Mapping Fantasy, the New Reality
Today we turn to fantasy to find reality not to escape it. The reality culture of late capitalism (Kardashian surgery, Parts Unknown gastronomy) is virtual, scripted, and unavailable for radical cognitive mapping, that is, for the epistemology necessary to reify transnational existence. HBO’s Girls epitomizes these authenticity politics. The show’s detached Brooklyn bohemia–rent-making baristas, auspicious auditions, plus-size nudity–is whitewashed Horatio Alger even when SoHo BDSM. Game of Thrones, however, is progressive within the generic boundaries of high medieval fantasy. Rather than obscure class relations in fairy tale ethics, good vs. evil, GoT continually clarifies the social totality in food, clothes, castles, and ideas. One learns about who obeys whom, but also about power’s materiality. Nature is amoral (anyone can die at any moment) and economics immoral. Where Girls’ reflexivity du jour proudly, anxiously announces its awareness of its relation to the Real, merely taking Real Housewives to its endpoint, GoT radically allegorizes our individuated and social experiences. That is to say, GoT brings us closer to the idea of totality. This contrast is important. One now engages in the fantastic to apprehend one’s self and to discover the “truth of our social life as a whole.” Fantasy, not reality, articulates aesthetic representation of individual experience as well as “our world as a totality.” We are productively grounded by a game of thrones. As Jameson puts it:
“[W]e will thus be unable to insert ourselves, as individual subjects into an ever more massive and impersonal or transpersonal reality outside ourselves. This is the perspective in which it becomes a matter of more than mere intellectual curiosity to interrogate the artistic production of our own time for signs of some new, so far only dimly conceivable, collective forms which may be expected to replace the older individualistic ones (those either of conventional realism or of a now conventionalized modernism); and it is also the perspective in which an indecisive aesthetic and cultural phenomenon like Dog Day Afternoon takes on the values of a revealing symptom.” (Signatures of the Visible)
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Here’s a draft of the conference paper, delivered on 7 January 2015 at the 13th Annual Hawaii International Conference on the Humanities:
Girls vs. Game of Thrones: Mapping Fantasy, the New Reality
Dreamy Honolulu, HI, affords the “haole” or visitor an excellent context to rethink the economic implications of reality aesthetics, a phenomenon specific to our historical moment, one that I want to call “Reality Culture.” Reality Culture is late capitalism’s “reality,” the familiar spectacle in Jerry Springer infidelity, Kardashian surgery, Instagram performativity, and Parts Unknown gastronomy, a reality that is virtual, scripted, cost-effective, and unavailable for radical cognitive mapping. “Cognitive Mapping” is Fredric Jameson’s term for the progressive epistemology sourced in aesthetic representation that is necessary to reify transnational existence or, to put it more responsibly, one’s relation to social totality. This totality, Marx’s and Lukács’s totality, includes “labour, language, and all which constitute our human existence.” Such an important term deserves lengthy explication. Jameson suggests that today
the phenomenological experience of the individual subject—traditionally, the supreme raw materials of the work of art—becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable !1 for most people. There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience. (Postmodernism, 411)
Take for example the popular HBO series Girls. Girls epitomizes the authenticity politics that obscure social totality even as that show is hailed as reality par excellence. Without too harsh a condemnation—after all, I like the show as do some of you—one might argue that Girls detached Brooklyn bohemia—its rent-making baristas, auspicious auditions, and plus-size nudity —is whitewashed Horatio Alger even when SoHo BDSM. Its radicalism begins with identity crisis and ends with identity politics. What, for instance, is more real than Shoshanna Shapiro accidentally smoking crack cocaine, or Girls creator Lena Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath receiving an unsolicited golden shower from boyfriend Adam Sackler? Rest assured the peeing takes place in an actual shower, and is followed by Hannah’s violent protest—Hanna’s extended , over-the-top shriek serves the dual function of instructing viewers that no respectable person should permit such an affront and that the peeing may not be a big deal after all. Episode 8, Season 1 ends like those before it and many to follow, with Hannah and Adam having realer- than-real sex. It turns out that Hannah is really mad because Adam had earlier lost his temper at a driver who nearly hit the walking pair. One should imagine here Adam’s Ratso to Hannah’s Joe Buck, including hood smashing and something echoing, “Hey, I’m walking here!” Adam Sackler, by the way, will eventually land a dream role in the Broadway production of Major Barbara while Hannah Horvath will struggle with whether or not to remain at her “sell-out” job at GQ.
