mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
9 (2006), Nr.2/June
Rezension
1. Oliver Fahle/Lorenz Engell (ed.),
Philosophie des Fernsehens, München: Wilhelm Fink 2006, 203, Seiten, € 30,80.
39.898 Zeichen.
The sound mixture of Stüwe & Legenstein at
Wienstation, Lerchenfelder Gürtel 28, consisted of house music and drum and
bass, played from two PowerBooks softly, not too loud and with a focus on
extended breaks. Along with playing acoustic guitar some melodies or riffs a
nice French fella gave, about every five minutes and in quite good German
equipped with sympathetic accent, explicitly partial comments on what happened
on the wall on which was projected the broadcast. The broadcast was set silent
film mode, the sound of the broadcast suppressed and replaced by a long prefab
stadium audience applause loop. With broadcast culmination points of the match
this soundscape was turned a bit louder by the DJs. The optical quality of the
picture was excellent, giving a taste of what HDTV will be in the near future.
The game transmissed took its course with cameras near to players’ faces.
Crackling tension.
It is obvious that team sports is particularly apt for
being broadcast. This was the case with radio, and it is even more so with
television. The production and technologically staging of sports events
coalesces economically with viewer attitudes of getting satisfaction with
sensation-seeking and the chance of regression to childhood stages
psychoanalysis has devoted a good deal of describing to. On the other hand with
being emotionally involved in television as an everyday matter of all people in
Western civilization obviously makes it difficult for theorists to deal with.
TV seems to have spread even in intellectuals –
news! – into a form of semi-awareness that explains why they don’t want
to cope with TV as is noticed frequently. For this reason it took some time to
establish a Fernsehwissenschaft that
would attract the attention of philosophers. Especially in German speaking
countries we can feel a vivid impulse given by what is established since the
end of the 1990es as philosophy of the media. Incubation time is over. Before
us lie outlines of what can be examined as „philosophy of television“.
The volume to be scrutinized is edited by master mind
Lorenz Engell and his compatriote Oliver Fahle. Engell has already heavily
included philosophy in his Ph.D. thesis from 1989, Vom Widerspruch zur
Langeweile. Logische
und temporale Begründungen des Fernsehens, = Studien zum Theater, Film und
Fernsehen, number 10. On the basis of a professorship at Weimar
Bauhaus-Universität since 1996 and as founding Dean of the School of Media
there (1996-2000) he specialized early on in philosophical TV theory. A debated
account of the very philosophy of TV done by itself – apart from „philosophers’ philosophy“– as a
reflection of the medium by itself in terms of Aristotelian Luhmannism has been
given by Engell in his „Tasten, Wählen, Denken. Genese und Funktion einer philosophischen Apparatur“,
in: Stefan Münker/Alexander Roesler/Mike
Sandbothe (Hg.), Medienphilosophie. Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs, = ftb
15757, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 53-77, 198-200, 208f., especially pages
53-58 and 76f. (compare
Lambert Wiesing’s criticism stored on Mike Sandbothe homepage: http://www.sandbothe.net/288.html?&no_cache=1&sword_list[]=wiesing).
What Engell offers himself with „Das Ende des
Fernsehens“ is a mature treatment of one feature of TV: the end. With seriality
and the event in mind and with aiming at an understanding of finiteness as a
form of reflection in TV Engell intends to sublate finiteness from an aesthetic
and theoretical level to a philosophical one. That, at least, is suggested by a
list of stunning televisual events: the turning off of Eastern Germany TV on
October 2 1990 11.59 pm, the suicide of a TV host in front of a camera, the
politically meant invitation to turn off the TV set after having turned off the
studio light by host Adriano Celentano himself, the live images, on occasion of
a report about the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, of the breakdown of a wall
of monitors shown on these very monitors, the daily end of national TV programs
playing the national anthem. Counter to Raymond Williams’s theory of, as one
could say, TV’s „non-finite“ flow Engell does not think of the end of a live
broadcast, the open end of a studio discussion, the end of the flow
interrupted, the possible termination/sublation of TV in newer media like the
internet. He addresses an end that intrudes as the outer world the world within
of televisual signs. Asked with direction to Heidegger: Can media and not only
existence (Dasein) refer to its own end? With George Spencer Brown Engell says
yes, but it is possible only if TV is a system critical of itself in temporal
terms. In fact, as Engell demonstrates, an observation of TV can be imported
into itself. This concerns space, but time as well, by a pre-running
(Vorlaufen) in possible states of the system. There is a basic
self reference of the event that is gone in the next second. This paradox means
an overcoming of the finiteness within the program flow: the fading of the
event ist the event. The end of TV is an interruptor of self reference,
delivered with the impression of the intrusion from the outside by means of
outside reference. This circumstance paves the way to negate a possibility, to
negate the event in the reality mode. In this sense the event in the system
means the end. As a consequence a „second“ system is established for this end,
for instance as a thought in the viewer’s consciousness, an observation Engell
