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| Minima Sententia |
| Instrumentalisation of the Image and Simulation of Public Communication |
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by Tatiana Goryucheva
"They are perfectly aware about the real state of affairs,
but they continue to act as if they were unconscious about it."
Slavoj Zizek "Sublime Object of Ideology"
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The reality of contemporary man, he who is part of urban civilisation, is sliced into several modes of being. His spatial environment is flexible and dynamic. His world picture transforms into a multiple interface, where even his personal self-identification starts to be modelled after an unstable dynamic image, which is defined by a system of choices. Space-time, social, and symbolic-ideological systems of man's orientation evolve together with the conditions in which he lives or is situated historically or accidentally. The present information-based stage of development of civilisation is related to the transference of the objective world into information strata, where the function and consumption of an object is determined by its inclusion in a parallel information process, which in fact constitutes the object. Thus, the whole system of the consumer market is based on the total informatisation of the distribution process, starting with advertisement, detailed information about the product on its packaging or label, and ending with new forms of hybrid media production, where magazines, tv programmes, films, internet resources - i.e. products that already belong to the field of content production - become tools for the promotion of certain goods on the market.
Under these conditions the image as such transforms into a unit of information and is built into the process of instrumentalisation of the world vision itself. In other words, the image becomes at the same time the object and means of manipulation. Its major strategic goal is to manage the individual's motivation. The sort of iconoclastic reaction of art in XX century to the overproduction of visual information in mass culture and advertising was to some extent also a response to the increasingly pragmatic exploitation of imagery. The extremes of such exploitation are advertising and propaganda (including propaganda art), which pretend to create a complete hegemony in forming the language of mediated communication in public spaces.
New is badly forgotten old
It is amazing to see how easy, quickly and naturally in Russia socialist and communist slogans and placards were replaced with, both in their form and scale, much more aggressive advertising billboards, outdoor electronic screens, and huge object-installations, like compositions and corporate logos on top of buildings, including those which have an "important historical and cultural value". If one follows the logic of the post-soviet transformation of the whole process of decoration and use of urban public spaces - as it appears so typically and brightly particularly in Moscow - then it becomes obvious that despite the radical changes in society, its mentality, the reality of its being, the ideological models of manipulation - with the social mind as their essence -, are still the same as in the Soviet epoch. Moreover, the change of the outer appearance of public visual communication as well as its direction and conceptual content - which can be considered its upper layer - hardly touched its basic motivation layer, the essence of which is the formation and activation of archetypal subconscious propositions and complexes, as well as manipulation with them. Before it was obvious that the placard "The Party is the mind, honour and conscience of our epoch" was not about the meaning of the well-known party (while it remained unclear whose epoch actually was referred to). It rather acted as a didactical rhetoric instrument, which pointed out and fixed ideological orientation marks. Today, a picture with a naked girl at an advertising poster doesn't sing the praises of the beauty of the female body, but, being a means of trivial PR-technology, attracts the consumer's attention to a product or brand through the activation of subconscious instincts. In the past, the mass reproduction of Lenin's image in monumental propaganda under the slogan "Lenin is now even more alive than the live one", was not in fact a tribute to his memory and merits, but a personified symbolical authentication of party power through its historically legitimated inheritance and following of "Il'ich's testimony", i.e. the founding father. Consequently it formed a legitimisation, though, violent, for a ubiquitous presence and natural, though unconditional, central ruling role of the party. The current monumental reanimation of certain objects and figures from the past, both historical and artistic, is in essence neither an act of perpetuating memory of other heroes, nor of enlightenment, but rather an attempt of power - still poorly understood - to mark the environment of its "culturalised" activities with clumsy associations to the theme of the "Russian national idea": the orthodoxy - the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, great power - Peter I, the national - fairy tails, etc. In fact the symbolical and social function of an object "with meaning" in the urban public environment is defined not by the wishes of those who order it, but by its interaction with actual communicative public space, which is formed and changes under the influence of the full range of social, political, economical, historico-cultural conditions.
