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THE CONCEPT OF liVE TELEVISION 13 industry discourse. In turn Zettl reinforces industry practice through his widely-used textbooks for television production courses, thus creating a closed circuit validating received television aesthetics. Zettl's view is that the essential nature of television is related to the concept of liv~ television. Unlike film, which freezes events in frames, television in its very essence (that is to say the essence of its technology) consists of process. The ontology of the television image thus consists in movement, process, "liveness" and / presence: -- While in film each frame is actually a static image, the television image is continually moving, very much in the manner of the Bergsonian duree. The scanning beam is constantly trying to complete an always incom­ plete image. Even if the image on the screen seems at rest, it is structur­ The Concept of Live Television: ally .in mot~on. Each ~elevision frame is always in a state of becoming. Whtle the fIlm frame IS aconcrete record ofthe past, the television frame Ontology as Ideology (.when li~e ~ is a reflection of the living,constantly changing present. The ltve teleVIsed event and the event itself exist in the same present. This is impossible with film. But as a record of the past, film affords us great control in the re-creation of an event.... Obviously, the filmic event is Jane Feuer largely medium dependent, while television in its essence (live) is largely event depend;!!:.t. [emphasis Zettl's.] While film can reflect upon our world-or pretend to being current, it is totally deterministic; the end of the story is fixed as soon as the reel is put on the projector. Live television, on the other hand, lives off the instantaneousness and uncer­ Not much has been written on the aesthetics of television. One of the tainty of the moment very much the way we do in actual life. The fact that reasons for this becomes obvious as one sets out to correct this lack: no one is television can record images and then treat them in a filmic fashion in no entirely sure exactly what the entity "television" is. At the level of the way reduces the aesthetic potential and uniqueness of television when 'used live. 2 economic and cultural base, debate rages over whether the technology is cause or effect. In his book on television, Raymond Williams addresses this issue at Zettl's phenomenology of television echoes Andre Bazin's "realist"ontology spme length and with some success, concluding that communications tech­ of cinema without admitting, as Bazin does, that "realism" is based on artifice. nology in general and specifically television "is at once an intention and an To equate "live" television with" eallife" is to ignore all those determina­ effect of a particular social order."l At the level of aesthetic superstructure, an tions standing between the '!event" andourperception of it-technologyand J even more difficult contradiction arises: Is television a thing-in-itself (i.e., a institutions, to mention two. Nevertheless, it is difficult to demonstrate the specific signifying practice) or is it merely a means of transmission for other ideological nature of such an aesthetic. processes of signification (cinema, news, "live" events)? And related to this: For, from a certain technological and perceptual pointofview, television Should an aesthetics of television be historical and descriptive (based on is live in a way film can never be. Events can be transmitted as they occur; received network practice) orspeculative (based on an assumed essence of the television (and videotape) look more "real" to us thandoes film. The point at medium)? The differences between television and its supposed linguistic which Zettl's argument slides from technological "fact" to ideological "inter­ sister, cinema, are too great not to see television as a qualitatively different pretation" is difficult to determine. It is notenough to pointout, as I intend to medium, but granted this, what is specific to the diversity within television? do shortly, that network practice scarcely ever (indeed never in pure form) These are the terms in which the dilemmas tend to be pos~. Both network explcits television's potential for "unmediated" transmission (assuming that advocates and alternative video enthusiasts alike tend to argue from an the very selection and treatment of events did not in itself preclude total assumed "essence" of the medium as if the history of that medium were not presence). For this merely leaves things on Zettl's own terms (i.e., the essence inexorably linked to what one assumes to be its essence. is live but it just hasn't been exploited yet). One has rather to critique the One of the few sustained attempts at a speculative television aesthetics "live" aesthetic at the base of its philosophical assumptions. Zettl's logical falls victim to just such a lack of historical consciousness. Herbert Zettl's development from the nature of electronic scanning to that of being in a aesthetic reflects the confusion of essence with history that also dominates "state of becoming" is itself philosophically and ideologically determined. In THE CONCEPT OF UVE TELEVISION 15 14 JANE FEUER Yet American network television, in the very process of technological order to have an argument at all, Zettl must first personify the apparatus, advancement, has nearly destroyed even the simplest meaning of "live" animate and humanize physical processes. Thus his whole argument is transmission. Videotape, though perceptually equivalent to "live" transmis- founded upon a metaphor. Moreover, it is possible that we perceive video as sion, preserves the event, eliminating uniqueness and thus aura.4 The intro­ more ~real" because the industry tells us it is "live." Perhaps the ideology at duction of computerized editing equipment is making video editing as least in part determines the perception. Ontology and ideology are con­ flexible as film editing. Curiously, the most sophisticated new technology- founded at the very base of Zettl's argument in his attempt to posit an such as computerizedgraphics and instant replay techniques-was developed "essence" which is ideologically neutral. precisely for the purpose of recording and freezing those "live" sports events It is at this basic level of the ideology of the television apparatus that that were supposed to be the ontological glory of the medium. Anyone who Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow attempt to critique received notions watched the 1980 Olympics had to be aware that the idea of an event about television current affairs programming. Heath and Skirrow argue that, ~appening on~e ~s no longer a part of this highly packaged occasion. Clearly, due to its electronic nature, television is far more capable of affirming its own In terms of thIS SImplest conception of the "live," current American network mode as one of absolute presence than is film, even though the vast majority television is best described as a collage of film, video and "live," all inter­ of television programs are not broadcast "live." They argue convincingly that woven into a complex and altered time scheme. Why, then, does the idea of1 ~ by postulating an equivalence between time of event, time of television television as essentially a live medium persist so strongly as an ideology? " creation and transmission-viewing time, television as an institution identifies Raymond Williams invokes the concept of "flow" as away of explaining all messages emanating from the apparatus as "live." The live program is the effect of immediacy and presence the experience of television gives. The thus taken as the very definition of television. In this way, television as an defining characteristic of broadcasting, both as technology and as cultural ideological apparatus positions the spectator into its "imaginary" ofpresence form, Williams argues, is one of sequence or flow. Thus the "true series is not and immediacy.3 the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by Heath and Skirrow define the ideology of the television apparatus another kind of sequence" (advertising, previews, etc.).5 Television becomes according to its temporal, electronic dimension, but suggest that otherfactors a continuous, never-ending sequence in which it is impossible to separate out are involved, such as the closeness, availability and interpellative nature of individual texts. Heath and Skirrow amend Williams' concept of flow to that the television image itself. Indeed, as television in fact ~s and less a of "flow and regularity," i.e., within the planned flow, certain elements, such "live" medium in the sense of an equivalence between time ofevent and time as ~eries and commercials, predictably recur.6 The experience of flow, I of transmission, the medium in its own practices seems to insist more and beheve, relates as well to the television viewing situation. The set is in the more upon an ideology of the live, the immediate, the direct, the spontaneous, home, as part of the furniture of one's daily life; it is always available; one may the real. This is true of both program formats and metadiscourse (references intercept the flow at any point. Indeed the "central fact" of television may be to the "Golden Age" of live television, "Live from New York, it's Saturday that it is designed to be watched intermittently, casually, and without full Night," the many local spots glorifying "instant" camera news coverage, concentration. Only the commercials command and dazzle; and these only if "live" coverage of the Olympics, etc.). you stay to watch them. (We shall see that some television formats are Television's self-referential discourse plays upon the connotative rich­ explicitly designed not to be watched as a totality.) Television, then, because ness of the term "live," confounding its simple or technical denotations with a of the property of flow, seems "real" in another sense; unlike cinema, it is an wealth of allusiveness.

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