Television and the Meaning of 'Live' E-Book

Paddy Scannell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 600

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book is about the question of existence, the meaning of ‘life’. It is an enquiry into the contemporary human situation as disclosed by television.

The elementary components of any real-world situation are place, people and time. These are first examined as basic existential phenomena drawing on Heidegger’s fundamental enquiry into the human situation in Being and Time. They are then explored through the technological and production care-structures of broadcast television which, routinely and exceptionally, display the situated experience of being alive and living in the world today. It shows routinely in the live self-enactments of persons being themselves and the liveness of their ordinary talk on television. It shows exceptionally in television coverage of great occasions and catastrophes as they unfold live and in real time. Case studies reveal the existential role of television in salvaging the possibility of genuine experience, and in revealing the world-historical character of life today. To explore these questions, the agenda of sociology - its concern with economic, political and cultural life - is set aside. Being in the world is not, in the first (or last) instance, a social but an existential question, as an existential enquiry into television today discovers.

Passionate and sweeping in scale, this new book from a leading media scholar is a major contribution to our understanding of the media today.

Leseprobe

Television and the meaning of live

Television and the meaning of live

An enquiry into the human situation

Paddy Scannell

polity

Copyright © Paddy Scannell 2014

The right of Paddy Scannell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7964-8

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Part one: An introduction to the phenomenology of television

Prologue: Heidegger’s teacup

1.  What is phenomenology?

2.  Available world

3.  Available self

4.  Available time

5.  Turning on the TV set

6.  Television and technology

Part two: Television and the meaning of live

7.  The meaning of live

8.  How to talk – on radio

9.  How to talk – on television

10.  The moment of the goal – on television

11.  Being in the moment: the meaning of media events

12.  Catastrophe – on television

13.  Television and history

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

At the heart of this book is the concept of the care structure – the hidden creative input that goes into the making of any thing, any human institution, event or practice. How could I not be aware, then, of this book’s care structure – the unseen unacknowledged labour of its production, all that has gone into its realization? It is this, of course, that must be properly and appropriately recognized in the act of acknowledging. It is a rather awesome responsibility and duty. There is so much to recognize, so many to remember – all those, who, on the one hand contributed to what went into the writing of this book; all those who have contributed to its production as a book.

I have paid my dues already to some of those whose work informs this book in its predecessor, Media and Communication, which contains accounts of the writings of David Riesman, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, J.L. Austin, Paul Grice, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. Their thinking has been formative for mine in the drawn out process of writing its successor. The extent of my debt of gratitude to Martin Heidegger will become apparent in everything that follows.

There are two key topics to the second part of this book: the study of live talk and of live events. I have thanks to pay in relation to both. In the first case to my friends and colleagues in the Ross Priory Group who have contributed so much, through the years, to my understanding of the workings of talk on radio and television.1 They include Andrew Tolson, Joanna Thornborrow, Stephanie Marriott, Kay Richardson, Ian Hutchby, Trudi Harman and especially Martin Montgomery who introduced me to socio-linguistics (and sailing). The groundbreaking study of media events by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz was the initial inspiration for this book. As always, I have learned a great deal from the teaching situation through the years. All the programs discussed in part two have been used by me many times in the classroom. By dint of repeated viewings and discussions of them with students and colleagues, I have gradually come to see how they disclose the workings of live broadcasting and what is at stake in this.

On the production side, I must thank Andrea Drugan especially, my commissioning editor in Polity, and her colleagues Lauren Mulholland and Jonathan Skerrett. I confess I have lost track of all those colleagues whose friendship I have severely tested by asking them to read draft chapters at various points along the way. Rather than give offence to anyone by omission, I simply wish to thank them all – and especially the two reviewers for Polity who have read several iterations of the manuscript. Their patient advice and comments have been deeply helpful and taken into account. Dimitrios Pavlounis checked the references and compiled the bibliography, thereby sparing me a task I could hardly bring myself to do. Thanks, Dimitri – I could not have managed without your assistance. I have long ago acknowledged my debt to my wife and daughter, Suzi and Sonia, for their cheerful tolerance of ‘the boringness of Heidegger’. For their continuing forbearance towards him and their loving support of me, I continue to be more grateful and thankful than I can possibly say.

Preface

I would like to think of this enquiry into radio and television as a contribution to what might be called third-generation media studies. It follows on directly from Media and Communication (Sage 2007) which was written as a textbook to introduce students to the academic study of media and communication. In my accounts there were two key moments: the formation of a sociology of mass communication at Columbia in the 1930s, and of media studies at Birmingham in the 1970s. The book’s focus was not in the first place on media and communication but throughout on how academics engaged with and thought about the media and why. As I will shortly argue, academics go about their task by producing their object of enquiry as an academic object. But radio and television, the internet and mobile phones are simply not academic things – and in fact are resistant to being thought of as such. My aim and purpose here is an attempt to think of radio and television in their terms rather than in academic terms. This means to think of them in situ: as everyday worldly phenomena, as part and parcel of ordinary existence. In what follows, I set aside all critical, theoretical and political approaches in my enquiry into television as disclosive of the human situation today. In so doing I am, to put it another way, bracketing the discourses of sociology and cultural media studies – the first two generations of academic enquiry – of which I gave accounts in Media and Communication.

The provocation of this book is that it sets aside one of the most taken-for-granted, normal and normative assumptions of modern academic thought – namely, the explanatory power of sociology. I do so in order to resuscitate something that it has smothered out of existence and which yet underpins all its discourses. Anthony Giddens has argued, rightly I think, that sociology is perhaps thediscipline of modernity: it is ‘the most generalised type of reflection upon modern social life […] Modernity is itself deeply and intrinsically sociological’ (Giddens 1991: 41, 43). We have all learnt to think sociologically. It has become a second nature to us. In today’s common-sense self-understanding, human being is being social. This book is an enquiry into the meaning of the word ‘life’ and whatever that means it is surely something more than the merely social. Its problem, however, of which I am vividly aware, is that can no longer be taken as a serious question. It has dwindled to the status of an Oxbridge undergraduate joke (Monty Python and the Meaning of Life). The question of existence is, I have come to think, a limit question for the humanities and social sciences today, since it is nowhere recognized, acknowledged or addressed by them – in the fields in which I read, at least. The meaning of ‘the social’ marks the limits of their thinking and, by extension, the limits of modernity’s self-understanding if (as I take it) that question is indeed modernity’s ownmost topic and concern, as Anthony Giddens has argued. It is a foundational assumption of this book that what lies outside ‘the social’ (what determines it)1 is ‘existence’; life itself, life as such.

I begin with a sketch of phenomenology as an interdisciplinary way of thinking, and go on to a consideration of its distinctive, distinguishing topic, as worked out by Martin Heidegger, namely the question of existence, the meaning of (the word) ‘life’. This was the focal concern of Being and Time (hereafter BT), one of the seminal texts of European thinking in the last century. But it was written nearly a hundred years ago, and the world today is not as it was when Heidegger published his life-defining work in 1927. If we are to benefit from its thinking, it must be re-thought in light of its relevance in and for our own times and this is what I try to do. I have undertaken a summary best reading of Being and Time which I hope is true to its central project, while critiquing it at certain points and trying to retrieve its integral unity. For it must be emphasized that it was hastily written (in order to get tenure!) and remains incomplete. In particular, it fails to deliver on what its title promises – namely a clear account of the relationship between the two components of its title – ‘being’ and ‘time’.

The standard introduction to BT, in America especially, is Being-in-the-world, by Hubert Dreyfus. It was first published in 1991 and has since gone through dozens of reprints. By now it has become the classic vade mecum and guide to BT for English-speaking readers. Yet it is only about Division One, the first part of the book. Division Two is ignored. In his preface, Dreyfus tells us that he considers Division One to be ‘the most original and important section of the work’. Division Two, he goes on, has two separate and somewhat independent themes. The first is the ‘existentialist’ topic of resolute, authentic being in face of existential anxiety, guilt and death. The second is the temporality of human existence and of the world, in which Heidegger tries to retrieve an originary ‘ecstatic’ temporality that goes beyond time as succession (the movement from past to present to future). On this Dreyfus comments:

Although the chapters on originary temporality are an essential part of Heidegger’s project, his account leads him so far from the phenomenon of everyday temporality that I did not feel I could give a satisfactory interpretation of the material. Moreover, the whole of Division II seemed to me much less carefully worked out than Division I and, indeed, to have some errors so serious as to block any consistent reading. (Dreyfus 1991: viii)

I agree. Division One has an integral unity, a clear narrative direction to it and a remarkable focused intensity of purpose in pursuit of its goal – the truth of what it is to be, what in fact we are, namely human. It can be read as a stand-alone text, and in many ways it is. But it is incomplete. The topic of the book as a whole, as given in its title – Being and Time – simply has not yet appeared. Division One was intended as a preparation for that topic. It is a long time coming in Division Two, and by the time he gets there Heidegger has lost his way. The topic of temporality is not properly reconnected with the topics of Division One. But without it we cannot grasp the overall unity of the work. This can be summarily stated. It is a fundamental enquiry into the human situation.2 It has three irreducible components: people, place and time. Division One explicates the first two topics (place and people) in preparation for the third: time, the ‘lost’ topic of Division Two.

