Beyond representation

Television drama and the politics and aesthetics of identity

Geraldine Harris

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Beyond representation poses the question as to whether over the last thirty years there have been signs of 'progress' or 'progressiveness' in the representation of 'marginalised' or subaltern identity categories within television drama in Britain and the US. In doing so, it interrogates some of the key assumptions concerning the relationship between aesthetics and the politics of identity that have influenced and informed television drama criticism during this period. This book can function as an introduction because it provides students with a clear and coherent pathway through complex, wide-reaching and highly influential interdisciplinary terrain. Chapters examine ideas circling around politics and aesthetics, which emerge from such theories as Marxist-socialism and postmodernism, feminism and postmodern feminism, anti-racism and postcolonialism, queer theory and theories of globalisation, and evaluates their impact on television criticism and on television as an institution. These discussions are consolidated through a number of case studies that offer analyses of a range of television drama texts including Ally McBeal, Supply and Demand, The Bill, Second Generation, Star Trek: Enterprise, Queer as Folk, Metrosexuality and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence.

1
Beyond realism? Modes of reading in Marxist-socialist and post-Marxist-socialist Television drama criticism

The ‘back story’: the critique of realism and the turn to form

In the context of mid- to late twentieth-century British television drama criticism, the relationship between politics and aesthetics was most often defined through reference to the Marxist-socialist tradition and more specifically to the work of theatre practitioner and theorist Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht famously developed a critique of what he termed ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘dramatic theatre’, which he defined as offering an illusion of reality that conformed to the ideology of the ‘parasitic bourgeoisie’ (Brecht, 1987: 160–1). Usually understood as an attack on naturalism and/or realism, Brecht’s analysis of this aesthetic embraced all aspects of production including illusionist staging, linear narratives, psychologically motivated characterisation and naturalistic acting. He argued that these characteristics operate together to passively ‘implicate the audience in the stage situation’ by means of an emotional identification with the characters and with their situation, as if these represented universal truths (37). For Brecht, this type of theatre ‘takes the human being for granted’ as a product of ‘evolutionary determinism’ and therefore as ‘unaltering and unalterable’ (37). In its stead, he posited a model of politically progressive ‘epic’ theatre, based on characters represented as contradictory ‘social types’, episodic and dialectical narrative structures and various other anti-illusionistic ‘alienation effects’ which draw attention to the theatrical ‘means of production’. According to Brecht, this form would produce an active spectator, a ‘rational’ observer who remains detached from the action within which the human being is constructed as ‘the object of inquiry’, as altering and alterable, or as he puts it ‘man [sic] as process’ (37).

As Elizabeth Wright pointed out in 1989, there is already something more than a little ‘postmodern’ about Brecht’s ideas. Nevertheless, his approach did not constitute a rejection of the ideas of a radical realist aesthetic, nor of the possibility of representing the ‘truth’ of the human subject. Rather, he acknowledged that each era has its own mode, or rather modes, of representing reality and he offers up epic theatre as a form of socialist realism, designed to reveal the truth of the class struggle in ‘the scientific age’, as a contribution to the inevitable triumph of Marxist-socialism (Brecht, 1987: 107–12). In his theatre, then, notions of the human subject and reality may be portrayed as altering and alterable but in an already determined direction.

For various obvious historical and political reasons there has been little explicit evidence of the influence of these ideas within mainstream North American television and television criticism. However, in Britain between the 1960s and the late 1980s, many television scholars, playwrights and producers, including Raymond Williams, Trevor Griffiths, John MacGrath, Jeremy Sanford, Jim Allen, Ken Loach, Troy Kennedy-Martin and Alan Bleasdale, were allied with socialism, and as a result this perspective dominated debates over aesthetics and political progressiveness in television drama. For instance, as a Marxist-socialist Trevor Griffiths was often called on to defend the use of television naturalism within his screenplays. He did so on the grounds of accessibility to a popular audience but also asserted that rather than naturalism, which he defined as un-self-reflexive, he actually employed a type of ‘critical realism’, which he placed firmly within a Marxist-socialist literary tradition (see Griffiths, 1986 and Poole and Wyver, 1984).

As this suggests, the definition of realism and naturalism and of the differences between them was a matter of dispute. In 1977, Raymond Williams argued that naturalism merely produced the ‘flat external appearance of reality’ and as an expression of a ‘doctrine of character formed by environment’ had a ‘certain static quality’, so that it emerges as a ‘passive form’ (Williams, 1977: 65). By contrast, realism, which like Griffiths he associated with Marxism, was ‘active’ and ‘went below this surface to the essential historical movements, to the dynamic quality of environments’ and the possibility of intervention to change them (69). Yet on purely formal grounds, if the nineteenth-century work of Henrik Ibsen on the one hand and that of Anton Chekhov on the other were used as models, some of Trevor Griffiths’ television works such as Country (1982) could be placed somewhere between realism and naturalism, albeit rearticulated through the Marxist tradition. As this suggests and as Brecht himself asserted, the exact difference between realism(s) and naturalism(s) cannot necessarily be decided on the basis of aesthetics alone (see Brecht, 1987: 105).

