Community television: the constitution of a medium analysed by means of Sartre's progressive-regressive method

Dunning, Ray

Abstract

The work is presented in two volumes. The first volume is intended as a protracted introduction to the second. Volume One This volume is divided into two parts with an introduction. The latter draws attention to the fact that the word television no longer refers exclusively to broadcast television; it now embraces several different forms which have little more in common than the cathode ray tube (CRT) image. Methods of feed and distribution vary considerably and these formal elements condition different patterns of human work and association. According to McLuhan this is tantamount to saying that the term television embraces several different media. This is not generally seen to be the case and consequently the different forms of TV become confused one with another. Conclusions drawn through experience of one form of television are automatically attached to the other forms, and this usually means that work with GCTV or portable video is compared unfavourably with broadcasting, or that those working with GCTV or portable video automatically identify their work with that of the broadcasters. This damages the integrity of the different media and media operations, and it impedes development. There is a need to differentiate more clearly between them. Differentiation wTould be simple enough if media were definable simply in formal terms, as McLuhan would have us believe. But forms may mediate between men in different ways according to the meanings men bestow on them. The confusion, then, exists at the level of intention. We need an approach which embraces both the formal and the phenomenological . We have such an approach in Sartre’s material dialectic. Using Sartre's formulas man is mediated by things to the exact extent that things are mediated by man; we may dialectically oppose particular human relations conditioned by the formal character of the medium (i.e. McLuhan's approach), and the constitution of particular forms by human praxis (i.e. the phenomenological approach). The dialectic unfolds or develops in time, and herein lies the beauty of the method. At a given moment, two particular forms or two particular actions may appear similar; but in temporal sequence they will appear quite different. At a given moment, two men with 'TV' cameras may appear to be operating within the sarnie medium, but if we take into account their respective actions in preceding and succeeding moments, the work of one might turn out to be very different from the work of "the other. PART ONE Sartre’s "Search for a Method" : A Summary Sartre’s Questions de Methode vias published in i960 along with the first volume of a much longer treatise, the Critique de la Raison Dialectioue, to which it was prefixed as an introduction. It was written originally in response to a request by a Polish review for an article on The Present Situation of Existentialism. Sartre saw in this suggestion an opportunity to express, in a country with a Marxist culture, what he saw as the existing contradictions in its philosophy. In particular he criticised the lazy formalism of modern Marxist writers such as Lukács. The article was revised for publication in i960. It sets forth specifically those ways in which Existentialism seeks to modify Marxism and to change its direction. The result is a method whereby the existential Marxist may hope to understand both individual persons and history. Surprisingly, it is a contemporary Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, who supplies the basic principles for the method. He suggests that a living community appears first in a horizontal complexity or as a particular social structure. But this structure has, as its counterpart, a vertical or historical complexity. The two complexities react upon one another. In order to study such a reciprocity of interrelations without getting lost, Lefebvre proposes a three-stage approach: first comes a Descriptive phase, guided by experience and by a general theory; then there is an Analytico-Regressive phase which attempts to discover precise dates; and finally there comes a Historic-Genetic phase in which there is an attempt to rediscover the present, but elucidated, understood, explained. To this, Sartre adds his notion of the project, by which he means that the most rudimentary behaviour must be determined both in relation to real and present factors which condition it andin relation to a certain object, still to come, which it is trying to bring into being. Lazy Marxism is progressive; it is a method of pure exposition resting on the long analyses of Marx himself. The Existential approach is regressive. But the regressive biographical facts on which it concentrates show only the traces of a dialectical movement, not the movement itself. It leaves to be discovered the enriching movement of totalisation which delivers each moment from its antecedent moment. Sartre’s analytic-synthetic method, then, is an attempt to unite the progressive regressive approaches of Marxism and Existentialism, respectively, in a continuing cross-reference. PART TWO Community Television : The constitution of a medium analysed by means of Sartre’s Progressive-Regressive Method. Sartre’s method is concerned with understanding, or making intelligible the constitution of particular human collectivities. The present work recognises a collectivity of people and groups of people in the U.K. who have, as a common project, the use of television in community development. Community TV is the medium in which and through which these people and groups are identified one with another. To look at it in another way: community TV is constituted as a particular medium in and through the common praxis of the people and groups who subscribe to the notion. We may establish and protect the integrity of this medium, and disentnagle it from confused notions associated with 'television' in general, by using Sartre’s method to analyse its constitution as a materialisation (objectification) of the collective project of the videast community. We discover, firstly, that community TV proper (as opposed to 'local* TV) exists in the U.K. more so in what has been said and written about it than in actual practice. Our descriptive phase, therefore, represents the ideal form of the medium or the collective ideal of the videast community. The second phase of analysis returns to the first proposal to set up a community TV service in the U.K. (in 1969) and plots successive events up to 1973 when the present work was begun. At this point it becomes clear that the historical reality of community TV quite rudely contradicts the ideal notion. The third phase of analysis begins to resolve this contradiction in terms of a double dialectic: (i) The dialectic between the ideal form of community TV and real anterior conditions (i.e. the contradiction between the collective project of community videasts and its objectification under particular socio-material conditions). (ii) The dialectic between the ideal as collective project and the individual projects of videasts (i.e. the objectification and alteration of individual projects mediated by the ideal). Volume Two The purpose of Volume One is not to reach conclusions but to clarify what is meant by community TV, and to explicate the circumstances under which the Bentilee community video project was conceived. The Bentilee experiment was an action-research project undertaken between October, 1972, and June, 1973, on a large housing estate in Stoke-on-Trent. Bob Jardine and I organised the research under the supervision of Ronnie Frankenberg, Professor of Sociology at Keele University. We kept day-to-day notes throughtout the fieldwork, and these we later edited and put together with relevant reports and transcripts of audioand videotapes to compile a Project Diary. This Diary represents Volume Two of the present work.

Citation

Dunning, R. (1974). Community television: the constitution of a medium analysed by means of Sartre's progressive-regressive method. (Thesis). Keele University

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Apr 4, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 4, 2024
• Additional Information: Describes a project undertaken with fellow-researcher R.D. Jardine, whose thesis also covers this subject https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/790359/
• Award Date: 1974