'You [Still] Have to Fight for Your Right to Party': Music ...

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'You [Still] Have to Fight for Your Right to Party': Music Television as Billboards of Post-Modern Difference Lawrence Grossberg Popular Music, Vol. 7, No. 3, Music Video and Film. (Oct., 1988), pp. 315-332. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0261-1430%28198810%297%3A3%3C315%3A%27%5BHTFF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Popular Music is currently published by Cambridge University Press.

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http://www.jstor.org Thu Jan 24 01:04:02 2008

Popular Music (1988) Volume 713

'You [still] have to fight for your right to party': music television as billboards of post-modern difference a.

LAWRENCE GROSSBERG'

Rock music has not only provided the soundtrack of our lives, but a large part of the image repertoire as well. Neither the conjunction of popular music and other media (including television and film) nor the inseparable relation between rock and roll and visual iconographies, styles and attitudes is new. Nevertheless, it is clear that the force of these conjunctures in our cultural lives is rapidly spreading, viral-like, across media, genres, contexts, interests and generations. This is neither surprising nor necessarily bad; as rock and roll generations have grown u p and asserted their plurality and influence, it is their music which is taken for granted, offered as capitalist entertainment and sometimes exploited for marketing purposes. This reconfiguration, often described as rock 'moving into the mainstream of contemporary culture' has been enabled and even engendered by technological, social and economic conditions. But it is the speed with which this is being accomplished, the particular ways it is inserted into broader contexts, and the effects it is having that interest me. The topography of popular culture is obviously changing; how rock and roll has come to define the dominant forms of cultural enjoyment and even legitimacy, offers us an opportunity to map out some of the cultural changes of contemporary life, and their relations to ideological and political struggles. After all, the sensual and social economies of various media are often contradictory. The qualities and conventions of images - both visual and sonorial - in film, television, radio and recorded music vary immensely. The social contexts and relationships which have organised the ways different media and genres are produced and consumed are themselves significantly different; their economic structures, while often parallel, remained, until recently, relatively autonomous. In particular, rock and television have traditionally functioned - in terms of the relations they establish between the performer, the individual fan, and the society in fundamentally opposed ways. Music television2 in the eighties thus points to specific changes in the cultural economies of 'both rock culture and television entertainment. These changing articulations of the cultural terrain cannot be measured by any straightforward analysis of texts or audiences. The terms of such communicative models have to be located within the multi-layered terrain of everyday life. Moreover, we have to understand the complexity of what is at stake here: not only questions of economics and ideology, but of the organisation and communication of 'moods' or affective state^.^ To put it crudely, people need not

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only interpretations of their realities, identities with which to live, and pleasures which constantly ameliorate the threat of pain and numbness, they need to 'feel good' about their own positions, practices and possibilities. This has always been, I believe, a crucial dimension of rock and roll's power and popularity. Here, then, I want to map out, or at least point to, some of the vectors along which the cultural terrain is being reconstructed, and to question the political significance of the emergent cultural formation. I will use the changing relations between rock and television, not as a collection of isolatable texts and audiences related, through specific sociologically defined uses and interpretations, to autonomous political struggles (e.g., economic, gender, etc.). Cultural practices are more than something to be read (whether by fans or critics); they engender a wide range of effects which construct the very possibilities for mobility and placement in everyday life. They serve as 'billboards' or roadmarkers4 identifying the intersections of historical forces and popular struggles, intersections at which practices and subjects can be located in a variety of different ways, intersections from which one can move on in different directions and into different dimensions. My own 'travels' with music television have suggested four interconnected sites of re-articulation: youth and the ideology of national identity; stars and the commodification of everyday life; marginality and the politics of culture; and post-modernity and the logic of discourse. My observations are offered as grounded speculations about, rather than definitive interpretations of, the place of music television in contemporary cultural politics.

Youth and America Music television is the therapeutic scene of a generation's schizophrenia and a nation's identity crisis. Post-war cultural history is built upon two contradictory interpretations of the baby boom generation's identity: it is both the TV generation (from teenyboppers to yuppies) and the rock generation (from countercultures to subcultures). This makes it easy to argue that music television represents the former's victory over the latter. There is some truth in this: if rock culture constantly sought to define an autonomous position for its fans as youth, television culture constantly drew them back into the domestic economy. If rock used 'youth' to mark the power of the differences it constantly constructed, television constantly undermined that sense of difference and autonomy. I am not claiming that rock belongs to the young (as if there were some necessary and privileged position of youth) but rather that those to whom rock 'belongs' construct a difference that is often marked by changing meanings of 'youth'. Hence, a part of the history of rock involves a continuous struggle, not only between but within generations, for the privileged position of rock fan as the embodiment of an historically specific conception of youth. Youth in rock has rarely been defined chronologically but rather by what one's relation to rock says about one's difference from another audience, another population. There is, in fact, across the surfaces of contemporary pop culture, a struggle over the meanings and politics of 'youth' and over who has the power, if not the right, to appropriate its ideological and emotional empowerment. One can see it in the proliferation of contradictory cultural images, representations and social practices articulated to youth; it is visible in the chaotic multiplicity of implied audiences of music television (which at the very least are

