It is important to understand in reading the following piece that it comprises one dimension of a more multi-faceted analysis based on interviews with thirty women who watch talk shows on a regular basis. I examine their watching talk shows as a routine, generally mundane practice situated in a reciprocal relation to each woman's everyday life as well as the matrix of institutional practices and structures within which everyday life is itself situated. From the start, therefore, I recognize the ineluctable interweaving of the structure and ethos of everyday life, culture and political economy, evident in only a bounded way in the following essay. 

Given my substantive and theoretical interests, one of my key initial research questions in this study was that of: who if anyone engaged with talk shows as legitimate public discourse. While not the focus of the following piece, a key finding of my study was that, indeed, some women do engage with certain talk shows this way. This is to say that some women find certain shows address issues they find important and relevant in a manner they find appropriate and efficacious. In this aspect of my analysis I found that while the criteria most women used for discerning legitimacy was fairly consistent, how they apply these criteria varies. At the most extreme, for example, several women engage with The Jerry Springer Show as legitimate discourse at least some of the time, while many engage with this show only as entertainment. In this part of my analysis I account for both the consistency of the criteria the women use in discerning legitimacy as well as the variability with which they deploy these criteria. 

In the following piece, I shift the terms of my analysis from a concern with the extent to which women engage with talk shows as legitimate public discourse to the finding that many of the women I interviewed watch these shows "for entertainment." Rather than dismiss or devalue this, I explore the intelligibility of the shows from this aspect. I find that this orientation provides an opening for understanding some important aspects of contemporary American culture that are distinct from concerns with "useful" and "productive" discourse.

Well, Jerry Springer is the favorite of mine cause he's got like, I don't know so much gossip and so much trash on his show. I guess [laughs] that's what I'm attracted to watch. I don't know why...Like, you know, I even notice that people say, "Oh, I don't watch talk shows. It's a bunch of garbage." I was over at my sister's house the other week and Jerry Springer was on. And somebody was sleeping with someone else. And my sister was [laughs] looking at the TV. And she had her head turned for a while! [laughs] And she says she doesn't watch it. You know that got her attention. So I think stuff like that gets people's attention to watch them. And then they keep you watching them whenever they get a chance. That type of thing. So it kind of lures you in. But it's all a bunch of trash. [laughs] (Jamie)

They are fun type shows...I think it was one where they have the...spikes...Like the one guy who actually implanted spikes in the top of his head...Did you hear?...That was a weird show...The earrings and the tongue...Yeah. It was all about that kind of stuff. And that was, like, really "Wow!"...It was crazy that night. It was really, he had a bunch of wild people on, you know. But it was fun. I liked it overall. I thought it was kind of a crazy show. Like I couldn't not stay up to watch it. (Janice)

Like, you know, a lot of times people are on with these really screwed up relationships and really bad family ties [said in a rhythmic cadence] and things like that. And it's sort of like...I really personally think that's probably a lot of their lure...(Susan)

I just think they're weird. I'm just like fascinated. I'm like, "How can they get on TV and just let everybody know they're a freak? Don't they know their parents are watching? And, I don't know. It's just a weird interest...it's weird...I don't know. I just like to watch it just to see how people get on TV and tell their business to the world like they don't care. (Olivia)

I just, like, leave whatever I need to do and jut watch it. It's like, "Oh, couple of minutes [laughs]." I end up staying for about two hours. (Claudia)

...I used to love them so much. Like, I mean, you wouldn't understand how we couldn't wait to get home. We would be like, "Oh my God! We have five minutes!" We'd...step on the gas. Run in the house. It was like so gross. (Joanie)

I mean to hear people talk about who they're sleeping with and what they're doing. Like, of course it's going to grab you. Because these people are talking about themselves. (Amanda) While their specific language varies, the women who watched talk shows as entertainment shared a sense of "attraction" to the shows, that is, a sense of being acted upon or pulled to the shows in a way they could not fully explain. This inability to account for their attraction to the shows is evidenced in the extent to which the women consistently spoke about how "I couldn't not stay up," having their attention "grabbed," being "lured" and "fascinated." This is the case even though the women always have actual control over their viewing. That is to say, they don't really have to watch; they can flip to another show or turn off the television altogether. Here, I look more carefully at the "luring" character of this attraction the women attempt to describe but seem to be unable to represent. 

Up until this point my analysis has primarily been grounded in a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of "language" and the "discursive" in its social and historical aspects. But here, in trying to think through the "lure" of the talk shows, an analysis which focuses on language seems inadequate, since it is precisely the women's difficulty in discursively accounting for their attraction that I am most interested in. It is not that I dismiss the importance of the discursive here, since how it is something that cannot be articulated in language is itself an important dimension of understanding discourse and how it operates. However, attempting to understand that which language seems to elude requires additional conceptual tools. Therefore, with help from Gordon (1997) in orienting my analysis, I engage with Butler's (1997) theorizing on psychoanalytic theory and its relation to systems of classification and the constitution of the subject in thinking through this phenomenon of "the lure" and the pleasure the women derive in watching talk shows like Jerry Springer. In the spirit of Gordon and Butler's theorizing, I am attempting to think through the phenomenon I have encountered in my interviews with women in a way that opens some possibilities for understanding this "lure" and its associated pleasure that goes beyond the cultural commonsense on the matter of dismissing the shows as "trash," "exploitative" or "cultural rot." Mine is an effort to provoke productive thinking in regard to the study of how systems of classification emerge and operate and their link with subjectivity.

Haunting is a constitutive element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it (Gordon 1997,7).

A distinctive and consistent characteristic of the women's accounts of their attraction to the Springer show (and other's consistently characterized by them as similar to it) was that as they spoke they frequently laughed, commented, "I don't know" or described laughter as a key dimension of their watching the shows. 

I think Jerry, I think Jerry is just a freak. [laugh]...Because he has "I want to be a stripper", "This is my fantasy, to be a stripper", "I'm a male prostitute." He had something like, um, like yesterday, he had a show on Satan churches, "I worship Satan." And then, another time he had a show, "My boyfriend used to be a woman." [laughs] (Olivia)

..And like I said, I don't know why, but I like watching fights. I don't understand why they do it. I still tend to like it although I know I wouldn't get on the show and make myself look like a fool....(Michelle)

I don't know. People either try to relate to them or they just think that they're so outrageous that they're funny. I don't know. I don't know why I watch them. I watch them out of boredom. There's nothing else on TV. This is funny. (Joy)

I think the topics are funny. Like, what as, what was the show that she did that it was funny? Was it...Oh, "I'm fifteen." Something like that. Something about, "I'm fifteen and why can't why didn't you allow me to have sex in my house?" Did you see that part? No? [laughs] I thought that was a funny show. They were talking about younger kids talking to their mother about why. "Why don't you let me have sex in my house. [laugh], I just think it's a funny topic. (Claudia)

It was apparent in their accounts that the attraction the women felt to the talk shows defied their attempts at explanation and that their laughter pointed to an experience that was beyond words. In each case, as they attempted to point to their attraction, the language the women employed and the mood in which they spoke indicated an experience in which they felt "something" acting on them, which, while they couldn't explain it, produced a sense of pleasure. I suggest that this inexplicable attraction, this "inarticulate experience" constitutes what Gordon refers to as a haunting.² Haunting, Gordon suggests,

describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence, if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itselfknown or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition (Gordon 1997, 8, emphases mine).

I approach the women's inability to articulate their experience of attraction, but to acknowledge its presence and its effects as symptomatic of a haunting. The attraction the women experience toward the shows that "lures them", "grabs their attention", "fascinates them" clearly constitutes an instance of their being "drawn affectively," sometimes even apparently, against their own "better" judgment in some cases. I employ Gordon's concept here because she is attempting to provide a critical vocabulary that is capable of representing "the depth, density, and intricacies of the dialectic of subjection and subjectivity..." (Gordon 1997, 8). The ghost here "is not a case of dead or missing persons sui generis." (Gordon 1998, 25). Rather, the haunting is apparent as a "social figure" (Gordon 1997, 25) through the moods in which the women speak about their attraction and the laughter which intersperses that which they can say. Importantly, for my analysis, Gordon frames this haunting in a sociological sense, emphasizing that "haunting is a shared structure of feeling, a shared possession, a specific type of sociality" (Gordon 1997, 201).

