Article:
Dredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of TELEVISUALITY

Abstract

In 1995, John Caldwell’s TELEVISUALITY: STYLE, CRISIS AND AUTHORITY in American Television familiarised media studies with a heterodox methodology, mixing formal analysis and technical insights with work floor knowledge with elaborate theorising. In this interview Caldwell describes how this approach emerged from a conjuncture of practices as different as art school, farm labor, and high theory. Instead of defining the theoretical essence of the medium this combination of approaches allowed for a recursive mapping and drilling of television’s dynamics. Caldwell claims the ‘commercial media industrial systems’ can neither be understood nor effectively criticised with a one-size-fits-all approach; rather, only if we seriously take into account the changing concepts and practices that emerge within these systems. This also requires a pedagogy which does not teach a well-defined model of analysis but rather makes room for collaborative, open-ended research.


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Stauff, Markus; Caldwell, John T.: Dredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of TELEVISUALITY. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 4 (2015), Nr. 2, S. 51-70. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15197.
@ARTICLE{Stauff2015,
 author = {Stauff, Markus and Caldwell, John T.},
 title = {Dredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of TELEVISUALITY},
 year = 2015,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15197}",
 volume = 4,
 address = {Amsterdam},
 journal = {NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies},
 number = 2,
 pages = {51--70},
}
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