consumer voters

In "The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence," Henry Jenkins asks "What models of democracy will take roots in a culture where the lines between consumption and citizenship are blurring?" (41). A co-national of Alexis de Tocqueville, I am fascinated by this issue. The way I read the 2016 election, it seems that consumers (media consumers, audience members) can forget to put on their citizens' hat when they go to the polls. Media and TV build familiarity. We've been marketed the current president for ages, and now... I read the following sentence in a March 20 article framing what might be a silver-lining  to the president's COVID response as follows: "It seems increasingly possible that, in eight months’ time, voters will appraise Mr Trump on a substantial new issue: his competence to be president." 

Evergreen TV

What is television in the current day and age? In his 2004 article, "Convergence-Television," Cladwell noted that "Of the three industries, television is more effectively mastering e-entertainment than either the film or high tech worlds" (50). Sixteen years later, we can attest to the truth that streaming content somehow has managed to be called "television," by distributing programs that used to be available only on TV and by creating its own content which is reminiscent of TV's formats. TV renews itself. Getting ever further from what it initially was, but latching onto enough of its identity to remain true to itself.

Caldwell describes television as the "one persistent nagging bridge between old media and new media" (70). Somehow television, via all sorts of ancillary channels, merchandise, websites, through multiplexing and convergence, TV is able to funnel and network our attention and psyche. Sometimes I feel like TV has been integrated by modern man as a bodily organ, if not essential, at least very much tied to our functionality in the world.

a beginning of the world?

https://hyperallergic.com/550001/what-to-stream-on-means-tv/

Henry Jenkins Frightens Me [Core Post]

The use of "convergence," especially in the Jenkins piece, makes me very nervous.  It is undeniable that American media enterprises have rapidly consolidated ownership, but Jenkins' tone (and that of other scholars) seems to transform that historical trajectory into an inevitable force of nature that we may only try to weather.  Activism is oddly foreclosed; the evenness of convergence is of more concern than resistance.  The hopeful(?) prediction that "innovation will occur on the fringes; consolidation in the mainstream" is just as much a history of capitalism than a vision of the future.  "Name-calling" is hardly the worst horror of that history.    

Similarly, I do not see anything speculative about the idea of a world where "through media concentration...any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television."  That has been the state of communications media as long as it has existed.  I would even go so far as  to question if the period at which Jenkins was writing was when that started to unravel, as demonstrated through the British telefilm Ghostwatch (1992), the smash-hit The Blair Witch Project (1999) and its sequel, and the post-Paranormal Activity (2007) found footage boom.  All of those directly confront the reality/fiction distinction and the authority of media, while their predecessors were more concerned with journalistic ethics and imperialism (Cannibal Holocaust, 1980) or the very authority of television itself (Special Bulletin, 1983; Countdown to Looking Glass, 1984; Without Warning, 1994).  In the wake of Trump, it is a cultural assumption for many that the media is not authoritative.    

Frankly, I am horrified by the idea of replacing resistance with blogging.  The mention of Howard Dean could be definitive proof that such technowhimsy is unfounded, though an alternate reading could be that Bernie was the actual fulfillment of prophesy.  Some prophesy.  My concern is probably best channeled into a question that is just tangent to Jenkins.  How much does any of this materially affect the lives of working people?  New illusions of "engagement" based on mediated resistance and acceptance of corporate oligarchy is only a superficial "change."  The average person is never going to be empowered under capitalism, and corporate blogging are not going to help that.    

Presentation// Left Futures for the (Melodramatic) Soap Opera: Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives

Clip: Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives, 1984. Part 3: "The Bank (Victimless Crime)": 

http://www.ubu.com/film/ashley_perfect_03.html
Suggest starting 1:23 for ~5 min.

Finding revolutionary potential in the soap opera form is not exactly new, but I’ve had to ask myself several times over now why that feels so familiar a notion. Network TV’s audience has always been, for the most part, notwithstanding, because a certain formula was working for its soaps: where would a politics that did anything beyond parody or adjustment actually enter when the intention was to meet a mass audience; and this is not to mention its flamboyant characters, who veer from rich to working-class in upstairs-downstairs theatrics that eschew nuance and substance for conflict after conflict after conflict. Yet I’ve almost put the soap opera on a pedestal, as if it were the perfect open text, its difference in repetition serving as the utopic gap between goal-oriented narrative and stylistic excess, to use Jane Feuer’s articulation (and also Linda Williams’s), much as melodramatic film warrants.

