123 storage, simultaneity, and the media technologies of...

Storage, simultaneity, andthe media technologies ofmodernity

William Uricchio

The motion picture medium during itsfirst few decades offers a vividinstance of a nineteenth-centurytechnology which simultaneously

gave form to and was shaped by the concep-tions of space, time and event which definedthe culture of modernity. Whether we invokemodernity in Baudelaire’s sense of the tran-sitory, the fugitive and the contingent, or thesense of the mass reproduction attendant tomodern industrial production, the film me-dium has been emblematic. Not surprisingly,these two very different senses of modernityinfuse our understanding of the medium’searly years, linking the physiological studiesundertaken by Muybridge and Marey, themotion analysis studies by Frank and LillianGilbreth, and the fragmentary and relativisticnotions of space and temporality celebratedin the cinematic and meta-cinematic work ofLéger, Duchamp, Pirandello and commodi-fied for a mass public by the pantheon of earlyfilm directors. However, despite its em-beddedness in the fabric of modernity, anddespite its frequent invocation as an analoguefor the modern, the cinema’s relationship tomodernity is not unproblematic. In the pagesahead, I shall address some of its complica-tions, especially as they relate to the historicalconception of moving image media. By recon-sidering the horizon of expectations whichgreeted the appearance of the film medium, Ihope to problematise aspects of the fin-de-siècle notion of mediality and pursue someof the implications both for the definition and

reception of early film and electronic media,issues which resonate with the new digitalmedia technologies and, more generally, withour historical vision of media development.

The film medium’s definition and inscriptionas a technology and cultural practice, despitethe efforts of the post-Brighton conferencegeneration of film historians, has tended tobe positioned within a teleologically-orientednotion of technological development.1 Ofcourse, the last two decades of film historicalscholarship have successfully complicatedour understanding of narrative, performanceand other signifying practices. Moreover,some scholars have taken pains to delineatethe conditions of reception attendant to themedium’s first audiences.2 But with a fewsignificant exceptions, such work has tendedto be textual in orientation, revealing filmstudies’ genealogical links to the discoursesof literary studies and art history. Significantaspects of film’s status as a medium have thusbeen marginalised, and among the most sig-nificant has been the issue of time.3

Longbefore theadventof computer-enhancedvirtual realities, film together with other latenineteenth-century inventions such as thetelephone and phonograph ‘virtually’ ex-tended human perceptions to events and lo-cations beyond their physical and temporalbounds. Film, like its sister communicationtechnologies and the transformations in in-dustrial production and transportation net-works, both stimulated and facilitated a new

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experience of time, space andevent.Althoughthecultural implications of this change wouldbe realised and celebrated with the appear-ance of the concept of modernism, a lessdesirable result appeared on the pages ofmedical and sociological journals. The gen-eration which underwent this reconstructionof experience – from the idiosyncrasies oflocal time to the rigors of universal time; fromdistance traversed by foot or steam and meas-ured in days, to the transgression of space bytelephone and aeroplane and measured intime-zones – seemed particularly prone to abattery of new diseases. By the turn of thecentury, fragmentation, alienation, neuras-thenia, over-stimulation, even ‘Newyork-itis’plagued the neural networks of those under-going the reorientation from one culturaltime/space to another.4

Film’s temporal claims – theactualité

The construction of time, film’s real site ofontological and epistemological distinction,offered powerful new ways of seeing (beyondthe feat of seeing into the past), in the processoffering both a backdrop and set of analoguesfor theorists from Bergson to Deleuze to usein their work on temporality. Leaving asidefor a moment the referential temporality ofthe dramatic narrative film, where tenses aswell as duration constitute the fabric of thefiction, I turn to the early actualité for exem-plification.5 The shock of time evident in theradical compression of fast motion or theextension of slow motion, in the impossibilityof reverse motion and stop-motion, trans-formed topics like the blossoming of flowers(Nature’s Fairest, Gaumont, 1912) or the life-cycle of flies (Flies, Eclipse-Urbanora, 1913)into documents of unexpected cultural rele-vance.Particularlyat aculturalmomentwhenthe relations among time, space and experi-ence were being debated in fields as diverseas sociology (Simmel), physics (Einstein) andpainting (the Cubo-Futurists), film offered itsaudiences a powerful way to explore concep-tions of time which would otherwise haveremained vague abstractions. The experienceof time in its many modes must be consideredas ‘actual’ and as sensational a topic as itsmore frequently discussed spatial corollary,

images of remote or exotic locations.6 Havingsaid that,wemust recall that thespatialisationof time was often linked with remote loca-tions, a phenomenon particularly evidentwith train-mounted panorama shots. Theseimages, discussed by Lynne Kirby, recallWolfgang Schivelbusch’s discussion of the‘shock’ and ‘annihilation of space and time’experienced by early train travellers, experi-ences perhaps not so different from thoseexperienced in the seats of cinemas.7

Manyearlynon-fiction film subjectsextendeda notion of documentation and temporalityestablished in the illustrated press since theearly 1880s. Paradoxically, the still photo-graph established the dominant horizon ofrepresentational expectations. The introduc-tion of relatively low cost printing techniquesin the last quarter of the nineteenth centurytogether with the proliferation of the illus-trated newspaper and magazine, thestereograph and picture postcard, servedquickly to stabilise certain representationalconventions.8 On theproduction side, onecansee similarities within pictorial composi-tions, image typologies, and markets betweennews photographs and moving pictures. Half-tone photographic images of fires, parades,crowded city streets, disasters, and industrialprocesses and technology tended to dominatethe new visual discourse in a process of stand-ardisation driven by producers, buyers andaudiences. The extension of these practicesin the film medium may be seen among otherplaces in American Mutascope and Biog-raph’s turn-of-the-century 68mm ‘living post-card’ series attesting to the intertextual ‘fixing’of certain cinematic conventions not only bywell-established production practices par-ticularly evident in the press, but by theintertextually-positioned expectations ofviewers, again, largely informed by their ex-posures to the press.

