I
Broadcast TV, approaching its half century, has just developed its only original art form — the video clip. Its originality lies in three dimensions — the foregrounding of the signifier over the signified, the 'openness' of its textual structure, and its appeal to a non-conventional, possibly oppositional audience.
II
The signifieds drive TV. The low image quality of early TV forced it into "illustrating the news"; that is, into putting visuals to existing forms of entertainment. "Radio with pictures" may be too dismissive a description, but the general inflexion is justified. So the TV screen carried conventional images, because the more conventional the image, the more easily the fuzzy areas resulting from its low definition could be filled in by the viewer. As communication theory has it — the more noise there is on the channel, the greater the need for redundancy in the message. The cumbersome technology also contributed and so even when film was used (to be transmitted via tele-Cine) the same conventions of high redundancy were applied.
Consequently, advances in the visual quality of the signifier occurred in the cinema: TV concentrated on building a mass audience by screening messages of high redundancy that promoted the myths of the dominant ideology. Myths operate within the realm of the signified, they are conceptual structures that can be realized via a variety of signifiers, and this is how TV commonly operated (and still does): it provides a wide variety of signifiers for a limited number of signifieds. The TV message is typically determined by its signifieds.
III
Culture is a sense making process and mainstream culture makes mainstream sense. Arranging and relating the signifieds is central to this process for the signifieds are the cultural categories imposed upon our experience whose resulting order constructs the sense that we make. The signified is simultaneously both the process and the Product of culture.
Rock music defies the signified. Its plasticity (Langer: 1982) foregrounds the signifier, places sensation above sense, the body over the mind, pleasure over ideology (see Fiske: 1983). The video clip offers the same resistance, the refusal to make sense as TV normally makes
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sense. What is the sense of the short trousered schoolboys in the operating theatre in "Blinded me with Science"? Make your own sense, find the possibility in the text that helps define the experience of your subculture. See the text as a do-it-yourself meaning kit. Find in TV not the ready made sense of others, manufactured in their interests and sold to you as a commodity that binds you into the capitalist system: find rather your sense, resisting sense, popular sense, even, if you wish, non-sense.
IV
Does popular mean "appealing-to-many-many-people" or "of-the-people"? Are the two senses necessarily contradictory? Appealing-to-the-many is the mass marketeers' sense, of-the-people is your sense. Do the mass marketeers know or care if their appeal is homogenous or heterogeneous? By this I wonder if a 'popular' programme can have a large audience that finds roughly similar sense in it (with necessary variations round the fringes) or lots and lots of small audiences each finding separate senses according to their own social space. The 'openness' of the video text raises this possibility. TV sense is normally centralised sense: is video sense local sense, sense made in our social space rather than theirs?
V
Has film been here before? Yes and no. Film theory and the avant-garde, elevated the signifier, found in it links with pleasure and desire — but did it for a coterie audience. Avant-garde film took place, takes place, in a fringe institution for fringe people. Video clips occur in a mainstream institution and institutions are vital determinants in the sense that a culture makes. Institutions, ideology and making sense are inseparable. The significance of the open, local senses of the video clip happening within the closed, centralised institution of TV cannot be ignored.
The signifier is properly a fetish, for a fetish is the overvaluation of a threat. The threat of the signifier is its resistance to ideology, its location in the sensations of the body, the physical senses rather than the mental senses) The plurality of meanings in video clips makes us talk of their senses, not of their sense. The pun that links them with the physical senses is no accident of language for the linguistic system is never accidental. The system identifies links and structures that we might, and often do, miss. Video clips' (over)valuation of the signifier allows a resistance to the mainstream whose ideological work is done mainly on the plane of the signified. Video clips are to TV as youth is to the middle aged mortgagee, or as sensation is to (common) sense. Youth offends middle age, sensation offends common sense and fetishising the signifier offends that hegemonic signified.
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Video clips: TV
Signifier: Signified
Physical sensation: Mental sense
Body: Mind
The present: The past and future
Youth: The aged
Pleasure: Ideology
Resistance: Conformity (see Fiske: 1982)
VI
Has capitalism finally provided an anti-capitalist mode? Too much to ask, but look at the contradictions. McLaren's "Buffalo Girls" scratches and destroys the disc — the commodity — while making the sound = the sense. Kiss's "Like it Loud" destroys the suburban home which is the necessary context for its loudness (loudness is a signifier of resistance because it is, simply, a signifier, a sensation).
