Page 200 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 185
The above two quotations forcefully express a perceived alignment
between factual news coverage and commercial advertising. Televi-
sion now portrays the ‘strike against understanding’ of which
Kracauer (and more inadvertently Benjamin) identified then in its
vestigial, photographic form. The quantitative increase in images
produces a profoundly qualitative change which Lapham describes in
terms of the (il)logical extension of photography’s ‘greedy eyes’
tendency in the coverage of important issues. The damaging social
consequence is that reasoned argument is increasingly replaced by a
vaguely associative form of images. Part of photography’s iconic
appeal is the misleading way it appears not to mediate: a photograph
is its own content, or, as McQuire puts it, ‘a medium in which the
signifier effaced itself before the force of the signified’ (McQuire
1998: 30 ). Despite this apparent neutrality, photography’s particular
3
form creates what Sontag describes as a democracy of images that
reduces everything to the same banal quality of the photographable 4
– a tendency Benjamin tried to imbue with radical potential but
which this book’s approach has consistently questioned. Television
news provides a technologically more sophisticated version of the
same essential technological grammar that underlies photography,
but with much greater ideological effects. It uses repetitive individual
iconic representations (for example, sepia photographs/early film to
portray historical events) for the representation of otherwise com-
plex situations. Langer uses the term condensation symbols to describe
Lapham’s notion of a metonymic function which contrasts with
Nichols’s concept of metonymic moments that momentarily succeed
in escaping the tele-frame. In this instance, familiar images create a
visual shorthand of instant, uncritical recognition.
The ideological impact occurs when, through the familiarity bred
by such symbols, the audience tends to forget that the representa-
tion of whole events by iconic images only purports to represent the
full conceptual complexity. As Lapham puts it above: ‘they depend
5
for their effect on the substitution of the part for the whole’ . Just as
we tend through familiarity to forget (or choose to acknowledge
initially and then subsequently overlook) the extent to which various
celebrities are famous merely for being famous, so iconic represen-
tations are included in news coverage under the guise of adding to
our understanding of an event when in fact they oversimplify it. As
with critical theory’s rejection of the overly optimistic claims made
for popular culture by active audience researchers, Langer argues
that with respect to television news there is a real danger that
defenders of its democratic visual form are indulging in a form of
complacent relativism defined as ‘a misplaced and depoliticized valori-
sation of “the everyday” ’ (Langer 1998: 24). Uncritical acceptance of
TV news’ over-reliance upon images rather than concepts means that

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