Television:

Sign of The Times in Contemporary America

Mahmut Mutman

Assistant Professor,
Bilektn University, Department of Graphic Design

___________________________________________________________

Department of Graphic Design, Bilkent University, Bilkent 06533.

Phn #: 438 0609 (home); 266 4000-ext. 1749 (off.); Fax #: 266 4136

e-mail: mutman@bcc.bilkent.edu.tr
 Television:

Sign of The Times in Contemporary America

Mahmut Mutman

Since its appearance as a major means of 'mass communication' in the

aftermath of the World War II, television has increasingly become one of the most

powerful metaphors of contemporary American culture. Occupying a central place at

the cross-roads of politics and business, entertainment and information, home and

world, sound and image, work and leisure, television is certainly not simply an

effective means of disseminating knowledge or images, but a cultural form, a

regulating metaphor for social life. Many of its characteristics underpin the ideals of

routine social life in contemporary American culture of work and consumption: a

technological achievement, a means of communication covering vast distances and

bringing information and images to our homes, a service product in all its varieties

and programmes, produced in a professional, disciplined and punctual manner and

presented as a response to our 'demand.' This is perhaps why television, like one of its

precursors, cinema, is often considered as an 'American thing.' In his introduction to

the new edition of his well-known collection, Television: The Critical View, Horace

Newcomb writes:

" ... television has often been seen as both cause and effect, source and
symptom, agent and evidence of ... new social and cultural
developments. This is especially the case when 'television' is defined
as or by 'American commercial television.' And because the form of
American commercial television is shared throughout the world, either
through the export of programming or through the collapse of various
forms of public service broadcasting in the face of an advancing
privatization of investment, 'television' in any context often means
'American TV.' " (9)
 Such widespread global influence of American TV and its association with

American way of life might conceal the fact that television is not unproblematically

accepted in American society. Indeed it has frequently been an object of scientific

research and intellectual criticism as well as public controversy in America. One

might separate two main forms of discursive activity in relation to television: public

discourse and intellectual discourse, including academic research. Public discourse is

a large and somewhat ambiguous category which might include the popular magazine

type of TV criticism as well as more serious public opinion writing on television.

Criticisms often directed to individual programs and shows are certainly not the most

interesting part of this proliferation of public discourse around television—though

they might constitute perhaps the largest part—to the extent that they are part of the

same apparatus of media. Very rarely television is taken as a whole institution in this

kind of writing. Nonetheless public discourse may turn out to be interesting when it is

considered as an essential part of the way television is instituted by several forces in

society. Indeed despite that it might at times be critical, this kind of discourse must be

considered within the same context as some other discourses on and around TV:

commercial advertising for TV sets, expert opinion on the virtues of a recent

innovation or the presumed dangers of television for children, etc. All these public

discourses together are involved in the signification of television, thus influencing

television's signification of the world. The public discourse on TV becomes an

essential part of the analysis of TV as cultural institution. 1

The other kind of discourse on TV can be subsumed under the general title of

academic and intellectual discourse on media, which shows a great variation as well.

Social scientific study of media is understandably characterized by an academic

distance from common sense assumptions. Indeed what is nowadays called "media

studies" has a long history rooted in the sociology of mass communications and social

1A good example of the analysis of such public discourse is Cecilia Tichi'sElectronic

Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture .
psychology of the immediate post-war period in the U.S. Emerging as a response to

the hypodermic-needle theory of the pre-war and war years, early sociology of mass

communications was characterized by meticulous empirical research on the "effecs"

of media messages on discrete, observable individual behavior and opinion. Since

2

the prior hypodermic concept of direct and immediate effects had been common

sense in the years of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms, the main objective of these

empirical studies was to develop a precise measurement of how effective the media

actually were. Such studies (especially on voting and buying behavior) indicated that

the media do not create any significant change in individual attitudes and opinions.

We might say that most of the media research in the last three decades have

developed as a critical response to this dominant paradigm. And it is not a

3

coincidence that the most significant part of this research has been on television.

Following its social and cultural installation in the 1950s , television has rapidly
4

become a major mass medium, and hence a prime object of analysis and criticism.

The recent media studies seem to employ various different methodologies from the

semiological analysis of media texts to the ethnographic study of audience groups. 5

One common aspect of these various approaches is their rejection of a simplistic

dichotomy between "direct and total effect" and "no effect", and their insistence on

questions of cultural domination and resistance.

