Television and Everyday Life

MODERNITY ETC.
But the particular character and content of that agency remains to be
addressed. The society in which we live is changing, some would say rapidly
and fundamentally changing, and these changes are most significantly
expressed in the practices of everyday life. Agency by itself is a conceptual
abstraction, and we need to think what it might mean to be acting within the
heavily mediated society of contemporary times. Does television make a
difference; does it ‘signify’?
I want to approach this question through some reflections on modernism
and post-modernism as distinct aesthetics, and modernity and post-modernity
as supposedly new forms of social and cultural organisation, and in particular
to examine both modernism’s and post-modernism’s close identification with
the urban experience, with the city. I do not intend to try and settle the matter
of post-modernity’s or post-modernism’s distinctiveness with respect to
modernity and modernism, though I take it as axiomatic in matters of social
and cultural life that revolutions and epistemological and aesthetic breaks are
likely to be found more often in theory than in experience. Indeed I can begin
by pointing out that one of the classic examinations of the paradoxes of the
experience of modernity (Berman, 1983) draws attention to the significance
of the city for the definition and indeed the collapse of modernist culture. This
preoccupation with the materiality and culture of 
urban
space is continued
within many discussions of post-modernism (Harvey, 1989; Lash, 1990; 
Zone
1/2
), where the significance of the metropolitan urban experience, however
differently conceived and imprinted by a supposedly newly emerging post-
modern aesthetic, remains.
For both Harvey and Lash, though with different emphases, the city is where
both modernism and post-modernism are forged and most dramatically find
their clearest expression. Modernism, its order, its standardised functionality,
is expressed in the urban fabric, an urban fabric which makes ‘modernism
happen’ (Lash, 1990, 31), but which also expresses it. Modernism is embodied
in the confidence of urban design, in the boulevards of Huyssmans, the urban
freeways of Moses, in the grids of the city and the standardised units of office
blocks and housing developments. But as Berman reminds us, there is also a
modernism of underdevelopment (expressed in the building of, and living in,

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St Petersberg) and most crucially there is in modernism a self-destruction, a
built in obsolescence of the city itself (Berman, 1983, esp. 307). At the root of
modernism’s elective affinity with the city are the changing relations to space
and time which they both address and express.
6
And similarly post-modernism,
in its address and expression has defined a more fragmented diverse, human
and supposedly democratic aesthetic which is the product of—collectively—
technological, industrial and cultural change. The cities, then and now, were
the site too not just of architectural or spatial expression, but also of distinct
forms of social life. They provided the infrastructure for the ‘melting-pot’, for
the intermixing and movement of peoples and cultures forced, however
temporarily, together, and thence to be moulded by the combined effects of
ideology and urban design.
Against the authority of the modernist city, critics identify Los Angeles as
the exemplary post-modern urban environment, one which breaks free of the
grand narratives and superordinate ideologies of modernism, through its diverse
and fragmentary, dispersed and displaced, mobile collage of malls, freeways
and (sub)urban sprawl. Los Angeles is not so much a melting-pot as a pot that
is melting, as recent events in Watts have once again reminded us:
It is a city of pragmatic adaptation to the innumerable differentiated urban
micro-orders which constitute it, and which collectively make up an
unplanned mega-space…, which threatens the meta-narrativistic principles
upon which the theory and practice of Western urban planning and design
have been based for millennia. It is, finally, a city which cannot be reduced
to a single principle: not the motor car, not the freeways nor the railway
system that preceded them, not its lack of history…not Hollywood and the
dream factory, not the giant corporation, not the high technology company,
not the beach, not the smog, nor the sun.
(Boyne and Rattansi, 1990, 20)
Los Angeles may have been seen as the embodiment of all that post-modernism
represents for the city, yet it also expresses another history, a history which is
both the reverse image of that of the city, and one to which the media, firstly
radio and then television, have made indelible contributions. This is a history
of the suburb and it is a history not just of a particular form of material and
social space, but a history of an emerging cultural formation. The suburb
represents the soft underbelly of modernity, a kind of Achilles’ heel, for it is
both persistent, and increasingly dominant as an environment in which we either
live, or aspire to live. The suburb is that soft underbelly because it has emerged,
both by accident and design, as a form of life that modernism has created almost
to escape from itself. The writings of Ebenezer Howard and the subsequent
Garden City movement, provided a catalyst for an alternative vision of modernity,
one that would freeze the atavistic utopia of the rural idyll and transplant it into
the body of the city. The suburbs came to represent that strange hybrid (arguably,