Even so, the focus on the question of form in politically progressive drama continued, as was evident in contributions to this debate from theatre playwright David Edgar (Edgar, 1979) and television and theatre writer John McGrath (1977), and in the famous exchange in Screen around Ken Loach’s and Jim Allen’s British television documentary drama Days of Hope (1976). In response to an article on this text by Colin MacArthur, Colin MacCabe critiqued it as being definable as a ‘classic-realist text’ that ensures the position of the subject in relation to dominant norms of ‘specularity’ or looking relations (MacCabe, 1981: 316). Replying to MacCabe, John Caughie pointed out that two sorts of ‘looks’ were operating in Days of Hope, making a distinction between naturalism, which he associated with what he terms the ‘documentary look’, and ‘classic’ or ‘Hollywood realism’ or the ‘dramatic look’ (Caughie, 1981: 341–2). According to Caughie, the documentary look, which has the appearance of being unplanned and chaotic, ‘constructs the social space’ of the fiction, while the dramatic look invites an emphatic identification with the characters as ‘psychologically motivated individuals’ (342–6). While he allows that the documentary look has progressive potential, in so far as it draws attention to the camera and therefore to the ‘means of production’, it also fixes its objects as ‘static victims’ who are ‘looked at and looked on’ (346). In any case, he concludes that the dramatic look ‘will impose its resolutions on the documentary disorder’ and the drama will end up ‘being about the privileged centred individuals, rather than an analysis of the document, thereby defusing any progressiveness’ (346). Ultimately, then, like others such as Edgar and McGrath, Caughie argues for a model for progressive television drama closer to a Brechtian ‘epic’ form (351). Within these structuralist debates about realism and naturalism on television, the distinction between the two can become confused in terms of affect, and Brecht’s notion of realisms collapses into a single and apparently stable form, designated by critics as Hollywood or classic realism.

From the 1970s, if not before, a similar collapse was occurring in parallel discussions about politics and aesthetics amongst feminist, gay and lesbian and anti-racist practitioners, activists and academics – voices that were still rare in television and television criticism. Within each of these political movements and across a wide range of cultural production, there was a search for alternative, ‘oppositional’ forms other to realism, which was characterised as the dominant mode of mainstream culture. In some instances these alternative forms borrowed from Brecht but in others the aim was to discover ‘new’ forms and/or to rediscover and reclaim in positive terms what were perceived as ‘authentically’ black, female or gay and lesbian forms and historical cultural practices, previously lost or marginalised.

From structuralism to poststructuralism and the impact of deconstruction

The concern for the relationship between aesthetics and the politics of identity was further strengthened under the influence of post-structuralist linguistic theory within the academy, evinced, for example, by Laura Mulvey’s seminal feminist essay of 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. First published in Screen, this article also prefigured MacCabe’s later focus on ‘dominant specularity’ and Caughie’s on ‘looks’ in drama documentary. Mulvey argues that within Hollywood realism the ‘looks’ of the camera and of the male protagonist operate together in ‘looking at and looking on’ the female characters, so as to construct them and by extension the female viewer who identifies with them as passive objects of the patriarchal male gaze. Mulvey’s essay draws on the post-structuralist, psychoanalytical linguistic theories of Jacques Lacan, but also recalls Franz Fanon’s influential work of the 1950s on ‘race’, fetishism and the politics of looking. Fanon’s influence, reworked through Lacan, is also directly in evidence in Homi Bhahba’s 1983 essay, ‘The Other Question’, and Robert Stam and Luise Spence’s 1983 essay in Screen on colonisation, racism and representation, both of which mounted a critique against ‘classic’ Hollywood realism in similar terms to Mulvey, but in relation to black subjects (see Stam and Spence, 1985 and Bhabha, 1986). As Lola Young points out, all these works can be seen as attempting to move debates about marginalised identity categories beyond issues of simple positive or negative representation (Young, 1996: 8). This same drive is evident in feminist television criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, within which the aesthetic qualities of soap opera as a ‘feminine’ narrative form began to be discussed in positive terms (see Modleski, 1997: 45).

