Nick Browne built upon the notion of flow to suggest that “the network is basically a relay in a process of textualizing the interaction of audience and advertiser” (74) and that the audience is active not “directly by what it wants, but through the figure of what is wanted of it.” To “read” flow as a whole for Browne is to read what he calls the “(super)text.” It is to recognize that television is not a medium of a priority in which programming is surrounded by commercials, but a medium in which commercials are surrounded by programming. Television shows thus become the connective tissue of the flow of advertisements, but are themselves really incidental to what television means within a commercial context.

But while Browne’s and to a greater extent Williams’ theories helped coalesce our field around a particular framework in these early years, there is not really an overwhelming body of flow work; indeed, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it actually deployed (please share good counterexamples in the comments!).

Perhaps because of technological convergence through DVRs and TiVo, television fragmentation, and the so-called post-network era, for many television scholars working on “important” texts – most often masculinized shows that air in primetime – flow has become passé, bygone, and moved beyond in television studies. Choosing not to engage with the (super)text and focusing only on the narrative elements of a show makes for concerning, unremarked-upon assumptions about “quality” audiences and spectatorship practices with strong implications for erasures of class and gender beyond what I can cover here.

But flow is, of course, alive and well and even, as I’ll argue, desired. Moreover, it’s not only characteristic of network broadcasting (especially in daytime), but cable and non-network spaces are themselves begging for ‘flownalyses.’ For instance, I’m an avid viewer of Logo’s #sitcomtherapy nights, which air old episodes of queer-friendly sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Roseanne, punctuated by bumpers showing gay men and couples, PSAs by gay puppets educating audiences about AIDS, and programs for queer shows with queer bodies like RuPaul’s Drag Race, all the while overlaid by Tweets, hashtags, and queer trivia.

This syndicated flow with its rich semiotics of queerness legitimates the queer readings long, though less-explicitly, tied to such shows by queer folks. I admit to becoming willfully complicit in my own exploitation as a live viewer, choosing to sit through commercials instead of popping in a DVD because I find the experience of flow pleasureful, and I long have. And I’m not alone.

Syndicating queerness, as I’m calling it, is something I’m exploring as part of a larger project and in the process of researching it, I’ve found many other instances of the derived pleasure and nostalgia of flow in the post-network, digital era online, one of which I’d like to remark upon here: nick reboot.

nick reboot is a 24/7 online live-streaming “channel” for 1990s and early 2000s Nickelodeon programming – both live action and cartoon. Fan activists (many from the so-called millenial generation) have long petitioned Nickelodeon to revive this nostalgic programming (shows like Salute Your Shorts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Rocko’s Modern Life) but every time shows have been revived, they’ve been situated within the wrong flow context, matching twenty year old programming with present-day commercial breaks. So in an effort to recreate the flow of the era, the creators of nick reboot scoured the web to assemble user-uploaded original and syndicated programming (once aired on Nick but perhaps later syndicated elsewhere) as well as commercials, station IDs, and bumpers from the era, VJing them in such a way as to create a mechanics and performance of 90s-era flow.

While DVDs and YouTube videos promise old programming, they remain scarred as edited – incomplete texts without commercials, bumpers, etc. that thus read as less televisual (the problem of the DVD archive). Fans long for flow and the (super)texts of their childhoods, finding in nick reboot pleasure from a place of nostalgia as they re-imagine and relive the subjectivities they inhabited as children viewers.

The single video stream “channel” is accompanied by a live chat room where users reminisce about the shows and advertised products in real-time, virtually recreating the communal characteristic of network television lost, some argue, in the present-day Netflixian era. What’s more, flow is illuminated in nick reboot by its somewhat random nature that seems itself unscheduled. You watch nick reboot, particularly in commercial transitions, often just to see what’s on nick reboot without the luxury of a digital guide that lists all the shows for at least seven days. Users can follow nick reboot on Twitter for a broadcast schedule or have it delivered to their inboxes but only a few hours ahead of air times – a newfangled variance of TV Guide.

