SOURCE: "Television: The Medium in the Mass Age," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Fall, 1983, pp. 619-32.

[In the following essay, Birkerts ponders (he role of television in contemporary society, describing its "consciousness" with respect to the social implications of "watching" it.]

No one who has walked through the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii is likely to forget the oppressiveness of the experience, far outweighing its historical fascination or its cachet as future table talk. The dreariness of a George Segal sculpture has been multiplied a thousandfold: the heavy seal of Time has been impressed upon the ordinariness of daily life. We are suddenly able to imagine our lives embalmed at a casual moment. Indeed, I sometimes wonder what hypothetical aliens might find if our planet were surprised by an avalanche of ash—especially if their craft landed, years hence, somewhere on our shores. I try to imagine their exclamations, their cries of puzzlement, as they go from house to house. I envision through their eyes the petrified, white-washed figures, their arrangement—singly, in groups—some four to eight feet from a prominent up-ended box. There would be boxes with horns, boxes without. Gender markings? The more enlightened among them would shake their heads. "These are clearly religious objects, domestic shrines. We have found the remains of a very spiritual race."

Television. The truth of it is too much to grasp, too various. Seen synoptically, from an imagined altitude, all these blue lights look like a radiant roe, or a swarm of cells in a tissue culture. But from another place, from the ease of a chair in a room, they seem like nothing much, a breather from the assaults of the day, a few laughs, a shine of fantasy. Both views are true; neither view is true. Who is going to say? And how? Stalk it with language and it cackles at you, formulate a concept and it sprays you with dots. It is as tricky as mercury. You shiver it to pieces and it hugs itself back together. Mercury is apt. If you could do the impossible, if you could contrive some kind of barometric instrument for which television and its contents would be a mercury, you would be able to read the spiritual air-pressure of a time and place. But in fact you can do little more than play, break it into blobs, stare at their sheen, watch as they hurry back into a single imponderable lump.

At one time, twenty years ago, say, to write about television was a more feasible undertaking. Twenty years ago television had not yet seeped as deeply into the culture; it was not so co-extensive with the social fabric. There were still free zones, places to stand, Archimedean points from which to work the lever. This is no longer the case. Where television could once be considered apart from reality, as a toy, an "entertainment," it has now greatly expanded its reach and impact: it has become, by way of massive social participation, a significant portion of the reality itself. So much so, in fact, that the interface between society and television can no longer be clearly described. Television programs increasingly comprise the content of private lives; shows and situations are discussed as if the personalities and events were real and in the world; the information and opinion purveyed determine, to a large extent, the public perception of historical and political events. To discuss the phenomenon, therefore, with some hope of grasping its essential nature, its quidditas, is to embark on one of those classic fool's errands—to quest for fleece. Though in this case the fleece takes the form, in Norman Mailer's words, of "a pullulation of electrons."

Tele-vision. Quite literally "vision at a distance" or "over a distance"; also, the instrument or appliance whereby this is accomplished. When not in use it is a strange enough object, an opaque window fronting a box, the box studded with dials and connected, by way of wire and plug, to the sorcery of an electrical system. Its function, by all accounts, is to provide entertainment and information. Like the automobile and the telephone, it has become nearly indispensable. Like the automobile and the telephone, it is one of our guarantors of equality: anyone can drive anywhere, call anywhere—any American can watch any show.

Television watching, this vast and ramified ritual, this mass phenomenon, is scarcely served by the word "entertainment." It wears the guise of being a relaxant—like softball, dancing or drinking—but it is so much more, or less, than that. If it were simply entertainment or relaxation that people sought, they would soon be driven to other expedients: the fare is passing poor. No, there is very little correlation between the available entertainment content and the 800 or so million man-hours that are put in—every day—in front of 200 million television sets.

Television represents the "outside world" to the individual. This is one of its services. To own a television is to have a seat in the arena where the world is visually presented. Of course, television is by no means co-extensive with the world, nor do its visual contents in any way encompass the world; but it is part of the nature of the medium to convey this impression subliminally. By simply pressing a button, the viewer makes contact with what is, in his imagination, an international information empire. The assurance is patent that if anything of urgent importance happens anywhere in the world, the information will be promptly conveyed. In this one sense television is no different from the radio. The fact that it is a visual medium, however, greatly magnifies the unconscious impact of this function.

