Andrew Herman

Department of Sociology
Drake University
ah7301r@acad.drake.edu

 

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

 

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.”

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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”

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

Works Cited

 

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• Straw, W. “Music Video in Its Contexts: Popular Music and Post-Modernism in the 1980’s.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
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