Every few years, Flow’s editors select our favorite columns of the last few volumes. We’ve added special introductions to these important pieces. We’ve also appended the original comments below, as these were important in the piece’s first life. Enjoy!

Columns Editor Colin Tait:
By raising the specter of “dead white men” theorists and their applicability to the 2008 Economic Meltdown, Jefferey Sconce provoked one of the most highly-charged debates on Flow in some time. Many reacted against his resurrecting the ghosts of Jean Baudrillard and Karl Marx to discuss the contemporary state of media studies, particularly as he highlighted that in the shadow of 9/11, the triumph of consumer culture and an all-out image-war in the U.S. Election made a return to these thinkers a worthwhile, if not necessary intervention. Not to mention that Sconce, tongue planted firmly in cheek, asked what the point of analyzing John Adams slash fiction was in relation to the larger failures of huge institutions.

The lengthy and sometimes volatile discussion revealed some of the political investment that scholars and critics have in their field, which was as illuminating and productive as the original incitement. Moreover, heavy hitters in Media Studies weighed in, revealing the article as a sort of litmus test for the state of theory and practice. Not only is it an interesting read but a necessary interjection, and a call to debate where we (as media scholars) are, and where we want to be in the future.

The party is over, or so we are told. Blame who you want: Wall Street speculators—minorities with the audacity to be home owners—two years of a Democratic congress or eight years of Dubya. Bottom line–America has awoken to the cruel reality that an economy cannot survive based only on endless and increasingly manic consumption. For a time the nation made a valiant last-stand of mass disavowal, millions of Americans raiding the nearest Wal-Mart each week for new flat-screens, bulk salad-shooters, and mountains of 99 cent undershirts, all the while realizing that their own community’s only remaining exports were tears and crystal meth. To those reading this beyond the borders of the U.S.A.: our apologies—we would have bought more crap, but we’re completely maxed out.

Up in critical theory heaven, I can only imagine that Marx and Baudrillard are laughing themselves sick over our current predicament. Intoxicated by the sheer plenitude of the media and our own pleasures of consumption, television studies in particular seems to have thought that it was finished with such bummers as alienation, ideology, and commodity fetishism. All of that messy totalizing “theory” had seemingly been replaced by draining the Marxism out of the CCCS, translating Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” into the language of a network marketing plan, and empowering an entire generation to dismiss Adorno as a humorless lunkhead because he couldn’t or wouldn’t (hypothetically) recognize the complexity of the Battlestar metaverse. It was a great scam. The proliferation and fragmentation of the media allowed us to find more and more content worthy of our attention, extol the pluralistic virtues of a seemingly infinite marketplace, and celebrate the special status and ingenious pleasures of anyone who liked television for any reason (except, of course, Fox News). Meanwhile, television as an object, institution, and vector of power slowly went ahead and continued doing what we always suspected it was doing—stealing more and more of our time and creative energy; dissolving any lingering remnants of embodied community; and encouraging us to continue yielding our interiority to fantasy lives crafted by market forces.

For his part, Baudrillard made a series of observations/predictions thirty years ago that seem to be coming true with alarming accuracy: 1) As the west ascends into simulation and hyperreality, the only remaining political tactic of any consequence will be terrorism, inasmuch as the terrorist intervenes more in the world of signs than in territory; 2) Western consumerism would eventually succeed in completely replacing “exchange value” with sign value, creating a “system of objects” that would cultivate and replicate the consumer-citizen as the vector for its own survival (in other words, your iPod needs you more than you need your iPod); 3) Leftist reformers of media would continue to fantasize about improving the progressive content and positive applications of the media, when the very advent of television as television signaled the endpoint of such rationalist paternalism. Over the course of his career, Baudrillard gradually became something like the court jester of cultural theory, but consider this: Many of us now root for Obama in what is essentially a sign war against the terroristic tactics of the McCain campaign, hoping he will deliver us from an economic meltdown triggered by a collapse in credit and consumer confidence that is, at its heart, a crisis in the signification of value, assets, and the future. Moreover, this crisis in monetary meaning stems in part from an attempt to finance a doomed simulation of American military strength through appeals to a fantasy of limitless shopping and virtual equity—a form of consumer ecstasy explicitly sanctioned by the President as an appropriate sign of solidarity in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which was itself a spectacle of global fascination engineered by bin Laden to strike a symbolic blow at the heart of the western world’s financial center that, in the end, seems to have revealed there was really only a symbol there in the first place. Yep, Baudrillard was an idiot.

Is media studies poised for a similar collapse? One could certainly argue that television studies’ often unexamined celebration of consumption has invested in the unstable fiction of the “active audience” with the same zeal and certitude that bankers bought up sub-prime mortgages. Perhaps because our big brother, film studies, seemingly reached a dead end in theorizing larger issues of representation, subjectivity, politics, etc., television studies often seems happy to go for the low-hanging fruit of the more localized negotiated reading, a theory of hegemony and desire that comes without all the baggage of basic alienation or a barred subject. Accelerating immersion into the media is to be celebrated because audiences are now active, even creative in their engagement of the culture industries. But if we examine what constitutes the activeness of the active audience—customizing one’s TiVO profile; setting up a Heroes blog; organizing a save Friday Night Lights campaign; planting spoilers in an I Love Money chat-room; writing a John Adams slash story; firing off a missive to Anderson Cooper 360; buying an entire season of Lost on DVD so that one can lose another 19 hours of their life—we should be compelled to ask if these “activities” actually serve us, or if they instead actively expand the demands and desires of television itself, the most seductive point-man in the overall “system of objects” that wants us to continue serving as the Petri dishes in which it cultivates its own future sustenance. In his short polemic, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Baudrillard argued that the masses—as a phantom of sociology—possess only inactivity and inertia as a weapon to guard against interventions into their non-existence. Like a black hole, these hallucinatory masses are to be celebrated for their ability to absorb and neutralize any attempt to define and/or understand them. In this respect, perhaps the much-maligned “passive” viewer of television wasn’t such a bad guy after all—a spectator who consumed media sporadically, casually, and even resentfully– exhibiting a minimum of fascination for the medium itself and remaining stolidly impervious to television’s desire that we engage it more actively, with greater attention, in imaginary dialogue, with creative enthusiasm, and in increased opportunities for multi-platform consumption. We may find that encouraging a more active engagement of the media, rather than a passive resistance and reluctant coexistence, will be like catching the confrontational gaze of a psychopath on the subway: he knows that we know that he knows that we are watching him, opening the door for an escalating spiral of control and terror that will prove very difficult to escape.

