Television and ontology
7
located patterns of daily life. Money, air travel, media content are all, in their
various ways, trusted. They only work, of course, because they are trusted.
Giddens’ argument is that we have learnt (as it were) to ‘trust from a distance’
as a result of our earliest
experiences of childhood, but that our capacity to do
so is constantly vulnerable to threat, a threat that is increasingly derived not
from natural hazard but from socially created risk. Giddens also suggests that
our confidence in these new ‘abstract’ and attenuated trust mechanisms is ‘not
for the most part psychologically satisfying’ (Giddens, 1989, 279).
Giddens’ model of the experienced social world consists, therefore, in a
dialectic of space and time, presence and absence, and in the routines that emerge
and are sustained in order to hold the various elements of the dialectic together;
routines that exist to protect individuals and collectivities from unmanageable
anxieties,
anxieties that accompany, indeed that define, situations of crisis.
In offering his account of the links between unconscious processes, conscious
actions and the sustainable routines of everyday life, Giddens draws on a wide
range of social and psychoanalytic theory. A number of comments are in order.
The first is that it is perfectly possible to read him as offering a model of social
life which is over-ordered, over-rational, and paradoxically over-threatened. There
is some justification for each of these readings. His model of the social is of a
routinised, defended social order. His model of the unconscious is one in which
reason triumphs over the complex and irresolvable conflicts of the psyche. His
model of modern society is one in which the level of
risk and uncertainty is an
ever-present and palpable threat. His judgement of the fragility of ontological
security in conditions of modernity as compared to the pre-modern seems
exaggerated. His evaluation of the quality of contemporary life seems
contradictory and scarcely justified. Yet each of these objections, while partially
true, should not be allowed to mask what I think is the value of his theory—at
least for the purposes at hand—which is to provide the beginnings of an analytic
rather than a descriptive account of the structure of everyday life.
Of course, the world as we and others experience it will not match point by
point Giddens’ characterisation of it. Actually we do often live, as he himself
acknowledges (1984, 50), in a world of broken patterns,
non-rational or
duplicitous actions, irresolvable conflicts and unpredictable events—in liminal
as well as in secure environments. Yet those of us who do manage (or manage
for much of the time) the challenges and risks of everyday life do so because
we have, as individuals and as members of social groups, the resources—our
senses of trust and security—which are grounded in our experiences of
predictable routines in space and time.
The irony of Giddens’ position, of course, is that he only belatedly considers
the media as significant factors in creating modernity (Giddens, 1991, 23–7)
and equally is only just beginning to recognise the relevance of his theory to an
understanding of the media. This will be my concern and I want to pursue it by
considering and extending two aspects of his argument in a little more detail.
8
Television
and Everyday Life
My argument will go in two directions. The first is backwards, as it were,
towards the psychodynamic conditions for the establishment of a basic sense
of trust in the developing infant. But in considering the circumstances of these
early years I expect to widen Giddens’ perspective by considering not only the
development of ontological security in the experience of basic trust, but also
the development of a sense of the symbolic which can be seen to accompany
it. I shall suggest that in the theories of the English psychoanalyst,
D.W.Winnicott, and indeed within that body of psychoanalytic thought known
as
object relations theory, there lies the seed of a potentially powerful
explanation for the space that television occupies in culture and in the
individual’s psyche.
The other direction is also one marked by Giddens, but this time one that,
although substantially developed in his analysis of the patterned constraints of
everyday life, still fails to reach the crucial significance of the media and
television for everyday life under conditions of modernity. This concerns the
central role of routine in everyday life; habit, seriality, framing, and of course
the media’s role in defining and sustaining these routines.
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