4 - The Tactile and the Index: From the Remote Control to the Handheld Computer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter takes up Marshall McLuhan's reflections on of television’s tactility. With the help of Charles Sanders Peirce's taxonomy, it distinguishes between two different forms of tactility: a tactility of wrapping, of comprehensive wholeness and inclusion, and a tactility of direction, of pointing and causing. Analysing key devices from the remote control to the smartphone, this chapter examines the transition between the two forms of tactility; in other words, the moment when receptivity, inertia, and passivity turn into relatedness, action, and causality. The technical instrumentation constantly renegotiates the interrelations between the allegedly impassive matter and an assumed purposeful will. Remote controls and smartphones always go back behind the well-rehearsed distinction between activity and passivity, between (human) will and (technical) body.
Keywords: tactility, indexicality, Charles Sanders Peirce, touch screen, remote control, computer mouse
This chapter is motivated by the experience of the traditional television user. As everyone can assert, and as Raymond Williams marvelously described it, the experience of television (at least in one of its dominant forms) is one of an intermediate state between day and night, sea and land, closeness and distance, consciousness and dream, reality and magic, attention and distraction (Williams 2008, 77-121). The television experience is one in which the world changes completely just by pushing a button. This is why the following begins with a completely surreal question: how can one imagine the transformation of a person into an animal, such as the metamorphosis of a university professor into a mouse? This could happen only by magic, as it does in fairy tales, or by technology, such as in films – and here I am thinking of not only animated movies (Panovsky 1947) and early cinema (specifically, the cinema of Georges Melies. See Solomon 2010 and Engell 2013a, 255-268) but also regular feature films, such as Alain Resnais’s wonderful My American Uncle (1980), and computer-generated images. Of course, this happens in everyday experiences using a television remote control. This chapter centers on the hypothesis that the computer's main function, the mouse click – or, more recently, the touching of a virtual key on a screen – is deeply rooted in and has been prepared by remotely controlled television.
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- Information
- Thinking Through Television , pp. 79 - 92Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019