You Must Study the Motions of the Bodies of the Living

On the Medium of Television

Item! I happened upon this review of Yuval Noah Harari’s latest effort, on AI and the future of humanity, written by our own JSR in the Washington Post. JSR does not seem to have liked the book one bit, though he’s probably just jealous that Harari gets to sleep in a hyperbaric chamber on board his low-orbit vessel, the Sapienship, while a team of robot-servants brings him Cokes Zero and updates him in soothing voices on our species’ prospects for long-term survival.

Item! On her most recent passage through Paris, our own Hélène Le Goff reports a brief sighting of JSR en chair et en os (or at least, she tells me gravely, en os). She says he appeared incredibly frazzled, was carrying an original Latin edition of Christiaan Huygens’s Cosmotheoros (1698), and for some reason his shirt-front pocket was heavy with slide-rule, compass, and other tools typically more associated with the trades of the draughtsmen and engineers of the previous century. When Hélène asked him why he was so adorned, JSR replied somewhat incongruously: “I’m a professor.”

Item! I’ll skip the introductory small-talk that has been the norm here so far among my fellow staff-writers. All you need to know of me for now is that, as JSR often jokes, I really should be legally required to preface everything I write with a warning: “What follows was written by someone with zero epistemic humility”. I believe what he means is I’m a tad annoying, but don’t think for a second I don’t know it! Trust me, I’m fully aware there are plenty of readers out of whom I must really annoy the hell, and not just for my attachment to archaic grammatical rules. What can I say? If a certain percentage of you will inevitably find my style unappealing, others will in time learn to delight in the knowledge that what they are getting is truly my style — my voice, my words, my self. That’s your Kenny Koontz Guarantee, baby!

1.

It should trouble you at least a bit, shouldn’t it, that you can’t really see any proof of the existence of bodies in motion prior to the late 19th century? Honestly sometimes it seems to me that the only way we can know at all that there was motion in the universe in 1877 is that in 1878 Eadweard Muybridge caught his galloping horse on film, and no one present at that key moment in the early history of the moving image —not Muybridge, nor his assistants, nor the horse itself— seems to have taken motion to be something new on the scene. Muybridge wanted to film the horse at its gallop not because galloping was a novelty, but because filming was. And the horse, too, probably had at least some dim idea that it was not discovering new powers within itself, but only doing what horses had always done. Or so the story usually goes.

By now you are probably saying that there of course were representations of motion prior to 1878, in painting and sculpture, for example, or —why not?— in written language too. A galloping horse on film is no less a representation of an animal in motion than a painting of a galloping horse, and there are countless examples of the latter in the material record of our past extending back into deep prehistory — it is just that the particular pathway of transfer in the case of painting is different, and somewhat more reliant on processing through the human mind than through automated technology.

But don’t play dumb with Kenny Koontz, petulant reader. You know what I’m talking about. Every new media technology has triggered a Great Leap Forward in humanity’s ability to access the past, which ultimately means in its ability to convince itself of the reality of the past. There are masses of chawbacons in the interior parts of America who will tell you there were never any dinosaurs, but no one is going to tell you there was never any Bing Crosby. We’ve got footage of the man!

2.

Not every moving image is alike, however. There are in particular very different lineages by which we may trace back the origins of cinema, on the one hand, and television on the other. And once we have done so, good historical ontologists that we are, we will be somewhat better placed to understand the “nature” or “essence” of these very different technologies.

In particular, we will be better positioned to understand why we have so often invested cinema with the status of an art, while we have consistently seen television, notwithstanding occasional disingenuous or ignorant claims about its newfound prospects for a promotion, as at best a source of entertainment. It is not, I maintain, that television is inherently a “middle-brow art”, to cite Pierre Bourdieu’s lovely characterization of photography —let’s bring back the working-class snobs, baby!—, but that it is not an art at all, and never can be. It is a medium.

The phylogenetic split between film and television occurs, in fact, some considerable time before either of these technologies exists in any proper sense. Consider, for example, Joseph Plateau’s remarks on the potential uses of his own variant on the new phenakistoscope technology that was rapidly proliferating in the early 1830s. Plateau wrote to Michael Faraday in March, 1833, that the phenakistoscopic illusion of motion would likely be of most interest “in phantasmagoria”, which is to say in the popular entertainments of the era that relied on lanterns and shadows to create titillating spectacles. The first representational illusion of motion in the history of technology —at least if we exclude some of the very interesting arguments for the animating effect of a flickering torch held up to some of the most beautiful specimens of Paleolithic cave art—, that is, is one that was immediately understood to be of relevance for potential innovations in the theatrical art-form that is most directly ancestral to cinema.

