{"id":2043,"date":"2026-10-31T16:43:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T20:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2026-10-31T16:43:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T20:43:10","slug":"jane-schoenbrun-public-access-afterworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=2043","title":{"rendered":"Jane Schoenbrun, PUBLIC ACCESS AFTERWORLD"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jane Schoenbrun is best known for her three recent films: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair<\/em> (2021), I Saw the TV Glow<\/em> (2024), and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma <\/em>(2026). All three films are about ambivalence and desire, and how they are intertwined with media; all are focused, at least implicitly, on nonbinary and trans sexuality. Camp Miasma<\/em> is by far the best new film I have seen this year. And now, Schoenbrun has just released a novel, Public Access Afterworld<\/em>, that deals with many of the same themes as the films. This book is the best meditation upon television, in media form (rather than being a critical or philosophical essay), since David Cronenberg’s Videodrome<\/em>, from more than forty years ago (1983). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel has multiple layers, and switches among a number of different protagonists. A Foreword has a first-person narrator, who disclaims authorship, and tells us rather that they are just transcribing things told them by another inmate in the “juvenile correction facility” in which they are incarcerated. The tale teller is named David Sawyer, which is also the name of one of the characters within the mostly-third-person narrative that follows. Indeed, the narrative proper begins with two high school students, David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, who continue to watch Erin’s old analog television set, when the transition from analog to digital television (on June 12, 2009) means that the analog set now receives nothing but static. But after staring at the static for hours, they think that they discern broadcasts momentarily emerging from the static. Their source is apparently the “public access afterworld” of the book’s title. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(I am reminded of the famous opening line of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer<\/em> (1984): “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”. But now that the digital transformation has taken place, all the old analog channels are dead. Schoenbrun’s novel doesn’t quite read as science fiction; nonetheless it is as obsessed with new technology as much as any sf text). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erin soon disappears, apparently into the afterworld itself; that is to say, into the static of the analog screen). David is widely suspected of having murdered her, but her body is not found, and due to lack of concrete evidence he is not charged. Erin is only the first of a number of young people (mostly women) to whom David is drawn, all of whom eventually disappear into public access afterworld. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its second chapter, the novel switches to another protagonist. As the first-person narrator (but who are they?) proclaims, “Every TV show has a hero. Buffy<\/em> had Buffy…” (this is followed by more examples of TV shows redundantly named after their hero or protagonist). The narrator then continues: “My TV show has Bethany Peters”. This suggests that the primary reality of the novel, which seems to be set in our contemporary world — mostly in upstate New York and in New Mexico — is itself a televisual construction, with characters who have been invented. As the novel proceeds, we are led to level within level, a TV show inside another TV show, until we finally reach apparent bedrock: the public access afterworld itself, which still has the structure of a set for a TV show, or actually for several, but is also the primary locus from which all TV shows and series are generated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result of this structure is a kind of ontological (as well as epistemolgical) whiplash: the most luridly fictionalized scenario (described like a low-budget 1950s science fiction film) is the basic, or most thoroughly concrete level — yet it is also a nighmarish prison from which the denizens need to escape in order to get back to our own world, the world that psychedelic radicals in the 1960s scornfully described as “consensus reality”. Our actual world is seemingly the most real, but this is because it is actually the most mediated and constructed of all worlds. Getting beyond this apparent world to the bedrock that grounds and generates it means acceding to an oppressive world of artifice and psychotic delusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am reminded of Nietzsche’s passage abotu “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable’. Nietzsche narrates a progression, in which values once embodied by an aristocracy then get projected into an unattainable afterlife. But this cannot last; the idea of the ‘true world’ is eventually rejected as ‘useless and superfluous’. But once we reject the true world, Nietasche says, we must also reject its dialectical opposite, the merely apparent world; this dual rejection leads to the “high point of humanity”, an enlightened state embodied in Nietzsche himself, or in his figure of Zarathustra. But Schoenbrun’s novel suggests that this position is also a delusion, and perhaps even the most self-deceived moment of all. Enlightenment cannot be separated from instrumentalism and control, as Adorno and Horkheimer suggested. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also recall the pronouncements of Dr. Brian O’Blivion, the McLuhanesque guru of Videodrome<\/em> who informs us that “television is reality, and reality is less than television”. But the postmodern phantasmagoria of Schoenbrum’s novel (and films) seems far away from Cronenberg’s (old-fashioned in comparison) tragic sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, Bethany Peters is an 18-year-old trans woman who has become unmoored from any sense of connection or belonging. (She mostly avoids her parents, who still refer to her by her deadname). She is the latest of the figures David is drawn to, all of whom have the qualities that link them to the public access afterworld (qualities that David himself conspicuously lacks). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We meet a number of other figures also, over the course of the novel’s ten “episodes” (episodes rather than chapters, as befits a season of a television show, which is the format that the novel claims for itself). I won’t trace the vertiginous shifts of the narrative, any further than I have already). You could say that the book is ultimately an account of “storming the reality studio”, as William Burroughs long ago urged us to do; but we also learn that the TV studio where what we take for ‘reality’ is generated can never be taken down once and for all. Liberation is only conditional and relative. Bethany Peters becomes the only person to go to the public access afterworld and return (together with a few other prisoners she brings back with her), but like Jesus’ harrowing of hell this is only a one-time event that leaves the world mostly unredeemed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bethany Peters destroys the reality studio, and returns to the world of consensus reality. But she also realizes that nothing is really over. She feels the nagging sense that “something’s wrong”. The battle with and against the enveloping static of a mistuned television set will need to be fought all over again. This, of course, is the logic of television itself, where every triumph is shadowed by the promise of renewed conflict. The novel leaves us with, as the narrator says, “the final image of my TV show’s first season” — an image of Bethany puking to the realization that she will need to do everything all over again. It’s the triumphant finale of the TV show’s first season, but it is also a cliffhanger, because it portends another season to come. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jane Schoenbrun is best known for her three recent films: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), I Saw the TV Glow (2024), and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026). All three films are about ambivalence and desire, and how they are intertwined with media; all are focused, at least implicitly, on … Continue reading “Jane Schoenbrun, PUBLIC ACCESS AFTERWORLD”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2048,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions\/2048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}