Re: Adorno on TV

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

I'm not a puritan or a Protestant.  I boycotted TV because it was crappy
and I had exciting things to do instead of sitting in front of the shit
box.  '70s TV was very tacky, except for COLOMBO.  I started watching the
tube again because someone gave me an old black and white and TV is a
babysitter and it helped get me thorugh the long Buffalo winters.  It is
addictive.  Now if you want me to classify different TV shows or attitudes
to shows or who is stupefied by it and who makes the same allowances as us
smart people .... that's an interesting project.  There really are some
dummies out there and certain things reinforce their dumbness as they are
designed to do.  But obviously not everyone is a zombie.

Sorry I didn't realize you required my complete analysis of BARNEY MILLER
or ALLY MCBEAL.  Writing reviews however is a full time job.  If I've got
to do any more of this I'm going to start passing the hat.

There is a perverse pleasure at gaping at in-your-face stupidity.  Is it
ironic distance?  Is it camp?  Is it neurotic fascination?  Is it just
time-wasting?  How is it different for a critical person than an uncritical
one?  Are both parties reacting to the same power for the same reasons?
Are there perhaps different levels so that one can enjoy on one level what
one rejects on others?  Do both dummies and smart folks enjoy the feeling
of feeling smarter than the blithering idiots they see on TV?

Now as to whether you SHOULD or SHOULD NOT enjoy something, that's close to
an irrelevant question.  Enjoyment is a quirky matter.  You tell me I
should enjoy caviar or opera 'cause they're top shelf yet I hate both.
What's a mother to do?  There is one thing I know for certain: if you can't
be critical about what you watch, you cannot be critical about what you
face in real life, and you will screw yourself up every time.  This much is
NOT conjecture.  The same critical faculty operates in both, in the same
way.  There is only one difference: you will not enjoy the consequences of
being a dumbbell in real life as you may in your entertainment choices.

No, I don't think these demented children who shoot up their classmates did
it because of all the violence on TV.  I'm more interested in less dramatic
ways that TV shows reinforce ignorance that is already in the culture.  I
think that a show like LIVING SINGLE has done a lot of harm, whereas the
old AMOS 'N ANDY that people revile was pretty much harmless.  But how can
I prove it?  Comedy is the most epistemically complex form.  For example,
is to exhibit and then make fun of a character, to satirize that character,
or is it just another way of getting us to sympathize with and accept said
person as a social type?  Is a comedian who plays a fool smarter than what
he is playing, or is he the same sort of fool himself?

I know just the type of women who would identify with some of the loathsome
females on LIVING SINGLE, but it's also true that their vanity and their
foibles are being made fun of.  So which is it: is this show a way of
exposing buppie female selfishness and vanity or is it a way of promoting
it?  You could make a case either way, but given time, I could prove to you
that in spite of making fun of the foibles of these obnoxious wenches, the
entire subtext of the show is to reinforce a certain mindset and to promote
the same sort of unreflective backward attitudes that makes such garbage
popular in the first place.

I never thought Redd Foxx was the wretched character he played on SANFORD
AND SON.  But I am absolutely convinced that the real Martin Lawrence is
just as much an ignorant oaf as the character he plays.  But how can I
prove it?  But to return to the show itself, the main character comes in
for his share of commeuppances for his atavistic black male mentality, but
the fact remains that everything else in the show is designed to reinforce
and support it.  Martin's got that ghetto style, and we all find that so
charming, don't we?

And furthermore it is plain obvious that if either one of these shows were
about white people, they never would have been allowed on the air.  The
feminist mafia would have had the network executives' heads on a platter.
But because of the racial double standard in gender relations aided and
abetted by everyone in this society including the pomo crowd, and because
the market research departments know just who they are dealing with (unlike
in the old apartheid days), they know full well what they have to play to
in order to capture a certain market, and hence you have the racial sexual
double standard which you can see everywhere on TV all the way down to Coke
commercials.  The very title LIVING SINGLE could only be a show about black
women and nobody else: it is as ideologically weighted as a neutron star.

Now I don't care whether you watch this shit ironically and enjoy it or
not, but if you were a black woman and told me you liked it without any
further qualification, I'd have you pegged in a second, turn my back on
you, and never speak to you again.  Because I do know just the sort of
mentality this is all about, and just what it is capable of.

At 10:19 AM 6/7/99 -0700, Matthew Levy wrote:
>don't you get it?  Neither you nor Simon has produced anything
>here which enlightens me or anyone else about the logic of
>television ... what you've done is demonstrate to me that you can
>participate in a discourse about
>selfhood and aesthetic value in which you strive to maintain your
>"standards", to avoid being a "baby", to avoid being "violated",
>etc. ...
>and I find this position indistinguishable from puritanical
>protestantism.
>Why should I care which TV you will and will not watch?  If we're
>going to
>have a discussion about how the content of television shows has
>substantively changed over the last three decades, or to talk
>about what
>political-aesthetic functions the shows you don't like perform, or
>just
>basically to engage in anything beyond a list of what Simon and
>Ralph
>don't like, we have to start somewhere other than where you guys
>are at.
>I'm the only one so far who's said that I watch TV ironically and
>don't
>have a problem dealing with that ... I believe ironic distance is
>a
>perfectly serviceable way to engage the content of entertainment
>critically ... but when it comes down to it I probably don't watch
>any
>more TV than either of you does, since I really don't have the
>time and
>when I do have free time there are other things I like better than
>watching shows I don't like.  But this doesn't absolve me of the
>responsibility, if I am going to critique these shows, of saying
>something
>detailed and substantive about them, instead of just protesting
>that my
>intelligence has been insulted.  And anyway if the point of discussing
>these things is to produce knowledge that is useful to others, then we had
>better be able to tell these others something about the shows they find
>entertaining beyond simply calling them stupid.  But I guess if you're to
>the point of wanting to rip your eyes out, the task is left to the rest of
>us ...