An Ontology of Everyday Distraction
The Freeway, the Mall, and Television
Margaret Morse
from Patricia Mellencamp (ed.) Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism Indiana : 1990
Thus television turns out to be related to the motor car and the aeroplane as a means of transport for the mind
— Rudolf Arnheim
Derealized Space
Metapsychological effects of privatization
A Nexus of Exchange between Economic, Social, and Symbolic Systems
Conclusion
The following essay articulates an intuition which has been expressed from time to time in critical literature‑that television is similar or related to other, particular modes of transportation and exchange in everyday life.
This investigation of the subjective and formal bases of this intuition is limited here to the built environment of freeways and malls. Television and its analogs, the freeway and the mall, are conceptualized as a nexus of interdependent two‑ and three‑dimensional cultural forms which don't so much look alike as observe similar principles of construction and operation. These shadows or inverse aspects of the work world are forms of communication which also function interdependently.
Freeways, malls, and television are the loots of an attenuated fiction effect, that is, a partial loss of touch with the here and now, dubbed here as distraction. This semifiction effect is akin to but not identical with split belief‑knowing a representation is not real, but nevertheless momentarily closing off the here and now and sinking into another world‑promoted within the apparatuses of the theater, the cinema, and the novel. Its difference lies primarily in that it involves two or more objects and levels of attention and the co presence of two or more different, even contradictory, meta-psychological effects. Ultimately, distraction is related to the expression of two planes of language represented simultaneously or alternately, the plane of the subject in a here and now, or discourse, and the plane of an absent or nonperson in another time, elsewhere, or story.
However, beyond the invocation of ail elsewhere and a "spacing out" or partial absence of mind described here, many aspects of "distraction" are left to the imagination or to later treatment: a review of the rich field of the iconography of automobiles, freeways, malls, and television,`' an account for the shifting relations between mastery and bondage anti the feelings of pleasure and boredom involved in their use, and the ambiguous value the analogs of television enjoy lit our culture‑each in its own way being considered a "vast wasteland and a waste of time as well as a devotion allied with the American dream.
The preconditions of distraction are postulated in the phenomenon of "mobile privatization," and the general features which promote this divided state of mind are described as "the phantasmagoria of the interior." Furthermore, freeways, malls, and television are posed as interrelated anti mutually reinforcing systems organized in a way which allows for "liquidity," the exchange of values between different ontological levels and otherwise incommensurable facets of life, for example, between two and three dimensions, between language, images, anti the built environment, and between the economic, societal, and symbolic realms of our culture.
Television is a key element of these exchanges and transformations, not only because it invests images with exchange value but also because it models exchange itself, both as an apparatus which includes the viewer virtually in discourse and via representations of constant shifts through various ontological levels, subjective relations, and fields of reference. The dualism of passage and segmentation which is part of the freeway, mall, and televisual realms is discussed more theoretically in relation to discourse and story.
There is nothing discrete about television, for its very nature is to annex pre-televisual culture and leisure time to itself. This essay seeks, in broad strokes, to situate) television as a cultural form in a larger socio‑cultural context of everyday life. This speculative project draws explicitly and tacitly on previous works of synthesis to support its premises, for example, Raymond Williams's relation of broadcasting to the changing social context of mobile privatization in which it developed; Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk or arcade project of research on the genealogy of commodity fetishism in the nineteenth century in glass‑and‑ironwork‑enclosed shopping arcades, dioramas, and exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace; and, Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope or unit of space/time which oscillates between literary representation and the spatio‑temporal experience of everyday life. The archetypal chronotope, the road, for instance, invites comparison with the freeway, as does Benjamin's conception of the arcade with the mall.
Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is an inspiration to the basic premise of interchangeability between signs and objects described here. His vision of liberation from formal determination, surveillance, and control is based on the distinction between language and society as formal systems versus language as it is enunciated or as a social form enacted in practice at any one time. This distinction is expressed spatially, for example, as the difference between place, a proper, stable, and distinct location, and space, composed of intersections of mobile elements, taking into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. He concludes that "space is cc practiced place," a geometry of the street redefined and made habitable by walkers.
De Certean's vision of liberation via enunciative practices bears the marks of its conception in another time and place, that is, in a pre-mall, pre-freeway, and largely print‑literate, pre-televisual world. In the meantime, in the United States at least, the very nature of the street and pedestrian activity as well as the predominant modes and media for linguistic coin enunciation has changed. However, the notion of~ praxis as enunciation, be it linguistic, pedestrian, or other, which evades predetermined paths and escapes from literal reality into an elsewhere and to other levels of consciousness is, as we shall see, one fully congruent with the operation of malls, or, for that matter, freeways and television. Indeed, distraction is based upon the representation of space within place (in which, as we shall see, space becomes displaced, a nonspace) and the inclusion of (for de Certeau, liberating) elsewheres and elseuhurns lit the here acid now.
Thus, de Certeau's very means of escape are now designed into the geometries of everyday life, and his figurative practices of enunciation ("making do," "walking in the city," or "reading as poaching") are modeled in representation itself. Could de Certeau have imagined, as he wrote on walking as an evasive strategy of self‑empowerment, that there would one clay be video cassettes that demonstrate how to "power" walk? This investigation takes stock of this new cultural environment.
To contour this new terrain is less to map postmodernity than to explain why a map per se is virtually impossible to construct. For the level of iconicity shared by television and its analogs is one of common preconditions and principles of articulation rather than one of resemblance ill shape or the bounded-ness of contiguous or even specifiable locations in space. Rather, these analogs share the nonspace and the simultaneous temporalities of distraction.
1. Derealized Space
The late twentieth century has witnessed the growing dominance of a differently constituted kind of space, a nonspace of both experience and representation, an elsewhere which inhabits the everyday. Nonspace is not mysterious or strange to us, but rather the very haunt for creatures of habit. Practices and skills that can be performed semi-automatically in a distracted state‑such as driving, shopping, or television watching‑are the barely acknowledged ground of everyday experience. This ground is without locus, a partially derealized realm from which a new quotidian fiction emanates.
Nonspace is ground within which communication as a flow of values among and between two and three dimensions and between Virtuality and actuality‑indeed, an uncanny oscillation between life and death‑can "take place." One finds the quintessential descriptions of nonspace in the postwar generation which was first to explore suburbia. Tony Smith's description of a car ride along a newly constructed section of the New Jersey Turnpike at night' expressed a formative experience of elsewhere out of which grew (in the ig6os) the conception of environmental art by artists like Robert Smithson. With earthworks such as Spiral Jetty, Smithson undermined the objecthood and the locus in space of his sculpture, lost somewhere between documentation in a gallery or museum and an inaccessible referent somewhere else. Robert Hobbs explains Smithson's nonsite and nonspace sculptures as a profound assessment of mid‑twentieth‑century experience:
In an era of rootlessness, massive reordering of the landscape, large‑scale temporary buildings, and media implosion, he viewed people's essential apprehension of the world as a rejection of it. Vicariousness, projection to some other place by rejecting where one actually is, has become a dominant mid‑twentieth century means of dealing with the world. Making the Nonsite (which brings together non-seeing and nonspace under one rubric) a primary determinant of his aesthetic forms, Smithson emphasized ways people non-perceive.
Later descriptions of nonspace (for example, Baudrillard's notion of simulation) also emphasize it as a focus of derealization. Baudrillard conceives of simulation as a loss of referential anchorage to the world or the insecurity of denotation as it applies primarily to objects, whereas his own spatial allusions to networks, inert masses, anti black holes lay claim to a kind of poetic scientificity. But this mixed metaphor in "The Ecstasy of Communication" is the vehicle which conveys the full complexity of his conceptualization of spatiality in postmodernity: "The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen (instead of alive‑in projecthe as it was before)." The interiors of the home television viewing space, the automobile, the space capsule, and the computer are ultimately associated with the interiority of the human mind. The image of the exterior world from these interiors is no longer a "Western window" onto reality but, for Baudrillard, the dubious vision of television.
In his popular and playful ontology of the shopping mall, The Malling of America, William Severini Kowinski goes even further, calling the malt a ‑TV you walk around in." Here the mode of locomotion is different, but the interiority (not ,just exterior vision) of the viewer is equated with television itself: "The mall is television, [in terms of] people's perceptions of space and reality, the elements that persuade people to suspend their disbelief."7 These spatial comparisons depend on a common experience of some degree of fictitiousness within their (un)realities. The implication is that television epitomizes a new ontology of the everyday: vast realms of the somewhat‑less‑than‑real to which significant amounts of free time (unpaid leisure, the shadow of work) are devoted on a routine, cyclical basis. The features of this derealized or nonspace are shared by freeway, mall, and television alike.
The first distinguishing feature of nonspace is its dreamlike displacement or separation from its surroundings:
Freeways are displaced in that they do not lie earthbound and contiguous to their surroundings so much as float above or below the horizon. The freeway disengaged from its immediate context is "a bridge over the barriers of both social and natural geography," offering as well "a continued shelter from engagement with ghetto areas." In Kevin Lynch's famous study of cognitive maps of the city, from the point of view of the streets, the freeway is almost invisible, "not felt to be `in' the rest of the city". Similarly, from the subjective point of view of a driver or passenger experiencing motion blur, the city isn't visible either, except at times as a distant miniature seen from a Freeway which is usually also physically depressed, elevated from its surroundings, or shielded by its own greenbelt.
To paraphrase Charles Kuralt, the freeway is what makes it possible to drive coast to coast and never see anything. In fact, the freeway divides the world in two, into what David Brodsly calls "local" and "metropolitan" orientations. These also denote two realities: the one, heterogeneous and static; the other, homogeneous and mobile. The passage between them can be accompanied by a shock, a moment of "severe disorientation". Furthermore, the process of displacement is a prelude to condensation.
The freeway not only represents transportation from the city in the suburbs, but it is also a greenbelt and an escape "from the world of stucco into an urban preserve of open space and greenery" (4g). Suburbia is itself an attempt via serial production to give everyman and everywife the advantages of a city at the edge of the natural world. Thus, the suburbs are "a living polemic against both the large industrial metropolis and the provincial small town," which nonetheless manage to "maintain the facade of a garden patch of urban villages, a metropolitan small town, without ever compromising the anonymity that is a Hallmark of city life" (33; 45).9 Freeways and the suburbs they serve are thus examples of the "garden in the machine," which provides mass society with a pastoral aesthetic and rhetoric.
Malls are similarly "completely separated from the rest of the world." Kowinski calls this separation "the first and most essential secret of the shopping mall":
It was its own world, pulled out of tine and space, but not only by windowless walls and a roof, or by the neutral zone of the parking lot between it and the highway, the asphalt moat around the magic castle. It was enclosed in alt even more profound sense‑and certainly snore than other mere buildings‑bemuse all these elements, arid others, psychologically separated it front the outside and created the special domain within its embrace. It's meant to be its own special world with its own rules and reality.
The mall is a spatial condensation near a node where freeways intersect, serving a certain temporal radius; it is "a city, indeed a world in miniature." Shops that are four‑fifths of normal size" are linked together within a vast and usually enclosed multileveled atrium or hall devoted solely to the pedestrian consumer (albeit served by autos and trucks).'' A regional center saturated by chain stores which turns its back on local shops," the mall is the paradoxical promise of adventure on the road within the idyll of Main Street in a small town before the age of the automobile.
The mall is not only enclosed, Kowinski adds, but it is protected from exposure to the natural and public world through unobtrusive but central control. This private surveillance escapes the kind of sharp vigilance in the light of democratic values to which it would be subject in the public world: we do not expect the consumer to possess the same kinds of rights and responsibilities as the citizen. Shopping malls are essentially governed by market planners (i.e., by a fairly limited pool of mall entrepreneurs, builders, owners, and managers) and market forces. Each mall is carefully situated and designed in terms of its architecture; the "retail drama" of its syntax of shops and types of commodities, promotions, and advertising conveys a unified image which attracts some parts of the surrounding population and discourages others.
Consumers of all ages (but probably not all social conditions) come together to re‑create the lost community of the street and the agora now under the private management of the arcade. The courts of foot traffic allow consumers and "mall rats" (nonconsuming loiterers) to intermingle in an attenuated and controlled version of a crowded street. Thus, the mall retains elements of the milling crowd, but as a private space in which anonymous individuals, preferably ones with particular demographic characteristics, gather en masse. So the paroxysms of release from individuality via bodily contact described by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power are unlikely; the street celebrated by Bakhtin as a place of festival which erases boundaries between self and other is scarcely imaginable.
Rather than a site of "contamination," the mall is a place to shore up the boundaries of the self via commodities which beckon with the promise of perfection from beyond the glass or gleam from beyond the threshold in brightly lit shops.
Television is likewise premised on private reception in an environment isolated from events "out there," which determine the conditions of life outside the home. Joint lulls has described this practice as the "double distance" of television's complicity with the viewer against an "outside world" represented as "hostile or bizarre," and the viewer's delegation of "his or her look to the TV itself." Both means of distancing constitute the opposition ‘inside/outside,' which insulates the viewer from events seen.
But this division of the world is Complicated by the reconstruction of an idealized version of the older forms of transport, social and media communication within the very enclosures from which they are excluded. The past inscribed within the present is constructed as fast through this very act of separation; a local and heterogeneous world beyond continues to exist but with fading resources, a phantom from an anterior world. This interior duality has symbolic dimensions as well: oppositions between country and city, nature and culture, sovereign individual and social subject are neutralized only to be reconstituted within nonspace in a multilayered compromise formation, a Utopian realm of both/and in the midst of neither/nor.
This process of displacement Front context is also one of dislocation. In a quite literal, physical sense, freeways, malls, and television are not truly "places." That is, they cannot be localized within the geometrical grids that orient the American city and countryside.
As Brodsly explains in his essay on the L. A. Freeway, a freeway is not a place but a vector; even its name or number is a direction rather than a location. Channels of motion dedicated solely to one‑way, high velocity travel, freeways are largely experienced as "in‑betweens," rather than enjoying the full reality of a point of departure or a destination. And magnitude on the freeway is popularly measured in minutes rather than miles. Yet, within that waste of time spent in between, usually alone and isolated within an iron bubble, a miniature idyll with its own controlled climate and selected sound is created. In this intensely private space, lifted out of the social world, the driver is subject, more real and present to him or herself than the miniatures or the patterns of lights beyond the glass, or farther yet, beyond the freeway.
Television is also dislocated, insofar as it consists of two‑dimensional images dispersed onto screens in nearly every home in the United States, displaying messages transmitted everywhere and nowhere in particular. Television is also a vast relay‑and‑retrieval system for audio‑visual material of uncertain origin and date which can be served up instantaneously by satellite and cable as well as broadcast transmission and video cassette. Other two‑dimensional media including newspapers and periodicals (the prime example being the hybrid satellite/print production of USA 7oduy, now appearing as a television magazine program as well) are increasingly identified less with the specific location(s) from which they emanate (insofar as that can be ascertained) and more with a range or area of distribution they "cover"‑indeed, mass‑circulation media have constituted the "nation" as a symbolic system of common associations as well as a legal and political creation. The freeway and the mall provide the greatest evidence and manifestation of a homogeneous, material culture, just as television is the main source of shared images (visual and acoustic). There is even a "national" weather within these enclosed spaces of mall and home and auto‑the even temperature of the comfort zone."
Nonspace is not only a literal "nonplace," it is also disengaged from the paramount orientation to reality‑the here and now of face‑to‑face contact. Such encounter with the other is prevented by walls of steel, concrete, and stucco in a life fragmented into enclosed, miniature worlds. As Brodsly explains: "Metropolitan life suggests the disintegration in space and time of individual's various dwelling places. Often living ill `communities without propinquity,' the individual metropolitan must somehow confront the task of reintegrating his or‑ her environment .... One does not dwell in the metropolis; one passes through it between dwelling places" (2). This task of reintegrating a social world of separated, dislocated realms is accomplished by means of an internal dualism, of passage amid the segmentation of glass, screens, and thresholds. Thus, each form of communication becomes a mise‑en‑abyme, a recursive structure in which a nested or embedded representation reproduces or duplicates important aspects of the primary world within which it is enclosed.
The freeway, for instance, is divided into a realm of passage, both over the outside world and from inside an idyllic, intensely private, steel‑enclosed world of relative safety. At the same time, the sociality with the outside world that has become physically impossible inside the automobile is re‑created via radio, disc, and tape.
Television is similarly derealized as communication, i.e., the primacy of discourse in television representation is not anchored as enunciation in a paramount reality of community, propinquity, and discursive exchange. While every act of enunciation disengages an utterance from the subject, space, and time of the act of enfinciation,2t television‑with its temporal and spatial separation of interlocutors into a one‑way, largely recorded transmission‑is doubly disengaged. Hence televisual utterances waver uncertainly in reality status. However, the primary levels of "interlace" with the viewing audience of television are those televisual utterances which represent direct engagement. Or address oriented proxemically on face‑to-face discourse, that is, the discursive level of presenters, hosts, and spokespersons. The discursive plane of television includes all sorts of unrelated, nonprogram material, from ads, logos, and 1. R's, public‑service announcements, to promotions and lead‑ins, as well as the discursive segments within programs themselves, from openers and titles to presentational segments.
This primary plane of discourse seems to be an overarching presumption of television representation even when it isn't directly on‑screen, and it builds the framework of television flow as a whole.
