8

Media Ethnography

Thickness and Force

Matt Briggs

René Descartes, writing in the 1640s, enumerated the passions as: wonder, esteem, scorn, generosity, pride, humility, servility, veneration, disdain, love, hatred, desire, hope, apprehension, jealousy, confidence, dispair, irresolution, courage, boldness, emulation, cowardice, terror, remorse, joy, sadness, mockery, envy, pity, self-satisfaction, repentance, approval, gratitude, indignation, anger, vainglory, shame, distaste, regret, and lightheartedness.

(Highmore, 2009, p. 3)

I start this chapter with a reference to Ben Highmore's book A Passion for Cultural Studies. I do so because he urges us to think about the sheer force of our passions in relation to the media. “Passion,” in this context, we must understand, is about “the pull and push of your connection to the social world, it is about the ebbs and flows of your feelings, the peaks and troughs of your liveliness, the pounding of your creaturely-ness” (Highmore, 2009, p. 3). Passion, then, is primarily concerned with the force of everyday experience: with feelings, emotions, and affects, with identity and subjectivity as irreducibly lived. It points to the ways in which culture, meaning-making, and power, the relations between self and others, are never experienced and lived out in the abstract, as so many discourses, meanings, ideologies, or representations. It acknowledges the ways in which such things always come to matter as lived, as embodied, as personal and passionately invested. Such an emphasis, Highmore argues, requires us to approach culture as a passionate field. It is “this sense of intimacy,” he argues, that is crucial, for the force of our passions connect us to our cultural worlds: they “catch hold of us, attach us to ideas and beliefs, and in doing so ‘scoop’ out a space for an imagined subject of that culture” (p. 4).

A Passionate Culture

These issues are explored in a number of different ways throughout the present chapter, although my principal aim here is to think about how media ethnography can expand the ways we think about media texts, their meanings, and the practices that enable them – practices through which these texts are drawn into semiosis. My case study draws upon my research in the area of children's media culture. Here lies the unifying link between the three terms in the title – ethnography, thickness, force; for, if we want to conduct useful media ethnographies, it is not enough to call upon the somewhat vague and imprecise notions of “thick description” (a phrase borrowed from Clifford Geertz); it is also vital to expand what we include in such descriptions, to reconsider the role of researchers as we investigate phenomena, as we write, and, most significantly, to expand our intellectual approaches to media texts. The last action is imperative; for, all too often, a concern with audiences forecloses a deep and creative examination of media texts – a situation that is compounded by our narrow conceptualization of meaning-making. In putting forth this argument I will pay particular attention to the ways in which my research has addressed issues of identity on one hand, and on the other hand the affective or passionate modalities of semiosis through which meanings are made and through which culture comes to matter.

Generating Thick Data

My key models in designing the research presented in this chapter were Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath's (1992) ethnography of reading, together with the tradition of self-reflective media studies work – for example Matthew Hill's (2002) work of fan culture and Theresa Senft's (2008) account of webcam girls. While I don't intend to review here any of it fully (for an excellent overview, see Murphy & Kraidy, 2008), this tradition is still uneasy about clearly delineated realms of objectivity and subjectivity and seeks to capture, and indeed to benefit from, the ways in which we as researchers are caught up in what we study. Wolf and Brice Heath, for example, systematically record the first author's daughters' emergence in the world of storytelling over a total of nine years. Unlike some audience research traditions, in which we find formal interviewing, surveys, and carefully coded transcripts (Fisch & Truglio, 2001), such an ethnographic method is far less precise, employing a mixture of data collection methods. These include systematic note-taking, opportunistic scribbling on the back of whatever comes to hand, tape recording, and general background or implicit knowledge. In this fieldwork environment, the ethnographer must find productive and useful ways to reflect upon and record fleeting aspects of shared experiences and emotional connections (Wolf & Heath, 1992, pp. 9–14). As such, Wolf is fully represented in the research materials. Her presence in the ethnography is not simply that of a neutral observer. Rather she is a central and important part of the social and family dynamics she studies and observes. As I explore below, when we want to study passionate culture, the force of media experience, and its thick embedding in everyday life, such a subject position for the researcher becomes very useful. It makes the experience of the researcher into a central part of the project itself: something to be embraced rather than something awkward and embarrassing (and somehow to be got around).

In my own case, my “thick data” were generated at home, as I explored my son's meaning-making of preschool television programs. My first research notes were made when my son Isaac was just over seven months old. The “fieldwork phase” of the research generated approximately 400 pages of notes, which represent 126 entries recorded over a 12-month period. As thick description tries to account for the broadest possible set of relationships and practices, my observations were not restricted to the occasions when Isaac was watching television, but rather took into account anything that seemed to be connected with how meaning-making practices were being shaped by my wife Sara and me, in our roles as new parents. In this mode of fieldwork I recorded any spontaneous speech and behavior in which we alluded to fictional characters, both while watching television or reading books and in our routine interactions with Isaac, for instance in play and caregiving. As I demonstrated above, much detail about what we were doing at the time and about our home environment and media ecology was included in my notes. The purpose of my observations was to situate Isaac's meaning-making experience of television as closely as possible in the context of his daily routines, of his relationship with us, and of his rapid physical and psychological development.

