... aimed at the. WORK(ING) OUT 7 .... If we consider the broad history of women ...... One subject, for example, citing the case of her sister, told us how ...... interview took place in the home of Jim Dubois, 62 years old, and his housemate Larry.
CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 4 Number 1 January 1990
ETHNOGRAPHY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
CULTURAL STUDIES is a new international journal, dedicated to the notion that the study of cultural processes, and especially of popular culture, is important, complex, and both theoretically and politically rewarding. It is published three times a year, with issues being edited in rotation from Australia, the UK and the USA, though occasional issues will be edited from elsewhere. Its international editorial collective consists of scholars representing the range of the most influential disciplinary and theoretical approaches to cultural studies. CULTURAL STUDIES will be in the vanguard of developments in the area worldwide, putting academics, researchers, students and practitioners in different countries and from diverse intellectual traditions in touch with each other and each other’s work. Its lively international dialogue will take the form not only of scholarly research and discourse, but also of new forms of writing, photo essays, cultural reviews and political interventions. CULTURAL STUDIES will publish articles on those practices, texts and cultural domains within which the various social groups that constitute a late capitalist society negotiate patterns of power and meaning. It will engage with the interplay between the personal and the political, between strategies of domination and resistance, between meaning systems and social systems. CULTURAL STUDIES will seek to develop and transform those perspectives which have traditionally informed the field—structuralism and semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism. Theories of discourse, of power, of pleasure and of the institutionalization of meaning are crucial to its enterprise; so too are those which stress the ethnography of culture.
Contributions should be sent to John Fiske, Department of Communications, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53706, USA. They should be in duplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors, available from the Editors or Publishers. They make take the form of articles of about 5000 words, of kites (short, provocative or exploratory pieces) of about 2000 words, or of reviews of books, other cultural texts or events.
CONTENTS
ARTICLES Work(ing) Out Susan Willis
3
Popular taste and erudite repertoire: the place and space of television in Brazil Ondina Fachel Leal
21
Women watching together: an ethnographic study of Korean soap opera fans in the US Minu Lee and Chong Heup Cho
33
Casino world: bringing it all back home Mark Neumann and David Eason Making distinctions in TV audience research: case study of a troubling interview Ellen Seiter Ethnosemiotics: some personal and theoretical reflections John Fiske
47
63 85
REVIEWS The passing of the Rex Marina Vitale
101
A connecting view John Corner
105
Notes on contributors
109
iv
ARTICLES
2
WORK(ING) OUT SUSAN WILLIS
Our bodies, ourselves In 1971 the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published a resource book for women that represented a significant victory in the struggle waged by women for autonomy. The book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, was extremely visible throughout the early 1970s. Its dog-eared, paper-bound cover featuring a photo of banner-waving women could be found in many women’s homes, on the sofa or kitchen counter, where it served as a focal point to rally women’s desire for collective activity, discussion and a full range of ‘consciousness-raising’ pursuits. I mention this book because, seen now in retrospect, it clearly defines an important moment in the women’s movement of this century, one whose political specificity no longer exists, but one that we need to remember in order to understand the problems we must face in the last decade of the twentieth century if the struggle for liberation is to continue. I rediscovered Our Bodies, Ourselves just the other day, ran across it on an undistinguished shelf at the public library and flipped through its pages to review the photos, essays, and testimony. I was deeply struck by the dramatic simplicity of the book’s conceptualization both of selfhood and of struggle. Ours is not an era that offers such direct, bold and concrete statements and strategies to women. I want to cite two of the book’s testimonies because they so clearly define the collective’s goals and the opposition its members faced. The first testimony is that of a young mother whose voice, like that of all the testimonies assembled in the book, combines with the observations and assessments made by the collective and demonstrates the collective’s desire to develop a non-centred, and therefore non-authoritarian discourse: I watch my daughter. From morning to night her body is her home. She lives in it and with it. When she runs around the kitchen she uses all of herself. Every muscle in her body moves when she laughs, when she cries. When she rubs her vulva, there is no awkwardness, no feeling that what she is doing is wrong. She feels pleasure and expresses it without hesitation. She knows when she wants to be touched and when she wants to be left alone. She doesn’t have to think about it— it’s a very direct physical asking or responding to someone else. It’s beautiful to be with her. I sometimes feel she is more a model for me than I am for her!
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Occasionally I feel jealous of the ease with which she lives inside her skin. I want to be a child again! It’s so hard to get back that sense of body as home. (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1976:40) There is something very appealing about the organic construction of selfhood: the body as home for the self. By comparison to the way contemporary feminists confront women’s experience of alienation and sense of inferiority by focusing on ever more narrowly defined problems such as sexuality, which is then subdivided by sexual preference and scrutinized in relation to linguistic and psycho-analytic theories; or women’s roles as these are stratified by capitalism and shaped by male domination; or women’s image, as this has been generated by the media and defined by the all powerful ‘male gaze’, Our Bodies, Ourselves boldly ties everything up in a holistic struggle where selfhood emerges as women learn to take care and control of their bodies. The primary reason why the Boston Collective saw their struggle so clearly and completely is the unmediated male domination of health care which they confronted and contested. Moreover, the generally polarized nature of late 1960s politics combined with more overt forms of male domination in all sectors of society than women today can ever hope to confront, produced a situation where women could grasp their struggle against overt oppression, where they could define specific goals and at the same time see themselves bound up in a larger collective quest for wholeness and affirmation. Read in hindsight, the book’s documentation of unmitigated misogyny is starkly appalling. However, such hostility can have an explosively invigorating effect because it offers women a clear target against which they can define oppositional attitudes and strategies. Witness this horrifying statement by a male gynecologist: total hysterectomy should also be performed as prophylactic procedure. Under these circumstances, the uterus becomes a useless, bleeding, symptom-producing, potentially cancer-bearing organ and therefore should be removed…. To sterilize a woman and allow her to keep a useless and potentially lethal organ is incompatible with modern gynecological concepts. Hysterectomy is the only logical approach to surgical sterilization of women. (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1976:148) This doctor’s disgust for the bodies of his patients renders visible the ideological supports of male domination against which women shaped their struggles throughout the 1960s and early 1970s in unequivocal terms. The project defined by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective is to demonstrate compassionately that women’s struggle for autonomy requires wresting control over their bodies away from male-dominated medical practice and the pharmaceutical industry. Their book makes it clear that ignorance is a barrier to selfhood and a tool for domination. Liberation means becoming familiar with the body, exploring it, particularly the sexually taboo zones, in order to seize the body as the site for the definition of self in community. Today, nothing is the same. The notion of political wholeness that shaped so many women’s collectives and projects has evaporated, as has the possibility for conceptualizing
WORK(ING) OUT 5
autonomy as a basic, well nigh organic, unity. If anything women’s struggle has become diffuse and rendered all the more frustrating for the lack of sharply drawn male opposition. This is not to say that male domination no longer exists to serve the interests of capitalism. This is still a male-dominated society. But the forms of domination are less recognizable. In many daily-life situations patriarchy is part and parcel with commodity culture and commodity gratification. One of the aims of this chapter is to disengage instances of domination from commodified practice, thus rendering it in stark detail and triggering women’s impulse for oppositionality and alternative thinking. Women’s bodies are still a contested zone. Although the terms of the struggle have shifted since the 1960s, many women continue to situate their primary desire for liberation in a bodily expression of selfhood. To understand how male domination intersects today with women’s bodily articulation of selfhood, I would shift the analysis from the unmediated forms of domination we find in health care to the amorphous, highly mediated realm of daily life in consumer society, where I would begin by looking at women’s exercise programs. The workout Many young women today do not realize that exercise for women as a widely available and socially acceptable endeavor represents a recent victory in women’s struggle for equality with men. In looking back at Our Bodies Ourselves, I was amazed by the book’s comparatively mild chapter on exercise. It urges women to get into exercise, investigate a YMCA program, or consider taking up a sport like swimming, tennis, perhaps jogging. How tame these suggestions seem by comparison to the exercise standards many women set for themselves today. I had forgotten that most of the book’s readers would have grown up in an era that downplayed the importance of exercise for women. None of the book’s original readers would have benefited from Title IX legislation that opened public school team sports to girls. One of the positive outgrowths of the women’s movement in the 1960s was the invigorating of the female body coupled with the acceptability for women to appear in public activity engaged in vigorous physical activity. Sixty-minute aerobics workouts four or five times a week or a jogging program aimed at twenty-five miles a week, these are the exercise standards many women set for themselves. Most are white middle-class, professional women, although many younger black women students and professionals are beginning to enter the exercise lifestyle. Racial equality and class mobility are synonymous with the professions and professional workouts. While for the working class in general, and particularly black women who work outside the home, freedom means liberation from effort, ‘why exercise when you kill yourself working all day?’ I want to look at women’s exercise, bearing in mind its narrowly defined constituency, but realizing at the same time that middle-class white America defines the model and the look of consumer capitalism. I also want to maintain a sense of all the positive features exercise for women generates including the development of independence and the possibility for bonding between women; but I want particularly to scrutinize the way exercise has evolved in a commodified society so as to contain or limit these positive features.
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At the time when the Boston Women’s Health Collective urged women to sign up for exercise at local recreation halls and YMCAs, many women had begun to make exercise a part of their daily lives with Jack LaLanne. A TV entrepreneur of exercise and health products, LaLanne mixed rhythmic stretching, bouncing and bending with brazen exhortations to ‘Bertha’ and ‘Gertie’ to get up off their bulgy behinds, work their baggy thighs, and strengthen their flabby underarms. ‘Come on now, Clara, do just one more’. LaLanne’s daily half-hour exercise program was immensely popular during the 1960s. It underscored a moment when many women found themselves bound up in domestic space and work, with the TV something of a companion during the hours when kids and husband were out of the house. LaLanne’s exercise had the practicality of offering women a wide range of movements that could be performed with no more fancy equipment than a straight-legged wooden chair. Women at the time did not seem to consider the jarring incongruity of shaping their movements to the video image of a very muscled man, whose bulging pectorals and biceps they could not hope to achieve even if they performed every movement ten times as directed. In the early 1960s, women who sought autonomy through exercise had to put up with patronizing male attitudes towards women’s ‘lesser’ physical capabilities, outright condescension toward flab, and exaggerated macho images of male physical prowess. LaLanne is reported to have swum from Alcatraz to the mainland, his hands manacled behind him, and towing a small boat. This may be a figure for liberation, but it’s not one any of the male prisoners on Alcatraz ever duplicated, nor is it one the 1960s housewife could readily emulate. Today LaLanne has been replaced by a new male TV guru of exercise for women: Richard Simmons, who was once proportioned like the Pillsbury Dough Boy and now offers his slimmer, trimmer body as an example of what every overweight woman can achieve. With a round baby face and somewhat childish voice, Simmons offers women a lot less machismo than LaLanne but he serves up equal doses of condescension toward flab. Where LaLanne aggressively chided women for being overweight, Simmons cajoles and preaches. Of course, neither ever mentions that male domination, which restricts many women to home life or body-restricting clerical jobs, is a major flab-producing factor. Both LaLanne and Simmons define the woman viewer as offensive to the male gaze and helpless—if not altogether mindless—for having gotten a too-large body in the first place. In the face of overt male domination of exercise for women, Jane Fonda’s Workout, and particularly her ‘Prime time workout’ for women in midlife, represent something of a feminist alternative in the exercise market. Published in 1981, the Workout book was on the bestseller charts for two years and continues to be newly discovered and widely read by women. Its dif fusion has subsequently been extended by a videotape version available in every home video rental store. In her 40s when the book first appeared, with photos of herself throughout, Fonda undertook the task of ‘womanizing’ exercise. She made it clear that women of all ages can strive for and attain health, strength—and a good-looking body (although many women drew the line at doing back flips à la Fonda). The ‘Prime time workout’ included in the book of essays, Women Coming of Age, is an excellent model for understanding how far a feminist approach to exercise can go in a culture that continues to be defined by men and capitalism. I see this book as an exercise
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in contradiction whose tentatives towards defining women-centered notions about the female body bring to light in equal measure the limitations our society places on the full realization of such alternatives. The title, ‘Prime time workout’, is a good case in point. Fonda explains her choice of words by underscoring the double meaning of prime time. A woman’s ‘prime of life’—her middle years—elides with the notion of network prime time. Fonda makes the comparison in order to emphasize a simple point about sexism. That is, men in their prime times are like the 9:00 slot on CBS. They are the most sought after, most successful, most esteemed. In contrast, women at age 40 are made to feel like a 4:00 sitcom rerun. (AM or PM, take your pick.) The book is written to stake women’s claim on the future and on future definitions of womanhood. But as Fonda explains in her introduction, Women Coming of Age documents a moment of transition. It is not yet clear to Fonda writing the book or any of us following its guidelines what sort of women will emerge as the 1980s and post-1980s come to be defined more and more by women over 40 in the workforce and in the public eye. The problem Fonda confronts is how to shape the transition, deeply burdened as she is with twentieth-century male-dominated ideas of womanhood where beauty is synonymous with youth. Proclaiming that the physical characteristics of a woman’s aging are ‘negotiable’ (Fonda, 1984:39) Fonda defines a thin line between recapitulating the quest for beauty (how to combat facial wrinkles, for instance) and affirming some wholly new and autonomous notion of womanhood whose precursors are the fifty-year-old marathoners and swimmers whose photos crop up throughout the book and function as reality principles to the more glamorous dance-pose photos of Fonda herself. Because I read Women Coming of Age after having rediscovered Our Bodies, Ourselves, I couldn’t help but read Fonda’s book in the light of the early 1970s project. Because many women currently in their prime times have the 1960s embedded in their life experience, this is perhaps not an inappropriate way to consider Fonda’s book. From this perspective, the question of selfhood that informs the earlier project is everywhere implicated in Fonda’s writing but nowhere confronted. Indeed, Fonda comes across as something of a collective in one as the book features photos of Fonda, like so many stills from her movies, defining her now as child, now mother, or wife, now camp counselor, or researcher, and finally pet-keeper. All of these roles are finally subsumed by the ‘I’ of Fonda, the book’s narrator, who speaks from experience and with great conviction. Residual traces of collective social practice enter Fonda’s writing in other ways. There is the workout group itself, and the testimonies of women who have benefited from Fonda’s program. Some, we are told, have been active politically both in the United Farm Workers Movement and the Campaign for Economic Democracy. However, the emergence of selfhood and the sense of collective activity are both cut short and contained by the book’s narrow focus on bodily wellbeing, which is defined specifically as a product of the workout. This brings me to the consideration of the other half of the book’s exercise title: the notion of the ‘workout’, itself. My hypothesis is that the workout, as the contradictory synthesis of work and leisure, may well represent the most highly evolved commodity form yet to appear in late-twentieth-century consumer capitalism. The workout isolates the individual for the optimal expenditure of selectively focussed effort aimed at the
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production of the quintessential body object. Nevertheless, I would maintain that the workout, and particularly the nautilus workout, includes utopian dimensions as well. In seeking to reveal how the workout embodies production and consumption in capitalist society and the desire for their utopian transformation, I am elaborating on Fredric Jameson’s dictum that ‘even the most degraded type of mass culture has a [utopian dimension] which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, critical of the social order from which (as a commodity) it springs’ (Jameson, 1979:144). The workout represents the culmination of the trend in exercise towards privatization. The process originated at the turn of the century with ‘males only’ health clubs and terminates in today’s unisex exercise spas. It is abundantly clear that exercise is a commodity with the advent of TV exercise shows and the now more individualized mode of consumption: the video cassette. In today’s big-money exercise market, the only possible antithesis to the commodity form are local community exercise classes offered in school gymnasiums and church recreation halls. However, the burgeoning of glitzy private clubs and spas has made the YMCA and community recreation programs appear lackluster and oldfashioned—something for the elderly and middle-age-spread cases. The difference between a workout in a private spa and an exercise class at the ‘Y’ is the way the latter promotes bonding between women and a sense of community that cut across the generations and socio-economic strata. Women who participate in com munity-organized programs generally comment that they most appreciate getting to know, and to laugh and sweat with, other women. Community-sponsored exercise programs do not sever their participants from their lives with families and friends. Rather, the exercise class creates an opportunity for women to develop themselves in community with other women. Such opportunities are absolutely negated when exercise is channelled by the media into private living rooms. The private spa, then, offers escape from job or domestic space, but it severely limits the possibility for conversation and community. This is because a woman who participates in aerobatics at a spa is made to see herself as an isolated individual. The atmosphere of the spa promotes an aura of body rivalry. Mirrors are everywhere. Women compare, but do not share themselves with others. They see themselves as bodies. They scrutinize their lines and curves and they check out who’s wearing the hottest leotard. The workout focuses women’s positive desires for strength, agility, and the physical affirmation of self and transforms these into competition over style and rivalry for a particular body look and performance. Body rivalry has long been a feature of men’s exercise. Men flexing for themselves and each other in front of a mirror is the single most expressive metaphor of masculinity and exercise. The workout puts women in contention with one another for the right look. For women, poised body line and flexed muscles are only half the picture. Achieving the proper workout look requires several exercise costumes, special no-smudge makeup, and an artfully understated hairdo. The workout produces the gendered look of exercise: long Barbie-doll legs, strikingly accentuated by irredescent hot pink tights; set off by a pair of not too floppy purple leg warmers (worn even when the weather is warm); a willowy body poured into a plumcolored leotard whose leg openings define the thigh at waist level; and finally a color-coordinated headband (or wristbands)—teasing reminders that in order to look the way it does the body must sweat. Many women now wear their exercise costumes while doing
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errands to and from the spa. I have seen women in dazzling workout costumes on line at McDonald’s, getting cash at the bank’s instant teller, picking their kids up at day care, pushing a shopping cart at the supermarket, and on city streets from coast to coast. Most women who appear in public à la exercise choose not to cover up their luminescent body socks with blouse, skirt or dungarees. In so doing, they unabashedly define themselves as workout women. In making a public body statement, a woman affirms herself as someone who has seized control over the making and shaping of her body. She demonstrates her right to participate in professional body toning, an endeavor previously felt to be a man’s prerogative. However, all these affirmative, apparently liberatory aspects of a woman’s public-exercise statement are negated by the simple fact that men do not appear in public similarly clad. Why should they? Being male is synonymous with having muscles, just as it is synonymous with having a penis. The workout, notwithstanding its co-ed classes and equal access to the nautilus, substantiates male domination through the gendered look of exercise. As with most things in our society, having gender generally comes to mean being female. By the simple reason of being dominant, men need not proclaim themselves as gendered subjects. Women, who define their struggle for equality solely at the level of gender, stand to gain little more than the right to appear as gendered subjects. The image of the workout woman articulates the fundamental contradiction between the desire for dramatic transformation shackled to the desire for gender identity, in a society where only one gender needs definition. ‘Get in shape, girl’. This refrain gives its name to a line of products and their advertising jingle featuring play/exercise accessories for young girls. There are special exercise bangles, leotard belts, and pastel ‘heavy hands’ for 6- and 7-year-old girls. The message is clear: exercise is a commodity. It’s not something you do, but something you buy and wear. Working Many women who workout today, work at managerial jobs, part-time jobs, clerical jobs, micro-assembly jobs, and professional sit-down, body restricting, stress-producing jobs. For such women the not-so-distant remembrance of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ must summon up striking alternative notions of women in the workforce. ‘Rosie the Riveter’ is an icon intimately associated with industrial labor during the Second World War. Clad in overalls, toting tools and a metal lunch box, ‘Rosie the Riveter’ represents the explosive moment when women as a group appropriated not just the uniforms and roles traditionally reserved for men, but actually seized the single most important symbol of male-dominated industrial capitalism: the machine. The image of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ astride the tremendous fuselage of a B-52 gives feminist reversal to the privileged relationship of man to machine defined a century earlier by Emile Zola in his apocalyptic railroad epic, La Bete Humaine. Zola’s portrayal of the engineer who forces bone, muscle and passion to control a hurtling locomotive epitomizes man’s integral relationship with the machine, unbroken till the 1940s. Unlike ‘Rosie the Riveter’ who dramatically defined women as a productive force, most working women today have difficulty perceiving their labor in terms of production.
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Plate 1
Many working men also feel disassociated from producing but the experience is more largely a woman’s experience because women predominate in service-sector employment as well as unskilled and micro-assembly jobs. If we consider the broad history of women in the workplace from the Second World War to the present, we would begin with women’s appropriation of industrial jobs in the 1940s, their return to domesticity in the 1950s, and their reinduction into the labor force during the 1970s and 1980s as a lowskilled and low-paid component of the labor force. The image of women actively engaged in production and intimately associated with machinery has been erased from popular inconography. Even if she works a forty-hour week, a woman will probably never be thought of as having anything to do with machinery other than labor-saving kitchen devices (like the food processor ironically named ‘La Machine’) and the family car. In the context of women’s labor history, the nautilus machine is a capitalist wishfulfillment. It gives a woman access to the machine but denies access to production. It requires energy and effort and negates the experience of labor. It isolates the individual from other women who workout and defines her body as an assemblage of body areas and muscle functions, each requiring a specialized machine and machine function. The nautilus machine and the woman who works out on it is the distorted 1980s equivalent of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ astride the body of an aircraft. As an icon in the popular imagination, the nautilus metaphorizes women’s relationship to self and to labor. Nothing is produced but the body itself. ‘You practically crawl inside it’. This is how my son characterized working out on the nautilus as compared to the now old-fashioned weight-lifting equipment where your strength is pitted against the machine’s resistance. When asked to describe the nautilus, most people have expressed similar feelings of being assimilated into the machine. Rather than
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Plate 2a
the direct expenditure of effort out of your body, along a wire, over a pulley to lift a weight, the nautilus incorporates your body into its function. The woman inside the nautilus machine is the object produced by the machine even while she is at the same time the producer producing herself as product of the machine. The allusion to production is enhanced by the layout of the room housing the nautilus. Anyone who has ever visited a machine shop will see in the nautilus’ division of labor, where separate machines are designed and situated in order to accomplish specific tasks, a mirrored and chrome version of a tool-and-die shop. The woman who works out has the illusive gratification of being in the workplace, where she can experience first-hand the reduction of labor into repetitive, narrowly defined tasks. What I find most striking about mass culture today is that many of the features that define a particular mass cultural object, such as those that typify the aerobics workout, are reiterated in other cultural objects, some of them from the realm of ‘high’ art. A good example is the photographic artist, Cindy Sherman, whose work has for some time been acclaimed by the New York art world and has more recently come to the attention of the popular press, such as Vogue magazine. Cindy Sherman’s photography enacts the same relationship to production and consumption as do women who workout on the nautilus machine. The majority of Sherman’s photos are of herself. Most of the earlier work resembles black and white movie stills with Sherman depicted as someone either in a
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Plate 2b
Fellini landscape or in a Hollywood B movie. Curiously enough, many of Sherman’s photos bear a strong resemblance to the photos of Jane Fonda that appear in the movie star’s workout books. Sherman’s photos of herself are not self-portraits in the traditional sense of the term because each photo reveals an entirely different Cindy Sherman. Each is a discrete photo object whose singular subject is made-up, costumed and depicted as somehow autonomous and separate from Cindy Sherman the photographer. Sherman is both the photographer and the subject photographed. She is inside the production/reproduction circuit. She is the product produced and hung on the gallery wall for public consumption and at the same time she is the producer producing the body image product. There is a famous woodblock print by Albrecht Dürer that many students encounter in an introductory art history course. It depicts a male artist in the process of capturing on paper the reclining figure of a nude female. Between the artist and his subject is a grid, through which the artist gazes and whose lines and spaces dissect the supine female body, thus allowing the artist to reproduce her in detail and perspective. By appropriating the camera, the mechanism for reproduction, Cindy Sherman occupies the privileged position of Dürer’s artist and is at the same time the objectified model. Indeed, in one of her photos, Sherman
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mimics the reclining pose of Dürer’s nude which she could only have captured by defining her gaze at herself along the line of sight first used by Dürer’s artist. Sherman’s art, like women working at the nautilus, is the most appropriate image for the era after the struggle to appropriate male-dominated production has been won and then summarily reabsorbed by capitalism. Not unlike industrial machinery, the machine for photographic production, the camera, was originally associated with great male artists; Cartier-Bresson, Stieglitz, Hine. The influx of women photographers in an art world previously dominated by men is fundamentally related to the development of photography as a leisure-time commodity. Only after the camera was domesticated largely by Eastman Kodak to tap the tremendous profitability of home photography did it become accessible to women and children, female photographers and housewives alike. If the Luddites urged breaking the machinery of capitalism, and ‘Rosie the Riveter’ represented a temporary feminist usurpation of the machine, then Cindy Sherman, the nautilus of photography, defines intimate oneness with the machine and assimilation into the production process. In the nineteenth century, Marx wrote against the worker’s alienation. He demonstrated that in selling labor power, the worker was separated both from control over production and from the fruits of labor, the commodities and profits from their sale. The contradiction of the commodity is that it can be absolutely divorced from the worker while at the same time it is the container of the worker’s alienated labor. Alienation informs the entire circuit of production and consumption under capitalism. In such a system, the utopian impulse often finds expression in the very forms that simultaneously articulate its containment. The image of a woman producing herself on the nautilus machine and Cindy Sherman dramatically posing into her self-activated camera are both expressions of women’s deep desire to deny alienation. Both articulate the desire to seize control over production and the commodity. Both demonstrate the utopian desire to be in control, to activate the machine. And they express the highly reified desire to be absorbed into the machine’s function. Both express the utopian longing to no longer see one’s alienated labor in the commodity, but do so by the dystopian formula of making the self into the commodity. The libertory impulses are in every instance contained within the larger capitalist system which gives the lie to the notion of feminized production. Cindy Sherman and the nautilus are epiphenomenal metaphors for an era when more and more women are being brought into the workforce. Many now derive from the middle strata whose women in the past would have been frozen in the domestic sphere. This means that whatever notions of alterity that previously informed the bourgeois family and home as separate from production are now collapsed as the home, office, and highway merge into every woman’s production/reproduction circuit. Then, too, because most women are brought into production as part-time or service workers, their wage labor is as devalued as their domestic labor was (and is) invisible. Images of women at one with the machine, collapsed into a system where production is simultaneous with reproduction are not alternatives, but rather sublime metaphors for the working woman’s place in commodity capitalism.
