Abstract
This chapter offers a critical overview of philosophical debates concerning the nature of the television medium, television’s art status, and television’s aesthetic value.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature here is quickly becoming voluminous. For a start, see Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, ed., Television After TV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, ed., Television Studies After TV (New York: Routledge, 2009); and James Bennett and Nicki Strange, ed., Television as Digital Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
- 2.
Glen Creeber, Small Screen Aesthetics: From Television to the Internet (London: BFI, 2013), 3.
- 3.
Jason Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?” in Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and Nicki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 257.
- 4.
Noël Carroll, “TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 278–279.
- 5.
David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 59.
- 6.
One caveat here: Given the protean nature of our creative practices, media have an ineluctable temporal dimension on my account. So, I admit that, in principle, the practices that partly constitute the media of film and television, respectively, could shift so as to end up being identical. Film and television’s convergence into a single medium is, therefore, an open possibility on my view; I just don’t think it has happened. For further discussion, see Ted Nannicelli and Malcolm Turvey, “Against ‘Post-Cinema,’” Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies Journal 26/27 (Spring/Fall 2016): 33–44.
- 7.
Ted Nannicelli, Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017).
- 8.
The term “differential feature” is Berys Gaut’s. See his A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224; 291.
- 9.
For example, Emily Nussbaum, “When TV Became Art,” New York Magazine (December 4, 2009), http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/. Also see Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2014).
- 10.
Some critics are more careful about this than others. For example, the title of David Bianculli’s The Platinum Age of Television (New York: Doubleday, 2016) belies his sustained, if not completely balanced, consideration of American programming from the 1950s.
- 11.
Noël Carroll, “Identifying Art,” in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 75–100.
- 12.
See, especially, Noël Carroll, “Art, Practice, and Narrative,” in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–75; Noël Carroll, “Art, Creativity, and Tradition,” in Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 53–73; Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3–25; and Jerrold Levinson, “Refining Art Historically,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 37–59.
- 13.
Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 287.
- 14.
Berys Gaut, “Replies to Ponech, Curran, and Allen,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 2 (April 2012): 206.
- 15.
Here I focus on character engagement and narrative suspense. For a broader discussion, including running gags in comedy, see my Appreciating the Art of Television.
- 16.
Robert Blanchet and Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television Series,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 18–41. Blanchet and Vaage focus on positive feelings toward characters, but there might a negative thesis compatible with what they propose. That is, it may also be the case that increased familiarity with characters can also foster stronger negative reactions to them. See Malcolm Turvey, “‘Familiarity Breeds Contempt’: Why Repeat Exposure Does Not Necessarily Turn TV Characters Into Friends,” in Screening Characters, eds. Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor (forthcoming). Likewise, Jason Jacobs has pointed out to me in personal communication that our familiarity with characters may also simply result in boredom, say, if the characters are flat or stereotypes.
- 17.
See the collation of episode recaps in Anna Silman, “The Best of This Week’s Mad Men Recaps: ‘The Strategy,’” Vulture.com (May 20, 2014), available at http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/best-mad-men-recaps-the-strategy.html (accessed February 28, 2017).
- 18.
Dolf Zillmann, “The Psychology of Suspense in Dramatic Exposition,” in Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, eds. Peter Vorderer, Hans J. Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 208. Zillman describes this affective reaction as “noxious,” which is more contentious because suspense evidently elicits pleasure in many fictional contexts such as those described here or, say, in Hitchcock movies. I’m grateful to Jason Jacobs for this reminder.
- 19.
For a broader reflection on “interruption” in television, see Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted.”
- 20.
The claims in this paragraph do not account for the possibility of “binge-watching” episodes on DVD or streaming services. As I have emphasized already, the features of television I describe here can be thought of as characteristic or differential features rather than unique or essential features; so, the possibility of binge-watching does not threaten my claims. There is also a difficult question about whether the binge-watcher has a proper experiential engagement with the program given that she does not experience them in the way the creators intended—unless all episodes are released simultaneously on a streaming service. In the interest of space, I leave these complications aside for now.
