E. Ann Kaplan: "Whose Imaginary? The Televisual Apparatus, The Female Body and Textual Strategies in Select Rock Videos
A.S. Van Dorston
April 1991
By the "social Imaginary," Kaplan refers to the historical moment
within MTV in which a contradictory construction of old and new discourses about
"politics, sex and romance" has been established within a high-tech
"televisual apparatus." A "televisual apparatus" is a combination
of elements including the television itself and its technological ways it presents
images; its various `texts' (ads, commentaries, displays); the relationship
of programming to the sponsors, whose ads might be called the "real"
texts; and the variety of sites, the viewer receives the images (134).
Jean Baudrillard,
a French postmodernist, is a large influence on Kaplan's work. She cites his
model of the "hot" and "cold" universe as an example of
how television has transformed communication and the ways of interpreting the
images. It also serves as a distinction between the era of classic Hollywood
cinema and the era of MTV. While in the "hot" universe, Freudian (Oedipal)
narratives are useful in analyzing cinema, MTV's "cold" universe demands
different analysis, as the space between private space/time and public space/time
disappears. Such elimination of boundaries produces schizophrenic tendencies
in subjects, and they are no longer able to find a psychological sanctuary within
objects. With new technology, a new relationship between subjects and objects
emerge in which we, as subjects, are in "the position of mastery and control,
and can play with various possibilities" (as in televisions, computers,
etc.) (133).
Before anything political
can result from such power and control, MTV divests such freedom from any revolutionary
implications for commercial purposes, reducing them to "the `radical chic'
and the `pornographic'" (134). However, the chaotic nature of the medium
does allow some radical expression. Kaplan gives a few examples of this later
on.
Kaplan is interested
in the "myths, images and representations" in MTV videos as they might
be seen as both reflecting unconscious changes in young people's "real
conditions of existence" and as tapping into the unsatisfied desire remaining
in the psyche from the Lacanian mirror-phase.
MTV uses the "coming-up
next mechanism" to tap into this desire. Unlike classic Hollywood movies,
videos do not have a fixed time limit, or a clearly defined "frame."
Instead, they exist on a never ending horizontal axis, in three to five minute-long
segments, which keep us watching, forever hoping to "fulfill our desire
with the next one that comes along" (136). Such a desire is insatiable
because it exists in some far distant and never-to-be-experienced future. The
idea of trapping millions of people in an endless mode of consumption is a particularly
appealing one to MTV and its sponsors.
Within this framework,
Kaplan examines how this "decentering televisual apparatus" positions
women. She comes up with a confusing multiplicity of messages. Unlike classic
cinema, the male gaze is not monolithic. The texts in MTV vary widely, and are
difficult to know exactly what they mean, "because its signifiers are not
linked along a coherent, logical chain that produces an unambiguous message"
(137). Kaplan refers to Fredric Jameson's contrast between pastiche and parody.
While parody takes a critical yet humorous position, pastiche is a mode that
lacks any clear positioning with regard to what it shows or toward earlier texts
that are used. MTV often randomly samples previous texts in an uncritical manner.
Kaplan takes a moment
to stop the flow of videos and look at some exceptions. Videos like Pat Benetar's
"Love Is A Battlefield," "Sex as a Weapon"; Donna Summer's
"She Works Hard for the Money"; Tina Turners' "Private Dancer";
Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"; and Aretha Franklin/Annie
Lennox's "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" all reconstruct the
female body other than the "prevailing `post-feminist' or various `male
gaze' ones" (139).
Madonna's "Material
Girl" is an example of the more common post-feminist videos that are more
heavily marketed on MTV. It is difficult to see how any of the video parodies
Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" sequence in "Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes." Much of it is thus put in the pastiche category. The images
that Madonna presents are multiple and ambiguous, the ones "sponsors consider
`marketable', since they are those most often cycled and also propagated in
the ad texts interspersed among the video texts" (146). This is consistent
with the idea what MTV is one continuous advertisement, the flow being broken
down merely into different kinds of advertisements.
While there is much
room in MTV for post-feminism, Baudrillard suggests that left/liberal humanism
no longer as a place. Feminism, therefore, needs to change along with the situation.
To address postmodernism will be difficult, as the new era "arguably makes
impossible the critical position itself, making then irrelevant any `feminist'
stance" (153). But while Kaplan is doubtful that the MTV era can be co-opted
by feminists, it can at least be examined more thoroughly, in how the blurring
of distinctions between a `subject' and an `image' and the reduction of the
female body to an `image' can be dealt with.
