Timeless storytelling
Why are people everywhere so elated or so astonished that so many stories are now being told on television, and apparently so well? Art and culture critics are far from the only ones who have repeatedly praised the new kind of TV series over the past decade – first the HBO series The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire, which have long since become classics; then, from other networks, came Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and soon afterward increasingly specialized series, some of which updated other less epic and less traditional televisual formats and won similar praise. Such praise has long since ceased to be limited to US production – Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, as well as British and Canadian series have also attracted attention, some of them for very different reasons; common to all of them, however, is the tremendous cultural progress with which they are credited.
There are two assertions that are more or less implicit in all this commentary: first, that until now TV wasn’t much good at telling stories; and second, that it is extremely important that there be some place in culture where stories are told abundantly and openly, with intricately branching, convoluted plots that ultimately all come together into a grand, coherent form. Everywhere, the claim that storytelling is an anthropological constant, a transhistorical core of humanity, is being revived. Sometimes it is even ratcheted up further, as in the bold and fascinating theory of German experimental filmmaker Klaus Wyborny, who sees the narrative principle operating even outside human intelligence as an almost biological constant, and who effectively attributes a narrative logic to every interpretation of movement in (perspectivally) changing spaces.
For me, this raises two sets of questions. If television wasn’t telling stories before, what was it doing? Could it be that it had a good reason – or a less good reason – for doing it? And was that reason media-specific, or did it follow the logic of the culture industry?
The second set of questions concerns the good reasons that existed before and especially during literary modernism for rebelling against the standard of storytelling. Have these reasons been soundly refuted? Or have they been illegitimately suppressed, and do they in fact have something to do with what TV was engaged in before it became so incredibly good at telling stories? And if we look at the historical sequence of such partisanships, normativities, and successes, does history in the sense of progress and regress play a role in it, or is it just a matter of technical media formats and their succession, or even of purely cultural-industrial developments linked primarily to the development of economic complexes?
To answer these questions, one would first have to know if the culture industry itself has a history, and if so where TV is situated within it. When Adorno and Horkheimer originally presented the concept of the culture industry, they described it as a stage in the dialectic of enlightenment, one that is preceded by other stages. In this sense, it would be a component of history, at least of history in the minimal sense of a succession of phases and periods. But what comes to completion in the culture industry is the total domination of the law of value in what may be the last remaining area where difference and independent-mindedness, resistance and dissidence, still existed, at least semantically – that of art. In this sense, we are dealing with what is essentially an almost post-historical end point, a black hole in which history ceases to exist. On the other hand – and this has often been raised as an objection – this description turns a blind eye to the history of the very vehicle that enabled culture to become a mass, industrial phenomenon in the first place: the technical media. This applies to their economy as well, and hence to the core of Adorno and Horkheimer’s argumentation, which views the culture industry as based on the convergence of ideology (“mass deception”) and profit. Yet the latter is based on mass cultural production and distribution. And this business model, which is based on reproduction, is no longer even available in the digital age. In any case, it was never the business model of television to begin with, whose economy, with its financing by advertising revenue, subscriptions, fees, or state subsidies, much more closely resembles digital business models.
Television as a stage in the history of the culture industry
But the poverty of the culture industry as an ahistorical or post-historical condition doesn’t just bring to mind the authors of posthistoire (Alexandre Kojève, Ernst Jünger, Hendrik de Man); it also recalls Louis Althusser’s remark that ideology has no history, which means something a bit different. Althusser’s comment seems to more accurately capture the specific ahistoricity that reigns in the stage of the culture industry for Horkheimer and Adorno. It is only from the vantage point of today, where the omnipresence of commodities and exchange is governed by a different business model – one that trades in expectations and anticipation – that it is possible to look back and investigate the earlier stages of the culture industry.
