Chapter four

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Live television and its audiences:

Challenges of media reality¹

Claus-Dieter Rath

 

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At the end of his televised address to the nation on New Year's Eve 1986, West German Chancellor Kohl asked for God's blessings for 1986. For a while it was not quite clear whether this was due to a lapse or a technical problem. Next day, the first day of 1987, the network apologized and broadcast the correct New Year's address. The prerecorded cassette had been mixed up with the one from the year before. One of the commentators on the glitch wrote:

Shouldn't we – the people – be upset about being fed with canned material on this dignified and festive occasion? I think it is reasonable to give a live address if one wants to be taken seriously. Besides, it would be the best guarantee against mixing up cassettes, be it intentionally or by stupid mistake.²

Live broadcast as a risk factor

This was one of the rare occasions when something went wrong with a prerecorded broadcast. But then, generally speaking, live broadcasts are much more risky both from a technical and from a content point of view. We need of course to distinguish between regular, well-prepared routine live broadcasts and special, out-of-schedule live events. Among the former are sports shows like soccer games, car races, ski competitions, most studio discussions and talk shows, news and public affairs programs, religious services, reports from the stock exchange, some concerts and theater plays, certain game shows on Saturday evenings. The second group includes the coverage of catastrophes, national predicaments, festivities, and public anniversaries, important speeches by political leaders or parliamentary debates, etc. As a rule, events of this second type are mostly broadcast in an improvised way, since they are assumed to be of particular or even urgent interest to the public. The regular program schedule is then abandoned in favor of the rhythm of events.³

Live broadcast as a choice in programming

From a technical point of view, live television is no real necessity any more. Since the late 1950s, when AMPEX developed electronic video-recording facilities, preproduction techniques have allowed for an effective control of the television program. Nevertheless, live broadcasts continue to exist just as in the early days of television. Over the last decade they have become more and more appreciated – at least by European audiences and television producers. We find a growing number of live interviews and reports as part of the evening news or of certain public affairs programs. Discussions of the meet-the-press variety, rock concerts (often broadcast in several countries simultaneously or even worldwide), talk shows, and live sports programs are increasingly represented on television. This tendency has actually gone so far that live transmission is presently regarded as a special quality of television. Let us examine some of direct broadcasting's essential dynamics.

Live as an “impure” broadcast

Although the viewer knows that he or she is sharing the event via the eye of the camera, direct broadcasting supports the illusion of one's immediate presence on the scene, the impression that one is an eyewitness. This supposedly direct view occurs almost in real time. Broadcasting time lasts as long as the cameras are running.⁴ Thus, the program is put together not by integrating several versions of one take at the editing table, but by the spontaneous development of the events in front of the camera and by the moment-to-moment decisions of the television crew, who often become “actors” on the scene.⁵ This is why, in a live broadcast, footage which would have been cut out of a recording will actually get aired. Mistakes – or what are considered such – cannot be erased. The live broadcast is an “impure” broadcast.

The choice of topics

First of all, obviously, the mediated event is chosen among an infinite number of events, since television has, of course, its economic and temporal limitations. Among the major constraints producers work under are the need to make money and the banal but important consideration that the viewers' day has only twenty-four hours. Therefore, selection has to take place, selection among items of information, topics, and images to be put on the air. One of the main criteria for this decision is the degree of topicality of a forthcoming or ongoing event. Its definition determines the placing and timing given to an event – and supposedly the extent of the audience's attention. Live broadcasts based on the assumption of an event's topicality have consequently become eagerly sought-after commodities in the world of television – to the point where public and private television stations compete for them. This race for topicality and the live broadcast not only reflects changes in technology, but, more importantly, also in the social fabric in general and consequently in aesthetics.⁶

Topicality

Approaching topicality⁷ phenomenologically, we can describe it by distinguishing between the set of opposites shown in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1

Topicality	vs.	Non-topicality
something new, news	vs.	something old, known for a long time
here and now	vs.	experience, tradition
emerging, vanishing	vs.	Existing
urgent, imminent, hot	vs.	long-term, boring, lukewarm
alarm, horror	vs.	habit, the habitual
moment	vs.	Duration
dynamic	vs.	Structure
concrete	vs.	Abstract'8

Essentially, then, topicality is an instrument for producing attention. Or, to turn this around: the individual or a group pays attention to an event as soon as it is marked by special, topical signs, a certain number of which are known in all cultures and to all people: love and death, faithfulness and treachery, existence and danger, power and failure, gain and loss.⁹