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Plate 3
Jem and the holograms ‘The simulacrum is the truth’. This is Jean Baudrillard’s brilliantly succinct way of summarizing all the phenomena of late capitalism, including the receding significance of the referent, the loss of the subject, and the endless flow of mass-produced and fetishized commodities (Baudrillard, 1981). By affirming ‘the simulacrum’ as ‘the truth’, Baudrillard metaphorizes the relationship between production and consumption in late capitalism. Indeed there is a popular new doll marketed for young girls whose name is Jem and who is a simulacrum, not in the old sense of the term as every doll is a mimetic representation of a real child or baby, but a simulacrum totally divorced from any possible referent whose only truth is itself. Physically, Jem is a Barbie lookalike: long, thin legs and torso; accentuated breasts; hard, stiff body (made not for play or cuddling, but for posing in her myriad fashions); blue eyes; and synthetic blond hair. Unlike Barbie, whose media appearances are limited to TV commercials for Barbie, Jem is the star of a weekly cartoon series and her own two-hour video, as well as being a toy marketed from coast to coast. ‘Record company executive by day, rock star by night’, this is the advertising hype for Jem. Actually Jem’s transformations are more frequent than the Wolfman’s. This is because she doesn’t require the moon in order to change, but regularly flip-flops between rock
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star and executive at least three or four times a day. Jem’s dual personality brings together all the cultural connotations associated with transformation and identity. She is the schizoid personality, she is also Cinderella, she is the simulacrum who produces her own referent (who, as it turns out, is also a simulacrum), and she is also a very good example of the nautilus/Cindy Sherman syndrome: the woman inside the circuit of production and consumption. The story of Jem is a little complicated, but most 6-year-old girls can give a fair account of how Jem and her alter ego came about. The greatest difficulty for the child narrator is in attempting to tell which personality is real and why. The story begins with Jerrica, whose mother is long dead and whose father has just died, leaving his daughter heir to the Starlight Record Company, which he owned, and the orphanage, which he acquired as a tax shelter. As executrix and philanthropist, Jerrica quickly runs head on into opposition: the unscrupulous Eric Raymond, who is executor of her father’s will and Jerrica’s official guardian. Raymond’s aim is to take over the record company, thus leaving Jerrica penniless and unable to keep the orphanage going. However, all is not lost because Jerrica’s father has left her another bequest, a marvel of high technology: ‘a complete music synthesizer and holographic machine!’ Cynergy is the machine’s name. Endowed with a feminine voice, personality and face that appears on her video screen matrix, the machine is Jerrica’s fairy godmother. This is where the story becomes difficult to tell for the child who is most likely to base her narrative on the story of Cinderella. In both the Grimm and the Disney versions of the fairy tale, Cinderella’s transformation is enacted at the level of appearance. As the brothers Grimm tell it, Cinderella chants over her mother’s grave and a little bird throws down a gold and silver dress and slippers. In Disney’s animation, Cinderella cries over her mother’s grave and her fairy godmother (a pre-Baby M form of surrogate motherhood) transforms a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, and Cinderella’s ragged dress into a bouffant ball gown. Transformations such as these do not pose a problem for the child narrator whose experience of stories is apt to include all the traditional forms, particularly those like fairy tales that involve magical explanations. After all, Cinderella, notwithstanding her fancy dress, is still Cinderella. However, Jerrica’s transformation to Jem is another matter altogether because she really becomes someone else. And if that weren’t enough, the high-tech holographic machine thoroughly eases all but the most residual traces of those factors that in the Cinderella story function as a reality principle (like the pumpkin and Cinderella’s grimy face). Cynergy does not just dress Jerrica up in new attire and give her an acoustic guitar, she produces Jem as a holographic image, who completely replaces her referent, Jerrica. What’s more, the machine can also make a holographic image of Jerrica. This means that once the process begins, Jem and Jerrica are simultaneously defined as simulacra and as real. The simulacrum is the truth’. While watching the Jem video with my 8-year-old daughter, I found myself struggling to define what was real and what wasn’t. In one scene, Jem is about to be run over by a speeding car. ‘Is that Jem a projection from the machine, or is she really there’, I asked. ‘She’s really there’, said Stacy, ‘but Jerrica, when she was standing by the side of the road, was a projection…that time’. Of course, the whole thing—Jem, Jerrica, their
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respective projections, the fairy godmother machine—are all animations, which, if we recall the relationship of animation to the film industry, represents something of a technological simulacrum with respect to the cinematic reality of film. What’s more, these particular animations are all computer-produced, making them the synthetic antitheses of the original hand drawn, painted and inked animations produced by the Disney Studio in the 1930s. The production of art is at stake in the creation of Jem just as it is for Cindy Sherman. This Cinderella is a world-famous musician and lead singer accompanied by the female rock group, the Holograms. Composed of former orphans from Jerrica’s home for the homeless, the Holograms have similarly been transformed by the holographic machine. Jem and the Holograms travel around the world cutting gold records, playing to sellout concerts, and winning every rock music competition they enter. Throughout, they are doggedly pursued and snafued by a rival female rock band, the Misfits. This gang of rowdy evildoers loses all its music competitions to Jem, and consequently tries to sabotage Jem and her success. What’s interesting about the Misfits is that the loud and clearly bad music they play is real. It’s their own music, played by themselves on their instruments. Whereas Jem’s music, which wins all the prizes and sounds good, is no less a simulacrum than Jem herself. As one of the orphans exclaims when they all first discover Cynergy, ‘Wow, this is a complete music synthesizer!’ From its composition, through realization, to sales, Jem’s music, her art, is a product of the machine. This is where Jem as artist and producer rejoins Cindy Sherman and the nautilus machine. Jem is inside the producing machine, playing at being producer and object consumed. She produces her art, and she and her art are produced. Jem allows us to grasp a larger picture of production not available to us when we focus more narrowly on Cindy Sherman and recognize in her work the positive aspect of a woman artist’s appropriation of a field previously defined by men. What we see with Jem is the feminization of production. Cynergy is the machine as woman. She is a surrogate mother for whom there is no difference between creation and procreation. Cynergy offers the young child born into an era when women’s rights to economic and social equality are supposed to have been won, the appearance of a production system defined by women and run by women. This, however, is an illusion more false than any simulacrul truth. The absent father who made the machine, bequeathed it to his daughter, and probably controls her through it from the grave defines the bottom line in capitalist production. The invisible fatherly mastermind suggests a new way of looking at Cynergy—now as father surrogate in drag. From fairy tale to romance As storytellers, young girls will find enough similarities between Jem and Cinderella to structure a tale along the lines of the traditional fairy tale. Besides the fairy godmother, and the new rock star dresses, there is also a pair of sparkling rose-colored earrings, Jem’s equivalent of the Cinderella slippers. These stay with her from one transformation to the next and function as a magical, techno-cybernetic hookup with Cynergy. Whenever Jerrica finds herself in trouble, she puts her finger to her earring and chants, ‘Show time,
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Cynergy’. Immediately, she becomes Jem, who solves the problem and closes the episode by reversing the chant. ‘Show’s over, Cynergy’, and Jem becomes Jerrica again. As they form an audience, young girls who watch Jem on TV function not as tellers, but as readers. From this perspective they are put in a position where they are instructed on how to read a different popular form, one that will shape their lives as adults to a much greater extent than the fairy tale. This is the romance. For every Cinderella component Jem includes an equally significant narrative feature derived from Harlequin romances. In bringing together the two traditions, Jem extinguishes the contradictions that are more apparent in the older tales by assimilating them to the romance where contradiction is more thoroughly managed. Grimm’s version of Cinderella is a tension-wrought text. In the relationship between Cinderella and her dead mother, the tale demonstrates the potential for strong, nurturing bonding between women, whose antithesis is the equally strong dissension and rivalry between Cinderella and her stepmother. The fairy tale allows young girls to experience both sides of women’s contradictory relationships fully and to realize that the way women are—either caring or competitive—is largely determined by their relationship to absent or superficially defined male figures. The deepest contradiction of the fairy tale is the strength of male domination which need not be described in full in order for the Prince to be the solution to Cinderella and the resolution of the tale. Tania Modleski has written an important essay on the Harlequin romance. Whereas these novels have long been felt to be little more than trashy reading for self-indulgent women, Modleski shows that the romance articulates women’s deepest hostilities towards men as well as their own ill-defined longings for autonomy. The romance is, then, the form for the containment of women’s aspirations and for the management of social contradiction. Inferring from the texts and their portrayal of women, Modleski concludes on an optimistic note focussed on the untapped strength of women’s desire: ‘the fact that the novels must go to such extremes to neutralize women’s anger and to make masculine hostility bearable testifies to the depths of women’s discontent’ (Modleski, 1982:58). Jem goes to such extremes to manage the young girl’s awareness of the contradictions embedded in the allusion to Cinderella and likely to become freshly activated at a time when young girls expect to fulfill all their aspirations and have not yet learned that, while times have changed, the structures of domination that contained their grandmothers continue to the present and may well contain them. Jem’s machine-generated talent, success, and body allow her to experience the fruits of her aspirations without ever having to confront the social opposition that any other young girl would have to deal with in order to become a corporate executive, successful musician, and beautiful, manycostumed star. However, the most potent device for the management of contradiction in Jem is the erasure of all adult women figures and the subsequent function of men as the young girl’s only socializing influence. The young girl’s total dependence (both economic and emotional) on a dominant male figure (whether he be cast as benign or sinister) without recourse to a counter-balancing female character is a fundamental feature of romance. Besides the father and his holographic machine, Jem is conditioned by her relationship to her boyfriend, Rio, a sort of ineffectual Prince Charming; and her combative relationship to Eric Raymond, a stock Harlequin character who is as evil as he
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is handsome. In usurping the young heroine’s rightful place as head of Starlight Music, Raymond forms a direct link with the father and demonstrates that while men may pay lip service to women’s equality, real power is still in the hands of men, who may appear to be antagonistic (the one good, the other evil), but are in fact co-conspirators. In developing a comparison between Harlequins in North America and the Latin American photonovels and libros semanales, Jean Franco coined a succinct pun for the way Anglo women are managed and brought into control by the male-dominated network. As she put it, they are ‘incorporated’ (Franco, 1986). This is definitely the case for Jem as it is for many of the Harlequin heroines who strive for careers only to find themselves brought into the corporation as mascots, play pretties, dependent nieces, and finally wives. Jem’s ‘incorporation’ extends into her love relationships, negating the possibility for developing and experiencing her sexuality. In her life and identity as Jerrica, she is defined as girlfriend to Rio, her age-mate and buddy who helps out at the orphanage and in the daily concerns of rock music administration. They are like old-fashioned high-school ‘steadies’ whose relationship will never become sexual simply because Jerrica is always vanishing, usually at a moment that would have brought her closer to Rio, in order to become Jem. Jem, of course, is extremely attractive and usually in some dire situation, requiring Rio to come to her rescue. Hence Jem is constantly seducing Rio who undergoes deep torment over his emotional infidelity for Jerrica. However, the relationship between Jem and Rio will also never be sexual because as soon as the escapade ends, ‘Show’s over’ and Jem becomes Jerrica. On the surface this all looks like a complicated way to keep sex out of children’s Saturday morning cartoons. Read more deeply and from a liberal perspective, we might be tempted to say that cutting off the development of both love relationships helps teach young girls not to see themselves wholly defined by a man, love and marriage. However, read more profoundly and in the context of the way patriarchal power dominates the corporation and works through the machine, Jem’s inability to continue either her ‘steady’ relationship or her seductive relationship can only be interpreted as an abrupt negation of her adult sexuality. The machine that controls her passage from one identity to another has her perpetually locked at the level of pubescent child. Allowed to establish budding relationships with another man, she is finally and foremost her father’s daughter. Jem as a contemporary women’s allegory is a horrific tale. In it, the desire for selfhood is met with a machine-produced body and machine-produced art. While the desire for autonomy is solved by ‘incorporation’ into the corporation. This is patriarchy nautilusstyle. It allows women the false gratification of seeing themselves in the self-made products they constitute. However, because real power lies elsewhere in the larger corporate structure, Jem who activates the holograph and is the hologram, like you or I, when we activate the nautilus and become its finely honed body, enact the expropriation of ourselves as producers and the alienation of ourselves as consumers.
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References Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacres et Simulation. Paris; Edition Galilee; also ‘Simulations’, in In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities and Other Essays, trans. P.Foss, 1983 . New York: Semiotext(e). Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1976) Our Bodies, Ourselves . New York: Simon & Schuster. Fonda, J. (1984) Women Coming of Age . New York; Simon & Schuster. Jameson, F. (1979) ‘Reification and utopia in mass culture’. Social Text I. Modleski, T. (1982) Loving With a Vengeance. London: Methuen. Vogue (1988) ‘The Image Culture’, March .
This article is based on a chapter from the author’s forthcoming book A Primer for Daily Life, New York and London: Routledge.
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POPULAR TASTE AND ERUDITE REPERTOIRE: THE PLACE AND SPACE OF TELEVISION IN BRAZIL ONDINA FACHEL LEAL
I will discuss the notion of beauty as it is represented through various material objects, the television set being one of them, in the houses of people from two different social classes in Brazil. Culture is understood here as signifying practice, as structures of socially significant meaning. I am concerned with the logic of everyday life, and the way cultural forms— such as taste—find their articulations in situations of daily life. The data I will be referring to here are parts of the ethnographic research I conducted in Porto Alegre, Brazil entitled The Social Reading of the 8.00 PM Soap Opera (Leal, 1983; Leal and Oliven 1988). In that work I sought to reconstruct how a single mass-media message is watched, understood and re-elaborated by structurally differentiated individuals. In that research, I analyzed the role of the television, the television set as an object, one soap opera and the viewer’s perception and retelling of the soap opera narratives. I worked with two groups of families; one from the professional upper middle class and the other from the working class (blue-collar workers). Each group occupies a structurally different position in a very hierarchical social context. In the research each group functioned as a relativizing parameter—as an anthropological other’s other—where each difference found in the comparison became a heuristic datum. I conducted an ethnographic study of the audiences, watching the soap opera with the people in their houses. I asked them to tell me the story that was going on in the soap opera and I compared the retellings of one group with the other. I concluded that the matrix of meanings of a mass-media text was not the message itself but the concrete experiences of the people, their life histories, their life projects, their class position, and their social contextualization. The proposition that there are different possible re-elaborations of a single massproduced cultural good and that its forms of consumption can unfold and conform cultural specifities is a proposition familiar to the anthropological concern with cultural mediations. The constitution of the anthropological object is always at the level of concrete articulations in which a given fact, artifact, code or message is incorporated as meaning. That is, beyond the level of determinations we find real people, their discourses, memories, ideas, gestures, feelings and their objects, certainly overdetermined, but still vigorous and powerful in their specificity and their capacity to assign meanings.
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Let me briefly explain what is the 8.00 PM soap opera (a novela das oito) in Brazil. 8.00 PM soap opera is the generic name that the mass-media producers and public use to refer to the soap operas that are aired daily at 8 PM on one of main television networks— Globo. Globo is the fourth largest private television network in the world, after the three American ones. Soap operas—telenovelas—in Brazil are prime-time television viewing and have daily audiences of the order of 50 million viewers and last around 8 months each. They are of good technical quality; their texts have been considered innovative and polemical. Brazilian soap operas are also successful goods in international markets, such as China, Sweden, Cuba, Poland, Italy—which is, at least, a very interesting cultural phenomenon. The main argument of this paper is that the place of the TV set in people’s lives, and the place of the TV set in their home in Brazil (probably as everywhere else), are intimately related. The 8.00 PM soap opera image and speech are processed in different cultural systems where they acquire new and different meanings. My intention was to reconstruct these meanings made up of everyday practices, individual emotions and familial experiences. I believe that to reconstruct these meanings is also to reveal a specific cultural system in which the mass media in a capitalist society, as is the case of Brazil, play an integral role. There is an indissoluble relationship of mutual influence between the television and cultural system in which each shapes and is shaped by the other. I understand ideology to refer to systems of representation, social practices, ways of life and modes of thought, all in their particular and concrete manifestations. This understanding diverges from the traditional approach of the sociology of mass communication, which takes the message and its intention to be omnipresent, manipulative and a homogenizing factor. In this view, the ideo-logic of the mass media encloses itself in its own message, and in so doing exercises and reproduces domination. In contrast to this approach, I believe that to understand how the mass-media message is thought, reinterpreted, actualized and incorporated in the speech and practices of social actors and what are indeed the actual dimensions of its perception, is also to understand the effectiveness and limits of domination. To identify the forms through which the legitimacy of domination is reproduced daily is also to recognize and to discover a specific symbolic order, that is a specific cultural reality. The place of things While doing my fieldwork, I realized that there was something very important that I had been taking for granted all along. To illustrate this let me relate to you a field anecdote. In one of the suburban working-class houses where I was doing my work, the living room was being renovated. Among the changes was the relocation of the front door. With the change in the door position, the family relocated the place of the TV set in the room. The explanation given to me was that they had to change it because the new door would not allow the TV set to be seen. In fact, the door would not hide the TV screen from those who were watching TV inside the room. What was important was that the new door position would not allow the TV set to be seen from outside the house, that is from the street.
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Significantly all the decorative objects that were displayed close to the TV were moved along with it to the other corner of the room: they followed it as an entourage, as interconnected pieces of one coherent set. The accidental f act of my presence during the moving of the TV set revealed that the place of the TV and the place of all decorative objects are not arbitrary. They confer upon each other, as parts of a system, relational properties and significance. The choice of arrangement of these knickknacks illustrates the fact that objects are not ontologically meaningful in themselves, but human action is inherently symbolic. In social life we are actors defining cultural constituents, building up meanings, transforming material objects into cultural objects. The decorative objects, the TV set, and the TV soap opera image are themselves elements of meaning that bear significance and vitality in their domestic context, because they are all encoded by a code that employs the symbols that form the culture of everyday life of the people. The messages have meaning because the symbolic frameworks used are those of the people. A system of meanings The objects around the TV set in the home that I just mentioned (where the objects were rearranged when the door was moved) were typical of a working-class neighborhood in Brazil, and the analysis is generalizable. These objects conform to an aesthetic and ethical standard, in the sense of referring to a specific ethos. They constitute a matrix of significations particular to them and their arrangement reveal a symbolic strategy. This TV entourage includes plastic flowers, a religious picture, a false gold vase, family photographs, a broken laboratory glass and a old broken radio (Plate 1). Such decorative objects are recurrent facts and thus, in Geertz’s sense, fundamental and should be treated as a sociological problematic (cf. Geertz, 1973). These things are also of the same order as what Malinowski (1961) called the ‘imponderabilia’ of social life. Now, I will try to analyze each of those elements and show how they conform to a system of meanings. The people I interviewed classified their objects as belonging to two orders: the aesthetic order—‘the ones that serve only to decorate’ (the vase, the plastic flowers); and the utilitarian order—‘the ones that we use, or that can be useful for something’ (the TV, the cracked laboratory glass and the radio that does not work). The religious painting and the photographs transcend this distinction between utilitarian and decorative functions: ‘they are pretty, and good for something’. As this matter was considered by both (the observer and the observed) during the interview, we realized that all of the objects correspond to both planes of reference. The vase and flowers are decorations, and decorative objects are useful. The TV, the radio, and pictures are made to be watched, i.e. they are useful, but they are also ‘pretty’. Let me now describe ethnographically each of the components of this TV entourage. I will start by the cracked laboratory flask in this house; although it is uncommon, I am taking it exactly because it is an extreme example: it is a stereotype of scientificity and the scientific is particularly rich in meaning for people such as these who, one generation ago, were rural peasants. Even though it is cracked, it preserves the image of rationality (albeit
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Plate 1
a cracked rationality), of ‘modern’, ‘urban’ and ‘scientific stuff. Its non-use as laboratory equipment, because it is not in a lab and is broken, is just a circumstantial fate. The glass is decorating the house because ‘scientific stuff has a magical appeal, and it is the magical appeal that makes the lab glass a beautiful thing. The plastic flowers in gold-colored vases are interesting because they are found even in houses that have real flowers planted in the courtyard. Most of these suburban houses are owned by people who immigrated from rural areas, and they continue to grow plants, even in very small yards. Regarding plastic flowers, they say: ‘they last forever and are always pretty’. It seems that they control the production of plants in the yard, or planted in the empty cooking oil cans. But it is the plastic flower that is the main protagonist here, and there is no direct control over the production of plastic flowers: the things whose fabrication escapes their control have, hau, a mystique, an enchanting magic (Mauss, 1972 [1904]). They are what anthropologists call fetishes, syntheses of symbolic meanings. They are also what political economists call commodity fetishes: they cannot be produced inside the domestic space, they must be bought, they are commodities. In order to buy them, one needs money, another fetish, that in all of its symbolic dimensions is above all an attribute of social legitimacy, prestige and power in a urban capitalist society. The commodity nature of these knickknacks is concealed through the transformation of money into objects—nobody would decorate their houses with coins—this mystique that accompanies the objects is what makes them ‘pretty’. The repertoire of objects in a house in a working-class neighborhood is strategically located in the most evident corner, next to the television, as a point of magical contagion. There is a common quality among all of its elements—that of fetish: from the non-control over their production, from their nature as commodities, and because they reify knowledge of another order and are thus cultural capital from another social class (Bourdieu, 1979). In other words, the things do not reflect their qualities as things, but
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Plate 2
rather their social qualities, precisely in the sense Marx employed the notion of commodity fetishism. Classical anthropology teaches us that the mystique of objects being exchanged is that the exchanged objects function not only in a system of obligations of giving and receiving as affective and mystical cement, but the objects are also, in themselves, syntheses provided by and for symbolic thought. On the wall, next to the TV set, there is a family picture with several smaller photographs in the frame corners. In these working-class houses, photographs are rare, expensive and made to be displayed. Here the fetish dimension is linked with alien technology, the event of capturing these feelings and images of relatives that have died or did not come to the city. Small snapshots from ID cards (‘identities’) are placed on top of the family picture, within the borders of its frame. These ‘identities’ qualify individuals to function in the urban institutional order (they must be shown in order to receive medical treatment, to attend school, to find a job, or to vote). The framed pictures are a bricolage of lost kinship webs through another magical technique—that of freezing images. The social system that broke these kinship webs is reproduced in the symbolic system within the photograph frames—the large pictures are of the lost relatives (dead or still in the country): the small IDs are the modern, urban relatives who have made the transition. Religious pictures are also common in working-class homes. In this case, we have a brightly colored religious image of Noah building the Ark with his family, which is in itself a myth, and recognized as such. The caption, written in capital letters, THE ARK OF GOD ANNOUNCING THE FLOOD, strengthens the relation of the two myths— that of Noah’s family and of the family-photograph image—because both refer to origins. Written words in illiterate household are like the family pictures and the laboratory-glass artifacts of distant origins; they are a discourse on divine things—things of another world
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and from an imprecise time. The written words are a wise speech about the unintelligible. The TV is the most important element among the set of objects in a home of the working-class group. The TV set sits on its own small table, with the importance of a monument, and it is typically decorated with a crocheted doily. The TV, on or off, represents the owner’s search for the social recognition of TV ownership which is why it has to be visible from the street. The old radio, next to the television, has already lost its charisma but is still there, documenting the earlier form of this status attribute. The television as an object is a vehicle of a knowledgeable and modern speech, it is rationality in the domestic universe, where the rational order is paradoxically sacralized as mystic. ‘We like TV a lot because we find out about things, the fashions, the news, and on the Fantástico (a popular TV Sunday variety show) they even show some experiments that the scientists are doing.’ The TV object here is a fetish in the sense that it is infused with an ethereal magical meaning (that for which there is no rational explanation or over which there is no control); even when it is turned off and when no one is watching it, it is potential cultural capital, consecration of legitimate knowledge. All these objects in working-class houses are strategically placed in the most obvious corner of the house’s front room. They are arranged around the TV set and they have a common quality: ‘modernity’. They are seen as urban rationality inside the domestic space, and as an ethos and cultural capital of another class. They are meant to be seen from the street by those capable of recognizing this social code, which is also an aesthetic code. In the working-class neighborhood the boundaries between house and street are imprecise. The doors are always open, in order to enlarge the space of the front room, and in many cases the door is the only opening in the room. The television and decorative objects seen from outside have a demonstrative role as indicators and as social attributes prized by those initiated into that status code. The tenuous demarcation of space between the house and the street is the veranda, or porch, the liminal space of the domestic sphere, the place of mediation and contagion, where the of exposed objects is also a system of socially significant signifiers. The liminal space is ritualistically preserved as such. The external antenna, as an attribute of the television, could in part fulfill the function of indicating the household possessions to the neighborhood, but the liminal space where the body-to-body, face-to-face contact occurs—the immediacy of the mediation—is fundamental in this social relation. The plastic rose in the ‘golden’ vase, the photographs, the religious image, the laboratory flask, and most of all the television set and the spaces they occupy in the domestic order are meanings that comprise a cultural rationale. That is, a symbolic system, including an ethos of modernity, that is itself a part of a larger symbolic universe that has as its principal locus of significance the city and industry. This system of meanings seeks to ‘conquer’ the urban power space (that of capitalistic relations), while insistently trying to differentiate and delimit urban cultural space from the rural space that is still very close to the actors, by manipulating signs that are shared by their group as indicators of social prestige.
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Plate 3
Erudite repertoire The popular taste of working-class people is expressed in objects which they think are elements of the elite’s cosmology. Paradoxically, upper-class members identify those items as low-class and tasteless. The place of television in people’s lives and the placement of the TV set in people’s homes are intimately related. In upper-class houses there is enough space for many things, while in small, working-class houses, turning the TV set on influences the dynamics of the entire home and mobilizes its occupants. In the day-to-day lives of the upper class (and in their life histories) there are many alternatives and possibilities and plenty of capital (in all its forms) that allow them access to a whole universe of commodities. In the lives of working-class people, watching TV is one of the few possibilities for leisure. This activity takes place during the scarce, non-working hours and it is understood as a form of participation, although marginal, in the universe of the other class. The upper class does not consider watching soap operas to be a legitimate activity for members of their class. The identification of watching soap operas with lower-class taste implies, or could imply, that a person who watches TV regularly and readily admits to doing so lacks full participation in an elite system of values, which is associated with dominant positions in the social structure. The lack of participation in the elite’s world view might also indicate in such a person a lack of aptitude for playing the dominant role. The houses of upper-class families have many rooms and the TV set is never near the front door. Usually, the living room is very spacious and the TV set will be almost hidden inside it. TV tables with wheels are considered ‘ugly’ and in ‘very poor taste’. In apartments that have smaller living rooms, the TV set is usually confined to the bedroom.
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In many cases, there is a specific room just for watching TV, so that it will not interfere with the other activities in the house. In contrast to working-class houses, those of the upper class have distinct rooms for each activity and the separation is strictly maintained. The notions of privacy, self, and individuality are important parts of this world view and wealth allows these notions to be made concrete in commodities, space, objects, possessions. There is a place for each thing and one of everything for everybody. Frequently, there is more than one TV set, one for the children, one for the maids, and another for the other adults of the house. There is no positive aesthetic value associated with the TV set. In all forms and shapes it is considered a utilitarian object; it is not decorated, nor is it considered a decorative object. Just as the lower classes value the TV as representing sophisticated technology, the upper classes prize their expensive sound systems which only they can afford to own. They seem to associate with them an analogous aesthetic value because the superlative stereo technique indicates prestigious erudition. Decorative objects in upper-class houses can be classified according to three categories—folk art, art, and antiques—each category representing a search for originality, uniqueness, and possessions as indicators of privilege. Folk and ‘native’ handicrafts, such as weaving and pottery, are considered beautiful because of their uniqueness, and because they are not industrially mass-produced. Associated with folk and indigenous art is the idea of primitive exoticism. In fact, this is only possible because of the great social distance between the upper class and these ‘primitive’ and ‘folk’ artifacts. The distance is such that the consumption of these objects entails no risk for them of confusion with a lower-class identity. This practice, and the values associated with it, is an inversion of the role of plastic flowers in working-class homes. For the upper class, aesthetic and social taste is expressed in hand-made rural folk objects, for the working class it is the manufactured, urban object that carries meanings associated with prestige. In contrast to working-class spaces, upper-class houses and apartments have a foyer or entrance hall that prevents contiguity of the house and the street. This is a space that establishes distant and formal relations. Before penetrating the most intimate interior rooms there are many spaces to traverse: the telephone, intercom, the foyer, the hall, and the sitting room. Such houses have more than one entrance—the social and the de serviço (tradesman’s entance). It is the entrances that classify those who come to the house as either subalterns or social equals; visitors classify themselves and know which entrance they should use. The service and work sphere is associated with the kitchen and ‘social’ life with the living room. The notions of space, division of space, and empty spaces are aesthetic elements and crucial values in the upper-class group. Aesthetic conceptions of taste, beauty, and ugliness are socially produced. They are defined according to expectations of one group toward the other. In a class society, taste situates its generative locus of significance in the dominant culture or the representations that the other social groups make about what the dominant culture is. Thus, the working class imitates what it takes to be the aesthetic elements of the upper class, while the upper class studiously appropriates and labels as ‘folk’ and ‘art’ handicrafts, everyday items, and sacred objects from the others, and
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reconstructs them as exotic other. They become art only after their manipulation and their classification as such by the upper class. Also they become ‘beautiful’ only when lifted out of their original context and displayed together with ‘fine art’ and ‘antiques’, conveying an aura of erudite taste. Taste, which is often considered to be a very subjective and individual notion, is in fact a social standard that takes for prestigious the established power relations.
Ideology as symbolic efficacy In the display of objects in the working-class home, we see that the glow of the image and speech of the television is of the same order as the glow of the painted gold vase with its decal of Renaissance nobles dancing a minuet in an imperial garden, also a recurrent knickknack in their houses. Both are authority rhetoric and elements of an organized and hierarchical world view. The 8.00 PM soap opera, with its massive audience among the working class, is enveloped in a mythical feeling because it springs from an apparatus that produces images that are uncontrollable, and not only because the soap opera text itself makes use of mythical elements. The soap opera is here taken to be a meaningful element of the ideological repertoire of a given symbolic order, institutionalized, legitimate, and dominant. But the soap opera also articulates and actualizes meanings taken from non-institutionalized symbolic mediations, that is, culture. Only elements that have acquired social value can be part of ideology. In other words, it is a necessary condition for ideology’s own efficacy that its elements be neither imaginary nor false. Its elements must be able to assume significance that are true, i.e. meaningful to a given reality. I contend that the notion of ideology, without the connotation of falsity or false consciousness, corresponds to the notion of culture; culture as articulation of meanings. The plastic rose, the lab glass, the painting of Noah, the TV set, and even the 8.00 PM soap opera are elements of signification that construct their own coherence in relation to a dominant ethos of rationality of capitalist relations of production and reproduction. This coherence is thought, named and displayed as aesthetic, and it is specific to a particular class. Aesthetics take socially distinct forms; although they share the same cultural paradigm, they constitute themselves differently as distinction. In upper-class houses with their high levels of participation in cultural capital this difference takes the form of pottery, weaving, and handicrafts. That which is taken for ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ is celebrated as an aesthetic standard when sufficient social distance is guaranteed. The beautiful is the most ‘primitive’, the most ‘folk’—the unique. The hau and the aura of these objects is in their uniqueness, rarity, and privilege of owning them. In contrast, among working-class families the beautiful is the similar (that which other people also have), which creates a kind of prestige in the contagion and solidarity in the sameness within the class. For there is also a sense of difference, of distinction in these working-class families, but it is a difference from a shared other—the other order that
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produces the plastic flowers, the photographs and the soap opera. The cultural intention is a social logic that manifests itself in an aesthetic rationale. What is common to both class rationales is the appropriation of cultural expressions of other groups and their recodification and introduction into another circuit in which they are given a new meaning in a way that modifies their original sense. As group members, individuals share common values, and even the potential rupture of or deviation from these values implies, in its very basis, a consensus. Individuals coherently choose alternatives with the signification system of their groups. Each group has its own system of comprehension, which is related to the group’s history, and for which culture is the moment of signification and symbolic representation. This does not necessarily imply homogenized groups and codes; consensual codes, or elements of code, can be, to a certain extent, differentiated and even contradictory. Meaning is a dimension of the sign for the social agent who decodifies it; it is an idea associated with the signifier. The signification to which the signifier is related is arbitrary. The way we conceive, classify, and reproduce the signification has to do with the form in which our culture conceives and classifies it: here we return to the sense that anthropology gives to this notion of symbol as a social relation of perceptions and finally culture, as a practice, saturated with meaning. Consent is fundamental in any power relationship: the subaltern pole is permeated by the culturally hegemonic elements which are, or can be, reinterpreted in the ambiguous terms of these relations. The polarity is neither determined and reduced by economic relations of production nor does it exclude one of the levels, but it is the very same relationship that gets established as political relationship. In other words, ideological articulations always occur within class discourses, as class conflict, not as class reductionism. The repressive and reductive strategies of domination are already present in the internal logic of culture in a class society. For example, the choice of the place and space of television in working-class houses and its identification by this group as another class’s prestigious element implies a recognition of the other class’s authority. However, the exercise of power works through compromises that are articulated concretely in the negotiating process and by non-hegemonic elements necessary to assure new or constantly renewed domination objectives. In an anthropological investigation any cultural object, as, for example, a soap opera, can be taken as a meaningful element of the repertoire of a given institutionalized, legitimate, and dominant order. But any element also articulates and actualizes meanings taken from non-institutionalized symbolic mediations, that is, culture.
References Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) La Distinction. Paris: Minuit. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Leal, Ondina Fachel (1986) A Leitura Social da Novela das Oito. Petropolis: Vozes.
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Leal, Ondina Fachel, and Oliven, Ruben (1988) ‘Class interpretation of soap opera narrative: the case of the Brazilian “Novela Summer Sun”’. In Theory, Culture and Society , 5:81–99 Malinowiski, Bromslaw (1961) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. Mauss, Marcel (1972 [1904]) A General Theory of Magic. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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WOMEN WATCHING TOGETHER: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF KOREAN SOAP OPERA FANS IN THE US MINU LEE AND CHONG HEUP CHO
Introduction Understanding the audience watching programs on video tape is never a simple task. It becomes a more complicated matter and requires new theorization and empirical support if the audience is from another country, but consumes rather its own cultural products in a foreign country where more program choices are seemingly available. More specifically, this paper concerns a question of ‘why is it that some Korean housewives in America prefer Korean soap operas to American ones?’ The Korean programs were rented on tape from a local store, and watched by women in a group. Our approach to this question depends largely upon the assumptions derived from perspectives of audience studies in the field of cultural studies. As ownership of VCRs increases, this new technology supposedly offers more viewer alternatives. As Gray (1987) suggests, however, the meanings and pleasures of video have become a home-based experience subjected by the politics of the family. Therefore, we will initially take into consideration the context of viewing. Following this, the study examines the cultural contexts of a Third World country in order better to understand how its differences from those of the advanced capitalist societies may be related to the text. This question will then be related to the process of viewing, the interaction between the text and the context of viewing. Finally, as the research interest lies in the audience preference of Korean soap operas to American ones, the audience perception of both American and Korean soap operas will be examined. In order to collect the audience responses, twelve in-depth interviews were conducted with Korean student families residing in Madison, Wisconsin, in November 1988. Subjects were all college graduates and they were middle or upper-middle class. The context determinations—VCR and everyday life Ann Gray’s study on the VCR in the home is one of the few examples of researches in which the use of VCRs is addressed in the context of gender relations within the family. She found in her study that, for many women, viewing choices are often negotiated and the programs which ‘women enjoy are rarely, if ever, hired by their male partners for viewing together because they consider such films to be “trivial” and “silly” and women are
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laughed at for enjoying them’ (Gray, 1987:49–50). This observation is confirmed in the statements of the most of the women we talked to: S1: Fridays are my favorite day of the week. That’s when we go to supermarkets together and rent some videos for the weekend. I usually let him choose his tape first and select mine later to avoid any nasty comments on my selection. If he is still sarcastic about my tape, he has to wait one more week to have his favorite dish on the dinner table. S2: I think men consider whatever involves infidelities, incests, and complicated love stories as trash. But I don’t see much quality in the martial art films either. Just as they need them to be excited, I need soap operas. While some women insist on their own cultural tastes or viewing choices, most women feel shame when they enjoy soap operas. This underlying sense of denigration has influenced their viewing habit in such a way that they either watch alone late in the evening after the husband and children have gone to bed or together with friends during the day. But both viewing habits are not mutually exclusive as women often watch the same program twice. S3: I know it’s disappointing to indulge myself in the ‘low quality’ soap operas, but I have nothing else to do to release my stress. I like to watch the tapes together with my friends when the big kid (husband) has gone to school. But when we get together, we just turn on the video and talk about something else such as cooking recipes, big sales, scandals…. So, I watch the program again late in the evening. S4: My husband just hates to see me watch the video. Once I stopped renting the video tapes for a while and read novels instead. But he complained again and asked me to do more constructive things. And that really hurt my feelings and pride, but I still asked him nicely ‘what’s more constructive than reading a book?’ His answer was just incredible; ‘Do you call that a book? You are reading trashes!’…. After that incident, I watch the tape late in the evening when I am all alone. The common strategy for the husband to discourage his wife from watching soap operas is to compare her viewing choice to that of a housemaid. The usual comment (that’s something the housemaid watches) makes the women feel shame as they violate the natural law of the Confucian notion of family which specifies the role and the status of each family member based on gender and age. The Confucian code of behavior prescribes what constitutes appropriate women’s behavior and what does not. The woman must not only respect her husband and elders but also must not damage the family image and honor. She must not begrudge her subjection, but must learn to be obedient to her husband. The superior status of the husband within the family is more than common sense. Woman’s everyday life and her pleasures exist only within the realm of the Confucian world view. While she is subjected to the family structure, however, her status may be ranked as superior to that of housemaid according to this ‘natural law’. By equating the act of viewing with that of those who are at the bottom of the social order and thus generating the feeling of shame, something undesirable for family image, men try to
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regulate wife’s viewing choice. It is not surprising then that many women tend to denigrate their cultural taste as in the statement of the above subjects. The testimonies also show that women often negotiate their program choices. Many women rarely do what they want to do for themselves and this is most evident in television watching. It is because the home is not considered as a sphere of leisure, but rather a work place, which constantly interrupts their television viewing. In other words, they have to negotiate the pleasures of television watching with their domestic responsibilities. Within this context, it would be difficult for them to concentrate on and enjoy television. As for men, however, home is the place for their leisure activities. What complicates the matter is the persistent social demand for the traditional work ethics in Asian societies where leisure is considered largely as ‘evil conduct’ or ‘a waste of time’. This social norm is so prevalent that women may feel shame when they watch television. These conflicting situations may also make women rearrange their viewing time and prefer to watch the video when they are alone. It should be noted, however, that the very same women consciously challenge the traditional patriarchy within limits, using the skills they know best. It took various forms in the case of women we talked to: using her husband’s favorite dish as a weapon against him (S1), enjoying gossip and thus releasing emotional strains (S3), or just women’s refusal to view the video in company (S4): all seem to indicate women’s continuous struggle to expand their own social space although the power this cultural struggle gives is limited. The seemingly rigid patriarchal control then never guarantees its dominant ideology as it is faced with various cultural forms of resistive power possessed only by women. Social practice is the site on which the dominant ideology is constructed, but, at the same time, it is also the site of resistance to that ideology. The fact that men have to work hard to determine women’s viewing taste indicates the difficulty of ideological control: ‘control’, as Fiske (1987:184) argues, ‘is a process that needs constant struggle to exercise it, it is ongoing, never finally achievable’. The difficulty of ideological control is most evident in the example of the video club operated by the women. In order to share the video rental fees, they have formed a video club. It is the secondary function, however, that is far more significant in terms of its potential as a means of resistance. As in the statement of S3, the program is sometimes not so important as the opportunities the video club creates to talk about scandals or problems common to their everyday lives. The topics range from a bargain sale at a local department store to the love life of famous television stars. But the social gathering usually ends up with talking about husbands’ behavior in the family. Women are curious about other people’s lives and compare them with their own. As such the video club operates as a kind of forum to evaluate and criticize the husband’s behavior. S1: Time passes really fast when we get together. What I hate most is that I have to prepare dinner before my husband gets home. This is especially true when I hear from my friend that her husband has just bought her a nice birthday present—My husband always forgets my birthday.
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S3: I always promise to myself I would never talk about my husband. But if somebody starts talking about last night’s fight with her husband, I cannot help joining her and complaining about my husband—and it makes me feel a hundred times better. S7: If you talked to other people, you will be amazed how similar problems we all have. You learn a lot of things how to get your husbands by just chatting with more experienced wives. It is clear from these examples that oral culture plays an important role in making meanings and pleasures from the routines of everyday life. More importantly, oral culture can be resistant and television is made into oral culture by gossip. And its meanings are recirculated in everyday life. Thus, the pleasure women find comes not from absorbing the dominant ideology but from their conscious resistance to the political power their husbands exercise. As we saw, this politics of family between husband’s power and wife’s resistance has little to do with the program itself. This struggle for meanings and pleasures already exists even before women watch the program. As Fiske (1987:77) notes, ‘television, with its already politicized pictures of the world, enters a context that is formed by, and subjected to, similar political lines of power and resistance. The intersection of its textual politics and the politics of its reception is a crucial point in its effectiveness and functions in our culture’. For this reason, we now turn to the text and the process of viewing. The polysemy of the Korean soap opera text and the process of viewing In discussing popular television, we need to regard the television text as ‘open’ and containing contraditions which some readers may use differently, and therefore offering its viewers a great variety of meaning actualizations. This is not to deny that the soap opera’s textual strategies are ideological. On the contrary, any discussion of popular culture, particularly in a developing country, must begin by identifying the ideologically conservative nature of its government. Its preoccupation with social control and the maintenance of its own power makes it difficult for the media to be relatively autonomous, not to speak of taking an anti-government stand. Consequently, the media have been used mainly as a vehicle for the official viewpoint, ranging from the promotion of mass education to raising the people’s aspirations for the purpose of overall economic growth. But these dominant ideologies have always been challenged by the diverse conditions of both production and reception. In terms of production, it has been the commercial media, not the public system, that play on this condition and profit most from it. Since they are not allowed to cover politics differently from their competitors, they compete with each other in the politically less controversial areas, especially in soap operas and sports. But these television entertainment programs may become political. The media know all too well not to risk their commercial interests by challenging the government directly and therefore offer politically safe but ‘serious’ programs. In order to attract more audiences, however, entertainment programs, especially soap operas, have to be
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progressive and contain many contradictions which are essentially against the interests of the dominant ideologies. Television entertainment programs have, then, played an important role, in developing countries, by providing a forum for the most progressive ideas to bear witness to the grim realities of everyday life. A good example of the point is the Korean television mini-series. The Sand Castle, which consists of eight episodes and depicts the family crisis of a middle-aged couple. The story is a typical love triangle story of a husband’s extramarital affair. The wife’s preoccupation with her feeling of rejection by the husband and his irresolute attitude toward both his wife and lover make the marriage unsuccessful and eventually lead the wife to decide to divorce him. The traumatic state of her emotions is much emphasized, if not exaggerated, as compared to the rational approach the husband takes to cope with the problem. Much of the subplot deals with the mistress who is also depicted as a victim. What is unusual about this story is its feminist approach in representing sympathetically the female characters’ points of view in a country where the Confucian notion of family prevails and a husband’s extramarital affairs are considered as a norm rather than an exception. It may be argued from this program that as the country has developed into a more advanced capitalistic and thus more ‘free’ country, patriarchy has widened its scope in terms of accommodating a new perspective, namely feminist viewpoints. Thus, the progressive theme in a conventional soap opera form is never really progressive as it is contained within a patriarchal frame. So, soap operas may provide an ideological frame through which the events are constructed in such a way that dominant meanings are consistently produced, denying any attempt to speak of alternatives beyond them as not inherently containable. This view, however, overstresses the power of the text while ignoring the important factor of social context in the consumption of popular culture. A text can only exist in the context of viewing. Likewise, we cannot understand the way in which the viewing experiences of various social groups are understood without taking the text into consideration. The polysemic nature of the television text stems from the fact that, although the media have to conform to the overall policy of the government, they can somehow manage to alter the associations of the various elements of dominant ideology to attract the ideas and values of various subordinated social groups. In the case of The Sand Castle, the feminist viewpoints are exaggerated to an extent that invites the audiences to question the role of the housewife within the Confucian notion of family. Thus the program may challenge the dominant ideology of patriarchy and the overall capitalistic social system which demands the traditional Confucian moral sense in order to maintain and further its existing patriarchal power structure. Such challenges to the dominant ideology may escape the notice of the government authority because they occur in a ‘trashy’ program, but they would be striking to most viewers whose social experiences are quite different from the ‘official’ social system. The controversy surrounding the program was enormous in Korea. Male audiences complained about the way the program dealt with the extra-marital affair and were furious about the station’s decision to broadcast such a feminist program. The complaints centered on female audiences’ supposed inability to distinguish between reality and
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fiction. Weekly Joong-Ang (3 November 1988) reported a typical conflict between the husband and the wife as follows: Wife: Oh my goodness, I can’t believe it. That makes me sick! Will you look at this program? Husband: Pity! Do you call that a drama? What’s so special about it? Wife: This is not a simple drama. Husband: Silly you! It’s just a cheap drama. Just turn off the TV set and go to bed, will you? Wife: I am surprised you say that. You must have something…. Otherwise, you don’t have to be that negative about it. Husband: That’s a cheap shot! What on earth are you talking about? Wife: Are you saying that you have nothing against him? You certainly must have something. Which side are you on anyway? Husband: I can’t believe you keep saying that! Are you insinuating that I have an affair? I told you it’s just a drama. Don’t get confused! The magazine also offered the explanation as to why the program was ‘explosively’ popular among women viewers: The popularity of The Sand Castle lies in the way the content is recognized by women as real that can happen to everybody. In other words, the middle-aged husband who feels lonely despite his established socio-economic status, the highly educated beautiful young woman who has a morally selfish love, and the typical Korean housewife who has sacrificed herself for her husband and children for the last twenty years, all can be found around us and can be anybody among us in real life. It is for this reason that women turn their attention to the program. The noisy reactions may be inevitable as some women personify the event as theirs. As the magazine correctly points out, women were attracted to the program primarily because of the story’s ‘believability’. It was the first and foremost common perception by the women that ‘that’s the world we live in’. But the program had different appeals to different people. Women mobilized the meanings and pleasures differently from the same program and the popularity of it depended in part on the way the text was recognized by the audience. One subject, for example, citing the case of her sister, told us how remarkably similar the program was to her sister’s case. Thus her pleasure of reading the program was increased as she brought her own intertexual experience and attitudes. For her, the pleasure she found lay in the way the wife was portrayed. She was depicted as strong and resolute as contrasted to her real sister who forgave her husband after an affair. S9: When my friend recommended it to me, she was trying to tell me the plot. At first, I thought it was just another typical story about a husband’s affair. But as it was revealed, I was stunned. It was about my sister! So, I told her to stop telling me the story. I wanted to know exactly how it would end and how it would be different from my sister’s real life story…. I loved the way she treated her husband at the end.
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In many cases, subjects rejected the dominant ideology and expressed sympathy for the wife and dislike for the mistress and the husband. The husband was most criticized for his arrogance and ambivalent attitude toward both women. It is interesting to note that many expressed dislike for the mistress although they agreed that ‘she was a victim of the system’. Similar to the findings in the study of Seiter et al. (1987:24–5), she was criticized not for her ‘villainness’ but for her ‘passivity, her dependence on men, and her failure to take care of herself’ despite her high educational background and middle-class status. This was not the only reading of the characters, however, as the subjects sided with different characters. The wife, for example, was viewed by one subject as a ‘psycho’ and she was disliked for behaving irresponsibly towards the family, especially the children, despite the fact that she enjoyed high material privileges. Nevertheless, all the respondents praised the characters’ ‘good’ acting. Thus one subject told us that she liked the program because of the male character’s ‘perfect’ performance: S8: He is gorgeous. I have been his fan for a long time—ever since, well, his—I don’t remember the title of the program now. Anyway, if he runs for the National Assembly, he’s certainly got my vote. But I don’t want him to leave television. He’s just perfect and looks so gentle…. If my husband had money and power like him, I wouldn’t give a damn about his affair. As noted before, many subjects watched the program as a group while their husbands were out. The operation of the video club made it possible for them to feel comfortable to talk about the program and share their experiences together. Moreover, the inevitable consequence of this mode of watching was that the program became an important social issue and women took advantage of the occasion to evaluate their husbands’ behavior at home by positing the topic as a real problem they faced. After watching the program together with their friends, two subjects rented it again and tried to show it to their husbands. One had a similar experience to the woman reported in the magazine: S7: After we watched the program together, no, he did not actually pay attention to the program much, I asked him a question anyway. I first asked him whether or not he would have an affair if he returned to Korea and I was shocked and disappointed to hear him saying ‘men can have an affair’. I was upset because he took it as a matter of truth. I thought it was other men, not my husband who can actually say that! I felt cheated and asked myself ‘Is this the man I dedicate myself to?’ But I was still curious to know how he would handle the situation if he had the same problem. He then refused to answer the question because he knew I was upset by then. I did not talk to him for two days after that. The other, too, aroused male resistance: S3: We talked about the program until one o’clock in the morning. I did not understand why he sympathized with the husband…. We then changed the topic and ended up with talking about my career when we returned to Korea. I said to him, ‘women too
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should have a career to avoid that problem’. He said no and I said yes…we had a terrible fight that night. It is clear from these examples that the dominant ideology never completely fulfills its task. As the gap between the television world and the real social world is wider in developing countries, the audiences’ social experiences have become important criteria in reading the television text. They can certainly detect the gap between the two worlds and they also know how to connect them. As the gap is wide, they tend to distrust the television world and therefore rely more on the oral culture. This is particularly true for the Third World audiences since strong primordial ties and collectivistic spirits are still evident and oral culture almost always works better than the media. The operation of the video club can be seen as a form of oral culture and it has been an important forum for women to participate in the discussion of their social experiences. Paradoxically, then, the very rigidity of cultural policy of the government in a developing country produces readers who are determined to take advantage of every opening the text offers. Intertextuality of The Sand Castle The television text, if it is to be popular, cannot exist alone without other texts which refer specifically to it. The role of these secondary texts is to organize particular meanings of the primary text, and they do so in a variety of ways. Not only do they promote the interests of the producer, but they also provide a pleasurable meeting point between the text and the audiences: one needs only to think of the flood of press releases and promos, or the pervasiveness of ‘talk’ shows. The commercial importance of this intertextuality for the producer becomes all too evident when a television network, for example, spends half an hour during its morning show speaking about its successful but controversial drama. Like the primary television text, intertextuality representing the producer’s interests cannot accomplish total domination but rather stimulates the imagination of the audience. The following section will show how contradictory it is for the producer to talk about both the dominant ideology contained in the program and the program’s popularity simultaneously. In an attempt to alleviate male audiences’ outrage, or simply to take advantage of the controversy surrounding the mini-series, the network prepared a special segment in a morning show to discuss the issue of men having an extramarital affair. The main participants were a male marriage counselor and two of the television stars who actually appeared in the drama. The program also showed the result of the interviews with the people who were presented as typical men and women. It is interesting to note that the people’s comments on the drama largely supported the dominant ideology of family promoted by the marriage counselor. The theme of his message was that it is women, not men, who are responsible for the destruction of the family. Thus, he offered the woman ‘ten commandments’ to make it worthwhile for a man to keep her and her family secure. Some of his advice included ‘variety’, ‘make-up’, ‘mutual hobby’, ‘obedience’, and so on. By the time he had finished his tenth piece of advice, however, it became too absurd to take his recommendations seriously. Moreover,
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the impossibility of following his solutions only questioned the validity of the official ideology of family. Thus, one of our subjects comments: S12: That guy must be a nut! Why should women be blamed for a husband’s affair? Who wouldn’t like being a nice wife? He wouldn’t say things like that if he were a woman. He doesn’t know a thing about how hard it is to be a mom, a wife, and a maid at the same time. This guy is worse than the husband in the drama! The near-unanimous support by the TV interviewees for the ideology of family is clearly contradicted by the interview results from our own subjects. This is not surprising, for we know that the program is based on the official ideology of patriarchy. The way the interviewer structured the questions did not allow them to say anything but the socially desirable answer. It is possible, too, that any undesirable answers were edited out. But the socially desirable family exists only in relation to the undesirable and the producer had to talk about it even if the program’s purpose was to reinforce the notion of patriarchy. Thus, the program continuously ran the risk of ‘failure’ as it was not well-related to the audience’s own experiences. Rather than supporting the dominant ideology, then, the program enabled its audiences to be conscious about the issue and to demand some form of correction. Indeed, it gave women a rare opportunity to think seriously about their relations with the husband. However, this was more evident in the subjects who watched both the drama and the talk show on video than those whose interviews were broadcast. Compare, for instance, one woman in her 40s on the show with one of our subjects whose response was typical of many others: Yes, I had exactly the same experience. I thought about a divorce but ended up with forgiving my husband. I try to forget what he did when he is nice to me, but never I forget when he is bad…. What else can you do? I will lose everything if I let him go…. I will probably have to live with it. S11: I think the relationship is a tragedy. But the wife in the drama does what she is supposed to do. I would do the same thing and divorce my husband if he had a mistress. In fact, I warned him, ‘Don’t even think about an affair. Otherwise, that’s the end of our relationship.’ These two women speak two different languages: one official and the other popular. The first comment related the TV show to her real situation, but not in a way that led her to question the ideology of patriarchy as it was presented by the strategies of official language. Only in the domain of the popular does it begin to be stripped of its validity. Popular oral culture allows women to redefine what it means to be a woman in partriarchy for it invokes their own meanings of everyday lives by means of the official language itself. As the dominant ideology strategically uses intertextuality to impose its own selected meanings, so does the popular, but often tactically. As de Certeau (1984) argues, strategies are the means by which the forces of domination exert their power, tactics are the means by which the people resist or negotiate with these forces. Women
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constantly mobilize tactically a particular strategic meaning offered by the text to resist it and share their experiences with each other. The persistence of oral culture among women is the consequence of its relevance to their immediate social environment. They too take advantage of this intertextuality as an important opportunity to reflect on their everyday lives and to increase their own space no matter how limited it might be. The difference between the two women is one of intertextualities and how they are mobilized. The two women differ also in the definition of their interests as well as how they stand up for them. As the woman on the show suggested, the ideology of patriarchy wants women to live up to the marriage contract: as long as men take care of women’s economic needs, women should be the prisoners of that system. It leaves women little room to maneuver, but only attempts to bind them. Nevertheless, women do manage to expand their space. One of our subjects, for instance, told us her tactics in successfully manipulating her husband after watching the mini-series: S10: You should try this. You see it works. I got the idea from the drama when she [the wife] spent tons of money, for the first time, for her clothes, shoes, and everything. I always felt guilty when I went shopping for myself. But he’s the one who always buys something for himself. He can spend money for his hobbies but I can’t. I don’t even have a hobby. He bought a fishing rod again the other night and he said it was on sale. You see, he already has four of those. So I decided to teach him a lesson. I went out and bought a very expensive dress which I always wanted to buy…. You should have seen his face when I told him the price I paid. And that’s not all. I went.out again and bought a matching pair of shoes. He was furious this time, but I completely ignored him and told him I would buy a bag the next day…. My idea was that if I spent that much money, he wouldn’t dare to buy things for his hobbies and it worked. He finally gave in and told me to keep only the shoes…. I ended up with buying less expensive but still nice clothes. There are several points to make in this example. First, her comment on the mini-series supports our claim that the television text was used to understand her own situation. It not only brought her subjection into her consciousness but helped her increase her own space by demanding some form of correction. The second is her comment that spending her husband’s money made her first feel guilty and eventually empowered. The value of patriarchal capitalism rewards women who spend less of the husband’s money. Thus, spending money for herself rather than for the family can be considered as a sign of resistance. But she had to use the resources provided by her husband to teach him a lesson. Excessive spending was the tactic she used to cope with the structure of patriarchy. This is her own way of what de Certeau (1984) calls ‘making do with what you have’: it is a tactical maneuver. In so doing, she successfully resisted the male politics of power and defended herself against her husband’s attempt to bind her. As Bowlby (1985, quoted in Fiske, 1989) notes, ‘spending the man’s money can be a resisting act within the politics of marriage’.
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Perhaps, for these reasons, men were reluctant to let their wives watch this television drama. Their reactions were best summed up by one man on the show who was interviewed by the station: ‘I didn’t allow my wife to watch the program because if she had she would have learned too much about the men’s world.’ Nevertheless, those women who watched the mini-series learned various forms of ‘resisting acts’. The most commonly reported tactics include the refusal to sleep with the husband, refusal to serve dinner, and the demand that he share domestic drudgery. Another interesting resisting tactic was introduced by one of our subjects who confessed that she fantasized her former boyfriend and compared him with her husband while she watched the mini-series: S12: The man [the husband in the drama] reminds me of my husband. He does alright to his wife materially, but he is torturing her mentally. I’d rather have a poor, well not really poor, you know what I mean, I’d rather have the husband who always cares about me just like the young fella in the drama…. I wonder what would have happened if I had married him [her ex-boyfriend]. He was always nice to me. I think he would have been a better choice. Well, maybe not. McRobbie (1984) argues that fantasy is no different from reality as it is often contextualized into social relations. In the case of the above subject, her fantasy is based on the present relations with her husband. Although she may never be able to escape from her reality, her empowerment by means of fantasy could achieve something in a patriarchy. Thus the same subject said to us: I’d better tell my husband what I want. This time really seriously. He always tells me I shouldn’t complain because I have nothing to complain about. I know what he means by that. But life is not that simple. He talks about only half the life. The other half, he doesn’t care about. He doesn’t know how stressful it is to waste my life here, doing nothing…. I can’t go out because I can’t drive. I asked him probably a million times to teach me how to drive. But he always worries about an accident and the baby’s safety. I can’t understand why he assumes an accident if I drive. I am gonna have to register for driving lessons myself. Indeed, driving was one of the most commonly reported complaints by our subjects. In the last episode of the drama, the wife drives off in her car after she has received a telephone call from her (ex)husband. The story ends with that scene implying that her independence or freedom has been finally achieved, something she could never do when she lived with her husband. Those of our subjects who couldn’t drive always referred to this final scene and complained of their inability to drive even in America. They were all in agreement that ‘driving is a necessity to live independently from the husband’. It is interesting to note that while they like to go to a grocery store together with their husbands, they all want to go to a department store alone, for shopping in the grocery store is part of their domestic labor and their subjection, but a department store represents an opportunity of freedom. Our research constantly confirms the point that making sense of the television text is a way of making sense of our social relationships and
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our roles in those relations, and, in this process, the strategies of the dominant ideology of patriarchal control are constantly challenged by the cultural resources possessed by women. Indigenous soap opera and cultural imperialism Perhaps the American television program, Dallas, has been the most studied program in the quest to find just how and why people find pleasure in it. Ang (1985) suggests that even though the program cannot solve the contradictions of patriarchy, the audiences recognize the problems as realistic at an emotional level. She says that what women recognize is not a real world but a subjective experience of the world, and they can identify themselves with a ‘tragic structure of feeling’ in soap opera. Katz and Liebes (1985) asked similar questions of the audiences outside of America. The main focus of their study was what is it about Dallas that is popular among Third World audiences. They designed their study in such a way that they could investigate different levels of conflicts (family vs. business) in the program recognized by various subgroups in terms of nation, ethnicity, gender. They then asked subjects what were the generic conventions (genre, characters, narrative form) they found pleasurable. Rather than finding effects, their research focused on the process of viewing and concluded that viewing a television program is a ‘process of negotiation’ between the text and the context of the audience. In the Third World context, however, the westernization of local programs, or ‘transnational copy with a national label’ (Matterlart, Delcourt, and Matterlart, 1984) has been a focal concern by intellectuals who want modernization but at the same time their cultural autonomy. Hurley (1975) characterizes the issue as the problem of ‘communication colonialism’. Prosser (1976) emphasizes the virtue of ‘cultural pluralism’ as opposed to ‘cultural homogenization’. As the international circulation of most media products originates from the West, the United States in particular, it has been regarded as a practice of ‘cultural distribution’ (Varis, 1974). The debate concerns not only the transfer of media technologies, but also the consumption of various forms of western culture including music, television, films, and news. As noted previously, however, certain indigenous soap operas are almost always more popular than foreign programs mainly because the settings and characters are familiar, and the audiences perceive the problems as real, even though the stories may be exaggerated. But the indigenous soap opera form has been also criticized as promoting values consistent with the goals of international capitalism rather than those of indigenous socio-economic structures (Flora and Flora, 1978). Others, on the other hand, argue that the telenovela in Latin America has been a contributing factor to the decline of US program sales, but although its themes and purposes are different from metropolitan soap operas, it is none the less viewed as promoting the ideology of domestic capitalistic enterprise. While these arguments are interesting, they do not provide convincing accounts of how Third World audiences may actually interpret programs. As in the hypodermic model, the audiences are assumed to be passive and to absorb the social, political, and economic values of the cultural products they watch. Our research leads us to reject this pessimistic view and to argue that Third World audiences are not simply exposed to the television texts, but are
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active meaning-producers themselves, selecting, rejecting and transforming the text based on their cultures and experiences. The following remarks are based on some of the descriptions by our subjects on the generic conventions of indigenous soap opera text as compared to those of American programs. In most cases, ‘realness’ was the reason for selecting the Korean programs instead of American alternatives. S1: I don’t think any Korean audience understands one hundred per cent of American programs. It’s not the problem of language but the problem of culture. No matter how fluently you speak English, you never get the feeling of their culture. They don’t look real as compared to the Korean programs. While this subject describes the differences broadly, one woman explained the cultural differences in more concrete terms: S2: I like to watch American programs. Actors and actresses are glamorous and the pictures are sleek. But the ideas are still American. How many Korean women are that independent? And how many men commit incest? I think American programs are about American people. They are not the same as watching the Korean programs. But I watch them for fun. And I learn the American way of living by watching them. I like the Korean programs because I get the sense of what’s going on in my country. That helps me to catch up with the changes in my country I have forgotten while I am in America. There is an obvious contradiction in this subject between the subject position produced by the consumption of American programs and her social subject position offered by the norms of Confucian morality. In the American programs she selects the values of women’s independence as desirable while distancing herself from the norms of sexuality. Yet even progressive American sexuality is kept within the norms of the family: S2: I like the way American men treat women. They are nice to women. But that’s only when they live together. Once they are divorced, they become selfish. American soaps except for the Cosby Show don’t have the concept of family. I never miss the Cosby Show because he [Cosby] is more like my father. What’s interesting here is that what to an American may seem to be a traditional or conservative representation of a family, may, for a Korean woman, be progressive. Despite cultural imperialism arguments, the Third World audiences like to watch their own cultural products. Even when they are exposed to the foreign programs, they don’t necessarily soak up the dominant ideology transparently. What crosses cultural boundaries in international communication are not things and events. Rather, they are symbols. But the symbols are context-bound and become meaningful only in their relationship to other symbols. If the television text becomes meaningful to the audiences, it becomes meaningful in the sense that the text is transformed into the existing cultural context of the audiences. In other words, the message becomes meaningful, or acquires
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the status of being a set of symbols, only because it undergoes a certain transformation in terms of its newly structured relationship with the symbols existing in its new cultural environment. References Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas. London: Methuen. Bowlby, R. (1985) Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. London: Methuen. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London: Methuen. Fiske, J. (1989) Reading the Popular . Boston: Unwin Hyman. Flora, C., and J.Flora (1978) ‘The fotovela as a tool for class and cultural domination’. Latin American Perspectives 5:1 . Gray, A. (1987) ‘Behind closed doors’. In H.Baehr and G.Dyer (eds) Boxed in Women and Television. London: Methuen. Hurley, N. (1975) ‘University satellite for Latin America’. Journal of Communication, 25, Spring . Katz, E. and Liebes, T. (1985) ‘Mutual aid in decoding Dallas’. In P.Drummond and R.Paterson (eds) Television in Transition. London: British Film Institute. McRobbie, A. (1984) ‘Dance and social fantasy’. In A.McRobbie and M.Nava (eds) Gender and Generation. London: Macmillan. Matterlart, A., Delcourt, X., and Matterlart, M. (1984) International Image Markets. London: Comedia. Prosser, M. (1976) ‘The cultural communicator’. In F.Heinz-Dietrich and Merill, J. (eds) International and Intercultural Communication. Hastings House Publisher. Seiter, E., Kreutzner, G., Warth, E.M., and Borchers, H. (1987) ‘Don’t treat us like we’re so stupid and naive: towards an ethnography of soap opera viewers’. Paper presented at the Seminar on Rethinking the Audience, University of Tubingen, February 1987 . Varis, T. (1974) ‘Global traffic in television’. Journal of Communication, 24, Winter .
