30 June Abhijit Roy

Abhijit Roy will speak at Goldsmiths in room 137a main bldf on 30 June from 11am till 1pm

Abhijit is Head of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal.
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‘Flow’ and Television Theory: conjectures on their encounter with the Non-West (Abstract)

Since 1974, the notion of ‘flow’ as constituting what Raymond Williams calls the “central television experience”, has been subjected to repeated criticism, elaboration and reformulation. My presentation shall engage with these debates to investigate whether the television screen-form is historically conditioned to produce specific ideologies of subject-formation. I suggest that the recent onslaught on the tenor of ideological suturing in ‘flow’ is premised upon a certain ‘western’ experience and an utterly ‘modern’ assumption of a direct relation between ideology and form. The problems in such an assumption can be particularly understood when we try to locate the Indian context vis-à-vis the apparatus of television and show how the so called ‘pre-capitalist’ traits in the Indian popular performative forms are homologous with what the critiques of ‘flow’ try to specify as the fragmented, distracting and hence ideologically centrifugal experience of television. The presentation will particularly look at the Indian popular film as a key repository of the indigenous performative forms and as an instance where frontality, spectacle and discontinuity can perfectly produce, as in television, a set of ideologically coherent positions. While examining this formal correspondence between television in Late Capitalism and the ‘heteronomous popular’ of the territories that continue to be highly heterogeneous in production relations, I wish to hint towards a possible genealogy of the televisual flow-form. This genealogy, the paper suggests, would be incomplete unless one takes into account the appropriation and re-signification of the pre-modern (I prefer to use ‘alternative modern’) by the apparatuses of consumerism. Since a fragmentary, discontinuous, frontally addressing and open-ended representational form has historically sustained the non-western popular and has now entered into a correspondence with the new global televisual mode of representation, can we say that the televisual subject with the legacy of colonial modernity is enmeshed, albeit contingently, in a grid of ‘identification’ with the consumerist television’s form? How does on account for the kind of negotiations that are in process? What exactly is the historical location of the Western viewers in this mapping of the ‘modern’ across the televisual globe? The questions finally lead us to the efficacy of a discursive distinction between the inter-constitutive trajectories of modernity in the theorization of the televisual mode of representation.

Abhijit Roy
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