Topicality as a social condition

Proneness to topicality varies from one society to another, from one area of life to another, from individual to individual, and from one situation to another. While in static or “cold” (Lévi-Strauss) societies topicality is mainly constituted by cyclical events (rites of hunting and cultivating, of sacrifices, of initiation, of war, etc.), the modern, historical, “hot” societies tend to be permanent generators and consumers of topicality.¹⁰ Among the factors conducive to this dynamization are the process of capitalist industrialization with its overall acceleration of public and private areas of life, changing political power constellations, daily stock exchange quotations, transport conditions in the big cities, news program schedules, special announcements interrupting their rhythms, fashions determining who or what is “in” or “out.” But even “hot” societies may have their “colder” and their “hotter” phases (economic crisis, civil war).

The impact of media topicalities

Individuals living in modern societies are in a certain sense subjected to a permanent process of initiation through media topicalities. Media events generate a cultural climate or mood which may become decisive for a period of our lives.

There are three aspects of viewer involvement with television broadcasts. First, physical involvement: it functions via identification with the physical actions of television's actors (sportsmen, game competitors, fighters, dancers, lovers, etc.) as well as with the dynamics of sound-track and of camera movements and montage. Second, linguistic involvement: through the presentation of the event by means of sight and sound (the language of cameras, editing, reporters' commentaries, etc.) the illusion of being there and of sharing the view via the eye of the camera is created. Television thus becomes an electronic network. Third, social and cultural involvement: the spectator is brought into time through a linkage of macro- and micro-practices of power, between the public sphere and private daily life, between the idea of collective life and the rituals of the television viewer.

In a broad sense, the live media event presents a timing which is socially compelling. It guarantees our being in time, our being up to date. We may speak of live television, which thereby functions as an apparatus of synchronization, as an audio-visual implantation into the social body's “interdependence-chains.”¹¹;

Event – story – history

If the journalistic or media-bureaucratic routine is interrupted, this happens, as we have discussed, in the name of a topical event. Since the latter connotes something new, extraordinary, unprecedented, right now emerging, it is viewed in relation to history, in terms of the (future) classification of the event in a historical continuum. Our feeling is one of taking part in a historical event.

If a present or past event is declared to be of historical relevance, it must in some way rise above the everyday chaos of factual details. As a special “point in time”¹² it must be specifically linked to the past and the future. It must also have a special quality of content – a quality that attributes continuity to the plurality of facts and fragments of the “discrete images in time.”¹³ Thus an event, we may say, is being subjected to the “chronological coding”¹⁴ of historiography. Lévi-Strauss calls historiography “never history but the history-for,”¹⁵ that is, history for an imaginary other – an absent subject like a future viewer, listener or reader, people from other societies, etc. The individual occurrence gets short-circuited into a fictitious historical stream, and the event gains socio-cultural sense. Thus live broadcast narration, with its visual, verbal, and sound commentary, integrates the event into the symbolic order provided by historical and cultural continuity. We are dealing with a process which posits a specific relationship between moment and structure.

Seen from the angle of the viewer, the apparently empty time of his or her everyday life is transformed into full time – time filled by public or publicized events. Life becomes full of supposedly significant events. The viewer becomes part of the social fabric through the sudden impact of the “world outside” upon a moment in fragments to his or her own life story. The viewer's life becomes a story, since what emerges is a holographic social space, an electronic 3-D picture, in which the individual suddenly appears as part of a symbolic structure.¹⁶ More precisely, attending the integration of a topical event, which may happen to be a relatively shocking occurrence, into the symbolic forms of story and history, can help the viewer, via identification, to integrate his or her individually perceived traumas and subjective phantasies into the grids of symbolic, cultural order.¹⁷ In this sense, television broadcasts represent cultural authority – even if they are not considered to be, or labeled as, cultural broadcasts.