When will we know we have actually entered the depression that follows our consumer blow-out, both in the global economy and in the meaningful production of new media theory and criticism? Most likely television itself will let us know when the economic depression has begun, and in so doing, will only underscore our continuing inability to fully theorize the medium’s power to integrate our financial and libidinal economies. Then again, for those who don’t have to pawn their sets for food and rent, we might realize the depression has begun once we notice the economic undead beginning to mass around the previously snug and secure boundaries of our home theaters. They won’t be there to discuss The Gilmore Girls.

Image Credits:

1. When media consumption goes too far.

2. Marx, disappointed.

3. Baudrillard told you so.

Original Comments:

Elana Levine said:
I appreciate the way you critique the diminishing impact of critical perspectives in television studies, in particular those perspectives that bring with them an inherent suspicion of the capitalist market (rather than the seemingly happy embrace of it in some contemporary media scholarship). However, I don’t think that a wholesale dismissal of the perspective you label “active audience” is necessary. Nor do I think that dismissing scholarship on Gilmore Girls or any other particular television text, or of the ways that viewers interact with such texts, is an appropriate corrective.

Challenging what may seem like an acceptance of television’s consumerist function in some scholarship need not resort to old-school political economy-style bashing of all television, all TV viewing, or all TV scholarship that takes such matters seriously. To do those things seems to me to rehash a debate between two poles of media theory and criticism that were never as far apart as their respective proponents declared, and which falsely juxtaposed a masculinist, elitist “TV is duping the masses” perspective with a feminized, populist one.

I share your desire for media theory and criticism that offers something new, and something that helps us to grapple with television’s place in our contemporary quagmire of consumption, but think that the way to inspire such intellectual creativity is to encourage work that takes ALL dimensions of television seriously–its programming and its engagement by viewers as well as its complicity with a troubled economic system. To me, the day we neglect any of these dimensions in favor of any other is the real harbinger of the “collapse” of television studies.
-October 31st, 2008 at 3:58 pm

Kit Hughes / FLOW Staff (Author) said:

Thanks for the great, timely column. I think you bring up some very difficult questions that may require media scholars to reevaluate their own relationships with the field. I also wonder about other repercussions of the drive to consume media at increasingly accelerated rates, namely the damage wrought on the environment. Do we need to begin talking about an ethics of media studies?
-October 31st, 2008 at 8:30 pm

Hollis Griffin said:

It must be the province of Great Men to trivialize whole bodies of knowledge and scholarship, and to consider matters of economy as if they have no affective functions. After all, Great Men have long waged wars — critical and others — with a staggeringly myopic view of what constitutes “the economic” and “the political.” Citing Baudrillard betrays a desire to play provocateur and have the proverbial Final Word. Engaging in meaningful praxis about the direction of the field might ask what points of connection exist between “active audience” scholarship and political economy criticism at this particular juncture. Pointing to the heavens just to wonder if Baudrillard is laughing casts an archaic pall over a critical tradition regularly complicated and invigorated by issues of difference. Referring to the spectre of Great Men as conclusive proof that criticism made in the name of plurality is somehow ill-conceived isn’t all that shocking — it’s just wrong.
-November 3rd, 2008 at 12:04 am

Derek Kompare said:

An intriguing provocation as usual, Jeffrey, which reminds us that certain voices and theories still have not only relevance but invaluable insight, despite not being in the current media studies playlist (there’s that iPod again). Many other voices from the past similarly have much to offer about this moment.

That said, I’m inclined to agree with Elana and Hollis that simply reasserting old dichotomies and reanimating Great Men is of limited critical use, and is more of a valuable point to raise and advance the discussion than an endpoint. I agree wholeheartedly with your reservations about the seeming hegemony of “active audiences” in much media studies today, and of our continued focus on relatively marginal texts and practices (a focus that’s been more or less constant in the 17 years I’ve been working in the field). I think we may indeed have lost sight of “television” (in a Williams sense of the word), and even (gasp) “mass culture” (to reanimate everyone’s favorite straw man, Adorno) along the way, and that has left us less-than equipped to handle this looming social collapse.

However, the way forward should be less through “fiat by Theory” (as alluring as that still remains, not least because it reads and sounds “cool,” as in George Carlin cool), and more through reassessing our critical tools and (most importantly) analytical methodologies. Just what is the “it” that we’re not only studying, but basing our definition of “the Field” on? Should that “it” change radically at particular historical moments, or should it remain constant? How do we get at that “it”? Are we wedded to our tools, our product, both, neither?

I’m not certain of the answers at all, but I do know that it’s essential to critique where we’ve been and what we’re doing, and we certainly need more of that soul-searching. I’m just not convinced that picturing the smug ghosts of Karl and Jean, or avoiding eye contact with Lorelai Gilmore on the subway, is all that helpful in the long run.
-November 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am

Michael Kackman said:

It’s easy to forget that criticism is an ongoing dialogue, and instead to allow a caricature of our presumed opposition to stand in for a real debate. Some degree of strategic ignorance is a necessary part of our work — we bracket off portions of the debate, setting them aside so we can focus on what we most care about. Maybe Jeff is being hyperbolic and deploying some caricatures of his own, but frankly he’s got a point.

When we allow a caricature of critical theory stand in for the real thing, we evacuate reception studies of a crucial point of leverage — perhaps its most important one.

It’s worth remembering that the foundational scholarship on active audiences began by trying to theorize the possibility of audience agency within conditions of alienation, marginalization, and economic exploitation. If, on the other hand, all we’re doing is celebrating “agency” without a critical discussion of that which it is pushing against (whether it be ideologies, institutions, economics, etc.), what’s the point? Optimism for its own sake? Blech.