But this is basic, obvious. There is another function that is far more important and worrisome: television acts upon the unconscious of the viewer not as an appliance or a plaything, but as a consciousness. It fosters and encourages the most bizarre sort of identification. The implications are staggering. But before we consider them we must question some of the mechanics of this phenomenon.

The identification is not really attributable to the fact that the medium delivers human voices and images. Those are contents. Prior to contents are the impacts of the form itself, the medium. Consider, first of all, the seamlessness: the impression derived from the absence of holes and gaps, coupled with its electronic nature, coupled further with its insistent uniformity. The visual possibilities of the medium are, potentially speaking, inexhaustible. But what has in fact happened is that the corporation-owned networks have narrowed the range and content of presentation to such an extent that it is impossible to distinguish one channel from another. The idea of channels as separate bands is further negated by constant switching. Not only is the medium seamless, its contents are as well. The result is that the images, sequences and structures are so much alike that they become, for the viewer, different simultaneous utterances by the same entity, and, in the last analysis, one utterance. And this entity, television, thereby takes on the lineaments of consciousness.

This ersatz consciousness is, so far as its contents are concerned, rudimentary enough. It scarcely reflects the complexities of the human mental operation. Its form, however, is unconsciously most persuasive. It depends upon—and itself creates—lack of resistance. There are no obstacles. The visual and audial materials are ingested directly with no need for translation. They are calculated thus: to resemble reality while being simpler than reality. The fluidity of the medium conditions us to passive absorption. There is nothing to engage the conscious faculty. A broad, one-way "channel" is opened between the medium and the unconscious. As we suspend our supervisory powers, the medium sets itself up as a surrogate. It is with our consent that a generally flat, banal configuration of materials is alchemized into a ghostly dimensionality.

What is the nature of the medium that can effect so subtle an interchange? Norman Mailer, in his essay "Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots," writes:

Often, when the stations would go off the air and no programs were left to watch, he would still leave the set on. The audio would hum in a tuneless pullulation, and the dots would hiss in an agitation of what forces he did not know. This hiss and the hum would fill the room and then his ears. There was, of course, no clamor—it was nearer to anti-noise dancing in eternity with noise. And watching the empty video, he would recognize it was hardly empty. Bands of grey and lighter grey swam across the set, rollovers swept away the dots, and something like sunspots crackled forth.

The primeval echo of the passage is not fortuitous—the grey, tuneless hum represents nothing so much as our idea of undifferentiated consciousness. We know these sputtering voids because we produce something very like them in ourselves. Eyes closed, emptied of thought, hovering near sleep, we fill up with a similar pullulation. This is the primary level of identification: that our consciousness generates images and thoughts—contents—out of an agitated void just as television does. The medium has a psychic likeness. And we project upon that likeness something of our own sense of psychic dimension. It is this dimensionality—which does not actually exist—which welds into a disquieting unity the various differentiated emanations.

Identification and projection, both subliminal, secure a reality status for what is, in essence, a play of illusion. It could even be argued that we attribute a higher reality status to television than we do to life itself. I say this only half in jest. I suspect that there is a certain by no means small percentage of chronic viewers in whom the organized materials of television programming have effectively replaced any active, discriminating consciousness they might have once possessed. But can it be that the two—consciousness and television—are similar enough to be interchangeable? Or, to put the question differently, can it be that life as seen on television is effectively interchangeable with life as the individual experiences it? These are by no means idle questions.

It is not television that is conforming to modern life so much as it is modern life that is taking on the hues of the medium. The processes that strip modern experience of uniqueness and resonance, that make possible the shopping mall, the housing project, the uniformity of the suburb, the bland interiors of the work place—the list could go on and on—these prepare us for television. Since television cannot transmit uniqueness or resonance by its very nature (I will discuss this later with reference to the concept of "aura"), it is admirably suited to mirror modern experience. To television belongs all the persuasiveness of the ordinary. Its flatness, banality, the ambient feel it confers to time, all conform closely to our experience. What is more, it presents us with that experience in distilled and organized shape. We experience ordinariness in condensation; it is more real to us than the ordinariness of our lives. The fact that it is electronically "bedded" impresses upon it the stamp of authority.

