Live and kicking: a meta-critical discourse on television and television studies

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Television studies has been engaged in a reflexive self-discourse since its beginnings, and the last few years have seen a noticeable number of publications that consider the state of television as an object of study and/or television studies as the discipline that studies this object. Here, Cinema Journal's special 'In Focus: The Place of Television Studies' section - edited by William Boddy, with contributions from other senior US scholars including John T. Caldwell, Michele Hilmes and Lynn Spigel1 - and the British response to this by members of the Midlands Television Research Group - 'In Focus: The Place of Television Studies: A View from the British Midlands', edited by Charlotte Brunsdon and Ann Gray, with contributions from Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley2 - have been especially illuminating as a Bakhtinian self-dialogue. With this essay, we wish to reflect both on these prior reflections and on the relationship between the object and the discipline towards the end of the first decade of the twentyfirst century. Considering the nature of the transition of television and a possible reformation of television studies, we will focus on the uncertainties of the discipline, with regard to both research and teaching, and highlight a number of issues and concerns that have perhaps not so far been brought to the forefront as much as they deserve. We will also indicate how our arguments resonate with sf and sf studies.Post-object, post-discipline?It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any work on the current state of television and/or television studies, must contain a discussion of the fact that television is in a state of transition. Indeed, Lincoln Geraghty's recent discussion of sf television since 1980 is built on the premise that the genre has 'been at the forefront' (144) of the medium's response to changes caused by television's shifting relationship with the 'old' and 'new' media of cinema, the internet and computer games. But if, as Spigel reminds us, '[the] recent interest in the future also has a history. Looking back on the history of TV scholarship, we see that television has seemed perpetually on the verge of transformation' (86), and since Helen Wood and Lisa Taylor encourage us to 'not forget that television is not that old' (144), then why is there such a noticeable preoccupation with current technological and institutional convergences and consolidations, especially the impact of the digital? Why this preoccupation with 'post-TV' and 'TV III' (see Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein)? It seems that this preoccupation exists not just because it is a significant enough change - Boddy calls it 'fundamental' ('In Focus' 80) - but also because it is a significant enough change at a time when television studies as an established discipline can respond to this change.3 Furthermore, it is a change that goes to the heart of the object as well as the discipline. As Brunsdon points out:There have been two prerequisites for development of the primarily Anglophone discipline of television studies. The first was that television as such be regarded as worthy of study. ... The second prerequisite was that television be granted, conceptually, some autonomy and specificity as a medium. ('What is' 96)We will return to the first prerequisite later, but for now we will focus on the idea that a discipline is dependent on the existence of a definable enough, distinguishable enough object of study. To the extent that television is currently undergoing significant change, this is occurring at a moment when the discipline is, as we have indicated, established in the sense that it has come to form a cohesive, developing body of work, but, at the same time, is only recently beginning to gain acceptance within the larger scholarly community. So, this change is, in one way, an 'exciting prospect' for television scholars since, as Boddy puts it, 'many of the traditional tools of television studies, formulated in an earlier era of nationally defined broadcast practices and institutions, will have to be rethought for a moving-image culture with less fixed notions of medium, text, spectatorship, schedule, and nation' ('In Focus' 82). …