Gramarye

Excellent! ??Alias?? is back, with a reasonably strong start. The way they spun the “my name isn’t Michael Vaughn” thing from last semester wasn’t great, but the Prophet Five expansion of the ??Alias?? conspiracy universe seems like a better choice than what we saw in the third season, as it gets at backstory and helps to open up the show’s universe in a way that seems likely to contribute to the overall storyline. They get major points for getting me to like Vaughn before killing him off. (Well, “dislike less”, anyway.) It wasn’t a masterpiece — it was no second season debut, to be sure — but it left me optimistic about what we’ll be seeing over the coming weeks. This seems to be a recurrent theme this season — shows starting conservatively, giving themselves something to build on. This is not at all a bad thing.

??Night Stalker?? also debuted tonight. I wasn’t terribly impressed — it certainly beats the hell out of ??Supernatural??, but that’s not saying much. I doubt the show is going to be able to execute its premise convincingly over the long haul, and I’m not overly impressed, so far, with the performances or, especially, the chemistry. In many ways it’s a much, much less interesting and worthwhile version of ??Miracles?? — but not in a more marketable way. Just in a less good way.

MIT Media Lab: $100 Laptop

Nifty.

“Chris,”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com:2521/ugp/show/Chris one of my favorite people, and an excellent interlocutor, recently emailed me asking about the present-centeredness of pragmatic theories of truth and the general problem of pinning down a solid definition of anything in the field of pragmatism. What follows is most of my response.

Pragmatism does not necessarily get along well with time. Especially, *Deweyan* pragmatism (as opposed, I think, to Jamesian pragmatism) does not deal well with the past. There is no concept of enduring truth per se, which we would expect, but more worringly, there is often no concept of enduring value or enduring disposition. Of course, that’s the whole point — we’re trying to get away from false eternalisms and essentialisms. But it leaves us stuck with a situation where we’re forever saying, “I don’t know for sure, but, based on what I know right now, here’s what seem to me the assumptions that will best enable us to go about our business.” Which is fine, and I think a good place to be, but it’s not a very firm foundation. Precariousness is its primary attribute, both as a virtue and as a vice.

Now, I think Dewey would say that pragmatism is interested in what is good and *has been good*, i.e., he’s interested in things that have both a past and a future. His constant approach to history was to find things that were sort of like his ideas and market them as precursors. (He was a Neo-Hegelian during his formative intellectual years, remember.) Dewey subscribed to a sort of idealized teleological evolutionary view of ideas: he thought that over time, the environment would select the good ones, and that our best ideas were refinements of older good that were just not quite good enough. And of course, he would have an optimistic (form his point of view) view of the future, in which future ideas continue to improve on ours.

What this means of course, is that Deweyan pragmatism is absolutely, completely devoid of loyalty. No idea, no value, no good is good in itself. All will continue to be revised. Dewey would say, this isn’t as bad as most essentialists think, because it’s not like we have any reason to believe the evolution of ideas will be discontinuous; rather, it would shape up in ways that, were we able to see them and reflect rationally on them, we would approve of.

But of course, there are major flaws in this kind of thinking. For one thing, we have no reason to think that the environment is this uniform thing that continuously selects in one period what is best for the next; in fact, we have every reason to think this is not true. Indeed, we have every reason to think that it’s advantageous to keep things conflicted, confused, and unresolved, with strange holdovers from the past not doing anything much — precisely because we don’t know what the future will hold. (Obviously I’m juxtaposing one biological metaphor against another here, for whatever that’s worth.) This is why the Jamesian pluralistic standpoint — that, because we don’t really know what the hell is going on, we should have many different viewpoints and accept the fact that we’re not going to “solve” that problem — is vastly superior to the Deweyan version of pragmatic truth, which is, at many points, *shockingly* similar to classic enlightenment models. At the end of the day, James understands that because you and I have different *assumptions* about the way the world works, and different *tastes* in the questions we want to ask, we are never going to be able to have a viable meeting of the minds about everything; only the areas of inquiry where there is *already* sufficient shared interest will be productive. Dewey really believed that, to borrow from an early Buddhist text (that I’m inclined to think was being ironic, but may have been serious), “Truth was one, not two.” He believed that he was definitely right about things, and that his pragmatic arguments were proofs, not persuasions, which I think is how James felt about his writings.

But in order for Dewey to have this very aggressive, and in many ways very old-fashioned, view of pragmatic truth, he had to have this hard-edged presentism, in which the past, now outmoded, is constantly being not necessarily discarded but certainly *whittled down* to what matters *now.*

(Note: I recall this question of loyalty came up in “The Spirit of Politics,” and we all got in trouble because we trashed Dewey about it, but almost none of us had bothered to do the other half of the week’s reading, which was about loyalty…..that was by, I believe, Royce.)

