Allegory and the Crisis of Signification

Abstract

Where is the VDU? We can break this question down into two or three more: where is the video image? Where is the monitor in relation to the viewer? Where is the monitor in geographical space? Where are the actual monitors? And where do they presume that the viewer is? To start with the question of the distribution of VDUs, video monitors are most prevalent in the industrialised world and the Gulf States. In the rest of the world, monitors are clustered in the great cities. For the agrarian poor, video is still a remote, as yet scarcely used medium dominated by state monopolies of broadcasting. But if timeshifting and playback are still comparative rarities, video as a production medium is beginning to extend its role in the developing world, especially since the advent of chip-based cameras, far more resilient to humidity and dust than their tube-based predecessors. Video hardware is still overconcentrated in the Northern hemisphere, and both broadcast and cassette distribution favour heavily the products of its increasingly centralised communications industries. The democratic potentialities of video are thus severely hampered by its bonding with the dominant economic forces in global capitalism: little equipment is available for African, Latin American and South or South-East Asian video production and playback, and even less of what is made gets shown in the West.