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on the state of American television

el’ or a ‘tragedy’–tends to appear as the always singular displacement or translation of other media. The “epic theater” of Brecht, for instance, is interpreted by Benjamin as the staging of what he calls –or rather, cites as–“the citability of gesture.” Citability, usually associated with language and in particular with written texts, parts with this medium in order to enter into relation with ‘gesture,’ involving a bodily movement that points away from where it is situated. Whether or not this movement is consummated depends not on itself but on others: audience, readers, or interpreters. Benjamin’s -abilities always involve such an appeal to transformative reinscription on the part of those others who are its destined addressees. It is no accident that old and new media converge in Benjamin’s discussion of Brecht’s theater. Theater spans the gap between old and new media, between “cult” and “exhibition value,” as Benjamin calls it in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.” For the great resource of theater, old as well as new, is, according to Benjamin, that of “exposing the present” (Exponierung des Anwesenden). And it is such exposure, in which all enclosure becomes unhinged, that marks Benjamin’s theory of media no less than the mediality of his writing, which is always exposing the established sense of the words it uses by turning them inside-out. This is obviously a very different conception of ‘medium’ and of ‘mediality’ than those that are familiar to many today. But to the extent that they provide an alternative scheme for approaching the instability of representations in the audiovisual media, they will hopefully prove useful for a reconsideration of those media, including the uses to which they are generally put. It elects presidents. It wins wars. It is both a mirror and an engine of our culture. Television is, undeniably, an extremely influential force in our country. And television viewing has never been more a part of our lives. Last year, Nielsen Media Research reported that during the 2004–2005 season, the average U.S. household tuned in for eight hours and eleven minutes per day. This is 2.7 percent higher than the previous season, 12.5 percent higher than ten years ago, and the highest levels since Nielsen Media Research began measuring television viewing in the 1950s. However, instability, invention, and revision are now at work in every aspect of the medium–from content to viewer-