In the last paragraph of Lynn Spigel’s “Installing
the Television Set,” Spigel quotes historian Carlo Ginzburg, who writes:
“Reality is opaque; but there are certain points—clues, signs—which allow us to
decipher it.” Why do you think Spigel closes her analysis of
post-war television’s role in American domestic spaces with this quote? How
does she describe her historical approach/methodology? What types of “traces”
of the past does she examine in this essay and how does she use them? Do you agree with her approach to history?
In choosing to end her article with a statement attesting to the perpetual haze that obscures even the most thorough attempts at reconstructing the past, Lynn Spigel acknowledges the fallibility of “history” – that no matter how hard one tries, it remains impossible to ever truly comprehend the immeasurable scope of variables that influence and shape any one thing.
ReplyDeleteApproaching the study of early television, Spigel astutely diagnoses the obvious flaw in the basic structure of most previous scholarly accounts, mainly that which had been carelessly overlooked or blatantly omitted. Observing that economic factors and technological advances had been meticulously chronicled time and again, she notes the unmistakable absence of the human element, specifically the physical and social environments of the consumer into which television was inserted.
Recognizing that nothing occurs in a vacuum, Spigel attempts to reexamine the manner in which we study and analyze history, not as a linear chronology of events – as before – but as a complex and multi-faceted entity that is fluid, rather than concrete, in nature. In keeping with this progressive restructuring, the article that follows begins the delicate task of reanalyzing the past, utilizing a myriad of “trace” elements – such as articles in women’s magazines, advertising campaigns, and even television shows themselves – in its reassembly of what can only amount to one small dimension of the substantial social discourse that surrounded the television as it related to its domestic environment – in this case, the suburban middle-class home and the housewife who inhabited it.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe present, barring your existence as an omnipresent being, is only viewable from one set of eyes, leading to a narrow picture of what the world truly is. No matter how knowledgeable you are about the world, there are things happening beneath the surface in every facet of life. This is what Carlo Ginzburg means by reality being an opaque. Each individual viewpoint is a different portion of the total picture, and only by acquiring as many viewpoints as possible can you explore the entire scene.
ReplyDeleteThe subject of history is a collection of these snap shots in order to form a clearer picture of that time period. The development of the television not only as a piece of furniture, but a member of the household was not clear to people of that time period (thus ‘opaque’) and so the TV was a loved and feared possession. Looking back at those years, it is quite clear to us what the television actually was, a portal that connected the viewer to places they would never see otherwise. This is because we have most of the details. However, we do not have all of the snapshots from those years, and so there must be some minuet details we are missing. The evolution of the television is continuing to this day, and the true nature of this evolution is as foggy to us as it was to the people of the 1940s and 50s.