Core Post 1: Organizing Principles

An overarching theme here seems to be television’s imbrication with a general commodification of the visual field across built spaces (our authors focus on the United States in particular)—a process which has vastly reorganized such minor and uncomplicated things as time, perception, and sociality since the postwar period in which television assumes its ubiquity, though we could, as Morse’s citations of Benjamin’s Arcades Project suggest, trace this back to an earlier moment in modernity. We see such commodification of the visual in Colomina’s example of Kodak’s “Instamatic” camera, introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair: “With it, the camera, this window into the world, which in the 1939 World’s Fair was still contemplated (like television) with amazement, became a mass-consumable technological object… With the mass consumption of the camera came, paradoxically, the ‘privatization’ of the view, that is, of the exterior” (8-9). For Colomina, these sorts of paradoxes, these interpenetrations of exterior and interior, public and private, become an organizing principle of midcentury architecture.

In a more recent example, McCarthy examines how the “intrusive presence” of the CNN-produced Accent Health Network emanating from medical waiting room TVs has played a role in the broader commercialization of the “medical space” (to import a bit of present-day corporate jargon; 205). Elsewhere, Morse discusses, well, a lot of things. Echoing and updating Benjamin, she posits television as productive of states of “distraction” which underlie our habituation as consumers (n. 26, pgs. 218-19 was helpful in clarifying the link between distraction and consumption). Like Colomina, Morse is interested in how television can situate us in both a somewhere and an elsewhere at once. This ties into distraction, has serious consequences for the boundaries between and contours of what constitutes public and private, and makes television, along with other features of postmodern infrastructure like freeways and malls, part of a “nexus of exchange between economic, social, and symbolic systems” (208; section heading).

Key to this exchange is Morse’s formulation of the “nonspace” (which again ties into distraction in ways I’d like to parse out more). The specter of anthropologist Marc Augé’s influential and oft-contested concept of the non-place was hanging over me as I read about nonspaces, though I believe Augé did not coin this term until a few years after Morse’s writing. There is some definite overlap here: In a reductive account, non-places include sites like freeways, malls, and airports which, for Augé, lack historical and relational grounding in ways that “places," traditionally understood, do not. Morse’s formulation of “nonspace” involves similar sorts of geographic nodes and throughways. But she articulates the nonspace as less a site-specific phenomenon, more a diffuse psychic state of having one foot in a here, one in a there; one in reality, one in a fiction. The non-space, then, is something of a pervasive, transitory state of mind that, rather than offering grounds for alternative space-making practices (as De Certeau might enjoin us to), might be seen as the mediating factor interlinking national/military to television to domestic space in Colomina’s figure of the “cabinet,” or in Morse’s terms, as that which creates nexuses in the “one great machine” (212). 

Other question I’m left with: Do the particularities of places, bodies, and material histories start to drop out in the mode of postmodern theorizing in which Morse seems to be operating? Like, she does at one point acknowledge that “there is indeed a heterogeneous world of local values,” but beyond that I wonder what would happen to some of the concepts she develops were we to put them to work in a more empirically oriented study? Or one that starts from a place of considering things like race, gender, class, location, rather than ending with these issues, as Morse does with her concluding notes about televisual discourse’s exclusion of “others”?