While Stallybrasse and White (1986) account for the presence of a dynamic of attraction (desire) and disgust in the encounter with the carnivalesque and frame it psycho- analytically in terms of displacement, Gordon and Butler's theorizing can be helpful in trying to understand more about how it is that these displacements occur and operate as such, including their implications for subjectivity. I look to Gordon's notion of haunting to orient my analysis, defining the "lure" the women point to as a type of haunting, given how this "lure" operates largely through affect, seemingly outside of discourse. The nature of this particular haunting will be made apparent as my discussion proceeds.

Understanding the "lure" as a haunting, I draw on Butler's discussion of melancholia and foreclosure in relation to subject formation and her concern with how the psychic is grounded in the social, as well as how the psychic pervades the social. The haunting, I suggest, operates through the mechanism of foreclosure to produce a type of melancholia. Butler's theorization of foreclosure and the melancholia this foreclosure founds are provocative in attempting to think through how this "lure" operates and in understanding the distinctive pleasures the women seem to derive from watching shows like Jerry Springer. 

While Butler concerns herself specifically with the constitution of the gendered subject and its relation to homosexual desire, I suggest that her theorizing opens some provocative possibilities for theorizing the subject as even more multifaceted and complex. Butler's discussion clearly begins from the premise that gender is a foundational dimension of the subject. I include gender in my analysis through a broadly textured figuration of subjectivity as complex personhood³ (Gordon 1997). As the accounts of the women I interview make apparent, while gender is a foundational dimension in the constitution of the subject, they demonstrate that they locate themselves as occupying complicated, multi-faceted, sometimes contradictory simultaneous subject positions. This includes their locating themselves not just in terms of gender and sexuality, but locating themselves as a certain kind of subject at a moment within a remembered history and an imagined life trajectory. This includes, but is not limited to, being racialized, gendered and classed subjects. This is shown, as well, in the women's narratives about their viewing practices and evidenced more fully in my analysis of the different types of pleasure different women experience in watching the talk shows. 

Butler's discussion of Freud's notion of melancholia helps to understand Stallybrasse and White's notion of this displacement of carnival. Stallybrasse and White argue that the actual practice of carnival was never fully abolished. Rather, they suggest, it was displaced through fragmentation, marginalization, sublimation and repression. I am suggesting that in addition to the material suppression and displacement of carnival, a related psychic process occurs.⁴

According to Freud, melancholia is a condition of unresolved grief for an "object" lost and is "central to the formation of identifications that form the ego."

There is...the incorporation of the attachment as identification, where identification becomes a magical, a psychic form of preserving the object. Insofar as identification is the psychic preserve of the object and such identifications come to form the ego, the lost object continues to haunt and inhabit the ego as one of its constitutive identifications. The lost object is, in that sense, made coextensive with the ego itself. Indeed, one might conclude that melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego and, hence, avert the loss as a complete loss. Here we see that letting the object go means, paradoxically, not full abandonment of the object but transferring the status of the object from external to internal (Butler 1997, 133-4, emphasis mine).

In my analysis, melancholic identification is understood as the process through which haunting is accomplished. Melancholia can be understood as the refusal or disavowal of a loss accomplished through internalizing the object "haunt[ing] and inhabit[ing] the ego as one of its constitutive identifications" (Butler 1997, 133). Butler's reading of Freud suggests that "'the character of the ego' appears to be the sedimentation of objects loved and lost, the archaeological remainder, as it were, of unresolved grief" (Butler 1997, 133). In this understanding, the ego, what the subject self-reflexively recognizes as "I" depends on melancholic identifications. Haunting, then, is fundamentally constitutive of the ego. 

