Page 179 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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164 Now
spill into the Manichean, localized, and dramatic channel marked
out for it by the mainstream media?’ (Nichols 1994: 19). Prefiguring
post-Katrina government failures in New Orleans and a subsequent
inability in the rest of the USA to maintain high levels of interest in
the plight of the victims, Nichols points out that: ‘Public response
rises and falls in relation to the pulsations and rhythms of media
coverage itself’ (Nichols 1994: 20). His analysis resonates with
Baudrillard’s cogent phrase, ‘the mortal dose of publicity’ (Baudrillard
1981: 174) – simply being included in the media’s frame of
reference means that your message becomes subordinate to their
medium (to paraphrase McLuhan) and its agenda.
Although sharing Benjamin’s emphasis upon the profound quali-
tative changes in society that are produced by the exponential
increase in the quantity of mediated output, Jameson (1998)
replaces Benjamin’s positive interpretation of the decline of aura
with a much more negative assessment. He furthers our understand-
ing of capitalism’s powers of abstraction with his use of the term
dialectic of reification to refer to the way in which the colonization of
the cultural field by commodity values takes place at an ever deeper
level but in an increasingly immaterial form: the strength of the
commodification process stems from its hard-to-pin-down nature.
Jameson relies upon digestive imagery to describe the Enlighten-
ment’s forces of secularization and realism as early phenomena in an
ongoing historical process which:

seizes on the properties and the subjectivities, the institutions
and the forms, of an older pre-capitalist world, in order to strip
them of their hierarchical or religious content … what is dialec-
tical about it comes as something like a leap and an overturn
from quantity into quality. With the intensification of the forces
of reification and their suffusion through ever greater zones of
social life (including individual subjectivity), it is as though the
force that generated the first realism now turns against it and
devours it in its turn.
(Jameson 1998: 148)

Jameson’s analysis resonates not only with, once again, Marx and
Engels’s ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’,
but also Benjamin and McLuhan’s identification of the cultural
tipping point at which the quantity of mechanically reproduced
images leads to a qualitative shift in social relations.
In an additional development of this chapter’s food theme (see
below) it is interesting to note again the language of digestion that
frequently occurs in descriptions of capitalism’s ability to absorb
more overtly symbolic cultural forms. For Nichols, like Jameson,

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