Dreyfus unerringly identifies the great theme of Division One as being-in-the-world. This has two components. The first (and it is the key to everything that follows) is the being of the world: the ordinary everyday human world of material things, the immediate environment, the umwelt (the topic of place). This is explored in chapter three, the magnificent cornerstone of the whole of the first part of the book. It is followed immediately by the obvious next most relevant topic, namely the being in this ordinary everyday world of ordinary everyday people (the pivotal second component of the human situation). This, the topic of chapter four, is the crux of Division One, and it is at this point, as I will shortly argue, that Heidegger takes a wrong turn that distracts him from his overall project. Nevertheless, the first two components of the human situation are convincingly established in Division One; the being-there of the ordinary everyday world and the being-in-it of ordinary everyday human beings. But the project is radically incomplete without the absolutely crucial question of time. Being-in-(the time of)-the-world: that was the projected but not fully realized integral theme of Heidegger’s exploration of the human situation and its inextricably connected elementary components – place, people, time and in that order.

The world of the 1920s, in Division One, is always the umwelt; the immediate environment in which any individual life is unavoidably situated. But nearly a century later the world today, for anyone living in a post-modern society, is both their own immediate environment (the place where they live) and the world-as-a-whole. This is the world as routinely and daily disclosed by all tele-technologies of communication and, centrally, I will argue, by the two key technologies of radio and television taken together under the rubric of broadcasting. As anyone at all familiar with Heidegger knows, he was, in his later years, much vexed by the question of technology and, as an aspect of his general distaste for its frenzied dominion, he was none too fond of either radio or television. Radio broadcasting, he declared in 1949, ‘has interfered with the essence of the human’ (Figal 2009: 278). As television spread through Germany in the next decade, Heidegger publicly deplored its impact on his fellow Germans while occasionally enjoying watching live TV coverage of soccer (of which he was passionately fond).

Human technologies are world disclosing. So Heidegger argued in his much discussed lecture on ‘The question concerning technology’, the first version of which was given in Bremen in 1949, in a country shattered and ruined by a worldwide war of its own making. What was that war if not the first total global war on land, sea and air in which technologies of mass destruction put to the slaughter over sixty million people. The apotheosis of all these technologies was the atomic bomb – modernity’s technological sublime. It was with all this in mind that Heidegger thought and spoke of the question of technology.3 But in our world today, technologies no longer appear as an overwhelming threat to human life as such. They are rather, in many respects, our essential everyday life support systems. It is another fundamental assumption of this book that we now live in a totally technologized world. To understand our ‘conditions of existence’ demands that we address the question of technology as constitutive of the world we live in.

Television is, like any complex technology, a continuously evolving, changing historical thing. When I began work on it back in the late 1970s, I thought of it in two related ways. There was the TV set in the living room, and what we (in Britain) watched on it – namely the BBC and ITV. It was natural for me to think of TV and radio as more or less synonymous with the BBC – with British television. It was the only television I knew (apart from American shows, restricted to no more than 15% of total output). Television was experienced, thought and studied at first within the frame of the nation-state. It is no longer possible to think within this frame. Today, we must think of television as such: not this or that television – American, British, Japanese or whatever – but simply, television. To be sure, when I try to show how it works, in what follows, I take particular cases and these, naturally enough, turn out to be drawn from the televisions that I know – British and, to a lesser extent, American. But the programs I examine have no privileged status by virtue of their being American or British. When dinosaurs were first discovered, all over the world, they were not thought of as American or British dinosaurs when their remains were discovered in those places. Old programs, wherever they were made, are now part of the accumulating common global fossil record of broadcasting. What follows is an effort at re-thinking the initial terms in which I thought of radio and television as I encountered them back in the 1970s. Such an effort is a necessary response to two basic facts – one great, one small. The world has changed in the last 40 years – and so have I.

I began this book as a contribution to the study of media events, inspired by the seminal work of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz. They understood media events within the frame of a Durkheimian sociology of ritual. I was particularly taken by their subtitle, ‘The live broadcasting of history’, and that was and remains a focal concern of the second half of Television and the Meaning of ‘Live’. It is a study of what is at stake in live-to-air radio and television broadcasting. This is a rather peripheral topic in Media Studies as Jerome Bourdon (2000) has noted, and there is, at best, only a scattered literature on it.4 It took quite some time for me to discover it as the crux of my own concerns in the two related topics of part two; talk on early radio and television and the coverage of media events and news. I gradually came to see them both as inseparable and basically to do with the management of liveness, more exactly the problems broadcasting unavoidably confronts in managing the immediate now of speech (talk) and action (events) in live-to-air transmission. On the one hand, there is the ever-present risk and danger of technical error and performance failure that is intrinsic to live situations in public; on the other hand, the potential triumph of what Hannah Arendt calls ‘great deeds and words’ in the unforgiving light of publicness. The breakthrough into what the book is now about came when I saw that these issues were in no way peculiar to broadcasting – that they are, in fact, the issues that all of us confront in the management of our own daily lives and concerns. The issues posed by live broadcasting, I began to think, tell us something of the nature of the everyday human situation that all of us are unavoidably in. I mean we, the living, who must always speak and act in the immediate now-of-concern in the course of an unfolding life. In so doing we confront the same possibilities and dilemmas – whether at the level of individual lives or of high politics – that broadcasters face anywhere in the world. There is no more guarantee of success for broadcasters in any live broadcast situation than there is for any of us in any real-time life situation in which we find ourselves – the issues in both circumstances are the same. The question of the meaning of live broadcasting had grown into the meaning of life as we, the living, encounter it – and at this point I realized the book needed a complete rethink!

