Serialization Theory

Media of Serial Narrative edited by Frank Kelleter

by

Various versions of the Planet of the Apes

Kelleter, Frank. Media of Serial Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017.

This book collects essays by a wide range of narrative media scholars and divides them into four different sections based on medium (comics/lit, film, television, and digital transmedia), even though there are obviously overlaps between those media as stories branch out and find homes in different media. I want to come back and read all the essays I skipped because they weren’t directly connected to the other works on my reading list, but for now I read the intro, all of the film and most of the television essays (I’m not allowed to read the essay by Sean O’Sullivan as he is on my exams committee). Here’s the brief summary of each.

“Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality” – Frank Kelleter

Kelleter, editor of the book, uses his introduction to talk about what he calls “popular seriality” or the sense of seriality that has pervaded most media forms. He juxtaposes this to the idea of the “work” that has dominated popular and academic conceptions of the media landscape, an idea of a full and complete object that can be fully studied and explained or taken in. Popular seriality, on the other hand, extends on almost interminably, constantly inventing and reinventing the story such that it cannot be studied, explained, or taken in the same way as a singular work. He calls out, like the title says, five ways of looking at popular seriality: as evolving narratives (where there is a feedback loop between everybody involved in the production and reception of the serial that all create change within the narrative); as narratives of recursive progression (where narratives constantly are revised and reformulated as they are adjusted and continued such that what might be the main idea at the beginning might not be even part of the story by the end); as narratives of proliferation (where we must take into account the wide array of official, semi-official, and unofficial stories that are told with elements of the narrative, particularly what Kelleter calls “serial figures” who retain some central core while also shifting greatly depending on their incarnation); as self-observing systems and actor-networks (where serials become what Kelleter calls “entities of distributed intention” that attain an agential status through the reflection and work of the people involved in its making or experiencing); and as agents of capitalist self-reflexivity (where serial narratives become ideologically wrapped up in the idea of renewal via duplication, a core tenant of capitalism itself).

Kelleter’s ideas start off relatively benign but become increasingly more troubling as they go along, largely because they seem so plausible. His last two ways of looking at popular seriality will be something to wrestle with as I continue my work on serialization as a storytelling strategy.

Based on the points discussed so far, we can describe popular series as self-observing systems, in the sense that they are never just the “product” of intentional choices and decisions, even as they require and involve intentional agents (most notably, people) for whom they provide real possibilities of deciding, choosing, using, objecting, and so on. In shaping the self-understanding of their human contributors, series themselves attain agential status. As praxeological networks, they experiment with formal identities and think about their own formal possibilities. And they do not do so instead of human beings but with and through dispersed participants, employing human practitioners (who are sometimes much younger than the series in question and who will often express a sense of practical commitment to it rather than a sense of originating authorship) for purposes of self-reproduction. Series are not intentional subjects but entities of distributed intention. (25)

At its most abstract, my (systems-theoretical) argument suggests that popular seriality, understood as a larger historical phenomenon that has accompanied Western modernity since the mid-nineteenth century, supports a practical regime of continuation itself. What is being continued here is the contingent, but historically powerful, partnership between democratic ideologies and a particular system of cultural production. It is worth remembering in this context that one of the most difficult problems of serial storytelling consists in translating repetition into difference. Following Eco (1990), this has been said so often that we sometimes like to move beyond these terms. But we ignore Eco’s lesson at our own peril, because what looks like a simple matter of narrative technique on closer inspection turns out to be a core problem of modernity itself: the problem of renewing something by duplicating it. This problem lies at the heart of an entire system of cultural production that, for want of a better term – and without need for revelatory pathos – is still best described by the name it has chosen to describe itself: capitalism. (29)

“Inevitability of Chance: Time in the Sound Serial” – Scott Higgins

Higgins writes about old film serials like Flash Gordon, and observes that not only do the serials have a pretty obvious 5-part structure in the small episodes (three action beats at the beginning, middle, and end with two dialogue segments that come between each of the action beats), but also that there is also a somewhat standard overall structure for the full run of the serial where the opening and closing episodes contain most of the narrative progression while most of the episodes between do relatively little to progress the plot in any real way. Though these early serials are not my main area of interest, they are nevertheless influential for the movies and shows that I am interested in, and so Higgins’ ideas must be contended with as I think about whether or not my objects of study stick to these structures or deviate from them meaningfully.

“Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula” – Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer

Denson and Mayer productively develop their own conception of the “serial figure” by claiming that they are the character who, via their liminality and ease of crossing borders, often takes up a kind of media-ness as they adapt and change depending on the time and situation they appear in. These figures don’t usually change over time, at least not in the way we think of traditional character growth or change. Instead, they adapt (or are adapted) to fit within one historically-rooted idea or another while retaining a core truth(s), especially including the ability to change form or inhabit different planes of existence. It’s a very intriguing idea, even if my own area of interest is in the very opposite phenomenon (where characters do change, usually offscreen, from their previous incarnation).

In particular, we are interested in the way that Dracula embodies and paradigmatically exemplifies a “spectral” logic that enables serial figures to proliferate across media channels, passing from literature to film to radio to TV and to digital media, exhibiting all the while and uncanny sort of resiliency that is the product as much of the figure’s flexibility as of its iconicity. By serial figure, we mean a type of stock character inhabiting the popular cultural imagination of modernity – a “flat” and recurring figure, subject to one or more media changes over the course of its career. We see serial figures as integral and ideologically powerful components of the political and economic order of modernity, part of a system that works expansively to increase commensurability and connectivity. Serial figures operate in this system as mediating instances between the familiar and the unknown, the ordinary and the unusual. […] These figures parasitically appropriate the media ensembles of a given period, taking up residence in them and making them their own. In doing so, they function as markers and active agents of the very process of media change. In a certain sense, they become media – epitomizing the fact that media are never only transparent means of transportation but that they also imprint their “traces” indelibly onto the “messages” or “contents” they convey (Krämer 1998: 74). […] These large-scale media transformations tend to be read in terms of “innovations” (or, more recently, “updates”) and thus suggest that media history is a directed and linear process. But serial figures, with their feedback loops and self-reflective logics of iteration, epitomize the fact that the evolution of media systems is a non-teleological process: overdetermined by competing forces, random, accidental, and consequently always also haunted by a sense that “things could have been otherwise) (Denson 2012). In this respect, not only are serial figures subject to constant narrative revision and adjustment for the sake of retrospective continuity, but they also invite counter factual questions (“what if?”) about the course of media history itself, thus situating themselves as the ideal conceptual figures for media archaeological inquiries. (108-9)

“Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Serialization” – Frank Kelleter and Kathleen Loock

One of the two essays that directly touches upon my area of interest, this essay by Kelleter and Loock is rife with interesting ideas and examples. The central conceit is that the remake is not fundamentally distinct from the ways that serials work, from the ideas of revision and cinematic self-historicization (where a remake or sequel tends to confer a certain status upon the original film that is sometimes only recognized or reignited by that sequel or remake) to enable what they call second-order serialization, or serial narratives about (and by way of) serial narratives.

Unlike daily cartoons or telenovelas, feature film iterations cannot structure rhythms of everyday life. Instead, they often structure seasonal, generational, and media-historical sequences. (131)

In short, the early [Planet of the Apes] films, the 2001 remake, and the 2011 prequel/reboot – made so many years apart – all lay claim to being state-of-the-art, thereby reflecting, with varying degrees of success, distinct media specific moments of an expansive narrative consumer aesthetics. In this manner, popular culture’s increased availability for re-performance and comparison invites deeply autobiographical engagements with commercial material, to the point of structuring individual personalities and their life stories in terms of progressing brand (dis)attachments. But media generations can also recognize themselves in the cultural concerns of remade films, which are usually accentuated more sharply there than in non-serialized formats. (142-3)

“New Millennial Remakes” – Constantine Verevis

Verevis, like Kelleter in the opening essay, identifies several ways that a phenomenon happens or works, in this case the object of study is the spate of remakes that occurred in the early years of the new millennium. Verevis claims that these remakes are intermedial and transnational, that they embrace the postauteur (where the marks of authorship shift from originality towards reproducible trademarks), that they are characterized by proliferation and simultaneity, which lead into the final idea that they do not compete but coexist with the originals. There’s some strong crossover with the ideas presented in the previous essay by Kelleter and Loock, but Verevis uses the essay to draw out some minor differences in the concepts presented in each.

