First of all, I want to be clear that I had no intention of dismissing the questions of perception and experience raised in your post, or for that matter Shawn VanCour’s project for “a production-oriented approach to media aesthetics” that “combines close analysis of surface-level textural phenomena … with critical study of the production techniques and possibilities of media.” I find the substance of both your posts valuable not only in principle but also in (my own) practice. My concern is with the hazards of situating these things under the aegis of aesthetics. If my post came across as reductive, it is probably because it was envisaged as a polemic against cavalier use of “aesthetic” and its variants – and all polemics are necessarily in some measure reductive. Even so, I recognize that there are larger problems that I ignored in the interests of forcefully making a point.

You ask me to say more about what I mean by aesthetics, and elsewhere you ask if I can suggest a better term for discursively framing the experience of a given show. I’m going to take an oblique approach to answering these questions. Before I pared my post down to its present length I had included a further semantic distinction, beyond differentiating between the nounal and adjectival forms of aesthetic. Neither of the foregoing aligns with notion of “an aesthetics of ____” – as for example in “an aesthetics of HBO,” or more broadly “an aesthetics of television.” Here again we have a modality of the aesthetic that seems to be fuzzy in application. It’s frequently unclear what exactly is being proposed in articles or book chapters that claim to be taking us “toward an aesthetics of such-and-such” (and once again I’m certainly not guiltless in this regard). Yet “an aesthetics of …” surely ought to imply a describable system of inquiry and interpretation, a methodology—as in “a feminist aesthetics”—not a particularized reaction to a given text or a set of defining traits for that text.

With this in mind it seems to me that what your post and Shawn VanCour’s each propose, explicitly or implicitly, is an aesthetics of media – and here I want to lay stress on the indefinite article in that phrase. The value of “an aesthetics of …” is surely that it inherently allows for the coexistence of multiple, varied aesthetic engagements with a text or set of texts, rather than pointing to a monolithic interpretive or evaluative system. While I can’t straightforwardly satisfy your request for a working definition of aesthetics per se, I can say that in principle I’m content for it to be any approach that logically emerges from the existing discursive field, provided that it’s not dogmatic and exclusive. In practice, though, I can’t rid myself of the worry that the evaluative mode of aesthetic inquiry in television studies—if we can dignify it with the word “inquiry”—seems too readily to subsume, or at the very least tinge, other approaches.

This leads me to your other question, viz., is there a better term than aesthetics to help us frame questions of perception and experience? At this point I’m sure I don’t need further to belabor my unease over “aesthetic” and related words. I’ll content myself with saying that there are other ways of reflecting on experience, and that in my view there needs to be compelling reason to invoke the aesthetic in preference to one of these alternatives. In our recent email correspondence you said that you find yourself increasingly favoring “phenomenological”; I would add that we might also consider thinking in terms of the “affective.” And if we must envisage a “turn,” why could it not simply be an experiential turn?

I spend a lot of time parsing how people use specific words to evoke different things — that is, how people make words mean different things — so I appreciate what you’re doing here. I’m on board with calling formalism formalism if it makes work clearer. And I think there are places where “look” or “feel” or “style” might be better than “aesthetic,” such as in the case of Mad Men.

But — this will not surprise you — I’m puzzled by your reductive approach. What value is there in dismissing questions of perception and experience? Or, another way to ask this question, can you suggest a better term than “aesthetics” to talk about the experience of a show, if it is hard to imagine reclaiming the word’s original meaning?

I don’t mean these questions as veiled accusations — I’m genuinely curious, in part because I’m not entirely satisfied with the word “aesthetics,” either. Plus, I appreciate your background in art history — like so many things, I backed into the question of aesthetics accidentally. I first approached Antenna about the series on the “aesthetic turn” as a way to work through questions I found puzzling. I think work by people like Shawn VanCour (for instance, his consideration of the industrial pressures that shaped how people listened to early radio) helps us get at some rather perplexing problems. Personally, I’m interested in ideas of translation, especially between media, and the ways the experience of a translated text differs from that of the original.

I think the value of the Aesthetic Turn series has been the way people have addressed questions of experience. (And I think others have addressed it better than I, frankly.) So I wonder if you’d say a bit more about what you mean by “aesthetics.” If it’s not evaluative, and if it doesn’t consist in formal or stylistic analysis, what is it?