Television Aesthetics: A Pre-Structuralist Danger?

This article is, in part, a response to Jason Jacobs' earlier and intriguing 'Television aesthetics: an infantile disorder', published as part of the 'Good Television?' special issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2006). More than that, however, it is also an attempt to push the debate about television aesthetics-and, more specifically, issues of value-towards further reflection on what is at stake in processes of canon-building and in work and in work which appears to enact and embody specific cultural tastes and identities. I will argue that a 'traditional aesthetic discourse' is very much identifiable in a number of key pieces in the field of TV studies, Jacobs' work among them, and that far from being either merely 'subjective' or wholly stratified by sociological identity, this discourse is in fact linked to a specific philosophical position which I will term 'pre-structuralist'.