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105 See Warhol, Having a Good Cry.

106 John Corner, ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions,’ Television and New Media 3 (2002), 255-269 (p. 262).

107 John Dewey, Art As Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 2005 [1934]), p. 40. 108 Nelson, State of Play, p. 19.

109

Schwaab, ‘“Unreading” Contemporary Television’, p. 30.

110 West’s full quotation epitomises both the extraordinary nature of the classical aesthetic experience – ‘this blazing jewel that I have at the bottom of my pocket, this crystalline

concentration of glory, this deep and serene and intense emotion that I feel before the greatest works of art’ – and its wholeness, for it ‘does not call to any action other than complete experience of it. Rather one rests in its lap’ (emphasis added). See Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), p. 195.

programmes on DVD does allow for a greater sense of textual discreteness. Yet as television is sliced into such bounded commodities, the literature has become more and more concerned with its surplus textuality. Will Brooker combines Henry Jenkins’ work on media convergence112 with Williams’ theory of flow, arguing that televisual textuality stretches beyond the boundaries of the broadcast text in a pattern of ‘overflow’.113 He considers the more literal implications of the vernacular phrase ‘to follow a specific show’,114 exploring how audiences increasingly follow textual threads across multiple media platforms. Matt Hills recognises a similarly unbounded textuality, referring to the iceberg-like ‘hyperdiegesis’ of cult television, in which the televised text is only a small portion of a massive narrative structure.115 For these authors,116 the broadcast text is simply one part of both the television narrative and our encounter with it, which proliferate in multiple directions: for Brooker, across a horizontal axis of spread, and for Hills, down a vertical one of depth. Television’s unwieldy textualities, it seems, pose something of a problem for aesthetic theory’s love of a perfect, whole object.

The structure of these massive textual geographies has been elegantly explored in Jonathan Gray’s work on paratexts.117 Gray argues that contemporary media texts cannot be understood in isolation from the smaller texts that surround them, such as previews, promotional material, reviews, creator commentary, and fan activity. Paratexts heavily

112 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

113 See Brooker, ‘Living on Dawson’s Creek’. 114

Ibid., p. 457.

115 Hills, Fan Cultures, p. 98.

116 This line of scholarship also includes Jamie Sexton’s discussion of television’s ‘leaky’ and ‘porous’ boundaries in the age of convergence, John Caldwell’s ‘second-shift aesthetics’ of the dispersed digital environment, and Elizabeth Evans’ and Henry Jenkins’ work on transmedia television, which explores how television narratives extend across multiple media platforms. See Sexton, ‘Television and Convergence,’ in Tele-Visions: An Introduction to Studying Television, ed. by Glen Creeber (London: BFI, 2006), pp. 160-68; Caldwell, ‘Second-Shift Media Aesthetics:

Programming, Interactivity, and User Flows’, in New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, ed. by Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 127-44; Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011); and

Jenkins, Convergence Culture.

117 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

influence the audience’s construction of meaning by guiding audiences into and out of texts, establishing discursive frames, and fostering a sense of textual presence and attachment. As ‘frames and filters’ for the other texts they surround,118 paratexts are orienting texts, helping audiences seek out pathways through the complex architecture of television. Importantly, they largely occupy the ordinary, unexceptional spaces of our mediatised lives – advertisements on bus shelters, promotions during commercial breaks, creator commentary on Twitter, and so on, scattered across the contemporary

mediascape. Paratexts, therefore, invite very ordinary and routine forms of perception and engagement. Our analyses of television need to account for these everyday frames, rather than just focusing on the objects they enclose.

The audience’s experience and response to the aesthetic qualities of television can be similarly understood as multiple, dispersed, and fragmentary. Saito makes the

excellent point that aesthetic theory always assumes a successful aesthetic experience,119 epitomised by John Dewey’s assertion that aesthetic experience is always consummatory, ‘run[ning] its course to fulfilment’.120 Sarah Cardwell unproblematically quotes David Thorburn’s early work on television aesthetics, which suggested that the aesthetic attitude was rare in television because most programs are ‘partial achievements, arresting and powerful intermittently’.121 What Cardwell and Thorburn miss is that such intermittency is a crucial part of the aesthetic (and affective) experience of television, particularly the favoured texts of television aesthetics – serial narrative. John Caughie more usefully recognises this, suggesting that ‘the centrality of serialisation seems to me to have a lot to do with what I take to be one of the defining characteristics of television as a domestic technology: its interruptability’.122 Sean O’Sullivan’s work on serial fiction furthers this point, arguing that the idea of satisfaction is entirely ‘antithetical to the structure and

118 Ibid., p. 3.

119 Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, p. 46. 120 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 36.

121 David Thorburn, ‘Television as an Aesthetic Medium’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 4 (1987), 161-73 (p. 170).

attractions of seriality as a practice.’123 The engagement with serial fiction thus unfolds in what he calls, implicitly echoing Jacobs, ‘the language of parts, rather than of wholes’.124 Rather than classical aesthetic evaluation, then, serial television might be better suited to an ordinary, everyday, messy, and sensorial form of aesthetic analysis.

In Umberto Eco’s discussion of the relationship between what he calls modern and postmodern aesthetics, he makes the interesting suggestion that ‘when one speaks today of the aesthetics of seriality, one alludes to something more radical’.125 It is this ‘something more radical’ that I hope to approach with my theory of televisual

kinaesthetics. Kinaesthesia helps bridge the gap between the aesthetics of the everyday and of traditionally valued forms of artistic expression. As the fundamental sense for our navigation through the world, kinaesthesia is embedded in the routine experience of our lives. Yet it is equally involved in more intense moments of aesthetic experience, such as what Ellen Dissanayake refers to as ‘the swooping sensation inside the chest as one watches a dancer leap or a cathedral vault soar’.126 Dissanayake here points to the way that aesthetic experience, while classically understood as something that ‘seizes one’s whole mind or imagination’ through a heightened visual experience,127 also seizes the primary sensory faculties of the body. Television aesthetics, from Ellis’s glance to Caldwell’s televisuality to McCabe’s aesthetic ‘iconography’,128 has always, and almost entirely,129 focused on vision as the means of aesthetic perception. Yet by bringing the body back into

123 Sean O'Sullivan, ‘Serials and Satisfaction’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 63 (2013), para 2. <https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ravon/2013-n63-ravon01450/1025614ar/>

124

Ibid., para 28.

