24/7, 16.8: is 24 a political show?

Thus, 24 is a political show, but for entirely different reasons than might be assumed at the outset. 24 is political because the show embodies in its formal technique the essential grammar of the control society, dominated as it is by specific network and informatic logics.

The role of the viewer is to identify the specific socio-historical reality in operation and then to establish expressive connections between the medium itself and the larger context in which it is embedded. The expressive connections of course are never neat and tidy, but this is precisely what makes the act of interpretation so fun to begin with. What is the ideology of the aesthetic? It is an historical and material productive circuit, which both proscribes, in a stochastic if not outright manner, the formal grammar of any given aesthetic medium, yet nevertheless is the retroactive effect of that very grammar accumulated over time and culture.

ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY is an author and programmer. He teaches at New York University in New York City.

NOTES 1. I thank David Parisi for this word choice, as well as his thoughts throughout. 2. See in particular Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 3. Anne Friedberg attends these questions with much greater detail than I. See the final chapter of her book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 4. Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies," Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177-182.