Reconstruction 10.4 (2010)

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Irresolute Intermediaries: Television, Memory, and Weird Frontiers / David Lewkowich, Ph.D. candidate

Abstract:

The task of narrating our memories is a difficult and virtually impossible undertaking, especially since it is often those moments we cannot recall that, in the end, may prove be the most formative. In this paper, I look at what it means to narrativize reminiscences of the televisual viewing experience, as banal encounters that nevertheless shed light on the fragmented nature of our relations in the social world. Despite the ubiquitous presence of television in our everyday lives, its worth is rarely interrogated at the level of the writer/researcher’s subject and of memory. This piece looks not at the substance of television’s programmes, but instead, at how television functions as a site and a screen through which our identities are figured in the presence of (sometimes absent) others. In these narrations, I think of this nomadic dialogue with the self as an act of risky reading, where reading the world of which memories form a part—despite their disposition as inarticulate scramblings—allows us to reconsider the value of our social and psychic relations as dialogic moments of co-construction and ambiguity.

Keywords: culture studies, education; television, film.

<1> In Blush (2005), Elspeth Probyn’s rousing account of the multifarious temperaments of the distinctly human affect of shame, she tells us how “the emphasis on narrative is important when you’re dealing with new ideas and new ways of being” (pp. xiv-xv). “New ways of being,” however, are never simply delineable as such, and as with all things that call for uncertain and persistent reworkings of relations in the social world—language, technology, reading, teaching, learning; all various ways of walking and talking—the shadows of the future are invariably knotted up and implicated through the contours, memories, and encounters of the past. And as we find ourselves in the middle, the moving target of the temporal present, the curiosities of narrative inquiry figure emphatically here as well. As Judith Butler (2003) notes, in the staging of autobiographical (re)tellings, we “live a vector of temporalities” (26), whose imprecisions are “never fully mine, and never fully for me” (27). It is with this appreciation for the indispensable inaccuracies of inventiveness always imaginable in the recollected reconstructions of a storied world—conceiving of research as “an unworking without destination, thinking as departure” (Haver, 1997, 284)—that I intend to look at the place of the televisual. I will also enact—through a staging of television memory and narrative reminiscence—a nomadic dialogue with the self, wherein, “dialogue is not an accident, a contingency of reading, but its structuring condition of possibility” (Felman, 1987, 23).

Television as technology and bad memory object

<2> In relation to memory, Amy Holdsworth (2008) reminds us that “television has often been characterized by its ‘transience,’ ‘ephemerality,’ and ‘forgetability’ … Television is not only the bad critical object in the academy, but it is a bad memory object as well” (137). As I recognize it, there are undeniably qualities of banality, boredom, and inconsequence that certain species of television can foster—through which our memories of TV watching are typically ungraspable and irretrievable, languishing in the nature of a trivial experience that we do not, cannot, ponder past a moment. Following from this, the idea of characterizing TV as an essence of negativity, and as a waste of time and space, might be worth dwelling on and not discounting in full. Since the matter of which reality counts, or whose thinking and narrativizing gets written off as epistemological and ontological waste, relates to the movements of power in everyday human relations, it is here worth enunciating the perennial curriculum question: Whose knowledge is of the most worth? Enmeshed in some of the features that readily define the inclination to associate television watching solely with negativity—that it produces passivity, represents the interests of the status quo, reinforces traditional stereotypes of gender, race, class, and sexuality—is a potential not just for lack and loss, but for something productive as well. If for nothing else, there is here a questioning of what the “otherwise” might look like (unrecognizable, grotesque, abject, unnameable), and a possible positioning of the taken-for-granted and assumed as sometimes strange and absurd. Such readings are unavoidable; they come as a consequence of the failure that must transpire in all representations of lived experience, televisual and otherwise, inevitably insufficient and undetermined.