Motion pictures, however much they mighthave dwelt on the sites/sights of modernity asarticulated and circulated by the illustratedpress, nevertheless struggled to achieve thepress’s sense of immediacy. Press photo-graphs regularly made the transition fromcamera to printed page within the day, withthe weekly illustrated pressobviouslyextend-ing the time delay. At least through the first

124 William Uricchio

decades of the twentieth century, this tempowas dampened a bit by the relatively longcirculation life of the printed image with, forexample, the recycling of illustrated papersthrough the hands of multiple readers. Buteven so, the news photograph had a sense ofcurrency that the slower production and dis-tribution cycles of the motion picture haddifficulty achieving. The logistics of printingmultiple film copies and distributing themthrough a cumbersome (and frequentlychanging) system of exchanges forced thecinematic notion of currency to be far moreexpansive. Particularly before the routinisedcirculation of newsreels by the early 1910s,the ‘news’ value of films was severely com-promised vis-à-vis that of the illustrated press(with several striking exceptions such asGrand National (Barker, 1911) which wasreportedly processed on a train to Londonimmediately after the race in order to permitsame-day screening at Barker’s music hall,9 atechnique used as well with footage of thePrince of Wales’ investiture at Carnarvon thatsame year).10 From the perspective of its audi-ences, the recasting of that most temporallymarked of film genres, the actualité, into aprocess delayed by months risked transform-ing the meaning of certain topics.

But if theactualité could be identified throughits engagement with time and its doomedevocation of currency, it also seemed to becharacterised by an attempt to evoke the ‘ac-tual’ in the sense of ‘presence’. Judging bymany early humorous and exaggerated re-ports, the attempt to achieve a kind of pres-ence seems to have come easily to film. Filmssuch as Uncle Josh at the Picture Show togetherwith anecdotal (often apocryphal) reportsabout early audiences behaving as thoughscreen images had the same ontological statusas theviewers themselves, suggest thatat leastthe issue of the film medium’s convincinglevel of verisimilitude was open for discus-sion.11 Terms like lebende Bilder, bioscoop,and vitascope attest to the positioning of themedium not only through the spatial mimeticcapacities already well known through pho-tography, but through temporal mimetic ca-pacities and the ability to represent durationand movement. The flow of traffic at busyintersections, the manner in which dignitar-ies walked, rode and deported themselves,

and the mesmerising action of fires and in-dustrial machines, all articulated adimensionof experience which was frequentlydescribedin period reports as ‘liveness’.

The discourse of ‘liveness’ may at first seemcontradictory when applied to a mediumwhich lagged behind in the race for immedi-acy with the newspaper photograph. But aswe shall see, period use made no real distinc-tion betweenthe ‘liveness’of simultaneityandthe ‘liveness’ of a storage medium, suggestingeither an imprecision of use or a confusionthat carried over into cinematic repre-sentation. Nevertheless, this knowingly defi-cient sense of film’s ‘liveness’ was frequentlycelebrated by the medium’s early descriptionas ‘a window on the world’, a phrase whichattested to the perception of actualité in themost literal sense.

Competing temporalities

Despite all of these developments, film failedto live up to a set of temporal expectations inplace since the invention of the telephone in1876. In this regard, perhaps the most impor-tant emblem of alternate visions of techno-logically-enabled temporality appeared at the1900 world exhibition in Paris. A compen-dium of the new, the exposition provided anelaborated intertextual frame for appreciatingthe dissonant and competing spatio-temporalrepresentational systems available as cinematook its place. Thomas Kuchenbuch’s portraitof the exposition needs no retelling, but thefascination of the exhibit in part stems fromthe way in which mechanical visual storagesystems (the cinéorama with its 360-degreesynchronised 70mm film images of a balloonflight) competed with real-time electrical vis-ual transmission systems (the earthographimage telegraph).12 Although the film me-dium’s popularity was yet to be realised, theearly variations on the telegraph and tele-phone directly addressed the period’s interestin speed and simultaneity, and would even-tually do much to refine the definitions of thefilm and television media, and with them, anew sense of subjectivity.

Systems such as the earthograph and Walde-mar Poulsen’s telegraphone (essentially amagnetic telephone answering machine) di-rectly addressed the period’s interest in elec-

Storage, simultaneity, and the media technologies of modernity 125

tro-magnetic radiation, and were related inthe public’s mind with the rapid advancestaking place in wireless telegraphy, withspeed and simultaneity. This linkage is notas strange as it might at first appear, especiallyconsidering the rapid pace of telegraphy’sdevelopment in the period. For example, thefirst recorded distress signal from ship toshore was sent the year before the 1900 exhi-bition, and within one year, Marconi sent thefirst trans-Atlantic transmission. Such con-crete and sensational articulations of a tem-porality only suggested by the cinemaobviously exacerbated a deep and – since theadvent of the telegraph – a growing tensionin the conception of time, and in particular,the notion of simultaneity. Stephen Kern hasneatly summarised the period’s dilemma re-garding the nature of the present:

Thinking on the subject was divided overtwo basic issues: whether the present isa sequence of single local events or asimultaneity of multiple distant events,and whether the present is an infinitesi-mal slice of time between past and futureor of more extended duration.13

This duality recalls the two views which Zenoaddressed in his paradoxes (and which, inturn, were refuted by Bergson, who grappledwith the problem of spatialising time).14

Zeno’s paradoxes intervened into the compet-ing views of Heraclitus, who took the positionthat time was discontinuous and conflicting,and that the apparent connectedness and flowof events was but illusion, and Parmenides,who took the view that time is an extendedstate of being. These two pre-Socratic philoso-phers help to underscore the key temporaldifferences not only of the fin-de-siècle, butmore significantly of the film and televisionmedia. Heraclitus’ view, with a discontinuousreality and illusionistic appearance of conti-nuity, is consistent with the temporality ofthe film medium, in the same way that Par-menides’ view of an extended state of beingis continuous with (ideal-typical) television.The problem of the late nineteenth century,and as we will see, even of contemporarythinking, is that in some fundamental waysthe temporal attributes of the film mediumare confused.