These participant observations were supplemented on 16 occasions with an audio-visual recording of Isaac and Sara or me watching Teletubbies together. In total, these 16 recordings amount to around eight hours of footage. In addition, I generated around two hours of footage of Isaac playing, reading, dancing, looking at the computer, and coloring. Following Marilyn Cochran Smith's (1984) protocol, all the audiovisual materials were fully transcribed. I recorded the speech between Sara, Isaac, and myself, as well as the speech between the Teletubbies and the narrator. My records also included details of the music and other diegetic sounds. I made an effort to align horizontally the documentation of media rituals with an account of what was happening as we watched, who responded how and when, and also with what was happening on the screen between the Teletubbies (for examples, see Briggs, 2007b and 2007c). These transcriptions were then placed in the context of the appropriate field notes, those that were recorded around the general time of the recording.

Thick Description and Textual Analysis

There are important methodological issues involved in the mode of research I describe here, because most audience research is designed and conducted in ways that are not especially helpful in terms of feeding back into our understanding of media texts and of the meanings that they offer (see Briggs, 2009b). While Gillespie's (1999), Hoover, Schofield Clark, and Alters' (2004), and, to a lesser extent, Georgiou's (2006) media ethnographies have endeavored to combine the analysis of viewing practices, family life, and media texts with the meanings that are made (that is, the process of semiosis) in such a thick and forceful analytical moment, other ethnographies – such as those by Hugh Mackay and Darren Ivey (2004), Thomas Tufte (2001), Elizabeth Bird (2003), Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch (1992), and JoEllen Fisherkeller (2002) – consider the texts either apart from the ethnographic analysis or not at all. Of course, there is no automatic reason to do any of these things, and the accounts provided in these analyses are full of important insights that I am not able to review in full here. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, quite often, when audience research presents itself as using the methods of ethnography, it is built around relatively thin descriptions. Fisherkeller for example spent two and a half months in a school and conducted a survey with 50 students, all of which was designed to enable her to select the three focal participants who inform the bulk of her research. However, these key informants were very thinly researched: there were just one home visit to a child's parents, between one and three hours in duration; two audio taped interviews with each focal participant, 12 months apart; and a single session of watching television with the informants in their own homes, together with one visit to Fisherkeller's own home (with follow-up phone calls a number of years later).

There are some very notable exceptions to this tendency toward “thin” description; such is Purnima Mankekar's (1999) magisterial ethnography. It is worth dwelling on it for a moment, for throughout the research she clearly demonstrates how television's texts and their scheduling, characters, and discourses intersect with the organization of domestic space, the ordering of time, family rituals, identities, and gender roles. In this comprehensive ethnography, the texts she considers and the method of analysis she pursues are firmly embedded in the feelings and structures of passionate culture. It is worth considering one example here, namely how Mankekar explores the ritual aspects of viewers' engagement with Param Veer Chakra – a hugely popular series broadcast on India's state-run television channel Doordarshan.

Briefly put, Param Veer Chakra told the story of members of the Indian armed forces who had been awarded the eponymous medal for bravery. The address was both personal and national; the series was taking its audience through the life of each soldier, his youth, his family, his military career, and finally the acts of heroism for which he had been honored. As Mankekar explains, while the narrative structure is similar to that of soap opera insofar as it is centered on psychological conflicts, in Param Veer Chakra the heroes are town between love for their family and love for the nation. In all the cases, the force of nationalist affect prevails over the pull of family-based passions. This structure and the strong nationalist sentiments it provoked were predictable, and indeed sought after (Mankekar, 1999, p. 262). The passions that the program roused (the melodramatic pleasure, the pathos, and the nationalistic sentiments stirred up by the series) were, however, part and parcel of the ritualistic structuring of time and space in the homes that Mankekar researched. Here is her account, which is worth reproducing at length:

What I hope to demonstrate here is that there is much to be gained in terms of understanding our media culture when we see how meanings that are offered to us by specific media texts are drawn into semiosis in the complex practices, spaces, and relationships of everyday life. Indeed, as Jenny Kitzinger (2004) has argued, if the media have any influence at all, it is only through these complex audience activities, and it is the relationship between the three that we should endeavor to understand. In this way we start to see, in the illustration above, the issues of the thick embedding of practices, of the force of the media, of and the way in which they enter our passionate culture. As I detail in what follows, Isaac's introduction to television has to be seen in relation to a whole range of parenting practices, to the daily organization of our lives as parents of a pre-school child, to a wider set of discourses about childhood, parenting, and television, and to the institutions that govern them. As I have argued, such a thick description also needs to be set within accounts of how we felt about these things with our passions: what it felt like to watch, what our hopes and fears, our pleasures and frustrations were; how watching television with Isaac made an impression on us, in our minds, and on our bodies.

Accounting for Force

While the principles of thickness and force are designed to overcome the separation between “text,” “context,” and “response,” the final accounts have been presented (in their published form) as narratives rather than in the somewhat ossified form of transcriptions, which is significant in trying to capture the feelings and affective forms of a passionate culture – that is, the ways in which the media “impress” upon us. But this was the case with the published narratives only; the conceptualization and preliminary analysis emerged, however, from the behind-the-scenes process of transcribing, which calls for creating distance from fieldwork experiences and observations (the objectification of a table, with the clarity that this provokes). These initial analyses were subsequently developed and rewritten in narrative form as I watched the videos again. It was an evocative process, which brought back to me – and, it is hoped, evoked for the reader – a sense of the force of these encounters, of their thick entanglement in the multiple contexts of passionate culture. There was much going back over the materials and much rewinding (and at least as much frustration with how long it takes and with the sheer size of the undertaking). Sara would come into the study at times – to watch, to remember, to feel. Her comments (of a personal nature) have found their way into the analysis. Many times a passing phrase, a tone of voice, or a glance revealed a lot; they drew my attention to things I had missed, forgotten, or thought previously unimportant. Participating in my fieldwork, she was pointing out details that were hidden in the thickness of context, details that invariably brought me back to the experience-near nature of force (when I was tempted to stand back too far) through the experience-distant nature of concepts (Geertz, 1983, p. 57).