By the beginning of the new millennium, however, there was evidence of a discursive shift, with subsequent industry discourses framing publicity more positively around a new film’s “remake” status by ascribing value to an earlier version and then identifying various filters – technological, cultural, authorial – through which it had been transformed (“value-added”). In the first instance, this move can be seen as a commercial strategy (a way to sell a back catalogue), but it also identifies a serial practice in which the remake does not simply follow an original but recognizes new versions as free adaptations or variations that actualize an implicit potentiality at the source. This trend, which has increasingly led to authorized remakes that bear only a generic resemblance to their precursors, seems to have found its apotheosis in the “reboot”: a legally sanctioned version that attempts to disassociate itself textually from previous iterations while at the same time having to concede that it does not replace – but adds new associations to – an existing serial property. In other words, it marks out not merely a critical historical moment in which remakes no longer linearly follow and supersede their originals but also a digitized, globalized one in which multiple versions proliferate and coexist. (148-9)

The remake has never been a static thing but a concept that is always evolving. And while it may be too early to draw conclusions as to the nature of a distinct historical period, these notes should demonstrate that the present and future of cinema is a re-vision of its past, especially in the new millennium, and that aesthetic and economic evaluations of film remakes (good or bad, success or failure) are less interesting than the cultural and historical significance of new millennial remaking practice. (164)

“The Ends of Serial Criticism” – Jason Mittell

At the start of the TV section, Mittell focuses on arguing that the study of serial storytelling is fundamentally different from that of the singular work because it has formal and production-based differences that must be paid attention to. He writes of the way that a show might use one element (a taped confession in Homeland, for example) in different ways throughout the series to mean different things in different situation, a point that he extrapolates to write of the way that a long-running show can contain multiple different political (or other) perspectives, sometimes conflicting ones, over the course of the show. These realities mean that academics studying serial stories must be cautious of trying to pin a show or story down to one particular position, particularly if they are writing about a show that isn’t yet finished. Even a finished show might come down on one side or another, but that still doesn’t negate the variety of perspectives contained within the show.

His second point is that shows and other serial stories have the ability to incorporate audience sentiments within the show, but that such a possibility doesn’t cancel out other criticism of the show. To demonstrate this point, he writes of the way that Walter White uses much of the same language that the misogynist “fans” of Breaking Bad used in talking about Skyler White during a climactic speech to her. While this makes for a powerful example of the ways that shows can respond to their bad fans, Mittell takes pains to point out how the show fostered such fans to begin with through season after season that positioned Skyler as an obstacle to Walter instead of a more fully developed and understandable character. The overall point of Mittell’s essay is that we, as academics interested in looking at serial media, must pay attention to the plurality of polysemy of the form, a polysemy that comes not just from applying different lenses to a singular work but from the series itself, which by their nature contain multitudes of different meanings.

We can understand these serial instances of political reframing through the lens of articulation, as defined by Stuart Hall (Grossberg 1986): dominant forms of political ideology are forged by the contingent linking of social practices to cultural meanings, which frequently shift and transform within new contexts. […] Serial articulation depends on the practice of reiteration, where repeating and reframing help define which linkages are maintained and which are discarded over the course of a series, highlighting how the political interpretations of serial narratives are always subject to revision and recontextualization. Seriality itself is wrapped up within this notion of articulation, as the connections between the already-seen and the new installment are the chemical reactions that create resonances of meanings, emotional engagements, and layers of cultural politics that encourage viewers to keep watching for new linkages and recontextualizations. (175)

As argued by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch (1994, analyzing conventional episodic forms), the power of television narratives to raise cultural questions is at least as important as their power to provide ideological answers. Television’s ability to act as a cultural forum is even more vital for long-form serialized narratives whose potential answers providing closure are deferred for weeks, months, or even years. Such temporal gaps highlight how much political meaning making occurs within the broader temporal frame of serial consumption, as the politically explosive questions that Homeland raises remain ambiguously unanswered for months, creating a temporal gap for viewers and critics to fill with their own shared practices of interpretation and debate. (176)