TV scholars much stronger and smarter than I have long and successfully defended against the notion that television in the post-network/Hululian era is dead. To the list of the living and, indeed thriving, I add flow itself and encourage us all to challenge ourselves by keeping these “(super)texts” complete in our classrooms and our research where possible. Put down those clickers, put away your video editors, and bask in the flow of television.

Notes:
1. Not unlike the class exclusivity of Nickelodeon, nick reboot is exclusive itself requiring an invitation from one of the original members to join.

2. Scholars themselves struggle researching flow probably as off-air broadcast isn’t long protected by fair use, a problem of the limited television archive that will be a part of an upcoming TV Studies SIG workshop at SCMS.

Until recently, I would have to explain that Marilyn Hagerty writes restaurant reviews for the Grand Forks Herald. But not after what Anthony Bourdain calls “her infamously guileless Olive Garden review” a year ago last March. The review went viral when people elsewhere used it to congratulate themselves for having more sophisticated tastes or, in a second wave of comments, took offense that such earnestness would earn this salt-of-the-earth writer such scorn.

Now Hagerty has published Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews, whose title is pretty self-explanatory. I went to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks as an undergraduate, and I’m faculty now. Reading her book was like visiting old haunts, many of them long gone.

Watching Hagerty go viral was a strange experience for people in Grand Forks—our town isn’t home to a lot of celebrities. What made it especially surreal was seeing ourselves reflected in the fun-house mirror of blog posts and news articles by people who have never been here but were sure they knew all about about us. Both reactions—the self-congratulatory and the offended on Hagerty’s behalf—seemed to come from the assumption that we’re earnest people immune to the irony that pervades the post-modern cosmopolitan world of the coasts. We’re simple and therefore worthy of disdain or admiration, or some combination. Or, as Anthony Bourdain writes in his preface to Grand Forks:

This is a straightforward account of what people have been eating—still are eating—in much of America. As related by a kind, good-hearted reporter looking to pass along as much useful information as she can—while hurting no one … This book kills snark dead. (p. ix–x)

In other words, what was striking was the claim, made at a distance, about what it means to be here. And by “here” I mean where I am sitting, in my house facing 3rd Street, just north of downtown. Bourdain’s observation is a symptom of a nostalgia for a simpler time, one that—from his perch in New York City—appears to exist here. The distance from there to here is one of time as well as space:

Grand Forks is not New York City. We forget that—until we read her earlier reviews and remember, some of us, when you’d find a sloppy joe, steak Diane, turkey noodle soup, three-bean salad, red Jell-O in our neighborhoods … A prehipster world where lefse, potato dumplings, and walleye were far more likely to appear on a menu than pork belly. (p. viii–ix)

So what does it mean to “kill snark dead”? Snark is what we get when we try through sarcasm to negate what other people say. We pull their rhetorical rug out from under them, so to speak, but in the most cynical way—we know they’re wrong, but we can’t come up with something better ourselves. The truth is, we have no rug, either. It’s a symptom of the post-modern cosmopolitanism of the coasts (which are no longer “prehipster”), or so I’m led to believe.

Marilyn Hagerty does not do snark. On the contrary, she admonishes her readers:

To me, it’s embarrassing when companions make noisy complaints in restaurants. In fact, I avoid complaining even when asked by the waitress if everything is OK. I usually just nod my head and say everything is fine.

But one of my friends tells me, “You are wrong.” She maintains that it helps the restaurant when you let them know what you don’t like.

OK. I’ll concede you should let them know. But I think you should do it politely. (p. 5)

But this doesn’t mean Marilyn Hagerty is simple or naive. Far from it. By Bourdain’s account,

In person, she has a flinty, dry, very sharp sense of humor. She misses nothing.

I would not want to play poker with her for money. (p. ix)

The few times I have met her, I’ve been left with the same impression. What people missed when they read her Olive Garden review is that her humor—what we might read as a refined sense of irony, even if she wouldn’t call it that—shows up in her reviews, if you know where to look. Her irony doesn’t take the form of snark, but it isn’t the simple earnestness for which Bourdain is nostalgic, either. It’s flattering for a town like Grand Forks to be noticed by people like Bourdain, but to the degree that their recognition of the town flattens out the experience of living here, it misses the point.

This is the view from my front yard. It’s not always so dramatic.

So what’s it like to live here? I can speak only from personal experience, but I don’t think I’m terribly different from other people here. I’m aware of what’s happening elsewhere. I travel there often. The fabric of the world beyond Grand Forks is woven into the fabric of Grand Forks, too, and it’s the tug between there and here that gives texture to the micro-structure of feeling (if I may abuse Raymond Williams’s useful term) that characterizes life here. Hagerty is aware of this, too. She travels. She takes the same approach to reviewing New York’s Le Bernardin as she does to reviewing the Grand Forks Olive Garden. The effect is funny and suggests there’s more to her approach than she’s letting on. Her humor is even clearer in the notes that accompany her reprinted reviews in Grand Forks. After her reviews, a quick note appears: “Topper’s succumbed to a fire and the site is now home to a bank” or “Starlite was evicted from the Grand Cities Mall in August 2002 for nonpayment of its rent” or “Mexican Village continues to operate in Grand Forks.” After her review of Le Bernadin, she adds, “Le Bernardin continues to operate in New York.”

(By the way, if you’re ever in Grand Forks, I recommend Rhombus Guys Pizza and, if your timing is right, the Saturday night dinners at Amazing Grains. I cooked for the Amazing Grains dinner once, and Marilyn Hagerty mentioned me in a column.)

Image: James Turrell, Dhatu, 2010

A year ago, Neil Verma and I assembled a panel for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference titled, “The Aesthetic Turn in Radio Studies,” aimed at mapping renewed engagement by radio scholars with concerns traditionally classified under the heading of “aesthetics”: among them, analysis of narrative structure and broadcast genres, methods of spatial and temporal representation, styles of vocal performance, and experiential qualities of radio listening. This turn to questions of aesthetics has also swept the field of television studies, with a proliferation of work on narrative complexity, TV genres, visual style and sound style, performance studies, and viewing experiences engendered by television’s changing technological interfaces. Yet, despite its prominence in contemporary media research, few efforts have been made to trace the origins of this aesthetic agenda or assess its current methods and goals. A genealogy of the aesthetic turn, I suggest, in fact reveals a return to and affirmation of core concerns extending back to the founding moments of American media studies. While recognizing this rich history, in assessing directions for future work on media aesthetics, I wish to argue the value of a specifically production-oriented approach, as an updated project of “historical poetics” that blends traditional tools of textual analysis with methods derived from current work in production studies.

An aesthetic agenda has, to some degree, been a part of the media studies project from the start, even in the “effects” tradition to which subsequent humanities-oriented approaches are commonly contrasted. Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport’s founding 1935 study, Psychology of Radio, for instance, pursued a detailed investigation of radio’s distinctive modes of affective engagement (its “psychological novelty”) and the presentational styles needed to “conform to the requirements of the medium” (182). In their 1955 Personal Influence, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld lauded this attention to the experiential qualities of different media, while reminding researchers that the “content analysis” on which effects research relied also required close attention to “form,” or the presentational techniques used to render content via particular delivery channels (22).  Lazarsfeld championed this same approach during his tenure at the Rockefeller-funded Office of Radio Research, warning against exclusive reliance on quantitative studies and courting figures such as Rudolf Arnheim to develop what Rockefeller staff described as a “positive aesthetics of mass communication” that employed humanistic methods to illuminate the communicative properties and possibilities of mass media.† A fully developed program of mass communication research, as Lazarsfeld understood it, would demand strategic forays into the field of aesthetics.

