ABSTRACT
In many parts of India, television is now watched on multiple screens and operates in conjunction with other communication technologies like the mobile phone and via platforms such as YouTube. My contention in this chapter is that, even as it continues to constitute political landscapes, television has now become objectless: it cannot be located in any one object (namely, the TV screen) but is, instead, distributed through and across social formations via multiple nodes. In fact, I would argue that its affective potency has increased because of its objectless status. If television was the “mass” medium of the twentieth century, how has its dispersal through and across social formations changed how we respond to it and theorize it? My chapter is intended to be evocative rather than explanatory: although it draws on data from India, it is conceptual rather than empirical. My objective is not to present an Indian case study to which we can “apply” current theories about television and thereby resurrect a tired binary of (“First World” = universalist) theory versus (“Third World” = particularistic) empirical data; instead, my goal is to theorize from the empirical material that follows in order to sketch the contours of an analytical framework that enables us to examine the implications of objectless television.
