Michael Mahoney
On Air and Undressed: Jim Spagg and the No-Frills Utopia of Public-Access Television
“This is the point,” urges an exasperated magazine editor at the start of David Foster Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel,” “people do not want to look at shit.”1 Here, there is nothing figurative or incidental about the word “shit,” and as Wallace’s story progresses, the accuracy of this assumption will increasingly be problematized as a conglomerated media industry swarms to the side of a man whose bowel movements are formed in the shape of famous Western cultural artifacts. While it’s fairly easy to see how this forcefully crude and literal “shit as art” device provides Wallace’s novella with an object to comment on the absurd state of a post-millennial American media culture caught up in an obsessive and paradoxical drive toward both “reality” exposure and shock, by the time of its 2004 publication this bodily conceit would likely have been the furthest thing from novel for viewers of Portland, Oregon’s cable access network, PCA-TV. In fact, 2004 probably brought some degree of morbid relief for many of the more conservatively minded PCA viewers who could now safely assume that they would no longer be bombarded with any further broadcasts that featured live shots of defecation. After 11 years of controversial programming that had only recently come to an uneasy halt, local eccentric and public-access television fixture Jim Spagg had unexpectedly passed away, due to complications from leukemia, mere months before a temporary ban on airspace usage stemming from an act of televised excretion would have been lifted.
All of this is merely to say that the initial, indignant concern about the unmarketable nature of shit at the start of Wallace’s novella seemed to be in concert with the reality of an isolated case of broadcasting live defecation. But even if Wallace was too eager in suggesting the arrival of the American media’s ultimate destination in the toilet, “The Suffering Channel” remains poignant in its diagnosis of the increasingly precarious and troubling nature of media industry labor in the face of a growing penchant for shock-based reality programming. Here, we get a fictionalized representation of something that oftentimes gets lost in critical accounts of American mass media in the age of reality TV: namely, the actual experiences of work that the production of such content practically entails, and, as a corollary, the associated affects that emerge in response to the particular logics of profit-driven exploitation that structure such experiences. In a recent anthology chapter on the history of workplace dynamics in the American television industry, Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson note that an industry-wide movement toward reality programming that started to unfold around the time of the 1988 Writers Guild of America Strike “radically challenged the existing division of labor”2 in TV production, as networks increasingly began to favor these lower-cost formats over more expensive, scripted products. Noting that “the creative workforce, largely below-the-line workers,” were ultimately “forced to bear the brunt of these cost cutting strategies,” Curtin and Sanson describe how the use of “amateur talent, repurposed home videos, and hidden camera footage”3 came to replace a larger, unionized body of labor. In other words, Curtin and Sanson provide a thorough account of how the rise and subsequent proliferation of low-cost, reality-based television programming in the U.S. throughout the 1980s and 1990s can be understood to index a large-scale transformation in both the divisions of labor that govern the production of content and the very logics of “creativity,” “quality” and “craft” that underwrite these divisions.4
With this in mind, I want to briefly align myself with the shit-show promoters in Wallace’s story in a larger effort to draw some lines of conceptual distinction in places where networked media convergence seems to otherwise posit more romantic ideals of creativity, quality and craft as aesthetic fulcrums for corporate strategies of appropriation and exploitation. Here, I find the case of Jim Spagg and his televised acts of transgression to provide something of heuristic value, as the vast bulk of his broadcasting career entailed an ongoing effort to probe both the regulatory and cultural boundaries of a very specific set of affordances made available by the institution of public-access television—an institution that not only radically redefines the notion of “user generated” TV content, but that importantly crops up on a national scale almost simultaneously with the industry-wide transformations taking place around “reality” content that Curtin and Sanson describe in their essay. My contention is that public-access television, viewed as an institution that openly affords individuals with a potential platform for unregulated expression, provides a unique context for a form of cultural production that occupies a distinctive liminal space within the larger framework of a mass media landscape that is overwhelmingly networked, globalized, and dominated by commercial interests.5 With a decade-long tenure on Portland Cable Access that consistently outraged viewers with a crude array of uncensored nudity and voyeuristic home video footage, Jim Spagg and his career offer a distinctive occasion for critically evaluating the political-economic stakes of public-access television insofar as they serve as a limit case for the extremes to which this freedom of usage could be pushed. This paper will accordingly take up Spagg’s televised antics as the embodiment of a historically specific condition of creative