Herland?

“Nobody will ever believe how they looked. Descriptions aren't any good when it comes to women, and I never was good at descriptions anyhow. But it's got to be done somehow; the rest of the world needs to know about that country”.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian novel of an all woman society, Herland starts with the male narrator confessing to this inability to describe his subject.

Mark Lawson had no difficulty in finding words with which to mock contestants, laughing at their intelligence and likening them to rats (but not of the lab variety which of course we like).

Perhaps he'd prefer less Herland and more Caged Heat.

BB functions very well as a cipher through which observers perceive what they want to perceive. For some newspapers it is the dead hand of commercialism and for others simply indications of general decadence. What they tend not to see is much of the thing itself.

‘None of them had ever seen it. It was dangerous, deadly, they said, for any man to go there. But there were tales of long ago, when some brave investigator had seen it -- a Big Country, Big Houses, Plenty People -- All Women’ (Gilman).

Glass and Plastic

'Focuault is Dead' has an interesting take on the OFCOM ruling. OFCOM ought to be discussed in relation to Kant, Baudrillard much more often. Check it out here.

A World of Wrestling?

It can't be coincidence that a week before the summer Big Brother OFCOM puts the show in the headlines with its public criticism of it. It is also widely reported that in the Australian BB house a contestant will not be informed about the death of her father. The Daily Mail says that there will be public grovelling at the start of the new series and the The Daily Star claims that certified sex addict will enter the house. Who issues such as certificate?

Unrestrained sex. Unknowable death. This story has already been written. Transgression and punishment have already been trailed.

But this time it will be more explicit than before that we are to jeer and boo not only the contestants but the programme itself, its makers and its broadcasters. You don’t even have to watch to join in.

Big Brother has exceeded itself and the show has become the show.

Here’s Barthes:

‘The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve’.

Time, then, for twelve weeks of society-wide wrestling. I hope there is free bread. The circus is back in town.

BigBrother's Big Theory

Beginning

This blog exists for the core audience for Big Brother UK: cultural theorists and their graduate students, sociologists, philosophers and the rest. It is for online real-time needlessly intellectual dissection of the programme: what it all 'really means' and 'what it says about the culture'?

The blog will incubate 'Big Brother Theory' in all its forms, to all levels of excess. It invites debates and disputes, theorisations and deconstructions of all kinds. It wants economistic critiques, genealogical studies of celebrity production, psychoanalytic explorations of the desires invited and repelled by CelebReality Media. You can apply neuroscience if you want to.

But we also want to know who you want to win.

Comments are invited. Anyone wishing to initiate a post on which others may comment is invited to e-mail their text to bigbrothersbigtheory@yahoo.co.uk. It will be posted.