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From Screen to Site: Television's Material Culture, and Its Place**

From Screen to Site: Television's Material Culture, and Its Place** From Screen to Site: Television’s Material Culture, and Its Place* ANNA McCARTHY Television, Philosophy, Modernity Like all technologies of “space-binding,” television poses challenges to fixed conceptions of materiality and immateriality, farness and nearness, vision and touch. It is both a thing and a conduit for electronic signals, both a piece of furniture in a room and a window to an imaged elsewhere, both a commodity and a way of looking at commodities. It therefore makes sense that TV—understood as a particular form or mediation of inscription, speech, and images—should become a cardinal trope in diverse philosophical texts on modernity’s core problematic. Alongside the cinema, though rarely in textual proximity to it, TV serves as a kind of rhetorical toy in numerous acts of writing, and representing, the modern. Martin Heidegger’s famous description of television as the “abolition of every possibility of remoteness” in “The Thing” leads smoothly toward Jacques Derrida’s coded allusion to television’s particular (im)materiality in an essay on a novel by Philippe Sollers: “While we remain attentive, fascinated, glued to what presents itself we are unable to see presence as such, since presence does not present itself, no more than does the visibility of the visible, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

From Screen to Site: Television's Material Culture, and Its Place**

McCarthy, Anna
October , Volume Fall 2001 (98) – Oct 1, 2001
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.93
Publisher site
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Abstract

From Screen to Site: Television’s Material Culture, and Its Place* ANNA McCARTHY Television, Philosophy, Modernity Like all technologies of “space-binding,” television poses challenges to fixed conceptions of materiality and immateriality, farness and nearness, vision and touch. It is both a thing and a conduit for electronic signals, both a piece of furniture in a room and a window to an imaged elsewhere, both a commodity and a way of looking at commodities. It therefore makes sense that TV—understood as a particular form or mediation of inscription, speech, and images—should become a cardinal trope in diverse philosophical texts on modernity’s core problematic. Alongside the cinema, though rarely in textual proximity to it, TV serves as a kind of rhetorical toy in numerous acts of writing, and representing, the modern. Martin Heidegger’s famous description of television as the “abolition of every possibility of remoteness” in “The Thing” leads smoothly toward Jacques Derrida’s coded allusion to television’s particular (im)materiality in an essay on a novel by Philippe Sollers: “While we remain attentive, fascinated, glued to what presents itself we are unable to see presence as such, since presence does not present itself, no more than does the visibility of the visible,

Journal

October – MIT Press

Published: Oct 1, 2001

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