Enthusiasm: Video Looks at Television

Abstract

Gidal reserves particular vitriol for the idea that it is viewing that produces meaning, at least when such a thought is merely asserted rather than thought through. Under the rubric ‘Context’, he argues that ‘it is an idealism to try to isolate specifically made up viewer-contexts… Such an idealist position sees groupings of individuals, misnamed “context”, producing the world from their individualities’ (Gidal 1989, p. 89). Perhaps the target of this attack was the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, home of a major intervention by sociologically-inspired theoreticians in cultural and media theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Where film had followed the path of textually-based notions of subjectivity, the advances in television studies, especially the early work of David Morley (Brunsdon and Morley 1978; Morley 1980a, 1980b, 1981), began to ask questions of the ‘social reader’, the actual people who sit in front of the set. To what extent is the textual formation of subjects overdetermined by their prior involvement in social and cultural structures of class, gender, family life, race, employment and so on? In the 1980s, elements of this critique have emerged as the foundation of an approach to the evaluation of mainstream media quite at odds with the 1970s debates in film theory, and it is towards the more recent formulations of these themes that I want now to turn my attention.