Videoclips are undoubtedly a new phenomenon, and real novelty in cultural forms is always exciting. I find John Fiske's strong claims on their behalf intriguing and provocative, not least because of the venerable lineage of the issue he raises in relation to this fledgling genre. What does constitute a revolution in a cultural form? When are such changes a hopeful sign, as an index of a fundamental change in society at large, as a cause or catalyst of such a change? Do videoclips signal some kind of revolution?
I must confess to being less optimistic than John Fiske is, when I look at the conditions in which this phenomenon is taking place. Reagan's USA isn't, on the surface, a ferment of revolutionary activity, and the development of videoclips in Australia seems not to have noticed any stark difference between Fraser's Australia and Hawke's. More important, I don't see signs of political activity, the mobilization of any group in society against the status quo, which anyone attributes to watching videoclips. I don't expect too much of a cultural form as a political force, but it seems to me that popular music in the mid-sixties did have political reverberations, exaggerated at the time perhaps, for polemical reasons on both sides, but real enough to constitute a threat that had to be taken seriously. Videoclips, at this stage in their history, don't seem to be causing those anxieties. Of course, this revolution may be catching the enemy off guard, taking them by surprise. Or it may just represent the kind of situation they are happy with: the development of a new commodity, which will provide enhanced employment for one group of producers (film-makers) at the expense of another (the "musos", the proletariat of the music industry), with the main profit going where it always does.
I want to address the basic questions raised by videoclips with reference to Marxist theory as well as semiotics. Marxism asks us to start with the material conditions of production, to foreground the role of labour in creating value and resist ideological forms which slide and mystify the agents and processes of production on behalf of the expropriators of that labour.
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Exactly what, and how much, are the makers and promoters of videoclips doing to create the value of that product? Graeme Turner has claimed: “It is no longer possible to see the videoclip simply as the parasite on the body of rock 'n' roll; in the hit parade singles market at least, the relationship between parasite and host has been reversed" (1983: 110). Leaving aside the felicity of the metaphor (after all it's his peroration, where one is expected to go over the top), I would take issue with this claim. Debra Jopson (1983: 30) reports spectacular increases in the price paid for videoclips, but this still normally counts as part of the promotional budget, along with advertising and packaging of the product. It is as part of this stage in the economic process that the videoclip industry must be understood. In fact, album covers and posters have long shown many of the qualities that now appear in videoclips, and stills from videoclips are a common feature of album covers, posters and ads, and this close relationship is no accident.
I propose the term "semiotic surplus value" to describe a crucial process to do with advertising and packaging, including videoclips, in this category. Marx saw the value of a commodity as produced by the labour that created it. Under capitalism, however, the capitalist pays the worker as little as possible for the use of that labour power. The expropriated value he terms the surplus value of the commodity, which is kept as profit by the capitalist. We can extend this basic concept if we look at value from the point of view of the consumer. The price paid by consumers represents their estimate of the value of the commodity, not its actual value (which they usually don't know). The buyer of a new car believes that it will enhance his potency, the buyer of a perfume or deodorant believes it will guarantee her sexual appeal. In both cases, the commodity they suppose they are buying includes potency or sexual appeal, as well as a material car or a bottle of scented alcohol. They are buying meanings as well as goods. Similarly, the buyer of a record is also buying the images and meanings carried by the videoclip. I call these contributions to the value of the commodity their semiotic surplus value. Part of the work done to create semiotic surplus value is done by the artists who design packages, advertisements or videoclips; but some of it is done by the consumers themselves, since meaning does not exist without the elaboration of consumers. So both producers and consumers of such images and meanings are expropriated of their work insofar as they aren't paid for it. And ultimately, since nothing in the world of commodity transactions is free, it is the purchasers of the records who pay whatever price is involved. This price is not simply monetary: it includes a kind of semiotic deprivation, a rip-off of their sense of reality itself: "those poor saps on the receiving end, the viewers, can never be certain they are getting the real thing until they see it live" (Jopson, 1983: 30).
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III
As Graeme Turner points out, the current videoclip typically neglects the performance itself for a narrative content, reinforcing the dominance of visual over musical:
the dominance of visual style over musical style in the clip reflects the inversion in the balance of power between the clip and the music. Where the music itself may have once offered hints of subversion or opposition, now the subversive content usually occurs within the visuals alone (Turner 1983: 108).
