Infrastructures of obscenity: Total Request Live and participatory TV production in action

Obscenity and pornographic culture did not disappear with Times Square’s gentrification in the 1990s. Rather, gentrification inaugurated new obscene cultural forms, displaying the opulence of celebrity and the enclosed spaces of media production. Using observations and interviews with production staff at Total Request Live (1998–2008), the flagship music countdown show on the MTV cable network, the essay examines techniques of incorporating audiences and audience-generated content into late-1990s/early-2000s TV production, just before social media’s rise. It examines media production within a material urban process, not simply producing ideology or images, but inciting and laboring on forms of self-exposure and a quasi-erotic excitement of watching others transgress deepening class hierarchies. The essay describes the urban material foundations of this cultural form as infrastructures of obscenity. For this, it theorizes obscenity beyond sex and explicitly erotic content. It likewise proposes obscenity as an alternative to standard analytical approaches to media, like ‘ritual’, ‘transgression’ and carnivalesque ‘inversion’ or resistance, which are insufficient to understand the production techniques at TRL. It connects those insights to Times Square’s millennial transformations, focusing on the strategies used by MTV’s Midtown Studio in the production of TRL. The analysis demonstrates how the social production of new architectural and infrastructural strategies in Times Square’s post-Disney Store period used highly staged audience engagement to build a recursive, shared experience of obscenity through transgression, prurience, intensity, and authenticity. The infrastructures of obscenity approach complements theories of active viewership but also problematizes viewers’ activity as fully-formed resistance or ‘subversion,’ implicitly or explicitly. This essay’s evidence illustrates how an opposing organizational project by media capital happens, imperfectly, pragmatically, and perhaps even contrary to many theoretical assumptions about how audiences and industry encounter each other, provoking further an engagement with contradiction, ambivalence, and labor to materially organize the heterogeneity of social feeling.