Complexity, Prefiguration, and Cultural Hybridity

Understanding how television producers work within a variety of levels of culture is further informed by two additional concepts, the first focusing on the individual as a source of culture and the second attempting to explain cultural behavior from a macroperspective. The first set of concepts comes

from Ricoeur, who argued that people keep track of time through a nonlin ear emplotment of their lives, building on Aristotle's concept of mimesis. The emplotment process involves prefiguration, configuration, and refigura tion (Ricoeur, 1984). The major focus of my discussion will be prefiguration

because that is the phase space where the patterns of meaning first become apparent. Ricoeur showed how the individual is coupled with culture; how the individual is a recursive symmetric scale of the culture, if you will.

The second concept, which I discussed in Chapter 2, is hybridization. More specifically, I will examine several theoretical variations on how a gen eral theory such as hybridity may be applied to specific global and national actions, such as those of television producers. I will also refer to Ricoeur and use his notions of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration to show how

cultural patterns begin to emerge in complex, often hybrid cultural systems. Combined with complexity, these concepts help show that beyond quan tifiable, somewhat predictable effects of demographic factors on peoples' cultural choices within complex cultural systems, there are a number of far

less linear cultural elements. These combine to create complex possibilities of cultural formations or patterns within cultural systems. These patterns or

formations can be seen as the reflection of fractal patterns of strange-that is to say, nonlinear-attractors, using complexity theory terms. A wide vari ety of cultural elements combine to form patterns of cultural knowledge and

1 44 Chapter 6 cultural choices, such as those of television producers. These patterns depend

on a specific context, which is itself constantly evolving in a process of hybridization of elements. Ricoeur ( 1984) termed this context a prefigura

tion to encounters with culture or communication acts. Complexity and Cultural Change

Within the emergence of culture are stable patterns. Once patterns are set, even within complex systems, they tend to create boundaries that maintain them. Arthur ( 1990) noted that "once random economic events select a par ticular path, the choice may become locked-in regardless of the advantages of alternatives. If one product or nation in a competitive marketplace gets

ahead by 'chance,' it tends to stay ahead and even increase its lead" (p. 92) .

A s a n example, Arthur cited the success o f the VHS videocassette recorder over the Betamax. Despite similar starting positions, better marketing of VHS increased its initial market share; this made it popular with rental shops, which reinforced its market share in a positive feedback loop.

In cultural terms, these relatively stable patterns can be seen as patterns within strange attractors. Prigogine and Stengers ( 1 984) described how sys tems use communication to counter destabilizing forces and limit the impact of significant shifts in the external environment. Valdez (personal communication, June 8, 1 997) saw cultural fractals as emerging within the kinds of parameters discussed above as boundaries. Valdez gave an exam ple of how conditions like the rise of urban centers, which concentrate intel lectual and economic resources, make certain kinds of cultural formations possible, such as the variety of artists who participated in a few centers to create and support the Latin American baroque period of music, architec ture, sculpture, and literature. Certain conditions made cultural production possible. For example, the Baroque movement of Europe created an initial imported or received cultural condition within the Spanish and Portuguese colonial contexts. In Latin America, this movement drew on local elements as well to create patterns, which produced Baroque cultural products that resembled those of Europe but differed in many details (Valdez & Hutcheon, 1995).

Gonzalez ( 1 997) talked about cultural fronts, both in the sense of borders between cultures (that may be hybridizing) and in the sense of battlefronts, "fractal zones of intersection and interpenetration . . . resistance,

'capitulations,' negotiations and skirmishes" (p. 32; see also Gonzalez, 2001 ). Gonzalez saw networks of people drawn together in fronts. One example for him is the combination of genre traditions, television industry structures, tele vision producers, and television audiences that produced the Latin American

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telenovela, a distinct variation on the rather globally dispersed notion of the soap opera. Producers drew on European serial novel traditions, American radio and television soaps, Cuban and other early Latin American adaptation of those genres, and emerging local and national cultural traditions that lent themselves to melodrama on television. Audience response ensured that advertisers would supply the economic resources for continued and expanded production of telenovelas in an increasing number of countries. Audience feedback shaped the productions away from elite-focused dramas toward a

mass culture form that resonated more with a variety of traditions and plot devices and that could involve both men and women, peasants, urban work

ers, and the middle classes (Martin-Barbero, 1 993). This cultural formation spread all over Latin America, with distinct adaptations or fractular varia

tions, so that Brazilian telenovelas are quite different from those of Mexico (Hernandez, 200 1 ) . Earlier, I discussed the commercial television soap opera

as a fractal or pattern; here, the effect of distinct national cultural formations of people, institutions, and resources makes for patterned but not particularly linear variations. The source of these patterns at the level of the individual is prefiguration.