Given Reality Culture’s force and ubiquity—the scripted Real of affect and artifice—it seems entirely plausible to suggest that today one must turn to fantasy to find reality not to escape it. HBO’s Game of Thrones provides an illuminative comparison since Game of Thrones is radical within the generic boundaries of high medieval fantasy. Rather than obscure class relations in fairy tale ethics, good vs. evil, Game of Thrones continually clarifies the social totality in food, clothes, castles, and ideas. One learns about who obeys whom, but also about power’s materiality. Nature is amoral (anyone can die at any moment) and economics immoral. Whereas Girls’ reflexivity du jour proudly, anxiously announces its awareness of its relation to the Real, merely taking The Bachelor and Real Housewives to their endpoint, Game of Thrones radically allegorizes our individuated and social experiences. That is to say, Game of Thrones brings us closer to the idea of totality. This contrast is important. One now engages in the fantastic to apprehend one’s self and to discover the “truth of [ … ] social life as a whole.” Fantasy, not reality, articulates a representation of individual experience as well as “our world as a totality.” We are productively grounded by a game of thrones. This grounding is as necessary as it is rare, yet without it, Jameson suggests “[W]e will [ … ] be unable to insert ourselves, as individual subjects, into an ever more massive and impersonal or transpersonal reality outside ourselves” (Signatures of the Visible).
Conversely, Reality Culture produces scripted spectacle and occlusion, a masking of economic class and social totality by identity politics—the concerns of beauty, wealth, and blind cynicism, but also race and gender abstracted from their material relations. Late capitalism “reality” is therefore part of a politics of affect, a “feel good” radicalism that shifts our focus from primary to secondary contradictions and in doing so yields neither social self-consciousness nor long-term positive social change. The fantasy in Game of Thrones, however, is more revealing. Consider, for example, Tywin Lannister’s important observation regarding the power and imperviousness of the Iron Bank. Note that the Iron Bank resides in the Free City of Braavos and is the most powerful financial institution in the Known World, with clients across Essos and Westeros. The Iron Bank, then, is the perfect analogue for our own monopolization of banking and regime of finance that extends through a totality of labor and consumer relations. Simply put, Tywin’s observation should be ours:
“One stone crumbles and another takes its place and the temple holds its form for a thousand years or more. And that’s what the Iron Bank is, a temple. We all live in its shadow and almost none of us know it. You can’t run from them, you can’t cheat them, you can’t sway them with excuses. If you owe them money and you don’t want to crumble yourself, you pay it back.”
Umberto Eco once suggested that the “Middle Ages are a mirror for the present. We find there the roots of our problems, of our anguish, of our crises.” Eco’s point is cogently made through Game of Thrones fantasy, a realism that defamiliarizes Reality Culture “reality” and lays bare the limits to “[t]he commonsense tenets of realism,” especially when the tenets are aestheticized through late capitalism. Game of Thrones draws from a spatially complex medieval history and painstakingly depicts the relationship between its houses and subjects —“York, Lancaster, Plantagenet, Tudor/Stark, Lannister, Targaryen, Tyrell.” One could go as far as to say that Games of Thrones fantasy is closer to realism in the traditional sense than is most Reality Culture fare. According to Bill Nichols, traditionally, realism depicted individuals as “social animals whose identity arises not in isolation but from active participation in the lives of others” (183). When coopted by Reality Culture, realism’s “commonsense tenets,” that is, a “coherent organization of time and space, the creation of character types with recognizable personalities and needs, a linear narrative of actions, reactions, and results that moves toward the resolution of familiar problems or issues”—no longer serve “a common perspective” (183). Nichols reminds us that realism in the old sense permits “common cause and enduring community over the alienation and disenchantment of modernist narrative or the irony and cynicism that underlies much of postmodernist art.” This realism is lost in Reality Culture.
