The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction

The Carnival of Images This page intentionally left blank THE CARNIVAL OF IMAGES Brazilian Television Fiction Mic...

Author: Michele Mattelart | Armand Mattelart

41 downloads 777 Views 11MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

The Carnival of Images

This page intentionally left blank

THE

CARNIVAL OF

IMAGES Brazilian Television Fiction Michele and Armand Mattelart Translated from the French by David Buxton

BERGIN & GARVEY

New York • Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mattelart, Michele. [Carnaval des images. English! The carnival of images : Brazilian television fiction / Michele and Armand Mattelart ; translated from the French by David Buxton. p. cm. Translation of: Le carnaval des images. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89789-212-7 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper) 1. Soap operas—Social aspects—Brazil. 2. Television broadcasting—Social aspects—Brazil. I. Mattelart, Armand. H. Title. PN1992.8.S4M2813 1990 302.23'45'098 l-«Ic20 90-36026 Copyright © 1990 by Bergin & Garvey Publishers All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-36026 ISBN: 0-89789-212-7 First published in 1990 Bergin & Garvey, One Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface

ix

I. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A GENRE

1

1. A Narrative Memory

7

—A community of meaning

7

—False continuities

9

—The appropriation of a genre 2. The Formation of a National Television Industry

14 19

—The construction of the Globo network

19

—The irresistible rise of a multimedia group

22

—A national symbol of the free enterprise spirit

26

—The authoritarian state, the market, and the aesthetics of the spectacle

29

3. The Secrets of Production

37

—Audience management

37

—An open work?

41

—Censorship and the power of the text

44

—The medium is the merchandise

47

—Advertising and modernity

50

vi

Contents

—A monopoly in action

53

—The crisis of a genre?

56

II. THE SOCIAL LINK 4. National Memory and Popular Memory

65 67

—The return to use value

67

—The question of populism: The malaise of theory

72

5. The Novela and Society

79

—The impact of a genre

79

—A crisis in the representation of the social

80

—Intellectuals, the left, and television

82

—Populism: Old questions, new debates

87

—The return of emotion

92

IH. TELEVISION: THE RETURN OF THEORY 6. Television as a Mode of Organization

103 107

—The blind spots of criticism

107

—The question of determinations

110

—The disciplinary apparatus

114

7. Technical Thought

123

—Optimal management

123

—The relation with the audience

126

—The end of great narratives?

131

—Neoliberalism in theory

133

8. The Construction of the Popular Audience

141

—The genre as an ethnic category

141

—A suspect genre

144

—The postmodern challenge

148

Contents

vii

Selected Bibliography

155

Index

167


Preface Saturday, 14 June 1986: a huge demonstration by the antiracist movement in Paris. A newly set-up private television channel faithfully broadcasts the show given by singers and musicians throughout the night. This live broadcast was to be an efficient way of making the idea of multiethnic, multicultural France more popular. But having paid the organizers for the sponsorship rights, this private channel was not about to renounce its commercial breaks. On a giant screen beside the podium, the video transmission of the concert is regularly interrupted by commercials. The crowd responds, booing advertisements for powder that "washes whiter than white," cheering others that "bring out all the colors." In countries only yesterday dominated by public television, examples like these show that the private sector does not necessarily develop in isolation from the domain of civil society. This sort of example could be used to close debate prematurely as much as to open it. Through the transformation of the audiovisual landscape, the one-way celebration of the democratic virtues of the market can, in effect, replace the similar one-way celebration of the pluralist virtues of public and quasipublic institutions. Perhaps it is time to put to one side obsessive questions like: "Where is the public service going? What is happening to the links between the state and the television?" and "What is going on in the private sector? Where is it leading?" These presuppose admitting from the outset that the market is not a sector apart from society, as a last-ditch statist position would argue, nor is it all of society, as neoliberal economics tends to delude itself, propelling it into the role of the Great Regulator.

X

Preface

Television is becoming internationalized. That is to say, the norms of program production and distribution are becoming generalized in terms of a global market. This internationalization is a logic so powerful that analysis could very well stop at this point And yet, at a time when norms are becoming universalized, the need has never been greater to examine the specific, concrete way in which each society links up with the enveloping reality of the market and international exchange. This need is so strong above all because it corresponds to the wish to escape from the apocalyptic vision of a fusion of the particular within a deterritorialized cosmopolitanism. And also because it responds to the need to understand how, within this logic of integration into a world market, the differences among societies, groups, and cultures express and recombine themselves. How do specific processes of acclimatization to the new technoscientific conditions work? What are the modes of appropriation of this movement toward the transnationalization of commercial exchanges? As much as we need a political economy of the audiovisual production market, do we not increasingly need a political anthropology of this same market, linking it to the lived and conflicting experience of social groups? However much the market has become the gold standard of the internationalization of economies and cultures and the vector of universalization, all markets are not interchangeable. If the pursuit of excellence in the electronic age prescribes a new common Utopia, a pragmatic Utopia, each society has its own way of attaining it, through its particular history of relations between institutional and popular cultures, between industrial and symbolic rationality. It is these particular histories—often ignored by concentrating discussion on costs, techniques, and operationality—which explain why today certain television cultures are more competitive than others, selling programs in a hundred markets despite the still hegemonic presence of the U.S. audiovisual industry. Meanwhile, other national industries are still seeking an identity on the world market. This book aims at a dual objective: first, to analyze the formation of the Brazilian commercial television system and the emergence of a genre, the novela; and second, to establish theoretical guidelines so as to understand better the stakes of critical reflection on the upheavals occurring in television today. Whereas in European countries, at the dawn of privatization, we are