Ricoeur and the Hybridization Process Ricoeur ( 1984) was trying to account for how humans create a time

based narrative for their own lives and also enter a discourse with a larger social group. His model is useful because it shows how individual narrative

patterns may become part of a larger culture. Ricoeur ( 1984) focused on how narrative emerges over time and describes a prefigured time, where

sense-making begins and patterns emerge; a configured time, which is the immediate social reality-the immediate experience of culture; and a refig ured time, which is the projection of the narrative, both personal and col lective, into the future (p. 54). Ricoeur's refigured time feeds back into the prefiguration, the context for configuration, and the immediate experience

of culture. I argue that it also connects with a broader culture. The symmet rical patterns of individual prefigurations are also visible in a larger culture,

j ust as the patterns of the larger culture are present at the level of the indi vidual prefiguration. These are recursive layers in which the individual has

exceptional experiences but also shares most of the broader cultural context, and indeed is constantly feeding parts of his or her own experience back into

the cultural context via refiguration.

For communication scholars, in a social environment, prefiguration is the first evidence of cultural patterns. Ricoeur's ( 1 984) language is similar to complexity theory in that he said prefigurative notions are held "within the

1 46 Chapter 6 field of our temporal experience. " He suggested that the patterns emerge in

an understanding of narrative plots. Plot, according to Ricoeur, is an " imi tation of action," echoing and building on Aristotle's notion of mimesis (as explicated in Ricoeur, 1 984). In other words, plot is both symbolic and real, acting as a kind of attractor for both meanings and behavior.

When applied to television, this echoes the point that genres are formulas for connecting the expectations and lived experiences of audiences with the creative direction and needs of producers (Allen, 1 995 ) . A television genre, such as soap opera or its specific fractular relative in the telenovela,

is a concise formulation of expectations drawn out of a common prefigura tive context by both audiences and producers. When writing melodrama,

authors and producers draw on the prefigurative to anticipate the interests of their audiences. Audiences choose programs based on interests and images similarly drawn from the shared cultural prefiguration. The audience expe

riences the television program in the moment of configuration. Their satis factions and dissatisfactions are communicated to each other and, through a

variety of personal and mediated channels, enter the larger cultural context through refiguration, which then eventually (re)cycles into the prefigurative.

Ricoeur's ideas suggested how patterns, which are partially but not com pletely cultural, evoke a certain context for meaning as meaning emerges and as time moves from a prefigurative to a refigurative state. This prefiguration

is generally the first sense of boundary and pattern that can be articulated in complex systems. Ricoeur ( 1984, p. 55) argued that once people see the pattern, they project it on others as a general assumption of understanding. Prefiguration is emergent, in that neither time nor this process is ever fixed. It is underdetermined, in that individuals can never be fully aware of what part of the pattern originated in the culture and what part may have origi nated in genetics, individual agency, and so on. It is holistic in that prefigu

rative ideas, regardless of their source, arise from individuals to impact the whole system in some way. Individual experience within the configurative

stage takes place in interaction with other people and their ideas. The indi vidual's interaction with others also then refigures the cultural context in a

large summation, which forms and reforms holistic cultural patterns.

To analyze the process through which cultural formations, such as television genres, are created, Ricoeur's ( 1 984) ideas of prefiguration, con figuration, and refiguration are useful. He described the context in which someone receives a cultural artifact as the prefiguration, which includes cultural elements that form cultural knowledge. From a general pool of cultural knowledge, individuals draw a personal repertoire of symbols and interpretive understanding. Thus, television producers or writers sitting down to create a new melodrama in Brazil or Taiwan will draw on a pool

Producing National Television, Glocal and Local 14 7

of cultural knowledge. In fact, they will draw on several pools at several levels. The previous example shows that Brazilian serial producers took both global and regional Latin American models into account, drawing on new ideas that circulated at both levels, global and regional. More partic ularly, producers or writers know that the new television program must succeed with its original national audiences, even if they hope that it might later be exported to regional or global audiences as well. So the pool of understandings in Brazil or Taiwan about what makes for an interest ing melodrama or soap opera is crucial. That pool of knowledge includes the writers' own previous work, things they wish to borrow from other parts of national culture, a sense of what a "Brazilian" or "Taiwanese " soap opera ought to b e like, and feedback from the audience about what they like.