Countdown - the main home of video clips — is on non-commercial TV, yet the audience — the young adult — is one that mainstream TV misses but that advertisers want.
$100,000 to make a Michael Jackson clip evidences a capital intensive industry: but the openness of the text allows a range of radical meanings. (Maybe not with Jackson, but in the form in general). If ideology inheres in the form rather than the context — then video clips, however capitalistic their production, always, necessarily have radical potential.
Capitalism dislikes contradictions — it irons them out of its typical mode — bourgeois realism. In offending realism, video clips offend capitalism: in boosting record sales they maintain it.
VII
Cunning capitalism — recognising that youth wishes to buy the illusion of freedom. Video clips are that illusion. While appearing to offer a choice of sense, they prescribe those choices-to-be-made within the space always already mapped out for the young. The space labelled (and therefore contained) as the teenage problem. Always with us, but copable with. Resistances that strengthen the dominant system by demonstrating its ability to permit, contain and finally defuse, oppositional forces. Barthes' metaphor of inoculation is productive here — the body politic increases its resistance to radicalism by injecting itself with carefully controlled doses. Have you had your video shot today, dear, you don't want to go down with radicalism, do you?
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VIII
Video games are like video clips. Rapidly changing signifiers demanding a physical response. The faster the response the larger the resistance which is the name of the game. The manufacturer provides a programme, the machine plays it, and as long as the player resists the speed, the tricks of them, he (gender deliberate) survives. The signified is apparently within the dominant ideology — saving the earth from alien invaders, the white man from wild animals, the pac man from monsters, but actually the game is the youth saving himself from the threat of domination posed by the industrialised world. The computer is the means of this threat and the means of resisting it: the videoclip is the product of capitalism and the means of resisting it.
IX
Video games that hook the local consumer. Fool him with the illusion of being in control, of resisting the machine and the world that makes it. But his resistance lasts only as long as his third life. After that he has no resistance to the urge to feed more coins into the slot, the hip pocket of the manufacturer. But is the symbolic resistance any less real for being bought as a commodity? Can a commodity serve the interests of both manufacturer and consumer? Surely, otherwise why do we buy books?
Videoclips are less concerned with illustrating music than with foregrounding fashion. Clothes, make-up, hair — the style of the signifiers are propagated (see Turner, 1983). These signifiers are short-lived, everchanging, and thus oppositional to the fixed world of the established. Their style and its transcience are both subversive. Fashion is free floating signifiers, significant only in their oppositional stance.
XI
Some video clips are merely accelerated Hollywood (e.g. most of Michael Jackson's) where the mainstream has become rapid stream but still flows in the same bed. The gloss and glibness of them are signifiers in a discourse within a familiar institutional frame — Hollywood — so its easy assimilability into the map of discourses that constitute the culture is assured. Oppositional elements the text might contain qua text are robbed and transformed by this institutional assimilation. Other clips (Malcolm McLaren, Madness, Men at Work, Kiss, etc.) mainly Oz and Pom, have elements of anarchy, of non-sense, of the surreal. They contain rough contradictions that shatter the smooth soothing unity of the normal TV discourse. But is
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this enough to defy their institutional frame — ABC TV? Yes, for they leak outside TV, into discos, home videos, and may soon become personal and local like the audio disc.
XII
The reading subject is not then positioned into dominant specularity as by bourgeois realism. Dominant specularity is a position of false consciousness because from it the subject "perceives the facts, the truth", transparently in their own objectivity This false perception disguises the process by which this "factual" truth is constructed by the bourgeois discourse, its construction naturalised into objectivity. For video clips there is no objectivity, no facts that transparently make their own sense. The subject's role and the role of the discourse in sense making are foregrounded. Foregrounding the process of of sense making over the sense that is made necessarily resists dominant ideology in which the invisibility of the process is the essential condition for the naturalisation of the product.
John Fiske teaches at WAIT.
References
Fiske J. (1982) "Surfalism and Sandiotics: The Beach in Oz Popular Culture", Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 1:2 pp. 120-149.
Langer, J. (1982) "Playback", Metro, 59, pp.69-70.
Turner, G.(1983) "Video Clips and Popular Music", Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 1:1, pp.107-1 10.
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