It is fairly straightforward business to interpret a television program using the field’s well-established critical tools, isolating the particular episodes and moments that best support an argument or focusing on opinions that will help label a text ideological and/or progressive. But once you account for how serial television works over time and across various cultural sites, it becomes hard to say anything about a program’s politics with any conviction that is not draped in contingency, partiality, and competing perspectives. That might also be true for a stand alone cultural work like a novel or film, as a text’s multiple layers of meaning contradict itself and create enough interpretive varieties to sustain decades of competing scholarly interpretations. But a serial text talks back to its critics by rearticulating the meaningful moments through reiterations and recontextualizations, as with Homeland‘s video, or by putting the words of its most rabidly misogynist viewers into its protagonist’s mouth, as with Breaking Bad‘s climactic phone call. Interpretive criticism of a moving target that both serially rearticulates itself and directly incorporates its own cultural reception is of a distinctly different order than the stable polysemy of a novel or film, or even the post-serialized finality of a television series that has completed its run. (181)

“Sensing the Opaque: Seriality and the Aesthetics of Televisual Form” – Sudeep Dasgupta

Dasgupta spends much of this essay adding on to Mittell’s concept of the “drillable” TV text, those shows that invite and inspire audiences to investigate and try to fully understand the plot, characters, and world depicted therein. Dasgupta suggests that if Mittell claims that these kinds of shows create a sense that audiences can completely take in and understand a text through this drilling process (which happens largely online after initial airing), they also usually contain moments of opacity that are un-drillable, pure sensation and meaningless. Dasgupta’s premise is intriguing to say the least, as it pushes back against the standard academic stance that everything is explainable and understandable with enough work, but I have to say that I was just not smart enough to follow the rest of the essay. I just couldn’t make sense of Dasgupta’s references to other academic works and theories, which left me without a lifejacket in the middle of an ocean of non-understanding. I’ll go back to this one in the future to try to figure it out, but for right now, I’m throwing the towel in.

Storytelling in Film and Television by Kristin Thompson

by

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003)

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Kristin Thompson spends most of the four essays (collected from a speaking series given about a year earlier) here arguing for the value of looking at individual episodes, seasons, or series as objects of analysis. Opposing Williams’ idea of flow where viewers are basically unable to distinguish between what is the programming and what is the interruption (in terms of ads or even changes of show or channel), Thompson suggests (rightly) that viewers are not only able to make such distinctions, but that the storytelling, which aligns with her conception of the classical Hollywood storytelling structure, helps viewers make this distinction and forms the fundamental argument for her desire to focus on shows in every scale as the objects of study for television scholars. While this argument may seem somewhat unnecessary, I’d wager it only really seems that way now, in 2020, almost 2 decades after Thompson first made this argument. Her mode has become the standard, but TV scholarship is still relatively new, and it is very possible that the time between her argument and now has been shaped by that very argument.

To focus more on how that storytelling works, she notes that film is reliant upon redundant storytelling that uses dangling hooks and multiple narrative threads, and that TV weaponizes those concepts to ensure that viewers understand what is happening in an episode, season, and series. It’s a compelling argument.

She also, in the third essay, argues that the prevalence of TV has changed the way that we tell stories overall. She claims that the concept of seriality has become so embedded in the public consciousness that it has influenced film and literature, leading to a resurgence of sequels, prequels, and saga style storytelling. I find this claim to be very credible, but I think it both needs some more bolstering and some further thought given the developments of the past 20 years. But I guess that’s what I’m here for.

In her fourth essay, she argues that there can be such thing as Art Television the way there is Art Film, following Bordwell’s famous essay outlining the six features of art cinema. She shows that there are pretty tight homologies between the two media in how they handle the same ideas, using David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet as her primary examples.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

As I said above, she only really argues with (or even references outright) Raymond Williams’ concept of flow. Otherwise, she’s obviously positioning herself as an argument for what might be seen as a standard film theory angle on TV theory. I think it’s important to notice what is similar between the two media, as well as what is different. Though I wouldn’t go as far as McLuhan does on the concept of medium specificity, there are definite differences that make for real, meaningful variances in how the two media handle similar ideas/stories/techniques. Thompson provides a good first step here by noting that there is a tendency towards a unified act structure in different types of TV in a way that is similar to the classical Hollywood style, but there’s so much more to explore (and that was already explored after Thompson’s publication).

