Core Response #1 -JAE-

 *I went way over the word range, and I'm rusty. My apologies.*

    I feel compelled to try and explore McLuhan and Feuer’s examples of space, intentionality, and bodies. I believe that spaces impact the opportunities one may access as well as inform one’s own identity. This week’s readings made me think of the work of Sara Ahmed (2006) who argues in Queer Phenomenology that spaces orient as well as disorient people. Additionally, McLuhan loses me at a few points that bring to mind Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism in which Said deeply explores the danger, injury, and dehumanization that is present when agents of Western societies lazily conflate the cultures of the Arab peninsula, Asian continent, and South Pacific into the exotics and fetish for the Western imaginary. Yet, both works are poignant and insightful provocations that largely remain powerful in the 2021 mediascape to use Arjun Appadurai’s term. Yet, where McLuhan is intentionally spectacle-driven and ranting theory on a feverish macro-level, Feuer is precise, straightforward, and empathetic.     

    Jane Feuer and Marshall McLuhan approach TV as a site of conflict, where the medium penetrates, impedes, envelopes, and engages its viewership. Both McLuhan and Feuer assert that spaces thought of as “environments” and “anti-environments” (McLuhan) or the “viewing situation” (Feuer) impact the mobility of ones within the spaces. Beginning with McLuhan, he writes that 

“environments are active processes...where the ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or counter situations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly” (69).

I am understanding this passage as implying that environments are formal, normalizing, and yet elusive spaces, while anti-environments are conspicuously creative or provocative spaces. In other words, assessing potential dangers will be more difficult in an environment than in an anti-environment. Furthermore, McLuhan reinforces the image of formality discrepancies between an environment and an anti-environment by asserting that “professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental” (69). And TV is not only made in a professional environment, but it is also a tool of the professional environment.  McLuhan states that, “in television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art” (125). While I find the mention of a wizened Oriental art fetishistic and Orientalizing, I cannot shake the powerful imagery of just how pervasive professional TV when it intercepts a body. Beyond this, Jane Feuer also investigates dynamics of space, media, and the bodies that intercept them. 

    Whereas, Feuer explores relatable spatial concerns through how the TV/radio flow, or chronologically mapped itinerary of a TV or Radio time block, intercepts bodies. She asserts that flow extends beyond the TV throughout the “viewing situation” (15). The viewer can intercept or be intercepted by the flow at any given time within the boundaries of the viewing situation. The flow is a product of professional environments, whereas the viewing situation, per her example, is the viewer’s living space, which is arguably an amateur space or anti-environment. Additionally, Feuer asks “is the spectator positioned by the apparatus, or is the spectator relatively free, and if so, what permits us to analyze texts in the way I have done above, and why is Good Morning America so successful?” (21). The formal, normalizing, and pervasiveness of TV flow are flavored by the effects of history. Feuer posits that a medium’s essence and history are “inexorably linked”(13). TV, like all other media, is designed with an audience in mind. Through research campaigns various points of a target audience’s standpoint can be identified and weaponized in the structuring of TV programming as well as flow. Furthermore the delivery tactics of TV, or as Feuer terms it “mode of address” are honed to penetrate the target audience’s standpoint. Which, in this case, is realized through the conduit and paradigm of the “idealized nuclear family” (19-20). Yet, Feuer notes that this paradigm is a fantasy, and one that can inculcate as much as they can alienate viewers. The media is targeted and their effectiveness is intertwined with how history and space have socialized the viewer.