From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: Trashiness and Banality (was: Re: Madonna (was: Re: Curriculum c
Date: 30 Sep 92 10:43:23 GMT

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

> I wonder about television defining our reality.  Some people 
> seem to think it does, for instance rights groups who petition
> networks to get more of their category of person into sitcoms
> and cop shows -- in positive roles, that is.  But there were
> a lot of single mothers around before Murphy Brown was thought
> of, at least in the venues wherein I sojourned.  The tele-
> vision, it seems, does not create a class, but it creates 
> class-consciousness for a class.  In enables to members of the
> class to see themselves as part of the class.

The groups: African Americans, gays, women, Hispanics, etc., who
want to see more of their members portrayed in positive roles are
right, of course.  Fictional role models are, if anything, _more_
important than real, live, flesh and blood ones.  When the sitcom
parent goes to the school to talk to the principal about the funny
thing her sitcom kid did in class, and we see her talking to a
black principal, to whom she must defer as to any other authority
figure, and we hear the black principal give her standard and
conventional advice, the whole idea of African Americans as
principals and other authority figures is increasingly
legitimated.  If a civil rights leader called for more Cliff
Huxtables on television, I don't think Johnny Carson and David
Letterman would feel it necessary to explain to him that Cliff
Huxtable was a fictional character, as they laboriously explained
to Dan Quayle that Murphy Brown was a fictional character.

> In other words, it creates not physical or phenomenal
> reality, but political reality.

Precisely.  Although that political reality is a part of the
phenomenal reality we have called the "Lifeworld" since Husserl
coined the term.

> Considering that decisions
> on what to program when are made by a small group of rather
> unusual people: more male, more wealthy, more coastal, more
> educated, more white, than those for whom they are creating
> politics -- see Faludi's _Backlash_ -- we have a peculiar
                                                   ^^^^^^^^
> situation where a potentially revolutionary class is being
  ^^^^^^^^^
> given its consciousness and led by people almost totally
> outside the class, with an entirely different (although not
> necessarily opposed) agenda.  If Delacroix were to paint
> the revolution again, instead of a bare-chested goddess
> leading Parisians over the barricades, he'd have to paint a
> fat balding guy with sunglasses waving a videocam while a
> ragged bunch of women and children straggled behind.

There is nothing peculiar about it at all.  Since the days of the
sophists the "vanguard of the revolution" have been members of a
counter-elite poised to replace an "established" elite which holds
its position due to inherited privilege.  The "vanguard" have
always presented themselves as champions of an even more
disadvantaged class and justified their deconstruction of the
basis of the established elite's privileges as being on behalf of
that more disadvantaged class.  Whether it is a peaceful political
change, as in England, or revolution as in France and Russia,
there were enough elements in the bourgeoisie to constitute a "new
class" which gained its legitimacy through its "leadership" of the
class just beneath it.

--
Richard Carlson
Internet:              rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Bangpath:              {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
CompuServe:            76605,470
Voice:                 (404) 881-6877