The Limitation of Mainstream Journalism: The Lens of Zizek and Baudrillard - Essay Example

?The Limitation of Mainstream Journalism: The Lens of Zizek and Baudrillard Introduction As scholars like Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard have claimed, one of the major indicators of mainstream journalism is the apparent differentiation between representation and reality, on which earlier approaches toward cultural construction could still depend on, is not credible or acceptable anymore. Although the Western audience may visualize the presence of ‘reality’ behind the images presented by the commodified media, so it is asserted by Zizek, people’s “ruthless pursuit of the Real” (Zizek 2007, 24) is but “the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Real” (p. 24), permitting the audience to translate the Real into the ultimate melodramatic outcome, as shown in the successes of The Truman Show and The Matrix. This is the context criticized by Jean Baudrillard: “The very definition of the real has become that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction” (Baudrillard 1983, 62). This trend, in several circles, frequently referred to as one of the core components of ‘postmodernism,’ has been recognized as a rejection of the chances to ever cope with the extremism of reality that Lenin talked about (Arva 2008). Actual events and everything that is ‘real’ in the world cannot be represented because it is constantly already an image, because the images make up reality itself (Klaver 2000); Andy Warhol describes this vividly and briefly: “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real begins” (Wolff & Geahigan 1997, 59). In the period after September 11 numerous people propose that the attacks marked the closing stages of postmodernism. These suggestions were aired all over the American popular press (Flatley 2002). The diagnosis: the terrorist hostilities were a remarkable ‘return of the real’ (Flatley 2002): ‘they were not a simulacrum [likeness similarity] but a horrifyingly actual event of historical proportions; here reality had emerged with perfect clarity from amidst the confusing simulacra [representation]’ (p. 4). A confusion between the real and simulated here is absent. Slavoj Zizek (Taylor 2011) equated the impact to the scene in The Truman Show when the lead role discovers that he has been existing in a simulated reality, or the scene when Keanu Reeves in The Matrix is enlightened of the ‘desert of the real’ (p. 201) that he truly dwells in. Everyone knows that the contemporary world is frequently disrupted by episodes of violence and terrorism; however, American has the capacity to inhabit a simulated world where in this ceases to be the case (Nightingale & Ross 2003). A lot of individuals, outside of the United States, seem to be feeling that “Now you know what it feels like to live in the rest of the world” (Flatley 2002, 4). The anticipation shown in numerous places was that Americans, by means of their own experience of anguish through the recently restored ‘real’, would acquire a brand new compassion for the vicious reality where in the rest of humanity dwelled in (Klaver 2000). Hence, the objective of this essay is to discuss the limitations of mainstream journalism within the perspectives of Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard. Zizek and the Limitations of Mainstream Journalism If journalism, specifically in its printed form, has increasingly lost its importance within the overall human communication paradigm, it is not merely due to its inherent weakness as a carrier of meaning, but due to the ‘the precarious status of reality’ (Arva 2008, 60) itself as well, or what is referred to by Slavoj Zizek as ‘fantasy-frame of reality’ (p. 60). This section will review and discuss Zizek’s idea of mainstream journalism, particularly its limitations or weaknesses. As emphasized by Zizek, even though ‘reality’ is established by the process of ‘reality-testing’, the framework of reality is organized by the excesses of hallucinatory vision (Zizek 1993): The ultimate guarantee of our ‘sense of reality’ turns on how what we experience as ‘reality’ conforms to the fantasy-frame. (The ultimate proof of it is the experience of the ‘loss of reality’: ‘our world falls apart’ when we encounter something which, due to its traumatic character, cannot be integrated into our symbolic universe) (p. 89). It therefore implies that the success of information over journalism is actually because of an exaggeration of the former’s integrity or reliability. What makes journalism credible, by the same reason, would be our eagerness to relate to the simulated truth of a narrative the same ‘fantasy framework’ that we apply in actual ‘reality-testing’ (Zizek 1993, 89). Nevertheless, people are evidently becoming less eager to do so, especially when faced with intense occurrences, which normally take place outside the fantasy framework (Zizek, 1993). Rather, people instinctively attempt to bring back the ‘Real-reality’ taken away from the fantasy framework through which journalism, which ironically, only obscure the representation’s reality, or the ‘simulacrum’ of an intense occurrence (Eastern Michigan University. Division of Academic Affairs 2008): “If the passion for the Real ends up in the pure semblance of the spectacular effect of the Real, then, in an exact inversion, the ‘postmodern’ passion for the semblance ends up in a violent return to the passion for the Real” (p. 1). In severe conditions of distress, when the application of the ‘fantasy framework’ becomes inadequate for establishing a relatively secured sense of reality, individuals turn to exacting self-harm (Clemens & Pettman 2004), as if to ensure that their physical existence is real. Identifying unreal components in reality, or the use of the fantasy framework, may prove a lot more challenging than identifying impressions of reality in creative writing. Apparently, the question is whether the truth is worth aiming for by any means (Der Derian 