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Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television. - book reviews
Art Journal, Winter, 1995 by Thomas Keenan
As though . . . the simulation of real life were not part of real life! - Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., 1977
During the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, witnesses regularly testified that they were able to recall the precise times of past events not by referring to clocks or watches or even printed records, but only by the hours when their favorite television programs began and ended every day.
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One witness, speaking to a camera and out of the jury's presence, offered the defendant an alibi. A tabloid headline paraphrased: "I Saw O. J.'s Bronco." But who didn't? For so many hours that summer afternoon and evening our world was O. J.'s Bronco, across Los Angeles and across our televisions, images passed from chopper to chopper and screen to screen. All of the narrative drama of the trial, even the promise of a resolution, will never compare with the utter dislocation of that drive, its endless and aimless dispersion, its blinding and riveting monotony. Where was that car that we saw, and how fast was it going? On television it moved at the speed of light.
Cut. Today, wrote Ernst Junger in 1934,
today any event worthy of notice is surrounded by a circle of lenses and microphones and lit up by the flaming explosions of flashbulbs. In many cases, the event itself is completely subordinated to its "broadcast"; to a great degree, it has been turned into an object. Thus we have already experienced political trials, parliamentary meetings, and contests whose sole purpose is to be the object of a planetary broadcast. The event is bound neither to its particular space nor its particular time, since it can be mirrored anywhere and repeated any number of times.(1)
Today, this fearful and precise observation rings like a commonplace, a cliche of what we blithely call the television age, and yet it retains considerable shock value. The priority of the transmission over the event itself, the ubiquitous light of publicity, unbridled repetition and the disappearance of distance, and even the occurrence of global events that seem to belong only to the medium, now define our ordinary experience of television. Yet paradoxically these everyday phrases remain grounds for enthusiasm as well as suspicion and resistance. We know, and repeat any number of times, that television has no respect for reality or experience. Rather than effacing itself in the world-giving transparency that ought to be proper to a medium as such, it instead turns opaquely into a space and time itself (to be precise: more than one space and time), "the media." And today, every day, we are surprised by the damage television does to our sense of the way things are and ought to be. Still, we learn nothing from our astonishment. Whether falling back reactively on everything charred in those flaming explosions or leaping exuberantly out of them into some unknown fire, we remain blinded by the glare of this electro-optical light to the theoretical difficulties and possibilities of television.
The violent light of publicity and the irreducibility of televisual transmission are, finally, strangely unaccountable events. Without offering the ground for any determinate politics, conservative or radical, they nevertheless disarm from within the entire metaphysical apparatus that props up the television system and which our ongoing amazement seeks, wittingly or unwittingly, to reaffirm. The explosions and the broadcast still seem to befall the event like an accident, and the particular present, in time and space, of its occurrence seems not simply unbound but truly lost, sacrificed, scattered across the wilderness of so many airwaves. But the dispersal is originary: that is the point Junger approaches, however hesitantly. Television is where events occur by being sent elsewhere, where things begin by being repeated. Events "whose sole purpose is to be the object of a planetary broadcast" means that things take place, and time, on television - not just in order to be broadcast, but only insofar as they are transmitted.
Today, things happen, good and bad, on TV - which is not to say that they don't also happen elsewhere, or that they just don't happen, but they do in fact happen . . . on air.(2) The time and space of television condition our world - they do not make it any less real, and certainly not any less true. We do not confirm or verify, like amateur epistemologists, the actual existence of things by checking in with (their representations on) our televisions - no, we simply take the time to watch them happen. This remains the most difficult thing to think about television: what happens there, and when it comes to pass. Events bound for broadcast, unbound from the present: again, for the first time, they return . . . a flashback, a trauma, a ghost.
Almost a decade ago, Jacques Derrida faced a video camera in Toronto and talked about film and television . . . "a ghost dance," he called them:
contemporary technologies like film, television, telephones . . . live on or off of, in some way, a ghostly structure. Film is an art of the ghost, which is to say, it is neither image nor perception. . . . The voice on the telephone has a ghostly appearance. It is something neither real nor unreal, something which returns, is reproduced - finally, it's the question of reproduction. From the moment when the first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, we are dealing with the ghostly.(3)
