Thinking Through Television 9789048525621

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Thinking Through Television

Televisual Culture Televisual culture encompasses and crosses all aspects of television – past, current and future – from its experiential dimensions to its aesthetic strategies, from its technological developments to its crossmedial extensions. The ‘televisual’ names a condition of transformation that is altering the coordinates through which we understand, theorize, intervene, and challenge contemporary media culture. Shifts in production practices, consumption circuits, technologies of distribution and access, and the aesthetic qualities of televisual texts foreground the dynamic place of television in the contemporary media landscape. They demand that we revisit concepts such as liveness, media event, audiences and broadcasting, but also that we theorize new concepts to meet the rapidly changing conditions of the televisual. The series aims at seriously analyzing both the contemporary specificity of the televisual and the challenges uncovered by new developments in technology and theory in an age in which digitization and convergence are redrawing the boundaries of media. Series editors Sudeep Dasgupta, Joke Hermes, Misha Kavka, Jaap Kooijman, Markus Stauff

Thinking Through Television

By Lorenz Engell

Edited by and with an introduction by Markus Stauff Translated by Anthony Enns (except Chapters 4, 5, 10, 12)

Amsterdam University Press

This publication was supported by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. IKKM BOOKS Volume 36 An overview of the whole series can be found at www.ikkm-weimar.de/schriften

Cover illustration: Moritz Wehrmann Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, hulshout isbn 978 90 8964 771 9 e-isbn 978 90 4852 562 1 doi 10.5117/9789089647719 nur 670 © L. Engell, M. Stauff / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Introduction

Markus Stauff

1 On the Difficulties of Television Theory

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Part 1  From Transmission to Selectivity 2 Click, Select, Think: The Origin and Function of a Philosophical Apparatus

29

3 Television with Unknowns: Reflections on Experimental Television51 4 The Tactile and the Index: From the Remote Control to the Handheld Computer

79

Part 2  Televisual Events 5 Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze

95

6 Traps and Types: A Small Philosophy of the Television Scandal

113

7 Boredom and War: Television and the End of the Fun Society

131

Part 3  History – Memory – Seriality 8 Narrative: Historiographic Technique and Cinematographic Spirit 145 9 Beyond History and Memory: Historiography and the Autobiography of Television

171

10 On Series

189

11 The Art of Television: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Family Resemblance’ and the Media Aesthetics of the Television Series

201

Part 4  Objects – Agency – Ontography 12 On Objects in Series: Clocks and Mad Men

223

13 Forensic Seriality: Remarks on CSI

239

14 Instant Replay: On the Media Philosophy of the Slow-Motion Replay

257

Bibliography

271

Publication Data

293

About the Author

295

Index

297



Introduction Markus Stauff

In the current moment, probably no one would doubt that media shape human thinking. There are, however, many levels (and different approaches) to this connection between media and thought. The volume at hand, which exemplifies (rather than represents) the vast and versatile work of media philosopher Lorenz Engell, makes a number of specific interventions in this discussion: first, in alignment with current debates in New Materialisms, it shows how the material processes of media have to be considered as actual thinking instead of only as shaping ‘our’ thinking. Second, it argues that media also think themselves and thereby reflect on and actually contribute to their historical transformations. Third, in a remarkable divergence from most similar approaches, it focuses on the allegedly boring and outdated medium of television. There are good reasons for this: whatever the future of television might be and whatever the term ‘television’ might come to stand for in the coming years, the multitude of forms and operational procedures that have been emerging with and around television can be described as ‘under-thought’. There is certainly no shortage of groundbreaking and thought-provoking work on television. Compared to other media, especially film and digital media, a more theoretical and philosophical approach is conspicuous in its absence. While most research inquires into how television changed the patterns of communication, the basic social fabric, and the spaces of everyday life (with concepts like mobile privatization, the family circle, and ambient television), the medium’s contribution to a culture’s modes of thinking and to the emergence and structuring of its basic categories (think of time, event, memory, choice, evidence, etc.) is seldom addressed. This is all the more regrettable since, even if television might have lost its character as the defining medium in most areas around the globe, the realities and manners of thinking it brought into being have had a lasting impact – which is often overlooked because of the lack of conceptual work. This is also why this volume seemed a more than appropriate contribution to a book series

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_intro

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which, under the title Televisual Culture, seeks to foster discussion about the lasting, sometimes hidden, transforming and transformed, ‘legacies’ of television. Thinking Through Television discusses topics and procedures that grant access to the thinking of media more generally. More specifically, it shows that the neglect of television is detrimental to media philosophy and media theory. As the dual meaning of its title suggests, the volume, on the one hand, offers a thorough reflection on the dominant aesthetic, epistemic, ontological, and cultural forms of television. The features dealt with here – transmission, seriality, history, agency, and others – are not surprising; they build on a pretty broad consensus about the cultural forms and material operations that became articulated by television in the second half of the 20th century. By contextualizing them within (and thinking them through) theoretical and philosophical concepts from Heidegger and Wittgenstein to Deleuze and Luhmann, the specificity and consequentiality of these often taken-for-granted features of television are reappraised and opened up for comparison with other media and broader cultural dynamics. On the other hand, Thinking Through Television, of course, means that television (similar to the typewriter for Nietzsche and film for Deleuze) actually enacts thinking and thereby forces philosophy to think differently. Philosophical concepts are not applied to understand the intricacies of the medium of television better; instead, television’s procedures, which here are fully appreciated as the medium’s acts of thinking and reflection, are used to gain new insights on both the medium and philosophy itself. There is a media theoretical twist to this: media bring new objects or new spatial and temporal orderings into the world, and, in the process, they also change (philosophical) thinking. Additionally – and the least explored so far – they unavoidably reflect, conceptualize, and think through their very own existences, operations, and transformations. John Caldwell and others have convincingly shown that media-theoretical reflections are ubiquitous within the media industry’s work environment and lead to reflexive aesthetics (e.g. Caldwell 2008; Mayer 2011), but Engell additionally argues that media practices (in the widest sense) constitute media philosophy and that media philosophy has to be anchored in the forms and practices of media. Media reproduce and transform themselves by clarifying and experimenting with their basic building blocks. A medium, as Engell argues in Chapter 2, can best be considered a space of possibilities, and emerging forms, ´such as an event, experience, function, representation, symbol, image, text, or system´, can thus be conceived as actualizations of a medium.

Introduc tion

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While this might sound abstract and conceptual at first, Engell’s writing immediately concretizes these philosophical arguments through analyses that provide close and detailed attention to the actual functions of television, including its formal as well as its technical and institutional operations. The texts thereby show that we can learn much more about television than we thought by paying more attention to how the medium itself articulates problems, offers provisional answers, and reflects on and transforms its core characteristics. Engell suggests ways to access what television has to say about its own history, its seriality, and its audience. The performance of witnessing and scrutinizing on forensic crime dramas like CSI, for example, articulates new models of viewership just as the global event of the Moon landing did 50 years ago.

Television’s (Non-)Exceptionality The focus on television in this volume might be both misleading and appropriate. It could be considered misleading since Engell’s engagement with television is solidly embedded in similar work on other media and is therefore just one topic within the development of a broader philosophy of media.1 As he explains in Chapter 8 and in a number of other monographs on the topic (Engell 1995; 1992; 2003), cinema and the succession and transformation of films in history offer just as much – but different – insight into history, historiography, modernity, and memory. His more recent work discusses museum display cases next to film and television, to highlight the ‘ontographical’ quality of media (this term is also taken up in the final part of this volume). Here again, instead of defining the nature of ‘being’ through pure philosophical thinking, the operations of the medium – that is, the transposition of elements from one framework into a different and differently ordered one – are scrutinized for their contribution to this ‘being’. Engell’s media philosophy goes far beyond what is considered the mass media, and his texts regularly include references to the basic cultural technologies of numbers, writing, and, not least, the realm of digital and ubiquitous calculation. Nevertheless, he clearly deviates from both pan-mediality and medium specificity (most prominent in McLuhan). While his philosophy highlights differences between media (e.g. analysing how TV organizes history and memory differently than cinema), his focus on each medium’s processes 1 For a full overview of his publications and his current research projects, see https://ikkmweimar.de/en/ikkm/people/lorenz-engell/

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of transformation problematize a simple equation between a medium and its alleged social or perceptual impact. This is shown, for example, through the distinction between medium and form, which he takes from systems theory. Instead of outlining the basic features of television (or any other medium), he focuses on its forms, which continue to articulate – and thereby change – its potentials. Even though most of his work involves an analysis of media content (movies, TV broadcasts, etc.), his emphasis on ‘form’, in principal, goes far beyond a formalist approach and instead includes all of the changing, perceivable, and effective elements of the medium – including the set, the remote control, and the mechanisms of audience measurement and their entanglement with broader technical and economic transformations. And yet, the focus on television – and the assumption of its exceptionality – is also more than appropriate. It is no coincidence that it is the everreturning key topic of his research over the past 30 years– a research trajectory that reveals no major breaks or ruptures but rather constant curiosity and changing alignments. His writings engage with media historiography, postmodernism, actor-network theory, anthropology, and the work of a number of very different philosophers who have played a more marginal role in media theory, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Günther Anders. First, there is what could be called the strategic appropriateness of his focus on television, which results from the tension between the medium’s philosophical complexity and richness and the already mentioned lack of theoretical research on television and philosophy. As Engell dryly remarks in the introduction to this volume: ´The intellectual and philosophical evasion of the mega-medium of television, the refusal to reflect theoretically on its simultaneously extensive use and effectiveness, denies the fact of television but nevertheless does not change it.´ The ignorance of television in intellectual and philosophical thought is not just a gap to fill but also a symptom of the frictions between traditional philosophy and television’s philosophy – thereby hinting at the provocations television might have to offer. In his first monograph from 1989, based on his PhD thesis, Engell invokes Aristotle and Heidegger as allies to counter Neil Postman´s (and the Frankfurt School’s) verdicts that TV undermines rationality and reflection; he does not defend the rationality of the medium but rather analyses its temporal and rhetorical forms in order to show that its alogical qualities have to be considered an important disclosure of and reflection on nonrational aspects of being (Engell 1989). Chapter 7 of this volume exemplifies this early phase of his work by stating that ´people do not watch television because they wish to escape boredom but rather, on the contrary, because they wish to find it´.

Introduc tion

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In the 1990s, Engell and Oliver Fahle published a bilingual (German and French) anthology on Deleuze’s film philosophy, in which his own contribution takes issue with the ´all-too-convenient divide between an affirmation of electronic images when they are part of artworks and their renunciation as dead images when they appear on TV´ (Engell 1997, 469, my translation), which he identifies in Deleuze’s work. This, of course, is a pattern that can also be found in other philosophers´ work (Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy come to mind) who praise film or media art for its aesthetic and political potentials but only have snarking asides on television. (Stanley Cavell, who is extensively discussed in the first chapter, is one of the few exceptions, although he characteristically published many books on film and only one article on television.) Engell counters this compartmentalized treatment, which made film the medium for aesthetic and philosophical concerns and television the medium of aesthetic and philosophical poverty, as discussions of television were limited to questions related to social practices, representation, and political economy. The focus on television is essential to Engell’s work because if one aims to approach all media as philosophical machines then it is best not to start with media art or canonical films but rather with the allegedly lowest and dumbest media forms. While this collection includes chapters that analyse texts that would now be called ‘Quality TV’, it at no point assumes that these texts would be more philosophical (or would offer ‘better’ philosophy) than a soap opera, a replay in TV sports, or a live media event. Next to this strategic role of television for media philosophy, the medium offers procedures and practices that make it not only an especially fruitful but also a historically paramount philosophical machine. The two chapters in this collection that discuss the broadcast of the Moon landing outline how its ´range of visibility and simultaneity´ differentiate it from other media. Because of the exponentially increased number of images that are globally circulated in real time, television experiments – and thus philosophizes – with ordering images in linear, serial, parallel, eventful, selective ways. Next to the Moon landing, the remote control is another key element because it reorganizes global visibility into (a reflection on) individual choice. This combination of the Moon landing and the remote control allows us to see another aspect of television’s exceptionality in Engell’s work: more than any other medium, television embodies the tension between its seemingly homogeneous and homogenizing functions and its constant technical, industrial, and aesthetic transformations. Television offers exceptionality in its multiplicities.

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Is This German Media Theory? This focus on television is also one of the clearest differences between Engell’s approach and the scholarly branch that has been branded ‘German media theory’ since the early 2000s. German media theory can be said to be notoriously disinterested in television. Its lines of research and especially its media-archeological work regularly jump directly from the innovations of the late nineteenth and early 20th century (moving images, wireless communication, sound recording and transmission, etc.) to computing and the Internet. The few pages Friedrich Kittler – often considered the founding figure of German media theory – published on television in his overview monograph on Optical Media certainly belong to his less inspired writing. For German media theory, television seems to be too dominated by commercial popular culture and thus too banal to require any archeological or philosophical scrutiny. Even to start asking about Engell’s relationship with German media theory might sound like a silly shortcut between nationality and academic paradigm. After all, Engell’s name never seems to appear in references to German media theory – one review positions his work at the middle ground between media archeology and cultural studies, though (Powell 2014, 411). And yet, there are aspects of his work that might, in an international context, suggest a connection. Furthermore, for more than ten years now, Engell has co-directed one of the major German media research institutes (the IKKM in Weimar) together with Bernhard Siegert, who is one of the most well-known representatives of German media theory. Both focus less on the content of media texts and the political economy of the media industry than on the recurrent procedures and operations of media as world-generating: the very basic categories of culture – like time, space, (human) agency, rationality – exist not before but rather through media. Indeed, studying media’s constituent role in culture, society, perception, and agency is the stated research objective of the IKKM. German media theory famously focuses on materiality; in a refreshingly anti-humanist take (intended to radicalize and technologize Michel Foucault’s work), they find it downright naïve to ask about ‘reception’, as media execute their specific order and their way of making distinctions irrespective of how people use them. Engell would partly agree with this assertion. Niklas Luhmann, one of his main reference points, countered the idea of individuals as originators of meaningful exchange with the remark that ´only communication can communicate´ (Luhmann 1992, 251). In other words, it is not people but rather the historically increasing

Introduc tion

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differentiation of subsystems and their specific codes that allow for and structure communication. In this approach, however, and in Engell’s media philosophy, the symbolic forms of media and the development of subgenres (eventually, all of the differences that make a difference) are considered effective operations of media. In his introduction here, Engell approvingly refers to Kittler’s dictum that only that which is switchable exists. For Kittler, this means materially switching between ‘on’ and ‘off’, but for Engell, as his analysis of the remote control in Chapters 2 and 4 shows, buttons only become operational in relation to the channels and genres that make choice a reflexive procedure (which does not necessarily imply that each TV viewer reflects upon it). While German media theory is mainly interested in dynamics that avoid or happen uncoupled from thinking (e.g. communication as the mathematically calculable distinction between signal and noise), Engell would surely side again with Luhmann, who argues that there is no communication without metacommunication, such as the constant observation of what is considered to be part of this observation and what is not (see Powell 2016 for a detailled account). Media are thus much more dynamic and flexible entities in Engell’s philosophy than in German media theory: the operations of media might produce surprising new ways of thinking that are not already determined by the basic alternatives of the switch, and these new ways of thinking might also transform the media themselves. And yet there’s one aspect in Engell’s work that he shares with German media theory: both emerged through a certain intentional (and certainly not ignorant) isolationism. While the IKKM has actively contributed to international exchange since its inception, neither German media theory’s nor Engell’s writing engage much with the internationally more common approaches in media studies. Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies are not considered as sources of either inspiration or antagonism. German media theory abhors the focus on representation and meaning, claiming that the politics of cultural studies is too superficial (because it ignores the ‘deeper’ technological or even ontological layer). Engell’s media philosophy does not in principal oppose such questions (his Introduction to Television Theory covers some of the key authors [Engell 2012)]) but rather circumvents them by restricting his articulation of media’s philosophizing to topics that have already been taken up by canonical philosophers. There is therefore no explanation as to why television should not also be thinking about race, class, and gender—topics that, historically, have been just as constitutive of the medium as seriality or simultaneity.

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Both of these approaches show that a certain withdrawal from the internationally dominant debates and the circle of internationally signif icant peer-reviewed journals might be a condition for their highly original contributions to the field. On the other hand, this withdrawal also prevents productive discussions. It would be interesting input for media studies to discuss the similarities between Engell’s and Paddy Scannell’s appropriation of Heidegger to disclose the temporal and experiential qualities of television (Scannell 2013). It could be just as productive to combine Engell’s scrutinizing of history as a sequence of experiments with research on TV’s never-ending quest to find and mold its audience (e.g. Ang 1991; Ouellette 2002; McCarthy 2010). This book hopefully allows for more of such debates.

The Structure of this Book The introduction to this volume is a translation of the f irst chapter of Engell’s German-language Introduction to Television Theory from 2012, which discusses some general preconditions for television theory in dialogue with McLuhan and Cavell and thereby lays the groundwork for the approach used in the following chapters. These chapters can be read individually, but the connections and interrelations between them also serve to develop a broader argument. The first part, From Transmission to Selectivity, focuses on the ongoing historical transformations of television and on how the formal and material operations that emerge within these transformations offer insights into the medium’s entanglement with broader worldviews and cultural patterns. Using early institutional experiments as key reference points, including the Moon landing, the introduction of the remote control, and the process of digitization, the chapters in this section analyse television’s historical trajectory as aiming first at global visibility and then – as soon as this was achieved – turning to the question of ordering, segmenting, and selecting the seemingly unlimited visibility. The systematic argument is that (contrary to its reputation as a monotonous standardizing machine) television, throughout its history, enacted institutional and aesthetic experiments in order to determine the nature of a global audience, individual choice, etc. This argument also addresses questions related to contemporary media culture, such as the organization of information, the individualization of choice, and the increasingly haptic quality of media.

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The second part discusses the category of Televisual Events in depth by focusing on seemingly familiar topics like global media events, TV scandals, and the TV coverage of war. The main focus, though, is the question of how the global reach and ongoing flow of television redefines what an event can be – and what events eventually make visible. The third part continues this investigation into the temporality of television (time being clearly more pronounced than space in Engell’s work more generally) by now focusing not on the special moments of the event but on how television organizes the overarching temporal patterns of History – Memory – Seriality. The material operations of technical media (e.g. the Maltese Cross of analogue film or the tube projection of analogue television) are basic ways of organizing time, and the aesthetic forms enabled by these operations create history and memory as they reflect on them. Seriality has often been discussed as one of the most characteristic features of television (which glaringly shapes post-televisual media practices), yet it has rarely been analysed as a mode of temporal reflection in a philosophical sense. Finally, the section on Objects – Agency – Ontography offers an in-depth discussion of what television (and the forms described in the prior sections) has to offer for the ongoing discussion on new materialism and objectoriented philosophy. The temporal forms of television and its eclectic use of innovative visual technologies offer insights into the status of objects and their agency. While partly representing a new direction in Engell’s work – in which television’s ‘thinking through’ sometimes leans towards a ‘mere’ reflexive approach – it can also be considered a slight shift in emphasis. The experiments of television have always been approached as ontographic constellations – that is, assemblages that bring ‘real’ temporalities, audiences, choices, and visibilities into our world (by thinking through them and thinking them through). As such, one could argue that television’s ontographic work produces realities that still impact and shape the thinking and doing of digital media. Some of these chapters are being published here for the first time, while others were produced for different occasions and contexts. Except for minor corrections and some unification of vocabulary and references, they have not been changed. We kept some overlap between the chapters to make them readable individually and to preserve the ongoing development of the arguments. Anthony Enns was the most careful and thoughtful translator one could wish for. Felix Clasbrummel helped with unifying the references. All this was possible thanks to generous funding of the IKKM in Weimar.

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References Ang, Ien. 1991. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London/New York: Routledge. Caldwell, John T. 2008. Production Culture. Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham/London: Duke Univ. Press. Engell, Lorenz. 1989. Vom Widerspruch zur Langeweile. Frankfurt am Main; Bern: P. Lang. —. 1992. Sinn und Industrie. Einführung in die Filmgeschichte. Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Campus. —. 1995. Bewegen Beschreiben: Theorie zur Filmgeschichte. Weimar: VDG Weimar. —. 1997. ‘Fernsehen mit Gilles Deleuze.’ In Das Kino bei Deleuze / Le Cinema selon Deleuze, edited by Raymond Bellour, Tom Conley, Oliver Fahle, Lorenz Engell, and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, 468–481. Weimar: Bauhaus-Univ. —. 2003. Bilder des Wandels (= Serie Moderner Film, Bd. 1). Weimar: VDG. —. 2012. Fernsehtheorie. Zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Hamburg. Luhmann, Niklas. 1992. ‘What Is Communication?’ Communication Theory 2 (3): 251–259. Mayer, Vicki. 2011. Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCarthy, Anna. 2010. The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. New York: The New Press. Ouellette, Laurie. 2002. Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People. New York: Columbia University Press. Powell, Larson. 2014. ‘Media as Technology and Culture.’ German Studies Review 37 (2): 405–16. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2014.0059. —. 2016. ‘Boredom, War and Paradox: German Theories of Television.’ In German Television: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Larson Powell and Robert Shandley, 1 edition, 33–49. New York: Berghahn Books. Scannell, Paddy. 2013. Television and the Meaning of ‘Live’: An Enquiry into the Human Situation. Polity.

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On the Difficulties of Television Theory Abstract Television has remained a subject of considerable neglect and contempt in philosophy. This chapter examines various explanations for this neglect of television: is it, as Neil Postman assumes, due to the irreversible triviality and commerciality of television, which exposes every attempt to theorize as hopeless? Is it, as Stanley Cavell’s analysis assumes, because television, philosophically taken seriously, would force us to confront the increasingly catastrophic and uninhabitable state of the world? In contrast to these approaches, this chapter suggests starting from the technical form of television: with the omnipresence of television, switching finally becomes an ontological form, since the television image is not an image of the world, but an intervention into it. Hence, the world of television is never the same. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, visual culture, media change, Stanley Cavell

Television produced the first images that could be switched on, off, and even over. As Marshall McLuhan repeatedly emphasized, the television image is electric; in other words, it is the image in the age of electrification (McLuhan 1994, 8ff). However, electric light is not only artificial, comprehensive, and transformative (by turning night into day) (Ibid., 52), but also switchable. The electric, switchable television image dominated Western popular culture and the general relations of communication of the later 20th century, and it continues to have a sweeping and formative effect that towers over everything else. It has led us from the age of classical analogue mass media, such as newspapers, film, and radio, to the age of digital networked media. It has thus left its mark on contemporary media culture and practice to an extent that is still not fully comprehended. It has shaped entire ways of life, introduced and accompanied the age of consumption, and given the nuclear

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family their economy, morality, daily routines, and everyday knowledge. It has defined political power structures. It has exponentially increased the number of images produced. It has created and established temporal structures – from daily and weekly rhythms to the basic understanding of actuality and eventfulness to the practices of expectation and memory. It has occupied dreams. With respect to spatial regimes, it has set into operation massive processes of inclusion and exclusion, and with respect to its programs, it has practiced forms of control over the distribution of knowledge that are still in effect today. It has exercised a definitive influence on the transformation of generational and gender relations, the formation and reformation of differentiated global cultures, and the relationship of nature to culture and technology. Its worldwide handling of images and sounds has marked an unavoidable foil to their consistency and appearance, their ability to transform and circulate. It has set a standard in terms of the scope, depth, and speed at which information is conveyed. It has determined visibility and invisibility, openness and hiddenness, proximity and distance, reality and fiction, prominence and normality. It has written history, and in the process it has decided what is a story, what is news, what is a subject and an object, and what in general is considered to have been (I will come back to this shortly). Nevertheless, many theoretical approaches to television have been constrained by a strikingly odd diagnosis – namely, that the development of television theory remains stunted. According to these approaches, therefore, television and theory are considered deeply incommensurable (Adelman et al. 2001, 23-24). Unlike writing or film, for example, television has not inspired a theory that grasps more than a particular, isolated aspect of the medium and that defines the medium as a concept, model, or perspective that unifies differences. In terms of theory, television has not yet been properly understood or at least formulated. The easiest and most obvious reason for this circumstance is that the people who are actually responsible for the formation of theory and who are trained for this kind of theoretical work – academics, media scholars, intellectuals, critics, philosophers, and columnists – are simply not interested in television. As a form of mass culture, television is largely commercial and therefore necessarily trivial. It is primitive and often vulgar, yet it is also based on a highly complex and expensive technology (in the mid 1980s, before the PC permeated everyday life, color television was by far the most complex technical device in the average household). This vulgarity and technical complexity do not exactly attract the development of academic concepts or theories. On the contrary, it inspires contempt and

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an unambiguous lack of appreciation. Hartmut Winkler appropriately described it as ‘Mount Olympus and pigsty’ (Winkler 2006, 93). The gods of academic concepts thus refused to consider or dwell in the ‘pigsty’ of unspeakable commercial and cultural triviality. It is fair to say that film and radio possessed many of the same attributes during the first half of the 20th century, and they also provoked numerous critiques. However, this did not prevent anyone from developing serious theories about these media, which were widely recognized as valid. Film and radio theory have thus produced monographs whose scope and prestige have tirelessly outpaced the state of television theory. Therefore, there must be other reasons for the lack of theory. A fartherreaching explanation inspired by media theory could be established in connection with the work of media-pedagogue Neil Postman (Postman 1988, 64 ff.). According to Postman, theoretical work and theoretical reflection are fundamentally steered by concepts. As a result, they are connected to writing and rationality in the broadest sense. However, television precisely attacks the abstract, logical rationality of concepts and argumentation, which are carried and established by the medial form of writing. In other words, television massively undermines and ultimately suspends the Western culture of writing and argumentation – and with it the ability to develop and discuss theories. This is obviously due to the medium’s emphasis on images and, in particular, the illogical way in which these images are connected and arranged (cf. Engell 1989). This explanation thus assumes that an appropriate theory was not developed for television because a theoretical and conceptual culture is fundamentally foreign to its form. A closer look reveals that this assumption is also not convincing, as there is no reason why theories can only be developed in relation to objects and topics that are already informed by theory. On the contrary, the illogicality of television could provoke the development of a theory, although it apparently has not yet done so – or at least not in terms of a grand theory. In his essay ‘The Fact of Television’, philosopher Stanley Cavell offered another point worth considering. He also chose as his starting point the astonishingly insufficient theorization of television (Cavell 1982). In searching for the underlying cause of this insufficiency, he initially considered the world of forms and structures on television, and he identified the series as the dominant cultural form that the medium developed and implemented (Ibid., 79-83). Due to this arrangement, television must say and show everything in one form of series or another. In order to understand what television is and does – and to understand why it remains theoretically neglected – it is therefore necessary to address the series form.

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When attempting to understand something, it is useful at first to distinguish it from something else. Cavell thus began by drawing a distinction between television series and television genres (Ibid., 79), as he had already extensively addressed the phenomenon of genre formation in film. Like television series, film genres also include large numbers of individually well-defined parts or works that can be organized into groups and extended almost indefinitely. According to Cavell, however, television series and film genres differ considerably in the relationship of the parts to the whole. In particular, the features that a film must possess in order to be included in a given genre are constantly being renegotiated, and a film belongs to a genre not when it exhibits certain features, but rather when it participates in this negotiation. As a form, therefore, film reflects the quality of the genre as medium – namely, as a malleable force that enables and at the same time regulates the continuous emergence of the new (Ibid., 81). In the case of television, however, the inclusion of an episode in a given series is determined not by the relationship between features and their negotiation – that is, between form and medium – but rather by the relationship between format and improvisation. As a format, a television series specifies a number of rules – a formula – that guides the creation of each episode so that the variance – the number of different possible episodes – is virtually infinite. Cavell compares the television series to the improvisational technique of jazz: a chord progression or theme is predetermined along with a few basic rules for the ongoing proceedings, and the improvisations then follow this formula so that the progression yields a coherent whole (Ibid., 83). The series ends, according to Cavell, when the format has exhausted the variability and fruitfulness of the guidelines. The formula of the format is thus sterile – ossified – and the individual episodes appear one after the other, so they are perceived as a linear sequence even though they do not actually build upon one another. They are simply variations of a basic principle or formula, which can be extended indefinitely, and these variations are not discussed or developed but rather exhausted. In other words, film genres are process-driven, while television series are structural. The combinatorial formula that determines all of the possible variants that a format permits gradually wears down, but combinatorics makes them all available in one format of possibility. As formats, therefore, series tend to be simultaneous; like matrices or diagrams, they actually operate in a rather flat arrangement whose individual combinations are updated one after the other. An example of such a format, according to Cavell, is talk (Ibid., 86). The never-ending stream of talk goes through all the variants of speech and

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discussion or arguing and chatting. The format determines the structure, but the successively exhausted variability is virtually limitless. On the one hand, it is an unending, structureless, continuous, and ever-present stream of speech. On the other hand, this virtually limitless world of possibility is always simultaneous, as it is defined by the format. In other words, Cavell describes talk as a carpet of speech and chatter that underlies everyday life and that collectively constitutes a condition of simultaneity even though only one piece can be perceived at a time and these pieces are replaced in an endless sequence. Cavell thus famously defines television as a ´stream of simultaneously received events´ (in contrast to film, which he defines as ´successive projections of the world´) (Ibid., 85) due to the importance of simultaneity between broadcasting and reception as well as the structural simultaneity of continuous chatter. Everything that occurs on television must stand out against the background of this stream of ´simultaneously received events´. To be more precise, it involves not only one such stream – namely, a format – but rather many of them, which are offered at the same time. Our everyday life is populated by countless formats and sub-formats of talk, which encompass a vast number of television series and a virtually endless stream of simultaneous episodes. According to Cavell, this ensures that the structural matrix of formats remains inexhaustible, that nothing ever changes, and that everything is understood as different variations of the same – or at least that everything that could actually occur in the form of the event is only perceived against the uneventful background of the series and the world of formats. From the perspective of television and its dominant form, the series, the world is a fundamentally uneventful and immutable foil that is constantly deviating little by little through the stream of images. Based on these considerations, Cavell famously concludes that television is a medium not of observation – of viewing – but rather of surveillance – of monitoring (Ibid., 85). Like security guards in the monitoring room of a store or subway, television viewers similarly switch from one monitoring point to another, and the switching of the image and its stream corresponds to the ruling of the outside world; indeed, the former secures the latter. This implies that television also orchestrates the distinction between the inside and the outside, as viewers sit inside – in a milieu of inclusion – and only feel sympathy for the world outside through their acts of surveillance. Cavell is naturally thinking of the relationship between the living room and the outside world, home and reality, or suburbia and urban space. If one were interested in a contemporary comparison, one would undoubtedly think of a series like The Wire. The practice of inclusion, which is enabled

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or produced by the monitoring of television and which is realized in the form of the series, excludes the world and its inhospitableness – that is, its deep-seated uninhabitability (Ibid., 95). According to Cavell, therefore, television’s technical form – switching – and ontological form – ruling – condition one another. Going beyond Cavell, it appears that the switchability of the television picture constitutes its most prominent technical feature, which distinguishes it from all previous types of images, and at the same time has a share in its ontology: as Friedrich Kittler claimed, only that which is switchable exists (Kittler 1990a, 6). For Cavell, however, it involves a negative ontology: we have made the world uninhabitable and uncanny. These thoughts may have been influenced by Martin Heidegger (Heidegger 1954, 146), or Cavell may have been thinking of our current social or ecological unliveability. In any case, he argued that television viewers limit themselves to monitoring the world, which reassures them that what they fear most – the loss of the world – will not happen or at least has not yet happened: everything outside remains normal and unchanged. Hartmut Winkler agreed: for him, the refusal to take action or intervene constitutes the core of television behavior (Winkler 2006, 94). Cavell concluded that the connection between the dominant cultural form of television – that is, the series – and the uninhabitability of the world is made most apparent by the absence of a coherent theory of television (Cavell 1982, 162). As long as viewers refuse not only to take action – following Winkler – but also to think about this refusal – that is, as long as they are only monitoring but not reflecting – then they are actually occupied with the uninhabitability of the world, although they have no need to recognize or face it. The intellectual and philosophical evasion of the mega-medium of television – that is, the refusal to reflect theoretically on its simultaneously extensive use and effectiveness – denies the fact of television but nevertheless does not change it. Viewers do not even want to understand what it means that television is a technological symptom of uninhabitability. As a result, they ultimately help to optimize its efficiency in excluding the world by foregoing the insight that it has to offer. Cavell’s essay is interesting not only because of its thesis concerning television’s distance from theory or theory’s hostility towards television, but also because of its form. It is an eminently theoretical statement about television, but it is also strangely fragmented and disparate in its structure and argumentation. Cavell repeatedly interrupts his own explanations in order to switch back to earlier essays, discuss individual examples in more detail, or insert long intermediate passages. His essay thus touches on many

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aspects of television that readers will repeatedly and extensively absorb in the course of the following chapters, such as questions of temporality and seriality, synchronicity and the event form, as well as different modes of vision and visibility. Cavell’s sketch of television theory also repeatedly confronts readers with the basic dualism of the technical form and the world form – that is, switching and ruling. The form of his essay thus converges with the practice of monitoring that it describes – in other words, the successive current deviation of a (theoretically) simultaneous general situation. It apparently already belongs to the universe that it is trying to understand. One might even go so far as to say that his essay involves the surveillance rather than observation of television and that this might be a more appropriate and consistent approach than the traditional form of theory, which involves thinking and operating with the whole picture in mind. Of course Cavell’s observations also raise many questions. For example, the phenomenon of control remains very vague, as does the relationship between the practice of monitoring and its (feedback) effects on the world being monitored (Ibid., 163). Intervention and nonintervention in the world are possibly not as clearly distinguishable as Cavell would have readers believe – especially if he is correct. The clear separation between the inner and outer space of television is also possibly not yet the last word. There is also the question as to whether the serial form of television has in the meantime gone in an entirely different direction, in which the focus is no longer the formula and its exhaustion but rather what Cavell described in relation to film as the genre-as-medium. His essay was written in 1982, so it does not acknowledge the emergence of neo-television, which has marked a new epoch since that time. Perhaps it is now necessary to recognize increased mutability as a distinctive feature of television, which would be contrary to Cavell’s basic approach. There is some evidence to support this claim. For example, a general overview reveals just how much theoretical approaches to television are bound to their historical locations. The reason why not one – or even more – theories of television have yet been developed may also be due to the fact that television constantly and severely transformed during the long period of its dominance as a mass medium. This was already true of its technological basis. At the time of its expansion as a mass medium in 1948, it transformed from an electromechanical apparatus into an electronic tube technology. The uninterrupted live broadcasts that characterized early television (television began, both in practice and theory, as a medium of pure transmission) were also discontinued in the mid 1950s with the introduction of filmed series and AMPEX image recording. The golden age of television, which served as

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a benchmark for early critical theories of the medium (Adorno 1963, 69-80; Anders 1956; Baacke 1974), thus ended after only a few years. It completely changed not only the production but also the observability of the medium, which caused theoretical upheavals. The introduction of the remote control and the explosive increase in the number of television channels around 1980 also resulted in the emergence of an entirely new paradigm, known as neo-television, which transformed television into a new medium and inspired a new phase of theorization (Casetti and Odin 1990, 9-26). Furthermore, the process of digitization, which has severely taken hold of television since the turn of the century, makes it seem completely unclear what we are actually (theoretically) talking about when we talk about television – namely, about an object or an agent of digitization. In any case, these examples show that the historical half-life of theoretical approaches to television is not very long. They are often temporary and linked to specific events, and this can also be recognized in Cavell’s essay – notwithstanding its undisputable relevance up to our days.. In short: perhaps television theory begins not with complaints about the lack of theory but rather with insights into the consistency of theoretical reflections on television. The deplorable state of this theory – its insufficiency, its small format, its heterogeneity, its dispersal, its limited validity, its rootedness in previous technological actualities – possibly outlines the precise form and even provides the formula through which television theory can become effective at all in a cultural, conceptual, and epistemological environment shaped by television. In particular, it operates not as a sequence of large, complete, conceptual projections of the world of television, but rather as flowing information in the paradoxical stream of simultaneous theoretical events.

References Adelman, Ralf, Jan O. Hesse, Judith Keilbach, Markus Stauff, and Matthias Thiele, eds. 2001. Grundlagentexte zur Fernsehwissenschaft: Theorie ‒ Geschichte ‒ Analyse. Konstanz: UVK. Adorno, Theodor W. 1963. Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Anders, Günther. 1956. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. München: Beck. Baacke, Dieter, ed. 1974. Kritische Medientheorien: Konzepte und Kommentare. München: Juventa.

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Casetti, Francesco, and Roger Odin. 1990. ‘De La Paléo- à La NéoTélévision.’ Communications, no. 51: 9–26. Cavell, Stanley. 1982. ‘The Fact of Television.’ Daedalus 111 (4): 75–96. Engell, Lorenz. 1989. Vom Widerspruch zur Langeweile. Frankfurt am Main, Bern: P. Lang. Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Vorträge und Aufsätze, vol. II. Pfullingen: Neske. Kittler, Friedrich. 1990a. ‘Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt.’ werk und zeit. Vierteljahresschrift des Deutschen Werkbundes 38 (1): 6–8. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Postman, Neil. 1988. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books. Winkler, Hartmut. 2006. ‘Nicht handeln. Versuch einer Wiederaufwertung des Couch Potato angesichts der Provokation des Interaktiv-Digitalen.’ In Philosophie des Fernsehens, edited by Lorenz Engell and Oliver Fahle, 93–102. München: Fink.

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Click, Select, Think: The Origin and Function of a Philosophical Apparatus Abstract This chapter understands television and, in particular, the remote control as a philosophical apparatus. The remote control leads to thinking via the functions of touch and choice. Television, via the remote control, grasps the world as a space of possibilities. With the broadcast of the Moon landing in 1969, television leaves the horizon of the world as a closed, all-encompassing whole for the first time. Later, the remote control transforms each television image into a choice made, relative to other images and choices. Television sees itself as a condition of this world’s possibilities. Finally, media evolution leads to the introduction of the computer mouse as a universal selection tool, transforming the world into a field of infinitely revisable choices and decisions. Keywords: remote control, Moon landing, visual culture, media change, globalization, liveness

Media philosophy and philosophers’ philosophy are in a state of tension. While philosophers produce written texts, in which they think, media produce the ability to think by establishing the conditions that make thinking itself possible – and consequently also behavior or action. In short, media make thought thinkable. Media philosophy therefore does not have writers, much less philosophers; rather, it is an event or possibly even a practice. It is not waiting to be written by philosophers, as it always already takes place in and through media. As a result, media philosophy can only be found and revealed in media themselves. I will provide a rudimentary and tentative sketch of this approach on the basis of television. By focusing on a single aspect – namely, the thought involved in selection or its ability to make something conceivable

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch02

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– what is ‘inherent’ to the philosophy of television – that is, television itself – is rendered into something ‘foreign’ to it: philosophical writing. In addition to considering its consequences, the primary obligation of philosophical work is rightly regarded as the clarification of its underlying assumptions (even if this clarification occasionally hinders the consideration of results). If media are granted their own philosophical activity outside the framework of philosophers’ philosophy, then it must first be shown how media clarify their own assumptions. And it is precisely through the process of clarifying their assumptions that media make them themselves conceivable and therefore possible.

Trailer Every medium makes something possible that was not possible before the emergence of the medium. Media are enablers, as they make something communicable, accessible, representable, measurable, changeable, etc. Media thereby open a specific horizon of possibilities by allowing something new to arise, evolve, and become a reality. Media are fundamentally generative, and each medium crystallizes its own condensations, events, and structures in a diffuse, imprecise, and indifferent – but not entirely indeterminate – space of possibilities. Forms come into existence and pass away. Every form that emerges in a medium, such as an event, experience, function, representation, symbol, image, text, or system, can thus be conceived as the actualization of a medial potential. Conversely, every actualized potential also adds new possibilities to the medial repertoire and changes old ones. New realities alter what is possible, just as a change in position alters one’s perspective with regard to subsequent or previous positions. Forms are therefore not only the products of a medium; rather, a medium is also the result of actualizations or forms. Consequently, media can also be conceived as made, produced, and especially mutable; they are by no means prior or original. This oscillation, in which a mutable supply of possible forms is constantly being revised through actualization, constitutes a medium. As a result of this process, however, the medium immediately withdraws and makes itself unnoticeable. It leaves behind a multitude of actualized, observable forms, yet it remains nothing more than a shell – a horizon of possibility and a condition of the formation, creation, and transformation of forms – that cannot be observed or described. Only fixed forms can be observed and described, as they speak while the medium itself does

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not. (Here, and in the following, the concept of the ‘medium’ should be understood in the most general possible way as a complementary term for ‘form’ in the sense of a ‘loose coupling’ rather than a ‘fixed coupling’, which Niklas Luhmann developed in connection with Fritz Heider; see Luhmann 1995, 165f; Luhmann 1997, 190-202; Brauns 2002; Engell 2001b). Intervention in, access to, and understanding of the medially constituted world is therefore always mediated by forms, while the media themselves – their condition of possibility – necessarily remain unknown and virtually imperceptible. We talk about ‘the media’ as a thing or an event, but not as its condition of possibility. This can lead to the assumption that the world – the entirety of all actualized forms – is immediately or so to speak naturally accessible as a discrete, closed, and unchanging repertoire beyond all conditionality. If the medium appears, however, then it is obscured by a screen whose translucency allows the various modes of experience, possibilities of action, and forms of thought to be differentiated. The medium is thus hardly tangible in terms of the world structures or events that it itself nevertheless constitutes or at least conditions. As one possible form of condensation and generalization, a medium also retains the possibility of self-referentiality. It is able to react to itself, but it then paradoxically contains itself as a form. The medium thus appears as a self-contradictory (i.e. self-conscious) form, in which the various possibilities of the medium refer to one another. While the medium still remains fundamentally diffuse and invisible, it nevertheless develops its own reflexive form or philosophy; in short, it develops the ability to design its own possibilities. Media revise themselves; they imagine their possibilities. Preconditions and results intertwine in a self-generative process. Media only exist insofar as they are constantly becoming and changing, and they can only be opened up to philosophy through their transformation. When we talk about ‘the media’ as a thing or an event, such as a storage medium or a mass medium like writing or television, we usually mean this already philosophical form of the medium that refers to its own possibilities and thus to its own mediality. In terms of their philosophy, the ‘media’ in this sense are also already second-order media. And this concrete, everyday talk of medial objects is correct to a certain extent, as a medium so identified can allow the virtuality of the medial horizon to be seen between the forms and the multiplicity of their possibilities; ‘the media’ thus often appear as productive forces, as they are fundamentally generative. Under these conditions, philosophizing can and will essentially mean writing, as philosophy has been connected to verbal writing since its very

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inception. Writing has the characteristic double face of a medial form: it is an actualized form generated by a medium that it itself is not, yet at the same time it also acts as an intermediary in an enormous field of forms and generates its own horizon of possibilities, such as reports or announcements. As a form, writing belongs to the horizon of a medium that remains unnamed; as a medium, however, it generates its own forms. Philosophy is the form that acts reflexively towards these forms (Luhmann 1997, 249-290). Only the medium of verbal writing, which is always implied but never explicitly disclosed in philosophy, ensures the reflexivity of communication – the thinking of thought, the meaningfulness of meaning – which enables and requires philosophy. However, philosophy only became aware of this connection (Derrida 1997) after other media became available to render similar services in entirely different ways. What allowed this underlying mediality to be perceived was the difference between not merely the forms, but rather the horizons of the forms. Different fields of activity are open to a philosophy that is conscious of media in this way. It can conceive of media as a new – though never available – object of philosophy. It will particularly look for concepts in classical texts that can be used to understand this new object – the media – and to construct a specific media philosophy (Hartmann 2000). This is how the translucency of the topical or non-topical medial is handled in thought. It is precisely this approach, however, that can and will question the extent to which the ideas and concepts of these classics are medially conditioned, such as by specific writing tools or dissemination technologies (Kittler 1985a). It is not possible for philosophy to abandon the interiority of verbal writing, which it inhabits. When conceived as a complement to philosophers’ philosophy, however, media philosophy must attempt to conceptualize the activity and functionality of media outside the practice of reading and writing. In addition to verbal writing, the first medium to be considered is numbers. As the philosophy of numbers, mathematics presumably performs the same function for this medium that philosophy performs for verbal writing (Cassirer 1994, 417-473). For other non-linguistic graphics, pictograms, and visual media of all kinds – from painting to photography and film to electronic images – it is the visual arts that ensure the reflexivity of the medium as reflected in observable forms and thus make its mediality conceivable (Deleuze 1986; 2008; 2003). Image, number, and writing do not communicate themselves; rather, they open up spaces of communication for and through the creation of forms.

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However, these are all recording, storage, or notational media that provide different kinds of descriptions and make it possible to draw conclusions. The translation of media philosophy into written philosophy only becomes difficult when other, non-notational media are discussed, as they describe nothing, allow no conclusions to be drawn, and provide no instructions. Examples include observational media like the telescope or the microscope, pure transmission media like the telephone or the radio, and control media like money or electrical current. While these functional media condition the development of forms, they themselves do not communicate; rather, they span interiorities whose limits cannot be discussed or can only be discussed from the inside. Through functioning rather than recording, they liberate experiences and thought forms, which can also be reflexively directed towards experientiability and conceivability. Television also ranks among functional media; it even combines and coordinates the functions of observation, transmission, and control. As a design of its own possibilities – as philosophy, therefore, which is the objective here – television also developed a logic that lies in the transition from visibility to selectability, which accordingly leads from self-perception to self-selection. Television thus creates and develops the possibility to think about selection and to conceive of the world as a space of selection. I will attempt to describe this movement in the following.

Space Night Since at least 1884, television has been conceived as ‘a device designed to make an object located at one place A visible at any other place B’ – this is the famous definition in Paul Nipkow’s patent application for the ‘electric telescope’ in 1885 (quoted in Hickethier 1998, 15; see also Abramson 1987, 13ff). As it is easy to see, this understanding implies that television is a technical installation, that there is a division between (at least) two different locations in space (A and B), and that there is an object situated at location A that is visible at location B. Locations A and B are not entirely isomorphic, as A is defined precisely by the presence of the object while B is arbitrarily chosen: any location can be B. The basic state of television as a dispositif is thus sufficiently described (see also Noel 1998). What is interesting about this initial concept is that there is no mention of a transmission from A to B. However, it is necessary to keep simultaneity in mind: the object is present at location A and at the same time visible at location B. This spatial arrangement is thus at the same time a synchronization. Therein lies the special

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effect of television, as there are many other media that make something visible at another location at a later time, such as photography, drawing, painting, etc.1 As a medium, therefore, television is conceived as a space of possibility that extends to all of the B locations where the visibility of the object can reach, which are simultaneously privileged by their relationship to the special location A. During the early period of the development of television (up to the 1930s), the concept of a simultaneous link between selected locations was experimentally realized – albeit for various different reasons; according to the same consistent pattern of outside and inside – of the large in the small – the opera was supposed to be brought into the parlor, the Olympics into the television studio, and the image of the Führer into the heart of the German people (Zielinski 1999, 148ff, 162ff; Hoff 1991, 218). Television thus makes simultaneity and spatial entanglement conceivable. In addition to simultaneous visibility in different locations, the basic form and function of selectivity was also within the range of possibilities. According to this concept, what is selected or chosen is always location B – in other words, the location of the spectators, who shows that they are chosen through possession, purchasing power, and participation (Zielinski 1999, 157f). The linear connection to location A, which is technically instrumentalized through signal transmission, gives the selection a vectorial form that is comparable to a beam of light. This changed as the distribution of television reception increasingly tended toward saturation and eventually comprehensive coverage in the 1950s (in Europe in the 1960s). The arbitrary and privileged location B simply became all locations. Television represented no longer a projected beam directed at a select location within a space of possibility but rather a dense zone of accessibility, in which the locations are reached not individually but rather all at the same time. If all locations are fundamentally homogeneous and can be reached at the same time, however, then their being chosen no longer makes any difference and has no meaning. A tendency to reverse the relations of selection was already evident early on in the USA – the motherland of television – and later also in Europe. In the late 1950s, the ‘receiver’ began to decide which objects and thus which location A would be made visible at location B, 1 The production director of Nazi television, Eugen Hadamowsky, grasped this in his own characteristic style: ‘In (live) television programs as well as current recorded television reports there is the magic of the moment, the great oneness, the holy simultaneity, on which for me the greatest power and meaning of life has always depended.’ (Quoted in Hoff 1991, 217)

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although this decision was narrowly and cautiously limited by preselection (Chateau 1998). And television hastened to expand by constantly offering new objects and locations and by extending the zone of selectability over all known surfaces. This expansion culminated in an experiment 2 of maximal range and scope, which surprisingly gave way to a return or contraction of the place of television. As if it were a second invention of television, the model of selection was thus newly conceived and supplanted by that of transmission, which enabled entirely different possibilities for development. This happened spectacularly in the greatest television event of all time, which marked both the triumph and the end of classical television transmission – namely, the Apollo project of the 1960s and in particular the sleepless space nights of the live broadcasts from outer space and from the Moon in 1968-1969, which presented mythical images of the Earth as seen looking back from the capsule (Barnouw 1990, 422-428; Zec 1985; see also Chapters 3 and 5 in this volume). The functions of the selection pattern, locations A and B, visibility, objects, and simultaneity suddenly became reflexively related to one another. The object made visible – namely, the Earth – was itself the entirety of all locations. Moreover, the object situated at location A was not actually visible (for anyone); rather, its visibility was only a product of the apparatus. And, unlike the early relations of television, what was communicated was not the highly selective choice of a particular location B, but rather the indiscriminate all-at-onceness of all locations and their common bond in collective expectation. The present, in the sense of simultaneity, prevailed not just between locations A and B, but rather between immeasurably numerous locations. The object at location A thus merged simultaneously with all other locations and was made visible through this merger. As a form of television, the Moon shot made the space of possibility of television (or television as a medium) self-reflexive. The world generated by television watched itself as a world and experienced its own mediality – namely, its fabricated nature as selection and projection, as the choice and design of a horizon of possibility. At this point, it no longer experienced itself directly, but rather it was distanced from itself and mediated by itself. 2 Scientific modes require concessions. The cultural and scientific history of experimentation has recently become part of media studies. Film, for example, is now readily seen as an extensive neurological experiment. In television, the idea of the experiment has constantly been rediscovered since the beginning – not just since the experimental setup of Big Brother (see Stäheli 2000 and Chapter 3 in this volume).

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Television thus unfolded as a philosophical apparatus, which represented the actual origin of the medium. From this point on, television functioned against the backdrop of this panoptic experience of the century – that the world became visible and visualizable in the world – which was made possible by television itself. It also became conceivable that everything could be made visible anywhere at any time. Henceforth, the idea of transmitting visibility from one location to another no longer made sense. The general tendency was to conceive of every image of every object as already available at every location. The challenge now lies no longer in transmitting visibility, as was the case from Nipkow’s time to the Moon shot, but rather in choosing between all of the possible visibilities and objects. This requires an entirely new philosophical practice – namely, selection – that distinguishes the actual, which is visible in the present, from the virtual, which is just as possibly visible. With this philosophy, all forms of thought that assume the transmission of definite contents, messages, and communications or the manipulation (in the sense of remote control) of issues and modes of representation gradually begin to evaporate (the latter was f iercely renewed by Bourdieu 1998). By shifting from transmission to selection, thinking about media turns inward, as it becomes important to note the relations between what is actual and what is virtual or between what is chosen and what is not. However, these relations exist between medium and form. Thinking, in the form of selection, makes it possible for the medium at the same time to conceive of the paradoxical form of the medium.

Remote Control Television subsequently conceived of its own new possibilities. After the implosion of the transmission formula, it generated new imperatives, new forms, and new material crystallizations. It was first necessary to solve the decision-making problem. While most of the TV households in large American cities could receive three to f ive different channels by 1960, there was only a single channel in most European countries (Hickethier 1998, 118ff; 206). The problem of choosing from a repertoire of possibilities, which is typical of television, thus arose early on in the USA, and it underwent various escalations and perspectives for solutions that were later pioneering. The first solution was the new schematization of program events. Ever since the early 1950s, television has been a timing machine that distinguished

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between morning, afternoon, and evening programs as well as weekday and weekend programs that were aimed at housewives, school-age children, fathers, or all of these groups simultaneously. However, the selection problem could no longer be solved in this way once there were several programs broadcast at the same time. When the location of the television became the living room, dominance within the family coincided with decision-making power over the television program (Spigel 1992, 36-72). In the USA, it was already clear in the 1950s that differences between programs, even of a minor nature, could be projected onto the differentiations within the television audience, either individually or in the aggregate: men and women, like adolescents and adults, simply did not want to watch the same things (Ibid., 123ff). Television behavior and individual self-positioning, program selection and self-choice, the medium of television and the form of being began to overlap; like a form of existential self-design, television-viewing was experienced as a process of selection or a pressure to decide. A second approach thus tackled the problem using spatial solutions, such as small televisions for the kitchen designed especially for housewives (the ‘TV stove’), strange dual devices that allowed two viewers (the married couple) sitting next to each other to follow two different programs at the same time by means of a mirror construction (Ibid., 70f), mobile devices like Richard Sapper’s ingenious portable design in 1962 that was free to be used in the rooms of all teenagers, and lastly the comprehensive proliferation of television screens of all sizes in all open and closed, public, half-public, private, and even moving spaces (bus, train, plane, wrist, etc.) (Diesing and Zec 1985). A third approach did just the opposite. It attempted not to neutralize but rather to increase the decision-making pressure. This approach was characterized by reflexive self-improvement – that is, an increase in the pressure of possibility and thus in its own mediality. It once again employed a strategy of temporalization; this time, however, the strategy was not extensive by defining time windows that permanently avoid the decisionmaking pressure, but rather intensive through the proliferation of selection and decision-making opportunities. This was made possible by the remote control, which was already developed in an early electromechanical form in the mid 1950s. Wireless remote controls then became available around 1970, and since 1976 they have been a standard accessory for nearly all televisions. The main operating elements of the remote control are the buttons for selecting different programs; in other words, it is primarily a selection

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machine. Channel-changing is now an easily made, quickly revisable, and (if necessary) repeatable decision. Instead of making the choice between several offerings unnecessary, it actually promotes and at the same time resists such choices, as it is no longer necessary, and will soon no longer be possible, to spend an entire evening on one chosen channel. Through frequent and skillful handling, it is even possible to follow multiple programs at the same time. The remote control crystallizes television’s reflexive capability as a medium of selection, as the television conceives and creates itself as a medium in the remote control. In its own way, it is a philosophy of television – and a privileged one at that, as it functions as the very possibility of controlling the virtual and the actual. In other words, the remote control is mediality itself, as it is the paradoxical form of the medium that contains itself as a possibility. The form that is not selected or actualized is not impossible or excluded but rather only screened off, as it is pushed from the center to a less central or marginalized area of attention and can be pulled back at any time; it is virtual, possible, and always still available. I see not only what I actually see, but also what I could be seeing instead, and the paradoxical form of the medium lies precisely in this distinction. At the touch of a button, the actual changes into the virtual, one form changes into another possible form, and the possibility not only of another form but of change itself makes the medium possible – that is, conceivable. Primary and secondary aspects, broadcast and interruption, theme and rheme are still different, but no longer distinguishable. This is precisely why the image that is immediately visible on the screen and the one that will be actualized next are obviously different, yet at the same time they tend to blur, overlap, and become indistinguishable. The use of the remote control thus proves to be the conceptual space of the medial in that medium and form somehow become indistinguishable from one another without losing their dissimilarity. As a result, the experience of time and especially of the present is deferred with respect to the classical concept of television. As seen above, the present was defined as simultaneity or the communication of simultaneous visibility in the sense of the – reflexively communicated – simultaneity of viewing and the event being viewed (the principle of ‘live’ television). In classical television, this especially involved the synchronization of all ‘B locations’ and thus all receiving and viewing processes. Simultaneous visibility is now understood as one possible case among many others, and the synchronization of viewing is largely abandoned. The present no longer appears as the coordination of processes, but rather as the difference between conditions. If

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I briefly switch away and then switch back, I do not miss anything (crucial); it thus seems possible to jump forward or backward within a short period of time, and the difference between what comes earlier and later is easily blurred. On the other hand, the moment of switching – the push of the button – is articulated precisely and absolutely as the present moment, as it marks and produces the difference between before and after, actuality and virtuality. It is the point at which parallel programs converge and the events on the screen are synchronized with those in front of the screen, although only for this moment. Even if it cannot be extended, the push of the remote-control button still represents the experiential form of presentness as punctuality in and on television. The world of television is thus revealed to be no longer panoptic as a permanent overall context or as the background of the experience and space of possibility of all visible objects or processes and all locations of visibility. Rather, it appears as the unity of the difference between the actual and the virtual (and thus at the same time as the source of time in general, which can be understood as the ‘coalescence’ of the virtual and the actual; Deleuze 2003, 141). It no longer constitutes the condition of possibility of events, but rather it has itself become an event (Zourabichvili 1994, 61f, et passim) that appears at the press of a button. In other words, the television event can no longer be grasped in the conventional, journalistic sense as an event that appears on television, as an object of representation or reporting, or even – simulation-trained – as a projection of an event in the environment (see Engell 1994). This recursiveness – the release of television as a thinking medium – leads to an enormous increase in its possibilities. In particular, the dissemination of the remote control as a selection technology f irst made possible the explosive increase in the range of programs in the late 1970s, as it established the prerequisite for coping with the tremendous selection pressure that accompanied this rapid increase in complexity. The elimination of broadcasting monopolies in most European countries, beginning in 1977 in Italy, and the resolution of the capacity problem through the installation of cable- and satellite-receiving systems in the 1980s in all industrialized societies, which are usually considered the cause of this change, are actually only symptoms or crystallizations of an increased principle of selection that was orchestrated by means of the remote control. The great promise of 1969 to make the world of television reflexive, visible to the world in its entirety, and subject to selection appears to have been finally achieved in the 1990s.

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As the generation of a new form on a horizon of possibility, however, the rise of the remote control cannot only become a medium. Rather, forms, as seen, fundamentally impact the medium by adding new possibilities. The potential of adding new possibilities to the medium is also conversely brought into the form. Television develops forms that not only thematize but also stage selectivity as an event in the present. The emergence of the form as a compression of the space of possibility of the medial and the mutual conditioning of both thus comes into the world of forms of the medium. No longer does television present individually developed and selected forms; rather, the genesis of the form is brought into the form itself as the increase of the medium’s own possibilities. A new form of functional simultaneity is thus also used, which articulates itself as difference (i.e. the difference between before and after in the process of switching between channels). Selectivity becomes a component of possible forms, and actualized forms prove to be a product of selection. This was integrated into the famous light test from German game show Wünsch Dir was (Make a Wish), in which the power consumption of a particular region served as a control variable according to which the audience’s approval of a particular candidate was measured. Participation made the viewer’s decision a possibility of the medium. In the political talk show Pro und Contra (Pro and Con), the studio audience was also permitted at crucial points to confirm their yes or no opinion when commanded to ‘press now!’ This function became more broadly implemented using digital tele-voting systems, and it constitutes the basic framework of entire structural concepts of television, such as Big Brother. The mutual integration of information, selection, and understanding (waiting for voting results, evaluating the event) – according to concepts developed in communication theory – recurs each time. The structural duplication of the communication event can clearly be seen in the new millionaire quiz shows: four possible answers are noted (predetermined information); one of them is chosen and recognized as the candidate’s answer (selection); and finally an agreement or disagreement is presented after the longest possible waiting period (understanding). In other words, television illustrates the essential feature of mediality as form, but this form refers to something other than itself, such as the process of shaping opinions (in the case of Pro und Contra or television coverage of federal elections) or world knowledge (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). Graduated, coordinated selection from a repertoire of possibilities thus appears as the essential feature of the world itself. The medium withdraws once again from the conditions that it itself created.

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Miami Vice The transition from classical to modern television3 was marked by a shift from transmission to selection prof iles in the conceptual space of the medium, from the conception of the present as simultaneous experience to the constitution of the present as the experience of difference, and from the visibility of the world as the horizon to the generation of the world as an event. In all three of these shifts, television turned to the foundation of the medial in the intermediate space between virtuality and actuality. If a medium designs and instantiates itself with regard to its own possibilities – that is, its mediality – then it reflects, as seen, its own conditions; at the same time, however, it also sets its own development in motion by designing itself and thereby also its own further possible development. In the self-design of television – like media in general – reflecting on medial conditions is functionally entangled with the possible effects of this reflection. Clarifying its own conditions and reflecting on its own effects are activities that are typically expected from philosophy. In order to speak of media philosophy, it is therefore necessary to show that the philosophy of the medium is not limited to a reflection on conditions in the sense of self-representation, self-justification, and self-perception; rather, in the case of television at least, it proceeds to the design of effects – that is, to self-projection and self-selection. In other words, it is necessary to question whether the medium conceives of its own functions in the course of its development. In its classical phase, television actually designed itself as the possible (self-)perception of the world, which is evident in countless examples that used (and still use) reporting and eyewitness metaphors; this function of television culminates, as seen, in the experimental flight to the Moon. In the course of its subsequent modernization, however, it began to project itself onto its function as the possible self-selection of the world. Even though this transition ultimately took place over several decades (and may still be ongoing today), it was nevertheless sustainable and active. By functionalizing itself as the possible self-selection of the world, television was intermeshed and synchronized with tangible and experienceable macroscopic developments – namely, with the social formation of the television society (see, for example, the social design of childhood: Engell 3 Cf. Bourdon’s (1998) extensive discussion of modernity and postmodernity with reference to Umberto Eco’s distinction between ‘paleotelevision’ and ‘neotelevision’; Bourdon directly opposes ‘archaic’ television and the ‘postmodern’ and thus avoids the classical-modern distinction chosen here (see also Comstock 1991, 1-13).

