How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tube
A film may have its own unity, with its relationships coherent and its balance precise. But that the ultimate unity can be entirely foreseen is a dubious proposition: the distance between conception and delivery is so great, and the path between them so tortuous and unpredictable. . . . A film. . . cannot be made in the mind and then transferred to celluloid precisely as conceived. One of the prime requirements for a film-maker is flexibility to improvise, and to adjust his conceptions to the ideas and abilities of his co-workers, to the pressures of circumstance, and the concrete nature of the objects photographed.
--V. F. Perkins, Film as Film
In studying popular culture, especially when working on my book Gilligan Unbound, I quickly ran into hermeneutical difficulties. I wanted to discuss television shows as works of art, to demonstrate how they present a meaningful view of the world in a skillful and sometimes even masterful manner. I was interested in how a sequence of television shows expressed changes in the way Americans perceived their place in the world, and, more specifically, the way their attitudes toward globalization evolved. This project involved making statements such as: “The Simpsons portrays the national government negatively and celebrates a turn to the local and the global” or “The X-Files suggests that modern technology is at war with the power of the state.” In short, like many of my colleagues, I surreptitiously imputed intentionality to something inanimate and truly unconscious--a television series. One could claim that in such circumstances saying “The Simpsons” is simply shorthand for saying “the team that created The Simpsons,” but I suspect that something more is at work here, an attempt to evade the difficult questions about intentionality and artistic purpose that analyzing a television show raises.
“Sailing to Byzantium” Versus The X-Files
Our basic model of aesthetic intentionality in literature is the lyric poem. When Yeats sat down to write “Sailing to Byzantium,” we like to think that he was free to shape the poem any way he chose. Thus, we want to say that the resulting poem was wholly the product of Yeats’s intentions and his alone, and that means that every word in the poem is aesthetically meaningful.[1] One can therefore legitimately worry over the most minor details in a poem like “Sailing to Byzantium,” and make something of the fact that Yeats chose to use one particular word rather than another. But is this kind of close reading appropriate to television shows, when we know that they are not produced the way lyric poems are? No television show is created by a single author. Scripts are typically the product of a team of writers, and even the list of people officially credited with writing a given script does not include all those who had a hand in it. Writing for television resembles committee work rather than what we normally think of as artistic activity. Scripts generally involve compromises and may end up embodying different conceptions of the work in question and sometimes even contradictory ones.
Moreover a script is only the rough blueprint for creating a television show. In the process of actually shooting the show, the director, and sometimes even cast members, modify the script, perhaps because it has led to problems in production or simply because on the spur of the moment they think that they can improve it. A show has not taken its final form even after it has been shot. Network executives, censors, and potential sponsors may well demand further changes in the show before it can be aired. The result of the complicated production process of a television show is that the work that finally reaches the screen will never correspond exactly to the idea of the person who first conceived it and will often, in fact, be quite remote from the initial conception.
It thus becomes problematic to speak of intentionality in the case of television shows when it is difficult just to identify whose intentions one is talking about. Moreover, the nature of television production is such that an element of contingency is inevitably introduced into the final product. As an interpreter, one might, for example, try to make something of the darkening of the light in a particular scene, and claim that it was intended to achieve a darkening of mood. But if one asked the producer about this particular “effect,” he might say something like this: “It was two days till airtime, we needed to finish the lakeside scene; I knew I was running out of light, but we were also running out of money, and I hoped nobody would notice the difference.”[2] So much for any attempt to find the changed lighting of the scene aesthetically meaningful. In the course of researching Gilligan Unbound, I found many cases where developments in a television program could not be explained in terms of purely aesthetic considerations. In the second season of The X-Files, for example, Agent Dana Scully was abducted, possibly by aliens, and for several episodes the audience was wrapped up in the question of her fate. One might marvel at the ingenuity of the show’s creators in mapping out this dramatic turn of events, until one learns that, far from planning it in advance, they were scrambling to cope with the fact that the actress who portrayed Scully, Gillian Anderson, had become pregnant and was going to be unavailable for shooting in the middle of the season. For all that The X-Files managed to make of Scully’s abduction, at root it was a plot device to cover over a production snag.[3] The more one reads about the history of shows like The X-Files, the more one realizes that this kind of improvising, rather than careful planning in advance, is typical of television production.
With considerations such as these in mind, I grew uneasy in the course of working on Gilligan Unbound. Was I falsely imputing aesthetic intentionality to shows like The Simpsons (1989- ) and The X-Files (1993-2002)? Was I wrong to look for artistic unity in television shows, when so many aspects of their creation point to a disunity of conception and an even greater disunity of the ultimate product? I had come to the study of popular culture with the training of a literary critic, and had devoted much of my career to analyzing Shakespeare. Thus, it was natural that when I viewed television, I was looking for masterpieces, for shows that use traditional artistic techniques to convey important truths about the world we live in. But can masterpieces be produced on a weekly schedule and a tight budget, and also please sponsors? My whole enterprise in Gilligan Unbound was haunted by the fear that I was illegitimately using categories derived from high culture in my study of popular culture.
Nevertheless, despite everything I learned in the course of researching television shows, I could not ignore what had originally drawn me to some of them--what looked like a high level of artistic achievement. In theoretical terms, the application of the concept of artistic intentionality to television shows seems dubious, but I could not help seeing signs of artistic intentions at work in some of them. Despite the general messiness of the medium, some of the shows seem extremely well crafted and, when carefully analyzed, appear to make coherent statements. Even the best of the shows do not achieve the artistic coherence of a perfect Yeats lyric, but that does not mean that one should label them incoherent. I began to ask: is it fair to judge television programs by the standard of artistic coherence achieved in lyric poetry at its best? If I was having trouble applying the idea of artistic intentionality to television shows, perhaps the problem was not with the television shows but with the model of artistic intentionality I was using.
On reflection, it does seem inappropriate to use standards of artistic coherence derived from one medium to understand an entirely different medium. A thirty-two-line lyric poem is at least in material terms much easier to produce than a one-hour television program, and one can imagine the poem issuing from a single consciousness in a way that seems impossible for the television show, which must necessarily be a cooperative effort. Notice that this distinction is not simply one between high culture and popular culture.[4] A lyric poem may not be the appropriate model for understanding a Shakespeare play either. Shakespeare was, of course, a great poet and there is much that is poetic in his plays. Nevertheless, their conditions of production more closely resemble those of a television show than those of a lyric poem. As a dramatist, specifically a commercial dramatist, Shakespeare was working in a cooperative medium, and no doubt the finished form his plays took on the stage involved the kind of compromises we can observe in television production today. We do not have the detailed information about the production history of Shakespeare’s plays that is available for television, but historical research has uncovered elements of contingency even in Shakespeare.
For example, we know something about the casting in Shakespeare’s theater company. Its principal comedian was originally a man named Will Kempe, who specialized in comic dances and little dialogues with himself. When Kempe left Shakespeare’s troupe--like a television actor today leaving a successful series--he was replaced by a man named Robert Armin, who excelled in different forms of comic business. Armin evidently sang well, and he also specialized in playing the part of a fool. This change in personnel in Shakespeare’s company helps explain the fact that, in roughly the first half of his career, the chief comic figure in his plays was a clown, such as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, whereas in the second half, Shakespeare switched to a fool, such as Touchstone in As You Like It.[5] This development may seem relatively insignificant, until one realizes that one of Shakespeare’s most distinctive strokes of genius--his inclusion of a fool in his greatest tragedy, King Lear--was not a move he pulled out of thin air. It is a good question: if Robert Armin had not replaced Will Kempe in Shakespeare’s company, would the dramatist have come up with the brilliant idea of counterpointing Lear’s tragedy with the Fool’s comedy? We have reason to believe, then, that much like television writers today, Shakespeare wrote with specific actors in mind and sometimes tailored his plays to their peculiar talents.
