Yet if kinaesthesia is vital to our everyday movement in the world, then it must play an important part in the perception of all screen based movement, not just the excessively and expertly kinetic; as Amelia Jones suggests, ‘there is no moment of non- kinaesthetic empathy in our apprehension of…everyday objects and bodies in the world’.40 I argue that kinaesthesia has much to offer the study of smaller, more fragmentary, and more ubiquitous screen cultures – particularly the everyday
technologies of television. However, to date, with the notable exception of Claire Perkins’s recent work (which I will return to explore in depth shortly), there has been next to no discussion of kinaesthesia in television. Rather, like cinema scholarship, television studies has been more concerned with the static body as a spectacular image. This work is echoed across the body of scholarship that explores the spectacle of the dead body (particularly the female body) in crime television.41 Charlotte Brunsdon notes that contemporary crime drama is less concerned with exploring the processes of policing than with ‘staring at bodies’,42 a comment that I would extend to the scholarly literature itself, which is also more interested in staring at visual spectacle than attending to the meanings of particular actions. Alexia Smit highlights the recent trend in exploring the interior of the human body on television, yet emphasises the dynamics of visual pleasure and intimacy over any
40 Amelia Jones, ‘Foreword: Kinaesthetic Empathy in Philosophical and Art History: Thoughts on How and What Art Means’, in Kinaesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), pp. 11-15 (p. 12).
41 See Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Structures of Anxiety: Recent British Television Crime Fiction’, Screen, 39 (1998), 223-243; Susan Sydney-Smith, ‘Endless Interrogation: Prime Suspect Deconstructing Realism Through the Female Body’, Feminist Media Studies, 7 (2007), 189-202; and Sue Thornham, ‘“A Good Body”: The Case of/for Feminist Media Studies’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (2003), 75-94.
consideration of movement.43 We can trace a similar trend throughout the literature on
reality television: scholars have outlined how televisual bodies are complicit in
perpetuating particular norms of identity and consumption cycles, again focusing mainly on static corporeal signifiers such as weight, clothing, or hair and makeup.44 Skeggs and
Wood refer to reality television’s ‘forensic focusing on…parts of bodies’, evoking, much like writing on crime television, a static, passive body waiting to be dissected and visually examined.45As Rachel Moseley notes, the body in reality television is ‘put on display for the approval of the audience’,46 again likening the body to a static object for consumption rather than an entity in motion. While all of this work is compelling and offers valuable insights into corporeal spectacle on television, its failure to closely engage with questions of movement indicates that there is more work to be done on the power and meaning of the moving body.
Claire Perkins’s recent essay makes a valuable first step toward extending the scholarship on televisual bodies.47 In an elegant analysis of HBO’s Girls (2012-2017), she draws from dance theory to contend that much of the meaning in television narrative is communicated through the corporeality of the moving body. She argues that television’s focus on dialogue facilitates a creative juxtaposition with the gestural capacities of the body, creating what she terms a ‘physical televisual verbosity’ that communicates meaning to the audience.48 She identifies a similar corporeal dimension to the typical
serial narratives of television, suggesting that our familiarity with such texts is grounded in acquired knowledge of the physical forms of the characters – their body language, their
43 See Alexia Smit, ‘Visual Effects and Visceral Affect: “Tele-Affectivty” and the Intensified Intimacy of Contemporary Television’, Critical Studies in Television, 8 (2013), 92-107.
44 See Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood’s discussion of how the appearance of the body accrues commodified value through reality television in Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); and Meredith Jones’s work on the ways in which the dynamics of the gaze create particular normative bodies in cosmetic surgery television. ‘Media- bodies and Screen-births: Cosmetic Surgery Reality Television’, Continuum, 22 (2008), 515-24. 45 Skeggs and Wood, Reacting to Reality Television, p. 13.
46 Rachel Moseley, ‘Makeover Takeover on British Television’, Screen, 41 (2000), 299-314 (p. 306). 47 Claire Perkins, ‘Dancing on My Own: Girls and Television of the Body’, Critical Studies in Television, 9 (2014), 33-43.
gestural movements, their appearance – as much as with the patterns and formulas of the narrative. Perkins’ work is compelling and insightful, and the only piece to clearly
recognise the potential of linking kinaesthetic theory with television studies. Yet her relatively specific focus – on excessively performative bodies within a discrete narrative – suggests that there is scope for a wider consideration of kinaesthesia in television. If kinaesthesia communicates meaning in television, then it might work as a preferred mode of making such meaning, and hence is worthy of a more detailed analysis.
To some extent, my critique of the existing scholarship may seem like a relatively pedantic issue with the focus of corporeal scholarship. However, I believe that
questioning the language we use and the frameworks we employ for discussing screen spectatorship and meaning-making is crucial for our understanding of media. For while a close engagement with kinaesthesia remains somewhat scarce within television studies, scholars have always used the language and metaphors of movement to more broadly describe television aesthetics and engagement. Travel, orientation, mobility, and flow: the frames of reference we employ to make sense of television seem to suggest a deep
kinaesthetic core to the medium. Raymond Williams’s two foundational theories of the medium – flow and mobile privatisation – are both metaphors of movement, one based in the disorienting experience of travelling away from home, and the other in the comforting feeling of being at home while on the move.49 As the so-called ‘window on the world’, the experience of watching television has always been equated to a feeling of travel, reflected in Joshua Meyrowitz’s famous statement that television ‘escorts children across the globe even before they have permission to cross the street.’50 Television narrative itself is something that moves and something that invites mobile metaphors: Robyn Warhol describes serial narration as akin to the ‘ebb-and-flow’ of the sea,51 and Will Brooker
49 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (London: Routledge, 1974).
50 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 238.
51 Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003), p. 105.
discusses the textual ‘overflow’ of contemporary television programmes that spill beyond the limits of the broadcast format.52
In the introduction to this thesis I argued that our metaphorical language has much to reveal about our embodied experiences. The ease with which we reach for metaphors of movement to describe television clearly suggests that kinaesthesia has always been crucial to our experience of the medium. Yet there is a strange slippage between the frames of reference and turns of phrase we use to make sense of television and our relationship to it, and the scholarly frameworks and objects of analysis we tend to privilege when we talk about contemporary television drama – mobility in the former, and visuality in the latter. For just as scholars prefer to focus on the body as an image rather than a moving entity, television studies has recently been much more eager to re- frame television as an aesthetic medium, rather than a kinaesthetic one. I.B. Tauris’s extensive Reading Contemporary Television series epitomises this trend: collections on series such as 24, CSI Crime Scene Investigation and Mad Men devote multiple chapters to questions of visual and aural style,53 suggesting that the sanctioned reading of
contemporary television is an (audiovisual) aesthetic one. In what follows I now turn to explore and evaluate this recent surge of scholarly interest in television aesthetics, considering what we might gain if we allow such aesthetic analyses to be more attuned to the kinaesthetic properties that seem to lie at the heart of the medium.