Valerie Walkerdine's (1997) ethnographic research is useful here, for she suggests that such a commitment to thickness of context acknowledges the interpersonal (or passionate) space occupied by those involved in the research act, and that the problems with challenging the truth claims of ethnography have more to do with not taking on board our feelings in a systematic manner than with denying having these feelings in the first place. Instead of seeking to banish the force of passionate culture, she seeks to undermine the division between objectivity and subjectivity and to disrupt the idea that the subjective is something that “interferes with, biases and distorts the truthful view of the object of study.” As she continues:

Against the tenets of positivism, Valkerdine's position requires us to take seriously the force of our own personal experience as an analytic category, while recognizing that, as thickly embedded or positioned subjects, we have the ability to grasp certain features of media practices in more adequate ways, precisely because we are dealing with experiential aspects of knowing.

Introducing Isaac

Isaac is just 8 months old, it's Sunday afternoon, and his mother, Sara, has just switched on Teletubbies. They have been playing, there are toys scattered over the floor: reds, yellows, greens, and blues. Isaac looks up at the camera, grinning, while I film the moment. This is nothing unusual, as we are always filming him in order to capture – or rather to produce – our family memories:

Isaac is sitting on the floor playing with his new Po doll; we have just returned from shopping and he is very pleased with it, it's a new toy, but he continues to chew on a plastic building block (dribble running down his chin). Teletubbies starts; he hears the music and looks around to the television. This is a real effort, as he is sitting with his back to the television (he has to twist right around); but it's worth it.

Joining in on the introduction, Sara shares Isaac's pleasure as the Teletubbies jump out of their holes, one at a time. This is a ritual: Sara and Po join in on our side of the screen: “Huh, What's that? Oh, Po.”

NARRATOR:	One.
TELETUBBIES:	One.
SARA:	One.
NARRATOR:	Two.
TELETUBBIES:	Two.
SARA:	Two.
NARRATOR:	Three.
TELETUBBIES:	Three.
SARA:	Three.
NARRATOR:	Four.
TELETUBBIES:	Four.
SARA:	Four.
SARA:	Do you want to turn around so you can see.

As they finish, Sara picks up Isaac and turns him around, sitting him in her lap, and she sits Po beside him, saying: “Look, Po's watching.” All of a sudden the theme music bursts out, breaking its restraint as the Teletubbies dance and introduce themselves. Meanwhile the periscope announces “time for Teletubbies, time for Teletubbies”; as they do so, Sara picks up the Po toy and makes it jump to the rhythm of the music:

NARRATOR:	Tinky Winky.
TINKY WINKY:	Tinky Winky.
NARRATOR:	Dipsy.
DIPSY:	Dipsy.
NARRATOR:	La La.
LA LA:	La La.
NARRATOR:	Po.
PO:	Po.
SARA:	Po.
SARA:	Po's dancing look!
TELETUBBIES:	Teletubbies, Teletubbies, say hello.

The Teletubbies turn to face us, waving “Eh oh!” As they do so, Sara waves Isaac's arm in return; he looks delighted. The singing and music continues and Sara makes Po dance along with the music again:

NARRATOR:	Tinky Winky.
TINKY WINKY:	Tinky Winky.
NARRATOR:	Dipsy.
DIPSY:	Dipsy.
NARRATOR:	La La.
LA LA:	La La.
NARRATOR:	Po.
PO:	Po.
SARA:	Po!

As they play, Sara makes Isaac kiss Po to the rhythm of the music; he grins broadly again, rocks forward slightly, his eyes are bright with wonder: he is completely absorbed in this ritual. Sara and Isaac and Po all hug together on this side of the screen, while the Teletubbies hug on their side: “Teletubbies, Teletubbies, big hug!” “Big hug ahhh”!

A few moments later the windmill appears and the Teletubbies run through the hills to look. We cut to the periscope and Sara asks: “Hu! Where have they all gone?” She has preempted the part of the periscope, which repeats after her: “Where have all the Teletubbies gone?” The dialogue continues as Sara asks again “Where are they?” and dances Po up and down: “We know where Po is don't we!”

Po had a special significance for us. When we first started watching Teletubbies, we somehow engineered an affinity between Isaac and Po. I first noticed this when Isaac was 7 months old, as I recognized how much they resemble each other. Quite by chance, he was wearing a red baby-grow; and he seemed to act and feel like Po, with his growing social feel, his mobility, and his curiosity. As we watched, the “littlest one” produced a passionate response: I picked him up for a cuddle (I just had to). Squeezing him tight (close to tears) I asked: “Are you my little Po?” Perhaps the intensity of the emotion (in the mind) is matched by the affective wave (a welling-up) that rises through the body; the two seem to express each other in a dialogic expression of feeling. A few days beforehand, Sara had picked up Isaac, asking: “Do you want a cuddle? Are you Tinky Winky? No, you're Po because you're red.” She cuddled him saying “Big Hug,” adopting the Teletubbies' intonation. Her affective cadence in imitating the Teletubbies seems to reproduce something of the feeling that lies in and behind a real hug.