believes to explain with Deleuze by a doubling into the actual and the virtual
thereby confirming the finitude of the system. Engell further believes that
this application of system theory cannot but sustained by a finiteness that is
modelled in terms of Peirce’s semiotics. The TV sign system – which admittedly is narrower than the system
of system theory – does not refer to objects but events: with help from
Derrida’s différance one could invoke a Saussurian temporality. In any case,
Engell thinks to supports his account with Bense’s aesthetics, G. Günther’s
dialectics and Serres’s notion of the parasite, but most of all with Peirce’s
recognition that you can generate signs only from other signs – and that taken
as an event! This amounts to a minimal definition of art which may be extended
temporally, as Engell supposes. Given that the last sign is the interpretant of
earlier signs or pictures, TV cannot produce a last sign or picture. Now, what
about finiteness in TV? Peirce’s referring in terms of dynamic interpretants –
in the consciousness – makes them final ones, if only virtual ones
and as a limit. Again, this final sign is a sign for the entire chain of signs
within the interpretation process. But it reveals the properties and
achievements of the sign system to be the properties and achievements of
consciousness. This very simultaneity of sign system and consciousness makes TV
live, an event-ual sublation between the different systems (Niklas Luhmann). To
this final interpretant Engell adds three more kinds of interpretants: the
emotional/saturating interpretant, the energetic/practical interpretant, and
the logical/pragmatical interpretan. It is the latter that works as a rule
organizing the saturating and the energetic interpretants. Summary: For
television there is never an end at the end – the end may only be found in the
full course of the events; the doubling of the event of the end and the end of
the event is given with live TV: final events are always live; and the
intrusion of the outer world always coincides with an outbreak into the
environment of the system. According to this, finality refers to the inner, the
outer and to their distinction. „That the final interpretation is preferred and
rooted in the relation of the picture system TV to its environment is based on
the fact that in this connex a ‘self’ of television is distinguished from its
‘other’ in a way that this distinction reflects itself on its turn.“153 That
exactly puts ourselves into question and makes TV philosophical. For the end
can be imagined. Qed.
Richard Dienst’ „Seinsgefahren in einer televisuellen
Welt. Heidegger und die onto-technologische Frage“ is a translation of part of chapter/essay
6 of his „Still Life in Real Time. Theory after Television“ published in 1994.
The editors do not inform about the context of Dienst’s work within his book
and to TV discourse more generally, nor do they elucidate the book’s
interesting title. Dienst who works on a high critical level in the portion
presented here entertains a minute reading of Heidegger’ writings on technology
and „The Time of the World Picture“. According to Heidegger the compression of
space and of history by means of modern technology entails a challenge to the
world in claiming to be a truth on its own. With the Ge-stell – Dienst names
the translations „installation“ (Lacoue-Labarthe), „enframing“ (William Lovitt),
„emplacement“ (Samuel Weber) and „con-struct“ (L. Harries) – in machinery and
science man establishes a constancy (Bestand) that dispenses with all distance
to nature thereby completely absorbing it. With this comes technology’s
permanent re-presentation of which Heidegger diagnoses a suppression of
appearance and the difference of traditional truth between revealing and
hiding. Hence the difficult position of poiesis between téchne and technology
as Dienst puts it with Heidegger interpreter Hubert Dreyfus. Whereas true art
is seen by Heidegger as a scene of confrontation with technology, the Ge-stell
of television for instance seems to be incapable of touching the providence,
destin(y)ation, propriety, befitting (das Schickende). Says Heidegger that
television, the set up of projective subject/object space, transforms things to
pictures and informations as already cinema had been an ordering of universal
visibility. But as Heidegger does not invoke ethical or socio-economical terms
to prevent his cultural critique from cynically equating motorized agriculture,
concentration camps and the hydrogen bomb he does not treat cinema or
television either. For this reason it cannot be figured out what his account
has to say about Brecht’s estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt) or the
cinematic potential against alienation that the Cahiers du cinéma credited
Heidegger once with having recognized it. Contrary to this and equipped with
insights by Adorno, Baudrillard and Kittler Dienst feels as sure as to think
that space and time can only be
surpassed by television and that the uncanny needs to be reserved to atomic
energy. He further thinks that the bracketing or parenthesizing frame, as he
puts it with Derrida and supposedly beyond phenomenology, makes all things
constantly available yet not visible because of TV’s lack of distance. Also
TV’s permanent shift encloses an inconspicuous concealment. Dienst concludes
with a political critique of the TV interview that Heidegger gave a the end of
his life comparing it to Heidegger’s political attempt in 1933. Dienst’s
conclusion however that resistance in what form ever inevitably needs to
arrange with power, more precisely to involve a mutual infiltration of the
enemies of technology and the friends of television remains questionable.