Television as consciousness. This impression comes, in part, from a simple, potent illusion: that we perceive the medium as layered, and therefore deep. The illusion is created by constant alternation of contents. The hero is, say, trapped inside a burning building; a sudden—but expected—elision brings us the imagery of a tropic isle, a voice enticing us to sample something unique; another elision brings us the face of our local news anchorman, the pulsing sound of a ticker, a quickly-pitched summary of the hour's headline. And then we are back in the burning building. The impression is not one of segmentation, but of layering. With our partial suspension of disbelief, we imagine that our hero was battling flames while we were hearing the latest on the border war. The illusion reinforces in yet another way the idea that we are in contact with a complex, superintendent, perhaps even profound, entity.

Walter Benjamin was one of the first thinkers to investigate seriously the impacts of technology upon the sphere of art. He did not live to see the invention of television, but the structure of his analysis is such that the subsequent technological advance has not altered it significantly. The ideas about "aura" which he articulated and elaborated in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are perfectly applicable to the problem of television.

Briefly, aura can be conceived as the invisible envelope of presence or context that surrounds and. in effect, guarantees the uniqueness and reality of a work of art. It is by nature impenetrable and intransmissible. Though Benjamin defines the concept primarily with reference to art, he recognizes its generality. Aura is the essential attribute of any individual, location, situation or object that has not been compromised by displacement or reproduction. He writes:

We define the aura … as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it [the object] may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.

Aura forms, in other words, the basis of subjective experience; it cannot be objectively isolated. To take anything from its natural context is to destroy its aura. Anything stripped of its aura is no longer that thing—its certificate of uniqueness is gone. Insofar as it then presents itself in the guise of the original, it is false.

This fairly simple recognition—though, of course, much ramified by Benjamin's prismatic intelligence—was one of the bases for his critique of modern life, a critique which centered itself upon the disintegration of meaning and the radical disharmony between the individual and his world.

A few sentences later, Benjamin claims:

Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image as seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is a mark of a perception whose "sense of the universal equality of things" has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

If we consider not just objects, but the fragile, context-bound webbing of all human interchange—which television undertakes to mimic and reproduce—then the concept of aura is immensely useful.

We must take care, however, to avoid the direct substitution of terms. The situation is somewhat more complicated. For television does not set out to reproduce the actual world. Nor, with few exceptions, does it pretend to transmit genuine human interaction in context. No, what television does is to manufacture situations and interactions among created, scripted personalities. What it delivers, therefore, is essentially a caricature of social reality, the simulacra of human exchange. There is no question of aura being destroyed—what is captured by the television cameras has no aura to begin with. Instead, subtly and insidiously, reality, the genuine human interaction, is being steadily sponged, divested of authority. The aura is robbed, not directly, but by proxy. All human exchange—travestied, replicated, absorbed by 200 million watchers—is progressively, and perhaps permanently, diminished.

Television and aura are incompatible. Anything filmed directly—an animal, a landscape, an embrace—is promptly dispossessed of presence. The image preserves certain accuracies while the essence is flattened out and caricatured. What we receive through the picture tube has the outer lineaments of the actual with none of the pith or savor. The viewer, of course, is not unaware of this. The problem is that after a while—after sufficient exposure—he starts to forget. The more he watches, the more the tension between the thing and its image is vitiated.

Television, I have said, provides a psychic likeness and is received by the unconscious as a consciousness. But it is not a consciousness. It is a hybrid, a collage possessing some of the rudimentary attributes of consciousness. It is utterly bereft of aura. And consciousness without aura, without context or uniqueness, is a monstrosity, a no-presence that matches up with nothing in the natural world. It is something that is not alive that is trying to impersonate life: it is travesty. Possibly Mailer has something like this in mind when he writes:

So, in those early mornings when television was his only friend, he knew already that he detested his habit. There was not enough to learn from watching TV. Some indispensable pieces of experience were missing. Except it was worse than that. Something not in existence was also present, some malignancy to burn against his own malignancy, some onslaught of dots into the full pressure of his own strangled vision.

