Television Culture [antikvár]

Chapter 1 Some television, some topics, and some terminology Any book about television culture is immediately faced with the problem of defining its object. What is television? And, equally problematically, what is culture? In this book I work with a definition of television as a bearer/ provoker of meanings and pleasures, and of culture as the generation and circulation of this variety of meanings and pleasures within society. Television-as-culture is a crucial part of the social dynamics by which the social structure maintains itself in a constant process of production and reproduction: meanings, popular pleasures, and their circulation are therefore part and parcel of this social structure. Television, its viewers, and the ways it functions in society, are so multifarious that no tightly focused theoretical perspective can provide us with adequate insight. The theoretical and methodological roots of this book lie in that loosely delineated area known as "cultural studies" which derives from particular inflections of Marxism, semiotics, post-structuralism, and ethnography. This area encompasses both textually inflected and socially inflected theories of culture, and requires theoretical, analytical, and empirical approaches to rub together in a mutually critical and productive relationship. The book will focus on the problem of how the textuality of television is made meaningful and pleasurable by its variously situated viewers, though it will also consider the relationship between this cultural dimension and television's status as a commodity in a capitalist economy. But we start by considering television as a cultural agent, particularly as a provoker and circulator of meanings. How meanings are produced is one of the central problematics of the book, but a convenient place to start is with the simple notion that television broadcasts programs that are replete with potential meanings, and that it attempts to control and focus this meaningful-ness into a more singular preferred meaning that performs the work of the dominant ideology. We shall need to interrogate this notion later, but I propose to start with a traditional semiotic account of how television makes, or attempts to make, meanings that serve the dominant interests in society, and how it circulates these meanings amongst the wide variety of social groups that constitute its audiences. I shall do this by analyzing a short