Abolir la croyance pour faire place au savoir… Les chaînes à l’heurede la télé-réalité

Abstract

the author re-examines the question of fictional experience (construed as a «shared suspension of disbeliefs»), departing from the observation of particular cases, such as the reality shows’one: assuming a critical position towards the notion of «contract», the author proposes, as a counterpart, that the question of the fictional regimes be taken as a problem connected with the forms of knowledge associated to the production of texts. The author recurs to the no¬tion of «genre promisse», as a matrix of the phenomena of existential adhesion, from the part of the beholder of fictions: the constitution of genres implies the consideration of the worlds to which the very genres are related, in such a way that the validity of each genre would be taken as laying upon the promisse of a world (either real, fictional or playful) which is capable of conditioning the beliefs of the beholder. In examining the case of the reality shows, the author identifies the phenemenon of the blurring of boundaries between types of worlds, as of types of correponding genres.