From the Cold Earth: BP’s Broken Well, Streaming Live

Televisual “Liveness” and the Bottom of the Sea

 
The viewer of a live image of a bomb exploding in a faraway country might well find him or herself sighing in relief: “I’m glad I’m not there; I’m glad that’s not me.” Unfeeling though it may be, this response acknowledges a real vulnerability. Wherever the unfortunate other is, there the viewer could have been, had this or that variable been otherwise. Nothing much more reliable than good fortune protects the viewer from the exploding bomb seen live on the screen.
 
Of course, there’s plenty of fiction in that liveness—a thousand good reasons to put “live” in quotes. What Derrida calls the “artifactuality” of televisual liveness was, by 1996, when he gave it this spin, already settled law in the theory of television.¹ That this law has long been settled does not mean, however, that law-abiding watchers of “live” imagery have nothing to fear. The fiction of liveness is not the comforting kind. The bomb one watches explode “live” is no less real for those scare quotes. Nor does the televisual screening of the explosion place the event in the past in the way that a cinematic screening would; the technical delays and the technological différance of the “live” transmission do not add up to anything approaching a safe distance between the time of recording and the time of projection. The viewer who shudders in relief at having escaped a disaster he or she watches “live” is not lost in a fantasy. Right now, somewhere else, something terrible is in fact happening.
 
The viewer of a live image of oil washing up on faraway beaches might well feel the same kind of relief at having escaped disaster, especially if he or she lives near a beach. “I’m glad that’s not my beach,” the viewer might well say. One can feel possessive about a beach. The ocean floor, however, is another story. Even the most robustly self-interested viewer of the live streaming video of BP’s spewing well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico could not have felt the familiar relief that it wasn’t him or her in the frame. It was nobody. Nobody was down there—that’s what was frightening.
 
It would have taken the eyes of a fish to see the broken well from the perspective of life. We could see it only through the eyes of ROVs. These mesmerizing machines are not inhuman in form, with their delicate arms and hands, capable of lacing and unlacing wire. But unlike robots in a car factory (or in any number of dystopian movies), they do not take the place of human beings. What their cameras show us is a place that cannot truly be ours, no matter how many licenses BP may hold to drill there, and no matter what right the United States may have under international law to that part of the ocean floor. William Empson’s “Legal Fiction” puts nicely the absurdity of extending land ownership deep underground: “Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in hell’s / Pointed exclusive conclave” (l. 9–10). Possession of the bottom of the sea is hardly less a matter of fiction. Indeed, BP’s name for the part of the sea floor from which this disaster sprung—the “Macondo Prospect,” after the fictional town of One Hundred Years of Solitude—nods to this unconsciously.
 
The world of the Gulf floor is not quite ours, however much our oil companies may prick at it. It is part of the earth, of course, but it is no closer to being ours than the moon is. The idea of a colony on the ocean floor stretches imagination just as much as the idea of a colony on the moon. If Atlantis is down there somewhere, then Atlantis is indeed utterly irrecoverable. The image of the ocean floor evokes lost civilizations, lost ships, bones turned to coral; any power that it evokes is lost, a drowned book. The image of the broken well spewing forth day after day is an image less of the abuse of power than of the limits of power. A thousand abuses led to it, but if the broken well were merely an instance of the abuse of power, then the same power that produced it could fix it.
 
BP had to be forced by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to let its video stream live, but it is not at all clear that the committee was right to do this if its aim was to sharpen sensitivity to BP’s crime.² BP’s powerlessness was ultimately our own; we couldn’t, through the government or any other agency, descend to the ocean floor and fix what BP couldn’t. Faced with such helplessness, it is difficult to resist apathy.
 
