Page 183 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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168 Now
the culture industry’s emphasis upon short-term consumption and
physical stimulation. For example, in the medieval social practice of
courtly love, much emotional energy was devoted to highly imprac-
tical, inevitably unrequited relationships – a young, financially weak
man would typically desire a woman well beyond his own social class.
An important element of the courtly love aesthetic was the way in
which the complex mix of frustrated emotional energy generated by
the non-consummation of this desire was frequently sublimated into
various forms of artistic expression – the love songs of the spurned
suitor and so on.
By stark contrast, the culture industry is predicated upon a
radically different form of systematically exploited frustration.
Instead of maintaining an artistically productive distance from the
object of their desires, consumers’ appetites are stimulated by
constant and ready access. Rather than sublimating desire into
symbolic expression, the culture industry repressively de-sublimates.
Consumption does not provide fulfilment but rather constantly
deferred satisfaction – the seductive tensions of symbolic desire are
replaced with the profitability of recyclable sensations designed to
aid the ready circulation of yet more commodities. The traditional
notion of seduction as a mode of interaction between the sexes may
be anachronistic in the light of contemporary gender politics, but
Baudrillard’s deliberate use of such an anachronism serves to
emphasize a greater, much wider anachronism in the heavily medi-
ated society of today – the scarcity of these ambiguous modes of
interaction. Unlike symbolic cultures permeated by seductive proc-
esses, the mediascape creates a further development of the culture
industry – a semiotic culture based upon the immediate satisfaction
of consumer desires through the consumption of signs rather than
symbols. A highly operational and functional mode of explicit reveal-
ing now dominates the mediated perspective. The link between
Baudrillard and such theoretical predecessors as Kracauer, Adorno
and Lowenthal, comes from their shared focus on the processes by
which industrialized forms of physical production are transposed
into the world of cultural representations. The profound conse-
quence of this transposition is the pervasive colonization of cultural
life by commodity values as Banality TV’s revelatory gaze reaches ever
further into previously veiled areas of the life-world.
Baudrillard emphasizes throughout his work that the significance
of this situation goes much further than the moralistic condemna-
tion normally associated with the term obscene:

From the discourse of labour to the discourse of sex … one
finds the same ultimatum, that of pro-duction [original empha-
sis] in the literal sense of the term … To produce is to
materialize by force what belongs to another order, that of the

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