Cable Waves

At some point in the last few months, a new kind of place appeared in the economic order of my television set. I didn’t see it at first. One of my graduate students was the first to ask me—with a distinct air of suspicion—if I had noticed anything unusual on channel 33.1 But when I checked, it didn’t show up on the set that I scan most intimately and exhaustively: the one that opens up my living room to a glorious horizon of digital plenitude. In fact, I couldn’t see it at all until I turned on the smaller, older television set that I watch as I drift into and out of sleep in my bedroom. Then it appeared in all its promised splendor: in the place where ESPN Classic had once opened up a portal to the nation’s heroic past, there appeared instead a DOS-based graph—looking like a relic of the seventies in its own right—that declared itself “HP 85721A CABLE TV ANALYZER A.02.09.”

Live Signal Frequency

The technological anachronism notwithstanding, this graph turned out to register a very different temporal order than its nostalgic predecessor. Indeed, the top-left corner of the black-and-white screen displayed the proper day’s date and a real-time clock counting the seconds, while the top of the screen marked out the “total input power” of the cable signal at my house. And underneath, the coup de grace: a live graph of the “total” signal frequency that spurted, condensed, and leapt across the entire “span” of the spectrum, mapping out a constant state of electronic agitation. I will not mince words: channel 33 had become the very picture of televisual presence. ESPN Classic—like the glorious past it had summoned—would be gone for good.

There is of course nothing inherently strange about the disappearance of a cable channel—especially in service areas like Stillwater, Oklahoma, where one provider holds a monopoly and can change the lineup of channels with impunity. But it is not every day that one turns on the television to find a real-time graph of cable television’s quivering liveness; I have never seen one anyhow. Cable providers typically deal with the elimination of a channel in one of a few ways: they insert another channel, conceal the gap by eliminating the un-programmed channel from the channel-flipping flow, or simply allow the blue screen of an electronic void to cast a chromatic reproval upon customers too cheap to upgrade their package. Of these standard solutions, the introduction of the cable TV analyzer channel most resembles the last. After all, I didn’t see it at first because the digital tuner connected to my main television does not show it. When channel 33 disappeared from its lineup, it was quietly eliminated from the numerical flow of the channels one traversed in moving up and down the broader band, as per the second solution. To click on channel 33 was to land on either channel 32 or channel 34; the onscreen channel guide made this same causal elision. Channel 33 simply ceased to exist as a place on the spectrum for digital customers, most of which already knew that ESPN Classic was also available at a more upscale version of this same location on the spectrum: channel 133.

There is no Channel 33

In other words, SuddenLink attended to the aesthetic preservation of flow in its broadband programming economy—and the experience of plenitude that it makes to digital customers—as if it were touching up a vagrant’s attempt to deface the Mona Lisa. But for customers still clinging to their old analog sets or their basic cable budgets, it provided the closest thing possible to an aesthetic presentation of the plenitude lost on their outmoded technology. That is, the company did not simply refuse to cover up the gap in the flow of channels available, and it did not simply confront analog recidivists with the aesthetic guarantor of that flow’s absence: a chroma-key blue screen signifying the hole that had opened up in the economy of channels. A fortiori, it provided a display manifesting this technological outmodedness in its own primitive aesthetic, and doing so for the eminently “practical” purpose of providing a diagnostic read-out on the impending expiration of the technology itself. Like most diagnoses, though, this one inevitably participates in effecting the outcome that it promises to merely predict: it is an EKG for another era’s liveness that anxiously assures this expiration in advance by making the potential of the signal to flat-line at any given moment a permanent fixture of the pre-digital programming economy.

As the terms that inflect this entire account already suggest, the canonical television studies scholarship on both “liveness” and “flow” offers indispensible resources for explaining how the economic imperatives of the television industry might profit from this unusual display of its technological capacities, and why the display itself might cultivate a sense of anxiety in the spectator to this end.2 And yet, as I have tried to suggest in my two previous columns, shifting these terms into the theoretical vocabulary of post-Heideggerian political thought opens up new ways of thinking about the economic basis for these familiar tropes of televisual presence; new ways of thinking about the relation between ontology and technology that has codified around them; and new ways of approaching the hegemonic nature of this relation at the level of methodology. Along these very lines, we might consider how strongly the account of the cable television analyzer laid out above—and more precisely, its position in relation to the technological economies of television programming—resonates with Ernest Laclau’s well-known account of the empty signifier. As Laclau explains at much greater length in the 1996 Emancipation(s), an empty signifier is one that points “from within the process of signification, to the discursive presence of its own limits.”3 It can perform this impossible task because it effaces the particularity of its own particular significance in the differential order that defines signification as such, emphasizing instead the equivalences of its signifying potential, and in doing so, “assum[ing] the role of representing the pure being of the system—or rather, the system as pure Being.”4 A full explanation of the empty signifier is of course beyond the scope of this essay. But suffice it to say that Laclau defines this set of discursive relations as the logic of hegemony itself, whereby a particular signifier assumes the function of representing a universal meaning that fundamentally exceeds it and does not exist otherwise. And as Laclau insists, the ontological force of this hegemonic set of relations derives precisely from the aesthetic economization through which it establishes signification as a system—not from any “last instance” of economic relations per se.

With this premise in mind, we might think of the appearance of the cable TV analyzer on channel 33 in similar terms. After all, it presents us with the image of a frequency equalizer rather than an image of any particular channel in the economy of cable programming, and in doing so, it points to the plenitude that lies beyond the hegemonic limits of this system precisely in the act of constituting this system as an economy that is aesthetic and financial at once. Put otherwise, the cable TV analyzer makes the absence of a particular signal—ESPN Classic—present by presenting the presence of the signal in general in the empty space it has left behind. Of course, to think of the cable TV analyzer in this way is to think of the apparatus of television in rather different terms than we might think of it in the Althusserian theoretical economy which largely informs our existing discussions of television technology. For it reminds us that the television screen itself functions in a similar way regardless of any one technological incarnation of its “essence,” even when it conceals the economic limits of its order in the constant flow of images, channels, and programs that pass across its surface, as it does in the digital programming economy described above.5 Or rather, it reminds us that if the aesthetic affect of televisual flow evokes its own experience of the medium’s “pure Being” or presence, it is only because it too defuses the power of any one image, channel, program, or technology to exhaust the specificity that the screen itself signifies—not because it defines the “essence” of some originary notion of television technology.

At the same time, this scenario reminds us that if the aesthetic experience of rupture associated with “live” crisis coverage often marks out an affective crisis in the ontological economy of television representation, it is only because such crises temporarily fix the hegemonic significance of the world that television—in the broadcast era and the post-broadcast era alike—otherwise promises to scan indeterminately. Simply put, to think of the cable television analyzer as an empty signifier requires that we think in turn of the entire ontological discourse surrounding television as something more complicated than a delusion of technological essentialism—something that cannot be completely “demystified” through materialist histories of production relations and reception studies, and neatly dispensed with as mere ideology. Insofar as it reminds us that the economic basis on which television’s ontological discourse relies is aesthetic first and foremost, it reminds us that the medium also constitutes the material relations of its industrial, political, technological, and territorial economies on the ontological grounds of this aesthetic economy. And in this much, it reminds us that understanding the complex role television new and old plays in the production of our social and political existence will require something more than sensitivity to the myriad differences that ultimately define the medium’s specificity in an infinite number of material institutions and practices—as crucial as this mode of research may be. For unless we accept the accumulation of these differential specificities as the medium’s promise of yet another plenitude that we cannot hope to represent, and must thus defer indefinitely, it requires that we indulge in a hegemonic crisis of our own: we must reconsider the distinctly Althusserian theoretical foundations on which the field is built as such, as well as the questions, terms, and methodologies it has allowed us to take for granted for so many years.

Image Credits:
1. Author’s photograph
2. Author’s photograph
3. Author’s photograph

Please feel free to comment.

1. I owe special thanks to Adam Cottrel for bringing this exciting channel to my attention.
2. I am thinking of a whole range of scholarship that I cannot cite in full here, but suffice it to say that I have tried to evoke the insights and terms of at least three key essays in particular: Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 222-239; Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1983), 12-21; Patricia Mellencamp, “TV Time and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television,” in Logics of Television, 240-266.
3. Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 36.
4. Laclau, 38-39.
5. I make a much more substantial version of this argument in a forthcoming essay called “On the Grounds of Television,” which will appear in The Place of the Moving Image, eds. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Let the night of ABC programming that took place on January 4th, 2010 go down in history as the most profound staging of the relation between literal and figurative meaning since Paul De Man’s deconstruction of rhetoric in the 1979 Allegories of Reading. Perhaps it was something in the air—and I’m referring here to The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love, the first show of ABC’s prime-time lineup, and the point from which all of the rhetorical intrigue took off. If the titular pun on the newest bachelor’s profession as a pilot did not immediately register as the cue for a rim-shot, the poetic stylings of the ladies hoping join him “in the cockpit”—as more than one blushing contestant put it—would clarify any confusion.1 Perhaps most memorably, a Cambodian hopeful named Channy used the beauty of her native language to assure the bachelor that he “could land [his] plane on [her] landing strip anytime.” Indeed, De Man may have been the first to argue that figurative language grounds our sense of both literal meaning and ontological reference to an extent where “it matters little whether we call the inside of the box [of language] the content or form, the outside the meaning or appearance,” but it was surely Channy whose reference to a decidedly non-linguistic box brought the deepest conceptual implications of this argument into the profanity of material existence.2

Click here to view the embedded video.

And yet, Channy’s bid to impress The Bachelor would not mark the last invocation of such literal and figurative boxes on ABC that night; nor would The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love mark the high-point of the evening’s rhetorical lessons. On the contrary, ABC had even more advanced material planned for the evening than a much-hyped franchise debut: the special broadcast of a new dating show pilot, produced by Endemol, called Conveyor Belt of Love. Much as the title suggests, the show presents itself as a campy demystification of The Bachelor’s romantic rhetoric: in the course of an hour, thirty men lined up on a conveyor belt pass before the eyes of five single women. In a flagrant violation of industrial principles of efficiency, though, the belt pauses for 60 seconds while each man does all he can to convince one of the women to invite him into her box—a feature of the mise-en-scene that inspired fits of giggles whenever a contestant shouted “I want him in my box!”—unless and until a more appealing man rolls by and takes his place there. The last men standing get a date.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the show’s bravado display of high-concept low-humor cultivated considerably more rhetorical ardor than The Bachelor in the television trades and the blogosphere. In fact, I am confident that no other programming event in the history of television—with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s testimony on the Lewinsky affair—has ever inspired so many TV critics to entertain the vagaries of linguistic reference. When ABC announced the show in early December, for instance, the website TV Squad published an article called “ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love Will Literally Treat People Like Meat,” which began with the appropriately De Manian declaration, “ABC has officially found a way to turn reality dating shows into a literal metaphor.”3 By the time the show finally aired a month later, it was clear that even the most wizened assessments of the show would be conveyed with the same rhetorical excess that defined the evening’s programming itself. “After ABC’s new Bachelor takes flight tonight,” wrote another giddy reviewer, “stay tuned for a reality dating show that really keeps it moving. Literally.” 4 Several reviews even went so far as to include stock-photography scenes of industrial grade meat portions plopped side-by-side on a conveyor belt. 5

As this last flourish illustrates particularly well, it was the show’s employment of an actual conveyor belt that inspired so much talk of literalism. And it was the apparent matter-of-factness of this flourish that produced an apparently uniform interpretation of the show as a metaphor for the industrial production of contemporary television programming, on the one hand, and the reality dating show’s commodification of bodies, love, and romance on the other. Appropriately enough, this interpretation also has the quality of obviousness that defines the literal as such—especially when one recalls that the show’s triumphantly literal title itself appropriates the proven marketing formula of another mainstream exploitation hit, the illustrious Snakes on a Plane (2006). And yet, if we take seriously the proposition of a “literal metaphor” that these readings both cite and enact, then we must also recognize that an industrialist reading of the show depends on a rhetorical tautology for its sense of matter-of-factness: one “literal” conveyor belt must stand in metaphorically for another “literal” conveyor belt. Or rather, the conveyor belt must serve at once as figure and ground, trope and referent for the material base of industrial production.

It is here that De Man’s deconstruction of linguistic boxes proves especially instructive for thinking through the rhetorical excess of all these other boxes—the gendered language of constrained transgression that defined one particular night of ABC reality, to be sure, but also the industrialized language of materialism that generally defines how we think about the “real” logics of production and reproduction organized by the boxes in our living rooms. For indeed, De Man’s objection to the metaphor of the box for thinking of language rests on his argument that the literal “ground” of the discourse of reason always already depends for its referential stability on an aesthetic rationalization of the stylistic excesses that, ironically, undo this stability as well. Put another way, the aesthetic dimension of language plays a constitutive role in producing the discursive ground that we point to when we call something true or real. Accordingly, if we want to speak comfortably of economic rationalization or a material “base” for aesthetic affects, then we must ignore the history of irrational tropes that found the philosophical justifications for these seemingly transparent discourses of ontological truth and substance. De Man’s conception of rhetoric thus requires that we recognize the literal and figurative foundation for the dominant Marxist theory of production—which is to say, the “base” of industrial relations—itself depends for its foundational and even literal quality on the very metaphor of foundationalness that designates it. And as Ernesto Laclau has argued, we must thus begin to think not simply of the ways in which material relations produce aesthetic modes of existence, but also of the ways in which aesthetic relations, and style in general, produce the discursive ground on which the ontological production of social and political materiality takes place as such.6