<3> However, since I see television as an ambivalent technology par excellence, in that it “show[s] the way but not [does] not determine it” (Buonanno, 2008, 64), I don’t want to overly romanticize the subversive implications of its use and viewings. I therefore agree with Andrew Feenberg (2006), who points to technology as something that “frame[s] not just one way of life but many different possible ways of life, each of which determines a different choice of designs and a different range of technological mediation” (13). As Roger Silverstone (1996) notes, “there is…nothing ‘natural’ in the placing of, or the practices associated with, media and information technologies in the domestic context” (286). And for Lynn Spigel (1992), the complicated embedding and incorporation of television into the geographies, genderings, and histories of our domesticity is part of a process that has had to be learned, since “the installation of the television set was by no means a simple purchase of a pleasure machine” (32).

<4> I want to ask, therefore, about the habitual lenses that we use in our everyday interpretations, and mediated rememberings, of television’s substance and worth. If we think on what we ignore, we generally can also get a glimpse at what we value, even if such valuation is unvoiced. As I see it, many of our lives are invariably punctuated by the grammar of the televisual, a language that shapes our body as it speaks, and often gets us to speak along with it, living into being the movements of an epistemologic process; a co-construction quietly akin to the relations we cultivate and value in our various associations with other people.

<5> But in this dialogic relation, what about the way television is constructed as a “bad memory object,” as an object towards which our memory is often oriented mistakenly, and whose images might provide a false account of the past, and thus also of present reality? To begin with, memory itself—in its unpredictability and brashness—is always potentially bad and perverse, and in its motives is a temptation that woos and flatters, though also insults and shames; reminding us of what we could have been, and simultaneously of what we were and were not. As Annette Kuhn (2000) puts it, “the past is unavoidably rewritten, revised, through memory; and memory is partial: things get forgotten, misremembered, repressed” (184). In its role as an irresolute intermediary we can certainly then assume, at the very least, that our memory—as “always already secondary revision” (Kuhn, 184)—holds the key to something silent and dormant within us, that its (re)mappings exhibit an unconscious demand that persists in speaking, despite being frequently muffled and gagged.

<6> I will think of television, then—as technology, as text, as mediator in multiple fields of representation, as narrative, as cultural form and forum, as economy, as phenomenological object—through the following assumption: that the memories we persist in recreating about TV speak to its nature as a co-creator of our psychic selves (in that it influences how we think about ourselves, how we think about others, and how we think about ourselves in relation to others), and to a perverse desire we all have to forget about this relation, to ignore its import from the moment of enunciation. For Kuhn (2000), “memory does not simply involve forgetting, misremembering, repression—that would be to suggest that there is some fixed ‘truth’ of past events: memory actually is these processes” (186, italics in original).

<7> The perverse impulses of which I speak are, as Deborah Britzman (1998) tells us, “simply pleasure without utility” (69), meaning ordinary, everyday, pleasurable experiences, often disallowed and discounted. There is no doubt that this sense of perversity, which William Haver (1997) describes as a “chaos of pleasures and affects” (278), can be related to the virulent sentiments of love and hate we both reap from and foist on the televisual; categories of pleasure and displeasure through which we often feel shame and guilt. Certainly, we take pleasure in watching television we love, but we also sometimes persist in watching television we hate, staging our viewings as “fans at times, and anti-fans at others” (Gray, 2008, 65). For Roland Barthes (1975), who recognizes the relation of pleasure and the erotic as that which is slightly seen yet remains ungraspable, “many readings are perverse, implying a split, a cleavage” (47). And given the obsessively intertextual nature of television—its “contradictions and instability” (Fiske, 1987, 107)—perversion is, for Barthes, “the realm of textual pleasure” (10).

<8> To “claim deviancy as a site of interest” (Britzman, 1998, 84), then, is something that can only happen when we admit to the consequences of our libidinal and erogenous selves, whose impulses of love and hate often remain otherwise repressed and unacknowledged. In this moment, I also think of perverseness as put forward by the protagonist in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse (1966), who presents it as “a mobile without motive” (272, italics in original), an involuntary, yet common, conceptual methodology for contrary thinking. It is an “act without comprehensible object,” where “beyond or behind this there is no intelligible principle” (274), and where the unintelligible is, therefore, that “imp” which refuses to be named. Invariably, as “reality and the televised version of reality have … become profoundly intertwined” (Gray, 2008, 103), our understanding of the fantasies contained and constructed in such ubiquitous televisual tropes as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and the police, along with the consequences we attribute to experiences of romance, friendship, and familial relations, are inevitably filtered through the myriad—and often contradictory—fictions and fantasies of the televisual as a narrative terrain of fractured reminiscense. 

