CSAA 2011 Conference Proceedings: Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities. International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding: Adelaide, 2012
Popular television reality-history series, of which New Zealand"s One land (2010) is a recent exa... more Popular television reality-history series, of which New Zealand"s One land (2010) is a recent example, exemplify the extent to which new "media technologies [are] reorientating everyday epistemologies, ontologies and cultural practices" (CSAA conference call for papers). In these formats, contemporary family groups are immersed in the social and material conditions of everyday life from a nominated period in the past. Rather than a formal re-enactment of times past, these productions take history to task, encouraging participants to critique and even challenge the "rule book" -regarding gender relations, social etiquette, domestic practices, dress and behavioural codes -handed down by the period in question. Nevertheless, these formats also seek to produce narratives of national history, both through the particularisation and fetishisation of culturally specific domestic details, and a generalised affect of nostalgia (literally, an aching for home), making place at least as important on these shows as time.
Following on from other media theorists, John Hartley suggested in 1983 that ‘if TV has a distinc... more Following on from other media theorists, John Hartley suggested in 1983 that ‘if TV has a distinctive feature, it is that it is a “dirty” category’. In this conception, television's dirt, and the power it manifests, is purely metaphorical: an effect of its ‘scandalous’ aggravation of otherwise ‘clean’ binary formations. Decades later, television's dirtiness has taken on new, more literal forms, as prime-time reality programming embraces domestic dirt and disorder as its cause célèbre. These programmes, exemplified by the popular UK format How Clean is your House? (2003- ), give new relevance to Hartley's conception and invite a critical reappraisal of the formal relationships between dirt, television and power. More specifically, the particular association between reality television and material dirt is predicated upon a long history of cultural prejudice against both. Indeed, one broadsheet reviewer has proposed that reality programming about filthy houses offers ‘evidence of our intrinsic bestiality from both ends’, as both producers and consumers of dirt. The vitriol of this attack is indicative, not only of television's devaluation as trash, filth or waste, but of the ‘power of dirt’ in Hartley's terms, as a productive and disruptive site of scandal, transformation and new meaning. Using How Clean is your House? as its exemplary text, this paper draws on both television theory and academic scholarship on dirt to interrogate the relationship between televisual dirt as metaphor and the material manifestation of domestic dirt on screen.
The historical re-enactment reality series, of which Pioneer House (New Zealand 2001) is the firs... more The historical re-enactment reality series, of which Pioneer House (New Zealand 2001) is the first New Zealand example, constitutes an anomaly in reality programming because it signals a clear intention to identify itself with a historical past. As has been discussed elsewhere, reality television is definitively present-ist in its representation of time and space, as it privileges the affective impact of immediacy over the discursive intervention of historical context.[1] Pioneer House similarly prioritises the present tense, even as it takes New Zealand’s colonial past as its subject material. This contradiction is managed via a number of temporal strategies which pull the past into the present, rendering representations of lived experiences from a historical past as both contemporary and seemingly (a)live. As Pioneer House participant Janice Feyen aptly observes, reality television formats such as this, in which contemporary families adopt the living conditions of a past time, supply a “feeling” relation with the history they purport to offer – an alternative model of engagement which is definitively sensory and significantly unmediated. In this way, readers of history are re-positioned. Instead of looking from the outside in (“through the window”), or backwards at what has been, programme participants are invited to corporealise bodily experiences from the past century as they bring history to life.
Primetime reality television in New Zealand is dominated by examples of real estate television, i... more Primetime reality television in New Zealand is dominated by examples of real estate television, in which private homes are rebuilt, redecorated and/or resold.Although many of these reality formats originated in the United Kingdom, their reproduction in New Zealand is complicated by the context of colonial settlement. Here, the act of building, resiting,
redeveloping or sellingon private property inevitably recalls the (often iniquitous) processes by which firstgeneration European settlers established control over a new land. With reference to Arjun Appadurai’s work on the “production of locality”, (1996:
180) this article suggests that New Zealand’s home-improvement television enacts the social and material settlement of a new land in ways which betray a certain
insecurity of tenure.
In early 2009 the British tabloid and broadsheet media were consumed with the impending death of ... more In early 2009 the British tabloid and broadsheet media were consumed with the impending death of reality TV star Jade Goody. Goody, an under-educated working-class girl transformed into a media personality by UK's Big Brother, had already been at the centre of two major media controversies: one in 2002 for her tabloid vilification and recuperation during Big Brother 3 and again in 2007 for using racist language against a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother. Her medical diagnosis of advanced cervical cancer, however, shifted the controversy in terms of magnitude: filming a reality TV show for Living TV during her treatment and rapid decline, Goody was accused of 'selling her illness' to the media and even of intending to die on television, the ultimate taboo. These programmes were widely reviled by commentators as the nadir in Goody's mutually exploitative relationship with celebrity media, but we argue that the Jade series is a structurally groundbreaking programme in which real time and television time begin to coalesce in a way that disrupts categories of celebrity, privacy and mortality. Our analysis focuses upon the ways in which Goody's impending death impacts on her self-image and on the series' production, highlighting both her celebrity and the show as emergent texts. Through a close analysis of the series, we interrogate Goody's complex relationship with her celebrity persona in the shadow of terminal illness, and the British public's even more complex relationship with the mediatisation of celebrity death.
In this chapter we will argue that the social relevance of Reality TV lies in its creation of int... more In this chapter we will argue that the social relevance of Reality TV lies in its creation of intimate viewing communities, but this is an intimacy that cannot be understood without a closer examination of the temporal (and spatial) aspects of immediacy. The aim here is to show that Reality TV pursues intimacy (emotional closeness) through immediacy (temporal closeness), coupling the proximity of the 'here' with the urgency of the 'now'.
We argue that despite the avoidance of calendrical dates on Reality TV, it is here that time comes forward, fully present, which suggests that the appeal of Reality Television has to do with the way it fulfils the temporal potential of the medium itself.
CSAA 2011 Conference Proceedings: Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities. International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding: Adelaide, 2012
Popular television reality-history series, of which New Zealand"s One land (2010) is a recent exa... more Popular television reality-history series, of which New Zealand"s One land (2010) is a recent example, exemplify the extent to which new "media technologies [are] reorientating everyday epistemologies, ontologies and cultural practices" (CSAA conference call for papers). In these formats, contemporary family groups are immersed in the social and material conditions of everyday life from a nominated period in the past. Rather than a formal re-enactment of times past, these productions take history to task, encouraging participants to critique and even challenge the "rule book" -regarding gender relations, social etiquette, domestic practices, dress and behavioural codes -handed down by the period in question. Nevertheless, these formats also seek to produce narratives of national history, both through the particularisation and fetishisation of culturally specific domestic details, and a generalised affect of nostalgia (literally, an aching for home), making place at least as important on these shows as time.
Following on from other media theorists, John Hartley suggested in 1983 that ‘if TV has a distinc... more Following on from other media theorists, John Hartley suggested in 1983 that ‘if TV has a distinctive feature, it is that it is a “dirty” category’. In this conception, television's dirt, and the power it manifests, is purely metaphorical: an effect of its ‘scandalous’ aggravation of otherwise ‘clean’ binary formations. Decades later, television's dirtiness has taken on new, more literal forms, as prime-time reality programming embraces domestic dirt and disorder as its cause célèbre. These programmes, exemplified by the popular UK format How Clean is your House? (2003- ), give new relevance to Hartley's conception and invite a critical reappraisal of the formal relationships between dirt, television and power. More specifically, the particular association between reality television and material dirt is predicated upon a long history of cultural prejudice against both. Indeed, one broadsheet reviewer has proposed that reality programming about filthy houses offers ‘evidence of our intrinsic bestiality from both ends’, as both producers and consumers of dirt. The vitriol of this attack is indicative, not only of television's devaluation as trash, filth or waste, but of the ‘power of dirt’ in Hartley's terms, as a productive and disruptive site of scandal, transformation and new meaning. Using How Clean is your House? as its exemplary text, this paper draws on both television theory and academic scholarship on dirt to interrogate the relationship between televisual dirt as metaphor and the material manifestation of domestic dirt on screen.
The historical re-enactment reality series, of which Pioneer House (New Zealand 2001) is the firs... more The historical re-enactment reality series, of which Pioneer House (New Zealand 2001) is the first New Zealand example, constitutes an anomaly in reality programming because it signals a clear intention to identify itself with a historical past. As has been discussed elsewhere, reality television is definitively present-ist in its representation of time and space, as it privileges the affective impact of immediacy over the discursive intervention of historical context.[1] Pioneer House similarly prioritises the present tense, even as it takes New Zealand’s colonial past as its subject material. This contradiction is managed via a number of temporal strategies which pull the past into the present, rendering representations of lived experiences from a historical past as both contemporary and seemingly (a)live. As Pioneer House participant Janice Feyen aptly observes, reality television formats such as this, in which contemporary families adopt the living conditions of a past time, supply a “feeling” relation with the history they purport to offer – an alternative model of engagement which is definitively sensory and significantly unmediated. In this way, readers of history are re-positioned. Instead of looking from the outside in (“through the window”), or backwards at what has been, programme participants are invited to corporealise bodily experiences from the past century as they bring history to life.
Primetime reality television in New Zealand is dominated by examples of real estate television, i... more Primetime reality television in New Zealand is dominated by examples of real estate television, in which private homes are rebuilt, redecorated and/or resold.Although many of these reality formats originated in the United Kingdom, their reproduction in New Zealand is complicated by the context of colonial settlement. Here, the act of building, resiting,
redeveloping or sellingon private property inevitably recalls the (often iniquitous) processes by which firstgeneration European settlers established control over a new land. With reference to Arjun Appadurai’s work on the “production of locality”, (1996:
180) this article suggests that New Zealand’s home-improvement television enacts the social and material settlement of a new land in ways which betray a certain
insecurity of tenure.
In early 2009 the British tabloid and broadsheet media were consumed with the impending death of ... more In early 2009 the British tabloid and broadsheet media were consumed with the impending death of reality TV star Jade Goody. Goody, an under-educated working-class girl transformed into a media personality by UK's Big Brother, had already been at the centre of two major media controversies: one in 2002 for her tabloid vilification and recuperation during Big Brother 3 and again in 2007 for using racist language against a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother. Her medical diagnosis of advanced cervical cancer, however, shifted the controversy in terms of magnitude: filming a reality TV show for Living TV during her treatment and rapid decline, Goody was accused of 'selling her illness' to the media and even of intending to die on television, the ultimate taboo. These programmes were widely reviled by commentators as the nadir in Goody's mutually exploitative relationship with celebrity media, but we argue that the Jade series is a structurally groundbreaking programme in which real time and television time begin to coalesce in a way that disrupts categories of celebrity, privacy and mortality. Our analysis focuses upon the ways in which Goody's impending death impacts on her self-image and on the series' production, highlighting both her celebrity and the show as emergent texts. Through a close analysis of the series, we interrogate Goody's complex relationship with her celebrity persona in the shadow of terminal illness, and the British public's even more complex relationship with the mediatisation of celebrity death.
In this chapter we will argue that the social relevance of Reality TV lies in its creation of int... more In this chapter we will argue that the social relevance of Reality TV lies in its creation of intimate viewing communities, but this is an intimacy that cannot be understood without a closer examination of the temporal (and spatial) aspects of immediacy. The aim here is to show that Reality TV pursues intimacy (emotional closeness) through immediacy (temporal closeness), coupling the proximity of the 'here' with the urgency of the 'now'.
We argue that despite the avoidance of calendrical dates on Reality TV, it is here that time comes forward, fully present, which suggests that the appeal of Reality Television has to do with the way it fulfils the temporal potential of the medium itself.
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redeveloping or sellingon private property inevitably recalls the (often iniquitous) processes by which firstgeneration European settlers established control over a new land. With reference to Arjun Appadurai’s work on the “production of locality”, (1996:
180) this article suggests that New Zealand’s home-improvement television enacts the social and material settlement of a new land in ways which betray a certain
insecurity of tenure.
We argue that despite the avoidance of calendrical dates on Reality TV, it is here that time comes forward, fully present, which suggests that the appeal of Reality Television has to do with the way it fulfils the temporal potential of the medium itself.
redeveloping or sellingon private property inevitably recalls the (often iniquitous) processes by which firstgeneration European settlers established control over a new land. With reference to Arjun Appadurai’s work on the “production of locality”, (1996:
180) this article suggests that New Zealand’s home-improvement television enacts the social and material settlement of a new land in ways which betray a certain
insecurity of tenure.
We argue that despite the avoidance of calendrical dates on Reality TV, it is here that time comes forward, fully present, which suggests that the appeal of Reality Television has to do with the way it fulfils the temporal potential of the medium itself.