Beschreibung:
Public Rituals for Private Consumption : Television's Royal Wedding The televising of public events of a political nature adapts the traditional realm of ceremony to a very modern form of "publicness". one inherited from cinema. Audience members are isolated, separated, both from each other and from the focus of the occasion. Their experience is one of not-being-there. Exploring a particular festive occasion—the wedding of the Prince Charles and the Lady Diana Spencer (London, 1981)—this paper extends Benjamin's thesis on the status of "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" to the domain of ritual. We suggest that one can no longer conceive of occasions without television, but only (and only in the abstract) of occasions minus television. In other terms, television's broadcast of an event increasingly turns into the "real" event, while the original event is demoted to the status of a matrix, of a studio-setting, of a convenient but ancillary prop. Based on a comparison between different types of public occasions and the mode of participation involved in each, this paper analyses the way in which a collective event survives the family-centered circumstances of its reception. Television seems to blur the dividing line between "public and "private". Public ceremonies are offered for private consumption. Is such a consumption still ceremonial in nature ?