Page 193 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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178 Now
Baudrillard takes Benjamin’s notion that with the decline of aura
comes a loosening of traditional ties to space and time and pushes
the concept to its illogical extreme. Non-banal political discourse
becomes increasingly difficult in a mediascape premised upon an
aesthetic in which, because of this loosening of ties, the decontextu-
alized, freely floating image dominates and pervasively undermines
the rational. Apart from Benjamin, this shallowness and evacuation
of meaning is a central theme of the other thinkers of then, relating
directly as it does to:

1 Kracauer’s strike against understanding
2 Adorno’s culture industry
3 McLuhan’s medium is the message
4 Boorstin’s pseudo-event and Debord’s society of the spectacle.

This chapter builds upon these previous analyses to explore the
overall political and ideological impact of the mediated image. It
develops Jameson’s (1991) notion of ‘the cultural logic of late
capitalism’ as a ‘waning of affect’ by using Baudrillard’s paradoxical
notion that current mediated society suffers from images that are too
explicit and detailed. Baudrillard’s radical theory of the implosion of
communication is opposed to Benjamin’s explosive ‘the dynamite of
the tenth of second’ to argue that the contemporary media is no
closer now than it was then to confronting the heart of Kracauer’s
‘urgent human concerns’ submerged as they are by a ‘blizzard’ of
images. The superficially realist/naturalist portrayal of the everyday
presented in explicit visual detail in both Banality TV and nominally
more serious news programmes (formerly included under the term
discourses of sobriety) are now increasingly indistinguishable. This
produces an ideological representation of reality that distracts (in a
diametrically opposed sense to that proposed by Benjamin) from the
key issues of power, freedom, liberated consciousness, and so on with
which critical theory concerns itself.
A critical examination of the West’s unhealthy relationship to the
mediated image is needed to uncover the true nature of the
malevolence lying behind heavily mediated events (both the carefully
pre-planned and the spontaneous) such as the 9/11 tragedy and the
abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. McLuhan ([1964] 1995) offers the
myth of Narcissus as a defining metaphor for the West’s problematic
relationship to the screen. Influenced by McLuhan, Baudrillard
suggests that the inchoate nature of the Western response to 9/11 is
ultimately a result of its myopic, overly fascinated relationship to its
own excessively mediated culture more than any actual power held
by its perceived enemies. In this chapter, we explore how the
image-sponsored strike against understanding described in previous
pages has manifested itself in a geopolitical context in which the

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