The equivalence of all destinations
I think that rereading old critiques of television is a good way of doing "tech criticism" today. Almost all the same concerns about screens and the "end of reality" and the stupidification of the masses are already in place. Not only that, the critics of these critics tend to anticipate the optimism of today's tech apologists. Rather than perpetually repeating the cycle, maybe there is some meta-analysis that could take place.
In that spirit, I was going through essays in the excellent 1983 collection The Anti-Aesthetic, which is about postmodern culture, which is in many respects about television. One could argue that postmodernism began when it started to become clear that television had altered people's relation to "reality" not by showing fictional worlds that were mistaken for real but by blurring the distinction everywhere between "experience" and "mediation." Anything could be put on a screen, and a screen could be put anywhere.
"Something has changed," Jean Baudrillard writes in "The Ecstasy of Communication":
the Faustian, Promethean (perhaps Oedipal) period of production and consumption gives way to the '''proteinic'' era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication. With the television image — the television being the ultimate and perfect object for this new era — our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen.
The upshot here (at least as I read it) is that television — which Baudrillard identifies as the successor to the automobile as the object that serves as the definitive expression of the spirit of the age — has turned everything (including the audience itself) into images, into media, all of which is networked together on the same plane (the famous "precession of simulacra").
That concept seems a lot less cryptic now, because phones — the definitive object of the spirit of the current era — makes it more intuitive, more obvious: Everything can be digitized (that is, exist as commensurate "electrical impulses," which is how theorists tended to talk about this in the 1980s), time and space can be homogenized, the real (physical reality) and the representation (the screen) are fully imbricated. The subject (audience) and object (content) are similarly enmeshed, such that every moment of consumption is a moment of production. Consumption-production becomes continuous, and it no longer makes sense to talk about discrete moments of consumption, of the symbolic import of specific exchanges. Instead there are flows, the constant management of identity through a serial production of the self and of one's relationships, which are in the constant process of remediation.
Baudrillard argues that all this puts people in the Major Tom position of being in orbit, "isolated In a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin." You can seem to pilot your life through screen interfaces: "Telematic power," Baudrillard claims, is the "capacity of regulating everything from a distance, including work in the home and, of course, consumption, play, social relations, and leisure."
Zoom life during the height of Covid was perhaps the most elaborated expression of this yet; as dystopic as that was, it was the life of privilege relative to the "necessary workers" who had to leave their private orbit and maintain that illusion for others. They were stuck in "the real." It was a bit sinister to see commentators lining up to declare the Zoom lifestyle as "the new normal," as something everyone would want to perpetuate far beyond the pandemic. Baudrillard too represents such developments as inevitable: "The simple presence of the television changes the rest of the habitat into a kind of archaic envelope," he argues, "a vestige of human relations whose very survival remains perplexing."
But what seems most inevitable is that some people will be left out; while some sustain themselves in an individualistic orbit, others work to sustain the material supply lines to outer space. In a sense the opposition of public and private space — which Baudrillard insists has been abolished by what we now think of as connectivity — is replaced by a more rigid distinction between those who experience the "ecstasy" of networked life and those who serve it.
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Baudrillard's analysis derives from a shift in how television was understood: It ceased to be conceived as a portal to another world and was instead taken to be a layer that saturated it, a kind of augmented reality before the fact. Jonathan Crary, in an essay from the 1984 collection Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, characterizes this as the "eclipse of the spectacle." That is, the "spectacle" as Debord conceived it — as a fake world that could beguile fundamentally passive viewers, inculcate them with ideology, isolate them from reality, and sell them hyped-up commodities that were "really" worthless — no longer worked that way.
"We have witnessed the gradual displacement of aura from images of possessable objects to digitized flows of data," Crary writes, "to the glow of the VDT" — i.e. a "video display terminal," 1980s lingo for "screen" —"and the promise of access embodied there." Television no longer represented an idealized world (the spectacle) that we might imaginatively project into so much as reconstitute the world as images, or what Crary describes as "binarized pulses of light or electricity that unhinges the fictive unity of spectacular representation." As a result, "television, as a system which functioned from the 1950s into the 1970s, is now disappearing, to be reconstituted at the heart of another network in which what is at stake is no longer representation but distribution and regulation."
It can seem counterintuitive to argue that what we generally call "images" now are not representations — after all they depict something, they represent it in mediated form. But the key point to the whole Baudrillardian line of thinking is that you can't have "representation" when there is nothing but representations. If everything is always already mediated, then in a sense nothing is. Television is not somehow contained in the box that sits in a living room; it saturates reality with its logic so there is nowhere to stand outside it.
If everything is images — if it's all digital stuff — then the images are like currency; they are tokens, maybe even nonfungible ones. They are just part of a uniform code, interchangeable signs in a universalizing discourse. Crary points this out with respect to the paradox of high-definition images: "As reproductive technology attains new parameters of mimetic 'fideliity' (holography, high-resolution TV) there is an inverse move of the image toward pure surface, so that whatever drifts across the screen of either television or home computer is part of the same homogeneity."
Crary is eager to insist that the homogeneity is to some degree an illusion, that Baudrillard's view is "totalizing" and excludes the possibility that there are "interstices" in the grid that disrupt its smooth functioning. This is reminiscent of tech critics today who point out that the most dystopian tech critics are too often simply taking tech company claims at face value, treating their ambitions as already realized, as inevitable. But where today's critics are rejecting hype about "smart" tech and various modes of solutionism, Crary seems like he is trying to reject the "postmodern condition" altogether, as if it were just an overhyped product and not an all-encompassing epistemology. He wants us to basically take it on faith that hyperreality will short-circuit itself, that materiality will assert itself as disruption and disorder, upsetting the smooth function of the mediated flows. "We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard," he declares. Must we? It's likely that the incapacity is unevenly distributed; some will be fully rationalized, others will have the privilege to resist or profit by it.
Insisting on that "fundamental incapacity" seems nostalgic to me. It smuggles back in the world of the spectacle that was supposed to be in eclipse — the real material world and the fake world of images. It expresses hope for the possibility that things can be "real" and "fake," for a break in the homogeneity, even if it means being duped by misrepresentations. You can see some of this nostalgia when Crary denounces "'interactive' technology" as a "sham" even then, when it was barely a technological possibility, and reminds us that in the early 1960s "television then still allowed aleatory experiences of drift and anomie." Again, this is like tech critics who want to remember the good old days of online serendipity, when you could "surf" the web free of tracking and trolls while remaining more or less anonymous, a faceless flaneur. You could be detached in a way that compulsive interactivity has made impossible.
This is an ironic reversal of the idea that Interactivity would democratize media, including the voice of viewers in what spectacles are produced and circulated. But in practice, interactivity is more like Foucault’s “compulsion to confess” — an “incitement to discourse” about the self that both mystifies it and reifies it. The self then would be understood as inaccessible except through its expression in what media content one consumes and produces. That's where we are now. Compulsory interactivity eliminates that critical distance from the “spectacle” and situates consumers as being fully identified with what they “choose” to consume. The space for disavowal is closed.