Organic Form and Romantic Aesthetics
Thus, my efforts to reassure myself about the legitimacy of what I was doing in Gilligan Unbound led me to more general reflections about the nature of culture. Perhaps contingency is a more important factor in the artistic process than the example of lyric poetry would lead us to believe. In this regard popular culture may provide a better model for culture in general than the relatively elite activity of poetry. The domination of lyric poetry as our model of artistic creation is itself a historically contingent development. Poetry is one of the oldest of the arts, and certainly had a considerable head start over television in offering a model of artistic activity. Already in Aristotle one can observe the tendency to think of all art as a form of poiesis, and his Poetics introduced the organic model of poetry and art more generally--the crucial notion that a true work of art must form an organic whole. Given Aristotle’s conception of organism, that means that in a true work of art every part has a function to play in the whole.[6] That in turn means that every part of a true work of art is there by design, not by chance. Aristotle was the first to try to theorize contingency out of the realm of art.[7] His organic model of art proved to be extremely durable and powerful, especially as a heuristic device. Precisely because critics were guided by the conception of the work of art as perfectly designed, they were impelled to study the often hidden ways in which art works hang together. Elements that might at first look anomalous in a work proved on closer inspection to have a role to play in its overall aesthetic logic.
Aristotle’s organic model of art is so useful that it even survived one of the great revolutions in criticism--the shift beginning in the late eighteenth century from Classic to Romantic aesthetics. However much the Romantics revolutionized our conception of artistic form, they still maintained that it is organic in nature. In fact, they tended to make their argument against Classic conceptions of form by insisting that they are mechanical and only the new Romantic conceptions are genuinely organic.[8] The Romantics opened up the concept of the organic unity of art, allowing for more complex forms of unification and for more heterogeneous elements to be unified, but they still remained true to the Aristotelian ideal of the artwork as perfectly designed. The difference is that the Romantics introduced the idea of artistic genius. The art work takes organic form, not because artists follow patterns inherent in the nature of the genre (as in the Aristotelian tradition), but because artistic geniuses shatter old models that have become mechanical and create new forms that restore life to their art.[9]
The Romantic reconception of organic form was developed in Germany, and reached England chiefly in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which were in many cases derived--even plagiarized--from German thinkers such as Schelling and the Schlegel brothers.[10] Coleridge did much to establish the organic model of poetry in particular and art in general in the English-speaking world, and was especially influential on the development of one of its chief incarnations in twentieth-century aesthetics, the New Criticism.[11] Our tendency to think of organic form in poetry as our model of art in general is largely the result of the way the New Criticism dominated American academics in the 1950s and 60s. The New Critics did not simply take lyric poetry as their model of art; more specifically, they operated with a certain kind of poetry in mind--the modernist lyric of Eliot and Yeats. They came to read not just all poetry but eventually drama and fiction as well on the model of works such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or “Sailing to Byzantium.”[12] It is remarkable how many genuine insights the New Critics were able to produce, even though they were generalizing from a small sample of what actually constitutes literature. But the very specific nature of their model of artistic form leads to misperceptions when one tries to apply it to the realm of popular culture.
This is especially true because the New Criticism and the Romantic/modernist aesthetic out of which it grew were biased against popular culture from the start. In fact, both Romantic and modernist aesthetics defined themselves in opposition to popular culture. The very idea of a split between high culture and popular culture is basically an invention of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.[13] Given economic, social, and political developments in the late eighteenth century, the Romantic generation was the first group of artists to confront mass commercial culture in the modern sense.[14] The Romantics found themselves competing in a newly developed cultural marketplace, in which commercial success was replacing aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage as the chief support for the arts. The Romantics’ ideal of organic form became a weapon in their struggle with their competitors in the cultural marketplace. The Romantics identified organic form with what they now defined as high or true culture, and cordoned off a lower realm of popular or mass culture, which fails to measure up to the exalted standard of organic form. As Alvin Kernan formulates their position: “Isolated from society, exiled from and hostile to the world of industrial capitalism, they have spoken in poetry the truth and beauty known only to the imagination, defended the authentic human self with its ancient ways of thinking and feeling against science and crude utilitarianism, and created perfect works of art, organic in structure, crystalline in form.”[15] Whereas the Romantics as geniuses could remain true to the purity of their inspiration and achieve perfection of organic design in their creations, they deemed the products of commercial culture imperfect because artistically impure.[16] Motives other than the purely aesthetic supposedly corrupt works of art produced for commercial markets. This Romantic attitude linked up with the idea of the autonomy of art, developed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment. The Romantics claimed that true art could be produced only by the artistic genius operating in total independence and splendid isolation. Artists have to be relieved from the demands of the commercial world in order to be free to pursue their artistic vision and produce works that will be completely faithful to their own design and hence genuinely organic in form.[17]
If, on the other hand, artists are forced to work with commercial success as their motive, their vision will inevitably be compromised. They will have to introduce elements into their art to please others, rather than themselves, and thereby corrupt the organic purity of their creations. The thrust of Romantic aesthetics is evident in the way that nineteenth-century critics tended to look down upon the novel as a popular form, hardly a form of literature at all.[18] Created with a commercial market in mind, the novel was not viewed as authentic art, but rather as an impure form, filled with aesthetically extraneous elements whose only function was to please the public and sell copies. According to Romantic aesthetics, in a poem every word has an artistic function to perform in the work as a whole, but in a novel, many words are there simply because the novelist was being paid by the word.
In short, an anti-commercial bias was built into the Romantic aesthetic from the start, and hence it is hardly surprising that, when we apply a late form of that aesthetic, the New Criticism, to popular culture, it looks suspect as an artistic realm. The Romantic heritage in our aesthetics has prejudiced us against popular culture. We assume that only if artists are given complete autonomy will they be able to achieve anything great. Unity of design demands a single designer, who out of his own inner depths molds his material into pure organic form. Accordingly, many of the institutions in our culture today are designed to shield artists from external pressures, particularly commercial ones. This is especially true of universities, foundations, and government granting agencies, which pride themselves on providing artists with financial support and thus freeing them from any need to please the public.[19] Supposedly this freedom will make their art better.
This glance at the historical development of our aesthetic assumptions helps clarify what is at stake in the debate over popular culture. When we find that the conditions of production in television are not the same as those in writing poetry, we assume that this is a bad situation and will make television less of an art form than poetry, perhaps not an art form at all. It is the Romantic ideal of the solitary genius that makes us wary of multiple authorship in television writing. We are also put off by all the elements of contingency involved in television production. We think that great works of art must be carefully planned in advance, and are suspicious of any work improvised on the spur of the moment. And we are right to have these suspicions. Much of the greatest art was produced by individual geniuses, working according to the Romantic aesthetic and with an organic view of form in mind. Many great artists have complained about interference with their aesthetic autonomy, and have been particularly bitter when commercial demands have intruded into what they hoped would be the self-contained world of their art.[20] This attitude prevails even in the realm of television. In researching Gilligan Unbound, I noted how frequently television producers railed against network executives who had interfered in the production process.[21] Like all artists, these producers crave a free hand to create their shows as they see fit. They do not want network executives or censors or sponsors telling them how to do their job, and they view outside interference as a source of corruption in their work. And in many cases they are justified in this view. Network executives often failed to understand what these television creators were trying to do and would have ruined their shows if the producers had not stood their ground and maintained their integrity as artists in the Romantic tradition. If the most creative talent in television distrusts conditions in the medium, surely critics trained in traditional high culture can feel justified in their doubts about it. And television produces enough trash programming every year to make anyone with taste wonder if there is not something inherently inartistic about the medium.
