Turn Off TV Studies!

Long before the emergence of televisual appliances and services, people engaged in the study of television by fantasizing about the transmission of image and sound across space. Richard Whittaker Hubbell made the point in 1942, when he published a book entitled 4000 Years of Television. Television even has its own patron saint, Clare of Assisi, a teen runaway from the thirteenth century who was canonized because of her bedridden vision of a midnight mass cast upon a wall. Centuries later (in 1958), Pius XII declared this to have been the first broadcast.¹

As TV proper came close to realization, it attracted intense critical speculation. Rudolf Arnheim's 1935 "Forecast" predicted that its cosmopolitan vision might bring global peace, by showing spectators that "we are located as one among many." But television was also "a new, hard test of our wisdom." The emergent medium's easy access to knowledge would either enrich or impoverish its viewers, manufacturing an informed public, vibrant and active—or an indolent audience, domesticated and passive. Two years after Arnheim, Barrett C. Kiesling said, "It is with fear and trembling that the author approaches the controversial subject of television." Such concerns about TV have never receded.² They are the very stuff of most inquiries into this bewildering dispositif.

Like most domains of the human sciences, the study of television is characterized by contests over meanings and approaches, not least because its analysts "speak different languages, use different methods," and pursue "different questions."³ Broadly speaking, TV has given rise to three key concerns of academic research: (1) ownership and control (television's political economy); (2) texts (its content); and (3) audiences (its public). Within these categories lie several other divisions:

• • Approaches to ownership and control vary between neoliberal endorsements of limited regulation by the state, in the interests of guaranteeing market entry for new competitors, and Marxist critiques of the bourgeoismedia's agenda for discussing society

• • Approaches to textuality vary between hermeneutic endeavors, which unearth the meaning of individual programs and link them to broader social formations and problems, and content-analytic endeavors, which establish patterns across significant numbers of similar texts, rather than close readings of individual ones

• • Approaches to audiences vary between psychological attempts to validate correlations between watching TV and social conduct and culturalist engagements with viewers' sense-making practices.

For the purposes of this article, I am most concerned with purportedly progressive work that seeks to make a difference, to further cultural politics and democracy—that is to say, work of tendency, as opposed to work that aims to divine people's secrets through psychological surveillance.

In preparing Routledge's five-volume latest hits and greatest memories of academic writing on television⁴ —from which some of the reflections in this essay draw—and during my five years editing Sage's journal Television & New Media, I have been struck by the narrowness of humanities TV studies. The recent makeover by SCMS signals that the operatic stature of cinema within the organization is compromised. But I also think that U.S. and British television studies are in danger of making the mistake that has condemned cinema studies to near irrelevancy in the public sphere of popular criticism, state and private policy, social-movement critique, and union issues. That mistake was to set up a series of nostra early on about what counted as knowledge and then to police the borders. This is a standard disciplinary tactic.

The particular cinema studies données barely need rehearsal: psychoanalysis good, psychology bad. Spectatorship fascinating, audience boring. Archive good, laboratory bad. Criticism good, ethnography bad. Author interesting, wonk dull. Textual analysis good, content analysis bad. What are the equivalent biases in contemporary U.S./U.K. TV studies? I fear that many are shared, though audiences are now deemed interesting insofar as they are populist delegates for analysts' own fandom. In general, criteria and methods have been transferred from one medium to another by those working within the humanities in the English language.

In the United States today, literally millions of people are petitioning the Federal Communications Commission about TV ownership, control, access, and content, and...