A.S. Van Dorston

December 1990

In 1987, E. Ann Kaplan said MTV is a postmodernist phenomenon that's here to stay. As MTV approaches its 1991 decade anniversary, it is still indeed going strong. From Kaplan's perspective, however, this might not be a good thing.

MTV was born in Reagan's America, amidst materialism, racism and sexism, with women as the target of objectification and commodification. In its celebration of "the look, the surfaces, the self-as-commodity," MTV has reduced the female body to an objectified image right from the start (Kaplan, 151). Because videos themselves were nothing but commercials for albums and artists, MTV seemed to be about nothing but consumption.

MTV, however, accomplished more for consumerism in four years than commercials have done in forty years. Instead of advertising products as a way to enhance one's life, MTV made videos themselves a way of life. Videos became an experience to be shared, part of what Pat Aufderheide calls "a wondrous leisure world." Videos gave products "a new location on the consumer's landscape, not as messengers of a potential purchase or experience, but as an experience in themselves, a part of living" (Aufderheide, 117).

Many agree with Kaplan that the process people, or spectators go through in entering an MTV way of life, can be dangerous. It evokes an insatiable desire of plenitude that is coaxed with MTV's coming-up-next mechanism. A literally endless (24 hour a day) flow of short segments keep us in an excited state of expectation, promising that the next segment will fulfill our desires. The infinite flow is separated only by different kinds of advertisements and images. Recent scholarship on MTV is concerned with the social and psychological effects these images have on a consumer/spectator enveloped in an "MTV way of life."

In "Postmodernist Music: The Culture of `Cool' Vs. Commodity," I conceived of the "MTV way of life" as a hopeless condition of spiraling into what Fredric Jameson calls the "schizophrenic state." People will change the way they think and use language in a way that the flow of words and images in texts like MTV "are such that the reader/spectator cannot associate any meaning or recognize boundaries and differences, past and present." The schizophrenic state is to be fixated on a detached signifier like MTV, isolated in a present from which there is no escape. "Videos on MTV create a grab-bag out of western cultural history to dip into at will, obliterating historical specificity. Kids will grow up with the `televisual apparatus' with a consciousness that no longer thinks in terms of a historical frame" (Van Dorston, 4).

MTV kids will instead only have desire as their frame of reference - desire for a kind of plenitude that will never be reached. In their unfulfilled, schizophrenic state, they will be vulnerable to MTV's dominant codes and messages that tap into their need with their complicit ideologies. In addition, the conceived differences between reality and representations would collapse in a way that would render concepts like parody obsolete. The postmodernist practice of the random borrowing or simulation of motifs from other artists and texts is a form of pastiche that could signify a lack of orienting boundaries. MTV videos could be seen as parodies without a sense of humor (Van Dorston, 5).

When the past becomes pastiche, no critical distance is possible. As a result, music video's occasional attempts at satire prove feeble.

(Aufderheide, 129)

Videos like Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" and David Bowie's "Let's Dance," try to raise social issues only to lose any message in the disjunctive images of pastiche and fantasy.

Humor plays a much smaller role in art when an artist cannot take a critical position from which to speak. If the youth culture of the future is in danger because it does not take a critical stance toward on-going events, then the loss of mechanisms for critical evaluation of social structures and ideologies is indeed something to worry about (Kaplan, 152). This could mean the end of oppositional discourses. Attempts at opposition will always be lost to the glamour of "media events," and to mere surfaces/textures/images rather than real threats to the status quo. Kaplan believes that in anything that seems like dissent on MTV, there turns out to be nothing behind the representations/images (Kaplan, 54). Any chance of artists representing ideas on videos other than MTV's commercial objectives, appeared to be doomed.

Instead of giving MTV another chance, I looked at postmodernist avant-garde and marginalized artists to regain the critical position and sense of humor in music. I characterized it as music that "has the capacity to articulate alternative or plural identities of groups belonging to the margins of national or dominant cultures, and celebrates the principles of parody, pastiche, stylistic multiplicity and generic mobility" (Van Dorston, 8). It is music with a counterhegemonic agenda against practices associated with the increased power of advertising and the electronic media, the advent of universal standardization, neocolonialism, institutional xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia. Such artists include Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Negativland, a plethora of rap/hip-hop groups, "World music," artists, and artists from a multiplicity of marginalized subcultures. Many of these artists masterfully combine poetry, sounds, performance and technology into a brilliant montage of artistic expression.