Preface

xi

beginning to glimpse the complexity of the relations between television and the market and between the market and the state, the observation of television industries that have been commercial from the outset gives food for thought on the ambiguous, polyvalent character of these links. In ten years, Brazil has succeeded in creating a national audiovisual program industry that has shown itself capable of exporting on a grand scale. The internationalization of Brazilian programs goes hand-in-hand with the attraction of a cheap, efficient mode of production. Confronted with the dual need to increase their production and lower their costs, European television channels have recently developed an interest in the novela; it copies neither the European serial nor the U.S. series, yet fits into the dynamics of serialization. This book invites the reader to consider the history of genres, the ideological and aesthetic forms that have crystallized the collective imagination and in which popular memory and national memory are always in tension. Part of this study wasfinancedby the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Centre National d'Etudes des Telecommunications (CNET) in the course of a research project entitled "Single or Multiple, the Paths of Serialization," directed by Michdle Mattelart. We would like to thank these two institutions for their assistance. Thanks are also due to Professor Roberto Amaral Vieira, researcher at the School of Social Communication at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, who considerably facilitated contacts with Brazilian television professionals. We should like to extend our gratitude to the latter, especially the screenwriters Doc Comparato and Aguinaldo Silva, the producer-director Paulo Ubiratan, the public relations staff of TV Globo, and the members of Globo's documentation and archives section. To the numerous Brazilian and Latin American friends with whom we have shared our lives and preoccupations since the beginning of the 1960s we express our gratitude and our friendship. M. and A. Mattelart Paris




I The Archaeology of a Genre History has hardly accustomed us to conceiving of the Third World as an industrial actor in its own right in the field of television production. Is not the image of a victim in revolt, projected during the 1970s by Third World demands for a new world order of information and communication, still very much present in the mind? But what has really happened in the last few years? We have not only seen the television industries of some Third World countries make their entry into the world program market, but also the takeover of media in postindustrial societies by Third World firms. Brazil and Mexico (and, to a lesser extent, Venezuela) have made their entry onto the international television scene. Both countries belong to what are currently called "newly industrializing countries," situated for the most part in Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore). But unlike the others, which mainly export electronic equipment, the two Latin American newcomers have (along with Hong Kong) captured a significant share of the program market.1 Brazil even goes one better by offering an attractive model for other countries. In Europe, for example, Italy has led the way in massively appealing to the Brazilian program industry to make up for the imbalance brought about by the discrepancy between the programming needs of private television stations and national production capacity. Over and above the purchase of programs, however, the interest shown by certain First World countries in the know-how of the young Brazilian television industry motivates this previously unthinkable rapprochement in a world where the transfer of know-how is usually thought to occur in only one direction—from North to South. European

2


television systems first had to improve their modes of production and programming by lowering their fabrication costs and giving greater program space to series before becoming interested in a genre which has since come to the fore: the novela. Although French television channels have not yet publicly considered this question, as the Italian public system (RAI) did in 1981 in the Ficchera Report, similar concerns have been expressed since the opening up of the national television system to private interests. There is one difference, however. An explicit question runs through the Ficchera Report: Where is one to find an alternative to the American mode of serialization that regally looms over the Italian universe of deregulation and, as an indirect consequence, over the newly felt concern of Italian public service television to revise and rationalize its mode of production? The Ficchera Report systematically surveyed the organization of the production of fiction series in the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Australia with a view to comparing them to the Italian situation. It is therefore important to observe that interest in the Brazilian novela did not originate in the RAI's study but in pragmatic calculations by Italian private television stations prompted, in their competition with the public service, to diversify their purchasing policy on the international market This purchasing policy was very quickly complemented by exchanges of technology when TV Globo lent its technical engineering assistance to the new private networks in Italy. In France, on the other hand, it was under the noble patronage of the Ministry of Culture that Brazilian television emerged as a reference in debate. In January 1985, the prestigious Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris) organized a series of viewings and discussions around seventy hours of programs, mainly from TV Globo, TV Manchete, and VideoAbril. Anticipating this, the first channel (TF1) launched a novela ("Baila Comigo") ("Dance With Me") in October 1984. Several years after other European countries, French television finally opened itself up to Brazilian fiction. In August 1985, the Brazilian multimedia group Globo bought a majority share in the Italian subsidiary of the French firm Tele-Monte Carlo. In Brazil, there is obvious interest in profiting from the deregulation of public television in Europe. After Italy, France is in the sighting line and beyond France, the entire European market, opened up by transborder satellites. While purchasing shares in Tele-Monte Carlo,

