New Arrangements, New Arraignments.

One piece of information from this article that really stuck with me was Johnathon Crary's statement: that by the late 1920's, when the first experimental broadcasts occurred, the vast interlocking of corporate, military, and state control of television was being settled. Never before had the institutional regulation of a new technique been planned and divided up so far in advance¹. Perhaps it is because the relationship between television and censorship is a topic that regularly comes up in conversation with my father. “You know that in South Africa,” thats where I was born (and, as a pre-teen, immigrated to New Zealand from), “we didn't get Television until 1976.” Just as a contrast, New Zealand, a far smaller country with a smaller economy, introduced it's public to television in 1960.

Within Spectacle, Attention and Counter-Memory, Crary references a selection of writers that could easily be described as marxists of some description. The ones that I'm referring to are Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillad and Guy Debord.

Without even reading the main body of this text, one could assume, just from looking at it's references, that it had something to do with the politics of distribution.

In his essay, The Hell of the Same, Jean Baudrillad recalls Walter Benjamin's thoughts about what happens when a work (of art) is massively reproduced: that the work's 'aura', its here-and-now quality²

is somehow lost. Crary mentioned that Television, as a new medium, required a new type of attention. It's in-sync combination of sound and film was something that the public had seen before in the cinema,
but in television, something different metabolized. Perhaps in the beginning, in relation to other available means of marketing, television appeared to keep this aura (that Benjamin spoke of) in tact. The sort reproduction that occurs in a television broadcast, is not necessarily the production
line reproduction where the same thing is made over and over again. The electron gun inside the TV is fired by a charge that is prompted by the broadcast signal: Making it a more derivative form of reproduction where the reproduction is always linked back to the original (or the enigma), and is in turn linked to every other reproduction.

Perhaps this is why Television has served as a such a formidable marketing tool?

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1 Crary, Jonathan. “Spectacle, Attention and Counter Memory.”

October 50 (Autumn, 1989): 96-107.

2 Baudrillard, Jean. “The Hell of the Same.” The
Transparency of Evil.
London: Verso, 1993.113-123.