BLIND DATE (Continued)
Blind Date is instructive because it is at once characteristic of TV generally and it focuses and thematises those aspects of social communication that have been transformed by electronic media. In psychoanalytic terms (derived from Lacan
) desire is constituted as a field in which a subject is reflected and projected back to him/herself via an object mediated through the symbolic representation of the dominant cultural code. The field of desire can thus be represented as a network of communications in which the subject/object couple is abolished. The "couple" is certainly valorised on Blind Date. It is the symbolic end, the "prize beyond the prize." But the place of the "couple," or the coupling, remains enigmatic and at the very least transient (even while the declared ideal is a permanent marriage), undercut by a heavy satire that rejoices in a kind of regulated play of communicative exchange. Each episode turns on two events. A screen divides three contestants of one gender from a single questioner of the other. In each case, it is the questioner's task, or quest, to arrive at enough material (in the form of answers) to allow a decision as to which one he or she would like to share a date with. After making the decision the quester meets first the losers (to cascades of relief or disappointment from all sides) and then the winner, as "the screen goes back." A week later viewers will see the edited highlights of the date the two have won as they take turns in reporting on its success or otherwise. Sometimes friendships blossom, very rarely marriages, and more often sporting adieus in acknowledgement of a basic lack of chemistry, lack of enough in common, or just general dislike.
The Satire of the Couple
In a mode of information, where the universe is communication, the dominant code can only "impress" at the cost of a fundamental uprooting. The dominant code no longer represents the normal as natural but impresses as one code amongst others. The presentation of dominant values must always carry with it its own satirisation. Blind Date overtly valorises heterosexual love and subordinates desire beneath the aim of getting people together into twos. It is a kind of mathematics. Twice a week carefully organised groups of four are reduced to two, half the group as waste or remainder, the other two to continue the game. The game itself represents an attempt (or repeated attempts) to reduce the apparently arbitrary and irresponsible nature of love relations to some kind of regulated, ritualised, or even necessary determination ("the chemistry"). The rarity of a successful coupling all the more ensures its necessity--a massive reduction of chances, false cues, mistaken identities, and misleading first impressions ("when the screen went back ... "). However the reduction only brings out in relief the arbitrary and wasted remainder that is discourse or communication itself. The irresponsibility that underlies the premise (at base the radical enjoyment of a communicative exchange beyond purpose or function) is deeper and more fundamental than the regulations which cannot thus contain it. This fundamental irresponsibility satirises the seriousness of the heterosexual encounter--always aiming for the reduction to two, two as one, the core of the modern nuclear family unit.
We should mention here also the role of the audience. As with all TV the production of meaning and pleasure involves active engagement by an audience. However, as I have suggested, the audience is always a fiction, an abstract ideal, or at least a heterogeneous and fragmented entity that will not be accounted for. So the "speaker" of the TV message also tends towards undetermined heterogeneity. Who is the "author" of Blind Date? Strictly speaking the question does not make sense. What subjective positions are made possible for identification? This is a better question but the answer will remain undetermined for viewers of TV actively engage in a constant process of shifting identifications and these include ironic, or even angry distancing--dis-identifications. Blind Date invites constant engagement/disengagement so that viewers can in short time spans identify with the questioner, then the contestant, the "audience" proper, the compere, or they can indulge in any phantastic identifications that they might produce themselves. At the same time they may just as well view the whole event from a detached perspective of disgust, irritation, or irony. What the relationship brings out more than anything else, however, is the heterogeneous nature of relationships per se. Because the show presents sexuality as a fundamentally communicative experience, identifications easily occur on that level (communication) so that the gender of the questioner (and this is strictly rotated) is subordinated in terms of its significance to the exchange itself (a kind of barter). Anyone can identify with questioner and/or contestant in an uprooting of essential gendered characteristics. I can suspend my gendered heterosexual identity and choose between three men and so on and so forth.
Thematising the Network
It would seem, then, that the overt message, valorising heterosexual relationships in the aim of the rare permanent coupling, is a mere foil or decoy for a more powerful message valorising the nature of television itself. The formal questionnaire scene repeats and thematises the communication event typified by TV in particular and electronic media in general. The very "blindness" of the event (I could be on the telephone to someone I don’t know--a wrong number?) is what Baudrillard identifies as obscenity itself: "That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information" (131). The fragmented and elliptic bits of information exchanged for questions, a kind of postmodern love-call, are units of a kind of barter, specifically a bidding by discourse. In this sense these threes network into the ancient folk tradition--the three princes, the three sisters (Cinderella and the ugly ones), the three bears, the three caskets (gold, silver, and lead), King Lear and his three daughters bidding with discourse for parts of the kingdom. On Blind Date everyone is like a viewer, subject to discourse, summoned to communicate. The question of choice (can anyone really choose?), which channel, which identification etc., is the question of reduction, regulation and distinction. The illusion of distance, presented by the "screen," a veil between a mythical subject and object, disappears once the choice has been made. However, nothing is revealed in this revelation but more discourse, a visual pleasure that one is stuck with, that one has to take one’s chances with. And it is this risky business that TV offers for our pleasure, which indulges our irresponsibility. The childlike playfulness and the illusion of choice, is given to us with the necessary correlative of guidance. TV reduces our pleasures to those of the child and offers us guidance so that we behave as an audience ought to. Blind Date does not fail to satirise this situation. The plummy talk-over, which reduces/regulates the contestant’s answers, renders what is already conspicuously arbitrary even more arbitrary. The regulator is revealed as deregulator so that, once again, the overt message, valorising the need to reduce the arbitrary and make a choice in the irrational game of love, is in fact a decoy thinly veiling a more powerful message. That is, the arbitrary is in fact the very condition of love itself. The regulated, ritualised meeting of potential couples is satirised and ridiculed in a situation that repeats, thematises, and valorises the arbitrary, uprooted nature of television communication.
Is this reading subversive of the dominant code? Or rather, is what we isolated as the dominant code simply a massive decoy for what is actually the dominant code--that which powerfully regulates social and cultural production by the systematic insertion of arbitrary values and decisions at the basis of social relations. The problematic question about TV for cultural studies is one that turns on this undecidable tension.
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