We are familiar with this type of extension of our everyday imagination and experience, from participating in festivities or mass events – like national anniversaries, parades, and public trials – from witnessing pickets or street demonstrations or, still in some countries today, executions. The “Hands across America” event which took place in 1986 is a recent example of this type. It is a type which signals affirmation or protest against the established order. Generally speaking, the relationship between maintaining and overthrowing public order which we observe in such traditional mass events appears to be a decisive element of live television.¹⁸

Television as part of social power-relations

It does not take a sociological training to regard television as an institution of power. A viewer's dissatisfaction with a program will trigger responses such as: “That's what they want to make us believe!”¹⁹

As an announcement medium and one that provides conformity with the spirit of the time, television combines micro- and macro-practices of power. It is a guiding medium both for those who control a station and for the watching and listening subjects who ensure reality by means of television, by taking it as a guide for their lives.²⁰ Thus, an essential function of television lies in its capacity for semantic and syntactic mediation, which is independent of the individual program, be it news, political propaganda, or an entertainment show. Therefore the power relation between television and the audience is already operative on the level of its network form. This is not to say that the television institution is necessarily a totalitarian instrument, since

in itself the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.²¹

There is a conflict between television and political-economic institutions on the one hand and television and the audience on the other which is often grounded in the concept of “inappropriate” representation of facts, i.e. restrained or exaggerated consideration of an event. Within the social institution of television conflicts may arise, when, for instance, a live-broadcast participant acts unsuitably or is ill-mannered and “the audience” (which might be individuals or representatives of parties or pressure groups) protests by telephone, or an editor or TV director intervenes. The consequences may be the broadcast's immediate interruption or sanctions against those who were in charge of the program (commentators or editors will no longer be in charge of the program or will lose their jobs). It might also happen that the mediated event itself initiates a dynamic which leads to the broadcast's cancellation because of ethical, moral, political or aesthetic considerations (if it deals with obscenity, atrocities, suffering or dying people, scandals, etc.). The need for topicality requires suspense and the extraordinary (extremes, sensations, the exotic, the monstrous, etc.). Not infrequently, television is involved in such a dynamic, because an event's representation must maintain its topical quality (something has to happen) and its “telegeneousness” (i.e. it must be technically and dramaturgically accessible). In its search for the extraordinary, television as a power institution runs the risk of becoming overwhelmed by it. Thus a program could itself become involved in the creation of a scandal by provoking a real drama, directly intervening in the action.²²

On the other hand, we can observe as well that the mere presence of a station's emblems (” Are you filming for TV or for yourself?”) will feed back on to the event. The presence of television cameras will cause the characters who participate in the event to stage themselves for television. We shall return to this point.

In the light of these considerations we are led to focus on a triple set of issues which may be distinguished from one another:

1 the television institution's interrelation with a specific event, i.e. estimation of its topicality, reactions to the event (ignoring, minimizing, dramatizing, blowing it up), considerations about the political, financial, and technical risks of a coverage, the internal limitations of its time grids.

2 the spectator's interrelation with the specific event, i.e. what does the event signify to him or her, does it have a subjective topicality for the spectator?

3 the spectator's interrelation with the television institution, i.e. how does he or she judge the station's way of dealing with the event by symbolizing and codifying it, by showing and telling what is “reality”?

Showing and telling the event

It would be wrong to assume that the live/non-live opposition has anything to do with the reality/fiction opposition or with the realism/mise-en-scène dichotomy. Without any doubt the event at the scene can be falsified by the broadcast. Live editing has at its disposal not only the whole range of camera techniques and sound engineering but also a large variety of advanced electronic devices (like picture and lettering inserts, acoustical and color effects, etc.) to manipulate image and sound.

Needless to say, what we get to see on a live broadcast has already been prepared and selected by live-editing on the control monitors. It has been scanned and given a rhythm; the camera people and the speakers have already commented on the event.

For Umberto Eco live television is “an improvised report.”²³ The director tries to impose an order on an amorphous situation. It is his or her job to tell a story by interweaving diverse elements. Relying on organization, choice of elements, and their composition, tonality, and style, the director has to blend qualitatively and quantitatively different kinds of event sequences. The result may be an exciting drama, but it will always be the director's symbolization or interpretation. ‘The producer's choice becomes a composition, a narration, a discursive reunion of images, analytically detached from the context of an entire series of simultaneous and overlapping events.”²⁴ What intervenes between the event and its representation is the order of discourse to which television producers are subjected.²⁵

Live suspense

What live broadcasts share with other program types, such as television features or fictional series, is their dramatic intensity. “Action” and “drama,” of course, are aesthetic concepts deriving in their audio-visual form from the theater and the cinema, and as such they have to be constructed. Therefore, the dramatic quality of fictional programs may be much higher than that of direct broadcasting. But “live” television adds another dimension to these characteristics: like dramatic incidents on the street or in the family, “live” television is endowed with the special notion of an encounter with the “real.” Its particular attraction lies in the promise of the unforeseeable. An example is the tragic Brussels 1986 soccer game with its panic scenes and the succeeding slaughter right in front of the cameras.

