Governmentality and Social Control in Contemporary Television Talk Shows

London.
The second and final day of Transforming Audiences starts with a keynote by Peter Lunt; who highlights the overall focus on new media at this conference, and shifts our focus to television in response. TV still has a key role to play in mediating public participation and engagement, both in politics and in cultural engagement in everyday life.

One of Peter's projects, Talk on Television, especially examined the role of television talk shows in the UK in this context; their evolution points to the transition of popular television as it combines factual broadcasting with entertainment and thus moves towards infotainment formats. This can be seen as a sign of a new populism in public service broadcasting, aiming to address the individual and to invite them to participate more directly in the programme. Such shows are still tightly scripted, but in a different way that also allows for more openness in their plot.

To some extent, this can be traced in the shift from talk shows through therapy shows to reality TV, that is, from a focus on talk through a focus on emotions to a focus on performance. Aligned with this is also a shift from talk shows serving the public sphere (or providing an oppositional, agonistic extension of the public sphere) to a centring on identity and difference, and finally to a focus on governance mechanisms for guiding the content of such shows (that is, a focus on social control).

There's been a great deal of recent work on governmentality, of course; Peter notes the book Therapy Culture by Frank Furedi, for example, which highlights the proliferation of therapy as a way of addressing the anxiety of self-reflection and describes this as a form of governance at a distance. Lifestyle and therapy television shows which invite the individual to reflect on themselves in public play an obvious role here. From this point of view, TV is a technology of the self, a means through which people produce themselves as reflecting individuals, and this connects with Foucault's work on governmentality as something that is no longer located within specific disciplinary institutions but is dispersed across society as 'soft power'.

This gives us a view of society as a dispersed network of loosely connected social institutions, rather than as a tightly organised hierarchical structure; in this view, then, television is no longer a special, central media form (contrary to conventional perceptions of the position of the BBC in society, for example), but rather one institution amongst many that is engaged in these processes of social control.

There are also opportunities for an alternative view of participation in television here, then. Peter turns to ITV's Jeremy Kyle Show, a popular talk show dealing with moral dilemmas and family disputes and involving elements like DNA tests and lie detectors to 'solve' some of these issues. (One example he shows us is about a grandmother and aunt demanding that the mother of the grandchild take a DNA test to prove the child is related to them...)

The show is based around confrontation (rather than taking a therapeutic approach), and - at least in the example shown - this confrontation is around the boundaries of the family; this highlights and problematises the complexities of the changing structure of contemporary families, even while not really questioning some of the fundamental concepts underlying the idea (for example, it may question how a family should operate, but stays away from the question of what a family is). There are limits to what ideas Kyle is prepared to contest - even in the absence of marriage plans, for example, the partner is described as 'the fiancée' rather than highlighting the reality of unmarried cohabitation. The programme does not challenge the self-representation of its guests in key respects, even though it will attack them strongly on other aspects.

The backdrop to such programmes, on the other hand, is the wider discourse on a 'broken Britain': the (terminal?) decline of social and family tradition and the reconfiguration of the family into a number of possible contestable models which results from it, described by some as the 'plastic', that is, malleable, changeable family. Built into this are perhaps some very conservative views of what family ought to be like, of how people ought to engage with one another, of what a 'pure' relationship should be. The show is a superb articulation of contemporary problematics, but at the same time does not engage in a deeper discussion of such issues.

What, then, is the positive social value of a programme or format such as this? It attempts to intervene in the public discussion, but is not a traditional public knowledge project as embodied by older-fashioned talk shows involving expert commentary and respectful discussion; it is oriented towards a mode of emotive expression and shared experience, and through this provides some guidance. It may be involved in governing people's conduct at a distance, but provides no real normative discipline.

What happens here, instead, is a struggle for recognition (within the intimate rather than public sphere), for love, respect, and esteem; human beings require recognition in order to create and sustain human identity, and its absence or withdrawal leads to psychological harm. Recognition, then, is a perpetual, dialogic, agonistic struggle; respect and esteem are tightly connected to this - esteem, for example, is the recognition of the individual's contributions to societal goals.

Governmentality theory can be applied to this, but this should not be used to misunderstand shows such as this as a simplistic tool for exercising normative discipline. Power as extending into social relationships is essentially weaker and based on other mechanisms than simple discipline; what takes place through shows such as this is not an institutionalisation of power and knowledge through the normalisation of specific social settings, but a much more conflicted and contradictory process.

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