The broad strokes of US economic, labor, and media history with which George Lipsitz begins his article "The Meaning of Memory" perform valuable work in emphasizing the extent to which the American television landscape at the time of its mass implementation post-WWII is dependent not only upon its imbrication with capital in the form of its advertising-driven financing but, pivotally, prior to this dependence, upon the state sanctioning and coaxing this relationship to explicitly ideological-economic ends. As much as the tale of (American) television is one of fostering consumer ideologies, it is one of the state's active involvement in enabling this ideological work. Lipsitz succinctly lays out the challenge with which the capitalist state was confronted in the turn away from Depression-era scarcity and wartime solidarity towards the social-economic reorganization that characterized the 1950's in order to emphasize the invaluable television played—was made to play—in ideologically legitimating "Government policies after the war [which] encouraged an atomized acquisitive consumerism at odds with the lessons of the past." (75) Lipsitz's most valuable contribution (to me) is his underscoring of how the state's economic and media policies, deliberately or otherwise, helped ensure the (relative) coherence of this ideological legitimation: as outlined in detail on page 76, "FCC decisions... combined to guarantee that advertising-oriented programming based on the model of radio would triumph over theater TV, educational TV, or any other form. Government decisions, not market forces, established the dominance of commercial television, but these decisions reflected a view of the American economy and its needs which had become so well accepted at the top levels of business and government that it had virtually become the official state economic policy." (76) Lipsitz thus identifies the profound imbrication of state interests and decision-making with what is all too often understood to be the abstract hand of "the market," a corrective echoed in David Harvey's Neoliberalism (2005) which takes in part as its project an elaboration of this same dynamic, the necessity of active state intervention in capital's reorganization that masquerades as a non-state project. (Lipsitz's closing line in the above paragraph also makes me think of C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite (1956), which situates this blurring of state and capital interests in terms of the profoundly intertwined nature of the minute population of state policy-makers whose class interest is always-already that of the business elite and vice versa.)
Lipsitz also identifies the capacity for oppositional readings that, as Habermas's notion of late capitalism's "legitimation crisis" demonstrates, necessarily inheres in the terms by which television seeks to appeal to this ideological reorganization, which always-already relies upon ideas contradictory to the new ideology seeking to uphold itself. Lipsitz defines this problematic nicely: "A system that seeks to enlist everyone in the role of consumer must appear to be addressing all possible circumstances: a system that proclaims consensus and unanimity must acknowledge and explain obvious differences within the polity, if for no other reason than to co-opt or trivialize potential opposition." (99) While Lipsitz is here writing in the context of the 50's sitcoms' reproduction of ethnic solidarity and pre-consumerist values in their efforts to legitimate capitalism's fragmentation of these same structures, this quote is a prescient analysis of the now relatively vernacular phenomenon of "woke capitalism," which might be read nowhere better than in the contemporary American media landscape. For a too-short example, we might think of Marvel's harnessing of a liberal identity politics, surely the most emblematic articulation of a set of hegemonic texts whose financial and cultural success is unquestioned and which wears on its sleeve its imbrication with and cultural legitimation of U.S. empire and yet finds cultural caché (and, indeed, Oscar nominations) in its practices of "diversity and inclusion" which help what should be the bitter medicine of Captain America go down a little smoother.
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