Re-Thinking
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PART II
180 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
The use of terms like nigger and the frequent obscenity are indexes of the
violent and conflicted relations between African-American men and women, blacks
and whites, and other societal forces within the tense and deteriorating ghettoes of
fortress America. Ghetto life is violent and rappers insist that their music and
language simply articulates experience of the ghettoes, unembellished and in your
face. There is indeed often a sense of place central to rap music, with Ice-T and
Ice Cube, for instance, locating South Central Los Angeles as the site of their
musical expressions. Rap music videos often take place in urban ghetto
environments with some ventures out into the more familiar iconic public spaces
of places like Los Angeles or New York.
Chuck D of Public Enemy described rap as the CNN of the African-American
community, as its source of news concerning whats coming down in the community,
what people are feeling and thinking, and whats on the horizon. Indeed, the albums
of Public Enemy, Ice-T, Ice Cube, and other rapper groups anticipated in an eery
fashion the actual L.A. uprisings in May 1992, when the L.A. police who beat
Rodney King were found not guilty by a suburban California jury (despite a
videotape of the beating that showed in graphic detail the excessive violence used
to restrain King).35 There are constant references, usually highly derogatory, to
U.S. political figures, like George Bush or Bill Clinton, or to officials like former
Los Angeles police chief Darryl Gates.
Thus rap articulates a very distinct sense of place and time. Rappers often state
both where they are rapping from and the date in their albums (Ice-T, 1991, mother
fucker, you should have killed me last year). They are frequently asking the
question What time is it? and answering: Time to Wake Up! Spike Lee, as I
noted, constantly used the phrase Wake up!, almost as an emblematic motto to his
films. Yet, it was not clear from his films what one what supposed to wake up and
do. Rap clues you in. Rap tells it like it is and gives some good hints about What is
to Be Done. Rap tells you that it is the time of conflicts between races, sexes, and
classes. It is the time of the fire, the fire this time and once again, the time of urban
violence and explosion. It is the time of buck-wilding, of wild sexuality, of STDs,
HIV, and AIDS, of drugs, of crime, of gangs. It is a violent time, a time that will
take many victims, especially young black males.
It is also a time to do something, a time to get educated as to what is happening,
time to think and act for oneself. Dont believe the hype! Public Enemy shouts
and rap music systematically attacks media culture, while contributing to the
development of an alternative culture. Indeed, in a way rap music incarnates what
Herbert Marcuse (1964) described as the great refusal, refusing to submit to
domination and oppression. Rap songs frequently invoke groups that are doing
something, as well as the black radical heroes and traditions of the recent past.
Public Enemy and other rap groups frequently refer to Malcolm X, the Black
Panthers, R.Rap Brown, and others in the black radical tradition and themselves
articulate its radical critiques of racial oppression and refusal to submit to
domination. Public Enemy performs in quasi-military regalia and, following the
Black Panthers, have their Ministers of information, education, and defense, as
Black voices 181
well as their assault technician to produce the electronic sounds, using military
and revolutionary metaphors to describe themselves.
Its also the time of the apocalypse for black people, time that theyd better do
something, or pay the price. Sister Souljah sings of The Final Solution, Slaverys
Back in Effect, telling how the President just announced that he, Vice-President
Duke, and the Congress have just declared slavery back into effect because black
people have not advanced technologically, their education testing scores are in
decline, they are on welfare and having too many children, and so on. In her
apocalyptic vision, the fascist government has ordered all blacks to report to
designated camps. Ice Cube describes himself as Amerikkkas Most Wanted,
using the fascist code Amerika to describe the United States, punctuated by a
triple K, signifying the Ku Klux Klan, and he and other rappers frequently evokes
pictures of a present and future fascist America.
Other rappers also project an apocalyptic future where violence is directed against
blacks. Indeed, for many rappers, the apocalypse is now. Many blacks believe that
HIV and AIDS is a government conspiracy to kill blacks, that drugs are encouraged
and allowed by the government to destroy the black community and black youth,
and that the power structure has no more use for black labor in a technological
society and wants to exterminate them. And they are also aware that blacks are
killing themselves in record numbers and that the violence threatens the very
existence of the black community. The question then is: What can be done?
In such an apocalyptic situation, only radical solutions and politics have any
meaning. Whereas Spike Lee is a voice of black nationalism, identity politics, and
self-pride, much rap music is an articulation of the voice of black radicalism. As
noted, there are frequent references to icons of the black revolutionary tradition
and the use of the radical political discourse of the 1960s. Yet there is also a strong
component of black nationalism and identity politics in rap music, which links rap
to Spike Lee.36 Indeed, there are frequent positive references to Lee in rap music.
Public Enemys Burn Hollywood Burn! (illustrated in a powerful music video)
praises the films of Spike Lee in opposition to Hollywood stereotypical treatment,
or neglect, of blacks. Lee, of course, featured Public Enemys Fight the Power
in Do the Right Thing. Ice Cube in turn used the Italians litany of racial epithets
from DRT in one of his songs to remind blacks what whites really think of them.
And Ice-T includes images of Spike Lee in his music video version of Original
Gangster.
Both rap and Spike Lee thus tend to a form of identity politics, though there is
some debate over the parameters of identity. Ice-T, for instance, has a song where
he equates all people of color and oppressed people with niggers, identifying
Mexicans, Koreans, and other people of color with those oppressed by a white
racist society. Ice Cube and other rappers, however, sometimes have derogatory
references to Korean-Americans and other racial minorities in their songs, restricting
the proud badge of nigger to black African-Americans as the privileged group
of identity. And X-Klan and other rap groups advocate an Afrocentric black
nationalism that privileges visions of a black nation.
182 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Indeed, much rap music affirms the strands of radical black politics, ranging
from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers to Louis Farrakan and Elijah Muhammad.37
Public Enemy and other rappers often sample Malcolm X speeches and reference
other black radical groups and figures. Ice-T sings openly of black revolution and
while he sometimes celebrates the joys of consumer materialism (i.e. his house,
car, possessions, etc.), he also frequently attacks capitalism as an economic system,
whereas Spike Lee, as I have argued, tends to support a form of consumer capitalism
where blacks have their piece of the action. Moreover, Chuck D of Public Enemy
sees the system as a structure of oppression and many rappers call for the end of
oppression and advocate radical political change.
Some rap music openly calls for violent revolution, while Lee advocates at
most liberal reform. Public Enemys music video flashes images of black oppression
and struggle and then flashes the message, Where are the revolutionaries? Shut it
down! Yet there is another strand in rap that stresses the urgency of mere survival,
as when Grandmaster Flash states in his 1982 hit The Message:
Dont push me cuz, Im close to the edge,
Im trying not to lose my head.
Its like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
how I keep from going under
broken glass everywhere,
people pissing on the stair,
you know they just dont care.
I cant take the smell, I cant take the noise.
Got no money to move out,
I guess I got no choice
Throughout the past years, there have been heated debates within the black
community and mainstream media culture concerning the alleged celebration of
gangs, violence, and drugs by rappers. Indeed, there are examples of such
celebration, or naturalization, throughout rap music, but the major artists usually
have a more nuanced position. As early as 1987, rap groups organized in a Stop
the Violence Movement, which produced a collecti ve statement, song and video
titled Self-Destruction (George 1988). Public Enemy, Ice-T, and other groups
have been sharply critical of drug use as a poison to enslave and destroy black
people. When they and other groups adopt gangsta and gang metaphors, they
are often referring metaphorically to their own group, to their crew. As noted,
there is a strong component of group identification within rap, wherein one finds
their own identity within broader communities. Although such celebration of group
ethos and adoption of gang metaphors can support the existence of street gangs, it
also promotes more benign forms of community that serve as a positive pendent to
the narcissistic individualism endemic in contemporary U.S. society.
Indeed, there is a strongly moralistic and didactic streak in many rap groups. A
close listening to Ice-Ts Original Gangster notes moralistic condemnation of those
who devote themselves to a life of crime and drugs, as well as to those blacks who
Black voices 183
sell out and distance themselves from their own people. A song titled Ed describes
the life of a homeboy who drank a lot, did drugs, gambled, and blew all his money
on women.
One night he got drunk
And started drivin real fast
Eds dead
Ice-Ts Midnight tells of the all-night adventures with violence and police of a
gangsta crew and although the rapper character got home safely, he went off to
sleep and at six in the morning the police broke through his doorriffing off the
message that the gangsta life dont pay. House describes parents in a home down
the street who drink and abuse their child and Ice-T tells the neighbors that they
should act like they give a damn! and Do something, call a cop. Ice-Ts Escape
From the Killing Fields provides a harrowing picture of violent ghetto life,
punctuated with the chorus: Ya gotta get out! Ya gotta get out! His Body Count
describes the violence of ghetto life and desperately calls out for the need to address
the problems and find solutions.
Although Ice-T presents a macho, sometimes violent persona, he also constantly
attacks drug use and indicates the consequences of violence, so it is simply wrong
to claim that all rap celebrates such things, when some of the more popular rapsters
clearly do not. And in Keep your head up, 2 Pac tells his brothers to treat their
women with more respect and that men who knock up women and then abandon
them are not real men. Ice Cube warns of the dangers of sexually transmitted
diseases, as does Sister Souljah and other female rappers. Moreover, Sister Souljah,
stupidly condemned by Bill Clinton, passionately tells her people to quit engaging
in destructive and amoral behavior. In a song Niggas Gotta, she raps:
Niggas keep dying, mother keep crying
I ask why
Why we dont open our eyes cause
Niggas keep killing, illin and thrilling
No time, niggas still chillin
Niggas still drinking, boozing and stinking
St Ides38 big banking and niggas not thinking
Niggas still smoking, gagging and choking
Counting pennies and broke
And still niggas joking
Niggas still fucking, humping and sucking
Family gone broken, father out buggin
Ask a nigga something he replies nothing
Grabs his balls and keeps walking
Niggas grow bolder, wild with no order
184 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Time grows shorter, father raped the daughter
Father up and left her, though he shouldnve kept her
Reverend shouldve blessed her, instead he tripped and slept her
Niggas sink deeper
Niggas still sittin, eating and shittin
Roots cut off, forgotten and forgetting
Wanting for plenty aint got any, needing for many
I wonder when we gonna get up, get serious
Niggas got to do better
Niaggas too lazy, confused and crazy
Having more babies, no answers for the maybes
Gave up too easy, minds too weak, see
Niggas gotta do better.39
All the motifs that we have so far discussed are fully evident in Ice Cubes Death
Certificate (1991). The text is a highly complex modernist collage of contemporary
sounds and voices, condemning the society that offers blacks a quick death
certificate with their birth certificates. The album opens by evoking a state of
emergency and Ice Cube says that the Death Side presents a mirrored image
of where we are today while the Life Side presents a vision of where we need
to go so sign your death certificateimplying that black revolution will eliminate
the supremacy of the white race. The inside cover liner says that the best place for
a young black male or female is the Nation of Islam and a picture shows Ice Cube
reading the Nation newspaper with a headline Unite or Perish, while neatly dressed
black youth and uniformed men from the Nation stand in the background.
The Death Side opens with a musical collage of a funeral of a young black and
quickly cuts to a defiant Ice Cube warning not to go after him because hes the
wrong nigga to fuck wit. The opening stanzas of the song warn against fucking
with him and threaten anyone who tries in violent terms, sprinkled with obscenities.
He then brags up his rap crew as number 1 in the area, a typical self-aggrandizing
move of rappers, rooting his music in South Central L.A., and noting that: In 91,
Ice Cube grew stronger and bigga. The last stanza announces that it is payback
time and the lyrics threaten L.A. police chief Darryl Gates, warning him that if he
comes up against Ice Cube, hell be goin up against a Zulu. Deploying the
macho bravado typical of certain strands of rap, Ice Cube warns Gates that hell:
Break his spine like jellyfish and Kick his ass til Im smellin shit, concluding
Mess with Ice Cube ya get punked quick-pig!
The macho bravado and violence is only comprehensible in the context of the
tense conditions between L.A. blacks and the police, in which former police chief
Darryl Gates has become a symbol of white racism and violence against blacks.
Ice Cube is warning that there will be a payback and articulates black rage against
the L.A. police. In another song, a cop bellows out that Were gonna treat you
like a king, and Ice Cube replies: What goddamn king? The policeman answers:
Black voices 185
Rodney King! Martin Luther King! And all the other goddam kings from Africa!
and then shoots him. The references to King refer both to the white violence
against black leaders and ordinary blacks, but also to white violence against blacks
in Africa, including kings, and transcodes the popular black nationalist discourse
that blacks were once a nation of kings and princes.
The album is highly moralistic, as well as politically radical, telling blacks to
give up the nappy and constantly attacking black sellouts and Toms. A song
Look Whos Burning warns about venereal disease and there are admonitions
for safe sex throughout the album. While earlier Ice Cube refused to malign drug
use, he now, perhaps following the line of the Nation of Islam, also attacks drug
use in the community and warns blacks that their very survival is at stake.
Several other songs on the Death Side describe the death of young blacks and
many express black rage at oppressive ghetto conditions. The Life Side opens with
sounds of a birth and cuts to I Wanna Kill Sam, where Ice Cube commences
with an angry threat to kill Sam cause the shit he did was uncalled for. In the
second stanza, he describes the rape of a black mother and then capture and
incarceration in a place where they were forced to work all daypresumably
slave plantations, though the stanza could describe blacks thrown in prisons and
work camps today. The result was the breaking up of black families and breaking
down of black willpower, until blacks surrendered and prayed to the white God for
mercy and relief.
Cutting to the present, Ice Cube complains that today the U.S. government
wants to tax him, execute unruly blacks, spread drugs and HIV, and make people
of color fight their wars. The song concludes with the phrase that Ice Cube wants
to kill Sam cause he aint my muthafuckin uncle, suggesting that blacks are
aliens in the United States. In this song, Ice Cubes rage overflows, his words fly
out like bullets, and his bitterness and anger are obvious in every line.
Turning more mellow and cautionary to black youth in Doing Dumb Shit, Ice
Cube tells of how as a fourth grader he pulled girls hair, taunted the school bully,
played the class clown, made dumb jokes, shot his b-b gun, knocked on peoples
doors and ran away, played hide and go get it, til I got my ass whopped when I
was ten years old, doing dumb shit. As a young teenager, he fell in love, started
having sex, put rubbers on the wrong way, and woke up one morning with a bad
case of the clap cause he was doing dumb shit. As an older teenager, he got a
VW, did drag racing, hung with the OGs (original gangsters) and got some street
knowledge, and got in trouble doing dumb shitbut he survived.
Today, when seeing young black males doing the same dumb shit, going through
the same stage of growing upbut dying young, Ice Cube is outraged at the culture
that is killing them, but at the same time he warns his young audience that today
doing dumb shit can get you killed and that its time they started wise up. The
song ends with the refrain dumb, dumb, dumb and its corollary is that young
blacks should get smart and stop engaging in dumb things like gangs, drugs, crime,
and the violence that is killing off young black males at an alarming rate.40
In Us, Ice Cube opens with a young black boys fantasy of wealth and
186 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
consumer goods and cuts to condemnation of blacks who refuse to invest in their
communities. Ice Cube reiterates the messages that there is no one to blame but
us, concluding with the warning that nobody gives a fuck about (cutting off
sharply before saying us). Thus his message is that of black unity, self-sufficiency,
and independence, not relying on any white benevolence or government handouts.
This nitty-gritty street realism pervades rap and at least one wing moralistically
condemns all the practices that keep blacks divided, oppressed, addicted, and
subordinate.
Moreover, there is a positive emphasis on the need to work for change within
the community. A radio voice-over indicates that Ice Cube himself has stayed in
his community, invests in it, and tries to work for change. Indeed, in Vaseline he
bitterly attacks members of his former group N.W.A. for leaving the community,
hanging with whites, and selling out on their black radicalism (less palatable is his
homophobic attack on their Jewish manager, indicating that Easy E turned faggot
and that his former crew are now getting fucked with no vaseline).
Ice Cubes bitter and violent attacks on his former crew and black sellouts
indicate the deep divisions within the rap community and the tremendous differences
between the groups. Indeed, there is a big distinction between rappers and those
who engage in rock, soul, or mainstream popular music. There is also a difference
between those ghettocentric groups who call for reform or revolution within their
communities, and Afrocentric groups who call for a separate African nation. There
are different levels of radicalism in rap, often delineated by live performances
which tend to be most raw and extreme, to albums, sometimes not played on the
radio because of their radicalism, to rock videos that tend to be the most benign
because of television censorship.41
There are also many other differences between the various groups in terms of
style, political ideology, and personalities. But the competition between groups
also points to the habit and game of dissing (i.e. disrespecting) ones opponents,
which builds on Jamaican and other African-American games and traditions, and
which is also perhaps a function of heavy competition between the groups. There
is also a drive among the various groups to be the best, though rappers often refer
to each other positively as well, with Ice-T devoting a whole song to references to
other rappers and groups who were Players. In early 1994, several of the most
popular rap songs played on BET (Black Entertainment Television) refer back to
Public Enemy, which has become an icon of political rap.
Indeed, there is now a coherent tradition of rap with its icons, hierarchies,
typologies, legends, and villains. Rap has a private language and slang with its
homies or homeboys (pals from the neighborhood), crews and posses (i.e. the rap
team), technical music lingo, expressions like dope and fly (which are positive),
and often ritual obscenity and insider pejoratives. Terms like gangs often function
metaphorically to describe the crew of the rap group and terms like bad signify
cool, or good, thus reversing its ordinary connotations. Such a complex
linguistic form requires learning a language and interpreting the many layers of
meaning and signification.
Black voices 187
In a sense, it is surprising how long the form has maintained its popularity,
surviving as highly popular for at least fifteen years. Although rap music emerged
in the 1970s, it did not hit the charts and public notice until the late 1970s and
exploded into popularity in the 1980s. It seems to be even more popular in the
1990s, obviously articulating experiences of alienation and rage among large
segments of youth and urban blacks. It has also become increasingly controversial
in the past years, as I shall indicate in the next section, after indicating the sense it
which it can and should not be described as postmodern.
Houston Baker is constantly describing rap as postmodern by virtue of its
nonauthoritative collaging or archiving of sound and styles that bespeaks a
deconstructive hybridity. Linearity and progress yield to a dizzying synchronicity
(Baker 1993b:89). Rap does assemble a collage of contemporary sounds and
pastiches previous forms in its sampling. But the sampling is sometimes
deconstructive (as when a lyrical pop song is sampled in a violent context that
undermines its ethos), though sampling can also be positive, as in the frequent
homages to James Brown and other classics of R. stop making sense, that resist meaning and interpretation, rap music is
often a meaning machine that demands interpretation, that multiplies meaning,
signification, and political messages.
In the sense that I am using postmodernism (roughly that of Jameson 1991),
rap is arguably modernist. Rap is a highly expressive form and rappers have distinct
voices, styles, and messages, often related to modern politics. In opposition to
fragmentary, disconnected, flat, and one-dimensional postmodern texts, which only
refer to themselves or lack depth of meaning, the collaging of most rap music often
adds up to a political statement, rather than fragments of nonsense or minimalist
meaning. Rap often identifies with specific politics like 1960s black radicalism or
Afrocentrism, rather than the evacuation of politics, as in some postmodern texts.42
The rap albums of a Public Enemy, Ice-T, Ice Cube, or Sister Souljah add up to an
often coherent statement and, as noted, the music is often highly intertextual, producing
a collectivity and distinctive codes of rapping, rather than extreme postmodern
fragmentation. In fact, rappers like Ice Cube and Ice-T often follow rather conventional
linear story or narrative lines in their rapping, which often have a narrative closure
(though Public Enemy often operates with more complex forms).
Yet, there are also arguably postmodern features to rap, such as the recyling
appropriation and sampling of previous forms,
the eclectic mixing of styles, the enthusiastic embracing of the new technology
and mass culture, the challenging of modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy
and artistic purity, and an emphasis on the localized and temporal rather
than the putatively universal and eternal.
(Shusterman 1991:614)
188 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Schusterman demonstrates the presence of these features of postmodern
aesthetics in rap and my only difference with him is that he begins his definition of
rap, claiming that it is characterized by a recycling appropriation rather than unique
originative creation (ibid.: 614).
By contrast, I have been arguing that rap music is often highly original, is
expressive of a distinctive and strong voice, often has distinct messages and coherent
narrative structures, proliferates meanings, requires an active audience, and in these
senses shares key features of modernism. I would thus conclude that rap is between
the modern and postmodern and draws upon both modernist and postmodernist
aesthetic strategies. Description of these aesthetic categories is, of course, contested,
but I would argue that rap is not a primarily postmodernist form, or, rather, is not
fundamentally defined by its use in some rap artists of postmodern aesthetic
strategies.
Rap is, to be sure, a hybrid form, combining African-American traditions with
contemporary style, mixing the human voice and technology, found sounds and
media snippets, music and discordant noise. But collage and hybridity are
themselves features of modernist movements like cubism, surrealism, dada, and
futurism. But most importantly, rather than deconstructing identity à la
postmodernism, rap music is about creating identities. The rappers themselves
establish their identities through their music and their audiences identify with
oppositional culture and the critical attitudes and postures of rap, thus producing
oppositional identities. Indeed, rappers are Gramscis organic intellectuals, who
articulate the experiences of oppression of their community and focus attention on
the causes and possible solutions for solving the problems articulated in the music.
This brings us to the hotly debated issue of the effects of rap and the question of
constituting counterhegemonic, alternative communities and cultural forms in the
present moment.
RESISTANCE, COUNTERHEGEMONY, AND EVERYDAY LIFE
Thus rap music constitutes a culture of resistance against white supremacy and
oppression. Resistance by African-Americans not only takes the form of musical
and cultural expression, but also takes multiple forms of resistance in everyday life
through language, style, attitude, and social relations. African-American expression
through cultural artifacts is evident in the forms of media culture studied in this
chapter, but also finds articulation in more avant-garde forms of culture. Within
film, for instance, Marion Riggs Tongues Untied (1989) articulates the experience
of black gay males, their oppression in the hands of mainstream culture, and Riggs
contradictory attitudes toward whites and whiteness. Julie Dashs Daughters of
the Dust (1991) captures black history and womens experience from the point of
view of a young black women visiting an island off the coast of Georgia that was
once a refuge for runaway slaves, which forces her to rethink her position in U.S.
society. The film also interrogates the tensions between tradition and modernity in
the African-American experience.
Black voices 189
The curious thing about black rap music is that precisely the more radical
products seem to be the big sellers, though it is estimated that white male teens buy
over half of the product. Music is less capital-intensive than film and has a high
rate of return that makes it possible to quickly produce and sell its product. Film
and more capital intensive forms of culture make it difficult for blacks to gain
entry, though, as noted, the success of the films of Spike Lee helped make it possible
for a number of young black film-makers to intervene in media culture.
This brings us to the issue of how rap music can be coopted into a consumer
culture. As noted, the mega-best sellers of rap are often consumed by young middleclass
whites and it is not clear what effects rap has on these groups. During 1994,
MTV advertised a rap-oriented journal called Vibe, and the advertisement
appeared to transform rap into a consumer fetish for buppies, yuppies, and young
consumers. And the type of rap played on MTV, BET, and other television networks
is usually the more watered-down pop version of rap.
Thus, rap can thus easily become a commodity fetish and mode of assimilation.
Rap has also been assimilated to advertising with shoes, cars, and even food storage
ads (the Reynolds [w]rap campaign), have used rap techniques. Yet all popular
commodities have a double-edged, or even multiple, effects. The commodity rap
can circulate oppositional thought and action, and can empower people to struggle
against the system of oppression. And it can function merely as titillation and
entertainment and be coopted for conservative ends.
Moreover, the rap evocation of history and politics might have contradictory
effects. On one hand, it is salutory that rap returns to the black radical tradition and
deploys images of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, and black
political heroes in their lyrics and videos. And yet such appropriation also has the
effect of transforming complex historical persons and positions into images, into
easily consumed icons of radicalism that lack real political substance. The politics
of rap can thus contribute to reducing politics to slogans and clichés, thus aiding in
the evacuation of politics of the genuine sufferings and struggles of people. Such
reduction of politics to image and cliché also aids the transformation of
contemporary politics into a battle of images and a form of media sound-biting.
But it is a mistake both to dismiss all media culture because it is circulates in the
commodity form and can be easily coopted into consumer culture, just as it is a
mistake to believe that all so called popular culture empowers people by producing
meanings, pleasures, and identities that somehow enable people to control their
lives and to resist domination. In particular, it is important to see that even an
overtly oppositional form like rap can be easily coopted, but can also radicalize
and provoke oppositional behavior. Difference sells, but the difference can provoke
effects different than mainstream culture, such as the production of oppositional
identities and practices.
Indeed, during the past few years there has been furious debate about the effects
of rap. When N.W.A. released their song Fuck the Police in the late 1980s, the
FBI wrote threatening letters to their record label and the issue was widely discussed
in the media. In 1990, there was a veritable assault on rap in the media with Tipper
190 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Gore writing a widely circulated and syndicated piece attacking Ice-T and other
rappers (Washington Post, January 8, 1990).43 The Los Angeles Times published a
long article highly critical of rap (February 11, 1990), as did many other daily
newspapers. Newsweek published a long assault on raps attitude (March 19,
1990) and U.S. News and World Report (March 19, 1990) also published an attack
on rock and rap. The rap effect: the more records rap artists sold, the more worried
parents became, the more the media attacked its excesses, and the more crimes and
violence were pinned on rap.
In 1992 Ice-T formed a group Body Count which released an album with the
title song Cop Killer. As noted, President George Bush attacked Ice-T, FBI
officials wrote to Warner Brothers to indicate that they did not appreciate the song,
as did many police officials and citizens, possibly mobilized by conservative groups.
Ice-T first agreed to take the song off of the album, though he replaced it with a
powerful rap in favor of freedom of speech. He then, for reasons not fully specified,
left Warner Brothers, probably because of pressure to further censor his outspoken
radical views. The issues were played out in the mainstream press which continued
the heated debate over the effects of rap, with efforts to censor it and ban it
intensifying.
Since then the rap effect has continued to produce a wealth of claims that specific
acts of violence and crime were caused by rap music and there have been many
calls to ban and censor it. By 1993, many in the black community were attacking
rap and some black radio stations agreed not to play so-called gangsta rap, which
allegedly promoted sex, drugs, obscenity, and violence. The same year, rappers
like Flavor Flav of Public Enemy and Tone Loc and Snoop Doggie Dogg were
arrested on crime charges. And so by 1994, rap was a music form under siege
though it continued to sell well and be highly popular, perhaps in part because of
the furious controversy.
The assault on rap is perhaps unprecedented in media history. Probably never
before has a cultural form been under such heavy assault. During the last months
of 1993 and early 1994, literally hundreds of articles appeared each month on the
topics of rap and violence and night after night attacks on rap appeared on
televisionenough material for a separate book on the topic. The hysteria is surely
a sign of public panic concerning the rise in crime and a scapegoating of rap as a
cause of the rising violence and public disorder. It is also symptomatic of the
negative attack on young black men in contemporary U.S. society, surely the most
stigmatized group of the present moment.
There is no doubt but that rap has powerful effects, but they are complex and
many-sided. One also needs to see the diversity of views and positions within the
rap community with some groups and individuals openly promoting crime, drugs,
misogynony, anti-Semitism, and glorifying the gangsta lifestyle, while other groups
are more critical of these tendencies and advocate black independence, education
and self-help, unity, and the search for genuine political solutions to the problems
of blacks in the U.S.A. today.
In fact, rap is often scapegoated for the real problems of a highly divided society
Black voices 191
in which conflicts between classes, races, and the sexes are highly explosive. It is
perverse to blame these divisions on rap, which simply calls attention to them.
Read diagnostically, therefore, the most extreme and offensive elements of rap are
symptomatic of real problems that need to be addressed and just banning rap is not
going to address these problems. Most of the best rap groups are aware of the
powerful effects of their form and some have tried to use rap music constructively,
although there are obvious offensive expressions that should be criticized, analyzed,
and debated.
But it is ridiculous to spend excessive energy attacking the fantasies of violence
of an Ice Cube when real violence is being exerted against the members of his
community. This is the real problem and scapegoating a rap singer for the problems
is demagogic and futile. The cultural expressions will remain until the problems
are addressed. Until then, one should expect violent and offensive expression from
rappers who are articulating experiences of a violent and offensive society.
A diagnostic critique is thus interested in what rap means, what it is a symptom
of, and what it tells us about contemporary U.S. society. Rap is a curious cultural
form in that some of the more oppositional and radical tendencies have entered the
mainstream, or at least the best-selling charts, and seem to be most popular. The
rap effect: the more outrageous, the more widely discussed and consumed. The
TV channels and many radio stations, to be sure, do not play the most radical
examples of rap, but its underground popularity, the way rap music circulates and
is disseminated through oppositional communities, makes it an efficacious
counterhegmonic form.
Otherwise, one must often leave the mainstream to seek out the more radical
and distinctive black voices. Many African-American writers and poets are not
able to be published by the mainstream press and are forced to go to alternative
presses. Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider (1984) tells of the difficulties of a black
lesbian feminist getting published in the mainstream and many black writers have
had to turn to alternative presses and publications. Indeed, there is quite a range of
African-American publications both inside the black mainstream and outside it
which cater to more marginal groups.
But not every African-American can make rap albums, films, or write books,
and so therefore ordinary black people express their defiance of the white racist
system in a variety of forms. Black slang and lingo provide a private language of
communication and a linguistic and gestural repertoire to articulate black identity
and rebellion. Black dance and modes of traversing space position black bodies in
their uniqueness, as they defiantly traverse hostile space in a fashion that articulates
their identities and forms of rebellion. Playing music loudly from a ghetto-blaster,
or driving through urban spaces with a car radio playing rap, are other forms of
black everyday cultural expressionindeed, such acts formed a key element of
the plot of Do The Right Thing and one of the most distinctive features of Spike
Lees films is the way he is able to catch black speech patterns, humor, bodily
movement, cultural style, and modes of expression and relation.
There are thus many forms of oppositional cultural expression that resist the
192 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
codes, practices, and ideologies of mainstream culture. These forms are sometimes
evident in the mainstream, but are found more frequently within alternative cultures
and everyday lives. Such a terrain provides a goldmine for cultural studies, that is
only beginning to be tapped, and that will provide important work and perspectives
for cultural studies in the future. For these reasons, a critical multiculturalist agenda
is an important part of educational reform and should be part of the politics of
cultural studies. Our culture is deeply enriched by the contributions of groups and
individuals hitherto marginal and we can only benefit from a greater diversity of
voices and experiences. Cultural studies should thus listen to these voices and
experiences and to bring them into its purview.
And so: what time was it in early 1991? As Ice-T completed the cutting of his
album Original Gangster, bombs were about to be dropped on Baghdad. Ice-T
ends his album with sympathy for the victims of the upcoming war and for blacks
taken from their communities to a fight in the deserts of the Middle East that didnt
really concern them. In the next chapter, I will analyze this moment, using the
resources of cultural studies to dissect the Gulf War as a media event.
In the current moment, advertising, television, films, and popular music are
producing new forms of identity. It is thus obviously time to get hip to these. The
future is arriving before our eyes, bringing dramatic technological change and
resultant anxieties and problems. It is time, therefore, for cultural studies to address
these concerns. Consequently, my studies will continue to pay attention to a
multiculturalist agenda and will analyze class, race, gender, and other components
of a media culture studies, paying attention to omissions and exclusions, as well as
representations and discourses, in key artifacts of contemporary media culture.
In the next chapter, however, I want to enlarge the focus of a multiperspectival
cultural studies to focus more intently on the production and political economy of
culture, as well as analysis of text and audience, making explicit an emphasis that
has so far only been implicit. The succeeding studies will illustrate such a model
and will continue to probe the ways that media culture provides material for
identities, transcodes existing political discourses, and forms the cultural matrix in
which we live, suffer, and die.
NOTES
1 My understanding of African-American culture is deeply indebted to the works of
Michael Dyson (1993a),Ed Guerrero (1993a and 1993b), bell hooks (1984, 1990, 1992),
Mark Reid (1993), and Cornell West (1992a and 1992b), and to discussions with
Guerrero, Reid, West, and my colleague at the University of Texas, Harvey Cormier.
2 The liberation of oppressed groups can only take place through their own struggles and
in alliance with others struggling against common forces of oppression. It is from this
perspective, then, that I am carrying through these studies, as a mark of solidarity and
in alliance in struggle against common forms of class, race, and gender oppression. As
a member of a relatively privileged social group, however, I have strongly relied in this
section on the positions articulated in the writings noted in the previous note and thus
consider this study as a dialogue with my African-American brothers and sisters and
those interested in their voices and struggles.
Black voices 193
3 There has been much debate concerning what terminology to use to describe black
people of African-American descent in the U.S. Following what seems to be the current
convention, I use the term blacks and African-Americans interchangeably, though
some prefer Afro-American and some prefer to leave out the hyphen, which to me
usefully signifies the cultural duality and tensions in the experiences of blacks in the
U.S. who have both an African origin and U.S. roots and experience.
4 Guerrero also claims that in times of a general slump, Hollywood invests in low-budget
black films to up the profit-margin, whereas it ignores African-American films when
profits are high and the industry has no need to continue a specifically black-focused
product line (Guerrero 1993b:165).
5 Lees Shes Gotta Have It cost only $175,000 and pulled in over $8.5 million; School
Daze was budgeted at $5.8 million and took in over $15 million; Do the Right Thing
was budgeted at $6.5 million and grossed over $25 million (Patterson 1992:55, 92,
121). Many of Lees films have also been profitable in the video-cassette market.
Evidently, the money made on these films persuaded the Hollywood money establishment
that Lee and other young black directors were marketable and funded a renaissance of
black film in the early 1990s (see Guerrero 1993b:157ff. and Patterson 1992:223f.).
Reid, however, notes that Lees own films draw on earlier black cinema: Lees film
journals never recognize his debt to other black filmmakers, yet he borrows from their
cinematic portrayals of urban black life and their use of contemporary black music
(Reid 1993:107).
6 The following study was first presented in a symposium on Malcolm X organized by
Mark Reid at the Society for Cinema Studies, April 17, 1993, and was then presented in
a workshop on contemporary film at the American Sociology Association in August 1993.
7 I do not know whether Brecht specifically influenced Lee, or if Lee (re)invented
something like a Brechtian cinema out of his own experiences and resources. I have not
yet found any specific references to Brecht in the book publications that Lee regularly
produces on his films, and have found only one mention of a possible Brecht/Lee
connection in the growing literature on the black director. Paul Gilroy, in a critique of
Lee in The Washington Post (November 17, 1991), notes that like Brecht who has
influenced him so much, Lees loudly declared political commitments only end up
trivializing the political reality at stake in his work and thereby diminishing its
constructive political effect. But other than this (contestable) statement, Gilroy and
other critics have not yet explored Lees appropriation of Brechts aesthetic strategies.
For a fuller presentation of Brechts aesthetics and politics, see Kellner 1981.
8 See Barthes (1975) on the writerly modernist text that requires an active reader.
9 Jameson (1990 and 1991) stresses the role of individual vision and style in modernism,
while Bürger (1984 [1974]) analyzes the historical avant garde that attempts to change
art and life, as opposed to more formalistically oriented modernist art.
10 This reading was suggested in conversation by Zygmunt Bauman after a series on
postmodern film at the summer 1992 10th anniversary conference of Theory, Culture,
and Society. In addition, Lees DRT is read as a postmodern film in a somewhat
indeterminate sense in Denzin 1991:125ff; likewise, Baker (1993a:1745) describes
Lee as a true postmodern with an astute, witty, brilliant critique of postmodern,
urban hybridity in DRT, but without giving the term postmodern any substance. I
will argue below that Lee basically grounds his politics and aesthetic strategies in
modernist positions and is not in any important sense postmodernist.
11 Of course, there are many postmodern politics, ranging from the nihilism of the post
1980s Baudrillard to the pragmatic reformism of Lyotard and Rorty, to the multiculturalist
identity politics of many women and minority group postmoderns; see the survey in
Best and Kellner 1991.
12 This is an homage to the Robert Mitchum character in Night of the Hunter, who was,
194 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
however, quite evil, thus Lees appropriation of this symbolism perhaps inadvertently
coded Raheem as more negative than Lee intended.
13 Lee indicates that he is down on Black youth exhibiting gold chains and the like (They
dont understand how worthless that shit is in the long run), but doesnt do anything in
the film to criticize this form of consumerism and in fact reproduces it in his cinematic
images and capitalist ventures (see Lee and Jones 1989:59, 110 for Lees disclaimers).
14 Patterson (1992:125ff.) notes some criticisms of Lees commercial activity and I return
to critical evaluation of Lees cultural politics later in this chapter.
15 bell hooks (1990:179) complains that a stuttering and inarticulate black youth is chosen
to represent the profoundly intelligent and articulate views of Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King.
16 Put differently, Lees portrayal of racism does not take into account logical types, that
there is a hierarchy of racial virulence, usually dictated by color (blacks being subject
to the most extreme racism, followed by Hispanics, Asians, and ethnics like Italians).
Other hierarchies are those of gender (with women below men), sexual preference
(with gays subject to prejudice from straights), and so on, such that black, lesbian
women would suffer significantly more oppression than, say, Hispanic men. The scene
under question, however, portrays all forms of racism in terms of linguistic equivalence
of cultural difference and racial hatred (I am grateful to Rhonda Hammer for this insight).
17 In interviews after the release of the film, Lee said that he was constantly amazed at
how people were indignant over the destruction of property, but few of these people
seemed to focus on the black youths death. Lee was initially concerned to interrogate
the conditions that could lead to wanton killings of black youth, spurred on by the
Howard Beach killings in which white youth gratuitously assaulted black youth, leading
to one of their deaths. Thus, Lee seems to believe that violent protest is a legitimate
response to the senseless killing of blacks, as would, presumably, Malcolm X himself.
In a book on the making of DRT (Lee and Jones 1989), Lee remarks: The character I
play in Do the Right Thing is from the Malcolm X school of thought: An eye for an
eye. Fuck the turn-the-other-cheek shit. If we keep up that madness well be dead. YO,
ITS AN EYE FOR AN EYE (ibid., 34; Lees capitals).
18 This reading was suggested by Kelly Oliver in a comment on an earlier draft of my
paper. Indeed, as indicated in note 17, Lee was angry that many viewers and reviewers
seemed to be very upset by the destruction of property, but were overlooking that a
black youth was killed by the police.
19 In a throw-away line, Mookies sister Jade mentions that shed like to see something
positive happen for the community, but it isnt clear what she has in mind and in the
absence of a more complete development of her political views, one can only guess.
20 It is precisely this nihilism that Cornell West warns blacks against (1992b).
21 It was generally overlooked in the reviews of the film that a good part of Jungle Fever
was spent attacking the crack scene, portraying it as a dead end and in extremely negative
terms as a major force of destruction in the black community. Lee avoided the issue of
drugs, however, in his earlier films, for which he was criticized.
22 Brecht too was sympathetic to criminals and often presented them positively, as in the
Three-Penny Opera. At times, they were figures of oppressed proletarians, though Brecht
also used the gangster figure to present capitalists and fascists.
23 Although the narrative suggests that Malcolm was attracted to the white woman, Sophia,
as a means of exerting sexual power and gaining racial revenge, there are both positive
and negative images of the relationship, which is more favorably presented than the
image of interracial relationships in Jungle Fever, despite the fact that Malcolm X
himself came to sharply condemn black men pursuing white women; I interrogate Lees
controversial sexual politics below.
24 The Nation of Islam, for instance, preached black superiority, presented the white man
Black voices 195
as a devil, and in general engaged in racist teachings, advocating black separatism
rather than structural social transformation. For some years, Malcolm X shared this
perspective, but eventually distanced himself from such teachings and developed more
revolutionary and internationalist perspectives. See such collections of Malcolm Xs
later writings as X 1992.
25 Obviously, the question of historical accuracy is important in evaluating a film that has
the pretense of telling the truth about Malcolm X s life. Lees book on the film (Lee
and Wiley 1992) indicates that he was attempting to uncover the truth of Malcolm Xs
life through research and interviews, so one could validly examine the film for its
historical accuracy; such a project, however, goes beyond the scope of this study. For
some reflections on historical correctness and distortions of X, see the symposium in
Cineaste, Vol. XIX, No. 4 (1993):518 and the review by hooks 1993.
26 A curious set of images for interpreting Lees sexual politics are found in the opening
dance by Rosie Perez in Do the Right Thing, hooks (1989) notes how this dance replicates
male behavior (male dance forms, boxing, fighting, etc). But Lee possibly intends this
as a powerful image of a woman of color; the dance is accompanied by the rap song
Fight the Power which puts positive energy into the scene. It is a striking, but
ambiguous sequence, perhaps signalling the films modernism which requires the viewers
to construct their own readings.
27 For Brecht, a political learning play would impart exemplary political insights and
behavior to its audience, helping to politicize them and to incite the audience to participate
in social change. It is not clear that Lees films function in this way, but rather, as I am
arguing, serve instead primarily as black morality tales.
28 See, for example, Reed 1993, 1819 and Baraka 1993, 145ff.
29 See the discussion on these issues in hooks 1992 and West 1992b.
30 Some histories and analyses of rap that I have sampled fail to cite Gil Scott-Heron and
the Last Poets as a precursor of rap. I remember their work well and when I began
hearing rap more and more in the 1980s, and began hearing as well a highly politicized
rap, I always harked back to Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, a great group worth
listening and relistening to today. I was therefore gratified to read that Chuck D of
Public Enemy stated:
The thing about the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron is that they were into a jazz-type
approach, doing poetry over a beat. When rap music came along it was poetry over a
beat too, but in time. More important than the Last Poets and Gil-Scott Heron, to us,
was James Brown. His record, Say it Loud, Im Black and Im Proud had the most
impact because it was danceable and yet you still thought about itthe groove was
funk and soul, which was different from jazz.
(cited in Decker 1993:63).
31 On hip hop culture, seeToop 1984; George 1988; and Dyson 1993a. Paul Gilroy (1991)
points to the British and Caribbean roots of rap and hip hop. On most definitions, rap is
one category of hip hop culture that includes styles of dress and expression, dancing,
graffiti art, and other forms of cultural expression. Much of hip hop has disappeared, but
rap has survived and rules as the music of choice of significant segments of black youth.
32 In a 1990 New York Times Op-Ed piece on 2 Live Crew, during the time of their obscenity
trial, distinguished black scholar Henry Louis Gates defended the group, saying that its
verbal excess was satire, that its songs like Me so horny, were a carnivalesque
transgression of propriety, and that they displayed great virtuosity. One of the foremost
critics of African-American culture, Houston Baker, countered that such a blanket defense
fails to discriminate between various rap groups and that more discriminate evaluation
would note that 2 Live Crew are distinctly inferior to the better rap groups and that their
songs are offensive and mediocre (Baker 1993b:64f.).
196 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
33 This holds true not only for the black community: rape and crimes against women are
at an intolerable level in all races and socio-economic classes, thus rap articulates
misogynist attitudes not only in the black community, but throughout U.S. society.
Indeed, an unfortunate aspect of raps popularity may be that it articulates negative
attitudes toward women that may replicate attitudes in non-black groups who are unable
to openly articulate such aggressive sexism.
34 A rap roundtable in Essence (September 1992:83ff.) discusses the issue and concludes,
in the words of Q-Tip: Black men and women have both got to learn to work together
(120). So while, negatively, rap undeniably has male suprematist attitudes and blatant
sexism, it has also promoted debate over these phenomena in the black community, as
well as the society at large.
35 John Fiske reminds us that four months before the Rodney King affair, another black
suspect, Tracy Mayberry, was beaten to death by police, but it, like so many similar
cases, was practically invisible because of its failure to be documented in media culture
(Fiske 1993:227f.). Fiske has an excellent account of Black Liberation radio and other
forms of resistance in contemporary Afro-American culture, but curiously ignores rap
and other forms of black cultural expression like the film and novel. Indeed, Fiskes
recent work marks a shift from concern with texts within cultural studies to the culture
of everyday life.
36 For an illuminating discussion of the resonances of 1960s black radicalism and
Afrocentric black nationalism in contemporary rap, see Decker 1993.
37 Public Enemy and other rappers are often very positive toward the Nation of Islam, and
Ice Cube surprised some followers by coming out as an adherent to the movement in
his 1991 album Death Certificate which I discuss below.
38 St. Ides is a high alcohol-content beer that Ice Cube endorsed in an ad, for which he
was criticized by some.
39 Decker is strongly critical of Sister Souljah for replicating Public Enemys patriarchal
attitudes when she sang with the group, implying that she had no feminist perspective
(Decker 1993:67ff., 77), while the song cited is definitely critical of black male behavior
from a feminist perspective.
40 John Singletons Boyz N the Hood, in which Ice Cube plays, opens with the statistics
that: One out of every 21 black American males will be murdered in their lifetime.
Most will die at the hands of another black male. Some other statistics:
For black men between the ages of 18 and 29, suicide is the leading cause of death.
Between 1973 and 1986, the real earnings of black males between the ages of 18 and
29 fell 31 percent as the percentage of young black males in the workforce plummeted
20 percent. The number of black men who dropped out of the workforce altogether
doubled from 13 to 25 percent. By 1989, almost 32 percent of black men between 16
and 19 were unemployed, compared to 16 percent of white men. And while blacks
comprise only 12 percent of the nations population, they make up 48 percent of the
prison populationOnly 14 percent of the white males who live in large metropolitan
areas have been arrested, but the percentage for black males is 51 percent.
(Dyson 1993:209)
41 Public Enemy released a 1993 collection of their Greatest Misses, alluding to the fact
that their songs were usually not played on radio, despite their great popularity. Likewise,
their powerful music videos, like Shut it Down, are rarely shown on mainstream
television.
42 There is, to be sure, a postmodernism of resistance as well as a ludic or apolitical
postmodernism (see Foster 1983).
43 Wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore, Tipper Gore was one of the founders,
with Nancy Baker, wife of Republican party luminary and key player in the Reagan and
Black voices 197
Bush administation, James Baker, of the Parents Music Resource Center. Ms. Gore
became President of the controversial group which attacked the lyrics of rock and rap
music, calling for a ratings system to offer parental guidance. The group created a
tremendous media stir and was widely debated (see Grossberg 1992).
198
Chapter 6
Reading the Gulf War
Production/text/reception
In previous chapters, I indicated some of the ways cultural studies could analyze
how cultural texts transcoded political and ideological discourses on both the
macro level of major political events and struggles and the micro level of everyday
life. I suggested how cultural studies could also use its readings of cultural texts
to illuminate the socio-political events and realities of the era and how analysis
of the competing political discourses and struggles could be used as a framework
to analyze cultural texts. In this chapter, I will indicate how the methods of cultural
studies can be used to analyze and critique political events like the Gulf War
and will also be concerned with expanding my conception of a multiperspectival
cultural studies.
In a sense, the 1990s war against Iraq was a cultural-political event as much
as a military one.1 In retrospect, the Bush Administration and the Pentagon
carried out one of the most successful public relations campaigns in the history
of modern politics in its use of the media to mobilize support for the war. The
mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere tended to be a compliant
vehicle for the government strategy to manipulate the public, thereby imperiling
democracy which requires informed citizens, checks and balances against
excessive government power, and a free and vigorous critical media (see Kellner
1990a, 1992b).
And so cultural studies faces the challenge of explaining how the successful
manipulation of the media and public took place during the crisis in the Gulf and
the war against Iraq. A politically active cultural studies should intervene in the
key social and political debates of the day and attempt to illuminate major political
events and crises, as well as the popular texts of media culture and audience reception
and practices. As we shall see, cultural studies is particularly well suited to undertake
such tasks and practitoners who wish cultural studies to be political and to connect
with the key political events of the era should not shirk such responsibilities. It is
also the duty of good citizens to learn techniques of media manipulation and to see
through government and commercial propaganda and disinformation, since
democracy can only flourish if there are informed and active citizens.
In this chapter, I will thus apply the methods of cultural studies to the text and
effects of the Gulf War (itself a media construct, as we shall see). I will also
Reading the Gulf War 199
illustrate my model of a multiperspectival cultural studies, which combines 1)
analysis of the production and political economy of texts with 2) textual analysis
and interpretation, and 3) analysis of audience reception and use of media culture.
I argued in Chapter 1 that, on the whole, recent work in cultural studies has tended
to ignore political economy and the production of culture and has been overly
textualist, or has focused narrowly and one-sidedly on ethnographic study of
audience reception of texts. Thus, cultural studies has tended to focus critical
attention on the analysis of media and consumer culture and its reception at the
expense of context and analysis of how media culture is produced. I will accordingly
demonstrate the need to focus on the production, reception, and effects of the texts
of media culture in order to explain the role of the media in events like the war
against Iraq.
This multiperspectival approach is necessary to overcome more limited
approaches that primarily focus on text and audience. Accordingly, I first discuss
the production of the text of the crisis in the Gulf and then the Gulf War. This
will involve analysis of disinformation and propaganda campaigns by the Bush
Administration, the Pentagon, and their allies, as well as analysis of the constraints
produced by the so-called pool system. I also indicate how the political economy
of the media in the United States facilitated the manufacturing of consent for U.S.
government policies. Then I analyze the meanings embedded in the text of the war
against Iraq and the reception of the text by the audience. The latter process will
involve some speculation on why the Gulf War was popular with its audiences and
how the Bush Administration and the Pentagon mobilized public support for the
war. My example indicates how I envisage cultural studies as a political project
concerned with the key issues of the day.
DISINFORMATION AND THE PRODUCTION OF NEWS
The war against Iraq can be read as a text produced by the Bush Administration,
the Pentagon, and the media which utilized images and discourse of the crisis and
then the war to mobilize consent and support for the U.S. military intervention.
Unpacking the text of the crisis in the Gulf and then the Gulf War requires
analysis of the process of the production of news and information, including analysis
of sources, gatekeeping and censorship, codes and practices of normal journalism,
the sociology of news production, and processes of disinformation and propaganda.
This dimension of cultural studies has been downplayed and I believe that this is
highly unfortunate because analysis of the production of news and information, as
well as entertainment, sheds important light on the origins and context of the
emergence of cultural texts which contributes to understanding their meaning and
effects.
Analysis of the text of the crisis in the Gulf indicates that from the beginning
the mainstream news institutions followed the lines of the Bush Administration
and Pentagon.2 Mainstream media in the U.S. are commercial media, subject to
intense competition for audiences and profits. Consequently, mainstream television,
Reading the Gulf War 201
newspapers, and news magazines do not want to alienate consumers, and thus are
extremely cautious in going against public opinion and the official government
line. The mainstream media also favor official government sources for their stories,
especially in times of crisis. Thus, they tend to be conduits for U.S. government
policies and actions, though there are significant exceptions (see Kellner 1990a).
In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in early August 1990, the U.S.
government began immediately, first, to build consensus for the U.S. military
intervention and, then, to promote a military solution to the crisis, and the
mainstream media were compliant accomplices. When the Bush Administration
sent a massive troop deployment to the region, the mainstream media applauded
these actions and became a conduit for mobilizing support for U.S. policy. For
weeks, few dissenting voices were heard in the mainstream media and, especially,
TV reports, commentary, and discussion strongly privileged a military solution to
the crisis, serving as a propaganda vehicle for the U.S. military and national security
apparatus which was facing severe budget cutbacks on the very eve of the invasion.
No significant TV debate took place over the dangerous consequences of the massive
U.S. military response to the Iraqi invasion, or over the interests and policies which
the military intervention served. Critics of U.S. policy were largely absent from
the mainstream media coverage of the crisis, and little analysis was presented which
departed from issues presented by the Bush Administration.