In the case of Conveyor Belt of Love, for example, we might recognize that if the imagery of mass-production works with such transparent uniformity as a high-concept sight-gag about popular media, it is only because this imagery holds such a time-honored place in the rhetorical repertoire of cultural theory and criticism. Or rather, it is because the aesthetic traits of what Adorno and Horkheimer so memorably described as The Culture Industry also furnish the sense of a transparent, rational, and uniform order that we attribute (perhaps rather willfully) to industrial production. On this point it is instructive to recall how Adorno describes the aesthetic of the variety act in “The Schema of Mass Culture”—an essay that precedes The Dialectic of Enlightenment by three years. Reflecting on the endless presentation of different attractions promised by continuous vaudeville, he wryly concludes that variety in fact “already represented the magical repetition of the industrial procedure in which the selfsame is reproduced in time—the very allegory of high capitalism.”7

Adorno’s choice of imagery here is interesting enough as another instance where the aesthetic figure of total production helps constitute the origin of industrial materiality that seems to ground it. And yet, if we return once more to the eponymous Conveyor Belt of Love, his reference to variety theater also helps clarify the potential rewards of re-thinking the show’s aesthetic beyond the confines of a techno-industrial critical economy. After all, if we do not automatically accept the conveyor belt as a transparent metaphor for the rationalized procedures of the industrial assembly line, then another set of metaphors comes into view—one closer to Adorno’s, but with very different critical, theoretical, and methodological implications for how we might think about the ontological ground of television “production”. Indeed, if we take the object “conveyor belt” seriously as an element of style, then the former becomes recognizable not just a conveyor belt, but also a figure of the “serial assembly” of “timed units” that Raymond Williams dubbed television “flow,” and the organic movement of water and time whose image it summons; not just televisual “flow”, but a figure of the presentational aesthetic that, as Williams also observes, connects the trope of flow to the formal structure of popular variety theater; and not just the formal conceit of “popular” variety theater that so struck Adorno, but also the presentational aesthetic that marks both the taxonomic orders of natural science and the rotating display cases of the early modern department stores where variety shows first began. More simply put, the Conveyor Belt of Love becomes recognizable not just as another metaphor for mass-production, but a fortiori, as a rhetorical condensation of the excessive figurative relation that it shares with the spectacular aesthetic of the variety show, the ontological aesthetic of television technology, and the evidentiary aesthetic of both natural and man-made taxonomies of material plenitude. And while this way of seeing the show may at first sound like an exercise in rhetorical excess itself, it in fact opens up some very provocative ways of re-thinking the claim to transparency and totality that the figure at the heart of this excess makes. Perhaps most importantly, it draws our attention to the resemblance between the trope on spectacular display here—a trope of unity or continuity articulated through the presentation of difference—with the “equivalential chain” of differences that Ernesto Laclau has described as the aesthetic condition of all hegemonic discourse.8 We might thus begin to think of the show’s aesthetic as a staging of the figure through which any particular set of differences can be generalized as an ontological whole—nothing more or less than a spectacular object lesson in the art of hegemonic production. 9

To put matters this way is not to suggest that the conditions of industrial production are irrelevant to television aesthetics, or that we can ignore the economic motivations for television’s logics. It is simply to suggest that we can only understand the full complexity of these logics if we recognize that they do not define the ontological ground of what or how television produces as discursive forms of existence. More to the point, it is to suggest that we might see the “logics” of television in altogether new ways if we begin to explore how the materiality of television aesthetics—the stylistic ground of the television image itself—also works to “produce” the ontological affects that define our social and political reality. In turn, we might also begin to reconsider our sense of what constitutes the logical, unadorned, and indeed transparent “ground” of the industrial “base”—not to mention the methodologies to which we attribute a “material” or “materialist” value in relation to our thinking of it. After all, we have long insisted that television is not simply a “toaster oven with pictures.” Why treat it like a box?

