EVENT TV

THE PRODUCTION AND INHABITED RESISTANCE OF IMAGES OF CONTROL

Wendy Davis

Post Pressed 2010

eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:45:21:45 PPMM © 2010 Wendy Davis. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the editors or the publisher.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:45:21:45 PPMM Contents

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 1 INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION OF THE TELEVISUAL EVENT ...... 5 CHAPTER ONE: LOOKING AT TELEVISION: PAST PRACTICE AND POINTS OF DEPARTURE ...... 17 Television and British Cultural Studies ...... 17 Williams: Flow ...... 18 Image problems ...... 19 Fiske: Th e audience ...... 21 Television: History and the archive ...... 26 Television: Genres and texts ...... 27 Television: Industry and policy ...... 29 Television: Technological qualities and capacities ...... 30 Television: Liveness ...... 31 Television: A historical engagement with the image ...... 37 Television: Th eory ...... 43 Conclusion ...... 44 CHAPTER TWO: THE IMAGE AS EVENT: CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES FOR ENCOUNTERING TELEVISUAL CONTROL ...... 47 Events — virtualities — machines ...... 48 Th e qualities of the event ...... 50 Irreducibility...... 51 Repeatability...... 51 “Eff ective” history ...... 53 Events of discipline and events of control ...... 54 Deleuzian control ...... 55 Waves and modulation ...... 56 Smoothing the boundaries ...... 56 Control and capitalism ...... 59 Resistance ...... 61 Tactics, humour and everyday life ...... 64 De Certeau and Deleuzian control ...... 65 Inhabited resistance ...... 67 Comedy as inhabited resistance: Self-refl exivity and carnival ...... 67

eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Th e television image, the televisual event: A mode of analysis ...... 71 Sign-image-event ...... 71 Deleuze and Foucault: Striking scenes ...... 73 Becoming-surface/Becoming-scene ...... 77 Conclusion ...... 80 CHAPTER THREE: LIVENESS, THE EMERGENCE OF CONTROL AND THE TELEVISUAL POTENTIAL FOR INHABITED RESISTANCE ...... 83 Early appearances ...... 83 France, 1894...... 83 United States of America, 1929 ...... 83 Scotland, 1927 ...... 83 Television and cinema: Comparative histories ...... 85 Images of liveness: Th e televisual-cinematic nexus ...... 88 Scanning and transmission: Technical principles ...... 89 Techno-materiality, televisual liveness and the event of control ...... 94 Workers leaving the factory: Flickers of liveness ...... 96 Discipline: Th e cinematic event ...... 100 Televisual liveness: Between the lines ...... 102 Felix the cat ...... 102 Th e emergence of control ...... 103 Stookie Bill ...... 106 Conclusion ...... 110 CHAPTER FOUR: TELEVISUAL FACES: DIRECT ADDRESS AND THE PRODUCTION AND INHABITED RESISTANCE OF CONTROL ...... 113 Bruce Gyngell ...... 116 Facialization and direct address ...... 118 A speaking face: Th e construction of direct address ...... 121 Graham Kennedy ...... 125 Transgressive television? ...... 127 Graham Kennedy as televisual face ...... 129 Inside-outside face ...... 130 Self-refl exivity: Th e inhabited resistance of control ...... 131 Live ads: Th e smooth space of capitalism and control ...... 135 Conclusion ...... 138 CHAPTER FIVE: THE COMEDY OF RESISTANCE ...... 139 Norman Gunston: Th e little Aussie bleeder ...... 141 Political joke ...... 148

eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Th e dream with Roy and H.G.: “When too much sport is barely enough” ...... 152 Clowns, rogues and cranks ...... 153 “Hello boys” ...... 156 Th e battler’s prince ...... 160 Kath and Kim: Foxymorons from Fountain Lakes ...... 163 “Th e joker is me” ...... 164 “Look at moi ploise: Oim noice, diff erent and un-ewes-ual” ...... 169 Th e television mockumentary ...... 171 Conclusion ...... 175 CONCLUSION: THE TELEVISION MOCKUMENTARY AND THE FUTURE OF THE TELEVISION EVENT ...... 179 Watch this space ...... 189 ENDNOTES ...... 197 REFERENCES ...... 217 INDEX ...... 229

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Preface and Acknowledgments

I grew up watching television. The diet was as varied as the two channels we received in regional Queensland in the 1980s allowed it to be. That is, not very. Looking back, there were a great many US sitcoms, together with ABC dramas and British comedy, as well as cartoons and music videos. We were a TV watching family. Some series were forbidden (for reasons I couldn’t understand at the time), such as classic Australian soaps like Neighbours and A Country Practice. Arguing that “everyone else watches them” didn’t work. For other programmes however, the house would draw to a halt. From memory, among many others these included Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, Rumpole of the Bailey, MASH, as well as Inspector Gadget, The Goodies, You Can’t Do That on Television, and Degrassi Junior High. Then of course there was The Cosby Show, The Golden Girls, Roseanne and Who’s the Boss?. And more recently there has been Cheers, Blackadder, Northern Exposure, Seinfeld, The West Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development. The list could go on and on and I haven’t even mentioned the programmes I actually discuss in detail in this book. This childhood lived with television perhaps goes some way to explaining the existence of this book, and my ongoing academic interest in television. Much later, when I first went to university studying music, I (somewhat inexplicably) bought Clive James’ collected volume of television criticism. These were columns he had written throughout the 1970s for the British newspaper, The Observer. I read it avidly from cover to cover, many times over, frequently laughing out loud even though I had never seen many of the programmes. Here was someone who watched television with the same critical eye for detail that (it was very slowly dawning on me) was also the way in which I watched television. I wanted to write about television too but didn’t really know how to go about it. I was also distracted by finishing a music degree. However, I kept watching television and it has continued to be a central thread in my life. When you find yourself unable to resist following up someone’s description of an object as “nice” with “noice, different and un-ewe-usual” (Kath and Kim), or regularly using the quibbling analogy of “taking credit for someone else’s big salad” (Seinfeld) you know TV has infiltrated your life in a particularly forceful way. Arguably, this is the power of television, and it is the broader context in which this book is situated. It

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM formulates one way of understanding and conceptualising TV’s force in our daily lives. And when I re-read James’ work recently, I realised that he was doing the same thing. We just go about it in very different ways. While to all intents and purposes (particularly when filling out forms or writing my resume) I call myself a television studies researcher, under the broader umbrella of the discipline of cultural studies, that field is so increasingly varied that it verges on the ridiculous to try and fit neatly into it. What’s more, I don’t believe I do. Not everyone wants to read about television analysed through the lens of a somewhat loosely aligned group of critical theorists, centred on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Of that, I am myself philosophical. Some of the ideas you will find here first appeared in embryonic form in my Honours dissertation a decade ago. In particular, the idea of inhabited resistance germinated there, as did some of my interest in Norman Gunston. As you will see though, this accounts for only part of what follows. The rest of the book owes its existence to my PhD thesis completed in 2006. Some of it has changed little since then, although the advice of three wise examiners improved the final version immensely. Other parts have been rewritten and greatly revised in the effort to make it read less like a thesis. However, I believe this ancestry cannot be fully disguised or removed, so if it times it seems like you are reading a thesis, then that’s because in a sense you are. Enjoy the experience if it is a new one for you. More recently, some of the material in this book has been the basis of a number of journal articles. Details of these papers can be found in the book’s list of references (Davis 2006; Davis 2007; Davis 2008). I owe a debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisors Dr Geoff Danaher and Dr Wendy O’Brien who saw that project through to completion. I particularly thank them for their unquestioning confidence that the PhD was in fact the material for a book, and that it was a simple matter that one day it would turn into one. Throughout this writing process I have been supported by CQUniversity, in particular my colleagues and friends at the Bundaberg Campus. And of course, I would like to thank my wonderful family who have been there the entire time as a support in the background, offering encouragement and wise advice when it was asked for, and even sometimes when it wasn’t. Much of the time that can be the best advice there is. I found that through writing (and re-writing) this book I now look at television and our culture, of which it is still a vital part, in a new way. So,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM in reading Event TV I would ask that you simply keep in mind that at a very simple level, it is about television. In his Introduction to the translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus (1987) Brian Massumi invites readers to engage with that book like a record. He notes that some tracks you will return to many times. Others you will read once and decide not to listen to again. I would say something similar about this book. If it engages you, makes you think different or new thoughts about the place of TV in your life, or our society, then that’s fantastic. If it doesn’t, then maybe this is not the book about television for you. That’s fine too.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1100 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Introduction: Th e question of the televisual event

Over the past few decades most would agree that the cultural institution of television has irrevocably changed. For instance, in Australia we have witnessed an increasing decline in the dominance of the big three commercial networks, the continuing and unfortunate decline of the ABC (the government sponsored national broadcaster), the increasing rise of pay and satellite services, as well as the emergence of various forms of digital production and broadcasting, including the use of the internet to disseminate recent and archival television programming. As Castells astutely prophesises, the “present and future of television” is “decentralisation, diversification, and customisation” (1996, p. 240), highlighting ongoing changes in television’s modes of circulation and reception over the last decade or so. As even a brief glance at the history of technology will show, technological development is a fluctuating and ever-changing area. While some new technologies manage to firmly insert themselves into the fabric of everyday life, others burn brightly and then quickly fade away. Television would seem to be the former. In spite of continuing competition from other visual technologies and entertainments, thus far television has shown a marked capacity to reinvent itself, maintaining a central position in contemporary culture. Although some aspects of the technology bear little resemblance to the television of years gone by, there are other qualities of the technology that remain crucial to understanding television’s continuing cultural and social force. While Castells argues for television being the technological precursor to the rise of the information society (1996, p. 329), in the time since he made these comments television has inconveniently failed to be effectively superseded. Rather, television has competed with varying degrees of success with the newer digital, networked, computer technologies, as well as with older rivals such as cinema. There have also been transformations in television’s technological hardware through the emergence of plasma and LCD screens, together with the advent of the home theatre systems and media rooms. Similarly, there have been changes in a number of technologies aligned with television, with the explosion of DVD technology accompanied by the rapid demise of the faithful

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1111 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM videotape. At the same time, television currently faces substantial competition from new digital technologies focused around the personal computer, and more mobile technologies like personal digital music and video players. In short, continual shifts in the technological landscape mean that television’s position in contemporary culture is also transforming. Such transformation is not unprecedented in television’s mode of operation. Rather, the current changes in television’s production and distribution are the most recent manifestation of the technology’s characteristic transformation and experimentation that has been a feature of its development. Indeed, the examples I discuss throughout this book trace one such arc of televisual transformation. We see a shift from the experiments and innovations of the 1920s, through the development of mass, public broadcasting, to the contemporary point of another iteration of technological transformation with the emergence of individual, mobile technologies. The television image’s quality of liveness also emphasises the point that television is defined to some degree through change and transformation. A typical understanding of liveness might be television’s capacity to present real events in real time. This would describe the technology’s capacity to transmit episodes as they happen. I find this to be a rather limited and limiting definition of liveness. I employ the concept of televisual liveness as a quality associated with the technology’s particular technical processes and, consequently, a specific mode of image formation. Liveness is defined by considering the production of the television image and its resulting mode of appearance. Focussing on televisual liveness recognises that the image is one of the more stable features of the television technology. Therefore, a project seeking to understand television’s technological force and specificity needs to focus its discussion and analysis on an aspect of the technology that has remained more or less constant. In this way, the risk of becoming immediately dated or passé as other aspects of the technology quickly transform is somewhat diminished. Indeed, television is all about the production and appearance of its images. For, it is through the appearance of its images that television enters contemporary culture producing encounters and connections with its viewers. While my project is not a study of audiences, in the book’s Conclusion I consider how my project’s renewed engagement with the television image might inform future studies of television audiences.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1122 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Admittedly, it is easy to recognise that television is a continually evolving and transforming research object – in the image’s liveness, its production, and its technological distribution. My point of departure is informed by this recognition in combination with Gilles Deleuze’s implication that television is arguably a quintessential technology of control (1995a). Written in 1986, Gilles Deleuze’s Letter to Serge Daney provides a thoughtful dialogue between Deleuze and Daney’s writings on cinema. It also contains some provocative, if somewhat disparaging, remarks about television. For instance, in comparison to cinema, Deleuze points out, “that TV’s social functions…stifle its potential aesthetic function. TV is, in its present form, the ultimate consensus: it’s direct social engineering, leaving no gap at all between itself and the social sphere, it’s social engineering in its purest form” (1995a, p. 74). Contrasting the aesthetic potential of cinema with the social function of television, these comments reveal Deleuze’s apparently rather low opinion of the technology. It would be easy to see Deleuze’s attitude to television as an elitist dismissal of the technology for being too simple and banal. Deleuze questions the effects of this increasingly popular cultural form and, in a related move, calls for the elevation of cinema as an aesthetic form. Here television appears to be a technology with potentially very negative effects. Television’s “social engineering”, and its apparent capacity to intervene directly in what Deleuze calls the “social sphere”, is seen to be significantly endangering cinema’s viability as a cultural and artistic form. Indeed, in his assessment of Daney’s writing Deleuze notes that “it’s from television that there comes the new threat of a death of cinema” (1995a, p. 75). Deleuze explains the reason for this as follows: Because television is the form in which the new powers of “control” become immediate and direct. To get to the heart of the confrontation1 you’d almost have to ask whether this control might be reversed, harnessed by the supplementary function opposed to power: whether one could develop an art of control that would be a kind of new form of resistance. (1995a, p. 75) Deleuze suggests that the solution to the problem of developing what he calls a “new form of resistance” to televisual control is a challenge for cinema (rather than television) as it enters the ever-changing technological landscape of digital imagery that is seemingly upon us. Deleuze writes:

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1133 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Cinema ought to stop “being cinematic”, stop playacting, and set up specific relationships with video, with electronic and digital images, in order to develop a new form of resistance and combat the televisual function of surveillance and control. It’s not a question of short- circuiting television – how could that be possible? – but of preventing television subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema into the new types of image. (1995a, p. 76) Here Deleuze establishes a competitive relation between television and cinema, crediting cinema with a potential trace of radical resistance. Conversely, television is positioned as an all-encompassing machine, seemingly poised to remake all technological forms in its own image. In observing that there is “no gap” between television and the “social sphere” (1995a, p. 74), the perspective emerges that there is also no space for negotiation, or indeed resistance, in the encounter between the technology and its audience. That is, it appears television’s forces of control are so intense that there is no room within TV’s field of operation for producing articulations of resistance as part of its technological entry into the social field. In the two decades that have passed since Deleuze wrote his essay it is conceivable that he would see television’s tentacles of social control as even more insidious. However, cinema has not exited stage left with a pathetic whimper in the face of the threat Deleuze sees television as posing to its survival. If anything, both technologies have found ways of adapting and surviving in our changing economic and social landscapes. Both television and cinema have transformed their industries and aesthetics, remaining vital players in the construction and configurations of contemporary popular culture. We can forgive Deleuze (and Daney) their inability to predict the future in this regard. Perhaps in 1986 when Deleuze’s essay was first published, it did seem as if television would be responsible for the demise of cinema. Deleuze’s comments and opinions about television highlight issues that are productive to pursue in a quest to better understand this technology. In particular, this includes the question of how television might produce what Deleuze calls a “new form of resistance” that can be produced as part of the operation of control — what he refers to as an “art of control”. Related to this question is a further issue — of the potential television holds for constructing such resistance, given that the technology would seem to resonate with what Deleuze describes elsewhere as the “society of control” (1995b, pp. 177-182).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1144 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM These connected issues: television as a technology of control, and its potential to articulate formations of resistance as part of this operation of power, are central to my discussion and analysis of the television event.2 As a point of contrast to Deleuze, I address this question by considering the potential of television, rather than cinema, to produce a resistive operation of control. However, like Deleuze, my deliberations on television are also informed by the technology’s relationship to cinema. Together with the event, the image, liveness, control and resistance constitute the central conceptual threads of my engagement with television. The television image is examined as an event, outlining this concept through a reading of certain theorists from the field of poststructuralism. This produces an understanding of the television image that in its specific mode of appearance actualises a virtual operation of force and power. Developing a theoretical and descriptive mode of analysis and engagement with the television image assists in considering the relation between the liveness of the television image and the televisual event of control. One of my aims is to show that to understand televisual liveness, we need to engage with the specific qualities of the television image, not only as a certain kind of textual representation, but also in terms of its articulation of an event. That is to say, the television image is a specific kind of object, one that appears, moves and transforms in various ways, with the capacity to effect changes to the social field through its eventness, of which liveness is one quality. One way of doing this is to explore televisual liveness through a technical, material analysis of the television image, thereby more completely engaging with the image as site of the televisual event’s emergence. This perspective is demonstrated initially in the analyses presented in Chapter Three and then further explored and developed through Chapters Four and Five. More importantly, the analysis undertaken throughout those chapters argues that the television image can produce and accommodate movements of resistance as part of the operation of control. As the discussion in Chapter Two elaborates, control can be described as the extension of intensive disciplinary processes throughout the social field. That is, the dispersal of mechanisms of power throughout a flexible and modulating social field, the institutional operation of disciplinary power transforms into open, shifting operations of control. As that chapter also discusses, control is characterised by “wave-like” movements of force, a flexible, yet increasingly

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1155 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM intensive, formation of capitalism, as well as the production of a “smooth”, yet “striated” space. Control’s potential mode of resistance is defined here as inhabited resistance. The concept of inhabited resistance is proposed and utilised to describe actions that work from within, rather than in opposition to, operations of power. As Chapter Two outlines, inhabited resistance is complicit, tactical, creative and pragmatic. The concept defines movements of resistance that at once inhabit and transform systems of power through tactical and creative configurations. The appearance of this mode of resistance is identified and described by analysing various televisual images and scenes of comedy and humour. As the discussion in Chapter Three emphasises, the constitutive principles of scanning and transmission through which the television image is formed produce an image with a quality of liveness that can be easily disrupted as it appears. Through this recognition a connection is made between the qualities of televisual liveness and the potential for conceptualising television as articulating the event of control. As the book’s Conclusion discusses, it is critical that television scholars continue to engage with television in whatever form the technology takes in the future. As the television technology continues to diversify and transform, it should be a similarly neverending and transforming project to try to comprehend its shifting cultural force. This contributes to the ongoing project of television studies by signalling a new and productive way of writing, watching and thinking about television. It does this by recognising the potential television holds to configure and make visible relations of inhabited resistance. Chapter One: Past practice and points of departure reviews the central modes of television studies. The discussion encompasses textual analysis, audience studies, historical approaches, policy studies and questions of aesthetics. The chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of these various modes as well as the connections that can be made between them and the current project. Beginning by considering a number of well-known engagements with television from the established tradition of British Cultural Studies, the chapter traces how, from what might be considered the inception of television studies with Raymond Williams (1990), this field of cultural studies practice has shied away from a sustained encounter with the television image in other than representational and/or ideological terms.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1166 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Given that liveness is a central concept in my argument on the television image’s articulation of control and inhabited resistance, Chapter One also examines various conceptions of liveness that have emerged in television studies. Overall, the chapter highlights how there has been little sustained address of the specific qualities of the image in other than representational terms. Observing this gap in the related fields of television and cultural studies, suggests that this theoretical and analytical approach can inform other branches of television studies. This is a point that is returned to in the Conclusion. Chapter Two: The image as event outlines the theoretical perspective and concepts that are employed in discussing the television image as an event of control. The chapter also explores the potential television has to produce configurations of inhabited resistance as part of the operation of control. By considering certain poststructuralist writings on the event, together with concomitant theoretical concepts (such as the abstract machine and actual- virtual relations) the television image is conceptualised not just in terms of a representation of particular incidents and episodes, but also as an event. This describes how the specific mode of the television image’s appearance actualises a virtual operation of force and power. Following Deleuze’s suggestion that the television technology actualises the event of control, the chapter outlines characteristics of control as a contemporary operation of power, drawing regular points of distinction from the Foucauldian elaboration of disciplinary power. Most significantly, with the distinctions between discipline and control, the potential for resistance also changes. While delinquency has been conceived as a form of resistance to disciplinary power, considered in some detail in Foucault’s Discipline and punish (1977a), Deleuze is far less specific regarding the mode of resistance produced by operations of control. Indeed, as my opening commentary on Deleuze’s writing points out, he questions if resistance is even possible. As a response I propose that a pragmatic, complicit mode of inhabited resistance is possible within the operation of control. Inhabited resistance is conceptualised and described by considering a number of other writings and commentaries on control in conjunction with the de Certeauian notion of tactical resistance. Also considered are what particular formations of inhabited resistance might look like, suggesting the comedic practices of carnivalesque and self-reflexivity as two potentially effective formations of inhabited resistance. Comedy and humour then, are vital threads for exploring control and inhabited resistance.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1177 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM This proposal is then explored and developed in the analysis of Australian television comedy. Chapter Two also details a theoretical framework for approaching the television image in terms of its articulation of an event. Suggesting that such an approach needs to account for the image as a synthesis of techno-materiality and scenic relations, the semiotic concepts of content and expression are developed into the image-oriented concepts of becoming-surface and becoming-scene. These concepts allow for the development of a semiotic practice that is not restricted to questions of meaning and representation, but also encompasses technical process and materiality. A different perspective on the sign that conceives of the television image as a disjunctive synthesis of surface and scene is explored. This allows for the consideration of relations of force and formations of power that might be articulated through the modes of appearance of various cultural forms. Accepting that the television image can be understood as poststructuralist sign provides a theoretical and conceptual framework for comprehending the emergence of an event. The event is that operation of power that appears through the specific appearance and configuration of the television image, closely connected to its techno- material quality of liveness. In Chapter Three: Liveness, the emergence of control and the potential for televisual resistance, three images are considered – two televisual and one cinematic – engaging in a comparative discussion of the moments of early television and cinema. The distinctions, as well as the similarities, between television and cinema are described in order to initiate an exploration of the televisual event of control and its potential mobilisation of inhabited resistance. Here, cinema provides an instructive point of contrast for analysing television. Initially, the technical processes of each image’s mode of production are considered in order to understand the images’ contrasting modes of appearance. In its engagement with the respective images through descriptive and theoretical analysis, televisual and cinematic liveness can each be understood as distinctive techno-material qualities. Engaging with the early cinema image of the well-known Lumiere actuality film Workers leaving the factory provides a useful point of comparison for then discussing television images from the 1920s of Felix the cat and John Logie Baird’s Stookie Bill, which are the main focus of the chapter. These television images constitute

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1188 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM the first point in the map of televisual control and the technology’s potential for resistance. Choosing these relatively unknown television sites to introduce the question of the televisual event is one way of countering the ahistoricity that frequently characterises television studies by highlighting a period of television’s development not often considered – the era of its experimentation and invention. The point that emerges from discussing these early televisual sites is that while the technical processes of producing a television image are continually transforming, the technological principles by which the television image appears (scanning and transmission) remain more or less consistent. Because the television image is scanned and transmitted, it is in a continual process of composition, in contrast to the cinema image that is reducible to single, coherent frames. From this technical distinction the chapter is able to describe the techno-materiality of the television image as partial, unstable and contingent. This emphasises that liveness does not only rest on television’s technical processes of scanning and transmission, which can portray episodes and incidents as they occur. Rather, liveness is a quality of images that have a techno-materiality of liveness, whether or not what they are depicting is in fact live or not. In other words, what is examined is the relation between the processes of scanning and transmission and the material effects and formation of the television image. For the question of the televisual event of control, this introduces a way in which we can discuss the television image’s mode of appearing in terms of its articulation of an event. That is, we can understand the television image’s techno-materiality of liveness as a scenic operation and relation of force, which then displays a connection to the Deleuzian society of control. Most importantly, the description of television’s techno- materiality of liveness illuminates the heightened potential for television images to accommodate movements of inhabited resistance actualising the televisual event of control. It is the television image’s capacity to be disrupted by movements of interference during the process and production of its appearance that articulates the operation of control, together with its potential for producing inhabited resistance. Particularly, in the example of Stookie Bill, we see the techno-materiality of liveness and control reiterated and intensified through the intervening movement of such resistance in the scenic configuration of the image.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 1199 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Chapter Three, then, introduces a key point for expanding and developing this engagement with the television image through Chapters Four and Five. There, the scenic configurations of control and inhabited resistance are further elaborated by engaging with a particular selection of comedic television sites and images. Chapter Three’s analysis signals a crucial move in my discussion. While in the examples from the 1920s the techno-materiality of the image is more clearly visible as surface rather than scenic movements, in later examples the television images become scenically more complex. This does not mean that the mode of engagement advocated in Chapter Three is no longer possible. Rather, it is that we are able to engage with the scenic configurations of television images also in terms of the event of control and the potential articulation of inhabited resistance. Chapter Four: Televisual faces: direct address and the production and inhabited resistance of control, considers images from the period of the 1950s and 1960s. Doing so extends the analysis undertaken up to that point, while also developing an analytical perspective that can account for technical refinements in television production. This, then, marks another point in the map of televisual control and inhabited resistance.3 That is, as television entered its period of mass broadcasting its images became scenically more complex, with surface material effects of technical processes (lines etc) gradually diminishing. Thus, the analysis of the televisual event of control needs to employ the knowledge of the potential for inhabited resistance produced by televisual liveness to inform a detailed consideration of television’s scenic relations and configurations also in these terms. In particular, in television’s broadcast mode of direct address a connection emerges between the televisual appearance and construction of faces and the scenic configurations of images actualising the event of control. The chapter focuses on two iconic moments from Australian television. The first is Bruce Gyngell’s introduction of broadcast television to Australian audiences and the second, the early television comedy programmes of Graham Kennedy. The Gyngell image illuminates a connection between direct address and the televisual quality of liveness, exposing the myth of television’s capacity for unmediated, uninterrupted communication implied by direct address. The Gyngell scene demonstrates how the liveness of the television image can be scenically constructed through stabilising movements of control, thus minimising its potential for resistance. As such, this image provides a

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2200 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM useful point of contrast for the discussion of Kennedy and other comic texts that follow where the televisual capacity for inhabited resistance is intensified in the scenic configurations of these images. The other set of images Chapter Four examines are focused around the well-known Australian television personality, Graham Kennedy. Indeed, it is from this example onwards that television comedy’s potential to articulate the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance is fully explored. In particular, Kennedy’s comedic practices of self-reflexivity and carnivalesque humour are discussed in terms of the scenic configuration of control and inhabited resistance. This further explores control’s possibilities for inhabited resistance, as well as the potential of humour to function as such a tactical practice. Highlighting this aspect of Graham Kennedy’s television illustrates further the television image’s potential to both articulate and resist the operation of control. Through the analysis of more contemporary television sites, Chapter Five: The comedy of resistance, builds on the points developed in the Kennedy analysis. Analysing three sets of images from Australian television comedy develops our understanding of the technology’s capacity to produce and accommodate scenic articulations of control and inhabited resistance in varying forms. Considering The Norman Gunston show (2004), The dream with Roy and H.G. (2000) and Kath and Kim (2002-2004; 2007)4 explores the comic and humorous practice of inhabited resistance to the televisual operations of control. In conjunction with Kennedy, these sites map one mode of televisual practice that actualises the event of control through the configuration of scenes of resistance. There are other contemporary television styles and genres which others may choose to explore with regards to control and inhabited resistance, however, they do not have the comic, humorous dimension which makes the images and programmes considered here so pertinent to the discussion. Television comedy and humour, then, is addressed in terms of its articulation and resistance to the televisual operation and event of control. Conceptualising television comedy in terms of a politics of control foregrounds the social and resistive force of the technology. The television images and scenes addressed in Chapter Five also signal another transition in the televisual technology, as television currently stands on the cusp of a shift from mass broadcasting to mobile, individual televisual practices. At the point of the Conclusion we arrive at what appears to be

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2211 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM another moment of transformation and flux in the technology’s operation in the social field. This is signalled in the introduction of technologies that allow mobile and individual engagements with television. From the vantage point of the Conclusion we are able to clearly observe the various connections made between the television image, liveness, control and inhabited resistance, as well as considering the future challenges for the discipline of television scholarship. Specifically, the Conclusion considers the television mockumentary, an increasingly popular comic form which also connects to the discussion of the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. Ultimately, the analysis and discussion undertaken in this book outlines one perspective on how such inhabited resistance can be configured. Doing so recognises the potential of the television event to mobilise an “art of control that would be a new kind of form of resistance” (Deleuze 1995a, p. 74).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2222 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Chapter One: Looking at television: Past practice and points of departure

The scope of this chapter is broad and necessarily so. In seeking to carve a niche in television scholarship it is essential to recognise what kind of work is being done in the field. Surveying the scene of television and cultural studies in terms of my project what we find are various points of departure, intersection and resonance, but nowhere that clearly locates the style and mode of work that I am undertaking. In casting a critical eye over the field of television and cultural studies, we find a range of touchstones – British cultural studies, audiences, pleasure, resistance, utility, archival and historical analysis, liveness, policy, genre, the image, ideology, aesthetics and theory. Working through this gamut of issues, further clarifies my direction and focus, as well as situating my project within current and previous academic television and cultural studies. Television and British Cultural Studies In many ways British Cultural Studies is the approach that really sparked the academy’s interest in television and popular culture. Despite Graeme Turner’s well-founded suspicion of providing such “myths of origin” (1993, p. 4) in his discussion of Australian cultural studies’ practice, British Cultural Studies does need to be situated at the centre of any discussion of the development of cultural studies’ approaches to its objects of research, of which television is just one. As Kellner and Durham note of British Cultural Studies: “The school of cultural studies that has become a global phenomenon of great importance over the last decade was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964” (Kellner & Durham 2001, p. 15). As Turner outlines British Cultural Studies is a disciplinary field that has its beginnings in a particular convergence of Marxism, structuralism, literary theory and considerations of popular and working class culture.5 Kellner and Durham again describe how this style of cultural studies “came to concentrate on the interplay of representations and ideologies, of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, especially concentrating on media culture” (Kellner and Durham 2001, p. 15). For television studies in particular, the interests of what is termed British Cultural Studies is television’s place in

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2233 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM social processes as a communication medium that makes available various ideological meanings and pleasures for its viewers. This is reflected in John Fiske’s comments in his essay on the British Cultural Studies approach to television: “cultural studies sees the television experience…as a constant dynamic movement between similarity and difference” (1992, pp. 302-03). Fiske also argues, that the dominant ideology of any programme can be read in a variety of different ways by its many different viewers (Fiske 1992, pp. 302-03). With regard to the specific qualities of the television image, British Cultural Studies began promisingly with the seminal publication in 1974 of Raymond Williams’ Television: Technology and cultural form (1990). However, there quickly followed a turn away from engaging with liveness and the television image in any sustained manner. Williams: Flow The influential status of Williams’ Television: Technology and cultural form (1990) on later developments in television scholarship should not be underestimated. As Turner proclaims: “It marks the beginning of a new breed of British accounts of television” (Turner 1996, p. 57). Williams’ well-known concept of televisual flow emerges through his detailed exploration of the institutional practices of television’s programming and broadcasting, in the bid to understand what he describes as television’s “mobility”. As Williams outlines, his notion of flow was generated during an evening of watching American television in Miami.6 The opportunity to watch a film, interspersed with commercials and trailers advertising films coming up on the same channel, highlighted how “the transitions from film to commercial and from film A to films B and C were in effect unmarked” (Williams 1990, p. 91). Williams describes how he found himself experiencing a “single, irresponsible flow of images and feelings” (1990, p. 92), thus crystallising his powerful concept of flow. For Williams, television’s technical mobility, in the “flow” it offers its viewers, represents a substantial transformation in systems of communication. He explains that television broadcasting makes previously “discrete” cultural forms such as books, pamphlets and plays available in one place, sequenced by the technology into a “single dimension and in a single operation” (Williams 1990, p. 87). Reading academic evaluations of this book one could mistakenly assume that the concept of “televisual flow” is all that Williams offers. While this is not the case, flow has been seized upon by the many

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2244 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM writers who have drawn on Williams’ work.7 Indeed, in the intervening years since Williams produced Television:Technology and cultural form, the concept of flow has been variously described as a “fetish” (Dienst 1994, p. 33) and a “totem” (Corner 1999, p. 60) in television studies. Both descriptions signal the somewhat questionable status flow has come to occupy – one sometimes characterised by simplification and lack of critical engagement. However, flow resonates with the desire to understand liveness as an integral feature of the televisual technology. Moreover, Williams’ development of the concept is an important milestone in television scholarship. It sees the technology in terms of more than just its technical capacities and attempts to comprehend the technology’s particular mode of entry into our cultural and social networks. Williams also explores the notion that the mobility and flow of television can also be identified in other forms of public communication and social experiences. Whether or not these forms of communication transform society, or are responding to the “mobile privatisation” that is a result of industrialisation (Williams 1990, p. 26) is a question Williams addresses in his discussion of the relationship between television and society. Williams vehemently rejects what he calls Marshall McLuhan’s “ideological representation of technology as a cause”, arguing that what is needed is a “radically different position in which technology, including communication technology, and specifically television, is at once an intention and an effect of a particular social order” (Williams 1990, p. 128). Although Williams critiques McLuhan’s technological determinism, his own statements underline his belief in the connection between television and society.8 While this is not wrong, and the relationship of television to culture is being explored here also, what seems to have followed Williams is an analytical obsession with television’s potential social function. Image problems It seems that the capacity for Williams’ writing to provoke an engagement with the television image has been missed and it is this point that I would like to draw our attention to further. In formulating his concept of televisual flow, Williams comments on television’s “visual mobility” (1990, p. 77). For Williams, the television image is potentially fascinating, but also more than a little confounding. He finds “it is often difficult to respond to some of its [television’s] intrinsic visual experiences, for which no convention and no mode of description have been prepared or offered” (Williams 1990, p. 77).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2255 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM However, he also recognises that visuality is one of the “primary processes of the technology…and one that may come to have increasing importance” (Williams 1990, p. 77). He writes how “when, in the past, I have tried to describe and explain this, I have found it significant that the only people who ever agreed with me were painters” (Williams 1990, p. 77). With this reference to painters, Williams could be seen to be signalling the potential for an aesthetic analysis of television. However, with the exception of a few excursions into the question of aesthetics in television studies, the possibility of Williams’ writing for introducing a sustained engagement with the qualities of the television image in later television scholarship seems to have been missed. As the above précis of his discussion of mobility would indicate, Williams’ musings on television’s “visual mobility” ultimately shy away from engaging with the visual, preferring instead to concentrate on mobility. It is, however, possible to see great potential in these undeveloped comments from Williams on the capacity of television to provoke an analysis that centres on the qualities and capacities of its images. Although I have chosen not to frame my discussion in specifically aesthetic terms, there is some connection between the detailed analysis of television images I undertake in later chapters, and these thoughtful observations from Williams. Lynn Spigel offers a possible explanation for cultural studies’ apparent lack of engagement with the television image in such terms. In her introduction to a 1992 edition of Williams’ Television: Technology and cultural form, Spigel considers the place of Williams’ writing within the broader project of cultural studies and contemporary writing on television. Spigel argues that the cultural studies’ trend towards audience/sociological analyses rather than aesthetics in the 1980s is a result of the 1970s drive to dismantle cultural hierarchies of taste. Audience studies make it possible to attribute a positive subversive value to television, rather than regarding it as an inferior cultural form (Spigel 1992a, pp. xxxi-xxxii)9. Situating Williams’ arguments on television within the historical context of the 1970s, Spigel offers an explanation as to why he may have sidelined a consideration of the qualities and capacities of the television image. That is, at the time when Williams was writing, to engage with television’s visuality would be to enter the aesthetic discourses of high art, which would have been severely at odds with the everyday popularity of television.10 Indeed, it is still unlikely that television would be seen to have much in common with more artistic forms such as photography and visual

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2266 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM art. Unfortunately, Williams does not provide an alternative language or theory of the television image with which this could be achieved, perhaps explaining his move away from engaging with the image, to his exploration of the institutional and technological concept of flow. Fiske: Th e audience After Williams, John Fiske is another important figure associated with British Cultural Studies. Fiske’s perspective on television continues the trend established by Williams, focussing on the relation between television and society but without really engaging with the qualities of the television image. Fiske, and the continuing project of British Cultural Studies, can be placed in some context by recognising the way in which Fiske’s writing illuminates the conceptual gulf between British Cultural Studies and another perspective on mass culture represented by the theorists collectively known as The Frankfurt School. A group of writers that includes Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Frankfurt School established a particular mode for conceiving of mass culture and its audiences. As Lacey (2002) points out, their view of the effects of mass culture can be described as a “hypodermic model” whereby audiences have little choice but to establish an “uncritical” engagement with popular culture (Lacey 2002, p. 145). Lacey’s summation of The Frankfurt School’s approach to the audience is supported if we consider a collaborative essay on mass culture by Horkheimer and Adorno, where, in a discussion of the new “industries” of mass culture, they describe the passivity of consumers of popular, mass produced culture, such as television. Horkheimer and Adorno conceive of mass culture consumers who will “fall helpless victims to what is offered them” (2001, p. 79), describing these poor unfortunates as “the deceived masses” (2001, p. 80). Indeed, there would appear to be a certain resonance here with Deleuze’s perspective on television. Deleuze’s commentary on television as the “ultimate consensus” (1995a, p. 74) and the difficulty this produces for conceptualising the technology’s potential politics of resistance provides a point of commonality with The Frankfurt School’s vision of mass media forms like television. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Fiske’s work was influential in reiterating further what might be called the terrain of audience studies, connected to the discipline of British Cultural Studies. His arguments present a distinct pole of contrast to The Frankfurt School’s view of popular culture and its audiences, underlining instead the resistive potential certain programmes make available for television audiences. Television’s potential for resistance

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2277 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM is also a topic of concern here, so it is useful to consider Fiske’s writing on television to comprehend the contribution of British Cultural Studies to such a debate. Some of Fiske’s best-known writing in this area occurs in Television culture (1987) where he focuses firmly on television’s place in the social structure. Here his concern is “television-as-culture”, where television is “a crucial part of the social dynamics by which the social structure maintains itself in a constant process of production and reproduction: meanings, popular pleasures, and their circulation are therefore part and parcel of this social structure” (Fiske 1987, p. 1). With this perspective as his foundation, Fiske engages in textual analysis where, through an embrace of polysemy, the “text” is in a continual production of multiple readings by its audience. Fiske reasons that polysemic texts are socially produced because “one program can stimulate the production of many texts according to the social conditions of its reception” (Fiske 1987, p. 14). Throughout Television culture, Fiske presents analyses of television concerned with resistive pleasures, play, excess and carnival, in a bid to define what he calls the “active audience”, escaping what Brundson has identified as television’s discursive production in and through negative “metaphors of addiction” (Brundson 1990, p. 60).11 However, Fiske’s perspective on television has not been without its detractors of what is seen as an overly celebratory approach to the technology. For instance, Dienst somewhat sarcastically argues, “Fiske…whistles a happy tune of resistance whenever the dark clouds of ideology gather” (Dienst 1994, p. 31). Heath also criticises the approach to television and popular culture represented by Fiske’s work, characterising its embrace of resistance as “patronizing” (Heath 1990, p. 285). However, I do not think we should be quite as dismissive as these writers. For Fiske, the resistive potential of television is more than simply celebratory, because it is grounded upon the form of subversive power Spigel argues is idiomatic to the intellectual project of cultural studies (Spigel 1992a, pp. xxxi- xxxii). As Fiske writes: “The pleasure and the power of making meaning – of participating in the mode of representation, of playing with the semiotic process – these are some of the most significant and empowering pleasures that television has to offer” (Fiske 1987, p. 239). In other words, Fiske’s writing recognises a social and political function for the televisual technology, one that empowers rather than oppresses its audience. While his theoretical

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2288 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM and analytical approach contrasts greatly with the one that is being explored here more generally, Fiske’s concerns also resonate with my discussion of the television image’s articulation of control and inhabited resistance. Turner observes that in the 1980s the critical eye of cultural studies was turned towards the audience (Turner 1996, p. 121) and if Fiske’s writing is emblematic of such a movement it would seem he is correct. Cultural studies also accommodates other modes of audience studies. Unlike Fiske, who reads texts in terms of their production of, and by, their audiences, other cultural studies writers have engaged in empirical, quantitative surveys and analyses of the television audience in a bid to better understand the cultural force of the technology. Representative of this field of practice in British Cultural Studies is Buckingham’s (1987) examination of the audience of long-running British drama Eastenders. Here Buckingham engages in a discussion of the modes in which British audiences so strongly connected with the various themes and narratives of this hugely popular television drama. Situating Eastenders against the social context of British culture in the 1980s, Buckingham also discusses the focus groups he ran with younger viewers of the programme, presenting and interpreting their responses to the show. While his mode of analysis is ethnographic rather than textual, his motivation reinforces a Fiskean view of the audience, arguing that “viewers actively seek to construct their relationship with the programme on their own terms – terms which are often very different from those which appear to be on offer” (Buckingham 1987, p.154). Morley also provides some explanation and justification of the ethnographic approach to television audiences, the purpose of which he sees is “to analyse processes of culture and communication within their social and material settings” (1992, p. 5). He argues that the value of this type of research is its demonstration of “what television means to different kinds of people, watching different kinds of programmes, in different contexts and at different times” (Morley 1992, p. 7). Interestingly, in the 1990s, despite the proliferation of various modes of engagement with television, the focus on the audience in television studies was still detectable in certain ways, albeit with variations on the pleasures and resistances so powerfully espoused by Fiske and the ethnographic researchers. Virginia Nightingale’s Studying the audience: The shock of the real (1996) effectively traces the development of this form of cultural studies practice over the past few decades, discussing in some detail the earlier work of Morley and

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 2299 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM Buckingham. John Tulloch (2000) also explores the various approaches to the audience in relation to television studies. Also indicative of this trend is John Hartley’s Uses of television (1999). Throughout his book Hartley is particularly keen to ascribe television and television/cultural studies with utility.12 He insists that focusing on “use” makes his book crucially different from other analyses of television. Hartley claims he is interested in how ‘useful’ TV is for its own ‘end users’, especially the public-as-audience, but not forgetting my own constituency – those in intellectual, academic, critical or governmental positions who ‘use’ television for thinking about other problems, such as the state of culture, politics and modernity. (Hartley 1999, p. 3) Specifically, Hartley asserts that “the uses of television are best understood by means of the concept of TRANSMODERN TEACHING. And that what television has been used for is the formation of CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP” (capitals sic, Hartley 1999, p. 26).13 Hartley’s project of situating television within the realm of teaching and citizenship formation firmly places the technology within a complex social network. It also appears to be an attempt to distance himself from discussing the televisual communication of resistive pleasures advocated by Fiske, instead representing a desire to academically legitimise television by attributing it with an educational function. In doing so, Hartley replaces the carnivalesque pleasures of Fiske’s television with a vision of the technology as a respectable purveyor of learning and information. He even historically assigns television a salvatory role, attempting to bolster his argument on the televisual formation of cultural citizenship by making a connection between the social, teacherly function of contemporary television and the position of the Catholic church in pre-modern Europe (Hartley 1999, p. 38). Indeed, Hartley asks, “is television better thought of via ‘Hoggartian’ notions of teaching, population-gathering and cross- demographic communication than via ‘Birminghamite’ notions of power, hegemony and ideology?”, clearly signalling the attractiveness for the reader of the first option (Hartley 1999, p. 54).14 Here, again, Hartley is attempting to distinguish himself from Fiske, whose work is informed by what Hartley terms as “Birminghamite” notions. However, despite Hartley’s efforts to distance his analyses from such Fiskean concerns, there are many similarities between their approaches to the construction of television as a research object.15 Both Hartley and Fiske

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3300 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:46:21:46 PPMM are concerned with television’s social function, with television as a tool for communication, whether it is teaching cultural citizenship or offering its audiences an engagement in resistance to dominant ideologies through the formation of meanings and popular pleasures. In other words, Hartley and Fiske represent a dominant intellectual project in British Cultural Studies, exploring the audience’s relationship to television as well as the nature of that relationship, whether it is one of utility or pleasure. As we can see in the development of television scholarship I have traced from Williams through to Hartley, there is a tendency in British Cultural Studies to focus on television’s popular and ideological meanings and the discipline tends towards analyses and considerations of the audience in its various forms. Indeed, if the later writing of Hartley is any indication, this approach to television is becoming institutionalised as a recognisable style of television studies. While clearly a valid approach to television, it is also a little disheartening at first for those television scholars not really interested in such an audience-centred approach and wanting to explore another aspect of television. Indeed, by discussing the development of television studies the urgency to reengage with the television image is clarified. This is particularly so given that it seems there has been little sustained focus on this aspect of the technology from the British Cultural Studies perspective at least.16 While it seems ridiculously obvious to begin with questions of the television image that Williams found so problematic, the apparent absence of such questions post-Williams, or indeed the connection of issues of the image to the concept of liveness, suggests that such questioning is both possible, and potentially enlightening. Not to engage with the television image is to overlook a constitutive feature of the technology, inhibiting our understanding of television’s cultural force. Furthermore, re-engaging with the television image in terms of televisual control also offers the possibility of conceiving of another useful and pleasurable technological quality. Thus, television’s potential for mobilising a politics of inhabited resistance can be conceptualised both at the site of the image and in the viewer’s encounter with the technology through the appearance of the image. More broadly, developing the nuances of inhabited resistance, in conjunction with the contemporary operation of what Deleuze has called the society of control, reinvigorates the ongoing cultural studies question of resistance.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3311 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM Television: History and the archive Apart from the number of highly influential approaches to television in mainstream British Cultural Studies, cultural studies provides other modes of engagement with television, which, nonetheless, are connected to the perspectives of British Cultural Studies. These are also useful to consider to clarify further the project’s relation to both its object of research and its disciplinary affiliations. The British Cultural Studies influence is evident in another addition to academic writing on television – Alan McKee’s Australian television: A genealogy of great moments (2001). Canvassing ordinary television viewers and their memories of great moments on Australian television, McKee attempts to democratically formulate an Australian textual canon. In doing so, albeit by adopting a rather diluted version of a Foucauldian genealogy, McKee leaves the way open for subsequent transformations of what he conceptualises as Australia’s collective television memory. McKee’s genealogy of great television moments allows him to explore Australia’s collective television memories, attempting the difficult task of establishing an archive in the face of what he describes as television’s acknowledged ephemerality and the lack of access to archived material in Australia. This is a point also acknowledged by Elizabeth Jacka who notes, “it is difficult to do a theorized history of something as complex and as pervasive as television when the basic historical materials do not exist” (2004, pp. 27-28). While it is refreshing to find a contemporary discussion of Australian television that joyfully engages with its texts, ultimately McKee’s analysis still focuses on audience pleasure, resistive potential and reception, continuing in the tradition of British Cultural Studies. Despite McKee’s and Jacka’s astute observations on the difficulty of producing sustained, coherent engagements with the television archive, Spigel has demonstrated how this may be possible. Her writing belongs to the tradition of analysing television’s capacities, again as a tool for communication. However, Spigel’s work demonstrates increasing complexity in the relationship between television and society, as well as new ways of conceiving of this relationship through textual content. By analysing the archives of magazines and advertisements surrounding the introduction of the technology into the United States, Spigel traces the discursive production of television as a cultural institution in American society. In two books, Make

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3322 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America (1992b) and Welcome to the dreamhouse: Popular media and postwar suburbs (2001) Spigel examines the complex discursive and ideological relationships that connect the media, the suburbs and society. In the earlier book her argument centres on the television sitcom and what she calls the “theatricalization” of domestic space, both on the television screen and in the home. In Welcome to the dreamhouse, she attempts to understand how middle-class ideals about family life “helped shape the visual forms, storytelling practices, and reception contexts of postwar media and consumer culture” (Spigel 2001, p. 3). Although her focus is television in the United States, Spigel’s exploration of the relationships between media technologies and their audiences connects her in some way to the British Cultural Studies tradition. However, unlike much of that work Spigel’s writing demonstrates a commanding grasp of the cultural archive, allowing her to develop persuasive arguments on the resonances between television and society, particularly in the organisation of domestic space post-1950s. With these topics as her focus Spigel, like Williams, Fiske and Hartley, does not address the televisual image and its quality of liveness in any sustained manner. However, her approach highlights how projects in search of a historical perspective on television may need to consider previously unexamined cultural sites.17 This is a point that Chapter Three highlights in its discussion of television’s period of experimentation and invention. Television: Genres and texts A continuing tradition in television studies is the discussion of particular programmes in terms of their generic conventions and/or hybridity or resistance to these forms. Some earlier essays representative of this style appear in Turner and Tulloch’s collection of essays on Australian television where Cunningham (1989) examines the Australian form of the mini-series, Fiske (1989) considers game shows, and Williamson (1989) discusses television documentary. Feuer also discusses the part such analysis can play in the construction of genres, with her thoughtful comparison of the various conceptions of the sitcom genre produced by different writers. The approach she describes would seem to be more fruitful than what she calls the “taxonomy” approach to genre, whereby the intention is merely to classify (Feuer 1992). This type of cultural studies writing on television is both infinite and ubiquitous and it is impossible to provide anything but a brief overview within the scope of this review. What can also be pointed out is that apart

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3333 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM from delineating the characteristics of a genre, a further mode of engagement with programmes and genres exists which often involves the critical reading of specific texts or televisual styles in terms of their representations of contemporary relations of power, race, class, and/or gender. A useful example of this style of cultural studies is the body of work that exists on soap opera, often read through a gendered or feminist perspective.18 Similarly, Bonner’s discussion in Ordinary television (2003) attempts to map and analyse another style of television programming. Bonner focuses on the lifestyle, talk and informational genres, pointing out that these have often been passed over in television studies. I am not particularly concerned with rejecting questions of genre, and this topic is not a motivating force in the project. Rather, my discussion demonstrates how generic codes can be incorporated in the mode of analysis being developed here. That is, the discussions in Chapters Four and Five highlight particularly how what might be conceived as generic features of television comedy can also be discussed in terms of the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. The move towards the analysis of specific texts rather than straightforward generic elaboration signals a proliferation of cultural studies’ approaches to television and popular culture, as well as what we can recognise as the disintegration of previously fixed genres and styles. Although often still clearly connected to the concerns of British Cultural Studies, there is potential in cultural studies practice for different modes of engagement with television’s texts and programmes to emerge. This practice would be characterised not so much by the disciplinary affiliations of cultural studies, but rather by a practice of critical reading, employing an appropriate variety of theories and perspectives. With this in mind, it is valuable to recognise that some authors attempt to shift discussions of television away from the perspectives of British Cultural Studies. In the second half of this chapter I discuss a number of such alternative modes of television studies as they relate to my focus on liveness and the television image. Such discussions can include questions of television aesthetics, a point raised by Brundson in her thoughtful 1990 essay and explored by Caldwell (1995) in his discussion of US television. Jacobs (2001) also considers the question of television aesthetics (2001). Highlighting the question of television aesthetics, Jacobs demonstrates one method as to how such an analytical mode

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3344 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM appropriate to television might be executed through an analysis of television drama, whereby he engages with some of the “expressive dimensions of television” (Jacobs 2001, p. 443). Usefully he notes that, “one of the central problems with the judgement of television has been its uncertain relation to ‘traditional aesthetic criteria’, combined with an abhorrence of that criteria and its appropriateness manifested by television studies” (Jacobs 2001, p. 429). Jacobs’ point perhaps explains the scarcity of this type of writing in television and cultural studies. There are connections between my approach to television and a question of aesthetics. My analysis of techno-materiality is initiated through a consideration of the qualities of the image and this provides a point of intersection between aesthetics and my discussion of television. Television: Industry and policy Turner (1993) describes the “transdisciplinary” character of cultural studies as it is practised in Australia, the national context in which the present project is being produced. Whether or not this project’s perspective on television is specifically Australian is perhaps not of great significance, however there are resonances between the position being developed here and Turner’s earlier assessment of the possibilities for cultural studies in Australia. He maintains: “The majority of cultural studies in Australia speaks explicitly from a local position while drawing on a wide range of theoretical influences” (Turner 1993, p. 5). This description connects with my own use of certain poststructuralist analytical practices and concepts in a discussion of a selection of Australian television images and programmes. However, Turner also notes that in Australia there is “an indigenous breed of media studies interested in policy and the construction of national identity” (Turner 1993, p. 6). Television is discussed through a policy and industry focus in Cunningham and Turner’s edited text The media in Australia: Industries, texts and audiences (1997), as well as in Craik, Bailey and Moran’s 1995 collection of essays on Australian media policy. Cunningham, Miller and Rowe (1994) also devote some time to the discussion of Australian television in terms of policies and its potential as a global industrial export in their book Contemporary Australian television. It seems that, particularly in the 1990s, there has been a certain fascination in Australian cultural studies with the policies and regulations that construct the media industry, including television. At first glance this approach appears to have little in common with this project’s perspectives and practice. While

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3355 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM clearly not a consideration of public media policy, I do recognise television as a potent force in the circuits and networks of contemporary culture – a point that is also highlighted by analyses of television in its industrial and policy guises. The concept of control describes a capitalist mode of production, consumption and circulation. By highlighting television’s articulation of the event of control we gain some insight into how the technology makes visible its capitalist status through the appearance and configuration of its images. Television: Technological qualities and capacities It is feasible that the apparent reluctance to engage historically with television’s texts (and consequentially the image) in television studies can be explained by the relative incoherence and insubstantial nature of the technology’s archive (the point acknowledged by McKee and Jacka), as well as the relatively short histories of both cultural studies as a discipline, and television as a cultural form. As McKee’s astute observation on the absence of a coherent television archive in Australia underlines, television and history, even in their broadest definitions, would seem to be two fairly incompatible terms. These difficulties are highlighted by postmodern theory’s characterisation of television as the antithesis of history, an influential portrayal of the technology in the discipline of cultural studies. As McQuire discusses, a number of well-known postmodern, critical theorists including Jameson, Debord, Baudrillard and Virilio have defined television according to its apparently destructive historical impulses. McQuire points out, for these theorists television epitomises postmodern culture’s loss of history (McQuire 1998, p. 129). Similarly Hoskins (2001) notes: “The popular and almost conventional academic view is that television trivializes the present and creates, if anything, an ephemeral and ultimately simulated history that disappears and is forgotten in the ever-succeeding moments of still more television images” (Hoskins 2001, p. 214). However, as McQuire thoughtfully acknowledges, the postmodern perspective on television’s relation to history can be seen as a “mourning for the disappearance of a particular kind of history: the dream of continuous history which comforted the Western subject with an image of its own sovereignty” (McQuire 1998, pp. 130-131). Clearly, there is a difference between writing a history of television and comprehending the technology’s capacity to transform our understanding of history. In terms of history and television studies, what has been achieved most successfully are cultural histories of broadcasting, televisual institutions and

