellis, Rick Altman and John Fiske,
provides a kind of history of television studies itself.
Williams's definition of flow offers a more fluid
understanding of television production and consumption than
that based on television simply as a sequence of programmes.
As he states in _Television: Technology and Cultural Form_
(1978): 'There has been a significant shift from the concept
of sequence as *programming* to the concept of sequence as
*flow*' (cited by Corner, 61), and this perceived shift,
together with the particular context in which Williams' work
was produced (a British academic's experience of American
television after a transatlantic crossing to Miami),
provides a useful commentary on a term which is often
employed casually but which, in this chapter, is opened up
and examined as a diverse and suggestive concept. Summing up
the discussion, Corner notes one of the central difficulties
with the term: 'It is the problem of
essentialism, whereby use of an idea of flow, wittingly or
not, produces in the analysis an essential television
artefact along with its related experience. It is a tendency
consonant with a totalizing imperative in certain strands of
television criticism: television has always to be seen in
sum; attention to the parts is never enough.'
(68) In particular, he shows
how 'flow' is employed in pessimistic discourses about
television as mass culture, discourses which hark back to
the literary traditions out of which Williams was writing
(69). Corner thus argues strongly for a constant recognition
of television's diversity and the concomitant need to resist
the still effective pull of making absolute moral or
political judgments about 'television'. What is also evident
here is how problematic it can be to apply a particular term
without regard for the contexts which produced it and the
specific manner in which it was originally
employed. It is not surprising,
considering Corner's acknowledgement of the fragmentary
nature of television and television studies, that
Baudrillard casts a small shadow on this volume, although
his work only makes explicit appearances in the chapters on
Image and Knowledge. Corner cautiously acknowledges the
importance of such accounts of postmodernity. While
insisting on the importance of studies which examine
specific aspects of television, and which emphasize
television's specificity within the academy, he is not
averse to drawing a larger picture of television's impact on
cultural life: 'The extension of the
public knowledge field by television, a process coextensive
with television's steady colonization of everyday life (a
process noted at points throughout this book), has changed
the nature both of public life and private life. I remarked
earlier that it has seemed to some not simply to have
blurred but to have collapsed the boundaries here.'
(118) Rather than following a
pessimistic route which views such developments as
signifying the end of culture, however, Corner questions the
extent to which the blurring of private and public lives on
television can be taken as a simple symptom of decay. Again,
he raises the difficulty of assessing the effect of changes
in representation upon public knowledge, and concludes the
chapter on Knowledge with a more optimistic argument: 'The
'culture of testimony' which is apparent in many new formats
is no substitute for analysis but it redresses what has been
within many broadcasting systems an inadequate interest in
ordinary feelings and too foreclosed a sense of ordinary
life.' (119) In the closing chapter
Corner looks at the future of television -- 'Television
2000: The Terms of Transformation' -- and notes that this
chameleon medium is still in process, still evolving. The
problems this causes for television studies are manifold and
manifest; a constantly changing field produces a vertiginous
sense of time past, present, and future all clamouring for
scholarly attention at once. As Corner comments, the study
of television 'has barely begun to make a full political,
social and cultural assessment of 'television as we know
it', yet its very object of study is shifting towards
'television as we knew it' with some speed' (121). He is
also pessimistic about the ability of academic study to have
any impact on the political debate about the future of
television -- the academy's role, as in many fields, seems
to be that of recording, analysis, and commentary, rather
than any direct impact on debates within the industry -- and
in this case argues that the 'modest amount of achieved
scholarship' (121) in the field is a major handicap. The
study thus ends with a call for more work -- and more
sustained work -- on every aspect of television. Any
researcher looking for a new area of study could do worse
than consider Corner's map of the absences and weaknesses in
existing knowledge about television, such as the scanty
cultural history of television, or the lack of work on
representation across different genres. He concludes with
the comment that the study of television 'was always bound
to be messy, with speculation and polemic strongly to the
fore' (127), but this is not a call to raise 'standards' or
endorse a hierarchy of 'quality'; rather this volume is an
investigation of the messy field of television studies and
an invitation to further study. Newcastle Upon Tyne,
England Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Rosemary White,
'Television at a Distance: Corner's _Critical Ideas in
Television Studies_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 15, July
2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n15white>. Read a response to this
text: John Corner, 'Keeping a
Distance: A Response to Rosemary White', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 7 no. 16, July 2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n16corner>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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