Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology
the media not only ‘constructs’ the popular, as if the ‘popular’ pre-existed its journalistic mediation, but it then adheres to this definition of the ‘popular’ and thus perpetuates it. This mythic shading of the media would be quite interesting if it wasn’t, as with all blind faith, so insidious, so in touch with the unconscious, so much a built ‘drive’ that modelises people. But as with ‘heaven’, access to the media is a fraught and self-immolating path. Not just anyone can get in, for access to the media becomes a slow trickle because introjection of the ‘new’ has to be couched in terms of the already pre-existing and discovery of the contemporaneous is overshadowed by the preparation of the ‘new’! That there is a constant obedience to these exigencies of the profession via editors and that this obedience effects a journalist’s modes of perception and communication means that even when research is carried out it cannot be turned into a ‘processual’ endeavour, a means of extending selftheorisation, but must be directed towards the final piece whose outcome is, before even being written, somehow already expected (its syntax and superlatives are already capitalistic). This relates to the journalistic trade in ‘symbolic capital’ where, in order to increase assignments (and assignments vary in prestige), there is a sense that whatever is said in an interview situation is subject to its being filtered via the journalist’s own agenda: an agenda that may encompass… subservience to an editor to ensure the status of regular contributor… to the seeking-out of subjects and material that fits neatly into the tenor of a long-term approach (the thesis). In the latter instance the pay-off is that the journalist enters into an exchange with a creative practitioner whereby the latter is offered the promise of diffusion because the journalist is structurally placed as a gatekeeper permitting access to a means of mass distribution and potential popularity. This latter point is itself problematic for the unconscious dynamic which pervades such an exchange is one of censorship where the whole mythic idea of the popular (saved by visibility/ made subject) becomes a fear of being unpopular (dammed by invisibility/ made abject) and, like a child who seeks approval, we are witness to one means by which the media induces infantilism: there is a rush to conform to the proscribed limits of behaviour and thought, to seek not to be marked out, to never say or encourage anything politically contentious, to agree with that which flatters. But, there is another aspect of these journalistic ‘invisible structures’ that are left unspoken and editedout: cronyism. Here a meeting between a creative producer and a journalist is one that is mutually complimentary rather than one that constitutes an interrogative opposition. Both know the score and both use each other. Like any professionalism, adaptation to such ‘invisible structures’ is an
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