November 29, 2015

"Jon Dovey writes about how reality-TV programming affects the way we understand the very concepts of truth and authenticity."

"With the rise and dominance of reality television over the last twenty-five years comes the concomitant belief that humanity is knowable via the investigative camera, the first-person essay, and the webcam confessional. Dovey writes, 'Statements about the world no longer have any purchase unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalizing, general and unified.' Indeed, MTV traffics in the self—it rolls out a seemingly endless list of personal stories, unique identities, which are, nonetheless, ultimately generic and universalized."

From Amanda Ann Klein's "Thirty Seasons of 'The Real World'" in The New Yorker, which doesn't identify Dovey or link to his writing. I'll guess that he's this professor of screen media. I couldn't Google to more context for that quote.

I was interested in those ideas because they meshed with something I just read, the old Tom Wolfe essay,  "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" (linked yesterday in this post). That was written in 1976, which was 16 years before "The Real World" even got started (in 1992, the year of the first Clinton presidential campaign). That Wolfe essay is about the vitality of American individualism and ends quite profoundly:
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!

Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes... Me... Me... Me... Me....
ADDED: Isn't it funny for The New Yorker to be brooding about the effects of reality TV on the American mind and not to mention the most dominant reality TV character of our time: Donald Trump?

11 comments:

Anthony said...

Don't laugh! This ain't reality TV!

chickelit said...

Isn't it funny for The New Yorker to be brooding about the effects of reality TV on the American mind and not to mention the most dominant reality TV character of our time: Donald Trump?

Really? Perhaps The New Yorker has taken Althouse's mother's own advice: "You'll only encourage him."*

On the other hand, look back at that much-talked-about-cover -- the Bill Blass boys' locker room one. And the splash one too that came later. They look prescient.

___________________

There's something telling about Althouse's first couple of posts about Trump: she refused to give them a Donald Trump tag.

Fernandinande said...

And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes... Me... Me... Me... Me....

Wolfe likes hearing himself write.

Laslo Spatula said...

At the Authenticity Seminar:.

"People, we are the only Me we Will Be, The Me of You and You Alone. You, in the second row: what is your Authentic 'Me'?"

"The Inauthentic Me was weak, afraid, paranoid. I now realize the Inauthentic Me was just hiding myself from Exploiting the weakness and fear of Others. The Authentic Me knows I am not Paranoid, but Fully Aware, and this Awareness enables me to Identify the Inauthenticity in other People."

"I'm not really sure you should use the word "exploit," but otherwise I think you have made Great Progress."

"Yeah. Like I can tell that the guy to my left is Gay. Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay."

"What? I'm not gay!"

"Just let your Inauthentic Self keep telling you that."

"But I'm not gay!"

"You are not just Gay, you are Ashamed to be Gay. You gotta get Authentic, man."

"I am NOT Ashamed because I am NOT Authentically Gay!"

"So your Authentic Self believes Gays should be Ashamed?"

"I didn't say that!"

"It is common for People with Shame to project that Shame on others."

"I am not projecting anything, you asshole!"

Oh. You are Ashamed to be Gay and now you view me as an Asshole? Like an Asshole to be fucked Homosexually? Is that it? Do you not see how your Authentic Self is crying out to be heard?"

"My Authentic Self wants to kick your ass --"

"People! People! Self-Authentification can be hard, but we must not resort to violence."

"My Authentic Self abhors violence. I just don't want this Gay Guy sucking my Cock."

"I DO NOT want to suck your cock!"

"It's a fine cock. Do you not even want to see it?"

"I DO NOT want to look at your cock!"

"Um -- Excuse me?"

"Yes, yes: you in the back."

"Well, I'm Authentically Gay, and I am more than willing to suck on the Gay Guy's cock."

"I am NOT Gay!"

"People, I believe we need to let this Man have the Emotional Room he needs to make Peace with his Authentic Gay Self: Awareness doesn't necessarily come overnight."

"But. I. Am. NOT. Gay."

"Dude, Just because you haven't sucked on a cock yet doesn't mean you're not Gay."

"People! Listen Inward, because that is where All Truth will be found."

"Can we -- please -- just move onto someone else?"

"I think that is a good idea. You, in the fourth row?"

"I have learned that my Authentic Self likes to grope women on buses..."


I am Laslo.

Sebastian said...

"how reality-TV programming affects the way we understand the very concepts of truth and authenticity."

True, according to a more old-fashioned "concept of truth." Progs softening up the proles for manipulation, readying them for the reality show of one of their own running the country like a Chicago community organizer. Lots of tribal conflict and mayhem galore to keep the story going. The producers of that particular show even got the perfect reality show character to try and lead the enemy tribe. Not something you could script.

wildswan said...

If the me-me's doesn't have kids there won't be enough grown-up kids forty years later to support social security. And so there will have to be Social security rationing and those without kids will be cut off. This has already almost happened in Europe except there they have a supply of migrant Moslems to bring in to replace the lost generation of me-me kids. So that's OK.

MisterBuddwing said...

As Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once noted, "Nothing is really real unless it happens on television."

He also said, "A celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knowness."


n.n said...

I thought the dominant Reality TV character of our time was Obama, Mr. Pro-choice in Chief, creating and fomenting one man-made crisis after another throughout North Africa, Middle East, Eurasia, and, if he has time, Europe, North America, and South America, too.

Robert Cook said...

The chief thing to remember about "reality tv" is that it's not real.

Guildofcannonballs said...

"'Statements about the world no longer have any purchase unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalizing, general and unified.'"

Self-refuting or an admission the writer writes twaddle according to his own metrics.

tim in vermont said...

A really funny movie on Netflix is "Welcome to Me" about a woman who wins the lottery and uses the winnings to finance a "vanity" TV show on a shopping channel where she explains her life.