I therefore wrote what is now part one of the book as a preliminary exploration of the human life situation as we the living encounter it, in preparation for the study of the live situation in broadcasting as encountered by both parties to it – the broadcasters on the one hand, listeners and viewers on the other. Each part is, I hope, reciprocally illuminating of the other. Heidegger provided the essential framework of part one as the prelude to part two, but I had to wrestle him into shape. I have re-thought Heidegger in light of my concerns. Rooted out of my accounts are Heidegger’s dubious notions in Being and Time on the masses (the They) and authenticity. His later jeremiads on technology are discarded, while hanging on to the key point that the essence of technology is nothing technological.5 I have re-thought the question of being-in-the-world – the great theme of Being and Time – as being-(alive and living)-in-(the time of)-the-world. Unless the question of being is made fully explicit as being alive in time, there will always be the danger of lapsing into what Heidegger himself labels onto-theology, the cloudy realms of metaphysics. The underlying concern of Being and Time is one that I unreservedly share – to salvage and redeem the lost topic of existence, the meaning of ‘life’. But to bring that question back to life requires tact in getting the balance and tone right, in raising the question again in an appropriate and timely way that makes it fresh and relevant to our world, our lives and our concerns today. This I have tried to do through an enquiry into live radio and television because that seems to me to be precisely the right way back to the question. Broadcasting is part of the taken for granted fabric of the world as a whole and speaks to the everyday life concerns of peoples situated in their own life world everywhere. In its management of live-to-air talk and events on radio and television, broadcasting unobtrusively reveals something of itself and of the world-historical situation of human life today, as I at last discover.

Part one

An introduction to the phenomenology of television

Prologue: Heidegger’s teacup

By way of a beginning here are three stories about Heidegger and television. Martin Heidegger’s life spanned most of the last century. He was born in Messkirch in 1889 and died in 1976. Messkirch, at the time of Heidegger’s birth, was a village with a population of around 2,000, situated in south-west Germany, just north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border. He grew up in a deeply rural, traditional Catholic environment; his father was a craftsman, a master cooper and the sexton of the parish church. His mother’s family were small tenant farmers.1 In 1961, Messkirch celebrated the 700th anniversary of its founding and it invited its most famous son, the now world renowned philosopher, Martin Heidegger, to join in the festivities and give a talk.

Heidegger’s talk, appropriately enough, was on the meaning of ‘home’, and, he remarked, coming home to Messkirch today, the first thing one notices is the forest of television and radio aerials on every roof-top. He saw in this a potent symbol of what the future held in store for Messkirch and the world. The TV aerials showed that human beings were, strictly speaking, no longer ‘at home’ where, seen from outside, they lived. The people of Messkirch might be sitting in their living room, but really, thanks to television, they were in the sports stadium or on a safari or being a bystander at a gunfight in the Old West (Pattison 2000: 59–60). The 71-year-old Heidegger was deeply suspicious of the intrusive, alien presence of television in people’s homes.2 It was part of the domination of mankind by modern technology.

That is the first story. Here is the second. Heidegger, for sure, did not have a television set. And yet, in his later years, he would regularly go to a friend’s house to watch television. All his life Heidegger had been a keen sportsman. He was an excellent skier and would head for the snow- covered slopes whenever he could in the winter. He had always been fond of football and in his youth he was, Safranski tells us, a useful performer on the left wing. In his later years he became an enthusiastic follower of the European Cup on television and, ‘during one legendary match between Hamburg and Barcelona, he knocked over a teacup in his excitement’ (Safranski 1998: 428). This match took place in the 1960–61 season, the same year in which Heidegger gave his talk in Messkirch.3

And lastly, another football story – as told in English by Friedrich Kittler before an English audience.4 Heidegger is now an old man in his eighties and his death is less than two years away.

Back in 1974 when Germany’s football team won the title of World Champion – for the second time – the philosopher Martin Heidegger happened to take a train from Heidelberg back to Freiberg […] and since in city trains at that time there were dining cars Germany’s greatest thinker had the chance to make the acquaintance of Freiberg’s theatre director:

‘Why didn’t we meet before?’ was the director’s urgent first question.

‘Why don’t you ever show up at the dramatic performances I give?’

Heidegger’s answer was simple:

‘Because on your stage they’re just actors whom I’m not at all interested to see.’

‘But dear Professor, I beg you, what else could we in the theatre possibly do?’