Butler points to two types of loss that may be involved in melancholic identifications. Repression signifies that the desire for attachment might once have lived apart from its prohibition. That is to say, an attachment existed but is now disavowed. The attachment was possible and is no longer possible. In contrast, foreclosure signifies an attachment that is "rigorously banned, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss" (Butler 1997, 23, emphasis mine). 

A preemptive loss signifies a desire or attachment prohibited prior to its ever being lived or experienced. Butler characterizes this as a "never-never" formula. For example, in respect to homosexual desire as being preemptively prohibited in subject formation, she suggests that the formula operative is "'I have never loved'" someone of similar gender and 'I have never lost' of that love and loss" (Butler 1997, 23). Because this type of loss is preemptive, the subject cannot reflect on it, thus showing the limits of reflexivity, "that which exceeds (and conditions) its circuitry." This kind of foreclosure "structures the domain of what is possible" (Butler 1997, 23-24). Butler suggests:

If melancholia designates a sphere of attachment that is not explicitly produced as an object of discourse, then it erodes the operation of language that not only posits objects, but regulates and normalizes objects through that positing. If melancholia appears at first to be a form of containment, a way of internalizing attachment that is barred from the world, it also establishes the psychic conditions for regarding "the world" itself as contingently organized through certain kinds of foreclosures⁵(Butler 1997, 143, emphasis mine).

Foreclosure, then, is constitutively linked to the way in which we find "the world" intelligible. The foreclosing of certain attachments become "the condition of possibility for social existence," for certain types of sociality amongst certain types of subjects. Butler proposes this is a sociality "afflicted by melancholia, a sociality in which loss cannot be grieved because it cannot be recognized as loss, because what is lost never had any entitlement to existence" (Butler 1997, 24, emphasis mine). What is operative here is a distinctive type of negation. While negation implies the negation of something which has or had existence, this type of negation negates the possibility of a certain social existence. (Thus the "never - never" formulation Butler proposes as characterizing melancholic identification.)

I am suggesting that this foreclosing or preemptive loss is operative for the women who are attracted to watching the talk shows and experience pleasure in their practice of watching talk shows like the Springer show but find that their attraction exceeds explanation. This foreclosing may be understood as that through which the women's encounters with the shows is intelligible. The shows are intelligible as impossible. That the women sense an attraction or something acting on them which pulls them to watch the shows is evidence that their watching is, at least in some ways, not a purely rational choice. The social prohibition producing this melancholic identification operates through renunciation. Renunciation, in Butler's argument, is fundamental to the act of classifying or social ordering and to the emergence of the subject locating herself within that social order. 

Focusing on the foreclosure and unavowable loss of homosexual attachment, which makes it thereby renounced as a possibility, Butler states:

If this love is from the start out of the question then it cannot happen, and if it does, it certainly did not. If it does, it happens only under the official sign of its prohibition and disavowal. When certain kinds of losses are compelled by a set of culturally prevalent prohibitions, we might expect a culturally prevalent form of melancholia, one which signals the internalization of the ungrieved and ungreivable homosexual cathexis. And where there is no public recognition or discourse through which such a loss might be named and mourned, then melancholia takes on cultural dimensions of contemporary consequence. Of course, it comes as no surprise the more hyperbolic and defensive a masculine identification, the more fierce the ungrieved homosexual cathexis (Butler 1997, 139, emphasis mine).

What is critical to Butler's (and my own) analysis is her attempting a social psychoanalysis example, using psychoanalytic concepts to understand foreclosure as a socially grounded process versus its being an apparently individual phenomenon. Here, preemptive prohibition or loss is understood as grounded in dominant regulatory discourses. The subject emerges as a certain kind of subject constituted in these discourses through melancholic attachments. Therefore the subject emerges through prohibitions which can be understood as its "constitutive outside." The psyche is therefore formed in relation to the social. In this theorization, the psyche is not regarded as universal and ahistorical but very much connected to the specificities of culture and history as are the particular prohibitions through which the subject emerges must be understood not as transcendent, universal or ahistorical but in the specificity of the historical moment in which they exist.