In this context, in 1981 when a television programme dealing with racism in Britain was critiqued on the grounds of its use of realism, Stuart Hall was moved to point out that too great an emphasis on aesthetics in oppositional politics can prove a distraction. As he put it, ‘the social division of labour’, or the oppressions of gender, sexuality and race, ‘cannot be simply overcome by a few typographical or stylistic devices’ and he also warned against reducing all types of realism and naturalism to a ‘single monolith’ (Hall, 1981: 51 and 49–50). In fact, what was tending to happen as a result of all these interventions was that classic realism was being reduced to a monolith that was perceived as naturalising the ideological perspective not only of Brecht’s culturally and socially dominant ‘parasitic’ bourgeois subject but of a white, western, heterosexual, masculine, parasitic, bourgeois subject. Attempts to challenge, resist and overturn this form were then perceived as an important part of the process of ‘decentring’ and/or deconstructing the enlightenment subject that is often linked to a particular theoretical moment in the 1970s and specifically to Lyotard’s 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

However, like Brecht, many feminist, anti-racist and gay and lesbian thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s maintained a notion of a subject and of objective reality outside of representation, to which representation refers. By contrast, in principle, the concept of subjectivity and of identity that begins to inform the ideas concerning the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the 1980s and 1990s is one that is the product of representation, or rather, an effect of language, discourse or symbolic systems. Influenced by ideas from Derrida and Foucault but developed by a wide range of feminist, postcolonial and queer theorists, in this paradigm (contrary to some interpretations), the existence of the ‘real’, of nature, or of a biological or metaphysical essence of human subjectivity is not denied. Rather it is posited that there is no access to reality, nature or subjectivity except through linguistic and discursive systems, which are demonstrably historical social and cultural constructs. Produced within and by these systems, subjectivity is perceived as operating in the same fashion as they do. In brief, this means that subjective identity is structured around a series of interdependent binary oppositions, and is produced through the play of repetition and difference, which produces multiple, shifting and often contradictory meanings and identities. Subjectivity and identity are therefore in ‘process’, and if like some meanings they give the appearance of being single, stable and universal, this is because the binary oppositions that structure the system are hierarchical. This means that one term or position has been traditionally (historically and socially) valued over the other in western thought and perceived as the ‘first’ or original term, to which the other positions or other terms are understood to refer back. Any ‘differences’ from the ‘original’ are then constructed as ‘imitations’ or ‘poor copies’ (see Derrida, 1978 and 1981). Hence, for example, femininity and homosexuality are defined not in ‘positive’ terms in and of themselves but negatively in terms of their difference and implied ‘inferiority’ to masculinity and heterosexuality.

The first stage of deconstruction is a reversal that reinscribes in positive terms the traditionally ‘inferior’ term(s) in any given binary opposition, including and indeed specifically in the oppositions between the real and representation and, in terms of subjectivity, between ‘original’ and imitation or poor copy. In the second stage, the relationship between opposing terms is ‘suspended’ so as to put it radically into question, so that the reversal is never a permanent fait accompli. In theory, this should eventually lead to a ‘third stage’ of deconstruction, which achieves the dissolution of the stable and singular enlightenment subjectivity into subjectivities and an endless proliferation of shifting identity categories, to the point that the concept of such categorisation becomes utterly meaningless (see Derrida, 1981). However, this stage has not actually been reached in most theory and certainly not in the practice of everyday life. This is mainly because deconstruction itself is not a single act but a long-term process or rather a set of processes which recognises the impossibility of transcending deeply entrenched systems of thought and behaviour at one go. As such, deconstruction recognises the necessity of ‘working within’ the system of hierarchical binary oppositions it describes, and like this system operates through both repetition and difference, difference and repetition. The alternative models of subjectivity that emerge from deconstruction might therefore be politically more progressive than that posited by enlightenment subjectivity, but are in effect reversals of it, defined in relation to and dependent on it, repeating as well as differing from it and by the same token repeating and differing from each other.

These processes of reversal and repetition, added to the difficulties of achieving a suspension of meaning outside of strictly limited contexts, mean that there is always the possibility that these alternative modes of subjectivity and identity can be recuperated back into the system. In short, they can be appropriated to a single, dominant model, which claims the ‘truth’ of subjectivity and identity as essentially multiple, contradictory and shifting, and which therefore simply replaces the ‘old’ enlightenment model, rather than displacing the binary structures of thought which produced it. This model may then appear to embrace and celebrate differences while actually reducing them to the same, in ways that, as Sarah Ahmed points out, universalise and privilege ‘a certain kind of Western subject, the subject of and in [postmodern] theory’ (Ahmed, 2000: 83).