Although he criticizes Avital Ronell’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s writings,
lectures and interviews pertinent to what is circumscribed with the title of
her book (The Telephone Book. Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech,
Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska 1989) he could have made more use of her
critique of the Heidegger-Telefonzentrale centralizing power by means of a TV
channel today relativized by local networks and the prospective mobile phone
potential of technological individualization.
Claudia Blümle („Blu-Box“) draws on blindness as
constitutive condition for the visual arts. She refers to invisibility, to
blackness in cinema, to the black area between film frames, an area that has
been expanded to including black film of various length into movies. She
interprets Derek Jarman’s last movie „Blue“ as an allegory of nonetheless
opaque „fifth wall“ as was called TV by author Werner Rings in his 1962 book on
the history of television. Jarman managed to thematize his increasing
incapability of seeing at the end of his life by using the blue-screen effect.
That effect finally was left as a lack –
the only visible thing remaining. Come with the blue background of PAL
the TV specific blue-screen effect is thereby revealed to make visible
blindness, as Blümle recognizes. She takes up Derrida’s recognition of the fact
that drawing implies the blindness of the eye between the object out there and
the object to be drawn on the paper, a blindness thematized with drawing the
origin of the drawing and the prosthesis by the perspectival apparative
conduction of the drawer’s gaze (and finally discovered as the eye’s blind spot
by physicist Mariotte soon after Descartes. Artist Richard Kriesche’s video
„Malerei deckt zu Kunst deckt auf“ of 1977 also uses the chroma key procedure.
Whereas painting covers s part of the world and so hides what it could or
should make visible, Kriesche’s video reveals by means of a TV technique that
covering with the paint blue on the surface –
in reality: glass – first of all reveals that coating is the condition
of revealing, of making visible.
An
important lesson for philosophy is Ralf Adelmann’s and Markus Stauff’s
„Ästhetiken der Re-Visualisierung, Zur Selbststilisierung des Fernsehens“. It
is probably the first time that a title uses „Ästhetik“ in plural form.
Obviously is meant style – „Ästhetik
oder Stil“55 – , design, look and not an account of theories about
re-visualization, not to speak of aesthetic theories in the philosophical
sense. The explation is: of the volume’s thirteen authors there is only Trinks
who is a philosopher by education and he does not even work at a philosophy
department. As with the selection of authors for the seven volume „Ästhetische
Grundbegriffe“ German speaking countries have a communication problem between
Kulturwissenschaften and philosophy. Or has philosophy here become so weak that
it is unable to deal with advanced cultural or technological subjects? Although
Adelmann and Stauff hold that „Ästhetik oder Stil“ has nothing to do with TV
but more with arts or pictorial media like film or photography – a move against the neglect of non-normative
mass medium TV between film/photography and computer in recent philosophy of
media – they do not ignore influential philosophical conceptions. Even in the
Kulturwissenschaften after the post-semiotic visual turn as proclaimed by WCT
Mitchell and with the emergence of the concept of visual culture TV has been
kept on the back burner, they observe. Still influential theories of the flow
(Raymond Williams), of the bardic (Hartley/Fiske) and of the excess of
seriality (Fiske) remain semantic theories. True, say the two, television does
not bring forward unique visual forms, and yet it’s possible to work out a
picture theory of TV not focused on visualization as new or on TV as art.
Adelmann and Stauff perceive help from reception theories like
Dewey/Shusterman’s account of a pop-aesthetic experience of the artistic in
somatic effects or Susan Sontag’s concept of visual taste as an anti-artistical
and -stylistic form of aestheticization. On a more empirical level of
production – split screen, animation,
writing, auteur style – the authors recognize a will to temporary constructions
on a „field of visualizations that does not produce typical pictures but processes
specific aesthetics <Ästhetiken> throughout“ (page 61, my translation).
They say so consciously of Horkheimer and particularly Adorno (1953) who
reproached TV as being part of the cultural industry negating style and giving
aesthetic miniatures of people shown quasi „without words“. Adelmann and Stauff
are fascinated by any visual element possible, may it come from reality TV’s
infra red recordings, documentaries, surveillance video or camcorder pictures.
For this reason they finally resort to TV director John Caldwell’s heavy volume
„Televisuality. Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television“ from 1995
of which have been translated forty pages by Adelmann and of (another
contributor of the volume to be reviewed here) Matthias Thiele in a reader
under the title „Grundlagentexte zur Fernsehwissenschaft“ composed in 2002 of
translations from English and (one) French texts from 1956 to 1999.
Oliver
Fahle delivers an observation of „Das Bild und das Sichtbare. Eine
Bildtheorie des Fernsehens“. Like Bordwell’s four visual styles in that
author’s more structural history of film –
taken by Fahle with Niklas Luhmann as an evolution in modernization
concerning the technological, economical, institutional threshold extrinsic to
media and the aesthetic/poetic threshold intrisic to media – and with having in
mind the leap from painting, photography and film to the digital media Fahle
considers, in the steps of Deleuze, a bifurcation of the image of old TV and
the meta-image of the new TV, two stages of TV Francesco Casetti and Roger Odin
had tried to seperate in an article of 1990, edited as one of the
Grundlagentexte. Casetti and Odin distinguish the hierarchical communication
structures of education oriented programs for collectives of old TV from the
interpersonal proximity of the exchange between TV producers and TV public in
the everyday event space of new TV. To the latter Fahle attributes a meta-image
because, seen in more formal terms, there have emerged series of images that
can not anymore be semantically contextualized, images that remain indifferent
as mere interruptive image sequences (Christian Metz), images that may be
conceived as a series of mise-en-phase énergétique. This is all the more so
since the advent of remote control, says Fahle who concedes that strictly
spoken the „meta“ does not apply to TV because of the lack of a diegesis
altogether. To exclude ensuing problems from the outset Fahle recommends an
expansion of the notion of the image with the visible. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty
has shown, Fahle emphasizes, images are manifestations of seeing, that is of
the visible out of things themselves. The visible and the seeing are linked
like sea and coast, and Merleau-Ponty demonstrates this relationship with the
spontaneous order of things as perceived by Cézanne painting nature in a kind
of primal, original state thereby having stepped between the classical,
figurative, spatial and limited picture and the modern, abstract, temporal and
unlimited picture as Fahle puts it. In terms of external media the picture is a
framed composed visual thing, whereas the visible has become the out-there
(Michel Foucault) for the modern image as a theme of the picture interlaced
with the visible, an intermediate zone (Deleuze). Only that hors-champ plus
movements given with montage and camera open an understanding for the
relationship of the visible and a picture merely given by approximation. Fahle
also explains the break in TV history as stated by Casetti and Odin with a step
to monitoring act, a change that Stanley Cavell had made the core of his
definition of TV from already from the beginning when film’s succession of
automatic world projection is succeeded by TV’s stream of simultaneous event
reception. Fahle steps on with Merleau-Ponty in saying that by the focusing act
of the gaze the visible is open for several processes simultaneously:
monitoring + viewing allows for disseminating perceptual points together with
the composed images of the quadrage.
Fahle finally draws on the non-identifying gaze of repetition thereby opening
up the new as characteristic for new TV. Speaking of aesthetics it is possible
only as an identity of re- and decenterings that are transverse to genres
establishing permanent difference.
For Hartmut Winkler, philosophy has lost „the“ power.
The title of his contribution „Nicht handeln. Versuch einer Wiederaufwertung der couch potato
angesichts der Provokation des interaktiv Digitalen“ deserves translation, for
it summarizes his position: „No acting. Essay of a
revaluation of the couch potato in face of the provocation of the interactive
digital“. Referring to his one time 270 minutes zapping with 2000 times
switching – 40 channels 50 times -
Winkler discovered his desire for forgetting and recovery by getting lost in
the stream of television. Winkler speaks of the oceanic feeling – a feeling, I
add, of the unlimited and eternal as Sigmund Freud’s „Civilization and its
Discontents“ renders Romain Rolland’s description of the origin of religion.