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3366 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM reception, as has been noted here already through the discussion of Spigel’s research. However, for the television image and its quality of liveness, which affects how we understand television’s contemporary transformation of the notion of history, any form of historiography or even a historical sensitivity remains frustratingly underdeveloped. This does not mean it is impossible to incorporate a historical dimension into such a discussion. Indeed, Chapters Three and Four provide a historical perspective on the problem of the image and liveness through their consideration of television images from the 1920s and the 1950s and 1960s in terms of the televisual event of control. As the following section outlines, there is great potential for historical awareness to be incorporated into a discussion of the qualities of the television image, a point necessary for engaging with the concept of the televisual event. Firstly, however, we can explore the connection of a number of established and influential engagements with televisual liveness to my own perspective. Television: Liveness An early essay on liveness by Jane Feuer raises some pertinent questions and problems for a discussion of liveness and the television image. In The concept of live television: Ontology as ideology (1983, pp. 12-22) Feuer identifies the uneasy relationship of television to aesthetics as a background for her observation that liveness is an ideological concept rather than an aesthetic term. Feuer’s perspective is grounded by her critique of an earlier television theorist, Herbert Zettl. As Feuer states, Zettl argues that the technical essence of television is process, making television’s ontology, its aesthetic or mode of appearance, one of “liveness” and presence (Feuer 1983, p. 13). However, Feuer argues that Zettl’s comment on television’s “logical development from the nature of electronic scanning to that of being in a ‘state of becoming’ is itself philosophically and ideologically determined” (Feuer 1983, p. 13). Feuer believes that Zettl problematically conflates television’s ontology with its ideology, even while trying to “posit an ‘essence’ which is ideologically neutral” (Feuer 1983, p. 14). In other words, Feuer prefers that we see liveness as a powerful televisual ideology, rather than an aesthetic directly connected to television’s technical processes of scanning and transmission. For Feuer, liveness needs to be interrogated as an ideology if we are to develop a clearer understanding of television’s cultural force. In such a discussion of ideological liveness we might consider the connected values of television’s apparent immediacy, reality or

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3377 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM transparency that are mobilised in the content of its texts. That is, how, and to what effect, does television positively construct itself as live (even though in the technical sense it may not be)? While it may be true that liveness is ideologically tied to television, this does not mean we should dismiss the potential of understanding liveness also as a material effect of particular technical processes. Indeed, what is more likely is that televisual liveness is not simply (in Feuer’s terms) ideological, or ontological, but a combination of these two aspects of the technology. The perspective I develop throughout this book is that liveness is produced both at the level of image representation and through the connection of the image’s technical processes and resulting materiality. Fiske (1987) discusses the quality of televisual liveness with observations on television’s textual never-endingness and lack of closure. He utilises liveness to allow him to develop his theory of audience resistance and pleasures. However, he provides no sustained consideration of liveness in terms of a connection to the television image and the way this might relate to the cultural force of television. Rather, to define liveness Fiske articulates the fundamental technical differences between television and film: “Film presents itself as a record of what has happened, television presents itself as a relay of what is happening. Even at the micro level this sense of the present is conveyed by television’s technical process” (Fiske 1987, p. 22). That is, film records and projects, while television scans and transmits. Thus for Fiske, in terms of time, film is attached to the past, while television belongs to the present. While this distinction is in essence correct, it is a little simplistic, giving minimal consideration to the techno-materiality of the television image. As I will outline, understanding the technical principles and material effects of scanning and transmission in the television image furthers our understanding of the capacities of the television image for articulating the event of control. Such technical principles also inform the connection and analysis of the image in terms of the formation of inhabited resistance. Liveness, as a key televisual concept, is subsumed into Fiske’s discussion of television’s potential to accommodate the resistive pleasures of the audience – the central focus of his analyses of television and popular culture.19 I also consider the potential of the techno-materiality of liveness to produce and accommodate movements of resistance. However, rather than initially focussing on resistance at the location of the television viewer, this takes the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3388 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM form of the articulation of inhabited resistance of control, through the image’s disjunctive synthesis of scene and surface. Elsewhere, scholarship on televisual liveness focuses on the challenges liveness offers for the technology’s capacity for history and memory, resonating with the postmodern position so neatly summarised by McQuire. This perspective is highlighted by Doane’s, Information, crisis, catastrophe (1990, pp. 222-239), and Mellencamp’s TV time and catastrophe or beyond the pleasure principle of television (1990, pp. 240-266). For Doane, televisual liveness means that storage, and therefore history and memory, are “alien” to television (Doane 1990, pp. 226-227). This observation grounds the development of her argument on what she sees is the “catastrophic” nature of television. Doane claims: In fact, catastrophe could be said to be at one level a condensation of all the attributes and aspirations of “normal” television (immediacy, urgency, presence, discontinuity, the instantaneous, and hence, forgettable). If information becomes a commodity on the brink of extinction or loss, television magnifies that death many times over. Hence catastrophe functions as both the exception and the norm of a television practice which continually holds out to its spectator the lure of a referentiality perpetually deferred. (Doane 1990, p. 238) Through Doane’s deliberation on televisual liveness she observes a negative relation between television and history, in terms of television’s capacity to construct or provide history for its viewers. Mellencamp (1990) also finds television’s reconfiguration of history and memory concerning, evident in her discussion of contemporary television in terms of disaster and anxiety. Both writers articulate the negative discourses typical of the postmodern “loss of history”, although, as McQuire indicates, this view encompasses only one perspective on historical production. In focusing on a disastrous live event (the television broadcast of the Challenger space shuttle explosion) to develop theories of television, both Doane and Mellencamp reiterate the attitudes of mourning and dread espoused by other postmodern theorists with regards to television. Whether the disastrous scenario of a society permanently in the grip of catastrophe and/or disaster is the only way in which the effects of televisual liveness can be conceived is a matter for ongoing discussion.20 As I highlight in the later chapters of this book, television comedy offers an alternative site through which we can understand liveness as a techno-material

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 3399 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM quality connected to the television image’s articulation of resistances to the operation of control. Caldwell (1995) offers another position on televisual liveness. Rather than engaging with it as a feature of the contemporary television landscape, he dismisses it. Rejecting liveness is, I suppose, one way of solving the problem of the continuing haziness and difficulties surrounding this technological quality as a concept to be incorporated into analysis of the television image. This clearly suits Caldwell’s own argument, which is focused on televisual style and the particular aesthetic mode of television that he sees as developing in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, for Caldwell, liveness seems to be a hindrance to an analysis of “televisual style” (1995, p. 27). Echoing Feuer’s earlier position, Caldwell dismisses liveness with the idea that through the introduction of videotape, the technical processes of the medium are no longer really “live” (1995, p. 27). However, he also has little time for the position that Feuer develops, arguing that 1980s writers like Feuer who examine television’s ideological liveness are “overstating the importance of liveness” (1995, p. 30). Caldwell also reserves some criticism for what he calls “high theory”, writing: “As long as high theory continues to overestimate the centrality of liveness – it will also underestimate other modes of practice and production: the performance of the visual and stylistic exhibitionism” (Caldwell 1995, p. 30). While extremely commendable in attempting to outline a new area of discussion by drawing a distinction between televisual liveness and stylistics/ aesthetics, I believe it is difficult to maintain the position of so quickly dismissing liveness.21 In contrast to Caldwell’s position I suggest that liveness remains an ongoing problematic in television studies. By recognising that the image is a synthesis of technical process and materiality we must also recognise that the television image is always characterised by liveness, no matter what the source of the broadcast (i.e. real event or recorded material). I discuss this point further in this book, particularly in Chapter Three’s consideration of the principles of scanning and transmission and the techno-materiality of the television image. Mimi White’s Television liveness: History, banality, attractions (1999, pp. 39- 56) provides a more considered engagement with liveness, one that does not seek to deride the shortcomings of television’s historical capacities yet which is able to also accommodate liveness into its analytical scope. White explicitly

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4400 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM addresses the responses of Doane and Mellencamp to the Challenger disaster, and discusses the implications of their work for television theory generally. She employs their essays in a critique of what she sees as a recurring trope in television analysis – employing the 1986 Challenger disaster to explore televisual liveness. In particular, Doane’s essay is addressed because White sees that this essay assumes an inherent link between liveness and television’s capacity for catastrophe. However, White maintains: [T]he relation to be explored between catastrophe and television is not best understood only, or even predominately, in terms of the medium’s alleged liveness. Rather catastrophe more typically develops through the ongoing coarticulation of liveness and historicity that characterise the presentation of disaster and catastrophe on television. (White 1999, p. 43) In other words, White recognises that liveness cannot simply be reduced to either television’s technical operations or its representative, ideological capacities. It is also produced through what she characterises as a discursive operation, one that coexists with other televisual discursive strategies such as history and memory. That is to say, liveness is constructed and produced in the formation and presentation of television texts but, as White argues, so are other effects, such as a sense of history. With this perspective, White’s essay is a more contemporary response to the issue of liveness than Feuer’s notion of ideological liveness, as it replaces ideology (as meanings and cultural values that are represented by the televisual text) with the more nuanced Foucauldian concept of discourse. This enables the television image to be perceived as mobilising and producing particular meanings and values that may then enter and transform the social field. Recognising that liveness can be a discursive practice also avoids the problems of technical essentialism in describing the technology that Feuer noted in Zettl’s writing, thus allowing for a consideration of how television produces and articulates liveness in its images and programmes. However, White points to a further difficulty. She argues that to privilege liveness means that other televisual discursive practices, such as history, memory and preservation “are at best relegated to a secondary status – a veneer which is readily stripped away from its foundational liveness” (White 1999, p. 43). While not dismissing liveness out of hand as Caldwell tends to, White argues that in much television studies “liveness is the master term or key word…that

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4411 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM subsumes a host of other qualities and characteristics” (White 1999, p. 46). She contends that to “specify the experience of television in singular terms” (1999, p. 46) limits our understanding of television. She also sees that “scholars persist in developing the term, foreclosing the range of theoretical approaches to understanding the appeals – aesthetic and social – of the medium” (White 1999, p. 46). White’s evaluation of the place of liveness in television studies functions to ground her own proposal that “history, duration and memory are as central to any theoretical understanding of television’s discursive operations as liveness and concomitant ideas of presence, immediacy and so forth” (White 1999, p. 41). So, she eventually moves to reject the centrality of liveness in television studies by developing Tom Gunning’s well-known theory of the “cinema of attractions” into a theory of televisual attraction and banality.22 Implicit in the development of an alternative understanding of television’s technological capacity for history is the recognition that television studies often employ liveness to argue for television as a “key apparatus in contemporary popular culture which contributes to the fundamental loss of historical consciousness” (White 1999, p. 43). In other words, White wants to reinstate history and memory into analyses of television, but in so doing illustrates how liveness cannot remain a priority in such a consideration of television.23 White’s essay is particularly interesting in relation to the concerns of this project. The desire to recognise television’s technological capacity for transforming and producing history is worthy, and clearly the ahistorical perspective of many studies of televisual liveness is frustrating, as it circulates further negative views of television generally. In seeking to remedy this situation White not only provides a thoughtful perspective on televisual history and memory, she also provokes a potentially new perspective on liveness although this is not fully articulated in her essay. When White notes that televisual liveness is no longer a “literal feature of the medium” she is to some degree correct, but only in so far as this description implies that liveness is the transmission of real events in real time, as they happen. She is also correct to point out that even those events like the Challenger disaster that we initially experience in real time are always to some degree constructed through other televisual discursive strategies such as history and memory (visible in the processes of the replay or the reconstruction). In noting that liveness is both a technical and discursive feature of television, White comes

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4422 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM closest to the perspective being developed here. That is, her writing suggests the possibility that liveness can be introduced through an initial consideration of the television image’s relation of technical processes and materiality. Rather than push liveness to one side in favour of questions of history and memory, I am interested in how liveness always remains a quality of the televisual image. That is to ask, how is liveness articulated even in those images and text that are not real events in real time and therefore not so obviously connected to the televisual quality of liveness, in the literal sense described by White? To do this effectively I propose that we need to return to moments of televisual experimentation and invention. It is in images from that era that we can more easily recognise the techno-material qualities of the television image. This, in turn, usefully informs a discussion of television as an event of control with the potential also for forming inhabited resistance. Such analysis is the focus of Chapters Three, Four and Five. Television: A historical engagement with the image Apart from writers such as Feuer, Caldwell, Doane, Mellencamp and White who are specifically focused on liveness, there is other scholarship where televisual liveness is addressed as part of a broader analysis of television’s technological qualities and capacities – issues which also inform this project. Having considered those writers whose primary focus is televisual liveness, it is also useful to see what others have to say about liveness, even though it may not be the motivating concept in their writing. The three writers I will now consider are valuable for a number of reasons. Firstly, their writing contributes to overcoming some of the inadequacies of the cultural studies practice discussed in the first part of this chapter – especially in that discipline’s preference not to engage with the qualities of television images, apart from their capacity for meaning and representation. Secondly, unlike the writing on liveness just considered, these writers are not so fixated on contemporary television texts and events. Although perhaps not as sustained a field as the scholarship in the previous section, this writing on television and technology is illuminating for the historical perspective it suggests for this project. Together these writers demonstrate how a greater historical sensitivity, as well as a consideration of television in conjunction with other technologies, can be utilised in a discussion of the television image, and the technology more generally.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4433 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM In Visions of modernity: Representation, memory, time and space in the age of the camera (1998) McQuire presents an account of the modern transformation of visual representation. He discusses the cultural significance of the photographic image and camera technology in order to undertake a detailed analysis of its specific implications for conceptions of space, time, history and memory in contemporary culture. McQuire discusses the developments in movement and time in visual culture, from the introduction of geometrical perspective in painting through to the contemporary technology of television. This supports his interrogation of the claims of realism and the truthful status of visual images that he sees dominating visual culture since the invention of the camera. In doing so, McQuire strongly emphasises the necessity of a historical approach to visual culture to illuminate concerns about the contemporary culture of the image. He believes, “an analysis which seeks to explore these cracks in the edifice of realism needs firstly to understand its foundations” (McQuire 1998, p. 17). In other words, to see the relevance of this statement for the current project, one needs to understand the historical development of television as a technology of control if we are to understand its particular manifestations in contemporary culture. In his own writing, McQuire argues for the need to recognise the importance of the camera and the subsequent dominance of the visual image in our culture. He observes that, whether valid or not, the contemporary visual image remains dominated by ideologies of realism and he convincingly argues that realism is a formative influence in contemporary culture — one that it has been loath to discard. Apart from his useful discussion on the need for a historical perspective on image technologies, McQuire also specifically addresses television. In his discussion McQuire gathers photography, cinema and television together under the banner of camera technologies. While this is slightly problematic if one considers their differing technical processes, he does also maintain a certain distinction between television and other visual technologies through the concept of liveness. And, unlike Caldwell he argues that even video technology has not really altered the technological imaginary of television. As he points out: “Even in an age of pre-recording, the primary televisual fantasy is that everything is ‘live’, is occurring right now – or, at least, is being seen right now, even if only by the imaginary dyad of host and viewer” (McQuire 1998, p. 96). Recognising that liveness is a quality not solely resting on television’s

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4444 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM technical capacities yet obviously connected to them, is a significant move. It counters previous attacks on liveness as no longer relevant to a discussion of the technology and supports White’s recognition of the combined technical and discursive production of liveness. McQuire’s position usefully supports the perspective being developed here, which is seeking to better understand liveness as a quality of the television image, Also promising is McQuire’s observation on television’s increasing tendency to include its technical apparatus into its scenes of representation (McQuire 1998, p. 97). In noting the intrusion of technical apparatus (cameras, microphones etc) into the television image, in some sense McQuire is grappling with the relationship between the television image and its technical mode of production that is vital to a consideration of liveness. For McQuire, one implication of this specific aspect of television is to distinguish television from cinema. He points out: Far from denying its mediation of the real, television celebrates it. Where classical narrative cinema might be compared to the magician who uses sleight of hand to deceive the eye, television increasingly styles itself as a conjuror who can expose the workings of the trick, and appear all the more seductive for doing so…. By revealing the workings of its own apparatus, contemporary television claims not only to show us “the world”, but also to show its own process of showing. (McQuire 1998, pp. 97-98) Sadly, McQuire does not elaborate in any detail on the way in which television “shows us its process of showing”.24 His acknowledgement of this televisual process only extends as far as what has now become an established television genre – reality television.25 However, McQuire’s comments provide an illuminating description of the differences between television and film, more thoughtful than Fiske’s straightforward contrasting of the temporalities of past and present. Instead, McQuire signals the connection between the technical processes of television and film and their respective visual images. For McQuire, the possible intrusion of technical processes into the television image is responsible for some of its attraction as a technology that thrives on unexpected events. As with Deleuze’s perspective discussed in the Introduction, we can note the explanatory value of contrasting television with other technologies such as film. This point is practically exhibited in Chapter Three.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4455 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM While Cubitt’s Timeshift (1991) is not explicitly focused on television, in a preliminary discussion to his analysis of the transformations video has brought to television, Cubitt addresses the technological capacities of television. Cubitt rethinks the issue of televisual presence through Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the “metaphysics of presence” (Cubitt 1991, p. 29), signalling the fruitfulness of an encounter between television and poststructuralist theory. Within the context of Derrida’s theory, Cubitt observes: “The discourse of TV flow is ‘present’ in the sense that the viewer can enter into dialogue with the screen. Yet the broadcast flow is also a vanishing, a constant disappearing of what has just been shown” (Cubitt 1991, p. 30). By invoking this theory Cubitt attempts to describe something of the television image’s vitality and continuing transformations – particular features of the technology that resonate with the quality of liveness being addressed here. For Cubitt, the issue of televisual presence is not restricted to the images on the screen. He also conceives of the television subject, or viewer, through this theoretical perspective. Here, the viewer is not the fully formed subject that characterises Fiske’s conception of the audience. That is, this is not a viewer who actively engages with the text in the manner of their own choosing by exerting their will over a text’s excesses of meaning. Rather, Cubitt describes a “distracted viewer” for television, a viewing condition that is necessary to prevent the production of what he calls a “schizophrenic” subject that would otherwise result from television’s constant process of presence (Cubitt 1991, p. 31). Defining television and its viewers as being in a constant state of process allows Cubitt to conceive of television in all its manifestations (as broadcast, as viewing process, and discursive object) as a “site of struggle” (Cubitt 1991, p. 33). This presents an alternative to lamenting the impossibility of seeing television as a discrete object for analysis, or its viewers as a coherent group or audience. For Cubitt, television is all about process and production: I’d argue that the status – ontological, epistemological, political – of television is produced in the individual viewer, in the micro-culture of the living room, in the local, national and global cultures variously, as a kind of ghost, a frightening, comforting, harmless, powerful, informative, debilitating, entertaining, boring matrix of contradiction which requires the faith of its viewers in its presence to them as object before it can take on the aspect of producer of meaning…The viewing

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4466 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM of – and the writing about – television has as a primary function the task of producing TV as an entity. (Cubitt 1991, p. 33) That is to say, television is continually in a vital mode of production and requires a connection to be made between image and viewer for it to circulate any kind of meaning in our culture. And, in Cubitt’s view, these meanings are fluid, unstable and subject to ongoing change. Again, Cubitt’s comments on televisual presence resonate closely with a possible discussion of the televisual quality of liveness. Following his description of television, Cubitt continues with his primary task of understanding video culture in terms of its transformation of the televisual technology. As with McQuire, Cubitt’s writing signals the usefulness of contrasting television with other technologies (in his case video) to garner further insights into the respective mediums.26 Uricchio (1998a) also addresses the issue of televisual liveness in his discussion of television’s technological specificity. Arguing that television is a “ubiquitous” and “disparate” medium, both in its broadcasting and the academic theorising that surrounds it, Uricchio observes that television is continually transforming, however, this feature of the medium is masked by what he describes as its ubiquity, thus preventing a stable definition of the technology being formulated. In order to address this problem, Uricchio takes a historical perspective on television, examining the debates that surrounded its conception and invention in the 19th century. He points out that early discussions of the technology centred on the simultaneity between the appearance and production of television’s moving images. Uricchio sees that television was part of a broader interest in simultaneity and connectivity and therefore had the potential to construct radical forms of national identity and the modern state. However, he contends that this radical potential has now been lost. In contrast to Doane’s perspective, Uricchio sees that contemporary television has mutated into a storage technology, and simultaneity and connectivity are now articulated more fully in other technologies such as the internet and mobile phone (Uricchio 1998a, n.p.). A second essay, Television, film and the struggle for media identity (1998b), continues Uricchio’s discussion of television’s technological simultaneity, further focusing on defining television as a contemporary cultural form. Here, Uricchio presents a stronger emphasis on the value of historical engagement, maintaining that there is a need to take a new look at the past in order to understand the continuing difficulties of constructing an identity for television

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4477 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM and film. His project sets out to re-interrogate media history in terms of television and the concept of simultaneity. Uricchio recognises: The televisual as both an imagined and a technological construct, was born with the invention of the telephone in 1875…Within one year of the telephone’s invention, writers took the idea of a directable, simultaneous, point-to-point linkage, and replaced the grain of the voice with the grain of the image. (Uricchio 1998b, p. 119) In other words, Uricchio argues that the idea of the “televisual”, which would be easy to consider a mid-20th century phenomenon, was emerging in earlier 19th century technologies of simultaneity. Most importantly, for my perspective, Uricchio also considers the technological differences and similarities between film and television. While he does not advocate conflating television and film he does point out that the study of each technology can benefit the other, especially in the consideration of each technology’s relationship to notions of liveness. He points out: “Our understanding of cinema as a cultural practice can only benefit from an understanding of alternate and competing visual representation systems, and from a more nuanced appreciation of widely used descriptors such as ‘liveness’” (Uricchio 1998b, p. 125). Uricchio also believes that those involved in television studies can learn from the re-evaluation of film scholarship in recent years. It would be useful for television studies, to extend film’s recent historiographic break with teleological-driven history – and the consequent ‘rediscovery’ of historical possibility so evident in the continuing work with early cinema – to television. In this work, technological and cultural dead-ends are every bit as interesting as the patterns of success which have tended to dominate media history. (Uricchio 1998b, p. 125) In a similar spirit to McQuire’s questioning of the ideology of realism underscoring analyses of images since the invention of the camera, Uricchio argues that “television’s technological and representational traditions remain a long overdue research area” (Uricchio 1998b, p. 125). He asserts that if viewed from a certain historical perspective: “Both television and film break in significant and different ways from a representational tradition that has lurked behind a substantial body of theorization, suggesting that much work remains to be done” (Uricchio 1998b, p. 126).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4488 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM That is to say, Uricchio’s perspective on technology and media history opens the way for reconsidering concepts such as liveness and the television image, which have been frequently employed in television studies yet, as he also points out, insufficiently considered. What Uricchio calls “simultaneity”, as a technological feature of television, connects and resonates closely with the concept of liveness that is a key issue here. Incorporating a historical awareness of the development of his chosen technological capacity, Uricchio illustrates the potential a similar approach may have for considering the televisual articulation of control and resistance. Together McQuire, Cubitt and Uricchio highlight the potential of employing a historical consideration of liveness and the television image. As I noted earlier, in other strands of cultural studies, a historical sensitivity to television is only lately developing through writers such as McKee, and, more coherently, Spigel. However, as Uricchio and McQuire point out, when seeking to renew our understanding of an everyday technology such as television, it is useful to consider not only its present, but also its past. Moreover, it is also particularly informative to contrast television with other image technologies, such as film, to produce critical explanations of these cultural forms. In this sense Chapters Three and Four elaborate on Uricchio’s perspective. The analyses of some early film and television images highlight the explanatory potential of television and film, as well as mapping the technological event of control in sites other than contemporary television. Television: Th eory To approach the questions of the television image and the televisual event, we need to also recognise the potential of an encounter between television and theory, in particular poststructuralism, a point developed in Chapter Two. Part of the inspiration for this perspective comes not only from the writing considered so far, but also from a rather individual account of television by Richard Dienst (1994) where he advocates strongly for the use of theory “as a mobile cultural practice” (1994, p. x). Unlike much of the writing already considered in this chapter Dienst’s book, Still life in real time: Theory after television, employs various theoretical modalities (Marxism, phenomenology, poststructuralism) to think about television, and, it seems, vice versa. While his book represents a detailed encounter between television and theory, there is a sense that Dienst might be more interested in theory than he is in television, using television to produce a kind of bravura theoretical performance. This is

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 4499 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM perhaps a danger with highly theoretical projects, a point reflected in Caldwell’s denigration of high theory, but one that I am attempting to avoid here. In other words, to produce a useful theoretical engagement with television it is vital that theory is employed to say something about television rather than television being used to extemporise on theory. A balance is clearly required. Other writing representative of a more intensely theoretical engagement with television includes essays by Dumm (1993) and Probyn (1993), as well as various essays by Brian Massumi (2002). At the risk of labelling, these writers consider television from a poststructuralist perspective and, like my project, their concern is how television connects to, and articulates, contemporary operations of force and power. However, again, like the earlier work of Doane and Mellencamp, the analysis tends to focus on specific television instances of disastrous, unusual events (e.g. the first Gulf War) rather than the more regular practices and qualities of television broadcast. As my analysis of particular television images later in the book demonstrate, it is also possible to employ more regular modes of image production, such as the televisual style of direct address and television’s presentation of comedy, to generate a discussion of television’s cultural force.27 Conclusion My review of cultural and television studies literature serves a valuable purpose with regard to the overall aims of this project and what now follows. Considering the main tenets and engagements of cultural studies with television signals the relations and connections between my project and other debates focussed on television. The British Cultural Studies’ focus on audiences in their various guises as a continuing problematic alerts us both to the relevance and the difficulty of this question for discussions of television. Just how to understand the audience’s connection to television is not central to my discussion, however, suggestions are made regarding this issue in the Conclusion. Similarly, my discussion here bears a connection to the problem of archival and historical research about television. By returning to the admittedly meagre and somewhat ephemeral television archive from the 1920s, Chapter Three works to recover the significance of this era of television production for our understanding of the contemporary televisual field. At the same time, using these texts to interrogate the notion of televisual liveness and the articulation of control, positions the project as a response to the peculiarly contemporary discussions of this vital television quality. Also, the specific selection of mainly

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5500 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM comedic Australian television images in Chapters Four, Five and the Conclusion, are addressed not in terms of traditional genre or textual analysis. Rather, through their connection and articulation of the televisual event of control the discussion of these television images reinvigorates the question of generic and textual analysis for television studies. In so doing, concerns also central to policy and industry analysts – the question of television’s place and potential effects in contemporary culture – are distinctively addressed. Developing and employing concepts from a reading of poststructuralist theory illuminates the discussion of television. This means the vitality of television studies is maintained through the new perspectives such theory brings to the objects of its attention. From the range of literature considered here we are now in a better position to see how the project on the television image and the televisual event might proceed. Even though it appears that the field of study and commentary addressing the television image is relatively disparate and uneven, the number of resonating terms and concepts for liveness – flow, presence, simultaneity and immediacy – also suggest the continuing relevance of liveness for television studies. Unfortunately, the frustration of many studies of liveness, and television studies generally, is their unwillingness, or inability, to confront the television image as the initial site of inquiry. This, combined with their focus on contemporary texts and examples, means that considerations of liveness are yet to provide the nuance a writer like Uricchio suggests is required. While acknowledging that some writers see liveness as being of diminished importance for television scholarship, I suggest that we need to provide an alternative. Mapping connections between televisual liveness and the technology’s operations and articulations of control seeks to produce a more conceptually nuanced approach to televisual liveness, Initially, it would seem straightforward enough to discuss liveness simply as a concept that rests on television’s technical processes. This means that we would recognise the validity of defining liveness through television’s capacity to broadcast real events in real time. Connected to the constitutive technical processes of television as a scanning and transmission device, at first this seems an attractive definition of televisual liveness because it positions television in contrast to its technological counterpoints like film. However, one difficulty with a real in real time definition of televisual liveness is that it does not adequately account for the plethora of recorded programming broadcast on

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5511 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM television. As this chapter has discussed, Caldwell resolves the tension between recorded programming and liveness by hailing the diminished relevance of liveness for television scholarship. While the relevance of liveness to television studies will decrease considerably if we restrict its discussion to the technical definition of broadcasting real events in real time, from another perspective, if we renew our understanding of the technology and its processes for producing images, liveness remains a potential feature of recorded television broadcasting (the insightful point made by McQuire). As I will discuss further in Chapter Three, due to its twin technical processes of scanning and transmission, the television image is always in the process of composition. So, even though much television programming is no longer broadcast in real time, through the technical processes that produce the television images, the quality of liveness is maintained. What this means is that to understand televisual liveness as a feature of the image’s articulation the televisual event, we must more completely engage with television’s particular modes of production and appearance. That is, we need to engage with what I am calling the techno- materiality of the television image. Realising the need to consider the techno-materiality of the television image is a key point for analysing the televisual event of control. To understand the image as a site of the emergence of the televisual event requires a more complete understanding of both the technical processes of television and the material qualities of the image these processes produce. That is, technical processes and materiality need to be considered not in isolation from each other, as if the image had no relation to technical processes, but in combination. Therefore, my approach to the televisual event begins by analysing the relation between image and technical processes and in Chapter Two I discuss a theoretical perspective and develop a set of concepts that are relevant to such a project. In doing so, through an engagement with the television image, what we find is that we are able to understand the cultural and technological force of the television image through its actualisation of the operations of control. As the theory discussed in Chapter Two outlines, this allows us to recognise television’s location and production of cultural and social networks, its connection to control as a contemporary articulation of capitalism, as well as the potential technological articulation of a specific mode of inhabited resistance.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5522 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM Chapter Two: Th e image as event: conceptual perspectives for encountering televisual control

The television event invites a renewed engagement with the qualities and capacities of the television image (such as liveness). This engagement can take account of the principles of television’s technical processes together with the materiality of the television image. In other words, the question of a televisual event needs to be addressed by focusing on more than the television image’s capacity to present content, themes and representations. The challenge is that television scholarship appears to lack a theoretical framework through which such analysis can be undertaken. The four broad sections in this chapter outline the concepts to be utilised in my approach to television. First, I consider the concept of the event. I define its usefulness for the current project while also recognising the number of other ideas that are resonant with this theoretical concept. From this discussion we are better able to consider how it is that the television image articulates a formation of force and power with the potential to effect connections and transformations with other such formations (for example the television viewer) visible in the emergence of the televisual event. Secondly, I explore the Deleuzian concept of control, as the operation of power to which the television image and technology is connected. By examining comments by Deleuze and others on the operation of control, and describing its transformations of force, space and boundaries, capitalism and resistance, I argue for the viability of considering television as an event of control. Thirdly, I consider the television image’s potential to produce articulations of a mode of resistance particular to an event of control. As I have already indicated the question of a politics of resistance in the operation of control is not extensively explored by Deleuze. However, by considering a variety of suggestions and statements by other writers surrounding this issue, I introduce the concept of inhabited resistance as one possibility for understanding political action in the society of control. This section of the chapter also explores the potential for considering certain practices of comedy in terms of the televisual

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5533 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM event of control and inhabited resistance. This point is developed in the analyses of television images undertaken in Chapters Four and Five. Finally, the chapter addresses how I will be approaching the television image as the site for such analysis. That is, by what method do we understand and describe the television image as an event that articulates an operation of control? This section begins by discussing some analytical precedents from the field of cinema and visual cultural studies, identifying principles and intentions that can support the analytical perspective I am developing for the television image and the televisual event. To develop a set of concepts which can be applied, yet not necessarily restricted, to the analysis of television, this chapter turns again to the poststructuralist field of critical theory. Tracing the transformation of structuralist semiotics through to the developments of poststructuralism highlights structuralism’s tendency to overlook both the material qualities of signs (their modes of appearing as aural and visual configurations) together with their related technical modes of production. My discussion shows how certain poststructuralist theory allows for consideration of the materiality of signs, excessive to their representational capacities. The concepts that are introduced for the analysis of the image are becoming-surface and becoming-scene. The following chapters then employ these concepts to discuss the television image’s relation of techno-materiality and representation, through which television’s event of control can be perceived and described. Events — virtualities — machines So, what exactly does it mean to speak of television as an event? The common sense connotations of a television event would be of something happening. Events can be important, exciting and powerful. They bring about change. They can also be insignificant, boring and banal. They may seem to change nothing at all. The Deleuzian event is considerably similar to this. First published in 1969, Deleuze’s The logic of sense (1990) presents a sustained deliberation on the event in an effort to describe their “happening”. In this early work Deleuze attempts to conceive of the moment of an event’s appearing, recognising the instantaneous, transformative effects of events together with the “double structure of every event” (1990, p. 151). Deleuze explains just what is meant by this duality through the connected concept of the actual-virtual relation. As he describes:

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5544 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its actualisation, the moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs…The future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive present and from the point of view of that which embodies it. (Deleuze 1990, p. 151) In this statement, Deleuze clearly refers to the actualisation of the event. He also introduces the notion of virtuality, in his description of “the future and the past of the event” (1990, p. 151). In other words, an event has no “present” as such, but rather obeys a temporality that can be described as the “future-past”.28 To completely comprehend the force of any event, then, requires a consideration of the irreducibility of the actual to the virtual that forms the composition of every event. There is the actuality of the event – its visible mode of appearing and the site of the event’s entry into our cultural formations. So for television, the image is where the televisual event is actualised, “embodied in a state of affairs”, through particular technical and material qualities. In television’s case, we can understand this actualisation as the particular appearance of the television image. Then there is the virtuality of the event – the articulation and composition in the mode of the event’s actualisation of an operation of power that is the conditions of the event’s emergence as a material, visible formation. For television, I am proposing that we understand its actual-virtual articulation of the event through the operations of control.29 As with much of the contemporary theory labelled poststructuralism, the concept of the event resonates with a number of other ideas and concepts that emerge from this field of critical practice. Along with the theoretically connected ideas of the abstract machine, and the actual-virtual relation, the concept of the event emerges particularly clearly from a reading of certain works by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. For instance, the event resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine – a concept that traverses their writing in A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1987). As a precursor to approaching television with these concepts and as a means of explaining the connection between the concepts of the event and the abstract machine, it is instructive to explore Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of Foucault’s analysis of power in Discipline and punish (1977a) in these terms as a further corroborating example.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5555 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM In A thousand plateaus Deleuze and Guattari argue that Foucault’s detailed discussion of the history of punishment, surveillance, and the connected appearance of delinquent behaviour, is a useful example for illustrating their more abstract semiotic theory. To summarise their discussion of Foucault, as signs of punishment, both prisons and delinquency emerge at certain moments in history, making visible a set of forces and formation of power Foucault names discipline, or what Deleuze and Guattari would call a disciplinary abstract machine. While the objects and appearances of delinquency (i.e. the delinquent behaviours of certain bodies) and the operation of disciplinary power are produced together, Foucault outlines how they are also excessive one to the other, even existing in a resistive relation that, paradoxically, is the means to their continuing production.30 In other words, these formations of the actualisation of delinquency (as bodies, behaviours, architectures) are sites where we can also note what could be called disciplinary virtuality. The actual sites articulate a virtual operation of force and power visible only in specific configurations of bodies and machines they produce. In the relation between the actual sites of punishment, the appearance of delinquency, and the articulation of these sites of a disciplinary operation of power, we can locate the disciplinary event. From these brief examples it can be gleaned that the abstract machine is a concept, like the virtual, that may describe an operation of power, visible in various sites through the articulation of actual configurations and materialities – i.e. the emergence and composition of various events. These poststructuralist concepts enable television, as a technology that produces images, to be discussed not only in terms of its representational capacities, but also in terms of the technology’s articulation of a particular operation of force and power, and consequently connected to a certain manifestation of capitalism. As events, television’s images can be understood as technological articulations of force, and as sites for television’s entry into, and potential transformation of, contemporary culture. Th e qualities of the event While it is valuable to recognise connections between the event and resonant theoretical concepts, it is also important for the present discussion to outline the vital qualities of the event that inform my discussion of the television image in these terms. Specifically, such qualities include irreducibility, repeatability and the effect these have on our understanding of the historical occurrences of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5566 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM events. This detailed discussion of the characteristics of the event then informs my subsequent exploration of control as the specific form of the televisual event. Irreducibility In Foucault’s observations on the architecture of the panopticon in Discipline and punish, he delineates the relationship between what we might call a technical machine (i.e. the material formation of the panopticon – the new surveillance-style prison) and what Deleuze and Guattari call the abstract machine. What Foucault points to is their intermingling and irreducibility. Indeed, Foucault calls the design of the panopticon “a diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (1977a, p. 205). This statement signals that the disciplinary event is articulated through a synthesis of technical and abstract machines, where an abstract machine is an operation of power articulated by technical machines, yet not reducible to them. As Sheridan notes in his commentary on Foucault: “The event must be seen paradoxically, in terms of ‘a materialism of the incorporeal’” (1990, p. 129). In other words, Foucault’s analysis shows how discipline is an abstract machine that is articulated by the technical machine of the panopticon, but irreducible to it, because the disciplinary event is also perceptible in other sites such as schools, factories, hospitals, barracks etc. To apply this theory to the televisual event, television is a technology producing images articulating the event of control. However, as an operation of power control is also irreducible to television. This means that control is perceptible in other cultural technologies and sites. Repeatability Another quality of the event is its repeatability, which is of great relevance to the question of the televisual event, for television is nothing if not repetitious. Considering the force of television in terms of its actualisation of an event allows us to engage with televisual repetition in a more productive way, through the principle of difference and repetition that characterises the temporality and mode of appearance of events. The principle of repetition and difference is central to the theorists whose work is driving this discussion of the event.31 Because the entirety of an event is never visible in its mode of actualisation (that is, as a virtual operation the event is never completely articulated, but is only visible in the form of its actualisation) it can potentially recur and be repeated in different ways.32

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5577 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM Massumi also describes the event’s principles of difference and repetition, in terms of a relationship in the event between what he identifies as “reproducibility” and “uniqueness” (1992, pp. 18-20). He writes: The fact that an event can be reproduced…does not belie its utter uniqueness (its separation or difference from all other events…). For re-production is translation, a transformational carrying-over to another site or substance…The uniqueness of the event means that its happening is always also its undoing. Its reproducibility means that it will nevertheless come again to be undone: to each event, many happening returns. (Massumi 1992, pp. 19-20) Clearly then, there are tensions in the appearance and production of events – between repetition and difference, between reproductions, returns, uniqueness and variation. While events, to be events, must by definition be repeatable, they will never be repeated, or actualised, in exactly the same way twice. However, the conditions of the event’s emergence, their virtuality or abstract machine, can potentially be infinitely rearticulated in other sites. As Massumi again notes, “each event is unique. It only stands to reason, then, that the event’s general conditions do not fully account for its repetition, as it happens, different at each iteration” (Massumi 2002, p. 222). That is, an event’s mode of appearance articulates and forms the operation of force by which events are composed and emerge as part of various cultural formations. At the same time, every site of the event’s actualisation also necessarily varies and differs from its other sites of emergence. To return to the television image, it would seem that the image is also produced through the logic of differential repetition. That is, the television image is the actual site where the virtuality of the event of control can be observed. In terms of repetition, we have seen all television has to offer before, yet its images are never exact repeats of those that have previously been broadcast, and television continually composes itself as new. Conceivably, this recognition allows for a productive understanding of television’s reliance on well-worn genres which seem to accommodate infinite variations on particular formulas. Even in television broadcasting’s reliance on endless reruns and repeats, differences are still part of the event of their repetition, perhaps not so much in the image on the screen, but in the timing of the broadcast and the context of its reception by the audience.33 While the television image appears through the repetition of similar image formations, the event of television

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5588 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM is also actualised through configurations and relations of difference and uniqueness.34 Thus, the event of control may be endlessly articulated through the appearance of the television image. Yet, it also always appears with slight variations and differences from its previous actualisations. “Eff ective” history There is one further implication of the theory of the event I am employing to explore television’s cultural force. Through this perspective on events we can conceive how events occur and recur at different historical moments. Connected to the logic of repetition and difference, the implication here is that traditional modes of history conceptualise events only in so far as describing what happened and at what date. Traditional history would take the discussion of an event no further than what we would now recognise as its actualisation. As Deleuze and Guattari observe, “what History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience” (1994, p. 110). In this statement there is a point of commonality with the writings of Foucault. For it is this type of “History” that Foucault also critiques, where he advocates practising what he calls the “effective” histories of the genealogy rather than traditional history of the search for constants and origins (Foucault 1977b, pp. 139-164). The traditional history that Foucault critiques is resonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the “first way” of considering events which involves “going over the course of the event, in recording its effectuation in history, its conditioning and deterioration in history” (1994, p. 111). Rather than this approach, which Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari see as limiting our comprehension of the force and power of events, we can choose another mode of engagement with them.35 Examining the traces of events, through the remains of their mode of actualisation, with the historical eye Foucault advocates, we can genealogically resurrect the emergence of particular types of events. This historical practice connects the distribution of various sites into a diagram of the emergence and production of a particular form of event, through both its repetitions and variations. Selecting images from various eras of television’s production, maps the emergence of the televisual event of control by locating the actual-virtual relations of control in the images that television has produced at different points in the televisual field of operation. In doing so, we can recognise the repetition and difference characteristic of the televisual event of control.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 5599 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:47:21:47 PPMM Events of discipline and events of control Foucault’s elaboration of disciplinary power is arguably the quintessential analysis of virtual operations and configurations of power. Considered in conjunction with the theories of the event, the actual-virtual relation and the abstract machine, Foucault’s analyses of technologies and institutions are immensely instructive for a project on television. Like the panopticon that is central to Foucault’s deliberations on disciplinary power, television is also a particular kind of technology that makes certain things and objects visible according to specific technical procedures. Furthermore, television is also a technical machine, a set of processes, which in its production of images, displays a connection and articulation to its own abstract machine. However, while Foucault’s genealogical mapping of the disciplinary event is masterful and provides a valuable precedent for approaching many technological sites, I am not convinced that a straightforward connection between television and discipline is most productive, given that television is not solely a technology of surveillance – a key aspect of the operation of disciplinary power.36 To simply connect television and discipline would imply that to some degree there have been few, if any, changes from the emergence of discipline in the examples Foucault describes to the operations of force articulated by more recent technological formations. In Foucault’s description of the operation of disciplinary power he observes a transformation in the operation of power – from the model of centralised, sovereign power to the more dispersed mechanisms of discipline. It is also important to remain aware that the historical methodology Foucault employs is not evolutionary or linear. From a temporal point of view, then, discipline does not replace an extinct sovereign model of power but rather emerges at various points alongside it. As I have discussed more generally in connection to the event, the qualities of difference and repeatability highlight the potential disparate, non-linear emergence of events. As operations of force and power, sovereignty and discipline may potentially overlap and coexist. Thus, Foucault’s observations introduce the possibility that other operations of power can emerge alongside the ongoing articulation of disciplinary power, articulated in different cultural sites and locations. Similarly to Foucault’s observation of the emergence of discipline through a transformation of the sovereign model of power, Deleuze suggests that a further transformation is taking place. He proposes that in many cultural sites

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6600 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM and technologies disciplinary power is changing to the operation of control, a formation of power which holds immense potential to inform a discussion of the event of television. Therefore, the relation of discipline to control is not characterised by opposition, or a linear transition from one to the other. Rather, there are connections between the two forms. As Massumi notes, in the society of control, “disciplinary command functions are not dismantled, but rather released. They disseminate and vary, coming to be even more finely distributed throughout the social field” (Massumi 1998, p. 56). Control, then, can be understood as the intensive dispersal of particular disciplinary operations. As I observed in my earlier discussion of the abstract principles of the event, the event of control, visible in the television image’s actualisation of virtual configurations of power, may also be articulated in other sites and by other technologies. While we can speak of a televisual event of control, we must also recognise that the emergence of control as television’s virtual operation of force and power can also be articulated in various other sites at different points in history. I am describing how this is so for television, but this does not mean that the event of control is not articulated in other sites. Indeed, according to the logic of these concepts, it must be, as a virtual operation of power can be actualised and repeated in an infinite variety of ways.37. Thus, control may be articulated as the televisual event, but will also be dispersed across other sites, forming a network of force and power that defines contemporary culture. Deleuzian control In perhaps his best-known essay on this topic, Postscript on control societies (1995b, pp. 177-182), Deleuze provides a succinct discussion of just what a society of control looks like and how it functions, drawing regular points of comparison with the operation of disciplinary power. In contrast to Deleuze’s other theoretical writings the notion of control appears somewhat incompletely articulated, almost appearing as an afterthought in a few late essays and interviews. Wise comments on the apparent “vagueness” surrounding control; however, he also notes that “the essays have proved to be remarkably generative” (Wise 2002, p. 30). Hardt makes a similar point, also suggesting that, given the comparative paucity of Deleuze’s discussions of control, it is up to others to further develop Deleuze’s ideas (Hardt 1998). What these writers highlight is that Deleuze’s brief commentary outlines some

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6611 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM of control’s general principles. In its brevity Deleuze’s writing holds great potential for various readings and uses. In this discussion of control I outline some of the central principles of this formation of power. These are control’s transformed workings of force, its characteristic levelling and smoothing of boundaries, control as a mode of contemporary capitalism and production, as well as the question of potentially transformed modes of resistance in a control society. Control’s general characteristics then inform my discussion of television’s articulation of a politics of control and inhabited resistance. Waves and modulation Control operates through what Deleuze describes as processes of “modulation”. He observes how “control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite and discontinuous” (Deleuze 1995b, p. 181). Here, as Rodowick points out, we can see a “wave-like” conception of force emerging, “where the idea of waves or currents becomes the dominant conception of force” (2001, p. 208). Hence Deleuze’s observation that controls (in contrast to discipline), “are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next” (1995b, p. 179). Such a vision of continual modulation is perhaps crystallised by Deleuze’s metaphor: “Surfing has taken over from all the old sports” (1995b, p. 180), a description that articulates the undulations and modulations of the operation of force and regulation in the control society. Rodowick explains and develops this surfing metaphor further, noting how “relations of force involve knowing how to insert oneself in a preexisting current, characteristic of the popularity of sports such as windsurfing or hang gliding” (2001, p. 208). This comment signals a further implication of control’s transformed logics of force – the capacity for resistance. Smoothing the boundaries Deleuze signals a number of implications of control’s transformed relations of force. One of these is typified by his comments on the breakdown of institutional barriers. He notes: “we’re in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement – prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family” (Deleuze 1995b, p. 178). Furthermore, he describes how: In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything – business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6622 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM modulation, a sort of universal transmutation. (Deleuze 1995b, p. 179) Hardt (1998), in particular, engages with this aspect of control, pointing out how Deleuze’s comments provoke a new conception of space. In this “collapse of the walls that defined the institutions”, Hardt describes how “there is progressively less distinction, in other words, between inside and outside” (Hardt 1998). He sees that this effectively produces society as a form of “smooth space” (1998), although also explains that this description requires some qualification. Hardt writes: “It might appear that it is free of the binary divisions of modern boundaries, or striation, but really it is criss-crossed by so many fault lines that it only appears as a continuous uniform space” (Hardt 1998).38 In other words, in disciplinary societies there was a conceivable separation between various institutions such as the family, school and work. However, in the society of control such separations are in the process of being smoothed out. Individuals are produced by potentially multiple institutional procedures at any one moment as operations of control disperse throughout the social field. Deleuze further articulates this possibility in Control and becoming (1995c) with some specific examples: Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. (1995c, p. 175) Thus, in disciplinary institutions the individual may have been produced as a child or a student or a worker. However, with the boundaries between these institutions and spaces that produce such distinctive behaviours blurring, then conceivably individuals can be simultaneously produced as child- student-worker all in the same open social field, modulating between each of these positions depending on the variable intensities of force at any given moment.39 Wise also describes the “smooth space” of control, seeing it functioning through a “series of constant adjustments. It is not about being trained and then let loose but being constantly tweaked (continuing education)” (2002, p. 32). He also provides an interesting example, distinct from the areas of education,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6633 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM business and punishment that Deleuze invokes. This is contemporary culture’s embrace of product placement. Wise observes: “Product placement represents the migration of advertisements from separated, regulated spaces into the spaces of programs, films, and eventually out of the media and into our lives” (Wise 2002, p. 37). This contemporary media practice is another example of the smoothing of a boundary, the blurring of advertising and entertainment. As a product features in a film or television programme the cultural form synthesises these aspects of its production and entertainment and advertising appear together in what Deleuze might call a “coexisting metastable state”.40 As Foucault does in Discipline and punish, Deleuze tends to concentrate on examples from social institutions (i.e. education, businesses etc) in his elaboration of control. In exploring the possibility of employing Deleuze’s concept of control in an analysis of television I am following Deleuze’s own suggestive comments. As I have already pointed out, in Letter to Serge Daney, Deleuze proposes, “television is the form in which the new powers of control’ become immediate and direct” (1995a, p. 75). Despite this tantalising hint on the potential connection between television and control, Deleuze appears to have little sustained interest in the technology. Given television’s constitutive processes of scanning and transmission, his association of control with the logic of waves and modulation is initially very attractive for bringing to my analysis of television, although Deleuze also clouds the issue slightly with some comments that could be seen to endorse a discipline/analog – control/digital opposition. He explains these terms thus: We’re supposed to start all over again each time, and although all these [disciplinary] sites have a common language, it’s analogical. The various forms of control, on the other hand, are inseparable variations, forming a system of varying geometry whose language is digital (although not necessarily binary). (1995b, p. 178) In strictly technical terms, equating control with the digital would effectively exclude television from such a discussion, given that until recently television was not primarily a digital technology. However, Deleuze’s comments on this topic do not simply provide an equation between the continuing technical developments of digital culture and the society of control. As Deleuze himself explains, he employs “digital” not simply in terms of the technicalities of binary code, but rather as a concept that describes a process of continuous change and transformation — one that does not directly provide a trace of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6644 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM a pattern as an analog process might (Deleuze 1995b, p. 178; 1995b, pp. 202-203). In this regard, Massumi makes a persuasive argument that any opposition between the analog and the digital, particularly in technical terms, cannot be maintained. He describes how “the digital is sandwiched between an analog disappearance into code at the recording and an analog appearance out of code at the listening end” (Massumi 2002, p. 138). In these terms, a binary opposition between digital and analog culture, or indeed control and disciplinary events, is difficult to uphold. Rather, each potentially overlaps and coexists with the other.41 Therefore, what I am exploring with television, which is a technology currently in transition from analog to digital technical processes, is television’s potential articulation of the society of control, prior to control’s articulation in the more recent technological forms of digital culture (i.e. forms of digital media).42 According to the logic of the event already explored in this chapter, the control society must have emerged gradually, not as an orderly, linear transformation, but in specific local sites within the operation of discipline that became intertwined and incorporated into a network of control. 43 According to this perspective we should not conceive that control would have appeared as a fully formed operation of power that makes disciplinary power obsolete. Rather, just as Foucault identifies discipline’s emergence at points within the operation of sovereign power, control also emerges at certain points in disciplinary society. Control and capitalism Deleuze also describes the new procedures of the control society in terms of a “mutation in capitalism” (1995b, p. 180). In the Postscript essay he contrasts the economic aspects of control with those of discipline. Initially, he contrasts systems of money where: “Discipline was always related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies” (1995b, p. 180). Similarly, he contrasts control and discipline as capitalist modes of production: Nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed toward production, and proprietorial. Thus it made the factory into a site of confinement, with the capitalist owning the means of production and perhaps owning other similarly organized sites (workers, homes, schools). As for markets, they were won either through specialization,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6655 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM through colonization, or through reducing the costs of production. But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production, which is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil refineries. It’s directed toward metaproduction. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells finished products: it buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities. It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets. Thus it’s essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses. (1995b, pp. 180-81) What Deleuze describes here is a fairly widely accepted view of the changes in capitalism that have accompanied the explosion of consumer society since the mid-nineteenth century. We need look no further than the proliferation of media and mass communication technologies, including television, for the type of service, market-oriented capitalism that Deleuze identifies as characteristic of control. Indeed, Massumi provides a succinct description of the transformation in capitalism that resonates with Deleuze’s comments when he states: “Capitalism is now more processual than it is productive, more fundamentally energetic than object oriented” (Massumi 1992, p. 134).44 Others have described the “mutation in capitalism” Deleuze defines as control, in connection with the cultural and aesthetic style of postmodernism. Perhaps most famously, Frederic Jameson argues that the emergence of what he defines as a postmodern aesthetic (as nostalgia, pastiche, and a waning of affect), can be understood as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson 2001).45 However, although there are possible conceptual connections between control, postmodernity and late capitalism, Rodowick makes a useful argument for bypassing these last two terms in favour of Deleuze’s notion of control. Underlying Rodowick’s unwillingness to employ such concepts in his discussion of contemporary digital culture is a perception that they carry with them too much cultural studies baggage, from their usage over the past few decades. As such, Rodowick views both “postmodernism” and “late- capitalism” as ultimately rather unhelpful in debating contemporary cultural forms (Rodowick 2001, pp. 206-208). In this instance I am suggesting that it is control, which can be employed in creative, productive directions not always coherently signalled by Deleuze, that offers a path through the postmodern,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6666 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM late-capitalist impasse that Rodowick identifies. Furthermore, despite increasing competition from digital technologies, television is currently maintaining an integral position in the functioning of contemporary culture and capitalism. Resistance An intensification and transformation of Foucauldian disciplinary power, control is employed by Deleuze to describe the operation of force in an open, non-institutional social field. Power is flexible and adaptable, meaning that contemporary culture is unstable and contingent. Nothing stays the same for long, as previous social boundaries have been eroded with new technologies and practices; everything changes. With this in mind, the final aspect of control I am exploring is the possible strategies for resistance within the society of control. By examining the comments of Deleuze and others connected to this issue and through a discussion of some of these ideas in conjunction with the political potential of de Certeau’s notion of “tactics”, I propose that we consider a mode of inhabited resistance as one conception of political and resistive strategies in the society of control. In particular, I suggest that we can recognise the potential of certain practices of comedy as possibilities for constructing a resistive inhabiting of the society of control. If the operation of control represents a shift in the formation and working of force and power in the social field, then it is vital that we also consider the political dimension of this transformation. In other words, to effectively understand the control society we need to consider what the procedures are, if any, by which control can be resisted. As Rodowick notes: Our urgent critical task is to understand how relations of power are being transformed, to formulate strategies of resistance equal to the task of challenging them, and to recognise new modes of existence being invented as the expression of alternative utopian longings that may result in new forms of collectivity. (Rodowick 2001, p. 219) Rodowick points out the necessity of considering the question of resistance for control, if we are to be able to make a way forward within the new relations of power. Similarly Hardt (1995; 1998) argues that the question of resistance is central to any exploration of control. He writes: “Analysing the new technique of social control is only worthwhile to the extent that it allows us to grasp also the new potentialities for contestation and freedom emerging within this new paradigm” (Hardt 1995, p. 41).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6677 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM This is particularly vital, because as Hardt clearly expresses in his later essay (1998), we can no longer conceive of preceding modes of resistance as appropriate, or even possible. Commenting on control’s smoothing of the space between the public and private spheres, Hardt describes how the political effect has been that “the place of modern liberal politics has disappeared and thus from this optic our postmodern or imperial society is characterized by a deficit of the political” (Hardt 1998). Deleuze provides a more specific example for the question of the politics of resistance when at the conclusion of the Postscript essay he asks whether trade unions still have a role to play, “or will they give way to new forms of resistance against control societies?” (Deleuze 1995b, p. 182). Together, what Hardt and Deleuze signal is that, with the emergence of control, the notion of a fixed, oppositional, critical position quickly becomes both ineffectual and anachronistic. Deleuze is not particularly optimistic about the possibility of the construction of effective modes of resistance in the society of control. His comments in this regard are fairly brief and a little speculative. Indeed, he seems rather despondent at times about the consequences of control, somewhat pessimistically noting: “Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for ‘universals of communication’ ought to make us shudder” (Deleuze 1995c, p. 175).46 The chief difficulty, then, is that in the control society, there is no outside position from which resistance, or a critical position, can be either developed or maintained with any sense of stability. With the smoothing out of boundaries and processes of control intersecting and modulating throughout the social field, there is no escape from control’s operations. Thus, an indistinctness and flexibility in terms of critical positions also develops. This is also Deleuze’s point of dissatisfaction with television. Deleuze’s description of the technology allows for no “gap” between its operation and the “social sphere”. Therefore control accommodates no locations from which to escape or oppose its operation. As I have already noted, in this perspective, television appears to operate as an all-encompassing machine (Deleuze 1995a). Deleuze is not alone in his perspective on control. For instance, Massumi describes control in terms of the “the principle of complicity, or untranscendable control” (1998, p. 58). Clearly, one implication of this is the difficulty of maintaining oppositional modes of resistance. A further implication, however,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6688 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM is that individuals must construct new relations of resistance to counter the more intense and modulating processes of control. Deleuze hints at the type of behaviours such resistance might encompass in his interview Control and becoming (1995c): It’s true that even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called “sabotage” (“clogging” the machinery). (Deleuze 1995c, p. 175) Here Deleuze implies that the kind of resistive practice required for the operation of control is one that is generated from within the system, rather than from outside it. This is a significant point for the question of control’s politics of resistance, and the suggestion is elaborated on further by Rodowick in his discussion of the resistive strategies appropriate to control. He writes: The question then is how to introduce some friction into “friction- free” capitalism…The ethics and tactics of the “digital underground” are exemplary in this respect: culture jammers, guerrilla media, cyberpunk culture, warez or software pirates, hackers and phone freaks all provide rich material for examining the creative possibilities that already exist for resisting, redesigning, and critiquing digital culture. (Rodowick 2001, pp. 233-34) Again, the types of resistive behaviours Rodowick describes are practices that inhabit and take advantage of a system, disrupting it from a position within it. As Rodowick notes, this is a “tactical” and “creative” response to the operations of control. Such practices recognise the unavailability of an oppositional, outside critique. Through these examples’ complicit mode of operation and the inside relation with the system they are disrupting, the potential emerges for certain practices to produce new locations from which to operate in different ways to that which the operation of power proscribes. I am calling this tactical practice inhabited resistance, and it is also signalled by Deleuze’s suggestions on the forms which resistance might take: “The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (Deleuze 1995c, p. 175). Deleuze’s choice of words is significant here. That is, we may momentarily “elude” control, but it cannot be “escaped”. Again, these suggestions point to a tactical, creative and complicit practice of resistance, rather than an oppositional mode of operation.47 The