Further acts of internal disengagement install second‑ and third‑level segments as units of narrative (disengaged) Or dialogue (engaged) within the primary discursive plane of the television utterance. However, the nesting order of disengagement does matter, for Greirnas notes that the effect is different when dialogue is included in narration rather than when narrative is included in dialogue. In the former situation, predominant in the novel, for example, dialogue is referentialized, that is, given a spatio‑temporal locus (however fictive) by the narration; in the latter situation, predominant in US televisual representation, narration is dereferentialized, that is, lifted out of a spatio‑temporal context (however real) into a symbolic or affective realm. That is to say that even in nonfiction genres such as the news, the dominant reference point of the utterance will be a simulacrum of an ultimately fictitious situation of enunciation rather than a world outside.
2. Metapsychological effects of privatization
In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Walter Benjamin anticipated the everyday world to come and discovered the roots of nonspace in the hlrenonrenon of privacy and enclosure. While privatization has largely been conceived as an economic and political term, it appears to have metapsychological effects associated with its derealized surroundings‑the postmodern development of what Benjamin called the "pleoratosvcagorio of Lice interior," a mixture of levels of consciousness and objects of attention. The process of distancing the worker from the workplace and the enclosure of domestic life in the home, separated from its social surroundings, allowed a compensatory realm of fantasy to flourish, a conglomeration of exotic remnants in which new and old are intermingled. This phantasmagoria of the interior broke with the immediate present in favor of a primal past and the dream of the epoch to come. However, the twentieth‑century phantasmagoria idealizes not the primal but the immediate past, and is an agent responsible for its decay. And the u‑ or dystopia which these forms anticipate seems less a vision of a future earth transformed for good or ill than a hermetic way of life liberated from earth itself.
The temporal world is also lifted out of history in favor of cyclic repetitions less determined by than modeled secondarily on daily and seasonal cycles of the sun, the stages of life, and the passage of generations. As labor is more and more liberated from solar and circadian rhythms, cycles of commuting, shopping, and viewing become shiftable as well. Television program schedules are "intricately woven into the fabric: of out‑ routine daily activities ‑21 because they are organized by the same division of labor outside and inside the family which recruits the daily commuter and the recreational shopper. And it is the demands of labor itself which may produce a state of mind and body which is best compensated within the comfort zone.
Time is largely experienced as duration on the freeway, a "drive time" guided by graphics in Helvetica (connoting a clean, homogeneous, or unmarked publicness and a vague temporality "from the 1960s on"). Continuity with the past is represented largely in terms of automobile model and year. Similarly, within the mall (its in Disneyland, McDonald's, and other realms of privately owned mass culture), decay or the fact of time itself has been banished from cycles of destruction and regeneration via a scrupulous cleanliness and constant renewal of worn parts.
On television, duration of viewing time is also the prime experience of temporality. The work of time itself as decay is seldom represented in images of the human body or everyday life. Nor is the past so much remembered via narrative as it is rerun or embedded as archival images within contemporary, discursive presentation. Even the image quality of the past records of grainy black and white‑is gradually undergoing electronic revision to meet today's expectations. The phantasmagoria of television and its analogs is thus to be imagined less as escape to flickering shadows in the cave than as .a productive force which shapes spatio‑temporal and psychic relations to the realities it constitutes. The state of mind promoted within the realms of nonspace can be described as distraction.
Distraction as a dual state of mind depends on an incomplete process of spatial and temporal separation and interiorization. The automobile, for instance, is connected to the world outside via the very glass and steel which enclose the driver. However, the dualism of outside/inside within these separate realms means that a connection with "outside" drifts between a "real" outside and an idealized representation.
A sheet of glass alone is enough to provide a degree of disengagement from the world beyond the pane. Add to this the play of light which appears to be part of the mise‑en‑scene of the mall, the freeway, and television‑the world beyond the glass glows more brightly than the darker passages and seats we occupy. Beyond its glow, even the "real" world seen through a clear glass windshield, shop window, or screen has a way of being psychically colored and fetishized by the very glass which reveals it; the green glasses of the inhabitants of the Emerald City of Oz are a mythic expression of, this vitreous transformation.''
However, green visions promote it state of mind which remains somewhere between Oz and Kansas, or between regression to the primal scene and a commercial transaction: because mental life oil the freeway, in the marketplace, and at home is linked to very real consequences for life, limb, and pocketbook, it requires vigilance while it also allows for and even promotes autonansms and "spacing out." "Being carried away" to a full‑blown world of fantasy is not in order‑but the "vegging out" of the couch potato is a well‑publicized phenomenon. Malls and freeways also can induce a state of distraction: For example, the very design and intentions of the mall taken to extreme all induce what the "cosmallogist" Kowntski diagnoses as the "zombie effect (floating for hours, loss of sense of time and place) which he diagnoses as copresence of contradictory states of excitement enhanced to the point of overstimulation mixed with relaxation descending into confusion and torpor (339). In discussing the habit of driving, Brodsly calls "detached involvement" (4'7) an awareness of the outside environment mixed with that of an intensely private world within the interior of the automobile. Noting that the automobile is one of the few controlled environments for meditation in our culture, he describes how even the temporal link with the outside world may fade: "Perhaps no aspect of the freeway experience is more characteristic than the sudden realization that you have no memory of the past ten minutes of your trip"
In his mythological investigations of everyday life, Roland Barthes made the subjective experience of driving a metaphor for the operation of mythology itself. In "Myth 'Today," he turned from analysis of objects and scenes such as the "cathedral‑like" "New Citroen" to the practice of driving as an alternation between two objects of attention:
If I am ill a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window‑pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparency of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full.
For Barthes, this constant alternation constitutes a spatial category of a continuous elsewhere which is his model for the alibi of myth. If we were to expand Barthes's metaphor of semiotics and driving with concepts of discourse, the alternation of which lie wrote would also be one which shifts between planes of language and subjectivity. That is, the awareness of a subject would shift between a here/now in the interior of the automobile and awareness of a world elsewhere beyond the glass (in which the interior is also lightly reflected) through which the subject speeds. But because the interior of the auto is disconnected anti set in the midst of a new kind of, theater of derealized space, the experience of what is normally the paramount reality‑the experience of self‑awareness in a here and now‑becomes one of unanchored mobility. This mobile subject in the midst of elsewhere is a cultural novum and the model for a new kind of fiction effect, unbound and uncirculnscribed by the fourth wall, without a 180‑degree line to separate the world of‑ the imaginary and the subjunctive from the commonplace.
