During
the brief part of a presentation I hard at Annenberg last night, Sarah Banet-Weiser
discussed some of her work with self-branding, especially for young people on social media. She mentioned that self-branding has the scary side effect of people
treating themselves and interacting with each other as objects.
When
reading Baudrillard, he points out something similar, "men of wealth are no longer
surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by
objects." (32) What Banet-Weiser expressed concern over, Baudrillard hints
at; "We are living the period of the objects: that is, we live by their
rhythm, according to their incessant cycles." (32) Not only do objects
drive people, but self-branding is a way to sell people as one would sell an object.
Baudrillard
also points out that the drugstore has become consumer central, the place to
get a fix of the "cafe, cinema, book store, auditorium, trinkets, clothing
and many other things." (35) I then had a small moment of horror, because the
other night when I was bored, I walked myself right around the block to the
nearest Rite Aid just to look around. In a world with a whole arsenal of more
meaningful pastimes, it was a drugstore I chose to break up the evening's monotony. Consumerism at work.
Being
new to this course of study, it always seemed that the focus on
consumers, marketing and selling products is just a necessary evil in the
world. I worked in retail and merchandising for years. As a manger-in-training,
I was taught quick sell items should go right by the cash registers, items on
display will faster, more popular items should be placed towards the back of
the store so customers have to walk through a maze of other products to get
what they want, items placed at eye level sell better and organized merchandise
is easier to shop.
In
other words, companies invest a lot of time organizing their wares to get
maximum profit out of each customer. Or, as Baudrillard says about this focus on product organization, "The arrangement directs the purchasing impulse towards
networks of objects in order to seduce it and elicit, in accordance with its
own logic, a maximal investment, reaching the limits of economical path."
(34)
To
sum up, what Banet-Weiser points to, and my own Rite Aid and retail
self-evaluation, Baudrillard's thought, "we have reached the point where
"consumption" has grasped the whole of life," is thought
provoking. (36)
The title of György Pálfi’s film Taxidermia immediately draws attention to the film’s positioning of
the human body as the site of conflicted historical and ideological battles. Human
bodies in all their visceral, unpalatable materiality literally form the page
on which the vagaries of the script are “fleshed out.” Food is a central
metaphor through which Pálfi charts out the anatomy of three
generations. This characterization of the body as both the site and object of
consumption slips into particularly tricky terrain, as it is near impossible to
achieve an objective dissociation from the object of analysis when one is
essentially also part of the subset of objects. In other words, the discussion
of the human body and practices of consumption are marked by the vanishing
simplicity that Marx notes in relation to the discussion of the fetishistic
character of forms of consumerist practices that become so pervasive that they
begin to seem like “nature.”
The central character in the first story, Morosgoványi Vendel
presents us with a figure that is disempowered and constantly in “want”.
Whether it is through the sensuous play with fire, or the less than savory
scenes with the pig, Morosgoványi comes across as an embodiment of the
infantilized “lower” class that cannot control “hunger”, but is constantly
constituted by it. On a side-note, I am wondering if the construction of this
character, especially in light of the association of deviance/depravity has
anything to do with older representative figures such as the character of
Woyzeck rendered by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1979 production with which
Csaba Czene’s portrayal of Vendel bears an uncanny similarity.
Csaba Czene as Morosgoványi
Klaus Kinski as Woyzcek
It is in the second and the third stories that the connection
to consumption becomes more intense. The characters of Balatony Kálmán, his son
Lajoska, and the strained relationship between them is constituted by embodied
practices of consumption. Kálmán's past as a speed-eater is particularly
interesting to note as it brings in an angle of literal “consumption” in
relation to the history of socialism. If we tend to connect constant
consumption as an effect of late capitalism, Kálmán's “state-approved” cycles
of public swallowing and regurgitation point towards a different sort of
consumption that is more literal and more embodied than an abstract notion of
consumption that is understood in more symbolic terms. Kálmán's speed-eating
and his ultimate metamorphosis into a giant consuming mass of flesh resembling Jabba the Hutt, are a less-than-subtle nod to consumption as something that
constitutes the body and its relationship to the social world.
Jabba the Hutt
Kálmán the eating machine
Finally with Lajoska we come into a realm of consumption that
more than constitutes the body’s relation to the world. Not only does Lajoska’s
“appetite” become the bone of contention between him and his father, it also
constitutes itself as consumerist guilt. Not only is Lajoska not like his father in terms of
appetite, he also does not conform to ideal body-type imagery that proliferates
through advertising (here I am thinking specifically of the gymnasium and
Lajoska’s desire to transform). Baudrillard’s idea that consumption now comes
to be seen as a “citizen’s duty” is reflected in Lajoska’s finally sacrificial
offering of his own body…if Lajoska is not the ideal “dutiful” consumer in
life, in death at least he transforms into a consumable “object.” If anything,
his machinistic suicide is a “ritual” act that allows him to redeem himself—perhaps
one that allows him to access the only kind of martyrdom that is possible in a
forest of consumption.