“Live” is in opposition to “canned,” “recorded” – just as fresh food stands in contrast to canned food. But as fresh food is not the same as raw food, a live event is not the same as the “real.” It is rather a symbolic approach to the “real.” As René Magritte put it:

The mystery is obviously something unrecognizable, which is to say that it is not representable, either iconographically or symbolically. Thus I am not looking for a representation of the mystery but for pictures of the visible world, which are united in an order that evokes the mystery.²⁶

If, then, the unforeseeable breaks into the “live” broadcast, the representation will tend to destroy – at least for an instant – television's firmly established symbolic order. In this instance, something gets out of control, and often the authority is not able to stamp the event with its symbols; for a split second we find ourselves in a non-legal space. Here, at the outer edge of the symbolic, a moment of horror is constituted. The viewers then judge the unfolding discourse or even the speechlessness of the media agent according to what they perceive in sight and sound about that particular instance. They judge whether or not the right words are found, whether an adequate mise-en-scàne is constructed, thus reintegrating the event into the specific symbolic, cultural order.

Topicalities and (pseudo-)myths

Although eagerness for topical events – as stories – is an effect of the historical invention of the electronic media and, even before, of the press and cinema, its origins lie beyond them, in a socio-cultural shift that took place in the course of the twentieth century.

In 1933, the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin pointed out the gradual decline of “experience” : after the disturbing experiences of the First World War and inflation, the transmission of the human heritage from generation to generation – expertise, maxims, various forms of knowledge as an aid for the single subject acting in and interpreting the world – was no longer decisive.²⁷ Under the impact of these shocking historical events, traditional wisdom and experience were superseded by the immediate present, the momentarily meaningful, by topical actuality. What emerged was a specific disposition toward the present moment.²⁸ This shift from experience to actuality represents, on the one hand, an enormous challenge to and – consequently – change in perception and aesthetics; and on the other, paradoxically, it leads to an invasion of imperative pseudo-myths.

This tremendous development in technology has brought along an entirely new form of poverty for mankind. And the reverse fact of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas, which has come with the revival of astrology and yoga wisdom, Christian Science and palmistry, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism, and has been spread among – or rather, over – the people. For it is not a case of true revival, but one of galvanization.²⁹

The extinction of experience is not synonymous with the extinction of mythical structures. Rather, the extinction of certain types of tradition (i.e. the transfer of experience) can increase the value of others, something which is confirmed by the significance of such phenomena as sensational journalism or human interest stories. Here, each occurrence is presented as a recurrence of certain (sentimental or scandalous) patterns and dynamics – but in the form of a shocking event.

As Benjamin pointed out, referring to the cinema audience's perceptive situation,

the film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every presentday citizen.³⁰

Catching the moment

Live broadcasting attempts to capture the significant moments of an event. This is why it sometimes lasts unbearably long. The climax must be waited for. It is not always possible to increase suspense by presenting images or by the speaker's intervention. Often, “nothing” happens: the soccer game has not started yet, the president of the republic has not yet appeared in front of the waiting crowd to make his declaration, the missile launch has been postponed, latest election results are not yet in. But the cameras transmit images. We are there and we stay there, for the long-awaited “unexpected” could happen in just a moment This type of expectation can be produced – on different levels and with different intensities – by the hesitation of a quiz candidate, the private confessions of a talk-show guest, star appearances, sports records, speeches to the nation in cases of emergency, or by a possible catastrophe or an assassination attempt during an official state occasion.³¹

What fascinates us, while we are still waiting, is the aura of the “inaccessible,” that which can be imagined, yet – due to subjective and social censorship – is not actually perceived. The uncanny is the major characteristic of live television. We, as assumed eyewitnesses, can see the unfolding of the event, perceive what “evokes the mystery,” in Magritte's words. What is expected to occur (and what causes the suspense) is a moment of truth.

