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Postmodern Archaic: The Return of the Real in Digital Virtuality 
Gerald Gaylard 
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa 
geraldgaylard@languages.wits.ac.za 

(c) 2004 Gerald Gaylard.
All rights reserved. 

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Our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not
stockpile the past in plain view. 

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations 19


1. The standard spin given to digital virtuality in our era, and not just
by advertising copywriters, is that of naïve optimism. Jaishree Odin, for
instance, describes hypertext as effecting a radical shift "from the
linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive
encounters to that of the nonlinear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical
aesthetic involving active encounters," adding that this latter aesthetic
is more capable of "representing postcolonial cultural experience since
it embodies our changed conception of language, space, and time" (599).
While one can certainly endorse the call for more polyglot, less rigidly
hierarchical modes of practice, we should be skeptical about the role of
hypertext in advancing that project. Indeed, as I will argue here, if we
look past the utopian hype we can discern a tendency toward the healthy
survival, even flourishing, of realist tropes and mores within digital
virtuality, a tendency with a number of disturbing connotations for
"postcolonial cultural experience." 

2. Perhaps surprisingly, the digital virtuality industry today often
emphasizes its naturalism and realism; it is an industry that currently
sells itself less on its ability to abstract than on its increased
high-focus representational resolution. In other words, digital
virtuality's initial promise to create the new, to reify the imagination,
has often led rather toward more reification and objectifiction than
expanded imagination. This is not only visible in some digital technology
(for instance, "motion capture" in which actual human motion is the
original data for "realistic" animation) and in the leagues of
advertising copy in the vein of "never seen before," "digital reality
creation," "zero defect," "and everyone's invited," but also in the
recently prominent quasi-surveillance of home videos and "reality TV";
docu-soapies; documentary films such as The Great Dance; films such as
The Blair Witch Project, The Truman Show, The Sixth Sense, Series 7: The
Contenders, and The King is Alive; atavistic rhythms in digital techno
and trance music; some "new ageism," as in Terence McKenna's The Archaic
Revival; and so on. I hope that it is clear therefore that I am using
virtuality in the widest sense to include any kind of interactive digital
cultural products, or any artifacts that utilize digital technology (from
miniature cameras to computer games to films to internet web pages).
Moreover, I am arguing that virtuality is not confined to technology, but
involves a wider set of cultural practices that tend to rework the "real"
in the service of commodification. I want to call these cultural
practices the "postmodern archaic" because they use the enablements and
blandishments of digital technology to test and ratify current notions of
virtuality and reality by comparison with a version of the past. How are
we to understand this plethora of digital products and practices, all
raising in some way reality and realism and the relationship between
them? 

3. My sense is that this technology tends to raise issues of
representation in the same general way that all technological innovations
require cultural adaptation to their potentials. Indeed, it might even be
asserted that the quality of cultural production declines when new
technologies are introduced as producers have to spend time exploring,
understanding, and integrating those technologies. It is a commonplace,
for instance, that when "talkies" were first introduced, they were of low
quality content-wise; a similar decline from prevailing standards of
quality was all too apparent when computer-generated imagery first came
into vogue. So my contention is that cultures are perpetually in
oscillation, or at least subject to wave-like ebbs and flows, with the
rush to new and potentially less representational forms invariably
precipitating a resurgence of normative realisms. 

4. To appreciate this curious give-and-take logic in the forms and
technologies of representation, it is helpful to survey the major
historical analyses of realism. Many of these are concerned with the
genesis of modernity, with Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting, and
with the novel--in particular the nineteenth-century realist novel of
Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Austen, Hardy, et al. Such critics as Lukács,
Auerbach, Watt, Levin, and Alter point out that narrative realism in the
novel initially took the form of exhaustive, not to mention exhausting,
adjectival description, particularly focusing on domestic minutiae.
Typically, such novels were located in the lounge, parlor, and kitchen,
although they seldom made it into the bedroom. Hence, despite the
different manifestations of realism, from the classical geometries of
Renaissance realism to the social realism of the nineteenth century,
realism tended to take the form of mimesis or objective verisimilitude:
imitation, representation, referentiality. Such belief and practice were
also manifest in the early days of the cinema with Kracauer, Bazin, and
others lauding celluloid for its unprecedented representationality.
Television too has been a mimetic form, reflecting the spread of
multinational technocracy for Langer, Kroker, and Cook, among others, and
is now the format of a peculiarly postmodern form of realism: the
illusion of participatory democracy fostered by "reality TV." As Bourdon
and Fetveit argue, the raison d'être of television is the promise of its
being live and therefore authentic, a contract with audiences that
involves them in "a specific interpretive community, and, beyond . . . a
national audience" (Bourdon 550). Thus realism has been characterized, I
think correctly, as the belief in the ability of signs to represent an
objectively verifiable world accurately. 

5. Of course, the signs that are taken to be realistically representative
are culturally specific, so the heritage of realism that concerns us here
was not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but was also the cultural aspect
of a massive social upheaval beginning in the West but ongoing to this
day throughout the globe; ontologically this belief in disinterested
representation was termed empiricism, which was reciprocally reliant upon
science, industrialization, and colonialism. As Mary Louise Pratt notes,
scientific exploration, involving the systematizing of nature and
indigene in the eighteenth century as part of the imperial project,
relied upon representation. Hence empiricist and realist
disinterestedness was not culturally innocent and produced a
systematization or mapping under the hegemony of the Western bourgeoisie
and the authority of print. A wide diversity of critics has seen both the
novel and film as bourgeois genres in thrall to a realist mode which, as
Nash remarks, is "anthropocentric" (13). Realism, at least in its early
days, was Western, empiricist, materialist. Readers, viewers, and writers
co-founded an ordered and rational world--a world of stability in the
midst of industrialism's maelstrom, a secular humanist substitute for
religion's ontological reassurance. Realism was fuelled by the desire of
the rising and insecure bourgeoisie to embed and reify its ideology, a
reification perhaps most evident in the technological media artefact of
the imagination of mass consumer culture, the novel, a reification that
was arguably to find its most recent apogee in television. The point here
about realism is not so much that the form is inherently wrong-headed,
but simply that it has a specific history, a history which has not been
altogether kind to non-Western worlds. 

6. Now it may seem like a large leap from the nineteenth-century realist
novel to virtuality, but the essentially materialist critique of realism
can still be legitimately invoked in the context of digital culture. Even
in the context of new media, realism serves to provide a coherent and
comforting narrative by offering an apparent anchorage in actuality. This
recurrence of realism within postmodern culture becomes clear if we
perform even a very brief materialist critique of Survivor, the exemplary
instance of reality TV and "the most popular show in the United States."
Survivor does not utilize digital technology in particularly overt ways,
though it is clearly present in the capture and playback of video and
audio, editing and title sequences. Rather, as is typical of hypertext
and reality TV, the series utilizes notions of accurate representation,
surveillance, fame, and democracy. 

7. Survivor attempts to fuse elements of the soap-opera (a compressed
series of struggles over friendship, intimacy, and betrayal within a
small community, a lot of close-up emotional-response shots), the tourism
show (like Lonely Planet), the eco show (wildlife documentaries), the
game show (a million dollars are up for grabs in a competitive format),
the detective program ("whodunnit," or perhaps that should be
"whowinsit"?), and the newer genre of reality show or infotainment
docu-soap-opera (in which events and emotions are apparently spontaneous
and unscripted). The plot of Survivor is rather similar to a pilgrim's
progress: via a series of tests and votes, some survive while others are
eliminated and eventually, via tasks that supposedly bring the survivors
closer to the elements, the environment, and the indigenous culture, the
final three are "initiated" into the local tribe, though of course there
is only one "sole survivor" who wins the million. 

8. Survivor is not just realistic; its realism has the incontrovertible
gravitas of spontaneity under the objective gaze of the unedited lens. So
the first aspect of this "new" realism is what I want to call the
"illusion of spontaneity." There was a time when the tag "based on a true
story" was a lure for viewers, but now that seems no longer enough; what
viewers want is the true story itself. What contemporary realism seems to
demand is not only density of description, of space, of objects, in order
convey verisimilitude, but also spontaneity of time, possibly because
spatiality has become so hyper that time is seldom linear. So the early
realist emphasis on place and linear time in the novel or on exhaustive
texture in the film has shifted to an emphasis on globalized space and
synchronic time, and particularly unmediated time, spontaneity. This is
evident if we examine the credit sequence at the end of the show: along
with the usual roll-call of post-production and casting for the Africa
season were bush managers, psychologists, safety coordinators, as well as
fourteen editors, eighteen cameramen, and fifteen audio personnel. At no
stage are any of these production personnel or processes foregrounded in
the final aired product. The illusion of spontaneity is required for
television to appear live and therefore authentic and is an inheritance
from the instrumental empiricism that informed the novel. Moreover,
credibility fostered by immediacy is further structured by the dramatic
tension so germane to novelistic narrative, a dramatic tension that is
provided by accidents, revealing comments by participants, and
particularly by the tribal council at the end of each episode when
participants are voted off the show. The frisson of the unexpected, and
therefore the live, that these moments provide further fetishizes the
epistemological structures of conventional realist narrative; in other
words, consumers are programmed by the rhetoric of spontaneous spectacle,
the exceptional, and the individualism that underpins realism. Indeed,
the placement of the unscripted, unscriptable, moment of tribal council
at the end of the show provides a climax that keeps viewers watching. 

9. The second aspect of this realism, inextricably intertwined with the
illusion of spontaneity, is its spatiality, which in this case is the
archaic surroundings of what the narrator Jeff Probst calls "a land
virtually untouched by the modern world." The first point about these
surroundings is that they are an actual physical location, a place, and
physicality is always the last refuge of the authentic, the real.
However, this place is also a space, a space which I want to call the
"postmodern archaic." I have chosen the word archaic because it does have
a sense of spatiality as well as of time, suggesting the primitive, the
old and outdated, as well as ancient habitation, ruins, or simply nature
or the bush. Now of course the archaic is nothing new. Indeed, one might
say that the archaic is as old as nostalgia, and, therefore, it seems
important to keep in mind that the archaic is hardly a new trope in
cultural production, particularly Western cultural production, and here
one might cite the Bible, through Rousseau to Ruskin, Mollison and
beyond. Indeed, nature or "the natural" is an invention of culture and
inevitably recurs as culture becomes more and more palimpsestic, recurs
as a symbolic ballast to the layered excesses of culture. As Raymond
Williams has it: 

By "residual" I mean something different from the "archaic," though in
practice these are often very difficult to distinguish. Any culture
includes available elements of its past, but their place in the
contemporary cultural process is profoundly variable. I would call the
"archaic" that which is wholly recognized as an element of the past, to
be observed, to be examined, or even on occasion to be consciously
"revived," in a deliberately specializing way. What I mean by the
"residual" is very different. The residual, by definition, has been
effectively formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural
process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as
an effective element of the present. (122)


In the case of the postmodern archaic, the archaic is the residual, for
in its guise as nature and the corporeal it is continually available for
the specialized purpose of testing and confirming contemporary culture.
To put this differently, we might regard the postmodern archaic as the
residual in the guise of the archaic; contemporary repurposing of the
residual makes it appear original, archaic, and incontrovertible. In the
theatre of this archaic we discover our "roots," a sense of pristine
organic holism, shorn of culture's detritus. As Marianna Torgovnick
argues,


the metaphor of finding a home or being at home recurs over and over as a
structuring pattern within Western primitivism. . . . this line of
thought about the primitive takes us full circle and returns us to the
earliest meanings of the word primitive as the original state of
something--biological tissue, church organization, social organization.
For "going home," like "going primitive," is inescapably a metaphor for
the return to origins. . . . For the charm to work, the primitive must
represent a common past--our past, a Euro-American past so long gone that
we can find no traces of it in Western spaces. . . . The primitive must
be available or our 'origins' may no longer be retrievable, re-creatable.
(185-87)


So the archaic is a sign of an authentic common past, a home that soothes
modernity's homelessness. 

10. The archaic is visible in the forgeries utilized by artists to obtain
the appearance of archaic authenticity: artificial worm-holes in wood,
oil paintings darkened by candle smoke, outmoded language in novels. The
sense of authenticity was to be particularly important in the Modernist
primitivism of Picasso, Yeats, Lawrence, and Joyce. At another level,
what child has not imagined what would happen if all the technocultural
scaffolding and paraphernalia of contemporary life were to disappear?
Hence the archaic has been particularly prevalent in depictions of
childhood and fantasy, and the corollary is also true, that the archaic
is often infantilized. So the archaic has a past, and its present can be
identified in any number of contemporary cultural phenomena, including
neo-tribalism, neo-paganism, aspects of the ecological movement,
conservation, concern for the endangerment of tribals and their
lifestyles, certain religions, reality television, and so on. At the
postcolonial level, the long history of the archaicization of Africa, for
instance, can be traced back to at least early cartography,
nineteenth-century imperial romances as in Rider Haggard, the
ethnicization of the female primitive in Saartje Bartmann, the fetishized
images of the bushman and frontiersman, the work of Laurens van der Post,
wildlife documentaries, recreations of dinosaurs and so on. Such
archaicization is also prominent in the frontier theme so dominant in
America, particularly in the Western. These images and stories tend to
preserve the bush and its aboriginal denizens as pristine, primeval,
authentic, and as a commodity for consumption. The archaic can also be
found in the reaction of various nationalisms to these imperial images in
the valorization of indigenous cultures, traditions and landscapes.
Nevertheless, what is postmodern about this archaism in contemporary
culture is the extent to which it is reified as a simulation, a
Baudrillardian simulation. Jameson notes that

nostalgia film, consistent with postmodernist tendencies generally, seeks
to generate images and simulacra of the past, thereby--in a social
situation in which genuine historicity or class traditions have become
enfeebled--producing something like a pseudo-past for consumption as a
compensation and a substitute for, but also a displacement of, that
different kind of past which (along with active visions of the future)
has been a necessary component for groups of people in other situations
in the projection of their praxis and the energizing of their collective
project. (137)


11. What makes this archaic postmodern is the extent to which it is
apparently real, spontaneous, live; the extent that technology has become
fast enough to capture or outpace reality. The "postmodern archaic" in
this case is the utilization of a reservoir of symbolic archaic value as
the backdrop and test for "progress"; in other words, the desert island,
the outback, the savannah, are yardsticks to measure how far modern
people have come from their "roots," and to determine whether they can
still functionally return to them. The pristine is so appealing because
in an era of vertiginous change it can be made to be a relative constant,
and because it can act as an empiricist, realist litmus test and,
hopefully, validation of contemporary hyperculture. In other words, the
postmodern archaic might be seen as part of the ongoing human attempt to
cleanse and stabilize nature and the visceral, to control the messiness
of the flesh, and what is particularly postmodern about this is that it
is technology that is the agent of the sanitizing sublimation. Hence I am
using a Jamesonian distinction between the postmodern (as in the
sociohistorical era) and postmodernism (reflexive cultural production in
and about that era) to emphasize Baudrillard's notion of the "simulacrum"
that characterizes the postmodern. Indeed, postmodernity or the
postmodern has been consistently characterized as a space rather than a
place due to its dependency on globalization and simulation. According to
this distinction, Survivor is definitely an example of a postmodern
simulacrum, rather than of critical, reflexive postmodernism (which may
well be simulacral itself). As John Langer suggests of disaster coverage
in Tabloid Television, this simulacrum attempts to forestall the
depersonalization and community breakdown that accompanies technocratic
postmodernity. 

