Objective/context:

I analyze a daily domestic practice performed by housewives from an industrial town in the Pampas of Argentina. They call this time of day, on a daily basis and informal manner, “levantar la mesa con el quilombo de la tele de fondo” or to collect the table with the ruckus of the TV in the background. To understand this field of contemporary subjectivation, which is inscribed in the oikos of the working class as a technology of the self, I describe the metaphors and natural symbols activated by a gossip and celebrity scandals television program.

Methodology:

The material presented here is the result of an ethnographic approach conducted between 2015 and 2017 to practices performed by a group of women aged 25 to 55. With a dialectical approach, it describes and objectifies the simultaneity of domestic tasks, especially those that are opaque to the actors, paying attention both to what they say and to what they do.

Conclusions:

By watching quarrels on television gossip shows while cleaning the house, women deploy a technology of the self-constituted by a cultural text through which they experience the garbage of the self. This technology activates their cleaning and produces an animalization of the subject and then their objectification. Thus, the self is transformed into the work tools that the body manipulates every day.

Originality:

The anthropological gaze developed to address the quilombo de la tele (the ruckus of the TV) and its cleansing properties is based on a Geertzian interpretation of the sentimental education of women through catfights. The cultural analysis of its natural symbols and metaphors is complemented by the Foucaultian explanation of the exercise of power that the discovery of self constitutes for the modern subject. This combination renders comprehensible the socio-cultural process by which housewives in late capitalism identify with animals, sponges and floor cloths.

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