Television, by contrast, traces its ancestry back not to shadow-plays and “magic discs”, but to the telegraph and the transistor. As telecommunication media, these latter have as their most basic purpose the simultaneous connection of different points in space, and the fact that what they do also involves a certain duration in time is secondary to this spatial function. Film is as essentially temporal as television is spatial — it is “sculpting in time”, to invoke Andreï Tarkovskiï’s oft-cited definition. Time, for film, is a power, in the sense of potentiality. It is what the filmmaker is given, as raw material, to work with. For television, it is a problem. It is what the TV studio is confronted with, as a void, to be filled up. (I know I’m ending my sentences with prepositions now; that’s just Kenny Koontz loosening up and feeling good, baby!).

As usual in the history of technology, it is impossible to identify with any precision the day or the year of television’s birth, though it is safe to say that it lags, by several significant decades, behind film. A key development is the disc invented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884, which would underlie the new technology of so-called “mechanical television” as it proliferated throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. If early photographic and cinematic innovation was predominantly French, television was, from the time of the Nipkow disc to the end of World War II, primarily a German concern. Unsurprisingly, most of its earliest applications were military in nature, which is to say, ultimately, for the production and management of real phantasmagoria, rather than of their cathartic representation. It was only in the post-war years that television’s commercial applications began to be explored, and only sometime in the mid-1950s that the United States became en essentially televisual culture. Elsewhere in the developed world it happened later, and in the developing world even later still. Some regions had barely moved into the television age at all before wireless internet technology came and rendered it mostly otiose.

Another way of putting the point we have been making so far might be to say that, while television is haunted by the specter of empty time, in film, by contrast, there is no time at all until there is action of a certain duration. In film, from the beginning, time was Leibnizian (JSR isn’t the only one who gets to cite Leibniz!), a phenomenal consequence of change. Televisual time by contrast is Newtonian, a preexisting empty container that may or may not be filled up. But if you are an employee of a local network affiliate in, say, Little Rock, Arkansas, and you allow five or six seconds of dead air to seep in on your watch, you will learn very quickly that even if empty time is metaphysically possible, it is nonetheless a great sin to give yourself over to it.

3.

I have said that time is a problem for television, and in the remainder of this essay I would like to flesh out what I mean by that.

From at least the silent-film era, cinéastes understood what they had to do: depict stuff happening towards some end or other. In much early television by contrast, it was often just stuff happening. An amusing early-1900s entry in The Onion’s masterpiece of faux-history, Our Dumb Century, purports to be a negative film review complaining that a new feature called Man Doing Backflips is really just an uninspired retread of Man Doing Somersaults. Certainly, some early cinema really did depict pure motion such as this, not motion towards a goal. But it seems to me such works always had the character of experiments. Just as soon as the potentials of the new technology were worked out, filmmakers moved from the imperfective to the perfective, and —perhaps with the exception of the reintroduction of experimentation by the avant-garde, as for example in Stan Brakhage’s cinematic explorations of pure geometry—, has stayed there ever since. Even Muybridge’s horse was, at least implicitly, running a race, which means that it was trying to get somewhere, and not just running for lack of anything better to do, as one might, say, while away a summer afternoon doing somersaults.

The difference I have identified —that film is for sculpting while television is for filling up, that film is perfective while television is imperfective— has everything to do with the fact that television is in its truest nature a medium and not an art-form.

For those employed in operating this medium, again, there is no greater fear than the fear of dead air, a very good and barely figurative label for which might be the old horror vacui. So much of early television, especially at the low-budget local affiliate stations, seems to have been churned out with the primary purpose not of accomplishing something, but only of filling the void that the new medium had itself brought into being.

Thus what we often see are forms of structured recreation, such as square-dancing, that at least appear to me to have undergone no measurable warping effect as a result of the lens being turned on them. To this extent early television often shows us a form of human life —of moving, of exchanging greetings, of laughing— that we have good reason to believe the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people we see in this medium would have recognized as their own. This is not footage of the 19th century, exactly, but the 19th century is still working its epigenetic effects in these people’s faces and bodies. 

Consider the following rare episode of the Kate Smith Evening Hour from 1952, featuring, among others, Hank Williams, Sr., and Anita Carter of Carter Family nobility. I am not forcing this on you because it is country music —that’s Mary’s beat, baby! I skew more Dean Martin—, but only because it is so perfectly illustrative of several of the points I have been making so far.