I think that while watching Taxidermia I was a little disappointed at the level of
grotesqueness. I have definitely seen instances that were more morbid than what
was projected on film (although I will saw that there were a few moments in the
final story where he was cutting himself open that were nearly on par with my
preferred limit on disgusting). While watching the film it made me think of the
seven deadly sins, which is probably a cliché way to look at the film, but as I
read Baudrillard’s Consumer Society I
began to really invest in the critique of the historical economic shifts it was
trying to depict. I think the third story in the film is well represented by
the idea that, “The substance of life, unified in this universal digest, can no
longer have any meaning… there is no
longer a symbolic function, but an eternal combinatory of “ambiance” in a
perpetual Springtime” (Baudrillard 38). I feel like the relationship had by the
taxidermist son with his “put to pasture” eating champion father deftly critiques
overconsumption and the problems with misconstrued notions of abundance. The
father’s consumption has literally left him immobilized and eventually the
son’s decision to preserve his father’s body as well as his own mechanically
stuffed torso explains the unsatisfactory existence that is tied to a heavy
consumer culture. The taxidermist son has been so underwhelmed by the ideas and
presence of his father that his life is spent going through the motions of
consuming on the behalf of his incapacitated father. Eventually, the
preservation of their corpses highlights this lack of satisfaction with their
economic participation while the exhibition of their bodies explores how they
are caught in their own “perpetual Springtimes” and have become cultural products
of their generations. The second story sequence about the height of the
father’s career and prime of his life is best explained by the statement that
“we neither produce nor consume just any product: the product must have some
meaning in relation to a system of values” (Baudrillard 40). During this
segment nearly all of the consumption is shown to be for the pride of the
nation (which may perhaps represent the competitive period of consumption to
show the wealth and development of soviet bloc countries both during and after
the split. I guess looking back at these periods as depicted by the film may be
a hard pill to swallow and I had such visceral reactions to watching the
characters eat in the second portion (yet somehow watching rich women in Beverly
Hills drop $40K on a 2 year old’s birthday doesn’t warrant any disgust on my
behalf for that level of consumption, sorry personal TV watching
anecdote). Is there any difference
between physical consumption and monetary consumption in the grand scheme of
things (or should they both make me nauseous)?
The articles by Jean Baudrillard and Karl Marx investigate the relationship between production, consumption, and individual freedom. They both examine the oppressive nature of a consumer society and, within its context, locate the binary relationship between human needs and their fulfilment. While Marx views production as the driving force of a capitalist society and focuses on individual’s alienation from the fruits of his/her labor, Baudrillard emphasizes the constitutive function of consumption, as driven by constructed human needs. He objects to the notion of homo economicus by claiming that “The whole discourse on consumption, whether learned or lay, is articulated on the mythological sequence of the fable: a man, ‘endowed’ with needs which ‘direct’ him towards objects that ‘give’ him satisfaction. Since man is really never satisfied (for which, by the way, he is reproached), the same history is repeated indefinitely, since the time of the ancient fables” (38-39). In other words, Baudrillard recognizes that the more we can have, the more we want, while at the same time arguing that the need we feel “is not a need for a particular object as much as it is a ‘need’ for difference (the desire for social meaning)” and thus, our “satisfaction can never be fulfilled” (48).
György Pálfi’s Taxidermia connects these notions of individual subjugation to forces of consumerism with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view of the human body (rather than consciousness) as the primary site of human cognition. For Pálfi’s characters, body becomes a site of negotiation between three forces of life: instrumentality, power, and freedom. Everything they do is viewed from the subject-object perspective of mediation. Body as a perpetual condition of experience delineates all parts of Pálfi’s triptych.
The first tableau, abstracted from any particular political or historical details, portrays Morosgoványi Vendel’s balancing act between private intimacy and public regulation. Army as a form of oppression (and an extreme case of placing state’s power structure over individual freedom) disables Morosgoványi Vendel’s ability to fulfill his sexual needs: the fire of his solitary moments is put out by the ice-cold encounters with his lieutenant, Öreg Balatony Kálmán. The specific historical context of Hungarian communist era becomes irrelevant since the focus is on universal dangers of an oppressive totalitarian regime, which invades individual autonomy, dignity, and the most private sphere of human sexuality. Human individualism is brought down to the level of one’s body, which in turn becomes the last frontier of freedom.
