Theorizing Television:

John Fiske (1985a, 1985b) called for re-theorizing the &dquo;open&dquo; television text and for new modes of socio-cultural reading of television texts, especially in terms of intcrtextuality. But this new emphasis upon intertextuality runs several risks: that contextual intertextuality will overwhelm and overdetennine texts and their specificity and that intertextual and discursive notions of audience reception will fall back from the problematic of empirical-ethnographic notions of audience positioning within dominant ideology to non-political sociological &dquo;effects: ’ Nonetheless, it is necessary to address the continuing problematics of text and context, issues and definitions of the televisual text, and television’s positioning of its spectator-audience. In our continuing efforts to theorize these issues, a cultural studies approach seems most appropriate. Concepts of text, textuality, and intertextuality are appropriate problems for such theorizing efforts. Hence the questions and problems raised by considering these three concepts are likely to concern matters of form and meaning, of production and reception, of ideology and culture where the first term of the paired considerations is not privileged ove