Public intellectual discourse is perhaps a third 'intermediate' category we

should yet distinguish. A good example in this category is Jerry Mander's Four

2 See, especially: P. Lazarsfeld, B. R. Berelson, H.Gaudet,: The People's Choice:

How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign .
3 For a succinct criticism of the concept of effect, see: Todd Gitlin: "Media

Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm"

4 For the process in which TV is instituted as prime family entertainment, see Lynn

Spiegel: Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Post-war America.
5 John Fiske's Television Culture , and Dave Morley'sTelevision Audiences are best

examples.
Arguments for the Elimination of Television. That television has never been simply
6

and homogeneously approved in American public discourse is evident in the title as

well as the content of Mander's influential work. But more interesting is the way in

which the author presents a point of view that is comparable in its simplicity to the

assumed naiveté of the world-view espoused by television. Mander's approach is

determined in the last instance by an opposition between alphabetic literacy and

visual communication. In the reading process, the reader is self-conscious, but

television watching is a kind of wakeful sleep in which the audience watch somebody

else's dream (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 201). The flow of

dream images bypass conscious thinking and people respond to them with zombie-

like passivity. Mander draws largely on Victor Tausk's concept of "influencing

7

machine" as well as orthodox psychoanalytic concept of schizophrenia. The mental

state of the TV viewer is close to that of the schizophrenics that is described by a

confusion of the inside and outside, the internal and external worlds.

Mander also argues that television overemphasizes the activities of the right

half of the brain, devoted to image, fantasy and intuition, at the expense of the

activities of the left half, which is the part devoted to cognition and critical thinking.

The consequence of the hegemony of television is the possibility of increasing

debilitation and eventual loss of our capacity of analytic and critical thinking.

Naturally Mander does not believe in the use of television for progressive cause

either. In one example he cites, the attempt by the Hopi Indians, who represent a

natural and sane way of life for him, to use the medium to communicate their

alternative point of view in a land dispute was proved to be entirely ineffective. The

6 Another example that comes to mind is Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business . My reason for choosing Mander for a
critical engagement will be clear below. Nevertheless I must emphasize that one can
find very similar themes in Postman's work as well.
7 My critical reading of Mander draws on Gregory Ulmer's, although I do not

necessarily agree with all the conclusions he draws from it. See, Gregory Ulmer:
Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video, 68-70.
Hopi argument was lost in abstract formulations such as 'progress vs tradition' and the

images of strange, savage-looking people.

Mander's contradiction in advocating both European alphabetic and native

oral cultures is evident. The harmfulness of television is so obvious to him that the

simple objective becomes to collect as much evidence as possible to make the point.

This way of thinking might tell us more about television than its criticism. Gregory

Ulmer considers Mander's categorical and oppositional way of thinking as

reminiscent of philosopher Plato's similar criticism of visual representation.

According to Ulmer, there is also something of a catastrophic mentality in Mander's

approach, that is the "end-of-the world" imagery, prevalent in our time. Ulmer8

develops his criticism of Mander's arguments in the context of his own search for a

critical use of visual technologies in education. While Mander assumes a true

representation of the world, Ulmer is interested in what we can do and can not do

with visual technologies. Mander's approach has an undeniably intellectual, and more

specifically Platonic aspect, but it might also be taken as a kind of intellectual

argument which is not so alien to cultural common sense. Although the degree is not

insignificant, Mander's position can also be seen as an extreme version of the

response liberal middle class families give to television. A widespread attitude found

among the liberal urban middle class depends on a certain (moral) economy of

watching. If television is watched inappropriately, it might be quite harmful—an

approach that we find especially in relation to children's socialization. Appropriate

use of television is about the amount of watching and the time of watching

(especially the latter is also implied in television scheduling.) Although Mander

comes up with a much more radical solution such as eliminating television altogether,

he shares a set of related assumptions with those who argue for a moral economy of

watching TV. These people might favor a milder or moderate approach, and perhaps

many of them would not agree with the proposal of the elimination of television, but
8 Ulmer: 1989: 70.
the point of my argument is that such differences might be hiding a complex set of

assumptions about television which is shared by people who have otherwise different

moral or political positions. This set of assumptions forms a complex whole. I want

to examine it in details now, but I need to point out in the very beginning that this

complex set of assumptions is part of the institution of television itself.

The first of these assumptions is that television is an instrument, that is to say

a medium of communication by which information and images are transmitted.