The camera obscura – film’s identityproblem

Our collective understanding of the past en-courages something like a self-fulfillingprophecy. The logics and systems that havebeen inscribed inourhistoriessituatenotonlyour perceptions and expectations, but alsoinform the choices of the material we seek,save and admit as evidence into our archivesand arguments. Even assuming this dynamicof mutually reinforcing ideas and evidence,however, the search for ‘broad patterns’ and‘collective understanding’ is complicated bya number of structural factors. Can we speakof ‘orthodoxy’ with regard to media history?The last decade or two have perhaps givenamplereason toargue ‘no’. In television’scase,most historical research is so recent that or-thodoxy is not yet an issue. In film’s case, the1985 publication of The Classical HollywoodCinema formally laid to rest the canon of filmmasterpieces so carefully cultivated by ourcritical forefathers (and still in evidence infilm studies curricula). Its authors mappedthe development of film style, productionorganisation and technology while steeringclear of the canonised aesthetic criteria andfilmswhichhad for so long servedas referencepoints to those in search of orientation. Forfilm histories constructed around the ‘mas-terpieces’ of film art, this critical turn wouldseem to have marked the beginning of the end.

But masterpieces aside, the history of film’shistories seems to have its own ‘canon’ offavoured developments, anecdotes and argu-ments, elements which have regularly re-turned in each generation’s recasting of itsposition vis-à-vis the past. The process offilm’s historical construction is striking asmuch for the consistency of the ‘facts’ or‘myths’ (depending upon one’s historiog-raphic inclination) referred to, as for the ritu-alistic critique of the meanings derived fromthose referents by previous generations. As-sertions of inadequate research or inaccuratefocus have routinely been seized upon asmotives for dismissing past interpretations,yet until recently such critiques have them-selves been driven by changes in interpreta-tion rather than being based upon new data.

Although this obviously oversimplifies thecase, it allows us to consider the community


of film scholars in something like the termslaid out by Hobsbawm and Ranger, and byBenedict Anderson, in their work on nation,tradition and identity. Developmental mythshave helped to define the boundaries of ourdiscipline, keeping our eyes on some issueswhile relegating others to the margins. Thelong fixation with an idealised notion of ar-chival print integrity, and the concomitantneglect of such conditions of exhibition ascolour and sound;15 the search for the movingimage’s technological lineage in terms of thecamera obscura and laterna magica, and thesuppression of the role of coincident devel-opments in television and scientific apparati;and the tendency to perceive film history firstand foremost as a textual problematic andonly secondarily as a set of culturally boundpractices, have all contributed a stabilisinginfluence to an otherwise vexed notion ofdisciplinarity. Pre- and early cinema haveassumed important roles in our foundationalmyth, the place where we recall the develop-ments which gave us a cultural practice, aresearch object, a raison d’être.

If one looks to the earliest histories of the filmmedium, at the elements of what function asdevelopmental genealogies, one cannot butbe struck by the high degree of correspon-dence with what appears in today’s textbooks.David Hulfish’s 1909 The Motion Picture: ItsTheater and Its Making, for example, drawsupon even earlier instances of the same argu-ment, tracing the role of the camera obscura,the zoetrope, Muybridge’s work for LelandStanford, Edison’s Kinetoscope, etc. in themedium’s development. Although one couldcertainly argue that the continuity of thesereferences with those of the present reflectsan intersubjectively-confirmed core of agreedupon events, there may also be reasons tochallenge this easy assumption.

‘Facts’, assumptions, language, technologicalreferents and, of course, national myths allprovide the basic warp upon which eachpassing generation’s interpretative scheme iswoven. But, to extend this metaphor, just asthe spaces between the warp and weave con-tribute to the final texture, so too do therecurrent absences in the stuff of which cin-ema history is constructed. The problem isthat some of the most recurrent elements also

appear to be somewhat unreliable – an attrib-ute that admittedly has little to do with theconsensual function of these recurrences, buteverything to do with our vision of history.

A basis for revision? Re-consideringtechnologiesOn the morning of 1 July 1913, a transmitterlocated in the Eiffel Tower sent the first timesignal around the world. Global simultaneity,or something close to it, was finally achieved.This moment, probed by Stephen Kern for itsimplications, served as the culmination of aseries of developments such as the telegraphand international agreements on standardtime which gave form to a culturally distinc-tive conception of time.16 The Eiffel Tower’srole in the new culture of simultaneity in-spired poets, painters and the public, butcuriously, the very idea of time celebrated inthis use of Eiffel’s construction had alreadybeen undermined in 1905 by Einstein’s spe-cial theory of relativity. Regardless of scien-tific perceptions, however, popular andindustrial culture seemed to embrace a notionof speed whose logical culmination, in thecommunications sector at any rate, was theever-diminishing interval between transmis-sion and reception. Given the rather deeplyingrained Western tendency to construct lin-ear developmental narratives, it isnot surpris-ing that the histories of communicationtechnologies or today’s advance press for newmedia systems have privileged a particularnotion of progress. From such a perspective,it seems self-evident that a temporally dis-junctive storage medium (film) would inevi-tably give way to a medium of temporalsimultaneity (television) and, in turn, thatnew technologies of simultaneity (enhancedby individual address capacities) such as theinternet will eventually assume centre stage.

Despite the familiar progression of eventschronicled in most media histories, however,there is good reason to reconsider the fabricof cultural expectations and technologicaldevelopments so central to this century’s no-tion of media, and in the case of this essay,particularly the moving image media. By ex-amining the cultural imagination, technologi-cal capacity, and cinema’s own earlyproduction practices, it might be argued thattelevision rather than film occupied a central


place on the nineteenth-century horizon ofexpectations. This repositioning addressesemergent cinema’s cultural position, raisessome questions regarding cinema and televi-sion’s construction of viewing subjects as wellas into contemporary debates over ‘new me-dia’ as a set of technologies, discourses andcultural practices.

Examining the developmental histories of oldmedia technologies when they were new, asCarolyn Marvin has argued, offers a powerfulif overlooked means to evaluate elements ofcontinuity in our own endeavours.17 The his-tory of ‘old media’ developments, if freed fromthe teleological determinism which so oftenaccompanies retrospective considerations,can provide a surprisingly diverse range ofalternative concepts and consequences.While these are most often made up of deadends and spoiled dreams, the spectrum ofavailable alternatives to a particular mediatechnology both as a context and as an objectlesson provides insights in the process oftechnological and cultural assimilation. De-velopmental patterns are not so interestingfor their sometimes uncanny sense of antici-pation as for what they reveal about the struc-tures of innovation, implementation andcultural integration, all issues covered underthe rubric of the social history of technology.

The last few years have seen a number ofdifferent attempts to consider and conceptu-alise developing (media) technology, the ef-forts of Bijker, Kittler, Zielinski, Winston,Douglas, Marvin and others among them.These scholars have offered wide-rangingconstructions of media/technological historyand developmental theories which havehelped to stimulate much needed reflectionand problematise easy assumptions about ourvery definition of media systems. As histori-ans engaged in the construction of theory,their efforts have been directed towards pro-viding interpretative (and sometimes polemi-cal) frameworks that have been accepted,contested, or modified, but that have alsotended to overshadow the nuances and com-plexities of the developments themselves. Arather different approach has been in evi-dence among researchers of early cinema overthe past twenty years. In this case, a field ofstudy which tends to focus on the excavation

of stylistic possibility and institutional his-tory extended its efforts to the considerationof the technological possibilities and alterna-tives that preceded and initially competedwith the medium of projected film. This pro-ject was itselfpart of a larger move to constructa detailed social history of media production,distribution, exhibition and reception. Theresulting research has tended among otherthings to document the micro-history of long-overlooked technological developments, theback-stories of their success or failure, andthe complexities and contradictions of popu-lar exhibition and reception, providing a richdatabase for subsequent analysis.18 These twoapproaches – historically-informed theorybuilding and micro-historical excavation –stand as two axes helping to orient considera-tion of the existing field. And although effortscontinue along both of these directions, itseems increasingly clear that we can lookforward to an invigoration of research thanksto synthetic work now beginning to appearfrom the centre of the field.

Re-reading liveness

As previously mentioned, histories of the filmmedium have ritualistically included refer-ence to the camera obscura, giving cinema arespectably old genealogical trajectory thatstretches back at least to Giovanni Battistadella Porta’s treatise on the subject. As anauthenticating strategy, the camera obscuraargument has some obvious benefits for cin-ema, but it also brings with it some difficul-ties. The camera obscura and implicitly thosetechnologies such as cinema (television andeven virtual reality) discursively dependentupon it have been deployed as part of twovery different arguments. On the one hand,they offer evidence of a teleological progres-sion of ever-more ‘accurate’ or ‘natural’ sys-tems of representation. On the other, they areseen as apparati of social and political control,disciplining and positioning viewers throughan ideology of representation. The respec-tively conservative and radical agendas lurk-ing behind these two deployments are easyenough to see (particularly in the debates overnew media), but perhaps this bifurcated viewis a bit preliminary, at least with regard tofilm.


While one can appreciate the attempt to locatethe cinematic apparatus and viewing subjectwithin a particular tradition, such an ap-proach also masks significant differences inrepresentational systems. The tradition of thecamera obscura is predicated upon a spatiallyfixed and unified subject position and uponsuch elements as simultaneity, spatial prox-imity and even the optical contiguity of theworld viewed with the viewing subject. Cin-ema, by contrast, is capable of activating mul-tiple subject positions and points of view, andis by definition recorded (non-simultaneous)and thus freed from such constraints as ‘prox-imity’ and ‘contiguity’. But if film practicerepresents a break from the camera obscuratradition, does seeing television as a ‘pre-cine-matic’ discourse offer any additional cluesinto the range of available ways of seeingwithin which cinema positioned itself? Istelevision in fact a more appropriate inheritorof the camera obscura tradition, and if so, doesthis shed any light on cinema’s detour fromtelevision? Or is the televisual itself a radicalreconfiguration of this tradition and a sinequa non for understanding the emergence ofthe modern viewing subject and the viewingdiscourses of which media from cinema tovirtual reality are but different expressions?

The argument, to which we will return soon,depends on a definition of television that hasmore to do with an ideal definition of themedium, one discursively related to the phi-losophy of Parmenides, than the one most ofus actually have an opportunity to view on aregular basis. It depends on an idea of televi-sion relentlessly asserted (but rarely pro-vided) by CNN, an idea shared in by millionsduring the World Cup or the latest mediaevent/disaster: it depends upon simultaneity.Obviously videotape becomes oxymoronicfrom such a view of television (although oxy-moronic or not, it is embedded in social prac-tice, albeit for different reasons than thosedeployed for the cinematic), so perhaps theword televisual willhelp tokeep the emphasison that quality of simultaneity repeatedlyemphasised by early writers on the televisionmedium but which remains more potentialthan actual.

Writing in a time of tremendous advance inelectro-mechanical technologies, Albert Ro-

bida attempted to chart the course of the nexthundred years in his 1883 book, Le vingtièmesiècle.19 Along with other literary visionariessuch as Jules Verne and inventors such asCharles Francis Jenkins and Paul Nipkow(both nineteenth-century developers of tele-vision), Robida’s sensitivity to the potentialof the conceptual and technological statusquo appears in retrospect not only profound,but serves as a powerful reminder of just howmuch of the future is embedded in our past.Robida’s description of the ‘telephonoscope’,for example, detailed an audio-visual tech-nology that could bring distant entertainmentinto the living room, that could serve as ameans of surveillance, and that could servethe mission of ‘la suppression de l’absence’by facilitating real-time face-to-face commu-nication over vast distances. Robida’s predic-tion of television, like those of some of hiscontemporaries, offers a striking instance oftechnological anticipation, but it also speaksto the long history of ideas, urges and attemptswhich infuse our latest understanding of‘new’ media.

The lesson is a simple one. Technologicalcapacity requires the cultural imagination inorder to emerge as cultural practice, and thelast quarter of the nineteenth century wasseething with possibilities and limits whicheventually gave conceptual form to film by defacto defining the televisual.

The televisual, as a technological construc-tion, was born with the invention of the tele-phone in 1876. Although the telegraph beforeit had transformed Western notions of timeand space, the telephone offered somethingeven more radical – the live transmission ofvoice, the opportunity to direct point-to-pointencounters with the simultaneous. Withinone year of the telephone’s invention, writerstook the idea of directable simultaneity andreplaced the grain of the voice with the grainof image. The wedding of telephone and pho-tography and the consequent full-blown de-scriptions of live ‘television’ transmissionstook many forms. In June 1877, L’année scien-tifique et industrielle included a descriptionof the ‘telectroscope’, a device attributed toAlexander Graham Bell that sent live imagesover a distance. Within two years of the tele-phone’s invention, a now famous cartoon ap-


peared in Punch which showed a girl in Cey-lon speaking with her parents in London byway of a wide-screen ‘electric camera-ob-scura’ attributed to Edison and a telephone(Fig. 1).20 By the end of the century, AlbertRobida would provide his detailed vision oftelevision as an apparatus of simultaneitycapable of entertainment, communicationand surveillance (Fig. 2). Through these fan-tasised expressive efforts, an idea of simulta-neity already defined and experiencedthrough the telephone quickly took hold inthe popular imagination as a quality thatcould be extended in image.