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defined by adolescent fantasies, college leisure time, the fears of thirty year olds and the cultural memories of forty year olds). These struggles, as widespread as they are, are, indeed, often centred on rock and music television and in the discourses that surround them. Whether in the populist moral rhetoric of the fundamentalist right (as in Tipper Gore's [I9871Raising PG Kids in an XRated World)or the elitist intellectual rhetoric of the neo-conservatives (as in Allan Bloom's [I9871 The Closing of the American Mind), or the heterogeneous attacks on the sixties (its political and cultural energy either reduced to or separated from pleasure, sexuality and drugs), the re-articulation of youth is a central struggle. It is not only a question of circumscribing moral possibilities but of relocating the political implications of the popularity of pop culture in general, and of rock culture in particular. After all, youth is, if nothing else, a powerfully charged element in a wide range of ideological and teleological (if not utopian) codes. But this still ignores the specific historical conditions which determined the connections between sociological groups, ideological meanings, and political positions. The United States is a country which, for many reasons, has always constructed its own identity in the future tense; it was the land of possibility, the 'beacon on the hill', the new world, the young nation. It is a nation predicated upon differences, but always constructing an imaginary unity. After the Second World War, it faced a contradiction. On the one hand, the young nation had grown up, taking its 'rightful' place as the leader of the 'free world'. On the other hand, what had defined its victory depended upon its continued sense of difference from the 'grown-up' European nations. It was America's openness to possibility, its commitment to itself as the future, its ability to re-forge its differences into a new and self-consciously temporary unity, that had conquered the fascist threat to freedom. The post-war period can be described by the embodiments of this contradiction: it was a time of enormous conservative pressure (we had won the war protecting the American way, it was time to enjoy it and not 'rock' the boat) and a time of increasingly rapid change, not only in the structures of the social formation but across the entire surface of everyday life. It was a time as schizophrenic as the baby boom generation onto which it projected its contradictions. Resolving this lived dilemma demanded that the American dream still be located in and defined by a future, but now, an immediate one, a future embodied in a concrete generation of youth who would finally realise the American dream and hence become its living symbol. The American identity slid from a contentless image of the future to a specific image of the present. America, which has always had to search for some sense of its national identity, found one by identifying its meaning with a generation whose identity was articulated by the meanings and promises of youth. Youth, as it came to define a generation, also came to define America itself. Bloom's attack on an openness which is always 'progressive and forward-looking', an openness powerfully associated with contemporary youth and youth culture, is a struggle over 'what it means to be an American'. Indeed, if youth has no meaning except a commitment to openness and change, if it can only be defined in a forever receding future, what does it mean to have placed youth at the centre of the American identity? An empty centre for a centreless society. For Bloom, the struggle involves breaking the powerful link between youth and the meaning of America. For Gore, the contest is around the concept of youth itself. The former explicitly substitutes an image of the adult at the centre of the American identity; the latter redraws the difference between youth and adult. But both are concerned with the meanings and

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investments that we make in youth, and both reserve their most passionate attacks for pop culture, rock and music television. On the other side, Coors' beer explicitly attempts to link itself to the problem of American identity ('Coors - an American original') by constructing that identity from the contradictory images of post-war youth cultures. Thus the contemporary forms and popularity of music television are billboards which locate us within a broader ideological struggle (by no means the only one).

The commodification of culture A second vector locates music television in changing structures of economic production. In many ways, music television merely continues forms of packaging and promotion that have defined post-war popular culture. It also shares many features of the post-war recording industry. But it also exhibits certain features which, while not unique to it, point to a significant re-organisation of the entertainment industry, and to less obvious shifts in its commodification of the cultural terrain (Frith 1988). While these changes are still incomplete and certainly extend back into earlier moments, they are becoming increasingly powerful and their forms increasingly well-defined. We might begin by noting that the primary product of entertainment is gradually changing: the production of a hit is less important than the production of a star as a marketable commodity. While stars have long been produced and promoted, their mobility across media and genres used to be circumscribed by the identity which defined their popularity. These limits have not only disappeared, but it is their absence which now defines the star. The new star does not need a history. The old model of a star building an ever expanding audience while 'paying their dues' is being replaced by the immediate insertion of a figure into a position of stardom already waiting for them (although there are no guarantees the audience will take up the position). It is less a matter of talent than promotion and visibility, not because the latter have not always been operating but because talent is now less a prerequisite than a 'resource pool' available for random corporate andlor popular raiding (Frith 1988). The star needs no origin or identity outside of their various appearances as a star. Their stardom does not rest on a particular activity or identity which will forever provide the basis of their reputation. In fact, their ability to occupy this new dispersed position of stardom may depend only on an ironic reference to their artistic skills, and it is perfectly reasonable (and common) for an audience to discover such talents only after identifying the star somewhere else. Not only is it increasingly difficult to distinguish between advertisements, videoclips, and episodic sequences from films or television programmes, it is increasingly difficult to define where a pop star's popularity is located (e.g., Bruce Willis as a singer, the star of Moonlighting and a spokesperson for Seagram's wine cooler; Phil Collins has probably won as many fans through his commercials as through his actual records). The star has to remain distinct from any particular activity, or from any specific ideological identity or attitude, in order to be free to occupy the space of star. To the extent that a star has a particular image, its meaning must always be radically ambiguous while its affect is always specified. The star need no longer imply a way of acting or looking - one need not emulate them - for it is a matter of communicating a mood rather than an image. It is the star as a billboard, announcing a particular mood, that is the major product promoted by music

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television. The star is a mobile sign which can be linked to any practice, product or language, freed from any message or set of values. The star is no longer an individual measured by their creativity, their authentic relation to their performance, or even the possibilities of an audience projecting its fantasies onto them. The star is a commodified and mobile sign, moving across the broad terrain of cultural tastes and entertainment, inflecting any cultural practice or context down the roads defined by specific affective states, giving them emotional coloration. (What happens, for example, when Jacques Derrida appears as the object of pop affection, whether in a song entitled 'I'm in Love with Jacques Derrida' or through his inclusion on an album with William Burroughs, Tuxedomoon and Cabaret Voltaire).

The structure and politics of the cultural field A third vector cutting across the surfaces of music television involves the changing relations between the periphery and the mainstream in contemporary pop culture. Most commentators on music television begin by assuming that rock's power depends upon a marginality measured by notions of authenticity, resistance and transgression. Insofar as television's position as mainstream or central is taken to mean that it embodies the dominant normative structure, the movement of rock and roll into a conspicuously central position in television (and the entertainment industries) must signal the incorporation of rock's marginality, the abandonment of its resistance, the undermining of its transgression. Culture is assumed to be built upon the inherent difference and constant battle between the centre and the margin; the local or peripheral is equated with the marginal, and all struggles are identified as moments of resistance. Rock is dispersed into different subcultures, each defined less by their necessary stylistic individuality than by their assumed marginality and resistance. This understanding of rock (held by fans as well as critics), substitutes a romanticised politics of resistance for more traditional liberal valorisations of progress. The diverse forms of music television, as well as the contemporary distribution and consumption of rock, suggests that while there may be a periphery, there is no longer anything mariginal, anything which can or even must actively resist being pulled into the centre. But at the same time, the mainstream is not a site of hegemonic and homogeneous identity, but the changing space of a proliferation of difference. There is no stable centre here, or rather the centre is always defined only by distances and densities. Even if rock is increasingly the mainstream of popular culture, it is not only the mainstream of rock that has entered into the centre. (Consider the variety of music'television programmes and formats, or the diverse playlist of almost any episode of Miami Vice.) If rock radio formats are always defined as much by what they would not play as by what they would, it is hard today to find a song that MTV cannot play. Movies like The Big Easy can propel a peripheral music like zydeco into the charts, not to be co-opted but to be temporarily present, only to move back, apparently unchanged, into the periphery. If we attempt to make sense of the politics of rock, and of the diversity of its audiences, in terms of specific 'taste' groups or subcultures, we are already implicated in a distinction which belongs to the fan; it is part of the very economy we need to situate historically and politically. The notion of subcultures correctly points to the fact that rock fandom has always been intimately connected with images - of style, stars and attitudes - and with a range of cultural practices. The rock fan's taste

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is constructed by, and given meaning within, a larger 'apparatus', a loose alliance between musics, looks, practices, structures of experience and social relations. This partly accounts for the heterogeneity, not only of interpretations and evaluations of particular texts, but of the definition of the 'genre' itself. There is, in fact, a struggle over what is to be included as 'rock and roll', over its boundaries and meanings. That question is never merely musical; it draws upon differences of social iconography and historical experience. It constructs an elitism at the heart of rock and roll': the claim that one understands or recognises 'real' rock and roll better than both outsiders and other groups within the rock and roll audience. This elitism is at least a part of rock's functioning; it helps construct the forms of rock's 'popularity' and allows us to speak of 'fans'. But what is the bond which holds the disparate elements together and which stitches the fan into particular apparatuses? What is the nature of the investment which empowers specific rock apparatuses, and within which specific meanings and practices of rock are valorised? My claim is that these 'alliances' are affective. That is, the effectiveness of rock and roll is gained, in the first instance, through something other than its meaningfulness (or, if one prefers, that rock's signifying work is used to get somewhere else). It is affect - passion, mood (fun, which is not the same as pleasure) - that defines the temporary stability of particular rock 'n' roll alliances and consequently, that defines the relations between fans and the music. While music may function with, and often demands, even less attention than the most mundane conversations, its presence or absence is powerfully effective on our mood. That powerful and passionate relation is often taken as the first necessary sign of a true rock and roll fan, although we should not confuse the affective power of a specific apparatus with the degree of its fans' commitment. The difficulty of imagining a TV fan is a consequence, in part, of the fact that until recently, TV's affective communication was often taken as a 'null mood' (captured in such notions as 'couch potatos' and 'vegging out'), as, if anything, an escape from the affective extremes associated with both real life and rock culture. These affective alliances may operate in a number of dimensions but they are, most powerfully, the mode by which rock and roll's elitism, and its fans' 'difference' are produced. They encapsulate particular groups of fans; as soon as a boundary is constructed to mark off the limits of a specific affective alliance, it marks the fan's position as different. Other forms of popular music may also encapsulate their audiences, but rock and roll's power does not depend so much on its ability to locate us within an ideologically determined identity as on its ability to inflect a n y ideological position into its own affective states. It is the encapsulation itself and its effectiveness, rather than the specific content of any encapsulation, that is important. Contrast this with country music's use of narrative to construct an ideological representation of a particular set of social relations. Rock and roll involves the ability to occupy a certain affective social space; it constructs a mobile bubble which separates 'us' from its own construction of a homogeneous identity of 'them' (on the model of the margin and the centre). Although the mobility of the encapsulation may vary, what is important is that it works in the everyday life of fans, whether they are conscious of it or not. Music television increasingly points to changes in our ability andlor need to construct boundaries marking off the parameters of an affective alliance. Such alliances, while still existing, are less singular, less 'well-formed', less exclusive and less stable than before. Increasingly, mobility across alliances is celebrated by fans

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who, nomadically wandering through them, are not rendered homeless. On the contrary, the contemporary fan - neither mainstream nor marginal - is at home everywhere. While it was once possible to be widely known and still 'marginal' (and it perhaps still is in England), knowledge seems increasingly to carry musical practices and performers into the centre since there are no longer any affective markers powerful enough to define the boundaries. If marginality once depended upon a pop bohemianism (e.g., being 'hip' as a form of difference that is parasitical upon the mainstream), the contemporary cultural terrain has made everyone hip, even the nerds. Difference is now immediately granted because, in fact, it is no more than a temporary configuration. One can see this operating in the changing patterns of production (e.g., combining genres of rock which have been incompatible previously like 'heavy metal punk' or in the diversity of styles and music which are increasingly mixed in the performances of local bands) and distribution (MTV's 'hip song' of the week which can range from Cutting Crew to Whitesnake, to Fishbone, to Husker Du). If the cultural terrain is a space of mobile alliances, the centre is defined only by the velocity with which elements move through the social space, the density with which elements are gathered together. Thus, the major record companies do not so much define the centre as attempt to maintain their economic control as the centre constantly disintegrates and is re-articulated. (Consider the success of groups like the Grateful Dead or the Beastie Boys.) The problem with theories of marginality is that they assume some simple correspondence between the structures of the different domains of social and everyday existence. But the 'centre' is always constituted and empowered differently in the maps of political, economic, ideological, libidinal and affective relations. Thus, the fact that rock and roll has 'become' mainstream (in what sense was it ever not - unless critics simply rejected and ignored the largest part of its fans?) does not guarantee that it is delivered over to dominant ideological positions. Neither does production and distribution outside of the dominant economic institutions guarantee political resistance. This unevenness or lack of necessary correspondences suggests a different reading of the subcultural appropriations of affective alliances: subcultures are merely those affective alliances which have sought to re-articulate themselves to ideology; to live the specific passions and attitudes of their own affective difference (manifested in part in the production of what Hebdige calls a 'forbidden identity'). It is for just this reason that they seem both desirable and no longer viable in the eighties, when no image is forbidden and the only way to construct an identity is within and between the admittedly temporary alliances we find ourselves in. But there is more at stake in the reconfiguration of the relations between the mainstream and the margins (which is not the same as the deconstruction of any marginality). It involves a significant change in the ways in which rock's (and pop culture's) politics are shaped. Rock's affective power was, after all, always placed into ideological struggles: whether through its construction of fans' identities, or through its articulation of the relations between the public and the private, or through its narratives of emotion and romance, or through its politicisation of the body and pleasure, or through its constant undermining and redrawing of the line between the worthwhile and the worthless. Thus, while the politics of any affective alliance were never inscribed upon its surface, they were nevertheless always a part of its functioning. Today, that relationship, as well as the need to articulate affective alliances ideologically, has all but disappeared. While there is much one can know