The Object World of the Televisual

<9> Now, above all else, television—what Horace Newcomb (1999) refers to as the “central story-telling system” of our present era (cited in Buonanno, 2008, 72)—is an object, and an object toward which we invariably orient ourselves. Since its inception as a technique of communicative address, television has played the role of “a powerful centralising medium” (Williams, 2003/1974, 49), and a medium of conceptual travel, providing what Milly Buonanno (2008)—with reference to Raymond Williams’ description of “mobile privatisation”—refers to as “symbolic mobility … equivalent to a journey without a departure, to a migration without leaving one’s place of origin” (107, italics in original). The etymology of the word itself, “its capacity to allow us to see (-vision) at a distance (-tele)” (Allen, 2004, 105), also speaks to the ability of being able to narrate the world from beyond one’s immediate environment.

<10> To come back to the question of orientation, Sara Ahmed (2006), writing on the phenomenology of sexual orientation, notes that “to be oriented is … to be oriented toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. These are the objects we recognize, such that when we face them,” as into a screen and though the image may change, “we know which way we are facing” (543). In our everyday lives, we all use objects as a means to situate ourselves in the world, and though Ahmed focuses on other objects, such as desks, the ubiquitous nature and “veritable dailyness” of television (Silverstone, 1994, 2), enables it to play more than just a trivial role in our movements of social arrangement. Though its presence may often be taken for granted—as “a fixture, yet not a demanding one” (Buonanno, 2008, 36)—traces of television’s histories still play out in its every enunciation.

<11> Television, as “technology and cultural form” (Williams, 2003/1974), has often been constituted as the prime medium of heterosexual domesticity and the nuclear family, with the set often “placed totemicly within the symbolic center of the (family) home” (Morley, 2004, 316), and in many ways this accounting is still true, with “the underlying logic of television’s normative character … positioned in familial terms” (Needham, 2009, 151). Davis and Needham (2009), in their introduction to Queer TV, admit “a history of theorisation that complicates any attempt to perceive television” differently, such as “through a queer optic” (3). For many thinkers (Aaron, 2009; McCarthy, 2001; Villarejo, 2009; among others), the migration of televisual content from something networked in time and bounded in domesticity—one screen in the living room around which the family enthusiastically circles—to any number of screens, endlessly proliferating inside and outside of the home—in bars, doctor’s offices, subway platforms, iPods, and various rooms in the scattered household—the idea of television viewing practices as ultimately normative and clearly homogenous no longer rings true. “Without doubt,” Silverstone (1996) writes, “television is no longer condemned to a single set” (281). In the seemingly infinite transformations of TV, both technological and otherwise, it is worth asking what relations are upset, requiring “new rituals of use” (Lotz, 2007, 241), and what relations are left unchanged.

<12> Despite modifications in delivery, however, TV may still orient us emotionally toward a sense of dwelling and a comforting ambience, whether on a plasma screen or personal computer, and while perhaps the context has changed, we should still persist in asking; does the narrative logic remain the same? For Lynne Joyrich (2009), there is value in tracing out how “the epistemology of the console … needn’t be just a consolidated box of our culture’s ignorance and fears”  (p.19). Though she in no way considers television’s knowledge as necessarily critical or emancipatory, Joyrich argues that television’s narrative “paradoxes, spiralings, and double movements” contain contradiction at their core (19). This is similar to Shoshana Felman’s (1987) understanding of “literary knowledge,” as “a knowledge that is not authoritative, not that of a master, a knowledge that does not know what it knows and is thus not in possession of itself” (92, italics in original). While the excesses of epistemological meaning in televisual narratives might, on the one hand, incarcerate our imagination, at the same time they might also work to de-familiarize the taken-for-granted. For John Hartley (1983), “television’s signifying practices are necessarily contradictory—they must produce more than they police” (cited in Fiske, 1987, 76, italics in original). Indeed, what makes television a significant part of what we call “popular culture” is that its simultaneous appeal and delivery is often made to differently situated viewers, no longer bound by arrangements in time and space, and through differently felt registers of human experience. As I see it, then, there is not only a “polysemy of the program,” as John Fiske (1987, 16) argues, but also a spatial and temporal polysemy and promiscuity—a “non-monogamy of viewing” (Aaron, 2009, 71)—inherent in the shifting structures of this medium in constant transition (Brundson, 2008), a tendency that Buonanno (2008) characterizes topographically, as a “polygamy of place” (20).

