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-sizefits-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.