‘I’d rather like seeing and hearing not actors but heroes and gods.’

‘Impossible. Heroes don’t exist and gods even less.’

‘So haven’t you watched our recent world championship on TV?

Although at home my wife Elfride and I don’t have one, I visited some nearby friends in order to watch. And for me the most obvious thing to remark was the fact that Franz Beckenbauer, the hero of the German team, was never fouled or wounded – he’s proven to be invincible and immortal. Now you can see, even amongst us, there are heroes and gods!’

What do these stories tell us? Like any good tale they point to a moral which I take to be something about academics and how they think as academics on the one hand, and how they act when, on the other hand, they stop being academic. In his public role of mystic sage, Heidegger deplores television. When he gets home and hangs up his professional hat, he becomes ordinary like the rest of us, and does what the rest of us do ordinarily. He watches television and is absorbed by it. What needs serious consideration is not what Heidegger thought about television, but what happened to him when he watched it. Heidegger’s spilt teacup is what calls for explanation. How could he be so excited? By the end of this book I hope to have offered some answers to that particular question. Here at the beginning I want to note the problems of academic thinking, particularly when it engages with the ordinary world of everyday life which for all of us today includes something that we speak and think of as ‘television’.

1

What is phenomenology?

Phenomenology is a logos (a discourse) of the phenomena (the things that are visible). It is distinct from and in opposition to what we might call noumenology – the logos of the noumena: the invisible things, the things that belong to nous (the mind, consciousness, logos itself). Since Plato, the distinction between the visible things of the human world and the invisible things of the human mind has been a polarizing philosophical crux. What is the relationship between them? Plato was suspicious of phenomenal reality (the world as it appears to us) and privileged ideas (the ideal forms of thought/consciousness) over the appearances of things. Since then, in the Western tradition, consciousness (introspective mental acts of cognition) has been taken as the basis of what it is to be human: cogito ergo sum. It is the cogito (the ‘I think’) that grounds the sum (I am). Phenomenology is firmly committed to a view that thinking begins by looking outwards not inwards. In an originary sense we are moved (are summoned) to thinking by looking at the world, the alpha and omega of all thought – where thinking begins and ends. The point is not to contemplate the world, still less to presume to change it – but perhaps, at last, to recognize, acknowledge and try to understand it. This is what phenomenology essays. Its motto is given by Edmund Husserl (who gave phenomenology its name within philosophy): ‘To the things themselves’. This means to attempt to think of things in their terms in the first place: not what I might think they are but what, in fact, they are. In phenomenological thinking, what a thing is (its truth; what it ‘means’) is immanent in the thing as it appears to us and as we encounter it. Things are disclosive of what they are; they reveal themselves as what in fact they are in the ways in which they appear and present themselves. For this way of thinking truth is revelatory: the immanence of truth in the world as the truth of the world.

At the end of the introduction to Media and Communication (M&C), I offered a preliminary succinct definition of phenomenological thinking as ‘an effort at an understanding of the world uncluttered by the usual academic baggage’ (Scannell 2007: 6). I meant this as a provocation, but also exactly. An initial formulation of phenomenology might be that it is a way of thinking situated in academia that serves in part to put in question the taken for granted assumptions that underpin academic disciplines and their frames of thinking. In particular, it is a critique of the way in which academic thought invariably works to produce the objects of its thinking as academic objects. This point has been made most pungently by Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘discursive formation’. A discursive formation is the product of institutional discursive regimes of truth (law, medicine, psychiatry, sociology) with the power to objectify that of which they speak. What is criminal and what is not, what is health and what is not, what is sanity and what is not, what is the social and what is not – positively and negatively the truth of what these things ‘are’ is the effect of self-validating, self-legitimating, self-regulating discourses that produce them as such. Outside of the university, there is no such thing as Literature – I mean Literature as the academic thing that is taught at universities, with degree courses and graduate programs and a forest of learned books and journals going back a century or more which collectively combine to produce the thing that is known and understood by all concerned (not without occasional challenges) as Literature. The truth of what this thing is, is the effect of institutional realities that produce and reproduce it as such – as a purely academic object. In the world outside the institutions of higher education, there are books of all sorts and there is a complicated publishing business and there are (or were) bookshops and there are readers … but all this goes on outside of the university and is not studied within it. Literature is not, in the first place, a worldly thing. It is an academic thing – objectified as such by the internal institutional processes that produce it as such.

The disciplines that constitute the humanities and social sciences (I leave the natural sciences out of these considerations) are all, in Foucault’s terms, discursive formations: Literature, linguistics, anthropology, history, sociology, psychology. They are, in the first and last instance, all the effects of institutional modes of thought that produce them as institutional realities. And there is no necessary correspondence between any of them and what lies outside the university itself – namely the non-academic world of everyday life. Phenomenology is of course a hideously academic word – who outside the university would ever use the word in ordinary, non-academic conversation? But it wants to escape from the world of the university and reconnect with the world outside its lecture theatres and seminar rooms. It aspires to engage with the ordinary everyday world without preconceptions, theories or prejudices; without thinking in advance that it knows what it thinks about it.

