Terminal Holding
Patterns (Flight 101 Is Indefinitely Delayed)


Whether one consults the annals of the annuals of the world, or supplements uncertain chronicles with philosophical inquiries, one will not find an origin of human knowledge that corresponds to the idea one would like to hold regarding it. Astronomy was born of superstition; Eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, lying; Geometry of avarice; Physics of vain curiosity; all of them, even Ethics of human pride.

The science and arts thus owe their birth to our vices: We should be less in doubt regarding their advantage if they owed it to our virtues.

- Jean Jacques Rousseau, part 2 of the First Discourse, 1750

Nearly two hundred and fifty years down the unlinear line that passes for history, the doubts leveled by Rousseau regarding the origins of knowledge – its genesis and promulgation within the arts and science – remain as pressing now as they did then. Nowhere, perhaps, is such doubt both more in evidence and less proclaimed than on America's TV channel 18, a form of television edification that goes under the name of the Discovery Channel. Spilling from the barium light of the postmodern hearth into the living rooms and living arrangements of those who, like myself, have come to favor the easythetics of passivism over the rigors of travel, "nature television," the TV vérité of the 1990s, has become the gesamtkunstwerk from which the annals of our world are laid bare. Responding to the outside world seen in interior light, we find a new form of indoor anthropology, in which both science and art, nature and aesthetics are fused in the particular nonspace that television's focus has claimed as its own. Within this improbable architecture, the art of distance and the technology of proximity have combined to produce a spatial alloy, the measure perhaps, not just of our times but of the vices out of which such times are born.

The Discovery Channel has during the last ten years entered eighty million homes via the cable network to become a global enterprise, a name as the press release would have it "synonymous with informative television entertainment worldwide." In many ways, what Discovery does on the tube in what National Geographic once did in print. As well as catering to a taste for the forbidden – thongless Masai and topless Amazons did for the pipe-and-slippers crowd what nature's tech-war does for the current demographic – it provides a complete cosmology, a world that moves seamlessly from the paleo to the neo, from The Great White Shark to Submarines: Sharks of Steel, from the ethnology of blowpipes and nose rings in People of the Rain Forest, to that of F14s and epaulets in Carrier: Fortress at Sea. It has, in other words, become a part of the solid furniture of television life. And for those whose calendars permit, its particular brand of nonfiction infotainment, from which hard-core nature programming is nevermore than an hour or so away, has become the roughage in a televised diet made macrobiotic by endless afternoons og human plight – incest, child abuse, family meltdown – of Ricki, Maury, or Jenny.01

As furnishing for global living rooms, the Discovery Channel has more in common with airport architecture than with its domestic domicile, for it models a nonspace, a duty-free ecology and discounted state of mind. Like the holding patterns between customs and immigration, it devotes itself only to the curious pleasures of detachment and delay. A form of home-flight entertainment, tele-nature is both state without a place and place without a state. Hitting Channel 18 on the remote offers pleasures similar to those of passing through ticket check and immigration. In both cases we check in to relieve ourselves of the encumbrances of baggage and identity. Assigned flight and seat numbers, we can relax, confident that within their combined vectors is held the covenant of travel. Enfolded within this promise of future space, we become sedentary tourists expectant of the mobility of flight but confined to the departure hall, the first-class spaces and satellite lounges of "Admirals," "Connoisseurs," and "Ambassadors": places where status is the mere promise of state, the empty reassurance of the name. Held within their archaic nomenclature, the fear of nonspace finds club comfort in the invocation of the old state(rooms), and social hierarchies now left behind. As the security checks, inspections, and continual surveillance remind us, the nonspace of the airport, like tele-nature, is a no-man's-land where violence, once unstated, becomes pure terror: the omnipresence of threat. Everywhere and nowhere, these are global spaces whose logic, once detached from the spatial landscape of calculation, belongs only to such a figure of excess. In common with ethnology and the human sciences, of which "interest" programs provide an accurate if none too rarefied barometer, nature television also predisposes its audience as direct witness to present actuality. Nature, which like human behavior is beyond the reach of normal life, eludes everything but television's long-armed grasp. But the elsewhere that it describes-the wide open plains, untamed savannas, submarine landscapes, and other cruel spaces-has joined the specular might of an equatorial culture devoid of meridians, an arena not unlike the talk-show floor or airport lounge, where actuality is without time or place. Like the underdeveloped colonial territories once favored by ethnological and anthropological research, this is a space from which we harvest not a sense of distance but of the civilized near.

