Figures of Time

“Providing a highly original contribution and a compelling televisual study, Toni Pape positions contemporary television as simultaneously aesthetical and political. He gives us an entirely new approach to thinking what media might be as an assemblage in motion while demonstrating how affect and representation, narrativity and movement, and immediation and mediation function relationally. An invigorating book.” — Anna Munster, author of An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology

“Figures of Time is an exciting book—what a rare feat to bring together a committed reading of television with a deep curiosity for all that makes the televisual what it is becoming! What makes this book unusual—and exciting—is that it risks thinking across, bringing into resonance the quality of a close reading with the political urgency of what else lurks in the interstices of a medium that moves across culture, aesthetics, and politics. With careful attention to the politics of preemption, to questions of futurity and how these, together, shape narratives to come, Toni Pape weaves a book that produces a theory of televisual experience that asks how aesthetics orients the very question of living.” — Erin Manning, author of The Minor Gesture