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 6699 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM need for tactical responses to control is also apparent in Deleuze’s more explicit request for creativity to form part of control’s transformed relations of power and resistance. He writes: “Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people” (Deleuze 1995c, p. 176). How such a creative politics of inhabited resistance might be articulated within the operations of television is central to tracing the televisual event of control. Tactics, humour and everyday life Like Rodowick, Massumi sees that there is potential for resistance in the society of control but specifies that it must take a particular form. He points out that resistance “would define itself less as an oppositional practice than as a pragmatics of intensified ontogenesis” (1998, p. 60). In the same essay he usefully comments on the particular characteristics of such a pragmatic and productive form of resistance: Productive interference patterns that fail to resonate with capitalist legitimation, either by excess or by deficiency or with humor, are at least momentarily unassimilable by the supersystem…Tactical noncommunication might take a ritualistic form, mimicking the ritual legitimation of capitalist power, to very different effect – and affect. For it would not be sadistic but joyful; not exorcistic but invocational, calling forth what are, again from the point of view of the supersystem, vague and alien powers of collective existence whose determinations escape. (Massumi 1998, p. 61) Again, we can see a reference to tactics here, as well as the potential of such tactics to encompass excess, humour and joy as ways of operating in a creative relation to the processes of control. This is a useful point to consider further in developing the notion of inhabited resistance for television, informed by pragmatic, tactical and creative ways of operating in the control society. Together with Wise’s assessment of Deleuze, who Wise sees as suggesting a “politics of everyday life” as the most appropriate mode of operating in the control society (Wise 2002, p. 43), Massumi’s description suggests the possibility exploring de Certeau’s writing on the tactical practice of everyday life has for informing our understanding of resistance in the society of control.48

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7700 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM De Certeau and Deleuzian control In The practice of everyday life (1984) de Certeau explores how everyday life can indeed be a “politics”. Through his consideration of the “tactical ways of operating” available to individuals in contemporary culture his theory displays some extremely productive connections that can be made with the Deleuzian notion of control. De Certeau also points to the possible humour and joy that can mobilise, and be mobilised through, tactical practices of resistance. Like Deleuze and the other writers on control discussed here, de Certeau observes the contemporary transformation of the social field into a smooth, yet modulating and contingent space, describing both its freedoms and its intense, multiple procedures of striation. De Certeau writes: The system in which they [consumers] move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an elsewhere. (de Certeau 1984, p. 40) Again, we can note that conceivably there is no longer an outside position from which critique and resistance might be generated. However, de Certeau has a clear conception of what kind of resistances and movements are available. Reminiscent of Deleuze’s comment that the ability to resist control must be considered “at the level of our every move”, de Certeau describes how this transformed social field requires that: One would thus have a proliferation of aleatory and indeterminable manipulations within an immense framework of socio-economic constraints and securities: myriads of almost invisible movements, playing on the more and more refined texture of a place that is even, continuous, and constitutes a proper place for all people. (de Certeau 1984, pp. 40-41) In other words, the operation of power that Deleuze names control accommodates chance-like, unpredictable and unplanned movements of resistance. This is what de Certeau describes as tactics; movements that can pragmatically take advantage of a system, using it to their own ends while still remaining complicit within it. De Certeau is quite specific as to how tactics operate, discussing how, “a tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance” (de Certeau 1984, p. xix). Like the resistive practices suggested by Deleuze, Rodowick and

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7711 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM Massumi that are complicit with, and inhabiting, the system they are also resisting, we can see how the de Certeauian tactic is also a complicit, inhabiting practice – one that again bears a creative and elusive relation to an operation of which it is also a part. As de Certeau notes: “It [the tactic] must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’”(1984, p. xix). Deleuze and de Certeau each articulate a need to return to the local/micro level to partake in possible resistive practices to the operation of control. Deleuze invokes this through his call for a renewed belief in “the world” and “a people”, as the sites where the potential to engage in resistive manipulations of control exists: “If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume” (1995c, p. 176). Deleuze’s request for a return to “belief” in the world and the capacity of individuals to elude control reads initially rather idealistically, because, as I have already discussed, in his writings on control he provides little elaboration on just how this can occur in a practical sense.49 Interestingly, however, de Certeau seems to have a somewhat clearer idea of the types of practices such a Deleuzian “belief in the world” might entail. Distinct from the quasi-criminal practices discussed by Rodowick and Deleuze, de Certeau’s ideas resonate with Massumi’s comments suggesting the political potential of a resistive practice of humour, as well as the overall joy this might produce. De Certeau points out: “Such a politics should inquire into the public…image of the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it” (de Certeau 1984, p. xxiv). Here de Certeau invokes a joyful, contingent mode of resistive practice, one that is part of the social field as well as using it to advantage through a playful, creative relation, producing a different mode of existence. De Certeau’s writing furthers the concept of an inhabited mode of resistance with some evocative images of tactical practice: “It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse” (de Certeau 1984, p. 37). Moreover, de Certeau observes a potential connection between this mode of tactical practice and “wit” – a style of humour. By “manipulating” and “enjoying” the unexpected opportunities for resistance in the social field through “cross-cuts, fragments, cracks and lucky hits in

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7722 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM the framework of a system, consumers’ ways of operating are the practical equivalents of wit” (de Certeau 1984, p. 38). Inhabited resistance To explore the ways in which certain forms of television comedy might function to articulate the event of control and inhabited resistance, it is valuable to clarify and define my development of this concept. By engaging with the available scholarship my discussion of control highlights a number of pertinent points in this regard. In the Deleuzian control society mechanisms and technologies of disciplinary power have reached an intensive saturation point in the social field. No longer restricted or specific to institutions and particular technologies, now the operations of power modulate throughout all places and spaces in our society. As I have discussed, this means that there is no escape from operations of control. Thus, the further conclusion I have drawn is that as this social operation of power intensifies, opportunities and formations of resistance must necessarily transform also. As the social field becomes an open, modulating, yet striated, space, formations and movements of resistance can no longer be conceptualised as oppositional or outside, because such a position is no longer viable. Therefore, forms of resistance must also inhabit the open field of the control society. From the discussion of Deleuze, de Certeau and other theorists we can see how inhabited resistance has a number of defining qualities, including complicity, pragmatism and creativity. Such tactical movements and forces can be produced through certain cultural formations articulating the event of control. In particular, certain comic practices and styles hold great potential for articulating the event of control and its connected mode of inhabited resistance. Comedy as inhabited resistance: Self-refl exivity and carnival The proposition that comedic and humorous practices can function as a mode of resistance and critique is, of course, not new. Indeed, Henri Bergson’s essay, first published in 1900, on laughter and the comic, points to the social dimension of laughter and comedy, seeing the purpose of such practices in terms of the capacity for social critique. He writes: To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one….Laughter must answer

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7733 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social signification. (Bergson 1956, p. 65) Throughout his meditation on comedy and laughter, Bergson continually returns to laughter’s essential social relation, remaining “convinced that laughter has a social meaning and import” (Bergson 1956, p. 145). From satire to slapstick, comic practices employ various techniques to both make fun of, and criticise, certain ideas and social norms. Humour and laughter, as complicit, resistive practices, are also highlighted by Deleuze’s assessment of Foucault’s mode of operation in Discipline and punish (1977). Of Foucault’s historical practice and method Deleuze observes: The Divine Comedy of punishment means we can retain the basic right to collapse in fits of laughter in the face of a dazzling array of perverse intentions, cynical discourses and meticulous horrors. A whole chain of phenomena, from anti-masturbation machines for children to the mechanics of prison for adults, sets off an unexpected laughter which shame, suffering or death cannot silence. The torturers rarely laugh, at least not in the same way. Valles has already contrasted the revolutionaries’ unique sense of gaiety in horror with the horrible gaiety of the torturer. Provided the hatred is strong enough something can be salvaged, a great joy which is not the ambivalent joy of hatred, but the joy of wanting to destroy whatever mutilates life. (Deleuze 1988, p. 23) What Deleuze finds in Foucault’s analysis of discipline is the critical and enduring force of laughter, especially for those engaged in resistive practices while also being located within the operation of a fiercely disciplinary social field.50 The power of such laughter, in its mobilisation of joy, remains undiminished in the face of increasingly intense disciplinary procedures. We can see here that Deleuze has identified the joy of delinquency in the unexpected practice of disciplinary laughter. Following Deleuze’s lead, how laughter and joy are mobilised through the event of control is a question of locating and describing the resistive practices that can be accommodated and produced by a control technology, such as television. My discussion of inhabited resistance highlights that forms of comedy and humour might be employed for effectively resisting the televisual event of control. Practices need to emerge that, while complicit with the target of their critique, also manage to resist the object of their attention. And as the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7744 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM commentary from de Certeau and Massumi hints, comedy and humour can play a vital role in producing such complicit practices of resistance within the event of control.51 Two such complicit and tactical comedic practices found on Australian television are self-reflexivity and carnivalesque. As Chapter Four discusses in some detail through the example of Graham Kennedy, television frequently employs self-reflexivity as a mode of comic inflection. In such instances, self-reflexivity appears through pragmatic, opportunistic movements (both visual and aural) that interfere with and disrupt the appearance of the television image. Viewing televisual self-reflexivity in this way allows a connection to be drawn with the concept of inhabited resistance being outlined in this chapter. As such, Kennedy’s television images are instructive to consider in terms of the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. Another theory of laughter and the comic, Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1968) exploration of the carnivalesque style introduces a comic practice peculiarly resonant with the practice of inhabited resistance and the control society. Bakhtin’s discussion of carnival laughter is particularly pertinent in this regard. He notes its characteristics as being “the laughter of all the people”, “universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants” (Bakhtin 1968, pp. 11-12). He notes further that carnival laughter is, “ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival” (Bakhtin 1968, pp. 11-12). As Docker usefully summarises: Carnival laughter…differs here from the ‘pure satire’ of modern times, where the satire places itself above the object being mocked. In contrast festive laughter is also directed at those who laugh…Festive laughter is always philosophically ambivalent. It is aware of the relativity of all truths and conceptions, including its own. (Docker 1993, p. 180) Docker reads Bakhtin’s exploration of carnival in terms of its resonances with postmodernism, and, as I have signalled, there are also connections between control and some versions of postmodernism. This allows a further connection to be drawn between carnival as a mode of social critique and the potential resistive strategies of the control society, a point that will be explored further in the analyses in the following chapters. What is valuable about Bakhtin’s description of carnival is its identification of a comic, humorous practice that is complicit with the target of its critique. As a tactic of resistance,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7755 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM the carnivalesque, and particularly its characteristic figures of fools and clowns, inhabit the society to which it is also constructing a resistive relation. As Bakhtin notes, “clowns and fools…are characteristic of the medieval culture of humour. They were the constant accredited representations of carnival spirit in everyday life out of carnival season” (Bakhtin 1968, p. 8). In other words, it seems that clowns and fools had the potential to permeate the social field, as a visible trace of the powerful and resistive force of the carnivalesque. While Weekes (1998) points out the limitations of engaging in an unnuanced embrace of the resistive power of Bakhtin’s discussion of carnival, the notions of the complicity of carnival laughter and the resistive force of the fool can be usefully employed in discussing television’s articulation of control. Specifically, analysis of carnivalesque television images further emphasises how these Bakhtinian concepts inform the analysis of control and inhabited resistance as the televisual event. My discussion of the Australian television comedy of Norman Gunston, Roy and H.G. and Kath and Kim, illustrates the potential for analysing carnivalesque television images in terms of the articulation of the event of control and inhabited resistance. Through distinctive means, Bergson, Deleuze and Bakhtin illuminate the potential for tactical, complicit processes of comedy, humour and laughter to function in a political and resistive way. These comic practices are intimately connected to notions of social critique and contestation. Of particular relevance is the recognition that some comedic practices (in particular self- reflexivity and carnival) can produce the inhabited resistance characteristic of the society of control. As I will explore in the television images analysed in later chapters, a mode of comedic practice that simultaneously inhabits and resists provides one actualisation of the televisual event of control. Prior to this, the following chapter outlines both a historical perspective on the televisual event, as well as considering the emergence and articulation of forces in the television image resonant with the event of control. This analysis provides a substantial re-engagement with the television image, underlining further the inadequacy of certain modes of television studies with regard to this constitutive aspect of the technology. Exploring the techno-materiality of liveness of the television images from the 1920s further highlights television’s potential to produce and accommodate movements and configurations of inhabited resistance as part of the operation of control.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7766 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM Th e television image, the televisual event: A mode of analysis One final conceptual question remains for analysing the television image as an event of control. That is, what kind of engagement with the television image is necessary if we are to consider its specific mode of appearance in terms of the actualisation of control – that is, as an event? Semiotics, or the study of signs as producers of meaning in language and culture, has a well-established history in cultural studies through the linguistic influence of structuralism. Taking a structuralist perspective on the television image means that we would be able to account for the television image’s particular production of representation and meanings as part of contemporary culture. However, by engaging with the specific poststructuralist transformation of semiotics and the status of signs, we can produce a more nuanced understanding of the force of the television image in our culture – not only as a participant in the cultural production of representations and meanings. We are also able to recognise the role of the image in the production and mobilisation of culture – of the television image’s connection to, and articulation of, forces and operations of power, such as the event of control. Sign-image-event Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, is a regular point of introduction to structuralism through his influential linguistic theory, where, broadly speaking, the meaning of signs is produced through their differential relation to other signs. In the Course in general linguistics (1966), Saussure’s linguistic thought and philosophy has been posthumously compiled into a complete and fairly representative volume of his work. In Saussure’s essays and notes we find an exposition of the foundations of linguistic and structuralist theory, which is useful for informing and developing the present discussion of the television image in terms of semiotics and the sign. The key point is that Saussure’s semiotic theory is one founded in difference. He writes: “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (1966, p. 114). In other words, meaning is produced via a relation of difference. As Saussure comments, the content of a sign “is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it” (1966, p. 115). Signs (letters, words etc) have meaning and content insofar as what they are not. Thus, meaning and value is produced through the systemic and differential relation of signs to other signs.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7777 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM This logic of difference, where signs have no inherent meaning, is connected to another of Saussure’s key linguistic tenets. He argues for the “arbitrariness” of signs. His principle of signification, where signs function through a relation of a signifier to a signified, is the basis for this proposition. Realising that linguistics is more than the simple business of giving names to things, Saussure expands the notion of language’s performance of a designatory function by describing the process of signification. His perspective is that “the linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image” (1966, p. 66). For Saussure, the “concept” is the signified of the sign – the abstraction to which the sign points, while the “sound-image” is the signifier – the “sensory” aspect of the sign – the word on the page or its sound in the air. Moreover, Saussure believes that the signified-signifier relation is an arbitrary one and he argues that because of this arbitrary relation it follows that the linguistic sign generally is arbitrary (1966, p. 67). As he clarifies further: “The signs used in writing are arbitrary; there is no connection…between the letter t and the sound that it designates” (Saussure 1966, p. 119). Characterising the sign and its signified-signifier relation as arbitrary correlates with Saussure basing his linguistic theory on difference. That is, to support the argument that language is such a system requires a theory that concentrates on the relations between signs, rather than the signs themselves to any sustained degree. Not only does Saussure enforce this perspective by describing the arbitrary nature of signification, it is reinforced in that he overlooks the materiality of the sign. As he states: The means by which the sign is produced is completely unimportant, for it does not affect the system…Whether I make the letters in white or black, raised or engraved, with pen or chisel – all this is of no importance with respect to their signification. (Saussure 1966, p. 120) In other words, believing that signs are arbitrary, Saussure attributes little importance to their mode of appearance – their shape, colour, texture or sound – or what we might call the materiality of the signifier. Neither does he assign much importance to the sign’s mode of production – the technical processes by which the sign has been allowed to appear. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how this is an oversight. That is, in our age of competing and varying technologies, such issues of production and appearance are increasingly important – arguably more so than at the turn of the 20th century

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7788 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM when Saussure’s theories were developed. Indeed, there is evidence of this in the explosion of graphic design, logos and branding that are an integral part of our consumer culture. While Saussure’s work in the field of structuralist linguistics lays the groundwork for continuing contemporary scholarship in semiotics, it is important to recognise the limitations of his structuralist perspective on meaning and the cultural processes of signification, particularly with regard to the television image and the question of the television event. Indeed, the reluctance of many television scholars to take the image as a focus of inquiry no longer seems so strange once we recognise the influence of Saussure’s structuralism on cultural studies, and the dismissal of sign production and materiality in his theory. Broadly speaking, poststructuralism does not restrict analysis of semiotic systems and processes to the Saussurean system of difference. One reading of the poststructuralist field of practice centres on its concern to develop a semiotics not simply focused on signs as referring or pointing to objects outside themselves, or as functioning solely through a system of difference by which structuralism is grounded. Much poststructuralist theory also recognises signs as material phenomena – objects that appear with particular and characteristic qualities. These are qualities (such as the shape of a word on the page or its sound in the air) that have as much significance as the object to which a word, image or sound may refer. By recognising the relation between these two aspects (e.g. the relation of shape/sound and designated object) a word, and indeed a television image, can be considered a sign through this theoretical perspective. By locating the television image and its qualities such as liveness in the context of the transformation of the concept of the sign through poststructuralist theory, we arrive at a point where the relation of the televisual technology to culture can be more effectively described. There are principles arising from certain theoretical engagements with cinema and art that are instructive for also analysing television. Given the distinct absence in television studies of this type of project, it is useful to consider such influences and writing, even if it addresses other cultural sites. Deleuze and Foucault: Striking scenes In Deleuze’s books on cinema (1992; 1989) we find a substantial example of a sustained poststructuralist engagement with an audiovisual technology. Overall, Deleuze’s method is a descriptive engagement with the materiality of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 7799 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM the cinema image for which, and through which, he develops some specifically cinematic concepts. Throughout his analyses Deleuze shifts his focus away from some of the traditional concerns of film studies (e.g. narrative, genre, representation) and, in the process, critiques the inadequacies he identifies in these modes of film scholarship. Additionally, Deleuze’s writing highlights the value of allowing the analysis to be conceptually specific with regard to the object under discussion.52 Of utmost concern for Deleuze is to engage with cinema in cinematic terms, rather than apply other epistemologies to it. Indeed, in the concluding paragraph of Cinema 2 Deleuze clearly articulates the need for a specifically cinematic semiotic practice and set of concepts: Cinema is a new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as a conceptual practice. For no technical determination, whether applied (psychoanalysis, linguistics) or reflexive, is sufficient to constitute the concepts of cinema itself. (Deleuze 1989, p. 280) Deleuze’s drive to produce cinematic concepts results in a vast, yet detailed, engagement with cinema focused through two main concepts – the movement- image and the time-image.53 Indeed, following Deleuze we can see how television also is “a new practice of images of signs whose theory philosophy must also produce as a conceptual practice”. Deleuze’s engagements with cinema provide an instructive precedent of a techno-material analysis of a cultural technology. That is, what Deleuze’s particular investigation of film provides is a perspective for interrogating the specific materiality of film, and, by association, other image-based technologies such as television.54 Foucault also provides some examples of descriptive and theoretical analysis of images. Although Foucault is perhaps best known for his masterful analyses of the discursive production of social institutions and practices, a descriptive engagement with images is also found in two of his essays on visual art – This is not a pipe (1998) and Las Meninas (2002). In these shorter writings Foucault, like Deleuze, presents an alternative to representational analyses of visual images. Briefly, This is not a pipe is a meditation on Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting of the same name, arguing that the relationship between words and images should be seen as open, proliferating systems. The relation between them is irreducible – words and images cannot be resolved one into the other. Similarly, Las Meninas, the opening section of Foucault’s The order of things (2002) also signals the irreducibility of a visual image.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8800 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM Here Foucault extends on his analysis of This is not a pipe, pointing out how in the scene of a painting by Velasquez, the position of the spectator is produced and made visible. Foucault’s writing has been connected to visuality and vision by a number of commentators.55 Indeed, Dana Polan likens Foucault’s writing to Deleuze’s work on cinema which Polan says demonstrates how “a linguistics or narratology of cinema must give way to a semiotics of visual energy and luminosity” (Polan 1988, p. 114). Polan provides a succinct assessment of what characterises this style of analysis. While clearly Foucault’s writing is theoretically and conceptually rigorous, Polan notes how to follow Foucault’s approach to visual sites and images one needs to “reject the abstraction of high philosophy for the description of striking scenes” (1988, p. 111). Foucault’s discussion of Velasquez’s painting, which portrays a scene of artistic production, is indeed emblematic of the description of a striking scene. And, in one way, Foucault’s discussion succinctly summarises the perspective I am developing for the televisual event. The scene portrays an artist gazing directly out of the painting at the objects of his attention – a king and queen. The two sovereigns appear in the painting as reflections in a mirror in the painting’s background. In the foreground an ensemble of children observe the scene of artistic production, while the artist is poised in front of his canvas, the back of which is visible in the scene. Foucault engages in an exquisitely detailed description of the play of gazes and positioning of the various figures in the painting. In doing so, he is not concerned with the painting as a representation of real people. Rather, he deliberates on the relations of gazes, conceiving of the painting as a statement of sovereign power. (Foucault 2002). That is, the painting actualises the event of sovereign power, just as the panopticon articulates the disciplinary event as an operation of power. Considering the writings of Deleuze and Foucault provides useful instruction for how a project similar in intent for the television image and the televisual event can proceed. As Deleuze finds for cinema, such a task requires concepts capable of appropriately engaging with, and describing, the television image in all its specificity. In other words, to engage in a descriptive analysis, concepts are required that allow us to recognise the image’s quality of televisual liveness as a techno-material quality together with the image’s potential representational capacity. The questions that can then be asked of the television image are similar to those posed by Deleuze and Foucault to

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8811 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM their objects of analysis. In particular we should ask: what is articulated by the television image’s relations of movement and time, by its configuration of visuality and aurality and its mode of appearance? Or, to use Polan’s evocative description of Foucault’s analysis: what sort of “striking scenes” are particular television images and how can we conceive of them articulating their connection to an event of force and power? In short, what sort of event is television? Focussing on these questions extends our consideration of the television image beyond the representational order of meaning. This provides a new perspective on television’s force as a technology in contemporary culture by highlighting the connection of the television image to the event of control. A number of terms are employed and developed in various poststructuralist writings – event, virtuality and abstract machine – that explain the connection between signs and their articulation of force. Massumi notes that this produces a different type of linguistic/semiotic practice. Helpfully addressing Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of structuralist semiotics, Massumi discusses the main principles of this analytical practice with welcome clarity. He notes: Linguistics should be a pragmatics that opens language to the vagaries of “context”, indexing grammar to relations of power and patterns of social change….The challenge is to conceptualise the real conditions of production of particular statements….A language does not exist in some pure and eternal realm outside the speech act it produces. It subsists locally but globally in each and every one. (Massumi 1992, pp. 42-43) Again, Massumi’s explanation reinforces the need to consider signs as more than relations of signifiers to signifieds, because this perspective overlooks the connection of language to the cultural and social systems of power that produce and construct signs. In other words, there is a need to consider the sign’s relation to, and articulation of, an event. In the spirit of the repetition and difference of the event, we have also returned to the question of the televisual event. We can now pose the question of television events with increasing nuance. That is, how can the television event be observed through the image’s irreducible qualities and disjunctive synthesis of techno-materiality and scenic representation? We should be able to perceive the connection of the cultural production and circulation of signs to a social operation of power, such as the event of control, to explain

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8822 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM how particular formations of meaning occur at specific moments. In doing so, we can more clearly recognise the difference in semiotic and theoretical practice between structuralism and poststructuralism. That is, the production of meaning by signs can no longer be considered as simply arbitrary or differential as in the Saussurean model. Rather, there is a connection between the appearance of signs, their mode of production, and their constitution and location in the world as a contingent composition of force and power. This theoretical perspective allows for the consideration of what I have already outlined in some detail through the concept of the event. Incorporating an awareness of force and power does not mean that the sign is no longer the starting point for analysis. What it does mean, however, is that a different perspective on the signs of our culture is highlighted – one which sees them as more than producers of representations and acknowledges them as articulations of virtual operations of power. Once this aspect of the sign is recognised, a different set of questions emerge for analysis, concentrated on how certain signs, objects and appearances are produced. What are the conditions that enable their production, and more importantly, are these conditions visible in some way in the appearance of the signs and objects of our culture? The question we can now ask of television is, how does the televisual event emerge and become visible in the televisual production and circulation of signs – its television images? Becoming-surface/Becoming-scene The television image’s articulation of a control and inhabited resistance can be better understood through an analysis of what I am calling the television image’s dual propensity for becoming-surface and becoming-scene. While these are not necessarily televisually-specific concepts (and as the following chapter demonstrates can be employed in a discussion of cinema), their value lies in their potential to recognise the television image’s combination of a mode of representation and its mode of production. I am introducing and employing these terms to describe and explain the television image’s specific combination of technical processes and materiality with its specific configurations of representational scenes. In formulating these concepts I have combined three terms – “becoming”, “surface” and “scene”. My desire to consider television as an image-based technology requires terms that can acknowledge television’s synthesis of aurality and visuality, and I have chosen surface and scene initially for that reason. While others have sometimes

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8833 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM incorporated these terms into their research and discussion of images, they have not done so in a way that I see is most productive for television.56 Becoming is a central concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, used to rethink traditional modes of subjectivity. As Massumi succinctly states: “they use the word ‘becoming’ in place of ‘being’” (1992, p. 37). Questions of subjectivity notwithstanding, what becoming generally describes is a vital process of movements and transformations, characterised by rhizomatic creativity rather than serial logic. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, becoming “is a question not of organization but of composition: not of development or differentiation but of movement and rest, speed and slowness” (1987, p. 255). So why should becoming be employed here in a project desiring to better understand the television image and the televisual event? The answer lies in the television image’s techno-materiality. Becoming can account for television’s neverendingness, the ongoing appearance and quality of its images. In other words, becoming resonates with television’s continuing process of composition, decomposition and recomposition – the flow of the television image in the material, phenomenal sense (not simply the flow of programming that Williams describes). In this way, becoming is particularly useful for describing the sometimes contested notion of liveness that recurs in discussions of the television image. As a descriptor for the television image’s ongoing process of varying speeds, movements and interactions, becoming is appropriately suited to my discussion of the techno-materiality of televisual liveness. Becoming is even more useful when connected to the concepts of surface and scene. In short, becoming-surface signals the tendency for an image to make visible its technical operations and processes, while becoming-scene signals the image’s configuration of movement and action – its potential for semiosis and meaning through the visual and aural formation of an image. Using these two terms in a discussion of the television image is based on the premise that every image or appearance is produced through a partial, disjunctive synthesis of surface and scenic tendencies. These two aspects of the image intermingle, yet are irreducible one to the other. The television image can be becoming-surface – that is, moving/tending towards surface — but only in conjunction with movements of becoming-scene. Moreover, it is in the configuration and surface-scene relation of any image or site that articulates an operation of force, connecting television to a social network of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8844 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM power – the event. In other words, the television image is neither one nor the other, but always in a condition of their disjunctive synthesis through its ongoing process of composition. Renewing our engagement with the television image and seeing it as a technology that circulates signs in our contemporary culture, we can do more than analyse the image as a representation of a real occurrence. Following the pragmatic theoretical practice of poststructuralism, we see how television’s images and particular modes of production and appearance also actualise an event of control. That is, television functions as more than a self-contained system of representation. As events, its images can be perceived as movements and operations of force that appear in specific local ways, yet are connected to global systems of force and power, here defined as control. At this point then, the procedure for the analysis of the televisual event can be outlined. Firstly, I will consider the production of the television image through the technical processes of television – the vital procedures of scanning and transmission that distinguish television from other image technologies. To avoid simply producing a technically determinist argument, the specificity of television’s materiality in relation to its technical processes needs also to be described. We can recognise the materiality of the image in two ways – first in its surface’s relation to television’s technical processes and secondly as a scene of meaning and representation. In this way, we engage with the television image as a disjunctive synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming- scene, allowing us to see the synthesis of these two tendencies of the image that mobilise and produce the televisual event as an articulation of control. Together with recognising the television image as a synthesis of surface and scenic tendencies we can also consider whether the techno-materiality of the image articulates and connects to what we now understand of the control society. How does television actualise its connection to the society of control and is its production of liveness a constituent feature in this process? Finally, and perhaps most crucially, what is the potential for displaying movements of inhabited resistance as part of the televisual event of control? To answer these questions my discussion will look at both visual and aural aspects of the image. We need to consider the visual composition of the television image – the colours, figures, movements and speeds that appear in the image. Sound too, and its configuration in the image, needs to be described and discussed. Visuality and aurality perform representational functions in

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8855 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM the television image. That is, they are part of the image as becoming-scene. However, they also have a becoming-surface/ techno-material function. In the combination of visuality and sound the television image’s techno-materiality of liveness is mobilised and made visible. This disjunctive synthesis of scene to surface in the audiovisual formation of the image is where the event of control and inhabited resistance can be located. While aurality does not figure in the very early examples of television images from the 1920s, it is critical to the analysis of the images from the 1950s onwards. As Chapter Four highlights, the words spoken by Australian broadcaster Bruce Gyngell are a vital part of the television image’s techno-materiality of liveness. And as Chapter Five particularly will demonstrate, sound and timbre, in terms of the Australian accent, play a crucial role in articulating the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. Furthermore, the particular examples discussed in those later chapters highlight how the disjunction of aurality and visuality in the scenic construction of images also produces events of control and inhabited resistance. These formations are exemplified by the comic practices of self- reflexivity and carnival I have signalled as potentially illuminating for discussing the televisual event. Conclusion Through an exploration of the event, and more specifically Deleuze’s proposal of control as a contemporary transformation in the operation of power in the social field, the chapter has introduced two vital concepts for discussing the force of the television image. Outlining some of the general principles and qualities of control emphasises the potential this concept holds for an investigation of television. In particular, the political practice of inhabited resistance and its possible manifestation through comedy is a useful concept to bring to analysing television as an event of control. By noting the transformation from Saussure’s structuralism to the poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari among others, we have seen how the subsequent twists of poststructuralist semiotics allows us to see signs as articulating particular operations of force and power to which they are connected, and by which they are produced. In other words, signs have more than a designatory function; they are also events that articulate and produce a virtual formation of power. To consider the possibility of the televisual event in terms of the television image’s techno-materiality, this chapter suggested the potential for a descriptive style of analysis of the televisual image, by

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8866 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:48:21:48 PPMM exploring some instructive analytical precedents that lie in studies of cinema and art. In addition to signalling their connection to the theoretical movement of poststructuralism, Deleuze and Foucault engage in a descriptive mode of analysis, accounting for how various images can be approached as more than representation. Considering these illuminating excursions into cinema and art suggested that a poststructuralist deconstruction of the television image holds vast potential for unravelling television’s cultural force as a technology. The chapter then employed the poststructuralist perspective on the sign to propose two concepts specific to analysing the television image – becoming- surface and becoming-scene. Through their conceptual connection to an image, these two concepts allow us to explore the irreducibility of the television image’s relation of representation and techno-materiality. To be utilised as a means of initiating the descriptive analysis of television’s techno-materiality, becoming-surface and becoming-scene aid in opening up the television image to an interrogation of its social and cultural dimensions through its potential actualisation of an event – control. This will occur through an analysis of the aural and visual configurations of television images in the chapters that follow. While I have proposed a direction and practice for analysis of the television image, clearly, at this stage such questions are necessarily theoretical and abstract. It is only by engaging with specific examples of television images that a practical elaboration of these issues stemming from renewing our engagement with the television image through the concept of the event can be produced. With the enhanced theoretical perspective and concepts that have been outlined here this is now the task of the remainder of this book.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8888 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM Chapter Th ree: Liveness, the emergence of control and the televisual potential for inhabited resistance

Early appearances France, 1894 In 1894 the Lumiere brothers produced the first examples of what is commonly referred to in cinema histories as the actuality style of film-making. One of the best-known actualities is Workers leaving the factory.57 The film consists of a single shot. On the right of the image, workers, mainly women, surge out of the open gates of a factory entrance. To the left is a smaller, shadowed doorway through which workers also exit. The movement of the crowd is relatively steady and continuous, apart from a few brief disturbances. At one point two women exit in different directions. As they separate, one pulls at the other’s apron strings, momentarily disrupting the stream of workers. They quickly blend back into the crowd, continuing on their separate ways. A dog bursts through the crowd, quickly followed by a man on a bicycle. The film concludes abruptly with workers still filing out of the factory entrance. United States of America, 1929 As part of RCA’s first television broadcasts, the image of Felix the cat appeared on television screens as just two inches high for two hours per day (The Restelli collection 2004). By the time he appeared on television, Felix was already a well-known and popular cartoon character from previous appearances in comic strips and films. Even more so than Workers leaving the factory, this is an image of simplicity. The figure of the cat stands arms outstretched, eyes wide, and facing straight ahead. The image is black and white, of low resolution and the most noticeable feature is the horizontal lines shooting through the image.58 Scotland, 1927 In 1927, Scottish television pioneer John Logie Baird used his new invention – Phonovision – to record a television signal, preserving one of his many television experiments (McLean 2005). Stookie Bill – the name of the dummy that one of the images presents – appears facing straight ahead while a human

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 8899 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM hand manipulates his head.59 The image is stretched and distorted, permeated by wavy lines. Like Felix the cat, Stookie Bill is also black and white, with an extremely low degree of resolution. …………….. These three images are particularly useful sites with which to continue the discussion of the televisual event of control. The technical, material and theoretical contrasts they illuminate between television and cinema introduce and develop key ideas for understanding the connection between liveness, the televisual event of control and the televisual production of inhabited resistance. Highlighting contrasts and distinctions between television and film aids in emphasising the specificity of each technology. Following Uricchio (1998b), by engaging with one technology’s mode of liveness we can begin to more thoroughly understand the qualities of the other. These three images also demonstrate how the concepts of becoming- surface and becoming-scene can be usefully employed to understand and describe the television image’s techno-materiality as a televisual event of control.60 By analysing the 1920s television examples and the actuality film, we see more clearly how television can be understood as a technology of control. The comparison contextualises the engagement with the television image through the contrasts in technological process and production. Through the various images analysed here, the surface-scene relation of television’s techno-materiality of liveness signals both the television image’s actualisation of control, as well as the potential television images have to produce and accommodate the inhabited resistance of control, although such potential is not as completely realised as it is in later examples. This supports the perspective of reengaging with the image as the site of television’s technological entry into the social field. It also provides some historical context for televisual control and inhabited resistance further informing the images considered in future chapters. Returning to television’s era of experimentation and innovation identifies an initial point in the genealogy of televisual control and inhabited resistance. From here, the transformations of the televisual event of control continue to be mapped, by engaging with particular comedic formations of televisual images in some specific television practices of self-reflexivity and carnival.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9900 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM Television and cinema: Comparative histories In exploring the relation between television and cinema from a television studies perspective, it is tempting to position cinema as an inadequate, or failed televisual technology, thereby overturning the traditional aesthetic hierarchy between the two forms. For instance, Dienst asks: “Whether cinema has not always been compensating for its incapacity to transmit images – if, in other words, the dream of television as simultaneous inscription and diffusion has not haunted all cinematic forms from the beginning” (1994, p. 146). While Dienst’s position is attractive as a means of countering the aesthetic snobbery often directed towards television as a cultural form, ultimately, fully embracing this perspective would overstate the relationship between the two technologies. As I have acknowledged, Uricchio (1998b) presents a more thoughtful engagement on the conceptual relationship between television and cinema. While, like Dienst, Uricchio recognises a quality of liveness in film’s construction and cultural practice, he avoids conflating the two technologies, arguing instead that we should focus on their differences.61 Indeed, as I noted earlier Uricchio sees the need for “a more nuanced appreciation of widely used descriptors such as ‘liveness’” (Uricchio 1998b, p. 125), a position that underpins my own discussion of television and cinema. Elsner, Muller and Spangenberg describe a connection between the thought of television and the technical capacities, and incapacities, of the cinema. They argue: The need for long-distance transmission of moving pictures seems to have arisen with the invention of the cinematograph, and with the popularity of the motion picture film. The period between about 1875 and 1925 could be called a phase of speculation about television… (Elsner, Muller & Spangenberg 1994, p. 110) Uricchio also explores the period identified by Elsner, Muller and Spangenberg (i.e. 1875-1925), however, in terms of situating television in a history of technology, he concentrates more on transmission (particularly of sound in the form of the telephone and the radio), rather than considering a scanned, transmitted image. Uricchio announces 1875 as an important date in the history of television because “the televisual, as both an imagined and a technological construct, was born with the invention of the telephone in 1875” (Uricchio 1998b, p. 119). This statement emphasises the desire for transmission that existed in the late 19th century, albeit in terms of sound rather than an

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9911 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM image combining sound and visuality. Elsner, Muller and Spangenberg also acknowledge the place of the telephone in the pre-history of television. They outline how: “In 1926, the British television pioneer John Logie Baird claimed in an advertisement for his mechanical television apparatus (the ‘televisor’), that in 1876 some visionaries had already announced that, after hearing by telephone, seeing by telephone would follow naturally” (Elsner, Muller & Spangenberg 1994, p. 111). In contrast, in his history of television in the United States, Barnouw presents an alternative view of television’s technical and conceptual relationship to other late 19th century technologies. He maintains “television’s pre-history must include the phonograph (1878), the peepshow kinetoscope (1894), the cinematographe (1895) and the wireless and radio” (Barnouw 1975, p. 6). The matter of television’s technological specificity is complicated further by Barnouw’s acknowledgement of the relationship between television and radio. He emphasises the connection between radio and television through his discussion of the names given to early experiments in television. These included “visual wireless”, “visual radio” and “electric vision” (Barnouw 1975, p. 17). Such commentary on television’s conceptual connections to other 19th century technologies, and where it should be placed in a cultural history of technology, is telling. Initially, the apparent difficulty of reaching a consensus on the technological tradition television belongs to alerts us to the problem of origin stories. When engaging in historical inquiry it seems there will always be competing views and opinions rather than an authoritative truth at a presumed point of origin, therefore there seems to be little gained from working to assign one.62 Secondly, considering various assessments of television’s technical and conceptual place in the history of cultural technologies highlights both the connections and disjunctions between television and its technological counterparts. While clearly there are links to be made between the technical principles of television and the transmitting technologies of the telegraph, telephone and radio, these forms are not characterised by the production of an audiovisual image in quite the same way as television. Thus, considering this commentary also reveals the potential for re-engaging with aspects of television, such as the qualities of its image that may have been insubstantially addressed previously.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9922 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM As I have already observed, because of the technical characteristics of television, it has been more difficult to develop and maintain the archives required for a sustained historical engagement with its images.63 This point has had implications for my choice of images here. Unlike cinema, television is not in the first instance a recording, storage device, and prior to the regular use of videotape in combination with the televisual technology, programmes and broadcasts were less easily stored. While the Lumiere film has survived to occupy a somewhat exalted position in the cultural histories and analyses of cinema, the television examples I have introduced here are arguably less well-known. The difficulty of locating original images from television’s embryonic period of development means that analysis and discussion of this era of television will always be speculative to some degree, however this does not necessarily diminish the importance or value of such engagements to the project of television studies. Consequently, for those interested in television history, it is particularly vital to engage with those images that have managed to survive, even if it must be in the form of the digital reproductions I am examining here. While the surviving fragments of early television have a significance they may not have had were there an abundance of available, intact archival material from this period to draw on, television studies remains an incomplete project if it fails to account in some way for this early period in the technology’s history. Therefore, it is critical that images such as Felix the cat and Stookie Bill are further explored. The value of these early television images is not only that they enhance our understanding of the point of their invention. They also offer potential insights for more contemporary television scholarship. As Gunning outlines in Re-newing old technologies: astonishment, second nature and the uncanny in technology from the previous turn-of-the-century (1998), considering the history of visual culture is a valuable method of understanding the cultural force of contemporary technologies. Gunning advocates examining technologies at their point of introduction or invention, before they fade into what he describes as the “world of habit” (Gunning 1998, n.p.). His perspective is similar, exploring regarding the comparative techno-materiality of early television and early cinema and their production of liveness.64 There is a similarity here also with Uricchio’s observation on the fascination and value of engaging with what he calls “technological and cultural dead-ends”

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9933 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM (1998b, p. 125). While the examples I have chosen seem to be far removed from the contemporary manifestations of these technologies, in the opening stages of their development cinema and television’s technological capacities for liveness are clearly evident. More importantly, the television examples I have chosen to address here are indicative of the television image’s mode of appearance that remains a feature of the contemporary television landscape. Furthermore, engaging with the images through the poststructuralist semiotic perspective discussed previously constitutes an encounter with the techno- materiality of the images. Through this we can understand television’s distinctive technological articulations of operations of power – that is, the images as events. Images of liveness: Th e televisual-cinematic nexus The images I have selected each present, (or would have presented), an image of a live event in the everyday sense of the word. The duration of each image would have been equivalent to the time it took for the episode to appear on the screen. As such, the examples conform to what can be understood as a fairly straightforward definition of televisual liveness. This is the presentation of a live event – one that unfolds in real time — captured in image-form. All three of the images I have described would have captured an episode as it happened and the material of the image has not been subjected to editing after the recording has taken place. It is this initial point of commonality that underlines the point alluded to by Dienst, Uricchio and others. That is, beginning with this definition of liveness shows how liveness has not always been a concept peculiar to television. It is also a potential of early cinema. Despite this similarity, the three images I have selected to address can also assist in distinguishing the particular technological capacities of television and cinema, highlighting the specific potential of the television image in terms of control and inhabited resistance. The first point of contrast between television and cinema rests on their distinct technical processes. Although the Lumiere film presents a real, uninterrupted episode in terms of an equivalence between the duration of the image and the duration of the incident captured at its moment of recording, the cinematic technology does not have the capacity to project the episode and produce the cinema image at the same time as the episode is being captured by the camera. The film camera records the workers leaving their factory late one afternoon, freezing the event on the film stock as a series of sequential frames, or photograms. To complete the cinematic technology’s

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9944 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM production of an image, the series of photograms is later run through the film projector at speed, blasting light through the photograms and reanimating the event onto the cinema screen. At the first screening of Workers leaving the factory, viewers of the Lumiere film would have witnessed an image depicting incidents that occurred at a separate time and place to the time and place of the image’s projection. In comparison, because of its characteristic technical processes, the televisual technology does have the capacity to produce an image at the same time as an incident is being captured by the camera. Television is produced through scanning, transmitting processes rather than the recording, projecting techniques characteristic of cinema. Television images such as Felix the cat and Stookie Bill were produced through the technical procedures of scanning and transmission and it is these processes that allow television to present images of episodes as they are happening. Like cinema, a televisual episode being captured by the camera occurs at a different place from the place where the image is viewed. Unlike cinema, however, television has the potential to present images to the viewer simultaneously, at the same time as they are being captured and processed. Scanning and transmission: Technical principles Considering the technical principles of television, particularly concentrating on scanning and transmission, further highlights the specificity of television’s technical processes in contrast to cinema. It also informs our understanding of the potential televisual articulation of control and inhabited resistance. In the 1920s, inventors were exploring two types of scanning – mechanical and electrical. While electrical scanning ultimately triumphed, the mechanical scanning device invented by German Paul Nipkow (the 1884 Nipkow disk) and the later mechanical experiments of Scotsman John Logie Baird, were also important in the overall development of both the idea and the reality of television.65 As Winston (1998) acknowledges, the story of television’s technical development is peopled with numerous inventors from Britain, Russia and the United States, and is often coloured by the Cold War (1998, p. 100). Winston also outlines the “ground of scientific competence” (1998, p. 90) that led to the development of television. In 1908, the possibility of electrically transmitting images was articulated by a British electrician, Campbell Swinton, in the journal Nature, although Swinton had at the time produced no prototypes

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9955 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM (Winston 1998, p. 93). At a public address in 1911 Swinton “elaborated his ideas on the receiver by suggesting a special cathode ray tube which would have at its front a mosaic screen of photoelectrical dots” (Winston 1998, p. 94). At a similar time, however (1907), an electrical television system was patented by a Russian inventor, Boris Rozing (Winston 1998, p. 100). Winston notes that Rozing was inspired by the observation that “the electron beams in the common cathode ray laboratory oscilloscope left complex, luminescent patterns on the front of the tube” (Winston 1998, p. 101).66 Incorporating the cathode ray tube in his experiments, by 1911 Rozing had successfully transmitted by wireless over a distance “a distinct image…consisting of four luminous bands” (Winston 1998, p. 101). However, it is Rozing’s student, Vladimir Zworykin, and the prodigious American inventor, Philo T. Farnsworth, who, in their individual experiments, are often credited with the realisation of electrically scanned television. Fisher and Fisher describe the similarities between the designs and prototypes of Zworykin and Farnsworth. Each system worked by “focusing an image through a lens at one end of a cylindrical, flat-ended tube onto a plate at the other end coated with a mosaic of many photoelectrical cells, then scanning the electrical image formed by the cells” (Fisher & Fisher 1996, p. 126). Both men employed electrical scanning in their systems although Farnsworth used an anode finger to scan the image, while Zworkyin’s system used an electron beam (Fisher and Fisher 1996, p. 126). One might assume that the technical processes of television would have undergone radical transformations since the time of their invention, however the “mosaic of photoelectrical cells” employed in these early experiments with television is still relevant for understanding the principles of production and appearance of the contemporary television image. Taylor describes how in electrically scanned television light is focused on a small, photoconductive, glass sheet (Taylor 1975, p. 227). Light sensitive, the photoconductive plate produces an image as it registers variations in light of the source object or image. The plate is scanned by an electron beam, converted into an electrical signal, transmitted to the television receiver and scanned onto the screen. Taylor provides a succinct description of the production of the electrical signal from the image of light that registers on the photoconductive plate: “The electron will scan the whole image at great speed. While it is passing over

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9966 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM bright patches, the resistance will drop, current will flow and the voltage at the output will fall” (Taylor 1975, p. 227). Clearly, the technology of television is constantly being refined and has nearly completed its transformation from analog to digital. Although these technical processes are changing rapidly, it would seem that scanning and transmission have changed little in principle. As Fisher and Fisher point out: A 1996 television receiver works on almost exactly the same principles as did those designed by Farnsworth and Zworykin…scan an image with a beam of electrons to create an electrical signal, and then re- create the image at the receiver by turning that signal back into an electron beam and bombarding a fluorescent screen. (Fisher and Fisher 1996, p. 341) Fisher and Fisher also make an interesting comment regarding the place of scanning and transmission in digital television: “Images will still have to be scanned before they can be transmitted into binary signals” (1996, p. 341). Dienst makes a similar observation with regard to the transmission of the television signal, maintaining that although technically there are different types of transmission (broadcasting, metal wire, laser technology), each relies on a “common two-step procedure that I will call the de-screening and re- screening of light through a video signal” (Dienst 1994, p. 17). These various descriptions of television’s technical processes underline a point vital to my consideration of the capacities of the television image, particularly in terms of articulating the event of control and inhabited resistance. That is, the principles of these technical processes – scanning and transmission – are key to understanding the television image’s techno-materiality of liveness, whether it has been produced by mechanical, electrical, analog or digital processes.67 Some writers argue that the emergence of video detracts from television’s quality and capacities of liveness, instead aligning the technology more closely with cinema. Cubitt, for example, states, “through video, TV can cease to be a slave to the metaphysics of presence” (1991, p. 36). Cubitt sees that video’s capacity to “shift time” – that is, its ability to store events and replay them at a later time, effectively dulls the presence and immediacy that characterises the television image. The tension between the technology of video and the technical production of the television image is also evident in Caldwell’s mildly derogatory description of contemporary television as “tape masquerading as liveness” (1995, p. 223). However, video only diminishes the liveness of the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9977 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM television image if we cling to the belief that liveness is defined solely by the transmission of real events in real time. Of course the majority of television broadcasts are not based on the transmission of real events in real time, but this particular definition of liveness supports Feuer and Caldwell’s claims that television is becoming, in Feuer’s words, “less and less live” (Feuer 1983, p. 14). Such positions ignore what is being identified here as the importance of the principles of television’s technical processes in the composition of the liveness of the television image. These principles are still relevant even when video is the source of the televisual signal, or television is taped and viewed at a later time. Dienst supports this view when he says, “taping broadcasts for later viewing…does not necessarily diminish the power of the program” (1994, p. 23). He also asserts that “there is no point of exteriority from which video could escape television” (Dienst 1994, p. 166). Indeed, the relation of other technologies such as film and video to television demonstrates the capacity of television to accommodate and transform other technologies without substantially altering the techno-materiality of the television image. Accounts of television’s invention and experimentation further refute the notion that televisual liveness should be defined by the unmediated presentation of the real in real time, by uncovering a conversation between film and television. This reiterates Uricchio’s call for a more “nuanced” understanding of liveness. In this regard some telling points are made about early experiments with television. Winston observes: Although the fantasy, albeit grounded in the principles of telephony, of seeing distant moving pictures with sound was in the air, nevertheless a confusion seems to have existed in the minds of many of these early television thinkers. They dreamed of the reproduction of movement, dreamed of it in advance of cinema; but they addressed themselves to the transmission of stills, a species of almost redundant effort since… other systems already existed for such purposes. (Winston 1998, p. 93) Winston also describes how a number of early television systems, both mechanical and electrical, worked best when transmitting film (Winston 1998, p. 97). Farnsworth was one inventor who experimented with perfecting his device by working with film (Barnouw 1975, p. 78). Dienst explains this feature of early television in terms of its technical capacities. He writes:

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9988 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM Film was included as an intermediate step within specially built broadcasting machinery: a scene was shot on film, the film was run straight through a developing process in less than a minute, and the resulting footage was shot by either a mechanical or electronic scanner for transmission…Because lighting could be better controlled, these television cameras scanned flat images more easily than three- dimensional scenes. (Dienst 1994, p. 21) Dienst employs the historical information of early experiments in television to further question its technological specificity being defined by access to the real in real time. He points out: Experimenters were content from the start to transmit blurry outlines of faces, silhouettes, cartoon cats, and easily recognizable symbols…. In these early prototypes, a transmission could be considered successful as long as an image took shape against the choppy grey static…But if these images rush to make a claim on reality, it rests on the fact of transmission – reproduction at a distance – not on the veracity of representations. (Dienst 1994, p. 20) Barnouw also describes how the first successes with an electronic system, by Farnsworth, came “when he transmitted various graphic designs including a dollar sign” which … “‘jumped out at us from the screen’” (Barnouw 1975, p. 78). Such an episode signals the potential impact of this new type of image. In “jumping out” at its observers we can recognise the cultural force produced by the immediacy of television’s scanning and transmission. It seems that it did not matter what the source of the television image was, but rather that the technicalities of scanning and transmission produced a specifically televisual image. These descriptions further underline the point that televisual liveness does not rest in the particularity of an episode or incident before it is incorporated and transformed by the technology’s technical processes. Neither should we restrict our understanding of the force of liveness to the presentation of real events in real time. Rather liveness can be understood as a techno- material effect of the technical principles that constitute and broadcast certain episodes and incidents as television images. Although television has entered a transformed era of digital broadcasting, and my discussion so far highlights that there have been a number of different technical processes employed throughout the history of the technology, through the principles (rather than

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 9999 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM strictly technical processes) of image production, liveness remains a quality of all television images. Techno-materiality, televisual liveness and the event of control Considering the principles of scanning and transmission allows some instructive comparisons to be drawn between televisual and cinematic liveness, furthering our engagement with the television image in terms of its potential for producing and accommodating inhabited resistance to the event of control. Composed line by line, the television image is not reducible to frames as the cinema image can be. In cinema each photogram has a frame, capturing and freezing a moment in time as an image. Film appears through a series of individual, complete images, projected one-by-one in succession, producing the moving, animated cinema image. By contrast, the television image has no separate frames as such, because the image is produced through a continuing signal that modulates in intensity. Therefore, the television image is in a continual process of composition. Vital to the production of a television image is the photoconductive, or photoelectric screen, allowing for what we could call an unfixed mode of recording, electrically registering light impressions from a source object or image that are then scanned and transmitted as an electrical or digital signal. In other words, television’s images are always partial and, unlike cinema, there is no point at which a complete, finite image can be conceptualised. Dienst describes the connection between these processes and some of the material characteristics of the television image: At the scale of micro-seconds and electrons, scanning cannot deliver an image all at once – its composition is always in process, and a “stable” frame can be instantaneously switched midway through. Although pixels can retain luminosity long enough to await the next scanning cycle and thereby approximate the succession of discrete filmic images, the fact that no image is ever constituted entirely in a single instant grants television a range of technical options for framing and editing, including incision and torque of the image’s surface. (Dienst 1994, pp. 20-21) While Dienst’s comments on the relation between scanning and the television image are illuminating, as my discussion above indicates it is difficult to even invoke the terminology of the frame for television. However, Dienst’s identification of the television image’s possibilities for “torque” signals a useful connection between the technical production of the television image and its

