| The debut of the documentary-style reality television program Intervention (Benz et al.) in 2005 marked the emergence of a subgenre of reality programs that focuses specifically on addiction and recovery. Previous depictions of addiction on television were largely restricted to individual news items and documentaries, made-for-television movies, "very special episodes", or, at most, as a recurring aspect of a fictional character's backstory; this subgenre, hereafter referred to as "recovery television", represents the first time that multiple ongoing programs work to construct cultural understandings of addiction for television viewers. As a result, Intervention and its genred imitators, including VH1's Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew (Buchta et al., 2008) and TLC's My Strange Addiction (Bolicki, Cutlip, Galligani, Tarpinian, & Theeranuntawat, 2011), mark a distinctive shift in the history of the depiction of addiction and alcoholism in the media. For critical/cultural scholars, television is seen as a medium with potentially profound ideological and normative influence. Arguably, television is one of the ways in which we learn about the world, and this pedagogical function must be interrogated when it extends to issues of mental or corporeal health---especially when the issue in question, addiction, is itself contested terrain for contemporary medical science. The recovery television subgenre represents a potentially influential discursive formation which requires further examination. This dissertation is an examination of how the phenomenon of addiction becomes a televisual discursive formation, the subgenre of reality television called "recovery television", and is thus reconstructed by the interactions between text, audience and industry.;The production and industrial discourse surrounding Intervention (Benz et al., 2005) positioned the program as "discourse of sobriety," a text with direct relation to reality and a desire to enact social change. Yet, the industry requires standardization, and therefore coercive power is exercised on these subjects to meet these standards. In turn, the standardized logic works as Foucauldian biopower (Foucault, 1978); it teaches the viewer how to live as self-sufficient individuals in neoliberal society.;In VH1's Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew (Buchta et al., 2008), Dr. Drew Pinsky, star, cocreator and co-producer of the Celebrity Rehab franchise exercises the power of the "tele-clinical gaze" over his patients. Pinsky's gaze, a hybrid of Foucault's clinical gaze (Foucault, 1973) and the gaze of the television producer, diagnoses his patients utilizing his expert medical knowledge with an eye to transforming this medical treatment into televisual spectacle. Ultimately, the need to transform treatment into a spectacle for consumption compromises the patient's treatment.;Finally, the derivative texts of recovery television demonstrate that the reification of addiction into televisual commodity is complete. Addiction is reduced to an easily replicable formula. In this reduction, the concept of addiction becomes almost unrecognizable. Ultimately, the transformation into spectacle has detached the sign from the signified; the image of addiction is now undistinguishable from the other commodities in the society of the spectacle.;In a society where consumption is equated with success and happiness, and where vast resources are mobilized to stimulate consumptive appetites, the phenomenon of pathological consumption becomes a source of cultural anxiety. Recovery television programs tap into the collective cultural anxiety about addiction and the thin line between normal and deviant consumption: "The face of madness [that] has haunted the imagination of Western man" (Foucault, 1965, p. 15). Just as madness haunted enlightenment society, now addiction---coded as deviant consumption---haunts contemporary consumer culture. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
