“Nothing Is Left Alone for Too Long”

Abstract

This article examines reality television as a cultural form of what Gilles Deleuze calls “control societies.” For Deleuze, the shift from disciplinary societies (enclosures, bounded spaces, institutions) to control societies (circuits, modulated spaces, networked relations) is marked by a change in the processes of subjectification. The “postindividual” or the “dividual” is characterized by interchangeability, flexibility, and mobility (in accordance with post-Fordist forms of labor). On reality TV (RTV), subjects nowbecome variables to be replaced, reversed, and transformed. More specifically, individuals' subjective limits are often tested corporeally (challenges on Fear Factor) and affectively (prank shows). We can think of RTV less as a genre than as a loose assemblage of techniques and experiments. I examine a wide range of programs, concentrating on prank shows.