My favorite essay from last week was the William’s piece. I appreciated the urgency of culture in his approach to TV rather than the more formalist/functionalist descriptions/narrativization of TV as such. Unsurprisingly, I felt similarly to Newcomb and Hirsh’s essay. However, “culture” operates slightly different in both of the essays. Whereas the Williams essay deploys culture as a means to avoid the technologically deterministic/formalist definitions of TV, the pervasive insistence on claiming TV’s ontology, Newcomb and Hirsch argues that analyses of TV don’t account for culture enough, if at all.
Newcomb and Hirsch insist that the dominant “models” of TV analysis, the “communication” approach and the “aesthetic approach, aren’t already culturally based, or based enough. For both, a cultural analysis of TV lie in between these methodologies. Therefore, “culture” operates epistemologically for Newcomb and Hirsch, whereas Williams was more concerned with untangling the ontological preoccupations of TV at the time. If culture as such avoids the determinism of a McLuhan-esque description of TV, then accounting for that culture also avoids a similarly totalizing approach towards analyzing TV.
Neither TV as a medium of communication nor TV as an aesthetic object/medium account for TV’s political, economic, or social implications. For the authors, the former overdetermines TV as a structure whereby the specificity and variability of content is overlooked. They feel that this “communication” approach—I presume they feel similarly to approaches of TV’s political economy—presume correlations that affirm a certain relationship between TV and society, or TV’s audience. They suggest that this relationship only confirms the dominant “effect”, or symptom, of TV’s role within society, in which there are no alternative or oppositional modes of reception and viewpoints. On the other hand, they argue that approaching TV as an aesthetic object overlooks the “important questions of production and reception.” (562) Ultimately, they conclude “television does not present firm ideological conclusions—despite its formal conclusions—so much as it comments on ideological problems.” (566)
It is here where I find the most generative points from the essay: the author’s emphasis on cultural “liminality.” For the authors, liminality draws on Turner’s analysis of the liminal stage of TV’s ritualistic processes and practices in which TV neither determines, or is determined by, society. Rather, this liminality considers TV and society as mutually co-constitutive. TV and society are unequivocally integral towards each other’s development and implications. However, if TV’s liminality is the space in between society’s “shared beliefs” (aesthetic approach) and its modes of production and reception (communication approach), it also allows the authors to wedge a similar liminal space in between modes of analysis towards TV as text and structure. That is, the authors hinge on liminality, or the theme of "in-betweenness,” as that very “cultural basis” of TV analysis that they begin their essay with.
However, it is in their particular descriptions of liminality and TV as cultural forum space where we can find the essay’s datedness and limitations. For both, TV means American TV. Whether that’s the content referenced or TV’s structure, mid-century “America” becomes the backdrop for the essay. Additionally, TV is linear TV insofar as the authors themselves reference William’s definition of TV flow as well as their own description of the “viewing strip.” Most of us will find our own texts that stretch the limits of the essay. Transnationally co-produced animation—usually involving Japanese animation—are those such texts for me. Given Japanese animation’s outsourcing of in-between animation labor for cheap production, usually in Southeast Asia or India, it’s still difficult to unwind the prevailing presumptions of an “anime aesthetic” or anime as such simply referring to Japanese animation. With recent transnational co-productions between “bigger” animation companies, I find Newcomb and Hirsh’s article still relevant. I worked on a recent project that explored Thunderbolt Fantasy and its production between Taiwan’s Pili International and Japan’s Nitroplus. The co-production alone lends itself to an analysis examining the circulation of capital and labor behind the series, but I also found it aesthetically intriguing—really intriguing. I analyze the series’ juxtaposition between its Japanese and Taiwanese dubbing, arguing that future anime scholarship necessitates examining the aural and material implications of voice-acting in order to avoid universalizing anime texts and animation industries in terms of a Japanese visual aesthetic and mode of production. Inspired by reading Newcomb and Hirsh, I sought to map the relations comprising Thunderbolt Fantasy materially and aesthetically, hoping to avoid an analysis where one overdetermines the other. However, after rereading the article I find myself wanting to consider the postcolonial histories between Taiwan and Japan as an added layer of analysis. I certainly owe a lot to the authors and their emphasis on liminality and space—whether space means discursive, epistemological space or material space.
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