CASINO WORLD: BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME MARK NEUMANN AND DAVID EASON
Gambling, like all forms of popular culture, has its stories. Some of them recount adult fairy tales of the plumber or secretary who becomes an instant millionaire with a winning lottery ticket or a slot jackpot. ‘I almost didn’t buy the ticket’, she says. ‘It was my last coin and I just dropped it in and prayed’, he says. Other stories resemble the cautionary tales we once told about comic books, crime fiction, and movies, and that today we tell about television, rock and roll, and pornography. These moral fables describe lives ruined by the ‘sin’ or ‘pathology’ of gambling. ‘He was a good man, worked hard, and took care of his family until he started gambling’, we say. ‘It was just like heroin. She just couldn’t stop’, we say. Nestled in these stories, gambling calls out to us as something we should do or as something we should control or stop.1 We dramatize consensus and conflict in this dialectic of the stories we tell in order to live and the lives we live in order to tell stories. In this study, we analyze the stories of a small group of gamblers. While there is drama in these stories, it is not the drama of big winners or losers. They are stories of recreational gamblers, people who make the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Salt Lake City to the Nevada state line once or twice a month or visit Las Vegas and Reno two or three times a year. We met them through an ad we placed in three Salt Lake City newspapers that read in part: ‘GAMBLERS WANTED for research project. Talk about your gambling experiences. Confidentiality assured.’2 We were contacted by sixteen people from diverse occupational and educational backgrounds. They are ‘gamblers’ in this study because they described themselves as such and not because they met any criteria of ours. In loosely structured interviews that lasted from one to two hours, we asked them to talk about their gambling: to tell us about the games they played, their habits, and to reflect on the significance of gambling in their lives. Our concern in these interviews was not with what the gamblers did at a given moment or with the truth or falsity of their accounts but with how the gambling experience was given structure and meaning in its telling. Autobiographical reflections, we believe, are moments when the self is displayed on cultural terrain in the performance of a story that positions and fixes experience by endowing it with structure. It is in such ordering, the displaying of the ‘I’ within cultural categories, that societies produce and maintain perspectives on the nature of reality.3 Janet Gunn argues that autobiographical stories display an answer not to the question ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Where am I?’4 The gamblers’ stories suggest this question of social location lingers long after the disjunctive time and space of the casino become memory. Gambling
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may be a flight from everyday forms of sociality, but its ultimate subject in these stories is the place of the self in society. We find that these stories give depth to Henri Lefebvre’s view that leisure experience offers sites for critiquing daily life. The worlds of leisure, he argues, provide an inverse image of daily life that compensates for it in ways that inherently recall and critique the everyday world. People seek out in leisure what is sometimes lost or obscured in the worlds of work, family, and private life. The world of leisure cannot develop, Lefebvre notes, ‘without constant reference to everyday life and the changing contrasts implied by it’.5 Roger Abrahams elaborates on Lefebvre’s view by looking to the coexistence of ordinary and extraordinary experience for uncovering some of the deeper meanings and concerns inherent in contemporary cultural life. The fundamental difficulty of modern cultural experience, he suggests, is deciding ‘what do we contrast with what in developing our notions of the real?’6 Extraordinary experiences are, for Abrahams, the ‘Big Times’ which serve as a baseline for judging everyday activity. In our analysis, we look for commonalities and differences in structure that interrelate time within and between the stories people told us about their gambling. We find in these accounts the narrative pattern of a cyclical quest. The quest begins in the vague boredom, tedium, and disappointment with everyday life, takes form in the flight to the casino for a different way of belonging, confronts within the action of the casino the liminality of playing with social identity and, ultimately, the representation of social structure, and plays itself out in an ambivalent return to everyday life. The nature of the return acknowledges the impossibility of escape even as it lays the groundwork for the next flight. What gamblers bring home is a self-conscious story of promise, action, and evaluation, a story of hope against all odds. Anticipation: the promise of the casino world At the Stateline Casino in Wendover, Nevada, a poster stands on a chrome pedestal among the rows of slot machines. The poster shows a photograph of a man and woman with their hands raised in the air as if celebrating a moment of victory. Next to them is a slot machine that displays five ‘7’s across the middle line. The caption above the photograph, in three-inch type, reads: ‘$120,160 discovery’. Below the photograph, a short paragraph explains: In the true spirit of Columbus Day, David and Cecilia Valerio discovered new wealth when David hit the super jackpot on our famous Quarter Progressive Carousel for $120,160.70. Not bad considering all they were searching for was a little fun and relaxation. Congratulations, Dave. Columbus would be proud. This poster is but one of many familiar cultural images that mediate the promise of the casino. It is not a promise of winning but of possibility. Like Columbus, whose quest for a passage to the Far East brought him to discovery, David Valerio’s search for relaxation changed his life. Not only are he and his wife $120,160 wealthier, but they also have
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become a model of the possibilities for discovery that may await anyone who makes a similar journey. Their image sits in the bank of machines, holding their moment of victory frozen in time and space and reminding us of the possibilities that await in the casino world, possibilities absent in most of our everyday lives. Riches, of course, are the obvious possibility the casino offers. Some are content, however, with merely observing the world of the rich. They become tourists or spectators of others’ worlds. For example, a number of gamblers pointed out that they liked to go to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas to watch the play of an elite. ‘There’s a real observer mentality among most of the people in Caesar’s’, one gambler said. ‘They’re not there to gamble as much as they are there to watch people with lots of money gamble. You walk up through the blackjack tables and there’ll be a $50 table. And there’ll be a whole mess of people standing around watching somebody bet 200 bucks a hand.’ As a tourist spectacle, the world of an upper-class elite is an object of what Erik Cohen refers to more broadly as the ‘experiential tourist’.7 This type of tourist, argues Cohen, pursues meaning by vicariously experiencing the worlds of others. The ‘wealthy-at-play’ in Las Vegas provide a focal point for one middle-class quest to see something real, but the observer may also seek fulfillment by moving down the class structure. Carl, a university teacher and graduate student, recalled the following experience in the small Red Garter Casino in Wendover: I like the Red Garter because it’s smokey and they play country music—I hate country music—and there’s cheap meals and stuff. I consider that a down to earth casino. There are normal people there. I mean, I like playing craps with truck drivers…. I like those people a whole lot more. They’re easy to talk to. When they say, ‘What do you do?’ and I tell them, they’re not impressed, they just accept it. For Carl, the Red Garter is more real. Real places, he argues, are ‘down to earth’ and ‘normal’, places where his own social status has little relevance. Other players find fascination with the ‘glitz’ of Las Vegas and say that an ‘observer mentality’ is part of the scene. While players regard the casino as an ongoing spectacle where they can simply watch others, it is also a place where they can explore possibilities for ‘otherness’ within themselves. The casino is a place to take on and try out alternative notions of identity. For instance, some players commented on the opportunity to act like a ‘big shot’ and be catered to by dealers and waitresses. Some recalled images that appear to be derived from the mass media. One woman associated the casino with status and luxury: ‘I think definitely of European suits and diamonds. The type of thing you see around the roulette wheel or something.’ Albert, a 46-year-old poker player, associated his moments of play with the frontier gambler: ‘Maybe I was born before in the Wild West and I was a gambler. That is what I sometimes think, that there was a time before.’ Others point to a gap between popular images of casino life and their own experiences there. One player assessed the casino image as follows: Even the advertisements for the casinos are all the pretty people, you know, doing the gambling. And I look around the casinos and that’s not who I see there
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necessarily. You don’t see people walking around in tuxes and fancy dresses and so forth. But I think that’s part of the allure for people. It’s that you’re in the action. In seeing beyond this image, he lays claim to the reality of the casino. Anonymity also provides a stage for improvising identity. For example, one gambler noted that part of ‘getting away from it all’ comes from being able to present himself anew in the casino: I would rather play, and be there by myself and be just kind of an isolated little gambler, or be among other people and try to get to know someone and chat with them…. It’s kind of a way to leave things, to leave friends, be out on your own and in control…as far as betting and who you talk to, who you are as far as presenting yourself…getting people to like you on initial interactions, all that kind of thing. For other gamblers, it is the game itself that provides the ‘interaction’. One player said that gambling is like the excitement of a first date: I like my marriage. I think it’s a good marriage, but I do miss that part of dating which is unknown. And I think, in some ways, gambling does similar things for me. When you play video poker and the cards are dealt, there is that moment that you are not sure what you are going to get. In the same way, when you go to pick someone up on that first date, you don’t know what is going to happen. Another gambler also equated the games with romance. ‘When you’re going to go out with a girl’, he said, ‘half of the fun is the chase and the pursuit. In this case in gambling, it’s the pursuit of winning. It’s the chase. I like winning more definitely.’ For these players, gambling is a romance with the unknown, but others talk about the appeal of gambling coming from its mystery. Erving Goffman suggests that part of the attraction and entertainment in casino gambling is that it allows us to take chances and risks and to display a sense of character before others.8 Goffman argues that the ability to take risks and make decisions typically is absent from our lives. Casino games offer an opportunity to engage in risk-taking and decisionmaking on a momentary and relatively harmless level. In a broad context, the casino provides diversionary moments that allow people to transcend the routine and explore, investigate, and discover something about themselves that may not be present in the routines of everyday life. Gambling casinos offer a chance to experience ourselves in a time and place where, we believe, things have not yet been determined. The casino suspends the routines and expectations of the everyday world. For instance, one gambler suggested the casino’s attraction lay in its capacity to provide a place for transcending divisions that separate us in everyday life. ‘When I look around the casino’, he said, ‘one of the things I notice is that the gambling casino is there for anybody. You can be lonely, you can be old, you can be ugly, fat, it doesn’t matter. You’re in the action. You can play.’ This sense of social latitude in action suggests the liminality of the casino world. A liminal zone, Victor Turner argues, is a socio-psychological space that allows for new
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ways of experiencing the world and is characteristic of ritual.9 According to Turner, rituals are socially constructed experiences that allow individuals to ‘reclassify’ reality and to understand society and culture in alternate ways. A limen is a threshold or boundary space that provides a gap between categorized worlds of experience. Turner argues that in the moment of liminality ‘the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one’s own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements.’10 The gambling casino provides access to a liminal state that may occur in the instance of a single game. One gambler suggested this notion of liminality in his comments about the action that occurs in the play at the craps table. ‘It’s a feeling of action’, he said, ‘being involved in the game. I think there’s a sense of the unknown when the dice are rolling around in the air, there’s that moment when you’re not sure…you’re hoping for, and then there’s the decision.’ While he speaks of the feeling of ‘action’, his words suggest the complexity of the experience of play. His description of dice ‘rolling around in the air’ conjures up a moment when time and space become absent of structure and order. His words suggest an image of the dice, perhaps rolling in slow motion, that places him in the center of an ‘unknown’ world full of ‘hope’. As the dice hit the green felt craps table, the player confronts a restructuring of social order where significance is fixed in new ways. Admittance to a ‘world of possibility’ may be one of the essential promises of the casino world. A single roll of the dice is an instance of uncertainty (and therefore possibility) which is performed repeatedly in the broad and diversified experiences of the casino world. The open-ended nature of play provides passage to a liminal zone where different formulations of experience, self, and other await. Idealized notions of social life, Grant McCracken argues, are often displaced to other domains as cultures attempt to manage the discrepancy between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ forms of social experience. ‘Confronted with the recognition that reality is impervious to cultural ideals, a community may displace these ideals’, he says. ‘It will remove them from daily life and transport them to another cultural universe, there to be kept within reach but out of danger.’11 Because the casino world exists at a distance from the everyday world, it is a place where idealized visions of life, luck, skill, or rationality can be demonstrated to seem probable, and perhaps achievable.12 The casino provides experiences that give form and substance to such abstractions in much the same way that the consumption of goods in the everyday world substantiates class status. The fall of the dice or the deal of the cards are, on a most basic level, decisive because they indicate whether one is a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’, ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’, ‘rational and skillful’, or ‘unwise and frivolous’. Clearly, we find the same distinctions in everyday life. The home, workplace, and daily routines all provide instances where luck or ability to reason are materialized in some consequential task. But the casino offers other ways to test fate and skill, and it is always open. Action: inside the casino world The promise of the casino is to live and act differently, at least for a brief time, but the casino is also a world of its own where a fundamental social question must also be asked: ‘Where do I belong in all of this?’ Inside the casino world, gamblers discover new
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relationships with the others they confront. The casino world is a new social world calling for new distinctions between self and other and an understanding of a new set of social relations. As the gamblers attempt to make these distinctions of similarity and difference, they find that familiar modes of comprehending the social world reappear. Inside the casino, everyday social structure is played with, explored, improvised, experimented with, but almost always re-presented. This re-presentation is evident in the ways that gamblers position themselves in relation to their new gambling others. Linda, a poker player, described the duality of the casino as a space that negotiates between a desire to escape the everyday world of social convention and structure and the continual reappearance of familiar notions of social order: I met this guy who was so rude, and I was really getting upset that he was so rude. He was a young guy, in his 20s, late 20s maybe, not an old crotchety man or anything. His wife was about his age and she comes up and goes, ‘Oh don’t get mad at him please. He’s really a nice guy at home. I mean everybody likes him at home. He has lots of friends and stuff. He’s really not like this.’ And I thought, that’s perfect because that’s exactly what you do. You think you can walk in here, and you can have no inhibitions, you can be anything you want. You don’t have to be nice. And we’re talking about some real personal things. Money is a very personal, sensitive subject and mix that with drinking, I mean you’ve got people in their raw form. You’ve got sex available. You’ve got virtually no time, no responsibilities or anything. I think you just see a real raw side of people. That’s why it’s an escape like it is. I mean people still are okay, because they do for the most part have fun and enjoy themselves. And they have fun with each other being part of it. In fact, it wouldn’t be any fun at all if there weren’t 10,000 other people in there, right? But it is a place, too, where you can be the ugliest self you want to be in that environment. Linda’s comments point out that the casino allows us to experience a new way of ‘being in the world’, but the sociality of the everyday world reappears. Civility becomes necessary only in its absence. Her comments suggest that, as people act out their desires, the achievement of transcending the everyday world serves only to recall it: ‘He’s not like this’ at home. The individual exists in the gap between two forms of order and structure, the everyday and the non-everyday, drawing upon each almost simultaneously. The symbols, rituals, and conventions of one world represent themselves only as they are escaped, creating contradictions the gambler must negotiate: Money is both a plaything and the price of playing. Lost inhibitions produce the desire for tolerance and civility. The quest for anonymity brings new social bonds. The casino is, in one sense, a place where strangers meet, but it is also a place where people cease to be strangers, at least for a few moments. Most of the craps players we interviewed commented on the sense of excitement and action that always seems to surround the craps table. They frequently characterized the craps table with terms like ‘yelling’, ‘laughter’, ‘action’, and ‘energy’. Many players also described craps as a game where momentary communities and allegiances are formed. For instance, one craps
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player talked about the feeling of social pressure that he encountered by betting against the dice. I felt pressure by playing the ‘Don’t Pass’ line. And you’ll find that by far the majority of people play the ‘Pass’ line. I sense that they look at people who play ‘Don’t Pass’ a little funny. Because what the ‘Don’t Pass’, of course is, is betting against the roller, betting that they’re not going to make the point. Which means that you’re going against a lot of people. And you win and everybody else is losing. So usually you find that the ‘Don’t Pass’ line takes up less room on the craps table. But I think there are much fewer ‘Don’t Pass’ players than ‘Pass’ players because I think that the pressure is there. As the player describes it, the action at the craps table provides a model of social interaction that includes concepts like the ‘power of consensus’, ‘deviance’, and ‘social pressure’. This description of craps views the table as a social unit, with players working toward a common goal. By betting against the ‘community’, the player feels a sense of pressure. In another interview, a craps player said that he liked to bet the ‘Don’t Pass’ line because it was fun ‘to be different, to make weird bets’. For him, the craps table seemed to provide an opportunity to exercise social resistance, to differentiate himself within the community. Another player’s comments pointed to the differentiation of the table. He defined the table as a totality that was segmented into smaller units and allegiances. He said, ‘I do have a hard time betting against people that are standing on the same side of the table as me because I felt like I should be supporting them because they were by me. But people on the other end of the table, I could always bet against them without feeling bad…. It’s like because they’re standing beside you that you don’t want to bet against them.’ The mere fact of physical association becomes a consideration for making a bet. In this interview, the gambler pointed to luck as being a bonding element among the players on his end of the table. He said that he was reluctant to bet against them because you think ‘you’re going to affect the person’s luck’. His comments suggest that he feels a sense of obligation and responsibility to the players with whom he has physical contact. These players are teammates. The way gamblers play a game is a way of making distinctions between self and other in the internal social structure of the casino world. For example, Tim, a 25-year-old iron worker, described the integrity of playing and taking risks at the blackjack table. Nothing pisses me off more than to go into a casino, sit down and play blackjack and see this guy that’s won let’s say $50. He’s playing $1 a hand. Come on, damn it, put some money on there! If the cards are hitting, put some freaking money out there and walk away with something. Big deal, you won fifty bucks! If you would’ve been betting $5 a hand, how much would you have won? That’s how my little buddy Al was, he’d lose a lot, but when he won—he’d win a lot. It wasn’t any of this mediocre shit.
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Tim’s friend Al was willing to risk all, and Tim found this admirable. For Tim, the key social boundary is determined by the willingness to take a risk, and he differentiates himself from others on the basis of such a playing style. Identity in the casino also can be claimed on the basis of the kinds of games chosen. Here, a player relates to other gamblers out of his or her experience of membership in a community of certain game players. For instance, one craps player pointed out that ‘not everybody plays craps’. He said, ‘You know other people play the slots. The slots, from what I heard in casino language from a friend who deals in Reno, is that people who play slots are just “wimps”. You know they’re not really gambling. It’s the blackjack players and craps players. And craps is kind of an awe type of thing because people look at it and have no idea what is going on.’ This player, considering himself a serious gambler, looks down on slots because of the minimal skill involved. Because many view it as a game of complexity, craps is often regarded as a game of higher status. Another craps player also pointed to the awe surrounding the craps game: There’s the jargon. That’s kind of fun, too. When you learn craps, there’s a sense of being on the inside because a lot of people don’t understand how to play craps. And I’ve had friends come up with me to the craps table and it’s kind of fun because you’re throwing money all over the place, and you’re yelling out your bets, and they’re just completely confused. So there is a sense of ‘Yeah, I know what’s going on here.’ For these players, the codes, rules, and conventions of the game serve to draw boundaries between craps players and other players. There is a sense of having an inside knowledge, possessing and controlling an experience that not everyone can have. This kind of differentiation occurs in other games as well. For example, Linda said that playing poker, a game that, like many casino games, is a male province, was a way to prove herself with men, a way of gaining their respect. For many gamblers, identity is connected to the degree of control and decision-making experienced during play. Goffman suggests that decision-making is significant in gambling because it allows people to exercise a sense of power that may be absent from their everyday lives. We infrequently make important decisions in the workplace, but while gambling we are entirely in control of our decisions.13 For gamblers, then, statistical measures, probabilities, odds, and percentages are important ways of empowering decisions. Don, a manager in his late 30s, recalled: ‘I wouldn’t gamble unless I knew how to gamble. And I didn’t know how. I knew the slot machines were a rip-off percentage wise. And this book [on video poker] explained the best strategies and the odds at the best strategy which seemed reasonably good. So at that point I started to gamble for entertainment at those odds, because I could play for a long time and not lose much money.’ Don plays nickle and quarter video poker machines for entertainment. He told us that he didn’t gamble to make money because his job provided him with enough money to buy whatever he wanted. Video poker provides entertainment because it allows him to exercise rationality by providing an acceptable advantage. Each time he plays a hand of video poker, he confronts a machine that will allow him to make decisions regarding a ‘fixed
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probability’. For him, probability appears to be both an immediate opponent in the game and a framework that explains gambling in general. He stated later in the interview that he thought gamblers ‘lose in the long run’ because of probability. Gambling offers him little in the way of financial risk but a great deal in its capacity to allow him to confront abstractions such as goods, probability, and percentages in a material form. Video poker materializes the abstraction of probability, allowing him a level of engagement and confrontation with what he otherwise knows only on conceptual terms. Some gamblers choose particular games precisely because of the levels of control and decision-making that are involved in playing. Carl expressed a preference for playing craps. ‘Because you’re either betting with or against the dice’, he said, ‘you have that kind of control there. It’s not like you can control what happens, but you can control your bet more…you could have placed the bet differently. In blackjack the cards come up, that’s it. That’s fate.’ Richard, another craps player, found craps enjoyable because there was ‘less control’. He said, ‘In blackjack you get mad. If you take a hit and break, or if you wouldn’t take a hit and the dealer beat you, it was more frustrating. Craps is easier for me to deal with because it’s just random. The random rolls of the dice. So, you’re betting your money and it’s more on the odds.’ Richard later mentioned that he enjoyed poker because it provided ‘ultimate control’. He said that poker is a game where ‘it’s all on you… you’re making the decision from the very instant you are looking at the cards.’ Carl’s view of both blackjack and craps places fate as the decisive controlling factor in the outcome of play. But it is craps that provides a structure where he makes choices. His bets are a reflection of his ability to read the table. Through his decisions and control, craps allows him to make his presence known on the fixed terrain of fate. The game allows him to deal with fate in a concrete form. For Richard, craps is a game where fate becomes a source of relief for making decisions. Poker, in contrast, is the game that provides him control and choice, the opportunity to determine his own fate. Information in the form of gambling systems, probability, odds, and calculations is a means of empowering betting decisions, providing justification for choices. One gambler said that he found horseracing to be a form of gambling where he could research his decisions through racing forms. As a result of this ability to investigate, he found horseracing to be a form of gambling where you could ‘put fate in your own hands’. He later rethought his comment and refined his statement by saying, ‘You may not have fate in your own hands, but you feel like it anyway.’ His comments about horse racing and research suggest the importance of information in other forms of gambling as well. Rationality provides a basis for justifying decisions and confronting the unknown from a calculating stance. In all of these examples, and gambling in general, the question of control and decision is often upset by a constant recognition of fate. Systems, strategies, probabilities, and research are ways of coming to decisions, but the systems tend to break down when fate enters the equation. While gamblers arm themselves with decision-making strategies, they also (often simultaneously) explain the results of playing with less scientific terms. Nearly all of those interviewed expressed a belief in superstition or luck. For instance, one woman described how she picked up her cards in the order that they were dealt because it was bad luck to do otherwise. Another player told a story of a good omen while driving to
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the casinos in Wendover. He said that he stopped to help a Chinese man fix a flat tire on his van in the middle of the desert. After he fixed the tire, he drove on to the casino and won $1,600 playing keno. Being a ‘good Samaritan’, he argued, made him a winner. Two other players mentioned the importance of dreams in some of their gambling experiences. Each said that certain numbers appeared in their dreams and these numbers were sources of winning while gambling shortly thereafter. Superstition, luck, dreams, and omens are explanatory frames that provide a way of comprehending gambling and the fate of the self. When rational methods fail to account for wins or losses, superstition, luck, clairvoyance, and fate offer modes of explanation that cannot be proven wrong. Rationality and mystery coexist in the ordering of the gambling experience. This coexistence suggests part of the appeal of gambling. The casino, and specifically its games, shows us the boundaries of fate. In this ambivalent, liminal space, destiny waits veiled for the self. The casino is a place for discovering the relationship of identity to fate. The casino world, and the moment of gambling, empowers the self through control and decision-making but presents experiences that seem to defy rationality. The empowered self may find evidence of its own genius. For instance, one gambler described feeling ‘high and mighty’ after he won a poker tournament and ‘strutted’ out of the casino. Another said he liked the casino because it let him feel and act like a ‘big shot’. But the self may also discover evidence of its own limitations and of the importance of the irrational in life. In either instance, the experience of everyday life is restructured. The casino provides an internal world that is socially organized. While players may enter the casino to escape the structures that enable and constrain everyday life, to be someone different, it is also a place where those same social constraints reappear. As some of these interviews suggest, the casino provides a microcosm of social structure. The casino is a place where social structure is re-presented in unique forms. Games become places where competition and risk work in the service of style and status. As players draw boundaries among themselves in the everyday world, they also do so in the social sphere of the casino. For the player, the self-society relationship is transformed, refigured, parodied, and experimented with. In this way, the casino remains an island for escaping from the everyday world but one where new social determinants act to create the social world the players momentarily seek to break away from. Evaluation: putting the casino world in its place In the first two sections, we considered how players position themselves in relation to the casino on a narrative journey of autobiographical reflection. In the first section, we focused on the ways that the casino calls out to the individual who longs to belong to the world in a different way. Here, we viewed the promise of the casino world from the perspective of everyday life. The casino emerged as a place of promise and possibility. In the second section, we considered the ways that individuals locate themselves reflexively within the casino world. The casino and gambling provide a social world where players do in fact belong in different ways, even though those ways have familiar structural features. We examined the ways that individuals differentiate themselves within the world of the
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casino in relation to their gambling others. In this last section, a third domain of reflexivity considers gambling in relation to the return to the everyday social world. Here, we focus on how individuals locate the meaning and significance of gambling as past experience rather than as future promise. The promise of gambling creates the present as anticipation. The experience of the casino itself creates the present as action. In this section, the present is evaluative, and gambling experiences are linked to life history and broader social issues. Here, gamblers talk about the enduring lessons of the casino world. In the journey away from the casino, the everyday world reappears as a context for measuring the casino experience. One player described the ride home from the casino as a moment when he accounted for his gambling in terms of the everyday world. He said, ‘I start trying to figure out how many drinks I got for however much money I spent. “Oh, yeah, that’s paying $20 a drink out there. Oh, but they did give me a free dinner, too, so it’s about $18 a drink.” I figure this shit out all the way home.’ Money spent, lost, or won is clearly one of the distinctive ways that gambling becomes concrete in the everyday world. For this player, making his gambling expenses relative to the everyday world is a process of calculating and comparing the costs of leisure. For another player, money is significant, after playing, only as a scorecard. He considered the amount of money lost or spent merely as the ‘price of admission’ for leisure and a measure of his skill. These examples suggest the immediacy of everyday life as a context for making gambling meaningful. While the everyday world is always close at hand in the casino—as the faces of big losers indicate—for some gamblers, winning, losing, and playing are important markers in the larger context of their biography. For example, Albert referred to six years of compulsive poker playing as a ‘nightmare’. Poker games were ‘like an addiction’ that put him in jail and nearly ruined his marriage. In a similar way, gambling was a biographical marker for Tim, the 25-year-old iron worker. While working in Nevada on an isolated construction job, he said that he lost $15,000 in a year. Now unemployed and going to college, Tim recalls the Nevada experience on a number of levels. ‘It’s different when the casino is your home’, he recalled. When I was living in Hawthorne, the casino was my home. I was living in a little shack. It was an old run down hotel owned by this little Italian lady…. I had a little black and white TV. I’m in the middle of nowhere, I can get maybe one or two channels, and I’m too cheap to go pay for a nice hotel that has HBO because that’s going to cost me $80 a week…. You know I should have spent the 80 and got a decent hotel where I could’ve been a little more occupied watching TV or whatever…. If I did it again, well they did have a lake there. It’s like you’re too damn cheap to go out and buy a fishing pole and spend your days fishing after work or on the weekends. But by God, you always had money for gambling. His recollection of his gambling experience is closely tied to his situation in Hawthorne. His statement preserves the importance of gambling in his life at that time. Gambling occupied a central position in his life and that centrality remains embedded in his personal narrative as a time of unusual circumstances and unusual losses. It is only when he considers his present situation that he shows any notion of regret or misgivings about his losses: ‘I’m
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trying to go to school now. It would be real nice to have it [the $15,000]. You feel stupid. You feel really dumb like, “Yeah, we had a fun time, but we’re the ones who got took to the cleaners.”’ Tim’s statements suggest a struggle to come to some coherent notion of what happened with gambling, himself, and his past circumstances. Gambling attests here to life’s precariousness and to the ability to weather a volatile period and persevere. While all of those interviewed professed a desire to continue playing, their general remarks about gambling were not always consistent with this desire. For instance, one gambler said that he would be opposed to bringing gambling into the city where he lived. ‘It’s a system based on other people’s misery’, he said. ‘I think that it is perhaps best left in Nevada and Atlantic City.’ Another player argued that gambling was harmful to the majority of people. ‘I don’t think gambling is good for most people’, he said. ‘I consider myself a fairly rational person. I can take forty bucks and still have a good time…and only take forty bucks. But when people sell their cars and turn their families into hostages just because they think they can win, well I think that it’s out of hand.’ Notions of gambling as a social and psychological problem clearly permeate these comments. Moderation and regulation are in the forefront as these players locate themselves in relation to the broader social and personal consequences of gambling. Another player’s comments about the social relevance of gambling suggest an opposite point of view. You can lose money doing anything…. I’m not one of these puritans who have to show something for a dollar, the puritan ethic of having a dollar, earn something. I don’t see anything wrong with it. I think it’s a good institution. I mean people they say, ‘Oh, you’ll get the fever, it’s a disease.’ Oh, God, horse shit. If a person can’t control himself with gambling, I mean if he goes overboard, he has to sell his family down the river or whatever, that’s the guy’s own problem and no matter what, he’s too obsessive. No matter what he gets involved with in life, he’d be obsessive. I mean not just gambling, it’s the person. While these gamblers are quite reflective about their experiences, it is clearly not reflection without contradiction. Their views here portray a broad range of opinions about the presence of gambling in American society. A player can understand his or her own gambling behavior, find meaning in it, justify its significance, and, moments later, provide a different viewpoint on gambling as an institution. While gamblers confront fate in the casinos, some of their comments suggest a confrontation more abstract in nature. As one player put it: ‘We beat the casinos.’ Beating the casinos can mean a number of things, from breaking even to winning a lot of money. But the victory often has meaning that goes beyond the context of the casino. One gambler described beating the casino as follows: Just to quit while you’re ahead is the best feeling. It’s like for once you socked it to the big evil corrupt empire and you came out a winner, you played against the odds and won…. You bet. It’s big business. Anytime big business pays out for once is a pleasurable feeling. I mean these big corporations, whatever, big business, is always socking it the common people no matter what. I mean there was an apple machine
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up on campus that would sock it to me every week. It was almost like a slot machine, I put my fifteen cents in there, and I’ll be darned if I would never get an apple. But you go to a Coke machine or something and it starts spitting out money, it’s like revenge is sweet. His story about ‘winning big’ places the casino as part of one large corporate empire. By winning in a casino, he suggests, he sends shock waves through a much larger corporate structure. The casino, as it is described here, becomes a place where figures of competition in everyday life appear as dragons that can be slain. It is difficult for the individual to beat ‘the system’, or realize any sense of a system, except in the instances where he or she can see that victory or opponent in some material form. Because the opponent in gambling can take many forms (the system, the house, the dice, the cards, the dealer), it can metaphorically represent numerous forms of antagonism in the gambler’s life (big business, shortage of money, routine job). A win against the casino is a victory against some large abstraction of power that individuals continually confront but may be helpless against in everyday life. In the comments of these gamblers, we find a duality between the desire to escape the social world and the continual presence and reappearance of that world in various forms and instances. Whether going to the casino in search of some different way to be in the world, to win money, to explore identities, to play, to strike out against the system, to make their fortune, or to lose everything, there is an implicit sense of social order that remains omnipresent. The transcendence of daily routines through the action in the casino is ultimately temporary, always recalling in some way the life that the individual has left and will return to. The experience of the casino world does not last but, instead, must be sought again and again. In this sense, the casino suggests a model for life in a modern consumer culture. The casino world’s place is guaranteed only because those who seek what it offers can never be satisfied. Play is never-ending because in many ways it is play, not material reward, that gamblers seek in the casino. People journey to casinos seeking, most of all, experience. As in the consumption of cars, fashions, and the products of mass media, it is not the material thing that matters but the experience it provides. Tim suggested this idea of endless consumption when he commented on the following question: ‘Do you ever get to that point when you’ve played enough?’ I don’t think you can. I think you just want to play higher and higher stakes. It’s just like rich people. I always picture myself, if I had a couple of million bucks, I’d spend my time at Lake Powell fishing with a nice boat and this, that, and the other. But they don’t. It’s like rich people, they have every possession they could possibly want. They still play. They still go out and manipulate their funds, try and get more rich and more rich. I think that’s life in general. I think people were made to basically keep moving forward. If you don’t move forward, then you get stagnant and you get bored. I think it’s just human nature. I think that human beings have come so far. I don’t think you top out on gambling. I think you can burn out on it. I think you can get tired of playing. But there’s always different kinds of gambling.
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Tim’s comments describe the continual and insatiable appetite for experience that accompanies living in a society that must remain consuming to remain alive. Earlier we suggested that the casino was a place where an idealized vision of social life seemed to exist at a distance from the everyday world. Gambling promises an opportunity to traverse that distance and make real those visions. Yet, as Tim and other players suggest, there always seem to be higher stakes to play. ‘There’s not much fun left in playing the two dollar tables once you start playing reds [usually a five dollar chip] and greens [usually a twenty-five dollar chip]’, another player told us. This quest for higher levels of play in the casino reminds us that a broader itch for meaning and new experience remains regardless of how often we scratch at life in a consumer society. The acquisition of the object or experience that promises a ‘bridge’ to the ideal, McCracken notes, may bring us to a critical confrontation of the ‘ideal’ with the ‘real’ in our life. When displaced ideals become incorporated into a person’s life through possession, ‘it is now an incipient part of the “here and now’”, he says, ‘and vulnerable to contradiction’.14 In testing the durability of our ideals in the everyday world we often discover that what we sought does not last. Such awareness may lead us, of course, to new activities or to green-chipped versions of previous ones. Such are the contradictions we live. Gambling is the face of a capitalist society, a face full of hope and discovery for those who experience unequal distributions of wealth and an inability to exercise social power in any significant sense. Gambling, our interviews suggest, is more than a false promise that veils economic and social inequity. We go to the casino to achieve something more complicated and tenuous than wealth. We go to casinos in search of various forms of meaning, meaning that can only be achieved through alternative and transformative experiences. Vicki Abt, James Smith, and Eugene Christian-sen touch on the nature of this quest when they suggest contemporary gambling in America is based in a desire for pleasure and status. The contemporary cultural interest in gambling, they argue, illustrates a reversal in traditional values, the replacing of the Protestant ethic by a new ideology of ‘hedonistic consumerism’. Rather than practice self-denial or seek to accumulate wealth, ‘gamblers invest in the present—in a chance for immediate, materialistic rewards and pay-offs in an atmosphere of self-indulgence’.15 Perhaps, but there is a bit too much of the nostalgic moralist here to suit us. As a social and cultural site, the casino suggests something about the contradictions of experience we live. Such contradictions are not pretty, but neither were the contradictions of the culture of self-denial. Like others before us, we struggle for meaning in conditions not of our own making, believing there must be some way out of here. Our ways out, perhaps more than those of other ages, are self-consuming, full of promise for meaning and identity one moment and inscribed with vagueness and discontinuity the next. We still seek visions, and sometimes on a dark night those flashing casino signs seem to advertise them. Most of us know in the morning that there were no visions, that a new world is as inaccessible as the culture of the Protestant ethic. And so we work and watch TV and wait, and start to hope for visions again. In the meantime, we make meanings the way people always have: by telling our stories.
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Notes 1 See, for example, Henry R.Lesieur, The Chase: Career of the Compulsive Gambler (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1984); Margaret O.Hyde, Addictions: Gambling, Smoking, Cocaine Use and Others (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978); Tomas M.Martinez, The Gambling Scene (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1983); Mark G.Dickerson, Compulsive Gamblers (New York: Longman, 1984); John Rosecrance, Gambling Without Guilt: The Legitimation of an American Pastime (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cde, 1988); and Gamblers Anonymous—2nd Edition (Los Angeles: G.A. Publishing, 1964). 2 len Ang used an advertisement in a Dutch women’s magazine to obtain information on the viewing habits of people who watch the television program Dallas. See Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, trans. Della Couling (New York and London: Methuen, 1985). 3 See James W.Carey, ‘A cultural approach to communication’, Communication, 2 (1975), pp. 1–22; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 4 Janet Gunn, Autobiography: Toward A Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 5 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Work and leisure in daily life’, in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (eds) Communication and Class Struggle. Volume 1: Capitalism, Imperialism (New York: International General, 1979), p. 137. 6 Roger D.Abrahams, ‘Ordinary and extraordinary experience’, in Victor W. Turner and Edward M.Bruner (eds) The Anthropology of Experience (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1986), p. 66. 7 Erik Cohen, ‘A phenomenology of tourist experiences’, Sociology, 13, 2, (May 1979), p. 186. See also Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 160. 8 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). 9 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 52. 10 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 114–15. 11 Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 106. 12 McCracken suggests that the consumption of goods and services ‘become a bridge to displaced meaning and an idealized version of life as it should be lived’ (p. 110). 13 Goffman, op. cit., pp. 149–270. 14 McCracken, op. cit., p. 112. 15 Vicki Abt, James F.Smith, and Eugene Christiansen, The Business of Risk: Commercial Gambling in Mainstream America (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p. 22.
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MAKING DISTINCTIONS IN TV AUDIENCE RESEARCH: CASE STUDY OF A TROUBLING INTERVIEW ELLEN SEITER
Discussions about the television audience have proliferated recently. After a period of preoccupation with textual analyses of television, audience studies have been an attempt, in part, to verify empirically the kinds of ideological readings constructed by (white and middle-class) critics.1 The new critical interest in television audiences can be traced to 1980 when David Morley published his study of Nationwide, but it was in 1986 that the debate on television audiences emerged as the focus of scholarly attention at gatherings such as the International Television Studies Conference. Recently, the debate about audience studies has taken place at a high level of abstraction, as witness Martin Allor’s useful essay ‘Relocating the site of the audience’ published with four responses in a recent issue of Critical Studies in Mass Communication.2 In this paper I wish to discuss the political issues of audience studies in the terms laid out in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, and to discuss the problem of the ‘self-reflexive’ researcher in the context of one case study. By doing so, I hope to encourage a change within the current academic discussion of audiences. I feel we need to take up more concretely the problems of research as a practice. I believe cultural studies must focus on the differences in class and cultural capital which typify the relationship between the academic and the subject of audience studies. Nowhere is this more vivid than in the study of television. The problem emerges most clearly when we discuss empirical research as a practice. Here I describe an interview with two white men that illustrates some of the political problems of interpretation in audience studies. But in doing so I also make a gesture that scholars in television and film studies endlessly repeat in our work. I completely ignore racial difference, and thereby contribute to the racism which permeates academic discourse. This is the story of a ninety-minute interview that I conducted with co-researcher Hans Borchers as part of a larger study on television soap operas carried out in Oregon during the summer of 1986.3 Out of twenty-six such interviews we conducted, I have chosen this interview because of my interest in gender and class, and in the discomfort many people feel when they identify themselves as members of the television audience. This interview took place in the home of Jim Dubois, 62 years old, and his housemate Larry Howe, about 55 years old. (I have changed their names here.) Both men are retired graphic artists, who moved to Eugene from California two years ago. The interview was conducted by myself (an American film and television professor in my early 30s) and Hans Borchers (a German American studies professor in his early 40s). All four of us are white.
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I wish to describe how our subjects reacted to us as interviewers, how the inferior television audience was persistently identified as female, and how the power differential between us as academic interviewers and Jim and Larry as subjects related to the playing out of class difference during the interview. Throughout the interview, it was uppermost in these men’s minds that we were academics. For them, it was an honour to talk to us and an opportunity to be heard by persons of authority and standing. They made a concerted effort to appear cosmopolitan and sophisticated. For them, our visit offered a chance to reveal their own personal knowledge, and their opinions about society and the media. They had no interest whatsoever in offering us interpretative, textual readings of television programs, as we wanted them to do. In fact, they exhibited a kind of ‘incompetence’ as viewers in this regard: they were unable to reproduce critical categories common to TV Guide and academic television criticism.4 All fiction shows could be labeled soap opera: situation comedies and medical shows, alike. Yet many television shows were seen by Mr Howe to conform to a more personal, master narrative about the painful relations between generations, which stemmed from his own bitter experience as a father. This interview made me personally uncomfortable, because of my age and my gender, and because of my status as an academic. When we talk about examining our own subjectivities as researchers, we also need to ask what it means to ask someone else about television viewing. Television watching can be a touchy subject, precisely because of its association with a lack of education, with idleness and unemployment, and its identification as an ‘addiction’ of women and children. This interview exemplifies the defensiveness that men and women unprotected by academic credentials may feel in admitting to television viewing in part because of its connotations of feminine passivity, laziness, and vulgarity. For me, the interview raised profound methodological questions about ‘unstructured’ interviewing. Our goal, which we discussed as a research team at great length, was to hear whatever soap opera viewers wanted to tell us. We wanted to follow digressions, to be receptive to unanticipated areas of discussion. (The psychoanalytic scenario was clearly in the back of our minds.) But our subjects wanted to present themselves in a good light. Though we were strangers, they knew we were academics and to a large extent that dictated the kinds of things that were said to us. That is especially prominent in this interview where our ‘subjects’ were doubly defensive as men and as members of an older generation. I am going to describe the dynamics and the sequence of conversational events that took place when we visited Mr Howe and Mr Dubois’s home at some length. When we extract quotes from this context, much of their significance is lost. Very often, the meaning of statements as part of an exchange (and an unequal one) between researcher and subject is obscured. While this interview is atypical in many respects of our experiences with soap opera viewers, especially women, it vividly demonstrates something that happened in all the interviews. People often compare their own television viewing to that of the imagined mass audience, one that is more interested, more duped, more entertained, more gullible than they are. Academics as television viewers are no exception to this rule. The
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imagination of that other television viewer is deeply implicated in the class/gender system. For Mr Howe and Mr Dubois, television’s contaminating effects were directly and persistently related to the feminine (a tendency they share with academic writing about the mass media, from the Frankfurt School on).5 This interview also exemplifies the extent to which television as a ‘mass’ form is viewed in a very different way by those without access to college educations and more authentic bourgeois culture. For workingclass and petit-bourgeois viewers, television is alternately relied on as a source of education and condemned for its failure to confirm and to replicate experience. The interview Torn by all the contradictions between an objectively dominated condition and would-be participation in the dominant values, the petit bourgeois is haunted by the appearance he offers to others and the judgment they make of it. He constantly overshoots the mark for fear of falling short, betraying his uncertainty and anxiety about belonging in his anxiety to show or give the impression that he belongs…. He is bound to be seen as the man of appearances, haunted by the look of others and endlessly occupied with being seen in a good light.6 Mr Howe and Mr Dubois began the interview with a disclaimer about the amount of time spent viewing and the insistence that they only watch soap operas occasionally because they are usually out in the afternoons. This was an unusual start for the interview because Mr Howe had answered a newspaper advertisement asking to interview soap opera viewers. Mr Dubois explained that he only watched occasionally when seized by the distant hope that ‘maybe today we’ll see something good happen rather than something tragic happening…. I guess soap operas make you glad that you don’t have more problems than you do.’ Mr Dubois then offered an excuse for why they do watch: to see the houses and locations on the shows: ‘That home is beautiful. We’d like to own it.’ The vineyard on Falcon Crest is shot on location in Santa Barbara, where Larry used to live. This being said in defense of their interest in that show. Mr Howe moved on to a statement of his preferences, based in part on a critique of soap opera in general: I think the soap operas that I can tolerate the most are the ones that don’t take place in one room for the whole episode—where they stand there and talk each other to death. And never move outside. I like to see some automobile travel, some outdoor scenery, not just two people or three people at a table sitting there yakking each other to death. Despite our resolutions to be non-directive, we reverted to the tactic of trying to elicit a comparative critical scheme (and ended up sounding like network focus group supervisors). We asked: ‘which are the worst that way?’ (Here we desperately try for some comparative rating, an attempt to be systematic.) The answer is an equation of this problem with women and with tragedy. Mr Dubois explained: ‘I think the afternoon ones
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have a tendency to be too tragic…it is more tragic in the afternoon, because afternoons are geared to woman, and woman likes to cry and likes to see somebody else’s tragedy…. “Oh, I’m not doing so bad, Look at her.” And they relate to that, whereas I, as a man, can’t relate to that.’ Mr Howe then broke in with a kind of mini-lecture typical of the interview, in which he described to us the origins of television before the First World War, and the Berlin Olympic telecasts. Mr H. was trying to display his knowledge about a topic he (erroneously) assumed we would be interested in and could confirm his expertise at (a mistaken assumption given our lack of knowledge or interest in the technological origins of television). We politely listened but did not reinforce this kind of talk. We were more receptive to Mr D. when he returned to the topic of soap opera. Still attributing the tragic sensibility to women, but now generalizing about the problems of illness, he told us this story: ‘I’d never been in the hospital in my life—so it’s always an adventure—until recently. I had a minor heart attack. I was rushed to the hospital in emergency. So then all the General Hospital things that went on, that I had seen, sort of became real to me. I couldn’t believe that I was in the hospital playing the part of a very, very sick man.’ As an older viewer, illness is the most authentic fiction television presents’ to Mr D. Mr H. broke in for five minutes with a discussion of medical students inviting Robert Young to be graduation speaker because they had confused Marcus Welby with a real doctor. We were feeling more and more uncomfortable with Mr Howe. He sounded eccentric to us, and his story mixed up. I believed he must be wrong, not the educated medical students. But this story allowed him to formulate his strong objections to TV: ‘it just goes to show you how they can trivialize, that’s the word, they can trivialize anything, and make it seem insignificant.’ He applied this tendency to trivialize to priests, nuns, doctors and then—wanting to spark our interest—professors. Mr H. proceeded to draw an opposition between professors and scriptwriters, who ‘misinform the public’, ‘when they set themselves up as something to be admired or respected. I read about what high ratings they have, well I get resentful because of the fact…well what are they measuring themselves against…what is the mentality of the people that are watching?’ Along with the imagined other viewers, many people we interviewed felt this enormous antagonism towards the television industry’s creative personnel. Writers were constantly coming under attack for boring the audience, or patronizing them. At this point, Mr Dubois made a revelation: Mr H. is a self-taught man. Mr D. proudly described how much research his friend had done, and how television material instigated his research activities. ‘When he sees something that is definitely a mistake and wrong, he’ll check on it.’ Mr H. explained: ‘I can’t get into secret government archives. I can’t get past security clearances on military bases. But there are ways of finding things out. Societies that I have knowledge of, the people who are members of societies. Through letter writing. Library textbooks.’ Mr D. continued to praise him: ‘He’s an avid reader, so he knows his stuff. Also he has, he really has a photographic memory…which I rely on and he relies on.’
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This story about research unsanctioned by the academy, convinced me that Mr H. was a crackpot. Returning to his anger at the box, Mr Howe told a story about Elvis Presley once firing a ‘45 caliber six shooter’ at his television set. In his comprehensive empirical study of French cultural differences, Bourdieu discusses the difference between legitimate and illegitimate self-education, between the kind of autodidacticism practiced by academics, and the kind that Mr Howe does: There is nothing paradoxical in the fact that in its ends and means the educational system defines the enterprise of ‘legitimate autodidacticism’ that is ever more strongly demanded as one rises in the educational hierarchy (between sections, disciplines, and specialities etc. or between levels). The essentially contradictory phrase ‘legitimate autodidacticism’ is intended to indicate the difference in kind between the highly valued ‘extra-curricular’ culture of the holder of academic qualifications and the illegitimate extra-curricular culture of the autodidact. Illegitimate extra-curricular culture, whether it be the knowledge accumulated by the self-taught or the ‘experience’ acquired in and through practice, outside the control of the institution specifically mandated to inculcate it and officially sanction its acquisition, like the art of cooking or herbal medicine, craftsmen’s skills or the stand-in’s irreplaceable knowledge, is only valorized to the strict extent of its technical efficiency, without any social added-value, and is exposed to legal sanctions whenever it emerges from the domestic universe to compete with the authorized competences. (Bordieu, op. cit., p. 25) Information is routinely given as one of the ‘uses and gratifications’ of media use. But I think it is difficult for academics involved in television studies to imagine the frustration and anger provoked by a dependency on television for education and a lifelong exclusion from elite forms of higher education. Some of the flashes of rage in this interview on Mr Howe’s part, and many of the stunned silences on mine and Hans’s, stemmed from our face-to-face confrontation of this difference in access to cultural capital. I emphasize this point because it is an arena where the distinction between legitimate and illegitmate autodidacticism is one we as academics have an interest in maintaining. I had already placed Mr Dubois and Mr Howe in class terms by their home furnishings— carefully maintained, early American matching pieces, of which they were proud. Taste in things like clothes, food and furniture, and patterns of consumerism is one of the earliest acquired and most striking forms of class distinction, according to Bourdieu. At this point in the interview, Mr Dubois revealed that he had a career in the fashion industry and used the television, in a specialized professional way, to learn about style: they show the home, they show the furniture, well this is a little bit, it’s not all a loss, it’s a little bit of an education for me. I know what early American furniture looks like, or Renaissance furniture looks like. I know what pseudo modern furniture looks like…so its sort of educational for me…even though the plot may be absolutely ridiculous.
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Then the conversation turned to a brief discussion of the various things that bother them about television: too much sex; too many commercial interruptions. On guard against a perception on our part that they were too familiar with television, Mr Howe then drew a distinction between themselves and ‘others who have TVs in every room…if we have other things to do we just go and do them…otherwise we’d just sit around and watch TV all day.’ Mr D.: ‘if it’s raining and we can’t get out to do the things that we want to do out of doors, that’s when we’ll watch. As I told you, most afternoon programs are geared to ladies. That’s when they show all the gushy…’. Mr H.: ‘They can stand there and iron or they can stand there and prepare food or whatever and watch TV…’. Despite the fact that these men have lived in households without women for twenty years, domestic work is seen as the domain of women, the domain of women watching television. Hans asked if they talk with other viewers about television, since this aspect has been conspicuously absent in this, compared to our other interviews. Mr D. talked about a friend who is a real fan, who arranges her lunch hour around them. This led to the following exchange: Mr H.: Well, you know, where the word came from…it’s actually true …it’s a shortening of the word fanatic. Mr D.: She was brought up with soaps, because her mother, Mrs Applebaum, a lovely lady, I really love her…she was an avid watcher …she was a housewife and this was her passion. Mr H.: Is that the lady that every time she coughs or sneezes bubbles come out of her mouth? he said she was brought up on soaps…. Hans, cutting short the joke which we obviously did not find funny, broke in to ask whether soaps have changed, commenting that most of our interviews had been with younger people. Mr H. speculated that ‘the young people see through soap operas and consider them to be so absurd that they don’t bother with them’. But Hans contradicted him: ‘They watch them alright.’ Mr D. then confirmed this, displaying his knowledge about the young and about fashion trends: ‘They talk today’s language…they use the slang…they’ll also use even in the commercials, as well as the story itself…hard rock sounds and stuff like that. The clothes that they wear is the updated clothes’. Mr D. then mentioned that he called up his son, a lawyer, to verify the implausibility of one of the legal plots on the show. Again, the theme of ‘research’ appears, and Mr D. lets us know that he has access to real knowledge, and is not being taken in by television. Mr H. then asked us about the popularity of American TV in Europe, something he has read about and which horrifies him. This allowed him to share with us more of his knowledge. He has travelled in Germany, he has a keen interest in the Soviet Union and subscribes to Soviet Life. He told us the history of the Carl May society. We listened politely but uninterestedly to these things. But at this moment Mr H. was telling us what he wanted to talk about. For him, talking to academics and to a European professor was a rare opportunity. For our part, we had no real interest in his encyclopedic knowledge or in his generalizations about twentieth-century culture, which repeatedly took the form of
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the statement ‘instead of art imitating life, life imitates art’, woven throughout his comments. To force him back into the position of the everyday television fan, we asked what other shows they watch. Mr H. continued in his educated tone: ‘private detectives type adventure shows, police shows, travelogue shows, historical and archeological productions, such as Jacques Cousteau…the discovery that dolphins have an intelligence now thought to be as high or perhaps even higher than human beings’. This list is not only entirely respectable in terms of bourgeois cultural norms, it is also (not coincidentally) composed entirely of ‘gender genres’. And his preoccupation with education (read class distinctions), voiced throughout the interview, surfaces here again in the fascination with intelligence, albeit in animals. Mr D. contributed that they like to watch documentaries about animals and about castles. ‘They take you through every old castle…we’re interested in all sorts of old buildings…and one of our goals and dreams is that we want to someday buy a Victorian old home and try to restore it.’ This returned Mr H. to a recounting of his travels in Germany. But Mr D. continued to describe the show about castles: ‘And that’s what amazes me …the art, the paintings, the old paintings and where they came from.’ Mr H. interrupted here to mention his favorite show, Murder She Wrote. He explained that they have surmised that the show is shot in the actress’s own home on the east coast, in ‘a beautiful area and a beautiful home’. We asked why he said it was like a soap opera, still trying, even after an hour, to draw out these critical categories. He explained that there is ‘a lot more talking than any action of any kind…that program is just very talkative’. But Mr D. interrupted, ‘Larry, it’s logical talk though. They are trying to solve a crime. At least a crime is committed.’ This led to a debate about whether Hill Street Blues and Barney Miller are soap operas, with Jim explaining to Larry the differences. ‘They label it a comedy. They don’t label it a serious drama or a series.’ Now Mr H. returned to his theme which sounded like something he planned to say before we arrived. ‘it’s got to be negative and down in order to be…’ (soap opera). Mr D. explained again ‘I think it was originally started for ladies that were doing their laundry and their wash and they were using this soap.’ Sensing the end of the interview. Mr H. now brought up the most personal and the most passionate judgment of television. As in many interviews we conducted, feelings of real anger or despair surfaced at the end of the conversation, as more personal details from the past were brought in. One point I will say. If you want to call it resentment you could call it that …it is always the parents’ fault. Never the kids that are old enough to make their own decisions. They are always made to look good. Or victims of the way their parents raised them…. Just as though they had not control over their own lives as all brainless boobs. All the father’s fault. Father never knows anything. He’s a boob, an idiot. Only mother knows how to make decisions. Or the kids are the heroes always….