practice in which an emerging late-capitalist culture of DIY ideals arrives at the medium of television. Moreover, as an aesthetic enterprise which depends on the constant subversion of the more familiar regulation standards for broadcasting content on commercial TV, Jim Spagg’s media legacy equally stands as testament to the potential of public-access television’s embedded promise of a publicly controlled means of production. While Spagg is hardly the first or only oddball to utilize public-access airspace for eclectic or challenging purposes, my purpose here is simply to treat him as a case study for a tragically underdocumented field of artistic production that’s specific to the medium of public-access television. While I won’t be able to do proper justice to the larger contours of this public-access avant-garde, I will merely point out that its legacy extends to the present day with programs like New Haven, CT’s surrealist variety show The World We Live In, featuring the always baffling comedic genius of Nick Grunerud and Peter Cunningham.6
In distinction from network-produced forms of television content and the larger media ontologies they inhabit, I will consider how public-access television provides a site for radical redefinition of these media ontologies through its embedded, utopian logic of community “access.” I should stress that in describing this logic as “utopian,” by no means do I wish to offer a blanket endorsement or valorization of the entire field of practical instantiations of this condition of access, or even to suggest that the very real anger and outrage that Spagg himself generated was wrongheaded or philistine. Rather, my purpose here is merely to point out how public-access television constructs and organizes a set of relations that disrupt and blur conventional categories of production and spectatorship on a material level in a manner that operates above and beyond the asymmetrical “semiotic” feedback loops that scholars like John Fiske have optimistically tried to posit as a site of generative exchange between television viewers and network producers. Without necessarily doubling back into sentimental cultural mythologies about the supposedly autonomous “independent” arts, I am interested in how public-access television affords a potential space for non-commercial artistic or intellectual activity within a media sector that is otherwise dominated by an “underlying macroeconomic structure that has set, and continues to set limits, parameters, and operating rules of national broadcasting as show business.”7 In this respect, my understanding of public-access television as a utopian enterprise conceptually leans, in part, on Jose Esteban Muñoz’s revival of a distinction first formulated by Ernst Bloch between “abstract” and “concrete” utopias. Drawing from Bloch, Muñoz observes that “Abstract utopias falter for Bloch because they are untethered from any historical consciousness. Concrete utopias are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential.”8 While I argue that public-access television can be understood as the instantiation of a concrete utopia insofar as it emerges as a publicly controlled and operated institution for expression that bears only a minimal degree of formal relationality to commercial TV, I equally want to preserve a dialectical frame of reference that locates it simultaneously in contradictory terms as a site of struggle against both the asymmetrical, profit-driven imperatives that govern television broadcasting and, as the case of Jim Spagg makes clear, a struggle that oftentimes manifests on a level internal to the affordances of public-access itself. To borrow Muñoz’s own language, I want to posit that public-access functions both as a “public” and a “counterpublic” entity, one that frequently subsumed larger community conflicts in the form of internal battles over the terms of acceptable airspace use.
What is fundamentally utopian, however, is that the “public” circumscribed by public-access television is not so much a collective instantiation of some Habermasian ideal, as Ralph Englemann suggests, but rather a site where the divisions and objects of labor itself are both productive and reproductive: productive in a utopian sense, where the work of producing content for television is open to any interested party for any given expressive purpose, and reproductive in a formal sense, in that it harnesses TV’s own organizational structuring of content into blocks of scheduled programming which vacillates between newly taped shows and reruns of older shows. In the latter case, and largely as a result of the bare-bones, low-quality technology set-up for public-access stations, which often creates a situation where taped recordings will rotate in and out of the broadcasting schedule for upwards of an entire decade with minimal (if any) information that would distinguish between newer content and much older programming. As with many cable televisions, public-access pads out its airtime with reruns but, for the most part, there are no formal mechanisms in place that would easily separate the reruns from fresh content. If this formal similarity seems to be at odds with the ideal of “community focused television” insofar as it merely reproduces the governing logic of corporate broadcasting—an objection that Adorno would seem to anticipate in his repudiations of amateur radio—there are nevertheless some distinguishing details that seem important to clarify here.9 First, all of the programming is produced by and for interested members of a given community and, by airing such outdated content, public-access television can actually be seen to further valorize that content by re-airing it so frequently.
Although I am more interested in questions of labor and the dynamic and fluid relations between production communities and audience on public-access TV, this is where Muñoz’ discussions of utopian temporalities actually seems to offer more than mere identity politics. Writing on C.L.R. James’ notion of the “future-in-the-present,” Muñoz writes: “I contend that James’ dialectic utopianism…helps us imagine the future without abandoning the present. James’ formulation works as a refunctioned utopianism that is predicated on a critique of the present.”10 I would extend this, however, as a critique of the present that manifests on multiple, oftentimes overlapping registers: a critique that takes the form of pragmatic public challenges to very real problems facing their communities, but also a critique that actually carries out its operations on the dominant formal structures of commercial TV media itself and the temporalities that it organizes and constructs. With this in mind, I want to propose that public-access television provides an occasion for confronting what Fredric Jameson has called “the shape of a Utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the Utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.”11
Unlike Muñoz, I am admittedly less interested in the questions of identity that govern his project—questions that too easily risk sliding back into tacit affirmations of the very neoliberal imperatives of selfhood that they profess to resist—but it would equally be an oversight to ignore the manner in which Jim Spagg is very much a figure who would fall under the rubric of at least one of his so-called “sexual avant-gardes.” But as I hope to show, questions of identity politics only form a single topical service of what public-access TV is capable of achieving on a more collective level. From a dialectical standpoint, Spagg certainly performs what Muñoz elsewhere terms rituals of disidentification, “a mode of performance whereby a toxic identity is remade and infiltrated by subjects who have been hailed by such identity categories but have not been able to own such a label.”12 But to write this off merely as some shirking of “hegemonic” normalizing impulses is to ignore the fact that this actually did produce a highly variegated community response, with both organized efforts to defend Spagg’s actions and organized efforts to put a stop to his antics. As the lead sentence to an obituary notice from the May 9, 2004 issue of The Oregonian perfectly conveys, Jim Spagg seemed to have an almost intransigent penchant for drumming up public controversy during the last two decades of his life
Jim Spagg, who thought of himself as an artist, but who attracted attention from angry parents and shocked legislators a decade ago for prancing naked on cable-access television, died Saturday at his Portland home.13
To put it bluntly, Jim Spagg was a one-man engine of public scandal: an artist—a term I’ll use without necessarily affirming his own purported claims to being “the greatest artist of all time”14—who specialized in shock, using television as his principal medium. But again, Spagg was not involved in any major network broadcasting (aside from appearing in a brief segment on the Fox newsmagazine A Current Affair devoted entirely to a long-standing feud between Spagg and his neighbor, Ed DeKota), nor was he a (known) part of any signal intrusion incidents.15 Born in Ohio, Spagg relocated to Atlanta in the 1980s, where he first discovered the affordances of local public-access television and began producing highly eccentric content for a program called The Jim Spagg School of Humanity which assaulted viewers with a seemingly random collage of studio and home video footage held together only by Spagg’s style of “hosting,” which generally consisted of a mixture of monologue ranting and off-key karaoke singing. Viewers were also invited to call in about anything that was on their mind, likely marking off Spagg’s shows as a rare breed of public-access programming that airs calls from viewers but is fundamentally impossible for viewers to prank call (the scourge of many public-access call-in shows around the country, as a quick YouTube search reveals). After an arrest involving the sale of pornography to an undercover police officer, Spagg relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he not only resumed his activities with the local public-access station, but escalated them in terms of both volume and the unprecedented nature of his content. Taking advantage of a local law that classified nudity as protected first-amendment speech,16 Spagg hit the Portland airwaves with a string of programs whose titles alone should give an indication as to the source of their controversy: Jim Spagg’s Sex Show, Jim Spagg’s Nude Scene, Jim Spagg’s Naked Truth, and the perversely tantalizing Jim Spagg’s: The Show Where “It” Happened Before and “It” Will Happen Again.17
Even if there was a great deal of on-air nudity involved (and clearly there was), as I hope to make clear, there was actually more to these shows than mere exhibitionism on display. Aside from a large handful of archived newspaper articles describing Spagg’s broadcasting antics (usually in the context of viewer outrage), the only widely available public record of Spagg’s antics consists of around 65 clips from his broadcasting career on YouTube, most of which have been uploaded by a user with the all-too-fitting moniker “freespeechfan.” The content of these clips falls fully within the acceptable terms of use stipulated by YouTube’s “Community Guidelines,” which explicitly state “YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content. If this describes your video, even if it’s a video of yourself, don’t post it on YouTube.”18 Meaning, in other words, that the only recorded artifacts from Spagg’s shows available to those outside of the Portland area are all categorically devoid of the sort of content that made them controversial in the