The best reception scholarship still understands audience agency and participatory cultural production as fundamentally emerging out of tension, exploring such issues as the cooptation and commodification of fan practices by media industries, the porous boundaries between consumption and production, ideological struggles, etc. The best of this work will endure, and will continue to spark a productive dialogue with critical theory of even the sternest sort. It’s a conversation that needs to continue.

One small quibble, though — it seems a little disingenuous to critique fans and reception scholars for their disconnect from the real, while simultaneously pointing out that the realm of the symbolic has profound material effects. No?

I am so totally going to find some of that John Adams slash. Hawt. Then I’ll go vote, even though the choices may never really measure up….
-November 3rd, 2008 at 1:59 pm

Jeffrey Sconce said:

I appreciate the concerns raised by Elana, Hollis, and Derek—in fact, I could have anticipated many of them. As Derek quite rightly points out, this debate has been going on for several years now. What concerns me, I suppose, is a seemingly growing trend in television studies to settle into a comfortable form of pluralist mapping, and in the process, a ceding of the aesthetic and creative functions of theory/criticism for a type of positivist sociology that tends to reaffirm the logic of the marketplace. I think we can all agree that different people (and people of difference) like television for a number of reasons—they’re supposed to.

I’ll try to bundle my response according to a few of the themes raised across the 3 responses:
1. I have no interest in political economy. Bringing up Marx does not signal a desire to memorize the Time-Warner family tree. That’s why I linked him here to Baudrillard—perhaps the greatest arch-enemy of political economy ever (in this world and presumably the next!)
2. It is interesting, and indicative of where we are presently, that all 3 responses to a piece critiquing our unexamined emphasis on active/affective pluralism rather explicitly warn against a “dichotomy” that would squelch the active/affective pluralism of media criticism! Obviously, everyone should do what they want in media scholarship—but sometimes appeals to theoretical abstraction can remind us that something might actually be at stake, and that the constant appeal for a harmonious variety of critical approaches is, in its own way, as totalizing, imperious, and as empty a gesture as the most authoritative of authoritarian theories.
3. As to the “Great Men” angle—yes, we’ve all been trained to repudiate appeals to the unquestioned authority of white male Europeans (and increasingly, “theorists” of any kind—including women and/or those of color). But do any of us want to pretend, in our desire to perform an “anxiety of non-influence,” that whatever critical work we engage in today is somehow wholly autonomous from this work? Not every appeal to an influential theorist of the past is a bid to crush difference; indeed, where would theories of difference be without the “great men” of Foucault, Freud, and “Mr. D.” his own bad self, Jacques Derrida? In this respect, while one can speak of a post-Marxist or neo-Marxist era, can we really ever imagine an “un-Marxist” era?
4. Do we want to retain a place in our field—whatever it may be at this point—for modes of critical/theoretical writing that indulge aestheticism and speculation, that proceed from the assumption that the chief task of media scholarship is to produce discourse about the media; or, will we settle for the fantasy that in our ever more localized, specific, and historicized attention to quotidian practice, we are somehow finally overcoming—through taxonomy and description—the fundamentally irreconcilable gap dividing language and truth?
That said, I’m in complete agreement with Derek’s third paragraph—reassessment, redefinition, and soul-searching about the field…that’s really all we can ever do.
-November 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm

Jonathan Gray said:

I’m not so sure how common “active audience” work really is though. I notice a Vilas Hall circa John Fiske flavor to the commentators here — so perhaps we’ve entered a timewarp back to 1990 ;-) — but even when Fiske was seeing rebellion on the beaches of Cottesloe, active audience work was hardly hegemonic, except perhaps for the briefest of moments. I worry when I hear it being attacked, therefore, not because the excesses of active audience theory don’t deserve it (because they often do), but because those excesses usually exist in straw man form alone (even [and sometimes especially] when ascribed to Fiske), ever ready to be invoked when we want to convince ourselves that we’re doing the really cutting edge work, not falling into that trap into which those people over there did. I don’t know many of those “people over there,” though, and rumors of their vice grip on the discipline are exaggerated. With television studies’ recent amping up of critical production studies (not just poli econ) from people such as Caldwell, Havens, Tinic, Lotz, Curtin, and so forth, I think it’s all the harder to find those elusive active audience people claiming that setting up a Heroes blog is a blow against The Man. Most of the people I know whose profile might lead one to believe they’re active audience acolytes (ie: those in the much-maligned fan studies) see the study of affect as a way at getting at some of the fundamental structures underneath a society that is suffused with appeals to affect (indeed, the only three Adorno pseudo-fans I know are all fan studies scholars).

So, while I’m not blind to the provocateur nature of your post, Jeff, while I realize it’s not just a big dump on active audience studies, and while others have already covered the benefits of your call for such introspection, I think that, ironically, criticizing the active audience scholar and seeing him or her as the culprit often allows us to avoid the form of introspection you call for, since we usher in the straw man, find ourselves and our own work better than him, and then feel comfortable again, secure in the knowledge that we’re doing the stuff that counts as good scholarship. If television studies hasn’t done the things you want it to do, though, it’s not (just) active audience work that’s filled the gap — it’s usually a random and eclectic collection of work in other paradigms too.
-November 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 pm

Horace Newcomb said:

Perhaps it’s worth remembering that “active audience” approaches (plural in and of themselves), emerged in particular contexts as attempts to counter work that seemed to oversimplify cultural processes through applications of large theoretical concepts. These concepts suggested that experiences, artifacts and even industries could be explained in some totalizing manner. (Some, though not all, of these concepts are cited in Jeff’s essay.) In that sense, the “active audience” approaches provided valuable reasons to re-think some of the larger theories. (If, for example, one accepts the first premises of Culture Industry or The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the conclusions are inescapable. The only way “out” is to reject those premises, or at least question them in strong ways.)

I now take as a given that audiences are “active” and worry far less about the implication that this somehow replicates or assists “the industry,” or even “positivist sociology” than Jeff does. One can argue (as it has been argued against the entire “field” of “television studies”) that any attention, critical or otherwise, to what constitutes television, does the same thing. We are born co-opted.