Note: Quine also *gets* this pluralistic thing that Dewey and Rorty never quite tune into. He basically states in “Two Dogmas” that where we end up with our pragmatic inquiries will depend in part on where we’re coming from in terms of our personal past *and* our cultural inheritance, and that this isn’t necessarily the same for all people.

Let me see if I can rephrase: What Dewey and Rorty don’t take into account is the way in which the as-yet-unknown future of our ideas undermines the authority with which we are able to expound them in the present, and should force us to be more respectful of past ideas (since they may before long be current again) and more cautions about present ones.

Clear, precise, full, exhaustive definitions are basically antithetical to pragmatism, because they are basically characteristic of foundationalism. I mean, what is foundationalist philosophy but the long- and hard-cultivated ability to say, exhaustively, conclusively, what a thing, any thing, actually *is*? When we reject that and say, “All definitions are unfinished,” we doom ourselves to a life of having trouble defining things.

There’s also the fact that pragmatism varies wildly from pragmatist to pragmatist; from the beginning, James was already miles away from the original version of pragmatism defined by Peirce, which he originally intended merely to popularize; thus Peirce had to rename his idea “pragmaticism.” Similarly, Dewey’s intellectual roots are actually to a considerable extent continental, rather than anglophone, and his thought does not actually bear that close a similarity to that of James or Peirce — nor did he call it pragmatism; he called it instrumentalism (why, I don’t know; what a terrible name). And Rorty’s philosophy is heavily influenced by Nietzschean and postmodern theory (not to say he is either of these things, but you would never find a guy like Rorty in a world without them), and a skimpy epistemology more similar to James’s than to Dewey’s — but he still identifies as a Deweyan.

Of course, it’s important to consider context. “What is pragmatism” has different answers depending on the situation, the particular frame of reference, the writer and the audience, etc. And in many cases it’s better to discard the over-arching label and talk about specific, concrete, applied examples — since most versions of pragmatism suggest that’s where the action is, anyway.

Saw the premiere of ??Commander in Chief??; it wasn’t _bad_, and it covered an acceptable range of content for a first episode — basically just introducing the premise and establishing some relationships. But the show is not marked by strong ensemble acting — _or_ by any especially powerful individual performances. Now, this may just be a function of the fact that we’re just starting out, and not every writer can bring us straight into a show with either rapid-fire brilliant dialogue or high-tension, dynamic episode plotting (Sorkin and Abrams, respectively), and it’s possible that this one will find its sea legs yet. And certainly I continue to be in favor of portraying a woman president. But we’ll have to wait and see.

Clearly this show’s greatest challenge is going to be ??West Wing?? — not as a direct competitor, since ??West Wing?? is about to end its run, while this show is just starting, and they’re doubtless hoping to just usurp the audience. (Appropriately, I guess.) But ??West Wing?? has set an undeniable standard for political drama, especially political drama within the White House. As a result, viewers are going to have extremely high standards. We’re seeing a lot of shows this season that are obviously post-??Lost??, but none of them are anywhere near as close as ??Commander?? is to ??West Wing??; normally, you’d see shows this similar come out either at the same time, in direct competition, or after an appropriate pause to let people sort of refresh their palette. For me, the problem went right down to set design and camera work; I’m continually jarred that it doesn’t _look_ like the ??West Wing?? White House.

It just occurred to me tonight that ??Prison Break?? not only hasn’t taken a turn for the suck, it’s been steadily improving. They’ve made excellent use of the closed space, especially with the latest episode, in which walls are broken down and the usually contained violence of the prisoner populations is spreading. It’s also done better with its pacing, finding ways to tell gripping and fast sub-plots without giving away too much from the main storyline. And it has wisely assigned reduced screen time to Robin Tunney’s end of the conspiracy storyline. (This strand may become more interesting later, but right now, it’s best to keep it in the background.)

It’s still not in the Abrams/Sorkin league, but I am still, at least so far, consistently impressed.

(Surface, however, continues to blow, but in a somewhat more amusing, campy way.)

I don’t think I’ve posted this previously, but I wouldn’t put it past me to forget such a thing at 6:00 AM at night (yes, that’s what I mean), so here’s a little user’s guide to some dirty sanskrit:

First off, let us clarify the threefold division of dirty sanskrit. First, there are terms that are used in the same category linguistically and sociologically as our own vulgarity and profanity. On this point, I can’t help you, as I’m not acquainted with the kind of scholarly apparatus that would clarify this category. Second, there are terms that, while probably at least to some extent scatalogical, are chosen primarily for their etymological and/or biological end/or whater-logical relationship to existing vulgarity and profanity in English. The last consists of neologisms which consist of the logically accurate combination of existing Sanskrit parts of speech to form translations of actual or possible English vulgarity and profanity. The last category is obviously the most readily accessible to the student. There’s also those Sanskrit words that happen to sound like English curse-words, but that’s a story for another day.

