3 - Television with Unknowns: Reflections on Experimental Television
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
For Jean Francois Lyotard, experimental action is a recursive and even paradoxical quest for the as yet unknown rules which govern this quest itself. With television, however, we can distinguish between different types and degrees of experimentation. Television with only one unknown dimension refers to the testing of the technical device itself, as it took place in the early and developmental period up to about 1936. Television with two unknown dimensions, on the other hand, is about the relationship between the apparatus and its users observed through secondary dispositions, from audience research to legal regulations. Finally, television with three unknown dimensions – as exemplified in shows like Big Brother but also coverage from the Gulf War – incorporates the feedback function and recursively questions the reality it generates itself.
Keywords: television theory, philosophy of media, Jean Francois Lyotard, experiment, media change, Big Brother
Someone who has no questions or who has already prepared suitable answers is not doing an experiment, as an experiment is a special technique for eliminating ignorance or uncertainty, which someone who already knows everything does not need. In particular, it indicates a certain scientific thirst for knowledge (Bernard 1865; see in general Frey 1972). Measured in these terms, television does not seem to have much room for the experimental, as it always seems to have answers but never questions or, at most, quiz questions with predetermined answers; it apparently does not provoke questions or seek answers, but rather it always already knows everything. It unfurls a carpet of redundancy under the everyday; it operates not between ignorance and knowledge, like an experiment, but rather between diffuse half-knowledge and comforting omniscience, which further confirms what is always already assumed (this is the classical position of critical theory: Adorno and Horkheimer 1969, 108-150; Adorno 1963, 69-80; Adorno 1967, 60-70). And it is impossible to speak of aesthetic experimentation on television, as it does not seem to be aware of any alternative to formal standardization and it apparently works towards the ever-increasing formatting of the entirety of everyday life – in sharp contrast to the experimental testing of different forms of life and experience.
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- Thinking Through Television , pp. 51 - 78Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019