Yet I keep coming back to the fact that somehow television manages to produce works of genuine artistic quality. Which shows are authentic masterpieces is a matter of dispute--we are still in the comparatively early stages of television and hence are still sorting out its canon. But most people who take television seriously are willing to offer examples of what they think are its great shows. Since these shows are exceptional in quality, one might argue that their genesis must have been exceptional--that only when certain producers succeed in getting networks to respect their autonomy as creators does genuine quality television result. But the facts do not support this view of the matter. The shows people regard as the masterpieces of television were by and large produced according to the general rules of the medium. Although the most creative producers have repeatedly stood their ground against interference with their artistic integrity, they have also known when to yield to pressures from outside forces, commercial or otherwise. There is no simple correlation between the independence of television producers and the artistic quality of their shows. Producers with a relatively free hand have come up with artistic failures, while some of the best shows have been produced under the greatest commercial pressures.
Thus, although the ideal of the autonomy of art may be responsible for some of the greatest masterpieces in other media, television does not seem to offer evidence for its validity. This is reason to question not the ideal of the autonomy of art, but only the range of its applicability. It would, in fact, be surprising if all great art were produced according to the same formula. Thus far, when talking about the distinctive production process in television, we have been implying that insofar as it is distinctive, it has a negative effect on what is produced. But perhaps there is something in the process that is positive, that actually contributes to the artistic quality of the resulting product.
In Praise of Multiple Authorship and Improvisation
Consider the issue of multiple authorship in television. It is certainly true that too many cooks can spoil the broth in art as well as life. The result of continually rewriting scripts is often to make them bland, to take out any originality and assimilate them to familiar patterns. But there is no reason why several minds coming together to write a script could not in some cases improve the final product. Different writers may bring different talents and strengths to the task, and help to inspire each other and spur each other on. No writer--not even Shakespeare--is so great that he never makes mistakes and cannot benefit from some criticism and correction. Many television writers, far from wishing to be left alone, speak positively about script conferences and look forward to continual feedback on their work. The writers of The X-Files, for example, consistently talk about how helpful Chris Carter, the creator-producer of the show, was to them in refining their original script ideas and making them work in the context of the series.[22] Upholders of the autonomy of art insist that in creation, the individual artist knows it all and does it all. But this is not always true even in the most rarefied realms of high culture. Multiple authorship is not as uncommon in serious literature as the Romantic aesthetic would lead us to believe.[23] I am not just thinking of famous teams of authors, such as the English Renaissance dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher. In fact, multiple authorship was quite common in English Renaissance drama--another parallel between Shakespeare’s medium and television.[24] From what we know of the rewriting of plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, it seems that the Elizabethan Age even had its own script doctors.[25] Shakespeare himself may have served as one--we see his hand at work at a few points in a play called The Book of Sir Thomas More—indeed, in the only dramatic passage we may have in Shakespeare’s own handwriting, he is to our eternal frustration evidently working on somebody else’s play.[26]
Even in the very bastion of the Romantic aesthetic--the writing of Romantic lyrics--artistic collaboration is not unknown. Wordsworth and Coleridge are among our models of the Romantic solitary genius, and yet they worked together on the volume of poetry that made them both famous, Lyrical Ballads. Although today each of the poems in this volume is credited to one author or the other, their handiwork was not distinguished in the original edition, and we now know that some of the poems were in effect joint productions--that some of the lines in the poems credited to Wordsworth were, in fact, written by Coleridge and vice versa.[27] Wordsworth and Coleridge were constantly commenting on each other’s work and willing to take advice from each other, much to the benefit of the published work. Perhaps the most famous modernist poem is The Waste Land and it is, of course, ascribed to T. S. Eliot. But the publication of the original manuscript has revealed that Ezra Pound’s editing played such a role in the finished form the poem took that he might as well be credited as co-author.[28] The degree to which Eliot was willing to accept Pound’s editorial suggestions seems incredible to us, raised as we are on the Romantic aesthetic. Yet we must also admit that much of what we think of as the distinctively modernist character of The Waste Land results from Pound’s efforts to edit the text down from Eliot’s original inspiration.
Someone might object that these are cases of solitary geniuses working together, and thus quite different from the kind of collaboration characteristic of television, which often more closely resembles the case of a writer working with a commercial editor rather than a fellow artist. But even in this case, studies have shown that editors at commercial publishing houses have sometimes played an important role in the shaping of literary masterpieces. One of the most famous editorial collaborations in American literature involved the novelist Thomas Wolfe and the editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons. As Jack Stillinger writes: “Perkins’s most publicized accomplishment. . . was the virtual creation of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935) out of huge masses of manuscript that Wolfe had brought him in despair.”[29] Thus, the issue of multiple authorship does not allow us to draw a sharp line between high culture and popular culture. And, although multiple authorship may introduce contradictions into a work of art or result in a kind of “lowest common denominator” effect, it may instead, through the benefits of synergy or feedback, improve the ultimate product. The demands of the marketplace, far from always ruining literary works, have in many cases improved them. Commercial pressures can exercise a disciplining effect on artists, if only by forcing them to finish a work by a certain date or to keep it at a reasonable length. The record of art produced with foundation or government grants does not offer convincing evidence that being released from having to please the public is a sure path to greatness for an artist.[30] Thus, the fact that a popular medium such as television does not afford complete autonomy to individual artists is not an effective argument against it.
Rethinking the issue of contingency in television production leads to a similar conclusion. When we see producers scrambling to finish shows by a deadline, rewriting scenes up until the last possible moment, and jerry-rigging special effects, it is hard for us to believe that what they are creating can be genuine art. This is especially true because of the way critics tend to approach art works. They are generally looking to uncover a plan in the work, a pattern by which it is structured, and they assume that the artist had this plan fully elaborated before constructing it. What the critic discovers retrospectively, the artist must have divined prospectively.[31] It is natural for such critics to question the artistic potential of television as a medium when it does not seem to allow for this kind of advance planning.
But, once again, our knowledge of high culture does not support this critique of popular culture. To be sure, we know many cases of artists who did, in fact, plan out their masterpieces well in advance, sometimes down to the smallest details. But for every example of the advantages of advance planning in the arts, we can find counterexamples of the corresponding advantages of improvisation. Many great literary masterpieces have been produced with deadlines fast approaching and the authors desperately struggling to finish them in the quickest way possible. Some artists seem to need the pressure of deadlines to produce their best work.[32] Some arts have incorporated improvisation as one of their fundamental principles. Think of the importance of improvisation in the careers of such musical geniuses as J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. In short, many creators in the realms of high culture have had to come to terms with an element of contingency in their art and have even learned to turn it to their advantage. Consider, for example, the role of the found object in surrealism.[33]
The Slavics scholar Gary Saul Morson has argued that some authors have even made contingency the fundamental principle of their literary art--chiefly, in his view, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He shows that Dostoevsky, for example, allowed breaking stories in newspapers to alter the plot lines of a novel in the course of serial publication:
In The Idiot, real crime reports that first appeared between installments are read by the characters, who seem to be following the press along with the readers and the author. These real crimes shape characters’ imagination, discussion, and future actions. Because those crimes took place after some sections of the work had appeared [in print], the reader recognizes that they could not have been part of an original plan, and that forces outside the author’s control shape his work as it goes along.[34]
This case is analogous to the way television shows often incorporate references to contemporary events at the last minute.[35] Morson shows that Dostoevsky deliberately created open-ended narratives, in which he himself did not know in advance in which direction the story was headed.[36] He in effect left the course of the action up to his characters, waiting until the last minute to see what decisions they would make and thus shape the outcome of the story. Morson argues that contingency becomes an aesthetic value in the novels of Dostoevsky; the open-ended narrative is a way of celebrating the reality of human freedom.
