One of the most characteristic effects of the mediatization of human life is the constant feedback between being a spectator and being a spectacle, between being self and being other. In a world lived through images we are all “self” and at the same time we are the “other” of another “self”. This situation gives rise to a threshold of indistinction between identity and alterity: we are a self because we experience subjectively and we are the other because we embody an external gaze. We are thus confined to a circular threshold where a regression to a mythical form of consciousness takes place (5.12), a limen in which the psyche is externalized and closes down around us. In this indistinct world between self and other, between inner and outer, celebrities begin to play the role of archetypes of the contemporary psyche (2.17, 5.13). The terrible place imposed on us by the media is largely a product of this regression to a previous structure of consciousness.
Thus, we have that reality television not only eliminates the distance between the public and the private (9.1, 9.2, 9.9, 9.11, 9.14), the real and the fictitious (9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.7, 9.15, 9.19), it also does the same with the distance between self and other, to the point that these become confused and diluted in a structure that resembles what Jacques Lacan called the big Other. This concept, a trans-individual symbolic order that underlies inter-subjective and social interactions, serves as a repository for the “supposedly unknown” knowledge (everything we pretend not to know) that sustains a society. The big Other is a level of knowledge invisible to the habitual self or its alterity, but it is where all the assumptions, conscious or unconscious, that shape our worldview go. In fact, Mark Fisher does not fail to assert that the desires and preferences that feed the control circuit proposed by a reality show like Big Brother, are the desires and preferences of the great Other, who is the consumer of public relations and propaganda par excellence. Once integrated into the reality TV feedback loop, the assumptions of the big Other become a tool of coercion (yeah, well I bet 32 million people would disagree with you bro) that reinforces the effectiveness of the system’s control mechanisms.
Seen in this light, Howard Beale in Networkand Frank in God Bless America (and to some extent John Nada in They Live) are tricksters of sorts who reveal the supposedly unknown knowledge stored in the great Other in order to break the feedback loop of the control mechanism. It is not by chance that in many dualistic religions the trickster
acts as a second creator of the world or part thereof and plays the role of spoiler of the supreme god’s creation […] In the biblical myth of Genesis, one can recognize the discrete presence of a Trickster ex machina, the serpent who reveals sexuality to the primordial couple of humans, this effecting their expulsion from paradise […]1
Once again we encounter the intersection between politics, media and religion in a Gnostic format that corroborates the Ophite vision (6.4) according to which the serpent in the garden of Eden would have been the first to try to free us from the tyranny of an unconscious god (the big Other) that prevents us from accessing the tree of of life.
- Mircea Eliade, Ioan Culianu and Hillary Wiesner The Eliade Guide to World Religions, 96. ↩︎
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