The invention of the phonograph, the abilityto fix and record the ephemeral quality ofsound, followed the telephone by one year.And like the telephone, the ‘liveness’ of thephonograph sparked the imagination of thoseinterested in extending the quality to images.In 1878, for example, Wordsworth Donis-thorpe wrote to Nature describing a soundmotion picture device – 8 frames per secondon a flexible, spooled ribbon with phono-graphic accompaniment. The near coinci-

dence of ‘live’ telephonic (simultaneous) and‘live’ phonographic (recorded) technologiesand their related imaginary schemes make thediscussion of nineteenth-century notions of‘liveness’ extremely difficult. In cinema his-tory, the romanticised recurrence of the ‘Lu-mière effect’ – an impression of reality sostrong that viewers allegedly sought coverfrom the filmed image of an oncoming train– finds at least discursive support in the‘liveness’ asserted in the names and termsassociated with the early film industry suchas vitascope and window on the world. Suchperceptions of ‘liveness’, as with the phono-graph, were central to the marketing successand probably even audience pleasuresof earlycinema. And while it is impossible to recon-struct a full sense of late nineteenth-century‘liveness’, what nevertheless remains clear isthat ‘simultaneity’ was both invoked by it andhelps to distinguish its different forms. Thatis to say, both the telephone and the phono-graph were hailed as ‘live’, but only one of-fered access to simultaneity. The experienceof simultaneity over distance was relativelypervasive at the moment of cinema’s intro-

Fig. 1. Almanac for1879, Punch 75, 9

December 1878.


Fig. 2. From AlbertRobida, LeVingtième Siècle(Paris: G. Decaux,1883).


duction (in the US, close to 1 million tele-phones were in place by 1895), and the ex-tension of simultaneity to moving images, tothe televisual, was fully imagined and posi-tioned in popular media. Cinema historianshave tended to flatten the discourse of live-ness, some even using the Lumière anecdoteto assert a sense of simultaneity. And, indeed,for viewers then as now, perhaps the illusionof simultaneity was acceptable (as well ascheaper and more reliable). But a look atbroader cultural practices, at the telephone,at the ideas sparked by electricity, at thefantasies of new media, all suggest that simul-taneity stood as a powerful anticipationwhich cinema could simulate but never de-liver.

Thus far we have dwelt on the intermedialand the imaginary as sites for the discussionof simultaneity and the construction of a newviewing or listening subject. Obviously manyother realms – political, economic, social andso on – offer insights into this process; butperhaps briefly exploring the point throughtechnologicalhistory, through inventionsandpatents, through the world of practice, willhelp tosolidify thediscourseof the imaginary.Vis-à-vis television history, such a discussionhas the added advantage of calling attentionto a long and largely neglected tradition ofrepresentational efforts distinct from those ofcinema (with which it is too often conflated).If the televisual as an imagined technologyenjoyed a period of rich development shortlyafter the invention of the telephone, certainlyits material base (like the telephone’s whichit held in common) also enjoyed a long pre-history. My point is not to trace out a detailedtechnological genealogy, but rather to suggesta set of developments which parallel thoseusually invoked in the history of cinema. Forexample, the milestones in photography socentral to cinema’s development – Daguerreand Henry Fox Talbot’s experiments in 1839– might be paralleled to Samuel Morse’s 1837demonstrations of an electronic telegraph;Renaud’s projection model praxinoscope orMuybridge’s zoopraxiscope, both fromaround 1879, might be paralleled to Bell’svoice telephone of 1876. More importantly,however, the patents for what would appearas the first working television systems werefiled in 1884. Paul Nipkow’s patent for the

elektrisches teleskop, the so-called ‘Nipkowdisk’, provided the heart of mechanical tele-vision systems into the early 1940s. Nipkow’ssystem permitted the instantaneous ‘dissec-tion’of images, their transmissionaselectricalsignals, and their ‘reassembly’. By 1889, Laz-are Weiller’s phoroscope proved capable ofmuch the same task, except that in place of aspinning disk, Weiller used a revolving drummade of angled mirrors. With an almost sym-bolic prescience, nearly one hundred yearsago as projected moving pictures first gracedthe screen, Charles Frances Jenkins designedhis phantascope – a name that included twodevices: one a moving picture system co-de-signed with Thomas Armat, and the other atelevision system that promised, but so far aswe know, failed, to transmit simple shapes.

The point is that television, historically con-ceived as a medium of simultaneous trans-mission, found both a place in latenineteenth-century popular imagination anda place in the patent register. The basic con-ceptual problems of the technology had beenresolved, and an imagined and technologi-cally possible way of seeing at a distance wasfully anticipated and articulated. Why thenthe initial success of film and not television?It is, of course, possible that for many viewers,simultaneity was simply not important, re-gardless of what larger cultural practicesmight suggest. But, as the subsequent historyof attempts to establish a reliable, mass-pro-ducible and affordable apparatus demon-strated, there were also very real physicalreasons.21 The space between conceptual so-lution and technological deployment was aprofound one. Slow developments in the elec-tronics, technological and manufacturing in-frastructure, limited broadcast spectrumavailability and the consequent struggles tostandardise and control emissions, the con-sequent necessity for broadcast centralisa-tion, and even such basic requirements aswidespread electrification (not ‘universal’ inthe US until the1930s), allpoint to the reasonsfor television’s long delay. The film medium,by contrast, benefited from rudimentarymechanical technology, superior and stableimage quality, and low investment require-ments, all assuring easy and decentralisedproliferation.