12. Thus we see that in the Survivor: Africa season, many attempts are
made to integrate the contestants with the locale so that challenges and
rewards partially involve the local flora and fauna and local practices
such as bartering and drinking cow's blood (as the Masai do). Hence the
postmodern archaic is not merely a test, but is motivated by a Luddite
consciousness, and in particular by what N. Katherine Hayles calls
"corporeal anxiety," the fear of dematerialization of the body, and a
corollary need for community/family/tribal bonds (800). Thus what is also
piquantly postmodern about this archaicism is the apocalyptic anxiety
that the archaic, our own roots as externalized in primitive societies
and locales, is disappearing at an accelerating pace. Baudrillard
similarly links anxiety and panic with nostalgia: 

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full
meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of
reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an
escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the
figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is
a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and
parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation
appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real
and hyperreal. (12-13)


This nostalgia requires that the viewers of Survivor consume the genetic
substrate of the archaic authentic and thus establish its authenticity;
the word is made flesh in an act of ingestion, voyeurism enters the body.
Clearly Lukács is hardly enough and psychoanalytic analysis is of utility
here. Much has been made of the link between cannibalism, vampirism and
consumer capitalism, and here I think that we see the same connection in
that capitalism involves incorporation via ingestion. Perhaps we might
call this canny capitalism? Sparkle Hayter satirizes Survivor as a
contained and sanitized capitalism in a short story which postulates that
real castaways would have to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.
If we consider that money today is virtualized in terms of computer
transactions, but we can still make a withdrawal of actual physical cash
from the machine and thus confirm the veracity of virtual capital, then
via consuming the illusion of spontaneity and the postmodern archaic, the
postmodern subject is able to confirm the veracity of virtual culture
today. 

13. In the cow's blood drinking scene in Kenya in the Survivor: Africa
season, for instance, the host Jeff Probst comments, "I'm going to tell
you up front, when I first saw this done it seemed very brutal to me, but
I spent a lot of time with these guys and found out exactly the opposite,
cattle are revered . . . cattle are truly a source of life, what's going
to happen is something they do every day and how they live." While this
might be seen as admirable postcolonial foregrounding of cultural
position and prejudice, the prejudicial is immediately re-established by
Probst's next comment, "just to assure you, we've tested and quarantined
this cow, this one is completely clean," something reinforced by the
camera's lingering glance on the blanching face of one of the women
contestants when blood is mentioned. This cultural othering is further
compounded when Probst pours the blood into a glass jar while saying
"pour it into a serving container that suits you guys," which might
indeed be a metaphor for the postmodern archaic as a whole. Furthermore,
such scenes of ingestion are not only characteristic of the "eat or be
eaten" ethos of capitalism, but have become a trope in reality
television, partly because they appear to be live, but also because the
trope of the "gross out" is not just an exercise in multicultural
tolerance but in sensationalizing the limits of cultural tolerance
through stomach-turning. Scandal is required for the maintenance of
viewer interest, but the scandal must always be contained within
culturally sanctioned boundaries of acceptability. Thus the postmodern
archaic has the double function of both critiquing contemporary culture
and retroactively ratifying that culture. 

14. Hence Survivor might well be accused of tokenism, for not only are
there no indigenous inhabitants taking part in the show--all the
contestants and backing crew are American (the only locals credited in
the Africa production were a location manager and carpenters)--but also
the gestures toward the indigenous are almost insultingly offhand and
exoticizing. The music in the Australian Survivor (composed by Russ
Landau and David Vanacore), for instance, alternates between schmaltzy
neo-classical in the scenes construed as patriotic to the United States,
so that when the contestants chat to their families via the internet in
one reward violins swell portentously. On the other hand, indigenous
scenes are accompanied by "primitive" indigenous drumming or spooky
didgeridoo playing to indicate threatening danger. This contrast is most
apparent in the Survivor: Thailand season when in one episode the
survivors sing the cheery yuletide song "Sleigh Ride" on a sultry
summer's night, with the camera panning into the moonlit Thai landscape
with eerie accompanying music. In fact, the theme tune to the series is
called "Ancient Voices" in the credit sequence. This aural sensationalism
exoticizes the archaic and appropriates the other. In fact, Africa,
Australia, Asia, and so on in Survivor are understood through projections
of the repressed of the West, as in Conrad's evergreen Heart of Darkness.
A necessary background in reading realist media production today would
seem to be critical postcolonialism alongside formalism and
psychoanalytical theory, at the least. 

15. Of course, it is not my intention to disparage these noble attempts,
noble savage attempts, to embrace the other, but I cannot get away from
the fact that they are merely a façade amounting to no more than local
color, for the narrative of the game itself is a capitalist orgy of
"democratic" voting, defeat, accumulation, and victory. The initiation
into the local(e), this neo-tribalism, cannot be allowed to interfere
with a bigger tribalism, a nationalist agenda; hence the triumphal finale
ratifying capitalism with a final vote into millionaire status, the
golden calf of America. A central transcultural aspect of the game show
is its valorizing of competition, materialism, commodity fetishism, and
winning. In game shows the linking of specialized knowledge and skills
with material reward instantiates the capitalist ideological
underpinnings to American value systems. While the "third world," savage,
primitive archaic is apparently there as a test, the game as such is not
tested because it embodies the notions of the law of the jungle and
survival of the fittest. 

