Page 177 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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162 Now
the ruins have other needs, pose other demands, raise other
questions – if their voices can elude or exceed the tele-frame.
(Nichols 1994: 18)

A consideration of Nichols’s specific conception of Reality TV serves
to introduce the next chapter’s discussion of the increasing merging
of entertainment and news – Langer’s (1998) Other News. In Blurred
Boundaries (1994), Nichols uses the term Reality TV, in a specific
sense, to refer to the widespread conflation of previously distinct
fiction and non-fictional television formats – a blurring of the
boundaries that formerly existed between entertainment-orientated
content and journalism’s traditionally more serious coverage of
current affairs. His above comment describes the way in which the
media frame tames the explosive potential of the camera hoped for
by Benjamin. Rather than ‘in the midst of its debris and ruins’ being
able to ‘calmly and adventurously go travelling’, Nichols points out
(presciently in the context of the later tragic events of Hurricane
Katrina and its disastrous aftermath) that ‘those among the ruins
have other needs’ beyond tele-mediation. His interpretation of the
camera’s mediation of reality suggests a betrayal of Benjamin’s hopes
that the camera would enable radical insights into the social
condition of the masses. Instead, the camera’s ability to reveal is
co-opted by the culture industry to provide objects of stimulation for
the passive voyeurism of viewers absorbed by the tele-frame, again,
counter to Benjamin’s hopes for the masses to absorb the media
rather than vice versa.
The blurred boundaries Nichols thus refers to in his work can be
understood as a consequence of capitalist society’s remarkably adept
ability to take the grounded materiality of reality and its innate
tension between the general and the particular and reduce them to
abstract formulas and models that underpin the subsequent blurring
of social boundaries. In this context, Eagleton builds upon Marx and
Engels’s evocative image that in capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into
air’ and Kracauer’s concept of Ratio, to suggest that: ‘Capitalism …
for all its crass materialism, is secretly allergic to matter. No
individual object can fulfill its voracious appetite as it hunts its way
restlessly from one to the other, dissolving each of them to nothing
in doomed pursuit of its ultimate desire … It is a culture shot
through with fantasy, idealist to its core’ (Eagleton 2003: 165). In The
Perfect Crime (1996a), Baudrillard similarly speaks of this capitalist
ability to eviscerate particularity from reality. He writes in terms of a
murder in which no trace can be found of ‘the corpse of the real’
(Baudrillard 1996a: i). The mediation of reality explicitly acknowl-
edged in the very phrase Reality TV creates an ersatz Debordian/
Boorstinian reality in an anodyne form suitable for consumers. This
undermines Kracauer’s previously cited opposition to ‘dragging the

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