TV: Battleground of Representation

TV: Battleground of Representation.

(Part 7 )

The powerless social critic can at best claim 'special' knowledge, as did the clergy did when Darwin and the discovery of fossils made life difficult for their hegemony that largely rested on abstract constructs. However such knowledge is no more special and certainly less powerful than the dualistic 'skeptically empiricist' view of network programmers, another kind of epistemological instrumentalism that sits well with the necessities of everyday commerce (and of course science). Indeed a 'culturally-based' theory is always going to be less powerful where the index of power is economic success. The only 'more powerful' knowledge would have to be able to win an economic battle, not a cultural one, and this would be exceedingly unlikely.

It would be wise for theoreticians to be aware of the older discourses existing within epistemology and the philosophy of science and instead address the real issue: what or who does television represent, and how does it represent and for whom. Luckily this other set of thorny questions are also outside the scope of this paper, but they will be addressed in the next part of this work in progress.

Resistances

So what do the critics think can be done about it? There is obviously a great deal more to be worked through in the debate about 'bad' television and suggestions for its 'improvement". Ang has already been quoted as saying that the audiences' ability to "get along" with television "in creative ways" might be a sufficient level of 'democracy' to justify acceptance of the status quo, or at the least a positive outlook about the hegemony of institutional domination. On the other hand Gitlin is left hoping (like a lot of people in the debate) that there may still be some public activism left after the heady days of the 60's: "if ever there is to be an American television industry that aims to do something different... it will be because publics organise to insist on it... " (Gitlin p334).

However the way in which this is to happen is left, perhaps for another book, perhaps for another discipline. More recently Ang's 'weak' political stance, a version of de Certeau’s (micro) tactical responses to the (macro) strategies of powerful institutions, occupies a similar position to that held by earlier effect analysts who sought to examine primarily what audiences do with the programming that they have little control over.

Here, the academic, versed, like the cultural critic, against the might of a plethora of institutional edifices, are the less radical tactics of resistance, a sort of a 'weed' in the 'garden' (or the jungle where, confusingly, everything is a weed) of industrial capitalism:

"Among the institutions that construct television discursively, three stand out; the television industry (networks, stations, producers, etc.); political/legal institutions (usually formalised as regulatory bodies, and intermittently as government-sponsored inquiries and reports); and critical institutions (academic, journalistic, and - surprisingly rarely - self-constituted audience organisations or pressure groups)" (Hartley p105).

Hartley and Giltin are right. Nothing will change unless someone does something about it and for this to happen someone must want to do something about it, be able to do something about it, and believe that what they want to do with it is what is good or better for all. If all this is a little bit awkward, given the irreducible complexities of all the above then perhaps, like, and indeed attached to, the passive people meters, the audiences will just have to wait to see what comes on next:

"[I]t may well be that the more advanced audience measurement becomes, the less streamlinable the information assembled will be. The more it sees, the less it can get to grips with what it sees, as it were. The calculable audience member tends to dissipate before the ever more sensitive microscope of audience measurement, and increasingly regains his or her (sic) status of active subject" (Ang p95).

Whether a subject who has 'dissipated' and has disappeared from the all-seeing eye of the State can be said to be meaningfully 'active' is arguable. I assume here that Ang does not mean that resistance translates as a kind of anarchistic audience underground, where, because the State can’t see it, then its members are finally ‘free’. It may be that if the State can't 'see' you maybe you don't really matter anymore, maybe you're not really there at all?

Stay tuned.

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