2001). The ‘obsession for the Real’ that has engulfed post-industrial countries in the final stages of the twentieth century, resulting in the explosion of ‘reality-TV’ programs, may have in fact been a “fake passion whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Rear” (Arva 2008, 60). Similarly, Baudrillard foreshadows a ‘scenario of power’ displacing the ‘power ideology’ (p. 60). Zizek merges philosophy and psychoanalysis to present a revolutionary point of view on the ideology that dominates mainstream journalism. Although direct citations to mainstream journalism in the works of Zizek are modest, his illustrations and theories put journalism at the core of the contemporary representational capitalist system: “Capitalism is a social system which is premised upon the dominance of the particular… in our society of the spectacle, by their subordinate role as part of an over-arching media systems” (Taylor 2011, 8). With the intention of illustrating the way ideology ‘lies in the guise of truth’ in a civilisation that prides transparency and wealth of information, Zizek adopts the cynicism concept of Peter Sloterdijk as ideology’s wing. Referring to the contemporary period as ‘cynical’ in which one argues to be ‘aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality’ (Zizek 1989, 29), Zizek claims that “… we believe much more than we appear to believe… and obey much more than we appear to… (Sharpe 2004, 88)’ Zizek adds that the tension between ‘unknown knowns’ (Sharpe 2004, 88) and clear concepts of ideology provides an idea of the particularly faint operation of the former when a person hears or sees information and representations in the media: ‘… cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself’ (Zizek 1989, 30). Zizek, reflecting Baudrillard likens the steady waning of false impression with the disappearance of reality itself. If reality-testing takes place through the use of the ‘fantasy framework’ onto the truth so as to incorporate it into the symbolic domain, it implies that the core stability of our reality cannot be maintained without invented story (Zizek 1993): “As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency” (p. 88). Figment of the imagination is what eventually helps us systematize apparently implausible occurrences into an essentially logical system—the central irony of magical realism (Grusin 2004). The media persistently showers us with the necessity to discard the ‘old frameworks’ (Zizek 2001): ‘if we are to survive, we have to change our most fundamental notions of what constitutes personal identity, society, environment, etc.’ (p. 32). According to Calcutt and Hammond (2011), contemporary theories argue that we are in the verge of a new ‘post-human’ age where in journalism will become more and more inclined to confuse reality with representations, and vice versa. Thus, the assumptions of Zizek are mainly predictive of the future inadequacies of journalism in representing ‘reality.’ Baudrillard and the Limitations of Mainstream Journalism In a review of the Apocalypse Now, a movie by Francis Ford Coppola that was originally released in 1979, Baudrillard claims that the “war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common haemorrhage into technology” (Baudrillard 1995a, 59). The assessment of Baudrillard of present-day society has in common several of the assumptions of Bauman and Virilio (Arva 2008). Baudrillard is concerned about the manner in which technology, or essentially journalism, detaches us from the world. Faced everyday with stories of torment and misery, we remain submissive mediators of dynamic forgetting (Baudrillard & Glaser 1995a). A long way from being the negligent spectator of postmodernity, Baudrillard is supporting accountability in a ‘state of indifference’ and condemning the ‘flight into amnesia’ (Der Derian 2001, 82). Apocalypse Now, in the point of view of Baudrillard, is an outrage. For him, the complex and drawn out production procedure reflected the indulgences of the Vietnam War (Flatley 2002). These indulgences have been exceptionally illustrated in Hearts of Darkness, a feature about the making of the movie that pursues what seems to be Coppola’s fall into mania and vanity, a voyage that can be discerned to reflect the plunge into ‘insanity’ of one of the leading characters of the film, Colonel Kurtz (Flatley 2002, 4). The pure display of the movie, as argued by Baudrillard, with helicopters wrecking communities in Vietnam to the rhythms of Wagner, reflects the technological conceit of the Vietnam War. The movie turns out to be a ‘technological and psychedelic fantasy, (Baudrillard & Glaser 1995a, 59)’ and the movie, similar to the war, turns out to be a “test site, a gigantic territory in which to test their arms, their methods, their power” (p. 59). The movie is interested with exhibition and what is portrayed by Horkheimer and Adorno as ‘conspicuous production’ (Flatley 2002, 4). Within this perspective, there is no room for moral concern or serious thought, an argument adopted by Susan Hayward when she remarks that movies like Apocalypse Now do not challenge the authenticity of the Vietnam War (Arva 2008), putting emphasis on the “sadism of the enemy, the unknown other” (p. 61). Baudrillard argues the same in the review of Black Hawk Down (Merrin 2006). People find gratification in the story and the representation of present-day aggression; consuming news reports of destruction is vital to the most thriving movies in mainstream or popular culture. However, the concern of Baudrillard is not the fact that Apocalypse Now fosters lack of sympathy via its journalistic techniques of the other; instead, it is that the movie removes the truth of the incidents (Baudrillard & Glaser 1995a): “one revisits everything through cinema and one begins again” (p. 59). Baudrillard (1995a) further claims that: The war in Vietnam ‘in itself’ perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm, which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war (p. 59). Therefore, journalism