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2000, 145-160). In order to do so, it was thus required to develop special and concrete forms, as a medium can only be operative as a form. If modern television functions as the world’s organ of selection, then this formation crystallized in experienceable, accessible, or manageable values, as did the observation function of classical television. In particular, television took advantage of the exigencies that resulted from the emergence and development of consumer society (Wildt 1997; Hardach 1985). Television formulated this society and faced these exigencies in an outstanding way. By functionally participating in consumption, it fused the basic cultural techniques of the consumer economy – like choosing from an overabundance of products – with its own mediality (Buxton 1990). In this context, the management of selection involved, on the one hand, orientational operations that television inaugurated and taught (just as a book inaugurates and teaches reading) and, on the other hand, the functionalization and instrumentalization of the cycle of goods, which led to the increased self-generation of television itself. There were attempts to develop shopping programs, which were called ‘Television Department Stores’, as early as 1952; they were promoted, among other reasons, so that mothers could introduce their daughters to the range of products and teach them how to handle them from home (Spigel 1992, 78f). More well-known is the case of the soap opera, a television genre that was exclusively conceived as a shell program for the advertisements contained therein. Early soaps aimed to address the intended audience – namely, housewives – through scheduling (typically mornings, when nobody else was at home, and at fixed daily times, which best suited the daily routines of housework), dramaturgy (fewer images and high redundancy, so it was possible to look away occasionally while performing other duties), and setting (a middle-class family, which was grouped around a mother figure), so that the essential core elements – the (only so-called) commercial ‘breaks’ – could reach suitable, preselected customers (Cantor and Pingree 1983). However, advertising was not the only representative domain oriented towards the conditioning of decisions. Since the 1950s, the reflexive integration of the television event into the cycle of goods has also taken place in various forms in game shows and quiz shows (Marschall 1980, 125-137): from The Price Is Right, which involved guessing the prices of consumer items, to Non-Stop, which involved memorizing the consumer items to be won (hair dryers, washing machines, electric blankets, etc.). Ever since, television as a medium has enabled or required individuals to conceptualize and create themselves in the context of possible possessions and consumer goods. When everything is basically available for selection,

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this soon leads to selection pressure, and control over selection behavior can take place no longer by restricting freedom of choice, but rather only by coordinating the selections that the special space of television allows to be installed, observed, and (if necessary) revised. For example, the distinction and individuation function determines not just the possession of certain brands of clothing, but also automobiles and cigarettes (Bourdieu 1984). The preference for a particular series or soap on television (as opposed to others) or the commitment to a particular musical style or band in music television, which is tremendously important in popular culture, already fulfills a meaningful social function. In a society that is thoroughly functionalized and based on selection, the selection process became a central instance in which the struggle for self-assertion and heteronomy took place, and it was actualized through the use of the remote control. By choosing a particular program, the viewer chose an extract from the world of goods and, in turn, a lifestyle or mode of existence. Self-fulfillment appeared as self-selection, and self-selection meant selecting from a range of products, so television was both the practice of selection and the site where selection itself took place. By coevolving with the system of consumption, television thus managed not only to establish but also to functionalize its mediality. With the transition to modern television, however, the medium also generated its own forms, which crystallized the function of the medium as self-perception or self-commission. The perhaps most highly elaborate example is the series Miami Vice from the 1980s. Formal aesthetics are entangled with a functional description of the series through the imagery and the montage rhythm with its structure of ‘built-in remote control’, the blending of text and paratext, as well as the stylistic design of the characters, the interior spaces, and the placement of individually accentuated consumer items (Ferrari, Armani, Martini, etc.). It is crucial, however, that, in Miami Vice, television was not only functionally engaged in the cycle of consumption and selection, but also designed and recognized as an object and form of consumption. Just as advertising has little to do with any of the properties of the commodities being promoted, so too did the style or surface structure of Miami Vice have little to do with the criminal-investigation plot. The progress of the plot was determined by the requirements of color dramaturgy and musical narrative rhythm rather than the other way around, and Miami Vice was thus the first series in which the selectivity of the medial design event became reflexive, as selectability itself could choose and be chosen. It knew that it could be deselected, and it reacted to this by renouncing visual progression and narrative context

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and instead integrating countless breaks and transitions that provoked viewers to change channels or switch the program off, yet it was precisely for this reason that switching did not occur. Miami Vice prevented the viewers from forgetting that they had a remote control in their hands, as every cut was a reminder of televisual selectivity; however, it simulated the effects of selection in a compressed way that also undermined selection itself or at least allowed it to be temporarily suspended. Just as the light test or the millionaire quiz show gave form to the medium’s own inherent enabling structure as a prerequisite of the medial, which made it accessible to reflection, the same occurred here in terms of function.

…And Here Comes the Mouse4 The relationship between the medium and the world has also been inverted at least to some extent: the conceptual structures of the medium no longer shape the conception of the world, which would allow the medium to facilitate an experience of the world that is nevertheless still medially conditioned. Rather, the world withdraws completely; it confines itself to occasional flashes of exceptional experience and otherwise leaves it up to the medium to serve as its substitute. We now think of the world as an alternative. Phenomenally, we behave towards the world as if we had a remote control at our disposal to switch the world on, off, or over. By conceiving of the world as an all-encompassing space of possibility that underlies selection or as a selection event, the world itself effectively becomes selectable. The consumer society and the medium of television (at least what we knew of it) have thus reached the logical limit of their developmental scope. Conceiving of the world as selectable, as television does, is paradoxical because there must be another world and another medium that provides this choice. And it must be a world that could also not exist – a contingent world. If it were truly contingent, though, then it must also provide the choice of not being able to choose it. Whatever this newly impending formation is called – information society, knowledge society, experience or even sensory society – it would not be possible not to choose or communicate in this society, which is unimaginable for communication theory (Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson 1988) as well as the self-determination of medial 4 ‘Und hier kommt die Maus’ (And Here Comes the Mouse) is a popular song from the highly successful children’s educational television program Die Sendung mit der Maus (The Show with the Mouse), which has been produced by German public service broadcaster WDR since 1971.

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existence. Like communication and society or world and sense as media, media are always non-negatable terms, as every negation takes places in the medium and must be medially conditioned. Negation itself not only requires but also confirms the medium (Luhmann 1984, 96). Switching television off is also performed using the remote control, so the option to choose is always a choice and the television apparatus thus remains constantly and continuously plugged in (the light-emitting diode indicates this). However, the philosophical apparatuses have outgrown the remote control and have begun to develop new possibilities of thought and contingency. There is an inflation of remote controls for everything as well as a proliferation of buttons. Two devices are particularly important for the further history of selection – namely, the mobile telephone and the mouse. The mobile telephone is a symbol and a practice of unlimited addressing and accessibility in measured space, which thus ceases to be space. It detaches communication from the sense of place. The mouse, along with its surrogate and successor technologies like the trackball and the touchpad, functions as a digital universal machine of selection. It can be seen as the heir of the television remote control, as it is a typical complementary medium that only functions when coupled to another one – namely, to a screen and what happens on it. Like the remote control, the use of the mouse also involves the stages of information, selection, and understanding, which can be proven through the deviation and pre-activation of control panels, the practice of clicking, and the chaining of mouse actions to more complex connections, such as processing or search operations with their routines and surprises. Nevertheless, the mouse clearly goes beyond the remote control, as it removes the flow of time from the selection process. The mouse thus detaches the concept of selectability from the experience of the moment. The alternatives available to the mouse are typically spread out before us, arranged side by side in various graphic interface control buttons. Once a selection is made, it is also possible to return to the original selection situation – that is, the previous page – and it is highly probable that it will be found unchanged (unlike a television program, which always continues despite the viewer’s ability to interpolate what was missed). Problematic contingency thus tends to dissolve, as the boundary between actuality and virtuality is blurred. There is no difference between what is not but could be and what is but could not be. Time is thus conceived differently. Insofar as the present can be defined not as a precise point of difference but rather as an imprecise zone of difference – namely, as a period of time in which decisions can still be revised and the events that have occurred have not yet led to other events (Luhmann

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1997, 819f, et passim) – the mouse works to extend the present rather than contract it to a momentary event, as with the remote control. This has the side effect that the problem of responsibility can hardly be conceived in a world of revisable choices: people must only take responsibility for things they have actually done. Beginning with television and the remote control, and continuing with the mouse, media condition how we think about media, the world, things, and the self in terms of selectivity, contingency, and alternativity. However, the world does not entirely coincide with this definition of the present. As long as there is mortality, time passes in the world. If we think of ourselves as temporal and mortal beings, then we are unable to repeat or change any of our decisions – not even the most important ones. This is a critical aspect of the contemporary shift in the philosophy of mediality as selection (Engell 2000, 161-182). What Nam June Paik said about the video recorder – ‘there is no rewind button on the Betamax of life’ (Paik 1996, 435) – is even more true of the mouse: there is still no return to the previous window. However, the first vaguely recognizable apparatuses of gene technology are working to extend the principle of selection beyond mortality by making the freedom of choice that the media allowed us to attribute to ourselves, in that it attributes it to itself, obtainable for each of our characteristics.

Closing Credits I have attempted to outline how the philosophy of television, restricted to the dimension of selectability, could be described as an always already functioning (the television works and we cooperate, whether we watch or not) and thus conditioning conceptual space. In this context, describing means translating the possibilities of the medium into the form of another medium – namely, writing and philosophical thinking about writing – in order to know and communicate what media make conceivable – in other words, their own media philosophy. If it is helpful to show that classical (or modern) philosophy already conceived of what media make conceivable – or that media already made this foresight conceivable to some extent – and if the concepts of scientific theory construction and the practices of academic debates can be consulted, then all the better. In any case, such descriptions only concern the work of media and media development when they are tied back to the philosophical practice of media.

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Media philosophy can thus help to observe the thinking of the world itself, the possibility of which is compressed, shaped, and realized not only in texts but also in artifacts, artistic objects, technical apparatuses, social configurations, and traffic conditions. By privileging human language, we can always think that we are the ones who think of the world. Media philosophy shows that this is not so.

References Abramson, Albert. 1987. The History of Television, 1880-1941. McFarland. Barnouw, Erik. 1990. Tube of Plenty. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. —. 1998. On Television. Ferguson: The New Press. Brauns, Jörg. 2002. ‘Medium und Form. Einleitung.’ In Medium und Form, edited by Jörg Brauns. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Buxton, David. 1990. From the Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cantor, Muriel G., and Suzanne Pingree. 1983. The Soap Opera. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Pub. Cassirer, Ernst. 1994. Die Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen. Vol. III: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Chateau, Dominique. 1998. ‘Interprétance et activation: deux concepts d’une théorie de la réception télévisuelle comme pratique.’ In Penser la télévision Actes du Colloque de Cérisy, edited by François Jost and Jérôme Bourdon, 191–204. Paris: A. Colin. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum. —. 2008. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Diesing, Eckhardt, and Peter Zec. 1985. ‘Fernsehräume.’ In Unser Fernsehen! vom Pantoffelkino bis zum Terminal, edited by Norbert Nowotsch and Rainer Weissenborn, 35–45. Drensteinfurt: Huba. Engell, Lorenz. 1994. Das Gespenst der Simulation: Ein Beitrag zur Überwindung der ‘Medientheorie’ durch die Analyse ihrer Logik und Ästhetik. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften.

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—. 2000. Ausfahrt nach Babylon. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. —. 2001b. ‘Die Medien der Gesellschaft: Konzeption und Funktion der Medien in Niklas Luhmanns Systemtheorie.’ In Welt-Bilder, edited by Siegfried Reusch, 41–45. Der Blaue Reiter; 13. Stuttgart: Omega-Verlag. Hardach, Gerd. 1985. ‘Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der 50er Jahre. Restauration und Wirtschaftswunder.’ In Die Fünfziger Jahre: Beiträge zu Politik und Kultur, edited by Dieter Bänsch, 49–60. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Hartmann, Frank. 2000. Medienphilosophie. Wien: Universitätsverlag. Hoff, Peter. 1991. ‘“…das Bild des Führers in alle deutschen Herzen!” Das frühe deutsche Fernsehen als Gegenstand und als Medium der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda ‒ eine “nicht bestellte Erfindung”.’ In Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945, edited by William Uricchio, 208–34. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hickethier, Knut. 1998. Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Kittler, Friedrich. 1985a. Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1995. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marschall, Rick. 1980. The Golden Age of Television. London: Bison. Noel, Nel. 1998. ‘Les dispositifs télévisuels.’ In Penser la télévision Actes du Colloque de Cérisy, edited by François Jost and Jérôme Bourdon, 59–74. Paris: A. Colin. Paik, Nam Jun. 1996. ‘Art & Satellite.’ In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz. 434-436: University of California Press. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV. Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Beavin, and Don D. Jackson, eds. 1988. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. London: W. W. Norton. Wildt, Michael. 1997. ‘Die Kunst der Wahl. Zur Entwicklung des Konsums in Westdeutschland in den 50er Jahren.’ In Europäische Konsumgeschichte: zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums, 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Hannes Siegrist, Hartmut Kaelble, and Jürgen Kocka, 301–26. Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus Verlag.

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Zec, Peter. 1985. ‘Mana oder die Funktion des Fernsehens.’ In Unser Fernsehen! vom Pantoffelkino bis zum Terminal, edited by Norbert Nowotsch and Rainer Weissenborn, 17–25. Drensteinfurt: Huba. Zielinski, Siegfried. 1999. Audiovisions. Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press. Zourabichvili, François. 1994. Deleuze: une philosophie d’événement. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

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Television with Unknowns: Reflections on Experimental Television Abstract For Jean Francois Lyotard, experimental action is a recursive and even paradoxical quest for the as yet unknown rules which govern this quest itself. With television, however, we can distinguish between different types and degrees of experimentation. Television with only one unknown dimension refers to the testing of the technical device itself, as it took place in the early and developmental period up to about 1936. Television with two unknown dimensions, on the other hand, is about the relationship between the apparatus and its users observed through secondary dispositions, from audience research to legal regulations. Finally, television with three unknown dimensions – as exemplified in shows like Big Brother but also coverage from the Gulf War – incorporates the feedback function and recursively questions the reality it generates itself. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, Jean Francois Lyotard, experiment, media change, Big Brother

Someone who has no questions or who has already prepared suitable answers is not doing an experiment, as an experiment is a special technique for eliminating ignorance or uncertainty, which someone who already knows everything does not need. In particular, it indicates a certain scientific thirst for knowledge (Bernard 1865; see in general Frey 1972). Measured in these terms, television does not seem to have much room for the experimental, as it always seems to have answers but never questions or, at most, quiz questions with predetermined answers; it apparently does not provoke questions or seek answers, but rather it always already knows everything. It unfurls a carpet of redundancy under the everyday; it operates not between ignorance and knowledge, like an experiment, but rather between diffuse half-knowledge and comforting omniscience, which further confirms what

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is always already assumed (this is the classical position of critical theory: Adorno and Horkheimer 1969, 108-150; Adorno 1963, 69-80; Adorno 1967, 6070). And it is impossible to speak of aesthetic experimentation on television, as it does not seem to be aware of any alternative to formal standardization and it apparently works towards the ever-increasing formatting of the entirety of everyday life – in sharp contrast to the experimental testing of different forms of life and experience.

Television as an Experimental Program However, such diagnoses are precisely wrong in what they denounce about television. Scientific and aesthetic experiments often answer questions that are entirely different from those posed by the experimenter, researcher, or artist (Rheinberger 2001, 8, 21ff). The experiment and experimental thought never know exactly what they do not know. Knowledge and ignorance are not mutually exclusive, as the operative question and the actual determination of each unknown and uncertainty are often integrated into the design and procedure of the scientific experiment itself. The experiment incorporates uncertainty about not only other topics, from which it sets itself apart, but also always about itself; its questions refer not only to things that are external, but also – or even primarily – to itself (on the difference between self-reference and hetero-reference, see Luhmann 1984; in relation to mass media, see in particular Luhmann 2000, 10-14; see also Luhmann 1997, 96ff, 754ff). Experimental television thus does not begin with questions that are openly seen and always already answered or with the visible, standardized forms and preformatted events that it produces but rather first and foremost with its own structure – that is, with the dispositifs and institutions of television itself and the level of uncertainty that they produce. As a result, it is important to question whether the dispositif of television has or bears a resemblance to a specific experimental structure and whether and how televisual texts visualize the material as well as immaterial experimental structure that makes them possible. And the question is not always the one posed by the experimental apparatus, the one raised by the televisual text (like the broadcast or the program) when it thematizes the structure of television, or the one that the institutional experimenter or broadcaster conceived for television when it was originally constructed. In this respect, the experiment always involves the elimination of something unknown or uncertain, which the experiment itself first created and which can be broader or simply different than what the experimenter had in mind.

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If and insofar as this is true, it is easier to conceive of television – and all other mass media, which appear to be under the guidance of television at the end of the 20th century – as principally experimental. Mass media actually do nothing but generate redundancies and thus confirm knowledge (Luhmann 2000, 20f). Nevertheless, they must f irst generate, process, and convert information into redundancy. Information is thus defined simply as the elimination of ignorance and uncertainty, which television itself first created and assigned an exceptionally broad significance (Ibid., 104ff). Consider the wide variety of television entertainment based on such question as ´who was the perpetrator?´, ´who will win?´, or ´who will marry whom?´ These are questions that television answers, but that it must also first pose. Questions about the lives of celebrities similarly presuppose fame itself, and the same obviously applies to political information as well. If television is understood as a dispositif, then this dispositif produces its own questions and it is thoroughly comparable to an experimental arrangement. Therefore, these questions can be not only self-referential but also self-reflexive – that is, they can refer to something that is not known about the experimental procedure, which, in this case, is the experimental setup of television itself. It is then possible to see television as fundamentally experimental – even if it does not appear this way at first glance. The research on the history and logic of the experiment, which has been practiced very productively in recent years, could point to an entirely new way of understanding television in general.1 This would offer tremendous advantages and interesting perspectives. For example, the interplay of institutions (producers, networks, regulators, etc.), actors (editors, authors, moderators, etc.), screen events (formats, programs, broadcasts, etc.), and audiences could be understood differently if they were modeled on the principle of the experimental field, in which, as indicated, an important function is assigned to the technical apparatus and the surrounding discourse. It is thus possible to speak of a distributed authorship that would include not only human subjects but also institutional structures, technical processes, and aesthetic forms (Rheinberger 2001, 18-34; Latour 1999,174-215). Television studies would greatly benefit from such a fundamental understanding of ‘the television’, as it would finally be possible to grant television as a field its own agency and it would no longer be necessary to play the system aspect and the actor aspect against each other (e.g. Braun 2008). 1 Joseph Vogl called my attention to this entire research complex and provided crucial help and notes (Latour 1999; Serres 1991; Rheinberger 2001).

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On the other hand, one criterion of the internal differentiation of media or television studies would be lost: if television is fundamentally experimental – in a way that still needs to be explained – then it does not make sense to show once again the forms and phases specif ic to experimental television – particularly within its own logic and history. Not all forms of eliminating ignorance and generating information are experimental in precisely the same way (as the use of rumor as a source of knowledge shows; e.g. Kapferer 1997). This even holds true for academic knowledge. 2 Conversely – and this would be even more important – it would also be possible for television to demonstrate the special features of the experimental process, which could surpass the notion of the television experiment as a mere analogy by expanding our understanding of the experiment itself. This particularly applies to artistic experiments, even if they do not seem to have a place on television. It would therefore be necessary to question when and under what conditions – logically and historically – the process of television can be identif ied as specif ically experimental. In the following, the technique of experimentation will be observed somewhat more precisely and television’s relationship to this technique will be questioned. A thesis on the experimental nature of specific forms of television will also be formulated, subject to such precise examination. This thesis will in fact borrow from the self-understanding of artistic experimentation. According to Jean-François Lyotard’s famous formulation, experimental art is art that is searching for the rules by which it operates in this search (Lyotard 1984). The thesis thus concerns the relationship between the dispositif and the process, on the one hand, and the texts produced, on the other hand; it also identifies as experimental those processes whose products are part of the dispositional field and thus participate in the processes through which they themselves are made possible or called into question. Television may not be art, but the concept of an artistic experiment that questions its own process is nevertheless very helpful. Beyond the claim that television is always already an experimental setup, experimental television will be discussed here under three conditions. First, television is experimental – self-referentially – when it involves arrangements that serve to eliminate ignorance of its own arrangements. 2 Nonexperimental academic disciplines would be the ‘understanding’ humanities (see Dilthey 1990); with naturalism, which was influenced by positivism and modelled after Bernard (1865), the experimental method was nevertheless promoted as a literary method of acquiring knowledge (Zola 1880).

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Second, it is characterized – self-thematically – by the fact that these arrangements and processes are thematized and thus made visible through its products (i.e. broadcasts). Third, experimental television integrates these broadcasts into the structural conditions of their production and – self-reflexively – makes this inclusion apparent. These conditions are organized in ascending order so that they each presuppose and include the previous one, and the concept of experimental television refers precisely to this process.

Some Properties of an Experiment Not all knowledge – not even all scientif ic knowledge – is generated through experimentation (concerning this and the following, see Frey 1972). This is true f irst and foremost historically, as an experimental method could only be discussed after the empiricism of the late Middle Ages, which emerged with Roger Bacon. Experimental knowledge is also systematically limited. According to the classical understanding of methods, it is dependent on experiential knowledge rather than argumentative knowledge, which is acquired through intuition or communication, and this experience must be expressly sought and brought about rather than occurring simply accidentally (Flasch 2004, 402-409). On the contrary, it should be systematically provoked and controlled, according to Immanuel Kant, as reason only understands what it brings forth by its own design and thus subjects to its own laws of causality and consistency (Kant 1983, 23-24). In other words, only an experience that is subjected to reason is reasonable. The experiment thus requires nature in order to respond to questions of reason; it conceives of nature as a witness that assists with the verdict of science, which is based on its own laws. The causation of experience can be considered particularly experimental when it is obtained using appropriate instruments and apparatuses; it thus becomes, on the one hand, identically repeatable and verifiable and, on the other hand, variable in its causation (Serres 1991, 223-249). Experiments are organized in series and establish linked connections over a scheme of reproduction and variation, in which the conditions of the attempt – in other words, the experimental setup – are more or less systematically modif iable depending on the problem and the path of knowledge. This characteristic of experimental knowledge will appear again at the very end of these reflections with regard to seriality, which is also of prime importance for television. Causal relations between the experimental

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setup and the initial conditions, on the one hand, and the results, on the other hand, can ultimately be formulated through the linking of test series and the use of different procedures. Serious doubts about this classical concept of experimentation first emerged in the 20th century. In his essay on ‘The Experiment’ (1928), Hugo Dingler described experimentation no longer as merely the act of judging or preparing a judgment, but rather as a creative act that generates something new (Dingler 1928). This is important in the present context because the experiment here serves no longer exclusively to generate knowledge or information, but rather to produce phenomena and even new objects. Gaston Bachelard also discussed experimentation in this sense as a ‘phenomenotechnique’ (Bachelard 1938, 14f). Appropriately, Dingler turned from the concept of knowledge to the ‘form’ of reality in the experiment, whose proximity to aesthetic and medial processes is obvious. Dingler also focused no longer on working hypotheses and conclusions – Kant’s laws of reason – but rather on technical instruments and their manual production, which he attempted to record systematically for the first time. This is an important prerequisite for the assumption already presented above that the technical structure of an experiment is not simply a passive tool in the hands of a logical experimenter, but rather also contributes to the experiment, its question, and the answer obtained. Experimental scientists can thus be understood as tinkerers who do not know what they are doing and whose tinkering is directed at finding out what they are actually doing. The workshop or atelier nature of the experiment once again resembles that of an artistic experiment. Due to developments in physics in the 20th century, problems arose concerning the basic principles of experimentation (Mittelstrass and Wolters 1980, 622). These problems were primarily related to quantum physics. First, the results of certain experiments could no longer be attributed to particular causes; instead, an attribution was only possible by statistically calculating a multitude of cases. (This will also be important in observing the experimental processes on and of television.) Second, the problem of measurement arose, as a measurement alters a microphysical system so severely that it differs from its non-measured condition; such a measurement thus merely measures itself or rather its own effects. This interaction, which represented an apparently insurmountable difficulty for the classical understanding of the physics experiment, is also important here because it identifies precisely what is experimental in an aesthetic experiment, which always sets out to eliminate ignorance itself.

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Television with One Unknown Contemporary historians of science, such as Bruno Latour, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and Michel Serres, understand the scientific experiment as a complex system that correlates technical and nontechnical conditions, integrates institutional and social conditions, and creates individual and local events (Rheinberger 2001, 18-34; Latour 1999, 174-215). According to Rheinberger, experiments never consist solely of themselves, as they are always embedded in entire ‘experimental cultures’ (Rheinberger 2001, 24ff). Two of the properties that Rheinberger associates with experiments are particularly important in the present context. First, Rheinberger points out that the emergence of something new in the sense of the unexpected is central to an experiment (Ibid., 144ff), although this function applies not only to scientific but also to artistic creativity; just as scientific knowledge requires an experimental setup, the aesthetic process possibly requires a medial setup, which in the present case is television. Second, Rheinberger points out that experiments constantly generate records – in other words, they produce signifiers, which usually assume a graphic, written form. Experimental spaces thus create representational spaces (Ibid., 110-115), which is significant for an understanding of experimental television. If the production of records, inscriptions, and signifiers and the development of representational spaces are understood no longer simply as retrospective – as documentation – but rather as the actual purpose of the experimental setup – in Derrida’s sense– then a second and increasingly autonomous system can emerge, as the apparatus can be used to produce signifiers or events in the representational space, which is then also increasingly social, communicative, and aesthetic (Derrida 1997). What emerges, in Kittler’s terminology, is the medium as Aufschreibesystem (Inscription System or Discourse Network as the book was titled in English; Kittler 1985b, 1990b). The separation of a created phenomenon from the original goal of the experiment can lead to a reversal of relations, as the phenomenon no longer serves as an indexical sign of processes that occur within the apparatus – that is, as mere proof (Rheinberger 2001, 110f) – but rather the apparatus serves as an instrument for creating the phenomenon. The phenomenon itself is thus free to denote something other than the apparatus. This transition is of paramount importance for the emergence of television, as it is precisely what happened when signaling instruments – like an oscillograph – and eventually an entirely new representational space – the picture tube – emerged from the appearance of light in a vacuum tube, which was actually

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a side effect.3 This process was complex, and the use of tubes in an operational television system involved numerous steps in the pioneering days of electronic television: Campbell Swinton (1911); Rosing and Zworykin (still before 1920); Jenkins, Baird, and von Ardenne (in the 1920s and early 1930s); and the first major test-run during the Berlin Olympics (1936) (Abramson 1987, Chapter 5; Winston 1986, 44-67; Oberliesen 1982, 156ff; Hiebel 1999, 352). In the form of a publicly displayed device, such as Dénes von Mihály’s ‘Telehor’ (1924/1928), the origin of television can come across as merely the representation or visualization system of another experimental setup. The screen of the ‘Telehor’, for example, is infinitesimally small and awkwardly skewed, claiming no more attention than the countless measuring and regulatory instruments surrounding the entire apparatus (Zielinski 1999, 139, 143f; Abramson 1987). The transition of the picture tube from a retrospective and automatic representational space to the actual object of experimental knowledge and development also transformed the question posed in the early period of television experimentation. The representation and its production were treated no longer as part of the answer, but rather as part of the question and the problem. The aim was then to make the light effects of the picture tube independent of the technical conditions of its origin and to subject them to other controllable, arbitrary conditions. They were supposed to make something other than their own causes visible. With the help of another dichotomy outlined by Rheinberger, this change can also be understood as television’s shift from being a technical object to an epistemic object (Rheinberger 2001, 24-30). According to Rheinberger, following Serres, an epistemic object – which is here understood in terms of both material objects and objects of knowledge – is the ‘embodiment of what is not yet known’ (Ibid., 24; Serres 1991, 1-15). A technical object, on the other hand, is the experimental setup itself – the relatively stable environment of the experiment – which is based on ‘an ossified body of knowledge’ and can thus be seen as the embodiment of what is already known (Rheinberger 2001, 25). Countless interrelations and uncertainties exist between these two things, from which the production of the new emerges. The question built into the experimental setup determines the possibility of the epistemic object, and its production in turn reacts to changes in the technical object. In the case of a scientific experiment that leads to the development of a mediatechnology like the picture tube, it is possible to assume that an epistemic object – or at least technical evidence 3 Claus Pias (2017, 73ff) describes the early history of the vacuum tube and the screen image from the perspective of the computer screen.

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of an epistemic object or an unknown question built into the experimental setup – leads to a new technical object. With this transition, however, the direction of the question changes and an entirely new experimental setup emerges that no longer specifically serves scientific knowledge. If the representational space is removed from the original experiment, for example, then all further experimental epistemes will only be related to the experimental setup, like the field of television, which was previously merely a representational space that referred to something else but which is now socially and aesthetically on its own. Although it is of an experimental origin, not everything that occurs or is possible in this representational space – which is completely independent and autonomous with respect to its original conditions as a technicalscientific experiment – will be of an experimental nature. In this sense, the epistemic object of television as an experiment, as already mentioned above, refers exclusively to television itself, and the experiment no longer involves scientific or technical knowledge but is instead communicative, social, and aesthetic. This removal of television from the technical-experimental context of its original creation occurred gradually over a long period of time, and it occurs over and over again in different phases of technical change. However, the phase or level of experimental television was relatively complete when television emerged on both sides of the experimental equation: that of the experimental setup or the technical object and that of the question or the epistemic object – in other words, when the acquired knowledge was applied to the function and optimization of the technical apparatus itself. A strange intermediate state was thus reached in the countless experiments of pioneers like Baird, Zworykin, and others in the 1920s and 1930s (Abramson 1987, Chapters 6 and 7). Although the apparatus, as an experimental setup, was always only able to make something appear that it itself created under controlled conditions, it was now supposed to make something visible that lay beyond itself – in other words, it was supposed to create a phenomenon that did not refer to the apparatus itself and that could no longer be considered the mere results of measurement. However, the goal of the experiment was not what was visualized but rather visualization itself – that is, the technical object. This shift entailed a change of reference. What was visualized was no longer understood as the internal cause of the dispositif; rather, it was attributed to the external world. It thus involved introducing and systematizing – that is, making repeatable – the distinction between hetero-reference and self-reference, which allowed the apparatus to become a medium (Luhmann 2000, 24-31, 194-195). However,

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this was only possible when questions about the apparatus itself could be hidden, which was only possible when the questions were answered with sufficient accuracy. The series of early transmission and studio experiments, particularly between 1923 and 1936, showed how the construction of the apparatus always extended further into its environment while it was subjected to this experimental fine-tuning (Abramson 1987, Chapter 8; Winston 1986, 67-75; Hickethier 1998, 22-29, 36-60). Perhaps this provision not only applies to television but also marks the difference between scientific experiments in general, whose questions are not directed towards the experimental setup itself despite all of the interactions between the epistemic object and the technical object, and the experimental testing of inventions, in which the epistemic object is the technical object itself, but that must remain a matter of speculation. It is nevertheless true that, during its phase as a technical experiment, television was both a question and an answer. In this respect, it is possible to describe this form of television as television with a single unknown.

Television with Two Unknowns The experimental condition of television did not end with the technical deployment of an operative, experimentally proven, and unquestionably operational device. On the one hand, the technical device inherently strives for further improvements, and the perfectibility of the technology was already recognized early on as one of its main features (Jünger 1946). From the perspective of the technical object and the experimental setup, this points not to an ontological quality of the technical as such but rather to the fact that an implemented technical setup never entirely loses its experimental nature. If one accepts the idea that the epistemic object and the technical object more or less completely overlap and that they can even be viewed as identical, thus constituting a single unknown, then this unknown never entirely disappears. The device always remains capable of innovation, available for revision, and subject to the interplay of the technical and the epistemic as two sides of the same device. In any case, this is precisely what happened with television. The logic of experimenting with one unknown basically repeated itself with the introduction of color television (Abramson 1987, Chapter 11; Hickethier 1998, 212ff; Bruch 1967), the development of new distribution technologies like cable and satellite television (which in the USA no less than in Germany involved long, explicitly experimental phases or ‘pilot projects’) (Jäckel 1991, Arnold 1990), the introduction of new peripheral

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devices like the remote control and the video recorder (which then resulted in a complete restructuring of the entire system) (Winston 1986, 83-100; Zielinski 1986), and finally supplements like videotext or extensions like the 16:9 picture format. The digitization of television and the introduction of high-definition television, which is still ongoing today, work the same way. Television is thus continuing to experiment with one unknown – namely, its technical setup – to which it directs questions. On the other hand, television never remains static at the level of the apparatus. Instead, technical implementation follows industrial, economic, social, and f inally cultural and symbolic implementation – and this is precisely why television became not a device or a laboratory apparatus, but rather a medium in the sense of a mass medium. Television thus entered a second, more complex phase of experimentation. The technical experiment joined the institutional experiment as a tremendous yet nevertheless finite extension of the experimental field. What both of these forms had in common was that they involved experiments and the acquisition of knowledge about television itself. Furthermore, the focus of attention was not what was made visible or transmitted but rather visualization or transmission itself. However, the institutional apparatus was now no longer a purely technical-material setup; rather, it was a multilayered structure composed of legal, economic, cultural, and other regulators, whose interplay in combination with the technical apparatus was tested, observed, and (if necessary) methodologically changed. This shift introduced nontechnical television research, such as sociological, legal-economic, and psychological methods. 4 The distinguishing mark of the experimental use of television thus remained the fact that knowledge was supposed to be gained by using television and that this knowledge (about television) was supposed to be generated through testing. In institutional experiments, this required the introduction of a limit and the exercise of a control. For example, not every entrepreneurial venture, such as the marketing of a new technology or medium, is an experiment. In this sense, RCA’s decision to begin mass producing televisions and to start a broadcasting operation in 1946 was not an experiment, despite its uncertain outcome (Barnouw 1990, 113-114). Nevertheless, what happened on the American television market in 1948-1951 was highly experimental: television was limited by a law that prohibited any expansion of broadcasting activity beyond the existing level. 4 Abelman and Atkin 2002, 156-169. For more on the history of television research in Germany, see Bessler and Bausch 1980; Schorr 2000, 85-98. I am grateful to Patrick Rößler for advice and guidance concerning the history of empirical communication research.

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This limit, which was assigned to the temporal medium of television and which placed it under new experimental conditions, took place not only in an objective social space but also in time, as it involved a moratorium. The conditions under which television took place were also subject to control, as the FCC was ordered to observe and regulate the industry. The testing of multiple television systems during the 1936 Olympics, which was temporally and locally limited, created similar laboratory conditions, and during WWII laboratory-like conditions were also established for Nazi television, which was primarily intended as hospital television for a very small, limited audience (Elsner, Müller, and Spangenberg 1991; Uricchio 1991). This was not the case when regular broadcasting operations first began in the USA, but they were brought under control once again through the ‘freeze’ of 1948; Barnouw consequently describes the famous ‘Golden Age of American Television’ (Marschall 1980) as a ‘laboratory period’ (Barnouw 1990). Significantly, this also marked the beginning of a methodologically and systematically empirical form of television research. In 1948, C.E. Hooper’s marketing research service expanded the surveys that it had developed for radio in the 1930s.5 The A. C. Nielsen Co. followed in 1950, and it later developed into a market leader and then a monopolist of rating surveys in the USA (Ibid.; Nielsen 1955). Interestingly, the instruments used for audience research (both mathematical-statistical as well as semantic) were largely derived from experimental psychology (Schenk 1987), and the basic structure of the experiment was thus repeated to a certain extent. If legal regulators and survey instruments are understood as components of the experimental setup, then the first years of this phase (like the technical object of television described above) were about optimizing the operations of the apparatus itself and, in turn, the conflation of the question with the apparatus. In other words, it was an experiment with only one unknown. At the same time, however, a fundamental expansion of the experimental situation of television also took place, as the experimental setup soon mutated in telemetry with peculiar apparatuses like Nielsen’s famous ‘audimeter’ and in regulation with the first legal definitions.6 In this way, television was always being put to the test, and a strict distinction was also established between television itself and the object being tested – that is, the technical apparatus. Unlike the earlier period of experimentation, 5 Abelman and Atkin 2002, 159I. Interestingly, this does not apply to television experiments in Nazi Germany, see Bessler and Bausch 1980, 34-35; Schenk 1987, 5. 6 Nielsen 1950, 24-34. The ‘GfK-Meter’ was employed in Germany, see Klingler, Boters, and Zöllner 1998; Gehrau 2002, 135-142.

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the rating survey no longer served primarily to test the rating survey itself even though there were naturally all sorts of feedback effects and changes in methodology that employed mass-communication research (Schenk 1987, 12-29). This fundamental separation of the research object from the experimental setup also showed that a second representation or inscription system (Aufschreibesystem) had been laid over the first – that is, over television or more precisely over the screen image. This second system worked with its own data (i.e. ratings), which it visualized on its own (see e.g. the graphic representations in Nielsen 1955, 36, et passim). This differentiation entailed a second separation, which was expressed within the research object or the object of knowledge. In this phase, the epistemic field of the medium was therefore subjected to two divisions. On the one hand, it was separated from the design of its research or observation; on the other hand, it was also split into (at least) two areas: screen events, which included broadcasts, programs, formats, images, sounds, phrases, genres, dramaturgies, topics, etc., and audience behaviors. This second division was methodologically grounded in communication theory and technically embedded in the methods and instruments of audience research; it was thus incorporated into the epistemic field through the experimental setup. The first separation, which distinguished between the experimental setup and the object of knowledge, was repeated in the second separation insofar as it also distinguished between a relatively stable structure, which corresponded to the technical object or ‘ossified knowledge’, and a relatively variable structure. The only problem was that it always had to be explicitly determined whether the television program and its forms or the behavior of the audience was supposed to be seen as stable or changeable; in other words, it was necessary to ascertain what were the constants and what were the variables in the experiment, as audience research could be read both ways.7 It thus involved not merely one but rather two unknowns (or actually two times two unknowns: the survey method and apparatus, on the one hand, and the distinction between the screen event and the audience reaction, on the other hand). It first served to record audience behavior (their habits, beliefs, etc.), and the systematization of different reactions to the same television offerings was then used to distinguish target groups from one another.8 With a stable set audience it could also gauge the differences 7 Nielsen also documents this in the case studies, which provide information concerning the viewing habits and the internal structure of the audience as well as the features of certain programs (Nielsen 1950, 127-152). 8 See the discussion of the Stimulus Response Model in Schenk 1987, 22-29.

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between broadcast types, formats, and styles, which helped to increase the acceptance and effectiveness of advertising. Basically, it could reveal the reciprocal production of television offerings and audience profiles (Klingler, Roters, and Zöllner 1998, 955-965; Abelman and Atkin 2002, 121ff). However, it also opened up a third unknown, as it had to pose the question of the nature of the relationship between both of the examined poles. This would have been impossible without questioning the basic theoretical and technical structure of empirical communication research. It had to reflect the fact that television generates its audience to the same extent that it is subject to the influence of this audience, such as their purchasing power. This undermined not only the second separation (that of the epistemic field) but also the first (that of the research dispositif and the examined dispositif ). Quantitative mass-communication research then became part of the experimental field of television as a whole. The discussions that continue to develop in and around mass-communication research to this day, such as the never-ending discussion of representations of violence and their effects9 or the influence of television on the outcome of elections (this debate has accompanied television since the legendary duel broadcast in the American presidential election of 1960, see Barnouw 1990, 271-277; see also Prokop 1985, 116-135), thus demonstrate the division of the field, which always amounts to nothing more than negotiations of causality or finality.

Television with Three Unknowns: Foundations and Transitions Whatever does not function in institutional space (such as economics, law, and the research dependent on them) can indeed develop in communicative space. However, this two-sided schema, in which relatively fixed and relatively unknown parameters are interrelated like two unknowns in a constant exchange relationship of reciprocal uncertainty, is once again surpassed when an experiment incorporates a third unknown. We thus come to the actual and rather narrow field of experimental television. Its principal setup is already clear from Lyotard’s (1984) definition of experimental art as an experiment that is always searching for the rules by which it operates in its search. The rules are thus no longer fixed while the work is variable, as in the case of one unknown. The work is also not fixed while the rules are variable, as in the case of two unknowns. There is also no interplay between 9

For an overview, see Klingler, Roters, and Zöllner 1998, 561-578.

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these positions, which are experienced as fixed and flexible in relation to one another. Instead, neither the work nor the rules nor their correlation is known. In experimental art, there are therefore three unknowns; in addition to the aesthetic method and the aesthetic object, there is also the reflection or interpretation of their relationship. In other words, the experimenters themselves becomes an unknown. It is no coincidence that this form of experimental television with three unknowns began when the dispositifs of audience research were integrated into television itself. They were allocated to both unknowns – the screen event and the audience – and they established a connection between them. The earliest example in Germany was the famous light test on Wünsch Dir was (Make a Wish) in the late 1960s. It was historically revealing that the process of statistical prediction was introduced in election coverage during precisely the same time period – in West Germany at least – beginning with its relatively spectacular performance in the election of 1969 (Hickethier 1998, 261-262; Friedrich 2001, 109-110, 116; Schreiber 1972). In the final round of this game show, the performances of the candidates were evaluated by the ‘external’ audience, as a geographically selected group of viewers was supposed to switch on all of the items in their homes that required electricity. The appropriate power station would then measure the increase in energy consumption, and the candidates with the largest increase were the winners. The show thus incorporated all of the ingredients of an experiment – namely, a limitation in space and time, measurement, and to some extent control over the conditions, which were causally applied (switch actuation=increase in energy consumption). The measurement of the audience’s reaction was, in turn, observed on television through the live switch in the power station. However, the cause of the audience’s evaluation was never questioned, and the criteria may have had less to do with game performance than the overall appearance and appeal of the candidates. The audience thus constituted the constant within the epistemic field, while the game performance constituted the variable. Nevertheless, viewers ceased to be either schematically questioned variables, like a guinea pig, or variably filled, unquestionable statistical constants. They were still – more than ever – part of the experimental field of television, but now in the function of witnesses or co-experimenters who were affected by the voting results and also learned something about themselves from the outcome – namely, whether they were part of a majority or a minority. Because viewers did not know the outcome of the vote and the behavior of other viewers, they did not actually know exactly what they were doing when they turned on their lights.

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In short, this game show already contained three unknowns – namely, the evaluation of the candidates, the progress of the broadcast itself, and the relative status of the participating viewers, who were simultaneously engaged in an open-ended process of classifying themselves through their evaluations of the candidates. This process was later improved, and today audience voting, such as via digital tele-voting systems, is an entirely normal part of television shows. This process experiences an additional inversion when the voting and the relations that it incorporates into the experiment are, in turn, reflected on television. This often occurs on a small scale, such as the incorporation of a live audience that serves as a kind of model of the actual audience and is itself also part of what that audience watches on television even though it is not necessarily visible. The incorporation of this mixture into the experimental context of the ‘third order’ also occurs on a quiz show when the candidate is able to ask the audience for advice (Hallenberger and Kaps 1991). This provides three uncertainties: the knowledge of the candidate, the knowledge of the audience, and their difference with respect to one another, as the candidate must decide whether to accept or reject the results of the audience survey. In these cases, the statistical analysis of the results through a corresponding graphic and its interpretation through the moderator often play a crucial role.

Television with Three Unknowns: Large-Scale Experiments and Pilot Projects The first large-scale global television event, which can also be described as an experiment of the ‘third order’, took place at roughly the same time that Wünsch Dir was aired on German-language television. This was obviously the flight to the Moon in 1969 (Barnouw 1990, 422-428; Hickethier 1998, 274-275). The huge scale of the project was not opposed to its experimental nature. A particle acceleration experiment is not much less expensive today. The experimental nature of the Apollo project can already be read from its setup. Even though the space in which it took place – that is, outer space – can be seen as infinitely vast, a closer look shows that outer space – precisely because of its infinite size – was not the space of the televised experiment but rather part of the epistemic object. Unlike other spaces, it is fundamentally impossible to experience or visualize outer space due to its boundlessness or the imperceptibility of its limits. Nevertheless, one of the goals of the experiment was to make this space visible by means of and within a very well-defined and closed experimental space.

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The actual experimental space was nevertheless distributed and subdivided in a relatively complex way – namely, it consisted of a network of interconnected laboratories. The most important was undoubtedly the famous ‘mission control center’ in Houston, Texas. Other important laboratory spaces were the interior of the capsule, the lunar module, and the part of the landing site that was within visual range of the Moon camera. The studio spaces of the broadcasters also functioned as their own experimental spaces, such as the studios of German broadcasters WDR and ZDF, which functioned as a miniature control center and featured a model of the lunar module built at a scale of 1:1 (Hickethier 1998, 274; Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen 1970). All of these laboratories were interconnected through television. Nevertheless, the setup determined that this was not a perfect network, as the connections were highly selective and nonreversible. The control center could be made visible at all other locations, as could all of the external locations whose images reached the control center. However, the reverse was not true, which was mandatory for the fundamental mono-directionality of television. The main service of television thus involved the transmission of control images – of the places where the outcome of the experiment was visible, where the epistemic object could be seen – to all connected television sets. All living rooms were thus connected to the experimental configuration as remote sites of the entire laboratory. This is precisely why the broadcasts of the famous lunar night are perennially characterized by observations about the number of viewers worldwide and appeals to the global community of viewers who participated in the human experiment of flying to the Moon. It is easy to recognize that this example is a substantial composite of the television experiment. Like experiments of the ‘first order’, the epistemic object of the experiment was the experimental setup itself – namely, the answer to the question as to whether it is possible to bring two men to the Moon and back unscathed; in other words, whether the dispositif of the Moon flight – the technical object – would function. The experimental setup also required properly working audiovisual communication between the astronauts and the control center. Like the flight setup in general, this communication initially represented a certainty that was also created by television itself through patient and repetitive explanations of the function and construction of the experiment as a whole and all of its individual phases. At the same time, it was also subject to testing as the experiment was underway – that is, it was also seen as an uncertainty and an unknown. Its function was thus not limited to that of a (retrospective) representation and recording space. The same devices that were employed to visualize the

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experiment on all television screens were also necessary to control and operate the mission itself. The inclusion of a second unknown, and thus the transition to a secondorder experiment, is characteristically linked to the audience. The audience not only witnessed the event but was also surveyed, and Barnouw accordingly refers to the experimental flight to the Moon as ‘Cosmic Nielsen’ (Barnouw 1990, 422).10 It was already clear the following day that the experiment had divided the epistemic field, as not only the astronauts but also the audience were test subjects who participated in the successful test of a process that created and visualized the largest live audience of all time; a continuous awareness of this fact was even provided while the experiment was underway. At this level, it also demonstrated feedback between the technical and the (divided) epistemic object, which is inherent to all television experiments, as the world ultimately watches itself by watching television (cf. Chapter 2 in this volume). The flight to the Moon became a ‘third-order’ experiment – that is, a communication experiment – when it included a third unknown with a reflexive function. This was the case when the relation between both of the other unknowns became uncertain and the progress of the experiment became dependent on this third unknown. The control of external conditions is normally required of any experiment in order to test the experimental process itself, but the ‘third-order’ experiment put this control at risk, so what is true of artistic experiments, according to Lyotard, also applies here: the experimenters themselves no longer knew what they were doing. In the Apollo experiment, this transition to the three-part epistemic object occurred at two points. On the one hand, it occurred during the lunar night itself, as the exit from the lunar module was moved forward several hours due to the smooth operation of the mission. This decision, which was contrary to the planning of the ongoing broadcast, effectively meant that the live coverage would not be interrupted and instead the allotted time would be extended. Instead of once again switching on their televisions at a predetermined time, the audience waited before the screen, uncertain of the outcome.11 The experimenters thus relinquished control not only over the technical operation – which was already risky enough – but also over its 10 It is also no coincidence that ARD moderator Günther Siefarth served as both a space expert for the Moon coverage and a prediction expert for the election coverage of 1969 and thus for a second-order as well as a third-order experiment. 11 Kühnert 1969a. On the ambiguity of the flight to the Moon as a television experience, see Hickethier 1998, 274-275.

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televisual use. However, this waiting and expectation made the early exit seem even more probable. Through this large-scale experiment, television proved that it was searching for the rules by which it actually functioned. The experimental setup also implied that these rules should ultimately ‘hold us in limbo and yet leave us empty’ – to use Heidegger’s phrase (1983, 130, 161 et passim) – and with this conclusion the experiment came to an end. At the same time, the television experiment was also connected to and increased the complexity of the problem of experimental knowledge acquisition in the exact sciences, which is also characteristic of the three-part relation discussed here, as the process of measuring and observation influenced the behavior of what was observed, just as it did in microphysics. This influence was not only retrospective, like the use of feedback in the case of the two-part experiment, but also direct. The observers perceived a a phenomenon of a third kind that they themselves had first created through their observation – namely, the interaction between the behavior of the astronauts and that of the audience. In the end, they were observing not the astronauts but rather their own process of observation; they were waiting on their own waiting (Nowotsch and Weißenborn 1985, 17-25). The second test run of the ‘third order’ involved the Apollo program as a whole. With the exception of the imperiled Apollo 13 voyage, the ratings sank drastically during the following missions, which ultimately led to the program’s surprisingly quick discontinuation. This renewed the underlying question of the discursive process of television – or, more precisely, its repeatability or eventfulness. To phrase this in terms of the concepts of television itself, it renewed the question of the relationship between seriality and live simultaneity. Their polarity, which was inconceivable in the early years of the medium, was explored and established here as the basis of televisuality. The early cancellation of the ‘Apollo’ series was perhaps inexplicable and problematic for space travel, but not for television: the question raised about its own process of questioning was answered – albeit temporarily and in relation to the specific experimental setup of the televisual dispositif at the time.

Experimental War In order to recognize the changes that television has since gone through as an experimental setup of the third type, I will conclude by looking at two experiments in the 1990s. The first is instructive because it involves two experiments separated by a few years – namely, both of the American Gulf Wars. Numerous observations have already been made concerning this topic

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– especially about the first Gulf War (Virilio 1991; Virilio 1996, 119-165; Felix and Zimmermann 1991; Krass 1991, 268-277) – so a few relatively well-known keywords may suffice. The basic experimental situation, with its closure and its control over the conditions experienced, can easily be recognized in the dispositifs of both Gulf Wars; they clearly differentiate the theater of war in the desert from the jungle (Vietnam) or the cultural landscape (Vietnam, Yugoslavia). What is interesting about the first Gulf War as a televisual laboratory situation is that the demarcation of the experimental space was at the same time the epistemic object, and it was accomplished through the experimental setup – that is, the dispositif of electronic reporting. At the level of a first-order experiment, it thus involved thoroughly technical objects and extensive technical tests of new reporting technologies – in particular, live satellite coverage in the first Gulf War. This technology was also elaborately staged on the screen itself. During the first Gulf War, it was also repeatedly pointed out that the same technology that facilitated the visualization and representation of the outcome of the experiment could also be found at the core of the military experimental setup, such as the video and satellite control of guided weapons. The question to be answered was whether television could achieve a virtually complete closure of the space of war while at the same time directing as much global attention as possible towards this space. The Heideggerian concept of ‘holding in limbo and yet leaving empty’, which was tested during the flight to the Moon, was then employed in a new way. However, the dispositif of the experiment underwent a radical transformation, as television was no longer used as a representational space. It still had a special function within the experimental setup, but it no longer obeyed the basic principle of Bachelard’s phenomenotechnique. It was dedicated not to rendering something visible but rather, on the contrary, to rendering something invisible – or rather to the dissimulation of the visible by rendering something else visible beforehand (Bourdieu 1998, 19). The incredible number of images that reporters and commentators showed in place of the events or consequences of the war already illustrates this as an imaging process in a literal sense; the reporting itself also visually concealed what was presumed to lie behind it. To be more precise, this experiment rendered television itself visible as the machinery of invisibility (Ibid.; see also Baudrillard 1981, 16-17, 48-56). This dissimulation process also showed how the representational machine – the process of visualization, which merely shows and records the production of the phenomenon in the technical apparatus – was detached and assumed an independent existence as its own experiment, which was then fed back to it: the military setup of

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the war was rendered as invisible as its effects, and this invisibility, in turn, became the condition of its operation. The reversal of the question that experimental television poses to itself is particularly important for the epistemic object of the television experiment. What was sought here was not the elimination of ignorance – either about the war in the sense of the testing of war technology or about television as a representational system – but rather the elimination of the function of television as an experimental organizational form of ignorance itself. It involves knowledge of the production of ignorance. The television experiment thus assumed the task of exposing the true nature of the medium, which, until then, was the function of (especially critical) television analysis. Television thus took over part of the work of exposure, which had previously been the task of critical media research (e.g. Prokop 1995, 11-17; Baacke 1974, 7-19). Through analysis and discursification it thus coexisted – even in third-order experiments – with the theory of television as meta-television. It is thus possible to describe it as an anti-experiment, as this insight into the experimental nature of the undertaking and the inclusion of the audience into the experiment were part of its overall design. If it is true that television experiments employ television at the same time as both a technical and epistemic object, then the specific situation of the second Gulf War is recognizable as a ‘third-order’ experiment, as the experimental setup was the first unknown, the inclusion of the audience was the second unknown, and the relation of television to its own process was the third unknown. In the first Gulf War, this question was raised (and simultaneously answered) in connection with the dissimulation described above. This time, however, the experimental setup produced a new phenomenon: an answer to a question that was not foreseen. While withholding and dissimulating were paramount in the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War involved an attempt to regulate the production of images and thus return to television as a phenomenotechnique. Television and the war were no longer separated from one another; rather, they were inextricably interwoven in the form of ‘embedded correspondents’ who were directly involved in the events of the war but also closely supervised. In addition, television was no longer visualized as an invisibility machine that dissimulated what it produced; rather, the relations of representation were completely reestablished. The visible was no longer of an entirely different order than the invisible – namely, that of the technical object, which as a solidified certainty makes all questions possible. The relationship between television and the war was no longer exclusionary, as it had begun (Uricchio 1991, 235; Karschnia 2005, 33-46; Chapter 7 in this volume); rather, what

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was supposed to be made visible was precisely the short circuit between what was visible and the process of visualization – in other words, the embeddedness of television in the military operation itself. The controlled images could still dissimulate the war, but this was done with images of a similar rather than opposite order. The latest images were thus juxtaposed with and played off against other possible images. This experimental setup nevertheless produced an unforeseen phenomenon: images appeared on the screen that nobody had intended. They were not of an entirely different order than the intended images, as they still involved images of war; however, they were of an entirely different origin. The vacant functional site of another possible visibility was primarily filled with images circulated by the Arabic broadcasters Al Jazeera and Al Arabia (Boyd 1995; Lynch 2006; El-Nawawy and Iskandar 2002). This effect remained practically imperceptible in the USA, but, in the rest of the world, images of Arabic reporters were inserted – almost equally – next to those of ‘embedded correspondents’. From the perspective of a theory of experimental television, this means that the entire experimental field – namely, the relation of the technical object and the epistemic object and the role and function of the experimenter and the act of experimentation – was now at their disposal. The experiment brought to light a second experimenter that had been invisible until then, and it can thus be seen as an experiment with authorship. In searching for its own process, the television coverage of the second Gulf War represented an experiment in which television itself was experienced as a complex field of activity that could only lay claim to agency through this complexity and heterogeneity (Latour 1999, 174-215; Gell 1998).

Big Brother In the 1990s, television proceeded to search for its own process in an entirely different way – and in the end only temporarily – in the format of the surveillance show. These shows were likewise delivered virtually worldwide, but the most spectacular example in Germany was Big Brother (Böhme-Dürr 2001; Mikos 2000). This experiment is interesting because it can be seen as an inversion of the experimental flight to the Moon, with which it has surprising, even if reversed, parallels. It not only shows the increasing self-reflexivity of television in general, but it also explores the extent to which television can be conceived as an experiment and yet at the same time be openly staged. The text no longer represents the medial conditions of its own production in the technical and institutional setup.

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Everything that needs to be said about this format, even explicitly regarding its basic experimental setup, has already been cleverly said and can be briefly recalled (Balke, Schwering and Stäheli 2001, 7-13, 55-77). The experimental nature of the concept and structure certainly does not need to be laid out here. Nevertheless, it not only determined precisely what was supposed to be made openly visible, but it was also always already part of the visible prerequisites of the show. The exigencies of experimentality already constituted the core of what was established as certain in the structure, as the experimental setup – including the floor plan of the house, the locations of the cameras, the rules of the game, and all of the different types of broadcasts (live transmissions, summaries, studio broadcasts, evening shows) – was an extensive core component of what was visualized and communicated. Incidentally, this already strongly recalls the arrangements made for the flight to the Moon. Like that experiment, this one similarly involved not a closed laboratory space – the Big Brother house – but rather a network of different spaces – in other words, a dispersed experimental space. At the same time, this experiment also involved the controlled experience and exploration of television itself, as television enabled the coordination of this experimental space. The first layer of the experiment was the testing of the setup itself as a viable format. The second unknown, the audience, was included through the live studio broadcasts, which were part of the complete package, and especially through audience voting and the extension of the format beyond television – not only to traditional accompanying media, like magazines, but also to the Internet. In this respect, it involved a remarkable expansion of the experimental field rather than its spatial containment in the Big Brother house, as might initially be assumed. The assumption that it involved a reprehensible human experiment that examines human behaviors in an extreme situation (uninterrupted observation, shortages of food, enclosed spaces, etc.) is also mistaken (Dörr 2000); rather, it involved an epistemic object of the ‘third order’ by questioning its own formation. Big Brother attempted to eliminate the ignorance that it itself created, just as television attempted to eliminate the ignorance that it first created, and therefore it was not a human experiment but rather a television experiment. This was made clear by the fact that the moral debate fueled the business of the program and contributed to its commercial success. It was also made clear by the fact that the relationship of the television experiment to the scientific experiment was once again invoked and televisually and experimentally ascertained by television itself. If the concept of television as an experiment is purely metaphorical, then the viability of that metaphor was at the very least experimentally verified. This was reflected not only in

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the appearance of media scholars on the program but also in the attempt to reformat Big Brother and provide countless new variants and seasons.

Conclusion: Experiment and Series As so often happens, the experimental setup here made something unexpected probable, and it thus functioned as a medium (Luhmann 1984, 411ff; Luhmann 1981, 25-34) whose performance consisted in suddenly making something that was merely latent more or less virulent. In this case, it manifested an apparently unavoidable difference that made television itself visible, and through this difference it ultimately entered once again into the problematic area of experimental knowledge and its variants between the classical notion of the scientif ic experiment and the self-reflexive experimental situation of art and modern natural science, as the aesthetic experiment and the microphysical experiment are both characterized by an indissoluble connection between what is measured and the process of measuring. This has inevitable consequences in an area that is also of central importance to television – namely, the temporal structure of the experiment or more specifically the phenomenon of repetition and the potential of repeatability. Repeatability and experimentality exist in a relationship of tension with one another. If ‘everything on television is a repetition of everything on television’ (Les Levine, quoted in Gruber and Vedder 1983, 164), then this does not seem to correspond to its experimental nature. Like the flight to the Moon, Big Brother also demonstrated once again the specific unrepeatability of the televisual experiment – that is, its eventfulness.12 This would seem to distinguish television from the classical scientific experiment. Of course it also seems as if a repeated scientific experiment is unable to eliminate ignorance, as it can only confirm knowledge that has already been acquired. This is only true to some extent, however, as a repeated experiment can eliminate ignorance in a pedagogical context as well as in the form of the surprising refutation of firmly believed knowledge. Nevertheless, an identical experimental setup – a repetition of the experiment – is at least ideally possible in the classical scientific experiment; repeatability is even fundamental to the traditional experimental process (on the problem of repeatability of experiments, see Mittelstrass and Wolters 1980, 622). This was not the case at the outset of television, as televisual experiments were initially neither repeatable nor iterable. This is precisely why they correspond 12 On television as an event, see Engell and Fahle 2006, 7-19, here 14ff.

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to microphysical experiments, which cannot simply be repeated (like an aesthetic experiment) because, in principle, every measuring process yields a different result. Like modern art in the age of its reproducibility or scientific experiments involving a series of tests, yet even more fundamental than both of these, the television series was an intermediate format between experiment and routine. Through the series, television mediated not only between the three basic orders of the experiment – that is, experiments with one, two, and three unknowns – and between aesthetic and scientific experimental forms, but also between the opposing poles of uniqueness and repeatability. As seen above, television experiments always assume the form of the sequel, series, or serial. As a general rule, they thereby lose part of their experimental character – although there are exceptions, such as 24 or, even earlier, Twin Peaks (Engell and Fahle 2006, 17ff). The original experiment can thus be read no longer as an experiment, but rather as a prototype – as the first case of a standardized process sequence whose components are nevertheless always reversible and adaptable. The result may be considered a program in the narrower sense (Luhmann 1984, 432-433). The series is a process that never entirely stops functioning as an epistemic object that is constantly being tested until the opposite is proven. The fundamental seriality of television is a strange operation between technical and epistemic structures that must be reconsidered once again in an entirely new way as a variant of the experimental process.

References Abelman, Robert, and David Atkin. 2002. The Televiewing Audience. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press. Abramson, Albert. 1987. The History of Television, 1880-1941. McFarland. Adorno, Theodor W. 1963. Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1967. Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1969. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Arnold, Franz. 1990. Abschlußbericht der Begleitforschungskommission des Kabelpilotprojektes Dortmund. Düsseldorf: Presse und Informationsamt der Landesregierung NRW. Baacke, Dieter, ed. 1974. Kritische Medientheorien: Konzepte und Kommentare. München: Juventa.

