Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy - Softcover

Mayer, Vicki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822350076 ISBN 13: 9780822350071

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Below the Line illuminates the hidden labor of people who not only produce things that the television industry needs, such as a bit of content or a policy sound bite, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion. Vicki Mayer considers the work of television set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She shows that these workers are increasingly engaged in professional and creative work, unsettling the industry’s mythological account of itself as a business driven by auteurs, manned by an executive class, and created by the talented few. As Mayer demonstrates, the new television economy casts a wide net to exploit those excluded from these hierarchies. Meanwhile, television set assemblers in Brazil devise creative solutions to the problems of material production. Soft-core videographers, who sell televised content, develop their own modes of professionalism. Everyday people become casters, who commodify suitable participants for reality programs, or volunteers, who administer local cable television policies. These sponsors and regulators boost media industries’ profits when they commodify and discipline their colleagues, their neighbors, and themselves. Mayer proposes that studies of production acknowledge the changing dynamics of labor to include production workers who identify themselves and their labor with the industry, even as their work remains undervalued or invisible.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vicki Mayer is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is a co-editor of Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries and editor of the journal Television and New Media.

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BELOW THE LINE

Producers and Production Studies in the New Television EconomyBy Vicki Mayer

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5007-1

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................viiIntroduction WHO ARE TELEVISION'S PRODUCERS?...............................................11. Producers as Creatives CREATIVITY IN TELEVISION SET PRODUCTION..........................312. Producers as Professionals PROFESSIONALISM IN SOFT-CORE PRODUCTION......................663. Sponsoring Selves SPONSORSHIP IN PRODUCTION.............................................1034. Regulating Selves REGULATION IN PRODUCTION..............................................139Conclusion RETHINKING PRODUCTION STUDIES IN THE NEW TELEVISION ECONOMY.....................175Notes.......................................................................................187Bibliography................................................................................207Index.......................................................................................225

Chapter One

Producers as Creatives

CREATIVITY IN TELEVISION SET PRODUCTION

If the study of production as a characteristic of human action has been relatively absent in the study of television production specifically, then the notion of creation and creativity as social manifestations of human action has been similarly unacknowledged by television scholars. The hewing of creativity from a universal social characteristic to a specialized individual trait has a long history. From its Latin root creare, meaning simply "to produce," creativity turned into the monopoly, first, of artists who could channel the divine through their metaphysical expressions and, then, of all individuals who could express their inner talents. In the sphere of television production, creativity frequently conflates with the legal authorial rights that certain individuals hold as creators of television programs and series. In the annals of U.S. television history, Norman Lear, Stephen Boccho, Aaron Spelling, and, more recently, David E. Kelley, Joss Whedon, and Mark Burnett are examples of those workers who take credit as content creators. Together with their above-the-line personnel, they form the so-called creative class in the new television economy. To reconstitute the invisible labor of production and the identity work implicated in this limited yet highly visible hierarchy, this chapter both deconstructs the popular associations of creation and creativity and reconstructs the social foundations of these terms by looking at electronics assemblers, a community of practice that has been excluded from scholarly consideration.

A social theory of creation, according to the philosopher Hans Joas, dates to the 1800s, but it has been all but lost in the common associations today between individual genius and creative action. Proposed by Joseph Herder and Karl Marx but developed by American pragmatists in the early twentieth century, social theories of creativity examine how people coordinate their actions using a common language and tools already imbued with social meanings. This dual focus on shared language and tool use connects the creator to a system of symbols and material resources that both contains individual actions and marks them as different, hence as creative. By insisting that creative action has a social context, Joas distinguishes creative actions sanctioned as creative by society from those actions that are not. These conceptions of creation and creativity thus conjoin the interiority of mental labor with the exteriority of a world that enables its articulation. This unison contrasts the presumed division between internal creativity and external constraints in the construction of the paradigmatic producer of film and television studies.

Scholars have long recognized that television program creation is distributed among workers in a large industrial bureaucracy, but they have also maintained creativity as the special reserve of the individually talented producer. As summarized by Michele Hilmes, "Industry study is the translation of authorship into a dispersed site marked by multiple, intersecting agendas and interests, where individual authorship in the traditional sense still most certainly takes place, but within a framework that robs it, to a greater or lesser degree, of its putative autonomy." In its formulation, individual creativity in television production requires but also opposes the social constraints that are effective, practical, conventional, and, hence, uncreative by definition. While some scholars have focused on the limited autonomy that all above-the-line workers hold in a labyrinth of temporal, financial, and stylistic constraints, others have identified a special fraternity of auteur producers who have risen above these constraints to stamp their unique marks on television content. Even those jaded by the industry seem to hail the lone creator who achieves self-expression despite "cronyism, mutual backscratching, behind-the-scenes favors, revolving doors, musical chairs, careers made by falling upward [and] the 'amazing largesse' given to favored members of the 'creative community.'" Indeed, Hortense Powdermaker's early look into Hollywood production summed up the situation neatly by indicating that the industry destroys the creative inspirations of artists, who become mere assembly-line workers.

The limited articulation of creativity within the narrow confines of the creative class has the television producer and (nearly always) his trade oscillating between acting as an artist and acting as an assembly-line worker. Of these two poles, the assembly-line worker is the invisible laborer, the one whose absence of creativity unpins the artist's autonomy. While we may envision the creative producer as a particular type of unique individual, mental images of the assembly line cue up either an anonymous mass or, in the New International Division of Labor (NIDL), images of largely third world young women, docilely moving their agile fingers to the punch clocks of transnational commerce. Uninspired, they threaten the individualism and the creative spirit that above-the-line workers supposedly monopolize. Without them, though, there would be no television creator or a creative community, as the television set is among assembly-line workers' creations. It is this community of electronics line workers and their feminized labors that I turn to in order to deconstruct our received notions of creativity and to reconstruct a notion of creative action that is both social and individual in the practices of assembling.

Based on Joas's exploration of a social theory of creative action, this chapter explores the creative capacities of television set factory laborers in the international industrial zone of Manaus, Brazil. Located at the center of the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus and its inhabitants have had unique symbolic roles to play in national politics and global economies. There, line assemblers are the first laborers to contribute surplus value to television through their underpaid and grueling physical work and their unpaid and unrecognized immaterial work. The former has been the subject of a growing literature on the effects of global commerce and trade liberalization. The latter has appeared in recent ethnographies of factory work, mostly located on the U.S.-Mexican border. In the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822350076
• ISBN 13: 9780822350071
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 250
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland