core post: reality tv or "epistemological inauguration of political modernity"???

I would like to be able to say more things about Cheer and The Bachelor than I currently feel capable of saying. I usually can only participate in the way television audiences have done since time immemorial: commenting on the Bachelor’s performance, on his emotional indecisiveness (scrutinizing his concerned gaze for hint of the decisions he must make), and on the various sub-plotlines that he must juggle. Or watching Cheer, the punishment on young bodies is the focus, as they are tossed over and over for no obvious material return. We admire and pity the protagonists, suspended briefly by junior college cheer over the maw of poverty.

                  McCarthy has a theoretical apparatus ready to decode both of these reality TV test cases. She writes that reality TV is “a realm of excess, not simply a set of techniques and procedures but also, very concretely, a neoliberal theater of suffering…Producing scene after scene of painful civic pedagogy, suffused with tears, rage, and insults and pushing the limits of the self to mental and physical extremes, the genre’s affective dimensions might have something new to teach us about the process of self-organization in which modern subjects find themselves caught.” (3)

                  I quote at length here because at this point in her essay there are still a couple of directions which her argument might have lead. Where I expected her to go, was to say that the producers have played a dangerous game with the audience: through and amidst the succession of neoliberal shocks outlined by Raphael, reality TV (or RealiTV) producers had hunted for drama outside the studio. This meant looking in the courts and the police, creating competitions for talent, and asking the audience to actively participate. The danger is that the affective dimension(s) of representing these processes is manifold and unstable. What I mean is this: while documenting Judge Judy’s punitive justice or the behavior of cops on Cops had wildly different affective resonances based on the position of a subject, both socially and in time. The extreme proximity of these shows to the “real” means viewers are forced to learn from the show in a way that could be uncomfortable and perhaps demand “self-organization.”

McCarthy’s argument, however, instead detours through Agamben and Foucault to think about naked biological subjects…or something. We’ll discuss more in class, I hope.