Page 199 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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184 Now
profound political implications of a type that cultural populism’s
misplaced optimism prevents it from seeing. It is too wedded to
understanding media content from within its own closed system and
terms rather than, as critical theory does, questioning the desirability
and justification of the very system itself.
Baudrillard’s work represents perhaps the most trenchant culmi-
nation of McLuhan’s the medium is the message sentiment: ‘It is not as
vehicles of content, but in their very form and very operation, that
media induce a social relation … The media are not co-efficients,
but effectors of ideology … The mass media are anti-mediatory and
intransitive. They fabricate non-communication’ (Baudrillard 1972:
169 ). With the advent of more sophisticated media than were
2
available for Benjamin’s analysis, we can see the further evolution of
his notion of distraction and Jameson’s description of ‘rapt, mindless
fascination’. The result for Baudrillard is ‘an abyss of language, an
abyss of linguistic seduction, a radically different operation that
absorbs rather than produces meaning. The sarcophagus of linguis-
tics was tightly sealed, and fell upon the shroud of the signifier’
(Baudrillard 1990a: 57). In his penultimate book before his death
Baudrillard described Reality TV in a manner that evokes Adorno
and Kracauer’s assessment of the culture industry, as well as suc-
cinctly describing the atmosphere of a contemporary mediascape in
which Banality TV has colonized sober discourse to produce: ‘a
mirror of platitudes … life that has already been rigged by all the
dominant models’ (Baudrillard 2005: 181).

The visually inspired decline of the public sphere
Closer in character to poetry than prose, the electronic media
employ a simplified vocabulary adjusted to the demands of a
thirty-second television commercial (no compound sentences,
words of one or two syllables, parable in place of argument),
and they depend for their effect on the substitution of the part for the
whole. The gaunt face of a Rwandan child stands surrogate for
the continent of Africa, a helicopter shot of an Iowa cornfield
expresses the boundless store of American virtue.
(Lapham 2001: viii; emphasis mine)
He does not violate the old truth-morality. Rather, like the news
maker, he evades it. It is not only advertising which has become
a tissue of contrivance and illusion. Rather, it is the whole
world. The ambiguities and illusions of advertising are only
symptoms. Advertising events are no less or more unreal than
all other pseudo-events.
(Boorstin [1961] 1992: 214)

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