Let us take as an example the – extraordinary – live coverage of situations in which an individual or a group of people are trapped in a cave or mine, i.e. situations which prohibit visual access. What we wait for in these instances is evidence, the visualization of facts. In 1949, Kathy Fiskus' tragic entrapment was commented upon as paradigmatic of television:

Two television stations, KTTV and KTLA, kept their cameras focussed on the scene continuously for twenty-seven hours. The coverage was set down as a milestone for the medium's development comparable to radio's spectacular performance on the occasion of Floyd Collins' entrapment in Kentucky in 1925.³²

Of course, hundreds of movies are based on the same situation (calamities in Arctic stations, submarines, hotels, aeroplanes, elevators, etc.), but live television works like an epiphany: the appearance of a hidden or lost, a desired object. It may appear from one moment to the next. Will the victim live or die? Who is guilty? Will Mother Earth set her prisoners free? Are there any heroes to snatch the victim from the jaws of death? What we are facing here are facts (birth and death) which can be dealt with in terms of stories. Birth and death cannot “tell themselves” since they are hypolinguistic phenomena, but they have an enormous cultural and subjective value, as we can easily perceive if we examine our birth phantasies or our phantasies of danger, threat, and death. As discourse events they appear in the form of myths, pseudo-myths or narrative stereotypes. Thus, the events themselves acquire the status of topicality, because in a particular socio-political situation they trigger phantasms of universal or at least broad cultural range. They become local, regional, national, or even planetary affairs which we face privately in our cosy living-rooms.

This concept is reinforced by public statements such as those which followed the 1949 incident:

A little girl was dead. That was the news – just one little girl. Three days ago only a few people knew the name of this little girl. Yesterday there was no one in this country and few in other civilized countries who had not heard of three-year-old Kathy Fiskus of San Marino, California. Millions upon millions followed the heartbreaking story as they did no other news of the day … Yet, even Kathy's father and mother must have felt that something like a miracle of human compassion had taken place. Their little daughter had suddenly become a symbol of something precious in all our lives. Two great world wars and many smaller ones have cost the lives of multitudes.³³

In this case we can observe how a perhaps not too uncommon incident became a topic of nationwide symbolic meaning. Thus sometimes a private event can become an emblematic affair whose solution symbolically stands for the state of things.

Since live broadcasts are produced for a “mass audience,” they don ‘t deal with unique objects for individual viewers. Rather, the specific uniqueness implied here is signified by the collective, simultaneous perception of an event charged with symbolic value. In this sense, we can say that something like a “live aura” exists. It inscribes its audiences into the social order of what can be called the “television community.”

Acting audiences

The most heterogeneous kinds of “media events” are projected into our living room: partly simulations or deceptions, partly real events whose procedures are oriented toward television broadcasting.³⁴ Small-scale events which are inaccessible to the “masses” and “insignificant” are blown up into media events, thereby transforming themselves.

There are different ways for viewers to participate from their living-room armchairs: they can express their approval or disapproval of a particular topic in a television discussion by simply dialing a certain telephone number, an action which will immediately register on the screen, or they can express their own opinion directly in some broadcasts by passing on information to them.³⁵ These real-time interventions, by the way, work also as a kind of guarantee of simultaneity.

Sometimes, the public may even act directly at the scene. It may be present as an applauding audience in the studio or perhaps one individual may participate in an entertainment show or ask critical questions in a political feature. Occasionally, the audience takes matters into its own hands: after a reported accident the audience may become curious and rush to the scene.

This is illustrated by the following example. In the early summer of 1981 in Vermicino, near Rome, a little boy fell into an uncovered well. For two days and two nights Italian television devoted three channels to uninterrupted reporting of the rescue work which failed. The entire nation (including the press) followed the developments. Attracted by the broadcasts, new actors thronged to the site, claiming to be “saviors”: alpinists, speleologists, acrobats, and contortionists, all took turns to be roped down into the well to attempt to grasp the child. Each of these actors thus played a role in this macabre live-television show.³⁶ Significantly it happened at a time of national political-economic crisis. Therefore, as in the 1949 example, “saving the child” also meant saving one's own way of live.

As a new geographic entity, a sovereign “state,” with its own guarantors, the “space of the broadcast media” cuts across the geographies of power and social life which together define national or cultural space. New modes of ordering reality emerge at the push of a button: the world of television language, television geography, television community. Television thus can create social reality, an ability of a quite different order from merely improving family or community life. What is decisive is not merely the medium's influence on reality, but its power to constitute reality. Television events are able to work as an electronic platform: only a small number of political and social issues have the same power.

