Core Response #2_Ann

I think Margaret Morse article, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: the Freeway, the Mall, and Television”, is such an enlightening piece to read during this specific time of the course. To me, Morse piece is not only a good comparative piece to read alongside the article, “Domesticity at War” by Beatriz Colomina, but also a great reference back to our discussion two weeks ago on the idea of TV as a culture forum. To be completely honest, I find Colomina’s piece rather meandering and it is a little bit difficult to pinpoint her argument at first. However, after reading Morse’s piece, Colomina’s idea of “the popular privatization and commodification of the exterior” and her examples spanning from architecture to public art pieces start to become more lucid (Colomina, 10). In some ways, Morse and Colomina are both paying attention to the interiorization of the exterior and how technology, politics, and economy have changed the private life and cognition of the modern people. Colomina, of course, is focusing on the definition of “screen” and “window” in relation to both television and architecture, while Morse is more interested in the ontological questions of modern “non-space” that exists as a result of the suburbanization and technological developments in the US (Morse, 196). 

Other than elucidating Colomina’s piece better, Morse’s writing also speaks to an important aspect we examined last week in the discussion of television and female role in domestic life. Instead of focusing on television contents like Modleski or Mellencamp did in their essays, Morse, although she did not explicitly point it out, is more interested in the ontology of television in relation to other “derealized” space like freeway and mall and how that ontology may affect people’s (including women’s) life. She poignantly points out the connection between these three non-spaces: 

The mall is a displacement and the enclosure of the walkable street and a collective site in which to cash in the promises of the commodities seen on television. The freeway is the manifestation of personal mobility at its most literal, its radius a lifeline that makes the consumption style of suburban living and shopping economically feasible as well as logistically possible” (Morse, 210). 

Reading this, I can’t help but think of how may this interconnectedness between television, freeway, and mall affect women—especially housewives—working in the domestic space. Using Morse’s argument, the television set has already turned the domestic space into an exterior space, and the freeway and the mall are both outside the reality. With that in mind, I wonder if women are completely placed outside of reality by staying at home with the television set, and by going to the mall through the freeway without arriving at other destinations? If these three non-spaces are the ones that women most often visit, then whether women are confined in a modern trap of technology and privatized mobility is a question I do not have an answer to yet. 

The last thing I want to mention is Morse’s theorization of the “privatized mobility”, and when she mentions the potential methods to “open the television apparatus out into the public world” (213). Morse writes in the conclusion, “the privileged sites of subjectivity on television are those allotted first to the enunciation of televisual utterances and the interests those utterances serve; and second to those subjects in passage represented in the utterance, shifting between a relation to the viewer and relations to embedded object-worlds” (214). This passage complicates our discussion on Newcomb and Hirsch’s “Television as Cultural Forum”. I don’t think Morse is as optimistic as Newcomb and Hirsch in believing in television as a site to spark communication; rather, she theorizes the ontology of television to be a privatized experience detached from reality from the beginning. As a result, it is difficult to penetrate and bring “outsiders” into the construction of television content.