Commercial television’s fictive time is a second-degree simulation of real fictiveness
Evidence
These propositions allow us to return to the concept of total flow itself and to grasp its relationship to the analysis of commercial (or fictive) television in a new way. Material or machine time punctuates the flow of commercial television by way of the cycles of hour and halfhour programming, shadowed as by a ghostly afterimage by the shorter rhythms of the commercials themselves. I have suggested that these regular and periodic breaks are very unlike the types of closure to be found in the other arts, even in film, yet they allow the simulation of such closures and thereby the production of a kind of imaginary fictive time. The simulacrum of the fictive seizes on such material punctuation much as a dream seizes on external bodily stimuli, to draw them back into itself and to convert them into the appearance of beginnings and endings; or, in other words, the illusion of an illusion, the second-degree simulation of what is already itself, in other art forms, some first-degree illusory fictiveness or temporality. But only a dialectical perspective, which posits presences and absences, appearances and realities, or essences, can reveal these constitutive processes: for a one-dimensional or positivistic serniotics, for example, which can only deal in the sheer presences and existent data of segments of commercial and experimental video alike, these two related yet dialectically distinct forms are reduced to cuts and lengths of an identical material to which identical instruments of analysis are then applied. Commercial television is not an autonomous object of study; it can only be grasped for what it is by positioning it dialectically over against that other signifying system which we have called experimental video, or video art. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 222
Categorization
- XREF: The dialectical-positivistic contrast echoes the ‘one-dimensional’ critique from Marcuse that Jameson draws throughout the book against poststructuralist flattening. — connects to: Simulation substitutes signs of the real for the real itself — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 9