Thus, dealing with elements of contingency turns out to be something popular culture has in common with many forms of high culture. It may be possible to eliminate all elements of chance from a brief lyric poem, but it is much more difficult to do so in a long novel. Some novelists have failed to catch minor changes in their works when typesetters accidentally introduced them in the printing process.[37] The larger the work, the more likely it will admit imperfections by the rigorous standards of tight, poetic form. But, for critics such as Morson, what looks like imperfection from the perspective of the Romantic aesthetic of organic form, may be a higher kind of perfection according to a different aesthetic. The famous bagginess of the novel, which makes it seem loosely organized and even shapeless by comparison with lyric poetry, can also be viewed as a virtue and seems to be related to the novel’s greater realism and, above all, its ability to capture a wider range of ordinary human experience. Insofar as contingency is an important element of human life, any form of art that strives to eliminate it risks becoming untrue to the way we actually experience our existence.[38]
The Feedback Model
Recognizing that contingency is an inevitable component of both life and art, many artists, even in high culture, choose not to sketch out their plans in advance and prefer to develop them as they go along--to try a variety of possibilities and see what works and what does not. The alternative to a “perfect plan” model of artistic creation is a “feedback” model, in which the imperfections of a work of art are gradually corrected in a process of trial and error (or, according to Morson, sometimes even left in place to achieve a variety of effects). The feedback model is far more common in high culture than the Romantic aesthetic would lead us to believe. Many artists crave contact with their audience precisely because of the valuable feedback it can supply.[39] Sometimes the audience is able to judge when artists are doing their best work more easily than they themselves can. For this reason, the way contemporary artists are shielded by institutional grants from the need to please an audience may actually have a deleterious effect on their art. Being free of the public’s demands may be every artist’s dream, but it can easily turn into a nightmare of aesthetic isolation, cut off from all sources of guidance and legitimate criticism, and perhaps even from the ultimate source of artistic inspiration itself.[40] There are many cases of artists who did their best work when they still felt a need to cater to their audience, and lost their way artistically when they began to feel that pleasing the public was beneath their dignity as autonomous geniuses.
If feedback from an audience is actually valuable to artists, popular culture has certain advantages over high culture in its more elite forms. In particular, many aspects of the production process in television that look dubious from the viewpoint of the Romantic aesthetic may turn out to work to the benefit of those who labor in the medium. What from one angle looks like harmful interference with the integrity of the artist in television, from another angle looks like helpful feedback. Not all the advice from network executives is wrong-headed. Although their primary consideration may be the infamous bottom line, their very concern with audience reaction may sometimes leads them to their suggest ways of genuinely improving programs. In my research on Gilligan Unbound, I was struck by the way successful television producers actively seek out feedback from all sources and look to it for guidance.
In the case of The X-Files, the producers discovered a new feedback mechanism--the Internet. They carefully monitored the many web sites that sprung up to discuss and celebrate the show, and learned a great deal in the process. For example, in a first-season episode entitled “E.B.E.” The X-Files introduced a new set of characters called the Lone Gunmen (Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund)--three paranoid conspiracy theorists and computer experts who help the hero of the show, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), in his struggle against the government. The writers who thought these quirky characters up (Glen Morgan and James Wong) felt that they were a failure and were ready to drop them from future episodes. But the Lone Gunmen caught on immediately with one of the core segments of the X-Files audience. As technological nerds, they appealed to precisely the fans who were among the first to take advantage of the Internet. Because of the popularity of the Lone Gunmen as judged by the X-Files web sites, the producers decided to bring the characters back.[41] If the rest is not exactly television history, the quirkiness of the Lone Gunmen certainly contributed something to The X-Files, especially an element of humor that helped lighten the prevailing dark mood of the show. Somehow the show’s audience, or a segment of it, was better able than the producers to sense the longterm contribution these characters might make to the series. The Romantic aesthetic tells us that giving in to audience demands can only corrupt an artist’s vision. But the customer may occasionally be right, and artists who listen to their audience may learn to improve their art.[42]
As this example from the history of The X-Files reminds us, unlike many forms of art, a television series cannot be created all at once, but must of necessity be produced over long stretches of time--weeks at first, but over years if the series is successful. This is one reason that the television series does not fit the “perfect plan” model of artistic creation. But it is very well suited to the feedback model. Creating episode after episode, and unable to go back and alter earlier efforts in light of subsequent developments, television producers often find themselves in the embarrassing position of having introduced lapses in continuity into their shows, if not outright contradictions.[43] A devoted fan may have fun pointing out such inconsistencies, but they mark television shows as failures according to the strict demands of coherence imposed by the organic model of poetic form. But what a television series loses in coherence over the years, it gains in its ability to experiment with new possibilities and find out ways to improve the show and expand its range. As the case of the Lone Gunmen demonstrates, in its long run a successful television series will often introduce new characters, and see which ones click with its audience. Characters who prove to be unpopular will be dropped, and characters who are popular will see their roles expanded.[44] Although the addition of a popular character may not always improve a show artistically, it often does and can sometimes revitalize the whole series.
In the serial character of much television production, it yet again proves impossible to maintain a strict division between high culture and popular. For television did not invent the mode of serial production. It goes all the way back to the eighteenth century, when novels were first published in periodic installments. This method of producing novels reached its peak in the Victorian Era, when Charles Dickens led the way in making the serial novel the most popular and financially rewarding form of entertainment in England.[45] The novels we now study reverently in universities as masterpieces of fiction and, hence, high culture were at the time of their creation serially produced and consumed, much like the weekly installments of shows on television today. We can observe the same feedback process at work in the Victorian novel. Novelists often killed off or otherwise disposed of characters who were proving unpopular with their audience, and devoted more pages to those who were evidently increasing weekly or monthly sales.[46] Jennifer Hayward has argued that the serial in its many incarnations--the serialized novel, the comic strip, the movie serial with its cliffhanger endings, the radio soap opera, the television soap opera, and other forms of serialized television--is the distinctive form of modern culture.[47] The fact that serial production, by allowing for all sorts of audience feedback, facilitates communication between artists and their public may go a long way toward explaining the form’s popularity.[48] Serially produced works will usually be looser in form and fail to achieve the level of artistic coherence possible in lyric poetry, but, on the positive side, they can be more experimental and pursue a wider range of possibilities in terms of both form and content. This is just as true when one compares a Victorian novel with a lyric poem as when one compares a television series.[49] Observing the similarities in the way serial production functioned in the nineteenth-century novel and in contemporary television is a good way of seeing how much high culture and popular culture have in common.
Creationism Versus Evolution
To place my argument about popular culture in a larger context, I want to examine briefly the broader implications of the contrast I have been drawing between the “perfect plan” model of artistic creation and the “feedback” model. The “perfect plan” model of artistic creation has its deepest roots in Western theology and the teleological understanding of the universe to which it is related. To think of artists planning out their works perfectly and in advance is to think of them on the model of God creating the universe, especially as understood in Christianity. According to this view, for any kind of meaningful structure to come into being and function, it must be the work of a single designer, who can bring all its elements into harmony. This way of understanding the world long dominated thought in a wide variety of areas. It seems natural to human beings to trace order anywhere they find it to some kind of single master planner, someone who brings the field into order in the first place.[50] In politics, this way of thinking produced the theoretical support for monarchy--the claim that a country is ruled best when a single authority is in place to give it order. In economics, this way of thinking leads to the belief that the government must intervene to introduce order into the marketplace, to set prices, for example, or, more generally, to impose restrictions on commerce in order to make the common good prevail. In biology, this way of thinking leads to what is called creationism, the idea that the perfection of form we observe in biological phenomena can be explained only as the work of a single divine creator. To borrow a term from economics, all these approaches to understanding order celebrate the virtues of “central planning.” They offer “top down” models of order. Given the prevalence of this kind of thinking, it is understandable that it came to dominate aesthetics--the traditional idea of organic form in poetry is another way of celebrating central planning as the only route to order. As long as people thought that only a single, divine creator could be responsible for the order we see in the biological realm, it was logical to view order in the aesthetic realm as having a similar origin.[51] The ideal of central planning is actually more plausible in aesthetics than in any other realm. In poetry, we can, in fact, observe poets at work and watch them achieve perfection of form by carefully designing their poems.
