TV Series (Dec 2023)
The Sky and the Mud. The Art and Politics of Television
Abstract
The “return effect” of critical television studies has proved difficult if not impossible to discern in the discipline of politics. This essay suggests this failure may have much to do with the pervasive and insidious dichotomy art/non-art, which undergirds the refusal to see television as capable of doing politics. I argue for the fundamental politics of television by way of a critique of David Foster Wallace’s 1993 effort to keep television in its place. Wallace’s polemic pivots on a cheap allusion to Stendhal’s novel of 1830, The Red and the Black, because Wallace defines television as a mirror – “not the Stendhalian mirror” but a mere “bathroom mirror” that reflects our own image back to us. I turn this allusion against Wallace by showing that a careful reading of Stendhal unravels the entire thread of Wallace’s own critique. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s account of “art” as that which sustains itself by including “non-art,” I show that Wallace has television exactly inside-out, because he gets both Stendhal and art completely wrong. Contra Wallace’s typology, there are never two kinds of mirrors (simple mirrors and Stendhalian mirrors), but only ever just mirrors. Stendhal’s mirror is a powerful mirror in motion, but we all have access to such mirrors. The rich and vibrant history of television studies repeatedly explores television as precisely a Stendhalian mirror, capable of not just reflecting but also refracting the world. Television is a moving, blurring, zooming, and focusing mirror capable of showing us the sky or revealing the mud in a way that may alter the very partition of the sensible.