This dominance of visual over musical style is not in doubt. I also find the phrase "balance of power" useful, since it points to the conflict of interests that undoubtedly exists in the videoclip. But the comment that the music once had "hints" of subversion, which it no longer has, while the visuals alone carry that kind of hint, is at the heart of the debate about the radical potential of videoclips. I think I agree with Graeme Turner that popular music has less radical content now than it has had at some earlier stages, though groups like U2 or Redgum make it necessary to be cautious in that claim. I certainly agree with both Graeme Turner and John Fiske that there is often a powerful hint of subversive or oppositional content in the visuals. But in order to gauge costs and gains of this shift we need to be able to say just how music and visuals do carry "subversive" or "oppositional" content.
On song, important pioneering work has been done by Lomax and his associates, who have shown a number of correlations between features of song style and social forms (1978). These correlations show the presence of a set of natural or motivated signifiers of social form, ideological markers that seem to be nearly universal (see Hodge, 1984). Some of the most significant markers concern voice quality, and the social organization of musicians and audience. Barthes (1976) saw "the grain of the voice" as carrying important meanings, and the same is true of the "grain of the instruments". From Lomax's work it seems likely that the basis of this signifying system is an iconic equation between voice control and social control, so that, for instance, a strangulated or tense vocal quality signifies a repressive social order, and a relaxed vocal quality the reverse (see also Fonagy, 1971). The social organization of the musicians, and their relation to the audience, is similarly an iconic sign-system, representing a microcosm of a complete social order, with minute differences able to signify a variety of different ideological messages.
The set of messages constituted by a song style is a more powerful ideological force than the content of any individual song, because it is continuous throughout every performance, the precondition for every song. Every song style carries ideological content, an ideology which can be situated in relation to the dominant ideology in a number of ways. It can reproduce some of the features of the domi-
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nant society so as to confirm it, e.g. celebrating a harmony between human and machine, offering as natural a structure of dominance between star and backing, singers and audience. It can also reproduce some aspects of the dominant social order in a way that exposes its defects: e.g. offering a version of society that is fragmented, angry, and is isolated and lost. Or it can offer an alternative version of society, again either to confirm or to criticise contemporary society. So the folksy you-all-come country band offers a reassuring escape from contemporary society, while rock 'n' roll, soul, reggae, punk and other styles have signified genuine alternative social models, with roots in the lived experience of oppositional groups.
Records have always been a transformation of the totality of performance. "Live" singles and albums are in a minority: most records delete the performance aspect, turning the song into a commodity that can be owned and played in innumerable homes, thereby carrying an entirely different ideology from that of the rock concert. Videoclips have been another site of transformations, one that at an earlier stage transmitted more of the performance. Now, in spite of the efforts of groups like Kiss, performance is adjudged to be visually "boring". In any case, the format of performances is probably less op-positional now in Australia, with super-stars filling the same large venues in each capital city on identikit Australian tours, interspersed with other tours arranged in heirarchical order by entrepreneurs whose control over the music scene is unchallenged.
A diagram can help to show what is potentially lost through the transformations typical of the contemporary videoclip:
Performance Videoclip
(words (transported
(Song ( (
( (music (diminished
Ideology ( (
( (musicians (
(Performance ( (
(audience (deleted
The ideology carried by the performance is almost totally removed. If the producers of the music appear it is not as musicians but as products of their own fantasies (or the fantasies triggered off in the minds of videoclip makers, in response to the meanings of the song). The music, as a message-system, has to compete with the visual images, which typically have a narrative form that parallels the words of the song. So the contemporary videoclip establishes the primacy to decompose that verbal base. The virtuosity of their style often signifies an indifference to song, music and musicians. Although the film of a performance is always a transformation of its significance, (a shot of a hand strumming a guitar or lips miming a
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song does not give a transparent and total image of the production process) the absence of such footage is a further stage in the mystification of production processes and the role of agents of production. Producers of videoclips are themselves totally, irrecoverably transformed into their frenetic, brief commodity.