I think of Raul Ruiz’s The Wandering Soap Opera, of which it’s been written: “The film’s central premise is that the best approximation for Chilean reality following the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is that of a soap opera or telenovela; after all, what other narrative form is flexible enough to accommodate all the pent-up collective spasms of seventeen years of repression?”[1] And Rainer Maria Fassbinder said in an interview:[2] “Take a film like [Douglas] Sirk’s Written on the Wind: what passes on the screen isn’t something that I can directly identify with from my own life, because it’s so pure, so unreal. And yet within me, together with my own reality, it becomes a new reality. The only actuality that matters is in the viewer’s head.”

Melodrama, then, as Fassbinder proves, might make room for transformative thinking (or the spectator, as Jane Feuer reminds) moreso than political messaging per se. So if we can move away from linguistic theories of structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, might we find ourselves instead in nomadic, rhizomatic territories that seek to place aesthetic works on a continuum wherein the distance, the gap itself between mise-en-scène and content is crucial; and politics is emphasized as dispersed, non-masterly thinking and being? Perhaps this gap is represented best by the “indefinitely expandable middle” of a serial drama that Feuer mentions in “Melodrama, the Serial Form, and Television Today.” Yet I also think of Edward Said on in-betweenness, about which he says, “There is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position.”^[3] Any insistence risks closure, resolutions, and “[a]ny ultimate resolution—for good or for ill—goes against the only moral imperative of the continuing serial form: the plot must go on,” as Feuer says.

For a nomadic theorist, the soap characters involved in their complex familial plots and networks would be as important for the gap between texts as they are to the dominant text, to the straightforward narrative. Feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti reminds us that subjects in the nomadic state “work to disrupt conceptions of linear time, to subvert set social conventions and power relations,” and that, importantly, they are not metaphors, but “expressions of different socio-economic and symbolic locations.”[4] And if “the ‘openness’ of TV texts does not in and of itself represent a salutory or progressive stance,” as Feuer writes, perhaps it is crucial to simply move, or place, these subjects outside the mainstream (including niche television in the main/stream here), and look at experimental modes of distribution, such as public access TV. These platforms, less subject to regulation and advertisement, also allow for the collapse of genre. For wouldn’t the Brechtian mode of distanciation at hand here not circle back or around, so that these aesthetic works, these modes of narration and influence that have given us the serial melodrama, eventually hybridize? I.e., if melodramatic theater  has influenced à film à television à web à theater? (Radio drama is in here too.)

I put pressure on this because I still want to make a case for the televisual serial form’s inclination toward progressive politics, despite Jane Feuer’s wonderful summation that it can be interpreted in either direction. “The emergence of the melodramatic serial in the 1980s represents a radical response to and expression of cultural contradictions,” she writes. “Whether that response is interpreted to the Right or to the Left is not a question the texts themselves can answer.” She also notes that only the elite reader/audience, already committed to subversive ideas, would drag out a consciously subversive “secondary text” from any melodrama. Like reading Twitter for confirmation bias, seeing the form as uniquely suited for leftist/progressive politics may say more about who is seeing (me); or rather, looking, than it does about whatever content, dominant or secondary, is being parsed.

These two last points bring me to Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives. I am not positive that bringing modes of distribution into the argument, if a televisual soap opera has been partly defined by its existence on network TV, does anything but continue to interpret. Still, across a few ponds in the 1980s of Dallas and Dynasty was a parallel universe: public access. First staged and broadcast by American avant-garde composer Robert Ashley for UK’s Channel 4 in 1984, Perfect Lives was an opera made for television. It confronts its audience with “exaggerated, [sung] delirium, providing a challenge to our perception, [with] the excesses of behavior narrated by Ashley himself.”[5] While this narration-by-author made it difficult to reproduce “faithfully,” after Ashley passed in 2014, younger experimental performers took the opera off-screen to different sites. This allowed for content written for TV to resonate with other built environments as it re-became a performance. 