For Freud this feeling is one of continuity and may be traced back to the
states of falling in love with a person or of helplessness as infant. Winkler
in some consequence lives his feeling colourfully described against being the
everyday subject necessary for our working identity. TV as interactive, like
computer games, by means of the remote control gives space for a performing
practice like the incitation of sex with an inscription of power in the clothes
of emancipation, as Winkler puts it with Foucault. The same with TV. Watching
TV means sharing the function of symbolic media processes when the acting ego
is not eager to question itself. Winkler finally does not convince with having
discovered subversive potential in couch potatos, be it at the cost of
dispensing with emancipation.
Mary-Ann Doane’s „Information, Krise, Katastrophe“ is
obviously a translation of one of her older texts. Well hidden in brackets
attached to footnote 25 seems the mention of the original place of publication
in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.),
Logics of Television. Essays in Cultural Criticism,
Again with
Caldwell Matthias Thiele’s „Ereignis und Normalität. Zur normalistischen Logik
medialer und diskursiver Ereignisproduktion im Fernsehen“ observes TV since
1980. Determined as a series of special events Thiele finds
a dialectics at work. Events are linked with normality, produce normality.
Thiele observes that the TV-as-event is modelled in three ways: it is a
pre-media window to the world (something we cannot say anymore in the age of
Windows, I think); it is news before the event – staging and mediation of
events – ; and it is the TV with and as
event. It is the third model that is conceived by Thiele along Baudrillard’s
theory of the construction and generation of events as hyper-reality that
includes an ecstasis, a death of reality that fades into a sea of mere signs.
Without discussing Baudrillard’s account –
it would have been worthwhile to inquire what Baudrillard says about TV
from a more detailed theoretical philosophical perspective – Thiele turns to
Engell’s „Das Amedium. Grundbegriffe
des Fernsehens in Auflösung: Ereignis und Erwartung“ (montage a/v 5 (1996), nr. 1). According to
Thiele Engell sets out to describe events as a selection, manufacturing and
reworking of parts of tokens (Vorkommnissen) that bear more similarity to
discursive events as Foucault analyzed them in „Orders of Discourse“. Punctual
events in the proper sense are impossible with TV because events are
permanently expected, produced, stretched and repeated. Therefore we have to
deal with the paradox of the permanent event, an event determined by effects so
much so that we cannot but speak of events in the status of deferred action
(Nachträglichkeit), as Kay Kirchmann says. The unexpected live modus turns out
to be something always already expected, says Thiele with Engell and turns to
Louis Althusser’s „Contradiction and Overdetermination“ (1962) with highly
insufficient reference to the text – no
trace of normality given by Thiele and claimed by him to have been treated by
Althusser – whereas Thiele could have
much more profited from the concept of overdetermination in Freud (mentioned by
Althusseer), when for instance any of the elements of „normal“ manifest dream
reveals to be nourished and represented by several elements of latent dream thinking.
For this reason Thiele’s notion of a normalist program (Normalprogramm) – by the way not systematically developed in
face of program deviations – lacks a
solid basis significantly even when he extends normalist production of events
to the „normalizing“ control gaze in monitoring (Cavell).
Also in his
contribution „Philosophie der Möglichkeiten. Das
Fernsehen als konjunktivisches Erzählmedium“ Kay Kirchmann follows the line
given by Engell to a great extent. Like Otto Gmelin’s Hegelian view of TV as an
exterioration (alienation?) of the programmed
idea to the world and like Engell’s and Fahle’s apprehension of TV as self
reflective medium and TV philosophy focusing not on the mimetic or
transformative but autopoietic acts of the medium – Luhmann with philosopher and gestalt
psychologist Fritz Heider: media can only be observed with their forms – Kirchmann intends to demonstrate this stance
by an application to the narrativity of TV programs. As a certain panoptism the
camera directed on the moon onto the earth and with the selectionism of
multi-channel TV since the 1970es (in Germany) along with the remote control
device and second and third TV sets in households a main feature of TV may be
recognized in the apparent pressure to exploit different possibilities (Engell).