In a wider sense the fetishising of public memory, which previously happened first of all for ideological reasons, while today its purpose is rather the creation of "tourist attractions", is mainly driven by two centripetal forces: unification and identification of the society and its social space on the basis of certain unifying ideas and symbols. While contemporary public art has already refused of monumentality and its characteristic imposing of identificatory symbols: "this is your hero", "this is your history", and even "this is the object, which you should like",1 - it seems that advertising has picked up this relay-race-baton with incredible enthusiasm.
Ideology and advertising are the motors of regression
Actually, the fundamental thing for the communication model of each advertising message is a necessarily collectivist identification of the recipient as consumer, i.e. a person who a prori looks for satisfaction of his needs through material consumption2 on the one hand, and a unifying construction of the phantasmatic desirable on the other. In other words, advertising is modelling common archetypal complexes of desire, where an advertised object is playing the role of functional attribute, while the subject-consumer to be seduced is included in this passive communication as if he were a patient with the disabled function of consciousness to imagine what he needs. In this violent infantilisation of a consumer and sense devastation of his needs the key communication element is a unified object oriented visual code, reduced to elementary meanings, upon which the whole representation system of advertising is built. Jean Baudrillard writes in his book "System of objects", in the course of analysis of social function of this code: "Such universalisation and effectiveness is reached by means of extreme simplification, impoverishment, when language of social merit is regressing almost to the limit: "Man is characterised by his things". Coherence of the system is reached due to creation of a certain combination, set of conventional elements; i.e. this language is functional, but it is poor symbolically and structurally." 3 The perception of the consumer, being trained by such ubiquitous functional language, risks to be captured within a limited system of coordinates for determining meanings and their interpretation.
Similarly, in propaganda art idealistic and in their individualistic characteristics reduced images, serve as a transitory sign navigators, which direct not so much the course of thoughts, but passive associative reactions through the map of hollow stereotypical meanings that do not have multiple interpretations within the system of predetermined sense coordinates. This system is in both cases initially determined by its functional mega-task. For art propaganda this is the creation of ideological mythologies through which official dogmatic and stated values are evidently translated. For advertising this is the modelling of situations for the most effective stimulation of desire itself, as well as its direction towards a certain product. Both, the first and the second, through simulation of artificial illusory relationships around an object of presentation, and consequently of distribution (either commercial or ideological), mask real social relationships, and what is more important, the conflicts and contradictions that are inseparable from actual reality, and which define the socio-cultural landscape of the life of any society.4
Mass media is the opium for the people5
This problem of the masking and neutralisation of conflictual processes, which happens in contemporary culture, is aggravated and even mainly conditioned by those strategies of public communication, which mass media impose, while they are considered to be providers of one of the sides of the public in the society, where a public politician who limits himself to one-side rhetoric and doesn't participate in tv and on-line talk-shows, or direct interviews, today is not public enough to keep the public interested in his figure. Obviously the policy of representation of the public sphere in mass media is built upon an attraction principle, where the keystone is satisfaction, not of real public interests, but of private idle curiosity, i.e. entertainment. Meanwhile behind the curtains of the mass media theatre its mechanism is working for the realisation of interests of a small group of the social elite affiliated with its ruling. Industrial standardisation and unification of mass media production on an international scale as a result of common processes of economic globalisation, is driven in fact by the corporate logic of management, where the content aspect acquires a pragmatic functional meaning in the system of corporate interests to be realised. The manipulative character of contemporary propaganda and public information war already doesn't need inactivation of well-developed ideological complexes of recreated beliefs in certain highest value hierarchies. Slavoj Zizek, who insists on the idea that post-ideological era is still far from us, pointed out that the new level of development of ideological discourse is characterised by its a-priori orientation towards functionality, and thus, by extreme cynicism. Just remember the recent information-propaganda campaign in support of the war in Iraq in 2003 led in the USA and UK, as well as the subsequent exposing of scandals. 6
In the situation of total inter-penetration, mutual substitution, and fusion of physical and represented media reality, the space of public communication (in the case of mass media, in fact, quasi-public or not public at all) gets features of a mirror room, where the multiplicity of reflections of the presented object mystifies our idea about it. The peculiar obsession of mass media with an attraction-type method of mystification in favour of commercial benefits is demonstrated in nowadays highly popular documentary tv programs, which supposedly open "true faces" and "life's secrets" of stars, spies and other famous people. It appears as well in the use of the always popular and profitable genre of "exposure", which in Russia in 1990s escalated into unprecedented information wars in the form of "compromising materials flushing".