The large question is something like: What do we need to know about what we study? I think we needed to know more about audiences at one time and probably continue to need to know things about audiences. Like most rich theoretical and methodological strategies, however, “active audience” strategies can be applied in better and worse ways – or can be driven into the ground of the same point with more and more examples. Having never studied audiences I’ve only wanted to make it difficult for the people who do by asking other questions. In a way, that’s what Jeff is doing here. And I’ve worried for some time that our questions have led us to come to look quite like literary studies and film studies – not that there’s anything wrong with that for those who wish to pursue more detailed, precise, marginal, minor, specific, gap-filling, overlooked, lost, newly discovered and important (choose your modifier) examples and topics. Passion for and excitement over such specific aspects of any type of expressive culture is the luxury of our academic lives. That this luxury fosters guilt lies, I think, at the heart of Jeff’s essay. Personally, I’ve always thought Baudrillard was a fictional character he created, and placing him in a position of critique alongside references to the diminution of my retirement funds is not a nice story at all.

The task remains to define the bigger questions and to pursue answers to them so that the more specific encounters can add up to something. I think that’s the point of Jeff’s essay. On this topic I recommend Milly Buonanno’s The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories (Intellect, 2008). In the introduction I refer to Milly as “a philosopher of television.” We need more of these. And since I reject the potential for pessimism that comes with all the somewhat closed-ended theories he referenced, I am, actually, willing to go with optimism for the sake of optimism. As a compass it points in better directions. Whether we get there or not remains to be seen.
-November 11th, 2008 at 3:42 pm

Heather Hendershot said:

I realize that this may sound hopelessly naive, misguided…I don’t know…jejune? But I am having trouble making the connection between the collapse of the global economy, the mortgage crisis, melting icecaps, you name it, and our success or failure as media scholars pursuing proper or improper methods. The party is over, and we have been wasting our time discussing Gilmore Girls and Battlestar?

I’m particularly stuck on Jeff’s point #4, above. I’m not sure what it means to “indulge aestheticism and speculation,” but perhaps it’s shorthand for thinking about how narrative works on television, how it makes us feel or look at the world, and perhaps working through (speculating?) on why old-fashioned concerns about the politics of representation might still be meaningful to us. I have no illusions that TV Studies–whether oriented around industrial analysis, audience studies, textual readings–fixes broken things. Who actually thinks that their “taxonomy and description” overcomes “an irreconcilable gap dividing language and truth”? To give a concrete example, I’ve recently written an essay about the shifting representation of abortion on television. I don’t feel that this kind of analysis is indulgent; nor do I feel that my essay on representational politics will in any way have an impact on policy. There’s a good chance that within the next four years, several Supreme Court justices will step down, and they will be replaced by liberals or centrists; if McCain had won, the court would have swung in the opposite direction. So long Roe v. Wade. I can’t think of anywhere were the link between language and truth is more stripped bare than the instance of Supreme Court decisions: the men and women in robes write things down, and the world changes in concrete, tangible ways. Legal speech is performative language; most scholarship is not. Of course, some is, insofar as we read books, and they change us, and we hope to change others with our own books. I’m not arguing that scholarship doesn’t really matter because it isn’t always directly “effective,” but, rather, expressing frustration with the notion that certain kinds of theoretical work is inherently better than other kinds of research (that is perhaps more empirical, more celebratory, or more something else) because it just gets more done, does more heavy lifting. Honestly, I don’t know if I am engaging in a “comfortable form of pluralist mapping” here–just trying to work through some ideas that all of this discussion raises for me. (I’m not a theorist by inclination, and I suspect that Jeff and any of the other smart people who have already contributed to this discussion could easily pin me for the count in any serious discussion of Baudrillard or Marx.)

Assessing where TV Studies is at, what kind of work we want to pursue, and which theories are useful or not is terrific–we are obviously all for it. Asking what the hell we are doing helps us move forward, find new areas of study, cast aside methods that don’t seem useful anymore, and create new approaches. Is the “chief task of media scholarship” to “produce discourse about the media” (back to point #4)? Well, sure, in large part. If you happen also to do research that leads you to teaching gay teenagers how to shoot and edit videos about their lives, appearing before the FCC to explain why Goth music should not be blamed for Columbine, consulting (yes, for cash) with video game designers about how to make games that aren’t misogynist, or testifying in a court room about why a magazine or videotape is not legally obscene, that’s fantastic, but we’re not all pitiful tools of The Man if much of what we do is study viewer engagement, write about new twists in the construction of TV narratives, or turn into “archive rats” (as Richard Hofstadter put it) and spend all our time on nerdy research that helps us better understand the past. So say we all. So sue me.
-November 12th, 2008 at 2:40 am

Jeffrey Sconce said:

I just wanted to add a second note in response to the recent posts from Jonathan, Horace, and Heather.

I absolutely agree with Horace’s reminder that the initial move toward examining the more localized activities of audiences began as a corrective to modes of theory that had little use for the socio-historical specificities of cultural practice. But even in this shift in emphasis there was also a sense that the “media”—as an abstracted hallucination of the entirety of its products and practices—was a suspect, perhaps even sinister structural force worthy of constant critical engagement. As Michael points out, so much of the early work in reception studies (and even its feisty offspring, “fan studies”) proceeded from a position of alienation, marginalization, etc. (both in the audience and the scholar!).
While I certainly don’t think we should simply return to measuring the cells that comprise the inescapable prison-house of the alienated subject, I do sometimes wonder if our collective desire to empower audiences through appeals to their sociological singularity and/or participatory zeal hasn’t served to evacuate important theoretical questions about television as a structural force, or even—to return to Baudrillard once again—an “evil object” that has through its proliferation and acceleration completely broken free of its human creators to obey its own logics and imperatives. Laugh if you want–but the existence of The Hillz, Dane Cook, and the upcoming media blitz that will surely attend the new “Tom Cruise as one-eyed Nazi” movie prove me right. Shouldn’t we still want to ask the larger theoretical questions that might help us understand how we came to live in a world of The Hillz, Dane Cook, and “Tom Cruise as one-eyed Nazi” movies, and how desperately sad such a world is (made even more sad by the fact that no one asked to live in such a world, and we seem so sanguine in simply letting that world exist).