Following this formula of state--individual irreconcilability, the second story echoes Baudrillard’s notion of satisfaction that can never be fulfilled. Here, however, the individual lacks agency to oppose the machine of the totalitarian system and ends up acting contrary to his/her instincts (eg. the pregnant woman eating 20 kilos of caviar). Pálfi’s Hungary combines the elements of the Soviet Union’s obsession with control, authority, and emotional (and physical) disarming of its citizens with the grotesque eating contests (consumptionism par excellence) taken from the American consumer society . Food, eating, and the eater lose their basic meaning and function and become subjugated to the totality of the situation, in which individual finds himself/herself.
Lastly, the third story portrays human body negotiating the tragic choices of self-oppression and external objectification. In the end, Lajoska’s self-control becomes his distorted means of power. It is not sex or food, which Lajoska seeks to control. His final piece of taxidermy becomes the quintessence of capitalist perversion and degeneration of the individual: human body loses its dignity and constitutive function. The taxidermy statues were supposed to mimic human body, but in the end it is Lajoska’s human body that becomes the reflection of the statue - a produced object.
Our readings describe vast systems
of consumption and production, but Taxidermia
serves as a valuable counterpoint because it focuses so intently on the
status of individuals within a macrocosmic backdrop. As Ana, Victoria and
Sebnem have each already noted, the film does this by spectacularizing the
processes through which prevailing ideologies of three distinct political
regimes in Hungarian history manifest themselves directly through the bodies of
its three male protagonists. I won’t reiterate their close readings here.
Instead, I’ll focus on what strikes me as particularly noteworthy about the
film’s politics: the way that it uses a structure
of genealogy to undo the ideological logics that it depicts. It seems
significant to me that despite the fact that this story is a triptych, the
three segments blend almost seamlessly into one another, eliding both the dramatic
events that lead to historical change in Hungary and the periods of optimism
that followed. The result is that all of these stories, more or less, come to
the same result. Pálfi’s smooth transitions from one era to the next underscore
the fact that although methods change, these political processes all seem to work
toward the same end, namely creating a subject who willingly exploits and
destroys himself in the service of fulfilling latent societal expectations.
Perhaps even more radically, this
structure denaturalizes the ideologies that it depicts, showing that none of them is
the end point that it purports to be. In the second segment we see a grotesque
of the consumer-citizen figure that Couldry describes, and he’s still wheezing
and farting in the film’s third segment. This concluding segment, which not
incidentally concludes with a literal depiction of navel-gazing, is a crushing
satire of late-capitalism, and I’m curious
how others interpret it. By situating Lajoska’s story in a lineage, both
personal and political, the film gets outside of the current neoliberal mindset,
critiquing our assumptions that our current political state is permanent. Here
the film strikes me as schizophrenic, though, as it seems to want to state that capitalism
is not the end of history, or even much of an improvement to what has come
before, but it also ends by concluding its bloodline. Thoughts?
Presence is not effaced by a void, but by a redoubling of presence
that effaces the opposition between presence and absence. Nor is a
void effaced by fullness, but rather by repletion and saturation, by
a plenitude greater than fullness. This is the reaction of the body by
obesity, of sex by obscenity, an abreaction to a void.
-From Baudrillard's “Fatal Strategies”
Taxidermia
György Pálfi's Taxidermia is an interesting manifestation of Foucauldian conceptualization of power. Stripped of the possibilities of challenging the system, all three protagonists exercise their limited power of controlling their bodies. In other words, they counter the power exerted upon them by exercising power on their own bodies. These instances of exercising counterpower reproduce the fetishization and commodification of their bodies (and their labor). Therefore, they join their oppressors in the consumption of their own bodies.
Morosgoványi's labor is exploited by his commander as he is forced to perform heavy physical tasks while also being subjected to physical and psychological abuse. He is exposed to surveillance of the state and the army through his commander and he has very little privacy. His living conditions are horrific and he simply survives on his fantasies. His body is owned by his commander and the army, so he mostly challenges that authority with his fantasies and masturbation becomes a way to claim the ownership of his body. As the lines between reality and fantasy gets blurred, he is first mentally destroyed by the system and then, his commander destroys him physically by shooting him.
Unlike him, Kálmán is not a soldier. However, as a competitive eater, who represents his country in international eating competitions, Kálmán is also subject to state's surveillance and control of his body. His work causes serious damage to his health and even vomiting what he ate can't help preventing further damage. Despite, his collapse during the games, which is mirrored by his wife's premature labor induced by another unofficial performance, he goes on competing and ends up as a morbidly obese man. Kálmán's hopes for prosperity and fame are dependent on his ability to eat in that economic system, so his body becomes his only weapon of struggle.
Although Lajoska sees the end of that economic system, his life is dominated by another type of exploitation. As he tries to escape his father's oppression, he exercises power over the dead bodies of animals. The only time he challenges his father's oppression leads to Kálmán's death. The idea of his oppressor’s absence makes Lajoska's life, which was defined by serving his father, devoid. His body becomes his masterpiece as he kills himself after attempting to alter his physique by bodybuilding. When one of his customers finds Lajoska's body and exhibits what's left of him in an art gallery, commodification of the third protagonist's body becomes visible.