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The Tactile and the Index: From the Remote Control to the Handheld Computer Abstract This chapter takes up Marshall McLuhan’s reflections on of television’s tactility. With the help of Charles Sanders Peirce’s taxonomy, it distinguishes between two different forms of tactility: a tactility of wrapping, of comprehensive wholeness and inclusion, and a tactility of direction, of pointing and causing. Analysing key devices from the remote control to the smartphone, this chapter examines the transition between the two forms of tactility; in other words, the moment when receptivity, inertia, and passivity turn into relatedness, action, and causality. The technical instrumentation constantly renegotiates the interrelations between the allegedly impassive matter and an assumed purposeful will. Remote controls and smartphones always go back behind the well-rehearsed distinction between activity and passivity, between (human) will and (technical) body. Keywords: tactility, indexicality, Charles Sanders Peirce, touch screen, remote control, computer mouse

This chapter is motivated by the experience of the traditional television user. As everyone can assert, and as Raymond Williams marvelously described it, the experience of television (at least in one of its dominant forms) is one of an intermediate state between day and night, sea and land, closeness and distance, consciousness and dream, reality and magic, attention and distraction (Williams 2008, 77-121). The television experience is one in which the world changes completely just by pushing a button. This is why the following begins with a completely surreal question: how can one imagine the transformation of a person into an animal, such as the metamorphosis

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of a university professor into a mouse? This could happen only by magic, as it does in fairy tales, or by technology, such as in films – and here I am thinking of not only animated movies (Panovsky 1947) and early cinema (specifically, the cinema of Georges Méliès. See Solomon 2010 and Engell 2013a, 255-268) but also regular feature f ilms, such as Alain Resnais’s wonderful My American Uncle (1980), and computer-generated images. Of course, this happens in everyday experiences using a television remote control. This chapter centers on the hypothesis that the computer’s main function, the mouse click – or, more recently, the touching of a virtual key on a screen – is deeply rooted in and has been prepared by remotely controlled television. The philosophical question addressed here is precisely this: if the remote control serves as a tool for the designed transformation of something into something else, then it figures this within a chain of more or less intended transformational procedures; hence, it is a materialization or externalization of the will or intention. I am using the term ‘intention’ here to refer in the primordial sense to any direction towards something, like the broader sense that phenomenology gives to the term ‘intentionality’, but I am turning it into a material relation or driving force without further reference to what in phenomenology would be called ‘consciousness’ (Drummond 2003, 65-92). As it is meant here, intentions or directions are linked to movements, and they are produced not as a given immaterial structure, such as consciousness, but rather through an interplay of energies within and outside the human body, such as technologies. This is exactly why technologies of the will or intention, such as the remote control or the computer mouse, are linked so closely to touch and to the tactile – or, more precisely, to the use of the index finger. As I will develop, arguing along the lines drawn by McLuhan and Serres, the index is the bodily residence of what we mostly call ‘will’ or ‘intention’ (McLuhan 1994). With the notion of the index, we also have to take into account the semiotic idea of indexicality as developed in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce 1998, 274-292). McLuhan’s ideas about the tactile, conceived as a specificity of television even before the spreading of the remote control, can lead us to this hypothesis. Seen in its relation to television, the computer is not only and maybe not so much a discrete or digital machine but rather an indexical machine and hence a magic tool – a technology of will, intention, or, to say the least, direction. To a certain extent, this idea is rooted in McLuhan’s application of the concept of touch to the analogue television screen, which can be extended to the remotely controlled world of modern television and even further to the more recent computer mouse and touch screens. It can

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also be developed along the lines drawn by Serres’s philosophy of touch as he deploys it in his book The Five Senses (Serres 1985; Peirce 1992). In McLuhan, as others have already convincingly shown, there are two different concepts of the sense of touch (see Cavell 2016; Heilmann 2010). The first is connected to the skin as a wrapping surface and a generator of unity. The second is connected to the finger – mainly the index finger – and the digit – that is, to counting. According to Cavell and Heilmann, it is in this second sense that the computer (which is often claimed to be deplorably underrated in McLuhan’s work on television) could be integrated into McLuhan’s media anthropology of touch and the tactile (Ibid.). What I want to show here is that this is true, but it is only one side of the coin. As magic tools, the television remote control and the computer are both rooted in and derived from the first understanding of touch in McLuhan’s work. Moreover, even the idea of the digital as a purely symbolic order does not get rid of its foundation in the conception of the tactile (or the real) as skin, surface, and an all-embracing sense of unity. This reveals itself if we bridge the gap between the two different conceptions of touch and the tactile in McLuhan with the help of other thinkers’ ideas – namely, Serres´s and Peirce’s concept of ‘secondness’ and the index (Peirce 1998). According to the hypothesis, the technologies of direction, intention, and will – including the remote control and the computer mouse – lead precisely from the tactile as primordial unity in the first sense of McLuhan’s understanding to the digital and symbolic order in the second sense via an intermediate understanding of touch linked to movement, agency, causality, and indexicality, such as it is reified in the remote control. I want to extend the idea that the computer mouse also belongs to this intermediate realm of touch and the tactile in the sense of the indexical, the deixis, and the distant causation of movement, force, intensity, energy, agency, and magical and technical power. The remote control unites three dimensions in its most basic features or regimes: the symbolic regime (in the numbers of the channels), the indexical regime (in the function of pointing to the television set), and the iconic regime (in the images on the screen). These three regimes are perfectly compatible with what Peirce in his work on founding categories called ‘firstness’, ‘secondness’, and ‘thirdness’. According to Peirce, the category of firstness includes everything that exists for itself without any relation or reference to something else. One could also add that the skin-like, wrapping qualities of the sense of touch come into play with the overall presence of televised (and other) screen images, which surround us like a habitat, ecosphere, or iconosphere. The category of secondness includes everything that exists via its relation to something else, be it in cause-and-effect relations or in pointing to something (Peirce 1993,

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243-245). As an indexical device, the remote control adheres to the realm of secondness since it serves as a tool of articulation, addressing, directing, and even acting in the above-mentioned iconosphere – that is, the sphere of images. The category of thirdness includes everything that exists via its function to relate to other entities, such as words, signs, and symbols. In this sense, it would be entirely correct to state that the computer belongs to the realm of thirdness – that is, to the digital and hence to digits, numbers, the discrete, and the symbolic (Kittler 1985b). However, this does not reveal much about the computer, since the digital in the computer is increasingly black-boxed (Latour 1999). In contrast, the mouse button and the touch screen – the main interfaces and central devices in our daily use of the computer – are tools through which users exert their will or intention – or rather what they believe to be their will and intention – on the images and processes on the screen or iconospherical world. Hence, the mouse button belongs to the order of chains of continuous causation and fluxes of energy. It is a physical, possibly metaphysical, and once again indexical device of secondness in an iconic habitat. It is not so much an instrument of counting, calculus, and the symbolic; rather, it is a magic wand, like the remote control, which operates on an indexical level within the overall wrapping sphere of touch in McLuhan’s sense. To quote a parallel case in media history, the moving image is a discrete, well-structured, and symbolic image-by-image articulation of movement and time. This procedure is black-boxed in the movie camera, but, when projected on a screen, the moving image is indeed fluid and creates coherent and continuous fluxes of movement and time. In a similar way, the computer can also be seen as a universal, discrete, and symbolic machine; moreover, it is also a tool of agency, influence, and coherent flux of causation. It is an electrical rather than electronic device. This is why we are licensed to talk about a post-digital age, in which McLuhan’s work may be of even greater influence despite the fact that it was designed to describe the world of television. With this hypothesis, I take up previous research on electrical buttons and keys – particularly those on the remote control and the computer mouse (Engell 2000, 305-324; Chapter 2 in this volume). In these studies, I propose qualifying the keypad as an apparatus of differentiation, discretion, selection, and decision very much in the sense of Peirce’s category of secondness. I concentrate on the technical conversion of the indexical touch – of pointing to something with your fingertip – into a symbolic order of epistemic and social relevance. I will now dig deeper and research the transformation of the primordial sense of touch as a wrapping and overall phenomenon (firstness) into the movement of causation and the causation of movement (secondness) or the relation of touch and agency.

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Touch as Firstness For McLuhan, touch or the tactile is a sense of integration, closeness, or even immediacy, whereas other senses – namely vision – are distinctive and distant. Touch, according to McLuhan, integrates all of the other senses into one interplay, thus overcoming the separation and specialization of the senses (McLuhan 1994, 60, 185, 293-296). From the standpoint of physiological evolution, one could affirm this idea by stating that the prior organ of perception is the skin and that all other senses have developed as specializations of specific zones of the skin, such as the retina of the eye, the tympanic membrane of the ear, and the surface of the tongue. It is the skin that wraps the body and makes it a whole, of course, and it is the hand that serves as an organ of touch for grasping and apprehension under the leading control of eye and ear, thus integrating all of the senses into the tactile (Ibid., 45f, 60, 107-111, 185). In terms of media evolution, McLuhan expands the idea that the gaze changes its character with the advent of the televisual image. The small size of the television screen makes it a feature not of distance but of closeness; its coarse pixel structure leads to a scanning procedure in perception that has more to do with haptic than visual activities, and the gaze itself thus becomes tactile. This idea is even more relevant if one takes into account the use of the remote control, in which the fingertip takes over the leading function from the gaze. With regard to the computer, one can easily state that the mouse and the touch screen signal the re-entry of physical grasping and operating in the world of the symbolic, as Heilmann has pointed out (Heilmann 2010, 131-32). Moreover, touch overcomes the deep divide between the subject and the object. In the case of taste, for example, the object becomes part of the subject, so the subject/object division is transformed into the difference of the whole and the part. In the case of hearing, the body’s own voice is looped back to the very same body through the ear, which allows the body to perceive itself as an object and enables it to apply the subject/object division to itself (McLuhan 1994, 335f). In the case of vision, however, the body is not able to perceive itself, as the eye is unable to look at itself without the help of a mirror or other externalized artifact, like a photograph. Here, the separation between the two is the clearest and most dichotomic. As we know, the dichotomization between subject, human, or thought and object, thing, or body became canonical with the advent of the Gutenberg Age in early modern Europe – and this happened precisely because, according to McLuhan, the printing press privileged vision over all of the other senses (Ibid., 71, 85-87).

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Touch, on the other hand, does not separate subject and object; nor does it loop one back on the other or relate them in terms of part and whole or internalization, as in the case of taste. Instead, subject and object are experienced at the same time. They overlap and melt into each other, which is true not only for the skin in general but also for the more specialized zones of the skin, like the kissing tongue. They are not yet or no longer distinct from each other. This self-presence or immediacy of the tactile can also be found in other sensory forms, such as the kinesthetic sense of gravity, equilibrium, and movement, which are all connected to the body’s internal and immediate givenness in contrast to its outer self-perception as an object, such as in the coupling of voice and ear. Finally, if we move beyond McLuhan, we can quote Elias Canetti’s conviction that the sense of touch plays a crucial and, to a certain extent, irrational and magical role in the melting of great numbers of subjects into one more or less homogeneous crowd, which he refers to as the ‘black mass’ (McLuhan 1994, 116f; Canetti 1960). Overcoming the sense of distance is the decisive procedure in the emergence of the crowd, according to Canetti, and its replacement by the sense of touch soon attracts more and more bodies in a sort of gravitational force. In McLuhan’s terms, one could easily reformulate this as a shift from the visual to the tactile as the dominant force in social relations. Equally important is McLuhan’s idea of the temporal immediacy or instantaneity of the touch, which makes the tactile universe – what I have called the iconosphere – one of shared time, synchronicity, or presence, such as in live television. This leads to the conclusion that, in a tactile universe, cause and effect would not only emerge at the same time, but they would not even be separate, which would make them hardly distinguishable. It is not difficult to see McLuhan’s concept of touch and tactility as a reality that could be described as firstness according to Peirce’s semiotic categories and operational ontology, as it is the mode of being of everything that stands for itself and not in relation to anything else (Peirce 1931, 302-314).

From Touch to the Symbolic (and Back Again) Moving on from McLuhan’s first approach to the tactile, Cavell has already referred to his other approach – that is, counting, digits, and numbers as the externalization of touch – so I can be very brief. As Heilmann has pointed out, McLuhan claims that counting and numbers are based on magical cause-and-effect relations (Heilmann 2010, 127). Counting, McLuhan writes, has the power to assemble and unite isolated items

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into unified quantities, much like Canetti’s ‘black mass’ (McLuhan 1994, 116f), but as soon as they become signs or symbols – in other words, as soon as they become elements of a complicated notational system, in which symbolic operations can be effectuated – they are cut off from the tactile and enter into the visual or symbolic world of the Gutenberg galaxy. Within a Peircean ontology, as we have seen above, symbolic systems or symbolic machines belong to the realm of thirdness or relation (Peirce 1998; McLuhan 1994). Thirdness is the categorical and ontological status of everything that exists insofar and because it relates to other given entities. For Peirce, however, thirdness does not exist per se, but only as deriving or emerging from f irstness via the intermediate status that we already encountered earlier, which Peirce calls secondness. For McLuhan, the symbolic arrives in a more or less unprepared manner from the outside, transforming the primordial f irstness of touch and counting into the abstract mathematical order of the visual. Digitization just happens, one might say, but McLuhan does not provide a precise explanation as to how digitization occurs in this sense of the transformation of primordial touch or f irstness into the symbolic order or thirdness. Interestingly enough, one could say that, for McLuhan, the firstness aspect of the touch, which is present in the televisiual image and in television’s iconosphere, leads directly to the symbolic order of counting, digits, and the digital precisely because he did not take into account the remote control (and, of course, the computer mouse) as the indexical device that links touch to vision and thus to symbolic procedures. Nevertheless, McLuhan does provide an interesting hint with regard to this transformation. According to McLuhan, the process of transforming touch into the symbolic order is reversible, as it is precisely through electrification that calculation, computing, and counting by numbers are brought back into the tactile and the interactive regime of touch (McLuhan 1994, 116f, 249f). Electricity is thus a mediating force that bridges the gap between the digital and the tactile or between the symbolic order (thirdness) and touch (firstness). Electricity is a form of energy that is linked to electric tension or voltage, which is a form of intensity; it has to do with magnetism as a force of attraction and coupling. Electricity is often conceived or metaphorized in terms of current or movement, so the mediator between the symbolic and the tactile seems to involve physical energy, movement, tension, intensity, and forces of attraction. At the same time, McLuhan also conceives of electricity as a milieu or habitat, thus linking qualities of Peircean firstness and secondness by turning the former into the latter (Ibid., 347-358).

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In his philosophy of the senses, Serres conceives of the tactile in an interestingly similar, if somewhat different, way by linking the tactile to movement and mobility (Serres 1985, 11-110). For Serres, the sense of touch is not linked to the coherence and identity of a unified whole, as it is for McLuhan. Furthermore, its origin is not the surface of the skin but rather the interior of the body (McLuhan 1994, 44f). Taking the kinesthetic sense as a part of the tactile, like McLuhan, Serres describes the situation of a sailor on a burning ship who, in an attempt to get out, becomes stuck in a narrow porthole (Serres 1985, 11-16). Trapped between inside and outside in an unbearable tension between heat and cold, his whole self-perception concentrates and condenses into one single point in the middle of his body. According to Serres, the condensed focus of tactile attention and attraction can and will wander to the periphery of the body in other situations. The tension between hand and foot – or, in the sailor’s case, heat and cold – can be replaced by the tension between the body and some external object, as in the case of a juggler, card player, or pickpocket (if you think of Bresson’s famous movie), who concentrates his whole bodily existence or attention into the movement or touch of his hand (Ibid., 17-29). For Serres, the sense of touch, as a kinesthetic sense, is characterized by its mobility and its eccentric or centrifugal force. The tactile, in the sense of touch, emerges when the wandering focus arrives at the very outer limit of the body – that is, the skin. In other words, the skin is not the origin of the tactile but rather the surface or screen on which it appears when the tactile focus that is moving through the body reaches and crosses it. Touch can even transcend the body, which leads to the action of pointing at, aiming at, or moving towards someone or something. For Serres, therefore, indications and indexical signs of all kinds, directions in both senses of the term, and even paths in the landscape are all forms of the externalization of the tactile (Ibid., 349-379; 406-416), and the movement of the body through the landscape is a consequence of the mobilizing force of the tactile. For Serres, as for McLuhan, this marks a sharp contrast to the sense of vision. According to Serres, the view you get when flying over a landscape or crossing it in a car is derived from abstraction (when the tactile comes from attraction) and from taking distance (when the tactile demands approaching), which leads to the symbolic order. The predominance and logic of the visual could be reduced, and perception could be reorganized under the primacy of the tactile; however, both authors have completely different attitudes towards this process. McLuhan posits that applying the discrete order to the visual leads back to the dominance of the tactile. He sees in Impressionist and Pointillist paintings as well as the pixel structure of

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photographs a tendency to reorganize the visual as an assembly of countless isolated optical touches. When Serres mentions the tactile and sensual qualities of the gaze, however, he refers not to Seurat and Pointillism but rather to Pierre Bonnard (Ibid., 30-42). For Serres, the visual touch denotes not the decomposition of the visual into discrete optical touches or singularities, but rather the continuous movement of the eye across the surface of the painting, which leads from one type of texture to the other and which links the textual and sensual qualities of the physical painting to that of the depicted surfaces – that is, the textiles and skins present in Bonnard’s work. Again, the distinction between the representation and the represented or between the subject and the object of the representation is made to disappear in the realm of the tactile.

Tactility, Indexicality, and the Digital If we apply this difference between McLuhan and Serres to the case of the mouse button or the touch screen, the tactile qualities of the digital are regained or reconstructed for McLuhan, whereas they would have never been absent for Serres. As Heilmann insists, articulation, interruption, and the click as such are decisive for McLuhan (Heilmann 2010, 134). One could even say that the agency of the click operates as its own disjunction or interruption, to the detriment of another preexisting agency, such as a flow (of action or energy). In other words, it is a negative operation. From a more Serrian standpoint, touching the pad or the key would be a positive energetic operation of a different type of agency, such as in the ‘coup de foudre’ phenomenon of the overpowering irresistible force of love at first sight with its two intertwining energies of driving/being driven and of attracting/being attracted. Another difference between Serres and McLuhan involves the function of the process of externalization. For Serres, externalization is not so much an operation that is applied to the sense of touch, like McLuhan’s idea of the ‘amputation’ of specific functions of the human body and their delegation to technical tools; rather, the sense of touch demands and inevitably leads to externalization. Indeed, the sense of touch is externalization, and its logic is the logic of externalization. Touch is to be looked at as a driving force or agency that moves across the body, moves or leaves the body (as in the deixis), or makes other bodies move when extended beyond the body. Pointing at someone, for example, can and will make this other body move. One might even say that the tactile belongs to the order of transformation

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and transgression – that is, becoming different and exerting agency on the other.1 It seems evident that this understanding of the tactile is not only an interesting complement to McLuhan but also leads to a new understanding of the electric component in the digital or the electronic: pressing the mouse button means having the initial impulse of a movement turn into a flux of energy that goes beyond the body and finally, in an unknown or even magical way, arrives on the screen, where it has an effect on the movements that take place there. It is in that very same logic that we can imagine the transition from touch in the primordial sense of counting to the symbolic in terms of calculus. It is not merely the arrival of symbolic forms that makes the difference but also the impact that touch can effectuate on them, such as by writing or by manipulating counting stones, the abacus, or other calculating tools. In this sense, the digital would derive not from the discrete – that is, from interruption and binarism – but rather from causation, energy, flux, and coherence. Chains of causation or flux lead to change in the detail or the whole. In other words, touch leaves an impact, and symbolic forms are derived from the force of this impact, whether it be in the form of the wound caused by the weapon, the mark of a hit, the inscription of a fingerprint or footprint, or a more complicated indexical sign. One must add that magical practices of any kind, like casting spells or bewitching, correspond to the same model of tactile agency and coherent chains of causation, as Alfred Gell has shown in his intriguing work on the index (Gell 1998). To get a more precise theoretical picture of this process, which is crucial for an understanding of the post-digital age, it is helpful to go back to Peirce’s concept of the index. In Peirce’s taxonomy, it is not coincidental that firstness refers to pure qualities, such as gravity, perception, or iconicity; thirdness refers to thought, logic, or symbolicity; and secondness refers to causal relations, physical forces, and, most importantly, indexicality. The index is what mediates between the touch and the digital. In Peirce, we have at least three different understandings of the index. The one I want to focus on here can be found in Peirce’s famous critique of Josiah Royce’s ‘Religious Aspects of Philosophy’. According to this definition, the index 1 It is only very recently that I encountered Etienne Souriau’s writing on the mode of being of the unfinished work (Souriau 2009). Here, Souriau develops the idea that it is the work (of art) underway that demands completion. Pushing forward this idea, in the case of deixis and other indexical operations, one could assume that the driving force would not be the directing or moving towards but rather the attraction of the move, and internalization would be as important for the philosophy of the tactile as it is demonstrated here for externalization. Unfortunately, it was too late to integrate this concept into this chapter.

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is a sign that ‘like a pointing finger exercises a real physiological force over the attention, like the power of a mesmerizer, and directs it to a particular object of sense´ (Peirce 1958, 42). Peirce then gives several classic and often-quoted examples, such as the weather vane and the barometer; smoke and lightning; a photograph; signposts and landmarks; and deictic words like ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘I’, and all other pronouns. According to Peirce, the index does not convey any information about the object to which it directs attention – other than its mere existence and the fact that it is being referred to. The index does not know anything about its object except that it is there. This is why Peirce talks about the index as an ‘existential relation’. How is it possible for the index to direct perception and thought? For Peirce, the agency of the index is rooted in the fact that it has some physical, material quality it would not have if the object to which it directs attention were not there. This quality is always present in the index – even when the index is not perceived or ‘read’ as such. The index possesses a ‘dual conscience’ – namely, that of a ‘will’. ´What I call volition […] does involve the sense of action and reaction, resistance, externality, otherness, pair-edness´ (Ibid., 43). Peirce talks of the index as a place of clash, collision, and impact. Peirce’s concept of ‘will’ or intention can thus be read not just as given entities or forces but also as effects or ascriptions motivated by the sensation of impact on something, just as the sensation of an isolated, discrete spot on the skin is an effect of the primordial sense of touch crossing the skin, as we have seen with Serres. In this sense, we might say that the place of will and intention is nothing like consciousness; rather, it is precisely the index or the spot where the movement of the tactile reaches the outer limit of the body, crosses the skin, and goes beyond – regardless as to whether it involves the help of switches like keys and mouse buttons.

Towards the Touch Screen Let me close with an even more speculative observation about a possibly deep change in the order of the tactile and the body technologies of the will. Referring back to an anthropological point of view, one can state that the evolution from the all-inclusive primordial sense of the tactile to the symbolic order of calculus or the digital occurs via the fingers or ‘digita’, which represent the most peripheral and far-reaching parts of the human body and the sense of touch. There is one specific ‘digitum’ that is particularly crucial in this process, and this is, of course, the index. The index is the bodily tool of deixis and of causation. Along with the other three fingers, the index is counterweighted by the thumb. As Leroi-Gourhan and others have shown,

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the human grasp – so important to McLuhan – is a product of the force and counterforce between the four fingers of the human hand and the thumb (Leroi-Gourhan 1964). The relationship of the thumb as a counterforce to the finer sense of touch located in the four fingers also represents the solid ground, the Earth, gravity, being patient (Gell 1998), or Peirce’s category of firstness, while the index represents will, intentionality, agency (according to Gell), or Peirce’s category of secondness. The idea of the computer mouse as a magical or electrical tool is based on the use of the index plus the mobility of the hand as a whole. What will happen anthropologically if this order of the fingers of the hand is reversed? We have evidence that this is precisely what could happen today. The spacebars of the typewriter already integrated the thumb into the set of fingers as deictic tools, and it thus became a member in the chain of causation. In the use of the remote control, the old order of the thumb and the index as counterweights was already partially subverted. Either you needed two of your hands to operate it (in which case the index retained its function) or you had to turn your hand around, take palm and fingers as solid ground for the remote control, and use the thumb both as deictic tool and means of causation. This process accelerated with the increased use of touch screens on mobile phones, computers, and tablets. What does this lead to? The principle distinction between firstness (gravity, the Earth, etc.) and secondness (agency) is still maintained, but the operators have changed places. We thus need to ask what happens when our will or intention leave their original location and start to wander across the surface of our bodies in a second-order movement. If it is true that the computer is a magical tool of transformation and evolution, then the handheld computer might, in the long run, even transform what we call our agency, intentionality, or will. Maybe this would be the true proof of our having arrived in the post-digital, indexical, and more than ever electrical age. Williams’s magical in-between experience of the medium and the experience of the medium as directing – as the body of the will – would then have intersected in our technologies.

References Canetti, Elias. 1960. Masse und Macht. Hamburg: Claassen. Cavell, Richard. 2016. Remediating McLuhan. Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Drummond, John. 2003. ‘The Structure of Intentionality.’ In The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, edited by Donn Welton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Engell, Lorenz. 2000. Ausfahrt nach Babylon. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. —. 2013a. ‘The Magical Image in Georges Méliès Cinema.’ In Technology and Desire: The Transgressive Art of Moving Images, edited by Rania Gaafar and Martin Schulz. Bristol U.K. Intellect Books. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heilmann, Till. 2010. ‘Digitalität als Taktilität: Mc Luhan, der Computer und die Taste.’ Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (3): 131–40. Kittler, Friedrich. 1985b. Aufschreibesysteme 1800-1900. München: Fink. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1964. Le Geste et la parole. Paris: Albin Michel. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Panovsky, Erwin. 1947. ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.’ Critique 1 (3): 5–28. Peirce, Charles S. 1931. Collected Papers Vol I: Principles of Philosophy, Accessed 1 June 2018. https://www.textlog.de/peirce_principles.html. —. 1958. Collected Papers Volume VIII: Reviews, Correspondence, and Bibliography. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. —. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Vol. 1 (1867-1893). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 1993. ‘One, Two, Three. Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature.’ In Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 5: 1884-1886, 242–47. Indiana University Press. —. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Vol. 2 (1893-1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Serres, Michel. 1985. Les Cinq sens. Philosophie des corps mêlés. Paris: Grasset. Solomon, Matthew. 2010. Disappearing tricks: Silent film, Houdini, and the magic of the twentieth century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Souriau, Étienne. 2009. Les différents modes d’existence: suivi de Du mode d’existence de l’oeuvre a faire. Ed. by Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Williams, Raymond. 2008. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.

5

Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze Abstract This chapter claims that television coverage of the moon landing brings no less than a (further) Copernican revolution of the gaze and of human self-understanding. In a reversal of the gaze, the central perspective breaks down, and so does the Copernican order with the gazing subject in the center. The Earth appears on innumerable and omnipresent screens all over the visible surface of the Earth. From now on, every place on Earth is always visible as a picture taken from possibly every single other place on Earth. Television is no longer a matter of making something appear at another place by means of transmission technology, but of selecting from the multitude of always already available virtual images – and places – to make it actually appear. Keywords: Moon landing, anthropocentrism, globalization, totality, liveness, media event

The successful American expedition to the Moon in 1969 with the Apollo project may have been an important event in the history of space travel, a catalyst for technological development of a kind previously only seen in phases of war, and of course a key date in the Cold War. But, first and foremost, it was the supreme television event. It also provided the basic model for all television events since then, so that changes in the variation, selection, and re-stabilization of television events in the time since could be measured and described in relation to the expedition to the Moon (Luhmann 1997, 413-594). After this event, nothing was ever the same again, as television established itself as a force of change rather than just a witness to it. Instead of putting itself at the service of the Moon project, it used the flight to the Moon to serve its own ends and turned it into its own agent.

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch05

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In the following, I elaborate on the meaning and stakes of this claim in four movements, taking up topics that were already mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3 in a more systematic way. In the f irst movement, I explain the significance of the Apollo landing as a television event in greater detail. In the second movement, I argue that the flight to the Moon also marked an important turning point in the whole scopic regime of the modern era. As the self-proclaimed high point of an optical dispositif that began, at the latest, with Galileo’s telescopic gaze, it gave valid and final expression to the modern planetary order of the gaze. In the third movement, however, I propose that this intensification of the modern way of seeing requires reflection. And it is precisely through this process of reflection that the televisual view of the Moon, while giving large-scale confirmation of this way of seeing, at the same time converted it into a completely new quality or ‘second order’. Finally, in the fourth movement, I argue that the Moon project completely – and crucially – reversed this order of the gaze yet another time, as the flight to the Moon was only a success because it led to a return to Earth. By returning from the Moon to Earth, television already laid the roots for the establishment of a new view of the world, possibly on an epochal scale – a view of the world that no longer belonged to a planetary order, but instead obeyed a satellite regime. Similarly, in the course of these four movements – from television as witness to television as independent agent, from the individual telescopic gaze to the all-powerful televisual gaze, from the first-order regime of the gaze to the ‘second order’ regime, and from the dispositif of the planet to that of the satellite – the expedition to the Moon not only marked a great television event or simply the greatest event among other comparable ones, it also stood alone; it was entirely singular.

The Greatest Show in the History of Television The singularity of the Moon project with regard to the history of television begins with the fact that the flight to the Moon was the first major event that would not have been possible without television. It played out not only in front of the camera and for the camera, but also by means of the camera, as the event itself was expressly brought about with the resources of television, on which it relied. Television not only accompanied the flight to the Moon, but also publicized its novelty and witnessed, verified, and proved the events. It did all of this, but above all it was involved in the organization of the flight from the very start – from conception to implementation to editing.

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The Moon project was a television project, and the flight was a television program. Television produced, released, and instrumentalized the flight to the Moon for its own purposes. The interesting thing is that television made no secret of this. Even if one had no other sources but the relevant television footage from 1967 to 1969, the role of the medium in organizing the flight to the Moon would be obvious. Television itself openly displayed the dependence of the flight to the Moon on television. Here we can follow the analysis of Eric Barnouw, who demonstrates that the lunar mission was announced in advance in the newspapers as ‘The greatest show in the history of television’ (Barnouw 1990, 424), and the Nielsen ratings indeed showed that it received the highest ratings ever recorded. But Barnouw also explicitly talks of the ‘script’ that television developed for the flight to the Moon, which – at least in the case of Apollo 11, the first complete mission to the Moon – was faultlessly performed for us and in front of us (Ibid., 425). Significantly, television also cast itself in the lead role in this script, and this is one of the reasons why I describe it as an example of ‘second-order television’. The difference between this and previous live television events was that they were happening anyway and were then broadcast, whereas the flight to the Moon took place right from the start as television, through television, and only on television. This began with the necessary technologies. Without the processes of imaging and image transmission developed for television, successful monitoring and control of the flight and the Moon travelers would not have been technically possible. Thus two companies specializing in television technology, RCA and Westinghouse, were involved in the technical preparation of the program from an early stage (Ibid., 423). However, the preeminent function of television technologies for navigation and control, aided by transmitted visibility and visualization, was not left in the invisible realm of experts and technocrats. On the contrary, it was clearly communicated to the public, though it is worth noting that this communication underwent a shift from the microscopic to the thematic level: what is the point of putting a man on the Moon if we have no camera to show it? The first maneuver Neil Armstrong had to carry out was, of course, to activate the external camera on the lunar module. His first significant action was to deliver the famous declaration about man and mankind on camera. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the goal of the Apollo mission was to put a camera on the Moon, and it was the camera that required a cameraman and an actor. It is thus no coincidence that, from the first telecommunications satellite ‘Telstar’ in 1957 to the present age of navigation and positioning systems, the only economic sector relevant to consumers to benefit from

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space travel (i.e. the only one lying outside the military-technological industry for producing spacecraft) has been the telecommunications industry: television, mobile phones, and satellite navigation. The structure of the overall program of Apollo flights from 1967 onwards, and the time sequence of the Apollo 11 flight in particular, were also closely governed by the dramaturgical demands of television – or, to be more precise, the demands of the episodic series – and not by technical requirements. As a result, there was also extensive coverage of the preparatory flights. From an economical and journalistic point of view, this was done to secure the audience’s interest using the dramatic device of intensification, as every flight went a little further into space (and back again) than the previous one. This kept up the suspense, though it was by no means necessary for technical reasons. The media pattern at work here obviously involved the production of information by creating and then eliminating uncertainty (Luhmann 2000, 51ff). Every murder mystery on television follows this pattern; indeed, it is the basis of the fictional information of the mass media. It is therefore only logical that there has been vigorous, though groundless, speculation about the flight to the Moon being a fiction created using the methods of television – speculation that nevertheless possesses a grain of truth, as it is based on the structural chain of serialized fiction (Nowotsch and Weißenborn 1985, 16-25). Be that as it may, the area in which television has particularly developed this structural element – that is, the elimination of self-created uncertainty – is the principle of the series, or more specifically that epoch-defining product of the culture industry known as the episodic series. This serial effect of the Moon program – one of the two cornerstones of the televisual world to this day – was supplemented by the second: the effect of television ‘liveness’. Since the landing of Apollo 8, it has been possible to transmit live images from outer space. Spectacular use was made of this capacity with the famous ‘live’ Bible reading from the Apollo 9 capsule at Christmas, which juxtaposed the story of the Creation, read by the astronauts themselves, with images of Earth recorded from the window of the capsule. This element not only built up the importance of the program itself, for the first time, it revealed the planetary dimension or universal aspiration of the undertaking, and it simultaneously positioned this universal undertaking within the long chain of special Christmas broadcasts that had established and structured the history of radio and television up to that point, including Reginald Fessenden’s legendary maritime radio broadcast on Christmas Eve 1906; Manfred von Ardenne’s presentation of television using cathode ray tubes in 1926; the terrible radio broadcast of Christmas 1942, which linked German troops from all the fronts into a single televisual unit; and the

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commencement of television broadcasting operations by the ARD (German public service broadcasting network) in Christmas 1952, which, admittedly, was scarcely noticeable in the distant USA. A third element linking television and the flight to the Moon is their joint epistemology, which obeys the regime of visibility and evidence (Bartz 2007, 57ff). The flight to the Moon could never have attained the character of reality in the sense of ‘effectiveness’ had it not been possible to visualize on television the silver luminary in the night sky, which also shares a specific, gentle, flat glow with the black-and white-screen. In short, the Apollo program was – more or less purely – a television show. Contrary to the claims of conspiracy theorists, however, it was staged not in the closed and remote interior world of a studio in the desert, but rather in a production space that was apparently not separated in any way from the space in which the viewers lived and experienced the world. Furthermore, this space was bigger, more comprehensive, and more unbounded than anything that came before or after – namely, outer space or the universe itself. The strategy was not separation and concealment, but rather inclusion, opening, expansion, and disclosure. In this way, the simulated world of the space flight became one with the world that was deluded about the flight. The entire process, including the final success and above all the procedures of the mission, had to be disclosed and put on display in the same way. The uncertainty that was eliminated at the end of the process first had to be created, and for this it was necessary to name, communicate, and make visible, as much as possible, the improbabilities that needed to be overcome. The flight to the Moon thus also marked an important stage in the history of the visualization of technical knowledge. The whole technical process in all of its various phases, the basic functions of the technical components, the difficulties that had to be surmounted, and the underlying physics were all presented to the public in countless visualizations and popularizations, and television was the principle route of this dissemination. The procedures of the project were thus explained again and again using countless animations, models, and diagrams and with accompanying commentary from engineers, doctors, and experts. In their annual reviews of the period, the public service broadcasters in Germany noted with great pride the incredible number of hours of programming they had devoted in this way to the flight to the Moon (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen 1970, 216; Hickethier 1998, 274ff). The broadcasters’ own space-travel experts – such as the legendary Günther Siefarth of the ARD – also briefly became popular figures. Again, then, the simulational nature of the enterprise was made plain for all to see (Baudrillard 1981, 56-58). These efforts were of course supplemented

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by other media, such as newspapers, magazines, calendars, and posters. However, it was the visualization of television above all – and not just its goal at the moment when it was accomplished – that gave the whole project its credibility by proving that it could work (Luhmann 1984, 179ff). It was precisely this credibility that opened up the political scene to the complex of space travel and television. In terms of economics, for example, the immensely expensive space-travel program was funded by taxes and therefore enjoyed prestige among all sectors of society in order to justify the costs in the eyes of the members of Congress who had to approve it. In terms of politics, the aim of the whole undertaking was, above all, to gain a geopolitical advantage over the other bloc in the Cold War (Barnouw 1990, 427). To this end, the lunar television program pursued a double strategy. On the one hand, the global public – and ideally also the population of the other bloc – had to be convinced of the performative superiority and unsurpassed power of the American economic and political system. In order to reach this goal, NASA was prepared to take the considerable risk of a publicly staged operation, on display and ‘live’ at all times, which could have failed for all to see. On the other hand, the idea was, far more profoundly, to diminish the fundamental dichotomy of global politics at the time – that is, the Cold War itself. The flight to the Moon was intended to come across as a victory for all mankind, and it was actually presented as a collective undertaking of and for all the countries of the Earth. America was thus supposedly acting on behalf of all peoples and all powers, and television was indispensable for this propaganda goal because it was the only medium capable not only of expressing this aspiration but of bringing it about performatively by means of its structure as a global ‘live’ broadcast that actually took place. Behind this staging, however, power was also wielded in yet another form – namely, that of the medium itself. Television was not simply placing itself at the disposal of official geopolitics; instead, it was using the figuration of the Cold War to its own ends in an act of virtually unprecedented media self-empowerment. Whatever people would do after this, they would do it as agents of television (Ibid., 428).

Looking at the Earth This unique positioning of the flight to the Moon as a television event is not the end of the story. As I have already proposed, the Apollo program was not only a gigantic television show, it was the central event of television history. Television thereafter was not the same as television before; we

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can almost speak of pre-Apollonian and post-Apollonian television. In the process of the Moon broadcasts, television thus appropriated an epochal relevance, as it appropriated power over reality by organizing an event of planetary dimensions and declaring the world to be its own interior. At the same time, it also positioned itself within a scopic and epistemic grand tradition – namely, that of the Copernican world order and the Galilean viewpoint.1 Armstrong’s speech about ‘mankind’, declaimed while on the Moon, already hinted that this was about the central position, or more correctly the universal position, of ‘man’, but that it was also, in particular, about his position and visibility in space. This was already shown very simply by the view from the window of the capsule to Earth. Other initial indicators included the world tours on which astronauts who had returned from other phases of the mission were sent during the Apollo 11 preparations. These tours not only had a political function in the framework of the emerging policy of détente but also helped to raise global awareness of the program itself (Barnouw 1990, 423). Of course, the main thing to be mentioned here is the fabulous, astounding, and (both aesthetically and epistemically) impressive images of the Earth – our place in the universe – as it appeared from the Moon against the backdrop of this very universe (Kühnert 1969b). These images were the main achievement of the complex of television and space travel, which produced them in two steps: firstly by making them possible and secondly by disseminating them on a vast scale across the whole planet. For the first time, the Copernican position of our habitat as a planet in the universe became completely obvious, appearing for all to see against a backdrop of jet-black emptiness that was nevertheless seen from a different point, which also served as a base for the gaze. Television thus finished what Galileo had begun (Vogl 2007). Television also surpassed the Galilean order in two respects. Like the telescopic view of the universe, the televisual view offered insight into the spatial and physical order that prevailed throughout the universe, including the place of the observer – that is, the Earth. Unlike the telescope, however, it made the Earth itself visible rather than simply showing other, analogous planets. The scopic regime of European modernity -- which began with the development of perspective, continued with the increasing prevalence of reading, and was given the finishing touch by Galileo’s telescopic gaze -- was thus resoundingly confirmed and at the same time transformed. Of course, photography and film had already brought about substantial changes by 1

For the concept of the ‘scopic regime’ see Forster 1988, 3-28.

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breaking up the points of view from which we regard the world (Aumont 1989; Schröter 1998). After all, it makes a great difference whether one takes the view into the universe as the basis for logical deduction or speculation about the situation on one’s own planet, like Galileo (Vogl 2007; Serres 1991, 231ff) or whether one actually looks at one’s own planet while looking out at another object – namely, the Moon and the astronauts walking on it. The televisual view of the Moon produced evidence, as already shown, but it was not just ordinary evidence. It was pan-evidence: everything was made visible. This kind of evidence meant that the visualization of the universe not only occurred for one eye at a time, and only for a few select eyes overall; on the contrary, it was carried out without distinction – at least this is the principle claim – for all to see at the same time. All of the limitations and opportunities for doubt in the Galilean view were thus bypassed in one gigantic push. In 1969, there was of course no longer any need to assert the Copernican worldview per se. But by giving its weighty support to the Copernican tradition and displaying his worldview expression on a grand scale with decisive new dimensions, television took on the task of both securing and de-trivializing that which was already taken for granted. In this respect, it functioned as a technique of implausibilization (Luhmann 1984, 162ff). In a completely unexpected manner, it formulated a consensus that was planetary in two senses: it simultaneously attained maximal redundancy on an epistemic level and maximal information on an aesthetic level. Furthermore, every attempt to exclude people from participation in this view (e.g. by governments that did not join the live transmission for political reasons) was perceived as wrong. Anyone denying others this view was thus automatically placed outside the consensus of the universe and in the context of an inquisitorial, misanthropic ignorance. But the Copernican turn was really only significant as a turning point, as it changed something profoundly. Completing it thus meant carrying on a change or bringing it to an end, and this is exactly what television accomplished with the Moon program. It not only confirmed the view deployed in the Copernican/Galilean turn, but also carried out a transformation, as in this deployment. Moon television took what the Copernican turn claimed and signified – for both the spatial order and the order of the gaze in outer space – and turned it back onto the spatial order and the order of the gaze on Earth. In the process, it took aim at a peculiar area of tension in the order of the gaze in the modern age. Although the modern world order irretrievably renounces the central position of the Earth, it simultaneously confirms and reinforces the central position of the subject of the gaze – and thus of the

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subject of cognition – in relation to the object of the gaze. The subjugation of the object by the subject, as exemplified in Florentine central perspective, was first given valid expression in the modern view; it was probably even the prerequisite for the achievement of the new world model. The view that proved the relativity and coordinateness of the place of the observer was based on the sovereignty of the observer’s gaze. The visual exaggeration of television began precisely at this highly charged relationship between view and place.

Second-Order Observation To explain this suggestion, a detour is required. I would like this talk of television’s ‘Copernican turn’ – admittedly quite excessive in terms of method – to be understood as it is used by the French film scholar Youssef Ishaghpour. He speaks of film’s ‘Copernican turn’, which he pinpoints as beginning with the work of Orson Welles (Ishaghpour 2001). By film’s ‘Copernican turn’, he basically means the same thing that has been influentially discussed elsewhere as the transition from classical to modern film (Deleuze 1986, 211-217), but he puts it differently, describing it as a shift from the ‘image of reality’ to the ‘reality of the image’ (Fahle 2001; 2005). The change in viewpoint that Ishaghpour observes in Welles’s work involves a shift from an established approach to one that marks a new epoch. The first sees the moving picture as an instrument for recording, reproducing, or producing moving reality, including invented or imaginary reality. The second, new approach, however, directs attention to the image itself as an agent of production and observation. The interest no longer lies in what is represented, narrated, made up, or documented; instead, the interest lies in how this is done – how the image engages with the image. According to Ishaghpour, Welles’ films in general – and especially Citizen Kane (1941) – lend themselves to being read as observers of this radical change. Citizen Kane thus represents not (only) an observation or representation of the life of the main character, but also an observation of this observation – a representation of this representation. In a different theoretical context – namely, that of systems theory and radical constructivism – one could speak of the transition to ‘second-order’ observation (Foerster 1974; 2003). Ishaghpour, however, sees this shift as ‘Copernican’ because it goes hand in hand with a complete destabilization of that which was previously seen as necessarily fixed and primary. Whatever was the constant – the narration of a story, the announcement of an event, a figure, a character, or a historical fact – became the dependent variable of an artistic process,

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which was the actual subject of the film. Things that were fixed became mobile. And film assumed a paradigmatic role here. In the 20th century, the transition to ‘second-order’ logic took place everywhere: in other cultural fields, other arts, and also in scientific knowledge. Without a transition of this kind to the ‘second order’, there would be no conceptual art, no media art, but also no discourse analysis, no modern computer science, and no philosophy of difference. Perhaps film did not invent this second order, and perhaps it was not the first medium to make this transition, but it made the second order visible, observable, and part of everyday discourse. The case of the flight to the Moon was of course somewhat different again. Television was based on a completely different viewing regime and formed a different dispositif than that of film. Perhaps there was actually no real line of development connecting film and television because, as far as its technological basis is concerned, television, unlike film, is a medium of transmission rather than of recording. It does not retain anything; it merely connects. It imports and exports images and views. It is precisely this function that enables it to connect the internal organization of the images that we know from film with the external organization of places and views far beyond the reach of the cinema and the studio. Even in its classical, pre-Moon, pre-Apollonian phase, television was always a matter of merging the space of the image – the internal organization of the events on the screen – with the space of the real world – the living room in which the television stands – and the boundless system of space outside. It is simultaneously intimate and planetary in scale and conception, and this is precisely what links television’s ‘Copernican turn’ in the order of outer space with Ishaghpour’s concept of a ‘Copernican turn’ in film. Television, of course, inherited the first hints of this quality from radio, which also displayed a globalizing tendency. But it took it a step further in its early efforts at worldwide networking and the spectacular live transmissions that defined the early history of television (Hickethier 1998, 85ff). Television also developed this networking even further through its close links with space travel, which began well before the flight to the Moon. Its revolution thus had quite different dimensions than that of film. It involved the transition to the ‘reality of the image’ and thus to ‘second-order’ processes, but in the dimension where planetary or global thinking was connected with the perceptual situation of the subject, which could not otherwise have become a planetary or global subject. A planetary way of seeing, such as that deployed by television, can be distinguished in part by the fact that it operates through universal views rather than through clips and scenes. In fact, the truly spectacular images

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showing the Earth as seen from outer space and from the surface of the Moon were by far the most fascinating and effective images of the whole expedition to the Moon. At the same time, however, they were ‘second-order’ images. In order to allow a universal view of this kind, television first had to leave the planet. It had to open up a level of its own reality and order in outer space. Only then could it return to the planet, taking with it this reality and order of its own, which became visible in the previously impossible image of the planet. Thus it imported the second level into the first level, since the planet could only be observed effectively (i.e. collectively or publicly) on and from the planet itself (we will not go so far as to say: by the planet) (Spencer Brown 1994). There could be no image of the planet in the sense of a ‘first-order’ visuality because no image could capture the planet as a preexisting object. There could only be the planet as image – as the result of a specific and comprehensive operation (i.e. the expedition to the Moon). This transition to the reflexivity of the televisual arrangement of space was clearly formulable – perhaps more clearly than anywhere else – in the definition of television itself. Television is, according to the official definition given by Paul Nipkow in 1884, ‘a device designed to make an object located at one place A visible at any other place B’ (Hickethier 1998, 15; Abramson 1987, 13ff). This practical and paradigmatic definition uses the modern, binding distinction between the subject and the object of the gaze and presupposes that places A and B are different. Television was thus established as a medium for the transmission from A to B of the visibility of the object for a subject. It thus sprang from the scopic regime of modernity, undaunted and unscathed by all the upheavals that challenged it, and it embodied this regime on a mass-media basis. Television changed in the age of Apollo, however, and our vision and the order of our images changed with it. The subject of the gaze, which was located at place B (on Earth), saw place B as it appeared from place A. In other words, place B was made visible at place B, and place B thus became part of the reality of the image. Television thereby entered its ‘second order’, as it transformed from a medium of transmission to one of reflection. Of course, the success of this process required previous practice in the filmic principle of the reverse-angle shot – cutting to the perspective of a person in the film who has just been looked at as an object (Žižek 1999). The extension of this principle to inanimate objects had also already become an established practice in film, such as when the hero’s view of an object is supplemented by a view into the character’s face from the perspective of the object he or she is looking at, which makes the character’s reaction to the object visible (Balázs 1923, 59ff).

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As suggested above, television transported this conventionalized filmic principle into a totally different dimension – a planetary dimension – as the gaze was no longer focused on an individual subject-object relationship. The object sighted was not the subject of the gaze, and the gaze itself possessed no individuality, as in the case of the mirror or reverse-angle shot. Instead, the subject of the gaze was place B – the place of the subject of the gaze itself – but no view of the subject was made visible. This was a first step towards the de-personalization of the viewing relationship. The relationship between subject and object within the gaze was thus made visible no longer as an origin that was given but rather as a consequence that was produced by a spatial conf iguration. However, this was not a matter of a single, addressable place B, where subjectivity could be produced. On the contrary, the flight to the Moon was about a global dimension – the indivisible totality or the total space of all possible places labeled B viewed as a whole (Deleuze 1986, 8-11). If the space could be broken up into any number of points of view and axes of view by the mobile camera and the editing process, then the televised image of the Earth would show the whole spectrum of possible points of view and viewing relations. It would show, in a single image, the possibility of all even remotely possible images – not all of these images themselves, but rather the totality of all places B that would become possible. This totality would be made visible at place B. This is not sheer speculation; rather, it is resoundingly confirmed when one searches through the television footage of 20 and 21 July 1969. The globalizing aspiration of the coverage played an enormous role here. The commentaries repeatedly pointed out the huge numbers of viewers and the fact that the Moon broadcast could be simultaneously received all over the world. This was illustrated by live coverage of viewers in all sorts of other places on Earth, showing them in their connection to the flight to the Moon and the view of the Moon, awaiting the event on the screen. This particularly applies to two much-emphasized images that, while lacking the aesthetic quality or fascination of the picture of Earth, were nonetheless of great relevance for the overall project. The first was the repeatedly shown image of the control center in Houston, Texas, which was the image most frequently seen in this whole context and particularly on the evening of the flight itself (Kühnert 1969b). Here, in turn, an enormous number of images were to be seen: radar images, visualizations, images of monitors showing data, but also television images, including the same ones that viewers could also see. Large numbers of men in white shirts were kept busy viewing and commenting on all of these pictures. In the image of the control center, the

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totality of all images found an image that could then, in turn, function as part of the totality of images. The viewer’s own screen thus became a control center. Cavell gave theoretical expression to this state of affairs with his suggestion that ‘monitoring’ had replaced ‘viewing’, although he did not refer to the Apollo program (Cavell 1982, 75ff). A second much-emphasized image was to be seen during the telephone conversation between the astronauts and President Nixon: a split screen juxtaposing the President, with the precise indication ‘Live from White House’, and the astronauts, with the caption ‘Live from Moon’. This turned the screen into the place where the two places, A and B, were once again visually brought together and duplicated. The area that interests Ishaghpour – the micro-organization of the image and the sequence of images – became a reflection of the area that concerned Nipkow in his definition of television: the external organization. For Ishaghpour and others, filmic modernity began with Welles (Fahle 2005). According to this view, the analogy of the ‘Copernican turn’ lies in the fact that the transition to a ‘second order’ or to the ‘reality of the image’ was a sign of modernity. In connection with this, one could test whether the flight to the Moon can be seen as the beginning of a modernizing movement for television as well. However, this assumption would have to take into account the fact that televisual modernity – as we saw in the previous section – positioned itself in a continuous line with the modern order of the gaze, which it nonetheless transformed at the same time. It would also have to show how television -- which, as we saw in the first section, rose to hegemony through the flight to the Moon -- conducted its own modernization as a push to modernize the whole televisual world.

The Disintegration of Universal Vision The radical change brought about by the transition to a ‘second-order’ level of television cannot be the end of the story – especially if we accept the argument outlined above. According to this view, the change in the order of the gaze and the order of thought effected by the Moon project must have had planetary dimensions in the sense that it seized hold not only of television, which produced it, but also of television’s whole world (i.e. the world). This must be another turning point of almost Copernican dimensions, which would be even greater than that perceived by Ishaghpour in film. I therefore wish to end with a few suppositions and a little evidence regarding this perspective of continuing change.

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The place from which the reality of the image (i.e. the planet) could be made visible in a planetary sense was, as we have seen, not the planet itself. It was a place that was accessible from the planet and that could be imported to or projected onto it, but it was different from it. In Nipkow’s schema, the view back from the Moon to the Earth was actually a third place, which was quite visible but by no means the object of the gaze or the coverage. It was neither the place of the visible (i.e. the Earth) nor the place from which and in which everything became visible, since this place was the planet’s satellite (i.e. the Moon). It was a secondary place, subordinate to the planet itself and dependent on it but nonetheless necessary in order to see the planet. The view from the Moon (or from a point on the way to the Moon) back to Earth was the decisive change in viewpoint brought about by the flight to the Moon – a result that was not planned, programmed, or foreseen. The Moon not only reflected our gaze without becoming the object of the gaze, but it also looked at us without becoming the subject of the gaze. Neither object nor subject of observation, it nonetheless permeated the image. It did not remain invisible as an exterior that had to be unveiled. It was by no means central to this image (that was still the Earth), and it therefore also bore no resemblance to an empty center (Foucault 1989, 3-18). It was marginal; at most, the lunar soil at the bottom edge of the image framed and grounded the image. Nonetheless, the satellite played a crucial role. It was not a center around which the image and ultimately the whole configuration of images were mounted. Instead, the satellite was a factor that played a marginal but fundamental role in each picture and in the overall configuration. The images and events of a single night of television are not enough, however, to justify talk of a change in viewpoint – let alone a Copernican one. A lasting effect and some consequences are needed. Even the massive impact of that image of Earth as we encountered it above, which became extraordinarily popular in 1970 as a magazine front page, a poster, and an element in advertising, is certainly not sufficient proof of this. One hint of a change of outlook may be the fact that the cover of the famous report to the ‘Club of Rome’, written by systems analyst Dennis Meadows and published in 1970 under the title The Limits to Growth, showed the image of Earth seen from the Moon (Meadows 1972).This study was the first to describe and conceive of the Earth in its entirety as a global and closed system, and it had considerable influence on the ecological ideas emerging at the time. If we look closely, however, we can see that the flight to the Moon used the image of the Earth to mark the turning point or the result of turning back. Turning back had to lead to a return, just as the television signals had to

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return from the Moon to the Earth and the flight was not finished until the Moon travelers returned. Television’s return to Earth thus also meant, on the one hand, the return of the principle of universal vision, reflexivity, and the external perspective of the gaze. In this process, universal visibility or reachability could not retain its unique character as the one image that included all places and became visible simultaneously in all places. Instead, it brought with it, on returning from space, the principle of the satellite – that which is incidentally visible without ever becoming central and which accompanies all images, as no picture is possible without it. Universal vision was thus disintegrated once and for all. This, however, confirmed the success of the new scopic regime. After all, the ‘Big Event’ of the flight to the Moon still functioned in a pre-Apollonian logic of the one view, shared by all and uniting all, produced in a place A that was fundamentally inaccessible, remote, and only visible by means of enormous effort and expense. It was unrepeatable, and the swift failure of the subsequent episodes in the ‘Apollo’ series, with rapidly dwindling ratings, showed how unsuitable the project was for everyday life. Because television primarily inhabits everyday life, the flight to the Moon brought the solution to the problem at the same time, though television did not at first notice or develop it. Indeed, television’s return from the Moon brought this place – the satellite – down to Earth and made it available at all times. From then on, television retained the basic tendency to deconstruct each place A that it showed at place B as part of a totality of visible places encompassing both all As and all Bs. It was this procedure that marked, as we have seen, television’s modernization, its transition from an order of viewing to a ‘second order’ of monitoring. The image of the control center in Houston as the immanent counterpart to the transcendent image of the Moon (which it nonetheless included) captured this Cavellian dichotomy in a single image. At the same time, however, television also added the third place – the satellite – to each of its images. The third place did not necessarily have to become visible; like the lunar soil, it was sufficient that each picture on television looked as if it were being observed from another picture. True, this process did not play any significant role in 1969 or for many years after, as the technical instruments to implement it were not yet available. The image of the control center was also not yet a central master image, as it was either the backdrop or marker of a basic continuum or it carried within itself all of the other images from which it could be seen. The President on the telephone saw exactly the same thing that we saw in the bottom left corner of the screen – that is, the picture of the Moon and the

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Moon travelers as seen from outside. In other words, what we saw was an image that was always already seen from the perspective of another image (or part of an image). As the support for this external gaze, the satellite was thus included in the picture. According to this idea, there was no longer any exterior, blind spot, or empty center of the picture. Jean Baudrillard wrote something in a similar vein in 1978 (although he did not take the flight to the Moon into account), describing television as the ‘end of the Panopticon’, which could already be sensed but had not yet taken its full effect (Baudrillard 1981, 48-56). As mentioned above, the explicit and obvious visualization of the place of the satellite that occurred during the Moon broadcast was later omitted. And yet television, having returned to the Earth, no longer has a blind spot; it identifies every place B (i.e. every control center or every place where we are located as viewers) as a possible place A that is made visible by television. This identification, however, is only effective from a third place – namely, that of the satellite. It is for this reason that the place of the satellite enters into every picture on television. In this scenario, television revolves around and accompanies both itself and us – and we do the same for it. Every picture on television now simultaneously contains an exterior view of itself as one of its inverted images or at least as the necessary possibility of its own occurrence. Seen from the satellite, every place A is just (any) place B, and vice versa. This also applies if the image undergoes no changes in angle and no relativization, either executed externally or internally (e.g. through a split screen). And it is precisely this unprecedented viewing routine that is the prerequisite for the successful functioning of all of the innovations of ‘neo-television’ in the 1980s, including the multiplication of routes of distribution and dissemination, the increased number of channels, the use of remote controls, and the transition to John Caldwell’s ‘televisuality’ – that is, the self-referential stylistics of television (Caldwell 1995). In the end, the Apollo program led to a gradual epochal shift in the momentum of the planetary perspective. In fact, it actually disappeared. Barnouw correctly points out that the planet already looked like a spaceship or artificial satellite in the Apollo images (Barnouw 1990, 426). With television’s return to Earth, the view of the planet emerged as what it was: the satellite’s view. The tremendous uniqueness of the flight to the Moon thus lies in the fact that, on the one hand, it held up an all-encompassing image that had never been seen before to reflect, for the first time, an era of viewing, and, in doing so, reinforced and concluded the era. It is this image – the triumph of the Copernican-Galilean view – that made the planetary perspective visible and available. On the other hand, the price

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for bringing it back to Earth was the beginning of the end of the planetary perspective and the transformation of the planetary regime into a satellite regime. The heroic universality, wholeness, and uniqueness of the planet on the night of the Moon landing gave way to what it had already become on that night: something that belonged entirely to the regime of the satellite. Since then, television has thus ceased to be the central agency of omnipresent monitoring, observation, and imaging. Television itself is nothing other than the artificial satellite of a form of everyday life that it created through its own return from the Msoon, in which all places revolve around each other as different places and all views revolve around each other as images.

References Abramson, Albert. 1987. The History of Television, 1880-1941. McFarland. Aumont, Jacques. 1989. L’oeil interminable: cinema et peinture. Toulouse: Seguier. Balázs, Béla. 1923. Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Barnouw, Erik. 1990. Tube of Plenty. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Bartz, Christina. 2007. MassenMedium Fernsehen: die Semantik der Masse in der Medienbeschreibung. Bielefeld: Transcript. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée. Caldwell, John Thornton. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1982. ‘The Fact of Television.’ Daedalus 111 (4): 75–96. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fahle, Oliver. 2001. Jenseits des Bildes. Poetik des französischen Films der 20er Jahre. Mainz: Bender. —. 2005. Bilder der zweiten Moderne. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Foerster, Heinz von. 1974. Cybernetics of Cybernetics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foucault, Michel. 1989. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Hickethier, Knut. 1998. Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Ishaghpour, Youssef. 2001. Orson Welles, cinéaste: Une caméra visible. Vol 2: La période Américaine. Paris: La Différence.

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Kühnert, Hanno. 1969b. ‘Tagebuch einer Fernsehnacht.’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (14.08.1969): 14. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 2000. The Reality of Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Meadows, Dennis. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Nowotsch, Norbert, and Rainer Weissenborn, eds. 1985. Unser Fernsehen! vom Pantoffelkino bis zum Terminal. Drensteinfurt: Huba. Schröter, Jens. 1998. ‘Intermedialität. Facetten und Probleme eines aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Begriffs.’ montage a/v 7 (2): 130–54. Serres, Michel. 1991. Eléments d’histoire des sciences. Paris: Bordas. Spencer Brown, G. 1994. Laws of Form. Portland: Cognizer. Vogl, Joseph. 2007. ‘Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope.’ Grey Room 29 (October): 14–25. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The fright of real tears: the uses and misuses of Lacan in film. London: British Film Institute. Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. 1970. 6. Jahrbuch: 1969. Mainz: Informations- und Presseabteilung ZDF.

6

Traps and Types: A Small Philosophy of the Television Scandal Abstract According to the Greek etymology of the word, a scandal is a trap. In most cases, the scandal brings to light something that was previously hidden and thus provokes malice or shame. The television scandal is therefore a trap set up by television. The shamed ‘victims’ of the scandal – such as celebrities or politicians – are not the victims of the trap. Rather, they are the bait that television places in order to catch the actual victim, namely the outraged viewer. The attention that a scandal attracts is therefore less focused on the scandalous event than on the attention itself. Some scandals, additionally, focus on the transition between the word of television and the outside world and thus reveal the basic disposition of television as a trap. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, media scandal, selfreflection, media event, attention

The principle of the scandal is very old, very useful, and perhaps even essential. The scandal is actually an apparatus or even an automatic machine. This is revealed in the history of the word: the concept of the ‘scandal’ is etymologically derived from the Sanskrit word ‘skandati’, which means ‘jump’ or ‘spurt’. The suddenness of the scandal, as well as its sexual connotations, thus existed quite early. The word ‘scandal’ also stems from the Greek word ‘skandaletron’, which refers to the triggering mechanism in a trap. Such a trap consists of a large rock, which is positioned vertically with the help of a piece of wood. A cord is then attached to the wood; if the prey walks under the stone, the cord is pulled, the wood falls, and the animal is crushed by the stone. This arrangement can also be understood as an automated machine if bait is attached to the wood and the wood falls as soon as the animal tugs hard enough on the bait. This trap was later simplified

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as the ‘skandalon’, the stumbling block or pitfall. Eventually the Latin word ‘scandre’ emerged, which referred to climbing as well as to chanting or the intonation of speech. In fact, the distinctive and characteristic pitch of the scream has also always been part of the scandal. Scandals have thus been around since the hunting culture of the Stone Age. In the modern era, the physical apparatus has been replaced with a social and discursive one. However, it is no less concrete and dangerous and has no fewer advantages. It is now used to slay social existences, social individuals. The execution supports not biological but rather social reproduction through the implementation and confirmation of conventions. The collective prevails. Natural conditions – like gravity and hunger – are exchanged for ethical and aesthetic ones – like consensus and elegance. Survival, in the sense of social communication, is also secured. Courtly society presumably plays a key role in this reformation (Elias 1976). In the modern era, the process of democratization eventually extended the model of the scandal to the entire mass society. It thus became entangled with technology and manufacturing, while still retaining its relationship to institutions and conventions. The scandal became a mass-media phenomenon (Luhmann 2000). Scandals had never before been so suddenly and completely circulated and processed as in the age of mass media and, in particular, television. Traps are set up everywhere, and they are constantly snapping shut. Television even produces scandals in series by bringing them into circulation and allowing them to fade away just as quickly in order to make way for new ones. We are all well-acquainted with the phenomenon of the scandal, though its physical form and location have repeatedly changed. The apparatus is now no longer merely social, but rather virtually philosophical, as it calls itself into question. It reaches far beyond the dialectic of norm violations, as it also ensures that something becomes or remains conceivable even under the adverse conditions that it itself produces. It still involves survival, but this survival is no longer biological and social reproduction but rather the reproduction of the possibility of reproduction itself. It now no longer involves the punishment of deviant behavior, but rather the very possibility of such deviations. Reproductions are not identical copies of the same – of what is already available – as they are not limited to preservation; rather, they always refer to the possibility of change and development – to potentials. The television scandal strives to protect the range of possibilities – whether imaginary or virtual – under the conditions of increasing determinacy and functionalization in the modern era. Deviation is now threatened and rewarded at the same time – or, to be more precise, the threat is at the

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same time the reward. The television scandal is about the unpredictable in the age of the program and thus the programming of unpredictability. Television calls the program into question by means of the scandal, even though it is itself a program. The scandal still functions, even though it is itself dysfunctional.

