Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image

15. On the Grounds of Television

339 15 On the Grounds of Television MEGHAN SUTHERLAND Since the medium of television emerged in the United States more than half a century ago, it has almost invariably been understood as a form of displacement. When we see a place on television, we are most often somewhere else—at home instead of at the ball game, at a bar in the United States instead of at the Olympics in some other country, in Iowa instead of on the New York soundstage that stands in for New York in the world of sitcoms. Television’s reputed capacity for providing a real-time “window on the world” also lies chiefly in the nonspecificity of the place in the world it might show us. When the box is not turned on, the blank screen becomes something like a placeholder, the place where any place at all has the potential to present itself. As the medium’s earliest corporate promoters frequently pointed out, the word television itself names nothing more or less than a technology of displacement; the “miracle” it performs on our relation to the space–time of the world is simply the work of the image through which this transaction occurs.1 The producer and engineer Jody Dupuy puts matters most plainly in a 1945 manual for General Electric, where she writes, “Man has always wanted to be in two places at the same time and now he can be by means of television . Tele is Greek for ‘at a distance.’ Vision, of course, means the ‘ability to see.’ Therefore, television is the ability to see at a distance.”2 With the spirit of Dupuy’s reference to ancient Greece in mind, we might call the medium of television an ontology of displacement; with the talk of miracles in mind, we might even go one step further, to the language of deconstruction, and call it an ontotheology of displacement—an act of Genesis performed only half-heartedly on the seventh day. After all, the very essence of television technology in these accounts is to make present on-screen any spatiotemporal place that has been displaced by the spatiotemporal place in which the screen is present; it is to remake as plenitude whatever space or time a being lacks, or as Dupuy puts it, “to be in two places at once.” Television technology could thus be said to give a discrete, material existence—the console—to the entwined dynamics of 340 | MEGHAN SUTHERLAND displacement and potentialization that Martin Heidegger has described as the essential ontological effect of modern technology on the natural world.3 Seen this way, television displaces the natural order of places in the world precisely by storing the totalizing potential to present any place in the world “live” on-screen, in the “standing reserve” of the electronic screen. It embodies nothing less than the machine on which the “world picture”—Heidegger’s dystopian metaphor for the technological destruction of being—might actually take place as a material image.4 Of course, this scenario only really coheres if we are talking about television technology as a picture in the strictly metaphorical sense. And in this case, the latter could not really be said to displace anything, with the possible exception of a houseplant or some furniture.5 It is only the appearance of a particular image of place on-screen that actually affects the ontological displacement of extant time and space that is attributed to television technology as a medium of electronic presence; the apparatus only exists as a conceptual embodiment of this possibility, until the image of an absent place appears on-screen. In other words, whenever we are talking about a technological medium of representation—one that shows actual pictures of the world, too—things get messier than Heidegger’s metaphorical economy of modern technology can accommodate in its original conception. As Ernesto Laclau points out in a discussion of political representation that applies equally to the aesthetic sense of the term, the phenomenon of representation is itself necessarily a form of displacement. He writes: There is an opaqueness, an essential impurity in the process of representation , which is at the same time its condition of both possibility and impossibility. The “body” of the representative cannot be reduced for essential reasons. A situation of perfect representation would not involve any representation at all.6 In the context of media representation, we might paraphrase this idea by saying that the picture of the world on-screen necessarily gives the...