Fig. 1. In a move lauded by Katz and Lazarsfeld, Cantril and Allport’s Psychology of Radio (1935) delineates key differences between storytelling techniques for radio vs. stage and screen entertainment (228).

Despite this early dalliance with humanities-oriented research methods, concerted development in this area was delayed until the television era. Beyond the initial flowering of more literary modes of narrative and genre study in the 1960s-1970s (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s discussion of this period), few movements did more to advance the aesthetic agenda than the cultural turn that followed in the wake of work by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in elaborating the foundations of their own multimodal “television studies approach,” the cultural turn brought not only new methods for analyzing audience “decodings,” but also valuable tools for studying institutional contexts and the “encoding” strategies pursued by media producers. From John Fiske and John Hartley’s work on semiotics, to new models of genre study by Julie D’Acci, Robert Allen, and Jason Mittell, cultural studies scholars have encouraged close reading and critical interpretation of media texts, while working to situate these texts within their larger industrial and cultural contexts. Importantly, then, concerns with questions of aesthetics in contemporary media studies represent not a radical correction and repudiation of the cultural turn, but rather a strategic renewal and intensification of founding tendencies within this movement.

Fig. 2. Cultural Studies interventions: The “encoding” half of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model (1973) calls for combined attention to media texts and their underlying institutional contexts.

The rise of production studies in recent years has offered further opportunities for enriched modes of aesthetic analysis. From John Caldwell’s seminal work on production culture, to Havens, Lotz, and Tinic’s influential “mid-level” approach, production studies scholars have argued the need to supplement structural analyses of media ownership and regulation with detailed studies of craft practices – moving industry studies, in effect, from the corporate boardroom to the studio floor. When coupled with methods of close textual analysis, consideration of struggles on the set and the “self-theorizing talk” (Caldwell) of producers in interviews and trade journals offers valuable tools for understanding, as Havens et al put it, “in an aesthetic sense . . . how particular media texts arise” and achieve dominance (237) – illuminating, in other words, the processes through which particular sets of programming forms and production styles are consolidated, and connecting them to the larger modes of production of which they are a part.

Fig. 3. A production-oriented approach to media aesthetics: Applying new tools for industry analysis from contemporary production studies, while reintegrating close analysis of resulting textual forms.

While most production studies work has remained focused on contemporary media and has yet to fully cultivate the aesthetic component of its research agenda, a production-oriented approach to media aesthetics holds great promise and may be of particular value for historical work. As an updated project of historical poetics, this approach combines close analysis of surface-level textual phenomena (the “what” of media programming) with critical study of the production techniques and institutional logics behind them (their “how” and “why”), isolating privileged formal properties and possibilities of media while recognizing these as historically contingent products of industrial sense-making and consent-winning. However, such an approach remains every bit as much “aesthetics” as “industry studies.” In a field increasingly occupied with an aesthetic agenda, why not call this certain tendency by name and begin serious discussion of its nature and future?

______________

† John Marshall, “Postwar Work in Film and Radio,” Memo to David H. Stevens, December 16, 1943, and “Interview with Rudolf Arnheim, January 3, 1944, Series 200R, RG 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Thanks to Josh Shepperd for his assistance in procuring these documents.

On (the) Wisconsin Discourses, Part Two (Part One,

What political investments are written into discursive analysis?

The previous post in this series looked at how “discourse” became a foundational concept for Media and Cultural Studies at Wisconsin. Concisely stated, the term “discourse” is used as an abbreviation for how cultural groups adjudicate upon and incorporate information into frameworks of belief over time. Central to this approach is the supposition that the most sustainable opportunity for organizational change occurs during the formation of consciousness. In Emeritus Professor John Fiske’s work, reference to the term discourse carries several political assumptions indebted to the Birmingham School regarding the agenda of media and cultural studies research:

1) Social and political change occurs most sustainably in the superstructural sphere, among belief systems and within conditions of identity formation; 2) Identity formation is subject to what codes and meanings are available in cultural circulation, be it through media, education, politics, or the popular; and 3) Cultural messages can be collected and then assessed, or mapped, among other coherent belief systems for the purpose of strategic intervention.

