Feedback: Television Against Democracy

American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned andoperated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participatein except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community whilepreventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchangeof opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that

American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned andoperated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participatein except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community whilepreventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchangeof opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundlyantidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere oftelevision and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit.The figures whose work Joselitexamines--among them Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, AndyWarhol, and Melvin Van Peebles--staged political interventions within television'sclosed circuit. Joselit identifies three kinds of image-events: feedback, which canbe both disabling noise and rational response--as when Abbie Hoffman hijackedtelevision time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed to the media; theimage-virus, which proliferates parasitically, invading, transforming, and evenblocking systems--as in Nam June Paik's synthesized videotapes and installations;and the avatar, a quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which canfunction as a political actor--as in Melvin Van Peebles's invention of SweetSweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and influencedstyles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes Joselit, remain valuabletoday in a world where the overlapping information circuits of television and theInternet offer different opportunities for democratic participation.In Feedback, Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories ofart history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assessacts of representation in a variety of media--including the medium of politics. In atelevisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, arthistory has the capacity to become a political science.