FEAR OF MUSIC
by
ANDREW HERMAN
ah7301r@acad.drake.edu
Department of Sociology
Drake University
_Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.1 (September, 1993)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu
Copyright (c) 1993 by Andrew Herman, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
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copyright law, and it may be archived and
redistributed in electronic form, provided that
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notification of the publisher, Oxford University
Press.
Review of :
Goodwin, Andrew. _Dancing in the Distraction Factory:
Music Televison and Popular Culture_. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
I. Fear of Music: Postmodernism and Music Television
[1] The first time I heard the terms "postmodernism" and
"the postmodern" was at the "Marxism and Interpretation of
Culture Conference" at the University of Illinois during the
torpid summer of 1983. Like the inhuman heat and humidity
of the Midwestern July, the terms hung heavily in the
conference atmosphere, a prominent feature of almost every
presentation, debate, and discussion. The omnipresence of
the terms was particularly frustrating as almost nobody had
anything close to resembling a straight explanation of them.
Clearly, I thought, these terms must have some shared
intersubjective meaning, otherwise all these people wouldn't
be enunciating them with such zest and enthusiasm. Finally,
in desperation, I nearly assaulted a fellow conference
participant during an incredibly hot and hazy dance party,
determined to extract at least a basic definition of this
hot and hazy chimera, "the postmodern."
[2] This individual did her best to satisfy my
inquisitorial hunger by telling me of "the crisis in
representation," the "death of the author," the "collapse of
master narratives," "pastiche and parody," the "waning of
affect," and so on. Unfortunately, none of these
characterizations of "postmodernism" or "the postmodern"
made much sense to me. And so I just stood there nodding
and grinning, hoping to convey vague understanding. Sensing
a lack of comprehension on my part, and desperate to
extricate herself from what was rapidly becoming a dead-end
conversation, my reluctant interlocutor directed my
attention to the spectral glow of a television monitor that
hung in the corner of the room. "Look," she said
triumphantly, "the postmodern is in this very room. If you
want to understand the postmodern, watch music television."
She then slipped away, leaving me to ponder the connection
between music video, MTV, and postmodernism.
[3] My companion that evening was probably not the first,
and most certainly not the last, to note that there was an
intimate connection between the postmodern, music video in
general, and _MTV: Music Television_ in particular. Indeed,
the argument that music video as cultural form and MTV as
televisual apparatus were quintessential exemplars of
postmodern culture has become the dominant interpretation of
music television within cultural studies. For example, John
Fiske (1986, 1989) argues that music video as textual form
is postmodern because of its fragmentary and disjointed
nature. In its privileging of signifier over signified,
contends Fiske, music video produces the distinctively
postmodern experience of decentered subjectivity.
Similarly, E. Ann Kaplan (1987) and David Tetzlaff (1986)
maintain that MTV, as a regime of televisual experience, is
postmodern because of the atemporal, ahistorical and
dreamlike quality of its programming flow. Although they
draw widely different political conclusions from their
analyses, Kaplan, Kim Chen (1986), and Will Straw (1988)
locate the postmodern nature of music video in its
palimpsistic intertextuality and representational practices
of pastiche and parody. Finally, Larry Grossberg (1988,
1989, 1992) argues that MTV evinces a cultural logic of
"authentic inauthenticity," a peculiarly postmodern form of
identity politics that self-consciously celebrates the
temporary affective commitments of style and pose. As an
expression of the logic of postmodern culture, Grossberg
maintains that music television locates identity and
difference in the surface appearances of mood and attitude
rather than in the meaningful modernist depths of ideology.
What makes this superficial, "inauthentic" politics of style
"authentic" (and therefore postmodern), according to
Grossberg, is that performers, programmers, and audiences
all know that there is nothing beyond the pose. In the
cynical postmodern sensibility of MTV (and, for Grossberg,
popular culture as a whole), there is no pretension to
making a difference in the structure or fabric of everyday
life beyond the differences of image and appearance.
[4] It would be an understatement to say that Andrew
Goodwin finds the predominance of such accounts within
cultural studies a bit troublesome. Indeed, much of
_Dancing in the Distraction Factory_ is a sustained, if
uneven and somewhat contradictory, polemic against the
understanding of music television as distinctively
postmodern. For Goodwin, the aforementioned authors and
their analyses (with the partial exception of Grossberg)
represent a theoretical arrogance and political naivete of
egregious proportions. They are part of a "current fashion
for conflating the specificities of different media and
genre into a ragbag category of 'postmodernism' that does
injustice in equal measure to both the conceptual field
[i.e., postmodernism] and the object of study [i.e., music
television]" (17). Although Goodwin grudgingly admits that
there are certain features of contemporary society and
popular culture that might be accurately and fruitfully
understood as "postmodern," music television is not one of
them.