Theoretically Kirchmann recognizes behind that a unity of difference between
the actual and the virtual at work (Deleuze) that may again be depicted with
reference to something else. TV series and their formation of opinions, their
genres of game and knowledge shows and their fragmentation of narration – like Miami Vice responding to ad breaks and
video clip styles – testify to this
complexity. Kirchmann concludes from TV’s preference of possibilities that TV
– today’s new TV (Casetti/Odin)! – is „modal“ TV, is subjunctive in the
grammatical sense instead of classical indicative TV. It correlates with an
aesthetics of discontinuity, as Kirchmann puts it. On the one hand TV programs
today are hyper-narrative, on the other hand narrating remains the basic mode
for any forming in media including the labyrinthic game’s moves towards
possible worlds (Mary-Laure Ryan). The same with movies and literature. A bit
too fast Kirchmann claims that these narrative forms have „become reflective: ergo
philosophical“ (page 166), he gives no theoretical evidence either. But he has
interesting things to tell, for instance of the first German interactive TV
game in channels ARD and ZDF in 1991, „Mörderische Entscheidung – Umschalten Erwünscht“, of the narrative
peculiarities of the mock history „Der Dritte Weltkrieg“. Highly fascinating is
his analyses of the episode „When Night Meets Day“ of the series „Emergence
Room“, broadcast first in the USA on May 9, 2003. Kirchmann uses a variety of
instruments of literary analysis to show the antagonism of discourse versus
histoire, a multifaceted procedure that may be found occasionally in cinema
movies, but is at home in TV’s space of possibilities. Kirchmann may be right
with regarding the „TV program as a continuous subjunctiv“171, in its immanent
and transverse figuration of selection possibilities (again Engell). He
concludes with the prospective that Engell’s theory of TV as a dispositive
structure and his own of TV as subjunctive narrative may be once synthesized as
a theory of programmatic structure in the subjunctive.
Vrääth
Öhner in his text „Von der Gewöhnlichkeit des Ungewöhnlichen. Serielle
Ordnungen und Ordnungen des Seriellen im Fernsehen“ is right with being more positive
about Williams’s flow conception. TV flow –
if achieved at all – is considered by Öhner as a unity within the
difference of technology and cultural form attesting visual mobility, contrast
of points of view and the optical field variation. They all make for a kind of
beauty between utopia and pessimism that is not characteristic everyday TV.
Having said this Öhner deals with common defense against the uncanny by
pragmatism with respect to contents and theory. As with Marshall McLuhan there
is a neutralization in transforming spectators into screens and dominating that
uncanny technology by means of the alphabet. Similar Freud at first glance to
whom Öhner refers. He traces back the horrible to the common and explains its
threat with seeming invincibility and the incapability of seperating the
besouled and the unbesouled. Again with Freud Cavell constructed the topos of
the uncanny of the common. This allows, according to Öhner, with a re-reading
of Williams’s theory, to attribute to TV flow the ambivalence of technology and
culture, of the planned and the irresponsible, of stereotypes and flowing
identities, of the repeatable and the transitory. That genres do not amount to
be genres-as-medium but only cycles makes them uncanny, says Öhner with Cavell.
And with Deleuze, the stability of the series is achieved by a synthesis of the
homogeneous instead of the heterogeneous. Hence multi-seriality does not lead
to crisis but to synthesis of the heterogeneous and in consequence to a
non-balanced state against which TV’s indifference can be put into play
(Lawrence Grossberg). This explains the transitory of repetition, the longue
durée of for instance an event like 9/11 (Oliver Fahle). Time (Dienst) and the
present (Deleuze) converge here with the flow. We can get accustomed to the
uncanny of the common by means of the mechanism of global representation. And
repetition is not the transitory. The uncanny is common like the vicinity of
remote points.
Heidemarie Schumacher’s contribution „Fernsehen und
Hysterie“ departs from the fact that already what doctor Jean-Martin Charcot
dealt with as hysteria has run into a rapture of series of copies of disease
symptoms produced by, but not restricted to patients. Comparably the
hallucinating similarity produced in more recent times with the effect of
liquidating reference or the replacement of the real by signs of the real
culminates today in the production of a hyperreal (Baudrillard) that even works
without television. Broadcasts like „Big Brother“ or the cult of the webcam
testify to what is celebrated as authenticity. Taking account of these newer
social and cultural developments Schumacher observes a form of hysteria in
talkshows that appears to be transformed to series of hyperreal emotions acted
out, played. This is what she adds to a definition of the new television
concerning the social space (Casetti/Odin). It explains why – apart from the law of serials’ „infinite
analysis“– conflicts in daily soaps or
talks basically remain unsolved, why there are formless, endlessly stretched
„second/third/fifth“ acts but no „first/fifth“ ones and why there is a whole
culture of „first/fifth“ acts superimposing the other ones with recaps and
cliffhangers. The result is, as Schumacher says, a hysterodrama with a
simulated symptomatology along the self-representation of addressees. Lay
actors in daily afternoon’s talking cure produce affects on command nowadays
under the supervision of priests, judges and therapists. In any case these
freak shows demonstrate an inner emptiness resting on the schizoid cleavage of
emotions.
