shameless commerce/right to privacy

The highly contradictory notion of bourgeois privacy makes its transformation into an internal limit (to be transgressed by police, media, and perverts) a political and libidinal inevitability. The unthought-through debt that the right to privacy owes to the right to property is repaid when privacy is transformed into property. The cold hard cash that even B-grade celebrity can earn seems to be the newest, shiniest brass ring to which ordinary people can aspire when reality television asks us to trade in the privacy of our bedroom or toilet for a few weeks of televisual fame. There is an inexhaustible reservoir of middle-class hotties - trapped by credit-card debt, but proud of their flat abdomens - who submit to screen tests in order to expose every moment of their lives to the television camera. In this segment of the overdeveloped world, individuals feel that privacy is the last thing they have left to exchange for a golden parachute out of the increasingly abject middle class.

The culture industry's enthusiastic mobilization of surveillance technologies proves that Adorno and Horkheimer got it right when they suggested that mass-produced entertainment teaches us to submit and adapt to logics and technologies of domination -- in this case 24 hour surveilance and the destruction of the boundaries around our private parts.


Revised excerpt from my article "A Brief Genealogy of Privacy" in Grey Room. -

Always ready to up the ante on disciplinary entertainment, Fox is set to start up a cable channel devoted entirely to Reality Television -- 24/7.