Therefore, all three men's bodies are commodified and fetishized in different ways. As they are exploited by their oppressors, the struggle to resist becomes a counter attempt to control and to exploit the body. Both the use value and the exchange value of the body are annihilated while Morosgoványi, Kálmán and Lajoska end up contributing to their consumption by the system.
As a conclusion, it can also be said that these stories of commodification supports Baudrillard's critique of Marx's essentialization of the use value (p. 39). Marx's definition of commodity fetishism refers to the erasure of the human labor in the evaluation of product's value. While Marx points out to the prioritization of exchange value for that evaluation, Marx's critique takes the use value for granted according to Baudrillard, who emphasizes that utilities and needs are as artificial as the market values (p. 339). Especially in the cases of Morosgoványi, who is an orderly, and Kálmán, a competitive eater, utilities are constructed artificially by the system for the purposes of governmentality. Lajoska's body as an art object appears in a similar artificial system of use value. Then, it becomes evident that the problem is not just about isolating the value from the labor and it is also important to think about why the labor is performed in the first place. When considered all together, these three different contexts of fetishization in the film depict that commodification exists across different time periods and political systems. Therefore, the essence of commodity fetishism and commodification is an issue of power struggle rather than a manifestation of a specific system of production and consumption.
In no way could I have prepared
myself for the horrors that I experienced while watching Taxidermia. I saw Taxidermia as
a film that communicated the self-destruction of the human race through its
over-consumption, as expressed through thematically repetitive images of body
horror engrained within a plot that traces the effects of consumption through
multiple generations. In my viewership I developed a focus on the
representation of humans in an animalistic way; both in their encouragement and
commodification of human consumption into a form of entertainment (the eating
competitions), in their actual physical attributes that give them an appearance
similar to that of animals, and in the conclusion of the film in which the
taxidermist makes himself and his father an object for display, just as the
taxidermied animals who decorate his storefront. In the beginning of the film, Morosgoványi’s
sexuality is projected in a barbaric/animalistic way; he is unable to be
satiated and very much expresses his sexuality through an animalistic deeply
rooted necessity, which leads him to having sex with his lieutenant’s wife, who
seems to oscillate between herself, an overweight, rugged woman, and a pig
carcass while they have sex.
This hybridity between humans and products
of consumption or animals is revealed in the birth of her child, Kálmán,
who is born with a pig’s tail and becomes very much like a pig whose distinct
behavior and purpose is to limitlessly gorge on food so that it can itself
become a product of human consumption. He very much resembles a pig- his very
purpose is to consume as much as possible with no restraint to provide
entertainment for those who watch the competitions. In “Consumer Society”
Baudrillard writes, “This repetitive and metonymic discourse of the consumer
and of commodities is represented through collective metaphor and as a product
of it's own surplus in the image of the gift and of the inexhaustible and
spectacular prodigality of the feast” (33-34). The cycle of
overconsumption is communicated through Kálmán’s cycle
of overeating, regurgitation of food, and eating again; his method of
regurgitation itself becoming a commodity to be used by future speed-eaters. This
tragedy and cycle of consumption is reinforced through the passing down of consumption
through generations. As Marx writes, “It is nothing but the definite social
relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic
form of a relation between things….the fetishism of the world of commodities
arises from the peculiar social character of the labor which produces them”
(332). Taxodermia represents how we become
“products” of consumption, and like objects in a factory line we become
replications of our environments and of our relatives and their behaviors, and
humanity seems to be predisposed through this consumption to self-destruct;
consumption becomes almost a part of us, integrated into our genes, becoming so
natural that it is almost unnoticed in our daily lives. The film ends with the
representation of the all-encompassing consumptive drugstore, Balatony
buying the same thing over and over and in bulk, his father consuming
lard, again assimilating to a product of consumption as he shares the same meal
as his cats, his prized objects, and Balatony transforming into a
spectacularized object of study himself to be recirculated and put on display
as an art piece. In his ultimate transformation Balatony symbolizes the
preservation of humanity through production.
György Pálfi’s
Taxidermia presents us with a
dizzying caricature of consumption and explorations of the abject that push the
norms of acceptability yet always retain their unavoidable connection to
politics, and thus shy away from seeming gratuitous. Indeed, it is impossible not to think of the politics of
over-consumption and the exploration of consumption as a sport in the context
of a country that was marred by under-nourishment and famine, particularly in
the early years of Stalin’s rule. The film is fascinating in its approach to
over-eating; though it critiques the practice through its exaggerated
characters and nauseating depictions of the competitions and after effects,
eating is also tied somewhat to a liberating impulse. Particularly in the
construction of the father and mother’s blossoming relationship, these
characters are unbound by social norms and consume unabashedly; food is drawn
upon to explicate freedom – significantly, the mother talks of the “socialist
paradise” that is Cuba, where “oranges drop from the trees”. Similarly, in the
celebration of the soviet union’s anniversary, caviar is enlisted for a
demonstration of the over-eaters’ ability; a food reserved for high class
occasions and known for its scarcity is thus diminished to just another pile of
fodder for over-consumption. Fidel’s appreciation for these competitions is
also mentioned, and all these references amount to an intriguing relationship
between wastefulness and socialism; in a society where theoretically equality
reigns, a surplus is deemed acceptable only within the context of
‘entertainment’ or ‘sport’, so that over-consumption is moderated in a
purposefully delineated framework. If we apply Marx’s outlining of commodity
fetish to the film, food here has moved beyond its usefulness as a fuel for the
body to a commodity that transcends its initial, base necessity and role in
nourishment. It is no longer seen as a utility but rather as an ironic element for amusement.
What’s notable as well is how Pálfi
does not allow the audience to distance itself from its own hypocrisies
concerning consumption; the scene where a pig is graphically dismembered and
its organs harvested emphasizes how divorced we are as consumers from the labor
and processes of production. We are happy to consume our bacon without giving
its origins a second thought, and the mechanics of our capitalist system that
masks labor processes ensure that most of us never need face this reality.
This is taken to an extreme level
in Taxidermia’s stomach-churning
ending, which reduces a human body to a work of art made for intellectual
consumption and careless contemplation. The gallery at the end highlights again
the notion of being removed from the process of production, where consumption
and personal satisfaction are privileged over the origins of the ‘product’. Here
art itself is equated with consumption, where intellectualizing a corpse
becomes acceptable within the parameters of high art. There are clear parallels
with Damien Hirst’s work here, and a disturbing suggestion that anything can be
packaged and displayed for consumption, including the human body. Again, a
sense of wastefulness pervades the sequence, whereby a life has been given up
for ‘entertainment’ and its value has been displaced onto a
production/consumption system that has literally become overwhelming. This scene also complicates Adorno's distinctions between mass culture and 'high art', as here the discourses of elite, 'high' culture are directly tied to consumption; even the intestine-looking pretzels served to the guests point to this connection. Ultimately, consumption pervades every facet of our lives and over indulgence cannot be separated into an 'elite vs the masses' dichotomy.
Since I brought it up in class... I still feel somewhat ambivalent about ART HISTORY (not so much ART) but the second half of the article is right on. All very relevant to our conversations about the role and value of cultural studies.
I grew up with watching PBS fairly regularly, as it is one of few channels my non-cable subscribing family has access to. As Mike pointed out in his post, PBS' longstanding staple programming Masterpiece (Theatre) has undergone a form of rebranding that has made "status striving more accessible than it once was." I believe that this rebranding and its effects extend beyond Masterpiece. I have found myself interested in the issue of the accessibility of PBS in general. PBS has long been accessible to anyone with a television set and and antenna, however when I was young there was only one PBS affiliate station available to me, KVIE channel 6 in my case. Since the government mandated switch to digital broadcast, this has not exactly been the case. I now have access to channel 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3, all of which airing different programming at different times, and aiming for different audiences at different times as well. This "multiplexing" delivery format has reminded me of another network that is considered to be a social signifier of class and taste, HBO. This strategy allows PBS and their affiliates to reuse their programming at no extra cost with the potential of ultimately bringing in more viewers throughout the day. No longer are PBS watchers beholden to the schedule that has been set for them with children's programming in the mornings and late afternoons, with cooking shows sandwiched between these blocks, Masterpiece and Nova in the primetime slots, and news programming such as Frontline and Charlie Rose in the later evenings. The morning hours are no longer reserved for children, for a lone adult without children can simply switch to another variant of the channel and enjoy a show about gardening. Beyond this, many of us accessed PBS with a television at all through their online streaming video archive and handy PBS app for mobile devices. While the PBS taste is more accessible, it has also become more selective. It is no longer simply the affiliates to blame for censoring our consumption (as described in Allison Perlman's Blacking Out "Black Journal") but individual audience member.
Over the past week, I too have used these varying forms of accessibility to pick and choose what I specifically wanted to consume. A Frontline episode about the "Culture of Liking," a few Nature episodes (I am particularly excited about "My Bionic Pet" which is coming in April), and an episode of one of my favorite PBS programs, California's Gold (featuring the American treasure that was Huell Howser.)
I confess, I have been a PBS addict my whole life. Raised by relatively poor parents who didn't want to pay for cable when I was younger, my early media exposure was defined by PBS programming. Sesame Street was absolutely my favorite television show (I had an Ernie-themed birthday one year), later on I devoured the Anne of Green Gables books because I was first inspired by the lovely PBS adaptations, and every Christmas like clockwork I sat down to watch Mikhail Baryshnikov's Nutcracker. All of this was thanks to PBS -- and the VCR, which I think should be noted as equally formative to my PBS exposure since, because we were relatively poor, we also didn't have the money to call into the PBS drives in order make a pledge and then receive the official recordings of the shows in return. Instead, we bootlegged it with our VCR; my VHS of the Nutcracker is still a prized possession, though I don't own a VCR anymore.
There is a point to this anecdote, I promise.
In the past two weeks I've thought a lot about my early experiences with PBS in light of our discussions about taste and class. We've already had a couple of posts about how PBS sets itself apart from other programming because it is tasteful, because it is quality, because it is sort of British, because it is educational, and -- here I think Bourdieu would agree -- because it is distinctly notthose other shows. I think Ana summed up this aspect of PBS fantastically when she wrote that "taste
is determined by class and education, and constructs itself primarily as a
matter of differentiation and rejection of other
tastes. In this sense, PBS constructs itself in this instance as not low class, as not based on commercial or popular appeal necessarily, but rather
as a designator of what ‘quality’ television is."
But this is only true up to a point. PBS is also incredibly American in its aims and audience, which means that the taste and class that it projects is aspirational and limited. PBS's audience is not the one-percenters, the jet-setters, nor the arbiters and influencers of taste. (I've worked for some of these people, and they wouldn't be caught dead watching Antiques Roadshow or Rick Steve.)
PBS's audience is a middle America that is desperate to distinguish itself with a little bit of history and recycled taste: it's the humble Virgina mother who suddenly discovers that she's distantly related to former Austrian royalty because of her father's old pocket watch; its the middle-aged couple from Iowa that's saved at every holiday for the last five years so that they can finally take a week-long trip across the Alps, as perfectly prescribed by Rick Steve's travel books; its the hipster that gets to self-congratulate himself as he watches Pioneers of Television for being smart enough and discerning enough to watch such a quality and informative show instead of football; and it's the teenaged girl who sits down and watches Jane Austen adaptations, Doctor Who, and Sherlock while drinking Earl Grey and wishing that she were British -- or at least Anything But American.
Oddly enough, this is why I love PBS, because it is culture and taste for the aspirational classes, and it embodies something particularly American that well predates modern PBS programming. My grandparents (on both sides of my family) were often fond of telling me about how they acquired all of the books that they have since bequeathed to me and my brother. All of my grandparents came from low socioeconomic backgrounds: mechanics, potato farmers, barbers, and more potato farmers. Yet, they wanted more for themselves and more for their children, which is why they regularly spent their savings on updating their Encyclopaedia Britannica collections and buying "the Great Classics," as my grandmother called them: Aristotle, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson. In essence, it was the Western Canon of Philosophy and Literature. And they weren't the only ones doing this; buying these collections was a generational phenomenon across the mid-century aspirational American middle class. I believe that PBS's programming is a direct legacy to this era, particularly in regards to its aspirational values and its consideration of what qualifies a "quality" or "tasteful."
Of course, the irony in this is that the "taste" PBS latches onto is bourgeois at the best of times. As I said before, no one-percenter jet-setter would be caught dead going on a Rick Steve's tour of Europe. And then there's Downton Abbey. Despite many American's confusion over this subject, Downton is not made by PBS. Nor is it made by the BBC (which is also not an uncommon belief). It's made by iTV. As my British friend quipped to me the other day, "it's astounding how Americans can repackage our soap operas as good TV," and then she went on to point out that Downton didn't even hold enough nutritional value to be on the BBC. As result, as much as I love PBS for the way it fuels and encourages the aspirations of the middle class, it's also a double edged sword that reinforces the class disparities between those who aspire and those who have already arrived.
And on a related, but not an entirely on-topic note, I thought I would share this new web series that I've been watching Thug Notes, which does some fascinating things in regards to taste and class.
As other posters have mentioned,
it’s remarkable how much British television informs PBS and its cultural
branding, particularly through such widely sought out programs as Downton Abbey and Sherlock. On the one hand, this is a somewhat unsurprising development
if one considers the tremendous strength that the public broadcasting ethos of
‘informing, educating, and entertaining’ has possessed in shaping British
television history itself; public broadcasting there has undoubtedly influenced
the forms of public broadcasting in the US. On the other hand, it is astounding
how much British culture continues to be associated with conceptions of taste
and high class in the US, and how minimally ‘chav culture’ and lower British
class representations have been disseminated outside of the UK in contrast.
British programming broadcast on PBS draws extensively on pre-established,
literary material – executing a ‘high class’ connection to literature – that is
proudly linked to British national heritage. This can be seen, for instance, in
Sherlock’s privileging of its London
setting, or in Downton Abbey’s
foregrounding of class conflicts and dynamics in its central thematics, as well
as its concrete ties to the seminal British drama Upstairs/Downstairs.