Jürgen
Trinks with „Erlebte und erzeugte Serialität. Ein Beitrag
zur phänomenologischen Medienanalyse“ categorically states that television is
thinking, but, unlike Engell, in distance to Philosophy. Trinks speaks of a
kind of thinking that is realization, expression, a lived thinking experienced
through the body. The key example for TV seen this way is the TV series, a
possibility of experiencing – with
imagination, phantasy, bodilyness (Leiblichkeit) and affectuality – seriality with cinematic pictoriality,
narrativity and presentation that is sustained by monitoring (Cavell).
Pictorial seriality, first, is linked
by Trinks with fin de siècle
impressionist painting, with photography and film. At stake is not an object,
but an appearance realized with time. Required is style of thought directed to
an expectation of contingency. Husserl saw the picture as composed of a
material basis, a sujet as something meant and the pictorial object as a whole
of representational elements together with the material of the pictorial thing.
With Husserl Trinks states that there is no pictorial thing given with TV,
hence a stepping forward of pictures’ rhythmical movements, a „dance“ of
pictures. Necessary becomes a decision about the use of the series of film
frames, and before all about depicting. As with photography the mirroring and
the play with depiction run into kind of intermediate time allowing to plunge
into or emerge from the horizons of not yet decided situations. Simultaneously
being struck and the living of phantasy is fulfilled in bodily experience. Secondly pops up a seriality after a
transformed narrativity. Narrative connections work via markers together with
particular temporality and an aesthetic quality of the horizon of bodily
uncertainty. Here comes in Cavell’s principle of series-episode as a deviation
from the narrative: a singularity to be tested in different contexts. Thirdly, there is a need for supply by
TV with serial forms because of the peculiarities of monitoring, its
expectation of the unexpected and its trained gaze for quick turns that allow
for a mastering of fear and anxieties, be they imagined or real. This
considered and compared Trinks willynilly is drawn to recognize that TV further
entails a reception attitude focused more on consciousness and not interbodily
relationships. He observes a removal of the uncanny – not the sublime! In consequence the world
becomes boring and the body is excluded without having the transpossible. All
this makes possible seriality as entertainment and superficiality, seriality’s
phantom-body effects (Günther Anders), a seriality that reworks imagination
without phantasy and replaces contingency with disposal.
O.k. Some remarks will be in order. What do we do with
all this?
When Kay Kirchmann says there is only Fahle’s/Engell’s
philosophy of TV – „no further account
for the formulation of a philosophy of TV at hand“ (pages 158f.) – he does not
think of or ignores the theories of a variety of philosophers. He may
depreciate them. But then he should say so. And why. There are quite a few
figures around though. Yes, Theodor
There is a problem that can only be solved by
philosophers with acquiring a double perspective, an internal and an external
perspective. As for the latter, we must not ignore anymore that in film theory
– and TV theory – Cavell and Deleuze are not taken as seriously as philosophers
like it to see. Besides the difficulty of and the suspicion against philosophy
by film and TV studies the reason for low regard is that the result of an
approriation of both philosophies is judged in terms of which and how many
theorems we can get from them. A preliminary reading may give the impression
that Cavell’s book is a hybrid mixture of Bazin, Panofsky, Baudelaire, the
formalism of Greenberg and Fried, Kuhn and, more hidden, Wittgenstein and some
Heidegger, and that Deleuze’s two books are a forced attempt of a synthesis of
Bergson and Peirce including texts on movies by Pasolini, Burch, Eisenstein,
Metz, Vertov, Beckett and rarely on philosophy by Balázs, Nietzsche, Maldiney
or Merleau-Ponty, with both Cavell and Deleuze entertaining a variety of film
interpretations. An additional difficulty for using Cavell and Deleuze in film
and TV studies is that the former seems to not take much notice of film and TV
studies – to put it carfully – whereas Deleuze refers in many cases to French
film studies that have not given translations, with finally both Cavell and
Deleuze refraining from giving a full philosophical setting of their
endeavours.