It is therefore not surprising that the central planning model of order survived in aesthetics long after it began to be challenged in other areas. Probably the most famous challenge to this way of thinking came in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin showed how the perfection we observe in the structure of animals and plants can be explained without recourse to the notion of a divine creator of that structure. His idea of natural selection is what we have been calling a feedback or “bottom up” model of order. Evolution proceeds by what we now call random mutations, which lead to a proliferation of biological forms--experiments in life forms, as it were. In Darwin’s view, the environment provides the feedback in this system, selecting out new forms that work and rejecting those that do not. If this sounds like my description of how a television series develops over time, with the audience accepting or rejecting innovations, that is just my point.[52] What looks anomalous from the viewpoint of traditional poetics fits the Darwinian model of how form can be perfected in a system that does not have a central planner, but instead evolves over time. Darwin, in fact, provides a way of questioning traditional poetics by questioning its fundamental conception of organic form. Both Aristotelian and Romantic poetics stake their claims on the principle of organic form. But since Darwin we have come to understand that organic form need not be the result of conscious design or pre-planning.
Franco Moretti and Gary Saul Morson have led the way in showing how Darwin’s ideas can help us rethink our notion of literary form.[53] Drawing upon the work of Stephen Jay Gould, both have stressed how Darwin, as opposed to Aristotle, allows for an element of contingency in biological form.[54] The validity of Darwin’s theory, in fact, hinges on our ability to find evidence of imperfection in biological form--elements of an organism that do not fulfill the Aristotelian criterion of being integral parts of the whole and that, therefore, do not appear to be the result of divine creation. The presence of vestigial organs in animals, for example, can be explained, not by any theory of perfect design (since they, in fact, have no function), but only by reference to an animal’s evolutionary history, and history is the realm of the contingent. As Gould writes:
Darwin invoked contingency in a fascinating way as his primary support for the fact of evolution itself. . . . One might think that the best evidence for evolution would reside in those exquisite examples of optimal adaptation presumably wrought by natural selection--the aerodynamic perfection of a feather or the flawless mimicry of insects that look like leaves or sticks. Such phenomena provide our standard textbook examples of evolutionary modification. . . . Yet Darwin recognized that perfection cannot provide evidence for evolution because optimality covers the tracks of history.
If feathers are perfect, they may as well have been designed from scratch by an omnipotent God as from previous anatomy by a natural process. Darwin recognized that the primary evidence for evolution must be sought in quirks, oddities, and imperfections that lay bare the pathways of history. Whales, with their vestigial pelvic bones, must have descended from terrestrial ancestors with functional legs. . . . If whales retained no trace of their terrestrial heritage, . . . then history would not inhere in the productions of nature. But contingencies of “just history” do shape our world, and evolution lies exposed in the panoply of structures that have no other explanation than the shadow of their past.[55]
If the biological realm allows for contingency of form, then, according to Moretti and Morson, literary form can admit contingent elements as well.
Darwin’s revolution in how to conceive order was preceded by a revolution in economic thinking that we associate with Adam Smith and classical economics. Darwin himself admitted to being influenced by classical economics in the person of Thomas Malthus, and in retrospect we can see that Malthus’ theory of population was crucial to Darwin’s understanding of natural selection.[56] Smith and his followers attacked central planning in its root economic form, the belief that only government intervention can achieve order in markets that would otherwise, if left to themselves, break down into chaos. Smith showed just the opposite--that markets are self-regulating and self-ordering, and it is government intervention that throws them out of balance and produces chaos. In Smith’s analysis, the pricing mechanism of free markets produces the feedback that orders economic phenomena. Rising prices are a signal to producers to turn out more of a good, and falling prices a signal to turn out less. The price mechanism thus works to bring supply into line with demand, and thereby to make the market move toward equilibrium. When the government intervenes and tries artificially to raise or lower prices, it sends the wrong signals to producers and that leads to surpluses or shortages in the market, which is to say, economic chaos.
Thus, in both Smith’s economics and Darwin’s biology, systems generate order from within themselves and on their own. In the traditional theological model of order, a force outside or above the system is necessary to intervene and introduce order into what would otherwise be chaos (the “top down” model of order). In the Smith/Darwin model, a system becomes self-regulating through a feedback mechanism (the “bottom up” model of order). Such a system does not achieve perfection all at once by an act of divine creation; rather it is always striving toward perfection through a process of evolution; it is, in effect, self-perfecting, rather than perfect. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek has popularized the use of the term “spontaneous order” to describe this sort of system, and he did much to develop a general theory of spontaneous order, showing how the concept is applicable in a wide range of fields beyond economics and biology, from linguistics to law.[57] I have been trying to apply the concept of spontaneous order to popular culture. The realm of popular culture looks messy and disordered to us, and we have a hard time understanding how any kind of artistic form could emerge out of this apparent chaos. The idea of spontaneous order always seems counterintuitive to us; as human beings, we are evidently conditioned to attribute order to an individual who orders it. That is why the ideas of both Smith and Darwin (not to mention Hayek) encountered so much initial resistance and are rejected to this day by many people. But if one recognizes the various kinds of feedback mechanisms at work in popular culture, one begins to see how it can somehow produce art out of chaos.
The Productions of Time
To return to my initial questions, if we find that authorship is as it were “corporate” rather than individual in television production, that does not rule out the serious study of television programs. As we have already seen, even in high culture the concept of the single perfect author is perhaps best understood as a heuristic device. We may never encounter a work of literature actually produced entirely and perfectly by a single author, but it is useful to read literature and especially lyric poetry as if this were the case. We will find more in a literary work if we are looking for perfection in it. That is why the New Criticism, for all the dubious aspects of its theoretical foundations, proved to be fruitful in analyzing literature. Thus, when we turn to popular culture, even if we see that single authorship is not the norm of production, we can still “read” individual shows as if they had artistic integrity. This approach will help us to find whatever artistic merit they may, in fact, have.
In short the typical critique of popular culture is a version of the genetic fallacy. By concentrating on how works of popular culture are produced, it prejudices us against taking the products seriously. But, as we have seen, in both high culture and popular culture the genesis of a work does not necessarily tell us anything about its artistic quality. A work produced by a seemingly haphazard process may not turn out to be haphazard in form (by the same token, a perfectly planned work may turn out to be lifeless and dull). Instead of focusing on the original intentions of the creators in popular culture and worrying whether they have been carried out faithfully, we should dwell upon the intentionality of the finished produced--whether in the end it has become, by whatever process, a work of art. We must beware of taking the perfectly unified lyric poem as our only model of aesthetic achievement. As studies of the novel are increasingly revealing, a work of literature may embrace various forms of what would be regarded as imperfection in lyric poetry and still have aesthetic value. As Morson and Moretti have argued, novels may make those imperfections serve new artistic purposes. The same may be true of what are often considered to be the aesthetic shortcomings of popular culture. We should be careful about judging the new media of popular culture by the artistic standards of the older media of high culture. We should instead be looking for the unprecedented aesthetic possibilities suddenly opened up whenever a new artistic medium comes along. In sum, we can take the artistic forms of popular culture seriously without assuming that they will conform to the norms of high culture in the past. Indeed, the genuine excitement of studying popular culture may well be to discover the new conceptions of artistic form it is developing.
The spontaneous order model also helps us rethink our negative reaction when we encounter the element of contingency in television production.[58] We have begun to realize that to eliminate all contingency from art might well be to take the life out of it--especially now that Darwin has given us a concept of biological form that incorporates contingency, rather than banishing it, as the Aristotelian tradition tried to do. Another way of saying that television production inevitably involves an element of contingency is to say that it inevitably takes place over time, sometimes long periods of time.[59] In the model of a divine moment of perfect creation, time is seen as the great corrupting force. The world is perfect at the moment of creation and can only degenerate thereafter. A similar view is embodied in the idea of the moment of perfect poetic creation. The poet’s vision is at its purest at the instant of inspiration, and his efforts to work out his original idea over time and embody it in material form only lead him away from its initial perfection.[60] In the spontaneous order model, time is the friend rather than the enemy of creation. In both Adam Smith and Darwin, systems perfect themselves over time, and, on a smaller scale, the same process can be observed in the evolution of a television series. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was The X-Files.