Bourdieu has outlined how taste
is determined by class and education, and constructs itself primarily as a
matter of differentiation and rejection of other
tastes. In this sense, PBS constructs itself in this instance as not low class, as not based on commercial or popular appeal necessarily, but rather
as a designator of what ‘quality’ television is. The audience it addresses is
nowhere as plainly detected as in the commercials that accompany online
streaming of its Masterpiece program
series. An ad for a luxurious cruise around Europe, emphasizing the beautiful
landscapes and lavish museums, clearly courts a slightly more mature, affluent,
educated audience that has the means and desire to travel in order to
experience the ‘legacy’ of Europe’s history and art. This is a distinguished audience
that has chosen PBS over other
stations, making its preferences clear.
What can be a productive
comparison is turning to the notion of ‘quality television’. Though it is a
slippery term at best, its associations in different contexts seem fascinating
to me. On the one hand, PBS presents itself as a distinguished marker of
‘quality’ programs that emphasize education, history, art, and literary
adaptations. On the other hand, cable channels like HBO – which itself
proclaims, ‘it’s not TV, it’s HBO – court the term in order to emphasize a
notion of ‘quality’ that privileges groundbreaking televisual storytelling,
writer-driven shows, and content which embraces the taboo and would certainly
fall far from PBS’s goals of courting wider audiences, preferring to tap into
niche tastes. Both channels draw heavily on notions of branding
differentiation, unique programming, and high production values to offer their
viewers guidelines for taste and taste molding. Even so, PBS purports to
educate its viewer and provides its own ‘service’ in doing so, preferring a
(somewhat more) generalized address while HBO draws on the discourse of quality
for a different agenda, and its viewers are drawn into a subscription service
that clearly demarcates a higher class, affluent audience. In this sense, PBS
offers itself up to a broadcast audience, though its content clearly demarcates
the boundaries of this in emphasizing British content focused on white upper
class lives and relying heavily on literary heritage. Ultimately, other British
classes and content are not the only casualties; in addressing such a
specialized audience in disguise under the presentation of a broadcast, general
address, PBS risks alienating large sectors of its audience that may mistakenly
be perceived as part of the ‘margins’.
I attended Charlotte Brunsdon’s talk on the televisual city
Friday and found it to be quite unique. When describing the way London was
portrayed in television she kept emphasizing the importance of such literary
works from Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. She explained
that much of how London is depicted stems from its growth and development
during the 19th century. I thought that it was amusing just how
often she mentioned literature as the defining factor to the screen version of
London (because in order to justify film as an art it has been frequently
compared to older art forms). To me it sounded like there was a matter of both
class and taste to the way in which London was presented through television
(and to a greater extent film). And although there have been some changes in
how London appears the main goal of these changes is similar to how Holohan
discusses changes in the presentation of the family (in a documentary mode) as
“a move toward fluidity in making and interpreting meanings about social
structures” (22). The newer depictions of London are faster and more condensed
so the audience quickly assesses the on screen city as London and in the case
of her example of the contemporary TV show Sherlock, the city becomes even more
fluid in its representations (does this perhaps expose a shift in how audiences
navigate metropolitan areas and the “social structures” of a city?) almost
becoming a character in its own right. While I am aware that not everyone was
at the talk I found it quite valuable that how she discussed the televisual
city (and the work done on depictions of cities in television) during our week
of class and taste. Charlotte explained that in comparison to film little work
has been done on cities in television (again film is seen as of a higher class
and more refined taste than television) and she talks about this as being in
relation to the gendered assignments of TV and film. She describes the city on
film as the place of the flanneur out
and about the town while the city on television is brought into the home for
the domestic audience (and I’m realizing now I should have taken notes instead
of being swept in the rapture of her insightful lecture, I apologize that I
don’t have an eidetic memory to recall her exact terms on the PowerPoint).
Though the city itself remains the same whether it is on film or television,
how it is presented can differ drastically. “Objectively and subjectively
aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing or home
decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social
space … the strategies aimed at transforming the basic dispositions of a
life-style into a system of aesthetic principles… are in fact reserved for
members of the dominant class” (Bourdieu 206). Essentially, as Charlotte
pointed out, London aesthetically has been constructed based on the prominent
literature that emerged during its most formative years of development and this
has been maintained long after their authors have come and gone. This is
mirrored in many debates between film and television with one being heralded as
a high art. Well now that I feel like I have been ranting I want to say that
these “aesthetic principles” that come to define class and taste definitely hit
a wall when they mingle in different arenas (the work on cities like London in
film vastly outweighs the work on it in television even though the city is
highly cosmopolitan). So what is class? What is taste? What does it mean to be
the smart sibling in Honey Boo Boo’s family? Is it enough to be a London when
on television or the prettiest person when in a trailer park? How does one
maintain notions of class or taste as being consistent when current media
allows the intersection of the tasteful and the tasteless (my Little Pony porn
I’m talking to you)?
