Core Response #3 – Max Berwald

“After acquiring the network, Tisch and his advisers set about streamlining, downsizing, and reorganizing all the major divisions at CBS. The frenzy and uncertainty of this activity produced greater fear, suspicion, and public fights, especially in the news division (Auletta 1991; Du Brow 1990; Powell and Alter 1986). (This was the volatile and unstable climate in which the innovative Frank’s Place appeared in the CBS schedule. In this climate, the show proceeded to get lost in the shifting network schedule, where it found little stability or support, and was ultimately cancelled because of poor ratings.)” (Gray, 64) 

It could be because I’m green in industry studies and still figuring out what the bedrock claims are in that subfield, but for me the most provocative moment in the Gray article is the quick parenthetical above. Later in the article, Gray concludes:

“The recognition and engagement with blackness were not for a moment driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives in all phases of the industry. In large part they were driven, as most things are in network television, by economics.” (Gray, 68)

Fair enough! And this is what I would assume. But what the parenthetical moment regarding Frank’s Place reveals is that corporations are not necessarily themselves hyper-rational actors that (1) know what is economically in their interest, or (2) mechanically pursue what is in their economic interest. Rather, corporations can more or less overnight become sites of struggle between different self-interested actors, and the resulting struggles can produce media texts that are not perfectly calculated to organize an audience. Over and beyond this possibility for (and I would say the likelihood of) dysfunction, as Gray’s description of a 1980s transition from a lavish corporate culture of “expense accounts, opulent offices, and extravagant parties” to something less expensive illustrates, corporations are also cultural formations. (64–65) 

The legal status of corporations can make this harder to see but it seems important, again because it indicates that we should exercise caution in thinking that a given community or ethnic group can be or has been effectively hailed (organized) on the basis of some cold, calculating, capitalist logic which, having smelled the potential for profit, hunts it out as a matter of course.  

The Han article describes an interesting species of corporate cultural mistake. ImaginAsia believed that on the basis of 1990s “Asian Cool” they would be able to organize, in one fell swoop, both a sizable Asian American audience and an audience of non-Asian Americans with an interest in “Asian culture.” Unfortunately, the fact that non-Asian Americans displayed an interest in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Iron Chef did not mean that there was a stable, knowable formation underlying the same, ready and waiting to be exploited by rational capitalists. (Crouching Tiger is actually a great example. The film itself assembles a sort of unstable, transnational, diasporic Chinese identity, and in the following decades attempts to reproduce its success have met with very checkered results. To me, this suggests that while a given formation may have great appeal there's no guarantee that it is a stable formation that will be ready and waiting when, say, a corporate network goes looking for it.) As it turned out, not even the Asian American audience (which would seem to be the first step in this plan) was sufficiently stable to support ImaginAsia’s designs.