A few weeks later Isaac was attracted to dolls in the Tomy, My First Teletubby range. Sara suggested that we buy him Po, “because she is the smallest.” It was actually two weeks later that we bought him Po. Isaac was miserable, having had a tummy bug, and Sara told me he needed it “as it will make him feel better.” When we arrived back home, she suggested to Isaac that he could watch Teletubbies with Po: “Wow! Yeah! You going to watch with your Po!” Soon after this Sara started referring to Isaac as “Pissey Po” (“hello my little Pissey Po”). One morning Isaac brought Po into bed with us. Sara picked up Isaac with Po and gave them a big hug: “Ah, it's my big Pissey Po with his little friend Po, are you my Pissey Po?” We laughed sentimentally at his red baby-grow, “ah he looks like Po,” and I surprised myself by adopting this “voice” (an inflection) in those moments when we were being most sentimental.

On Being a Parent: Thickness and Force

As a game, Teletubbies was “easy,” in the particular sense that it gave us something to do. It was an activity much like those where we interacted through books or toys. “It was easy”: this sounds perhaps a little too frivolous (or lazy, perhaps negligent, inattentive): like I wasn't trying. I feel like I have to defend myself against this “easiness” and against the accusation of neglect, which is so readily assumed when one lets a child watch television. As I write, as I present myself to the reader as a parent to be scrutinized, I find myself feeling apprehensive, self-conscious perhaps: my cultural capital is on display. I will be judged not only as a researcher, but also as a parent. I need to capture what I mean by “easy,” and to find the root of my unease. The question emerges at a point of tension where I am reluctant to speak, to reveal myself. I get a glimpse of the culture that envelops me, of the forces that shape me: it is this place from which I can speak.

Our ease with the Teletubbies game was not due to lack of attention. It was not a lack of care, nor was it an abandonment of Isaac to the screen. Rather, when I say “easy” I mean it to suggest something about the way in which the text offered a structure for interacting, just as turning the pages of a book or playing with building blocks do. I don't feel uneasy about these: I feel proud to display them; I congratulate myself (“what a good parent I am”). No, the unease is specific to television. I was busy, and at times I found it hard work being with Isaac, keeping him (and myself) entertained, while I was feeling that I had other work to be getting on with. I felt that, to be a good parent, I should have to attend to him constantly: to engage as much as possible, to be attentive to every manifestation of his development, and to recognize, nurture, and celebrate his growth. Television is often positioned against the discourse of good and dedicated parenting, and against the dispositions that responsible parenting seems to demand. In some versions of this discourse, subjecting one's children to television is seen as tantamount to abuse (Buckingham, 1997).

But parenthood is fraught with contradictory demands, and I'm not so sanctimonious as to hide this: I needed things to do with Isaac when my capacity for unstructured play waned, when I tired of being attentive, when I was frustrated, and when other things were on my mind. Being with a toddler is hard work. There is a whole support network of institutions, formal and informal, commercial or otherwise, which acknowledges parents' struggles and taps into the interpersonal dynamics that are produced – whatever they may be. The culture industry, in which Teletubbies is a major player, is just one part of this field. As such, Teletubbies can be seen as less of a text and more of a signifying practice: at once a set of discourses, a discrete text to be watched, and a material practice – but also a set of affordances to be taken up and used, to be drawn into semiosis (Kress, 1997). In short, media rituals precipitate a complex set of meanings, some of which were socially given while others were produced as we played. My questions are: Just how do media intersect with culture, and how is one to account for this confluence? These are questions of thickness and questions of force.

Descriptions: Through Thick and Thin

The phrase “thick description” was originally proposed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his famous book The Interpretation of Cultures. For those of us who are not trained anthropologists (and I take it that the majority of this book's readers fall into this category), this can be something of a slippery phrase, not least due to Geertz's somewhat elliptical style of writing. Geertz suggests, for example, that thick description should be concerned with the “webs of significance” in which we are suspended (which we ourselves have spun), and he likens it to reading a manuscript: “foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries.” To make matter worse, such a manuscript is not written but finds its form in the “transient examples of shaped behavior” (Geertz, 1973, p. 10).

Rather than endlessly working through Geertz's concept of thick description and deconstructing what he meant by it, I think we can begin to see what lies at its basis in what has been written above. In this account, the rather mundane practice of watching television with an infant is situated in a much wider nexus of cultural practices. We see the ways in which Teletubbies is not so much a discrete program as a part of wider play and parenting practices, a part of the routines and habits that structure our day and perhaps get us through it. In this we see the ways in which the text is perhaps best approached as a game rather than as a set of meanings; something that has implicit roles, or a set of rules if you like (Briggs, 2007b, 2007c). Teletubbies is also something that articulates a set of discourses: that the program has to be educational, that the romance of childhood, or play, should be made useful (Briggs, 2006). In this capacity, as I have argued elsewhere (Briggs, 2006, 2009a), Teletubbies says more about the construction of the “good parent” than it does about the child. As a signifying practice, it was an almost constant form of address, and one of several trailers made claims about CBeebies' ability to “release your child's potential”:

At this confluence of identities and feelings (passions), institutions and discourses (structures), we can see, perhaps more precisely, Geertz's measure of an adequate thick description. This must be, mainly, a description of meanings, the practices and texts that generate them, and their significance as they unfold in the lives of those we seek to study. But it is also, at once, a case of seeing how these meanings are structured, lived out, and experienced; how they feed back into each other, are resisted, are embraced, are reproduced. But how, then, if this is the case, should we generate such thick and forceful accounts? How do we render passion?