Much like the PBS program, The Great
American Dream Machine, served as a precursor to many popular sketch
comedies as Laurie Ouellette mentions, An American Family was
just the first of a plethora of reality shows centered around families.
However, it is clear from our screenings in class that there is a distinct
difference in the PBS program and the TLC reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
An American Family attempted to show an honest and accurate
representation of a family in America, while Honey Boo Boo attempts
to do the same on the surface at least. The main difference between these
two programs as well as the others that I will discuss in this post is that the
PBS programs' main goal is the educate while Honey Boo Boo and
other similar shows strive simply to entertain and usually do so by dramatizing
reality.
According to Bourdieu’s ideas about taste and class
distinctions one might assume that people who enjoy watching PBS programs are
middle and upper class people. However, in my experience this does not always
ring true. A person’s taste is not always an accurate indication of their class
status. I grew up watching PBS children’s programming because my parents did
not want to pay for a satellite dish, so my choices for TV watching were
limited. This was also true for many of my other childhood friends. The lower
income of our families is actually one reason we watched these kinds of
programs. So for this assignment I thought I would watch some of the shows that
I often watched with my parents: Nature,
Antiques Roadshow, and Rick Steve’s Europe.
Each of these shows, like The Great American Dream Machine, now has their own counterparts on
other networks, but with significant differences in the aesthetics. For example
I watched a Nature documentary called
“The Beauty of Ugly” which discussed animals with ugly features that serve
important functions in the survival of those creatures. The main purpose of
this episode was to inform and educate the viewers about specific animals and
their functional but ugly features. In contrast, the programs that now populate
the Animal Planet network are much more concerned with entertaining their
viewers than actually educating them. In particular there is a show called My Cat From Hell in which a cat behavior
specialist comes into people’s homes and teaches them how to train their out of
control kitties. This program as well as others on Animal Plant tends to
dramatize reality and turn it into a dramatic story rather than a factual
representation of reality. In many episodes of My Cat From Hell the owners of the cats will describe how the
uncontrollable behavior of their pets is ruining their lives and their
relationships with their spouses or roommates. During the interview portion of
the show, dramatic music will play alongside montages of a cat attacking her
owners, and the owners will describe how they feel “betrayed” or even scared to
live in their own house.
Once this problem is introduced the rest of the
episode will focus on the cat behavior specialist solving the cat’s behavioral
problems and thus also solving the relationship problems of the cat’s owners. Obviously this is very different from a PBS Nature documentary in which the main
purpose of the episode is to educate the viewer, and there is no attempt to
dramatize reality or turn it into a melodramatic tale.
Similarly, the PBS program Antiques Roadshow has several copycat shows on other networks that
drift over the potential educational value and instead concentrate on creating
a more dramatic and entertaining story. On Antiques
Roadshow the most climactic moment is always right before the appraisers announce
the worth of the item, before that moment they simply talk about the history
behind the item. The History Channel’s Pawn
Stars operates in a similar fashion. Customers come into the pawnshop
usually to sell their items but then a tense negotiate takes place between the
customers and the pawnshop owners. While Pawn
Stars does provide a brief historical account of the objects it usually
does not come from an expert appraiser like Antiques
Roadshow. The reality show interview format is also used heavily in Pawn Stars when the customers tell the
story of how they acquired their objects and how much they hope to sell them
for.
This is clearly quite different from the format of Antiques Roadshow which is more
concerned with telling the history of the objects and the amount of worth and
not actually concerned with whether the owners will sell them.
Finally PBS’s Rick
Steve’s Europe is a travel show that tells viewers the best landmarks to
visit when travelling. The host visits specific sightseeing attractions and
relays the historical importance directly to the audience. So just like the
other PBS programs, its main concern is to educate viewers and provide them
with information for their own trips to Europe. Its reality show counterpart
can be seen in CBS’s The Amazing Race
where teams of two compete in a race around the world. The historical
significance of many of the stops is glossed over or mentioned briefly only to
explain the particular task or test they must complete to move on in the
competition. Furthermore, The Amazing
Race is first and foremost a competition show, so great importance is
placed on the drama and excitement of that competition, leaving the educational
portions of the show as a second thought. Once again, entertainment and drama
take precedence over educational material.
Obviously the PBS network is meant for people with
a particular taste aesthetic while similar shows on other networks are aimed at
different audience. Bourdieu might suggest that this means these shows are
aimed at different economic classes. However, taste is not always that simple. As
I mentioned before it was my family’s lower class status that originally
limited me to watching PBS programs for entertainment, and now I have watched
and enjoyed watching every program mentioned in this post. So Bourdieu’s ideas
of aesthetic taste reflecting class distinctions may not always hold true.
