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TOWARDS A SEMIOTIC PRAGMATICS OF TELEVISION

By

Christopher Lawrence Adamson

A THESIS

Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Telecommunication

1993

ABSTRACT

TOWARDS A SEMIOTIC PRAGMATICS OF TELEVISION

By

Christopher Lawrence Adamson

This thesis addresses itself to a sign-system, or semiotic, analysis of
televisual communication. The goal is to determine the boundaries and the
relevant subject matter of a televisual pragmatics, defined as the relation of
signs to interpreters within a symbolic system.

Because televisual communication has not received ample semiotic
consideration, the approach uses several analogues instead. Analogous
theories include linguistic pragmatics, pragmatics of fiction, film theory,
narrative theory, and reader-oriented criticism. Televisual fiction is considered
first, then non-fiction (in informational and persuasive forms), and then hybrids
and other special cases. Because these approaches relate to the text as a
whole, pragmatic analysis is then applied to elements within a televisual text,
by studying the implicit semiotic assumptions of a television production
textbook.

Major findings are that interpretation is not related to fictive / non-
fictive status and that interpretive strategies are not developed ad hoc but

learned.

Copyright by
CHRISTOPHER LAWRENCE ADAMSON
1993

ACKNOWLEDGIVIENTS

The input and guidance of my thesis committee — Mr. Robert Albers,
Dr. Thomas Muth, and Dr. Gretchen Barbatsis — was invaluable during the
preparation and revision of this thesis. In particular, I’d like to thank Dr.
Barbatsis for guiding me to lines of research that proved vital, for counter-
examples and “don’t you thinks” that made me rethink my assertions, and for
helping me take a vague idea relating linguistics to televisual semiotics and

actually make them coalesce.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

1. Introduction

2. Definitions and Methods

3. Pragmatics and Televisual Fiction

4. Pragmatics and Televisual Non-Fiction
5. Pragmatics Within a Televisual Text

6. Conclusions

Bibliography

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39
61
71

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 General semiotics as compared to two distninct semiotics
Figure 2 Worth’s “context of interpretation

Figure 3 Illogical Closure

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25
64

 

1. INTRODUCTION

Language systems, symbol systems, or semiotics are usually thought of
as having several branches of inquiry, including syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics. An initial trichotomy of these terms, suggested by linguists, is
that syntax relates signs to each other, semantics relates signs to the things
they represent, and that pragmatics relates signs to their interpretersl.
Pragmatics, therefore, implicitly includes the participants in a conversation as
part of the system of communication. While this “relation of signs to
interpreters” definition of pragmatics is imperfect, it will serve to introduce the
concerns of this thesis.

Pragmatics can be described as the study of how meaning is inferred
from context. This means that there is more to communication than what is
communicated, but also how it is communicated, the conditions of
communication, the identities of the communicators, and even their purposes
in communicating. Furthermore, pragmatics reveals that the means of
communication are often crucial to properly understanding the message.

Within the field of linguistics, the sign system of spoken natural
language, pragmatics has received ample scholarly consideration. Some rules,
such as HP. Grice’s “co-operative principle” have been postulated, and today’s
student of pragmatics has some general concepts of how to determine how

meaning is encoded and inferred pragmatically. While hardly a closed book, the

 

1The distinguishing of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics comes from Morris’
Foundations of the Theory of Signs, as summarized in Levinson’s Pragmatics, p. 1.
Morphology, the study of the make-up and characteristics of signs themselves, can
also be seen as a fourth field in the science of semiotics.

1

2
study has progressed to a point where it is interested in special cases, such as

“speech acts,” in which an utterance actually performs an action2.

In newer semiotics, however, this attention seems lacking. In the
symbolic system of television, a formal delineation of syntax, semantics and
pragmatics does not seem to be available, to say nothing of the actual science
of such fields.

For example, there has been an attempt to delineate a semiotics of
film3, an attempt which has met with only fitful success. Theorists such as
Lotman and Metz succeed in defining the shot as film’s atomic unit of meaning,
a cademe whose ability to contain meaning is somewhere between that of the
word and the sentence in linguistics. Ultimately though, those who hope for a
description of a formal grammar of film with the detail available to users of
natural languages are disappointed, as the task seems daunting at least and
perhaps impossible. This, quite likely, applies to the similar (but not identical)
semiotic of television.

At this point, the less-rigid nature of the study of pragmatics becomes
an asset. As stated above, studies in linguistic pragmatics have generated
some theoretical laws, but pragmatics is generally more flein'ble and tentative
than syntactic theory might be. This makes it a potentially valuable tool for
analyzing meaning construction and inference in other symbol systems,
including television. While we may presently have little hope for transforming
a television shot, scene or sequence into a grammatical model of a sentence or
a Chomsky-an deep structure, there is reason to think that the tools of

pragmatics, a reader’s use of his or her knowledge about the context, purpose,

 

2For example, “I nominate Betty” or “I quit!”
3Film, as will be argued in the next section, being a similar but not equivalent
semiotic when compared to television.

3
and meaning of a message, could help us better understand how the semiotic of

television functions.

In this paper, I will be attempting to reveal the nature of the pragmatics
of television through two means. The first is to identify issues, concepts, and
phenomena that are clearly within the field of televisual pragmatics, showing
both their importance to semiotic study and their unique pragmatic nature.
The second will be to determine the boundaries of this pragmatics of
television — the points at which inquiry becomes semantic, or leaves semiotics
altogether and enters other fields of study.

By identifying the nature of a televisual pragmatics, we will not only be
exploring one potentially valid field of study, but we will also be developing a
better grasp on the general concept of a televisual semiotic. This is of vital
importance because many inquiries into television overlook semiotics in favor
of the study of form and craft (on the production end), or social effects and
other psychological phenomena (on the receiving end). An explicit study of the
televisual semiotic can focus on the nature of the communication itself, and

implicitly involves both the producer and the viewer of the televisual text.

2. DEFINITIONS AND NIETHODS

Several definitions are in order, particularly of terms in the introduction.
The general semiotics is the study of anything that can be used for
communication. A particular semiotic is a system of signs4. Signs, in turn, are
defined by Saussure as the smallest unit of a semiotic, and are those elements
that can be characterized by what a given element signifies and by the
characteristics of that signifier5. The fact that these signs are in a system
implies that the meaning is not completely inherent to the signs themselves,
but is rather brought out by the manipulation of signs.

The sign system we are studying is television. This term is meant in its
current US. usage, as a audio-visual form of communication, sent over air or
wire in a one-to-many paradigme. Television can be considered “synchronous”
in that the program is capable of reception at the same time for an infinite
number of viewers. However, it is also asynchronous because message
creation and reception seldom take place at the same time7. Messages sent

over such a medium will be referred to as “televisual.” This definition is

 

4These definitions are from Ellen Seiter, “Semiotics and Television”, in Channels of
Discourse, p. 17.

5Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, p. 25.

6Formally, I am defining it as “broadcasting" as cited in section 305 of the
Communications Act of 1934 (revised).

7The requirement that viewers get the message at the same time is very tenuous,
and very much open to interpretation — for example, different time-zones get
network television at different times. Within the area of one broadcaster (antenna,
cable head-end, etc.), I believe this requirement holds, and it is necessary to keep
us from dragging home-video (such as VHS tapes, cam-corders, etc.) into the
discussion.

Also, if you count the time it takes for the signal to travel through the air, or
to and from a satellite, all electronic media would be “asynchronous” in my second
usage. However, I am more concerned with the deliberate construction and
transmission that seems essential to televisual messages.

4

5
intended to rule out several related media, such as the “video-phone,”

multimedia and other computer-dependent digital video formatss, and personal
home-video formats such as cam-corders, all of which are generally considered
part of the world of telephony.

Television is a complex sign system, combing several other semiotics
into a given message. Of five primary varieties of the symbolic experience
identified by Gross — lexical, social-gestural, iconic, musical, and logico-
mathematical9 — television typically combines the first four. Furthermore, a
given television message actually consists of two fields, one audible and the
other visual. The sound is created by modulated current flowing to a speaker,
while the visual consists of an “electron gun” illuminating tiny dots on the
screen, drawing horizontal lines to fill the screen once every thirtieth of a
second”. However, such a rate is much too fast to be perceived by the human
eye, so I would argue that a televisual sign is not a frame or anything within it,
but rather anything that can be perceived by a viewer as something with
discrete properties (i.e., can be identified as a signifier) and is perceived as a
referent to something (i.e., has a signified).

The use of reader-oriented criticism throughout the following chapters
requires that we make a few notes about the conventions of that line of

research. For our purposes, a “text” is not only a literary text, such as a novel,

 

8Such as QuickTime for the Apple Macintosh, or Video for Windows for Intel-
based PC’s.

9Gross, “Modes of Communication and the Acquisition of symbolic Competence,” in
Media and Symbols: The Forms of Expression, Communication, and Education:
The Seventy-third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, pp.
66-74.

10In the NTSC standard, at any rate. Note also that this “frame,” the complete
drawing of the screen that happens every 1/30 of a second, actually consists of two
“fields,” one being the even-numbered lines of the screen and the other being the
odds. One field is, of course, drawn every 1/60 of a second.

6
poem, or play, but also a television program, commercial or film”. An “author”

or “writer” is understood to be a physical12 person or group of persons who
create such a text. A “reader” or “viewer” is a physical person who processes
the signs in the televisual text and performs some sort of processing, decoding,
or interpretation on those signs.

Given that we will be comparing linguistic and televisual texts, it is
worth noting that a key difference between the sign systems is that televisual
signs are iconic — televisual signs of things and people tend to resemble
physical-world things and people”. By contrast, linguistic signs are non-iconic.
The word “tree” does not look like or in any other way resemble a tree (or any
other physical world object) significantly more than any other word.

Because this meaning is conveyed from and to certain entities, we
should also note our definition of definition of “communication,” which for our
purposes comes from Worth: “a social process, within a specified context, in
which signs are produced and transmitted, perceived, and treated as messages
from which meaning can be inferred.”14
Models for an approach to televisual pragmatics

Since television is a distinct semiotic, it will not do to simply impose
linguistic analysis on televisual utterances. Linguistic pragmatics has an

appeal in that it is fairly developed, sophisticated, and powerful, but it is

 

11Since we are proceeding without a televisual equivalent of a “sentence,” it is
difficult to determine a point at which a given collection of televisual signs is too
small to be a “text.” My criteria for a “text” will require that a given collection of
signs be self-contained and applied to some communicative purpose.

12“Physical” meaning that a given person or thing exists in what we perceive to be
the physical world outside us. Phenomenological concerns prevent us from using
the term “real-world” for this purpose.

13For reasons that will become clear in chapter 4, I am not asserting that televisual
signs must resemble those things that they represent, or that they are necessarily
representational at all.

14Worth, Studying Visual Communication, p. 165.

7
understood to be relevant only to natural language”. A quick glance at some

key issues in linguistic pragmatics shows its inappropriateness for such a
cookie-cutter approach. Concepts such as “conversation analysis” and “turn-
taking,” vital to the understanding of the rules of face-to-face conversation, are
not of much use when the form of communication is not face to face and the
reader / viewer / listener has no opportunity to directly respond to the
speaker“.

Our problem stems from the fact that spoken natural language and
television are two distinct and different symbol systems, each a semiotic. To
impose pragmatics onto television, what we need is a pragmatics of general
semiotics. What we have is a pragmatics of one particular semiotic. Figure 1

illustrates this situation.

 
  
 
 
 
  
   
 

. ragmatics
- (general)

 
  

Semiotics

 
   
  

  
 
  

 

ragiiiatlics d

partlcu arlze , ,
Natural for natural TeleVISion
language language)

 

 

Pragmatics of natural language
' does not fit televrsron

 

Figure 1. General semiotics as compared to two distninct semiotics

In figure 1, the shaded circle is the science of pragmatics that applies to all
symbol systems, and adapts to them (in this case, deforms to the corner in the
“Natural Language” box). Unfortunately, the circle doesn’t exist in real life,

and all we have is the trapezoid, which will not fit in “Television.”

 

15That is to say, verbal speech in a non-synthetic language.

16Which, in turn, prevents the speaker from getting feed-back from the listener.
These concepts are covered thoroughly in Levinson, Pragmatics, chapters 2
(deixis), 3 (conversational implicature), and especially 6 (conversational structure).

8
Still, there are uncanny parallels between eidsting theories of linguistic

pragmatics and the heuristics that guide the creation of television messages.
For example, consider Grice’s “maxims of conversation”:

° Co—operative principle — make your contribution such as
is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged.

0 Maxim of quantity — make your contribution as
informative as is required for current purposes... do not make
your contributions more informative than is required.

0 Mardm of quality —— try to make your contribution one
that is true, specifically: do not say what you know to be false,
and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

0 Maxim of relevance — Make your contributions relevant.

0 Maxim of manner — be perspicuous, avoiding ambiguity
and obscurity, being brief and orderly”.

Keeping in mind these maxims, and the co-operative principle in particular,
consider the “contextual media aesthetics” that are the cornerstone of Herbert

Zettl’s televisual textbook Sight Sound Motion:

0 Predictable aesthetic response — “we can predict how
people will respond to specific aesthetic stimuli and contextual
patterns.”