The Archaeology of a Genre

3

Roberto Marinho, President and founder of the Globo group, made no secret of his intention to continue negotiations with Tele-Monte Carlo once the French audiovisual landscape became clearer. In October 1986, Roberto Irineu Marinho, son of the President, clarified the European intentions of the group: "We don't aim to own anything. That has never been our strategy in Europe. It was almost an accident that we acquired Tele-Monte Carlo. It practically fell into our laps. We want to participate as partners in France, Germany, and elsewhere and help to build a European production system able to compete internationally."2 For decades, the perception of the relationship between television systems throughout the world was so "overdetermined" by the very real hegemony of the American television system in the international market—what other country could boast of selling its series in over one hundred countries—that all other television systems appeared to be in the same boat. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was the only one to stand out from the others, but was doomed to play only a minor export role at the time. This perception of the world television system reflected not only the reality of American power, but also the currents of thought that reflected the American way of life. In the wake of this domination, it was long thought that anyone seeking to make profits in the television industry had to reproduce the American model. No longer hegemonic, U.S. television nevertheless remains dominant. In 1987, U.S. companies earned one billion dollars in foreign markets, which represented between 70 and 75 percent of all international television program transactions.3 The internationalization we are seeing today indicates the disintegration and unleashing of both the realities and the references of yesterday. It signifies above all the appearance of new actors who are blurring the dividing line between so-called Third World and so-called developed countries, between underdevelopment and development. Furthermore, behind the rapprochements taking shape today in the quest for market performance emerges the implicit or explicit questioning of models of television that remained protected as long as the imperative of internationalization was not felt as a condition of survival. Questions once ignored or avoided have become vital: Why do some television systems succeed better than others in placing their products on the international market? Why are some television systems more "popular" than others? Why are some television genres more "popular" than others?

4


But when Third World television systems come to berth in the old ports of Europe, these questions take on a particular echo. For what the confrontation with the television systems of these new countries calls into play, beyond the issue of technological and industrial modernity, are the representations of the relations between cultures that are historically situated on either side of the geopolitical division of international power. The habits created by cultural production systems slotted into the borders of nation-states are increasingly shaken by the groundswell of market forces. This spells the end of those sensitive nationalistic feelings that legitimized, in the heart of old Europe, a television system centered on preserving the national culture. The reverse side of latent forms of racism, of the nostalgia for a pure, unspoilt society, is a drive for cultural interbreeding. Fascination/rejection—this coupling is not only present in the psyche of the old continent. It is also, after its own fashion, present in the psyche of the new pretenders to the markets of the old world. Intersecting nostalgias, where one dreams of the future of the other, where the latter envies the past of the former. The stereotype vies with deep intuition to breathe life back into the old dilemma between affectivity and reason, between nature and culture. Is not the phantasm invested in those programs from the Tropics, from the storm zones, that of a return to the primitive world, to magic, to syncretism? At the same time, in a more contemporary face of the same phantasm, the rediscovery of the symbolic ties to a "Latin community" seems to be looming. It was the promise of a "reconciliation with our Latinity" that was celebrated by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia: "The novelas represent a popular art adapted to modern means of communication without losing the brilliance of their origins."4 Notes 1. The Shaw Brothers Studios in Hong Kong produce both for the movie industry and television (they launched their television studio thanks to the support of Time-Life, CBS and the main English channels). In 1984, their television studios were employing 2,500 people and producing around 2,000 hours of programs a year. As for their movie studios, they were employing 1,200 people and producing 30 to 35 films a year. (O. Assayas and C. Tesson, Hong Kong Cinema, Paris, Editions de l'Etoile-Cahiers du Cinema, 1984). Among the countries which are not part of the category "New Industrializing Countries," one can find two big audiovisual producers: Egypt and Lebanon.

The Archaeology of a Genre

5

However, India, which belongs to the new industrializing countries, is the largest film producer in the world (with an average of 700 a year), but she has not yet emerged as a big television producer. Nevertheless, if she does not enter this program market, because of a weak television industry, she contributes to the internationalization of the film industry through video networks and in specific markets. 2. Variety, October 15, 1986, p. 146. 3. Variety, April 1, 1987. This percentage gives quite imperfect information about the place American programs occupy in national schedules, particularly because they cost more than those produced by other industries trying to reach an international market. Thus, to take the example of Italy, in 1985, 67% of program-hours imported into the peninsula were coming from the United States, and 17% from Latin America (mostly from Brazil). But, the 67% accounted for 87.5% of the total spending for imported Italian programming, whereas the South American importations only represented 2.5% of this spending. In 1986, in the Italian markets, the cost for a 40-minute episode from a novela ranged from 3,000 to 6,000 dollars, and the cost for half an hour of American programming from 6,000 to 48,000 dollars (Variety, October 15, 1986, March 25, 1987). 4. Quoted in 'Televisao: cultura de exportaqao," Veja, Sao Paulo, January 30, 1985, p. 117.


1 A Narrative Memory

A community of meaning "National identity is not a theory but a leisure time practice. . . . We owe everything to the melodrama. Its massive catharsis and emotional discharge suitable for the general public organizes their understanding of reality. In the melodrama, the powerlessness and the heroic aspiration of a collectivity which has no public outlets are combined."1 This definition given by the Mexican writer Carlos Monsivais situates clearly the importance of melodrama in the syncretic formation of popular culture and mass culture in Latin America. One of the key components in the narrative memory of the continent, the melodrama was purveyed by films, radio serials, magazine serials, fotonovelas, songs, and television serials. Film historians have clearly determined the place that "the family melodrama, peopled with wives and mothers blessed with a fantastic capacity for self-sacrifice, able to mobilize the Oedipus Complex of the whole of Latin America in an irreversible crescendo"2 has held in the production of the two premier film industries in Latin America—Mexico and Argentina—from their beginnings in the 1930s. This popular recognition of the melodrama is confirmed by certain writers from the continent: the Argentine Manuel Puig who has found the inspiration for most of his novels in it; the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa who has constructed one of his narratives, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, around the daily life of a radio melodrama, as popular as ever since the 1930s.