And to the swelling audience of recumbent travelers, Discovery's nature programming preys upon a delicious and cataplexic fear. With no place to run and no place to hide, our paralysis would appear no different from that of the victims of nature's mortal indifference. Transfixed by natures pixilated enactment of its own death, we rehearse its bit parts like speechless extras whose cues have been long since missed. For here nature itself has achieved the status of nonplace, a place of memory and wordless communication. Sheathed only in the uncertain pleasures of our own solitude it has become a place of anthropological silence. Formally, these hour-long armchair missions into a dark Other-where Africa is still the "Cradle of Legends," the Nile still "River of the Gods"-pay homage to the nineteenth century belief in the explorative character of travel, to an era tuned to the metaphorical resonance of the remote. This was a time when nature and culture were still divided over the unknown of passage. Unbounded by the guardians of travel, the old parentheses of excursion and return, our journeys of discovery never leave nature's departure lounge. Like latter-day Marlows, we strain upriver, searching for the equivalent of Kurtz's Inner Station, the remnants of some colonial "mission," a heart of darkness beating perhaps to the rhythm of the Other and suspected to be absent from the postmodernized soul. But the savagery that for Conrad, writing at the beginning of an era, came in the breath of existential epiphany -"The horror! The horror!"- is now, at the end of that era, delivered simply as horror. Where Marlow's journey of realization fills the jungle with the cadenced but relentless crescendo of the pounding drums, and is echoed in the throb of language propelling novel and protagonist toward the figure of Kurtz, ours takes place in the narrative silence of pure scopic revelation. The flower of European civilization ("all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz"), exemplar of enlightenment, the figure of benign colonialism, like that of disinterested science, has abandoned himself to … certain practices.

Today we trade not in the ivory of animals but of vision. Colonized and harvested in the name of science it is nonetheless distributed in the name of something else-something less to do with the epic confrontation of civilization with its unlawful or repressed desires than with the sheer thrill of vicarious and uncommitted travel. And. so we find that against nature's magnificent backdrop our televised journey leads from serenity to sanguinity. Violence flares like our match in the dark. Illuminating nothing more than a fascination with an aestheticized and indifferent terror, nature television broadens the narrow thread of Conrad's mythic river into leisureways opening no longer onto the Africa of the soul but into Floridas of the mind.

Other elements of a fundamentally nineteenth-century vision, seemingly at odds with postmodernity's amphitheater of the wild, also survive in entropic form. Nature, according to the nineteenth-century romantics, offered the sublime reassurance of a monotheism, evoked in the work of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, not as object but as subject of our contemplation. Soaked in allegory, the natural world merely provided the backdrop against which the imagination tested its loneliness and ultimately found reassurance in the existence of presences larger than itself. In this sense the camera that lingers on the dried-up water holes of the Serengeti is little different from the gaze that fixes Friedrich's architectural ruins-albeit that one is cast as a necropolis to natural ruination, the other to the demise of civilization.

An emblematic painting from c. 1818 entitled Wanderer above the Sea of Fog depicts a man perched on a craggy pinnacle, his torso twisted, a wild mop of red hair confronting the viewer. Although his body faces us we see only the back of his head; an exaggerated contrapposto forces our gaze to follow his, into the interior space that is his mind and our image. Staring at this enigmatic character swathed in mist, we wait for him to turn around, to reveal in his features those of the landscape beyond. But the autonomy of the pictorial space is never broken; our gaze never met. The solitary figure addresses nature as if it were nonplace, a space of suspended identity where travel deprived of movement becomes a region into which the gaze can pass but the body can never follow. Like the figure, the image itself becomes a description of this suspension between interior and exterior spaces, the thrust of the body and the turn of the mind.

The proscenial membrane that divides the seen from the being seen is never punctured. In Friedrich's remarkable painting, the spectator (perhaps for the first time) is cast as nothing other than his own spectacle. Confronted by the forces of nature he strikes a pose, and in doing so derives from his awareness of this a rare and sometimes melancholic pleasure. Whether attached directly to its chothonic powers or indirectly to a philosophy of nature-from which God, the infinite, appeared as the vast diffuse presence behind the screen of natural facts-the romantic conception of the universe still hovers around the fringes of our understanding, framed as it is between the polarities of nature and culture, of seeing and being seen. But the nature that was once asked to model God must now do the same thing for science. And in part, the attraction of such programming belongs precisely to the fact that what we are watching is not the revelation of the Other but of a technological deity that pours distance into proximity, and in doing so transforms space into nonspace, travel into aesthetics.