Big lies and disinformation
The Bush Administration controlled the media discourse in part through
disinformation and propaganda, and in part by means of control of the press via
the pool system. In the early days of the crisis in the Gulf, for instance, the Bush
Administration carried through a highly successful disinformation campaign by
means of their control and manipulation of sources which legitimated the U.S.
military deployment in Saudi Arabia on August 8, 1990. During the first days of
the crisis, the U.S. government constantly claimed that the Iraqis were mobilizing
troops on the border of Saudi Arabia, poised to invade the oil-rich kingdom. This
was sheer disinformation and later studies revealed that Iraq had no intention of
invading Saudi Arabia and did not have large numbers of troops on the Saudi
border in a threatening posture (see the discussion below and Kellner 1992b for
documentation of this claim).
The disinformation campaign that legitimated the U.S. sending troops to Saudi
Arabia began working through the Washington Post on August 7, 1990, the same
day Bush announced that he was sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia. In a front
page story by Patrick Tyler, the Post claimed that in a previous days meeting
between the U.S. chargé daffairs, Joseph Wilson, and Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein, Hussein was highly belligerent, claiming that Kuwait was part of Iraq,
that no negotiation was possible, that he would invade Saudi Arabia if they cut off
the oil pipes which delivered Iraqi oil across Saudi territory to the Gulf, and that
American blood would flow in the sand if the U.S. sent troops to the region.
202 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
A later transcript of the Wilson-Hussein meeting revealed, however, that Hussein
was cordial, indicated a willingness to negoiate, insisted that he had no intention
of invading Saudi Arabia, and opened the doors for a diplomatic solution to the
crisis. The Post story, however, was taken up by the television networks, wire
services, and press, producing an image that there was no possibility of a diplomatic
solution and that decisive action was needed to protect Saudi Arabia from the
aggressive Iraqis. Such a storyline legitimated the sending of U.S. troops to the
Gulf and provided a perfect justification for Bushs intervention in the region.
Editorial columns in the Washington Post the same day supported the imminent
Bush Administration deployment. Mary McGrory published a column titled The
Beast of Baghdad, which also assumed that Iraq was set to invade Saudi Arabia
and which called upon Bush to bomb Baghdad! Precisely the same line appeared
in an op-ed piece by the Posts associate editor and chief foreign correspondent
Jim Hoagland who kicked in with a column: Force Hussein to Withdraw (p.
A19). As certain as McGrory of Iraqs imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia, Hoagland
opened by proclaiming that:
Saddam Hussein has gone to war to gain control of the oil fields of Kuwait
and ultimately of Saudi Arabia. The United States must now use convincing
military force against the Iraqi dictator to save the oil fields and to preserve
American influence in the Middle East.
(Washington Post August 7, 1990)
According to Hoagland, Saddam Hussein respects only force and will respond to
nothing else.
The rest of the article consisted of false analysis, questionable analogies, and
bellicose banality. Hoagland claimed that the Iraqi dictators base of support is
too narrow and too shaky to withstand a sharp, telling blow. Yet some six weeks
of the most vicious bombing in history were unable to dislodge Hussein whose
support, or staying power, was obviously much stronger than Hoagland could
imagine. Hoagland also believed that he [Hussein] is so hated at home that his
defeat, even by foreign forces, will be greeted as deliverance by his own nation
and by much of the Arab world. As it turned out, both Iraq and the Arab world
were deeply divided over Hussein and the sweeping generalities that Hoagland
proclaimed were totally off the mark.
Hoagland also claimed that Ronald Reagans decision to bomb Libya was the
right model for Bush to follow. This example was revealing because Muammar
Qadhafi preceded Saddam Hussein as a symbolically constructed enemy upon
which national hatred could be projected, and thus served as an object lesson for
Third-World countries that refused to submit to domination by the neo-imperialist
superpowers.3 Moreover, it is far from certain that the terrorist incident for which
Qadhafi was punished (i.e., the bombing of a Berlin disco) was carried out by
groups affiliated with Libya. But facts have little relevance in an ideologues brief
for bombing.
In his opinion piece, Hoagland lectured George Bush on why he must take
Reading the Gulf War 203
urgent and forceful action to save his presidency and, like McGrory, urged military
action against Iraq. Hoagland assumed both that Iraq planned to invade Saudi
Arabia and that only a military blow from George Bush could save the day. In fact,
there were important Arab diplomatic initiatives underway, blocked by the United
States, but these efforts were ignored by the war-mongering Hoagland.4 Letting
his reactionary beliefs slip through, Hoagland interpreted Iraqs invasion of Kuwait
as a challenge to the legitimacy of all remaining monarchies in the Arabian
Peninsula, where Britain established most existing boundaries and political systems
in the colonial era. Hoagland thus defined the principles at stake as the legitimacy
of some of the most reactionary monarchies in the world, with borders drawn by
British colonialists who deliberately deprived Iraq of a viable seaport and robbed
national groups like the Palestinians and the Kurds of their homelands.
Indeed, Hoaglands whole article manifests what Edward Said (1978) described
as an Orientalist mentality in which white Westerners establish their superiority
by vacuous generalizations about people in the Arab world. Hoagland characterized
Arabs as understanding only force and incapable of defending themselves and
solving their own problems. For him, the Gulf crisis is thus the locus of a rare
case where the United States would be unwise not to use force. Analyzing such
intellectually bankrupt pleas for a military strike against Iraq would not be worth
the time and energy except that Bush Administration officials paid close attention
to Hoaglands columns. Further, his poorly written, badly argued, and banal punditry
was highly acclaimed in political circles; indeed, he was awarded a Pulitzer prize
for searching and prescient columns on events leading up to the Gulf War. In
addition, his and McGrorys columns are significant because they were published
in the Washington Post, supposedly a bastion of liberal enlightenment, and read by
U.S. policymakers. Further, McGrorys demonization of Hussein was retooled and
republished in Newsweek (Sept. 3, 1990), part of the Washington Post Company.
Thus, the Bush Administration and Washington Post disinformation and
propaganda concerning the Iraqis readiness to invade Saudi Arabia worked
effectively to shape media discourse and public perception of the crisis and to
legitimate Bushs sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia. In particular, Patrick Tylers
front-page story concerning Husseins meeting with Joe Wilson and Iraqs alleged
refusal to negotiate a solution or leave Kuwait provided the crucial media frame
through which debate over the advisibility of sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia
was conducted.5 On August 7, PBS McNeil-Lehrer discussion of the proper U.S.
response to Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, co-anchor Judy Woodruff stated: Iraqs
leader Saddam Hussein was quoted today [in the Post storyD.K.] as saying the
invasion of Kuwait was irreversible and permanent. Later on the same show, former
national security adviser (and Iran/Contra felon) Robert McFarlane quoted the
story as evidence that Hussein was not going to leave Kuwait, and that therefore
U.S. military intervention in Saudi Arabia was necessary. And in a discussion with
Arab-American leaders as to whether a U.S. military intervention was justified,
Woodruff interjected: the U.S. chargé in Baghdad did have a two-hour meeting
with Saddam Hussein yesterday which by all accounts was very unsatisfactory as
204 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
Saddam Hussein insisted that he was going to stay in Kuwait and made what were
reported to be veiled threats against other nations in the areaall lies that Bush
Administration officials fed to the Post, which were then disseminated by other
mainstream media.
In his early morning television speech on August 8, which announced and
defended sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, Bush claimed that the Saudi
government requested our help, and I responded to that request by ordering U.S.
air and ground forces to deploy to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, accounts
of the Saudi-U.S. negotiations later indicated that the United States pressured the
Saudis to allow U.S. military intervention into their country (Woodward 1991:241ff.
and Salinger and Laurent 1991:110ff.). Bush repeated the dubious claim that Iraq
has massed an enormous war machine on the Saudi border, and his administration
emphasized this theme in discussion with the media, which obediently reproduced
the argument. At 9:24 a.m. on August 8, for instance, Bob Zelnick, ABCs Pentagon
correspondent, dutifully reported that the Pentagon informed him that Iraqi troop
presence had doubled since the invasion of Kuwait, that there were now more than
200,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait with a large force poised to invade Saudi Arabia.
Yet it is not at all certain how many troops Iraq actually deployed in Kuwait
during the first weeks of the crisis. All pre-invasion reports produced by the Bush
Administration indicated that Iraq had amassed about 100,000 troops on the border
of Kuwait. Initial reports during the first few days after the invasion suggested that
Iraq actually had between 80,000 and 100,000 troops in Kuwait, more than enough
for an occupation, as the Bush Administration liked to point out and as the
mainstream media diligently reported; once the U.S. forces were on their way to
Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi forces suddenly doubled and reports claimed that there
were at least 100,000 Iraqi troops amassed on the border of Saudi Arabia. But
these figures invariably came from Bush Administration or Pentagon sources, and
sources critical of the U.S. claims concerning the number of Iraqi troops deployed
revealed a quite different figure.
St. Petersburg Times reporter Jean Heller published two stories (November 30
and January 6) suggesting that satellite photos indicated far fewer Iraqi troops in
Saudi Arabia than the Bush Administration claimed (the January 6 story was
republished in In These Times, February 27, 1991:12). Hellers suspicions were
roused when she saw a Newsweek Periscope item that ABCs Prime Time Live
had never used several satellite photos of occupied Kuwait City and southern Kuwait
taken in early September. Purchased by ABC from the Soviet commercial satellite
agency Soyez-Karta, the photos were expected to reveal the presence of a massive
Iraqi troop deployment in Kuwait, but failed to disclose anything near the number
of troops claimed by the Bush Administration. ABC declined to use them and
Heller got her newspaper to purchase the satellite photos of Kuwait from August 8
and September 13 and of Saudi Arabia from September 11. Two satellite experts
who had formerly worked for the U.S. government failed to find evidence of the
alleged buildup. The Pentagon kept saying the bad guys were there, but we dont
see anything to indicate an Iraqi force in Kuwait of even 20 percent the size the
Reading the Gulf War 205
administration claimed, said Peter Zimmerman, who served with the U.S. Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency during the Reagan administration (Heller, In
These Times, February 27, 1991:2).
Both satellite photos taken on August 8 and September 13 showed a sand cover
on the roads, suggesting that there were few Iraqi troops on the Saudi border where
the Bush Administration claimed that they were massed, threatening to invade
Saudi Arabia. Pictures of the main Kuwaiti airport showed no Iraqi planes in sight,
though large numbers of U.S. planes were visible in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon
refused to comment on the satellite photos, but to suggestions advanced by ABC
(which decided not to show the photos) that the pictures were not of high enough
quality to detect the Iraqi troops, Heller responded that the photograph of the north
of Saudi Arabia showed all the roads swept clean of sand and clearly depicted the
U.S. troop build-up in the area. By September, the Pentagon was claiming that
there were 265,000 Iraqi troops and 2,200 tanks, deployed in Kuwait, which posed
a threat to Saudi Arabia. But the photographs reveal nowhere near this number
and, so far, the U.S. government has refused to release its satellite photographs.
Indeed, Woodward (1991) noted that the Saudis had sent scouts across the border
into Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion to see if they could detect the Iraqi troops that
the United States claimed were massed for a possible invasion of their country.
The scouts had come back reporting nothing. There was no trace of the Iraqi
troops heading toward the kingdom (Woodward 1991:2589). Soon after, the
U.S. team arrived with photos of the Iraqi troops allegedly massed on the Saudi
border, and General Norman Schwarzkopf explained to the Saudis that the Iraqis
had sent small command-and-control units ahead of the mass of troops, which
would explain why the Saudi scouts failed to see them (ibid., 1991:268). Former
CIA officer Ralph McGehee told journalist Joel Bleifuss: There has been no
hesitation in the past to use doctored satellite photographs to support the policy
position that the U.S. wants supported (In These Times, September 19, 1990:5).
Indeed, Emery (1991) reported that King Hussein of Jordan was also sent pictures
of tanks moving along roads near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border which had been shown
to the Saudis, and that King Hussein claimed that the Saudis had pressed the
panic button when they saw the photographs. King Hussein was skeptical and
argued that if Saddam Hussein had wanted to invade the Saudis, he would have
moved immediately, when the only thing between him and the Saudi capital was a
tiny and untestedif expensively equippedSaudi army (Emery 1991:15).
Here is how the disinformation campaign worked to legitimate U.S. deployment
of troops in Saudi Arabia: high Bush Administration officials called in journalists
who would serve as conduits for stories that Iraq refused to negotiate a withdrawal
from Kuwait and that they had troops stationed on the borders of Saudi Arabia,
threatening to invade the oil-rich kingdom. The Pentagon and the Bush
Administration also released information at press conferences concerning the Iraqi
threat to Saudi Arabia and unwillingness to negotiate, and these official
pronouncements supplemented the unofficial briefings of reporters. In turn, editorial
writers and commentators on TV networks took up these claims, which they used
206 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
to bolster arguments concerning why it was necessary for the U.S. to send troops
to Saudi Arabia.
Hence, disinformation stories were planted and then reproduced and circulated,
producing the effect desired. Indeed, as noted, there are reasons to believe that the
Bush Administration may have exaggerated the number of Iraqi troops in Kuwait
and the threat to Saudi Arabia to scare the Saudis into accepting the U.S. troops
and to justify its own troop build-up in the region and eventual military action. The
mainstream media reproduced the U.S. claims and figures as facts with newspapers
like the Washington Post and the television networks serving as conduits for Bush
Administration disinformation. Moreover, Post editorial writers and columnists
actively promoted a military solution, urging an attack on Baghdad even before
Bush announced that he was sending troops to Saudi Arabia, thus becoming doubly
complicit in legitimating Bushs policies.
Moreover, the major newspapers, news magazines, and television networks did
not criticize Bushs deployment or debate whether it was wise to send so many
U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in the first place. Peace activists and the alternative
press argued against the deployment and for a U.N. peace-keeping force to be sent
to the area, rather than a massive U.S. military force, but this position got no hearing
in the mainstream media (FAIR, Press Release, January 1991). Furthermore, the
leaders of the Democratic party also failed to criticize the U.S. military deployment
and the press tended to neglect those congressional and other voices that opposed
the deployment, especially during its first weeks. Indeed, there were many
oppositional voices to the Bush Administrations policies that were simply excluded
from the mainstream media, thus precluding serious debate over the proper U.S.
response to Iraqs invasion of Kuwait. But the mainstream media only draw on an
extremely limited repertoire of voices and privilege the same administration officials
and top Democratic party leaders, thus freezing significant views out of public
policy debates and contributing to the crisis of democracy which is now a central
aspect of political life in the United States (Kellner 1990a).
The Hill and Knowlton propaganda campaign
And so we see that a successful disinformation campaign was undertaken by the
Bush Administration and the Pentagon in order to legitimate sending U.S. troops
to Saudi Arabia. Beginning in early October, a sustained propaganda campaign
was underway that legitimated the U.S. use of military power to force Iraq out of
Kuwait. This campaign involved demonization of the Iraqis for their rape of
Kuwait and the demonization of Saddam Hussein as another Hitler and the
incarnation of evil.6 This campaign was inspired by a British campaign during
World War I, repeated by the U.S. when it entered the war, on the rape of Belgium
which demonized the Germans as rapists and murderers of innocent children
charges later proven to be false.
The demonization of Hussein and the Iraqis was important because if they were
absolutely evil and a threat on a par with Hitler and the Nazis, no negotiation could
Reading the Gulf War 207
be possible and a diplomatic solution to the crisis was excluded. To help demonize
the Iraqis, a Kuwaiti government group financed a propaganda campaign,
undertaken by the U.S. public relations firm Hill s identity was not revealed, supposedly
to protect her family from reprisals. This story helped mobilize support for U.S.
military action, much as Bushs Willie Horton ads had helped him win the
presidency by playing on primal emotions. Bush mentioned the story six times in
one month and eight times in forty-four days; Vice-President Dan Quayle referred
to it frequently, as did Norman Schwarzkopf and other military spokespersons.
Seven U.S. senators cited the story in speeches supporting the January 12 resolution
authorizing war.
In a January 6, 1992 op-ed piece in the New York Times, John Mac Arthur, the
publisher of Harpers magazine, revealed that the unidentified congressional witness
was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. The girl had been brought to
Congress by Hill s former chief of
staff when he was vice-president and a Bush loyalist, was president of Hill s 20/20 disclosed that a doctor who testified
that he had buried fourteen newborn babies that had been taken from their
incubators by the soldiers was also lying. The doctor was actually a dentist and
later admitted to ABC that he had never examined the babies and had no way of
knowing how they had died. The same was true of Amnesty International, which
published a report based on this testimony. (Amnesty International later retracted
the report, which had been cited frequently by Bush and other members of his
administration). ABC also disclosed that Hill focus group survey, which brings groups of people together to find out what
stirs or angers them. The focus group responded strongly to the Iraqi baby atrocity
stories, and so Hill
stories promoted by Bush Administration officials to demonize the Iraqis. TV
broadcast stories about radio stations playing records that simulated rock classics
with new lyrics vilifying Saddam. T-shirts appeared with vicious images of Saddam
Hussein and the Iraqis. Tabloid magazines published sensational stories detailing
his alleged sexual crimes and perversions (Rifas 1994) It is as if U.S. popular and
political culture needs evil demons to assure its sense of its own goodness and the
media responded with the demonology of the Iraqi dictator.
Thus, the extremely negative framing of Hussein and the Iraqis ruled out a
diplomatic solution to the crisis. In addition, the constant war talk created a climate
in which only military action could resolve the crisis. The media presentation of the
confrontation as a struggle between good and evil, with the evil Hussein unwilling to
negotiate and threatening the allies, produced tension and the need for a resolution
that war could best provide. The rhetoric of Iraqi rape and penetration was
deployed from the beginning of the crisis throughout the war. The media demonized
Saddams Big Gun and chemical weapons, as well as his missiles that could hit
Cairo and Tel Aviv. His very name was mispronounced as Sad-dam, evoking sadism
and damnation, and Sod-dom, evoking sodomy. Deploying both racist and sexual
rhetoric, Bush claimed that the U.S. went to war against the dark chaos of a brutal
dictator who followed the law of the jungle and systematically raped a peaceful
neighbor (quoted in Joel Bleifuss, The First Stone, In These Times, March 206,
1991:4). Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was cited in the same article,
rhetorically asking if you would let a man like that [Hussein] get his hands on what
are essentially the worlds vital organs?
Throughout American history, vengeance for rapeespecially the rape of white
women by people of colorhas been used to legitimate political and military action
against colored people. Captivity drama narratives of white women captured and
raped by Native Americans were a standard genre of colonial literature and during
the Spanish-American war, the Hearst newspapers popularized the story of the
Spanish kidnapping of an upper-class and light-skinned Cuban woman as a pretext
for U.S. intervention. John Gottlieb wrote in The Progressive that:
Bush not only used rape as a justification for the war against Iraq, but also
cited the sexual assault of an American officers wife by a Panamanian soldier
as a reason for invading that country, andused the rape of a white woman
by black convict Willie Horton to attack Michael Dukakis in 1988.
(April 1991:39)
In addition to carrying out a massive propaganda campaign, the U.S. government
also instituted a sustained effort to control information and images. A military
pool system was set up which restricted the access of the press to soldiers and the
battlefield; the press was taken to chosen sites in limited pools and were
accompanied at all times by military personnel who restricted their access and
Reading the Gulf War 209
who even censored their reports. This was the tightest control over the press in any
war in U.S. history and assured that primarily positive pictures and reporting of
the war would take place. The pool system was established after the Grenada
invasion, in which the press was not allowed on the island until after the significant
military activity. A commission was set up which outlined rules through which the
press would be allowed to report on military action in pools, supervised by the
military, which would also have censorship power. This system was used in both
the Panama invasion and war against Iraq, with highly controversial results.7
In addition, few significant antiwar voices were heard in the mainstream media
during the first months of the troop build-up in Saudi Arabia. A study by the media
watchdog group FAIR reported that during the first five months of TV coverage of
the crisis, ABC devoted only 0.7 percent of its Gulf coverage to opposition to the
military buildup. CBS allowed 0.8 percent, while NBC devoted 1.5 percent, or
13.3 minutes for all stories about protests, antiwar organizations, conscientious
objectors, and religious dissenters. Consequently, of the 2,855 minutes of TV
coverage of the crisis from August 8 to January 3, FAIR found that only 29 minutes,
or roughly 1 percent, dealt with popular opposition to the U.S. military intervention
in the Gulf (FAIR, Press Release, January 1991).
The few images of antiwar demonstrators in the U.S. that appeared during the
crisis in the Gulf often juxtaposed anti-American Arab demonstrations that
frequently burned U.S. flags with images of U.S. demonstrations. Such a
juxtaposition coded antiwar demonstrators as Arabs, as irrational opponents of
U.S. policies. U.S. demonstrators were portrayed as an unruly mob, as long-haired
outsiders; their discourse was rarely cited and coverage focused instead on the
chanting of slogans, or images of marching crowds, with media voice-overs
supplying the context and interpretation. Major newspapers and newsmagazines
also failed to cover the burgeoning new antiwar movement. Thus, just as the media
symbolically constructed a negative image in the 1960s of antiwar protestors as
irrational, anti-American, and unruly, so too did the networks present the emerging
antiwar movement of the 1990s in predominantly negative frames.
Not only was the discourse of the antiwar movement ignored, but none of the
foreign policy experts associated with the peace movementsuch as Edward Said,
Noam Chomsky or the scholars of the Institute for Policy Studiesappeared on
any nightly news program (FAIR Press Release, January 1991). A Times-Mirror
Poll, however, that was recorded in September 1990 and January 1991 discovered
pluralities of the public saying they wished to hear more about the views of
Americans who oppose sending forces to the Gulf (Special Times-Mirror News
Interest Index, January 31, 1991). Furthermore, soldiers who were alarmed at their
deployment in the Saudi desert and objected to the primitive living conditions
there were silenced, in part by Pentagon restrictions on press coverage and in part
by a press corps unwilling to search for dissenting opinions.
And yet on the eve of the war, more than 50 percent of the American public
opposed a military solution to the crisis. Perhaps images of families being separated
and young troops being sent to the Saudi desert produced a negative response to
210 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
the possibility of a war in the region that could take many U.S. lives. Perhaps,
despite the lack of critical discourse on the media, many individuals could still
think for themselves and produce antiwar opinions against the grain of the dominant
promilitary solution government and media discourse. Perhaps the memory of
Vietnam and U.S. military misadventures produced apprehensions over a war in
the Persian Gulf. But the disinformation and propaganda campaigns were successful
in that they persuaded the majority of nations in the U.N. and the U.S. Congress to
support a declaration legitimating the use of force to expell Iraq from Kuwait. And
once the war began, the Bush Administration was quickly able to mobilize support
for its positions. How was this possible and how can cultural studies contribute to
explaining the public support for a nasty and vicious military adventure?
THE MEDIA PROPAGANDA WAR
When the U.S. began military action against Iraq on January 16, 1991, the
mainstream media became a conduit for Bush Administration and Pentagon policies
and rarely allowed criticism of its positions, disinformation, and atrocities during
the war. Television served primarily as a propaganda apparatus for the multinational
forces arrayed against the Iraqis and as a cheerleader for their every victory. Anchors
like Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC went to Saudi Arabia and, along
with the network correspondents there, seemed to totally identify with the military
point of view. Whenever peace proposals were floated by the Iraqis or the Soviet
Union, the networks quickly shot them down and presented the Bush Administration
and Pentagon positions on every aspect of the war (for systematic analysis and
critique, see Kellner 1992b).
The media framed the war as an exciting narrative, as a nightly miniseries with
dramatic conflict, action and adventure, danger to allied troops and civilians, evil
perpetuated by villainous Iraqis, and heroics performed by American military
planners, technology, and troops. Both CBS and ABC used the logo Showdown
in the Gulf during the opening hours of the war, and CBS continued to utilize the
logo throughout the war, coding the event as a battle between good and evil. Indeed,
the Gulf War was presented as a war movie with beginning, middle, and end. The
dramatic bombing of Baghdad during the opening night and exciting Scud wars of
the next days enthralled a large TV audience and the following weeks provided
plenty of excitement, ups and downs, surprises, and complex plot devices. The
threats of chemical weapons, terrorism, and a bloody Iraqi ground offensive seemed
to produce great fear in the TV audiences and helped to mobilize support against
the villainous Iraqis (see discussion below for documentation). The ground war in
particular produced a surge of dramatic action and a quick resolution and happy
ending to the war (at least for those rooting for the U.S.-led coalition).
Television also presented the war visually with dramatic techno-images, playing
repeatedly the videos of high-tech precision bombing and the aerial war over
Baghdad and the Patriot/Scud wars over Saudi Arabia and Israel. The effects of the
war on American families was a constant theme, and patriotism and support for
Reading the Gulf War 211
the troops was a constant refrain of the commentators. The military released videotapes
of high-tech precision bombing which were replayed repeatedly, similar to
replays of heroics in a sports event. Indeed, sports metaphors were constantly used
and the pro-war demonstrators who chanted USA! USA! rooted for the American
side as sports fans, as if the Gulf War were the Super Bowl of wars. The military
and media kept daily tally of the score of Iraqi tanks and equipment eliminated,
though the sanitized war coverage contained no body count; figures and images
of wounded or dead soldiers were strictly forbidden. The winnability and
justification for the war were stressed and the narrative was oriented toward a
successful conclusion which was presented as a stunning victory.
It was obviously in the TV networks interests to attract the audience to their
programming and competition revolved around presenting the most patriotic,
exciting, and comprehensive coverage. To properly explicate this dimension of the
text of the Gulf War, one needs to focus on the production of the text within the
framework of the political economy of commercial television. First, the sources of
the news on the mainstream media were severely limited to the Bush Administration
and the military. This was partly the result of the pool system that restricted media
access to the theater of battle and that exercized censorship over every image and
report filed. Yet the networks themselves also restricted the range of voices that
appeared. A survey by FAIR of the TV coverage of the first two weeks of the war
revealed that of the 878 news sources used by the three major commercial networks,
only 1.5 percent were identified as antiwar protestorsroughly equivalent to the
amount of people asked to comment on how the Gulf War disrupted their travel
plans. In the forty-two nightly news broadcasts, only one leader of a peace
organization was interviewed, while seven Super Bowl players were asked their
views of the war (cited in Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, March 20, 1991:5).
On the other hand, in report after report, television portrayed prowar rallies,
yellow ribbons, and the wave of patriotism apparently sweeping the country. The
networks also personalized the U.S. troops and their families, thus bonding the
public to the troops in the desert, helping manufacture support for the U.S. military
policies. In these ways, the audience was mobilized to support every move of the
Bush Administration and the Pentagon and as the war went well and relatively
fast, the country was swept along in a victory euphoria, as if it was winning the
Super Bowl of wars and was thus number one in the world. Such imagery and
discourse helped create support for a war that barely 50 percent of the public and
Congress desired on the eve of Bushs bombing of Baghdad.
Furthermore, the audience was terrorized into support for the U.S. troops by a
series of propaganda campaigns, masterfully orchestrated by the Bush
Administration and the Pentagon. Early in the crisis, reports were leaked that Iraqi
chemical weapons were being brought to the field of battle, and throughout the
war there were many reports of the threat of Iraqi chemical weapons. In addition,
there were almost daily reports on the threats of terrorism manipulated by the
Iraqis. When the Iraqis paraded U.S. POWs on TV, there were claims that they
were torturing coalition troops. Such reports created a mass hysteria in sectors of
212 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
the audience, who were positively bonding with the troops. Moreover, after the
Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia, there were reports of thousands of
people buying gas masks and vignettes of families producing sealed rooms in their
home in the case of chemical attack. Obviously, such hysteria helped mobilize
people against the Iraqis and desire their military defeat and punishment.
Analyzing the war discourse from the perspective of the production and effects
of the media representation of the war, television and the mainstream media arguably
served as propaganda arms for U.S. government policy. The media endlessly
repeated Bush Administration big lies, such as its alleged efforts to negotiate a
settlement with the Iraqis when it was actively undermining the possibility of a
diplomatic settlement. The mainstream media repeated that the goal of the U.S.
war policy was the liberation of Kuwait until the very end when it was obvious that
the destruction of the Iraqi military and Iraqs economic and military infrastructure
was the goal. And the media repeated every propaganda line of the day, amplifying
Bush Administration claims concerning alleged torture and mistreatment of U.S.
POWs (later revealed to be highly exaggerated), that an Iraqi infant formula milk
factory destroyed by U.S. bombing was really a military installation producing
chemical/biological weapons, that a civilian sleeping shelter was really a military
command and control center, or that Iraqi environmental terrorism was responsible
for the Persian Gulf oil spill and other ecological devastation (whereas allied
bombing was also responsible; see the documentation of all these claims in Kellner
1992b).
The mainstream media projected the image of the war most desired by the
Pentagon and the Bush Administration; i.e. that it was fighting an eminently clean
and successful high-tech war. From the beginning, the bombing of Iraq was
portrayed as efficient and humane, targeting only military facilities. Over and over,
despite pictures from Iraq which revealed the contrary, the Pentagon and Bush
Administration stressed the accuracy of their bombing strategies and the oft-repeated
images of the precision bombs, with video cameras built into their heads, presented
an image of such accurate bombing. Likewise, the frequent pictures of Patriot
missiles apparently knocking out Iraqi Scud missiles created the impressions of a
clean high-tech war. Later, the Pentagon itself admitted that only 7 percent of the
bombs used were so-called smart bombs and admitted that over 70 percent of its
bombs missed their targets, but the dominant images of a high-tech war presented
an impression of a highly efficient techno-war. It was also revealed that a large
percentage of U.S. casualties resulted from friendly fire, from the bombing of
ones own troops.
Although the mainstream media served as propaganda conduits for the U.S.
government and military, in my interpretation, the media are not propaganda
instruments per se for the state as some argue (Herman and Chomsky 1988;
Chomsky 1989). Rather, one should see the major commercial networks primarily
as money machines seeking ratings and profits. If the war is popular, then in pursuit
of ratings the networks will provide a positive picture of the war, eliminating
discordant voices, as happened in the Persian Gulf War. Moreover, General Electric
Reading the Gulf War 213
and RCA, which own NBC, are major military contractors who will benefit
tremendously from a successful war, and NBC dutifully served as a Pentagon
propaganda organ from beginning to end of the war (for evidence, see Kellner
1992b). It was claimed that GE produced parts of every major weapon system
used in the war, so that the file footage of U.S. weapons and the gushingly positive
reports of their technological wonder were in effect free advertisements for products
produced by GE/NBCindeed, desire to promote U.S. weapons for sale was one
of the major purposes of the war in the first place.
But it was liberal Dan Rather of liberal CBS who served as the biggest
booster and cheerleader of the military. During the first days of the war, Rather
was the most skeptical and critical network reporter. But Rathers ratings were
falling and so he went to Saudi Arabia to report the war directly. Henceforth, he
celebrated the military and became the most fervent supporter of the ground war,
exulting in the blow out and magnificent and brilliant military action which
slaughtered the hapless Iraqis, totally demoralized after forty days of bombing and
without the technology to fight a high-tech, U.S.-led, multinational coalition military
machine.
The lack of significant critical voices in the mainstream media during the crisis
in the Gulf and then the Gulf War also can be explained by reflection on the political
economy of the media and the system of media production in the United States.
The broadcast media are afraid to go against a perceived popular consensus, to
alienate people, and to take unpopular stands because they are afraid of losing
audience shares and thus profits. Because U.S. military actions have
characteristically been supported by the majority of the people, at least in their
early stages, television is extremely reluctant to criticize what might turn out to be
popular military actions.
The broadcast media also characteristically rely on a narrow range of established
and safe commentators and are not likely to reach out to new and controversial
voices in a period of national crisis. The media generally wait until a major political
figure or established expert speaks against a specific policy and that view gains
certain credibility as marked by opinion polls or publication in respected
newspapers or journals. Unfortunately, the crisis of democracy in the United States
is such that the Democratic Party has largely supported the conservative policies
of the past decade and the party leaders are extremely cautious and slow to criticize
foreign policy actions, especially potentially popular military actions. The crisis
of liberalism is so deep in the U.S. that establishment liberals are afraid of being
called wimps or soft on foreign aggression, and thus often support policies
that their better instincts should lead them to oppose.
Consequently, the only criticisms of a major U.S. military intervention that
appeared in the mainstream media during the first weeks of the U.S. intervention
came from hawks like Zbigniev Brzezinski, and even some far right conservatives
like Pat Buchanan, while Democrats and liberals tended to go along with the initial
military build-up, until Bush doubled the U.S. forces after the November 1990 election.
Then the Democrats supported the policy of sanctions (rather than calling for a
214 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
negotiated settlement) and once the war began, for the most part supported the Bush
Administration policies, pointing again to the crisis of liberalism in the U.S.
In addition, the commercial nature of the broadcast media also intensified the
propagandistic effects of Gulf War coverage. The big advertising agencies were
extremely nervous concerning the perceived negative impact of having their
products associated with controversial and perhaps depressing events like war.8
Yet as the war proceeded, many corporations tailored their advertisements to the
growing patriotism, sprinkling their ads with flags, praises of troops, and patriotic
slogans. Red, white and blue merchandise boutiques appeared in Bloomingdales
and Neiman Marcuss department stores and in their advertising. Ralph Lauren
robes, bathing trunks, and other objects appeared embroidered with the flag.
Britches ads spouted Rugged Patriotism fashion, while Ross-Simon ads displayed
Fashionable Patriotism (McAllister 1993:224). Advertising discourse shifted from
you to our appeals, binding together the product and nation with our troops.
Golf balls apppeared with Saddam Husseins face on them, a T-shirt was marked
with a drawing of Hussein fleeing a missile with the caption: You can run but you
cant hide. Another ad featured a Saddam Condom with Directions: use this
condom to help prevent unwanted mistakes like Saddam Hussein, and a mass of
other Desert Storm paraphernelia was marketed (ibid., 1993).
The result of the propaganda blitz and war hysteria was a warrior nation that
turned many in the TV audience into fanatic supporters of the Bush Administration
war policy.
WARRIOR NATION
Part of the reason why people supported the Gulf War has to do with what might
be called territorial herd instincts. When a country is at war and in danger people
tend to support their government and pull together.9 It could be argued, however,
that during the Gulf War the country was not really in danger, that a diplomatic
rather than a military solution could best serve the national interests, and that support
of the troops required bringing them home as soon as possible. Moreover, the
country was genuinely divided at the start of the war and there was a large antiwar
movement in place before Bush began the military hostilities with Iraq. Furthermore,
Kolko (1991:25) points out that public opinion since 1969 has been increasingly
anti-interventionist and that every Rand Corporation poll had indicated that U.S.
military intervention would not receive adequate public support. Yet during the
Gulf War, the public was mobilized to support Bushs interventionist policies, in
part at least, because of the media support for the war.
To begin, the prowar consensus was mobilized through a variety of ways in
which the public identified with the troops. TV presented direct images of the
troops to the public through desert dispatches which produced very sympathetic
images of young American men and women, in harms way and serving their
country. TV news segments on families of the troops also provided mechanisms
of identification, especially because many of the troops were reservists, forced
Reading the Gulf War 215
to leave their jobs and families, making them sympathetic objects of empathy
and identification for those able to envisage themselves in a similar situation.
There were also frequent TV news stories on how church groups, schools, and
others adopted U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia as pen pals, thus more intimately
binding those at home to the soldiers abroad. As we shall see in this section,
people were also bound to troops through rituals of display of yellow ribbons,
chanting and waving flags in prowar demonstrations, and entering into various
prowar support groups.
The media also generated support for the war, first, by upbeat appraisals of
U.S. successes and then by demonizing the Iraqis that made people fervently want
a coalition victory. Initial support was won for the war effort through the mediagenerated
euphoria that the war would be over quickly, with a decisive and easy
victory for the U.S.-led coalition. Then, the audience got into the drama of the war
through experiencing the excitement of the Scud wars and the thrills of technowar
with its laser-guided bombs and missiles and videotapes of its successes. The
POW issue, the oil spills and fires, and intense propaganda campaigns by both
sides also involved the audience in the highly emotional experience of a TV war.
The drama of the war was genuinely exciting and the public immersed itself in the
sights, sounds, and language of war.
The media images of the high-tech precision bombing, (seeming) victories of
Patriot over Scud missiles, bombing of Iraq, and military hardware and troops
helped to mobilize positive feelings for the U.S. military effort in much of the
audience. Military language helped normalize the war, propaganda and
disinformation campaigns mobilized prowar discourse, and the negative images
and discourses against the Iraqis helped mobilize hatred against Iraq and Saddam
Hussein. Polls during the first weeks of the war revealed growing support for the
war effort, revealing a wide-spread propensity to believe whatever the media and
military were saying. A Times-Mirror survey of January 31, 1991, revealed that 78
percent of the public believed that the military was basically telling the truth, not
hiding anything embarrassing about its conduct of the war, and providing all of the
information it prudently could. Also in the survey 72 percent called the press
coverage objective and 61 percent called it for the most part accurate. Eight out of
ten said the press did an excellent job and 50 percent claimed to be addicted to TV
watching and said that they could not stop watching coverage of the war. Of adults
under 30, 58 percent called themselves war news addicts and 21 percent of these
addicts claimed that they were having trouble concentrating on their jobs or
normal activities, while 18 percent said that they were suffering from insomnia.
It was, I would argue, the total media and social environment that was responsible
for mobilizing support for the U.S. war policies. From morning to evening, the
nation was bombarded with images of military experts, vignettes of soldiers at
home and abroad, military families, former POWs, and others associated with the
military. Military figures, images, and discourse dominated the morning talk shows,
the network news, discussion programs, and the 24hours-a-day CNN war coverage,
as well as saturation coverage on C-Span and many other cable networks. On
216 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
home satellite dishes, the channels were saturated with live transmissions concerning
the war, as the networks prepared or presented their reports from the field, and one
satellite transponder provided hours per day of live military pool footage from
Saudi Arabia for use by the networkspropaganda provided by the military free
of charge. TV news preempted regular programs for weeks. The result was a
militarization of consciousness and an environment dominated by military images
and discourses.
I have already noted how the audience was terrorized into identification with
the U.S. war policy and there is much evidence that war hysteria indeed swept
through the nation. TV news featured frequent reports on the tremendous increase
in sales of army-surplus war merchandise. Segments showed stockbrokers buying
gas masks to take to work because they feared a terrorist attack on the New York
subways. Stores all over the country sold out of gas masks after the dramatization
of the Scud attacks on Israel and an announcement that President Bushs bodyguards
were carrying gas masks at all times. One TV news episode featured a saleswoman
who told of how a frantic mother came in the store that day to buy a plastic covering
for her childs crib like they have in Israel. On January 29, NBC featured a
woman buying a gas mask, telling how her child had been waking up in terror at
night, fearing an attack, and that she is buying a gas mask for the child to comfort
her. On February 3, CNN broadcast a segment that showed an Atlanta family buying
gas masks and constructing safe rooms in their house in case of a terrorist attack.
It is difficult to determine the degree of fear, and, in particular, fear of terrorism,
evident in the American public during the Gulf War. In his analysis of the symbolic
culture of violence in the United States, George Gerbner and his colleagues in the
Annenberg School of Communication argued for years that the culture of TV
violence produced a mean world syndrome whereby people who watched heavy
doses of TV violence were highly fearful and tended to submit to conservative
leaders who offered to alleviate their fear (Gerbner and Gross 1976). During the
crisis in the Gulf, Gerbner and his associates (1992) did research that indicated
that the amount of violence in film culture was accelerating significantly; the number
of episodes of violence in sequels to popular films like Robocop, Die Hard, and
Young Guns doubled or tripled in comparison to the original, showing that a culture
nurtured on violence needed ever heavier doses to get their fix. Such heavy doses
of violence from popular culture, however, created dispositions toward fear that
led the public to seek refuge in authoritarian leaders like George Bush or Norman
Schwarzkopf.
The war hysteria in the United States produced an infanlilization of U.S. society,
which was especially evident in the fetishism of yellow ribbons and the prowar
demonstrations. Yellow ribbons had been broadly displayed during the Iranian
hostage crisis in which U.S. hostages were held in the late 1970s by militant Iranians.
The yellow ribbons go back to the Civil War and Indian wars in which the families
of soldiers displayed yellow ribbons when their loved ones were away at war and
held in captivity (recall John Fords John Wayne vehicle She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
and the popular song Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree). The ribbons
Reading the Gulf War 217
reappeared when U.S. citizens were held captive by the Iraqis in Iraq and Kuwait
during the crisis in the Gulf.
The yellow ribbon symbolism in the Gulf War combined the hostage and soldiersin-
harms-way connotation, with a popular discourse portraying the U.S. troops as
the hostages of Sad-dam In-sane. Curiously, the symbolism of the ribbons was
transferred from hostages to soldiers; previously, the ribbons were displayed to
commemorate the situation of U.S. hostages in Iraq but were soon transferred to
the soldiers. This symbolic transference suggested that the U.S. troops in Saudi
Arabia were hostages, held against their will in the desert because of the presence
of an evil which had to be surgically removed (actually the troops and the entire
world were the hostages of the respective Iraqi and U.S. political and military
establishments which produced the war). The symbolism implied that innocent
Americans abroad were victims of foreign aggression and linked the soldiers with
their supporters on the domestic front.
Displaying yellow ribbons provided talismans, good luck charms, and signs of
social conformity all at once. It enlisted those who displayed yellow ribbons in the
war effort, making them part of the adventure. Drawing on mythological resonances,
tying ribbons to trees connected culture with nature, naturalizing the solidarity
and community of Gulf War supporters. The ribbons symbolically tied together
the community into a unified whole, bound together by its support for the troops.10
The ribbons thus signified that one supported the troops, that one was a loyal
member of the patriotic community, that one was a team player, and a good
American. They also signified, however, that one was ready to give up ones faculties
of critical thought and to submit to whatever policies and adventures the Bush
Administration might attempt.
Indeed, the sight of yellow ribbons mesmerized the media, scared Congress,
and demoralized antiwar protestors. Yellow ribbons appeared everywhere in some
neighborhoods and regions of the country and some individuals who refused to
put yellow ribbons on their homes were threatened by their neighbors. This mode
of forced conformity reveals a quasi-fascist hysteria unleashed by the Gulf War
and a disturbing massification of the public. There were indeed many examples of
protofascist behavior among the U.S. population during the Gulf War. An Italian
basketball player at Seton Hall University was thrown off the team when he refused
to wear a U.S. flag on his uniform and eventually returned to Italy after harassment
by patriots. After Professor Barbara Scott, at a campus rally at the State University
of New York, New Paltz, urged U.S. military personnel not to kill innocent people,
she was dubbed Baghdad Barbara, accused of treason by a state senator, and
subjected to hate mail and a letter campaign aimed at the university president and
Governor Mario Cuomo, urging them to fire her. In Kutztown Pennsylvania, a
newspaper editor was fired for his editorial titled How about a little peace? and
an editor was fired from a Round Rock, Texas paper for publishing an interview
with a Palestinian-American expressing antiwar views.11
Arab-Americans were victims of government harassment and intimidation since
the beginning of the crisis. Neal Saad described how Arab-Americans were visited
218 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
by the FBI in their homes, places of business, and neighborhoods and were
questioned concerning attitudes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, the PLO, Arab-
American political activities, and terrorism (in Clark 1992:188ff.). During the war,
harassment intensified and Pan American Airlines actually decided not to allow
Arab passengers on their planes! Identifying ethnic members of a country with
the enemy itself promotes oppression of minorities who belong to these groups.
This identification happened in World War II with Japanese-Americans who were
interned in concentration camps and began in the crisis in the Gulf with FBI
investigations of Arab-Americans. The result was a resurgence of racism against
Arabs and acts of violence against them.
Anti-Arab racism proliferated within U.S. popular culture. For years, Arabs
had regularly been villainized in Hollywood films and American television
entertainment (see Kellner and Ryan 1988 and my study in Chapter 2), and during
the Gulf War anti-Arab sentiments were mobilized against Iraqis. The words Bomb
Iraq were superimposed on the lyrics of the Beach Boys song Barbara Ann. A
radio show in Georgia proclaimed, towelhead weekend, telling callers to phone
in when they heard the traditional Islamic call to prayer; a disk jockey in Toledo,
Ohio solicited funds from listeners to buy a ticket to Iraq for an Iraqi-American
professor who was critical of the war. Jennie Anderson wrote:
In the United States, anti-Arab propaganda is a hot commercial item. A widely
disseminated T-shirt pictures a U.S. Marine pointing a rifle at an Arab on the
ground, with the caption, HOW MUCH IS OIL NOW? Another briskly selling
T-shirt shows military planes attacking an Arab on a camel, with the caption,
ID FLY 10,000 MILES TO SMOKE A CAMEL,
(The Progressive, February 1991:289).
Another T-Shirt read: Join the army, see interesting places, meet new people, and
kill them.
In addition, there was much violence against Arab-Americans in the United
States during the Gulf War.12 Even before the war began, businesses owned by
Arab-Americans were bombed, an Arab-American businessman was beaten by a
white supremacist mob in Toledo, a Palestinian family riding in a car was shot at in
Kansas City, and an Arab-American who appeared on a Pennsylvania television
program received seven death threats. Later, Edward Said and other Arab-American
activists received death threats, and during the Gulf War itself violence against
Arab-Americans accelerated. The United States had demonized Arabs for years in
the figures of the Yasar Arafat, Muammar Qadhafi, and images of Arab terrorists.
The demonization of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis heated up racist passions that
exploded into violence against Arab-Americans.
Yet wars also divide countries between those who do and do not support the
official war policies and the Gulf War produced such division and conflict in the
country. It polarized individuals into pro- and anti-war groups, it alienated people
from those who did not share their views, it ruptured families, friendships, and the
vestiges of communities that have survived the onslaught of television and the
Reading the Gulf War 219
consumer society. Although TV portrayed the division clearly in the case of Arcata,
California, a town torn between pro- and anti-war citizens (i.e. on a CBS news
segment on January 24 and an NBC segment on February 3), one rarely saw the
genuine divisions in the country over the Gulf War, or the anti-war voices as the
war ground on.
During the Gulf War individuals were not merely passive spectators of the media
war, but there were active pro- and anti-war demonstrations and organizing. Indeed,
the Bush Administration promoted the line that one was either pro-war and a good
citizen, or anti-war and thus not a good citizen, not a patriotic American. Call-in
radio and television shows featured rabid and aggressive attacks on the anti-war
demonstrators, and more and more pro-war demonstrations and violent opposition
to the antiwar demonstrators appeared on television. On January 17 at a basketball
game in Missoula, Montana, as anti-war protesters were being dragged off the
courts by police, the crowd pelted the protestors with potatoes and began chanting
USA USA In fact, one began seeing pro-war demonstrations almost every day
on television, with crowds waving the flag and chanting. Revealingly, these usually
small demonstrations got increasingly more coverage than the larger anti-war
demonstrations. The networks quickly shifted, on cue from the Bush Administration,
to segments covering the new patriotism and love of the flag. News reports
featured yellow ribbons and flags with many stories on flag factories where the
managers indicated that they could barely keep up with the demand.
Divisions in the country and the quasihysteria involved in those who supported
the war was evident on talk radio. The talk radio shows overwhelmingly supported
the war and most callers supported the lines of the mostly pro-war talk show hosts
(Nimmo and Hovind in Denton 1993). Callers frequently wanted to nuke Iraq
and attacked anti-war protestors, calling them looney tunes, traitors and worse.
Many callers attacked CNNs Peter Arnett, the sole Western correpondent remaining
in Baghdad, as supportive of Saddam Hussein and many talk show hosts and callers
claimed that CNN owner Ted Turner was sympathetic to Iraq (Nimmo and Hovind
1993:95). One caller labeled ABC anchor Peter Jennings a jerk for an ABC
report on the bombing of the Iraqi sleeping shelter that the U.S. was claiming was
a command and control center; the talk show host agreed, noting that Jennings
isnt an American anyway (he is, in fact, a Canadian; cited in Nimmo and Hovind
1993:95).13
Carl Boggs (1991) argued that the intense nationalism, racism, glorification of
violence, and militarism evident during the Gulf War was a response to growing
powerlessness and insecurity, and was similar to the situation in Nazi Germany
analyzed by Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom (1941). The pro-war
demonstrations seemed to offer mechanisms through which individuals could escape
their powerlessness and overcome (temporarily) their insecurities. The flag-waving
and chanting pointed to individuals immersing themselves in masses and exhibiting
collectivist, conformist behavior. It appeared that powerless individuals felt
themselves part of something greater than themselves when they chanted and waved
flags. Human flag phenomena began to appear: in San Diego, 30,000 people
220 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
appeared in red, white, and blue T-shirts on January 25 to form the worlds largest
human flag, photographed from a blimp and dutifully broadcast by the television
networks. On February 2, an even larger human flag was formed in Virginia Beach,
Virginia, with 40,000 people chanting USA, USA as they became one with their
country and flag. On February 15, CNN featured a story on the new patriotism in
which flags were shown flying en masse throughout the country and TV images
linked the flags to portraits of George Bush, accompanied by the 1988 Republican
campaign song as background music.
All over the country, whenever there was a pro-war demonstration, crowds
chanted USA USA! The lack of specific content in the chant in favor of empty
patriotism contrasted with the anti-war chants and slogans that always had a specific
content-attacking the war, calling for the troops to come home now, or affirming
specific values like peace. Yet the masses of pro-war demonstrators who chanted
USA! every time they were given the occasion were not articulating any particular
values or reasons for their pro-war and pro-America stance. Rather, they were
simply immersing themselves in a crowd and expressing primal patriotism, national
narcissism, and aggressive threats against anyone who was different. The USA!
chant thus expressed loyalty to the home team in the Super Bowl championship of
contemporary war and bound together the prowar constituency into a national
community of those identifying with the U.S. war policy, becoming part of
something bigger than themselves through participation.
In addition, the pro-war demonstrations seemed to make people feel good
through providing experiences of community and empowerment denied them in
everyday life. Those who were usually powerless were able to feel powerful,
identifying themselves as part of the nation proudly asserting itself in the war.
Losers in everyday life, the pro-war demonstrators could experience themselves
as part of the winning team in the Gulf War. Participating in the prowar rituals
thus gave individuals new and attractive identities that gave them a renewed
sense of participation in a great national adventure. Like sports events and rock
concerts, the prowar demonstrations thus provided the participants with at least
a fleeting sense of community, denied them in the privatized temples of
consumption, serialized media watching, and isolated life styles. For almost
100 years, sociologists have studied crowd behavior and analyzed the mechanisms
through which individuals dissolve themselves in mass behavior. During the Gulf
War the phenomenon of individuals immersing themselves in mass behavior
was a daily feature of the TV war. Usually, American community in the Age of
Media Culture is a simulated TV community, whereby one becomes one with
the others by watching the same images and participating in the same ritualized
experience of events like the Super Bowl or Gulf War. Yet one could participate
in the ritual of the Gulf War more fully by leaving ones home and joining into
pro-war demonstrations, in which one could become more vitally integrated into
the patriotic community.
The flag-waving and chanting also provided a new form of participatory
experience that enabled individuals to be part of an aesthetic spectacle. The
Reading the Gulf War 221
pro-war flag-wavers and chanters had been immersed for years in the aesthetic
of consumer culture: viewing seductive commodities in advertisements;
fascinated by images of luxury, eroticism, and power in the images of popular
entertainment; tempted by the dazzling display of the commodity world in
malls and stores; and gratified by whatever items they could afford to buy in
their everyday lives (i.e., cars, clothes, electronics, etc.). The Gulf War was
packaged as an aesthetic spectacle, with CNN utilizing powerful drum music
to introduce their news segments, superimposing images of the U.S. flag over
American troops, and employing upbeat martial music between breaks. The
audience was thus invited to participate in a dazzling war spectacle by its media
presentation.
Moreover, pro-war demonstrators were able to overcome the usual privatization
and passivity of TV culture by more actively participating in the public celebrations
of the war. Many individuals of the TV war audience were normally isolated,
disempowered, and able to feel that they belonged in the consumer society only if
they could afford to buy the icons and totems of social prestige. A pro-war
demonstration and flag-waving, however, is a cheap thrill, offering anyone the
opportunity to become part of an aesthetic spectacle of a sea of flags, rousing
music, and enthusiastic chanting. Although individuals at home watching television
are passive and isolated, in pro-war demonstrations the participants were active
and socially bonded.