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Textual analysis of several different kinds of TV shows, including some extended dialogue scenes that are presented in script form.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By trying to port film theory ideas to TV theory, she both argues for their fundamental similarity and notes the obvious differences.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Her argument is pretty foundational for TV studies as far as I can tell, as her focus on aesthetics and poetics is a core from which other kinds of analysis can be built. I’ll definitely be going back to her ideas on serialization, even if I don’t think they’re as fully developed as they need to be.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

film, television, poetics, serialization, serials, sequel, redundant narration, dangling hooks, art film, art television, flow

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, I argued further that the norms and widespread use in recent decades are essentially still those of the “Golden Age” of studio filmmaking in the decades before 1960. This is not to say that all films draw on all aspects of that model, and certainly there are some films that stretch the conventions. I mean rather that the norms are still there to be drawn on, and most films do. Here I would like to take one further step and suggest that many of these norms have been adopted or adapted by television precisely because they have been so suited to telling straightforward, entertaining stories. (19)

Thus it would appear that in some cases even half-hour programs that are not interrupted by commercials tend to include major turning points that divide them into large-scale parts, or acts – though obviously here the authors were not required to time these moments as precisely as they did. With the increasing number of original series produced by premium channels like HBO in the U.S., one might wonder whether these commercial free programs also fall into evenly timed acts. A look at one half-hour sitcom, Sex and the City, and one roughly hour-long drama, The Sopranos, suggests that act structure is somewhat more flexible in such programs, but that it is not abandoned or radically altered. (51)

Such divisions of programs into acts, whether rigidly or flexibly proportioned, are not simply arbitrary. They give an episode a sense of structure, much as the balanced movements of a classical concerto do. They provide the spectator with a sense of progress and guarantee the introduction of dramatic new premises or obstacles at intervals. They allow for the rising and falling action that many writers refer to as crucial to good plots. Regular turning points also give variety to a story, ensuring that the action does not simply involve a character striving toward a goal and meeting a series of similar obstacles. Thus there are reasons why even television episodes that are broadcast without breaks would draw on an act structure. (54-5)

Currently all the familiar studios of Hollywood’s golden age are subsidiaries of large multinational corporations. In many cases, adaptations are attractive because such companies already own the rights to various narratives that have already been produced in one medium but which are available to be recycled in another. Moreover, these huge companies have been able to market their products, including movies, in part by using synergy. That is, a company’s TV stations will promote its movies, while its record division puts out the soundtrack, and so on. Such marketing now has also come to mean selling the same narrative over and over in different media. (81-2)

What, then, of serial narratives? It is possible that the vogue for sequels, series, and serials in film reflects an influence from television. […] These films [in the Lethal Weapon series] also, however, incorporate the mild seriality of much serious television, with the characters and their situations gradually changing. (103)

It is apparent, then, that the tendencies toward adaptations of stories among media, toward sequels, and toward seriality are all part of a general stretching and redefinition of narrative itself. In particular, the notion of firm and permanent closure to any given narrative has loosened across media. Series television, with its broad possibilities for spinning out narratives indefinitely, has been a major impetus in these tendencies. They, along with the innovations and interwoven multiple plot lines discussed in the last chapter, seem to me some of the most intriguing areas where an analyst might explore the aesthetic specificity of series television. (105)

Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams

by

Matt Groening’s The Simpsons

Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Second Edition (1990). New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Raymond Williams dedicates much of this book to explaining what television is as a technology (that is, an extension of the more fundamental technology that is broadcasting, which first came to prominence via audio and the radio), what kinds of cultural requirements called it into existence (the increasingly atomized social world of a post-Industrial Revolution society), and the effects it has (to be listed later). It seems he writes largely to counter Marshall McLuhan’s conception of technological determinism, in which the technology just kind of pops into existence and has certain effects that are largely disconnected from the culture in which the technology exists. Williams, on the other hand, says that we need to return intention, history, and context to the discussion of television and its effects.

Williams tracks the history of the development of the technology that would lead, eventually, to television and then traces the way that other technologies were results of social needs (tele-phony/graphy as a way of communicating brief information across long distances quickly as a result of a growing desire to organize military and capitalist maneuvers) as a way of setting up how television, which is centrally produced but distributed broadly to individual homes, allows for a similar social requirement to be met. That social requirement is the need for distribution of information (and, less importantly but still crucially, entertainment) to a people who are increasingly separated from a sense of community that had once held society together. As societies get bigger and more spread out thanks to industrial practices and pressures, television (and radio before it) became a way to redeploy the kinds of things that might have been accomplished via town meetings or even public gatherings.