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about specific alliances (e.g., whether square dancing groups, or neopsychedelic fans), their ideological implications have become increasingly distant from, if not irrelevant to, their surfaces.

Post-modernity and communication But we can only begin to understand the political significance of this restructuring of the cultural terrain if we look at the question of music television's affective politics. If rock's ideological power was defined by the ways it articulated affective states to social practices and ideological positions, the question of its marginality and resistance is secondary. If rock always plays in the space between feeling desperate and feeling good, we must remember that feeling good about something can become a form of legitimation, and feeling desperate a form of constraint. I want to argue that the viability of ideological politics has been disrupted because, in fact, the affective politics of pop culture are being transformed. This is the fourth and final vector I wish to discuss: music television points to a new discursive economy, a new set of affective statements being made by emergent forms of pop culture. To put it simply, 'the politics of feeling good' is increasingly being replaced by a 'politics of feeling', and the context of despair is increasingly being given shape by a discourse of ironic nihilism. Music television is a complex collection of statements and strategies; it is only if we begin to recognise the specific forms that have emerged at the centre of contemporary culture that we can begin to understand not only the exigencies of its popularity but also, the effectiveness and power of both individual texts and of the formation as a whole. This is not merely a question of the formal characteristics of media texts or cultural practices. Many of the formal categories used to describe this formation are still too abstract and decontextualised to offer a useful access to social effects.5 If the articulation of rock and television has always taken place on top of the contradictions that exist between the cultural apparatuses that have been constructed around them, then the incredible speed and intensity with which the connection has become both intimate and central suggests that significant changes are occurring within each. Such changes are not directly inscribed across the totality of either television or rock production and consumption but rather, point to the construction of specific cultural formations within a larger transmedia communicative structure. That these formations have a determinative history does not negate the need to seek those emergent tendencies which have both given them shape and enabled them to become increasingly central. The affective structures I want to describe are engendered by an increasingly central mobile alliance (which, although full of tensions and contradictions and hence fragile, is also strong, because it is constantly re-articulated before it collapses under the pressures of those contradictions) which is itself both reinforced and contradicted by other cultural formations and tendencies. It is only within this open and contradictory terrain that we can locate the increasingly rapid movement of music television - and particular affective economies - from different points in the social formation - toward an imaginary centre. And it is only on this terrain that we can recognise the ways in which music television continues rock's production of an affective economy, even as it reshapes the possibilities of affective alliances, and their articulations to social and ideological struggles. This structure of moods marks new forms of historical contradiction and empowerment, of mobility and stability, as it itself moves rapidly through the social

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and cultural spaces of society. Its billboards seem to spread, appropriating an ever-widening range of cultural practices, re-articulating the highways and places of everyday life. I argued earlier that music television is in part the screen on which a generation's schizophrenia is being represented and therapeutically lived. That schizophrenia can be described as the increasingly precarious relation between affect on the one hand, and ideology and desire on the other. For those generations who have grown up after the war, there is a growing gap between two aspects of our experience, between the available meanings, values and objects of desire which socially organise our existence, and what we can invest ourselves in, what we find it possible to care about. In other words, it has become increasingly difficult - if not impossible - to make sense of our affective experiences and to put our faith in our ideological constructions even though they may still be operating as 'common sense'. We do not trust our own common sense even as we are compelled to live it. It is increasingly difficult to locate places where it is possible to care about something enough, to have enough faith that it matters, so that one can actually make a commitment and invest oneself in it. Whatever the reality of such perceptions, the future has become increasingly uncertain (and its images bear a striking resemblance to contemporary Beirut!). It is becoming more and more difficult to make sense of our affective experiences ('life is hard and then you die') or to put any faith in the taken for granted interpretations and values of our lives and actions (e.g. love, family, sex, work). Even the promise of 'sex, drugs and rock and roll' has given way to 'romance, rejection and rock and roll'. We are condemned to constantly try to make sense of our lives in structures that clearly contradict our experiences. What is called for, strategically, must be a contentless and infectious communication, a communication of 'affective differences. Rock and roll empowers its fans by placing them into a particular 'affective alliance' which marks their difference, not in terms of their beliefs and values as much as their ability to struggle against the dominant moods of contemporary life, without being able to rely on its languages. Obviously, there is nothing about this strategy which necessarily implies any sort of political resistance, personal authenticity or cultural marginality. On the contrary, rock and roll is always located within the mainstrain of everyday life; knowing that anything you believe in or desire is likely to end up being another trap, rock and roll offers strategies to continue believing in something, if only the need to believe and the sense of difference (elitism) that being a fan defines. What happens when rock's work - its elitism, its production/marking of affective alliances, etc. - is transferred into televisual modes of communication. Television's impulse as an apparatus is democratic: its tendency is to create a communicative economy in which everything - individuals, roles, genres, positions - is equally viable and potentially valuable as a televisual image. It thus renders difference not insignificant but ineffective: an in-difference of difference. There is nothing in the medium which allows for significant distinctions to be made between images: everything is equally small and rapidly used up. Everything is available on the screen; there is no secret knowledge (from Groucho Marx to Pee Wee Herman, the 'secret word' of television is told to you throughout the programme). Similarly, until very recently, it made no difference in social terms what TV one watches; the crucial issue is whether one watches (or admits to watching) it. I do not mean to deny that the images presented on television are always ideologically selected and inflected, and that they are, through a variety of technological and economic