So, in the case of the women's encounters with the Springer show (and others the women encounter similarly), what is the foreclosed loss involved? And what, in this case, are the "culturally prevalent prohibitions" which underlie the foreclosure? I suggest that the social prohibition and thereby disavowed loss is the practice of collective rituals of excess, exuberance, sensuality and uselessness and the carnivalesque sensibility they embody. The carnivalesque being a practice of ritual inversion which 

gives symbolic and ritual place, and active display, to the inmixing of the subject, to the heterodox, messy, excessive and unfinished informalities of the body and social life...[which] attacks the authority of the ego...and flaunts the material body as a pleasurable grotesquerie protuberant, fat, disproportionate, open at its orifices (Stallybrasse and White 1986, 183).

While festival and carnival was cyclically and ritualistically integrated into pre-modern, pre-capitalist societies, as a "carnivalesque break from the productive ordering of everyday life..." (Pfohl 1992, 213) in which the community participated, in contemporary society, simulations disembedded from collective ritual abound, but they have been 

"...marginalized in terms of both social class and geographic location..." reducing the value of festival, confining its "childish" continuance to lower class and "deviant" sectors of the population. In this, white modern and straightmale forms of CAPITAL either triumphed over festival or labored to neutralize its subversive charm. This is to purify the carnival of unprofitable transgression and reduce it to "good clean fun," "organized sports," "games of chance," and the "well-earned vacation." This is to reduce festival excess to access and make it a marketable item (Pfohl 1992, 215).

What is central here is not the particular form per se of carnivalesque ritual but its disembedding from the larger matrix of social practice, its marginalization and devaluation and its production (as commodity), for the most part, through the mainstream it has historically worked to transgress. Within the discourse of modernity privileging rationality, productivity and grounded in the notion of a sovereign subject, the carnival as practice and sensibility has become devalued and moved from the public to the private domain where it becomes a matter of personal taste in entertainment. I am suggesting that the lure of the talk shows is the haunting of the disavowed and ungrievable loss of this dimension of existence as integral.

I return now to the accounts of the women I spoke with who consistently had difficulty finding language to account for their attraction to the talk shows I have characterized as carnivalesque. I have proposed that the women's responses (including both their inability to articulate their experience and their laughter) can be understood as symptomatic of a psychic process of melancholia. While this melancholia manifests in the individual, I am suggesting that it is symptomatic of a more general cultural melancholia with respect to carnivalesque ritual and sensibility which I am recognizing as a particular integral dimension of human existence. The women who watch the shows encounter a flagrant, excessive and unapologetic representation of what is psychically prohibited as an "impossibility." While all encounter the shows through a melancholic identification, how they locate themselves in relation to this "impossibility" varies. This is evident in how the women articulate the pleasure they derive from watching the shows and, importantly, the mood in which they do so.

Like, I think Jerry Springer is like the really, the really weird one. Like the really crazy one. Which is why, I mean, I guess, it's kind of fun to watch. But, like, [laughs] you know, I'm in college, like I don't care...You know what I mean? Like, I just watch them for the fun of it really...She'll [Ricki Lake] intentionally, I think, put people on that'll just like, she have a mistress or something, and then like somebody's wife. You know, for the purpose really of, you know, having a fight and stuff like that. But, I don't know. I guess it's pretty twisted to watch them. But, I like, I don't know... (Susan)

I make jokes through the entire thing because I am a very sarcastic person. And I feel like I have to make fun of everyone on the show...I guess it's like after I go to my classes, like, and I'm kind of stressed. And I go to the library, and I get stressed. And I'll come home, and I'll just laugh at the TV for like an hour before I do my workÖLike it kind of just relieves everything. (Karen)

It's like the cases that they have are so far out there. They're so extreme that it's amusing to watch...Like you feel bad sometimes that like these people are sitting there like going through this, like in front of other people. But it'sÖit's entertaining. (Colleen)