A picture is a lie, but contains a hint
In these mystifications and machinations the image often becomes a hot bold point, a photo or video fact, around which the fiercest struggles for authenticity and reliability are going on. The major purpose here is the acknowledgement of the represented event as real, so that consequently it has the right to constitute reality further on. In the course of this struggle, the represented figure of a hero, who is exposed or defended directly or indirectly by means of the image, became an object of information-ideological games, where each turn of a plot, such as: "experts confirmed", "experts denied", "author of shooting confessed", etc, - defines a next combination of interpretatory meanings, which are transformed into information products. The imagery factography of an event is formed by a mutually exchangeable referential interaction of visual and narrative ranks of meanings. The image here (and it's important that today it's primarily reality-like photo and video), being part of a text to be created, serves as a bridge into reality, an important symbolical and at the same time psychological link between processes of oscillated interpretation and direct visual presentation of a fact.
The artist Les Levine once stated: "The experience of seeing something first hand is no longer of value in a software controlled society, as anything seen through media carries just as much energy as first hand experience. We do not question whether the things that happen on radio or television have actually occurred. The fact that we can confront them mentally through electronics is sufficient for us to know they exist..."7 Yes, we know that the eye of the cameraman is selective, that contemporary digital technologies of editing allow to simulate any "real" scene, yet the presence of "real" reality itself in mediated reality (reality in square = Simulacra8) is enough to switch us into a wild game-attraction, or to be more precise a quasi-game, which can partly be attributed to Johan Huizinga's term-phenomenon - puerilism. Under puerilism Huizinga assumes those common characteristics of the culture of the XX century, which are usual for teenager's behaviour - i.e. not a naive child but still not a mature personality - among which he indicates "easily satisfied, but a never saturated demand for banal entertainment, a craving for rude sensations, a yearning for mass shows" and even "a weakening of moral standards and exaggerated role of the guide", etc.9 This elitist and in itself quite speculative concept, introduced by Huizinga in 1930s, today reminds us of the massive "teenagerisation" of commercial mass popular culture, which dominates over other forms of culture, including different youth- and subcultures, most of which do not have access to public means of communication at all.
Art beyond politics? Art not for public?
Contemporary art against this background looks, it seems, a kind of elitist subculture not so much due to its existence "for selected lovers", or its complimentary role in contemporary culture on the whole (these are already consequences), but rather due to the limitation of its communicative potential.10 Art as such already does not define the image of our culture. Instead mass media, advertising and industrial forms of mass culture are doing it. The function of visualisation, or to be more precise - of depicting, representation of reality, is however too abstract and blurred to be placed in the centre of the discussion about the role of art in socio-cultural activities of society. If we were to do a small logical trick in this context and look at the art as a medium, i.e. a practice, technique, method of production and distribution of information of a specific - aesthetical - character, while comparing it with other forms-means of communication (the same mass media, advertising), then the following question appears: what is the specificity of this medium regarding its contribution to the process of formation and circulation of senses and meanings in contemporary society at the level of publicly important interests? Since a work of art is, generally speaking, the information, then what is its specific value in comparison with other media accessible for public information? It is more interesting and inspiring to look for answers to these questions through practice in the ruthless context of daily life of city public spaces, under the conditions of unequal competition with aggressive, sophisticated and well adjusted to its purposes media propaganda, monstrous idols and tourist attractions. These questions put the talk about art in the domain of politics. What's more the perspective of bringing them into space of public communication looks more intriguing, even if this space is potential and not actual yet. But it is made actual by events that happen in it.