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structures, differentially available to different audiences. I mean rather to suggest that television's democratic mode of self-presentation is always in tension with its apparent interest in - and commitment to - representing reality. Television's oft-noted ability to 'immediately' present the real depends in fact on its electronic simulation, production and mediation of the real. Thus, contrary to the claim of some post-modernists that television reduces reality to the image, it challenges and re-locates the particular importance and effectiveness of this imagelreal difference. Thus, there is no guarantee that the televisual democracy is always delivered to the dominant positions of power; advanced capitalism clearly struggles to articulate this democratic communicative economy to its advantage; it is not the only possibility, nor has it entirely succeeded. Music television then is not the post-modern emblem par excellence but a sophisticated re-articulation of the democratic imaginary operating within the television apparatuses themselves to the affective elitism of the rock apparatuses. Music television works in part by reconfiguring the tendential communicative strategies of each apparatus, or rather, by marking out the vectors of the emergent cultural formation. Television has become increasingly elitist (in the form of an ironic connoisseurist cultism) and increasingly affective (in the form of sentimentality). It has inscribed new billboards which re-direct its viewers into some of the basic structures of rock culture. On the other hand, rock has appropriated the forms of television's democracy with the result that one's position within the culture is determined less by the requirement of particular stylistic commitments as the source of difference and more by the fact of the commitment itself. Music television is a billboard for the increasingly common and foregrounded production of a particular structure of emotional experience: sentimentality. But we must not treat this as a simple, unproblematic or ahistorical category. Its moment of emergence at the centre of a new cultural formation might be emblematically located in such texts as Love Story and Brian's Song (the prototypes of made-for-TV movies). It is emotion for the sake of emotion. Not only has such communication renounced its claim to represent reality, it has renounced its place in a representational economy. Its meaningfulness becomes only the means of producing something else. Its value is no longer that of the imaginable real - whether fantasy or utopia. It does not provide rules for learning because the question of the credibility (or incredibility) of what is on the screen becomes irrelevant; narratives, when they are present, go nowhere. For whatever reasons, these are no longer situations we can even imagine ourselves into, despite the fact that all situations are personalised and presented as if they were ideologically related to our own lives (i.e., the characters are often 'just like us' yet fantastically different. Thus there is a significant difference between Father Knows Best in the fifties and The Bill Cosby Show in the eighties: put simply, we know that our spouses and children will not, cannot and perhaps should not be that wonderful!). It no longer matters what one suffers from (e.g., what a friend described as the disease movie of the week) so long as one suffers. MacDonald's advertisements now celebrate the losers rather than the winners (e.g., in the Olympics) because, after all, their affective experiences are at least as powerful, if not more so, than the victors'. The stories and meanings become merely the occasion for a constant movement between emotional highs and lows; they need not be located in the possibilities of our own lives, nor even in the believability of someone else's. Sentimentality as the apparent excess of emotion is the over-indulgence of affect and its liberation from any significant anchoring in reality or intelligibility. While we may

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not be sure if TV is crazier than reality, or if it is more real, it is unquestionably more intense and, apparently, more desirable precisely because of that intensity. It is the site of emotions more real because more extreme, more excessive and the fact that the excess is constructed precisely through the unbelievability and unintelligibility of the message makes it all the more powerful. In the world of television, we get to live out affective relations which exceed our lives and always will (perhaps because we will have already experienced them on TV). The structure of sentimentality not only places affect above meaning, but places intensity above specificity as if it were only necessary to feel something more intensely than is available to us. While it is necessary to feel something - anything - that strongly, it is irrelevant what one feels because no particular feeling matters in itself. What matters is affective excess; Faulkner's poetic choice of grief over nothing has become television's unquenchable need, not only to never feel nothing, but to constantly raise the stakes by which feeling something - anything - is measured. If rock 'n' roll valorises affect because of the difference it makes, television's appropriation of the primacy of affect has created a democracy of affect which can only be traversed by an ever-spiralling search for the excessive affect necessarily divorced from the contingencies of daily life. But the billboards of music television powerfully redirect this structure of sentimentality into a particular affective logic, an ironic elitism, manifested in the relationship to specific programmes as well as to the medium itself. While there have always been programmes with small groups of devoted viewers, and even instances (Startrek, The Avengers) where such devotion was predicated upon a privileged understanding and knowledge, it is rare that one's cultural place (which is not quite the same as one's identity or sense of self) depended on such relations. At least until such programmes entered reruns! Today, such relationships are instantly available, whether to Mighty Mouse or Crime Story or MTV. This relationship is not defined by specific programmes but, at the very least, by a shifting set of programmes which are united by being positioned within a specific structure of elitism built upon a particular form of irony. This elitism, however, is not the same as rock's; there is no privileged knowledge. Any secret is instantly available and constantly repeated for any viewer. The only secret is the irony that there are no secrets because there is nothing behind the screen, nothing written upon its surfaces. While this doesn't guarantee that everyone will 'get it', this elitism does not depend upon encapsulating an audience and defining it as privileged, or even different. This logic does not depend upon its limited availability but rather upon its knowing self-consciousness. Its 'hipness' is democratic and, in a sense, unimportant. The entire apparatus itself serves as nothing more than a billboard for this affective logic. This elitism increasingly takes the form of a temporary celebration of 'cults', by which I mean that it is less a celebration of the specific object and more a celebration of one's ability to celebrate it; it implies an attitude - ironic, hip - which allows one to celebrate a difference that has no status apart from its being celebrated. Secret knowledge is dissolved into the distinctions within public taste. The irony that results is, however, always overcoded by the excess of affectivity. Difference is relocated so that only the affective matters; it refuses to make judgements or even to involve itself in the world. This is perhaps too strong; let me say rather that if it does not hermeticise the world, it does anaesthetise it. It starts by assuming a distance from the other which allows it to refuse any claim or demand which the other might make. This 'hip' attitude is a kind of ironic nihilism in which ironic distance is offered as the only reasonable relation to a reality which is no longer reasonable. Television,