Though the live image of an exploding bomb is equally problematic ethically, the problem is not the same. Apathy is not quite the issue. The viewer is not at the same remove from what he or she sees. The exploding bomb is the successful expression of a human power—the bomb is doing what the power that made it designed it to do—and there is no position from which to watch it other than that of power. That position is relative—“I’m glad that’s not me” expresses its frightening contingency—but the viewer cannot entirely disavow the power of the bomb, even if he or she is not a part (as citizen or member) of the power that fired it.³ Watching and surviving has that price. Though it may remain irresponsible, relief at having survived the bomb is not a sign of apathy, and it can in some cases grow into empathy, according to something like the Golden Rule. The stare of the viewer of the live streaming video of BP’s broken well was bound to be more blank, the nature of his or her concern less clear.
 
The image was hypnotic. The movement of ROVs is slow and sleepy. Like dreamers, they alone light what they see, independent of the sun or any other star. And what they see, they see silently. The video they shot of the spewing well was soundless. Only live chats provided commentary, elaborating and multiplying theories in response to the underlying question: “What are we seeing here?” But it was the oil itself that bound the spell. Its dumb flow was the spitting image of the time spent viewing it. Any live image is, along with whatever else it may be, a reflection of the time invested in it; the time of the event you are watching live is your time, not some other time. Any live image separates you from your time this way, lets you see it passing.⁴ But this particular live image was particularly reflexive. The literal fluidity of the oil made it work as a metaphor for the already metaphorical fluidity of the “live stream.” The second metaphor reinforced the first, in the looking glass of which the viewer’s time was “flowing.”⁵ This doubling back upon itself of the viewer’s time had the strange effect of lightening the loss of it. There went your time, your life, bleeding out. And why not let it go, if you could still see it going even after you’d let it go—if letting it go didn’t mean that it all went black? (The oil spilled upward; at five thousand feet, the water was clear.) Watching such a scene, it was easy to dream that death would somehow not be the end.
 
So, thanks to the live stream, an environmental disaster became an occasion to dream of immortality. Of course, some hearty viewers of the live stream may have managed to stay awake, out of the undertow of the double metaphor of flow. But the strong undertow was there, in the image. In pulling this way, was the image calling the viewer to anything other than a kind of apathy?
 

Affirming Life on Earth: “Live” Imagery Versus Film

 
Were we talking about a film of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the question would be very different.⁶ Fictional though it is, the “liveness” of a “live” image means that the life of the viewer is never completely safely out of the picture. Even if the picture is of a place the viewer could never be, as it was in the case of the live streaming video of BP’s spewing well, every “live” image is a kind of mirror. In its reflection of the time spent watching it, the live streaming video of the well pulled the viewer, however ironically, into the picture. Because the viewer could not in any real scenario be down there live on the ocean floor, the live streaming video of the well offered a safety that the live image of a bomb exploding in a faraway country does not—the viewer could enter the picture only figuratively—but that safety is not the same as the safety offered by film.
 
While the viewer of live imagery is protected from what he or she sees by space, the viewer of film is protected by time, which is in fact more reliable. Some distances in space—like the one between the Gulf floor and anywhere on the surface of the earth—are safer than others, but the gap between the time of shooting a film and the time of its projection is always safe. No matter how far it is narrowed (for example, in the case of “rushes”), it can never be crossed. There is simply no possibility of watching oneself live, or even “live,” on film. The time-based removal of the film viewer’s life from the picture he or she views, ghostlike, gives birth to intimations of immortality quite different in kind from any to which the viewer of the live stream of BP’s broken well might have been lured. In the final gesture of The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell describes a feeling of “immortality” based on “nature’s survival of me.” The experience of film is, according to Cavell, a vision of that survival:
 

A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is an importance of film—and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world, either because I left it unloved (the Flying Dutchman) or because I left unfinished business (Hamlet). So there is reason for me to want the camera to deny the coherence of the world, its coherence as past: to deny that the world is complete without me. But there is equal reason to want it affirmed that the world is complete without me. That is essential to what I want of immortality: nature’s survival of me. It will mean that the present judgment upon me is not yet the last.

(160)

However fantasmatic it may or may not be, such a vision certainly cannot happen live; it is born of a clear difference between the time of recording and the time of projection.⁷ For Cavell, television, in its capacity for liveness, is a mortal threat to film’s saving vision. In the final gesture of “The Fact of Television,” an essay that meditates on what distinguishes television from other media—and from film in particular—Cavell returns to the final gesture of The World Viewed, asserting darkly that “the medium of television makes intuitive the failure of nature’s survival of me” (85).

 
In opposing television to film in this way, Cavell falls in with a major line of post-WWII thinking about the moving image. Like Cavell, though in a very different idiom, Gilles Deleuze and Serge Daney develop (and, in Deleuze’s case especially, radically transform) the story sketched by André Bazin, according to which cinema releases the world from our death grip, freeing us to see it in such a way that we can affirm it in all of its excess over us. And, like Cavell, Deleuze and Daney see television as a threat to cinematic freedom—a threat that may harbor within it a saving power but that in any case calls for far greater concern than the kind expressed in commonplace lamentation about the evil of TV.⁸
 
Film saves, according to this Bazinian line of thinking, by letting the viewer see an image of the world without him or her—by removing the viewer from a world that nonetheless remains his or hers. Protected by time from the action projected on the screen (and watching, according to Deleuze’s account of postwar film, the image of time itself), the viewer can open his or her eyes anew to the world, which is otherwise sealed under a protective crust of clichés.⁹ The story is rather grand, and good arguments can be made that it is not entirely clear-eyed when it comes to the grand illusion or myth of realism. But whether or not you believe that film’s protection of the viewer from what he or she sees on screen makes possible a saving vision of the world, the protections offered by live television—television in the exercise of the power most proper to it—are certainly far thinner than those offered by film. Though television does not really shrink or homogenize space in the way that utopian and dystopian theorists alike have surmised (I explore the reasons for this below)—though it does not spell, as Heidegger feared, the “abolition of every possibility of remoteness”—the spaces it traverses are traversable as well by “smart,” televisually guided bombs (to whose “point of view” the coverage of the first Gulf War introduced us).¹⁰ The trajectory of these bombs, through the eyes of which one watches war “from the inside” while resting on one’s couch, could always be reversed; such blank, lifeless eyes could just as well be turned on you. You could, in theory, watch on television the arrival of the bomb that will kill you, right up until the moment of impact.¹¹
 
Television is tied from the start to the dream of a missile with eyes. Long before smart bombs fell on Baghdad and Judith Butler gave the “optical phallus” its name (Butler 44), television already gave us a bomb’s eye view. Richard Dienst tells the stunning tale:
 

In 1928, engineers at General Electric broadcast “the first television drama production” over the experimental station W2XAD. It was called “The Queen’s Messenger”… Shortly afterward, another drama was broadcast, of quite a different kind: it simulated a guided missile attack on New York City, from the missile’s point of view, a slow aerial approach ending in an explosion.

(128)

Television shares a trajectory with the bombs it covers, and the age of its reign is that of the bomb of bombs. Cavell tunes in to something essential to this age in his description of television as a medium for the live confirmation of rumors of the destruction of what he calls “nature” (by which he means the world’s inhabitability by us).

 
If, in his association of television with the nuclear threat, Cavell, like Heidegger, misses some of the ways in which television keeps the distances it seems to destroy, it is at least partly because of his sensitivity to a new need for distance from our threatened existence.¹² When the formerly divine power to destroy life on earth comes to rest in human hands, as it does with the invention of the atomic bomb, the persistence of life on earth has to be willed in a new way. The political theorist George Kateb lays out the difficulty: in order to attach ourselves to earthly existence in such a way that we are disposed to seek its continuation, we’d have to find enough remove from our unchosen immersion in it to have a fresh look at it and find new wonder in it; but though we take on a divine power in the nuclear age, we do not simply replace God—we cannot take a God’s eye view. So a new mode of detachment—a non-theological, non-metaphysical twist on transcendence—would be needed.¹³
 
Film responds powerfully to this need. So do other arts, of course. Kateb himself privileges poetry as an avenue to this detachment—he likes Whitman’s counsel to be “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it” (167). But if you are avid for the experience of being “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it,” it is easy to see how you could find yourself frequenting movie theaters and loving film for the very reason that Cavell outlines in The World Viewed: its peculiar removal of the viewer from a world that remains his or her own.
 
In what follows, I try to show that there is in fact such a thing as televisual satisfaction of the need for a new, not quite transcendental distance on earthly existence. But there is little analogy between the televisual satisfaction of that need and the cinematic satisfaction of it. Not only does time not protect the tele-viewer from what he or she sees—the big difference that we have already seen—but while film is born of silence, television is a chatterbox from the start. A child of radio, television is a social medium that serves the purpose of company (not to mention the purposes of companies, whose direct address of the viewer is the mode of chatter most characteristic of the medium). Though television, as it becomes “old media,” may be coming fully into its own as a medium for art (in some of the high-end shows on HBO, for example), the medium does not allow for anything quite like the aesthetic distance valued by Kateb and Cavell. (Ironic disavowal of one’s vulnerability to what one sees there—a staple of talk about television, modeled for us by the gods of the late night shows—is meager compensation for the lack of such distance.)¹⁴ Television is rather an endless occasion to feel, unfeelingly, the nearness of disaster and a sense of company in that misery.
 
This is not to say that television is aesthetically (and/or morally) “bad,” exactly, but rather that the distances to be explored in it—the vistas it opens for thought—cannot be recognized so long as we’re looking for the same sort of distance that film affords. Television no more allows its viewer that sort of distance than Clarence’s nightmare of the bottom of the sea in Shakespeare’s Richard III gives Clarence room to breathe. The ocean floor, to which Clarence sinks in his dream and to which Prospero says he will consign his book in The Tempest—that distinctly earthly and unmagical region beyond our power—is, I argue in what follows, the ultimate vista of television.¹⁵ TV proper—the “old medium” watched by Cavell, Deleuze, and Daney—opens this vista but keeps the view clouded; reaching televisually beyond TV proper, the live streaming video of BP’s broken well in the Gulf made it clear.
 

In the Televisual Distance

 
I say “TV proper” just to name very loosely the kind of television that live streaming video supplements. In fact, the intimacy of the relationship between “TV proper” and the live streaming video that plumbs its depths renders the boundaries of “TV proper” highly uncertain. We are dealing here with supplementation, not opposition. Though many of the most exciting developments in online video involve the exploitation of truly new possibilities, the existence of a real distinction between “new” and “old” in these cases does not mean that any strict opposition can be drawn between “TV proper” and “new media.”¹⁶ “Television,” notes Lisa Parks, “has always been a site of media convergence” (9), and, as such, it is right at home in the contemporary “culture of convergence.”¹⁷ Indeed, one can argue that the more its “content” is parceled out and distributed via “new media,” the more central the place of TV becomes. John Caldwell, for example, sees the interactivity of the Web sites that supplement TV shows not as a departure from “TV proper” but as a realization of TV’s oldest, and greediest, wish: “any interactivity (good, bad, or indifferent) is economically valuable to producers and has been a defining goal of broadcast television since its inception in the 1940’s” (Convergence Television 53). Of course, “new modes of media delivery and television-Net convergence also have an impact on television’s textual forms and the ways we relate to television” (Convergence Television 43), but the result is still television—more television than ever. As Jennifer Gillan puts it in Must-Click TV, “these changes are more about evolution than revolution” (3).
 
Caldwell offers his comments on the continuity between TV and Web interactivity as sober correctives to the heady rhetoric of revolution (as in, “the digital revolution”) that dominated a first wave of writing about the Internet. This rhetoric has not disappeared, of course, and it is not entirely unwarranted: talk of “evolution” can be too sober to account for those ways in which traditional TV has been radically, violently displaced by its Web supplements. If talk of revolution tends to be too rosy, too close to the happy hum of marketing blather, talk of continuity can miss real openings.
 
So I am happy to report that the continuity I see between TV and the live streaming video of BP’s broken well is not entirely unbroken. What the live stream showed is what TV would show were it to show all that it can see—if it did not cover up something essential about itself in its coverage of the world.¹⁸ The live stream let us see the real reach of TV’s powers of vision. In doing so, it can hardly be seen as a counter-power to TV. But in showing TV’s full powers of vision, the live stream of the broken well did not deliver at all the same rush of power that TV ordinarily delivers to its viewer. That familiar rush is what makes the pleasure of TV so inevitably guilty: my house has not been bombed; the proof is that the explosion has happened, and I am still here watching; I am on the side of the bombers, whether I like it or not; I cannot really claim to be on the side of the dead, dead to the world though I may seem to be. The TV watcher’s guilty watchword: “I am alive!” He or she is merely playing dead. Meanwhile, the live stream of the broken well was more genuinely mortifying.
 
The live stream could be accessed in a number of ways: right from the source, on the BP Web site; on the Web site of the House Select Committee; on UStream; or through the double mediation of any of the many news sites—some “local,” as in the case of WKRG in Mobile, Alabama, and some national, as in the case of the PBS NewsHour—that had embedded UStream’s channeling of BP’s video. In the case of the news sites, the “convergence” of TV and live streaming video was explicitly part of the show. The rhetoric of media convergence came directly into play, which made the question of the real relationship between TV and the live stream particularly pressing.
 
Needless to say, the drama of media convergence staged on the news sites involved plenty of smoke and mirrors. The embedded video was offered there as a supplement to TV, not unlike the live feed offered on the Web site of Big Brother, the long running prime-time surveillance show. We were being let into the kitchen, allowed to see the “raw” material from which the news was clipped and cooked. To the extent that this presentation of the live stream encouraged the viewer to dream that, having gone “behind the scenes,” he or she had entered the circle of power of the production room, it was clearly just an illusion in service of the greater glory of the TV news. And it certainly served this end to some extent. Indeed, if it could not be made to serve the greater glory of the TV news, the news sites would never have embedded it. (Again, Caldwell, Gillan, and Andrejevic, among others, have shown how TV has made the powers of the Web its own.) But in its amplification of the power of TV, it also allowed the viewer to see something that the TV news really can’t contain, can’t frame and recuperate as TV news.
 
The news showed only a few seconds of the video of the spewing well before moving on to the next image (the oil covered beaches, the pelicans). Within the ideological scheme of the news, those few seconds were cast as representative parts of the whole live stream, of the unremitting image of the unremitting spill. But the real “whole” of the image was something more, or less, than the sum of such parts—something incalculable, beyond this kind of figuring. It is not that the uncut image was in any sense perfectly raw, beyond any figures that might be cooked up for it. It is just that the figures that the TV news cooks up—for example, that of the “rawness” of the footage it clips from—won’t take you, figuratively speaking, to the bottom of the sea, a place you can go only figuratively speaking (even if you had access to a deep-sea submarine, you couldn’t disembark the sub at your underwater “destination”).
 
In its double reflection of the life spent watching it (the time of watching being marked both by the flow of oil and by the “streaming” video itself), the live stream pulled the viewer’s life down into the depths where it can go only figuratively. I don’t mean to suggest that it was impossible to resist the downward, ironic pull of this current, only that this current had a very different currency from the kind circulated by the news. Watching the live stream, one was not constantly called back to the oil-slicked surface from which the reporters gave their live, up-to-the-minute reports. Life was not a beach, even an oil-slicked one. Of course, to see one’s life reflected in the flow of oil is to find oneself caught in a dream: oil is not life, not blood; the earth does not bleed with us, does not live and die with us. But the indifference to life that one can feel in the spell of such a (tele-)vision of its expenditure is not entirely dreamy. To see human life in what is alien to it is purely a projection of figurative language, but to feel the earth’s indifference to human life in one’s trope-induced moods of indifference to death—to feel intimate with the earth in those moods—is not an illusion. The figure is not symmetrical, perfectly reversible: there can be no human life on the ocean floor, but there is alien earth in us—earth of the kind we find on the ocean floor. Not everything about us ends with the life in us. The dust, of course, remains. And this remainder is already there in life, underlying it and lying in wait. You don’t have to be dead: a real connection to the dust in us can be felt wherever the real contingency of such a possession as life is felt.
 
The absoluteness of that contingency was the whole drift of the live streaming video from the Gulf floor. If the live image of a danger in a habitable region of the earth gives the viewer a sense of the contingency of his or her particular location, the live image of a broken oil well on the ocean floor gives the viewer a sense of the contingency of human existence period. The earth would go on without us. Even if companies like BP were ever to succeed in destroying the earth’s habitability for human beings, the earth would survive. In film, Cavell finds a vision of “nature’s survival of him”—the world complete without him—on which he bases a paradoxical claim to a kind of immortality. In the live streaming video of the spewing well, there was a strange assurance of the earth’s survival of all of us—a vision of the earth in the absence of the human beings who prick at it. We saw that part of the earth where we can’t be—the greater part of it, which, if the flood ever comes (man-made this time), will become the whole.¹⁹ For this asymmetrical, troubling part-whole relationship, the TV news offered a superficially comforting substitute, in which the shot from the ocean floor coupled with the shot of the beach gave us a picture of the whole disaster, which, pictured that way, would always allow for human survivors—for lucky viewers like us.
 
To minimize the greatness of that part of the earth where we can’t live: this is certainly to shorten distance, to shrink the earth fantasmatically in something like the way that Heidegger feared. But the distance closed by TV news is the very one television itself opens to view. The live stream from the Gulf floor testified to the priority of that opening, to the secondary, belated nature of the closure. It let us see live a part of the earth where we can’t live and made clear television’s real scoop, which the TV news desperately tries to hide: our power over the earth does not go very far below the surface. It does not extend to the ocean floor, no matter how much drilling we do there. It doesn’t extend, that is, as far as television lets us see.
 
Discerning the chiastic figures by which television turns the inside out in bringing the outside in—by which television makes the home uncannily faraway in bringing the faraway into it—deconstructive critics have perhaps responded best to the apocalyptic worry (and, on the other side of the coin, the utopian hope) that television shrinks distance.²⁰ To take the real measure of the chasms in these chiasmi is to see the wideness of the world anew—to see it televisually, even as TV tries incessantly to convince you that it in fact makes the world small, life-sized, by showing you faraway places “live.” The dominant picture of the world-wideness of the World Wide Web has only reinforced the small-world picture TV tries to sell. The fantasy TV peddles—what Lisa Parks in her book on the “convergence” between TV and satellite technology calls “the Western fantasy of global presence” (37)—has never been more powerful, the widespread scholarly claim to be wise to the ruse notwithstanding. If scholarly weariness with the “critique of the metaphysics of presence” is so widespread—if most scholars today are desperate to “get beyond” all that, as if it were so much positive knowledge that could simply be added to the general fund of knowledge—this may be at least partly because the task of that critique today is truly overwhelming. The fantasies of presence are today more powerful than ever, more capable than ever of including and neutralizing any critique of them.
 
In the age of live streaming video on the Web, there is more TV to be watched, and more to be seen on and in TV, than ever. And so long as there is TV to be watched, the ironic meaning of TV’s introjection of the outside will remain to be seen. It will always need to be seen again, anew in order for TV’s ever-renewed fantasy of global presence to be seen through. What the live stream of BP’s broken well—that opening in the world-wide webbing of the televisualization of the world—singularly, eventfully, and therefore ungeneralizably allowed to be seen (until the well was finally “killed,” and the illusion of human power over the ocean floor was, however weakly, restored) was at once a place pointedly in the world and a place to which human beings pointedly could not be present. That scene, that earthly spectacle of human absence, gave a singular twist to the inside/outside chiasmus that is structural to all televisualization: in this image, the absolutely elsewhere, the elsewhere that can never become a here to us, is not outside the world. Thus, not only was the tiny, individual home from which one viewed this faraway scene turned inside out uncannily in its hosting of this vision, but our entire home planet revealed itself to be deeply alien, by no means naturally hospitable to human life.
 

