Policing the Wire
by zunguzungu
I love The Wire, good lord I love The Wire. But I continue to be struck by how often the conversation about the show insists on rehearsing a narrative of TV transcending TV, one of David Simon’s favorite hobbyhorses. Here he is, for instance, in the introduction to the new edition of the a book first published in 2004 (h/t), darkly castigating television’s slavishness to the commercial break:
“As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it – or at least that has been the case for most of its history. What else can we expect from a framework in which the most pregnant moment in the story has for decades been the commercial break, that five-times-an-hour pause when writers, actors and directors are required to juke the story enough so that a trip to the refrigerator or bathroom does not mean a walk away from the television set, or, worse yet, a click on the remote to another channel.”
And of course he’s not wrong; The Wire could only be the show that it is by getting past the very constraints of the medium which he is here identifying. The Wire’s narration is novelistic in a specifically Benedict Andersonian sense: it interpellates “us” in the same way “the wire” connects the criminals to the police who are watching them, producing defining categories by the very process of surveillance and communication. Anderson argued that the “rise of the novel” coincided with the imagination of national communities, because people had to learn to think of themselves as occupying the same national space as their compatriots, the same way a student has to learn to think of all the characters and events inside a book as occupying a single “novel.” The novel and the nation, in a crude sense, are both pedogogies that teach people new ways to apprehend themselves and their place in space and history. It’s interesting, then, that Simon sees the work of the show as teaching us:
“The first thing we had to do was teach folks to watch television in a different way, to slow themselves down and pay attention, to immerse themselves in a way that the medium had long ago ceased to demand.”
Again, I don’t think he’s wrong when he asks “how can a television network serve the needs of advertisers while the hollowness at the core of American politics, education and newspapering is laid bare, and it is made entirely clear to viewers that they are a disenfranchised people, that the processes of redress have been rusted shut, and that no one – certainly not our mass media – is going to sound any alarm?” The kind of cognitive dissonance that a commercial break in The Wire would produce is truly difficult to imagine, and I really think he is right: the show simply could not work without the sense that everything was happening at once, the extent to which it causes you to forget the texture of its medium. This is why, I think, The Wire could never be self-reflexive about that medium (in the way The Conversation is, for example): it imagines place and collective political possibility through the very simultaneity which it artificially produces.
At the same time, to argue, as Simon does, that “The decoupling of the advertising construct from a broadcast entity was the key predicate for the political maturation of televised drama” is to make the particularities of The Wire’s ideological and aesthetic choices into a narration of maturation in a way that could benefit from being considered more critically. Simon writes, for example, that this “calculating restraint offered viewers a chance to do something that television rarely, if ever, allows its audience: They were free to think hard about the story, the different worlds that the story presented, and ultimately, the ideas that underlie the drama.” But any time the creator of a text talks about how his or her readers/viewers are “free” to interpret, well, I get nervous; if you think you are both teaching and liberating your readers/viewers, well…
Bonus The Wire Content! #1 — Apparently Harvard is teaching a class on The Wire! (h/t) But instead of being taught by some dumb flack in an English department, it is being taught by William Julius Wilson, who is pretty much the shit.
Bonus The Wire Content #2 — Have you guys read Policing the Crisis? What a book, man, what a book. It’s sort of an advanced critique of The Wire’s anti-capitalism, and reading it is at the root of all my “The Wire is nostalgic for a liberalism that never existed” ethos lately. I may stage a debate between The Wire and the CCCS, when I get around to finishing Policing.
The Wire is nostalgic for a time when labor was organized and effective and when economic constructs did not hold maximized profit and little else to be of societal benefit. That liberalism existed for a critical period in modern American history. It was called the New Deal.
I understand that; I am too, in all sorts of ways. But to say “that liberalism existed for a critical period in modern american history” is problematic when you look at all the things “liberalism” didn’t include: women’s and minority rights, for example. FDR brought us all sorts of new deal projects I like; he also brought us internment camps and no meaningful steps on lynch law in the south. All I’m saying is that labor has traditionally been organized in ways that favored the welfare of white male laborers above all, often quite explicitly. That’s not to say it’s not better than what we’ve got now (the absence of labor organization) in some ways, but it’s why I question the “nostalgia” narrative. We can’t (and don’t want to) replicate the past, we want to learn from it and do better than it. But I also think nostalgia is weak progressive politics; progressives are called progressives for a reason, while it’s a conservative staple to talk about the way things used to be (and plays into the hands of people who are interested in maximized profit above all).
