Televisual control : the resistance of the mockumentary

This paper argues that television articulates all operation of power that can be usefully conceptualised through the Deleuzian notion of control. Drawing on the writings of Gilles Deleuze andother French philosophers, the paper examines television's cultural and technological force through the notion of control with specific reference to the television mockumentary. Through a discussion of the Australian mockumentary We Can Be Heroes (Chris Lilley 2005) the paper also outlines the capacity of television to offer opportunities of resistance to its operations of control. Beginning with an acknowledgement of Deleuze's position on the role of television (cf short essays 1995a; 1995b, 1995c), this paper proposes that televisual control holds the potential for a mode of "inhabited resistance". Exploring the mockumentary television mode and its theorisation, the paper develops the concept of inhabited resistance to describe a complicit, pragmatic and creative formation of resistance. This type of resistance works from within the televisual operations of control. Generated from control and unable to escape it, the relation of control and inhabited resistance assists in describing the formation and practice of the television mockumentary as an idiosyncratic and particular televisual form.