That the mediated is engrained in the live is apparent in the structure of the English word immediate. The root form is the word mediate of which immediate is, of course, the negation. Mediation is thus embedded in the im-mediate; the relation of mediation and the im-mediate is one of mutual dependence not precession … Similarly, live performance cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization, since liveness was made visible only by the possibility of technical reproduction. (Auslander 1999: 53-54)

NICK KAYE ON SAMUEL WEBER

In Mass Mediaurus: Form, Technics, Media Samuel Weber argues that in its overcoming of distance television’s operation confuses the relationship between representation and its object. Indeed, in bringing events ‘closer,’ he argues, television sets before the viewer not simply a representation of the events it relays, but a ‘transposition of vision itself’ (Weber 1996: 116), and so a bringing closer of a mode of perception – a view. It is in this transposition of vision that television’s transmitted image asserts a tension between ‘the presentness associated with sense-perception’ (Weber 1996: 116-17) and the absences in which representation conventionally functions. In this tension, Weber concludes, and so in its overcoming of distance, television’s image occupies a place that is, properly, ‘neither fully there nor entirely here’ (Weber 1996: 120). Turning to the consequences of this dislocation, and the uncertainty it provokes in viewing, Weber notes that ‘one does not usually speak, in English, of ‘seeing’ television but rather of ‘watching’ it (…) we watch events whose outcome is in doubt, like sporting events. (…) To watch is very close to watching out for or looking out for, that is being sensorially alert for something that may happen’ (Weber 1996: 118). The mode of attention Weber describes presses toward the terms of the ‘ephemeral’ and ‘the live’: a ‘looking out for,’ an active projection toward that ‘whose outcome is in doubt,’ an anticipation of that which ‘may happen’. (Kaye 2007a: 243-4)

References

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