Television is the most powerful system of images in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Nonetheless, TV has attained only little philosophical attention so far, especially compared to other (visual) media such as film. This book looks at TV as what happens on the screen and beyond it; which is mainly the operation of switching images. It therefore proposes a new definition of TV as the first picture that can be switched on, off, and over, which stresses that TV is more tactile than visual.
Through the operation of switching, TV figures the world from within and as the course of its figuration. This is grasped here by the term of “ontography”. Through the ongoing interlacing and bridging of “TV 1.0” (the image is being switched) and “TV 2.0” (the image is a switch), TV exponentially increases the production and circulation of images. It transforms the world and itself from an analogue state to a digital one and from central perspectivism to pluri-perspective. In terms of time, through switching and the switch, it develops and reworks new temporal orderings, such as instantaneity, synchronicity, flow, and seriality. TV makes its own history. In space, it creates a mediasphere as its habitat and hence new forms of being-in-the-world, of proximity and distance, and scale. Anthropologically, it works on what a subject and an object is, on what makes the human being, and ontographically, how it is possible that there is something at all instead of nothing: through switch-images.
Author(s): Lorenz Engell, Bernd Herzogenrath, Patricia Pisters
Series: Thinking Media
Edition: 1
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 392
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Television 1.0
Chapter 1: Switching On: The Beginnings of Television
The Switchable Picture
Current and Switch
The Tube Image
Beginnings on Television
Switching Off from the World and Switching On Into It: Stanley Cavell and Marshall McLuhan
Switching Modes of Being
Chapter 2: Live Television
A Definition of Television and the Order of the Simultaneous
The Raw Materials of Television
Live Television
A Side Note on Radio
Before Experience
Present, Simultaneity, Synchronicity
Moment, Instant, Event
Being-Present (Dabeisein) When Not-Being-Present (Nicht-Dabeisein)
Critique of Liveness: The Division of Time
Critique of Liveness: Pseudo-Events and Events on Strike
From the Economy of Time to Boredom
Chapter 3: The Series (1)
Seriality and Transmediality
Series of Identity and of Difference
Series as Cycle and Series as Medium
The Emergence of the Series
Plurality and Seriality
Soap!
Episodes in Continuing Series
Cliffhangers
Episodes in Episodic Series
Memory
Borrowed Memory
Secret Agent Series
Serial Secret Agents
The Third Series
The Series as Discontinuum
The Series of Reflections
Chapter 4: Flow
Beyond Meaning
Emergence and Immersion
Flow in Space
The Semantics of Flow
Heterography
Flow and Bodies
Heterochrony and Presence
The Dionysian Switch
Humor
Chapter 5: Interconnecting
Direction
Operations and Their Agents
Sender and Receiver
Extensions of the Body
Organ Projection
From the Axe to the Screen
Hot and Cold Media
Touch
Internalizations
Couch Potato
Part II: Trajectories, Expansions, Intensifications
Chapter 6: Instant Replay
Videography
Replay
Slow Motion, Freeze Frame, and Reversal
Ontography of the Instant Replay
Twofold Ontography
Chronography
Change and Measurelessness
Aionography
Meaning
The Counter-Present of the Instant Replay
Chapter 7: The Space Image
Cosmos Live
The Apollo Series
Boredom
Chronic Boredom
Univocity
The Switch Image in the Age of Its Experimentation
Three Phases of Experimental Television
Space as Television Laboratory
The Visible Planet
The Planet Opens Its Eyes
Eye and Gaze
The Total Image
The Big Switch Image
Chapter 8: Switching: Remote Control
Between Magic and Command
Digital and Universal
The Cultural Technique of Selection
Communication Theory
Remote Control as Communication Technology
Television with an Implicit Remote Control: MTV and News Channels
Series and Casting Shows
Choosing, Dreaming, and the Entire World
Double Contingency
Paleotelevision, Neotelevision, and Televisuality
Selection Styles
Contingency and Latency
The Actual and the Virtual
The Indexical World
Chapter 9: Second Screens
Expanded Television
The Family of Television
Ambient Television
Becoming Flat, Becoming Space
Discontinuity
Analogism
Without a Studio
Transparency Spaces
Becoming a Switch
From Ontography to the Ontogram
Ontogram and Diagram
Pervasive Switch Images
Prosumer and Patient
Computer Television
Part III: Television 2.0
Chapter 10: The Series (2)
The Forensics of the Series
Multiplication and Finitude
Second Series
Resemblance 1: Epistemology
Resemblance 2: Family Resemblance
Resemblance and Its Medium
Qualities without Objects
Resemblance 3: Icon and Diagram
Serial Ontogrammatics
Sitcom
Chapter 11: Reality and History
Ontography and Simulation
Ontography and The Reality of the Mass Media
Reality 2.0
Big Brother
Early Forms and Constellations
Experimental Television
Celebrity: Ontography of Prominence
Celebrity, Scripted Reality, Makeover Show
Television Reality: Ontography and Self-Reference
From Reference to Operation
Television History: The Attack of the Present on the Rest of Time
Hyperreality and Historical Ontography
Being There Is Everything: The Iconicity of Television History
Beyond History and Memory
Chapter 12: Switch-Off-Images
Flow 2.0
Henri Bergson: The Materiality of Images
Perception-Images
Interruption-Images
Cliffhanger, Freeze, Instant Replay
Memory
Fancy Transitions and Test Patterns
The Light-Emitting Diode
The Technical Body and the Human Body
Anchor-Images: Anthropic Casting and Tactical Operations
The Dionysian Switch
Boredom
The Logic and Existence of Switching Off
Bibliography
Index