Indeed, the pro-war constituency rooted for the U.S. team as if it were a sports
event and from the beginning there was a close relation between war and football.
During a break in a nationally televised football game from El Paso shown on New
Years Eve 1990, an announcer greeted U.S. soldiers in the stands who were there
courtesy of the John Hancock insurance company. Then, as Haynes Johnson put it:
while the cameras panned rows of cheering, waving soldiers, the sportscaster
pointed to a mural painted across the stadium wall. Depicted was an eagle
swooping down on prey. Helpful as ever, while the cameras slowly played
across the mural, the sportscaster read aloud the message spelled out there:
Go Desert Shield, Beat Iraq.
(Washington Post, January 4, 1991:A2)
There are, in fact, interesting connections between war and football, patriotism
and sports in the American imagination. Both activities involve teamwork,
coordination, and game plans, and both activities are highly competitive and
violent. In both, squadrons of helmeted men seek to gain territory and try to
drive-their enemy back, while throwing balls, bombs, or bullets downfield.
Both stress the values of discipline, training, hitting the opposition hard, and,
above all, winning. On December 19, Lt. Gen. Calvin Waller told the press,
Im like a football coach. I want everything I can possibly get and have at my
side of the field when I get ready to go into the Super Bowl (United Press
International, December 20, 1990). On a news segment on the CBS morning
show on January 25, a sports fan stated that he liked Buffalo in the bowl because
222 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
its an impressive unit with powerful weapons. A U.S. soldier in a January
23 report on CNN said that Saddam Hussein doesnt have much of a team; in
comparison with football hed be the Cleveland Browns. Army Chief Warrant
Officer Ron Moring stated on the eve of the war: Its time to quit the pregame
show. Were a lot more serious about what were doing. Theres a lot more
excitement in the air.14
Football metaphors were also employed in war rhetoric when Bush said
that Tariq Aziz gave them a stiff arm after the unsuccessful Geneva meeting
at the eve of the war. A U.S. pilot returning from the first nights bombing raid
said that it was just like a football game where the other team didnt show
up. Helen Thomas asked Bush in a January 18 press briefing if the Gorbachev
peace initiative was perceived as an end run [around Bushs desire to start
and win the war]. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio headline
indicated that the Canadian armed forces in the Gulf were given the green
light to tackle the Iraqis. ABCs Nightline (January 17, 1991), quoted fliers
just back from the first missions of the war, enthusing: Its just like a football
game once you get airborne and you get the jet under you and you start feeling
good, then you just start workingworking your game plan. Another pilot
exclaimed:
Its like being a professional athlete and never playing a game. Today was
the first game and the enemy didnt show up, the opponent didnt show up.
We went out there and ran our first play and it worked great, scored a
touchdown, there was nobody home.
(ABCs Nightline, January 17, 1991)
In addition, the military planners talked of making an end run around the Iraqi
troops massed on the Kuwaiti border. Scud missiles were intercepted by Patriots
and Col. Ray Davies described the U.S. air team as like the Dallas Cowboys
football team. They werent a real emotional team. Thats exactly what its like
with these pilots out here. They know exactly what they ve got to do (Washington
Post, January 19:C1) Furthermore, the audience processed the Gulf War as a football
game. A Jesuit professor wrote in the National Catholic Reporter.
A resident adviser in one of our college dorms tells me his students watched
the CNN live war and cheered and took bets as if they were watching a
football game. Small wonder. A sports mind-set has revved us up for the
war. Some weeks ago, TVs most disconcerting image was of Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney whipping the cheering troops into a fighting frenzy
as if he were a coach at halftime in a locker room.
(National Catholic Reporter February 1, 1991:1)
And so the Gulf War became a game in which the U.S. emerged victorious in the
Super Bowl of wars.
Reading the Gulf War 223
SOME CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
The analysis in the last sections suggested how the media helped mobilize support
for the Gulf War. The examples that I gave of Gulf War hysteria and the warrior
nation were all derived from the media which in their polls, nightly news reports,
and discussion shows presented the appearence that the Gulf War was wildly popular
and that the nation was undergoing orgies of patriotism, as well as the irrational
hysteria that I noted. But this picture might be highly misleading, replicating the
very picture produced by the media themselves. Most of the people that I spoke to,
ranging from my Texas neighbors and colleagues to students, were against the war
and we had well-attended teach-ins every day at the University of Texas, so there
was certainly an anti-war public in the United States. In the months after the war,
I talked to many people who said that in their travels and work in rural Kentucky,
south Texas, Michigan, West Virginia, and other parts of the country there was
significant opposition to the warmuch more than the polls and media let on.
Before the war began, polls and media discourse revealed a divided nation, but
once the war began these divisions became invisible.
Thus, the media might have produced a false picture of the degree of support
for Bush Administration Gulf War policy. A study in Britain revealed that support
for the Gulf War was much softer and more ambivalent than the polls indicated.
Martin Shaw and Roy Carr-Hill argued:
two surveys of a local population in Northern England, based on random
samples of the electorate{reveal} that while perceptions of the war closely
reflected the pictures of the war provided by the media, there was a great
deal of anxiety not reflected in national poll findings, and resistance to
media coveragereflected particularly in the finding that large minorities
agreed that television and the popular press glorified the war too much.
(Shaw and Carr-Hill 1991)
The authors also claim that their surveys indicated that peoples attitude toward
the war often varied according to what newspaper they read.
A study in the U.S. noted a distinct bias in the very mode of questioning
concerning audience support for the war. Eveland, McLeod and Signorielli
(forthcoming) noted that poll questions tended to focus on presidential job approval,
or confidence in the military, rather than whether people really supported the war
and wanted it to continue. A January 17 Gallup poll indicated that when asked if
respondents approved of the way Bush was handling the crisis in the Gulf, 81
percent said that they approved; by January 27th, Bushs approval rating (for
handling the Gulf situation) went up to 84 percent; by February 3, approval of the
way the president was handling the situation inched up to 85 percent, though it
decreased to 79 percent by February 13 (Eveland et al. forthcoming).
After the successful ground war, Bushs approval ratings shot up to a high of 90
percent. But more detailed analysis of poll data indicated that there was not the
seemingly overwhelming bipartisan support. Solop and Wonders (1991) review
224 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
of published poll date indicated that those most supportive of President Bush and his
war policies were republican white males who had conservative attitudes. Females,
blacks, liberals, and Democrats were less supportive. Moreover, the study by Eveland,
McLeod, and Signorielli based on interviews during and after the war:
revealed that there was less overall support for the war than would be expected
given the degree and type of media coverage relating to public opinion about
the war. Both during and after the war, more than 50 percent of the
respondents said they were neutral or disagreed with the statements in the
I support the war scale. In addition, during the war only 6.6% of the
respondents said that they strongly agreed with statements describing support
for the war; this figure fell to 2.8% in the survey conducted one year later.
(Eveland et al. forthcoming)
Moreover, further focus on audience reception and how audiences might process
the propagandistic and jingoist images of the military and the U.S. intervention
suggests that television images and discourse may have contradictory effects and
that audiences may resist media manipulation. Utilizing a deconstructive
perspective, one might argue that the extremely ideological and propagandistic
nature of the TV coverage could be read as evidence that the population did not
swallow the Bush Administration rationale for the war and needed to be constantly
indoctrinated to assure that they accepted the official war policy. For, as noted,
further research and more in-depth interviews indicated that support for the U.S.
policy was soft, and the one-sidedness, limited range of voices, and blatant
propaganda could be read as signs that government and media elites knew that
they needed to maintain a hard-sell propaganda campaign to manage and maintain
a prowar consensus in a public that had serious (and legitimate) doubts concerning
the war.
Furthermore, although saturation television coverage was strongly
propagandistic and seemed to help mobilize audience support for the war, continued
coverage of turmoil in the region, especially images of the suffering of the Kurds
and other Iraqis at the end of the war, soured much of the audience on the war and
perhaps on military intervention, which didnt seem to have achieved promised
positive results. Thus, ultimately, the media may have contributed to turning large
segments of the public against military solutions to the problems of the Middle
East and elsewhere and to the commitment of U.S. forces to resolve the problems
of the world. It may be that the nightly images of the soldiers in the desert and then
the images after the war of continued suffering and turmoil might have raised
questions concerning the wisdom of U.S. military intervention.
Moreover, the fact that the war was experienced by much of the audience as a
dramatic spectacle meant that it could be soon forgotten, overwhelmed by
Hollywood, TV, and other subsequent spectacles of the culture industry. By the
summer of 1992, Bushs presidency was in serious trouble and, as it turned out,
patriotic images and discourse from the war were unable to save him in the 1992
election. Revelations of the positive and supportive Reagan/Bush policies before
Reading the Gulf War 225
the war toward Iraq suggested that Bush and his cohorts had constantly miscalculated
in providing aid and diplomatic support to the Iraqi regime from the early 1980s to
the eve of the invasion of Kuwait (see Friedman 1993). The fact that Saddam
Hussein continued to rule with an iron fist in Iraq and that his neighbors continued
to feel threatened, fueling a further and potentially catastrophic arms race in the
region, raised questions as to the success of Bushs Gulf War policy and whether
the war really accomplished any significant long-term goals, other than temporarily
boosting Bushs ratings in the polls and producing a positive image of the U.S.
military after the shame of defeat in Vietnam.
Thus, in the chaotic aftermath of the U.S. intervention, the extreme hyperbole
of the construction of Saddam Hussein and his regime as absolute evil to some
extent backfired because Hussein was not removed from power in the aftermath of
the war. Although Bush urged the Iraqis to overthrow Hussein, once the U.S.
declared an end to the fighting and Iraqi rebels rebelled against Husseins regime,
the U.S. remained on the sidelines. General Schwarzkopf himself stated in a PBS
TV interview on March 27, 1991, that he had preferred to continue fighting to
annihilate completely the Iraqi military which was violently suppressing the
insurgent forces against Hussein as Schwarzkopf spoke. The continuation of Saddam
Hussein in power, the destructive environmental effects of the war that may continue
for years, and instability of the region may reveal the Persian Gulf War to be a
Pandoras box of evils that produced a brief euphoric high with a long hangover.
Consequently, saturation television coverage of dramatic political events is a
two-edged sword: it might shape public opinion into supporting the U.S.
intervention, as it obviously did during the Gulf War, but repeated images of a
drawn-out stalemate, or images of death and destruction in a fighting war, or images
of protracted suffering as long-term effects of the war, could be turned against the
system and its leaders who produced such destruction. The very ubiquitousness of
television and the central role that television is playing in contemporary politics
renders it a complex and unpredictable political force. Lust for pictures to attract
audiences led the networks into a race to get into Iraq and to interview its leaders
and to show its people. Although Saddam Hussein proved to be a total media flop,
the images of the Iraqi people going about their daily lives were the only humane
images of Arabs that appeared during the period leading up to the war. Images of
continual and increased suffering of the Iraqi people and others in the area as a
result of U.S. military intervention might ultimately lead people to see that war is
no way to solve political conflict, and that it produces overwhelming destruction,
suffering, and death.
Hence, a multiperspectival approach that captures different aspects of a complex
phenomenon like mainstream media coverage of U.S. interventions in the Middle
East should also analyze the contradictions of audience reception of the media
texts and televisions potentially contradictory images and effects, as well as
analyzing the media text and its conservative, systems-maintenance effects.
Although my analysis has focused primarily on the ways that television coverage
of the U.S.-led war against Iraq supported the policies of the Bush Administration
226 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
and Pentagon, analysis of the reception by audiences of the Middle East Crisis, the
war, and its aftermath might have ultimately helped undermine Bush and the
conservative hegemony, contributing to his defeat. Perhaps Bush went overboard
in demonizing Hussein and his continued rule of Iraq served to rob Bush of claims
of genuine victory.
In any case, the effects of television and the mainstream media, as always (see
Kellner 1990a), are contradictory and may have unintended consequences. While
in the spring of 1991, the Gulf crisis and War constituted a tremendous victory for
the Bush Administration and Pentagon, the event did not save his presidency and
eventually raised questions concerning whether he was really an effective President.
Its short-term positive effects also point to the fickleness of audiences in a mediasaturated
society, who soon forget the big events of the previous year.
And yet the woefully one-sided coverage of the Gulf crisis and War by the
mainstream media calls attention once again to the need for alternative media to
provide essential information on complex events like the Gulf War. During the
War, those of us who opposed it got information from computer data-bases, such
as PeaceNet, or progressive publications like The Nation, In These Times, and Z
Magazine. Locally, in addition to holding daily teach-ins at universities, critics of
the war attempted to make use of public access television and radio to criticize the
Bush Administrations war policy and refusal to negotiate a diplomatic solution.
Democratizing our media system will require a revitalization of public television,
an increased role for public access television, the eventual development of a public
satellite system, and the production of progressive computer data-bases (Kellner
1990a). Because politics are more and more acted out on media screens and texts,
without the reconstruction of television and the mass media, the prospects for
democratization of the American political system are dim.
NOTES
This study was presented in lectures at the University of Michigan, at the Popular Culture
Association conference in San Antonio, at the Marxist Literary Group summer conference in
Delaware, at York University and Trent University in Canada, at an international cultural studies
conference in Taiwan, and at several other colleges and Universities. For critical comments
and useful discussion, I would like to thank members of audiences at these venues, and Richard
Keeble, who has constructively criticized the text. Different versions of this study were published
in the Centennial Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1 (Winter 1992) pp. 542 and Styles of Cultural
Activism, edited by Philip Goldstein and published by the University of Delaware Press (1994).
In this study, I draw on my book The Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner 1992b).
1 I am using the term war against Iraq for reasons that will be spelled out below. As of
this writing (spring 1994), the war is still going on so it would be a mistake to limit the
event under scrutiny to the events described as the Gulf War from January through
March of 1991.
2 By the mainstream media in the United States, I mean the major national television
networks, including ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC; the national weekly news magazines
Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report; and national newspapers such as
the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Washington Post. See
the contrast between mainstream and alternative media that I develop in Kellner 1990a.
Reading the Gulf War 227
3 On August 6, 1954, the New York Times published an editorial celebrating the overthrow
of the Mossadegh Government in Iran and the restoration of the Shah, accompanied by
a takeover of 40 percent of the Iranian oil by U.S. corporations, breaking a British
monopoly. The editors wrote:
Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy
cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical
nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Irans experience will prevent the rise
of Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the
hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders.
Namely, those who will have a clear-eyed understanding of the U.S.s overriding
priorities (thanks to Noam Chomsky for this reference). In this context, the U.S. military
intervention and Gulf War was an object lesson to Third-World leaders who do not
follow U.S. priorities and policies.
4 From the beginning, Iraq was feverishly trying to negotiate a solution to the crisis and
was cooperating with Arab efforts to mediate the crisis; there were over eight Iraqi
secret missions which attempted to reach a diplomatic solution, all of which were
rebuffed by the Bush Administration, which obviously wanted a war; see the discussion
in Kellner 1992b.
5 Through data-base searches, I discovered how this story was taken up by the television
networks, most major newspapers, and was used in many later summaries of the story
to explain why Bush had to send U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia; see the documentation in
Kellner 1992b.
6 A study undertaken by the Gannett Foundation indicated that there were over 1,170
articles linking Hussein with Hitler (La May, et al. 1991:42). This comparison obviously
presupposes a false analogy in terms of the military threat to the region and the world
from the Iraqi armywhose threat was hyped up from the beginning. Iraqs 17 million
population can hardly compare with Germanys 70 million and its military was
significantly less threatening than Hitlers military machine, which was the most
powerful in the world in the 1930s. Nor could Iraq, which depends on oil for over 95
percent of its exports, be compared with an industrial powerhouse like Germany. It is
also inappropriate to compare a major imperialist superpower with a regional power,
Iraq, that itself is the product of colonialization.
It might also be noted how the Bush Administration and media personalized the crisis,
equating Iraq with its leader. Whereas in coverage during the 8year war between Iran
and Iraq, in which the U.S. covertly supported Iraq, references were to Baghdad and
Iraq, during the Gulf crisis and war it was usually Saddam Hussein who was referred
to as the actor and source of all evil (I am grateful to Richard Keeble for this insight).
7 See the critical discussions of the pool system in the New York Times Sunday Magazine,
March 3, 1991; the Washington Journalism Review (March 1991); the Columbia
Journalism Review, March/April 1991, pp. 239; Index on Censorship, April/May 1991;
Le monde diplomatique, May 1991, pp. 1118; and the articles in the New York Times
May 5 and 6, 1991 and the discussion in Kellner 1992b.
8 In an otherwise illuminating article, that I draw upon in this discussion, McAllister (in
Denton 1993:212) claims that: During the Persian Gulf War, government-produced
propaganda was less prevalent than during the world wars. But McAllister apparently
failed to see the propaganda campaigns that I am analysing here and that the very
advertising he discusses contributed to the propaganda effects of TV war coverage.
9 In his book The Territorial Imperative (London: Fontana, 1967), Robert Ardrey tells
how he was a young playwright in New York at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing,
thinking only of his career and personal life, when he was transformed overnight into a
patriot when he perceived that his country was under attack.
228 Diagnostic critique and cultural studies
10 As Elissa Marder argued in an unpublished paper, Arbologies of Roland Barthes, the
tying of ribbons to trees played on mythological resonances of the sort analyzed by
Barthes in Mythologies (1972). The very concept of Operation Desert Storm is a
mythology in Barthes sense of naturalizing unnatural events, making a phenomenon
of ugly history appear to be an event of nature, an inevitable desert storm bringing just
retribution on the evils of Saddam Hussein.
11 The first three examples are from winter 1991, while the last examples are documented
in The Texas Observer, (February 8, 1991:89 and April 19, 1991:22.
12 The Anti-Discrimination League reported that incidences of violence against
ArabAmericans reached an all-time high during 1991, with 119 hate crimes compared
with 39 in 1990 (the New York Times, February 22, 1991).
13 ABC Baghdad correspondent Bill Blakemore reported directly from the bombed sleeping
shelter, poking holes in the U.S. account that it was a military command and control
center; later, it turned out that the U.S. was lying, or had faulty information (see the
account in Kellner 1992b).
14 Some of these football examples are from the Greenpeace Gulf Report on January
18, 1991, Situation Report No. 2 from the PeaceNet mideast.gulf bulletin board.
During the ground war, General Schwarzkopf and media reporters regularly used football
metaphors to describe U.S. tactics.
Part III
Media
culture/identities/politics
231
Chapter 7
Television, advertising, and the
construction of postmodern identities
According to anthropological and sociological folklore, in traditional societies,
ones identity was fixed, solid, and stable. Identity was a function of predefined
social roles and a traditional system of myths which provided orientation and
religious sanctions to define ones place in the world, while rigorously
circumscribing the realm of thought and behavior. One was born and died a member
of ones clan, of a fixed kinship system, and of ones tribe or group with ones life
trajectory fixed in advance. In premodern societies, identity was unproblematical
and not subject to reflection or discussion. Individuals did not undergo identity
crises, or radically modify their identity. One was a hunter and a member of the
tribe and gained ones identity through these roles and functions.
In modernity, identity becomes more mobile, multiple, personal, self-reflexive,
and subject to change and innovation.1 Yet identity in modernity is also social and
other-related. Theorists of identity from Hegel through G.H.Mead have often
characterized personal identity in terms of mutual recognition, as if ones identity
depended on recognition from others combined with self-validation of this
recognition. Yet the forms of identity in modernity are also relatively substantial
and fixed; identity still comes from a circumscribed set of roles and norms: one is
a mother, a son, a Texan, a Scot, a professor, a socialist, a Catholic, a lesbianor
rather a combination of these social roles and possibilities. Identities are thus still
relatively fixed and limited, though the boundaries of possible identities, of new
identities, are continually expanding.
Indeed, in modernity, self-consciousness comes into its own; it becomes possible
to continually engage in reflection on available social roles and possibilities and
gains a distance from tradition (Kolb 1986). One can choose and makeand then
remakeones identity as ones life-possibilities change and expand or contract.
Modernity also increases other-directedness, however, for as the number of possible
identities increases, one must gain recognition to assume a socially validated,
recognized identity. In modernity, there is still a structure of interaction with socially
defined and available roles, norms, customs, and expectations, among which one
must choose and reproduce to gain identity in a complex process of mutual
recognition. In this way, the other is a constituent of identity in modernity and,
consequently, the other-directed character is a familiar type in late modernity,
232 Media culture/identities/politics
dependent upon others for recognition and thus for the establishment of personal
identity (Riesman et al. 1950).
In modernity, identity therefore becomes both a personal and a theoretical
problem. Certain tensions appear within and between theories of identity, as well
as within the modern individual. On one hand, some theorists of identity define
personal identity in terms of a substantial self, an innate and self-identical essence
which constitutes the person. From Descartes cogito, to Kants and Husserls
transcendental ego, to the Enlightenment concept of reason, to some contemporary
concepts of the subject, identity is conceived as something essential, substantial,
unitary, fixed, and fundamentally unchanging. Yet other modern theorists of identity
postulate a non-substantiality of the self (Hume), or conceive of the self and identity
as an existential project, as the creation of the authentic individual (Kierkegaard,
Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre). The existential self is always fragile and
requires commitment, resolve, and action to sustain, thus making the creation of
identity an existential project for each individual.
Anxiety also becomes a constituent experience for the modern self. For one is
never certain that one has made the right choice, that one has chosen ones true
identity, or even constituted an identity at all. The modern self is aware of the
constructed nature of identity and that one can always change and modify ones
identity at will. One is also anxious concerning recognition and validation of ones
identity by others. Further, modernity also involves a process of innovation, of
constant turnover and novelty. In some formulations, modernity signifies the
destruction of past forms of life, values, and identities, combined with the production
of ever new ones (Berman 1982). The experience of modernité is one of novelty,
of the ever-changing new, of innovation and transitoriness (Frisby 1985). Ones
identity may become out of date, or superfluous, or no longer socially validated.
One may thus experience anomie, a condition of extreme alienation in which one
is no longer at home in the world.
By contrast, ones identity may crystallize and harden such that ennui and
boredom may ensue. One is tired of ones life, of who one has become. One is
trapped in a web of social roles, expectations, and relations. There appears to be no
exit and no possibility of change. Or, one is caught up in so many different,
sometimes conflicting, roles that one no longer knows who one is. In these ways,
identity in modernity becomes increasingly problematic and the issue of identity
itself becomes a problem. Indeed, only in a society anxious about identity could
the problems of personal identity, or self-identity, or identity crises, arise and be
subject to worry and debate. Theorists of self-identity are often anxious
(Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre) concerning the fragility of identity and analyze
in detail those experiences and social forces which undermine and threaten personal
identity.
Identity in modernity was also linked to individuality, to developing a uniquely
individual self. Whereas traditionally, identity was a function of the tribe, the group,
or a collective, in modernity identity was a function of creating a particularized
individuality. In the consumer and media societies that emerged after World War
Television, advertising, and identity 233
II, identity has been increasingly linked to style, to producing an image, to how
one looks. It is as if everyone has to have their own look, style, and image to have
their own identity, though, paradoxically, many of the models of style and look
come from consumer culture, thus individuality is highly mediated in the consumer
society of the present.
Thus, in modernity, the problem of identity consisted in how we constitute,
perceive, interpret, and present ourself to ourselves and others. As noted, for some
theorists, identity is a discovery and affirmation of an innate essence which
determines what I am, while for others identity is a construct and a creation from
available social roles and material. Contemporary postmodern thought has by and
large rejected the essentialist and rationalist notion of identity and builds on the
constructivist notion which it in turn problematizes. Consequently, one of the goals
of this chapter will be to explicate how identity is formulated in postmodern theory
and is constructed in contemporary cultural forms. At stake is whether identity is
fundamentally different in so-called postmodernity and whether a distinction
between modernity and postmodernity, and modern and postmodern identities,
can be sustained.
IDENTITY IN POSTMODERN THEORY
From the postmodern perspective, as the pace, extension, and complexity of modern
societies accelerate, identity becomes more and more unstable, more and more
fragile. Within this situation, the discourses of postmodernity problematize the
very notion of identity, claiming that it is a myth and an illusion. One reads both in
modern theorists like the Frankfurt School, and in Baudrillard and other postmodern
theorists that the autonomous, self-constituting subject that was the achievement
of modern individuals, of a culture of individualism, is fragmenting and
disappearing, due to social processes which produce the levelling of individuality
in a rationalized, bureaucratized and consumerized mass society and media culture.2
Post-structuralists in turn have launched an attack on the very notions of the subject
and identity, claiming that subjective identity is itself a myth, a construct of language
and society, an overdetermined illusion that one is really a substantial subject, that
one really has a fixed identity (Coward and Ellis 1977; Jameson 1983, 1991).
It is thus claimed that in postmodern culture, the subject has disintegrated into
a flux of euphoric intensifies, fragmented and disconnected, and that the decentered
postmodern self no longer experiences anxiety (with hysteria becoming the typical
postmodern psychic malady) and no longer possesses the depth, substantiality,
and coherency that was the ideal and sometimes achievement of the modern self
(Baudrillard 1983c; Jameson 1983, 1991). Postmodern theorists claim that subjects
have imploded into masses (Baudrillard 1983b), that a fragmented, disjointed, and
discontinuous mode of experience is a fundamental characteristic of postmodern
culture, of both its subjective experiences and texts (Jameson 1983, 1991). It is
argued that in a postmodern media and information society one is at most a term
in the terminal (Baudrillard 1983c), or a cyberneticized effect of fantastic systems
234 Media culture/identities/politics
of control (Kroker and Cook 1986). Deleuze and Guattari (1977) celebrate
schizoid, nomadic dispersions of desire and subjectivity, valorizing precisely the
breaking up and dispersion of the subject of modernity. In these theories, identity
is highly unstable and has in some postmodern theories disappeared altogether in
the postmodern scene where:
The TV self is the electronic individual par excellence who gets everything
there is to get from the simulacrum of the media: a market-identity as a
consumer in the society of the spectacle; a galaxy of hyperfibrillated
moodstraumatized serial being.
(Kroker and Cook 1986:274)
Many of the postmodern theories privilege media culture as the site of the implosion
of identity and fragmentation of the subject, yet there have been few in-depth
studies of media texts and their effects from this perspective. With the exception of
the work of Jameson (see Kellner 1989c), few of the major postmodern theorists
have carried out systematic and sustained examination of the actual texts and
practices of popular media culture. For instance, Baudrillards few references to
the actual artifacts of media culture are extremely sketchy and fragmentary, as are
those of Deleuze and Guattari (while Deleuze has written extensively on film, he
does not theorize it as postmodern). Foucault and Lyotard have ignored media
culture almost completely. And while Kroker and Cook (1986) carry out detailed
readings of contemporary painting, they too neglect to carry out concrete studies
of media culture in their explorations of the postmodern scene (though, à la
Baudrillard, they ascribe tremendous power to the media in the constitution of
the postmodern scene).3
For instance, the film Pretty Woman puts on display the key role of image in the
construction of identity in contemporary societies. A working-class prostitute
(played by Julia Roberts) meets a corporate Prince Charming (played by Richard
Gere) and transforms herself from fashionless street girl to high-fashion beauty.
The film illustrates the process of self-transformation through fashion, cosmetics,
diction, and style, and the extent to which identity is mediated through image and
look in contemporary culture. The result of the Roberts characters transformation
was thus a new personality, a new identity, enabling her to get her man and become
a success in the image identity market. The message of the film is thus that if you
want to become a new you, to transform your identity, to become successful, you
need to focus on image, style, and fashion.
In this and the following chapter, I examine, in somewhat more detail than is
usual in rapid postmodern raids into media culture, some popular artifacts to see
what they tell us about identity in contemporary societies. My selections are hardly
innocent although they are symptomatic of what are generally taken to be salient
features of postmodern culture: proliferation and dissemination of images without
depth; glitzy, high-tech produced intensities; pastiche and implosion of forms; and
quotation and repetition of past images and forms. My focus will be on images of
identity in a popular television series Miami Vice, which is often taken as a
Television, advertising, and identity 235
symptomatic postmodern media text, and cigarette advertisements which so
far have been relatively unexplored by postmodern theory, but which reveal
some interesting changes in contemporary image production. Together these
studies should illuminate some of the dynamics of identity in so-called
postmodern societies.
My take on identity in contemporary society and culture will, however, be critical
of several central claims of postmodern theory. I criticize what I consider to be
one-sided and inadequate postmodern positions on contemporary culture and what
I take to be the limitations of excessively formalistic postmodern analysis. I also
put in question claims concerning postmodernism as a concept that interprets
contemporary culture as a whole, and conclude with some critical reflections on
the very concept of postmodernity as a new epoch in history and the concept of
postmodernism as a cultural dominant.
Television and postmodernity
While the postmodern intervention in the arts is often interpreted as a reaction
against modernism,4 against the stifling elitist canonization of the works of
high modernism, the postmodern intervention within television is a reaction
against realism and the system of coded genres (sitcom, soaps, action/adventure,
and so on) that define the system of commercial television in the United States.
In this sense, postmodern interventions within television replicate the assault
on realism and genre which modernism itself had earlier attacked. Modernism
never took hold in television, especially in the commercial variety produced in
the United Stateswhich is culturally hegemonic in many sites throughout
the world. Instead, commercial television is predominantly governed by the
aesthetic of representational realism, of images and stories which fabricate the
real and attempt to produce a reality effect (Kellner 1980). Televisions relentless
representational realism has also been subordinate to narrative codes, to storytelling,
and to the conventions of highly coded genres. Commercial television
has been constituted as an entertainment medium and it appears that its
producers believe that audiences are most entertained by stories, by narratives
with familiar and recognizable characters, plot-lines, conventions, and
messages, as well as by familiar genres. This aesthetic poverty of the medium
has probably been responsible for its contempt by high cultural theorists and
its designation as a vast wasteland by those who have other aesthetic tastes
and values.
If for most of the history of television, narrative story-telling has been the
name of the game, on a postmodern account of television image often decenters
the importance of narrative. It is claimed that in those programs usually designated
postmodernMTV music videos, Miami Vice, Max Headroom, high-tech ads,
and so onthere is a new look and feel: the signifier has been liberated and
image takes precedence over narrative, as compelling and highly artificial
aesthetic images detach themselves from the television diegesis and become the
236 Media culture/identities/politics
center of fascination, of a seductive pleasure, of an intense but fragmentary and
transitory aesthetic experience.
While there is some truth in this conventional postmodern position, such
descriptions are also in some ways misleading. In particular, I reject the familiar
account that postmodern image culture is fundamentally flat and one-dimensional.
For Jameson, postmodernism manifests the emergence of a new kind of flatness
or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal senseperhaps
the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms (1984:60). According to
Jameson, the waning of affect in postmodern image culture is replicated in
postmodern selves who are allegedly devoid of the expressive energies and
individualities characteristic of modernism and the modern self. Both postmodern
texts and selves are said to be without depth and to be flat, superficial, and lost in
the intensities and vacuities of the moment, without substance and meaning, or
connection to the past.
Such one-dimensional postmodern texts and selves put in question the continued
relevance of hermeneutic depth models such as the Marxian model of essence and
appearance, true and false consciousness, and ideology and truth; the Freudian
model of latent and manifest meanings; the existentialist model of authentic and
inauthentic existence; and the semiotic model of signifier and signified.
Cumulatively, postmodernism thus signifies the death of hermeneutics; in place of
what Ricoeur (1970) has termed a hermeneutics of suspicion and the polysemic
modernist reading of cultural symbols and texts, there emerges the postmodern
view that there is nothing behind the surface of texts, no depth or multiplicity of
meanings for critical inquiry to discover and explicate.
From this postmodern view of texts and selves, it follows that a postmodern
cultural theory should rest content to describe the surface or forms of cultural
texts, rather than seeking meanings or significance.5 Against such a formalist and
anti-hermeneutical postmodern type of analysis connected with the postulation of
a flat, postmodern image culture, I would advocate a cultural studies which draws
on both postmodern and other critical theories in order to analyze both image and
meaning, surface and depth, as well as the politics and erotics of cultural artifacts.
Thus, I argue here that interpretive analysis of image, narrative, ideologies, and
meanings continues to be of importance in analyzing even those texts taken to be
paradigmatic of postmodern culturethough analysis of form, surface, and look
is also important. I argue in the following pages that the images, fragments, and
narratives of media culture are saturated with ideology and polysemic meanings,
and that thereforeagainst certain postmodern positions (Foucault 1977;
Baudrillard 1981; and Deleuze and Guattari 1977)ideology critique continues
to be an important and indispensable weapon in our critical arsenal (see Chapter 2
for discussion of the issues at stake here).
In addition, there is another familiar postmodern position which I would also
like to distance myself from: the view, associated with Baudrillard (1983b, 1983c),
that television is pure noise in the postmodern ecstasy, a pure implosion, a black
hole where all meaning and messages are absorbed in the whirlpool and
Television, advertising, and identity 237
kaleidoscope of radical semiurgy, of the incessant dissemination of images and
information to the point of total saturation, of inertia and apathy where meaning is
dissolved, where only the fascination of discrete images glow and flicker in a
mediascape within which no image any longer has any discernible effects, where
the proliferating velocity and quantity of images produces a postmodern mindscreen
where images fly by with such rapidity that they lose any signifying function,
referring only to other images ad infinitum, and where eventually the multiplication
of images produces such saturation, apathy, and indifference that the tele-spectator
is lost forever in a fragmentary fun house of mirrors in the infinite play of
superfluous, meaningless images.
Now, no doubt, television can be experienced as a flat, one-dimensional
wasteland of superficial images, and can function as well as pure noise without
referent and meaning. One can also become overwhelmed byor indifferent to
the flow, velocity, and intensity of images, so that televisions signifying function
can be decentered and can collapse altogether. Yet there is something wrong with
this account. People regularly watch certain shows and events; there are fans for
various series and stars who possess an often incredible expertise and knowledge
of the subjects of their fascination; people do model their behavior, style, and
attitudes on television images; television ads do play a role in managing consumer
demand; and, most recently, many analysts have concluded that television is playing
the central role in political elections, that elections have become a battle of images
played out on the television screen, and that television is playing an essential role
in the new art of governing (Kellner 1990a).
Now, obviously, different audiences watch television in different ways. For some,
television is nothing more than a fragmented collage of images that people only
fitfully watch or connect with what goes before or comes after. Many individuals
today use devices to zap from one program to another, channel hopping or
grazing to merely see whats happening, to go with the disconnected flow of
images. Many individuals who watch entire programs merely focus on the surface
of images, with programs, ads, station breaks, and so on flowing into each other,
collapsing meaning in a play of disconnected signifiers. Many people cannot
remember what they watched the night before, or cannot provide coherent accounts
of the previous nights programming.
And yet it is an exaggeration to claim that the apparatus of television itself
relentlessly undermines meaning and collapses signifiers without signifieds into a
flat, one-dimensional hyperspace without depth, effects, or meanings. Thus, against
the postmodern notion of culture disintegrating into pure image without referent
or content or effectsbecoming at its limit pure noiseI argue by contrast that
television and other forms of media culture play key roles in the structuring of
contemporary identity and shaping thought and behavior. I have argued elsewhere
that television today assumes some of the functions traditionally ascribed to myth
and ritual (i.e. integrating individuals into the social order, celebrating dominant
values, offering models of thought, behavior, and gender for imitation, and so on).
I also argued that TV myth resolved social contradictions in the way that LeviStrauss
238 Media culture/identities/politics
described the function of traditional myth and provided mythologies of the sort
described by Barthes which idealize contemporary values and institutions, and
thus exalt the established way of life (Kellner 1982). I illustrate these points in
the following sections where I discuss how popular television programs, and
more generally advertising, function to provide models of identity in the
contemporary world.
Consequently, I argue that much postmodern cultural analysis is too one-sided
and limited, in either restricting its focus on form, on image alone, or in abandoning
media culture analysis altogether in favor of grandiose totalizing metaphors (black
holes, implosion, excremental culture, and so on). Instead, it is preferable to analyze
both form and content, image and narrative, and postmodern surface and the deeper
ideological problematics within the context of specific exercises which explicate
the polysemic nature of images and texts, and which endorse the possibility of
multiple encodings and decodings. With these qualifications in mind, let us then
examine Miami Vice to discover what we might learn concerning television,
postmodernity, and identity.
Miami Vice and the politics of image and identity
Miami Vice, along with MTV, was many critics favorite example of postmodern
television (Gitlin 1987; Fiske 1987b; Grossberg 1987). The program originated in
1984 as a product of Hill Street Blues producer Anthony Yerkovich and film
director Michael Mann; Mann became the controlling figure and remained with
the program until its end in 1989. The series took the form of a crime drama centered
around two undercover officers, Sonny Crockett, a Miami native and former
University of Florida football player (Don Johnson) and Ricardo Tubbs (Paul
Michael Thomas), a Puerto Rican detective who migrated south from New York
City. Their superior, Castillo (Edward James Olmos), was a Cuban-American and
they had a variety of police co-workers and street informants who were series
regulars. Action focused on Miami drug and crime scenes, and was shot at actual
Florida locations around Miami.
In Miami Vice, images are detached from the narrative and seem to take on a life
of their own. Its producers rejected familiar earth tones and offered instead a wealth
of artificial images, emphasizing South Florida colors of flamingo pink, lime green,
Caribbean blue, subdued pastels, and flashing neon. On the cutting edge of image
and sound production from the beginning, the series deployed four-track stereo
and used popular rock music to establish ambience, often playing entire songs as
background to the action, replicating the music video form of MTV.6 Their use of
lighting, camera angles, cutting, sound, and the exotic terrain of Miamis hightech,
high-rise, high-crime, and multiracial culture makes for a wealth of resonant
images which its producers sometimes successfully turned into aesthetic spectacles
that are highly intense, fascinating, and seductive. The sometimes meandering
narratives replicate experiences of fragmentation and of slow ennui, punctuated
with hallucinogenic intensity. Image frequently takes precedence over narrative
Television, advertising, and identity 239
and the look and feel become primary, often relegating story-line and narrative
meanings to the background.
No doubt, this arguably postmodern style is a fundamental aspect of Miami
Vice and yet I would submit that most analyses of the series as postmodern
get it wrong, or miss key aspects of the phenomenon. Privileging Jamesons
category of the waning of affect, Gitlin (1987), for example, claims that Miami
Vice is the ultimate in postmodern blankness, emptiness, and world-weariness.
Yet, against this reading, one could argue that it pulsates as well with intense
emotion, a clash of values, and highly specific political messages and positions
(see Best and Kellner 1987 and the following analysis). Grossberg (1987) also
argues that Miami Vice and other postmodern culture obliterates meaning and
depth, claiming:
Miami Vice is, as its critics have said, all on the surface. And the surface is
nothing but a collection of quotations from our own collective historical
debris, a mobile game of Trivia. It is, in some ways, the perfect televisual
image, minimalist (the sparse scenes, the constant long shots, etc) yet concrete.
(Grossberg 1987:28)
Grossberg goes on to argue that indifference (to meanings, ideology, politics,
and so on) is the key distinguishing feature of Miami Vice and other postmodern
texts which he suggests are more akin to billboards to be scanned for what they tell
us about our cultural terrain rather than texts to be read and interrogated.
Against Grossberg, I would argue that Miami Vice is highly polysemic and is
saturated with ideologies, messages, and quite specific meanings and values.
Behind the high-tech glitz are multiple sites of meaning, multiple subject
positions, and highly contradictory ideological problematics. The show had a
passionately loyal audience which was obviously not indifferent to the series
which had, as I attempt to show, its own intense, affective investments and
passions. In the following discussion, I thus argue that reading the text of Miami
Vice hermeneutically and critically provides access to its polysemic wealth and
that therefore it is a mistake to rapidly speed by such artifacts, however some
audiences may relate to them.
By contrast, for a one-dimensional postmodern reading, an artifact like Miami
Vice is all surface without any depth or layered meanings. On my reading, however,
the form, narrative, and images constitute a polysemic text with a multiplicity of
possible meanings which require multivalent readings that probe the various layers
of the text. For my political hermeneutic, the show is read as a social text which
tells us some things about contemporary society. In particular, I wish to suggest
that Miami Vice provides many insights into the fragmentation, reconstruction,
and fragility of identity in contemporary culture and that it also provides insight
into how identities are constructed through the incorporation of subject positions
offered for emulation by media culture. Against the Althusserian position, taken at
one time by Screen, which claims that ideological texts interpolate individuals into
subject positions that are homogenous, unified, and untroubled, I shall suggest
240 Media culture/identities/politics
that on the contrary the subject positions of media culture are highly specific,
contradictory, fragile, and subject to rapid reconstruction and transformation.7
To begin, media culture provides images and figures with which its audiences
can identity and emulate. It thus possesses important socializing and enculturating
effects via its role models, gender models, and variety of subject positions which
valorize certain forms of behavior and style while denigrating and villainizing
other types. For example, it is well-documented that Miami Vices detectives
Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Paul Michael Thomas) have become fashion
icons, arbiters of taste. Crocketts unconstructed Italian jackets, his tennis shoes
without socks, his T-shirts and loose pants, his frequently stubbled beard, his
changing hairstyle, and so on produced a model for a new male look, a new hip
alternative to straight fashion, a legitimation for loose and causal. Tubbs, by
contrast, provides an icon of the hip and meticulously fashionable with his Vern
Uomo double-breasted suits and thin Italian ties, fashionable shoes, trendy earring,
and nouveau-cool demeanor. Their male associates, Zito and Switek, with their
Hawaiian shirts, loose, colorful pants, and very lack of high fashion provide models
of more informal clothing and looks, while the women detectives Gina and Trudy
are constantly changing their clothes, hairstyles, and looks, validating a constant
turn-over and reconstruction of image and look.
The social horizon of Miami Vice is the materialist consumer society of the
1980s and the Reaganist emphasis on wealth, affluence, fashion, style, and image.
During this time, a new image culture defined identity in terms of image. Miami
Vice, in its images and stories, transcoded these fashion and identity discourses
and in turn influenced the fashion, style, and look of its era. The Miami Vice effect:
it was now cool to engage in more casual fashion styles and to constantly change
ones look and image. Don Johnson and other actors on the show became fashion
icons and role models, and the show promoted a glitzy high-tech look which
synthesized advertising and TV techniques, combining dazzling images with fast
editing and intense musical soundtracks and background.
Crockett and Tubbs and their colleagues are arguably role models for macho
white males, blacks, Hispanics, women, and teenagers, while the criminal underclass
portrayed provides criminal identities. Thus, quite specific gender and role models
and subject positions are projected, as are quite different images of sex, race, and
class than are usual in the typical mediascapes of television world. In general,
Miami Vice positions its viewers to identify with and desire an affluent, up-scale
lifestyle via its projection of images of a high-tech, high-consumption affluent
society. Its iconic images of high-rise buildings, luxury houses, fast and expensive
cars and women, and, of course, the pricey and ambiguous commodities of drugs
and prostitution produce images of affluence and high-level consumption which
position viewers to envy the wealth and power of the villains while identifying as
well with the lifestyles, personality traits, and behavior of the heroes. The challenge
of Miami Vice is to present the good cops as more appropriate and desirable role
models than the bad drug dealers and affluent criminal underworld who in a
sense live out the fantasy of unbridled capitalism.
Television, advertising, and identity 241
The program also invites viewers to identify with a fast, mobile lifestyle focusing
on exciting consumerist leisure. The opening iconic images of the show present a
speedboat racing across the ocean with blue waves and white foam pulsating to an
intense musical beat; the images cut to exotic birds, sensual women, sports
competition, horse and dog racing, and other leisure images with affluent Miami
as the backdrop. These opening images are packed together with quick editing
which provide a sensation of speed and mobility, iconic invitations to get into the
fast lane and join the high life. The show itself will then demonstrate how individuals
enter into this leisure utopia and find the good life within its spectacles and
enticements.
As its narratives unfold, Miami Vice presents some revealing insights into the
problematics of identity in contemporary techno-capitalist societies. The chief
characters (Crockett, Tubbs and their boss Castillo) all have multiple identities and
multiple pasts which intersect in unstable ways with the present. In each case, their
identity is fragmented and unstable, different and distinctive in each character, yet
always subject to dramatic change. Crockett is presented as an ex-football star, a
Vietnam veteran, and a young man familiar with the criminal underworld, with the
players in the drug and crime scene. His nickname Sonny codes him as an icon
of youth while his last name Crockett, evokes the hero image derived from the
name of one of the heroes of the Alamo, Davy Crockett, who was subject of a
successful Disney TV miniseries in the 1950s and the hero of John Waynes The
Alamo in 1960. Unlike the stolid bourgeois Davy, however, Sonny is presented as
having been married and divorced with several episodes depicting him with his
former wife and son, yet these encounters are infrequent and he gains no real
lasting identity as a father or husband in the series.
Instead, Crockett is portrayed in multiple relationships, relatively unstructured
and subject to quick change. In early seasons, he is shown involved with his
colleague Gina and is also involved with a fashionable architect, a stewardess who
dies of a drug overdose, and a woman doctor who is also a drug addict. These
relationships were featured in single episodes within which the relationship
disintegrated, never to reappear (his two lovers involved with drugs died). In the
1987/8 season, Crockett marries a successful rock singer who he was assigned to
protect (played by Scottish rock star Sheena Easton), yet she soon disappears on a
seemingly interminable rock tour and when he is shot and almost dies (A Bullet
for Crockett, 1988), she cannot be reached and only his colleagues are there for
the death watcha substitute family of a type increasingly familiar in TV world as
the divorce rate soars in the real world.
Tubbs, by contrast, is presented as a street-wise black cop who leaves New York
after his brother is shot and comes to Miami to seek his brothers killer; he decides
to stay and teams up with Crockett. His name Ricardo Tubbs, his nickname Rico,
and his dark, multiple-hued skin codes him as of mixed racial descent. Tubbs rarely
talks about his past and lives a perpetual present, closely connected only to his
partner Crockett. Their boss Castillo was also, like Crockett, a Vietnam veteran
who worked as well for the Drug Enforcement Agency in Thailand where he married
242 Media culture/identities/politics
and lost his wife in a battle with a drugs baron. Presumed dead, she and the drugs
baron arrive in Miami (Golden Triangle, 1985); Castillo learns that she is now
happily married, but was kidnapped and is in effect the hostage of the drug dealer,
who threatens to kill her husband if she leaves or betrays him. After Castillo rescues
the woman, in a Casablanca-inspired ending, he bids her and her husband farewell
at the end of the episode.
Castillo appears as the brooding patriarch, the self-contained and self-enclosed
autonomous subject who defines himself by his morality and actions. His is the
most stable identity in Miami Vice and he presents a figure of an autonomous self
with a strongly fixed personal identity. Yet Castillo too is presented as a man of
great passion and intensity which he constantly suppresses, producing the image
of a smoldering figure who could explode any moment into violence and chaos,
whose carefully constructed moral boundaries might at any moment dissolvea
quiet, tragic figure who could easily fall into the more chaotic world of violence
and nihilism which threatens all boundaries and identities in the fragile and unstable
world of Miami Vice.
Crockett and Tubbs in contrast to Castillo are constantly changing their looks,
styles, and behavior. At the beginning of the 1988/9 season, Crockett appeared
with shoulder-length hair, sometimes held back in a ponytail, while Tubbs appeared
with a thick beardwhich disappeared later in the season. The instability of the
cops identity in Miami Vice is exploited in a plot device which utilizes their multiple
identities as cops and undercover players in the underworld. Both assume
undercover roles with Crockett living on an expensive boat, masquerading as drug
runner Sonny Burnett, while Tubbs assumes the role of buyer/dealer Ricardo Cooper
who sometimes assumes a Jamaican, Caribbean persona, while other times he
appears as a hip, black urban hood. One would think that the word would soon get
around that Burnett is really the vice cop Crockett and that the various
criminals who Tubbs plays are really masks for the vice cop Tubbs. Yet in
show after show, Crockett and Tubbs assume their criminal identities and slide
from good guy to bad guy as easily as one would change ones undershirt.8 Such
doubled-coded identities signals the artificiality of identity, that identity is
constructed not given, that it is a matter of choice, style, and behavior rather than
intrinsic moral or psychological qualities. It also suggests that identity is a game
that one plays, that one can easily shift from one identity to another.
Postmodern identity, then, is constituted theatrically through role playing and
image construction. While the locus of modern identity revolved around ones
occupation, ones function in the public sphere (or family), postmodern identity
revolves around leisure, centered on looks, images, and consumption. Modern
identity was a serious affair involving fundamental choices that defined who one
was (profession, family, political identifications, and so on), while postmodern
identity is a function of leisure and is grounded in play, in gamesmanship, in
producing an image. The notion of a playercentral to identity construction in
Miami Viceprovides clues to the nature of postmodern identity. A player knows
the rules and the score and acts accordingly. The player plays with and often flouts
Television, advertising, and identity 243
social conventions and attempts to distinguish herself through ritualized activities,
through gambling, sports, drug-dealing and use, sexual activity, or other leisure
and social concerns. The player becomes someone if she succeeds and gains
identity through admiration and respect of other players.
One of the structuring principles of Miami Vice points to a schizoid dichotomy
within the identity construction of the two main characters which I believe points
to tensions within contemporary identity construction. As noted, Crockett and Tubbs
are both cops and players in many episodes, acting as criminals to entrap the real
players. In the 1988/9 season, the plot lines played on this double identity, as
Crockett schizophrenically slid from Burnett back to Crockett. The story suggests
that it is easy to fall into, to become, the roles that one plays and that identity
construction today is highly tenuous and fragile. Suspense was built around whether
Crockett could continue to be Crockett, or whether he would suddenly become
Burnett. The moral seems to be that when one radically shifts identity at will,
one might lose control, one might become pathologically conflicted and divided,
disabled from autonomous thought and action.
Thus it appears that postmodern identity tends more to be constructed from the
images of leisure and consumption than modern identities and tends to be more
unstable and subject to change. Both modern and postmodern identity contain a
level of reflexivity, an awareness that identity is chosen and constructed, though,
in contemporary society, it may be more natural to change identities, to switch
with the changing winds of fashion. While this produces an erosion of individuality
and increased social conformity (to contemporary models of identity), there are,
however, some positive potentials of this postmodern portrayal of identity as an
artificial construct. For such a notion of identity suggests that one can always
change ones life, that identity can always be reconstructed, that one is free to
change and produce oneself as one chooses.
This notion of multiple, freely chosen, and easily disposed of postmodern
identities can be interestingly contrasted to more traditional images of police who
had quite different modern identities and who offered quite different subject
positions. In Dragnet (19519 and 196770) Jack Webbs Sgt. Friday was the
model of the tight, moralistic, and ascetic authoritarian personality, while Robert
Stacks Elliot Ness in The Untouchables (195963) was literally untouchable
and incorruptible by women or criminals. Both were extremely rigid, authoritarian
figures without apparent personal lives or any individuality or complex personality
traits. The chief cop in The F.B.I. (196574) was also highly impersonal, with no
distinctive personal identity, as were the cops in 1950s police dramas like Highway
Patrol, M Squad, and The Naked City.
In the 1960s and 1970s more personable cops began to appear with Columbo,
Kojak, Baretta, Starsky and Hutch, and so on. Yet these TV cops too had relatively
fixed identities which were readily identifiable by their personality quirks, by their
marks of individuality. Columbos shuffling, modest, and sly methods of
interrogation, Kojaks bully-boy masculist tactics, Barettas identification with the
little guy and rage at criminals who hurt his people, and Starsky and Hutchs
244 Media culture/identities/politics
explosions of moral rage provided these TV cops with stable, familiar identities
more highly individualized than previous ones, but equally substantial and fixed.
Such stability is no longer visible in Miami Vice where Crockett and Tubbs assume
different hairstyles, looks, roles, and behavior, from show to show, season to season.
Although identity in Miami Vice in the figures of Crockett and Tubbs is unstable,
fluid, fragmentary, disconnected, multiple, open, and subject to dramatic
transformation, it nonetheless privileges certain male subject positions. In particular,
macho male identity is positively valorized throughout; Crockett, Tubbs, and Castillo
are all highly macho figures and their male and female subordinates emulate their
behavior. The viewer is thus positioned to view highly aggressive, highly masculist,
and, fairly often, highly sexist behavior as desirable, and a macho male subject is
thus privileged as the most desirable role model. The two women vice cops
Trudy and Ginaare often assigned to play prostitutes, or to seduce criminals and
are thus presented in negative stereotypes of sluts and seducers; they often fall into
situations of danger and must be rescued by the male cops. When they are allowed
subjectivity of their own, they fall for criminals, as when Gina falls in love with an
unscrupulous IRA thug in the episode entitled When Irish Eyes are Shining
(1985). The women cops are presented most positively when they engage in
aggressive male behavior, as when Gina shoots the IRA gunmen, or Trudy shoots
an especially sleazy criminal who she was forced to sleep with in her undercover
work. Such macho behavior replicates the images of women warriors which became
an increasingly central image in the late 1970s and 1980s (Alien, Aliens,
Superwoman, Sheena, and so on). Equality in this ideological scenario thus becomes
equal opportunities to kill, to become women warriors equal to the macho males in
the realm of primal aggressivity.
The show is also arguably racist, privileging the white male Crockett as the
subject of power and desire, as the center around which most of the narratives
revolve. In January of 1989, NBC devoted its Friday night primetime schedule to
Three for Crockett, broadcasting three straight episodes that centered on the
central white male figure. In terms of image construction, white is also the privileged
color: Crockett often wears white jackets, drives a white car, carouses on white
sand beaches, and pursues beautiful white women. Blackas in the traditional
melodrama genreis coded as the site of danger, mystery, uncertainty, and evil.
Few shows have used as many and as menacing black, nighttime backdrops, in
which the light forms and figures are privileged as the positive index against the
negatively valorized black background.
And yet the black/white friendship of Crockett and Tubbsinterpreted by some
critics as blatantly homoerotic (Butler 1985)presents one of the most striking
images of interracial friendship in the history of television, and Tubbs and Castillo
are two of the most positive images of people of color yet to appear. On the other
hand, while Tubbs and Castillo arguably provide positive role models for young
black and Hispanic males, most of the images of blacks, Hispanics and Third-
World people of color in the series are strongly negative. Two informers featured
on many episodesthe Cuban Izzie and the black Noogieare stereotypes of
Television, advertising, and identity 245
Hispanic and black street hustlers, the improper role models against which Tubbs
and Castillo are defined. Two black policeman have been featured in supporting
rolesan obnoxious New York officer and an overly aggressive and incompetent
federal drug enforcerwho also present the negative antithesis of the ideal black
professional. The criminals are also stereotyped people of color who play the usual
conventional roles: drug dealers, war lords, prostitutes, gun runners, and so on,
who are predominantly vicious, unprincipled, dangerous, and violent.
Third-World scenes are likewise presented negatively as places of corruption,
violence, and multiple forms of evil and these negative emanations from the site of
otherness, the hearts of darkness, are shown as threatening the utopia of Miami
with its easy affluence and upscale lifestyles. The underclass of the United States
by contrast is rarely portrayed, though some episodes have shown quite striking
images of ghetto life and one 1986 episode realistically depicts the problems of
ghetto blacks in a story of a young black athlete, unable to escape from the violence
and degradation of the ghetto.
In fact, there are some socially critical and progressive aspects to the series. In
a sense, the vice portrayed is as much capitalisms vice as Miamis. While Miami
is the site of unbridled crime, it is also the site of unbridled free enterprise and
drug dealing is the ultimate in high-profit capital accumulation, while drugs
represent the ultracapitalist dream of a commodity that is cheap to produce and
that can provide tremendous profits in its selling. A Thai drugs baron in a 1985
episode The Golden Triangle states that drugs are no different from tapioca or
tin ore from Malaysia. It is simply a commodity for which there is a demand.
Indeed, the series is one of the few to present critical images of capitalism. One
episode, The Prodigal Son (1985), featured Living Theater impresario Julien
Beck as a New York banker. In a meeting with drugs barons, the banker stated that
the financial establishment favored continued drug trade to help them recoup their
loans to Third-World countries, for whom drugs was one of the few high yield
exports. In this and other episodes Miami Vice thus practices mild social critique.9
Like Balzac and Brecht, Miami Vice associates wealth with crime, capitalist
enterprise with criminality. On the other hand, the very glamorizing of crime also
celebrates high-powered capitalism, so the equation of crime and business is highly
ambiguousan ambiguity that runs through the series and which constitutes
postmodern identity as ambivalent and beyond traditional good and bad role
models. For identity is often constructed in media culture and society against
dominant conventions and morality; thus there is something amoral or morally
threatening about postmodern selves which are fluid, multiple, and subject to rapid
change. From this perspective, Crockett is a highly ambivalent hero for American
culture: he is frequently unshaven, never wears a tie and often goes without socks,
is sexually promiscuous, and often reverts into his undercover Burnett role in
which he plays with gusto the hip player, ready to do anything for some bucks.
Yet Miami Vice is really neither nihilistic nor celebratory of crime. Like the
traditional gangster genre in Hollywood film (see Warshow 1962), the series can
be read as a cautionary morality tale which shows that those who go beyond
246 Media culture/identities/politics
acceptable boundaries in the pursuit of wealth and power are bound to fall. Like
the gangster genre, Miami Vice is deeply attracted to its criminal underworld and
plays out the primal passion play of capitalist free enterprise: devotion at all costs
to maximizing capital accumulation. Miami Vice thus identifies the ultra-capitalist
subject position as one of greed, uncontrolled appetite, and violent aggression
which inevitably leads to death and destruction.
And yet the images of the affluent lifestyles of the criminals are so attractive
and appealing that the series itself is morally ambivalent, investing both the
professional identity of the cops and the outlaw identity of the criminals with positive
valuean ambivalence intensified by the dual identities of Crockett and Tubbs
who play out both affluent criminal roles and professional cop roles, within the
same episode. Such ambivalence perhaps intensifies the sort of relativism that certain
postmodern theorists claim is symptomatic of the contemporary condition. The
series also puts on display and reinforces tendencies in contemporary society to
adopt multiple identities, to change ones identity and look as one changes ones
clothes, job, or habitat. This analysis of Miami Vice suggests, in fact, that image,
look, and style are key constituents of a postmodern image culture and key
constituents of postmodern identity.
Consequently, Miami Vice puts on display the way that identity is constituted
in contemporary society through image and style, and suggests that such a
mode of identity is highly fluid, multiple, mobile, and transitory. Yet I have
attempted to show that certain images of fashion, gender, and style are connected
to specific content and values, thus constituting specific modes and forms of
identity. Likewise, the images and narratives of media culture are also saturated
with ideology and value, so that identity in contemporary societies can (still)
be interpreted as an ideological construct, as a means whereby enculturation
produces subject positions which reproduce dominant capitalist and masculist
values and modes of life.
Throughout this book, I have attempted to redeem Marxist, feminist, and
multiculturalist modes of ideology critique against postmodern formalism which
abstracts ideological content from image and spectacle and which affirms theses
concerning the collapse of meaning and identity in a postmodern mediascape.
Against this operation, I have suggested that rather than identity disappearing in
contemporary society, it is rather reconstructed and redefined and I have attempted
to show the relevance and importance of theories which focus on specific ideological
subject positions and modes of identity formation to help illuminate these processes.
Thus, whereas the modern self often assumed multiple identities, the necessity of
choice and instability of a constructed identity often produced anxiety. Moreover,
a stable, substantial identityalbeit self-reflexive and freely chosenwas at least
a normative goal for the modern selfa type of stable identity clearly observable
in the television heroes of the 1950s through the 1970s. The rapid shifts of identity
in Miami Vice, by contrast, suggest that the postmodern self accepts and affirms
multiple and shifting identities. Identity today thus becomes a freely chosen game,
a theatrical presentation of the self, in which one is able to present oneself in a
Television, advertising, and identity 247
variety of roles, images, and activities, relatively unconcerned about shifts,
transformations, and dramatic changes.
This analysis would suggest that what might be called postmodern identity is
an extension of the freely chosen and multiple identities of the modern self which
accepts and affirms an unstable and rapidly mutating condition. Yet precisely this
condition of a multiplicity of choices was a problem for the modern self, producing
anxiety and identity crisis. For the postmodern self, however, anxiety allegedly
disappears for immersion in euphoric fragments of experience and frequent change
of image and identity. I would not, however, want to go as far as Jameson (1984:62f.)
who claims that anxiety disappears in postmodern culture, nor would I want to
deny that identity crises still occur and are often acute (a psychiatrist friend told
me that gender confusion is especially acute among teenagers today, who are deeply
attracted to androgynous figures like Boy George and Michael Jackson, as well as
to feminine males like Prince, or macho women like Madonna). Indeed, when
one changes ones images and style frequently, there is always anxiety concerning
whether others will accept ones changes and validate through positive recognition
ones new identity.
Yet one surmises that there is a shift in identity formation and that postmodern
selves are becoming more multiple, transitory, and open. For Jameson (1984:76),
the figure of David Bowie gazing in fascination at a stack of television sets was a
privileged figure of the postmodern selfan image to which we might add figures
of the TV channel-switcher, rapidly changing channels and mediascapes, or the
modem-connected computer freak, rapidly switching from computer games, to
data-bases and bulletin boards, to ones own personal word-processing system
and files, which figure the new postmodern terminal self. Moreover, there are
emancipatory possibilities in the perpetual possibility of being able to change ones
self and identity, to move from one identity to another, to revel in the play of
multiple and plural identities.
In any case, whatever its naturemodern or postmodernidentity in
contemporary society is increasingly mediated by media images which provide
the models and ideals for modelling personal identity. Media stars like the cops on
Miami Vice, or pop superstars like Michael Jackson or Madonna, also provide
models of identity through the construction of looks, image, and style. Advertising
too provides such models of identity and in the following discussion I want to
show how some cigarette ads provide figures of the dramatic shift in the nature
and substance of personal identity in contemporary society. After an examination
of these artifacts, Ill draw some provisional conclusions concerning identity and
postmodernity.
ADVERTISING IMAGES
Like television narratives, advertising too can be seen as providing some functional
equivalents of myth. Like myths, ads frequently resolve social contradictions,
provide models of identity, and celebrate the existing social order. Barthes (1972
248 Media culture/identities/politics
[1957]) saw that advertising provided a repertoire of contemporary mythologies,
and in the following discussion I depict how cigarette ads contribute to identity
formation in contemporary society. The following analysis is intended to show
that even the static images of advertising contain subject positions and models for
identification that are heavily coded ideologically. As in the previous discussion, I
argue hereagainst a certain type of postmodern formal analysisthat the images
of media culture are important both in the mode of their formal image construction
and address, as well as in terms of the meanings and values which they communicate.
Accordingly, I discuss some print ads which are familiar, are readily available for
scrutiny, and lend themselves to critical analysis.
Print ads are an important sector of the advertising world with about 50 percent
of advertising revenues going to various print media while 22 percent is expended
on television advertising. Let us look first, then, at some cigarette ads, including
Marlboro ads aimed primarily at male smokers and Virginia Slims ads which try to
convince women that it is cool to smoke and that the product being advertised is
perfect for the modern woman (see the illustration following).10 Corporations
such as those in the tobacco industry undertake campaigns to associate their product
with positive and desirable images and gender models. Thus, in the 1950s, Marlboro
undertook a campaign to associate its cigarette with masculinity, associating
smoking its product with being a real man. Marlboro had been previously
packaged as a milder womens cigarette, and the Marlboro man campaign was
an attempt to capture the male cigarette market with images of archetypically
masculine characters. Since the cowboy, Western image provided a familiar icon
of masculinity, independence, and ruggedness, it was the preferred symbol for the
campaign. Subsequently, the Marlboro man became a part of American folklore
and a readily identifiable cultural symbol.
Such symbolic images in advertising attempt to create an association between
the products offered and socially desirable and meaningful traits in order to produce
the impression that if one wants to be a certain type of person,for instance, to be
a real manthen one should buy Marlboro cigarettes. Consequently, for decades,
Marlboro used the cowboy figure as the symbol of masculinity and the center of
their ads. In a postmodern image culture, individuals get their very identity from
these figures, thus advertising becomes an important and overlooked mechanism
of socialization, as well as manager of consumer demand.
Ads form textual systems with basic components which are interrelated in ways that
positively position the product. The main components of the classical Marlboro ads are
the conjunction of nature, the cowboy, horses, and the cigarette (see Figure 1). This
system associates the Marlboro cigarette with masculinity, power, and nature. Note,
however, in the Marlboro ad in Figure 2, how the cowboys decline in size, dwarfed by the
images of desert and sky. Whereas in earlier Marlboro ads, the Marlboro man loomed
largely in the center of the frame, now images of nature are highlighted. Why this shift?
All ads are social texts which respond to key developments during the period in
which they appear. During the 1980s, media reports concerning the health hazard
of cigarettes became widespreada message highlighted in the mandatory box at
250 Media culture/identities/politics
the bottom of the ad that The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette
Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health. As a response to this attack, the Marlboro
ads now feature images of clean, pure, wholesome nature, as if it were natural to
smoke cigarettes, as if cigarettes were a healthy natural product, an emanation
of benign and healthy nature. The ad, in fact, hawks Marlboro Lights and one of
the captions describes it as a low tar cigarette. Many 1980s Marlboro ads deployed
imagery that was itself light, white, green, snowy, and airy. Through the process
of metonomy, or contiguous association, the ads tries to associate the cigarettes
with light, natural, healthy deserts, clean snow, horses, cowboys, trees, and
sky, as if they were all related natural artifacts, sharing the traits of nature,
thus covering over the fact that cigarettes are an artificial, synthetic product, full of
dangerous pesticides, preservatives, and other chemicals.11
Thus, the images of healthy nature are a Barthesian mythology (1972) which
attempt to cover over the image of the dangers to health from cigarette smoking.
The Marlboro ad also draws on images of tradition (the cowboy), hard work, caring
for animals, and other desirable traits, as if smoking were a noble activity,
metonomically equivalent to these other positive social activities. The images, texts,
and product shown in the ad thus provide a symbolic construct which tries to cover
over and camouflage contradictions between the heavy work and the light
cigarette, between the natural scene and the artificial product, between the
cool and healthy outdoors scene and between the hot and unhealthy activity of
smoking, and the rugged masculinity of the Marlboro man and the Light cigarette,
originally targeted at women. In fact, this latter contradiction can be explained by
the marketing ploy of suggesting to men that they can both be highly masculine,
like the Marlboro man, and smoke a (supposedly) healthier cigarette, while also
appealing to macho women who might enjoy smoking a mans cigarette which
is also lighter and healthier, as womens cigarettes are supposed to be.
The 1983 Virginia Slims ad pictured in Figure 3 attempts in a similar fashion
to associate its product with socially desired traits and offers subject positions
with which women can identify. The Virginia Slims textual system classically
includes a vignette at the top of the ad with a picture underneath of the Virginia
Slims woman next to the prominently displayed package of cigarettes. In the
example pictured, the top of the ad features a framed box that contains the narrative
images and message, which is linked to the changes in the situation of women
portrayed through a contrast with the modern woman below. The caption under
the boxed image of segregated male and female exercise classes in 1903 contains
the familiar Virginia Slims slogan Youve come a long way, baby. The caption,
linked to the Virginia Slims w oman, next to the package of cig arettes, connotes
a message of progress, metonomically linking Virginia Slims to the progressive
woman and modern living. In this ad, it is the linkages and connections
between the parts that establish the message which associates Virginia Slims
with progress. The ad tells women that it is progressive and socially acceptable
to smoke, and it associates Virginia Slims with modernity, social progress, and
the desired social trait of slimness.
Television, advertising, and identity 251
In fact, Lucky Strike carried out a successful advertising campaign in the 1930s
which associated smoking with weight reduction (Reach for a Lucky instead of a
sweet!), and Virginia Slims plays on this tradition, encapsulated in the very brand
name of the product. Note too that the cigarette is a Lights variety and that, like
the Marlboro ad, it tries to associate its product with health and well-being. The
pronounced smile on the womans face also tries to associate the product with
happiness and self-contentment, struggling against the association of smoking with
guilt and dangers to ones health. The image of the slender woman, in turn,
associated with slimness and lightness, not only associates the product with socially
desirable traits, but in turn promotes the ideal of slimness as the ideal type of
femininity.
Later in the 1980s, Capri cigarettes advertised its product as the slimmest slim!,
building on the continued and intensified association of slimness with femininity.
The promotion of smoking and slimness is far from innocent, however, and has
contributed to eating disorders, faddish diets and exercise programs, and a dramatic
increase in anoxeria among young women, as well as rising cancer rates. As Judith
Williamson points out (1978), advertising addresses individuals and invites them
to identify with certain products, images, and behavior. Advertising provides a
utopian image of a new, more attractive, more successful, more prestigious you
through purchase of certain goods. Advertising magically offers self-transformation
and a new identity, associating changes in consumer behavior, fashion, and
appearance with metamorphosis into a new person. Consequently, individuals are
taught to identify with values, role models, and social behavior through advertising
which is thus an important instrument of socialization as well as a manager of
consumer demand.
Advertising sells its products and view of the world through images, rhetoric,
slogans, and their juxtaposition in ads to which tremendous artistic resources,
psychological research, and marketing strategies are devoted. These ads express
and reinforce dominant images of gender and position men and women to assume
highly specific subject positions. A 1988 Virginia Slims ad (shown in Figure 4), in
fact, reveals a considerable transformation in its image of women during the 1980s
and a new strategy to persuade women that it is all right and even progressive
and ultramodern to smoke. This move points to shifts in the relative power between
men and women and discloses new subject positions for women validated by the
culture industries.
Once again the sepia-colored framed box at the top of the ad contains an image
of a woman serving her man in 1902; the comic pose and irritated look of the
woman suggests that such servitude is highly undesirable and its contrast with the
Virginia Slims woman (who herself now wears the leather boots and leather gloves
and jacket as well) suggests that women have come a long way while the everpresent
cigarette associates womans right to smoke in public with social progress.
This time the familiar Youve come a long way, baby is absent, perhaps because
the woman pictured would hardly tolerate being described as baby and because
womens groups had been protesting the sexist and demeaning label in the slogan.
252 Media culture/identities/politics
Note, too, the transformation of the image of the woman in the Virginia Slims ad. No
longer the smiling, cute, and wholesome potential wife of the earlier ad, she is now
more threatening, more sexual, less wifely, and more masculine. The sunglasses
connote the distance from the male gaze which she wants to preserve and the leather
jacket with the military insignia connotes that she is equal to men, able to carry on a
masculine role, and is stronger and more autonomous than women of the past.
The 1988 ad is highly antipatriarchal and even expresses hostility toward men
with the overweight man with glasses and handlebar mustache looking slightly
ridiculous while it is clear that the woman is being held back by ridiculous fashion
and intolerable social roles. The new Virginia Slims woman, however, who
completely dominates the scene, is the epitome of style and power. This strong
woman can easily take in hand and enjoy the phallus (i.e. the cigarette as the sign
of male power accompanied by the male dress and military insignia) and serve as
an icon of female glamour as well. This ad links power, glamour, and sexuality and
offers a model of female power, associated with the cigarette and smoking. Ads
work in part by generating dissatisfaction and by offering images of transformation,
of a new personal identity. This particular ad promotes dissatisfaction with traditional
images and presents a new image of a more powerful woman, a new lifestyle and
identity for the Virginia Slims smoker. In these ways, the images associate the
products advertised with certain socially desirable traits and convey messages
concerning the symbolic benefits accrued to those who consume the product.
Although Lights and Ultra Lights continue to be the dominant Virginia Slims
types, the phrase does not appear as a highlighted caption in the 1988 ad as it used
to and the package does not appear either. No doubt this heavy woman contradicts
the light image and the ad connotes instead power and (a dubious) progress for
women rather than slimness or lightness. Yet the womans teased and flowing
blonde hair, her perfect teeth which form an obliging smile, and, especially her
crotch positioned in the ad in a highly suggestive and inviting fashion code her as
a symbol of beauty and sexuality, albeit more autonomous and powerful.
The point I am trying to make is that it is precisely the images which are the
vehicles of the subject positions and that therefore critical literacy in a postmodern
image culture requires learning how to read images critically and to unpack the
relations between images, texts, social trends, and products in commercial culture
(Kellner 1989d). My reading of these ads suggests that advertising is as concerned
with selling lifestyles and socially desirable identities, which are associated with
their products, as with selling the product themselvesor rather, that advertisers
use the symbolic constructs with which the consumer is invited to identify to try to
induce her to use their product. Thus, the Marlboro man (i.e. the consumer who
smokes the cigarette) is smoking masculinity or natural vigor as much as a cigarette,
while the Virginia Slims woman is exhibiting modernity, thinness, or female power
when she lights up her slim.
This sort of reading of advertising not only helps individuals to resist
manipulation, but it also depicts how something as seemingly innocuous as
advertising can depict significant shifts in modes and models of identity. For
Television, advertising, and identity 253
example, the two Virginia Slims ads suggest that at least a certain class of women
(white, upper-middle and upper class) were gaining more power in society and
that women were being attracted by stronger, more autonomous, and more
masculine images. Advertising campaigns attempt to incorporate such images to
associate their products with the socially desired traits which are then further
promoted with the ads attempts to promote their products.12
A comparison of late 1980s Marlboro ads with their earlier ads also yields
some interesting results. While the Marlboro ads once centered on the Marlboro
man, and in the early 1980s continue to feature this figure, curiously, by the late
1980s, human beings disappeared altogether from some Marlboro ads which
projected pure images of wholesome nature associated with the product. The caption
Made especially for menthol smokers, the green menthol insignia on the cigarette
package, and the blue and green backdrops of the trees, grass, and water in the ad
all attempt to incorporate icons of health and nature into the ads, as if these menthol
Lights would protect the buyer from cigarette health hazards. Undoubtedly this
transformation in the Marlboro ads points to growing concern about the health
hazards of cigarettes which required even purer emphasis on nature. Yet the absence
of the Marlboro cowboy might also point to the obsolescence of the manual worker
in a new postmodern information and service society where significant sectors of
the so-called new middle class work in the industries of symbol and image
production and manipulation.
The prominent images of the powerful horses in the late 1980s ad, however,
point to a continued desire for power and fantasies of virility and masculinity. The
actual powerlessness of workers in contemporary capitalist society makes it in
turn difficult to present concrete contemporary images of male power that would
appeal to a variety of male (and female) smokers. Eliminating the male figure also
allows appeal over a wider range of social classes and occupational types, including
both men and women who could perhaps respond more positively to images of
nature and power than to the rather obsolete cowboy figure. Furtherand these
images are clearly polysemic, subject to multiple readings,the new emphasis on
Great refreshment in the flip-top box not only harmonizes with the refreshing
images of green and nature, but points to the new hedonist, leisure culture in
postmodern society with its emphasis on the pleasures of consumption, spectacle,
and refreshment. The refreshment tag also provides a new legitimation for cigarette
smoking as a refreshing activity (building on the famous Pepsi pause that
refreshes?) which codes an obviously dangerous activity as refreshing and thus
as health-promoting.
Moreover, the absence of human figures in the late 1980s Marlboro ads could
be read as signs of the erasure of the human in postmodern society, giving credence
to Foucaults claim that in a new episteme the human itself could be washed away
like a face drawn on sand at the edge of the sea (1970:387). Yet the human cannot
so easily be washed away and lo and behold in 1989, not only human figures, but
the Marlboro man himself returned in a new ad campaign. One ad provides an
example of a new advertising strategy which requires the consumer to produce the
254 Media culture/identities/politics
meaning herself, much like a modernist text. This fully two-page ad portrays giant
hands (presumably those of the Marlboro man himself) holding a pair of gloves,
with a cigarette held between two gnarled and weatherbeaten fingers. The only
captionbesides the federally mandated list of ingredients and warnings to ones
health -says: Come to where the flavor is. There is no Marlboro cigarette box,
portrayed nor any caption stating the brand name. Instead one has to look quite
closely at the small brand name inscribed on the cigarette itself to discern precisely
what brand is being advertised.
Half of the two-page ad is buried in darkness with only the caption and
difficult to decipher fragments of images emerging. The other half of the ad
centers on the gnarled hands, perhaps projecting the subliminal message to
those concerned with the health risks of smoking that it is possible to smoke
and survive. For the heavily lined hands are obviously those of someone who
has lived life to the full, whose vicissitudes and experience are etched into the
very skin of his hands, whose deeply textured skin attests to a long-lived life.
In this way, the cigarette is associated with survival and a full life, thus assuaging
worries that smoking constitutes a serious risk of cancer and other dread diseases
and providing subliminal functions of anxiety reductiona typical task of
contemporary advertising.
This Marlboro ad is one of a genre of contemporary ads which forces the
consumer to work at discerning the brand being sold and at deciphering the text to
construct meaning. The minimalism of product signifiers appeals to readers jaded
with traditional advertising, tired of the same old stale images, and bored with and
cynical toward advertising manipulation. To the cool postmodern reader, the
association of masculinity with smoking Marlboros might be laughable, yet even
such minimalist ads utilize product differentiation and use new images while
building on old cues. In addition to appealing to a survivalist urge in the
contemporary smoker, the 1989 ad invites her to Come to where the flavor is.
The emphasis on flavor appeals to hedonist tastes, to enjoy the flavor, to light up
for pleasure. Such appeals interpellate contemporary individualist-hedonist impulses
to have fun, to do what one wants and pleases at all costseven the destruction of
ones health.
The textual system of this 1989 Marlboro ad as a whole thus addresses its reader
as an individual, as someone able to read the complex ad and to choose their own
pleasures as they will. There is thus a subliminal appeal to the individuals freedom
and creativity which invites the reader to interpret the ad as one chooses and to
light up the cigarette when one pleases in disregard of the obligatory government
warnings linking cigarettes to health risks. The gnarled hands as well are those of
an individual who is charge of his life and who makes his own decisions, so the
text as a whole is structured to associate smoking Marlboro with individuality and
power. Interestingly, this ad and the other Marlboro ads which erase human subjects
play down gender identity and one might read this as a decentering of gender
identity in contemporary society, as a disassociation between the product and gender,
as a bracketing of the centrality of gender in the constitution of identity. The appeal
Television, advertising, and identity 255
here is directly to use-value, to the pleasure and flavor that the cigarette produces
rather than the sign value of masculinity, or the appeal to power.
Moreover, this text works to get the reader to identify with the product and to
produce a pleasurable feeling from the feat of producing meaning, from reading
the ambiguous text, that is presumably then transferred to and associated with the
product, so that the image of Marlboro is associated with free choice and creativity.
And yet the highly paid cultural interpreters who work for advertising agencies are
hedging their bets concerning the Marlboro ads of recent years. For the 1990s has
seen a return of the previous realist ads which center on the old Marlboro cowboy,
along with production of a new type of ad just analyzed, as well as a new series of
pure nature imagery.
In the 1990s, Marlboro has returned to recycling old images, especially of the
famous cowboy and nature. The December 1117, 1993 TV Guide back-cover ad,
for instance, features the cowboy riding a horse, followed by another horse which
he has roped and is leading through a snowy field. The white snow is blowing
behind the cowboy deploying the images of nature. Thus, the image combines
power and control with images of nature, implying that if you want to be a natural
man and in control, smoke a Marlboro. Curiously, however, although the corporate
insignia Marlboro is featured in bright red script there is no pack of cigarettes,
or even a single cigarette, shown, nor is the cowboy, pictured hard at work, smoking.
It is if Marlboro is embarrassed by their product and can only sell the qualities of
nature and masculinityand death, as the Surgeon Generals warning, boldly
emblazoned in a letter box in the bottom right-hand corner notes.
The multiplicity of strategies in cigarette ads show that the advertising agencies
of contemporary capitalism are not at all sure as to what will attract consumers to
their products, or with what images consumers identify. For, as I have been arguing,
one of the features of contemporary culture is precisely the fragmentation,
transitoriness, and multiplicity of images, which refuse to crystalize into a stable
image culture. Thus, the advertising and cultural industries draw on modern and
postmodern strategies, and on traditional, modern, and postmodern themes and
iconography.
SITUATING THE POSTMODERN
In a sense, it is undecidable whether contemporary image culture and forms of
identity should be described as modern or postmodern. The multiplicity of types
of Marlboro ads currently circulating helps put into question claims concerning a
radical postmodern rupture with modern culture and that postmodernism is a new
cultural dominant. For the current Marlboro ads draw on traditional, modernist,
and postmodern image production and aesthetic strategies, while deploying a variety
of traditional and contemporary ideological appeals as well. Rather than taking
postmodernity as a new cultural totality, I would thus argue that it makes more
sense to interpret the many facets of the postmodern as an emergent cultural trend
in contrast to residual traditional values and practices still operative and a dominant
256 Media culture/identities/politics
capitalist modernity defined as the project of the hegemony of capital whereby
commodification, individualism, fragmentation, reification, and consumer culture
are still key constituents of the modern age.13
On the other hand, one could describe precisely this co-existence of styles, this
mixture of traditional, modern, and postmodern cultural forms, as postmodern.
Perhaps the very lack of a cultural dominant and the mixing of a variety of aesthetic
styles and strategies, such as one sees in advertising, is postmodern. Yet
contemporary Marlboro advertising campaigns suggest that the highly paid and
often sharp interpreters of the contemporary scene in the employment of corporate
capital see the continuing existence of traditional identities, where masculinity is
still important, combined with a modern concern for power and enjoyment as a
continuing social force and matrix of contemporary values and identity. These ads
show that traditional and modern culture co-exists with a postmodern culture
whereby new forms of images are needed to catch the attention of a jaded and
cynical consumer. If postmodernity were the cultural totality that some of its
celebrants claim, one imagines that the most highly paid and sophisticated image
producers would inundate its denizens with postmodern imagery, but no,
contemporary advertising and media culture suggests that instead the contemporary
culture is highly fragmented into different taste cultures which respond by producing
quite different images and values.
A megacorporation like Marlboro goes after all of these audiences, thus one
sees a certain heterogeneity in its image productions with different appeals sent
out to different audiences according to market segmentation: the old Marlboro
man for readers of TV Guide; horses and nature for the health and vitality conscious
readers of fashion magazines like Elle and M; and more complex aesthetic spectacles
for the gourmet hedonists who read Vanity Fair and the like. The multiplicity of
advertising strategies pursued by the Marlboro folks also points to the immanent
contradictions of commodity culture. For advertising attempts to produce identities
by offering products associated with certain traits and values. And yet the inexorable
trends of fashion and the new advertising campaigns undermine previously forged
identities and associations to circulate new products, new images, new values.
To be sure, there have been ad campaigns that adopt postmodern strategies
of image construction to sell their goods. Robert Goldman describes one Reebok
campaign that failed (1992) and in 1993/4, Levis ran an ad campaign that
showed disconnected fragments of images and words of the contemporary scene
with the product logo submerged in the text as just another fragment, forcing
the viewer to figure out what was being advertisedwhich is, one supposes,
an effective way to get the brand name in the viewers mind which is a major
function of the advertisement, though as failed postmodern ad campaigns
indicate, the strategy of deploying postmodernism in the aesthetics of
advertising is risky.
And so it is that advertising, fashion, consumption, television, and media culture
constantly destabilize identity and contribute to producing more unstable, fluid,
shifting, and changing identities in the contemporary scene. And yet one also sees
Television, advertising, and identity 257
the inexorable processes of commodification at work in this process. The market
segmentation of multiple ad campaigns and appeals reproduces and intensifies
fragmentation and destablizes identity which new products and identifications are
attempting to restabilize. Thus, it is capital itself which is the demiurge of allegedly
postmodern fragmentation, dispersal of identity, change, and mobility. Rather than
postmodernity constituting a break with capital and political economy as Baudrillard
(1976) and others would have it, wherever one observes phenomena of postmodern
culture one can detect the logic of capital behind them.
This argument suggests that much postmodern theory is excessively abstract in
bracketing political economy and capitalism from the phenomena which it describes
and thus occludes their economic underpinnings. Furthermore, such theory tends
to overgeneralize, taking examples from new emergent trends which it conflates
into a new cultural dominant. Some postmodern cultural theory also abstracts from
ideological content and effects, focusing merely on formal structures or image
construction. Against such positions, I have argued that rather than advertising and
the other images of media culture being flat, one-dimensional and without
ideological coding, as some postmodern theory would have it, many ads are multidimensional,
polysemic, ideologically coded, open to a variety of readings, and
expressive of the commodification of culture and attempts of capital to colonialize
the totality of life, from desire to satisfaction.
My analyses thus suggest that in a postmodern image culture, the images, scenes,
stories, and cultural texts of media culture offer a wealth of subject positions which
in turn help structure individual identity. These images project role and gender
models, appropriate and inappropriate forms of behavior, style and fashion, and
subtle enticements to emulate and identify with certain identities while avoiding
others. Rather than identity disappearing in a postmodern society, it is merely
subject to new determinations and new forces while offering as well new
possibilities, styles, models, and forms. Yet the overwhelming variety of possibilities
for identity in an affluent image culture no doubt creates highly unstable identities
while constantly providing new openings to restructure ones identity.
It is difficult to say whether on the whole this is a good or bad thing and it
is probably safer to conclude with Jameson that the phenomena associated with
postmodernity are highly ambivalent and exhibit both progressive and regressive
features. There does seem to be more of an acceptance of multiple and unstable
identities in the contemporary cultural mileux than was the case previously. Modern
identitieshowever multiple and subject to changeappeared to be more stable,
whereas there currently seems to be more acceptance of change, fragmentation,
and theatrical play with identity than was the case in the earlier, heavier, and more
serious epoch of modernity.
On one hand, this increases ones freedom to play with ones identity and to
dramatically change ones life (which may be good for some individuals), while,
on the other hand, it can lead to a totally fragmented, disjointed life, subject to the
whims of fashion and the subtle indoctrinations of advertising and popular culture.
Against a totally dispersed, fragmented, and disconnected identity, one might want
258 Media culture/identities/politics
to valorize certain features central to modern identity, like autonomy, rationality,
commitment, responsibility, and so on, or one might want to reconstruct these
concepts, as, for instance, Habermas has attempted to do with rationality. In any
case, identity continues to be the problem it was throughout modernity, though it
has been problematized anew in the current orgy of commodification, fragmentation,
image production, and societal, political, and cultural transformation that is the
work of consumer capitalism.
Indeed, the quest for identity is arguably more intense than ever in the present
moment. There has been something of a rebellion against producing identity solely
as an individual achievement in the contemporary era, with increased emphasis on
tribal, national, group, and other forms of collective identity. In many parts of the
world, there has been a return to tribalism, to past forms of collective identities
national, religious, or ethnicand one finds parallel projects in so-called identity
politics whereby individuals gain identity through membership in groups and
affirmation of a collective identity (i.e. as a woman, a black, a gay, or some
combination thereof).
Yet the quest for individuality and particularity in ones look, image, style, and
life continues apace. Media figures like Michael Jackson and Madonna show that
identity is a construct, that it can be constantly changed and refined and finetuned,
that identity is a question of image, style, and looks. Michael Jackson, for
instance, erases the boundary between black and white, male and female, adult
and youth in his image constructions. In some of his music videos, he appears
black, in others white and in yet others indeterminate; sometimes he appears highly
masculine, sometimes more feminine, sometimes androgenous. At times, he appears
as an adult, firmly in control of his career as King of Pop, and other times he
appears as a youth, as a lover of children who is more comfortable with kids and
being a kid than with adults.14
The point is that many icons of media culture suggest that identity is a matter of
individual choice and action and that each individual can produce their own unique
identity. In any case, the issue of identity is more pressing and contested than ever
before in contemporary societies. Against the globalization of culture, there are
intense struggles to preserve and enhance national identities; against the forced
identities of modern nationhood (often a product of imperialism), individuals and
groups are constructing identities in terms of religion, ethnicity, and region against
former national identities; against all collective identities, other individuals are
attempting to construct their own personal identities, which often are, however,
highly mediated by collective forces.
Personal identity is thus fraught with contradictions and tensions. Many
individuals, for often different reasons, are indifferent to national or other collective
identities and wish to construct their identities through their own lifestyles, looks,
and image. Others fervently embrace identity politics and construct their identities,
their deepest sense of who they are, by affirming their membership in various
groups or collectivities (i.e. women, blacks, gays, or whatever). Some have labelled
this form of identity politics postmodern, but interest group politics and even
Television, advertising, and identity 259
gaining identity through political and group affiliation is also a modern
phenomenon.
And so we are left with the question: Is the current construction of identity
distinctly postmodern, and has a fundamental shift in the construction of identity
taken place? If so, are we living in a completely new epoch, a postmodernity? I
would argue that it is equally arbitrary and open to debate as to whether one posits
that we are in a situation of late modernity or a new postmodernity, or whether one
posits identity as primarily modern or postmodern. Either could be argued. The
features that I have ascribed to postmodern identity could be read as an
intensification of features already present in modernity, or as a new configuration
with new emphases that one could describe as postmodern. In fact, concepts and
terms, like identity itself, are social constructs, arbitrary notions which serve to
mark and call attention to certain phenomena and which fulfill certain analytical
or classifactory tasks. So the debate over the postmodern is largely a debate over
what terminology we should use to describe the contemporary socio-cultural matrix.
If the terminology illuminates shifts in contemporary culture, it is useful. If it
covers over phenomena like the continuing role of capitalism in constructing
contemporary societies and identities, then it is harmful.
Likewise, it is an open question as to whether one wants to keep using the
category of the subject in cultural theory and elsewhere. The concept of the subject
has been shown to be socially constructed and the notion of an unified, coherent,
and essential subject illusory.15 Rather than constructing something like a subject,
or interpellating individuals to identify themselves as subjects, media culture tends
to construct identities and subject positions, inviting individuals to identify with
very specific figures, images, or positions, such as the Marlboro man, the Virginia
Slims woman, a soap opera mother, or a Madonna.
Yet postmodern claims concerning the complete dissolution of the subject in
contemporary culture seem exaggerated. Rather, it seems that media culture
continues to provide images, discourses, narratives, and spectacles that produce
pleasures, identities, and subject positions that people appropriate. Media culture
provides images of proper role models, proper gender behavior, and images of
appropriate style, look, and image for contemporary individuals. Media culture
thus provides resources for identity and new modes of identity in which look,
style, and image replaces such things as action and commitment as constituitives
of identity, of who one is. Once upon a time, it was who you were, what you did,
what kind of a person you wereyour moral, political, and existential choices
and commitments, which constituted individual identity. But today it is how you
look, your image, your style, and how you appear that constitutes identity. And
it is media culture that more and more provides the materials and resources to
constitute identities.
And so Strike a pose! Vogue! as Madonna orders. The advantage of this shift
in the constitution of identity is that postmodern identities suggest that one can
change, that one can remake oneself, that one can free oneself from whatever traps
and restrictions one finds oneself ensconced in. The disadvantage is that identity
260 Media culture/identities/politics
becomes flattened out and trivialized in terms of style, look, and consumption in
which one is defined by ones image, possessions, and lifestyle. Ones identity is a
construct, constituted out of the materials of ones life-situation and one can change
and transform ones life according to ones projects, as Sartre, Foucault, and others
remind us. But constituting a substantial identity is work which requires will, action,
commitment, intelligence, and creativity, and many of the postmodern identities
constructed out of media and consumer culture lack these features, being little
more than a game someone plays, a pose, a style and look that one can dispose of
tomorrow for a new look and image: disposable and easily replaceable identities
for the postmodern carnival.
Even weirder are some of the mutations of identity in computer culture. Many
people who join MUDSMulti-User Dimension real-time discussion sites on
computerstake on identities of members of the opposite sexor of different
races, classes, professions, or whatever. Some players in MUD games take on
multiple personalities and play out different roles and identities in their computer
interactions. In MUDs, Sherry Turkic notes, the self is not only decentered but
multiplied without limit (cited in David 1994:44). Turkle also noted in a 1994
conference that the drastic rise in the number of patients diagnosed with multiplepersonality
disorders might be correlated with computer and other role-playing
games, though she also defined health as a fluidity of access to different selves
and suggested that computer role-playing might also serve as a form of self-therapy
(David 1994:44).
We will explore further transmutations of identity in contemporary society in
the theories of Jean Baudrillard and cyberpunk fiction in Chapter 9. But first let us
examine Madonna as a celebrity and identity-machine for the end of the millenium.
Continuing our probing of contemporary culture, politics, and identity, and the
proper terminology to describe our present moment, we shall accordingly turn
next to interrogation of the Madonna phenomenon which is deeply connected with
the problematics sketched out in this chapter.
NOTES
1 On identity in modernity, see Berman 1982 and the essays collected in Lash and Friedman
1992. On the discourses of modernity, see Antonio and Kellner, forthcoming. I am
interpreting modernity here as an epoch of rapid change, innovation, and negation of
the old and creation of the new, a process bound up with industrial capitalism, the
democratic revolutions, urbanization, and social and cultural differentiation. Following
the conventions of modern social theory, I am assuming a distinction between modern
and premodern societies, but it should be kept in mind that such distinctions are ideal
types that highlight certain features of a social order, while sometimes covering over
similarities and continuities.
2 On the Frankfurt School analysis of the decline of individuality, see Kellner 1989a. On
the dissolution of identity in postmodernity, see Baudrillard 1983a, 1983b, 1983c;
Jameson 1983, 1984, 1991; and other texts that I discuss below.
3 For some other attempts to analyze postmodernism and popular culture, see the articles
in Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1986) and Vol. 10, No. 2 (1986);
Television, advertising, and identity 261
Screen Vol. 28, No. 2 (1987); Kaplan 1987; Ross 1988; Connor 1989, with bibliography:
263ff.; and Hutcheon 1989:107f.
4 On modernism in the arts, see the discussion in Chapter 4. I am using the term
modernism here to denote a series of artistic practices that attempt to produce
innovation in the arts in form, style, and content, which begin with Baudelaire in the
mid-nineteenth century and continue through Madonna.
5 This antihermeneutical position was argued earlier by Sontag 1969 and Barthes 1975.
6 Audiences and critics immediately took to the series use of rock music soundtrack.
One early review noted:
Throbbing with rock-and-rhythmic camera work, the weekly drama is in the vanguard
of network series that have begun to move to a name-brand beat. Its detective heroes
dress to Devo, cruise to Phil Collins and fight crime to the Rolling Stones. As executive
producer Michael Mann observes, Miami Vice and MTV are really first cousins.
Adds composer James Di Pasquale: There is no question that the marriage of television
and rock is getting more romantic.
(People, October 29, 1984)
And:
The most striking aspect of Miami Vice is its use of music. In most television
programs music is employed to emphasize the action on the screen, to highlight tension,
for example, or underscore sadness. But Miami Vice takes rock-and-roll selections
by popular performers, such as the Rolling Stones and Phil Collins, as well as more
obscure works by Jamaican Rastafarian reggae groups, and combines them with closely
edited film montages to create music videos similar to those shown on MTV Music
Television, the round-the-clock rock-music cable channel.
(The New York Times, January 3, 1985)
7 I hesitate to use the term subject positions since I do not believe that things like
subjects exist, that the notion of the subject is purely ideological and a socially
constructed fiction. Yet media culture does produce positions through which audiences
are invited or induced to identify with, thus I use the term subject positions in this
sense to describe identities, roles, looks, or images established by media models and
discourse.
8 This double-coded identity for the vice cops fooled Gitlin (1987) who claims that the
viewer has to take for granted that two Miami cops (1985 take-home pay: $429 a week)
can blithely afford the latest and flashiest in cars and clothes (1987:152) and that the
cops exhibit traces of outlawry (ibid.,: 153). He misses here the recurrent plot line
that they have been assigned undercover identities as players in the drug scenea
plot device made explicit in the pilot (available for video-cassette rental) and in many
episodes of the series.
9 For further examples of some progressive political messages on the series, see Best and
Kellner 1987.
10 The method of reading ads and the interpretation of advertising which follows is indebted
to the work of Robert Goldman (1992) and his collaborative work with Steve Papson
(forthcoming).
11 The tobacco leaf is (for insects) one of the most sweet and tasty of all plantswhich
requires a large amount of pesticides to keep insects from devouring it. Cigarette makers
use chemicals to produce a distinctive smell and taste to the product and use preservatives
to keep it from spoiling. Other chemicals are used to regulate the burning process and
to filter out tars and nicotine. While these latter products are the most publicized dangers
in cigarette smoking, actually the pesticides, chemicals and preservatives may well be
more deadly. Scandalously, cigarettes are one of the most unregulated products in the
262 Media culture/identities/politics
U.S. consumer economy (European countries, for example, carefully regulate the
pesticides used in tobacco growing and the synthetics used in cigarette production).
Government sponsored experiments on the effects of cigarette smoking use generic
cigarettes which may not have the chemicals and preservatives of name brands, thus no
really scientifically accurate major survey on the dangers of cigarette smoking has ever
been done by the U.S. government. The mainstream media, many of whom are part of
conglomerates who have heavy interests in the tobacco industry, or who depend on
cigarette advertising for revenue, have never really undertaken to expose to the public
the real dangers concerned with cigarette smoking and the scandalous neglect of this
issue by government and media in the United States. Cigarette addiction is thus a useful
object lesson in the unperceived dangers and destructive elements of the consumer
society and the ways these dangers are covered over. (My own information on the
cigarette industry derives from an Alternative Views television interview which Frank
Morrow and I did with Bill Drake on the research which will constitute his forthcoming
book on the dangers of tobacco.)
12 Michael Schudson (1984) summarizes the literature and studies which put in question
the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in actually getting consumers to buy their
products; in fact, advertisings functions in promoting style, models and images of
identification, and various ideologies is more interesting to cultural studies which should
see advertising as an important and powerful legislator of style, fashion, and identity.
13 The distinction between residual, emergent, and dominant culture comes from Raymond
Williams (1977).
14 In 1993, there were widespread accusations that Jackson regularly sexually molested
young boys, that he was a pedophile whose house was a lure for young boys, whose
parents he often paid to let them visit him and spend the night. Interpreting some of
Jacksons music videos in this context suggests that the lyrics of many of his most
popular songs can be read as legitimations of pedophilia which are addressed to young
boy lovers. I do not know if Jackson is guilty of child molestation, but it is clear that the
extensive media coverage of the charges, supported by former employees in his mansion
and one of his own sisters, has produced an image of Jackson as pedophile, as child
molester. He who lives by the media and its images dies by it as well. And yet media
resurrection is also possible. In the summer of 1994, Jackson married Elvis Presleys
daughter, positioning himself as responsible adult, as husband, and as part of the lineage
of the King of Pop, a role that he has long sought. Media culture is thus a question of
image, of the production and fine-tuning of images and of the attempt to erase negative
images when they appear.
15 During the 1970s, contributors to Screen magazine polemicized against essentialist
conceptions of an unified subject, following French post-structuralism, and argued
following Althusser s theory of ideologythat the cinema constructed illusory
individual subjects, interpellating individuals to see themselves as subjects. This too
is probably an illusion, for it makes more sense to see media culture as interpellating
individuals to construct specific identities, to identify with specific subject positions,
rather than with some occult subject. In fact, the concept of the subject is highly
abstract and can often be usefully replaced by cognate terms such as identities, subjectpositions,
ways of seeing, discourse positions, and the like.
263
Chapter 8
Madonna, fashion, and image
For the past decade, Madonna Louise Ciccone has been a highly influential pop
culture icon and the center of a storm of controversy. She is the best-selling and
most discussed female singer in popular music, one of the most prominent stars
of music video, an aspiring movie actress, and, most of all, a superstar of pop
culture. For her fans, she is the ultimate pop icon, the image of fashion and
identity, who produced legions of Madonna wannabees who slavishly imitated
her fashion statements. For her detractors, she is the ultimate in crass
commercialism and media manipulation, the epitome of banal consumerism run
rampant in media culture.
Madonna has thus become a site of contestation and controversy, adored and
abhorred by audiences, critics, and academics alike. Most of the polemics, however,
are contentious, of an either/or and pro or con nature, and they fail to grasp the
many sides of the Madonna phenomenon. While some celebrate her as a subversive
cultural revolutionary, others attack her as antifeminist, or as irredeemably trashy
and vulgar. Against such one-sided interpretations, however, I argue that Madonna
is a site of genuine contradiction that must be articulated and appraised to adequately
interpret her images, works, and their effects.
My argument is that Madonnas images and reception highlights the social
constructedness of identity, fashion, and sexuality. By exploding boundaries
established by dominant gender, sexual, and fashion codes, she encourages
experimentation, change, and production of ones individual identity. Yet by
privileging the creation of image, looks, fashion, and style in the production of
identity, Madonna reinforces the norms of the consumer society which offers the
possibilities of a new commodity self through consumption and the products of
the fashion industry. I argue that grasping this contradiction is the key to Madonnas
effects and to interrogating the conditions under which the multiplicity of discourses
on Madonna, and contradictory readings and evaluations, are produced. Madonna
pushes the most sensitive buttons of sexuality, gender, race, and class, offering
challenging and provocative images and cultural artifacts, as well as ones that
reinforce dominant conventions. The Madonna construct is a set of contradictions
and in the following pages Ill explore the images, codes, and effects that constitute
the Madonna phenomenon.
264 Media culture/identities/politics
FASHION AND IDENTITY
Madonna is interesting for cultural studies because her work, popularity, and
influence reveal important features of the nature and function of fashion and identity
in the contemporary world. Fashion offers models and material for constructing
identity. Traditional societies had relatively fixed social roles and sumptuary codes,
so that clothes and ones appearance instantly denoted ones social class, profession,
and status.1 Identity in traditional societies was usually fixed by birth, marriage,
and accomplishment, and the available repertoire of roles was tightly constricted.
Gender roles were especially rigid, while work and status were tightly circumscribed
by established social codes and an obdurate system of status ascription.
During the medieval period, identities in Western Europe were especially
circumscribed and rules even dictated what members of different classes could or
could not wear. Modern societies eliminated rigid codes of dress and fashion, and
beginning around 1700 changing fashions of apparel and appearance began
proliferating (Wilson 1985). Although a capitalist market dictated that only certain
classes could afford the most expensive attire, which signified social privilege and
power, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, fashion was democratized in
countries which carried through a democratic revolution, so that anyone who could
afford certain clothes and make-up could wear and display what they wished
(whereas previously, sumptuary laws forbade members of certain classes from
dressing and appearing like the ruling elites; Ewen and Ewen 1982; Ewen 1988).
Modernity also offered new possibilities for constructing personal identities.
Modern societies made it possible for individuals to producewithin certain limits
their own identities and to experience identity crises. Already in the eighteenth century,
the philosopher David Hume formulated the problem of personal identity, of what
constituted ones true selfhood, even suggesting that there was no substantial or
transcendental self. The issue became an obsession with Rousseau, Kierkegaard,
and many other Europeans who experienced rapid change, the breakdown of
traditional societies, and the emergence of modernity (see Chapter 7).
In modernity, fashion is an important constituent of ones identity, helping to
determine how one is perceived and accepted (see Wilson 1985; Ewen 1988).
Fashion offers choices of clothes, style, and image through which one could produce
an individual identity. In a sense, fashion is a constituent feature of modernity,
interpreted as an era of history marked by perpetual innovation, by the destruction
of the old and the creation of the new (Berman 1982). Fashion itself is predicated
on producing ever new tastes, styles, dress, and practices. Fashion perpetuates a
restless, modern personality, always seeking what is new and admired, while
avoiding what is old and passé. Fashion and modernity go hand in hand to produce
modern personalities who seek their identities in constantly new and trendy clothes,
looks, attitudes, and style, and who are fearful of being out-of-date or unfashionable.
