What-is-going-on

In her essay Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, Mary Ann Doane argues that “television’s conceptualization of the event is heavily dependent upon a particular organization of temporality” (p.223) that insists on “present-ness”. In light of this assertion, I would now like to address the potential implication of such a dominant (in the contemporary world) temporality for the human beings – turned – TV viewers’ (general) perception in/of time. As starting point for my exploration I will use the Kantian postulate that (consciousness of) time is an a priori intuition (together with space) – and, thus, that all human perception happens in time (and space) – as it is dis/proved by the mode of perception ("out" of time) that the temporality associated with television generates.

By insisting on “present-ness”, by putting everything in the present tense continuous (“this-is-going-on”) – even if it happened in a more or less distant past – , television, I shall argue, radically distorts its viewers’ perception in/of time – if it does not erase it altogether. In a certain sense, this phenomenon accounts for a sort of “indoctrination”, as a result of which the TV viewer becomes unable to “locate” (the temporal equivalent of this term is what I mean here) events in the past, present and future - depending on the situation –, and to position him/herself at a (critical) distance from them – as Barthes and Bazin’s category of “that-has-been” allowed him/her to do. Associated with this inability to perceive in accordance with a tripartite structure of time is also an erasure of (in my view, personal and collective) history, as Doane also indicates: “Television, too, has been conceptualized as the annihilation of memory, and consequently of history, in its continual stress upon the “nowness” of its own discourse.” (p.227). This phenomenon suggests a decreasing value attributed to the past – as well as to the future – by the television viewer, with multiple potential social (threatening the very identity of societies), political (non-engagement in political action, passivity), and, most importantly, ontological (the human being becomes another type of perceiving-machine than he/she used to be) implications.

Thus, when everything “happens” in the present, the category of time (in the Kantian conception of it) ceases to frame human perception. Metaphorically put, television blunts the a priori intuition of time.

Notes

1) In his essay Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”, Levin states that “films teach us how to see the world and register a sense of how culture is doing exactly that” (p.584). Extrapolating, I would suggest that this is the case with television as well – perhaps even more so than with films, possibly because of the goal of television - as identified by Altman (that of keeping people from turning the TV off). Paradoxically, even though time is the “major category of television”, television affects precisely the human perception in/of time.

2) Another important implication of the mode of perception (“out” of time) that television generates is the substitution of information for knowledge that characterizes the contemporary world. Information, in my view, is perfectly compatible with the “blunting” of the "intuition", whereas knowledge requires a perception in/of time (with its tripartite structure).