According to this, there is a 'real world' where events happen outside the institution

of television, a world which is by definition separate from television or media. The

task of media professionals and journalists is to report these events to us. The

possible problems are biased, subjective reporting and what communication theorists

call "noise," that is what interferes with the transmission of the message. When the

report is objective and all noise is eliminated, you have a transparent view of the

event. The questions of bias and noise are questions of moral and professional

training, that is to say essentially technical questions. In such a view, television is no

more than an instrument, a medium between the sender and the receiver, which

provides the latter with a transparent view. In some significant parts of his criticism

of television, Mander assumes precisely such a model of communication, a

transparent communication in which the message sent is identical to the message

received. In his view, television is an obstacle for the realization of such an ideal and

normal human communication for which the example would probably be the Hopi

Indians. It remains to be discussed whether Mander's argument assumes a deeper

9

theoretical framework in which a kind of primal 'face-to-face' human communication

is opposed to a form of technologically mediated communication, and further,

whether this can be read as a fear of technology. I shall not develop this point here,

9I am not arguing or assuming that television can communicate Hopi Indians' point
of view. Indeed I would like to question the assumption that they are somehow more
natural than white Americans.
but it is sufficient to say that television itself is regarded by Mander as a kind of noise

which interrupts better (or ideal) forms of communication. His criticism of television

is a reversal of the position of television within a more general moral framework of

transparent communication that he shares with his adversaries.

Second assumption is related to the first: the separation of a place called "real

world" from television as if the latter has no part in it. This is an assumption that goes

as far back as the Ancient Greek notion of mimetic representation that characterizes

the visual paradigm of Western civilization. Western tradition of oil painting, with its

rule of perspective formulated in Renaissance, is regarded as a distinguishing instance

of this visual problematic. The techonologies of mechanical reproduction such as

photography, film and television as well as the birth of mass culture constitute an

important turning point in this history. Now we have visual representations and
10

images which are reproducible in great numbers and which have become an essential

part of our day-to-day existence, with implications for the governing of our modern

societies. To give an obvious example, today it is simply impossible to think of

politics independent of media and in particular television. Visual representation on a

mass scale is a fundamental aspect of politics today as well as the "image" which the

politicians have to establish and elaborate through self-presentation and rhetoric on a

daily basis. Apparently the media or television simply represent what happens in the

real world of politics; but in reality they are themselves part of this real world, with

their massive power of representation from daily news photo to political

commentary. The same applies for all different spheres of life: how is it possible to

think the ups and downs of financial markets independent of the business news on

television which provides information in the shortest time? How can one think of the

organization and financing of sports today separate from the way sport events are

The consequences of this development is brilliantly analyzed by the German critic

10

Walter Benjamin in the beginning of the century. See his "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
represented in the media? In many spheres of life television does not simply

influence society, it directly participates into its daily running. Even the most

objective and unbiased news reporting of an event (if there is such a thing) is

functional in underlying the significance of that event. As numerous researches have

shown, the journalists do not have political or subjective bias in a simple way, but

they have implicit and explicit criteria about what makes a good news story and are

clearly selective in their presentation of what happened or how it happened. The

paradox is that such a direct participation into the making of reality requires the

assumption that there is a real world that is indepedent of television. In other words,

this second assumption means that television is bound to misrecognize its own action

in the real world; it has to deny its own role in the making of reality and construct

itself as a simple instrument which provides a transparent view precisely in order to

construct reality 'as it is'. Mander's proposal of eliminating television assumes that the

present social organization is not touched by television at all and therefore does not

carry any trace of it.

This brings us to the third assumption which is the perhaps the most difficult

to understand, but it logically follows from the first two. It is essential to the

institution of television that the audiences are considered as a group of people who

are separate from or external to television. Television professionals as well as many

others would concur that the people's attitudes, norms and opinions are strongly

influenced by television. In this sense, Jerry Mander's argument that television

induces a schizophrenic state of mind is only a negative version of a widely accepted

idea. The effect of television is often taken as evident, but the important point here is

the assumption of an individual or an attitude which is prior to television and is then

changed by the action of it. But there is also an ambiguity in Mander's approach,

because this influence might be considered in two ways: either as a total impact on

mass or society or as the effects of single messages on observable behavior. The

former can be understood in a historical sense, in terms of a difference between a

social situation in which television occupies a central role and one in which it does

not or it does not exist. But the latter idea is more structurally related to the

assumption that the audience is external to the institution of television. However

"influence" is not the only consequence which is associated with the idea of the

externality of audiences. More important than this is the freedom of choice which is

attributed to the audience member. Once considered as entirely outside the institution

of television, audience member can exercise his/her freedom of choice before various

TV programs. Of course, in the case of criticisms such as Mander's—the thesis of

total impact on social and individual behavior—it is precisely the lack of exercise of

such freedom that matters.

