Core Post #5

Reading Anna McCarthy’s “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” makes me think about different models of analyzing the institutions of modern subjects. Different from Ouellette and Hay, who focus on reality TV’s political rationalities in light of the concept of governmentality, McCarthy extends the discussion to an affective aspect that foregrounds the failure of self-government and tries to negotiate the seeming contradiction between the two frameworks. The excess of reality television, according to McCarthy, demonstrates a point of contact between the two analytical frames. It also offers a more nuanced conceptualization of neoliberal subject that considers not only the technocratic terms of citizen, but also the affect of natural human.

This subject McCarthy discusses, on a second thought, is different from the real audiences that audience studies would typically expect. Already encoded in the structure of the shows, the affective dimension that McCarthy focuses on stays in the realm of the dominant reading of imagined/ideal audience, rather than real people’s various responses. The latter, although highly valued by audience studies, is (perhaps rightly) ignored in this article because it is irrelevant to the point McCarthy tries to make. The inevitable contradiction between “reality” and abstraction is beyond the scope of this post, but Dr. Seiter’s article, in the reading two weeks ago, gives plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about audience studies and could potentially justify McCarthy’s choice.

Another point in McCarthy’s article that might be valuable for further thinking is the place of ethics in neoliberal form of governing. As McCarthy notes, Random 1 suggests that neoliberal citizenship is “an ethical-political position based in the acceptance of the irresolvable state” (between self-governing and the impossibility of governing the self) (31). The affective aspect of reality TV (suffering), then, not only showcases how a subject in neoliberal society negotiates the contradictions, but also provides a simple answer to the problem of everyday ethics: the right conduct for neoliberal citizens is to accept the irresolvable state. In this sense, ethics plays a more important role in neoliberal society in that it is complicit with the practice of pastoral power. It functions as the point of entry of the public into the private, the institutional into the individual, the intersubjective into subjective. What McCarthy does in her article, then, is not contradictory to Foucault’s concept of governmentality—the affective dimension of reality TV leads to an ethical judgment that, through forming a model for citizen subjects, facilitates neoliberal form of governing.