Now, I don’t have most of my notes or my great big dictionary (Monier-Williams is the only way to fly), and in point of fact this is only a pretext to perform yet another test on the delightful online ITRANS interface. So we’ll only make a cursory beginning. I’ll doubtless come back for more nonsense later.

Also, anyone who objects to foul language should obviously not continue past the

Most of our efforts as sanskrito-scatologists were previously held up by our lack of a sanskrit term for “fuck.” This persisted even after we’d found the latin equivalent used by victorian translators and those of merely victorian sentiment. The breakthrough came when came across an article which happened to provide antique termsm for “fuck” in several languages, including Sanskrit. Perhaps he could provide me with a link? It’s a veritable fornicatory rosetta stone, anyway. With its help and that of Whitney’s Verbal Roots, we came up with not one but three terms: “yabh,” “kudh,” “pra-kudh”

Respectively, “fuck,” “sport amorously,” and “fuck.” You can see how that might work.

These are the verbal roots. “Fuck!” is probably best translated as an imperative, so it would be, “yabha!”; “fuck you” would be “yabha tvam.”

So, we can now form terms that, while doubtless unattested, would probably make the proper insultative sense to a native speaker, like “motherfucker”: ‘mātṛyabhtṛ” (This is the stem; “tvam mātṛyabhtā” would be “You motherfucker”)

And terms like “fuckwad,” (”wad of fucking”) which are much more abstract, but no less fun for us: (And by us, I mean me.) “yabhanaghana” (”You fuckwad” would be “tvam yabhanaghanaḥ”

And of course, this now allows for the completion of the Shaft lyric, even though it technically wasn’t required for the script: “eka durmātṛ–” “nikūṇa tava mukhaṃ” This of course approximates, “One badmother–” “Shut your mouth!”

I’m zoning out a bit, but I’ll throw in one last tidbit, just because it’s such a nifty insult, and one that I think would be a useful addition to the English language:”svapāyugrasta,” (”tvam svapāyugrastaḥ” is “you own-ass-swallowed-one”) which is to say, “One who has been swallowed by his own anus.” (This is formed on the model of a real term–a philosophical term, no less, used in the sāṃkhya-kārikāḥ: “svayonigrasta”–swallowed by ones own…womb, or origin; return to ones source.)

Now, it should be noted that while I went back and provided the most likely declined and conjugated forms, I may well have erred in some or all of them, and I didn’t check the sandhi at all. So, user beware. And this has of course merely scratched the surface of dirty sanskrit. More to follow.

I’m rather fond of this, and I figured I might as well bring it over where the posts are searchable.

Television and the past

Television is the most important artistic medium available to Americans today. I suggest this because I believe television is the only viable current successor to theater, and theater is—or, rather, was—something special. Historically, the role of theater is to bring communities together for a shared experience—to “communicate” in the Deweyan (or the Nietzschean, though Nietzsche meant it as an insult) sense; this role is not played by many other art forms. Thus theater is one of the natural foundations of cultural literacy¹—of the shared ideas, phrases, images, and archetypes which form the material for communication, ranging from new art to sermons to business letters to political speeches, and cultural literacy is the lifeblood of a community, especially a democratic community that is reluctant to delegate all of its cultural activities to specialized elites. (Hannah Arendt¹ has written in The Human Condition on the intimate relationship between politics and theater, both being privileged venues for pure action.)

Many art forms, and most especially the book—which, for many people, is the victim in the story of the success (or whatever) of television—are not well equipped to provide this sort of shared experience. Books are very good at creating a connection between two or a handful of people across time and space, for creating virtual communities that, for example, allow me to fall madly in love with a French woman who died decades before I was born (Simone Weil), but very bad at bringing together people who are part of existing actual communities, especially relatively large and busy ones, like a city, or a nation.

The book has not been supplanted by the television. The practice of watching television has not replaced the individual immersing himself in a world of text (a practice of which I am also very much in favor), but the practice of communities immersing themselves together in a common experience.

While theater itself still exists as such, it no longer approximates in any way its former role; it exists now for elites, hobbyists, and tourists. It is not a normal or an extensive part of community life. That role has been taken over by first film and now television, and in the future possibly content distributed via the internet and viewed on a variety of appliances ranging from home theaters to portable personal video players, but in any case by the much and unfairly reviled flickering screen in whatever embodiment. (More on why I’m talking about television rather than movies later.)