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however unreasonable (and it certainly is strange these days) is as reasonable as reality. In fact, reality is already stranger than any fantasy we could construct. And consequently, the strange is always disturbingly familiar. This estrangement from the familiar and familiarisation of the estranged means that the lines separating the comic and the terrifying, the mundane and the exotic, the boring and the exciting, the ordinary and the extraordinary, disappear. If reality is already cliched, the cliches can be taken as reality. If we are in fact totally alienated, then alienation is the taken-for-granted ground upon which we build our lives. All images, all realities, are affectively equal - equally serious, equally deserving and undeserving of being allowed to matter, of being made into billboards within everyday life. If the equality of all images assures a perpetual search for difference, the elitism of this communicative economy ensures not merely the impossibility but the absurdity of such difference. That nothing matters itself does not matter! But this 'nihilism' is always inflected by sentimentality, into an ironic elitism in which the only possibility for difference is in the fact that something - it does not matter what - matters. Or, more accurately, the only difference that the specific content makes is that, because it matters, it makes a difference. As a result, there is, increasingly, a kind of cynically self-conscious elitism about the very meaning of being a rock and roll fan. All images become equal, all styles temporary and deconstructed, even as they are celebrated. Even if everything is an image, the fact that all images are equal does not necessarily negate the necessity and importance of images. But it does deconstruct the inherent possibility of any single image. Thus, in a paradoxical sense, music television has freed the music from the image. For example, one likes Madonna - whose music always sounds the same but whose images are constantly changing - if one believes that she does not take her images too seriously. (And it is interesting to note that this superstar has been a dismal failure on the film screen where, I would argue, a different logic still operates.) To appropriate, enjoy or invest in a particular style, image or set of images no longer necessarily implies any faith that such investments make a significant (even affective) difference. Instead, we celebrate the affective ambiguity of images, images which are 'well developed in their shallowness, fascinating in their emptiness'. After all, reality can be so constraining on our lifestyle choices. Let me describe the specific form of this irony then as 'authentic inauthenticity', which is not the same as inauthentic authenticity, and which is often confused with cynicism and nihilism. Within this logic, one celebrates a difference knowing that its status depends on nothing but its being celebrated. If every identity is equally fake, a pose that one takes on, then authentic inauthenticity celebrates the possibilities of poses without denying that that is all they are. It is a logic which allows one to seek satisfactions knowing that one can never be satisfied, and that any particular pleasure is likely, in the end, to be disappointing. For even if all images are equally artificial, and all satisfactions equally unsatisfying, one still needs some images, one still seeks some satisfactions. Although no particular pose can make a claim to some intrinsic status, any pose can gain a status by virtue of one's commitment to it; it can become an important billboard on one's affective maps of what matters.

The affective communication of music television Authentic inauthenticity is democratic - its cultism is not exclusive. It is available to all those who have grown up in spaces already colonised by the post-war popular

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media and who have shared certain historical experience (e.g., the promos for Nik at Nite in which audience members are identified via their media history). Moreover, this logic is apparent across the range of music television. I am always surprised that critics take MTV - or individual texts within it - so seriously. MTV is neither a contemplative text which is constantly demanding interpretation and attention, nor is it some wonderfully orgasmic activity. That it is a source of pleasure is clear; that the pleasure is somehow historically superior or inferior to other forms is less so. This is not merely a matter of understanding the practices by which MTV is consumed. Such sociological studies of uses and functions tells us little about the modes of communication and larger cultural structures into which these practices are inserted, or how they are functioning. Like singles on Top Forty radio (MTV's format and playlist is largely AMIAOR), the videos themselves are largely superfluous. Certainly any specific video is irrelevant. What makes it so powerful is its 'hip attitude', its refusal to take anything- itself, its fans and the world- seriously, even as it appears to knowingly do just that. This attitude toward itself is captured most clearly in its self-promos (e.g., an apparent beer commercial in which MTV as beer is acknowledged to taste terrible but, as the promo concludes, 'at least the videos are pretty good'), and it is here that MTV exhibits for us its participation in a cultural formation. One need only watch MTV (and increasingly, any pop culture) for a few minutes to 'see' its authentic inauthenticity. I want to describe then some of the ways in which difference is marked affectively in this emergent cultural formation. In particular, I will offer three articulations of affect to authentic inauthenticity, three forms of identity, three strategies of empowerment which are effective in this formation: ironic inauthenticity, sentimental inauthenticity, and hyper-real inauthenticity. Each of them seeks to define forms of empowerment: to re-constitute the ability to make a difference when nothing makes a difference, to enable a difference to be defined when there is no centre to measure it against, to proffer strategies for being different predicated on the absence of difference. Each of them creates a series of images of stars who embody, not authentic instances of subjectivity and political resistance, or even ideological statements, but temporary moods which can be appropriated by fans as temporary places rather than impossible identities, strategies by which they can continue to locate themselves within affective alliances, and continue to struggle to make a difference, if not in the world, at least in their lives, even though difference has become impossible and possibly irrelevant. What distinguishes them from one another is the ways they use affect as a strategy for enacting their own authentic inauthenticity. Ironic inauthenticity is perhaps the most pervasive strategy; it is commonly thought of as 'post-modern' because it is the most purely ironic, inflecting sentimentality into the fleeting moments of its temporary investments. Although it seems to celebrate the absence of any centre or identity, it actually locates that absence as a new centre. That is, it celebrates the fragmentary, the contradictory, the temporary. And it celebrates them with all the seriousness (or lack of seriousness) that is necessary. It can take everything equally seriously or equally humorously because the differenceis less important than the temporary construction of an image of the centre. David Letterman, Pee Wee Herman, Madonna invest themselves in the image, but the image itelf is unimportant. What is important is the fact of the investment itself, with no claim beyond that. It doesn't matter what image one takes; take any image and live it for as long as you want or like. It is the construction of any

