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212 Critical Theories of Mass Media
seductive properties of a culture based upon symbolic exchange.
From this radical critical perspective, mass-media society of the now
involves the cold seduction of semiotic codes. The skill with which
consumers can manipulate such codes, is not grounds to be positive.
It is defended by cultural populists/active audience theorists as
displacement activity in an attempt to compensate for the codes’
ultimate lack of critical non-commodified substance.
It is this basic disagreement that continues to fuel the parallel
theorizations of cultural populism and critical theory. In recent
Deleuzian-inspired variants of cultural populism, the concept of flow
of desire is used to interpret positively the cold seductions of the
culture industry.
From one angle, RTV [Reality TV] is a nightmarish cybernetic
dystopia. But the control society is not simply the latest notion
in a line of pessimistic scenarios. These new conditions create
both new intolerables and new potentials: Antidotes ‘can be
tracked down only in what for the moment appears to be
poison’ (Virno, 2004). In the control societies, it is ‘not a
question of worrying or hoping for the best, but of finding new
weapons’ (Deleuze, 1990/1995: p. 178). Although RTV seeks to
transform the world into an experiment, it is also impossible to
contain all impulses into the game dynamic. Rather than
lament the loss of the interiorized subject, we look to dividual
practices of fluctuation and collaboration for new possibilities.
If capital, via control societies, ‘interweaves’ reality and televi-
sion, then this interweaving can be undone and the threads
reworked to make new meshworks (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p.
71). Producing desubjectified flows does not guarantee their
containment (as containment belongs to disciplinary society’s
techniques); their very fluctuation can become new sites for
alternatives. This means there is ambivalence at the heart of the
absorption (Virno, 2004, p. 84).
(Bratich 2006: 77–8)
In opposition to such consistently misguided optimism, this book
reasserts the unambivalently negative aspects of the distracted
absorption promoted by Banality TV.

Conclusion: aura, the pornographic and prudish, and
the case of Picasso’s Guernica

Our present political order is based upon the non-being of
human deprivation. What we need to replace it with is a
political order which is also based upon non-being – but
non-being as an awareness of human frailty and unfounded-

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