The antenna towers of Babel: News, television, Madonna and the politics of postmodern popular culture

Leftist cultural theory usually suggests that cultural production supports the forces of domination via ideological unification, by getting the subject population to adopt the ideas, attitudes, and outlooks of the dominant class. On the contrary, I suggest that mass produced culture does its political work by fragmentation and misdirection. First of all, the ideological content of popular media promotes no single "dominant ideology," offering instead a Balkanized smorgasbord of competing positions. Not that this represents any sort of democratic pluralism--the numerous quarreling idea systems offered up at the pop culture buffet merely tend to support the same set of material social conditions in different ways. More importantly, the political effects of culture are increasingly less a function of ideology and more a function of postmodern spectacle and superficiality. A form of social disorientation is among the products of such seemingly innocuous entertainment programs as MTV and Miami Vice. A form of depoliticization is among the products of such seemingly political forms as the news. We have not yet reached the apocalyptic collapse of meaning and the accompanying impossibility of social action described by Baudrillard, but we have been moving in that direction. This movement is not inexorable. It proceeds by fits and starts, and has been subject to temporary setbacks, but so far any signs appearing to indicate the death of postmodernism are mere illusions. Any attempt to organize an oppositional social movement now faces the following condition: The dynamics of the prevailing cultural system, dominated by the mass media, have lead to the formation of widespread habits of perceiving, interpreting, and interacting with 'reality' which mitigate against citizens developing any sort of purposive understanding of the social order in which they are enmeshed. The upshot of all of this for activists is that political organization is impossible without cultural organization. Any opposition movement that hopes to be effective will need to develop the tools to address its public in terms that can restore some of the depth and meaning that have been stripped from the symbols systems that must be used to negotiate political organization and social change.