Televisual Traps and Disruptions But how does the television scandal function? It is possible to learn a great deal about this from its etymological roots. Scandals are merely triggers that release something; they generate victims as well as observers or beneficiaries. They sometimes require bait, and they involve the transformation of something latent – like the potential energy of the vertically positioned stone – into something virulent – like the kinetic energy of the falling stone. However, the fact that the scandal is merely part of a larger structure and that this structure is transparent for all viewers seems to contradict the common understanding of the scandal as having something to do with exposure. Many scandals are actually exposure scandals in that something is made visible that should have remained invisible. When people think about scandals, therefore, they often think about violations of the rules of visibility, etiquette, and shame – from Janet Jackson’s breast 1 to executive salaries. Nevertheless, the scandalously shocking event is only the bait, and it can remain relatively ignored for the entirety of the scandal. Exposure and disclosure are not what scandals are really about. Like bait, the scandalous event can be revealed at any time to the victim as well as the viewer and hunter. If the scandal involves exposure, and thus knowledge, then the only knowledge that is released is that of the victim. And victims only learn something in the moment when they tug on the bait and the stone falls on them, which reveals that the entire apparatus was a trap. This apparatus – the dispositif of the trap – is nothing other than television itself. If anything is exposed, it is television that exposes something about itself. The scandal would thus be a particular form of television and not a type of event – namely, a moment of reflection. Through the scandal, television reveals and reflects on itself as a trap. It points away from itself towards the scandalous event only to return to itself in the same movement. 1 During the half-time show of the American Super Bowl on 1 February 2004, Justin Timberlake tore away part of Janet Jackson’s jacket and thereby exposed her breast.

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However, the victim of a scandal, such as a celebrity, is not the victim of the trap but rather only the bait, like a goat used to catch a tiger. The actual victim is the tiger, who pounces on the goat just as the television viewers pounce on the scandal. Like the tiger, viewers also tug at the bait and then watch as the stone falls on them. They possibly even understand that they have been trapped. Viewers are thus simultaneously inside and outside the apparatus. While they know that gravity plays a decisive role in the trap, they initially lack such knowledge about television. If they are first able to determine this power, then they are also able to explain how television occupies the functional place of the stone as the crucial feature of the trap. However, the power and function of television is not deadly – and here ends the analogy; rather, the television scandal is more or less without consequences – for the victim or viewer, that is, but not always for the bait. Viewers can always fall back into the trap, and they often do – and not always reluctantly, but often with sustained and secret pleasure. If the scandal is understood in the broadest sense as a disruption of the sense of shame, decency, or even public order, then it can be compared to other televisual disruptions. Scandals are disruptions of the public – communicative disruptions that refer to the social dimension. Other disruptions are based on the transmission function of television and refer to its technical dimension (Schulte 2003). Just as scandals are disruptions of the public, so too are technical disruptions initially interruptions of the normal and the expected. However, disruptions also make the assumptions underlying the normal and the expected, which are never thematized or acknowledged, suddenly noticeable. Through the process of negation, disruptions turn what is normal into a reflexive event so that it then receives attention. That which is self-evident and therefore unnoticeable and uncomprehended with regard to television is lifted out of this self-evidence by the disruption. For example, the loss of the picture reconfirms the characteristic category of visibility that is unique to television and that distinguishes it from other media. Likewise, the disruption of transmission prevents the communication of simultaneity, which is otherwise crucial for live broadcasts. Normality and disruption are thus entangled and almost dialectically related to one another. They are only noticeable in connection with each other; without disruption, there would be no normality, and vice versa. Disruption and normality also interact with one another through the interplay of latency and virulence (or virtuality and actuality; Deleuze 2014, 145f). On the one hand, normality is latent or virtual, so disruption is nothing but normality that has become virulent or acute in the mode of negation. On the other hand, disruption itself is also latent within normality as a constantly looming

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possibility, so normality or expectation is already latent within disruption (Luhmann 1984, 456ff). Lastly, it is also possible to question whether disruption and normality coincide asymptotically – that is, whether television in the end knows no other normality than that of disruption. Is it not particularly characteristic of television that every image is essentially a disruption of another image or emerges from another image as a disruption? At any rate, the process of advanced electronic imaging makes it appear so. The remote control also serves as a powerful instrument that allows viewers to disrupt the program and the broadcast flow, which would otherwise serve as a characteristic feature of television.2 Everything that the viewer sees disrupts everything else. At the same time, however, the remote control also constitutes the central core of the postmodern televisual dispositif. The last remaining disruption would then be the unexpected lack of disruption or uneventfulness – in other words, the test pattern and its derivatives, such as beautiful pictures of aquariums, railways, or outer space. The same applies to the most important case besides the technical disruption – namely, the communicative and social disruption of the scandal. Television selects, produces, and intensifies scandals because it recognizes itself in the scandals themselves. The scandal is therefore a philosophical moment when television thinks about itself (see Chapter 2 in this volume).

Redundancy and Attention A scandal can be characterized as a game of exposing and concealing, knowledge and ignorance, or truth and deception. The reflexive moment can also already be found within it. What is scandalous is not that which is made visible but was supposed to have remained hidden, such as the details of a person’s intimate life, but rather that which was kept hidden because it could only happen in hiding, such as the use of cocaine or bribes. However, the alternating structure of exposing and concealing is still not specific enough for the scandal, as it can also be found in comparable ways, such as in criminal investigations or through scientific research. Therefore, not only does the dichotomy of knowledge and ignorance pertain to the scandal, but also in a particular way to the phenomenon of the public. No one is personally entrusted or enlightened in a scandal, and no one acquires 2 For a representative theory of discontinuity, see Postman 1988; for a representative theory of continuity, see McLuhan 1994.

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individual knowledge. Rather, something is disclosed and made generally accessible to the public. And what is communicated is by no means only the scandalous behavior; rather, what is important is the communication of the fact that this behavior is communicated. The scandal first emerges in the moment of its disclosure or general communication. Only then does everyone know that everyone knows. This communication of communication is the triggering mechanism; the shocking behavior is only the bait. The scandal thus involves reflexive and redundant knowledge – not a person’s individual knowledge, but rather a person’s knowledge of the knowledge of others. In this respect, all scandals are media scandals, as they thematize the production of redundancy that is characteristic of mass media of all kinds (Luhmann 1984, 43ff). There are very good reasons why rumor – the sister of the scandal – has been called the first mass medium. Media knowledge is always knowledge of the knowledge of others. This aspect is normally either concealed (informational programs or news broadcasts seem to involve objective facts rather than the knowledge of others) or affirmed, as in spectacular live broadcasts with millions of viewers worldwide. However, the scandal is the only form that reflects on the redundancy of media knowledge, and it tends to do so using the basic form of all reflection – namely, negation. What is scandalous is not the event as such but rather only its disclosure to the public, and this communication of something that is already redundant makes the redundancy itself doubly redundant. The opposite of redundancy is attention, and scandals not only engage and provoke attention but also draw attention to attention itself. The scandal is not only an observed event but also an event whose observation is observed, and this attention to attention or observation of observation is presented outwardly as outrage. Next to the public, with which it is closely entangled, outrage is actually the core event of the scandal. Like the falling stone, it occupies the functional place of gravity in the trap. Outrage is an excess of attention or observation. People who are outraged not only devote attention to a fact or event but also observe it excessively. Whatever causes people to be filled with indignation is not important. The purpose here is not to determine the substance of a scandal or question the kinds of behaviors that belong or lead to a scandal, it is only a means of producing and maintaining this excess of attention. Because this attention outgrows and extends beyond itself, it also at the same time returns back to itself, draws attention to itself, and thus becomes reflexive. Furthermore, if the motif of attention and outrage is entangled with the motif of redundancy and the public so that redundancy constitutes the triggering mechanism

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that attracts attention, then the construct of the trap is complete. The attention that outgrows itself in the scandal is still always the attention of others, which explains the paradox of redundant attention. The highest intensity of devotion and the gaping emptiness of the object mark the poles between which the scandal is situated.

Types of Traps: Taxonomy Television is a modern medium that can create attention and redundancy more efficiently than any other. This is due to its range and instantaneity. Television is therefore currently the most effective agent in the production of scandals. It also shapes scandals into their own highly specific typology. Not every arrangement of events as a scandal is equally telegenic. Rather, scandals are telegenic when television discloses something about itself that corresponds in one way or another to the basic functions of the medium. The different types of television scandals thus differ in terms of the basic functions that they reveal. Television primarily has three basic operations: position, negation, and reflection.3 Each of these operations is devoted to a particular type of scandal in which it appears. The Positive Scandal: Television and World Obscenity: The positive operation of television reveals itself when the stumbling block remains completely trivial and its objectionability merely lies in the fact that the shocking event or scandalous situation takes place on television, where it is openly visible and exposed to public perception. This would therefore include events that would not be unusual or objectionable if they did not happen on television, such as descriptions and performances of sexual activities. Some famous examples would be the masturbation instructions that Nina Hagen once gave on a talk show or the legendary appearance of a fifteen-year old schoolgirl in a transparent blouse on the game show Wünsch Dir was (Make a Wish). This would also include the interruptions that more or less regularly accompanied the treatment of sexual themes on daily talk shows in the late 1990s. On closer inspection, however, there are also countless examples that do not involve sexual obscenity, such as 3 This operational or more precisely theoretical differentiation is oriented towards Peirce (1983, 51 ff). However, Peirce uses different terms to describe differentiating operations, such as ‘dissociation’, ‘specification’, and ‘discrimination’.

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the politically incorrect jokes about women and Polish people on the Die Harald Schmidt Show4 and other gaffes. Although such remarks are always considered unattractive and unacceptable, they only come off as potentially scandalous when they are uttered before a television audience. These events become scandals through their mere occurrence on television. At home, at a pub, or in private or half-private surroundings, they would perhaps be annoying or disagreeable, but they would not become scandals. If scandals originate from the entanglement of attention and redundancy, then the cause of the scandalous potential of such events must lie in the specific way in which television draws the viewer’s attention to them and thereby at the same time draws attention to the attention of other viewers. In other words, the first form of the scandal seems to involve the ability of television to arouse attention at all and thereby to generalize or communicate. It involves the ability of television to position something at all and thus how television is able to recommend something and make it appear as an object. Interruption: Perhaps it is easiest to explain this moment by thinking of a rare yet still identifiable form of the television scandal that seems even more banal than the basic form discussed above – namely, the scandal associated with the activity of television prior to the determination of content.5 In the 1980s, Adriano Celentano produced such scandals on Italian television with his live show Il magnifico, such as when he extinguished the stage lights for several minutes so that nothing could be seen or when he temporarily left the studio after advising viewers to do something else for a moment. Such escapades recall the American entertainer Ernie Kovacs, who performed similarly destructive interventions on early live television (see Marschall 1980, 21). The ensuing commotion exhibited all of the characteristic features of the double structure of the typical scandal, such as the gaffes that, in both cases, were eventually expected. However, it particularly points to the fact that the functionality of television was itself undermined and that television was made impossible by means of television. The scandal here converges with the technical disruption, as discussed above, as the ability of television to make anything visible and thus demand attention is suspended. This is even more evident when it is noted that all of these cases are based on a temporal relationship that is characteristic of television – namely, 4 A late-night talk show that aired from 5 December 1995 to 23 December 2003 on commercial broadcaster Sat.1. 5 This corresponds to Peirce’s understanding of ‘firstness’, which is generated by the operation of position; see Peirce 1983, 56.

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simultaneity. All of the scandals of this first type, which involve the positivity of television or its ability to present something, occur on live broadcasts. They span a common time horizon between the events and the attention the viewer directs at them, on the one hand, and the attention of others and thus redundancy on the other hand (what a viewer sees at any given moment is also seen by others at precisely the same time). Next to visibility, this temporal horizontality also appears to be specific to television: whenever it recommends or presents something to attention, it does so in the mode of the visible and the simultaneous in the sense of the potential availability of everything at the same time. The range of visibility and simultaneity defines the horizon within which television is possible at all. It delineates the world of television as the sum total of all of the medium’s possibilities, which also differentiate it from all other media. This leads to the conclusion that the first type of scandal involves television reflecting on its own world – that is, on the worldliness of television itself. The concept of television as a positive space or a space of possibility is thereby called into question, as Nina Hagen and Harald Schmidt sound out the horizon of these possibilities through concrete particulars and Celentano and Kovacs undermine the very possibility of television at all. The horizon of possibility is also recognized as specific to the medium by the fact that the scandalous behavior occurs not as such but rather as a television event. Programmed Scandal: In addition to the two variants of the positive type of scandal cited above – that of the concrete particular and that of pure horizontal possibility – there is also a third variant – that of television as a structure of possibility that methodically and systematically creates the possibility of scandalous events. This third variant also involves the ability of television to position itself on a third, reflexive level. The best example is Big Brother, which became a scandal before a single episode had aired. The scandal was that the program wanted to expose people to public attention systematically, that it wanted to draw attention to this attention, and that the rules of conduct made scandalous behavior possible and even probable – behavior that was itself not objectionable but whose disclosure through television in the mode of visibility and temporal horizontality was unusual to say the least. Scandalous events were thus preprogrammed through the format, so the actual scandal was not the events that occurred (which remained absent to a large extent) but rather the programming itself. In retrospect, it seems as if television was reproached as a scandal because it wanted to draw attention to its own mechanisms instead of politely concealing them. In other words, what was supposed to be publicly exposed was television itself, and this was a scandalous plan that elicited outrage long

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before it was even realized. Yet this outrage created precisely the attention that the undertaking required, so the fundamental self-referentiality of the scandal clearly emerged once again. The Negative Scandal: Television and Event Scandals that exclusively involve television itself and its horizon of possibility represent perhaps the original model of the television scandal, as they concern the very possibility of television to be scandalous. However, they are certainly not the only or even the dominant form. In addition to this first type – the positive scandal or the actual television scandal – there is a second type that functions in virtually the opposite direction, as it involves an event that generates outrage but whose cause and location are situated outside of television. The outrage is then directed not at television itself, but rather at what it shows. In such cases, television reveals the shocking event and makes it available for public discussion, but it also strives at all costs to remain free of condemnation and to contrast itself to that which is scandalous. Television thus attempts to remove itself from the reality outside of television by claiming its independence or at least its distinguishability from the scandalous events themselves. Contrary to the first type of scandal, which does not refer to any reality outside of television and only involves its inner world, this type is called the negative scandal. In this type of scandal, therefore, television discloses not its ability to present and communicate something but rather its ability to distinguish something – namely, itself – from something else.6 One of the characteristic features of this second, negative type of scandal is that television refers no longer to itself but rather to something external to itself, which strengthens its relations with other media (see Luhmann 1984, 15ff; Peirce 1983, 59).7 The scandalous behavior or event occurs outside of television, and therefore no longer takes place during a live television transmission; rather, it has always already happened at another time and place (although it is usually very recent, as this satisfies the medium’s need or compulsion for timeliness). In contrast to the first type of scandal, the main feature of the second type is that the outrage or indignation is caused 6 If the first type of scandal belongs to ‘firstness’, according to Peirce’s taxonomic logic, then the second type marks the category of ‘secondness’ or ‘hard facts’; see Peirce 1983, 55. 7 Peirce def ines the second differentiation operation (which he terms ‘specif ication’, but which is here called ‘negation’) as the reference to the other and thus as the distinction between the reference to the self and the other.

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by the scandalous behavior or event itself, such as episodes in the love life of a national goalkeeper, embezzlement and corruption in the boardrooms of industry, accepting advantages through leading politicians, and politically incorrect statements made by professors. This is the precondition that allows television to be represented as an independent and externally induced event. The centerpiece of this type is no longer the worldliness of television but rather television as a media event. Nevertheless, this event can only appear relative to television, as the outrage that constitutes the scandal in the first place necessarily requires the appearance of something scandalous on television and its mediation by television or other mass media that are interconnected with television, perform groundwork for television, and are ultimately dependent on television, which is true of the tabloid press but also other forms, such as investigative journalism. In recent years, however, television has established more intense series based solely or primarily on celebrity gossip – from tabloid shows to rather camp-oriented gossip circles like Blond am Freitag (Blond on Friday).8 In contrast to the first type, outrage is now directed no longer at the presence of the event in the medium – and thus the medium’s dimension of possibility – but rather the reality of the event itself. The reality of the scandalous event is thus understood negatively in two ways: first, it is evaluated negatively, and second, it serves as a negative foil for the medium, which removes itself from the dimension of the external event by means of the scandal. On the occasion of the scandal, television points not to itself but rather to something different, from which it distinguishes itself. Television thus uses the scandal to mark a limit beyond which there lies something else; it defines itself, which is also a function of negation. In contrast to the first type of scandal, therefore, this second, event-oriented type can also be identified as a negative scandal. Like the positive type, it is also possible to identify three different variants of this type. Celebrity: The first of these variants has the least negative force.9 It dodges around the outer limit of the medium rather than drawing it precisely, and it is easiest to explain using the example of the celebrity scandal. However, celebrities should not be confused with people who are merely famous. In precise, well-defined terms, celebrities are celebrated merely because of their celebrity status. They are not or no longer celebrated for their abilities, 8 A weekly talk show which was broadcast by German public service broadcaster ZDF between 2001-2007. 9 Peirce (1983, 59) speaks of ‘indeterminate specification’; Luhmann (1997, 222) uses the term ‘indeterminate negation’.

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their prominent functions, or their performance10 but rather solely for their own prominence. Former athletes are therefore more suitable for the production of celebrity scandals than active ones, and leisured aristocrats are more suitable than influential politicians. Scandals do not hurt celebrities but rather make use of them. In any case, celebrities not only operate as fundamentally self-referential figures, but they are also always media-dependent in a particular way. More precisely, they are dependent on their presence in the mass media and the redundancy that this presence creates. If celebrities are celebrated because of their celebrity status, then they are celebrities because of something they already have, which they have because everyone knows them. If someone appears on television, then the viewer may not necessarily know this person; what is known, however, is that this person is known by others. The celebrities involved in scandals are therefore products of television. Television has recently begun to make this process transparent through casting and star-search programs, which incorporate the production of celebrities into the format. The possibility of producing celebrity scandals is thus multiplied. The scandal itself, as a behavior or action, takes place not on live television but rather in the outside world, such as discotheques, apartments, or off ices. However, this behavior only attracts attention because viewers already know the person from television – and actually as the person that others already know. Television, and the other media that work in conjunction with it, thus create the possibility and the prerequisites of the celebrity scandal, and they also profit from it. They condition and enable the scandal without creating it directly, and they regularly incriminate the scandalous event and thereby reinforce, where needed, the outrage of the audience. This outrage may also include simulated or false outrage. In contrast to real outrage, false outrage is characterized by doubling or refraction. It takes pleasure in itself and is self-reflexive in a way that is reminiscent of aesthetics. Simulated, reflexive outrage can also turn into amusement and derisive-ironic detachment in a thoroughly ambiguous way, as it knows or believes that it knows how scandals are fabricated, yet it still willingly commits to them. Real outrage about an objectionable and alarming event is thus replaced with amusement over its redundancy – namely, the fact that others are giving so much attention to the scandal. However, this reflexive, aesthetically motivated, and amused false outrage – a camp phenomenon – is 10 Luhmann (1984, 66f) attributes the media’s interest in people to the binomial of person and action, but does not address the self-referentiality of celebrities.

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often difficult to distinguish from real, relevance-oriented interest in the lives and transgressions of celebrities. Politics: The second variant of the negative type of scandal shifts from the enabling of the scandal to its detection. The model case is the political or economic scandal, in which television brings a wrongdoing to light. In this case, television once again maintains close ties to other media, especially the press, with which it forms connections. It may even appear that television is simply repeating and disseminating the reports and conclusions of other media. It then profits from the research performed by newspaper reporters, who are considerably more flexible, but provides a larger audience. A topic of general interest can no longer be brought up without television. Even though there have hardly been any large-scale scandals that were not detected by the press since the mother of all political scandals in the age of television – namely, the Watergate scandal – it is also true that a newspaper alone could not have disseminated and developed these scandals to the required extent. Television has even developed its own program formats for these types of scandals, such as the political magazine show, which also involve determining the boundary between television and the external world that must be transgressed. However, this transgression occurs as the investigative extension of television or its penetration into the external world. Accordingly, the negation – the removal of television from the external world – is significantly more severe. Viewers of the scandal distinguish more clearly between the message of the medium itself and the reality to which this message refers and which ultimately caused it. Unlike celebrities, scandalous events have nothing to do with television; on the contrary, the people involved normally do everything they can to conceal their actions from the eyes of the public. Most of them also suffer the consequences of the scandal: sooner or later, they are forced to apologize, repay, or resign – long before and independent of regular verdicts of guilt, such as in legal or political procedures. One could react to the celebrity scandal with outrage or disinterest with regard to the medium that exaggerates such irrelevancies, but that is not the case here. If television itself attracts attention at all during this type of scandal, then it is in a very particular way, as the spatial ubiquity and temporal omnipresence of television coverage represents the virtually uninterrupted surveillance of the public by itself. What is surprising is that the people implicated in these scandals deal with the possibility of being discovered, which is surely to be expected, in such an unwise fashion. For example, the limitless attention that the public pays to itself calls into question how politicians in particular, who in a media democracy desperately need the public, could so

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wrongly estimate the controlling function of the public, which television embodies. In this case, the outrage is largely directed not at the medium but rather at the impudence of the people involved, who apparently assume that they can use television when they need it as a medium of legitimation and representation and then dispose of it when it places them under supervision. As television here finds and designates its own limits, it simultaneously attempts to push them further away while emphatically highlighting their insurmountability. If the celebrity scandal begins first and foremost with redundancy, then the political scandal originates from attention. Falsification and Deception: The negative type of scandal is also represented by a third variant known as the falsification or deception scandal, which is reflexively related to the variants discussed above. An example of a falsification scandal is the case of Michael Born, the news counterfeiter who, in the 1990s, supplied numerous magazine programs to various German broadcasters with invented and more or less sensational reports; as a result, he was eventually convicted of fraud. A lovely example of a deception scandal is the American quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. It turned out that the contestants, who were immensely popular at the time and earned huge cash prizes, secretly received assistance from the producers and that the tension and competition were simulated. Public outrage led to the establishment of a congressional committee and the prolonged decline of the genre, which was forced to give way to evening series (Barnouw 1990, 243ff). The falsification of news actually plays a surprisingly important role in television coverage. The revealing of inauthentic or falsely contextualized television images has been observed most recently in connection with terrorism and war coverage, such as the case of the allegedly jubilant Arabs celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center. Whereas the first variant (the celebrity scandal) dodges around the boundary between television and the external world, and the second variant (the political or detection scandal) makes this boundary more precise and at the same time pushes it further away, the third variant thematizes, problematizes, and criticizes this process. The almost educational function of the scandal – the fact that television discloses information about itself – is nowhere more evident. The Reflexive Scandal: Television and Series The television scandal is not limited to position – the world of the medium itself – and negation – the event external to the medium. A third, complex, and infrequent type of television scandal also involves the ability of television to distinguish between position and negation and at the same time

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connect both poles with one another and to one another. This third type thus clarifies, reflects, and represents the relationship between television and non-television. However, this happens not outside of television, but rather through television itself. In this type of scandal – the type of representation – television represents itself in relation to the other. It is for this reason that the representative scandal always includes and integrates elements of the positive and negative types. This type of scandal characteristically does not confine itself to singular events; rather, it unfolds as a multilayered process with multiple phases, and in each case the scandalous event changes the level. The cases or events of the second type of scandal are here transformed into processuality – that is, into a series structure that does not separate one from the others but rather unites them all into a single figure of becoming.11 The three types of scandals thus thematize worldliness, then eventfulness, and finally seriality. However, the basic functionality of television can only be surmised from their interaction. Judgment: A few examples could illustrate this third type of serial, representative, or reflexive scandal. The affairs of the American president Bill Clinton and in particular his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky mark the first variant of the representative type of scandal. This scandal initially began as a negative scandal: the President was publicly accused of misusing his powerful position and exploiting it for personal gain. However, Clinton’s decision to confront these accusations shifted the scandal to another level, as it then involved not just his sexual behavior, but also his dealings with the television public, which was given access to the embarrassing interrogations of countless participants. Clinton also circumvented the investigative committee and the special prosecutor by submitting himself solely to the judgment of the public – that is, the judgment of organized redundant media attention. As a result, the judgment concerning the President’s misconduct was not only issued publicly but also determined by the public, as their reactions were constantly included in the television coverage. The entire dispositif of television also judged; however, this judgment was variegated and thus surprisingly in Clinton’s favor. It particularly distinguished between the President’s administration, which continued to maintain high approval ratings during the entire time period, and his sexual habits, including the representation of these habits on television. The scandal thus shifted from the accusation of sexual coercion to the appropriate way for the media to handle it, and the subsequent extensive 11 The concept of ‘seriality’ employed here is oriented towards Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘series’; see Deleuze 2008, 150; Deleuze 2014, 379ff.

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and even excessive public confession effectively compensated and made up for the public lies. It is also revealing that the scandal was ultimately silenced through a counter-scandal. The publication of intimate and, to some extent, anatomical details would normally be extremely scandalous if it had involved a scandal of the first or second type. Treason: The scandal surrounding weapons expert David Kelly in Great Britain had a similar structure, although, in this case, television was no longer solely in charge. Journalist Andrew Gilligan claimed in a radio report that he had heard from a participant that a report on military threats from Iraq had been subsequently falsified. In the original report, the threat level was represented as substantially lower, but the government exaggerated the report in order to produce arguments for an intervention in Iraq. In a later investigation, the source of this information was publicly identified as Kelly, who worked for the government. However, the assertions that Gilligan cited concerning a falsified report were never actually made by Kelly in this form. Before it could be determined that Gilligan had not adequately verified this alleged insider information, Kelly committed suicide. Gilligan subsequently lost his position, the director of BBC radio was forced to step down, and the BBC issued an apology to the government. A classic detection scandal thus suddenly transformed not only into a falsification scandal but also into a scandal whose incriminating object – the bait in the trap analogy – was the medium itself. The behavior of the government, which had allegedly exaggerated the report for political reasons, was initially seen as scandalous, then the behavior of the weapons expert, who allegedly committed an indiscretion, and lastly the behavior of the medium – that is, the redundant attention that was so intolerable that Kelly ended up taking his own life. The first phase involved a negative scandal, in which something that the government wanted to keep secret was made known to the public – namely, that the threat from Iraq was small and that the government had lied to the public about it. The second phase involved a positive scandal, in which the ability of the medium was discussed in order to draw attention to something that was not public – namely, military secrets. The third phase involved a scandal of representation, in which the medium questioned its own rules and its ability to discriminate and mediate the medial and the non-medial. Mistake: A third case, which should be mentioned in conclusion, is far less dramatic and also much simpler. It involves former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s New Year’s Eve address in 1987 (Engell 1988). Due to the fact that two videocassettes were mixed up, the address from the previous year was broadcast again instead of the one that had been prerecorded for the current year. After the mistake was recognized, the correct address was then

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broadcast the following day. The scandal thus began as a scandal of the first type, as the scandalous event took place on television and only because of television. It then briefly passed through a phase of the second type, as it was discussed whether this was an externally induced attack designed to ridicule the Chancellor with the help of television. Lastly, however, the irrelevance of the process was itself seen as scandalous, and the scandal thus reached the level of the third type, which is what makes this case interesting despite its simple form. In other words, the irrelevance of the mix-up revealed the irrelevance of the broadcast and the address in general, as attention was being drawn to nothing and this nothing was being made redundant. Television thus disclosed its own non-mediality, negativity, or nullity in this scandal, yet paradoxically it still generated positivity from this disclosure. By releasing its own nullity as a positive characteristic of itself, it simultaneously strengthened the positivity of the world surrounding it, which it also affirmed, and presented itself as the placeholder of nothingness in this world. It showed itself as both part of the world and the opposite of the world, as both the epitome of fullness and the embodiment of emptiness, as both excessive attention and reflexive redundancy, and as both the stone and the triggering mechanism of the trap.

Conclusion: Full and Empty Traps While the scandal of the New Year’s Eve address is in itself not very meaningful, these difficult formulations undoubtedly overload it with meaning. Nevertheless, they reveal something about scandals in general – an asymptotic tendency that can be seen not only in this case, but in many if not all cases of television scandals. The coupling of redundancy and attention, which is characteristic of the television scandal, is based on the coupling of two mutually exclusive alternatives: the limit condition of attention, on the one hand, and complete fulfillment, on the other hand. Both of these conditions can be described through the more or less total absorption of the medium: in the first case, the medium is absorbed through the objects of its attention, and in the second case, it is absorbed through the publicness of its processes. The medium generates both the objects and the public, but it nevertheless loses itself in them. The explicit or implicit threat of disconnection or the loss of the world extends to all of the variants examined here – from the simplest to the most complex. Fullness and emptiness are pushed together in the scandal, and both of these limit cases are thus present at the same time as the most extreme possibilities of the medium, in which the medium itself can disappear.

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This is precisely how the scandal ensures the dimension of the possible and thus the reproductive capacity of the world. Through three different operations – position, negation, and reflection – the medium calls itself into question as a representing world, as a representation of an event, and as a series of representations. By calling its foundations into question in this way, television plays with the possibility of no longer being itself – of being merged into something that it is not (or at least not anymore). However, the world that it is both part of and opposed to – namely, our world, its reliability, and its lack of preconditions – would then also disappear with it. In the scandal, therefore, television ascertains its own possibilities in relation to its extreme values of fullness and emptiness. It ultimately confronts itself and its viewers with the always cushioned and mediated horror of its own potential disappearance, which would also mean the disappearance of the world. This shock can only be temporary, but it is continually necessary. The chain of scandals is thus never-ending, which arouses the strange feeling that often accompanies the fading away of a scandal – the mixture of shallowness and shame that often accompanies the experience of excess, although, in this case, it is admittedly more of a public condition than an individual feeling. It is such a pleasure to return to normality and find the medium again, yet, at the same time, one is still eager for the next scandal.

References Barnouw, Erik. 1990. Tube of Plenty. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2014. Difference and Repetition. London: Bloomsbury. Elias, Norbert. 1976. Die höfische Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Engell, Lorenz. 1988. ‘Wechselwirtschaft und vertauschte Ansprachen.’ Tumult (11): 102–15. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 2000. The Reality of Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Marschall, Rick. 1980. The Golden Age of Television. London: Bison. Peirce, Charles S. 1983. Phänomen und Logik der Zeichen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schulte, Julia. 2003. ‘Fernsehen als Störung.’ unpublished diploma thesis, BauhausUniversität Weimar.

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Boredom and War: Television and the End of the Fun Society Abstract Television is always and fundamentally boring. Boredom is television´s defining quality and existential core function as a medium. Boredom neither fills time, nor shapes it, nor distributes it. Rather, it suspends linear time and instead lets time last as pure temporality in its unstructured horizontality. Television thus eludes the comprehensive instrumentalization and the possible dictate of sense of late modernity. Taking the example of the first American Gulf War, this chapter shows how all the apologies of war as an essential and existential event are undermined by television, even when it is television itself that spreads them. Something else only applies to terror: terror does not obey the regime of boredom, but that of the opposite existential mood and affect: fear. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, simulation, Gulf War, boredom, temporality

During wartime, it is often said that mass media – and especially television – are agents of war. Television has even been described as the continuation of war by other means; the screen has been conceived of as the actual battleground and viewers have been considered the soldiers occupying it. The contemporary television war has popularized this view, but media history has always known that all of the important innovations in media technology originate from war and military technology. For nearly 20 years, media historians have claimed that war is the father of all media and that the history of modern media is the history of modern warfare (this is particularly prominent in Kittler 1985a and Bolz 1989). As a result, it has become rather banal to talk about the aforementioned alliance between television and warfare, to describe television as an agent of war, and to explain television as a key weapon or arena of war.

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch07

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The following contribution will reconstruct the connection between war and television in a different way. In the process, it will be revealed that this connection obviously exists but that it is very different from what is generally assumed. I will show that television – regardless of its technical origin – is a rather ineffective weapon that is ill-suited to the demands of warfare. This is due to the basic constitution of television as a dispositif. If television is a continuation of war by other means, then it is no longer the kind of war that we expect and recount. A televised war is different from the kinds of wars presented in films or novels. It is also no longer a war of calculation or a war of the computer. Television has always already significantly revised and altered this kind of war. It crystallizes a highly specific aspect of war, to which all other aspects are made subordinate. Television subjects war to its own conditions; it is television that keeps war in check. However, the superimposition of military and televisual structures, which can actually be observed, is itself only selectively and accidentally possible, as it cannot be stabilized and it does not follow any principle other than that of variation. Television is a temporal or, more precisely, a temporalizing medium. Access to televisual representation is restricted according to time – that is, according to time as it is understood by television. It possesses a special temporal form, which it establishes as the general experience of time that it makes possible, or indeed probable, and that it then represents. According to my thesis, however, these media-specific figures of time are at odds with the compressed figures of time that accompany catastrophes and, particularly, wars. Television obeys the logic of a fun society rather than that of a war society, as it is dedicated to pastimes and leisure activities rather than intensive temporal compression. What is most crucial for television is the dichotomy between event and boredom and the way in which this dichotomy becomes reflexive in the event of boredom itself.

Television and Boredom Television is boring (Engell 1989). It is not simply boring sometimes or predominantly or more in some of its manifestations and less in others. Boredom is not a mere feature of television that could also turn out differently; rather, television is deeply and profoundly boring, and it offers everyone the boredom they seek depending on their horizon of expectation and acculturation. Therein lies its meaning, or more precisely its lack of meaning, as it must be assumed that people do not watch television because they wish to escape boredom but rather, on the contrary, because they wish to find it.

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In the same way, it is also presumably a mistake to suppose that a pastime involves the avoidance of boredom. Pastimes, and television in particular as the ideal pastime, appear to be merely techniques of ‘de-borification’, as formulated by Gert Mattenklott (1987). However, pastimes dispel not boredom but rather time, and what remains when time is successfully dispelled is precisely boredom. What a pastime dispels and annihilates is what we mostly and must understand as time, which is characterized by three main components. It is therefore useful, particularly with regard to boredom, to conceive of time as the ordering of events. One might say, following Luhmann, that time forces events to remain behind (Luhmann 1995, 181). The first main component of time is thus the linear succession of different events, which can undergo and mediate compression and extension. Events follow one another more or less closely, so earlier events can be distinguished from later ones and past events can be distinguished from future ones. The second main component of time is the horizontal juxtaposition of different events, which enables and enforces the synchronization of events and thereby generates complexity to an ever-increasing degree. The third main component is the duration of the present as the time frame within which future events can be planned and foreseen and decisions are still revisable. This duration constitutes a contrasting foil to the events and makes them perceptible for the first time. If time is suspended, such as following a successful pastime, then there is no longer any pressure of the future, any coordination of the simultaneous, or any revision of what has taken place. The present is free of these burdens. This results in a presence without contouring through a temporal contrast or counteragent and a loss of temporal orientation or even meaning. Planning and projection are suspended, revision and retrospection are shifted, and coordination and communication between the events recede further away. This can be represented macroscopically as a lack of concern, interest, and orientation – in short, as the experience of boredom. However, time defends itself against this suspension. Because it is based on the ordering of events, it has a special form of protection at its command. A special feature of events is what systems theory calls ‘basic self-referentiality’, which can be described more simply as self-doubling (Luhmann 1984, 181, et passim; see also Barel 1979, 37ff): the occurrence of every event is itself an event. Just as an echo that gives rise to an event consists in turn of other events, so too does every event automatically involve other events; it reproduces itself in them, and it is therefore difficult to stop. Boredom can thus spread particularly as soon as the self-doubling of the event runs into danger. It is the result of an interruption of the self-referentiality of time.

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When this occurs, not only do orientational goals and instrumental connections suffer, but also the sense of meaning. The meaning of an event is understood in relation to something other than itself – in other words, in relation to that which might otherwise be the case, to that which precedes and enables it, and to that which follows and results from it, which Luhmann describes as the ‘“and so forth” of experience and action’ (Luhmann 1984, 93). When we talk about boredom, we are actually talking about a condition of meaninglessness. A meaningful leisure activity is precisely the opposite of a meaningless pastime. A pastime is thus not an antidote to boredom but rather a withdrawal of structured time, which leads to boredom. Generations of skeptics, melancholics, existentialists, and pessimists have made this observation again and again.1 By producing boredom, a pastime effectively interrupts the self-referentiality of a chain of events. It is possible to study how this works using television as an example. To begin with, television has two particular ways of producing boredom. The first is deflation or, to use one of Baudrillard’s expressions, ‘the event strike’ (Baudrillard 1992). Events refuse to occur or they are prevented from occurring. Television then acts as a brake on the self-referentiality of time. It is well-known that events are incidents that mark a difference between a before and an after. In the case of television, this can take the form of narrated and represented events, such as a final match, a state visit, a new commissioner, or a new lover, as well as the optical and acoustic events of narration and representation themselves, such as a live broadcast, a last episode, or a new music video. There are also two variants of this deflation strategy of withholding events. The first and simplest method involves abandoning defined events altogether. This can be seen, for example, when television transmits images of an aquarium, a fireplace, a view of the Earth from space, or Germany’s most beautiful highway junctions, which normally serve as a foil for the occurrence of an event without allowing any events to stand out against this background. The second method involves repeating events and thus increasing their redundancy. This actually results in the occurrence of televisual events, but these events do not denote change and therefore do not refer to specific points in time that could be used to distinguish between 1 These include Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Otto Fenichel, and Wilhelm Josef Revers (Lessing 1980). In terms of the sociohistorical context, see also Wolf Lepenies’ brilliant study (1969). For recent examples, see Doehlemann (1991) in connection with Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s famous article on television as an entirely empty ‘null medium’ (1991).

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a before and an after. This does not necessarily require literal repetition, as structural repetitions fulfill the same purpose, such as formats that involve daily broadcasts. However, this method works best when the repetition of the same is indistinguishable from the repetition of difference – in other words, when identity and difference merge in a diffuse cloud of similar differences. It seems to me that this diffusion of events in an imprecise space of similarity, within which they are virtually the same yet slightly different, fundamentally informs the development of the television series in many of its manifestations. Television also remains linked to the gradual movement of this temporal cloud along and through external time through its formation of habitual patterns of viewing, through its penetration into everyday life, and through its still-intact referentiality (i.e. its reference to the world) (Engell 2000, 9-30). This makes serial forms of television the perfect pastime. Daily formats, such as soap operas and talk shows, represent this type to the highest degree (Gerhards and Möhrmann 2002; Plake 1999). The other way in which television produces boredom is through the inflation of events. In this case, an abundance of events are produced with such intensity and speed that the ability to perceive them – not to mention the ability to process them – reaches the very limits of possibility. The basic self-referentiality of the event – its ability to double itself – is not hindered or hampered but rather tremendously enhanced. The result is an explosion of self-referentiality. It thus becomes virtually impossible to ascribe meaning to individual events, as the production of meaning not only generates time through its references but also requires time in order to be implemented – time that it does not receive when this strategy is employed. Every event leads immediately to the next one, which gives rise to a dense chain of events that cannot be related to one another. The density of visual data can increase enormously, as in the case of music television, action films, and commercials, or the constant arrival of new information can be staged as a breathless sequence. Both have the effect of acceleration in linear time. Television can also compress simultaneous events. The multiplication of channels and programs and the possibility of deviating from the bouquet of programs by means of the remote control (Winkler 1991) transforms the abundance of simultaneous parallel possibilities into a superabundance of excessive complexity. Countless cultural critics have sharply criticized television for this constant tendency to pull away from one event and refer to a subsequent or parallel event. Heidegger describes this process, in which an event is always inserted between the beginning and the end, between the cause and the effect, between desire and fulfillment, so that, even after hours of viewing, the information sought has still not been provided

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and the viewer’s desire still has not been fulfilled, as ‘that which holds us in limbo and yet leaves us empty’ (Heidegger 1983, 130). The viewers are no further than when they started, and time is thus suspended or dispelled. When this condition arises, whether through deflation or inflation, boredom reveals its effects. Time is experienced as absent and irrelevant. Heidegger’s ‘profound boredom’ occurs, which he describes as the ‘refusal of being as a whole’ (Ibid., 225). The individual things in the world and their connections withdraw and are instead replaced by the actually impossible idea of Heidegger’s famous ‘temporality’, which refers to the profound interconnectedness of being in the world as that which approaches us. In boredom – as with fear – the totality of this world, which evades every concept, becomes palpable or discernible. These formulations may seem excessive for television. Nevertheless, there is good reason for television studies to address this loss of structure, meaning, and world, such as the famous concept of program ‘flow’ (Williams 2008; Wulff 1995) or the lovely description of the soap opera as an ‘infinitely extended middle without beginning and end’ (Cantor and Pingree 1983, 23). Nothing would prevent meaning and world from becoming palpable in their structureless totality through precisely this loss of meaning and world. Through boredom, television would thus become the medium that provides access to the world, the totality of meaning, and the formation of time.

Boredom and War After focusing initially on boredom, I now turn to the topic of war. In April 1915, the Dadaist and avant-gardist Walter Serner published a polemical essay on ‘Boredom and War’ in the third and f inal issue of the journal Mistral, which he edited himself. Since that time, the essay has lost little of its brilliance and sharpness. I will quote a few passages: The world is boring. This fact is indisputable as well as insufficiently prepared. […] The prevailing condition of the inhabited surface of the Earth is thus merely the logical result of a boredom that has become unbearable. From this perspective, the popular distinction between culture and civilization breaks down due to the need for anesthesia. This is the only way to understand why millions of people would humbly, willingly, and often even enthusiastically obey the call to kill each other. Everything becomes self-evident. One lies, cheats, guzzles, boozes, sleeps around, is a socialist, royalist, philatelist, singer, suffragette, and soldier.

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But the cleverly concealed phantom of boredom lurks behind everything and eventually captures everything in its tight grip. The statesman rings, the curtain rises: war! […] Newspapers scream hurrah and call the ministry […]; music swells and drowns every change; great speeches, calculated and honed to be historically valuable, trickle down to the now drunken crowd; high mass is advertised, and God will personally sponsor the battles. […] The statesman in his VIP box has his spectacle, humanity has a grisly pastime, and death – who delivers hundreds of thousands of people – pays his respects to boredom, which already afflicts the audiences and actors again after the first act. Yes, the world is boring. It is a good time to embrace this indisputable fact, and I hope its widespread dissemination will be the most effective way of combating boredom. (Serner 1990, 146f)

Serner’s diagnosis can obviously be extended far beyond the year 1915 to include the present postmodern society, whose economic foundation has even been converted to the so-called leisure industries, such as travel agencies, advertising, entertainment, courses in weaving and bungee jumping, or the new aristocratic information and consulting industries that appear as service and knowledge economies. However, the ‘de-borifying’ production of culture is only able to repress boredom, and, according to Serner, the more successful the repression, the greater the pressure. In the end, the ultimate spectacle must be employed – namely, war. According to the famous and almost jubilant dictum put forward by German reporter Peter Scholl-Latour on a talk show on 12 September 2001, contemporary war also marks the end of the fun society – that is, the end of an ineffectual way of searching for meaning that systematically destroys what it seeks (i.e. meaning) in order to be able to look for it even more intensively. Although this is less true for Serner than for Scholl-Latour, such contradictions clearly reflect the old longing for war as an essential and authentic experience that involves something real and maximal; an intensification of all individual and societal forces; the most extreme concentration, alertness, determination, and speed; a heightened form of life; and therefore precisely the opposite of entertainment, distraction, and diversion. In this view, war is always a real event rather than an artificial spectacle. For example, every war makes a before clearly distinguishable from an after – in other words, it denotes an event whose occurrence is lived, experienced, and communicated as an event. War promotes the experience of death as an unrepeatable, essential, and final event.

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In a strange way, this longing for war undoubtedly connects the old legionnaire (Scholl-Latour) to the media theorists cited earlier, who, in their own way, are also enthusiastic about war and military technology, much like the Italian Futurists, some of the Expressionists, and a good portion of the Fascists and National Socialists who glorified war. It is also no coincidence that echoes of this longing for war can even be found in Heidegger’s work, such as his concept of ‘boldness’. However, it does not correspond to Serner’s position, which was precisely the opposite. Serner saw war not as the release of something essential, but rather only as an intensified and perhaps ultimate form of distraction from the essential. This is strangely related to the fact that certain phases and aspects of war often appear tedious and boring to those who conduct it as well as to those who participate in it directly. The extreme and selectively compressed violence and danger, which is expected and also periodically occurs, are contrasted with long phases of waiting and anticipation, during which the soldiers do not know exactly what they are waiting for due to a lack of knowledge or an overall view. Time itself occasionally seems to disappear. This phenomenon is discussed in countless war reports. Stendhal described it in The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal 2000, 63-119); David Wark Griffith experienced it in the trenches of the Somme (Virilio 2009b, 20f; 25, et passim); and there were even reports of disorientation and waiting during the most recent Gulf War. With the loss of the commander’s hill and the classic theater of war, the experience of war appears to be lost to those who conduct it. The experience of war thus simultaneously revolves around extreme violence and its apparent counterpart – boredom. It is even possible that there is a close connection between the extreme use of violence and boredom; at the very least, their effects increase in direct proportion to one another. In studies on civilian life, clever sociologists have empirically observed that senseless acts of violence and inescapable boredom often occur together, as the former can be a distraction from the latter. This is precisely how Serner saw war: as an attempt to escape from the essential and a continuation of the entertainment industry by other means. According to Serner, however, what people seek to be distracted from – what they are trying to escape – is the profound boredom of the world. This connection is also fundamental to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein (Heidegger 1983, 30ff). In particular, Heidegger associates boredom with an unspecified and actually unfounded fear that leads to the suspension of external time and the avoidance of the given. This fear, which complements boredom (especially during times of war), makes the totality of the world and meaning perceptible to the same extent that the world and meaning are

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lost. The combination of fear and boredom in the experience of war could thus be justified through an analysis of Dasein. It could also be reshaped and asymmetricalized by television so that fear more or less completely evaporates.

War and Television This leads me to the third part of my argument, which addresses the question of how war and television relate to one another. Does war on television signal the end of the fun society or its continuation by other means? Everything that happens through a medium is affected by the medium. If war is waged in accordance with television, then it must submit to its laws. The first of these laws is the primacy of spectatorship, which Serner already noted. In television coverage of the theater of war, the focus of the action shifts, as it is prior to spectatorship and staged for spectators. Its meaning no longer lies in the defeat of opponents and the assertion of interests, but rather in the public disclosure of this activity. By shifting the focus of the event onto spectatorship, the fear and boredom of the spectators – rather than those who are physically participating in the war – become relevant. This leads to the second law of television, which is central here. War is boring. On television, it must either become a serial or be broadcast quickly as a live event. We have all witnessed this. So much has been said and written about the televised staging of both Gulf Wars, which was clever, fallacious, and boring, that I only need to recall here what you have already known for a long time.2 Two entirely different strategies were employed to make the American Gulf Wars boring. In the first Gulf War (which was actually the second but the first officially under American leadership), the removal of war events occurred in a way that is typical of television, as mentioned earlier – namely, through the absence of events as well as the repetition of the few events that had already taken place. The expectations of the global audience were also fomented by the use of the long countdown – the timeline of the war – which is a typical feature of live broadcasts; however, these built-up expectations were neither fulf illed nor disappointed (such as through avoiding the war), but rather emptied out. What was expected actually occurred, yet it remained hidden from view. The images that were made available were inconsequential, which provoked unspeakable comparisons 2

For a summary, particularly with regard to the second Gulf War, see Virilio 1991; 1996.

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between the images of the war and those of video games, or they were not directly related to the event itself, like the famous image of the cormorant covered in oil. The coverage was, to a large extent, not only repetitive but also tautological, as journalists mostly interviewed other journalists or they commented reciprocally on each other as experts. As a result, all of the material was repeated endlessly like a huge feedback loop – from the green tracer bullets over Baghdad to the burning oil wells. In contrast, the strategy employed in the television coverage of the second Gulf War (which was actually the third) was precisely the reverse, and it was thus highly effective and original. This time, viewers were attuned not to the paradox of a previously expected surprise, but rather to that of an unforeseeable predictability. For example, the beginning of the invasion was completely foreseeable, yet it was presented on television as uncertain up to the very end; the same was true of the outcome of the war. The strategy of embedded reporters also led to a particularly intense focus on the risks and side effects of the war, which was actually due to the fact that European and Arabic journalists successfully sought to present news and observations from a non-embedded perspective. Unpredictable and accidental events were thus given an almost disproportionate weight. At the same time, however, the machinery and planning of the military proceeded unbelievably smoothly in almost the exact way that they were foreseen (until the capture of Baghdad). The only surprise was that there were no surprises: there was amazingly little and clearly inferior resistance, no urban warfare that went on for months (to the astonishment of Scholl-Latour), no use of chemical warfare, and hardly any suicide commandos. The events of the war were not withheld from viewers, as they were in the first Gulf War; rather, they were produced as television events whose occurrence followed a program that was announced beforehand as well as during the further course of the war. This strategy effectively removed the basic self-referentially mentioned earlier; in other words, the occurrence of the war was anything but an event. The chain of self-reproducing events could be controlled and furnished with an ending, which allowed television to interrupt the self-referentiality of the war. As a television program, the second Gulf War was thus considerably more successful than the first. This time, the production also sought to provide the broadcast with an ending that was to some extent recognizable, regular, and opportunely timed, whereas the first war was simply aborted. Television effectively learned how to domesticate war and turn it into a more or less reasonable program. The laws of the fun society prevailed – for the moment at least – but it was a temporary victory, as this process could

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not be repeated. According to the credo of the fun society, everything will be different next time, especially when nothing should be.

Concluding Remarks on Terror, War, and Television Regardless as to whether the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001 was the beginning of a war or the cause of a war, it was at the very least a war event and its aim was undoubtedly the destruction of the fun society. It sought to destroy boredom and its circulation from the outside because it is experienced as destructive by those outside its grasp and because the price that it demands must be paid by others. It allowed the outer world to enter into the inner world, and it thus also addressed the holism, worldliness, and inescapability of meaning in an unprecedented act of negation. Unlike the inside perspective of the fun society, this attack was carried out as a genuine, unrepeatable event that could not be grasped through a flood of images. Unlike the fun society, it instrumentalized not boredom but rather its functionally equivalent counterpart: fear. As Heidegger points out, fear and boredom are complementary ways of accessing nothingness and thus the totality of meaning and the world. Fear and boredom feed one another and keep one another in balance. The terror society places this relationship under the primacy of fear. It is not without reason that terror prefers to strike places designed for leisure activities, such as cafes, bars, supermarkets, and tourist locations. In contrast, the fun society and its main agent – television – establish the primacy of boredom. However, it will never be able to remove its counterpart – fear – and it is for this reason (but not only this reason) that terror will never be suppressed through war and that fear will always accompany the fun society, which is thus also a society of fear. In response to terror and the demands of the war on terror, television serves to separate terror and war even further. However, the war on terror is not actually directed at terror itself. It occurs on an entirely different level – namely, on the level of television programming and the entertainment industry. War is thus drawn into the realm of boredom. This does not change anything about its true horror; rather, it only changes its effects on spectators and its entertainment value. This brings me back to Serner. For him, the most effective way to combat boredom is to gain insight into boredom, but every attempt to fight boredom eventually reverts back to it. However, Serner was writing before the age of television. For television spectators, insight into boredom would only be possible if it itself were boring in all of its amusements.

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References Barel, Yves. 1979. Le paradoxe et le système. Essai sur le fantastique social. Grenoble: Presse Universitaires. Baudrillard, Jean. 1992. L’illusion de la fin, ou, La grève des événements. Paris: Galilée. Bolz, Norbert. 1989. Theorie der neuen Medien. München: Raben. Cantor, Muriel G., and Suzanne Pingree. 1983. The Soap Opera. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Pub. Engell, Lorenz. 1989. Vom Widerspruch zur Langeweile. Frankfurt am Main, Bern: P. Lang. —. 2000. Ausfahrt nach Babylon. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Gerhards, Claudia, and Renate Möhrmann, eds. 2002. Daily Talkshows: Untersuchungen zu einem umstrittenen TV-Format. Frankfurt am Main, New York: P. Lang. Heidegger, Martin. 1983. Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (1929/30), Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann. Kittler, Friedrich. 1985a. Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1995. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mattenklott, Gert. 1987. ‘Tödliche Langeweile.’ Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken (41): 91–103. Plake, Klaus. 1999. Talkshows: die Industrialisierung der Kommunikation. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Serner, Walter. 1990. Gesammelte Werke 1: Über Denkmäler, Weiber und Laternen. München: Goldmann. Stendhal. 2000. La Chartreuse de Parme. Paris: Librairie generale. Virilio, Paul. 2009b. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Radical thinkers. London, New York: Verso Books. Williams, Raymond. 2008. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge. Winkler, Hartmut. 1991. Switching, Zapping. Ein Text zum Thema und ein parallellaufendes Unterhaltungsprogramm. Darmstadt: Häusser. Wulff, Hans J. 1995. ‘Flow. Kaleidoskopische Formationen des Fern-Sehens.’ montage a/v 4 (2): 21–39.

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Narrative: Historiographic Technique and Cinematographic Spirit Abstract In a close analysis of pre-cinematographic and early cinematographic techniques, this chapter discusses the analogies between f ilm and (historicist) historiography. For both, narration always means to relate the events of the real world to those of the possible world, to some imaginary events which might have been the sources or consequences of the real events. Cinema and history are deeply interconnected approaches, it turns out, to f ill the gaps of sense-making which opened up in the process of modernization. This f inally implies that, with the advent of electronic and digital media, such as television and the computer, not only narration, but also history as we know it, is put into question. Keywords: philosophy of media, media history, historiography, memory, modernity

When my father’s father’s father had a diff icult task to accomplish, he went to a certain place in the forest, lit a f ire, and immersed himself in a silent prayer. And what he had to do was done. When my father’s father was confronted with the same task, he went to the same place in the forest and said: ‘We no longer know how to light the f ire, but we still know the prayer.’ And what he had to do was done. Later, when my father had the same task to accomplish, he too went into the forest and said: ‘We no longer know how to light the f ire, we no longer know the mysteries of the prayer, but we still know the exact place in the forest where it occurred, and that should do.’ And that did do. But when I was faced with the same task, I stayed at home and said: ‘We no longer know how to light the fire, we no longer know the prayers, we don’t even know the place in the forest, but we do know how to tell the story.’ ‒ Jean-Luc Godard

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch08

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Media The concept of the medium must be used carefully. If everything is a medium, then a medium is nothing; the concept’s power to discern and therefore its meaning are lost. However, this is precisely what is about to happen; we have already entered the era of pan-medialism, in which everything can and will be defined as a medium and everything can and will be theoretically justified as a medium. In other words, the development of theory reduces reality to a mere concept, which increasingly appears to mutate into media; it (only) now appears as always already mediatized.1 It is thus often helpful to see a medium as something that is not form (see, for example, Luhmann 1992) or as something that is not reality. However, it is possible to learn something from the problem of pan-medialism through the distinction between mediality and reality, which will be maintained here for the purpose of clarity (Peirce 1992, 124-141). If everything is a medium and there is no longer a reality limited to the realm of media, as – depending on the operational basis – the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic (Lacan 1975) or reality and fiction (Koch 1988; Haug and Sachs 1898; Bolz 1989) or fiction and simulation (Kittler 1989; Bolz 1989) are supposed to merge, then only a medium is able to define what a medium is. In other words, media are understood no longer as opposing reality but rather as interacting with other media that shape, reshape, organize, define, and instrumentalize reality. Variable hierarchies, complexes, and configurations of media emerge, and every possible horizon of reference is merely another medium (as with Kittler 1989 and Bolz 1989). In this sense, the first and greatest pan-medialist, McLuhan, asserted that the content of a medium is always another medium (McLuhan 1994). Media thus refer to one another rather than an extra-medial reality, as every medial change originates from another medial change and involves a restructuring of the entire configuration. According to pan-medialism, therefore, the manipulation of concepts becomes the manipulation of objects (Kittler 1989, 60-63). This may seem absurd to a theoretical mind, as the concept of pan-medialism is actually theoretically and logically untenable (Engell 1994, 11-19), but it nevertheless opens the eye to complex medial configurations – even if they are not necessarily the only reality. 1 As if this were not always already so; and this is precisely what contemporary media history attempts to do: it was always already so. Authors as fundamentally different as Theodor W. Adorno and Gilles Deleuze have understood theory as the formation of concepts; Knops (1986) critiques the idea of theoretical work as the formation of concepts in connection with f ilm theory and with film as ‘moving thought’.

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In Wim Wenders´s film The State of Things, for example, a screenwriter writes on his computer, ‘Stories only exist in stories.’ This sentence is absolutely true. It is not reality but rather only stories that produce stories, as the shaping of reality into the form of a story is itself a story. A comparable but more complex configuration is to be analysed and historically justified here – namely, the relation between visual media and history or, more precisely, cinematography and historiography. The idea that cinematography and historiography are both media clearly corresponds to our preconception of media and thus does not require any further justification (Kracauer 1985); however, they are also both related to another medium – namely, narrative.2 As a means of representation, narrative is also a medium; for example, the ‘content’ of this medium (and the ‘object’ of representation) is a plot. I would also like to conceive of the ‘content’ or ‘object’ of historiography – namely, history itself – as a medium. History is by no means what happens (or happened); this would be an event.3 Rather, history is the methodological (re-)construction of events and especially the connections between them. In the present context, ‘methodological’ must be understood as a medial property; in this sense, a process is ‘methodological’ insofar as it is implemented and thereby controlled according to internal medial regulations. Narratives could thus be as methodological as television game shows or molecular biology research. Lastly, the relations between the media of cinematography, historiography, narrative, and history also involve a fifth and highly diffuse medium – namely, meaning – as history is a means (that is, a medium) of finding meaning and, conversely, meaning is the comprehensive medium in which history (as well as narrative) takes place.4 The following remarks will explain this seemingly bizarre correlation between cinematography and historiography within the context of the media of narrative, history, and meaning.5

An Example: The Maltese Cross What is cinematography? In Wenders’s film Kings of the Road, an itinerant cinema technician removes and replaces the Maltese gear in an old film 2 For a classic definition of narrative, see Laemmert 1967; for more on narrative in the media, see Kloepfer and Möller 1985; for more on film narrative, see Fell 1974, among others. 3 For more on this distinction, see Stierle 1983. 4 The concept of meaning employed here is based f irst and foremost on Luhmann and Habermas 1968, 25-100; see also Luhmann 1984, 142ff. et passim; Bourdieu 1987. 5 For a more detailed discussion, see Engell 1995; for a briefer discussion, see Engell 1992.

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projector in the projection room of a provincial cinema – a difficult repair – and then comments: ‘That is the heart of cinema.’ This sentence is once again absolutely true. The Maltese cross is the specific technical center of cinematography. Everything else is merely photography or a comparative form of photography, as the Maltese cross is what makes cinematography qualitatively different.6 In order to understand the specifics of the cinematographic medium, it is thus useful to begin with an examination of the Maltese cross. From a technical perspective, the Maltese cross is a mechanical gear that translates one form of movement into another. A wheel sits on a continuously rotating axis with a pin attached off-center – usually on the outer edge. The pin clasps the interstices of a second wheel on a second axis that consists of four sectors or wings (in the style of the Maltese cross) divided by narrow notches. Every full turn of the first continuously rotating axis moves the second wheel and thus the second axis a quarter turn forward. After this forward movement, the second axis rests until the pin reaches the next interstice, and so forth, so that the Maltese gear translates a continuous rotary movement into a slower but more importantly discontinuous rotary movement. The first axis can be driven by an electric motor, a clockwork mechanism, or even a hand crank; the first axis then drives the transport gears of the second axis, which move the film in a camera or a projector past the image gate. The discontinuous, jerky movement of the film transport was actually the main problem that the invention of the cinematograph had to solve.7 Cinematography is the art of recording or projecting 16, 18, or better yet 24 photographs per second over an extended period of time. During recording (and playback), the image must pause before the film gate for a fiftieth of a second (otherwise it would be blurred); after recording, the gate shuts and the image is replaced by the next image on the film strip at lightning speed (also approximately one fiftieth of a second). When the process of recording and playback is successfully free of interference, it provides the observer with the familiar impression of a continuously self-moving screen image. The movements recorded by the camera are divided into phase images, which are then projected as sequences of still images that once again convey the impression of fluid motion. 6 Kracauer (1985) sees film differently – namely, he sees it as the continuation of photography by other means. This lack of understanding with respect to film is based on Kracauer’s disregard of the Maltese cross mechanism as fundamental to the medium. 7 For more on this, Zglinicki (1979) is still useful; see also Ceram 1965; North 1973.

