TEXTUAL PRACTICE Editor Terence Hawkes University College, Cardiff Postal Address: Department of English, University College, Cardiff, PO Box 78, Cardiff CFI IXE
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TEXTUAL PRACTICE Editor Terence Hawkes University College, Cardiff Postal address: Department of English, University College, Cardiff, PO Box 78, Cardiff CFI IXE. Editorial board Christopher Norris UWIST, Cardiff (Review Editor) Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Angela Carter Terry Eagleton Wadham College, Oxford John Frow Murdoch University, Australia Linda Hutcheon McMaster University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Allon White University of Sussex This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Methuen & Co Ltd, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. 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ISSN 0950-236X © Methuen & Co Ltd. 1987 ISBN 0-203-99064-1 Master e-book ISBN TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1987 Contents Articles Invisible fictions: television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure 1 JOHN HARTLEY ‘The thin crust of refinement’: culture, socialism, naturalism 19 WIM NEETENS The rhetoric of remembrance: Derrida on de Man 34 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS Prospero meets Adam Smith: narrative exchange and control in The 49 Prelude IAN REID Theory, enlightenment and violence: postmodernist hermeneutic as a 73 comedy of errors THOMAS DOCHERTY Reviews Making history 98 SUSAN ADRIAN SHAHZADE Signifying 102 JANE MOORE Sexual politics 105 MARGARET ATACK Habermas 110 EDMOND WRIGHT Rethinking Marx 116 J.M.BERNSTEIN Poetics and hermeneutics 119 JOHN LLEWELYN Invisible fictions: television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure JOHN HARTLEY PASSPORT CONTROL Although television as an institution is dependent upon audiences, it is by no means certain what a television audience is. However, it seems that this is not the only uncertainty facing those working in the field of television studies. E.Ann Kaplan, for instance, in her introduction to Regarding Television, remarks: The structure, form, content and context for British television are so radically different from those of its American counterpart that everything has to be rethought by critics in this country [the USA]. Television scholarship is simply not exportable in the easy manner of film criticism.1 The idea that international television criticism is a contradiction in terms is not confined to the American side of the Atlantic. In fact it has been taken even further by the British writer John Ellis, who suggests not only that television scholarship is unexportable but also that one nation’s television is ‘incomprehensible’ to observers from other nations. In the preliminaries to his Visible Fictions Ellis confesses that at the time of writing he had never visited the United States, and continues: This really demonstrates an insuperable problem with all writing about broadcast TV: unlike cinema, which in its commercial sectors has a highly integrated international aspect, broadcast TV is an essentially national activity for the vast majority of its audience. Broadcast TV is the private life of the nation-state…incomprehensible for anyone who is outside its scope.2 Neither Kaplan nor Ellis qualifies these remarks with customary scholarly caution. Both write in absolute terms: television is incomprehensible for those outside its scope; television criticism is simply not exportable; everything has to be rethought; the problem is insuperable; it applies to all writing about broadcast television; television is essentially national. Furthermore, their remarks are not 2 TEXTUAL PRACTICE isolated. Quite a lot of media criticism in recent years has been conducted around a perceived gulf, as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, between American and Anglo- European perspectives.3 This gulf, once invoked, is made to explain such divisions as those between empirical and theoretical approaches; so-called transmission and ritual models of communication; liberal-pluralist and Marxist theories; even the disciplinary location of media studies—in America it’s a social science, in Britain it’s in the humanities. If these divisions really constitute an insuperable problem, then of course international television scholarship does become impossible. Or, more accurately, the kind of criticism that constructs as its object an essential form, on the model of ‘cinema’ or ‘literature’, becomes impossible. What the uncertainties noted above do imply is that there is no such thing as ‘television’—an abstract, general form with invariable features. Neither does television have any essential mode of production, distribution and consumption—despite the very obvious fact that many television shows, series and formats display exactly that ‘highly integrated international aspect’ claimed by Ellis for cinema. As for television studies, a certain uneasiness with the erection of essential, national boundaries around television scholarship has been voiced by Willard Rowland and Bruce Watkins in their introduction to Interpreting Television. They discuss ‘this old and contentious issue’, largely with reference to a myth of American ‘dependence’ on European thought, and show that, although that dependence is mythical, the consequences of reiterating the myth have been real enough. They argue that, although it is tempting, it is inadequate to categorize current research by means of a ‘bi-polar, European/critical versus American/ liberal dichotomy’. They conclude that ‘it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak about any pure national or even regional tradition of thought, especially in communication and cultural studies.’4 If it is indeed difficult to speak of pure, national traditions of thought in this context, it may be easier, and certainly more productive, to speak of impurity. It may even be possible to see in impurities not a problem but a fundamental criterion for cultural studies. The productivity of impurity, of transgressing national boundaries unawares, has been amply illustrated, paradoxically enough, by John Ellis. Having erected pure—insuperable—boundaries between British and American television, and between British and American writing on television, he then subverts this line of thinking completely: Sudden exposure to the often bizarre practices of broadcast TV in another country can stimulate fresh thinking about the whole phenomenon of TV. This is the case with Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘flow’ which resulted from his culture shock on seeing US TV. Seeing another country’s broadcast TV has the effect of ‘making strange’ something we normally take for granted: TV, normally habitual and bound into the life of the nation, suddenly becomes an alien and inexplicable series of events.5 INVISIBLE FICTIONS 3 Thus, transgressing the frontiers of the familiar, the national, produces culture shock—the bizarre, the alien, the inexplicable—and this turns out to be the very condition for understanding, stimulating fresh thinking by breaking habitual bonds. Even so, it has to be noted that some bonds remain taken for granted: Ellis is still presuming that there is such a thing as ‘the whole phenomenon’ of television, in the teeth of his own evidence to the contrary. TELEVISION: ANOTHER COUNTRY? Since the concept of the nation seems to play such an important role in specifying both television and TV scholarship, it would seem to be a good idea to look at what the concept of the nation might mean. However, it wouldn’t be such a good idea to substitute for the essentialism of ‘television’ another kind of essentialism—for instance, the notion of an essential ‘America’, or ‘Britain’, or ‘Australia’, or even ‘the nation’. Nations cannot be understood ‘purely’, that is, from their own supposed intrinsic or essential features. Neither television nor nations can be understood at all, in fact, except in relational terms. They have no pure, intrinsic properties but only differences from other, related domains. Benedict Anderson has argued that they are by definition limited, or impure, because each nation is defined by other nations: Even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings,