Page 192 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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8

The politics of banality: the ob-scene as

the mis-en-scène

Introduction

We are all quite familiar with this immense process of simula-
tion. Non-directive interviews, call-in shows, all-out participation
– the extortion of speech: ‘it concerns you, you are the
majority, you are what is happening.’ And the probing of
opinions, hearts, minds, and the unconscious to show how
much ‘it’ speaks. The news has been invaded by this phantom
content, this homeopathic transplant, this waking dream of
communication … A circular construction where one presents
the audience with what it wants, an integrated circuit of
perpetual solicitation. The immense energies spent in maintain-
ing this simulacrum at arm’s length, to avoid the brutal
dissimulation that would occur should the reality of a radical
loss of meaning become too evident.
(Baudrillard 1990a: 163)
The transpolitical is the transparency and obscenity of all
structures in a destructured universe, the transparency and
obscenity of change in a de-historicized universe, the transpar-
ency and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of
event.
(Baudrillard 1993: 25)
In the first of the above quotations, Baudrillard summarizes the
focus of the previous chapter – the tautological circularity of a media
system that encourages active audiences only to better disguise the
underlying meaninglessness of their activity. The second quotation
encapsulates the dire political consequences of such a circular system
– a de-historicized and transpolitical culture once again reminiscent
of Kracauer’s fears. This state of affairs fatally undermines Ben-
jamin’s declared hope, at the end of his Essay, that new technologies
of reproduction could create a radical politicization of aesthetics.

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