Page 218 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Conclusion 203
A crucial ideological aspect of the culture industry typically
overlooked by cultural populists is thus the manner in which
ideology is created, not by the difficult task of persuading a
potentially resistant and cynical person, but by the de facto success to
be achieved by constant exposure to systemic repetitions that pro-
duce their own qualitative effect. To illustrate this point Žižek uses
the example of the various symbolic practices associated with religion
(baptism, confession, communion, and so on). Our conventional
understanding is that these practices reflect and embody a prior
belief, but Žižek argues this underestimates the actual belief-
generating power of the acts themselves irrespective of any prior
belief, so that such symbols:
far from being a mere secondary externalization of the inner
belief, stand for the very mechanisms that generate it. When
Althusser repeats, after Pascal: ‘Act as if you believe, pray, kneel
down, and you shall believe, faith will arrive by itself’, he
delineates an intricate reflective mechanism of retroactive ‘auto-
poetic’ foundation that far exceeds the reductionist assertion of
the dependence of inner belief on external behaviour. That is
to say, the implicit logic of his argument is: kneel down and
you shall believe that you knelt down because of your belief –
that is, your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your
inner belief; in short, the ‘external’ ritual performatively gen-
erates its own ideological foundation.
(Žižek 1994: 12–13)

This book has demonstrated the theoretical roots of a critical theory
that sets itself apart from cultural populism by being sensitive to this
ideological component. It is not enough to believe that you are
consuming the culture industry’s content in an ironic or empower-
ing fashion, the fact that you are consuming generates its own
non-autonomous forms of belief – irrespective of your intentions.

The perversion of cultural populism

everything now is aestheticized: politics is aestheticized in the
spectacle, sex in advertising and porn, and all kinds of activity
conventionally referred to as culture – a sort of all-pervasive
media-and-advertising-led semiologization: ‘culture degree Xerox’
(Baudrillard 1993: 9)
Reality TV may be as sensational as it wishes, it may be as
seemingly decentered, ahistorical, and futureless as it chooses,
but … it is never critical of the hierarchy perpetuated by its
own form … Reality TV can be as heterogenous, dispersive,

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