The freeway provides the most obvious examples of mobile subjectivity:
Each [freeway] exit ramp offers a different visual as well as kinesthetic sensation. 'The interchange is like a mobile in a situation where the observer is the moving object. It is the experience of an effortlessly choreographed dance, will) each car both performing and observing the total movement and the freeway architecture providing the carefully integrated setting.
Yet from the observer/moving object's point of view, this mobility is it paradoxical feeling of stasis and motion. In nonspace, the body in motion is no longer a kinesthetic key to reality, for at the wheel of the automobile (or at the remote control of the television), engaged in small motor movements which have become highly skilled and automatic, it explores space as an inert mass, technically or electronically empowered with virtual or actual speed. Indeed, what we experience is not an erasure, circumvention, or fragmentation of the body but its investment with a second and more powerful skin within which a core remains secure, intact, and at rest in it vortex of speed.
Of course, mobility is a multifaceted and paradoxical concept per se, with many fields of reference: from displacement from one location to another, to the freedom of movement which is symbolically equated with social mobility, to the feelings of pleasure in effortless flight which has roots in infancy, to the fundamental psychic link of motion with causality and subjecthood first described by Aristotle. But mobility also suggests the opposite of subjecthood, the freely displaceable and substitutable part, machine or human, which enables mass production and a consequent standardization brought to the social as well as economic realm. Nonspace engages all of these possibilities.")
Motion is not only paradoxical, but it is also relative. Safe within the halls of consumption, the body may stroll with half a mind in leisurely indirection. But the shops passed in review are themselves <t kind of high‑speed transport, the displacement of goods produced in mass quantities in unknown elsewheres into temporal simultaneity and spatial condensation. And oil the freeway as well as the airplane, a new and paradoxical experience of motion has evolved: on one hand, the relative motion of an enclosed space beyond which the world passes in high‑speed review; or inversely, the dynamic sensation of movement itself experienced by a relatively inert body traversing the world at high speed. A "bubble" of subjective here and now strolling or speeding about in the midst of elsewhere is one of the features that constitute new, semifictitious realms of the everyday.
Of course, any mobility experienced by the television viewer is virtual, a "range" 01displaced realm constituted by vectors, a transportation of the mind in two dimensions. Our idyll, or self‑sufficient and bounded place, is the space in front of the TV set, what Baudrillard calls "all archaic envelope." But these couch bodies are also travelers, responding in a checked, kinetic way to the virtual experiences of motion we are offered as subjects or view in objects passing our screens."" Television also offers the road ill the midst of the idyll, reconstituting a virtual world Of face‑to‑face relationships shared between viewer and television personalities displaced or teleported from elsewhere in the process, a fiction of the paramount reality of discourse. Thus discourse or represented acts of enunciation can be understood as a container for both the viewer and the personalities of television which provides protection from a world thereby constituted as beyond and elsewhere.
Discursive segments also constitute a plane of passage between the shows, items, and stories embedded within the plane. Sometimes passages are even marked its such via the motion of, subjects who can speak as if directly to its, the viewers within the televisual representation. For instance, the syndicated yet local program Evening Magazine often shows its local hosts in motion, walking as they introduce unrelated, packaged stories (produced at many different stations) to the viewer." While this practice seems strange and gratuitous, it is quite simply a visual realization of the virtual power of language as a means of transport. The use of movement as passage marker is echoed, for instance, in the work of visual anthropologists Worth and Adair, 35 who, in trying to understand the films they had incited members of the Navajo tribe to make, concluded that almost all of them "portray what to members of our culture seems to be an inordinate amount of walking" (144). Worth and Adair concluded that for the Navajo, walking itself was an event and "a kind of punctuation to separate activities" (148). On television, such marking may also be represented in far more minimal than spectacular ways, for example, spatially via shifts of an on‑screen subject in body orientation and eyeline or verbally via the use of discursive shifters. The overall discursive framework of televisual representation, including the use of hosts and presenters of all kinds, provides a means of passing between object‑worlds, be they stories provided for entertainment or fantasies that surround commodities, in a way which virtually includes the viewer.
In Visible Fictions, John Ellis determined .that the segment is the basic unit of television (in opposition to or modification of Raymond Williams's notion of flow).3t' The basic dualism of televisual representation opts for neither concept alone but helps to explain why, despite its segmentation into Unrelated items, television is not commonly perceived as fragmented, but rather is experienced as unified and contained. Nor is that coherence achieved simply by virtue of "flow" or the juxtaposition of items on the same plane of discourse. The duality of passage and seginentation in physical as well as represented space is related in turn to the dual planes of language, the engaged discourse of a subject in passage and the disengagement of stories from the here and now of the subject.
The separate segments which disengage from discursive passages are recursive or embedded "hypodiegetic worlds" at one level removed from the frame of passage. Segments with widely disparate topics in contrasting expressive moods from the tragic or the comic to the trivial or traumatic can be united via discourse into flow. Other sub‑ or "hypo" levels of narration can appear within any one discursive or narrative segment‑three, for instance, are typical of news reports. Thus, television discourse typically consists of "stacks" of recursive levels which are usually quite different in took and "flavor." These stacks are also signified at different spatial and temporal removes from the viewer and have different kinds of contents. Thus a shift of discursive level is also a shift of ontological levels, that is, to a different status in relation to reality. Television formats then amount to particular ways of conceptualizing and organizing "stacks" of worlds as a hierarchy of realities and relationships to the viewer.
Formally, shifting from one televisual segment to another may be a shift in the hierarchy of discourse‑but shifts and passages between levels can also occur within segments. For instance, there is a category of television segment, including advertisements, logos, and rock videos ,by the raison d'etre of which is to engage the viewer with a sign, image, or commodity by means of a represented passage through a whole range of discursive and ontological levels. Such segments are condensations of what are ordinarily dispersed in syntactic alternations of discursive segments with embedded stories or fantasies.
Furthermore, televisual representations may include several layers in the same visual field, simultaneously. An obvious example is the image of the narrating news anchor against "world" wallpaper and over‑the‑shoulder news windows. Like television, freeways and malls provide similar examples of multiple worlds condensed into one visual field: for example, the automobile windshield is not merely glass and image of the world into which one speeds, but also a mirror reflection of the driver and passengers; the rear‑view mirror displays the window of where one has been; the side‑view mirror shows what to anticipate next. Meanwhile, the landscape unfolds right and left, distorted by speed.
The representation of the copresence of multiple worlds in different modes 40 on the television screen is achieved via division of the visual field into areas or via the representation of stacked places which can be tumbled or squeezed and which, in virtual terms, advance toward and retreat IM111 the visual field of the viewer. Discursive planes are differentiated from embedded object‑worlds via sixes: the vector of eyelines and movements, and changes of scale along the z‑axis of spatial depth indicate it proxemic logic of the shared space of conversation with the viewer. The constant reframings in and out along the z‑axis of depth which David Antin saw as part of the television form‑t2 apparently (to have it function as links with a spectator rather than as inexplicable or gratuitous reframings of a spatially continuous, diegetic world. Even in fictional worlds beyond the plane of discourse, a relation to the z‑axis of discursive relations with the viewer can be discerned. For example, in tier discussion of soap operas o> television, Sandy Flitterman noted the lack of continuity editing and the practice of alternating Framing of characters in a two‑shot as nearer to and farther from the viewer.'t3 This practice can be explained historically by the television studio situation of l' a editing by means of switching between two or more cameras. But it can also be explained as part of a proxemic logic of relations with the spectator which pervades even fictional worlds.
What is ultimately at stake in this insistent relation to the viewer is a site of exchange. For the representation of mixed and simultaneous worlds is deeply allied with the cultural function of television in symbolically linking incommensurabilities of all sorts‑the system of goods or commodities and the economic relations it orders, the sexual‑matrimonial system which orders sociality and the symbolic order of language, including images, symbols, and the spoken and written word. If television itself is a great storehouse for tokens of all these cultural systems, exchange values are created by their juxtaposition, but even more by means of passages through them, in which television programming offers many different itineraries from which to choose.
The viewer as mobile subject has remote control over trajectories and channels plus power to take the off ramp and leave the zone of televisual space. However, the television viewer who enters a car to go shopping, or even to work, hasn't left nonspace behind‑these realms are variations thereof. (For this reason "home shopping" channels represent less the interaction of television with the world than a "short circuit" of communication and growing withdrawal into enclosed systems.)
Thus the realm of nonspace is divided again via the play of motion and stillness organized by passages and thresholds to the worlds behind the glass, by a 7nise‑en‑.scene of light and darkness, and by proxemic indicators of nearness and distance within an unanchored situation. This very mobility allows what could be a profoundly disorienting and fragmented experience of life to act as a powerful means of reunifying the flow of time and space into a virtual here and now of a communal world. Voices anti images offer community to a disengaged and enclosed world of the home, the automobile, and the mall. A banished, paramount reality is recreated as a phantom within elsewhere. The result may be the "secular communion"" of the freeway, the shared passages of the mall, or parasociality in relation to television personalities. Thus the institutions of mobile privatization restore a vision of the world from which they are disengaged and which they leave largely displaced.
3. A Nexus of Exchange between Economic, Social, and Symbolic Systems
Realms of everyday experience‑the freeway, the shopping mall, and television‑are part of a socio‑historical nexus of institutions which grew together into their present‑day structure and national scope after World War II. Transportation, broadcasting, and retailing displaced the earlier socio-cultural forms of modernity such its the railroad, the movies, and the strop windows along a brightly lit boulevard.'"'1'lrese earlier forms of modernity were in themselves means of surveillance and control. Like the cinema, the railroad is an odd experience of immobile motility, virtual and actual, in which spatiality retains a semipublic nature.
Institutions of communication after World War 11 intensified processes of privatization and massification which had begun far earlier. Private life in the postwar era presumed a significant amount of leisure or discretionary time anti "all apparently self‑sufficient family home" which "carried, ors <t consequence, all imperative need for new kinds of contact". Raymond Williams pointed out the paradox which the notion of "mass" communications hides‑the increasing functional isolation and spatial segmentation of individuals and families into private worlds which are then mediated into larger and larger entities by new forms of communication.
In the United States, the paradox of mass culture and social isolation is even more acute, for to a far greater extent, the public airwaves, rights of way, and places of assemblage have been given over to private ownership or use and to market forces. Perhaps because the principles of mobile privatization are congruent with widely and deeply held American values of the good life along with dreams of social mobility which hold that ideal attainable for all, the choice of the private automobile over public conveyances, for instance, "seems to reflect an overwhelmingly popular consensus rarely matched by social movements, and it flourishes because it continues to serve that general will."
The automobile represents an apparent freedom from the lock step of a public time schedule as well as "the complete subversion of the traditional sanctuary of the public realm‑the street," so that merely driving a private automobile can he understood as a ritual expression of national faith: "Every time we merge with traffic we join our community in a wordless creed: belief in individual freedom, in a technological liberation from place and circumstance, in a democracy of personal mobility. When we arc stuck in rush‑hour traffic the freeway's greatest frustration is that it belies its promise.” This faith in mobility sustains cultural homogeneity rather than diversity; and, paradoxically, the feelings associated with vast improvements in the freedom of motion are in lock step with submission to demands for greater conformity.
A common faith in freedom of movement and of choice among commodities, destinations, and channels sustains the institutions of mobile privatization. They are the realms of answered prayers, embodiments of clearly held beliefs, anti phantoms of desire become commonplace, a field of action constituted by the automatisms and chains of associations which make up vast networks in the symbolic system of our culture. Constraints built on these chains of associated ideas are owned, not imposed, and require very little surveillance. As an early theorist of representational punishment cited by Foucault in Discipline and Punish explained:
this 1ink [between ideas] is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.