8


I had always been curious to know who the writers were who churned out these serials that kept my grandmother entertained in the afternoon, these stories that assailed my eardrums at my Aunt Laura's, my Aunt Olga's, my Aunt Gaby's, or at my countless girl cousins' when I went to visit them. I suspected that the serials were imported, but it surprised me to learn that the Genaros did not buy them in Mexico or in Argentina but in Cuba. They were produced by CMQ, a sort of radio-television empire ruled over by Goar Mestre. . . .1 had heard so much about the Cuban CMQ from announcers, m.c.'s, and technicians at Radio Panamericana—for whom it represented something mythical, what Hollywood represented in those days for filmmakers—that as Javier and I drank coffee in the Bransa we had often spent considerable time fantasizing about that army of polygraphic scriptwriters who, there in the distant Havana of palm trees, paradisiac beaches, gangsters and tourists, in the air-conditioned offices of Goar Mestre's citadel, were doubdess spending eight hours a day at noiseless typewriters turning out that torrent of adulteries, suicides, passionate love affairs, unexpected encounters, inheritances, devotions, coincidences, and crimes which, from that Caribbean island, were spreading throughout Latin America.3

A brief remark is necessary at this point before continuing our analysis of the genealogy of the telenovela. Looking through accounts of the origins of the telenovela, as much in the popular press as in more serious articles, one could have the impression that the history of popular genres can be written through their family ties, their continuities in a sort of genealogical chain: from speaking to writing, from writing to radio, from radio to television, and so on. The harmony of a linear, univocal progression, the natural passage from one medium to another, from one technology to another. Historical guidelines are there to tell us that there has been a passage, but we have no idea of what this passage has been, or how it has been marked. Whereas this simulacrum of knowledge points out successions and heritages, a critical analysis attempts to discover innovations and ruptures beneath the apparent continuity. One cannot pretend to approach the historicity of a popular genre today merely by establishing a lineage with products that have preceded it If there are links, there are above all ruptures: the new product is acted on by new social and aesthetic rationalities, at the center of new industrial strategies, within new forms of production and consumption. In full knowledge of the fact that the relations between one generation of products and another are more complex and contradictory than a linear history leads one to think, we offer the following outline.

A Narrative Memory

9

False continuities A radio serial like "El Derecho de Nacer" ("The Right to be Born"), written by the Cuban author Felix Caignet and produced in the same Goar Mestre studios imagined by the character of Vargas Llosa, was for many years a radio link between all the countries of the continent, before being adapted for television. The Havana studios were one of the main centers of production of the genre. Brazil became acquainted with the novela through adaptations of serials from Cuba and Argentina. It was only in 1947 that the first properly Brazilian radio serial, "Fatalidade," was launched on Radio S2o Paulo. One year previously, Radio Nacional de Rio de Janeiro inaugurated a policy of giving predominance to radio serials by importing from Cuba 300 episodes of the enormously popular "Em Busca da Felicidade" ("In Search of Happiness"). But by broadcasting the first Brazilian radio serial, Radio S5o Paulo was to stimulate national versions of the genre that became increasingly successful during the golden age of radio in the 1950s.4 The radionovela virtually died out in the 1960s but re-emerged in a more modern form in the 1980s, this time catering for national rather than local audiences. The re-emergence of radionovelas enables us to appreciate the changes that have taken place since the 1950s. Gone is the dewy-eyed serial whose characters were caught up in the web of fate; the major concern today is to escape from the Manicheism of the 1950s and to integrate issues of interest to a young audience.5 The radionovela was an important training ground for the genre that subsequently blossomed on television. It was in the writing of radio serials that a whole generation of television screenwriters (notably Ivani Ribeiro, Janete Clair, and Dulce Santucci) learned their trade. In their golden years, stations like Radio S5o Paulo transformed themselves almost exclusively into producers of novelas: each novela used an average of ten actors out of a staff of 200 and no fewer than fifteen different novelas were broadcast a day. In the archives of Radio S5o Paulo, there are some 2,500 novelas for all tastes (religious, detective, romantic, sentimental, for children). Prime time was between 8 and 9 at night but also between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M. What was new in the Brazilian radionovela was that it lasted only an average of forty episodes, many fewer than the novelas imported from Cuba or Argentina. In the mode of production of radionovelas, one element is essential, as much today as yesterday: the advertising agency, in particular, the

10


advertising departments of corporations linked to the soap and detergent industry like Lever Brothers and its network of advertising agencies, Lintas. It was in 1950 that Lever began to produce radionovelas in Brazil. Its advertising agencies had their own services for selecting and adapting imported novelas, and authors were hired by the firm rather than by the radio station. In the beginnings of the telenovela, authors were directly hired by producingfirmslike Lever Brothers and Colgate-Palmolive.6 Historians agree in recognizing the importance of the Cuban Gloria Magadan (hired by Colgate in the United States and loaned out to its Brazilian subsidiary) in the development of the telenovela in the 1960s. The radio and television soap opera in the United States, like the Brazilian novela, was also historically linked to detergent companies, as its name suggests. Between 1955 and 1960, radio serials disappeared from the ABC, CBS, and NBC radio networks, and were reincarnated on the television networks of these same companies. Procter and Gamble, a pioneer of the radio soap opera, transferred all its know-how into television production. The soap opera department of this firm still produces an average of six serials a year for the big three networks. One of its most famous soap operas, "Guiding Light," celebrated its forty-fifth anniversary in 1983, including thirty years on television. Such serials are broadcast every day from Monday to Friday, fifty-two weeks a year.7 It is tempting to look for common ground between the telenovela and the soap opera. It should, however, be remembered that since the 1960s, the telenovela has not been produced by detergent companies, whereas the soap opera continues to be so. Second, the soap opera remains confined to afternoon viewing and, not surprisingly, appeals to an audience that is 80 percent female. (Tellingly, if the novela is also shown daily, it triumphs as much in the evening as in the afternoon and attracts an audience of both sexes and all ages). Third, the soap opera remains fundamentally limited to a country's domestic market, apart from a few notable exceptions. In 1981, the Italian entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi ("Canale Cinque" at the time) signed a barter agreement with Procter and Gamble. In exchange for advertising time in the afternoon slot, the U.S.firmundertook to supply 250 episodes a year of "Guiding Light" and "Search for Tomorrow." By 1986, 1,500 hours of each of these soap operas had been shown on the Italian private network.8 The telenovela, on the