Williams then turns to examining who controls the production and dissemination of television programming, which, he notes, was always secondary to the fact that the signal existed in the first place. It was not that there were tv shows sitting around waiting for a technology to allow them to be broadcast into people’s homes, but that once that signal existed there was then a need for something to send over it. By looking at several British and American tv stations, he looks at what it means to have publicly owned stations and privately owned stations, both what that means for the kinds of shows that are being produced and shown on the channels and what it means for the way that the channels are being run financially. Williams later notes that as technologies of dissemination continue to develop, these signals will soon be able to reach around the world, which will have various additional effects of cultural imperialism and further consolidation of power.

Williams then investigates the way television works on a programming level. Here is his most famous concept from this book, that of flow as the dominant mode of televisual communication. He outlines how tv shows flow into one another, how within those shows there is a flow from scene to scene (or from show to commercial and back) and how within those smaller units there is still a continual flow of visual and aural information. This, he claims, is what makes it hard to turn the tv off, and what makes television seem insidious to those who would classify it as a means of society’s degradation. Even though we might switch between channels to find alternate programming, there is still an experience of flow from one channel to the next. It’s everywhere!

Williams then investigates the effects of television. Here is where he makes his strongest case against McLuhan, who he claims is treating the television as an ideology rather than a technology that has been made and used by a society. Television isn’t pushing the things on tv, society is via the television. Looked at this way, Williams claims, we can see how television was developed to help facilitation communication between those in power and those who have power over them, but also how others can co-opt that system for their own ends. Here lies the realm of pirate radio and tv stations, which exist fully within the boundaries of what is made possible with the technology even if they are not an intended effect of that technology. This kind of thing seems crucial to understanding the rest of William’s project, which projects the current (for 1974) situation of television into the future and in which Williams largely predicts the internet, in concept if not explicit detail.

Williams lays out how the continual development of technology related to broadcasting will soon create an international network of competing and conflicting distribution methods, aka the internet. Williams sees two ways of this working out. On the one hand, if arguments can be made that there should remain some level of local control over what is sent across these new means of broadcasting, there might be a real democratization of information and communication. On the other hand, if corporations are able to influence the development of these technologies enough, they might be able to manipulate the course of events towards a situation where the corporations are able to control what is seen as acceptable and possible within their neigh-unescapable grasp. It seems clear to me that Williams, in creating this binary of possible outcomes, hit exactly on what has happened, in that the internet has allowed for a greater ability for people to communicate with each other and learn about the world, but that corporations still largely control the ways in which those people use that information and lay out patterns of thought that those people still largely follow. There are cracks in the system because both of these outcomes happened at once and the corporate control is not nearly as all-encompassing as it would have needed to be to create that full dystopia and is indeed largely in control of the ways people communicate, but still those pirate messages are possible and even likely within this system. Perhaps it is utopian after all.

Williams’ concept of television and broadcasting is largely limited to Britain and the US, which does tend to limit his analysis somewhat. I would be curious to read a history of television during this time in other countries to see if the English language examples are as universal as Williams seems to claim they are.

Sarah Palmer watches TV on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Williams really only explicitly debates with McLuhan, who he pretty well takes to task for his technological determinism. Other than that, the biggest bit of context is the period in which Williams is writing. About 20 years after television’s popularity began, and with an ensuing 40+ years of development that has followed had made some of his arguments a little outdated. For instance, he writes about the technological inferiority of television as a visual medium when compared to the cinema. While that still remains true, at least on a level of scale, television is no longer so technologically inferior that it limits what can be shown on it the way it did in Williams’ time. Indeed, televisions can now have more color information than a digital projector at a theater can. This means that tv as a way of transmitting old (or new) movies is no longer a matter of dealing with poorer picture quality for the convenience of home viewing. Still, Williams’ analysis allows room for this change to happen, and even briefly predicts it.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Williams takes the socio-political view of the development of technologies as his main way of understanding how technologies come to be based on desires that needed to be fulfilled. He also examines not just the intended effects of a technology such as television but also their unintended and yet still possible effects. By looking at intentions and then effects, he is able to see why television came to be and what it is doing, and what it could be doing.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Williams methodological choice is largely his rhetoric. Here he argues that technological determinism is a flawed way of understanding the ways technology interacts with societies, and he aptly argues for a fuller understanding of its role as a social tool.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As the start of my television-theory readings, this works really well to ground me in a way of thinking about tv as a medium. Even though it contains little in the way of theories of television as a medium of drama, where most of my readings will be focused, it still will likely remain foundational to my understanding of what is going on at a societal level with tv.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

television, technological determinism, cause and effect, cause, effect, social, society, broadcasting, flow, commercial, public, technology, medium, programming

