I'd like to start a little meme to get the producers, editors and general profiteers from Big Brother to be entered into the house for next time, and allow anyone who's been on the show to edit them and provide the tasks.
You should write to Channel 4's Deputy Chairman, film-producer David Putnam (soon to become the new BBC Chairman), in his Cork, Ireland, abode (where he actively simulates the role of fruity-voiced and condescending Anglo-Irish fogey-squire), who, in a recent interview on RTE radio attempted to pathetically distance himself from all the goings-on at BB despite actively presiding over its pre-meditated orchestration (Putnam reminds of Sasha Baron Cohen's distancing from Borat: "Oh, Borat has nothing whatsoever to do with me or my lifestyle or my values". Just because I invented him doesn't mean I've any responsibility, etc).
ANIMAL MOTHER: So! Ya seen much racism!?
JOKER: Well, I've seen a little on TeeeeVeeee!!
The Big Brother brouhaha: A pseudo-reality, this "unscripted/improvised" but entirely contrived drama, this faux-history concocted to be recorded, starring some bourgeois women, becomes the scene/narrative/history onto which the critical interpretation of race and class in Britain and the world are displaced - this, not Iraq, not Guantanamo, will be the scene of history, politics, class war, sociality, for public examination. Many levels of simulation away from any reality but retaining its shape, its appearance - pure Image. "Goody" as image is "working class" but also "white"; "Shetty" as image is "racial other" but also "gentry" etc.. The reaction of the audience appears chaotic but is deftly managed self-management - a spontaneous agreement to focus and to become mesmerised by the image-reality, to pretend to interact with it, to take it seriously. Several aims are achieved. Everyone gets to vent and everyone's discontent is simultaneously expressed and disciplined by this containment, this magnetic gathering of public thought and feeling and its commodification as images - of "racism", "class hatred", misogyny too. For those with hatreds to vent, here are image-targets who can function as distilled elements of class and race (and gender) precisely because they merely represent on the level of appearance the objects of class oppression and race oppression (in life, they have escaped, by joining the bourgeoisie, the elite of wealth and status; what remains is a spectre of racism and class oppression plus prejudice; a spectral alliance based on Shetty's individual identity as a person of colour and Goody's accent and manner, purified by the concealed frame.)
To the realm of pure spectacle, class oppression and racism are transferred, etherialised on the way, gutted of history and of content. Everyone is gratified - those harbouring ill-will or anxiety, who wish to vent their hatred and by doing so establish their own purity and innocence, are provided with scapegoats, but more importantly those who experience simmering discontent and dissatisfaction are provided an opportunity to play at a dissident or self-assertive activity normally obstructed - to denounce racism and/or class contempt, but to do so as the studio audience of a spectacle (an indispensible part of the democratic-eviction spectacle) where the images of these evils, commodified and empty of all content and materiality, wrenched from context, made convertible, are presented as entertainment. Anti-racists can denounce the hostility and racism to which Shetty was subjected; this can be followed by a debate among them between those with class contempt to vent and those with contempt of bourgeois politeness to vent; racism itself can be transformed by some viewers, unaware of being prompted, into an Image that is an utter bogey, evil incarnate, and therefore pronounced not present. Goody isn't/is "a racist" - is anyone/isn't everyone? What could this racism be that would justify such a question, such a framework? (It's like "a homosexual"? He may have fucked a few boys but that doesn't mean he's "a homosexual" as Kushner's Roy Cohen puts it? Or is it like "a liberal"? A "terrorist"? Or what?)
What the "debate" creates is a racism that is an essence that owes everything to racial discourse itself - the "debate" is between one-drop-rule and other varieties - which emanates from A Racist that is nothing but Image, the companion of Race as Image, Image-Race, itself. The Image-Racist which the audience response portion of the programme invents harmoniously - both the "she is" and "she isn't" sides participating equally in this Image-Production - slips unobserved into the place of racism as a political, social and economic reality and blocks our comprehension and perception of it. In the same manner, the class contempt which appears in the disgust for the vulgarity of Goody produces Image-Class, and the prejudice which is vented slips into the place of exploitation, of the reality of class, equally blocking comprehension. As with the "veil controversy" and the "cartoon controversy", the important thing is not how various blocks of audience interpret the show but that all obey the demand to a) interpret it at all b) interpret only its "interior" as if it were not a contrived spectacle, ignoring the contrivance, contrivers and their purposes and c) apply to this contrived spectacle treated as history only this very small set of Image-Ideas supplied by the contrivers themselves.
The achievement of the spectacle-producers is that audience is persuaded to accept the spectacle in place of reality, even/especially those who are livid about it, and assist in its process of the commodification of audience thought and attitude and their re-vending to audience, packaged and branded by mass media, as imaged opinionettes and attitudettes. You can "personalise" them of course, like embroidered Nike sneakers. But you must have your politics, your racism/anti-racism and your class contempt(in either direction), and indeed the "reality", the social world toward which you take these postures, in relation to the corporation, supplied by it alone.