For instance, Perfect Lives Manhattan took place during Occupy Wall Street's encampment at Zuccotti Park, in the financial district. We had discussed doing ‘The Bank’ episode at Zuccotti Park, but eventually decided against it because of our need for amplification (and the complicated politics between the Occupy movement and the city) and the desire to be within walking distance of the Performa headquarters, around which the other episodes were located. However, with that in mind we chose to perform the episode in front of a Citibank, near Washington Square Park (Fig. 5), that had received a lot of press a few weeks earlier for locking patrons in the bank during an Occupy protest that was mishandled by the police.²¹ Our hope was that the generic idea of the small-town bank would resonate with the politics surrounding big-name banks in the city, and this Citibank in particular.[6]

            To sum up: It’s my take that political futures for the TV soap opera include, in the end, moving off-air to take advantage of banalities that we know now—having narrowed down living to our living rooms—are in fact excessive: e.g., being present, in a place, thinking.

---

[1] https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4831-locarno-2017-ra-l-ruiz-s-the-wandering-soap-opera

[2] https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/rainer-werner-fassbinder-1974-primary-need-satisfy-audience

[3] Said, Edward W. “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals.” Grand Street, no. 47 (October 1, 1993): 116.

[4] Braidotti, Rosi, “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11.2–3, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 180.

[5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/tempo/article/story-of-the-huge-face-of-an-arrangement-varispeeds-adaptation-of-robert-ashleys-perfect-lives/1C984DF239C53B625A0281B94494CC75/core-reader

[6] ibid.

I really enjoyed John Caldwell’s essay, “Convergent TV.” It stood out to me as the most knowledgeable or “profound” of the three essays we read for this week. Caldwell seemed to predict the ways in which TV would converge into a system of online streaming platforms. For example, his analysis of octopus.com and how it would become an indicator of the how TV industry would become interactive was very intuitive. He also seemed to have a grasp on how TV would be pirated in similar ways to how napster operated. Overall, I find it very insightful for an essay that was included in Spigel’s book in 2004.

What u watching

So since this is a TV class and we're all at home and potentially looking for distractions, I thought I'd open up a thread for us to recommend what we're watching now. I know for me, I'm constantly feeling like I'm out of streaming options because of the sheer immensity of options, so maybe we can all help each other out.

I just finished Season 2 of Kingdom, and I gotta say, episode 1 of Season 2 is probably the most epic episode of television I've seen in awhile. Thoroughly enjoyed it and praying for a season 3.

So drop a comment for what to watch next and what's keeping you occupied (and sane) during this time whether it be TV, movies, books, podcasts or anything at all.

(Subtle plug I've also been reading Howl's Moving Castle and if you're a fan of the movie, for sure check it out!)

Making The Cut

Has anyone started watching Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn's new fashion competition show that premiered on Amazon Prime this weekend? It's called Making The Cut and it's very similar to Project Runway in many ways, but what's most interesting to me about this new show is that all the winning looks from each outfit are sold on Amazon. It's not revolutionary for a show like this to sell outfits online, but this could definitely be a game changer for Amazon and how they produce new content that takes advantage of it being integrated to their major store.

[11] Ray Kyooyung Ra – Tiger King Saved Me (Week 11)

Hey, all you cool cats and kittens! (If you know Tiger King, you know.)

This is not a core post, but a recommendation I am writing out of pure love for the documentary series that saved me in this time of quarantine. So I will not go too deeply into breaking down the episodic structure and mastery of story-telling in Tiger King, and I can’t give away too much for your viewing pleasure; but please, please, everyone, you must watch this Netflix original documentary series.

I always thought that with the increasing self-awareness of reality television, the narrative formula of reality TV will be revamped or renewed by streaming platforms in some manner. Netflix, however, came in out of nowhere and thwarted all of my expectations, bravely blurring the line between dramatically produced reality TV and true crime documentary in Tiger King. Tiger King divides its story into seven episodes in a way that plays with and preys on the audience’s expectations, much like your typical reality TV format, but at the same time never lets you forget that this is a true crime documentary you are watching—next thing you know, you’ve binged all seven episodes, left emotionally drained. One episode left my chest physically hurting. I audibly gasped and clutched my invisible pearls multiple times while watching Tiger King, and true story, this was only 5, 10 minutes into the first episode of the series.

I give this series five out of five stars. No, actually, five scars.