[5] According to Goodwin, the fundamental problem of the
postmodernist take on music television is that it fails to
take into account that music television is, quite simply,
*music* television. Although there has been some work done
in media studies on the aural dimension of television (e.g.
Williams, 1974; Altman, 1987), according to Goodwin, "very
few analyses of music television have thought to consider
that it might be music" (5). Goodwin devotes much of the
first part of the book to detailing the deleterious results
of the bias in studies of music television towards the
visual.
[6] For example, Goodwin takes issue with two widely held
positions that represent polar extremes of the postmodern
assessment of the politics of music television. The first
is the pessimistic argument that music video has had a
detrimental impact on the interpretative imagination of the
audience because its visual images tyrannically fix the
lyrical and musical meaning of a song. The second is the
more optimistic, "avant-garde" argument that music videos
represent a radical, subversive break with "classic realist"
modes of representation and subjectivity because of their
temporally fractured narrative and distinctive mode of
address. Due to their narrow emphasis on the visual text of
music video, both arguments ignore two *con*-textual
dimensions of music television that are central to Goodwin's
own analysis.
[7] The first dimension is the interdiscursive polysemy of
music television. Goodwin argues that there are a
multiplicity of extratextual discourses beyond the visual
image which help constitute any particular song's meaning.
These include discourses of performance, promotion, and
stardom that are crucial to understanding the institutional
context of music television. Secondly, the hermeneutical
valences of music video can be understood only by taking
into account the phenomenology of synaesthesia, or the
complex relationship between sound and image that was
central to the production of the pleasure and meaning of
songs long before music television.
[8] When both dimensions are foregrounded in the analysis
of music television, Goodwin maintains, the aforementioned
arguments make little sense. In the case of the
"meaning-fixing" dominance of video-text images, because of
the array of discourses that are both inscribed in a music
video as well as brought to the video by an audience, there
is a multiplicity of visual associations that are conjured
by the audience, many of which have little to do with a
particular video's images. Rereading the avant-garde
argument about the anti-realist nature of music video,
Goodwin points out that if one understands the institutional
history of pop music discourses and the aesthetics of
performance, the supposedly radical mode of address of music
video (where the performer often directly addresses the
audience) is, in fact, revealed to be "entirely conventional
and thoroughly ordinary" (76). Further, if one considers
the ways sound and image are linked through the process of
synaesthesia, the fractured narratives and other
"instabilities" in the music-video text (which are
supposedly indicative of its postmodern character) can be
understood as visual analogs of the musical structure of a
song in terms of voice, rhythm, tempo, timbre, harmonic
development and, of course, lyrics. Thus, according to
Goodwin, much of what makes "no sense" to postmodernists
(c.f. Chen, 1986; Fiske, 1989) makes a great deal of sense
in terms of what he calls a "musicology of the image."
Indeed, from this perspective, music television represents
"the making musical of television" through the subordination
of vision to sound as much as it does the triumph of the
visual over the musical (70). Consequently, as Goodwin
concludes with a nice rhetorical flourish,
music television does not, generally speaking, indulge
in a rapture with the Symbolic; nor does it defy our
understanding or attempt to elude logic and rationality
through its refusal to make sense. Far from
constituting a radical break with the social processes
of meaning production, music television constantly
reworks themes (work, school, authority, romance,
poverty, and so on) that are deeply implicated in the
question of how meaning serves power. (180)
II. Meaning, Power and the "Scandal" of "New Populism"
[9] It is this issue of "how meaning serves power", and how
it's currently being addressed within contemporary cultural
studies, that is Goodwin's ultimate concern in the book. As
should be clear by now, he believes that the postmodern
perspective is ill-equipped to explore the "social process
of meaning production" in music television because of its
fascination with the surfaces of visual imagery. However,
Goodwin is equally critical of what he terms the "new
populism" of cultural studies. Although he never specifies
precisely to what work the epithet refers, one gathers that
this new populism is characterized by an ethnographic focus
on the processes of reception and a concomitant privileging
of the audience's power in terms of interpretation and
pleasure (e.g. Ang, 1985; Lewis, 1990). For Goodwin, this
so-called new populism accords "too much autonomy" to
audiences because it implies that they "could construct
meaning from media texts at will," thus denying the salience
of hegemonic or preferred meanings that emanate from
cultural institutions and are inscribed in cultural
artifacts and texts (14). This valorization of the audience
in cultural studies, Goodwin insists, has entailed an
abandonment of the project of ideology critique and its
concern with the relationship between meaning and power. To
my knowledge, even the most optimistic of those who might
fall under the Goodwin's rubric of new populism, such as
John Fiske (1989, 1992), do not in any way maintain that
power or preferred meanings are inoperative in the process
of reception. Nonetheless, Goodwin dramatically asserts
that the new populism's supposed abandonment of concern with
ideology as power constitutes "the 'scandal'" of cultural
studies (158).