These people are stupid and what they're doing is ridiculous. (Natasha)

These women enjoy their practice of watching talk shows. The pleasure they derive is within a dynamic of attraction/repulsion, in which they not only distance themselves from the shows, but are disparaging of them. Theirs is a pleasure tinged with sadism and voyeurism, grounded in the "discriminating gaze" (Stallybrasse and White 1986, 135) of the bourgeois social imaginary. I refer to their pleasure as disparaging pleasure in that the experience they describe seems to be one in which their pleasure is mediated by negation, a negation which ranges from mild ridicule to bordering on contempt. In some cases, as with Susan, for example, the women are even self-critical of their own pleasure as well as of the show itself. In each case, however, the women assume a status superior to that which they are encountering in the shows. If we understand that the shows as constituting a representation of that which is the object of a melancholic identification (and thereby evocative of a culturally preempted prohibition), it then makes sense that given how they locate themselves as subjects, that these women must negate the shows and even their own pleasure.

Janice, Michelle and Tina speak about the pleasure they derive in a distinctively different mood:

I like the "You slept with my man and now I'm going to get you back." That's a topic because I have, as a young adult you deal with stuff like that. I like stuff like t hat because I know most of the time it's probably something that I've been through, but I wouldn't take it to the next level like they did. So that's why I like those kind of shows. But at the same time, I still don't think people behave as they should at all, but I still like the shows like that...(Michelle)

...If I turn on to watch Martin or something, that's my entertainment. But with Jerry I'm sort of, it's entertainment, but also I'm doing something...I can turn it on maybe as a form of entertainment, but then, later on I find myself really getting into it. It touches base with something going on in the family or something in my life. So, I can say it's both. (Janice)

It's just stuff that, you know, I've seen. And I heard a lot of things in my life. And when something new, that I've never seen or heard, it just catches my attention. (Tina)

These women speak about the pleasure they take in watching the shows with a sense of affinity, even affectionate. While they speak about the shows as "wild," "crazy," encountering what they see as "strange" and different from themselves, their curiosity is less distanced and more participatory than the other women. In their narratives, they seem not to assume a superior position. Even when they used some of the same descriptors as the other women, including, for example, "ridiculous" or "stupid," their mood was not disparaging or dismissive, but rather affectionate.⁶ These women are not disparaging about the pleasure they encounter, nor are they self-critical about their enjoyment of the shows. 

While clearly each of the women speak from a materially situated social location (in terms of class, race, gender and age, for example), the kind of pleasure they articulate seems connected to their sense of themselves as subjects which, while mediated by their material circumstances (i.e. actual social location), is not determined by it. Rather, their account of their pleasure involves how they locate themselves as subjects within the dominant discourses of rationality and productivity and within a "life trajectory" that includes both a remembered past and an imagined future. This remembered past and imagined future are grounded in the women's actual material circumstances but, again, not fully determined by them. Those women who seem to locate themselves squarely within these dominant discourses as rational, productive subjects or, who aspire to this position, (Susan, Karen, Colleen and Natasha) are attracted to the shows and experience pleasure which I characterize as "disparaging pleasure." It is notable that Susan, Karen and Colleen are all white, middle class college students. Natasha is black and grew up in the suburbs, her parents having moved the family from the inner city, attended two years of college and planned to return after getting her beautician's license. She viewed her work with hair as supplemental to her future career as a lawyer. The carnivalesque these women encounter "denies with a laugh the ludicrous pose of autonomy adopted by the subject within the hierarchical arrangements of the symbolic" of rationality and productivity, what Stallybrasse and White refer to as the "bourgeois subject" (Stallybrasse and White 1986, 184).

In contrast, those women who seem not so invested to identification as rational, productive subjects, appear to allow themselves to experience a pleasure I characterize as "affectionate pleasure." In their narratives, Tina and Jamie, for example, seem less hooked into these dominant discourses as the basis upon which they identify themselves as subjects. 