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identity as absolutely real and totally ironic. One can deconstruct gender at the moment of celebrating it (and celebrate it precisely because one can deconstruct it). One can take on an identity predicated on the deconstruction of identity itself (Max Headroom). The issue is not investing in the ideological consequences of particular images but the fact that one must inevitably invest in some images, regardless of what they are. Feeling something, anything, is better than feeling nothing. Living some identity, however temporary, is better than living none. And the choice may have little relation to the significance of the identity itself but merely to its temporary ability to mark some affective difference and distance. Ironic inauthenticity celebrates its own investment in the image precisely because it is self-consciously taken as an image, no more and no less. In the end, crocodile tears are as good as real ones, perhaps even better because they require no anchor in the real in order to be effective. Of course, if one fails to see the irony, one is left only with the despair of illusions and lies, a depoliticised nihilism. The second strategy, sentimental inauthenticity, is predicated on the fundamental problem of any specific affective investment. One does not, and cannot, trust the content of any feeling, emotion, investment, even the most temporary and ironic one. Certainly this cannot mark any difference; certainly it does not mark any difference in a world which has increasingly appropriated ironic inauthenticity. Yet sentimental inauthenticity celebrates the magical possibility of making a difference against impossible odds. And what enables that possibility is not any specific affective investment but rather the intensity of the investment itself. Such a strategy requires the absolute ordinariness of the subject: their only difference is that they care about something, that something matters to them so much that they are re-identified with and empowered by it regardless of what it is. This is a strategy which constructs images of victory, but the site and stake of the battle - or even whether one recognises the moral rectitude of the subject - is irrelevant. Rather, the subject is just like us except that they care about the struggle, they believe in something, to a degree which makes it beyond our sense of our own realities. One wears one's affect, one's passion, on one's sleeve, and it is this which converts ordinary skills into magical victories. Bruce Springsteen is arguably the best embodiment of this strategy. His stardom rests upon at least two facts: first, he appears to be just like his fans; and second, he cares more about rock and roll (and his fans) than any other performer. He can renounce rock and roll culture (growing up, getting married, refusing drugs) precisely because he is doing it so that he can continue to make rock and roll. His popularity crosses not only sociological differences, but interpretive differences as well. It does not seem to depend upon how one interprets his songs or even whether one is able to identify with the particular narratives he constructs. His sense of 'immediacy' is not contradicted by the size of his audiences, or by his use of videoscreens. Moreover, his videos defy any generic identification of musical and visual style. Similarly, Miami Vice is predicated upon a constant confusion of images: actors playing at being cops playing at being players. But it also embodies an almost absurd and largely unspoken commitment (one is in fact never sure what it is that they are committed to) that enables the characters to continue to seek a difference in a world predicated on their own inability to be different, or even to recognise the difference. This difference is not constituted by their commitment to any value or ideology, but merely to their own activity. Consider a classic scene in which Tubbs is questioning their lifestyle: Crockett responds, to Tubbs' amazement that they are, after all, better than the

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crooks. After an ironic pause, he adds, 'better shots'. Such statements enable us to construct a partial connection between the popularity of such diverse figures as Springsteen, Rocky, Rambo and Reagan. It is the dominant strategy in many contemporary youth movies (e.g., Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, Quicksilver, etc.), so that whatever the ideology of the hero, their heroism is not tainted by the reality of their position. There are no superheroes here; on those rare occasions when there are, they are necessarily made into self-conscious cliches which are only problematically available as subject-positions. Sentimental inauthenticity constructs a field of 'mundane exotic' identities which celebrates the ordinariness of the exotic and the exoticism of the ordinary. One need never agree with, or identify with, the particular content of a commitment; one need only recognise that something matters so much that they are transformed from an ordinary individual into someone heroic, if not superhuman. The danger of such statements is that one can confuse the celebration of the intense commitment with an identification with the content of the commitment. Because of the often traditional activities and values represented, such statements threaten to reproduce a new conservativism in the heart of pop culture. The final strategy, hyper-real inauthenticity, distrusts, and often rejects, not only the specific form of any affective investment but the very fact of affect itself. Its articulation to sentimentality is purely negative. Its tone is bleak; its practice is super-objective. Portraying the dismal reality - in all its dismal, gritty and meaningless detail, with no affective difference inscribed upon it - is the only statement left available, and it matters little whether that reality is contemporary or futuristic: all images have become post-holocaust because the true holocaust is the very destruction of any possibility of caring, of making a difference. In fact, affect has become impossible because the last site of potential investment - desire and pleasure - has become the enemy. Caring too much is dangerous and often destructive (The Name of the Rose) and desire kills (AIDS).There is no transcendence, no possibility of moving to a position outside of the grainy, grotesque detail of reality. No narrative voice is capable of any judgment or discrimination because, in the end, no matter how special or grotesque, the speakers are just like us. Thus, we are even denied the grandeur of existential meaninglessness and given only the sheer facticity of existence. Make a difference is no longer a matter of inserting oneself into even a temporarily privileged position; nor is it a matter of controlling a chaotic world. For there are no longer any guarantees that chaos is not more deserving of our affective commitment than order. There is only individual survival and normality (however abnormal). One sees this in movies such as Star 80 (perhaps the precursor), The River's Edge, Full Metal Jacket, The Boys Next Door and Blue Velvet (although this last is perhaps also surreal), and television programmes like The Max Headroom Story, The Many Lives of Molly Dodd (at least as it has attempted to frame itself) and Miami Vice (especially in those episodes in which the cops confront the inpenetrable machinations of the multi-nationallgovernment apparatuses, or in which romantic involvements always end in Peckinpah-type killings). But it is perhaps most visible in a new generation of ads and promotions (e.g.,Jordache'sfilm noir ads, Converse's scene of a young couple breaking up, and MTV's promo in which Duran Duran merely says, 'In exploitation's name, we must be working for the skin trade'). Without the ironic inflection, such statements merely reproduce a structure of cynicism and pessimism which, in the end, offers egoism as the only viable political strategy. I am not claiming that these three ways of constructing a centre are available on