That "something not in existence" is the Frankenstein of a consciousness pieced together like a quilt from a thousand heteroclite fragments.

To turn on the television set is to make the flight from three dimensions into two. It is an escape, an effort to kill self-reflective consciousness, at least for a time. Two dimensions are easier to reconnoiter in than three. But it is not only while watching that one participates in two-dimensionality. After enough exposure to the medium, the world itself—which we may here define as everything that is not television—loses some of its thickness and complexity. The eye of the beholder is altered. Television has the same power of alteration as art, except that it works in the opposite direction. The reality content of the world is diminished rather than augmented. But why? That is, why would consciousness, the supreme distinguishing feature of the species, its evolutionary trademark, wish to obliterate itself? It must, to some extent, be due to the quality of life available to the individual. That life consists, for too many people, of meaningless work and prolonged exposure to the concentrated ordinariness of television. A self-perpetuating tautology sits near the heart of the issue.

Television-watching also represents a diffusely-enacted participation in ritual. The viewer is, to a certain extent, looking past the content, engaging the form itself, the sentient global mesh which gives the medium much of its authority. This participation is passive and abstract. The viewer interacts with the medium; the medium, in turn, interacts with the whole world of viewers. One makes oneself a part of the circuitry and thereby extends and deepens the circuitry. It is participation in the life of the times—insofar as television-watching is itself a significant part of the life of our times. Another tautology. The same impulses that were once discharged actively—in public assembly—are now expressed from the armchair. The medium thus becomes the abstraction of community itself. It is a touchstone, a point of reference. A common mental property attains a powerful pseudo-reality through cross-referencing. The coffee-break ritual—"Did you see Dynasty last night?"—is not so much an expression of interest in the show as it is an act of self-substantiation.

Most discussions and analyses of the effects of television occupy themselves with the contents of programming. I would contend that the effects of the medium itself, the fact of it, its form, the structure through which the contents are presented, is of far greater importance. It is the medium that forges the connection with the unconscious, enables the contents to pass directly by all conscious monitoring. It is the form that gradually conditions the psyche of the viewer.

Television establishes a path of least resistance—visually, psychologically—indeed, it is that path. It is a prism that refracts the rays of attentiveness. The attention faculty itself is gradually altered. For one thing, new time-expectancies are created. The viewer becomes accustomed not only to 30 and 60-minute units, but to mini-units as well, two and three minute blocks of commercial interruption coming every five to seven minutes. The effects of this are not easily gauged, except in the realm of television-viewing. Here we find that people come to expect—and need—side-tracking every few minutes. Uninterrupted programming generates anxiety and boredom. The fact is that the commercial interruptions are a welcome distraction from the banality of most programming. Night after night, month after month, the mind is made to be a shuttle-cock. How can we believe that this leaves its focus and tenacity unimpaired?

In the same way, the structure of programming promotes the idea of resolvability. The container shapes the content, and not vice-versa. Thus, every thirty minutes there has to be a wrap-up, a conclusion. Can it be that the constant repetition of this expectation does not begin to affect the viewer's psyche? That it cannot be proven to do so is no assurance. There are other questions. For example: if television does function as a surrogate consciousness, does this in any way undermine the viewer's existential base, his awareness of himself as a creature suffering time? No one will disagree with the assertion that television makes time more palatable. But what does it mean that time is made more palatable? What painful encounters with the voids in the self are thereby short-circuited?

We cannot very well pursue these questions without bringing will into the discussion. Will, the capacity or power whereby the self consciously acts upon itself. It is will that we call upon in order to persevere in an action, to endure difficulty without relinquishing our intention. Any movement against the natural grain of a situation requires some amount of will. But what are the effects upon the will of prolonged passivity, of putting the self repeatedly into a state of suspended animation, of replacing obstacles by a path of least resistance? Is the faculty of will analogous to a muscle—does it atrophy from lack of use? If it is, then the whole issue of television is tremendously important. For the world will not change its nature to conform to the laws of television. If the will is indeed eroded by television-watching, then what is affected is the public as well as private domain. The obvious consequence is political passivity, a passivity that readily translates into susceptibility to power. Nature abhors a vacuum; so does the social sphere. Where there is passivity there will flourish, in some form, the will to power. This is not to say that watching television is paving the way for the demagogue. It is to say, however, that the arena of impact may be larger than we at first imagine.

