On Experts and Judgment: Reality TV

Abstract: I provide some analysis of the role of the “expert” and “judge” tropes in popular entertainment culture. I further critique these roles as democratically damaging and relate them theoretically to the role of a passive, consuming audience.

Some thoughts on the role of the expert in entertainment culture: one site in which the role of the “expert” seems to have been appropriated and properly monetized is reality TV, especially competition-game shows that involve the elimination of contestants based around some form of judgement. By example, let’s turn for a moment to the industry of cooking and the entertainment platforms that have grown up around it. If an unofficial surveyist were to ask members of three different generational pools—let us say 40-60; 25-40; and 15-25—who they took as the general public “authority” on cooking, I imagine the spread would look something like this: 40-60 responding with Julia Child; 25-40 responding with Emeral Degassi and Martha Stewart; 15-25 responding with Rachel Ray, Gordon Ramsey, Bobby Flay and Jose Andres. The rise of this expert-celebrity chef is indicative of the popularization of a certain type of technical knowledge: we see conduits such as these playing a central role in transmuting culture from high-to-low. Or: the advent of entertainment shows like Top Chef, American Idol and America’s Next Top Model all attempt to popularize—that is, both make transparent to the people and submit to the people’s will—industries that are otherwise high-brow and opaque. As such, the mysteries of the culinary industry—where its top members all seem to know one another in a semi-conspiratorial Illuminatus of the elect—or of the record-label/recording industry, or of the fashion industry, are unconcealed and flaunted as liberated public possessions.

The attempt to make accessible these otherwise expert-dominated industries both acts as a conservative salve and as a progressive democratic program: it preserves the actual opaqueness of those industries while sanctioning off a realm devoted squarely to the democratization of expertise. It is an opening, a “window in” that is simultaneously a closure and the maintenance of a screen. Even in this democratization, the role of the expert is preserved, albeit transformed: what we arrive at, in shows like Hell’s Kitchen, are semi-fictional accounts of the industries they purport to represent. Not only, of course, in the formalization and gamification of competition, but in the overall depiction of the relationships which emerge in the process. It is not so much that figures like Ramsey, Simon Cowell and Donald Trump (in his Apprentice heyday) are even faux experts—they are not, and in fact have covered the gamut of success and failure in their respective industries. But this form of expertise, which embeds itself in these shows, occludes more traditional forms of recognition and accolade that exist outside the entertainment domain—for instance, the James Beard Award in cooking, or the Global Business Excellence Awards. Not only does Trump exist as expert within the realm of the Apprentice, therefore, judging contestants on their performance against his own understanding and “success,” but The Apprentice itself becomes a form of expertise—the winner of the show not only claiming Trump’s approval, but the supposed stamp of an entire industrial worldview.

This modern gamification is ironic on three fronts: 1. in terms of the relationship the consumer has to the expertise on the screen; 2. in terms of the contemporary role of “patronage” that links moneyed interest to expert to artist; and 3. in terms of the relationship popular choice forges with expert refinement. As to 1.: the great irony of cooking shows (and this is less the case for music competitions) is that the viewer has no capacity to taste what is depicted on the screen. In this scenario, the viewer’s relationship to the product in questions is totally and thoroughly mediated by the role of the expert on the show—we trust taste buds that are not our own to opine on food we will never know. I am reminded here of Aristotle’s commentary on the cook: who is the best judge, the cook, or those actually eating the meal? A contemporary manifestation of this dialectic can be found in the decline of the role of the expert in movie reviews, and the rise in sites that aggregate and pool collective judgments, like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.

Beside this, and regarding point 2., the audience has appropriated a tradition today that goes back to at least the renaissance: I mean, the idea that moneyed interests, now linked to the will of the people, may select from among its own (often middle-class) ranks the meritocratic “stars” that shine brighter than most. The audience operates today as vicarious patron, and thus as vicarious expert. The show American Idol is one vicissitude of this trend, whereby the gauntlet of expertise is only speciously mediated by real “experts” and is really a representation of the vox populi/people’s choice. That there is a separate “People’s Choice Awards” seems like a careless cultural redundancy.

Finally, concerning point 3.: here we see the reversal of what Madison took to be the ideal format for representative democracy. The Madisonian model: elected, expert, elite representatives were supposed to refine and funnel the will of their popular constituencies; as such, the model that Madison endorsed for Congressional election, especially viz. the Senate, created a system of general upward “filtering” of popular opinion. Madison envisioned the voice of the public always being heard, but heard through the more refined larynxes of their best and brightest—American Idol reverses this relationship entirely, will still preserving the ultimate republican tone. American Idol begins with an intense expert gauntlet, a pool of tens-of-thousands being whittled down through back-stage screenings and edited auditions. It is only after the vast majority have already been determined unworthy that the public voice is then invited to view and judge the live performances. Here, the experts still make their cases, but the ultimate decision rests in the number of votes owned by the audience’s—e.g. “America’s”—favorite. Of course, the role of the expert hangs behind the scenes as well, particularly in the role of pairing contestants and in setting contestants at odds with one another; this is the administrative level of audition management, production and direction of cast. Contrary to Madison’s representative process, it is the voice of the expert that is finally refined and judged by the people. In this sense, the transference from individual/expert preference to collective preference mirrors the proceduralism of sovereignty that is closer to Schmitt’s notion of dictatorship than it is any robust liberal and republican tradition.

On a more theoretical level, the expert comes to stand as proxy for a type of experience. Through competitive cooking shows, the audience is called to experience food without eating—to consume food without calories. In similar fashion, there is the illusion of facing decadence, like Odysseus tying himself to the masthead, without having to yield sacrifice. The expert becomes both cook and critic, not only tasting the food and experiencing it directly, but then having sanction to interpret and translate—in a word, market—that experience as they see fit. This marketing amounts to conjuring an experience for people who cannot directly experience it themselves—or whose experience and consumption is limited to only one secondary aspect of the subject in lens. To this end, too, the role of jargon used in critiquing the material, or even just in the asides made by the contestants and experts themselves, is strategic: the sharing of a discourse/lexicon otherwise hidden or locked “behind closed doors” with the greater public has the effect of creating pseudo-experts—viewers who believe they now have some window into the workings and sayings of an industry. The ability to “foreshadow” in reality shows thus operates on a type of linguistic and structural level: the synergy invites the audience to accomplish a type of constructed, false detective work. The real act here is in creating a predictable environment that is hidden behind a veil of contingency. The signs are set, like Hansel and Gretel, to determine a type of path-determinacy that was, at the time, seemingly undetermined; by strategically providing the tools to “judge,” the audience is falsely given the opportunity to analyze a situation’s contingencies—contingencies that are largely predetermined on a structural, if not directly manipulatable, level. The “myth” of the audience-as-judge is here revealed in its full confusion.[1]

[1] See, in part, Arendt’s commentary on Kant’s aesthetics and the separation from the judging audience/spectator from the acting agent.