<13> In the interests of imprecision, and with the intent of mining the significance of television in “the relationship between remembering and transformation” (Radstone, 12), I will now carry out the narrative displacements of what Kuhn (2000) has termed a methodology of “memory work,” and which she describes as:

an active practice of remembering which takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, treating it not as ‘truth’ but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation…[and] a conscious and purposeful staging of memory. (186)

Metro Cars and Weird Frontiers

<14> Travelling in the tracks of a city’s bowels, by metro or subway, can be an occasionally confusing and disorienting affair. Spaces and decorum shift incessantly, combining and interfering with each other’s topography, often haphazard and indiscriminate. Before the lines of the metro engrave themselves in our minds as fixed and immovable impressions of the substrata, we might get lost and find ourselves across town from where we suppose ourselves to be. There is a disorderly familiarity and a significant change in mood and climate that comes from stepping into these spaces of underground travel, from the world outside to the world inside. We take our jackets off, we put our jackets on, our sensations of waiting are changed, and we look at people differently—flirting little glimpses, suspiciously spontaneous, and with a strange sense of what the conventions of public space entail. We occupy ourselves differently, and as Marc Augé (2002) writes about the Parisian Metro, “to speak of the metro first of all means to speak of reading and cartography” (9), the reading of spaces, the reading of faces, and the reading of social situations. Some of us read books, some of us unconsciously map the twists and turns of our intended routes, some of us watch other people, some of us text, some of us listen to music, and some of us watch screens, both large and small, which, as Lisa Parks (2007) writes of “campground television,” are “integrated within a transient place where visitors are constantly coming and going” (120). For certain of these screens, we carry them with us on mobile devices, and for others, they preexist our arrival, and are exhibited throughout the metro stations, presumably put into place to alleviate the dread that waiting can sometimes bring. For Anna McCarthy (2004), waiting, which she sees as something undeniably “central to the general organization of TV time” (194), is typically associated with the affective nature of “routine, boredom, repetition, [and] deadness” (193, italics in original). What is typical, however, is by no means imperative, and so McCarthy also emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the shape of a shifting context and its relation to variations of affective meaning, where “televisual waiting is a grounded activity that takes on different meanings from place to place” (202). It is in this way that boredom can carry an erotic charge, and that deadness can come to signify a vibrant and libidinal energy.

<15> Travelling from one end of the city to another, I recently found myself unthinking and arbitrarily unoccupied in a metro car; at times looking into the book I held, or at the snail-paced hands of my watch, while also throwing simple glances to the spaces and people around me. Having an interest in the transmutations of TV viewing outside of domestic spaces, what Buonanno (2008) calls moments of “despatialized simultaneity” and “despatialized asynchrony,” I noticed a man beside me viewing some kind of moving image on his iPod (a prosthetics of television use representing a transitory “media ecology” [Bar & Taplin, 2007, 76]), and so I positioned myself closer to him, interloping over his shoulder, to more intimately inhabit what I took as an “authentic” instance of the “changing ontologies of television” (Bennett, 2008, 158). In this movement, however, I was treading in what was surely a shared space that this other man came to claim as his own, for what he was watching was no television drama, at least in the glance I observed, but some hardcore porn. I turned away, simultaneously embarrassed, shocked and surprised, for the last thing I expected to see on a handheld TV screen in the metro was flesh on flesh, and as I experienced an awareness that I was invading his space, I likewise considered that he was infringing upon mine. This was a weird frontier, to say the least.

