Die Wohltemperierte Schreibmaschine

Last month was the 25th anniversary of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Eight years ago, I was teaching the book in one of my classes and thinking about reality television, still a relatively new field at the time, and I wrote the following essay.

I think there are some useful things to gained from the book, and I expect it to become (along with the Simpsons) one of the lenses we use to reflect on our era.

The Obsession with Reality

Did you ever think this national obsession with “reality television” was fascinating according to the terms themselves, “reality” and “television”? In fact, one might assume that the interest in “reality” televised should be somewhat ridiculous since we all live in reality every day anyway and it should be, as my life obviously is, dull.

With that said, there is a long history in our culture of fascination with “real” stories and “real” people. Even Wordsworth was fascinated by the “language really used by men” (quotes from the preface to his Lyrical Ballads). He wanted his poetry to avoid poetic artifice, instead capturing “incidents and situations from common life,” as well as “the essential passions of the heart,” which were altogether best expressed by what he called “low and rustic life.” An interesting note on class prejudices here, Wordsworth seems to suggest that the lower classes have the truest emotional moments, worth treating poetically. In short, their emotional responses are less contrived and less artificial because they are poor. He moves on to suggest that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and here his emphasis on spontaneity outlines the same automatic assumption that viewers of reality television have, that spontaneous emotion is the true emotion. In other words, emotional responses are authentic when they are immediate and unprocessed.

For the past week my mother has been trying to tell me about this show she’s been watching where men and women get married according to a voting body: the audience. Apparently, although the rules are beyond me and my students laughed at how alien I made it appear in my description, suggesting that I am “so out of touch” with contemporary life, these people meet each other and related family members and friends and then they are voted on by those watching the show. Those with the most votes as a match get married. My mother records this show and calls friends to discuss what has occurred in each episode. When she speaks about the characters she describes them as if she knew them in real life.

I have come to think about this as a fascinating thing. Apparently, as my students have informed me, this television show is the most popular show in the country, with millions of viewers if not, no doubt, thousands of people voting on these television couples weekly, and perhaps even millions of people calling each other to discuss who was left at the alter and who will live happily ever after.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the subject of reality television recently because I’ve been re-reading Don Dellilo’s White Noise in one of my English classes (the same one that thinks I am out of touch). In the book, specifically the “Airborne Toxic Event” chapter, Jack and the family are caught dead in their pattern of performing their lives when a catastrophe strikes and they have no idea how to respond to it. They are forced to evacuate their homes amidst a mass exodus of cars all desperately trying to escape the “cloud of deadly chemicals.” Aside from being one of the funniest moments in American fiction, this chapter has some stunningly apt moments that relate directly to the problem of reality. The first is when the family makes it onto the freeway and find themselves looking into other cars to see the faces of other evacuees in order to find out how frightened they should be. It’s hilarious but somehow fitting that this family, stunned into primitivity by the fact of modern technology and the incomprehensible world of noise (advertising, media, all psychic data) that encompasses them, cannot assemble legitimate reactions to something as stark and obvious as catastrophe. Or perhaps catastrophe, because it goes against the routine of daily life, is inherently the least obvious thing, and therefore, the most difficult to interpret.

In that case, Delillo has another example that everyone should be able to relate to: the subject of death. In a moment of personal insight, Jack describes his relationship with death, “It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself.” I added the emphasis to point specifically to Delillo’s constant use of television as the source of reality. Jack understands he is separated from death, or the condition of dying, only when it is televised for him, in a moment during the “Airborne Toxic Event” chapter where an official, someone “with access to data,” assesses his risk after being exposed to the toxic cloud. He spends the rest of the novel otherwise obsessed with death in ridiculous ways. He is, in fact, safe, but he fails to realize this, instead acting out his life as an exaggerated response to his overwhelming fear of mortality.

Later in the chapter, a mysterious man shouts:

We look around and we see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?

In the world of White Noise “reality” is something that is filtered by television, and made comprehensible by the culture that feeds off of television, or other forms of media. This man, speaking in cataclysmic/prophetic tones, is merely emphasizing the ways in which their catastrophe remains unreal to the world if it remains untelevised. In a way this makes sense. We find ourselves extending our antennae in the world, and television, the news, and radio all must work as extensions of our sensory abilities to perceive the world around us when they bring us information about the world beyond the world that we know. The moment of humor occurs when the man’s pronouncement borders on suggesting that the catastrophe remains unreal to those who experienced it because it has not been televised. Thus, television grants the status of “reality” to important situations for everyone. The question for these fictional characters becomes “how will I remember my life if I’ve never been on T.V.?”