Now I want to examine these assumptions in details. My purpose is to

establish a view of television which is different from the one that is implied by an

unproblematical acceptance of such assumptions. To begin with, I define the idea of

television as merely a channel or medium of communication the technicist or

technological reductionist idea of television. Against this technological reductionism,

I would like to take an approach that is closer to the paleontologist's: technology is

not a mere instrument but it signifies some fundamental characteristic of a social

form or cultural ethos. What kind of social or cultural ethos is expressed by the
11

instrument or apparatus of television? When we ask such a question, we immediately

realize that the answer is not straightforward but indeed multifaceted and complex.

There is the TV set as an everyday object and a piece of furniture that we find in the

sitting rooms of our homes; there are camera, transmitters, antenna, receivers, tube

and screen; there are the studio and a whole social organization that we call a 'TV

channel' (with its specific set of roles and statuses from the adminstrator to the

reporter and the cameraman); there are various kinds of programs; etc. The result of

the operation of this complex apparatus of television is a series of images and

Such a view is broadly influenced by Andre Leroi-Gourhan's approach. See his: Le

11

Geste et la Parole, Technique et Langage.

information. I define "image" as a visual expression characteristic of modern culture,

which is different from a kind of visual expression such as oil painting. Images are

produced by technologies of reproduction such as photography, cinema and

television. Philosopher Heidegger defined modern age as the "age of world picture."

For Heidegger, images or pictures have become the primary means of "worlding" or

constructing the world of modern society. In his words, "it is not simply that we have

a different picture of the world, but we now have the world as picture" (The Question

Concerning Technology, 130). According to Heidegger, the development of modern

technology, which is the essence of modern world view, is a result of the desire to

command nature (Basic Writings, 283-318). In the modern age, the desire to control

and dominate over nature is itself out of control. Technology orders the world in a

way which blocks the expression of a more authentic truth about ourselves (314-315).

Heidegger is interested in the destiny of Western civilization, which he sees as

beginning with the Ancient Greek concern with philosophical search for truth. The

unique historical development of this paradigm ends in modernity, which signifies a

forgetting of its fundamental truths, for instance that the essence of technology is not

technological.

Technology is also often considered as an extension of human bodily organs

or a projection of human body. Such an approach implicity assumes that human

12

body is lacking, insufficient; technology is needed to increase its power. It is not

difficult to see that the assumption of human body as lacking is complementary to the

assumption of nature as excessive and violent hence in need of control. It only

follows that nature and/or human body is produced by the same assumption which

produces the concept of technology, and this assumption belongs to a problematic of

12Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, and Jurgen Habermas's essay on

"Technology and Science as Ideology" in hisTowards a Rational Society are typical
examples.
knowledge as power and control. We can easily think of television (indeed the
13

whole media) as an extension of our eyes and ears, an extension which increases our

"natural" powers of seeing and hearing. What constitutes then the excessive and

violent aspect of nature? In comparison to television (or media), this would be for

instance rumor, an uncontrollable and dangerous form of dissemination of

knowledge. This is why television does not simply inform us, but is a control of the

flow of information in the first place, a site of controlled information, coded and

disseminated through 'proper' channels. The sense of control and command here is
14

properly modern, and it finds its most crystallized form probably in the contemporary

American culture, with its highly organized and technological character, its strong

business pragmatism and professionalism.

Heidegger's approach can be read as an explanation of technology as the

cultural ethos of modernity rather than useful tools which make our lives easier. As I

have argued above, today many social practices from governing to production and

exchange is impossible to conceive without direct participation of television. In a

similar way, Cecelia Tichi calls television an environment. Following an approach

suggested by Tony Fry, I call the social environment as constructed or worlded by

television the "televisual." Television or the televisual is an essential aspect of our

15

sociality, our cultural ethos today. Indeed, Mander proposes to give up some

significant part of this sociality or ethos, but he thinks this is possible just by

eliminating television. This is because he does not see that, as the visual instance of a

desire to control being caught up in its own movement, television is already beyond

itself. For instance, the popular middle class complaint about the excessiveness of

