Television and the Unconscious, Donald Kuspit: An Interview

Abstract

Donald Kuspit proposes that television is a technology that involves a certain self-hypnosis by the viewer. Television is disintegrative if for no other reason than that the image is inherently broken up much like a mosaic. The image we see is only virtually unified; in fact, it consists of a delicate interplay of atomized bits that are not integrated. The unconscious, Kuspit argues, receives or picks up these monads independently of the unifying horizon that makes up the integrity of the virtual television image. Central to this view is the understanding that television exploits a gap between sensing and understanding an image. Particularly in the case of television, the viewer’s libidinal investments are involved, because the image itself has an ersatz unconscious made up of suggestive fragments which are resonating at a level that the eye does not register. Television allows for conditions approximating Freud’s depiction of memory in which objectified experiences are made up of smaller fragments whose logic obeys a different law during sleep, namely, that of "drives" as opposed to that of the "real." Watching television, then, is much like dreaming in that the viewer encounters a free flowing of highly charged semiotic fragments that are libidinally connected. What makes the image hypnotic, however, is that the image as a totalizing field has the authority of the real behind it which directs or dictates something to the viewer to structure unconscious perception. How this dictation from without is inscribed into the narcissitic relation we have with the televised scene was a major point Kuspit elaborated. He certainly makes a very original and profound insight in the study of video.