New Television

The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre

Martin Shuster

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226504001
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Even though it's frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as "chewing gum for the mind" really disappeared.Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes.

Part 1

- 1 -

Worlds on Screen

The Ontology of Television Series and/as the Ontology of Film

1. Introduction

To truly understand the television shows that interest me, it is most fruitful to start with certain topics in the philosophy of film, since film is, in fact, the most suggestive context for them. This is something I will argue for explicitly at the end of this chapter; right now, it implicitly orients my discussion. In making this claim, it needs to be stressed that the claim is not meant to minimize the extent to which these works of art are television products.1 Yet, these television series are exactly interesting exactly because they—broadly speaking—share several contexts: film, television, and, as will emerge later, even literature. Here, though, the opening claim is simple: in order to understand what these television shows fundamentally are—in philosophical parlance, what their “ontology” is—they need to be understood, in general terms, as congruous with film; simply put: both films and television shows are screened.2

I thereby engage with the work of Stanley Cavell, who offers one of the most robust reflections on the significance of “the screen” in this context. Furthermore, in addition to these sort of “ontological” reflections, Cavell is particularly relevant and useful for the overall project of the book, since he is one of the few philosophers to consider seriously popular film. In doing so, he connects the various films he discusses to themes in philosophy, motifs in literature, and reflections on modernity more broadly (all also relevant for understanding television series). Cavell does this by showing how films cannot be reduced merely to kitsch, entertainment, or to something inherently “unserious.” Cavell’s understanding of film also importantly rests on a broader understanding of the notion of a “medium.” And an understanding of this notion is exactly what is most required for situating the television series under discussion, and thereby the genre of new television.

2. Prelude: The Ontology of Photography and Film

Understanding the ontology of television series depends on understanding the ontology of film, which depends on understanding the history of photography, which, in turn, links to the trajectory of French modernist painting in the nineteenth century. While Cavell mentions these connections several times in The World Viewed (1971),3 they are most apparent in his discussion of the automatism of photography, and thereby film.4 Cavell points out:

Photographs are not hand-made; they are manufactured. And what is manufactured is an image of the world. The inescapable fact of mechanism or automatism in the making of these images is the feature Bazin points to as “[satisfying], once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with reality.” (WV 20)

“It is essential,” he continues, “to get to the right depth of this fact of automatism” (WV 21). For Cavell, this means disputing important elements of French film theorist André Bazin’s account of film. Foremost among the disputed claims is Bazin’s suggestion that photography “freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.”5 Bazin’s suggestion, which is likely an “intuitive” view of the matter, is that the rise of photography gave to painting a sort of new artistic lease: photography allowed painting to enter a nonrepresentational phase (and the rest, as they say, is history).

In response, Cavell emphasizes that (1) it is misleading to say that painting and photography were in competition, and (2) in fact, painting “was not ‘freed’—and not by photography—from its obsession with likeness”; it was rather “forced to forgo likeness exactly because of its own obsession with reality, because the illusions it had learned to create did not provide the conviction in reality, the connection with reality, that it craved” (WV 21). Painting only gave up a desire for objective reference well after photography came on the scene, giving up that desire because of its own, internal history and evolution (WV 21). One way to understand Cavell’s points is to stress that the focus is not on the “automatism” of film, that is, that the camera seems to capture everything that comes before it, and do so automatically. Rather, it is on what automatism marks or suggests. Cavell writes that “what is manufactured [through photography] is an image of the world” (WV 20, emphasis mine). Central is the notion of “world.” Automatism is essential to the birth of film (more on this shortly), but for film’s continued existence, automatism is chiefly important mostly to the extent that it clarifies how the notions of “world” or “worldhood” function in film’s context. In stressing this point, Cavell’s account is quite distinct from the many film theorists he is often—mistakenly—associated with, notably André Bazin and Erwin Panofsky (on this point, see especially WV 184).6 For this reason, Cavell throughout uses “automatism” in a novel way, and understanding this use as implicated with his use of the notion of a “medium.”

Beginning with the former, Cavell stresses that photographs are inherently “mysterious” (WV 19), because “we don’t know how to think of the connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of” (WV 18). He highlights that “a photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves” (WV 17). A photograph of me is not a likeness of me, it is me, and in that sense it is not representational. At the same time, it is a photograph of me, that is, it is not me. In a later text, Cavell returns to the same idea when he writes that “representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription.”7 The ontological status of a photograph—what it fundamentally is and how it functions—is difficult to pin down; it is, in Cavell’s words, “mysterious.”8 This mysteriousness argues against understanding photography as representational; it just isn’t the case that photography represents anything. There is a lot more to say about the philosophy of photography, and there are objections to be mounted against Cavell,9 but for my concerns, it is more fruitful to highlight why Cavell feels uncompelled to engage in exactly the sorts of questions that occupy contemporary philosophers of photography (namely the type of “causality” involved in photographs, the sort of relationship they have to reality and real objects, their representational status, and so forth). Even though Cavell touches these issues occasionally, his discussion of photography occurs in a quite different register. Concluding the train of thought presented so far, he claims:

One could accordingly say that photography was never in competition with painting. What happened was that at some point the quest for visual reality, or the “memory of the present” (as Baudelaire put it), split apart. To maintain conviction in our connection with reality, to maintain our presentness, painting accepts the recession of the world. Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past. (WV 23)

There is a lot here. First, with the notion of “presentness,” Cavell is referencing the work of art historian and critic Michael Fried—a relationship that bears closer examination. Second, Cavell’s account obviously and crucially relies on what it means to be present to and in a world. Note how the distinction between photography and painting is to be understood as the idea that in (modernist) painting, the “recession of the world” is accepted, while in photography, “reality . . . is present to me, while I am not present to it.” Putting aside for a moment the point about painting, the point about photography is that what is essential to understanding the ontological significance of photography is reality, not realism. The latter implies a representational stance, where a photograph is compared to reality, while the former suggests that a photograph simply presents a “slice” of reality or, as Cavell will later say, a “screening” of it; reality is “held” before us (WV 189), it is “projected, screened, exhibited” (WV 184).

This point can be formulated in even stronger terms, as when Cavell claims that “that the projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference from reality. (There is no feature, or set of features, in which it differs. Existence is not a predicate)” (WV 24, emphasis added). The photographic and filmic image does not thereby record reality, and this because “the projections we view on a screen are not in principle aurally or visually indistinguishable from the events of which they are projections” (WV 183). The question of the relationship between camera and reality is not a straightforward one; in fact, understanding that relationship hinges on formulating a conception of world. What does it mean to have a world? Or to be in one? Sensitivity to such questions accounts for the distinct register in which Cavell’s discussion of the ontology of film occurs. The inquiry asks after the nature of the relationship between a human view of the world and the world, the relationship between the viewing of a film and the screening of its world. One way to frame this point is to highlight that, like Heidegger (whom Cavell invokes in this context), Cavell’s interests are ontological as opposed to ontic (BT §4),10 concerned with the nature of being as opposed to any particular being. This is apparent from the very first page of The World Viewed, where a Thoreau epigraph inquires: “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?” Why, indeed.

The notion of “having a world” or “worldhood” is also central to Cavell’s understanding of automatism. Well into The World Viewed, Cavell summarizes his thinking as follows: “I have spoken of film as satisfying the wish for the magical reproduction of the world by enabling us to view it unseen” (WV 101); and “viewing the world unseen” is unpacked through direct reference to traditions within modern philosophy:

What we wish to see in this way is the world itself—that is to say, everything. Nothing less than that is what modern philosophy has told us (whether for Kant’s reasons, or for Locke’s, or Hume’s) is metaphysically beyond our reach or (as Hegel or Marx or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche might rather put it) beyond our reach metaphysically. (WV 102)

Strikingly, Cavell is linking the aesthetic project of film to the project of modern philosophy, especially in how the latter has been understood by Heidegger. Cavell stresses this link to Heidegger when he writes that “Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self” (WV 102). Compare this to Heidegger’s claims in “The Age of the World Picture” (1938),11 where Heidegger claims that “the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.”12 In this way, the distinguishing feature of modernity is not scientific prowess or the rise of subjectivity (although these too are important), but rather that these phenomena are symptomatic of a broader trend: one where, with the rising importance and development of human subjectivity, there is also a concomitant understanding of the world as an image, as fundamentally representational. As Heidegger writes, “world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.”13 Understanding agency as “modern” becomes bound up with conceiving of the world as “out there” and with understanding any access to the world as occurring by means of representation. In a deep sense, agents literally become subject to the world. Heidegger characteristically puts these points by tracing the word “subject” to its alleged Greek etymology:

What is decisive is not that man frees himself to himself from previous obligations, but that the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. We must understand this word subjectum, however, as the translation of the Greek hypokeimenon. The word names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. The metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has first of all no special relationship to man and none at all to the I.14

Cavell echoes Heidegger when he claims that “at some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world” (WV 22). What’s essential is that films produce a world, that is, they screen or project reality. Importantly, though, this is not our reality. Exactly in virtue of being screened or projected, the screen’s reality is forever sealed off from us. This separation is ontological; the screen bars us ever entering that world. And yet that world is screened before us. Film thereby offers a powerful response to the predicament that Heidegger diagnoses moderns as occupying. Because we do not do any of the representing, and instead reality is screened to us, film takes the responsibility for (representing) the world, so to speak, “out of our hands” (WV 102). According to Cavell, the condition of modernity (echoing Heidegger) is that “our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became isolation” (WV 22). Photography and film allegedly move us beyond this predicament by allowing us to maintain “the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it” (WV 23).

Before elaborating these points, I want to pause to consider how intimately the connection to Heidegger is being drawn. This is important because while Cavell relies on elements of Heidegger’s account to advance an understanding of “world” and human agency, he fundamentally rejects other elements of Heidegger’s account, especially the latter’s understanding of modernity (unsurprising, since Heidegger himself notably detested film, seeing it as “the illusion of a world which is no world...