Now, television has points of convergence and points of divergence with the role played by theater historically. It is a collective experience uniting diverse members of a geopolitical community, and it provides the ground of our current cultural literacy, exemplified in watercooler debriefs of last night’s shows and in the proliferation of television-derived metaphors and anecdotes in our normal speech and writing. Allusions to literature have been supplanted, in many of the classrooms, living rooms, and coffee shops I’ve occupied, by allusions to The Simpsons, which has the kind of cultural-literacy market share that Dickens or Shakespeare once had, but have no longer.

Television differs from theater mostly in terms of the consequences of its technology. A theater experience is physically shared; you can see and smell the audience around you; you can hear it gasp or laugh or heckle. One may watch television with family and friends, but this always still has the stamp of the private, and therefore, perhaps, is less constitutive of a community. However, whatever this loss is, in exchange you get the capacity to tie together not just a town or a considerable portion of a city, but the better part of an entire nation, and, in the case of America, a nation desperately in need of more cultural common ground. This strikes a sort of middle ground between the traditional, virtual-community-building of books and the concrete actual-community-building of theater; while it’s true that the vast majority of the people with whom you share a television program are spread across space, they are usually localized in time—thus the watercooler conversation. Thus the immediate entry of reference-able material into the cultural mainstream.

Television also, and here not only as a result of technical affordances alone, differs in the kind of storytelling it provides. A television show may last for years—decades, even, in the case of some soap operas and news programs. The extent to which programs capitalize on this varies. Some are almost entirely episodic, using recurring characters and themes, but ultimately telling the same stories again and again; this is not essentially different from familiar genres like commedia dell’arte. Other shows are designed around long-term story arcs of varying length—but, owing to the production cycles of the industry, not usually longer than a season. (Obviously there are exceptions, including the recent work of JJ Abrams, which demonstrate multi-season plotting as an integral feature.) The possibility of long-term storytelling has the potential to deepen the community experience, creating imagined histories of a scope not encountered in the theater. A traditional theater troupe in theory could, but in practice never would, make this kind of commitment. But the centralization and specialization (and yes, the metastatic growth) of the Hollywood machine open up this possibility.

Television and the present

Now, there is clearly a flaw in my logic thus far, or, at least, an important point I’ve been glossing over. I refer, of course, to the well-known fact, the truism, that television sucks—by which I mean not that television as a medium is somehow corruptive or bad, but that much of what is presented in that medium is unimpressive. Television has not, by and large, lived up to its potential.

Setting aside the possibility that dumbass particles are an unavoidable byproduct of cathode ray tubes, the most obvious explanation for TV’s quality issues is the marketplace. In any market situation, people sell what other people will pay for—that is, what they want, or can be made to want, enough to pay for. Sellers will of course have an incentive to sell what can be produced cheaply and dependably (not what can be made dependable, mind you). This fact is not very inimical to the process of constructing a towel rack or, with suitable safety and environmental regulations, even a car. It is not, however, a fitting guardian of art and culture.

The profit motive in art tends to reduce it to entertainment. This is not to say that art should not entertain; indeed, it is of great importance that art be interesting, engaging, enjoyable, but it is also important that it be more than just these things. Efficient production in television means an unhealthy dependence on familiar plot formulae, short or nonexistent story arcs, and old, old jokes³.

Possibly more serious is the extent to which the consumer demand for emotionally positive and simple storytelling undercuts the ability of American popular art to work with the domain of tragedy. Tragic storytelling—which deals with the limits of our powers—the possibility of real loss which is not redeemed by some compensatory victory, the ways in which even when we are at our best—when we are being heroes of whatever stripe—we still betray ourselves and each other, and the possibility of real conflict between virtues, goods, and rights. These are aspects of life which cannot be effaced by consumers’ desire to be told pretty stories, and when we attempt to avoid this fact, the consequences are at times quite dire. (Cf. US foreign policy.) If art is to bear any relation to reality—and whether you think that art reflects life or life reflects art or both, there should be some relationship—it has to be able to handle stories that run counter to our ironclad will to optimism.

It is tempting to place the lion’s share of the blame for the media marketplace on consumers; if they just wanted what was good for them, Hollywood would sell it. But that’s not exactly what’s happening. There’s a persistent incentive for Hollywood to make the minimum possible product within any range of what the consumer would be willing to pay for. What is more, there is an incentive to use advertising to reinforce the acceptability of the minimal and reduce the expectation, even the sense of the possibility of, the maximum. Thus, between the demons of market and marketing, it is not clear how much power a viewer really has to change his mind about what he wants—in the absence of options.

