June 2011
Hisamitsu Mizushima / kenji Nishi / Hitoshi Sakurai
“It’s mere present”—coexisting with time has been the raison d'etre of television. But now television is about to enter an age of full-digitization where a new principle of order shall be introduced in a manner to relativize time, on which it used to rely so much.
Let’s say this requires us to think from a perspective of “data.” One would realize a time-free, space-free mode that supports “data” (digitization) is already voraciously eating away the framework of a system called television both from inside and outside. TV programs are becoming something which is recorded seamlessly or retrieved on demand while the warp and woof of programming is coming apart, fleeing from the closed circuit between transmission and viewing, which allows programs transform themselves into independent “content.”
The new principle of order will probably not protect television’s self-consciousness that tries to be itself. Television’s commitment to serve as a system that “undertakes publicness” was nothing but a representation of its self-consciousness. But television has come this far without fully examining its nature. What kind of process has it gone through before reaching “here”?
If TV archives face up to its existence, it will give us a clue to this question. However, archives do not speak for themselves in terms of its invitation to the broadcasts’ historical depiction. As the word “archive,” a synonym of archeology, shows, time and space are embedded in them. The word also explains a difference between archives and “data base” or “library,” terms for a physical mode meaning “storage of information.” Consequently, the value of broadcasting archives goes far beyond mere support for storage, classification, selection, or use.
Archives as a whole make up “layers of programs,” or layers of present. As television inevitably accompanies technologies in the entire process, archives also exist within the chain, and “taking out” something from there also happens in the same circuit. The TV system has constantly translated time into space, and search has been utterly dependent on its characteristics. Storage of materials useful for program production was the initial function of TV archives, which started accumulating their own footprints as the self-consciousness of TV broadcasting grew, and now, digitization is forcing us to review, or “initialize,” the ideal status of archives.
This paper is not about a “study on TV programs using archives.” Rather, it shows we are standing at the threshold of an attempt of “studying archives with layers of TV programs.” The layers enable us to visualize the synergy and cancellation, or correlation, between parts (programs) and the whole (broadcasting), which make us find a principle of reviewing the vanishing existence of what we call broadcasting, in other word what kind of procedure (“what” and “how” does it do”) would constitute “broadcasting”—that is our present hypothesis. Since this is a hypothesis, at the current stage our approach will not go beyond finding clues. Rather, since the subject itself is a product of time, or history, research on archives allows us to get to the core only asymptotically as we always trail preceding changes. However, one should not forget that “findings of research” are also texts, which will make up an archive when they are accumulated. Contraposition of different archives may open up a possibility of forming a new type of “research on television.” This paper is an attempt to take a detour to find a new concept of “public sphere.”