The Reality Reality Show
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perception and placed it in opposition to reality, we will eventually have to
confront Cartesian thinking.
At the start of his Meditations, Descartes is searching for apodictic
knowledge—knowledge that cannot possible be wrong. He begins to doubt
everything he has ever thought to be true, realizing that it could, in fact, be
erroneous. He doubts what his senses are telling him because he realizes that he
can be fooled, he might be mistaken, and that he could even be asleep and
dreaming everything around him. All of appearance is thus doubted away as
potentially misleading; and then Descartes discovers one thing that he cannot
doubt—the only thing that he cannot doubt, in fact—which is the fact the he is
doubting. To doubt he is doubting requires a doubting act to do it, thus
disproving itself. He cannot doubt that he is doubting, cannot think that he is not
thinking, and because of this he concludes that he must be existing in some
manner. Perhaps he is just a brain in a vat, or sound asleep in the midst of a
complex dream, but one thing is for sure: if he is capable of thinking, he must
exist in some manner as a thinking thing. Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I
am. But it is this / with which Descartes is left that proves problematic. It is
necessarily an immaterial self, a mere succession of conscious thoughts, and
thus is not to be confused with the material body I seem to have. It takes
Descartes several more meditations to be able to prove that his material body is
real, but by then the dualism is complete. I have a body; I am a mind.
It is little wonder, then, that makeover shows focus merely on the body of
the person in question, for the physical is the realm of appearance, the realm of
manipulation and deception. Whether it is the hardcore plastic-surgery ethos of
“Extreme Makeover” or the more fashion-and-makeup oriented “What Not to
Wear,” the reality makeover show is always aware that it is dealing with the
realm of appearance. As a culture, we are not supposed to think that the physical
appearance of a person has anything to do with who he or she really is. We are
supposed to think that beauty is only skin deep, and the real person—t he
Cartesian mind that is lodged in that body “like a pilot in a vessel”—should be
the true focus of our attention. But mind/body duality is yet another
manifestation of the reality/appearance divide. It is one thing to argue that we
should not ethically and politically judge people based on how well they
measure up to a standard of beauty, but it is quite another to say that the body is
in no way constitutive of the self, that the flesh is not itself conscious, that our
corporeality is just an afterthought of the minds we all truly are.
We live in a world of change. It is what Plato called the Realm of Becoming
as opposed to the Realm of Being. Time is the enemy, he thought. This realm of
changing appearances, of flickering shadows arranged temporally, obscures the
true nature of things. The makeover TV show is a show about changing
appearances, and as such celebrates the Realm of Becoming. It thus hints both at
the immorality of judging others based on their approximation of a cultural
standard of beauty, but also at the positive sense in which being-human is beingflesh and being-in-the-world. In a capitalist society, this admission that the