Summary
Abstract
Seriality is one of the most striking manifestations of modernity. The identical (and mainly spatial) seriality of production processes can be distinguished from differential (and mainly temporal) seriality as it emerges, especially in modern art. On television, the episodic series differs from the continuing serial. Series offer a closed action in each episode; the individual episodes do not build upon one another, but reproduce a previous scheme. Continuing serials form a fluid and dynamic stream of development. This chapter describes the most important characteristics of both forms and outlines a third type of television's seriality, the neo-series, which emerged in the 1990s. Contrary to the principal endlessness of the early forms of seriality, the neo-series is marked by its finitude.
Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, seriality, series, serial, reproduction
There can be little doubt that the consumer society of the 20th century goes along with series and seriality (Beil, Engell, et al. 2017, 12-15). It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the middle of the 20th century, a powerful new medium emerged that can be read as a huge experiment with time and especially with the possibilities of seriality and the production of time by series. This medium, of course, is television. A comparable richness of different serial forms has never been developed anywhere else. Television shows circulate commodities as well as streams of moving images. And during the evolution of the television series, the opposition between those rooted in identity and hence in space and those rooted in difference and hence in time has been more or less systematically iterated, reiterated, differentiated, and folded back on itself (Deleuze 1969, 36-37). One might even assume that the astounding career of television happened due to the need for such a space where experiments with serial time and its forms could be undertaken and that, inversely, our thinking about seriality – even in philosophical terms – is deeply affected by the serial operations and practices of television.
Watched closely, though, television's position towards seriality, as we will develop here, differs from both the identical and the differential series. In its beginnings, television did not deliver anything stable in time.
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- Thinking Through Television , pp. 189 - 200Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019