Technologies of simultaneity

An unusual experiment filled the air in Berlinduring the summer of 1930. Siemens’ engi-neers tested a gigantic loudspeaker mountedin Berlin’s version of the Eiffel Tower, thefunkturm, with results that could be heard asfar away as Wannsee; indeed, speech andmusic could be clearly heard within in a60-degree range some twenty kilometresaway. This massive device weighed severaltons and was part of a product line that in-cluded loudspeakers designed for installationunderground and in street-corner kiosks. Ac-cording to their developers, these loudspeak-ers could literally be used to cover the countrywith sound, and they promised to unify peo-ple from distant locations through sharedparticipation in live sports, political and com-mercial events. The attempts of companiessuch as Siemens and Telefunken actively topursue the development of ever-larger loud-speakers and to deploy them across the nationwere consistent with their interest in othertechnologies, in particular, in radio and tele-vision. Besides being motivated by a desirefor profits, these technologies were driven bya remarkable awareness of the media’s abilityto redefine the public sphere, both extendingthe notion of event and the notion of humanpresence. As such, these technologies werethe direct inheritor of the same nineteenth-century imagination which ultimately de-fined the film medium through its limits. Inthis case, however, the dream of simultaneitywas technologically fulfilled.

This incident from a relatively early momentin the history of acoustical amplificationcom-plicates the more familiar narratives of soundtechnology in the service of the recordedmedia of film and the phonograph. But theconjunction of loudspeakers, radio and tele-vision in the German electronics industry ofthe late 1920s and early 1930s reveals some-thing more, namely the interworkings amongvarious media technologies in pursuit of aparticular goal: the attempt to extend beingbeyond the site of its physical embodiment,to extend real-time participation in distantevents, and in the German case, to redefinethe Volkskörper.22 This goal can be seen in anynumber of examples. From the late 1920s intothe late 1930s German broadcasting authori-

ties urged both the electronics industry andconsumers to put ‘a radio in every house’ byco-ordinating the design and pricing of the‘people’s receiver’. The campaign was a mas-sive success with the public, and it encour-aged broadcasting journalists and engineersalike to theorise the potentials and implica-tions of a public defined by a technology.Before 1933, writers from a variety of ideo-logical persuasions charted the utopian pos-sibilities of the new technology. But the 1933‘co-ordination’ of broadcasting by the Na-tional Socialist state resulted ina more strictlydefined sense of how radio would be used toforge the new spirit of the nation, calling tomind Jeffrey Herf’s notion of ‘reactionarymodernism’.

Early German television offers perhaps themost far-reaching instance of the nineteenth-century ideas of simultaneity. Daily publictelevision broadcasting began in March 1935and continued until late 1944, but despiteimpressive technological developments, it re-mained a medium with a relatively smallpublic.Oneof the reasons for television’s slowstart, despite its technological lead, had to dowith the definition of the medium. Caughtamong warring political and industrial con-stituencies, television found itself the subjectof curious and heated debates over its mediaidentity. Television was generally seen asderiving from someexisting medium,existingas a variation rather than a self-standing me-dium. Was television the logical culminationof radio? in which case it could broadcast amix of liveand stored programming andtrans-mit to the atomised domestic setting of theindividual home. Was it more like cinema?in which case it could rely upon filmed ma-terial and exhibit it to collective audiences intelevision theatres. Or was it more closelyrelated to the telephone? in which case itcould be used to enhance point-to-point com-munication and information transfer. Allthree visions vied for domination and all threefound material form. Most of those peoplewho saw television in Berlin visited one ofthe city’s thirty or so television halls (mostseating forty people, and one seating 800).There they saw both live programming suchas the 1936 Olympic Games and live televi-sion drama, as well as filmed programming,such as shortened versions of feature films


and news features. Plans were inplace to massproduce television receivers for home use,and indeed the orders for the first 10,000public sets were issued just as war was de-clared. Although home television remainedthe privilege of a select group of critics andfunctionaries, it was heavily promoted as ahome commodity. Television also took formas part of the communication infrastructure.By the mid-1930s, a televisiontelephone sys-tem linked Berlin with Hamburg, Leipzig,Cologne and Nürnberg, giving form to yetanother vision of the medium.23

A debate raged around the issue of simulta-neity and the need to distinguish television’scapacity for simultaneity from cinema’s nec-essary rupturing of time. Especially after thestart of war, proponents of simultaneity sawtheircase literalisedthroughthedevelopmentof television guidance systems for rockets andtorpedoes. Produced in quiet co-operationwith several American-based multi-nationalelectronic firms, the guidance systems per-mitted a pilot to ‘see’ his target from theperspective of the missile, guiding it to suc-cessful contact. At the war’s end, Allied in-telligence found one factory that wasproducing 300 miniature cameras a monthwith semi-skilled slave labour for the still-ex-perimental television missile guidance pro-gramme. The idea of television as thetechnological fulfilment of the camera ob-scura takes on sinister dimensions with thislittle-known development, dimensionswhich Paul Virilio has outlined in his analysisof vision and simulation in the conduct ofwar.

Perhaps the most revealing insight into howthe medium of television would reposition ifnot eliminate film appeared in a top-secretreport produced by the Post Ministry in 1943.The Post Ministry had long been engaged ina bitter conflict with thePropagandaMinistry,a conflict based on the culture clash betweencareer civil servants (the Post) and NSDAPhacks (Propaganda). With the Post responsi-ble for television’s apparatus and technology-intensive live broadcasts, and Propagandaresponsible for programming, disputes wereinevitable over everything from time alloca-tion to the sharing of radio licence fees. Latein the war, however, senior officials at the

Post Ministry drew up a secret plan for post-victory Europe that they felt would render thePropaganda Ministry redundant. The plancalled for a live cable television news networkto connect Greater Germany and the occupiedterritories. Round-the-clock live televisionnews, the Post’s domain after all, would sim-ply do away with the need for premeditatedpropaganda and filmed programming. Thelive connection between the leadership andits followers, the extension of nation throughshared event, would constitute the neuralnetwork linking the new Germany, construct-ing the new Volkskörper anticipated in theloudspeaker experiments of the late 1920s.Thanks to such diverse factors as Germanengineering education, the efforts of philoso-phers from Junger, to Benjamin, to Heidegger,and the massive state-stimulated electronicsindustry, Germany offers a particularly goodexample of the interworkings of media sys-tems in pursuit both of common goals andautonomy, a pursuit with direct implicationsfor media identity and cultural practice.