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The fact that the first flawlessly functioning cinematograph – the Lumière brothers’ famous apparatus8 – solved the problem of intermittent motion with the help of an eccentric claw rather than a Maltese cross does not invalidate Wenders’s proposition, as there is no gear mechanism that generates less friction than the Maltese cross mechanism, which has no dead point and which is thus fundamentally different from the pistons, rods, and cams used to convert motion in the peripheral gears of nineteenth-century engines (steam engines, internal combustion engines, etc.); nothing is better at preserving celluloid material or the functional parts of the camera itself (there is less frictional force than with gripping and eccentric mechanisms; in addition, the Maltese cross simply has fewer moving parts). Only the Maltese cross is able to realize the desired image transport without tearing the perforations; within approximately a fiftieth of a second, the image transport begins slowly, accelerates, and then slows down again before the image finally comes to a halt. It is for this reason that the Maltese cross is generally found in cinema projectors, which are designed for continuous, reliable, and non-destructive use. Wenders’s proposition also implies a prioritization: the heart of cinema is not recording, as elsewhere assumed,9 but rather projection – that is, the theater. This is where the intermittent static images (seemingly)10 coalesce into self-moving images, the narrated stories are perceived, and the film finds its meaning. However, the Maltese cross mechanism offers far more. It not only technically regulates the synthesis of continuous (analogue) and discontinuous (discrete) motion, but also objectifies the epistemological problem of the cinematograph. In addition to its technical properties, the Maltese cross (and, with it, cinema) also has the properties of a dispositif,11 as ‘analogue’ and ‘discrete’ are not just movements but also modes of perception or worldviews 8 For more on the technical details of the Lumière cinematograph, see Zglinicki 1979 as well as the sources cited therein. 9 See, for example, Kracauer (1964), as well as broad sections of ‘classic’ film semiotics from the 1960s and 1970s, which discussed the Pasolini-Eco debate, the problems of image aesthetics, iconicity, etc. 10 For viewers it is irrelevant that film involves a perceptual effect based on the physiological condition of the eye, which is produced in the act of seeing through the retina and optic nerve (see Zglinicki 1979), because they perceive the fluid motion as the movement of what is being perceived rather than a product of the perceptual apparatus itself. Film thus entails a double projection, as the projector projects an image onto the screen and the viewer also projects the perception of movement onto the image. 11 For more on the concept of the dispositif, see Baudry 1986; Deleuze 1991. For more on the use of the dispositif concept in film and media studies, see Baudry 1974; Blüher 1994; Zielinski 1999, 18f, among others.

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(see Eco 1972). If the Maltese cross constructively sets the analogue and the discrete in relation to one another, then it also mediates, in an abstract but nonetheless ‘real’ way,12 between two fundamentally different horizons of experience. The epistemological interaction between these two worlds is the cognitive and conceptual problem that the realization of the cinematograph was supposed to solve. In other words, there was a cognitive problem embedded within the purely technical problem of the cinematograph, and the Maltese cross can thus be understood as the crystallization of both of these problems. The epoch-making position of cinema in the culture of the 20th century is (at least partly, though presumably mainly) due to the cognitive and conceptual proposition that it suggested. Through this proposition, it promised to solve a problem that emerged in the nineteenth century from a conflict between two competing views of the world as either analogue (continuous) or discrete (discontinuous).13

Two Worlds: The Real World and the Possible World In order to understand how the emergence of cinematography and the formation of modern historiography at the end of the nineteenth century were linked with one another as well as with a specific epistemological problem from this epoch, it is useful to imagine that there are two worlds that interact with one another: the real world and the possible world. The first world includes everything that is actually the case, while the second world includes everything that is no longer or not yet the case as well as everything that could be the case but for whatever reason is not. If the first world describes the realm of the actual, then the second world describes the realm of the virtual.14 If it is acknowledged that the possible world is also a fact – not in terms of its content, mind you, but rather in and of itself – then it is also necessary 12 The idea that the ‘abstract’ is also at the same time the ‘unreal’ is obviously a recurring philosophical problem that has found its way from Plato to the scholastic problem of universals and the struggle over realist doctrines to contemporary media theory, such as simulation theory (see Baudrillard 1978; Eco 1985; Kittler 1989; Engell 1994; Bolz 1991) or the debate over the alleged ‘materiality of communication’ (see Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer 1994). 13 The concept of ‘world’ used here follows the groundwork laid by systems theory. For more on systems theory, see Luhmann 1984; for criticism of systems theory, see Thome 1973; for an interesting contrast to the ‘world’ construct in systems theory, see also Heidegger 1983. For a film-oriented foundation for the concept of the ‘world’ image, see Deleuze 2008. 14 ‘Virtual’ is used here in the modal-logical rather than the media-theoretical or culturaljournalistic sense à la Baudrillard; see Becker 1952.

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to acknowledge that the entirety of this world is contained within the real world of positive facts. And if the possible world includes the variants that will be the case as well as those that will not, then it appears conversely that the first world is also contained within the second. The individual cases involved thus oscillate between these two worlds – not only in an abstract sense, but also in real life. When something that was previously only possible becomes real, it becomes part of the first world, and when something that was previously real is no longer real due to a new occurrence, it becomes part of the second world. This oscillation between reality and possibility or actuality and virtuality can be observed and described in various ways. For example, Aristotle described it as the ‘becoming real’ of the possible states of an object in motion; in other words, every object has a potential that is not limited to its given circumstances but also includes a surplus of possibilities, which Aristotle refers to as the entelechy (Aristotle 1956, IV, 10-14). If one of these possibilities becomes a reality, then the object changes or moves. However, the oscillation of a given circumstance or object between the real world and the possible world can also be conceived as the abstract or conceptual movement of meaning (Luhmann 1968, 31). In this sense, it is the interaction with the world of possibilities that confers meaning on a given circumstance or fact. The fragile interaction between these two hypothetical worlds assumes considerable importance in our concrete everyday lives, as every change or impairment to this interaction directly concerns us – namely, in our efforts to do what is right, to anticipate the cause and effects of our own actions or the actions of others, to develop alternatives to the present, or merely to recall the past. The cinematographic apparatus allowed the real world and the possible world to merge and become synthesizable for the first time, which is precisely what made it a media technology (Kirchmann 1993, 36). A historical investigation of the emergence of cinematography at the end of the nineteenth century thus shows where the context of its emergence can be found. The cinematograph must be understood as a reaction to a problem concerning the relations between the real world and the possible world; more precisely, it was an attempt to stabilize their fragile interaction, which had apparently fallen from consideration in the nineteenth century, in a new way that would now be synthetic-technical and possibly controllable. The Maltese cross mechanism of the cinematograph turned the interaction of the actual and the virtual into the relationship between fragmentation and connection or stasis and movement. With the help of the Maltese cross mechanism, the cinematograph reunited the discrete as the real and the analogue as

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the virtual, which had been strictly separated and set in opposition to one another in the nineteenth century; fragmentation had previously been set against totalization, but the cinematograph arrived at a new synthetic totality through fragmentation.

Chronophotography The nineteenth-century worldview was primarily characterized by two interconnected structural processes of transformation: fragmentation and the focus on given circumstances. The spatial experiences engendered by large cities as well as the newly emerging industrial cities can be cited as an example of fragmentation (Girouard 1985, 262ff; Mumford 1963, 522; Benevolo 1983, 801-804). After a phase of somewhat explosive urban growth in the second half of the century, processes of structural formation were put in place that resulted in the territorial division or differentiation of functional districts within the urban experiential world. Factories, homes, administrative offices, and service areas were increasingly separated from one another; social stratification was similarly reflected in increasing spatial separation (Girouard 1985, 266f; Mumford 1963, 576ff, 569ff; Sennett 1983, 162, 267). The same process also occurred on a narrower scale within residential buildings. Before 1880, the floors, courtyards, and rear buildings of a large townhouse provided a rough cross-section of the social fabric, but, around the turn of the century, such houses were built for a homogeneous social class and neighborhoods were zoned for particular social groups (Posener 1979; Senator 1976; Monke 1968; Sennett 1983, 159; Major 1984, 84). The experience of social diversity and totality was dissolved and became either abstract or virtual, as a long-range movement through the extended urban space and across the various urban districts was able to restore a virtual impression of social totality from different sub-regions and experiential spaces. This was achieved by means of transportation, such as horse trams, underground railways, streetcars, and, later of course, the automobile (Mumford 1963, 525, 576; Girouard 1985, 284). More importantly, this virtual restoration was already visual, as the moving passenger was free to observe the surrounding space.15 A similar point can be made for the perceptual conventions of urban encounters on streets, squares, and boulevards (Sennett 1983, 187ff). The 15 Schivelbusch 1986; Asendorf 1984, 43-51; see also Sennett 1983, 160. For more on the selectivity of perception in connection with systems theory, see also Luhmann 1984, 560f.

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machine-made clothing of the late nineteenth century, which tended to be uniform, naturalized a rapidly changing, fragmentary gaze. Through the close observation of the details of other people’s clothing, it became possible to analyse and assess their social position and characteristic qualities. Comparable perceptual and experiential exercises also applied when dealing with the newly emerging (industrial) consumer culture of the nineteenth century. The department store can be taken as a medium for this culture, as it presented a diverse array of goods made up of countless individual products placed ‘together’. Every piece was fully detached from its context of origin and use and surrounded by completely different pieces (Asendorf 1984, 35ff, 291; Benevolo 1983, 866f). Instead of presenting the natural relations between the objects or the ‘true’ order of things, the department store gave rise to a new virtual world of possible connections, which was visually coded and therefore closely comparable to a tram ride through different parts of a city. The department store’s elaborately staged presentation of goods – which were then also packaged – allowed customers to replace the severed link to the naturally evolving contexts of articles, such as their origin and use, with new and more strongly mediated contexts. The goods were decontextualized and desubstantiated; their context was removed from the realm of experience and recognized instead as referring to possibilities within the realm of knowledge and imagination (Göhre 1907; Posener 1979, 466; Asendorf 1984, 36). This process opened the way to the staging of goods, which charged them with secondary and tertiary meaning.16 If the decontextualized products could be separated from their origin and use, then they could, in principle, stand for other contexts. Through naming, labeling, and packaging, for example, products could evoke and represent other parts of the world, which became bound to actual, given objects. This required enough space and light to see the products as well as enough space to guide the movements of the visitors and direct their attention to the attraction of every individual detail. These were the requirements that the cast-iron and glass architecture of late nineteenth-century department stores knew how to satisfy (Asendorf 1984, 22f; Girouard 1985, 293ff; Posener 1979, 472; Wiener 1912). The emptying of an object’s traditional meaning and the charging of the object with a new, synthetic meaning allowed it to escape the given fragment through a virtually synthetic context. This was typical for many 16 Secondary meaning can be understood as the commodity fetish (Marx) and the commodity myth (Barthes); tertiary meaning can be understood as individualized and integrative communication by means of commodities, such as individual self-description through the acquisition of certain objects (Veblen; Bourdieu).

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of the shifting processes in the horizon of experience of nineteenth-century popular culture. Fragmentation overlapped with the positive world and (synthetic) re-totalization overlapped with the virtual world. This overlapping, which was introduced by the Maltese cross apparatus and which later became a distinguishing feature of film, emphasized the principle of meaning production as the creation of objective, temporal, and social contexts, which was described earlier as the ‘surplus of possibility’ that refers to something beyond a given event or object (see Luhmann 1984, 101, 142ff; Luhmann 1968, 76f; Bourdieu 1987). The newly emerging consumer culture of the nineteenth century was thus devoted to the visual isolation of an individual fragment from its raw, natural context in order to obtain better or more precise knowledge of the given. The same goal also applied to many other fields of experience that were influenced by fragmentation, including, in its own methodological way, the physiology of movement. Natural movements could not be studied in nature due to their liveliness (study demands time, but movements hurry past), so physiologists in the 1870s and 1880s developed improved devices for the optical recording and disassembly of movement, which led to the emergence of chronophotography. The functional principle of chronophotography is simple, as it is based on breaking down the perceptible continuum of movement into a series of snapshots or photographic stills. I will briefly summarize the history of the invention and development of chronophotography as the immediate precursor to cinematography (Zglinicki 1979; Sadoul 1946). In order to study the movements of a horse, a professor of natural history at the Collège de France named Étienne-Jules Marey developed a pulse writer – the so-called ‘sphygmograph’ – that used hydraulics to convert the movements of a horse’s legs into (analogue, continuous) curves on a diagram (Zglinicki 1979, 172f; Asendorf 1984, 62; Giedion 1982, 37). Following the same principle, he also constructed a cardiograph – a hydraulic-mechanical precursor of our contemporary electrocardiograph. In 1870, Marey recorded the gallop of a horse and found that the horse raised all four hooves from the ground for a moment and then cushioned his entire body weight on a single hoof. Marey had a painter ‘transfer’ these key moments back into images, which were included in his published studies as illustrations (Zglinicki 1979, 173). In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge successfully obtained an experimental confirmation of Marey’s results in a direct, photographic way that did not require analogue curves, diagrams, and drawings (Ibid., 173-179). Muybridge’s photographic sequences realized the program of movement analysis with the help of visual digitization, as they ideally reduced a complex movement

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to a series of discrete steps that each represented an individual given fact. His six, then 24, then 100 cameras were placed at precise intervals along the edge of a racing track. This ideal-typical visual digitization configuration can also be described as a ‘chronophotographic consciousness’17 that clearly and appropriately expressed the work of fragmentation that the nineteenth century performed in so many areas. The fact that nineteenth-century physiology’s instrumental technique of cognition arose from a combination of photography and clockwork, out of which film technology emerged,18 was a consequence of the positivist methodology of modern science. It focused on the observation of visible surface phenomena and the strict non-observation of ‘underlying’ or ‘transcendental’ phenomena. According to this epistemological construction, it was thus possible to perceive a fact but not its meaning, which remained purely speculative like a type of theology or at least metaphysics (Comte 1975). With the help of snapshot photography – that is, decontextualized recordings – these epistemological-methodological standards facilitated the attempt to come closer to an objective, positive, repeatable, and verifiable form of perception, which integrated science into the context of other cultural shifts in the nineteenth century. The technological prerequisite of chronophotograpy was the reduction of shutter speeds; the epistemological prerequisite was the intensification of the positivist principle of isolating fragments. The invention of chronophotography marked a historical turning point – namely, the moment when photography turned into cinematography. In 1879, Muybridge came up with the idea of resynthesizing his image sequences and thus reconverting them from digital back into analogue with the help of projection technology in order ‘to show by means of synthetic reconstruction movements that were photographed from real life’ (Zglinicki 1979, 175; Muybridge 1887). For the first time, segments isolated from a rigid sequence once again became a continuum – a moving or rather self-moving image. The ‘cinematographic consciousness’ that emerged at this point was both a continuation and a reversal of the chronophotographic consciousness. From an epistemological-historical perspective, the process by which a fluid, continuous movement is reconstructed from a series of static 17 For a rationale and discussion of this concept, see Engell 1995. 18 The precursors of cinematography are thus clearly identif ied and demarcated, and it is hardly sensible to see the entire history of human culture as precursors. The cave paintings of the late ice age were necessary but not sufficient conditions. The invention of cinematography was only possible after the development of photographic snapshots (with exposure times shorter than 1/40 sec.) and the implementation of a mechanistic understanding of motion. Cf. Zglinicki (1979), who suggests a more comprehensive prehistory of film.

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photographs projected onto a screen is of the utmost importance because it is only possible through the biological properties of the human eye (Zglinicki 1979, 108-112). Muybridge’s projector, the ‘zoopraxiscope’, suggested a qualitative escape from compressed fragmentation precisely because it enabled the experience of continuity – if not in the recorded reality itself, then in the image, in the imaginary, in the illusion. The continuity (or sense) of movement, which had previously been carefully extracted, reappeared in the projected image, at least to a microscopic extent, as the screen illusion was based on the fusion of an image with what it no longer is and what it will be. This constant change represented a shift from the analytical to the synthetic, from the digital to the analogue, from the fragmentary to the total, from the discrete to the continuous, and from the positive to the virtual. Due to the drastically different perceptual worlds of the nineteenth century, there was a need for the experience of virtuality and totality – a need that cinema could successfully answer – and this was already apparent at the end of the nineteenth century through the success of panoramas.

The Panorama The scientif ic obsession with meticulous fragmentation, which was wholly confined to the positive world, found its ‘virtual’ counterpart in the overwhelming totality of the spatial and visual experience of popular panoramas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The permanent panorama buildings with a radius of 15 meters or more, like those in Berlin at Alexanderplatz and in Paris on the Boulevard Montmartre and the Champs Elysées (Girouard 1985, 290), employed state-of-the-art techniques of illusion that made use of lighting and projection effects. Shadows could move in front of a colored background, moving images could be projected, and individual details could be colorfully illuminated. The images also featured various topics that would later be taken up by cinematography, including fantastic subjects, current affairs, exotic travel scenarios, and reconstructions of major historical events (Zglinicki 1979, 91-107; Zielinski 1999, 25-28; Oettermann 1980). The panoramas enabled a gaze that charged every detail and fragment with meaning and that usually passed from one isolated point to another; the gaze thus represented the counteractive experience of distance and continuity. From the perspective of the gallery-like central observation pavilion, the horizon of a panorama was unstructured and seemingly infinite, as the edge of the building and the projection surface remained

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hidden. The movements represented were also clear and continuous. Every detail was part of an open and recognizable thematic framework so that it could not convey a disordered simultaneity and succession: ‘The swaying screens of the exhibition stands were guarantees for the imagination. It is here that our world-view is rounded off. Man, who only experiences himself fragmentarily, feels an urge to bend the beginning and the end of existence together in the palm of his hand, to stand on the hub of the world.’ (Carlo Mierendorff [1920], as quoted in Zielinski 1999, 32f) The basic idea was that of a possible world as the world and thus as both an ‘environment’ (the totality of what I myself am not) and a ‘final horizon’ (in any case, a non-negated category) (see Heidegger 1983; Luhmann 1968, 34). The world relationship of the panorama or the ‘panorama consciousness’ can be seen as a complement to the chronophotographic consciousness, as the positivism of chronophotography stood alongside the virtualism of the panorama. The dispositif of the Maltese cross made it possible for the first time to synthesize both of these world relationships at the same time and to integrate them in a controlled way. The vivid sensory and quasi-cosmic experience of the panorama broke away from the apparently dense, chaotic, and fragmentary experience of its surroundings; at the same time, however, it did not exclude the extension of the gaze into the urban environment but rather completed it and rounded it out. The railway journey panorama, for example, complemented railway journey perception in the ‘outside’ world, yet these two modes of perception did not involve the same gaze, as Zielinski (1999, 26f) shows. The environment itself could no longer be experienced within an ordered horizon, but the panorama could be experienced as an artificially ordered horizon. It thus appeared simultaneously smaller and larger than the space surrounding it, which always applies to any interaction between the positive world and the virtual world. The panorama accordingly constituted a possible world in a double sense: it ensured the possibility that the experiential and perceptual space of the urban environment was recognizable as a world despite its discontinuity and complexity, and, at the same time, it also provided a possible alternative to what was actually perceived. Everything that could otherwise only be imagined – distant worlds, historical events – or extrapolated from encountered fragments – namely, from context – could be seen and experienced in a panorama. While this space of images was ‘only’ an illusion, it was still experienced vividly – in other words, virtually. The intricate meshing of possibility and reality and the constitution of the senses through a technical and popular cultural institution was more apparent in the panorama than anywhere else in the entertainment industry

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of the nineteenth century, and the economic success of the panorama (Oettermann 1980; Zglinicki 1979, 95 et passim) indicates that the demand for a sensory experience of context and meaning – a confirmation of a coherent overview – must have been relatively high. The panorama could not satisfy this demand for long. It was altogether too expensive to construct, and it was difficult to change its ‘software’ – that is, the panorama image. It was also far from faithful to the natural experience of seeing the surrounding world, and it was thus unable to guarantee a direct and permanent connection between the virtual world inside and the positive world outside. It was also very limited in its ability to convey narrative meaning, which offered a range of decisive advantages compared to other forms of meaning. Firstly, narrative meaning is inherently temporal (Luhmann 1978), and it is therefore much easier to connect to an environment shaped by rapid changes, possible accelerations (Virilio 2009a; Virilio 1996; Hickethier 1986), and fundamental instability. Secondly, narrative meaning requires the inclusion of communicative instances – especially with the ‘recipients’ or ‘consumers’ of meaning – more than any other form of meaning production; in other words, narrative meaning is inherently co-productive (Eco 1987). And lastly, narrative meaning is particularly suitable for intermediality, as it can function in more than just one medium and it can be transferred from one medium to another; it thus allows a medium to become the ‘content’ of other media. These advantages made it possible for cinematography to become a ubiquitous hegemonic medium in the first half of the 20th century.

Cinematography The Lumière cinematograph was the first19 machine able to liberate itself from the mechanistic-machinistic world, of which it was a product, and to set this world in opposition to a second, virtual world. From a technical perspective, the essence of the Lumière cinematograph was a gripping mechanism, which was later generalized as the Maltese cross. Its other def ining feature was that it served as an apparatus for both recording (disassembly) and projection (reassembly).20 The cinematograph thus also 19 On the so-called ‘Skladanowsky dispute’, see Zglinicki 1979, 323-354; Niessen 1934; Engell 1992, 41-46. 20 It also served as an apparatus for copying (contact prints) as well as a dark box for developing film. Lumière operators in 1896-1897 thus had all of the devices they needed in one.

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represented the culmination of the century of disassembly and its transition to the century of totalizations. Even though the modest short films of 1895-1896 contained neither the narratives nor the complex meaning structures of later film systems, it would be wrong to underestimate the medium and ignore its enormous creative possibilities as a formal meaning-giving strategy. The size, brightness, intensity, consistency, sharpness, and depth of the screen image produced by the Lumière cinematograph were repeatedly described as the characteristics that made it a novelty (Coissac 1937; Sadoul 1946, 264-297). These characteristics seemed to constitute the special perceptual experience of film as an impression of reality – an experience that was initially individual but also became necessarily intersubjective through the universal adoption of a film-historical canon. The first Lumière programs were famously dedicated to the reproduction of everyday, familiar, and predictable events (Sadoul 1946, 279). The events themselves were mostly unspectacular (a card game, breaking waves on a beach, etc.), yet their filmic representations were reportedly a sensation (Toeplitz 1978, 18). From the very beginning, therefore, the positive worldview and the virtual elements of the cinematograph both opposed and permeated one another. This was continued in films that already had microscopic narratives at their core – L’arroseur arrosé is the most famous example – or those that made the impossible possible – such as Démolition d’un mur, in which the movement of a collapsing wall is played backward so that the wall stands upright again at the end. Compared to all of the other imaging techniques known until then, there was a relatively high degree of similarity between moving pictures and natural perception, and this was of utmost importance, as it endowed the (false) virtual world with the positivity of the world that was actually perceived. La sortie des Usines Lumière is another film that used aesthetic and dramaturgical structural approaches to transform a quite ordinary meaningless event into a rudimentary narrative. This narrative was also connected to the experience of fragmentation and disassembly in everyday life, and it was precisely this connection, which was neither inherently fantastic nor fictional, that lent the resulting film its quality as a possible world in the real world. Generally speaking, however, the Lumière films satisfied the contemporary need for meaning in other ways by superimposing a virtual order over the world of everyday perception, which was largely fragmented and chaotic. Cinema thus ordered the world and conferred a meaning on it that it did not inherently possess. The Lumière f ilms employed rigidly schematized structural images that were by no means accidental. Cuts,

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angles, and distance were chosen in a way that produced an optical overview of what was shown while also allowing the event to exceed the frame so that the process of extraction appeared to be a quality of the image itself rather than the event it depicted, like the view from a window (Nagel 1988, 186f). Foreground and background were clearly set against each other, as were lateral movements and movements into the depth of the image (Ibid., 184ff). These oppositions were held together by diagonals and diagonal movements, which allowed a three-dimensional space to be constructed from a flat surface and which enabled a contrast between the simultaneity of different actions in the foreground and background and the sequentiality of a continuous series of actions (see Zglinicki 1979, 232-254; Niessen 1934; Engell 1992, 41-46; Kloepfer and Möller 1985; Fell 1974) Such schematizations indicate that even very early films were already technologically realized forms of meaning production that extended virtual systems to the disparate real. The ordering of the ordinary or the structuring of the familiar, which was experienced in everyday life as fleeting, endangered, and no longer self-evident, could thus be f ixed. Although the order offered by early films was very simple, it was seen as a potential means of isolating the meaning of visual experience and thus reproducing its worldliness. Films offered an order to things. As it developed, the order and meaning offered by films was almost exclusively assumed to be found in narrative, which was already evident in Méliès’s utopian-fantastic films around 1898, in the strides made by the Brighton School around 1900, and above all in Griffith’s films in the 1910s. The normal format that set the standard of the medium was neither documentary film nor experimental film but rather fictional narrative film, which became the most innovative and effective form of narrative in the first half of the 20th century. Just as the cinematograph technologically enabled the meshing of the positive world and the virtual world, which conveyed a sense of meaning, so too did narrative aesthetically perform the meshing of the positive and the virtual. Film and narrative also coevolved insofar as they made themselves available to each other.21 In their perhaps most developed form, the great film myths of the 1930s to the 1950s worked to convey a sense of meaning through mass culture, and myth is also a form of narrative – even when it involves the myths of modern everyday life (Barthes 2005). Regardless as to whether they took the form of star images or genres, 21 On coevolution, see Jantsch 1989. Luhmann (1984) speaks of ‘external complexity’ that a system can make its own; two ‘interpenetrating’ systems can thus reciprocally provide complexity to one another.

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such as Western or gangster films, these myths always participated in the finding of individual, social, and historical identities through the use of leading models (Jarvie 1970). Star images also showed that these identities could far exceed national – that is, American – models and patterns, as they were associated not with a national but rather with an industrial and cultural need for meaning. In other words, narrative meaning replaced natural meaning, which had become impossible.

History The meshing of the positive world and the virtual world constituted the experience of meaning, yet this was made increasingly difficult or even impossible in the perceptual reality of the nineteenth century due to the separation of the dimension of possibility from the sphere of reality and the avoidance of connection in favor of fragmentation. Film (especially narrative film) provided a remarkable solution to this problem in both a technical as well as an aesthetic sense, as it attempted to visualize synthetic connections that could no longer be experienced naturally, which allowed them to be experienced again aesthetically. It thus functioned at the interface between the nineteenth century (the age of fragmentation and analysis) and the 20th century (the age of totalization and synthesis) (Jünger 1946). However, film was not the only solution to this problem. The nineteenth century was also called the century of history (Foucault 1989, 235-239), and there was actually a shift in the area of history that paralleled the development described above, as narrativity also played a key role. For centuries, historiography was traditionally considered a subgenre of narrative literature, and it was associated with literary aesthetics, such as in Aristotle’s poetics. From Bodin to the Enlightenment, historiography was understood as a complement to pedagogical literature (Rüsen 1988, 63; Blanke and Rüsen 1984). In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, this view gave way to an increasingly modern and specifically scientific view of history. This shift was first recognizable in Johann Gustav Droysen’s Outline of the Principles of History (Droysen 1978-1980). The narrative treatment of historical material was here expressly and clearly separated from the study of historical conditions. The actual historical study of the past was thus methodologically separated from the representation of past events within the academic discipline of history, where history is more and other than the writing of historical novels (Rüsen 1988, 64f). Until then, historians had

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been primarily instructed to use the techniques of representation and the selection of material, but their instructions were now based primarily on scientific knowledge production through the collection and evaluation of historical source materials. While the objectification of history was previously based on the subjective representation of the flow of events, which was rooted in personal memory, it was then understood as the solidification of connections through objective witnesses rather than re-narration, so a ‘correct’ history became dependent on objective, verifiable evidence rather than a convincing representation. Historical research involved tracking down and seeking out sources and then examining their value and content using the methods of textual and source criticism, such as comparison. In this way, it investigated (or constructed) historical facts. Credible and correct access to the past was secured no longer through narrative witness reports, as with Voltaire in the eighteenth century (Voltaire 1810; Meinecke 1968), but rather through the methodical investigation of the facts. The positivist program thus infiltrated the field of historiography or rather established it for the first time as an academic discipline. For Droysen, facts were admittedly just fragments, and they were by no means synonymous with history itself; rather, history was only generated and produced through their interpretation (Droysen 1978-1980, 22; Rüsen 1988, 64), which provided a sense of connection and which could only be understood as historical movement. This was then followed by the representation or linguistic description of their interpretation. Research and narrative were thus separated from one another, and interpretation mediated between them. It is easy to recognize here both poles of the study of movement, which were operative at virtually the same time in chronophotography: just as the investigation of facts using source criticism resembled the disassembly of movement into static fragments, so too did the linguistic representation of facts as historical narratives resemble the reassembly of static images into moving pictures. Droysen’s successors pushed this separation even further. Ernst Bernheim, whose Handbook of Historical Method (1908) was one of the main documents of historical positivism, also dealt with the problem of researching and representing historical facts. For Bernheim, however, representation remained subordinate to the facts themselves, which were constituted through research, and an adequate representation was one that appropriately accentuated them. What is crucial here is Bernheim’s focus on the interpretation of sources and facts, which supposedly emerged from the sources themselves (Rüsen 1988, 65). The idea behind this is that the fragments contain the instructions, so to speak, according to which their context can

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be reconstructed. Consequently, he believed that historiography should and can reconstruct the past ‘as it really was’ (Leopold von Ranke’s famous proposition: Ranke 1872, 285). The structural parallels between Bernheim’s idea of historiography and the process of disassembly and reassembly in perceptual and sensory experience, as described above, are obvious: isolated, individual pieces yield content (facts) as well as connections to a broader general overview, its history, and its further use or significance. The fact as reality and the context as possibility actually constitute two different layers, but they are found in one and the same source. For Bernheim, however, a representation that could constitute new narrative connections remained a problem. His concept of historiography was thus closer to chronophotography than cinematography, as chronophotography treated the resynthesization of phase images through projection as a secondary effect (Zglinicki 1979, 175ff, 185ff) and cinematography began with moving pictures. The separation of isolated facts from the horizon of possibilities did not necessarily result in the neglect of the latter. For example, Wilhelm Dilthey introduced a new set of priorities (Dilthey 1973; Dilthey 1990; see also Ineichen 1975) by insisting on a separation between research on the world of facts and research on the world of possibilities. This entailed a tremendous revaluation of the world of possibilities, which was now no longer envisioned as a dependent variable – as something that ‘only’ emerged after the facts were researched – but rather as its own ‘fact’ or object of research. Whereas the natural sciences employed an analytical approach that focused on facts, which reflected a technical way of thinking, the humanities employed a synthetic approach that focused on possibilities or meanings (Akoun 1975, 108f). The emergence of the humanities was accordingly seen as a form of compensation for the loss of meaning in the technical-industrial modern age (Marquard 1979). While narrative tended to call this age of secularization and segmentation into question, the humanities were committed to the methodological preservation of narrative, as the historical-hermeneutic method was itself a narrative technique of meaning production. For Dilthey, therefore, the separation of the positive dimension from the virtual dimension in historiography paralleled the transformation of perception in the modern age. There were also important parallels between the founding of the humanities – in all its varieties – and the cinematographic rather than chronophotographic consciousness, as they were both connected to the natural sciences and technology (Marquard 1979); they both occupied the space opened up between the real world and the possible world; they were both products of and attempts to overcome fragmentation, subtraction, and separation; and they were both based on a linear, abstract, schematic, and

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instrumental conception of time, which was irreversible for the former and all-encompassing for the latter (although they each attributed meaning to the temporality of this process in their own way: as either historical time or narrative time) (Luhmann 1976a). It is therefore no coincidence that Dilthey’s ideas were associated with Henri Bergson’s vitalist program (Pflug 1980). If Dilthey represents the historical-hermeneutic way of thinking, then Bergson is rightly seen as representing the cinematographic way of thinking. Indeed, large sections of Deleuze’s film philosophy are based on this proposition (Deleuze 1986; see also Knops 1986, 130; and Fell 1974, 64, 233f). The connection between the historical and cinematographic projects has been repeatedly discussed by critics such as Siegfried Kracauer (Kracauer 1971, 15f, 60-65, 124f et passim; Kracauer 1985, 115ff: see also Mülder-Bach 1987, 359-361), among others (as early as Nowell-Smith 1990). While film and historiography were by no means identical, and their differences were perhaps more numerous and significant than their similarities, their emergence nevertheless involved structurally isomorphic media and parallel operations. In other words, the cinematographic and historical consciousness – or rather the cinematographic and historical medium – belonged together. And as the cinematographic medium became the leading (trivial and mass) cultural project of the first half of the 20th century, not only did the humanities set itself up as the leading model in the organization of knowledge within the canon of cultural studies, but the historical-hermeneutic paradigm that defined ‘historical thought’ since the nineteenth century also set itself up as the leading model in the organization of knowledge outside the technical sciences (see Droysen 1978-1980). It still dominates wide areas of scientific discourse today to a certain extent – despite or perhaps because of all the criticism it received and all the attempts that have been made to overcome it. However, an interesting shift occurred in the humanities with regard to the media of film and narrative. In the 1970s, after a phase of theorizing and modeling (see Rüsen 1988, 65f), critics began to reassess the question concerning historiography and historical narrative (see Koselleck and Stempel 1983; Quandt and Süßmuth 1982; Kocka and Nipperdey 1979), which had been largely ignored since the nineteenth century. The starting point of this reopened discussion was the view that the development of meaning was rooted not in the historical fragment and its temporal perspective, but rather in the context and perspective of the present. History was thus seen as part of the contemporary process of meaning production (Rüsen 1988, 69; Baumgartner 1976, 280; Luhmann 1976b). According to this line of argument, history is constantly being rewritten and it constitutes itself through this process; in other words, it does not exist outside of historiography

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(Rüsen 1988, 76; Baumgartner 1982, 73-76).22 The grammar and rhetoric of historiography and narrative were thus seen as essential components of historical knowledge production.23 It is interesting that Kracauer can be considered a forerunner of the rehabilitation of historical narrative, as he insisted on the close proximity of historiography and photographic media (see Rüsen 1988, 65f). The idea that historical knowledge production is grounded in narrative implies that history is the development of a possible world rather than an understanding of a positively given past and that this possible world also has a virtual existence outside of history itself (Luhmann 1976a, 295f). As a possible world, history is also connected to literature (see Jauß 1983, 535f) and, of course, especially fictional narrative film. The logical consequence of this view is that every reality and every present chooses its own past and makes it available; even a past that was operable in the present would thus be called history (Luhmann 1984, 118). The establishment of historiography (especially the kind of institutionalized historical research performed in the nineteenth century) could indicate that individual memory and narrative are no longer sufficient in modern society. As the nineteenth century demonstrates, history provides a vital contribution to solving the problem of meaning – or perhaps above all the problem of identity (Hanisch 1997) – that arises in increasingly differentiated social systems (Rüsen 1988, 74f). History is thus a form of meaning that, to a large extent, overlaps with narrative meaning, which became the principal medium of cinematographic meaning production.

Media The media of the outgoing nineteenth century and the incoming 20th century (cinematography, historiography, narrative, and history) mutually constituted and stabilized one another. As a technically implemented medium, cinematography played a pivotal role that positioned it at the decisive interface between the analytical (chronophotography as a positive medium of observation) and the synthetic (the panorama as a virtual medium of totalization). This conclusion immediately raises the question of the current state of meaning, history, and narrative in an era that is dominated no longer 22 See also Baumgartner 1976, 274-302. 23 Weinrich 1983, 519-523; Stempel 1983, 523-526; Danto 1974; White 2014. For a critique of White and the concept of narrative historical knowledge, see Rüsen 1982.

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by film but rather by television and increasingly by digital, computer-based media. It should be beyond dispute that today, in the phase of pan-medialism, history, narrative, and possibly also meaning (Engell 1989) must have new functional uses. Even if one does not immediately accept an analysis that testifies to the end of history (in addition to Francis Fukujama, see, above all, Baudrillard 1992) or the end of human culture altogether, one must still take into account the possibly epoch-making ruptures of meaning. The concept of the medium may no longer be sufficient to explain what is happening – if operations according to concepts, propositions, and conclusions should still be the tools and tasks of theory at all. With the disappearance of cinematography as the principal medium and the assumption of this function by the television and the computer, it is more than probable that the forms of circulating meaning must stabilize themselves in new and different ways. For example, the television and the computer are not narrative media; perhaps they are not even visual media.24 A structural examination of how electronic media culture establishes meaning has yet to be done. This is probably due to the fact that it calls for a new academic discipline, and it can no longer be restricted to the historical-hermeneutic-narrative methodology. The humanities emerged and expanded during the cinematographic age, and it is now putting them into perspective once again. Indeed, we are contemporary witnesses of this process. The meaning and knowledge requirements of the medial present with its digitally based apparatuses and dispositifs, which greatly expand the possibilities of synthesis, will yield new ways of knowing and new functionalizations that correspond to a yet-to-be-described (media) techno-logic.

References Akoun, André. 1975. ‘Die Soziologie.’ In Geschichte der Philosophie: Ideen, Lehren 7: Die Philosophie der Sozialwissenschaften 1860 bis heute, edited by François Châtelet, 102–28. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein. Aristotle. 1956. Physikalische Vorlesung. Paderborn: Schöningh. Asendorf, Christoph. 1984. Batterien der Lebenskraft : zur Geschichte der Dinge und ihrer Wahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Gießen: Anabas. Barthes, Roland. 2005. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1992. L’illusion de la fin, ou, La grève des événements. Paris: Galilée. 24 According to Marshall McLuhan (1994), television is a tactile medium that implies the end of the age of visual discourse.

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Baumgartner, Hans Michael. 1976. ‘Thesen zur Grundlegung einer transzendentalen Historik.’ In Seminar Geschichte und Theorie: Umrisse einer Historik, edited by Hans M. Baumgartner and Jörn Rüsen, 274–302. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1982. ‘Die Erzählstruktur des historischen Wissens und ihr Verhältnis zu den Formen seiner Vermittlung.’ In Historisches Erzählen: Formen und Funktionen, edited by Siegfried Quandt and Hans Süßmuth. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Benevolo, Leonardo. 1983. Die Geschichte der Stadt. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Bernheim, Ernst. 1908. Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Blanke, Horst Walter, and Jörn Rüsen. 1984. Von der Aufklärung zum Historismus: zum Strukturwandel des historischen Denkens. Paderborn: Schöningh. Bolz, Norbert. 1989. Theorie der neuen Medien. München: Raben. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. Sozialer Sinn: Kritik der theoretischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Coissac, Georges Michel. 1937. Histoire du cinématographe: de ses origines jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Gauthier-Villars. Comte, Auguste. 1975. Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42). Paris: La Société Positiviste. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1973. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Stuttgart: Teubner. —. 1990. Vom Aufbau der historischen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Droysen, Johann Gustav. 1978-1980. Historik. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog. Eco, Umberto. 1972. Einführung in die Semiotik. München: Wilhelm Fink. —. 1987. The Role of the Reader. London: Hutchinson. Engell, Lorenz. 1989. Vom Widerspruch zur Langeweile. Frankfurt am Main, Bern: P. Lang. —. 1992. Sinn und Industrie: Einführung in die Filmgeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. —. 1994. Das Gespenst der Simulation: Ein Beitrag zur Überwindung der ‘Medientheorie’ durch die Analyse ihrer Logik und Ästhetik. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Fell, John L. 1974. Film and the Narrative Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1989. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge.

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Giedion, Siegfried. 1982. Die Herrschaft der Mechanisierung: ein Beitrag zur anonymen Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Girouard, Mark. 1985. Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Göhre, Paul. 1907. Das Warenhaus. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening. Hanisch, Manfred. 1997. ‘Historienmalerei und nationale Sinnstiftung.’ In Bild und Geschichte, edited by Siegfried Mattl, Karl Stuhlpfarrer, and Georg Tillner, 21–33. Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag. Haug, Wolfgang, and Herby Sachs, eds. 1989. Die Ausblendung der Wirklichkeit. Grafenau: Trotzdem Verlag. Hickethier, Knut. 1986. Medienzeit ‒ Beschleunigung und Verlangsamung. Siegen: Universität Siegen. Heidegger, Martin. 1983. Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (1929/30), Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann. Ineichen, Hans. 1975. Erkenntnistheorie und geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Welt: Diltheys Logik der Geisteswissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Jarvie, I. C. 1970. Towards a Sociology of the Cinema: A Comparative Essay on the Structure and Functioning of a Major Rntertainment Industry. London: Routledge & K. Paul. Jauß, Hans Robert. 1983. ‘Zur Analogie von literarischem und historischem Ereignis.’ In Geschichte ‒ Ereignis und Erzählung: V. Kolloquium der Forschungsgruppe ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’, edited by Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. München: Wilhelm Fink. Jünger, Friedrich Georg. 1946. Die Perfektion der Technik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Kirchmann, Kay. 1993. ‘Zwischen Selbstreflexivität und Selbstreferentialität.’ Film und Kritik (2): 23–37. Kittler, Friedrich. 1989. ‘Fiktion und Simulation.’ In Philosophien der Neuen Technologie, edited by Ars Electronica, 57–80. Berlin: Merve. Kloepfer, Rolf, and Karl-Dietmar Möller-Nass. 1985. Narrativität in den Medien. Mannheim: MAkS Publikationen. Knops, Tilo Rudolf. 1986. Die Aufmerksamkeit des Blicks: vom Schwinden der Sinne in der Filmtheorie und seinem Gegenmittel. Frankfurt am Main u.a. Lang. Koch, Joachim. 1988. Abschied von der Realität: das illusionistische Zeitalter. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Kocka, Jürgen, and Thomas Nipperdey, eds. 1979. Theorie und Erzählung in der Geschichte. München: DTV. Koselleck, Reinhart, and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, eds. 1983. Geschichte ‒ Ereignis und Erzählung: V. Kolloquium der Forschungsgruppe ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’. München: Wilhelm Fink.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. 1971. Schriften 4: Geschichte ‒ vor den letzten Dingen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1985. Theorie des Films: Die Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lacan, Jacques. 1975. Schriften 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. 1976a. ‘Weltzeit und Systemgeschichte Über Beziehungen zwischen Zeithorizonten und sozialen Strukturen gesellschaftlicher Systeme.’ In Seminar Geschichte und Theorie: Umrisse einer Historik, edited by Hans M. Baumgartner and Jörn Rüsen, 337–87. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1976b. ‘Evolution und Geschichte.’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2): 284–309. —. 1978. ‘Temporalization of Complexity.’ In Sociocybernetics: an actor-oriented social systems approach, edited by Felix R. Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, 95–111. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. —. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1992. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas, and Jürgen Habermas, eds. 1968. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Major, Máté. 1984. Geschichte der Architektur, Bd. 3: Gesellschaft, Kultur und Architektur von der Mitte des 18. bis in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die Architektur Europas und ihr weltweiter Einfluß in der neuesten Zeit. Berlin: Henschelverlag. Marquard, Odo. 1979. ‘Kompensation. Überlegungen zu einer Verlaufsform historischer Prozesse.’ In Vergangene Zukunft: zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, edited by Reinhart Koselleck, 230–65. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Meinecke, Friedrich. 1968. Zur Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung. München: R. Oldenbourg. Monke, Fritz. 1968. Grundrissentwicklung und Aussehen des Berliner Mietshauses von 1850 bis 1914, dargestellt an Beispielen aus dem Stadtteil Moabit. Dissertation. Berlin: Technische Universität. Mülder-Bach, Inka. 1987. ‘Der Umschlag der Negativität: Zur Verschränkung von Phänomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Filmästhetik in Siegfried Kracauers Metaphorik der ‘Oberfläche’.’ Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 61: 359–61. Mumford, Lewis. 1963. Die Stadt: Geschichte und Ausblick. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Muybridge, Eadweard. 1887. Animal locomotion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania.

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Nagel, Josef. 1988. Frühe Entwicklungstendenzen einer medienspezifischen Filmsprache. Erlangen: Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Niessen, Carl. 1934. Der Film: eine unabhängige deutsche Erfindung. Emsdetten: Lechte. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 1990. ‘On History and the Cinema.’ Screen (2): 160–71. Oettermann, Stephan. 1980. Das Panorama: die Geschichte eines Massenmediums. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat. Pflug, G. 1980. ‘Lebensphilosophie.’ In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 5, edited by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel, 135–40. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Peirce, Charles S. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Vol. 1 (1867-1893). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Posener, Julius. 1979. Berlin auf dem Wege zu einer neuen Architektur: das Zeitalter Wilhelms II. München: Prestel. Quandt, Siegfried, and Hans Süßmuth, eds. 1982. Historisches Erzählen: Formen und Funktionen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Ranke, Leopold von. 1872. Abhandlungen und Versuche. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 24. Rüsen, Jörn. 1988. ‘Historische Methode.’ In Historische Methode, edited by Christian Meier, 62–80. München: DTV. Sadoul, Georges. 1946. Histoire générale du cinéma 1. Paris: Denöël. Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, ed. 1976. Das Stadthaus Berlin im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Sennett, Richard. 1983. Verfall und Ende des öffentlichen Lebens: die Tyrannei der Intimität. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Toeplitz, Jerzy. 1978. Geschichte des Films: Bd. 1. Berlin: Henschelverlag. Virilio, Paul. 1996. Un paysage d’évenements. Paris: Galilée. —. 2009a. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Voltaire. 1810. History of Charles XII, King of Sweden. Frederick-Town: John P. Thomson. Wiener, Alfred. 1912. Das Warenhaus. Berlin: E. Wasmuth. Zglinicki, Friedrich von. 1979. Der Weg des Films. Hildesheim: Olms Presse. Zielinski, Siegfried. 1999. Audiovisions. Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press.

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Beyond History and Memory: Historiography and the Autobiography of Television Abstract Hardly any representation of history on television can do without an implicit reference to the history of television itself. Taking up theories of collective memory, this chapter suggests to distinguish between history as referring to some external and cut-off past, and memory as an enduring, internal presence of past events. Memory is by no means a storing device, but an operative switch: it ensures that something that is perceived is either treated as something already known or as something new. In this sense, television treats external history within the framework of its own function for social memory. It takes from its own repertoire of forms and suggests that it has always been involved in all the historical events it represents. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, media history, historiography, memory, modernity

The purpose of this chapter is to establish a relationship between the history of television and the history shown on television. The representation of television history in relevant works of television historiography, which has rarely been discussed, might appear to have nothing to do with the often problematic representation of history on and through television (Knopp and Quandt 1988; Sobchack 1996; Roberts 2001). However, the clarification of their relationship is interesting if two additional ideas are taken into consideration. The first idea is that the representation of history is always, at the same time, a relation of production: history is not only the object but also the product of historiography. Like their historical context, historical facts are also constructed. The means of their construction – that is, the

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch09

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media of historiography – thus enable certain historical perspectives while simultaneously setting the conditions for their use. As with all representations, the representation of history and the media through which it is represented influence what is observed and described during the process of observation and description (Engell and Vogl 2001; Crivellari and Grampp 2004). This applies to the representation of television history as well as the representation of history on and through television. The second idea is merely a working hypothesis. While it will be applied here exclusively to television, it could presumably be extended to other forms of historiography as well. According to this hypothesis, the representation of history on television occurs basically as the observation of television’s own history. The means and object of representation exchange places, as television uses history as a lens through which it observes – that is, produces – its own past and its relation to the past. The representation of history on television can thus be seen as an endeavor that parallels the study of television history, whether in the form of written texts or museum exhibitions. In other words, television is not waiting for historians to write its history; rather, it is always already writing this history itself. The task of television historiography could then be to uncover television’s own autobiography, which is latent within its images, broadcasts, and programs. In the following attempt to confirm this hypothesis, there is one methodological distinction or differentiating feature that will play a key role – namely, the distinction between history and memory. Television’s past possibly shapes history as well as memory, as it refers simultaneously to the external horizon of the historical as well as to the internal horizon of television. As these other- and self-references are brought together, historiography and autobiography become interconnected. Television’s historical broadcasts thus remind viewers about something historical while, at the same time, they recall and reaffirm the history of television itself. This provides a basis for comparison that establishes a relationship between the study of television history and television’s production of its own past.

History and Memory The distinction between history and memory was first introduced by Maurice Halbwachs (1985; 1991) in the 1920s. It was developed in more specific detail in the 1950s, and it was widely discussed and elaborated in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Halbwachs, history is primarily a differential operation that employs distinctions and separations (see Halbwachs 1991,

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66-77). More specifically, history separates the past from the present and from direct experience. It also objectifies and reconstructs the past in order to examine the relations between the past and the present. By identifying discrete chronological stages, it also allows the shifts between stages to be observed, such as those between different epochs or styles.1 History is thus based on the fundamental assumption that its operations are generalizable and that the historical way of seeing things can outlast individual people, social groups, or even societies (see Halbwachs 1991, 71f). This does not mean that history excludes competing perspectives, and it does not contradict the idea that historiography is inherently driven by the interests of the present. Rather, it simply means that historiography claims to generalize and that differences in perspective can only be addressed within this context. Memory, on the other hand, assumes that the past is not gone but rather active and available in the present (see Halbwachs 1991, 39ff, 68). It is not discrete but rather continuous. Unlike history, therefore, it does not make shifts visible by distinguishing earlier conditions from one another and from present conditions; rather, it reveals that which remains constant throughout all memorable time. Memory also produces identity, which is based on a fundamentally spatial logic. It is for this reason that memory primarily articulates itself in and is bound to specific places – the ‘mnemotope’ (Halbwachs)2 or ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1984-1992) – rather than points in time. Unlike history, memory also does not allow or demand any generalizations about the entities that support it, regardless as to whether they involve individuals, social groups, or society as a whole (Halbwachs primarily speaks here of the ‘nation’). Collective memories establish the identity of a community or social group, and it is through these collective memories that different communities and groups distinguish themselves from one another. The social function of memory is thus based on the plurality of memories, which is contrary to history’s tendency towards universality. Both memory and identity dissolve together again. The fact that memory is associated with the particular rather than the universal also entails a further distinction between individual or personal memory and collective or social memory. Halbwachs insists that individual people only have personal (what he calls ‘autobiographical’) memories to the extent that they can be seen as independent of the social contexts in 1 The parallels between history and cinematography have been observed at various times, such as by Kracauer 1985, 115ff; 1971, 15f, 60–65, 124f; see also Mülder-Bach 1987. 2 See Maurice Halbwachs [1941], La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte (quoted in Assmann 1992, 41, 60ff.)

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which they are embedded – in other words, only to a very limited degree (see Halbwachs 1991, 34). Individual memory thus corresponds to personal life experiences, although it remains unclear what people would remember if they were not reminded of others. Collective memory, on the other hand, is a supra-individual, social instance of memory, which is linked to communication in the broadest sense. Whatever a social group talks about – whatever circulates in their communication – constitutes their collective memory. To go beyond Halbwachs, this is the place where the media come into play as agents of collective (and thus also of individual) memory.

Television and Memory Strangely and against all odds, the theory of collective or social memory that has been developed in Germany in recent decades has almost never been interested in television: the programmatic anthology Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses, for example, contains only a single article that refers to television – and then only among other media (Erll and Nünning 2004). There are no contributions on television in the volume Das soziale Gedächtnis edited by Harald Welzer (2001), and the same is true of Erinnerungskulturen (Cornelißen, Klinkhammer, and Schwentker 2004) and Kontexte und Kulturen des Erinnerns (Echterhoff and Saar 2002). Aleida Assmann´s book Erinnerungsräume actually has an extensive chapter on media, but it does not mention television (Assmann 1999). It remains to be seen whether this is due to intellectual arrogance, anxiety (as Cavell [1982] assumed), or simple ignorance. One of the few exceptions, however, is systems theory, which views collective or social memory as fundamentally connected to mass media and especially television (see Luhmann 2000, 37ff; Luhmann 1997, 569-594; Esposito 2002, 253-273). The function of television for collective memory in contemporary society is thus extremely obvious and only needs to be invoked here in a few key points. The circulation of certain images on and through television, which are always linked quasiritualistically to recurring dates and times, ensures their penetration into individual as well as collective memory, such as the television coverage of the terror attack on 11 September 2001, the tracer bullets over Baghdad, and the opening of the Berlin Wall; television also repeatedly analyses older images, such as journalistic photographs, which keeps them alive even though they were not produced for television. Television not only keeps these virtually universal images alive in memory, but it also facilitates the memorization of all sorts of particular elements.

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Images of collectively experienced catastrophes (like the 2002 flood in the German state of Saxony) as well as collectively experienced triumphs (especially in sports) constitute sharply contoured memories,3 and the consistent localizability of such images shows that collective memory tends to be spatially organized. The transmission structure of television also supports the spatial organization of collective memory, and this is particularly evident in the case of live television, which is fundamentally based on the visualization of a spatially fixed object (or event) in another location. The particularization of collective memory also continues in the fictional realm. The repetition of entertainment programs facilitates the formation of generational identities as well as memory communities, such as the fans of certain series or formats. Television’s ability to provoke and structure individual or personal memory also becomes evident when one observes the extent to which viewers remember not only the images repeated on television, which circulate in collective memory, but also how and in what context they previously saw them. Today, for example, most viewers are still able to recall precisely how and where they first saw the images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center. On the other hand, television also shows that collective memory always remains independent of individual memory, as it is by no means merely the sum of personal, autobiographical memories. Viewers generally recognize an image as a function of collective memory even when they are seeing it for the first time, as this is indicated by written comments, syntactical embeddings in the program, stylistic references, and material traces. The presence and independence of collective memory is particularly evident when viewers see television images for the first time, as they assume that these images exist in the personal memories of others and that ‘the public’ is already familiar with them, or could be familiar with them, even though they are not. Collective memory thus contributes to the constitution of individual memory – even when there is no actual event image.

Remembering and Forgetting The function of forgetting is also important (see Halbwachs 1985, 368; Assmann 1992, 37, 70ff). Sorting things out of collective memory – in other 3 The Miracle of Bern in 1954, when the German team won the football World Cup, was perhaps the last collective triumph that was not entirely dependent on television, although it was dependent on mass media.

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words, collective forgetting – is possibly more comprehensive and relevant because it ensures the adaptability and future development of social groups and prevents their communicative capacities from being depleted by repetition. As society changes, according to Halbwachs, only precisely as much is remembered as is necessary to preserve the identity of the group. Luhmann (1997) and Elena Esposito (2002, 12-43) have gone further than Halbwachs and Jan Assmann (1992, 46) by incorporating the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard (2000, 1975, 348f) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1988, 245-334), among others. For them, memory is not a form of storage; rather, it is operationally based on the distinction between remembering and forgetting. In other words, it always and only operates in the present by separating incoming events into the familiar and the new. While the former involves the practice of remembering, the latter involves the practice of forgetting. Esposito (2002, 260–265) argues that the mass-media system is based on this separation of the familiar from the new through the practices of remembering and forgetting. The central feature of the mass-media system is its ability to distinguish between the familiar or redundant and the new or informative (see also Luhmann 2000, 15-22). This is particularly true of television, as television must constantly decide which items to remove from circulation in order to make room for the new. This process occurs through repetition (see Esposito 2002, 266). Television’s repetitive operations are extremely diverse and conceptually delicate. It is assumed that only the structural characteristics of serials and ‘instant replays’ reflect the philosophy of repetition, as described by Kierkegaard (2000), Nietzsche (1988), and Deleuze (2014). However, these structures particularly show that the memory function of repetition lies in the distinction between the known and the unknown. The repetitive operations of television range from the ritualistic repetition of entire programs (such as Dinner for One, which is broadcast on German television about ten times every New Year’s Eve) to remakes (which are sometimes shown while the original series is still on the air) to reruns (depending on the season, three to five episodes of the German crime series Tatort could appear each week and the same feature films, like the James Bond series, could be shown repeatedly on various network or cable channels) to periodic replays of old news reports from earlier decades. 4 In each of these cases, quasi-editorial decisions are made concerning whether a program should be rebroadcast or retired, and every repetition is also identified as such. As a result, television viewers must constantly decide whether to remember – to appreciate the 4

Felix (2001) provides an overview of various repetition phenomena.

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program as familiar – or to forget – to see something new and interesting in the program (see Kierkegaard 1975, 337ff; Engell 1989, 248-256). That is the actual topic of a rebroadcast. It would be possible to extend Esposito’s considerations by recognizing two specific features of television’s repetitive operations, which are made apparent by the fact that these operations are becoming more common and in part more refined. The first is that remembering and forgetting do not appear to be polar opposites; rather, there is a gradual transition between them, which becomes evident in the temporal depth of the repetition of certain images. The second is that the development of television is characterized by its refusal to forget. This is only possible because the pure quantity of television broadcasts is technologically almost infinitely extendable. This extension, accompanied by a significant increase in the number of rebroadcasts, is a response to television’s inability to forget, and the thing that television cannot forget above all is its own past.

Television and History The distinction between history and memory is not simply theoretical or methodological; rather, it is an operation that is inherent to television itself and that it also performs on itself. Television thus occupies a special position of observation, as it simultaneously observes both sides of this distinction – the distanced and discrete past of its environment and its own present and identity-securing past – just as memory simultaneously observes both remembering and forgetting through the act of repetition (see Engell 1988). Television has even created a privileged area for this superimposition of externally referential history and internally referential memory. It is not without reason that historical programs evade, as much as possible, the binary opposition between news reports and entertainment programs, which first established television as a mass medium (Luhmann 2000; Esposito 2002, 264ff). On the basis of this distinction, television visualizes the differences between hetero-references to the world external to television – through news reports – and self-references to television’s own internal world – through fictional narratives. In both of these areas, television operates by distinguishing between redundancy (or remembering) and information (or forgetting) – in the first case through a difference in the external world that is observed in news reports and in the second case through an internally created difference that is observed in works of fiction. According to Esposito (2002, 264), television as a system contrasts itself

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with its environment by strictly separating both of these areas. Esposito’s argument can be extended, however, by considering how historical programs also blur this distinction by visualizing memory as uniting the differences between redundancy and information and by visualizing history as uniting the differences between news and entertainment, as will be shown. Television ultimately observes them both at the same time, and that is perhaps how it establishes the self-defining reflexivity of mass media, the possibility of which Esposito (2002, 267) fundamentally doubts. The primary forms employed in historical programs are visual documents and visual representations. The former is a form of testimony – of an interviewee (the so-called ‘contemporary witness’) or a place where something occurred – and the latter is a form of reconstruction (the ‘reenactment’ of historical scenes). Visual illustrations, such as maps and animation, are also used. These explanatory images are closely related to the (usually off-screen) commentaries of the narrators or experts. The organizational role of the montage should be mentioned too, as it coordinates the assemblage of the various material and formal elements. Historical programs do not necessarily use all of these forms, and they differ greatly in how they use them; nevertheless, significant commonalities can be noted.

Presence and Past In terms of visual documents, historical programs almost exclusively use technical images, such as photographs, film clips, and archival material from television itself. Interestingly, these images tend to be deployed not for their indexical functions, as would be expected, but rather for their iconic functions (Peirce 1983, 64ff; see also Walther 1979, 62-66). They do not substantiate what they represent by establishing a causal relationship between the event being depicted and the image of the event, which was triggered in the apparatus by the event itself. They reflect not the Barthesian dictum ‘that is how it was’ (see Barthes 1988, 76ff), which unsurprisingly represents a kind of historiographer’s creed (see Ranke 1872), but rather ‘that is how it was experienced’ or ‘that is how I experienced it’, which just as unsurprisingly represents a form of memory. In other words, they substantiate the event by representing someone’s participation in it. This transforms historiographic documentation, which distances and generalizes the past, into a form of remembering that proceeds via identification and particularization. What is important is not that these documentary images are recordings of an event, but rather that they come from the same

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situation and the same space as the event itself. Documentary images are thus conceived not as products or effects of the situations they document, which can be temporally delayed (as effects follow causes), but rather as part of these situations, as they occur at the same time. This can be explained using an admittedly extreme example. Films and photographs from the National Socialist period have an incredible presence and power due to the fact that the recording apparatuses and their operators must have been present in the scenes they depict, and these visual documents are fascinating – in an undoubtedly gruesome way – due to the fact that they even exist at all. They thus document not the events themselves – the scenes depicted – but rather those who were present at these events – the imaging technologies and their operators. In other words, they are part of the scenes they document rather than traces of these scenes. Rhetorically speaking, they represent a form of (iconic) pars pro toto rather than (indexical) monstratio. This applies even more to images of documents (second-order documents), such as filmed manuscripts or images of images and objects that play a role in the documented or reconstructed events. Generally speaking, these images are not concerned with the text of the manuscripts, which are not readable; if the text is important, it is frequently superimposed over the image as typographically distinct lettering or moving text. The manuscript itself is valuable not because of its content, but rather because of its iconic function: it is part of the same context that it is supposed to document. This preference for original objects is not unique to television, as it is common in many popular and trivial forms of historical representation (see Eco 1996); however, television instrumentalized and reshaped these popular forms.

Archive and Fiction In this context, it is also important to visit the original location of an event. Nearly every case of historical documentation on television includes images of the buildings and places where the event being reconstructed originally took place or could have taken place. Unlike historiography, which separates an event from the location where it took place, the organization of memory relies on such links between the past and a fixed, accessible place. Interestingly, television here takes advantage of its basic function as a medium of transmission that makes something in one place visible in another place (see Chapters 3 and 4 in this volume). The original location thus acquires elements of presence, as viewers see the place as it is shown here and now.

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At the same time, however, distance and difference are also introduced not only because the original location is not actually present (in the viewer’s living room), but also because it is shown merely as an aftereffect of the event. It is the same place, and yet it is not the same. Only the image can show – in combination with other images, if necessary – the aspects of the original event that still cling to the location. The image thus semioticizes the place, as it becomes the source of the relationship between the past and the present. It also reshapes this relationship as memory (through hetero-reference) and as history (through self-reference). Wherever the epistemology of the documentary is mobilized, it is accompanied by the epistemology of the fictitious. Historical programs on television make extensive use of reenacted historical scenes in the style of feature films. Unlike feature films or teleplays, however, historical programs employ fictionalization as a strategy of artificiality – namely, as medial fabrication. And whatever holds true for scenes and plots also holds true for original locations and objects, which can be reconstructed as sets and props; they replace or complement what is present as well as what is no longer present. In a significantly more frequent and conspicuous way, however, such reconstructions are also made apparent as such. In other words, television operates with a temporal division: it makes what is absent iconically present, yet, at the same time, it also creates a sense of distance by pointing out that what is shown is a mere reconstruction. Television thus oscillates between the processes of memory and historiography. By simultaneously offering them both as different perspectives on one and the same operation, television establishes itself as a link to the past, which also includes its own past. The replaying of visual documents in the course of historical programs nevertheless deserves special attention. Television here extensively unfolds its archive in front of the viewers’ eyes. It thus highlights its own repetitive activity (unlike advertising, in which repetition is unmarked ) and, more significantly, reveals how this process actually generates the historical. In November 2004, for example, there were countless programs dedicated to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which replayed again and again the news images of the decisive press conference announcing the opening of the border, the crowds gathered at border crossings, and the nightly scenes of people being welcomed on the other side. Contributions that historically reach back even further also allow television’s archival images to circulate again. Heinrich Breloer initiated a response to this practice in his teleplay Todesspiel (WDR 1997) by including news images, having actors reenact the represented situations, and then allowing witnesses to describe

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the events on camera. Archival materials are now increasingly integrated into current news programs, such as images of politicians who are now deceased or images of crimes whose perpetrators are now being sentenced. Television’s archive also includes stock images that were made long before the rise of television. The repeated broadcasts of visual documents, such as those from the National Socialist period, have established television as the place where these images can be experienced again and again, yet they are largely excluded from circulation in their ‘own’ area of distribution – namely, cinema. Television thus represents the total repertoire of all of the images in circulation, and all other images are in this way consigned to the prehistory of television. Television particularly emphasizes the inherently repetitive and archival nature of these images through overlays or commentaries that introduce a purely operative distinction between the familiar (redundant) and the new (informative) material, which tends to have little to do with ‘real’ temporal relations. As mentioned earlier, television makes the replayed images, which have already passed through the machinery of distribution, seem familiar, even if individual viewers may not recognize them. It is precisely by marking these images as repetitions that television produces collective memory, on which it relies. This not only reveals one of the structural paradoxes of repetition, which is logically a petitio principii, but it also shows how television facilitates grand, affirmational experiences that ultimately lead to the formation of identity; in this case, it actually leads to television’s own claim to identify with itself across all of the historical distance that separates the time of the broadcast from the time of the recording. Television thus acts as an instance of participation and proves itself to be a medium of presence in two senses, as it is present in the documented scene as well as in its own representation of the scene. It makes itself into a – more or less involved – universal witness (see Dayan/Katz 1992).