Surprisingly, however, it is the media scientists – who are not generally known as champions of historico-philosophical thinking but tend to be positivists of a more or less contingent progress – whose critique of the category of the culture industry might be capable of providing it with a history. Against Adorno, Wolfgang Hagen has argued at length that radio is based on a variety of different technical standards and that consequently the ownership of the sets and their use by the entertainment and advertising industries and for purposes of political propaganda cannot simply be regarded as following a single homogeneous technical principle. Friedrich Kittler, who was well known for his global hatred of the Frankfurt School, went even further, arguing that the term “commodity” should be systematically replaced by the term “code” throughout the entire culture industry chapter. In my view, while doing so would initially decouple the commodity from its historicity, it would then make it possible to develop the relationship between code and commodity precisely as the dynamic of the culture industry’s historicity: the commodity – timeless in its highest form as product of the integrated cultural industry, as part of the spectacle in the Debordian sense – has a specific technological-material history. Its pure exchange value is not that pure: it needs specific machines to be read and to be distributed, and these machines are based on codes and their techno-historical concreteness. Thus by joining Kittler only in a portion of his argument, we do not arrive at a compromise between incompatible positions; but we do acquire material to clarify the cultural-industrial constellations as historical stages of a cybernetic capitalist integration of art and culture.
The first stage of that integration would be the pairing of radio and film. Radio brought the public sphere, centrality, propaganda, and entertainment, often staged as festive – ritual forms of the state and representation – into the midst of the nuclear family, its kitchens and its living rooms, so that orders could be received there and so that the established order could be replicated and installed there in microcosm, while also being flexible and adapting to the private course of events. This institution, however, was paired with another one, cinema, that really was situated in the public outside world; people made pilgrimages to it in a kind of secularized festive spirit, in order to indulge there in the most private of all pleasures, dreaming – a kind of guided dreaming that now took place entirely in public. And while it did occur in the dark, it unfolded with an almost military synchronization during the funny parts, as well the sad and tearful ones.
This knowledge that formative, defining, standardizing, and organizing cultural institutions that had emerged around the distinction between public and private could be redesigned – for example, by combining theater and bedroom into cinema, or parade ground, concert hall, and family rituals into radio – also helped pave the way for the development of the next stage of the culture industry. But that next stage incorporated a knowledge that had played no role in the first stage or had been processed unconsciously by it and domesticated: an awareness of the magical effect of dramatizing the indexical technical transmission of a real person rather than neutralizing it in the shadow of escapisms and officially authorized entertainments at the family table. While radio and film continued to exist in this new stage, they were now overshadowed by the new constellations of pop music and TV, both of which were combinations of media technology and social mechanisms.
From radio, television inherited the importing of the public sphere into the midst of one’s own four walls – the function, as McLuhan puts it, of the “electronic hearth” – but it also brought home the movies’ invitation to dream. At the same time, it established a new relationship with the broadcast announcers, no longer one of pining adoration embedded in classical narratives but one of everyday encounter, in which familiar public persons were permanently conjured up. The same direct access to the medially transmitted recorded persons was provided by pop music, through the doubling of sound and video recording, now, however – unlike cinema – without a fixed public location but as a permanent relationship that always had to be completed by the recipients: fans who wander through public space, connecting listening experiences in their bedrooms and recognizing the performers on TV, record covers, and magazines, with listening situations in bars and at concerts, who show themselves in public as marked and realized fans.
In this second culture industry, the indexical aspect took center stage, the sudden entrance of the live or prerecorded broadcast person. But that entrance wasn’t naked and aggressive as in early film, the cinema of attractions, slapstick; nor was it embedded in culture and narrative as in culture industry I, the Hollywood film and the well-orchestrated radio show. Instead, the surprising and magical moment itself was now the driving force of cultural-industrial production: the highly individual but untrained voices of folk music, R&B, and rock and roll, the ordinary people of TV news and soap operas. People identified by imperfections and singularities or people who were lackluster but familiar took the place of the celestial diva who commanded adoration or the idealized “great guy” and model employee à la Jimmy Stewart. The most salient thing about these figures was that they were real; either real through material and bodily cracks in the old cultural-industrial facade, the kind camp is so fond of, or real through the ordinary, everyday quality of the TV hosts and soap opera actors who were seen on a daily basis and whom many viewers, as the saying goes, knew better than their own life partners. Above all, however, they were real through the aggressive and sexual presence of the pop star, who was doubly (phonographically and photographically) staged as vital, powerful, sexual, and threatening.
