Cultural Ecosystems

In this chapter I will outline the theoretical foundations and the methodological frame-work I deploy both for the historical analysis of the anthology form in U.S. television, within a diachronic perspective, and for the synchronic analysis of contemporary anthological narrative models in their interaction with streaming platforms. I notably propose to adopt an ecosystemic perspective to the study of television narratives, and more specifically of the anthology, as a form inserted within a media and technological system, and deeply tied to cultural practices. I will therefore start with a “cultural-ecological (or systems-theoretical)” (Kelleter 2017: 3) approach, which draws upon a long theoretical tradition in the domain of anthropology and semiotics, to ultimately reconnect with media ecology and platform studies. As an interdisciplinary concept, developed by the American anthropologist Julian Steward (1993), cultural ecology asserts the presence of a correlation between cultures and their environment, thus focusing on processes of adaptation happening through cultural means. This super-organic, adaptive vision of culture was originally theorized in close relation with a biological and environmental framework. When the

television scholar Frank Kelleter refers to it in Media of Serial Narratives, he employs the con-cept of cultural ecology in application to popular narratives in order to stress their connection with “coevolving conditions of cultural environments” (Kelleter 2017: 3), which calls for a sys-tem inquiry to analyze the relationship between sets of elements existing in cultural habitats. In this sense, cultures should be observed as systems made of several interacting and overlapping components, which are organized into economic, political, social, technological forms.

Such an ecological and systemic thinking for understanding cultures finds several points of convergence with the neo-formalist theory outlined by Caroline Levine, where forms are ob-served as being context-sensitive and embedded into systems of various entities and natures. As she points out, these systems can themselves organize into forms, namely networks. Levine’s as-sociation between networks and forms results particularly interesting as it motivates the adoption of an interdisciplinary approach, where the anthology form is analyzed precisely in the interac-tion with surrounding networks, which are also forms. Before Levine, in A Thousand Plateaus, the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored system theory in relation to culture, by advancing their own “assemblage theory”, a framework that accounts for socio-cul-tural, evolutionary dynamics of self-organizations into networks, thus cutting across technologi-cal determinism and social constructivism (Bousquet 2014). Assemblage theory observes culture as a constellation of elements - i.e. a network of systems - participating into processes of coding - or else ordering -, and stratification. They call this model of culture “rhizome”, a net that “cease-lessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circum-stances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7) Fur-thermore, in this heterogeneous multiplicity, “what counts are not the terms or the elements, but

what is ‘between’ them, the in-between, a set of relations that are inseparable from each other.” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: viii) This postmodern perspective on the study of cultural sys-tems as assemblages is particularly interesting in application to digital culture and the diffusion of the internet, where the emphasis is on networked dynamics, fluidity, interoperability between sys-tems.

Assemblage theory and the rhizomatic paradigm were adopted, among others, by the Mexican-American philosopher Manuel DeLanda, who advocates that instead of reducing social analysis to either a microscopic or macroscopic view, it is rather necessary to consider social phenomena as multi-scalar (Delanda 2006: 32), made of components linked together within a complex and non-linear network forming an assemblage - or assemblages of assemblages, in the case of a larger scale (ivi: 33). In DeLanda’s model, whereas assemblages are historically contin-gent, it is suggested that components exist in a relation of exteriority with the assemblage, mean-ing they don’t change their essence as they are moved from one assemblage to another through processes of coding/decoding (ivi: 19). This might sound very abstract, but it helps solving the dialectic found in Levine between forms as both transhistorical and yet historically contingent.

While forms as single entities are transhistorical and do present the same set of affordances in potentiality, on the contrary, as assemblages - i.e. systems - they become contingent, since they are defined by the actuality of their uses and interactions. As remarked by the literary scholar Hu-bert Zapf, this notion of the “evolution of aesthetics and imaginative forms of textuality as dou-ble-coded” (Zapf 2016a: 141) - that is to say as both transhistorical and historical-specific - recurs also in the application of cultural ecology to literature.


Despite the challenges encountered by both Levine’s and DeLanda’s theoretical frameworks as

they approach such a complex matter, their perspectives still come useful for understanding the anthology form in its potential affordances and actual uses, as it emerges, on the one hand, as a transhistorical feature across human societies for the organization and distribution of culture, and, on the other hand, as a contingent entity that manifest itself in the relationship with other entities or systems - i.e. platforms. Ultimately, a cultural-ecological and system-theoretical perspective offers an interesting point of departure for the analysis of television narratives. However, they lack of a more pragmatic vision, which is necessary for defining a full methodology in applica-tion to the media landscape. To this regard, Peter Finke provides a more concrete explanaapplica-tion of cultural ecosystems, by stating that “information and communication have become major driving forces of cultural evolution (see Finke 2005, 2006).” (Finke, quoted in Zapf 2016b: 79) Starting from this broad conception of culture as a structured, complex and dynamic ecosystem, and rea-soning more closely on information and communication ecosystems, I therefore want to introduce a second theoretical framework that guided my methodological choices: that of media ecology.