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the coded surfaces of music television's texts, nor that they define the totality of its communicative statements. Nor am I claiming that they are unique to music television. Rather they belong to, and have to be located within, the larger cultural formation I have been describing. Other strategies could be identified (e.g., contemporary forms of horrorigore, of fantasy and superheroes, neither of which play an important role in music television). Yet, the fact remains that many of these strategiesistatements - and the effects they engender - would have been judged to be the result of either insanity or aesthetic genius (perhaps itself a form of insanity) if they had been uttered even twenty-five years ago. Today, they are, at the very least, moving rapidly along a variety of vectors into the centre of popular culture and everyday life. They are the communicative highways and social places (defined along the highways) that the billboards of music television are opening up in the modern world. If we refuse to see the ways in which this formation is re-directing our mobility and re-locating our stability, we will never recognise its political and social stakes.

Endnotes 1 This essay is as close as one can come to a collective effort and still maintain the privilege of individual author-ity. I would like to acknowlege and thank my graduate students, especially Charles Acland, Jon Crane and Phil Gordon for their invaluable contributions and assistance. I would also like to thank Simon Frith for his many suggestions and for the many conversations which have contributed to this paper. 2 The term 'music television' itself refers to a complex cultural formation, and discussions often conflate a number of different questions: the relation of pop music to images; the relations between pop music and their contemporary video and filmic presentations; the relations between such music videos and television (i.e., the variety of ways videos are both imbricated within televisual discourses and used by televisual and rock audiences); and finally, the particular discursive contexts and forms in which videos may be related to each other (e.g., formats of various music video programming). While these are all obviously related, we cannot assume that there will be a single answer which would adequately describe and explain this culturally complex structure of practices and relations. 3 Affect works as much on the 'physiological' as the psychic side of everyday life. For a more elaborate discussion of this concept, see Grossberg (1988).For a discussion of its relation to rock and roll, see Grossberg (1987~).For a discussion of its relation to postmodernity, see Grossberg (forthcoming A and 8). 4 For a discussion of 'billboards', see Grossberg (1987~)and Morris (1988). Billboards define complex appeals which draw us down specific

roads, open and close alternative routes, and reconstruct the tendential forces of history. The fact that I am talking about music television partly determines the visibility of different vectors (the highways defining our fragile sense of personal, cultural and national identity) and of the relation between them. Had I chosen other cultural practices, or other questions about their relations to political and economic struggles, the map I offer would look significantly different. But music television is not the 'object' of my reading for it is as problematic a concept as any other structure which organises the cultural terrain. Whether one argues that television (and the multinational entertainment corporations whose interests are increasingly spread across the entire terrain of cultural production, distribution and consumption) has 'incorporated' rock or that rock has colonised television depends upon prior assumptions about the identities, interests, effects and politics of both television and rock. Talking about music television demands that we talk about many other cultural events, and the work that they do. We cannot assume their differences because these are always the temporary products of the distances separating them within our cultural lives. It is these distances which are partly announced, and partly constructed, on the surfaces of our cultural billboards. Music television is the 'vehicle', the self-constructed tour-guide, in which I will travel, mapping out a piece of the changing network of roads and billboards defining the cultural politics of everyday life in contemporary USA. While I may often see the reflections of my vehicle, they will always be articulated by the billboards in which their

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reflections are offered; sometimes I will see more of the billboard than the vehicle. Sometimes I will stop at a particular Intersection and look at the vehicle itself. I am specifically interested in the relations between certain emergent trajectories in the cultural formations and the (apparently) growing conservatism and cynicism of contemporary social and political life. 5 For example, notions of excess and repetition are not sufficient as descriptions of the context of post-modernity, for what is missing is an understanding of how different forms of excess and repetition have been articulated to specificmedia practices and forms, and how these structures of communication have in turn entered into, or perhaps been appropriated by, specific media and ideological relations. One needs to disting-

uish between an excess of the signified (which has traditionally been most powerful in writing), an excess of the signifier (which has historically dominated commercial cinema) and an excess of the enunciation (which has defined so much of television experience, i.e., the very multiplicity of images). Moreover, each of these different sites of excess has its own historically and generically specific forms. Similarly, the forms of rock's excess have varied, but I think it is fair to say that rock's excess is predominantly located in the domains of the enunciation, like television, and of the signifier, like film. However, unlike the traditional television and film apparatuses, rock's excess depends not only upon multiplicity but also upon the excessive energy and affect of the performance - live, visual and sonorial.

References Bloom, Allan 1987. The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster) Frith, Simon 1988. 'Picking up the pieces', in Facing the Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon) Gore, Tipper 1987. Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society (Nashville: Abingdon Press) Grossberg, Lawrence 1 9 8 7 ~ '.Rock and roll in search of an audience or, Taking fun (too?) seriously', in Popular Music and Communication, ed. James Lull (Beverly Hills: Sage) Grossberg, Lawrence 19878. 'The in-difference of television', Screen, 28 Grossberg, Lawrence 1988. 'Postmodernity and affect: All dressed up with no place to go', Communication, 10

Grossberg, Lawrence Forthcoming A. 'Putting the pop back into postmodernism', in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Grossberg, Lawrence Forthcoming B. 'Pedagogy in the age of Reagan: Politics, postmodernity and the popular', in Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture, ed. Henry Giroux and Roger Simon (New York: Bergin and Garvey) Morris, Meaghan 1988. 'At Henry Parkes Motel', Cultural Studies, 2(1)