I have avoided almost entirely the discussion of the contents of television. This is not to say that the contents are negligible. They are not. But I don't believe that their effects can be properly taken into account until certain features of the medium have been examined. Secondly—and this is a more elusive reason—I believe that the contents cannot be discussed independently. They are too much influenced and shaped by the nature of the medium. For this reason a substantial amount of what is "on" television exists below the threshold of language. It is too diffuse, too ambient, too random. It generates a liquid near-emptiness that defies words or concepts.

This randomness is an attribute of the medium more than of the contents. It is a direct consequence of the inability of the electron tube to transmit aura. There is a permanent shortage of legitimate material, of visual elements that will effectively "play." The contents, therefore, are always inadequate to the container; they cannot fill it up enough. What happens as a result is that there are, cumulatively speaking, long minutes of visual vacuum—eternal-seeming car-chase sequences, desolate facial pans, etc. Visual muzak. A network must fill up all of its allotted time, daily, weekly, yearly. There is not enough quality to go around. What little there is must be diluted into the solution of available time. Television maneuvers, therefore, in a field of extremely narrow options. And the options grow fewer as repetition exhausts the basic repertoire of scenarios. Networks are forced to use the same formulaic high-tension sequences over and over. The stock sit-com imbroglio has not changed from the times of Terence. There is no possibility for visual beauty—nothing beautiful has ever survived passage through the electron tube. For beauty is the apotheosis of aura—it dies running the electronic gauntlet. Instead, there is ambiance—not "ambiance"—dead-time in which the viewer is brought face to face with the medium itself, its grey, crackling, fundamentally alien presentness.

The case of John Hinckley Jr. invites a few observations on television content. We are informed that the would-be assassin was a misfit and a loner—the usual epithets—and that prior to his attempt on the president he put in hundreds of hours in motels across the country watching game shows, soap operas, and crime shows. Now, I would not dare to be so simplistic as to assert any actual causal connection. Hinckley did not become the kind of person he was by watching television—if he had there would be 50 million Hinckleys in the streets. No, he watched as much television as he did because he was the kind of person he was. The question that emerges is whether or not there was some small but vital area of overlap, some way in which watching exacerbated something in his psyche and rendered certain previously passive traits volatile.

In any case, the issue raised—as murky as it is important—is that of the impact of television, form and content, upon the unconscious. Not just the unconscious of John Hinckley Jr., but of millions of children and adolescents who have not yet integrated their unconscious into their ego structure. The more hours put in before the pullulating tube, the fewer are the hours spent in contact with the stubborn grain of the world. In other words, the materials absorbed into the unconscious include proportionately more illusion. The unformed, atomized ego structure absorbs the form, the violence, the caricature of relations, and shapes itself to those in the way that it should be shaping itself to actual experience. Again, consider the extreme case—Hinckley. He turned to fantasies of violence, I would argue, not because he had been made violent, but because he did not comprehend what violence really is. Shooting the president was a garish fantasy that took up obvious, available imagery without any understanding of its real nature. Not only is the will subject to erosion; the reality sense is as well.

It has been argued that television, along with certain other developments in modern technology—computerization, information processing—is opening the way for a new social evolution, that the time-honored view of the self—as a solitary, suffering being—is giving way to another. Maybe there is a new socially-integrated species of "mass man" waiting in the wings. If so, this passive acceptance of circuitry, this collective participation in suspended animation, is to be regarded as highly advantageous.

If this turns out to be the case, I, for one, would surround the word "evolution" with a thicket of quotation marks.

I don't believe that transformations like this take place without profound upheaval. I hold with the Freudian model enough to think that repressed instincts return in altered form. The species is not yet at a point where the instincts have atrophied entirely. I pray that it is not one of the secret offices of television to insure that atrophy.

I come back, finally, to my epiphanic moments on neighborhood streets, to my shock at seeing so many separate patches of blue light. I cannot shake the feeling that these form in their aggregate some new terrestrial constellation. Like all constellations, this one will have to be named and charted. And we will have to determine whether its occult influences are finally benign or not. I would be surprised if they were.