- 21.
See, for example, John Thorton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); and Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 22.
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 137.
- 23.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 97.
- 24.
T.W. Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 (Spring 1954): 235.
- 25.
See, for example, the views critically discussed in Alexander Nehamas, “Plato and the Mass Media,” The Monist 71, no. 2 (April 1988): 214–234.
- 26.
Roger Scruton, “Hiding Behind the Screen,” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society 28 (Summer 2010): 55.
- 27.
For an initial, forceful response, see Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” in Art in Three Dimensions, 201–234.
- 28.
Sarah Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics,” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 73.
- 29.
See, for rare, older examples, Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1974); and David Thorburn, “Television as an Aesthetic Medium,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4, no. 2 (June 1987): 161–173. Thorburn writes, “Let us first understand the term aesthetic in its descriptive, its cultural, or anthropological dimension. The term suggests not a valuing of aesthetic objects but a designation of their chief defining feature—their membership in a class of cultural experiences understood to be fictional or imaginary, understood to occur in a symbolic, culturally agreed upon imaginative space” (162). By my lights, this is a call to study television as an art.
- 30.
Jason Jacobs, “Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (December 2001): 427.
- 31.
Sarah Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond,” in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 28.
- 32.
Also see, in this vein, Jacobs, “Issues of Judgment and Value”; and Christine Geraghty, “Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 25–45.
- 33.
See Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond”; and Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted.”
- 34.
For a recent example in television studies, see Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television (New York: Routledge, 2012). For rebuttals to this position in television studies, specifically, see Jason Jacobs, “Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 3, no. 1 (2006): 19–33; Ted Nannicelli, “In Defence of the Objectivity of Evaluative Television Criticism,” Screen 57, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 124–143; and Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond.”
- 35.
What I am describing as “neo-Kantian” views of aesthetic attention or “the aesthetic attitude” include Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5, no. 2 (June 1912): 87–118; Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914); and Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism: A Critical Introduction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
- 36.
Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus 111, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 89.
- 37.
Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1994), 22.
- 38.
For an example of this confusion, see Matt Hills, “Television Aesthetics: A Pre-Structuralist Danger?” Journal of British Cinema and Television 8, no. 1 (2011): 99–117.
- 39.
John Ellis, Visible Fictions, Revised Edition (London: Routledge, 1992), 137.
- 40.
According to Ellis, “The TV image tends to be simple and straightforward, stripped of detail and excess of meanings” (129). For criticisms of “glance theory,” see Caldwell; and Carroll, “TV and Film.”
- 41.
Theodore Gracyk, Listening to Popular Music, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 38.
- 42.
Sherri Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 1 (January 2008): 30–31.
- 43.
Roger Scruton, “In Search of the Aesthetic,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 3 (July 2007): 240.
- 44.
See, for example, Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic.”
- 45.
Christopher Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 3 (July 2010): 228.
- 46.
Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” 228–230; Tom Leddy, “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3–22.
- 47.
Quoted in Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120.
- 48.
Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 120.
- 49.
Ibid., 387n57.
- 50.
See Hills, “Television Aesthetics.”
- 51.
Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 121.
- 52.
Malcolm Budd, “Aesthetic Essence,” in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33.
- 53.
Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” 229.
- 54.
John Caughie, “Telephilia and Distraction: Terms of Engagement,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 3, no. 1 (2008): 15.
- 55.
George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1964): 56–65.
- 56.
See, for example, Dan Hassoun, “Tracing Attentions: Toward an Analysis of Simultaneous Media Use,” Television & New Media 15, no. 4 (2014): 271–288.
- 57.
I am grateful to Jason Jacobs for valuable comments on an earlier version of this chapter and to Routledge for allowing me to reproduce several sentences from my book Appreciating the Art of Television.
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Nannicelli, T. (2019). The Television Medium. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_40
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