Page 196 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 181
2 A regime of ‘common-sense’ media values (see Barthes 1973
[1957]) is created. This is based upon the self-evident nature of
images in the face of which the audience, once again, adopts a
largely passive and accommodative response. Even the most
imaginative interpretations do not tend to question the validity of
the tele-frame itself.

The tele-frame’s meaning system is not imposed upon people;
rather, as previously pointed out, it works in a less overtly hierarchi-
cal and historically exploitative manner than the privileges tradition-
ally enjoyed by elites. Its common-sense quality encourages an
uncritical acceptance of the media’s content and produces various
layers of tautological communication so that:
1 The photographable is what is photographed
2 The celebrity is well known for being well known
3 The branded good has value because it is a brand
4 The reporting of the Other News is important because it is
reported.

Celebrities contribute to the production of a commonsensical false
consciousness through the ease with which, in stark contrast to the
majority of consumers, they circulate in their elite social realm and
personify the commodity form. They illustrate our repeated recourse
to Marx’s observation that within capitalism commodities circulate in
a manner akin to social relations while human relations within the
rest of us non-celebrities are increasingly objectified and static.
The Other News’ deceptively natural, cyclical, formulaic nature
creates ‘a metaphysical system which poses causal relations as
fluctuating between grand cycles of external recurrence (the more
things change … )’ (Langer 1998: 154) – an ideology of repetitive
normality. Langer argues that the main ideological impact of the
Other News is the essentially conservative message this gives the public
through its ‘drama of fatalism’. This conservatism implicitly suggests
that one should be glad with one’s lot because life could be much
worse compared with the private/natural disasters that are presented
for viewing. In addition, the ongoing diet the Other News provides of
the personal tribulations of celebrities exposed by the media dem-
onstrates how their fame is hard won and, therefore, although
individual celebrities may be censured, the institution of celebrity
itself is not. In such a context, inequality and other key social
problems become much easier to define as accidents of fate rather
than as the result of the particular actions of historical and
economic actors/actions – and this is where the usually subtle
ideological functioning of the mediascape becomes most obvious
and close to what Marx originally meant by his notion of false
consciousness.

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