Television and embodiment: a speculative essay

Abstract

This essay brings insights from classic scholarship on television (for instance, Raymond Williams) and moving image culture (Vivian Sobchack) into conversation with recent studies of affect to trace how lifestyle programming on Indian television might have recast consumption in contemporary India. In particular, I am concerned with how theories of affect enable us to understand the creation of aspirational subjects in post-liberalization India. I argue that lifestyle programming compels us to go beyond prevalent emphases on ideological interpellation to examine the sensuous knowledges created by television. Extrapolating from my speculations on the synaesthetic and kinaesthetic dimensions of our engagement with these programmes, I posit that television has extended our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and movement such that it is no longer possible to conceive of television (the medium as well as the message) as distinct from sociality and, indeed, from our subjectivities.