The Video Public Sphere

The personal is political. Since the 1960s this phrase has been a rallying cry for social movements founded in identity. It is a creed in which progressive demands emerge from the specific social (and sometimes biological) experiences of a particular class of citizens. Identitarian activism thus posits a causal relationship between individual experience and political orientation. In the United States this convergence of the personal and the political is largely associated with various sorts of counter- or subcultures typically including people of color, women, lesbians, gay men, and other gender outlaws, But minoritized publics are not the only ones to link the personal with the political. Indeed, such articulations are among the fundamental modalities of mainstream power under late capitalism in which corporate and political bodies are rendered intimate and subjective. If sixties radicals and their progeny made the personal political, it is certainly true that since the mid-twentieth century the political ha s been made personal along a much broader social spectrum. One need only consider the escalation of sexual ethics (and sexual scandal) as a means of evaluating political candidates from the period of the philandering-but-tolerated John F. Kennedy to that of the philandering-but-excoriated William Jefferson Clinton. It is my belief that the emergence of broadcast television in the 1950s and its ubiquitous dissemination in the 1960s has greatly abetted this bilateral embrace of the personal and the political by producing a public sphere in which social questions are understood in terms of individual (and often fictionalized) dramas. It will be my assertion that television fosters a particular form of spectatorship: it creates a split or multiple identification, in which there is an approximate reflection of the viewer's experience, but also simultaneously, a re-channeling of this experience into a limited number of conventional and highly moralized narratives. This gap opened up between a spectator and his or h er reflection provides a space for ideological formations to take root. The mechanisms of these identifications are typically veiled in broadcast television, but they are made explicit in certain forms of video art. In this essay, I will take my cue from Fredric Jameson's insight that television and video art are dialectically linked: "Commercial television is not an autonomous object of study; it can only be grasped for what it is by positioning it dialectically over against that other signifying system which we have called experimental video or video art." [1]

The political dimension of fictional television narratives was made manifest recently in a fascinating struggle over minority representation on television dramas and sitcoms. Led by the NAACP (whose leadership was not without controversy), [2] a coalition of minority media activists demanded that the major networks include a greater number of people of color in television programming both on the screen and behind the camera. What is striking about this action is that the NAACP, one of the oldest and most venerable civil rights organizations in the United States, recognized that not only representation, but representation in the entertainment industry is integral to politics. Prime-time programming, perhaps even more than the constant stream of journalistic reporting on news networks such as CNN, was recognized as constituting an important site of political activism. In his 1995 book, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness", Herman Gray explores the cultural shifts which underlie the recent NAACP action. [3] He demonstrates how the changing demographics of television viewership in the 1980s led to an expansion of television dramas and sitcoms featuring black characters. In order to engage what they considered the rising proportion of African American viewers of network television-resulting in part from the migration of affluent audiences to cable programming-network executives and producers sought to develop programs that would appeal to black experience while not alienating white audiences. This reflexivity of programming and audience is itself an important lesson about the business of television. Alongside the proliferation of identity-based politics in the 1980s, there developed an analogous strategy in the mass media of "narrowcasting," in which programs were consciously addressed to specifically defined ethnic and socio-economic audiences. Network executives recognized that profits could be enhanced by more aggressively exploiting television's capacity to solicit idealized identifications between viewers and fictional characters. The Cosby Show was probably the most successful of this genre of programming, but its promotion of a split or hybrid form of identification attracted criticism from some African American intellectuals. If, on the one hand, it presented a positive image of an affluent black family, it also channeled black experience almost totally into standard middle- and upper-middle-class models of success. This is not to say that African Americans do not and should not be represented as embracing the American dream, but rather that The Cosby Show formulated a hybrid, and to many minds a conservative, identification in which blackness is reflected, but also re-narrativized, in a domesticated form profoundly reassuring to white viewers. The program consequently made little or no reference to the conditions of institutionalized racism and economic repression which is part of the experience of many African Americans. Its success nonetheless left the door open for activists to demand di fferent and more diverse representations of black experience on television.