first place. To be sure, we get plenty of segments where Spagg is talking about backlash he’s received for some of his more indecent content (for example, there is a 20-minute segment split into two parts called “Why I Crapped on TV”), but no nudity, no obscenities, and certainly (and thankfully) no scenes of actual defecation. With that being said, however, what we do get from these clips is an almost sui generis mixture of freeform segments that weave together clips of Spagg either singing or ranting with assorted clips from home video recordings. One clip begins with a Hawaiian-shirt-clad Spagg standing in his living room, giving a breathless monologue about his status as a “false false prophet” while messages like “Public-access TV: It’s The Closest You’ll Come to Reality TV” and “Viddy the Show” flash across the screen in brightly colored, stock computer fonts. This monologue then cuts rather suddenly to a brief interlude segment of a truncated conversation about the Grateful Dead between Spagg and an unnamed woman in what appears to be a public-access studio. While the messages continue to flash across the screen, this studio segment has been thoroughly treated with low-grade post-production image-mirroring and overlaying effects that blend shots of walking crowds over silhouetted doubles of Spagg and the woman, giving it an almost psychedelic visual quality. Moreover, a soundtrack of loud ragtime piano music running throughout the segment makes it difficult to actually focus on the spoken conversation before the scene cuts off entirely and abruptly transitions into a lengthy clip of audio-muted home video footage of Spagg and his neighbor sparring across a fence. The loud piano music continues, and brightly colored messages like “Jumping Gee-Horsey Farts!,” “Happy Doodles!,” “Far Out Groovy Scene!” and “Nudity is not Dirty!” flash across the screen: messages that appear to be signature catchphrases, as they similarly pop up in a large number of the archived clips.19 Spagg’s personal tone and presentation throughout the clips is equal parts euphoric, jovial, and defensive, even as he is extolling his own merits and virtues as an artist: much of the content here is justificatory, even if his reasoning for “why I crapped on TV” really only boils down to a naive statement that
taking a shit is just an ordinary, average, normal everyday thing, and so I just wanted to put that on my show and it amazed me how many people got excited about it…I wasn’t trying to offend anyone, and it shouldn’t have been offensive other than that it was strange because it’s something that you don’t normally see. So that’s why I, Jim Spagg, world’s greatest artist, took a shit on TV-there you have it. Happy doodles!20
My own sense is that Spagg defecated, performed naked, and spoke about whatever was on his mind over local television airwaves out of a more basic motivating principle: namely, that he simply knew that he could. I want to suggest that as an extreme—and extremely tenacious—figure within a nationwide tapestry of eccentric and oftentimes licentious public-access broadcasting, Jim Spagg, in styling himself as the “man who shit on television,” was equally attempting to utilize the relatively permissive nature of public-access regulations as a means to redefine the broader field of cultural relations that television occupied as a preeminently commercial enterprise. Here, of course, Spagg is hardly alone—in fact, many of the clips that are available on YouTube feature monologues about the merits of public-access in providing an alternative to mainstream media: “of course public-access is also media, but it’s more honest media,”21 quips Spagg in one such segment; “you can’t get anything more honest and more real than public-access television.”22 Fittingly, a very similar desire for a media outlet that addresses and represents the interests of a highly diverse audience in an “honest” and direct fashion underwrites much of the cultural backstory behind the institution of public-access television broadcasting. Even a cursory glance at the history of public-access television in the U.S. reveals a story of utopian optimism about the potential for decentralized, community-based broadcasting that began in the heyday of 1960s radicalism. But before turning more closely to this history, it’s worth pausing here to emphasize that public-access television should not be understood as being synonymous with the more ubiquitous “public television,” which generally serves as colloquial shorthand for content aired in the U.S. by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). While both provide a platform for noncommercial television content, they stand in stark distinction from one another in almost every other practical respect. In his comprehensive Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History, Ralph Engelman stresses the importance of recognizing “a fundamental distinction…between federal and community forms of public radio and television, with the former rooted in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the latter in more decentralized and participatory practices.”23 While PBS airs professionally produced programming aimed at national audiences, public-access television provides a forum for locally produced content aimed at very narrow local audiences. Moreover, while PBS receives funding support from private donations, grants, and annual federal appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which also oversees National Public Radio), public-access stations and utilities are paid for entirely by regional cable franchise-holders. Public-access TV, in other words, is truly public television in the strictest sense: a participatory, community television that is managed and produced exclusively by and for private citizens (to be clear: public-access is equally not a proxy for local news broadcasting, though local government sessions and debates are often aired on public-access stations).