This new version of the culture industry was in part the result of an updating from the perspective of the culture industry itself, an optimization of its ideological production and business activities. It was also a result of criticism of the first culture industry as passivizing, sedating, and escapist. But both of these factors are secondary compared to two more powerful ones: a technology that made it possible to sell cultural commodities in a decentralized fashion, by way of identification, rather than in a centralized manner, by way of veneration: “That’s someone I’d like to have” was replaced by “That’s how I’d like to be”. Finally, however – to compress somewhat the arrival of a new era around 1960 – we come to what is also an ideological turning point: the medially broadcast authentic person replaced the glamorous Fordist star as the central cultural vehicle and turned the authentic person into the supersignifier of post-Fordism, evolving in the course of the latter’s history, at least at first glance, from a dissident symbol into a mainstream one.
Television and domesticity
On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that the authentic, self-identical televisual person employed principles of realism and authenticity from various later, more advanced art forms in mainstream versions from the very beginning. In most televisual formats, some if not all of the broadcasting day was marked by a style of presentation that was lacking in drama and distinguished by slowness and redundancy in documentary, news, and fictional formats. Only in the evening and in many countries at night did TV become a platform for cinematic formats, some of which it then produced itself, especially in countries like Germany and France. Initially, however, TV’s core business and aesthetic hallmark was that, unlike the complementary institution of pop music, it sought to follow the model and maxim of culture industry II – authenticity instead of glamour – not with drama and mortal danger, risky living and existential experience, but with ordinariness, boredom, consistency, redundancy, and banality.
Classical narrative, which in the European tradition assigned itself its first rules in the picaresque novel, always called up the horizons of adventure and biography, a pattern that continued in the Bildungsromans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Television abandoned these two reference points. In its genuine products – soap operas, news shows, and series that revert to their starting positions at the beginning of each new episode – neither length of life nor the twists and ruptures associated with adventure are an element, much less their continuations in the inner adventures of the psychological novel. Television derives its realism from the suppression of reality’s temporal dimension; on TV, it is always now. This now is by no means incompatible with the inclusion of past historical realities, whether the battles of World War II repeated evening after evening on the History Channel or the soap operas of an earlier decade stuck in permanent reruns: the now of TV encompasses many different moments; common to them all, however, is that they are always presented as moments, never as potential developments.
In culture industry II, this elaboration of the permanent self-identity of the moment was television’s central task. But it would be a mistake to assume that this configuration of the televisual produced a dominant ideology all by itself. Ahistoricity, the eternal now, a high degree of familiarity, an unendangered present were just one component of Fordist socialization. A clearly defined suburban home in which the TV set occupied a central location stood opposite a changeable and threatening world. But that world was occupied by other cultural media and mechanisms. The movies were distinguished by sexual permissiveness, and there were drastic images of violence, while pop music celebrated alternative lifestyles. Occasionally, these phenomena were even represented in television’s formats (talk shows, music shows), albeit as something distant and strange, and old movies were shown at night or late in the evening. Timelessness and ahistoricity, the permanent now that television established, were only one component of the total ideological constellation of culture industry II, which remained stable roughly from the late 1950s to the mid or late 1980s but continued to exist and have an impact thereafter as well.
It is tempting to describe the part played by TV in this constellation as that of a particularly massive and insidious disempowerment (Entmündigung), the creation of a cosmos of escapism and passivity, in which primarily the weakest and most oppressed but still integrated members of society – housewives and the unemployed – were compelled to live. However, at least since Jules Michelet’s peculiar study La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages (1863), we have known that domesticity has a dialectic. In the ever larger latifundia of the Late Middle Ages, the wives of the serfs more and more frequently stayed home alone, developing a kind of magical pragmatism linked to the type of work that Silvia Federici has called “reproductive labor”. This constellation returned in the suburban life of High Fordism in a very different form. But television’s task here was not just to tranquilize the home-bound reproductive workers and prevent them from rebelling, from appropriating the affective capital they had labored to produce. No matter what it did, television also supplied material for such psychological projections. The more optimistic (often much too optimistic) theories of later cultural studies (John Fiske et al.) have devoted a great deal of attention to these projections on the part of stay-at-home female, young, and unemployed fans.