Yet the avant-garde of subcultures will always be subordinant -  maggots trying to scale the garbage heap of mainstream commercial culture. Jean Baudrillard said a minority will never be able to take over the form of the mass media and change the content to any good purpose, since what is oppressive about the media is precisely the "code" which in their very form they embody. Mass media like MTV talks to its audience while never allowing the audience to respond, and confirms it audience's muteness by simulating audience response, via phone-ins, studio audiences, viewer's polls and other forms of bogus "interaction." "The mass media fabricates non-communication, making it impossible for any significant populist takeover" (Van Dorston, 9). And whenever a marginalized artist scores a "coup," the postmodern music industry quickly stretches its boundaries to include the eruption of cultural difference, actually reinforcing its own stability. Counterhegemonic commentary becomes a quasi-commodity, a "part of a ritualized exchange in an institutional and commercial economy of ideas and intellectual styles," according to Stephen Connor. The ethical awareness of marginal groups in mass culture, "in their recognition of an important diversity of voices and interests [are] in danger of being smashed into a flat, commodified pancake" (Van Dorston, 22).

If marginalized subcultures can only continue to express themselves sufficiently outside of the mainstream, what is the mainstream to do? What are people like Hard Harry in the movie Pump Up the Volume to do after they've been arrested by the FCC for their underground pirate radio stations? According to leading theoreticians like Lawrence Grossberg, Stephen Connor and Kaplan, they must adapt and survive. I myself said, "the answer to the question of what exactly will happen to oppositional discourses, subcultures, and even `cool' forms of postmodernist music and culture in a stage of capitalism that is advancing to the point where nearly all communication will be allowed to happen only to benefit corporate and institutional profit and nothing else, is anyone's guess" (Van Dorston, 23).

As downbeat as it sounds to advocates of populist forms of cultural expression like myself, the study of mainstream culture will have to always entail the study of culture that above all is financially successful. On MTV, if a video isn't profitable, it disappears from rotation instantly. Yet the causes of the popularity of a video is not one-dimensional. Shifting political climates reflect changing consumer tastes, influencing the material shown on MTV. The relationship between MTV and consumers is dialectical. It is a discursive exchange between viewers who demand to see certain things, and MTV whose interests are to reflect the viewers' interests while at the same time trying to influence and manipulate the viewers' interests in subscribing to materialist lifestyles and ideologies. MTV taps into the collective memory of American consumer values embedded, encoded, and enshrined by the history of advertising.

When this relationship is analyzed with elements of literary criticism, film studies, post-structuralism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalytic theory, it appears to be much more complex than the process of MTV transforming the viewer's experience into a decentered, schizophrenic, and ultimately empty experience, as suggested by Kaplan's structuralist analysis. Because MTV is such a postmodern art form, its seemingly meaningless fragments are rich with connotations, and viewers are free to play a far more active role than that described by Kaplan. Viewers can decode meanings in the fragmented text "according to their own set of values and perceptions, as opposed to accepting passively the `messages' intended by the industry's writers, directors, and producers" (Harvey, 40).

For example, one analysis argues that "those who allow themselves to be seduced by advertising are getting something out of the exchange as well," no matter how superficial the gains may seem to be (Harvey, 59). Even though the "real thing" is held just out of reach, music video provides us "with a momentary rupture in the seamless flow of everyday life . . . to the overall maintenance of the social order, as do all good ritual devices." Such ritual devices include the masked ball in Jacobean drama, the quest searches in Christian mythology, or the predictable pranks that characterize modern, secular celebrations of Halloween. Videos give viewers/consumers "a safe place to scream when the frustration of always falling short of institutionalized illusion becomes too much to handle" (Harvey, 60).

MTV is a controlled environment with well defined parameters of time and place in which extreme deviance and indulgence can occur. MTV can serve as a form of safety valve for society in which viewers wallow in cultural taboos until they become sick of it. The reimposition of taboo in the "real world" becomes not only bearable, but a welcome relief (Harvey, 45). Instead of warping viewers, sex and violence in videos could actually be therapeutic, or at least self-reflective. The dreamlike qualities of MTV allow for the indulgence of otherwise unapproachable impulses and desires as an escape valve for cultural tensions. With its "frantic, fragmented messages," MTV can tell us much about our "most deeply buried fears and our most profoundly felt desires. It is so easy to lie to ourselves when we use full sentences" (Harvey, 61).