Of course, fashion in modern societies was limited by gender codes, economic
realities, and the force of social conformity which continued to dictate what one
could or could not wear, and what one could or could not be. Fashion in modernity
Madonna, fashion, and image 265
itself underwent complex stages of historical development, though by the beginning
of the twentieth century, modern fashion rationalized clothing and cosmetics, and
mass markets began to make changes in fashion open to mass consumption (Ewen
and Ewen 1982; Ewen 1988). Yet fashion codes continued to be relatively fixed
for some classes and regions. Documentary footage from the U.S. in the 1950s,
shown in the 1982 ABC documentary Heroes of Rock and other sources, depicted
parents, teachers, and other arbiters of good taste attempting to dictate proper and
improper fashion, thus policing the codes of fashion and identity. Crossing gender
codes in fashion was for centuries a good way to mark oneself as a social outcast
or even to land in jail or a mental institution.
The 1960s exhibited a massive attempt to overthrow the cultural codes of the
past and fashion became an important element of the construction of new identities,
along with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, phenomena also involved in the changing
fashions of the day. In the 1960s, antifashion in clothes and attire became
fashionable and the subversion and overthrowing of cultural codes became a norm.
So-called fashion subversion continued to be in vogue during the following decades,
and the fashion industry allowed new flexibility and marketed an everchanging
array of new styles and looks. By means of such fashion moves, individuals could
quickly produce their own identities through resisting dominant fashion codes and
producing their own fashion statements, or using dominant styles in their own
ways. One of Stuart Ewens students provides interesting testimony concerning
how it was possible to produce ones own style against dominant fashion codes:
I went to Catholic school for twelve years. In grammar school, I wore a
uniform for eight years. I used to try to rebel against this in little ways, such
as not wearing the tie I was supposed to, or by wearing the wrong type of
collar. It was a way of finding myself a little freedom, a way of fighting
the system in a small way.
(cited in Ewen 1988:5)
Indeed, Madonna herself tells in an early interview how she expressed adolescent
rebellion through fashion from the time she was a young girl, indicating she and
her girlfriend dressed extravagantly:
Only because we knew that our parents didnt like it. We thought it was fun.
We got dressed to the nines. We got bras and stuffed them so our breasts
were over-large and wore really tight sweaterswe were sweater-girl floozies.
We wore tons of lipstick and really badly applied makeup and huge beauty
marks and did our hair up like Tammy Wynette.
(Madonna, cited in Lewis 1993:142)
During this period, media culture became a particularly potent source of cultural
fashions, providing models for appearance, behavior, and style. The long-haired
and unconventionally dressed rock stars of the 1960s and the 1970s influenced
changes in styles of hair, dress, and behavior, while their sometimes rebellious
attitudes sanctioned social revolt, as when Bob Dylan proclaimed that The Times
266 Media culture/identities/politics
They are AChanging, or that change was Blowing in the Wind. Groups like
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and performers like Janis
Joplin or Jimi Hendrix sanctioned countercultural revolt and the appropriation
of new styles of dress, behavior, and attitudes. The association of rock culture
with long hair, social rebellion, and nonconformity in fashion continued through
the 1970s with successive waves of heavy metal rock, punk, and new wave
attaining popularity.
More conservative television programming, films, and pop music by contrast
provided mainstream models for youth. During the past two decades, cultural
conservatives have been reacting strongly against 1960s radicalism and fashion,
and youth culture and fashion have become battlefields between traditionalist
conservatives and cultural radicals, attempting to overturn traditional gender roles,
fashion codes, and values and behavior. Thus, fashion and social identities are
themselves part of a process of social struggle and conflict between opposing models
and ideologies. Conservatives have their fashion models and style, as do subcultural
rebels. Political struggles thus are partly played out in fashion wars as well as
elections and political debate.
High school in particular is a period in which young people construct their
identities, attempting to become someone (Wexler 1992). High school has been
a terrain of contradiction and struggle for the past decades. While some parents
and teachers attempt to instill traditional values and ideas, youth culture is often in
opposition to conservative culture. Although the 1980s was a predominantly
conservative period with the election of Ronald Reagan and a right turn in U.S.
culture (see Ferguson and Rogers 1986; Kellner and Ryan 1988; Kellner 1990a),
the images from popular music figures sometimes cut across the conservative grain.
Michael Jackson, Prince, Boy George, and other rock groups undermined traditional
gender divisions and promoted polymorphic sexuality. Cyndi Lauper revelled in
offbeat kookiness, while Pee Wee Herman engaged in silly and infantile behavior
to the delight of his young (and older) audiences. Throwing off decades of cool
sophistication, maturity, respectability, and taste, Pee Wee made it OK to be silly
and weird, or at least different.
THE MADONNA PHENOMENON
It was in this period during the 1980s, in which youth identities were being
renegotiated in a conservative era, that Madonna first came to prominence.
Her early music videos and concert performances transgressed traditional
fashion boundaries and she engaged in overt sexual behavior and titillation,
subverting the boundaries of proper female behavior. Thus, from the
beginning Madonna was one of the most outrageous female icons among the
repertoire of circulating images sanctioned by the culture industries. Although
there were no doubt many more far out and subversive figures than Madonna,
their images and messages did not circulate through mainstream culture and
thus did not have the efficacy of the popular. The early Madonna sanctioned
268 Media culture/identities/politics
rebellion, nonconformity, individuality, and experimentation with fashion and
lifestyles. Madonnas constant change of image and identity promoted
experimentation and the creation of ones own fashion and style. Her sometimes
dramatic shifts in image and style suggested that identity was a construct, that
it was something that one produced, and that it could be modified at will. The
way that Madonna deployed fashion in the construction of her identity made it
clear that ones appearance and image helps produce what one is, or at least
how one is perceived and related to.
Thus, Madonna problematized identity and revealed its constructedness and
alterability. Madonna was successively a dancer, musician, model, singer, music
video star, movie and stage actress, Americas most successful
businesswoman, and a pop superstar who excelled in marketing her image
and selling her goods. Consciously Grafting her own image, she moved from
being a boy toy, material girl, and ambitious blonde, to artiste of music videos,
films, and concerts. Her music shifted from disco and bubblegum rock, to
personal statements and melodic torch singing, to (with the aid of her music
videos) pop modernism. Madonnas hair changed from dirty blonde to platinum
blonde, to black, brunette, redhead, and multifarious variations thereof. Her
body changed from soft and sensuous to glamorous and svelte to hard and
muscular sex machine to futuristic technobody. Her clothes and fashion changed
from flashy trash, to haute couture, to far-out techno-couture, to lesbian S. s
fashion moves generally caught shifts in cultural style and taste, and thus
achieved the status of the popular, providing fashion models and material for
appropriation by her vast and varied audiences.
Consequently, to properly grasp the Madonna phenomenon, one must perceive
her marketing strategies, the ways that she sold successive images and incorporated
various audiences, and the mechanisms through which she herself became a pop
superstar. Madonna is one of the greatest PR machines in history and she has hired
top agents, publicists, and creative personnel to market her and produce her
images. From the beginning her every move was surrounded by publicity and year
after year Madonna references in media culture have proliferated. Indeed, a Nexis
data-base search for Madonna and pop references from the decade from 1984 to
1993 indicated over 20,000 citations! Madonna is her publicity and image and
the Madonna phenomenon is thus importantly a successful marketing and
publicity story.
While there are certain continuities in Madonnas development which I will
explicate, there are also at least three distinct periods that can be (roughly) equated
to shifts in her music production, her deployment of fashion and sexuality, and the
construction of her image. I will accordingly delineate these periods to articulate
the contours of what has become known as the Madonna phenomenon. My focus
will be on Madonnas images and cultural production, their impact on their
audiences, and her cultural effects over the past decade. Although I deploy the
Madonna, fashion, and image 269
standard methods of cultural studies featuring textual analysis and reception of
texts by audiences, I argue that a generally neglected component of cultural
studiespolitical economy and the production of cultureis an important
key to the Madonna phenomenon.2 For Madonnas success is largely a
marketing success and her music, videos, other products, and image are
triumphs of extremely successful production and marketing strategies
though she has had her marketing and critical failures, mainly her films.
Madonna has made the right connections, has worked with talented music
and video producers, has a phalanx of professional business managers and
publicists, and has for the most part brilliantly produced her own image and
sold it successfully to her audiences.
Madonna I: the boy toy
In 1983, Madonna released her first album, Madonna, and two of the songs (Lucky
Star and Holiday) became major hits. Her early music and songs are rather
conventional popular dance music aimed at a teenage market. But Madonna was
an especially flashy performer and began to attract notice at this point with music
videos of her top hits which were featured on MTV, a relatively new channel which
was to play a key role in her career.3 Indeed, Madonna emerged as one of the first
MTV superstars, whose music videos quickly sold her image to a vast national
audience. From the beginning, Madonna crafted music videos that produced a
distinct image which marketed her to various audiences.
One of her early music videos, Lucky Star, features Madonna as an especially
voluptuous sex object, energetic dancer, and innovative fashion trend-setter. The
video opens with a black and white sequence with Madonna wearing black
sunglasses which she slowly pulls down revealing sultry eyes, intensely focusing
on the camera (and viewer). The sunglasses, of course, were symbols of the
punk generation, which influenced Madonna during her early 1980s days in
New York, and would later become a symbol of the cyberpunk movement as
well (as Bruce Sterling claims in the introduction to his anthology Mirrorshades
1986:vii). Their deployment suggested that Madonna would reveal something
of herself in the video, but that she knew that her performance was an act and
that she would maintain her control and subjectivity. The final sequence returns
to black and white, depicting Madonna pulling the shades over her eyes as the
screen fades to black.
At the end of the brief opening sequence, the screen dissolves to white and a
color sequence shows Madonna dressed totally in black. As the music slowly begins,
she writhes in an erotic pose, the camera cuts to a freeze frame of her face, she
winks, and the video cuts to Madonna dancing and cavorting with two dancers.
The wink, like the opening frame, tells the viewer not to take this too seriously and
perhaps to say to women and feminists that although she is presenting herself as
the object of the male gaze, as an objectified sexual object, she knows what she is
doing, that she is controlling her image. This opens the possibility that Madonna
270 Media culture/identities/politics
will subvert the very images and frames that she is now exploiting to make herself
a lucky star.
Eschewing the narrative frame of most music videos of the day, Lucky Star
presents a collage of images of Madonnas body. The video shows her
energetically dancing, alone or with the two dancers, striking erotic poses, and
showing off her body and clothes. It is important to note that the emerging
Madonna phenomenon, Madonna as pop megasuperstar, is related to her
deployment of music, dance, and image. The music is conventional dance music,
but it is good dance music that empowers the audience to dance and exhibit
themselves à la Madonna. Indeed, she distinguished herself early on as a dancer
in the New York club scene and emerged in her music videos as a spirited
performer of her own songs in the form of dance.
Now Madonna might not be a great dancer, but the edits, framing, and movement
of her music videos allow her to appear as an attractive image and her dance
movements presented her as a free, lively, expressive young woman, using dance
to present her as a moving, attractive, and seductive image. In Lucky Star,
Madonna is dressed in a tight and short black skirt with a black leotard underneath.
She wears a loose black blouse which lightly covers a black veiled lace body shirt
underneath. Around her waist, one sees the famous unchastity beltlater
marketed by her Boy Toy line of fashionwith a large buckle and chains around
the waist. Madonna has a black bow in her hair and a distinctive star earring with
smaller crucifix earrings as well. Completing the outfit are black bobby socks and
short black boots.
Madonnas fashion at this stage constitutes a subversion of conventional codes
and justified wearing any combination of clothes and ornaments that one wished.
Of course, Madonna herself became a model of teen fashion and the infamous
Madonna wannabes slavishly imitated every aspect of her early flashy trash
clothing and ornamentation. She linked fashion to exhibitionism and aggressive
sexuality, connecting fashion revolt with sexual rebellion and the unconventional
use of religious symbols like crucifixes. Thus, Madonna legitimated unconventional
fashion and sexual behavior, endearing her to an audience that felt empowered by
Madonnas flaunting of traditional standards and codes.
Her other early rock video hit, Borderline, depicts motifs and strategies that
would make Madonna a lucky star. The video narrative images weave two sequences
together to illustrate the love song. In color sequences, Madonna sings, flirts, and
seduces a Hispanic youth, while in a black and white sequence an Anglo
photographer snaps pictures of her and courts her. In one black and white sequence,
she sprays graffiti over lifeless classical sculptures, a modernist gesture of the sort
that codes her music videos as transgressors of the codes of high culture, establishing
her as a practitioner of pop modernist subversion which breaks rules and attempts
innovation, though within the limits of the popular.
In Borderline, she breaks the taboo of interracial relationships, by depicting her
character with a Hispanic youth. While she seems to reject him for the fashion
photographer who will make her a star, she rejects the photographer in turn, implying,
Madonna, fashion, and image 271
perhaps, a desire to control her own image, or to pursue her own sexual pleasures.
Madonna is already pushing the buttons of sexuality, and going over established pop
borderlines, with the lyrics promising a utopia of sexual ecstasy (You keep on pushing
my love over the borderline) and the music has upbeat dancing rhythms which
enables Madonna to exhibit her energy and talent as a dancer.
In the video of Borderline, Madonna wears several different outfits and her
hair ranges from dirty and messy blonde in the Hispanic color sequences to
beautifully fashioned glamorous blonde in the black and white sequences. The
contrasting video images of the two Madonnas suggests that ones identity is a
construct that one can modify or change at will, and indeed Madonna herself was
to precisely do this. In addition, Madonnas offering herself to males of various
colors in her music videos (and in reality, if the gossip is true) breaks down racial
barriers to sexuality, but is also a clever marketing strategy inviting white, Hispanic,
and black youths to fantasize that they too can have or be Madonna. Indeed, it was
arguably Madonnas marketing strategy that enabled her to appeal first to white,
urban and suburban working-class and middle-class girls who identified with her
rebellion and flashy and trashy fashion statements, and then successfully to a wide
range of different audiences, pulling in new fans with each successive career move,
as I document below.
Already in her first music videos, Madonna is deploying fashion, sexuality, and
the construction of image to present herself both as an alluring sex object and as a
transgressor of established borderlines. On one hand, the video validates interracial
sex and provides all-too-rare images of Hispanic barrio culture. Yet the two
contrasting narrative sequences convey the message that while you might have a
good time hanging out with Hispanics, it is the white photographer who will provide
the ticket to wealth and success. But she ends up with the Hispanic youth and the
narrative thus valorizes multi-relationships, for the Madonna character continues
to see both guys during the narrative sequences, projecting the fantasy image that
one can have it all, crossing borderlines from one culture to another, appropriating
the pleasures of both cultures and multiple relationships.
The video also puts on display the contrasting fashion codes between upperclass
culture and Hispanic culture, identifying Anglo culture with high fashion,
high art, and luxury. By contrast, Hispanic culture is equated with urban ghettos,
blue jeans, pool halls, and less expensive and stylish clothes and ornamentation. A
later Madonna video, La Isla Bonita, however, utilizes fantasy images of Hispanic
fashion as an icon of beauty and romanticism. Such multiculturalism and her
culturally transgressive moves (i.e. highly explicit sexuality and interracial sexuality)
turned out to be highly successful marketing moves that endeared her to large and
varied youth audiences.
Madonna became a major pop culture figure, however, with the beginning of
her concert tours in 1985 and she began consciously marketing her own image and
a wide range of fashion accoutrements, which she sold under the Boy Toy label.
Already by 1985, the first Madonna effect was evident, displaying her powerful
impact on her audience:
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At concerts her per capita sales of T-shirts and memorabilia are among the
highest in rock history. She sells more than Springsteen, the Rolling Stones
or Duran Duran, says Dell Furano, the concession merchandiser for her
tour. At her San Francisco date, $20 T-shirts sold at the rate of one every six
seconds. She began marketing Madonna-wear, which she described as
sportswear for sexpots. The line included a $25 lace tank top, a $30
sweatshirt, $20 pants and a medium-priced ($30) tube skirt that can be rolled
down for public navel maneuvers.
(People, May 13, 1985)
While an up-scale version of Madonna-wear was also marketed, as were Madonna
make-up kits, her image also encouraged thrift-shop down-scale fashion for the
Madonna look: wearing underwear outside of skirts, loose t-shirts, cheap bracelets,
earrings, chains, and crucifixes also provided appropriate decoration. Indeed, the
Madonna look became known as flash-trash, so that almost any teenage girl
could afford to look like Madonna and share her attitudes and styles. Madonna
fashion made it possible for teenage girls to produce their own identity, to make
their own fashion statements, and to reject standard fashion codes.
During the Virgin Tour, Madonna wore a brightly colored jacket and tight micromini
skirt, a sparkly lingerie harness and black lace stockings that stopped at the
knee, and an array of ornaments, including crucifixes, a peace medallion, and
bracelets. Prancing around in spiked boots, her belly button exposed, Madonna
would take off the jacket to reveal a lacy purple shirt and black bra, accenting a
lush and accessible sexuality. For the hit song, Like a Virgin, Madonna appeared
in a white wedding dress and screamed Do you want to marry me to which the
girls and boys both answered, Yesss! Thrusting her hips as she sang, You make
me feel like a virgin, she unfolded a belly roll as she intoned, touched for the
very first time. This highly sexual rendition of the song mocks virginity, but also
makes fun of sexuality by ironizing its codes and gestures. Her play with sexual
codes reveals sexuality to be a construct, fabricated in part by the images and
codes of popular culture, rather than a natural phenomenon. It also reveals
sexuality to be a field of play, of self-creation and expression, and of desire and
pleasure. From the beginning, Madonna would successfully exploit sexuality and
would in turn present sexuality as natural, enjoyable, and funcertainly a healthy
attitude in a once puritanical culture.4
Madonna wannabees proliferated and she quickly became a model for identity,
associating changes in identity with fashion and style changes. Lewis summarizes
the early Madonna effect:
The shopping mall is a site around which female fan participation in female
address videos coalesces. Madonna is everywhere, writes one biographer,
there is even a mall in California that people have nicknamed the Madonna
mall because so many girls who shop there try to look just like her.In
response to the popularity of MadonnaStyle, Macy s Department Store
created a department called Madonnaland devoted to selling the cropped
Madonna, fashion, and image 273
sweaters ($30), cropped pants ($21) and a variety of jewellery accessories such
as crucifix earrings and outsize pearl necklaces ($459) resembling those worn
by Madonna. The department became the location for the mobilization of
Madonna fans in the summer of 1985 when Macys sponsored a Madonna lookalike
contest to coincide with the stars New York concert date.
(Lewis 1993:144)
Madonnas deployment of fashion and sexuality during this early phase is more
complex than it appears at first glance. While it is easy to dismiss the early
Madonnas posturing as a shameless sex object, boy toy, and material girl who
collapses identity into image and style, a closer reading of her music videos produces
another picture. For instance, her music video Material Girl (1984) seems at first
glance to be an anthem of Reaganism, which glorifies shallow materialism and
celebrates greed and manipulation (The boy with the cold hard cash/Is always Mr
Rightcause Im just a Material Girl). On this reading, the song is a replay of
Marilyn Monroes Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend and is advocating the
same calculating and shallow materialist attitudes.
Although Madonna has assumed a Monroe-like look in this video and does
deploy some of the fashion and poses of Monroes 1950s hymn to bourgeois
materialism, a closer look at the music video provides some different perspectives.
The musical numbers are enframed with a narrative in which a producer looks at
the images of Madonna singing and begins courting her. He is casually dressed in
a brown work shirt and appears to her as an employee of the studio, yet he asks her
out and in the final scene they are seen kissing in an old truck which he had rented
for the occasion.
There is thus a tension between the musical numbers which celebrate wealth
and materialism, and the narrative which privileges true love. On one reading,
which Madonna herself asserted, the video shows the material girl rejecting her
wealthy suitors in favor of a poor working boy. When confronted with the critique
that she was celebrating crass greed, Madonna responded: Look at my video that
goes with the song. The guy who gets me in the end is the sensitive guy with no
money (People, March 11, 1985). On this account, Madonna turns down the guys
courting her in the music and dance sequences for the poor but sincere guy shown
in the realism sequences.
A closer reading raises questions, however, as to whether the poor boy in the
video, played by Keith Carradine, is really poor and whether Madonna doesnt
actually get a very rich and successful businessman in the video. The narrative
images reveal the Carradine character to be a studio mogul who cleverly poses as
a sincere poor dude who wins Madonnas heart. Thus, in Material Girl Madonna
is all things to all people and has it every way: for conservatives of the Reagan
years, she is a celebrant of material values, the material girl, who takes the guilt
away from sex, greed, and materialism. For this audience, she is Marilyn Monroe
reincarnated, the superpop superstar, the super-ideal male fantasy sex object and
female fantasy boy toy icon. But for romantic idealist youth, she is the good girl
274 Media culture/identities/politics
seeking love, who chooses true love over material temptations. Yet in the music
video narrative, she gets both love and a successful guy.
Thus, the music video of Material Girl arguably deploys modernist aesthetic
strategies that put narrative and social codes in tension and that require an active
viewer to produce meanings and interpretations from the polysemic text. The video
also expresses elements of Madonnas own philosophy and, arguably, articulates
some of her contradictions (i.e. trying to have it all ways). Thus, like modernist art,
the music video creates an innovative structure, articulates the artistes vision, and
requires an active reader to decode the possible range of meanings.5
Moreover, the video Material Girl problematizes identity and decouples the
link between expensive clothes, wealth, and position. Carradine wears a brown work
shirt and pants and this is perfectly alright, the video suggests, indicating that fashion
and identity are up to the individual and not societal codes. Madonnas images and
music videos thus legitimate individual choice in appropriating fashion and producing
ones image. Yet the most attractive images in the musical production numbers do
celebrate high and expensive fashion, diamonds, and other costly ornaments as keys
to a successful image and identity. And it could be that the powerful images of wealth
and high fashion, reinforced by the musical lyrics, do privilege bourgeois materialism
over romance and individual choice in the music video.
A high level of ambiguity, irony, and humor permeates Madonnas work and
image. Her use of fashion is humorous and ironic, as are many of her videos and
concert acts. The items marketed in her Boy Toy and Slutco lines are often
humorous, as are the very titles of the lines themselves. Indeed, the much-maligned
term Boy Toy itself is ironic and allows multiple readings. On one level, Madonna
is a toy for boys, but on another level boys are toys for her, the Boy Toys are there
for her toying around and the unchastity belt comes off at her whim and desire.
Indeed, Material Girl shows the guys as Madonnas toys and her dance numbers
with men during the Virgin Tour concerts present them as her underlings and
accessories with whom she toys and dominates.
Crucially, the early Madonna projects in her videos and music an all-too-rare
cultural image of a free woman, making her own choices and determining her own
life. The early Madonna image of a free spirit floating through life on her own terms
is perfectly captured in her role in Susan Seidelmans Desperately Seeking Susan
(1985). The message here, consistent with Madonnas other early work, is that one
can fundamentally change ones identity by changing ones fashion, appearance,
and image. Madonna herself would dramatically exemplify this philosophy in her
two succeeding stages in which she radically alters her image and identity.
Indeed, in 1986 alone Madonna metamorphized from the sluttish boy toy in
some of her videos, concert performances, and Desperately Seeking Susan to
the more sophisticated and serious young woman portrayed in the music video
Live to Tell, her new husband Scan Penns favorite song and the theme of
one of his movies. She then appeared as a short-haired young blonde teenager
of Papa Dont Preach, where the Madonna character decides against abortion
when she becomes pregnant. This music video utilized a narrative and realist
Madonna, fashion, and image 275
form to tell the story of a young woman with a problem whereas another music
video from the year, Open Your Heart, deployed a complex modernist
deconstruction in which Madonna problematized the male gaze, appearing as
a stripper in a carousel porn parlor and dancing off at the end with a young
boy, in a Charlie Chaplin outfit, deconstructing oppositions between sin and
innocence, adults and youth. These music videos thus deployed different
aesthetic strategies from the traditional narrative form of Live to Tell and the
gritty realism of Papa Dont Preach, in which images unproblematically
illustrate the lyrics and the lyrics comment on the narrative action, to the
deconstructive modernism of Open Your Heart. Madonna was experimenting
with different forms and styles, and in the process constructed a new set of
images, and a new identity.
Madonna II: whos that girl?
Madonna had arrived. In 1985, her records had sold 16 million singles and albums.
She had no. 1 pop hits with Lik e a Virgin and Crazy for You, and by the time
she was 26, Madonna had made seven Top20 singles in seventeen months (it took
Barbra Streisand seventeen years to do the same). Madonna made a successful
film debut in Desperately Seeking Susan and her Virgin Tour established her as
one of the hottest figures in pop music. She was featured on the cover of Time
magazine and was profiled in People, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and other popular
magazines. Her first album, Madonna, eventually sold over three million copies
and her album Like A Virgin racked up 4.5 million copies in domestic sales, with
2.5 million more worldwide by 1985. Moreover, Madonna knew that she was a
superstar and plotted her moves accordingly.
Needless to say, Madonna deployed fashion and sexuality to produce the image
that would mark her mid-to late 1980s stage, characterized by continued
megasuccess as a recording star with best-selling albums and music videos, another
successful concert tour (Whos That Girl?), a much-discussed and eventually
failed marriage with movie actor Scan Penn, and two movies that flopped with
critics and audiences (Shanghai Surprise and Whos That Girl?).
The first visible change in image had to do with her weight and body image.
The early Madonna was soft and a bit chubby, but rigorous exercise and diet
transformed her body. She also changed her hair and fashion styles, utilizing more
glamorous haute couture fashion, while frequently changing her hair arrangements.
In many photos and in the 1986 film Shanghai Surprise Madonna appeared more
and more like Marilyn Monroe with glamorous, wavy, and fluffy blonde hair. She
also emulated the look of other classic movie stars like Lana Turner and Marlene
Dietrich. Yet in her rock videos Cherish and Papa Dont Preach, Madonna
sported short, cropped blondish hair (à la Jean Seberg in Breathless) and garish
platinum blonde hair in the 1987 movie Whos That Girl?, which reprised the
figure of the 1930s Hollywood screwball comedy heroine. The song Like a Prayer
featured Madonna with her natural dark hair and she also appeared in red hair and
276 Media culture/identities/politics
various shades between light and dark in the videos, photos, and documentary
footage of the period from 1986 to the end of the 1980s.
Madonnas 1987 Whos That Girl? tour, captured on the video-cassette Ciao
Italia!, disclosed her to be twenty pounds lighter and highly athletic. For years,
she had been dieting, exercising for hours each day, and even lifting weights to
build up her body. The tour featured her energetic dancing, with break-dancer
accompaniment, intricate lighting effects, seven or eight costume changes for the
star, and dramatic shifts of image and mood throughout the show. Wearing a skimpy
black corset at the start of the show, Madonna played to her sex-kitten image, but
then shifted to the romantic sentimental mode of her album True Blue. But after
wearing a 1950s prom dress to reflect the innocence of True Blue, she put a black
leather jacket over the dress for Papa Dont Preach, while the words safe sex
were flashed on a huge screen at the back of the stage.
Mocking Material Girl, Madonna wore a ridiculously tacky outfit and sang
the lyrics with a high-pitched Betty Boop twang to ironize the lyrics. For La Isla
Bonita, she chose a Spanish-style cabaret dress and wore an international melange
of clothes in Holiday, which signalled the celebatory and wholesome attitude
she was trying to promote. Eschewing the bawdy sexuality and sexual repartee
which marked her earlier Virgin Tour, and that returned in even more extreme
forms in the later Blonde Ambition and Girlie Show tours, Madonna is relatively
restrained in her deployment of fashion and sexuality during this period, appearing
to mature in appropriating more traditional images and fashion.
The stage of Madonnas True Blue deployment of more traditional images of
women and sexuality, however, undercut her subversiveness as a fashion image
and model for young women. Whereas the flash trash of the early Madonna
legitimated creating your own fashion statements and mixed and matched cheap
attire, Madonna II produced the traditional image of the slender, well-dressed
beautiful women, forcing the wannabees to go to exercise salons, beauty parlors,
and to buy expensive clothing, cosmetics, and jewelry.6 Indeed, during this period,
there was a marked turn to gyms, dieting, and the cultivation of slimness as the
ideal for women. Madonnas image in the fashion magazines also sent out the
message that high and tasteful fashion was back and that flash-trash and
antifashion were out.
From 1987 to 1989, Madonna thus adopted more traditional fashion and attitudes,
and tried to appear more respectful of traditional gender roles. Trying to make her
doomed marriage with Scan Penn work, Madonna appeared in romantic love songs
videos (True Blue), singing of the joys of devotion, commitment, and true love.
Madonna decided to shed the trampy sex kitten look and boy toy image for a more
conventional feminine appearance. As Forbes put it:
She began singing in a deeper, more serious voice, and in a video from her
third album wore honey-blonde hair and a demure flowered dress. In July
1987 she got herself on the cover of Cosmopolitan as a glamorous blonde,
and in May 1988 she graced the cover of Harpers Bazaar as a prim brunette.
Madonna, fashion, and image 277
Her True Blue album of that period sold nearly 17 million copies, and she
sold more albums among the over20 crowd than ever.
(October 1, 1990)
As noted, Madonnas marketing strategies successively targeted different audiences.
While she appealed to young teenage girls in her early work, she quickly
incorporated minority audiences with her use of Hispanic and black figures and
culture in her videos and stage performances. The True Blue phase incorporated
an older audience and perhaps a more conservative one, through her exploitation
of more traditional images and types of song. Thus, rather than going for a lowest
common denominator popularity, Madonna achieved her stardom through
successively incorporating different audiences into her orbit.7
The effect of Madonnas second phase was thus to legitimate more traditional fashion
and images of women. The period was an especially creative one in the field of music
video. Her album Like a Prayer (1989) revealed her to have matured psychologically
and musically. The songs deal with the pain of the breaking up of her marriage with
Scan Penn, repressed guilt over her mothers death, conflicts with her father, and the
pain and difficulties of growing up. The music video of the title song brings out religious
motifs from Madonnas Catholic upbringing and incorporates a more complex modernist
phase in her music video production, which would attract a large academic following.
Although in her earlier videos and image construction, Madonna utilized crucifixes as
part of her fashion attire, the music video of the track Like A Prayer is built primarily
around religious images and themes. The video fuses religion and eroticism in a narrative
celebrating love, both spiritual and carnal. The refrain, In the midnight hour, I can feel
your power, Just like a prayer, you know Ill take you there, could either refer to
religious or sexual ecstasy.
Madonna brings out the latent eroticism in the Catholic religion and uses it for
striking aesthetic and moral purposes. She also incorporates the joy and enthusiasm
of black gospel music, thus fusing sacred and secular, Catholic and Protestant,
themes and images. The video contrasts images of an inside and outside world,
where the outside is the site of racial and sexual violence, bigotry, and injustice.
The inside world of the church, however, is one of love, community, and goodness
powerful religious messages and images.8
The narrative of the Like a Prayer video depicts an innocent black man wrongly
accused of a crime that the Madonna figure observes. She goes into a church,
dreams of making love to the statue of a black saint, and then rescues the innocent
black to flamboyant images of gospel singing, burning crosses (representing the
evil of Klan bigotry), candles, and other religious iconography. For the dream/
fantasy sequence of the video, Madonna wears a black slip which signifies sleep,
the oneiric, and eroticism, exploiting the powerful symbolism and aesthetic effects
of black. The imagery promotes integration and harmony between blacks and
whites, with Madonna singing with a black choir in a black church, kissing one
black man and saving another. The video thus projects a powerful image of goodness
and morality, doing the right thing.9
278 Media culture/identities/politics
Yet such are Madonnas contradictions that her use of images undercuts the
religious message, as she appears dancing in church in a slip and her erotic behavior
in the church probably goes beyond established boundaries of proprietyindeed
Italian television banned the video under pressure from Catholic groups (Savan
1993:88). But, as always, Madonna profits from her contradictions, appealing both
to Catholics gratified to see some eroticism and life injected into its institutions
and to see dramatization of its morality, as well as to lapsed or antiCatholics who
are thrilled by subversive images, such as Madonna kissing a black man and dancing
in her slip in a church.
In the music video of Express Yourself (1989), which is perhaps the culmination
of her second period, Madonna produces a highly complex modernist text that
plays with issues of gender, sexuality, and class. Madonnas forest of symbols
unfolds with images of a futuristic city in the air, supported by machinery below,
drawing on the iconography of Fritz Langs modernist film classic Metropolis.
Madonna suddenly emerges standing up on a giant swan. Addressing herself to a
female subject (a rather rare move), Madonna proclaims: Come on girls, do you
believe in love? Well, Ive got something to say about it, and it goes like this. The
lyrics of the song affirm self-expression, doing your best in all things (Dont
settle for second best, baby), and overcoming obstacles to ones goals. The song
employs the imperative mode and Madonna defiantly shouts Express yourself!
at key junctures in the song. While a verse indicates that What you need is a big
strong hand to lift you to your higher ground, it is clear from the subtext, and the
images that accompany the music video, that the big strong hand should be your
own, and not the typical male helping hand.
Indeed, Madonna is constantly inverting relations of gender power and
domination in the video, putting on display the socially constructed images of
women, and exhibiting the male fantasies that produce such images of women and
sexuality. Utilizing as a frame for the video Langs Metropolis, Madonna inverts
the liberal humanist theme of the film, as Morton argues (in Schwichtenberg 1992).
Langs film represents conflicts between workers and capitalists in a futuristic
city, as well as between fathers and sons, men and women. At the end, all conflicts
are overcome in naive images of total reconciliation. Madonnas video, by contrast,
presents stark and powerful images of the differences between capital and labor,
and men and women. Images near the end of the video of two men fighting and of
the quasi-violent encounter between Madonna and a male worker suggests the
irreconcilability of the opposing interests of class and gender and continual struggle
between the classes and sexes as the fate of the human species.
Or, one might read the images of the men fighting as a feminist critique of male
violence and brutalitya reading supported by the text as a whole. The video
presents a panoply of traditional patriarchal representations of women, beginning
with Madonna standing on top of a swan and then representing her holding and
becoming a cat, sliding across the floor and licking a plate of milk. In these images,
Madonna appropriates traditional feminine images, but then undercuts them by
contrasting discordant images of women and assuming the male subject position,
Madonna, fashion, and image 279
showing that all representations of gender are socially constructed and can be
assumed and thrown off at will.
The most offensive image, from the standpoint of feminism, Madonna in
bondage, can be read as the fantasy of the capitalist male who projects her onto a
video screen, in bondage with an iron collar and chains. It is crucial to note that
this image is presented as the fantasy of the patriarchal/capitalist of the video who
puts on his monocle to feast his eyes upon Madonna in bondage shown on a video
screen. The images here are obviously playing on the concept of cinema constructed
by a male gaze, and its suggests that images which objectify women are the
projection of males who fantasize women as sex objects. From this perspective,
Madonna is putting on display the ways that male fantasy and power objectify
women, fantasizing them as in bondage, as animals, as beautiful objects for male
lust and domination.10
Within this display of male images, however, Madonna suddenly emerges in a
suit, with a monocle, and grabs her crotch, signifying her assumption of the male
position of power and control.11 At one point, she rips open the jacket to reveal her
breasts and to disclose that the male image is just another social construction, a
subject-position that anyone can occupy. By implication, images of women are
also subject positions, produced by male power, that women may choose to occupy,
or may choose to vacate in favor of male subject positionsor something altogether
different. This deconstructive reading suggests that Express Yourself puts on
display the artificiality of images of gender and suggests that individuals can choose
their own images and self-constructions. The lyrics of Express Yourself indeed
order individuals to produce their own identity and to construct their own selves
a thoroughly modernist project that I will explicate further below.
And yet, once again, Madonna undercuts her own feminism by displaying
herself in traditional fetishized images of women and as appearing as an object
for the male gaze, as well as a subject in control of the narrative and the video
itself. There are thus contradictions between Madonnas pop feminism, her
deconstruction of dominant images of women, and her replication of precisely
these images. Once again, however, Madonna profits from her contradictions,
appealing both to feminists and to male viewers like the characters Beavis and
Butt-Head who like to ogle female body parts. Thus, her anthem of liberation
can be viewed either as a feminist text, or as just another objectification of
womens bodies for male pleasure.
Madonna III: blonde ambition
Thus, the Madonna effects were increasingly contradictory. On one hand, she
presents herself as a feminist in control of her life and career, and on the other
hand, she presents herself as just another female body to titillate men and provide
fashion models for women. During her third period, in the 1990s, she would continue
to push the boundaries of sexual representation and to become an icon of sexual
liberation. Moreover, she became even more eclectic in her use of fashion and in
280 Media culture/identities/politics
her image production, drawing on some of her earlier images, which she frequently
quoted and sometimes parodied. Madonna also became political during this period,
making statements on behalf of AIDS victims,12 the homeless, saving the rain forests,
womens rights, and in 1990 even made a get out and vote video, threatening to
spank those who refused to vote. In 1992, she supported Bill Clinton for President.
After the break-up of her marriage with Scan Penn in 1989, Madonna continued
to explore representations of sexuality and gender, entering upon the stage of her
work where she would systematically challenge conventional representations of
sexuality. This 1990s phase attracted legions of lesbians and gays, pro-sex feminists
and sexual libertarians, and academics who would produce a cottage industry of
Madonna readings that attempted to decipher her images and texts. It is quite
remarkable the extremes to which Madonna has gone in crossing the boundaries
of established norms of sexual representation. For Madonna has now deployed
images of interracial sex, masturbation (in her concert tour), lesbianism, S. Justify My Love, in 1990 and to rarely play Erotica
in 1992. She also produced a book of erotic images, Sex (1992) and became herself,
as an artifact of pop culture, regularly exhibited in magazines which intersperse
interviews or stories with provocative images of Madonna in kiddy-porn poses,
drag, or other provocative images. Madonna had obviously developed from young
sex object on the move, to mature woman, prepared to control her own destiny and
to move music video into new realms of image production.
In her most recent period, marked by a series of highly controversial rock videos,
the Blond Ambition tour and the 1991 film of the tour (Madonna: Truth or Dare),
the 1992 album Erotica and the book Sex, and her 1993 Girlies Show, Madonna
has been recognized as a top pop superstar and even Americas shrewdest
businesswoman. Her publicity and marketing machine continued to pump out
publicity at a furious rate and the public continued to be fascinated with every
detail concerning Madonnas life.
But it was probably her rock videos of the late 1980s and 1990s in which
Madonna most notably created wide cultural controversy that attracted the attention
of academic critics and cultural theorists. Along with Michael Jackson, she is
arguably one of the first rock video superstars and is perhaps the supreme master,
or rather mistress, of the form. Open Your Heart, Like A Prayer, Express
Yourself, Justify My Love, and Vogue are modernist masterpieces of video
art. Breaking the rules of music videos which deploy expressive images to illustrate
the lyrics, Madonnas best music videos contain a multilayered structure of images
that require an active viewer to generate the sometimes complex meanings
proliferating in the play of the music, lyrics, and images. Or, à la postmodernism,
one can simply view her videos as a dazzling stream of images. For, as we shall
Madonna, fashion, and image 281
see, Madonna employs both modernist and postmodernist aesthetic strategies, thus
appealing to devotees of both.13
Densely crafted feasts of images, her music videos can be enjoyed on several
levels by different audiences: teenage girls and boys can process the music and
images in different ways according to their own fantasies; more sophisticated music
and cultural critics can enjoy grappling with polysemic modernist texts and
occasional uses of postmodern strategies; and students of popular culture can attempt
to discover why and how Madonna is popular. Once again, we see how Madonnas
subversive artistic practices also coalesce with a successful marketing strategy.
Thus, Madonna should be interpreted in terms both of her aesthetic practices and
her marketing strategies, and her works can thus be read either as works of art, or
analyzed as commodities that shrewdly exploit markets. In fact, Madonna is
interesting both as an aesthetic and a marketing phenomenon, and a
multidimensional reading should interrogate both sides of the Madonna equation.
In the 1990s, Madonna has attempted to produce an identity as an artist. Her
rock videos became increasingly complex, or attempted to expand the boundaries
of the permissible in terms of male and female gender roles, overt sexuality, parody
of religion, and modernist ambiguity. Fashionwise, she sometimes returned to the
sexy and flamboyant attire of her early stage, but she mixed it with haute couture,
futuristic technofashion, S. high and low
culture. Yet, Madonna deployed the typically modernist strategy of shock in her
outlandish use of fashion, sexuality, and religious imagery, especially in her rock
videos, which are highly complex cultural texts that allow a multiplicity of readings.
If one conceives postmodern art to be a fragmented display of disconnected
elements in a flat, superficial play of surface without any depth or meaning (as
Jameson 1991 and others would have it), most of Madonnas work is emphatically
not postmodern in this sense. Instead, both her more realist videos and modernist
videos convey meanings and messages, though with her more modernist music
videos like Express Yourself, the meanings are often elusive and difficult to
grasp. The modernist strategy of adopting shock techniques have been a constant
in Madonnas work and although she deploys camp, irony, and humor, her subject
matter and themes are often quite serious. So in a sense, Madonna is more modernist
than postmodernist, though her work also embodies postmodern themes and
aesthetic strategies as I indicate below.
Throughout the Blonde Ambition tour, Madonna played out a deconstructive
drama of playing with gender roles, frequently wearing mens clothes, grabbing
her crotch, and declaring she was the boss, thus occupying male gender positions.
She also had her male dancers wear fake breasts, womens clothes, and submit to
her power and control. The message was that male and female were social
constructs that could be deconstructed and that women could occupy male positions,
roles, and behavior and vice versa. Yet, as I shall argue in the conclusion, Madonna
does not subvert relations of domination or offer egalitarian images of relations.
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Like conservative deconstruction, Madonna puts on display binary oppositions
that constitute our culture and society, demonstrates their artificiality, and questions
the prioritizing of one of the oppositions over the other, without putting anything
new in its place. Thus, she tends to place women, primarily herself, in the position
of power and authority which is rigorously exercised over men and women.
To deconstruct traditional gender oppositions and relations of power and
domination, Madonna uses irony, humor, and parody to push the sensitive
buttons of masculine and feminine and to provoke reaction to the
overthrowing of traditional images and stereotypes and their exchange and
mixture in the genders of the future, which would presumably be multiple
rather than binary. There was indeed always a strong mixture of irony and
satire in Madonnas work from the beginning and her concert performances
became increasingly campy,14 as was the dramatization of her life on the road
in Truth or Dare. Her performance of Material Girl in the Blond Ambition
tour, for instance, is pure camp, with Madonna and two female singers sitting
on a raised platform in hair-curlers and bathrobes, singing the song with false
accents, out of tune and in high-pitched voices. The image puts on display the
labor and ridiculous activities that women go through to make themselves
beautiful and mocks the ideal of the material girl (of course, on another
level Madonna herself is the extreme example of almost superhuman labor and
expense to make herself beautiful, a contradiction that pervades her work
and that I return to in the conclusion).
Her most striking music videos are highly aestheticized, using modernist
techniques of the construction of compelling images. The orgy scenes in Justify
My Love are highly abstract and theatrical and Vogue deploys posed images to
celebrate pure camp (Strike a pose! Vogue! Vogue!). Indeed, Vogue parodies
fashion conventionsmodeling, posing, photography, and objectificationbut
reinforces them by identifying voguing with a gay dance phenomenon and then
cultural celebrity. On the other hand, the video puts on display the conditions of
production of the image by disclosing the poses of fashion and star images and the
construction involved in the production of images.15
The video opens with parting feathers, signifying camp style and artificiality,
and then presents a montage of posed images with her dance troupe assuming
fashion poses. Two servants voguing while they clean the house suggests the
desirability of image-creation throughout the spheres of everyday life. The frame
centers on Madonna who orders Strike a pose! and a set of images shows her
ensemble obeying. The lyrics sing of escape from everyday life through voguing,
transforming oneself into a more desirable image, Youre a superstar, thats what
you are! Voguing, the lyrics suggest, is open to anyone (It doesnt matter if
youre black or white, if youre a boy or a girl) and produces aesthetic selftranscendence
for all (Beauty is where you find it). But then the static images,
derived from the fashion industry, are transposed into the gay dance style
documented in Paris is Burning and infused with erotic energy. And finally,
Madonnas pantheon of privileged images (Greta Garbo and MonroeBette
Madonna, fashion, and image 283
Davis, Rita Hay worth gave good face) is illustrated by images of Madonna herself
striking poses in the guise of the above mentioned celebrities.
Madonna has been attacked for poaching images and phenomena, like
voguing, from gay culture and utilizing its images and style in her work, defused
of its original context. She was also attacked by black critics for drawing heavily
upon black music in her work and then leaving out references to blacks, or people
of color, in her pantheon of images in Vogue. In reference to the first criticism,
one could argue that Madonna has done as much as anyone to normalize gay
and lesbian sexuality in popular media culture, and is indeed idolized by many
in the gay and lesbian communities. Likewise, she could respond to her black
and other critics of color that she has done as much as anyone to promote black
(and Hispanic) music, dancers, singers, and musicians, while attempting to break
down color lines and barriers between the races. She could also answer that her
pantheon in Vogue is arguably a gay male pantheon that includes precisely
who she cites.
On the other hand, one could also argue that Madonna ultimately privileges
whiteness and that the people of color around her simply highlight her distinctive
whiteness. Moreover, her videos and concert performances replicate white
superiority and power, showing Madonna totally in control of, overshadowing,
and dominating everyone else. In any case, the complexity and sensitivity of issues
of race, gender, sexual preference, and class that Madonna takes on demonstrates
a courage to tackle controversial topics that few popular music figures engage
with her consistency and provocativeness.
Vogue contains images of corsets and bras and the inside/outside fashion
deconstruction that one observes in Madonnas videos and concert performances,
in which bras, corsets, and panties are worn outside of blouses, skirts, or suits,
suggesting that all fashion is artificial. Her images suggest that corset, bras, and
other standard female attire are symbols of womens submission to cultural
standards, which might as well be worn outside to make the bondage transparent.
On the other hand, these icons of womens oppression to fashion standards are
rendered erotic in Madonnas iconography, showing how one can transform signs
of oppression into signs of mockery and libidinal enjoyment.
Madonnas modernist deconstruction was disseminated via an aesthetic of shock
and excess defined by her fashion, attitude, and behavior. There were, of course,
market reasons why one might adopt such strategies: they create an image, call
attention to oneself, and sell. Intense narcissism is ever more visible as a key element
in the Madonna phenomenon and one could read the 1990s Madonna as an image
factory in which her own image is the meaning of her musical texts and other
image productions. Madonnas continuing to go beyond herself and to push the
boundaries of the permissible utilize modernist aesthetic strategies of excess, shock,
spectacle, and theatricality. In the Blonde Ambition tour, Madonna produced a
futuristic look, wearing far-out technofashion, suggesting new syntheses of
technology and the human. Her blonde hair tied back severely, a microphone unit
strapped to her head, and her body adorned with bustiers and futuristic clothes
284 Media culture/identities/politics
designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, Madonna appears as another species, a new
technobody, designer-fashioned for the next century.
The Blonde Ambition show also features male dancers with fake breasts and
women dancers with penises, suggesting the emergence of a new species in the
technofuture, which subverts previous boundaries between men and women.
Grabbing her crotch throughout the show, a defiant Madonna presents herself as
an icon of power and sexuality. The dance numbers also exploit far-out fashion
and explicit sexuality to constitute her identity as an iconoclastic figure of the
transgressor against established conventions. She, like the successful modernist
artist, thus establishes new norms by breaking the old ones.
However, her 1992 album Erotica and book Sex indicate that Madonna may be
falling into a trap that could render her boring and predictable. The songs in her
album and music video Erotica deploy some of the same images and blatant
sexuality as Justify My Love and her earlier sexual provocations, and do not
break any new ground. Her book Sex is something of an embarrassment with pictures
on shabby paper with an aluminum cover and metal-binding that easily breaks (so
I was told by a book store manager who showed me several broken books which
had been returned). The pictures of S. Madonnas sexual fantasies, is also trite and
unerotic.16 Fashion is deployed in these works to shock and provide libidinal
excitement, but by now such imagery is rather commonplace.
But in the best of her music videos, Madonna emerges as a modernist
boundary-buster. Her concept of art privileges self-expression, experimentation,
pushing the limits of taste, and crossing the borderline into new areas of experience
and representation. Madonna has continued to push pop culture beyond previous
boundaries and to subvert established rules, conventions, and limits. Her
deployment of fashion and sexuality in particular shatters previous rules and
conventions and established her identity as an iconoclastic modernist. On the
other hand, so far her modernist moves have been extremely successful from a
commercial point of view and Madonna emerges as much as clever
businesswoman as artiste.
Thus, one must also grasp the Madonna phenomenon as a commercial
enterprise. In April 1992, it was widely reported that Madonna had signed a $60
million deal with Time-Warner, which would market her albums, music videos,
and films, providing her with large royalties, development money, and the
opportunity to promote the work of young artists. Utilizing modernist terminology,
Madonna said that she envisaged the contract as an opportunity to produce a group
of collaborating artists, that constitute an artistic think tank which would be a
cross between the Bauhaus, that revolutionized art, architecture, and design in
Germany in the 1920s, and Andy Warhols factory that brought together artists
from film, music, painting, fashion, and other contemporary arts in the 1960s and
beyond (New York Times, April 20, 1992, B1). Forbes reported that during the
period 1991/2, Madonna earned $48,000,000, making her, once again, one of the
most highly paid performers of the period (September 28, 1992). Madonnas art,
Madonna, fashion, and image 285
fashion, and identity games have paid and call attention to the fact that media
culture is commercial culture that sells cultural commodities to audiences.
MADONNA BETWEEN THE MODERN AND THE POSTMODERN
Concerning the deployment of fashion and sexuality, Madonnas cumulative
message seems to be that you can do, say, and be anything that you want. The
construction of ones own identity begins with fashion, with ones look. Here
the fashion message is that you can wear anything, that anything goes, that one can
construct ones own look out of the materials of ones culture. Madonnas use of
fashion as excess, of appearing in the most outlandish and outré costumes
imaginable, suggests that fashion is not a rigid code, not a set of rules to which one
must conform, but a field of imagination and creativity in which one can construct
any image that one wants.
Of course, Madonnas linking of image, fashion, and identity also suggests that
it is in ones look, in how one dresses and makes oneself up that identity is
anchoreda debatable proposition. But, Madonna intimates, fashion is not enough:
one must strike a pose, vogue, develop attitude, behave in a certain way.
Madonnas way is excess, shock, pushing beyond the limits, and always trying to
develop something new. The Madonna way is to attract attention through going
beyond the bounds of conventional attire and behavior. Such a position empowers
people to dress, act, and be what they want at the same time that it enslaves people
in the necessity of developing an image, striking a pose, constructing identity
through style, forcing people to worry about how they dress and look and how
other people will react to their image.
The Madonna phenomenon thus suggests that in a consumerist promotional
culture identity is constructed through image and fashion, involving ones look,
pose, and style. Identity is nothing deep as it was in much modern theory that
assumed an essential self, or the project of developing an authentic selfhood.
Whereas for Heidegger Selbständigkeit (standing-by-yourself, self-constancy) and
Wiederholung (resolute repetition in the face of death of ones fundamental choice
of selfhood) constituted authentic selfhood and identity (see Kellner 1973), for
Madonna and postmodern identity-construction it is precisely change, constantly
redeveloping ones look, and striking outrageous and constantly changing poses
that constitutes ones image and identity. Of course, and curiously, Madonna is
authentic in Heideggers sense in that she has resolutely adhered to this project
now in over a decade of shocking fashion, images, poses, and iconoclastic behavior,
all of which have created and promoted Madonna.