Implications

These instancesdrawnfrom film’spre-historyand television broadcasting’s first years arebut a few of the many cases where the struggleto define or extend media’s technological ca-pacities and cultural practices have resultedin tangible action. The histories of both mediaare rich with such incidents, attesting to theprocess of ongoing redefinition so much a partof the media landscape. But despite the liveviewing of Diana Princess of Wales’ funeralby some two billion world-wide viewers andthe World Cup final, television has steadilybeen shifting away from an engagement withthe simultaneous. The explosion of channelsavailable with cable or satellite has turnedtelevision into a very different sort of timemachine – one which permits instant accessto random points in the televised (and filmed)past. Today’s television public equipped withremote control tuning can zap through hun-dreds of programmes, viewing across news,information and entertainment programminggenerated anytime in the past 100 years. Tele-vision’s present, with increasingly rare excep-tions like Diana’s funeral, has beendisconnected from its real-world referent. But


interest in simultaneity seems not to havedisappeared, rather, it has simply been dis-placed. The increasing presence of near-si-multaneous events on the internet such asweb-cam sites is but one example. Twenty-four hour access to the lion cage at the LincolnPark Zoo, or to the exterior of the ParliamentBuilding in Ottawa, Canada, or to a coffee potin a mathematics department at CambridgeUniversity, or any number of mundane loca-tions feeds through the internet in static im-ages refreshed every few seconds. The tensionbetween the static and the immediate is, forthis viewer anyway, almost unbearable, butit also offers a hint of an internet applicationwhich may well have a future.

What do we gain from considering an alter-nate set of referents for media’s developmen-tal history? What are the benefits of, forexample, seeing film within a cultural frame-work prepared for the appearance of televi-sion? By deepening our understanding of thelate nineteenth-century horizon of expecta-tions, we can certainly better locate thestrengths, liabilities and possibilities of a me-dium we have far too often ‘flattened’ from apresentist viewpoint. Our understanding ofcinema as a cultural practice can only benefitfrom an understanding of alternate and com-peting visual representation systems, andfrom a more nuanced appreciation of widely-used descriptors such as ‘liveness’. For exam-ple, the predominance of non-fiction filmsubjects from 1895 to ca. 1903–06 togetherwith descriptors of the film medium as ‘awindow on the world’ or ‘the mirror of nature’suggest a sense of simultaneity with the sub-ject viewed and the external world. Newspa-per reports, cartoons and even film subjectsasserted that some patrons confused screenevents with real events. While this hasusuallybeen read as evidence of visual realism, suchanecdotes could also be read as accenting theperceived simultaneity or ‘presence’ of repre-sentation and reality. This reading is under-scored by the term used to describe thefictional narrative subjects which increas-ingly dominated the screen after 1903–06:‘canned drama’. The notion of storage, oftemporal dislocation, is central to this term,despite the frequent maintenance of realistrepresentational strategies. Although admit-tedly speculative, such perspectives are po-

tentially useful for the understanding of earlyproduction practices (and possible receptionpatterns), as well as for re-evaluating a strainof utopian discourse that runs through thewritingsof someearly filmandradio theorists.

Such an approach underscores the need (forthose interested in television) to extend film’srecent historiographic break with teleologi-cally-driven history – and the consequent‘rediscovery’ of historical possibility so evi-dent in thecontinuing workwith earlycinema– to television. In this work, technological andcultural dead-ends are every bit as interestingas the patterns of success which have tendedto dominate media history. In this sense, filmhas enjoyed a relatively developed – if uneven– historical exploration which the televisionmedium largely lacks.For anumber of reasonsranging from the medium’s ephemeral natureto its institutionalisation within a social sci-ence paradigm, the technological and repre-sentational traditions of television remain along overdue research area. As the examplesdrawn from Germany’s television history in-dicate, insights into the construction of na-tion, public and event await those researcherswho are willing to untangle the broadcastmedia networks.

Repositioning film within a field of televisualexpectation helps to make clear the extent ofthe break with the camera obscura tradition,at least as regards cinematic practice. Whileone can appreciate the long history of at-tempts to locate the cinematic apparatus andviewing subject within this tradition, as wehave seen, such an approach also hides sig-nificant differences in representational sys-tems.24 Television, rooted in simultaneity, ina technologically enabled sense of proximityand contiguity, might seem to fulfil preciselythose criteria missing in cinema.25

The re-positioning of the camera obscura hasdirect implications for the construction of thehistorical cinematic viewer, particularly inthe context of an actively articulated alterna-tive. A ‘re-reading’ of early cinema discourse(a task that remains to be done) might wellreveal less continuity with the model of thehidden and controlling unified subject con-structed by the camera obscura than we haveimagined, a revelation with obvious conse-


quences for our understanding of repre-sentational history.

Perhaps it is time to begin more serious con-sideration of traditions other than that of thecamera obscura, traditions having centrallyto do with storage and reconstruction (mem-ory theory) and with a mediated and morefully modern notion of the subject. But lestwe simply switch television with film, thereare also good reasons to qualify television’sappropriateness as inheritor of the cameraobscura tradition, chief among them the me-dium’s tendency to rely upon stored (vide-otaped) material and its potential forfragmenting viewing position by cuttingamong multiple spatial positions within real(simultaneous) time. Viewed from this per-spective, both television and film break insignificant and different ways from a repre-sentational tradition that has lurked behinda substantial body of theorisation, suggestingthat much work remains to be done. More-over, it appears that a candidate has appearedwhich can legitimately take up the historicallinkage with the camera obscura: the internetweb-cam. But this development, with all ofits possibilities, must await resolution of thestasis-liveness problem of the web-cam’s lowimage-refresh rate. But even assuming tech-nological improvement, theproblemof indus-trialising and packaging directable livenessmay prove to be a far more serious stumblingblock. Perhaps, too, there is something to be

learned from what might be called the law ofdiminishing resolution, in which a hierarchyof phenomenological density seems to corre-late with the shift from textual specificity(film) to low-resolution connectedness (web-cams). From this perspective, different sets ofcriteria may account for the deployment andcategorisation of these media beyond the tem-poral dimension which this essay has privi-leged.