This prefigures or shapes the work of writers, producers, actors, and others in the production process. It provides boundaries and rules, as well as resources for the moment of creation. As producers create, they structure not only their work but also prefigure the viewing experience of the audience. That audience encounters a narrative that will inevitably have, to use Hall's (2001 ) idea, an intended reading included or encoded by the authors, a pre figured message that the producers hope to transmit to the audience. Such

prefigured knowledge also affects another step in television, which is the cul tural understandings of program distributors and programmers (Harrington

& Bielby, 2005; Havens, 2006). In choosing what programs to buy, sell, and schedule, they also dip into the same pool of knowledge but make their own assumptions about what audiences like.

The prefigurative should not be seen as determinant. Bhabha ( 1 994) noted:

The representation of difference must not be read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articula tion of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going nego tiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. (p. 2)

Bhabha emphasized that culture is performed, or what Ricoeur would call configured, at the moment when an individual or group creates or encoun ters a work of culture.

People are thought of as consuming cultural products such as televi sion programs. The moment of media consumption is the configuration.

Individuals receive media within a cultural context and work within limits or boundaries imposed by economics, access to technology, and class-related

148 Chapter 6 demographic characteristics, such as education. Also, individuals employ

cultural knowledge from the cultural prefiguration or context. Individuals process media within a cultural context, making sense of media using cultural knowledge (Martin-Barbero, 1 993). Much of the sense making goes beyond the individual, however. People talk with others in a process of symbolic interaction and social construction, using interpretive communities to which they belong (Lindlof, Shatzer, & Wilkinson, 1988). Conversation selects elements, again within a cultural context, which are then added to the cultural context. This refiguration process, according to Ricoeur, reworks the cultural context, which then becomes the prefiguration for ongoing or further media consumption.

The idea of refiguration also provides a sense of how television producers learn from their audiences. People talk to each other and "word of mouth" develops about a television program that either excites or disappoints

people. Often that word of mouth reaches producers directly as they try to find out what people think of their work. For example, several well-known Brazilian writers for telenovelas have said in newspaper interviews that they listen carefully to what their maids say about their shows and others to get direct feedback. Production houses and networks, particularly the dominant

network, TV Globo, also run focus groups, do surveys, and look at ratings to get feedback about programs. At a less formal level, both ideas from tele vision programs and audience reactions to them sink into the larger pool of shared culture. Characters are remembered as beloved or hated, influenc ing how writers develop new characters and how audiences interpret them. Certain social or political themes resonate and are expanded or avoided. For example, one Brazilian soap opera in 2001 started off to develop three themes: cloning of human beings (the soap title was The Clone or o Clone),

how Arab-Brazilians were fitting in, and drug use among teenagers. As feedback came in to the writers and producers, it became clear that, after September 1 1 , the second theme was more interesting to the audience than the first, and the third theme became so compelling that the show was fol lowed frequently by short interview segments with real-life teenage drug users about their experiences to amplify the theme. All of these kinds of cul tural waves refigure the larger pool of meanings. The next time someone either creates or watches a television program, the prefiguration of both cre ation and reception now includes these new meanings and symbols.

To understand more clearly how television producers and programmers work, it is helpful to review the notions of localization and glocalization, two specific forms of hybridization that I explored in Chapter 2. First, I look

at how various national or local producers tend to take ideas they have seen in foreign genres or specific programs and adapt them for local productions,

Producing National Television, Glocal and Local 149

which I might characterize as glocalization (Robertson, 1995). Second, I examine the idea of localization of transnational formats. I will look first at

the adaptation of global models to national and local production (Moran, 2004), which has been prevalent since 1 950, and then later in Chapter 7

(Chalaby, 2002; 2005a), at how (in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan) global producers of television programs and channels intended for export have slowly worked toward adapting those cultural products toward new audiences other than those for which they were produced. Then, I test a new concept, delocalization, to look at how those in countries such as Brazil, Hong Kong, or Mexico, who have produced programs for a specific cultural or national audience, try to adapt them for global or regional audiences.

Complexity, Prefiguration, and Cultural Hybridity