Dérive psychose géographique

This chapter reads Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la télévision [I Live in the Television] (2006), a novel that directly confronts the reader with the hegemony of commercial visual media in everyday life. Delaume takes as a starting point former TF1 CEO Patrick Le Lay’s assertion that television exists in order to ‘sell to Coca Cola…available human brain time.’ Delaume subjects herself to 22 months of constant television viewing, documenting—and attempting to resist—such effects upon her mind and body. By amplifying the everyday activity of television watching to the point of hyperbole, Delaume takes us from the ‘metanoia’ of having the polished world delivered to you on the screen, to the ‘paranoia’ and ‘dérive psychose géographique’ [drifting geographical psychosis] that results from television’s worst de-localizing and de-socializing effects. This chapter draws upon Paul Virilio’s media theory and Delaume’s own musings upon map and territory—which draw upon Deleuze and Guattari—to reveal the processes by which commercial visual media deprives its viewers of the cognitive distance vis-à-vis reality needed to forge existential territory. Delaume’s ludic novel goes to great lengths to restore this distance, and exposes the political and phallocratic regime behind television’s imposed logics in the process.