The Empire of the habitual is the matrix of mental and social life, made of mundane opportunities and choices and composed of practices conducted half‑aware, which assemble one's very personhood. What is new in contemporary life are not these institutions of mobile privatization per se but the interpenetration of layer upon layer of built environment and representation, the formative and derivative, the imaginary and mundane. Embodying values as neither here nor there, both present and absent, they are ideal expressions of the zones of ontological uncertainty, expressions of both Kansas and Oz.
Although we may perceive no alternative, no one forces people to watch television or to drive, particularly on the freeway, or to go to the mall or to buy anything on display there or on television. But few indeed resist. One prescription for an aesthetic mode of resistance to consumer culture requires the passerby to remain bewitched on this side of the window, glass, or mirror, poised at the moment between perfection and lack, never cashing in desire for the disappointments of fulfillment.5t But aesthetic resistance depends on an older disposition of the subject in relation to the spectacle of an imaginary world framed and discrete behind the glass. The cycle of consumption in a "Highway Comfort" culture is designed for maximum mobility and circulation of a consumer inside the imaginary world of images and objects. One of the successes of this system of interrelations is on one hand the liquidity of images, objects, and commodities, and on the other the ease with which the subject passes from one role to another‑driver, passerby, and consumer‑each requiring a different mode of attention and psychic investment in objects.
Such convertibility between these various systems of communication and exchange is necessary; freeways, malls, and television are not merely similar in form, they are systems constructed to interact in mutually reinforcing ways.5' Each institution is a kind of socio‑cultural distribution and feedback system for the others: Television (most obviously as mass‑audience network broadcasts) serves as the nationwide distribution system for symbols in anticipation and reinforcement of a national culture presented not only as desirable but as already realized somewhere else. The mall is a displacement and the enclosure of the walkable street and a collective site in which to cash in the promises of the commodities seen on television. The freeway is the manifestation of personal mobility at its most literal, its radius a lifeline that makes the consumption style of suburban living and shopping economically feasible as well as logistically possible. The auto on the freeway is a juncture between television and mall, a "home" and commodity fetish on wheels. Convertibility between systems means that values can be exchanged whether they are expressed as commodity objects or images, it) two or three dimensions, or in gigantic or miniature scale.
,Just as the mall is it miniature suburbia, a figure of desire become literal and three‑dimensional, the television box is it quintessential miniature, both its copy and prototype; even in its gigantic form, the large‑screen projection, it is no bigger than a picture window or an alternative to wallpaper. Bachelard explained how miniaturization is an attempt to master and control the world, which one can then enter in one's imagination by making oneself very small. This miniaturization is responsible for the feelings of safety linked with malls, freeways, and television, what Susan Stewart in On Longing termed "feminization," as opposed to a "masculine" metaphor of the gigantic, its abstract authority of the state in collective and public life. Miniaturization is a process of interiorization, enclosure, and perfection, one in which the temporal dimensions of narrative or history are transformed into spatial ones, a plenitude of description of seemingly endless details. This contraction of the world which expands the personal serves a process of commodification its well, the transformation of action into exchange, nature into marketplace, history into collection and property.
The realm of the gigantic and exaggerated in public life, a collective body in pieces, has been shrunk into it perfect whole. Kowinski describes the technique of miniaturizing the shops and concessions in theme parks and malls its designed to evoke the nostalgic feelings the adult has when visiting the world of childhood, the once vast seen as tiny. The incomprehensible then comes near, no longer too far away or too foreboding: the distant and the exotic are sought in order to collapse them into proximity and approximation with the self.
However, once within the miniature, the universe looms endless, just as the stars shine through Benjamin's glass‑topped arcades of nineteenth century Paris. How are malls, freeways, and television as miniatures compatible with representation of the universal and the social? In Learning from Las Vegas," Robert Venturi et al. described a new kind of monumentality which began with the Las Vegas strip cut off from the surrounding desert and concluded within the darkened and low‑ceilinged casinos, spotted with islands of activity, from glowing tables to garden oases. Rather than tall and imposing, like the skyscraper as upended panopticon and symbol of coercive or (via reflective glass) impenetrable power, the new monumentality is long and low, without discernible edges or ends or secure locus in place, rather like mirages lifted above the grids of homes, shops, and offices.
Indeed, the very lack of panoptical positions afforded within the wings and cubbyholes of the typical mall is responsible for its sense of endlessness and a sense of disorientation within it. The freeway is "long and lowness" incarnate, but it also offers "kinks in the road" beyond which one can anticipate the unknown, in which accident and death can lurk, as a prime source of the monumental within a highly controlled, otherwise predictable system. "Kinks in the road" on television are temporal in order, possibilities of irruption of the unexpected in a plot or a schedule within an endlessness of parallel worlds which go on whether switched on or not, whether we watch or not, is a primary reference in daily conversation, which we may be equipped to enter or not.
In principle, miniatures such as the mall are conceptual units which are invertible: that is, a mall can be lifted off the page, a scale model can be shrunk or expanded and plunked down in a nowhere that is anywhere suitable freeway access and (usually upscale) demographics prevail. This liquidity is certainly one of the secrets of commodity culture, allowing signs and images to become realized as objects of desire and also to circulate freely between different levels of reality. One still "unnatural" anti hence disconcerting feature of postmodernity is the presence of 'glowing signifiers of desire realized in the midst of everyday life‑images magnified into monuments (e.g., Michel de Certeau speaks of New York skyscrapers as "letters") or the big world shrunk down to the miniature size of 'a theme park or a mall. This invertibility between language and reality, i.e., world‑ to‑image‑to‑world fit, is inherent in the performative aspect of language, or the capacity to declare worlds into existence within designated and proper boundaries. But those boundaries now extend to cover much of everyday existence: perhaps never before has it been so opportune or so feasible to realize a symbol or idea dramatically in 3‑D. This expansion of the performative, making the actual virtual and the virtual actual, is behind the most recognizable features of postmodernity as theorized in Boorstein's culture of the image and "pseudo‑events," in Callois's description of an indecidable state between the animate and inanimate," and in Baudrillard's "simulations." Beyond liquid worlds that readily convert into one another, we are now undergoing a process of gradual convergence of the analogs of television with television itself. In the mall, not only can television screens be found in department stores and passages, but the mall as an architectural form has begun to sprout "video walls." On the freeway, we can soon anticipate the appearance of the virtual video screen or "head up display" which will floats‑in a driver's field of vision like a freeway sign. It seems that soon one will have to speak of one great machine.
