One night in Miami...

We are normally given some twenty or twenty-five minutes of the film, to get us interested in it; then four minutes of commercials, then about fifteen more minutes of the film; some commercials again; and so on to steadily decreasing lengths of the film, with commercials between them, or them between the commercials, since by this time it is assumed that we are interested and will watch the film to the end. Yet even this had not prepared me for the characteristic American sequence. One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial "breaks." Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deoderant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. [...] I can still not be sure what I took from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem -- for all the occasional and bizarre disparities -- a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.
-Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 91-2

What is interesting here is the tendency of the Marxist move, which we see I think most concretely in Williams (that is, it is registered most thoroughly in experience, not theory, or rather in the collapse of the thought-work distinction--a factwhich Adorno talks about), though it's present in Marx to a huge degree already (mostly as blistering theoretical irony--something I feel many readers don't fully understand). This is to rely not on clearer insight into the phenomenon in question, but to a fleeting glimpse captured while in an irrational state, which does not disclose that the totality is irrational, but transforms what, in any other state, you would call rational into an irrational moment (which presupposes an irrational totality indeed, but also determination, in the Hegelian sense). I think this has to be distinguished somewhat from (though no doubt it is related to) a hermeneutics of suspicion. I should give, in conclusion, Williams' general theory of "flow" or rather (since it is determined, through institutions) "planned flow," which tries to make sense of this experience:

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, to that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real "broadcasting." Increasingly, in both commercial and public-service television, a further sequence was added: trailers of programmes to be shown at some later time or on some later day.
-Television, 91