But studies of these fragmented desires seem to spell out a society slanted toward escapism and sexism. Sexism in videos has been shown to effectively transmit negative attitudes about women, and cannot be justified as merely harmless indulgence. There is a need for competition with the misogynistic, male-addressed discourse that has dominated MTV. A recent rise in feminist videos are presenting a possibility for balancing out the male/female perspectives. Much to the surprise of many MTV scholars, feminist art has come out of the margins and proved the postmodernist format of MTV to be susceptible to feminist appropriation.

The objectification and subordination of women is currently being challenged by creative performers and directors who are masterfully using postmodernist techniques to manipulate, deconstruct, and reconstruct prevailing constructions of female sexuality. At least within the boundaries of female sexuality, feminist videos fit into a sort of mainstream counterhegemony that I have previously ignored. With more women and blacks watching more music videos than any other group of teenagers, these formerly marginalized viewpoints can have a powerful influence on the entertainment industry (Roberts, 5).

While I have not kept up with the most current videos from the increasing number of African-American women doing rap and dance music, I am familiar with the older precedent-setting videos by Pat Benetar, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Eurythmics, and Janet Jackson. These artists show an ability not only to use pastiche to its fullest potential in drawing attention to the exploitative traditions of videos, but contrary to Kaplan's theories, actually dismantle the male gaze through humor. By ridiculing the male gaze and male behavior, women liberate themselves from the male constructions of female as object.

In "Material Girl," Madonna copies the exploitative portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend," and then subverts it by surrounding herself with powerless, personality-less male dancers. In "Typical Male" and "What's Love Got to Do With It," Tina Turner saunters around, pushing men around, toppling a giant male shoe symbolic of male authority, and playfully swings an oversized red baseball bat, wagging the phallus in the face of a phallo-centric society.  

Not even sexist advertising is spared in Pat Benetar's "Sex As A Weapon." Benetar criticizes the negative images of women used from the 1950s to the present in advertising with a pastiche of images and Benetar dressed in a variety of historical frames. Muscle-bound men are portrayed as ridiculous and ineffectual, and Benetar even destroys a James Bond figure by taking away his gun and blowing away his machismo image. Like Turner, Benetar also ridicules the use of phallus', with lipsticks, guns and hot dogs. Her direct references to advertising even includes the music industry, criticizing MTV itself. She even criticizes one of her own album covers for its sexism. Referring to one's own experience to validate a critique of exploitation of women's bodies is becoming more popular among feminists. By employing "the postmodernist techniques of fragmentation, self-reflexiveness, pastiche, and the combination of popular culture and the avant-garde," Benetar puts the use of women's bodies to sell products into a feminist context (Roberts, 9). "Sex As A Weapon" was one of the most political videos to survive on MTV, and hints toward many more to come.

Much more common, however, are videos of women asserting their sexuality any way they please, such as most of Madonna's videos, Janet Jackson's "Nasty" and "What Have You Done for Me Lately," and the previously mentioned Tina Turner videos. These videos do not directly criticize the music industry as overtly "Sex As A Weapon" does. In fact, they often validate the industry in showing that involvement in the process of capitalism and production need not equal passivity (Roberts, 12). In "Nasty," Jackson pays to get into a theater, but goes on to take over the screen.

In "Postmodernist Music," I wrote that on their It Will Take A Nation of Millions to Bring Us Down album, Public Enemy said "This time, the revolution will be televised" (Van Dorston, 6). But I was highly skeptical of the importance of this statement. Perhaps any revolution that takes place will only exist on the television screen. But then again, if Jackson and her peers indeed unite their "One Nation Under A Groove" and take over the screen, who knows what will happen? The future holds the possibility that many substantial changes could result from the complex relationship between MTV, the popular culture industry and the consumer/viewers. While chances are that the changes will not be "radical" and "good" enough for my tastes, we can only get a sense of what these changes could be through studying the complex relationship through a variety of disciplines.

. . . we need to redefine what our texts and subjects should be; we must analyze the complex interplay of subject and object, pleasure and danger, power and powerlessness that constitutes gender relations in popular culture.

(Roberts, 15)

Only through combinations of critical theory's deconstructionism of audience consumption as it occurs within the production process, symbolic anthropology's use of ritual mechanisms, psychoanalytical theory's examination of individual internalizations and culturally-generated myths, and critical techniques of film studies and literary criticism, can one fully get a sense of MTV's character and function as a postmodernist phenomenon in contemporary and future mass-mediated society.