Unpacking cultural commonsense about "trash talk" shows like the Springer show present an opportunity to understand the operation of cultural classificatory systems and their relation to subject formation. Most commentary or analysis of these shows is uncritically grounded in dominant discourses of rationality and productivity. Some are grounded in a morality founded in these dominant discourses and therefore (based in the logic of my analysis) negate the shows out of hand (See, for example Abt 1997). Others (Shattuc 1997, Willis 1996, Carpignano et al. 1993) analyze these shows in the context of their embodying the possibility of a popular public discourse forum. While several other analyses of talk shows, like mine, suggest that the shows embody representations of the carnivalesque (see Shattuc 1996, Masciarotte 1991), neither engages the issue of how viewers encounter the shows in this way and the historical role of the carnivalesque as integrated into larger social practices. In this chapter, I have attempted to shift the terms of analysis. Situating these shows within a context of public discourse (with the standard being discourse amongst citizens about issues of common concern), focuses analysis on how the shows fulfill or violate the dominant standards for public discourse or open new possibilities for it. I foreground these shows as embodying a different sensibility and aesthetic altogether. I am suggesting that the shows embody a carnivalesque aesthetic which operates as and is encountered by viewers as a powerful symbolic inversion, a function distinct from providing a public discourse forum. Analyzing the shows on these terms opens the possibility for analyzing the workings of culture, the workings of dominant historical discourses, and their relation to subject formation. 

It is here that Gordon's notion of haunting as an analytic term becomes useful. I am suggesting that the shows these women watch as entertainment and from which they derive pleasure attract them through their evoking that which haunts us as a culture. What haunts us is an aesthetic missing in our culture in an integral way. Following Butler's argument, this haunting signals not a simple repression of this aesthetic as a fundamental dimension of existence, but its being foreclosed as a possibility. 

The aesthetic of the carnivalesque and the type of sociality it embodies, its uselessness, excess, expenditure and sensuality are denied or devalued within the terms of the dominant discourses. Discourses of purposefulness, economy, rationality and productivity and their accompanying aesthetic provide the terms through which we encounter the world and thereby make sense of day to day life. I am proposing the attraction the shows hold for those who watch them, evidenced in the millions of people who do so daily, is grounded in this phenomenon of haunting. The carnivalesque aesthetic draws us in by virtue of a melancholic identification. I am suggesting that the attraction these shows hold for the women I interviewed (and for myself) and the pleasure derived from them can be understood not just as a signal of a sensibility and practice lost and repressed but as a loss which cannot be grieved within dominant cultural conventions.

The varying ways the women find themselves experiencing the pleasure they derive in watching the shows reveals the ways in which they locate themselves as subjects within dominant cultural discourses and in their material circumstances. It reveals that how one locates oneself as a subject matters with respect to the kind of pleasure we allow ourselves and, conversely, that pleasure can be unpacked so as to understand subject formation. 

While I argue that these talk shows (like the Springer show) work to evoke the carnivalesque impulse which is generally denied or devalued, I am not suggesting that this contemporary form operates ritually as did, for example, fairs and carnivals in pre-modern, pre-capitalist western European societies when such rituals included the community in general. As a commodified form, produced, distributed and controlled by highly rationalist organizations for the purpose of generating profits, these shows simulate the carnivalesque sensibility in a fragmented and displaced manner. The carnivalesque embodied in these shows is not a "break from production" (Pfohl 1992, 213). Rather it is itself a product of production, with, moreover, the intent that it be productive (in terms of generating advertising revenue), thus making the aesthetic of uselessness useful.

Most importantly given my concerns for the study of culture, my analysis raises the issue of the absence of spaces of collective, celebratory rituals of expenditure, excess, uselessness and sensuality, rituals of symbolic inversion in contemporary society, rituals which are both collective and integrated into the larger matrix of social practice. While talk shows and other forms like World Federation Wrestling powerfully simulate the carnivalesque aesthetic, they are disembedded from larger collective social practice in which the carnivalesque plays an integral role within the community. On the other hand, perhaps, given that these are commodified forms, they constitute yet another form of the prevailing social practice of consumerism. 