Put differently, media analysis for John Fiske consists of identifying how coded messages circulate and correspond to other meanings. Central to this orientation, it is assumed that social change can be observed in cultural circulation before it has taken the status of official knowledge or institutional precedent. If a specific practice has become dominant, it will still resist ossification and can be addressed through appropriate tactics. With reference to study of the effects macro-conditions such as regulation and industry ownership, discursive analysis favors evaluation of the everyday practices, meanings, and strategies reflective of consciousness and perspective. “Mapping” is a bottom-up method developed for the purpose of empirically identifying traces of dominant and emergent consciousness in information, opinion, and intention. A cultural studies project is fundamentally based in the hope that researcher literacy of this selection process be utilized for political mobilization.

What is the relationship between media literacy and aesthetic analysis?

Perhaps the most misunderstood element of Fiske’s work is his contention that aesthetic and political domains are never mutually exclusive. Aesthetic construction is, for Fiske, a fundamentally deliberative process directed at circulation. Since screen, image, text, and interpretation are filtered through discursive lenses, aesthetics cannot be divorced from ethical and political considerations. Representations are in the first place constructed with conceptual concerns, be it profit, advocacy, or depiction. And he believes that there are tools for tracing how those concepts become tangible practices and consequent reference points for social engagement.

Fiske argues that political will can be viewed in part among contours of discursive circulation, such as television, popular culture, etc. He claims that traces of consciousness can be seen both implicitly and overtly within how information is conceived, created, and positioned. Groups identify with, resist, or attempt to affect flows of cultural circulation within circulation itself. And in this way, the “understanding” of media adds a tool for political planning.

Which information has the capacity to infiltrate hybrid circulating spheres of political investment relies heavily upon how perceived confluence is interpreted by the internal “sense” of a discursive formation. That pleasure is taken in the consumption of media, for example, depends upon the quality of the artifice of communicative or representational impact, and to how many different outlets, messages, and interpretative channels information is received.

Discursive analysis of media is directed at mechanisms beyond ordered discipline or ideological reproduction at varied productive and interpretive processes. Analysis begins with tangible codes, methods of production of those codes, and distributive practices. To account for the complex processes surrounding media, Fiske proposes something like Richard Hoggart’s concept of “drift” literacy. Fiskean media literacy evaluates how different cultural information is filtered and comes into contact among public and popular spheres.

An act of production can be evaluated for the quality of its creative use of technology, performance, and affect. But for Fiske aesthetics refers to the way that content design serves as a façade for political will. He’s much closer to Bourdieu’s notion that aesthetic evaluation is indicative of one’s place in a social field, than say Kant’s argument that aesthetics are synthetic judgments based in a priori cognitive structures. Either position would be quite different than the assumption that Fiske advocates for a low media effect framework. An audience is not automatically or merely “active”; cultural analysis requires that a discursive formation carry historical engagement with cultural logic and hold coherent views for how to reconcile social contradictions. A discourse cannot spontaneously materialize out of shared habits of consumptive reflection, regardless of the degree of reciprocation between audience members or content manufacturer.

Hence Fiske’s “literacy of media aesthetics” may be thought about as critical evaluation of the artifice and strategies of discursive circulation. For a discourse to sustain, it must be recognized among a social field. And a social field is always embedded within future-directed political struggles over perspective, belief, and material relations. Research into “discourses” includes evaluation of how groups, industries, and individuals develop and interpret coherent codes of framed perspective. Since information is coded by methods of production while inflected with conditions of interpretation, developing tactics for political intervention requires sophisticated literacy of cultural institutional practices.

The next post in this series will look at how the concept ‘discourse’ has been examined by several faculty approaches to research into ‘circulation’.