Switch Image, The: Television Philosophy (Thinking Media)

Television is the most powerful system of images in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Nonetheless, TV has attained only little philosophical attention so far, especially compared to other (visual) media such as film. This book looks at TV as what happens on the screen and beyond it; which is mainly the operation of switching images. It therefore proposes a new definition of TV as the first picture that can be switched on, off, and over, which stresses that TV is more tactile than visual. Through the operation of switching, TV figures the world from within and as the course of its figuration. This is grasped here by the term of “ontography”. Through the ongoing interlacing and bridging of “TV 1.0” (the image is being switched) and “TV 2.0” (the image is a switch), TV exponentially increases the production and circulation of images. It transforms the world and itself from an analogue state to a digital one and from central perspectivism to pluri-perspective. In terms of time, through switching and the switch, it develops and reworks new temporal orderings, such as instantaneity, synchronicity, flow, and seriality. TV makes its own history. In space, it creates a mediasphere as its habitat and hence new forms of being-in-the-world, of proximity and distance, and scale. Anthropologically, it works on what a subject and an object is, on what makes the human being, and ontographically, how it is possible that there is something at all instead of nothing: through switch-images.

Lorenz Engell is Professor of Media Philosophy at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, and co-director of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie. Engell is the author or editor of over 20 titles, all in German.

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (1999) and An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010) and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (2012) and Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (2009). His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, program director of the research group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures, and co-director of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003); Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (with Rosi Braidotti; 2012) and The Neuro-Image (2012). See for articles, her blog, and other information at www.patriciapisters.com.