Image Credits:

1. The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love
2. Sixty Seconds of Fame
3. Men in Boxes
4. Judgment Time

Please feel free to comment.

1. It should also be noted that the parodic schmaltziness of The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love is hardly restricted to the linguistic. A pillow-shot repeated throughout the first episode shows a lone airplane banking off the clouds of a hot-pink and orange sunset while Jeffrey Osborne’s eighties hit “On the Wings of Love” plays.
2. Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 5.
3. Danny Gallagher, “ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love Will Literally Treat People Like Meat,” http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/12/09/abcs-conveyor-belt-of-love-will-literally-treat-people-like-mea/, 9 December 2009.
4. Matt Webb Mitovich, “Conveyor Belt of Love: Wild Show’s Secrets Revealed!” http://www.fancast.com/blogs/2010/tv-news/conveyor-belt-of-love-wild-shows-secrets-revealed/, 4 January 2010.
5. In addition to the TV Squad review cited above, see (for just one example): Michael Schneider, “ABC Finds Conveyor Belt of Love: Speed-Dating Reality Special to Air in January,” Variety, 9 December 2009. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118012472.html?categoryid=14&cs=1.
6. For Laclau’s most sustained discussion of the role that De Man’s conception of rhetoric plays in the ontological production of social relations, see Ernesto Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 229-253.
7. Theodore Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 70.
8. See Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
9. I explore this proposition at much greater length in my dissertation, “Variety, or the Spectacular Aesthetics of American Liberal Democracy” (Ph.D. Diss, Northwestern, 2007), and a book manuscript that I am currently adapting from it.

Anyone who follows the soap opera One Life to Live knows that the citizens of Llanview, Pennsylvania have both seen and made plenty of trouble. When I first began watching the show a quarter-of-a-century ago, the illustrious Mitch Lawrence had commandeered half the women in town as sex slaves using a few well-placed barbituates and an evangelical charisma. In the years since, he has returned to wreak similar forms of havoc at least three times; he is doing it right now, in fact. And he is hardly the only one. As in every soap opera town, the social body of Llanview is composed of born rogues—which is to say, the unethical, the immoral, and the violent. At least to my thinking, it is this vision of every social body as a fluctuating compendium of accidental murderers, petty thieves, and pious criminals that makes soap operas so compelling. But it is also this fundamentally perverse vision of the social that requires the genre to include moments of moral and textual reconnaissance. As a genre, it must periodically collect its stray plot-lines and outlaws into something like a community, something like a story, and something like the kind of society with the kind of values that we read about in civics classes and German philosophy—the Romantic volk, the Kantian universal, the Habermasian public.

For as long as I can remember, One Life to Live has generally fulfilled this requirement with a P.T. Andersonesque montage of shots showing each character enjoying his or her particular struggle or triumph in some place or another—getting laid in a bar, repressing a rape in a hospital—while a song about the universal struggles and triumphs of life serves to bind these characters together into an economy that is temporal, moral, ethical, geographical, and textual all at once. In December of last year, however, the writers introduced a new trope of unity to the show’s aesthetic repertoire: the broadcast of an old black-and-white holiday film called Christina Comes Home for Christmas. In other words, rather than using a maudlin song as an ad hoc analogy for the galvanizing effects that both television and soap operas have attributed to the medium’s affect of “liveness” since the fifties, they opted for an even more concentrated expression of televisual presence than live television itself.