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110000 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM materiality. Because through its technical principles the television image is always partial, the capacity for interruption and interference between the sites of transmission and the production of the image is greatly intensified. Also, distortion and disappearance of the image are always possible, suggesting that any coherence in the appearance of the image is only ever a result of the continuing production of television’s partial, unstable image. Considering television’s technical principles and processes of image production suggests a connection between these characteristic televisual operations and the operation of control through the image’s intensive articulation of flexible, modulating movements. Given my commentary on control so far, Dienst’s recognition of television’s heightened potential for interference and interruption in the image is also promising in this regard. Recalling my discussion of the potential resistive practices for control, where tactical, complicit disruptions and interference in its operations were described in terms of inhabited resistance, a striking connection seems possible between control and the techno-materiality of the television image. That is, the television image’s quality of liveness seems particularly resonant with control’s modulating operations of force. Furthermore, as a technological site television seems to have an immense capacity for displaying resistance to control’s operation. Through the potential of television’s techno-materiality of liveness to be disrupted and interrupted while it is appearing, television also has a heightened potential for displaying the tactical, inhabited resistance that I am outlining as a possibility for the event of control. We need to consider televisual and cinematic liveness as distinctive qualities, mobilised and produced through both the technical distinctions between television and cinema, and the images each technology produces. The analysis combines knowledge of the technical differences between television and cinema just canvassed with an analysis of the materiality of their respective images. Describing each technology in these terms highlights the substantial differences between television and cinema. Furthermore, the consideration of the technical principles and materiality of each technology enables their distinctive modes of liveness to be conceptualised, in Uricchio’s terms, as more “nuanced” concepts. This occurs through the connection between these modes of liveness, their technological articulation of events and their potential modes of resistance.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110101 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM Workers leaving the factory: Flickers of liveness The actuality style of film-making, of which the Lumiere films are examples, has provoked a variety of theoretical and analytical responses from film scholars.68 In terms of liveness most interesting are those writers who have chosen to engage with the actualities through what can be described as the “spontaneity” and “incoherence” of these films. In doing so, they signal the potential the actuality style holds for considering the question of liveness, through the films’ connection to the vitality that is one connotation of liveness. For example, in two essays on actuality films, Doane (1997; 1999) highlights some of these issues. She notes the spontaneity that characterised the practice of the actuality film, defining their attraction through the construction of what she describes as a particularly modern temporality. In other words, for Doane (1997), the attraction of the actuality films is not in their storytelling or narrative capacity. Rather “their fascination was indissociably linked with their sheer representation of movement through time” (Doane 1999, p. 80). Cubitt (1997), also, argues that actuality films need not be defined through their narrative possibilities. In addressing Workers leaving the factory, he describes the radical potential of the film style, while also noting this was a quality that disappeared in the face of a rapid development of narrative and other filmic codes. Describing the Lumiere film he writes: As the workers take their leave of the brothers’ factory and set off for their own, unregulated pastimes, we are invited to recognise the moment of liberation from work in a medium likewise liberated from formal composition, theatrical staging and the unifying and artificially coherent vision of technocratic and academic visuality… Soon enough cinema would redefine itself, lenses redesigned to guide attention to core actions, property rights invested not in images, but in narratives…in its birth the moving of the image is utopian: in the making of machine perception lay the unmaking of the world. (Cubitt 1997, n.p.) Because at this point in its development cinema was yet to develop a code of compositional rules and regulations, for Cubitt the actuality films are filled with possibilities for seeing the world in new ways. Although arguing that these possibilities were lost in the development of film’s regulatory structures such as narrative, unlike Gaudreault (1990), Cubitt does not attempt to define the actuality films in terms of their connection to narrative. Rather,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110202 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM his description of this early cinematic practice is indicative of an alternative view of the actuality films and, like Doane’s essays, Cubitt’s perspective on the actualities underlines the potential these images hold to provoke a variety of theoretical and analytical responses. An earlier essay by Vaughan (1990) also hints at the potential value the actuality style has for exploring liveness. Similarly to Cubitt and Doane, Vaughan observes the “spontaneity” of the actuality films. In a discussion of another of the Lumiere actualities, Boat leaving the harbour, Vaughan argues that early cinema audiences were impressed by film’s “ability to portray spontaneities of which the theatre was not capable” (1990, p. 65).69 According to Vaughan, in Boat leaving the harbour, such a spontaneous moment occurs when a wave emerges from the background of the scene, threatening the direction of the men in the boat. She sees the recording of such spontaneous events as signalling the “potentiality of the medium” (Vaughan 1990, p. 64). The writings of Doane, Cubitt and Vaughan highlight that, contrary to Gaudreault’s (1990) view, the appeal of the actuality films is not necessarily that, in their employment of unedited shots, the narrative structures that quickly developed to dominate Hollywood style film-making are evident. Rather, the resonance between Doane, Cubitt and Vaughan’s discussions and my own focus on liveness underlines the potential a film like Workers leaving the factory holds for further discussing cinematic liveness, as well as being a point of contrast to its televisual forms. Considering the actuality film images through the concepts of becoming-surface and becoming-scene also executes the style of descriptive, techno-material analysis proposed in the previous chapter. An analysis of Workers leaving the factory that seeks to produce a descriptive engagement with the film’s techno-materiality and consider the image as a disjunctive relation of becoming-surface and becoming-scene need not begin with the film’s representational capacity. Utilising the practice of poststructuralist semiotics, we must recognise that the film image is not simply reducible to the episode that took place over a century ago at the gates of a factory in France. Neither must we attempt to make the film conform to a narrative logic. Although one could note how the collection of incidents portrayed in this image is linear in the sense that the image has duration (i.e. it takes up a length of time), the relations depicted between the various moving figures need not be considered causal. For example, the dog does not appear

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110303 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM because of the disruptive women. We can also consider the irreducibility of the image to that occurrence, in the material qualities and composition of its images. So, to avoid falling back onto traditional modes of cinematic analysis (of theme, content, narrative, representation etc) let us begin not with dogs, women or workers, but with another point in the composition of the film image – a mark on the wall of the factory gate. In the centre of the image is a discoloured mark running down the white wall of the factory gate. Focus on this mark on the wall as the film unfolds and something very interesting is perceptible. The light density of the mark is unstable – it wavers between quite dark to almost disappearing. While this material effect is no doubt partly due to the deterioration of the film stock over time, what the wavering light of the mark also draws attention to is the flickering that characterises the entire film image, which was a feature of early cinema technology and practice. Everything here is set in motion, including the materiality of the image itself. The workers are moving out of the factory gates while dogs and bicycles move quickly out of shot. At the same time the image shudders with the characteristic flicker of early cinema. I am proposing that we can conceive of the flickering mark in two ways. It can be seen both as a straightforward indication of technical processes and as a techno-material synthesis of movements of surface and scene. Technically, the flickering of the mark indicates cinema’s technical processes of production – the recording and projection of the sequence of photograms which, when streamed through the Lumiere cinematographe, produced a moving, animated image. For the mark to appear, it had to be captured numerous times on a succession of photograms and the series then run through a projector. The mark’s particular mode of animation, and its flickering and changing light density, signals the cinematic production of movement through the sequencing of photograms and the brief intervals of darkness that occur between each photogram. As Cubitt describes: “The halt and judder of early ‘flickers’ severed the still from one another and emphasised the distinctive quality of each moment at which the shutter opened to seize its split second of light” (Cubitt 1997, n.p.). However, flickering not only draws our attention to the division between each frame as Cubitt notes. Flickering also highlights the connection of cinematic frames one to the other, and the technology’s particular constitution of movement. The mark on the wall highlights the capacity of cinema to set all things in motion as it produces them as images

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110404 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM – even those that would otherwise remain still, such as buildings, marks and other inanimate objects. The second option points to the image’s actualisation of an operation of power, making perceptible the image’s virtuality — its eventness. By highlighting cinema’s capacity to set objects in motion, what we are also considering is cinema’s particular mode of liveness – how movement and life are produced and inscribed in its images. Cinematic liveness, then, can be understood not only through the technical processes of cinema, but also by describing the material relations and effects such processes produce in the form of a cinema image. In this example, flickering is just such a material effect, signalling the specificity of cinema’s animation and movement. Recognising this dual aspect of cinema’s materiality means we can now explore how to conceive of the cinema image and its particular mode of liveness by engaging with the image as a synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming-scene. In doing so, we can understand cinematic liveness as a quality mobilised in the relations and movements in the configuration and appearance of the image. The flickering mark, as a material indication of the technical processes of recording and projection, is a movement that signals the image as becoming- surface/ becoming-scene. Tending towards pure surface, the flicker can be conceptualised as a deterritorializing force that moves to undo the cinema image’s representational coherence and stability, undoing the mark on the wall as a stable representation of an object.70 Yet, at the same time, the mark on the wall is only moving towards coherence and stability, remaining visible both in spite, and because, of the flickering that undoes its coherence and makes visible cinema’s technical mode of production as part of the image’s materiality. Thus, the mark and the other objects visible in the image also signal the image as becoming-scene. This point describes the tendency of the image to move towards making meanings and producing coherent representations. As a sign, the flickering mark (and by association the cinema image) cannot be separated into mutually exclusive becomings of either scene or surface (except abstractly as I have just described). This highlights the disjunctive synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming-scene that we should recognise as characteristic of technologically produced images.71 Workers leaving the factory is instructive because in this example the image as becoming-surface is particularly evident. Thus, we are more able to recognise the cinematic image as a disjunctive synthesis of surface to scene. The flickering

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110505 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM mark draws our attention to the cinematic technology’s capacity to present movement – cinema’s specific processes of animation and inscribing life. The mark also indicates what we might call cinema’s illusory capacity. For in the case of the mark, movement appears in the image even though there is none at the point of recording. The flickering mark also signals the disjunctive speed of cinematic projection. At this point in its development cinema is unable to produce an imperceptibly animated, static object. Therefore, it exposes the operation of the cinematic technology and the way in which it produces liveness through the quality of illusion, no matter the degree to which the image bears any resemblance to its point of origin. By considering Workers leaving the factory in this way, the difference between the actualisation of the cinema image and the episode it purports to represent becomes more apparent. The appearance and movement of the Lumiere film is produced through recording and projecting an unstaged, live incident. If we engage with, and describe, the techno-materiality and configuration of the image as a relation of becoming-surface and becoming- scene, we can recognise that the concept of cinematic liveness does not only rest on the depiction of a live, unedited event. Liveness is also produced in the disjunctive synthesis of scene to surface of the cinema image. In this example, the disjunction has been described through the characteristic flickering of the cinema of this period. Discipline: Th e cinematic event Through the description of an image’s disjunctive synthesis of becoming- surface and becoming-scene, we can recognise the cinematic technology not just as a technical operation, but also as an articulation of force. We can note the potential connection of the cinema image and technology to an abstract machine and the image’s actualisation of an event. Although at the moment of Workers leaving the factory it is arguably too early in cinema’s history to make a firm connection with a particular virtual operation of power, we can observe cinema’s possible resonance with the operation of discipline, as it is described by Foucault. There is potential to see the processes of recording and projection as disciplinary because in its recording process cinema regulates and fixes episodes and occurrences, holding and transforming them in the form of the photogram. As the consideration of the flickering mark illustrates, cinema’s capacity for liveness occurs through a process characterised by a drive to hold and regulate

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110606 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM the events through which cinema’s technological eye produces a fixed series and sequence of photograms. To produce the series of photograms, the technology disciplines the original event – arranging, ordering and serialising its movements in the recording process. Like the operation of disciplinary power Foucault describes in Discipline and punish (1977), which has at its centre the forces of delinquency (forces exceeding the regulatory techniques of discipline), the actuality film demonstrates how cinematic liveness might be seen as a similar delinquent movement. What I have described as the becoming-surface of this image in the materiality of its flickering is indeed a delinquent movement that exceeds and resists the image’s scenic potential. In fact we can see how this cinema image is permeated by delinquent movements that undo the image’s potential for forming meaning, but which are nevertheless recaptured by the image’s formation of movements of becoming-scene. However, although we can observe a connection between cinema’s technical principles and disciplinary operations, as well as the delinquency of certain aspects of the cinema image, for Workers leaving the factory to clearly actualise a disciplinary event, such delinquent movements would have to be both produced, and acted on, by forces moving to minimise the delinquent relation of becoming-surface and becoming-scene that produces cinematic liveness in this image. I do not think there is any such procedure or movement appearing in this image. Indeed, this image tends to prioritise becoming-surface as the flickering is a continuing feature throughout the image. It seems that to some degree cinematic liveness as a techno-materiality remains unregulated in this example. There is one further possibility that we can consider to explain a potential connection between cinema and discipline. As my opening commentary on Workers leaving the factory acknowledges, the actuality film soon fell out of fashion and narrative-focussed cinema gained in popularity. The refinement of the cinematic technology, together with its production of narratives that provide coherent, structured scenes, can be seen as a technique that minimises the delinquency and liveness of the cinema image. Also, the improvements in cinema’s screening and technical practices have minimised the possibility of the technical processes I have focused on here for deterritorializing the cinema image. Liveness, then, has not remained an important concept for analyses of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110707 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM cinema, perhaps underlining Cubitt’s point – that certain aspects of cinema’s potential subsided once other filmic codes and practices developed. Engaging in a discussion of the techno-materiality of cinematic liveness establishes points of comparison for discussing televisual liveness. The value of discussing cinematic liveness lies not only in highlighting certain qualities of cinema previously overlooked or under theorised. It also recognises that the concept of liveness, so prominent in television scholarship, can be more completely understood by considering other sites in which a form of liveness emerges. Televisual liveness: Between the lines As the analysis of the actuality film demonstrates, the image can be discussed in terms of its disjunctive synthesis of technical processes and representations, and as articulations of force and power. The following analyses of television explore how televisual liveness can be understood by considering the relation between television’s processes of scanning and transmission and the effect these processes have on the techno-materiality of the television image. The techno-materiality of the 1920s images highlights television’s difference from cinematic liveness, while also introducing the idea of television as a control technology, in contrast to film as a disciplinary technology. We are then able to observe how the television image’s specific mode of actualisation articulates the event of control. These images present moments of the actualisation of the televisual event of control, where control emerges in varying formations and intensities. Felix the cat As I described in the opening of this chapter Felix the cat appears facing straight ahead. The image is black and white, of low resolution, with a noticeable feature being the horizontal lines that shoot through the image.72 Felix the cat highlights one way in which televisual liveness is articulated through the synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming-scene. Through this relation of surface to scene we can also note the actualisation of the event of control in the television image. Through an awareness of television’s technical processes we can presume that as it was scanned and transmitted, the image of Felix would have been in a continual, active mode of composition. Therefore, although nothing much happens in the image in terms of the cat’s action and movement, through

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110808 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM the technical processes that characterise the production of the television image, materially the cat appears in a condition of process and modulation. Reminiscent of an improperly tuned television set, the horizontal lines visible in this image are indicative of the scanning and transmission process, whereby the material effects of these processes are perceptible in the image. We can understand the appearance of such lines in terms of the image as becoming- surface. The horizontal lines signal the constant technical process of the image’s formation, where there is never stillness, only mobility. While cinema’s flicker signalled the image’s construction through the connected sequence of distinct, coherent images (photograms), televisual lines indicate that at no point can the television image be reduced to a single, coherent frame. This means that the television image’s composition is forever incomplete and partial as the image continually modulates in its mode of production and appearance. As with the cinema image, the television image does not only become- surface. Just as we saw the flicker and the mark in Workers leaving the factory appear in a condition of disjunctive synthesis, with Felix the cat the lines are produced in a disjunctive relation with the image’s formation of the cat. Indeed, in this image there is no point of separation between cat and lines. As the image tends toward a form recognisable as the object “Felix the cat”, we can observe the image’s configuration of becoming-scene. However, we can also see it as an image, or sign, of cat-lines because of the way the catness (becoming-scene) and lines (becoming-surface) appear together, each irreducible to the other and maintained in a relation of disjunctive synthesis. The lines allow the scene of the cat to appear yet, at the same time, they prevent the image from resolving into a coherent representation of a cat. Similarly, as a scene, the image tends towards catness but never attains a condition where a stable image can be perceived without the deterritorializing movement of even more lines that tend the image towards a surface. In other words, the image is produced through a perpetually irreducible relation of becoming-surface/becoming-scene. Because of the disjunctive synthesis of surface and scene needed for the image to appear and be maintained, the tendency towards resolving cat and lines is continually delayed. Th e emergence of control The mobility and modulation signalled by the lines invite a further comment on the image as an actualisation of an event. That is, how might this image’s actual mode of appearance also articulate a virtual operation? How does the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 110909 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM techno-material relation of cat-lines connect the television image to a particular configuration of the social field? As the rolling, horizontal lines visible in Felix the cat produce a mobile, modulating image, the techno-materiality of the image actualises control’s undulating operation of force. When compared to disciplinary operations, control is defined by more intensive and dispersive operations of force. Characterised by modulation and mobility, control effects transformations in social operations of power through the continuous processes that permeate the social field. This means that no formations can ever be conceived as complete or stable. In Felix the cat, then, it is not simply that television’s technical principles of scanning and transmission connect with the continual modulation of force associated with the society of control. It is also that the partial techno-materiality of the television image produces the quality of liveness. Materially, the image is in a continual mode of flux, with mobility visible in the rolling, horizontal lines and the disjunctive configuration of cat-lines (the image’s disjunctive synthesis of surface to scene). This highlights the way in which the television image is produced through continuing movement and ongoing modulation, resonating with the event of control. In contrast to the disciplinary drive to confine and fix bodies, Deleuze’s account of control indicates that control functions through a more intensive logic of force and power. In a control society bodies are articulated and produced through forces that seem to be managing and manipulating them in a continual, ongoing process – through a paradoxical freedom from which there is no escape. That is, the operation of control, in the manner of Deleuze’s surfing metaphor, would seem to provoke a fairly passive relation to force, where formations can be swept along by operations of force. Elsewhere, Deleuze also invokes the image of a highway to explain the operation of control: A control is not a discipline. In making highways for example, you don’t enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am not saying that this is the highway’s exclusive purpose, but that people can drive infinitely and “freely” without being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future. (Deleuze 1998, p. 18) In other words, bodies must ride the waves, or travel the highways of power without the option to escape or oppose control’s various permutations

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111010 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM and transformations. As Wise comments: “Deleuze’s image is that of a highway; a highway that does not confine one, but it does control one’s movements, the options available to one” (Wise 2002, p. 30). Admittedly, such a concept of power does have the potential to produce a fairly bleak vision of the individual’s place in control’s transformed social field. However, by considering various commentaries on control it is also possible to construct a more optimistic understanding of its operations. This would occur by exploring potential mobilisations of resistance to the intensive processes of control. Control produces a specific mode of resistance – a tactical, inhabited resistance of its own procedures. While not escaping its operation of power, through a productive complicity, such resistance takes control in new directions, inhabiting existing formations of power in pragmatic and creative ways. Such resistance is also necessarily complicit and spontaneous, grasping windows of opportunity for tactical manoeuvres as, and when, they emerge. Most interesting in terms of the Felix the cat image would be if a movement of tactical, inhabited resistance could be observed as part of the image. In what I have described as the disjunctive synthesis of surface to scene, of lines and cat, there is some potential to see such an irreducible relation as an ongoing configuration of resistance. While connected, and necessarily so, the cat and the lines as a television image are engaged in an elusive process, always pulling away from, yet remaining in contact with, each other for as long as the image remains visible. Lines and cat do distort and interrupt each other but not to the degree of intensity required for the successful configuration of inhabited resistance as I have described previously in theory. Ultimately, then, this image is shifting, modulating and mobile, resonating with the operations of force in the control society, but its deterritorializing movements of resistance remain somewhat ineffective, as there is no indication or mobilisation of resistance at more than the techno-material level. Just as the liveness of the actuality film signalled that cinema is yet to completely articulate the event of discipline, in this site, the event of control is articulated in Felix the cat without any scenic sign of the inhabited resistance that is a potential of this operation of force. However, Felix the cat remains a useful initial image for considering the television image’s actualisation of the event of control. We are still able to note how televisual liveness is a quality mobilised in the disjunction of surface to scene. That is, the inability of the television image to resolve the tension between surface and scene produces an image in a condition of vital partiality

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111111 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM – a partiality that is productive and ongoing. The material qualities of the cat – its shape, outline, tonality and colour – prevent the image dissolving into the pure incoherence of rolling lines, which would be the case if an object was not being scanned and transmitted. On the other hand, the lines, as a visible signal of the technical processes by which the image appears, allow the image to move towards becoming a scene. Without the rolling lines there can be no cat-lines, highlighting that the lines both produce and maintain partiality and modulation. In this way, we can understand the techno-materiality of liveness in Felix the cat in terms of television’s actualisation of the event of control. Stookie Bill As the opening description of Stookie Bill notes there are a number of points about the Baird image that are similar to Felix the cat. Stookie Bill is also black and white, of low resolution and quite distorted, although not by horizontal rolling lines, but by vertical waves. Again, these features of the image could easily be dismissed as a consequence of the inadequacies of television’s technical development at this time. However, consistent with the perspective on television’s meagre textual archive we can see how this image highlights other points about television as well. In addition to underlining the difference between television and cinematic liveness, Stookie Bill demonstrates the need to consider the image’s techno-materiality, particularly in terms of its scenic configurations. By carefully engaging with the image’s configuration of becoming-scene we can more clearly perceive television’s articulation and connection to control. My discussion of Stookie Bill recalls Polan’s (1988) description of the Foucauldian analysis of striking scenes already noted here. The Stookie Bill images were produced in 1927, when John Logie Baird recorded one of the many dummies he used in his experiments.73 Throughout his early career, Baird’s focus was on mechanical rather than electrical scanning; however, as his son Malcolm Baird writes, later he did move to exploring the technology of electrical scanning (Baird 1996). Although, electrical scanning ultimately prevailed in the story of television’s technical development, it is also appropriate to discuss the mechanical Baird images here, given that, in using examples from the 1920s, I am focusing on a period of contestation between mechanical and electrical scanning. Also, my earlier comments signalling the importance of concentrating on the principles of scanning and transmission, and the production of the television image as a material articulation of force, make engaging with the Baird images a valuable exercise in this context.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111212 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM Baird used dummies rather than people in his experiments because they could withstand the intense light needed at that time for mechanical scanning processes better than his human assistants (McLean 2005).74 A consequence of the use of the dummy is that, like Felix the cat, the Stookie Bill image highlights the tenuous relation of the television image to any commonplace understanding of reality. That is, the image’s quality of liveness cannot be presumed to rest on the image’s portrayal of a real, live occurrence, given that the source of the image is an inanimate object. This point enhances the value of these sites for exploring the relation between televisual liveness and control. Therefore, the use of dummies and models in early television experiments further highlights the folly of equating liveness with a real, live event. Clearly dummies and papier-mache models are not alive, but they can be transformed into an image by the technology, appearing with the televisual condition of liveness. Through McLean’s restoration of Baird’s image we can observe how this would have been a mobile image that stretches and distorts with a wavy fluidity. As with the lines of Felix the cat, the waves emphasise the partial condition of the image. Their movements produce an image that is unstable, and like Felix the cat, an image that is in a continually active mode of composition. Once again, the wavy lines highlight that the television image is not fixed, that it cannot be reduced to static, stable frames such as the cinematic photograms. Just as the techno-materiality of Felix the cat has been described as a configuration of cat-lines, Stookie Bill is also characterised through a condition of disjunctive synthesis – this time through a connection of the wavy lines, the dummy’s head and the human hand that manipulates the dummy’s head from side to side. Signalling the image’s tendency towards becoming-scene (i.e. its movement towards representation) the dummy’s head and the human hand are deterritorialized by the becoming-surface of the waves. As with Felix the cat, becoming-surface and becoming-scene cannot be separated because they are intermingling forces that produce the particular techno-materiality of television images. This television image is composed through a disjunctive synthesis of head-hand-waves where becoming-surface and becoming-scene intermingle, yet never resolve one into the other. The condition of ongoing partiality, so visible in this example, emphasises the vitality and process of the television image. This characteristic is connected to television’s quality of liveness as well as its articulation of an event of control.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111313 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM The Felix the cat image introduced the possibility of the television image’s actualisation of the event of control. In that example the partiality and modulation of image observed through its disjunctive synthesis of becoming- surface and becoming-scene connected to the operations of force through the movements of waves and currents characteristic of the control society. As I have described it above, the Stookie Bill image is similar to Felix the cat in this regard. However, there is also a key point of distinction between these two images. In my discussion of Felix the cat, I noted that it was lacking a clear indication of a potential feature of the operation of control – movements of tactical, inhabited resistance. With Felix the cat, the televisual quality of liveness was to a degree unresisted within a rather passive, articulation of control. What I am proposing for Stookie Bill, however, is that through the particular scenic relation of hand to head and waves, we can observe a clearer articulation of control’s potential for accommodating inhabited resistance. In this regard, the human hand that moves to manipulate the dummy’s head in the Baird image is particularly significant. Practically, of course, the hand appears in order to create an image with some interest and movement in the testing of the early television technology. However, the hand also signals television’s tendency to incorporate complicitly productive processes of tactical, inhabited resistance into the scenes of its images. The image can still be understood as a disjunctive synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming- scene articulating control. Yet, scenically the image reiterates the processes of control by configuring relations, actions and figures that also actualise control and inhabited resistance as a televisual formation. This is a key point. In the images and scenes addressed in the following chapters the refinements in television’s technical processes mean that signs of technical operations (lines and waves as becoming-surface) are not as easily perceptible in the appearance of the image. However, far from arguing that this fact diminishes television’s connection to control, Stookie Bill signals how we can continue to engage with the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. In terms of actualising the event of control, the hand, as a form from outside the technology, enters the scene of the image, effectively breaking down any barrier between inside the image and outside the technological apparatus. As an action of becoming-scene the hand exerts a degree of control over the dummy’s head. This produces a new type of television image configuration, still permeated by liveness. Akin to a metonymic sign of television’s outside

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111414 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM (i.e. the human operator of the technology) the hand displays the levelling capacity of the televisual technology. This, then, is an image of disjunctive smoothness, where disparate scenic objects — the hand, dummy and waves — are connected by the same televisual techno-materiality, producing a contingent formation. The movement of the hand into the image shows the televisual technology’s capacity to effect and transform the social field through its capacity to technologically reconfigure various types of bodies (dummies and humans) into a televisual image form, articulating specifically televisual processes of control. Indeed, in this hand it is possible to draw a connection to the articulation of contemporary television’s global saturation, where there is almost no point of exteriority to the technology.75 There is very little in contemporary culture that is not, or cannot become, televisual. There is also very little refuge from the reach of television and its operation of control. To recall the discussion of Deleuzian control, forces of control may be eluded but not escaped. This also means that to avoid the gloomy view that television exerts an unchecked, manipulative power throughout everyday life, it is particularly vital to consider those televisual sites that display tactics of inhabited resistance to control. The hand can be seen as a scenic configuration of tactical, inhabited resistance. Seizing the opportunity to interrupt the image’s ongoing process of modulation and take it in a new direction, the hand must necessarily grasp the moment available for its manipulation of the dummy. As part of the image’s becoming-scene, the hand interrupts the image while it is still in its process of formation. In transforming the scene of the image, the hand becomes part of its scenic configuration. For at this point in television’s development there is no opportunity to stop, reshoot or reedit to change the image’s mode of appearance.76 Even though Baird had found a way to record the television signal in his experiments, for television at this point there is no way in which the image can be interrupted or transformed except on the run, while it is being composed and appearing. Thus, the hand must become part of the image that it is also trying to move in a different direction. In its disjunctive synthesis with the dummy this produces an image of scenic interruption and control. In this way, the hand actualises a complicit, yet creative, practice of inhabited resistance. In this image, control’s processes and relations of modulation, the smoothing of boundaries between inside and outside, and the movements

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111515 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:49:21:49 PPMM of tactical inhabitation signalled by the hand’s manipulation of the dummy are actualised in the image’s becoming-scene, affirming this television image as an articulation of control. What this means is that our understanding of televisual liveness is also extended and enhanced. Liveness, then, is connected to the televisual capacity to accommodate complicit, tactical movements of resistance, creating new forms and configurations that are televisually specific. Thus, in renewing our engagement with the techno-materiality of the television image, we can not only locate the visible processes and configuration of the emergence of the televisual event of control. We can also begin to recognise the complexity required to understand television’s quality of liveness. In particular, we can begin to see the heightened potential liveness provides the television image both to construct, and tactically resist, the event of control through particular technological configurations of becoming-scene. Conclusion Returning to the embryonic periods of television and cinema shows that technologies are not simply sets of technical processes but they also have specific techno-materialities. The analysis and discussion has presented an initial point in the map of televisual control and inhabited resistance. Locating my analysis in the early periods of television and cinema provokes new considerations of each technology’s relation to liveness and develops an engagement with these technologies as assemblages of technical processes and images. The reason for doing this was to explore the possibilities for understanding these technologies, not only in terms of representational capacities, but also in terms of the connection between these images and contemporary operations of power. The various images have been considered in terms of emerging cinematic and televisual events. Highlighting the distinctions between television and cinema has employed each technology as an explanatory point of contrast for the other. More significantly, this has provided some historical context engaging with television in terms of control and inhabited resistance. It is not sufficient to merely point out the differences between the technical processes of recording and projection and scanning and transmission in distinguishing between film and television. Here, I have demonstrated that a vital second step in the analysis can be taken. The discussion of technology that results combines an awareness of a technology’s technical principles with a descriptive analysis of the techno-materiality, and in particular the scenic configurations, of its images. Specifically, I have employed the concepts of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111616 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM becoming-surface and becoming-scene to explore the eventness of these images – their connection to, and actualisation of, virtual operations of power. With Workers leaving the factory, I highlighted the tension in the image between becoming-surface and becoming-scene through the flickering mark on the wall. Through its movement, the flickering mark drew attention to cinema’s particular mode of liveness. I also noted the resonance between cinema’s capacity for liveness and its illusory capacity – its ability to ascribe life and animation in an image through technical processes that serialise events into fixed frames. While suggesting that it is not fully articulated, I also noted the potential cinematic connection to a disciplinary event. Turning to television, in Felix the cat we saw the emergence of a different connection between the television image and its event. Here, the modulating, partial image, with its disjunctive synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming- scene, resonated with the event of control, although at this point, as with the actuality film, control is not completely articulated. It is in the Stookie Bill image that the potential connection between the operation of control and the television image emerges with increased clarity. As well as noting a disjunctive synthesis between becoming-surface and becoming-scene, I observed how in its configuration of becoming-scene the image actualised the Deleuzian control society. That is, the movement of the human hand in this image signalled control’s construction of a smooth space without a fixed boundary between inside and outside, as well as the mode of tactical complicity that defines control’s potential mode of resistance. Theoretically, one potential of the television image, because of its production through the continual, modulating processes of scanning and transmission, is that it could unravel, flying off in all directions. Thus, the image could lose the capacity to present visible, perceptible scenes. Arguably, this would be the fulfilment of its liveness, where the image was so interrupted by movements of becoming-surface that its scenic possibilities were no longer visible. It would no longer appear to be a television image as we know it. However, for the technology to be actualised in image form, I have suggested that the synthesis of scene and surface needs to be maintained without resolving one into the other. A consequence of this is that the deterritorializing, resistive potential produced through the liveness of the scene-surface relation means that such instances of tactical, inhabited resistance might most successfully occur on the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111717 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM run. That is, the techno-materiality of liveness produces a heightened potential for disruption and interference occurring during the unfolding of the image. There are two possible consequences of my discussion to this point that will be considered further as the focus of the discussion of televisual control and inhabited resistance shifts to television’s era of mass, public broadcasting. One is that certain television images will incorporate intensely controlling configurations of becoming-scene, to the point that there exists little opportunity for the complicit, tactical resistance of control to be articulated. That is, the resistive potential of televisual liveness is minimised through stabilising configurations of becoming-scene. Thus, few opportunities are offered where potentially resistive expositions of televisual control can emerge. Nevertheless, television also has the potential to accommodate and produce sites and images where a scenic configuration of inhabited resistance can be heightened. This occurs through a more intense scenic articulation of liveness, which at the same time is complicitly resisted, thus questioning and contesting the processes by which the image is appearing. In now turning to the self-reflexive comic practice of Graham Kennedy we locate a site rich in the scenic production of the inhabited resistance that is one mode of actualising the televisual operation of control.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111818 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM Chapter Four: Televisual faces: direct address and the production and inhabited resistance of control

While the images from television’s experimental phase emphasise the value of considering the techno-materiality of television’s liveness for the question of control, it is John Logie Baird’s Stookie Bill which more clearly highlights the television image’s actualisation of the event of control. I proposed that the human hand visible in the image signals television’s capacity to accommodate movements of inhabited resistance into the scenes of its images. In a complicitly, tactical movement, the human hand’s manipulation of the dummy’s head intensifies the partiality of the image, thus further heightening the liveness of the image. In this way, the image displays a relation with its outside, making visible the image’s actualisation of a virtual event. And, through this we saw how the force of the television image could be described through its configuration and production of a social field according to the operations of control. This discussion of the television image can be extended by focussing particularly on television’s potential for displaying the inhabited resistance that can be produced as part of the event of control. The television images I have chosen to discuss now are from the 1950s and 60s Australian television archive. The relative dearth of work engaging with images from this era forms part of their attraction for my inquiry. Firstly, I look at footage of television executive Bruce Gyngell introducing regular television broadcasting to Australian viewers in 1956. I then consider another well-known collection of images from Australian television broadcasting – Graham Kennedy. Gyngell appears in the guise of the serious presenter or newsreader, while Kennedy belongs to the genre of television variety and tonight programmes. Despite these generic contrasts, as well as some differences in technical sophistication, these sites highlight and develop further my point regarding the relationship between televisual liveness and the articulation of control. That is, one effect of the liveness-control relation is that inhabited resistance might best be produced on the run — through complicit and opportunistic practices. There are two consequences of this. The first is that certain televisual scenes are intensely controlled to the point that the resistive potential of television’s surface liveness is greatly diminished. While this form of television

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 111919 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM could be understood as specific to those modes of image production that rely on the broadcast of edited and recorded footage, in the Gyngell image we find a televisual articulation of control that in its mode of liveness and direct address, (similar to Felix the cat), is modulatory and contingent, yet displays no clear indication of inhabited resistance. In contrast, the Kennedy images’ scenic configurations exhibit television’s potential as a site that can produce and display the resistive processes required by the event of control. These images can be explored in terms of the presentation of operations similar to the hand of the Stookie Bill image. In particular, through the characteristic self-reflexivity of Kennedy’s comedy, there are hands everywhere – disrupting and interfering in the unfolding of the scene, while producing a smooth, yet intensely disjunctive, mode of television image. The mobilisation of inhabited resistance through the complicit processes of self-reflexivity actualises the event of control and the Kennedy images are a rich site for exploring these issues. By continuing the mode of analysis established in the previous chapters, we can see how the characteristic televisual quality of liveness is exploited in the mobilisation of inhabited resistance and control. This illuminates a further point in the map of televisual control and inhabited resistance. Here also I specifically focus on a typical televisual configuration – television’s broadcast of faces produced in the mode of direct address. Television images are heavily populated by faces — speaking, human heads that engage with the television audience in the mode of direct address. As Uricchio (1998a) observes of the technology more generally, faces and direct address are also ubiquitous across the broad spectrum of television genres and programming. From news, current affairs, journalism, lifestyle, chat, talk and entertainment shows, as well as in television advertising, the direct address of a face is a quintessential televisual image. By recognising the connection of the direct address of a face to television’s techno-materiality of liveness, we can see how such television images also produce a connection to the event of control. Thus, we will see how direct address, which is connected to the televisual capacity for liveness, also has an increased potential to clearly produce and actualise configurations of, and resistances to, control. Recognising that television is populated by heads and faces signals a further theoretical concept that can be productively employed in the analysis of the television images chosen for discussion. Through Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the concepts of the face and facialization77 we can understand

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112020 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM how the television image not only represents speaking human faces to its viewer. We can also recognise that the televisual technology functions to communicate with its viewers through what we can understand as the facialization of the image. In short, the concept of the face connects to the theoretical framework of the image as event. That is, as a face, the image is constructed as a productive, connective surface that articulates an abstract machine of force and power. By exploring actual television faces as scenic configurations that facialize the television image (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term) we are able to map the image’s movements of modulation and inhabited resistance that make visible television’s connection to the event of control. By further developing these concepts we can see the connection between the selected examples and my conceptual perspective on the televisual event. We can also extend the engagement with television in terms of its construction of a potential politics of resistance. I have introduced the concepts of surface and scene to illuminate the connection between televisual liveness and operations of control through the techno-materiality of early television images. The surface-scene relation assists in recognising the potential of the television image to display the inhabited resistance of control, particularly in forms such as direct address that have a heightened modality of liveness. However, in the analysis of Stookie Bill and here in the Gyngell image we can see not only the critical and explanatory potential of surface and scene, but, more importantly, the possibility of engaging with television images in the manner of a “striking scene” as exemplified in Foucault’s discussion of Las Meninas.78 Therefore, the analysis of the television images in this chapter suggests a productive way forward in my engagement with the technology. As the technology’s technical processes become more refined, we can no longer rely on the visibility of lines and other signals of technical production to elaborate the surface-scene relation of liveness and explain the image’s actualisation of control.79 As it developed into a technology of mass broadcast, television programming quickly became scenically more sophisticated in comparison to the fairly simple examples considered in the previous chapter. We can employ the understanding of the relation between television’s techno-materiality of liveness and control to consider these issues further through engaging with the televisual scene. If television is a technology of control, then, according to the argument and mode of analysis I have developed so far, it should be

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112121 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM possible to engage with the images the technology produces as events of control through their specific scenic modes of actualisation. My discussion of Bruce Gyngell and Graham Kennedy demonstrates how this mode of analysis can account for the technical refinements of the technology. The analyses also highlight television’s potential, recognised initially through the engagement with the scenic configuration of Stookie Bill, to produce televisual images of inhabited resistance articulating the event of control. Bruce Gyngell Television did not begin on the 16th of September 1956, much as though I’d professed and claimed it. The first broadcast of a 30-line Baird system was conducted between engineers on Radio 3DB and Radio 3UZ in 1928. The first face on television was the studio cat. (Gyngell cited in O’Regan 2000) On the 16th of September 1956, the first person to appear on Australian broadcast television, Bruce Gyngell, spoke words that are now well known in the history of broadcasting in Australia: “Good evening and welcome to television”.80 Gyngell sits in front of a map of the world with his upper body and face in the centre of the image. Wearing a dinner suit, his body slants to the right of the image and as he speaks his head bobs up and down slightly. In a 1993 lecture that was replayed on ABC Radio National’s Media Report in 2000, Bruce Gyngell attempted to downgrade the significance of this moment in Australia’s television history. In doing so, he highlighted broadcast television’s debt to the experiments and inventions of the 20s and 30s, such as I have discussed in the previous chapter.81 The pre-broadcasting era images are valuable because they draw attention to the emergence of the particular techno- materiality of the television image, although at the point of their invention television had not yet developed into the technology that had the capacity to reach potentially massive audiences. However, by the 1950s television was establishing itself as a technology of mass communication, developing its capacity to draw audiences of global proportions that characterises the technology today. The Gyngell image signals the beginning of this new era in television broadcasting, particularly in an Australian context. The 1950s were a fruitful period not only for Australian television but also its broadcasting counterparts in the USA and Britain. As Spigel (1992) points out, despite the technology being ready and available in the USA prior to

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112222 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM World War Two, television broadcasting and home television ownership did not really take off in that country until the 1950s. As she writes, “by 1955 about 65 percent of the nation’s homes had television”, and that “television was not actually a viable reality for most Americans until 1955, by which time it was installed in a majority of households in all areas of the country” (1992a, p. 32). Similarly, Hartley (1999) discusses the inconsistent efforts by the BBC in Britain, particularly in terms of the lack of attention it gave to broadcasting with the new technology prior to the 1950s. As he describes (1999, pp. 78-91), the BBC began regular television broadcasting in 1936, however, it apparently failed to grasp the potential of television at that time, seeing radio as its main priority. Hartley writes: As is well known, the two events which finally provided the incentive to make television in Britain into a popular cultural form came from the audience and government respectively, not from the BBC at all; they were the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953 and the launch of ITV (commercial television) two years later in October 1955. Only then did the BBC look to its laurels, responding to popular and legislative demand, and begin competing for a popular audience in earnest. (Hartley 1999, p. 90) Even so, Hartley points out that the take-up of television in Britain lagged behind that of the USA, suggesting the problem was a lack of suitable housing to accommodate this new domestic technology (1999, p. 91). In Australia, Blundell notes that, “on 16 September 1956, Channel TCN9 in Sydney finally launched Australia’s first regular television service” (2003, p. 60), in the same year Melbourne held the Olympic Games. He describes how, “the first night consisted of a mix of live material and imported comedy and drama across four hours. Gyngell hosted the explanatory first half hour called This is Television” (Blundell 2003, p. 60). Regular television broadcasting made its way to Melbourne a few months later on November 4th, 1956 (Blundell 2003, p. 61). From these accounts it seems that commercial television broadcasting rolled out gradually across Australia. As Hall comments, at the moment of its inception the spread of television was extremely minimal: “About three thousand sets had been sold in NSW…and another ninety-seven thousand people watched in their neighbours’ living rooms, in clubs, town halls and through shop windows” (Hall 1976, p. 28). With the differences in timing and programming between

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112323 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM Australian states, and even regions, it is a little mystifying that the Gyngell moment has been elevated to the iconic position it occupies in Australian television history, given that it was witnessed by a significant minority of the population.82 While the Gyngell image could still be discussed in terms of the birth of television broadcasting in Australia, the historical origins of Australian television are not my central concern. Origin stories, as the theory of history and the event reminds us, can be misleading and messy. However, this image is immensely instructive with regard to my overall discussion.83 Sitting as it does almost halfway between the 1920s examples and television’s contemporary field of operation, the Gyngell image highlights the transition that took place from television’s period of technological experimentation and invention to the development of mass broadcasting that characterises the later use of the technology. Also, the Gyngell image is a good example of television’s propensity to produce its images through the construction of faces of various types. As I have noted already, we can also see how the processes of facialization produce a style of television image still very much in evidence in the field of contemporary television. With the Gyngell image, this is a reassuring, informative face of authority. Scenically, the image actualises the event of control without exploiting the potential for inhabited resistance connected to television’s techno-materiality of liveness. Facialization and direct address In proposing that we see the Gyngell image in terms of the production of a televisual face I am employing a theoretical concept that resonates with the analytical perspective on the image as event. In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1987), Deleuze and Guattari discuss and explore the notion of the face and the process of facialization as concepts to describe how bodies become exterior surfaces (or faces) with the potential to connect to other such faces/surfaces. In the chapter, Year zero: Faciality (1987, pp. 167-191), Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the productivity of surfaces by rethinking the relationship between (sur)faces and abstract machines. Importantly, the face is conceptualised as a map that articulates an abstract machine (the operation of force and articulation of power) that it is both produced by, and produces. Through their development of these concepts, Deleuze and Guattari work to overturn the traditional relationship between faces and bodies. They argue that the “face overcodes the body”, prioritising exterior surface over any notion of interior being (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 170).84 Throughout

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112424 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM their discussion Deleuze and Guattari highlight the irreducibility of a face to a body, as well as the potential for a body to be “facialized” – that is, articulated in the network of power constitutive of the face’s production of its particular abstract machine. In other words, arguing that the face overcodes the body introduces a different way of conceiving of bodies, signalling their potential to become connective, productive exterior surfaces, rather than being defined according to any notion of interiority. Indeed, there is a connection that can be made here with the operation of control and its collapse of previously inflexible distinctions between such traditionally oppositional concepts as inside and outside. In their writing Deleuze and Guattari also draw a connection between the face’s articulation of an abstract machine to what they call the “semiotic of capitalism” (1987, p. 182). In other words, formations of capitalism, such as discipline or control, are particular operations of force that are perceptible through the formation of particular faces. By employing faciality as part of my reengagement with the qualities and force of the television image, the concepts Deleuze and Guattari explore reinforce the argument for the image’s capacity to do more than be reduced to a representation (i.e. that this image is simply a representation of the real Bruce Gyngell). Rather, the concept helps to recognise the capacity of the television image to mobilise certain qualities and affects (such as liveness) as well as the potential connectivity of the television image to other such faces – such as, for example, the human face of a possible viewer.85 Given facialization’s resonance with my overall conceptual and analytical framework, faciality can be appropriately incorporated into my discussion, particularly since it connects with a dominant mode of appearance of the television image in terms of the direct address of a face. It follows, then, that just as capitalism takes various forms so too will there be varying modes of faciality. If control is an abstract machine that is a mutation of another form of capitalism, discipline, then its articulation in a face should have a different mode of appearance to disciplinary sites. That is to say, the televisual configuration of movements of becoming-scene and becoming-surface that actualise the event of control should differ from a surface-scene configuration that articulates a disciplinary event.86 Moreover, while it may be that certain televisual faces articulate a connection to the operation of control through the disjunctive synthesis of movements of becoming-surface and becoming-scene, the scenic relations that articulate the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112525 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM televisual face of control need not necessarily appear in the same way (thus explaining generic and other differences in the plethora of televisual images and styles that still may actualise the event of control). Indeed, my discussion of the characteristics of events in terms of repetition and difference, mean that we cannot expect images of control will always appear in exactly the same way, even though the virtuality of control’s operations will be actualised in the configuration and appearance of the image. We can return momentarily to the hand of the Stookie Bill image to explain this further. The scenic-surface relations characteristic of the techno- materiality of liveness, as well as the action of the hand within the image’s becoming-scene, signal the image’s actualisation of the event of control – i.e. modulatory, continuing forces of control and inhabited resistance. While the Stookie Bill image is instructive for explaining these processes, what we must also realise is that the television image will not always literally include a hand in the scenes of its images. However, if the image’s connection to control is to clearly articulate a politics of resistance through the scenic configuration of various movements and forces, hand-like movements of complicit, inhabited resistance might also be visible in the configuration of the image. So to understand the process of facialization in the Gyngell example we first need to realise that the body of Gyngell is transformed by the televisual technology and becomes part of an image — a televisual face. This occurs in a similar manner to what we can see as the facialization of the hand in the Stookie Bill image, where the hand, through its entry into the image, is technologically reconfigured as a specifically televisual image. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, the head-body formation is a different process to the formation of a face. That is to say, they point out how the process of facialization involves crossing a threshold — from head to face, from interiority to exteriority, from depth to surface. They write: “The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body…when the body, head included, has been…overcoded by something we shall call the Face” (1987, p. 170). From this we can say that the corporeal head-body of Bruce Gyngell becomes a televisual face as the process of facialization takes place through television’s virtual operations of power. This is actualised through the processes of the televisual technology that forms a televisual face of control.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112626 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM A speaking face: Th e construction of direct address Through the production of a televisual face in the Gyngell image the event of control can be observed in a number of ways. The first point of interest here lies in the way the image’s configuration of becoming-scene unfolds with a face speaking in the mode of direct address. Arguably, this is one of television’s most typical modes of appearance. As McQuire notes: “Television promotes a mode of direct address adapted from radio in which presenters look viewers straight in the eye, even speaking to us as if they could see into our living rooms” (1998, p. 96). Fiske also points out that direct address is one of the primary modes through which television speaks to its audiences (Fiske 1987, p. 53). As well as defining direct address verbally, Fiske notes that it has a visual dimension in the way that television personalities…look at the camera and address it directly. This nonverbal direct address works through the eyes, tone of voice, facial expression, and gesture in the same way as direct verbal address to construct an intimate, explicit viewing relationship. (Fiske 1987, p. 53) 87 While usefully acknowledging the visual dimension of direct address, it seems to be questionable as to whether verbal and non-verbal elements would function in exactly the same way to construct the televisual mode of direct address. That is, visuality and aurality are distinctive components of the television image. In the terms of my focus here, aurality and visuality are each particular aspects of becoming-scene, appearing together to produce an irreducible, disjunctive formation as the television image. What is instructive about the Gyngell mode of direct address is the potential engaging with this television image holds for enhancing our understanding of the relation between televisual liveness and the event of control. The implication that television can directly address its audience is connected to the frequency of television’s presentation of talking heads – the capacity for the television image to present human faces speaking, looking straight ahead and out of the image. This tendency is evident if one dwells even momentarily on the preferences of television broadcasting and programming. The televisual preference for direct address is also underlined by the presence of television hosts in their numerous guises. A further implication of the televisual concept of direct address is that the technology constructs a form of unmediated communication. The image appears to address its audience directly, without

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112727 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM interruption, delay or artifice. This perspective on direct address can also be connected to the theories of liveness that draw on the real in real time argument. Such understandings of direct address inform the commonplace views of television’s capacities for transparent, unmediated reflection that rest on its technical capacity for liveness. Like the pre-broadcasting images, we can also consider televisual direct address in terms of its actualisation of the televisual event of control. Rather than understanding the force of this image in terms of the scanning and transmission of a real event, this analytical perspective engages with the image’s techno-materiality. And, as with the Stookie Bill image, we can consider the image’s configuration of becoming-scene to understand the image as an event of control. In this way, we are moving further toward an engagement with television employing the analytical practice of the Foucauldian striking scene. This means we examine the image’s scenic relations and configurations as an actualisation of power. In the Gyngell image we find not simply a model staring straight ahead, as in Felix the cat, or a dummy’s head being artificially moved, but a face that moves and speaks, apparently of its own volition. This is an image of a speaking head which is scenically more complex than the images considered here so far. With the entry of sound into the image’s mode of appearing, considering the image’s configuration of becoming-scene is even more relevant for highlighting the televisual connection to control. Sound also forms part of the disjunctive synthesis of scene and surface specific to the televisual production of liveness. By incorporating sound, in this instance of a voice, into the discussion of the image, we are able to more completely understand the image as a televisual articulation of the event of control. The techno-materiality of the scene-surface relation of liveness in terms of the modulation and mobility of the image’s disjunctive synthesis of objects and lines has been noted. In spite of its brevity, the Gyngell image conforms to Deleuze’s description of control being “short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded” (1995b, p. 181) in other ways apart from a techno-material relation of surface to scene. To understand this we need to consider the specific relations of force between the various objects and movements in the image. That is, how is control specifically articulated in the image’s aural and visual configuration of becoming-scene? The voice stabilises the contingency of the image by attempting to anchor its meaning. In this way, the Gyngell image produces its televisual mode of direct

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112828 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM address by constructing a face of authority, formality and information. This is signalled by the synthesis of the formality of the speech (what Gyngell says and how he says it) and in Gyngell’s appearance. His welcoming statement, “Good evening and welcome to television”, is said in a comparatively quiet tone, providing facts and information. This aural movement combines with the formality of Gyngell’s visual appearance. He sits behind a desk wearing a suit in a scenic configuration that mobilises a certain authority. Thus, Gyngell’s voice displays what the image is (television), and when it is occurring (evening). With such a stabilising, authoritative scenic movement in relation to the visual material of the image (man, lines, background) we can perceive the operation of control that calls the image something – television. The Gyngell voice also produces a technological connection between inside and outside, although in a different way to that which was observed in the Stookie Bill image. This connection further reinforces the television image as actualising an event of control. Even though, like the hand of Stookie Bill, the voice manipulates the other objects appearing in the image (the man, the desk, the map), it does so in a movement of stabilisation, rather than one of inhabited resistance. In this way, the voice can be understood as a more intense movement of control, which functions to diminish the resistive potential of televisual liveness by momentarily stabilising the contingent, modulating image through a scenic action of authoritative naming. The voice does not grasp the resistive capacity of televisual liveness, which it could have done by saying something that interfered with the unfolding of the image. This could have been a statement that questioned the production and status of the image: “Is anybody out there?”, “I suppose some of you think that television looks a little strange”. However, in what is said, “Good evening and welcome to television”, the voice is a movement of control that momentarily stabilises the contingent, modulating techno-materiality of liveness of the television image. Like all movements of control, the voice is short term in its effectivity. It does not disrupt or interrupt the televisual scene, but rather reinforces a smoother composition and flow of the image’s techno-materiality of liveness. In spite of the lack of a clear sign of the inhabited resistance indicative of control, we can see the production of the smooth space of control being actualised in this image in other ways. This occurs in the connection that the image articulates across the boundary between the technology and the world that the image makes visible. This results from the scenic relation of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 112929 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM the map of the world and the face’s construction of television in a mode of direct address.88 The television image produces a particular form of techno-materiality and scenic relations, the specific qualities of which can be interrogated if we are to understand how it is television functions as a technology in our contemporary culture. What I suggest we can note in the Gyngell image is an indication of television’s capacity to collapse and blur the boundary between the technology and the world outside, constructing a smooth yet disjunctive space of control. This is a similar capacity to that observed in the movement and relation of Stookie Bill’s hand. Here, it is made visible through different movements and images of becoming scene. As I have just indicated, in the Gyngell image the relation between television and the world can be conceptualised as stabilising, interpretive and explanatory. As the image of Gyngell speaks “Good evening and welcome to television”, television at that moment becomes the image that is giving it a name, and the specific actualisation of the image becomes television. That is, “television” becomes what it says and shows itself to be in its own image. Television, at this point then, equals an authoritative explanation of itself as a medium which, through the visibility of the map, extends into a notion of the world as connected to the technology. Talking head plus map produces a televisual face that articulates the technology’s power to extend its technological processes into the world. No longer outside the technology, the social field is permeated and drawn into the technological operations of television, articulating television’s characteristics as a technological manifestation of control. The Gyngell image allows some preliminary conclusions to be drawn with regard to television as a technology of control. As a control technology, television moves throughout the social field, adapting and exerting its forces in myriad ways, making this visible through the ongoing production of images. The procedures of television are mobile and flexible, allowing the technology to operate in a non-institutional way. Or rather, television is emblematic of the new institutional face of control. It is the “omni-institution” or “meta-institution” particularly resonant with the control society. As a technology, television exercises its power through a multiplicity of connected sites of production and mobilisation throughout the social field.89 As an omni-institution, television (akin to Deleuze’s description of the operations of control) is an institution without walls or boundaries, capable of permeating and transforming the social field on a global scale. Indeed, if, as Deleuze implies, television is the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113030 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM quintessential machine of control, we can perhaps understand this description through television’s ability to produce and transform power relations through its extensive, proliferating, globalising processes of facialization according to the operations of control. That is, the scene of the Gyngell image makes visible the way television can potentially produce the world in its own image. This scene highlights how the televisual technology can potentially map the world through the appearance of its images, transforming that which exists outside its technical processes and production into an image. In this way, the Gyngell image highlights television’s potential to extend throughout the social field, further signalling the smoothing, flexible and shifting operations of force that characterise control. What we can see now is how the televisual liveness-control relation informs an exploration of sites like Gyngell, where the inhabited resistance of control is less evident. In the Gyngell image we have observed what could be called television’s serious face, in its specific mode of actualising the event of control. Gyngell also functions as a point of emphasis for extending the analytical engagement with the television image. That is, my discussion is developing and shifting from considering the disjunctive synthesis of surface to scene, to a more detailed, descriptive encounter with scenic relations and configurations of control. In the Gyngell example we also find that the opportunities for articulating inhabited resistance, which is a potential of televisual liveness, is not grasped. As such, the Gyngell image establishes a useful point of contrast for now engaging with the Graham Kennedy images. Through these examples we can now consider the potential of television comedy (here the complicit practices of self-reflexivity and carnival) to mobilise the inhabited resistance that is one potential of the event of control, in the scenic relations of these images. Graham Kennedy “The look on your face!” Aiton said to Graham, recalling the incident. “You have just”, replied Graham Kennedy, “summed up in five words my entire talent”. (Blundell 2003, p. 6) Graham Kennedy occupies a pivotal place in Australia’s television history.90 Through his long-running variety programme, initially called In Melbourne tonight (1957-1969), he became one of the most successful and best- remembered personalities on Australian television. His first appearance on

