Figures of Time: Preemptive Narratives in Recent Television Series.

摘要

This thesis examines complex narrative temporalities in the recent television series Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007), Flashforward (ABC, 2009-2010), and Damages (FX/Audience Network, 2007-2012). The general argument proposes that the renewed technics of television have enabled innovative aesthetic standards and temporal experiences in serial TV fiction. It is subsequently shown that these new aesthetic and experiential qualities of TV fiction are correlative to an increased political and ethical relevance of time. This overall argument is laid out in four major steps.;The project first addresses the technics of recent television to show how new technologies have enabled new techniques of experiencing television. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as the media theories of Matthew Fuller, Thomas Lamarre, and Jussi Parikka, the complex and productive linkages between technology and techniques will be theorized as an abstract machine which I call the serial machine .;The argument then draws on theories of perception and nonrepresentational approaches to art in order to analyze the new qualities of aesthetic experience in serial TV fiction. For this purpose, I develop the central concept of the figure of time understood as the directly felt abstract shape effectuated by a narrative's movement through time.;It will be seen, in a third step, that the figural movements discussed in this thesis concern questions of future-orientation and preemption. All of the narratives in this project anticipate their own ending and take form with respect to this foretold future. They are therefore conceptualized as "preemptive narratives," in which the future poses an affective rather than epistemological problem. I will show that, in the serial narratives under discussion, the preemptive loop through the future is immediately ontogenetic in that it creates a reality in the present by inducing uncertainty and fear of the future.;Finally, the thesis proposes that such affective politics are an element of what Gilles Deleuze calls control societies, in which conditions of life are constantly modulated. Following his writings on control societies and Spinoza's Ethics, it is argued that the requirements of such a modulatory environment are ethical in nature (rather than moral). Drawing on the work by artists-philosophers Madeline Gins and Arakawa, I elaborate the techniques of attention which sustain an ethics for surviving the control society in the TV series Damages .