Phenomenology does not belong to any single discipline – it is not simply or only a sub-field of philosophy for instance. It is a way of thinking that is cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. Let me take two instances of phenomenological thinking from different disciplines by way of illustration; one from the UK, one from the USA. They occur more or less at the same time yet independently of each other. The first example is ‘linguistic phenomenology’, the second is ethnomethodology. I have given summary accounts of both in M&C. Linguistic phenomenology is the phrase that J.L. Austin used to describe what he did (Austin 1961: 182). His approach is more usually described as ordinary language philosophy. It is an essentially pragmatic view of language that asks what we do with words and tries to answer that question by carefully exploring how we use them. It is a view of language that is poles apart from language as conceived by linguists – by structural linguistics from Saussure to Chomsky. Linguistics produces language as an academic object and proceeds to study it scientifically (objectively). In so doing, it has transformed ordinary language that anyone and everyone can and does use into a technical, specialist object that only experts can understand. Austin’s approach privileges the nonacademic, ordinary worldly phenomenon of language-in-use as used by anyone and everyone (in Saussurean terms he is concerned with parole rather than langue). It endorses phenomenology’s motto – to the things themselves. In this case ordinary (non-academic) words and what we do with them – how we put them to use, in what circumstances and for what practical worldly purposes.

Ethnomethodology is the term coined by Harold Garfinkel to describe the new kind of radical sociology that was emerging in the USA in the 1950s. His work, and that of Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks, marked a sharp break with mainframe American sociology,1 which thought of society in terms of large-scale institutional structures (the state, the economy, the culture industries) whose continuing existence demanded the production and reproduction of individuals adjusted to their systemic requirements. This modernist macro-sociology was challenged by the new postmodern sociology of the 1950s which took the micro-social as its domain of enquiry. For Garfinkel, the kind of sociology he had learned at Harvard under Talcott Parsons had the effect of reducing individual social members to judgemental dopes who ‘function’ to maintain the stable features of the social order by acting in ways that serve to reproduce it. This disciplinary model of society presumes that individuals left to their own devices (i.e., without the control of social institutions) would, in a state of nature, act solely in their own interests and against each other. ‘Society’ acts as an external constraint that imposes and maintains social order. The new sociology sharply disagrees with this. If there is to be such a thing as society, there must be individuals predisposed to cooperative action and interaction with each other. Collaborative behaviours are not the effect of a mysteriously pre-existing social order that imposes itself upon individuals. Rather, the orderly interactions of individuals oriented to cooperation (working together) produce and maintain a social world. At stake in this difference between the old and the new sociology is the relationship between structure and agency (Giddens 1984). Ethnomethodology attends to the reasonable accountable methods of ethnos (social members) in interaction with each other and the ways in which they thereby sustain an intelligible, workable, meaningful world-in-common.

The philosophy of ordinary language and the sociology of interaction appear in different places at the same time and both, I have argued, are in response to the structural transformation of the world that becomes visible in the 1950s and which I have described as the transition from the time of the masses (the modern era that ends in 1945) to the time of everyday life – the post-war, post-modern era of today. Both are instances of what I think of as the phenomenological turn: the turn to the things themselves – language as such, the social as such. Let me summarize their similarities as a preliminary sketch of what I mean by the phenomenological orientation to things:

•  Both take a pragmatic approach to their object (language, society) that is distinctly parsimonious in respect of theory.

•  Each asks ‘How does it work? What can we do with it?’ Both presume the usability, the workability of their object domain. Both conceive of it as a practice. Each explores how the practice works, in what ways and under what situational constraints.

•  Each is oriented towards action rather than contemplation (theory). It is a mistake to think of Austin’s work as speech act theory – that term was introduced by his student, John Searle (1969). Austin’s thinking is profoundly resistant to theorizing. And likewise, the sociology of interaction – the interactive order that Goffman made his life’s work.

•  Each presupposes that the practice has an implicit logic-of-use: i.e., that language-in-use, interaction-in-action have reasonable, accountable and justifiable features that are taken as given and oriented to by participants.

•  These logics are not in any way external to the practices: they are what constitute their possibility. They are the structuring features that produce the practices (of conversation pre-eminently) as essentially reasonable (accountable, justifiable) and thereby workable.

•  In all this, the object domains are viewed from the perspective of the ordinary and mundane – the routine practices of everyday activities (such as talking) in practice, in use, in action. This perspective is thus oriented to the point of view of the laity and not that of the sociologist, the philosopher, the priest or the professor.