Although Engell and Fahle repeatedly refer to Cavell
and Deleuze, with this book’s selection of contributions – done on which
occasion? – Fahle and primus inter pares Engell (Thiele, Kirchmann, Fahle,
Adelmann/Stauff) unfortunately show no interest in more extensively dealing
with Cavell and Deleuze. Philosophically we are fed all over the book with
small portions of references, footnotes, quotations. The book lacks more
complex summaries of Cavell and Deleuze on their own conditions – even a
philosophical or theoretical summary of often cited
No, a philosophy is asked that is ready to resume work
for building new philosophical foundations. Doing philosophy of television also
means to use insights into the the structure and use of television for
synthesizing 20th century philosophies that have denied similarities and
connections with opposite schools at the time. Paradoxically editors Engell’s
and Fahle’s own contributions make an appetite for such an occupation with
Jürgen Trinks’s approach making a reconstruction of phenomenology’s specific
investigations all the more necessary, from Richir to Merleau-Ponty and Anders
and down to Husserl, Dewey (Shusterman) and Bergson. With regards to the
uncanny an exchange would be of help between Dienst and Öhner who develops a
view on Cavell that is broader than the still valuable references of Fahle and
Thiele. Peirce has been addressed by Engell in a way that could be further used
for bridging the gap netween Peirce and phenomenology. Phenomenology and Peirce
have something in common as Deleuze admitted in footnote 16 to chapter 6 in
Cinema 1. Despite his skepticism toward phenomenology Deleuze – expressed for
instance in Cinema 1, beginning of chapter four – there have obviously been
some expectations on the side of Deleuze the were disappointed („Sartre’s
anti-Bergsonism“). Fahle who is not far from being a Deleuzian profitably
proposes a reading of Merleau-Ponty. And Engell - besides his indications of
Goodman’s theory of notation in Languages of Art in his „Wählen ...“ – can even
get to grips with Luhmann and Spencer Brown on phenomenological terrain. We may
further hope that the sharpness of Baudrillard’s criticism honoured by Schumacher,
Dienst and Thiele may be preserved for philosophy once one will have come to
terms with his media apocalypse in transformation to philosophy of history that
refines and sublates the Casetti-Odin distinction.
As Maurizio Ferraris demonstrates with his book about
the mobile phone (Dove sei? Ontologia del telefonino, = Tascabili Bompiani 315,
Milano: RCS libri 2005) – a subject that is painfully completely absent from
the Fahle/Engell collection although a Japanese mobile communication company
had announced to offer TV transmission from spring 2004 as early as fall 2003,
as are absent theoretical occupations with TV’s general relations to radio, video, the internet, interactive art,
the TV set, HDTV or storage specifics – the medium’s universal capabilities if
producing and sending „inscriptions“ with registrating it simultaneously. These
inscriptions on a particular support/surface – a writing machine in this case –
make for social objects that have got to do more with recording than
communication and as such constitute social reality. This necesitates a turn to
the ontology of the media to which Ferraris contributes in favour of a weak
textualism according to Derrida and with contrast to the strong realism of
Reinach, the weak realism of Searle and the strong textualism of Foucault.
Ferraris gives an example of if not rooting the philosophy of the media or one
particular medium within more traditional philosophical realms.
Another realm could be aesthetics. Adelmann and Stauff
give the outlines of theory of TV that could well of high philosophical
importance. For the permanent reworking of the performance of style in TV over
months and years could give rise to the question whether that „evolution“
itself could be described as a play of intellect and imagination that was, as
is known, the basic requirement for the arts of Kant. Is television an – open –
art work as much as it is an object formed over a span of time that usually is
not observed with art?
For the moment I prefer considering a provisional
Kantian perspective on the gaming of televison. We have since as late as 1969
with Nam June Paik’s and Shuya Abe’s video sythesizer an artistic use of live
television. Now, with the remote control, with joystick/console, the cellular
and artistic notebook interfaces it has become real for all of us to ascend to
play with the instrument, consciously or not. The frustrating thing about TV is
that it seems to have not reached a specific artistic use yet. It may involve
all the traditional arts of spoken or written text, photography, film, music,
radio, theatre (in the studio or transmissed live or recorded), video, film.
But it has not come of age, come to its own consciousness of a specific
language. The key may be given with the realization of a Williamsian flow within
the different possibilities of remote control program selection that may again
be appropriated in a much more offensive way by artists. What I think of is a
mastering of TV images and sound – as for instance realized with "Piazza Virtuale" of "Van Gogh TV"
at documenta 9 in 1992 on a large scale – that may produce
an aesthetic distance to TV immediacy and allow for a phenomenalizing
sublimation of the numerous realities of fun, violence and control. Could a
live artistic confrontation with TV broadcasting under the title of
TV-VJing/DJing – the use of the remote control in public space – pave the way
for an art that allows to gain more philosophical insight? Could the
consideration and experimentation of this potential be another step out of the
current lameness in the philosophy of television and – of art?
Peter Mahr © 2006
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