None of this is to say that the conditions of television production guarantee high artistic quality and the automatic evolution of every show to perfection by its sixth or seventh season. Obviously from what we observe on television, something closer to the opposite seems to be the case. All I am claiming is that the typical conditions of television production do not simply preclude artistic quality, as some critics of the medium have argued.[61] As Hayward writes:
The ability to alter narratives in response to the success or failure of subplots or characters is seen as negative because we have constructed ideologies of the “true” artist and writer as governed only by individual genius and never by the demands of the marketplace. . . . There is no inherent flaw in a kind of “just in time” production of stories; neither does this method preclude the inspiration of creative genius. Instead, both market forces and artistic gifts can work together to produce texts crafted by an individual or creative team but flexible enough to respond to good and relevant ideas from outside, whether in the form of audience response, news events, or other sources.[62]
We have seen some of the ways in which the various feedback mechanisms in television production can help to improve the quality of shows, but that still requires the talent of a creative producer to take advantage of the circumstances.[63] Because that talent is rare (although perhaps no rarer in popular culture than in high culture), the overall level of aesthetic quality of television programs may remain low, even while oases of genuine art spring up from time to time in the vast television wasteland.[64]
My main goal has been to identify and try to overcome the prejudices we have inherited from the tradition of Romantic aesthetics. This tradition has been anti-commercial since its inception; the Romantics were the first to set up the autonomous creative genius in opposition to the vulgarity of the marketplace. In trying to rethink our view of popular culture, I have drawn upon the idea of spontaneous order, particularly because in its economic form, it shows that commerce can be an ordering and, indeed, a creative force. The ultimate objection to popular culture is that it is commercial culture, and in the Romantic tradition commerce and culture are viewed as incompatible. But once we begin to think of popular culture--and perhaps culture in general--as a form of spontaneous order, we can begin to understand how commerce and culture can work together for their mutual benefit.[65] To put the matter in the most unromantic terms possible: just because a television show is a commercial success does not mean that it is an artistic failure.
Notes
My epigraph is taken from V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (1972; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1993), 160.
[1]. This principle was the cornerstone of the New Criticism. See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), where he defends “the proposition that every word in a poem plays its part” (221; italics in the original). The New Critics did not, of course, invent this principle, and it has, in fact, often been embraced by authors themselves. See, for example, a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote on March 31, 1925 to his publisher, Horace Liverwright, warning him not to make any changes in the text of his collection of short stories, In Our Time: “It is understood of course that no alterations of words shall be made without my approval. . . . (T)he stories are written so tight and so hard that the alteration of a word can throw an entire story out of key. . . .There is nothing in the book that has not a definite place in its organization. . . . If cuts are made . . . , it will be shot to pieces as an organism” (Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981], 154-55).
[2] For a real life example of this kind of practical reality in the motion picture business, see Tom Weaver, “An Interview with Shirley Ulmer,” in The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009), 272. Ulmer’s wife reports of his habits on a movie set: “He always got to a point where he would suddenly say, ‘Well, it’s getting towards the end of the day. I’m gonna cheat—and you’re gonna cheat along with me. We’re gonna go fast, we’re gonna do one take.’ They would call him ‘One-Take’ Ulmer” (italics in the original).
[3]. For more on this bit of television history, see my book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), xxxv-vi. See also Brian Lowry, The Truth Is Out There: The Official Guide to the X-Files (New York: Harper, 1995), 23-25, 64-65.
[4]. For general discussions of the relation between popular culture and high culture, see Harriett Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture & High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1999), Russell Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial, 1970), 1-7, and Richard Keller Simon, Trash Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). On this specific point, Gans writes (37): “the freedom of creators depends less on whether they are in high or popular culture than on whether they are working in an individual or group medium. A novelist can create a finished product by himself, but playwrights, filmmakers, and musicians are inevitably involved in group enterprises, and their work is often changed by other group members who also participate in creating the finished product.” On this point, see also Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 163 and Perkins, Film as Film, 158-59, 169.
[5]. See David Bevington, ed., “General Introduction,” The Complete Works of Shakespeare (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997), lxvii.
[6]. See Poetics, 1451a. The key passage comes at the end of section 8: “And the parts of the events ought to have been put together so that when a part is transposed or removed, the whole becomes different and changes. For whatever makes no noticeable difference if it is added or not added is no proper part of the whole” (Aristotle: On Poetics, trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002], 26).
[7]. See Gary Saul Morson, “The Prosaics of Process,” Literary Imagination 2 (2000): 379. Aristotle does say that some authors have “discovered not by art but by chance” the right subjects for tragic treatment (Poetics 1454a; Benardete and Davis, 36), but here he is referring to the genesis, not the form of works of art. Elsewhere, Aristotle makes it clear that in a good plot, things will appear to happen, not by chance, but in accord with some design: “it will be more wondrous than if they come to be spontaneously or by chance, since even among chance things those seem most wondrous which appear to have come to be as if for a purpose” (Poetics 1452a; Benardete and Davis, 28).
[8]. This contrast, originally formulated by the German critic, August Schlegel, was famously articulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his lectures on Shakespeare: “The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material. . . . The organic form. . . is innate; it shapes as it develops from within” (David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967], 500).
[9]. For a brilliant and concise account of these developments in aesthetics, see Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
[10]. On Coleridge’s plagiarism in general, see Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971); for a discussion of the specific issue of organic unity and Coleridge’s relation to the Schlegel brothers, see 205-14.
[11]. For examples of the influence of Coleridge on the New Criticism, see Brooks, Well Wrought Urn, 7-8, 26-27, 258. For the idea of the “structure of the poem as an organism” in New Criticism, see 213. See Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, 98, for the more general connection between Romanticism and the New Criticism.
[12]. For further discussion of this point, see my essay “The Primacy of the Literary Imagination, or, Which Came First: The Critic or the Author?,” Literary Imagination 1 (1999): 133-37.
[13]. See Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, 4, 28.
[14]. For the historical background to these developments, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).
[15]. Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson & the Impact of Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 293. Gans, Popular Culture, 66 gives a similar account of the “creators of what was now explicitly described as high culture”: “The decline of the court reduced their prestige, their source of support, and their privileges. The rise of a huge market for the popular arts meant for them not only a severe reduction of cultural standards but also a loss of control over the setting of standards for publics of lower status and education. In this process the artists forgot the subordination and humiliation that they often suffered at the hands of their patrons and failed to appreciate the freedom and dignity that they acquired even as they lost their guaranteed audience and its economic support. They solved the problem of their audience by denying that they needed one; they created only for themselves and their peers who could appreciate their work. Consequently, they had only contempt for the new publics on whom they depended for economic support, even though these offered artists greater rewards and more freedom than they had had before. The cult of the artist as genius, later transformed into the romantic image of the artist, provided culture with the prestige it lost when it was no longer associated with the aristocracy.” On this point, see also Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 104-105. For a thorough critique of the Romantic ideology of the autonomous creative genius, see Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 8, 40, 42.
[16]. For one of the earliest attempts in English to condemn the emergence of mass culture, see Wordsworth’s preface to the 1800 second edition of Lyrical Ballads: “For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Jack Stillinger, ed., Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965], 449). This brief passage contains the germ of the critique of popular culture developed by the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century in such books as Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For more on the Frankfurt School, see Chapter Eight, on Detour. For a discussion of the importance of the Wordsworth passage, see Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, 113-14. She traces it back to German thinking on the subject; earlier she quotes Friedrich Schiller: “There is now a great gulf between the elect of a nation and the masses” (74).
[17]. On the connection between the idea of genius and the idea of organic form, see Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, 53-54.
[18]. For the critical hostility to the novel, see Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, 89-92. She cites a number of negative responses to the so-called “reading epidemic,” including this one from a writer named Johann Adam Bergk: “the majority of readers devour the most wretched and tasteless novels with a voracious appetite that spoils head and heart. By reading such worthless material people get used to idleness that only the greatest exertion can overcome again” (89). For further examples of nineteenth-century critiques of novel reading, see Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 6, 26-27, and Erickson, Economy of Literary Form, 139-41. For a full treatment of the subject, see John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York: King’s Crown, 1943). Going through all these accounts, one cannot help being struck by the fact that in the nineteenth century, reading novels was criticized for exactly the same reasons for which watching television is criticized today.
[19]. On this point, see Erickson, Economy of Literary Form, 15, 105, 171-72.
[20]. Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, quotes Schiller: “the German public forces its writers to choose according to commercial calculations rather than the dictates of genius” (80) and: “I now know that it is impossible in the German world of letters to satisfy the strict demands of art and simultaneously procure the minimum support for one’s industry” (84). For the continuation of this attitude in the present world, see Gans, Popular Culture, 191.
[21]. For some examples, see Cantor, Gilligan Unbound, xxxvii and especially 214 (note 6).
[22]. See Cantor, Gilligan Unbound, xxxvii and 215 (note 8). For specific examples of X-Files writers praising Chris Carter’s intervention in their work, see Brian Lowry, Trust No One: The X-Files (New York: Harper, 1996), 227-29 and Andy Meisler, The X-Files: I Want to Believe (New York: Harper, 1998), 122.
[23]. Jack Stillinger has assembled a wide range of evidence on this subject, and as the title of his book--Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius--indicates, he uses it to call the Romantic aesthetic into question. For his list of prominent examples of multiple authorship in the history of British and American literature, see 204-213.
[24]. See Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 164-69.
[25]. See Michael Mangan, Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (London: Penguin, 1989), 21: “We know from the evidence of Henslowe’s papers that in 1602 he paid two lesser-known writers, William Bird and Samuel Rowley, four pounds, ‘for ther adicyones in doctor fostes’.”
[26]. See G. Blakemore Evans, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1683-1700 and Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre & The Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 135-59.
[27]. For example, Coleridge wrote the opening line of Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” and Wordsworth wrote lines 19-20 of the original version of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (lines 15-16 of the later “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”). For a detailed study of another example of literary collaboration in the nineteenth century, see Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, & Victorian Authorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
[28]. For a full account of Pound’s contribution to Eliot’s poem, see the chapter “Pound’s Waste Land” in Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 121-38.
[29]. Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 146. For further discussion of the Wolfe/Perkins collaboration, see McGann, Textual Criticism, 53, 78-79. For further discussion of the general issue of authors working with editors and publishers, see McGann, Textual Criticism, 34-35, 42-44, 52-53, 75.
[30]. Paul Delany offers a particularly trenchant critique of government attempts to subsidize art under socialism in his Literature, Money and the Market (London: Palgrave, 2002). See especially 122: “institutions that seek to by-pass the market are not likely to be any more successful in promoting high art on demand. The Soviet writers’ unions, for example, specified a preferred literary form (socialist realism) and paid creators directly to make examples of the desired works. The effects of this command economy included a complete collapse of Russian fiction from its earlier achievements, much more dramatic than any decline of the novel in the West.” See also 172-74 for a further critique of government subsidy of the arts and a detailed discussion of how the system functioned, or rather failed to function, in the Soviet Union.
[31]. See Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 173: “because the product comes to us as a whole entity, we have mistakenly assumed that it was created whole in the first place.”
[32]. Samuel Johnson provides an excellent example of an author who seemed to need deadlines to get him to write; see Kernan, Samuel Johnson, 94-96. For another example, see Alan C. Dooley, Author and Printer in Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 40, where he discusses William Makepeace “Thackeray’s repeated references in his letters to writing frantically against deadlines.” For a discussion of Dostoevsky and deadlines, see Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), especially 202-203: “the ecstasy of risk also partially accounts for Dostoevsky’s habit of accepting money in advance for novels he promised to provide in an impossibly short time. The most famous such incident occurred on July 2, 1865, when he signed a contract with the unscrupulous entrepreneur Stellovsky to provide a novel by November 1, 1866. Stellovsky was counting on the forfeit provisions, which allowed him nine years to publish all Dostoevsky’s works for free. Dostoevsky went abroad, played roulette, borrowed more money, and worked on Crime and Punishment until it became clear he could not finish it on time. At last, with only a month remaining, he hired a stenographer and in twenty-eight days dictated another novel, completed one day before the deadline. Perhaps not just because of its topic, he entitled the work The Gambler.” In addition to reminding us that we owe some great works of literature to publishers’ deadlines, this incident shows how some authors, for good or ill, share the risk-taking spirit of the entrepreneur.
[33]. See Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 140-50.
[34]. Morson, “Prosaics,” 386.
[35]. For examples of these sorts of contemporary references in television soap operas, see Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 187-88. Hayward discusses analogous contemporary references in the serialized novels of the nineteenth century (30, 44), including cases of Dickens working from newspaper incidents (47). An example of this sort of contemporary reference early in the history of the English novel is the way Henry Fielding worked the Jacobite Rebellion into the plot of Tom Jones. See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 203-205, especially 203: “It has been suggested that Fielding did not originally intend to include the rebellion in his work but that he inserted the event at the last moment because it was happening just when he was writing book six.”
[36]. See Morson, “Prosaics,” 381 and “Sideshadowing and Tempics,” New Literary History 29 (1998): 608-609.
[37]. For many examples of this phenomenon, see Dooley, Author and Printer--he shows how the mechanics of book production in the nineteenth century introduced all sorts of elements of contingency into the final product. As he puts it in one case, “stereotype plates were subject to an insidious typographical entropy through which textual changes that nobody intended could occur” (4). See also 160, 164. For some specific examples of authors failing to spot textual changes introduced by mistake during the printing process, see 40, 45, and 48 (George Eliot), 40 (William Makepeace Thackerary), and 41 (Charles Dickens). As Dooley sums up the situation (85): “An author may have had complete control over every detail of a text right up to the moment printing began, but once the machines began to turn, faulty readings could appear and slip through without detection, or be noticed and erroneously repaired.”
[38]. See Morson, “Sideshadowing,” 599-600. Morson says of his distinctive approach to literature, which he calls “tempics” as opposed to “poetics”: “In literature and elsewhere, tempics, as a way of reading that takes time and contingency seriously, should help us to read experience without making a poem of it, and yet find meaning in it” (601).
[39]. For an example early in the history of the English novel, see Lennard Davis’ discussion of the procedures of Samuel Richardson, Factual Fictions, 189: “The method he chose for writing his works was to pass various drafts around to his correspondents and ask for criticism, revisions, and so on.” Davis compares this to “writing by committee” and speaks of “spontaneous reactions” to “spontaneous writing,” concluding that from its inception “the novel had the possibility of becoming a kind of circulating news/novel-letter, a work perpetually in progress, perpetually added to” (190). For a later example of this kind of literary feedback, involving Tennyson, see Dooley, Author and Printer, 21, 52.
[40]. For a provocative discussion of the problematic aspects of efforts by the Modernist movement to shield artists from commercial pressures, see Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites & Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), especially 40, 148-49, 168. In particular, Rainey analyzes the case of the poetess H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), who was relieved of commercial publishing pressures by the generous patronage of a woman named Winifred Ellerman (pen name: Bryher). Rainey describes this situation as “a modernist dream--or perhaps nightmare--come true,” and characterizes H. D.’s nonfiction prose after 1942 as “a kind of writing that suggests the solipsistic reverie that became her habitual state under Bryher’s benevolent but narcotic and claustral care” (156). See Delany, “Paying for Modernism” and “T. S. Eliot’s Personal Finances, 1915-1929" in Literature, Money and the Market, 146-71, for analysis of other attempts to “establish a modernist literary economy in isolation from the literary marketplace” (146). In the Eliot essay, Delany does a particularly good job of demolishing what he calls Ezra Pound’s “myth of the economic martyrdom of modernist writers” (162).
