Abstract
While the representation of pinboarding has long been an aesthetic feature or narrative device in film and television, Anne Ganzert’s discussion of the phenomenon argues that it is being increasingly used as televisual shorthand or trope ‘that quickly and easily explains what would otherwise take up additional time and effort’ (p. 5). She suggests that this increase is associated with the ‘upswing in police procedurals’ (p. 1) coupled with an increase in design thinking in print media and the proliferation of web 2.0 platforms (generally understood as the confluence of social media, user-generated content and cloud computing). The argument is premised on the notion that many viewers, having become acclimated over the past two decades to increasingly complex television narratives (Mittell, 2015), are actively or ‘consciously televiewing’ (p. 31) pinboards as epistemic objects which weave together the cultural practice of embedding, organising and analysing knowledge in a network of text and images in order to solve some problem. Yet, even as this point on the role pinboards play diegetically aligns with the existing discourse on transmedia as a recombination of data, symbolism and practice-based theorising (Ewenstein and Whyte, 2009), it also extends to Ganzert’s main thesis of pinboards as dispositive in relation to the structures of knowledge and power at play in televisual seriality. She takes the American television series Homeland (2011–2019), Castle (2009–2016), Flash Forward (2009–2010) and Heroes (2006–2010) as exemplars of the major ways pinboarding recirculates itself in an array of sign systems, distinct narrative meanings, materialities and creative production practices.
Arguing that within these television series (alongside illustrative tangents to others) ‘seriality detaches itself from the narrative and becomes its own aesthetic form’ (p. 19), in chapter 2 Ganzert proposes a Deleuzian approach that focuses not solely on pinboarding’s functions but mainly ‘on [its] relations and their qualities’ (p. 39). Yet, these functions – which provide evidence of places and spaces, time and knowledge – are comprehensively taken up in consecutive, if frequently overlapping, chapters and it is here that Ganzert’s methodology of close textural incision really sticks with the reader. However, Ganzert’s analysis, with its focus on visuality and relationality over aurality and singularity, can occasionally come off as unbalanced for a forensic deconstruction of an audiovisual medium; her omission of sound or its lexical markers from her extensive referencing and indexing is as curious as it is striking, though it is may be understandable, given the pinboard’s status as a ‘silent’ entity or visual attribute.
Nevertheless, having established how pinboards are pictorially configured in a process of visualisation which entails the application of genre expectation, colour theory, camera movement, characterisation and narrative necessity, chapter 3 focuses on the historical materiality of the photographic image; it explores how, in its ‘claim to represent reality or truth’ (p. 92), the photographic image mediates time through an indexical system of mnemo-signs in a series of references between its dual address to the viewer and characters. These intradiegetic relations thus become ‘evidence when they are integrated into a discourse [that]…enforces its believability’ (p. 99) via the serials’ recontextualisations of this primary property of pinboards. In chapter 4, Ganzert then borrows Baudrillard’s notion of maps as visualisations of ‘the spatial relations of representations’ (p. 108) to show how pinboarding can be appreciated as a ‘diagrammatic way of seeing’ (p. 111) which serialises the process of cognitive abstraction onto the plane of the image surface, organises the synthesis of the different signs into the blueprint (which operates as a specific aesthetics style through repetitions) and considers how inscriptions, or the pinning of objects on the board, fabricate temporality by folding the narrative into a visual memory of its most important details. This latter feature is especially useful for viewers as it accounts for both the increasing visual literacy required by the diverse viewing practices in our technology-saturated world and, while operating within the the trend in contemporary television to exhibit discontinuity, distortion and ambiguity, allows for, an otherwise absent, orientation of time and place.
Chapter 5 expands the mediation of pinboarding to a type of epistemic expectation that entails ‘episte-scopo-philia’ in which ‘seeing a character come to understand something certainly can be described as pleasurable’ (p. 142). Since delayed gratification is reflective of the conditions which occasion it, Ganzert draws on Foucault’s bifurcation of le dispositif as an assemblage of relations that, when constructed within the television apparatus, is both distally sensate for viewers and schematic for characters. Ganzert uses this concept to demonstrate how pinboards become topological images of knowledge generation through which the pinboarding character enacts processes or behaviours of abductive, inductive or deductive reasoning. Indeed, in shifting focus to the spatial changes, alterations and variations made, Ganzert reconfigures the diagrammatic system into a heuristic pictorial register that visually connects (or disconnects) subconscious associations, camera movement and montage. Positioning the structure of pinboards as essentially critical enables the comparison of modifications such as ‘rips and tears’ or ‘loose ends’ in television series other than those discussed here. Ganzert then posits in chapter 6 that the pleasure in serial television doesn’t necessarily dissipate upon the series’ finale but can reconstitute or transform itself in re-watching, in intra- and extra-diegetic remakes, and especially in spin-offs (not to mention literary extensions such as ‘forensic fandom’, reviews and technical evaluations). This reinstantiation of pinboards as serial images is ‘part of television’s self-reflective process when TV series address their own necessary ability to adapt to change in order to continue and create new episodes’ (p. 199), effectively importing the processes of recursion into narrative discursion.
After observing that pinboarding can incline towards a figurative trope that ‘merely illustrates the serial narrative rather conditions it’ (p. 214), Ganzert concludes by classifying ‘pinboarding as a cultural technique that visualises the reciprocal creation of board and show, of narrative and montage, of viewers and media’ (p. 224). By visually simulating these relations, pinboarding becomes in part dispositive of television’s seriality while also evoking a reflection on seriality more generally. If anything, then, Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television makes the case that the study of television ontology requires an interdisciplinary approach that applies a range of ‘methodologies and theories from (moving) image studies and art theory as much as from television, narrative and seriality studies’ (p. 229).