Moreover, fashion and identity for Madonna are inseparable from her aesthetic
practices, from her cultivation of her image in her music videos, films, TV
appearances, concerts, and other cultural interventions. Madonnas deployment of
fashion and sexuality are structured by an aesthetic of creativity, of producing
ones own look and identity. Her practice is linked to an aesthetic of excess and to
this day, Madonna continues to go beyond the borders of the permissible, to subvert
286 Media culture/identities/politics
and transgress established boundaries in fashion and art. In this sense, the putatively
postmodern Madonna is enacting a pop modernist aesthetic. Indeed, more
considered and theoretically informed reflection on the Madonna phenomenon
may deconstruct, or put in question, certain distinctions between modernism and
postmodernism. Many academic discourses fail to adequately conceptualize
modernism and describe as postmodern quite typical modernist aesthetic
strategies, practices, and goalsor they inadequately theorize the postmodern.
Madonna has been theorized as postmodern through her deployment of
strategies of simulation, pastiche, her implosion of gender, racial, and sexual
boundaries, and her use of irony and camp (see the articles in Schwichtenberg
1992). Yet boundary deconstruction, irony, and camp are arguably modernist
strategies and in fact Madonna constantly deploys self-consciously modernist
strategies, presenting her work as serious and transgressive art. In the 1990 Nightline
interview and the 1991 film Truth or Dare, Madonna describes her work as artistic,
claiming that she refuses to compromise her artistic integrity. She also indicates
that she wants to continue pushing buttons, being political, going beyond
established boundaries, and creating new and innovative works of artall selfconsciously
modernist aesthetic values and goals.17 Thus, while one might interpret
Madonna as postmodernist in the light of her uses of Baudrillardian categories
of simulation and implosion, one should also be aware of the ways in which
Madonna can be read as modernist.
For the most part, theorizing about the postmodern is as superficial and onedimensional
as the texts and practices described as postmodern in those terms. A
complex and challenging phenomenon like Madonna puts in question and tests
ones aesthetic categories and commitments. Yet Madonna does deploy a wide
range of aesthetic strategies and so if ones definition of postmodernism is a set
of cultural practices that combines traditional, modernist, and new postmodernist
forms and themes, then Madonna can be interpreted as postmodern. However,
one should note the extent to which she draws upon classical modernist strategies,
images, and forms in her most impressive music videos and concert performances
of the past few years. She also has a large repertoire of realist music videos in
which the images merely illustrate the lyrics of the song and produce realist
narratives to accompany the words and music (i.e. Papa Dont Preach, Live to
Tell, Oh, Father, This Used to be My Playground, and Rain). And in Fever,
she deploys explicitly postmodern image strategies in which the lyrics of the song,
itself a pop song of the 1950s, are flatly intoned over abstract images of a bronzed
and electronically contorted Madonna, presenting a flat surface of disconnected
images without deeper meaning.
While some have attacked Madonna as being totally antifeminist and a disgrace
to women, others have lauded her as the true feminist for our times and as a role
model for young women. Camille Paglia, for instance, has celebrated Madonna as
Real Feminist and an ideal of the strong, independent and successful woman,
who successfully affirms her own power and sexuality and defies conventional
stereotypes (New York Times, December 14, 1990, B1).18 I too have stressed the
Madonna, fashion, and image 287
extent to which Madonna reverses relations of power and domination and provides
strong affirmative images of women. But one could argue that Madonna merely
transposes relations of domination, reversing the roles of men and women, rather
than dissolving relations of domination. In her concert performances, her dancers
are mere appendages which she dominates and controls, overtly enacting rituals of
domination on the stage. In the HBO Blond Ambition tour video of 1990, for
example, she is constantly positioning herself in positions of power and control
over the male (and female) dancers. In simulated sex scenes in the tour, Madonna
was usually on top and in her infamous masturbation/simulated orgasm scene in
Like A Virgin, the male dancers first fondle Madonna and then disappear as she
writhes in an exaggerated orgasm.
In response to this critique, one could argue that Madonna is constantly ironizing
relations of domination, putting their mechanisms on display, and, as I argued in
my reading of Express Yourself, subverting them by disclosing the artificiality,
constructedness, and reversibility of relations of power and domination. Yet in her
real everyday relations with her cast, friends, and family in the documentary
Truth or Dare (1991), she also positions herself as the mother of her troop and is
constantly affirming her power over them, often admitting in interviews that she is
a bitch and control freak. Before each performance, Madonna says a prayer,
much like a football coach propping his crew to go out and win the big one (in one
sequence, she concludes by ordering her minions to go out and kick ass). In both
work and leisure scenes in her concert film Truth or Dare, Madonna is clearly in
charge and the opening song of the HBO documentary of the concert showed her
with a whip in hand, proclaiming I am the boss!
One could, of course, argue that the film Truth or Dare is itself a put on that
deconstructs the very genre of a film documentary by undermining the opposition
between backstage and onstage (Pribram in Schwichtenberg 1992). In Madonnas
entourage, backstage is onstage with the omnipresent camera catching every nuance
and Madonna and many of her circle are obviously playing to the film being shot.
Yet one could argue that the many images, scenes, and comments of her family,
tour ensemble, friends, and fans capture aspects of the truth of Madonna and
present perspectives on the real Madonna. For what is Madonna other than the
effects she produces and generates, the public persona that she assiduously
constructs? And the one thing that comes through repeatedly, reinforced by her
many interviews and music performances, is that Madonna is in charge, that she
totally dominates everyone around her.19
Madonna and Laurie
Madonna might be contrasted in this regard with avant-garde performance artist
Laurie Anderson. While Madonna often presents herself as a sovereign subject
who dominates her environment and controls those around her, Laurie Anderson
presents more egalitarian images of social relations. In Home of the Brave, a 1986
documentary of her concert performances, Anderson slides in and out of interactions
288 Media culture/identities/politics
with members of her cast, which often privilege the other performers, or present
ensemble singing or dancing, in which Anderson sometimes slides off to the side
and other times merges with her ensemble. Madonna, by contrast, always dominates
her entourage and is always the center of attention with the musical performance
numbers highlighting her talents, importance, and, especially, stardom.
Madonna is thus the sovereign and centered modern subject, always in charge,
always in control, while Laurie Anderson is more fragmented, dispersed, and
decentered à la postmodern subjectivity. In her 1990 music video collection,
Anderson presents a male clone of herself to help her with production and
publicity and then clones a female, and both clones are rather grotesque. While
Madonna grabs her crotch and prances in a male suit to symbolize her assumption
of the prerogatives of male, phallic power, Anderson uses electronic devices to
lower the octave of her voice, so that she sounds malebut an insecure, uncertain
male voice signifying the frailty of personal and sexual identity. She dresses and
sometimes looks androgenous, collapsing distinctions between male and female
(themselves social constructs), while Madonna is invariably a woman, even when
she assumes male power (as when she bares her breasts after grabbing her crotch
in the segment in Express Yourself in which she appears in a male suit, as if to
say, Look, Im really a woman).
Madonnas texts are meaning-systems, which proliferate polysemic meanings
and messages. Her performances on her music videos highlight the meanings of
the words, or use images to undercut or subvert the meanings of the lyricsas she
chooses. Her music videos are often complex modernist systems of meaning,
demanding interpretation and allowing multivalent readings. Madonna is a meaning
machine and her performances articulate her ideology, vision, and messages. Indeed,
one level of meaning perpetually conveyed in her music videos and performances
is that Madonna herself is a superstar, that Madonna is cool, that Madonna rules.
This narcissistic self-reference and self-promotion in her performances is perhaps
the underlying meaning of all of her images which relentlessly signify Madonna!
Madonna! Madonna!
Laurie Andersons performance in Home of the Brave, by contrast, provides
fragments of meaning which do not add up to any clear system of meanings. Her
texts thus disrupt, in postmodern fashion, the signifying chain, her images and
sounds do not connect, or add up to anything in particular. Rather, they present a
collage of disconnected signifiers, of sounds and images that do not signify, or that
merely point to themselves. Her performance is for the sake of performance, in the
moment, and does not produce any particular statements, positions, messages or
ideologiesunlike Madonna who is always in your face with her latest statement
or message.20 Laurie Anderson thus enacts a postmodern-deconstruction of
expression and identity, fragments and disperses her images and sounds, and resists
developing systems of meaning. She follows David Byrnes injunction to Stop
Making Sense and instead makes performances that are just thatperformances.
Whereas Madonna is forever prancing around familiar everyday worlds (or
exploring the utopian spaces of sexual fantasy), Anderson takes us to completely
Madonna, fashion, and image 289
new and different worlds with different sights, sounds, and logic. One thus enters
a new postmodern imagescape with Anderson where humans implode with
technology, familiar instruments give out strange, electronically mediated sounds,
and nothing is quite like it seems. Laurie Anderson herself often appears as an
extraterrestrial and her Nietzschean Ubermensch (pointed to in her pop song O
Superman) is a curious synthesis of the human and technology, a new species of
technohuman who produces new sounds, or as Sayre puts it, a new noisein a
new territory (1989:155).
In fact, Anderson deterritorializes her performance spaces that are themselves
strange and yet familiar. She also focuses attention on the musical instruments
played and in a highly implosive set of gestures merges the human and organic
with inanimate instruments. Ties become pianos which emit electronic sounds,
guitars become organic, bending and flapping, while humans merge with technology
or become mere shadows and photographic images. Many of Andersons
performances are strongly compelling and emit intense and strange images and
sounds that often take on a certain fascination and power. While Madonnas images
signify and demand interpretation, Andersens images resist interpretation. Her art
is an erotics of surfaces and the play of light, sound, movement, word, and
performance. Her texts are thus not polysemic, they resist reading, and revel in the
their own play and deconstruction of meaning.
While Madonna tends to exploit the familiar genres of popular music, Anderson
mixes pop, rock, jazz, blues, gospel, classical, and other idioms with new
electronic sounds and computer-generated images to produce a new multi-media
performance arta postmodern implosion of high and low art and familiar
music genres. At one point in Home of the Brave, she says Welcome to difficult
art, and then performs Language is a Virus From Outer Space. The musical
accompaniment mixes blues singers, with a jazz saxophone player, with rock
percussion, guitar, and piano, mixed together in a hybrid pop sound. Words and
images are flashed on the screen in the multi-media mode that Anderson uses,
and she concludes by emitting electronic sounds by pounding on her head and
gnashing her teeth.
In a sense, Andersons work is not really difficult, its just different: its fragments
dont connect, it operates in a different space and time continuum, and its
performances aim at otherness and strangeness rather than classical form, harmony
and symmetry, or the proliferation of meaning à la modernism. By contrast, her
gestures, sounds, images, and performance are simply strange and dont
communicate anything at allor what her signifiers communicate is simply
themselves and no more. Yet, in a manner typical of avant-garde art, Anderson
raises questions concerning what artand in particular music and performance
really is. Like John Cage, Anderson seems to imply that sound itself is music and
transgresses all musical boundaries mixing up familiar sounds with new
electronically produced sounds. Likewise, performance in Home of the Brave
combines musical numbers with storytelling, slices of everyday life, drama, comedy,
and multi-media play.
290 Media culture/identities/politics
Thus, in avant-garde fashion, Anderson uses some postmodernist techniques to
interrogate what art is and expands its boundaries through her performances. Her
performances do not add up to produce unifying meanings and her text is thus
totally fragmented, with euphoric moments, but no deeper meaning. When she
says Language is a Virus From Outer Space, citing a phrase of author William
Burroughs, who comes out on stage just before the performance to recite some
typically Burroughsesque comments on eyes, images, and representations, followed
by Anderson and companys performance of the song, there is no deep insight into
language, and the performances and words that flash across the screen do not
elucidate the phrase. Rather, the performance simply raises questions concerning
what language is that forces thought and reflection (and discussion if the song is
performed in a group situation).
Anderson is, of course, an avant-garde performance artist and Madonna is the
reigning queen of pop, so this comparison is between two rather different species
of culture. Yet such a comparison reveals the limits of Madonnas novelty and
creativity and the differences between opposing aesthetic strategies. Yet, curiously,
the difference is not between a robust and creative modernism and a flat and dull
postmodernism, as some might have it. Instead, Madonnas aesthetic strategies are
arguably modernist, while Laurie Anderson has been deploying arguably
postmodernist strategies in some of her work, such as Home of the Brave. Madonna
projects something of a individual style, vision, and voice, and attempts to produce
innovative and complex texts within the form of music video. Some of her works
do deconstruct familiar meanings, project a polysemic complexity of meaning that
demands interpretation, and that provide texts in which sight, sound, and
performance work together to generate a wealth of meanings. Likewise, Madonna
always has a political agenda and is frequently promoting her version of feminism,
sexual liberation, and self-creation.
Anderson, by contrast, deconstructs expression, fragments the signifying chain,
implodes musical idioms, resists interpretation and produces a chain of signifiers
that dont really signify, or that signify little beyond themselvesà la
postmodernism. Yet such postmodern work doesnt say anything, and evades
the social commentary of Andersons own earlier work in United States. Madonna
by contrast is a commentary machine and constantly presents herself as a cultural
revolutionary engaging in social critique, cultural innovation, and the promotion
of social change. This brings us to some concluding reflections on Madonnas
politics and effects.
The Madonna contradiction machine
Whatever the truth of Madonna (no doubt inaccessible in its multiplicity) it is
clear that her music videos and concert performances constantly enact relations
of power and domination and never portray egalitarian, reciprocal, or
communitarian relations. As for Nietzsche, the will to power is at the center of
Madonnas universe and Madonna represents herself as the subject of this will,
Madonna, fashion, and image 291
as the center of power and all-powerful subject. Thus, whereas it is salutary that
she presents images of powerful women overcoming male domination and while
these images might help to empower women, they do not overcome the
hierarchical structure of power and domination in our society. Nor do they present
an alternative to the relations of domination and oppression that currently structure
everyday life in contemporary societies.
Obviously, how one evaluates Madonna depends on ones specific politics and
morality, and someone who cultivates an aesthetic of shock and excess, as does
Madonna, is certain to offend and to become a target of criticism. Madonna,
however, thrives on criticism, which, along with her deployment of fashion and
sexuality, helps her produce an identity as a transgressor. Her breaking of rules has
progressive elements in that it goes against dominant gender, sex, fashion, and
racial hierarchies and her message that identity is something that everyone can and
must construct for themselves is also appealing. Yet by constructing identity largely
in terms of fashion and image, Madonna plays into precisely the imperatives of the
fashion and consumer industries which offer a new you and a solution to all of
your problems through purchasing products, services, and buying into regimes of
fashion and beauty.21 By privileging image, she plays into the dynamics of the
contemporary promotional culture that reduces art, politics, and the fabric of
everyday life to the play of image, downplaying the role of communication,
commitment, solidarity, and concern for others in the constitution of ones identity
and personality.
Madonna is thus emblematic of the narcissistic 1980s, a period still exerting
a strong influence, in which the cultivation of the individual self and the
obsessive pursuit of ones own interests was enshrined as cultural mythology.
The imperative to go for it! echoes through the 1980s and Madonna went for
it and got it. Yet in becoming the most popular woman entertainer of her era
(and perhaps of all time), Madonna produced works that have multiple and
contradictory effects and that in many ways helped subvert dominant
conservative ideologies. As I have argued, Madonnas deployment of fashion
and sexuality pushed buttons of race, sex, gender, class, and religion that
provoked contradictory responses, that highlighted the social constructedness
of these phenomena, and that indicated these artificial categories of everyday
life could be changed, or at least ones attitude toward such things as race and
sexual preference could be changed. In a sense, with the limitations that I have
noted, Madonna helped bring marginal groups and concerns into the cultural
mainstream and powerfully articulated the yearnings of young women for more
independence and power.
And yet there have been strong criticisms from the marginal and oppressed
groups whose images and style Madonna has deployed that she exploits people of
color, gays and lesbians, and marginal sexual subcultures for her own purposes,
bell hooks has argued that there is also a racist component in Madonna, who
privileges herself and whiteness over people of color. Madonna is always in center
frame and is always the dominant figure, appearing to hooks more as plantation
292 Media culture/identities/politics
mistress than as soul sister (hooks 1992:157ff.). hooks notes that Madonna
ultimately privileges the blonde look over her natural dark hair and so
when the chips are down, the image Madonna most exploits is that of the
quintessential white girl. To maintain that image she must always position
herself as an outsider in relation to black culture. It is that position of outsider
that enables her to colonize and appropriate black experience for her own
opportunistic ends even as she attempts to mask her acts of racist aggression
as affirmation.
(ibid.: 159).
Yet one could also argue that Madonnas constant changes of style, including hair
color, and her appropriation of black, Hispanic, gay and lesbian, and a vast array
of other images circulate positive images of marginal subgroups through culture.
In any case, Madonna is a site of genuine contradiction. On one hand, she promotes
feminism, yet some of her images undercut feminist critiques of femininity, beauty,
the objectification of women, and so on. On the other, Madonna sanctions revolt
and individual construction of image and identity, yet the form in which she carries
out her revolt is that of the models of the fashion and consumer industries. Madonna
calls herself an artistic revolutionary and celebrates modernist subversion, yet her
work is circulated in the commodity form of popular music and music videos,
which are, after all, at bottom, advertisements for the songs.
While there is sufficient material both to celebrate and to criticize her, one
should grasp the many-sidedness of the Madonna phenomenon and her multiple
and contradictory effects. Indeed, Madonna is a provocative challenge to cultural
studies. Unpacking the wealth of her artistic strategies, meanings, and effects
requires deployment of a full array of textual criticism, audience research, and
analysis of the political economy and production of pop culture in our contemporary
media society. Her work has become increasingly complex and it is precisely this
complexity, as well as her continued popularity, that has made Madonna a highly
controversial object of academic analysis in recent years. Madonna allows many,
even contradictory, readings which are grounded in her polysemic and modernist
texts and her contradictory cultural effects. At dull gatherings, mention Madonna
and you can be sure that there will be violent arguments, with some people
passionately attacking and others defending her. Whether one loves or hates her,
Madonna is a constant provocation who reveals the primacy of fashion and image
in contemporary culture and the social constructedness of identity.
NOTES
1 The ideal type constructing a distinction between traditional and modern societies is in
some ways an oversimplification, but I am using the distinction to attempt to highlight
key features linking fashion, image, and identity in modern societies. For more on the
discourses of modernity, their contributions and limitations, see Antonio and Kellner
1994 and forthcoming.
2 Much contemporary cultural studies focuses on textual analysis and/or audience reception
Madonna, fashion, and image 293
alone, generally ignoring the political economy and production of culture. In his study
of Madonna, for instance, John Fiske writes:
A cultural analysis, then, will reveal both the way the dominant ideology is structured
into the text and into the reading subject, and those textual features that enable
negotiated, resisting, or oppositional readings to be made. Cultural analysis reaches a
satisfactory conclusion when the ethnographic studies of the historically and socially
located meanings that are made are related to the semiotic analysis of the text.
(1989a:98)
It is my argument, by contrast, that analysis of the political economy and production of
culture is an important component which has been downplayed and even ignored in the
recent boom in cultural studies, and that Madonnas marketing strategies have been
essential to her success.
3 On the MTV channel, see Kaplan 1987 and the studies in Frith, Goodwin, and Grossberg
1993.
4 Madonna couldnt know at this time that the rise of AIDS would make sexuality an
increasingly dangerous domain. Later, she would become an AIDS activist and insert
safe sex messages into her concerts and albums. She would also, beginning around
1990, dramatize the dangerous aspects of sex itself.
5 Ann Kaplan (1987) interprets Material Girl and Madonna in general as symptomatic
of postmodernism on the grounds that Madonna pastiches Marilyn Monroe and mixes
genres and modes, such as realism and musical numbers in Material Girl. But this is
a partial reading of postmodernism and one could argue that for an artifact to be an
example of postmodernism, it should also deconstruct expression and meaning, rupture
signifying chains, and project a flat play of signifiers, of euphoric images, that refuse
meaning and interpretation, as in the concept of postmodernism, drawn from Jameson
(1991), with which I am working. Contrasted to such a flat, postmodern text, most of
Madonnas music videos demand interpretation and some contain complex aesthetic
structures that express Madonnas own ideas and style, that require interpretive work
and that produce multivalent readings, and are thus modernist in the sense that I am
using the term. I return to this theme later in the chapter and contrast Laurie Andersens
use of postmodernist aesthetic strategies with Madonnas use of modernism.
6 See the study by Bordo in Schwichtenberg 1992, who relates this phase of Madonnas work to
the production of plastic bodies in the entertainment and fashion industries, the proliferation
of anorexia and other eating disorders, and obsession with dieting and weight loss.
7 To be sure, there was overlapping of her various stages and Madonna did not abandon
her early audience and neglect their interests. One song on True Blue, Wheres the
Party, continues the early emphasis on liberation from the cares of everyday life through
partying with lyrical refrains I want to free my soul and I want to lose control.
Thus, there is always an emphasis in Madonnas work on partying and having a good
time, legitimating hedonism and pleasure.
8 During the same week in which Madonna released her video of Like A Prayer, her
Pepsi commercial was broadcast which used the lyrics to the same song and a collage
of images that transmitted the drink Pepsi message. A right-wing fundamentalist
group, however, threatened Pepsi with a boycott if they did not pull the commercial and
the craven corporation capitulated, proving once again that the religious right cannot
appreciate aesthetic imagery which promotes the interests of religion and that capitalist
corporations are both cowardly and antiaesthetic in their pursuit of profit. Her Pepsi
commercial itself, attacked by some of her critics, is in fact a complex modernist musical
video that deserves to be read in the pantheon of her music videos.
9 Just as Madonna is the vehicle of morality and liberal integrationism in Like A Prayer,
in the Pepsi commercial she liberates a group of Catholic schoolgirls who break into
294 Media culture/identities/politics
dance when Madonna appears, leading them to self-expression and drinking Pepsi,
equated in the commercial with secular salvation and joy.
10 A similar deconstruction of the male gaze is present in the 1986 music video Open
Your Heart. The scenario showed Madonna working in a peep show, with sleazy men
ogling her. She appeared somewhat distanced and cool, thus the video could be read as
putting on display the modes of male voyeurism through which the objectification of
womens bodies takes place. On this reading, Madonna refuses in the video to allow
herself to be an object of male desire; the viewer who wishes to watch her in this mode
is rendered uncomfortable by being put in the subject position of sleazy, voyeuristic
males. Thus, although the video offers Madonnas body as a spectacle, as an object of
voyeuristic pleasure, the framing of the images makes difficult fetishistic viewing by
identifying voyeurism and the objectification of the female body as part of a social
process that exploits women for the entertainment of pathetic voyeuristic males. Susan
Bordo (1992) counters that the video nonetheless reinforces the spectacle of womens
objectification, that the viewer is not really decentered and confused by this video,
despite the ambiguities it formally contains, and that the narrative context is virtually
irrelevant (1992). In fact, it is undecidable how different readers will process the video,
and while the images of the video may reinforce voyeuristic viewing of objectified
womens bodies, as Bordo suggests, the narrative context and juxtaposition of lyrics
and images may disrupt, in modernist fashion, voyeuristic viewing. Like Material
Girl, the video of Open Your Heart may have contradictory effects and appeal both
to cultural critics and feminists who love to see deconstruction and subversion, as well
as to men who like to gaze upon womens bodies and women who gain pleasure in
identifying with objectified females; lucky Madonna, whose polysemic texts attract a
wide range of readings and audiences.
11 The monocle is used by the capitalist to gaze at Madonna in Express Yourself,
objectifying her into a sexual fetish. Yet, as we see in Greil Marcus book Lipstick
Traces (1989), the monocle was part of the repertoire of Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck
and can thus be read as a Dada symbol and a sign that all of these traditional images
should just be mocked and rejected. Madonnas humor, irony, and camp would support
just such a Dadaist reading.
12 Madonna started giving AIDS benefits in the late 1980s and her album Like a Prayer
contained AIDS/HIV information and safe sex advice. In the 1990s, however, she became
more overtly political for a variety of causes and began referring to herself as a
revolutionary.
13 I am using the term modernism in the traditional sense of cultural practices which
break established rules, attempt to produce innovative forms, generate polysemic texts
with multiple meanings, and that require an active audience/reader to produce meanings
from the material of the text. A more recent postmodern take on modernism reduces
the modernist tradition and practices to a high cultural elitism, enshrined in canonical
texts in which modernist rebellions are transformed into new academic cultural norms.
Against the modernist canons, postmodernist texts and practices subvert the modernist
separation of high and low cultural forms, reject the attempt to produce monumental
texts that break with tradition and that are expressive of an authors subjectivity, and
often quote and pastiche previous works and forms. Many critics have interpreted
Madonna as a postmodern artist (see Kaplan 1987, Fiske 1989a, Bordo 1992, and
many of the other contributors to Schwichtenberg 1992), presumably because she works
in the arena of media culture, but I prefer to read many of her signifying practices as a
pop modernism, that deploys modernist aesthetic strategies in the area of music video
and concert performance. I have, however, suggested that she also deploys traditional
realist and narrative strategies in her music videos, and have discovered one example of
a clearly postmodernist strategy that I discuss below. I would therefore resist seeing a
Madonna, fashion, and image 295
phenomenon like Madonna as intrinsically postmodernist and prefer interpreting
modernism and postmodernism as aesthetic strategies and practices that performers
like Madonna can deploy.
14 On camp, see Susan Sontag who defines it as an unmistakably modern (note: not
postmodern) sensibility, characterized by love of the unnatural, artifice, exaggeration,
irony, involving play with cultural forms and images, involving a high level of theatricality
and travesty (1969, 277ff.)an excellent characterization of Madonnas aesthetic strategies.
15 Likewise, in the video of Open Your Heart, Madonna displays the production of the
objectification and fetishizing of women by displaying herself in a peep show. She
deploys standard objectified and sexist images of women, but undercuts them by
portraying the origins of fetishizing of bodies as sleazy dance parlors and voyeuristic
male gazes of low-life or perverted men.
16 I suppose that this is just my opinion. One journalist describes how he was eventually
brought to a masturbatory climax from the pictures, as did Carol A. Queen in Frank and
Smith (1993:139), a text devoted to discussion of the event of the book.
17 In the 1990 Nightline interview, Madonna defends Justify My Love as art, as artistic
expression, stating: I think thats what art is all about, experimenting, but it is an
expression, it is my artistic expression (concerning sexual fantasy). She also admitted
to pushing the limits of whats permissible. In Truth or Dare, she talks about refusing
to compromise the artistic integrity of her work when threatened by police in Toronto,
who wanted her to tone down her concert masturbation scene. In a later discussion in
the film, she indicated that she would continue pushing buttons, exploring the limits
of the permissible, and being political. Finally, in a 1992 USA Today interview, Madonna
described herself as revolutionary, the ultimate category of modernist theory and
politics (October 9, 1992, p. Dl).
18 Paglias labelling of Madonna as real Feminist underscores the dogmatism and
essentialism that characterizes Paglias own work. For Paglia, there is a real feminism
and Madonna is it, while other feminists are dismissed by Paglia. In fact, there are a
multiplicity of models of feminism and to say one model is real while the rest are
spurious is itself arrogant and dogmatic, for it is Paglia who denotes what real feminism
is, enabling her to savage sundry versions of false feminism. Likewise, Paglia theorizes
the essentially and genuinely feminine and masculine, binary opposites which she
believes provide a metaphysical foundation for culture. In fact, as I have been arguing,
masculine and feminine are social constructs. Moreover, there simply are many
different models of feminism, which have their respective strengths and weaknesses
(as opposed to there being one true feminism). Likewise, there are different models
of masculinity and femininity circulating in contemporary society, rather than there
being an essentially masculine and feminine.
19 Madonna herself continually stresses the control element, as in the interview where she
states:
People have this idea that if youre sexual and beautiful and provocative, then theres
nothing else you could possibly offer. People have always had that image about women.
And while it might have seemed like I was behaving in a stereotypical way, at the
same time, I was also masterminding it. I was in control of everything I was doing,
and I think that when people realized that, it confused them.
(Cited in McClary in Sexton 1993:102)
20 Laurie Andersons earlier five-hour synthesis of her performances United States
contained more social commentary, reflections on culture, society, and technology, and
arguably, a more discernible individual vision than the dispersed and decentered images
of Home of the Brave. This disappointed some critics who wrote of the tour preceding
the film:
296 Media culture/identities/politics
What was disappointing was the fragmentary nature of the evening. With her
monumental, four-part, two-evening United States, presented three years ago at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Miss Anderson pointed toward a statement larger than
her individual songs. Now, perhaps ensnared by the ambiance and compromises of
the rock world, she seems to have settled for songs, pure and simple. The tour program
has a title, Natural History, but it doesnt seem to mean much, and the songs dont
point beyond their generalized Andersonian aura.
(John Rockwell, New York Times, March 4, 1986: C13)
The critic obviously doesnt get the point that from the modernism and social critique
of United States, Anderson had moved toward the postmodernism of Home of the
Brave. A reviewer of the film wrote:
I expected Anderson to follow up on the more serious aspects of United States in
her later work, deepening her comments on personal, social, and cultural foibles of
our time. But she now seems less interested in criticizing our high-technology, lowintrospection
era than in reflecting it like a trend-conscious mirror. In her new film,
Laurie Anderson the performance artist has become Laurie Anderson the pop star
putting on quite a show, but focusing almost entirely on style rather than substance.
(David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 1986:25)
This critic also just didnt get it; i.e. that Anderson had made a postmodern turn,
deconstructing identity and the text, fragmenting and dispersing her images and sounds,
resisting meaning, sense, and social commentary.
Yet it appeared that Laurie Anderson soon after returned to more political concerns
in her next major stage show, Empty Places, see Laurie Anderson Gets Political,
by David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor (October 25, 1989). Moreover, in her
1991 performance pieces, she spent much time describing her opposition to the Gulf
War. Anderson continues her postmodernist experiments in her 1990 music video
collection, but also returns to modernist social and critique. Thus, modernism and
postmodernism are distinct aesthetic strategies that can be deployed for different ends,
or combined, if one wishes.
21 Entertainment magazine in a special September 4, 1992, issue on fashion estimated
that it could cost $377,012 to cultivate the Madonna look, if one adds up the expenses
from a years collection of clothes, jewelry, make-up, and services industries. The early
Madonna, by contrast, legitimated mix-and-match fashion in which anything goes.
Madonnas transformation of her fashion strategies and body images thus reflects
increased immersion in consumer culture and a growing commodification of her image.
297
Chapter 9
Mapping the present from the future
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk
Jean Baudrillard was arguably the most important and provocative media culture
theorist of the 1970s and early 1980s. His studies of simulation, implosion,
hyperreality, and the effects of the new communication, information, and media
technologies blazed new paths in contemporary social theory and challenged regnant
orthodoxies. Baudrillards claim of a radical break and rupture with modern societies
won him acclaim as the prophet of postmodernity in avant-garde theoretical circles
throughout the world. Baudrillard proclaimed the disappearance of the subject,
political economy, meaning, truth, and the social in contemporary social formations.
This process of dramatic change and mutation required entirely new theories and
concepts to describe the rapidly evolving social processes and novelties of the
present moment.1
Baudrillard described the emergence of a new postmodern society organized
around simulation, in which models, codes, communication, information, and the
media were the demiruges of a radical break with modern societies. In his delirious
postmodern funhouse, subjectivities were fragmented and lost, while a new realm
of experience appeared, rendering previous social theories and politics obsolete
and irrelevant. Baudrillards world was one of dramatic implosion, in which classes,
genders, political differences, and once autonomous realms of society and culture
imploded into each other, erasing boundaries and differences in a postmodern
kaleidoscope. His style and writing strategies were also implosive, combining
material from dramatically different fields, studded with examples from media
culture in a new mode of postmodern theory that effaced all disciplinary boundaries.
Baudrillards postmodern universe was also one of hyperreality, in which models
and codes determined thought and behavior, and in which media of entertainment,
information, and communication provided experience more intense and involving
than the scenes of banal everyday life. In this postmodern world, individuals
abandoned the desert of the real for the ecstasies of hyperreality and a new
realm of computer, media, and technological experience.
For some years, Baudrillard was a cutting-edge, high-tech social theorist, the
most stimulating and provocative contemporary thinker. But by the early 1980s,
Baudrillard ceased producing the stunning analyses of the new postmodern scene
that won such attention in the previous decade. Burnt out and terminally cynical,
298 Media culture/identities/politics
Baudrillard has instead churned out a number of mediocre replays of his previous
ideas, seasoned by a banal metaphysical turn in his thought, resulting in a
pataphysical scenario of the triumph of the Object over the Subject in the
contemporary world.2 Baudrillards travelogues, notebooks, theoretical simulations,
and occasional pieces fell dramatically below the level of his 1970s work, and it
appeared to many that Baudrillard himself had become boring and irrelevant, the
ultimate sin for a supposedly avant-garde postmodern theorist.3
While Baudrillard rambled and meandered during the later 1980s and into the
present, cyberpunk fiction became the literary trend of the moment and for many
the avant-garde of theoretical vision and insight. For its many enthusiasts, the work
of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Greg Bear, Lewis
Shiner, and others provided the most compelling images and mapping of our
contemporary high-tech and media culture. In particular, William Gibsons
Neuromancer (1984) was received as one of the most important novels of recent
years and a key text of the cyberpunk movement. Indeed, Neuromancer was a
brilliant literary debut, winning every major prize for science fiction. For some,
Gibson produced a whole new mythos and philosophical vision for the technological
age. The always extravagantly enthusiastic Timothy Leary declared that Gibson
has produced nothing less than the underlying myth, the core legend, of the
next stage of human evolution. He is performing the philosophic function
that Dante did for feudalism and that writers like Mann, Tolstoy [and]
Melvilledid for the industrial age.4
Gibsons other work is also compelling. His collection of short stories Burning
Chrome (1986) provides powerful visions of a new type of technological society
in which humans and machines are constantly imploding and the human itself is
dramatically mutating. His subsequent novels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa
Overdrive (1988) continued the cyberpunk explorations of Neuromancer, utilizing
some of the same characters and plots to further interrogate his themes of a rapidly
mutating technological environment and its effects on human beings. Gibsons
novel The Difference Engine (1991), co-authored with Bruce Sterling, presents an
imaginative reconstruction of the world of the industrial revolution, set in nineteenthcentury
England. And Virtual Reality (1993) provides an early twenty-first-century
vision of contemporary California as a dystopic technological nightmare in which
vicious corporations struggle for dominance of new technologies.
Cumulatively, these texts produce one of the most impressive bodies of recent
writing on the fate of hypertechnological society since Baudrillards key texts of
the 1970s. Like Baudrillards best work, they illuminate the contemporary scene
with a brilliant dance of concept, metaphor, image, and high energy prose. Both
Baudrillard and the cyberpunks exploded boundaries between philosophy, social
theory, literature, and media culture in providing texts that attempt to capture the
dizzying vicissitudes and searing intensity of our new high-tech environments.
Crucially for this study, both illuminate the present through analysis of future trends
that are already manifest.
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 299
Indeed, Gibson himself claimed that Neuromancer is about the present. Its
not really about an imagined future. Its a way of trying to come to terms with the
awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live (Mondo 2000, No. 7
[1990]: 59). Indeed, it is my contention that Gibson is mapping our present from
the vantage point of his imagined future, demonstrating the possible consequences
of present trends of development. In particular, he is charting the ways that new
technologies are impacting on human life creating new individuals and new
technological environmentsprecisely Baudrillards themes in the 1970s.
Yet in a certain sense both Baudrillard and cyberpunk became phenomena of
media culture who provided theoretical and fictional visions of a society increasingly
dominated by media and information. Both portray a world in which new
technologies and media are ubiquitous and in which human beings merge with
technologies and lose control of these extensions of themselves and of their new
techno-environments. In turn, both Gibson/cyberpunk and Baudrillard became
popular phenomena of a media culture, pop celebrities hailed as gurus and prophets
by audiences who may have no idea of the complexity of their thought and visions.
Hence, in this study, I wish to argue that while Baudrillard was one of the most
advanced theorists of media culture and new technologies from the mid-1970s to
the early 1980s, it is William Gibson and the cyberpunks who have carried out
some of the most important mappings of our present moment and its future trends
during the past decade. I shall suggest that Gibsons and the cyberpunk vision
builds on Baudrillards postmodern perspectives, but departs from the increasingly
retro French theorist in significant ways. I read both Baudrillard and Gibson as
providing mappings of the media and high-tech societies of the present and the
uncertain trajectory toward a not-too-distant future that contribute important insights
into the profound changes that we are now undergoing.
The present, in these mappings, is thus viewed from the perspective of a future
that is visible from within the experiences and trends of the current moment. From
this perspective, cyberpunk science fiction can be read as a sort of social theory,
while Baudrillards futuristic postmodern social theory can be read in turn as science
fiction.5 This optic also suggests a deconstruction of sharp oppositions between
literature and social theory, showing that much social theory contains a narrative
and vision of the present and future, and that certain types of literature provide
cogent mappings of the contemporary environment and, in the case of cyberpunk,
of future trends. I am therefore suggesting that Gibson can be read as a social
theorist, while Baudrillard can be read as a science fiction writer, and both can be
seen as providing cognitive mappings and poetic figurations to illuminate the
constellations of our contemporary high-tech media culture.6
FROM BAUDRILLARD TO CYBERPUNK
Brian McHale has described the curious reciprocal influence between postmodern
fiction and science fiction (hereafter SF) during the past decade.7 This interchange
is symptomatic of the process of implosion that Baudrillard thinks characterizes a
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 301
postmodern society in which different phenomena implode into each other. Cyberpunk
fiction thus involves an implosion of the techniques of modernist and
postmodernist fiction, the genre of SF, other popular generic codes, with the style
and figures of the punk movement and other oppositional urban subcultures. In
cyberpunk, the postmodern vision finds its paradigmatic literary expression and
disseminates its insights back into the contemporary culture from which it derived
its energy and edge.
The cyberpunk writers were first called things like the outlaw technologists, the
neuromantics, and the mirrorshades groupsbecause mirrorshades are a prominent
symbol of antiauthority in many of their works (Sterling 1986:ixxii). Capitalizing
on this image, Bruce Sterling published an anthology of cyberpunk fiction titled
Mirrorshades, featuring a promotional blurb by author Michael Swanwick who
wrote:
These are all hot young verbal pilots who think nothing of taking fortythousand
tons of screaming heavy metal prose and throwing it straight at the
ground in a forced power dive shedding sparks and literary chaos only to
pull up at the last possible instant shy of total grammatical implosion just to
see the horrified looks on the pale upturned faces of the civilians as the
afterburners cut it.
(inside back cover of book)
Such intense and hyperbolic prose is typical of the cyberpunks who strive to capture
the rhythms, feelings, flux, images, and experiences of the present in their whitehot
prose, on-the-edge characters, and fast-paced narratives that burn powerful
images into their readers while projecting frightening and prescient visions of our
often anxious present and even scarier future.
Eventually, the term cyberpunk stuck, though some have rebelled against the
label. The term cyber is a Greek root signifying control, and the term has been
absorbed into the concept of cybernetics, signifying a system of high-tech control
systems, combining computers, new technologies, and artificial realities, with
strategies of systems maintenance and control. The root cyber is also related to
cyborg, describing new syntheses of humans and machines and generally signifies
cutting-edge high-tech artifacts and experience. The punk root derives from the
punk rock movement, signifying the edge and attitude of tough urban life, sex,
drugs, violence, and antiauthoritarian rebellion in lifestyles, pop culture, and fashion.
Together, the terms refer to the marriage of high-tech subculture with low-life
street cultures, or to technoconsciousness and culture which merges state-of-theart
technology with the alteration of the senses, mind, and lifestyles associated
with bohemian subcultures.
As a subcultural phenomenon, cyberpunk in general thus signifies a hard-edged
avant-gardist posture toward technology and culture, eager to embrace the new
and ready to rebel against established structures and authorities in order to gain
new experiences and to put new technologies to work. The street has its uses,
Gibson likes to say, and as a movement cyberpunk operates outside the law, rebelling
302 Media culture/identities/politics
against centralized state and corporate structures in favor of more decentralized
subcultural use of science and technology to serve the needs of the individuals
involved. Whereas much SF tends to focus on mainstream, conformist types of
characters who operate within established institutions and law-and-order, cyberpunk
literature and film tends to utilize more marginal and even low-life characters.
And while hippie, punk, and previous oppositional subcultures tended to be
antitechnology, cyberpunk culture embraces technology which is used for the
individuals own purposes (although often against the purposes and interests of
established institutions and usages).
As a genre, cyberpunk can be read as distant warning systems, cautionary morality
tales, warning us about future developments in which there is no future that human
beings can control and mold to fit their purposes. There is thus an important parallel
between cyberpunk literature and Mary Shelleys nineteenthcentury novel
Frankenstein, which also provides warnings about new technologies running amok.
Cyberpunk stands at the beginning of a new technological revolution, warning of its
dangers, just as Frankenstein warned about an industrial and scientific revolution
out of control.8 But cyberpunk shows an entire universe already in a state of advanced
disarray and moving rapidly toward a frightening future where everything is possible
and survival becomes increasingly challenging.
Yet cyberpunks are not as negatively apocalyptic as some SF literature and film
of the past few decades. Writers like Gibson stress both the negative and positive
potentials of technology and a technological future and are neither techophobic
nor technophilic. Much previous SF, by contrast, was technophilic, celebrating
technology without critical reflection on its effects. Another strain of apocalyptic,
dystopic literature, by contrast, was purely negative toward technology, seeing it
leading simply to a catastrophic future. Cyberpunks, for the most part, are more
dialectical, though there is a residue of dystopic pessimism in some of its writers.
As a literary phenomenon, the cyberpunk writers were anticipated by William
Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, J.G.Ballard, and Thomas Pynchon, while rock music,
drug culture, and computer culture are also important sources and influences on
their writing and style. The cyberpunks come from widely different backgrounds,
some from science, some from literature, others from rock music, and all seem
familiar with oppositional countercultures. Despite differences in their visions,
politics, style, and attitudes, the cyberpunk writers share a general sensibility and
rootedness in the contemporary high-tech environment. Rather than fantasizing
about the fate of empires in another galaxy and time, the cyberpunks confront the
impending realities of our own world. Their writing style involves the piling-on of
intense imagery and vivid description, byzantine plots, and bizarre and violent
characters fighting for power and survival in the contemporary urban and corporate
world. Speed and energy are features of cyberpunk narratives which are fast-paced,
full of bizarre characters, twists of plot, and weird surprisesjust like life in the
high-tech society.
Unlike previous SF, often written by midwesterners, Neuromancer and other
cyberpunk fiction is urban, dealing with new urban experiences of crime, drugs,
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 303
sex, rock and roll, a high-tech and commercialized environment, and low-life and
underground subcultures proliferating and fighting for wealth and survival. Cyberpunk
fiction typically offers a dystopic view of an imminently arriving future where
megacorporations control all aspects of life for nefarious purposes, where
technology allows for more intense systems of control, but is always resisted by
underground and countercultural forces, where everything has become commodified
and life is dirt cheap (e.g., as in Gibsons novels where hired assassins are always
active and various characters are always ready to kill for a price).
The cyberpunks are very much a product of the technological explosion of the
1980s with its proliferation of media, computers, and new technology. Their work
is heavily influenced by the saturation of culture and everyday life through science,
technology, and consumer culture and their writing presents an overlapping of the
realms of high-tech and popular mass culture. As Bruce Sterling put it:
Traditionally, there has been a yawning cultural gap between the sciences
and the humanities: a gulf between literary culture, the formal world of art
and politics, and the culture of science, the world of engineering and industry.
But the gap is crumbling in unexpected fashion. Technical culture has
gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so
disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary that they can no longer be contained.
They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere.
The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control
of the pace of change.
(Sterling 1986:xii)
Cyberpunk fiction provides a response to this situation, attempting to map
contemporary technological, economic, social, political, and cultural realities,
capturing the momentous changes, the intensity and dynamism, and the new
possibilities and new threats to human beings. Thus, like postmodern theory
and culture, cyberpunk fiction is a response to explosive proliferation of
technology and mass culture which it embodies in its style and subject matter
and in turn illuminates. Thus postmodern theory and culture and cyberpunk
fiction are products of the same new high-tech environment and both serve to
map and illuminate it.
From this perspective, postmodern theory is the first high-tech social theory
and cyberpunk is a new high-tech literature for the jaded and hyped-up denizens
of the computer and media age. Cyberpunk writing also responds to the predatory
greed of unrestrained capitalism during the Reagan/Bush/Clinton era. The form of
capitalism represented in cyberpunk film and novels is very much a global capitalism
of mixed cultures and languages (e.g. Blade Runner and Neuromancer), of a
homogenous mass culture and market-place stretching across the globe, constituting
a global village and an everyday life permeated by products, cultural forms, and
minutiae from all over the world. This form of capitalism is also a technocapitalism,
an organization of society uniting technology with capital, in which technology
(especially media, information, and communication) becomes capital and capital
304 Media culture/identities/politics
is increasingly mediated by technology. Indeed, in Gibsons universe, information
is the privileged form of capital and the source of wealth and power.9
Likewise, the social world portrayed by cyberpunk fiction is a capitalism
without restraint, reflecting the unleashing of giant corporations spurred by the
conservative political regimes of the 1980sReagan/Bush, Thatcher/Major, Kohl,
and others. In this social Darwinist world, capital is totally amoral, only the
fittest survive and prosper (i.e. those fit for exploitation and corruption) and a
vast underclass hustles and deals for survival in violent urban worlds. The vision
of a totally amoral capitalist society is delineated in Simulations by Baudrillard
who described capital as immoral and unscrupulous; its primal (mise en)
scene involves instantaneous cruelty, incomprehensible ferocity, fundamental
immoralityit is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more
(Baudrillard 1983a:289).10
The vision of a world governed by mysterious corporate conspiracies is also
that of Thomas Pychon who is one of the key influences on cyberpunk fiction.11
In the world of cyberpunk, an unrestrained capitalism reduces society to
shamblesthe environment is wrecked, everything is increasingly artificial, and
experience is technologically mediated. Another key Baudrillardian theme in
cyberpunk is the implosion between biology and technologyhuman body parts
are easily replaceable with technological prostheses, personalities are
programmable, neuro-chemistry modifies intelligence and personalities, brains
and computers interface and implode, and individuals enter strange new
technological worlds. In addition, artificial intelligence strives for power, and
individuals seek immortality through cryogenics, or externalization of their
personalities in computer constructs. This is precisely the terrain mapped out by
Baudrillard who explored in his 1970s and early 1980s texts the phenomena of
simulation, implosion between humans and technology, cloning, genetic
engineering, communication and media, and the proliferations and disseminations
of the media and information society.
Baudrillard was thus a precursor and prophet of the brave new technological
world being explored and mapped by cyberpunk, though as we shall see,
cyberpunk fiction addresses themes that are ignored by Baudrillard.12 In the
following reading, I accordingly show the similarities between Baudrillard and
Gibsons Neuromancer, suggesting that Gibson provides a concretizing and
visualization of some of Baudrillards abstract categories. There are also
philosophical affinities between Baudrillard and cyberpunk: like Baudrillard,
cyberpunk fiction problematizes the notion of the subject; concepts of reality
and time and space are called into question with notions of cyberspace; implosion
between individuals and technology subvert the concept of the human being;
and the erosion of traditional values raises questions concerning which values
deserve to survive and what new values and politics could help produce a better
future. Indeed, both Baudrillard and cyberpunk call into question the very nature
of contemporary society, culture, values, and politics, and thus force us to confront
key theoretical and political issues.
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 305
NEUROMANCER AND THE BAUDRILLARDIAN VISION
Baudrillards main categories of hyperreality, simulation, and implosion are all
present in Neuromancer and there are interesting similarities and differences
between their visions of the high-tech funhouse in which we play, suffer, and die.
Both depict a high-tech information society where boundaries of all kinds have
implodedbetween cultures, between biology and technology, between reality
and unreality (or simulation). In this world, simulations have displaced reality,
and the body and human subjectivity have been drastically altered by new
technologies. In the following discussion, then, I would like to chart the similarities
and differences between Baudrillards postmodern and Gibsons cyberpunk vision.
While Baudrillards vision is somewhat abstract, Gibsons maps a world where
simulation and hyperreality are omnipresent, where processed and computer
generated identities abound, where individuals are reconstructed and altered via
genetic engineering, implants, and drugs, and where there is a confusing blurring
of boundaries between physical and virtual reality, with attendant ontological
confusion and indeterminacyprecisely the Baudrillardian vision in a compelling
literary embodiment. Thus, both Gibson and Baudrillard describe a world where
subjectivity, reality, and identity are called into question, but Gibson eschews the
intense nihilism of Baudrillard and foregrounds a quest for value, identity, and
expression of human qualities as a main structuring and motivating force of his
future universe. But while the (anti) theorist Baudrillard tends to be abstract and
detached, Gibsons texts exhibit a passion for objects, textures, and concrete
particularity. As we shall see, Gibson holds onto certain categories that Baudrillard
abandons, in particular the notion of a sovereign individual trying to control its
environment and maintain its sovereignty in a dangerous and vertiginous world.
The style of Neuromancer is postmodern in the sense explicated by Jameson
(1991), with Gibson combining traditional narrative and modernist literary
techniques. Postmodern Gibson collapses distinctions between high and low culture
and pastiches genres and conventions of popular fiction and film. Neuromancer is
traditional in its attention to plot, character, and narrative (it is not metafictional),
but is postmodern in the way it combines and implodes genres, mixing science
fiction with the detective genre, noir crime stories, high-tech adventure stories, the
western (the main character Case is described as a computer cowboy), corporate
drama, myth, and fantasy. Neuromancer draws on Chandleresque visions of social
corruption, with characters trying to preserve their humanity and integrity in an
inhumane and corrupt world. Like pulp noir fiction, the plot includes elements of
romance punctuated by deception, high-tech gangsters ranging from corporate
criminals, to low-life street hustlers, gun molls and deceptive women, punk and
oppositional subcultures, intricate corporate structures, an incestuous family drama,
and science fiction fantasy characters such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) constructs
trying to take over the world and computer constructs achieving reality in the
cyberspace of computers.
The storyline concerns the adventures of Case, a computer data and information
306 Media culture/identities/politics
thief who has his nerve cells burned out by a biotoxin as punishment for stealing
from his bosses. A mysterious individual named Armitrage, with a Special Forces
background, hires him for a big job and provides an illegal black-market operation
that enables Case again to access cyberspace through his mind and computer
console. He is teamed with a professional criminal named Molly, who has many
bio-implants, including razors which protrude from her fingernails. The narrative
proceeds through traditional plot devices of assembling characters for the Big Heist.
In Case and Mollys first adventure, they combine forces to steal a computer
construct from a giant corporation, which they will use for their next job. The
construct, Dixie Flatline, is the reconstructed computer intelligence of the man
who taught Case how to steal corporate data and who will help rob another, even
bigger, corporation.
The second major adventure involves a trip to Freeland,13 a planet owned
completely by the Tessier-Ashpool family, whose mansion contains the AI (Artificial
Intelligence) Neuromancer with whom Wintermute wishes to merge. This will
involve penetration of the family mansion and a long section of the novel involves
assembling the cast of characters: an evil man named Riveria who is able to project
holographs and is hired to seduce the daughter of the Tessier-Ashpool family, 3Jane;
a group of Rastafarians who provide muscle and assistance; and the AI Wintermute
who appears in the form of various characters during the last part of the novel. The
goal involves stealing the AI Neuromancer from the Tessier-Ashpool mansion,
Straylight, using the key which 3Jane possesses to open the door to the room
where Neuromancer is stored, a heist which requires Mollys expertise and Cases
computer skills to disarm the computer security systems and to guide Molly in her
quest to free Neuromancer so that it can merge with Wintermute.
The narrative and feel of the images is highly cinematic; in an interview Gibson
conceded he relied heavily on film noir elements and was influenced by Blade
Runner.14 Neuromancer also has a traditional unraveling of the mysteries at the
end, though the conclusion is bathed in mystery and ambiguity and is hard to
decode à la high modernism. Like modernist texts, Neuromancer therefore
requires an extremely active reader, though, as suggested, it is postmodern in
terms of the form of the novel and its themes; indeed, the implosion of complex
modernist fictional forms with pulp adventure motifs, conventions, and genres
is itself postmodern, combining modernist with traditional generic literary
forms, style, and features.