The television community

The relationship between viewer and medium cannot be described in terms of a system of representation which would allow viewers to make judgments about whether or not they are adequately represented in the programs they watch. The point is rather that viewers experience themselves as being “socialized,” as belonging to a kind of electronically constituted society whenever and as long as they watch television. The experience of watching television may therefore be described not so much by the words “I see,” as by the words “I am among those who will have seen.” This sense of collectivity established by shared visual perception is reminiscent of the kind of communities which may develop around movie stars (such as fan clubs) or certain literary texts, as for example the community formed by the readers of a particular newspaper, or religious communities which – like the Christian Church – are founded on scriptures. Live programs which are transmitted worldwide – such as the “mondovision” Band Aid concert in July 1985 – may establish a sense of united humanity, thus inviting the spectator to become a part of an imaginary totality. Long before the advent of television, yet acutely aware of the social implications of the visual, Georg Simmel, a German social philosopher, observed in 1908: “The immediate generation of very abstract, unspecific social phenomena is … privileged by the proximity of viewing and a lack of closeness in verbal interaction.”³⁷

Listening to a sermon or to a public speech by a political or cultural personality is based not only on a desire to hear the message, but, as Umberto Eco notes, also on the wish “to experience the event: to hear also the others, to take part in a collective happening.”³⁸ He adds, commenting on new forms of cultural performances:

I presume people who go to the stadiums to hear Beethoven follow the symphony from beginning to the end, but what counts is the collective rituality – as if that which used to be the High Culture can be reaccepted and placed in a new dynamics provided it also permits encounters, experiences in common.³⁹

It thus seems that even in the age of mechanical reproduction, we may find a vestige of what Walter Benjamin called “ritual value” (or cult value) in television events: the mass of the audience celebrates its role as observer of the social body, examining whether things are the way they ought to be, an attitude which may often take on the characteristics of an obsession.⁴⁰

Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process … is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera [in the German original Apparatur, which is a more comprehensive term] than by the naked eye.⁴¹

The representatives of the television community

Due to the millionfold reproduction of their televised images, people on the screen become – at least for a moment – celebrities, celebrities who belong to everybody, who immediately become ours. But at the very moment of its constitution, the aura is dispersed. The people on the screen belong to those who share them, who scrutinize them, as indicated in comments like: “My goodness, how old he has become!” “He is still wearing the same tie!” “Look at this haircut!” or “Look at that one!”

Such self-exposure and visibility claim their price. One is either rejected as a flop, bore, or failure by the audience and the critics, or one is accepted and promoted to the status of a representative or leading figure of the (imaginary) television community – with all its consequences. People who are familiar from the screen – popular show hosts or MCs, anchor persons or people who simply attain television stardom by appearing in studio audiences (let alone athletes or pop stars whose careers are promoted by television appearances) – are usually the objects of merciless curiosity and – just like chiefs of tribal communities – become subjected to permanent attention both on the screen and in their private lives. They become objects of desire, including the desire for physical contact, and, after a while, find themselves, in many cases symbolically, in some instances even psychically, sacrificed.

The attention given to these representatives of television communities indicates that the most important aspect of a (live) broadcast is not only its particular topic, but, essentially, the success or failure of the anchor person, the sports reporter, or the talk show host. In fact, this is precisely what distinguishes the live television star from the movie star: for the latter it is crucial to imbue the assigned role in the film with one's personal “aura” or “character,” while it is presence of mind and the style with which a given situation is mastered which count for the former.

In the name of the audience

While it is true that television stars preside over their (media) communities, they also act in front of cameras and microphones, which is the form in which the invisible audience of millions confronts them. In this situation they are under the same pressure to avoid mistakes as athletes, a fact which may lead to terrible accidents as when athletes in dangerous sports such as slalom skiing push themselves beyond their limits under the pressure of the live camera eye.

Both network directors and television critics continue their arguments in the name of “The Audience,” even if what is really at stake are ratings and cultural prestige. In the international political scene, the audience becomes a more and more imaginary, yet nevertheless quite effective factor of power. Thus Philippine ex-president Marcos' loss of power may be explained as partially due to live broadcasts by North American television companies, as when ABC News commentator George Will “grilled Marcos via satellite last November [1985]; it was one of those put-up-or-shut-up challenges.”⁴² After this event, many Americans shared the feeling of Tom Shales who wrote in the Washington Post: “Suddenly we are all terribly aware of the Philippines, but we don't fully know why.” Shales continues:

Dictators of the world take note: Clean up your acts, or risk a U.S. media invasion. President Ferdinand Marcos thought he could go on television and defeat it. Instead he became the star of a continuing saga that played a real-life version of “Sins.” He played the sinner.⁴³

The article depicts a grim perspective on the interrelationship between politics and the audience: “Revolution, it appears, can now take the form of serialized talk show.”⁴⁴

Notes

1 This essay is based on my article “Live/Life: Television as a Generator of Events in Everyday Life,” in Phillip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds) Television and Its Audiences: International Research Perspectives (London: British Film Institute, 1988), pp. 32–7.

