Cathrin Bengesser (Aarhus University) in conversation with Francesco Casetti (Yale University)
Cathrin Bengesser (CB): ‘From Paleo to Neo-Television’ (Casetti and Odin, 1990) was published in a special issue of Communications focusing on television. Can you tell us a little bit more about the context in which your conversation with Roger Odin about television started?
Francesco Casetti (FC): I’m going to tell you a story that I never told before. This piece is signed by the two of us and has been discussed intensely between me and Roger, but for the most part, it was written by Roger. Two years earlier, in 1988, I had led research on ‘new television’ in Italy, funded by RAI, the public television in Italy, which came out in the book Tra me e te. Strategie di coinvolgimento dello spettatore nei programmi della neotelevisione (Casetti, 1988). The title translates as: ‘Between Me and You. Strategies of audience involvement in the programmes of ‘neo television’. This research captured the turning point from a pedagogical model of television, in which the broadcaster had to ‘educate’ the audience, to a dialogical model, in which the broadcaster performed an apparent conversation with the audience (between me and you) and in which the leading role was taken by talk shows. This research was a direct filiation of an approach that I had previously experimented in the book, Dentro lo sguardo (Casetti, 1986), which was later translated as Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (Casetti, 1998). It was a book on spectatorship, inspired by enunciation theory. In this book, I tried to define four ‘positions’ that the ideal film spectator can occupy: as impersonal witness of a ‘nobody’s shot’, as the addressee of a look into the camera, as an inside observer in a shot/reverse shot and as a disembodied subject in what the old film theorists called ‘impossible objective shots’.
With my research team, we applied this enunciation approach to Italian television, and we discovered an increasing number of forms of address, which transformed the spectator from an impersonal observer into the ideal partner of a conversation—but also into the explicit target of an act of communication. Hence the rise of a new enunciational configuration, in which the simple ‘contact’ between a broadcaster and its audience was replaced by a sort of ‘contract’ between two parties that were made apparently active. Umberto Eco (I was very close to him, and he had invented the term ‘neo-television’ a few years before), as well as my French mentor Christian Metz, were very curious about what I was doing.
CB: What I love about ‘From Paleo- to Neo-television’ are its many examples from French and Italian television at the time. You stress in the beginning of the article, that it is not an account of French and Italian television, but a theoretical piece. Still, it could only have been written within the televisual landscape of the two countries at the time, right?
FC: Absolutely. It was the crucial moment of passage between state-owned television and commercial, industrial or private televisions. Tra me e te (Casetti, 1988) had an extraordinary impact beyond my expectation. It worked as a sort of critical manifesto, against the traditional way of thinking of the audience, and on behalf of a new way of implying television spectators. The left-leaning and innovative political movements in Italy were pushing for this idea of dialogical television, while the Democrat Christian party was keeping television as a pedagogical means. I remember that to my great surprise, the book was discussed by the board of the public television. In the meantime, a manager of Silvio Berlusconi’s television [Fininvest/Mediaset] asked me to meet. I remember he said: ‘This is a great book, except for one thing. You wrote that for public television instead of writing for us.’ Berlusconi was not yet a political figure, and in his television company there was a push for innovation; his managers recognised themselves as representatives of the ‘neo television’. The Berlusconi people who contacted me at the time understood that better than I did.
CB: And how did Roger Odin become involved in the theorisation of the ‘new television’?
FC: Roger Odin and I, we were close friends, we were both mentored by Christian Metz, and we were in conversation since we were both interested in pragmatics. My approach was inspired by the theory of enunciation, his was closer to a theory of communication—he then was building the edifice of what he called the ‘semio-pragmatics’. In 1988, upon Roger’s and Christian Metz invitation, I taught at Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Roger liked my attempt to use film studies to explore television, and he asked Edgar Morin, who was in charge of the journal, Communications, to edit with me a special issue on ‘neo television’. For this special issue, he wanted to ‘translate’ the enunciation approach into a semio-pragmatic one. I was very interested in this kind of convergence; we discussed a lot, we checked our drafts, but as I said, the final version was mostly his.
CB: How do you see the relation between your and Roger Odin’s approach to media? And more broadly, the relation between the contextual study of television as institution and mode of address—as put forth in this piece—and research on audiences, which was also foundational for television studies at the time?
FC: Roger and I were friends for our entire life. But in the 1990s, after this piece, we started to increase our divergences. While he insisted on staying with semio-pragmatics (Odin, 1990; Odin, 2000; Odin, 2011), I moved towards a more cultural and critical approach. We were both opposed to the simple analysis of content, which television studies were mainly about in the 1970s and 1980s. We both tried to move away from that. But Roger was interested in the presence of ‘institutional spaces’ in which television operates—i.e. its capacity to perform as a space of entertainment, experimentation or pedagogy—while through the analysis of the ‘modes of enunciation’ of the programmes—i.e. the way in which they imply a spectator and assign them a position—I became more and more aware of the relevance of a ‘relationship’ between the parties and a ‘negotiation’ of their respective places and spaces of action.