The themes and vision of Neuromancer are highly Baudrillardian, featuring an
implosion of national cultures in a totally imploded society, where the distinction
between technology and nature is also eroded. The novel opens with technological
imagery obliterating the very look of nature: The sky above the port was the color
of television, tuned to a dead channel (Gibson 1984:3).15 The locale features a
world in which races, cultures, nationalities are all imploded into one high-tech
futuristic culture à la Blade Runner. National boundaries are no longer of much
importance and, linguistically, discourses implode into each other, with bits and
pieces of different languagesespecially English, Japanese, French, and German
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 307
termsproducing a new form of international polyglot. The novel also fuses
computer and high-tech discourse, drug lingo, business and crime language,
subculture language (most notably Rasta), media culture references, with esoteric
allusions to music, painting, dance, and other forms.
As in the Baudrillardian vision (1993), aesthetics permeates everyday life with
Case being described as an artiste early in the novel and all of the main characters
are artists of one sort or another. Modernist art terminology and references also
abound. Molly adopts the pseudonym Rose Kolodny, referring to a work by
Duchamps (Gibson 1984:143; see also 207); and metaphors of dance, sculpture,
and music are frequently used to describe the various characters moves, thus
imploding art and professionalism. Indeed, even the commodity universe of
Neuromancer is permeated with modernist art forms.16 Seeking information
concerning whether he is to be the victim of an assassination, Case visits the office
of Julius Deane, who is one hundred and thirty-five years old and the recipient of
yearly DNA resetting and genetic surgery. Entering his office:
Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case
waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on
a low Kandinsky-look coffee tale in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock
hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the
bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the
convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time.
The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off
the tang of preserved ginger.
(12)
And so in Gibson, as with Baudrillard, aesthetic style permeates everyday life and
high and low culture implode in a commodity universe. But above all Neuromancer
projects a vision of implosion between humans and technology in a high-tech
world of plastic surgery, implants, drugs, artificial organs, artificial brains, and
genetic engineering. The bartender Ratz who serves Case in the opening scene has
a prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft
Kirin (3). His teeth exhibit a webwork of Eastern European steel and brown
decay (3). Mollys glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver
lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones (24). Her
gun seems an intrinsic part of her and in the introductory scene, she held out her
hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click,
ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath
the burgundy nails (25).
At the end of the electronic computer-disk version of his trilogy, Gibson claims
that his novels were not merely about computers,
but really theyre about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I
suspect theyre actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with
308 Media culture/identities/politics
machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and
usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be.
(Gibson 1991:5645)
While some contemporary science fiction (e.g., Ballards Crash) depicts a loss of
the human and its transformation into an object in a Baudrillardian vision of total
reification, or presents the disappearance of the human and the replacement of the
human by technology, or new lifeforms, in Gibsons vision, the human lingers on.
In particular, human emotions are the major motivation for the main characters,
especially fear, hatred, loyalty, and perhaps love, though love is under question in
the universe of Gibsons cyberpunk.
Gibson thus holds onto a romantic vision of individualism, of individuals
controlling their destiny, fighting for sovereignty in a world of technology and
giant corporations. Gibsons romantic individualism, however, is more like the
German romanticism of Schiller which did not celebrate nature over culture as in
Blake and some English Romantics, but rather deployed diversity, irony, and
complexity to delineate the relations between humans, culture, and technology.
Yet there is also some nostalgia evident in Gibson for things of the past and human
feeling and sentiment.17 Moreover, there are fears evident in Gibsons work
concerning the consequences of technology getting out of control and supplanting
human beings as master of the universe. In a sense, Neuromancer is a fantasy of
computers, or artificial intelligence, taking over. It turns out that an AI named
Wintermute is behind the machinations of the plot, desiring to merge with
Neuromancer, to produce a new synthesis of ROM and RAM, of information and
personality, thus, in effect becoming Goda new superbeing and intelligence
capable of controlling the universe.
The episode in which Case and his associates stop off at the Rastafarian space
colony of Zion, provides a theological flavor to the events. Zion represents a colony
colonized by former Rasta travellers, who continue to live in space. The elders of
Zion forecast the coming of the end of world and assign a ship, the Marcus Garvey
(named after the leader of the back to Africa movement in the 1920s). They assign
brother Maelcum as bodyguard and helper (perhaps an allusion to Malcolm X).
The religious prophecy concerning the end of the world codes the triumph of
technology as a religious thematic. Allegorically, their prophecy can be decoded
to read: the end of world=the end of modernity, where human subjects ruledor
thought they ruled. Henceforth, computers and artificial intelligence programs will
rule à la Baudrillard and their reign signifies that the end of the sovereignty of the
human species is at hand.
Both Baudrillard and Gibson share a postmodern vision that is a reversal of
the modern project for which technology is perceived as an extension of human
beings, who use technology to control and dominate nature. This time, however,
technology is taking over and is in control of humans who fight for their freedom,
their power, their autonomy, their humanity. Indeed, at the end of Neuromancer,
technology triumphs and the future of the human is uncertain. This theme is
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 309
anticipated in the films 2001 (in which the computer Hal takes over the spaceship),
in Colossus: The Forbin Project (in which Russian and U.S. supercomputers
merge to attempt take over the world), and in Demon Seed (where a computer
rapes Julie Christie and takes control of her house). In Neuromancer, however,
Gibson portrays the struggle of an individual hero, who still has desires, hopes,
fears, yearnings, hatreds, and memories struggling to retain control of his
environment. He thus follows the tough-guy fiction tradition of Raymond
Chandler who depicts individuals struggling for honor and sovereignty in a corrupt
world. Like Chandlers detectives, Gibsons heroes have their own code of values
and march to the beat of their own drum, despite all of the technological and
corporate forces trying to control them.
Gibsons subjectivities are, to be sure, vulnerable and flawed, but they represent
individual selves trying to survive, maintain control, and even to preserve honor
and dignity in a threatening world. This preservation of individual subjectivity
represents a major departure from Baudrillard, for whom the subject is a term in a
terminal, lost in the ecstasy of communication (1983c:128). For Baudrillard, the
subject lives no longer as an actor or dramaturge but as a terminal of multiple
networks (ibid.). Gibsons characters by contrast have standard human emotions
and live out adventures of romance, intrigue, deals, and quests for identity, power,
and meaning, yet the body is diminishing in importance and the characters are
most alive in the realm of cyberspace.
The term cyberspace was first used by Gibson in his 1982 short story, Burning
Chrome to refer to a computer generated virtual reality (Gibson 1986). It is now
a common term that designates various kinds of computer generated spacese.g.
various information services and communication systems, virtual reality systems
(computer generated audio/visual/tactile experiences, tele-presence, and so on).
The concept was embodied in the 1982 movie Tron, in which the characters entered
into computers for adventures in computerland. The TV series Max Headroom
drew on the concept, as did Hollywood films like The Lawn Mower Man and The
Ghost in the Machine.
Cyberspace is defined by Gibson in Neuromancer as:
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators in every nationa graphic representation of data abstracted from
the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations
of data. Like city lights receding
(51)
This definition of cyberspace as a consensual hallucination is, however, somewhat
misleading for the phenomena now being described by the term are the current
and real phenomena of the present moment, such as computer data-base systems,
e-mail and on-line computer communication, satellite television, and virtual reality
games and machines. These phenomena are neither hallucinatory, nor subjective,
but are simply the spaces and networks of a high-tech and media society.18
310 Media culture/identities/politics
In Gibsons universe, money, data, software, patents, government records,
military secrets, individuals profiles and other important data are stored in cyberspace,
which is accessible to computer cowboys who access it through their
consoles and with electric wires on their head called trodes (presumably short
for electrodes), enabling individual minds to interface with the computer world.
Cyberspace for Gibson has a colorful architecture and form; as he imagines it, it
is three-dimensional and navigable. Such is the speed of technological change,
and the way that reality imitates the most fantastic fiction, that corporations
are indeed storing data in graphic configurations, employing security systems to
prevent theft, unwanted accessing, and computer viruses.19 In any case, the world
of information in cyberspace for Gibson has a shape and structure, it is a universe
and reality unto itself.
The hyperreal realm of cyberspace, accessed through computers, is more real
and involving in Gibsons universe than the world of everyday experience. Case
refers to his body contemptuously as meat and a prison of flesh (6; see also 9,
passim). Bodily experience, including sex, is relatively uninteresting and
unimportant for him; his orgasm is described as a flaring blue in a timeless space,
a vastness like the [Computer] matrix (33). Only when Case enters cyberspace, it
seems, does he become truly alive and his craving to enter the realm of computerspace
replicates strivings for religious transcendence (or the frenzied need of drug
addicts).
Although Gibson does not indulge in a Nietzschean pathos of life and celebration
of the body, he replicates familiar Nietzschean motifs of the will to power and the
will to identity as major drives of human beings. Gibsons universe, like Nietzsches,
is one of struggle and the motif of self-overcoming, of constant transcendence, is
also a major (Nietzschean) motif in Gibson. And although interpersonal
relationships and love are relatively unimportant for Case, yet a residue of
romanticism runs through Gibsons work. In its very absence, Gibsons texts
promote a yearning for romantic love. Trust, betrayal, and male-female relationships
are a major theme for Gibson, as they were in the noir detective fiction to which
his work is deeply akin.
Gibsons characters move back and forth from cyberspace to the real (i.e. as
depicted in the novels narrative space), and like Baudrillards disappearing subjects
live in a world in which it is impossible to distinguish between simulation and
reality in a universe in which the body inhabits what Baudrillard called the desert
of the real (1983a:2). Throughout the novel, it is not clear if the characters are in
real space, in computer space, in implanted memory, in simstim space (a computer
simulation of reality), or in other realms of cyberspace. Thus the very concept of
reality disappears à la Baudrillard and the implosion between reality and other
dimensions of experience create a new multi-dimensional and disorienting realm
of experience.
Although Gibson makes use of the Baudrillardian themes of simulation and
hyperreality, the cyberspace of Neuromancer is complex, deadly, full of mysteries,
multidimensional, and a scene of adventure, whereas Baudrillards ecstasy of
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 311
communication by contrast is flat, one-dimensional, explicit and without depth or
mystery, being fully visible and obscene (1983c:1301). Whereas Baudrillards
postmodern world is cool, operational, rationalized and functionalized, and without
secrets and surprises, Gibsons universe is hot, violent, opaque, mysterious, and
full of secrets, surprises, and threats.
For Gibson, technology is anthropomorphized with a car that talks and drives
itself (87f.),20 and computer constructs that have personalities. Humans, however,
are technologized with implants, surgery, drugs, and genetic engineering altering
the very substance of the individual and producing new syntheses of the human
and technological. Indeed, Neuromancers allegory of technology taking over
concretizes Baudrillards vision (1990) of the triumph of the object. Moreover,
Gibson, like Baudrillard, does not simply replicate techno-phobic impulses, but
describes a new state of affairs in which technology takes on more power and
sovereignty than human beings. At one point, some French police arrest Case,
accusing him of betraying his species by working for an artificial intelligence.
Evoking the Faust legend, a French agent says to him:
You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of
pacts with demons. Only now, are such things possible. And what would you
be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself
and grow.
(163)
Yet Gibson betrays no sympathy for this position and the reader is positioned to
applaud Cases escape from these police.
The novel is also about power and the sort of immortality that corporations and,
presumably, computers, and individuals who interface with technology may attain.
Power, in Cases world, means corporate power and corporate control of
information and technology. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course
of human history, in Gibsons world had transcended old barriers. Viewed as
organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldnt kill a zaibatsu
by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the
ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory
(203). In this world, the corporate family Tessier-Ashpool was an atavism, a clan
(203), who wanted to keep possession of their wealth and power within their family
unit. The Tessier-Ashpool clan thus represents an earlier form of capitalism, family
capitalism, now obsolete in the global, transnational context.
From this perspective, the artificial intelligence (AI) Wintermute represents a
new form of technocapitalism, in which computers and an impersonal corporate
structure control information and power, and individuals gain power according to
ones ties to the corporation and field of corporate data. 3Janes mother, Marie-
France, had a different vision of future corporate structures than her old-fashioned,
patriarchal father (whose death she in effect engineers) and that vision is
programmed into the AI Neuromancer. Her mother imagined us in a symbiotic
relationship with the AIs, our corporate decisions made for us. Tessier-Ashpool
312 Media culture/identities/politics
would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity (229). Although old
Ashpool killed his daughter Marie-France, her vision presumably triumphed at
the end as this strategy had been programmed into Neuromancer, who is to merge
at the end with Wintermute.
In this sense, Neuromancer is an allegory about the demise of family capitalism
and the triumph of a new form of corporate capitalism in which technology assumes
the dominant position. But it is also an allegory about the triumph of technology
over the human and the quest for immortality. The AI Wintermute wants to become
part of something bigger, ultimately to merge with Neuromancer, to become a new
higher intelligence, to merge intelligence and personality to produce a higher lifeforce,
Godbut not God the Father. Moreover, in this form of computer
omnipotence, technology becoming God, there is no resurrection of the body, à la
Christianity and Buddhism.21 Wintermute may get a personality but there is no
hint that he will have a body, nor is there a hint at what sort of deity he will be.
Thus, the future in which technology takes over is presented as an open question.
Gibson does not indulge in technophobic and apocalyptic fright, but simply depicts
a situation in which computers appear to have taken over.22 Perhaps the computer
construct Dixie Flatline provides a hint as to the future and fate of Wintermute/
Neuromancer. Dixie, who only becomes alive when he is plugged into a computer
and his program is turned on and used, can talk, interact, and move through the
field of cyberspace, but the construct is bored with its virtual life and begs Case to
erase him, as if this form of immortality (i.e. with no body resurrected) is
unsatisfactory and even intolerable (Wintermute eventually grants Dixie its wish,
erasing him). This scene seems to imply that computer immortality is no immortality
at all, that without the resurrection of the body there can be no eternal happiness.
Or is this simply a limitation of the ways that humans are wired, and that computers
can very happily live forever without a body, this peculiar frame and density of
human beings? On the other hand, we know, and Gibson knows, that all technology
is quickly obsolete and will soon be museum piecessee Gibsons introduction to
the electronic publishing of his trilogy which makes this point (1991).
Furthermore, the old Tessier-Ashpool patriarch was also dissatisfied with his
cryogenic immortality, although in his case it may have been the manipulations of
3Jane that caused his discomfort. Case, too, seems to have gained some computer
immortality at the end of the novel, which closes with a passage:
He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest
on a new Ono-Sendai [computer console] and a ticket back to the Sprawl.
He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.
And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible,
who stood at the very edge of one of the vast steps of data. Small as they
were, he could make out the boys grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the
long gray eyes that had been Riverias. Linda still wore his jacket; she
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 313
waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her
shoulders, was himself.
(2701)
And so Case too seems to have achieved a form of immortality as a computer
construct, living forever in cyberspace. This is simply presented as a mystery at
the end of the novel and is neither celebrated, nor even probed in any way. It
allegorizes a condition in which implosions of the humans and technology may
produce new species which live in new arenas of space and time, and thus point to
a postmodernity beyond the current point where technology and humans coexist
in contradictory and unstable relations.
Perhaps the main limitation of Gibsons Neuromancer is the sketchy and inadequate
presentation of the synthesis between Wintermute and Neuromancer, which is
presented quite abstractly and with little detail. On the way to the final showdown,
Neuromancer makes Case brain-dead and he is thrown into a cyber-space world
where he has a confrontation with Neuromancer who takes the form of a Brazilian
boy (2434). In abstract, poetic diction, Neuromancer tells Case its name and tells
how Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road (i.e. programmed it), but her
lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days (i.e. she was killed by
her father before you could realize her plans to restructure the corporation under the
control of technology). The AI then explains: Neuro from nerves, the silver paths.
Romancer. I call up the dead I am the dead and their land. Stay. If your woman
is a ghost, she doesnt know it. Neither will you.
Neuromancer then tells Case that the choice is yours, as if Case could decide
whether he wanted a sort of (dead) immortality in cyberspace (which Case
encounters again in the last page), or to return to his bodily (meat) existence. Case
returns to consciousness and his body, but it is not made clear why, nor is it clear
exactly what Neuromancer is offering Case. As noted, it is also not clear what the
significance is of the merger between Wintermute and Neuromancer, or the
significance of the fusion between ROM and RAM, intelligence and personality.
The Neuromancer character is inadequately undeveloped and it is uncertain what
is in store for humans controlled by technology and the fate of the human in a
technological world.23
Yet Gibson neither glorifies nor condemns the artificial intelligence attempting
to augment itself. Wintermute is a sign for dead technology; Winter signifies
cold and lifeless and mute signifies silent; the term thus sets up an antinomy
between dead technology vs. live peoplebut without any Nietzschean pathos of
the superiority of life, of human life, over all dead things. Case, after all,
contemptuously describes his body as meat and there are no celebrations of the
body or nature; indeed, the scene of cyberpunk seems to be a postholocaust
environment where nature has shrivelled and died: animals are rare and some
species, like horses in Neuromancer, have even disappeared. Human nature for
Gibson is merely memories and emotions like fear, anger, and hatred, and a mutable
body, capable of assuming new forms in its implosions with technology.
314 Media culture/identities/politics
Thus, although Gibson, unlike Baudrillard, holds to a romantic individualism,
he is no humanist in any sentimental way, nor is he a technophobe. As in
Baudrillards vision, technology has won, thats that, and let the adventure continue.
Yet the novel also suggests a new sort of immortality: if ones brain, ones
intelligence, could be cloned, one could live for ever. Neuromancer depicts the
creation of an artificial intelligence that lives and the duplication of humans (Dixie
Flatline and Case) in cyberspace worlds who gain a sort of cybernetic immortality.
Now this truly would be a rupture in history if objects controlled human subjects
and produced the space of another lived realitya fantasy of the later Baudrillard
also suggested in Gibson. And with the overcoming of finitude in the transcendence
of death, the human would surely disappear because the deepest human emotions
have to do with fear of death and hatred of those who threaten ones life. Moreover,
in both Baudrillards and Gibsons universe technology can remake and drastically
change humans, both externally and internally. With humans becoming more
technological and technology becoming more human, a new implosion of humans
and technology ushers in a new historical epoch in the world of cyberpunk with a
new historical subject (or disappearance thereof in a world of objects). Such a
universe would deserve being described in terms of a postmodern rupture and
would constitute a genuine break in history.
Yet perhaps Neuromancer suggests that without resurrection of the body, eternal
life is not satisfying, or perhaps the AI will be perfectly happy without a body and
human form. Who knows? In any case, Gibsons universe is an open one. What
will happen next is uncertain and the technological future is unknown. But if we
know that significant changes have occurred we have a better chance of surviving
and thriving than if we continue to live with the illusions of the past.
MAPPING THE FUTURE; ILLUMINATING THE PRESENT
Gibsons Neuromancer and other cyberpunk fiction offer a valuable mapping of a
possible trajectory from the present to the future, pointing to key developments in
technology that will produce a different future. Cyberpunk fiction offers an
unflinching and realistic look at the powers that structure our world and raises
important issues about how technology structures our experience and the status of
the human being as the infrastructure of society shifts from industry and production
to a media and information culture, in the new era of technocapitalism. There is
thus an interesting difference in cyberpunk fiction from the traditional historical
novels described by Lukàcs and Jameson, which attempted to illuminate the present
by providing critical visions of the past (a strategy also employed by writers of
magic realist fiction like Marquez and Carpenter). But cyberpunk, by contrast,
illuminates the present by projecting visions of the future that highlight key
phenomena of the current moment and their possible effects.24
Gibson and Baudrillard thus provide an archaeology of the future in order to
delineate the structures, tendencies, and dynamics, of the present. These distant
warning systems provide cautionary morality tales that suggest the future
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 315
consequences of certain trends and phenomena of the present. Like Brave New
World, 1984, and other prescient projections of the future, Baudrillard and
cyberpunk provide both useful mapping and therapeutical functions. Extrapolating
from present technological, cultural, and social trends to possible future results
both helps individuals map their present social constellations and develop abilities
to cope with future-shock as the future inevitably hits us in the face with the speed
of electronic information and the force of a nuclear explosion.
Gibson and the cyberpunks are therefore not as dystopic as Baudrillard or such
prognosticians of the present/future as Huxley and Orwell. Cyberpunks are much
more positive toward technology than their predecessors and while they are not
naively techno-philic, they are not techno-phobic either, tending rather to balance
their appraisals of the effects of technology, seeing both positive and negative
aspects to the technological explosion and implosion of technology, culture, and
the human in the contemporary era. The products themselves of technological
consumer cultures, including personal computers, VCRs, walkmen and CB radios,
cable and satellite television, designer drugs, and the other paraphernalia of a hightech
consumer society, the cyberpunks see technology as omnipresent, but as
presenting new possibilities for individual pleasure and freedom, as well as
destruction and enslavement.
Neuromancer and other works of cyberpunk fiction also pose deep philosophical
questions concerning the nature of reality, subjectivity, and the human in a hightech
world: what is authentically human as the lines are being blurred between humans
and technology? What is human identity if it is programmable? What is left of
notions of authenticity and identity in a programmed implosion between technology
and the human? What is reality if it is capable of such vast simulation? How is
reality under erosion today and what are the consequences? Obviously, Gibson
does not answer these questions, but at least his works pose them and force us to
think them through.
As with Baudrillard, it is ultimately the politics of Gibsons work that are most
problematical.25 Gibsons cyberpunk heroes are not really models of political or
cultural resistance. If anything, they fit in all too well, involving themselves totally
in interactions with new technologies. To be sure, they are often marginal characters,
or beyond the law, and his books often portray groups of resistant countercultures,
but his main characters are never political rebels, and political rebellion in Gibsons
novels is often portrayed negatively.26 Although subcultural resistance is positively
portrayed in Gibsons sketches of the Panther Moderns (which combine
iconography of the 1960s Black Panthers with the British Mod subcultural groups),
there are rarely political revolutionaries in Gibsons basically postpolitical cultural
and technological world.
Gibsons nostalgia for romantic individualism, artifacts of the past, and lack of
politics are countered, however, by a sense of the ambiguous effects of technology
and he, like most cyberpunk writers, is much more affirmative of technology and
possibilities for humans to use new technologies for their own ends than Baudrillard.
In a sense, Gibson is simply very American-affirming the importance of individual
316 Media culture/identities/politics
sovereignty against social and economic forces. He is very American in his vision
of the redemptive powers of science and technology. For Gibson, beyond the frontier
lies new opportunity and in his stories, novels, and voyages always have a destination
and goal. As Csicsery-Ronay points out,
Gibson and his protagonists embark in story after story on quests to restore
value and meaning. They have an advantage over the earlier inhabitants of
modern fiction, in that the cyberspace promises that it may be possible
artificially to construct transcendence. Because the cyberspace has already
absorbed the affects and objects in the past that were associated with
sacredness and value, Gibsons protagonists have no choice but to try out
artificial transcendence.
(1992:226)
Baudrillard vs. cyberpunk
Baudrillard, by contrast, dissolves meaning and the subject in the ecstasy of
communication and is scornful of efficacious individual action, denying even the
possibility of individual sovereignty in a world ruled by objects. He sees technology
triumphant in a posthuman world and evidences little nostalgia for the erased
humanity in a technological universe. Baudrillard seeks no transcendence and seems
content to document the foibles and follies of the contemporary era. There is nothing
new under the sun for the jaded Frenchman who has seen it all, or who thinks that
everything has already been said, shown, and done and that all one can do is to
play with the pieces.27
In his post-1980s works, Baudrillard presents the spectacle of an alienated
European intellectual surveying the collapse of modernity which he coolly and
ironically chronicles in his texts. His nihilistic and cynical vision of the present
age is fully visible in his travelogue America (1988) where Baudrillard travels28
through the United States and sees the future in the American present. Or, put
differently, Baudrillard sees contemporary America as science fiction, as a futuristic
signscape that is the fate of the West, a present that will be Europes and every
wheres future.
Baudrillard constantly remarks on the science fiction hyperreality of the USA
today. Salt Lake City has the transparency and supernatural, otherworldly cleanness
of a thing from outer space (2). In the research institutes in Torrey Canyon, all
the future biological commandments are being devised; they are sublime,
transpolitical sites of extraterritoriality, combining as they do the earths undamaged
geological grandeur with a sophisticated, nuclear, orbital, computer technology
(4). The New York marathon is an end-of-the-world showbringing the message
of a catastrophe for the human race (pp. 1920). And the great Western desert
appears to Baudrillard as a fragment of another planet (at least predating any
form of human life), where another, deeper temporality reigns, on whose surface
you float as you would on salt-laden waters (68).
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 317
Baudrillards short essays on America illustrate his continuing fascination
with semiology, with signs, reading the U.S. as a constellation of signs, as an
astral America.29 Baudrillards sign fetishism reduces the complexity and
contradictions of the United States to a play of signs. The early Baudrillard was
very immersed in semiotics, the study of signs and signifying systems. While he
rejected the formalism and objectivism of much semiology, he held onto its mode
of seeing, reducing the world to signs. This vulgar semiological vision informs
America where Baudrillard claims that America is a giant hologram in which
information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements (29).
Following this principle, Baudrillard does not hesitate to make massive
generalizations about his theoretical object. America is the only remaining
primitive society (7); it is a realized utopia (75ff.); and it is a cultural desert
and wasteland. He uses the desert as the key metaphor for interpreting America
and describes the American miracle as that of the obscene (8), in which
everything is revealed, visible, present, and unhidden. This shallow, superficial
society is characterized by deserts of meaninglessness and his trip through
America produces a barely perceptible evaporation of meaning (8, 9).
America is thus an allegory for a country that is for him a play of pure
signs, devoid of meaning, purpose, or value. Baudrillards semiological reduction
of America to a desert, to an empty space, to meaninglessness, to pure structure
and event, is partially a result of his methodological choice to privilege speed
and driving as his mode of access to his object, as well as privileging deserts
over cities. Speeding through America, with his car stereo blasting and a trusty
bottle of whiskey as a companion, evacuates meaning and presents the spectacle
of pure speed, pure travelling, pure signs floating by in an empty indifference,
absent of meaning.
Yet unable to adhere to this ascetic methodological principle, Baudrillard
frequently slows down, especially in the cities, and then everything he sees
signifies something, every thing is a sign of something else. Break-dancers
signify to him, as they spiral around on the ground, an attempt to dig a hole for
themselves, radiating the ironic, indolent pose of the dead (19); California
jogging is like so many other thingsa sign of voluntary servitude (38); the
smiling eyes of squirrels at Irvine betray a cold, ferocious beast fearfully
stalking us (48); television sets left on in empty rooms in the Porterville hotel
reveal TV for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to
no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages
(50); and an exit sign on a freeway is a sign of destiny (53). Most memorably,
Americans smiling at Baudrillard signify:
The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: This country is good. I am
good. We are the best. It is also Reagans smilethe culmination of the
self-satisfaction of the entire American nation. Smile and others will smile
back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have
nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor
318 Media culture/identities/politics
your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference
shine out spontaneously in your smile. Give your emptiness and indifference to
others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile
smile Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
(34)
Mixing science fiction apocalypse with his obsessive semiology, many things signify
for Baudrillard the end of the world, including the New York marathon (19f.)
and California with its appliances, joggers, intellectuals working on wordprocessors,
political sects, overweight and anorexic individuals, and mentally-ill
people walking the streets (31ff.). Yet, Baudrillard also feels that although America
is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism
and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence,
it has about it something of the dawning of the universe (23). Moreover, America,
he constantly says, is the center of the world (14, 23, 28, 77f.), the model toward
which the rest of the world is moving.
Although Baudrillard rarely uses the category of the postmodern in this text, he
constantly equates America with modernity, as the prototypical modern society,
that was always free of feudalism and the limitations of traditional society, that
represented modernity in its purest forms (75ff.). Thus the end of the world
which he constantly experienced in America could be read as the end of modernity
and the dawning of a new world could be read as the advent of a new postmodernity.
Baudrillard, however, does not put this in these terms and so his reflections are
merely off the cuff remarks which betray a latently apocalyptic imagination that is
never fully unleashed.
In a sense, Baudrillards America represents his semiological imaginary running
amok. The French tourist reduces everything to signs and fails to see their material
underpinnings and effects, the social structure in which signs are embedded, or the
history that produces sign and structure. His semiological reductions are especially
evident in the study of Utopia Achieved in which he contrasts the U.S. with
Europe and other parts of the world. For Baudrillard, the U.S. is the original
version of modernity, it has no past traditions or history, it lives in a perpetual
simulation, in a perpetual present of signs (p. 76). Europe, by contrast, has a
history, has political and cultural traditions (and thus has politics and culture), and
depth. America, however, exhibits
what might be called the zero degree of culture, the power of unculture. It is
no good our trying more or less to adapt, their vision of the world will always
be beyond our grasp, just as the transcendental, historical Weltanschauung
of Europe will always be beyond the Americans. Just as the countries of the
Third World will never internalize the values of democracy and technological
progress. There are some gaps that are definitive and cannot be bridged.
(78)
Note here how Baudrillard employs ideal types of America, Europe, and the Third
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 319
World, which he maintains in their purity, claiming that there are some gaps and
differences that cannot be transcended. Such essentialist ideal-type thinking is of
course characteristic of the worst of modern theory that postmodern theorists reject,
yet Baudrillard falls prey to a mode of thinking based on cultural stereotypes and
bordering on racism.30 This is curious for Baudrillards own earlier analyses of
implosion included citing the implosion of racial differences in contemporary societies.
The cyberpunk vision
As I noted, the vision of a radical implosion between races, cultures, and parts of
the world is central to Gibsons cyberpunk vision and surely this vision describes
the actual breaking down of boundaries between America, Europe, and the Third
World, which is a trend of the present. Yet there are contradictory trends toward
more assimilation, breaking of racial boundaries and cultures, and homogenization
of society and culture confronted with growing racism, emphasis on cultural and
national differences, and fragmentation. But Gibson and Baudrillard tend toward
an implosive view of race and culture and thus do not properly grasp the explosion
of difference and conflict in the present moment.
In other respects, however, Gibson and the cyberpunks have a more accurate
and illuminating vision than that of Baudrillard, which remains stuck in an obsolete
and pernicious model of ideal types (i.e. of races and gender) and which is devoid
of political economy, class, and analysis of capitalism.31 The world of cyberpunk
by contrast is constituted by the new forms of technocapitalism, including
transnational corporations, especially US and Japanese firms, and the proliferation
of new technologies. The world of cyberpunk is a high-tech world where
information is the most desired commodity, where computers and cyberspace
provide access to new realms of experience, where drugs, cloning, and implants
produce new implosions of humans and technology. This is precisely Baudrillards
1970s theoretical world, which he abandoned in favor of exploring the desert of
the real in America and other contemporary sites of the disappearance of meaning,
the subject, history, politics, and the real.
As opposed to the reductionism of the semiological imaginary, one needs a
more multiperspectival social theory that combines political economy, sociology,
culture, philosophy, and radical politicsprecisely the mix of cyberpunk and the
postmodern theory at its best of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Jameson, and
others. Baudrillard, by contrast, has turned to a one-dimensional semiological
reductionism, to sign fetishism, that reduces the complexity of America and the
contemporary world to a few choice signs, which generally signify to Baudrillard
the end of the world and the reign of emptiness and meaninglessness. Desert
hereafter and forever.
Yet, the meaninglessness, indifference, and emptiness that Baudrillard finds in
America is precisely his own emptiness and alienation. By contrast, the most
advanced American forms of culture, like cyberpunk, express the energies of the
new technological society, the joy and power of utilizing new technologies, the
320 Media culture/identities/politics
ecstasy of interfacing, the potency of accessing new information and engaging in
new forms of communication, the transcendence of seeing images and artifacts
from all over the world, including the best of film and television, all there at ones
fingertips. Yet cyberpunk also depicts the downside of the new technological society,
the fact of growing discrepancies of wealth and power between rich and poor, the
mushrooming underclass, exploding into crime and violence, the growing power
of criminal and drug cultures.
The section on Utopia Achieved in America asserts constantly that America
lacks culture, by which he means European high culture. Baudrillard never
really engages American culture, such as jazz, blues, rap, or any form of popular
music; he seems to think that American art is completely below the level of
European art; and although he constantly refers to the important effects of
Hollywood cinema, he sees cinema, television, and other American cultural
forms as mere space, form, speed, and part of the American way of life and
thus not as genuine culture in the European sense. Such binary thinking (high
vs. low, European vs. American culture) is extremely dubious and has been
rejected by most postmodern theory and practice, showing Baudrillard
regressing to elitist European modernist prejudices. Cyberpunk, by contrast,
revels in the forms of popular art, as well as modernism.
For the most part, Baudrillard travels through middle-class and luxury America
which he describes as a utopia achieved (pp. 75ff.). He rarely sees the poor, the
underclass, or the virulent racism and sexism of U.S. society. He failed to see the
deteriorating social conditions for the middle class, for whom life is no utopia and
whose decline in standard of living cost George Bush the 1992 election. Although
Baudrillard recognizes the mentally ill wandering about in the streets, he does not
recognize the prevalent problem of homelessness, and the origins of this problem
in the specific conservative policies of Reagan and Bush. At one point, however,
he does taken cognizance of the problem of the poor. He recognizes that the easy
Californian/American life of the achieved utopia
knows no pity. Its logic is a pitiless one. If utopia has already been achieved,
then unhappiness does not exist, the poor are no longer credible. If America
is resuscitated, then the massacre of the Indians did not happen, Vietnam did
not happen. While frequenting the rich ranchers or manufacturers of the
West, Reagan has never had the faintest inkling of the poor and their existence,
nor the slightest contact with them. He knows only the self-evidence of wealth,
the tautology of power, which he magnifies to the dimensions of the nation,
or indeed of the whole world. The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion,
to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. This is must exit logic:
poor people must exit.
(111)
Baudrillard then discusses the disenfranchisement of the poor, their falling into a
Fourth World desert zone, as if the Last Judgment had already happened (112).
These passages accurately depict the logic and mentality of Reaganism, but in fact
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 321
this mentality fell victim to history, rather than eternalizing itself in a transpolitical
and transhistorical ideal type, as Baudrillards analysis would have it. Instead,
during 1992 this Fourth World became all too visible in the Los Angeles and other
urban insurrections in the United States and has found its cultural voice in rap (see
Chapter 5), a form ignored by Baudrillard. Moreover, the problems of the poor,
homeless, and other victims of the conservative policies were the products of the
failed economic policies of Reagan, Bush, and the Republicans, the analysis of
which Baudrillard also ignores (it remains to be seen whether Clinton and the
Democrats will do any better in addressing these problems).
Moreover, the passage just cited constitutes Baudrillards one reflection on the
poor and underclass in his entire book. In most of the travelogue, he speeds through
the deserts and cities, either alone or hanging out with the academics who invite
him for lectures. Cyberpunk, by contrast, explores the lower depths, the refused
and rejected of capitalist affluence. It also depicts the higher powers, the corporate
entities and forces that monopolize wealth and power, as well as the information
and technologies that are becoming the new arbitrators of wealth and power.
Cyberpunk explores the intensities, possibilities, and effects of new modes of
technologically mediated experience, while Baudrillard speeds through the ancient
landscapes of the West, and engages in hackneyed reflections on the desert, the
emptiness of cities, and the end of the world.
On the whole, Baudrillard reveals himself in his U.S. travelogue to be reductive,
hopelessly reactionary, obsolete, and very European. Baudrillard, the old fart, makes
fun of intellectuals on their word processors (34ff.), not knowing that they are plugging
into cyberspace, accessing incredible amounts of data at unforeseen speed, engaging
in new types of communication through bulletin-boards, e-mail, computer data-bases
and on-line discussion, and writing at new speeds and with new intensities. Baudrillard
by contrast exhibits a rather regressive mentality in the book, gaining satisfaction
from speed, from travel in his automobile, an experience that he had already declared
obsolete.32 His private mythologies of speed, cars, and desert, even give rise to archaic
fantasies, leavened by whiskey, as when he writes:
Death Valley is as big and mysterious as ever. Fire, heat, light: all the elements
of sacrifice are here. You always have to bring something into the desert to
sacrifice, and offer it to the desert as a victim. A woman. If something has to
disappear, something matching the desert for beauty, why not a woman?
(66)
One might object to my reading of Baudrillards America as proto-social theory
that his text is just literature, that it is merely a travelogue, that irony is his dominant
trope, and that I am taking it too seriously.33 Yet I would insist that both Baudrillard
and cyberpunk provide illuminating visions of contemporary society, that they are
describing key trends and phenomena of the present, that they are mapping in
important ways the social world in which we live and die, and that they therefore
contribute to social theory, even though they do not follow the protocols or
methodologies of established schools of thought. In recent years, there have been
322 Media culture/identities/politics
many calls to reject the models of modern social theory in favor of experimenting
with new modes of theoretical discourse and analysis, and I am suggesting that
Baudrillard and cyberpunk be read in this light. My argument is that even
Baudrillards philosophical travelogues and diaries like Cool Memories are a form
of social theory that can be appraised according to how they contribute to theorizing
and illuminating present social trends, phenomena, and experiences, or criticized
to the extent that they mystify, ignore, or distort contemporary social realities.
Thus, in a sense, even Baudrillards antitheory is a form of theoretical vision
and mapping. On one hand, Baudrillard is offering a new kind of discourse that
combines the discourse of social theory with storytelling, narrative asides, cultural
observation and criticism, and aphorisms. Yet he often claims that he is providing
insight into the present situation, charting its novelties and breaks from the past,
proclaiming the death of modern phenomena and the need for new theoretical
strategies and responses to the disappearance of the modern.
Although Baudrillard provides some essential tools to analyze our media culture,
there is a complete lack of analysis of the apparatus that produces hyperreality,
implosion, simulations, and the proliferation of images, information, and the ecstasy
of communication which produce his postmodern rupture. Baudrillards erasure
of political economy and production disables serious attempts to theorize
contemporary culture and communications, critical theory today should thus reject
Baudrillards overcoming of political economy and create new syntheses of
political economy, semiotics, and social theory in order to map the novelties and
conflicts of the present age.
The mappings of cyberpunk and much postmodern theory thus need critical
social theory to trace the vicissitudes of our media culture, to contextualize its
artifacts and to trace their effects. Baudrillard, by contrast, theorizes a flat, depthless,
superficial ecstasy of communication in which images and discourses circulate in
a hyperreal space, losing all contact with the real. Curiously, this is precisely the
fate of his own theory, which he admits is a simulation and which floats and mutates
in a hypertheoretical space more and more cut off from the realities and sufferings
of everyday life. His theoretical fictions explode theory into fragments and pieces
which he believes capture the reality of todays highly fragmented and disintegrating
society. There is, however, something left of the belief that theory, in whatever
form, can capture the real.
Baudrillards wager: pieces of theory, theory fragments and simulations, can
do what the old, more coherent and rational social theories could do: provide a
mapping of our present condition, produce orientation for thought and action, help
us cope with the changes and conflicts of social life. Yet Baudrillards own theory
arguably fails to capture the realities of the time and disables critical theory and
democratic politics. And so cyberpunk moved up to the front-lines of avant-garde
attempts to map contemporary social reality, summoning social theory and cultural
studies to theorize its insights, mappings, and blindspots.
Thus, in a sense Baudrillard does what modern social theory has done since the
nineteenth century, to chart out the vicissitudes of a new (then modern) era (see
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 323
Antonio and Kellner, forthcoming), but he does so in novel ways. I have argued
that in this sense Gibsons writings and cyberpunk also contain a form of social
theory and that this work has been more useful in recent years for developing
analyses and understanding of our contemporary society than Baudrillard, an issue
which I will take up in the concluding sections.
LITERATURE, SOCIAL THEORY, AND POLITICS
Building on Jameson s theory of cognitive mapping, I have suggested that both
the theoretical productions of Baudrillard and the (science) fictive texts of Gibson
project mappings of the trajectory from the present to the future. From this
perspective, theories, like Baudrillards, map out present social conditions, trends,
and possible futures based on extrapolation from the present to the futureas do
some modes of literature, especially SF and cyberpunk. Moreover, I suggest that it
is their analyses of the future that map the present, pointing to what is novel and
significant in our present and potential future effects. It is my claim that especially
the 1970s texts of Baudrillard and Gibson and cyberpunk both chart salient aspects
of our high-tech media society, using the means of theoretical discourse, metaphor,
narrative, allegory, and other techniques to illuminate distinctive features of our
present and rapidly approaching future worlds.
The present moment is undeniably a tense one with new technologies careening
out of control and the socio-political establishment and its institutions collapsing
(the communist world), or seemingly incapable of coping with the challenges of
the contemporary era (the capitalist world). It is accordingly a moment for bleak
and pessimistic visions and Baudrillard and Gibson provide appropriate articulations
of present moods of panic and anxiety concerning the present and future (attitudes
anticipated in the prophetic world of Pynchon and Burroughs), as well as mappings
of those forces causing the dis-ease of the present moment.
Cyberpunk activism
Baudrillard is more gloomy and despairing than Gibson, though Gibson thinks his
book is optimistic and that the future will be far less hospitable than what he depicts
as the present in Neuromancer.34 Other critics also think that Gibsons book is
optimistic and presents hope for the future in new interactions between humans
and technology (Leary 1990:53f.). In general, cyberpunks eschew attacking
technology per se and focus on the social forces that employ it for destructive and
evil purposes. In Gibsons work and other cyberpunk fiction, technology and
communication systems are represented as a fundamental means of power and
hence as something important for democratic control. There is thus a kind of
populism in the cyberpunk movement which advocates individuals using technology
for their own purposes and engaging in media and technological activism.
Indeed, a whole new hackers ethic has emerged which espouses information
for the people, fighting corporate control and monopoly of information. New
324 Media culture/identities/politics
computer data-bases and bulletin boards have emerged which present new sources
of information and communication. The intense interaction between people on
computer bulletin boards, ranging from discussions of classical music to soap operas
and politics, has now become visible to the mainstream (New York Times, December
1, 1992:B1). These boards are a new source of interaction, making accessible diverse
types of information and communication, allowing people to express their opinions
in a public forum that is participatory and interactive (as opposed to the one-way
communication system of broadcasting).
Other subversive potential for democracy of technological inventions such as
home computers and other technologies are present in cyberpunk fiction and in
the movements which are using technology to promote human change. Camcorders
enable individuals to film police violence, as in the famous Rodney King affair
when an amateur filmed the police brutally beating a black man arrested for
speeding. Public access television, community and CB radio, and bulletin board
and interactive computer systems enable individuals to air their views, to debate
issues of concern, to participate in social and cultural dialogue. Such technologies
thus facilitate individual participation and make possible two-way social
communication. Not, to be sure, the sort of face-to-face interaction valorized by
liberal political theories of the public sphere, but new modes of communication in
a new computerized and mediatized public sphere, one as important for the future
of contemporary politics as the previous public sphere of liberal democracy.
Cyberspace democracy: the new spaces of computer and media communication
make possible more participation in public debate, more outlets for political and
cultural expression, and more different voices and visions than in the precomputer
society. The realm of the public sphere has thus been expanded, allowing for a
vitalization of democracy, which has been decaying and in crisis for decades (see
Kellner 1990a and the conclusion to this book).
By contrast to cyberpunk activism, Baudrillard is technophobic and apolitical,
showing a future in which technology rules and the subject disappears, without
exploring ways in which new technologies can promote the growth of subjectivity
and produce new modes of experience, information, and democratic participation
and interaction. Baudrillard scorns alternative media, speaking contemptuously of
the negative ecstasy of radio, in which alternative voices are articulating their
views and positions (1983c:1312). He has no cultural politics in his post-1980s
writings, whereas earlier he promoted various forms of oppositional culture.35
Moreover, Gibson and cyberpunk offer a critical mapping of the corporate forces
that control technology and this work raises issues about ownership and control of
technology, about its uses and abuses. Gibson depicts the continued power of
capitalism, showing the desire for profit and power as basic motivations of human
beings in a competitive capitalist world. Thus for Gibson the imperatives of capitalist
accumulation and the competitive struggle for limited amounts of goods continue
to be the organizing principle of society. Gibsons mappings thus raise the question
of who should have access to information and who should control it, in a world in
which information and knowledge are power. Further: what are the potential uses
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 325
and abuses of cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering? Gibson
presents these developments as inevitable, as happening before our eyes and into
tomorrow, forcing us to confront the implications of the information and technology
explosion that we are currently experiencing.
Baudrillard, by contrast, obliterates the problematic of power and subjectivity
describing high-tech cybernetic systems, but never the forces, groups, nor
individuals that control them. By erasing political economy from the conceptual
framework of his theory, Baudrillard ultimately falls prey to technological
determinism. There are few references to capitalism or political economy in
Baudrillards later works and he seems to be describing a new technological order
in which technology alone rules, mercilessly imposing its imperatives and demands
on human who are henceforth powerless to control the products of human creativity.
Gibsons texts, by contrast, induce us to reflect about how technology can both
enhance human life and be a destructive force. This indeed is the challenge of our
technological future: how can we use technology to enhance human life, promote
democracy, and produce a better future? While Gibsons novels do not answer
these questions, they help us think through the nature of our present society and
what challenges and dangers we face in the future. And yet many are claiming that
the moment of cyberpunk is over, that it is now obsolete, and that we should move
onto to new concerns.
Forget cyberpunk?
It is has been argued that cyberpunk fiction has perhaps already had its positive
effects within SF literature and is now out of fashion and passé.36 It has been
mapped, charted, dissected, and anthologized, laid out in a useful academic
anthology by Larry McCaffery in Storming the Reality Studio (1991).37 The essays
tell you everything you want to know about cyberpunkits literary and cinematic
antecedents, its origins and trajectory, its themes and obsessions, its sociological
moorings, and relationship to SF and postmodern literature. The fiction selections
gave the reader a good sense of the style, feel, intensity, and hipness of cyberpunk
writing and its affinities for cinema, MTV, the drug culture, and the cyberspace of
computer universes. Reading through the texts of cyberpunk fiction one gets the
sense that the key moves have already been made, that the initial founding
documents have already charted out the iconography, lingo, themes, and style of
cyberpunk writing and that everything henceforth is derivative. Indeed, as Csicsery-
Ronay notes:
how many formulaic tales can one wade through in which a self-destructive
but sensitive young protagonist with an (implant/prosthesis/telechtronic talent)
that makes the evil (megacorporations/police states/criminal underworlds)
pursue him through (wasted urban landscapes/elite luxury enclaves/eccentric
space stations) full of grotesque (haircuts/clothes/self-mutilations/rock music/
sexual hobbies/designer drugs/telechtronic gadgets/nasty new weapons/
326 Media culture/identities/politics
exteriorized hallucinations) representing the (mores/fashions) of modern
civilization in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up with rebellious and toughtalking
(youth/artificial intelligence/rock cults) who offer the alternative, not
of (community/socialism/traditional values/transcendental vision), but of
supreme, life-affirming hippness, going with the flow which now flows in
the machine, against the specter of a world-subverting (artificial intelligence/
multinational corporate web/evil genius)? Yet judging from even the best of
writers in Sterlings anthology, for cyberpunks, hippness is all.38
(1991:184)
In fact, the creation/dissemination/assimilation of cyberpunk fiction has been so
rapid that the process of parody and pastiche has already become a standard narrative
device. For instance, Kathy Acker in Empire of the Senseless has already produced
a parody (or pastiche, it is undecidable) of Neuromancer. Cyberpunk fiction had
its moments, like Baudrillard, its brilliant breakthroughs, and then its boring
repetitions. Both of these avant-gardist writings/theories have had their highs and
lows, their hits and misses, and so now perhaps it is time to move on to something
new and different: beyond Baudrillard, beyond cyberpunk. The Something New is
perhaps more ecological, more womanly, more communal, and more innovative,
envisaging as yet unforeseen modes of writing, living, and relating. As Lewis Shiner
noted in his farewell to cyberpunk, the cyberpunks do not really address the current
national need for spiritual values and do not deal with the problems of disintegrating
families, addictions to alcohol and drugs and tobacco and sex. Instead of answering
contemporary questions of values and meaning, cyberpunk offers instead power
fantasies, the same dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster
movies like Rambo and Aliens. Its gives Nature up for dead, accepts violence
and greed as inevitable and promotes the cult of the loner.39
Perhaps Shiner (and we) should be more generous to his ex-comrades however.
For it has been the merit of cyberpunk to be on the cutting edge of radical writing
and mapping of the present as we head toward a frightening, but exhilarating,
new technological future. To be sure, cyberpunk literature began repeating and
parodying itself almost immediately, it is a boy s club of high-tech power fantasies
and low-life subcultural highs, and is an expression of and response to a period
of unparalleled social reactionthe Reagan/Bush yearswhich are now history.
But it is among the merits of cyberpunk to have caught the Weltgeist of its epoch
on the run and articulated prescient mappings and visions of the future with
deadly accuracy. Some of Gibsons most far-out fantasies are already high-tech
realities and no doubt tomorrow will surpass today in technological speed,
surprises, and nightmares.40
Further, although cyberpunk fiction may have had its moment and exhausted
its creative energies, it appears that cyberpunk as a mood, as an attitude, and even
as a cultural movement of alternative technology and lifestyles may continue to
thrive and be with us for some time. Books and articles on cyberpunk fiction,
culture, and uses of technology are proliferating and computer data-bases and
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 327
bulletin boards are rife with debates and discussions about cyberpunk. Taken as a
broad cultural phenomenon, then, cyberpunk continues to have creative energies
and effects, appearing as cutting-edge and radical. And yet we are still seeking the
philosophies that will help orient our lives, the theories that will chart the trajectory
of contemporary history, and the politics that will fight against the worst and produce
the best that it is possible for us to imagine. Baudrillard and cyberpunk will no
doubt be part of that mapping and vision, but only a part, however indispensable.
And so we should probably not forget cyberpunk as we create new theories and
politics, for the future may yet have some new surprises and revelations and
postmodern theory and cyberpunk are only part of the story that remains to be told
and made as we rapidly approach the next century.
NOTES
1 On Baudrillard, see Kellner 1989b, Best and Kellner 1991, and Kellner 1994a. I draw
in this chapter on my previous work on Baudrillard, but present some new perspectives
and juxtapose Baudrillard with cyberpunk fiction in order to indicate his contributions
and expose his limitations.
2 See, especially, Baudrillard 1990 [1983], and the discussion in Kellner 1989b, Chapter
6. The pataphysics is that of Alfred Jarry and his school; see the discussion in
Kellner 1989b.
3 One could argue, of course, that Baudrillard was never a postmodern theorist, that he
was always rooted within a certain current of oppositional French thought rooted in
nineteenth-century romantic and bohemian currents, in Jarry and pataphysics, and in
thinkers like Nietzsche, Bataille, and Debord and the Situationists (something like this
is argued in Gane 1991a and 1991b). But against such readings, I would insist that
Baudrillards interest derived from his claims to be theorizing radically new phenomena,
trends, and experiences of the present moment and that he derived his cultural power
and influence precisely from his novel descriptions of new technologies, cultural and
social forms, and experiences for which the label postmodern has been a generally
accepted description (see Kellner 1994a). Curiously, at the very moment when
Baudrillard dropped the theoretical ball, losing his initiative, Gibson and cyberpunk
picked it up, beginning their explorations of the new future world which Baudrillard
had been exploring.
4 Mondo 2000, No. 7 (1990):56. Science fiction fans and devotees of postmodern literature
were no less effusive. See the articles in McCaffery 1991. In addition, literary and
cultural journals, magazines, and computer bulletin boards have had countless laudatory
analyses and discussions of Gibson and cyberpunk in recent years.