Writing Passionately

This brings us finally to the question of representation: How shall we write from the standpoint epistemology of thickness and force? How shall we order the ethnography? With what signature should the work be signed: how do we render, not only thickness, but also the force of a passionate culture? Since the poststructuralist crisis in ethnography and the so-called “interpretative turn” that ensued in the 1980s, these issues have come under increasing scrutiny. James Clifford notes, for example, that ethnographic writing is fictive like a production, or that its creations are “true fictions.” On this construction of writing, the oxymoron (or contradiction) deliberately suggests the partiality of the claims we make about our ability to represent truth. The realities we produce are dependent, to no small extent, on the language and rhetoric used in the thick description, on the conceptual frameworks employed, on the institutional contexts, and on the honesty and skill of the ethnographer (Clifford, 1986, pp. 6–7, 25). Hence ethnographies are necessarily partial in both senses of the term: they are dependent upon the multiple positionings of the ethnographer there in the field, and they are dependent on the situated nature of the interpretation (the ethnographic text) there in the context of the institution and of the questions that have been asked – and the questions that it is permissible to ask.

Concerns raised about the truthfulness of ethnographic accounts, such as the ones produced here, miss the point. While what I recorded was true in the ontological sense that it happened (that I haven't made it all up), epistemologically the issue is less secure. There are now different sets of issues: how could one hope to verify this? Is this significant? Is it ever possible? Would someone else in the room produce a similar account, use the same words, notice the same things, and consider them to be significant enough to deserve being recorded? What would have been lost in the research materials if I had limited myself to the observable and the verifiable? To argue that my field notes could be invested with the same authority that positivist data have would be a methodological sleight of hand, as Geertz puts it. However, it would also deny the particular form of writing that thick description demands (Geertz, 1973, p. 23).

In suggesting this, Geertz is addressing the question of how to write – the question of what scriptural practice is suitable for rendering comprehensible the thickness and force of lived experience. I want to briefly consider the challenge of representing lived experience, as it is an important and overlooked aspect of writing, both in textual analysis and in audience research. I think that Roland Barthes' work is particularly interesting (and no doubt challenging) in this respect, for this is a question to which he constantly returned in his later writings, most of which deal with the passions. Barthes deliberates, variously, on the pleasure of the text (1975), on the nature of love, and its expression in discourse (1978), on desire (1992b), memory (1992a), loss (1980), and the self (1977). These writings are marked by a very different style from that we normally find in criticism. They are non-linear and polyphonous. They have no single points of entry. They are written as a number of fragments. Indeed, most of this work is arranged numerically or alphabetically. Since the scriptural practice is non-accumulative, these texts only make sense if they are read in a fragmented and decentered manner. While as Barthes suggests, fragmented scriptural practices upset the customs of reading in our society (1974, p. 15) and create particular challenges for the reader schooled in academic writing, such forms of writing that interrupt narrative norms do seem to convey a sense of forceful affect, as well as the inflections of lived experience.

Barthes' (1992a) posthumously published essay “The Light of the Sud-Ouest” accounts for this affective prose quite beautifully. There Barthes reflects on his childhood home in Bayonne. To know one's home, he suggests, to know one's place in the world, to recollect the past, to understand one's present, “to read” all of this and to say something of significance about it, is to read the cultural through the self. Such an interpretative practice demands that we learn to know through the confluence of mind and body, through memory and affect: “to perceive it in terms of the body and of memory, in terms of the body's memory. I believe it is to this vestibule of knowledge and of analysis that the writer is assigned” (pp. 8–9). I read Barthes as arguing that culture, mediated as it is by memory and perception, is known not only through our thoughts (of whatever kind), but also through the sensations they afford: that to know is also to summon up something of the experience of an event, and then to evoke it through language. We need a vocabulary and a syntax that can render the sensations that experience affords: “odours, exhaustions, sounds of voices, errands, changing light, everything that with regard to reality, is irresponsible and having no meaning except to form, later on, the memory of lost time.” This, he argues, is one way to understand the cultural through the self; for “these inconsequentialities, then, are a kind of gateway to that huge region with which sociological data and political analysis are concerned” (Barthes, 1992a, pp. 7–8).

Inconsequentialities

The Teletubbies look like soft toys (either teddy bears or dolls); and, like many other children, Isaac had a Po and a Tinky Winky, along with a family of assorted soft toys. Often these would accompany his viewing. They were part of a wider passionate culture, and, as such, their provenance (a singularity; a personal genesis; a history) endows them with meaning. These connotations tell of the semiotic materiality of the Teletubbies, of the closeness, the warmth, the affection of our passionate culture. As we (Isaac, Sara, myself) look, we experience their touch: the lighting, the perspective (the mise-en-scène) highlight their materiality; the signifier transposes from sight to touch (it is synesthetic). The gaze has a texture, it has a temperature: they look soft: we feel the cuddles, the “big hugs” of our passionate culture, as we cuddle together: Isaac, Po, myself (it could be Wibbly Pig or Pooh, the principle is the same).

