#todd gitlin

Television resembles reality so strangely because the images are extraordinary at the same time that they appear in our most ordinary settings. They come from afar, but they loom up right there in our own living rooms and bedrooms. That is why journalistic and academic critics of particular shows or genres, or of specific features of television, like violence, miss the essential point about TV's force. The images register with us as symbols, as diversion and ideology at the same time, by virtue of the fact that our guard is down when we watch. It is certainly true, as many researchers remind us, that we screen these symbols differently according to who we are and how we already see the world. We notice and soak up and ignore selectively, although not always consciously. The presence of the medium is such that we don't so much reflect on the meanings or (most of the time) study them; we swim in them. Television inscribes images of the acceptable that go beyond its stereotypes of men and women, blacks and whites, history and domesticity, significant as these are. Television has become the collective, secondhand dream of American society, and we don't even need to tune in to be wired up, affected by the look and the values that TV radiates. "Ideology" to Americans usually smacks of a foreign disease: something that afflicts other people. But ideology means nothing more or less than a set of assumptions that becomes second nature; even rebels have to deal with it. Television can no more speak without ideology than we can speak without prose. We swim in its world even if we don't believe in it.

In the realism that rode high in the 19th century, the work of art was supposed to express unity and continuity. Realism mirrored reality, criticized it and consoled. The individuals portrayed were clearly placed in society and history. High culture was just that - higher, more valuable, than popular culture. In modernism, voices, perspectives and materials were multiple. The unity of the work was assembled from fragments and juxtapositions. Art set out to remake life. Audacious individual style threw off the dead hand of the past. Continuity was disrupted, the individual subject dislocated. High culture quoted from popular culture. Post-modernism, by contrast, is indifferent to consistency and continuity altogether. It self-consciously splices genres, attitudes, styles. It relishes the blurring or juxtaposition of forms (fiction-nonfiction), stances (straight-ironic), moods (violent-comic), cultural levels (high-low). It disdains originality and fancies copies, repetition, the recombination of hand-me-down scraps. It neither embraces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly, with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony. It pulls the rug out from under itself, displaying an acute self-consciousness about the work's constructed nature. It takes pleasure in the play of surfaces and derides the search for depth as mere nostalgia for an unmoved mover. It regards ''the individual'' as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks. ''The individual'' has decomposed, as ''reality'' has dissolved; nothing lives but ''discourses,'' ''texts,'' ''language games,'' ''images,'' ''simulations'' referring to other ''discourses'' ''texts,'' etc. ''Characters'' can step out of character; they can die, as in Philip Roth's novel ''The Counterlife,'' only to live again. High culture speaks the same language as popular culture, even blurs into it.

Some shows become hits, and hits further solidify the conventions of the medium—for as long as they remain hits, and then a while longer. Through this sequence of development, selection, airing, and restricted audience "choice," conventions and conventional wisdom become enshrined. The genres that matter are television genres; the precedents adduced are largely television's own. The result is that popular television has formed its own history—though not in conditions entirely of its own making. While music, magazines, books, fashions, and radio, with their multiple distribution channels and relatively low production costs per unit, can become the fetishes, pleasures, and identity badges of specific publics and subcultures, high-cost television with its vast profits automatically caters to a hypothetical least common denominator—or dips below it. It is a cultural center without vitality, constantly changing in order to keep its purpose constant, pervading the national cultural space as has no other medium in the history of popular culture. Its style becomes ritualized because executives keep it that way and at the same time because its public expects television to look the way thirty years of commercial history have made it. Television pervades, usurps, lords it over the national cultural space. And therefore, increasingly, the tradition television belongs to is itself.

Even for the artist, in a world stripped of transcendent unities, the strategy of collage, of juxtaposition, makes the best of a bad situation. It is both recognition of, and romantic protest against, the idea that the world is finished, worn out. The best art coaxes a distinct unity out of juxtaposition; bad art deposits scrap upon scrap, endlessly reshuffling the cultural givens into pastiche, as in Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Whether in fin-de-siècle assemblage or surrealist juxtaposition, in Rauschenberg or Larry Rivers, the style of conjunction is central to modern art. In poetry we see it in the fragments of Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Pound's Cantos, in John Ashbery's breathless swoops from image to image. The nervous editing style of most contemporary film has shaped every other art form. In the novel, we have the pop-cultural dumping grounds of Joyce, the luminous lists of Jorge Luis Borges; in architecture, the postmodernism of Michael Graves and Philip Johnson among others. In a single building, postmodernism shamelessly combines the classical (columns and pediments), the decorative (ornament and trim), and the Bauhaus (simplicity and angularity). In museums, as Susan Sontag points out, the Paris Beaubourg is built with movable partitions, so that the relations between distinct exhibits can be redefined at the curator's will. The high forms of popular music are unified recombinant albums—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who's Tommy—and more recently, Blondie's 1980 album Autoamerican, which contains songs in big band, reggae, rap, religious-portentous, and rhythm-and-blues styles. Such albums with their peculiar unity assert that order can be assembled only from the juxtaposition of shards. They echo Eliot's line, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In fashion, the New Wave extends the conventional assertion that all styles are born equal and juxtaposition amounts to wit. Anything goes with anything else—tuxedo jackets with candy wrappers, leg warmers with sandals—mocking and extending the recombinatory mode at the same time. In the background stands the ultimate recombinatory form: television, the medium that perpetually levels, juxtaposing Holocaust to a soap commercial, news of cluster bombs in Lebanon to an appeal for hemorrhoid medicine, converting each bit into a sequel to the last and a prologue to the next, composing unintended and hitherto unimagined wholes out of parts and proposing that all images are related to all others. Scarecely a punk rock or New Wave album is complete without a song decrying television, satirizing the singer's dependency on it, skating along the slippery edge where irony and subjugation melt together. The fascination TV works on its most furious bewailers is the fascination of meaninglessness raised to a universal principle. Yet the mind-sets of network gatekeepers and New Wave songwriters may not be so different at least in one respect. They are both haunted by the half-felt premise that nothing is new under the sun.

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