Aaron Sorkin, one of the great living artists in the medium, has suggested somewhere that it is not that people don’t want something better, it’s that they don’t know the possibility is out there, and wouldn’t even know what it looked like if you asked them to describe it. After all, they lack a frame of reference in which the question would make sense. If you go ahead and give it to them, you may find that they do come to want it, or even that it was something they had been wanting all along⁴. As to the success of Sorkin’s prediction as applied to his own work, results are mixed; Sports Night suffered an early demise, while West Wing was a success and remains so after Sorkin’s departure and the show’s devolution to a more basic level of storytelling.

The most obvious, though not, I think, the best solution to this problem is public television, and PBS has, in fact, been vitally important, especially in the sphere of nonfiction. Indeed, it is indispensable to have programs like Nova and 3-2-1 Contact widely available to the public and produced apart from the coercion of profit motive. (The reporting of popular science, like that of politics, is an arena in which truth is sometimes fragile.) And Sesame Street is rare (and not just in television) for its respect, care, accessibility, and its high expectations about what kids can understand.

I am less impressed, however, by the inexplicable (or, rather, indefensible) affinity of PBS for cooking shows, or the fact that PBS caters to a narrow audience often excluding the people for whom TV is the most important cultural medium and for whom access to high-quality, no-cost viewing would be most beneficial. In a sense, PBS is “TV for people who read”; what we need is to pursue excellence in TV for people who watch.

So let’s return to the slums of regular commercial television for a moment. If we set aside the reality shows (which are demonstrations of all that is ugly about the human animal, and not in a good way) and the fascist, contentless police procedurals and the “dumpy guy with large-breasted wife” comedies, there are a few great shows that serve as evidence of the possibility of tapping the potential of television as an artistic medium for a national community.

In the present tense, two names leap to mind: Aaron Sorkin and JJ Abrams. Sorkin, who began in theater and transitioned to film before doing television (and who has declared that he considers television the more interesting and powerful medium), brought us the short-lived Sports Night (imdb) and the more successful, but also more conventional, West Wing. (imdb) Sorkin’s writing presents us with images of civic virtue that recall William James’s vision of a “moral equivalent of war.” James called on us to find ways of conceiving of public service as a kind of heroism, with all the trappings that entails, non-military ways of having heroism, drama, “manliness,” and the struggle between good and evil, and Sorkin’s West Wing is one of the best attempts to help us imagine this concretely.

Sorkin has helped us to make the imaginative leap necessary to see past our well-justified skepticisms regarding the authenticity of professional politics and the popular media, to give us a sense of what it would look like to, for example, choose a leader who is something more than the lesser evil.

Sorkin’s stories are full of a morality that is not simplistic and does not pander to constituencies, but consistently challenges expectations and asks questions for which we may not have answers. He also, far more than most makers of American entertainment, is able to deal with the element of the tragic. His emphasis is on the “modern” style of tragedy⁵ (i.e., reflections on the limits of our powers in the face of circumstance) and on problems of loyalty and responsibility—difficult subjects for Americans to deal with outside of sensationalism or pedantry.

Sorkin’s work is not plot-driven; like Greek philosophy, its basic structure is dialogue—the encounter of two powerful speaking subjects. And unlike Greek philosophy, Sorkin can accomplish such encounters without privileging one voice over the other; even when an argument is clearly lost, it is not a straw man; it is a real and serious struggle in which meaningful things have been said.

Sorkin’s work so far has not really fit into the landscape of television. Sports Night failed partly because it was something essentially different from other shows; viewers did not know whether to take it as a comedy or a drama (as edgy animated comedy Family Guy puts it, “I finally get Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night: it’s a comedy that’s too good to be funny!”), and many were doubtless thrown off by thinking it might be about sports. These are problems that aggressive marketing and good scheduling could have ameliorated, but ABC put little or no effort into bringing viewers to the table. West Wing had better success, partly because it is more close to viewer expectations (it looks and feels like a quasi-normal hour-long professional drama at first glance), and also because it had more well-known talent and content that many recalled from Sorkin’s successful film The American President—and of course, it tapped into the basic fascination of the office of the president. However, problems arose here as well, this time internally, because Sorkin’s extensive role in the writing of each episode—which was a key factor in the quality of the show—made West Wing relatively expensive to produce, and this ultimately led to Sorkin and collaborator Thomas Schlamme leaving the show.

