Abstract
To begin by saying that this book is ambitious would be a major understatement. What Scannell attempts here is not merely a corrective to Heideggerian phenomenology and of the hermeneutics of suspicion that has dominated our understanding of modernity and its institutions par excellence: the media – two ambitious intellectual tasks in their own right – but what is attempted here is even more daring: a repositioning of our thinking about the media and their role in our everyday lives beyond the grip of sociology. Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation is book number 2 in a trilogy. It was preceded by Media and Communication (Scannell, 2007) and is to be followed by another to complete the trilogy, which is to be called, astonishingly, Love and Communication. Scannell’s second book from the trilogy forms part of a sustained and systematic argument, if not a cultural project.
To understand the conditions of our existence, advances Scannell, demands that we address the question of technology as constitutive of the world in which we live. Such positioning situates Scannell’s thesis in an ambitious project that implicates media and communication studies at the heart of philosophy. To state that technology or, to be specific, postmodern Tele-technologies disclose our human situation is to treat technology as a fundamentally philosophical question, and thus, Scannell’s thesis is, by default, of great relevance not only to media and communication studies but also to philosophy.
Leaving its function as a textbook aside, Scannell’s first book in the trilogy, Media and Communication, is a review of the literature and the formation of the field of media and communication. A key theme carries over from Media and Communication into Television and the Meaning of Live, addressing the relationship between the two terms media and communication. A compelling account of how human communication works is, for Scannell, to be found in the combination between the sociology of everyday life (Goffman) and a return to the study of ordinary language that starts with Austin, Grice and conversational analysis. In Television and the Meaning of Live, however, Scannell brackets this literature because, for him, to think of media in socio-cultural terms only is not to begin to come to terms with what they, in fundamental ways, are about. Scannell’s Television and the Meaning of Live delineates a phenomenology of television beyond sociology’s grip, which, for Scannell, is incoherent as it is unable to think outside itself.
While Scannell brackets sociology and its variations here, he is inspired by Heidegger who, according to Scannell’s reading, poses the question of the meaning of the word ‘life’ precisely in relation to the question of everyday existence. The question of the meaning of the word ‘life’ has, for Scannell, been trapped in the long historical baggage of the Western tradition: the mix between theology and philosophy, a mix that is, for him, no longer accessible or meaningful. The question of what it means to be ‘alive’ is, for Scannell, in the first place, about the nature of the human ‘situation’ in which we are.
Taking his cue from Raymond Williams ([1961] 1965), Scannell makes a strong claim for the goodness of the world as ‘immanent in the things of the world’ (p. 12), an argument he weaves convincingly through the central concept of his book: ‘the care-structure’.
So, what does Scannell mean by the ‘care-structure’? How does he use this important concept to engage with the hermeneutics of trust and his phenomenology of television? To understand Scannell’s core concept, we must return to the central problematic of Heidegger’s project. For Heidegger, the world both reveals and conceals what it is for those who dwell in it. Here, the task of the phenomenologist is, at a basic level, one of unconcealment (p. 57). Television, argues Scannell, ‘is a technology – but not just a technology. It is a central political and cultural institution within the nation-states – but not just that. It is an everyday resource for modern and post-modern people’ (p. 59). The care-structure of things, including post-modern Tele-technologies, explains Scannell, is ‘nothing more or less than the human thought, effort and intention that has gone into producing the thing as that which it is’ (p. 14). In his bracketing of ‘critical theory’ and sociology as a departure point from which to delineate his concept of the ‘care-structure’ (also a key concept in understanding his hermeneutics of trust), Scannell revisits Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism and the Frankfurt school’s ‘culture industry critique’. In both cases, says Scannell, something is concealed from us. In the former, exchange-value conceals labour exploitation, and in the latter, mass culture conceals a kind of a mass deception. Rather than privileging his hermeneutics of trust over critical theory’s hermeneutics of suspicion, to which we need to add Heidegger’s contradictory mistrust of technology, Scannell argues that what is hidden (concealed) from us is not just ideology but also care – that ‘things conceal their goodness every bit as thoroughly as the ideological veil is drawn in the critical paradigm’ (p. 17). Scannell further explains that although the relationship between care and the ideology critique is contradictory, the two ‘do not cancel each other out’ and that ‘one is not truer than the other’ (p. 16). They are both true. The reordering of thought about the relationship between exchange-value and use-value, and the relationship between the ideology critique (hermeneutics of suspicion) and ‘care’ (hermeneutics of trust), is also a repositioning of the critique of modernity. Modernity is not just an ambivalent project; it is the product of two different types of concealment.
The main arguments that Scannell makes in this book come, in so many ways, as a result of a systematic conversation: a thinking with and against Heidegger. Through the metaphor of the teacup, Scannell exposes the tensions and contradictions between academic thinking and everyday experience. Heidegger got so excited by watching a football match on television that he spilt his teacup. However, this excitement (experienced in a non-academic everyday situation) is contradicted by Heidegger’s philosophical discourse on technology. For Heidegger (the philosopher), watching television is the kind of activity where one’s own Dasein vanishes into the ‘dictatorship’ of the ‘they’ (mass society) and which, for him, prescribes the essence of the being of everydayness. However, rather than analysing the ontology of the ‘they’ and ‘Being-with’, Heidegger, affirms Scannell, ‘jumps ahead to his own existentialist interpretation of the phenomenon’ (p. 28). This, for Scannell, signals the point at which Heidegger ‘takes the wrong turn’ in Being and Time (p. 28). This, I think, is also the point at which Scannell takes over from Heidegger. How does Scannell explain the ‘they’ phenomenon, and how does he relate it to everyday broadcast media?
[…] what Heidegger misses – and it is essential to his whole thesis – is anything like an adequate analysis of the necessarily anonymous character of social life as that into which any individual is thrown and in which individuality is formed. The ontology of being-with as such is simply not undertaken … I have tried to develop, thinking with but against Heidegger, a more adequate formulation of the phenomenology of the self in everyday life, taking as my starting point the ‘who’ of everyday broadcast media. (p. 28)
Scannell’s formulation of the phenomenology of the self in everyday life is articulated through two different structures: for-anyone structures and for-someone structures. The former ‘presents itself as useful for anyone (no matter who)’, and the latter ‘bespeak{s} things made for use only by particular individuals’ (pp. 29–30). Scannell’s formulation of the ‘who’ of everyday broadcast media is determined by what he calls ‘available time’. The present is available to us in three different orders of time: (a) necessary time (what is needed for the restoration and renewal of my body), (b) coercive time (the time of labour) and (c) free time (the marginal surplus, free time, my time and time for television) (p. 45). Scannell demonstrates how two different orders of ‘available time’ intersect in the immediate present of 24/7 news: so, we have the time that is mine and the ‘utterly global impersonal time’ of the human world. Both, according to Scannell, are ‘reflective of polar, dialectical aspects of the human situation’ (p. 47). This double articulation of life (my life and the times linked to the life and times of the world), adds Scannell, is ‘endlessly reiterated in the schedules of every-day broadcasting through the day from morning to night’ (p. 49).
The living is always, and avoidably, in the immediate present, which has two temporal and spatial ontologies: the punctual now (ontology A) and the phenomenal now (ontology B) – numbered time and experiential time. Ontology A (the immediate, punctual present) is for anyone. Ontology B is both concernful and experiential (for someone in particular). The surveillance camera, for example, falls under ontology A. However, the motivated humanely directed camera, observes Scannell, produces an available experience and falls, therefore, under ontology B. The chapter entitled ‘Turning on the TV Set’ is key to understanding the relationship between the two ontologies and offers an impressive demonstration of Scannell’s phenomenological thinking. Here, he considers the act of turning on the television set in two respects: ‘in terms of the transformation of the “object” – the television set – from an inert “thing” to an activated appliance and, intimately linked to this, a change in perception from objective observation to concernful engagement’ (pp. 62–63). This double transformation, observes Scannell, is a ‘move from the objective world of ontology A to the concernful world of ontology B’. ‘I am anyone as I turn on the television. I am someone as I watch it. My preferences determine what I watch’ (pp. 62–63).
The communicative, social ‘self’ in everyday life, observes Scannell, only becomes visibly recognisable in the post-war decade, as we move from the time of the masses to the time of everyday life. To argue for a hermeneutics of trust, as a default position for his thinking about the media and technology, in general, Scannell makes a historical distinction between technologies of modernity, which he associates with weapons of mass destruction (where technology appeared to be something alien to humanity), and the technology of postmodernity (including television, the Internet and mobile phones) which, for Scannell, represents a turning away from modernity’s technologies of the ‘sublime’. The postmodern world which, according to Scannell, appears in the 1950s (the age of television) also signals the fading of mass society and the emergence of the social everyday life. It is this precise historical distinction between the technologies of modernity and those of postmodernity that allows Scannell to showcase the hidden care-structures (the temporal and spatial proxemics) of postmodern Tele-technologies.