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113131 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM television screens was in May 1957, only months after the introduction of regular television broadcasting to Australia. As host of In Melbourne tonight he exhibited a very particular televisual style. Kennedy was supposedly in charge of the programme and its proceedings, yet would regularly undercut both his own position of authority and in turn that of the programme through what can be described as a practice of a comical, carnivalesque self-reflexivity. While Kennedy is by no means the only Australian television personality to have performed in this style, arguably he remains the benchmark against which those who followed can be compared. Two aspects of Kennedy are pertinent to discussing the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. The first is Kennedy’s appearance – in particular, his face. The inappropriateness of Kennedy’s face for television is noted by McKee, who points out that Kennedy lacked the “classically attractive looks” normally associated with those in the entertainment industry (McKee 2001, p. 21). Blundell, a little more poetically, also draws attention to Kennedy’s unusual facial features: “There were the trademark fish eyes that said one wag made him look like a famished barracuda” (Blundell 2005a, p. 15).91 As Kennedy himself acknowledges in the above quote, the idiosyncratic features of his face were a vital part of his attraction and television success.92 Given my discussion so far, what I will focus on is what this apparently unlikely television face highlights about the facialization of the television image in terms of the event of control and inhabited resistance. That is, what sort of televisual face is Kennedy’s? How does it contrast with the Gyngell televisual face in terms of its potential articulation of the event of control and inhabited resistance? The second aspect of Kennedy I am considering is perhaps the best- remembered aspect of Kennedy’s programming – the live advertisements. Predecessors of contemporary infomercials, Kennedy’s style of television advertising meant that “to advertisers he was a magician who turned the currency of TV advertising into entertainment that was often funnier than the show” (Canning 2005, p. 16). The many famous examples of these advertisements display a television image that is acutely aware of its own mode of appearance, satirising not only the claims of the product, but also questioning the veracity of the image making the claim. Through the comical images of Kennedy self-reflexively biting the hand that feeds him a mode of televisual face as direct address emerges that is still evident in

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113232 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM much contemporary television. The configurations of becoming-scene in the Kennedy images illuminate the potential for inhabited resistance of televisual direct address. These examples illustrate how the practice of self-reflexivity can scenically produce a mode of inhabited resistance as a means of complicitly disrupting the televisual event of control. Transgressive television? Kennedy’s programmes have been conceptualised as sites of resistance by other writers on Australian television. For example, both McKee (2001) and Turner (1989) discuss Kennedy in terms of his transgression of established television formats and genres. Turner’s essay, Transgressive TV: From In Melbourne tonight to Perfect match (1989), suggests that Kennedy’s television is perhaps the best example “of a host and a show that was always trying to break out of its frame” (1989, p. 32). Situating Kennedy’s programme in the context of theatrical vaudeville, Turner argues how In Melbourne tonight belongs to a style of television where “instead of taking the format seriously they used it as a set of conventions to attack and transgress” (1989, p. 32).93 Turner observes that this quality of transgressive television is connected to, and intensified by, televisual liveness, noting that “TV’s immediacy, its ‘liveness’…enables it to shock and surprise and scandalise” (1989, p. 27). Similarly, McKee also maintains that as a textual site Kennedy highlights a connection between televisual liveness and transgression. McKee focuses his discussion on a well-known incident where Kennedy was banned from broadcasting live by the Australian Broadcasting Control Board, after being accused of swearing on air. 94 McKee believes that thereafter the spontaneity, which was the hallmark of what he describes as Kennedy’s “calculated refusal of everything that should make good television” (McKee 2001, p. 21), was no longer such a force. He writes: “It is Kennedy’s spontaneity – his liveness – that the Board identifies as the source of his danger and thus takes away from him by forcing him to prerecord” (McKee 2001, p. 27). McKee’s argument seems to be underlined by the belief that liveness is most possible during a live broadcast (i.e. where an episode is broadcast as it happens). However, prerecording does not necessarily diminish the television image’s quality of liveness. This is because liveness can also be understood as a techno-material effect of the principles of image production, not only the broadcast of real events in real time. Thus, even though Kennedy did not always technically broadcast live, this does not necessarily mean that the potential for resistance

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113333 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM produced by the techno-material definition of liveness was absent from the image.95 It is also questionable as to whether swearing on television is the best example of the connection between liveness and spontaneity that characterises Kennedy’s work on television. In spite of the Board’s prerecording decree, Kennedy’s spontaneous and irreverent style remained more or less consistent through his appearances on various television programmes on Australian television screens until the late 1980s.96 There are some difficulties with discussions of Kennedy in terms of the transgression of established televisual norms.97 One problem is that implicit to these assessments of Kennedy is the traditional technological transparency perspective, where televisual liveness results from the technology’s ability to provide unmediated access to the real world. In the case of Kennedy, this view would say that television merely taps into his talents and represents him on the screen. There is little recognition of the capacity for television to transform the episodes it presents through its particular technical processes of production and subsequent appearance of images. So we should take care not to read Kennedy only in terms of transgression of television’s generic conventions. Such a perspective would seem to be formulated with the heavy influence and benefit of hindsight. For such a young medium, as Australian television was at the moment of Kennedy’s television debut, would it not be strange to assume that the technology arrives with its genres and conventions intact, already established and ready for ridicule? As Bert Newton, fellow performer and life-long friend of Kennedy, wrote following Kennedy’s death: “Let me paint a picture of Australian TV in 1956, early 1957. TV was an unknown quantity. We didn’t know what to expect. Floor managers, producers, performers, directors and audiences all learnt at the same time” (Newton 2005). Yet the view of television as a well-established medium at the moment of broadcasting’s inception persists in the perspective on television that assesses Kennedy’s work as transgressive. Rather than take this view of Kennedy’s television work I am suggesting that the importance of Kennedy is that these images established a televisual mode of communicative and generic strategies that are still in evidence in contemporary television. In this way, these images establish and create, rather than simply break or transgress, televisual conventions. Taking this view we are able to see how these images are not simply transgressive in an oppositional sense. Rather, what Philip Adams astutely calls Kennedy’s “peculiar” form of comedy critiques the televisual

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113434 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM process from a compromised position, from within the programme, as it is being produced. To connect this assessment to the discussion of inhabited resistance in Chapter Two, what we find here is that Kennedy is complicit with televisual processes, while also engaging in operations and behaviour that tactically inhabit and disrupt the image’s production and appearance. The scenic configurations of the Kennedy images display the pragmatism Massumi (1998) identifies as necessary for resistance within the control society. Employing self-reflexive humour and carnivalesque grotesqueness as comic practices, such complicity and pragmatism functions to produce images where the scenic relations of force actualise the inhabited resistance of the event of control. Specific instances and examples of the mobilisation of inhabited resistance from In Melbourne tonight further illustrate the distinction between transgressive or oppositional resistance, and the televisual mode of inhabited resistance.98 Graham Kennedy as televisual face Watching early footage of In Melbourne tonight it is apparent that Australian television quickly developed from its rather pedestrian opening image of Bruce Gyngell. The images from a 1964 episode of In Melbourne tonight underline this point. Broadcast at the time of Channel Nine’s opening of a new Melbourne studio, it is seven years after Kennedy’s television debut and he appears to be comfortable with the medium of television and the routine of his programme.99 I would suggest that in one way what we can observe in the Kennedy images is another scenic configuration of the facialization of the image in the mode of Gyngell. However, this coexists with a configuration of inhabited resistance to this mode of facialization. There is an irreducibility between these two aspects of the image in the construction of Kennedy’s particular mode of direct address. Sometimes Kennedy functions as a genial host, guiding the programme smoothly from segment to segment. However, there are other times when the image is produced as an unstable, resistive televisual face, displaying a scenic configuration of control and inhabited resistance. There are a number of ways in which this process can be observed, and through the appearance of Kennedy as becoming-scene the potential for televisual liveness to accommodate inhabited resistance becomes apparent in this televisual site.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113535 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM Inside-outside face In these early images Kennedy rarely sits still at the obligatory tonight show desk, except perhaps when spruiking a product in a live advertisement. Even then, efforts to facialize Kennedy’s body in a televisually acceptable manner akin to the Gyngell image (slow him down, place him behind a desk and focus on his face) fail because of the qualities of Kennedy’s face that are mobile and modulatory. Such movement is scenically configured on Kennedy’s face, which is produced through an exteriorising of bodily parts, connecting the corporeal head to the outside, constructing a television image as a productive, open field. Kennedy’s facial features are a fascinating aspect of his television appearances. McKee draws attention to his “big eyes, pointy nose and small chin” (McKee 2001, p. 21) while Docker describes how Kennedy “highlighted his face and body as grotesque, with his protruding eyes, open gaping mouth and long wandering tongue” (Docker 1994, p. 211). As Docker also discusses, Kennedy’s appearance connects him to the grotesque aesthetic of the carnival as it has been outlined by Mikhael Bakhtin (1968). In light of Docker’s description, it is instructive to return to Bakhtin’s original comments on the grotesque face: “The grotesque is interested only in protruding eyes… the bulging eyes manifest a purely bodily tension. But the most important of all human features for the grotesque is the mouth” (1968, pp. 316-317). Stallybrass and White (1986) further clarify the Bakhtinian understanding of carnival in a way that informs how Kennedy’s face connects to the concept of grotesque realism: Grotesque realism images the human body as multiple, bulging, over – or under-sized, protuberant and incomplete. The openings and orifices of this carnival body are emphasized, not its closure and finish. It is an image of impure, corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, “spirit”, reason). (Stallybrass and White 1986, p. 9) Noting a connection between the grotesque body of Bakhtin’s carnival and Kennedy’s face reinforces the connection between television comedy and the complicit, resistive force of carnivalesque humour and laughter discussed earlier. As I have noted, Bakhtin’s description of the universality and inclusivity of carnival laughter produces an understanding of carnival’s comic practice

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113636 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM as complicit in terms of its mobilisation of resistance (Bakhtin 1968, pp. 11- 12). Usefully, Bakhtin also points to a connection between the carnivalesque grotesque and comedy: “Grotesque forms of the body not only predominate in the art of European peoples but also in their folklore, especially in the comic genre” (Bakhtin 1994, p. 234).100 With its bulging, wide-set eyes and eruptive mouth, Kennedy’s face seems an unlikely fit with television in comparison to the smooth features and appearance of Gyngell. Yet, in the scenic production of a televisual face, Kennedy’s excessive and exaggerated features are an important part of his particular mode of direct address. By taking advantage of opportunities for spontaneity, erupting in laughter and using other disruptive, humorous gestures, the grotesqueness of Kennedy’s face continually interrupts any attempt to facialize the image in a serious, stable mode. As Kennedy’s mouth breaks into laughter, or he mugs to camera, a disturbance in the compositional flow of the television image is highlighted. 101 Thus, attention is drawn to the possibility of alternative configurations of becoming-scene that have the potential to produce a different kind of televisual face altogether. Laughter and mugging demonstrate that at any time televisual direct address can be interrupted and shifted in different directions. Very often this occurs through Kennedy expressing on his face a different quality to what is being said or done, both by him and around him. In continually emphasising the grotesqueness of his features in the best carnival style, an image is produced that dispels any notion of a human face as an expression of interiority.102 With its bulging eyeballs and slithering tongue, exploiting and blurring the boundary between the body’s exterior and interior, a flexible, outward-orientated face appears. In contrast to the more intensely controlled televisual face of Gyngell, Kennedy’s face grasps opportunities to constantly elude processes of control. Through the provocation and mobilisation of laughter the scenes exploit the capacity of televisual liveness for inhabited resistance. That is, the corporeality of Kennedy’s various bodily parts are continually disrupting the formation of a serious televisual face, complicitly inhabiting the televisual mode of direct address typified by Gyngell. Self-refl exivity: Th e inhabited resistance of control The scenic configuration of inhabited resistance is also evident in Kennedy’s opening monologue. The monologue has become a convention of variety/ comedy/tonight programmes as well as the theatrical tradition of vaudeville

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113737 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM that is part of Kennedy’s performance background.103 The usual function of such monologues is to welcome the audience, tell a few jokes and outline what the rest of the show holds. Kennedy does this, but he does not construct the unwavering, locked-in gaze of the reassuring, authoritative television face. Throughout the monologue, and indeed in other parts of the programme, Kennedy regularly looks away, with frequent sideways glances, beyond the camera. Again, this is a movement that interferes in the televisual construction of direct address, and a television image is produced in a mode of mobile, flexible direct address. In this type of practice, the Kennedy images scenically intensify the potential of television’s techno-materiality of liveness to be comically distorted and interrupted, displaying television’s resistive possibilities for its techno-materiality of control. We can understand these mobile facial movements in terms of their tactical relation to televisual strategies of control that would construct a traditional mode of direct address, by scenically configuring an image that both produces and resists direct address. This results in a television image that is neither only resistive nor only controlled, but a disjunctive synthesis of both. An instructive example highlighting the practices of inhabited resistance characteristic of Kennedy’s programmes appears in a scene from the 1964 images, in an exchange between Kennedy and, his oft-times offsider, Bert Newton. The image actualises an irreducible relation of control and inhabited resistance, through its literal accommodation of two televisual faces. Newton and Kennedy share the image, both employing the mode of direct address to the camera. Newton is a model of sincerity. He explains that he has a new job in radio but he is thrilled to be visiting the set of In Melbourne tonight. As Newton carries on, Kennedy stands slightly behind him mugging to the camera, making faces and gestures that mock the seriousness and apparent sincerity of Newton’s words. Kennedy also is working in the mode of directly addressing the camera, but it is his facial features and gestures, rather than his voice, that dominate the construction of his face in the configuration of becoming-scene. While Newton’s scenic visuality and aurality appear to be constructing a reassuring, stable televisual face in the mode of Gyngell, Kennedy’s destabilising mode of direct address moves to undo Newton’s efforts to facialize the image according to the serious mode. Occupying the image together, the assemblage of competing movements between the two human faces constructs an image where the process of production is

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113838 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM continually interrupted and breaking down. In this way, the televisual scene self-reflexively accommodates an awareness of the television image’s mode of production through a disruptive and interruptive configuration of becoming- scene. The important point about the Kennedy-Newton segment is not that it fails to produce a serious, stable televisual face (although it does). Rather, its failure can also be seen as a success and the image is facialized through an exposure and affirmation of this failure. In other words, the image displays an awareness of its processes of production, complicitly exploiting the qualities of televisual liveness. The scene revels in the instability associated with the capacity for the television image to accommodate spontaneous and unexpected movements, as part of the productive modulation of the operation of control. The scenic configurations described so far have been characterised in terms of a self-reflexive practice of comedy by Docker, who observes that Kennedy’s humour is “saturated with self-reflexivity” (1994, p. 210). The comic practice of self-reflexivity that characterises the Kennedy images also resonates with a certain perspective on television as a postmodern technology. As we have seen, the place of television in postmodern theory and debates of postmodernism is contested and, as Jim Collins points out, the attitude of postmodern theorists towards television is very often negative (1992, p. 331).104 In his essay Collins attempts to formulate a more positive understanding of television as a postmodern technology. He calls the self-reflexivity of postmodern texts “hyperconsciousness”, defining this as “a hyperawareness on the part of the text itself of its cultural status, function and history, as well as of the conditions of its circulation and reception” (Collins 1992, p. 335). Considering Kennedy’s televisual practice in light of such an argument of televisual self-reflexivity, McQuire’s discussion of the relation of self-reflexivity to contemporary television is useful to explore further, especially given that he does not tie his argument to theories of postmodernism. He argues, “contemporary television displays a boundless fascination with its own techniques of production” (1998, p. 97). McQuire describes how television increasingly “celebrates” its “mediation of the real” (1998, p. 97). He maintains that this feature of contemporary television distinguishes television from cinema and is partly an explanation for television’s continuing attraction as a cultural technology. As I have already noted, McQuire observes:

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 113939 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM Where classical narrative cinema might be compared to the magician who uses sleight of hand to deceive the eye, television increasingly styles itself as a conjurer who can expose the workings of the trick, and appear all the more seductive for doing so. (McQuire 1998, pp. 97-98) The scene of the exchange between Kennedy and Newton illustrates McQuire’s description of such a televisual mode of self-reflexivity. Through complicitly highlighting the image’s capacity to accommodate spontaneous movements, the scene actualises the event of control that is virtual to the operation of television. The event of control emerges through the inhabited resistance also configured in the scene. In the process, a televisual face is produced that can be described as self-reflexive in its “exposition of the workings of the trick” (to reiterate McQuire’s evocative phrase). That is, the image displays an awareness of its appearance as an image by exploiting the capacity of televisual liveness to interfere and disrupt its own production and appearance. My discussion also informs what has been described as postmodern self- reflexivity. Like the concept of inhabited resistance, self-reflexivity can also be understood as a complicit, pragmatic action, requiring immediacy to provide it with its particular comic force. As a comic practice, self-reflexivity grasps opportunities to engage with proceedings as they are unfolding. As I have previously pointed out, Massumi has argued that control requires pragmatic (rather than oppositional) practices of resistance. And as I have already argued, through its techno-materiality of liveness the television image is an ideal site in which to produce such pragmatic, disruptive movements. Self-reflexivity, which displays a pragmatic awareness of the unfolding of an event as it is occurring, can function as an excessive, comical interference of the televisual articulation of control. Therefore, complicitly engaging with the production and appearance of the television image, such scenic self-reflexivity actualises the inhabited resistance that can be produced within the televisual event of control. Thus, the televisual process of self-reflexivity is not only concerned with television reflexively turning in on itself. Such a practice also displays television’s connection to its outside. It is what we can recognise as a configuration of becoming-scene that actualises the televisual event. By connecting the image and technology through the operations of control, where oppositions such as

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114040 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM inside and outside are maintained as flexible and contingent, the television image further highlights its potential as a technology of control. Live ads: Th e smooth space of capitalism and control Other examples of complicit, inhabited resistance and the scenic actualisation of the televisual event of control can also be observed in Kennedy’s somewhat notorious live advertisements. These are also characterised by similarly self-reflexive comical practices. The idea for the live advertisement was quite straightforward. Companies paid to have their product featured on a programme where Kennedy (sometimes with an offsider) would read some copy endorsing the product. Kennedy’s live ads are a fascinating combination of advertising and entertainment, however, in contrast to the usual cinematic form of product placement, in television there is less likely to be ignorance of the fact that segments such as live advertisements are explicitly designed to sell product to the audience. At the same time, in the Kennedy examples, advertising was part of the entertainment of the programme. That is, in these segments the programme did not officially stop for a commercial break.105 Rather Kennedy simply took on the role of spruiking the product, while at the same time provoking laughter through his self-reflexive critique of the product and his involvement in selling it. By drawing attention to the processes of selling, yet simultaneously resisting these processes, he remained complicit with them and sold a product. It seems that as his television career progressed Kennedy paid little attention to the wishes of advertisers or the prevailing view of the network when it came to reading a live ad. Integral to his style was the “rubbishing” of the product – a technique developed during his early career on Melbourne radio (Blundell 2003, p. 37). The segments provide opportunities for Kennedy to creatively produce a television image that articulated a resistive relation about the advertiser’s grand claims for their products. Blundell aptly describes Kennedy’s style in these commercials: “In a voice that suggested the bright and determined manner of a mother thrusting a reluctant infant into the limelight, he placed the commercial artefacts determinedly on his desk before demolishing them” (Blundell 2003, p. 203).106 The live ads produced television images that were unstable, edgy and seemingly spontaneous (although according to Blundell’s account sometimes prepared).107

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114141 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM Frequently, Kennedy’s performance in the live advertisements involves the refusal of audience expectations in speaking about the product. Examples abound. Earnestly introducing the delights of a cruise on the Fairstar ocean liner, a clip from a disaster film is then played. Kennedy makes no acknowledgement of the unusual juxtaposition except to say, “yes – oh, it’s fun”, when the camera returns to him. Whether he is speaking of the cruise, or his joke, is left satisfyingly unresolved. Elsewhere, while expounding the apparent delights of Sao biscuits and their potential use in making vanilla slice, Kennedy pulls a face and asks the audience “sounds like dysentery, doesn’t it?”. Another time, unenthusiastically sampling some blueberry yoghurt he valiantly assures the audience “and it tastes delicious”, a statement accompanied by a look of disgust on Kennedy’s face. Also pertinent is Kennedy’s on-air exposé of the paltry amount of potato in each bag of Colvan potato chips. Before crushing the chips to demonstrate how little potato is in each bag he tells the audience “I love Colvan, they’ll love me for this”. Apparently hurt and insulted by the cheapness of the chip company, this live ad culminated with Kennedy’s outraged question to the camera: “Where’s the potato?” Another famous example of the tactical resistance of televisual address, “led to perhaps Australia’s longest ad, a 30-second read for Raoul Merton Shoes by Kennedy and Bert Newton that ran an astonishing 27 minutes as Kennedy lampooned its tagline, changing it to: ‘If they’re Merton, you’re hurtin’” (Canning 2005, p. 16). 108 In these examples we find scenes that are continually modulating, shifting in unexpected directions both aurally and visually, and the mobility and resistive potential of the television image is highlighted. We can observe how Kennedy’s tactical, inhabited resistances of televisual advertising appear through complicit actions that exploit what de Certeau would see as the “cracks” in the unfolding of the image, thus taking it in different directions (de Certeau 1984, p. xxiv; p. 38). In this way, the inhabited resistance of control eludes the expected televisual practices, yet is still complicit with the technological processes and productions of television. As well as confounding expectations through unexpected statements or spontaneous facial expressions, on occasion Kennedy incorporated other aural movements of self-reflexivity in the live ads. He would sometimes acknowledge the precarious relationship between advertisers and television programmes. This practice exposed another aspect of the production of the television image

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114242 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:50:21:50 PPMM – its capitalist relation. For instance, after disparaging the appeal of Tom Piper Plum Pudding, he notes with an air of mild desperation, “oh, I hope we can keep this client, we’re losing so many”, as if he doesn’t quite understand why advertisers might think their money isn’t being well spent in choosing Kennedy as their spokesperson. Another time, buoyed by the success of his rubbishing of a product he throws caution to the wind, announcing, “I’m in the mood to lose them all tonight”. Such self-reflexive comments make visible the capitalist relation of television’s production within the image’s aural configuration of becoming-scene. This occurs through Kennedy acknowledging the precarious, contingent character of capitalist investment in commercial television that enables the image to emerge and stay on the air. Control’s mode of capitalism operates through dispersive, processive, active forces and it is characterised by the shifting, contingent and flexible operations. In this way, Kennedy’s comments actualise the televisual event of control by acknowledging TV’s status as a product, one that is uncertain and unstable with no fixed value. Its images can be bought and sold and their value fluctuates according to what they present. Here again the televisual articulation of control is resistively affirmed through a complicit, self-reflexive comic practice. There are further types of self-reflexive movements in the Kennedy images. At times, Kennedy pauses amid the unfolding of a segment to comment on what is going on, or his own position in the proceedings. As Blundell notes: “He often adopted a hopeless expectation of audience disapproval. ‘You didn’t want to laugh, did you?’ he sometimes said aggressively. ‘It wasn’t very funny, was it?’ He had all the self-reflexive gags on hold” (Blundell 2003, p. 204). That is, Kennedy did not hesitate to interrupt proceedings or to question the success of his jokes. In this way again, the resistive potential of televisual liveness is actualised through questioning and commenting on the televisual scene as it is unfolding, further affirming a scenic configuration of force that articulates the event of control. This scenic configuration draws attention to televisual liveness’ potential to produce opportunities for the inhabited resistance of control, thus more clearly articulating the televisual production and articulation of this form of the event. Ultimately, what we find in these images then is not a transgression of some established television rules and conventions, but rather a mode of image production that actualises a complicit, inhabited resistance of television’s technological connection to the event of control. In their most intensely

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114343 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM creative moments what the Kennedy scenes show is that televisual liveness is always open to questioning and interruption. Furthermore, it is by doing so that the connection of liveness to the televisual operation of control is articulated in a mode of resistance. In the continual emergence of destabilising, disruptive movements the Kennedy images expose an increasing awareness of television as a technical and cultural process through the scenic configuration of inhabited resistance. Conclusion Through the Gyngell example we have seen how the disjunctive scenic relations of aurality and visuality functioned to minimise the resistive potential of television’s techno-materiality of liveness. Exploring the image’s production as a face we observed how this image presented a stable, reassuring mode of direct address. The Kennedy images actualise the production and inhabited resistance of control. In the various aspects of the Kennedy images there are interfering and disruptive hands everywhere. Through the visual and aural practices of self-reflexive and carnivalesque comedy, the appearance of the image is continually interrupted, resistively inhabiting the partial techno- materiality of televisual liveness. Discussing these iconic Australian television images in this way develops further my proposal that operations of tactical, inhabited resistance are one possibility for contesting the operation of control. Moreover, with the Kennedy images I have begun to explore the potential for comedy and humour to mobilise such resistance. In identifying television’s production of such sites of resistance, a political function is signalled for a technology sometimes derided for its passivity and banality. Furthermore, by now following the example of Kennedy, it is possible to locate other televisual images and scenes that actualise a resistive relation to the televisual actualisation of operations of control, thus further invigorating television as a site for the articulation of contemporary politics and resistance. The book now continues to explore the potential of certain comic and humorous processes, more strongly connected to carnival, to illustrate the televisual production and such resistances to control in later programmes.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114444 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM Chapter Five: Th e comedy of resistance

The images I have discussed so far illuminate a number of principles about the technological production and appearance of the television image. Firstly, the liveness of the television image has been conceived as a techno-material quality. By considering the image’s compositional, modulating production of a surface-scene relation, the connection between televisual liveness and the processes and operations of control has been explored. Moreover, because of the way televisual liveness heightens the potential for interference and disruption, the television image can be seen as an exemplary site from which the inhabited resistance of control, which has also been theorised as disruptive and interfering, can be produced and accommodated. So far the analysis of a selection of television images has mapped a connection between television and the event of control, not only through the techno-material qualities of televisual liveness, but also through the specific scenic configurations that constitute the television image. Through the discussion of such striking scenes the analyses have highlighted television’s capacity to produce images that actualise events of control. In the preceding chapters it has been suggested that this is one way in which we can understand television’s place and function in contemporary culture, especially given the possibility that there is potentially no point in the social field that the technology might not reach, extend into, and technologically transform.109 This technological capacity also informs television’s connection to the event of control. The technology is part of control’s constitution of what has been defined as smooth space, where it is no longer possible to conceive of positions that are exterior or oppositional to control. Techniques and technologies of control, such as television, permeate all social spaces and locations, producing open, modulating fields of power characteristic of the Deleuzian society of control. To counter the pessimistic view that television provokes passivity and conformity to the logic of control, I have suggested that it is possible to identify certain televisual practices and styles which articulate a resistive relation to control. Specifically, the concept of inhabited resistance has been outlined as a potential operation as part of the event of control. Informed by a reading of de Certeau’s discussion of tactical ways of operating in everyday life, Chapter Two argued that control’s modes of resistive operation must necessarily inhabit the field in which they are a contesting force. Because of control’s modulatory

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114545 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM and mobile operations of force that function to construct a continuous, open social field, institutionally specific or fixed, oppositional critical positions are no longer effective or indeed possible. Instead, a politics of resistance is constructed through actions and configurations of pragmatic complicity, here conceptualised as inhabited resistance. The idea of inhabited resistance is a productive way of reinvigorating the question of politics and critical resistance within the society of control. In particular, Chapter Two outlined the potential of comedy and humour to function as one mode of resistive practice within control. So far I have looked at two types of television examples. Typified by both Felix the cat and Bruce Gyngell are images where the resistive potential of television’s techno-materiality of liveness was not exploited or configured in the televisual scene, although control is articulated in the disjunctive synthesis of surface to scene. Alternatively, in the Stookie Bill and Graham Kennedy images the televisual event of control has been discussed through some scenic configurations of inhabited resistance. Through the becoming-scene of Stookie Bill’s image of the hand, we have seen how television can accommodate interfering, disruptive forces that actualise the modulatory operations of control, as well as its potential for inhabited resistance. Furthermore, in the Kennedy images the discussion considered the self-reflexivity of his comic practice as another such inhabiting, interfering, and disruptive scenic configuration, one that resists the stabilising tendency of the televisual mode of direct address. The Kennedy images actualise control through the scenic practices of inhabited resistance, particularly through the self-reflexive commentary on his status as a host, as well as complicit scenic references to the capacities of the technology. In this way, the Kennedy images highlighted television’s potential to articulate the inhabited resistance of control, visible through the self-reflexive tactics of comedy and humour. This proposition is explored further now by considering a number of comedic television images and programmes that can also be understood as tactically articulating the televisual event of control. As such, another point in the genealogy of televisual control emerges, this time enhanced through the inhabited resistance and comic practices of carnival. This also develops a point of resonance with the television face of Kennedy and its connection to the Bakhtinian version of grotesque realism. Furthermore, these analyses extend the practice of the striking scene theoretically outlined in Chapter Two

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114646 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM and already employed in the engagements with images in Chapters Three and Four. Here the selected texts are discussed in terms of their scenic relations of control and inhabited resistance. This clarifies the potential of these theoretical perspectives to renew our understanding of the technological force of television, by engaging with the specific sites of its appearance. The chapter considers three well recognised known from Australian television. From the 1970s I look at The Norman Gunston show, a satirical combination of television variety and entertainment, television journalism and current affairs. I then discuss the satire and parody of sports journalism and commentary from The dream with Roy and H.G., broadcast during Channel Seven’s coverage of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Finally, I explore the recent Australian comedy of Kath and Kim. In contrast to Gunston and The dream, which draw heavily on the characteristic televisual mode of direct address explored in the Gyngell and Kennedy examples, Kath and Kim can be defined as a mockumentary, or documentary style situation comedy, which in recent years has provided an interesting take on television’s traditional sitcom genre. In the intermingling of the fly-on-the-wall capacity of documentary and the satiric, comedic impulse of the sitcom, I discuss how programmes like Kath and Kim produce displays of inhabited resistance to the televisual operations of control. Considering this selection of television programmes emphasises the potential of carnivalesque humour to produce a tactical, inhabited mode of resistance, thus building my discussion to this point. Norman Gunston: Th e little Aussie bleeder On the 11th of November 1975 Australian federal politics was plunged into disarray through the unprecedented dismissal of the Gough Whitlam-led Labor government by the then Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. The Labor government was replaced by a caretaker coalition government, complete with a new Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser. The television coverage of this political event included Whitlam’s appearance, post-sacking, on the steps of Parliament House in Canberra. It was there that Whitlam made his now famous statement, “God save the Queen, for nothing will save the Governor-General”. This is a television image of great confusion, with a crowd of protesting general public, politicians, and a throng of journalists and media swarming around the entry to Parliament House. Another television image of this political event also exists, for in the midst of this constitutional crisis, which has come to be seen

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114747 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM as a turning point in the Australian political landscape, roamed the television character of Norman Gunston – aka The little Aussie bleeder. The Norman Gunston show was an ABC production from 1973-1975.110 As Hall explains, the programme was one of the more successful spin-offs from the ABC’s earlier comedy The Aunty Jack show (1976, p. 136). Norman Gunston, a comedic character whose alter ego is Australian actor Garry McDonald, is a parodic combination of an entertaining, witty, well-informed talk show host and a serious, investigative television journalist. The half-hour programme consisted of sketches, songs and interviews played live in front of a studio audience, as well as Gunston’s interviews and encounters with national and international celebrities and politicians. The broadcast of Gunston’s attendance at the Whitlam dismissal took the form of the latter, and was then screened during one of his programmes.111 In Gunston’s televisual style we find another set of images that articulate television’s production and inhabited resistance of control, particularly in the many events that Gunston constructed in his satire of television journalism.112 The Whitlam incident arguably typifies Gunston’s inhabited resistance of the televisual event of control. As such I shall use it to illustrate further Gunston’s actualisation of the televisual potential for producing such resistance. Although a character played by Garry McDonald, there are similarities between the Norman Gunston face and that of Graham Kennedy. Like Kennedy, Gunston displays a particularly excessive, exaggerated face that resists the traditional serious televisual processes of facialization as mobilised by Bruce Gyngell. As the previous chapter discusses, Kennedy’s appearances were marked by bulging eyes, a lascivious mouth and the exaggerated facial movements of his mugging to the camera. I also noted the connection between Kennedy’s face and the grotesque realism Bakhtin describes as characteristic of carnival. Gunston’s face is a similarly excessive and exaggerated visage. A greasy, comb over hairstyle, beady eyes, long nose, awkward, uncomfortable grin and omnipresent shaving nicks blotted with tissue, combine with a bodily stance and gestures to scenically configure an image of cringing, apologetic subservience. As with Kennedy, we can observe resonances between Gunston and the Bakhtinian grotesque. This occurs through the gaping orifice of Gunston’s mouth and the bleeding face that is always inadequately repaired. In this instance the televisual face is not a closed, coherent surface. Rather, it is a liminal, open site. As Bakhtin writes:

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114848 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM The grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon. The grotesque image displays not only the outward but also the inner features of the body: blood, bowels, heart and other organs. (Bakhtin 1968, p. 318) Through the bleeding, open face of the grotesque, we can find Gunston to be another form of the carnivaleseque fool. Gunston’s face shifts between a frowning worry of his prominent eyebrows, and an excessively awkward smiling when he doesn’t know what to say to his guests. Frequently during an interview he will turn away from his guest and produce what is supposed to be a reassuring smile directly at the camera. However, as a face of such exaggerated grotesqueness, this look has the effect of interrupting the flow of the interview to draw further attention to Gunston, rather than stabilising the serious, journalistic face of television. Scenically this is a disruptive action, where the procedures of televisual facialization accommodate actions of interference, at the same time as also attempting to produce a Gyngell style of televisual face. There is a disjunctive relation between Gunston’s visual appearance and face, and his overt, excessive attempts to construct the serious, stable face of television news and current affairs. This resists the production of a serious, televisual face while attempting and continually failing to construct one. There is ongoing verbal reiteration by Gunston to his status as an “in- depth journalist”, frequently telling his guests to get ready for an “in-depth interview”, or some “in-depth questions”. What follows are scenes where Gunston is again ineffective in stabilising the televisual discourse of news and current affairs. Instead he disrupts and interferes in it with simplistic issues and stories of personal experience, using everyday slang and expressions rather than the elevated discourse of television journalism (such as is employed in the Gyngell image). For example, in a studio interview with ex-Prime Minister John Gorton Gunston’s first question is, “Was there an underhand plot to get rid of you in Parliament, or did everyone come to the conclusion at the same time that you were a bit of a dill?” Similarly, “When you actually left the Lodge [the Australian Prime Minister’s official Canberra residence]…did you get your bond back?” Gunston explicitly produces procedures of televisual control in the verbal articulation of television’s mode of serious facialization. However, this process is also regularly interrupted and disrupted by another of Gunston’s characteristic moves. He continually shifts out of the mode of serious journalism into tangential, opportunistic, personal musings. They are

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 114949 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM connected to, but usually also inappropriate to, the televisual moment. Gunston grasps every opportunity to personally assert himself into the unfolding of the television image, and he is able to do so because of the liveness of the medium he inhabits. However, in doing so, Gunston comically interrupts and resists the mode of in-depth journalism he attempts to construct by infusing it with the anecdotes and expressions of the personal and the everyday. Such disjunction is intensified further by the uncertainty of Gunston’s delivery and questions to his guests. Gunston is produced as an apologetic figure in both what he says and how he says it. The apologetic inflections, the tone of his voice and his mode of enquiry are reinforced by the subject matter of his discussions.113 Instead of the hard-hitting approach of investigative journalists that he continually espouses, Gunston begins many of his questions with a tentative, “Excuse me…” which often proves particularly ineffective. The studio interview with Gorton highlights the cringing and apologetic style of Gunston. When Gorton does not sit where Gunston wants him to, there is an excessive show of apologetic gestures and nervous explanation in requesting that Gorton shift. Uncertainty is also evident when sometimes guests fail to get the joke of Gunston’s questions and start to turn on him, becoming annoyed or frustrated with the pointlessness of his questions. Gunston’s position will then quickly shift to align himself with the guest’s position, indicating a subservience and lack of stable, journalistic authority. This is evident in the interview that takes place between Gunston and Muhammad Ali at a press conference, where Ali, putting on a typical show of pre-fight bluster, has Gunston twitching, nervous and backing off from asking any questions, reverting to an inane grinning at the camera. In the face of Ali’s strength (both physical and conversational) Gunston is unable to maintain his interrogative style, shifting to an ineffective address to the camera. These episodes can be understood as indicative of a scenic configuration of pragmatism. That is, as part of the scene, Gunston is a figure that squirms and twists away through the televisual scene in a flexible, shifting display of pragmatism. Apart from the apologetic and uncertain delivery, Gunston also twists and distorts the language in exaggerating the elongated and flattened vowels of Australian speech. He also employs idiosyncratic, personal expressions such as “Trooly, rooly” (i.e. “Really, truly”). In this way, sound – the aural configuration of becoming-scene – also actualises the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. The excessive and personal display of a local idiom and

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115050 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM accent construct and accommodate a resistive action to the technologically globalising processes of television in the scene of these images. Recalling de Certeau’s description of tactical ways of operating in everyday life, we can understand how Gunston’s insertion of the personal and subjective into the potentially global flows of television can be seen as a scenic mobilisation of the kind of political practice that has been proposed as a possibility as part of the operations of control. De Certeau’s writing on tactics supports an argument for operations of inhabited resistance through his description of the opportunistic, manipulative style of tactics, a point that also resonates with Deleuze’s call for creativity to inform the practices that can potentially elude procedures of control. We can recognise Gunston’s movements in his televisual encounters and exchanges as similarly opportunistic, tactical and pragmatic practices. In grasping the opportunities television’s techno-materiality of liveness provides for interruption and disruption, Gunston opens and inhabits what de Certeau might see as the “crack” in the television image (de Certeau 1984, p. xxiv; p, 38). The liveness of the mix of interviews and direct address scenically reiterates television’s techno-materiality of liveness. Such scenes intensify the potential of the television image as a surface to unfold in unexpected and disruptive ways, accommodating inhabited resistance. Thus, into the portentous, serious images of news and journalism, Gunston irrupts, producing a television image that disjunctively synthesises television’s objective, serious mode with a simplistic, personal and subjective view of the world. In these tactics of personalisation we can also see the television image in terms of its construction of the smooth space of control that, recalling Hardt’s discussion, produces a flexibility and fluidity between the public and the private. Scenically, then, Gunston functions as an excessive infusion of the personal into the public spaces of celebrity and politics he inhabits, displaying the capacity of television to exteriorise the private by accommodating it in the images that are circulated through its globalising processes. The inhabited resistance of the traditional televisual mode of facialization is also produced by the scenic mobilisation of ineffectual, parochial nationalism. Just as Gunston continually and ineffectively articulates his indepthness, he also continually verbalises his Australianness, through both his twisted, excessive Australian accent, and in the mode of his encounters with his many international guests. In doing so, Gunston mobilises movements of cringing nationalism, configured in the television scenes as an inept and clumsy

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115151 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM articulation of Australian culture. For instance, in interviews Gunston assumes that his subjects will have familiarity with the parochial, insular national perspective from which he speaks, through references to Australianisms, his own past and his suburban childhood. The televisual production of such an image is a further aspect of the way in which we can understand Gunston as a televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. Examples include Gunston’s question at Hollywood actor Warren Beatty’s press conference as to whether Beatty might appear in any Crawford television productions during his visit to Australia.114 Beatty’s bemusement and confusion is a joy to behold. Similarly, in an interview with US comedians Cheech and Chong, in Gunston’s bid to engage in some “hip” humour, he tells them a topical but very lame knock-knock joke about Graham Kennedy. Again, Cheech and Chong are completely bemused by the specifically Australian reference, with Gunston having to assure them that the joke is indeed really funny. Another example occurs when Gunston, at the gates of ex-US president Richard Nixon’s home trying to convince security to allow him an interview with Nixon, supports his request with, “I don’t think there’ll be any language difficulties, we speak American in Australia”. This last incident highlights how Gunston produces images that satirise the exaggerated, cloying subservience of Australia’s national identity at the time of the programme’s production. By scenically exposing Australia’s cultural attachment to the United States, Gunston disrupts the smooth, globalising processes of the technology. His actions highlight a disjunction through the relation constructed between him as an excessive articulation of local Australian culture and the encounter with the political might of the United States (in the form of the closed gates of the Nixon compound). The images’ scenic display of inhabited resistance to the televisual operation of control is further imbued with a political force through the connection that I have signalled can be made between Gunston and the character of the fool from Bakhtin’s description of the carnival. This occurs not only through the grotesqueness of Gunston’s appearance already described, but also through his relations and encounters with others. The connection between the Gunston scenes and Bakhtin’s reading of carnival further support exploring the Gunston images as engaging in the social critique available to comedy, in terms of control and inhabited resistance. That is, there is a point of commonality between the inhabited resistance of control and what can

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115252 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM be seen as the tactical, complicit, yet subversive, mode of the carnivalesque fool. As has been discussed in Chapter Two, Bakhtin notes the “universality” and “ambivalence” of carnival laughter, describing it as “also directed at those who laugh” (1968, p. 12). Following Bakhtin, Docker also describes how the fool engages in a peculiar mode of self-parody: “They don’t exempt themselves from parody, mockery, abuse, for not only are such figures laughed at by others, but they also laugh at themselves. Folly mocks itself, nothing is sacred, no one is safe, including the fools themselves” (Docker 1994, p. 199). Appearing as a fool in these images, Gunston is mocked as much as those he interviews. In the encounters with others in the scene, made visible through the televisual technology, Gunston exposes the foibles and idiosyncrasies of his targets. In many ways, however, this seems of secondary interest to the further presentation and production of Gunston’s character. That is, the mockery of Gunston’s characteristics is intensified by, but not reliant on, his exchanges with other figures in the image. As well as the grotesque appearance already described, Gunston displays the tactics of what Docker describes as the “naïve, innocent” fool (Docker 1994, p. 199) to take part in the interviews. He constructs the authoritative position of the interviewer, but in the mode of resisting it while inhabiting it. This occurs through his explicit failure to fulfil what he sets up. Through his foolish qualities and movements he is incapable of effectively controlling the liveness of the televisual image (as occurs in the scenic configuration of Gyngell) or constructing any form of in-depth journalism. Through Gunston’s apparent innocence and guilelessness these images expose and disrupt this mode of construction of the television image from the position he occupies as complicit with television’s operations. There are other ways in which the Gunston images exhibit the technology’s actualisation of the mobile, shifting operations of control. Gunston travels the globe, emerging at various locations in search of the subjects of his interviews. In this scenic mobility he again signals television’s potential to permeate and produce the social field as a television image. His mobility also connects these images to the social mobility of the carnivalesque fool as described by Bakhtin. As I have already noted, Bakhtin describes how clowns and fools “were the constant accredited representatives of the carnival spirit in everyday life out of carnival season” (Bakhtin 1968, p. 8). As a carnivalesque, televisual fool, then, Gunston moves with a degree of freedom throughout the social field.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115353 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM In the bemusement, disruption and disorder his appearance and presence provokes, he constructs a mode of resistance to the televisual event of control. Gunston’s encounters and exchanges with celebrities and politicians, who in this instance are also TV images that circulate the globe through the vast technological reach of television, produce a relation of inhabited resistance to such operations. Appearing as an excessive and resistive configuration of Australian nationalism, Gunston is also complicit with the technological operations that enable such mobility, flexibility and circulation. Political joke The Whitlam dismissal is a moment that has been mythologised and totemised in Australian political history from various perspectives and for different reasons. It is fair to say that it has become an episode of national political significance, as a point of outrage for some and self-satisfaction for others. What I am concerned with here, however, is the episode as a televisual event. This incident was captured live by television cameras, as well as being a surprising, chaotic moment in Australian politics. Liveness permeates both the political scene and the television image. As the political event is transformed into a televisual event through the technology’s techno-materiality it holds great potential for accommodating inhabited resistance because as the scene unfolded it was also contingent and uncertain. Through the scenic configuration in the relations between Gunston and his encounters with others in the image, this episode illustrates further the Gunston image’s actualisation of inhabited resistance through the practices of comedy and humour. The scene unfolds like this. Following an establishing shot of the crowd who are chanting, “We want Gough, we want Gough…”, the image cuts to Gunston, microphone at the ready, listening to a Labor party official speaking to Australian Council of Trade Unions president, and future Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. The official says: “There’s an enormous, spontaneous sense of outrage Bob. You can sense it. It’s coming from everywhere. These people have assembled in a very short time. Ninety-nine point five percent of them would be supporters of the Labor government”. As Gunston gapes and opens his mouth to join in their conversation, Hawke pre-empts him, putting his hand up and saying, “It’s a bit too serious for that”. Quickly Gunston shifts from questioning mode to agreeing, “It certainly is, it’s extremely serious,” as he turns to directly address the camera. Again, we can note a scenic display

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115454 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM of pragmatism here, articulated through Gunston’s flexible shifting position in relation to these various political figures. Next is an exchange between Gunston and future Governor-General (then Treasurer) Bill Hayden. Somewhat unexpectedly Hayden knowingly engages in Gunston’s establishment of his character, stating that he recognises what a genuinely, serious person Gunston is. However, before Gunston can ask him a question, Hayden moves away, his attention diverted. This is followed by another brief exchange between Gunston and Liberal party stalwart, Billy Sneddon, who walks up the steps of Parliament House to be asked by Gunston, “does this mean Liberal politicians can come on my show?” Sneddon doesn’t answer and continues on his way. Finally, Whitlam, who the crowd have been waiting for, appears at the top of the steps, arms raised, defeated yet triumphant. Gunston inserts himself in the front of this scene grinning widely and inanely, and wolf-whistling, joining in the crowd’s adulation of Whitlam. So taken up in the moment, Gunston misses the opportunity to ask Whitlam a question and is left at the edge of the crowd, ineffectually calling after “Mr Whitlam, Mr Whitlam…”. Finally, at the top of the stairs Gunston addresses the crowd in his best oratorial, rousing style: “What I want to know is, is this an affront to the Constitution of this country – or was it just a stroke of good luck for Mr Fraser?” After the crowd roars a supportive response to each part of his question, Gunston lamely concludes, “thanks very much, I just wanted to know”. And the crowd laugh. Again, here we can see a scene that is flexible and shifting, where the relations between the various figures take unexpected twists and turns. Gunston’s entry into this political crisis and its transformation into a Gunstonesque image exploits the episode’s potential to be something else apart from a scene of outrage. Firstly, in Gunston’s movement through a scene of political protest, which culminates in the deposed leader’s bitter and self- righteous rhetoric against the Governor-General, Gunston exposes the futility of such protest, as he engages in one ineffective political exchange after another. He is refused by Hawke, laughed at by Hayden, and ignored by Sneddon. Gunston cannot successfully engage with either side of politics, and the face of serious journalism he continually attempts to construct is thwarted by the other political figures. More importantly, it is resisted by his own appearance and movements. At the opportunity that arises for Gunston to speak to the central figure in the unfolding drama he instead clowns around in front of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115555 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM Whitlam, missing the opportunity to speak with him. However, by grinning madly in the foreground, Gunston also creatively grasps another opportunity available at this moment to tactically resist the significance of Whitlam’s appearance. What could be a scene of outrage is transformed into a scene of jubilation as Gunston revels in the limelight of being in close proximity to the man of the moment. Similarly, in his exchange with the crowd of protesters, Gunston begins in the mode of political outrage and rabble-rousing, but with the weakness of his final statement mobilises a reaction of laughter. In the provocation of this laughter, mobilised through Gunston’s construction of his position as complicit with the crowd, the image displays the futility of an oppositional practices such as protest. It also displays the possibility of a different form of tactical reaction – laughter, which defuses both the serious televisual mode as well as the potential historical portentousness of the event. That is, through Gunston’s pragmatic and tactical manoeuvres, in this television image the Whitlam dismissal becomes a joke. Indeed, Gunston’s movements and performance articulate a resistance to the futurity of this event in the subsequent hero-worship of Whitlam in Labor Party history. One understanding of Whitlam’s moment of defeat connects him to an Australian myth of heroism as a celebration of failure and defeat that can be traced to the World War One legend of Gallipoli and the ANZAC tradition.115 Effectively, by laughing at this form of national myth- making through the technological processes of television, Gunston exposes its ridiculousness with regard to the Whitlam incident. Thus, with Gunston’s movements through the scene, an image of Australian political protest and outrage is transformed into a joke. It is still an image of resistance, but not the resistance of oppositional protest. Rather the Gunston-Whitlam scene exposes the comedic potential of the televisual actualisation of the event, through the opportunistic, tactical resistance of Gunston as a scenic force. In the ultimate futility of his operations of inhabited resistance, the tendency of control to continually shift and modulate is also actualised. More importantly, through the images of Gunston, the heightened potential of the television image to produce and accommodate the inhabited resistance that scenically actualises the televisual event of control is also demonstrated. Gunston scenically configures images that illustrate the resistive inhabitation of the televisual modes of direct address, as well as other televisual forms strongly connected to the technological quality of liveness, such as talk

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115656 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM shows, variety shows and current affairs. Through the creative and productive resistance of Gunston’s complicitly tactical movements, these images construct one image of Australianness through the ineffective, cringing and apologetic figure of Gunston. The carnivalesque visual exaggeration and excess resistively inhabits the serious televisual face that the images also move to configure. This disjunctive synthesis mobilises Gunston as a force that undoes the televisual process of control through actualising its comic potential. The images highlight the tactical mode of politics available in the everyday world of control. What Gunston mobilises is one image of the possibility for existing and resisting in a control society. Through the production of these television images we find the mobilisation of a resistive, excessive formation of national identity as one procedure available for the resistance of the global forces of control. In such an operation of power, the nation as a concept could be thought to be somewhat anachronistic. Technologies of control like television have the potential to smooth the space of national boundaries and identities. The most obvious example of this in Australia is the juggernaught of American produced and/or themed television broadcasting that fills the TV schedule. The television image exemplifies the capitalist flows of the control society. Its products (images) are mobile and can be transmitted around the globe, as well as being bought and sold in various markets through the global mobility of the contemporary operations of flexible capitalism. While clearly television, as a technology of control, has the potential to erode the cultural and social distinctions between various nations (a potential which to some degree is being fulfilled), as I have highlighted through the Gunston example, television also has the potential to accommodate the inhabited resistances to the globalising, smoothing tendencies of the control society. At the industry and policy level this would occur through the investment in the local television industry, with a drive to produce television programming that explores local and national stories. If Gunston actualises anything about the control society, it is the potential television has to make visible sites that articulate the mode and practices of resistance required for control. This occurs through the tactically complicit production of a carnivalesque Australian figure that resistively inhabits the technological processes through which it, as a television image, is also produced.116

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115757 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM There are other Australian television programmes that actualise the inhabited resistance of the televisual event of control, through the excessive mobilisation of local, Australian identities, albeit through different scenic processes to those employed by Gunston. In some more contemporary examples, however, what we find is less of the cringing, apologist expression of Australianess. Rather, in the programmes we explore now what we can note is a transformation to an excessive and more joyful scenic configuration of the idiosyncratically Australian vernacular and culture. Such programmes display another mode of tactically engaging and surviving in the modulating forces of the control society. The first example of this kind is The dream with Roy and H.G., which actualised the potential for television’s comedic resistance of control through the televisual event of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Th e dream with Roy and H.G.: “When too much sport is barely enough” There is a pair of commentators inhabiting the Australian media landscape who, through a satirical engagement with all things sporting, cut through the discourses of heroism, triumphalism and masculinity characteristic of the parochial and jingoistic world of Australian sport. These two comic figures are Rampaging Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson for whom, according to their own catchphrase, “too much sport is barely enough”. Similar to Norman Gunston, Roy and H.G. are the creations of two actors, John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver, however, unlike Garry McDonald, Doyle and Pickhaver produce their own characters and material. Roy and H.G. began their media careers on the then Sydney-based ABC youth radio station, Triple J. Their weekly sports programme, This sporting life, dissected and satirised the happenings of all things sporting, discussing Australian and international issues as they saw relevant. From their early days in radio Roy and H.G. moved into the world of television, initially with a straightforward adaptation of their radio show to ABC television in 1993, again called This sporting life. This was followed by the more successful Club buggery (1996; 1997), a weekly variety programme produced for ABC TV that combined musical numbers and interviews with celebrities and sportspeople in front of a live studio audience. A somewhat unprecedented move from the ABC to the commercialism of Channel Seven followed in time for their first foray into the Olympics with The dream (2000). They also returned to the ABC for The Memphis trousers half-hour (2005). It is the images and scenes of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115858 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM Roy and H.G. from the television broadcast of the Olympics in Sydney that I am looking at here. Screening nightly during the broadcast of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, The dream has also formed part of Channel Seven’s subsequent Olympics coverage both at the 2002 Winter Olympics with The ice dream, and in 2004 with The dream in Athens.117 The dream was broadcast each evening as an officially sanctioned part of Channel Seven’s Olympic coverage during the Sydney 2000 Games. The format of the programme was not unlike Roy and H.G.’s other radio and television programmes where, as authoritative experts, they provide their views and suggestions regarding sporting events. In The dream, their satiric eye had a particularly focussed target in the Olympics, whereas usually their topics are more wide-ranging, encompassing the Australian political, cultural and sporting landscape. The dream featured three main types of segments – Roy and H.G. in conversation with each other, interviews with Olympic personalities (both Australian and international) and their much-touted re-commentary of various Olympic events.118 Clowns, rogues and cranks Inhabiting the official Olympic broadcaster for The dream highlights a shift in Roy and H.G.’s position – from the self-proclaimed alternative youth radio of Triple J, and the public service, non-commercial, low ratings arena of ABC TV. With The dream they became intertwined in the globalising processes and culture of commercial television, with the official Channel Seven images of competition being broadcast around the world. Their comical and parodic construction of parochial Australian sports commentators appeared as part of the lengthier television text of Channel Seven’s extended Olympic coverage. Thus, an excessively rabid attitude to Australian success in any sporting arena appeared in conjunction with the television images of sporting authority that Roy and H.G. were parodying. This again produces images that actualise the televisual operations of control through the scenic relations of movement and forces that mobilise a tactical, inhabited resistance. In their scenic configuration of face, voice, gesture, together with what they say, Roy and H.G. are images that comically expose the prejudices and idiosyncrasies of Australia’s sporting culture and its connection to the idea of the nation through their excessive and exaggerated articulation of the same. These various aspects of the television images from The dream allow us to consider how in their construction and appearance they mobilise a tactical, inhabited

