Page 207 - Cultural Studies Dictionary
P. 207
DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES
been sucked into a ‘black hole’. In particular, for Baudrillard, television is the heart
of a culture marked by an all-encompassing flow of fascinating simulations and
facsimiles. That is, a hyperreality in which we are overloaded with images and
184 information. The prefix ‘hyper’ signifies ‘more real than real’ – a real retouched in
a ‘hallucinatory resemblance’ with itself. Baudrillard describes a process leading to
the collapse of boundaries, which he calls ‘implosion’, between the media and the
social. Here the news – ‘reality’ – and entertainment – ’fiction’ – blur into each other
so that ‘TV is the world’. Thus, television simulates real-life situations not so much
to represent the world as to execute its own as simulacrum.
The idea of a simulacrum has also been applied to Disneyland and Disney World,
two of the most significant multimedia symbolic public spaces of the twenty-first
century. Thus Disney presents a simulacrum of ‘Main Street USA’, where the
American urban landscape takes on symbolic and imaginary form. In this copy of
city life USA there are no guns, no homeless people, no drugs and no fear, which
is thus a far cry from the streets of New York City. Disney World’s
stimulating/simulated visual culture is the new model for public space whose
principles are echoed in numerous shopping malls.
Links City, hyperreality, postmodernism, postmodernity, realism, signs, symbolic
Soap opera A popular form of serial television that has received considerable attention
from cultural studies writers, especially since the mid-1980s, both in terms of its
textual construction and its audience responses. As a text, soap opera has been the
butt of high cultural aesthetic disdain and a number of cultural writers have been
concerned to demonstrate that this has been the outcome of distinctions of taste
formed by cultural power rather than a matter of any lack of intrinsic worth or
complexity as a text. Thus it has been argued that soap opera is a complex popular
form marked by:
• Open-ended narratives without the sense of closure to be found in the feature
film or the 13-episode series.
• Core locations that establish a sense of geographical space that the audience can
identify with and to which the characters return again and again.
• The tension between the conventions of realism and melodrama so that soap
operas can be differentiated from one another in terms of the balance struck
between these conventions.
• The pivotal themes of inter-personal relationship wherein marriages, divorces,
break-ups, new alliances, arguments, acts of revenge and acts of caring are at the
core of the soap opera narrative and provide the dynamic and emotional
interest.
The manner in which women have been addressed and represented in soap
opera has been pursued by a number of feminist writers because it is frequently
suggested that soap opera is a women’s space in which women’s motivations are
validated and celebrated. Broadly speaking, writers have concluded that soap opera