JJ Abrams, on the other hand, lives and breathes plot, spinning as though without effort complex and interwoven story arcs and constantly evolving relationships. Superficially, he confines himself to the most commercially viable of formats—spies in skimpy outfits on Alias, and in Lost a castaway epic that would probably never have hit the airwaves if it couldn’t be pitched as a gigantic Survivor reference. But despite the seemingly unrisky format of Alias, Abrams has used the show to explore the complex and tenuous nature of human relationships; people turn it on expecting sex and violence and they may not realize that it is about trust and betrayal, love and hate, loyalty, patriotism, and especially about what happens when these forces that hold us together come into conflict. This, together with an attention to the peculiar problem of destiny, the burden of history (especially of the “sins of the father” variety), and the struggle for redemption give Abrams his own, rather Greek, slice of the tragic sensibility. Lost, on the other hand, probes the intersection of identity and choice, and uses the loss of civilization to leverage the exposure of inner character and morality beyond mores.

Both Abrams and Sorkin have mixed success records. Sorkin’s Sports Night never got any traction, and while West Wing was successful, the creative strategies Sorkin used were not compatible with the show’s budget and shooting schedule, and Alias has not had the ratings or attention (or security) it deserved until the more popular Lost came along in a feeder time slot. And many other similarly impressive shows have failed to make it past their first season or two: Karen Sisco, for example, which was unusual for the specificity and depth of its female protagonist⁷, or some morally rich and deeply characterized fantasy and horror shows like American Gothic, Brimstone, G vs. E, Miracles, and the amazing White Dwarf⁸, as opposed to their more popular but also less deep counterparts like The X-Files. Other interesting shows have survived by becoming progressively less interesting—Everwood being a good example of this phenomenon.

Other shows are less powerful, but still important because of their impact on American cultural literacy. I’ve already mentioned The Simpsons, which has been notoriously extensive in its range of set-ups, plots, and ideas, to the point where a couple years ago there was talk of stopping the show because the writers had already done everything. Obviously they’re still making shows now, but nonetheless the incredible range of human behavior, of topical subject-matter, etc., that appears within The Simpsons does make it ideal as a venue for cultural literacy; it’s power for short-handing, metaphor building, etc. let it play for us today the role that Shakespeare played in the time of ED Hirsch’s father⁶. The problem here is that The Simpsons is not as complete a cultural product as Shakespeare; it is devoid of the tragic or, indeed, anything serious⁹.

We’ve also seen a recent renaissance in hour-long cable-network dramas. The added freedom of the more sheltered production environment and a more adventuresome audience encourage risk-taking and allow creators to explore the darker side of life—ceding a greater role to death, violence, angst, and existential speculation. However, the difficulty with this freedom is that it derives from and is provided to the narrower audience of premium cable subscribers—which grouping carries class implications and, in theory at least, age restrictions that isolate the cultural influence of such programs from the youth culture where it can do the most good. A degree of compromise may be found with original dramas on basic cable; The Shield, Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, and Battlestar Galactica being names that leap to mind as critically acclaimed¹⁰.

Another source of programming sheltered from the optimism-hungry demands of American broadcast is Japan; the sad and sweet Cowboy Bebop, to name the most obvious example, puts almost all recent American attempts at noir storytelling to shame with its compassion and introspection—while still utilizing the form of the action comedy. (In cinema, Out of Sight attempted something like this, with so-so success, while Road to Perdition, with heavy Japanese influence, produced something of a related (though very stiff and a bit heavy-handed) worth.

Of course, all of this is very recent, because I haven’t been watching TV seriously for very long. There are, of course, older shows that are of equal or greater value; Taxi, that noblest of sitcoms, is a good example, a meditation on the promises and disappointments of American dreams; Wiseguy also leaps to mind—a show which gets at a greater than usual share of conflicting rights and loyalties, the question of more than one kind of honor and justice, not to mention the Apollonian-Dionysian implications of Kevin Spacey’s character in season two. (And yes, it is telling that these feel “old” to me, when they don’t even break the b&w barrier…)

I am also ignoring Joss Whedon, another important voice in television; Whedon already has more than enough apologists.

Television and the future

So, how might we hope to achieve some progress in getting television not to suck?

Governmental and charitable interventions (alternatives to PBS)

I believed that the privileged point of leverage is with broadcast programming (or, to some (probably increasing) extent, basic cable), where there is the most accessibility and the broadest audience—but also where high-quality shows have the most trouble getting a toehold. I would support aggressive efforts on the part of the government to make it possible for important and worthwhile programming to succeed in this environment; this might mean government subsidies for shows like early West Wing that turn out a higher quality product (especially those that, like West Wing have important consequences for public perception of things like civic duty and political participation) at a proportionately higher cost, and/or for shows like Sports Night, which were under-viewed partly because their networks could not or would not promote them properly.