When art is actively intervening in public space, it pretends to be a statement, to some extent a statement on behalf of the art, since the space of the public sphere is in principal the place where one's position and political expression ought to appear. In this sense an art action in the places of open public access is fraught with a high level of responsibility for the content, direction and effectiveness of its message. Its content is defined by the dynamics of the actual situation. Its aim is to lighten the fire of doubts and questions. Its effectiveness is measured by its ability to make dynamic and destabilise connections that are perceived as given, and relations between reality, its representation, and its interpretation. If a sense explosion happens, if in the usual perception of reality even a small collapse appears, if new occurring relations start to generate questioning thought, then we are getting closer to making sure again: the victory of the art is in the emancipation of the will to imagine Other reality.
Tatiana Goryucheva - art theorist, historian of media art, curator.
NOTES:
1 - If monumentas symbols of power are destroyed or vandalised during political protests and revolts as attributes of an order imposed by power, then aesthetically unrecognised art objects for public spaces provoke anger primarily as material objects, which, according to the idea of those who do not understand them, do not demonstrate or possess necessary level of professional creative efforts and skills applied, therefore they are perceived as unworthy of meaning and value which are ascribed to them, i.e. as profanation of art. There are known cases of public protests against the placement of abstract and minimal sculptures in public spaces.
2 - Baudrillard extends meaning of the term consumption in his analysis of the structuire of contemporary material culture (book "System of Objects"): "<...> consumption is the active modus of relationship - not obly to objects, but also the collective and the whole world, - <...> within it the systematic activity and universal reply to external effects are reallised, <...> upon it the all system of our culture is based." Here further: "Consumption, to the extent of which this word has sense at all, is the act of systematically manipulation with signs." (italic of author) Jean Baudrillard. Sistema veschey. M.: Rudomino, 1995. P. 164
3 - Ibid. P.162-163
4 - Baudrillard formulated the logic of this process of idealistic semantic transfiguration in the following way: "We face the analysed by Marx formal logic of product, which is brought to the final conclusions: similar to how demands, feelings, culture, knowledge - all usual for a man forces are integrated in the process of production as goods, materialise in the form of productive forces in order to be sold, - in the same way all desires, ideas, imperatives, all human passions and relationships today are getting abstracted (or materialised) in signs and things, in order to become objects of purchasing and consumption.
<...> there is still aspiration for revolution, but without actualisation in practice it is consumed in the form of idea of Revolution.» Jean Baudrillard, Ibid. P. 165, 167.
5 - "Religion is opium for the people" V.I.Lenin
6 - Slavoj Zizek. Sublime Object of Ideology/Vozvyshenniy ob'ject ideologii. M.: Khudozhestvenniy zhurnal, 1993
7 - Edward A.Shanken. Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art. <http://www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/InfoAge.html> (Article for the book: Michael Corris, ed. Invisible College: The social dimensions of Anglo-American conceptual art. Cambridge UP, 2002)
8 - Baudrillard's term
9 - Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens. In the book: Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens. Stat'ji po istorii kul'tury. M.: Progress - Traditsia, 1997. P. 195.
10 - Against the background of social, political, cultural dynamics in XX century: taking into consideration the abolishment of estate hierarchy, the establishment of democratic forms of governing, first of all in Europe, the fusion and mutual penetration of different cultural forms, - rhetorics of contra-positioning terms "high culture" (i.e. aristocratic, enlightened) and "low culture" (i.e. for the people, mass) is not to the point. |
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