Television and embodiment: a speculative essay

Abstract

This essay brings insights from classic scholarship on television (for instance, Raymond Williams) and moving image culture (Vivian Sobchack) into conversation with recent studies of affect to trace how lifestyle programming on Indian television might have recast consumption in contemporary India. In particular, I am concerned with how theories of affect enable us to understand the creation of aspirational subjects in post-liberalization India. I argue that lifestyle programming compels us to go beyond prevalent emphases on ideological interpellation to examine the sensuous knowledges created by television. Extrapolating from my speculations on the synaesthetic and kinaesthetic dimensions of our engagement with these programmes, I posit that television has extended our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and movement such that it is no longer possible to conceive of television (the medium as well as the message) as distinct from sociality and, indeed, from our subjectivities.

Keywords:

• lifestyle television
• affect
• embodiment
• consumption

Notes

1. Williams, Television, 133–4, emphasis in original.

2. This essay is part of a longer project on theorizing television in terms of spatiality, temporality and intimacy.

3. See Juluri, Becoming a Global Audience; Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics; Roy, ‘Live(li)ness and Network Publics in Post-liberalization Indian Popular Films’; Rajagopal, Politics after Television; and Kumar, Gandhi Meets Primetime, for some examples of this work.

4. This article has been inspired by Vivian Sobchack's landmark study of embodiment and the moving image (2004). Her theorization of synaesthesia, embodiment and corporeality has been foundational to my own thinking on these subjects. See, in particular, her conceptualization of the cinesthetic subject, which incorporates two dimensions of the human sensorium, synaesthesia and coenaesthesia (2004, pp. 53–84), and her theorization of ‘interobjectivity’ (2004, pp. 286–318).

5. There has been considerable debate, in policy circles and in academic fora, about the Indian ‘middle classes’ – who they are, whether they can be identified, their significance to the construction of national identity, their role in the reconfiguration of communal politics, their salience in the emergence of new consumer cultures in post-liberalization India and so on. Most of these analyses have centred, justifiably, on the centrality of television to the changing definition and composition of the middle classes. Participating in these debates is outside the scope of this essay: I am less concerned with the middle classes as a sociological formation than with how television produces aspirations which, in turn, might compel us to rethink modalities of class formation.

6. Feminist scholars of media have played a crucial role in foregrounding the role of the senses in our engagement with media, in particular, with cinema. See, for instance, Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts and Williams, Screening Sex.

7. Williams, Television, 133–4, emphasis in original.

8. Ibid., 130.

9. Ibid., 132.

10. Lutz and Lila, Language and the Politics of Emotion.

11. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 27.

12. Ibid., 28, emphasis added.

13. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27.

14. Seigworth and Gregg, ‘Inventory of Shimmers’, 6.

15. In this regard, affect is similar to (but also different from) Raymond Williams’ conception of structure of feeling (1974). I will briefly parse out the difference between affect and structure of feeling later in this essay.

16. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.

17. Clough, ‘Introduction’, 2, my emphasis.

18. See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, for a crucial distinction between the unconscious (as defined by Freud) and the nonconscious.

19. http://goodtimes.ndtv.com/ (accessed May 25, 2011).

20. Hassan, posted on September 28, 2010. http://www.articleslounge.com/live-tv-channels/watch-live-high-streaming-of-ndtv-good-times-tv-channel-online-free/ (accessed May 23, 2011).

21. While this is not an ethnography of how my informants in call centres engaged with television, my analysis is ineluctably shaped by the sharp disjuncture I observed between the abilities of my informants to purchase the commodities that flooded the public spaces of Bangalore and their aspirations to the cosmopolitan lifestyles iconicized by them: most of my informants spent the bulk of their earnings on taking care of family obligations and, contrary to media stereotypes about them, did not have the luxury of squandering their salaries on pubs, fancy restaurants or expensive commodities. It thus was not long before I grasped, with particular poignancy, the gap between their aspirations to live high-end lifestyles and their ability to actually do so.

22. Manalansan and Martin, ‘Cooking Up the Senses’.

23. Dudrah, ‘Haptic Urban Ethnoscapes’.

24. Marks, Skin of the Film.

25. Manalasan, ‘Cooking Up the Senses’, 182.

26. All the comments listed above are from http://goodtimes.ndtv.com/GoodTimesShowCommentsList.aspx?ShowID=7 (accessed May 21, 2011).

27. See Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, and Rajagopal, Politics after Television, for analyses of these policy shifts and their impact on the production of subjectivities and publics, respectively.

28. One might say that the ability of television to interface with the body, to bring the distant and the proximate together in embodied ways, is not unprecedented (see Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, for an analysis of how the moving image reconfigures our perception of space and our ability to move through it). Recall, for instance, the name given to state-run television in India, Doordarshan, which suggests how the distant (door) can be viewed not simply through the simple act of viewing but, following Hindu notions of interactive viewing, through the act of darshan. Darshan, after all, refers to the ways in which the devotee absorbs through his or her gaze blessings from the deity (or, in some cases, the guru): the process of darshan is transformative rather than mechanistic. But to overemphasize darshan would be to exceptionalize Indian television and, hence, exoticize it, and also to reinstate the prevalent overemphasis on the ocular dimensions of media.

29. Clough, ‘Introduction’, 3.

30. See also, Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30.

31. It is important to note that most dictionary definitions of kinaesthesia refer to the experience derived from the sense of moving through space, thus foregrounding not literal movement but the sensation of movement (see also, Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, for a somewhat different conception of spatiality and the moving image).

32. For theories of immaterial and affective labour, see Hardt, ‘Affective Labor’ and Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’. For an analysis of affective and immaterial labour in the call centre industry, see Gupta and Mankekar, ‘Intimate Encounters’.

33. Doval and Ghosh, Financial Express.

34. See Mankekar, ‘Dangerous Desires’, on commodity affect in post-liberalization India.