[10] How, then, is this "scandal" to be stopped? In order to
have an adequate grasp of the social processes of meaning
and ideology involved in music television in particular and
popular culture as a whole, Goodwin maintains that cultural
studies must adopt a mode of analysis that is "more adequate
to the real." The "real" for Goodwin is constituted by
"actual, historical relations of power" and production (158,
167). In other words, the scandalous state of cultural
studies can be rectified by its reorientation within a
framework of Marxist political economy. Of course, Goodwin
is quick to point out that he is not advocating a return to
the good old days of crude base/superstructure certitude
where the masses were manipulated into false consciousness
by the products of the culture industry, products whose
ideological content could be explained solely in terms of
the imperatives of capital accumulation. Rather, Goodwin's
political economic approach is meant to be a
"non-reductionist" examination of the institution/text and
text/audience nexi of popular culture that situates textual
aesthetics and ideology, as well as audience reception,
squarely within the conditions of cultural production in a
capitalist society.
[11] Accordingly, from his perspective, a materialist
analysis of music television that is "more adequate to real"
adheres to the following logic. First, one must examine the
historical development and contemporary dynamics of the
institutional politics of production in the music and
television industries. This institutional analysis
establishes a contextual framework for understanding the
aesthetics and ideology of music videos as texts. Although
Goodwin claims he is not suggesting that textual content is
determined by conditions of cultural production, he does
want to emphasize that such conditions have a constraining
effect upon texts. Finally, having examined the nexus of
institution and text, one can proceed to the final step of
analysis wherein one examines the nexus of text and
audience, or the relationship between the politics of
production and the politics of consumption.
[12] Again, while not claiming that the meaning and
pleasures of music video are predetermined and fixed by the
institutional imperatives of production, Goodwin clearly
argues that there are limits to the polysemy of music
television which are set by its political economy.
Accordingly, he insists that the first and second levels of
analysis can produce an understanding of the third by
illuminating what he suggestively terms (but, unfortunately,
never explicitly defines) "reading formations." Such
reading formations are multidiscursive regimes of
representation and pleasure that privilege certain subject
positions in terms of ideology and affect. One example of a
"reading formation" is what Goodwin terms a "star-text."
The star-text is composed of the repertoire of images and
discourses which constitute a musician's or band's persona
and is central to the meaning of music videos. Such
star-texts operate as a "metanarrative" that structure a
musician's or band's identity. Thus, even before audiences
have seen a particular video clip of, say, the band U2, they
are probably familiar with the band's metanarrative or
star-text as the spiritual and political "conscience of rock
and roll." Further, argues Goodwin, such star-texts are
inextricably linked to the imperatives of the music industry
as they are an essential component of the effort to package
and sell musicians as commodities. After all, it was the
promotions department at Island Records that came up with
the "conscience of rock and roll" moniker for U2 in order to
sell _The Joshua Tree_ album. Thus, even though at the
book's beginning Goodwin hedges his bets by disavowing any
"claim to provide a definitive account of textual reception"
(xxiii), by its end he feels entitled to state unequivocally
that "while different parts of the audience will be
positioned differently, music television viewers are
nonetheless still positioned" (180). It is this claim about
the audience which, I would argue, represents the major flaw
in the logic of cultural analysis followed by Goodwin and
ultimately undermines his claim to provide a coherent
alternative to both postmodernism and the "new populism."
[13] When it comes to the first moment of Goodwin's
preferred mode of analysis, exploring the trends in the
music and television industries that fostered the
development of music video and music television, _Dancing in
the Distraction Factory_ is superb. Building upon Wolfgang
Haug's work on advertising and commodity aesthetics (1986),
Goodwin offers a compelling argument that it is impossible
to comprehend the pleasure and meaning of music video texts
without considering their status as unique promotional
commodities. Goodwin is certainly not the first to examine
the emergence of music television in terms of pressures of
market demographics, programming needs, and promotional
imperatives of the music and television industries (c.f., in
particular, Denisoff, 1988). However, his argument
concerning the confluence of industrial marketing and
programming imperatives with the emergence of new aesthetics
and ideologies of performance and musicianship which
privileged the artifice of the visual image (e.g. as
articulated by the "New Romantics" such as the Pet Shop
Boys), is startlingly original and convincing.