This is also a matter of characterization: the well-observed movements of the Teletubbies, their regular somatic displays of pleasure, of awe, of curiosity, of excitement. These are readily recognizable: this, Isaac might say, is what my body feels like (its forms of feeling) when I run, jump, giggle, sing, hug, bounce, fall, roll: when I know what is coming, when we jump up in peek-a-boo: feeling is drawn into semiosis. We recognize the passions that accompany experience: the simple delights of hiding behind a hill, of jumping up, of waving (“hello”); of greeting (“big hug”); of repetition (doing this again and again, so I know what it will feel like). This matches (it expresses) the rhythms of Isaac's body, the rhythms of his play. It amazes me, he wakes at seven after almost 12 hours of sleep, plays until mid-morning with an intensity I can barely keep up with, and then, exhausted, he is back to bed for two hours:

The Pleasures of Sound

These are pleasures of speech, of rhyme, as I call out “Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La, Po.” The television lights up “zing, zing, zing, zing” as I shake my legs: a tingling feeling, tingling (iridescent) with excitement and anticipation.

The Polyrhythms

Each character has a motif, often they seem to be superimposed: a cacophony of movement, of sounds and bodies; each appears on the hillside:

They greet us, with a joy and an enthusiasm (an eagerness) that match their movements:

They never stop:

Po rides the scooter – but the excitement is too much for her (for her body), she falls exhausted onto the floor:

A short rest and all is well; ready to play: again, again, again, again. . .

Passionate Bodies, Passionate Minds

One way of thinking about these issues of affect, as this type of embodied expressivity, is to conceptualize the body as a core that grounds subjective experience. As Barthes argues, we come to know as much through our bodies as we do through our minds (Barthes, 1992a, p. 7). Our bodies, however, are never singular but always dispersed: located in an environment; a body of experience, and an experiencing body. For Barthes, at once “a digestive body,” a “nauseated body,” and a third body “which is migrainous”; others that are “sensual, muscular . . . humoral”; still another, which is emotive, “which moves, is stirred, depressed, or exalted or intimidates.” And there are more: the “socialized body,” the “mythological body,” the “artificial body,” the “prostituted body.” Finally, “local bodies,” which is to say (in a different sense) ecological bodies: “A Parisian body (alert, tired) and a country body (rested, heavy)” (Barthes, 1977, pp. 60–61).

As Susanne Gannon writes, for Barthes the body is a source of knowledge: “but it is unreliable, fragmented, and dispersed in time, not a reliable reflection of any coherent or stable self” (Gannon, 2006, p. 481). This is precisely the point – and the difficulty – in autoethnography: not to make experience posit a stable “I” in its name, but to account (with the aid of concepts) for a phenomenology of the self in process: a self who experiences an affective (embodied) subjectivity in concert (or in dialogue) with others. I take this to be a question of thinking about the phenomenological and affective nature of the experiencing I; of what Ulrich Neisser (1988) calls the ecological self. In Neisser's account these multiple bodies provide a phenomenological locus of being: “‘I’ am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity.” This can be though of as the experiential self of agency and corporal affectively: the embodied self in a particular environment: the self in what I can see, do, hear, feel, touch and control: the “I who can do this,” the “I of coordinated movement,” the “I as distinct from the environment” (Neisser, 1988, p. 36).

As such, the ecological self is radically contextual and must be phenomenologically conceived: to move is to perceive consequences, both optical and kinetic. The perception forms an awareness, a nascent self emerging from the earliest moments of life. This is a coming into being as “bounded,” “articulated,” “controllable”; “by what it can see, and what it can do.” The ecological self is directly perceived, rather than as an object of thought (pp. 39–41). This is vital: the self is never disembodied. We always experience from a location: from a position. Subjectivity is situated in such an account. It must be: it is the nature of our embodiment in time and space (a lived, an ecological context).

This is important not only in terms of thinking about embodied experience, but also for thinking about the self in relation to the world. Taken as such, the ecological self can be thought of in the following ways:

• the self of agency (of authorship over actions and non-authorship of others – of being done to, of volition and repeatability: “this happens”);
• the self of coherence (of a physical whole which is bounded: not the shards of the fragmented self but a unity formed by a locus for integrated action);
• the self of affectivity (who recognizes and remembers the patterns and traces of actions – who feels);
• the self who has a history (it has a sense of enduring: “it goes on being”).

Through practice, the ecological self comes into being in a dialogue with others, with objects, and with self-experiences: “the self is not an experience of being but an experience of becoming, a process of improvisational co-activity with potentially infinite possibilities for self discovery” (Fogel, Koeyer, Bellagamba, & Bell, 2002, pp. 193–194). As this account suggests, the ecological self is performative. It is enacted and engaged, which is to say brought into being and preformed through physical play. The text affords this: there in front of the television as Isaac explores the corporeal, the mediated (simulated), and the material worlds: singing, dancing, waving, joining in, chewing toys, newspapers, pulling cables, blowing “raspberries,” insisting on feeding himself, crawling, tumbling, being hugged, bathed, and changed. He is a self with a physical potential for action. His body is drawn into semiosis experientially; it is felt through forms of feeling in physical and sensual play. While this is pragmatic (Isaac intrudes into the semiotic ecology), it is also pedagogic: Isaac observes, he sees, he listens, and watches. There is recognition: “I can do that,” “I can feel that.” This is experiential, which is to say affective as well as cognitive. These experiences, this ecological self, are cause for celebration: the self is reflected back quite literally by the Teletubbies, whose ebullient characterizations find their origin in Isaac.