•  The phenomenological perspective is aligned with that of ordinary social members. Both are oriented to a hermeneutics of trust that takes things at face value in the first instance. In this way the phenomenological position is sharply at odds with the dominant sceptical hermeneutic perspective of academia which is oriented to suspicion.

Phenomenology’s topic

Phenomenology, then, is a way of thinking that can be applied to any academic field of enquiry. It functions negatively as a critique, or reality check, on the taken-for-granted assumptions that constitute the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Positively, it has its own object domain – one that is largely absent from almost all the dominant discursive fields of academic enquiry today. Its project is, in this respect, redemptive: to breathe life into a lost, abandoned topic – the question of existence, the meaning of ‘life’.2 Once upon a time human beings were moved to wonder at the question of existence when they looked up at the stars and contemplated the heavens. In the totally human world of today, in which the natural world is no more than an occasional disastrous intrusion, the question of existence has become mundane. In our world, the meaning of ‘life’ is disclosed by the liveness of television and other electronic media of everyday communication.

The question of existence – the meaning of ‘life’ – is everywhere present and nowhere considered in the field in which I work – namely media and communication studies. It is there most visibly in that well-worn expression: ‘everyday life’. I have shown, in the long narrative of Media and Communcation, that ‘everyday life’ achieved recognition across a range of academic fields of enquiry and in different countries in the 1950s. It was, in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons, a post-war phenomenon first explored by Henri Lefebvre in his remarkable Critique de la vie quotidienne in 1947. It became a central concern of American sociology in the 1950s. Personal influence (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) was a study of the ways in which ordinary American women made decisions – about what to buy in the supermarket, what movie to go and see, what fashion to follow, what their opinions were about current events. And these opinions, tastes and choices were shaped in interaction with others, in conversation with friends and relations, family members, colleagues in the routine contexts of their daily lives. The new post-war sociology of social interaction pioneered by Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel and (a little later) Harvey Sacks, took mundane existence as its core problematic. In Britain the redefinition of culture brought about by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams re-specified it as the ordinary way of life of the working class (Hoggart [1957] 1992) or of a whole society (Williams [1958] 1965). The philosophy of ordinary language taking shape at Oxford in the 1950s was in tune with this cross-disciplinary concern with the ordinary and the everyday developing in different countries in the course of the decade – an emergent structure of thinking in response to a newly visible worldly phenomenon that hitherto had been off the radar of academic enquiry. I am not of course suggesting that everyday life was invented by academics, still less that it did not exist before the 1950s! Rather that it became salient in a quite new way in that key post-war decade. Academics began to attend to it because it was the moment in which ordinary mundane existence entered into publicness and history and as such it came to their notice. And one thing that made this double process visible was that then very new (and desirable) everyday technology – the TV set. Television itself is both a formal indication of the entry into history of everyday life and a key means whereby it became publicly visible and historical … a claim to be explored and justified in what follows.

The question of existence then, is to be considered in a particular way (as ordinary, everyday existence) and through one historically particular formal indication of it, namely television. The justification for treating the question of existence (the meaning of ‘life’) from an ordinary perspective is set out in detail by Martin Heidegger in Division One of Being and Time, and I will come to this in a moment. But it is the absolutely crucial starting point. It rescues the question from the blight of irrelevance into which it had long since lapsed. No longer some vague metaphysical, theological question of the Meaning of Existence (God, the Universe and Everything), it is posed by Heidegger concretely and directly and in ways that anyone can connect with and understand (if you stay with him long enough to get used to his inimitably tortured prose). The question now becomes that of the life that is, in each case, mine and the world in which I, in each case, am – the umwelt, the roundabout-me-world of everyday existence. This is the starting point of a fundamental enquiry into the meaning of ‘life’ (being)3 in terms of its fundamental components: place, persons and time, the irreducible components of any actual, concrete existential situation. My ‘self’ in relation to others and their ‘selves’ in the places where I live in the times of my life – this, concretely and matter of factly, is the life-situation in which all of us find ourselves to be. A crucial question, of course, is ‘Who is this “me”?’ Further, ‘What is the nature of my existential situation – my being in time and place?’ And ‘what kind of world is it that “gives” the very possibility of my being in it and how?’ This is the domain of enquiry that properly belongs to phenomenology: it is in exploring the mundane world of everyday life that we begin to get to grips with the question of existence; the meaning of life.

