The Outbreak of Television

Television is for pleasure, for bringing the family together, and for killing time. Those are the three functions of commercial TV.—Silvio Berlusconi, Italian media magnate

Television, like modernity and capitalism, has not always existed. It is a dynamic thing, a concrete machine, a collection of working parts: it had to be invented, produced, reproduced, and placed here and there upon the earth in numbers we can still count. To be sure, modernity and capitalism are dynamic things, too: whatever they are and whenever they emerged, they also work upon the earth without being visible or comprehensible all at once. Although the term "television" seems specific in a way "capitalism" and "modernity" (not to mention "postmodernity") do not, it definitely belongs to the same plane of abstraction, the same scope of materiality, and hence the same theoretical hesitation. Each of these terms names an elusive and unresolved object—perhaps not an object at all, but a "problematic"—something whose processes, functions, and domains cannot be fixed in a stable discursive field. Directed at such global abstractions, our thinking is forced to follow the very motions of dispersion and unification that would define the thing itself in its full contours. In light of all the interlacing questions about saying, doing, showing, and knowing that have been raised in contemporary theory, it is no longer possible to define television in a single set of terms, to treat it as merely derivative of the current mode of production, or to let its place in the history of writing systems go unexamined. If theoretical questions can dislodge television from its cosy nest of familiarity (lined with empirical certainties and ideological disclaimers), perhaps this thing can look strange again.

To approach and apprehend "television" in general, we must engage in creative speculation, combining and recombining all kinds of images, some supplied by television, some not. For if there are fleeting images visible on television, there must also be persistent images of television, visible somewhere else, which may be harder to discern. What abstract images—what rules of composition, figural devices, representational structures, or conceptual frameworks—can be built into and out of the concrete images on television? How do we know what television can show us? To explore these questions I will begin by working through three distinct historical images of television, to see how television looks before people begin to watch it. Later, I will outline two related sets of images—the technical and the theoretical—along with the narratives of invention they bear, in order to mark out the questions that occupy the rest of this study.

Imaginary Totalities

In debates about globalization, cultural imperialism, dialectics of enlightenment, and so on, "television" assumes a power beyond that attributed to its programming, as if its mere existence ensured certain effects, both ideological and physical. All of a sudden, at some point that should be within living memory, television seemed to flood the social sphere with a new kind of power. But the question is not: when does television begin? but: when does television begin to function to the second power? When does television replace the "communication" of discrete messages with the profuse "diffusion" of images? When does television cease functioning merely as a movement between distant points and begin shaping its own "world," gathering distances into itself in order to redistribute them according to its own program? And the answer is: from the start.

The dreams of television at its birth were already global. On the basis of the most rudimentary experiments in image transmission, televisuality was immediately imagined as an all-encompassing putting-into-view of the world. In its future ideal state, television would override the irreducible gap between speaking and listening (telephone, radio) with a field of total instantaneous visibility, where relays of cameras and monitors would speed up and finally erase the distinction between seeing and being seen (that old residue of the self-conscious subject, with its inevitable emphasis on "perspective" and "framing"). The earliest partisans of television saw no reason why anyone would refuse this offer of trans-visibility, since it included the promise of mutual recognition, equal exchange, and an immediate symmetry between transmission and reception, ultimately a kind of immanent Absolute Knowledge. An admirably succinct statement of these hopes comes from Rudolph Arnheim, writing in London in 1936, where public tv broadcasts were just beginning.

Wireless, with television, is the last phase of a development that was begun by the first seafarers and nomads. Man leaves his birthplace, crosses lands, mountains and seas, and exchanges produce, inventions, works of art, customs, religions and knowledge. European doctors, missionaries, educational officials in Asia and Africa; Chinese, Japanese, Indians and negroes at European universities; the African fetish in the metropolitan drawing-room and the stiff collar round the neck of the black chief: and to-day a voice singing, teaching, preaching, conquering, going everywhere, coming from everywhere and making the whole world participators in everything ... [Wireless] and television enable any number of people to hear and see simultaneously what is happening everywhere in the world.

Arnheim celebrates broadcasting not only because it perfects the lopsided cultural exchange in which Western religion, education, and medicine are swapped for the decorative exotic "fetish" (he got that right!). More important, he listens to the radio with an eye on the prospect of television and hears a new Gestalt: a single voice that sweeps up all the others into a placeless ubiquity, a circulatory transcendence from "anywhere" into "everywhere." Although Arnheim did not clearly recognize it, television would be the best finale for his story, returning us at last to a settled state of existence unknown since the primordial nomadic disruption. Stilled by the sight of television, we are supposed to say: let images and voices travel in our place and the world will be one.

Television's first imaginary horizon is the Utopia of uninterrupted free trade, already transnational, a realization of specifically metropolitan, imperialist geopolitical ambitions. The "worlding" image of television, with its ideals of total flow and tendential completion of the network, bears the unmistakable...