The Ecological Self

Isaac is 12 months old. He watches quietly, I sit on the floor behind him; he is having a mid-morning snack (juice and a biscuit): “would you like some daddy” he seems to say as he turns around. He pulls himself up against me, offering the biscuit into my mouth “umm, yum yum, thank you, thank you very much: it's the rabbits, it's the rabbits, wow!” (I revoice Bugs Bunny as the falling refrain sounds in the background). Isaac almost supports his own weight now, and he looks straight into my eyes – our bodies move in concert as I apply just enough pressure in just the right place. This is familiar, sedimented: we both take pleasure, him in standing, and me in “how well he is doing.”

Tinky Winky appears from behind a clump of talking flowers. He waves to us as I ask Isaac what he is doing. I sing along, with the ditty “do do tahh, ohhhh, what's that Tinky Winky doing?” He says “Eh Oh” as he looks at us from the diegesis. He waves again. I return the gesture by waving Isaac's hand: “Eh Oh.” He seems to say hello himself, in a vocal display of pleasure: “yeeh, yeah, yehhhh, yeahhhhh.”

The narrator begins his commentary: “one day in Teletubbyland, Tinky Winky stood on one leg.”

This is no monologue – we all take turns responding:

MATT:	Standing on one leg!
TINKY WINKY:	Stand on one leg!

Isaac is kneeling on bended knees, as we talk he launches himself forwards; sensing the change of tension, anticipating his movement, I pick him up into a standing position: our gestures are coordinated. Just as Tinky Winky prepares for his physical play, I literally scaffold Isaac (to support, but also to prompt):

A drum roll sounds in the background; it marks, with perfect timing, Tinky Winky's bodily performance and Isaac's efforts at standing: as he leans against me, propping himself up, I lift one of his legs in the air, saying “oohhhhhhhh yeah!” (I finish on the last flourish of the drum).

“Again, again,” Tinky Winky enthusiastically signals his pleasure jumping up and down. “Again, again”: he repeats the trick.

Just as he stands up on his own, lurching forward I say: “Can Pissey stand on two legs?” Wobbling he grasps the neck of my t-shirt. As he swings around, I pull him in for a hug: “Yeah clever boy. You're going to stand on two legs, you try, like Tinky Winky.”

In two weeks Isaac will be walking on his own: then he will jump up and play peek-a-boo with the Teletubbies: launching himself upwards (expressively): “BOO!” Isaac plays alongside and with the Teletubbies. Sara and I scaffold Isaac's experiences and, as we assume the implied role, we mediate the text: we draw it into semiosis. These rituals punctuated our patterns of relatedness. In this textual play we take pleasure in our bodies. Isaac explores his body's potential and the subjectivity this engenders. Textual and corporal play works in tandem with the other, for the ecological self is also the self who anticipates, whose body and emotions are shared. A self “in concert” with the other: who literally dances (embraced, as we have seen). Playing peek-a-boo, the familiarity of touch and of being held, the regularities of caretaking (“the way mummy changes me,” “the way daddy hugs me”); laughing together, watching Teletubbies: these are totally social experiences that are embodied, but routine. In short: they are habitual. In peek-a-boo, these interactions excite Isaac in a crescendo of joy and suspense; they are sedimented, however, as they are anticipated; the body knows and expects what is to come, it is prepared, and there is an affirming self-knowledge in this: “this is me, I carry on.” Through this play, Isaac is engaged in vital self-experiences (Stern, 1985, pp. 101–105).

Here I am trying out new ways of thinking, of how affect is related to the text beyond the identification of emotional responses or “pleasures” – a much too general term. By doing so I have to take my lived experience as the epistemological datum. It is not enough to rely on the objectively identifiable (to turn it into a text: to read it). This may explain something of the poetics of the act, of what can be seen on the tape; but this is not isomorphic with the erotics of the act: it fails to capture it, it exceeds it, it speaks a different language – or rather it accompanies it, like another semiotic register. In essence, this is the nature of the passions; for, while they flow and circulate, while they are both subjective and shareable, they are not readily objectified, recorded, and textualized. As an issue of lived experience, passionate culture can only just be spoken of, only just represented. The representation will always be but a poor approximation. We need new vocabularies, new ways of writing, and new ways of thinking to capture this.

Thickness, Force, Power

To conclude the research, I want to return to these issues now, insofar as they can be related back to what is arguably the central issue in media studies: the question of power. I do so by developing a theme that has emerged at several points in my argument and that links the questions of lived experience, affect, and power (pedagogy). As I have suggested, I think these can be profitably thought through as an affective pedagogy (Briggs, 2007c; Highmore, 2009). This is important; for thinking through the relationship between affect and cultural reproduction seems to be an important way of rethinking the rather sterile opposition between “audience pleasure” and “ideological effect.” This is often conceptualized as an opposition between power (the text) and resistance (the audience). Important as these questions are, they seem not to relate to the wide range of meanings that are in play as semiosis is generated, and often they are posed as high-level conceptual issues rather than as empirical questions to be pursued (e.g., Fiske, 1987).

In place of this power/resistance paradigm, I return to the perspective of passionate culture and ask a final question about the yoking of play, affect, and the pedagogic. To do so, it is useful to look at Elspeth Probyn's (2004, 2005) work, for she suggests that one important function of affect is to make us care about things. However, affect does not only make us care; it suggests ways of caring, and different ways of being involved. Here, as I have argued (Briggs, 2007a), affect is the meeting of the mind (the psychological) and the body (the physiological). In such a way Probyn argues that affect creates what can be thought of as “the mindful body”: an embodied subjectivity, which is directed toward the world in a specific and affective modality of interest (Probyn, 2004, pp. 26–27).