Indexicality and Self-Referentiality The iconic epistemology of participation shapes not only how television deals with the past, but also how it deals with its own past. In other words, it applies not only to ‘reenactments’ and other forms of historical reconstruction, but also to its (own) visual documents. As the theory of photography has repeatedly pointed out, the technical image is basically an overlay of the iconic and the indexical. The representation of history on television instrumentalizes these layers in a specific way. While the iconic

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layer is implemented as the positive copresence of the past and the present, the indexical layer is implemented conversely as the negative temporal distance between the past and the present. Material traces and indices serve to identify documentary images as ‘old’, such as scratches, jumps between images, color defects, and so forth. Age can also be conveyed by the stylistic features of the images themselves. For example, the lighting and the framing can be recognized as corresponding to earlier standards. This also applies to the behavior of the people in front of and behind the camera, such as their way of looking into the camera or the simple trait of smoking in the studio. The images also include features that correspond to the temporal depth of external everyday reality, such as hairstyles, glasses, fashions, cars, and the appearances of buildings and places, which can be considered derived indices. This distancing effect makes it possible to recognize a gradual transition between internally and externally referential features, depending on whether the time index is implemented through the material traces of the medium, the relationship between the images and the recorded event, or the references within the images to something beyond the images themselves. This transition also involves another intermediate step, as the distancing effect of the time index can be interpreted as a function of memory as well as of historiography. Edmund Husserl described individual, psychic memories as temporally distant, non-present, and negated (see Husserl 1966). However, historiography is also based on distanciation and chronological marking, as described by Halbwachs and Assmann. Derived indices, which refer to the fashions and styles of earlier everyday culture, are particularly important for this overlapping of the memorative and the historical. A characteristic feature is the marking of the past in terms of epochs and phases, such as a ‘typical 1950s look’. Such attributions are genuine historiographic techniques, and they are frequently reinforced by commentary for good measure. Television images thus act as records or historiographic documents, yet they are also embedded in collective and (when the temporal distance is short) individual memory. What is important in this context is the mechanism that records, expresses, and disseminates individual, collective, and medial memories as history. Just as television turns collective memories into historical (distant) records, it also historicizes the autobiography of the medium itself – that is, its self-referential memory. Television remembers itself and thereby creates its own supra-temporal identity, yet, at the same time, it also records these memories historiographically by distancing and objectifying them. Television thus views itself from a historical perspective, and this process

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is further enhanced when the historical indices superimposed over the material can be artificially added. Generally speaking, this technique is not at all convincing, but it allows television to control its own documents, as it can even manufacture its own archival records.5 Television thus writes history by rewriting its own history, such as when it pretends to be present in scenes that it could never have witnessed. All of history virtually becomes the memory space of television. This applies even more to the possible use of visual and increasingly digital animation. This imaging technology allows for reconstructive participation in any historical scene. It is especially used for the gray area between mythical memory and historical reconstruction, such as Troy, Atlantis, or the reign of the early Pharaohs; entirely fictional episodes of natural history, such as the lives of dragons; or projections of natural history in the future, such as the world in 50 million years. The way in which animation is used in historical television programs thus clearly differs from the way it is used in historical feature films. While historical films appear to provide direct access to the reconstructed past, like historiography, television constantly accesses the past through its own processes and thus shows that history is a product of these processes. For television, all of the past is part of its own past and all of history is part of its own history. Television’s self-referential horizon for history is not history but rather television itself. The various formats of the genre are connected to one another precisely by this reference to television’s own process of verification. This does not mean that a series like the infamous ZDF-History6 is identical to one of Breloer’s teleplays, an animated illustration of pyramid construction, or even Virtual History. However, all of these cases involve the use of both iconization and indexicalization, and they all tend to prioritize the presentation and thematization of the process of historical reconstruction above the representation of the historical event. This can occur implicitly through internal commentary, as with Breloer; explicitly through schematization and the verification of sources, as with Guido Knopp’s historical documentaries for German public service broadcaster ZDF; or performatively, as in Virtual History, which proudly demonstrates the technical capabilities of the medium. 5 The Discovery Channel series Virtual History uses artificial archival material produced through a complex mixture of digital and analogue processes to supplement or substitute for the lack of ‘new’ archival materials. The bold prediction is that someday it will no longer be possible to distinguish between ‘real’ and artificially produced archival material. I am grateful to my colleague Wolfgang Kissel for this valuable reference. 6 ZDF-History is a weekly historical documentary by German public service broadcaster ZDF (since 2000) frequently hosted by Guido Knopp.

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The represented history is always shown to be a product of the process of historical reconstruction, which marks television as the source of all sources – the ultimate limit of history itself.

Witnesses and Experts Another characteristic feature of historical programs is the use of interviews with witnesses and experts. As demonstrated earlier with regard to visual documents, witnesses similarly perform the iconic function of participating in historical events (as victims, perpetrators, bystanders, descendants, etc.), and it is usually through their participation that the importance of their memories is made clear. For the witnesses themselves these memories are simply recollections, but for the image they are already history. The complementary reference to historical distance is dropped, except in more complex cases that feature earlier, historical interviews, such as ZDF History. These interviews are then introduced as visual documents that refer directly to the historiographicmemorative function of television and the history of television itself. The testimonies given by witnesses are usually supplemented by statements from historians. Due to the historians’ lack of participation in the event and their need to generalize, their statements are fundamentally identified as historiographic – that is, distant from the past as history – and as a procedure of reappropriation. And, instead of focusing on participation or causation, they follow a relational epistemology – a symbolic way of knowing and representing – that relies on processes like comparing sources and relativizing events by connecting them to past events. There is also a paradoxical special form of experts who have expertise in matters that affect them personally; this is a form of expert witness who does not realize the event iconically and positively through participation but rather symbolically and comparatively through expert knowledge that is temporally and often also objectively distant. The off-screen commentary – the typically anonymous voice of the implied author and thus the personified self-representation of the program itself – also assumes the position of the historian or supplements the historian’s account. Whenever the documentary strategy uses the screen event as the subject and instance of memory, as extensively seen, the off-screen commentary uses it as an expert or historian. Television thus adheres to the special form of experts who have expertise in matters that affect them personally. This also applies to the forms of montage that link the various documentary and interview elements. By switching between sources and

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reconstructions or descriptions and commentary, they are either juxtaposed with or subordinated to one another in a variable and revisable way. It is therefore characteristic of historical programs that they do not strive to conceal the reconstructive nature of their historical representations; rather, they explicitly represent the process of reconstruction itself. The different temporal levels and relations can be freely controlled, selected, and updated, as in a control room. Television propagates itself as a tour through its own production facilities and, above all, its own archives as well as its animation and editing departments. However, the functional or processual nature of television is also characteristic of memory. Historical programs visualize the memory of television, and they thus perform the operations that distinguish between remembering (the familiar) and forgetting (the new) as well as between memory (self-reference) and history (hetero-reference).

Television History and Universal Memory Television represents history (as well as its own history) not as an object but rather as a process – indeed, as the process of television itself. This distinguishes the standard description of television historiography in media studies from television’s view of its own past, as history lives within the memory of television – that is, within its own operative inner space. Television thus describes itself and its own past historiographically as the place where the (idealized) totality of history arises as the cumulative effect or infinite sum of particular memories. It becomes a self-reproducing universal memory. According to Aleida Assmann (1999, 130-143), history is also the memory of memories. In other words, it is a second-order memory that makes a first-order memory possible or else observes and thus re-remembers it. Despite the fact that this idea contradicts the underlying assumption of systems theory that history and memory constitute two different horizons of self-reference (Luhmann 1997, 573f, 576f), it is interesting with regard to television precisely because, like the medium itself, it weakens the polarity of history and memory. Instead, Assmann distinguishes between (memorative) ‘functional memory’ and (historiographic) ‘storage memory’ (Assmann 1999, 130-142). Assmann’s idea could be extended to television by conceiving of historical programs as producing ‘storage memory’ as a subfunction of ‘functional memory’. Television would then facilitate transitions between both orders of the past, although this would require it to view itself and its (functional) memory as the foundation and horizon of all of history, including its own history.

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Television operates in a space that is beyond the difference between history and memory – or, to be more precise, it observes the unity of this difference. It constantly operates on both sides of this difference simultaneously. Sometimes it highlights one side and sometimes it highlights the other side, yet this emphasis is always revisable and repeatable – qualities that correspond with the medium itself. Depending on the perspective and the context, it is possible to read television’s own history (or historiography) as the largest and most highly differentiated collective memory or to read its own process of remembering (or autobiography) as both a universalizable and specializable history. The history of television is the history of its memory, and the memory of television is the memory of its history. From the perspective of television, the history of the world is its own and the world’s autobiography. Television is the simultaneous space where all of the layers of the past are adjacent to one another, including all of the layers of television’s own past. It could be worth writing this no longer chronological, linear, and causal but rather horizontal, potential, and contingent autobiography – that is, the universal memory of television – if not for the danger that it would almost inevitably be reduced to the historiography of television.

References Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck. Assmann, Jan. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Barthes, Roland. 1988. Camera lucida. New York: The Noonday Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1982. ‘The Fact of Television.’ Daedalus 111 (4): 75–96. Cornelißen, Christoph, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Wolfgang Schwentker, eds. 2004. Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag. Crivellari, Fabio, and Sven Grampp, eds. 2004. Die Medien der Geschichte: Historizität und Medialität in interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Konstanz: UVK. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard Univ. Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2014. Difference and Repetition. London: Bloomsbury. Echterhoff, Gerald, and Martin Saar, eds. 2002. Kontexte und Kulturen des Erinnerns: Maurice Halbwachs und das Paradigma des kollektiven Gedächtnisses. Konstanz: UVK. Eco, Umberto. 1996. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Minerva.

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Engell, Lorenz. 1988. ‘Wechselwirtschaft und vertauschte Ansprachen.’ Tumult (11): 102–15. —. 1989. Vom Widerspruch zur Langeweile. Frankfurt am Main, Bern: P. Lang. Engell, Lorenz, and Joseph Vogl. eds. 2001. Archiv für Mediengeschichte – Mediale Historiographien. Weimar: Universitätsverlag. Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2004. Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität ‒ Historizität ‒ Kulturspezifität. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Esposito, Elena. 2002. Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1985. Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1991. Das kollektive Gedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Wissenschaft. Husserl, Edmund. 1966. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. The Hague: Nijhoff. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1975. Entweder ‒ Oder. Köln: J.Hegner. —. 2000. Die Wiederholung. Hamburg: F.Meiner. Knopp, Guido, and Siegfried Quandt, eds. 1988. Geschichte im Fernsehen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 2000. The Reality of Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. München: DTV. Nora, Pierre. 1984-1992. Les Lieux de mémoire: Tome 1-3. Paris: Gallimard. Peirce, Charles S. 1983. Phänomen und Logik der Zeichen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Ranke, Leopold von. 1872. Abhandlungen und Versuche. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 24. Roberts, Graham, ed. 2001. The Historian, Television and Television History. A Collection. Luton: University of Luton Press. Sobchack, Vivian, ed. 1996. The Persistence of History. Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. London/New York: Routledge. Walther, Elisabeth. 1979. Allgemeine Zeichenlehre: Einführung in die Grundlagen der Semiotik. Stuttgart: DVA. Welzer, Harald. 2001. Das soziale Gedächtnis: Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.

10 On Series Abstract Seriality is one of the most striking manifestations of modernity. The identical (and mainly spatial) seriality of production processes can be distinguished from differential (and mainly temporal) seriality as it emerges, especially in modern art. On television, the episodic series differs from the continuing serial. Series offer a closed action in each episode; the individual episodes do not build upon one another, but reproduce a previous scheme. Continuing serials form a fluid and dynamic stream of development. This chapter describes the most important characteristics of both forms and outlines a third type of television’s seriality, the neo-series, which emerged in the 1990s. Contrary to the principal endlessness of the early forms of seriality, the neo-series is marked by its finitude. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, seriality, series, serial, reproduction

There can be little doubt that the consumer society of the 20th century goes along with series and seriality (Beil, Engell, et al. 2017, 12-15). It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the middle of the 20th century, a powerful new medium emerged that can be read as a huge experiment with time and especially with the possibilities of seriality and the production of time by series. This medium, of course, is television. A comparable richness of different serial forms has never been developed anywhere else. Television shows circulate commodities as well as streams of moving images. And during the evolution of the television series, the opposition between those rooted in identity and hence in space and those rooted in difference and hence in time has been more or less systematically iterated, reiterated, differentiated, and folded back on itself (Deleuze 1969, 36-37). One might even assume that the astounding career of television happened due to the need for such a space where experiments with serial time and its forms could be undertaken and that, inversely, our thinking about seriality – even

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch10

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in philosophical terms – is deeply affected by the serial operations and practices of television. Watched closely, though, television’s position towards seriality, as we will develop here, differs from both the identical and the differential series. In its beginnings, television did not deliver anything stable in time. It had no reified product. Television images could neither be copied nor stored, and therefore they were not reproducible. Once they were broadcast, they faded away (Bazin 2014, 44-45, 48-50). Before 1952-1953, there was no recording of electronic images, and other than the ‘filmed series’ from the mid 1950s on, there were very few recordings done in the TV industry until well into the 1960s (Abramson 2003, 50-72). Early television operated mainly in the so-called ‘live’ mode, so its way of making and marking time was somewhat different from the circulation of consumer goods or moving images. Seriality was based neither on one identical model reproduced in numbers and distributed in space nor on its variation, such as in the differential type of series, but rather on repetition in time. The process of repetition is quite different, of course, as it is not subject to any model, type, matrix, or fulfillment. Once repeated, the original is lost and the copy changes into an original of its own, which is then replaced by a new original.

Episodic Series This is exactly what happened in the episodic series format that emerged around 1950, and this same structure was maintained even when television production switched from live drama to recorded series in the 1960s. At this time, the possibility of reproduction was only introduced on the production side, and it was not available on the reception side until the arrival of the VCR as a commodity in the 1980s. The structural change from reproduction in space to repetition in time, which was due to the characteristic combination of technologies that constituted television in the 1960s, finally produced specific semantics in the episodic series (Buxton 1990). The diegetic world produced by episodic series can be read as a reflection, or maybe a repetition, of their time structure. In the case of classic television series with selfcontained episodic structures, like Bonanza, or Star Trek, it was possible to change the position of each episode in the sequence without consequences. The same was true of the worlds they depicted, as everything was always happening as if for the first time, and all of the characters dealt with it as if it were so. They never remembered that they had lived through an almost identical adventure the week before, and they never seemed to have learned

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anything from it. To be more precise, it seemed as if they may have had some memories, but they suppressed them on purpose in very much the same way that the viewers did. In other words, the worlds depicted on these series were more or less Kierkegaardian worlds full of routinized, repetitive behaviors that were only made bearable through the temporalizing aesthetic practice of active forgetting (Kierkegaard 1975, 2000). This is why it was possible for a crucial and iconic character like Adam Cartwright to disappear from Bonanza at a certain point without leaving any trace. It is hence difficult to say if such an episode is a singular object or a serial product, as it is obviously both at the same time and it thus combines two different temporal regimes. This was more implicit in Bonanza, but it was made explicit in Star Trek, as the very first episode dealt with Captain Kirk’s own past being re-performed and transformed into something new in a way that deceived him even though he had lived it himself. An even more striking example can be seen in the famous comeback of Bobby Ewing on the legendary 1980s series Dallas. Half a year after his death, Bobby reappeared in his wife’s bathroom and the whole time in between suddenly turned out to have been a dream. In other cases, the past was switched as well, such as when new characters suddenly appeared out of a formerly unknown past. The past, in the series, is not a fact; rather, it is constantly being made and remade according to the affordances of the present. When understood as the semantization of television’s own structural time, this practice leads us to its operations in constructing its own past and at television history as being operated by television itself. According to Luhmann, this is precisely what history is: the free, deliberate, and decontextualized access of a system to its own former states and past events according to the needs of the present in which the system is operating (Luhmann 1984, 118, 175). If we accept this idea, then the different types of television series can be distinguished as historiographies according to the way they address and assemble the past. In this context, one might also consider the striking resemblance between the way the episodic series accesses the past and the set of operations that are crucial to what we call ‘archeology’. As a method, the aim of archeology is to reconstruct past presences as they are produced in closed temporal layers of different discursive and nondiscursive operations, practices, and forces (Foucault 2002, 3-13; Parikka 2012). Like the episodes of a television series, therefore, these past presences constitute single layers of synchronicity. In archeology, there is no advance in time or evolution, and the past is neither told nor viewed in the way we view films; rather, it is monitored by viewers as they watch TV, especially in the case of the episodic series.

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Soap Operas and Flow The continuing series is based on a completely different principle – namely, flow. This principle is perhaps best represented by daily soap operas. Each episode of a soap opera is open to its preceding and succeeding episodes and contains at least three separate chains of action: one at the beginning, one at the ending, and one in the middle. This means that time is only weakly marked. It is observed while it is being made, but it is not tracked within the diegetic world of the soap opera; rather, it flows. Nothing ever returns, but everything has to be read as an effect of what happened before. While the heroes in episodic series act but do not learn, as we have seen, the characters in soap operas learn (or at least try to learn) but hardly ever act. This is precisely why the favored type of shot in a soap opera is the close-up, whereas, in an episodic series, it is the medium shot. The temporal effect is also inverted: as Muriel Cantor, Suzanne Pingree, and Tania Modleski have shown, whatever happens arises as something that is already familiar (Cantor and Pingree 1983, 11-12). Being or becoming familiar means not being or becoming identical to what viewers have already seen but rather resembling and recalling it. In terms of time, familiarization means that something has a link to past experience and leads to some expectation of future developments. The events in a soap opera are always read as subsequent and hence as a consequence of earlier events (which may or may not be known) and as bearing consequences for future events. In contrast to the characters in an episodic series, therefore, the characters in a soap opera must have memories and expectations, and every close-up is imbued with the processes of recalling and foreseeing. Even if this is never overtly shown or displayed, the close-up derives its affect from other images – that is, from the past and the future – much like Deleuze’s famous concept of the ‘affection-image’ (Deleuze 1986, 102-106). It is this quality of being affected by time rather than an action-reaction or stimulus-response scheme that transforms the serial structure of the soap opera into one coherent flux of time. Once again, the diegetic world serves as a referentialization or semanticization of the structural qualities of the format. This structure is not repetition, of course, but rather the often-disputed quality of televisual ‘flow’, which was first described by Raymond Williams in 1973 and which has been much discussed in television theory ever since (Williams 2008, 77-120). Flow refers to TV’s ability to create a coherent and continuous stream of information out of articulate, highly fragmented, and completely incoherent sequences of moving images, episodes, or program elements. The format of the soap opera thus mirrors the flow of television as a whole. In

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other words, it represents the temporal structure of television at the same time that the structure itself is being produced. It is also possible to conceive of the format of the continuing series as television’s way of historizing itself according to distinguishable epistemic approaches, as it is possible to draw an analogy between the quality of televisual flow and the process of historicization (see Chapter 8 in this volume). In sharp contrast to archeology, historicism focuses on tracing linear chains of action or thought (i.e. identifying how one incident leads to the next). In other words, it looks at presence (current or past) as a product of previous presences and as a condition for later ones. The aim of historicism is thus to make sense of one state of being by ascribing its cause to a previous state and explaining its effects on subsequent states. The result is that the past is not really past, as it is always still affecting the present as well as the future. If it is not yet obvious, the past can also be revised and reconstructed. In short, historicist history conceives of the past as one huge entity of englobing and floating time – one big presence – that resembles the temporal structure of television soap operas.

Television Philosophy Until today, television philosophy does not seem to have taken any notice of the difference between reproduction and repetition or, within the realm of repetition, the difference between the temporal regimes of the episodic and flow formats. On the contrary, television’s temporal structure has more than once been reduced to the spatial terms of reproduction. When German philosopher Günther Anders wrote his impressive and widely underrated essay ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’ in 1956, he described television precisely in terms of serial production and what he called ‘economic ontology’ (Anders 1956). For him, television is a ‘matrix’ designed to imprint thought and behavior on viewers according to its stereotypes. The economic logic of the matrix calls for endless identical copies of one and the same model, and, as a result, the world gradually becomes identical to the matrix itself. According to Anders, this leads directly to the serial structure of the continuing series. One plot, one setting, and one type of character are copied endlessly in subsequent episodes, which, from this point of view, are ontologically not really subsequent but rather kept in one and the same synchronicity. For Anders, therefore, time is transformed into space. This argument was reiterated in television theory for decades with little to no alteration until Cavell published his highly influential essay ‘The Fact of

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Television’ in 1982 (Cavell 1982; see Chapter 1 in this volume). Cavell’s famous distinction between ‘monitoring’ and ‘viewing’ refers to the difference between television and film by describing the televisual world as an everlasting and eventless present and the filmic world as constantly evolving over time. The archeological regime of the episodic series could be affiliated with the specificity of monitoring, as it negates and neutralizes the active memory of the viewer, as mentioned earlier, and thus works against the viewer’s temporal involvement or immersion in the narrative. In the historicist regime of the continuing series, however, the world evolves in linear time and is immersed by the viewer’s memory. In this way, it is closer to what Cavell described as the mode of viewing associated with film specatorship. A similar tendency can be seen in the works of other theorists, even with respect to the flow model of seriality. Flow is also widely read as a process that produces sameness, identity, or redundancy (Feuer 1983; Wulff 1995). All of the possible contradictions and paradoxes between the distinct elements from which televisual flow emerges (i.e. individual shows, episodes, shots, etc.) are made inarticulate and at last impossible in the overall flux of time that unites everything into one big stream. For Anders, again, one of the main ontological features of television is the familiarization of the world, which leads to the erasure of the exteriority of the world (Anders 1956). Television thus becomes a question of space – namely, the relationship between some ‘inside’ and some ‘outer world’. Cavell similarly described the outer world as completely cut off from reach, turned into a subject of sheer surveillance, and thereby deprived of any possible change in time (Cavell 1982, 94-96). For Anders, the outer world is not inaccessible but rather annihilated in an excess of accessibility, by which he means not television’s accessibility to the world but rather the world’s accessibility to what he calls the home or the family. According to Anders, the world’s resistance to the human will is extinguished, and hence the world (as conceived of in ontological and anthropological traditions) vanishes (Anders 1956). Temporal familiarization via memory and coherence thus leads to the emergence of one inarticulate coherent space. Again, as for repetition before, the differential series is reduced to the identical series and the temporal is reduced to the spatial.

Neo-Series: Limitation and Complexity There is, though, a third and still different type of TV series that has evolved remarkably during the last 20 years, which I would like to call the ‘neo-series’. Neo-series can be characterized by a temporal structure and temporal

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semantics that go beyond the duality of identical repetition and differential flow. This makes it difficult to reduce it theoretically to the terms of spatial and identical reproduction. I would like to suggest three main temporal characteristics of neo-series, the first and most important of which is a limitation of time. The format and diegetic world of neo-series are always heading towards an end in time, either implicitly or explicitly, as in the case of Twin Peaks (especially in its first season), 24, Breaking Bad, and FlashForward (Grampp and Ruchatz 2015). This is an inversion since in the previous case – namely, that of the continuing series or soap opera – the qualities of the medium (i.e. televisual flow) were, as we saw, condensed into each individual episode. In this case, however, the qualities of the episode – namely, its well-defined slot in the television schedule – is projected onto the format and then folded back into the individual episodes. This results in the form of either time pressure, as in the example of 24, or time dilatation, as in the example of Twin Peaks’s first season. Through both acceleration and retardation, the flow of time becomes explicit. This is particularly evident on 24, which features a constantly running clock, but it is also evident on Twin Peaks, which emphasizes the contrast between the extreme violence of the crime and the extreme slowness of both the FBI agent and the residents of the village. The absence of temporal change and the contrast between acceleration and delay are even subject to the action depicted on long-running series like CSI (for a more extensive discussion, see the following chapter). Time limitations also affect the structure of the format. If the temporal limitation is projected onto the diegetic world, for example, then the format itself can keep its useful endlessness by adding more and more episodes between the current episode and the actual end of the series. An almost indefinite number of episodes can be inserted between two successive episodes. As a result, the time scale within the format becomes variable, and temporal progress becomes partly asymptotic. This operation may have been inherited from the continuing series, as there are no temporal limitations on soap operas, but its asymptotic character does not produce any paradox between endlessness and finiteness. Some examples include the second and third seasons of Twin Peaks and Ally McBeal, where there is continuity and coherence between episodes, yet there is no progress toward a final conclusion. The external time limitation on 24 also results in a kind of internal endlessness, as does Walter White’s race against his death on Breaking Bad (Koch 2015). Due to time pressure, the number of images must be augmented. Either the number of shots and the frequency of cuts must be substantially increased

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or additional images must be included within the images themselves. 24, for example, uses split screens to depict multiple events occurring at the same time. CSI similarly features three parallel-running sub-formats as well as large numbers of screens, projections, and photographs that appear within the image and are subject to time axis manipulation, which is also the case on Lie To Me. Twin Peaks also features a fictional television series titled Invitation to Love within the series itself, and The Sopranos features a TV screen in the kitchen that shows what will soon happen within the episode. In FlashForward, these images even reach into a past that is simultaneously also a vision of a future to avoid. The neo-series is thus marked by all of the paradoxes of time travel and predestination. While time is limited in terms of its linear trajectory, temporal complexity arises as one of the major issues in its narrative structure.

Neo-Series: Transformation and Seriality The second temporal characteristic of neo-series is transformation, as neo-series always deal with something becoming different or transforming into something else – in other words, a metamorphosis. On Twin Peaks, for example, several characters transform into avatars of evil. Metamorphosis is also the main theme of Ally McBeal, wherein the characters are subject to instantaneous alteration performed by computer-animated images. Breaking Bad features numerous transformations: from life to death and back to life, from reality to dream to hallucination, from good to bad and back to good, from one image into another image. It also features the transformation of chemical substances into drugs as well as alterations of the brain and behavior under their influence (Engell 2014b). The Sopranos also features transformation through the hero’s psychotherapy, and the semantic here emerges once again from the transformational qualities of the format itself. Neo-series often have preceding parts, such as flashbacks or prologues, which are placed before an episode and look ahead to the next episode, which appears not only at the end but is already an interstice that bridges the commercial break and the continuation of the series. The transitions between an episode and its context or between successive episodes are thus smoothened by a step-by-step transformation of one into the other. The same can be observed in the television image itself through the introduction of new digital technologies, which grant the TV image an almost infinite plasticity, as well as new forms of production, distribution, and global exchange, which subject television itself to profound changes.

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The third temporal characteristic of neo-series has been observed by my colleague Oliver Fahle, who showed that ‘forensic series’ such as CSI, Crossing Jordan, and Cold Case display the human body in two different series of images (Fahle 2011). The first is a sequence of nearly still frames showing the immobile dead body from outside, while the second consists of rapidly animated images that penetrate and traverse the body, as if a virtual camera had been installed in a projectile or hypodermic needle (for more on forensic series, see Chapter 13 in this volume). Similar decompositions of the series into two or more lines of images governed by different temporal regimes can be observed in many neo-series. Fahle interprets these images with the help of Deleuze’s concept of serialization as the core operation in the genetic, creative, and evolutionary process of sense-making. According to Deleuze, serialization is based on the overlapping and interfering effects of two completely independent sequences or subseries: a repetitive sequence and a continuously flowing sequence (Deleuze 1969, 42-48). When these sequences touch and intersect, they generate complications, complexities, and paradoxes in many different ways. The sequence of these paradoxical units constitutes a third series of improvised moments of interference, and it is this third series that constitutes and marks a transformation or creation – that is, the coming into being of something new. The neo-series can thus be understood as the effect of a non-dialectical interplay of the two types of television series mentioned above – namely, the episodic and the continuing series. One could read the neo-series affirmatively in terms of Deleuze’s concept of serialization or critically to show that Deleuze’s concept could have been conditioned by the regime of television, which reached its peak between 1965 and 1990.

Historiogenesis For the two former types of television series, I have speculated that they could be part of two different historiographic regimes: the archeological regime for the episodic series and the historicist regime for the continuing series. The neo-series would then lead to a third, different, and perhaps not yet conceptualized historiographic operation. This operation would transcend the aforementioned opposition between the coherent integration of events on a timeline (historicism) and the synchronical cut through fields of forces that generate past presences (archeology). It would aim to understand not causation but rather creation – that is, the emergence of unprecedented and unforeseeable change. It would also concentrate on the very delicate microprocess of one presence turning into another one.

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Why is it that television might be interested in producing a perspective on history as a chain of creativity? Neo-series not only reflect a specific temporal regime and its technology but can also be read as television’s observation of the media’s own historic situation. According to the neo-series, and hence to television itself, the media is running out of time. But this observation is also, at the same time, an operation, and if this operation were understood as a short-circuit or reentry, then it would be subject to further research and discussion. I would suggest extending Cavell’s model by describing it as the interplay of viewing and monitoring – in other words, as a third mode that integrates observation and operation (Cavell 1982, 85-86). The events produced and portrayed in neo-series are both observations of the media’s historic situation and incidents in the evolution of the media being observed (Beil, Engell, et al. 2017, 24-28). In this sense, television is becoming historiogenetic, as TV serial production, as an observation, is becoming part of the history that it itself constitutes (Engell 2001a). Television observes, and through this observation it dissolves into a much wider regime of images with highly differentiated provenances and pasts. Television does not know how long this dissolving process will last or how many steps it will entail. In the meantime, it splits itself into different types of images and at the same time integrates them into its own image. Television is continuously transforming itself into something else, although it does not know exactly what it will become (Beil, Engell, et al. 2017, 124-142).

References Abramson, Albert. 2003. The History of Television, 1942 to 2000. Jefferson/London: McFarland. Anders, Günther. 1956. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. München: Beck. Bazin, André. 2014. André Bazin’s new media. Edited and tranlated by Dudley Andrew. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Beil, Benjamin, Lorenz Engell, Dominik Maeder, Jens Schröter, and Herbert Schwaab, eds. 2017. Die Fernsehserie als Agent des Wandels. Münster: Lit. Verlag. Buxton, David. 1990. From the Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cantor, Muriel G., and Suzanne Pingree. 1983. The Soap Opera. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Pub. Cavell, Stanley. 1982. ‘The Fact of Television.’ Daedalus 111 (4): 75–96. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. The Logic of Sense. London: The Athlone Press.

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—. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Engell, Lorenz. 2001a. ‘Die Genetische Funktion des Historischen in der Geschichte der Bildmedien.’ In Archiv für Mediengeschichte – Mediale Historiographien, edited by Lorenz Engell and Joseph Vogl, 33–56. Weimar: Universitätsverlag Weimar. —. 2014b. ‘Zur Chemie des Bildes: Bemerkungen über Breaking Bad.’ In Bildwerte: Visualität in der digitalen Medienkultur, edited by Gundolf Freyermuth and Lisa Gotto, 195–208. Bielefeld: Transcript. Fahle, Oliver. 2011. ‘Das Bild und das Sichtbare und das Serielle: Eine Bildtheorie des Fernsehens angesichts des Digitalen.’ In Blickregime und Dispositive audiovisueller Medien, edited by Nadja Elia-Borer, Samuel Sieber, and Georg C. Tholen, 111–33. Bielefeld: Transcript. Feuer, Jane. 1983. ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.’ In Regarding television: critical approaches ‒ an anthology, edited by E. A. Kaplan, 12–21. Los Angeles: University publications of America. Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Archeology of Knowledge. London: Taylor and Friends. Grampp, Sven, and Jens Ruchatz. 2015. Die Fernsehserie: Eine medienwissenschaftliche Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1975. Entweder ‒ Oder. Köln: J. Hegner. —. 2000. Die Wiederholung. Hamburg: F. Meiner. Koch, Gertrud. 2015. Breaking Bad. Zürich: Diaphanes. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What is Media Archeology. Malden, MA: Polity Press.l Williams, Raymond. 2008. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge. Wulff, Hans J. 1995. ‘Flow. Kaleidoskopische Formationen des Fern-Sehens.’ montage a/v 4 (2): 21–39.

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The Art of Television: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Family Resemblance’ and the Media Aesthetics of the Television Series Abstract This chapter further examines the seriality of television with the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’. According to Wittgenstein, the members of a family do not belong together on the basis of a fixed number of characteristics. Rather, some members of the family share some traits with some others, while others share other traits. Accordingly, television seriality is not based on the ongoing repetition of the same basic elements, but on the passing on and not passing on of elements from one episode to the next. The neo-series shifts the family resemblance beyond the level of the episodes. It constantly generates and discusses properties that can then be passed on or not passed on. Keywords: television theory, seriality, family resemblance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, reproduction, cliff-hanger

Time Slots and Titles Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953 (Wittgenstein 1984a), which was coincidentally also the high point of the ‘golden age’ of American television. We know nothing of Wittgenstein’s television experience, but his book dealt with the problem of the definitional power of concepts. He argued that, with regard to the living use of language, it is impossible to explain precisely and conclusively when and on the basis of which features a concept comprises an object or phenomenon. In a short and frequently cited passage, he refers in particular to games, which not coincidentally was also one of his own central concepts (Ibid., 225-580; here

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch11

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276-283 [§ 65-§ 76]). According to Wittgenstein, the concept of the game does not refer to any single consistent characteristic common to all activities. There are similarities between games that share certain characteristics and properties, but there are no common features that are exhibited by all games. For example, many but not all games feature competition with winners and losers. Ball, card, and board games also have common as well as distinctive features, as there are some similarities between all of these categories yet the features shared by all of the games in one category would not necessarily be shared by those in other categories. The total number of features exhibited by games is thus distributed over many different games, and no effective distinction can be made between essential and accidental features; rather, the similarities that hold the multitude of games together under this concept could emerge and disappear, depending on how they are viewed. Like colors, numbers, pages, or chairs, games are not conceptually or logically linked but rather related to one another, and they thus constitute a family. Instead of a strictly defined conceptual limit, Wittgenstein saw here ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: similarities in the large and in the small’ (Ibid., 278 [§ 66]), which he also describes as a ‘family resemblance’ (Ibid., § 67). He thus explicitly broke away from the philosophically rigorous and persistent demand for logical and precise distinctions between concepts in his polemics against Gottlob Frege (Wittgenstein 1984a, 280 [§ 71]). According to Wittgenstein, it is precisely imprecise images and photographs that are operative and cannot be replaced by precise images. Wittgenstein also employed the metaphor of spun threads, whose strength is due to the fact not that a single thread is woven throughout the whole, but rather that a huge number of different threads are overlaid with one another (Ibid., 278 [§ 67]). A family resemblance is thus a product of the living practice of attribution or observation. Wittgenstein repeatedly says ‘see’ (Ibid., 281 [§ 72], 529, 590; Gründler 2008, 79-90; Schulte 1989, 205), and this applies not to a generic category but rather to the genetic transfer or transmission of properties and features between family members. In his foundational and encyclopedic article on family resemblances, Gottfried Gabriel summarizes their four main features as follows (Gabriel 1980, 631-632): first, family resemblances are a question of (variable, but not voluntary) observation and attribution rather than a solid state of existence; second, they always exist between at least three elements of a family, whereby the third element represents the transfer between the other two and thus constitutes the aspect in which they are similar to one another; third, they develop in the linear

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time of a before and after, so every family member occupies a fixed, quasidatable position in the line of development; 1 fourth, in the extreme case that individual family members are very distant from one another on this line, they do not have to share any single feature with one another in order to belong to the family as long as there is a mediating line of transmission between them. This chapter will use the idea of family resemblances to discuss how we understand the concept of a ‘series’ on television, how series development and seriality function on television, and how the specific aesthetics of the television medium come into effect as a material aesthetic of time. Next to live transmissions, the series is the dominant aesthetic, epistemic, ontological, and cultural form of television. Serial access to the world was already identified early on as the ontological foundation of television itself (Anders 1956, 99-198, here 180f), and during the peak of television in the 1980s, it was once again used against television as a formal, existential, and anthropological characteristic (Cavell 1982). At first glance, one might assume that the family-resemblance problem does not precisely apply to televisual seriality. If a television series as a whole is conceived as the family and the individual episodes that it comprises are conceived as the members or elements of the family, then all of the members of the series family would appear to share countless features with one another, beginning with the title of the series and its fixed time slot. There are actually serial forms that condense a group of largely heterogeneous broadcasts or episodes into a single identifiable unit through a title and time slot rather than the transfer of features, such as golden-age platforms like The Philco Television Playhouse or Kraft Television Theatre, later anthologies series like The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and contemporary formats like Tatort (Barnouw 1990; Marschall 1980). Nevertheless, a closer look shows that this is not the case. With regard to the title of a series or serialized program (news broadcasts, magazine formats, etc.), it is important, as in the debate over family resemblance, that the mere existence of a commonly used word (or title) is not sufficient to support the claim of a unified concept (Goeres 2000, 273f). Instead, the question is which set of features or even which network of similarities must be exhibited in order for an entity to be included under one preexisting concept rather than another. In other words, why would the episode of a series that possibly has no features in common with other episodes of the same series not simply function under the title of another series? 1

For more on this genealogical aspect, see Goeres 2000, 272ff.

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The question of the time slot is more complicated. The rise of ‘new television’ (partially or entirely digital television) and the continuation of television by other means (Internet, DVD, etc.) has resulted in a decoupling of the transmission and the time slot (Stauff 2005), and what remains is only the sequence of the episodes as such. It thus appears that the question of the time slot is only meaningful in the context of traditional broadcast television. Its replacement is by no means complete and comprehensive, however, as the consumption of television series on DVD usually takes place in ritualized and rhythmized ways and thus in a kind of serialized sequence, such as every evening. In web-based television forms like Netflix, moreover, streaming is still related to the program sequence, as uploading is linked (albeit loosely) to release dates. This is also true of the distribution of television series on DVD, although it no longer applies to individual episodes but rather to entire seasons. The standards of traditional broadcast television thus continue to function like a medial habitus even though they no longer have a technological basis (Bourdieu 1984, 99-124). There is a reason for this with regard to the series. In contrast to what one might initially expect, the time of the broadcast is so interwoven with the series itself that it cannot be understood as a feature of the series without conversely understanding the broadcast as a feature of the time. The example of the soap opera proves this: it is continually broadcast every morning at a fixed time so that it ideally appeals to the housewife who works at home and optimally adapts to the routinized rhythms associated with housework (or these rhythms adapt to it) (Modleski 1983). With regard to this reciprocal adaptation of housework and broadcast rhythm, the time slot is not an unmarked feature of the soap opera; rather, the opposite is true. It is thus possible to ask what all mornings around 11:00 have in common. No matter what it is, it will undoubtedly include the broadcast of a series for its viewers. It is therefore not the evening that accounts for the newscast but rather the reverse. The time slot contributes no more and no less to the family identity of a series than the series contributes to that of weekdays and times of the day. In other words, the similarity between all mornings or evenings is as much a result of the similarity between episodes from the same series as the similarity between these episodes is a result of the similarity between all mornings or evenings. They support one another at most, but they are not predicated on one another.

Characters and Cliff-Hangers For very different reasons, therefore, neither the title nor the time slot can be considered consistent features of a series. The characters then come into

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question. Certain characters appear in every episode of a series, and all of the episodes that feature these characters constitute the series. Conversely, other characters belong to other series. It is tempting to verify this assumption using soap operas once again, as they are character-centered and they already deal thematically with family relations, genealogies, and family-like relationships (such as those between friends) (Cantor and Pingree 1983). It is precisely for this reason, however, that astonishing deviations are possible. For example, an episode of Guiding Light from 2009, when it ended, would have no characters in common with an episode of the same series from 1952, when it began (IMDb 2015; tv.com 2015). It is also possible that not all of the same characters will appear in two contiguous episodes of the same soap opera because the cast of a long-running soap that includes numerous story lines may be so large that all of the characters cannot appear in a single episode or even two different episodes. What is important is only that there will be subsequent episodes in which the characters from previous episodes will still appear next to one another. However, the same can also be said of other forms of series besides soap operas, such as those that feature self-contained episodes rather than serialized ones and those devoted to crime detection rather than family settings (I will come back to this). A series like Mission: Impossible also maintains its identity despite its rapidly changing cast and even after the disappearance of the anchor characters (White 1991). This principle still applies today in the case of Criminal Minds, CSI, and countless other series. It seems important, first of all, that such changes are often built into episodes, such as when characters are introduced within the diegesis as new or when they leave. This is a simple form, in which precisely the plasticity of the series – here in terms of its cast – is negotiated within the series or within a particular episode. Nevertheless, it also seems important that the distinction between major and minor characters completely disappears, is revisable, or is negotiated within the series itself, as explicitly happens at the beginning of every episode of Mission: Impossible (see e.g. dinadangdong 2010). All of the characters in a series thus constitute a reserve or variable pool, from which individual characters can emerge at times and into which they can once again return. The series thus does not come into effect through the features themselves, such as the characters; rather, like Wittgenstein, we see ‘similarities crop up and disappear’ in the course of their transmission or interruption, such as the return or disappearance of characters (Wittgenstein 1984a, 278 [§ 66]). This is only possible because the episode of a series is an element that is embedded in time and simultaneously furnished with its own duration, at

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the end of which something can be the case that was not the case before, such as when a character is added, omitted, or developed into a major or minor character. This process of transmission or interruption thus occurs not (only) between but also within the episodes themselves; indeed, it even constitutes their actual subject matter. To use Wittgenstein’s example, it is as if the playing of a game could change something about its essential elements or the use of a concept could change something about its meaning. This finding is confirmed by proceeding from the content to the structural, formal, aesthetic, and medial features of the television series. An example of this would be a peculiar feature that is simultaneously both marginal and central – namely, the cliff-hanger (Weber and Junklewitz 2009). The cliff-hanger is a final shot – initially placed at the end of a season, but later also at the end of each episode – in which a story line abruptly halts at its climax, a cause-and-effect relationship is interrupted (an effect is shown without its cause or a stimulus is not followed by a response), the standard shot/reverse shot sequence is suspended (only one of these conventionally coupled shots is shown),2 or a moving shot is suddenly arrested by a freeze frame (Engell 2010). The missing continuation is postponed until a later episode or spread across two contiguous episodes, and the episodes are thus connected by the interrupted progress that remains hanging in the air, so to speak (Fröhlich 2015, 127f). In other words, television series tend to be inconclusive, and this inconclusiveness is emphasized as a structural element of individual episodes, in which it is mirrored.3 A series of experiments conducted by Gestalt psychologist Bljuma Zeigarnik in the 1920s showed that broken or interrupted plots, movements, and arguments are remembered longer than completed processes, just as waiters and guests in a restaurant remember open orders longer than fulfilled ones. But that is not enough, as the new episode usually does not begin at precisely the same point where the previous episode ended. It also does not go back a little in order to repeat the interrupted situation, which would 2 It seems to be apparent here that the cliff-hanger is an interruption of the cinematic logic of connection, which Gilles Deleuze conceived as the leading type of ‘action-image’ (Deleuze 1986). The cliff-hanger can thus also be described as an ‘affection-image’ in the Deleuzian sense – namely, it is no coincidence that it shows (also in a freeze frame) a close-up of a human face. For more on the affective foundation of the cliff-hanger, see Deleuze 1969, 50-56. 3 In terms of perceptual psychology, the cliff-hanger is based on the ‘Zeigarnik effect’, which was named after Gestalt psychologist Bljuma Zeigarnik, who conducted a series of experiments in the 1920s to show that broken or interrupted plots, movements, and arguments are remembered longer than completed processes, such as when waiters and guests in a restaurant remember open orders longer than fulfilled ones (Zeigarnik 1927).

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conceivably serve as a reminder. Rather, the beginning of the new episode usually shows something entirely different (as if Zeigarnik’s waiter brought something other than what the guests ordered) and only later returns to the interrupted process. If the expected resolution (or something else) does not occur at the end of the first episode, then what occurs at the beginning of the second episode is unexpected. In this unexpectedness, both of these episodes are similar in that they are mirror-inverted doubles of one another. In other words, what they share is not a story line or movement, but rather a specific asymmetrical incompleteness. At the same time, the differences between the episodes accentuate their independence from one another. The new episode is precisely that: new. It can start wherever it wants, as it immediately shows. Nevertheless, this independence from the features of its predecessor and its successor does not prevent its inclusion within the same serial context or family; on the contrary, it is the prerequisite for this inclusion, as it is precisely what constitutes the family resemblance: every family member exhibits a particular set of features, which are determined not by the properties of the family itself, but rather by the process of transmission and its interruption. This is particularly applicable to television series because the principle of interruption also governs the relations within individual episodes, which are constantly interrupted due to the commercials as well as the multitude of story lines that they switch between. As a result, cliff-hangers are also introduced within individual episodes. This constitutes a transmission between the episodes as well as between the sequences within the episodes themselves, which means that there is a fundamental similarity between the individual episodes and the series as a whole (Fröhlich 2015, 421ff, 665). An episode is thus considered to be a member of a family when it preserves certain features, discards others, or adds new ones that were previously unknown. The distinctive function of the family resemblance is particularly demonstrated by the insertion of a new episode, which produces not only a generic identity for different elements but also difference itself as a creative, generative process. Family resemblance, understood as the continuation, addition of the unknown, interruption, and discontinuation of transmission chains between features and properties, is capable of propelling the emergence of the new from the known and of consequences from antecedents. 4 4 Within the context of this temporal drive, moreover, the cliff-hanger appears to be related to Alfred Hitchcock’s concept of the ‘MacGuffin’ – something that motivates the narrative but is given little or no explanation. Christiane Voss has shown that the MacGuffin functions above all through an affective regime, in which the viewer and the (filmic) narrative are collectively

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The cliff-hanger thus complements the historical and experiential dimension of the family resemblance (Wennerberg 2011, 40; Goeres 2000, 275) through its proactively operative orientation, which is directed forward in linear time and, as seen, does not correspond to subsequent flashbacks.5 In the case of the cliff-hanger, this process also does not necessarily require a third family member as mediator, as envisaged in the dominant understanding of the family resemblance; rather, it occurs within the framework of pure contiguity through the immediate juxtaposition and consecutiveness of the episodes. The cliff-hanger ensures that the next episode of that particular series is read as an episode of the same series and the direct result of the previous episode regardless of how it actually begins; it possibly even causes this external attribution, which is conventionally understood as a family resemblance. While a resemblance between members of the same family is always a question of attribution and aspectation, attribution and aspectation are also consequences of the properties of the television series as well as the individual episodes of the same series. The family resemblance between these episodes thus occurs under conditions that, in turn, constitute or simply are the medium (Engell and Vogl 1999, 8).

The Episodic Series, or: Seeing Something as Something Else So far, we have chosen as a reference point the continuing series, which consists of narratively connected episodes, but what happens when we turn to a type of series that consists of self-contained and unconnected episodes? Such episodic series not only constitute a large portion of the classic evening television schedule – from adventure to espionage series and from the Wild West to outer space – but are also represented today in more comprehensive forms, particularly in the area of crime detection and its self-contained weekly story arcs. The episodes are broadcast consecutively but not in any prescribed order, so they are infinitely interchangeable and in this sense do not occupy any particular place on the linear timeline. This is easy to notice, as the characters in these series do not accumulate any experiences, form any memories, or learn anything from one episode to the next (see Chapter 10 in this volume). involved in and entangled with one another, and the same can also be assumed of the cliff-hanger (Voss 2017; Voss 2013, 115-119; Weber and Junklewitz 2009, 129). 5 Søren Kierkegaard already noted the complementary nature of memory and repetition and referred to repetition as ‘forward-directed-memory’ (Kierkegaard 2000, 238).

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There are also no cliff-hangers in these series, as there is no continuity between the episodes; rather, they mostly seem to repeat each other both categorically and schematically. Viewers must be able either to benefit from the recognition of familiar scenarios or to learn nothing and instead forget everything that has already been experienced, much like the characters themselves. This would correspond precisely to the aesthetic orientation toward life that Kierkegaard recommended for the avoidance of boredom (Kierkegard 1975, 221-239; Engell 1988, 121). Plasticity, genealogical transmission, mediation between episodes, and overflow from one episode to another obviously do not apply here. The four classic elements of a family resemblance also seem to apply even less to an episodic series than they do to a continuing series, which already deviates from the conventional understanding of family resemblance in that contiguity and mediality are conditions of attribution (as seen with the cliff-hanger). In fact, the schematism of an episodic series would seem to correspond to the traditional and logical conceptual scheme advocated by the philosophy of language – mainly in opposition to Wittgenstein – rather than the dynamic concept of family and its mimetic-plastic method of establishing similarities (Geldsetzer 1999; see also Goeres 2000, 280-293). In a short and highly instructive article, however, Ulrich Richtmeyer shows how Wittgenstein’s family resemblance can also be understood as largely divergent from the standard definition quoted above (Richtmeyer 2009). Richtmeyer’s article is interesting for media philosophy because it seriously considers a media-aesthetical source for Wittgenstein’s thoughts – namely, Francis Galton’s so-called ‘composite portraiture’, which involved recording numerous portraits of different faces on the same photographic plate using multiple exposures. The resulting image revealed not a special face or facial type, but rather an extremely imprecise ‘nondescript face’, in which only singular points stood out where the individual faces were actually superimposed over one another, such as the corner of an eye or the contours of a lip. Wittgenstein was evidently interested in composite portraiture and also conducted his own experiments (Goeres 2000, 258-261; Stegmüller 1969, 195ff). Richtmeyer demonstrates the close proximity between this process and the production of family resemblance, as no single face has all of the outstanding features of the composite face, the individual faces have no single feature in common with one of the other faces, and it is impossible to predict what the individual faces contribute to the nondescript face (Richtmeyer 2009). Nevertheless, the image of the composite face appears not simply as visual noise or complete blackness but rather as a definite facial form. The outstanding features or lines on this form vary depending

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on which faces are recorded, and every composite portrait thus produces a different result, but the configuration that emerges can always be decoded as a face. It may be imprecise and vague, but it is still recognizable as such. If composite portraiture provides the model for family resemblances, according to Richtmeyer (Ibid.), then Wittgenstein’s concept must be reconceived once again – namely, from the perspective of media aesthetics. First of all, the order in which the faces are recorded has no effect on the result. There is therefore no longer a linear genealogical sequence that would assign each family member to a certain position in a line of ancestors and descendants, as the sequence could be changed arbitrarily and the result would always be the same. Second and surprisingly, this means that two members who are distant from one another but connected through the mediation of many intermediate links can have entirely different features, and this also applies to members who are immediately adjacent. Richtmeyer thus claims that the third feature of family resemblance is eliminated, as it is not necessary for a third to mediate between two members of a family (Ibid.). (Something similar was already identified above in connection with the cliff-hanger.) Richtmeyer’s argument is slightly imprecise at this point, however, as the idea that the resemblance between two members of a family requires a third does not mean that this third is necessarily positioned between the other two members in a linear sequence. Triangular configurations are also conceivable (as in Richtmeyer’s own diagrams), in which it is not necessary to determine the order of the members (Ibid.). The transmission or non-transmission of features would then proceed via outposts, so to speak. In terms of the logic of the serial, this means that a feature shared by two contiguous episodes can also only emerge in light of a later episode. What makes this different from the classic understanding of family resemblance is not the elimination of the third but rather the fact that family resemblance can proceed reciprocally, retrogressively, and circularly. In any case, these three changes to the concept of family resemblance (I will return to the fourth in the conclusion) implicitly eliminate the processual moment of plastic, genealogically directed transmission and linear temporality, which the continuing series supported. At first glance, these changes thus appear to support Cavell’s famous argument that the episodic series represents the basic form of television in general and that it is caused precisely by the suspension of the temporal flow, as fixed scenarios are repeated endlessly (Cavell 1982). By reshaping the temporal flow into a pattern of stasis and return, the episodic series effectively transforms the world from a dynamic to a static state and implements a flat, simultaneous arrangement for the purpose of control and the elimination of unanticipated

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or even catastrophic futures, which tend to lead towards an uninhabitable world (Ibid., 89-90, 95f). At second glance, however, something entirely different emerges. Cavell’s diagnosis was based on the idea that such a schema exists as the core identity of the series even if it arises or takes shape only gradually. But the fact that the schema is ‘not given’ with its variations refers to Schopenhauer’s lovely description of family resemblance as ‘variations on the same ungiven theme’ (Schopenhauer 1961, 227, quoted in Goeres 2000, 239f) and might also be due to its true unavailability, as it simply does not exist – not even as something that is either hidden or develops gradually. The blueprint can always change even before it develops, and it never reaches a final state. Cavell at least implicitly assumed that an ontological distinction is in place, as the variations are accidental and the schematizing features are essential (Cavell 1982, 82-86). However, family resemblance does not permit this distinction. As in composite portraiture, the distinction between the essential and the merely accidental is replaced by gradual and temporary increments, as the continuation of the series can always yield image elements or facial features that do not match those in the superimposed images. The process of family resemblance does not involve the gradual sharpening of something imprecise until it becomes recognizable; rather, it allows changeability to emerge despite all of the temporarily acquired contouring. And the fact that the sequence of episodes is reversible and interchangeable does not mean that there would only be the temporal relationship of simultaneity or the flat timelessness of the series; rather, it may be assumed that there is a continuous orbit or oscillation between the episodes, like that between members of a family, in which the variations that circulate features and properties interact, exchange, and permanently differ from one another. Like a family, therefore, an episodic series is subject to constant change – even when the temporal relations between the individual episodes appear to be static. Due to its nature as a temporal field, the series is reminiscent of Bergson’s universe of interacting images (Bergson 1991, 9-14). In other words, it generates from within itself – regardless of the external circumstances of image production – an inexhaustible temporal field of constantly new appearances that make the entire series constantly new – or, as critics have said, it is an endlessly evolving middle with no beginning and no end (Cantor and Pingree 1983, 90). In this context, the development of a television series also resembles an experimental process (see Chapter 3 in this volume). Scientific as well as artistic experiments generally develop or proceed in a series, such as that of trial, error, and the surprising effects that result (Bippus 2010). In

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his influential formulation of the experimental aspect of art and thought, Lyotard explained that the experiment is not aware of the rules it is following in its sequence of steps or episodes and that it is seeking to figure them out for itself precisely through the sequence of experimental steps (Lyotard 1984; Lyotard 1985, 68-74; for a critical take on Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein, see Goeres 2000, 296). What applies to the form of the episodic series is not the eventual recognition of something (namely, the formula, blueprint, structural theme, rule, etc.) but rather, to refer back to Wittgenstein, seeing something as a formula or rule and then seeing it once again as something else – namely, as a variant, provisional, and divergent case (Wittgenstein 1984a, 518-528; Schulte 1989; Gründler 2008, 84ff). Seeing something as something else instead of recognizing it means that everything that appears within the series could also appear differently if it proceeded or was configured differently, such as being surrounded by different episodes (Gebauer 2009, 208-215, here 212ff). The aesthetic streak in Wittgenstein’s thought is also characterized by the idea of seeing something as something else (Renn 2001; Gründler 2008, 79ff, 128-143). For Wittgenstein, logical processes, such as subsuming things under concepts, are related and therefore similar to aesthetic processes. This applies more to the method and style of Philosophical Investigations than its wording (Wittgenstein 1984a, 401, 406; Wittgenstein 2005, 11-60; Gründler 2008, 61f). Wittgenstein not only discussed his concept of family resemblance with a kind of episodic circularity, but he also integrated this circularity into the overall context of his thought. This is reflected in the concept of the game, with which he unfolded the phenomenon of family resemblance and in which an aesthetic moment is always inherent. Wittgenstein’s description of family resemblance responds to the demand that he should define this concept, around which he is constantly playing (Wittgenstein 1984a, 276 [§ 65]), but family resemblance is also a game that cannot be conceptually fixed. The process of cognition and conceptualization, which Wittgenstein aestheticized through the network of similarities, thus becomes a (language) game that also applies to itself. Logic and aesthetics are similar to one another, which means that they are also linked to one another in a series.

Finitude in ‘Quality Series’ The various manifestations of the serial form on television accordingly evolve between the series themselves. The basic opposition here between the continuing series, which obeys the genealogical principle of family

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resemblance and thematizes linear temporality, and the episodic series, which obeys the experimental principle and employs a plane temporal configuration, is a schematic distinction. In actual practice, however, there are countless hybrid forms. There is no general principle of serialization that governs continuing as well as episodic series, and most television series have serial as well as episodic features. What we explicitly refer to as a television series thus presumably consists of the coordination and interaction of both forms of serialization – those of linear time as well as those of the episodic temporal field – which then develop a family resemblance with one another and reveal new aspects to one another with every episode. This idea is inspired by Deleuze’s concept of the series as a creative moment, which is based on the interference between two types of series (Deleuze 1969). This is even more applicable today, as the development of television in the last decades has added a new form that is largely responsible for the recent remarkable cultural and commercial success of several television series. Many features can be cited to distinguish the new ‘quality series’ (a category which partly overlaps with that of the ‘neo-series’ discussed in Chapter 10), such as production values, advances in digitization, new distribution channels, economic shifts, and content priorities that arise from neoliberalism and globalization (Fröhlich 2015, 451-473). In this context, however, there is another criterion that can be connected to the previous observations on the structure of television series because it concerns the temporal consistency and condition of the series itself. More specifically, a new temporal relationship emerges with the quality series. While the continuing series with its unlimited progress and the episodic series with its continuous stasis and inexhaustible variability were both bound to the infinitude of time (or infinitude in time), this new type of series is a strictly limited form with a closed future (Grampp and Ruchatz 2015, 57f). Like South American telenovelas, these series have a (necessary) conclusion due to either external circumstances or internal plot features. In 24, for example, the protagonist has 24 hours to solve a problem, and every episode covers exactly one of these hours. In FlashForward, the plot proceeds inexorably towards the day of the predicted catastrophe, which it is naturally supposed to prevent. In Breaking Bad, it appears from the start as if the foreseeable cancer-related death of the protagonist would set limits to the progress of the plot (Grampp and Ruchatz 2015, 27f; Koch 2015, 17-35). In Sex and the City, the ultimate goal of the seemingly endless episodic sequence of affairs and relationships is a stable relationship – possibly even marriage. Ally McBeal is about nothing other than the protagonist’s attempts to remain on the threshold of adulthood even though she has

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already been in the midst of adulthood for some time. The foreseeable and, so to speak, preprogrammed breakdown of protagonists is also part of the narrative repertoire, as in Mad Men and House of Cards. There are also recognizable precursors. For example, the legendary first season of Twin Peaks had a strict temporal limit – namely, the answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer – and a similar dynamic also guided successful Scandinavian crime detection series like The Killing in the 2010s. There were also already precursor forms in the classical age of television, such as The Fugitive and Percy Stuart. The limit of the series in linear time introduces a third form of televisual seriality that alters the relationship between episode and series as well as that between fictional time and the rhythm of transmission and reception. While infinite seriality migrates into processes of recursion and feedback, the finite nature of each individual episode in a quality series becomes a structural feature of the series as a whole, which is then reflected back on each episode and is thus intrinsically established by the structure of the series itself. There is also a noticeable increase in the number of parallel story lines as well as a rapid increase in the iterative and recursive appearance of technical, screen-based images and television series within the serially narrated world, such as in Twin Peaks and The Sopranos. This also includes an engagement and negotiation with the history of television and even the history of the television series itself, as in Mad Men and The Newsroom. Extensive and mysterious biographical backgrounds can be either explicitly or implicitly integrated – as in Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, and Revenge – and they can potentially prove to be important or absolutely meaningless. The sense of pressure created by the temporal limit is also explicitly negotiated in the episodes, and there is a clear increase in the number of visual indicators of time, such as images of clocks and calendars (see Chapter 10 in this volume). House of Cards is an interesting case in this context, as the massive time pressure within the overall story line, which takes place in the political landscape of Washington, DC, is redirected within the episodes toward a strangely suspended slowness that is based on often unclear temporal relations. This creates a tremendous sense of urgency, yet, at the same time, it also conveys the impression that days can be prolonged almost indefinitely and that time can even be extended beyond the 24 hours of the day. In terms of family resemblance, this means that – unlike the example of composite portraiture – it is not possible to add any number of new elements. The genealogical-linear accumulation of always new and infinitely variable elements with differing yet related properties – that is, the transmission or

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plastic differentiation of features, which was previously identified as the essential characteristic of family resemblance – is here given a quantitative limit, which is not only factual (every television series must eventually end) or external (due to economic constraints) but also embedded structurally and thematically as a feature within the series itself as well as its episodes. In other words, we are dealing here with a family whose membership and features appear to be limited and unable to increase beyond a finite number. The quality series thus appears to have only a limited degree of vagueness, plasticity, and obscurity, and the attempt to arrive at a conclusive schematicthematic whole seems promising. However, this is precisely not the case; rather, these series can also be of an almost indefinite elasticity, as the approach of the envisaged end may be fixed in time (such as the final downfall of the protagonist) but it can always be slowed down or deferred, as in Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Delaying or deferring the temporal limit thus determines the dynamics of these series, as the number and frequency of the episodes and the course of their progress now appear to be plastic, expansive, and compressible (this is obviously close to Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance (Derrida 1997; Staten 1986; Horgan 2011). In other words, their external and factual finitude can shift to an internal and potential infinitude. As a result, time is no longer experienced in the infinite present as either a fluid extension into the constantly new, like the continuing series, or an endless sequence of repeating situations, like the episodic series; rather, it becomes a variable and plastic medium that can be transformed by the forms that it produces. This leads to a significant intensification and radicalization – or at the very least a further liquefaction – of the concept of family resemblance, whose consequences are presumably difficult to resolve in a logical manner. In particular, it means that these series are constantly negotiating the features that identify an element as the member of a family as well as what constitutes a feature at all, and the features themselves thus become imprecise. Twin Peaks is once again a characteristic example, as it remains unclear whether several of the characters actually exist or, if so, what they are (such as Bob and Leo Johnson); as features of episodes, however, they are interconnected in a relationship of continuity similar to the one that previously only connected the episodes. Just as the episodes of a continuing series constitute the members of a family in that they share, transmit, do not transmit, or add certain features, so too do the episodes of a quality series negotiate what constitutes a feature at all (such as a character) and which features determine a family connection. FlashForward, for example, struggles constantly and with many detours to determine whether the

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countless images of the original blackout can be linked and according to which criteria. In The Killing and The Bridge, as in Twin Peaks, new clues constantly emerge that redefine what even counts as a clue. The negotiation of family resemblance as the deployment of similarity is thus shifted into the series itself. In all of these cases, the eventual conclusion of the investigation is also a disappointment that persists after the end of the story (like a cliff-hanger in reverse), as the infinite appearance and disappearance of possible similarities remains untapped.

Life, Time, Medium This ultimately leads back to the fourth criterion of family resemblance – namely, its dependence on attribution – which Richtmeyer criticizes with reference to composite portraiture (Richtmeyer 2009). The conventional view is that family resemblance is a category of pure attribution that only comes about as a result of the gaze; in other words, what counts as a family resemblance is derived not from the features and properties of its members, but rather exclusively from the perspectives and configurations of succession and juxtaposition arbitrarily made by the observers – or, as in the example above, by the characters themselves. According to Richtmeyer, however, composite portraiture shows that the family – that is, the nondescript face – does not come about exclusively through unconditional attribution. Richtmeyer distinguishes here between the configurative and pictorial features of the nondescript face. The fact that it is recognized and addressed as a face at all and thus as a configuration is undoubtedly due to attribution and an acculturated and focused perception. However, the fact that certain features are thereby emphasized and made to appear more intense, such as light and dark zones or patches that disrupt the overall photograph, is not conf igurative; rather, the zones or lines of intensity seem to be entirely independent of the facial features that are considered important and significant. They are thus pictorial or, as Richtmeyer would prefer to formulate it, medial (Ibid.). Whatever is considered to be a feature stands out as such, and whatever does not stand out emerges from the technical process of image production – that is, from the medium itself rather than the observation or interpretation of the resulting image. Even though they are not visible or a theme for discussion, the qualities and potentials of the medium (such as the display of lightness and darkness) coalesce through the interaction between images or elements. Making the fundamentally transparent medium visible

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and perceptible is moreover a specific capacity of the aesthetic, and the articulated qualities and potentials of the medium turn into features of the form or the figured, which also marks precisely the use of aesthetics (Luhmann 1995, 165-214). A family resemblance thus relies not on one of these processes alone – configurative perception and attribution or the pictorial, media-technological production of features – but rather on their interaction, which we can formulate as a media-aesthetical function. This mutual immersion of the medium and the observer not only applies to television series, but also represents a third media-aesthetical approach, as Voss has demonstrated using the example of the cinema; affective and cognitive approaches, which focus on the body and representation, respectively, cannot be separated from one another (Voss 2013, 125-128, 261ff). Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, whose applicability as an aesthetic concept has largely been criticized within the analytical tradition (Goeres 2000, 295-299), thus proves to be productive as well as challenging with regard to media aesthetics – especially the media aesthetics of television. For Wittgenstein, games, aspects, and similarities emerge from and also vanish back into the process of ‘life’ itself, which cannot be further explained (Gebauer 2009, 232). ‘Life’ is the medium of life forms, language games, and the production of concepts, and language is the (second) medium, which performs, enables, and regulates this compression of life into forms as well as their dissolution. In the case of television, seen in light of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, such qualities and potentials are not necessarily those of ‘life’ as such,6 but they can still be those of time. Time thus appears as the ultimate aesthetic material of the television series. In the case of the cathode ray tube, which left its stamp on television even though television has a different technical basis today, even the image itself is temporalized, as it is gradually written by the cathode ray in the course of one twenty-fifth of a second and the written lines fade before the image is complete. Despite this fact – or because of it, as Wittgenstein would argue – the continuously appearing and disappearing image constitutes a unity. Time itself cannot be either perceived or experienced as a medium, yet television (as a second, technical medium) relentlessly experiments with it through the series. Independent from and interacting with our perceptions and configurations, it compresses time into variable features. These features are then consolidated through observation and attribution into aesthetic configurations that are read as forms, sequences, durations, and events 6 Television itself can see this differently, see Grampp and Ruchatz 2015, 49.

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(although this last term has not been addressed here). In its most basic medial state and in a highly time-consuming way, television deals with the question of what time actually is – or, more precisely, how it operatively comes about. Through its serial aesthetic of resemblance, it tests which versatile elements, properties, and features can be used to answer this question.

References Anders, Günther. 1956. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. München: Beck. Barnouw, Erik. 1990. Tube of Plenty. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1991. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Bippus, Elke. 2010. ‘Ephemere Differenzbildung in Serie.’ In Kunst der Serie: die Serie in den Künsten, edited by Christine Blättler, 123–48. Paderborn: Fink. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Cantor, Muriel G., and Suzanne Pingree. 1983. The Soap Opera. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Pub. Cavell, Stanley. 1982. ‘The Fact of Television.’ Daedalus 111 (4): 75–96. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. The Logic of Sense. London: The Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. dinadangdong. 2010. Mission Impossible TV Series (IN STEREO). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=5Pb5WV1RnXQ. Engell, Lorenz. 1988. ‘Wechselwirtschaft und vertauschte Ansprachen.’ Tumult (11): 102–15. —. 2010. ‘Are you in pictures? Ruhende Bilder am Ende bewegter Filme, besonders in Ethan und Joel Coens Barton Fink.’ In Freeze frames: Zum Verhältnis von Fotografie und Film, edited by Stefanie Diekmann and Winfried Gerling, 172–91. Bielefeld: Transcript. Engell, Lorenz, and Joseph Vogl. 1999. ‘Einleitung.’ In Kursbuch Medienkultur: die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard, edited by Claus Pias, 6–10. Stuttgart: DVA. Fröhlich, Vincent. 2015. Der Cliffhanger und die serielle Narration: Analyse einer transmedialen Erzähltechnik. Bielefeld: Transcript. Gabriel, Gottfried. 1980. ‘Familienähnlichkeit.’ In Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie, edited by Jürgen Mittelstrass and Gereon Wolters. Band 1. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. Gebauer, Günter. 2009. Wittgensteins anthropologisches Denken. München: Beck.

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Geldsetzer, Lutz. 1999. Wittgensteins Familienähnlichkeitsbegriffe. Accessed 25 August 2015. https://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/philo/geldsetzer/ famaenl.htm. Goeres, Ralf. 2000. Die Entwicklung der Philosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Logikkonzeptionen. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Grampp, Sven, and Jens Ruchatz. 2015. Die Fernsehserie: Eine medienwissenschaftliche Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript. Gründler, Hana. 2008. Wittgenstein, anders sehen: die Familienähnlichkeit von Kunst, Ästhetik und Philosophie. Trafo: Berlin. Horgan, Helen. 2011. ‘Rule Following and Differance: Wittgenstein and Derrida.’ M.A. Thesis, University College Dublin. IMDB. 2015. ‘Springfield Story: The Guiding Light (original title).’ Accessed 25 August 2015. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044265/. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1975. Entweder ‒ Oder. Köln: J.Hegner. Koch, Gertrud. 2015. Breaking Bad. Zürich: Diaphanes. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lyotard, Jean Francois. 1984. ‘Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity.’ Camera Obscura 4 (3): 110–25. —. 1985. Grabmal des Intellektuellen. Graz: Böhlau. Marschall, Rick. 1980. The Golden Age of Television. London: Bison. Modleski, Tania. 1983. ‘The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work.’ In Regarding television: critical approaches ‒ an anthology, edited by E. A. Kaplan, 67–76. Los Angeles: University publications of America. Renn, Joachim. 2001. ‘Ähnlichkeit und Einheit des Sprachgebrauchs bei Ludwig Wittgenstein.’ In Ästhetik des Ähnlichen: zur Poetik der Kunstphilosophie der Moderne, edited by Gerald Funk, 137–66. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag. Richtmeyer, Ulrich. 2009. ‘Vom Bildspiel zum Sprachspiel – Wie viel Kompositphotographie steckt in der Logik der Familienähnlichkeit.’ In A Selection of Papers from the International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, edited by A. Munz, K. Puhl, and J. Wang. http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-alws/ article/view/2828/3379. Accessed 25 August 2015. Schulte, Joachim. 1989. Wittgenstein: eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam. Staten, Henry. 1986. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Stauff, Markus. 2005. Das neue Fernsehen: Machtanalyse, Gouvernementalität und digitale Medien. Münster: Lit. Verlag. Stegmüller, Wolfgang. 1969. Metaphysik, Skepsis, Wissenschaft. Berlin: Springer. tv.com. 2015. ‘Guiding Light.’ Accessed 25 August 2015. http://www.tv.com/shows/ guiding-light/.

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Voss, Christiane. 2013. Der Leihkörper: Erkenntnis und Ästhetik der Illusion. München: Wilhelm Fink. Weber, Tanja, and Christian Junklewitz. 2009. ‘To Be Continued…: Funktion und Gestaltungsmittel des Cliffhangers in aktuellen Fernsehserien.’ In Previously On …: Zur Ästhetik der Zeitlichkeit neuerer TV-Serien, edited by Arno Meteling, Isabell Otto, and Gabriele Schabacher, 31–46. Paderborn: Fink. Wennerberg, Hjalmar. 2011. ‘Der Begriff der Familienähnlichkeit in Wittgensteins Spätphilosophie.’ In Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophische Untersuchungen, edited by Eike v. Savigny, 33–54. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984a. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 2005. Vorlesungen und Gespräche über Ästhetik, Psychoanalyse und religiösen Glauben. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag. White, Patrick J. 1991. The Complete ‘Mission: Impossible’ Dossier. New York: Avon Books. Zeigarnik, Bljuma. 1927. ‘Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen.’ Psychologische Forschung (9): 1–85.

12 On Objects in Series: Clocks and Mad Men Abstract In Mad Men, television negotiates its own integration into the emerging culture and economy of serial mass consumption of the 1960s. Therefore, Mad Men attaches special importance to the objects of consumption. While traditionally the solidity of objects is connected with their resistance to time, Mad Men is concerned with showing how the advertising industry charges objects with time in operations of synchronization and desynchronization. This chapter analyses how objects like the ‘Lucky Strike’ cigarette, the Kodak ‘Caroussel’ slide projector, or the ‘Playtex’ brassiere are all converted in various ways into agents of time, time displays, chronometers, and time machines. This suggests that clocks should finally be analysed as Mad Men’s paradigmatic object of temporalization and as an agent of timing. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, Mad Men, new materialism, objects, temporality

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between objects and operations on television. The unresolved and perhaps irresolvable problem of this relationship is its asymmetry: objects are produced, and they originate in operations or even in actions. They can thus be described as the result of operations or, in more traditional terms, as reified work or crystallized action. In the case of film, for example, cinematographic operations like exposure and lighting, framing and movement, montage and mise-enscène, and sound treatment and sound design all create objects that can then function as part of a narrative (Engell and Wendler 2009; 2011). Films themselves are also the products of a sophisticated arrangement and sequence of operations (Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell 2009). Film critics devote much of their academic or discourse-analytical expertise to deconstructing

Engell, L., Thinking Through Television. Edited by and with an introduction by M. Stauff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789089647719_ch12

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not only films, but also their objects in order to trace the operations that produced them (Latour 1999, 186-194). Conversely, it is much more difficult to imagine the ways in which objects themselves generate operations or even actions – or indeed carry out these operations or actions. With a few notable exceptions, film studies has persistently ignored this topic until recently (Chion 2004). How can objects change into operations or even actions that might then strike back at or affect them? In various contexts, critics have discussed how entire chains or series of operations intersect with or link to one another (Siegert 2012, 152), and it has been argued that operations produce more or less stable or transitory points of reference through objects, as they appear as temporarily suspended or crystallized series of operations (Latour 1999, 186-194). But how do objects open up spaces in which entire chains or series of operations become possible and indeed likely? And how do these operations in turn place objects in such a relation to one another that they are able to form chains, series, or fields and thus appear as activated or even active objects? It is precisely through moving images that objects appear capable of doing this, as they are able to take action – if not as actors, then at least as agents (Engell 2013b; Engell 2015). How is it possible for objects to turn into operations through moving images? In the case of film, objects and operations have a different relationship to time. Operations require time, while objects possess or accumulate it. Operations are short-lived and fleeting, as they always take place in time. In contrast, objects – or at least the macroscopically visible and audible objects of film – have a certain degree of permanency that makes them temporally stable, as they contract and aggregate time. Films constantly return to particular objects, for example, but they can only repeat their operations. Both the objects and operations of a film are thus able to contribute to synchronicity in their own way. While time is liquefied through operations and suspended through objects, both of these processes create chronological links. Moving images can also be described as both objects and operations. On the one hand, they are stable objects that remain relatively unchanged over time, that can be shown again and again, and that can be reproduced in order to create multiple copies that differ only in terms of their numbering. On the other hand, as a stream of images on the screen, they remain fundamentally fleeting; this is particularly the case for the television screen, which does not even recognize individual frames. No performance is ever the same. This double aspect of moving images thus engages in a significant way with the problematic relationship between objects and operations and the two different kinds of synchronization that they create.

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This paper is concerned not with feature films, but rather with the television series Mad Men, which extensively negotiates the relationship between objects, operations, and synchronizations. As in the case of film, objects and operations also complement one another in the continuing series, which is one of television’s most basic forms (Cavell 1982, 59-85). Objects are serialized according to a model or type through mass reproduction. In terms of time, there is no difference between the individual reproductions or tokens, as it is basically impossible to tell the exact date of their production (Peirce 1960, 4.537; Walther 1989, 327). We will here leave aside more recent developments in which each egg, even though it looks exactly like every other egg, is stamped with the hour it was laid and its ‘use by’ date. At any rate, each pack of a particular brand of cigarettes is interchangeable with any other pack of the same brand, as is each cigarette that it contains. The connection between the massive increase in serial products during the period of early television (from 1948 to around 1978) and the dominant form of the continuing series was detected early on (Anders 1956, 99-198, here 180f). Anders stated, for example, that, during the age of television, the serial object follows its own ontology, in which ‘the non-recurring does not exist’ (Ibid., 180). The model or type thus possesses no ontological relevance, as only the large number of reproductions partakes of being. In contrast, operations cannot be reproduced, so they are serialized not through reproduction, but rather through repetition. The following chapter concerns three forms of simultaneity created both in and through the continuing series: an object form, an operational form, and a serial form that synchronizes the objects and operations. It is a mark both of television – at least, that is the claim of Mad Men – and of our particular example. We will explore this in three sections, which will examine synchronization as an operation of television, the objects of the television series, and television’s contribution to the theory of objects through an (admittedly speculative) look at clocks as agents.

Synchronization as an Operation In a remarkable sequence, Mad Men intertwines the archival footage of the live coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination with the fictional events within the narrative (Episode 03.12: The Grown-Ups). In this sequence, synchronization as an operation of television takes place on different levels. On the one hand, the sequence demonstrates the synchronization of viewers and events in the case of live reporting. This happens in two ways.

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First, there is the shot at the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, which becomes audible as a bang in the Drapers’ living room and startles Betty Draper. This represents an isolated point at which the present moment is linked to an acoustic marker or indicative act. Through the sound of the report, the shot’s line of fire extends from the weapon to Betty Draper, thus producing an effect on her. Of course, the indexical effect of live transmission is by no means immediate; on the contrary, it is highly mediated, as it is both a technological and ideological construct. Deborah Esch’s deconstruction of ‘live’ has already shown this (Esch 1999, 61-70). This is confirmed here, as viewers can see exactly how television ascribes an effect to itself through the sequence of events on Mad Men. Nevertheless, the ‘createdness’ of the indexical does not change its effect; on the contrary, Peirce’s description of the index already insisted on its inner duality or divided nature. For Peirce, indices are only effective in their self-representation as the effect of a cause (Peirce 1998, 274-292). This sequence also shows a persistent synchronization of three rhythmic processes: the unfolding of events after the President’s murder, the progress of the TV program, and the passage of time within the rhythm of the Draper family’s life. Instead of targeting and addressing individual points, synchronization is based on superimposition and inclusion, and it is thus – to continue using Peirce’s taxonomy – iconic in nature (Ibid., 275). This corresponds to a function of synchronization that has always been attributed to classic television and that the series here attributes to itself (Modleski 1983). Of course, this includes the fact that the viewers are also synchronized with the fictional viewers within the series as well as with the unfolding events mediated through the various screens within the image. Viewers also synchronize their own time with the sequence of images and fictional events on Mad Men and with the rhythm of the TV channel (if they are watching the series as it is being broadcast). Jane Feuer identifies this synchronicity of the continuum, based on the flow effect, as a techno-ideological construct, yet this criticism does not reduce the potency of the construct’s effect, as Feuer herself notes (Feuer 1983). Conventional diegetic synchronization also takes place in this sequence, as the various places and groups of characters are shown as part of a coherent chronological complex. This does not involve parallel montage in the narrower sense, as the individual subsequences do not show the same stretch of time; rather than going back in linear time, they follow the fictionalized broadcast of the reporting on the events that follow Kennedy’s assassination. This is precisely why the various time periods linked together by the events create a single, coherent flow that passes over the differences between

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places, people, situations, and even times – in diegetic terms, after all, two days pass during this sequence. A further synchronization of particular importance for Mad Men is the linking of fiction to historical time. This makes it possible to date events within history – even down to the minute or the second, as in the case of the shot at Oswald. If the synchronization also extends to the viewers, then this inclusion might even work in the present. In other words, the bang in the Drapers’ living room could startle not only Betty Draper, but also the viewers themselves. Kennedy’s assassination and the events that follow then become integrated into a television present that is suddenly greatly expanded. At any rate, Mad Men synchronizes not only its own fictional narrative, but also television itself and TV’s own history by integrating archival material representing a veritable incunabulum into a current television series. Oswald’s assassination in front of rolling cameras in the middle of a live broadcast is a landmark in television history precisely because of its shocking synchronization effect (incidentally, this also marked the beginning of a series of murders and suicides in front of the camera; see Barnouw 1990, 336ff). This sequence thus synchronizes the fictional television viewers within the series with historical events, and, at the same time, it also synchronizes the viewers of the series itself with the history of synchronization through television. We should note here that Oswald’s assassination constitutes a special moment in television history for yet another reason. This broadcast was one of the few historical events recorded on videotape. Videotape recording had been introduced as early as 1953, but it established itself slowly (Winston 1986, 89; Abramson 2003, 55-70; Barnouw 1990, 193-197). However, it is crucial in this context that the recording was not only made for archival purposes, even though this is what made the sequence possible in the first place. Rather, it was also shown repeatedly as part of the continuing coverage of the events. Further repetitions, which in themselves constituted another new serial sequence, are even supposed to have shown the recording in slow motion. We are thus dealing with the first spectacular occurrence of the ‘instant replay’ (Engell 1989, 193ff; see also Chapter 13 in this volume). This, too, is a synchronization technique, with which viewers are now closely familiar, particularly during sports broadcasts: not only does it reproduce the moment that has just passed, but this reproduction is itself integrated into the same, unbroken flow of the broadcast, which includes the viewers in the further unfolding of the events. While time goes on, that which has just passed is brought back into the continuous flow of time instead of being let go. In this regard, it involves an echo, retention,

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or holding back of that which has not yet been extinguished. In the case of Oswald’s assassination, for example, the echo spreads further through the serial chain of recordings. In doing so, the distance between the continuously moving present point of the live broadcast and the replayed image slowly increases. As the number of reproductions grows, the replayed image gradually drifts away from the present and into the past. This can be seen beautifully in sporting events. The halftime summary, which replays slow-motion shots already shown during the game, has something of the nature of a review, even though the game as a whole is still ongoing. The repetition of this procedure in the match analysis after the end of the game goes even further towards relegating events to the past. This slowing down also leads to an expansion of the moment in duration. The moving image is not frozen completely; instead, the isolated moment becomes and remains visible as it emerges and passes. Once again, synchronization is directed not at an isolated point of connection, but rather at the process, which is slowed down as always. The event is thus endowed with durability in two different ways: by becoming reproducible and by being given duration within time in this reproduction. In the case of instant replay, the product of synchronization is an expanded, paradoxical, and heterogeneous present. It mediates between the past and the present or the event and its duration. It embraces two forms of synchronization – namely, synchronization through the coordination of points in time and synchronization through the superimposition of different time durations. Notably enough, it is exactly this performance of television that stays invisible, as it possibly represents the blind spot of the sequence, which serves as the model according to which all of the operations of synchronization in the whole series work. Maybe the unseen instant replay of the shot is the invisible image of the sequence that nonetheless forms its ‘punctum’ (Barthes 1988). It could then serve as the key to the procedures and objects by which the ascription of operativity or even agency becomes viable; I shall briefly return to this point at the end of the chapter (see Gell 1998).

Objects as (A-)Synchronies In the case of the serial object of consumption, which is intended for immediate consumption rather than repeated use, the stability within time that marks the traditional object becomes vested in the totality of the objects of a series, and this stability persists beyond the extinction or

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consumption of the individual object. If one cigarette has been smoked, the next is already there. For this reason, series of objects also mark an extended, enduring present. Serially produced products obviously dominated the age of industrial production right from the beginning, but they received an additional boost in the second half of the 20th century, as the economy of production was increasingly restructured as an economy of consumption. The contrast between the number of products displayed in a traditional shop and the mind-boggling quantities of identical specimens displayed in supermarkets can be regarded as symptomatic of this shift (Brauns 2004). However, the object series of the consumer system are no longer marked solely by the proliferation of the synchronization of individual objects as a serial presence. Besides the simultaneity of all of the objects in a given series, breaks in serial time are also increasingly created by bringing out new model objects or types. In the American car industry of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, for example, new models were launched regularly so that the previous model would be distinct from the following model. This distinction was based particularly on details of style or design. The principle of simultaneity still applies within a given model year, but the change in model from year to year creates a marked, dated progress in time. It constructs the difference between the old and the new, which relates the objects of earlier series to the past. Even though older models might function as well as ever, they have effectively been consumed. The succession of breaks after model changes thus creates a series of its own, and advertising plays a key role in this process. As a narrative about the advertising industry around 1960, this process permeates the Mad Men series as a whole as well as its subdivision into episodes. The gradual establishment of television as the dominant vehicle for advertising also forms a constant undercurrent in the series’ plot. It is no surprise that there is such a close fit between a fundamentally serial medium, an increasingly serially organized and economized world of consumer products, and a serial ontology of objects. According to Cavell, for example, the serial form is inherent in the television series as well as in the entirety of on-screen events (Cavell 1982, 64-71). Television also functions according to the principle of type and token, although the model or type is a completely dependent variable. All of the episodes of a series represent variations of a fixed pattern that is never fully realized and can only be apprehended in its variations. The pattern itself is invariable, however, as it does not evolve over time. The fact that the episodes are broadcast successively does not change anything about their synchrony, which links them together to create the pattern. As with serial objects, therefore, the serial form of television

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creates a single, synchronous, and coherent temporal plane, which, in Cavell’s theory, becomes the object of ‘monitoring’ (Ibid., 72ff). In Mad Men, the temporal logic, ontology, and operability of serial objects of consumption are somewhat different and more complicated, as they are always presented in a paradoxically asynchronous synchrony. In order to show this, it is useful to differentiate between the different levels of the object world in Mad Men and observe the transitions between them. First, there are the numerous objects that constitute the set and the costumes that define the various locations and their respective atmospheres, such as an apartment, office, or bar. Taken individually, these objects are irrelevant, as they are only able to mark a fixed point in time as a fashionable ensemble with a specific style and they are basically divided into two different milieus: that of the agency and that of the home. A third milieu, which will not be examined here, is located between these two – namely, that of the hotels, apartments, and bars. Within the home, the objects that constitute the set remain completely embedded in their context. Individual objects are virtually impossible to distinguish, as they are all superimposed over each other. They are set within a whole that they themselves create and that therefore forms part of a tradition – a past that is not past. The soft lighting and focus also contribute to this merging of objects into an ensemble, the habitat, the home. In contrast to the objects within the home, the objects within the agency stand out discreetly as singular entities with distinct contours. There is neither overlapping nor superimposition; rather, they each form the background for one another, against which they can appear individually as something new and cutting-edge. As they emerge from their context, they thus point ahead to the future. They can also be made to return back to their original contexts through cinematographic operations, such as close-ups, or simply by having the characters reach out for them. Both of these milieus designate the diegetic period of time to which they belong (the late 1950s and early 1960s) through their design, and they can thus be read as dates. They are also occasionally extremely historically accurate, as they are highly stylized and condensed. While their concentration often produces a ‘blanket’ synchronization, the simultaneity produced nevertheless splits apart and assumes two completely heterogeneous directions, as the milieu of the home points to the 1950s (and possibly even the 1940s) while the milieu of the agency points – predictably – to the 1960s. These two object worlds thus each have a different chronological index, and the difference between them produces the present of the series. This present is only disrupted when the gap between the milieus closes, such as when

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a serial object from the domestic world appears in the world of the agency. In one episode (Episode 01.09: Shoot), for instance, Betty Draper decides to work as a model again and poses in her prettiest dress for a Coca-Cola advertisement that fully endorses the style of the home. This advertisement then lands on Don Draper’s desk, where it immediately seems awkward and out of place – in other words, it is the result of an asynchrony. The same thing happens to one of the employees’ wedding presents – a huge stoneware ‘chip ‘n’ dip’ bowl made in the form of two giant lettuce leaves (Episode 01.07: Red in the Face). Viewers are told that this object serves as a carrier for chips; between the leaves, there is also another ceramic pot in the shape of a tomato, in which the dip can be placed. It is thus a classic kitsch object that represents something other than what it actually is. Through its representation, it also enters into a dual temporal logic, as it refers to a past that persists in the present yet is nostalgically declared to be lost forever. Funnily enough, and in a nod towards serial logic, this object has already been given away twice and one of the specimens is then exchanged again. As it sits on a desk at the agency, outside of its traditional milieu, this object seems not only strange, but also out of date. It is accordingly ridiculed – not only or even primarily because of its style but rather because it cannot take being isolated from the ensemble of objects that usually surrounds it. Within the broad context of the objects on Mad Men, there is also a further differentiation between things that are simply present and things that are actually touched and used, such as cigarettes, telephones, shirts, glasses, doors, writing implements, etc. (Heidegger 1996, 62ff). The most striking of these objects is undoubtedly the cigarette, which indiscriminately pervades all of the object milieus of the series. In Mad Men, the cigarette is an exemplary serial product in the sense discussed above, as it is relevant not as an individual item, but rather only in the concentration of its specimens. It also appears, at first, that there is no chronological relationship between the individual specimens, as cigarettes can be smoked in a random order that they themselves do not predetermine. Nevertheless, the cigarettes in Mad Men clearly serve functions of synchronization and production, in which the relationship between objects and operations can be observed. For example, cigarettes can only be smoked once, so they merge through their consumption. They are also smoked one after the other, so they determine their serial succession. The reproduction of the serial object and the repetition of the associated operation are thus linked. No other object more clearly supports Anders’s claim that the needs of consumers are produced by the products they consume, as the demand for cigarettes is created exclusively by the cigarettes themselves; in other words, cigarettes embody their own need,

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which is not ours but rather that of the objects for each other (Anders 1956, 176). In this regard, the individual cigarette is chronologically neutral and a series of cigarettes serves to suspend time, yet every cigarette is also directed toward the future – that is, the next cigarette. The operation of smoking thus follows the index as a vector of linear time that is always already present within the object itself in the form of the need that it embodies. In the case of the cigarette, the operations of consumption refer specifically to the object of consumption. This starts with the fact that cigarettes are linked to a specific sequence of visible gestures or operations that they require or, at any rate, elicit, and these operations also refer to other objects, such as lighters and ashtrays. Moreover, cigarettes on Mad Men nearly always accompany another process, and the lighting or extinguishing of a cigarette often serves to punctuate that process, such as by introducing, interrupting, or ending a conversation. Above all else, however, the cigarette marks the particular stretch of time required by its consumption, which is created exclusively by the interplay of the object and the operation. Another reason why cigarettes are among the leading objects on Mad Men is that most of the agency’s revenue is generated by their advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes. This draws attention to another type of object. In addition to the objects that constitute the sets and those that stand out from them, there are also the objects advertised by the agency. They are discussed in great depth, and in many cases, the agency also owns a specimen, such as a tube of lipstick, a massage belt, or a riding lawn mower. By entering into the world of the agency, the specimen functions as a type. This is also the case whenever a random specimen is taken as representative of a serial object even though it is not the original prototype. However, the presentation of objects as models or types within the agency leads to considerable complications, as it gives rise to jealous or competitive behavior, scorn or ridicule, or to a fusion of object worlds. At times, it leads to utterly absurd complications, such as when the lawn mower goes crazy and cuts off the foot of the new owner of the agency right in the middle of the office. While the campaign for Lucky Strike mainly consists of rejecting the health risks of smoking, the other campaigns usually deal with launching a new product or providing traditional products already on the market with a novelty factor – that is, a present-day index. Two of these products merit particular mention – namely, the Kodak ‘carousel’ slide projector and the Playtex brassiere – as they are once again marked by particular chronological relationships – or, to be more precise, they are marked as synchronizations. The latter product once again references the simultaneity of the asynchronous and the integration of different chronological perspectives into a

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synchrony. The agency is commissioned to reposition the Playtex brassiere against its main competitor, Maidenform. In the 1920s, Maidenform was the first brassiere with a supportive structure (Snyder, Minnick, et al. 2012). With the change in the ideal body image in the 1940s, it became a great commercial success by combining the idea of armor-like protection with a physically attractive form that satisfied the demands of a male-dominated gaze. Playtex, on the other hand, was promoted rather soberly for its perfect fit and comfort. On Mad Men, Playtex wants to attack Maidenform in its own field – namely, the realm of imagination. The agency then suggests ascribing to the Playtex brassiere the capability to cater simultaneously to the two different female role models of the day, one of which is new and the other still current in the 1960s. More specifically, it is supposed to make it possible for any woman to look like Jacqueline Kennedy by day and Marilyn Monroe by night. The proposed campaign thus distinguishes between day and night, Kennedy and Monroe, and the 1960s and the 1950s, yet these oppositions are also condensed within the same object to form an asynchronous simultaneity. In what is perhaps the most legendary pitch of the entire series, Don Draper presents the Kodak ‘carousel’ slide projector as a time machine by the means of which one can travel back to one’s past (Episode 01.13: The Wheel). Due to the shape of the tray, however, this journey to the past is circular. In other words, it does not simply move from the present to the past; rather, it treats the present as the extreme point of a circular movement that originates in the past and leads back to it again (Bergson 1991; Deleuze 1986). The present thus appears as the future of the past. According to Don Draper, this movement through time to the future and back again is itself a form of imagination that belongs to the past – that is, to childhood – as it resembles the experience of riding on a carousel. The souvenir photos in the circular tray of the slide projector make it possible to reproduce this experience in adulthood, which creates a longing for the past – or, to be more precise, a longing for the longing for the past. It is thus similar to a cigarette, as it once again creates a need that can only be satisfied by the object itself. In both cases, the shift from the object to an operation builds on a strongly affective foundation (Voss 2010). This ‘attachment’, to use Antoine Hennion’s term (2011), is clearly shown in the projector sequence, where it already appears to be doubly synchronized. On the one hand, it is palpable as a persistent present that spreads out atmospherically. On the other hand, it also assumes a particular direction, becomes indexical, and shifts from latent efficacy to virulent action (Voss 2015) when an advertising agent leaves the room in tears (which, however, can also be read as a part of the presentation).

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Here, synchronization is not only an operation that takes place through the use of an object; rather, synchrony – and multiple synchrony at that – is a quality of the object itself. In other words, synchrony is the precondition for operations that are linked to and perhaps even a result of the object. As with all qualities, it must be attributed or ascribed to the object, and, in the case of advertised objects, this operation of ascription can be observed in its (cinematically designed) chronological extension – an extension with which viewers can once again synchronize themselves. If such operations can be recognized by the fact that they alter circumstances, then synchrony is the most important precondition for the recognition of operations. Firstly, there is the synchrony between operation and observation. Secondly, there is the synchrony of the continuous condition (Bergson 1991). And thirdly, there is the synchrony of the condensed present of that which is objectively and chronologically different. This direction can still change as long as it is still moving and persists in its synchrony. According to Mad Men, therefore, the present (in its widest sense) is the condition of operativity, as it is an operative, eventful, and indexical relation between points in time as well as a continuous layering of various durations that attach themselves to the object and that it can release again.

On Clocks and Agents There is another type of object that does not occur or at least does not become relevant on Mad Men – namely, the clock. One would expect its presence to be imperative given the circumstances described, and it would appear appropriate for many reasons. As an object, the clock has always been self-running and thus operative. Cinematically, it is an explicit tool of intradiegetic synchronization between sequences, and it can also regulate the synchronization between the events broadcast on television and the viewers. An analogue clock in particular constitutes an archetypal interplay of iconic and indexical operations, which is matched perhaps only by photography (Peirce 1998, 275), as it blends flat, circular, and indexical arrangements in much the same way that the ‘carousel’ slide projector combines the flat plane of the picture, the circular tray, and the projector beam. Deleuze made special reference to the image of the clock in film, qualifying it as an ‘affection-image’ that precedes the ‘drive-image’ and the ‘action-image’ (Deleuze 1986, 87-108). If the image of the clock is not accounted for on Mad Men, then it might be the blind spot of Mad Men’s object world.

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The clock is not only operative in itself, but also possesses a function that triggers and perhaps even motivates operations. It wakes me up, makes me stay awake, urges me on, sends me off, makes me wait, or reminds me of something. The most obvious case is probably that of the alarm clock. It turns mere operativity into a kind of quasi-action. When I set the alarm, I give it the command to wake me up at some later point. This still holds even if it contradicts my desire at the time to keep sleeping. In other words, the task of the alarm clock is to turn my own command against me, if necessary, and thus turn me into the object of my own command. This divergence between the current command and a potential later insubordination is precisely preempted when I set the alarm clock. In this regard, the alarm clock perhaps brings me face-to-face with my own disembodied purpose in the form of an external force that confronts or is exerted upon me at a later point in time. I can then also treat the clock as if it had a purpose of its own, as I can trust it, curse at it, or even physically attack it. The same also holds true for other uses of the clock, although in a somewhat different form, as it always embodies a commission that I follow if I use it. I can choose to reject or accept this commission, but, in most cases, I will not personalize the commissioner. The clock not only takes over my own commissions by transferring them to the chronological level, but also makes itself available to many other different commissioners, such as employers, employees, or partners of all kinds. These commissioners include institutions whose distribution is highly complex, such as television or television series like Mad Men. These institutions force me to be punctual or allow me to take my time, and the agent through which they exert this force is the clock. This is precisely what constitutes the peculiar nature of agents. Agents act on another’s orders – characteristically on several orders that may be mutually exclusive (Engell 2013b). They also anonymize their commissioners, and they often add their own contributions to the orders that they receive. In the case of the alarm clock, this would be the preservation and transferal of the order through time, which only the alarm clock is able to do. This is their own share of the order, which they can carry out better, worse, or not at all. Clocks can be inaccurate, break down, or be set to the wrong time by third parties. Given that the agency on Mad Men is an advertising agency, it is also subject to the same principle – as are the individual agents who work there. They follow the orders of their clients – the so-called principals of the theory of economic agency (Schanze and Schüttpelz 2008, 159). One the one hand, the agents are clearly superior to their clients, as the commission can only be carried out by the agents and not by the clients themselves. In addition,

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the agents often go against their clients’ wishes, as they see something in the products that is completely different from what their clients see. The agents thus repeatedly betray their clients by disobeying their orders or carrying them out differently than expected. On the other hand, the agents are also at the mercy of their clients. In about half of the cases, the agents lose their commissions or are forced to carry them out in ways that do not match their own intentions. In the case of the Lucky Strike campaign, viewers are even shown in excruciating detail the level of humiliation to which Roger Sterling, Don Draper, and eventually the whole agency are subjected. However, people are not the only agents. Here, the almost absent clock serves as a prime example of an object that shapes and directs operations. It is also a prime example of what actually distinguishes objects as objects of consumption, as the ascription of efficacy, if not agency, to objects of consumption is precisely what an advertising agency does. This is a truism as well as an issue that is nonetheless complex in its individual manifestations in time and as time precisely because it requires synchronization. Up until the end of the 20th century, television was the advertising industry’s primary agent. In this regard, all of the objects advertised on Mad Men are metonymically clocks, as they follow the matrix of the clock in that they are assigned to shape and direct action; they thus not only embody but also give and release time. They are serial objects not only because they are produced and distributed serially but also (to take up Anders’s idea once more) because they are printed from one matrix – namely, the matrix of the clock (Anders 1956, 165-170). However, this does not happen in an indiscriminate fashion; on the contrary, each occurrence is differentiated and displaced in time, as with the alarm clock, thus conforming all the more to the serial order. The object that Mad Men ultimately advertises is nothing other than television itself, and this advertising campaign employs a thorough selection of the means and techniques that are at television’s disposal today. It represents television as it used to be and brings it up to date, thus synchronizing it with an imagined future of its own past in a ‘carousel’-like procedure. At the same time that television is desperately running out of time, Mad Men transforms it into its own reversed clock. I should add a final, speculative word. Our current theoretical endeavors are directed at researching the involvement of objects or even their agency and authority in many different fields, including academic research, the arts, and the media. Where, it has been asked, does this comparatively new interest in things come from? One explanation might be that media technologies in particular – that is, apparatuses for the perception, storage, and processing of data – confront us with the fact that artifacts now

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perform tasks that were formerly impossible for objects. One could also argue, as suggested by Claus Pias, that the computer-scientific practice of object-oriented programming has played a leading role in developing our current understanding (Pias 2012). If one follows the line of thought that governs Mad Men, however, then the theoretical ascription of agency to objects has another, completely different origin as well as a completely different principal agent, which is presumably no less powerful than the others. Its reason is also located in popular culture and mass media, as it can be found precisely in television itself and the circus of objects that it serves and continues to serve as best it can.

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Feuer, Jane. 1983. ‘The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.’ In Regarding television: critical approaches ‒ an anthology, edited by E. A. Kaplan, 45–61. Los Angeles: University publications of America. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hennion, Antoine. 2011. ‘Offene Objekte, Offene Subjekte. Körper, Dinge und Bindungen.’ Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 1: 93–109. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Mayer, Vicki, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, eds. 2009. Production studies: cultural studies of media industries. New York, London: Routledge. Modleski, Tania. 1983. ‘The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work.’ In Regarding television: critical approaches ‒ an anthology, edited by E. A. Kaplan, 67–76. Los Angeles: University publications of America. Peirce, Charles S. 1960. Collected Papers 4: The Simplest Mathematics. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. —. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Vol. 2 (1893-1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pias, Claus. 2012. ‘Zur Epistemologie der Computersimulation.’ In Spielregeln: 25 Aufstellungen: Eine Festschrift Für Wolfgang Pircher, edited by Peter Berz, 41–60. Zürich: Diaphanes. Schanze, Helmut, and Erhard Schüttpelz. 2008. ‘Fragen an die Agenturtheorie der Medien.’ In Agenten und Agenturen, edited by Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, and Joseph Vogl, 149–64. Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Siegert, Bernhard. 2012. ‘Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic.’ Translated by John Durham Peters. Grey Room, no. 47 (April): 6–23. Snyder, Jennifer, Mimi Minnick, Alison Oswald, and David Haberstich. 2012. ‘Maidenform Collection 1922-1997.’ Accessed 28 December 2017. http://amhistory. si.edu/archives/d7585.htm. Voss, Christiane. 2010. ‘Auf dem Weg zu einer Medienphilosophie anthropomedialer Relationen.’ Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 2: 170–84. —. 2015. ‘Affekt.’ In Essays zur Film-Philosophie, edited by Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle, Vinzenz Hediger, and Christiane Voss, 63–116. Paderborn: Fink. Walther, Elisabeth. 1989. Charles Sanders Peirce: Leben und Werk. Baden-Baden: Agis-Verlag. Winston, Brian. 1986. Misunderstanding Media. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.

13 Forensic Seriality: Remarks on CSI Abstract In Mad Men, television negotiates its own integration into the emerging culture and economy of serial mass consumption of the 1960s. Therefore, Mad Men attaches special importance to the objects of consumption. While traditionally the solidity of objects is connected with their resistance to time, Mad Men is concerned with showing how the advertising industry charges objects with time in operations of synchronization and desynchronization. This chapter analyses how objects like the ‘Lucky Strike’ cigarette, the Kodak ‘Caroussel’ slide projector, or the ‘Playtex’ brassiere are all converted in various ways into agents of time, time displays, chronometers, and time machines. This suggests that clocks should finally be analysed as Mad Men’s paradigmatic object of temporalization and as an agent of timing. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, Mad Men, new materialism, objects, temporality

The beginning of the series CSI in 2000 established a new subgenre of the detective series – namely, the ‘forensic series’ (Reichertz 2016a, 23; Allen 2007). It was initially defined purely thematically. The forensic scientist or laboratory analyst plays the leading role, and the story lines thus foreground laboratory activities and the securing of material evidence. The incredible success of this genre has since eclipsed most so-called ‘quality series’. Forensic Files, which came out before CSI, ran for fourteen seasons. Crossing Jordan only ran for six seasons, but it has been in constant syndication ever since. Even Bones, an average representative of the genre, ran for twelve seasons. However, CSI still remains the queen of the forensic series. The original show – CSI: Las Vegas – which ran from 2000 to 2015, comprising 336 episodes, was accompanied by two additional series: CSI: Miami, which ran for ten seasons, and CSI: New York, which ran for nine seasons. Even though they have since gone out of production, they remain an inherent part of many countries’ television schedules.

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CSI is interesting not only because of its success and its subject, but also because of its overall concept of television and seriality. CSI was not just a fictional narrative that took place in a setting – a criminological laboratory – that was seen as innovative at the time; it was also a more or less systematic exploration of what I refer to as ‘forensic images’. Following Sebastian Scholz’s use of the term ‘epistemic images’ (which was developed in connection with Rheinberger’s concept of ‘epistemic things’) and Rolf F. Nohr’s expression ‘useful images’, the term ‘forensic images’ refers to images that are supposed to serve not only scientific knowledge, but above all the ascertaining of truth in a juridical sense (Scholz 2010; Nohr 2014; Balke 2012). There is a close link here between forensic and televisual methods, processes, and issues, which is based on some surprising structural and procedural analogies between forensics and television. What I would like to point out is that CSI can be read as a kind of forensics of television itself and especially as a forensics of the series – a publicly conducted examination of the function of the serial image and its agency. In a narrower sense, this reading of CSI starts with the hypothesis that CSI negotiates some of the basic problems and questions of forensics. This includes, first of all, those of visibility and visualization and of the imagination and the imaginary of evidence in the sense of proof as well as of the development of a conviction or belief (Peirce 1967, 293-325; Wittgenstein 1984b, 19-20, 22-24; Stegmüller 1969, 168-169; Hollendonner 2009a, 27-29). Secondly, it also involves seriality and serial time itself as the characteristic temporal form of the forensic process. Thirdly, it also involves the form and function of the public, who witness this proof and whose participation gives forensics its name and, at the same time, constitutes the mass-medial essence of television (Englert and Reichertz 2016, 12-13). Fourthly, it also involves the relations and differentiations between knowledge and action and epistemology and pragmatism, which are of central importance to forensic processes. Fifth and lastly, it also involves the basic problem of the relations between activity and passivity and thus subject and object in the context of forensics as well as mass media; this negotiation is naturally of vital importance for television in its positioning vis-à-vis the digital and for the self-regulation of users between the classic notion of the television viewer as passive coach potato and neoliberal ‘prosumer’ (Winkler 2006, 100; Kempken 2016, 96-98). The expectation is that the persistent fascination with the forensic series (and with forensics in general) reveals how questions of visuality, evidence, seriality, publicness, knowledge (in relation to operativity), and activity and passivity, which are condensed into series like CSI, touch on basic issues that involve our media-induced posthumanocentric Dasein and the uncertainties that it produces.

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Production of Evidence Before we turn to an analysis of CSI under these five aspects, it is necessary to examine not only the function of these aspects for and in the television series, but also their importance for forensic procedures in general. In short, these five aspects should be used to establish the preliminary characteristics of forensics. Forensics is usually understood as an empirical science-driven investigation whose objective is to provide court-admissible evidence that will justify a legal conviction. Non-scientists, such as jurors, judges, and, increasingly, the wider public, should therefore be able to understand it (McDermid 2014; Forensic Architecture 2014). In forensic investigations, the investigators tend not to rely on the semantic statements of witnesses, motivations, and other clues based on human psychology or formal logical deduction, such as the techniques used by famous detectives (Peirce 1967, 323-325; Eco 1988, 200-213; Eco and Sebeok 1983); rather, they explore physical reality by looking for material traces, clues, marks, remains, and residue that can be considered physical and usually visual, visualized, or visualizable evidence. By combining these materials into sequences or arrangements, it is possible to reproduce the facts and their operative order as events. This leaves as little room for interpretation as possible; indeed, interpretation is effectively replaced by analysis. As a result, the connection between the material traces and the facts and processes out of which they emerge and which they prove is of crucial importance. This connection must itself be material, which means that it must be based on physical or biochemical causality and that the trace or evidence must have an indexical nature – in other words, it must be a symptom of an underlying cause (Peirce 1983, 65-66; see Chapter 4 in this volume). In order for it to function as a clue, the evidence itself must therefore be passive and have no influence on the trace and its preservation. In this sense, the material trace is like a patient who endures what is happening to him (Gere 2007, 130-132), whereas the criminal act, which is usually an act of violence, is attributed to an activity, and whatever bears the traces of this activity is conceived as an agent or actor (Gell 1998, 21-23; Engell 2013c; Engell 2014a, Englert and Reichertz 2016, 6-8). Visualizing the evidence is of crucial importance for this attribution of passive or active, material or actor (Wollmann 2014). The Latin word ‘evidentia’ already includes the moment of the gaze and refers to the apparent – in other words, something that requires no further justification (Mittelstraß 1980, 609-610) – and it is precisely this absence of any need for further justification that makes visualization a central process for forensics (Hollendonner 2009a, 28). The

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essence of forensics is therefore the entanglement of the indexical, which emerges from a causal reaction, and the visual, which makes something apparent. It is no coincidence that they co-occur in the imaging processes of various photographic media, such as photography in the narrow sense as well as heliography, x-ray photography, and spectography, among others. Photography is traditionally conceived as the self-registration of reflected light, which is causal because it is automatic (Bazin 2005, 16). Photographic film thus functions as passive material on which the active, moving beam of light inscribes itself, thereby producing an image of the reflected object. It is a pure apparatus, as it is removed from any intentionality or any association with human consciousness, knowledge, or feeling. Photographic techniques and their derivations and continuations in other imaging apparatuses are central to forensic processes precisely because they produce causality and visibility – or, rather, they produce the former by means of the latter – and this purely factual connection thus registers the physics of things and makes it public. These techniques are humanocentric, as they are oriented towards the possibilities of human perception (in this case, vision). At the same time, however, they emerge from a purely physical context, which connects things with one another without the public having to do anything. Sometimes physical reality itself can already be read as its own inscription, like a photograph, such as when heat or radioactivity burns or melts the surfaces of objects. In any case, the logic of scientific research (and therefore also forensic research) requires the visualization of traces and clues to be repeatable. The nonrecurring does not exist, according to both the scientific episteme and the ontology of television (Anders 1956, 180-181). A unique, temporary, and unreproducible visualization could also be just coincidental or ephemeral. As with all scientific experiments, forensic evidence must be able to be replicated and arranged in series (Rheinberger 2001, 70-72). The scientific procedure of taking evidence also follows two basic forms of seriality, which are familiar from television. The first is the logic of the continuing series, in which every performance deviates from the previous performance and thus makes progress possible. The first experiment is rarely the one that leads to the desired evidence, as the setup usually has to be refined, modified, and optimized; through this process, it is possible to get closer and closer to the truth (Ibid.). The second is the logic of the episodic series or series production in general, in which an experiment is repeated with precisely the same procedure and exactly the same results; it is also open to the public so that the results are always verifiable. Like television, scientific research (and therefore also forensics) distinguishes between these two basic types

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of seriality – differential updating and identical reproduction – and their progress gives rise to numerous mixed and overlapping forms (see Chapters 10 and 11 in this volume). The determination of facts and the development of events, which are serially condensed and solidified in the form of updates and reproductions, helps forensics to attribute actions, which are usually violent and punishable, to perpetrators. In the end, a guilty verdict can only succeed when it has nothing whatsoever to do with subjective motivations or emotional states, such as empathy or apathy – in other words, it is based solely on material and causal proof rather than interpretation. Forensics thus seeks to produce truth in the form of a causal attribution, and its goal is a legal conviction. As a result, forensic research fundamentally combines the perspective of human action with that of knowledge, such as the perspective adopted in genetic research or astrophysics. The forensic field is defined equally by insight and action or agency, and knowledge is always applied, applicable, and bodily coded. In forensic research, the perspectives of action and knowledge both involve a differentiation between active and passive or subject and object. In the area of action, this obviously involves the implicit and explicit separation between perpetrators and victims. It is interesting how often CSI negotiates this separation by making it a source of tension within an episode, such as when it turns out that a victim is not a victim at all and the real victim is actually a suspect or when characters arouse suspicion against themselves in order to make the CSI investigators determine the true facts. In the area of knowledge, research itself registers the distinction between active and passive by separating the researchers from their research objects – namely, the material that they handle, question, visualize, and eventually make to speak or show itself. In this sense, the material is also a victim of both the crime and the investigation that activates it and forces it to help solve the crime. Research thus also has the special effect of converting the passive into the active. And all of this happens, as already stated, in public – namely, in the forum that gave forensics its name (Forensis 2014, 5-6). The production of forensic truth occurs not between two parties – the investigators and the material – but rather between three – the investigators, the material, and the public (Englert and Reichertz 2016). The evidence should be made available for all to see, and everyone should be convinced of its accuracy and authenticity. Next to evidence, therefore, rhetoric is also an inherent feature of forensic research, and visibility fundamentally underlies this double logic of direct evidence and the rhetorical formations and dramaturgies used to

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strengthen convictions. This is nowhere more evident than on television, where the public – in the case of CSI, this is obviously the television viewers – once again assumes a double role. On the one hand, the public consists of neutral, uninvolved witnesses – a control and surveillance organ of proof before whom there should be no tricks, falsifications, simulations, or dissimulations. Just as Kant argues in his essay ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’, the determination of truth should be comprehensible to everyone rather than an esoteric, arcane matter that is only understood by a few insiders, even if they are scientific specialists (Kant 1958). On the other hand, the public must also be convinced by a series in the same way that a jury must be convinced by lawyers, and they must reach a verdict that, in principle, could always be different. The public is therefore the master of masters or the observer of observers, and forensic scientists are the objects of their control and observation; however, the public is also the object, if not the victim, of the manipulations and operations of the investigators and perpetrators – that is, their practices and rhetoric. The public and the television audience must therefore deal with not only seriality and visuality, but also activation and passivation because the roles of both an agent and a patient are attributed to and demanded of them (Gell 1998, 28-33; Engell 2013c).

Visualizations So much for the logic and phenomenon of forensics in the process of collecting evidence and its fictional elaboration. These five aspects are not only found on CSI but are also aesthetically and thematically dominant both separately and in combination. To start with visualizations (Wollmann 2014), all of the investigations on CSI begin precisely with the ‘crime scene’ for which the show is named. It is usually already defined at the beginning of each episode; the police are usually already there and have the place marked and circumscribed by the famous plastic tape: ‘Crime Scene Do Not Cross’. The crime scene is precisely that – a scene – and its boundary lines separate the actors of the investigation from the spectators and thus the public, whose presence, as we have seen, is nevertheless of utmost importance for the verification of their activity (Englert 2016, 63-69). The parallels between the crime scene and a film set are too obvious to be overlooked, but it is important to note that the spectators at the edge of the scene also metonymically represent the television viewers, who are excluded from the production of television fiction but who, unlike the spectators at the scene,

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can enter the crime scene with the investigators. This creates a transition or coupling between forestage and backstage, which has been identified by Joshua Meyrowitz as the characteristic spatial structure of television (Meyrowitz 1986, 46-49). Within the fiction, there is often a reverse parallel to this transition of the viewers between inclusion and exclusion – namely, the perpetrator, who was the main actor in the scene before it was a scene, is often found among the onlookers but is now, like them, excluded. The crucial factor in the opening scene is the activity of the investigators, which primarily consists of operations of visualization. The crime scene is first prepared for imaging, such as through the arrangement of evidence markers, and then completely photographed, and the sound of cameras provides a rhythm that punctuates the entire scene in which the facts of the crime are initially recorded (Lury 2007, 120). In the second step, the images obtained in this way are taken from the exterior space of the crime scene to the secured and completely closed-off interior space of the laboratory (Nohr 2014, 45). The exterior world, along with the public, is now completely banished. Even the light in the laboratory comes not from the outside, such as through a window, but rather exclusively from light sources within the visible interior space. Most of the light actually comes from the screens and other apparatuses on which the obtained images are processed. In the case of CSI: Las Vegas, the original series, viewers never even see an investigator enter or leave the building. It thus appears that an arcane and secret knowledge is being produced – a pure specialism that cannot be understood by outsiders, as with Kant’s ‘superior tone’ (Kant 1958, 382-383); however, the strict isolation of the room – even from the light of day – does not mean that the performances in the laboratory proceed unobserved. On the contrary, the exclusion of the curious public within the narrative is done for the benefit of a much wider public – namely, the viewers, who are still there. I will come back to this. It is important that all further investigations and manipulations mainly involve and are performed through images, as image processing and image practices are the main techniques used to acquire knowledge in CSI (Wollmann 2014, 3, 8-9). If they do not involve photographs, which document the crime scene, then they concern the transfer of real physical objects, particles, or information carriers, such as weapons, pieces of clothing, nuts and bolts, clumps of dirt, chemical substances, splinters, body parts and fluids, or even entire corpses, which are not simply investigated but also transformed and transcribed into visual or visualized data sets (Hollendonner 2009a, 29). All sorts of complicated technological processes are mobilized for this purpose, such as spectral analyses, microphotographic recordings,

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fingerprint impressions from the surfaces of objects, the visualization of temperature or climate data, and oscillograms of recorded voices from answering machines. The virtuosity of the investigators lies precisely in their ingenious use and combination of these visualization processes. According to the ontology of evidence on CSI, only that which can be visualized exists (Nohr 2014, 29). The investigators are essentially image engineers, and they thus resemble the engineers who developed television itself, whom we cannot see. If forensic work is understood as work on materials, as mentioned above, then it is now possible to say more precisely that CSI involves the transmission of facts from one form of materiality – a mixture of biological matter, textile, glass, metal, dust, and the remains of crime scenes (in short, a mixture of dead and fragmented materials) – to the materiality of images and, in particular, the live plasticity of electronic images (Turnbull 2007, 30). It is no coincidence, therefore, that the imaging technologies in the series also recall to an astonishing degree the technologies that produce television images – the same images in which the technologies themselves are displayed for viewers. It is also no coincidence that CSI and ‘CGI’ (computer-generated images) sound confusingly similar. The crime laboratory is also only a postproduction (Ibid.). This is emphasized by the fact that the investigators’ screens often fill the image and appear as the viewers’ own television screens. The investigators thus observe their screens in the same way that the viewers observe their own screens, and the investigators’ evidence effectively becomes the viewers’ evidence. When they present their results to one another, they are also presenting them directly to the viewers themselves, who are always included in the process of investigation. A second image series is also inserted into this series of manipulated, operatively forensic, and epistemic images, which continuously pours out of the investigators’ apparatuses in a stream of processing, revision, comparison, and superimposition (Fahle 2011). This second image series is completely different, as the images are neither indexical nor based on physical objects or photographs. They are also entirely different from epistemic images in terms of their appearance and aesthetics, as they are completely artificial, computer-generated, and highly speculative. This second image series involves moving images that show not what actually happened, but rather what could have happened, such as how a knife could have pierced a blood vessel, how a bullet could have penetrated a brain, how a poison molecule could have interacted with other molecules in a stomach, or how a car could have grazed the corner of a house. In this respect, they are subjunctive or hypothetical and thus fictional or imagined images (Hollendonner 2009a,

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33-35). These images are also taken from a purely imaginary perspective that is more or less physically impossible, such as from the interior of a heart or the path of an electron, as in a Whiteheadian world (Hollendonner 2009b, 108-110; Whitehead 1957, 182-184). These internal and aerial images, whose persuasive power is no less than that of images from actual laboratories (such as the images used on scientific programs), are located not on the investigators’ screens but rather in their imaginations or brains, as they are visualizations of their hypotheses (Adelmann 2011, 326). As imagined, hypothetical, or fictional images, however, they are triggered – if not created – in the brains of the investigators by the technical-indexical images seen on their screens. This is another transfer of materiality; however, this time, the transfer takes place from the investigators’ electronic images to their biologically and neurologically created imaginary images, which are actually externalized again and made visible for viewers through television. These images are thus created by other images, and the investigators effectively become image carriers or media.

Images in Series It is already clear that the images in the series are also linked to one another in a series, and they thus combine to form entire series of series, which are actually differentiated into different serial forms (Deleuze 1969, 36-38). The preparation of crime-scene documents already occurs in a series of images that function as punctuation by dividing the entire scene into periodic cuts and at the same time arranging the space sequentially. As indicated above, another of these forms, in forensic research as well as experimental research in general, is the strict and schematic reproduction of the same. Images are created and preserved, sufficient probative value is attributed to them, and they are reproduced as evidence in front of the other investigators before they are then copied and shown to the accused and their lawyers. Another copy is then placed in the archives, delivered to the investigating police, and so forth. The images thus migrate into countless sequences of the episodes. As Oliver Fahle and Deborah Jermyn have convincingly demonstrated, there is also another series of images – namely, those of the pale and motionless corpses laid out on the metal surfaces of the morgue (Fahle 2011; Jermyn 2007, 75). These images do not reveal any movement or convey any knowledge, and they do not coalesce with other images from other series; rather, they form their own sequence with their own inherent structure. They are oriented not towards knowledge but rather towards affect and affixation, respect

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and compassion. They thus prevent the bodies from being visualized as pure objects of research and instead grant them their own inactive yet still very present mode of existence. Lastly, there is also the productive series, as mentioned above, which is generated by a series of visual experiments and which is driven by the process of trial, error, and variation of the experimental setup. This involves precisely not identical reproduction or silent dignity in all of its variants, but rather the progressive flow of the investigatory process, such as a change in the continuing series of different investigations of the same object. More specifically, this image series breaks down into two subvariants – namely, the series of minimally divergent experimental setups, such as an adjustment to the ballistic parameters of a shooting test in order to optimize the results, and the mechanical sequence of image comparisons, such as when a fingerprint is automatically cross-checked with various databases (Wollmann 2014, 7; Deleuze 1969, 36). Even though they are independent from one another, two or more of the image series within CSI can also interact and thereby coalesce. They thus create interference effects, which form their own irregular series of a third or other type. This particularly occurs when two parallel series of images appear on the viewers’ own television screens, such as when the investigators are searching for a fingerprint or biometric photograph, which produces an effect similar to that of a split screen. If this does not result in a match, then the series continues to the next fingerprint or photograph. The (photo) graphic diagrams are thus superimposed over one another in quick succession so that they appear like a film. It is not surprising that this is highly reminiscent of Galton’s experiments with composite portraiture, in which the images of faces were superimposed to form an average face, out of which the main identity-establishing features of a particular family would emerge. These experiments inspired Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein 1984a, 276-283; see Chapter 11 in this volume), which involves not consistent and divergent features, but rather the transmission and interruption of certain features from one member to another in long serial configurations. This applies to the faces of families as well as to the identities of concepts in general. The logic of family resemblance through serialization is also at work in CSI; at the same time, however, there is also a comparison with the image on the other half of the split screen, which suddenly freezes when a successful match is found (it is not uncommon for the diagram or photograph to change color in order to mark such an occurrence). These static images can occur in series, and they thus punctuate the progress of knowledge through their own series of events. The individual image here does not prove anything at all; rather, it is only the sequence of images that

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gives the individual image its specific, sudden, and eventful character. Once again the nonrecurring does not exist (Anders 1956, 180-181). Each episode of CSI unfolds in precisely this way, even though it is completely self-contained and unconnected to any other episodes. CSI thus constitutes a fluid and time-based network of different serialization processes and their interactions, including converging and diverging or repetitive and differential serializations, such as those of the first and second order, which are already based on series. Knowledge production is thus conceived as a complex form of series production. The crime performed by the perpetrator produces effects outside at the crime scene, such as leaving behind a dead body, but the facts of the case are produced inside the laboratory using the reverse logic by tracing the effects back to their cause, and this production requires a complex serial arrangement. Even though CSI itself follows the rather traditional formula of the episodic series, in which there is no transmission of experience from one episode to the next and in which no inner-diegetic time passes between the episodes, it nevertheless thematically and critically negotiates seriality itself as a defining feature of the arrangement of televisual images.

Affect, Thinking, and the ‘Dance of Agencies’ The public also plays an important role as the essential core of both forensic research and television. As described above, CSI moves from excluding to including and immersing the observers in the investigation, and this involves a move from the inner-diegetic public (the onlookers) to the ‘real’ public (the television viewers). In an interesting double movement, the inner-diegetic public is initially excluded through the aforementioned demarcation of the crime scene, yet this demarcation line also attracts a crowd of onlookers. Observation is thus triggered by the boundary. Due to the fact that the perpetrator sometimes mingles among the onlookers, this crowd is also photographed and, in this way, brought back to the laboratory, where it can become an object of further investigation. The photograph of the onlookers thus occupies an intermediate position between a mere image object and a research object. As an image within the image, it also makes it easier for television viewers to transition from being excluded to being included in the image. It must not be forgotten that according to McLuhan the inclusion of the viewers is the characteristic feature of television in general; unlike films or books, television is an image (or text) that functions with and through rather than before viewers (McLuhan 1994, 22-32, 342-344).

