Television as an Art: On Humiliation-TV

The talk show is our paradigm example of humiliation television: people causing embarrassment in others as well as themselves in front of the camera. Often, fits of rage ensue, and the enraged will find themselves doing things they would not dream of doing in full daylight, so to speak. The humiliation that I will be addressing does not only concern the embarrassing nature of the events that are being broadcast. Every type of event or experience deserves representation, I believe, so why not the embarrassing ones as well? Yet experiences ought not to be represented in whatever way. Speaking generally, any subject somehow constricts the way it should be represented. A documentary about lions requires the types of angles and movements of the camera and different ways to edit the shots differ from a fiction film about two parents divorcing. Humiliation-TV is a subset of programs within the genre of emotion-television, the shows that convey real people’s emotional lives. Not all TVprograms belonging to this genre are as such cases of humiliation-TV, nor are all programs about humiliating experiences. The way in which the relevant emotional lives are represented is decisive. The locution “humiliation television” describes a moral aspect of televized representing—not just of its subject matter. To address it, I will start with an example that is connected with the phenomenon, although not quite an instance of it. The example is meant to introduce the moral dilemma of registration.
‘Television as an Art. On Humiliation-TV.’ Ruth Lorand (ed.) Television: Aesthetic Reflections. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004, 161-80.
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