° Selective seeing — “we screen out everything that might
interfere with our constructs.”

0 Emotional literacy — “art helps us see events from
various points of View and shift from glance to insight”

° Stabilizing the environment —— to make “our
surroundings... become manageable.”18

The comparison of certain elements of these theories, Grice’s “Maxim of
Quantity” and Zettl’s “Selective seeing” for example, suggests a relationship.
Taken as a whole, both of these theories seem to be describing similar
phenomena, whether as the pragmatics of natural language or the aesthetics

of television:

 

17Grice’s own work is “only partially published,” according to Levinson. This
summary is quoted from Levinson, pp. 101-2.
18Zettl, Sight Sound Motion, pp. 5-10.

9
° Both are concerned with making messages clear, concise,

and purposeful.

0 Both call for the participants to monitor the

communicational needs of the other.

° In fact, both make the matter of monitoring the other’s

communication and adapting to their strategies somewhat a

matter of prediction 19.

Grice’s principles, taken literally, do not work for televisual communication —
the one-way communication of television makes the co-operative principle
unworkable as a dynamic strategy. At the same time, it certainly seems that
similar purposes are at work in televisual communication. So, while we may
not be able to use natural language pragmatics as a tool to apply to televisual
messages, we can use it as a model for what televisual pragmatics might be.

In fact, we will not jettison natural language pragmatics entirely,
because one of its topics of interest is of potential use to us: the pragmatics of
fiction. Fiction, like television and unlike conversation, is asynchronous
(message sending and receiving occur at different times), is a one-to-many
communication, and does not easily invite feedback from the receiver to the
speaker. As we will see, it has even more in common with television than these
givens.

Another approach would be to apply the work done by Metz, Lotman, et
al. in the study of the semiotics of cinema or film. This has a clear appeal
because film, like television, is a one-to-many and asynchronous medium. Like
television, it is predominantly a iconic form of communication, but also
combines lexical, socio-gestural, and musical modes of communication.

While filmic and televisual sign systems share these similarities, there

exist several sharp contrasts. Each consists of some number of frames per

 

19These bullets can furthermore be distinguished as emphasizing (respectively):
source clarity, duty/responsibility concept from social contexts and "inherent
feedback" of a system. (Thanks to Dr. Thomas Muth for this point.)

10
second being displayed to the viewer, 24 in film and 30 in television, but film’s

frames are static images while television’s frames are created by a constantly-
moving electron beam. Film and television also have radically different aspect
ratios, lighting and color characteristics, and sound reproduction properties.
We also have different expectations for each medium, based on our knowledge
of the production techniques, abilities, and shortcomings of each. For example
there is no such thing as “live” film, yet we can and do expect television to offer
up-to-the-second news fiom the other side of the world.

This concern, combined with the fact that the work done so far in the
semiotics of film has tended towards an interest in syntactic and semantic

concerns, will restrain our enthusiasm for applying this line of research to our

 

current purposes. When an analogy is appropriate, this emerging semiotics of
cinema will be cited as a similar model for televisual semiotics, but because the
rules and purposes of cinematic and televisual communication are distinct and
different, we will have to use particular care.

Another line of research we can call upon is that of reader-oriented
criticism, a collection of theories whose common thread is the proposal that
meaning is not solely encoded by the author as a single immutable “thing” to be
pulled out of the text by the reader, but rather that meaning is created by each
reader in the process of reading. While some reader-oriented criticism leads to
dubious conclusions outside of our current field of interest”, the basic concept
is ideally suitable for the purposes of seeking a televisual pragmatic. Reader-
oriented criticism studies how a reader interprets meaning in a text, by
analyzing what goals and methods a reader assumes in the process of reading.

Given our interest in a science that studies televisual meaning acquisition

 

20For example the idea that all literature is intertextual and is merely about the
concept or craft of writing.

1 1
through means other than semantic ones, that is to say “the relation of signs

to their interpreters,” these reader-oriented theories seem appropriate for this
study.

A final line of research we will synthesize into our search for a visual
pragmatics is that of narrative theory21. Narrative, as defined by Seymour
Chatman, is one of three basic text-types (argument and description are the
others), and is characterized by its “chrono-logic,” i.e. its time-based
progression, as well as its need to be explicitly told by someone”. Television,
as we will see, is an inherently narrative medium. Things are told to us by a
mediator, which is to say a narrator. Perhaps this narrator is an overt on-
screen presence or some hardly-perceived consciousness guiding the
presentation. It doesn’t matter which — we know that images and sounds are
being offered to us in a deliberate fashion. And the fact that we know there to
be a narrator affects our reading of the text. Again, the utility for a study of
televisual pragmatics should be clear, as narrative theory provides us with
more clues as to the rules and purposes of creating and reading televisual
messages.

Strategy

All of these theories — linguistic pragmatics, pragmatics of fiction,
semiotics of cinema, reader-oriented criticism and narrative theory —— have
“something to do with” televisual pragmatics. By using them as analogues, we
should be able to discover the boundaries of televisual pragmatics.

The general approach will be to analyze the two mutually-exclusive
purposes of televisual texts: fiction and non-fiction. In Chapter Three’s

consideration of the fictive televisual, I will analyze contexts (within and

 

21Or “narratology,” preferred by Chatman, et. al.
22Chatman, Coming to Terms, chapter 1 and p. 114.

12
without the text), narrative, reading strategies employed by readers of fiction,

the purposes behind those reading strategies, and the purposes behind the
writing of a televisual text.

In Chapter Four, our attention will turn to non-fiction. I will use
televisual news reporting to explore the relation of description and narrative,
persuasive televisual discourse, and several kinds of hybrids that assume the
formats of other programs for various effects.

A hypothesis that will be explored at the end of Chapter Four is that the
nature of televisual signs makes questions of fiction and non-fiction somewhat
irrelevant — because these signs are their own evidence for existence and
because the discourse of fictive and non-fictive television is so similar, the
difference between the two, as reckoned by the reader’s ability determine a
difference, is all but nonexistent.

Chapters Three and Four will address issues relevant to a televisual
pragmatics, but will implicitly indicate the existence of borders to this study.
Non—semiotic issues are not relevant to pragmatics, and those issues include
(in most cases) craft, business, social effects, and policy.

Chapter Five will address the other borders to our study of televisual
pragmatics, the delineation between pragmatics and the other fields of
semiotics: syntax and semantics. To do this, I will examine the pragmatics
implicit in Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, an aesthetically-oriented televisual
textbook with many adherents. Zettl’s work is something of a “style guide” —
much like Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is for English-language writers
— with syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic issues all implicit in this guide to
effective communication in television. Contrast of pragmatic and semantic

issues will help to show the distinction between the two. Analysis of Zettl’s

13
work will also allow us to analyze smaller televisual units23 instead of the

pragmatic approach to texts-as-a—whole in the preceding chapters.
Finally, in our conclusion, I will make some tentative conclusions about
the field of televisual pragmatics and propose some courses that future

research may follow.

 

23An analogy to sentences is appealing here.

 

3. PRAGMATICS AND TELEVISUAL FICTION
Introduction

This chapter will consider the pragmatic nature of television texts that
are fictive, i.e. are meant as artistic works and are not necessarily amenable to
semantic verification relative to the truth-conditions of the physical world. I
will begin with a consideration of the pragmatics of fiction in written literature,
adapt this through analogy to television, and consider the concept of relative
“contexts” to texts within a given fiction.

I will then move on to the issue of narrative, the preferred discourse of
fiction, and consider the issue of the identity of the narrator in televisual fiction.
Following this, a consideration of the nature of signs will lead to an analysis of
reading “strategies” for televisual fiction and how such strategies are trained
and employed.

Pragmatics of fiction in literature and television

There are powerful reasons to think that a pragmatics of television
should start with an analogy to linguistic fiction. Perhaps the most compelling
of these is the fact that linguistic fiction forces pragmatic analysis to look
beyond truth-conditions as its primary focus for analysis and deduction.
Reducing speech to sentences of sentential logic risks irrelevance when the
speech is fictive. As J on-K Adams reminds us in Pragmatics and Fiction, one
can make various statements about Sherlock Holmes that defy semantic and
pragmatic analysis unless one considers the purpose of fiction. For example,
the statement “Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker hat” is false, because it

requires two presuppositions:

14

15

3(x): x is a person named “Sherlock Holmes”
i.e. Sherlock Holmes exists or existed

V(x): if x is Sherlock Holmes then x wore a deerstalker hat
i.e. If a given person is Sherlock Holmes, then that
person wore a deerstalker hat24

An initial reaction to this analysis is to say that it misses the point of fiction,
and that fiction’s purpose is more an artistic and aesthetic than blandly
informational. Actually, the analysis of truth-conditions will be more useful
than I am currently giving it credit for, but let us say for now that a
pragmatics of fiction must realize that fiction is quite unlike traditional face-to-
face speech, in which an analysis of information exchange and purpose seems

far more germane.

 

The differences between fiction and speech are plentiful. Fiction is
usually delivered in a one-to-many paradigm, from an author to potentially
many readers. Fiction is seldom face-to-face, meaning that direct feedback

from the reader to the writer is limited or non-existent25. Similarly, fiction is

 

2“’kFor those unfamiliar with sentential logic (or at least my use of it here), “El(x):”
should be read as there exists an x such that... while “V(x):” should be for all x, it is
the case that... The example, originally from Searle, is discussed in Adams,
Pragmatics and Fiction, pp. 2-7.

251 noticed a significant exception these first two criteria the other day in a
restaurant when I saw a parent reading to his young children. Not only were the
“readers” present, but they were capable of providing feed-back, occasionally
asking questions or screaming out for clarification. For the most part, though, the
children were largely willing to listen to the story and not intervene. This seems to
me a gray area — if authors and readers are present, then the situation may
become more like a conversation, in proportion to the ability of the readers to
respond to the author and affect the telling of a story. For example, if a literary
author goes to a bookstore and reads his or her work aloud, uninterrupted, the text
itself does not change significantly. Some opportunity for the reader to respond,
react, or interfere is like the case above — long passages may be like one-to-many
fiction, but the reader has an opportunity to alter the narrative through
interruption. The author then adapts to this interruption, although it might be said
that the reader has become something of an author as well. As more interruption
is permitted, the give-and-take increases until the control over the text is equal,
resulting in a conversation, in which both participants are authors and readers.
Thus, our use of “fiction” should be taken to infer situations where one participant
has primary, and perhaps total, control over the discourse.

16
seldom synchronous — the message is created at one time and received at

another, or at many others when we consider the possibility of multiple
receivers. Fiction is often carefully designed and conspicuously plotted, as
opposed to conversational speech in which the formation of a message, its
utterance, and its reception often occur simultaneously and instantly, in a
continuously shifting and adapting dialogue of short bursts, sentences instead
of chapters.

Of course, most of the above can be said about television. Televisual
messages allow one speaker to address many viewers, are not physically face-
to-face (i.e., television does not facilitate direct feedback from viewer to

speaker), are asynchronous26, and require a deliberate design (as will be argued

 

shortly). The most significant distinction is that while fiction is by definition

 

“not true,” that is to say not a referent to a physical reality and therefore not
amenable to semantic assignment of truth-conditions, television may or may
not be “true” in this sense. Aside from this, however, the two are remarkably
similar. It will also help us to note that the first four points are pragmatic
concerns relating to the context of the message, while only the fifth is a
semantic point about the message content. The distinction, more finely, is one
of reference, and we will see later that reference is an even murkier matter for
television than it is for fiction.

With these defining characteristics of fiction, Adams dismisses the idea
that fiction consists of “pretended speech acts,” by which he means
statements that would in themselves constitute actions if they weren’t meant
untruthfully. In its place, he elaborates a more promising model, starting with

the basic pragmatic structure of communication for a given text:

 

26Live television being a notable exception of debatable significance.

 

17
Pragmatic structure of text = W (text 1) R

were W is the writer, R is the reader, and text 1 is the text between them,
whether a novel, poem, or (by extension) a television program. Importantly,
this process always occurs within a context, a state which includes specific
purposes, beliefs, assumptions, societal norms and prejudices, etc. In fiction,
this structure is developed further by having another communication act occur
within the text:
W (S [text3] H) R

Here S and H are the “speaker” and “hearer,” and textg is the text between
them”, such as dialogue or letters between characters. The speaker and are
entities within the fictive text who carry out communication. Note that in this
structure, that instead of a text 1between author and reader, we now have a
textgbetween speaker and hearer. This latter structure is what happens in a
work of fiction: someone within the fictive world says something to someone
else. According to Adams’ argument, the speaker is always fictional, as is the
case when a character writes or says something. The fictional speaker might
well be a narrator, a speaker who is not an active participant in the story, one
who perhaps was not even an eye-witness, but yet exists solely as a
communicator within the fictive world.

The hearer is fictional, if one is around to hear or read the speech, as is
the case in dialogue, or when a character reads something written by another
character. Adams extends this argument to include whomever the narrator

speaks to, because he argues it cannot be the reader:

“When the narrator in Moby Dick, for example, begins the first
chapter of the novel with ‘Call me Ishamel,’ he is not speaking to
us, for the implied ‘you’ of his request does not refer to a real
person. We cannot speak to Ishamel (or to any fictional figure);

 

27The jump from text 1 to text3 is intentional. textg will be introduced shortly.

