Page 184 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 169
secret and of seduction. Seduction is, at all times and all places,
opposed to production. Seduction removes something from the
order of the visible, while production constructs everything in
full view … Everything is to be produced, everything is to be
legible, everything is to become real, visible, accountable …
This is sex as it exists in pornography, but more generally, this
is the enterprise of our culture, whose natural condition is
obscene: a culture of monstration, of demonstration, of produc-
tive monstrosity.
(Baudrillard 1990a: 34–5; emboldening added)

For Baudrillard, the ob-scene is not an ethically-loaded term for use
in judgement over the morality of particular images. The prefix ob
refers to the idea of hindering or being against. The ob-scene
therefore expresses the collapse of distance in our social experience.
There is no longer a scene or stage of action that we view from a
distance. This collapse has occurred across society to the extent that
sexual pornography is but an extreme example of a wider atmos-
phere of social explicitness – social porn – defined as the widespread
cultural manifestation of excessively explicit images, not necessarily
6
of a sexual nature (see Taylor 2007) . The scene traditionally viewed
upon a stage necessitates a gap between the viewer and the actor
(the theatre’s proscenium arch), but now that distance has
imploded: ‘The task of all media and information today is to
produce this real, this extra real (interviews, live coverage, movies,
TV-truth, etc.). There is too much of it, we fall into obscenity and
pornography. As in pornography, a kind of zoom takes us too near
the real, which never existed and only ever came into view at a
certain distance (Baudrillard 1983b: 84; emphasis in original). Banality
TV caters to an excessively explicit desire to see under the surface of
cultural forms previously based upon social practices of seductive
veiling and unveiling.

Food porn: the raw and the cooked

[T]hese shows tend to emphasize a compelling mixture of what
Levi-Strauss called, to distinguish the external facticity of nature
from the social significances of culture, the raw and the
cooked. Reality TV lurches between actual situations and events
of startling horror, intense danger, morbid conduct, desperate
need, or bizarre coincidence (the raw) and cover stories that
reduce such evidence to truism or platitudes (the cooked) …
Reality TV aspires to non-friction. It reduces potential subver-
sion and excess to a comestible glaze.
(Nichols 1994: 45)

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