13 We are reminded here of Michel Foucault's well-known concept of power-

knowledge technologies. See: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
14 This is an issue we could complicate further. Of course, television can never be full

control of the flow of information, there is no total control. We might think of the
infamous cases of urban riots and uprisings for which media and in particular
television have sometimes been held responsible.
15 See his important collection, Rua TV? Heidegger and the Televisual.
television assumes that television is a separate institution which can and must be

controlled, limited, rationalized and used in an economical way. However such a line

of argument continues the very assumptions which constructs television (as

technology) in an inverted form. Since the very assumption of technology as

command of nature constructs nature as ('naturally') excessive, as a violent force that

needs to be controlled, a critical response to television in terms of controlling its

excesses is part of the same conceptual paradigm of nature. Indeed this is a response

which naturalizes television by making its body to return to its normal natural

functioning. The psychologization and medicalization of children's habits of watching

television already assumes television as a natural body with a potential of excess, just

like children's bodies themselves. If we do not have a different picture of the world,

but the world as picture, if, in other words, the televisual is a primary means of

relating to the world, how can we protect ourselves from such an excess, since the

very means of controlling what we assume to be uncontrollable is itself out of

control? The assumption of a "real world" outside television is problematical, not in

the sense that there is not really a real world but in a different sense: television

conceived as social environment, that is the "televisual" is everywhere, without

limits. Television itself is commanded and framed by the force of its own desire to

control visually, which is the tele-visual. It is not only that there are screens

everywhere from shops to airports and streets, but more importantly the image is

already there before it is 'taken' by camera. The behavior of the politician who

prepares his speech in view of television is framed by the televisual. He is "imaged,"

his image is already there long before the cameraman arrives at the scene. In the mall

where each single shop window presents us with a radiating glow of lights, we are

walking inside the tube. The space of everyday life in contemporary American

society is already tele-visual, the world already a picture.

Nonetheless such a conceptualization of television without further

qualification of the notion of image would be misleading. Image, as I mean it here,

has three important characteristics. First of all, it is an image that is produced by

means of mechanical reproduction, that is to say, it is by definition a copy. Secondly,

as a visual sign, image is polysemic. It does not have any fixed meaning by itself, and

is always in need of other images or language (conceived in a broad sense, words as

well as thoughts) to be made meaningful. Thirdly, image is not what we see or look

at, but it is that which sees or frames us. This is the meaning of Heidegger's

formulation of the world itself as picture. In a sense, the contemporary world is a

room which its walls is made of mirrors—one can think of the increasing use of

reflecting glass on the façades of skycrapers. One of the important contemporary

psychoanalysts, Jacques Lacan has demonstrated that what I see in the mirror is not

myself but another figure to whom I enter into a problematical process of

identification. In this framework, the "I" is other. Following Lacan, we might argue
16

that in the contemporary world, from the street advertising to the television screen,

image is like a writing which inscribes our figures, making us visible as well as

making the world visible to us. Such a cultural environment requires the assumption

of a foundational belief in the indepedence, autonomy and superiority of seeing over

all other senses, thought and language (embodied by the whole modern technology

from telescope and microscope to the camera). However this privilige accorded to

seeing ends up in the paradoxical result of being caught up in a network of images, in

a complex process of identification which prisons the subjective desire in a world of

phantasms.

Such an inversion can also be observed in our everyday relationship to

television as audience. The privilige given to the visual is of course illusory, and

there is no flow of images without an accompanying flow of sound. The place of

language, or more specifically talk on television is crucial. There are different forms

16Jacques Lacan develops this analysis in an important essay that he wrote on the
early socialization of the infants titled as "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the Eye." See his Ecrits: A Selection, 1-7.
of talk on television and accordingly different kinds of images: news, serial drama,

documentary, video clip, current affairs, films, comedy, talk show, etc. Without

denying the significance of this plurality of discursive forms on television, I would

like to emphasize a level of television discourse which has a strategic importance. We

often hear on television a statement as follows: "dear viewers, here is what we

brought to you tonight, the kind of programs you want to watch, the images that you

want to see, all the information you need, etc." This is often said by the anchor

person on the prime time news, but also typically by the overvoice who announces

the upcoming shows in between two programs. Both of these voices, but particularly

the latter, can be regarded as the voice of television. Television speaks to us in this

statement. We, the audiences, are directly addressed as subjects or individuals ("you")

who demand and desire television. On the other hand, these programs are produced

by television in an obvious sense. In order to understand the significance of this

statement, we need to refer to a distinction made in linguistics between the subject of

utterance and the subject of the statement. When I say "I am lying," I am lying as the

