Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. - book reviews

The anthology - one of the finest inventions of literacy - is now having its life extended into the internet, where many homepages function as collections of favorite nodes. Some say that the Bible was the first anthology and that the higher criticism amounts to little more than pointing out this fact. Modern critics of the book, such as Walter Benjamin, have suggested that every book is a disguised anthology, and that the only part of rhetoric worth retaining in the age of mechanical reproduction might well be inventio - the gathering or collecting of materials (the scholar's card file). One version of the book made entirely of quotations that is associated with Benjamin would be an anthology with selections arranged to evoke the idea that motivated the editor to gather just these pieces. Perhaps the best evidence of the anthology form's continuing fascination is that one of the most significant theoretical texts of our time - Glas by Jacques Derrida - could be described as a theory of the anthology effect.

What is the anthology effect? Pattern. What is the source of confidence that allowed countless generations of scholars to pass their preliminary examinations for the Ph.D.? The anthology, with its headnotes, system of classification, selection of key examples, combination of examples into sequences, must share a large part of the credit. The illusion of coverage required by the traditional doctorate in the national languages was sustainable primarily due to the existence of anthologies. Nor is it surprising that those who benefited from the anthologies in receiving their license to teach would continue to rely upon them in designing the syllabi for their courses. The virtue of the anthology is that the work of inference remains to be done by the students, who must discover the principle of coherence binding the collection, with the rewards of this work guaranteed by the editor.

One of the best ways to focus or direct the work of a discipline is to put one of its defining problems into an anthology. Such is the purpose of both Video Culture and Illuminating Video. My name for this defining problem is "grammatology" - the history and theory of writing. Grammatology supplies a context that cuts across the debates about periodization and politics. The arguments that divide the thinkers and artists of our century into the categories of modern, postmodern, and avant-garde dissolve where subjected to the framework of grammatology, with its historical periodization of orality, literacy, and electronic civilization. This larger perspective proposes that the shift from orally transmitted culture to literacy provides an analogy for understanding how the emergence of an electronic apparatus in our time is affecting literacy.

By opening Video Culture with Benjamin's "Mechanical Reproduction" essay, John Hanhardt locates the question of video within the debates about aesthetics and politics that informed the work of the Frankfurt School. "The distinction between author and public," wrote Benjamin, in a phrase that sums up the organizing issue of these two collections, "is about to lose its basic character" (Video Culture, p. 39). The effect of this first section of Video Culture, titled "Theory and Practice," which takes up nearly half the book, is to illustrate the relevance of Frankfurt School theorists to the history of writing. The questions and prospects proposed by Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in relation to the phenomenon of cinema still await their answer in the era of television. Both Benjamin and Brecht envisioned a new medium capable of supporting a new institutionalization of letters, a two-way medium in which the receivers would become the makers, the readers become the authors of the texts created. This vision has not been realized in either cinema or television, but the prospect grows evermore plausible with each new generation of equipment, the latest installment of which is the internet.

The pieces gathered in the theory section - Benjamin, Brecht, Louis Althusser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Jean Baudrillard - build upon one another to develop a complex argument - the problematic - of the possibilities and limitations of technology and the avant-garde arts with respect to the ends of a progressive politics. The virtue of Video Culture is the focus it brings to this problematic, beginning with Hanhardt's concise review of the history of American avant-garde film and his overview of the scene of video art up to the 1980s. The latter two sections of the collection fill out this overview, discussing the interrelationships among the technologies of film and video, their institutionalization, in entertainment (as cinema and television) and in art (the avant-garde). The question guiding the discussion is whether the audio-visual media are capable of supporting critical reason. The key question of the problematic is precisely the defining question of grammatology. Video is discussed, that is, in terms of the invention of the language, institutional practices, and behaviors of individual subjects (the elements constituting the apparatus of an epoch).