[14] Similarly, Goodwin's analysis of how the institutional
discourses and practices of promotion, performance, and
stardom become encoded into the sounds, images, and
iconography of music video texts is nuanced and
sophisticated. Indeed, the chapter on what Goodwin terms
the "musicology of the image" should be required reading for
all students of music television and music in general. Yet
in spite of the complex relationship between sound, visual
image, and narrative structure that engenders the ideology
and aesthetics of music video, Goodwin maintains one cannot
escape the political economic fact that all video clips are,
first and foremost, promotional devices meant to entice
consumers to purchase other commodities. Further, both
music videos and the programming flow of networks such as
MTV operate as a "super-text" which constantly directs the
attention and desire of the audience towards commodities
that promise solutions to individual and social problems.
Accordingly, Goodwin argues, the polysemy of music video is
limited by a hegemonic reading formation of commercialism
which "attempts to restructure the subject-as-citizen . . .
along the lines of subject as consumer" (169). Therefore,
the central way in which in which Goodwin's political
economic approach is able to show how meaning serves power
in music television is to demonstrate how text, programming,
and audience are, to use an old Althusserian chestnut,
structured in dominance by the ideology of the marketplace.
[15] Naturally, when one makes such strong claims regarding
the hegemonic structuring of the reading formations of music
television one runs the risk of creeping (if not galloping)
reductionism. That is, there is a danger of assuming that
the politics of consumption in terms of use, meaning, and
pleasure can be read off the politics of production like
elephant tracks. Goodwin is well aware of this danger and,
to pre-empt such criticisms, says:
The objection to such arguments is that they tell us
too little about what particular television programs
mean, what use-values are obtained in the consumption
of popular culture and so on. . . . However, to argue
that diverse audience readings and real use-values must
also be taken into account is not to argue that a
politics of individual consumption, based around the
promotion of market relations, does not also operate.
Indeed, to suggest that the former actually cancels out
the latter is every bit as reductionist and simplistic
as the most brazen economism. (174)
[16] And, indeed it is. Yet what vitiates Goodwin's
otherwise reasonable argument here is the contradictory way
in which he deploys the audience in his analysis elsewhere.
On the one hand, he frequently appeals to an audience of
"music fans" to validate his hermeneutic analysis of the
multi-discursivity of music video texts. For example, when
discussing the visual iconography of performance, Goodwin
forthrightly claims that he is simply "describing the
process by which video clips make sense to the audience"
(90). On the other hand, while this may indeed be true,
Goodwin has absolutely no evidence to support his
conclusions (and admits as much, 95). Further, although he
concedes that his analysis "needs to be related to audience
interpretation and reader competence" (130), he does not
attempt to do so and dismisses almost out of hand other
attempts along these lines (e.g. Lewis, 1990). The
"audience" seems to exist for Goodwin only as a convenient
rhetorical device that enables him to claim a face validity
for his textual analysis and thus obviates the need for
engaging in or with ethnographies of the music television
audience. Doggedly sticking to his Marxist guns against the
new populists, whom he condescendingly terms the "bright
young things of cultural studies" (xxiii), Goodwin refuses
to believe that the audience might tell him something about
the politics of consumption that he doesn't already know.
[17] In the end, Goodwin's cavalier attitude towards the
audience and ethnographic study of the politics of
consumption both blinds *and* deafens him to the salience of
the concept of postmodernism for understanding the cultural
politics of music television. At this point in the debate
around postmodernism within cultural studies, it should be
clear that the concept entails much more than simply textual
aesthetics. The postmodern is not simply a style, attitude,
or pose, but a fundamental mutation in the fabric of
everyday life from the political economy of production to
the rituals of consumption. In order to understand the
politics of music television, to assess how meaning serves
power, it would seem to me that it is imperative to examine
how the postmodern is evinced in the everyday life of the
audience. Goodwin seems to suspect that this might be the
case when he notes in passing that "work on postmodernism as
a condition of reception might be extremely fruitful" (153).
Yes it would, but only if one is less dismissive of
ethnographic dialogue with the audience. And, in spite of
the many virtues of _Dancing in the Distraction Factory_, it
is this refusal to take the postmodern seriously that is
truly a scandal.
------------------------------------------------------------
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