In this respect, my argument may be less with the “active audience” paradigm than the unexamined assumption that a “pro-active audience” is intrinsically a positive, healthy, and valuable mode of engaging the media. Are there occasions where a passive audience—as in disinterested, lazy, and disengaged—might not be the more “progressive,” “humane,” and/or “productive” strategy for co-existing with the media’s demand that we engage it more deeply, more often, more enthusiastically? I don’t think such advocacy necessarily means a turn toward pessimism or cynicism—there are many immutable forces in the universe that we can do little about: earthquakes, bodily decay, wayward asteroids. The media have clearly “won” in this regard—in the future we will all be asked to perform more and more labor to ensure the continued circulation of media hardware and software. In facing this future, will there still be a place for skepticism, antagonism, and critical disengagement—or is the only response a type of Stockholm Syndrome where we fantasize that the only way to “master” and/or change the media is to consume more and more of it, to confuse its successful campaign of multi-platform implantation with our own illusions of critical engagement?

Finally, in response to Heather’s query, a brief comment on “indulging aestheticism and speculation.” By this I simply mean leaving room for critical writing that functions as a type of creative R&D and recognizes that critical inquiry is in and of itself a useful pursuit—even if it is purely speculative and somewhat aleatory. I am certainly not advocating some theoretical agenda that will trump all others in a philosophical version of Pokeman—rather, I was hoping to invoke our common intellectual ancestry to wonder, through the analogy of over-consumption, if we have simply abandoned the idea that less media might be a better idea than more media, or that passive disengagement might at times be a healthier strategy than manic immersion.
-November 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

Lisa Parks said:

I have nothing to add but wanted to thank Jeff Sconce for writing a sharp column and provoking such an discussion on Flow.

-December 8th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

Please feel free to comment.

Back when NBC was still riding high, Thursday primetime was the jewel of the crown. Friends, Seinfeld, and ER were platinum tent poles that could support innumerable Single Guys, Sudden Susans, Carolines, Wills, Graces, and other young white urban professionals looking to balance the demands of a career, romantic life, and the big city. No more. Friends and Seinfeld are long gone, of course, and ER is finally exiting this season with a whimper rather than a bang. Looking back, the comedies in particular seem increasingly dated, transmissions from that strange reality we all only vaguely remember before Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Iraq, and Great Depression 2.0. Not only do the go-go ‘90s increasingly seem like a distant fever dream, so too does television itself. The hubris of Thursday’s “must see TV” now settles for the more workmanlike “comedy done right”—a promise of basic competence that comes with seeing your audience dwindle by two-thirds. GE once offered Jerry Seinfeld part ownership of the company to stay in production; now Tina Fey begs on the Emmys for someone, somewhere to watch her show in some format, any format.

Friends, Seinfeld, and their many less successful clones emphasized a type of magical urban thinking—cue Jennifer Anniston entering Central Perk: “Hey everyone, I’ve just been made the head buyer at Barneys!” “That’s great,” say her professional chef BFF, inexplicably-employed paleontologist boyfriend, and lunk-headed soap-actor neighbor. Later they all retreat to their legendarily gigantic yet affordable Manhattan apartments. The old NBC formula was one of fantasy-identification, especially for the demo so valued by the network: here is life in the biggest of the big cities—pursuing your dreams, finding true love, and making lifelong friends. Even George Costanza, the resident punching bag on Seinfeld, landed a few hot dates and spent a couple of seasons working for the Yankees. And Seinfeld as a whole, though it scrupulously obeyed its “no hugs” credo across nine seasons, nevertheless depended on that familiar sense of community so important to the sitcom’s history.

Given this heritage, what is most remarkable about the current NBC Thursday line-up is just how radically it inverts this formula. If ‘90s NBC traded in lifestyle fantasies of urban excitement, bottomless consumption, and witty sophistication, the new NBC aesthetic offers the more sobering prospect of such dreams deferred and denied. We are now invited to ask: Just how much would it suck to live in Scranton and work as middle-management at a paper company? “Comedy done right” is apparently open season on any constituency standing outside the upwardly mobile urban single in terms of class, taste, and geography. For the past four years, My Name is Earl has explored the comedy gold to be had in a white underclass denied access to education or proper grooming products, following the time-honored comic tradition of two downscale dumb guys, one of whom is just slightly smarter than the other. More toxic is Kath and Kim, NBC’s Americanization of the popular Australian series (which may or may not return for a second season). Admittedly, I’ve only seen about 2 and a half episodes, but from what I can tell, the premise appears to be that Kath, Kim, and Kath’s fiancé are all reasonably happy, upbeat, and mutually supportive people who—hilariously—remain completely unaware that they are in fact tasteless boobs so unfashionable and naïve that they should pray for the sweet release of death. In short, the program is a series of wardrobe jokes punctuated by scenes in a mall, made by and for people who would rather drink gasoline than be seen anywhere near a Banana Republic. The fiancée even runs a Sub shop at the mall, apparently because the idea that there are people out there somewhere who would eat Subs at the mall is so deliciously tasteless as to be self-evidently hysterical.

The American version of The Office triples down on the comedy of lifestyle abjection: pointless profession + self-delusion + Scranton = critically acclaimed hell on earth. Yes, it’s more complicated than that, and yes, it is often hilarious. But in the show’s fundamental architecture, Jim and Pam serve as surrogates for the network’s desired demo—young, ironic, and self-aware enough to realize that without their youth, irony, and self-awareness, they would become just two more middle-aged losers trapped forever in this particular circle of cubicle Hell. Much has been made of the differences between the BBC and NBC versions. While it is hard to express exactly, the Gervais version always struck me as slightly more philosophical in its ambitions—after thousands of years of western civilization, has it come to this? How did the world become so ugly, boring, and petty? The NBC version, on the other hand, seems to be less about our wistful recognition of shared alienation and more a cautionary tale for young urbans about not getting stuck in a small town doing unrewarding labor. In short, the America version maintains the characteristically American hope that a better life might be had somewhere else doing something else, while in the British version, we all make paper, all of us, forever, without mercy or exit.

