{"id":2213,"date":"2017-10-14T20:05:15","date_gmt":"2017-10-14T20:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/?page_id=2213"},"modified":"2017-10-23T00:51:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-23T00:51:06","slug":"the-promise-of-television","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/the-promise-of-television\/","title":{"rendered":"The Promise of Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Promise of Television<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

ERIK BORN<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

W<\/span>hich\u00a0<\/span><\/span>came first\u2014cinema or television?[1]<\/a> Until recently, the origins of moving images were usually taken to be synonymous with those of \u201cthe movies,\u201d and the year 1895 was commonly considered the annus mirabilis<\/em> in the history of cinema. Despite some dissenting work on the development of moving images over the millennia,[2]<\/a> the date remained significant in mainstream film studies for marking at least three decisive conditions of possibility for the appearance of the medium: the availability of the cinematograph; the genesis of production and exhibition practice; and the emergence of aesthetic considerations. In television studies, on the other hand, there was never a similar consensus. Over two decades before the consolidation of cinema, there were already models for televisual machines, and the earliest patent for a mechanical television system, which looms especially large over the German historiography of television, was granted a decade prior to the first patents for cinematographic devices. Nevertheless, the promise of electronic television would remain unfulfilled throughout the anni horribiles <\/em>of two world wars, an extended incubation period representing a long-standing source of irritation for media studies. As the editors of a recent collection on German Television <\/em>observe, \u201cUntil the mid-twentieth century, television remained only an epistemic object, not fully realized and thus partly latent in the history of media.\u201d[3]<\/a> By extension, one of the editors wonders, \u201cMight television be a latency or blind spot of media theory?\u201d[4]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n

Television studies are confronted not only with the notorious difficulty of putting theory into practice, which doubtless contributed to the latency of the medium, but also with the even more sizeable challenge of putting practice into theory, of coming to terms with the long-standing critical backlash against the \u201cidiot box.\u201d Long seen as anathema to intellectual discourse, especially in the wake of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em>, the medium of television has been the subject of much productive theorization in recent years, not only in terms of the kinds of knowledge television produces but also in terms of the embodied knowledge required for its seemingly simple operation.[5]<\/a> Just as the answer to the chronological question no longer appears to be self-evident, thanks to over three decades of revisionist historiography, there is no longer a definitive answer to the ontological question of television. Against the common definition of television as a domestic live medium, studies of television continue to reveal the medium\u2019s complexity and heterogeneity.[6]<\/a> Whether in our current situation of Television after TV<\/em> or the historical formation of Television before TV<\/em>, to borrow the titles of two recent books, the essence of television may only be found, somewhat paradoxically, in its susceptibility to change. Against the common assumption that the success of a medium depends on its stabilization, moreover, the history of television, as one of \u201cconstant transformation,\u201d[7]<\/a> suggests a different framework for media studies, more in line with that adopted in The Promise of Cinema<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Like the promise of cinema, the promise of television speaks to \u201cthe modern period\u2019s expanding chasm between the \u2018space of experience\u2019 and the \u2018horizon of expectation\u2019.\u201d[8]<\/a> To borrow the subtitle of a seminal article on early German television, \u201cthe slow development of a fast medium\u201d was an experience of constant delays, of something always on the horizon.[9]<\/a> Unlike the cinema, however, the increasing discrepancy between experience and expectation may seem to have created a situation where competing media thwarted the development of television, which was never able to pin down its own identity. However, if change is the only constant in the history of television, then the medium can be better understood as an \u201cexperimental system,\u201d a concept from science and technology studies referring to the mutual interaction of objects, theories, and practices in the production of knowledge.[10]<\/a> From this perspective, constant transformation and not eventual institutionalization is what ultimately accounts for a system\u2019s efficiency. The experimental nature of television and its instable position between media can help explain its subsequent endurance and ongoing attraction, insofar as television remains an inherently experimental medium, largely removed from the teleology of media history.[11]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n

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An advertisement for a \u201ctelevision,\u201d an optical device that uses two lenses to magnify images at a distance, i.e. a telescope. Source: Illustrirte Zeitung (1884), repr. in Geiger, Fernsehen, 16.<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n

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Adopting a long view of television, distant vision emerges as either a red thread or a red herring. \u201cSeeing into the distance is an ancient wish attested to frequently in stories and fairy tales,\u201d observes Knut Hickethier at the start of his now-standard Geschichte des Deutschen Fernsehens<\/em>.[12]<\/a> While the origins of a desire for moving images are commonly traced back, at least in apparatus theory, to the Allegory of the Cave in Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em>, the media topoi of television are distributed across more heterogeneous allegories of seeing at a distance, usually concerning magic mirrors, looking glasses, and fantastical surfaces capable of monitoring everything imaginable. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the German word for a television, Fernseher<\/em>, still referred to the telescope, and the master patent for television, effectively a mechanical scanner that could analyze an image into pixels, was filed by Paul Nipkow under the rubric of an \u201cElektrisches Teleskop.\u201d[13]<\/a> Around 1900, the German word for watching television, fernsehen<\/em>, referred to the ability to see things at a distance in the sense of both remote viewing practices and psychic visions of the future, an indication of an alliance between occultism and technology that would remain prominent throughout the interwar period.[14]<\/a> Over the course of the long nineteenth century, an entire televisual paradigm emerged through the discursive construction of the desired medium as a \u201cwindow to the world.\u201d[15]<\/a> Disseminated in the popular press, the discourse of television came to signify immediacy, simultaneity, and ubiquity\u2014what we might now call the possibility of telepresence<\/em>. In the absence of a human body, the televisual machines present in its place were supposed to create a sense of real-time participation in remote events.[16]<\/a> From this perspective, the history of television may seem one of instrumentalization, the mobilization of technology in service of the \u201cextensions of man.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Against the backdrop of this well-developed televisual imaginary, the brief section on television in Friedrich Kittler\u2019s Optical Media <\/em>must sound absurd. \u201cUnlike film, there were no dreams of television prior to its development,\u201d the media philosopher claims, in typical apodictic fashion, about the differentiation of media systems in modernity. \u201cTelevision was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics.\u201d[17]<\/a> While commonly dismissed as part of his Teutonic military complex, Kittler\u2019s brief comments on television culminate in a productive distinction between symbolic, alphabetic, inscription-based media, on the one hand, and non-symbolic, non-alphabetic, signal-based media, on the other. Television, for Kittler, signals the decisive rupture in the history of optical media. \u201cIn contrast to film, television was already no longer optics,\u201d Kittler claims, thereby subverting the common classification of film and television as visual media. While we are able \u201cto hold a film reel up to the sun and see what every frame shows,\u201d we are able only \u201cto intercept television signals, but not to look at them, because they only exist as electronic signals.\u201d In other words, television\u2014at least, electronic television\u2014eludes the visual imaginary, since \u201cthe eyes can only access these signals at the beginning and end of the transmission chain, in the studio and on the screen.\u201d[18]<\/a> To put it less polemically, I would suggest that if human beings are unable to see television per se, other media are tasked with making it visible, another reminder of the constitution of television as an experimental system.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Television was hardly a foregone conclusion during the period examined in the sourcebook, and is better understood as part of an ongoing process of differentiation. For some readers, the inclusion of four texts explicitly about television <\/em>in a sourcebook on German film<\/em> theory, S. E. Bastian\u2019s \u201cThe Telefilm\u201d (#266), Arthur Korn\u2019s \u201cWhy We Still Do Not Have Television\u201d (#270), Ernst Steffen\u2019s \u201cTelecinema in the Home\u201d (#273), and Rudolf Arnheim\u2019s \u201cRadio-Film\u201d (#276), might come as a surprise. However, the careful juxtaposition of sources on film and television reflects the extent to which the promises of these two media were just as intertwined in their early days as they remain today. During the decades covered in the sourcebook, there were a variety of German terms for television beyond Fernsehen<\/em>, including Fernkino, Funkkino, Telefotografie, <\/em>and Radiokinematografie<\/em>. Each of these compounds associated the promise of television with an existing medium, whether film, radio, or photography, which should call further into question assumptions about media specificity as well as the televisual paradigm of immediacy. While most people seemed to know that they wanted television, hardly anybody agreed on what they wanted television for, and the fields for its most common predicted applications ranged from the police and the military, through meteorology and medicine, to illustrated magazines and the cinema.[19]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n

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The visualization of telepresence in Segundo de Chom\u00f3n\u2019s Le spectre rouge (The Red Specter, 1907).<\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n