GLASS EYES, “BLACK MIRRORS”

biopolitical agency in the curriculum of serial media narratives

Abstract

This article borrows a phrase from a famous television channel – “It's not TV. It's HBO!” – and reformulates it in order to show an investigative panorama that highlights the emergence of a certain cultural artifact: the serial media narratives. The objective is to show that a serial narrative “It is not TV. But it's curriculum!”, based on contributions from post-critical theorizations that intersect with the field of cultural studies. The argument is that this curriculum has provided a “marathon practice” that reinforces the biopolitical dimension of the constitution of a “serial culture”, which is not limited to the object that we investigate here, being able to extend to different aspects of our lives with different effects on our compositions as subjects. With this, we come to signify the curriculum of serial media narratives as a deterritorialized biopolitical assemblage, that is, a combination of disparate elements whose constitutive networks are fundamentally characterized by the total absence of borders. In the production of this “serial culture”, we pay attention to the regulation of the audience's social life in a particular exercise of power, weaving it into a discursive network that has demanded multiple subject positions to contain as many individuals as possible. We conclude that there is a “programmed narcotization of life” at stake here, capable of causing the blanching of our powers, the freezing of our vital forces and the proliferation of static and stabilized forms based on subjective redundancies.