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 115959 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM resistance to the televisual operation of control.119 By intensifying the comic and excessive aspects of televisual sport, like carnival clowns Roy and H.G. manage to say the unsayable with a directness unavailable to those television sports personalities, the images of which are produced through traditional televisual sporting discourses. Without the garish, bleeding grotesqueness of Gunston’s face, and definitely without apologetic and cringing movements, Roy and H.G. are not naïve or innocent; however, they do display connections with the carnivalesque grotesque and fools. Furthermore, they combine aspects of the “rogue” and the “crank” as described by Docker (1994, p. 199). He describes rogues as “social explorers who can move through every part of society, low or high” while cranks are “impatient of usual conventions, grumping away at them” (Docker 1994, p. 199). The roguishness of Roy and H.G. is highlighted through their enthusiasm to tackle any and every issue. During The dream this ranged from ongoing discussions of International Olympic President Juan Antonio Samaranch and his likely successors, through to the famous and not so famous athletes, right down to the army of volunteers that enabled the successful running of the Sydney Olympics. Similarly also to Kennedy and Gunston, as carnivalesque fools, Roy and H.G. exhibit a degree of freedom and mobility in moving through, and thus exposing, the intensely hierarchical and controlled Olympics organisation as a system of power that regulates the behaviour and roles of all those connected with it. In doing so, Roy and H.G. also function as cranks. This results from their various blustering tirades about whatever they think is either wrong or right with the Sydney Olympics. Such foolish movements are mobilised from bodies and faces that in many ways are indistinct from the targets of their satire. As the discussions of Gunston and Kennedy highlight, such complicity is a further characteristic of the carnivalesque fool. In The dream Roy and H.G. occupy a flashy set, complete with the large news desk at which they sit, and a background of television monitors, Olympic flame and Channel Seven logo. In this there is a clearly visible complicity with the target of their satire. They wear the sports jackets, shirt and tie of the other Channel Seven studio commentators and thus are without the continual visual grotesqueness that makes television images such as Gunston, or indeed Kath and Kim, which I shall address shortly, sites for the mobilisation of inhabited resistance. In this complicity Roy and H.G. engage in what Massumi describes as a productive mode of mimicry (1998, p.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116060 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM 61).120 Indeed, of the three examples discussed in this chapter Roy and H.G. are arguably the strongest example of the resistive power of mimicry, in that their absurd opinions and views are sometimes also taken seriously. There are many other times, however, when Roy and H.G. do emerge as visually grotesque through disrupting the traditional attire and illusions of the serious televisual face. In this way, a scenic invocation of carnival produces a resistive inhabiting of the television image of control. For example, on a number of occasions H.G. plonks his feet up on the desk to reveal he is wearing the official platypus mascot fluffy slippers. Also, in the penultimate episode, instead of a dress shirt and tie H.G. sports the garish Mambo designed shirt that the Australian team is to wear at the closing ceremony, under his jacket. At another point, when discussing the rules and technicalities of race walking, Roy clambers on the desk to reveal jeans and sneakers worn in combination with his formal jacket and tie. These seemingly spontaneous episodes and actions interrupt the image’s construction of serious sporting authorities, producing images that resist the serious televisual mode of address through the carnivalesque practice of displaying the usually unseen lower body. This type of comic practice will also be discussed in more detail in regard to the vernacular of The dream. Mostly, however, in the formality of their appearance and setting Roy and H.G. are not so far removed from the initial appearance of Bruce Gyngell on Australian broadcast television. And indeed, Gyngell’s suits and formality as a signal of authority have continued, as we have noted in the example of Graham Kennedy’s immaculate attire. The suit as a signal of authority continues to feature in contemporary television images as well. Gunston too was formally attired although, like his face and movements, his suit was resistant to the serious verbal discourse he attempted to produce, in its bright, shiny aqua blue. In spite of the instances described above Roy and H.G. are closer to the mode of operation observed in the Kennedy images. Their inhabited resistance is produced through the disjunctive synthesis of sound and image. Employing the mode of journalism and television news, they proceed to tactically resist the style of television image they also inhabit through their exaggerated gesture and verbal bluster. Similar to Kennedy’s practice of mugging, their faces are characterised by excessive reactions of outrage, shock, despair and joy. The two figures also exaggerate their physical gestures to further produce an excessive and resistive televisual face. In this way there are few stabilising, reassuring

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116161 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM movements that can be observed. In their interactions with each other there is continual disruption and interference through sudden vocal changes in pace and volume, as well as opinions that can fluctuate wildly from one side of an argument to another, in swift, unexpected about-turns. Once again, we can observe a scenic iteration of the techno-materiality of televisual liveness and its capacity to accommodate interference and disruption. In comparison to the solo figures of Kennedy and Gunston, with Roy and H.G. the comic excess is literally doubled, intensifying further the force of these carnivalesque fools and their televisual configuration of resistance. “Hello boys” These points can be illustrated through specific examples from various segments of The dream. The first is in their commentating practice. Prior to Sydney 2000 Roy and H.G. were well-known in Australia for their commentating performances. Throughout the three matches each year of rugby league’s State of Origin, where a team from Queensland compete against a team from New South Wales, Roy and H.G. would provide a live radio broadcast of the games on Triple J, encouraging listeners to turn down the sound on the television coverage and turn up their radio. What ensued would be a riot of ridiculous nicknames and description, in what Batchen describes as “sexual innuendo and near libellous commentary” (2002, p. 187). Similar broadcasts take place annually at the end-of-season rugby league and AFL grand finals. As Batchen describes: They then offer a running commentary over the top of the TV broadcast, incorporating everything into their aural satire from the national anthem played at the opening ceremonies (which they replace with an Aboriginal pop song from the 1970s) to the aimless camera pans over the crowd. The result is an extraordinary phantasmagoria of images and sound during which the very form of broadcast television is held up to ridicule and critique. (Batchen 2002, p. 187) As Batchen astutely notes, in these joyous sporting occasions Roy and H.G.’s satire is not only directed at sport, but also the way in which sport is produced as a television event. That is, they comment not only on the game, but also on the images of the television commentators and the images of the crowd, drawing attention to the comic potential of these television images as part of the overall sporting event. The duo carried these techniques through to The dream where night after night they would produce a re-commentary on

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116262 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM many of the Games’ more marginal sports, as well as incidents that may have been overlooked in the mainstream media because of the lack of involvement of high-profile sporting nations and/or Australia. As a practice television re-commentary can be described in terms of the technological operations of control. It encompasses the techniques of disciplinary surveillance and observation, which through the omni-presence of the television technology engages with the world of sport as an open and accessible field of operation. Some of Roy and H.G.’s favourite sports in The dream were water polo, Greco-Roman wrestling, judo, weightlifting, boxing and men’s gymnastics. For many of these sports, Roy and H.G.’s re-commentary exaggerated the sexualised discourses of sport to the point where innuendo was transformed into sexual explicitness. A potent brand of homoeroticism permeated their re-commentary and they produced a specifically grotesque vernacular to describe the sporting images. A connection can be drawn between Roy and H.G.’s re-commentary on these sports and Bakhtin’s description of the carnivalesque language known as billingsgate and the other forms of comic parody and composition of folk humour characteristic of carnival (1994, pp. 201-206). Specifically, billingsgate is a term given to the language of carnival that encompasses “curses, oaths, slang, humor, popular tricks and jokes, scatological forms, in fact all the ‘low’ and ‘dirty’ sorts of folk humor” (Stallybrass and White 1986, p. 8). In their re-commentary Roy and H.G. provide an excessive repetition and reference to male genitalia and bodily organs that resonates with Bakhtin’s description of “grotesque bodily billingsgate themes: diseases, monstrosities, organs of the lower stratum” (1994, p. 222). As part of this in their re-commentary Roy and H.G. also emphasise the homoerotic connotations of men’s sports. This is particularly apparent in their re-commentary on judo and Greco-Roman wrestling with continual observations on the competitors “having a grope”, “going for a feel”, “going the back door” and “whack someone on his back and grab his tool bag”. Similar references to the male genitalia and homoerotic themes infused their re-commentary on the men’s gymnastics. In the floor routines a gymnast who falls flat on his front is “battering the sav”, legs open in the air is known as “hello boys” or “I’m expecting company”. Placing legs together is then referred to as “closing the door”, while the splits is known as a “flat bag”. Indeed, throughout these scenes there is a clear obsession and reiteration of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116363 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM the open bodily orifices, particularly of the lower body, characteristic of the grotesque realism of carnival. Using these terms to mimic the official technical discourses of televised sport, in the manner of sports commentary with the typical low tone of the voice, following closely the ebbs and flows of the unfolding event, Roy and H.G. produce re-commentary permeated by sexual themes which fits quite beautifully with the images as commentary should. In this way, a different image of televisual sport is constructed through explicitly sexual, homoerotic themes, mocking the heterosexual and homophobic culture of public sporting discourses in Australia. It is the sexually explicit re-commentary that is also, in fact, engaging with the unfolding televisual scenes in the exacting, observational practice of the sporting commentator that constructs the images from The dream as actualisations of tactical, inhabited resistance. Roy and H.G. are complicitly engaged in the practice of sporting commentary as a technique of televisual control, however, what they say is so excessive and explicit that it highlights the difference between this sporting image and other images of television sport that do not grasp the opportunity for resistance as Roy and H.G. do. Here, then, is a different kind of television event. The sound in these images is not the reassuring, stabilising serious configuration of a Bruce Gyngell, but is closer to the complicit self-reflexivity of Kennedy and the flexible pragmatism of Gunston. Another important aspect of Roy and H.G.’s work in The dream was their nightly interviews with both Australian and international sportspeople. Combining gentle flattery and persuasion with outright attacks, in the interviews the two would manage to quickly disarm their guests, often provoking surprising honesty in the responses from the interviewees. While Gunston would attack his guests through his naivety and innocence, producing bemused and confused reactions, Roy and H.G. are constructed as eminently knowledgeable. However, their expertise is exaggerated to the point where it mobilises an authority that is disrupted by the ridiculous excesses of their statements. In their interviews it is usual that H.G. plays the straight man, introducing and welcoming the guests, and asking some more sensible preliminary questions. He then invites Roy to join the conversation, who asks the more pointed and direct questions. A regular theme here is Roy’s personalisation of his questions, often prefaced with “when I was being coached with my

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116464 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM [insert any sport here]…”. This is a move that in many ways is similar to Gunston’s invocation of the personal, in the anecdotes of his childhood and life that he includes in his interviews. There is a flexibility and mobility then that configures Roy and H.G. as sporting authorities. They can adapt to any interview situation through their excessive authority and exaggerated sporting expertise, which is a comic articulation of the trend of contemporary television sports to employ ex-players as presenters and commentators so that they may offer personal, expert advice in their discussion of proceedings.121 There is an explicit historicising gesture in such televisual scenes, located at the site of personal memories and past glories. Roy’s invocation of his personal and vast sporting experience produces the television image as historical, as well as subjective and individual. Throughout The dream memories of Olympic Games past are also scenically articulated through an excessive nationalist, historicising swagger. 1896, the year the Olympics were revived in the modern era, is constantly referred to as the “Edwin Flack Games” – the name of Australia’s lone competitor and medallist from that year. Also, many discussions are held around the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, recurringly and disparagingly referred to as the “toilet games”, in an explicitly grotesque image that also expresses anti-American sentiment. Atlanta functions as a constant point of contrast for Sydney which Roy and H.G. decide will be remembered as the “sublime games” or the “greatest games ever”. In the final episode of The dream of September 30, 2000 Roy and H.G. engage in a hyperbolic discussion of Sydney’s place in history asserting that Sydney has “thrown down the gauntlet”, “for the rest of games in eternity”, noting that future cities “will have to be bloody good to beat what we’ve turned on”. The reconfiguration and construction of alternative Olympics history did not always have a national inflection. Every programme is introduced with a particular title for the day of the week for which Roy and H.G. then provide an historical explanation from past games. For example “Finger-lickin Friday” is so named from an incident in 1904 at the St Louis games where Americans dropped live chickens into boiling oil and then ate them – a tradition that Roy and H.G. assure the viewer continues today. “Supernatural Sunday” comes from an incident at the games in Antwerp where the ghost of an ancient Greek athlete appeared before the crowd. Through such televisual scenes

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116565 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM history becomes a flexible, shifting and imaginative field of operation, akin to the open social field of control. A nationalist bluster and swagger was mobilised through various continuing themes of The dream. There was an ongoing, sometimes sly, sometimes explicit anti-American sentiment, focussed through the denigration of Atlanta, as well as more open tirades addressing the stereotypical stupidity and arrogance of Americans.122 Similarly, ongoing comparisons between the success of Australia and the lack of success for New Zealand (a traditional sporting competitor) were a recurring topic of discussion. Also, frequent invocations of the Australian nation as a coherent sporting community were displayed through excessive generalisations regarding the effect of the Olympics on the community, such as “The whole nation wants to take up sport”, or, following a silver medal for Australia in the long-jump, “The whole nation has gone jumping crazy”. As with Kath and Kim, Roy and H.G. produce and mobilise a creative Australian vernacular and language in their inhabited resistance of the television technology’s usual procedures of control. The aforementioned sexual innuendo plays a part in this, as do the constant nationalist invocations of Australia as a sports-mad television audience. This is also combined with Roy and H.G.’s inhabitation of televisual and media sporting clichés. They employ certain phrases and clichés to excess, and in doing so accentuate the hyperbole and ridiculousness of their usual employment in non-satirical sporting broadcasts. Indeed, in The dream episode of 27 September, H.G. explicitly acknowledges this process in reference to their continual use of words and phrases such as “tilt”, “throw down the gauntlet” and “cauldron”, stating that he and Roy are aiming to “devalue words of meaning by using them all the time”. That is, an excessive use of the traditional language of televisual sport is one way in which its established meanings can be resisted. Or, to put this another way, Roy and H.G. inhabit the world of televisual sport and in their carnivalesque practices of comic excess and exaggeration are at once complicit with, and resisting, the regulatory and stabilising controls of scenic television conventions of commentary and description. Th e battler’s prince This production of inhabited resistance is also clearly mobilised in one of The dream’s more memorable creations, the alternative Games mascot of “Fatso, the fat-arsed wombat” otherwise known as “the battler’s prince”. As a symbol of the Sydney Olympics, Fatso is indeed a grotesque, carnivalesque mascot.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116666 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM An excessive image of the lower body, Fatso slyly recalls former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating’s infamous comment that Australia was situated at the “arse-end” of the world. The idea of a mascot can be understood as functioning as a metaphor, a sign that mobilises meanings and comparisons between what it is and what it is associated with. In Sydney there were three official mascots in the form of anthropomorphised cuddly Australian animals. They were Millie the echidna, Syd the platypus and Olly the kookaburra (Australian government culture and recreation 2000, p. 1 of 1). Small, cute, friendly and welcoming, these official mascots were designed to draw positive connections between these characteristics and Sydney’s hosting of the Olympics. The dream’s mascot Fatso took the form of the traditional plush toy, and was also exclusively presented to guests of the programme in the form of a collector’s pin. A recurring theme throughout The dream was the failure of official mascots to capture the public imagination and the superiority of Fatso. Roy and H.G. were consistently disparaging of the Australian Olympic Committee’s choice of mascots and merchandising, continually referring to “Syd, Olly and Dickhead”. In one memorable scene Roy asks of Syd and friends in mock bemusement: “Why didn’t they work – they’re so cute?” to which H.G. replies, “but as I keep pointing out, this just stomps all over them”. And he uses Fatso to pummel the cute mascots all over the desk. Like the official mascots, during the course of the Games Fatso (through the efforts of The dream) made appearances at various sporting events. In the first week he notoriously was carried by a number of Australian swimmers at their medal ceremonies. This prompted a swift and rather humourless response from the International Olympic Committee in the form of memo stating, “Fatso is not allowed to appear with athletes anymore”. After reading this proclamation on the programme Roy rejects the ruling saying, “we’re going to try it on and the IOC can get stuffed”. Following this episode Fatso continued to be displayed during the programme, being feted by athletes and discussed by the international media. Fatso also occupied centre stage in Roy and H.G.’s interviews with athletes, all of which concluded with a photo being taken of the guest holding Fatso. Fatso’s circulation throughout the Olympics and the broadcast on this on television highlights again the operation of control. Fatso is an example of a shifting meta-product that can flow with the forces of contemporary

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116767 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM capitalism. Yet, he also highlights the virtuality of inhabited resistance that is a potentiality of the televisual operation of control. Like his creators Roy and H.G., Fatso demonstrates how a movement of inhabited resistance can occupy the televisual event of control, while exploiting it to different effect. Once again this is the complicitly productive mimicry that has been noted already in this discussion. Fatso mimics the role of a mascot, and in doing so produces interference and disruption throughout the capitalist system of operation. The wombat mobilises a less cute and cuddly notion of the Sydney Olympics. By intervening in the Olympics’ capitalist field of operation Fatso produced a connection to Australia as fat, short-sighted and struggling to achieve anything at all. Just as Gunston inhabited the Whitlam televisual event and turned it into a joke, Fatso inhabits and resists the televisual event of the Sydney Olympics, transforming the event into an arse. While thousands purchased tickets to be part of the crowds at the various venues and stadiums, for the majority of audiences, the Olympics is a television event that is engaged with through its television images. One of the increasingly rare episodes in the television schedule that is broadcast globally, the Olympics exploits television’s capacity for liveness in the technical sense. Also, in the broadcast of spontaneous and contingent events, the many scenes of the Olympics actualise television’s potential for disruption and interference in the techno-materiality of the television image. While there may be expectations as to the likely outcome of any sporting event in terms of winners and losers, produced as television images such events reiterate the televisual potential that things might not appear as planned. As a televisual event, then, sporting events such as the Olympics intensify the virtual contingency and spontaneity of the televisual technology, the connection between the techno-materiality of televisual liveness and the scenic operation of control and resistance. In the images of Roy and H.G., we once again can note the tactical processes of disruption and interference specific to the televisual processes, in scenic configurations of carnivalesque excesses. Just as we saw Gunston transform the Whitlam incident into a television event of a political joke, Roy and H.G. perform a similar operation in the field of television sport. By employing the carnivalesque tactics of excess and exaggeration they actualise television sport’s potential for comedy, resistively inhabiting television’s official sporting discourses. Their catchphrase, “when too much sport is barely enough”, neatly captures the possibilities of such movements of excess. Comic excess

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116868 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM and exaggeration are employed to transform television sport into a creative and productive field that exploits and displays such resistance in the television image. As part of a technology of control, what Roy and H.G. demonstrate is the resistive potential a carnivalesque parody of Australianness and national identity can mobilise within the globalising operations of the technology. Here, the social field is reconfigured again through the operation of television. As a final point of contrast we now turn our attention to the more recent Australian television comedy Kath and Kim. Unlike the blustering images of resistive tactical processes observed in Roy and H.G., Kath and Kim mobilises a feminine articulation of inhabited resistance to the televisual operation of control. Technologically and scenically Kath and Kim highlights the critical issue of resistance in the society of control, illustrating the televisual capacity for producing and mobilising a specific form of inhabited resistance. Kath and Kim: Foxymorons from Fountain Lakes Kath and Kim aired for three series, as well as a Christmas movie-length special on the ABC. In 2007 a further series broadcast on Channel Seven, in a much vaunted move to a commercial broadcaster. An immensely successful production for ABC TV, Kath and Kim has also been sold into overseas markets (with a remake produced in the United States)123 and the characters have achieved celebrity status, with their actors/creators Jane Turner and Gina Riley frequently appearing on talk and interview shows in character as Kath and Kim. Ostensibly the series is a family situation comedy.124 Set in the outer Melbourne suburb of Fountain Lakes the focus of the series is forty-something mother Kath Day-Knight, and her daughter Kim – both self-proclaimed “foxymorons”.125 The regular supporting cast includes Kel Knight, a local butcher, so-called “purveyor of fine meats” and Kath’s “great hunk-a-spunk” who she marries in series one, Sharon Strezlecki, Kim’s netball-mad, “second- best” friend, and Brett Craig, Kim’s long-suffering husband who works in an electronics store. Series two also sees Kim give birth to a baby daughter, Eponnee-Rae, who then features in later storylines, although, with the exception of her wedding episode set 20 years in the future where Eponnee is played by Kylie Minogue, she doesn’t have a lot to say. The scenic configurations of Kath and Kim actualise the tactical mode of inhabited resistance of the event of control. Central to this is the programme’s articulation of characteristics of carnivalesque fools. As has been discussed with

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 116969 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM regard to Norman Gunston and Roy and H.G., the figure of the fool characterises the invocation of the political and comic spirit of the Bakhtinian carnival. Similarly, with Roy and H.G., I looked at how their tactical mimicking of the language of television sport creatively produces the excessive carnivalesque scenes, which scenically construct these television images as a tactical response to the televisual operation of control. In Roy and H.G.’s crank-like clown faces of indignation, bluster and self-importance, we find the comically excessive articulation of national identity that is one strategy for resisting control’s globalising processes. With Roy and H.G. the televisual fools have doubled from the lone figures of Gunston and Kennedy. Turning our attention to Kath and Kim we find a larger cast of fools and clowns, intensifying the carnivalesque inflections of this televisual site, and producing further excessive images of a comic invocation of Australian identity. In Kath and Kim this occurs not through the parodically triumphant celebration of sporting glory, but rather through the construction of the suburban, aspirational classes in a society characterised by rampant consumerism as a mode of self-fulfilment. Kath and Kim provides an exaggerated portrayal of life in a contemporary society of capitalist control, and, through the carnivalesque excesses of its images, demonstrates one available mode of tactical, inhabited resistance to the culture of which it is a part. In the televisual articulation of comedy here, we find further examples of the style of complicitly, productive interference and disruption that is one way in which the resistive potential of control can be theorised. “Th e joker is me” From the song that accompanies the opening credits, the carnivalesque figure of the fool is strongly invoked in Kath and Kim. Combined with images of the main characters in various poses, juxtaposed with aerial shots of suburban streets, we hear Gina Riley singing The Joker, previously recorded by Dame Shirley Bassey124a : There’s always a joker in the pack There’s always a lonely clown, And there is a jester, just a fool, As foolish as he can be, There’s always a joker, that’s the rule, But fate deals a hand and I see…. The joker is me.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117070 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:51:21:51 PPMM Immediately, then, carnival is verbally articulated through the explicit reference to jokers, jesters and fools, and intensified through the heightened affective register of music. However, it is not simply the aurality of the opening credits that introduces this aspect of Kath and Kim. It is also the initial visual appearances of each of the characters displaying the traits that are then explored through the various episodes. Borrowing from the style of daytime soap opera to reinforce the excessiveness of character associated with that television genre, the characters appear in soft focus, as stills, or simply moving across the image. Kath and Kim occupy the screen for the majority of time, dressed in gaudy evening gowns. Kim appears with a pouty expression while Kath exudes a radiant serenity. Sharon appears in her ubiquitous netball uniform while Brett and Kel exaggerate the serious frown of the soap opera leading man. The multiplicity of clowns and fools in the opening credits is reinforced through the series in the characters’ behaviours and relations with each other. Of the five central figures who form the core of the action, there is rarely one who is produced as more authoritative than the other. Most interesting, as a point of contrast to the previous examples discussed, it is the female characters who are the focus of the action, each mobilising excessive modes of femininity in their efforts to fit in with the society they inhabit. Instead, however, they disrupt and resist through their bodily excesses, as well as their exaggerated deficiency in comprehending the realities of the world in which they live. Such exaggeration is also a mode of excess. As with Kennedy, Gunston, and Roy and H.G. there are connections that can be made here with the grotesque realism of the carnival. Highlighting this aspect of Kath and Kim we can recognise how the program provides a powerfully resistive comical inflection of what could otherwise be seen merely as a patronising portrayal of life in Australian suburbia. Blundell’s comment in The Weekend Australian Review reflects such a patronising position. He writes: Kath and Kim is comedy of sublime grossness, wonderfully questionable taste and just disguised disdain, the hugely successful high-rating sitcom celebrating the most dispiriting aspects of the Australian psyche. Turner and co-creator Gina Riley patronise not only middle-class pretensions but the consumerist culture (“effluence”) that has made John Howard such a long-serving Prime Minister. (Blundell 2005b, p. 21)

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117171 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM To simply read Kath and Kim as patronising or disdainful of the suburban classes is to miss the joke, overlooking the capacity of television humour to produce an empowering site of resistance. Also, the satire, while focussed on the suburban classes, does not restrict its comment to them, as evidenced in the programme’s portrayal of the snobbish upper middle-class shop assistants Prue and Trude. By recognising the resistive capacity of Kath and Kim’s comic excesses through its exaggerated, carnivalesque portrayal of suburban life and femininity we can again see the potential of television to produce and accommodate images of inhabited resistance to the operations of control. Initially, the connection of the figure of Kath Day-Knight to the style of the carnival can be noted through her appearance, which emphasises the excesses of the grotesque body in a similar manner to Norman Gunston. Specifically, this occurs through Kath’s clear attachment to fashion and clothing of past decades. Here, this is an apparent inability to move past the 1980s. With a tight, frizzy perm, garish make-up and colourful knitted jumpers, Kath revels without apology in her highly individual sense of fashion. Indeed, the consumption of fads and fashion is a recurring topic of discussion in the programme. For Kath, it is that she follows her highly idiosyncratic taste without fear or favour, manically trying to adapt her own style to every social occasion. This results in such spectacles as the velcro dots stuck to her wedding shoes (seriously impeding her progress up the aisle), the perfectly coordinated aerobic gear, the “personalised tote” (a handbag with her own image on it), the Ken Done jumpers she and Kel purchase at the airport, and the “prison story” of striped clothing she prepares for her possible stay in jail following the discovery of her bigamy. The verbal and visual focus on Kath’s clothing and appearance exaggerates the point that as a figure she is at once both behind, and of, the times. In the society of control, consumer culture, and fashion in particular, is driven by the quest for an excessive display of individualism, paradoxically through following rapidly changing fashions and fads. In this sense control is actualised in these television scenes through the appearance of Kath as a disjunctive synthesis of flexibility and rigidity, in ever-changing trends that nonetheless she seems compelled to follow to excess. Fashion expresses control’s intensely successful procedures of marketing, as well as the mobile practices of production and distribution that market individuality and freedom of expression only through the universally available option of conformity. The usual result of this is that

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117272 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM everyone looks the same because the choices available to them are strictly limited by what is available to purchase. While Kath is deficient in her lack of awareness that she is not at all up to date with the latest fashion, she is also peculiarly contemporary in her excessive fascination with using clothes and fashion to mark her individual personality. In this tension we can observe an inhabited resistance of control in these images. Kath conforms to the continual flexibility and shifts of the control society by varying her appearance through what she wears. At the same time she resists the latest cultural trends by wearing and appearing in items from another era. In her modulating and flexible appearance she actualises the event of control, but she also mobilises a certain disjunction and resistance to it. In this way, she is both a complicit consumer characteristic of the society of control, but also produces disruption and interference through her excessive display of clothing from another time. This, then, can be conceived as a temporal disruption, articulated in the excessive display of deficiency in the scenic configuration of the image of Kath. Scenically, Kim also produces inhabited resistance to the culture of consumption of the control society, through what we can understand as a grotesque display of bodily excess. As with Kath, Kim is a figure of complicit consumption who aggressively pursues the latest looks and fashion, only to actualise the ridiculous potential of contemporary capitalism through her incapacity to comply with its control of the female body. While Kath’s appearance signals a temporal interference in the culture of consumerism, we can see Kim highlighting a spatial disjunction. As a body, Kim is literally excessive to what contemporary consumer culture provides her. Consistently on a diet in the bid to conform to a svelte image of contemporary femininity, Kim is continually overflowing from her “bumsters” (the more excessive form of hipster jeans) and skirts that are short to the point of indecency, with her stomach spilling out from the undersized T-shirts she wears. In Kim’s excessively uncritical acceptance of consumer culture, we can see the actualisation of control’s potential for inhabited resistance. Rather than simply representing two women who can’t seem to realise how silly they look in the slavish acceptance of fashion, what we can observe is the way in which the scenes display how procedures of control, if let to follow their course and engaged in to the excessive degree they encourage, potentially produce bodies in modes of resistance. As a rampant consumer of fashion

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117373 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Kim is so complicit an inhabitant of consumer culture that she produces a body that will never fit the cultural norms it is attempting to achieve. This highlights the powerfully resistive modes of existence that can be produced in the society of control through movements of excess. This also, then, is a point of commonality between Kath and Kim and the previous sites I have considered. The excessive engagement with, and resistive inhabitation of, control’s consumer culture is not restricted to Kath and Kim’s construction of the female body. Such movements permeate the actions and behaviours of all the characters and their relations with each other throughout the programme. For Kim, having a baby is an opportunity to purchase to excess, signalled at one point through the list of baby accessories necessary to take Eponnee-Rae out in the car: “Backpack, frontpack, port-a-cot, papoose”. Similarly, Kath frequently invests and spends to excess. The episode where she becomes addicted to TV after the purchase of a plasma screen television is a case in point, as are the wedding preparations where she turns her finances upside down in the desire to hire a “pumpkin-style” coach. Overindulgence in food and sex are continual themes also, particularly through the excessiveness of Kath and Kel. This is particularly evident in the episode of Eponnee-Rae’s wedding where, twenty years into the future, we find Kath and Kel have become “yuge” (i.e. huge) after gorging for many years on a supposedly fat-free diet. In the visually grotesque bodies of Kath and Kel we can note the excessive and complicit consumption that produces a resistive site in their lumbering, and definitely no longer thin, bodies. Also, Kath and Kel’s sex life is a recurring topic of conversation, another way in which the Kath and Kim highlights the carnivalesque pleasures of the “lower bodily stratum” that Stallybrass and White note is one of the “discursive norms” of the “grotesque body” (1986, p. 23). In other words, the television images of Kath and Kim might be seen as sites where, through following and conforming to the processes of control, the television images in fact complicitly exceed and transform control’s field of operation. Through such scenes inhabited resistance, which is virtual to the operation control and requires an excessive and creative mode of engagement to be actualised, is articulated through the televisual production of images of grotesque bodies. From this it seems that control’s potential for resistive disruption and excess lies within the operation of control. There

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117474 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM is also a connection to the way in which the techno-materiality of liveness accommodates the capacity for inhabited resistance of the procedures of control that it articulates, but requires particular kinds of scenes to actualise this potential. In this aspect of Kath and Kim the images demonstrate how by grasping and following the opportunities control offers to a comically excessive degree of intensity, an image of resistance can be produced. In Kath and Kim this is specifically actualised through the configuration of the feminine as excessive and grotesque. As images that are constructed through the techno-material processes of television, Kath and Kim articulates the mode of inhabited resistance that can be produced as part of the control society. Specifically this occurs through the image’s scenic configuration of feminine excess and deficiencies in a carnivalesque display of complicit yet resistive operations of contemporary capitalism and consumer culture. “Look at moi ploise: Oim noice, diff erent and un-ewes-ual”126 Through similar processes to those described in the previous discussions of Norman Gunston and Roy and H.G., Kath and Kim also produces an articulation of inhabited resistance of images of control through their tactical and creative invocation of a particularly local and Australian idiom. There are connections between this aspect of the programme and Gunston’s comparatively mild distortion of vowels that contributed to his specifically Australian voice (i.e. the “trooly rooly” for “really truly”). There is also a strong connection to the creative and resistive vernacular produced by Roy and H.G. that comically inflects and inhabits Australian discourses of sports journalism to articulate an excessive and sexually explicit idiom. In carnivalesque terms, Kath and Kim mobilises a particularly feminine mode of billingsgate (in contrast to the sexualised, masculine sporting idiom of Roy and H.G.). Aurally as well as visually, then, Kath and Kim inhabits and resists the televisual configuration of sound in its scenes. Two of Kath and Kim’s best-known catchphrases exemplify their excessively twisted versions of the flat Australian vowels. “Look at me” becomes “Look at moi” and “Nice, different, unusual” becomes “Noice, different, un-ewes- ual”. Similarly idiosyncratic is their dropping of the “h” at the beginning of certain words. For example “huge” becomes “yuge” and “humour” becomes “yumour”.127 Such pronunciations and strangled vowels are an exaggerated production of an Australian accent, perhaps one of the few surviving markers of a specific national identity in the globalising operations of a control society. The

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117575 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM television image and its technological specificity enables television to epitomise control’s globalising processes through the intensity of image production and distribution enabled by scanning and transmission. Locating television images that articulate such an exaggerated Australianness being exported around the world in television’s global economy highlights the potentially resistive forces that the control society can mobilise and accommodate. The humorously excessive production of a very local Australian vernacular functions in a similar way to Gunston’s production of a cringing national face and Roy and H.G.’s overly assertive bluster. This illustrates the possibility of excessive and comic articulations of national identity (such as the aurality of an accent) to function as inhabited resistances to the televisual event of control. A related articulation of inhabited resistance occurs through Kath and Kim’s creative invocation of an Australian idiom (similar to Roy and H.G.), in the excessive use of malapropisms and local slang, including: “I’m gropable” – I’m ropable (i.e. really angry) “I want to be effluent” – I want to be affluent “cardonnay” – chardonnay that comes in a cardboard cask “sow my rolled oats” – sow my wild oats “I’m not as stupid as I look” – Do I look stupid? “No way joe-say” – No way jose “Sass and bidet jeans’ – Sass and Bide jeans (An Australian fashion label) The language of the programme functions according to a consistent and internal logic – as a coherent, yet alternative articulation of Australian culture. As such it presents a creative mode of expression, scenically configuring the televisual production of the social field through a repetitive construction of a local and idiomatic language. A connection to carnival billingsgate emerges in many expressions of scatological and what can be called toilet humour. By intensifying its Australian twists and inflections, and permeating it with images of the “lower bodily stratum”, the images’ manipulation of language again produces a space, or de Certeauian crack of interference and disruption. Effectively these scenes construct the images as a disruptive site, what Deleuze would call a site of “non-communication”, in actualising the televisual event of control.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117676 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Th e television mockumentary The actualisation of control in the Kath and Kim images stems not simply from the scenic construction of the characters and language, but also through the combination of these aspects with the visual style of the image. While the previous examples of Gunston and Roy and H.G. have been connected to the televisual mode of direct address explored in detail throughout Chapter Four, Kath and Kim belongs to a different televisual mode, or genre. This is the sitcom, where generally the dominating style of address is not direct to camera. However, Kath and Kim is not a traditional studio sitcom, but rather is shot in documentary style. That is, Kath and Kim belongs to a style of television comedy the genre of which has been labelled the mockumentary. The mockumentary has precedents in films such as Rob Reiner’s infamous This is Spinal Tap. In television, however, the documentary style has been employed in recent years in a number of television forms, including the situation comedy and, perhaps more noticeably, reality television. As its name suggests, the mockumentary is constructed in the documentary style and it mocks both the characters and episodes it presents, as well as documentary’s traditional, social and realist functions. These have been summarised by Corner as documentary’s “project of democratic civics”, its “journalistic inquiry” mode and “documentary as radical interrogation and alternative perspective” (Corner 2002, p. 259). Corner (2002) has traced what he sees as the recent televisual “shifts” in the use of documentary, exploring the connections between documentary and reality television, defining what he calls the “postdocumentary” culture of television. While in earlier writing Corner has stated that “core documentary on television, however entertaining it is also required to be, almost always works with a “serious” expositional (and frequently journalistic) purpose” (Corner 1996, p. 77), in his more recent essay he observes that there has been a “radical dispersal of documentary energies across the schedules” (2002, p. 263). The utilisation of documentary style in Kath and Kim is connected to the “radical dispersal” Corner describes. While Corner does not mention the documentary situation comedy, the description of what he identifies as the most recent transformation in documentary style — the “documentary as diversion” — resonates strongly with Kath and Kim. Corner argues that in its “diverting mode”, the “veracity of what you are watching is not a prerequisite to engagement or pleasure” (2002, p. 264). Clearly, as a fictional comedy the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117777 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM veracity of Kath and Kim, as a truthful account of life in the suburbs, is not the source of its success and appeal. However, Kath and Kim also employs the aesthetic style of the documentary Corner defines as “documentary as journalistic enquiry and exposition” (2002, p. 259) with the structuring mode of “reporting” where the camera functions as a “witness to visual evidence” (Corner 2002, p. 259). In this way, the programme blurs the division between fiction and reality. The images are too excessive and exaggerated to easily fit into the documentary aesthetic of witness to real events. However, constructed through the visual aesthetic of the documentary style, they reinforce the televisual capacity to reconfigure the world as its image in this site. In combining these two documentary functions Kath and Kim, then, explores the comedy of its subject matter. It also explores the associations of truth, reality and social import that traditionally characterise the documentary as a practice. This provides the programme with a satirical potency it may not have had if produced as a traditional sitcom. The employment of what Corner defines as the diverting and reporting mode of documentary also seems to characterise other television documentary comedies.128 Such programmes include the Australian current affairs satire Frontline (2004), the more recent British production of The office (2003), as well as Arrested development (2005) from the United States.129 Others include the Australian comedies of Chris Lilley, We Can Be Heroes (2005) and Summer Heights High (2007), as well as Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999; 2000-present). The visual style of each of these series has much in common with Kath and Kim as the programmes also employ many aspects of the documentary aesthetic. Firstly, they are performed out of the studio, without a studio audience or traditional sitcom laugh track. Sometimes, unlike the studio-based sitcom, they employ the use of a voiceover, sometimes the characters will turn and speak directly to the camera, or at least through the characters’ speech and gestures acknowledge the presence of the television camera. This can occur through whispering a conversation, by turning away, or, in the technique incorporated in the The office, having characters nervously glance at the camera during conversations, in a movement that displays awareness and concern at what is being captured by the cameras at that point.130 While the awareness of the camera is signalled in various ways in The office and also to some extent in Frontline, in Kath and Kim the characters do not acknowledge the camera in these ways. However,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117878 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Kath and Kim does employ the traditional voiceover and the non-studio setting common to this emerging televisual style of sitcom.131 It also utilises a flexible camera perspective meaning scenes can follow any of the characters wherever they move to, in a marked difference to the theatrically, staged style of the traditional sitcom genre.132 This is a feature of the documentary style implying that nothing is out of bounds to the camera. Technologically this feature also connects to the operation of control, where, as I have already highlighted, television’s potential global reach means boundaries between traditional oppositions like inside and outside, public and private, as well as national boundaries, can be smoothed out through the technological production of the television image. Corner’s reference to the dispersal of the documentary energy across the television schedule is also relevant here, particularly with regard to the televisual event of control. What he describes as the “documentary energy” can be understood as the disciplinary procedure of observation. As he notes in his earlier writing, “the idea of unseen observation” is “central to documentary aesthetics” (Corner 1996, p. 85). That is, in documentary’s journalistic, reporting mode the role of the television camera is to impartially observe incidents and occurrences and provide a record of them in image form. Corner’s characterisation of such procedures of observation as an energy is particularly suggestive in terms of the present discussion. If the documentary impulse to observe operates as an energy, potentially it is able to move and insert itself into various television styles and formats. This allows the observational, surveillance practice of the traditional documentary modes to infuse other genres and televisual practices. Thus, images are produced that perform different functions with other effects to those of the traditional mode of documentary. Therefore Corner’s label of television’s “postdocumentary culture” can be seen in the field of television production in the way the documentary impulse to observe and document the world has become flexible and mobile, shifting its focus to other televisual practices, such as in the production of a television comedy.133 Thus, perhaps, what has been called the mockumentary is not so much as a mocking of the documentary tradition, but rather one fulfilment of the televisual event of control, in the flexible and mobile relation it sets up with the episodes it captures and transforms into image form. This is the distinction between a disciplinary practice of documentary and a control

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 117979 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM form of documentary, one that is arguably more specifically televisual in its operation.134 Indeed, this also is one implication of Corner’s final comments in his thoughtful essay addressing what he calls television’s postdocumentary culture. He points out: “To the extent it wishes to enjoy a popular reach, the future documentary project in television will need strategically to reconfigure itself within the new economic and cultural contexts” (Corner 2002, p. 267). In this way we can understand programmes such as Kath and Kim, and the other documentary comedies I have mentioned here, not only generically as mockumentaries, but as one way in which television documentary demonstrates how the disciplinary impulse of the documentary adapts to the society of control by combining its energies with other televisual practices that also resonate with the production and inhabited resistance of control, such as yumour. The comic inflections and processes found in the documentary comedy again potentially articulate the movements of inhabited resistance specific to the televisual operation of control. As I have observed, there are various modes of actualising these processes in Kath and Kim which, similar to Gunston and Roy and H.G, configure and mobilise an excessive Australianness as one mode of tactical, inhabited resistance to television’s globalising processes of control. Here again is a televisual site occupying the mode of its image production through a resistive and excessive inhabitation, tactically disrupting the operations by which it is allowed to appear. In other words, the comic, carnivalesque excesses interfere in the observational techniques of documentary, yet are actualised as complicit with them. Television’s techno- materiality of liveness, with its heightened potential for disruption and interference, produces and accommodates such movements of resistance, the force of which is intensified through the scenic configurations of the television image. Finally, the combination of Kath and Kim’s documentary style and the tactical, inhabited resistance inscribed through the configuration of its images produces scenes articulating what I would suggest is the politics of everyday life that also resonates with event of control. The use of the documentary aesthetic for comedic purposes articulates the exteriorisation and smoothing of the public/private, inside/outside boundary that is a general characteristic of television. Mobilised primarily in Kath and Kim through excessive and resistive feminine bodies, the images focus strongly on issues traditionally

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118080 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM associated with the private sphere. The minutiae of everyday life becomes the stuff of exaggerated drama and the presentation of such themes subverts the documentary style which has traditionally been employed to expose what are regarded of issues of serious political significance. In its comically excessive combination of documentary and seemingly ordinary, yet grotesque, everyday life, Kath and Kim resists the traditional documentary function. At the same time the programme actualises the political potential of comedy, of the excessive carnivalesque images of everyday life in suburbia. While resisting the documentary aesthetic in one way, these images also display and create a renewed political engagement through the scenic configuration of inhabited resistance to the operations that produce the images of the programme. Indeed, to return to the theme song, with its final line “the joker is me”, we can now understand how it signals the programme’s invocation of the politics of humour in the local, individual everyday practices. This is one expression of the need for tactical manipulation suggested by de Certeau, and the creativity of the people suggested by Deleuze, inscribed through the connected and resonant operations of the televisual technology. Actualise the virtuality of the comic in everyday life. Such scenes illustrate the potentially resistive and political function of television in the control society through its capacity to produce and display such images of disruptive humour and carnivalesque excess. Conclusion The televisual event of control and inhabited resistance has been mapped here through an engagement with images of comedy and humour from the field of Australian television. In doing so, the idea that tactics of humour and excess may be useful practices for resisting the operations of control has been developed further. Exploring this proposition at the sites of television images and scenes has also contributed to my overall aim of exploring the connection between television and control, as well as arguing for an analytical reengagement with the television image in more than representational terms. That is, I have considered the images as specific actualisations of television events. In following the particular scenic configurations of these images, we have noted the television image’s articulation of its virtuality – the event of control, visible also in the production of inhabited resistance. The differences and similarities from one example to the next highlight the necessity of engaging with television through the specificity of its images,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118181 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM as a means of avoiding broad generalisations about the operation of the technology. While clearly Gunston, Roy and H.G. and Kath and Kim have numerous points of commonality connecting the images to control’s field of operation, they also illustrate the distinctiveness and differences that characterise televisual actualisations of control. In other words, these examples exemplify the repetition and difference characteristic of the event, where events certainly recur and repeat but never in exactly the same way. While each example considered here employs tactics of comic excess and exaggeration in articulating their particular mode of inhabited resistance, the images that appear as part of the process – the innocent grotesque, the blustering masculinity, and the excessive femininity – also form a somewhat disparate selection of images. However, my intention here has not been to privilege these sites above all others but rather to point to a style of television comedy as having the potential to effectively interfere in the televisual operation of control. Clearly, the programmes addressed throughout this book are a select group of texts. Yet, they are connected to each other not only through their Australianness, but also through their initiation and emergence from a public, rather than commercial, broadcaster. However, the transition to commercial television, first of Roy and H.G. and later of Kath and Kim, highlights the fact that while televisual expressions of inhabited resistance might initially seem to be a marginal, uncommercial practice, they are not without the potential to enter the broader globalising networks of capitalism and the operation of control. With this in mind I would also suggest that there could be other televisual sites and images actualising similar processes and connections to control that might bear consideration in future analyses of television. Given my discussion of Kath and Kim and its relation to television’s post-documentary culture I would envisage that the multitude of reality television programmes could also be considered in terms of their scenic relations of force and excess and their actualisation of the event of control. Their regular dramatisation of live competition that purports to make all episodes and incidents public, as well as the modulating, shifting relations of participants, offer scenes peculiarly resonant of control. With its emphasis on the formation of alliances between participants that are nonetheless contingent a series such as Survivor is a pertinent example. Similarly, soap opera and television drama could also be understood in this way, with the contingent and uncertain relations

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118282 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM of characters and its exteriorisation of the private in its focus on excessive emotions. Whether or not these televisual forms actualise the same potential for inhabited resistance as do the comedies I have considered here, remains a question that must be answered in future engagements of this kind with television. However, I would suggest that if the mode of inhabited resistance I have highlighted does emerge in other televisual sites it may not have the distinct potency of humour and comedy, and the connection of these comic practices to televisual liveness with its heightened potential for inhabited resistance. As always, however, there remain more images to watch and more connections to be made. And it is this that maintains television studies as a vital discipline.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118484 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Conclusion: Th e television mockumentary and the future of the television event

On December 29 2005 PBS’ Newshour presented a report and panel discussion on a recent transformation of the television technology. Addressing the phenomenon of TV-on-demand, presenter Jeffrey Brown summarised the effects of this development in terms of television’s distribution: Now people no longer depend on the whims of the television schedule, or movie listings. Content can now be watched on- demand on a variety of devices from iPods with video, to cellular phones, to computers, and on television sets equipped with digital video recorders, like Tivo, which allow consumers to view programs whenever they wish and to skip commercials. (Brown 2005) In the four years that have passed since this broadcast, television continues to transform into an increasingly mobile and individualised site for encountering and viewing images. In terms of this book, such developments in technological mobility signal the intensive and growing dispersal of the event of control throughout the social field.135 That is, through digital technologies, television is becoming even more firmly embedded in the everyday of our culture. Consequently, it is possible to speculate on what new opportunities television might offer for inhabited resistance in terms of both the programmes it continues to produce, as well as the relation between its images and viewers. As a final point in my discussion of televisual control I will consider these questions, as well as how this perspective can be employed to initiate further explorations of actual programming, using the examples of two Australian television mockumentaries, We can be heroes (2005) and Summer heights high (2008). In light of the genealogy of televisual control I have traced here, technological developments that individualise the audience’s engagement with television highlight the intensification of the televisual operations of control. Such developments also connect to the operations of control articulated in television’s early days of innovation and experimentation, which then transformed through the era of mass, public broadcasting. By tracing an arc from experimentation to mass broadcasting, these more recent and ongoing developments can also be seen in the context of televisual experimentation

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118585 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM and innovation. Indeed, this is reflected in the Newshour report where some uncertainty is evident as to just what the new forms of television production and viewing mean, as well as how commercially successful they will be. One panellist took a fairly conservative perspective, observing that TV-on- demand is really auxiliary – it is in addition to normal television. It extends the world of television, but it’s really not going to change the world of television broadcasting. The change is in watching things at different times on that same TV screen through digital video recorders and video on demand. (Brown 2005) The point is also made that substantial changes in television’s operations at the distribution and production level are probably yet to emerge, however, for the television industry, “within three, four, five years… it will completely change television distribution. It will change the way they think about things. So experiments now, profound change soon” (Brown 2005).136 Because we are currently experiencing a shift in the operations of television it is perhaps advisable to exercise some caution in making grand claims about the future of the televisual landscape. This does not mean that television scholars should not engage with debates surrounding the technology. Rather, we should remain aware that it is arguably only in retrospect that the social and cultural implications of technology can be most completely grasped. Historical evaluation is one means by which we can produce an informed consideration of the cultural force of various technologies. The genealogical mapping of televisual events of control and inhabited resistance undertaken here provides a weight of historical perspective through which continuing technological developments and transformations can be perceived and understood. Recognising continuing transformations in the technology should be regarded as another turning point in television studies. Thus, the point of closure is also a point of generation from which the ongoing shifts in contemporary television culture can now be observed and considered in future engagements with the technology. Moreover, it is not only at the technical and distribution levels that an intensification of social control can be noted. It is also evident in the recent trends and transformations of programming, such as the firmer establishment of the television mockumentary style that we are witnessing at the present time. Two recent examples written and created by

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118686 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Australian comedian Chris Lilley, We can be heroes and Summer heights high, emphasise this point. Both series are unique in that the main characters are all performed by Chris Lilley himself (in comparison to other television mockumentaries which usually have a cast of character actors). We can be heroes is a six part mockumentary, first screening in Australia on the ABC in 2005. It follows the stories of five central characters, each who have been nominated for the annual Australian of the Year awards. Phil Olivetti, J’aime King, Ricky Wong, Daniel Sim and Pat Mullins each aspire to greater things through the small amount of fame and notoriety their nomination brings with it. In Summer heights high the narrative focuses on three characters at a large public school in Sydney one of whom, J’aime King, also featured in We can be heroes. She is joined by Mr G, the school’s drama teacher, and Jonah Takalua, a Year 8 student of Tongan descent. Similarly to We can be heroes, these characters are also aspirational, dreaming of fame, fortune, celebrity and the recognition they feel they should be receiving from their peers. In both series, Lilley plays each of the central characters, and neither series strays from the strictly documentary style and aesthetic, a feature of the television mockumentary. Both programmes are biting, blackly comic satires on contemporary Australian culture and values. Additionally, they illustrate the resonance between the television mockumentary and the televisual event of control. The mockumentary explicitly calls into question television’s capacity to capture and broadcast real events, reflexively addressing television’s technological qualities. Connected to the spread of reality television, and with a common ancestry in documentary practice and technique, the mockumentary tells us much about the current state of Western television. In particular, in the television mockumentary we can observe television’s potential to offer up formations of inhabited resistance to the operations of control These two series are part of a growing trend in television comedy, where the traditional sitcom is competing for airtime and production budgets with television mockumentaries. In Australia alone in recent years we have seen We can be heroes and its later counterpart Summer heights high, as well their early predecessor Frontline (1994-5; 1997 ABCTV), Kath and Kim, The librarians (2007 ABC TV) and most recently The hollowmen (2008 ABC TV). Similarly, the form is also evident in overseas markets with Britain’s The office (2001-2003, BBC) and its American remake, together with Arrested

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118787 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM development (2001-2003, Fox) and Curb your enthusiasm (1999; 2000- present, HBO). And so they continue. The recent fashion for television mockumentaries has precedents in film with productions such as Rob Reiner’s infamous This is Spinal Tap (1984, Embassy Pictures, USA), as well as the later works of Christopher Guest such as Best in show (2000, Warner Brothers, USA), Waiting for Guffman (1997, Sony Pictures, USA) and A Mighty wind (2003, Warner Brothers USA). As I discussed at some length in Chapter Five, the mockumentary can be discussed in terms of genre, but also it is productive to consider it more broadly, as a televisual practice or style, connected to the televisual event as an articulation of a field of power. This allows us to consider We can be heroes and Summer heights high in terms of what they demonstrate about the current field of television, not just in terms of content and genre, but also in terms of the plays of force, power and the televisual mobilisation of inhabited resistance. As I have discussed in previous chapters, there is a strong resonance between the technical capacities of television and the practice of the documentary. As I have noted, to varying degrees the premise of the documentary is that television observes, captures and broadcasts the real world. Television’s predilection for documenting the world, and the connected assumption that this is a worthwhile and interesting practice, is what is reflexively addressed by the mockumentary, with its frequently absurd and banal parodies of everyday life. What is particularly incisive about both We can be heroes and Summer heights high is that they hold up to ridicule the celebration of mediocrity and ordinariness on the very medium and technology which was a part of the mobilisation of this strong vein in our culture in the first place. The role of television is clearly under the microscope in these, and other mockumentaries. For it is through TV that viewers have become schooled and accepting of the dramatisation of everyday life. In the now ubiquitous genre of reality TV, we can clearly observe the collapse of public and private domains that Deleuze notes is characteristic of the society of control. Writing on The Office Tara Brabazon neatly summarises one effect of such contemporary media practices: “When ordinary people are placed in an extra-ordinary situation and granted value and celebrity, cultural and critical literacies are devalued. Mediocrity is celebrated…the consequences of feted ordinariness are revealed” (2004, p. 107). Brabazon’s comments clearly resonate with We can be heroes and Summer heights high.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118888 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Both We can be heroes and Summer heights high utilise the flexible camera perspective typical of the mockumentary, discarding the three camera set up traditionally found in studio based sitcoms. This means the camera can follow the characters wherever they go. As is the case with so much television documentary, the boundaries between public and private, inside and outside are fluid and open, meaning that nothing is out of bounds. Technologically, this feature of the documentary (and the mockumentary) connects to the operation of control, where television’s globalising, modulating force means traditional oppositional boundaries can be smoothed out through the technological production of the television image. The mockumentary then, adopts the same technique, but with the addition of its satirical intent it also questions the reality of such images. Indeed, contemporary culture’s fetishisation of fame for its own sake (seen for example in the celebrity figure of Paris Hilton) is placed under the microscope in We can be heroes, and also to some extent in Summer heights high. For instance, in We can be heroes, each character uses their nomination for Australian of the Year as a stepping-stone for seeking fame in an unrelated area. Canberra student Ricky Wong has invented a groundbreaking solar panel, but what he really wants is an acting career on Home and Away. Foul- mouthed South Australian teenager Daniel Sim is donating his eardrum to his twin brother, but he wants to be a famous rapper. Ex-policeman Phil Olivetti from Brisbane saved some children from a wayward jumping castle, yet he dreams of becoming a motivational speaker. Snobby Sydney schoolgirl J’aime King sponsors up to 80 children in the third world, but has grand delusions of supermodel stardom. Meanwhile middle-aged housewife Pat Mullins in Western Australia has perfected the little known sport of rolling, setting a world record in rolling from Perth to Fremantle and during the course of the series is preparing for her next challenge. In seeking entry into contemporary culture’s machinic production of fame and celebrity, what we see here is a microcosm of control’s capitalist metaproduction of activities and services, reproduced thematically in the mockumentary. Similarly, the same egotistical, attention-seeking behaviour is evident in the three central characters of Summer heights high. J’aime’s transfer from her eastern suburbs private school to the underfunded public school Summer heights high through a student exchange program is characterised by more of her self-absorbed, and often cruel, teenage girl behaviour. To describe her as

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 118989 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM narcissistic is clearly an understatement. Year eight student Jonah Takalua is no less attention seeking than J’aime. However, of all the characters in Summer heights high he is drawn perhaps most sympathetically. Like J’aime, he is an outsider, in his case due to his Tongan cultural background. And even though he belongs to a tight knit clique of friends, he is further marginalised through his poor literacy skills and his need to attend remedial English in the school’s Gumnut Cottage reading unit. In some ways, Jonah’s character and narrative arc resonates with the semi-tragic figure of Pat Mullins in We can be heroes. Jonah’s desire for recognition comes from break dancing and he takes every opportunity to use this activity to gain attention (both positive and negative) while at school. While in We can be heroes, Chris Lilley created two characters of monstrous and manipulative selfishness (in Phil and J’aime), in Summer heights high, he has arguably trumped them both in the character of Mr G, the highly deluded drama teacher. Greg Gregson, or Mr G, as he is known throughout the school, is a character of high camp, great expectations, and a self image hugely disproportionate to the reality of his life as the Acting Head of Performing Arts. Like Lilley’s other creations, he is a character of grotesque excess, driven by a misguided belief in his own abilities, combined with a willingness to use the others around him to claw his way to some level of fame and notoriety. Mr G constructs his own reality where he is the centre of the school’s universe, and with every move seeks and expects the adoration of his peers and his students. In his own words: “I am drama”. Once again, as in We can be heroes, these three characters clearly articulate the culture of control’s production of the ephemeral qualities of fame and celebrity. We can understand this as the recognition and visibility that the control society encourages its inhabitants to strive for, in the bid to publicly create and shore up their own subjectivity, securing their place in the world. Presenting these narrative themes through the additional layer of the mockumentary actually works against our acceptance of the television image as a representation of reality. That is, the mockumentary disrupts the reality effect that is so frequently associated with the liveness of the television image. Instead of a representation of reality that would normally be connoted by the documentary look, what we find in this form is an ironic and satirical exposition of the banality of such television practices, while simultaneously

