Core Response #4 - Laura Broman

One of the classic symptoms of late capitalism is manufactured solutions to manufactured problems. My personal favorite version of this is the range of wildly silly “As Seen On TV” kitchen products that are supposed to save you time and money in the kitchen, two things which are surely scarce in your life due to your low-paying, energy-draining job. The language of the marketing on these products tends to target working women, promising to alleviate guilt over not having enough time to spend with your kids/in the kitchen. If you just brought the product, your problems would be solved.

We can see another form of this symptom play out in Anna McCarthy’s essay on the “Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” that is reality TV. Traumatic suffering belies the myth of liberal utopia as dreamt by Hegel and all the others, since trauma transcends our capabilities of self-governance and defies logic and rational explanation. Feelings don’t care about your facts, in other words. The traumatic subject, Bruce the amputee in the case of Random 1, suffers under detached neoliberal governance, his inability to function under self-governance rendering him abject in the eyes of civil society.

Yet, of course, the solution to Bruce’s challenges are not identified in any kind of policy reform or shift in governance from the self back to the state. Rather, he is given a superficial gift from the benevolent hosts of Random 1, his challenges transformed into a mirror with which the hosts and viewer can self-actualize as successfully responsible members of this private-civic sphere. The traumatized subject is recast as a product for consumption, and the myth of neoliberal self-governance is reaffirmed. The whole thing is a bit of a yikes.

Ouellette and Hay’s chapter on TV as democracy fits into these ideas in an interesting way. The illusion of choice is another component of capitalism, one which Ouellette and Hay don’t explore very deeply in this piece yet which is very much present. Yes, on American Idol you have the opportunity to vote for your favorite, a basic tenet of democracy (a word that desperately needs defining here, but I assume that happened elsewhere in the book). Yet whomever you choose to vote for, your affective labor and active participation in this private/public forum is ultimately to the benefit of the show, the network, the company that owns it, and nobody else. You have freedom of choice, but that choice ultimately has the same outcome whatever. American democracy at its finest.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll pull up one of those kitchen product infomercials on YouTube. I find them strangely soothing: at the most conscious level I can laugh at the terrible food they make using the products, which they insist tastes good, and I can shake my head at the gendered insinuations about nuclear families and responsibilities of child-rearing. But on another level, the one that takes over as I slip back into sleep, I can imagine that if I just bought the product, I would be a fully functioning, self-governing member of the state. And then everything would be okay.