Google

Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar

Comment, Comics and the Contrary. Contact: aj_bartlett1977*at*yahoo*dot*co*dot*uk
Enter your email address below to subscribe to Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar!


powered by Bloglet

Sunday, November 27, 2005

 

More 'comedy'

Channel 4 will soon enter a new competitor into the ‘reality’ TV arena. Space Cadets. What can I say? Only that, given that the ‘candidates’ for the show were systematically selected for their gullibility and lack of knowledge and then exposed to a training course that deliberately filled the gaps in these people’s knowledge with lies, the claim that this show will be a tremendous hoax is pretty weak. Indeed, it is not a hoax at all. A hoax fools people who ought to know better – such as people in authority for whom there is a duty to know better – or whole, undifferentiated populations. Space Cadets is not a hoax, rather, it shares more in common with a deception, a con. It is the television equivalent of the people who convince, against any responsible judgement, old ladies that they need to pay thousands of pounds to update their burglar alarms or fuse-boxes. Masters of capitalism, I call these people, with their highly effective exploitation of a niche market, but our law calls them con-men. Why, given the MO of the programme, did the programme makers not select a group of mentally disabled people and play practical jokes on them? Or even give up of the idea of fooling the intellectually weak and simple go for slapstick involving the physically weak? Let us push over old people and obstacles in the path of the blind. Why would the makers of Space Cadets not make these programmes? Because those would be immoral, they might claim. But the truth, given their lack of scruples in exploiting the weak, is that they do not make these programmes because the television audience retains enough sense of decency to reject these. For now. I hope. But we ought to reject Space Cadets, or at least hope that it ends the careers of all the ‘professionals’ involved.

Exploitation entertainment; from X-Factor, a programme that has built its success on exposing and ridiculing the tragic ambitions of people who lack any sense of personal affirmation without celebrity (ensuring its own survival by feeding this pathology) to Space Cadets. From the standard theme of modern porn (no longer hiding the exploitation of women behind plot and glamour, but celebrating it) to Bum Fight, a successful American programme in which the destitute are paid measly amounts of money in exchange for them engaging in their own mutilation for the entertainment of people higher up the economic order.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that capitalism leaves as the only “nexus between man and man… [that of] naked self-interest… callous ‘cash payment’”. Everything is swept aside leaving only “egotistical calculation”. “[P]ersonal worth [is transformed] into exchange value” and freedoms are replaced by Free Trade. Veiled exploitation is substituted by “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”. They predicted (and hoped) that this process would lead to an awakening of revolutionary consciousness. Rather, we buy naked exploitation as entertainment with as easy a conscience as we purchase our sweat-shopped clothes.

Comments:
Well, given that X-Factor trumps all other talent shows on TV, and given that it plays much more strongly on the humilation aspect of the early stages to secure its audience than other talent shows, I'd say that it fits into the trend - being at the mild end, Bum Fights at the other - of exploitation as entertainment.

More, just because someone makes a decision to participate, it does not mean that they are not being exploited. Even if we were to say that it did, are you seriously telling me that some of the very strange people shown on some of the early X-Factor programmes have any greater grasp of the world than old ladies conned into paying thousands for useless burglar alarms?
 
just because someone makes a decision to participate, it does not mean that they are not being exploited.

Sure, but just because they are being exploited doesn't make the decision to participate a wrong one for them.
 
I agree with that.
 
Thesisville: I disagree there. Call a spade a spade: it's exploitation. What's needed is a bit of sophistication to split cases of 1. voluntary and/or mutually agreeable exploitation, from 2. those that involve greater amounts of coercion, and therefore can't accurately be labelled the result of free decisions.

I see what you're aiming at re: bullying (where I agree with you). But I'm not sure the analogy quite works, unless your definition of bullying is so wide as to be useless.
 
Well, for me, exploitation is any situation where your surplus is knowingly and systematically being extracted for profit — i.e. work, business and related fields. Mowing your auntie's lawn for a free Mars bar doesn't qualify. So, no I don't think calling this exploitative is wrong or just some mushy all-encompassing label. I also don't agree that we have any need for a "loaded" notion of exploitation to seek social justice. The born-disabled might never go through life being exploited, but social justice demands they be cared for. A murdering, exploitative dictator still ought to be treated humanely on his deathbed. In fact, I'd go as far as saying exploitation was just a bare fact, not something of moral interest at all outside the individual relationship. Certainly not something that needs to be kept sacred for leftist sloganeering. Justice isn't retribution or redress of exploitation — it's simply justice.

Third, I don't agree that these shows are presenting humiliation as proper human conduct, just presenting it as normal human conduct, which it is, however unethical you or I think it is.
 
Are we to take it that you believe in nature red-in-tooth-and-claw?

Absolutely not.

As for the rest, I'm not slagging you off in fact. Not sure where you get that idea from. I agree with most of your first para. Second, leaving aside notions of scientific objectivity and the like (after all, if you take that all the way to Hume, we don't know anything, which seems rather pointless), I do see exploitation as a bare fact. In the pure Marxist sense of "extracting surplus". The mowing the lawn example doesn't work because there's a relationship there that goes beyond the employment relationship. I'm also not sure you can deny humiliation isn't part of human nature: surely you've witnessed it hundreds of times? It'll take a mighty theory to deny something that happens every day isn't part of natural human behaviour.

I doesn't mean I condone either, by the way, just that I'd start any theory of how the world ought to be from the starting point that both exist. And take notions of justice and what it means from there.
 
Blimey, a proper old fashioned Marxist!

Well, in some respects, i.e. how I might analyse certain things, yes, but I'm probably better described as a liberal. In the sense of Rawls, that is, rather than Charles Kennedy.

And I myself wouldn’t be quite so negative.

I don't think it's negative. More this: most people are capable of being altruistic some of the time. Some people are capable of being altruistic most of the time. But designing a system around most people needing to be altruistic most of the time is a recipe for disaster. Of course, designing a system that relies on people being venal most of the time is no good either. Hence redistribution in a Rawlsian sense - i.e. not paternalism, "looking after" unfortunates, but giving people their due. Obviously, that's very simplistic but I've only got five mins...

On human nature: well, yes, I know there are theories to explain a whole host of stuff, including Marx's contention that it derives from the dominant mode of production. Personally, I'd rather open my eyes on this. Humans can be good, very good, but they can be nasty bastards too.
 
I’m not sure what you mean exactly by opening your eyes

Just taking an empirical approach, basically, rather than relying on theories that aim to describe ideas/behaviour as solely or even mainly the product of X, whether that be the economic system or a reaction to structures of power or whatever.

Good luck with the post-structuralism, by the way. You must be way cleverer than I if you understand all that stuff...
 
Post a Comment

<< Home


Archives

August 2004   September 2004   October 2004   November 2004   December 2004   January 2005   February 2005   March 2005   April 2005   May 2005   June 2005   July 2005   August 2005   September 2005   October 2005   November 2005   December 2005   January 2006   February 2006   March 2006   April 2006   May 2006   June 2006   July 2006   August 2006   September 2006   October 2006   November 2006   December 2006   January 2007   March 2007  

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

«#?» Listed on Blogwise