Page 187 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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172 Now
witness the creation of a feast with no regret that it will never be
ours to taste’ (Kaufman 2005: 60). There appears to be little
difference in the filming techniques used in both sexual pornogra-
phy and gastroporn because both genres share a technologically
savvy responsiveness to the ‘greedy eyes’ grammar innate to the
camera’s optical unconscious.
The negative cultural consequences of this loss of traditional
auratic experience adds an important corrective to Benjamin’s
optimism. Social porn represents the previously encountered notions
of the pseudo-event and the society of the spectacle at their most
symbolically deficient and tautological. Cultural populists/active
audience theorists fail to see how what is apparently raw material for
viewers is in fact the ‘pre digested banal detail of everyday life’ to
re-quote Dovey. Critical theorists, by contrast, focus upon the nega-
tive aspects of this pre digested quality and their critique is cogently
captured by Kaufman’s summary of the underlying ideological
problem with pornography whether it be of the food or sexual
variety: ‘the big lie is “taste life”, have a real experience, when in fact
this is the most unreal experience … “Taste life” as though by
watching it you’re going to actually have some sort of authentic,
lifelike [experience] – not even lifelike – life itself is here, as
opposed to this outrageous simulacrum that’s being presented as
such’ (Kaufman, cited in Gladstone 2005: n.p.).
The key political implication of this situation is its resonance with
Nichols’s conceptualization of the ideological reduction of Reality TV.
Voyeuristic fascination reinforces the status quo: ‘The raw, the
savage, the taboo and untamed require recuperation. We flirt with
disgust, abhorrence, nausea, and excess seeking homeopathic cures
for these very states. Reality TV provides a curative for disease
through the (repetitive, tiresome) tale it tells’ (Nichols 1994: 46).
The culture industry’s harmful effects are not to be found in tired
debates about the relative merits of high versus low culture; they
reside in the effect of industrialized repetition on the human psyche
and culture whether it be at the micro-level of the camera’s panning
movement whether it be human sex organs or raw chicken breast, or
the more macro-level repetition of Banality TV formats and their ever
more invasive cultural presence. Dovey argues that there is a
widespread media-sponsored degradation of the public sphere
caused by our uncritical retreat/immersion into the graphically
explicit. Pornographic movies are obviously an extreme example of
this general tendency, but the frequently ludicrous nature of its
skimpy plots and acting at least maintain a critical distance of
amused cynicism in the viewer that may actually be less apparent in
social porn: ‘The ironic distances negotiated by our suspension of

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