can provide no ‘actual detachment’, ‘no aspiration for creating awareness,’ since the war and journalism belong to a similar ‘clownish effect in overdrive’ (Baudrillard 1995, 60). Evidently, Baudrillard is posing important issues about the way where in journalism contribute to the state of moral apathy that Virilio and Bauman claim is vital to war in the contemporary period (Saal 2008). People consume authentic warfare in journalism like we consume exhibitions of devastation in the cinema. If reality relies on creative writing, it is not the form of reality that Baudrillard is trying to introduce; Baudrillard is cautious of reality as a rule, specifically, as a structuring discourse that excludes any unusual perceptions of occurrences (Merrin 2006): as Baudrillard (2000) foretold in The Vital Illusion, “We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events” (p. 68). The ambiguity of such occurrences, apparently, exists not in the occurrences as such, but in the thoughts of the spectators, and is more frequently than not brought about by a caesura in awareness (Baudrillard 2000). Uncertainty in recognizing the truth of occurrences is the very effect that fictional literature, such as magical realism, provokes in its audiences, who constantly play as minor spectators of sorts (Arva 2008). This effect should be recognized not as reluctance to accept the ‘poetic singularity’ (p. 62) of the occurrence, but as willingness to maintain a broad mind toward some, usually even conflicting, ways of viewing and recognizing. Not challenging the truth, or discarding from the beginning its core dialectics rooted in such opposing dualities as good-evil, possible-impossible, true-false, natural-unnatural, etc., is what could eventually result in its downfall (Winch 1997). Mainstream journalism on the whole builds ideas of reality from the ‘hyperreal,’ as quoted by Baudrillard, or reality of cues of other cues (Grusin 2004). Signifying mainstream ‘hyperreality’, or the exaggeration of reality granted by an all-pervading mechanism of reproduction and consecutive levels of simulacra, as illusory truth is the evaporating reality by an intentional and careful, but also mischievous, exercise of imagination (Arva 2008). Recreation exists as ‘fabulation’ (Arva 2008): ‘postmodernist fiction does not stop at only signifying other signs, but also engages in Frankensteinian experiments of creating new ones (sometimes even just as monstrous as Mary Shelley’s motley creature)’ (p. 61). The ‘Macondo’ of Garcia Marquez is a non-Latin American community, but possesses all the indications of one, like the Yoknawpatawpha County of Faulkner which is a non-American South, but barely diverges from 19th-century Mississippi (Arva 2008). Nevertheless, the resemblance does not exist in the connection between the ‘referent (the real-life chronotope) and its fictional signified (the artistic chronotope)’ (p. 62), at the same time as ‘truthlikeness’ is not innate in the reconstructed referent as such. Verisimilitude and similitude are solely part of the personal viewpoint of the audience (King 2000): both are outcomes of the mechanism of understanding (p. 9). To prove his theory, Baudrillard chooses an absolutely evident reality and wrote an entire book trying to prove it wrong (Merrin 2006). He claims that the Gulf War did not take place. He implies that the war was very unbalanced that it did not represent a war (Merrin 2006). Disregarding American anxieties of severe fatalities, he believes that the war ‘was won in advance’ (Baudrillard 1995b, 61). According to him, the Gulf War was “a shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic version of what was the drama of war” (p. 72). He argues, from the perspective of an American, “No accidents occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to a programmatic order” (Baudrillard 1995b, 73). As a whole, the occurrences of early 1991 happened with respect to war as simulated lewdness does to real sexual acts (Flatley 2002). Baudrillard’s remarkably trivial essay persistently pounds on these issues. He situates himself between Iraq and the United States, equally holding each of these major players responsible (Merrin 2006). In his point of view, it is all a matter of ideology and aesthetics; the profoundly essential strategic, economic, and human concerns created by the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq vanish under the power of his unrelenting construction (Baudrillard 1995b). Thus, Baudrillard, detached from reality, contorts everything from the name of the president of France to the prevalence of traffic accidents in the United States (Clemens & Pettman 2004). The outcome is a work of remarkable blunder and awe-inspiring foolhardiness, the most absurd ever discussed in this essay. Conclusions Another distinction between journalistic and cinematic representations of war or devastation includes structural or psychological distinctions between the media of film and journalism. In its structural focus on wreckage and tragedy, it frequently appears that journalism itself is shaped in the context of destruction. Zizek and Baudrillard view spontaneity, dynamism, and synchronicity as major components of journalistic tragedy, which functions by disrupting the inevitability and comfort of regularly scheduled media programming. Basically, Zizek and Baudrillard believe that the live reporting of war and other catastrophes on television works to create fear and to restrain it. Destruction in news reports functioned to transport the viewers into the ‘real’ dimension that upset the commonplace and normal; although it was typified by everything which it is argued not to be, it remains inevitable, anticipated, its existence critical to the functioning of mainstream journalism. Although it cannot encompass the magnitude of a devastating event it would be capable of diverting the emphasis of journalistic tragedy away from the current and toward the upcoming. 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