Television and the Meaning of 'Live'

An Enquiry into the Human Situation

Paddy Scannell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745662558
  9780745662541
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745679648
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about the question of existence, the meaning of 'life'. It is an enquiry into the contemporary human situation as disclosed by television.

The elementary components of any real-world situation are place, people and time. These are first examined as basic existential phenomena drawing on Heidegger's fundamental enquiry into the human situation in Being and Time. They are then explored through the technological and production care-structures of broadcast television which, routinely and exceptionally, display the situated experience of being alive and living in the world today. It shows routinely in the live self-enactments of persons being themselves and the liveness of their ordinary talk on television. It shows exceptionally in television coverage of great occasions and catastrophes as they unfold live and in real time. Case studies reveal the existential role of television in salvaging the possibility of genuine experience, and in revealing the world-historical character of life today. To explore these questions, the agenda of sociology - its concern with economic, political and cultural life - is set aside. Being in the world is not, in the first (or last) instance, a social but an existential question, as an existential enquiry into television today discovers.

Passionate and sweeping in scale, this new book from a leading media scholar is a major contribution to our understanding of the media today.

Part one

An introduction to the phenomenology of television

Prologue: Heidegger’s teacup

By way of a beginning here are three stories about Heidegger and television. Martin Heidegger’s life spanned most of the last century. He was born in Messkirch in 1889 and died in 1976. Messkirch, at the time of Heidegger’s birth, was a village with a population of around 2,000, situated in south-west Germany, just north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border. He grew up in a deeply rural, traditional Catholic environment; his father was a craftsman, a master cooper and the sexton of the parish church. His mother’s family were small tenant farmers.¹ In 1961, Messkirch celebrated the 700th anniversary of its founding and it invited its most famous son, the now world renowned philosopher, Martin Heidegger, to join in the festivities and give a talk.

Heidegger’s talk, appropriately enough, was on the meaning of ‘home’, and, he remarked, coming home to Messkirch today, the first thing one notices is the forest of television and radio aerials on every roof-top. He saw in this a potent symbol of what the future held in store for Messkirch and the world. The TV aerials showed that human beings were, strictly speaking, no longer ‘at home’ where, seen from outside, they lived. The people of Messkirch might be sitting in their living room, but really, thanks to television, they were in the sports stadium or on a safari or being a bystander at a gunfight in the Old West (Pattison 2000: 59–60). The 71-year-old Heidegger was deeply suspicious of the intrusive, alien presence of television in people’s homes.² It was part of the domination of mankind by modern technology.

That is the first story. Here is the second. Heidegger, for sure, did not have a television set. And yet, in his later years, he would regularly go to a friend’s house to watch television. All his life Heidegger had been a keen sportsman. He was an excellent skier and would head for the snow- covered slopes whenever he could in the winter. He had always been fond of football and in his youth he was, Safranski tells us, a useful performer on the left wing. In his later years he became an enthusiastic follower of the European Cup on television and, ‘during one legendary match between Hamburg and Barcelona, he knocked over a teacup in his excitement’ (Safranski 1998: 428). This match took place in the 1960–61 season, the same year in which Heidegger gave his talk in Messkirch.³

And lastly, another football story – as told in English by Friedrich Kittler before an English audience.⁴ Heidegger is now an old man in his eighties and his death is less than two years away.

Back in 1974 when Germany’s football team won the title of World Champion – for the second time – the philosopher Martin Heidegger happened to take a train from Heidelberg back to Freiberg […] and since in city trains at that time there were dining cars Germany’s greatest thinker had the chance to make the acquaintance of Freiberg’s theatre director:

‘Why didn’t we meet before?’ was the director’s urgent first question.

‘Why don’t you ever show up at the dramatic performances I give?’

Heidegger’s answer was simple:

‘Because on your stage they’re just actors whom I’m not at all interested to see.’

‘But dear Professor, I beg you, what else could we in the theatre possibly do?’

‘I’d rather like seeing and hearing not actors but heroes and gods.’

‘Impossible. Heroes don’t exist and gods even less.’

‘So haven’t you watched our recent world championship on TV?

Although at home my wife Elfride and I don’t have one, I visited some nearby friends in order to watch. And for me the most obvious thing to remark was the fact that Franz Beckenbauer, the hero of the German team, was never fouled or wounded – he’s proven to be invincible and immortal. Now you can see, even amongst us, there are heroes and gods!’

What do these stories tell us? Like any good tale they point to a moral which I take to be something about academics and how they think as academics on the one hand, and how they act when, on the other hand, they stop being academic. In his public role of mystic sage, Heidegger deplores television. When he gets home and hangs up his professional hat, he becomes ordinary like the rest of us, and does what the rest of us do ordinarily. He watches television and is absorbed by it. What needs serious consideration is not what Heidegger thought about television, but what happened to him when he watched it. Heidegger’s spilt teacup is what calls for explanation. How could he be so excited? By the end of this book I hope to have offered some answers to that particular question. Here at the beginning I want to note the problems of academic thinking, particularly when it engages with the ordinary world of everyday life which for all of us today includes something that we speak and think of as ‘television’.