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As already mentioned, the viewers of CSI function as observers of observation and witnesses of knowledge production, yet they also function as objects of rhetorical evidence production. The investigators need to convince the viewers, who could potentially lose interest in the series if there is a surplus of plausibility or implausibility, if there is too much or not enough evidence, or if the image is too dark or too light. A truth that is unclear to the public or all too clear from the very beginning will not be convincing as either forensic results or serial fiction. What film producer Adolph Zukor always already knew applies to forensic research as well as mass culture: ‘the public is never wrong’ (Zukor 1956). It is thus a matter of rhetoric. Producing a stream of images that are evident to others always implies the use of rhetorical techniques or the exertion of influence over others, and evidence, as a figure or oratorical skill, is actually rooted in rhetoric. This begins with the production of a suitable public. Like the inner-diegetic public, of course, viewers are also included and excluded from CSI through one and the same operation. However, it is not enough to attract a public and then exclude them after they have become curious; rather, viewers are precisely excluded through the process of exclusion itself – that is, through exclusivity (although this process is also inclusive – that is, viewers are excluded en masse). The interface is the screen before us – the material glass that appears impenetrable yet transparent. It does not even require the inscription ‘Crime Scene Do Not Cross’. The screen is not an insurmountable boundary, but it does relentlessly separate two different forms of inclusion. Viewers can participate in the cognitive part of the investigation, which involves knowledge and evidence, especially because it emerges through screens like the one in front of them. However, they cannot participate in the physical manipulation and operation of imaging and image technology. It is through this exclusion from imaging that the public itself is generated as a television audience. The audience thus becomes the object of these operations and manipulations, to which the images are also subordinated, yet it nevertheless remains the master of the epistemic struggles of the images and their makers. In contrast to the curious onlookers at the edge of the crime scene, who can perceive themselves and one another as part of a crowd or mass, the viewers of CSI remain fundamentally isolated. The onlookers can behave accordingly, such as speaking with one another, but television viewers cannot do this in principle, other than perhaps in small groups in front of the apparatus. They perceive themselves as individuals, and in the case of CSI, which appeals to the cognitive faculties of each individual viewer, they especially perceive themselves as the individually addressed subjects of a

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cognitive process; as a result, they are even in some ways observed by the screen. It is only in subsequent secondary situations that they can interact with one another and experience themselves as a group – namely, as fans and followers of CSI (Horton and Wohl 1956). The spatial arrangement of the crime scene is thus also sequentialized when watching television through the succession of viewers. It is also possible to observe the ratio in which cognition – that is, perception, deduction, and judgment – and affect – that is, attention, attraction, enjoyment, compassion, anxiety, and boredom – are used on CSI. As Voss has demonstrated in her work on the moving image, the cognitive processes that occur between viewers and pictorial events are primarily based on affect (Voss 2013). The television public is also primarily connected to the events through being affected due to attention alone, which is doubly affective because being affected is itself attractive. The affective connection integrates viewers into the series, and it is this connection, rather than cognitive transfer, that forms a bridge between the self-contained episodes of a series like CSI, which are only connected through the expectations of viewers. It uses the series to create a series that is greater than the sequence of independent visual events. It is nevertheless important to add that affective relations exist not only between people (whether fictional or real). As Antoine Hennion has shown and proven with the concept of ‘attachments’, there are also strong affects between people and objects (Hennion 2011, 42-44). In this sense, images are attractive and alluring. This is also true of image objects, and there are a number of overlaps between the diegetic characters’ attraction to their images and objects and the viewers’ attraction to television images, as suggested by the images of dead bodies cited above. Following Deleuze, it is even possible to talk of an affection mode between images, and it would to be worth investigating whether there are relations of attraction between the images on CSI and in the formation of series more generally (Deleuze 1986, 98f, 103-105). The rhetorical effort would then not be a secondary supplement to the produced truth of the images; rather, it would be essential for serialization (as the compatibility of images) as well as forensics (with its dependency on public interest). The semitransparency of the screen, which allows the gaze, knowledge, and affect relations but not physical action to pass through, indicates that the acquisition of insight on CSI is a matter not of abstraction and pure thought, but rather of physical effort and skillful handling – namely, the handling of images – from which viewers are excluded. Handling and knowledge are systematically entangled with one another, yet, at

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the same time, they are also asymmetrically distributed. In forensics, as it is depicted on CSI, all knowledge and thought consists of embodied gestures and operations, in which viewers cannot participate (Winkler 2006). However, the investigators, who move in the universe of operative (digital) images instead of the passive mode of television, are also not simply free to handle things themselves. They must cope with the conditions and requirements of the machines, and they must accept the benef its and limitations of the interfaces and hidden programs. They must perform specific, learnable hand movements and bodily gestures, which only make sense in the laboratory and only in front of the computer screen. This results in an interplay between the investigators and their devices and programs, which follow their own scripts. Andrew Pickering would call this a ‘dance of agencies’ (Pickering 2010; Pickering 2014). Sometimes the devices absolutely dominate the investigators in order to obtain the final results; the devices thus require their help but function regardless of their intentions. Through this interplay, the previously passive material becomes a subject of knowledge (Reichertz 2016b, 164-166). Res cogitans, which René Descartes described as the immaterial and spaceless ‘thinking’ mind, is then identical to its counterpart, res extensa, or the extended corporeal substance. This leads me to my final and rather speculative point. If the materiality of electronic images and devices – in other words, what viewers see on their own television screens – is itself a transformation or better yet a transubstantiation of the physical materiality and matter of the crime scene, which then becomes a cocreator of knowledge, then this affects the entire process of forensics. If both the material being investigated and the material of the investigation contribute to the investigation itself, then it is no longer strictly possible to distinguish the active subject of the investigation from the passive object of the investigation (Panse 2007, 154-155); rather, they overlap and interact with one another. The active is no longer only active, and the passive is no longer only passive. As mentioned above, the public is also simultaneously active and passive, as they are the masters of insight as well as the victims of rhetoric. The same also applies to the investigators, who act through and for the public and are at the same time acted upon by their devices. The resulting tumultuous problem for forensics is how to attribute the responsibility for crimes to perpetrators. How can someone be held accountable for a crime when there is no longer any clear separation between actors and victims? We have now reached the limits of what a television series can answer. While CSI insatiably dissolves the boundaries between action and

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knowledge or activity and passivity, every episode still ends with someone being charged with a crime. An individual – a human being – is always identif ied as an offender, perpetrator, or lawbreaker, and this person also usually confesses when faced with the overwhelming evidence. This emphasis on the confession, which occurs at the end of each episode, involves a massive return to the psychology of individuals and their motivations and emotions. Every episode of the series thus convinces viewers to suspend their belief in the separability of the guilty and the not guilty and of person and object only to reestablish this separation once again. Peirce’s claim that cognitive processes constantly oscillate between the breaking of thought habits and the fixations of beliefs can also be seen here (Peirce 1967). It could be argued that this builds enormous trust in the institution of forensic medicine as well as (applied) science and cognitive technology (Engell 2016), as forensic images undoubtedly produce certainty and orientational knowledge (Nohr 2014, 269-270). At the same time, however, CSI also touches on very unsettling questions in a world of perceiving and thinking apparatuses, changing experiences of time, and symmetrizing relations between the human and nonhuman, which are worryingly topical today. It is possible that this is precisely what accounts for the tremendous appeal of the forensic series.

References Adelmann, Ralf. 2011. ‘Mars-Viskurse: De- und Rekontextualisierung von wissenschaftlichen Bildern.’ In Blickregime und Dispositive audiovisueller Medien, edited by Nadja Elia-Borer, Samuel Sieber, and Georg C. Tholen, 311–35. Bielefeld: Transcript. Allen, Michael, ed. 2007. Reading CSI. London; New York: I.B. Tauris. Anders, Günther. 1956. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. München: Beck. Balke, Friedrich. 2012. ‘Sichtbarmachung.’ In Handbuch der Mediologie, edited by Christina Bartz, 253–64. München: Wilhelm Fink. Bazin, André. 2005. What is cinema? Vol 1. London: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. The Logic of Sense. London: The Athlone Press. —. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eco, Umberto. 1988. Über Spiegel und andere Phänomene. München: Hanser. Eco, Umberto, and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds. 1983. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Engell, Lorenz. 2013c. ‘Über den Agenten: Bemerkungen zu einer populären Figur der Dia-Medialität.’ In Paradoxalität des Medialen, edited by Jan-Henrik Möller, Jörg Sternagel, and Lenore Hipper, 41–58. München: Fink. —. 2014a. ‘Das Fernsehen als Akteur und Agent.’ In Die Mediatisierung sozialer Welten: Synergien empirischer Forschung, edited by Friedrich Krotz, 145–65. Wiesbaden: Springer. —. 2016. ‘Die Kunst der Serie.’ In Kunst/Fernsehen, edited by Klaus Krüger, Christian Hammes, and Matthias Weiß, 19–38. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Englert, Carina Jasmin, and Jo Reichertz, eds. 2016. CSI, Rechtsmedizin, Mitternachtsforensik. Wiesbaden: Springer. Fahle, Oliver. 2011. ‘Das Bild und das Sichtbare und das Serielle: Eine Bildtheorie des Fernsehens angesichts des Digitalen.’ In Blickregime und Dispositive audiovisueller Medien, edited by Nadja Elia-Borer, Samuel Sieber, and Georg C. Tholen, 111–33. Bielefeld: Transcript. Forensis Architecture. 2014. Forensis; the architecture of public truth. London: Sternberg. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gere, Charlie. 2007. ‘Reading the Traces.’ In Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, edited by Michael Allen, 129–39. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. Hennion, Antoine. 2011. ‘Offene Objekte, Offene Subjekte. Körper, Dinge und Bindungen.’ Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 1: 93–109. Hollendonner, Barbara. 2009a. ‘Der Zauber der Präsenz: Evidenzproduktion in CSI.’ In Sehnsucht nach Evidenz, edited by Karin Harasser, Helmut Lethen, and Elisabeth Timm, 27–40. Bielefeld: Transcript. —. 2009b. ‘Der Blick nach innen.’ In Medien in Raum und Zeit: Maßverhältnisse des Medialen, edited by Ingo Köster and Kai Schubert, 107–17. Bielefeld: Transcript. Horton, Donald, and Richard R. Wohl. 1956. ‘Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.’ Psychiatry 19: 215–29. Jermyn, Deborah. 2007. Crime Watching. London: Tauris. Kant, Immanuel. 1958. Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie (Werke, vol. 5., 375-397). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kempken, Natascha. 2016. ‘Mord Online: Über tatort+ und die Aktivierung des Zuschauers.’ In CSI, Rechtsmedizin, Mitternachtsforensik, edited by Carina J. Englert and Jo Reichertz, 85–106. Wiesbaden: Springer. Lury, Karen. 2007. ‘CSI and Sound.’ In Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, edited by Michael Allen, 107–21. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. McDermid, Val. 2014. Forensics: an anatomy of crime. London: Profile Books. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass: MIT.

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Meyrowitz, Joshua. 1986. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Reprint edition. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press. Mittelstrass, Jürgen, and Gereon Wolters, eds. 1980. Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie. Band 1. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. Nohr, Rolf F. 2014. Nützliche Bilder: Bild, Diskurs, Evidenz. Münster: Lit. Verlag. Panse, Silke. 2007. ‘The Bullets Confirm the Story Told by the Potato.’ In Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope. 153-166, edited by Michael Allen. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. Peirce, Charles S. 1967. Schriften zum Pragmatismus und Pragmatizismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1983. Phänomen und Logik der Zeichen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Pickering, Andrew. 2010. ‘Material Culture and the Dance of Agency.’ In The Oxford handbook of material culture studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 191–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2014. ‘Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement.’ Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 1: 121–34. Reichertz, Jo. 2016a. ‘CSI und das Feld der deutschen Rechtsmedizin.’ In CSI, Rechtsmedizin, Mitternachtsforensik, edited by Carina J. Englert and Jo Reichertz, 23–29. Wiesbaden: Springer. —. 2016b. ‘Weshalb und wozu braucht man einen ‘korporierten Akteur’?’ In CSI, Rechtsmedizin, Mitternachtsforensik, edited by Carina J. Englert and Jo Reichertz, 149-168. Wiesbaden: Springer. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2001. Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge: Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas. Göttingen: Wallstein. Scholz, Sebastian. 2010. ‘‘Bildwelten, Welche im Kleinsten Wohnen’: Vom MedienWerden der Mikrofotograf ie zwischen Sichtbarem und Unsichtbarem.’ In Medialisierungen des Unsichtbaren um 1900, edited by Julika Griem and Susanne Scholz, 61–78. München: Fink. Stegmüller, Wolfgang. 1969. Metaphysik, Skepsis, Wissenschaft. Berlin: Springer. Turnbull, Sue. 2007. ‘The Hook and the Look: CSI and the Aesthetics of Television.’ In Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, edited by Michael Allen, 15–32. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. Voss, Christiane. 2013. Der Leihkörper: Erkenntnis und Ästhetik der Illusion. München: Wilhelm Fink. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1957. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Humanities Press. Winkler, Hartmut. 2006. ‘Nicht handeln. Versuch einer Wiederaufwertung des Couch Potato angesichts der Provokation des Interaktiv-Digitalen.’ In Philosophie des Fernsehens, edited by Lorenz Engell and Oliver Fahle, 93–102. München: Fink.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984a. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1984b. Über Gewißheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wollmann, Sabine. 2014. Visualität und Evidenzproduktion in CSI. Marburg: Grin Publishing. Zukor, Adolph. 1956. The Public is Never Wrong. New York: Putnam.

14 Instant Replay: On the Media Philosophy of the Slow-Motion Replay Abstract Television has invented a procedure which allows the transferral of the present and the past into one another almost seamlessly: the Instant Replay. This chapter traces the evolution of Instant Replay and describes its applications, from the murder of Kennedy killer Lee Harvey Oswald to the case of Zinedine Zidane’s disqualification from the World Cup finals. Through Instant Replay, the events appear in the mode of being recorded. For this relationship between image and reality, this chapter suggests the concept of the ‘ontographic’. In ontography, the operation of registering is not external to the object of knowledge, but is performed from within. In the Instant Replay, the ontographic appears as television’s mode of being. Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, instant replay, temporality, World Cup, ontology, ontography, repetition

As Anders wrote about the ontology of television as early as 1956, the nonrecurring does not exist on television (Anders 1956, see also Chapter 13 in this volume). But if the nonrecurring does not exist, then how does the recurring emerge and from what? How does the repeated exist, and how is it called into being? One of television’s answers to this question is the instant or slow-motion replay. Even though I will employ these terms as synonyms (unless otherwise marked), it is important to note that they are different. For Anders, the term ‘instant replay’ emphasizes the instantaneity of the repetition and hence the complementarity between the recurrent and the unrepeatable, which is the instantaneous moment. It also implies playback, which requires a record or inscription and therefore a technical medium. The term ‘slow-motion replay’, on the other hand, emphasizes deceleration and magnification (the German term for slow motion, Zeitlupe, literally

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means ‘temporal looking glass’). The metaphor of the magnifier points not to recording or inscription media, but rather to visibility and enhanced evidence of the event, which implies that something more precise becomes evident or that something latent becomes manifest through the temporal delay. This difference will only be addressed in the second and third part of this chapter. The first part will briefly describe the technical and economic conditions for the development of the instant replay and one or another of the more or less spectacular early and later uses of this technique. By this, we will see that instant replay is not so much a conceptual as an operative practice, as it is genuinely based on video or television technology. There would be no instant replay without video and live television, and the temporal technique of the instant replay thus emerged and evolved at a particular time in the development of television. In a short and final fourth part, I will add a few remarks on the slow-motion replay as a specific ontological process that I call ‘ontography’.

The Emergence of the Instant Replay Before 1953, all television was live, with only a few exceptions, and the events were thus transmitted directly without any repetition (Marschall 1980, 84), as it was fundamentally impossible to record electronic images (Abramson 2003, 60). Beginning already in the 1930s, however, it was possible to convert celluloid film into television signals through the process of so-called ‘image scanning’ (Winston 1986, 87-89), which is why feature films became an inherent component of early television programming. Due to the fact that electronic television cameras were unable to record any images that could be broadcast during news reports, small 16mm film cameras were used to record current events. The film was then brought to the broadcasting station by motorcycle couriers, and it was quickly developed and sent through the scanner. This was the only way to include moving images in news coverage prior to the introduction of magnetic image recording. Despite its leading role in the development of television across the globe, American television was unable to make this detour via celluloid for legal reasons (Barnouw 1990, 115). The film industry, which possessed all of the patent rights for the apparatuses of optomechanical moving-image production, refused to allow the television industry to use celluloid technology. Television broadcasters were only able to purchase feature films and newsreels from film producers at expensive prices.

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In the 1950s, therefore, live transmission was the only dominant, original, and unique form of television – even in fictional formats like television plays. These programs were performed and transmitted live in studios, much like a live theater performance, though usually without an audience. This was also true of advertisements, which were always performed live on a studio stage (Marschall 1980, 65-87). All of these formats were therefore unrepeatable in a narrow sense. They could be re-performed but not reproduced. The second major category of genuine television production was the form of the television series and seriality in general, which was complementary to and entangled with live transmission. In the absence of any recording technology or practice, serial arrangements were able to furnish television with a memory capacity that was allocated to the images themselves and the memories they called up in viewers – a borrowed memory, so to speak, that was more or less controlled or motivated – but that is not the main issue here (Voss 2011). Due to the dominance of live television not only in the USA but also in Europe (despite different legal conditions), many early theories of television saw live image transmission as the main characteristic of the medium. This is true, for example, of André Bazin’s early writings on television, which have only recently been published (Bazin 2014), Gerhard Eckert’s early text on television, which was highly influential in Germany (Eckert 1953), and Umberto Eco´s important analysis of television aesthetics, which he included in his first major work L’opera aperta in 1962 (The Open Work, Eco 1989). However, the hegemony of pure live television eroded or transformed in two steps. In 1953, the film industry, or more precisely Warner Brothers, concluded a contract with the television industry, or more precisely ABC, which transferred the production of television series on celluloid to the studio (Barnouw 1990, 193-195). Warner was thus able to produce television programs while preserving its own patent monopoly, and ABC was able to broadcast the programs. This marked the beginning of the ‘filmed series’, which helped to establish the Western as a television genre and completely changed the production mode of the format in the medium term. More important in this context was the launch of the first functional video recorder, the ‘Ampex Quadruplex’, in 1956 (Abramson 2003, 56-61; Daniel, Mee, and Clark 1999, 153-169). It was a gigantic apparatus with fivecentimeter-wide magnetic tapes, which enabled the recording of television image signals. However, these devices were financially costly to purchase as well as to operate, as the tapes were expensive and the apparatus required two to three operators. As a result, magnetic tape recording only caught on very gradually. In the 1960s, the use of Ampex machines, particularly in

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news coverage, was still a major exception, and before the mid 1970s, the magnetic recording and archiving of television images and programs was not even close to comprehensive, which had grave consequences for the historiography of early television (Engell 2000, 89-108). The first spectacular and for viewers unmistakable use of early Ampex technology, which allowed recording and live reportage to coalesce, occurred on 24 November 1963, when NBC featured a live broadcast of the transfer of Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, from police headquarters to prison (Barnouw 1990, 333-334). In the middle of this broadcast, in front of running cameras, Jack Ruby suddenly emerged from the crowd and shot Oswald dead. NBC recorded the transmission on Ampex and was then in a position to show the crucial seconds again and again (David Von Pein 2013). This occurred not ‘instantly’ or immediately afterwards, but rather only after at least nine minutes of the continuing live broadcast (Verna 2008, 2-3). The recordings were also relayed to countless other television stations, and altogether these images were shown hundreds of times over the next 24 hours. This television moment remains present today in America’s collective media memory, and a fictional version that took into account the original material was recently reconstructed once again in Mad Men (Booker and Batchelor 2016; Bronfen 2016; see Chapter 12 in this volume). A real instant replay, which follows immediately after the live broadcast of the event itself, took place exactly one week later. The traditional football game between the Army and the Navy was originally supposed to take place on 24 November, but it was postponed one week due to Kennedy’s assassination (Verna 2008, 10). The Army team was lagging behind, but they caught up to the Navy team shortly before the end of the game, when Army quarterback Carl ‘Rollie’ Stichweh made a spectacular six-point play. Less than a minute later, the same Stichweh made another touchdown with exactly the same play – or at least that was how it appeared to viewers watching the game on CBS. What they had actually seen, however, was the first instant replay immediately following an event (Malinowski 2010). This was only possible by means of a technical trick. When mechanically rewinding a videotape, it was normally very difficult and time-consuming to go back to a specific point. However, director Tony Verna came up with the idea of playing a beeping sound on the audio track of the tape at the beginning of each individual play, which marked the beginning of the passage to be replayed and which could also be heard while rewinding (Malinowski 2010; Verna 2008, 12). Within a very short time, the instant replay became a standard operation of football broadcasts on television. Stadium camera systems were also

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changed. Instead of only using one camera to follow the game in long shots, as before, three additional cameras, each connected to its own recording device, took close-up shots of plays and followed individual players. As McLuhan noted, football on television became something entirely different from football (DGA 2013). As a televised event, football made a career jump, which also had an effect on sports in general – particularly from an economic perspective. The same was soon true for baseball as well. It was helpful that American sports (football, baseball, and, generally speaking, also hockey and basketball) consist of calculated plays and countless time-outs (unlike soccer, which ideally proceeds with few interruptions). This provided time for instant replays, which could fill the breaks in a way that was suitable for television. In 1964, CBS even bought its own baseball team, the New York Yankees. Shortly afterwards, the California cable television company Subscription TV acquired the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers and relocated both teams to its own service area, where they continue to play today as the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers (Barnouw 1990, 350). In 1967, Ampex introduced a machine – the ‘Ampex HS 100’ – that was specially designed for slow-motion replays (CED Magic 2014). Interestingly, it originally used a video disc rather than magnetic tape. It had a recording capacity of 30 seconds at normal speed, and it could continuously slow down the images to a standstill or ‘freeze frame’. This expansion of the instant replay soon permeated sports coverage, where it triggered a surge of aestheticization: ‘Brutal collisions became ballets, and end runs and forward passes became miracles of human coordination.’ (Barnouw 1990, 348) In 1976, instant-replay systems were also included in the game itself, as they were supposed to allow plays to be reviewed during time-outs and they thus served to support either the referee or the coach. Another spectacular use of the slow-motion replay took place during the live broadcast of the Formula One auto race in Imola, San Marino on 1 May 1994. While driving into a long curve, known as the Tamburello curve, the Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna, multiple world champion, went off the track live on television. Instead of following the curve, he drove straight ahead and crashed into a wall. He was then flown to a hospital, where he died shortly afterwards. As the race continued, recordings of the accident taken from different perspectives (including the cockpit camera of Michael Schumacher, who was driving behind Senna) were inserted again and again like instant replays (iLOVEtheseVINYLS 2013). More and more slowed-down versions were also broadcast during the continuing race, but they focused not on the crash itself, but rather on the

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moment before the crash, when something must have happened to Senna’s car that forced him to drive straight ahead instead of following the slight curve to the left. Lengthy investigations conducted by the relevant authorities determined that this must have actually been the crucial moment when the car’s steering column broke. However, there were also other ways of interpreting the material, which suggested that Senna may have made a driving error and that the broken steering column was merely a result of the accident. My last example also comes from the world of sports, which is the largest domain of the instant replay. A legendary incident occurred during the final match of the 2006 World Cup in Berlin when the French soccer player Zinedine Zidane, who was considered to be the best player of his era and was revered as a genius, knocked down his opponent Marco Materazzi with a headbutt to the chest (dcmdcmdcm 2006). This event took place during overtime, and it was entirely separate from the game itself. In other words, Zidane’s attack came out of nowhere and was seemingly unmotivated. Materazzi and Zidane had each scored one goal by that point. Zidane received the red card in what was advertised as the final game of his international career, and he left the field completely dismantled as a destroyed and destructive hero. He left behind a shocked and horrified global audience. Italy ultimately won the game and became world champions. However, the actual scene could not be seen at the time. It was only during the time-out associated with the foul that host broadcaster ARD offered a slow-motion replay from the perspective of a camera placed on the edge of the field, which was directed at Zidane. The recording circulated for days on all sports broadcasts as well as in the news and in magazines. Days later, after both players were questioned, it finally turned out that Materazzi had continuously insulted Zidane in a vulgar way outside of regular game play so that Zidane, who knew Italian, eventually lost his temper. Television technicians then attempted to determine by means of slow-motion recordings whether Materazzi was actually speaking to Zidane at this moment and whether there could have really been an obscene insult. This version ultimately won out in the end, and it encouraged viewers to sympathize with Zidane, who was furnished from that point on with the image of a tragic hero.

Mythogenic and Analytic Functions of the Instant Replay Several features of this last example are instructive. The first is the mythogenic function of the instant replay. The fact that recordings of the event exist at all is due to the fact that one of the cameras was continuously

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directed at Zidane because he had the status of a legendary, ingenious player who had single-handedly brought France to this final match and was finishing the last game of his career, which was also considered to be one of the most important games he ever played. This myth was therefore a prerequisite for the emphasis placed on him in the television coverage of the game. At the same time, however, the instant replay and the complicated dispositif structure that it developed is also a myth machine. Through the processing, broadcasting, and rebroadcasting of television images, figures like Stichweh, Senna, and Zidane become even more mythical. Needless to say, the television material itself also transforms into auratic material. This also applies to Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald, although in this case, the myth was deferred. There were no fallen heroes here, only demons. However, due to the fact that Kennedy’s assassination, which took place two days earlier, was not recorded on magnetic tape (the famous images we know come from the so-called Zapruder film, an amateur recording on celluloid that did not appear until much later), there was an excessive desire for media-mythological idealization through television. This excess was then deferred and superimposed onto the recordings of the murder of the murderer. Television thus used a smaller object to make up for what it missed, and this belatedness is a general feature of the instant replay at all levels, as we shall see. However, the instant replay also functions as a myth machine in and on smaller cases. There is an entire videographic ladder that soccer players can climb, from the goal of the day to the goal of the month to the goal of the year, and so on. The end result is a figure who is no longer ephemeral or forgotten, yet who stands outside history and memory. As the examples of Senna and Zidane clearly demonstrate, however, the instant replay also works in the opposite direction because it is dedicated not only to the exaltation of people and situations, but also to their positivistic dissection, fragmentation, and analysis. This involves establishing exactly what might have happened – the decisive or fatal moment when the chain broke, the crash began, or the sudden acceleration left all of the others behind, after which everything else proceeded according to fate, so to speak. This also applies to smaller forms. At the end of each quarter (or halftimes for soccer), experts analyse slow-motion replays of crucial plays on the screen. Attention is characteristically focused not on the simple crossing of the finish line or the impact of the ball in the goal, but rather on the players’ preparation, the setup of the play, and the visualization of the decisive moment, such as when, in cycling, the water carrier positions the sprinter optimally in the field or, in soccer, when the defense makes a

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serious mistake or the offense performs a move that cannot be defended against, such as the so-called ‘deadly pass’. These two aspects of the instant replay – as timeless mythogene, which is embedded in interpretive processes of an almost overly large scale, and as detailed analysis, which focuses on physical causes that are below sensory thresholds – are equalized through its aesthetic features. The once rather comical fore- and backward playing of a football player’s movements – which on German television was baptized ‘foot-ballet’ in the 1970s (BasicMasterReloaded 2013) – has today given way to studies of choreographic movement and expression that are taken quite seriously. And they are held together by a further difference, which is associated with the tragedy of the momentary. Even though an event may have been unforeseeable, it can still be characterized as tragic because it is no longer available or negotiable. A tragic moment is one that introduces the immutability of an event, regardless as to whether it is fatal or not. The question is whether this moment must be imagined as a mechanical, automatic event or whether it reveals the scope of conscious decision-making, which only leads to the result when all of the decisions that follow the central moment are repetitions of the original decision. In Senna’s case, these were precisely the alternatives established by the debate between the supporters of the steering column theory and those of the driving error theory.

Negotiating Different Temporalities This provides a preliminary insight into the instant replay’s ontology of the present. Luhmann understands the present as the period in which an event or an action can still change or be changed (Luhmann 1984, 388-390, 397). Luhmann’s definition is interesting in this context because he conceives of the present as an extended period rather than as a specif ic point in time and because he sees intervention in an event as a guiding principle – in other words, he assumes a fundamentally operative understanding of the present. I would add that the instant replay’s intervention in the sequence of live images operatively generates a form of the present that recursively confirms and authenticates itself as the present by identifying itself as an effect of the operation. On the other hand, however, the instant replay – particularly with regard to its analytical power – also conceives of the present as a point in time – namely, as the moment when the event suddenly became tragically or triumphantly immutable, which, according to Luhmann, is precisely the moment when the present stops being the present

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(Luhmann 1984, 421-422). One element of the instant replay’s ontology of the present is thus the transition of the present into the future past (when it is no longer possible to change what lies ahead) or into the timelessness of a mythical presence (which now constitutes its operative self-defining present) (Gumbrecht 2004). Three different timing techniques thus characteristically run parallel to and into one another. The first is the live broadcast, which continues in the background of the instant replay and claims to synchronize the events taking place with their appearance on the screen. The second is the initially instantaneous and subsequently loop-like repetition of the event, which constantly renews the passing present moment on the screen – if not by extending the length of its duration then through the return of its presence. However, this duration is actually foreign to the characteristic feature of the event, which, strictly speaking, already expires again at the moment it occurs. The third is the slowing down of the image until it is brought to a standstill, ‘freeze frame’, or ‘arrêt sur image’, which is followed once again by its reacceleration back to normal speed. The ‘freeze frame’ takes the moment out of the ongoing event and makes it temporarily endless (Engell 2010). Additional temporal relations develop between and in these synchronizations. While the slow-motion apparatus is running, other things are still happening in the vicinity of the screen, although they are necessarily concealed from it. The livestream continues inexorably in the background, and it is often audible or commented on even though it is not visible – or, more recently, it is kept present as a smaller image within the larger image (a faded mode of diminished presence). This macroscopically increases the tension between the continuing live image and the loop-like orbiting of the passing moment, which suspends the linear flow of time in favor of a moving standstill (Virilio 1994) or a ‘walking in place’. The slow motion also microscopically negotiates the tension that characterizes the time-bound but not point-like emergence of the event, which takes place in linear time but remains in itself timeless. The slow motion mediates between, on the one hand, the appearance and disappearance of a singular event – its rise from a continuum to which it once again shrinks back and in the course of which it is an event at all – and, on the other hand, precisely its singularity – its extensionless existence in the ‘here and now’, the dynamic nature of which can be paradoxically eliminated and converted to an arbitrary duration through the freeze frame. This contradiction can be clarified by means of a human gesture. When we see the frozen image of a face, it is impossible to determine whether the person is nodding or shaking – that is, whether the face is making a positive or a

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negative gesture – as the image represents only one phase of this gesture. When we see a video recording of this gesture, however, it is impossible to study the precise facial expression of the person giving an affirmative or negative answer. The frozen image does not reveal that this is the moment, here and now, when the steering column breaks; rather, this can only be seen by extracting the image from its position in the sequence. When seen in real time, however, the sequence does not reveal this moment at all, as it is absorbed before it is even displayed. In the slow motion, therefore, showing and representing, deixis and diegesis (Ruthrof 1990, 190-191), and indexicality and iconicity (Peirce 1998, 273-277) merge smoothly into one another, as does the distinction between the discrete images and the continuous sequences created by their timing and frequency. It could also be added that the images on early tube television, which were written on the screen point-for-point and line-for-line, were already, for technical reasons, neither entirely discrete nor continuous (Engell 2000, 192-197). The present as a continuous sequence and an elementary point in time – that is, as duration and as a moment that cannot be extended – thus overlap macroscopically through the tension between the playback of the recording and the continuous live transmission as well as microscopically through the fluid transition from normal speed to reduced speed, freeze frames, sometimes even rewinds, and then back to normal speed again. This repeated overlapping, which ontologically precedes the event in time because it is a necessary condition for something to occur at all, is thus extracted, exposed, and explicitly made available to human perception as a screen event through retrospective technical interventions. All of the separations that distinguish between a continuous present and a now-point – in other words, between time as flow and time as a measured value or between retention and reproduction (Husserl 1966, 47-49) – are ontologically a posteriori with respect to their prior merger and are nevertheless operatively and repeatedly erased by the slow-motion replay. The instant replay also undermines every deconstruction of presence as undertaken by television theorists like Deborah Esch and Jane Feuer, who obviously refer back to Derrida (Esch 1999, 61-70; Feuer 1983, 16, 21). As seen above, the two modes of this retrospective televisual return to the time before time – and thus to the time before the retrospective itself – are the macroscopic repetition of the image during the continuing live event and the microscopic deceleration of the image to a standstill and then back again. They are now performed simultaneously on television through the instant replay, which gives rise to a third-level synchronization between macrotemporality and microtemporality. This is important because the technical timing process in the macrotemporal tension between continuity

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and repetition is connected to biological, neurological, and psychological possibilities and practices specific to human perception and the experience of time, yet it technically undercuts these possibilities and practices in the microtemporal transition to slow motion, standstill, and reverse motion. The synchronization and entanglement of these dimensions combines the technical apparatus and human perception in such a way that they mutually engage with and condition one another. One can also speculate as to whether such an entanglement of perception and technical equipment constitutes a prior loop of perception in general. These examples also nicely illustrate how the instant replay, which is woven into or even a fluid part of a continuing live broadcast, gradually emerges from this context and becomes an autonomous, decoupled event. Slow-motion replays were initially produced during half-time and then again after the end of each game for the purpose of analysis or for aesthetic reasons. They thus always operate in the field of live transmission, to which they are more or less directly connected, yet they are also detached from the live broadcast in the coverage of sports highlights on the day of the event, and they eventually circulate entirely outside of this context through different formats. The recordings are also archived for later replays, and they are even made available as YouTube clips, which are both forms of historicization. What is at work here is also a gradual if not already continuous transition from the present, in which the event exists as its own technical extension, to the past, from which it is reproducible again at any time.

Instant Replay as Ontography While Anders noted that the nonrecurring does not exist for the ontology of television, as cited at the start of this chapter, it is now possible to describe television’s mode of existence in positive terms. Anders’s proposition refers to a specific context – namely, the market logic of capitalism in the age of mass production and consumption, which coincides with television – and, within this context, it is also justified (Anders 1956). In a narrower sense, however, the instant replay is precisely not an ontological process that allows what is repeated to be present and that expels, excludes, or eliminates the merely nonrecurring. There are two reasons for this. First, the slow-motion replay produces a constant negotiation between temporal presence and absence, now and not-now, or the presence of something that does not exist (i.e. something that has just ceased to exist or has not existed for a long time) and the absence of something that does exist (i.e. what is displayed

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on the screen), and this is precisely how it genuinely creates time. Secondly, it does not occupy an external position with regard to what it describes and creates; rather, it technically, institutionally, and aesthetically registers itself continuously in the writing of time and the present, which is what it is. In other words, it is not actually an ontological process because it does not occupy an external position with regard to its own actions and interventions. Walter Benjamin already noted that the operator of a film camera does not observe but is instead immersed in the material (Benjamin 2008, 35). This is especially true for television, although the recording and playback are embedded in reality quite differently than for film. And with regard to the reality of time, this embeddedness manifests itself in the instant replay. I would therefore prefer to describe the slow-motion replay as an ontographic process – and even as an outstanding one. The concept of ontography is consistently contrasted with that of ontology, yet it has been recently used by various authors in diverse and divergent contexts and with different meanings and intentions. These authors include Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, and Peter Sloterdijk, who also refers to the work of Alexandre Kojève and media theorist Stephan Günzel (2001, 54; Harman 2011, 125-126; Bogost 2012, 38; Sloterdijk 2014, 79). Michael Stadler has most recently proposed a version of ontography as visual ontology, which is grounded in phenomenology (Stadler 2014). In all of these proposals, as Stadler shows, visuality, clarity, evidence, diagram and map forms, as well as immediacy and synthesis consistently emerge as the essential elements of ontography and are thereby set against the conceptuality and discursivity of ontology (Stadler 2014, 8-12, 146-148). Many of these features presumably apply to the instant replay as well, although Bogost specifically excludes all temporal arrangements from ontography, as he understands time as a form of consciousness and therefore not as a constituent element of being itself outside of consciousness (Bogost 2012, 38, 50). In contrast, the ontography of the instant replay would lie precisely in the fact that it records being as a process – namely, as shown above, the process of its own recording. In the case of the instant replay, the features of ontography would thus include the form of the continuous present and recursivity, which significantly (and unlike reflexivity and self-reflexivity) operates at the same level without an external position or second level; in this sense, it operates immanently. From the point of view of the instant replay, could television as a whole function as an ontographic agency? Besides the slow-motion replay, does television not employ a multitude of other individual and interactive ontographic processes and operations that also write realities at the same time and in the same way as they write themselves?

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Publication Data

1 – On the Difficulties of Television Theory First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2012. Fernsehtheorie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Hamburg, 12-24. 2 – Click, Select, Think: The Origin and Function of a Philosophical Apparatus First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2003. ´Tasten, Wählen, Denken. Genese und Funktion einer philosophischen Apparatur.´ In Medienphilosophie. Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs, edited by Stefan Münker, Alexander Roesler, and Mike Sandbothe, 53-77. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. 3 – Television with Unknowns: Reflections on Experimental Television First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2008. ´Fernsehen mit Unbekannten. Überlegungen zur experimentellen Television.´ In Fernsehexperimente. Stationen eines Mediums, edited by Michael Grisko and Stefan Münker, 15-45. Berlin: Kadmos. 4 – The Tactile and the Index: From the Remote Control to the Handheld Computer Revised version of: Engell, Lorenz. 2013. ´The Tactile and the Index: From the Remote Control to the Hand-Held Computer, Some Speculative Reflections on the Bodies of the Will.´ Necsus. European Journal of Media Studies, no. 4. http:// www.necsus-ejms.org/the-tactile-and-the-index-from-the-remote-control-to-thehand-held-computer-some-speculative-reflections-on-the-bodies-of-the-will/. 5 – Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze Revised version of: Engell, Lorenz. 2012. ´Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze.´ World Picture, no. 7. http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/Engell.html. 6 – Traps and Types: A Small Philosophy of the Television Scandal First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2005. ´Fall und Fälle. Kleine Philosophie des Fernsehskandals.´ In TV-Skandale (Kommunikation Audiovisuell Bd. 35), edited by Claudia Gerhards, Stephan Borg, and Bettina Lambert, 17-37. Konstanz: UVK. 7 – Boredom and War: Television and the End of the Fun Society First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2005. ´Die Langeweile und der Krieg. Fernsehen und das Ende der Spaßgesellschaft.´ In Zum Zeitvertreib. Strategien – Institutionen – Lektüren – Bilder, edited by Alexander Karschnia, Oliver Kohns, Stefanie Kreuzer, and Christian Spies, 19-32. Bielefeld: Aisthesis.

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8 – Narrative: Historiographic Technique and Cinematographic Spirit First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 1997. ´Erzählung – Historiographische Technik und kinematographischer Geist.´ In Bild und Geschichte, edited by Siegfried Mattl, Karl Stuhlpfarrer, and Georg Tillner, 97-128. Innsbruck/Wien: Studien-Verlag. 9 – Beyond History and Memory: Historiography and the Autobiography of Television First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2005. ´Jenseits von Geschichte und Gedächtnis. Historiographie und Autobiographie des Fernsehens.´ Montage AV 14 (1): 60-79. 10 – On Series 2010 conference paper; first published in this volume. 11 – The Art of Television: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Family Resemblance’ and the Media Aesthetics of the Television Series First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2016. “Die Kunst des Fernsehens. Ludwig Wittgensteins ‘Familienähnlichkeit’ und die Medienästhetik der Fernsehserie.” In Kunst/ Fernsehen, edited by Klaus Krüger, Christian Hammes, and Matthias Weiß, 19-38. © 2016 Wilhelm Fink Verlag, ein Imprint der Brill Gruppe (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland) 12 – On Objects in Series: Clocks and Mad Men Revised version of: Engell, Lorenz. 2015. ´On Objects in Series: Clocks and Mad Men.´ In Cinematographic Objects: Things and Operations, edited by Volker Pantenburg, 113-137. Schriften des Internationalen Kollegs für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie 21. Berlin: August Verl. 13 – Forensic Seriality: Remarks on CSI First published as: Engell, Lorenz. 2017. ´Forensische Serialität. CSI.´ In Von Game of Thrones bis The Walking Dead: Interpretation von Kultur in Serie, edited by Timo Storck and Svenja Taubner, 299-316. Berlin: Springer. 14 – Instant Replay: On the Media Philosophy of the Slow-Motion Replay 2018 conference paper; first published in this volume. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, and 14 translated by Anthony Enns



About the Author

Lorenz Engell is Bauhaus Professor for Media Philosophy in Weimar. Since 2008, he is co-director of the research center IKKM at Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar. His areas of research are media philosophy, media anthropology, operative ontologies, and film and television studies. His current research projects focus on the philosophy of the diorama, on media ontographies, and on emergence and immersion.

Index Abramson, Albert 58-60, 105, 190, 227, 258-59 Actual, actuality, actualization 8, 30-32, 36, 38-41, 43, 45, 116, 150-51, 153, 157, 161, see also: virtual, virtuality Adorno, Theodor W. 24, 52, 146 n1 Agents, agency 8, 12, 15, 24, 53, 72, 81-82, 87-91, 95-96, 100, 103, 111, 131, 174, 223-25, 230-41, 243-44, 252, 254-55, 268 Alfred Hitchcock Presents 203 Ally McBeal 195-96, 213 Anders, Günther 10, 24, 193-94, 203, 225, 231-32, 236, 242, 249, 257, 267 anthropology, anthropological 10, 81, 89-90, 194, 203 Apollo project 9, 11, 14, 29, 35-36, 41, 66-70, 72-74, 95-102, 104-11 apparatus, philosophical 35-36, 45-47, 51-53, 57-63 apparatus 82, 113-16, 149, 151, 158, 178-79, 236, 242, 245-46, 253, 258-59, 265-67 archive, archival images 178, 180-81, 183, 185, 225, 227, 260, 267 Aristotle 10, 151, 161 Assmann, Aleida 174-75, 185 Assmann, Jan 173 n2, 175-76, 182 audience 9, 14, 37, 40, 42, 51, 62-69, 71, 73, 98, 120, 137, 139, 244, 250, 262 autobiography 172-73, 182, 186 Bachelard, Gaston 56, 70 Baird, John Logi 58-59 Balázs, Béla 105 Barnouw, Eric 35, 61-62, 64, 66, 68, 97, 100-101, 110, 126, 203, 227, 258-61 Barthes, Roland 153 n16, 160, 178, 228 Baudrillard, Jean 70, 99, 110, 134, 150 n12, 150 n14, 166 Baudry, Jean-Louis 149 n11 Bazin, André 190, 242, 259 Benjamin, Walter 268 Bergson, Henri 164, 211, 233-34 Big Brother 35 n2, 40, 51, 72-74, 121 Blond am Freitag (Blond on Friday) 123 Blüher, Dominique 149 n11 Bogost, Ian 268 Bonanza 190-91 Bones 239 boredom 10, 131-39, 141, 209, 251 Bourdieu, Pierre 36, 43, 70, 174 n4, 153 n16, 187, 204 Breaking Bad 195-96, 213, 215 Breloer, Heinrich 180, 183 Caldwell, John Thornton 8, 110, 223 Canetti, Elias 84-85

Cantor, Muriel 42, 136, 192, 205, 211 Casetti, Francesco 24 Cassirer, Ernst 32 cathode ray tube 98, 217 Cavell, Stanley 11, 14, 17, 19-24, 81, 84, 107, 109, 174, 193-94, 198, 203, 210-11, 225, 229-30 Celentano, Adriano 120-21 Chion, Michel 224 chronophotography 154-55, 157, 162-65 cinema, cinematography 154-60, 163-70, 173, 206, 217, 223, 230, 234, 253 Cold Case 197 complexity, complex 10, 18, 39, 45, 57-58, 61, 69, 72, 133, 135, 147, 154, 157, 160, 194, 196-97, 249 computer, computing 29, 58, 79-83, 90, 132, 145, 147, 166, 252 Comte, Auguste 155 continuum 109, 154-55, 226, 265 Crossing Jordan 197, 239 CSI 239-41, 243-46, 248-53 Dallas 191 Dayan, Daniel 181 Deleuze, Gilles 8, 32, 39, 116, 127, 146, 164, 176, 192, 197, 206, 213, 233-34, 247-48, 251 Démolition d’un mur 159 Dermyn, Deborah 247 Derrida, Jacques 32, 57, 215, 266 Descartes, René 252 Desperate Housewives 214 Die Harald Schmidt Show 120-121 digital 9, 17, 40, 45, 66, 80-82, 85, 88-91, 145, 156, 166, 183, 196, 240 Dilthey, Wilhelm 54 n2, 163-64 Dinner for One 176 discrete 31, 80, 82, 86-89, 149-51, 155-56, 173, 266 dispositif 33, 52-54, 59, 64-65, 69-70, 96, 104, 115, 117, 127, 132, 149, 156, 263 dissimulation 70-72, 244, see also: simulation Draper, Betty 226-227, 231 Draper, Don 231, 233, 236 Droysen, Johann Gustav 161-162, 164 early television 23, 190, 225, 258, 260 Eckert, Gerhard 259 Eco, Umberto 179, 241, 259 ecology 22, 108-109 Elias, Norbert 114 ensemble 44, 230-31 episodic series, episodes 98, 109, 189-97, 201, 203-15, 229, 231, 242, 249, 251, 253 epistemology 24, 99, 149-50, 155, 180-81, 184, 240 Esch, Deborah 226

298  event 7-9, 11, 15, 18-19, 21, 23-24, 29-31, 34-36, 38-46, 52-53, 57, 63, 65-66, 68-71, 74, 95-97, 100-101, 103-104, 106, 108, 115-27, 129-35, 137, 139-41, 145, 147, 154, 156-57, 159-62, 175-76, 178-84, 191-92, 194, 196-98, 217, 225-29, 234, 241, 243, 248, 251, 257-58, 260-62, 264-67 expert 68, 97, 99, 128, 140, 178, 184, 223, 263 Fahle, Oliver 11, 74 n12, 74, 103, 107, 197, 246-47 family resemblance 201-203, 207-17, 248-49, 251, 257-58, 260-62, 264 Feuer, Jan 194, 226 firstness 82-83, see also: secondness, thirdness Flash Forward 195-96, 208, 213, 215 flow 15, 24, 45, 87, 117, 136, 162, 192-95, 197, 209-10, 226-27, 248, 265-66 Foerster, Heinz von 103 forensics 240-44, 251-52 forgetting 44, 175-77, 185, 191 form and medium see medium and form form, cultural 9, 18, 22, 203 form, symbolic 13, 88 format, formatting 20-21, 24, 30-31, 52-53, 61-64, 70, 73-75, 121, 124-25, 135, 160, 175, 183, 190-96, 203, 243, 259, 267 Foucault, Michel 12, 108, 161, 191 fragment, fragmentation 22, 151-57, 159, 161-64, 192, 246, 263 Galilei, Galileo 96, 101-102 Galton, Francis 209, 248 game show 40, 42, 65-66, 119, 147 Gell, Alfred 72, 88, 90, 228, 241, 244 German media theory 12-13 Gilligan, Andrew 128 Gulf War 51, 69-72, 131, 138-40 Günzel, Stephan 268 habitat 81-82, 85, 101, 230 Hagen, Nina 119, 121 Halbwachs, Maurice 172-76, 182 Harman, Graham 268 Heidegger, Martin 8, 10, 14, 22, 69-70, 134 n1, 135-36, 138, 141, 157, 231 Heilmann, Till 81, 83-84, 87 Hennion, Antoine 233, 251 heterogeneity, heterogeneous 24, 72, 203, 228 historiogenesis 9, 197 historiography 10, 45, 47, 150, 161-65, 171-73, 179-80, 182-83, 185-86, 260 history, historical 7-9, 11-15, 18, 23-24, 35, 45, 53-55, 58, 61, 65, 82, 95-100, 103-104, 113, 131, 134, 137, 145-47, 151, 154-57, 159, 161-66, 171-73, 175, 177-86, 191, 193, 198, 208, 214, 227, 230 Horton, Donald 251 House of Cards 214 icon, iconic, iconicity 81-82, 84-85, 88, 149 n9, 178-81, 183-84, 191, 226 iconosphere 81-82, 84 Il magnifico 120

Thinking Through Television

Illogical 19 Image 19, 22, 29-30, 35, 42, 58, 67, 71, 72, 81-83, 85, 101, 103-11, 117, 140-41, 148-50, 154-63, 174-75, 177-82, 189-90, 192, 195-98, 202, 214, 216-17, 224, 228, 234, 240, 245-53, 257-66 image, action 206 n2, 234 image, affection 206 n2, 234 image, body 233 image, computer generated 80, 196, 246 image, documentary 182 image, epistemic 240 image, interacting 211 image, mythical 35, 263 image, projected 156 image, stream of 21, 189, 192, 194, 224, 250 image, useful 240 image, virtual 95 images, animated 197 index, indexical, indexicality 57, 79-83, 85-90, 178-79, 181-83, 226, 230, 232-34, 241-42, 246-47, 266 instant replay 176, 227-28, 257-58, 260-68 instant, instantaneity, instantaneous 84, 119, 196, 257, 265 internet 12, 73, 204 Invitation to Love 196 Ishahgpour, Youssef 103-104, 107 Jenkins, Robert 58 Jünger, Friedrich Georg 60, 151 Kant, Immanuel 55-56, 244-45 Katz, Elihu 181 Kelly, David 128 Kennedy, Jacqueline 233 Kennedy, John F. 225-27, 257, 260, 263 Kierkegaard, Søren 134 n1, 176-77, 191, 208 n5, 209 Kings of the Road 147 Kittler, Friedrich 12-13, 22, 32, 57, 82, 131, 146, 150 n12 Knopp, Guido 171, 183 Kojève, Alexandre 268 Kovacs, Ernie 120-21 Kraft Television Theatre 203 L’arroseur arose 159 La sortie des Usines Lumière 159 latency, latent 74, 115-16, 172, 233, 258, see also: manifest, virulent Latour, Bruno 53, 57, 72, 82, 224 Leroi-Gourhan, André 89 Lie to Me 196 live, liveness 23, 29, 34 n1, 35, 38, 66, 68-70, 72-73, 84, 95, 97-100, 102, 104, 106-107, 116, 118, 120-25, 139, 190-91, 225-28, 246-47, 258-61, 264-67 Luhmann, Niklas 8, 12-13, 31-32, 45, 52-53, 59, 74-75, 95, 98, 100, 102, 114, 117-18, 122, 123 n9, 124 n10, 133-34, 146, 147 n4, 150 n13, 151, 152 n15, 154, 157-58, 160 n21, 164-65, 174, 176-77, 185, 191, 217, 264-65 Lumière, Louis; Lumière, Auguste 149, 158-59

299

Index

Lyotard, Jean Francois 51, 54, 64, 68, 212

Oswald, Lee Harvey 226-28, 257, 260, 263

Mad Men 214-15, 223, 225-27, 229-37, 239, 260 maltese cross 15, 147-51, 154, 157-60, 164 manifest, manifestation 74, 132, 135, 189, 212, see also: latent, latency Marey, Jules Etienne 154 mass media 9, 17, 52-53, 98, 105, 114, 118, 123-24, 131, 174, 175 n3, 176, 178, 237, 240 Materazzi, Marco 262 Mattenklott, Gert 133 McLuhan, Marshall 9, 14, 17, 79-88, 90, 117 n2, 146, 166 n2, 249, 261 mediality, medial 9, 19, 30-32, 35, 37-38, 40-46, 56-57, 72, 128-29, 146-47, 158, 166, 180, 182, 204, 206, 209, 216, 218, 240 medium and form 29-43, 46, 146, 171, 158 medium 7-11, 13, 18-24, 30-32, 34-46, 57, 59, 61-63, 69, 71, 74, 90, 97, 100, 104-105, 118-19, 121-23, 125-26, 128-32, 134, 136, 139, 146-48, 153, 158-60, 164-66, 177, 179, 181-83, 185-86, 189, 195, 203, 208, 215-17, 229, 257, 259 memory, collective memory 7, 9, 15, 18, 145, 162, 165, 171-86, 194, 208, 259-60, 263 Meyrowitz, Joshua 245 Miami Vice 41, 43-44 Mission: Impossible 205 Modleski, Tania 192, 204, 226 Monroe, Marilyn 233 Moon landing 9, 11, 14, 29, 35-36, 41, 66-70, 72-74, 95-102, 104-11 Mumford, Lewis 152 Muybridge, Eadweard 154-56

Paik, Nam Jun 46 panorama 156-58, 165 Panovsky, Erwin 80 Peirce, Charles S. 79-82, 84-85, 88-90, 119 n3, 120 n5, 122, 123 n9, 146, 178, 225-26, 234, 240-41, 253, 266 Percy Stuart 214 Pias, Claus 58 n3, 237 Pickering, Andrew 252 Pingree, Suzanne 42, 136, 192, 205, 211 playback 148, 257, 266, 268 Postman, Neil 10, 17, 19, 117 n2 Pro und Contra (Pro and Con) 40 Public 97, 99-100, 105, 116-22, 125-30, 175, 240-45, 249-52

narrativity, narrative 43, 103, 134, 145, 147, 149, 158-66, 177-78, 194, 196, 207 n4, 208, 214, 223, 225, 227, 229, 240, 245 neo-series; neo-television 23-24, 41 n3, 110, 189, 194-98, 201, 213 news, news coverage, news report, news show 102, 118, 126, 140, 176-78, 180-81, 203-204, 258, 260, 262 Nielsen, Arthur C. 62-63, 68, 97 object 8, 15, 18-19, 24, 31-36, 39, 43, 47, 56, 58-60, 62-63, 65-68, 70-73, 75, 83-84, 86-87, 89, 102-103, 105-106, 108, 118-20, 128-29, 146-47, 151, 153-55, 163, 171-72, 175, 179-80, 185, 191, 201, 223-25, 228-37, 239-40, 242-46, 248-53, 263 Odin, Roger 24 Oettermann, Stephan 156, 158 Omnipresence 17, 124 ontography, ontographical 9, 15, 257-58, 267-68 ontology, ontological 8, 13, 17, 22, 60, 84-85, 193-94, 203, 211, 225, 229-30, 258, 267-68 operation, operational, operativity 7-9, 12-15, 18, 23, 37, 42, 45, 52, 58, 60-62, 68, 71-72, 75, 83-88, 99-100, 105, 109, 120, 122, 130, 146, 162-66, 171-73, 176-77, 180-81, 185, 190-91, 195-98, 202, 208, 218, 223-25, 228-36, 239-41, 244-46, 250, 252, 257-58, 260, 264, 266, 268

quiz show 40, 42, 44, 66, 126 recording 23, 33, 67, 103-104, 148-49, 154-55, 158, 178-79, 181, 190, 209, 227-28, 245, 258-63, 266-26 recursion, recursive, recursiveness 39, 51, 214, 264, 268 reflexivity, reflexive 8, 13, 15, 31-33, 35, 37-39, 42, 48, 68, 105, 109, 116-18, 121, 124, 126-27, 129, 132, 178, 268 repetition 74, 135, 139, 175-77 replay 11, 176, 180-81, 228, see also: instant replay, slow motion representation 8, 11, 13, 30, 36, 39, 41, 57-59, 63-64, 67, 70-71, 87, 103, 126-28, 130, 132, 134, 147, 159, 161-63, 171-72, 178-79, 181, 183-85, 217, 226, 231 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 52-53, 57-58, 240, 242 Rosing, James 58 Ruby, Jack 260, 263 Sadoul, Georges 154, 159 scandal 15, 113-30 Schmidt, Harald 120-21 Schopenhauer, Arthur 134 n1, 211 Schumacher, Michael 261 secondness 81-82, 85, 88, 90, see also: firstness, thirdness segment, segmentation 14, 155, 163 selection, select, selective 11, 14, 29, 33-47, 65, 67, 82, 95, 102, 117, 132, 138, 152 n15, 162, 185, 236 self-referentiality 31, 122, 124 n10, 133-35, 140, 181 self-reflexivity 72, 268 semiotics, semiology 80, 84, 149 n9, 180 Senna, Ayrton 261-264 series, serial, seriality, serialization 8-9, 11, 13, 15, 23, 55, 69, 75, 98, 127, 135, 139, 176, 189-194, 196-198, 201, 203-205, 207, 210, 212-14, 218, 223, 225, 227-32, 236, 239-40, 242-44, 247-51, 259 Serner, Walter 136-39, 141 Serres, Michel 53 n1, 55, 57-58, 80-81, 86-87, 89, 102

300  Sex and the City 213 simulation 39, 44, 99, 124, 126, 131, 146, 150 n12, 244, see also: dissimulation simultaneity, simultaneous 10-11, 13, 21, 24, 33-35, 37-38, 40-41, 66, 69, 71, 98, 102, 104, 106, 109-10, 116, 121, 126, 129, 133, 135, 138, 157, 160, 172, 177, 180, 186, 196, 205-206, 210-11, 225, 22930, 232-33, 252, 266, see also: synchronicity Sloterdijk, Peter 268 slow-motion 227-28, 257-58, 261-63, 265-68 soap opera 11, 42, 135-36, 192-93, 195, 204-205 Sobchack, Vivian 171 sound 18, 63, 223, 226, 260 Spencer Brown, G. 105 Spigel, Lynn 37, 42, 263 sports 11, 175, 227-28, 261-62, 267 Stadler, Michael 268 Star Trek 190-91 Stendhal 138 Stichweh, Carl Rollie 260 subject 18, 53, 68, 83-84, 87, 102-106, 108, 156, 184, 240, 243, 250, 252 Swinton, Campbell 58 switching, switchable 13, 17, 21-23, 39-40, 44-45, 65, 68, 89, 171, 184, 190-91, 207 symbol, symbolic 8, 13, 30, 45, 61, 81-86, 88-89, 146, 184 synchronization, synchronicity 23, 33, 38, 84, 133, 191, 193, 223-32, 234, 236, 239, 265-67, see also: simultaneity systems theory 10, 103, 133, 150 n13, 152 n15, 174, 185 tactility, tactile 79-81, 83-89, 166, 189 n24 Tatort 176, 203 Technology 9, 12-13, 15, 18, 22-24, 32, 39, 58, 60-61, 70-71, 80-81, 89-90, 97-98, 104, 114, 131, 138, 151, 155, 160, 163, 177, 179, 183, 190, 196, 198, 204, 217, 226, 236, 245-46, 250, 253, 258-60 televisual, televisuality 8, 15, 44, 52, 69-70, 73-74, 83, 96, 98, 101-102, 105, 107, 110, 115-17, 132, 134, 192-95, 203, 214, 240, 249 temporality, temporalization, temporal 8, 10, 14-15, 18, 23, 37, 46, 62, 74, 84, 120-21, 125, 131-33, 135-36, 154, 158, 164, 177, 179-82, 184-85, 189, 191-98, 207, 210-11, 213-15, 217, 223-24, 230-31, 239-40, 257-58, 260 The Bridge 216 The Fugitive 214 The Guiding Light 205 The Killing 214, 216 The Newsroom 214 The Philco Television Playhouse 203 The Price Is Right 42 The Sopranos 196, 214 The State of Things 147 The Twilight Zone 203 The Wire 21 thirdness 81-82, 85, 88, see also: firstness, secondness

Thinking Through Television

Todesspiel 180 Toeplitz, Jerzy 159 token and type 225, 229 transmission 12, 23, 33-36, 41, 60-61, 67, 73, 97-98, 104-105, 116, 122, 175, 179, 202-10, 214-15, 226, 246, 248-49, 258-60, 266-67 Twin Peaks 75, 195-96, 214-16 universality 111, 173 Uricchio, William 62, 71 Veblen, Thorstein 153 n16 Virilio, Paul 70, 138, 139 n2, 158, 265 virtuality, virtual 21, 31, 36, 38-39, 45, 80, 95, 116, 150-54, 156-63, 165, 183 virulent 74, 115-16, 233 visual culture 8, 17, 29 visual, visualize, visuality 15, 32, 36, 43-44, 52, 58-59, 61, 63, 66-67, 70-74, 83-87, 97, 99-100, 102-103, 105-107, 110, 135, 147, 152-56, 160-61, 166, 175, 177-81, 183-85, 209, 214, 240-48, 251, see also: televisual, televisuality Vogl, Joseph 53 n1, 101-102, 172, 208 Voltaire 162 von Ardenne, Manfred 58, 98 Voss, Christiane 207-208 n4, 217, 233, 253, 259 Walther, Elisabeth 178, 225 war 15, 69-72, 95, 100, 126, 131-32, 136-41 Weinrich, Harald 165 n23 Wenders, Wim 147, 149 White, Hayden V. 165 n23 White, Walter 195 Whitehead, Alfred North 247 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 40 Williams, Raymond 79, 90, 136, 192 Winkler, Hartmut 19, 22, 135, 240, 252 Winston, Brian 58, 60-61, 227, 258 witness 9, 41, 55, 65, 68, 95-96, 139, 162, 166, 178, 180-81, 183-84, 240-41, 244, 250 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 10, 201-202, 205-206, 209-10, 212, 217, 240, 248 Wohl, Richard R. 251 world 8, 12, 14-15, 17-10, 21-24, 31, 33, 35-36, 39-47, 59, 67-68, 72, 79-80, 82-83, 85, 96, 98-99, 101-104, 106-107, 113, 118, 121-27, 129-30, 135-38, 141, 145, 150-54, 156-61, 163, 165, 175, 177, 183, 186, 190-95, 203, 210-11, 214, 229-32, 234, 245, 247, 253 world, possible 145, 150-51, 157, 159, 163, 165 Wünsch Dir was (Make a Wish) 40, 65-66, 119 ZDF History 183-184 Zeigarnik, Bljuma 206-207 Zidane, Zinedine 257, 262-63 Zielinski, Siegfried 34, 58, 61, 149 n11, 156-57 Zukor, Adolph 250 Zworykin, Vladimir 58 24 195-196, 213