Event overview
07375200417
Professor Helen Wheatley will give a talk on 'Posthumous Television' based on her forthcoming monograph Television/Death that explores the intersections between these terms
This paper will explore the idea that television (and the television archive) preserve life before death. Television is the one of the key photographic arts capable of ‘embalming time’ (Mulvey, 2006: 56) but with a built in propensity for image and sound retrieval via instant replay which makes its posthumousness all the more imminent, all the more apparent. I will argue that the critical thinking that surrounds death and the recorded image has somehow, inexplicably, largely overlooked television’s posthumous possibilities but that television is indeed ontologically posthumous, always and forever capturing life before death and capable of bringing the dead ‘back to life’. The paper will draw on Jeremy Tambling’s proposal that the ‘posthumous challenges a life-death distinction and the order in which that distinction is phrased; it throws chronology into disarray’ (2001: 7), and offer an exploration of examples that help us to think about television’s posthumousness in a variety of ways. I will also examine the affective experience of reencountering the dead via TV (drawing on research done for my recent monograph Television/Death (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), exploring how and why we might see an engagement with the television archive as an emotionally charged encounter. I will show how the television archive has frequently been seen as a kind of mausoleum, a common, tempting and evocative analogy, implying that the dead lie waiting to be disinterred in the TV archive, rebroadcast, edited into new programming, recirculated or rescreened in other contexts. However, unlike the mausoleum, which remains sealed save for the admission of fresh corpses, the television archive is an active facility, and the dead are constantly brought in and out of its environs for a variety of reasons and purposes. My paper will therefore explore the return of the television dead at length.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Apr 2025 |
5:00pm - 7:30pm The event will be followed by a reception to launch the series |
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