Week 13 Close Reading: Information, Crisis, Catastrophe

In "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe," Doane argues that the catastrophe, rather than representing a rupture in the continuity of television's stream of images, in fact reflects the very mode of television's operation in its insistence on the immediate, the urgent, and the discontinuous. Catastrophe, acting as a "mirror of television's own functioning," (234) thus activates two poles of TV's claim on the "real": the discontinuous and the continuous, technoscientific failure and unstoppable progess. Doane seems to suggest that catastrophe gestures outside the realm of signification itself, even though television operates on the level of images, sound, and text:

It is this remainder, this residue, which televisual catastrophe exploits. The social fascination of catastrophe rests on the desire to confront the remainder, or to be confronted with that which is in excess of signification. Catastrophe seems to testify to the inertia of the real and television's privileged relation to it. In the production and reproduction of the metonymic chain--the body-catastrophe-death-referentiality--television legitimates its own discourse." (236)

A couple of questions emerge: first, we have encountered over the course of this class, the notion that "states of exception" to a norm in fact aid in the production and reproduction of certain assemblages of knowledge-power and discourses, for instance the concentration camp in the context of biopolitical logics underlying racism. How does catastrophe legitimate television? On page 238, Doane claims, "If information becomes a commodity on the brink of its existence or loss, televisual catastrophe magnifies that death many times over." What is the function of maintaining the apparatus of television on the brink of existence? Stated differently, how does maintaining death as the limit of technology and signification help underpin particular modes of representation?

Another series of questions also come to mind: in what ways has this notion of the limit of signification emerged in this class? I'm thinking now of Foucault's argument regarding ethnology and psychoanalysis, which he argues attempt to leap over representation. In this case, Doane is discussing the limits of signification in the context of "referentiality" within television's economies of meaning. In what ways does Doane's critique resemble Shukin's attempt to locate the animal within the material and symbolic mechanics of capital? How does Doane's argument regarding the limit of death as the ultimate point of referentiality articulate with the other readings this week on biopolitics?