In her seminal Make Room for TV, Lynn Spigel argues that the stateside rise of television during the postwar era provided both a site of focus for larger cultural debates about a variety of domestic concerns and a representational medium which codified the contradictory terms of such debates.24 Here, Spigel challenges a trenchant strain of critique that reads television as a medium for manifesting fantasies about a “safe” divide between the public and domestic spaces, noting that “the ideology of privacy was not experienced simply as a retreat from the public sphere; it also gave people a sense of belonging to a community.”25 Public-access TV, however, radically catalyzes this sense of community around an entirely different mode of organization, one that circumscribes television viewers and television producers into roles that are theoretically interchangeable. To be clear, this is not merely just a context for what John Fiske and his acolytes have termed the “semiotic democracy” of televisual meaning, where television programming addresses itself to an audience that is “equipped with the discursive competencies to make meanings and motivated by pleasure to want to participate in the process.”26 Rather, public-access constitutes a nationwide “system that provides television production equipment, training, and airtime on a local cable channel, so members of the public can produce their own shows and televise them to a mass audience.”27 With the advent of user-uploaded streaming media websites like YouTube, the idea of a broadcasting platform for user-generated, locally produced content might seem banal. While I don’t wish to write off public-access as merely the formal precursor to such online entities, both seem to share a low-barrier entry logic with respect to DIY broadcasting that is almost unprecedented in terms of individual rights of access in the history of American mass media outside of similar decentralized forums for local radio broadcasting, though even these are generally held accountable for certain FCC broadcasting regulations. Unlike local newspapers, which maintain a curated staff of writers and editors and generally screen any reader-generated content before press, public-access television is much more demotic in its operations, generally requiring only an application and attendance at a training session for equipment use.28
Throughout his prescient 1974 work Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams wavers between a critical interrogation of the formal relations organized by the medium of television and a cautious optimism about the potential affordances that it might make available to a more radically minded enterprise. In drawing out some fundamental distinctions between the content makeup of British and American television, Williams even seems to reluctantly grant the latter a more democratic composition, noting that American television is much more open to public argument. There is a crucial difference in the fact that many public proceedings in the United States, from Senate hearings to local schools’ boards, are broadcast or televised, whereas in Britain there have been repeated refusals to allow the televising or broadcasting of any parliamentary proceedings. Again, there is the American use of the ‘free-speech message’, which usually comes among the commercials. This excludes certain categories of message which are subject to law or formal vote, but includes points of view about a wide range of public actions and attitudes, given on the speaker’s own responsibility….What can be said in general is that the transmissive elements of television are more widely used in American practice: an interpretation in terms of access.29
Here, note that Williams defines “access” as a central feature of what television should ultimately aspire to, and the cautiously optimistic forecast that concludes his book radically affirms this:
cable facilities, like the air-waves, must be conceived as publicproperty, and the operation of these facilities, by any group to which licence has been given, must be part of the system of publicly protected contracts between the cable operators and production companies. In many cases there could be permanent links, in particular communities, between local public-owned cable companies and production companies: real local bases from which some material would pass into one or other of the networks.30
Williams was, in practice (though not always directly), joined by a chorus of similarly minded efforts to stimulate such a vision into a concrete logic of production. A quick survey of the history of how such a demotic, DIY approach to television production emerged in the U.S. reveals a rather timely conjunction between media technology and political activism. As Engelman and Deirdre Boyle have each pointed out, the concept for public-access TV emerged side-by-side with the advent of home video recording technology in 1967, when Sony released the Portapak, the world’s first handheld video recording device formatted for television broadcasting, to consumer markets. As Engelman notes, the Portapak was immediately conceived of as a tool for New Left activism, providing a viable communications resource to media groups with names like “Raindance, Videofreeks, People’s Communication Network, Video Free America, Ant Farm, Global Village, and the May Day Collective,”31 who commonly sought to create alternative broadcasting channels freed from the constraints of mainstream commercial interests. Thus, political activism and emerging consumer technology were suddenly colliding and conspiring in the form of a demand for media outlets, and more often than not this took form around an aesthetics of shock. In Boyle’s words,
Video offered the first TV generation a means to challenge the authority of the ‘boob tube,’ to replace television’s banal entertainment and negative images of youthful protest and rebellion with the counterculture’s values and a fresh, new televisual reality. Fueled by adolescent rebellion and Utopian dreams, video promised an alternative to the slickly civilized, commercially corrupt, and aesthetically bankrupt world of Television.32
While I will turn to the affordances of video technology toward the end of this essay, I merely want to point out the fact that while countercultural, underground currents were directly responsible for projecting a desire for television access, the point here, again, is not to uphold some neoliberal logic of fetishized resistance or subversion for its own sake (especially when “creative destruction” and the Silicon Valley mantra “move fast and break things” have become bywords for deregulated free market anarchism). Not only are the vast majority of public-access broadcasts simply recorded proceedings of community forums (or commentary thereon), but it should equally be stressed that numerous other incidents of “controversial” programming involved far-right-wing, white-supremacy groups exploiting the same affordances as people like Spagg.33