Cinema’s successful emergence and televi-sion’s long delay as a mass medium – thisdespite television’s presence as both populardream and technological possibility – wouldseem to raise some significant questions tothe current debates over ‘new media’. Whatis the role of the imaginary, of expectation, inshaping technological capacity into culturalpractice? How might we think about the dis-placement of expectation by the easy avail-ability of ‘inferior’ alternatives? How dosimultaneous, unified-viewing position me-dia such as virtual reality relate to the distinc-tions offered by film and televisionparticularly in the construction of vision andsubject? As we witness a moment in mediahistory not so dissimilar from the late nine-teenth century in terms of the mix of discur-sive anticipation and technologicalpossibility, perhaps the developments of thepast will help to spare us unnecessary detoursin our future, but more to the point, offer usnew ways of seeing our present.

Notes

1. The reference here is to the 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton which triggered a reappraisal of filmhistorical assumptions and, eventually, methods.

2. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1991); William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of theVitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

3. Exceptions include such diverse approaches as Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography,Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1996); Armand Mattelart, TheInvention of Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Charles Musser,Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, LosAngeles and London: University of California Press, 1991); and Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisionen:Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989).

4. Georg Simmel’s 1903 article ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ seems emblematic of period percep-tions of modernity’s impact. See also Ben Singer, ‘Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of PopularSensationalism’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention ofModern Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), 72–99; andStephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1983).

5. I do not mean to argue here for an essential fact/fiction distinction nor even a narrative/non-narrative


distinction for the actualité as a category. However, my examples draw upon non-narrative instances(unless one defines narrative in terms of simple chronology or broadly in terms of reception). Thedistinction will return in sharper form when discussing especially live transmissions. For a fullerdiscussion of the actualité, see Kintop 6 (1997) and for its relation to time, see in the same number,William Uricchio, ‘Aktualitaten als Bilder der Zeit’: 43–50.

6. Although cinematic representations of space and time are both experienced within a real-time andreal-space reference system, the experience of viewing cinematic time is arguably less mediatedthan the experience of viewing distant spaces since temporal representations often require a fourthdimension for their articulation whereas three dimensional spaces are by convention representedin two dimensions. This difference complicates both the representation and reception of cinematictemporality.

7. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1997); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Train Travel in the 19th Century(New York: Urizen Books, 1979). Kirby’s book includes a wide-ranging discussion of train-mountedactualities.

8. See Tom Gunning, ‘“The Whole World within Reach”: Travel Images without Borders’, in RaymondCosandey and François Albera (eds.), Cinéma sans frontières 1896–1918 / Cinema Across Borders(Laussanne: Editions Payot and Qúebec: Nuit Blanche Editeur, 1995), 21–36.

9. This, according to Nicholas Hiley. See Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (eds.), Non-Fiction FilmFrom the Teens (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum/BFI, 1994), 26. Such attempts, while notcommon, were nevertheless persistent from film’s start, as Lumière’s practice of filming andexhibiting on the same day suggests. Charles Musser describes how in 1899 a reviewer for the NewYork Clipper, upon seeing film images shot the same day, seized upon this sort of development asthe essence of the medium: ‘the secret of Moving Pictures consists in their TIMELINESS. Withoutthat feature, such an exhibition would surely fail.’ Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: TheAmerican Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 275.

10. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 118.

11. See, for example, Stephen Bottomore’s collection of cartoon responses to the early film medium, IWant to See this Annie Mattygraph: A Cartoon History of the Coming of the Movies (Pordenone:Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995), 44–53.

12. The cinéorama may indeed have been more of a discursive gesture than a film experience. RichardAbel, based on Jean-Jacques Meusy, reports that it never actually opened. The Cine Goes to Town:French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 1995),14.


14. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907; rpt. New York: The Modern Library, 1944), 335.

15. The situation is changing. Recent initiatives by the Nederlands Film Museum, Bologna’s CinemaRetrivato, and the Pordenone festival have stimulated new interest and research into colour, andpreparations for a forthcoming NFM summer workshop on sound and the individual efforts ofscholars such as Karel Dibbets and Rick Altman are having a parallel influence on sound. Theseefforts may broadly be seen within the context of the shift from the text as a formal entity to thetext as social practice, although obviously formal concerns continue to play a role.


17. For an engaging and anecdote packed discussion of the introduction of electricity and the telephone,see Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communications in the LateNineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

18. Among the diverse contributions, Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1880–1941 (London:McFarland, 1987); Hermann Hecht, in Ann Hecht (ed.), Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia andAnnotated Bibliography of the Moving Image Before 1896 (London: Bowker Saur, 1993); Deac Rossell,‘A Chronology of Cinema, 1889–1896’, Film History 7: 2; George Shires, Early Television: ABibliographic Guide to 1940 (London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997) and Winston, Technologiesof Seeing.

19. Albert Robida, Le vingtième siècle (Paris: G. Decaux, 1883).

20. George Dumaurier, ‘Edison’s Telephonoscope (transmits light as well as sound)’, Almanac for 1879,Punch 75 (9 December 1878).


21. See Abramson and for a close look at the German situation before 1945, see William Uricchio, DieAnfange des deutschen Fernsehens (Tübingen, 1991).

22. Simultaneity, as Georg Simmel argued, can be seen as a defining characteristic of modernity, makingit a singularly appropriate concept to explore in the case of media. Simmel described modernity as‘an eternal present’ and as ‘preoccupied with simultaneity’. Critics such as Adorno and Kracauerwere quick to seize upon the dangers of this view, seeing it as idealist and ahistorical, but this doesnot diminish the power of Simmel’s insight into one of the organising principles of modern life.

23. Jonathan Crary, for one, has offered an interesting exploration of the implications of making thisdistinction between cinema as a technology dependent upon the camera obscura and cinema as acultural practice involved in the construction of the modern viewing subject. Obviously we differfundamentally on the relevance of the camera obscura to discussions of cinema – a difference withwide-ranging implications – but his discussion offers an excellent summary of the dominanttheoretical position. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in theNineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

24. For a provocative consideration of the implications of this argument for the construction of a newsubject, see Dominik Schrange, in Technokratische Subjektkonstruktionen Psychotechnik un Radioals subjektivitaetsgenerierende Apparaturen, forthcoming.

25. Although from a more presentist perspective, Richard Dienst pursues some of these implicationswith regard to the televisual in his Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1994).


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