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Television and Everyday Life
but never entirely, sterile) which simultaneously denied its origins and its
compromises, and trumpeted as the residents of Crestwood Heights trumpeted,
that those who lived within them had got the best of both worlds. They had not
got the best of both worlds of course, but neither had they got the worst. What
they got was a form of life, remarkably persistent in its appeal and one which at
the level of everyday life somehow seems to be making the transition from
modernity to post-modernity, providing as it does precisely that mix of strategic
mass production and tactical appropriation (see Miller, 1988) that the new forms
of consumerism both stimulate and depend upon.
7
The suburb, ubiquitous but invisible, desired but derided, domestic and
defensive, embodies many of the contradictions of modernity—particularly
those of inclusion and exclusion—but adds a few of its own. The functional
order of a Levittown or a Milton Keynes created to erase the challenging
complexity and confusion, as well as the grinding poverty and social grime, of
city life; the standardised dwellings of inter-war ribbon development—home,
hearth, ownership; the logics of new-found ersatz community life, distancing
yet connecting through self-interest; all of these marked a new form of social
order that contained and dominated, as well as liberated, its inhabitants. And
this is not to mention its capacity to exclude those who did not fit into the
tightening straight-jacket of the suburban ideal.
As I argued in Chapter 3 the contradictions at the heart of the suburb are
those that focus on the relationship between public and private spaces and
cultures. But the suburban ideal marks a much deeper cultural process—I
described it, following Marilyn Strathern, as a process of hybridisation. As she
suggests ‘suburbia is neither urban nor rural’ (1993, 191). And in the conflation
of both it comes to represent a new kind of fused and fusing reality, in which
boundaries: between nature and culture; the country and the city; and perhaps
also between fantasy and reality, become indistinct and inadequate. Indeed for
Strathern the suburbs, precisely in this hybridisation, become the harbinger,
symbol and crucible for the post-modern rather than the modern. The suburb,
like all good myths, is multiply useful, and suburbia has become the articulating
myth both for modernism and post-modernism, at least in many of their most
significant respects.
The floodlit privacy of the suburb has been sustained and is suffused by
television. The rapid development of the suburb in the United States after the
Second World War was supported by television’s insistence, through sit-com
and soap opera, that the ideals of suburban life—ideals that were unlikely to
have been met in reality as newcomers discovered rather less of a rural idyll
and rather more of a standardised and claustrophobic reality—were actually
sustainable. Lynn Spigel, while plausibly exaggerating the sense of horror that
the suburbs engendered in their first inhabitants, nevertheless correctly
recognised the ideology of television at the time: ‘to provide an illusion of the
ideal neighbourhood—the way it was supposed to be’ (Spigel, 1992, 129).

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The British experience of rapid suburbanisation was both earlier and different
and, in significant respects, it was radio, both as domesticated technology (Forty,
1986) and medium (Lewis, 1942, cited in Frith, 1983) and not television that
provided the support for its expansion during the 1930s. And here too the
ideal was less a model of the privatised neighbourhood and, arguably, more an
expansive ideal of national family (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991). Indeed as
Oliver 
et al.
(1981) note, the suburb itself was remarkable mainly for its material
absence both from radio programming and from the cinema, at least until after
the war.
Nevertheless, both in the 1930s in Britain and in the 1940s and 1950s in the
United States (and of course elsewhere too), the broadcast media were central
in articulating a culture of, and for, suburbia: principally for the white middle
classes and for those who could aspire to that status. The suburban oxymoron
captured so well by Williams’ description of it as ‘mobile privatisation’—despite
the fact that this most accurately referred to the consequences of the motor car
and public transport—had both a sociological and a cultural dimension.
Populations were indeed simultaneously displaced and connected; and
simultaneously sedentary and mobile. But they were also presented with, and
increasingly incorporated into, a publicly produced culture which materialised
in the scheduled but interruptable flow of the broadcast.
This culture was suburban in another, and most significant, respect. It
produced a fundamentally hybridised culture: neither-norist as well as both—
andist; a form of mediated experience which knew few bounds and had few
boundaries; an encompassing and increasingly inclusive culture in which
everything was within reach, everything possible, everything connected,
everything explained, if only for a moment and if only for now. Lynn Spigel,
once again, notes how one element of that hybridisation was expressed in an
emerging form of television: in the merging of two traditions of American
popular culture—the live and the narrated; the theatrical and the vaudeville,
and in the production of what she identifies as a middle-ground aesthetic:
Blending the wild spontaneity of vaudeville performance with the more
genteel—and decidedly noncontroversial—aspects of theatrical realism, this
genre [situation comedy] became the networks’ preferred form for reaching
a family audience.
(Spigel, 1992, 144)
This middle-ground aesthetic arguably also drew on the power of the media,
both in sound and then in image and sound, to merge reality and illusion,
though as I have suggested, the novelty of this should not be exaggerated, even
if its insistence can barely be denied. What it does, of course, is to leave
everything in place. In such a hybrid, illusion cannot challenge reality nor
reality puncture illusion. Suburban broadcast culture is, despite this radical
hybridisation, fundamentally—and in every sense of the term—conservative.

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Perhaps one can also see it as being opposed to the urban cinema on the one
hand, and as being increasingly vulnerable to the privatising impulse of
narrowcasting on the other.
I have been trying to suggest that the emerging broadcast culture of radio
and television was a key component of a new social, political and geographical
reality embodied both materially and symbolically, physically and ideologically,
in suburbia. In the suburban, correlatively, a new form of culture emerged,
different from, and opposed to, the abrasive challenges and uncertainties of
the city, and plausibly more significant even than the city in the formation of
modern and post-modern culture. In this sense, the question I asked at the
beginning of this section can be answered in the affirmative. Television does
make a difference. It does signify, but it does so as part of a tele-technological
system in which the crucial component is its broadcast form. Here modernity
and post-modernity are expressed in the content of television and in its active
hybridisation of public-private culture. How far this is or will be threatened by
the privatising of the media, most powerfully expressed in the video, but also
in the fragmenting of broadcasting through satellite and cable, is still unclear,
though there is little doubt that the suburban hybridisation of broadcast culture
is no longer quite as secure as it might once have been.