The Rigged Society
Hausknecht, Murray
The value of a social. ist orientation to contemporary events is demonstrated by the most unlikely people. In the course of his mea culpa in Washington the head of the Columbia...
...The quiz show was a gimmick that relied on the crude excitement generated by the "suspense" of competition...
...that, alas, the harshest things we have said in our attacks upon mass culture now prove to be more true than even we had realized...
...For the mass audience the quiz show scandal confirms the necessity for cynicism...
...and that could only be done by rigging the game...
...Indeed, the appearance of this norm is inevitable, since rigging is an important means of controlling the risks inherent in a "free market...
...Individuals place themselves in the hands of the riggers, because their own sensitivity to differences between value systems and the consequences of a transposition has been eroded simply through living in a mass society...
...ist orientation to contemporary events is demonstrated by the most unlikely people...
...If a mass audience is merely an aggregate of isolated individuals, then the only way of attracting it is by a gimmick...
...THE QUIZ saow scandal was most terrifying to those disenchanted with mass culture, despite the fact that it confirmed their vision of our society...
...It consists of transposing persons from contexts appropriate to their styles of life into contexts that are sharply inappropriate...
...Similarly, television creates and shapes its own audience...
...THE RIGGING process was much more elaborate than merely arranging who was to win...
...Persons like Van Doren perceived in his appropriate context represent alternative styles of life, levels of taste, esthetic criteria, etc...
...Indeed, the quiz shows had to be rigged, since any kind of audience generates its own imperatives...
...WHILE THE EXPOSURE of the riggers and the rigged was inevitable, it has an important unintended consequence...
...Effective control over the exploitation and manipulation of persons would require the existence of some organized community, in the broadest sense of that term...
...Yet this anxiety is a necessity for successful mass distribution, since the fundamental attraction of the rigged product is that it will help prop up the wavering ego structure...
...But the greater the isolation the more difficult it is to maintain a sense of one's identity, and therefore the mass audience is an anxious audience...
...And among the most important of these is the "rigging principle" which has reached its best known form in the automobile industry...
...Along with planning a limited life for the product there is an attempt to create a limited demand...
...The terror is rooted in the recognition that the vision is the reality...
...The product is specifically designed to last—and to satisfy the needs of the consumer—for a limited time...
...But a mass market or audience is by definition merely an aggregate of isolated individuals unrelated in any meaningful way...
...Furthermore, our whole economy rests upon mass production, and mass production requires mass distribution, and television plays a key role in mass distribution...
...The model for the gimmicks of a mass society is pornography, sex abstracted from a human context...
...The best current illustration involves Charles Van Doren, a member of a noted literary family and a college instructor who becomes a participant in an idiotic show fundamentally subversive of the meaning of intellectual work...
...an audience that is not a class audience or any other kind of coherent public but a mass audience...
...Stimulation by incongruity is a means of molding and maintaining this type of audience...
...The more subtle part of the process was the manipulation of persons, and this was essential both to the success of the shows and to the maintenance of television as an effective part of the system of mass distribution...
...In commenting on this technique once before I pointed out that one of its consequences is a blurring of the symbolic significance of persons (DISSENT, Winter, 1957...
...Such an audience cannot make the formal morality of the society a morality which effectively controls behavior...
...Thus, while the rise of the novel is related to the rise of the middle class, by embodying the values and orientations of that class the novel created and shaped its public...
...A blurring of these distinctions obscures the choices and makes it impossible for publics to rise out of the mass audience...
...The technique which has been evolved may be called, to paraphrase Kenneth Burke, stimulation by incongruity...
...There are many reasons why individuals will allow themselves to be manipulated and used as instruments for the mass distribution of goods, but one of these reasons is related to the long range consequences of stimulation by incongruity...
...Since television is primarily a business the governing principles which determine how and what shall be produced are the same as those in other areas of the economic structure...
...In short, selling to a mass market depends upon the rigging of both the product and the market...
...In the course of his mea culpa in Washington the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System set forth the framework for understanding the quiz show scandal: "The fact of the matter is that the advertiser who picks up the check is entitled to his commercial...
...The reception of anything addressed to an audience depends upon whether the audience is prepared to receive both the content and the form...
...in short, value systems about which publics may be formed...
...Planned obsolescence is most successful when the two manipulative processes mesh: the car breaks down just as the desire has been restimulated...
...THE RIGGING of a product, be it car or quiz show, is facilitated by the very nature of the market or audience to be reached...
...There it is known as planned obsolescence...
...It is impossible to break through one's isolation from others when one is suspicious and distrustful of them...
...Being designed primarily to evoke crude sensations, the gimmicks quickly lose their effectiveness and must be elaborated in order to restimulate the jaded...
...Therefore, the producer, like the pornographer, had constantly to search for ways of heightening the sensations of his primitive gimmick...
...This leaves the way open for the counter-norm, the rigging principle, to become, in practice, the dominant morality...
...But at the same time the content and the form help create and mold the audience...
...The other satisfactions which come from games, e.g., watching an exercise of skill, etc., were unobtainable...
...In other words, given the structure of American business and society there was not only no reason why the quiz shows should not be rigged, there were good "sound" reasons deeply rooted in the social structure why they should be...
...Thus, exposure and investigation of rigging can be regarded, paradoxically, as the necessary last act for the rigged products of television...
...One way of maintaining a mass audience is to breed the conditions which make it impossible for individuals to transcend their isolation...
...That is, the function of advertising is to cultivate a desire for a product, sustain it almost to the point where the market has been satisfied, and then restimulate it all over again for a new model of the same product...
Vol. 7 • January 1960 • No. 1