16. Thus the mirage of a test is partially there to quiet the apocalyptic
anxieties of a decadent culture; if the United States fell apart or was
attacked by its enemies and became a wasteland, Americans and their
culture could still survive and flourish because their culture is
natural. As Baudrillard notes, "everything is metamorphosed into its
inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form" (37). In a sense,
then, Survivor offers to American audiences not only the opportunity to
test and ratify their culture, but also the chance to consolidate a
collective identity, the possibility for a Barthesian plaisir, a pleasure
in self-recognition and hence validation. Unlike many other game shows,
Survivor does not offer substantial consolation prizes. There was one
season in which all the players received a car, and the runner-up always
receives one hundred thousand dollars. But these exceptions aside, losers
are sent home with nothing to show beyond a chance at some publicity and
post-production photo opportunities. 

17. But while the show does superficially offer us survivalism, a
narrative that confirms the "law of the jungle," it is carefully scripted
and contained. The host, Jeff Probst, maintains center stage as the
organizing voice of authority and control, the voice of the father,
echoing Chion's claim that television is vococentric in that the voice
"orients the viewers decisively in certain directions of interpretation"
(Bourdon 541). It is no mere idiosyncracy of style that has Probst
affecting frontiersman khaki fatigues and an imperious manner. This is
clearly a patriarchal cultural model, with the father as the voice of
authority, the "immunity idol" as phallic talisman, and the contestants
as Oedipal children jockeying for his divinely impartial approval or
disapprobation in the form of extinction. To take this Freudian model
further, the archaic landscape may well be the feminine, a primitive
oceanic in which the children find home. Moreover, the show is very
ritualized; the same routines are utilized in the same places at
regimented times. The off-screen props that actually enable this
quasi-survivalism were revealed most dramatically when one of the
contestants fell into the fire in the Survivor--the Outback season and
was badly burned: he was airlifted out in a helicopter. No doubt one of
the rather ghoulish pleasures that the show offers to audiences is the
threat of danger that does accompany even such a scripted and supported
trip into the apparently wild. Moreover, the audience revels in any
sudden changes in the plot or between the characters, much as it would
respond to a change of fortunes in a novel or sitcom. 

18. It is in this way that the game appears "natural" and therefore
"unquestionable." In other words, capitalism must be the ultimate culture
because it is not a culture as such but in fact unmediated nature,
verisimilitudinous naturalism; the divide between nature and nurture
collapses. So the totem of the tribe is not the desert island, the
outback, or the savannah, but the game itself--competition with winner
takes all as its crowning decapitation. The totem is capitalism, the law
of the jungle, the constitutive principle of the tribe as such. Indeed,
one might be tempted to read this particular brand of hyper-realism as a
justification of the pax Americana (or should that be belli Americana?).
This is graphically evident in the Survivor: Marquesas season in which
Probst informs the contestants at their first tribal council in a
picturesque building that "all over the Marquesas there are ancient
dwellings like this one, for thousands of years things have taken place
here, everything from sacrifice to other rituals; tribal council is
certainly a ritual, the vote definitely a sacrifice, because this is
where you are held accountable for your actions on the island."
Capitalism must contain the archaic in order both to conceal and to
justify its savagery. Here the ancient myths of purification and justice
via abasement and suffering are reinforced. As Langer notes of the
restoration of order in television news, "these stories reassure us that
the social organism has an 'immune system' which can expel untoward and
even astonishing interference. Risk to the community ultimately offers us
'faith' in the community" (125). 

19. The academic who has perhaps written most extensively about this
issue of postmodern archaicism is Dean MacCannell in Empty Meeting
Grounds: The Tourist Papers. MacCannell makes the point that tourism
stages authenticity in order to appeal to exotic expectations that center
around temporary escape from the West. He goes on to say that postmodern
archaicism which exoticizes the apparently genuine primitive other in an
act of identity tourism is not so much a metaphoric guilt expiation, but
an actual guilt being expiated, for we have in fact completely wiped out
our "savage" ancestors (one might, perhaps uncharitably, construe the
neo-tribalism of Survivor as more about an American attempt to obliterate
guilt at the colonial genocide of native Americans than about embracing a
multivalent global). MacCannell says: 


The touristic ideal of the "primitive" is that of a magical resource that
can be used without actually possessing or diminishing it. Within
tourism, the "primitive" occupies a position not unlike that of the
libido or the death drive in psychoanalysis, or the simple-minded working
class of National Socialism which was supposed to have derived an
ultimate kind of fulfilment in its labour for the Fatherland. Or the
physicist's dream of room-temperature superconductivity and table-top
fusion. These are all post-capitalist moral fantasies based on a desire
to deny the relationship between profit and exploitation. Let's pretend
that we can get something for nothing. The fable is as follows: The
return on the tour of headhunters and cannibals is to make the tourist a
real hero of alterity. It is his coming into contact with and experience
of the ultra-primitive which gives him his status. But this has not cost
the primitives anything. Indeed, they too, may have gained from it.
Taking someone's picture doesn't cost them anything, not in any Western
commercial sense, yet the picture has value. The picture has no value for
the primitive, yet the tourist pays for the right to take pictures. The
"primitive" receives something for nothing, and benefits beyond this.
Doesn't the fame of certain primitives, and even respect for them,
actually increase when the tourist carries their pictures back to the
West? It seems to be the most perfect realization so far of the
capitalist economists' dream of everyone getting richer together. (28-9)


The idea here is to give some guilt-expiating value to the primitive, but
not enough to invest in its economic uplift, otherwise even the
appearance of it will completely disappear, and not enough for the
primitive as an aspect of ourselves to disappear. What the consuming
public wants is not the archaic but the image of the archaic, because the
archaic itself involves too much suffering. So what is demanded is the
illusion of authenticity, which at the very least is the condemnation of
artifice via an unhistoricized simulation of nature. It seems that a
community always requires enough guilt to retain its members; postmodern
communities find just this amount of guilt in a peculiar version of the
archaic. 

20. We might witness this structuring of community around a belief in its
own value in a host of cultural productions today. The postmodern archaic
is not merely located within the putatively primitive, but manifests in
other sociohistorically specific ways that buttress the postmodern
community's sense of self: for instance, in the previous generation of
technology and culture, within classical and neo-classical "style,"
inside woman as "the natural," as a form of neo-Luddism, and so on. This
form seldom takes the extreme neo-Luddite manifestation of the American
Unabomber, Kirkpatrick Sale, or Scott Savage, who have all written
technophobic manifestos, but certainly utilizes nostalgic,
technoskeptical, conspiratorial, and/or neo-rural ideas. To cite just one
mainstream cultural example, the conservative Hollywood film You've Got
Mail provides a resolution to the challenges of corporate monopoly
through a saccharine romanticism enabled by e-mail in which the locus of
value is to be found in the individual and the quaint corner-shop which
caters to a small community. 

21. Nevertheless, Survivor does evince some small degree of
postmodernism's reflexivity, a reflexivity which also helps to account
for its popularity. The game embodies a sense of doubt about the valency
and meaning of progress and modernity, particularly in their relation to
the real, a suspicion that the archaic is ineluctable and that ancient
cultures are worth sustaining, if only because they have proved to be
sustainable and to respect their environments. Thus the postmodern
archaic is an embodiment and measure of alienation from contemporary
cultures, an instantiation of doubt about the virtualization and
digitalization of the real. Moreover, in the Survivor show, contestants
are essentially posed a moral dilemma: whether to embrace capitalist
survival whole-heartedly, and inevitably to deceive and betray, or to
take an ethical standpoint via another value system, and thereby
inevitably lose the game. This is complicated by the fact that embracing
capitalism requires extreme cunning; some facade of moral righteousness
is required in order not to rile the morals of the other contestants or
jury who might vote you off. It is this moral dilemma, the complexity and
ambivalence of morality in a community which is motivated by selfish
greed, which is important in the popularity of soap-operas and helps
explain the success of Survivor. 

22. The show does not end there, for there is a final episode in the
Australian season entitled "Back from the Outback," which details how
Survivor affected the lives of the contestants. Here realism is taken one
step further, for the virtual archaic is shown not only to have
profoundly affected people's lives, but also to have leaked into the
contemporary real. Hence, even if the show is not "real," it has "real,"
mundane, everyday, effects and ramifications; contestants are never the
same once they have been on the show. For some contestants this is a
boon, for they are depicted as able to capitalize on their media exposure
and become celebrities in their own right: from siege by
autograph-seekers, to popular ministry, to busy Hollywood schedules, to
propositions to pose nude in Playboy. For others, this is a nightmare as
media exposé renders their private embarrassments public. For most of the
contestants, some combination of dream and horror is their aftershock
from the show. Further, the show's official website is interactive and
contains a number of articles critical of the series. Hence the series
and its peripheral media do reflect upon its status as a show and its
ramifications upon the contemporary mundane. However, those reflections
are, like the show as a whole, genuflections to the real, and as such
efface the mechanisms of their artifice. The audience is given no clue as
to the intertextuality of this hyper-realism, for instance, and hence the
series eschews the self-reflexivity so prominent in the postmodernism of
Tarantino and Lynch, for instance. Even the self-reflexive aspects of the
show are part of the feedback mechanism of the archaic; the lessons
learnt in the archaic are brought back to the present in order to
establish continuity with the past and hence ratify that present. 

23. Thus it appears that without a vigilant self-reflexivity, almost any
cultural production in any genre can reassert dangerously reactionary
tropes and mores. I am not suggesting that Survivor is the model for all
reality TV, let alone for postmodern digital virtuality, but Survivor
shows how virtuality can raise issues of "reality," authenticity,
voyeurism, censorship, sensationalism, ethics, postmodernity, and
postmodernism, without responding to these issues in a particularly
probing way. 

24. A rather more self-reflexive Hollywood production that is based upon,
and satirizes, reality TV is Series 7: The Contenders. Directed by Daniel
Minahan, this movie involves contenders having to slaughter each other, a
comment on the demands of voyeurism, the quest for an authentic reality,
and the supposed appeal of "snuff" movies. The film may also be
satirizing special effects films and the notion that the screen may be a
cyborg training site. The killing theme suggests that murder is the
logical result of the lethal combination of the television networks'
desire to make a huge profit (after all, having contestants is surely
cheaper than paying a cast in the long term) and viewers' voyeuristic
desire for realistic sensationalism. The dangerous combination of
sensationalism and profit leads to the egotistical exhibitionism that
reality TV encourages, and reinforces the dictum that all publicity is
good publicity. 

25. However, there seems to be a deeper psychological underpinning to
what is happening in Series 7: The Contenders. The heroine, Dawn, is a
pregnant pragmatist who will stop at nothing to stay with and protect her
baby--a protagonist therefore representing the hapless innocence of the
physical archaic in the face of the inhumane progenitors of the game. In
other words, the film presents a Survivor-type alternative to
thrill-seeking blood-thirsty postmodern consumerism in the organic body,
female and individualized. The narrative stages the return of our heavily
pregnant heroine to her past where she encounters her first, and only,
true love, Jeff. The two of them had been the only two outsiders in their
middle American school and had collaborated on a school art video project
which we are duly shown: to the doom-laden chords of 1980's noir band Joy
Division's "Love will Tear Us Apart Again," the young pair cavort in full
gothic attire until, in true liebestod style, Jeff ends up dead on the
tarmac. Our heroine, pregnant with the future, finds that she is still in
love with the authenticity of her past with all of its
castration-complex, love-death alienation. So the film suggests that the
alternative to the brutality of postmodern hypermedia voyeurism is to be
found in Hollywood's oldest theme: the triumph of the lonely cowboy, the
revenge of the nerd, the justification of the modernist cult of
alienation. This version of the postmodern archaic reflexively accepts
and ratifies the heart of darkness within the West, and in so doing
sublimates that darkness into a noble savagery underlying the
palimpsestic layers of culture, nostalgically praising that past while
simultaneously killing it. As in The Truman Show, the only thing that can
save is the authenticity of human reciprocity, a heterosexual love boat
that must inevitably drown in the sunset. Thus, while Series 7: The
Contenders, like The Truman Show and a number of other examples of
"cinema vérité" which expose the truth via virtuality, ostensibly exposes
the dynamics of media hype, but its moral grandstanding and
revivification of tropes of archaism tend to replicate the melodramatic
individualism of the very hype it critiques. Viewers of such exposés can
exult along with the director in their intellectual superiority to the
mindless consumers of docu-soap operas. 

26. Another film to treat such themes is The King Is Alive, which takes
the familiar concept of archaic survival, and runs with it in a
characteristic yet challenging way. First, the film, directed by Kristian
Levring, is part of the "Dogme 95" concept developed by Levring along
with Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen: a
concept that eschews all post-production and anything that is not found
on location. This means that the film, shot chronologically on three
handheld digital cameras, is characteristic of the survival genre. The
plot consists of the stranding of a bus-load of Western tourists in the
dune sea of Namibia; indeed a desert island, but without the relief of a
blue sea counterpoint to its sand waves. These castaways, as in the
Robinson Crusoe tradition, are not alone; the single native inhabitant of
a deserted village where they find shelter acts as a choric voice to
their attempts to evade the boredom and insanity that accompany their
unhingement from modernity and its distractions. These attempts assume an
antic disposition via the staging of King Lear. Lear seems to have been
chosen because it is a play that deals with the loss of a kingdom, but
also because it turns around a tragic moment in which the King asks of
language that it embody accurately the realm of feeling and imagination
when he insists that his inheritance will devolve to the daughter best
able to "say" her love: 


Tell me, my daughters 
Since now we will divest us both of rule, 
Interest of territory, cares of state, 
Which of you shall we say doth love us most, 
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge. Gonerill, 
Our eldest born, speak first. (Shakespeare, 1.1.48-54) 


Cordelia refuses this demand that the language of "rule . . . territory .
. . state" embody love, and in so doing rejects the demand for
verisimilitude and institutes the tragic action of the play. Her
rejection is motivated not only by a child's rebelliousness, but also by
the refusal to use any language, let alone the glossy language of the
court, for she feels her experience and love have altogether more
gravitas: "I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue"
(1.1.77-78). It would seem that this episode from King Lear has been
chosen to cast a reflexive comment upon the plot of the film itself.
Plots of this type hold out the promise of verisimilitude, of testing
culture against archaic nature, through the castaway theme. Culture, the
play within the play, holds out the promise of a defense against, or
triumph over, nature through realistic accuracy and resolution, but is
unable to deliver on this promise because it is never able to embody the
real in speech. The demand that language, culture, embody the actual
inevitably leads to tragic results. 

27. In the play, as in the film, these tragic results are a ramification
of the linking of sexuality and identity through language. Confronted
with the shallowness of languages, and hence exposed to self-revelation
and consequent sexual insecurity, a number of the characters attempt to
avoid self-revelation through sexual conquest. In the first case, a
Western woman attempts to "make her husband jealous" by seducing the
black driver of the bus. Her assumptions here are sexist in the sense
that she imagines that all men are instantaneously sexually available,
and racist in that black men are imagined as particularly sexual and
sensuous. She even has the effrontery to tell the driver that her
purposes are entirely selfish and then ask whether she is a "bitch."
However, her attempt to elevate her own esteem by subjecting the male
backfires when he forces her to her knees in a submissive posture that
inverts her original intent, reducing her to anger and further verbal
abuse. 

28. In the second case, the woman's husband precipitately beats the black
bus driver for sleeping with her, not realizing that the act was
unconsummated. He thus exposes his insecurity as well as an outlook no
less racist and sexist than his wife's--leading her to reject him as a
"pig." These episodes are brought to culmination when the aloof father of
the rejected husband sleeps with a flirtatious younger American woman and
is deluded by her enthusiastic sexual response into a kind of erotic
egotism. In other words, a certain kind of sexualized self-esteem
requires realistic embodied confirmations. When she tells him that she
faked her response and that she finds him disgusting, his new found
inflated ego implodes and he murders her and commits suicide. It is as
the other travelers mourn these deaths that their rescuers arrive, an
unnamed party of Namibians. The suggestion is, I think, that rescue from
the demands for realism, from the external confirmations and embodiments
required by eroticized egotism, has as a prerequisite the death of that
ego and the silencing of that culture. 

29. While it may be thought that the film takes an arrogantly superior
stance to all of these selfish shenanigans, it contrasts with Series 7 in
refusing to grant the intellectual a superior status or elite position.
This intellectual, the French woman Romane Bohringer, refuses to play
Cordelia and join in the action of the play, but despite her critical
detachment and skepticism, she is never installed in the position of
reliable commentator. The role of commentator falls, rather, to Peter
Kubheka, the native inhabitant of the ghost town, who says that the
foreigners "speak without speaking to each other" and do so in order to
avoid the voice of the desert. In this his commentary is clearly
accurate, and is the voice left after the hapless visitors have departed.
This is one digital virtuality that offers no easy cultural certitudes
for viewers. 

30. The postmodern archaic and hyperrealism are so prevalent in
contemporary cultural production, as evident in the especially glaring
example of Survivor and in these two rather more reflexive examples,
partly because of cultural and corporeal anxiety. Modernity and
postmodernity instantiate such accelerated change that anxiety and
vertigo are inevitable by-products. This anxiety manifests in viewers
who, because they are spending so much of their lives in front of the
television or computer screen, demand increasing verisimilitude from
their reality generators. It also manifests within the media industry,
which is keen to establish its credentials as well as to make money and
hence foists, as it were, verisimilitude upon viewers. The result of this
is that, on the one hand, there is so much actuality on television that
it has tainted the less realistic footage, so that people unconsciously
absorb much of what they are watching as true; while on the other hand,
the fictional material has similarly pervaded the real so that the real
always seems to have an element of the bizarre and predictable about it.
Indeed this interpenetration of culturally coded perception and reality
may be an index of the predominance of visual literacy in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 

31. The postmodern audience has become predictable in its demand for
unpredictability, yet also requires recognition and comfort as an
antidote to anxiety. This demand for the illusion of spontaneity and for
comfort is often captured by the collaging of different subtexts, many of
them not culturally or historically innocent, in the creation of a
"simulacrum" in which a particular consciousness, national in the case of
Survivor, is technologically embodied and hence confirmed. The illusion
of spontaneity normalizes the panopticon, normalizes surveillance, and
the postmodern archaic normalizes culture and patterns of consumption.
Even where digitalization enters the realm of the fantastic, it is seldom
to confirm the existence of realms of the imagination, but rather to
reify the products of the imagination, and, ultimately, to sell them. Of
course, what is elided by this illusion is the suturing that sews these
sub-texts together and the ideological underpinnings of these sub-texts,
the dynamic of the links so to speak. So in a sense, traditional film and
literary study and criticism, which are all about exposing the
ideological underpinnings of suturing, are more appropriate than ever
before. Of course, traditional film/literary critical models now need to
be more flexible, multivalent, and open to a far greater variety of texts
than ever before. 

32. To conclude, the problem with responses to the dispersal of the
subject and the ubiquity of surveillance that tend to characterize
contemporary cultural production is that the old verities can sneak in
through the back door. As fragmentation and dispersal occur, so anxiety
and nostalgia flourish; the dream of depth and authenticity reasserts
itself. So virtuality creates its own critique via a postmodern realism,
and ironically that critique helps shore up virtuality (indeed, digital
communication seems particularly suited to render critique, debate, and
difference as display rather than as incommensurability). Within
virtuality there is an apocalyptic fear of floating too far from the
visceral, and hence ironically a whole strand of current cultural
production shies away from the new and shelters within the realist. I
think that interest in the archaic is vital at this sociohistorical
juncture, because without thinking of ourselves in different spaces in
the far-distant past and future we have very little perspective on
ourselves now. What we understand by the archaic should not be a
romanticized psychological projection, nor a creation of the very
corporations whose existence threatens the archaic. Moreover, the future
of realism seems assured in the sense that the further away from the
archaic and corporeal we move, the more we will need to return to it to
ratify our progress. The further from the archaic we journey, the more
regular and insistent our trips "back" to it have to become. These trips
have to be made because without them we have no sense of "progress"; the
body itself enforces them by reminding us of our physicality. As Marianna
Torgovnick notes, "our interest in the primitive meshes thoroughly, in
ways we have only begun to understand, with our passion for clearly
marked and definable beginnings and endings that will make what comes
between them coherent narrations. A significant motivation for
primitivism in modernism, and perhaps especially in postmodernism, is a
new version of the idyllic, utopian primitive" (245). The postmodern
archaic is likely to increase in future, and realism is unlikely to
disappear. The tribe has spoken. 


Department of English
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
geraldgaylard@languages.wits.ac.za 

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