1

What is phenomenology?

Phenomenology is a logos (a discourse) of the phenomena (the things that are visible). It is distinct from and in opposition to what we might call noumenology – the logos of the noumena: the invisible things, the things that belong to nous (the mind, consciousness, logos itself). Since Plato, the distinction between the visible things of the human world and the invisible things of the human mind has been a polarizing philosophical crux. What is the relationship between them? Plato was suspicious of phenomenal reality (the world as it appears to us) and privileged ideas (the ideal forms of thought/consciousness) over the appearances of things. Since then, in the Western tradition, consciousness (introspective mental acts of cognition) has been taken as the basis of what it is to be human: cogito ergo sum. It is the cogito (the ‘I think’) that grounds the sum (I am). Phenomenology is firmly committed to a view that thinking begins by looking outwards not inwards. In an originary sense we are moved (are summoned) to thinking by looking at the world, the alpha and omega of all thought – where thinking begins and ends. The point is not to contemplate the world, still less to presume to change it – but perhaps, at last, to recognize, acknowledge and try to understand it. This is what phenomenology essays. Its motto is given by Edmund Husserl (who gave phenomenology its name within philosophy): ‘To the things themselves’. This means to attempt to think of things in their terms in the first place: not what I might think they are but what, in fact, they are. In phenomenological thinking, what a thing is (its truth; what it ‘means’) is immanent in the thing as it appears to us and as we encounter it. Things are disclosive of what they are; they reveal themselves as what in fact they are in the ways in which they appear and present themselves. For this way of thinking truth is revelatory: the immanence of truth in the world as the truth of the world.

At the end of the introduction to Media and Communication (M&C), I offered a preliminary succinct definition of phenomenological thinking as ‘an effort at an understanding of the world uncluttered by the usual academic baggage’ (Scannell 2007: 6). I meant this as a provocation, but also exactly. An initial formulation of phenomenology might be that it is a way of thinking situated in academia that serves in part to put in question the taken for granted assumptions that underpin academic disciplines and their frames of thinking. In particular, it is a critique of the way in which academic thought invariably works to produce the objects of its thinking as academic objects. This point has been made most pungently by Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘discursive formation’. A discursive formation is the product of institutional discursive regimes of truth (law, medicine, psychiatry, sociology) with the power to objectify that of which they speak. What is criminal and what is not, what is health and what is not, what is sanity and what is not, what is the social and what is not – positively and negatively the truth of what these things ‘are’ is the effect of self-validating, self-legitimating, self-regulating discourses that produce them as such. Outside of the university, there is no such thing as Literature – I mean Literature as the academic thing that is taught at universities, with degree courses and graduate programs and a forest of learned books and journals going back a century or more which collectively combine to produce the thing that is known and understood by all concerned (not without occasional challenges) as Literature. The truth of what this thing is, is the effect of institutional realities that produce and reproduce it as such – as a purely academic object. In the world outside the institutions of higher education, there are books of all sorts and there is a complicated publishing business and there are (or were) bookshops and there are readers … but all this goes on outside of the university and is not studied within it. Literature is not, in the first place, a worldly thing. It is an academic thing – objectified as such by the internal institutional processes that produce it as such.

The disciplines that constitute the humanities and social sciences (I leave the natural sciences out of these considerations) are all, in Foucault’s terms, discursive formations: Literature, linguistics, anthropology, history, sociology, psychology. They are, in the first and last instance, all the effects of institutional modes of thought that produce them as institutional realities. And there is no necessary correspondence between any of them and what lies outside the university itself – namely the non-academic world of everyday life. Phenomenology is of course a hideously academic word – who outside the university would ever use the word in ordinary, non-academic conversation? But it wants to escape from the world of the university and reconnect with the world outside its lecture theatres and seminar rooms. It aspires to engage with the ordinary everyday world without preconceptions, theories or prejudices; without thinking in advance that it knows what it thinks about it.