More realistically, it might involve the the development of federally sponsored awards and other programs that provide recognition for shows that are, generally, good theater, and also for shows that help raise the level of public debate¹¹, but never for shows that achieve the latter at the expense of the former—because while it is important to combat the brain-drain effect of the Hollywood market, it’s also important to retain the viewability and accessibility of programming.

Other possibilities for funded interventions might include grants to writers and creators developing difficult projects, or the creation or support of initiatives designed to connect emerging creators with innovative ideas with big-name talent studio production dollars.

All of this effectively ignores the possibility of producing important art within the context of public television as it now exists in America, but of course, PBS has always also ignored this possibility. (PBS is good at being informative, but never at being creative.) It is unlikely that the level of funding necessary to produce good programming could be achieved entirely on the basis of government and private contributions, though this may change with shifts in the cost of production resulting from new technological developments. (See below)

Changes in production and distribution, and their consequences

DVD box sets

There are a number of shifts happening in the way that media are produced, distributed, and used. One of the biggest shifts is in the increased market for Complete Nth Seasons of things, a shift closely tied to the DVD format. (While DVDs are, as C. Harris has pointed out to me on a couple of occasions, an overrated format, especially compared to the magnet tape storage they are replacing, their compactness and menu-based browsing are much better suited to the presentation of seasons of television programs.)

This has meant that television shows can be used more like fixed texts in addition to being used like oral traditions (i.e., as part of a stable record to which many of us have access, where previously they had only functioned as a malleable set of overlapping memories), and has also been leveraged by some shows with small but intense user communities (“cult classics”) to enable comebacks of one or another kind, like the remarkable return to broadcast of Family Guy or the upcoming Firefly film. I suspect that this will have a positive effect on the expectations of viewers; as the saying goes (was it Santayana?), those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and box DVD sets tend to make the past which viewers have experienced more explicitly fixed in their minds, meaning that they will be more likely to want either new material or material that builds intelligently on the old material it rehashes. It will also favor the deepening of cultural engagement by fans in the material, thus speeding the incorporation of elements into shared cultural literacy.

Democratization of media

With digital video taking off and personal and small-business computing gaining power for specialized tasks like video editing, production is less and less dependent on the centralized hollywood infrastructure. For more information, see the detailed self-aggrandizement of the Apple PR machine at http://apple.com

In the future, more and more media will be produced either place-independent (and even in many places at once) or around smaller local centers (of which the Bay Area will almost certainly be one). This means it will be easier for small- to mid-scale projects to get off the ground.

It will also be more and more possible for individuals to produce video content with higher standards on a more rapid timetable. More importantly, decentralized distribution methods will follow the developments in blogging and podcasting that have essentially given everyone the power of individual print and radio publishing.

Now, just because everyone can have a blog does not mean that everyone will have a good blog. Quite the contrary, and similarly with emerging video content. Also, there are some concerns regarding the development of ego-casting—i.e., technologies designed to narrowly tailor my media consumption to my personal interests.

However, those who harp on the isolationist qualities of emergent entertainment forms are generally paying insufficient attention to the increasingly social character of the internet (and the increasingly internet-based nature of other entertainment technologies)—services and features related to tagging, rating, annotation, discussion, etc., most of which will themselves be easier and easier to disseminate and organize using RSS—that will re-integrate the individual viewing and listening practices into larger communities, and will probably elevate some independent producers to national attention. (Variations on the “slashdot” effect, for example, will probably be occupying marketing professionals for many years to come.)

Also, it should be noted that while increasing the raw amount of media produced will not in itself raise the average quality of them (quite the contrary), over the long run there is probably a benefit associated with giving viewers more and more choices driven by more personal, idiosyncratic visions—and less by industrial interests. (This is not to say that commercial viability is not a driving force in the majority of those personal visions—the use of journalistic blogging in attempting to launch careers in traditional journalism, or at least gain the fabled “fifteen minutes,” has demonstrated this.)

Here again it would be useful for the government or private foundations to take up a role in furthering the promotion of high-quality content—but here again, this is unlikely to work out.

It will also be important that attention be paid to the interactions of sub-cultures and pocket communities; analysis of social networks pertaining to media consumption, discursive communities, and cultural literacy should be undertaken, and consequences for k-12 curriculum might need to considered. It has always been important that schools teach kids to be critical consumers of media, and schools have always largely failed in this responsibility; as media become decentralized, this task will be much more important, but with the increase and diversification of producers of media and with more and more social tools for thinking and choosing together, it will also probably be a more feasible task. I should point out that the responsibility of public education to help children mediate between overlapping communal identities and discourses is nothing new, as John Dewey identified it quite clearly in the first chapters of his Democracy and Education. Making children good critical consumers of multiple, interconnected cultures is an essential duty of democratic education, though this is often obscured by the (eurocentric and otherwise suspect) integrationist aspirations of the Horace Mann school of educational theory and rhetoric.

(I should also note that it seems likely that secondary school electives like school newspapers and literary magazines, yearbooks, etc. may be the best existing model we have of the kind of amateur micropublishing environment that internet-based media production fosters, and thus these activities may become more and more important—less electives and more core curricula—as the skills they build become more and more the basic skills of civic and professional life; indeed, we may over time see a partial or total inversion of their relationship with the core subjects.)

By way of disclaimer, I do not mean to suggest that it is inevitable that television and its successors will begin more and more to achieve their potential, but that reasonably anticipatable developments will probably make it more and more possible for people and groups below the level of the freakin’ huge corporation to have an impact—for good or evil—on the creation of media.

¹ Obviously I’m doing things with this of which ED Hirsch (Cultural Literacy) would not approve; Hirsch’s basic premise is one I’m very fond of, but I disagree with almost everything he extrapolates from it. (Note: Of course theater and television are not the only media that serve this function, but few serve it to the extent they do/did. One exception that leaps to mind is the medieval cathedral, which was offered as a predecessor to modern television in one of the articles in the wonderful The Future of the Book edited by Geoffrey Nunberg of Language Log. In the article, the cathedral was proposed as a text which the audience would inhabit together, one which was was covered in wall to wall content.)

² Arendt would probably not be any happier than Hirsch to be deputized into my argument. Oh well.

³ Of course, these things have their place in art, as well. Any enemy of old plot devices will have to throw away his Shakespeare along with his soap operas. But there is a difference between taking a familiar trope as a starting point and building something fine and new upon it and simply playing a totally stale story over and over again as a cow chews cud.

⁴ This echoes one of Sorkin’s dialogues in The American President, in which Michael J. Fox and Michael Douglas debate the reason Americans accept mediocre leaders: do the people “drink sand” because they don’t have water to slake their thirst, or because they are incapable of distinguishing between the two substances? This is a recurring theme in Sorkin; one of his essnetial preoccupations is with the reluctance to settle for less. Both Sports Night and West Wing were meditations on idealism in practice in fields (television journalism mand politics) where those things are normally wholly incompatible. An unwillingness to settle for less—from oneself and from one’s colleagues—is one of the surest marks of a Sorkin protagonist.

⁵ I encountered this distinction in Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy.

⁶ Hirsch’s presentation of the cultural literacy concept centers on the importance of Shakespeare for business writing in his father’s time, versus the communication gap surrounding urban youth.

⁷ Feminism is a relatively weak point for me, but I think I’m on semi-safe ground saying that there was a difference between Sisco and other strong or strong-ish female characters on television in recent years. Sisco lacked the camp action elements of, say, Buffy or Alias (or, less impressively, Charmed), which tend to walk a line between irony and exploitation, and instead focused on quiet joys and sorrows of being a strong and self-directed woman in a male-dominated world. Sisco also seemed capable of having a sex life without being about her sex life, another unusual feat in Hollywood.

⁸ White Dwarf actually never made it past its two-hour pilot; it could be superficially glossed as “Northern Exposure in space,” but its arresting, surreal visual texture, its already intricate out-of-box geo-politco-ethical world, and its morally speculative setting made it something fine and, I suppose, doomed.

⁹ The perceptive reader will have noticed that I keep yapping about tragedy. The reason for that is that one of the ways in which the hollywood market has culturally impoverished America is the total loss of a sense of the tragic dimension of human experience; we tend to insist that the good guys should survive, win, get the girl, say witty things, and be really all around great guys, and the reverse for the other ones. But this means that our art can only be in sync with part of the world—can only have meaning in relation to a glossy and post-produced vision of life.

¹⁰ It’s possible that I’m underplaying or overestimating the worth of both premium and basic cable programming, as I have been without regular cable for quite a while, now. However, I have seen many of the shows being discussed either on DVD or on some more connected person’s TV. Insights from cable subscribers with more familiarity and thus more basis for reflection are of course welcome.

¹¹ The Everwood abortion episode, while maintaining its overall alignment with the WB’s pro-life stance, presents an admirably multi-sided and nuanced view of the subject, and especially of the ways in which we do not always feel or act as we expect ourselves to or are expected to. It would provide a good jumping-off point for a class discussion or a family conversation about a very important and sensitive topic, especially for young people with evolving political views.