Damiem Edam Stankiewicz
Program in Culture and Media
Dept of Anthropology
New York University

Political Aesthetics: Europe and discourses of creativity at teh French-German television station 'ARTE'

In 1992, Jérôme Clément, President of the first European television station, “ARTE,” wrote in a Le Monde editorial, “ARTE is a European project…What could be more important for Europe, now under construction, than to forge in common a memory, an imaginary, a common view of the world that surrounds us?” ARTE’s mandate is the production of “European” television programming that will encourage the “understanding and coming together of European peoples.” Funded by French and German governments, ARTE today boasts a viewing audience of over 100 million. Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, not far from the European Parliament building, ARTE’s staff of approximately 450 people is mostly French and German. ARTE offers an example of how far an integrating Europe has moved past its earlier status as a set of trade agreements; it points to the ongoing construction of Europe as a social and cultural project seeking to establish a uniquely “European” politics and society. This paper, based on several months of ongoing fieldwork with Arte television producers and staff in Paris and Strasbourg, takes up the question of what it means to produce a trans-national and regional television. Though there exist a number of well-established international television stations--the BBC, CNN, FranceInter, to name just three--ARTE is the first example of a television entirely produced as assembled as a shared project between two nations, in what is ultimately a complex legal and economic framework drawing upon financial resources and audiovisual production from several European countries. Drawing on fieldwork at ARTE and interviews with ARTE staff, this paper attempts to construct something of a rough model for how trans-national television producers necessarily grapple with the challenges of different aesthetic preferences, complex multi-national audiences, and the quotidian difficulties of working with several languages and producers from dozens of countries. I argue that producers at ARTE are always shifting between two available discourses for their work: the national, since producers at Arte are always struggling to maintain legitimacy in national mediascapes and funding structures, necessarily conciliating Arte's European mandate with what are understood to be still nationalist audiences; and the trans-national or regional, which is understood to allow for, and indeed to necessitate, more creativity, and to enable new kinds of aesthetic and political dispositions. In other words, production work at ARTE most often tacks between ideas about constraints or limits, understood to be national, and notions of creativity and novelty, which is imagined to be better enabled by the trans-national and European project. In this way, anthropologists might move towards constructing theories of non-national, trans-national, and globalized media-scapes: media producers, which increasingly straddle more than just one local or national media-scape, tend to partly frame national and trans-national politics in discourses about creativity and aesthetics. It is therefore in understanding the ways in which imaginings of the "old" and the "new" map onto aesthetic and production practices that we might better understand how politics are mediated and coded in burgeoning trans-national and globalized contexts. I argue that discourses about production at Arte, the world's first truly trans-national television station, help us to understand how media producers necessarily negotiate trans-national work. I conclude with some thoughts about the relationship of "Culture," with a capital "C," attributed to art and artistic practices, with "culture" in the anthropological sense--a fraught relationship that anthropologists need to more carefully consider when examining the emergence of regional and global media-scapes.