5 This is indeed how I recommended that one read Baudrillard in Kellner 1989b:203f.
6 The term cognitive mapping derives from Jameson 1984and 1991; see the discussions
in Kellner 1989c and Best and Kellner 1991 of the difficulties of mapping the
contemporary moment.
7 See McHale in McCaffery 1991 and McHale 1992.
8 Interestingly, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling joined talents to produce a novel
about a different path for the industrial revolution titled The Difference Engine (1991).
This novel imagines that the computer appeared earlier, that technocratic radicals under
Lord Byron governed England during the explosion of the Industrial Revolution, and
that working-class revolution in England was narrowly avertedthough the novel
postulates that in the United States, the South won the Civil War which broke out some
decades earlier, that the South was the dominant power in the U.S., that Texas was an
328 Media culture/identities/politics
independent state, and that Manhattan was a socialist commune governed by Karl Marx
and his followers.
9 On the concept of technocapitalism, see Kellner 1989a, Chapter 7 and 8.
10 This surprisingly accurate characterization of capital is undercut by an earlier analysis
by Baudrillard which proclaims the end of political economy in the society of
simulations (see Baudrillard 1976:20ff. and the discussion in Kellner 1989b:61ff.).
Such passages point to the Marxist origins of Baudrillards thought which are not entirely
suppressed even in his most violent polemics against the great bearded one.
11 On Pynchons influence on cyberpunk, see McHale 1991:315ff. Gibson frequently
cites Pynchon as a major literary influence; see the discussion in the interview with
Timothy Leary, op. cit.: 62f. and with McCaffery 1991:267. On Pynchons mapping of
contemporary capitalism, see Best 1992.
12 Baudrillard (1981) was also impressed by one of the precursors of cyberpunk fiction,
J.G.Ballard, writing an enthusiastic study of his novel Crash.
13 This reference is a perhaps an homage to Burroughs Naked Lunch which invents a
Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing (Burroughs
1959:21).
14 See Gibsons interview in McCaffrey 1991. On Blade Runner and dystopic science
fiction films, see the discussion in Kellner and Ryan 1988.
15 Henceforth, page references to Neuromancer will be put in the text without citations. If
the reader has not yet read Neuromancer, I would recommend that she or he do so
before proceeding with my reading.
16 Art and technology continue to implode in Gibsons later novels. Count Zero involves
a quest for a mysterious object, reminiscent of the works of Joseph Cornell collected in
the Chicago Art Institute. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, one of the characters, Slick Henry,
uses his robotic sculptures as weapons during an attack on his house. And all of Gibsons
work features implosion of human beings and technology.
17 Gibson once sold antiques and his work evidences a love for special old artifacts. He is
likewise nostalgic concerning old forms of individuality and humanity, forms that are
disappearing in the technological societies of the present. Like Orwell in 1984, Gibson
marshals sentiments for antique objects that signified a happier and simpler time to
present critique of the present debased form of social life.
18 Initially, there.was nothing quite like Gibsons cyberspace, but some crude
approximations of it, such as simulation devices or virtual reality glasses, but studies
are now proliferating on cyberspace and virtual reality which present Gibson as the
prophet of this new space and experience (see the articles on cyberspace in Benedict
1991). I have found hundreds of newspaper and journal articles in various data-bases
which describe contemporary forms of cyberspace and which attribute the origin of the
term to Gibson. This is clearly an example of someone coining a term and idea and
inventors following by creating the actual embodiments of it.
19 On the new worlds of information theft, see Hafner and Markoff 1991 and Sterling
1992.
20 Baudrillard (1983c:127) imagines a new communicative interaction with cars that replace
the pleasure of the intoxication and power of speed and Gibson provides the next stage
of development and concrete image of this fantasy. Interestingly, in a Rolling Stone
interview, Gibson notes that he was listening to Bruce Springsteens Darkness on the
Edge of Town when he was writing Neuromancer and: I was wondering if there couldnt
be a mythology of computers that had something in common with Springsteen s
mythology of cars (Rolling Stone, December 4, 1986:107).
21 The theme of the resurrection of the body is an esoteric one in Christianity, found in the
Gospels, but not always promoted as dogma. Certain sects of Buddhism, however,
represented paradise or Nirvana in very concrete terms with resurrected bodies enjoying
From Baudrillard to cyberpunk 329
the pleasures of the flesh (see the painting of Paradise in the Japanese national museum
in Tokyo).
22 Gibsons subsequent cyberpunk novels deal with the later adventures of many of the
same characters, but do not focus on the latter trajectory of Wintermute/Neuromancer,
whether its reign was benign or oppressive, suggesting that the mega-program broke up
into a plurality of decentralized programs. Gibsons later fictions, however, imply that
humans continue to have a certain amount of sovereignty, though it is always threatened
by corporations and technology.
23 In a subsequent novel, Count Zero, which takes place seven years after the action of
Neuromancer, it appears that the unitary AI intelligence-sentience has fragmented into
a multiplicity of warring gods, presented as a pantheon of voodoo deities. It is as if the
center could not hold and the future was condemned to relive wars of conflicting deities:
precisely Max Webers vision of modernity.
24 Modern theory also attempts to understand the present from the standpoint of the past;
consider Condorcets essay on historical stages, Comtes three stages of history, Marxs
historical periodizations, Nietzsches genealogies and comparative histories, and Webers
massive historical treatises, discussed in Antonio and Kellner, forthcoming. In this
sense, Foucault is a modern theorist, as was the early Baudrillard in his sketch of stages
of history in Simulations. Understanding the present from the standpoint of the future,
then, is part of an arguably postmodern stance, or at least that of cyberpunk.
25 See my critical appraisal of Baudrillards politics in Kellner 1989b.
26 See the extremely negative portrayal of working-class revolution in Gibson and Sterling
1991.
27 In a 1984 interview, Baudrillard describes the postmodern as
the characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible. One is
no longer in a history of art or a history of forms. They have been deconstructed,
destroyed. In reality, there is no more reference to forms. It has all been done. The
extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has destroyed itself. It has
deconstructed its entire universe. So all that are left are pieces. All that remains to be
done is to play with the pieces. Playing with the piecesthat is postmodern.
(1984:24)
One could describe cyberpunk fiction, which was appearing just as Baudrillard was
pontificating, either as something new and unexpected, or as precisely a playing with
the pieces of contemporary culture, and thus as a game of vestiges, to use Baudrillards
term.
28 In the following section page references to America will appear in the text without
citations.
29 In a polemic against my reading of Baudrillards America, Mike Gane attacks my
symptomatic reading, and then claims that I do not really undertake such a reading
(see Gane 1991a:178ff.). But in fact I read America as symptomatic of Baudrillards
sign fetishism, as the projection of his semiological imaginary on the object America.
Gane is thus the poor reader, totally misinterpreting my reading, distorting completely
my critique, and then offering his own hopelessly muddled reading, as a mirror of
Baudrillards own form of writing, that is fatally or poetically (p. 182). The ever
elusive Gane forces the reader to go to a footnote, however, to discover what he means
by an appropriate superficial form of fatal reading: This is only one moment of a
reading: that which follows an (apparently) regressive epistemology into the fatal and
the pars totalis. It follows the ascent to poetic ecstasy. Yet this becomes perverse, in
Baudrillards own thought: a pure collection (p. 228). Ganes own book is a similarly
perverse pure collection of fragments swirling about Baudrillard and his critics that
have no continuous arguments, coherent organization, sustained interpretive theses, or
330 Media culture/identities/politics
criticisms. To my mind, his muddled and confused prose and inability to mount a coherent
argument or interpretation contributes to the collapse of meaning that Baudrillard himself
so well describes.
30 Indeed, Baudrillards later writings abound with sexist and racist remarks, based on his
surprising turn to a metaphysical imaginary grounded in the sort of binary thinking that
he had earlier rejected. See my critique in Kellner 1989b, Chapter 7. He also fails
entirely to see the endemic racism in the United States (see the analysis of racial mixing,
pp. 82ff.) and engages in racist asides such as: As is well known, the Americans are
fascinated by the yellow-skinned peoples in whom they sense a superior form of cunning,
a higher form of that absence of truth which frightens them (85). Here Baudrillard
passes off his own prejudices and fears as that which is well known in America.
31 Baudrillard does mention that America is an advanced bastion of capitalism (90), but
nowhere analyses American capitalism, perhaps excusing himself from doing so with
the specious claim that capital can never actually be grasped in its present reality, that
it is always outrunning and eluding theory (p. 80). He thus affirms the classical Marxist
position of the absolute initiative capital enjoys as historical event (80), but
disingenuously proclaims the impossibility of theorizing it.
32 In the Ecstasy of Communication, Baudrillard (1983c) compares the mythologies of
modernity, such as speed and driving an automobile, with the experiences of
postmodernity, exemplified in the ecstasy of communication, especially through
interaction with media, computers, and new technologies. He declared obsolete a
mode of experience which he soon after immersed himself in.
33 Baudrillard does recognize that he is plunging into the fiction of America, entering
into America as fiction (p. 29). In a later article, he insisted that his reflections on
America are basically a fiction (Baudrillard 1993:243f.). Yet I would argue that his
text provides a model of American society, a theoretical vision of America, and that his
fictive enterprise actually deconstructs dichotomies between fiction and social theory,
as does cyberpunk fiction. But while cyberpunk provides crucial insights into new
trends, processes, experiences, and problems, Baudrillards post1980s work tends to
tell us more about Baudrillard himself than the objects of his writing and he is missing
what is original about contemporary American society and the proliferation of new
technologies and new modes of technological experience, topics that he once followed
and charted with interest and acuity.
34 Gibson thinks the terror of the future will be boredom and conformity induced by the
likes of Jerry Falwell and the radical right (Mondo 2000, Nr 7:59).
35 See Baudrillards earlier emphasis on the importance of cultural politics in The Mirror
of Production (1975) and the section on New York graffiti in Léchange symbolique et
la mart (1993 [1976]):118ff.), a section curiously omitted in the English translation of
Simulations (Baudrillard 1983a). Beginning in the later 1970s, however, he became
increasingly contemptuous of all cultural and media activism.
36 This is claimed by Csicsery-Ronay (1991) and by Fitting (1991).
37 See also the articles in Mississippi Review Nos. 478 and Critique (Spring 1992).
38 McCafferys reader (1991) also illustrates the claim of the increasing repetitiveness of
cyberpunk through its selection of primary texts, many of which are derivative of
Gibsons work, or imitate writers like Burroughs or Pynchon.
39 Lewis Shiner, Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk, New York Times, XX, 1991, op-ed
page.
40 In interviews, Gibson has noted how computer hacking and the computer virus scare
confirmed his fantasies which he insists were projections of his imagination rather than
inductions from technical knowledge.
331
Conclusion
From the future back to the present
The contemporary capitalist societies and cultures that have been the topic of these
studies are in a situation of seemingly permanent crisis with deteriorating social
conditions increasing human suffering. In the United States, more than 34 million
people live below the poverty level; over 3 million are homeless; over 10 million
are out of work; and millions lack basic health insurance and guaranteed medical
care (Hoffman 1987). During the 1980s, the distribution of wealth took billions
from the poorest 20 percent, while the wealthiest grew vastly richer. At this time,
the gap between the richest and poorest families became wider than at any time
since the 1940s: the take-home income of the poorest fifth of the nation fell 5.2
percent, while that of the wealthiest fifth grew 32.5 percent and the middle fifths
grew only 2.7 percent. The inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of the richest 1
percent grew 87 percent and nearly equals the total income of the poorest 40 percent.
In 1990, according to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the
top fifths after-tax income will equal that of the rest of the population combined
(Grossberg 1992:313).
Data released by the Congressional Budget Office in March 1992 showed that
between 1977 and 1989, income expanded for all Americans by a total of $740
billion, and an astonishing $550 billion of this74 percentwent to the top 1
percent of U.S. families. The incomes of this tiny elite of 600,000 families grew
from an average of $315,000 to $560,000 over the twelve-year period (in inflationadjusted
US dollars) (McQuaig 1993:62). Moreover, these statistics show that
people on the low end of the income-scale actually saw their incomes decline.
The proportion of low-income earners in the U.S. labor force continued to
rise and their condition continued to decline, while high-income workers wages
continued to rise, creating a two-tier wage structure and growing class divisions,
according to a 1994 report issued jointly by the Labor and Commerce
Departments of the Clinton Administration (Associated Press, June 3, 1994).
The report noted that the real hourly compensation of American workers
stagnated in the last two decades and actually fell for male workers, a
development unprecedented in the past 75 years in this country (ibid.). In
Britain as well the richest 10 percent is reportedly almost twice as well off as
it was in the late 1960s, while living standards of the poorest sixth are worse
332 Conclusion
than at the beginning of the 1980s, according to two major reports published
in England during 1994 (The Daily Telegraph, June 3, 1994).
Furthermore, in 1988, the nations of the world spent over $110 for each man,
woman, and child on military expensesoverwhelmingly more than on food, water,
shelter, health, education, or protecting the ecosystem (French 1992:37). Moreover:
From 1980 to 1984, world military spending grew from $564 billion to $649
billion (in 1980 prices), a growth rate of over 3.5 percent. Over 5 percent of
the production of the world, 27 times more than was spent on overseas
development, was spent on the military in 1983, most by industrialized
countries. Global military expenditures in 1985 were $900 billion, more
than the income of half the human race. Military expenditures surpassed the
combined GDP of China, India, and all of sub-Shararan Africaa sum
comparable to the combined GNP of all of Africa and Latin America.
(French 1992:37)
Meanwhile, the conditions of everyday life, even in the metropoles of the United
States, are deteriorating dramatically. Numbers of homeless and unemployed
continue to grow; epidemics of cancer, AIDS, and other deadly diseases proliferate
with no cure in sight; crime and violence are on the rise; tobacco, drugs, and alcohol
take millions of casualties yearly; drinking water continues to be contaminated by
toxic chemicals and basic foods are adulterated with chemicals, additives, and
pesticides, many of which contribute to deadly diseases. Accidents and deaths in
the workplace grow, while people are subject to increased surveillance, insecurity,
and cutbacks on social benefits.
As compensation for decaying social conditions, those who can afford it
are offered an always increasing dose of media culture and consumption.
Numbers of channels on cable television continue to multiply, with current
estimates of more than 500 channels on the horizon. There are also predictions
of the imminent arrival of supplementary programs available on demand via
computer. The hours of television watching continue to grow, the amount of
advertising continues to increase, and the colonization of leisure and society
by media culture continues apace.
But those who are most exploited and oppressed by the social order can
afford little more than the free entertainment provided by media culture,
especially television. As an escape from social misery, or distraction from the
cares and woes of everyday existence, people turn to media culture to produce
some meaning and value in their lives. Sports offer identification with glamour,
power, and success, empowering those who identify with winning teams and
stars. Soap operas and situation comedies provide education for coping in the
contemporary social order, while action entertainment demonstrates who has
power and who doesnt, who can and cannot exercise violence, and who does
and does not get awarded with the benefits of the good life in the media and
consumer society. Advertising demonstrates how to solve problems and how
to be happy, successful, and popularthrough proper commodity behavior.
Conclusion 333
Films glamorize the American way of life and provide unreal models of
identification, while images of violence constantly increase.
Many individuals practicing cultural studies celebrate this culture and way of
life and thus contribute to the perpetuation of an unjust and oppressive social order.
I have attempted to develop critical perspectives on contemporary society and culture
in this book and believe that surrender of criticism and oppositional resistance is
nothing more than capitulation to a way of life that produces incredible misery and
suffering for people throughout the world.
People in the future may will look back at this era of political and media culture
with disbelief. Perhaps denizens of an age of interactive technologies will look
back at the passive couch potatoes of this era in wonder. Perhaps those able to
access information from a wealth of sources from computer data-bases will be
astonished that in this era the vast majority of people depended on television for
their prime source of information. Perhaps later generations who have accessible a
vast array of significantly different and better cultural texts at their fingertips will
be amazed that people actually watched the programs of commercial television,
radio, and film during the present era. Perhaps individuals in a future age will be
astonished that people watched so much television, saw so many poor films, listened
to so much mediocre music, and read such trashy magazines and books, hour after
hour, day after day, year after year.
It is conceivable that the society of the future will look back at our age of media
culture as an astonishing age of cultural barbarism, in which commercially driven
culture industries pandered to the lowest common denominator, pouring out films,
TV shows, novels, and other artifacts that depicted violence as the way to solve
problems, that debased women and people of color, and that repeated the same old
tired genre formulas over and over. The endless sequels of popular film and eternal
recurrence of the same in the fields of television, popular music, and other forms
of media culture might strike a future age as highly primitive and barbaric. A
future age might look at an era that idolized Sylvestor Stallone, Madonna, Michael
Jackson, Beavis and Butt-Head, fashion models, and other celebrities as highly
peculiar, very weird indeed. Future generations may look at our advertisingsaturated
culture as the crudest and crassest commercialism, as the one of the most
amazing wastes of time and resources in the history of civilization.
Perhaps future historians will be astonished that during the 1980s and 1990s,
the period of these studies, mediocrities like Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and
Bill Clinton were Presidents of the United States; that reactionary Margaret Thatcher
and nullity John Major ruled England; that Helmut Kohl and his pedestrian
conservative party ruled Germany; that Italy was ruled by Christian and Social
Democrats who were revealed to be highly corrupt, followed by the election of a
media baron who rode to power on the electorates disgust with the existing political
system; that lackluster conservatives Brian Mulrooney and Kim Campbell governed
Canada; that undistinguished Boris Yeltsin ruled Russia after the collapse of the
Soviet Union; and that similar mediocre, greedy, corrupt, and vicious individuals
ruled much of the world.
334 Conclusion
Future ages might look back on the incredible concentration of wealth and
striking class differences, the phenomenal amount of world hunger and poverty,
the deadly diseases, the violence and social disorder, and lack of humane and
egalitarian social institutions and perceive this society as truly astonishing. Our
time might one day be looked upon as a dark age of incredible ignorance and
backwardness where life is much more nasty, brutish, and short than it needs to be.
Perhaps our time will be looked at as an especially backward period when
individuals had not yet adjusted to new technologies, when they were overwhelmed
by new media, and not yet well enough educated to govern themselves and control
the technologies and media. Perhaps future generations will laugh at our pretensions
to enlightenment and modernity. Perhaps a future generation will come to
terms with the new media and technologies and use them to enhance their individual
lives. Perhaps the growing choice of media artifacts will empower individuals to
increase their realm of choice and control over their culture and thus to increase
their autonomy and sovereignty. Perhaps in the future there will be media study
groups, like the book study groups of our era, in which individuals gather together
to critically dissect media artifacts and media education is a standard part of
schooling from grade school on up to the universities and beyond. Perhaps
individuals will learn to use the new technologies to communicate with each other,
to produce their own media artifacts which are circulated and distributed throughout
society, so that previously marginalized voices are able to speak, so that the full
range and diversity of cultures find expression, so that individuals and groups can
speak to others, be creative, and participate in the production of society and culture.
Perhaps future individuals and governments will discern the importance of
culture and subsidize a wide range of cultural artifacts, freeing cultural expression
from the tyranny of the market and the iron yoke of advertising. Perhaps the works
of the monstrous media conglomeratesTime/Warner, SONY/Columbia,
Paramount/Viacom/Blockbuster, Disney/Americawill be shunned and abhorred
by audiences who find their products intrinsically debased, insulting, and boring,
and these conglomerates will wither away, to be replaced by a vibrant spectrum of
media cultural expression and a wide range of visions and voices.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps the future will spend more time watching
more and ever stupider products and the lowest common denominator will sink
ever lower, to an era of cultural barbarism impossible to envisage in the present.
Perhaps the present will appear as a golden age of individualism, freedom, and
democracy to future inhabitants of dystopic societies, much as the postholocaust,
apocalyptic science fiction films represent our late twentieth century present as
utopian compared to the dismal future depicted in the films.
Cultural studies can play some role, however modest, in the struggle for a better
future. Cyberpunk, science fiction, and a future-oriented cultural studies can
articulate imagined and possible futures and help to guide our present and future
choices and action. Reflection on possible media futures calls attention to the
urgency of impending tasks for cultural studies that have been neglected or
suppressed in the tumult and confusion of the present.
Conclusion 335
On the positive side, we are living in exciting times in which new media and
technologies are producing new possibilities for communication, cultural
expression, and ways of living everyday lifeat least for privileged individuals.
We should not forget, however, the misery of the vast majority and should
struggle so that they can attain the same opportunities as those more fortunate.
Moreover, we need to consciously come to terms with our new technologies
and culture and devise ways to use them to enhance our lives and to make them
available to all. This requires reflection on media and technology and the
challenges and problems of living in a new media/technological society. With
these concerns in mind, I would suggest that cultural studies needs to address
several topics that have been pointed to in recent years, but not really
incorporated into its projects and problematics.
CRITICAL MEDIA PEDAGOGY
Cultural studies has often underplayed the importance of developing pedagogies
for promoting critical media literacy. While the Frankfurt School believed that
the culture industries were overwhelmingly manipulative and overwhelmingly
ideological, some versions of cultural studies argue that the media merely provide
resources for audience use and pleasure. Avoidance of its images and messages
seems to be the upshot of the Frankfurt School critique, while some cultural
studies simply celebrate sports, Elvis, fandom, and other media phenomena.
The Frankfurt Schools total rejection of mass culture seems inappropriate, as
media culture is here to stay and, if anything, its products are becoming increasingly
popular and powerful. Yet mindless celebration of media culture, without cultivation
of methods to promote critical media literacy, is equally pernicious. Thus, it is
important to pursue a project of developing a critical media pedagogy and to teach
ourselves and others how to critically decode media messages and to trace their
complex range of effects. It is important to be able to perceive the various ideological
voices and codes in the artifacts of our common culture and to distinguish between
hegemonic ideologies and those images, discourses, and texts that subvert the
dominant ideologies.
It is also important to learn to discriminate between the best and worst of media
culture and to cultivate oppositional subcultures and alternatives to media culture.
You are what you see and hear every bit as much as what you eat, and it is therefore
important to impress upon individuals the need to avoid media culture junk food
and to choose healthier and more nourishing products. This requires learning
discrimination and cultivating tastes for the better products of media culture, as
well as alternative forms of culture ranging from poetry, literature, painting, to
alternative music, film, and television.
McLuhan to the contrary, todays media-saturated younger generations are not
naturally media-critical or truly media-literate. Thus, developing critical media
literacy requires developing explicit strategies of cultural pedagogy and many
dominant schools of contemporary theorysuch as the Frankfurt School,
336 Conclusion
cultural studies, and most postmodern theoryhave failed to develop a critical
media pedagogy.1
Within educational circles, there is a debate over what constitutes the field of
media pedagogy with different agendas and programs. A traditionalist
protectionist approach would attempt to innoculate young people against the
effects of media addiction and manipulation by cultivating a taste for book literacy,
high culture, and the values of truth, beauty, and justice. Neil Postman in his books
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Technopolis (1992) exemplifies this
approach, attacking media culture and championing print media. A media literacy
movement, by contrast, attempts to teach students to read, analyze, and decode
media texts, in a fashion parallel to the cultivation of print literacy. Media arts
education in turn teaches students to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of media
and to use various media technologies as tools of self-expression and creation.
Critical media literacy, finally, builds on these approaches, teaching students to be
critical of media representations and discourses, but also stressing the importance
of learning to use the media as modes of self-expression and social activism.2
I would personally endorse this latter comprehensive approach that would teach
critical skills and how to use media as instruments of social change. The technologies
of communication are becoming more and more accessible to young people and
average citizens and they should be used to promote democratic self-expression
and social change. Thus, technologies that could help produce the end of
participatory democracy, by transforming politics into media spectacles and the
battle of images, could help in invigorating democratic debate and participation.
MEDIA AND CULTURAL ACTIVISM
Cultural studies has been especially negligent of developing strategies and practices
for media intervention and the production of alternative media. There has been
little discussion within cultural studies circles concerning how radio, television,
film, computers, and other media technologies could be transformed and used as
instruments of social enlightenment and progress. Likewise, the Frankfurt School
seemed inherently skeptical of media technologies and viewed them as totally
controlled by capitalist corporations.3 Indeed, when the classical theories of the
culture industries were being formed, this was more or less the case. The failure of
cultural studies today to engage the issue of alternative media is more puzzling
and less excusable since there are today a variety of venues for alternative film and
video production, community radio, computer bulletin boards and discussion
forums, and other forms of communications in which citizens and activists can
readily intervene.4
Thus, cultural studies today should discuss how the media and culture can be
transformed into instruments of social change. This requires more focus on
alternative media than has previously been evident in cultural studies and reflections
on how media technology can be reconfigured and used to empower individuals. It
requires developing activist strategies to intervene in public access television,
Conclusion 337
community radio, computer bulletin-boards, and other domains currently emerging.
To genuinely empower individuals requires giving them knowledge of media
production and allowing them to produce artifacts that are then disseminated to
the public. Increasing media activism could significantly enhance democracy,
making possible the proliferation of voices and allowing those voices that have
been silenced or marginalized to speak.
Critical media pedagogy and activism require new roles and functions for
intellectuals. Media and computer culture is producing new cyberspaces to
explore and map, and new terrains of political struggle and intervention. The
new cyber-intellectuals of the present may not be the organic intellectuals of a
class, but we can become technointellectuals of new technologies, cultural
experiences, and spaces, charting and navigating through the brave new worlds
of media culture and technoculture. These technologies can be used as
instruments of domination or liberation, of manipulation or social
enlightenment, and it is up to the cultural producers and activist intellectuals
of the present and future to determine which way the new technologies will be
used and developed and whose interests they serve.
A democratic media politics will accordingly be concerned that the new
media and computer technologies will be used to serve the interests of the
people and not corporate elites. A democratic media politics will strive to see
that media are used to inform and enlighten individuals rather than to manipulate
them. A democratic media politics will teach individuals how to use the new
technologies, to articulate their own experiences and interests, and to promote
democratic debate and diversity, allowing a full range of voices and ideas to
become part of the cyberdemocracy of the future.
MEDIA AND CULTURAL POLITICS
There has also been a failure in cultural studies to discern the importance of
media and cultural politics. The question of who will control the media of the
future and debates over the publics access to media, media accountability and
responsibility, media funding and regulation, and what kind of cultures are
best for cultivating individual freedom, democracy, and human happiness and
well-being will become increasingly important in the future. The proliferation
of media culture and technologies focuses attention on the importance of media
politics and the need for public intervention in debates over the future of media
culture and communications in the information highways and entertainment
byways of the future.
One of the key issues of the future will concern whether communications and
culture are increasingly commodified or are decommodified. Defenders of
commercial television in the United States are always praising free television, a
dubious product, however, only made possible at the expense of allowing advertising
to clutter the airwaves and giving advertisers and commercial interests significant
power over programming, while making advertised commodities more expensive
338 Conclusion
to consumers. In the future, however, even individual TV programs may be
commodified, owned by corporations which will charge for everything. Likewise,
today computer bulletin boards and routes of communication on the Internet are
free to those who have university, or government, accounts, whereas all computer
communication may be commodified in the future, as is telephone communication.
The struggle here is therefore to decommodify computer communication and
information, to make the Internet and other information highways of the future
open to everyone, free of charge, to expand public access television and community
radio, and to develop alternative cultural institutions and practices that are funded
by the community or state and made available to the people.
In France, the government carried out an experiment, providing free Minitel
computers to all telephone customers. These computers were initially to be used
for getting information, like time, weather, train and airplane schedules, and the
like. But they were soon used for public computer communications, with discussion
groups, bulletin boards, and other uses quickly developing. The point is that
computers will be part of the standard package of every household of the future,
much like television today, and efforts must be made so that everyone who does
not currently own a computer can get one and become part of the new culture and
society that they will make possible, rather than restrincting use of the new
technologies to those privileged groups able to purchase them.
Indeed, the very concept of information superhighways contains a democratic
core that could provide a terrain and discourse of struggle. While the notion that
information superhighways will automatically guarantee a free flow of useful and
abundant information to all is obviously ideological, a flim-flam promotional
discourse to sell the agenda of powerful corporations, the superhighway metaphor
has some significance for democratic struggles. For our national highway space is
that of a public domain, part of a public space open and accessible to all, free of
charge. The danger of the corporate information and entertainment scenarios of
the future is that megacorporations will own and control these resources, charging
fees for entry and use, transforming freeways into tollways.
Thus, while Internet and other computer networks are currently free, there
are plans to take them over and privatize them, charging for use and access.
Against such plans, one should utilize the discourse of the public sphere and
public domain and struggle to keep these highways open and accessible to all,
free of charge and free from corporate control. Likewise, a democratic media
politics will struggle for community television and radio, providing public access
for all citizens so that the entire community can take part in democratic discussion
and debate (See Kellner 1990a).
The free flow of information and communications is essential to a democratic
society and thus democracy requires that powerful instruments of information and
communication be accessible to all. Keeping the information superhighways open
to all, protecting current highways like the Internet, and struggling to open it to
more people is thus a key element of a contemporary democratic media politics.
Without a free flow of information, citizens cannot be adequately informed and
Conclusion 339
without access to forums of public discussion and debate, citizens are excluded
from the dialogue that constitutes the very heart of participatory democracy.
In fact, there are currently powerful struggles going on within and between
government, business, and the public concerning who will control the new
technologies of the so-called information superhighway, who will profit from them,
and what role the public will play in determining the future of our new technologies
and media culture. Individuals need to get involved in these debates and informed
concerning the importance of the issues involved. For instance, there are recent
attempts to censor communication on the Internet, to commodify communication
on it, charging for what is now free, to allow commercial uses of it, and to open it
to corporate domination. Other groups are struggling to preserve free
communication, to guarantee democratic access and participation, and to make
the resources of the new technologies open and accessible to everyone, thus
promoting, rather than restricting, democracy. These struggles will determine the
future of our culture and society and are therefore of prime importance to those
concerned with the future of democracy.
It is possible that failures to address political economy and to adequately develop
a media politics within cultural studies is a main source of the avoidance of public
policy concerns within cultural studies that Tony Bennett has been criticizing (1992,
in Grossberg et al.). Without a sense of how the larger social forces (i.e. the nature
of the broadcasting industry, state policy towards communications, etc.) impinge
on everyday life, it is impossible to grasp the relevance of public policy and media
politics on the nature of the system of communications and culture in a given
society. Yet in a context in which new technologies of communications are creating
dramatic changes in culture, leisure activity, and everyday life, one should perceive
the importance of media politics and the ways that the system and framework of
communications in a given society help determine what sort of programming and
effects are produced.
But without situating discussions of public policy within the context of social
theory and political economy that analyzes existing configurations of power and
domination, discussions of public policy are hopelessly abstract and beside the
point. In the United States, during the reign of Reagan and Bush (198092), there
really werent any openings for progressive public policy interventions, on the
national level. Instead, the political urgency at the time was defending liberal gains
of the past against conservative onslaughts (I would imagine that something like
this was also the case in England during the regimes of Thatcher and Major, and in
other countries ruled by conservative governments).
On the other hand, the era of conservative rule saw many exciting local
interventions, with lively alternative cultures proliferating and intense political
struggles, often cultural in focus, taking part on the local level. This experience
perhaps influenced the postmodern politics which emphasized local, rather than
global, struggles, but it is important to see that both local and national struggles
and issues are important. On the local level, one can often more visibly make a
difference, though even rearguard defensive operations on the national level are
340 Conclusion
important, as are public policy interventions that advocate genuine reform on any
level. The neglect of cultural politics by critical cultural and communications studies
is distressing and is a sign of the depoliticalization of intellectual life in the present
moment.
Thus cultural studies can be of importance for the radical democratic project. A
critical media pedagogy can cultivate citizenship by helping form individuals free
from media manipulation, capable of criticizing media culture and of obtaining
information from diverse sources, allowing an informed citizenry to make intelligent
political judgements. Critical media pedagogy can thus serve as part of a process
of social enlightenment, producing new roles for critical and public intellectuals.
Media culture itself is producing new public spheres and the need for intervention
in new arenas of public debatecommunity radio, public access television,
computer bulletin boards, and so on. Media culture is producing new texts and the
need to cultivate a media literacy able to read and decode images, scenes, narratives
and spectacles of the sort central to media culture.
Yet media culture also presents the challenge to cultivate new spaces for political
discussion and interaction, to produce alternative forms of media and culture, to
use the media to promote social enlightenment and to think how media culture can
be used for democratization. The challenge of media culture thus produces new
vocations for the intellectual: its ubiquity and complexity requires critical
intellectuals to subvert disciplinary boundaries and to draw on a range of disciplines
to understand media culture. It challenges public intellectuals to use media culture
to promote democratization and to produce new spaces and alternatives alongside
media culture. In other words, it is both a mistake to turn ones back on and to
ignore media culture as it is and to totally uncritically embrace it. Media culture
must be thoroughly analyzed, and possibilities should be explored to intervene
within mainstream culture as well as to provide alternative modes of culture and
discourse outside of its conventional forms and genres. Media culture is perhaps
our fate and cultural ambience as we rush toward the future and we must therefore
chart this new terrain and see how we can make it work for the goals of increasing
freedom, happiness, democracy, and other values that we wish to preserve and
enhance.
Thus, cultural studies has some important tasks for the future and can become
part of a process of empowerment and enlightenment. On the other hand, it can
easily degenerate into just another academic niche, with its canonized texts, stars,
and comfortable institutional homes. It is up to us and to the next generation to
determine the future of our media and technological society and it is to be hoped
that they will use cultural studies as a weapon of social critique, enlightenment,
and change, rather than just as another source of cultural capital.
NOTES
1 On critical media pedagogy, see Giroux 1992 and 1994; Scholle and Denski 1994; McLaren
et al., forthcoming.
2 On media and communications politics, see Kellner 1990a and Schiller 1989.
Conclusion 341
3 The exception here was Walter Benjamin (1969).
4 For more on alternative media, see Kellner 1990a and forthcoming.
342
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352
A Few Good Men 101, 103
Above the Law 92
Acker, Kathy 326
Adorno, T.W. 29, 51, 52, 134, 152
Advertising 4, 9, 98, 106, 24755, 3323
AIDS 18, 126, 280, 293, 294, 332
All That is Solid Melts into Air 142
Altermann, Eric 50
Althusser, Louis 23, 45, 52, 57, 103
America 31523, 330
Amityville Horror 131
Anderson, Benedict 162
Anderson, Laurie 2878, 2956
An Unmarried Woman 113
Animal House 131
Anti-Aesthetic, The 142
Antonio, Robert and Douglas Kellner 53,
260, 292, 323, 329
Apocalypse Now 118
Ardrey, Robert 2278
Aronowitz, Stanley 32, 51, 52, 54, 90
Baker, Houston 187, 193, 195
Ballard, J.G. 302, 308
Baraka, Amiri 170, 200
Barth, John 46
Barthes, Roland 23, 59, 112, 193, 228,
238, 2501, 261
Basic Instinct 102, 105, 108, 115, 116
Baudrillard, Jean 4, 7, 17, 23, 47, 49, 53,
68, 193, 233, 234, 236, 257, 261, 297,
329
Bauman, Zygmunt 193
Beavis and Butt-Head 6, 90, 106, 107, 108,
125, 139, 14352, 333
Beck, Julien 136, 153, 245
Beck, Ulrich 49
Bell, Daniel 17
Benjamin, Walter 77, 106, 152, 341
Bennett, Tony 32, 336
Berman, Marshall 44, 142, 232, 260, 264
Berman, Russell 66
Best, Steven 10, 54, 155
Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner 23, 46,
49, 122, 193, 239, 325
Beverly Hills Cop 113
Blade Runner 303, 306, 328
Bloch, Ernest 27, 57, 66, 109, 122
Blundell et al 534
Body Count 190
Boggs, Carl 101, 219
Borderline 2701
Bordo, Susan 293, 294
Bowie, David 17, 247
Boy George 247, 266
Boys in Company C 82, 117, 120
Brecht, Bertolt 15960, 163, 167, 172,
193, 245
British Cultural Studies 89, 25, 27, 313,
42, 51, 52, 90, 94, 95
Britton, Andrew 122
Bronner, Stephen Eric and Douglas Kellner
50
Buñuel, Luis 141
Bürger, Peter 15960
Burroughs, William 290, 302, 328, 330
Bush, George 6, 56, 75, 82, 83, 85, 100,
116, 126, 179, 190, 197, 198228, 303,
304, 326, 333, 339
Byrne, David 288
Camera Politico 5, 10, 56, 89, 122
capitalism 24, 30, 32, 40, 135, 3034, 311
12, 31923, 328, 330
Casualties of War 101, 102, 113
Chandler, Raymond 305, 309
Index
Index 353
Chomsky, Noam 209, 212
Chuck D 177, 178, 180, 195
Clay, Andrew Dice 149
Clayburgh, Jill 113
Clinton, Bill 9, 19, 43, 59, 151, 156, 179,
181, 183, 280, 303, 333
Close Encounters of the Third Kind 134,
135
Clover, Carol 1356, 153
CNN 5, 180, 216, 219, 220, 221, 226
Cold War 15, 73, 85, 126
Cop Killer 179, 190
Count Zero 298, 328
Cruise, Tom 76, 80, 81, 82, 83
Cruising 113
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan 316, 3256, 330
Cultural Studies 44
cyberpunk 4, 78, 269, 297330, 334
Dash, Julie 188
Dazed and Confused 139, 142
de Beauvoir, Simone 22
Death Before Dishonor 85
Death Certificate 1846, 196
Decker, Jeffrey Louis 195, 196
deconstruction 11217, 299
Deer Hunter, The 110, 113, 118
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 89, 234,
236, 319
Delta Force 85, 86
Denzin, Norman 43, 44, 161, 193
Derrida, Jacques 23, 37, 47, 112
Desert Hearts 102
Desperately Seeking Susan 102, 274, 275
diagnostic critique 56, 937, 11621,
12592
Dick, Philip K. 302
Die Hard 378, 39, 106
Die Hard II 38
Difference Engine, The 298, 3278
Dirty Harry, 104, 114
Do The Right Thing 15866, 1689, 169,
172, 173, 191, 193, 194
Dog Day Afternoon 109
Dylan, Bob 266
Dyson, Michael 192, 195
Easy Rider 89, 1046, 107
Epstein, Jon and Margaret 1011
Erotica 280, 284
Escape From Freedom 219
E.T. 1278, 153
Eveland et al 2234
Ewen, Stuart 264, 265
Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth 264, 265
Exorcist, The 104, 126, 134, 153
Express Yourself 2789, 280, 281, 287
FAIR 206, 209, 211
Falling Down 105
Fanon, Frantz 38
Fatal Attraction 102, 108, 115, 116
Featherstone, Mike 478
feminism 22, 23, 26, 28, 50, 55, 62, 98, 99,
109, 113, 2789, 2857, 2902, 295
Ferguson, Thomas and Joel Rogers 50,
152, 266
Fever 286
Fight the Power 160, 195
Fiske, John 32, 33, 34, 367, 37, 38, 50,
52, 89, 90, 96, 106, 108, 114, 196, 238,
2923, 294
Fitting, Peter 330
Foster, Hal 23, 142, 196
Foucault, Michel 8, 23, 24, 47, 89, 1523,
234, 236, 253, 319
Frankenstein 302
Frankfurt school 8, 9, 27, 2831, 35, 40,
49, 50, 51, 90, 94, 95, 111, 233, 260,
335, 336
Freire, Paolo 96
French, Marilyn 332
Freud, Sigmund 107, 154
Frisby, David 232
Fromm, Erich 219
Fuck the Police 189
Full Metal Jacket 102
Funhouse, The 130
Gane, Mike 327, 32930
Gates, Darryl 180, 184
Gates, Henry Louis 195
gender models 1, 7, 38, 60, 712, 80, 101,
1378, 171, 2402, 26492
George, Nelson 182, 195
Gerbner, George 38, 216
Gibson, J.William 92, 117
Gibson, William 7, 2989, 303, 304, 305
16, 319, 3235, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330
Gilroy, Paul 52, 58, 193, 195
Giroux, Henry 55, 96, 122, 340
Gitlin,Todd 156, 238, 261
global popular 5, 73
Go Tell The Spartans 117, 120
354 Index
Godard, Jean-Luc 141
Goldman, Robert 256, 261
Goodman, Paul 141
Gore, Tipper 18990, 1967
Gorz, Andre 50
Gramsci, Antonio, 27, 31, 45, 52, 57, 90,
101, 188
Grandmaster Flash, 176, 182
Grossberg, Lawrence 25, 33, 43, 51, 52,
53, 90, 197, 239, 331
Grossberg, et al 44, 51, 339
Growing Up Absurd 141
Grundrisse 41
Guerrero, Ed 158, 1634, 192, 193
Gulf war 4, 5, 6, 9, 75, 77, 838, 90, 106,
116, 198228, 296
Hall, Stuart 25, 37, 40, 412, 50, 52, 53,
100, 101
Hall, Stuart and Martin Jacques 50
Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel 36
Hammer, Rhonda 11, 194
Hand That Rocks the Cradle 102, 105,
11516
Hard Bodies 38
Harvey, David 49
Heartbreak Ridge 82, 103
Hebdige, Dick 40, 445
Heidegger, Martin 285
Heller, Jean 2045
Herman, Pee Wee 266
Herzog, Herta 29
Hill and Knowlton 20610
Hoagland, Jim 2023
Hoffman, Abbie 331
Hoggart, Richard 36, 52
Home of the Brave 28790, 2956
hooks, bell 170, 171, 192, 194, 195, 2912
Hooper, Tobe 127, 130, 135, 152
Horkheimer, Max and T.W.Adorno 16, 29,
51, 103
Hussein, Saddam 83, 2012, 2034, 206
7, 208, 225, 226
Hutcheon, Linda 47, 261
Huxley, Aldous 315
Ice Cube 6, 176, 178, 180, 181, 1846,
187191, 196
Ice-T 6, 176, 177, 178, 1823, 186, 187,
190, 192
identity politics 53, 1689, 1723, 193
Invasion USA 102
Iron Eagle 74, 75, 81, 834, 86, 87, 103
Iron Eagle II 83, 845
Jackson, Jesse 173, 179
Jackson, Michael 5, 7, 247, 258, 262, 266,
280, 333
Jameson, Fredric 8, 25, 47, 54, 59, 10910,
154, 233, 234, 236, 239, 247, 260, 281,
293, 305, 314, 319, 327
Jarry, Alfred 327
Jaws 109, 110
Jeffords, Susan 38, 50, 65, 68, 91, 101
Jewett, Robert and John Lawrence 69
Johnson, Richard 31, 42
Journal of Communications 30
Jungle Fever 158, 169, 1701, 171, 194
Justify My Love 280, 282, 295
Kaplan, Ann 261, 293, 294
Kellner, Douglas 10, 16, 17, 29, 46, 49, 50,
51, 52, 53, 59, 89, 95, 101, 107, 109,
110, 111, 122, 193, 198, 201, 210, 213,
226, 227, 228, 234, 235, 237, 252, 260,
266, 285, 324, 327, 329, 240, 341
Kellner, Douglas and Michael Ryan 50, 58,
59, 83, 89, 100, 102, 110, 126, 152,
218, 266, 328
King, Martin Luther 1601, 162, 165, 185,
189, 194
King, Rodney 164, 177, 185, 196, 324
King, Stephen 131, 152
Kolb, David 231
Korsch, Karl 57
Kroker, Arthur and David Cook 2334
La Isla Bonita 271
Lauper, Cyndi 266
Lazarsfeld, Paul 51, 156
Learning from Las Vegas 47
Leary, Timothy 298, 323
Lee, Spike 4, 6, 15774, 180, 189, 191,
193, 194
Lee, Spike and Lisa Jones 194
Lee, Spike and Ralph Wiley 195
Levi-Strauss, Claude 2378
Like A Prayer 2756, 2778, 280, 293
Like a Virgin 272, 287
Linklater, Richard 13942
Live to Tell 2745, 286
Lorde, Audre 191
Lowenthal, Leo 29, 52
Lucky Star 26970
Index 355
Lukàcs, Georg 27, 57, 314
Lyotard, Jean-Fraçois 17, 23, 47, 193, 234
Macheray, Pierre 112
Madonna 4, 5, 7, 25, 36, 53, 90, 106, 107,
140, 247, 258, 259, 260, 26396, 333
Madonna: Truth or Dare? 280, 282, 286,
287, 295
Malcolm X 158, 1601, 162, 1656, 194,
195, 308
Malcolm X 158, 1668
Man Who Fell To Earth 17
Marcus, Greil 294
Marcuse, Herbert 22, 38, 180
Marder, Elissa 228
Marlboro 24850, 252, 2536, 259
Marxism 22, 26, 32, 36, 41, 44, 45, 50,
5562, 98, 99, 109, 110, 328, 329
mass culture 347
Material Girl 273, 276, 282, 294
Max Headroom 235, 309
Mayberry, Tracey 196
McCaffery, Larry 325, 327, 328, 330
McGrory, Mary 202, 203
McGuigan, Jim 33, 52, 53
McHale, Brian 299301, 327, 328
McLaren, Peter 122
McLaren et al 90, 340
McQuaig, Linda 331
The Message 182
Miami Vice 4, 7, 9, 106, 235, 23847, 261
Mills, C.Wright 54
Missing in Action 64, 91, 102, 118
modernism 29, 479, 15960, 261, 280
92, 294
modernity 44, 53, 2313, 2646
Mono Lisa Overdrive 298, 328
Monroe, Marilyn 275, 283
Morrow, Frank 262
MTV (Music television) 5, 7, 9, 27, 106,
125, 139, 145, 150, 155, 189, 235, 261,
269, 280, 325
multiperspectival cultural studies 6, 26, 27,
50, 98101, 1989, 2256
multiculturalism 234, 28, 35, 50, 55, 58,
947
Navy Seals 86
Neuromancer 7, 298, 299, 3023, 304,
30514, 315
New Jack City 107
New Left 22
New Right 1819, 60, 133
news 4, 20 television 5, 67, 198228
Nietzsche, Friedrich 98, 289, 290, 327,
329
Niggas Gotta 1834
Night of the living Dead 131
Nixon, Richard 7, 18
Norris, Chuck 64, 68, 69, 91, 101
North, Oliver 69, 74, 83
Not Without My Daughter 92
N.W.A. (Niggers with attitude) 176, 186,
189
Offe, Claus 49
Oliver, Kelly 194
One Plus One 141
Open Your Heart 275, 280, 294
Original Gangster 1823, 192
ORourke, Heather 128, 153, 154
Orwell, George 315, 328
Paglia, Camille 286, 295
paleosymbolism 1078
Papa Dont Preach 2745, 276, 286
Paris is Burning 2823
Patterson, Alex 162, 193, 194
pedagogy 2, 910, 601, 3356
Penn, Sean 274, 275, 280
Pennies From Heaven 111
Perez, Rosie 195
Platoon 69, 82, 93, 102, 103, 111, 113,
11721, 122
Poltergeist 12539
Poltergeist II: The Other Side 1359
Poltergeist III 1534
popular culture 335, 39, 42, 55
postfordism 49
Postman, Neil 336
postmodern 7, 89, 17, 23, 28, 439, 50,
534, 142, 145, 165, 187, 193, 23360,
327 postmodernism 7, 479, 54, 193,
196, 28196 postmodernity 47, 54,
2358, 297
poststructuralism 202, 23, 24, 94, 98,
11217, 262
Presley, Elvis 90, 107, 140, 262, 335
Prince, Stephen 86
Principle of Hope 109
psychoanalysis 22, 98, 99
Public Enemy 6, 160, 176, 177, 1801,
182, 186, 187, 190, 195, 196
Pynchon, Thomas 46, 302, 330
356 Index
Q-Tip 196
Queen Latifah 176, 177, 178, 179
queer theory 26
racism 4, 61, 67, 81, 868, 96, 104, 1067,
160, 1634, 16870, 172, 17492, 194,
1945, 31819
Rambo 4, 5, 28, 39, 5960, 6275, 80, 83,
86, 912, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107,
108, 114, 118, 121, 151
rap music 4, 5, 6, 9, 90, 106, 108, 157,
160, 17492, 195, 1967
Reagan, Ronald 4, 5, 6, 9, 18, 19, 31, 50,
56, 58, 6288, 91, 100, 106, 117, 118,
121, 126, 130, 133, 137, 149, 157, 196,
266, 303, 304, 317, 320, 326, 333, 339
Red Dawn 75, 102, 118
Reed, Adolph 173, 195
Reid, Mark 192, 193
resonant images 1078
The Retaliator 85
Ricoeur, Paul 236
Riggs, Marion 188
Rockwell, John 2956
Rocky 4, 5, 65, 104
Roger and Me 111
Rorty, Richard 50, 193
Rosenberg, Bernard and David White 51
Rosenthal, Michael 54
Ross, Andrew 261
Rucker, Rudy 298
Ryan, Michael 5, 10, 51, 56, 99, 111
Said, Edward 57, 86, 203
Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 232
Sayre, Henry 289
Scatamburlo, Valeric 122
Schiller, Herbert 340
School Daze 158, 167, 169, 170, 193
Schorr, Juliet 49
Schudson, Michael 262
Schwarzenegger, Arnold 38, 101
Schwichtenberg, Cathy 287, 294
Scott-Heron, Gil 1746, 195
Screen 33, 42, 262
Seagal, Steven 92
Seidelman, Susan 274
Sex 280, 284
sexism 4, 61, 96, 104, 179
Shaft 104
Shaheen, Jack 86
Shaw, Martin and Roy Carr-Hill 223
Sheen, Charlie 118
Shelley, Mary 302
Shes Gotta Have It 158, 169, 171, 193
Shiner, Lewis 298, 326, 330
Shirley, John 298
Sholle, David and Stan Denski 340
Shusterman, Richard 177, 187
Simulations 304, 329
Singleton, John 196
Slacker 6, 90, 125, 13943, 151
Snoop Doggie Dogg 178, 190
Solop, F.I. and N.A.Wonders 2234
Sontag, Susan 261, 295
Souljah, Sister 6, 176, 1789, 181, 1834,
187, 196
Soviet Communism 15, 31, 678, 75,
834
Spielberg, Steven 1278, 134, 135, 152
Spivak, Gayatri 58, 99
Stallone, Sylvester 38, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70,
71, 72, 83, 91, 101, 333
Star Wars 84, 118
Steal the Sky 85
Sterling, Bruce 269, 298, 301, 303, 326,
3278
Stern, Howard 149
Sterrit, David 296
Stone, Oliver 69, 93, 118, 120, 122
Straw Dogs 104
Superfly 104
Swanwick, Michael 301
Terminator, The 39
Thelma and Louise 111, 113
Theory, Culture, and Society 51, 193
Thompson, E.P. 36, 40
Thompson, John 89
Three-Penny Opera 194
Time-Warner 284, 334
Toop, David 195
Top Gun 74, 7583, 88, 101, 102, 103,
104, 110, 111, 11415, 118, 121
Toynbee, Arnold 54
Triumph of the Will 76
True Blue 2767, 293
Turkle, Sherry 260
2 Live Crew, 176, 179, 195
Under Siege 92
United States 290, 2956
utopia 10812, 318
Index 357
van den Rohe, Mies 47
Venturi, Robert 47
Vietnam 28, 50, 56, 625, 67, 69, 102,
103, 11721, 122
Vietnam: Year of the Pig 56
Virginia Slims 248, 249, 2503, 259
Vogue 280, 2823
Wallace, Michelle 170, 171
Warhol, Andy 46, 284
Warner, William 68, 689
Warshow, Robert 245
Wayne, John 117, 120, 217, 241
Weber, Max 329
West, Cornell 172, 192, 194
Wexler, Philip 266
White Zombie 1556
Whos That Girl? 275, 276
Williams, Raymond 36, 42, 445, 51, 52,
101, 262
Williamson, Judith 251
Willis, Bruce 38, 101
Wilson, Elizabeth 264
Wood, Robin 113, 122
Woodruff, Judy 2034
Woodstock 1045, 1056, 107
Woodward, Bob 205
Wuthnow, Robert 104
Young Guns II 38
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