The Dominion of Signs by Nick Perry

Author:Nick Perry [Perry, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 1994-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Am I Rite? Or am I Write? Or am I Right?

A New Zealand Reading of The Singing Detective

Textual meanings exhibit an incorrigible instability, and the meaning of the term ‘text’ is resolutely indeterminate. Chapter Five can be read as wavering between a celebratory recognition of these points and a determined effort to control (for) them. More generally, a premiss of this book is that family photographs and abstract paintings, old movies and new clothes, traditional academic papers and contemporary popular music videos, can all be read as texts. This should be a commonplace. Yet the local implications of such a platitude have barely been explored. The dominant forms of textual interpretation and cultural analysis in this country continue to express those notoriously over-literary emphases which have long been characteristic of the Anglo-American intelligentsia. The Listener’s attitude towards television was for many years symptomatic of this tendency. Until the 1990s (and the arrival of Diana Wichtel) it persisted in employing television critics who did not even like the medium (Camille Guy was a creditable exception, a commendably open and responsive reviewer during her brief sojourn).

This might, of course, be interpreted as the unanticipated consequence of a wayward personnel policy, or perhaps as evidence of one magazine’s struggle to distance itself from that material base on which its claim to cultural centrality effectively rested. To see it as signalling a problem of criticism involves a shift of focus—away from one of the (once) favoured institutions of the New Zealand intelligentsia, and towards their own preferred subject matter and methods of working. From this perspective the Listener’s stratagem is symptomatic of a wider failure of critical practice; a pattern in which the dominant tendency is a malign neglect of television, and in which prescribing the attitude to be taken towards a given programme becomes a substitute for trying to understand how such texts achieve their effects. The procedural conventions of such a narrowly conceived approach can engage neither with television as a medium nor with the sheer diversity of its content.

Critics elsewhere have gravitated towards an emphasis on one or the other of these features, with their preference shaped according to whether they have been impressed by television’s uniformity or by its variety. Two of the best-known, but contrasting, stances were those adopted by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s and by Clive James in the 1970s. McLuhan (1964, p.32) fleshed out his well-known claim that the medium is the message by describing content as ‘the juicy piece of meat carried by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’. Food for thought, no doubt. In his column for Britain’s Observer Clive James was no less sardonic (he once described an Ingmar Bergman teleplay as ‘muesli without milk’). He saw in the content of television a rich feast of critical possibilities, a cultural smorgasbord which perfectly catered to his overdeveloped sense of wit. The result is a marvellous source of after-dinner one-liners. James has a gift for puncturing cultural pretensions, a talent for quipping against the pricks.

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