Nice post, Aaron, as always. A comment about simultaneity. I agree absolutely that the show’s impact has everything to do with the sense that everything’s happening at once, but not in quite the way you’ve mentioned. I think you’re making too big a deal about the lack of commercial breaks. The cognitive dissonance they’d provoke would, yes, be funny and ironic and weird, but I don’t think the show would have had any less impact if it were broadcast on one of the big networks. Most people still would have watched it on DVD, and if its content is truly strong enough to transcend the TV medium altogether, then it’s certainly strong enough to transcend the constraints posed by a few commercials.
Also, I think your point about simultaneity would have been stronger if it had thought about the show across seasons. That’s the organizing conceit, right? — that all the seasons/institutions in it are held together by the metaphor of “the wire.”
In fact, this leads to an interesting set of issues. Consider also that Anderson’s theory about the novel and the nation is speculative at best unless you take into account his analysis of the technologization of the newspaper and its crucial role in creating the sense of simultaneity that you’ve attributed to the novel itself.
In all the thinking about the show that I’ve heard or read, technology plays a shadowy, oblique role. The typical critical move is to sociology or history or aesthetics (understandably). But if one watches the show’s intro sequences, for instance, technology is absolutely fundamental. Is it important, for instance, that the titles of David Simon’s previous work emphasized concrete materiality (literally)? Homocide: Life on the Streets, The Corner. The question I’d invite all Wire fans to think about is in what ways does the show develop or transcend the Andersonian reading, viz. its understated emphasis on technology? Does technology, for instance, interpellate us in different ways, or create new modes of simultaneity?
Seafan, yes wrt the point about seasons, which I hadn’t thought about. But yes! And since the show finally dead-ends onto the newspaper as the paramount institution being eviscerated by neoliberalism, the very technology of nation building in Anderson’s account, it loses the kind of critical distance that a film like The Conversation starts with (or which Stuart Hall’s Policing the State doesn’t have to worry about defending). Have you seen the conversation, by the way? Such a good movie; if you liked the Wire, it’ll interest you.
Is there not an equivocation inherent in your lumping Simon’s claim to having to teach viewers to watch TV different with his suggestion that once they learn to accept the story on different narrative terms, they are then in a position to think about the content seriously.
certainly, it is conceivable that The WIre producers could be correct in their suggestion that viewers needed to learn to view the show on different terms than commercial cop show stuff. Indeed, the early critiques of the show in its first season — including the NYT reviews, among others — was that it moved too slow and was not paying out plot as it ought. Once viewers accepted The WIre on its own narrative dynamic, then they were in a position to acquire the content and think on it. Isn’t that what Simon is saying? By lumping the issue of narrative form together with content and claiming an equivocation in Simon’s stance, aren’t you in fact creating a straw man?
Throughout the great pattern of tnihgs you get an A for effort and hard work. Where you misplaced me was on all the specifics. As people say, the devil is in the details And that couldn’t be more correct at this point. Having said that, permit me reveal to you just what did work. The article (parts of it) is certainly incredibly engaging which is possibly the reason why I am making the effort in order to comment. I do not make it a regular habit of doing that. Second, even though I can see a jumps in reason you come up with, I am definitely not sure of just how you seem to connect your details that help to make the final result. For the moment I shall yield to your point but trust in the future you connect your facts much better.
hello there and thank you for your info – I’ve certainly pecikd up something new from right here. I did however expertise some technical issues using this site, as I experienced to reload the web site lots of times previous to I could get it to load properly. I had been wondering if your web host is OK? Not that I’m complaining, but slow loading instances times will sometimes affect your placement in google and could damage your high-quality score if ads and marketing with Adwords. Anyway I’m adding this RSS to my e-mail and could look out for much more of your respective fascinating content. Ensure that you update this again soon..
Fiktshun009 / If you are a blogger you would crtaee a post announcing that you are participating in the challenge using one of the badges I have included on the SSRC page.If you are not a blogger but a Facebook you would post a link to the signup post with some kind of a message announcing that you are participating in the challenge and then just leave a link to your Facebook page.If you have neither and want a post crtaeed so that you can have an extra entry, I’ll be happy to Guest Post it on the blog SoulScreamersReadingChallenge.blogspot.com you would just email me what you wanted to say about you, why you’re participating and anything else. I’ll post it on that blog and you could use the link from that post as the link for the participation post to get entry for the gift card or books at the end of the challenge.My email is fiktshun[at]gmail[dot]com.
fantastic issues altogether, you just won a new reader. What would you suggest in regards to your put up that you just made some days in the past? Any sure?
very nice