 

18

we cannot, for example, ask Ishamel for his second name, and in
turn, he cannot address us. This is not a simple difference of
historical time, but of context. .. we, as readers of fiction, are as
distinct from the fictional hearer as the writer is from the fictional
speaker.”28

Thus, somebody within the fiction takes on the part of the bearer (H in our
diagram above), whether that character is explicitly named, described,
addressed or not.

Looking at the text within the fiction, the text; that is communicated by
the fictive speaker to the fictive hearer, semantic analysis of this speech takes
as its truth-conditions the world within the fiction, and it is to this world that
the speech refers. Pragmatic analysis relates not only to the speaker’s and

hearer’s purposes within this world, but can also relate to the purposes of the

 

writer and reader in our “real world.” If the writer employs irony, for example,
the text,» may have one meaning when communicated as (8 [text;;] H), but be
meant and interpreted completely differently by the real-world writer and
reader. This is because pragmatics studies text as it relates to context, and
fiction has two contexts — the one within the fiction and the real-world beyond.
Semantics analysis is irrelevant in the real-world context, given fiction’s
definition as being un-”rea ”, and instead is only meaningful within the fictional
world.
Narrative theory

Given a narrator and one to whom he or she narrates, a “narratee,” we
find ourselves drifting into the field of “narrative theory.” Narrative theory,
largely an outgrowth of the Russian structuralist movement of the 1920’s,
concerns itself with the structure of narrated stories and with the means of

telling them.

 

28Adams, p. 23.

19
Applying this to fiction, we recall the pragmatic structure of fiction

described above:
W (S [text3] H) R
One factor this model does not account for is the fact that the reader is more
distant from the writer than this model would suggest. The reader cannot
determine the entire identity or character of the writer from the text”, but
instead can only make out a projection of that text, a vague concept of values
and ideas realized as an “implied author.” Narrative theory also makes a case
for an “implied reader,” the person the writer thinks he or she is addressing, but
obviously cannot do in fiction since the writer is addressing a potentially infinite
number of individual readers across a potentially infinite stretch of time. This
state of affairs requires a new diagram:
W(IA{ S[text3]H} IR)R
Clinging to the pragmatic structure of W (text) R, we could assume that textg is
the text between implied reader and implied author, making text 1 equivalent to
LA {textg} IR. This is not exactly the case. The implied reader is a set of
assumptions and values the physical author, W in our above diagram, ascribes
to his or her intended readers when creating a text. The implied author, on the
other hand, is a similar abstraction formed by the reader from the clues in the
text. Therefore, instead of connecting implied author to implied reader, textg
connects one physical-world participant to one implied participant.
So far, our focus has been linguistic fiction as an analogy for televisual
fiction, and I have noted some significant correlations. However, the
introduction of narrative theory brings up some important differences that

distinguish televisual fiction.

 

29The text between author and reader, i.e. text], i.e. (S [textg] H)

 

20
A narrator in linguistic fiction must be human or at least have enough of

a human-like consciousness to narrate the story. Chatman implicitly makes
this point in discussing narrative: “Narrative is the text-type distinguished
from others by a double ‘chrono-logic’ — a logic of event sequence, performed by
characters, in a setting... plus the diegetic condition: that is that the text must
be told by a human narrator.”30 In the case of a first-person narration, where
the narrator is a participant in the story events, this is easy enough to
understand, but even a third-person narrator must be human enough to tell
the story, to narrate the text. Sometimes this is true in televisual fiction —
Sarah Ruth Kozloff describes such narrators as J on-Boy Walton of The
Waltons who tells us stories of his youth in voice-over narration from some
future; Edward Everett Horton and William Conrad, the voices who performed
point—by—point narration of the stories as they unfolded on Fractured Fairy
Tales and Bullwinkle; Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock, who performed on-
camera introductions of stories on Night Gallery and Alfred Hitchcock Presents;
and Captain Kirk, the character on Star Trek whose “Captain’s Log” voice-over
narrates the story in the form of a message to “StarFleet Command.”31
Despite the fact that some of these narrators are within the stories they
narrate (J on-Boy Walton, Captain Kirk) while others are distanced from it, the
one commonality is that they are all tangible people. This is just like the case
in linguistic fiction, in which a first-person narrator is a narrator who is also a
character in the fiction, while the third-person narrator is a person who
narrates the story but is not intimately involved with the story events

themselves. In either case, we are capable of saying that the narrator is a

 

3°Chatman, p. 114.
31Kozloff, “Narrative Theory”, in Channels of Discourse, edited by Robert C. Allen,
pp. 60-62.

2 1
person, simply because of the fact that the narrator speaks our language and

seems like a genuine consciousness.

This is not always the case in television. Narrators like Rod Serling and
Captain Kirk are the exception, not the rule. Much of fictive television does not
have an on-screen or voiced-over human presence as the narrator. That is, the
person telling us the story is not always readily identifiable. Says Kozloff, “we
know that someone/something is presenting these images in just this way —
someone/something has chosen just these camera set-ups and arranged them
in just this fashion with just this lighting.” She continues with the observation
that when this narrator is not a tangible person, “the most common solution is
just to use ‘camera’ as a shorthand referring not only to the machine itself, but
to all the makers of narration; thus, one will often hear phrases like ‘the camera
then cuts to another scene.”’32

This concept of the camera as narrator does allow us to shoe-horn
televisual narrative into Chatman’s definition of narrative as the “chrono-
logical” text-type that must be explicitly told. On the other hand, there are
perfectly good reasons to reject this concept of the “camera.” On a very literal
level, one might ask that if this “camera” is the narrator of television, why is
the “typewriter” not the narrator of written fiction? To me, this seems to take
things too literally — perhaps the term “camera-narrator” would be an
appropriate way to stress Kozloffs use of abstraction.

Another reply would be that the camera is not the narrator, but that the
director and/or cameraperson are the narrators. This conflicts with the idea
that the narrator is, whether an identified character or not, part of the world of

the text, i.e. the narrator exists only within text 1. The director and

 

32Kozloff, pp. 56-7

22
cameraperson, as well as all other physical-world authors, are part of W, the

flesh-and-bone writer, and not participants within the text they create. If one
accepts the idea that these persons provide the text to us, deciding what to cut
to and when, then they are in much more direct contact with us — (S text 1 H)
exists only between characters and all other communication is from author to
implied reader or implied author to reader.

Chatman is acutely aware of this proposal in his discussion of film,
because it implicitly claims that filmic narrative does not require a narrator
within the text, which would mean that “film narratives are intrinsically
different, with respect to a fundamental component, from those actualized in
other media.”33 In this case, I believe the filmic conundrum is equivalent to the
televisual, as each has directors, camerapersons, and a seemingly-narrated
text, so Chatman’s wrestling with this issue is relevant to our purposes.

Chatman says that we would do well in all these media “to distinguish
between a presenter of the story, the narrator (who is a component of the
discourse), and the inventor of both the story and the discourse (including the
narrator).”34 Chatman cites as an example the Hitchcock film Stage Fright, in
which the first half of the film is a “lying flashback,” in that a false version of a
murder is related by one of the characters and the viewer is shown that
version. This has become an increasingly popular technique on television, as
sitcoms and cartoons use plots that revolve around the narration of different
“false” versions35 of an accident or some catastrophe. An episode of Tiny Toon
Adventures, for example, narrates such a lying flashback when two characters

try to improvise an excuse for their parents after a wild party results in the

 

33Chatman, p. 133.

34Ibid.

35“False” having an interesting semantic meaning here, namely that what it is false
is relative only to the truth-conditions in the world of the text.

 

23
complete destruction of their house. Their tall tale unfolds on the screen as if it

had really happened. In this case, as well as in Stage Fright, the viewer sees
what the narrator wants him or her to see — a presented text that is false
relative to facts within the text itself”. Ifthese cases are the director and
cameraperson speaking directly to us, shouldn’t we be upset that we have been
deceived? The answer is no, and not just because fiction is “untrue” to begin
with. The author37 creates the entire discourse — story and story-teller — and
a lying narrator is just one part of that text, i.e. text 1.

Televisual texts do indeed have a narrator, a story-telling construct
within the text created by the author or authors. Kozloff’s use of “camera”
may lead to some confusion, and rather than use the awkward “televisual

narrative agent,” I will use “camera-narrator” instead. This, hopefully, will

 

stress the point that televisual texts are narrated by an agent Within the text
itself.
Signs and strategies

Of course, the various speakers and hearers within a text need some
sort of signs to communicate, so it is worth considering the actual symbolic
content of texts. Sol Worth raises the issue of signs by offering three
situations that might convey meaning through signs.

Worth’s first example:

“You are walking along a street, and from a distance you notice a
man lying on the sidewalk. As you draw closer, you notice that he :
appears to be injured. In assessing this situation, if you assume

 

361n a typically-clever episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation takes this a step
further. A character is accused of an adulterous affair and murder, and the two
sides use the “holodeck” — a virtual-reality room that effectively provides a
televisual text; within the text —— to tell their versions of the story.

37Note that the “author” can be a group of physical-world authors, as is almost
always the case for televisual texts.

24

this to be a natural event, you will most likely ask yourself, ‘What
happened?’ or ‘What should I (or can I) do?’”38

The key phrase here is “if you assume this to be a natural event,” as we see

when Worth elaborates this as his second example:

“However, if you notice a sign pinned to his shirt which reads, ‘sic
semper tyrannis,’ you might make a further and more complex
assessment. Suppose you remember, at that point, either that a
guerrilla theatre group39 has been performing in your
neighborhood or that you read about guerrilla theatre in a book.
Your assessment of the situation might be now be quite
different.”40

Worth’s third example is to take this example and phrase it as something seen
in a movie, one which “you call a ‘fiction’ or ‘feature’ film.” Worth concludes
“There is no question that in our culture, a moviegoer, assuming
communicative intent, would not ask, ‘Is it real?’ or ‘What should I do?’ but
rather ‘What does it mean?’”‘l1

In all three of these examples, the primary signs are the same: the
image of a man lying on the street, incapacitated, with the second and third
examples introducing the note pinned on his chest. Yet the analysis is quite
different in each case. The meaning of these utterances are not in their
(identical) signs, but can only be gleaned by resorting to pragmatics, i.e. to
context and purpose (or assumption of purpose).

Worth’s analysis creates a hierarchy, in which the “situation” directly

drives the process of meaning inference. The first distinction made is between

 

38Worth, p. 135.

39From what little I know of guerrilla theatre, I’m taking this to refer to a
theatrical aesthetic that is played out in public places with little or no notification
that the action is meant as fiction, perhaps meant to shock everyday people out of
their commonplace assumptions (see my reference to Hawkes and J akobsen,
later).

4°Worth, op. cit.

411bid.

25
non-sign-events and sign-events, the former being the everyday occurrences

that are not assumed to be meaningful and are therefore not processed.

With a sign-event, however, some sort of meaning is assumed. If the
meaning is assumed to be natural, then the inference is an existential one —-
the viewer infers that this thing exists. In the examples above, this is the case
of the man lying in the street as a result of a presumably genuine injury. Ifthe
meaning is clearly meant symbolically, then the viewer infers that the sign
was shown intentionally and has purpose, and so infers that this thing means
something, and that this “something” is more than just existence. If the viewer
cannot determine whether a sign-event is existential or symbolic, then either
process of inference could ensue, depending on what other information is
available to the viewer about the context.

This process, Worth’s “context of interpretation” is summarized

 

graphically in figure 2:
SITUATIONS ASSESSMENT STATUS STRATEGY
I. Non-sign events (not assessed) (transparent) (not interpreted)

II. Sign events
Existential meaning —> Existence -—> Natural —> Attribution
Ambiguous meaning -—> ll

Symbolic meaning —-> Intention —> Symbolic —) Communicational
Inference

Figure 2. Worth’s “context of interpretation”

One of the various definitions of linguistic pragmatics has a special appeal
when applied to Worth’s system. The “felicity condition” definition calls
pragmatics “the study of the ability of language users to pair sentences with
the contexts in which they would be appropriate.”42 While this definition is

 

42Levinson, pp. 24-5.

 

26
imperfect for 1inguistics,43 the concept of dynamically pairing sentences with

appropriate contexts seems very much like the “ambiguous meaning” case
above. Once the viewer has seen the man laying on the street with the note
pinned to his chest, he or she then seeks a better grasp of the context to
interpret the sign-event: “is this some very bizarre thing that has actually
happened (existential meaning) or is it somehow intended as a symbolic event...
oh wait, hasn’t there been a guerrilla theatre group operating in these parts?”
Because of the ambiguity of the sign-event, the interpreter looks to context to
determine how meaning should be inferred. Television may make this
ambiguity particularly confounding, because of its iconic signs and vivid

descriptive powers44.

 

Reading strategies as pragmatics
Yurij Lotman reverses Worth’s methodology and achieves the same

results:

“No one of us, looking at a stone or a pine tree in a natural
landscape, would ask: ‘What does it mean, what did they intend to
say?’. .. But as soon as such a landscape is portrayed in a painting
this question becomes not only possible, but entirely natural.”‘l5

The first case is ridiculous because it attempts to apply an inferential strategy
to an existential meaning, when reckoned by Worth’s context of
interpretation46.