The Mindful Body

Teletubbies was habitual: it was routine. Childcare is work, and watching television, for Sara and myself, was part of this childcare. However, this work of childcare can be playful. As work and as play: once one accepts the ambiguity, one can enjoy the game of playing along while still going through the motions, subjected to its logic and to its repetition (both the daily routine and the fixed form of the text): hellos, tummy tales, dancing, magic windmill, goodbye. Play and non-play are not to be sequestered into separate corners of experience. While the routine of childcare is enjoyable, often rewarding, it is also a responsibility. Sara and myself were positioned here as responsible parents (habituated, as I have argued), and I am positioned here in a double articulation, as a responsible parent and as a researcher. My cultural capital was clearly on display, to be scrutinized – by myself and by others. In this way I was a subject of discourse; I positioned myself in relation to it: I habituated myself (see Briggs, 2006, 2009a).

In respect of this habituation, Isaac, as we have seen, certainly wanted Teletubbies on, again and again. It was a regular part of the day, a routine: it was habitual. The program was one means through which our routine was managed and through which Isaac became socialized into the abstract structuring of time (Davis, Buckingham, & Kelley, 1999). Isaac didn't always need to go to sleep after Teletubbies at 10.25, but I needed him to do so. I had other things that needed doing: I needed that hour or so, that space, that time. In this respect, while he wanted to watch, I also wanted him to watch. He was being “stitched” into culture here, in the abstract structuring of time, of space, and of the uses of his body (Foucault, 1979). In the broadest sense, this was an affective pedagogy: the playful and affectionate regulation of his body and of his time. Here we see the channeling of his somatic energies (his passions) toward adult needs and desires, which is to say cultural need and desires. He was learning through play.

An Affective Pedagogy

Isaac is now 16 months old. For once it's a lazy Sunday with no rushing around. We are having a long leisurely breakfast in the kitchen. I'm enjoying this quality time. Throughout our meal Isaac plays with a Teletubby magazine (not designed to be “read” but to be played with: colored in, ripped, talked about, shared). Finished, we move into the front room for Teletubbies. Tweenies is approaching the end, and Milo, Fizz, Bella, and Jake sing and dance the conga. Sara asks Isaac: “Do you want to dance?” He refuses (he is tired, he complains). He walks across to mummy, climbing on her lap, sucking his thumb, one hand behind his ear (his comforter). I interpret his feelings for him: “No, I need a cuddle.” I think that he will go up to sleep as soon as Teletubbies has finished. Perhaps I shall do some work, I have marking to do: so much for my leisurely Sunday.

The Teletubbies trailer begins. It is announcing what is to come and Sara sings along with the music: “Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La, Po.” She gently rocks to the rhythm, matching it with Isaac's mood. After a lull, the familiar music starts again, and Isaac walks over to the television. He picks up a small red basket on the way and hums along to himself, as he pokes it with a white stick (of the type to which balloons are attached). What is “to hand” is drawn into meaning-making here: he shakes it up and down (rather like a conductor's baton), saying “hello” to the Teletubbies as they appear in their house:

ISAAC:	It's there.
SARA:	Who's that!
MATT:	Look! Look at that!
ISAAC:	Yeah, Yeah! It's De! Da.
MATT:	You saying hello!

A little later the Teletubbies march off to the clarion call of the tummy tale. Isaac matches his excitement to theirs: he recognizes the move in the game and vocalizes in anticipation and involvement. The progressive marching music continues as Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La, and Po turn and look up at the windmill. Amid their gasps of delight and wonder Isaac shouts out “Daaaa!” and I respond excitedly “What's it going to be?!!” This is both a question about my pleasure and a request for an answer. Now he will learn about the world. Isaac's reply is a physical response: he runs across to the television and touches the screen as the Teletubbies hug (“they love each other very much”). The pedagogic, the ludic, and the passionate converge: a weave of voices.

To play the text with Isaac is at once to submit to childish pleasures and to share them with him, but it is also to teach him, not only the lessons of the text, but also how to make his pleasures useful: how to harness his passion. In this way we watch with him; we teach him how to respond (scaffolding his involvement): here you join in, let us know if you like it, call out, jump up, sing, talk, and dance: these are our friends. The mood (the inflection, the intonation) of this passionate voice is “wow.” It harnesses his interest, it becomes at once its heuristic partner: “How?” The emphasis here is on the pedagogic: on the sharing of interest. Our bodies become mindful.

This is a pedagogy that is based on affect as much as it is based on ideation. This semiosis translates across different semiotic modes, from touch and sound to sight: it is synesthetic. This is to reverse the common critical position (a cultural pedagogy): Isaac isn't making sense of the Teletubbies as characters, he isn't building up a complex portrait of psychological and cultural traits (the semic, the cultural, and the symbolic codes) in order to explicate a plot (to make sense of the story): he doesn't “read” or “decode” the text in order to make sense of the world, himself, and others. Isaac doesn't ask what the text really means; what (by allegory) that stands for: “What is the social message, the moral?” Later he will attend to these issues and explicate the text in this way (among others). The texts he will watch will address him with this pedagogic voice. His culture will teach him to do this kind of reading (at school, where ideation is the final goal of the text) (Turnbull, 1998). At 18 months, this is not a form of cognition available to Isaac: to critically approach the text only from this position would be to ignore the dynamics of passionate culture and the “impressions” of the text. Here research will need to find ways of asking what happens when feelings and structures meet in passionate culture, when they are yoked together in the thickness and force of everyday life.

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