| Cultural studies scholarship on contemporary media production tends to fall into two general categories: an optimistic and often utopian "user-based" model and a pessimistic/dystopian "industry-based" model. The Tao of South Park is intended as an intervention into this binary, and aggressively challenges assumptions about how scholars study media texts, industries, and culture. The introduction sets up this binary through a discussion of the American political landscape in a "new media" environment, and develops it by contrasting Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006) and Mark Andrejevic's Reality TV (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). It suggests that instead of studying moments of consensus and cooperation as utopian signifiers of a new media age on the one hand, or media shifts as indicators of an oppressive neo-fascist industry on the other, cultural studies scholars interested in progressive politics would be better served to look for moments of disconnect, overdetermination, and productive conflict among users, media texts, and media industries. Rather than discuss media as experience or media as hegemony, therefore, it is possible to reframe the argument in terms of active negotiations of "common sense," in which the boundary between political activism and political affect blurs.;Using the television show South Park as a case study, The Tao of South Park separates this negotiation of the political in popular media into three tactical modes: the allusive (Part 1), the responsive (Part 2), and the disruptive (Part 3). The allusive draws from existing cultural texts, both in media and in broader social norms (e.g. gender roles in Ch. 1), to form a dissonant assemblage that juxtaposes contradictory or antithetical messages and associations to clear a pathway for alternative modes of social discourse. For instance, by placing an attack on censorship and surveillance within a masterfully performed musical that draws on World War II propaganda, celebrity culture, gender performance, Disney films, and dozens of other allusions, the South Park movie (1999) critiques not only institutionally or culturally sanctioned censorship efforts (i.e. the V-Chip or the MPAA), but also the fallacious bases of such efforts in "childhood innocence" and the "degeneration" of U.S. culture. Part 1 concludes by suggesting that ultimately, although allusive tactics are useful, they alone are insufficient to challenge hegemony, as they may break down the basis for "common sense" but are unable to make suggestions of their own or reframe discourse entirely.;Part 2, which charts the responsive tactic, combines allusive modes of discursive negotiation with specific political interventions. It tracks two examples of the responsive in South Park: the first is the use of the character Mr. Garrison to extensively critique shifting gender and (homo)sexual policies in the United States, and the second examines South Park's varied engagements with religion and entrenched censorship throughout its eleven year history.;Despite their emancipatory potential, however, Part 3 points out that both the allusive and the responsive can only react to and shift the rhetorical strategies for existing discourse. When issues are not openly discussed or do not exist within popular frameworks, a disruptive tactic becomes necessary. By voicing perspectives on issues as varied as race relations, identity and the politics of the post-9/11 United States, South Park co-opts multiple political frameworks in order to demonstrate simultaneously the importance of the issues and their liminality within accepted civic culture. Masking itself within multiple and conflicting political ideologies, South Park's forays into racial and post-9/11 politics present a critical pedagogy that disrupts the ways in which the status quo represents itself.;A self-consciously oppositional institution that appropriates (and protects itself with) a lucrative brand identity and history of comedic or animated commentary, South Park is an example of how popular culture can interact not only with and react against dominant ideology, but also how such cultural productions are sanctioned and desired by a media system that requires audience loyalty. In South Park silences and traumas become apparent as silences and as traumas, internalizing their own repression and displacing it into poignant social commentary. This does not prove agency or effect, and indeed can be self-destructive, but it does demonstrate that because culture is made of shifting and evolving texts it is both possible to demonstrate the potential for and locations of emancipatory politics. The Tao of South Park seeks to chart such shifts and evolution, bridging gaps between community, media and the political. |