Hitchcock, master of the psychoplastic landscape, once made the claim that movies are first of all armchairs, with spectators inside. Now nature models the same dictum, as it has become composed around the recumbent gaze. The real estate of the moving image, once called the cinema, now answers to the name of the natural world. And just as Friedrich's romantic version of the sublime, or Conrad's horror, suggested in different ways the inescapable and omnipresent powers of forces beyond our control, so our distant close-up of the wild reinvests in nature a content betrayed by its domesticated setting and contemporized form.

Like those of Friedrich's wanderer, our own travels are designed never to break the proscenial divide separating the here from the elsewhere, the acculturated vision from its raw otherness. The question lying at the heart of television's Oedipal triangle-the familial alliance of science, art, and technology-as to whether we represent the construction or construct the representation is thus conjured only in spectacular muteness. For nature itself has become a "surd area," a fringe or backwater region where logic has been suspended. A psychic space like that of the airport waiting lounge, it demands only that we focus upon our detachment from purpose, suspended as if in contemplative quarantine.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the compass of the natural world, beamed as it is from satellites and nature banks, is not dissimilar from that of the shopping mall, the cineplex, the transit lounge-those spaces that Marc Augé identifies as characteristic of supermodernity." Framed within the handsome and hardworking velour of the aircraft passenger seat, the Discovery Channel has joined its pool of video liquidity to become literally incorporated in the seat of travel. Here the experience of tourism is played out in parallel time. The promise of destination withheld, it is delivered as a metaspace, which like roads in America, the twinned towns in Europe, and the celestial bodies of outer space is now given meaning only through adoption. (Bruce Willis's potholed section of the Long Island Expressway, it might be noted, compares less favorably with Dolly Parton's section of the same highway which in turn looks bleak when compared with my goddaughter's adopted star.) Orphaned within a sky without horizons, we adopt nature and the science that promises its delivery not in order to celebrate and understand, but to make of it a celebrity: to transform us as road users, star gazers, and vicarious travelers into pioneers of scarcity. Like the luxury goods of the duty-free halls, the travails of nature are offered as the exotic fruit of the traveler's suspended identity. For airport-style nonspace is no longer the reserve of waiting room, the space-time of infinitely protracted delay-its very architecture is now at one with the soft-furnishing of our immobility.

Fangs, a thirteen-part series of natural predatory dramas played out in anthropomorphized form, does for nature what The Good, the Bad and the Ugly did for Clint Eastwood and Westerns. The titles-"Forest of Fear," "Natures Gangsters," "Teeth of Death," "Silent Savage"- titillate with the possibility of gore and phobic association. A bright shaft of sunlight illuminates a tarantula as it sidles in for the kill. Close-ups of impossible detail linger in the repulsive landscape of its arachnoid otherness while a voice of sonorous authority (always a man's voice because the ego-ideal of these programs is invariably masculine) prepares us as witnesses to a convulsive, poisonous death with soothing talk of natural systems and eco-hierarchies. In another episode we might find ourselves face-to-face with a lion as it strains at the pulmonaries of an unfortunate wildebeest, still alive and kicking. It is not exactly the stuff of the Lion King. But then again it's not exactly not. For animal fables permeate Discovery's natural soaps as much as they do the saccharine landscapes of its computer-animated cousins. As Jerry Seinfeld has unwittingly noted, human nature as much as the laws of nature is inevitably the issue at stake: "I always love how one animal is star each week. And you want him to kill whatever he is trying to kill because you're on his side. If it's the lion, you want him to get that boar. The next week it's about boars. Now you're hoping that the boar gets away from the lion. Your loyalty is always so fickle."03 Survival in the gladiatorial world of snuff-nature is thus a fight less for life than for the capriciousness of our attention. The commentary, by continually invoking foundation narratives of war and flight, naturalizes the bloodfest with appeals to crude Darwinism as the final arbiter of territorial claim. But the theaters of aggression owe less to the evolutionary descent of man, or for that matter the primitivizing grandeur of Rousseau's noble savagery, than to a concept far more contemporary in its realization: that of total (ratings) war.

