ࡱ> []Z`  ,jbjb +;|c|c &|||||||   h         , RUh@ | @  || U    | |   T6||||    || $E   k 0     |D^D^Reality TV, Governmenality and Citizenship Panel Organizers: Laurie Ouellette and James Hay  SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1The idea for this panel grew out of our interest in the use value of Foucault for critical media studies in general, and television studies in particular. In our forthcoming book (tentatively titled) Better Living Through TV, we argue that Foucaults writings on the care of the self, technologies of the self, liberalism, the state, ethico-politics, bio-power, and governmentality (and the development of these ideas by contemporary scholars like Nikolas Rose, Mitchell Dean, Tony Bennett, Barbara Cruikshank, Paul du Gay, and Valerie Walkerdine, among others) are helpful for assessing the changing televisual landscape. We contend that Foucaultian-inspired cultural theory is particularly useful for making sense of the proliferation of reality and lifestyle television since the late 1990s, and its convergence with personalized interactive media. Because these televisual developments have roughly corresponded with the reform of the welfare state, the rearticulation of welfare and the public interest, deregulation, and the overall advancement of liberal (and neoliberal) rationales of governing at a distance, we situate Foucaults critical-conceptual value for media studies within contemporary political times, particularly in the United States. Rather than putting forward a full-blown position, we want to sketch out some key talking points. Our aim is to provide an organizational scheme for the panel by suggesting some important issues for contemplation, discussion and debate. We hope that panellists and audience members will take this general outline as a starting point for sharing their specific observations/critiques of reality television, its relationship to liberal and neoliberal strategies of governance, and the possibilities of citizenship involved. However, we also encourage everyone to think through the broader questions we pose here, so that we can collectively address the field-shaping issues of whether, why and how to bring Foucault into the project of TV studies at this historical juncture. Talking Points/Questions In our view, reconsidering television and TV studies through Foucaultian perspectives involves several interconnected sets of questions: 1) Does a concern with governance, and with liberalism as an evolving philosophy/practice of governing at a distance, involve rethinking the objectives of TV studies? If so, how? We would argue that a focus on governmentality raises a different set of questions than has traditionally guided media studies, particularly in the United States. For one thing, bringing television into an analysis of government forces us to imagine an alternative to the longstanding preoccupation with and distinction between TV as political economic or cultural practice. How, as we ask in our project, does TV operate as a way of training and guiding citizens, and how does this knowledge and these skills pertain to a governmental rationality which encourages privatization and personalization of welfare? Considering how TV operates through the rationalities of government shifts our attention not only from the questions that have dominated critical media studies (economism, textualism, ethnography, ideology), and from the preferred models of media power (domination and resistance) to the way in which television operates (for better or worse) as an increasingly primary resource for self-fashioning, self-actualization, self-management and the governance of the self. From this vantage point, a critical TV study (as an analysis of media and power) begins by considering specific political rationalities and technical applications that orient and comprise television, and that make it matter politically and governmentally in the sense of conducting conduct. Rather than considering the rules of watching and living with TV simply as the stylistic and textual codes and conventions of TV as narrative, the analysis thinks about how these rules are (technically) rules for living life in the 21st century. From this perspective, reality and lifestyle television operate as a resource for acquiring the practical knowledge and skills for empowering and managing ones self. Proceeding this way also involves identifying the linkages between the self-shaping and self-governing regimes circulated within and around television and the model of citizenship (self-sufficient, free-choosing, flexible, self-interested, entrepreneurial, empowered) that circulates in other realms, from the political arena to the corporate sector. In other words, bringing TV into an analysis of government leads beyond TV, or understands TV at its convergence with various programs and technologies of government and citizenship. 2) To what extent is bringing TV into an analysis of neoliberalism a useful move to make at this historical juncture? What might TV practices and transformations in the U.S. reveal about the current sites and forms of power, political practice, and citizenship in the U.S.? Our book argues that TV programming needs to be understood not only as a media network but also as part of networks providing various kinds of social support and welfare. These are networks through which the State, para-state agencies, TV companies, non-governmental agencies, non-profits, and citizens all participateand through which citizens are allegedly empowered to look after their own welfare. So, for example, the proliferation of reality-based charity TV (e.g. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Medical Miracles, Three Wishes, Pimp My Ride) should be understood as a public-private rearticulation of strategies for providing public welfare in which television plays a central role. What does it mean when TV takes over the role of the social service provider, and calls on TV viewers to do the same through volunteerism? How might we evaluate these ventures in ways that go beyond the limited framework of traditional political economic and ideological analysis? While our work is concerned with the U.S. context, we recognize the limitations of thinking through examples in the U.S. (rather than elsewhere). Therefore, we would add to this topic the issue of how televisions relationship to governmentality plays out in a range of locales. 3) To what extent do liberal and neoliberal modes of governing rely on and perhaps exploit an ethic of the care of the self? What is at stake in thinking about the current ethico-politics and self-training, compared with Foucaults exploration of antiquity? Here, we would point to the proliferation of nonfiction lifestyle TV that presents individuals guidelines for reflecting on and caring for themselves across sites of personal relationships, domesticity, physicality, and so on. The incorporation of tests and challenges into such programming evokes Foucaults analysis of ancient Greece, yet the motivations of working on the self are tied to contemporary political rationalities, lifestyle experts, and commercial imperatives. Moreover, television is increasingly tied to interactive web sites and other media that encourage work on the self within a broader commercial-cultural context that transcends the TV text and the usual context of TV viewing. Our project rethinks the idea of the TV program by considering how TV provides technical plans and regimens for living better lives. TVs connection to interactive technologies has entailed merging TVs longstanding programmatic capacity with the customizable capacity of web-based media. At the same time, TV brings an ethic of self-improvement and self-care into the home, so that it becomes highly regularized and available in ways that have not been accomplished by magazines and other customized dispensers of guidelines for better living. This, to us, is one key reason why television has become so integral to governing at a distance as theorized by contemporary Foucauldian scholars. 4) Foucaults concept of technologies of the self seems to offer a way of understanding the social dimension of the technical advice and self-shaping instructions that circulate on television. How does approaching television this way differ from the traditional focus on identity and representation, and what are the political possibilities of a technologized self? What sort of research is needed to account for the multiple dimensions of contemporary technologies of the selfthe guidelines that circulate through media and other venues for lifestyle experts, and the way in which people incorporate those technologies into their own self-shaping activities? And finally, how do we conceptualize power in this context? If resistance through the reading (or mis-reading) of texts doesnt account for televisions role in changing networks of governance, it also stops short of addressing the nature and limitations of empowerment offered by so much reality and lifestyle programming. We see this as a pivotal issue for a Foucaultian-based approach to TV studies. 5) How does an analysis of contemporary TV and governmentality make it necessary to rethink Foucaults arguments, particularly because Foucault focused on liberalisms emergence in the nineteenth-century? This question is important in part because Foucaults writing lacks a substantive discussion about communication and media. With few exceptions, many of the most well known theoretical elaborations of governmentality, particularly as theories of neoliberalism, also have had little to say about television or other communication/media practices. 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