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He continued: Father Knows Best was a satire on father knowing best. He was made to look like a ridiculous buffoon. That was another…you could call it a situation comedy, if you want. I think it borderline soap opera. But always the kids come out looking perfect…. Looking back now, I never suspected what my parents had to go through. I was one of those that was sympathizing with the kids until I became a parent and had children of my own. Now all of a sudden I’d just as soon slap the little monsters around…. Mr Dubois got in the last words before we broke up the interview: ‘That’s my theme song. I know what it is like to be young but you don’t know what it is to be old.’ Conclusion In writing up this interview, I have done extensive editing. I have attributed intentions and feelings to others. I have bolstered some generalizations I wanted to make with the authority of the real empirical subject. I have emphasized a couple of points, the role of gender and the role of cultural capital, which I would like to pursue here. Before doing so, let me also argue that audience studies might be helped at this point in time by the publication of unedited transcripts along with analyses. In a partial fashion, I hope to have demonstrated here how certain statements, if taken out of context in a discussion of something like ‘genres’ or sitcoms might create quite a different impression than when the interview is taken in sequence. Clearly, more concern should be paid to language in audience studies, and to the social context which produces it. What I have described here involves many ‘errors’ in terms of the goals of unstructured, ‘ethnographic’ interviewing. These problems were accentuated by a lack of rapport in the interview, but I do not believe that these errors are avoidable. We must pay more attention to methodology in empirical audience studies, and at the very least describe these methods more fully. But the problem will not disappear by adopting a more ‘correct’ method of interviewing. The social identities of academic researchers and the social identities of our TV viewing subjects are not only different, they are differently valued. We cannot lose sight of the differences that exist between us and our subjects outside of our discussions about television. This interview underscores the fact that the differences that may be played out in conversation between interviewer and subject (I use the term advisedly) are antagonistic differences, based on hierarchically arranged cultural differences. Recognizing such distinctions will be difficult for academics, Marxists or not, because of our highly homogeneous work environment, and our intensive professional socialization. Television may be particularly fascinating to us because it seems to provide access to the ‘other’, the working-class, the female audience, the fantasized agents of revolutionary change. But it will not suffice to imagine ourselves to be this other audience, or to adopt the position of the enthusiastic fan, as John Fiske has recommended. ‘Slumming it’ on our part merely obscures the fact that we are in a dominant relation in terms of access to
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cultural capital. Sitting down face to face, doing interviews with people different from us, does help raise consciousness about these issues. Empirical study is necessary to understand television viewing. But we must not pretend that the differences we find will be sympathetic or ideologically correct or even comprehensible from our own class and race and gender positions. As a feminist, I did not find Mr H. to be a particularly sympathetic subject (my irritation at his sexist jokes being, of course, a marker of my own class background). The currents of hostility and aggression which ran through Mr H.’s conversation, culminating in the discussion of his children, were disturbing to me. In my other work I have tended to focus on interviews in all-female groups where a certain level of rapport was established, and where the subjects were much more malleable to my direction of the interview, more forthcoming, more interesting because they related the media to their personal histories. Feminist linguists have found some evidence that women interrupt less often and rarely speak in lengthy monologues: we certainly found this true in our interviews. But Mr H. and Mr D. remind us about an important lesson in terms of the ‘gendered spectator’. They offer a vivid example of the denigration of women as an ego-defense. I am reminded of Bourdieu’s point that explicit aesthetic choices are in fact often constituted in opposition to the choices of the groups closest in social space, with whom the competition is most direct and most immediate, and more precisely, no doubt, in relation to those choices most clearly marked by the intention of marking distinction vis-à-vis lower groups. (op. cit., p. 60) The two men offer two different positions from which to do so (there are many more). Mr H. occupies the more machismo tradition (and appears the most ignorant about television). Television appeals to women because it is downbeat, emotional, talky. He is for history, for research, for facts, for action. He despises or resists character identification. He would rather ‘prove himself’ by talking about his educational exploits. He dominates the conversation repeatedly. Mr D. sets up an equally rigid dichotomy between himself and the woman as spectator. But he is more involved with television and approaches it from the position of an aesthete: he is interested in such as clothes, fashion, home design, architecture, art, forms which may challenge heterosexual male norms. What is curious here is the similarity in relationship to the construction of the audience ‘other as female’ despite these differences. It suggests the importance of mapping out the interplay of class and gender differences on the field of cultural consumption. The interview was full of miscommunications, and these miscommunications were often based on class differences, on the unequal possession of cultural capital. When interviewing those less educated, or with less ambitions to appear educated, than Mr H., this has been less of a problem. It is precisely because he aspired to bridge the gap which separated him from us that he made more mistakes. His system of references—Soviet life, German castles, secret societies, the military—was very different from our own, but we could recognize it as undistinguished. Throughout the interview, our status of academics
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compelled Mr H. to range widely over topics, to boast, to wander, to interrogate us about our opinions and knowledge. We did not want to surrender control of this verbal ‘exchange’, and this increased the undercurrent of hostility in the interview. The gap in class between Mr Howe and us, with its different priorities—material artifacts over ideas, history over sociology, encyclopedic knowledge over theory—is a relationship based not just in difference but in the antagonism of competing class values. The struggle between the dominant fractions and the dominated fractions tends, in its ideological retranslation, to be organized by oppositions that are almost superimposible on those which the dominant vision sets up between the dominant class and the dominated classes: on the one hand, freedom, disinterestedness, the ‘purity’ of sublimated tastes, salvation in the hereafter; on the other, necessity, selfinterest, base material satisfactions, salvation in this world. (Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 254) Bourdieu argues that nothing is better able to express social differences than the field of cultural goods—and here I would substitute television—because ‘the relationship of distinction is objectively inscribed within it, and is reactivated, intentionally or not, in each act of consumption, through the instruments of economic and cultural appropriation which it requires (ibid., p. 226). Obviously, Bourdieu’s ideas would have to be reworked to suit the United States. But his work attests to the importance of relating television to other cultural fields, food, art, clothes, furniture, films, newspapers, etc., the better to see class distinctions at work. In this broader context, it may be possible to avoid portraying television as a paragon of cultural pluralism (something for everyone, separate but equal, everybody happy). Though it is farthest from our intentions, critical scholars engaged in empirical cultural studies have borne a slight resemblance to market researchers. The challenge is to investigate popular tastes and explain how these tastes are distributed in relations of domination. To do so will also necessitate recognizing our own dominance and our own class interests within the system of cultural distinctions. Notes Thanks to Roy Metcalf for his extensive help on the project and his excellent transcription; and to Gabriele Kreutzner, Eva-Maria Warth and Hans Borchers, my co-workers on the Soap Opera Project. 1 Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Text and audience’, in E.Seiter, H.Borchers, G.Kreutzner, and E.Warth (eds) Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (London: Routledge, 1989), 116–29. 2 Martin Allor, ‘Relocating the site of the audience’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5:3 (1988), 217–33. 3 This study has been written up in the essay ‘Don’t treat us like we’re so stupid and naive: towards an ethnography of soap opera viewers’, in E.Seiter, H.Borchers, G.Kreutzner, and E.Warth, 223–47. (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
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4 In this sense they were the opposite of Umberto Eco’s ‘model readers’. See my ‘Eco’s TV guide: the soaps’, Tabloid 5 (1982). 5 See Andreas Huyssens, ‘Mass culture as woman: modernism’s other’, in After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 6 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 253.
The transcript Because so little ethnographic data is published in full, the transcript of the interview upon which this article is based is included in the hope that others will find it useful to their research. HB: As I told you on the phone, we’re a team of four people and the whole thing is funded by a German research foundation. The reason we are doing these interviews is to find out how people watch soap opera, what people’s watching experiences are? ES: We don’t have a set plan of questions that we want to ask you. We are interested in what your opinions are about soap opera. Mr H.: We’re being recorded right now? HB: Yes. So which are your favorite soap operas? Which are the soap operas you watch ? Mr D.: Well since we spend most of our afternoons out we prefer to watch any of the soaps that are on in prime time. The reason why, I think both Larry and I, have a tendency to watch these things occasionally, is because we are both semi-retired and some of the programs, other than soaps, are very very bad…that we figured, well, maybe today we’ll see something good happen rather than something tragic happening, which the soaps have a tendency to do…they’re always fighting with each other, they’re always against each other. As a matter of fact, I think that the characters are written in that way. Instead of trying to make you feel better they make you feel worse. And we enjoy some of them. Dynasty, we watch Dynasty. And some of the new ones that are coming up…the new one with Charlton Heston…we both happen to like Charlton Heston’s performances, and that’s why we watch. The Colby’s is the same. Of course, it’s a spin-off of all the others. And after a while, after watching a few years, you begin to realize that it’s repetitive. They repeat. If they don’t have a certain problem in one, they’ll have it in another. And…another reason why I think that I usually watch serials…I like to see how they work out their problems. I like to see how they work it out. Mr H.: Well, I guess, soap operas, in one way, make you glad that you don’t have any more problems in life than you do. To make a comparison between your own life’s ups and downs and whatever they have manufactured into each individual soap opera. Everything seems to be so terrible, you know, it’s a tragedy about to happen all the time. Somebody’s ill and dying or a child dies stillborn or a marriage is about to break up because of another woman or another man. It’s just that, I guess, the soap operas would die on the vine if they were geared to happy events. They have to gear to bad events, because evidently the human animal is only interested in hearing and seeing the bad. You couldn’t have a happy ending; you couldn’t have an enjoyable program with people just normally enjoying themselves or children behaving normally—they have to behave abnormally. Adults have to act crazy and be on drugs or liquor in order for
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people to enjoy it. And that gives the people, not necessarily me, but most people, I think, have a vicarious sense of pleasure that…. Thank God that’s not the way I lead my life…or…. There but for the grace of God go I…. That’s what it’s geared to—the negative, the black side, the dark side of life. HB: May I ask which soap operas are you referring to? The nighttime soap operas? Mr H.: Some daytime early hours and other night time. ATWT is one. Dynasty is another, like he mentioned. Mr D.: Falcon’s Crest is one of my favorites. It just so happens that both of us like certain scenes…other than old houses, like in FC. That home is beautiful. We’d like to own it. Mr H.: Dallas is a favorite. Not necessarily, but I mean it’s the least bad of most of the rest. It’s the most…the one you can tolerate the most. Mr D.: It doesn’t, you see, Dallas doesn’t put women in a good light. They are all lousy. They are all full of hate, envy, and jealousy. They are all out for…Dallas tends to make you feel that these women are out to power hunt. And they want to take it away from men. But FC has its good points and its bad points. One of the good points is that it’s a vineyard…and Larry comes from Santa Barbara where there are an awful lot of vineyards. So those scenes are familiar to him and I’ve been there and I like Santa Barbara—at least I used to. Anyway, so the scenes that they show in the vineyards, and the story involved around the family struggle on the show interests me, and interests him. ES: You mentioned the house on Falcon Crest. Which house is that? Mr D.: Her home. Jane Wyman’s home. The big house. The big estate. Mr H.: Used to be a Roman Catholic…like a monastery, many years ago. And it was sold and then it was…the area around it was converted into an area of a large amount of growing of grapes for wine purposes. They had their own separate wine cellars where the…oh, I remember now…did you ever hear of a Roman Catholic order called the Christian Brothers? That’s the name of the order. In fact, they even have that label on their wines. Christian Brothers. But, what I was going to say is that, I think the soap operas that I can tolerate the most are the ones that don’t take place in one room for the whole episode—where they stand there and talk each other to death. And never move outside. I like to see some automobile travel, some outdoor scenery, not just two people or three people at a table sitting there yakking each other to death. ES: Which ones are the worst that way? Mr D.: I think the afternoon ones have a tendency to be too tragic. They pull you down, whereas the night time ones have some element of surprise or adventure or sometimes, occasionally, things turn out well. The girl gets the guy that she’s after and she finds that divorcing her husband is not as bad as she thought it would be. That she’s not going to commit suicide. Those things, I seem to think that they make it more tragic in the afternoon, because afternoons are geared to woman, and woman likes to cry and they like to see somebody else’s tragedy. It makes, as Larry said, it makes their own lives more tolerable. ‘Oh, I’m not doing so bad. Look at her.’ And they relate to that, whereas I, as a man, can’t relate to that. But I can relate to the…evening ones which show these powerful guys who are greedy and out for power and out to destroy and full of hate and everything else. It’s man’s inhumanity to man—and I can understand that. Not that I relate to it…I think it’s disgusting…I think it’s terrible. JR is hateful. I realize that most of these writers, that write soaps, try to gear it to make it more exciting that way. So they exaggerate everything. They exaggerate the want of
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power. And although I shouldn’t say exaggerate, maybe I’ve led a very sheltered life, and I haven’t seen it that exaggerated in my life time. HB: When you say exaggerate do you mean exaggerate compared to actual life, business life, for example? Mr D.: I think they make it more exciting that way. Now I’ve been in business for a long time and I know that there’s thievery and I know that there’s competition and I know that people are really pitted against each other, but I don’t think they tend to think violently, as I say this is one of the exaggerations on soaps. They think violently. If a guy gets mad at this woman because she’s trying to take his business away—he slaps her around. I mean, to me, I’ve never seen it—maybe it does happen—maybe it does happen. That’s what I say, maybe I’ve been sheltered. Maybe I feel, because I’m nice and I wouldn’t do that they should be nice. I realize that it is fiction and so I accept it as fiction. I can’t really say that I would feel that this is true to life to me. HB: What do you think of the women on these shows who don’t let themselves be slapped around, who fight back? Mr D.: They can be pretty vicious too. Joan Collins is the most vicious of them all. She don’t let anything get in her way. She’s a strong woman. Maybe there are women like that. Maybe there are. I haven’t ever met any. So that’s why I feel its sort of vicious. Mr H.: I was just going to remark on a phrase, that I’ve heard a lot of times, about how art imitates life. I’ve seen an increasing tendency, at least in this country, cause I haven’t travelled to other countries for a number of years, whereby there is a tendency to turn things completely around backwards. To the point where life is imitating art. That’s not the way it should be, that’s upside-down. Life should not imitate art—art should imitate life. More and more people are being…I call it a subtle form of brainwashing…where people are concluding that that is the way to behave because they saw it on television, that’s accepted behavior. They’re are not thinking for themselves. They’re allowing that thing over there to do their thinking for them. I don’t do that—I refuse to do that. That’s where I say that more and more life is imitating art and I don’t like that trend at all. And specially is that bad with kids—impressionable little kids who grow up. This is the first completely, 100%, television generation, as it has been called now. Completely, from the time of infancy on up to adulthood, complete television generation, first time. More and more, kids do some terrible things and then they tell the police later on…. Well, I…. How did you get such a bizarre idea…. Well, I saw it on TV. Life is imitating art, supposedly art. And another thing I don’t like about these soap operas; they commercial you to death. You know what I mean. Every ten seconds they break into the story, they chop it up, and you don’t know what’s happening anyhow, because while the commercial is running so is the soap opera running. So that when they stop with the commercial and put you back on the soap opera you’ve lost track of where you were. Instead of stopping the episode of soap opera right where they cut in for the commercial…they don’t…because they’re in a timeslot, see. And they can only run so many minutes. So what they are doing is making a sandwich out of it. They are putting the commercial on top of the soap opera and running both of them together at the same time. And that’s chopping off the soap opera, and what have you got left; when you’ve got a dozen commercials in the space of one soap opera. HB: I’d like to ask you when did you first encounter TV or soap opera, for that matter? Mr H.: Well, I guess, the first one about thirty years ago. They had ‘em. Mr D.: They also had them on radio.
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Mr H.: Television has been around a number of years. Did you know television was around before World War II. In three countries—the United States, England and in Germany all had viable working television networks. Did you know that the first Olympics…not the first…but the 1936 Berlin Olympics were televised back to Berlin. 1936! I would say that my television watching started thirty years ago, but my soap opera…I never looked…I never…what I’m trying to say is I never searched them out. They just happened to come along. That goes back to about 1960, I’d say. HB: Which show was that, do you remember? Mr H.: No, I don’t. That’s how important it was. Mr D.: At that time, I believe, Larry, if you remember correctly, they came out with all these hospital and doctor…. Mr H.: That’s right. You’re right. You broke the log jam there. Ben Casey was one. Dr Kildare was another. Let’s see, what else? General Hospital, that was another. That was a biggy. Now you start jogging the…. Mr D.: And everybody was taking their pulses and…. Mr H.: They did that to death on those hospital shows. Mr D.: After a while, I guess, both the writers and directors and everybody else, and even the actors, were sick of them, because they had too many. Some of them are still on. General Hospital is still on. HB: Do you still watch it? Mr D.: Occasionally. HB: Does it make sense to watch occasionally? Mr D.: Occasionally. Not really. Sometimes…in General Hospital, I notice, what they do is they fill you in. They give you, at least, a synopsis, of part of the story that you haven’t seen or may have missed. So, but occasionally also you’ll all of a sudden you’ll see a new character and you’ll wonder where they came from. But…in those hospital series…it seems they get involved with one or two cases…that are new…and they complete them. Either the guy dies or he lives or the lady has her baby or whatever. Or she gets her disease and it is cured or it’s terminal. So when they tell you it’s going to be terminal already and you sob a little bit …you cry a little bit…and you feel sorry for the poor dear and these things are terrible. See now those things are more or less true to life. Those hospital things, I mean, we all have had family that have departed from chronic illnesses and stuff. I’ve never been in the hospital in my life—so it’s always an adventure—until recently. I had a minor heart attack. I was rushed to the hospital in emergency. So then all the GH things that went on, that I had seen, sort of became real to me. I couldn’t believe that I was in the hospital playing the part of a very, very sick man. Mr H.: Want to hear something incredible that happened a few years ago regarding one soap opera? So incredible that you won’t believe it. It happened in regard to this, uh, soap opera that starred Robert Young as a guy named Dr Marcus Welby. Now the graduating class of Columbia University in New York…of the medical school department of Columbia University…now this has to do with life imitating art. That guy has been an actor all his adult life, he has no medical training at all, except reading cues and reading the script. The graduating class, and this was not a spoof either, they were quite serious about it…they had been indoctrinated, or at least several of them in positions of power in the graduating class…to bring whoever they chose as a speaker… a valedictorian speaker at their graduating class. So they actually extended an invitation to Robert Young, in Hollywood, to speak…to come and make a commencement
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address at their graduating class, in the late 1970s …and he was on his way to doing it until the authorities at the school, at Columbia U, found out about it. They went right through the roof. The only person authorized to speak at any graduating class at a medical school is an MD. Not a professor. Not a faculty member. Not an outsider. And certainly not an actor. An MD. A fully qualified doctor. But these kids …or I say kids, they’re in their late 20s…were so indoctrinated with this idea that he was a real qualified doctor. And they invited him. And when they were asked later…they were called in on the carpet and asked if this was their idea of some kind of a practical joke or something. They looked wide-eyed. No it wasn’t a practical joke, they were deadly serious. They actually called for a movie actor to come in and give a commencement address on medicine…on what we could expect in the future in the medical world. The guy knows nothing about that—except his cue cards and his script. This is what I mean by…not art imitating life but life imitating art. That’s how deeply these soap operas among others affect people’s thinking. And I still think that that is a classic case of how incredible these things are in influencing people’s lives. HB: Are you saying…would this have wider application on television or just on soap opera? Mr H.: Wider. Not just soap operas. But in this case it was Marcus Welby, MD. Now they put MD on the tail end of that program…. I don’t know how they got that by the medical association or medical society or AMA. Because the guy was in no way an MD. But it just goes to show you how they can trivialize, that’s the word, they can trivialize anything, and make it seem insignificant. They do it with priests. They do it with nuns. They do it with doctors. With scientific people…professors…who spend all their lives studying intently and dedicating themselves to the pursuit of that single goal…and then they bring in some jerk-off actor, who nobody has seen before, and they put a white smock on him and call him Professor This or Professor That or Professor The Other, you know. Something so ridiculous that several times in these soap operas…. I’m not saying I’m so smart and they’re so dumb, but I am saying that several times there have been some statements made, that were no doubt part of the script, that were so stupid that, unless you were a complete dunderhead, you would catch it. And realize that the scriptwriters don’t really know what they are talking about. HB: The way you speak about soap opera and soap opera actors you sound pretty resentful, I must say. Mr H.: Only resentful when they misinform the public. When they set themselves up as something to be admired or respected. I read about what high ratings they have, well, I get resentful because of the fact…. Well what are they measuring themselves against to get those high ratings? What is the mentality of the people that are watching, if that’s what they constitute high ratings. Like that Marcus Welby episode, what does it take to get high ratings like that? I mean, there are those medical students, that already invited a man on his way there. He had to cancel out at the last minute. Wouldn’t you get resentful if your medical school was used for that? HB: Do you ever have discussions among each other after having watched a soap opera? Mr D.: You see, Larry likes to research an awful lot. He’s into that. And when he sees something that is definitely a mistake and wrong, he’ll check on it. Mr H.: Whatever is necessary. What I can do. I can’t get in to secret government archives. I can’t get past security clearances on military bases. But there are ways of
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finding things out. Societies that I have knowledge of, the people who are members of societies. Through letter writing. Library textbooks. Mr D.: He’s an avid reader, so he knows his stuff. Also he has, he really has a photographic memory…which I rely on and he relies on. Mr H.: I’m not really resentful as much as I am…direct and maybe a little blunt. Because when it comes to something that is just a bunch of poppycock I don’t believe…it’s like a friend told me…a good simile is…. Some people, he said, insist on washing and perfuming the garbage before they throw it out. You know what I mean. In this blunt way, what he was saying is, that some things that are so useless and silly are made to seem important…and valuable. And in other ways, important things are trivialized ‘til they become nothing…and that’s what I…I won’t go along with. You might think that that would practically say that I never watch soap operas, ‘cause a lot of that is trivial. But I watch them because like I first said, a lot of times it makes you glad that you don’t have any more problems in your life than you do. HB: Do you ever get mad at a show to the point where you talk to the screen? Mr H.: No. Nor do I get as mad as Elvis Presley once got at his television. He was watching with a couple of friends one time, in Nashville, Tenn., one time, and this is a documented fact…and he saw something that he didn’t like…whether it was a commercial that broke in on his particular program…he, normally, went around frequently with a 45 caliber six-shooter in his waist band…he pulled that out and he shot his television set out…right in the dining room of his big mansion in Nashville, Tenn. That was a well-known story. Then he told his friends…. Take it out and throw it on the dump. But his two friends, then and there, decided they didn’t want to work for him any more…they didn’t know but what he might take a shot at them sometime if he got mad at them. Mr D.: There are other times where, as I mentioned before, some of these new series, that are being on television today, are shot on location and I, in my small way, have been involved in fashion vision, which was commercialized by going to department stores and making short films, commercial films, of the fashions or the sales that they were having or whatever they were having. And it was started by a friend of mine and I went in with him, but that lasted a very, very short while…‘til we lost a lot of money. We lost a lot of time. So I’ve been behind the scene, these things. And that’s when I started to notice things…when you’re on location, and you go to a different location, you find things that you feel are for you. And on these programs that I watch, occasionally, they show the area, they show the home…to fit in with the character… they show the furniture. So little by little I felt…well, this is a little bit…it’s not all a loss. It’s a little bit of an education for me. I know what early American furniture looks like, or Renaissance furniture looks like. I know what pseudo-modern furniture looks like. So it’s sort of educational for me…even though the plot may be absolutely ridiculous. ES: What is there about the furniture and the homes on Dynasty, or Colbys? Mr D.: I like them. Of course, when they go into the sexual scenes and give you this business of a round bed…I’ve never had a desire for a round bed. Also, I feel that, as I said before, that evidently the writers have to do that. They over-exaggerate…even in the sex scenes…such wild passion. And then the next part of the series they’re fighting and you know. Course that happens too—I guess love can turn to hate. For many reasons. One thing I do object to when it comes to families…when there is such violent hatred between a father and a son or a father and a daughter that she actually
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comes out…. “I want to kill my own father”. That bothers me. That bothers me, but I also realize that this is fiction, and maybe the writers have to do that. Another objection I have, and Larry has mentioned it already, is that when you finally get interested and you want to relate to it…you want to get involved with the story…a commercial comes on. So you go wash a dish or…go to the bathroom. HB: Another topic we’re interested in is how do you watch soap operas? do you do other things or do you concentrate…? Mr D.: It depends. It depends on how much time or where our minds are. If we have other pressing things to do and we can watch as well as accomplish something else without just sitting and watching…we’ll do that. Mr H.: Normally we don’t do anything in here and that’s where the TV set is …we only have one…some people have a TV set in every room so they can do this and that and they can stand there and watch a small set. But we would have to do everything in here in order to be able to do that. So we …if we have other things to do we just go and do them. If we expect to get anything done, otherwise we’d just sit around and watch TV and nothing else gets done. Mr D.: Occasionally we do have the time and we’re a little bit tired of running around all afternoon, especially in warm weather, so we’ll…all of a sudden we’ll decide we’ll relax. Tonight we’ll watch television and forget about all this other stuff. And then we’ll do it the next day. I was advised to do that by my doctor. He said don’t pile it up. HB: So when you watch a daytime soap opera it’s accidental? Mr D.: It all depends. If it’s raining and we can’t get out to do the things that we want to do out of doors…that’s when we’ll watch in the afternoon. And as I told you, most afternoon programs are geared to ladies. That’s when they show all the gushy… Mr H.: They can stand there and iron or they can stand there and prepare food or whatever and watch TV. HB: Do you ever get a chance to talk to other viewers about soap opera? Mr D.: I have a very, very good friend…been a friend for about 45 years I’ve known her… she is now working in a hospital in LA. That lady has been watching soaps most of her life, and she’s such an avid watcher that even at work she goes into her boss and tells him…My program is on. And that’s when she takes her break. They have a little TV set in the lunch room. Her boss doesn’t mind. Shirley…she works in the Veteran’s Hospital…her husband…that’s why they have a TV…her husband sells them…he works for a Japanese company. He’s one of their top salesman…so that’s why they have a TV set. Mr H.: Well, you know where the word fan came from…it’s actually true …it’s a shortening of the word fanatic. Mr D.: She was brought up with soaps, because her mother, Mrs Applebaum, a lovely lady, I really love her,…she was an avid watcher …she was a housewife and this was her passion. Mr H.: Is that the lady that every time she coughs or sneezes bubbles come out of her mouth?…he said she was brought up with soaps. Mr D.: One thing I want to tell you, while we’re on the subject of soaps. They used to have a satire called Soap. That was on, at least when it started, it was on late at night because they used all kinds of foul language and very sexy talk and all kinds of really… almost porno situations…so they didn’t want young people watching. Now they are showing it again, and it’s about three o’clock in the afternoon. So, occasionally, when
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I see this is on, I turn it on and I wonder how they really get away with it. At three o’clock in the afternoon there are children home. Mr H.: It shows you the passage of a few years…. Mr D.: It’s very funny and I know it’s satirical and sometimes they go to an extreme to hook you, to grab you. HB: You just reminded me of a question I wanted to ask before. Most of the people we have interviewed are younger, younger people of 20, 25, 30 years of age and they don’t have the soap opera experience you have. Would you say that soap opera has changed? Mr H.: I think the young people of today, whether this is good or bad I’m not necessarily prepared to say, but I think the young people see through soap operas and consider them to be so absurd that they don’t bother with them. The plotting is so thin and so threadbare…it’s like tissue paper…and they…as they put it…it doesn’t turn them on. But if a rock and roll music show came on that would turn them on. All that banging and beating and screaming and wailing and yowling and howling and growling that would turn them on. But a soap opera…two people talking themselves to death… they’d sit there…. HB: They watch them alright. Mr D.: I’ll tell you why. Because they have changed a great deal. Each…every ten years they gear it to a certain type of viewer, so they do have…you’ll see…and even in the soaps they don’t talk the same way. They talk today’s language…they use the slan… they’ll use also, even in the commercials, as well as the story itself, they’ll use occasionally hard rock sounds and stuff like that. The clothes that they wear is the updated clothes. That’s the same way it’s been even many, many years ago. The clothing of each generation, or each ten years, of course fashion changes. The whole outlook seems to change. They go…have two son…I went through the hippie period with them…the era…and then I went through other…now one of my sons is a lawyer. So occasionally, when I see a soap with some legal background in it, I discuss it with my son. Because he doesn’t watch them too much—he’s too busy being a lawyer. But I tell him…is this true…and he’ll tell me if there is a case that they tried to tell you about on your soap…and I ask him…Ron is this factual? Could this really happen—could a guy really get off?…so he says…In these days, he probably could get off. No matter what crime he’s committed and as he says…. Because the prisons are overcrowded, the system…the criminal system is…we don’t have enough policemen around and things like that. So things change and I think that soaps change with them… they have to. They have to in order to make them even a tiny bit credible. HB: Speaking of clothes. What do you think of the clothes on Dynasty, Krystle’s clothes, for example? Mr D.: Nothing but the best. Those women are so gorgeous. I wish I was young again. HB: I’m probably not telling you anything new when I tell you that Dynasty is also very popular in Germany. Mr H.: Is it? That brought to mind a question I was going to ask you about how much I have noticed since I was over in that part of the world…I don’t know what is going on now, I only know what I read. It seems like Europe has been so heavily influenced by American television, but a subtle change has come about in this country…many of the things that in this country are almost ridiculed or put down as being silly or stupid are taken with far greater credibility over in Europe than they are here. And that’s peculiar, there is another example of instead of art following life, life following art. I
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find that reversing of reality…is what it is. A reversal of reality. What should be often isn’t and what should not be is. I think to myself…. My God…I mean this may sound very unflattering, but I think to myself…. My God, what is going on over there? Are people losing their minds or something? Can’t they discriminate between the real and the fantasy? Because some of it is so palpably absurd, not just the soaps…I’m talking about TV in general. That…you think, how could such and such a show be popular? ‘Cause you talk to people, like here or where I used to live…a group of people…and all of them are against a certain show…well you can say…. Well tastes change between certain people. What you and your friends don’t like somebody else would like. Yet some things are so really bad that you can’t imagine how they could be popular. HB: Not just Dynasty. Dallas, Falcon Crest, Bonanza. Mr D.: Well Bonanza is…used to be my favorite, because I like westerns. Mr H.: You also have the Karl May Society. Have you ever heard of that? [Tape ends] Mr H.: In Russia, no less, they have the equivalent of a Karl May Society. They actually get out and have summer encampments every year…they dress up in cowboy…in western costumes, authentic down to the last detail, also in various Indian costumes, authentic down to the last detail. They even have connections with various Indian tribes in this country to send them eagle feathers, of a certain type, not from eagles that have been killed but from eagles that have been salvaged out of the woods or whatever—because they want the authentic thing. And in Leningrad and Kiev and Odessa and all over Russia they have this network of enthusiasts…. My deep interest, as he said, when I get into something, I’ve got to get to the bottom of it. Find out about it…I won’t rest until I do find out about it…and then I got a copy of a magazine called Soviet Life. From a friend…. Have you see this magazine? It’s a color…a fullcolor publication and it looks like what used to be Life magazine in this country. And in that particular issue was confirmation of what I had heard. About seven pages were devoted to text and photographs of these Russian citizens, male and female, youngsters, adults, young people in their 20s, dressed up as Indians on the one hand (Kiowas, Paiutes, Apaches, Commanchees) and on the other hand as cowboys and original federal soldiers dating back to our American Civil War. Now I can’t believe any of this. You know what started it, believe it or not, there’s a thread of continuity between your interview, with me and Jack, and what got this society going in Russia, about twenty years ago. It was an American soap opera devoted to the wild west. It wasn’t Dynasty or Falcon Crest or Dallas and I’m not sure it was Big Valley, but it was… it might have been Bonanza. Because that came out at a very crucial moment, shortly after WWII and when Russia was recovering from the effects of WWII. I don’t know what triggered it off but all of a sudden…it’s just like after a rain, all of a sudden the grass springs up…. HB: What’s the connection between Bonanza and Karl May? Mr H.: Karl May is another thing entirely. Karl May pre-dates television. Karl May is a horse of a different color. But without television there is that same preoccupation with the American wild west…and did you know that the favorite viewing of both Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, in their private movie theaters in the Reichschancellory in Berlin or the Kremlin in Russia, were American cowboy movies. And this, I think, was a take off into later versions of soap operas that dealt with the wild west. Did you know there are, and have been, a number of soap operas. But not Carl May, but I mean this Russian version of it almost sprang completely from television and a television soap
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opera. He may be right, I can’t put my finger on it, but it can all be traced back to one soap opera. After the Second World War. It started in about 1955. About ten years after the war. And it had Russian in the subtitles printed on the screen…. It was still in English…but Russian subtitles. And all of a sudden enough people got interested, so intently in this…again, another example of instead of art imitating life, life imitating art. So it does have a great effect, in some cases, soap operas have a great effect on people’s thinking. HB: To return for the last few minutes of our interview to American television. What other shows do you appreciate Mr Howe? Are there other shows you do appreciate opposed to these others? Mr H.: Numerous. For instance, private detectives type adventure shows, police shows, travelogue shows, historical and archeological productions, such as Jacques Cousteau. There are a couple of others that are involved, having to do with the sea, with dolphins. The discovery that dolphins have an intelligence now thought to be as high or perhaps even higher than human beings. So they can learn a language. They have an experimental school in Florida where they’re teaching dolphins to speak the English language. Really fantastic things. Mr D.: We get a great deal of pleasure out of watching certain documentaries, specially about animals. We are both animal lovers. Not only about animals—they have a new thing that has been on television recently—about the old English castles. Which is fascinating. It’s usually a series—they usually have about three or four of them. They take you through every old castle…we’re interested in all sorts of old buildings…and one of our goals and dreams is that we want to some day buy a Victorian old home and try to restore it. Mr H.: I would like to get back some day and see my favorite castle in all of Germany. The number one. By myself. But I have one favorite castle that I want to see again. One that was built by King Ludwig of Bavaria. Mr D.: So they take you through the home and they tell you all about the artifacts. And that’s what amazes me…the art, the paintings, the old paintings and where they came from. And I’m very surprised that in a lot of these old mansions there are a lot of the Dutch and German and French paintings from way back are on those walls. Besides the old English paintings and it’s fascinating. Mr H.: Don’t forget to tell them about a program that’s a favorite with you, well it is with me too, and it’s almost like a soap opera and it’s shot in a movie actress’s…what Jack believes and I tend to agree with him…in her own home on the east coast. It’s called Murder, She Wrote. It’s very much like a soap opera. What’s her name…Angela Lansbury. She’s the detective lady. It’s taken strictly from Agatha Christie’s books. And the interior of the home, the kitchen and everything…after seeing several episodes…Jack became convinced that it was shot on location…right in her own home. And when he’s talking about paintings and all these artifacts and everything… it’s a very beautiful area and a very beautiful home. HB: Why do you say it’s like a soap opera? Mr H.: Because of the way the script seems to go. There is…it is a trademark of soap operas that there is a lot more talking than any action of any kind. Chase scenes or searches out in the woods or…so much of it is talking in a room between two or three people. That program is just very talkative. That’s why it resembles a soap opera. Maybe it’s not meant to be, but….