[41]. See Lowry, Truth Is Out There, 140 and Cantor, Gilligan Unbound, 167-68.
[42]. In the crisp formulation of Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 219 (note 12): “if it is perverse to believe that the market always rewards the better solution, it is just as perverse to believe that it always rewards the worse one!”
[43]. For some concrete examples, see Cantor, Gilligan Unbound, xxxvi and Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 154.
[44]. See Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 170, and 174-85 for a detailed study of the development of one character in a television soap opera in response to audience feedback.
[45]. For discussion of some of the aspects and implications of serial publication, see Erickson, Economy of Literary Form, 158-68 and Morson, “Prosaics,” 385-86. For a fuller discussion of the serial novel, and the theoretical problems it raises for understanding literature, see my essay “The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism,” in Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, ed. Paul A. Cantor and Stephen Cox (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), especially 37-76.
[46]. For examples of Dickens expanding the role of his characters or killing them off in response to sales figures, see Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 58-59, 61; see especially 58: “he greatly expanded Sam Weller’s role in Pickwick Papers, when sales jumped to forty thousand after Sam’s first appearance.” In the most extreme case of negative feedback in serialization, the publication of a novel might simply be stopped in mid-career if the public failed to respond favorably to it. See Erickson, Economy of Literary Form, 158.
[47]. See Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 2-3.
[48]. For the various forms of audience feedback in television soap operas, see Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 165.
[49]. See Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, for examples of both discontinuity in Victorian serial novels (82) and the greater potential for character development (37, 50).
[50]. See Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (London: Routledge, 1982), 3 vols., 1: 9-10, 26-27 and The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 24.
[51]. On the theological model in Romantic aesthetics, see Woodmansee, Author, Art, and the Market, 18-19.
[52]. Let me stress that I am talking about an analogy here, not an identity. Forms of biological and cultural evolution both involve a process of variation and then selection from among the variants by some kind of feedback. But the process of feedback in the two cases is fundamentally different. Darwin founded his theory of the origin of species on the principle of what he called “natural selection,” by which he meant to emphasize the fact that conscious choice by something resembling the human mind is nowhere involved in the process. In all forms of cultural evolution, the human mind does, of course, come into play and at some point conscious choices must be made. Faced with the range of possible jokes a brainstorming session of comedy writers has developed, the head writer or the comedian has to choose which will be featured in the show’s opening monologue. Faced with a wide array of programming, television viewers have to choose which shows to watch. What makes these processes still “evolutionary” is that they are not planned out completely in advance; they still involve feedback and hence development over time. In fact, these examples of cultural evolution resemble Darwin’s chief analogy for his theory of natural selection--the domestic breeding of animals. The first chapter of Origin of Species is entitled “Variation under Domestication” and shows how species change over time when human beings set out deliberately and consciously to alter them. This chapter makes it clear that Darwin himself recognized that evolution can occur as a result of either conscious or unconscious processes. And he recognized the different outcomes involved; domestic breeding, for example, produces results much faster than the unconscious process of natural selection. So does cultural evolution, because, unlike biological evolution, it is decidedly “Lamarckian”--in phenomena such as language, acquired characteristics can be inherited (which is to say that cultural traditions are deliberately passed down to new generations). For further discussion of the differences between biological and cultural evolution, see Hayek, Fatal Conceit, 23-28.
[53]. For Franco Moretti, see “On Literary Evolution,” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1988), 262-78; Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London: Verso, 1996), 20, 22, 94, 150, 177-78, 184, 188-91; and “Slaughterhouse of Literature,” 207-27. For Gary Saul Morson, see Narrative and Freedom; “Sideshadowing and Tempics” and “Contingency and Freedom, Prosaics and Process,” New Literary History 29 (1998): 599-624, 673-86; and “Prosaics,” 377-88.
[54]. For the element of contingency in Darwinian biology, see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), especially 51, 283-91, 299-301, 317-18.
[55]. Gould, Wonderful Life, 300-301. For the application of these ideas to literature, see Morson, “Sideshadowing,” 618-21.
[56]. See the introduction to Origin of Species, where Darwin writes: “This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom” (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996], 6). For the influence of Smith and classical economics on Darwin, see Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1: 20-22, 152-53 (note 33) and Fatal Conceit, 24-25, 146-47. If Hayek seems biased in favor of a fellow economist, the point is confirmed by a natural scientist--see Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 121-25, especially 122: “the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith’s economics transferred to nature.”
[57]. For Hayek’s understanding of spontaneous order, see chapters 1 and 2, “Reason and Evolution” and “Cosmos and Taxis,” of the first volume, Rules and Order, of his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1: 8-54. See also the essays “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” and “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design” in his Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 22-42, 96-105. For a brief but comprehensive survey of the development of the idea of spontaneous order, see Steven Horwitz, “From Smith to Menger to Hayek: Liberalism in the Spontaneous-Order Tradition,” The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, 6 (2001): 81-97. For more on the concept of spontaneous order and its application in the realm of culture, see the essays in Cantor and Cox, Literature and the Economics of Liberty, especially 1-97.
[58]. For a discussion of contingency and television, see Umberto Eco, “Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics,” The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 105-22. Eco deals chiefly with the distinctive phenomenon of live television broadcasts.
[59]. For the importance of the time element in serial forms, see Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 136.
[60]. The classic statement of this view can be found in Percy Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry: “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 504). For a critical assessment of this understanding of literary composition, see Dooley, Author and Printer, 171 and McGann, Textual Criticism, 102-103.
[61] For citation of some of these critics (including Adorno), and further critique of the idea that television has inherent limitations as a medium, see my essays “Is There Intelligent Life on Television?”, Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2008: 56-59 and “Get with the Program: The Medium Is Not the Message,” Academic Questions 23 (2010): 435-59.
[62]. Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 62. I have been concentrating on television, but as Hayward demonstrates, everything I have said about the virtues of multiple authorship and improvisation in this medium applies equally well to the other media of popular culture, including film. I have in effect been arguing against the famous auteur theory of movie making, a late descendant of Romantic aesthetics that views films as being created solely by their directors. Indeed, some auteur critics credit certain directors with possessing quasi-divine creative power in shaping their movies into perfect organic wholes. For a good exposition of the auteur theory, see Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929-1968 (New York: Da Capo, 1996), especially 19-37, 269-78 (as in any judicious presentation of a theory, Sarris makes many reasonable qualifications of its claims and significant concessions to its critics). For a concise and incisive critique of the auteur theory, see the chapter “Plays and Films: Author, Auteurs, Autres,” in Stillinger, Multiple Authorship, 163-81. I apply my arguments in this introduction about the conditions of television production to the case of a famous movie in my essay “‘As Time Goes By’: Casablanca and the Evolution of a Pop-Culture Classic,” in Political Philosophy Comes to Rick’s: Casablanca and American Civic Culture, ed. James Pontuso (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), 9-24. In the specific case of Casablanca, I show how multiple authorship and improvisation managed to produce a cinematic masterpiece, not the botched result auteur theory would have predicted. For the best analysis I know of the issue of authorship in movies, and the director’s role, see Perkins, Film as Film, 158-86. In a balanced discussion, Perkins manages to give the director pride of place in the creation of movies, while still acknowledging the role of many others in the process.
[63]. This is another example of how cultural evolution differs from biological--another case where in the “selection” phase of evolution, the intervention of a conscious mind is necessary. But notice that this is still a case of spontaneous order. The producer has not perfectly planned the production process from the beginning--he just recognizes the “perfect” outcome of a relatively unplanned process when he sees it. This is exactly what Hayek is talking about under the formula: “the results of human action but not of human design.”
[64] For a critique of FCC Chairman Newton Minow and his famous idea of television as a “vast wasteland,” see my essay “The Road to Cultural Serfdom: America’s First Television Czar,” in Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism, ed. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2010), 171-87, 216-19.
[65]. For a comprehensive treatment of this possibility, see Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). See also Perkins, Film as Film, 161-62.
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