Page 190 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 21 SESS: 9 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 8 09:09:07 2007 SUM: 50E73CC1
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap07

Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 175
Network) in which higher meaning is lost. We see here an indication
of the cultural consequences of the overexposure of reality by the
mechanically produced image that Benjamin began to explore
optimistically as the decline of aura and which Kracauer more
guardedly conceived of as the image-idea that drives away the idea
and threatens the traditional artistic interpretation of a reality
permeated by cognition.
The conceptual continuities between then and now continue fur-
ther as Baudrillard also builds directly upon the comparison Ben-
jamin makes in the ‘Work of Art’ Essay between the cameraman and
the surgeon. Reality TV becomes an enforcedly claustrophobic
attempt (think of the tightly controlled and contained sets and
compounds in which Big Brother – The Loft and similar programmes
function) to verify the notion of society, when society is by its very
nature a nebulous concept more likely to be destroyed than better
understood by such a mode of testing. Catherine Millet’s sexual
exploits are of a similarly misguided nature. According to Baudril-
lard in the case of both Millet and the camera: ‘we are in the
process of dissecting – vivisecting under the scalpel of the camera …
Catherine Millet … another kind of “vivi-sex-ion” where all the
imaginary of sexuality is swept away, leaving only a protocol in the
form of a limitless verification of sexual functioning, a mechanism
that no longer has anything sexual about it’ (Baudrillard 2005: 184).
Baudrillard provides a succinctly updated version of critical theorists’
objection to the culture industry and its manufactured manipulation
of aura. It bears repeating that it is not a question of ‘high’ versus
‘low’ culture, it is a question of objecting to the semiotic extirpation
of symbolic depth and ambiguity. The critical rejection of active
audience theories is based upon a rejection of their claims to being
active in any meaningful sense, constituted as they are by interac-
tions with predigested categories of the banal.

Conclusion

All mass culture is adaptation … The pre-digested quality of the
product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more
firmly in so far as it constantly refers to those who cannot
digest anything not already pre-digested. It is baby food …
based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of
needs it created in the first place.
(Adorno 1991: 67)
Whether on the Hot Network, E! Entertainment Television, or
CBS, the splanchnic response, not the lucubrations of the
intellect but the primal gut reaction – that’s what hauls in the
ratings. When the new president of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein,

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap07 F Sequential 21

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville