Abstract: 

The presentation proceeds with the suggestion that if we define politics - in its narrow everyday sense - as the processes that go into remaking the given scheme of things towards a larger good, we can find a common ground, in the concept of mediation, to understand what we allow politics as well as media to do to our worlds fundamentally. After all, we entrust both politics and media technologies to mediate our world in the hope that the processes of mediation would alter it, and return to us a better and augmented (sense of the) world, as the reward for all that we know is lost in mediation.

If so, certain paradigmatic shifts in how we have imagined the extents and limits of politics seem to be at the centre of a set of transformations in the dominant practices of media today as well. The presentation willillustrate this assertion first by charting a heavily condensed history of a few modalities in which we, until recent decades, have come to conceive the breadth and boundaries of politics? mediation of our world. Thesemodalities were instruments of displacing our ideas about the boundaries of politics onto designated spaces and domains where politics? mediation is warranted and sought, and those that should rather be kept away from it, as unmediated. In other words, they represent the decades-long practice of conceiving politicization from the vantage point of its boundaries ? a mode that reflected on our relation to media as well until the 1980s/90s.

The second part of the presentation will argue for an understanding of the dominant contemporary practices of media as shaped by a mode of imagining politics and politicization as incessant and boundless ? and as desirably so. Central to this are some appealing advancements in mediating the real that satellite television made available to us by the early 1990s, transforming (the private) home as the key site for political deliberation. To ground my argument, I look at the early years of Asianet ? one of the first private satellite television channels in India ? discussing the practices of news programming that the channel adopted on its arrival, and the manoeuvres of positioning itself in relation to other media forms, and as a challenge to the state?s monopoly over mediation.

About the Speaker:
Jenson Joseph is Post Doctoral fellow at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. He completed his PhD project titled *Industry, Aesthetics, Spectatorial Subjectivities: A Study on Malayalam Cinema of the 1950s*, from Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication, University of Hyderabad. His academic interests are primarily in the fields of history of media and cinema studies. He has written on cinema and regional history in journals like BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, positions: asia critique and Thapasam.