IV
John Fiske sees the "nonsense" of videoclips as a positive quality, offering the audience the freedom of making their own individual, perhaps oppositional sense. I agree: but I see the roots of this quality of videoclips in the nature of song itself (Hodge, 1976). Song is an oral form, its words organized by the syntactic forms typical of oral rationality, which moves in a different way from literate rationality: less linear, more tolerant of contradictions, working by juxtaposition rather than subordination, circular, repetitive, dense, fragmentary. And songs consist of words-plus-music, two semiotic systems potentially competing with each other, each challenging the principle of rationality of the other, the clash signifying the relativity of the dominant mode of rationality in contemporary society, the written word. The words of song are well-suited to coexist with meanings carried by another semiotic system, one organized by the laws of music rather than everyday rationality and the language of videoclips can fill this role. Song has been waiting for millenia for the coming of the videoclip. An earlier form of clip used wild camera movements, extreme angles, colour-changes, etc., in an analogue of the musical semiotic system. Songs vary in the degree to which they insist on their access to an alternative order or rationality, an alternative syntax. So do videoclips. But the form's affinity with irrationality remains as a permanent threat, not continuously exploited but never to be neutralized till the form itself is dead.
In considering the political effectivity of any cultural form, a decisive factor to take account of is modality, i.e. the nature of the relation to conditions of real life. Song is normally distinguished from speech in all cultures, constituting a marked form of discourse, with a different modality, a different truth-status. That unreal modality allows things to be said in song which are forbidden in everyday discourse, but the price of that freedom is that song-truths remain confined to song. An artistic form gains political effectivity, becomes genuinely subversive, only when routes are opened up between art and life, when the boundaries around the privileged discourse are broken down.
The current type of videoclip uses fantasy extensively. Jopson reports on one team of videoclip makers, "The Rich Kids":
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A sample of The Rich Kids at work: when they got hold of a band called Real Life for their clip Send me an Angel, they cut their hair, gelled it, put them in costumes and make-up and got them a backdrop of a forest. The idea was, they were Robin Hood types — what English [one of The Rich Kids] called la wintery, cuddly, cute, image' (Jopson, 1983:30).
There is some irony in doing this to a group calling themselves "Real Life". The videoclip makers here have created a stage persona as well as a background for the song, both of which establish barriers between the group and its style and everyday life, thereby neutralizing whatever message it had. The presence of a radical image — Robin Hood, the Ned Kelly of early England — underlying all these modality-buffers, is no longer threatening or subversive but "cute". The controversial hair-style of the early Beatles, though so trim and well-groomed by today's standards, was rightly felt to be threatening because they wore it off stage as well as on, as though they and all their fans had every right to.
Videoclips are a low-modality form and hence are unlikely to have any political effectivity. Billy Joel in a boiler suit, in the clip of "Uptown Girl", is not signifying the resurgence of working class vitality; Michael Jackson's descent into a black ghetto in the clip of "Beat It" is a magical fantasy. The reality that they do signify is the megabucks that have visibly been spent on their making. John Fiske celebrates the free play of signifiers in the new videoclip. I wish he was right, and that I couldn't see, in so many clips, the same recurring signified: big cash, and the power of the powerful in a world where more than ever they can call the shots. But it's also true that in the field of contemporary culture, popular music has carried more than its share of radical content, and this tradition is carried on by the videoclip. I don't happen to think that popular music has been made obsolete by videoclips, and the setting up of the videoclip phenomenon against popular music seems to me misguided. For musos as for makers of videoclips the real enemy is not each other but the vast capitalist structure that exploits them both.
Robert Hodge teaches at Murdoch University.
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References
Barthes, R. (1976) Image-Music-Text, ed. S. Heath, London: Fontana.
Fonagy, I. (1971) "The Functions of Vocal Style", in S. Chapman, ed., Literary Style, London: O.U.P.
Hodge, R. ',1976) "Linguistics and Popular Culture" in C. Bigsby, ed.. Approaches to Popular Culture. London: Edward Arnold.
(1984) "Song as Discourse" in T. van Dijk, ed., Literature and Discourse, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Jopson, D. (1983) "Video Clips", TheSatwnal Times.
Lomax, A. (1978) Folk Song Style and Culture, New Brunswick: Transaction.
Turner, G. (1983) "Video Clips and Popular Music", Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 1:1, pp.107-110.
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