Cultural studies thus reinterprets the fate reserved for women and other homebound individuals in such a way as to pierce the tranquilizing, escapist veil of the practical knowledge of domesticity, revealing a subversive “practice of everyday life” (Michel de Certeau) beneath it. According to the reading outlined above, this practical knowledge returned in the formats of daily recurrence, the different temporality of staying at home. Staying at home was a condition to which one was generally condemned, but the prison of this suburban home and its culture were also, on this optimistic reading of televisual culture, a laboratory of subversive practices. The absolute ahistoricity of television took its devastating toll in conjunction with its other components, which were situated outside this televisual culture. Traditional masculinity also had its place in this domesticity, at least on weekends and special occasions, in connection with sports coverage, whose only “history” is an eternal repetition of experimental setups, season highlights, and statistics that – like soap operas, advertising, news, and talk shows with their logic of the familiar – always recur within the eternal now.
Post-Fordist deregulations and installations
However skeptical one may be about these efforts to turn televisual culture into a kind of subversive retreat, it makes sense that it would only now be possible to arrive at a correct, or at least a different, understanding of the formal attributes of Fordist televisual entertainment – now that the regulating and regulated type of television has disappeared and been replaced with one that is increasingly location-independent and deregulated, whose virtuosity in the recounting of lavish, addictive, and convoluted narratives is not at all surprising, considering the social and cultural functions it fulfills. Not only have its output devices become increasingly destandardized since the 1970s, from tiny tabletop and car TVs to monitors the size of movie screens. The input itself has changed so dramatically – first with video and DVDs, then, more crucially, through changes to the structure of TV programming (on demand, subscription, etc.) all the way to streaming – that this kind of television is really nothing other than a kind of televisual book, which operates at precisely the poles of cultural and artistic reception that were not served by TV in its classical form: the private, highly individualized, intense, and often addicted activity of burying oneself in a book, and the quasi-religious celebration of a movie night at home.
In this context, it is interesting to note that the new culture of the quality TV series is often praised for reviving nineteenth-century narrative traditions (Dickens, Tolstoy, Zola): long arcs involving intricate complications that, in keeping with the spirit of industrialization and the shocks of urban life, produce an image of reality by accumulating and densely interweaving individual destinies. Even if (one is tempted to say thankfully) this does not apply to The Wire, Treme, Mad Men, or The Sopranos, it is not just an instance of the familiar ideologeme that the health of a culture is directly proportionate to the frequency with which it produces great realistic novels; according to this ideological position, so familiar in German cultural critique, things don’t look good for a society that produces no great novels, which reconstruct society through the density of the relationships of their preferably numerous characters. While any praise of the quality TV that offers this kind of dense narrative can count on approval from this quarter, there is something else that needs to be pointed out: the new storytelling often refrains far less than one might assume from the typical televisual habit of constantly returning an initial milieu (a family, sports team, band, school, business, neighborhood, or group of friends) to its initial state. Instead, it generates effects that are all the more exciting because they combine this specifically televisual brand of inertia and monotonous, anti-historical longing with accelerating and dynamic narrative techniques.
For example, in every major new series of the last ten or fifteen years, families (sometimes understood in a broader sense, as in the countless sitcoms about groups of friends, from Seinfeld to How I Met Your Mother) continue to play an important role (The Sopranos, Treme, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, etc., or professional families, as on police shows). Moreover, the central artistic vehicle of televisual entertainment, the interior, has by no means been abandoned. News shows, game shows, talk shows, and narrative TV shows from soaps and sitcoms to the ambitious “cinematic genres” all use a particular interior as a distinguishing marker, a compressed bit of narrative. Even in series that make generous use of exterior shots – which are unusual for television – and invest lavish budgets in cinematic movement sequences, the characters constantly return to certain recognizable places. They have this in common with the medium by which they are traditionally disseminated: the TV set itself, which had its place in the midst of a real stage set called the living room (today the entertainment center).
This is still the case today, despite the deregulation of TV watching in the digital age. Amazingly enough, it seems to provide the uprooted, deregulated binge-watchers of so-called quality series with a comforting reminder of the domesticity of the old TV. At the same time, however, the lost kitchen or lost living room has returned around the moving televisual image in another form – in the culture of the moving-image installation of the visual arts. The reader will recall that video art – when it still went by that name – always did whatever it could to present itself on monitors and screens that bore as little resemblance as possible to the TV sets of the families from which the artists had once fled. Video art favored minimal design, invisible mountings, and the flattest possible screens. But the disappearance or post-Fordist deregulation of domestic TV watching also heralds the triumph of the moving-image installation as the now hegemonic medium or format of the visual arts. Like so much else, the organization of model spaces with binding authority around moving-image output devices has simply migrated from the design of everyday life to that of abstract artistic tasks. This installation has outlived its usefulness as a cultural-industrial, mass-cultural phenomenon; it has now relocated to the realm of high art instead. Similar things have happened to other media. Books too became ever lighter and more portable, a development to which serialized novels, for example, reacted in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since the 1990s, libraries and archives have increasingly been digitized and placed online; but throughout this same period, they can more and more frequently be found in art installations, re-auraticized.
