SWITCHINGS Escaped from Itself

T. FRY 25 SWITCHINGS escaped from itself. We can, of course, look at television as a technology, as a system able to be thought in terms of an agency Tony Fry of directed power (via the will to power), or as a closed system (the will to will) with a being of its own whose limits we perhaps are unable to find inside outside and between us. Our sense of the power of television is perplexing — it is neither all powerful Switching on nor do we have an estimation of the enormity of its power. Heidegger, as noted, delivered a critique of the productivist basis Switching over of the metaphysical tradition. This he traced from the Greeks Heidegger was aware of the links between the media of mass delivery, and perpetual return of, anthropocentric knowledge — communication and the importance of technology across a span as the means to command a knowing of nature by the of sixty years of work. He was well aware of the transformation imposition of structure — to its transmutation into modernity. of time and space by electronic media and he was especially Here, then, is the passage of the accent of architectonics and concerned, as we shall see shortly, with the shrinking of their descent into forms of applied instrumentalism, these forms distance. For instance, in 1950, talking on this topic, he said: having their current manifestations in technologically determin- `The peak of this abolition of every possible remoteness is ist, disembodied systems underscoring the theology of reason, reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the with their objectified, dead dogmas of reduction, structure, and whole machinery of communication .2 geometry. 1 With his notion of the `will to will Heidegger Ambiguously, and earlier (1938), he viewed film and prefigured much of the critical concern with cybernetics. He put photography as a symptom, and a means of redirecting the forward an analysis that loaded technology with a determinate productivist impulse; at the same time, and at the same period, existence and an impetus of its own beyond any direct control of he also presented film as a technological means whereby the the `will to power. From such a view of technology as a world was being turned into a picture. controlled structure out of or beyond control, we can return to The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one the televisual. We can, for instance, ask of television: can anyone into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes or anything control and contain the medium? Globally the picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age answer must now be `no' (one could, of course, go on to ask [der IUeuzeit ].3 what is it that is global and can it be controlled anyway?). If What appeared on the screen was deemed of the projected such a question is to be broached we have to return to the and projecting. Using the military metaphors of his particular question of what television is, that is as a medium that has moment Heidegger viewed film as a weapon aimed at an audience. 26 SWITCHINGS T FRY 27 Heidegger writes of the `cal! as that which calls us back and world pictured, as fleeting fragment, is captured as image, forth to understanding. What is understood is the appeal to released as the imaginary and materialised as the replicated, the Daseins own Being, Being is called into being – Ìf we take the simulated, which is captured as image – and so self willing the call this way and orient ourselves by it, we must first ask what it televisual goes on, not being everything but leaving no thing gives us to understand.4 This is not to ask `what gives us outside its actual or imminent pover. knowledge but rather `what delivers the world of the beings we The modern age was characterised by Heidegger as an age in inhabit. The televisual escapes from television and spreads which to be before [vorstellung – `to place or stand before] the across the world of our dwelling. The televisual has become part picture dominates all. His understanding of picture does not of the condition and means of the formation of our Biven however simply equate it with image, picture also implies understanding. Our being exists before and after it is called into conception. More than just viewing the world as pictured, or as being by televisual encounter. It is not that ùs and `television a delivered way of seeing, he also understood it as an ontological are elemental to our lifeworld – just as there is no clear division location. He writes: between us and our culture. The televisual is a making and a "We get the picture" [literally, we are in the picture] concerning made that assists in the construction of a self/culture and its self. something. This means the matter stands before us exactly as it We picture ourselves in the knowing picture of the world stands with it for us. "To get into the picture" [literally, to put picture – we live located in image. We become fascinated by the oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set world view(ing) of television; it induces Being by seduction and whatever is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in therein in this place of our dwelling we come to our being. this way. ... Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its Heidegger explains enframing (Gestell) as: entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and ...that setting upon gathered into itself which entraps the truth which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before of its own coming to presence with oblivion. This entrapping himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a disguises itself, in that it develops into the setting in order of decisive sense to set in place before himself... Hence world everything that presences as standing rese rve, establishes itself picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture in the standing-rese rve, and tules as the standing-rese rve. 5 of the world bot the world conceived and grasped as picture. The televisual enframes, and in its enframing the televisual The television is by far the most powerful instrument of this world picture itself enframes; in such doubling the essences of picturing of the pictured, projection, reception and conception. technology and culture fase. Like a landscape the televisual To get the picture has now become a multichannel option, the stands before us as `just ready for the taking. picture is being here inside the televisual and the lifeworld The televisual entraps, via encirclement, by the working delivered by television. Thus we do not just live with television together of its lens of induction and its screen of projection. The for it lives in us. In its picturing it has escaped its technical 28 SWITCHINGS T. FRY 29 limits – we are partially formed in its image and the world we human beings, was enabled and constrained by the limits of make is designed by the schemata it delivers to the formation of what his formatory perceptual field, his historicity, allowed him our understanding. to see. In our moment, our now, we live historically at a time The modern age was said by Heidegger to display Live when history ends as that which stays in or with its place. Sight phenomena: is amplified, it is tele-visual, which is to say that which is ìn – science; sight, as the understood world, gets delivered by the `fore-sight – technology; of the televisual eye (as it goes ahead of us and becomes a large – the rise of arts subordination of aesthetics whereby art part of our `seeing-the-world). The biology and technology of becomes `the object of mere subjective experience; sight fuse. Looking back on Heideggers moment from `now it – the conception and consummation of all human activity as is possible to register both his insight and his blindness. culture; and "Seeing" does not mean just perceiving with the bodily eyes, but – the loss of the gods, that is, the loss of belief as a means of neither does it mean pure non-sensory awareness of something social unification via common worldviews.7 present-at-hand in its presence-at-hand. In giving an existential signification to "sight", we have merely drawn upon the peculiar The televisual not only embraces all of these phenomena, as feature of seeing, that it lets entities which are accessible to it to well as being in the modern world, as Being in the televisual be encountered unconcealedly in themselves.8 picture, but it also extends the dynamic of each. Its picture We can say that sight goes before seeing in the same way that holds the world in its immaterial grip. Its unification is neither understanding prefigures interpretation. Moreover, the sight of immanent nor transcendental. The picture and picturing can television goes before seeing as a way of seeing – `the tube is accommodate anything from anywhere, everything can fall open-ended, the screen pro-jects the pre-sent, the light illumi- within its enframing, its presence, as it contains and confines nates all that it falls on. everything and holds everything as picture. Thus, all things are We in fact live within the movements between: the static reduced to an endless re-production of ungrounded represent- picture and the moving image; between being-wrapped in the able objects projected at the universal mass subject (the space of the large screen and viewing the plural context space of anywhere audiences).

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