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204 Critical Theories of Mass Media
self-conscious, and reflexive as all get out, but it never calls our
own position as virtual participant and actual consumer into
question.
(Nichols 1994: 59)
Baudrillard and Nichols highlight above the betrayal of Benjamin’s
hopes for the politicization of aesthetics by means of technologies of
mechanical reproduction voiced in his Essay. The all-inclusive reach
into culture produces a ‘culture degree Xerox’ that generally avoids
critique by nature of its pervasive ubiquity. Žižek uses the psychoana-
lytical category of perversion as a technical (rather than a judgemen-
tal term) to describe, not acts of sexual deviancy, but, rather, an
excessive reliance upon rules or structures. The notion can usefully
be applied to cultural populism. It is perverted for the manner with
which it uncritically reinforces the media’s tendency towards ideo-
logical reduction. Despite the polysemic riches afforded by Banality
TV and its diverse targets, its ideological content remains homoge-
neously part of the culture industry. Banality TV and its associated
formats become a diversionary tactic to avoid dealing with genuine
social problems and their complex causes: ‘Unpredictability, uncer-
tainty, contingency: they loom as symptoms of incomprehension
masquerading behind an aesthetics of sensation’ (Nichols 1994: 59).
Thus, any radical potential to be found within Benjamin’s distraction
and Kracauer’s belief in the eventual unveiling of Ratio’s inadequa-
cies are co-opted back into the society of the spectacle.
Cultural populism sacrifices any notion of a critical edge for a
celebratory engagement with such contingency and its excitingly
random manifestations (although such nominal randomness appears
in predictable, formulaic packages/formats). In contrast, critical
theory refuses to interpret such representations of contingency as
evidence of ongoing interpretive struggle. Instead, it interprets them
as examples of an ex post justification/fig-leaf for a struggle that in
reality is profoundly unequal. Cultural populism’s emphasis upon the
significance of interpretative activity fails to give adequate weight to
the disproportionately systemic nature of the commodifying influ-
ences upon this interpretive process. To re-emphasize Nichols’s
previously cited point, social experience becomes relocated within
highly charged webs of significance. Traditional forms of social experi-
ence are thus liquidated as Benjamin did indeed recognize, but in a
manner vulnerable to systemic commodification to an extent he did
not foresee.
The ideological result is that rather than seeking to understand
the complexity of contemporary capitalist society, its politics are
reduced in cultural populism to the perverted fetishization of
Banality TV’s narrative structures. Nichols shares with Langer (1998)
the belief that the rise of these new formats serves an ideological

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