In each of Worth’s man-in—the-street examples, a particular strategy

was employed to interpret the meaning of a sign-event, whether that meaning :

 

43It is imperfect because it ultimately requires an over-homogenization of
communities or sub-communities to allow the linguist to make reasonable
statements about “appropriateness.” See Levinson, pp. 25-7 for discussion.

44As will be noted further in the next chapter’s opening discussion of Chatman.
45Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema, p. 14.

46But note that some people can and do look at a pine tree in a natural landscape
and interpret it as a natural sign, one created by a superior cosmic power (Nature,

God, etc.).

27
was existential or symbolic. Worth describes the strategy of interpreting an

existential event as having the following structure: an object, person, or event
is recognized, treated as or assumed to be a natural occurrence, and is
analyzed in terms of its real-world attributes.

Symbolic meaning, on the other hand, is characterized by its intention.
As Worth points out, “a tic of the eye cannot be taken as an offense; a wink
may be so taken in certain circumstances, even though the physical event
may be exactly the same.” In a given situation, we “determine the
intentionality of the behavior, and hence the nature and extent of
accountability,” based on our knowledge of social conventions, particularly
those relating to communication“.

In Worth’s film example, it is fairly clear that a symbolic strategy is
appropriate — the act of deliberately putting a particular scene on film and
showing it to an audience clearly states intention. The same can be said of
television, as the process of sending a message over the airwaves is such a
complex and expensive task that it cannot take place by accident.

Television messages are inherently intentional, because they are
articulated; Worth defines an “articulated event” as one which is “produced by
a person’s musculature, or by his [or her] use of tools, or by both.”48
Articulation implies intent, so a reader must assume that any text seen in this
medium is meant intentionally. Therefore, the most appropriate reading
strategy for television is to assume symbolic meaning.

It is possible, of course, to come up with cases that would seem to be
televisual examples of existential meaning. For example, someone could place

a camera on a street corner and start broadcasting that signal. The natural

 

47Worth, p. 137 -8.
48Worth, p. 137.

Al

 

28
events that unfolded would be available to anyone tuned in. But even in this

case, the viewer can be expected to ascertain the intentionality of the
situation, if only by asking “why am I being shown this?”49
The fictive strategr

Given that a televisual text is to be understood as symbolic, we find
ourselves returning to the analogy to fiction discussed earlier. The articulation
of a linguistic and televisual fiction is similar here, because although one is
electronic, the other print, they are still created or written in a pragmatic
structure that isolates the real-world reader and writer, still use narrators and
tell stories, and are delivered as an asynchronous text (rather than exist as a
give-and-take conversation).

But what is it that causes a reader to employ an appropriate reading
strategy when he or she is confronted with a work of fiction? Adams says the
writer can use “external conventions, such as having ‘a novel’ printed on the
title page, or internal conventions, such as writing in language that is overtly
marked as fictional.”50

What would mark language as overtly fictional? Adams does not say.
Some ideas can immediately come to mind —-— impossible situations (fantasy),
historical situations narrated with a modern language, a third-person
narrator’s omniscience — but it seems that this “overtly fictional” language
may evade a proper abstract definition and instead rely on a compendium of

possible special cases.

 

49Some of Warhol’s films, such as Sleep and Skyscraper, exist right on this extreme
of intentionality. The same could be said of the made-for-home-video products that
feature an hour of a fireplace or an aquarium. I argue the approach to the text as a
whole must still be symbolic, if only because I don’t think a viewer could see past
the 3-by-4 aspect ratio or overlook the phosphor-glow color and ascribe an
existential meaning to the fire, i.e. to say “that is a [physical-world] fireplace”.
50Adams, p. 25.

 

29
And more importantly to our purposes, do such conventions exist in

television? Our dramas and situation comedies do not have anything
analogous to “a novel” connected to their titles. Does television have at its
disposal a language that is “overtly marked as fictional?”

Worth has identified a potentially useful concept here, namely that the
identification of fiction can be found in the reader’s awareness of the synthetic
nature of the text. We not only assume that a text is symbolic, but also that
we can expect a certain presentation of its elements that will reveal its nature
to us.

To illustrate this, Worth cites a line of research and experimentation
that uses photographs of a doctor, easily recognized by his lab coat and
stethoscope, treating patients at a hospital, changing into an overcoat, leaving
the hospital, and walking down the street. The next photo in the series is of the
aftermath of a car accident, with the obviously injured driver hanging part-way
out the door — the doctor is clearly visible in the background of this photo. The
next photo has the doctor in the foreground looking at the wreck, now in the
background. The rest of the series shows the doctor walking further down the
street, entering an apartment, opening a door, and having a drink while smiling
at a woman. There is no shot showing the doctor helping the accident victim.

The pictures were shown to young children and college students. The
children insisted that the doctor had helped the man in the car, because as one
put it “that’s what doctors are for.” Worth hypothesizes that the children
treated this as an existential meaning situation, employed an attributional
strategy, and related this doctor to their stereotype of doctors. Older subjects,
however, were certain that the doctor did not help the accident victim, and
based their reasoning on what they know about story-telling. Said one: “If

they had wanted me to think he helped him, they would have had a shot of him

30
with a stethoscope or something, bending over to the guy in the car. They

would have shown him helping somehow.”51

The same pictures produce different interpretation, this time because of
the reading strategy employed. Older readers have sufficient familiarity or
competence with reading texts that they can use a knowledge of the structure
and their sense of intention to derive meaning.

The college-age respondent pointed out an interesting observation that
may show how readers distinguish fictional texts. According to Worth, “they
[older readers] recognized that it is highly improbably that such a complex
sequence could be captured in pictures unless it had been staged.” One

respondent said: “a guy’s going to think something’s wrong when every minute

 

a guy pops up in front of him and takes a picture.”52

What helps identify a televisual text as fictional? Certainly, the too-
convenient camera angles identified by the above respondent could be one
factor, but this wouldn’t apply to such examples as dramas which were all
shown from one character’s point-of-view (i.e., all the camera angles are as the
character would see the world) or one in which all the action was restricted to
one place.

The answer, again, is in the reader. Stanley Fish, for example, makes
some interesting demands of his “ideal reader.”53 According to Fish, this

reader:

1.) is a “competent speaker of the language out of which the text
is built up.”

2.) is “in full possession of semantic knowledge that a mature...
listener brings to the task of comprehension,” including idioms,
lexical sets, professional and other dialects.

 

51Worth, pp. 144-5. Note that this is from a “composite interview,” and may not
therefore be the exact response of one particular subject.

52Worth, p. 144.

53In his earlier work, quoted in Iser, this term is “informed reader.”

31

3.) has “literary competence,” i.e. is familiar with literary
conventions, has internalized entire literary discourses, can
identify genres, norms, and styles“.

The concept of a reader with “literary competence” is particularly interesting,
because it requires the viewer of a televisual text to bring knowledge of
previous viewing experience to a given text.

Ifthis viewer, for example, chooses to watch what he or she calls a
“situation comedy,” then an awareness of genre and style has already preceded
the interpretation of the text. The term “situation comedy” conveys much
more meaning than “humorous story based in an established situation” A
reader of a situation comedy relies to some degree on what he or she has seen
in other programs of that genre. Aside from assumptions about subject
matter and potential for entertainment, the reader must most importantly
assume intention and adopt an inferential strategy, possibly based on the fact
that there is no such thing as an existential-meaning (i.e. non-symbolic)
situation comedy, nor a non-fictional sitcom.

Other clues for which might lead the reader to adopt a fictive symbolic
strategy might include the camera angles (for reasons discussed above), other
production elements (lighting, set design), unrealistic events (from fantastic
elements to all-too-concise dialogue), commercial interruptions, music, and self-
reflexivity55. In fact, the title and title-sequence of a program might be a clue
to the reader to adopt the appropriate strategy, in the same way that “a novel”
cues a literary reader to use a fictive strategy.

The title sequence and credits of television programs act much like

frames, delineating the beginning and end of a program, and thereby separating

 

54Fish, Is There a Text in this Class, pp. 48-9. Also as quoted in Iser, The Act of
Reading, p. 31.

55Self-reflexivity being a text’s commenting on, reflecting on, or otherwise
revealing the fact that it is a text.

 

32
it from adjacent material in time, such as the next program“. It is also worth

noting that fictive television programs usually have titles that employ
metaphor or artistry, and are in fact part of the art, instead of exacting
descriptions of the program content — Star Trek instead of Hour-long Science-
Fiction Program Set Aboard a Star-Ship, or All in the Family instead of Thirty-
Minute Political Domestic Comedy Featuring Obnoxious Bigot as Ironic Main
Character. When one sees such a title or its associated visual sequence,
adopting a fictive symbolic strategy is probably the most appropriate
approach57.

There is also reason to think that the use of a inferential strategy is
learned in a culture, and is not sufficiently motivated by “cues” within the text

itself. Interesting anecdotal evidence for this proposition can be had from the

 

reactions to the first use of techniques we now consider common-place.
Lotman tells a story about a well-educated farm cousin who was invited to
Moscow to see her first motion picture, a burlesque. She came home from the
film “pale and grim” and when asked said “it was horrible, horrible,” explaining
that what she had seen was “human beings... torn to pieces and the heads
thrown one way and the bodies the other and the hands somewhere else again.”
Of course, what she was failing to understand was that she had been seeing
close-ups of various body parts instead of long-shots of the whole person.
Lotman also mentions that when Griffith first showed a screen-filling close-up,

a gigantic head grinning at the audience, “there was a panic in the cinema.”58

 

560ne might recall Frank Zappa’s definition of “the frame” as a device without
which “you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.” The Real
Frank Zappa Book, p. 140.

57Gretchen Barbatsis, in “Pictorial Encoding: Storytelling Themes in Television
Program Logos,” has gone into great detail analyzing how the construction of the
title sequence reflects the program content, through editing, music, and various
levels of iconography (such as logo type-face and screen balance)

58Lotman, p. 29.

33
These are intelligent people, but they were not yet competent to read

the text presented, because they had not yet learned to use a knowledge of the
movie language to infer meaning. Instead , they used an inappropriate
attributional strategy to read the text.
The purpose of the reader’s and writer’s fictive strategies

Adams says that pragmatics comes out of the text and that reading
strategies come from the reader, thereby implying that the study of strategies
is not necessarily germane to the study of pragmatics. However, it is a central
tenet of reader-oriented criticism that meaning is created by the reader in the
act of reading. I disagree with Adams here because the reader’s strategy helps
create that meaning, and given our definition of pragmatics as a relation of
signs to interpreters, the strategies that a reader uses to interpret those signs
is vital.

 

So, if we assume that televisual communication is purposeful, knowing
what a reader’s purpose is should lead us to a pragmatics of televisual fiction,
i.e. how meaning is inferred from the communicative context. I have already
covered how meaning is inferred from a strategy, and why that strategy is
employed, but why is this communication entered into in the first place, and
does that have an effect?

It is not enough that we read an event symbolically —- for fiction, there
must be something more. Fictive television is not “real,” in that it is not meant
as a record of physical-world events, but as something different. One could
read a fictive televisual text as existential meaning, seeing a group of actors on
a set performing a memorized reading of a script, but this completely misses
the point.

One possible analysis is to consider the communicative purposes behind

televisual fiction. Roman J akobson said that speech focuses on any of six

34
basic components of the communicational event59. These components each

relate to a different purpose of communication. The referential component
references physical-world objects, people, events and phenomena. The emotive
component focuses on the speaker’s emotional state. The conative component
communicates the speaker’s wish that the addressee do or think something.
Two components relate to the code: the metalinguistic, which references to the
symbol system itself, and the phatic, which establishes and maintains contact
and communication. Finally, there is the poetic component, which focuses on
the way in which the message is encoded“.

Some of these components provide fairly obvious televisual examples.
Commercials, appeals for charity, and election-time political advertisements
presumably have a strong conative element, while a fine arts piece might be
either predominantly emotive (if the emphasis was on conveying an artist’s
feeling or state of mind) or referential (if the emphasis was instead on showing
the artist him- or herself). The recent introduction of network logos at the
bottom right of the screen could be called a phatic phenomenon, given the
networks’ rationale that the logos visually inform viewers what channel they
are watching, allowing viewers to more easily initiate the connection.

Presumably, a fictive televisual text will be most primarily concerned
with the emotive and poetic concerns, while a non-fictive one should
presumably be more concerned with its referential aspects“. As we will see in

the next section, this is not necessarily the case.

 

59From Hawkes, pp. 83-4; also Levinson, p. 41. Note that these definitions seem to
be from the speaker’s point-of-view.

60Note that this does not literally mean poetry, i.e. literary verse.

61Cynical readers will note that both also have a conative element that relates to
the sender’s business — commercial broadcasters want viewers to watch the
commercials and patronize advertisers, while public broadcasters would hope to
get the viewer to send in a donation.

 

35
A reader of a poetic text should be more interested in the telling than the

story itself, and empirical evidence bears this assumption out. Just as V. I.
Propp found a staggering self-sameness in Russian fairy tales, Kozloff finds the
same phenomenon in television, that “certain motifs, situations, and stock
characters may have a nearly universal psychological / mythological /
sociological appea ” and that “such predictability had led scholars to remark on
television’s deficiencies in terms of one of the major engines driving narrative —
suspense.”62 Kozloffs examples are all of dramas, citing the viewer’s
expectation that on Perry Mason, for example, Perry will take on a seemingly
impossible case, his helpers will discover crucial evidence, Perry will make a
witness crack on the stand and finger the real killer, etc. An even stronger
example might well be Columbo, in which the viewer learns the identity and
modus operandi of the killer in the first scene, then watches as Lt. Columbo
investigates and ultimately cracks the case. Furthermore, there is the even
more limited variety on situation comedies, which often use stock devices like
“The Bet,” and “Mistaken Identity” to set up comic situations63.

However, this self-sameness may exist because the telling of the story
is more important than the story itself. If fictive television is most closely
related to the poetic component in J akobsen’s paradigm above, then the style
may be more important to the viewers than the actual functions of the plot.
For example, a 22-minute sitcom could easily spend most of its time moving
the story along. Instead of this, however, viewers might well be more
interested in jokes, put—downs, word-play, and one-liners than in a unique story.

There is a certain pleasure in the “repeated path,” one that is walked in a

 

62Kozlof’f, pp. 49 - 51.

63Esquire, March 1993, in “Sitcoms, Seriously!” by T. Friend has a humorous
sidebar that acts out what it claims to be the ten archetypal sitcom plots with
Barbie and Ken dolls.

36
different way each time. Columbo lets the viewer know “who done it” up front;

the pleasure comes from seeing just how the hero manages to find out what the
viewer has known all along.

What this says in terms of pragmatics, in terms of the viewer’s
interpretation of the text, may be that readers allow the text more leeway in
terms of the plot’s believability or structure. Some slack is granted by the
viewer in these areas because those elements of the text are of less
importance than the style or telling of the story. We also noted that the
emotive function is strongly identified with fiction, and if we extend this analogy
to fictive television, then we expect the audience to want to relate emotionally
to the program. By being predisposed to an emotional relationship to the text,
the viewer is probably more easily amused, saddened, or otherwise compelled
than he or she would be by everyday speech.

This latter use of the medium brings up a final interesting parallel with
Adams’ analysis of linguistic fiction. Adams notes a paradox for the writer,
who creates in a fiction a world in which the speaker (i.e. the narrator)
produces a biography or history or some other non-fiction. “What the writer
gives up in abandoning the communicative context to the speaker, he
attempts to win back through the reader’s recognition of the text as fiction.”64
Adams means that the writer may create a despicable world with a despicable
speaker, for example the first-person narrators of some of Edgar Allen Poe’s
short stories, and yet the writer will receive applause from and achieve an
emotional connection with the reader. This effect is achieved through a
pragmatic effect, namely that the reader knows he or she is reading a work of

fiction, and that those things in the text that offend him or her are probably

 

64Adams, p. 72.

 

 

 

37
meant to offend, and in achieving this reaction, the reader’s sensibilities have

been subtly altered, attention drawn away from the commonplace. As Terence

Hawkes describes poetry:

“The essential function of poetic art is to counteract the process
of habituation encouraged by routine every-day modes of
perception. We very readily cease to ‘see’ the world we live in ,
and become anaesthetized to its distinctive features The aim of
poetry is to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which
we are overly familiar, to ‘creatively deform’ the usual, the normal
and so to inculcate a new, childlike, non-jaded vision in us. The
poet thus aims to disrupt ‘stock responses,’ and to generate a
heightened awareness: to restructure our ordinary perception of
‘reality,’ so that we end by seeing the world instead of numbly
recognizing it.”65

Hawkes’ argues that the reading of a poetic text disrupts everyday

“seeing” by presenting an unfamiliar version of the world. In televisual fiction,

 

with its marked poetic component, the same concept applies: by encountering
the fictive world, the reader can experience a wide range of emotional reactions,
all guided by the knowledge that the scenes he or she is seeing are being
displayed purposefully, for aesthetic effect. Rather than dulling our senses,
televisual fiction can serve to raise our awareness above day-to-day tedium.
Summary

In this chapter, I have considered the pragmatics of fictive television by
beginning with an analogy to literary fiction. Here and in the discussion of
narrative theory, I considered the question of the texts within a televisual text,
their participants, narrators, and contexts. I then moved on to consider the
concept of reading strategies and explored the difference between the
processing of existential-meaning signs and symbolic-meaning signs. I argued
that fictive televisual texts always call for a symbolic-meaning assessment,

and therefore an inferential reading strategy. Finally, I considered the

 

65Hawkes, p. 62. Emphasis Hawkes’.

 

38
purposes behind these strategies, from emotional contact to cognitive

defamiliarization.

 

 

 

4. PRAGMATICS AND TELEVISUAL NON-FICTION

Introduction

This chapter will counterpoint the previous chapter by considering the
pragmatics of televisual texts which are non-fiction, i.e. are amenable to
semantic analysis by physical-world truth conditions and which purport a
reference to that world.

I will begin this analysis with the seemingly obvious first case of
television news reporting. I will examine the use of description, argument, and
the surprising recurrence of narrative, which was such a cornerstone of our

examination of televisual fiction. I will also consider the issue of the narrator

 

for televisual texts.

I will then consider other distinctive elements of televisual non-fiction
discourse, including variant positionings of physical-world authors and
speakers and textual speakers and hearers. This is a noteworthy factor in
persuasive televisual discourse, the non-fiction forms of televangelism and
commercials, which must go to significant pragmatic lengths to achieve their
intended effect.

Finally, I will consider the nature of pictorial televisual signs and
consider their ability — or inability — to adequately relate to real-world
referents. The discussion of this will lead to problems for reading strategies of
certain non-fiction texts that deliberately or unintentionally spur existential-
meaning strategies. From here, I will generalize and consider whether any non-

fiction text can be read with such a strategy.

39

40
The descriptive text-type

Chatman, in Coming to Terms, describes three primary “text-types”:
narrative, argument, and description. Further, he claims that while all three
are easily within the grasp of the linguistic text, “each medium privileges
certain ways of doing so,”66 and that the visual specificity of film inclines it
towards description. However, this description is very different from its
linguistic counterpart, and that film’s description gives us “plenitude without
specificity.”57 By this, he means that a filmic image is filled with detail, that it
in fact “exhausts the total potential of visible descriptive details,”68 and yet
lacks a certain precision. In comparing a scene from The French Lieutenant’s
Woman in both its book and film formats, he notes that while the film version
contains a shot showing the character Charles Smithson in full photographic
detail, only the book can tell us about his “dundrearies,” long-flowing side
whiskers that are named after a character in the play Our American Cousin.

One might be tempted to think that this inclination towards description,
towards the reproduction of physical objects in detail inclines television (which,
I have argued, is a close analogue of film) towards a representational mode of
communication. If this were true, then the fictive television discussed in the
previous chapter would seem something of a difficult aberration — television’s
ability to capture and relay detail should provide a daunting task for authors of
fiction, who would have to go to extremes to create unreal worlds. As we shall
see, the opposite may in fact be true: non-fictive television is the aberration,

and is structurally and stylistically derived from fictive television.

 

66Chatman, p. 38.
67Chatman, p. 39.
68Ibid.

 

4 1
The reason for this is the dominance of one of the main features of

fiction — narrative.
Narrative non-fiction

Narrative is crucially important in television, as one might expect from
the fact that time in television proceeds at a prescribed pace in a linear
direction. Unlike literature, the pace can neither be accelerated nor
decelerated by the reader. Unlike books or hypermedia, the text can not be
skipped around, accessed at different points, or run backwards.

When a book adopts a narrative strategy, a linear-time-based means of
conveying a meaningful sequence of events, it has yet another significant
difference from television, the difference of diegis versus mimesis, or between
“telling” and “showing.” This difference parallels the difference between the
forms of description that Chatman describes in the different versions of The
French Lieutenant’s Woman above.

Chatman argues that film69 could employ other text-types, such as
argument. “Explicit argumentation, however, is not an easy or usual property
of commercial films.” 70 While film and television can utilize argument, they
often do so in the guise of narrative fiction, which Chatman offers as allegories
to literature’s “fables, allegories, romans a clef, and heavily moralizing
novels.”71 Television viewers have obvious parallels in programs like All in the
Family, which argues for tolerance through the narrative negative example of
Archie Bunker, in countless pro-social cartoons like Captain Planet, which
teaches children through allegory and brief direct appeal to save the

environment, and science-fiction programs like The Twilight Zone and the

 

69Therefore, by aforementioned extension, television.
7°Chatman, p. 56.
“Ibid.

 

42
various Star Trek series, which adapt contemporary social issues to a

futuristic or fantastic context. Explicit argumentation seems to yield to
narrative when the message is televisual.

Kozloff describes this effect by showing how a non-fiction program, 60
Minutes, may describe or even argue, but is primarily a narrative. In fact, the
story she analyzes is a narrative consisting of several narratives — while “one
would expect that the thrust of the piece would be descriptive (‘this is what San
Diego does for its homeless’) and comparative (‘this is how New York City
handles its homeless’)”72 what one gets instead is a inter-related group of six
narratives, which Kozloff titles “History of 60 Minutes Treatment of
Homelessness,” “The Education of Harry Reasoner,” and “Case History: Denis
Alexander.”73

The use of television in this manner makes sense. If mimetic74
narration is the ideal format for television, based on its ability to show reality
with photographic detail and its inclination for linear-time-based presentation,
then presenting news as a narrative should accommodate this preferred mode
of presentation while representing reality in great detail.

As it will turn out, television may not be a genuine representation of
reality. Nevertheless, that may be the reading strategy that a viewer tends to
employ. We know that as a message with intention, we should adopt a
strategy that looks for symbolic meaning and infers deliberately
communicated messages. Yet there is a paradox with non-fiction television,
because the subjects, the things we are seeing, are assumed to be real. Do

readers of televisual non-fiction texts employ a strategy that is similar to the

 

72Kozloff, p. 44.
731 bid.

7“i.e., “showing” as opposed to “telling.”

 

43
reading of televisual fiction and yet expect to be able to make referential

inferences?

An interesting example of this paradox comes in Kozloffs work when she
discusses television news. “When Dan Rather (who functions both as
supervising editor and anchor of the CBS Evening News) faces the camera and
relates the evening news, he simultaneously figures as real author, implied
author, and on-screen narrator”75 This is a rather extreme claim, because
Kozloff claims that by employing direct address, Rather compresses the
previous narrative diagram (or “pragmatic structure,” to Adams) from:

W(IA{ S[text3]H} IR)R
to:
W (text 1) R
that is to say, direct address achieves the equivalent of a one-way face-to-face
communication.

Has this actually been achieved? No, because narrative is still at work.
Kozloff may have been biased by the fact that Rather is the only one in the
screen-space, and also because he is known to write some of his own material.
But if another person is added into the shot, for example co-anchor Connie
Chung, then there is a distinct problem: which one is the author? It can’t be
just Rather as the narrator now, not even if he writes all of Chung’s material.
Ifthe answer is suddenly “neither” of them, then we should rightly suspect the
power of Kozloff’s initial claim.

If the answer is that both of them are the narrator, then there is a
problem describing what happens when the camera is on a two-shot of Rather

and Chung, and then zooms in on one of them for a direct address, eliminating

 

75Kozloff, p. 59.

 

 

44
the other from the screen-space entirely. Whose choice would it be to do so?

The answer is that it is the “camera-narrator” described in the previous
chapter. Of course, this has really always been the case. The CBS Evening
News uses Rather as an anchor to introduce the video-tape pieces or live
interviews, which become the text when they are cut to. Rather was not the
force that cut to or from these elements; it was the work of the real author of
the program76. This author, of course, is whatever we can make out CBS to be
from the clues we are given in the text — the background filled with computers
and phones and white-collared journalists, combined with the actual content of
the pieces, leads us to imagine a large news consortium or corporation, with
certain resources and attitudes... and hence our conception of “CBS News” as
an implied author. The author controls the narrator, that is to say camera-
narrator, and has it take us wherever CBS News chooses to send the
narrative, from the anchor desk to the other side of the world.

Where does this leave Dan Rather and Connie Chung? If they are
entities within the text, shown or ignored at the whim of the narrator, then
they function largely as characters. They have no narrative control
whatsoever, and are instead players on a stage". In this case, non-fictive
television is much like fictive television, in that both are narratives with the
“camera,” an abstraction for the story-teller invoked by the director and

camera-person, as the narrator.

 

761 suppose a case could be made that someone ignorant of television production
might think that Rather called these pieces into being through a sort of magical
speech act — i.e. Rather says “let’s go to Eric Engberg at the White House” and
(kerpowie!) we’re there! I don’t think this is reasonable — given the savvy of media
readers demonstrated by Worth in the previous chapter, this seems extremely
unlikely.

77If they do write any of their own material, then they are also part of the “CBS
News” author. This would also be the case in other situations in which they
affected content, by walking out or ad libbing, for example.

 

4 5
A different kind of non-fictive narrative

Robert C. Allen78 makes a similar case for the “collapsing” of narrative
roles into each other in his discussion of such non-fiction forms as the talk
show and the game show. He notes that each provides “model readers” who
behave the way that the home viewer is supposed to — applauding and
laughing at appropriate times, calling out advice to game-show contestants,
etc. Furthermore, he notes that in these formats as well as some news
broadcasts, the term “we” is used to respond to both sides of the
communicative process. For example, a news report on a hostage rescue
operation was described as “well, we did our best; but we didn’t make it.”79 The
use of “we” in this case is interesting, because it does not include most viewers,

since they were neither participants nor even informed in advance of the

 

operation.

What may be happening instead is that this kind of television narrative
works better when the Viewer involvement is intensified, in this case by giving
the viewer a feeling of tacit responsibility and power. In a game show or talk
show, the viewer is made to more closely relate to the “bearer,” the studio
audience or contestant or whatever character within the text is being
addressed.

Ultimately, the reason that television does this is found in its conative
element — viewers who stay tuned in will see commercials, and these viewers
can therefore be sold in lots of one thousand to advertisers. This effect is even
more pronounced when the conative mode, the desire to make a reader think or

do something, is prevalent. An example of this is in a direct appeal for money,

 

781n “Reader Oriented Criticism and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, edited
by Robert C. Allen, pp. 74-112.
79Allen, p. 94.

46
in which the conative desire is not just for viewership but in fact for monetary

contribution to the televisual message sender.
Persuasive non-fiction

Allen calls this condition the “ultimate expression of television’s
rhetorical mode”80 and notes how the ringing telephones of the “phone-a-thon”
provide an indexical sign of model readers, showing how they should act. In
fact, television goes farther than the use of “we” and the model viewer. At the
extreme, some messages sent closely correspond to linguistic forms of
persuasive discourse, from suggestion to lobbying to the forms of
presupposition and implication used in clinical hypnosis.

Persuasive discourse, that is to say communication intended to alter
belief or motivate action in the viewer, is problematic for television It is easy
for a reader to break off the communication, by simply turning the channel or
switching the television off. As Chatman noted, argument is the one text—type
least common in film. As R. T. Lakoff notes in her analysis of television
advertising, “persuasive discourse wears out; ordinary conversation does
not.”81 Thus, persuasive television has to do something just to keep the
channel open, to say nothing of fulfilling its conative purpose.

Linguistic novelty is one approach a persuasive text could attempt to
use, and Lakoff found quite a bit of novelty employed in television advertising,
including:

1. lexical novelty or neologism (e.g. devilicious)

2. morphological or syntactic novelty (e.g. the soup that eats like a
meal)

3. syntactic innovation (e.g. absence of subjects and verbs:
Tastes great! Less filling! odd uses of definite article: Next time
I’ll buy the Tylenol)

 

80Allen, p. 96.
81Lakoff, quoted in Schmidt and Kess, Television Advertising and Televangelism,
p. 30.

 

47

4. semantic anomaly (e.g., Cleans better than another leading
oven cleaner)

5. pragmatic novelty (e.g., conversation in mini-dramas: “Fill it
to the rim.” “With Brim/”)82

M. L. Geis’ study found an equally wide variety of linguistic techniques

used over television for advertising purposes:

1. Use of imperative structures to make suggestions (e.g., Try
Ex-Lax pills, the overnight wonder)

2. Use of adjectivialization process (e.g., buttery, creamy, crispy)
3. Rhetorical questions (e.g., Why hasn’t someone invented a better
toothbrush?)

4. Elliptical comparatives (e.g., the new Chevette has more head
room, more seat and legroom, more trunk room)

5. The use of count nouns as mass nouns (e.g., a lot more Chevette
for a lot less money)

6. The terms introducing and announcing to attract viewer
attention.

7. Product names which constitute mini-advertisements for the
product itself (e.g. Soft & Dri deodorant)83

Rosemarie Schmidt and Joseph F. Kess looked for these characteristics
in televangelistic programming, religious broadcasts that support themselves
through a direct appeal to viewers’ charity. Their research found that most of
the advertising techniques listed above are actually present in the direct-
appeal segments of televangelistic programming.

In general, the televangelists exploited the pragmatic concept of
presupposition and implication, which is the logical or pseudo-logical
entailments of sentences as they are interpreted by hearers. For example, one
might hear the sentence the novice skater tripped on the ice and assume the
proposition the skater fell, despite the fact that this is neither stated nor

necessarily true. A variant of this is used in clinical hypnosis to induce a mild,

 

82Lakoff, quoted in Schmidt and Kess, pp. 30-1. I believe that case #4 may actually
relate to a reading strategy — expert readers may have chunked another leading
<product> into a meaningful unit, with the pragmatic footnote that the advertiser
has for legal or other reasons declined to name the competing product.

83Geis, quoted in Schmidt and Kess, pp. 31-2.

IE!

 

 

48
common trance state, with such implied causality statements as As you sit all

the way down in the chair you will go into a deep trance, 84 combining the two
unrelated events into an implicitly causal relationship. In televangelism,

various permutations of these concepts are employed.

0 Father, help each one here and millions watching by television to
prepare to meet God. (Jerry Falwell) Implication: millions are
watching.

0 Something good is going to happen to you. (Oral Roberts)
Implies as much as it says, but “something good” is such a huge
gap that viewers will fill it with their own projections. There is no
way to empirically validate the truth or falsity of this proposition.

0 Neighbor, some day we’ll stand before the Lord. And the Lord is
either going to say well done, or he’s going to look at us and say you
haven’t done a good job. I want to send you my fiftieth anniversary
that I’ve been in God’s work medallion. (Rex Humbard)
Implication (through Grice’s Maxim of Relation): to avoid wrath
of God (described in final phrase of first sentence), Viewers should
purchase medallion85.

This final quote relates back to Allen and Kozloffs game shows and talk shows
in its intriguing placement of the viewer. The viewer is addressed directly, but
the use of “we” is interesting — first Rex says “we’ll stand before the Lord” and
that God will “look at us,” (emphasis mine), but then suddenly the Supreme
Being will say that “you haven’t done a good job.” The partial collapse of the
distance between writer and reader, through the use of a direct address which
suggests W (text 1) R, brings the viewer closer to the text and into a personal
rapport with Rex. Suddenly, though, the viewer is pushed away to become a
“you” who may not be looked upon favorably by the Deity. In an instant, the
compression of hearer — implied reader — reader has been replaced by the

situation that Kozloff called a compression of writer — implied author —

 

84Schmidt and Kess, p. 25.

85Schmidt and Kess, 52-3, 55. Note that the third quotation is cited exactly as in
Schmidt and Kess.

 

49
speaker. I believe the purpose here is a use of pragmatics to increase the

effect of the implied causality — not only will non—charitable viewers be
smitten by Jehovah, but they will lose their rapport with Rex36.
Cues for reading strategies

As noted in the section on fictive television, one important cue for
adopting an appropriate reading strategy was the title of a program. In fictive
television, these titles were largely aesthetic. In persuasive television, we note
that they are again largely aesthetic, though rife with real-world implications of
the power of their contents: You Are Loved and Hour of Power are but two
examples. Interestingly, these also function as mini-advertisements for
themselves, as do the products sold by the televangelists: “The World
Outreach Partners,” “The Possibility Thinkers Club,” and “The New Hope
Telephone Counseling Service.”

It is also worth noting that Schmidt and Kess’ research only covered
those elements of the televangelists’ programs that consisted of a direct appeal
for funding from the audience, and that they only transcribed the audio portion
of the broadcast. What they omitted were segments that are much more
obviously narrative: pre-recorded segments with personal stories of
redemption, sermons told by the televangelist, and readings from the Bible. All
are clearly narratives,. In the latter two cases, they are told by an on—screen
narrator who functions as a character (for the benefit of the real narrator, the
camera) in much the same fashion as a news-reader like Dan Rather.

So again, the cues in the text, from the obvious narrative of the sermon
to the metaphoric title seems to indicate that the viewer is intended to assume

a reading strategy appropriate for a narrative. Because of the obviously

 

86A valid, but cynical, reading of Humbard’s use of “we” and “you” would be
something like “I’m going to be saved and you’re not.”

 

50
symbolic nature of the text, a strategy of communicational inference is

appropriate. And yet, as non-fiction, we expect that this text should be
representational somehow. The conative function of the text has some effect
on the presentation of elements, and most particularly in the relationship with
the audience, but this attempt to bring the viewer into the text does not change
the fact that the text is narrative. The viewer should adopt an inferential
strategy, just as he or she would with fictive television, game shows, talk
shows, or the news, to comprehend the meaning, i.e. the intention, behind the
utterance.

Variant non-fictive televisual texts

In the example of televangelism, metaphoric titles, in this case mini-
advertisements for their programs, provide an appropriate cue to readers to
employ an inferential strategy. One might well ask at this point: are there any
non-metaphoric titles on television?

As we’ve mentioned, it is appropriate and common for fictive television
to use such titles to cue their audience. Strangely, this seems common for
many news programs: 60 Minutes, 20/20, NightSide, Day One, Street Stories,
etc. Similarly, documentary series are prone to “artsy” titles, such as P. 0.V.,
FrontLine, and Nova.

It is something of a stretch to find a title that purports to describe its
contents without employing metaphor. Clearly CBS Evening News fits our
requirement, but perhaps more interesting are the half-hour program-length
commercials or “info-mercials” that have become increasingly popular of late.
Consider titles like Secrets of Success (a financial investment scheme) or
Incredible Inventions (featuring Ron Popeil’s food dehydrator). Clearly, these
titles employ the pragmatic concept of the title-as-mini-advertisement

described by Geis. But on the other hand, the titles seem to be a direct

 

 

5 1
statement of their content, if perhaps somewhat inflated — Mr. Lee does

promise to show you the “secrets” of a real-estate system that will make
anyone rich, i.e. “success”-ful. Popeil’s food dehydrator is an invention, and the
use of the adjective “incredible” is perhaps just a matter of perspective.

These programs, couched in direct-address but still camera-narrated
and therefore narrative, provide strong cues that they are to be read with an
attributive strategy. Indeed, that is presumably what such programs want
you to think: that what you are watching is real, that the products and
services shown are genuinely incredible.

It is no small irony that these non-fictional programs with a strong
conative purpose should put such an effort into seeming representational,

while ostensibly objective “news” and informational programming should try to

 

assume a more constructed and symbolic approach87.
Pictorial semiotics and the “real” world

But to what degree can any televisual non-fiction claim to be
representative of the physical world? As Worth argues, the controlled and
deliberate nature of television production makes any televisual message
inherently symbolic. Worth goes on to claim that, in the title of one of his
essays, “pictures can’t say ain’t.”

Worth makes the case that pictures88 are incapable of dealing in terms

of truth-conditions in the way that language is. Pictures cannot claim that a

 

87Another possibility is that even if viewers understand the symbolic intention,
they might overlook the attempt to sell them the product. Assumption of an
inferential strategy means that the viewer understands that he or she is being
shown this wonderful product, but does not require that the viewer ask why. In
such a case, viewers might see this as merely a demonstration of a product,
symbolic but not necessarily persuasive.

88And by this he means any pictorial means of communication, thereby including
the pictorial text (and presumably the socio-gestural text) within the televisual
text.

 

52
thing does not exist, because to do so, it must represent or portray the non-

existent thing, thereby giving it some degree of existence. Pictures are also
incapable of depicting “conditionals, counterfactuals, negatives, or past-future
tenses.”39

Instead, Worth argues that pictures are best understood as having a
function similar to the verb to be; pictures’ basic capability is the ability to say
“this thing exists.” Extrapolating this to television, a series of images90,
television’s visual text would then be a series of existential affirmations: “these
things exist.”

Now, it could immediately be argued that if pictures show the existence
of things, then it is much more a tool for representing reality than we have

hitherto given it credit for being. However, this argument is foiled by the

 

’

consideration of Nelson Goodman’s “unicorn-Pictures” and “Pickwick-Pictures,’
that is to say, pictures of things that do not era'st outside of the text. Goodman
calls these “representations with null denotations,”91 meaning that while they
are representations, they do not point to, represent, indicate or identify
anything in the physical world.

If a picture is a statement of existence, but states the existence of
something that does not exist, what are we to do? Is the picture a “lie”? Worth
argues vigorously that this is not the case. Worth identifies two purposes for
creating non-representational pictures, an assumption of “intention to portray
and depict a scene that corresponds to that at which the camera was

pointed”92 versus “art”. In a rough sense, these correspond to “non-fiction” and

 

89Worth, p. 178.

9°“Series of images” either being the series perceived by the viewer, the 30 frames
a second that whiz by, or something in-between.

91Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 25-6.

92i.e., where the director and cameraperson pointed the camera.

 

53
“fiction.” Pragmatically, we will give much more leeway in the latter case,

since a defining purpose of fiction is to represent that which does not exist.

But in the non-fictional case, we are stuck with a deeper problem. At
first glance, according to Worth, “assumptions of existence are more
reasonable with pictures, and therefore attribution naturally follows.”93 So if a
picture is representational, particularly a machine-made94 picture like a
photograph or television picture, then viewers should accept it as an infallible
representation of reality. Of course, this is entirely not the case. Worth’s
anecdotal evidence is compelling: when we see an unflattering photo of a friend,
we may claim that he or she “doesn’t look good in that light” or that “that’s not
his/her good profile,” or we may even blame “that stupid exposure meter” and
“these lousy cameras.”95 What Worth ultimately argues for is that “the real
world is symbolically inviolate,” and that when an ostensibly representational
picture conflicts with our concept of reality, then the picture is dismissed as a
“mistake, lie, or false statement,” and furthermore “we would rather change
our concept of the ‘real’ to match our images or myths, if need be, but... we
rarely allow a conflict between a pictorial symbol and ‘reality’ to go on for
long.”96

There’s a paradox here: how can the picture be a statement of existence
and yet not necessarily relate to anything existent, or worse yet, threaten our

perception of the physical world? Worth’s answer is that pictures “depict

 

93Worth, p. 170.

94Worth defines this as “photography and film” on p. 175. The term is somewhat
lacking, because there are plenty of “machines,” from air-brushes to lasers, that
are not themselves particularly inclined towards the creation of representational
pictures. A better definition might include a sense of such tools’ ability to “capture”
a complete image quickly and easily. This definition would also extend to
television cameras, crucial for our current purposes.

95Worth, p. 176.

96Worth, pp. 176-7.

 

 

54
events for whose existence they are the sole evidence,” and furthermore “they

constitute a ‘reality’ of their own.”97

Even though pictures may draw from what we perceive as reality, they
are, as a deliberate symbolic communication, “a way that we structure the
world around us... [and] are not a picture of it.”98 Instead, pictures are a world
unto themselves, and must be interpreted as self-contained symbolic entities.
Indeed, the analysis of pictures, films, and television is rarely performed in
terms of how closely the images correspond to the world outside — it is unlikely
anyone could stand to see an 18-hour long movie that captured every instant
of a day from one person’s perspective, despite the fact that this is how we
experience reality. Instead, pictorial communications are processed and
evaluated relative to each other. Larry Gross hypothesizes that forms such as
pictures, stories, poetry and the sonata “communicate the competence and
skill with which their structures have been manipulated”99 Correspondence in
pictures is not to anything in the physical world, but to “conventions, rules,
forms, and structures for structuring the world around us. What we use as a
standard for correspondence is our knowledge of how people make pictures. ”100
Pictorial problems for televisual non-fiction pragmatics

The problem, of crucial import for reading strategies of non-fictive
television is what can be inferred from a given televisual text. N on-fiction is
narrative, and as readers we must know on some level that televisual texts are
deliberate symbolic constructs. Nevertheless, there is endless confusion when

what we are seeing purports to be real.

 

97Worth, p. 179.

98Worth, p. 182.

99Gross, quoted in Worth, p. 181.
100Worth, p. 181. Emphasis Worth’s.

II-

 

 

55
This paradox can be seen in two similar kinds of news stories. The first

is a story about some yet-to-be-built NASA project, for example a space
station or the “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative program. Many news
stories will use computer animation to show the proposed project orbiting the
earth, shooting down missiles, etc. This visual text is like the unicorn-picture
— it asserts the existence of the space station, but no such thing exists outside
of this pictorial representation. Consider the second example: the recent
fiasco at NBC News when their DateLine program chose to show a pickup
truck exploding from a side impact. Their “demonstration” of a car ramming
the truck from the side was assisted by the use of two model rocket engines
strapped to the gas tanks that were ignited just an instant before the car hit
the truck. This picture is ostensibly of “real life,” but its interpretation depends

 

somewhat on the viewer’s knowledge: either it is a display of a dangerous
truck, or of a truck being blown up under carefully controlled and deliberately
telegenic conditions.

A major ethical debate ensued when it was revealed that NBC had
placed the igniters on the truck, leading to on-air apologies and firings. But an
interesting question that could be asked is: how is the space station story any
better? Both are news stories, ostensibly representations of physical-world
events, and yet the animation of the space station is even more a fiction than

the exploding truck101.

 

101Zappa, in his autobiography, goes so far as to claim this technique (when used in
the “Star Wars” story) constitutes duplicity on the part of broadcasters and the
Defense Department. According to Zappa, “the words ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Strategic
Defense Initiative are seldom uttered on CNN without the viewer being subjected
to a rerun of an animated clip showing nuclear missiles from The Evil Empire with
big red stars on them being vaporized by what appears to be a Saturday morning
cartoon ray gun. Clever subtext: ‘Who could argue with deployment of this
wonderful family-saving defense system? Why, of course it works! See there! Just
blew up another one!”’. Zappa, p. 349.

56
But is it? As Worth has argued, anything we see pictorially is a world

unto itself, a statement of existence for which it is the only evidence. By
shooting something with a television camera, we create televisual signs with
these properties. Non-fictional television is, as far as the viewer can ascertain,
essentially fictional, because televisual signs exist in this extant-unto-
themselves form and only in that form. Television is not, and in fact cannot be
representational, and therefore both of these cases are equivalent.
Representation of reality is a dubious conceit for such a densely symbolic
medium, in which the pictorial detail yields seeming “realism” for fiction, and
ample ability to fabricate a televisual reality for non-fiction.

Surely, though, we know there is a difference. I believe the best case to

make here is for a pragmatic middle ground that returns to a reader-oriented

 

view. What is the difference between the cues in these two texts? It may be
the difference between the use of portable cameras versus animation.
Animation, if it can be realized as such, sends a strong cue that it is its own
reality, either drawn on cels or by computer. Even if we sometimes see
television as a representation of “reality,” we do not do so when we see
animation, because it sends an even stronger cue to employ a symbolic
strategy than do other televisual techniques.

This does not, however, account for the fact that animation could
eventually become so good that these cues disappear, i.e. that we cannot
distinguish animation from conventional videography. In this case, perhaps 3
some other cue could keep a reader from employing an attributional strategy
— for example, his or her knowledge that such space stations do not currently
exist — but then again, perhaps not.

What happens when a viewer uses an improperly seeks attributional

inference, that is to say, what happens when they treat fictional televisual

57
signs as if they were statements of physical-world existence? The anecdote

that springs to mind is the urban legend of mass hysteria following Orson
Welles’ 1939 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.

For those who would employ pragmatic principles in the service of art,
this confusion of strategies has the potential of being a powerful tool: the 1983
made-for—TV movie Special Bulletin portrayed a hostage drama about nuclear
terrorists in Charleston, South Carolina as if it were a live newscast102. The
first scenes are game-show and soap opera commercials interrupted by the
“special bulletin” screen, and a cut to the (fictional) network’s anchor desk.
Discourse time and story time are kept in exact sync, as the story shifts from
anchor desk to the on-scene reporter, to interviews with esteemed
psychoanalysts and nuclear physicists. The program is shot on videotape and
produced very much a genuine news broadcast, even including packaged tape
roll-ins, stammering “experts” to fill time, high gain103 used in dimly-lit scenes,
and abrupt camera-work and loss of signal during intense moments.

Only a very few cues exist to tell viewers to shift to a symbolic strategy:
during the broadcast, the real-world network briefly placed a “you are watching
a dramatization” warning on the screen several times during the movie;
commercial interruptions take place periodically104; ellipses (time-lapse) occur
during the commercials; the time in the story at certain points does not match
real-time (it starts in the morning, but was broadcast at night); and the story

includes shocking events the reader might not easily accept105. Aside from

 

102Astute scholars of pragmatics will correctly assume that quite a bit is lost in the
transition to home video.

103An electronic effect that boosts the ability to shoot in low light, at the expense
of picture graininess and color quality.

104But even the commercials are co-opted into the fictional text by preceding them
with dialogue like “coverage of the situation in Charleston will continue.”
105Namely that the bomb actually goes off.

58
this, though, the movie achieves a remarkable aesthetic effect through the use

of televisual conventions and a knowledge of our improperly attributional
reading strategies.
Conclusions about non-fictive television

As I have argued, non-fictive television is more like than unlike fictive
television. Both are inclined towards narrative, and when we accept Worth’s
arguments that television images are pictorial affirmations of existence that
create a world of their own (with complete and verifiable representation of the
physical world an irrelevant impossibility), then we find that television is...
televisual. Reference to the outside world in television is unnecessary and
frequently inappropriate — television is its own world. Thus, a strategy of
communicational inference instead of attribution is always more appropriate.
Television is forever concerned with the quality of its structure and its artifice
and not with reference outside itself.

What happens when we see a friend or a familiar place on television, one
to which we have been acclimated to in non-televisual life? It seems to me that
there is a sense of alienation and of profound difference. If a campus building I
go to every day is used in a television news report, I sense it as being very
different. Perhaps this has something to do with the limited sensory data
television can provide — being there provides me with finer sound, a wider field
of vision, smell, feeling (of wind, stagnancy, or the building itself), etc. But
perhaps there is more than that in this case: I am unaccustomed to dealing
with that thing or that person in the video-space. It has different qualities
than those I experience in my perception of the physical world. It has become
a televisual sign, a symbolic image, and I can no longer just have a sense of “it

exists.” It exists as something different on television, and furthermore has

 

59
been put there for a reason... this time, someone is showing it to me. It

therefore has been embodied with inferential significance.

To a televisual reader, fictive and non-fictive signs are extraordinarily
similar. They are captured with photographic precision, yielding abundantly-
detailed description. These signs are usually presented in a narrative and are
always sent intentionally, compelling the reader to seek communicational
inference. Even if a televisual author creates an explicitly referential work,
how can the reader be expected to figure this out, when all televisual messages
arrive as detailed narratives sent with deliberate communicational intent. The
conclusion seems to be that not only can the reader not be expected to
determine the referentiality of a televisual text, but that the very act of
sending a message through this medium creates some level of communicative
intent on the part of the author.

Summary

This chapter has considered various types of non-fictive texts. The
analysis of news programs discussed the inherent narrative that typifies all
televisual texts. Further analysis discussed the concept of the televisual
narrator and the positioning of a reader within the pragmatic structure. The
next non-fiction considered was the persuasive text, which was noted for its
linguistic novelty, its use of logical presupposition and implication, and its self-
positioning as a straining-to—be-referential text. The visual text was
emphasized next, as Worth’s concept of pictorial signs and their properties
were expounded upon. The conclusion that visual text signs exist in their own
televisual reality was applied to ambiguous reading cases, such as the
exploding truck and the made—for—TV-movie Special Bulletin. Finally, the

hypothesis that televisual non—fictive and fictive texts are essentially

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6O
equivalent from the reader’s point of View was affirmed, based on the similarity

of their signs, their discourse, and their perceived intention.

5. PRAGMATICS WITHIN A TELEVISUAL TEXT

Introduction

This chapter will take a slightly different approach to the pragmatics of
the televisual semiotic. Instead of analyzing pragmatic approaches to
unspecified texts, I will consider how pragmatics operates within a text at
distinct levels within the text.

To do this, we will analyze Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, a comprehensive
view of creating televisual texts. First, I will examine the televisual utterance,
a in-context element within the text, and note how Zettl implicitly delineates a
syntax and semantics. I will then examine the pragmatic basis for many of
these syntactic and semantic rules. Finally, I will move to a more extensive
level within the text and analyze how Zettl’s “ways of seeing” provide televisual
authors with a rhetoric of the televisual.

Semiotics of the televisual utterance

Thus far, I have been interested primarily in pragmatics as they relate
to the text as a whole, from assumptions of intention to reading strategy to
modes of discourse. To begin this chapter, I will consider the pragmatic
concepts that guide the creation of individual utterances within that text. By
doing this, I will be careful to mark the distinction between televisual
pragmatics and semantics or syntax.

Herbert Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion is a unique book both in its range and
its approach to the subject matter. By dividing his approach among the
multiple fields created in a televisual text, he implicitly recognizes that several
texts are at work together within one larger text. Furthermore, his approach of

“applied media aesthetics” implies the artistic style that the previous chapters

61

 

 

62
crust in all television. This approach also distinguishes his work from other

textbooks that emphasize “television production,” possibly biasing them
towards issues of process or craft.

As discussed in Chapter Two, Sight Sound Motion can be seen as
television’s equivalent of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style — it is a style
guide, grounded in syntactic principles but also advocating a particular means
of effectively communicating.

Many of the individual chapters are largely about the syntax of
televisual communication, within five aesthetic fields that Zettl identifies: light
and color, two-dimensional space, three-dimensional space, time-motion, and
sound106.

This makes for an interesting connection with Gross, who, as outlined in
Chapter Two, claims that there are five varieties of the symbolic experience:
lexical (verbal language), socio-gestural (a verbal, culture-specific mode that
communicates “the stable characteristics and situational intentions of the
actor”), iconic (relating to visual depiction), logico-mathematical (a non-verbal,
“complex and specific code”), and musica1107. All of these except the logico-
mathematical mode are present in television’s sign system.

But where are they present? Consider Zettl’s aesthetic fields — four of
them are visual. This means that the musical and verbal texts must be in the
sound field, because to convert them to the picture field would translate them

into image5108. Consequently, that leaves 4/5 of the aesthetic fields (or 14 of

 

1°6Zettl, p. viii

107Gross, pp. 66-71.

108Note that these images would be non-iconic, because (as stated before) the
printed word “tree” does not resemble a tree, and the score to a piece of music does
not visually resemble anything.