Birdman (2014) provides another telling comparison since the film uses magical realism to illuminate the implications of Reality Culture and embodied hypermediation. Birdman could be our Citizen Kane, in many respects a groundbreaking film about an aging box office superhero (Keaton) who desperately wants to create something of merit, something artistic, something real. In place of Dickensian Bildungsroman we find Borgesian mirroring, a mirroring of a mirroring of a perpetual present miraculously sustained by a seemingly never-ending long take. The single shot is an illusion, part of the film’s leveling of Reality Culture and the Real itself. Birdman’s self-reflexivity and hypermediacy continually remind us that we are watching a performance within a performance. We wind our way through the St. James’s narrow corridors and cramped dressing rooms up to its boundless rooftop alongside the remarkable Keaton, Norton, Galifianakis, Watts, and Stone in ostensible real-time. The reflexivity is indeed profound since it forbids the effect of scripted reality (i.e., forbids the promotion of subjectivity and masking of social totality) even as we are there on stage learning the lines or confronting ourselves on social media. This reality, fetishized and commodified, is the “reality” that Keaton and his play admonish. Birdman carries out the critique by questioning the thing-in-itself, the Kantian noumena paraphrased on Keaton’s dressing room mirror, “A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing.” In the end, we have no choice but to follow Stone’s wondrous, wondering gaze out Keaton’s hospital window where we find that her father has succumbed to the scripted real, a simultaneous death of author, actor, consumer, and viewer, a generative and hopeful destruction to be sure.
As Birdman deftly and imaginatively illustrates, Reality Culture’s social media has made information the “opiate of the masses,” more so than religion or Arnoldian high culture ever could, and in doing so absorbed the body with it. Today, our bodies are perpetually wired-in and rewired through Reality Culture. Isn’t this the real lesson of Heidi Montag, Bruce Jenner, and even the late Joan Rivers, that cosmetic surgery no longer attempts to hide its effects? The body, always already commodified though and by capitalism, is now celebrated hypermediation. The all-too common outing, “It’s so obvious s/he’s had plastic surgery,” is now the very point of the procedure, a bodily refashioning that brings cultural capital. Lifts, tucks, and augmentations are no longer to be lost in the “real” person but rather made apparent like the possession and consumption of any prized commodity. Today’s alien, alienated body is haute couture. As Susan Bordo once brilliantly noted, the ostensible freedom of choice offered by plastic surgery merely masks the material, exploitative realities urging us to improve our bodies.
But why “reality” now?
What if the rise of reality culture is ultimately a disciplining of labor (i.e., a cost-effective labor strategy like offshoring, temping, and wage suppression) that brings studio and network heads greater profits in the immediate sense? Wouldn’t this mean that late capitalism produces the reality aesthetic and its three attitudinal corollaries: skepticism, cynicism, and voyeurism?
David Harvey has pointed to a series of global economic crises and socioeconomic shifts over the last forty-five years. Since the late 1960s, following the relaxation of immigration policy worldwide and Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism, labor has become less and less a barrier to capital. We have witnessed the concentration of wealth through wage stagnation, union busting, offshoring (West to East and, with NAFTA, North to South), “labor saving” technology, and, in the immediate sense, cost-effective casualized or flexible labor strategies (e.g., greater dependence on temping and downsizing). All of this disciplining of labor, of course, is a simultaneous disciplining of consumer. The quick fix has been the steady rise of a credit economy—“Get out your credit cards and spend!” smiles Harvey.
Reality Culture, then, neither emerged accidentally nor followed new consumer attitudes. Rather, Reality Culture is a byproduct of late capitalism’s neoliberal labor policy: the “reality” aesthetic—the phenomenon—is ultimately a cost-effective casualization of labor, sharing its ethos and organization with post-Fordist Toyotism—that is, part-timers, flexible manufacturing systems, customization of design, niche marketing, and emphasis on consumer lifestyles.
Looking specifically at reality television, Chad Raphael states that
[c]onfronted with rapidly rising above-the-line production costs, producers took it out on below-the-line labor and sought cheaper forms of
programming. [ … ] Lead writers [were] replaced with ‘story editors’ who [did] less and [were] paid less [while] [d]irectors [were] generally removed from reality shows entirely. [ … ] The catalyst in television’s turn toward reality programming was an increase in the cost of creating shows: Prices were driven up primarily by ‘above the line’ costs such as talent, direction, scriptwriting, music composition, computer animation, and location costs,” and a simultaneous demand for stars created an artificial labor shortage and inflated salaries for the lucky few (Raphael 136, 126).
As Thomas Fenaglio notes, “What followed was a revolution in the way networks sought new programming.
Reality TV is the result of the deconcentration of capital through globalized production, financing, and distribution, a fragmented totality that has brought a decrease in absolute and relative size of the core working class in the North and West with the emergence of a service class and other forms of casualized labor. These economic shifts have produced the necessary personal dispositions—skepticism, cynicism, and voyeurism—that demand “reality,” not the other way around.
Now to be fair, Girls has done a good job representing flexible labor given that the majority of its characters move from one temporary position to another. More obviously, Girls is not exactly “reality TV,” and hence does not exploit (as much anyway) a casualized labor base as, say, The Bachelor. Yet, like most “reality” fare, Girls depends on the fetishization and abstraction of reality, and very rarely if ever hints at the social totality connecting commodity and worker to their world relation. There is little possibility of progressive cognitive mapping in Lena Dunham’s Brooklyn. And while one could argue that this representation is merely a parochialism extending from Hannah Horvath’s narcissism (Durham has called her character a narcissist), the show is still part of the problem, not, in any radical sense, the solution.
Compare, finally, the analytic shortfall in Girls “reality” with another kind of popular fantasy: the Zombie text. As Torie Bosch suggests in “First, Eat All the Lawyers,” the zombie craze, whether as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or World War Z, reveals white collar anxiety facing the potential rise of blue collar professions following the recent Wall Street crises. Bosch says, “I can’t help but believe that this current Era of the Dead draws its power from our economic malaise.” [ … ] The zombie apocalypse is a white-collar nightmare: a world with no need for the skills we have developed. Lawyers, journalists, investment bankers—they are liabilities, not leaders, in the zombie-infested world.” World War Z author Max Brooks likewise argues that in the world of zombies, “No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What one does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.”
The truly radical popular text, then, cannot be Reality Culture’s scripted reality but rather the high Medieval and Zombie fantasy. Such realism in fantasy reveals what are, in the words of Marx, “the abstract relations that structure concrete material reality,” a depiction of reality that allows viewers to grasp “the relations of production in their totality” (Marx Wage-Labour and Capital, 29).
In his memorable 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Harold Pinter echoed Marx as he considered the limits to reality’s aestheticization. Pinter said,
In 1958 I wrote the following:
“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration !9 of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them, but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Given such a hard line drawn between art and politics, Pinter might not turn to fantasy or “reality” for truth. But fantasy would bring him closer.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan. ”‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture.“ Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 1099-115. Print.
Bosch, Torie. “First, Eat All the Lawyers.” Slate 2011. Web.
Fenoglio, Thomas. “The Economics of Reality TV.” A Critical Guide to Reality Television. 2009. Web.
"Harold Pinter: Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics”. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 11 Dec 2014.
Harvey, D. (2009, July 5). “The crisis today: Marxism 2009 [Videofile].” Web.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping”. In: Nelson, C./Grossberg, L. [ed]. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana-Champaign: U of Illinois P., 1990. 347-60. Web.
—-. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 20
—-. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Johnston, Philip. “Reality TV: A New Genre? A Critical Guide to Reality Television. 2009. Web.
Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008.
Lukács Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1971.
Mark, Karl. Wage-Labour and Capital. New York: International Publishers, 1988.
Raphael, Chad. “The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV.” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. 2nd ed. New York: New York UP, 2009. 123-39.
Print. Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud. “The Pedagogy of Totality.” Red Critique 9. 2003. Web.
STEVEN WEXLER 