The Switch Image: Television Philosophy

Description

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. 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