Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 16, July 2003
Keeping a Distance:
A Response to Rosemary White
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 I was generally very
pleased with Rosemary White's review of my book _Critical
Ideas in Television Studies_. Her early recognition of the
'distant view' that I adopt had the potential to become a
serious criticism. However, it ends up being an endorsement
of an approach that tries to refresh our sense of what is at
issue in studying television, while holding on to a degree
of general clarity, and without claiming, in a manner that
has become rather tedious in the literature (because of
widespread fraud), possession of some big new insight. I was
particularly taken by her idea that (in a way that she
occasionally finds a little frustrating) there is a kind of
alienation effect at work in some of the accounts, throwing
the reader into a productive re-assessment of things that
dominant strands of scholarship might have suggested we can
now take for granted. How to write, for whom, and for what
purpose are, of course, a set of questions that could be
pondered in the Academy a good deal more than they are. How
to write about television introduces, as White points out, a
quite distinctive set of hazards to do with value. Even the
very idea of serious academic consideration of television
can still produce a snigger in many circles, while parts of
Film Studies still regard consideration of the small screen
for purposes other than an 'off duty' essay rather
idiosyncratic and just possibly suspect (best left to those
who have found their intellect has failed to match up to the
demands of cinema!). My plan for the book began
to seem increasingly quixotic as I moved through to the
final draft. I wanted to touch on key issues affecting our
ideas about television across almost all of its dimensions.
Ideas and issues were central, there was to be no attempt at
a synopsis of the full range of published studies. So no
time for detailed examples that form a central part of my
earlier books like _Television Form and Public Address_, and
not much for the kind of detailed citations of the
literature that pass for 'discussion' in many textbooks. I
also wanted to avoid the kind of dense theoreticist language
than cannot see the wood for the trees, and then even loses
focus of the trees. Ideally, it was going to be a bit
demanding but useful for the more advanced student, while
having something to say for those involved in teaching and
research too. It certainly wouldn't be a textbook and so
would not adopt what has now become a conventional pedagogic
mode of presentation and address (what we can call the
'dutiful plod' model at its worst, with its pragmatic
variant, the 'tips for the essay' guide). Hopefully it would
be a bit more readable and more widely useful than a
specialist monograph too. The word limit started to make the
11 chapter scheme seem very pushed and, indeed, there is
some unfortunate truncation at points, but the idea of the
'sketch', the brief trip round the main points as I saw
them, was part of the plan. The word 'breezy' springs to
mind, with just a touch of the 'spiky' to give the further
thinking a good prod. 'Critical' got into the title because
I liked the way it played across the three meanings of
aesthetic appreciation, negative judgment, and central
significance -- all featuring in my account with various
degrees of alignment or tension. 'Ideas' seemed a good
temporary substitute for 'theory' given the abuse and
pretension to which that latter term had been subjected.
All this sounds a bit
self-satisfied but actually I was a bit unhappy when it got
to reading the proofs and more resigned than pleased when it
finally came out, despite having had very supportive
revision advice from John Caughie and Charlotte Brunsdon.
Somehow, the grand plan of a perky, suggestive trip around
almost everything seemed a good deal riskier. So the fact
that, with all its oddities (some planned 'strangeness' and
some unplanned), quite a few readers and reviewers liked it,
was really a relief. I'd had a few bad moments waiting for
first reactions. I take White's point about
the downside of too much 'even-handedness'. That could have
been managed better perhaps. But most of it is the result of
entirely genuine uncertainty and ongoing reflection on my
part, together with a wish to avoid the kind of banal,
over-polemicized commitment which has distorted so much work
in this area and substituted the striking of attitudes for
the understanding of the real complexities of use and value.
Where I do disagree with
White is her suggestion that the book 'works hard to assert
the specificity of television studies'. It does nothing of
the kind, keeping close to a plural and, as White notes
approvingly, 'messy' sense of the term as 'studies of
television' rather than a unified field. While engaged by
the specificities of television itself I take the
non-specificity of television studies to be essential.
'Television Studies' as a unified bit of academic terrain is
almost certain to be grossly curtailed in its resources of
scholarship and to have far too much contrived coherence and
self-referential complacency for its own good. Students
beware! (_Teleparody_, also reviewed here
at _Film-Philosophy_, picks up on some of these symptoms
with comic zest, as well as, I imagine, displaying a few of
them itself). I also feel that I might
value some kinds of journalistic writing about television,
particularly reviews, more than White seems to do. In
teaching I have always found the use of this material
productive, including asking for imitations and parodies as
well as serious attempts at popular writing, although I take
her point about the need to raise the issues that this
material often conveniently masks over. A last point. The cover
design. Well, in a book series this is largely out of the
hands of authors, as White concedes. It might have been more
attractive, but I don't know about 'creaky'. Within my
semiotics, that rather austere, oblique look, a touch
schoolbook, a touch arty, altogether a bit angular, is not
at all bad alongside the examples of busy, multicoloured
photo-literalism alongside it on the media studies shelves.
But that's taste for you. University
of Liverpool,
England Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 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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