Introduction

The intellectual debate that came from France in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and whose trajectory can be identified in the works of Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and later synthesized in the work of Edward W. Soja, initiated the new thinking about the relationship between space, the production of meaning, social relations, and identity. Foucault described the shift in the paradigm as “the epoch of simultaneity” – of juxtaposition (Foucault 1984 [1967]: 1). He used in his exemplification a structuralist set of relations that function on, what he called the “operating table” (Foucault 1973 [1966]), juxtaposed, set off against one another, open to implications about each other. It can be observed today that such analogy anticipated the contemporary cultural condition where the production of knowledge is complicated by the possibilities of simulation, replication, and simultaneous coexistence of multiple identities. The visual rather than textual world has erased the boundaries for the identification of factual values the presented material may have. We are still left with the operating table upon which the individual items are displayed, where they can be discerned in their opposition and incongruity; when appropriated and absorbed as a part of what we call our identity or existence, however, the underlying epistemic assumption positions truth beyond the limits of shared epistemological standards. It can be argued, however, that what may serve in social and political life as a means of manipulation, can still remain a creative mechanism in the arts to disclose the complexity of the contemporary world.

TV Culture – Self-fashioning Space

One of the most important cultural platforms for the production of meaning today is television. Being an important communication channel – its structure and content have changed significantly since the 1950s, when it originated. For a long time television was “dominated by commercial imperatives, and hostile to artistic achievement,” however, since the 1990s viewers can choose from a growing range of private networks that provide them with a content often referred to as quality TV (Hilmes et al. 2014: 26).