4. Conclusion
The nonspace of privatized mobility is not neutral ground. It is rather the result of the dominance of one set of values over other values held a little less dear. Those other values, loosely allied with the "public sphere," are represented‑but not included in a way that gives them substance. The dominance of the values linked with mobile privatization is also the result of a misunderstanding: ideas in the marketplace, that is, words and images as markers of economic and social exchange, are not the same thing as the free marketplace of ideas; and, correlatively, consumers are not the same thing as subjects of discourse. Broadcast and narrowcast ratings and cassette sales figures, for instance, are the measure of the first kind of marketplace, the pure exchange value of language and images. To the measure that. the stock of ideas is determined by pure exchange vague, the marketplace of ideas is diminished. (Deregulation and dismantling of obligation to a "public," however defined, are perhaps letter understood as a "depublication" of transport, social and media communication, the legal and regulatory surface of the general phenomenon of privatization discussed here.) To strengthen the second kind of values‑those related to discursive exchange among subjects, community, and a shared commitment to the just as well as the good life‑requires foundation work. First, a widely held sense of the difference between the market value and the discursive value of ideas must be established. Then, recognizing the extent and scope of an attenuated fiction effect in everyday life‑an effect now largely unappreciated or considered trivial and hence subject to little vigilance‑might already be a step toward bringing distraction within a controlled psychic economy of disavowal. For distraction both motivates and promotes the "liquidity" of words and images in economic exchange by undermining a sense of different levels of reality and of incommensurable difference between them.
However, the analysis of the situation advanced in this essay suggests how difficult such a project has become. First, the means of advancing such notions are largely restricted to those very venues of privatization and distraction which work against them. Furthermore, older concepts of liberation in everyday life based on "escape attempts"5s and figurative practices are no longer viable is a built environment that is already evidence of dream‑work in the service of particular kinds of commerce, communication, and exchange. Indeed, older notions of the public realm and of paramount reality have been largely undermined, and a return to a pretelevisual world of politics, the street, or the marketplace is unlikely.
Not that there is nothing outside the built environment of freeways, malls, and television: there is indeed a heterogeneous world of local values; the decaying world of the city and town left beyond the enclosures is also becoming a gentrified and lively realm of privilege and experimentation. Because the realms of privatization present a facade of self‑sufficiency and self‑determination, means of change are easier to imagine as coming from those realms outside than from within. Thus, a prime strategy which has been devised for changing television is one of penetration of these enclosed worlds with other public and private voices." What is ultimately at stake in puncturing everyday enclosures for low‑intensity dreams are the rights and responsibilities of subjects in the public realm, a once gigantic, now shrunken terrain to be reclaimed from everyday life.
However, when included within television, the public and private worlds outside are distanced ontologically under several other layers of representation. That is why inclusion in representation per se is not enough to open the television apparatus out into the public world‑for the privileged sites of subjectivity on television are those allotted first to the enunciation of televisual utterances and the interests those utterances serve; and second to those subjects in passage represented in the utterance, shifting between a relation to the viewer and relations to embedded object‑worlds. That is, the very formats and conventions which have evolved in US televisual representation work against dialogue with the "other," the excluded outsiders. Or the past and otherness are included by proxy in a way that blunts tile sense of all outside and of other‑ possible worlds.
Furthermore, even the embedded narrative or dramatic segments under the plane of discourse are not conducive to the representation of change, either formally or at the level of social content. Narrative that embraces change, heterogeneity, and historical reach is undermined at a global level by the underlying serial organization of televisual representation per se: the notion of a linear sequence with a beginning, a middle, and all end, in which "something happens," is limited to the micro‑level of tile segment. The temporal‑spatial organization of narrative on television can be compared with Bakhtin's analysis of the "road" chronotope in Greek romance. That is, the road was not a place where a change from one state or condition to another could occur‑it was rather an obstacle course which merely delayed the eventual reunion of' two characters who were destined to be lovers. These characters do not change, develop, or age in a journey governed solely by fortuitous incident. Like tile romance, television narrative often manages to combine a sense of passage with an ultimately static situation. Like itineraries in the mall or the freeway, these stories are highly segmented enchainments which have largely given up any pretense of development. The itineraries of viewing will always pass by representations of cultural goods of various kinds, over and over, but the system of combination seems impervious to change.
So, when the dominant principles of alternation on television work against both the narrative process of change in characters and a rhetorical process of argumentation, how can they then challenge or encourage change in the hind of the viewer? Differentiation by means of lifestyle and disposable income which must be distinguished from the differences between subjects in "local" and "heterogeneous" outside realms. That is why the proliferating venues for ever more demographically segmented audiences for audio‑visual representation bode well only if they also bring about formats which allow for the entry of new subjects from the outer world at the primary level of discourse. However, considering that this primary level of discourse is itself a fictional representation of discourse and part of a process which transforms outsiders automatically into insiders, the problem of representing discourse is one of degree. At best one can present a somewhat more intersubjective fiction of discourse and an only somewhat different kind of celebrity and momentary fame.
Yet, models of "penetration" and discursive exchange are necessary and useful precisely because the power relations of mobile privatization are the conventional expression of a kind of legal and social fiction based on widely held values. Changes in shared fictions, values, and beliefs occur over the long term, slowly and incrementally, not merely because once shared values are discredited or may be no longer viable, but because alternative values constituencies have labored to mark themselves in discourse. I believe the criticism of television can serve cultural change where it keeps such long‑term goals in mind.
