Nothing of any of this in the “TV” image, which suggests nothing, which mesmerizes, which itself is nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head – you are the screen, and the TV watches you – it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape – a tape, not an image. (51)
This quote struck me for a number of reasons; the first being the catatonic state one goes into when watching TV goes largely unnoticed. I guess it only goes unnoticed until your mom starts yelling at you to pay attention to her and not the TV, but everyone can relate to that zoned out state of interest. Baurillard alludes to this power of attention when he says that “you are the screen” and that TV has the power to “mesmorize”, but I would go one step further. TV has the power to place the viewer in the show, not the show in the viewer. Some of the best sitcoms of all time (Seinfeld, Friends, Everyone Loves Raymond, The Office) have the uncanny ability to place the viewer in the show. We have all experienced the crazy in-laws of Everyone Loves Raymond or a Chandler type friend. I experienced The Office over the summer in truly remarkable ways. All this to say that the power of television to place the viewer there gives it more power than any other medium. A film is an image; television is life.
Bumpkins, can you clarify your last point? You say film is just an image, but I'm not sure, by your account of TV, that shows, in and of themselves, are inherently more implicated in this strategy of the real than would be films. My sense is that Baudrillard points to television for its comprehensive, in-your-home quality. The shows themselves are merely media events, the process of television seems to be the enrapturing concept. That it lives in our houses, that, as Baudrillard says 'it watches us,' takes, in his account, the televised media event more mesmerizing.
What's the difference between watching a tv show on the tube versus watching a film on the tube? How does watching a TV show in the comfort of your home compare to watching a film at a movie theater?
He made a reference earlier on 51 in which he claims that "film in still an image" with a mythology behind it. TV is more "powerful" because it isn't anything more than what it is, basically nothingness. I understood movies, by his definition, to still have a meaning behind them, where it be philosophical or political. The movie going experience is something more than tv watching.
I hope that helps explain my reading of it.
Bumpkins, how easily does your account of absorption 'map' over Benjamin's? 'A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into the work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed the finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art' (239). And would Baudrillard's 'map' just as easily?
--Guattari Hero
I understand your reading a difference between cinema and TV and their effects on viewers. B speaks about "a history on the part of cinema", while TV "suggests nothing". I've experience but never quite been sure how to describe this sense that movies give off which is lacking in TV. Perhaps the constant interruptions of advertising destroy a certain sense of continuity in the television universe. The Sopranos and other uninterrupted shows partially bridge this gap. B repeats the view that dichotomies of cause and effects, active and passive have been called into question. B writes, "It is in this sense that one can say: TV is watching us, TV manipulates us, TV informs us" (30). He complicates the argument about who wields the power when we watch TV. He does not apply exactly the same about cinema.
I'm going to focus on Seinfeld for a minute and talk about why I think this show works best in describing Bumpkin's last statement of how "television is life." This show, particularly, grounds itself on the fact that it is a show about nothing. Whereas, in films, I think everything is more revolved around a certain message or storyline, television is able to suck the audience in due to the fact that these popular shows all try to base itself off of the reality of nothingness. Perhaps blankman is right about how interrupted commercials and advertisements helps further disintegrate the distinction between reality and television, which is how Baudrillard tries to explain as part of what deterrence achieves in postmodernism.