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Mr D.: Larry, it’s logical talk though. They are trying to solve a crime. At least a crime is committed. Mr H.: I’m not knocking it—I’m just saying it reminds me of a soap opera. HB: What do you think of Hill Street Blues? That’s a detective show I watch. Mr H.: I saw it last night. Sometimes they have good episodes and other times they’re too silly for words. I don’t know what happens to the script writers…they must have a bad day or something. Mr D.: Hill Street Blues with me has a tendency to be a little too violent. A little bit too much violence for me, so I wouldn’t consider it among my favorite shows. Mr H.: Barney Miller, that’s almost a soap opera type. Mr D.: But that’s comedy. HB: I was going to say, isn’t that a sitcom? Mr H.: Almost. Would you say that’s a separate category? Can’t soap operas also be funny? Mr D.: They label it a comedy. They don’t label it a serious drama or a series. Like we’re used to watching within old movies…we used to go and watch serials. Mr H.: In other words, it’s got to be negative and down in order to be…. Which leads you to wonder why it was labeled soap opera in the first place. Why that name? Unless it was being put down as a form of entertainment. Mr D.: I think it was originally started for ladies that were doing their laundry and their wash and they were using this soap. Mr H.: Here’s another category…this was films now not television…they applied it to TV…but first it became known in films, cowboys movies were, at one point, back about the late 1940s or 50s all of a sudden became known as horse operas. There again is the use of the word opera, like as to ridicule the type of show. On one hand you ridicule it by putting the word soap in front of the word opera and on the other hand you ridicule the cowboy movie by putting the word horse in front of it. Because opera is serious drama as well as music. So to sort of trivialize it, I think, I suspect, I’m not positive, but I suspect, as a means of trivializing it or putting it down you call it a soap opera on the one hand and a horse opera on the other. I’ve long wondered about that. HB: You think Hill Street Blues falls into the category of soap operas? Mr H.: Borderline. Borderline. HB: It does have this little love thing going on between…what are the names. Furillo and…. Mr H.: One point I will say, if you want to call it resentment you could call it that, I do resent the point that they seem to be so intent on…in most soap operas dealing with juveniles and juvenile problems of any kind and that is that always, always, always the parents come out looking bad. It is always the parents’ fault. Never the kids that are old enough to make their own decisions. They are always made to look good. Or victims of the way their parents raised them. Just as though they had no control over their own lives at all. Like they were brainless boobs. It’s all the parents’ fault. All the father’s fault. Father never knows anything. He’s a boob—an idiot. Only mother knows how to make decisions. Or on the other hand mother is a drunk, she runs around with other men and father has to try to hold the family together. The kids are the heroes, always. HB: Hasn’t this always been the case? In television shows of the 60s? Mr H.: To a large degree. Father Knows Best was a satire on father knowing best. He was made to look like a ridiculous buffoon. My Three Sons was another. That was another…
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you could call it a situation comedy, if you want. I think it borderline soap opera. But always the kids come out looking perfect. No fault can be found with them. Only the parents. It’s just like one guy told me…. He was a product of that generation…. He said…. Looking back now, I never suspected what my parents had to go through. I was one of those that was sympathizing with the kids until I became a parent and had children of my own. Now all of a sudden I’d just as soon slap the little monsters around. God, what a change in him. Mr D.: That’s my theme song. I know what it’s like to be young but you don’t know what it is to be old. Mr H.: Orson Welles made a very good…well-known song…a 45 r.p.m. with that title. Mr D.: I’d like to get a tape made and send it to both my kids. HB: Well, this has been very interesting and helpful.
ETHNOSEMIOTICS: SOME PERSONAL AND THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS JOHN FISKE
An anecdote to start with: in 1988 I conducted a small-scale ethnographic study of viewer readings of The NewlyWed Game (Fiske, 1989). On the show four couples were asked about the wives’ sexual compliance to their husbands’ ‘romantic needs’. The two wives who were least compliant were non-white. The two compliant wives were white. The female responses from which the contestants had to choose the most appropriate all had a racial accent—they were ‘Yes, master’, ‘No way, José’, and ‘Get serious, man’. ‘Master’ bore the accent of slavery, ‘man’ of blacks and ‘José’ of hispanics. Gender politics and racial politics were mapped onto each other. I studied three audiences. Myself as fan; graduate and undergraduate students, some of whom were regular viewers of the program, some not; and self-identified fans contacted by advertising. These audiences were overwhelmingly white middle class, but of both genders—although the third ‘audience’ was overwhelmingly female. The readings revealed by my ethnographic methodologies were largely concerned with the gender politics, and almost totally ignored the racial. Autoethnography So what were these methodologies? First I attempted through theoretically structured introspection to study my own responses. I knew that I watched the program regularly with considerable enjoyment. My theory of popular culture did not situate me as a cultural dupe, but as an active selector and user of the resources provided by the cultural industries out of which to produce my popular culture and my pleasure. My theory also told me that this pleasurable culture was produced at the interface between the program and my everyday life, and that the meanings involved in it would be produced by the interdiscourse between the social discourses in the text and those through which I made sense of my ‘self’, my social relations, and my social experience. These discourses worked not only to circulate meanings but also to constitute ‘me’ as both a social agent in the reproduction and regeneration of those meanings, and also as the social agency through which they circulated. I think I could discern in myself three main discursive practices by which I produced sense and pleasure out of this interface between the mass-produced text and my everyday life. There was a professional discourse which blurred the distinction between the domestic and academic—as a professional theorist of the media and popular culture I was
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interested in this as an instance in which I could trace larger cultural and political forces at work, much as a linguist can trace macro-linguistic systems in a single utterance. It is, obviously, this discourse which is dominating my account of my investigation of myself as fan. This professional discourse was in some ways contradicted, in others completed, by a more popular one. I have vulgar tastes; the garish, the sensational, the obvious give me great pleasure, not least because they contradict the tastes and positioning of the class to which, objectively, I ‘belong’, that of the white, middle-class male with acquired rather than inherited cultural capital. Taste is as political as knowledge. As a fan and an academic I moved between my professional and popular discursive strategies in both my viewing of the program and my investigation of my viewing. My third discursive strategy was much harder to describe—it involved those more semantic discourses by which I made sense of the topics that both infused my daily life and were called up by the program. Central to these was the discourse of gender, though any discourse necessarily overlaps into those situated close to it in that discursive matrix around which we, as social agents, move as we struggle to make sense of our experiences within the socio-political system. So, intersecting with the discourse of gender were, in my case, those of age, class, and, to a lesser extent, race, as I used my viewing of the program as a pleasurable part of the constant social process of making sense of myself as a social agent, a sense that had to encompass the position of being a middle-aged, middle-class white male, once married, now in an important heterosexual, non-marital, mixed-age relationship, living successfully in patriarchy and capitalism while being deeply dissatisfied with both, yet being concerned to produce areas of personal pleasure and happiness within which to make functional, usable meanings of my gender, class, age, and sexuality. This meaning process is cultural even though I trace it in the realm of the personal because the sense I make of myself is not only reproduced and regenerated from social resources, both discursive and textual, but is then inevitably put into social circulation in myriad ways as I move through my daily histories and encounters. My first investigation, then, was of myself, not as an individual, but as a site and as an instance of reading, as an agent of culture in process—not because the reading I produced was in any way socially representative of, or extrapolable to, others, but because the process by which I produced it was a structured instance of culture in practice; it was an instance of enunciation of a systemic social resource; it was langue manifesting itself in parole. What makes it theoretically valid is its systematicity and its amenability to theorization, not its representativeness in an empiricist sense. Neither I nor my readings are typical, but the process by which I produced them is evidence of a cultural system. Its systematicity is evidenced further by the physical environment in which I viewed the program. The discursive mix that structures my social self, and my readings of television, not surprisingly also structures my living room (see Fig. 1). My academic discourse has dictated not just the prominence of books in the room, but also the sort of books— academic, paperback, to be read and used, rather than coffee table books to be looked at and to give pleasure as objects. These books are functional books. But displaying them at all is the taste of a fraction of the middle classes—what Bourdieu (1984) calls the dominated dominant, those with high cultural, but low economic capital, and it signals a particular professional blurring of the distinction between work and leisure.
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Plate 1
This same class position is evidenced by the antique furniture, much of it bought at auctions rather than through dealers. This, again, as Bourdieu has shown, is a typical cultural practice of those whose position in the social space is similar to mine. The antiques, however, are inflected by my left-wing inclinations in a number of ways. They are what is known as ‘country’ antiques. Thus the table is not by Sheraton nor by a craftsman working directly from his book of designs but by an anonymous local carpenter: it is evidence of how Sheraton’s style was modified and absorbed into popular taste— simplified, made more conventional, the signs of its individual artistic signature erased— the movement is from the bourgeois to the popular, from the artist to the anonymous craftsman. More important perhaps, for me at least, antique furniture, unlike modern manufactured furniture, can be extracted from the commodity system of industrial capitalism. It resists the notion of individual possession. That table is 200 years old; it has passed through many households and will pass through many more: rather than possessing it I feel that I hold it in trust, I have a social responsibility towards it; it is situated within the communal and the historical rather than the individual. A similar reluctance to enter uncritically into the capitalist commodity economy can be seen in the homemade TV stand, and also in the TV, the VCR, and the audio cassette player, all of which are the cheapest I could find that would serve the function I wanted them to. They are (relatively) low tech, low consumerism. On the wall are poster reproductions of Aboriginal paintings. These clearly carry specifics of my personal history—I spent some years in Australia, and they are both a souvenir and a public display of that Australianness. They also exist with my class discourse—as Leal (in this issue) shows, ‘peasant’ or native art in urban, middle-class homes bears class-specific meanings which are absolutely different
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from those it bears in the society in which it was produced. But in conjunction with my antiques they enter not only a middle-class discourse, but also a left-wing inflection of it. They, too, carry meanings of the communal, of the unpossessability of the anticommodity. But these meanings, like all which oppose the dominant, can only exist in conditions of struggle. The posters are cheap (democratic) reproductions of the ‘originals’ (the word exists only in the high bourgeois aesthetic, not at all in the Aboriginal, nor in the popular) which are possessed by a white millionaire: each reproduction is captioned: ‘Aboriginal paintings from Central Australia: from the collection of Robert Holmes a Court’. The commodified originals are now part of the economo-cultural investment of a major capitalist: their poster reproductions enter the mass-market system (though their profit went to the Aboriginal peoples, not to Holmes a Court). Despite this powerful incorporating process, however, they can still carry enough meaning of a completely contradictory culture: erasure is never total, recovery always possible—it depends on the process and context of reading. The contradiction between my professional, class tastes and my more vulgar, popular ones must be what led me to place cheap plastic toy TVs on top of the real one, as though to provide myself with a reminder of the contradiction between my vulgar tastes and my respectable ones with their ‘message’ that TV is essentially trashy. Like all signs these toys are multidiscursive—they mean differently in different discourses: in my populist discourse they bear meanings of garishness and fun; they are also functional—as souvenirs they remind me of the trips on which I bought them. But in my middle-class discourse they comment on the trashiness of TV; in my academic discourse their irony enables me to distance myself from both the middle-class put-down of TV and the populist reluctance to theorize its own pleasures. Besides the TV are rubber caricatures of Reagan and Thatcher which squeak discordantly when squeezed, but their ‘silent’ speech is equally eloquent. They are from a British satirical TV puppet show, Spitting Images, and are not only a sign of my left-wing politics, but also that those politics can use television as part of their discourse, as part of their social circulation. They also indicate the fun and offensiveness that the process can produce. They are akin to my reading of the NewlyWed Game in their pleasurable mix of progressive politics, fun, offensiveness, and a populist vulgarity. This excursion into autoethnography has had a number of aims. I wanted to explore, in a specific instance, the idea of a symbolic environment that is constructed by a social agent out of the socially available resources, and that equally constructs that agent as a social member and marks his (in this case) position in the social space. The practices of dwelling in a house by which we make the landlord’s or builder’s structure our own for the time of our dwelling become, for de Certeau (1984) emblematic of how popular culture works in capitalist societies. We make our own spaces within the place of the other. An environment, therefore, is a contradictory mix of ours and theirs, it is what we make out of their resources (it is therefore a homologue, on a smaller scale, of its use in geographic discourse, where it refers to what a society makes of its natural resources). Television viewing produces a symbolic environment which occurs within a physical environment that is, in its turn, equally symbolic. The meanings and pleasures of television are accented by the semiotics of its place of reception. The two intersect and inform each other at all levels, and simultaneously and continuously merge into the social agent, in this case
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me, who both produces and is produced by them. The contradictory structure of discourse that organizes me as a social agent also organizes my living room and the meanings and pleasures of my television viewing. An environment, then, cannot be separated from the process of inhabiting it, for it exists only in that process. As I am the inhabitant of my environment, it is only I that can experience it from the inside. Using this ‘native’ experience in an academic discourse of course means that I must externalize it and distance myself from it in order both to describe and theorize it. But to produce an autoethnography, I have to be able to move in and out of my domestic environment, I have to be able to bring different, distancing discourses to bear upon my experience, to make that experience both private and public, to account for it as both a specific cultural practice and a systemic instance. Environments can be observed and interpreted up to a point from the outside, but they can only be experienced from the inside, and an autoethnography may be able to offer both perspectives. But any ethnography must include data that lies outside the ethnographer’s: it is necessarily empirical, though not empiricist. It must deal with data that has a material existence in the social world—but the problem is the nature of that existence, particularly if that existence has been generated by and for the process of ethnography. Much ethnographic data has been produced specifically for the investigator, which does not invalidate it, but it does urge caution and self-awareness in its interpretation (in which Seiter’s article is exemplary). Such data usually consist of words (in interviews, questionnaires, letters, phone calls, or conversations). These are recorded and turned into texts which can be analyzed discursively and related intertextually both to the original text (such as a TV program) that occasioned them and to the everyday life of their producers (as Neumann and Eason do in this issue). Such data differ from those ‘found’, but not produced, by the ethnographer. These may be letters to TV producers (D’Acci, 1989), to fanzines or the press, or the domestic environment of everyday life (Leal, this issue). These sometimes blur into the previous category as when ‘real’ conversations are recalled for the ethnographer (e.g. Hobson in Brown, 1989; Radway, 1984; Morley, 1986), and sometimes the ethnographer herself attempts to make the ‘produced’ into the ‘found’ by initiating a ‘real’ conversation and taking part in it as participant as well as ethnographer (Brown, 1987). This often becomes a form of participant observation (Hobson, 1982; Palmer, 1986) when the ethnographer is present during the production of the data but does not generate it directly, though her or his presence must affect it to a greater or lesser extent. In a useful extension of this method, the subjects may be asked to comment on the data noted by the investigator. Autoethnography produces yet another kind of data, ones in which the ethnographer is both producer and product, and which extend the data available from that which exists in material circulation in the social world to include that in the interior, personal world. Critiques of cultural ethnography from high theory (particularly its ideological and psychoanalytic forms) claim that its reliance on observable data exclude it from taking account of some of the most important forces in human and social experience, forces which can only be explained by the theorization of macro-experience, that which transcends and shapes the specificities of both the everyday and the individual. A properly theoretical autoethnography may deflect some of this critique, or at least the more valid
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points in it. It may be able to investigate ways in which socio-cultural forces or the play of meanings, pleasures and power are experienced and actualized both externally (in objects, symbols, practices) and internally in the social—and self-consciousness of the agent, in the organizations of discourse that structure both the interior and the exterior, both the social and the personal and that set the two in a relationship of analogic continuity rather than one of homologic similarity and difference. What autoethnography may be able to do, then, is to open up the realm of the interior and the personal, and to articulate that which, in the practices of everyday life, lies below any conscious articulation. (I had never made myself conscious of the meanings of my living room until I wrote this piece, not was I aware of their analogic relationship with my TV viewing.) It may also avoid the privileging of the theory and the theorist. Both psychoanalytic and ideological theories finally allow the theorist a privileged insight into the experiences of their subjects that is not available to the subjects themselves. They both position the theorist-investigator in a way that is disconcertingly similar to that of the old-fashioned imperialist ethnographer who descended as a white man (sic) into the jungle and bore away, back to the white man’s world, ‘meanings’ of native life that were unavailable to those who actually lived it. Autoethnography may offer a way of coping with the theoretical, ethical, and political problematics shared, in very different ways, by both high theory and empiricist (or imperialist) ethnography. I find traces of autoethnography in that way that some cultural ethnographers (e.g. Hobson, 1982; Radway, 1984; Brown, 1987; Ang, 1985; Lee and Cho, this issue) share the cultural experiences, politics, and pleasures of their subjects. The ethnographer in these cases becomes part of the community of viewers or readers, participates in some of their cultural experiences and thus begins to include her own experience as part of that which is to be studied and thus some of the insights that an autoethnography may be able to make more explicit. They all show, in various ways, the ability to move into and out of their own (auto)ethnography. It is probably not coincidental that all of these workers are women working within a patriarchal academy—for their ethnography requires them to step down (even if momentarily) from the position of privilege and power which patriarchal academia insists is the proper position for the ‘objective’ scholarly investigator and to align themselves with their disempowered subjects. It is also no coincidence that my call for an extension of this methodology (with its politics, ethics, and theory) comes from a left-wing, progressive academic (albeit a male, though hopefully not too masculine a one). Ethnosemiotics My second method was to show groups of students a recording of the program and to play as little part as possible in the discussion that followed. But, of course, my influence pervaded it. All the students knew me and my theories, all were in a professional relationship to me. But this does not mean that they were totally dominated by me— some rejected my theories; many negotiated toughly with my point of view; many were fans of the program long before they met me, and, if I was able to move between the discursive practices of academic and fan, then so too were they. To the extent that a training in semiotics and discourse analysis gives me some purchase on the structures of a
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text, it ought to give me some purchase, too, on the new text produced by my students in discussion. In particular, it ought to enable me to identify within it the play of a popular discourse, the play of an academic discourse, and the interplay between them (see Fiske, 1989). My third method was, through advertising, to call up yet more texts, both by telephone and letter. The telephoned ones were like the classroom ones, influenced by my presence, albeit in a different and more distant form. The ones that came in the form of letters, however, were influenced by the writer’s knowledge of academia rather than by my particular presence within it. Shortly I will analyze one of them in some detail, but before that I wish to distinguish them from, but relate them to, the original text of the program. Let me refer to the program as an industrial text, one produced and distributed for profit by the cultural industries, and the words of the viewers as popular texts produced out of the resources of the industrial as the cultural competencies of everyday life were brought to bear upon it. The industrial text is a commodity that exists as electronic patterns on a tape that can be sold and resold, stored, distributed, used and reused. It is a product composed of signifiers. Popular texts, however, have no such physical presence—they exist only in their moments of reading, which are their moments of reproduction and circulation. They are elusive, they disappear as fast as they are produced, they are ephemeral and live only in their moments and contexts of production. They are thus both difficult to study and to account for in the socio-politics of culture. To study them we almost inevitably have to record them—on tape or on paper or even in our memory, to freeze their state of being constantly-in-process, and thus to give them a material presence like that of the industrial text. This necessarily distorts one of their centrally definitive features, but it does allow them, when frozen, to be taken out of their context and into the study. This points to the second, apparently inevitable, distortion— decontextualization. It is not that the popular text is produced in a different context from that in which it is studied, but that the distinction of text and context is itself invalid. The context of the reception of the industrial text is not just an environment within which the popular text is produced—it is itself part of that text, just as the industrial text is part of that environment, for the popular text can only exist contextually. Popular culture exists only in its process, and that process is inherently contextual for it is social not symbolic or linguistic. In so far as semiotics and discourse analysis deal with texts that are, however falsely, separable from their contexts, the academic studying them must always engage in a hermeneutic reconstruction which can reinsert into the analysis, however hypothetically and tentatively, some of these elements of the context that cannot be turned into a text for analysis. If this is not possible, and it can never be completely so, the analyst must leave signposted gaps in the analysis. A letter from a fan of the NewlyWed Game will serve as an example. It reads: Dear Mr Fiske, Although I’m not sure exactly what you want to know, I can tell you, with some embarrassment, that I have become an avid viewer of The NewlyWed Game. I don’t know if I can really explain why, but I know I started watching it over three months ago, mostly
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because the time it comes on fits my schedule well. After I come home from work, I make dinner while watching the evening news, and then at 7:00 it’s ready, and I can sit down and eat dinner while watching The NewlyWed Game. Probably the thing I like about it is that I can relate a lot of that trivial domestic stuff to my relationship with my own husband, and it’s a little uncomfortable realizing how much we are like those couples on the show. In fact, I usually will answer the questions, and then guess how my husband would respond. If he’s home at that time and watches the show with me, I urge him to answer the questions, so we can compare our answers. Actually, we do learn something about one another, not always what we want to know. So, for that reason I enjoy the show. Another reason might be that I probably like to see people making fools of themselves. Well, maybe not fools, but just being themselves with all their peculiar idiosyncracies. It makes for good comedy in my opinion. The last reason has got to be because I just can’t stand game shows like Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy. I don’t get excited about games of chance or gambling, or that type of thing. I just thought of something else: it has to do with the MC of the show. He definitely goads the contestants to get them going. Stirring up conflict between the husband and wife does seem like part of the show’s appeal. That about covers it, Mr Fiske. For what its worth, I also watch The New Dating Game which follows The NewlyWed Game, but I don’t enjoy that as much. If I were single, I probably would prefer that one more. There are a number of points to make here. I do not wish to focus on the pleasure she produces for herself as she urges her husband to watch with her, so that they can learn things about each other that they do not always want to know. Rather I wish to focus on some of the methodological issues. How do we interpret her desire to write to me, which led her to keep my ad until she had time to? In my ad I identified myself as a fan, I tried to signal my popular discourse as well as my academic one: following Ang (1985) I identified myself as a fan as well as a researcher. I intend to ‘read’ her letter through my academic discourse to attempt to demonstrate a critical ethnosemiotics, a semiotic reading of ethnographic data. First she wants to write to me: not knowing what I want to know, she focuses on what interests her—her embarrassment at her ‘avid’ viewing. I trace here the ideology of popular culture (Ang, 1985) at work. She ‘knows’ that this show is low in the sociocultural hierarchy of taste, but yet, despite her college education, she finds pleasure in it, and she may find that my interest offers a form of legitimation. Her discourse shows evidence of this ideology of popular culture which leads us to denigrate ourselves for enjoying what is socially derided. This is typically explained by a metaphor of addiction: so the phrase ‘I have become’ hints at an addictive process beyond the writer’s control—a loss of control that is firmly contradicted later in the letter when she frees herself from this particular value system. Then she begins to contextualize the program—first by making it part of her domestic routine and in particular her nightly transition from the public to the private. At work she
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plays a publicly determined role, then, in cooking dinner, plays an equally externally determined role in domestic, rather than waged, labor. Watching the news, with its emphasis on the public sphere and the roles people play in it, seems appropriate as she labors in her social role of wife. The NewlyWed Game completes her transition to her personal sphere within the domestic—I can hear her relief in the words ‘it’s ready, and I can sit down’—the word ‘can’ suggests she is at last doing something she chooses to—its absence from the phrase ‘I make dinner’ is significant. It signals the change from labor to leisure, a change her husband made as he stepped through the door. The program is part of her entry into that sphere of her life where she has some control: where popular culture is produced. The discourse in the next paragraph is fascinating. First it reproduces the embarrassment expressed in the first paragraph—‘Probably’, ‘trivial’, ‘domestic’, ‘stuff’. It passes through this quickly, signalling that the values that cause it have to be rejected if the writer’s pleasures are to be investigated. Her discourse is that of patriarchy here with its implicit assumption that ‘trivial domestic stuff’ constitutes the world of the feminine in opposition to the important public world of the masculine reported on by the news. Once she has rejected this discourse and its values, her confidence in her own grows visibly. The verbs and qualifiers become stronger ‘In fact I usually will’, ‘I urge him’, ‘Actually, we do learn’, and she concludes emphatically ‘So, for that reason I enjoy the show’. The gradual self-empowerment that we can trace in the tone of her discourse here parallels that produced by her watching of the show. She ‘urges’ her husband to answer the questions, presumably against his reluctance. She associates this reluctance with the revelation of parts of their relationship that are repressed and though, as a good wife, she claims that what they learn is not always what they want to know, her confident next sentence shows that only in her role as wife does she not want to know; in the sphere of her life where she makes her popular culture—which is politically opposed to her wifely role—she does. The repression of strains in the relationship is to the advantage of the masculine not the feminine, partly because it is a mechanism of making the relationship conform better to the patriarchal ideology of the couple, and partly because the blame for such strains is ideologically placed as part of the feminine role. She returns to this point later, to reemphasize the stirring up of conflict between husband and wife as part of the show’s appeal—and ‘stirring up’ implies bringing up into visibility what is ‘normally’ kept invisible and undisturbed. My respondent’s admission of her pleasure in the revelation of the repressed in her own marriage leads her immediately to its equivalent in the couples on the show. Again she admits her embarrassment and uses discourse that bears values that differ from hers— so she uses it hesitantly: ‘might be that I probably…’. The switch to her values comes in the discursive association of ‘making fools of themselves’ with ‘just being themselves’. This is a small moment of recognition that masculinity and femininity are roles that people play in a constant masquerade, and that when the ideological roles slip people simultaneously ‘make fools of themselves’ and ‘are themselves’: the pleasure comes when the masks slip and their ideology is revealed. The phrase ‘just being themselves’ indicates her sense that there is a social ‘reality’ that is repressed by the roles: the laughter caused by the eruption of this ‘reality’ into the role is subversive. In almost every paragraph of
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the letter there is evidence of a (partial) adoption of patriarchal discourse followed by a pleasurable shift away from it that is the discursive equivalent of the conditions of her everyday life: she lives in patriarchy but finds spaces of her own within which to evade or oppose it. The dual problem of ethnography The problems of an ethnosemiotics, then, can be organized into two main categories: problems of generating the popular (con)texts and converting them into a form that, while making them available for analysis, distorts two of their centrally defining features—their processuality and their contextuality. This leads to the second group of problems, those concerned with the interpretation of these ‘new’ texts and the analysis of the process by which they were produced. The interpretation of any text is inherently fraught with problems, but at least a recorded text of a TV program is, in the realm of the signifiers, the same as that produced and distributed by the industry. A recording of a discussion, a photograph of the room in which the program was viewed, or a letter, are all representations or reproductions of a popular text that were called up for a particular function that differs from that of their original production; they were generated for academic study, not for the purposes of everyday life. They were produced in a different context, for contexts are as imbricated in function as they are in texts. This does not mean that the new functionalizing context has no connection with the original one, but that the differences and connections need to be taken into the analysis and theoretically reconstructed in it. I attempted in my autoethnography to go some way towards contextualizing a moment of reading of an industrial text. I hope I showed some of the ways in which the context is a text itself and in its intertextual relationship with the original text inflected it towards certain readings and away from others. But this text or context was not called up by the ethnographer. The letter was. How do I take account in my analysis that it was a response to my advertisement, and otherwise would never have existed? I suppose I can take some comfort in its tone—friendly, almost as a fan to a fellow fan. The phrase ‘Well, that’s about it, Mr Fiske’, coupled with her inability to know what I wanted, might be taken as evidence that she was minimizing the differences between the context of writing a letter to an unknown academic and that of watching the program. The analysis has revealed some discursive evidence that writing it was pleasurable in a way that paralleled and reproduced the pleasure of watching the program. So I may be able to argue that my analysis of the letter can be transposed relatively directly into an understanding of how she watches the program and how her watching is part of the condition of her daily life. Seiter (in this issue) gives the best example I have yet seen of an analysis of ethnographic data in which she takes full account of the presence of the interviewers, of their gender politics and of their status as professors. She is acute at identifying possible differences between what the viewers tell academics about their TV viewing and the way they watch it in their everyday lives. Of course, she has no way of describing this difference, for her only data is the interview, but she can and does identify those parts of the interview which appear to have been called up by the ethnographers’ academic status. This does not mean that the interviewers gave fake