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

If the technology is a cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects. Or if the technology, as used, is an effect, to what other kinds of cause, and other kinds of action, should we refer and relate our experience of its uses? (2)

[I]n the particular case of television it may be possible to outline a different kind of interpretation, which would allow us to see not only its history but also its uses in a more radical way. Such an interpretation would differ from technological determinism in that it would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology and that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central. (6-7)

The cheap radio receiver is then a significant index of a general condition and response. It was especially welcomed by all those who had least social opportunities of other kinds; who lacked independent mobility or access to the previously diverse places of entertainment and information. Broadcasting could also come to serve, or seem to serve, as a form of unified social intake, at the most general levels. What had been intensively promoted by the radio manufacturing companies thus interlocked with this kind of social need, itself defined within general limits and pressures. (21)

The ‘commercial’ character of television has then to be seen at several levels: as the making of programs for a profit in a known market; as a channel for advertising; and as a cultural and political form directly shaped by and dependent on the norms of a capitalist society, selling both consumer goods and a way of life based on them, in an ethos that is at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power. (36-7)

But there has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. Even within the last half-century, at the peak of popularity of the cinema, figures for Britain indicate an average of less than one attendance a week per head of the adult population. It is difficult to get any precise comparative figures for television. But it seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, then would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. […] Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food. (56)

But the cultural importance of the serial, as an essentially new form, ought not to be limited to this kind of traditional ratification. Few forms on television have the potential importance of the original serial. If the form has been overlaid, understandably, by the ‘classic’ emphasis, and more generally by the stock formulas of crime and illness, that is a particular cultural mediation, which it is necessary to understand and look for ways beyond. (58)

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a program of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’. (91)

The flow offered can also, and perhaps more fundamentally, be related to the television experience itself. Two common observations bear on this. As has already been noted, most of us say, in describing the experience, that we have been ‘watching television’, rather than that we have watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ ‘on television’. Certainly we sometimes say both, but the fact that we say the former at all is already significant. Then again it is a widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular ‘program’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organized, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. (94)

Especially in advanced industrial societies the near universality and general social visibility of television have attracted simple cause-and-effect identifications of its agency in social and cultural change. […] What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues – on the one hand ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, on the other hand ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’ – which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialized to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television’s effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause. (121-2)

[McLuhan’s conception of the media] is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions. For if the medium – weather print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such. The initial formulation – ‘the medium is the message’ – was a simple formalism. The subsequent formulation – ‘the medium is the massage’ – is a direct and functioning ideology. (130)

All technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices. […] There will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention. […] While we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology. […] We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real determining factors – the distribution of power or of capital, social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size between groups – set limits and exert pressures, but neither wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex activity within or at these limits, and under or against these pressures. (132-3)

The unique factor of broadcasting – first in sound, then even more clearly in television – has been that its communication is accessible to normal social development; it requires no specific training which brings people within the orbit of public authority. If we can watch and listen to people in our immediate circle, we can watch and listen to television. (135)

All this will take time and prolonged effort. The struggle will reach into every corner of society. But that is precisely what is at stake: a new universal accessibility. Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralized information and data-processing systems, the technology that is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some cases to control our whole social process. And it is ironic that the uses offer such extreme social choices. We could have inexpensive, locally based yet internationally extended television systems, making possible communication and information sharing on a scale that not long ago would have seemed utopian. These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psychodrama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities. (156-7)

Major and Minor Fields

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As I wrote about a little in the reading list post, your reading list will depend upon what your major and minor fields are. Here at OSU’s English department, you’re required to have one major field and at least one minor field. You can have two minor fields, though it feels like a lot more work for very little additional payoff, so I avoided that. Here at OSU, you’re also required to justify/explain your major and minor fields and what interests you about them, so for the sake of transparency and helping people who might be in the same position, I’m going to put my justifications here as well. Hope they’re useful for you.