125 Umberto Eco, ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics’, Daedalus, 134 (2005), 191-207 (p. 203).

126

Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995 [1992]), p. 141.

127 Collinson, ‘Aesthetic Experience’, p. 115. 128

Janet McCabe, ‘HBO Aesthetics, Quality Television and Boardwalk Empire,’ in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. by Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 185-197 (p. 196). 129 There is a growing body of scholarship on the aesthetics of sound on television, but this still maintains the integrity of the sensory hierarchy, in which sound is a close second to vision. See James Deaville (ed.), Music in Television: Channels of Listening (London: Routledge, 2011); Charles Fairchild, ‘Flow Amid Flux: The Evolving Uses of Music in Evening Television Drama’, Television and New Media, 12 (2011), 491-512; and Julia C. Obert, ‘Sound and Sentiment: A Rhythmanalysis of Television’, Continuum, 22 (2008), 409-417.

a discussion of television aesthetics, a body that senses both the ordinary and the extraordinary, kinaesthesia offers a way to consider television’s entanglement between artistic expression and trivial mundanity.

Kinaesthesia also provides a compelling means of understanding the rhythms of contemporary television texts, particularly serial narratives. Work on seriality tends to use metaphors of navigable space: Sean O’Sullivan, for example, argues that serial fiction emerges at the ‘crossroads’ between the old and the new,130 and that to follow a serial is to ‘commit to long stretches in this landscape’ of the in-between.131 Similar metaphors are liberally scattered throughout the scholarship on textual overflow. Jenkins describes contemporary television consumers as ‘hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels’,132 and Gray refers to a paratextual ‘realm through which we must travel’ in order to consume a text.133 In this sense, rather than the static, fixed position of the disinterested spectator, the television audience always occupies a mobile position. Yet Jenkins notes that we ‘do not yet have very good aesthetic criteria for evaluating works that play themselves out across multiple media’, or for analysing the extensive textuality of serial television.134 Again, I would argue that kinaesthesia goes some way towards addressing this theoretical paucity: attention to the ways in which we make sense of television through questions of movement, rhythm, and corporeality has much to offer the study of these mobile texts.

Kinaesthesia may also offer a corrective to the universalising tendency of aesthetic theory. Helen Piper presents a powerful and rigorous criticism of much of the existing work on television aesthetics, astutely recognising that the call to ‘“attend” to style is a rhetorical Trojan horse to justify the valorisation of style’.135 In particular, Piper

130

Sean O’Sullivan, ‘Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction’, in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. by David Lavery (I.B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 115-32 (p. 117). 131 O’Sullivan, ‘Serials and Satisfaction’.

132 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 21. 133 Gray, Show Sold Separately, p. 36. 134 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 96-7.

135 Helen Piper, ‘Broadcast Drama and the Problem of Television Aesthetics: Home, Nation, Universe’, Screen, 57 (2016): 163-183 (p. 166).

criticises Jacobs’s move to present the ‘universalising’ qualities of aesthetics as the proper mode of analysis for the globalised forms of television, noting that such claims to

universal appeal are ‘not an aspiration but an ideological conceit, a rationalisation of experience that underpins the authority of a certain mode of critical judgement.’136 While Piper frames her argument around the need to consider the local and national

specificities of television, which remain sites at which television has always and continues to be meaningful, I believe that kinaesthesia may also help us avoid removing a text from its political and cultural context in the name of a larger aesthetic ideal. As I outlined earlier in this chapter, cultural theorists have compellingly used kinaesthesia to unpack and critique particular ideologies of gender, desire, and body politics. Considering the kinaesthetic meanings and pleasures of television, then, goes some way towards fulfilling Piper’s call for ‘a more catholic understanding of what “aesthetic value” could, but may not yet, include’:137 the corporeal, the ordinary, the fragmentary, and the specific much more than the universal abstraction of a whole.

Charlotte Brunsdon suggests that due to the domestic, popular nature of the medium, ‘an aesthetic of television would…have to be an anti-aesthetic to be adequate to its object and the practices constituting it’.138 Indeed, the ordinary, interrupted, dispersed nature of television stands in opposition to the key assumptions of classical aesthetics I have outlined here. Instead of trying to make the medium fit the theory by elevating serial drama to the status of ‘quality’, it is time to allow aesthetic theory to adapt to the features of television, by returning it to the messy, sensorial, everyday form of perception that it initially was. Yet Brunsdon’s notion of an anti-aesthetics maintains a binary distinction between aesthetic evaluation and television, one that leaves this value hierarchy

somewhat unquestioned. Instead, I choose to follow John Caldwell’s interesting (if casual) suggestion that ‘aesthetics is perhaps the wrong disciplinary arena for television

136 Ibid., p. 171.

137 Ibid., p. 183.

scholarship. Perhaps athletics…are a better framework’ (original emphasis).139 Television, it seems, is long overdue for a kinaesthetic mode of analysis. It is overdue for a

consideration of how we are invited to make meaning through the kinaesthetic qualities and dynamics of movement and corporeality, ones that play out across our encounters with the vast, dispersed, and messy forms of serial drama.

139 Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 135.