And now the producers of The Office bring us the new Amy Poehler show. Here the premise is that some people, apparently of their own free will, live in Indiana and are stupid enough to take seriously a bullshit job at something as bogus as the Parks and Recreation Department. Hoping to prime the pump of snotty condescension for potential viewers of the series, NBC provides a link to the fictional town’s fictional website:

Pawnee is not a tourist Mecca, but this fact has made it a somewhat desirable location for those looking to get away from the crowds. Whether it’s taking in a community theater play in the park, guided tours of old Wamapoke hunting and burial grounds, or just shopping in a chain store on Main Street, there’s always at least one thing to do on the weekends.

Code words abound here, cuing the comic vignettes that will inevitably follow: “community theater” (talentless morons working very hard to excel in a laughable production of Mama Mia—one unlucky character deluded enough to believe he or she might really make it in the entertainment industry); “guided tours” (bored tourists shepherded through uninspiring attractions while listening to the comically misinformed narration of Poehler or a supporting cast member); “chain store” (see Kath and Kim, above). In an effort at some transmedial buzz, viewers are asked elsewhere to submit their ideas for solving the city’s “raccoon problem,” a Hooterville joke reminding us that one’s proximity to wildlife is inversely related to one’s access to a Jamba Juice, and thus stands as an index of shame.

Which brings us finally to 30-Rock, the exception that proves the rule. Here is the one last show that continues to explore the trials and tribulations of single and professional life in the Big Apple. TV critics and scholars love it (much more than the general public, it would appear). And why wouldn’t we? Despite the purportedly contemporaneous setting, the series has a strangely nostalgic feel to it, most likely because it celebrates both a medium and a world that no longer exist.

Like Mad Men (another critical/academic fave), Liz Lemon’s New York is a place where both New York and television are still important. Liz and her staff work valiantly each week to produce a new episode of television as if there was actually still an audience out there waiting for weekly installments of a television show. Despite all the in-jokes about corporate control, creative compromise, and systemic mediocrity in the age of convergence, the program verges on an almost CBS-like visit with “old friends”–not just the screwball genre it borrows from so liberally, but also the Dick Van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, SNL, and even the “hey kids, let’s put on a show” genre of classic Hollywood. Much is made of the show’s clever self-reflexivity, but in truth, this plays more like flattery for a 30/40-something audience that still believes they possess superior knowledge about how the media really work, when in fact the new media environment is, for most of this audience, a terrifying landscape of alien platforms, obtuse genres, and incomprehensible practices. Beneath it all is a certain sense of loss—not only for the weekly broadcast television that once constituted the Thursday night block, but also for the social/political/consumer habitus that once attended that now distant audience formation—an irony that stopped just short of snark; a second wave feminism still relatively unchallenged by the “whatever” assault of “get over it” third wave punks; a literate reflexivity; intertextual stunt-casting; fast-thinking New York wit.

30-Rock is perhaps the last series to make it out of nineties New York, as if its transmission drifted out into space, bounced off Pluto, and is only now returning to earth. To find the new clever, the new template in urban fantasy, the new state-of-the-art in media-savvy programming, I think we have to move our sensibilities west like the industry itself did long ago. Imagine a teenage girl living in, say, Pawnee, Indiana. Who is likely to be the more compelling role model: Liz Lemon or the Ollie Girls? Which show and city model a better fantasy for what it means to succeed in life circa 2009: 30-Rock’s New York or Sunset Tan’s L.A.?

In the end, 30-Rock is a rather singular vanity project about one extraordinary and unattainable reality—Tina Fey as Tina Fey in the story of Tina Fey’s rise to Tina Feyfabulism in New York. Who else could pull that off? But a lot of girls could dye their hair blonde, secure gigantic breast implants, find another girl to help craft a perverse Doublemint Het-lesbian fantasy act, move to L.A., get a tan, get a job in a tanning salon, and then find themselves on a cable reality series spraying tan juice on C-list celebrities. And who knows where that might lead—a promotion into Hef’s harem, a gig on the Bad Girls Club, a chance to cry at the feet of Bret Michaels? And even if that’s all there is in front of the camera, the girl from Pawnee will still have the condo in Van Nuys, a couple of kids, and maybe even a generous alimony payment from her former Rock of Love line-producer husband. But most of all, she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing she showed all those hayseeds back in Pawnee that she understood the game, she really knew how the media really works—not in any overly clever Seven Sisters/wink-wink/Brecht light/Liz Lemon kind of way (that’s soooo nineties)—but in the much crueler yet honest realization that you are what you signify, that your worth is defined primarily by your access to commodities, visibility, attention, and envy. Who needs to be a neurotic self-doubting sexless brunette in New York (or even worse, a receptionist in Scranton) when you could transform yourself, as Baudrillard might say, into the “more blonde than blonde,” the “more vapid than vapid,” the “more L.A. than L.A.,” thus ensuring the success that comes with achieving a transcendent state of pure obscenity and absolute fascination. That’s a growth market, especially when compared to the dwindling opportunities available to East Coast wags and wits. And even when the girl from Pawnee hits thirty, and is for all intents and purposes useless to the industrial economy she helped sustain for a couple of years, there is always the possibility for maybe one last curtain call in externalized self-actualization. I hear Fox is casting for MiLF Island next week.

Image Credits:

1. Central Perk: symbolic center of the old urban imaginary.
2. Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope: poise, symmetry, boredom.
3. Tina Fey as Liz Lemon: Queen of a doomed empire.
4. Holly Huddleston (1/2 of the Ollie Girls): “I live in L.A., have a bitchin’ tan, and date Ryan Seacrest. What have you accomplished in life?”

Orderlies working the psych-ward spend a fair amount of time policing the television set. The psychotic, as it turns out, do not fare well when left completely alone with what remains our most imperious of media. At the center of their difficulties is what psychiatry calls the “delusion of reference”—a belief that the mass media speak directly to you or about you. Is Drew Carey asking you, specifically, to “come on down?” Do “Pop-Up Videos” hit a little too close to home? Do you somehow feel the new 90210 is an elaborate allegory based on your own personal humiliations in high school, possibly stolen directly from your diary or mind? Congratulations, you’ve earned that first round of Thorazine.

