Page 82 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Interventionist Tendencies in Popular Culture 57

Dominance and Cultural Practice

The ruling knowledge system is most typified by television, as the
electronic church has come to be the dominant mode of producing
the governing culture. The evolution of television technology and its
economic organization reflects a structuring of choices (Williams 1974).
During such structuring, priorities were fixed and a hierarchy was cre-
ated concerning the way in which society uses its collective resources
for individuals. Operating on the aesthetics of spectacle and dictated
by the economics of advertising, the television industry has increas-
ingly come to condition, if not explicitly, to regulate the day-to-day life
of individuals—individuals who are simultaneously consumers and
citizens. We live in a period when an event is said to have ‘occurred’
only when ‘reported’ on television (Parthasarathi 1991); the credibility
of a political perspective depends upon the media exposure it gets. For
me, media representation, especially that of conflict, essentially draws
on the politics of the remembered, the imagined and the contracted.
In a consumer society the imagery of the ‘popular’ has been created by
the dominant media and since this latter is invariably associated either
with the state or the market, its representation thus constructed has
been a de-politicized or a-politicized one. Such representation needs to
be consciously scrutinized and incessantly challenged. Since the praxis
of alternative communication is politically benign without critique,
endeavours at portraying conflict in popular culture are incomplete
without building a critical perspective.
That upmarket issues such as deep ecology find prominence in the
mass media, and consequently impact pop music, art and television
documentary, only substantiates my belief that the key to the politics
of representation lies in the ‘packaging’ of conflict. Take the case of
gender politics. Rejecting its earlier view of women’s movements being
a reflection of Western ideology, the mass media in India has come
round to providing space for collective efforts against the oppression
of women. Yet in bringing such ‘women’s issues’ under its umbrella,
the mass media shies away from questioning patriarchy, the supremacy
of the monogamous family and sexual preference. What we see, thus,
is the dominant media instrumentally employing ‘women’s struggle’
to project an apparent ideological pluralism and political liberalism.
On the other hand, despite the peripheralization of subordinate
modes of communication taking place this very moment, popular