And, in a way, this is precisely the question that we may be asking ourselves. When we find ourselves as a culture obsessed with the authentic, the “real” as televised weekly, we may have come to a point where we are no longer really sure what “real” is, or even what “real emotion” is. It could be that the patterns we have been witness to, infinitely repeated in story form and mythologized (death, war, love, conflict, revenge, violence, as well as all archetypically recognizable narrative forms), have muted our understandings of our own emotional responses even as they have trained us to know how to respond according to a standard form. How do you feel when your wife cheats on you? Well, you respond like Othello in anger. What does love consist of? Well, it consists of sacrifice and hand-holding and marriage as seen in every family sitcom ever aired. The patterns of narrative we have inherited from the immediate forms of media we are enmeshed in have trained us to know how to respond emotionally to a norm in certain situations. Perhaps this is the point of cultural narratives, to teach ethics, morality, and condition social responses. Even so, the dazed characters of White Noise exaggerate the problem to such a degree that one begins to wonder if all of this cultural noise, radio, television, etc., has not stunted our ability to react personally to particular emotional moments, i.e., if the norm has not been substituted for the individual emotional response.

In any case, the subject of reality television seems to make this problem more apparent. Overall, it would seem that the problem with reality television is not that it is inherently bad television, on the contrary, it is probably some of the best television of the last ten years (as my mother would attest); but our obsessions with it may signify our neurosis surrounding “being real” and have real emotional responses to our own lives. When we want to know what “real” is we watch it on television.

Still, the most glaring reality about reality television is its utterly contrived nature. This is all too obvious to anyone who stops to consider the artifice inherent in situations where people get married by voting or are required to compete for large sums of money, entirely in front of the lens of the camera. Here lies an important question: when people use the term “reality” for “reality television” do they think this is truly “reality?” and what do they think is real about it? In fact, if these people are real, then what are we who are watching? Are we merely performing the reality of our lives?

In White Noise, for instance, this is precisely what happens. An example of this comes early in the novel where Jack and Murray visit an attraction called “the most photographed barn in America.” “The most photographed barn” as Murray says is not really a barn, but an idea of a picture of a barn. And what do these two find when they arrive–many people taking photographs of the barn. “No one sees the barn,” Murray says and he’s right. Delillo uses Murray to show the ways in which those who photograph the barn are taking part in the performance of the reality of the barn. They do not see the barn, but they take part in the history of the idea of the barn. This is a complicated way of saying that they show up because they are convinced this is something worth seeing, and when they get there they do merely what everyone else does. This is the nature of performing reality: we do what everyone else does (or what the pervasive images surrounding us tell us to do) and the performance of reality stands in place of reality itself.

One person who gets referenced a lot in discussions of reality and contemporary culture, not to mention White Noise, is Jean-Paul Baudrillard. It is not uncommon in Baudrillard’s language to see suggestions of reality paired with discussions of violence. The “violence of the real” or the “violation of the real” are both concepts he uses. Reading Baudrillard one almost comes to believe it would be possible to kidnap all of the “real” and hold it hostage, achieving the most horrific act of terrorism possible. In fact, he obsesses over “the real” in ways that often make him seem just that, obsessive, or even paranoid, and yet his pronouncements on our contemporary world are coming to seem more and more useful as our mediated world progresses.

Baudrillard describes a world in which image and reality come to hold about the same weight. He thinks of reality and the image of reality as pointing to the same depthlessness. They both succumb to the status of reality with little forethought or deeper insight. Still, we live in a world where reproductions of reality are taken for granted, and this focus on “the real” must signify some greater concern with reality. We reproduce and take for granted images of reality as reality and they, in fact, are reality to such a degree that the concept “reality” often begins to fall apart. Baudrillard describes in a 1996 essay the reproduction of L.A.-Disneyland in Orlando Florida as a life-size museum of something that already exists somewhere else.

Baudrillard describes how our fascination with “reality” creates a process of recursive cloning:

We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification, in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.

If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of Information(1).

When Baudrillard says, “the virtual takes over the real as it appears,” he means that our images of the real substitute themselves for real and become real, while we, meanwhile, are obsessed with the image of what is real. These reproductions of the real are never questioned as unreal, but instead are bought and sold as pieces of real. What remains close to Baudrillard’s mind, is the fact that all of this “reality” is constantly being bought and sold. “Reality” is manufactured as a commodity these days. Indeed, when we start to examine in an “image vs. reality” fashion, we begin to attempt to reconstruct what is real, attempting to find the real “real,” and for Baudrillard this neurotic searching touches off yet another round of “cloning” and “resurrecting” the real, as he notes above. This all points, in my mind, to a broader neurosis about what real living consists of, perpetuated by the constant images of “reality” that we are marketed with.

It makes sense, in a way, that societies who are constantly subject to messages demonstrating their lack, lack of hand soap, lack of fun, lack of freedom, that these societies would eventually become neurotic about all of the experiences they’re missing out on. Thus, the marketing of reality creates the need for it and supplies the self-perpetuating neurosis.



No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.