subject of utterance, but telling the truth as the subject of the statement. When

television tells us that it is the result of our desire, it behaves as if it is the subject of

the statement despite that it is the subject of the utterance. TV acts as if it is simply

the receiver of the direct expression of a natural desire which belongs to the audience

out there, while it is actually us who are the receivers of its unique utterance, and

while the TV itself is the producer of this language which can only be known, desired

and spoken, and for which the demand can only appear once it is uttered, and not

before. It is the television which looks at us, but we experience this look as if it is our

own. We can now see why the third assumption about the externality of the audience

is false yet necessary to the operation of television. The audiences are produced by

television itself, as if they are subjects or individuals who are free to choose to watch

it or not. This argument can be extended to our everyday, habitual relationship to

television. Television watching is part of our "habitus", which is defined by the

sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as the system of socially acquired bodily and psychic
dispositions (78-87). The instrument by which we turn the TV on or off, depending

on our choice and will, is called remote control; the remote is always within the reach

of our arm. But is television ever off? Whenever we turn it on, we are sure to find an

image "there." Television is always already there, running day and night, 24 hours. In

other words, we are not simply choosing between programs when we turn the TV on,

but we are receiving, at any moment, television itself. Our desire for image is desire

for something, a figure, a word, that is already there, already produced by and as

television. Our belief that we choose between programs is another instance of the

inversion that I described above. We assume we want and receive a certain kind of

image, a content, a scene, this program and not the other one, but what is given to us

is also the form or expression itself, television. Perhaps the best moments which

explain television are the moments when we do not look at anything particular on

television but "just watch television," as we often like to say.

There is a number of other important features of television which I have not

discussed here. The serial nature of its programming is one such feature. Television is

a programmed and scheduled flow of images and sounds, characterized by an

everyday, serial format. This serial, everyday nature of television implies some other
17

consequences about the nature and time of television image. It is news rather than

soap operas that must be regarded as paradigmatic here: television is, in Stanley

Cavell's words a current of simultaneous event perception (251-252). The time of

television is always present time, always "now, this." The specific nature of television

image can be described as live, in opposition to the photographic image which is by

definition past, even when it is a news photo.

17 Stanley Cavell makes a distinction between the aesthetic interests of cinema and
television. while the former is characterized by a genre-individual story format, the
latter is characterized by a serial-episode format. See, his Themes out of School, 150-
158.
 If our figures are inscribed by the world as picture, and if television occupies

a strategic part of such an inscription by its live image, then we are bound to

misrecognize our images and ourselves to the extent that we fail to read this writing.

Such a failure is organized by the speed and excess of images in our public and

private lives. In Avital Ronell's words, "what fascinates us robs us of our power to

give sense" (13). Arguments such as Mander's are misleading not simply because

they make false statements about television but because they isolate televison as a

separete institution or technology from a whole social organization. Our power to

give sense is taken for granted in such an argument: once television is eliminated, our

common sense is there to lead us into a sane life. But if television is a writing which

inscribes our world, then we must learn how to read it. Our failure to read or

interprete images is evident in our common sense assumption which considers seeing

as a direct means of knowledge. The trial of Rodney King was a tragic instance of

this failure. Avital Ronell draws our attention to the fact that neither prosecution nor

defense approached to George Holiday's video film of Rodney King's beating as a

narrative piece in need of reading or interpretation. While "the prosecution appeared

to believe that the video spoke for itself and did nothing to produce a reading of the

idiom of video", the defense team offered a "frame by frame" viewing (2-3). This

latter procedure however, questioned by no one, implied a reading which transformed

the video into freeze frame photography. By thus eliminating the temporization

required by reading, this unique framing would result in reproducing in the

courtroom the violence inflicted on Rodney King's body. If the mass protest that

followed was a quick violent response, that was not because television images

disseminated the bad news very fast and provoked the masses in an indirect way (a

question of controlling information) but it was because of an incapacity to see image

as a text that is in need of reading and interpretation.

Television, this sign of contemporary America, remains powerful maybe

because of such an incapacity. The claim that American people is visually more
literate than other societies because the media is most developed there is also

questionable, because the capacity to read and understand images critically has little

to do with a purely pragmatic or technical familiarity with them. Indeed the question

of how other cultures read American programs and shows sold all over the world

remains to be open. Horace Newcomb's point that television often means American

television is surely correct. Nevertheless one needs to add that that American

television is clearly readable by Americans is perhaps what remains hidden from this

fascinating global export.

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