Like schizophrenia itself, the delusion of reference is liable to become a meaningless category in the near future. Those qualities that have made television so acutely toxic to the psychotic (its simulated liveness, feigned interactivity, and virtual omnipresence) are only getting worse in the move toward convergence. Typically convergence connotes the horizontal and vertical interlocking of various media entities so that a given entertainment product might find more ways to steal our time and money. But to converge also suggests a closing in—the consumer-subject-citizen surrounded and increasingly squeezed by walls of media that move inexorably closer and closer, a once gothic fate of stone and spike now rendered in pixels and the hyperreal. At some centripetal singularity, we will all face the choice of either being crushed; or, in a final act of submission, to become a part of the wall itself—to converge with the convergence. And that will be the end of the delusion of reference. Once the enclosures are complete, the media really will speak to us directly, all the time, the formerly deluded now truly at the center of his or her own media universe. After that crucial tipping point, the delusion of reference will give way to the delusion of non-reference—the as yet unrecognized psychosis of not finding oneself at home in the media, of not obeying the imperative to stitch various media platforms together in order to reveal some industrially planted “secret” content, of not believing that the people who live in the TV are your intimate friends, and you theirs.

Look. NBC is calling you even now:

Hey hardcore Heroes fans, in preparation for Heroes Volume 4: Fugitives, we’re inviting you to share your passion and your storytelling abilities with the world (and maybe even the NBC viewing audience) through Heroes in a Hurry. The idea is simple: ask fans to briefly tell parts of the Heroes story in their own words, on camera.

Wouldn’t the NBC audience be a subset of the “world?” No matter, I get to create on-line property for the network—thousands will be amused by my zany, totally “me” demonstration of how well I’ve been paying attention to the franchise. What do you want me to do?

Because the Heroes story is rich, we’re suggesting that people focus their videos on a single character or idea. For example, tell us what happened to your favorite character this season, or give us your take on what happened during the eclipse.

That’s very helpful, thank you!

Edit something snappy on your computer or use your cell phone and shoot it all in one take. Make it starring you or your Heroes bobble-head collection, or action figures, or your pet iguanas—be creative. Just try to keep it short and focused.

Be creative? Can do, especially with all these terrific suggestions from the producers. Let’s see—keep it short, focused, snappy, character-based, recapitulative, and accommodating of ancillary bobble-head and action figure product lines. Got it! Oh wait, is that the nurse with my afternoon Haldol?

For now, some may still suffer a lingering anxiety that it might be best to get out before it’s too late–before the Xbox version of the TV adaptation of the movie based on the comic book inspired by a children’s genre born of Depression-era America keeps me in lockdown another two hours a day. Happily, there are product lines for these doubting souls as well. Consider a T-shirt now available for purchase, apparently in quantities sufficient enough so as not to come from the ironing board of a single homebound lunatic. Aimed at members of the Whedon-nation, the shirt reads: “How much Serenity stuff do I have to buy to get a sequel?” The shirt proclaims, in effect, “I’m hip enough to know that the entertainment industry is a ruthless bottom-line business, but I am beyond such exploitation because I have pre-emptively embraced said exploitation as a tactic of self-empowerment. I understand industry strategy, and by performing that “insider” understanding, am somehow inoculated from its effects and implications; or, more radically, no one can escape media exploitation, so why fight it; or, more colloquially, everyone already knows what I would do for Serenity (and Joss!)—all we’re arguing about now is the price.” It is rather like Christians responding to Nietzsche by printing up a batch of T-Shirts with crucifixes on the front, “the Religion of Slaves!” emblazoned proudly on the back.

This sentiment appears fairly common within the Whedon encampment. A website encourages Serenity fans to mail “wavecards” to Universal because, “In the film industry, money talks, so by sending these wavecards, which are officially licensed products, we’re putting money in Universal’s pocket and underscoring the potential for lots more profit.” Such activism, which no doubt goes well beyond the profit-verse of Firefly/Serenity, may well be a first in the annals of corporate protest: let us signify our unhappiness with the studio’s policy by doing exactly what the studio wants us to do—buy more officially licensed crap. A post on a Firefly message board seconds this strategy: “I agree that supporting licensed merchandise is the most straight forward way to support the movie. I’ve bought 8 copies of the BDS and BDM, and a Serenity T-shirt. I also rented Serenity once before I bought it.” Who wrote this, one wonders? A “fan” or a flak in the Universal legal department? Is it a loyalty oath of some kind? Or do these distinctions even matter anymore?

Twenty years ago, a person who professed a belief that his letters were having an impact on the color of Cliff Huxtable’s sweaters would have been a prime candidate for institutionalization, a delusion of reference par excellence. Today we take such ideation in stride: “Everyone knows producer X reads the Show Z message boards, he even logs in sometimes under an alias!” Therefore, the Show Z community has an impact on the program. As delusions go, this one is particularly sad, like the psychotic alone at a window in the day room who thinks he controls the weather. From Freud onward, theorists have attempted to account for how the psychotic translate internal affect into fantasies of external control, how libidinal energies become literalized as a type of ray that can influence a love object from afar. The entire point of the trolling media God fantasy—even if one knows, deep down, it’s really only an intern assigned to update all the ancillary content—is to flatter and thus further entangle viewers in fantasies of their own creative agency. Not only do the media speak to me, they want to hear from me! That show matters to me, so I must matter to it!

Of course, viewers can’t be blamed for believing they actually have a tangible impact on what direction Chuck might take on NBC, or in thinking that only their credit limit and more shelving space stand between them and a Daredevil sequel—the totality of the convergence enclosure is now set up precisely to encourage such delusions of “prosuming” reference. Captive now for almost a century to the technocratic administration of the imagination, perhaps this variant of Stockholm syndrome is the only possible endpoint allowed us. I want my kidnapper’s attention and approval so desperately that I’m willing to become a model consumer; an accommodating hostage eager to do everything within my corporately sanctioned power to advance the brand—for weeks, months, even years of my life.

If you find such pro-active corporate obedience to be sad and a little scary, don’t worry. After the convergence converges, after the culture industries perfect a handful of hermetically sealed franchises to better manage any potential eccentricities of affect, and after you discover there are no “licensed” fantasies that speak to your particular structure of desire—the orderlies will be there to provide you with all the Thorazine you could possibly want.