‘The’ postmodern aesthetic and the postmodern as a model of reading

On the same principle, these modes of thinking can produce a singular ‘dominant’ postmodern aesthetic. As part of the process of reversing and suspending the traditional relationship between the real and representation, deconstruction has tended to focus on the textual and linguistic as opposed to the material and the embodied. As a result, much of this theory, including that produced from within postmodern feminism, postcolonial and queer theory, has been expounded through ‘close readings’ of literary texts or cultural artefacts. Within such readings, emphasis is often placed on how particular aesthetic strategies, defined in ‘opposition’ to realism and naturalism and historically associated either with the avant-garde or with specific marginalised groups, can be seen to undermine, resist or subvert enlightenment subjectivity, or rather its naturalisation within realism and naturalism. These strategies therefore come to be defined and privileged as progressive, primarily in so far as they differ from classic realism. Under these terms, in the abstract, divorced from situated social and historical contexts and embodied practices, they can easily become confused with one another and cohere into a single generalised postmodern aesthetic, understood as expressive of a single postmodern subjectivity. If and when, as argued above, this mode of subjectivity is either implicitly or explicitly constructed as the ‘dominant’ mode of subjectivity and identity, this postmodern aesthetic is then in effect simply the latest form of realism. Yet both this subjectivity and this aesthetic often retain an aura of political progressiveness by dint of their earlier association with subaltern modes of identity and with practices that oppose classic realism.

In his groundbreaking What is Postmodernism? (1986), Charles Jenks attempts to identify and define postmodern aesthetics in visual art and architecture, but this is achieved through providing concrete and carefully located examples of different articulations and styles of both modernism and postmodernism. Nevertheless, some of the characteristics Jenks identifies, such as double coding or hybridity, the combination of elite and popular forms, old and new traditions, hyperconsciousness or self-reflexivity, pluralism, irony, parody, displacement, complexity and eclecticism, were rapidly taken up as standard, general descriptors of a single postmodern aesthetic (Jenks, 1986: 10–14). This, despite the fact that Jenks asserts that many of these features indicate the retention of a modern ‘sensibility’ within the postmodern, and he includes realism in this list (14).

According to Sara Ahmed, this reductive collapse of both realism and postmodernism into single and opposing monoliths can be traced back to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which defines the postmodern as the radical or progressive ‘working within’ modernism (Lyotard, 1984: 79). However, Ahmed argues that Lyotard presents a postmodern aesthetic as a ‘totalisation and negation of realism’, in ways that allow later literary theorists to construct ‘a progressive shift from realism through modernism and on to postmodernism’ and to produce ‘postmodernism as a model of reading’ (Ahmed, 1998: 146). As she points out, this narrative of progress depends on the assumption that realism is ‘necessarily a tool of the dominant culture’ and that it is successful in implicating the reader passively into a particular ideology and subject position (147). A postmodern aesthetic is then defined as overcoming this realism, by producing a plurality of meanings through its anti-linear narrative strategies and contradictory characters, and above all by drawing attention to its own constructedness, so that as Linda Hutcheon states, it ‘displays its own conventionality’ and ‘explicitly lays bare its conditions of artifice’ (cited in Ahmed, 1998: 149). As with Brechtian alienation, these strategies are thought to produce ‘active readers’ and distance them from ‘any self-conscious identifications on the level of character and plot’ (Ahmed, 1998: 149).

Ahmed argues that this model of reading assumes in advance that readers’ identifications are ‘dependent on a text repressing its own fictional status’, a theory not proven, for example, in the case of the reception of Brecht’s work. This is because the model presupposes that the politics of a text is reducible to its literary form and excludes consideration of ‘the particularity of representations’ (149, my italics). Ahmed then goes on to discuss the representation of gender in number of avant-garde literary and cinematic texts by (white, western, middle-class) male authors, which might be otherwise read as misogynistic but where, within postmodern criticism, the question of sexual difference is assumed to be ‘cancelled out’ or negated by the form of the text (150).

If Ahmed points to the dangers of postmodernism as a ‘model of reading’ in relation to Lyotard, a similar operation can be seen in play in the work of Jean Baudrillard, who rather than a narrative of political progress, presents the shift from realism to modernism to postmodernism as one of reaction and decline. While Lyotard, like many other literary theorists who follow him, focuses his analyses on works of the experimental avant-garde, Baudrillard concentrates on popular culture and the mass media – especially television. Indeed, Baudrillard understands television as a postmodern medi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: beyond the politics of identity?
• 1 Beyond realism? Modes of reading in Marxist-socialist and post-Marxist-socialist television drama criticism
• 2 The end(s) of feminism(s)? From Madonna to Ally McBeal
• 3 Divided duties: diasporic subjectivities and ‘race relations’ dramas (Supply and Demand, The Bill, Second Generation)
• 4 The world of enterprise: myths of the global and global myths (Star Trek)
• 5 Only human nature after all? Romantic attractions and queer dilemmas (Queer as Folk)
• Conclusion: beyond (simple) representation? Metrosexuality and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence
• References
• Index