More Soap: an Adorno-esque grouch

[See post below]

There are of course, within these soaps significant differences. Coronation Street at least seems to create genuine 'characters', wheras the 'characters' of Eastenders all seem to be emanations of a single ersatz-cockney Geist. And a single language speaks through them. Sure, it has a number or tricks up its sleeve. It can whisper menacingly, it can become suddenly sentimental about something that happened 'when i was a kid', but ultimately it's trapped in a single linguistic groove. And this language is one consisting almost entirely of pre-fabricated banaliites and recycled bits of received wisdom. Thus, someone can earnestly advise 'treat em mean, keep em keen' without registering the fatal damage inflicted on their ability to think. No actor can breath life into such lines; au contraire, they breathe death into the actor.

It is worthwhile pausing momentarily to consider these linguistic ready-mades, these formulaic sentiments, which are the lingua franca of Albert Sq*. They are semantic dead matter, uncoloured by interiority, sediments of experiences or thoughts now forgotten. But in using them there is a great echo of recognitiion, although an echo in which no distinct voices can be heard. This is the echo of the reassuring solidity of that 'Big Other' of received wisdom in which we live and breathe. To use such phrases is to be united with the serial anonymity of 'everyone else', whose hallmark such phrases are seen to bear.

Because the sole office of such phrases is to secure recognition, they are beyond or beneath the level of true /false. Their function is to plug the speaker in to the wiring of the Big Other. The castrating cost is the sacrifice of spontaneous free thought and individualised affect. To watch Eastenders, is to watch a community composed only of such people, whose thoughts, speech and intimate reactions are wholly reified, pre-packaged and impersonal. The world on screen may be an anachronistic village, a closed community, but it uses the debased linguistic currency which renders it wholly permeable to its millions of viewers.