Major Field Description: Post-70 U.S. Film and Television

My major field of study is Post-70 Film and Television, with a strong emphasis on blockbuster films and big budget series. These films and shows are not only the primary tentpoles for the industry during this period, but also the types of films and shows that become touchstones within and instigators of broader cultural conversations. They are also examples of storytelling pitched to the largest possible audience through what Hollywood largely considered as the default character and audience identity of the straight white cis-gendered male. Blockbusters highlighted technological filmmaking advancements (surround sound, digital editing, CGI, etc), the combination of which is fascinating in its implications for both how the films are made and why they are received the way they are by audiences. Of course alongside the rise of the blockbuster spectacular, there’s a strong independent tradition that thrives in the 1970s and continues somewhat diminished into the present (and from which some blockbusters like Halloween and The Terminator emerge); these films on my list provide important examples of alternate storytelling and scale-of-production possibilities. Though my focus is primarily on Hollywood film and television, I have included some examples from outside its boundaries in order to capture a range of other filmmaking (and television-making) techniques that often are eventually subsumed into Hollywood’s blockbuster style, like Spike Lee’s expansive scope in Do the Right Thing that gives the supporting cast space to be fuller characters than were previously allowed in Hollywood’s pragmatist cinematic form, not to mention its attention to characters and audiences that Hollywood had largely ignored in its general myopic concentration on whiteness. Although Hollywood is and has been dominated by white male voices, I also tried to be inclusive of films that had strong input by women and people of color where possible. Broadening beyond the auteurist understanding of single authorship of a film or tv show allows movies like Star Wars (with Maria Lucas’ editing) and shows like Veronica Mars (with Kristen Bell’s central performance) to be strong representatives of female voices in filmmaking alongside more traditional examples like Julie Dash’s direction of Daughters of the Dust and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s showrunning for Fleabag.

My list of secondary sources is populated with a mix of canonical film theory books and essays as well as representative writings on areas of particular interest to my focus on big budget, highly-leveraged film and television in the post-studio era. I consider myself to be, at least partially, a formalist, so Eisenstein, McLuhan, Bordwell, and Bazin (among others) are foundational texts for me. I am also, however, deeply interested in audience studies and spectator theory, an area that Jenkins, Lewis, and Staiger help illuminate. The history of film and film theory is significant to my major field, since I am bracketing a half century defined by the collapse of the classical studio system and the rise of radically new economic structures and film technologies in production, distribution, and exhibition; Carroll, Barnouw, Rodowick, Langford, and Connor will help me better contextualize the way that the current moment has come to be via industrial and technological changes over recent history. Following Richard Dyer, I am also interested in how Hollywood has constructed an overbearing whiteness as the often-understudied default position from which it tells its stories. So many of the movies and shows on my list are about whiteness without acknowledging that fact, and that phenomenon is one I am keen to study more.

via GIPHY

Minor Field Description: Narrative Theory and Seriality Studies

My minor field is in narratology with an emphasis on serialization in film and television. To get as broad an understanding as the field as is possible, I’ve selected some general overviews as well as some standout texts within important subfields (rhetorical narratology, natural and unnatural narratology). With that background, I then focused on serialization in film and television, an until recently underrepresented subfield within narratology. Here I have quite a few studies of television serialization, but, with a few exceptions, little on modern film serialization because not much has yet been written on that subject except for by writers like Locke and Verevis. Writers like Higgins have, however, investigated the world of early film serials. I hope to eventually combine the knowledge from this tv-heavy serialization theory with the more generalized film theory from my major field to create a deeper understanding of how film and tv narratives can operate serially. This will be a crucial part of my dissertation research, as I aim to write primarily about film sequels that were made long after the original films were in theaters. Seriality studies often looks to the way a show balances the serialized/episodic tendencies in relation to the show as a whole, while film studies—when it has analyzed seriality in its medium—usually looks at it primarily as an opportunity to continue a story/world that has been successful (commercially or critically) in the past. I think each of these foci have something to bring to each other, and I think the extreme length of time between films in the movies I’m interested in can call attention to the function gaps play in the aforementioned aspects of serialized filmic/televisual storytelling. To that end, I have populated my primary sources with various kinds of serialized storytelling in film and television. Many of the examples take an original film from my major field list and match it with that franchise’s latest entry, while others have a self-contained serial form, like Moonlight and Boyhood or Russian Doll.