A Narrative Memory

11

other hand, has proved its international potential. Although one should be careful not to limit the soap opera to a traditional, specifically American product, a form of "radio with pictures," it is, in general, not a form of mass culture concerned with the expression of modernity (which does not prevent it from being a lucrative source of advertising profits). Although Latin American countries have succeeded in occupying a specific slot on the world program market, there are numerous variations within the genre, which seem to stipulate different aptitudes for market penetration. The Mexican telenovela is reputedly more "weepy" and old-fashioned than its Brazilian counterpart9 Colombia is more oriented toward co-productions and adaptations of Latin American novels, for example, those of the Mexican Juan Rulfo (El Gallo de Oro) and the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti (Graciaspor el Fuego), among others. One of its latest projects is an adaptation of Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas have been so popular that, to protect the national market, the Colombian Radio and Television Institute (Inravision) decided that as of 1 July 1987, the transmission of these foreign programs will be suspended and replaced by four domestically produced telenovelas. The common ambition of all these countries is to penetrate the North American market. The existence of a Spanish-speaking network, created in 1961 by the Mexican firm Televisa and purchased by Hallmark Cards in 1987, offers a vehicle for this ambition. Almost two-thirds of the programs shown on this network (Univision, formerly SIN) are from Latin America, with Mexico supplying the lion's share. Univision has more than 400 satellite-linked affiliates around the United States, many of them local cable outlets. The competing network, Puerto Rico's Telemundo, the leading broadcaster on the island, carries telenovelas from Venezuela and Argentina and was awarded an exclusive multiyear advertising contract for airing Globo Records commercials on Telemundo-owned and -operated stations. Despite an intensification of the regional circulation of programs, the various national television industries do not necessarily maintain self-evident relations. Brazil rarely buys Venezuelan telenovelas, and Mexico did not purchase the Brazilian novela "Dancin' Days" until 1986, by which time it had already been around the world. The directors of Televisa have a very particular way of explaining their reserva-

12


tions in respect of Brazilian novelas: "Brazil's TV Globo produces esthetically better novelas but the content of Televisa's soaps is more understandable to the masses. Globo uses a lot of subplots and stories within stories, while our scripts are more direct and the themes more universal. Television is a mass communications medium. Cinema can be elitist but not television."10 To facilitate program sales to other Latin American countries in a context of widespread debt, large companies like Televisa and Radio Caracas Television have set up, since 1985, methods of payment that avoid currency transactions. Thanks to this bartering system, Latin American television stations can acquire programs in exchange for advertising time. For each program-hour, Televisa demands four minutes that it sells to American-based multinationals interested in promoting their products in the purchasing country. This system has become so commonplace in between Third World television systems exchanges that programs are often exported with advertising spots already incorporated. When Globo exported "La Escrava Isaura" ("Isaura the Slave Girl" and "Dancin' Days" to China, which was suffering from a lack of foreign exchange, it accepted advertising time instead of payment. The specificity of the telenovela as a genre is now recognized. As the magazine Variety noted in March 1986: "The telenovela is a Latin American popular art form as distinctive and as filled with dramatic conventions as the norteamericanos' Western. . . . The telenovela is not a soap opera, although clearly the genres are close blood relations."11 Interested in this genre, Lorimar Telepictures Corp. (which produces "Dallas") bought up in 1985 WKBM Channel 11 of Puerto Rico in concert with one of the biggest producers of telenovelas, Radio Caracas Television. Latin America represents only about 20 percent of Globo's offshore income. Unlike Televisa, which exports mainly to South and Central America and the Spanish-speaking market in the United States, the Brazilian company has become truly international, sweeping away geographical, political and economic cleavages.12 China, Poland, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Angola, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, and others have all been stirred by novelas. In 1987, the Soviet Union added itself to the list of buyers. In August 1985, the Polish chose "La Escrava Isaura" as the best television program of the past ten years. No less than 28 million viewers