2 From a letter to the editor of Der Spiegel 3 (1987): 10; my translation.

3 Of course, a previously recorded live broadcast, a film, or a feature can also be “an answer” to a special socio-cultural event, for example, the death of a famous actor.

4 This is a common feature in live broadcasts and early forms of videotaping, when video-editing facilities were not available, at least not for non-commercial groups. This phenomenon could serve as a starting point for further reflections on the relationship between styles and aesthetics of (early) video and live television.

  We now also have live playbacks: points of major interest can be watched again immediately, mostly from other perspectives and in slow motion, while the event goes on simultaneously (meanwhile, we may be assured by the reporter: “Don't worry, you won't miss anything important while watching the replay.”) Thus a kind of micro-memory becomes part of direct broadcasting, a technical innovation not yet available when Umberto Eco wrote (in 1962/7) that “there is no narrative trick by which a time-lapse could be created within the autonomous time of the broadcast event” (Das offene Kunstwerk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 189; my translation. Italian original: Opera aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1967)).

5 For example, by fencing off and illuminating a space, cameramen and reporters moving on to the scene, etc.

6 As Walter Benjamin put it: “… unspectacular social changes often promote a change in receptivity which will benefit the new art form.” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. Harry Zahn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969); reprinted in John G. Hanhardt (ed.) Video Culture (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986), p. 52, Note 26).

7 Because of its shared etymological root, the German term Aktualität appears to be adequately translatable into French (actualité), but poses problems in English. Here the term may occasionally mean “topicality,” “actuality,” “currency,” “significance,” etc., depending on the particular context. “Actuality” refers to “what really is." in the sense of “topicality,” the concept covers three areas: (1) speed of information transmission, (2) the latest (production, distribution, and reception of latest news), (3) societal, cultural, and personal concern and interest. See Claus-Dieter Rath, “Changes in the Concept of ‘Aktualität’ (‘topicality’) in the Age of New Electronic Communication Technologies” (paper presented at the conference “The Press and the New Technologies – the Challenge of a New Knowledge,” organized by the Commission of the European Community, Brussels, November 1985).

8 On a theoretical level, however, these opposites are related differently, since highlights, extraordinary events such as festivities etc., can be considered as indispensable for the maintenance of a given established order.

9 Tabloids usually rely on these topics of universal interest, which are projected into the world of stars and crowned heads. The topics are constantly exploited to provide a continuous stream of topical news (see, for example, the “Royal Watchers" in Great Britain). The tabloids offer examples of how topicality can be deliberately constructed; this may be contrasted to the process of “developing topicality.” Both types are combined in those cases in which the media create a kind of extra-medial topicality (provocation, falsification, insinuation, alarmist reports, scandals, scoops, etc.).

10 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: Universtiy of Chicago Press, 1979).

11 One cannot imagine … that oneself could ever experience events without reference to a tightly knit framework of time measurement, such as hours of the day or the sequence of calendar years. In actual fact, however, this specific time experience is bound up with a stage of social development at which societies could not function without a differentiated and firmly institutionalized framework of time measurements – a society with long interdependence-chains binding the social functions of many thousands of people to each other and thus requiring very close coordination of their activities in terms of time. It is well known that people of less differentiated societies neither possess nor need timing devices of our kind.

12 Georg Simmel, “Das Problem der historischen Zeit” (1916), in Brücke und Tür (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957), p. 49; my translation.

13 ibid., p. 55.

14 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).

15 ibid., p. 297.

16 See Claus-Dieter Rath, “The Invisible Network: Television as an Institution in Everyday Life,” in Phillip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds) Television in Transition (London: British Film Institute, 1985), pp. 199–204.

17 An object or a process becomes topical on condition that it contains the themes listed above – on the level of a direct physical stimulus (e.g. pain; “primary or hypolinguistic code”), on the level of a linguistic message (e.g. indication of a conspiracy or a symbolic gesture; “secondary, i.e. linguistic or sign code”), or on the level of an entire cultural and social order (e.g. collapse or devaluation of certain forms of social exchange; “tertiary, i.e. hyperlinguistic or text code”). In this process a past, a distant event, or products of the imagination are brought into a relationship of simultaneity, are brought into the present – i.e. into the field of political slogans which suggest dangers or conflict solutions, or into the field of fashion design “for ‘with it’ people,” since, “while reality precedes thought, it takes different forms according to the way the subject deals with it” (Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34, part 1 (1953): 11).