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119090 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM mocking the antics of the characters by revealing the disjunction between how they view their own behaviours and how others see them. To connect these two final program to my discussion so far we can outline the mockumentary’s great potential for cultural critique and political comment, in terms of my concept of inhabited resistance. As I have previously discussed, if the operation of control represents a shift in the formation and workings of social power, then it is also possible to consider the political dimension of this transformation. As Michael Hardt notes, “the place of modern liberal politics has disappeared” (1998, p. 142). Therefore, we can now also consider whether the places and spaces of politics may also have shifted. As I noted in Chapter Two, implicit in Hardt’s comment is that, with the shift to the society of control, previous modes of oppositional critique are fast becoming both ineffectual and anachronistic. A vital question then, is not whether control constructs an apolitical culture, but also how our concepts of politics and resistance change in a society of control. What mockumentaries highlight is that, in the televisual field of control our entire conception of resistance can change, allowing us to see how practices of resistance, inhabit the very forms they also resist. Drawing on Deleuze’s short essays that specifically refer to control, I have noted that Deleuze is not very optimistic about the potential to construct effective modes of resistance within the society of control. However, the notion of resistance is not one that is completely absent from Deleuze’s writing. In both Foucault (1988) and A thousand plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) resistance appears as a motif throughout, although it is not always named as such. The conceptual language of A thousand plateaus is filled with notions and concepts that connect to my terminology of inhabited resistance. Examples abound, including “lines of flight”, “becoming” and “deterritorialization” (1987). A useful example, their commentary on language and linguistics where they discuss the connection and the relation of major and minor languages (1987, pp. 75-110), encapsulates to some degree my notion of inhabited resistance. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari propose that we, “use the minor language to send the major language racing” (1987, p. 105). By “racing” they would seem to mean language can be inhabited by pragmatic, creative variations and transformations that are at once complicit and resistive. Furthermore, in Foucault (1988) Deleuze explicitly addresses the notion of resistance as he sees it emerging in Foucault’s writings. Here we

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119191 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM understand that the potential for resistance is always present: “the final word on power is that resistance comes first” (1988, p. 89). Moreover, “the diffuse centres of power do not exist without points of resistance that are in some way primary; and that power does not take life as its objective without revealing or giving rise to a life that resists power;” (1988, p. 95). Such conceptualisations of resistance (and clearly these are just a few examples) offer alternatives to more traditional notions of oppositional or dialectical formations of power and resistance that resonate with the concept of inhabited resistance I have developed here. In this way, they are more relevant to the complex threads and intermingling of forces in the contemporary culture of control. Considering various associated theorists and philosophers in Chapter Two produced a definition of inhabited resistance, whereby it was associated with pragmatism, complicity, creativity and tactics. However, it is also important to realise that the endpoint of such a complicit mode of resistance is that ultimately it is reassimilated into the modulating flows of capitalist control. The practice of producing and broadcasting a mockumentary can be understood in these pragmatic, tactical and complicit terms. That is, by infusing the televisual documentary style and disciplinary practices of observation and surveillance with the comic tendencies of parody, satire, excess and the grotesque aesthetic of carnival, the mockumentary is a peculiarly disjunctive synthesis of comedy and documentary. It is both these things at once, and the tension between the comic and the documentary mobilises a creative and pragmatic televisual practice that resonates with the concept of inhabited resistance. And while we can see the televisual field as resistively inhabited by the mockumentary, in the end any transformation of television’s operations is only ever fleeting and transitory, insofar as it lasts only as long as the start of the next program. Through the flexible utilisation of techniques of surveillance and observation, in combination with the mockumentary’s comic, satirical tendencies, we can understand the mockumentary not only as mocking the documentary tradition, but also as one fulfilment of the televisual operation of control. That is, mockumentaries such as We can be heroes and Summer heights high can be described not only generically, but also as one way in which television shows us how the disciplinary impulses of documentary transform as part of the televisual operations of control to combine its energies with other televisual practices such as humour. It is in this practice that we can locate an operation of inhabited resistance.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119292 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Apart from the satire mobilised in the construction of the characters and the narrative, the mockumentary can be understood as playing with the forms and fields of television production, albeit from a place within it. In other words, to recall de Certeau, the mockumentary is a tactical televisual practice of inhabited resistance. It draws on those quintessential television qualities (the capacity to record and broadcast real people and events). Yet, as these practices increase and flow through the television field accompanying TV’s technological intensification of control, they infuse and combine with other forms, such as television comedy, creating new forms like the mockumentary. By seeing the mockumentary as a televisual practice of inhabited resistance, at once complicit with, yet also creatively resisting television’s well established practices, we can begin to comprehend the flexibility and potentially resistive characteristics of this form. The challenges that the mockumentary offers up to the televisual field are also evident in the difficulty we might have in defining it as pure comedy. We can be heroes and Summer heights high function as cultural critique, drama, comedy, and sometimes even horror and tragedy. The boundaries between different television forms and the whole notion of genre becomes fluid, arguably in a way that corresponds with the smooth-striated institutional fluidity of the control society. As Brett Mills notes, “the conventional sitcom form has been repeatedly challenged in recent years” (2004, p. 68). By portraying its characters through the comic techniques of excess and exaggeration, to the point where some of them tip from the realm of the comic to the horrific, these programs also creatively inhabit audience expectations of the comic to produce a different formation. In these series, the mockumentary has a flexible relation between comedy and drama. We can be heroes swings effortlessly between each of these different tenors. One minute viewers may be laughing, the next they can be cringing in horror, or feeling genuine empathy for the characters. We can conceivably gape in horrified awe at Phil Olivetti and J’aime King, while the gentler portrayals of Ricky Wong and Pat Mullins arguably evoke more empathy. Indeed, the passing away of Pat in the final episode of We can be heroes is a stunning example of the way in which in the mockumentary, “the distinction between the ways in which the comedic and the serious are conventionally signalled have begun to be dismantled” (Mills 2004, p. 68). There are perhaps fewer of these moments in Summer heights high (given that it focuses on a lesser number of central characters), but the frequent

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119393 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM scenes between Jonah and his long suffering guidance counsellor, as well as his remedial English teacher, are not played for laughs. Indeed, the scenes where we observe Jonah’s interactions with his tough father are far from funny. In a few brief scenes Lilley manages lay bare the difficult homelife faced by many young school students and the reasons behind their failure to succeed in the traditional school system, as well as its inability to cope with them and their challenges. In these instances We can be heroes and Summer heights high add to the functions of parody, critique and deconstruction that Roscoe and Hight (2001) identify as characteristic of the mockumentary. Arguably then, these are mockumentaries that inhabit the form, while also resisting its comic tendencies through moments of true drama. Here, we can see the potential that lies in the practice of inhabited resistance for such movements to reflexively turn and twist in even more complicit play. Arguably, the continuing popularity of the television mockumentary tells us much about the field of television production at this time. Programs such as The office, Curb your enthusiasm, Arrested development and others, are as much about the specific characters and narratives they depict, as they are about the cultural and political force of contemporary television. By locating a discussion of the mockumentary within the context of television’s technological operations of power, we can see certain resonances between content, form and style through the Deleuzian concept of control. If indeed television is a quintessential technological of control, then it is crucial that we consider the potential television holds for offering places and formations or resistance to control. Even though television is strongly connected to the operation of control, such operations always hold possible complicit and frequently playful movements of resistance. As the mockumentary demonstrates, in the technological operation of control our whole understanding of resistance must change, allowing us to see how resistance actually inhabits the very forms it resists. It acts as part of them, rather than from some outside, oppositional position. In a parasitic, pragmatic fashion, the potential for inhabited resistance accompanies all of television’s operations, and is made visible when the televisual field is disrupted and occupied in creative ways, that nonetheless remain inside the televisual field. By recognising these technological and political capacities, we can see that despite certain claims to the contrary, television remains a peculiarly contemporary and vital technology.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119494 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM Watch this space The Conclusion’s final point of discussion considers how my analysis and discussion might inform existing approaches and ongoing problems in television scholarship, with regard to the transforming field of the televisual technology. Its sustained reengagement with the television image sheds new light on analyses that also consider the image in some capacity. This includes textual, generic and representational studies that examine how television portrays and constructs particular social relations from which certain meanings are mobilised. My approach to the television image has performed a similar function. However, it has extended the discussion of specific television scenes to produce a clearer understanding of how television operates as a cultural technology with the capacity to reconfigure the social field. Its engagement with the television image also intersects with the field of television aesthetics. It does this by highlighting the explanatory value of returning to the image as a site of inquiry, as well as developing conceptual perspectives that an aesthetic approach might also employ. There is also a point of intersection between this style of television studies and television scholarship that considers government and industry policies and regulations. Not only does the recognition of television’s operation as a technology of control focus attention on the medium’s place in contemporary networks of capitalism. It also addresses and recognises the force of television as a cultural technology, a point that underlines discussions of policy in terms of the function of technology in contemporary culture. The historical perspective on television is also distinctive. This is produced through returning to the era of television’s invention and experimentation, as well as by mapping the articulation of control and inhabited resistance across a selection of comic sites. This book has further implications that might prove fruitful for future research and writing about television. Recognising television comedy’s potential for mobilising resistance, I would suggest informs a critique of the peculiarly humourless tenor of contemporary global politics. We seem to be living in an age of the political mobilisation of fear and the continual invocation of terrorism and both are being regularly employed to strike fear and apathy into the hearts and habits of consumers and voters. Many times it is television, and the contemporary media generally, that transmits and mobilises these affective formations, as configurations that attempt to control and stabilise attitudes to the ongoing wars being waged under the auspices

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119595 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM of freedom and democracy. The politics of this situation aside, what I have traced here is an alternative form of politics, actualised as the comic and humorous inflections of televisual operations of control that distort and twist this technological actualisation of power through the mobilisation of laughter. In this, we can recognise the capacity of television and television comedy to produce movements of resistance eluding the regular practices of control. This is not to propose that we simply laugh maniacally in the face of what seems to be a fearful and terrifying social field, which is continually produced and articulated through media images. In terms of informing a productive style of political practice and resistance, the discussion of television comedy in terms of resistance and control highlights the productivity and possibilities of the concept of inhabited resistance. This is the capacity for complicit, tactical and pragmatic practices to effect change, creating new locations and practices that might elude the operations of the contemporary field of power. It is worth also reiterating the point that this form of politics is not about transcending the social field or constructing a viable, oppositional or outside critical position. Rather, it is to recognise the potential of momentary elisions of control. While almost immediately reabsorbed into the operation of control, such elusive actions provide short-term, contingent movements of resistance within control’s modulating, flexible operation of power. Laughter, self-reflexivity, carnivalesque complicity and excess are the practices that have been explored here as the types of inflections that can articulate such a mode of resistance within the production and scenes that television provides for its viewers. These comic and humorous practices thrive on the immediacy and creative pragmatism that also characterise control’s production of inhabited resistance. Such practices have been traced here in the sites of television’s entry into the social field – the image. However, as I have observed, television might also accommodate other forms of inhabited resistance that would prove instructive to consider in connection to events of control. For example, inhabited resistance might also prove illuminating in terms of conceptualising the television viewer or television audience, which has been a recurring issue for television studies. The concept of the televisual event recognises that the television image is the site of television’s capacity to engage, encounter and transform the social and cultural landscape. In other words, if we fail to understand the specific force of the television image we remain ignorant

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119696 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM of the site of television’s technological power. We also remain ignorant of the way in which the television image articulates what Deleuze and Guattari call the “condition of possibility” (1987, p. 180) of subjectivity. This notion provides some understanding as to how we can conceive of the television viewer being produced in connection with the television image – in fact as part of the emergence of the televisual event. A further implication of Deleuze and Guattari’s resonant concepts of becoming, abstract machine, faciality, actual-virtual and of course event, is the idea that the coherent, stable subject is conceptually inadequate for comprehending the social relations produced and transformed by the complex forces of contemporary power, such as control. In this theoretical perspective subjectivity is not a stable position that is formed by the will of an individual. Neither is subjectivity a position independent or pre-existing of one’s relations with the world. Rather, subjectivity is formed through the collective composition of power and the sites where individuals make connections with articulations of force and power. Television is just one of these sites.137 This theoretical perspective on subjectivity also emphasises that any mode of televisual subjectivity – the condition of the television viewer during their engagement with television – is produced through the connections viewers make with the technology, a connection that occurs and is formed through the mode of appearance of the television image. According to this theory, then, the operation of control articulated in the appearance of the television image also produces and forms the television viewer as part of that articulation of force and power. In other words, the characteristics of the television image-viewer encounter are formed and shaped by the event of control. As we sit and watch television, then, we are not entirely passive because of the assumed power television exercises to restrict and restrain. However, neither can the television viewer be conceived as always actively manipulating the images presented to them in some kind of act of oppositional or transgressive act of resistance. Rather, a relation and connection is formed between image and viewer, a contingent, local interconnection that emerges through the articulation of force and power of the televisual event. This point recalls the image of subjectivity that Deleuze describes as being produced through the transformation in social formations and technology that he sees as characteristic of the control society. He writes that “in control societies you never finish anything” (1995b, p. 179), and that “control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119797 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM orbits” (1995b, p. 180). For the television viewer, whose site of engagement with, and connection to, the technology takes place through the appearance of the image, they are exposed to the movements and operations of control – the modulations, instability, partiality and potential inhabited resistance thereof that I have argued is characteristic of the television image’s production and appearance. Therefore, in their engagement with television, the television viewer will be aligned with, and formed through, the operation of control. How else might inhabited resistance and control also be inscribed in the condition of the television viewer? Does television offer its viewers the same potential for inhabited resistance as is articulated in the technological production of particular images? Potentially, yes, if this is a viewer who makes controlled, yet tactical and pragmatic responses to the television image. For instance, there is a range of channels and programmes available at any one time. The viewer chooses what to watch, when to switch channels, and, with the development of video and the more recent on-demand, mobile technology, increasingly what time and in which format the television images will be viewed. All this choice and apparent freedom within the televisual field of images is, however, still constructed within a field of operation that controls what kinds of choices are available to the viewer. As the choices of how, when and what to watch on television multiply and proliferate throughout the social field, the viewer arguably gains increasing opportunities for tactical, inhabited resistance of the televisual field in terms of the individualised and personal choices they can make. Increasingly television styles itself as a technology of interaction and negotiation for its viewers; they can inhabit its field of operation in myriad ways. Sometimes this is inscribed in the unfolding of the programme (think of the fashion for phone polls and sms voting in many reality television contests). This type of programming scenically reiterates the potential television offers its viewers for individual intervention. Indeed, even the past decades of broadcast television have been predicated upon the notion of choice for the viewer. Even before we could time-shift (to recuperate Cubitt’s (1991) term) programmes with our VCRs and DVD recorders or download favourite programmes onto iPods, viewers were given choices between different channels and the capacity to easily switch between them with the remote control. So more recent technological changes, such as

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119898 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM TV-on-demand, can be seen in terms of an intense dispersal of this televisual function – of viewer choice and negotiation with the technology. Conversely though, as television disperses throughout the social field, the television viewer is also increasingly unable to escape its operations of control. Television viewers, then, become ever more complicit; also meaning that the potential for inhabited resistance also disperses and permeates the social field. However, with the increase in technologies of control, inhabited resistance appears as even smaller, local formations. This does not necessarily minimise its effectivity as a movement of resistance. To recall Deleuze’s comments, discussed in Chapter Two; “our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move” (1995c, p. 176). With regard to the television viewer, we can see how this statement signals the potential for inhabited resistance to be mapped through the viewing body, as a site of local and individual movements. So while there is no absolute model for engaging with the technology there is potential for individual viewers to grasp opportunities for eluding the televisual operation of control. Whether or not these actual viewing bodies and potential actions of resistance can be described (and how to do so) is a challenge that now presents itself for future engagements with the technology. If television continues to become more mobile and individualised, the ability of television scholars to find out just how viewers engage with the technology may become even more challenging in the face of the possibly infinite modes of engaging with television at a local level. For television scholarship, engaging with the television viewer in these terms means the limitations of strictly ethnographic studies remain. Similarly, as television becomes more mobile and individual, the range of possible academic responses to the technology increases, where none might be more authoritative than the other. Responses to television, both viewing and scholarly, might well vary slightly, one to the next, as a result of the disintegration of the mass, public broadcasters that have the capacity to produce a collective, common viewing experience. How to encompass and describe the television event in terms of its general characteristics may become increasingly complex but, nonetheless, increasingly vital. With this in mind I suggest that what is required for television scholarship is a continuation of the type of analysis undertaken in this book. We should address the local point of the appearance of television images and scenes, together with a consideration of the implications of these scenes for the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 119999 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:52:21:52 PPMM reconfiguration of the social field in various formations, recognising the potential connection of the viewer to the image in this way. Indeed, the final chapter provides instruction for future engagements of this kind. There, we saw how particular scenes comically transformed the idea of Australian national identity with the humorous inflections of carnival through which the scenes accommodated actualisation of inhabited resistance, disrupting and interfering in the established televisual operations of control. Viewers who connect to the televisual event through these scenes of inhabited resistance share in the mobilisation of inhabited resistance in this form. By laughing, the television viewer laughs both at and with the comic scenes and the televisual event transforms their body as also connected to this operation, visible through the potential affective reaction of laughter. The potential for other televisual scenes and images to offer connections with viewers, in the configuration of inhabited resistance, must first be considered by continuing to engage with the images and striking scenes the technology produces. In recognising the potential connections the image provides for the television viewer such analysis must describe the local televisual event (as in the specific configurations of Kennedy, Gunston, Roy and H.G. or Kath and Kim). However, to see television’s connections with viewers as simply a local relation of image to viewer can only partly explain TV’s technological force. In the provocation of laughter for example, we can also observe a global response that signals the transformation of viewer into the televisual network of control as a televisual consumer — where the audience is produced as a continuing, modulating viewer. That is, we can conceive of a complicit, yet tactical and pragmatic viewer of television’s neverending parade of images. For television scholars, then, the task ahead is to ride the Deleuzian waves and highways of television’s technological transformations, mapping its various permutations and articulations of power at the site of its entry into contemporary culture – the image. The challenges are similar to those that I have outlined and addressed here – to engage with the specificity of television’s proliferating images in order to realise the connection of TV to contemporary circuits and networks of culture. It is only then that we can continue to explore what Deleuze refers to as an “art of control that would be a new kind of form of resistance” (1995a, p. 74) such as the televisual mode of inhabited resistance traced here. And, if we are on the cusp of a new age of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220000 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM experimentation for the television technology the challenge that immediately presents itself for television scholarship is to watch this space…

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1 i.e. the confrontation between cinema and television. 2 A project that explores such issues necessarily differs somewhat from numerous other forms of television scholarship within the discipline of cultural studies. In this way, my approach to questions of control and resistance in connection to television expands further the diverse field of television studies. As I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, there are many styles of television studies, and a variety of challenges involved in selecting TV as a site for research. One challenge is that television is characterised by continual transformation, both in its place in the various formations of contemporary culture and at the location of its images. A consequence of this is that we need to continually question the adequacy of our critical engagements with television as a means of maintaining television studies as a vital area of research. 3 Chapters Four and Five focus on Australian television texts. This is not only because this is the national context in which this book has been written, but also because these texts provide exemplary illustrations of my theoretical concepts. 4 Note that the dates here refer to the various video and DVD recordings employed during writing, rather than original broadcast dates as these are the texts used for analysis. However, the original broadcast dates for The Norman Gunston show was 1973-1975. The dream was broadcast in September 2000, while Kath and Kim aired as three series on the ABC in 2002, 2003 and 2004. A further series was produced for Channel Seven in 2007. 5 Turner discusses this aspect of British Cultural Studies in the first chapter of his book of the same name (1996, pp. 11-37). Fiske defines the style of British Cultural Studies in a similar way: “The cultural studies developed at the CCCS is essentially Marxist in the traditions of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, though this Marxism is inflected sometimes with a structuralist accent, sometimes with an ethnographic one” (Fiske 1992, pp. 284-85). 6 We must assume this event occurred in the late 1960s or early 1970s given the date of Williams’ original publication. 7 In Still life in real time: Theory after television (1994) Dienst also focuses on television’s technological capacity for flow. Beginning with Williams, Dienst also addresses a number of other writers who engage with Williams’ concept including John Ellis, Jane Feuer, Rick Altman, John Fiske, Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow (Dienst 1994, pp. 12-27), highlighting the attraction of the concept for other writers on television. 8 Providing a succinct definition of the technological determinism that defines McLuhan’s theories of the media, Williams writes: “New technologies are discovered, by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions for social change and progress. Progress…is the history of these inventions which ‘created the modern world’” (Williams 1990, p. 13). For an elaboration of McLuhan’s ideas including the technologically determinist notion of “the medium is the message” see his book Understanding media (2001), which was first published in 1964.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220303 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 9 Spigel also points out that in focusing on the subversive in order to legitimise the particular intellectual project on which the discipline of cultural studies is based, cultural studies could well be partaking in its own brand of aesthetic taste-making (Spigel 1992a, p. xxxii). 10 Indeed the style of project that engages in similar discussions of visual culture can be represented by Sontag’s On photography (1979) and Berger’s Ways of seeing (1972), two well known excursions into visual art and culture from the 1970s. 11 Chapter Five of Television culture (Fiske 1987, pp. 62-83) is an explanation of the concept of the active audience. 12 This can be understood as another variant on the “legitimisation of the cultural studies intellectual project” described by Spigel (Spigel 1992a, p. xxxii). 13 The notion of cultural citizenship will be familiar to those who are aware of Hartley’s earlier writing on the media. For example see Hartley’s earlier work, Popular reality: Journalism, modernity and popular culture (1996). 14 The references here are to Richard Hoggart’s Uses of literacy (1958) to which Hartley’s book is a response, as well as the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, which, as the chapter has already noted, was a founding influence for the discipline of cultural studies. 15 Given Hartley’s apparent desire to take a step away from Fiske it is interesting to note that he and Fiske collaborated on an early text on the study of television Reading television (1978) in the vein of British Cultural Studies. 16 As Jacka (2004) notes: “A history of critical traditions in analysing television would be very interesting to do at this point when the dominance of the textual tradition in cultural studies appears to be on the wane” (2004, p. 33). It is possible then that the sustained focus on the television image as is being developed here is one way of reinvigorating cultural studies’ writing about the television text. 17 A more traditional history of television is represented by Barnouw’s Tube of plenty: The evolution of American television (1975) which traces the technical and institutional development of television in America. As Jacka (2004) also points out: “Media studies academics in Australia…have…neglected television history in favour of various approaches to contemporary television” (2004, p. 36). Although Jacka points out a number of authors who have examined various aspects of Australian television history, again she notes the problems of the inaccessibility of the archive. Jacka signals some histories of broadcasting in Australia, but her discussion points out that very few of these focus on texts or images, choosing instead to trace the development of the industry in Australia. (See Jacka 2004, pp. 36-37). 18 For a discussion of how soap opera can produce a particularly feminist practice of television studies see Brundson (1995). For other writing on soap opera see Feuer (1984), Matelski (1999), Geraghty (1991) as well as Bowles and Turnbull (1994). 19 The capacity for television to mobilise resistive pleasures is evident also in the discussions of Turner (1989) and Hartley (1989) – clearly a popular theme in television studies in the 1980s.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220404 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 20 Clearly the television broadcast of the 2001 September 11 attacks in New York could provide a further illustration of the positions being explored by Doane and Mellencamp. 21 Bourdon (2000, pp. 531-556) also critiques Caldwell’s position. He writes: First, stylistic exhibitionism has not erased genres which systematically use live broadcasting as a resource. These genres stress ‘liveness’ through a quite traditional series of indices such as the direct address to the viewer, or editing as a sign of continuity of the action…Second, refined stylistic treatment is less a major mutation of television than a strategy of American networks at a given point in their history and in given genres. World television, both national and local stations, still resorts massively to live broadcasting in traditional genres. (2000, p. 533) 22 See Gunning (1990) The cinema of attractions: Early film, its spectator and the avant- garde. 23 Just as Gunning (1990) argued that the attraction of early cinema was not its presentation of coherent narratives but rather in the spectacle of the production and appearance of the image, White contends that much of the attraction of television lies in its banality and repetition. 24 We can recognise that this process takes place across a variety of televisual styles and genres, from television journalism and current affairs that often present the microphone or show a camera operator in shot, to talk and tonight shows that display the borderline of cameras between set and audience in images of laughing, appreciative viewers. These televisual practices also intersect with Chapter Four’s discussion of the televisual production of comic self-reflexivity in relation to Graham Kennedy. 25 This term encompasses those programmes that explicitly incorporate signals of their liveness into their content – news, video shows, and surveillance programs – where the technical apparatus (cameras, booms, mikes etc) — can be seen by the viewer. It also refers to those programmes that place people in unfamiliar and challenging situations, often in the form of a contest, and broadcast the result. 26 Also, it is useful to note that Cubitt’s notion of the contingent processes characteristic of the viewing of television connects with the perspective on the television viewer that I discuss in the Conclusion, in relation to the televisual operation of control. 27 Bonner’s Ordinary television (2003) would be the contrast to these types of analyses of extraordinary television events, where, as I have already mentioned, she discusses the various forms of everyday television programming, often overlooked in television studies. 28 Massumi provides a clear explanation of the temporality of the future-past in his extensive example of the event of cutting a piece of wood. As Massumi describes, the happening of this event “is instantaneous, insubstantial. The wood is always about to be cut, or has just been cut. The cutting has no present, only the scintillating abyss of a future-past” (Massumi 1992, p. 20). 29 Massumi delineates further the connection between the notion of virtuality and the temporal logic of the future-past described by Deleuze. He writes: “The virtual is the unsaid of the statement, the unthought of thought. It is real and subsists in them,

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220505 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM but must be forgotten at least momentarily for a clear statement to be produced as evaporative surface effect” (Massumi 1992, p. 46). Also: “The virtual as a whole is the future-past of all actuality, the pool of potential from which universal history draws its choices and to which it returns the states it renounces” (Massumi 1992, p. 66). To explain further, then, the virtual is a way of conceptualising and describing the conditions by which actual objects and appearances emerge. The actual is a particular contraction and abstraction of virtuality. Only visible and perceptible in objects and happenings, virtuality is a way of understanding the relations of force and operations of power that produce, yet are only articulated by, certain modes of appearance. Thus, describing the actual-virtual relation of any site or appearance, such as for example the television image, is one way in which the event of television can be understood. 30 In Discipline and punish Foucault observes how delinquency is the “unassimilable residue” of disciplinary power (1977a, p. 282). For further discussion of Foucault in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory see A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 66-67). 31 This principle is a logic of time that has been appropriated and developed from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. 32 As Colebrook notes of this characteristic of the event, “any repeated event is necessarily different (even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor)” (Colebrook 2002, p. 121). Foucault also recognises the features of difference and repetition in his description of the Deleuzian event: “It is disguise of repetition, the always singular mask that conceals nothing, simulacra without dissimulation, incongruous finery covering a nonexistent nudity, pure difference” (Foucault 1977c, p. 177). 33 This aspect of the televisual event and its explanatory potential regarding the television viewer is considered in the Conclusion as an issue which might be taken up in future research of this kind of television. 34 Foucault also recognises the logic of repetition and difference that characterises events through what he notes as the “rule of repeatable materiality” (1972, p. 102). He describes how events have “a situated and dated uniqueness that is irreducible” but also a “form that is endlessly repeatable” (Foucault 1972, p.101). 35 Deleuze and Guattari also describe such an analytical practice in terms of “reassembling the event, installing oneself in it as a becoming” (1994, p. 111). That is, we try to comprehend the event’s irreducible actual-virtual relation. 36 It is worth noting the use of the televisual technology in CCTV, however this operation is arguably better connected to the articulation of control because it sees the disciplinary procedures of surveillance and observation move out of institutions and permeate the social field. 37 The event of control, then, could also be considered in relation to other scanning and transmission technologies (i.e. telegraph and telephone), as well as the more recent forms of digital culture such as the internet, computer interface, mobile phones and digital music/video players 38 Hardt also makes this point in an earlier essay, where he notes that in the society of control, “social space is smooth, not in the sense that it has been cleared of the

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220606 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM disciplinary striation, but rather in the sense that those striae have been generalized across society” (Hardt 1995, p. 35). 39 Holland also reiterates this point: “Whereas disciplinary power was exercised in the loci of enclosure – in the factory, in the schools, in the military, in the asylum – control is exercised virtually everywhere” (1998, p. 71). 40 Wise’s comments on the connection between popular culture and control through a discussion of The Truman Show appear in an essay that makes an effort to explore Deleuze’s ideas in relation to one media site (Wise 2002, pp. 29-47). Wise’s exploration of control and his bid to “present a somewhat nuanced version” (2002, p. 30) of Deleuze’s ideas, is strong in its synthesis of the concept of control, undertaking a thematic analysis of a film in his quest to understand television. 41 As Wise comments further: We need to make sure to avoid the easy and common reduction of this analysis to binaries: discipline versus control. Likewise, the elements of this regime are hardly new, but have intensified with the aid of new communication and information technologies over the past thirty years or so. (Wise 2002, pp. 33-34) 42 That being said, Deleuze’s comments on the control-digital-analog relation are a little obtuse, perhaps explaining the attempts by a writer on new media like Rodowick (2001) to incorporate the notion of the control society specifically into discussions of digital culture and technologies. Rodowick’s conflation of control society and digital culture proves somewhat unsatisfactory in its inability to acknowledge a possible historical dimension to the society of control, as if it only emerged in conjunction with technically digital technologies. Such a position effectively marginalises and excludes much television from such a discussion. For example, in the final chapter of Reading the figural (2001) Rodowick explores new media’s (i.e. digital technology) connection to recent transformations in capitalism and power, paying particular attention to the emergence of digital culture and a Deleuzian control society (Rodowick 2001, pp. 205-206). While Rodowick may not be entirely guilty of proposing a straightforward association between digital culture and the control society, he does fail to acknowledge possible resonances between technically analog culture and a society of control. 43 As Massumi notes, “A commonplace rhetoric has it that the world has entered a ‘digital age’ whose dramatic, ‘dawning’ has made the analog obsolete” (Massumi 2002, p. 143). In the essay where this insightful comment appears, ‘On the superiority of the analog’, Massumi provides a thoughtful counter to theories of digital culture that might endorse an epochal break with the analog. 44 Massumi also specifically recognises and discusses control as a mode of capitalism: “The current capitalist mode of power could be called control….It is no way underestimating capitalist control to call its worldwide trafficking in modulation the stylisation of power” (2002, p. 88). 45 Others also draw connections between shifts in capitalist modes of production and the development of postmodernism. For instance Harvey (1990) in his detailed discussion of postmodernity traces the shift from the Fordism of modernity to the “flexible accumulation” of postmodernism, as contrasting modes of production. Similarly Lash and Urry (1987; 1994) trace the transformation from “organised” to

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220707 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM “disorganised” capitalism, connecting the latter to an understanding of postmodern culture. 46 Wise also reiterates this point stating: We could even say that in a society of control, one might wax nostalgic for a disciplinary society because in that society at least there were limits to control; one could leave school and go to work. How much worse is the society of control if it makes us nostalgic for disciplinary institutions? (Wise 2002, p. 32) 47 Deleuze’s comments on the impossibility of “escape” from the control society resonate with de Certeau’s discussion of tactics and escape in The practice of everyday life (1984), a point I develop in the following section of this chapter. 48 The politics of everyday life by Paul Ginsbourg (2005) explores the tensions and possibilities existing in the relation of globalised power and everyday, local actions and politics. In the final pages of his book he puts forward a vision of a new form of political actions, “participative reformism” the practice of which resonates with Deleuze’s call for creative local practices. Ginsbourg argues that participative reformism “has the potential to touch everyday life in many of its most routine and intimate aspects…The natural starting place for such a politics is the home and then civil society and then the city” (2005, p. 196). 49 A similar invocation of creativity can be noted in some of Deleuze and Guattari’s other concepts, namely the notion of “lines of flight” and the connected idea central to their philosophy of “becoming”. These concepts are elaborated throughout A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1987). 50 As de Certeau also comments regarding Foucault: “His works, then, combine the laugh of invention with the concern for exactitude” (1986, p. 195). 51 Linda Hutcheon (1989) has described similarly complicit, tactical processes as specific to the “politics of postmodernism”. While observing that much postmodern theory refuses to identify an effective politics, she also maintains that we can understand postmodernism as offering, “a strange kind of critique, one bound up, too, with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyse and maybe even undermine” (Hutcheon 1989, p. 4). In contrast to Jameson’s influential theory of postmodernism already mentioned here, Hutcheon persuasively argues that postmodernism is not devoid of politics, even recuperating the practice of parody, another comedic genre, which was so famously denied any existence in postmodern culture by Jameson. See Jameson (2001, pp. 560- 561) for his comments on the replacement of parody with pastiche in his definition of postmodern culture. As I have already signalled, while it is not my intention to enter into the many arguments and positions surrounding postmodernism as a contemporary cultural aesthetic or style, what Hutcheon’s argument points to is a corroborating perspective on the kind of political and resistive practices I have explored here in terms of the control society. 52 Other writers have noted the critical relation Deleuze’s writing constructs to established forms of cinema studies. For instance, Dienst comments on the difference between Deleuze’s analysis and more established approaches to film. He observes how in a Deleuzian-style analysis: “It would not be the concept of representation, its

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220808 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM ontology, or its truth claims that matter but the mapping of energies and actions that might be released with any given set of images” (Dienst 1994, p. 147). Rodowick also recognises the individuality of Deleuze’s writing, characterising it as “not one but two ‘semiotics of film’” (Rodowick 1997, p. 39). Rodowick also neatly summarises Deleuze’s style of analysis of film, stating that it “requires a pragmatic approach where the logic of signs is deduced from images as they appear in and for themselves” (Rodowick 1997, p. 41). 53 In Cinema 1, one of the tenets of Deleuze’s analysis of the movements and temporalities of cinema is the removal of the possibility of fixed human perception located in the body of an observer separated from the image. Instead, Deleuze is focused on the cinematic connection between image and observer, in fact dismantling traditional approaches to subjectivity. Deleuze’s rethinking of the cinema image in Cinema 1 and his delineation of the qualities and characteristics of the movement- image provide support for the argument he develops in Cinema 2. In Cinema 2 Deleuze’s central proposition concerns a transformation from what he characterises as the classical cinema of the movement-image to the modern cinema of the time- image. More specifically, the difference between movement and time images can be thought through in terms of cinema’s relation to narrative. As Rodowick succinctly points out, in its traditional sense narrative is a structure imposed on film separate from the materiality of the film image. Usefully he observes that Deleuze’s alternative is to understand filmic narration as immanent to filmic images and signs (Rodowick 1997, p. 41). This perspective also presents the possibility that narration may not be immanent to the materiality of film signs and this is what Deleuze observes through the concept of the time-image in Cinema 2. For Deleuze, in the cinema of the time-image, cinema’s signaletic material (the appearance and configurations visible in its images) does not necessarily produce the coherent narratives that characterise the cinema of the movement-image. As Rodowick notes, what Deleuze observes in these examples is an “increased sensitivity to time”, where “every interval is a bifurcation point” producing images of “uncertain becoming” (Rodowick 1997, p. 15). 54 For an application of this style of analysis see Jodi Brooks’ essay Consumed by cinematic monstrosity (1989, pp. 79-84). 55 As Rajchman comments, Deleuze has recognised that Foucault is an “audiovisual thinker” (Rajchman 1988, p. 89), while Jay outlines the importance of visuality to Foucault’s thought generally, contending that Foucault engages in a mode of analysis that is peculiarly resonant with a particular notion of vision, one which “’corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates and disperses…the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself’” (Foucault qtd in Jay 1993, p. 385). De Certeau also discusses the “visual character” of Foucault’s historical practice (1986, p. 196). 56 For instance Weber defines his own key term of the television screen in relation to the idea of a surface, stating: “A screen is first of all a surface upon which light and shadow can be projected” (1996, p. 120). However, privileging the term screen over surface hints that his perspective may not be entirely appropriate for television. Screen and projection are concepts more resonant with a study of cinema. As the following chapter explores in greater detail, projection is not a suitable descriptor for the technical production of the television image. In adopting the notion of a screen for television

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 220909 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM Weber overlooks the potential of “surface” and the key point of difference these terms can delineate for television and film even though he notes how television images appear “not just on the screen, but even more as the screen” (Weber 1996, p. 120). Although Weber’s discussion of television continues to explore how television disturbs the regime of representation, by remaining tied to film-specific terms like screen and projection, he fails to fully account for television’s technological specificity. In a similar vein, while providing a comprehensive account of The image in his book of the same name, Aumont remains focussed on cinema and high art, and does not attempt any sustained interrogation of the qualities of the television image as a material surface. It would seem that the difficulties that faced Raymond Williams in his encounter with the television image are yet to be comprehensively overcome in various forms of scholarship on the visual image. 57 Workers leaving the factory (1894) can be viewed on a video collection of early film, The great primitives: Volume 1, n.d. videorecording, Jasonfilm, Strawberry Hills, NSW. 58 The Felix the cat image can be viewed at http://www.davidsarnoff.org/gallery-tv- bw/Felix_1928.htm 59 The Stookie Bill image can be viewed at http://www.tvdawn.com/tvimage.htm 60 As I have outlined in the previous chapter, becoming-surface signals the tendency for a visual image to make visible its technical operations and processes, while becoming- scene signals the image’s configuration of movement and action, its potential for semiosis and meaning. Such analysis is based on the premise that images are produced through partial, disjunctive syntheses of surface and scenic qualities — aspects of an image’s mode of appearance that intermingle yet are irreducible one to the other. Together the surface-scene relation of any visual image or site articulates an operation of force, connecting the technology to a social network of power (such as for example control or discipline). This is the actual-virtual relation of television – the “double structure” of events Deleuze describes in The logic of sense (1969) and that has been discussed previously. 61 Other writers have also suggested a connection between cinema and liveness. Essays by Burch (1981) and Michelson (1987) genealogically identify cinema’s capacity for what might be also understood as liveness, although unlike Uricchio their respective projects do not extend to including television. Burch argues for a genealogical project of the cinematic mode of representation, articulated in terms of what he calls cinema’s “Frankenstein dream” which would be “to conclude the ‘conquest of nature’ by triumphing over death through a substitute for life itself” (Burch 1981, p. 6). Burch includes the Lumieres’ films in his genealogy, arguing that their actuality films are “an experiment in the observation of reality” (Burch 1981, pp. 14-15) thus fitting into his view of cinema’s ability to technologically constitute a substitution for life. Michelson draws a connection between the content of cinematic scenes, in particular the way film represents the female body, and the technological capacity of cinema to produce moving bodies through the ascription of sensation and life. Again it is possible to note the recognition of liveness in Michelson’s analysis, however, she is less concerned with cinema’s creation of “substitutions” for life than she is with the active, productive capacity of cinema in general.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221010 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 62 This is the view explicitly stated by Foucault when writing of the genealogical mode of historical inquiry: “It opposes itself to the search for origins” (Foucault 1977b, p. 140). 63 As I have noted, McKee (2001) and Jacka (2004) also address the incoherence of the television archive. In a similar vein, Uricchio comments, “film has enjoyed a relatively developed – if uneven – historical explanation which the television medium largely lacks” (Uricchio 1998b, p. 125). 64 Gunning’s view also recalls Foucault’s writing on the emergence of disciplinary power. As I have discussed, in Discipline and punish Foucault traces how discipline was articulated at various points in the sovereign society, however the transition to modernity was characterised by the increasing proliferation of disciplinary power. In his analyses Foucault focuses on disciplinary moments and descriptions that articulate a resonance between the past and the present. In other words, Foucault presents an alternative to writing a linear, developmental history, engaging instead in a cartographic re-mapping of history by genealogically identifying discontinuous points where disciplinary operations are visible. Proclaiming the radical potential of what he calls a “cultural archaeology” of technology, Gunning’s approach to the past is similar to Foucault’s, as he seeks to “grasp again the newness of old technologies” (Gunning 1998, n.p.). 65 Winston’s account of television’s invention acknowledges the tensions that existed between mechanical and electrical scanning (Winston 1998). Dienst describes the workings of the Nipkow disk systems: “In the early prototypes of television, scanning was done mechanically: the field was exposed to the electron source by means of various moving parts (e.g. the Nipkow disk, a perforated spinning wheel that exposed the field as arcs of light)” (Dienst 1994, p. 19). 66 Used in scientific laboratories, the cathode ray tube was an important part of what Winston calls television’s “ground of scientific competence”. The invention of the cathode ray tube is credited to German, Karl Braun, who in 1897 developed a tube that made streams of electrons visible on a photoelectric surface (Winston 1998, p. 90). 67 As this comment indicates, the distinction between analog and digital is obviously a related area of inquiry but is not a primary concern here. Binkley (1988/89; 1993) provides one explanation of the difference between analog and digital media which he sees, “lies in how information is created and stored” (1988/89, p. 17). He defines television and film as analog technologies, describing how in such forms “pictorial information is not translated into a numerical format, but is inscribed by direct (physico-chemical) analogy to the shapes and colors at its source” (1988/89, p. 18). As Binkley points out, the key difference lies in an opposition between “transcription” (analogy) and “conversion” (digital) – a distinction he emphasises in a later article (1993, pp. 92-122). However, as Massumi’s discussion of the relation between digital and analog indicates, in conceiving of the relationship between them, it is not a matter of opposition but rather an intermingling. If we recall, Massumi has argued that a technical opposition or break between analog and digital processes is difficult to uphold: “the digital is sandwiched between an analog disappearance into code at the recording and an analog appearance out of code at the listening end” (2002, p.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221111 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 138). This point has also been discussed in Chapter Two with regards to operations of power. 68 Some, like Andre Gaudreault (1990), focus their discussion of film narrative through the actualities. Gaudreault’s focus is an investigation of film narrative, grounded by the premise that all cinema is inherently narrative (1990, p. 68). In “trying to define the minimal conditions of narrativity” (1990, p. 68), Gaudreault turns to the Lumiere films. He argues that because of their extreme brevity they represent the minimal conditions of cinema (i.e. most consist of a single, static shot, very short in duration). Maintaining that it is possible to identify narratives in the Lumiere films, Gaudreault presents the possibility of the single shot “micro-narrative” (1990, p. 71) claiming that “every shot tells a story merely by means of iconic analogy (and will continue to do so for as long as cinema exists)” (1990, p. 71). Gaudreault believes the development of film can be understood through the way micro-narratives (shots) are sequenced together. What he then calls “macro-narratives” can be identified, while the “micro-narratives” are “systematically disregarded” by the audience (1990, pp. 72-73).Gaudreault’s identification of narrative in the actuality films belongs to a view of film that privileges its narrativity, although if we recall the discussion of Deleuze in the previous chapter, from another perspective narrative need not be considered inherent to any form of cinema. Indeed, as a number of other writers illustrate, Gaudreault’s position is not uncontested in film studies. That is, narrative need not necessarily be a central concept when considering the actuality films, or film generally. On this point, Gunning, in his well-known essay on the “cinema of attractions” notes that “early cinema was not dominated by the narrative impulse that later asserted its sway over the medium” (Gunning 1990, p. 56). In his essay Gunning describes how early cinema is often divided into two distinct styles – the actuality which belongs to the “Lumiere” tradition and involves “placing the world within one’s reach”, and the “Melies” tradition of magic films. He notes that neither style accommodated a classical narrative but can be united in their “conception of cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience” (Gunning 1990, p. 57). 69 Vaughan describes how it was the spontaneous movements of what in the theatre would have been ‘inanimate’ objects, such as the sea, that audiences found particularly fascinating in the early cinema experience (Vaughan 1990, pp. 64-65). 70 Note that the spelling of “deterritorialization” is consistent with the edition of Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1987) employed in the writing of this book. 71 As I discussed there, becoming-scene describes the image’s function of content – the relation between the object designated and its transformation into a sign, while becoming-surface is connected to the sign’s function of expression – the sign’s specific, local mode of appearance. It is the intermingling and synthesis of these aspects through which a sign and its virtuality – in this case the cinema image-event – is actualised. 72 It also bears restating that the image as I am engaging with it here is a digital reproduction of the original broadcast of the Felix character. Consequently, my analysis of the image is to some degree speculative, but as I have discussed earlier, even this engagement is of value for interrogating the construction of liveness in the television image and the emergence of the televisual event.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221212 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 73 It was Baird’s invention of the Phonovisor in September 1927 that allows us to engage with the Stookie Bill image. Winston describes how Baird contrived to use “ordinary gramophone industry audio equipment to impress the (television) signal on a wax disk. ‘He tinkered with it for three months, recorded some images, publicised it, and moved on’” (Norman 1984, pp. 46-7, cited in Winston 1998, p. 269). The restoration of the surviving Phonovision recordings has been undertaken by researcher Don McLean. The images can be viewed on his website http://www.tvdawn.com/ recording.htm. As well as six of the Baird discs, McLean has restored other television recordings dated up until 1935, including some early BBC transmissions from 1933. The site also includes a 1967 30-line remake of the first British television play – The man with the flower in his mouth (McLean 2005). 74 Hills (1996) recounts Baird’s own description of the success he had in transmitting an image, initially with a dummy and then with a human: ‘The image of the dummy’s head formed itself on the screen with what appeared to be almost unbelievable clarity…I ran down the little flight of stairs to Mr Cross’ office and seized by the arm his office boy William Taynton, hauled him upstairs and put him in front of the transmitter’. After paying Taynton two shillings and sixpence to stay in position, Baird finally saw a human face recognisably reproduced on his apparatus. (Hills 1996, n.p.) 75 This capacity is evidenced in the various uses and styles found in the contemporary television landscape, from the technology’s employment in the wide-ranging surveillance of the social field in CCTV through to the practices of reality television and associated documentary influenced forms. This latter point is discussed in greater depth, particularly with regard to Kath and Kim, as well as the mockumentaries We can be heroes and Summer heights high. 76 If this were a cinema image the dummy’s head could also be manipulated by a hand, however it is more likely that this would occur through a process akin to that of stop-motion animation where the camera stops recording between each frame so the animator can manipulate the figures into their next position. In such a form the hand remains outside the image. 77Note that the spelling of “facialization’ is in keeping with its use by Deleuze and Guattari in the edition of A thousand plateaus employed throughout this book. 78 As I described in Chapter Two, the scenic configuration of that image makes visible a relation of force that actualises virtual operation of power – sovereignty. What I am proposing is that we can approach the television image in the same way, but in terms of the operations of control. 79 It would also be possible to perform an analysis on the Gyngell image similar to those performed on the television images in the previous chapter. That is, we could examine in some detail the techno-materiality of the image in terms of it being a disjunctive synthesis of becoming-surface and becoming-scene. As with the experimental television images, the Gyngell image is also black and white with a grainy quality. Although not as prominent as they were in the 1920s images, lines are still perceptible, producing a mildly undulating shadow that continually changes the visual tone of the image. 80 The Gyngell image was accessed through a tape provided by Channel Nine containing the news report on Gyngell’s funeral, broadcast on 20 October 2000. In the videotape

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221313 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM of this image supplied by Australia’s Channel Nine Network, there is also a caption across the lower section of the image: ‘Bruce Gyngell – First Host’. 81 Following his (and Australian television’s) debut, Gyngell continued to have a successful career as a television executive in both Australia and Britain, that arguably is synonymous with the first 50 years of television broadcasting in Australia. Shortly following Gyngell’s death, ABC Radio National’s Media Report provided a summary of Gyngell’s life and achievements. Host Mick O’Regan noted: Bruce Gyngell was born in 1929 and died at the age of 71 in September this year. He had a truly amazing career. By 1966 he was Chief Executive Officer of Channel Nine and went on to establish himself as a successful film and TV producer. He created the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, the forerunner of the Broadcasting Authority, and was its first Chairman. Gyngell was also credited with making the English Breakfast TV station, TV-AM a commercial and creative success story. He even did a stint earlier here on ABC Radio, but Gyngell is remembered well for establishing SBS, the Special Broadcasting Service, in 1980. He was their inaugural Chief Executive, before returning to the Nine Network. (O’Regan 2000) 82 McKee makes a useful point regarding state differences in contemporary Australian television: “Important differences still remain between states. Despite the fact that the commercial stations are now fully networked in urban areas, travelling across state lines in Australia can still be a disorienting experience” (McKee 2001, p. 14). 83 Indeed, it is interesting also to note the somewhat accidental nature of Gyngell being the first face on Australian television. Hall describes how, it was intended to be Chuck Faulkner’s evening. Faulkner had worked in American radio, had the appropriate accent, slicked-down hair with a quiff, wore unforgettable ties and was engaged to read the news in the March of Time style…Faulkner would be broadcasting from a church hall in Surry Hills, but someone else, broadcasting from the half-finished studio at Willoughby would also be necessary if the engineers were to stop the picture rolling between programmes. Gyngell remembers instantly offering himself, and so, opened the show, closed it, appeared every fifteen minutes and in the newspapers the next day, was recorded as television’s first face. (Hall 1976, p. 29) 84 In describing the overcoding of a body by a face, Deleuze and Guattari are conceiving of how bodies are incorporated into, and formed by, operations of force and power, thus moving and appearing according to the logic of that particular operation. For example, to draw once again on the Foucauldian concepts, a body is overcoded and transformed into a delinquent face through the facializing processes of discipline. 85 The implications of this project for reconceptualising the television audience are discussed further in my Conclusion. While control does not explicitly form part of their argument in A thousand plateaus, this theoretical work is an intensely creative exploration of the workings of contemporary capitalism, in terms of its movements and its effects, crystallised in Deleuze and Guattari’s chosen image of “schizophrenia”. In what Deleuze and Guattari conceive of as schizophrenia (and capitalism’s) radical, contingent and creative flows and forces there would seem to be a strong connection between their collaborative philosophy in this book and Deleuze’s later writing on the society of control. However, as Holland (1998) points out, the image of schizophrenia also fails to take into account important aspects of the control society, noting that

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221414 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM “the high-speed control feature of advanced capitalism…casts doubt on the viability of schizophrenia as a potentially revolutionary line of flight” (Holland 1998, p. 72). In offering control as an alternative concept Deleuze produces an arguably less abstract concept than the more radically creative ideas that emerge throughout A thousand plateaus. This is not to say that this work is without possible applications, but I have chosen to focus my discussion through a different concept that nonetheless has the potential to generate productive connections with the wider field of Deleuze’s writing and theoretical practice more generally. 86 This is the point explored in the previous chapter. 87 In his discussion of this aspect of television Fiske notes how the intimacy of television’s mode of direct address connects to television’s construction of the ideology of the family (Fiske 1987, pp. 53-54). 88 Television’s capacity to present the real world to its audiences sitting at home in their living rooms, without bias or prejudice, is a powerful and commonplace discourse in television news and journalism. Indeed, the idea of the world (as either a map or sometimes a spinning globe) is still visible in many news broadcasts either in opening titles or backgrounds. In one way such television images can be seen as signalling an established view of television’s technological transparency. Such a view implies that through its technological capacities for instantaneous broadcast of images (the strictly technical understanding of liveness) television produces images that are truthful and real. The connotations of truth and reality are intensified by the continuing use of direct address in these types of images, which also connects to the notion of an unmediated image. A talking head reinforces the apparent reality of television, through its similarity to the directness of non-technological communication events, such as a person-to- person conversation. That is, the established myth of technological transparency says that because of television’s capacity to broadcast real events in real time and thus directly address its audiences, there is little time for any further interference or editing before the television images appear. 89 The phrase “omni-institution” is inspired by Hardt’s comment on the “omni-crisis” characteristic of the control society (Hardt 1998). That is, as I have noted in Chapter Two Hardt explains control according to its ongoing proliferation and resolution of episodes of crisis. 90 Graham Kennedy passed away on the 25th May 2005. He was 71. 91 Fellow television personality Bert Newton describes the unusual relationship between Kennedy and television: “He wasn’t the most handsome, he didn’t have the mellifluous voice many other radio announcers had, but when he sat in front of the television cameras, all of a sudden the camera said: ‘Hey, I like you’” (Newton 2005). 92 Hall attributes part of Kennedy’s success to his “ageless impersonation of the quintessential schoolboy” (1976, p. 90) thus capturing the cheeky quality of his television performances. 93 Hall also observes the vaudeville quality central to Kennedy’s television style, describing how [t]he writers worked like vaudeville people and saw themselves as vaudeville people. They thought that a lot of the best influences on Kennedy had come from

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221515 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM vaudeville performers and that the sort of thing he was doing in his television show was what he did best. (Hall 1976, p. 91) 94 Graeme Blundell provides a detailed account of the infamous “crow call incident” where Kennedy, purporting to imitate the sound of crow, let out a noise that sounded remarkably like “fuck”. As Blundell points out, there were other factors involved with Kennedy’s perceived swearing, including perhaps Kennedy’s desire to escape his recently renewed commitment to Channel Nine. For a more nuanced discussion than McKee’s of this period in Kennedy’s television career see Chapter 22 in Blundell’s exhaustive biography of Kennedy (2003, pp. 313-320). 95 As I have noted, McQuire observes how liveness is largely unaffected by the advent of prerecording. “Even in an age of pre-recording, the primary televisual fantasy is that everything is ‘live’, is occurring right – or, at least, is being seen right now, even if only by the imaginary dyad of host and viewer” (McQuire 1998, p. 98). Furthermore, Chapter Three’s discussion of the television image’s principles of production formulate an alternative understanding of liveness as defining a particular techno-materiality, rather than simply real events broadcast in real time. 96 Kennedy’s television career ran from 1957 to 1990. The programmes he hosted included In Melbourne tonight, The Graham Kennedy show, Blankety blanks, Graham Kennedy coast to coast and Australia’s funniest home video show. He also had acclaimed roles in a number of Australian feature films but these are not universally celebrated in the same way as his work on television (The Australian 26 May 2005, p. 16). 97 Turner and McKee’s academic perspective of Kennedy, as a transgressor of televisual conventions and genres, has recently been reinforced by the journalistic summaries of Kennedy’s talent that followed his death in 2005. Even though television was in its infancy at the time of Kennedy’s debut, writers describe how he quickly learned to ridicule its conventions. As Kennedy’s biographer Graeme Blundell writes: “We loved the way he spent his life laughing at the orthodoxies of TV…lifting his slim digit to its pieties…sending everything and everybody up mercilessly (especially the commercials)” (Blundell 2005a, p. 15). Similarly, Phillip Adams noted how Kennedy’s was “a peculiar comedy that exposed TV’s illusions, making sets collapse around him, tearing up scripts before his audience and exploring the comedic possibilities of his crew” (Adams 2005, p. 15). Kennedy himself, however, dismissed the notion that he was doing anything radical or revolutionary in his early television career, promoting a rather fortunate naivety as reason for his success. In an interview with Ray Martin, Kennedy is questioned as to his awareness of his “revolutionary” role in “breaking the rules” of television. He quickly answers, “None of us knew anything” (King of television, 2003). While it would be fascinating to know whether such innocence is genuine or merely a tactical eluding of Martin’s line of questioning, Kennedy’s response I believe is in fact telling. Just as Kennedy dismisses such speculation, for the purposes of this discussion it does not matter what Kennedy’s comedic intentions were. Rather we should address ourselves to actualisation and appearance of the various images. 98 The footage of Kennedy discussed in this chapter has been accessed through the King of television DVD (2003).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221616 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 99 Interestingly the visual formality visible in the Gyngell image remains – Kennedy wears a dinner suit, however that is the only noticeable similarity to that image. It seems the formal, fashionable attire was a Kennedy trademark. Hall comments on the way Kennedy “darted around the studio floor – a pale figure in a white suit, clouded with cigarette smoke and gulping water whenever the camera left him” (1976, p. 90). Blundell also describes, “the way he darted around, a pale figure in an up-to-the- minute suit (he was always dressed to the nines), his assurance breathtaking” (Blundell 2003, p. 15). 100 Recognising a connection between television comedy, control, inhabited resistance and carnival also is a point that emerges in the sites explored in the next chapter. There we find a fuller exploration of grotesque bodies and behaviours, in more intense illustrations of this aspect of the carnivalesque complicity that is also evident in Kennedy’s televisual face. 101 “Mugging” can be understood as the inappropriate, excessive and exaggerated facial expressions and gestures. As I discuss in the following chapter this practice is employed in other Australian television comedy, such as for example Norman Gunston and Roy and H.G. 102 As Docker notes: “The carnivalesque stress is always on those parts of the body that are open to the world, through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or by which the body goes out to meet the world” (1994, p. 200). 103 Docker (1994) constructs Kennedy as part of the vaudeville tradition drawing a connection between his performances and that of the Australian theatrical clown from the period between World War One and World War Two, Roy “Mo” Rene. 104 As I have discussed earlier, McQuire (1998) makes this point also. 105 In contemporary television talk shows it has become normal practice for guests to be interviewed whilst promoting their latest book, movie, song, performance etc in a more intensive blurring of entertainment and advertising. Wise discusses the similar phenomenon of “product placement” with regard the flexible, contingent flows of capitalist production in the operation of control. He writes, “product placement represents the migration of advertisements from separated, regulated spaces into the spaces of programs, films, and eventually out of the media and into our lives” (Wise 2002, p. 37). 106 Canning describes one memorable incident where the product was literally demolished: “The night Graham Kennedy downed a plate of dog food on live television, the face of Australian advertising changed” (Canning 2005, p. 16). 107 Blundell discusses the mixture of rehearsal and actual spontaneity that characterised Kennedy’s style. This is evident in an advertisement for lemonade that clearly involved some preparation prior to broadcast. As Kennedy and a woman from the soft drink company verbally celebrate the fizziness and sparkle of the lemonade, we see a shot of very flat lemonade being poured into a glass. Kennedy affects an air of bemusement, although is clearly in on the joke. The segment degenerates into numerous attempts to find a can with bubbly lemonade, culminating in a final effort where milk pours from a can (much to the delight of the audience). Kennedy concludes the segment with “that was funny, Mike [his writer] thought of that too”. In doing so he undercuts the advertiser’s claims, while his final statement displays for his audience the fact that

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221717 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM the television image is heavily constructed and produced. A seemingly spontaneous and unfortunate occurrence (i.e. the drink is flat) has in fact been carefully prepared. However, it would seem that some adlibs were prepared and others not. As Blundell notes, “Sometimes…there was an exhilarating sense of cutting loose” (2003, p. 203). 108 Blundell also describes the effect of the lengthy Raoul Merton advertisement (2003, p. 171). 109 Although television viewing is more concentrated in certain parts of the world than others (i.e. First World in comparison to some areas of the Third World), these places are still subject to televisual control in the sense of being produced as images for audiences elsewhere. An interesting example is perhaps the television images of famine and disease in Africa that are produced to provoke more affluent television audiences to donate funds. 110 Scenes discussed in this chapter, including the Whitlam incident have been accessed on a DVD of The Norman Gunston show, released by ABC TV. 111 Interestingly Hall, writing at around the same time as The Norman Gunston show’s production, reads Australian comedy from the 1970s as “wholesome and rather benign” in comparison to its British counterparts like Monty Python’s flying circus (1976, p. 138). However, in the discussion of Gunston undertaken here, I propose there is immense potential in describing the scenes from The Norman Gunston show in terms of the televisual event of control and inhabited resistance. 112 There are similarities and contrasts to be found here with Kennedy. In the antics of Gunston we can also see connections to such comedic Australian characters as Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna Everage, and the Australian sporting experts, Rampaging Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson (aka John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver). There are similarities also with the comedy of the ABC’s more recent series CNNNN (2004) that also satirises contemporary news and current affairs, most notably by delighting in embarrassing Australia’s politicians. 113 Turner includes a short deliberation on Gunston in the context of his discussion of television’s particular Australian “accent” (Turner 1989, p. 25). He describes Gunston as “unique” in the “direct construction of Australianness”, also noting the programme’s mobilisation of the cultural cringe that dominated Australian conceptions of national identity at the time of Gunston’s production (1989, p. 33). It is unfortunate that Turner does not address Gunston in more detail in this particular essay. 114 Crawford was the production company responsible for much of the local television drama produced at that time. 115As I discuss further in the Conclusion, the myth of Australian national heroes has also been addressed in the ABC mockumentary, We can be heroes: Finding the Australian of the year (2005), a series that cuttingly satirises the construction and celebration of heroes in Australian culture. 116 In recognising the tension between television’s display of resistive, local images and the technology’s globalising processes of control we can see how the re-engagement with the television image being undertaken here connects with industry and policy analyses of television which might also consider the local-global relations of the Australian television industry.

