| This dissertation is an attempt to develop an interdisciplinary model for investigating the history of technology using philosophically-informed, sociological methods. Its central hypothesis is that television is—a multiplicity of particular conceptualizations of time and space—‘scannable space’ and ‘relay-instantaneous time’—arising from historical intersections of culture and science occurring prior to 1955. Using Michel Foucault's historical methods, such as archeology and genealogy, along with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of difference and his concepts of time-image and movement-image, this dissertation explores the historical emergence of television as a political physics and cultural place.; My dissertation proceeds by dislodging the history of television technology from strictly progressivist and materialist narratives, tracing instead the invention of television time and space to a 1843 method of telegraphic transmission utilizing the presentational, rather than the representational, principle of electricity. The dissertation then examines the political reasons for presentational electricity's initial non-necessity and the events such as the Titanic tragedy and World War I's submarine warfare, that transformed scannable space and relay-instantaneous time into ideological necessities. Next, the dissertation turns to the non-scientific and cultural determinations, such as the 1919 formation of the RCA and the codification of radio between 1922 and 1932, that imbued television time and space with scientific status and organized presentational electricity into a scientific domain. Rather than a strict adherence to the scientific method, the dissertation finds the legal inscriptions arising from the Farnsworth/Zworykin patent battle during the 1930s and long-standing industry conflicts over authority and discourse responsible for television's technological definition and transmission standard.; Lastly the dissertation investigates how television's political physics emerged as cultural place for watchers. Although initially experienced through the predictable temporal lens of movement-images, specific historical events, like the coverage of the Kathy Fiscus tragedy, the Kefauver hearings and the Army-McCarthy hearings, introduced time-images to television watching. With their co-presence between ‘event-happening’ and ‘event watching’ these events and their corresponding time-images granted television watching partial legitimacy as a cultural place.; In all, this dissertation and the history it excavates presents television time and space as a long standing critique of representation and identity as universal tropes of experience. |
