roachboy

i was thinking about the drift of this thread for a while this morning, and it prompted me to track down something from a book by mark crispin miller, "boxed in"--it comes from an essay called "how tv covers war" and seems germaine.
a quote first, short (i hope) explanation after:

the quote:

because the tv image is intrinsically restrained, then, it is not the newsman's purpose to take the edge off an unbearable confrontation. his illusory control performs a different function, necessitated not by the nastiness of actual events, but by tv itself. what upsets us most about these images of aftermath is not so much their painfulness as their apparent randomness; we suddenly arrive upon the unexpected scene and ask ourselves: 'why this?' watching the news, we come to feel, not only that the world is blowing up, but that it does so for no reason, that its ongoing history is nothing but a series of eruptions, each without cause or context. the news creates this impression of mere anarchy through its erasure of the past, and through its simultaneous tendency to atomize the present into so many unrelated happenings, each recounted through a sequence of dramatic, unintelligible pictures (p. 158)

======
question: do you think miller's characterization of tv news, particularly with reference to war (conflict more generally) is accurate? (i understand that it really should be a question posed after reading the whole of the essay, but one of the main arguments in it emerges quite clearly in the above, so...)

if you find that it is, then a couple of consequences follow:
what tv atomizes is the reality that it purports to depict.
miller argues throughout his book that the problem created by this rest on the fact (assertion?) that people confuse image with depiction of "the real" and do not see image as such.

in the case of conflict, miller claims that tv images strip away any explanation for conflict--which would mean that the perfect term for tv to traffic in is "terrorism" precisely because it is, in its nondefinition, most symmetrical with the nature violence.conflict as framed through tv as medium.

now if tv is a primary information source for many (a horrifying thought, but there we are), and if the suburban situation can be taken as a guiding image for thinking about how that information source is integrated into everyday life---the glowing furniture eye in the center of a living room---then it would seem to follow that the effect of the endless presentation of randomized violence would tend to reinforce a desire for a more authoritarian type of state, even if only at the level of psychological compensation---the authoritarian state system would not in itself be fully thought out, but would be figured as a kind of wish for a spectral father-type who would staunch the flow of arbitrary violence-- a flow of arbitrary violence that substitutes for a conception of the "world around me" or "the world in general"--no that's not right--that articulates, that gives particular content to an abstraction named "the world around me"

so i guess the conclusion from this part i would draw is rather the opposite of art's: that tv is fully complicit in creating a climate within which authoritarian solutions to imagary problems seems plausible (by imaginary i am not saying made up--rather problems the nature and meanings of which are constructed entirely by assembling tv images as sources...or by connecting tv images with other medium-specific types of information in a situation where the images function as the ground for thinking)

if miller is correct, it would follow that this effect can occur without any requirement of an agency being imputed to "the media" as such--rather, for him it follows from the nature of tv image assembly-communication itself (in the book he goes to considerable lengths to talk about the implications of this kind of cut-up pseudo-view of the world in a context of advertising streams as well)

it would also follow that the anarchy that would be produced would operate at the level of collective conceptions of the world, but would not function with anything like a causal connection to the social/political atomization of the audience--which would be much more a function of spatial/cultural choices particular to america (the suburban model as example)...the sense of chaos-in-the-world would inflect particular aspects of the experience of this spatial model (it might make you feel more isolated, more helpless, but this sense would neither cause nor explain the isolation produced by the american built environment)

i'll stop here--i suspect this has already gone on too long, but to pose an alternative viewpoint sometimes you have to chatter a while.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite