“Above the below”: body trauma as spectacle in social/media space

Abstract

The exposure and, more particularly, self‐exposure of psychological and bodily trauma has become the central feature of our “postdocumentary” culture. TV talk shows, observational documentary, life‐style programming and reality television all facilitate the exhibition and consumption of personal pain and suffering (as well as joy and individual success). Generally speaking, this showcasing of personal trauma is a gendered one; with many of the established and newer formats dismissed as feminised media culture; with few, if any, intellectual pretensions. This is partly the case because the domain of emotional suffering, at least, has been conventionally designated a “feminine” one, with women especially, licensed to speak about bodily or psychological insecurity, vulnerability or damage. When “masculine” damage or trauma is at stake, its presentation and articulation in media culture takes on quite different forms and meanings. Bearing in mind this context, this essay examines an example of the new hybrid of reality TV and performance piece: the David Blaine event entitled “Above the Below”. It does so in order to explore the meanings, symbolics and ethics of the current specularisation of bodily trauma in social and media space; revealing the multiple ways in which an ethics of the self and of becoming is articulated in a popular form. Ultimately, the aim is to make more complex our understanding of “the apparently oxymoronic ‘popularity’ of trauma” as cultural text (Radstone 2001, p. 189). I am drawing on Douglas Kellner’s (2003, p. 2) definition of media spectacle: “phenomena of media culture that embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to initiate individuals into its way of life, and dramatise its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution”. This dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside gives rise to a fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene conflation of private and public. It brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self‐exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience. Artistic objectifications of pain often concentrate on this combination of isolation and exposure. (Scarry 1985, p. 53)