 

63
16 “aesthetic field” chapters by my count109), creating a powerful bias in

televisual texts towards the iconic (or pictorial) and the socio-gestural.

This creates another clash with our perception of the physical world. As
Gross notes, “this lexical mode is so dominant an element of our consciousness
that we have tended to see it as the embodiment of thought and intelligence.”110
Yet, in a televisual text, speech is one-half of one-fifth of the available aesthetic
fields. Instead of being dominated by speech, televisual texts tend towards
domination by the visual fields, which communicate pictorial and socio-gestural
texts.

Within these aesthetic field chapters, Zettl’s attention tends not towards
the text as a whole but individual elements of it, such as shots, sequences, and
even still images, which are analyzed in terms of their graphic make-up. The
emphasis is on the utterance, the small packet of communication considered in
its contextlll.

While a televisual pragmatics would be useful for understanding the
interpretation of utterances, most of the material covered in Sight Sound
Motion is syntax, with some semantics. The syntax uses concepts from
graphic arts, common-sense reading, and the power of psychological closure to
develop a system of proper manipulation of televisual signs. Closure, a guiding
principle of the syntactic rules, is defined by Zettl as “taking a minimum
amount of clues and mentally filling in nonexistent information in order to
arrive at stable, easily manageable patterns.”112 This is similar to Iser’s

concept of gap-filling, in which readers “project” their own constantly-adapted

 

10912 of 16 if the chapters on time are considered as relating to speech or music.
110Gross, p. 66.

111As opposed to the linguistic concept of the sentence, which is considered without
regard for its context.

112Zettl, p. 391.

II“
,.

 

 

64
beliefs and assumptions into what a text leaves unsaid, resulting in a “dynamic

happening.”113 It is interesting to note that a guiding principle of this televisual
syntax is motivated by the needs and purposes of the participants, i.e. by
pragmatics.

It should also be noted that Zettl does not explicitly state when his
material is covering syntax, semantics, or pragmatics. For example, a picture
on p. 145 shows a woman with what appears to be a fountain coming out of her

head (see Figure 3):

 

Figure 3. “Illogical Closure”114

The explanation is that because of “the smooth continuity of vectors, we tend

to group objects together into stable perceptual patterns regardless of whether

they belong together or not.”115 The use of “belong together” is unexplained but

clearly a semantic concern — continuous vectors in the picture are an example

of perfectly good syntax. The only problem is that the various signs in the

picture cannot be combined in this way and be meaningful. Linguistically, this

would be like saying the cat rained, in that syntactic rules116 are adhered to, l

but an appeal to semantic knowledge reveals implausibility.

 

113Iser, p. 22, 165-9.

114Zettl, p. 145.

115Ibid.

116For example, sentences must have a subject and a verb, verbs must agree in
number with their subject, words must be spelled correctly, etc.

 

65
Zettl’s semantics seldom delve into what is to be said in a televisual text

(issues of content are presumably left to the reader of the book), but instead
emphasize means of expression that achieve specific aesthetic effects. For
example, chapter 10, “Building Screen Volume,” applies a concept of volume
articulation to show how effects of vastness, isolation, or confinement can be
achieved by purposeful manipulation, through lenses, angle, staging or
architecture. Description of Z-axis117 articulation yields effects such as
proximity, distance, power, and relevance. Semantically, these elements of
Zettl’s text provide the graphic equivalent of adverbs and adjectives,
intensifiers and modifiers for arbitrary content. This provides us some
knowledge about the boundary for pragmatic analysis in a televisual text, in
that we can see semantic principles at work.

Pragmatics and the aesthetic elements

 

Zettl’s overall concepts are not explicitly pragmatic, but some are based
on similar needs for understanding. Pragmatics relates signs to interpreters,
and early, Zettl does describe a concept of the “contextualistic media
aesthetics” that guide much of his thinking.

Zettl knows that signs do not exist meaningfully in a vacuum, but rather

require a context for their interpretation:

“We perceive our world not in terms of absolutes but rather
as changing contextual relationships. When we look at an event,
for example, we are constantly engaged in judging one aspect of it
against another aspect or another event.”118

Zettl’s contextual media aesthetics consists of four broad concepts:

' Stabilizing our environment — the clustering of “event
details into patterns and simple configurations”

 

117The axis of the screen-space that can be seen as running towards or away from
the viewer.
118Zettl, p. 5.

 

 

66
° Selective seeing — the noticing of “only those events, or

details of events, that we want to see or are used to seeing”

0 Predictable aesthetic response — the ability to “predict
how people will respond to specific aesthetic stimuli and
contextual patterns with reasonable accuracy”

0 Emotional literacy — Art helps the viewer “shift from

glance to insight”119
The first two concepts here relate to the process by which readers create a
text, through clustering of details into configurations and not even working with
some other signs. The fact that Zettl says that readers notice only those signs
they are used to seeing seems to clash sharply with Hawkes’ claims120 about
art as a defamiliarizer that shocks the reader out of anesthetized every-day
assumptions. Then again, Hawkes describes the “aim” of art, and not the
actual processing of symbolic data. A reasonable synthesis is that authors
may create signs with the hope of slipping them past the low-level screening
that Zettl describes.

But perhaps more interesting from a pragmatic point of view is the idea
of predicted response. This implies that an author takes it upon him- or herself
to know how a text will be interpreted. If the audience is expected to be reading
the text with an inferential strategy — and I have argued that this is the only
possibility with a televisual text — then this recalls Grice’s claim that “the
utterer must have intended an ‘audience’ to recognize the intention behind the
utterance.”121

But what can be predicted about any particular utterance? Zettl offers

chapter after chapter of predictable, reproducible means of creating an

utterance that will have a distinct effect. As exemplified in the quotes on

 

119Zettl, p. 6.
120Quoted at the end of Chapter Three, above.
121Grice, quoted in Worth, p. 168.

 

 

67
three-dimensional space above, Zettl’s text provides for generating all manner

of emotional and intellectual effects.

Some other examples of Zettl’s predictable responses include a tilted
horizon line to indicate “a relatively unstable event,”122 deep reds and other
“warm” colors that “produce more excitement than cold blue or other cold
colors,”123 and a car climbing easily up a left-to-right diagonal because “we
usually start at the left side of the screen and finish at the right.”124

When illustrated in the book, all these effects seem perfectly natural —
you see a car going up from left to right on an up-diagonal and it looks much
easier than the right-to-left climb. But the description of the predicted
response reveals why this is so: “we usually start at the left side”... why?
Because our culture reads left to right? Because water spins down the drain
that way in our hemisphere? If the direction of scanning were an arbitrary
choice made on each viewing, one could hardly assume every viewer would
proceed to read the screen from left-to-right.

It seems much more credible to hypothesize that reading left to right is
a learned televisual strategy. Similarly, is red naturally warm and blue
naturally cold just because of common real-world experiences, or have they
been made this way to some degree with experiences from previous texts?

More likely, what Zettl is recalling is an analogue of Fish’s demand for an
ideal reader, one who was aware of literary criticism, style, genre, and other
discourse that continued outside the text. The difference in this case is that if
we accept the premise that these predicted responses are learned, then we

have Fish’s “literary competence” operating not at the level of the text, but in

 

122Zettl, p. 7.
123Zett1, p. 67.
124Zett1, p. 111.

 

68
smaller elements within the text, namely utterances. This reader brings not

only knowledge of other texts to the reading of this text, but also knowledge of
other utterances to each utterance within the text. Just as I argued that a
reader who seeks out a “situation comedy” brings certain assumptions about
the genre to each text, so does he or she bring assumptions about the meaning
of light, color, graphic space, and volume... meanings learned primarily from
other media experiences.
Three styles of televisual rhetoric

Zettl also covers some concepts which relate to the text as a whole. One
which is clearly within the realm of pragmatics is the idea of “ways of looking.”
By this concept, Zettl means to distinguish between three means of conceiving

and developing a televisual message:

Looking at an event: Use of “an approach that comes as close as
possible to the point of view of an observer.” “Microphones and
cameras are used simply to report what is going on.”

Looking into an event: An approach which “scrutiniz[es] the
event... to look beyond its obvious structure, and if possible into
its very essence... to provide insight into the true nature of the
event”

Creating an event: Use of “technical devices and potentials of the
medium to build a unique screen event that depends entirely upon
the medium.” (emphasis mine)

This is a pragmatic issue because this constitutes Zettl’s concept of the
rhetoric of video. These three means of address are as different as the sonnet
and the phone call, and their purposes can be just as different.

The concept of “creating an event” could lead to improper equivocation if
we don’t clarify Zettl’s usage versus the concept of the extant-unto-itself
pictorial semiotic argued in the last two chapter. Any televisual message is

deliberately created and exists unto itself. I believe Zettl’s conception of the

69
event is key here — events which are not television-dependent can be “looking

at” or “looking into”, depending on the level of involvement and insight provided
by the “camera.” When a televisual author employs the “creating an event”
approach, he or she creates an event that can only exist on television ——
nothing like it can exist in another form.

With that issue resolved, this concept of a rhetoric of television opens
some interesting avenues of inquiry — what form (or forms) of rhetoric is
appropriate in a given context? An off-the-cuff or common-sensiscal answer
might relegate “creating an event” approaches to fiction and “looking at an
event” approaches to live events such as sports or current history, but such a
cut-and-dry trichotomy risks oversimplification. In linguistic usage, adopting a
non-standard rhetoric can have profound use in experimentation or for comic
effect, and there is little reason to think the same is not possible for the
televisual.

For example, political events such as conventions and elections are
usually shown with a “looking into” approach, rejecting the simple counting of
ballots (“looking at” approach) and constructing instead an seemingly endless
parade of commentators and statistics to reveal the “inside story.” As this
process of intensification continues, it is not unrealistic to think that news
coverage of such events could ultimately adopt a “creating an event” style of
delivery125. Similarly, a dramatic text rendered in a “looking at” style could
have a profound alienating effect, pushing viewers away from the characters

and action, or reminding them that they are watching an unfolding artifice126.

 

125With all the graphics, split-screens, computerized 3-d maps and other effects in
use, it might be argued that this has already happened.

126For example, comedy programs like SCTV, The Edge, and Bevis and Butt-Head
all use a screen-filling burst of static as a transition, in lieu of the more common
cut or dissolve. This is an aggressive reminder that the viewer is looking at a
constructed television text.

70
Summary

In this chapter, I have considered the pragmatics at work within a given
text, by identifying the implicit syntax and semantics in Zettl’s work. I have
also noted that it is a pragmatic “literary competence,” a knowledge of other
texts previously read, at work when a reader feels warm when seeing deep reds,
or senses instability when the horizon line is tilted. Finally, I considered the
ability of Zett ’s “ways of seeing” to offer a “rhetoric,” or a style of discourse
appropriate to the goals of a text. In summary, I have identified both a
televisual syntax and semantics that is distinct from pragmatics, as well as a
pragmatics operating within the text to parallel the pragmatics operating in
parallel to the approach to the text as a whole.

 

6. CONCLUSIONS

The purpose of this thesis has been to begin the search for the nature of
the semiotic theory of pragmatics as it can be applied to televisual texts. To
accomplish this, I have synthesized various lines of research and inquiry to
reach various conclusions and hypotheses, which now deserve restatement
and codification.

Television texts are like books, paintings, and several other
communicative forms in that they exist largely as unified wholes (as opposed
to conversations), permit minimal direct from the reader to the writer, and
may successfully operate in an asynchronous environment.

Televisual texts seem to be firmly rooted in aesthetic grounds for two
reasons. First, their analogues are all art forms, such as pictures, books, etc.
Even the most blandly descriptive television text has more in common
structurally with a novel than with a discussion. Second, they rely heavily on
narrative, and are statements of existential assertion for which they are their
only evidence, making fictive and non-fictive content virtually equivalent in
form.

Reading strategies for televisual texts should always assume
communicative intent because any televisual event is a sign event and is
constructed with symbolic meaning. It is impossible for television to only
reference physical reality — through its choice of shots, sounds, and style,
television always conveys meaning about what it presents. In television, how
something is presented is a crucial element in understanding what is presented.

Cues within televisual texts may be outweighed by a learned televisual

language. Individual texts are like Propp’s myths: story-lines often come from

'71

72
preexisting archetypes, and viewers may be more interested in the details and

the performances127 than in the progression of events.

These facts reiterate that we have identified important topics within the
range of televisual pragmatics. However, our purposes also called for
identifying the borders of televisual pragmatics. In our consideration of Zettl,
we verified the existence of a televisual semantics and syntax, and found a
distinct pragmatics operating at several levels. What remains unstated is
where the boundaries of televisual semiotics lie. It would be too easy to say
that it relates only to signs and systems, ignoring the fact that pragmatics
relates those signs and systems to interpreters, which brings the
psychology128 of readers into valid consideration for semiotics. Instead, we
must realize that readers bring a host of outside influences and literary
experiences to a reading of a televisual text, and the fact that these influences
affect the reading means that a televisual pragmatics must be careful not to

be overly narrow in its focus on the televisual text.

 

127By the actors or in the Chomsky-an sense.
128And perhaps the philosophy, physiology, etc.

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