The Coldness of the Earth

 
Human being is being of the earth—so scripture says, and etymology seems to agree. Life is breathed into earth. Life lost, the earth in us returns to earth. We know the story too well. But what would it look like rewritten for television, as it were—for the age of long distance vision that we live in? I have argued that, exercising the power most proper to television in a way that “TV proper” does not, the live streaming video of BP’s broken well revealed a strikingly alien earth. How would a myth of the creation of humanity starting from this televisually revealed earth go? Of course, the myth would have to cover up to some extent the true story of the live stream, which was the absence of a God-figure who might stop the well—who is capable not only of causing floods, as humanity can, but also of reversing them. The rewriting exercise is certainly awkward. Still, something instructive happens to the traditional story if we revise it such that the fistful of earth from which we are made is taken not from the land, where we can live, but from the bottom of the sea. Recast this way, the relationship between earth and breath is more antagonistic than it is in the old story (because the bottom of the sea is so openly inhospitable to human life), but this exacerbation of the traditional, metaphysical opposition is not simply more of the same. Rather, it upsets the hierarchy of the terms in the opposition. Earth ceases to be merely the passive vessel for human life, waiting to receive it and to be completed by it. In its hostility to human life, this underwater earth is another kind of substrate of life, not active exactly in its creation (I’m talking myth here, not science), but not docile, secondary, or otherwise subordinate to divine breath either.
 
However the rewriting of the story for the age of television might or might not go, it is certain that what television actually shows is profoundly out of keeping with any of the familiar scenarios in which the earth is cast, however well-meaningly, in the role of the helpless victim of big oil. Seen from the at once earthly and otherworldly perspective of the deep ocean floor—a perspective we can occupy only televisually—big oil looked terribly small. The live stream of BP’s broken well in the Gulf upset the familiar moral scheme according to which it is up to the human beings who have allowed their human power to be seized and invested in the monstrosity of big oil to reclaim that power and reinvest it in such a way as to protect the helpless earth. Of course, big oil is a product of the alienation of human power, and there can be no bringing it down to size without reclaiming that power. But a claim to that power will only contribute to the general heating of the air if, casting the earth in the role of helpless victim, it denies the radical powerlessness that the live stream showed.
 
If humanity really had dominion over the earth, then we wouldn’t have been seeing what we were seeing in the live stream of the Gulf floor. Humanity would have been heroically plunging to the depths to seal the well and stop the bleeding. There was no lack of will, on anyone’s part; what was lacking was the power. Unlike any agent that could be called “God,” humanity does not have a power to save equal to its power to destroy, or equal to its technologically supplemented power to see. Its power to destroy itself—the earth, to which the poisonous oil after all belongs, will survive the end of humanity. No matter how much, how globally we warm it, we can never warm it to the point that it lives and dies with us. We may die of the heat we create in our environment, but the earth to which we return in dying will always be cold.
 
Indeed, the cold of it is such that there is no earthly possibility of embracing the actual earthliness of life—our actual humanity—without lifeless, mechanical arms such as those that televisual technology gives us. This is not a question of compensating for our “natural” weakness. In giving us these arms, these technologies do not give us more power, exactly, though their blanket coverage of the world from the bomb’s eye covers this up quite effectively. Think again of the uncanny form of those ROVs that shot the well even as they tried to repair it. Their arms were not able to repair what their unliving eyes could directly see. Those delicate and beautiful arms are ours, real prostheses, with all their horrifying insufficiencies, to stretch out or not in the place of the gigantesque phantom limbs with which, in our inevitably globalizing dreams, we convulsively wrap the cold earth in a warm clutch, desperately trying to bring the whole thing to life in the image of the tiny, highly contingent part that we are.