Initially, it seemed to me that the new kind of television and the tremendous plausibility of the quality series, which are so well suited to DVDs, binge watching, streaming, and TV on demand, went far beyond a return to storytelling. Series like The Wire employ a cinematic language developed to recount, in a space of ninety minutes, long and complex plots lasting roughly eight hundred to a thousand minutes when read (assuming an average length of two hundred to two hundred and fifty pages for the novel and a reading speed of four minutes per page). This compressive aesthetic of cinematic narration, which uses visual forms to condense a copious amount of material, is the lingua franca underlying every work of narrative film – although of course every actual film occasionally deviates from it significantly. But TV series may last up to eighty times sixty minutes (or even more – The Sopranos has more than eighty episodes); their artistic task would thus be to use this extremely long time span in the service of a new narrative quality. The Sopranos, The Wire, and a few other series have achieved this. Around a typical TV kitchen installation, The Sopranos recounted the decline of the middle-class American family and the notion of family and domesticity associated with it in the slightly grotesque and heightened mirror of a Mafia family. Yet the latter was able to provide a perfect image of the ideological depth of the TV family by translating the classical family ideology of intense connectedness and closeness into the entanglements of a Mafia organization, one, however, that is ultimately foiled by post-Fordism, which no longer has any use for depth. The attempt to extort protection money from a Starbucks, which moves into a space that had previously been leased by a store owner whom the Mafia had been extorting, fails miserably. The Wire uses the time span in a similar way, recounting, around the familiar TV interiors of a police station and a court, the decline of these (and other) institutions.
The fragment as hope for the future
But this high degree of reflexiveness has rarely if ever been achieved again. Subsequent quality series have only recounted the history of the conditions of their own production in isolated cases. Instead, they feed into a widespread ideology (or expert opinion) which regards the grand narrative as something natural, inevitable, and anthropologically foreordained. And yet the much-vaunted nineteenth-century narratives to which the new TV series are likened were not by any means an end point but only the precondition for the transition from psychological and biographical narrative to the modernist and postmodernist writing that surpassed it, from Joyce to Pynchon – to put it, once again, in a radically abbreviated way. I am still waiting for a televisual counterpart to this development; for the moment, it seems to me, the only way ahead lies through the fragment.
And so it seems appropriate to close by praising another creator of TV series who has produced more than his share of fragments. While the official line is that this was always unintentional, the cracks at the end of the series created by David Milch in recent decades do not just occur at the end, where an elaborately constructed plot suddenly goes off a cliff, but often before it; the violent end ripples backward through the episodes. Deadwood constructs a complex web of destinies and political developments that is repeatedly severed by naked outbursts of brutality, only to generate, each time, an even larger collection of characters. Finally, shortly before the end, we are promised the individual stories of an entire theater company, before the series’ personnel is swallowed up by the void. Inherently fragmentary is the utterly surreal series John from Cincinnati, which revolves around a combination of Jesus and robot in a surfing village, and which was canceled by HBO after just one season. This series expresses such serious doubts about the stability of humanist world views – or creates such explosive antagonisms among them – that HBO had no choice but to abruptly put a stop to this marvel of implausibility at its very first climax. In the case of Milch’s most recent, and once again magnificent, series, Luck, which starred Dustin Hoffman as a sympathetic horseracing Mafioso, it was animal rights activists who succeeded in stopping it from shooting after a season, and one episode after a number of horses had been injured on the set; once again, this happened just at the moment when the show was about to scale new heights. Kafka and other great innovators associated with the fragment didn’t always produce their fragments intentionally either, but the fact that they were forced to do so was no accident; it lay within the cultural materiality of their time. Interrupted series – grand but impossible narratives – deserve our attention.