Page 217 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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202 Critical Theories of Mass Media
The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identi-
fication of the individual with his society, and through it, with
the society as a whole.
(Marcuse 1968: 10; emphases in original)
Information counts upon curiosity as the attitude with which
the viewer approaches the product. The indiscretion formerly
the prerogative of the most wretched of journalists has become
part of the very essence of official culture. The information
communicated by mass culture constantly winks at us.
(Adorno 1991: 83)

The cultural impact of the Other News resides not only in the
significant proportion of all news programming it takes up, but
perhaps more importantly the more subtle, qualitative impact it
achieves through the close juxtaposition of its form and tone, and
the blurred boundaries this causes with the discourses of sobriety. The
Other News cultivates among its viewers a tendency towards either
dramatic or emotional identification (combined in the emo) rather
than critical thought and this ideological component is more
powerful for being implicit and low key. This is an important
paradox (which is additionally implicit in this book’s more general
analysis about celebrity/trivia culture as a whole) – its deeply
ideological function tends to occur without due recognition that it is
ideological: ‘ideology … so produces and constructs the real as to
cast the shadow of its absence over the perception of its presence …
the real is by necessity empirically imperceptible [in] the capitalist
mode of production’ (Eagleton, cited in Mitchell 1992: 170).
Banality TV and the Other News undermine rational discourse but
do so while appearing to constitute either just ‘harmless fun’ or with
the active collaboration of its audiences, and so purportedly immune
from the charge of being manipulative. In this manner, cultural
populism’s accommodative interpretations of the contemporary tele-
frame adopts the same erroneous approach that classical political
economy adopts to the commodity form. The latter is ‘interested
only in contents concealed behind the commodity-form, which is
why it cannot explain the true secret, not the secret behind the form
but the secret of this form itself ’ (Žižek 1989: 16; emphasis in original).
The subtle effectiveness of contemporary forms of false conscious-
ness thus derives from their essentially non-coercive nature. The
critical theorists of then would perhaps struggle to apply their
ideological analysis of the culture industry to such overt expressions
of manipulation as T.V.’s Big Brother with its blatant recuperation of
Orwell’s critical inspiration to the point that: ‘the formula of
cynicism is no longer the classic Marxian “they do not know it, but
they are doing it”; it is “they know very well what they are doing, yet
they are doing it” ’ (Žižek 1994: 8).

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