Page 182 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 167
precisely that and present a cynical, exhaustive cataloging of
self-destructive behavior without benefit of comprehension or
context.
(Abt and Mustazza 1997: 21)
Abt and Mustazza’s above comparison of media content with pornog-
raphy can be seen as a further updating of Debord’s interpretation
of Marx’s observation that capitalism objectifies people and their
social relations while perversely imputing social qualities to objects.
For example, Banality TV bases much of its raw material upon the
consumption of people’s emotional lives selected disproportionately
from the stratum of society pejoratively described as ‘trailer-trash’.
This represents a disturbing extension of capitalism’s extraction of
cultural surplus value from groups previously excluded from the
creation of conventional economic value. Grindstaff contrasts the
process of revealing undertaken by a professional actor in which his
or her veridical (true) self remains secure while the acted persona is
paid, with that of the daytime television participant, whose veridical
self is exploited for profit and usually unpaid beyond travel expenses
and a day out in a metropolitan centre: ‘Producers must treat
emotion – their own as well as their guests – in a routine and
businesslike way, as just another element of the production process’
(Grindstaff 2002: 39). In Marxism, the alienation and exploitation of
the worker is a basic aspect of the capitalist production process. Now,
however, not only are people exploited during their hours of work,
but their work has come to include their personal lives whether that
5
takes the form of watching Banality TV or being watched by it .
While even the most cursory glance at current media content
confirms that much of it is objectifying and voyeuristic, Baudrillard’s
media theory provides some useful critical theoretical tools with
which to go beyond merely moralistic judgements to reveal some of
the underlying basic political and ideological processes at work.
In Baudrillard’s work, Lowenthal’s early (then) distinction between
idols of consumption and production is radically revisited in terms
of the contrasting notions of seduction and production. Baudrillard
reformulates the conventional understanding of seduction and its
normal sense of romance in order to illustrate the ubiquitous and
pervasive cultural effects within the mediascape. In place of its
romantic connotations, Baudrillard uses seduction as a technical term
to refer to the energy involved in social exchanges that have an
essentially symbolic and ambiguous nature. For example, historically,
there has been a cultural tradition of men pursuing women via a
series of games, gifts and general flirtation that has been met with
varying degrees of success depending upon the reciprocity of the
woman being so seduced. The outcome was either inherently
unpredictable, or, highly predictable but still distinctly different to

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