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Whose Imaginary? The Televisual Apparatus, The Female Body and Textual Strategies in Select Rock Videos on MTV

April 1, 1991 by A.S. Van Dorston

By the “social Imaginary,” Kaplan refers to the historical moment within MTV in which a contradictory construction of old and new discourses about “politics, sex and romance” has been established within a high-tech “televisual apparatus.” A “televisual apparatus” is a combination of elements including the television itself and its technological ways it presents images; its various `texts’ (ads, commentaries, displays); the relationship of programming to the sponsors, whose ads might be called the “real” texts; and the variety of sites, the viewer receives the images (134).

Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodernist, is a large influence on Kaplan’s work. She cites his model of the “hot” and “cold” universe as an example of how television has transformed communication and the ways of interpreting the images. It also serves as a distinction between the era of classic Hollywood cinema and the era of MTV. While in the “hot” universe, Freudian (Oedipal) narratives are useful in analyzing cinema, MTV’s “cold” universe demands different analysis, as the space between private space/time and public space/time disappears. Such elimination of boundaries produces schizophrenic tendencies in subjects, and they are no longer able to find a psychological sanctuary within objects. With new technology, a new relationship between subjects and objects emerge in which we, as subjects, are in “the position of mastery and control, and can play with various possibilities” (as in televisions, computers, etc.) (133).

Before anything political can result from such power and control, MTV divests such freedom from any revolutionary implications for commercial purposes, reducing them to “the `radical chic’ and the `pornographic'” (134). However, the chaotic nature of the medium does allow some radical expression. Kaplan gives a few examples of this later on.

Kaplan is interested in the “myths, images and representations” in MTV videos as they might be seen as both reflecting unconscious changes in young people’s “real conditions of existence” and as tapping into the unsatisfied desire remaining in the psyche from the Lacanian mirror-phase.

MTV uses the “coming-up next mechanism” to tap into this desire. Unlike classic Hollywood movies, videos do not have a fixed time limit, or a clearly defined “frame.” Instead, they exist on a never ending horizontal axis, in three to five minute-long segments, which keep us watching, forever hoping to “fulfill our desire with the next one that comes along” (136). Such a desire is insatiable because it exists in some far distant and never-to-be-experienced future. The idea of trapping millions of people in an endless mode of consumption is a particularly appealing one to MTV and its sponsors.

Within this framework, Kaplan examines how this “decentering televisual apparatus” positions women. She comes up with a confusing multiplicity of messages. Unlike classic cinema, the male gaze is not monolithic. The texts in MTV vary widely, and are difficult to know exactly what they mean, “because its signifiers are not linked along a coherent, logical chain that produces an unambiguous message” (137). Kaplan refers to Fredric Jameson’s contrast between pastiche and parody. While parody takes a critical yet humorous position, pastiche is a mode that lacks any clear positioning with regard to what it shows or toward earlier texts that are used. MTV often randomly samples previous texts in an uncritical manner.

Kaplan takes a moment to stop the flow of videos and look at some exceptions. Videos like Pat Benetar’s “Love Is A Battlefield,” “Sex as a Weapon”; Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money”; Tina Turners’ “Private Dancer”; Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; and Aretha Franklin/Annie Lennox’s “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” all reconstruct the female body other than the “prevailing `post-feminist’ or various `male gaze’ ones” (139).

Madonna’s “Material Girl” is an example of the more common post-feminist videos that are more heavily marketed on MTV. It is difficult to see how any of the video parodies Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” sequence in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Much of it is thus put in the pastiche category. The images that Madonna presents are multiple and ambiguous, the ones “sponsors consider `marketable’, since they are those most often cycled and also propagated in the ad texts interspersed among the video texts” (146). This is consistent with the idea what MTV is one continuous advertisement, the flow being broken down merely into different kinds of advertisements.

While there is much room in MTV for post-feminism, Baudrillard suggests that left/liberal humanism no longer as a place. Feminism, therefore, needs to change along with the situation. To address postmodernism will be difficult, as the new era “arguably makes impossible the critical position itself, making then irrelevant any `feminist’ stance” (153). But while Kaplan is doubtful that the MTV era can be co-opted by feminists, it can at least be examined more thoroughly, in how the blurring of distinctions between a `subject’ and an `image’ and the reduction of the female body to an `image’ can be dealt with.

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