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accounts of their TV viewing, but it does point to their foregrounding of certain practices and pleasures over others. Both Tulloch and Moran (1986) and Hodge and Tripp (1986) in their work with schoolchildren’s viewing are aware that when the interviews and screenings take place in school the discourse about TV is necessarily influenced by its context and by the way that the interviewer is inevitably positioned, to a greater or lesser extent, as a teacher. Krisman (1987) in her study of working-class girls in a London school found a qualitative difference in the data obtained from discussions when she was present, and one which she was unable to attend, so asked one of the girls to operate the tape recorder in her absence. Articulating such methodological and hermeneutic problems in ethnography is an important first step, even though articulating them is a long way from solving them. None the less, there seems little point in taking the extreme position of writing off all ethnographic data as invalid because of the problems of collecting and interpreting it. It is important that the process of collection and interpretation should be critically commented upon in the study. It is also important that various forms of ethnographic data should be correlated and their analysis combined with a textual analysis. This does not necessarily mean that we should give greater weight to the similarities among various forms of data, for ethnography is often concerned with the investigation of differences and specificities, but it does mean that we should be able to explain such specificities as instances of culture in process in which similar cultural and social forces are negotiated with in specific ways. We should, in other words, see them not as representative, but as systematic. But the ethnographer has to work not only with the data obtained, but also with absences. Semiotics tells us that what is absent from a text is as significant as what is present. The problem faced by the ethnographer is whether or not to intervene in the production of data in order to fill a perceived absence, or whether to leave the absence as significant and face the problems of interpreting it. This bring me back to the problem of the discourse of race in my study. The industrial text contains it: the images of people on the screen and the words they use are conventionally part of that discourse. All signs are, of course, multidiscursive for they are part of a variety of discourses—the words ‘master’, ‘José’, and ‘man’ circulate in the discourses of gender and class as much as that of race, and it was clearly the one of gender that my respondents, and I, selected as the most useful/meaningful to us. This may be because in the experiences of our white, middle-class, everyday lives, which is where our popular culture circulates, we had little need to make sense of race (or class) relationships, but much call on our ability to make sense of gender ones. It is also true, of course, that the explicit focus of the program is on gender. Ethnosemiotics must consider not only which resources of the industrial text are used, but also those which are not (contra those who ignore the industrial text, e.g. Morley, 1986). The absence of the discourse of race is a hermeneutic problem. Maybe it was, in fact, present in some readings but was repressed from their articulated, re-presented form. If so, this was a systematic repression that may be traced to a racist ideology. This, then, poses a methodological problem. Should I have drawn my subjects’ attention to it and thus ‘called up’ a use of the discourse that they, for whatever reasons,
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had chosen to ignore or repress? It is difficult to remember back to my own first viewing of the tape, but I think the discourse of race was part of my enjoyment of the black couple’s discomfiture—their style of interaction and reaction was entertaining and amusing: one white use of the discourse was to make sense of blacks as spectacles of entertainment for whites. I am not sure that I gave much weight to the hispanicness of the other non-white couple. I think, too, that I may have found it marginally amusing and therefore relieving that it was the black man who was least masterful of all. There may have been some relief in the contradiction of the white myth of the physical superiority of black sexuality; but I don’t think that I experienced any pleasure in the placing of the challenge to patriarchal power in the non-white women, though, clearly, this is a possible popular use of this juncture of the discourses of gender and race. I do recall distinctly, however, because it reproduced my dissatisfaction with patriarchy, my pleasure in the resistances of the two (non-white) wives and my displeasure at the two compliant white ones and my dislike of their husbands. What I do not recall at all is whether my pleasure was produced, in part, by the racial dimension. I doubt it, despite the fact that my racial politics are, I like to think, progressive. But these politics pertain more to my public and professional life; unlike gender politics they impinge less on the mundanity of my day-today existence. The process by which I turned this industrial text into my popular culture involved a selective use of its discursive resources and, as far as I could discern, the primary criteria for this selection were ones of relevance to my everyday life and the social terrains I had to negotiate most frequently and most problematically within it. Everyday life is, as Willis shows so clearly (in this issue), highly politicized not just because it occurs within a social structure whose only stable characteristic is its unequal distribution of power and privilege, but also because any personal negotiation of our immediate social relations is a necessary part of our larger politics—the micro-political is where the macro-politics of the social structure are made concrete in the practices of everyday life. The popular text is where the potential meanings, pleasures, and politics of the industrial text are actualized, and it is only in their actualizations that we can identify them. This involves an ethnography of social agents which runs the risk, which we must guard against at all costs, of allowing itself to be incorporated into the ideology of individualism. The social agent is not the individual of individualism but a socially constructed site crossed by a number of intersecting and sometimes contradictory discourses that has been produced by his or her particular trajectory through social space over his or her lifetime. But though social agents must, because of the contradictory nature of social forces, negotiate actively their own trajectory and their meanings of social experience, they cannot produce the discursive resources nor the social structure within which experience occurs, and meanings are made: they cannot choose the socio-historical terrain which their trajectory traverses. They are agents, not subjects, because their activity is not confined to making do with the determinations provided (active, creative, and underestimated though this may be), but what they do with these determinations feeds back in however small a way into the structure that produces them. How we use our language modifies, eventually, the linguistic system itself; so, too, our use of the social
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system is not just a product of that system but a producer of it as well. Any system is modified by each and every one of its uses. Macro-social systems have forces of reaction built into them, whether they be systems of representation or more directly social or political ones: they tend to maintain the current distribution of power (economic, gender, moral, aesthetic, racial, or whatever). Social progress or change can come, then, either from the overthrow of the system at the macro-structural level or from the progressive uses of the system at the micro-politics of everyday life. Ethnography is concerned to trace the specifics of the uses of a system, the ways that the various formations of the people have evolved of making do with the resources it provides. Ethnosemiotics is concerned with interpreting these uses and their politics and of tracing in them instances of that larger system through which culture (meanings) and politics (action) intersect. It is concerned, then, not just with meanings in process but with meanings in action. Refusing the distinction between text and context requires the parallel refusal of the distinction between meanings and behaviors. In the letter from the fan of the NewlyWed Game, the discursive progression from ‘Probably the thing I like about it’ through ‘I urge him to answer the questions’ to ‘So, for that reason I enjoy the show’ evidences a trajectory of meanings that continues from watching the show into social action within the micro-politics of her marriage. So, too, the continuities that connect my construction and activity as a social agent with my pleasures in the program and the symbolic environment of my living room will not stop in the realm of the semiotic or cultural, but will extend themselves into the sociobehavioral. An ethnosemiotics that focuses on cultural processes will necessarily dissolve boundaries between the interior, the personal and the social, for these boundaries are unhelpful constructions: they are constantly crossed by the play of meanings in process which occurs simultaneously within and across all of their territories. The interior is the personal is the social is the political is the interior. Similarly an ethnosemiotics is a textual analysis is an autoethnography is an ethnosemiotics. And through it all we catch glimpses of the play of culture which is ultimately our quarry. References Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas. London: Methuen. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction; a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, M.E. (1987) ‘The politics of soaps: pleasure and feminine empowerment’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 4:2, pp. 1–26 . D’Acci, J. (1989) ‘Women, “woman” and television: the case of Cagney and Lacey’ Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Hobson, D. (1982) Crossroads: the Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen. Hobson, D. (in press) in M.E.Brown (ed.) Television and Women’s Culture, London: Sage. Hodge, R., and Tripp, D. (1986) Children and Television. Cambridge: Polity.
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Krisman, A. (1987) ‘Radiator girls: the opinions and experiences of working-class girls in a London comprehensive’. Cultural Studies, 1:2, pp. 219–29 . Morley, D. (1986) Family Television. London: Routledge/Comedia. Palmer, P. (1986) The Lively Audience: a Study of Children Around the Television Set. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Radway, J. (1984) Reading the Romance: Feminism and the Representation of Women in Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tulloch, J., and Moran, A. (1984) ‘A Country Practice: approaching the audience’. Paper delivered at the Australian Communication Association Conference, Perth, 1984 .
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THE PASSING OF THE REX MARINA VITALE ■ James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy. The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1987), 279 pp.
This book has the rare virtue of being entertaining and well informed at the same time. It succeeds in not being pedantic while simultaneously developing a serious and rigorous critique of a complex cultural phenomenon that exists at the intersection of a multiplicity of interacting institutional, cultural, and discursive practices. The hermeneutical strategy the author adopts to account for this complexity is flexible and open to interdisciplinary suggestions whose co-ordinates he discusses in his methodological ‘Introduction’ before commencing his exploration of a wide repertory of film produced and released in Italy in the fascist period. This choice of theme is important in itself because the effort to examine an entire phase of film production and consumption in Italy, and bring to the surface its cultural significance, immediately reveals an innovative approach. As a matter of fact this approach goes against the grain of the mainstream critical practice which—both in the United States and in Europe—tends to concentrate upon auteur cinema and consequently makes the history of the Italian cinema start with neorealism. It thereby completely overlooks the film production of the fascist period; usually hastily disposed of as an uncouth expression of a regime ideology or as commercial rubbish: in both cases as ‘mere’ popular spectacle. But Hay is not interested in cinema as the ‘artistic’ expression of an author; he does not look at films as closed texts, definable exclusively on the basis of their formal structures. On the contrary, he looks at cinema as cultural production: therefore the analysis he proposes is not textual, but a ‘process analysis’ which may afford ‘a much richer understanding of the collaborative, competitive, and multi-discursive nature of cinematic productions and of the ways that film production and reception worked and reworked cultural ideology than has been provided by traditional film critics and historians’ (p. 4). Moreover, the author succeeds in the difficult task of keeping a balance between Frankfurt-school-inspired conspiracy theories and overly loose-ended reception theories which conflate the dialectic diversity of the encoders’ and decoders’ roles. The critical paradigms he follows are chiefly those offered by the theories of culture proposed by Williams, Lotman, and Geertz. These are pliable enough to accommodate his notion of film production as a complex dialogic process of mediation taking place within a
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fluctuating field of forces. A particularly important role is played in this context by what Hay defines as ‘film literacy’ or, in his words, ‘the signifying process through which a public learns to read films and, in so doing, learns to see and interact’, so that while ‘being learned, these techniques and models become (in an institutional or in a less arbitrary fashion) part of a culture’s larger “educational” forces and processes, i.e., its ways of structuring or disseminating (or teaching) cultural knowledge and ideology’ (p. 17). It is one of the contentions of the book that the wide diffusion of this literacy which occurred during the 1920s and 1930s in Italy contributed to produce ‘the Nation’ or a ‘national popular culture’ in the Gramscian sense of the expression, because it made widely available ‘conventions and codes through which audiences learned to see the world around them and to imagine one outside their own’ (p. 15). But is also the author’s contention that this process of ‘learning’, far from being unidirectional and univocal, is always contradictory and ambivalent, partly because a film’s diegesis ‘carnivalizes social experiences and [its] temporal economy repeatedly affirms the flexibility and mobility among established social categories’ (p. 27), but especially because film literacy, like all literacies, is always critical. Indeed, the author subscribes to Teresa de Lauretis’s affirmation that ‘spectators are not, as it were, in the film text or simply outside the film text; rather […] they intersect the film as they are intersected by cinema’ (p. 28). The bulk of the volume is constituted by the discussion of a large corpus of films which are grouped along tropological lines around six main areas or ‘root metaphors’ which recur with insistence in the most popular films of the period and which therefore build up a powerful popular mythology. What we are presented with, therefore, is not a history, organized in a chronological manner and sealed off in its irrevocable ‘pastness’, but an effort to chart a field of tensions which become visible in those metaphors or myths whose meaning was not fixed but dependent on a variety of elements mobilized by the cultural environment. The first of these tropes is the myth of the grand hotel which provides the setting of a number of films but also a double-edged symbol which could accommodate both the desire of a country in the throes of modernization and the revulsion of a traditional, still semi-rural community, for the glamour of modern life. The second is the myth of America, which was constructed both as a dream and a nightmare not only through the films produced in Italy, but also, and especially, through the appropriation of American films and newsreels by the local culture carried out by means of dubbing, of editing and deleting, and by specialized criticism and more general critical discussions (this section is particularly interesting given the author’s knowledge of the American scene from the inside). Then the analysis focuses on the representation of metropolitan life as a contradictory site of modernity. The public cityscape that outdoor shooting made it possible to choose as settings confronted the cultural, social, and psychological problems engendered by rapid industrialization and technological innovation and expressed an ambivalence towards consumer society. Moreover ‘movies which set dramatic action in urban environments… even enable their filmmakers to redefine and assert Italy’s national values in an age of increased international travel and commerce and, on the other hand, to demonstrate the resiliency of Italian middle classes’ (p. 131). The fourth trope is the rural myth which is
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seen in the context of the clash between the conflicting rhetorics of Stracittà (or ‘ultra-city’) and Strapaese (or ‘ultra-country’). It is a conflict which lies at the heart of the fascist identity and which was felt in all social milieus and debated in intellectual circles at the time. As Hay notes, however, the paradox of their debate and its importance in understanding Italy’s nationalpopular culture is that [the Stracittà group] saw modern subjects and styles as a means of representing a national and populistic identity and of contextualizing traditional themes; whereas the Strapaese camp believed that, by relying upon images of traditional culture, the arts could more effectively convey to a larger audience messages about national integration and modernization. Both groups addressed Italy’s need for a ‘popular culture’, but they each proposed different means of achieving it and articulating it. (p. 134) This paradox is reflected in the role reversal (‘city slickers in the country or bumpkins in the city’, p. 149) which is a common feature in these films. The last two myths are strictly related to one another. One is the myth of the divine origins of the Nation present in a group of historical films which, besides displacing contemporary ideological conflict, also helped legitimate a national-popular identity by concentrating on such historical subjects as the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and the Risorgimento, which could release powerful sources of cultural traditions and popular models. The other is the myth of the Empire extolled in a spate of films about colonial Africa whose message on the one hand is akin to that of the historical films because they are bound up with a similar idea of the empire as ‘spirituality’ and ‘the sense of shared experience which united peoples of different regions and socioeconomic statuses to create a new order’ (p. 184) while, on the other hand, ‘the meaning of armed combat in these films is not solely political. The authority of these films lies in the audiences themselves, in their attraction to such images of conquest and individual heroism’ (ibid.). The map of the national-popular film culture that Hay traces in this book is doubly interesting because, as well as offering an accurate reading of an impressive range of films and film criticism from the 1920s and 1930s, it offers a useful tool for understanding the cultural formation in which fascism was imbricated and the cultural fabric of which it was constituted. He is absolutely right in attempting an explanation of fascism not so much in terms of its leaders, its policy and its propaganda, but rather as an expression of an emerging and heterogeneous popular culture. However, it is surprising that he never mentions, in fact he laments the lack of, more subtle interpretations of fascism, for some very good work has been carried out to explain it in connection with a contradictory and relatively independent popular culture. Two omissions are particularly surprising in the otherwise wide and up-to-date bibliography. One is the very well-known work of Ernesto Laclau who, studying the South American situation, has formulated very convincing theories about the role of popular common sense in the formation of nationalistic ideologies. The other is the work of those Italian social and oral historians, such as Luisa Passerini, who have attempted to reconstruct, through popular memory, the interaction between official
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and popular cultures which constitutes common sense, and to account for the complex amalgam of motivations which characterized fascist culture in Italy. This last omission is the more surprising because the kind of probing into pre-war Italian popular culture that Hay attempts is in some ways similar in its object and methodology to the oral historians’ explorations into popular memory. It has the same awareness of being an archeology in the Foucaultian sense, and exhibits the same pleasure in trying to capture the thickness of the cultural fabric while being captured and captivated by it. For what this book really offers is the kind of ‘thick description’ that according to Geertz is typical of cultural artefacts. And it is highly appropriate that the book opens and closes recalling those recent films like Fellini’s Amarcord which recapture the atmosphere and culture of fascist Italy, not so much presenting the viewers with an analysis as plunging them into a historical milieu, densily inhabited by mythical signs such as the Rex—the ocean liner by whose majestic passing all the characters are spellbound in Amarcord—which aptly provides the subtitle of the book. It is refreshing that, for all his theoretical scholarship and analytical accuracy, the author may still be fascinated by the passing of the Rex.
A CONNECTING VIEW JOHN CORNER ■ Alan O’Connor (ed.), Raymond Williams on Television (Routledge, London, 1989), 223 pp., £7.95.
As an idea for a book, this comes across initially as a bit strained. Between 1968 and 1972 Williams wrote a monthly TV column for the Listener. The purpose of this volume is to reprint them, together with a few other previously published pieces on the medium. Two potential problems then arise. First of all, the familiar one of how convincingly items of occasional, and inevitably often rather hurried, journalism stand up to their generic transformation into a sequence of essays. Secondly, the sheer irrecoverability of so much of the material which is talked about, especially to a reader lacking viewing memories from the period in question. Happily, neither of these hazards develops into a significant limitation here and the primary reason for this is the way in which Williams used his column to develop a sustained, thematized debate about contemporary television, working out from particular programmes to the current and changing state of television forms, schedules, and institutional policies and their interpenetration with emerging terms of public and private life. One realizes with some surprise that the work collected in the book constitutes the most extensive body of non-literary textual commentary that Williams ever produced. Observing how his more familiar general ideas frame, and then shape up against, the specifics of viewing is one of the most instructive opportunities which this reprinting provides. His reviewing persona, as cultural theorist turned part-time journalist, is an interesting one. For his comments completely lack that emphatic separation between own experience and the cultural consumption of others which allow the comparable writings of Barthes and Eco the scope for their agile, essentializing wit as well as serving to underline their retained social distance as members of a detached intelligentsia. Williams makes reference to this personal dimension several times, either with characteristic generality: ‘What was really being explored was the unprecedented integration of this large and varied body of broadcasting with a busy, everyday life’ (p. x); or with more focus and pointedness:
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In teaching communications I’ve always taken the view that I’m the first to be influenced, even hooked. I used to begin a class by asking if anyone present had ever been influenced by advertising, and when I got the general negative I said that I had been, many times, and that was what I was there to talk about. In those days, in the Fifties, I could never get anyone to talk about the influence of television on themselves. The only way a discussion could be started was to mention its influence on children, and then, an hour or so later, we could work round to being honest. (p. 67) This question of ‘position’ (and then the consequent questions of theory and of method) is, of course, a continuing problem in cultural studies and probably a good deal more of one than Williams usually suggests, despite the convincing integrity of his tone after a decade which has seen some elaborate theoreticist evasion on this score. Here, though, the personalisms of column-writing itself are obviously a shaping factor in the address, necessarily referencing his comments not only outwards into an objectified cultural analysis but also back into his own weekly activities and viewing. So as well as the arguments we get, for instance, Williams singing along to Sesame Street with a grandchild, enjoying a range of sports coverage (‘I would keep my set for it alone’), praising (‘brilliant’) the comedy series The Last of the Summer Wine, noting the reliable strengths of Gardener’s World, and becoming absorbed in an Open University lecture on the geometry of surfaces. Such a perspective even allows for reflection on the viewing process itself, including those moments of ‘slipping out of frame’: When the figure at the window turned up in ‘Welcome Home’ I found that I was looking at almond leaves through our own blue venetian blind. Perhaps the frame is too small to enclose us dramatically; the world around the frame too insistently present and domestic. (p. 144) This tacking across between specific personal response and general proposition (at one level, a conventional enough feature of literary critical discourse) is contextualized and regulated in Williams’ writing by a more general concern with making connections. ‘Connection’, indeed, emerges as the keyword of this collection, closely followed by its opposites—‘distance’, ‘isolation’, ‘alienation’. As in, for instance, this comment on the documentary series Look Stranger: But the sense of just that title is disturbing, as in so many small programmes. They are done so well as visits, glimpses, but as you take their full weight you know they should be composed into a connected history, a connected way of seeing, that would include the real present. (p. 175) Or this, on the contrast between the isolationism of much contemporary drama and the continuities offered by serial fiction: ‘It does not surprise me that millions of readers and viewers turn away from what they feel to be an incidental playing with experience, and
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towards what the serial, if only as illusion, seems to offer: people regularly and connectedly known’ (p. 83). However (and leaving aside some vulnerable assumptions underlying that use of ‘illusion’), just what kind of connections are involved and how, precisely, they are to be grasped often remains irritatingly unclear, beyond the obvious pointers. As elsewhere in his work, a refusal to get caught up in reductionist forms of High Theory, with its imperious italicizations and sniffy ways of dealing with the experiential, ends up by making his connecting propositions depend too heavily on what are really rather shadowy apprehensions of totality, constantly rearticulated but never gaining sharper focus. Following the imperatives of a cultural materialism thus outlined, either into further analysis or political activity, soon becomes harder to do than a general feeling of inspiration and agreement would suggest. The immediate concern running through these pieces is a shift in the forms and the political consequences of British television. Williams registers a move from the relative openness and innovation of the 1960’s towards a more circumscribed, self-censoring and less socially imaginative set of practices which appear to be transforming the public sphere and aiding the advancement of what he calls ‘constitutional authoritarianism’. His anxieties about this ‘decadence’, ‘decline’ (and finally ‘crisis’) are rooted in a number of observed developments. There is the increasing emphasis on a complacent professionalism in the ways in which broadcasting organizes and presents public affairs (a disconnecting tendency across a wide range of programming). This shows itself prominently in the hurried and over-managed treatment of discussion and in the fact that: ‘We are now so used to seeing day-to-day public issues refracted through the same few minds that we may have given up protesting’ (p. 165). Then there is the hardening off of certain visual devices into a ‘house style’ which, by further promoting the frictionless flow of programming, reduces the opportunity for critical engagement: For where reason, fact and discrimination are now urgently necessary we are sodden with montage. What was originally a creative technique to express newly perceived relationships has become a manipulative evasion of all substantial connections…the production habits of a majority of professionals compose a structure of associations, image, tones, which set limits to actual insights and perceptions, yet ensures, in the programmes that follow each other so closely, a certain confidence of address. (p. 53) The shameless falsehood of the ‘natural break’ starts to seem to Williams more generally indicative of the erosion of public function by commercial strategy. In an unusually sustained and effective satiric vein, he devotes one column to a review of ‘ITV’s domestic romance’: The other night…I watched a 35-minute programme (ITV) into which, I do not doubt, as much care and effort and money had been put as into anything else that evening, and yet, to judge by what the critics said, it might never been put out at all. It is true that it was rather intermittent. It ran in short snatches of anything from
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45 seconds to about three-and-a-half minutes, over the period between 5.45 and 10.30 p.m. (p. 109) All through the collection, he notes the extent to which television has remained damagingly restricted both in its dramatic depictions and in its use of representative voices: ‘All I have to say…is that nobody would believe that there are 56 million people in Britain. We hear and see so few of them’ (p. 42). He also comments, prophetically as it turns out, on the developing trend for drama series to be located in some mythified and ideologically resonant past where an interest in costume, style, and manners starts to displace the dramatic working through of ideas. This overall registering of negative forces is nevertheless held in an often awkward but real tension with a positive sense of achievement and possibility. In drama, current affairs, comedy, sports coverage, and one-off features, Williams finds much to enjoy and admire and it is his sense of the potential this suggests for a wider television culture which stops his account from developing the generalized pessimism of a cultural pathology. Television is not criticized in relation to former, superior cultural formations—its democratizing, emancipatory characteristics provide the criteria for assessing dominant aspects of its present use. And very much against the received versions of cultural criticism at the time, Williams notes what he sees as the isolating, mannered, metaphysical character of much contemporary high culture when compared to the best work in television series, drama and comedy. Among the additional reprinted items, which include the important and imaginatively synthesizing lecture ‘Drama in a dramatized society’, the most recent is an essay on the coverage of the Falklands war. Here, the terms of critique are at their bleakest as Williams examines the public mediation of this bizarre, improbable event. The absence of significant popular opposition is registered most deeply. This is by no means entirely attributed to television’s regressive ‘culture of distance’ but other powerful factors in the mobilization of nationalist feeling are not given sufficient recognition to prevent a too media-centred, and I think too unproductively cynical, analysis finally emerging. We can easily guess what Williams would make of the British government’s current policies on ‘quality’ and ‘choice’ in broadcasting, in which the deregulated drive for private profit no longer even has to spend much time pretending to be anything else. But the terms in which that project of social disconnection needs to be engaged will clearly entail some changes in criteria and in perceived representational possibilities from those within which Williams framed his responses twenty years ago. There are vital, if also theoretically and practically intimidating, questions of subjectivity, gender, and nationality to address which simply do not get into his working notions of the ‘public’ at all, albeit that his Welsh identity keeps him alert to the various Englishings of Britain. That said, some of the primary elements at work in this collection—critically humanist, self-questioning, placing a sense of difficulty before theoretical elegance and, across it all, politically upset—will have to be kept up if the cultural study of television is to be more than simply an increasingly esoteric academic specialism.
Notes on contributors
JOHN CORNER is in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool… JOHN FISKE is in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison… ONDINA FACHEL LEAL is in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley… MINU LEE AND CHONG CHO are in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison… MARK NEUMANN AND DAVID EASON are in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah… ELLEN SEITER is in the Department of Speech at the University of Oregon… SUSAN WILLIS is in the Department of English at Duke University… MARINA VITALE is at the Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples.