Media historian William D.S. Olson provides a thorough overview of the slow and tenuous process by which advocates attempted to secure the use of unregulated airspace in the U.S. following the FCC’s Third Report and Order in 1972, which contained a provision that “all cable systems in the top 100 U.S. television markets [are] to provide three access channels,”34 with additional clauses mandating at least five minutes of free airtime for anyone wishing to use these channels, and that facilities and equipment be provided to members of the public. However, it was not until the passing of Barry Goldwater’s 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act that all cable franchise holders were suddenly forced to concede channel space for uncensored noncommercial public, educational, and local government use: so- called “PEG” bandwidth allotments. In practice, many cable franchise- holders exploited a loophole in this 1984 law to collect full franchise fees without the burden of providing facilities and bandwidth allocations by asking their partnering municipalities to opt out of the PEG mandate. As Boyle points out, “cable companies were free to run their local monopolies virtually unregulated, creating concentrated media empires that threatened to outstrip the former big three network monopolies. It was now up to individual communities to demand that public-access channels be provided and maintained in each new franchise agreement or renewal.”35 With this exception, however, those communities that did demand public-access stations and facilities from cable franchise-holders were entitled to pockets of airspace that fell completely outside the scope of the administrative constraints on broadcasting content set in place by the FCC. This resulted in two important and related outcomes: first, that both the means of television production and the use of airspace were suddenly made available to all interested members of the public; and second, that these members of the public could effectively use that airspace to whatever ends they desired without fear of regulatory sanctions. This, along with local laws that permitted nudity as protected speech, was what theoretically and practically allowed Jim Spagg to produce such controversial content. In fact, it wasn’t even technically the obscene act of defecating on camera that finally got Spagg temporarily banned from PCA-TV; rather, it was actually a somewhat flimsy allegation of copyright violation. The legal injunction against Spagg alleged that “a videotape of a show produced by the Independent Producers Organization that Spagg taped and re-broadcast on his (fully-clothed) talk show from Jan. 15 to Feb. 2” was copyrighted material, though this was almost certainly a fairly transparent smoke-screen to boot him from the air after his act of defecation.36
Without even dipping into the vast pool of examples in cases where “freedom of speech” has been bandied about in the service of some deeply troubling refusal of accountability, it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that the underlying ideals here reveal a deep- seated utopian fantasy for unchecked expression. Yet, in addition to providing a forum for a variety of immoderate political orientations, public-access broadcasting regulations equally provided a context for reevaluating the nature of television production itself. This is ultimately where Jim Spagg seems particularly relevant, as his decade-long stint of broadcasting indecency seems to manifest the most far-reaching extent to which these ideals could be pushed in the creation of television content. Unlike an earlier and more prominent wave of individuals who were predominantly using public-access television as a mere means toward some larger political end, the genius of Spagg’s chaotic televised exhibitions rests in the manner in which they seem to be largely inseparable from the form of their expression within the medium of broadcast television. Spagg’s inflated claims to being “the greatest artist of all time” notwithstanding, I think it’s fair to read Spagg’s career as an ongoing experiment in demonstrating the formal and representational affordances that noncommercial TV functionally made available to the public, an experiment which required a probing of its limits.
It’s worth stressing here that this is not just a matter of Spagg’s seeming to eschew a coherent conceptual purpose for his programs: there are unifying themes, of course, such as his penchant for first-amendment rights and his often repeated attempts to demonstrate that “nudity is not dirty” and “people are too busy, and too serious.” Gleaning from the small archive of clips available online, one gets the impression that the inchoate torrent of content in any given broadcast is too much of an assault on the viewer’s attention span to really serve any function beyond a perceptual and cognitive overload that simultaneously mimics and excessively proliferates the structures of attentional capture and framing employed by commercial TV broadcasting. Thus while his artistry seems deeply embedded in the technology and organizational working logic of television at large, in giving us a kind of overdetermined surplus of attention-grabbing content, Spagg manages to critically expose these structures in their heightened and accelerated form.
About midway through the third volume of Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler laments the fact that even the most salient Western Marxist contributions to a critique of the contemporary culture industry “engage in no analysis of television’s technical dimension—and even less of its phenomenological consequences in terms of individuation.”37 For Stiegler, this oversight constitutes an act of betrayal to Marx’s own, more properly dialectical, mode of analyzing the structural tensions between the material products of any given industry and the material conditions which subtend them. While I think that Stiegler’s attendant discussion of the manner in which television organizes a distinctive mode of temporal experience might usefully be recast in the context of public-access television toward a number of ends, I equally want to suggest that it needs to be appended to a more thorough account of the particular labor relations involved on the production side of TV. That is, even in accounting for the particular technical characteristics of television, Stiegler equally commits the error of dissolving the facts behind the concrete production of television into its finished products. As John Caldwell succinctly argues, “film and Television do not simply produce mass or popular culture…but rather film/TV production communities themselves are cultural expressions