Image Credits:
1. (No Caption)
2. These are not your thoughts.
3. An NBC-Universal employee demonstrates how you might best demonstrate
your enthusiasm for NBC product.
4. I hear and I obey.
5. Thorazine: Useful for sedating those who believe the television speaks to them directly, and in the future, for those who believe it does not.

Please feel free to comment.

The party is over, or so we are told. Blame who you want: Wall Street speculators—minorities with the audacity to be home owners—two years of a Democratic congress or eight years of Dubya. Bottom line–America has awoken to the cruel reality that an economy cannot survive based only on endless and increasingly manic consumption. For a time the nation made a valiant last-stand of mass disavowal, millions of Americans raiding the nearest Wal-Mart each week for new flat-screens, bulk salad-shooters, and mountains of 99 cent undershirts, all the while realizing that their own community’s only remaining exports were tears and crystal meth. To those reading this beyond the borders of the U.S.A.: our apologies—we would have bought more crap, but we’re completely maxed out.

Up in critical theory heaven, I can only imagine that Marx and Baudrillard are laughing themselves sick over our current predicament. Intoxicated by the sheer plenitude of the media and our own pleasures of consumption, television studies in particular seems to have thought that it was finished with such bummers as alienation, ideology, and commodity fetishism. All of that messy totalizing “theory” had seemingly been replaced by draining the Marxism out of the CCCS, translating Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” into the language of a network marketing plan, and empowering an entire generation to dismiss Adorno as a humorless lunkhead because he couldn’t or wouldn’t (hypothetically) recognize the complexity of the Battlestar metaverse. It was a great scam. The proliferation and fragmentation of the media allowed us to find more and more content worthy of our attention, extol the pluralistic virtues of a seemingly infinite marketplace, and celebrate the special status and ingenious pleasures of anyone who liked television for any reason (except, of course, Fox News). Meanwhile, television as an object, institution, and vector of power slowly went ahead and continued doing what we always suspected it was doing—stealing more and more of our time and creative energy; dissolving any lingering remnants of embodied community; and encouraging us to continue yielding our interiority to fantasy lives crafted by market forces.

For his part, Baudrillard made a series of observations/predictions thirty years ago that seem to be coming true with alarming accuracy: 1) As the west ascends into simulation and hyperreality, the only remaining political tactic of any consequence will be terrorism, inasmuch as the terrorist intervenes more in the world of signs than in territory; 2) Western consumerism would eventually succeed in completely replacing “exchange value” with sign value, creating a “system of objects” that would cultivate and replicate the consumer-citizen as the vector for its own survival (in other words, your iPod needs you more than you need your iPod); 3) Leftist reformers of media would continue to fantasize about improving the progressive content and positive applications of the media, when the very advent of television as television signaled the endpoint of such rationalist paternalism. Over the course of his career, Baudrillard gradually became something like the court jester of cultural theory, but consider this: Many of us now root for Obama in what is essentially a sign war against the terroristic tactics of the McCain campaign, hoping he will deliver us from an economic meltdown triggered by a collapse in credit and consumer confidence that is, at its heart, a crisis in the signification of value, assets, and the future. Moreover, this crisis in monetary meaning stems in part from an attempt to finance a doomed simulation of American military strength through appeals to a fantasy of limitless shopping and virtual equity—a form of consumer ecstasy explicitly sanctioned by the President as an appropriate sign of solidarity in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which was itself a spectacle of global fascination engineered by bin Laden to strike a symbolic blow at the heart of the western world’s financial center that, in the end, seems to have revealed there was really only a symbol there in the first place. Yep, Baudrillard was an idiot.

Is media studies poised for a similar collapse? One could certainly argue that television studies’ often unexamined celebration of consumption has invested in the unstable fiction of the “active audience” with the same zeal and certitude that bankers bought up sub-prime mortgages. Perhaps because our big brother, film studies, seemingly reached a dead end in theorizing larger issues of representation, subjectivity, politics, etc., television studies often seems happy to go for the low-hanging fruit of the more localized negotiated reading, a theory of hegemony and desire that comes without all the baggage of basic alienation or a barred subject. Accelerating immersion into the media is to be celebrated because audiences are now active, even creative in their engagement of the culture industries. But if we examine what constitutes the activeness of the active audience—customizing one’s TiVO profile; setting up a Heroes blog; organizing a save Friday Night Lights campaign; planting spoilers in an I Love Money chat-room; writing a John Adams slash story; firing off a missive to Anderson Cooper 360; buying an entire season of Lost on DVD so that one can lose another 19 hours of their life—we should be compelled to ask if these “activities” actually serve us, or if they instead actively expand the demands and desires of television itself, the most seductive point-man in the overall “system of objects” that wants us to continue serving as the Petri dishes in which it cultivates its own future sustenance. In his short polemic, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Baudrillard argued that the masses—as a phantom of sociology—possess only inactivity and inertia as a weapon to guard against interventions into their non-existence. Like a black hole, these hallucinatory masses are to be celebrated for their ability to absorb and neutralize any attempt to define and/or understand them. In this respect, perhaps the much-maligned “passive” viewer of television wasn’t such a bad guy after all—a spectator who consumed media sporadically, casually, and even resentfully– exhibiting a minimum of fascination for the medium itself and remaining stolidly impervious to television’s desire that we engage it more actively, with greater attention, in imaginary dialogue, with creative enthusiasm, and in increased opportunities for multi-platform consumption. We may find that encouraging a more active engagement of the media, rather than a passive resistance and reluctant coexistence, will be like catching the confrontational gaze of a psychopath on the subway: he knows that we know that he knows that we are watching him, opening the door for an escalating spiral of control and terror that will prove very difficult to escape.

When will we know we have actually entered the depression that follows our consumer blow-out, both in the global economy and in the meaningful production of new media theory and criticism? Most likely television itself will let us know when the economic depression has begun, and in so doing, will only underscore our continuing inability to fully theorize the medium’s power to integrate our financial and libidinal economies. Then again, for those who don’t have to pawn their sets for food and rent, we might realize the depression has begun once we notice the economic undead beginning to mass around the previously snug and secure boundaries of our home theaters. They won’t be there to discuss The Gilmore Girls.

Image Credits:

1. When media consumption goes too far.

2. Marx, disappointed.

3. Baudrillard told you so.

Please feel free to comment.