About a decade ago, I took part in a panel discussion at Frieze Art Fair that centred on what television scholars call the ‘qualitative turn’, that which is more popularly referred to as ‘the golden age of television’. In short, TV that behaves like ‘art’, which is to say: TV that showcases the bourgeois socio-aesthetic gestures and postures that once set the novel apart from the fable, pictorialism apart from photography as mere recording, Italian neorealism from Hollywood, and so on. I was joined by the philosopher Aaron Schuster, the artist Melanie Gilligan and the BBC producer Jonty Claypole and, in spite of our individual disciplines, we all acknowledged this trend. We did not, however, see eye-to-eye on what it entailed: mode of narration, visual register, character study, tone, production values, politics? - 大约十年前，我在Frieze艺术博览会上参加了一个小组讨论，集中讨论电视学者们称之为“质变”的问题，也就是更普遍地称为“电视的黄金时代”。简而言之，表现得像“艺术”的电视，也就是说：展示曾经使小说与寓言相区别的资产阶级社会审美姿态和姿态的电视，与摄影相区别的仅作为录音的图画主义，来自好莱坞的意大利新现实主义等等。哲学家亚伦·舒斯特、艺术家梅兰妮·吉利根和BBC制片人乔蒂·克莱波尔也加入了我的行列，尽管我们各自有自己的学科，但我们都承认这种趋势。然而，我们没有就它所包含的内容达成共识：叙事模式、视觉语域、人物研究、语调、生产价值、政治？
Women’s Liberation Movement
Decoding the image of Stuart Hall manning a crèche at the Women’s Liberation Movement conferenceA few months ago, this image of the late Stuart Hall, cultural theorist and political activist, appeared on my Twitter feed. Lying half-supine in light-coloured pants, a barely read newspaper cast to one side, Hall looks like he could be on a beach with a sleeping child slung across his chest. ‘Stuart Hall manning the crèche at the first Women’s conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970 ’ read the tweet bannering the image. The use of the noxious verb ‘manning’ and the truncation of the conference’s full name aside, the problem with this interpretation is the fist-bump emoji. Hall is conducting the basic human task of childcare: why does this appear so radical in 2017? A friend suggested that the scene is being viewed as a utopia. It is meant to remind us of the revolutionary ideas, such as the conference crèche, which never came to pass. Indeed, I’ve never seen a crèche at a conference. One of the tricky things about claiming this image as utopian is that utopias tend to ignore infrastructural details such as childcare, meal preparation and rubbish removal. They imagine a world in which such things just happen, seamlessly, without notice or concern. Look closer into the background of this image. There is a woman, her back to the camera, body bent over a child, reading perhaps. I wonder how many books, albums, artworks, made by men and women, have been assisted by labour such as this – invisible, unacknowledged, unpaid? Taken out of its private archive and posted for public celebration, this image centres a male scholar as a leftist hero to women, when what he is doing should be seen as merely routine. I can only imagine Hall would be horrified to be cast in such a light. Men should care for children without expecting credit. Once they do, perhaps we can finally begin to imagine a more ambitious and inspiring utopia for people of all genders. This is what the Women’s Liberation Movement conference – its full title – was all about. - 在几个月前的《妇女解放运动会议》上，Stuart Hall manning译作了一张《CR Ce Che》的图像，这张已故的斯图亚特·霍尔、文化理论家和政治活动家的形象出现在我的推特上。在一条浅颜色的裤子里躺着一半仰卧着，一张几乎看不见的报纸扔到一边，霍尔看起来像是躺在海滩上，一个睡着的孩子从胸口垂下来。