Jameson’s Complaint Video-Art and the Intertextual "Time-Wall"

Abstract

Frederic Jameson has argued that television is entirely superficial and flat; hence, it is incapable of haunting the mind by leaving afterimages or traces. Jameson calls this a "structural exclusion of memory" endemic to the medium of video. He also has reservations about what Raymond Williams called the "total flow" of broadcast television: whereas "programming" cuts up the flow into convenient temporal segments, Jameson’s complaint is that one no longer has any "form" which can be objectivized or set apart as something particular to be remembered. Television, in short, is too close to an ordinary mode of perception in which everything is experienced as the succession of fleeting moments. This means that television is connotative rather than denotative—impressionistic rather that objective. Television reduces everything to a flow and in so doing effaces difference, whereas art can arrest or disrupt the ongoing temporality of moment-to-moment experience. In critiquing Jameson, Zurbrugg argues that video art encourages self-analysis and allows for a critical examination of culture. Video art is polemical in that it creates strategies whereby the viewer is disoriented and required to think about his or her own processes of perception and cognition. That postmodernism offers exciting new discursive spaces is central to Zurbrugg’s outlook and contrasts with the gloomy pessimism of Jameson.