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221818 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM 117 Sadly at the recent 2008 Beijing Olympics The dream did not find its way into Channel Seven’s coverage, replaced with a morning show, Yum cha, hosted by the comparatively blander Andrew Daddo. 118 Re-commentary, to be discussed more fully shortly, is the term I am employing to describe Roy and H.G.’s practice of satirically commentating on the official footage of sporting events. 119 The dream was broadcast nightly during the 2000 Sydney Olympics on Channel Seven. Highlights were also released on video following the Games. 120 As was noted in Chapter Two, Massumi conceives of humorous mimicry as one tactic that can interfere in the communication processes of control. 121 In Australian broadcast television this is particularly evident in cricket and football where commentators could make up a whole team of retired players and spend much of their time also excessively invoking past memories and triumphs. 122 Anti-American sentiment is also a running theme in the more recent ABC series CNNNN which, in its parody of the better known cable news network CNN, uses voxpops to expose and satirise the ignorance of the American man-in-the-street to global politics and culture. 123 The US version of Kath and Kim aired in both the USA and Australia in 2008 to poor reviews and ratings. 124 The scenes discussed throughout this analysis have been accessed through the videos/DVDs of the series released through ABC TV. The three series aired on ABC television in 2002, 2003 and 2004 respectively. 124a The Joker was written by the songwriting team of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley as part of their 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. The musical was not a great success, however Shirley Bassey recorded The Joker and released it on her 1968 album This is My Life. The original lyrics, which have been adapted slightly for the Kath and Kim theme song, can be found here: http:// home.arcorde/bassey/song/sng68022.html 125 This is a term from the programme that describes attractive and desirable women. 126 Kath and Kim translation: “Look at me please: I’m nice, different and unusual” 127 Again, distorted vowels and idiosyncratic pronunciations feature in the dialogue of the upper middle class characters of Prue and Trude. 128 These types of comedies have been discussed by Mills (2004) and Thompson (2008) as “comedy verite”. 129 Note the dates cited intext here refer to the DVD texts of the programmes as they appear in the reference list. Frontline originally aired on Australian television with two series in 1994 and 1995, while The office originally aired in the United Kingdom from 2001 to 2003. Arrested development ran for three series in the United States from 2003 to 2006. 130 The office signals its characters’ awareness of the camera to perhaps the greatest degree of any of the programmes mentioned here. In one scene, characters engaging in a personal conversation are seen but not heard as they remove their microphones

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 221919 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM to avoid the content of their discussion being captured by the ever present television cameras. 131 It should be noted however that with Kath and Kim, the voiceover is one of the characters, usually Kath or Kim, whereas in We can be heroes and Arrested development, the voiceover is not also part of the cast of characters, so arguably carries more weight, impartiality and authority. Although, frequently in Arrested development this function is also reflexively and ironically fodder for comic play. 132 The development of this tradition has been very interestingly mapped by Lynn Spigel (1992b). 133 The re-commentary of Roy and H.G. arguably provides another example of this dispersal of the documentary impulse through its utilisation of a technique of observation in the televisual field. 134 This perhaps also explains the continuing presence of the many variants of reality television in television programming, with the disciplinary practice of observation now functioning as a mobile and extensively adaptable practice of control. 135 The advent of technologies that provide TV-on-demand in the USA has been expedited by deals like those sealed between digital content provider Apple and American television networks like NBC, ABC and the Disney Channel to provide programming for downloading onto portable players (Barnes and Wingfield 2005). Shifts in viewing habits and television distribution are also occurring in the USA through the introduction of technologies that connect to existing television technology such as the Slingbox and the Sony LocationFree Base Station. These devices ‘enable users to connect to their home televisions from any computer in the world with a broadband connection’ (Yuan 2006, p. 15). In other words, television is moving further away and out of the living room, becoming a more mobile and individual image-viewer experience. As Rana Forohaar comments in her discussion of the BBC’s new digital services, ‘just as all politics is local, all news and entertainment is now personal – in the digital age, users can manipulate media to do what they want, when they want’ (2005, p. 48). 136 This position is reiterated by other media commentary on the recent deals between some American television networks and TV/video-on-demand providers allowing viewers to purchase downloads of popular programmes. As Aline van Duyn comments, both NBC and CBS have agreed to charge 99 cents for the most popular programmes such as CSI and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but have admitted this is largely experimental and that they do not know whether people will be prepared to pay. (2006, p. 14) Similarly Kiley, Lowry and Glover describe how, “Martin D. Franks, an executive vice-president at CBS who helped forge the Comcast deal, acknowledges that offering prime-time shows such as CSI at 99 cents a pop is very much an experiment and not a clear path to profits”. (2005, p. 40) 137 One place where Deleuze and Guattari make this point is in their commentary on the face and the description of the processes of facialization that I introduced in the analysis of Chapter Four. They write, “the faciality machine is not an annex to the signifier and the subject; rather it is subjacent…to them and is their condition of

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 222020 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:53:21:53 PPMM possibility” (1987, p. 180). In this statement they indicate that subjectivity is composed by the forces that articulate a particular abstract machine of power and is visible in the production of a face. In other words, subjectivity is not a position external to an abstract machine but is produced through its operation – subjectivity is part of the event. Deleuze and Guattari’s version of subjectivity enables us to conceive of the connectivity and productivity of all objects in the social field– to understand the contingent, local relations of force and power between them. In this view, subjectivity is collective, rather than individual, because it is understood in terms of the connection between bodies and occurrences in the social field. Elsewhere Deleuze emphasises this point, writing, “subjectification isn’t even anything to do with a ‘person’; it’s a specific or collective individuation relation to an event…It’s a mode of intensity, not a personal subject” (Deleuze 1995d, pp.98-99). In A thousand plateaus Deleuze and Guattari call this collective mode of subjectivity a “haeccity” (1987, p. 253). They write, “there is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haeccity for it” (1987, p. 261).

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eeventvent ttv.inddv.indd 223434 77/10/2010/10/2010 44:21:54:21:54 PPMM Index A aurality 82-3, 85-6, 127, 138, 144, 171, 176 ABC DVD 225-8, 230-1 Australia 11, 32, 35-6, 122-4, 132, 142, 152, ABC television 158, 219 157, 162-4, 166-8, 187, 204, 214, 219, ABC TV 158-9, 169, 187, 218-19 225-31 ABC Video 229-30 Australian 35, 159, 164, 178, 189, 216, 218, abstract machine 17, 55-8, 60, 82, 106, 121, 223-4, 231-2 124-5, 197, 221 Australian broadcast television 122, 161, 219 actual-virtual relations 17, 54-5, 59-60, 206, Australian idiom 175-6 210 Australian television 20, 32-3, 35, 75, 122, actualisation 52, 55-7, 59, 76, 106, 108-9, 124, 131, 133-5, 147, 181, 214, 219, 225, 117, 122, 128, 130, 164, 181-2, 216 227-8, 230, 232-3 image’s 105-6, 119, 121, 126 Australian television comedy 18, 21, 76, 217 actualisation of control 77, 90, 121, 173, 177 Australian television history 124, 204 actualises 21, 85, 107, 125-6, 135, 140, 143- Australian television images 35, 144 4, 146, 150, 156, 158-9, 173, 175, 181, Australian television images in Chapters 51 213 Australian television personality 21, 132 actualities 55, 89, 102-3, 206, 212 Australian television programmes 158 actuality film images 103 Australia’s television history 122, 131 actuality films 90, 102-3, 107-8, 111, 117, 210, 212 B ads, live 141-2 Baird 112-13, 115, 213 advertisements, live 132, 136, 141-2 Baird images 112, 114 advertisers 132, 141-3 Bakhtin 75-6, 136-7, 148-9, 153, 223 advertising 64, 120, 132, 141-2, 217, 232 Barnouw 92, 98-9, 223 aesthetics 14, 16, 23, 26, 35, 37, 40, 224, Batchen 162, 223 228 BBC 123, 187, 220 aime 190 being 84, 94-5, 97-8, 103, 110, 112, 115, 125, Allen 224-5, 227-8, 232-3 133, 135, 137, 143, 154, 156-7, 164, 167 American television, evolution of 204, 223 Bergson 74, 76, 223 analog 64-5, 97, 207, 211 BFI 223-4, 226, 228-9, 231-2 analysis, mode of 29, 34, 77, 120-2, 209 Blackwell 224, 229 analysis of television 41, 43, 54, 64 Blundell 123, 131-2, 141, 143, 171, 216-18, appearance actualises, television image’s 17 223 art 13, 22, 27, 79, 87, 137, 200, 224, 226 boat 103 articulation 15, 18-19, 21, 39, 51, 53, 55-6, bodies 34, 48, 56, 110, 115, 124-6, 136-7, 60, 76-7, 82-3, 106, 108, 113, 124-5, 149, 160, 173-4, 200, 209, 214, 217, 221 143-4, 197 boundaries 53, 62-4, 68, 129-30, 137, 179- articulation of control 17, 29, 50, 76, 85, 80, 189, 193 114, 116, 119, 195, 206 Britain 95, 122-3, 187, 214 articulation of inhabited resistance 175-6 British Cultural Studies 16, 23-4, 27-9, 31-2, artistic production, scene of 81 34, 50, 203-4, 227, 232 athletes 160, 167 broadcast 40, 46, 51, 58, 93, 99, 120, 133, Athlone Press 225-6 135, 147-8, 159, 167-8, 185, 187-8, 203, attractions 40, 45, 102, 119, 132, 203, 205, 212-13 228, 233 broadcast television 20, 162, 198 audience studies 16, 26-7, 29 Brundson 28, 34, 204, 224 audiences 12, 14, 23, 26-31, 33, 35, 38, 46, Buckingham 29-30, 224 50, 122-3, 127, 141-2, 212, 215-18, 224- Burch 210, 224 5, 230-2 businesses 62, 64, 66, 78, 230

235 C clowns 76, 153, 155, 159, 170-1 Caldwell 34, 40-1, 43-4, 52, 97, 224 code 65, 102, 211 Cambridge 223, 228-31 coherence, cinema image’s representational camera 44-5, 48, 94-5, 127, 137-8, 142, 105 148-50, 154, 177-9, 189, 205, 215, 217, Columbia University Press 226 219, 230 comedy 16-17, 50, 73-6, 86, 137, 139, 144, capacity 13, 15, 25-6, 36, 38, 43, 53, 62, 146, 148, 152, 170-1, 181, 183, 192-3, 72-3, 94-5, 97, 101, 104, 122, 195-6, 218-19, 223 198-9 comic practices 73-6, 86, 118, 135-6, 139-40, cinema’s 105-6, 117, 210 143, 146, 161, 183 image’s 125, 140 communication 24, 29, 31-2, 225, 227 technology’s 12, 21, 36, 39 complicit 16, 71-2, 74-5, 111, 115-16, 118-19, capitalism 16, 52-3, 55-6, 65-7, 124-5, 168, 126, 135-7, 140-3, 153-4, 156, 166, 174- 182, 195, 206-8, 212, 214, 226, 230 5, 180, 193-4, 199-200 capitalist control 170, 192 composition 52, 55-6, 84-5, 98, 100, 104, carnival 28, 73, 75-6, 86, 90, 131, 136, 144, 163 146, 148, 152, 161, 163-4, 171-2, 192, television image’s 109 200 concept Deleuze 215 carnival laughter 75-6, 136, 153 concepts 15-18, 24-5, 30-1, 35-7, 43-4, 48-9, carnivalesque 17, 75-6, 153, 157 51-6, 78-81, 83-4, 86-7, 106-8, 120-1, carnivalesque excesses 168, 170, 180-1 124-5, 191-2, 203-4, 207-9 carnivalesque fools 153, 160, 162, 169 concepts Deleuze 125 cat 18, 89-90, 93, 95, 108-14, 117, 120, 128, conceptual connections 87, 92 146, 225, 232 conditions 55, 58, 83, 85, 109, 111, 113, 139, cat image 111, 114, 210 197-8, 203, 206, 220, 229 cat-lines 109-10, 112-13 configurations 14, 18, 20-1, 36, 56, 59-60, catastrophe 39, 41, 226, 231 82-5, 105-6, 113, 116-19, 126, 128, 131, celebrities 151, 154, 158, 187-90 133, 137-8, 140 Certeau 67, 70-3, 142, 145, 151, 181, 193, image’s 84, 109, 112, 127-8, 210 208-9, 225 connection 19-20, 37-8, 50-2, 60-1, 75, 82- Certeau and Deleuzian control 71 3, 90-2, 100-2, 115-17, 120-1, 125, 136-7, Challenger disaster 41-2 144-6, 175-7, 181-3, 196-8 Channel 135, 147, 158-60, 169, 203, 213, image’s 126 216, 219, 224, 230 potential 64, 72, 106-7, 117, 200 Channels of discourse 224, 227 technological 129, 143 characterises 41, 57, 81, 97, 104, 109, 122, connectivity 47, 221 124, 139, 178, 209 construction, image’s 109, 161 characters 148, 152, 155, 158, 169-71, 174, consumer culture 33, 79, 172-5 177-9, 183, 187, 189-91, 193-4, 219-20 contemporary criticism 224, 227 choices 93, 173, 198, 206, 228 contemporary culture 11-12, 36, 44, 51, 56, cinema 11, 13-15, 18, 44-5, 48, 79-81, 87, 61, 64, 67, 71, 77, 82, 85, 115, 130, 145, 90-1, 93-5, 97-8, 100-2, 104-8, 116-17, 192 209-10, 212, 225-6 contemporary technologies 44, 93 early 48, 93-4, 104, 205, 212, 228 contemporary television 30, 39, 47, 49, 97, cinema image 19, 80, 94, 100, 105-7, 109, 115, 124, 133-4, 139, 194, 204, 217 209, 213 contemporary television landscape 40, 94, animated 100 213 early 18 control 13-22, 49-55, 57-77, 85-7, 89-90, cinema image-event 212 100-1, 108-22, 124-33, 137-41, 143-8, cinematic liveness 18, 100-1, 105-8, 112 156-8, 166-70, 172-7, 179-82, 191-200, discussing 103, 108 206-8 cinematic technology’s capacity 106 art of 13-14, 22, 200

236 237 becoming-scene articulating 114 degree 11-12, 42, 60, 93, 106, 111, 114, 157, exploration of 57, 67, 207 188, 191, 212 globalising processes of 180, 218 degree cinematic liveness 107 inhabited resistance of 20, 39, 90, 119, Deleuze 9, 13-15, 17, 22, 31, 53-5, 60-74, 121, 131, 137, 142-6, 148, 152, 173, 180 76, 79-81, 87, 110, 191, 207-9, 214-15, resist 70-1, 199 221, 225-6 scenic configuration of 21, 135 Deleuze and Guattari 55-7, 59, 84, 86, 120- shifting operations of 15, 153 1, 124, 126, 191, 197, 206, 208, 212-14, social 14, 67, 186, 229 220-1, 226, 229-30 technologies of 145, 199 Deleuze names control 71 televisual articulation of 49, 120, 140, 143 Deleuze’s analysis 208-9 televisual operation of 118, 144, 152, 160, Deleuze’s concept 64 168-70, 180, 182, 192, 199, 205 Deleuze’s description 68, 128, 130 televisual operations of 21, 147, 159, 185, Deleuze’s image 111 192, 196 Deleuze’s perspective 27, 45 control being 128-9 Deleuzian 71-2 control highlights 73, 196 Deleuzian concept of control 53, 194 control society 61-2, 65, 67-70, 73, 75, 85, Deleuzian control 61, 115 111, 114, 130, 135, 157-8, 173, 175-6, Deleuzian control society 117, 207 197, 207-8, 214-15 Deleuzian control society mechanisms 73 Control’s mode 143, 145 Deleuzian event 54, 206 control’s operations 68, 101, 126 Deleuzian society of control 19, 145 Corner 25, 177-80, 224-5 delinquency 17, 56, 69, 74, 107, 206 cranks 159-60 delinquent movements 107 credits 7, 170-1 desk 129, 136, 141, 161, 167 cringing 148, 150, 157-8, 176, 193 Dienst 25, 28, 49, 91, 94, 97-100, 203, 208- critique 37, 41, 59, 69, 71, 73-5, 80, 162, 9, 211, 226 194-5, 208 differences 24, 36, 45, 57-60, 77-9, 82-3, social 73, 75-6, 152 91, 101, 106, 112, 116, 119, 126, 181-2, crowd 89, 147, 154-6, 162, 165, 168, 219 206, 208-11 Cubitt 46-7, 97, 102-4, 108, 205, 225 images highlights television’s 108 cultural citizenship 30-1, 204 digital technologies 64, 67, 185, 207 cultural criticism 224, 226, 229, 231 direct address 20, 50, 119-21, 124-5, 127-8, cultural form 24-6, 36, 47, 49, 66, 91, 233 132-3, 137-8, 144, 147, 151, 156, 205, cultural sites 60, 79 215 cultural studies 17, 23-4, 26, 28-30, 32-6, mode of 20, 120, 127, 130, 138, 215 49-50, 54, 77, 79, 203-4, 224-5, 229, disaster 39, 41 231 disciplinary event 56-7, 60, 65, 81, 107, 117, discipline of 8, 36, 203-4 125 culture 8, 25, 29-30, 44, 47, 77, 79, 83, disciplinary power 15, 17, 56, 60-1, 73, 206- 158-9, 170, 173, 185, 188, 200, 224-6, 7, 211 229-30 disciplinary societies 62-3, 65, 208 digital 64-6, 69, 206-7 discipline 17, 22, 27, 31, 36, 55, 57, 60-2, postmodern 208 64-5, 74, 106-7, 110-11, 125, 183, 206-7, visual 44, 93, 204 210-11 culture of control 190, 233 emergence of 60 Cunningham 33, 35, 225 discourse 41, 46, 158, 224-5, 227-8 cute 167-8 disjunctive synthesis 82, 85, 105-6, 108-9, 113-15, 117, 125, 128, 138, 157, 161, 172, D 192, 210, 213 Daney 13-14 display 120-1, 181, 205 Davis 8, 225 excessive 172-3

237 disruption 118, 145, 151, 154, 162, 168, 170, facialization 120-1, 124, 126, 131-2, 135, 148, 173, 176, 180 151, 213, 220 Doane 39, 41, 43, 50, 102-3, 205, 226 factory 18, 57, 62, 65-6, 89, 94-5, 102-3, Docker 75, 136, 139, 153, 160, 217, 226 105-7, 109, 117, 207, 210 documentary 147, 177-81, 188-90, 192, 224 factory gates 104 documentary energies 177, 179 fame 187, 189-90 documentary style 177-9, 181, 187 family 7-8, 33, 62-3, 215, 231 drama 123, 193-4, 223 Farnsworth 96-9 dream 21, 36, 91, 147, 158-67, 189, 203, Fatso 166-8 219, 226 Felix 18, 89-90, 93, 95, 108-14, 117, 120, Duke University Press 230-1 128, 146, 210, 225, 232 dummies 89, 112-13, 115-16, 213 Feuer 33, 37, 40-1, 43, 98, 204, 227 Durham 23, 226, 229-31 field 8, 15-17, 23, 29, 43, 51, 54-5, 79, 124, DVD Recording 203, 225, 227-31 145, 168, 179, 188, 193-5, 198, 211 film 24, 38, 45, 47-9, 51, 64, 80, 89, 98- E 100, 102-4, 108, 116, 177, 188, 207-12, electrical scanning 95, 112, 211 232-3 electron beam 96-7 film image 103-4, 209 Elsner 91-2, 227 filmic images 209 emergence 11-12, 18, 52-3, 56, 58-9, 66, 76, discrete 100 97, 116-17, 122, 182, 197, 207, 211-12 Fisher 96-7, 227 emergence of control 18, 61, 68, 89, 109 Fiske 24, 27-31, 33, 38, 45, 127, 203-4, 215, energies 179-80, 192, 209 227 engagement 15-16, 18, 20, 25-6, 29, 31, 34, flickering 104-5, 107 37, 40, 50, 52-3, 59, 90-1, 116, 121-2, flickering mark 104-6, 117 197-200 Flickers of liveness 102 descriptive 79-80, 103 flow 24-5, 27, 51, 84, 97, 129, 149, 164, theoretical 50, 79 167, 193, 203 entertainment 11, 64, 120, 132, 141, 147, fools 76, 152-3, 160, 170-1 217, 220, 227, 229 formality 129, 161 entry formations 16, 18-19, 30-1, 38, 41, 53, 56, technological 14, 90 61-2, 67, 73, 86, 108, 110-11, 115, 125-6, television’s 56, 196 193-4 episodes 17, 94-5, 99, 103, 106, 133-5, 150, image’s 107, 109 154-5, 174, 177, 179, 182, 215 Foucault 55-7, 59, 64-5, 74, 79-81, 87, 106, era, television’s 90, 118 121, 191, 206, 208-9, 211, 225, 227-8 escape 68, 70-1, 73, 110, 199, 208, 216 Foucault’s analysis 55, 57, 60, 74, 82 essays 14, 24, 33-5, 41-2, 47, 50, 61, 68, 70, Foucault’s observations 57, 60 80, 102-3, 180, 206-7, 212 Frankfurt School 27 evening 24, 122, 129-30, 159 function 21, 30, 61, 73, 76, 127, 129, 131, everyday life 11, 70-1, 76, 115, 145, 151, 153, 138-40, 145-6, 160, 176, 179, 194-5, 220 180-1, 188, 208, 227-8 future-past 55, 205-6 exaggeration 166, 168-9, 171, 182, 193 excess 28, 70, 157, 166, 168, 171-2, 174, 181- G 2, 192-3, 196 games 33, 159, 162-3, 165, 219 exchanges 138, 140, 151, 153-6 Gaudreault 102-3, 212, 228 Executive Producers 225-6, 229-31 genres 21, 23, 33-4, 80, 133-4, 177, 179, experiments, early 92, 96, 98-9 188, 193, 205, 216, 227 globalising processes 131, 151-2, 159 F Governor-General 147, 155 faces 12, 99, 120, 124-5, 138, 160-1 grotesque 136, 149, 161, 163, 166, 175, 181, faciality 124-5, 197 192

238 239 grotesque bodies 136, 172, 174, 217 image articulates 85, 129 Guattari 9, 56, 125, 221, 226 image form 117, 179 guests 149-50, 164, 167, 217 image-oriented concepts 18 Gunning 93, 205, 211-12, 228 image problems 25 Gunston 147-58, 160-2, 164, 168, 170-1, 175, image production 50, 100-1, 120, 133, 143, 177, 180, 182, 200, 218, 225 176, 180 Norman 8, 21, 76, 147-8, 158, 170, 172, image technologies 44, 49, 85 175, 203, 217-18 images 14-21, 35-41, 52-6, 79-82, 84-7, 89- Gunston exposes 153, 155-6 90, 92-7, 99-122, 124-32, 134-40, 142- Gunston images 152-3, 156 8, 151-4, 156-62, 170-83, 195-8, 212-15 Gunston image’s actualisation 154 cinematic 105 Gunstonesque image 155 excessive 167, 170 Gunston’s movements 151, 155-6 grotesque 149, 165 Gyngell 119, 122-4, 126, 129-31, 137, 144, modulating 110, 129 153, 161, 214 present 95 Gyngell image 20, 120-1, 124, 127-8, 130-1, producing 52, 57, 161, 209 136, 149, 213, 217 sporting 163-4 Gyngell image highlights television 131 television’s 56, 85, 100 various 87, 90, 116, 216 H images of control 126, 175 Hall 123, 148, 214-18, 228 Images of liveness 94 Hardt 61, 63, 67-8, 151, 191, 206-7, 215, image’s production 135, 144 228 image’s quality 81, 113 Hartley 30-1, 33, 123, 204, 227-8 implications 41, 44-5, 59, 62, 68, 93, 127, Hayden 155 180, 195, 197, 199, 214 head 90, 114, 120, 126-7, 130, 136, 215 incapacities 91, 173 dummy’s 113-14, 213 incidents 19, 94-5, 99, 103, 131, 133, 154, heroes 178, 185, 187-90, 192-4, 213, 218, 163, 165, 179, 182 220, 231 individuals 63, 69, 71-2, 197 highways 110-11, 200 inhabited resistance 16-18, 20-2, 73, 86, historical perspective 33, 37, 43-4, 47-8, 76, 89-90, 114-22, 131-3, 135, 140-8, 150-2, 186, 195 156-9, 168-70, 172-6, 180-3, 191-6, 198- history 32, 36-7, 39-44, 48, 56, 59, 61, 77, 200 92-3, 99, 122, 124, 139, 165-6, 203-5, configuration of 111, 135, 200 232-3 configurations of 17, 76 cultural 36, 92-3, 226 mobilisation of 120, 135, 160, 200 traditional 59, 204 mode of 52, 67, 133, 175, 183 history of technology 11, 91 movements of 19, 85, 119, 180 history of television 36, 91-3, 229 potential 198 host 42, 132-3, 146, 148 practice of 75, 115, 194 human hand 113-14, 117, 119 producing 19 humour 16-17, 21, 70, 72, 74-6, 144, 146, scenic configuration of 118, 137, 144, 181 152, 154, 175, 181, 183, 192, 224 televisual mode of 135, 200 inhabited resistance characteristic 76, 138 I inhabited resistance highlights 74 ideological liveness 37, 41 inhabited resistance shifts 118 television’s 40 inhabits 16, 69, 73, 76, 135, 145, 150-1, 157, ideology 23, 28, 30, 37, 41, 44, 48, 215, 161, 166, 171, 175, 191, 194, 198 227 interference 19, 101, 118, 145, 149, 162, 168, image actualises 124, 138 173, 176, 180, 215 image actualises control’s undulating interviews 61, 148-53, 158-9, 164-5, 167, operation 110 169, 216, 227

239 invention 19, 33, 43-4, 47-8, 91, 93, 96, lines 20, 108-9, 111-14, 121, 128-9, 213 122, 124, 203, 208, 211, 225, 227 horizontal 108-10 television’s 98, 195, 211 linguistics 77-8, 80-2, 191, 231 liveness 12, 15-20, 22-5, 37-45, 48-9, 51-3, J 89-91, 93-4, 97-103, 106-8, 113-14, 116- Jacka 32, 36, 204, 211, 229 21, 128-9, 133-4, 210, 215-16 Jacobs 34-5, 229 centrality of 40, 42 Jameson 66, 208, 229 dismissing 40-1 joke 138, 142-3, 150, 152, 156, 163, 168, image’s 13 172, 217 mode of 90, 120 joker 170-1, 219 particular mode of 105, 117 joy 70-2, 74, 152, 161 techno-materiality of 19, 38, 76, 86, 97, 101, 112, 118, 120-1, 124, 129, 138, 140, K 144, 146, 151 Kath 7, 21, 76, 147, 160, 166, 169-82, 187, technomateriality of 19, 126, 180 200, 203, 213, 219-20, 225, 230 television’s 119, 225 Kel 171, 174 television’s surface 119 Kellner 23, 229 televisual quality of 20, 43, 47, 114 Kennedy 21, 119, 132-8, 140-4, 146, 148, Logics of television 224, 226, 229, 231 160, 162, 164, 170-1, 200, 215-18 London 223-33 early images 136 Lumiere films 93-5, 102, 106, 212 Graham 20-1, 75, 118-19, 122, 131, 135, 146, 148, 152, 161, 205, 215-17, 223, M 228 Malden 224, 229 Kennedy images 120, 133, 135, 138-9, 143-4, Manchester 224-5 146, 161 map 34, 59, 121-2, 124, 129-31, 215 Kennedy images actualise 144 map of televisual control 19-20, 116, 120 Kennedy images actualise control 146 mark 104-6, 109, 173 Kennedy images display 135 mascots 167-8 Kennedy images expose 144 official 167 Kennedy’s programmes 133, 138 mass culture 27 Kennedy’s television 133 Massachusetts 224, 228-9 Kennedy’s television career 216 Massumi 58, 61, 65-6, 68, 70, 72, 82, 84, Kennedy’s television debut 134-5 140, 160, 205-7, 211, 219, 226, 230-1 Kennedy’s television images 75 material effects 19, 38, 104-5, 109 Kennedy’s television style 215 material qualities 52, 54-5, 104, 112 Kennedy’s television work 134 materiality 18, 38, 40, 43, 52-4, 56, 78-80, Keyworks 229 83, 85, 101, 104, 107, 209 Kim 7, 21, 76, 147, 160, 166, 169-82, 187, McKee 32, 36, 49, 132-3, 136, 211, 214, 216, 200, 203, 213, 219-20, 225, 230 230 King 216, 223-4, 228, 231 McKenna 230 McQuire 36, 39, 44-5, 47-9, 52, 127, 139- L 40, 216-17, 230 language 27, 64, 77-8, 82, 150, 163, 166, media 33, 35, 64, 66, 203-4, 217, 220, 224- 170, 176-7, 191, 227 5, 229, 231-2 laughter 73-6, 136-7, 156, 196, 200, 223, media history 48-9 232 media technologies 33, 233 lemonade 217 Melbourne 123, 224, 226, 228, 230 letters 77-8 Melbourne tonight 131-3, 135, 138, 216 life 7, 9, 49, 74, 105, 165, 170-1, 178, 190, Mellencamp 39, 41, 43, 50, 205, 224, 226, 192, 203, 210, 216, 219, 223, 226 229, 231 light 96-7, 104, 136, 139, 185, 209, 211 memory 7, 32, 39, 41-4, 230

240 241 collective television 32 P Michelson 210, 231 painting 44, 80-1 micro-narratives 212 panopticon 57, 60 Minneapolis 225-6, 229-31 parody 147, 153, 192, 194, 208, 219 MIT Press 223, 230-1 partiality 111-12, 114, 119, 198 mobile 21-2, 110-11, 130, 136, 138, 153, 157, Penguin 227-9, 231-2 179, 185, 199, 220 period, television’s 33, 124 mobility 24-6, 109-10, 128, 142, 153-4, 160, perspective 14-15, 18, 22, 27-8, 34, 37-9, 165 41-2, 48-9, 52, 59, 68, 78, 80-3, 90-1, mockumentary 147, 177, 179-80, 187-94, 134, 209 213 philosophy 77, 206, 208, 226, 229-31 mode 12, 17-18, 29, 54-5, 72, 75-8, 82-3, photograms 94-5, 100, 104, 106-7, 109 108-9, 120, 125, 138, 149-51, 153-4, 156- pipe 80-1, 228 8, 161, 170-1 pleasures 24, 28-9, 38, 225, 227-8, 232-3 capitalist 36, 65, 207 Polan 81, 112, 231 contrasting 18, 207 politics 21, 30-1, 62, 71-2, 146, 151, 155, image’s 18, 115, 128, 210 157, 180-1, 191, 196, 208, 220, 225-30, reporting 178-9 232-3 modernity 30, 44, 204, 207, 211, 228, 230 popular culture 14, 23, 27-8, 34, 38, 42, modulation 62-5, 109-10, 112, 114-15, 121, 204, 207, 226, 228 128, 198, 207 postmodern 36, 39, 66, 68 monologue 137-8 postmodernism 66, 75, 139, 207-8, 224, Morley 29, 231 226, 229 movement-image 80, 209, 226 poststructuralism 15, 49, 79, 83, 85-7 movements 19, 29, 44, 71, 76, 82, 84-5, power 15-18, 53, 55-7, 59-62, 67, 70-1, 81- 104-8, 111, 113-15, 117, 125-6, 128-30, 3, 85-6, 105-6, 110-11, 124-5, 188, 192, 161-2, 198-9, 209 196-7, 206-8, 221 image’s 121 relations of 67, 82 Muller 91-2, 227 sovereign 60, 65, 81 technological 197 N technology’s 130 NBC 220, 223, 232 power control 57 negotiation 14, 198-9, 226 power television exercises 197 new media 207, 231, 233 practices, conceptual 80 Newton 134, 138, 140, 215, 231 presentation, television’s 50, 127 NSW 123, 210, 224-5, 232 principles 57, 62, 68, 78-9, 82, 86, 96-9, 133, 145, 206 O television image’s 216 objects 7, 15, 23, 46, 51, 56, 60, 66, 74, 79- principles of television 53, 98 83, 105, 109, 112, 128-9, 206, 212 product 66, 132, 136, 141-3, 157, 217 observation 26, 32, 36-8, 96, 163, 179, 192, product placement 64, 141, 217 210, 220 programmes 7, 21, 29, 34-5, 131-2, 135, 141, office 178, 187, 194, 213, 219, 224, 228 146-8, 158-9, 167, 174-5, 178, 180-2, Olympics 158-9, 165-8 198, 205, 219 Sydney 147, 158-60, 166, 168, 219 popular 220 opportunities 72-3, 118, 131, 137, 140-1, 143, project 8, 12, 16, 23, 26, 33-4, 38, 42-4, 50- 199 3, 60, 79, 81, 93-4, 203-4, 214, 232 oppositional 68-9, 73, 140, 145-6, 192, 196- projection 104-6, 116, 209-10 7 Proquest database 223, 228, 230, 232-3 order 14, 18, 44, 47, 72, 80, 114, 200, 204, punishment 56, 64, 74 228 purchase 173-4 Ordinary television 34, 205, 223 outrage, scene of 155-6

241 R resistive practices 69, 71-2, 74, 146, 208 radio 91-2, 122-3, 127, 138, 158-9, 162 resonates 14, 29, 46-7, 49, 66, 70, 72, 124, re-commentary 162-4, 219-20 139, 151, 163, 177, 180, 188, 192, 208 real events 40, 42-3, 51-2, 98-9, 128, 133, respective images 18, 101 178, 187, 215 Retrieved 223-5, 227-33 real time 12, 42-3, 49, 51-2, 94, 98-9, 133, Riley 230 203, 215-16, 226 Rodowick 62, 66-7, 69-72, 207, 209, 231 realism 44 rogues 159-60 recent Australian television comedy Kath rolling 110, 189 169 Routledge 224-33 recording 59, 65, 93-5, 100, 103-6, 116, 211, Roy 21, 76, 147, 158-71, 175-7, 180, 182, 229 200, 217, 219-20 relations 15, 18-19, 41-2, 52, 61-2, 77-82, 105-6, 108-9, 113, 127-30, 152, 154-5, S 182, 197, 205-9, 211-13 satire 74, 147-8, 160, 162, 172, 192-3 capitalist 143 Saussure 77-9, 231 control-digital-analog 207 scan 96-7 differential 77 scanning 16, 19, 37-8, 51-2, 64, 85, 95-7, irreducible 109, 111, 138 99-100, 108-10, 116-17, 128, 176, 206, liveness-control 119 211 new 67, 69 scenes 21, 81, 83-5, 103-5, 108-12, 114-15, resistive 56, 76, 141, 144-5 119-21, 128, 131, 144-6, 149-51, 153-6, scene-surface 117, 128 174-6, 181-2, 199-200, 218-19 signified-signifier 78 scenic configurations 19-21, 112, 115-16, 120- surface-scene 84, 90, 121, 145, 210 2, 126, 129, 135, 139, 143, 145-6, 150, television’s 36 153-4, 159, 168-9, 173, 180 relationship 14, 25, 29, 31-3, 45, 57-8, 80, scenic relations 18, 125, 129-31, 135, 147, 91-2, 119, 124, 211, 215 159, 182 conceptual 91-2 image’s 128 technology’s 15, 48 television’s 20 relationship of television 25, 37 schizophrenia 55, 124, 206, 208, 212, 214- repeatability 56-7 15, 226, 229-30 repetition 57-9, 82, 126, 182, 205-6 schools 23, 57, 62-3, 65, 190, 207-8 representation 17-18, 23, 34, 43-5, 53-4, 77, screen 46, 58, 94, 96, 99, 134, 171, 209-10, 80-1, 83, 85, 87, 99, 104, 108, 125, 190, 213, 223, 227, 230 210 segments 135, 141, 143, 159, 217 resistance 13-15, 17, 19-23, 27-9, 31, 62, self-reflexivity 17, 21, 73, 75, 86, 90, 131, 67-73, 75, 111, 144, 156-7, 168-9, 191-2, 133, 137, 139-40, 142, 146, 196 194, 196-7, 199-200 semiotics 77, 79, 81 image of 156, 175 shifts 12, 21, 34, 67, 149-50, 156, 159, 173, inhabited mode of 72, 147 177, 186, 191, 207, 220 mode of 16-17, 53, 73, 111, 144, 154, 196 shot 99, 104, 177, 205, 212, 217 modes of 68, 173 Sign-image-event 77 movements of 15-16, 38, 73, 180, 194 signals, electrical 96-7 new form of 13-14 signification 78-9 politics of 53, 68-9, 126, 146 signifier 78, 82, 220 potential mode of 16, 117 signs 18, 54, 56, 77-80, 82-3, 85-7, 105, sites of 133, 144 109, 114, 167, 205, 209, 212, 230 television’s comedic 158 circulation of 82-3 resistive 21, 27-8, 32, 76, 117-19, 129, 136, similarities 18, 24, 30, 48, 93-4, 96, 148, 138, 142-4, 146, 157, 169-70, 180-1, 191, 181, 215, 217-18 218 simultaneity 47-9, 51

242 243 sites 15, 31, 39, 49, 52, 54-8, 61-2, 64-5, 72, technical principles 38, 95, 99, 101, 107, 110, 84, 90, 118, 120, 174, 181-2, 195-200 116 actual 56, 58 technical principles of television 92, 95 closed 63 technical processes 18-20, 38, 40, 43-5, 51- soap opera 34, 171, 182, 204, 224, 228, 3, 78, 83, 85, 95, 97-100, 104-5, 107-9, 230 112, 114, 116-17, 121 social field 14-15, 22, 41, 61, 63, 67-8, 71-4, technical processes of television 45, 52, 85, 76, 86, 90, 110, 130-1, 153, 195-6, 198- 96 200, 221 techno-materiality 18-20, 35, 38, 40, 52, social sphere 13-14, 68 54, 82, 85, 87, 98, 100-1, 106-8, 110, society 9, 25, 27, 31-3, 39, 53, 61, 63-5, 67- 113, 116, 119 8, 70, 73, 76, 169-74, 191, 206-8, 224 image’s 112, 128-9 society of control 14, 31, 53, 61, 63-5, 67-8, technological articulations 56, 101 70, 76, 85, 110, 146, 169, 172-4, 180, technological capacities 42, 46, 49, 94, 145, 191, 206-8 203, 210, 215 sound 78-9, 85-6, 91-2, 98, 128, 142, 150, technological concept 27 161-2, 164, 175, 216 technological determinism 25, 203 sound-image 78 technological developments 11, 185 space 14, 44, 53, 63-4, 68, 73, 157, 176, technological operations 130, 154, 163, 194 191, 195, 201, 217, 228, 230, 232 technological processes 90, 130, 142, 156-7 Spangenberg 91-2, 227 technological production 145, 179, 189, 198 specificity, technological 47, 92, 176, 210 technological qualities 36, 40, 43, 156, 187 Spigel 26, 28, 32-3, 49, 122, 204, 231 technologies disciplinary power 61 spontaneity 102-3, 133-4, 137, 168 Technologies of control 157 sports 62, 158, 161-3, 165-6, 168, 189 technology 11-14, 24-32, 43, 45-9, 60-1, stabilising 129-30, 149, 161, 164 90-4, 97-9, 101, 112-17, 120-2, 129-30, Stookie Bill 19, 89-90, 93, 95, 112-14, 117, 144-6, 186, 194-5, 197-200, 210-11 120-2, 126, 128-9, 146, 210, 213 camera 44 structuralism 23, 77, 79, 83 century 48, 92 structure, social 28 cinematic 94, 106-7 style 23, 33-4, 45, 72-3, 103, 126, 132, 140- cultural 57, 80, 139, 195 1, 145, 170-2, 177, 188, 194-5, 203-4, early cinema 104 208, 212-13 image-based 80, 83 actuality 89, 102-3 mobile 12, 198 style of television 132-3 new 11, 67, 123, 203, 223 style of television comedy 177, 182 postmodern 139 subjectivity 84, 190, 197, 209, 221 visual 11, 44 subjects 47, 152-3, 218, 220-1 technology of control 15, 44, 74, 90, 108, Summer heights 185, 187-90, 192-4, 213 121, 130, 141, 157, 169 surface 20, 39, 72, 83-6, 104-6, 108-9, 111, technology’s operations 22, 51 117, 121, 124, 126, 128, 151, 209-10 technomateriality, television’s 19, 180 Syd 167 telephone 48, 91-2, 206 Sydney 123, 159, 162, 165, 167, 187, 223-5, television 7-9, 11-61, 64-5, 82-6, 89-101, 227-8, 232-3 114-23, 126-35, 139-47, 179-81, 185-8, system 24, 64-5, 69, 71-3, 77-9, 96, 98, 160 194-200, 203-7, 209-11, 213-16, 223-9, 231-3 T analyses of 28, 30, 36, 38, 42, 108, 182 tactical practice 21, 69-72 analysing 18, 79, 86, 204 tactics 67, 69-72, 75, 151, 153, 181-2, 192, capacity of 26, 98, 151, 196 208, 219 commercial 123, 143, 159, 182 Taylor 96-7, 232 conceptualising 16 technical machine 57, 60 considering 53, 101

243 construction of 30, 130 7, 81-7, 97-101, 108-13, 116-22, 125-7, contrast 49 129-32, 136-42, 145, 150-1, 156-7, 195-9 contrasting 45, 47 analysing carnivalesque 76 defining 46-7 carnivalesque 76 early 18, 93, 98 comedic 146 era of 93, 195 contemporary 96, 161 including 35, 66, 210 discussing 18 live 37, 217, 224, 227 early 93, 121 normal 39, 186 experimental 213 on-demand 232 locating 176 potential 14, 16-17, 157, 194, 198 particular 50, 82 principle of 39, 231 potential 90 reality 45, 177, 187, 213, 220 produced 141 recognition of 101, 195 style of 124, 161 site of 90, 196-7 television image articulates 53, 197 situating 30, 91 television image being 218 specificity of 85, 95, 200 television image configuration 114 story of 95, 112 television image furthers 38 technological site 101 television image resonant 76 technological tradition 92 television image sheds 195 transgressive 133 television image’s actualisation 61, 90, 111, watched 7 114, 119 the world of 158, 186 television image’s articulation 17, 29, 40, television aesthetics 34, 195 83, 181 Television and British Cultural Studies 23 television image’s capacity 19, 53 television archive 32, 211 television image’s combination 83 television audiences 12, 27, 29, 120, 196, television image’s connection 77 214 television image’s dual propensity 83 television broadcast 39, 50, 98, 159, 205, television images highlight 49 224, 232 television image’s mode 19, 94, 139 television broadcasting 24, 122-4, 127, 186, television image’s production 198 214 television image’s quality 12, 101, 133 regular 119, 123, 132 television images reinvigorates 51 television cameras 99, 154, 178-9, 215 television image’s relation 43, 54, 82, 87 television comedy 21, 34, 39, 73, 131, 136, television image’s techno-materiality 19, 84, 177, 179, 182, 187, 193, 195-6, 217 86, 90, 97 conceptualising 21 television journalism 147-9, 205 television coverage 147, 162 television liveness 233 television culture 28, 177, 204, 227 television medium 135, 211 television documentary 33, 180, 189, 233 television mockumentary 22, 177, 185, 187- television drama 35, 182 8, 194 television event 15, 22, 53-4, 79, 82, 162, television news 149, 161, 215 164, 168, 181, 185, 199, 225 television practices 39, 90, 190 television examples 90, 93-4, 146 television production 20, 50, 179, 186, 193- television experience 24, 42 4 television field 193, 225 television programmes 64, 142, 147, 159 television forms 177, 193 television programming 34, 52, 121, 157, television functions 85, 130 220 television genres 119-20, 171 television scenes 151, 172, 195 television highlights 167, 185 television schedule 168, 179, 185 television image 15-22, 24-7, 36-8, 51-6, 75- television scholars 16, 31, 79, 186, 199-200

244 245 television scholarship 22-6, 31, 51-3, 108, 19, 129, 133, 143-5 195, 199, 201, 203 capacity of 137, 140 television screens 33, 89, 132, 209 techno-materiality of 84, 162, 168 television series 225, 229 televisual liveness-control relation 131 television signal 50, 89, 97, 115 televisual mode 128, 132, 134, 140, 156, 177 television sport 164, 168, 170 televisual practices 21, 145, 179-80, 188, television studies 16-17, 23, 25-6, 29-31, 192-3, 205 33-6, 40-2, 48-9, 51-2, 79, 93, 183, 186, televisual scenes 119, 121, 129, 139, 143, 146, 195-6, 203-5, 224, 229 150, 165, 200 modes of 16, 34, 76 televisual sites 115, 135, 170, 180, 182-3 television technology 12, 16, 97, 163, 166, televisual sport 160, 164, 166 185, 201, 220 televisual technology 21, 25, 28, 47, 79, early 114 93, 95, 115, 126, 131, 153, 168, 181, 195, television technology actualises 17 206 television texts 41, 204 texts 28-9, 32-5, 38, 43, 46, 50, 139, 182, television viewer 38, 53, 196-200, 205-6 203-4, 224-5, 232 television’s articulation 36, 62, 112 television’s 34, 36 television’s broadcast mode 20 theory 23, 27, 38, 42, 49-52, 57, 59, 71, television’s capacity 12, 20, 39, 41, 51, 128, 75, 78-9, 111, 124, 197, 203, 208, 226 130, 168, 196, 215 poststructuralist 46, 51, 54, 79 image signals 119 thousand plateaus 9, 55, 124, 191, 206, 208, television’s connections 140, 145, 200 212-15, 226 diminishes 114 thousand plateaus Deleuze 56, 221 visible 121 tie 139, 160-1 television’s development 19, 115 time-image 80, 209, 225 television’s mode 11-12, 149, 215 transformations 11-12, 22, 24, 32, 47, 53, television’s operations 153, 186, 192, 194-5 60, 64, 66-7, 79, 84, 86, 90, 97, 186, television’s production 12, 59, 143 191-2 television’s proliferating images 200 technological 12, 200 television’s quality 97, 113, 116 transgression 133-4, 143, 232 television’s techno-materiality 87, 90, 101, transmission 16, 19, 37-8, 40, 52, 64, 85, 91, 120-1, 124, 138, 144, 146, 151 95, 97-101, 108, 112, 116-17, 128, 176 televisual 18, 46-8, 53, 89, 91, 100-1, 115, transparency, technological 215 124, 126-8, 130, 132-5, 137, 140, 142, Tulloch 225, 227-8, 232-3 148-50, 166 Turner 24, 29, 33, 35, 133, 171, 203-4, 216, televisual control 13, 19-20, 31, 90, 116, 118, 218, 225, 227-8, 230, 232-3 120, 149, 164, 185, 218 TV 7, 9, 13, 33, 97, 132, 134, 174, 188, 193, encountering 53 200, 216, 223, 228, 230-1 genealogy of 90, 146, 185 twists 86, 150, 194, 196 televisual event 11, 19, 37, 49, 51-5, 57, 61, 76-7, 81-6, 116, 121, 140, 154, 168, 196- U 7, 200 unfolding 118, 120, 129, 140, 142-3, 150, 198 televisual event of control 15, 18-22, 34, 37, uniqueness 58-9 51-2, 59, 61, 70, 74-6, 85-6, 90, 132-3, United States 32-3, 92, 95, 152, 169, 178, 140-1, 146, 176, 179 219 televisual field 59, 191-4, 198, 220 University of Minnesota Press 225-6, 229-31 televisual flow 24-5 Unwin 225, 227-8, 232-3 televisual images 33, 43, 86, 90, 99, 122, Uricchio 47-9, 51, 90-1, 94, 98, 120, 210-11, 126, 144, 153 232 televisual liveness 12, 15-16, 20, 37-43, 47, USA 122-3, 188, 219-20, 225, 232 50-2, 81, 94, 98-100, 108, 111, 113, 118-

245 V variations 29, 58-9 Vaughan 103, 212, 232 video 14, 47, 97-8, 185-6, 198, 205, 219 Video Recording 226, 230, 232 viewers 12, 24, 29, 39, 44, 46-7, 95, 121, 127, 165, 185, 188, 193, 196-200, 205, 216 virtual operations 15, 17, 56-7, 60-1, 83, 109 virtuality 54-5, 58, 82, 126, 168, 181, 205-6, 212 visions 30, 62, 81, 208-9, 223, 229, 231 visual images 44, 80, 210 visuality 26, 81-3, 85-6, 92, 127, 144, 209 vitality, television image’s 46 voice 48, 127-9, 138, 141, 150, 159, 164

W walls 63, 104-5, 117, 130 waves 62, 64, 103, 110, 113-15 Weber 209-10, 232 welcome 33, 122, 129-30, 138, 231 Whitlam 147, 155-6 Williams 24-7, 31, 33, 84, 203, 231, 233 Williams’ Television 24, 26 Winston 95-6, 98, 211, 213, 233 workers 63, 65, 89, 94-5, 102-7, 109, 117, 210 workings 45, 140, 191, 211, 214 world 72, 83, 102, 122, 129-31, 151, 158-9, 163, 166-7, 171, 176, 178-9, 186, 188-90, 217-18, 223-4 World War 123, 156, 217 writers 25, 27-8, 33, 39-40, 43, 48-51, 53, 71, 97, 102, 133, 203, 207-8, 215-17, 226, 228

Z Zettl 37, 41

246 PB