Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life

Author: Roger Silverstone (LSE)
Year: 2002 (New Literary History 33(4))
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/silverstone-2002-complicity-collusion-mediation-everyday-life.md

Summary

Silverstone investigates everyday life "as a moral and a social space," arguing that no ethics of the everyday is conceivable without communication, and that all communication involves mediation — a dialectical, transformative process through which the meaningfulness of things is constructed. He analyzes four dimensions of the "mediated everyday" (ambiguity/paradox, physicality, sociability, ethics), and then develops the concepts of complicity and collusion: audiences, producers, and subjects are complicit in media representation, and jointly collude in denial of the other — "the illusion of connection."

Key Claims

• Mediation as dialectical: mediation is "fundamentally, but unevenly, dialectical" — the media and daily life are "in significant ways inseparable"; "The lived and the represented consequently become the warp and the weft of the everyday." The media form a "second order paramount reality" that runs through (rather than replaces) lived experience.
• The renewed everyday as moral space: against the celebration of paradox/ambiguity in everyday theory, Silverstone argues "Paradox, like history, is a luxury of the elite. Ambiguities are threats not comforts in the material struggles of the everyday." Everyday life "is tough for most people most of the time"; the media order/comfort the everyday, refusing paradox.
• Distance and trust: mediation transcends (but preserves) distance; "proper distance" is required to sustain "a sense of the other sufficient not just for reciprocity but for a duty of care." Mediated distance swings between incorporation (denial of difference) and annihilation (denial of common humanity). "The screen ... grants sensation without demanding responsibility, and it involves us in a spectacle without engaging us in the complexity of its reality" (Robins).
• Complicity and collusion: audiences are "active," hence morally responsible; they are complicit when they "uncritically accept the media's representational claims"; they collude in "shared denial" of the other's otherness. Following Marcus's anthropology, complicity is a "mutual misrecognition"; collusion is "playing together" in denial. "Complicity is implicated in our relationship to the forms and processes of mediation, collusion to its content."
• The illusion of connection: online networks offer "an illusion of connection," "the private masquerading as the public, the separate masquerading as the shared"; media "provide a sanctuary for everyday life ... But sanctuaries insulate and isolate as well as protect." Against Horkheimer/Adorno's pessimism, Silverstone insists on agency: "we can ... understand it and in that understanding take responsibility for it. We can then challenge and change it."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Communicative Capitalism · Spectacle · Noopolitics
Authors: Roger Silverstone · Rita Felski
Debates: (media and the everyday)
Related source notes: Everyday (Virtual) Life (Poster) · Communicative Capitalism (Dean)

Direct Quotes

"Paradox, like history, is a luxury of the elite. Ambiguities are threats not comforts in the material struggles of the everyday."

"The screen ... grants sensation without demanding responsibility, and it involves us in a spectacle without engaging us in the complexity of its reality." (Robins, as quoted)

"Complicity is implicated in our relationship to the forms and processes of mediation, collusion to its content."

"What is offered by such networks, and for the most part gladly accepted, is what can only be described as an illusion of connection."

Open Questions

• Does Silverstone's insistence on audience "complicity" and agency escape the Frankfurt School's pessimism, or does it risk blaming the mediated subject for structural forces — and how does the "illusion of connection" relate to Dean's circulation and the spectacular image economy?