Performativity of Ethical Practices in a Neo-liberal Era: Television Courtroom Shows, Governmentality, and Television Culture

Abstract

This article aims to explore the domain of television culture by using the American television courtroom shows. For this, I critically evaluate the way that television criticism has concerned the production of textual meanings and the empowerment of audiences. Such television criticism fails to help media scholars understand the way in which individuals’ practices of freedom and caring of the self and others are deployed within their daily lives, insofar as it primarily conceptualizes individuals’performance in terms of the textual openness and the transcendental reclaiming of textual meanings by individuals’ rational engagement in television culture. Analyzing the courtroom shows, I then explore the way in which ethical practices of freedom are recognized in the emergence of neo-liberalism in society, and discuss individuals’ practices of freedom as the care of the self and others.