Conjuring the Bad Object in New Writing on Socialist Television

Television is the love-to-hate medium. Or, in the more erudite formulation of the historian Michele Hilmes (by way of psychoanalytic theory), TV is the "bad object" of academe.¹ Frustrating and alluring, ontological uncertainty rubs against its heels like a cat: what is TV, after all? Is it a text, a technology, an institution, a way of life? On a more practical level, too, the case against studying television history has always been unusually strong: depending on the context (era, country), researchers find themselves with either far too much TV programming to watch or too little; the form is too fleeting and trivial or, again depending on the context, too obvious and predictable, unworthy. Socialist television has appeared, if anything, even more overdetermined to scholarly eyes—the bad object's bad object—and was, for many years, almost completely overlooked.² Yet in the past decade, a new cohort of scholars has switched on the box in histories of socialist Eastern Europe with meticulously researched, innovative studies.³ Add in to the mix some excellent new work on the TV/politics nexus in today's Russia, and the "bad object" may well, at last, make good.⁴

________

What do we learn tuning into this new wave of socialist television studies? One major theme in the new literature, and one that mirrors trends in writing about West European and North American TV, is television's paradoxical transnationalism.⁵ Traditionally, media histories have been mounted in national frames; the intimate association between broadcasting, the nationstate, and national identity made this an obvious way to organize analysis. But television, like radio before it, has a rich history of international exchange, cooperation, co-optation, and leakage that historians everywhere have only recently begun to explore in detail. Television could be at once a bedrock of national cultures in the postwar period and a phenomenon that thrived on transnational traffic in people, concepts, and content.

Both Anikó Imre's TV Socialism and Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable's From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television set their stalls squarely in the transnational camp, examining television right across the region, and both offer fascinating new information and some unexpected twists. Yes, TV administrators across socialist Eastern Europe shared ideas and coordinated activities, as we might expect. But some of them also developed significant, official connections across the East-West divide. Slovenian and Croatian TV, for example, set up cooperative arrangements with Italian RAI in the 1960s (Mihelj and Huxtable, 16). That socialist TV systems incorporated Western programming into their daily schedules is well known. But seeing the percentage figures across the region cannot fail to impress: 43.6 percent of all imports to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for the years 1960–90, 65.5 percent for Poland, 83.1 percent for Romania (181). Much of this programming was from the United States, and indeed, a cross-European analysis would show that in some years, American TV dominated screens more in the East than the West. And, of course, the unofficial leakage across borders—both within the socialist sphere (from Hungary, Bulgaria, and Serbia to TV-starved Romania in the 1980s, for instance) and between East and West—most famously, West Germany to the GDR, but also Italy to Croatia, Scandinavia to Estonia, Austria to Czechoslovakia, and others—often reached flood levels. Taken together, we get a view of television as a promiscuous, border-busting medium well before the introduction of international communications satellites in the late 1970s, traditionally seen as the game changer in the literature. Imre's claim that "most of Europe was watching many of...