Taking his cue from Edward Hall, and his work on the proxemics of human interaction, and using examples from two different programmes (The Brains Trust and Person to Person), Scannell gives an account of developments in the management and production of live talk on early radio and television, exploring their spatial and temporal proxemics as experiential effects that are produced by microphones and cameras. Scannell’s programme analyses demonstrate how the crossover out of the studio and into the world signals the moment when television started doing ‘being-in-the-world’ on behalf of the viewers. It is, for Scannell, in this broadcasting situation (one that conceals its care-structure) that the interaction between the public and the private exists. Scannell shows, in the cases of both programmes, how communicative ease is a major concern in the management of liveness. It is precisely this hidden process (its intentional concern to communicate with ease) that constitutes and drives the care-structures of broadcasting. As Scannell eloquently puts it, The immense, the truly overwhelming complexity of the everyday world and our everyday language is what we never ever see, precisely because it is this that is intentionally concealed from us by the very ways in which both work: they are made and meant for ease of use, for effortless use. To be effortless, they must render their own effort invisible. That is their gift, what they grant us – that we will take them both for granted – as if they were simple, natural, self-evident facts of life. The dialectic of truth (the immanent truth of the human world) lies in what, at the one and the same time, it reveals and conceals about itself. The hermeneutics of trust that I am at pains to clarify and justify is grounded in a simple recognition that what the world conceals from us (its fathomless complexity) is its greatest gift. Simplicity and ease of use is the absolute precondition of all everyday things that make up the everyday world and of our everyday medium of communication, talk. (p. 147)
Live television performances bring something to life for the viewers, making it alive (p. 168). In football, explains Scannell, a goal is ‘a moment’ where, in a Proustian way, time is regained and ‘marked as such by the formatted narrative routines of television’ (p. 168). Scannell’s broadcast television analysis of the famous David Beckham goal that he scored against Greece in the qualifying rounds of the 2002 World Cup shows how television re-creates moments in which time is reversed, so we are able to witness it in its ‘absolute purity’. We get to relive the moment captured in a ‘double movement’. What Scannell calls ‘the all-at-once’ of the reactions ‘there’, in the stadium, ‘is analytically deconstructed and reconstructed into a rapid visual sequence with a strict temporal order of significance’ (p. 175). The visual replay sequence is also analysed to show how television (and its hidden care-structures) allows us to live and relive such ‘magic’ moments. This type of media event and the ‘ecstatic’ experience it re-creates for us in the now – the Augenblick 1 – is, for Scannell, what the political optic does not and cannot see.
In ‘Catastrophe on Television’, Scannell analyses live broadcasts of 9/11, from CNN and the BBC, through two key different moments: the breaking of the news story (the forward-moving present of live and in real-time coverage) and the retrospective present accounts and analyses of the story. Here, Scannell’s phenomenological news analysis demonstrates, in a Boltanskian fashion, how the presence on the ground is ‘the only guarantee of truth’ (p. 207). The politics of the present as they are broadcast, here, for us, live through television to ‘achieve a transcendent character’ (p. 222), a kind of politics of real life that is, emphasises Scannell, ‘quite distinct from what academics often think politics ought to be’ (p. 222). His phenomenological news analysis is concerned with its ‘production care-structures’, with ‘how news manages to do what it does in response to and in the grip of the exigencies of the immediate present and its politics’ (p. 222).
While Scannell’s phenomenological turn is ambitious, in this book, he remains modest about his contribution as a media historian to doing media historiography. In delineating a phenomenology of television’s liveness, Scannell, by default, also demonstrates how television not only became a historical medium but also makes history in the present, resulting in a kind of politics, which, as Scannell advances, ‘discloses the nature of the human situation at the site of history’ (p. 209). As such, Scannell’s book is also a corrective to Fernand Braudel and the structuralist intellectuals of the late century, for whom the longue durée was far more important than histoire évènementielle (eventful time of everyday life) in assessing historical phenomena. The essence of history is, in this case, disclosed in the temporal transition from the évènementielle to longue durée. Here, Scannell puts forward and answers a fundamental question with which to assess the historicality of television: what is the transitional order of time in which the long term begins to appear out of the short-term present?
It is generational time, the time of generations in which the historical work of regeneration … is enacted in the present by the generations of the living. The historian’s task, Braudel thought, was to be concerned with the silent, imperceptible movement of slow time, while the sociologist attended to the noise of history in the making, the bustling life and times of the present. The study of television and the media in general, requires that we attend to both, but it is only now that the historical study of television is becoming possible, for only now do we begin to see its recession into the past and the working through of generational time in its output. (p. 52)
Scannell’s book is a seminal introduction to the phenomenology of the media. Media and Communication studies will never be the same after this book. Our field, already wading in the swamps of a theoretical cul-de-sac, cannot afford to ignore Scannell’s attempt at resuscitation, an opportunity to think of the media outside its dominant, yet crumbling sociological paradigms. Scannell’s championing of the hermeneutics of trust, as a default position for thinking about the media, is not meant to cancel out the hermeneutics of suspicion or the ideology critique – to think so is to misread Scannell’s book and his project. This book is a serious provocation, an attempt to untangle our thinking modalities. Scannell dares us to think with him about the media and the ‘human situation’ beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion.