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Popular Culture Review_________________
fleshy world of appearance is reality can manifest itself in terms of wanting the
perfect dress for the perfect occasion, the perfect shoes for the perfect evening,
the perfect tint to the perfect flowers at one’s perfect wedding. It can manifest
itself in madness.
There are those who criticize reality TV stars for “playing to the camera.”
They are performing roles, so goes the critique, even if they are not scripted.
Andrejevic suggests that the underlying claim of most reality TV shows, though,
is that comprehensive surveillance doesn’t oppress subjectivity, it creates
authenticity.1'5 This is because it is supposedly the case that no one could keep
“performing” 24/7. The “real” self has to show itself eventually, and thus the
more intrusive the surveillance, the greater the chance that one is seeing reality.
Both of these claims, however, are founded on the modernist assumption that
performance masks reality and there is some real self beneath the appearances
one puts up in various contexts and situations. It is this fiction of the self that has
to go. I am constituted by my roles and relationships—and by the manner in
which I appear in these contexts. The mask does not hide some true self but only
hides another mask. While it is thus perhaps true that on camera I would act
differently from the way in which I act off camera, this does not indicate that the
former is appearance and the latter reality. It merely shows that the two different
contexts are two different ways in which I am made manifest.
The narrative cohesion of our lives is up for grabs when we realize that the
self is defined by its performances—which is to say, its appearances. But
cohesion is still possible. Once we abandon the modernist fiction of the stable
self, we are free to see the roles we play as constitutive of our identity rather
than masks behind which the real self remains hidden. To be under constant
surveillance, then, creates a particular kind of self—one I have been calling a
disvidual—but it gets us neither closer to nor farther away from a true self.
In some ways, the fiction of the true self is related to the fiction of the
singular author of a text. In his essay, “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault
writes: “The author is . . . the ideological figure by which one marks the manner
in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” 4 That is, the concept of “the
author” marks our realization—and the resulting panic over the fact—that
multiple interpretations of a text provide multiple meanings for that text.
Modernity’s preoccupation with the real as opposed to that which is
perspectival, interpreted, and subjective thus creates a sense of anxiety. We
manufacture the idea of “the singular author” in order to have someone on
whom we can pin the responsibility of “singular author-ity as to the true
meaning of the text.” Similarly, the Active notion of the cohesive self is an
attempt to wiggle out of the responsibility we have to be and act authentically in
each individual context that constitutes our lives. It is an authenticity that cannot
be had by appeal to something more real than what appears in this moment. Just
as the meaning of this text—this text that was written by me, H. Peter Steeves—
is always up for grabs, so, too, am I, as H. Peter Steeves, always up for grabs.
These words would mean different things if they were currently being written by