Phenomenology does not belong to any single discipline – it is not simply or only a sub-field of philosophy for instance. It is a way of thinking that is cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. Let me take two instances of phenomenological thinking from different disciplines by way of illustration; one from the UK, one from the USA. They occur more or less at the same time yet independently of each other. The first example is ‘linguistic phenomenology’, the second is ethnomethodology. I have given summary accounts of both in M&C. Linguistic phenomenology is the phrase that J.L. Austin used to describe what he did (Austin 1961: 182). His approach is more usually described as ordinary language philosophy. It is an essentially pragmatic view of language that asks what we do with words and tries to answer that question by carefully exploring how we use them. It is a view of language that is poles apart from language as conceived by linguists – by structural linguistics from Saussure to Chomsky. Linguistics produces language as an academic object and proceeds to study it scientifically (objectively). In so doing, it has transformed ordinary language that anyone and everyone can and does use into a technical, specialist object that only experts can understand. Austin’s approach privileges the nonacademic, ordinary worldly phenomenon of language-in-use as used by anyone and everyone (in Saussurean terms he is concerned with parole rather than langue). It endorses phenomenology’s motto – to the things themselves. In this case ordinary (non-academic) words and what we do with them – how we put them to use, in what circumstances and for what practical worldly purposes.

Ethnomethodology is the term coined by Harold Garfinkel to describe the new kind of radical sociology that was emerging in the USA in the 1950s. His work, and that of Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks, marked a sharp break with mainframe American sociology,¹ which thought of society in terms of large-scale institutional structures (the state, the economy, the culture industries) whose continuing existence demanded the production and reproduction of individuals adjusted to their systemic requirements. This modernist macro-sociology was challenged by the new postmodern sociology of the 1950s which took the micro-social as its domain of enquiry. For Garfinkel, the kind of sociology he had learned at Harvard under Talcott Parsons had the effect of reducing individual social members to judgemental dopes who ‘function’ to maintain the stable features of the social order by acting in ways that serve to reproduce it. This disciplinary model of society presumes that individuals left to their own devices (i.e., without the control of social institutions) would, in a state of nature, act solely in their own interests and against each other. ‘Society’ acts as an external constraint that imposes and maintains social order. The new sociology sharply disagrees with this. If there is to be such a thing as society, there must be individuals predisposed to cooperative action and interaction with each other. Collaborative behaviours are not the effect of a mysteriously pre-existing social order that imposes itself upon individuals. Rather, the orderly interactions of individuals oriented to cooperation (working together) produce and maintain a social world. At stake in this difference between the old and the new sociology is the relationship between structure and agency (Giddens 1984). Ethnomethodology attends to the reasonable accountable methods of ethnos (social members) in interaction with each other and the ways in which they thereby sustain an intelligible, workable, meaningful world-in-common.

The philosophy of ordinary language and the sociology of interaction appear in different places at the same time and both, I have argued, are in response to the structural transformation of the world that becomes visible in the 1950s and which I have described as the transition from the time of the masses (the modern era that ends in 1945) to the time of everyday life – the post-war, post-modern era of today. Both are instances of what I think of as the phenomenological turn: the turn to the things themselves – language as such, the social as such. Let me summarize their similarities as a preliminary sketch of what I mean by the phenomenological orientation to things:

• Both take a pragmatic approach to their object (language, society) that is distinctly parsimonious in respect of theory.

• Each asks ‘How does it work? What can we do with it?’ Both presume the usability, the workability of their object domain. Both conceive of it as a practice. Each explores how the practice works, in what ways and under what situational constraints.

• Each is oriented towards action rather than contemplation (theory). It is a mistake to think of Austin’s work as speech act theory – that term was introduced by his student, John Searle (1969). Austin’s thinking is profoundly resistant to theorizing. And likewise, the sociology of interaction – the interactive order that Goffman made his life’s work.

• Each presupposes that the practice has an implicit logic-of-use: i.e., that language-in-use, interaction-in-action have reasonable, accountable and justifiable features that are taken as given and oriented to by participants.

• These logics are not in any way external to the practices: they are what constitute their possibility. They are the structuring features that produce the practices (of conversation pre-eminently) as essentially reasonable (accountable, justifiable) and thereby workable.

• In all this, the object domains are viewed from the perspective of the ordinary and mundane – the routine practices of everyday activities (such as talking) in practice, in use, in action. This perspective is thus oriented to the point of view of the laity and not that of the sociologist, the philosopher, the priest or the professor.

• The phenomenological perspective is aligned with that of ordinary social members. Both are oriented to a hermeneutics of trust that takes things at face value in the first instance. In this way the phenomenological position is sharply at odds with the dominant sceptical hermeneutic perspective of academia which is oriented to suspicion.

Phenomenology’s topic

Phenomenology, then, is a way of thinking that can be applied to any academic field of enquiry. It functions negatively as a critique, or reality check, on the taken-for-granted assumptions that constitute the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Positively, it has its own object domain – one that is largely absent from almost all the dominant discursi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Preface
• Part one: An introduction to the phenomenology of television
• Prologue: Heidegger’s teacup
• What is phenomenology?
• Available world
• Available self
• Available time
• Turning on the TV set
• Television and technology
• Part two: Television and the meaning of live
• The meaning of live
• How to talk – on radio
• How to talk – on television
• The moment of the goal – on television
• Being in the moment: the meaning of media events
• Catastrophe – on television
• Television and history
• Notes
• References
• Index