Television’s Escape Routes

<16> My afternoons as a young adolescent in the early 90s were often spent in front of the TV, and it was under such circumstances that I first discovered the seemingly infinite landscapes of the television rerun. Golden Girls, The A-Team, Dallas, Kojak, Columbo, The Wonder Years, 21 Jump Street, Cheers, Alf, Star Trek, Night Court, The Littlest Hobo; these were, among countless others, my nonlinear narrative mainstays, offering an impermanent refuge from a sometimes disenchanting world. As with Jonathan Gray (2008), I am also “part of a ‘seduced’ generation” (12). I could jump in and I could jump out, risking attachments with abandon and leisure. In large part, however, I learnt about the possibilities of creativity, personal relationships, and entertainment from these shows, and I discovered a pleasure, felt both then and now, in ornamenting my imagination— enacting a “dual experience … between desiring and inhabiting” (Moore, 2007, 20, italics in original)—through these narratives in which I figured ostensibly as a generational outsider. These characters did not seem like people I knew (despite obvious superficial similarities), though at the same time, the spectacle of their fictional lives tugged at the emotional and affective fabrics of my own, exposing sensations and sensibilities whose trajectories were nameless; as yet unmapped and unknown. Love, sympathy, attachment, boredom, disgust, nervous and erotic excitement, fear, shame, hate; all were felt and embodied through a disturbance of affect, but none were, as of yet, named. As Glyn Davis (2009) writes of television, “the medium is riven with incidents of perverse and unpredictable disruption” (62).

<17> One show that I distinctly remember feeling unfamiliar, agitated and awkward towards, yet which also excited and energized me—like a trashy novel that is too good to put down—was the 1970’s American sitcom, Three’s Company. As Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, says: “Three’s Company. It’s titillating and anxiety-producing.” Of course, since this show is filled with sexual innuendo, overexaggerated stereotypes, and a humour that itself often relies on misunderstanding, slippages of meaning, performance, and concealment, it is no surprise that—as an adolescent unsure of the social and historical conventions governing differences in sexuality—I often felt unsure and insecure about what was taking place on the screen. But my various reactions to this uncertainty are themselves revealing of something else—a relationship of reading that exists beyond the screen, that takes place only through the unanticipated and embodied consequences of the viewing moment.

<18> From what I recall (and of course, as memories shift, there is inevitably a certain invention to these narratives), whenever the emotional threat of disclosure and sexuality was most palpable in this show, I made one of at least four attempts to elude what I knew was a menacing, though transitory moment. Such acts of eluding were, in effect, an unconscious reaction to moments of disorientation, since “If we know where we are, when we turn this way or that, then we are oriented. We have our bearings” (Ahmed, 2006, 543). In response to an impenetrable texture of uncertainty, I would switch the channel, heading back only after I felt enough time had passed for the situation to be resolved; I would hit the mute button, thus dispensing with the language through which the threat was enunciated; I would switch the TV off, maybe taking this moment to grab myself a snack; or I would simply avert my eyes, perhaps burying them under the purple blanket whose quality of cloth I still recall, thus ignoring visually what I could attend to otherwise, through earshot.

<19> Now, I won’t here attempt to speculate on why I might have felt such shame, embarrassment and anxiety at these scenes, but what I find especially significant is the way I impulsively enacted various spatial and temporal escape routes, diverting the inescapable force of an affect, an inquisitive libidinality, that I could not yet name. In this relation, Medhurst (2009) speaks of “television’s potential as an erotic resource … [that can] be consumed, with due and daring surreptitiousness, in the unsuspecting midst of family life” (81). After enacting such escape routes, however, I would always return to the anchoring center of the console, making the escape neither a failure nor a success, but a detour and deviation, a tracking of my own route through the brush. Such digression is also similar to the marking out of “desire lines,” a term used in landscape architecture to describe those unofficial paths that humans have “walked” into existence—haphazard, illegitimate, and weed-ridden—“those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow” (Ahmed, 2006, 570). For Britzman (2000), “sexuality comes before our knowledge of sexuality. Our first urges for satisfaction come before we understand how satisfaction is made. This order means that our first knowledge is precocious, curious” (42). As a prowler into pastures not of my own making or generation, I was testing out tactics of psychic digression and detour through waters in which I was only a novice, only just learning to swim.

Sarajevo Static

<20> I had taken the overnight bus from Zagreb, travelling by darkness across the Croatian and Bosnian countryside. Exhausted and not a little disorganized, having been bounced in and out of sleep all night, I arrived at the Sarajevo station. As I stepped off the bus, looking like an obvious foreigner I’m sure, a woman asked me if I needed a place to stay. I told her I did, and we caught a taxi to her apartment in a partially crumbling high-rise building, and as we walked through the courtyard I caught the rays of early sunrise and the local minaret’s morning call to prayer. Once inside, I was pointed to a couch and told I could rest. I did so with no hesitation.

<21> A couple hours later I was awakened by my host knocking at the door, and as she walked in with a small breakfast of toast and coffee, she also turned on the television set. I sat up straightaway, confused by the situation as a whole, for I had forgotten exactly where I was. What was most disorienting, however, is that the television had no reception, and was a congested entity, a confusing application, filled with loud and gray, grating static. I tried changing the channel, but there was nothing—no VCR, no antenna. So I sat there, eating and drinking, trying my best to rub my eyes out of exhaustion. What was the use of that TV set, that unsettling static? Of course, in this retelling I cannot help but think of static as a metaphor for miscommunication, obscured and incomprehensible speech. What was the association that I could not grasp? Where was the meaning to which I was not privy? In my displeasure, was I making a culturally biased assumption about the possible and legitimate sources of pleasure? That static itself could not be comforting; could not provide the ambience we so often seek in television drama? Or was my host, instead, making a similar assumption herself? That North Americans prefer their television sets turned on from the moment they wake up, regardless of content, or rather, regardless of whether there was any content whatsoever? Or maybe, and perhaps this is the most likely alternative, she just wanted me to eat my breakfast quickly, and to be on my way so her living quarters could be a space for her living once again.

<22> In narrativizing our memories, we are immersed in the movements of reading, and “of theorizing reading as always about risking the self” (Britzman, 1995, 164), and in this, I think it important to recognize the multiple expressions of television—and of memory—as sites of potential multivocality (Newcomb, 1984), and as instable and “potential meanings rather than commodities” (Fiske, 14). As multifarious as our memories inevitably are, looking back on TV engages us in “a kind of thinking that is other to social utility … without alibi, agreement, or social sanction” (Britzman, 1998, 32). Practices of reading, whether engaged in the interpretation of televisual texts or the retellings of an experiential past, are acts of social performance—neither “innocent, normal, or unmediated” (Britzman, 1995, 164)—and while certain performances lend themselves easily to the (re)production of normalcy and sameness, others, as Britzman (1998) so subtly reminds us, “might well perform something interesting … [and] be educated to attend to the proliferation of one’s own identificatory possibilities and to make allowance for the unruly terms of undecidability and unknowability” (85). “Sometimes,” she continues, “something queer happens when the categories us/them scramble for articulation. Sometimes, they are disrupted” (90). Such inarticulate scramblings, in their peripheral and divergent trajectories, are what I have here set out to approximate. The pulsating presence of affect also plays a significant role in complicating this process of reminiscence, both in its potential as promoting aversion (those memories of the mind often avoided), or as prompting “touchstones” and preferred stories, vital narratives to which we repeatedly return in our evolving sustenance of self (Strong-Wilson, 2006).

<23> But what, exactly—one might interrupt, exasperated—are we engaged in reading? Our lives? Our memories? Our psychic selves? Our bodily reminders? Television shows? Educational theory? The point I’m trying to make is that such concepts and experiences are inevitably enmeshed, and that though we can read them typically—as separate occurrences of discrete origin—sometimes by reading things together, simultaneously, possessed by impulse and silenced by a strange confusion, we orient ourselves differently and otherwise. I am trying to approach the mode of thinking designated by Haver (1997) as an “ontological stammering,” which he describes as “the essential inability to conceptualize what is being thought when thought tries to think its thinking” (290). And of course, I fail in this impossible task, but as Felman notes, “a reading lesson is, precisely, not a statement; it is a performance. It is not theory, it is practice,” since, “it is not in words that the lesson can be learned, but in the body, in one’s life” (20). And so, designations of success and failure are here beside the point, and though the narratives of “memory work” may always remain unfinished, it is this very quality which allows us introspection into a process that can still be written—multiply inscribed in different registers and temporalities, and with regards to disparate experiential endeavours, in which televisual logics intersect incessantly.

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