Understanding talk shows as embodying the carnivalesque aesthetic and recognizing the haunting they evoke, opens the possibility for examining other forms that operate similarly to talk shows. For example, the raucous, bawdy and often (materially and physically) destructive annual college student ritual of "Spring Break" can be understood this way. It provides a clear example of a "break" from productive activity, even though enacted by a limited population (college students). Again, however, as with talk shows, "spring break" is a highly commodified embodiment of this aesthetic, with travel agents and beer companies capitalizing on the compulsion students feel for this break from their "ordinary" day to day routines which carry at least the expectation of productivity. Other forms such as "raves" or rock concerts or the "Be-Ins" of the 1960s can also be understood as rituals which access this aesthetic. It is no mistake that these forms are dismissed as "decadent" and "excessive" in mainstream discourse, rather than as a signal of the foreclosed possibility of carnivalesque rituals as integral to the symbolic activity of contemporary society. Related to this, recent calls for "civility" (Putnam 1995, Sandel 1996) are, clearly, important (and needed) but neglect the yearning for this other symbolic dimension of society. This raises a question as to whether given prevailing discourses within which subjectivity emerges, could such rituals be incorporated into the larger matrix of social practice without their being negated. What I am talking about ought not be confused as advocating public opportunities to "blow off steam" or individualized practices which are decidedly private. (Hence the concern when such practices spill over into the public domain.) Rather, I am advocating the recognition of the carnivalesque sensibility of play and uselessness as a valid and necessary dimension of human existence. With this in mind, the issue of the consequences for the disavowal and/or marginalization of this sensibility and the rituals through which it is enacted ought to be examined before dismissing such carnivalesque forms as trivial or morally wrong.

Abt, Vicki and Leonard Mustazza. (1992). Coming After Oprah: Cultural Fallout in the Age of the TV Talk Show. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Butler, Judith. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Carpignano, Paulo, Robin Andersen, Stanley Aronowitz, and William DiFazio. (1993). Chatter in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: Talk Television and the "Public Mind." In Bruce Robbins (Ed.), The Phantom Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon, Avery F. (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pfohl, Stephen. (1992). Death at the Parasite CafÈ: Social Science (Fictions) & the Postmodern. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Putnam. Robert D. (1995). Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Journal

of Democracy 6, (1), Jan: 64-78.

Sandel, Michael. (1996). Democracy's Discontents: American in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shattuc, Jane M. (1997). The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women. London: Routledge

Stallybrasse, Peter and Allon White. (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. 

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

3 This concept, taken from Gordon (1997), is a way of theorizing subjectivity in a way that goes beyond the sociological language of variables and causality. Complex personhood is meant to connote the messiness and complications of people's stories and senses of themselves as they are situated in specific material circumstances.

4 In their chapter "Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque" (1986), Stallybrasse and White

refer to the plausibility of viewing "the discourses of neurosis [of the hysterics treated and studied by Freud, for example] as the psychic irruption of social practices which had been suppressed" (176). 

5 This notion of "foreclosure" operating in the formation of intelligibility hearkens to earlier feminist scholarship which examines the absence of women and issues of women's concerns in social science research. For example, Dorothy Smith in Conceptual Practices of Power points to the "rupture" in women's experience, trying to analyze the discrepancy between experiences women encounter by virtue of their

material positioning in the society and their being able to speak about them. In addition, French feminists

work with this issue, showing that language permits experience to be intelligible in ways which privilege

a "masculine" mode. Butler attempts to suggest not only do we not have the actual discursive vocabulary to articulate certain experiences which are marginalized and/or devalued within hegemonic culture, but that

the very way we can encounter the world that is to say, what it is possible to know is in certain ways foreclosed. Recognizing the phenomenon of melancholia is the opportunity to recognize these foreclosures.

It is a signal alerting us to what is absent.

6 For example, this reminds me of the term "gordita" or "gordito" in Spanish. This term, while technically meaning "little fat one," is generally used affectionately, as a term of endearment, not as an insult.