and entities involving all of the symbolic processes and collective practices that other cultures use.”38 As Spagg himself seems to suggest in many of his frustrated rants about the administrative backlash he was frequently subject to over his PCA-TV career, his show constitutes a stylized testament to the horizontal production logic of public-access television. If Curtin and Sanson describe a movement toward increasingly polarized bodies of creative labor in the television industry starting around the 1980s, it’s worth pointing out here that their timeline for this transformation dovetails precisely with the advent of public-access allocation. In this respect, Spagg might be seen to perform what Michael Taussig has termed the “labor of the negative,”39 that is, a ritualized act of inversion which exposes and profanes the relations which structure and maintain constitutive public secrets. Here, the secret invests itself publicly as an illusory skin of flexibility and horizontality for a body of labor that remains highly stratified and exploitable. Curtin and Sanson note how the turn toward reality programming fundamentally transformed the nature of TV production, making it something of a post-Fordist laboratory where “creativity, popularity, and entertainment were all reconstituted through an industrial and managerial order that divided and organized the labor to insure efficiency and obscure the social relations among workers, and between workers and their audiences. This division of labor allowed corporate owners to control the workforce and extract the surplus value of their labor.”40
Here we should be clear: Spagg’s Sex Show was predominantly a one-man production, yet it seems to track well with this larger turn toward a highly flexible, non-unionized labor force and “prosumer” logic that depends upon the conversion of consumers into sites of unpaid, but nevertheless nonexpendable, creative labor. Here is where I think we can bring this into direct conversation with Stiegler’s account of how television is formally underpinned by a larger “contemporary hypomnesic technology of industrial temporal objects.” Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s theory of the pre- mnemonic retentional constitution of internal time consciousness, Stiegler argues that television structures a temporal experience of global immediacy and presentness while at the same time working to ensure the “forgetting of retentional mechanisms supporting this world of tools that are themselves forgotten as tools, devices that precisely constitute this world as world, and through whose interiorization we see, sense, move, think, etc.”41
Spagg’s shows fundamentally seem to invert this logic by forcing their audiences into a state of heightened attention, shifting the burden of temporal coherence onto the viewer, rather than constructing it as an effect for them. Mary Anne Doane famously asserts that “Television’s conceptualization of the event is heavily dependent on a particular organization (or penetration) of temporality which produces three different modes of apprehending the event—information, crisis, and catastrophe.”42 For Doane, informational modes are what present a formal ordering of time in sequential fashion, which crisis works to concentrate into a condensed temporality of the event. Finally, Doane posits the catastrophe mode as one that persistently constructs a temporality marked by a recurring sense of presentness without a past or future.43 Spagg’s show seems to enact all three of these modes, if not simultaneously, then at least in rapid succession. Watching even short clips of his programs requires a great deal of effort, as Spagg performs his trademark rants in various states of undress while dancing around in front of a green-screen background that rotates between home video footage and a wide spectrum of pornographic material. Moreover, live broadcasts came with an invitation for viewers to call in to the show, with an explicit understanding that there is no possible way for this to constitute any kind of interruption: prank calls, the scourge of public-access hosts across the country, are theoretically impossible here. In almost Cagean terms, any member of the audience could at any time be productively folded into the performance. But beyond literalizing the terms of “consumer labor,” Spagg equally invites viewers to construct a prosthetic memory for what Stiegler will describe as the prosthetic temporal retentional technologies of television itself through frequent appeals to “viddy the show.” Lucas Hilderbrand describes how “home video technology emerged amid debates about its suspect legality and potentially damaging uses”44 as cable companies and network firms struggled to preserve the profitability of their copyright holdings in the face of this reproductive technology. If, as Hilderbrand asserts, there is a close formal relationship between videotapes and what Stiegler would call a “prosthetic memory”45 then the invitation to record and even, at certain points, re-sell these programs seems to indicate a potential site of technological reappropriation within Stiegler’s self-described forecast of malaise.
In closing, it’s crucial to stress that the point here is not to suggest that Spagg was producing non-commercial “art” in distinction from otherwise empty commodified programming: as programs like the Tim and Eric show reveal, the rough and eccentric form of public-access broadcasting has come full circle into the realm of salable content. While Spagg hardly seems to prefigure Wallace’s fantasy of “a channel devoted wholly to images of celebrities shitting,” I want to suggest that what made Spagg unique was his capacity to manifest public-access TV’s radically innovative and penetrating utopian vision. To be sure, this was a vision for re-organizing divisions of labor and creative enterprise at the precise moment when the gathering storm clouds of the neoliberal economy were beginning to erode the familiar shapes of such categories in the commercial television industry at large. While the familiar rejoinder to public-access shows might be “But they’re shit,” in Spagg’s case that’s precisely why we should take them seriously as potential critical sites for rethinking the cultural landscape of television and television production in a post-network era.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, first and foremost, to my partner, MacKenzie Weeks, whose intellect, insight, and patience have inspired and sustained me well beyond the scope of this essay. Moreover, I also extend my deepest thanks to Catherine Liu, Michael Szalay, and Richard Godden for their intellectual guidance, professional support, and personal generosity. Finally, I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of my close friend and co-conspirator Joseph P. Krall: I miss you, Joe.