But why might television be a way into this question? We live in a totally technologized world – ‘we’ being the privileged members of postindustrial societies. ‘We’ are not the rural poor of other parts of today’s world. Such people do not (yet) live in a world that has things like television sets in it. Our world is one that is no longer defined and driven by necessity and whatever kind of thing television might be, it is not a necessary thing. The world that we (post-industrial people) inhabit is one in which we are totally dependent on the humanly created infrastructure that gives unceasingly, from moment to moment, hourly and daily, day in day out, the taken-for-granted conditions of our lives – in just about every conceivable way. By the infrastructure, I mean the global transport and communications networks that underpin today’s global economy and the common world to which it gives rise and of which we (post-modern people) are the most privileged beneficiaries. This world is without precedent. Now at last, really and truly, all the world’s a stage and all its men and women are its players. To say we live in a totally human world means that we live in a totally technologized world. If the infrastructure should collapse, the common world collapses. We are wholly dependent, in every aspect of our lives, on the harnessed energies of the petro-electro-chemical industries and the infinite supply of commodities generated by the global economy. The meaning of life today is a technological question, if by that is meant ‘the conditions of existence today’. Heidegger’s generation was much concerned with this question and he himself pointed out that the essence of technology is nothing technological. One way into the meaning of life today is through the question of technology precisely because it defines our conditions of existence.

Raymond Williams has argued that the ‘long revolution’ in Britain (the agonized, conflicted working through in time of industrial modernization) was, in the long run, a force for the good and that, by the 1950s, the mass of the population was directly benefiting from it (Williams [1961] 1965). Rising standards of living, increased material goods, gave the majority of people more control over their own lives, more choice in the disposition of personal time and income than had ever been possible for the hitherto but now no longer silent (silenced) masses. Television in the fifties, we might say, paraphrasing Williams, was and remains a significant index of the emergence of a post-modern, post-industrial culture of everyday life: an inter-personal culture oriented to leisure, material goods, conversation and enjoyment in the context of day-to-day existence. From its earliest days, television has been the expressive register, in the totality of its output, of the emergence of a post-war way of life oriented more towards communication than conflict. This transition took place throughout North America and Europe, though at different rates in different countries, in the transformed post-war world. The majority of people today, in the advanced economies of the world, enjoy a standard of living, a level of material abundance and well-being, that was scarcely imaginable in my childhood (the late 1940s). A key indicator of this is the quite remarkable expansion of life expectancy for men and women since the fifties. On present demographic trends it has been predicted that between one in four and five people alive in Britain today may live to be a hundred. Of course not everyone has benefited in the general extension of material well-being, and the gains are most certainly not evenly and equally distributed. A culture of affluence creates quite new kinds of moral problems and ethical dilemmas for its populations. But by and large and on the whole the members of post-war post-industrial societies today lead lives no longer dominated and defined by primary poverty, immediate material necessity. Freedom means, in the first place, freedom from necessity. Only when the necessary conditions of material existence have been secured can the enjoyment of unnecessary things begin. Television is one such unnecessary thing: one significant material good that is surplus to requirements. It is not for nothing that it has been conceived of and used, from the start, as a new form of everyday entertainment in societies oriented to leisure and free time.

The acknowledgment of the goodness of material things is a key theme of this book, and expressed in its central concept of the care-structure. If we live in a world that we can take on trust, it is only because we have faith in all the things of the world that allow us to be about our daily concerns in hopeful ways that are not essentially problematic. The workability of worldly things – each and all, separately and together – is the mark of the workability of the world – its enabling power that grants its inhabitants, the generations of the living, to be about their daily lives in manifold taken-for-granted ways. The gift of things is that they allow us to take them for granted. I wish to make a strong claim for the goodness of the world as immanent in the things of the world, a goodness that can be determined exactly by the measure of unthinking and unconditional trust that we are able (or not) to invest in it. The natural attitude towards the everyday world is one of faith and hope in its ordinary unremarkable workability – for by and large and on the whole, in common experience, things work pretty well all the time for all of us. Not now and then, or when they’re in the mood, or only on Tuesdays – but always and everywher e and unceasingly. Television is like this, when you think of it. The TV set does what I want it to do. It turns ‘on’ whenever I press the button on the RCD (remote control device), if I can find it. And whenever I turn it on, I find there is always something to watch – all the usual programs on the usual channels at the usual times on the usual days. The trick is to see just how utterly astonishing and amazing this entirely unremarkable fact, in fact, is. But, of course, ordinarily, that is just what we never see. It is a focal concern of this phenomenological enquiry not simply to make visible what the world conceals about itself, but to explain it. The concept of the care structure both accounts for and justifies the invisibility of what is hidden but immanent in the everyday material world of things.

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Available world

The care structure

What then is the care structure of things – of any and every thing, of any and every human practice and institution? It is nothing more or less than the human thought, effort and intention that has gone into producing the thing as that which it is. This care, of course, disappears into the thing, is subsumed by the thing, which stands independent of all the creative labour that produced it. We can never see what went into the making of any thing, whose hidden meaning is the starting point of Marx’s celebrated analysis of the commodity and its secret. At first glance commodities are just ordinary trivial things and yet they contain, Marx argues, all sorts of subtle metaphysical niceties. They are social hieroglyphs that do not come to market with their meaning branded on their forehead. The task of analysis is to expose what commodities conceal about themselves – and the truth that they hide is the exploitative character of the human labour that produced them.