Another divergence in our approaches relates exactly to ‘space’. For Roger, space was an abstract social construction that defined a set of operations; for me, it increasingly became the concrete situation in which spectators ‘negotiate’ what the broadcaster shares with them, accepting, refusing or readjusting the position that is assigned to them. Not by chance, in the 1990s, I led expansive ethnographic research on 34 families and their mode of watching TV—the research was coupled by a close analysis of the content, to better understand the opposed strategies of the broadcaster and the audience. Hence an interest for the entanglement between media, space, environment, that is still at the core of my research. To say the truth, now I understand better how Roger was considering crucial questions. After all, we both were building an ‘apparatus theory’ that responded, in different directions, to the question raised by Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, and especially Metz.
CB: Since you mentioned the example of apparatus theory, this brings me to a question about the translation of academic concepts and terms more prevalent in francophone scholarship and film studies. When translating your article into English, we had to transpose quite a few of them—‘dispositif’ or ‘mise-en-phase’—which have proven hard to grasp in English. How have you experienced working between these different languages and disciplinary traditions?
FC: Now I am teaching in the United States, and I had to learn not only a new language, but also another mode of thinking…. As for ‘dispositif’, it is a word largely accepted also in English. As for the concept of ‘mise-en-phase’, in Roger’s semio-pragmatics, it defines the ability of two parties in communication, to stay tuned, to be able to stay in the same ‘space of communication’ and perform synchronically. As for the concept of ‘apparatus’, I want to emphasise that in French there is a difference between ‘appareil’ and ‘dispositif’. According to Baudry (1970)‘appareil’ refers to the technical ‘machine’, while the ‘dispositif’ is the set of elements, habits, attitudes, positions and effects. In the English tradition, the two meanings overlapped in one word, ‘apparatus’. It is now an obsolete word: as many scholars, I prefer to speak of ‘dispositif’ or ‘assemblage’, for reasons that I explained in chapter 3 of Lumière Galaxy (Casetti, 2015). In particular, ‘assemblage’ defines well the coming together of technical aspects, social aspects, psychological aspects and pieces of machinery and operations.
CB: You said how in your work you are very much interested in what is happening out in the real world, in media as spaces. If you look at the media landscape today, do you see any traces of ‘neo television’ or do we find something else, somewhere else?
FC: That’s a pleasure to discuss with a journal focused on television! Well, I think, media don’t exist anymore, including television. What is it? Just a variable set of technical pieces, able to perform a variety of communicative functions, with totally different content, and without an element that keeps the components together. Watching TV in a café or a bar is different from watching it at home, as it is different to watch ABC, HBO or CNN. During the recent presidential campaign, at one point I was so anxious that I decided to watch only old movies—television as simply a surrogate of cinema. The same for my cellphone, film, radio, etc. What unifies all these media is simply the process of mediation. Indeed, mediation is the general set of operations we perform when we deal with the reality that we face or which surrounds us—whether it is an actual, a possible, a virtual reality, etc. Each medium embodies part of this set of operations—and this embodiment in turn enhances the set. Consequently, we can say that mediation is located differently in different media depending on the situation.
From this point of view, a current trend in media studies is to work not on individual media, but on the operations that cross different media and create unpredictable media families. I have recently been working on media that create a sort of bubble in which individuals seek refuge from their immediate surrounding, and that allow a ‘safe’ reconnection with the world ‘out there’ (Casetti, 2023). Among these ‘protective media’ are surveillance cameras, passwords, check points, but also television—I re-read in this vein the wonderful analyses of television of the 1950s by Lynn Spigel (1992).
CB: And from that perspective of mediation, whose role, do you think is stronger. That of the audience being the agent that chooses the mode they want to engage with media or that of the institutional ‘intentions’, the suggested uses implied in the media production?
FC: In a neo-liberal approach, we can, of course, imagine that the audience has more freedom. But that is exactly the discourse of the institutions and the industry. We don’t have more freedom; we are just playing a predefined game. I am thinking of Walter Benjamin’s idea of film as a space for play—‘Spielraum’—in which individuals train their sensorium by facing the shocks of the modern world. Today media are playgrounds in which we mediate the shocks of the world. We play the game of mediation. In this game, which is often unbalanced, I am interested in the countermoves that can spoil the pre-defined rules. Take what I called ‘protective media:’ if I protect myself against the world, what is the world doing to me? If I am in conversation with you over Microsoft Teams, as I am now, what can and will you do? You can hide yourself; explain better yourself; provoke me… You can take my word seriously or asking me to reverse my ideas. An interview is a game, in which what is a stake is a problem of identity and recognition.
CB: To conclude, I am interested in your reflections on what has happened to spectatorial relationships between Italy and France of the late 1980s and the current situation in the United States?
FC: Looking back at it now, of course I am still not in favour of state-controlled television, not at all, but I am also critical towards a neoliberal television in which every opinion has space without a real confrontation. Yet, the question of the ‘spaces of communication’ today has become the question of Internet, in which what wins is hate, resentment, faked news and paranoia. Social media are no longer a space of community. That was the dream at their dawn. The idea that we all together can be in conversation, address each other, have a conversation and discover what is the best. A space in which everyone can address you singularly. Now it’s Amazon addressing me singularly because they extracted my data and they want to exploit my inclinations. The last frontier of capitalism is to colonize my body. Go to hell, algorithm.
Bios:
