What it takes to make a successful reality television star isn’t too disparate from what it now takes to make a political actor.
I write this fully cognizant of the swath of “stars” in the reality television galaxy, from the Lotharios on The Bachelor (Since 2002) to the Alphas on Survivor (Since 2000) to the All-American Sweethearts on American Idol (Since 2002) to the so-real-you-could-reach-out-and-touch-em’ passersby on The Real World (Since 1992) to the Vulgarian Elites of the Real Housewives (Since 2006)…
There is a universe out there, where these stars have emitted a spectacular performance of reality, inevitably skewed by medium, that has bathed society in beaming rays of soft power for such a prolonged duration, that its illuminance has become blinding.
To make a competent reality television star is to make a modernized amalgamation, much like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, only much more cognizant of all the experiments and performances of starpower that came before, terrorizing our collective imagination.
Now, don’t look under the bed, look all around you- a digitized archive in the sky containing the vastness of these many performative actions to starpower, sanctions of identity, reiterations, and affirmations of consequence, that, like the greatest Slasher villain or Horror movie fiend, is out of sight, but always on your mind, and potentially, dangerously accessible, simply in saying their name three times whilst staring into a mirror, or perhaps when you’ve closed your eyes and fallen asleep…
The Internet has become a ladder up (or down) towards the world of the intolerable, where our dreams seek materialization through an immersion within the intensity of digital time, bending space around it, Social Media spreading across its surface like constellations, creating the emergent potential for community, as the individual exists in the “solitary glow of handheld devices” (37 Edwards).
The format for reality television and Internet consumption makes it truly difficult for their stars to burn out, with cross promotion and spin offs of spin offs into web series preserving their ray of light for a potentially unlimited period of time. And why exactly should we rid ourselves of them? Don’t forget- these are real people on the air, in our screens. Mr. Rogers was bound to be cancelled sooner or later, but why would we ever cancel someone (or something) like a Donald Trump?
Our reading this week, identify this collapse between entertainment and news, under threats of insurgency, and an appeal to a new kind of citizenship, indebted to an appeal to passion, a subsequent masquerade of information, and the birth of society as super-spectacle, where the line between hard and soft power, celebrity and charlatan, have blurred.
Mark Poster gives us a method for operating in this new domain and it relates squarely with Performance Studies. In “Information Please,” he contends that Western concepts and political principles cannot form the rights of man and citizen in this increasingly globalized condition. Operating in this domain not only ignores the World Wide Web of universality facilitated by the Internet, but also the humanizing force of technology on our natural plane of existence. This helps to develop my initial observation: What it takes to make the perfect reality television star and/or political actor is actually a bid towards man and machine hybridity.
“In short, we may build new political structures outside the nation-state only in collaboration with machines. The new community will not be a replica of the agora but will be mediated by information machines. What is required therefore is a doctrine of the rights of the human-machine interface” (72, Poster)
If we watch Trump’s performance in this realm of human robots (or maybe living dead), we bare witness to a political insurgency that exposes the outmodedness in our perceived notion of power in real-time, streaming now, in turn, “changing people’s frames of reference by offering windows of possibility, allowing for the viral opportunity to “feel the exhilaration of making a difference by the mere fact of being together” (Arditi). And like any noteworthy performance, these coups last far beyond their initial spark and are innately devised to do so.
Described by Benjamin Arditi in “Insurgencies don’t have a plan…,” these insurgencies are “animated by the belief that present-day conditions harm equality, freedom, social justice, and so on that they can make a difference by acting to make another, more equal and just world emerge from this one…organizing the future was not their top priority because they were already making a difference by merely demonstrating, occupying, and generally defying the order of things.”
Trump and his cohort strive to disturb the present as if in rehearsal for the future, a transmission that relies on the collapse of news and entertainment, the notion of a media, detached and untrustworthy, and an abdication towards Doom that inverts our man-made absurdities, exposing the underlying fragility of a cultural hegemony built on the dread and disillusion of its subjects.