For an indication of what makes the holiday broadcast event such a concentrated production of televisual presence, one can look no further than the show’s presentation of its effects.1 In the first part of the episode where the film airs, multiple characters tell rapturous stories about their childhood memories of the film and the unique meaning it holds for them. The subsequent event of the broadcast itself then serves as an affective and spatio-temporal consummation of two overlapping sets of relationships: at the level of the text and the community, the relationship between a whole succession of shots showing characters scattered throughout Llanview in isolated scenes; in each of the isolated domestic scenes, a romantic relationship between a pair of deviants brought together by the sentimental spirit that the film occasions. We see Jessica and Brody, both patients in a mental ward, learning to look past their respective war-crimes and hostage-taking episodes and into each other’s eyes; we see the extortionists Natalie and Jared passed out in the film’s electronic light after having sex; we see Blair, the wife of gang-rapist Todd, snuggling against her rogue-cop boyfriend as she mouths Christina’s lines about returning to true love; the list goes on. Whatever past and current indiscretions might haunt the citizens of Llanview, the simultaneity of this traditional holiday television broadcast briefly unites them in a communal time and space. More importantly, though, the sentimental genre of the Christmas film that makes the broadcast such a powerful conduit for communal bonding in these separate but networked scenes—supplying its own overarching soundtrack of maudlin music and dialogue—provides a textual affirmation of the universal values and needs that temporarily bind them together in the image of a moral economy, rather than a television audience. Simply put, the sequence cannot simply rely on the technology of “live” transmission per se in order to present the scene of the television audience as a spectacle of social plenitude or universal togetherness. It must connect the “imagined community” of electronic transmission to something more potent than the technology of a wall-socket, an economy, or a network—something that itself constitutes these technological figurations as ontological productions of social plenitude: a representation of the very ideal of universalism that undergirds the idealist social imaginary of broadcast technology and economics in the first place.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As I have already begun to suggest, the show’s staging of this scenario presents us with a visual literalization of what Jane Feuer so indelibly describes as the “ideology [of] ontology” that attends television liveness.2 Despite its apparent disregard for the very notion of the social contract, the community of Llanview is, just as Feuer puts it, “unified as a direct . . . consequence of television technology.3 Its appearance as such is embodied by its simultaneous appearance as a series of linked living room audiences. And yet, for me the interest of this enactment does not lie in the extent to which it might be said to promote an essentialist ideology of television technology, or the illusory experience of social co-presence that this ideology promises to the viewer as the scene of its ontological mystification. Instead, I would argue that the role of the holiday broadcast here draws our attention to an altogether different understanding of the relation between media, ontology, and the social.

Perhaps most fundamentally, it reminds us that the representational medium of the image plays a constitutive role in the particular ontological effect that is generally, if somewhat vaguely, attributed to the technological medium of broadcast “presence.” What is more, it reminds us that this ontological register of the medium does not necessarily have anything to do with the medium of television technology, ideology, or liveness per se—even though it conditions the social imaginaries they configure as either its double or its differend (to borrow a term from Lyotard). This is, after all, why the show relies on the trans-media genre of the holiday story in order to compose the universal moral economy of the show and the community. Insofar as these texts almost invariably present us with tableaux embodying the same universal ideals that most Western holidays allegedly honor—peace on Earth, good will (to men), the spirit of giving and compassion, family homecomings, and so on—they imply an image of the audience that is likewise bound together, as an audience and a society at once, by its economic embrace of these same ideals. Indeed, as the Christina Comes Home sequence makes visibly manifest, the aesthetic economy of the holiday homecoming tale already proliferates an isometric tableau of the audience gathered before it in each of the otherwise particular living rooms that it lights; the aesthetic enactment of universalism onscreen provides the ontological ground on which the “liveness” of broadcast configures itself as a technology of the social.

As the description of Llanview with which I began should make equally manifest, though, the images we see of its residents on a daily basis provide a radically different ground for the social imaginary of broadcast, and indeed, for the ontological construction of the social that the discourse of televisual presence can affect. Rather than providing an onscreen embodiment of universal community, this ensemble of warring rogues—a designation that, Derrida reminds us, positions one outside the rule of any moral or legal economy—instead presents us with the anti-social raw materials from which every economy of moral and political representation must construct society in reality, as well.4 That is, it presents us with an unreliably affiliated gang of warring sovereigns. By way of a closing, then, I want to propose that the flexible ontological affect of the television image has yet to be theorized within television studies. For although our field has effectively allowed the meaning of the term “ontology” to serve as an obsolete epithet for the mystifications of technological essentialism, in the scenes I have barely glossed above, the ontological question of the television image lies not in the nature of the technology that produces it, but rather, in the nature of the discursive social body that it produces. As a number of philosophers associated with the aesthetic turn in political ontology have elaborated—and I am thinking here of everyone from Ernesto Laclau and Jean-Luc Nancy to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Ranciere—the ontological construction of social materiality itself derives from these very same affects, which cannot be reduced to the two ontological scenarios that have defined the theoretical horizon of our field over the last several decades: simulation or materialism, Baudrillard or Althusser. The ontological gauntlet that this work throws down for us, then, consists of nothing less than our thinking both the politics of representation, and the place of television within them, anew.

Image Credits:

1. Christina Comes Home for Christmas
2. Welcome to Llanview sign
3. It’s a Wonderful Life

Please feel free to comment.

1. A rapturous review of this episode on Daytime Confidential only further confirms this effect.
2. Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, 1983), 12-21.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004).