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Masterchef – or what you always wanted to know about desire
Everything you always wanted to know about the psyche but were afraid to ask Gregg, Monica or Michel Roux jr.
In other words, what explains the popularity of Masterchef (Professionals) is of course that it is primarily about the multiple layers of the psyche catered on our home screens, and featuring that intimate event of joy when something 
goes in before later coming out. Food.
Think of Masterchef as the structure of the psyche. It comes in three. What you have is the drooling, child-like, enjoyment – jouissance! – of Gregg, whose whole body vibrates when brought in proximity of sugary desserts. His face is the face of enjoyment, unhidden. He cannot, because that is his part, as the id, the primal orientation to joy/food/excess.
Take Monica then. The professional, cool, rarely smiling, more likely a slightly contempt-filled face of judgment: who is good enough for Michel. She judges according to the expectations of the one who is absent. She does not eat much – if she 
does, it is only to evaluate, not to enjoy. She is empty, as she has to know what the Absent wants and act as the mouth of that. “This is not good enough for Michel”, is the cool, cruel judgment that lacks passion. (Yet, is she somewhere inside paranoid; what if she gets the judgment wrong?) She is impossible to please because she talks for someone else. She incorporates the function of the ego as a mediator.
Of course, Michel Roux jr. is not always absent – he does make himself visible at times. Still cool, but completely beyond the scale in comparison to others featured in the show, we are always almost double-guessing. What does he want? What does he really want? What else is that recurring ever-so-slightly missing bit but that lack that constitutes the unattainable? Hence, paranoia: the professionals who anyway have to work to please are here trying to mediate their actions in a situation of conflicting desires, ie the structures of the psyche, and finally the ever-so-slightly always missing bit what distinguishes the Absent one.
The Absent one does speak, of course: “So what is it that you want to show us?” The question of confession and subjectification. “Well, I want to be like you, Michel”. Of course, such a line never appears, would be blasphemy. Instead, what we hear time after time is “to see how far I can go.” And: “just to show what I can do”.
They are not there to enjoy the food (Gregg eats for all), but to enjoy the appreciation of the Ideal – Michel Roux Jr. (Mediated via Monica). Enjoyment comes via the Other.
So, of course, now the question is: which one do you identify with? The completely reckless hedonist Greg, or the cool evaluating and despising gaze of Monica – or the shaking, scared little competitors trying to mediate between the conflicting desires in their head externalized. As the absent one is, and remains, unattainable. And let’s not even talk about the Roux Sr.
(disclaimer: I am not and have never been a member of the Club Psychoanalytique and I read Žižek as a guilty pleasure, and never have claimed to offer accurate analyses. In other words, read this as tongue in cheek).
Security and Self-regulation in Software Visual Culture
“Not long ago it would have been an absolutely absurd action to purchase a television or acquire a computer software to intentionally disable its capabilities, whereas today’s media technology is marketed for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver.” The basic argument in Raiford Guins’ Edited Clean Version is so striking in its simplicity but aptness that my copy of the book is now filled with exclamation marks and other scribblings in the margins that shout how I loved it. At times dense but elegantly written, I am so tempted to say that this is the direction where media studies should be going if it did not sound a bit too grand (suitable for a blurb at the back cover perhaps!).
I shall not do a full-fledged review of the book but just flag that its an important study for anyone who wants to understand processes of censorship, surveillance and control. Guins starts from a theoretical set that contains Foucault’s governmentality, Kittler’s materialism and Deleuze’s notion of control, but breathes concrete specificity to the latter making it really a wonderful addition to media studies literature on contemporary culture. At times perhaps a bit repetitive, yet it delivers a strong sense of how power works through control which works through technological assemblages that organize time, spatiality and desire. For Guins, media is security (even if embedding Foucault’s writings on security would have been in this context spot on) — entertainment media is so infiltrated by the logic of blocking, filtering, sanitizing, cleaning and patching (all chapters in the book) that I might even have to rethink my own ideas of seeing media technologies as Spinozian bodies defined by what they can do…Although, in a Deleuzian fashion, control works through enabling. In this case, it enables choice (even if reducing freedom into a selection from pre-defined, preprogrammed articulations). Control is the highway on which you are free to drive as far, and to many places, but it still guides you to destinations. Control works through destinations, addresses — and incidentally, its addresses that structure for example Internet-“space”.
Guins’ demonstrates how it still is the family that is a focal point of media but through new techniques and technologies. Software is at the centre of this regime – software such as the V-Chip that helps parents to plan and govern their children’s TV-consumption. Guins writes: “The embedding of the V-Chip within television manifests a new visual protocol; it makes visible the positive effects of television that it enables: choice, self-regulation, interaction, safe images, and security.” What is exciting about this work is how it deals with such hugely important political themes and logics of control, but is able to do it so immanently with the technological platform he is talking about. Highly recommended, and thumbs up.
>Genitals in the Field of Vision
>If you happened to see an unusual amount of genitals a couple of days ago, you might have stumbled across Youtube’s “Porn Day” — a prankster or a media activist coup that was meant to raise awareness of the new music video policies on Youtube. So if you were looking for Hannah Montana or Jonas Brothers, you might have found something totally different, to put it bluntly. Responsibility was claimed by a Japanese message board community, but we could extend the logic a bit further.
Machinology 