"There is a bloody, brave little animal in Africa called the honey badger," entices the introduction to "Meanest Animal in the World?" "It kills for malice and sport. It does not go for the jugular, it goes for the groin." Teasing us with the promise of hard-core badger porn, the narration backtracks into the decorum and furry atmosphere of a family channel, with the hastily added proviso that these are the words of an American naturalist whose behavioral assessments belonged to an era before the long lens of tele-objectivity. The program focuses on the strange and apparently one-sided relationship between the honey badger and the goshawk. The bird, an opportunist scavenger, hangs out watching and waiting for those rare moments when its unwitting partner, the "four-legged digging and killing machine" fails to capture its prey-usually small mice, citizen soldiers of the savanna living under the constant administration of its fear. In many ways our own relationship to the shortsighted badger is similar to that of the hawkeyed hawk. The camera tracks the badger as if from the point of view of the hawk-from high overhead, swooping in at the first sign of action. It is the ideal vantage point, not only because it combines the effects of movement and distance but because it recognizes that just as the tele-journey has taken over from the grand tour so the zoom has taken over from the walk, the establishing pan from the panorama. The goshawk young observes the badger "without really knowing why," since it has yet to learn of the "special relationship between bird and beast." And like it, we fixate on nonfiction badger entertainment and the amphitheater of the wild from a similarly Kantian perch. For disinterested interest is precisely the attention that these programs demand-transforming as they do the science of understanding into the aesthetics of proximity.

The facts of badger life, or their appearance within narratives of change and evolution, would once (when gathered together and refined in sufficient number) have taken the observer, via a sort of brute-force inductivism, to grand theories capable of unifying and explaining the natural world. But the very attraction of this type of programming belongs largely to the fact that it tells us nothing of nature. The ultimate tale of progress, the motor of scientific advance, may have been empirical discovery, but the hyperstasis of pseudoscience is just pure Discovery.

We swim, burrow, and fly as if in a delirium of technology, our own impassivity ensnared by the simultaneous thrill of proximity and the promise of distance. Our desires actualized in visual pleasure-in the hallucination of detail and voyeurism of exactitude-we see less of the natural world than of the perceptual possibilities that it is asked to model. The play of appearances that once sustained the narratives of scientific and behavioral understanding are thus all but dissolved in the revelation of the technical apparatus. Stalking the planet with the technologies of enhanced vision, Discovery returns from its long, distant probes taking hostages of the natural world, at once acculturated by the technology that brings them into being and "naturalized" by the distance that separates us from them. It asks us not that we return to the scientific tenancy of the Enlightenment and narrate the order of things in the noise of knowledge but in the silent and familiar cocoon of recognition.

The nature of space and the space of nature have, since the nineteenth century and before, formed the two sides of a Mobian strip known as pictorial practice. We follow one side-perhaps the nature of the space of travel and the architecture of its holding patterns-only to find that it has become the other and vice versa. Warching television may not have been what Rousseau had in mind when he spoke of our "consultation with the annals of the world," but in it can be found an aesthetics of space as deeply indebted to our vices as it has been presumed to have been born of (pseudoscientific) virtue. Superstition, hatred, flattery, avarice, vain curiosity, and human pride are now perhaps the real players in that placeless space in which the illusion of the far away has been reinvented through the medium of nature's merciless travails. But while a social anthropologist might attempt to claim that nature constituted as infotainment brings with it the suggestion of weakness in our own society's capacity for symbolization-a weakness that finds its compensation in the TV veldt of violent struggle enacted over symbolic dominion, rules of alliance, lineage, and inheritance-such claims suggest precisely the correspondence between the origin of knowledge and the ideas one would like to hold regarding it against which we have been duly warned.

Approaching the end of the twentieth century, we might add to Rousseau's litany a further proposition: that nature is born of aesthetics-an aesthetics of proximity from which distance has beaten a retreat to the call of the wild. The mere description of a vanishing land, like that of the endangered species, might seem sufficient to evoke the sedentary naturalist straining to see it. But in this hypothetical distance, into which technology's trespass leads our gaze, we find only our own anticipated image, a headspace from which we retrieve a partial identity at the flick of the button, the stab of the remote control. Subjected to this gentle form of possession, we surrender ourselves with more or less talent and conviction to the passive joys of identity loss, a moment of romanticized solitude not dissimilar to that of Friedrich's wanderer or Nietzsche's last man, the narcoleptic moment when we face the mirror of our own endangerment: the spatial extinction of a world forever at home but always in flight.

Notes:
01. Ricki Lake, Maury Povich, and Jenny Jones are the hosts of eponymous talk shows.
02. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).
03. Jerry Seinfeld is the creator and star of Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms on American television in recent years. He is quoted here from a press release provided by the Discovery Channel.

The original version of the article, Natures Mosh Pit: Fear and Proximity in the Discovery Channel, was published in Parkett 45 (December 1995), in collaboration with Matthew Barney, Sarah Lucas and Roman Signer.





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