1. David Foster Wallace, “The Suffering Channel,” in Oblivion: Stories (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 238.
2. Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson, “The Division of Labor in Television,” in The SAGE Handbook of Television Studies, ed. Manuel Alvarado et al. (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2014), 140.
3. Curtin and Sanson, 140.
4. Curtin and Sanson, 140. More theoretical questions concerning these underlying aesthetic ideals are only gestured to in Curtin and Sanson’s piece in order for them to maintain their primary focus on describing the organizational logics and lines of division that constitutes contemporary television production cultures.
5. See: Timothy Havens, Global Television Marketplace (London: BFI, 2006).
6. John Kilduff’s Let’s Paint TV is also worth mentioning here as an example of a highly eclectic public-access programming career, as it seems provide an instance of a transition from television into user-uploaded, streaming video platforms. Garnering recognition from mainstream media outlets like VH1 and CBS, episodes of Let’s Paint TV famously consist of Kilduff trying to paint while engaged in byzantine multitasking stunts such as running on a treadmill, playing ping-pong, blending drinks, and/or taking live phone calls from viewers. Although the program gained wider recognition in its current incarnation on YouTube, Let’s Paint TV initially ran on Los Angeles public-access from 2002 until the studio was closed in 2008.
7. Ellen R. Meehan, “Why We Don’t Count: The Commodity Audience,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990).
8. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 3.
9. See Theodor W. Adorno, “On The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, Susan H. Gillespie, ed. Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley: U of California Press, 2002).
10. Muñoz, 56.
11. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso Press, 2009), 423.
12. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999) 185.
13. Peter Farrell, “Jim Spagg, Whose Nudity Riled State, Dies,” The Oregonian, May 9, 2004.
14. This was a claim that Spagg made quite frequently on his show and on his now-defunct websites (see: Jim Spagg, “Why I Crapped on TV Part 2” YouTube video, 9:33, uploaded by “freespeechfan,” July 23, 2008, https://www.ycom/ watch?v=qPG90RKCWK0.
15. Signal intrusion is a procedure that involves hijacking the broadcasting path between individual television stations and their entire network of subscribers. The most well-known incident, “The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion,” occurred in 1987, when two different Chicago stations were suddenly interrupted by an individual wearing a latex Max Headroom mask. HBO and Playboy TV also experienced well-known signal intrusion events in 1986 and 1987 respectively.
16. Farrell.
17. Lauren Drake, “Nude, Lewd—and Screwed,” Willamette Week, May 20, 2003, http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-2059-nude-lewd-and-screwed.html.
18. “Community Guidelines,” YouTube accessed May 5, 2015, https://www. youtube.com/yt/policyandsafety/communityguidelines.html.
19. Jim Spagg, “Jim Spagg—Bad Neighbors Caught on Camera 2,” YouTube video, 10:02, uploaded by “freespeechfan,” August 14, 2008, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=lmb6_Yl6yMU.
20. Jim Spagg, “Why I Crapped on TV Part 2.”
21. Jim Spagg, “The Media Hates Jim Spagg Part 1,” YouTube video, 9:14, uploaded by “freespeechfan,” July 23, 2008, https://www.ycom/ watch?v=5jsjvnJ2kaA.
22. Jim Spagg, “The Media Hates Jim Spagg Part 2,” YouTube video, 8:57, uploaded by “freespeechfan,” July 23, 2008, https://www.ycom/ watch?v=NMld0-LHZdw.
23. Ralph Engelman, Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996), 4.
24. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
25. Spigel, 100-101.
26. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987), 95.
27. William D.S. Olson, “The History of Public-access Television,” 2000, http://billolsonvideo.com/history-public-access-TV.html.
28. Most stations provide free or low-cost equipment training to interested parties. For example, the station which aired Spagg’s programming currently charges a small fee for equipment training (“Become a Producer,” Portland Community Media, accessed May 4, 2015, https://www.pcmtv.org/producers/become-a-producer), while New Haven Connecticut’s Citizens Television station provides free training (“Access Information.” Citizens Television, Inc., accessed May 4, 2015, http://www.citizenstv.net/access_information.html).
29. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 46.
30. Williams, 154.
31. Engelman, 239.
32. Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), 4.
33. David A. Kaplan, “Is the Klan Entitled to Public-access?” New York Times, Arts, July 31, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/31/arts/tv-view-is-the- klan-entitled-to-public-access.html.
34. Olson.
35. Boyle, 196.
36. Drake.
37. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010),
38. John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham: Duke UP, 2008)
39. See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999).
40. Curtin and Sanson, 140.
41. Stiegler, 159.
42. Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 223.
43. Doane, 233-4.
44. Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham: Duke UP, 2009), 5.
45. Hilderbrand, xiv.
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