Morse’s essay grapples with unpacking postwar America’s cultural and economic state of affairs through exploring the material and symbolic functions and presence of the “everyday” trip down the freeway, visit to the mall, and engagements with TV. Because I found Morse’s writing style extremely difficult—as if the sentences and paragraphs kept trying to escape whatever loose grip my brain had on them—, I had to formulate guiding questions that would help anchor me in essay’s argument and its stakes , or at least what I imagined to be the essay’s underlying argumentative questions:
“If freeways, malls, and TV are seemingly ‘everywhere,’ then what does that say about how postwar America / “late capitalist” America is configured? Whether its culturally, politically, or economically arranged? How does one account for an TV thing in almost every American household, yet account for the symbolic and cultural weight associated with each of those ‘things’”?
Distraction, then, becomes the essay’s operative means of pinning down how these three discrete things are everywhere, yet necessarily “must mean something”—something specific that eludes its basic material functions and immediate local spaces. That is, for Morse, “distraction” comes with a recognition of: 1) physically driving on the freeway, but perhaps conceptualizing the freeway as not a space in and of itself, but something ephemeral connecting different spaces, i.e. a necessary evil 2) the mall’s arrangement of retail stores and its logic of consumerism or sense of urban participation 3) TV’s being virtually everywhere, yet what do we make of that “everywhere-ness”? Or as Morse put it more neatly: “the process of displacement is a prelude to condensation.” (197) If displacement can be summed up as: “Oh look, TV’s are everywhere.”, then condensation might follow as: “Oh shit, TV’s are everywhere.”
I appreciated Morse’s essay emphasizing the “metapsychological effects associated with” mobile privatization and exploring the other consequences of mobile privatization, and not necessarily the economic and political consequences of that phenomenon as Williams examined. I’m curious as to the essay’s own contribution towards TV scholarship and broader affect studies. But for me, it seems that the essay seems to lay out some of the frameworks in thinking about the affective implications and consequences for the TV viewer. Morse writes that the “mental life on the freeway, in the marketplace, and at home is linked to very real consequences for life, limb, and pocketbook, it requires vigilance while it also allows for and even promotes automatisms and ‘spacing out’.” (203)
Tianhui made a great point in framing Morse’s nonspace with Lefebvre’s categories of different spaces and how minoritized subjectivities have different mobilities and experiences in these “passages and thresholds…of nearness and distance within an unanchored situation.” (207) To borrow Morse’s phrasing: what TV viewer is “nearer” to the imagined TV viewer in the essay? How might we account for these nuances? Maybe the essay leaves it up to others (us) to fill in these “nonspaces” with those varied subjectivities and agencies.
Funnily enough, I read the essay (or gave it my best effort) throughout my bus commutes to and from school. Having taken public transportation for as long as I can remember, I find a kind of peace and space of meditative contemplation throughout these trips. Because we were asked to pay attention to “screens” since last week, I become self-conscious of any layer of glass, and realized how much glass stuff I pass by during my bus commutes. I literally saw glass shatter as a branch fell onto a parked car during one of my commutes. Trying to make the most of that (un)fortunate event, I tried to think of the bus space, glass windows, and the glass shattering through the ways in which the essay might want us to think about TV. If the physical configuration of the bus allows the commuter to view the outside world as it rolls by, the same windows and “bus walls” occlude me from that realm and a physiological connection to the world. The relationship, then, becomes mediated, or metaphysiological as Morse’s essay lays out. I know the outside world is there, I know the glass broke, but those are fleeting moments—physically and emotionally, to different degrees—and that constant displacement lends itself to those states or modes of distraction. That is, how the world seems to be “outside” in the first place. The anecdote leads me to the essay’s strategy for change within TV’s “realm of privatization” in the hands of corporations and other repressive structures of power, in which change starts from the “excluded outsiders” of TV representation/production puncturing/penetrating/shattering the enclosed worlds of TV/Malls/Freeways(?) and being given the means to represent and speak for themselves. But I find myself more compelled by how the essay directs our attention towards feelings of disorientation, endlessness, and other registers of temporal experience. How does Morse's description of the "everyday" stack up to our/my contemporary everyday, as it relates to "TV" or the idea of TV as routine?
Hopefully, I’ll stop thinking about this essay too muchduring my bus commutes sooner than later.
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