18 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1979).

19 The major source of detachment, however, is the knowledge that the mass media are part of the outside world, and that therefore they cannot be trusted. West Enders enjoy making fun of the media as much as they enjoy the programs. As one of my neighbours put it, “We heckle TV just like we used to heckle the freaks at the circus when we were kids.” … In effect, the mass media are approached with some of the same ambivalence as other features of the outside world. This in turn allows the West Ender to interpret the media content so as to protect himself from the outside world and to isolate himself from its messages unless he wishes to believe them. Because of his suspicion of the mass media as an institution, the appearance of people and values of which he approves demonstrates that they are there because they are superior and cannot be held back.

20 Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term conduct is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations. For to “conduct" is at the same time to “lead” others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities. [Translator's note: Foucault is playing on the double meaning of the French verb conduire (= to lead or to drive) and se conduire (= to behave or conduct oneself), which corresponds to the noun la conduite (= conduct or behavior).] The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically, power is less a confrontation than a question of government…. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of actions of others. The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government…. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized.

21 ibid., p. 220.

22 See the controversies about “responsible,” “honest” vs. “irresponsible,” “dishonest” journalism.

23 Eco, Das offene Kunstwerk, p. 192; my translation. See the chapter “Zufall und Handlung. Femseherfahrung und Ästhetik (Ästhetische Strukturen der Live-Sendung; Freiheit der Ereignisse und Determinismen der Gewohnheit),” pp. 186–211.

24 ibid., p. 190.

25 Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper/Colophon, 1972).

26 Interview with Pierre du Bois, in René Magritte, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. André Blavier (München: Hanser, 1981; Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 543; my translation.

27 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

28 See Georg Simmel, “Das Abenteuer,” in Philosophische Kultur (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1983), p. 15.

29 Walter Benjamin, “Erfahrung und Armut,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 214–15; my translation.

30 Benjamin, The Work of Art, p. 52, note 29.

31 Thus, the live broadcast of the tragic Challenger Space Shuttle lift-off in January 1986 was watched by a relatively small audience compared to previous launches. The enterprise had developed into a routine matter and was no longer conceived of as risky. President Reagan, who, up to this point, had apparently always watched such events live on television, had to watch the catastrophe on a video recording.

32 New York Times, April 4, 1949, p. 38.

33 New York Times, April 11, 1949, p. 24.

34 See the study on the Royal Wedding, 1981, by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, “Rituels publics à usage privé: metamorphose télévisée d'un mariage royal,” Annates. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 1 (1983): 3–20.

35 See Rath, “The Invisible Network.”

36 See also Billy Wilder's film The Ace in the Hole, originally titled The Big Carnival, dealing with a case of entrapment in a cave as media sensation, and Woody Allen's Radio Days with the case of the dramatic but futile rescue action of little Polly Phelps who fell into a well. A recent case of worldwide live TV focusing on an entrapment in a well was the one of little Jessica McClure (October 1987, in Midland/Texas):

Alert and recovering from a two-and-a-half-day ordeal in an abandoned well, an 18-month-old girl underwent minor surgery at the hospital at Midland, Texas. The girl, Jessica McClure, who was rescued Friday night at the climax of a life-and-death drama that brought wild cheers, sobs of joy and world attention to a depression-weary city of 90,000 people in West-Texas, was tired but in a stable condition…. Millions of people across the country and around the world watched the drama on television. The three major networks inter rupted their programs.

  Friday night Jessica, barefoot, dirty and strapped to a board like a papoose, was raised up from the well to a thundering chorus of hurrahs and horns from crowds that overwhelmed the rescue site. At Midland Memorial, where Jessica was rushed to the emergency room, a parade of cars circled late into the night and the switchboard was inundated with well-wishers' calls from around the world. Thousands of teddy bears began pouring in.

(New York Times, October 18, 1987, p. 28)

37 Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen iiber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), pp. 488–9; my translation.

38 Umberto Eco, “Culture as Show Business” (1980), in Travels in Hyperreality. Essays, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987), p. 154.

39 ibid., p. 155.

40 This should be considered in the context of the relation between obsessive neuroses and visuality.

41 Benjamin, The Work of Art, p. 52, note 32.

42 Washington Post, February 24, 1986, pp. Dl, D2.

43 ibid.

44 ibid., p. D1.