A Narrative Memory

13

(86 percent of the national audience) gave an ovation to the story of Isaura, the white slave, provoking discussion in the press over the reasons behind this unprecedented success. Described by the critics as being "the worst form of melodrama" and "sheer kitsch," "Isaura" was defended by sociologists who, in an astonishing excess of sincerity, explained in the Party newspaper that "in a situation of social disappointment, the public seek consolation in fairy tales, as was the case in Czechoslovakia after 1968."13 The success of "Isaura" was crowned by a triumphant tour by Lucelia Santos, who played the slave girl. Long after its screening, songs from the novela could be heard on the radio. Lucelia Santos was also very popular in Cuba, where Fidel Castro confessed to having had to transfer the times of his meetings because of "Isaura," which was followed assiduously by his advisers. At the Congress on Latin American debt, held in Havana in August 1985, Lucelia Santos was the guest of honor. In Portugal, the novela "Gabriela" brought the country to a standstill at 8:30 P.M. During its screening, telephone calls dropped by 70 percent, and one parliamentary session was suspended to allow deputies to follow it. Modes of speech from a former colony were introduced into Portuguese parlance. In Angola, another former colony, the party in power (MPLA) profited from the screening of "Gabriela" by injecting messages before and after the program. In Italy, where novelas have occupied the afternoon slot, advertising time on some private channels has become as expensive at 2 o'clock as at 8 o'clock. The Americans themselves recognize that they must now compete with Brazilian and Mexican novelas that "are playing in prime time in certain European markets."14 But foreign sales are one thing, achieving prime-time screening is another. In France, for example, "Isaura" was shown on TF1 at 2:40 in the afternoon in 1987 and "Brilhante" at 6:35 P.M. in 1985 (rescreened in 1987 at 2:40). Some countries conflict significantly with the norms of the country of origin: in China, where "Isaura" was hugely successful, novelas are programmed at the rhythm of one episode a month! In 1982, the value of Globo's exports came to 3 million dollars. In 1987, this had climbed to between 15 and 20 million dollars. In comparison, the export turnover of France Media International, the organization responsible for commercializing the programs of the public channels, was no more than about 4 million dollars.15

14


The appropriation of a genre Before the Brazilian telenovela took on its present form, national production passed through several stages. The history of the telenovela began in 1963, Until that time, fiction serials were dominated either by imported scenarios or by one-off adaptations of world-famous novels, of which radio and film versions already existed (the works of Dickens, Dumas, and Hugo, for example). In this phase, Brazilian television was much more interested in large-scale theatrical productions that, although not appealing to mass audiences, nevertheless gave a prestigious image to the stations concerned. The first phase in the history of the Brazilian telenovela began in July 1963 with the launching on TV Excelsior of "2.5499 Ocupado" ("2.5499 Engaged"), an adaptation of an Argentine scenario written by Dulce Santucci, formerly a radio producer. After one month, this first telenovela was broadcast daily, a practice unheard of until then. The first period, which began with the minor revolution provoked by "2.5499 Ocupado," was marked by the large volume of imports from Argentina, Mexico and Cuba, which at first were simply translated. These imported scenarios coexisted with adaptations of Brazilian radionovelas. The adaptation of these foreign scenarios to the taste of the Brazilian audience and the adaptation of the radionovela genre to television were the formative elements of the Brazilian school of telenovela writers. The success of TV Excelsior's "A Moqa que Veio de Longe" ("The Girl Who Came from Afar"), written in 1964 by Ivani Ribeiro from an Argentine scenario, demonstrated the ability of a novela to monopolize a mass audience for the first time. The novela thus became prime-time viewing (after 8:00 in the evening).16 The second period began with the enormous passion provoked by "O Direito de Nascer" ("The Right to Be Born") in 1965, repeating on television its success as a radio serial after the Second World War. The adaptation of the scenario for television was the object of a contract between an advertisingfirm,mandated by a cosmetics company, and TV Tupi. After this success, all television channels increased the number of novelas in their programming: from a minimum of three, they passed to a minimum of four. Even a channel like TV Record, which had until then resisted the genre, bowed to public demand. At the same time that the novela consolidated its programming position, Brazilian screenwriters

A Narrative Memory

15

affirmed their autonomy in relation to imported scenarios. Not every channel, however, followed the same policy: whereas TV Excelsior, recognized as the real pioneer of the Brazilian telenovela, favored a pompous, grandiose style set in a national context, TV Globo continued until 1969 with stories (supervised by Gloria Magadan) set in Morocco, Mexico, Spain, Japan or Russia, all based on an infallible formula combining "secret dungeons, prison cells, taverns, hospitals and secret passageways in lugubrious castles with a gallery of characters, the handsome, the ugly, the gallant, the brutish and the luckless . . . exotic atmospheres, dramatic cape and sword romances, mysterious characters."17 The third period began in November 1968 with the launching on TV Tupi of "Beto Rockfeller," the veritable archetype of the modern Brazilian telenovela. As the historian Ismael Fernandez wrote: The main change introduced by Beto Rockfeller, which was to be a model for the future telenovelas, was the transformation of dialogues and the free development of the story. Grandiloquent stock phrases which until then characterized the dialogues were replaced by expressions which were closer to spoken language and reflected our way of expressing ourselves. The playing of the actors, directed by Lima Duarte, followed this direction: they were more agile, more free, carried along by the emotions of the characters, avoiding rigid poses. The integration of text and image was perfect.18

Inspired by the novel of Braulio Pedroso, "Beto Rockfeller" remained on the screen for one year and radically changed the formula of the novela. Not only was the rhythm faster, the language and movements of the actors more agile, but "Beto Rockfeller" introduced another type of hero and dramatic spirit: no longer was it a Manichean question of Good and Evil, nor was the hero an avenger, the incarnation of Passion and Good, but a modest individual, a city dweller subject to mistakes, doubt, feelings of insecurity, and a need for recognition, using all his wits to climb the social scale. He was, according to critics, "close to the national character." For thefirsttime, typical protagonists of various social classes were represented, from the industrialist with his place in the sun to the mechanic's mate. All were involved in conflicts and social confrontations. *The world of the Brazilian urban middle classes, with their dramas and aspirations, was to invade the telenovelas."19

16


Its characteristics were therefore: less stilted dialogues, room for improvisation, greater use of outdoor locations, an increase in the number of shots and sequences, and thus a faster narrative. The style of the television play was replaced by a language much closer to that of films. It was for "Beto Rockfeller" that videotape was used for the first time. As Decio Pignatari, one of the most penetrating critics of Brazilian television, put it: Beto coincided with the big technological innovation of tape. Thanks to videotape, the television play changed into the telenovela. . . . Tape favours close-ups and medium shots. It requires a different camera framing and therefore different movements by actors. As the camera is, so to speak, centered on the face, it becomes necessary to define speech which ceases to be literary and becomes freer, more relaxed, closer to the spoken language. In Beto, the avant-garde work of Fernando Foro in Mobile on TV Tupi clearly appears. The latter program, which experimented with verbal and non-verbal communication, inspired Lima Duarte to impose an agile, direct rhythm on Beto, attracting for the first time the most sophisticated urban youth as well as a masculine audience.20

"Beto Rockfeller" coincides with the period of the so-called Brazilian miracle, which saw an average annual growth rate of 11 percent before brutally deflating toward 1973. This model of growth benefited only a middle class minority (20 percent), but installed the consumption patterns of this well-off group as a point of reference for the aspirations of the whole population. "Beto," thefirstnovela with a self-consciously modern feel, represented the coming together of a national genre and appealed to a mass national audience that cut across social categories, age groups, income differences, and professions. An eminently suitable formula had been discovered, for "the novela genre is cheap to produce and perfectly adapted to advertising needs."21 The figures speak for themselves: the price of an American series in Brazil oscillated between 8,000 and 12,000 dollars in 1984, and television rights for an average U.S. film ranged between 20,000 and 25,000 dollars for a single screening. The production of one hour of a telenovela also cost between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars. An episode of "Dallas" cost one million dollars. The production of an American soap opera episode cost about 60,000 dollars.22

A Narrative Memory

17

Although "Beto" was launched on TV Tupi, the lessons of its success were above all taken to heart by the channel's main rival, the Globo network. Notes 1. C. Monsivais, "Junto contigo le doy un aplauso al placer y al amor," Textos, n. 9-10 (special issue on popular culture in Mexico). Bi-monthly revue of the Fine-Arts Department of the Government of Jalisco State, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1975, p. 45. 2. P. Paranagua, Cinema na America Latino, Porto Alegre, L & PM Editores, 1984, p. 50. Also underlining the importance of melodrama, the Mexican film historian E. Garcia Riera spoke of the "infantilization of viewers through the cult of the mother and the refuge in an idealized vision of the provincial world" in Historia Documental del Cine Mexicano, Mexico City, Era, 1976, vol. 8. 3. M. Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, London, Picador (Pen Books), 1982 (translated by Helen R. Lane). 4. Between 1943 and 1955, the Radio Nacional broadcasted no less than 11,756 hours of radionovelas. In 1956, the radionovela constituted almost half of the programming (up to 14 novelas a day). (M.E. Bonavita, Historia da communicagao. Radio eTV no Brasil, Petropolis, Vozes, 1982.) 5. M.A. Filiage, "Velhas emoqoes que estao de volta," Jornal da Tarde, January 14, 1984. 6. In the 1950s, Colgate-Palmolive produced telenovelas in other Latin American countries (Venezuela, for instance). See O. Moravia "Analisis de tres telenovelas de Roman Chalbaud," Videoforwn, Caracas, June 6, 1980. 7. On the soap opera, see M. Cassata and T. Skill, Life on Daytime Television, Norwood, N.J., Ablex, 1983; M. Cantor and S. Pingree, The Soap Opera, Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage, 1985. 8. Variety, April 23, 1986, p. 129. 9. The new strategy set up by Televisa at the end of 1986 may change the problem. The Mexican conglomerate started to restructure and modernize its production (with 6 telenovelas a day, many of them shot abroad, notably in Spain and in Miami). Televisa also moved the headquarters of its international marketing company from Mexico City to Los Angeles. 10. Variety, March 25, 1987, p. 105. The popular impact of the genre has been used for educational purposes. Telenovelas produced by Televisa have promoted schooling among the marginal classes, or supported national campaigns for family planning. In 1977, the telenovela "Acompaname," "the contraceptive telenovela," produced by Televisa in association with family planning associations, was immensely successful. This telenovela inspired the

18


program in Hindi Hum Log ("We the People") which received one of the biggest prime time audiences ever in India in 1984. 11. 'Telenovela is Something Else," Variety, March 12, 1986, p. 142. 12. Besides the Spanish-speaking market, Televisa also has notched other sales, including 11 separate novelas and 3 miniseries to Italy, 5 novelas to Spain (broadcast in Spanish, Basque, and Catalan), and a package of 3 novelas and 1 miniseries to China (Variety, March 25, 1987, p. 105). 13. P. Vodnik, "Les novelas font pleurer la Pologne," Liberation, March 19, 1986, p. 45. 14. Variety, October 15, 1986, p. 48. 15. "La vie des me'dias," Le Figaro, April 28, 1986, p. 17. 16. On the history of the Brazilian telenovela, cf. Ismael Fernandes, Memoria da telenovela brasileira, Sao Paulo, Proposta Editorial, 1982. 17. 'Telenovelas: vinte anos de sucesso e un bom futuro (ainda!) pela frente," Jornal do Brasil, July 31, 1983. 18. I. Fernandes, op. cit, pp. 13-14. 19. C. Litewski, "Globo's Telenovelas," Brazilian Television in Context, London, BFI, 1982. 20. D. Pignatari in "A telenovela faz 20 anos," interviewed by V. Magyar and A.L. Petroni, Jornal da Tarde, July 23, 1983. 21. In 1983, one minute of advertising on the 8 P.M. novela cost the equivalent of 30,000 dollars, i.e. two and a half as much as for an American serial. 22. Video Age International, April 1984, p. 32. As a comparison, the production of one hour of the French serial "Chateauvallon" (a national answer to "Dallas") was estimated at 1.8 million francs, that is to say around 225,000 dollars at that time (beginning of 1985). One episode of "Dallas" would cost French television 210,000 francs. The competition which followed privatization led to an inflation of purchase prices. Therefore, in April 1987, when TF1, recently privatized, offered 280,000 francs for one episode of "Dallas," the owners of another private channel (Channel 5) raised the bidding up to 600,000 francs. The amount was out of proportion to the audience rate of this serial which was actually losing momentum (15 percent, compared to 30 percent at its peak).

2 The Formation of a National Television

Industry The construction of the Globo network Rede Globo celebrated its twentieth birthday in 1985. From 1950 to 1965, the history of Brazilian television unfolded without the Marinho family, who were nevertheless highly present in the press (the daily O Globo) since 1925 and in radio since 1944. It was another press baron, Assis Chateaubriand, head of a chain of newspapers and radio stations (Diarios e Emissoras Associadas), who launched thefirstBrazilian station (TV Difusora) in SSo Paulo in September 1950, followed by TV Tupi in Rio de Janeiro in January 1951. TV Paulista (SSo Paulo) appeared in December of the same year, closely followed by TV Record in Rio. TV Difusora was a pioneer not only in Brazil but in all of Latin America, for it preceded the launching of the first Mexican station (belonging to Telesistema Mexicano, a direct ancestor of the multimedia conglomerate Televisa) by eight days. More or less at the same time, the first Cuban television studios were inaugurated, the famous CMQ spoken of by Vargas Llosa. Whereas radio stations appeared simultaneously throughout all the regions of Brazil in the 1920s, television emerged only in S5o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two poles of the country's urban and industrial development, before spreading out over the entire national territory from 1970. At that time, these two cities accounted for 56 percent of Brazil's national product and 73 percent of its industry.1 The history of television in this giant federal state goes hand in glove with the history of national integration. Television was to play a leading role in federating the country. It was television, the last of the

20


communication technologies to arrive on the scene, that progressively put the idea of a network and of national integration on the agenda of commercial and state strategies. The idea of a national radio network did not surface until the 1980s. Up until then, radio remained a local or regional means of communication.2 The press was no different "Since the origins of the press, no major daily has imposed itself beyond its state. Even major papers like 0 Estado de Sao Paulo, 0 Jornal do Brasil, A Folha de Sao Paulo or O Globo, although distributed throughout the country, are addressed above all to a regional audience which represents 85 percent of their readers."3 The possibility of publishing different editions of the same paper in different states was explored from 1954 to 1964 by Ultima Hora, which became the biggest populist paper in Brazil and arch-supporter of Presidents Getulio Vargas and later Joao Goulart. The dismantling of this network following the 1964 coup d'&at put an end to the only successful attempt at a national daily. Before television, however, the weekly press (in particular, news and women's magazines), although virtually all published in S2o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, had already succeeded in reaching a national audience with material of national interest. For the idea of a network to acquire credibility, an institutional framework favorable to the development of a national communication system had to be established. The year 1962 marked a turning point in this respect. In the course of this year, the first Brazilian telecommunications code was promulgated, entrusting to the state the responsibility of installing and operating the telecommunications networks and confirming the private status of radio and television broadcasting. Two years, therefore, before the military coup of 1964, the staff headquarters of the armed forces (particularly the army and navy) applied pressure for this code to be passed as quickly as possible. One can guess the links that the military regime would install between the national communications network and objectives of national security. In 1965, Embratel, the Brazilian national telecommunications company, was created. Its motto was: "Communication is integration." To attain its objectives, the federal government began by taking over the Canadianfirmthat controlled 80 percent of the telephone companies operating in the country. Among the priority missions of Embratel were the implantation of a microwave system between the states of Brazil, the installation and maintenance of an earth station for satellite communication, and finally, the setting up of a national television network.

The Formation of a National Television Industry

21

(This plan anticipated the creation of at least one VHF television channel in each big city.) In February 1969, the earth station for satellite communication was inaugurated. By 1972, a system of shortwaves covering all the country was operational. Before that time, videotape had been introduced. Although available at the end of the 1950s, it was not used until 1967, enabling the first stage of the national linkup to be accomplished. The first color television transmission throughout the whole country took place in February 1972. By August 1974, Brazil had become the fourth biggest user of telecommunications channels on the international satellite system (INTELSAT), which it used for both internal and external communications. In May 1978, the last earth stations were inaugurated, enabling residents of towns in the Amazon basin to watch the World Football Cup in Argentina live.4 Since that time, the satellite transmission system has been perfected. In February 1985, Brazil obtained its own telecommunications satellite, bought from the consortium Hughes Aircraft-Spar Aerospace (Brasilsat 1), which enabled its operators to complete the simultaneous transmission of programs over the whole national territory. In March 1986, the second satellite of the Brasilsat series was put into orbit by the Ariane rocket. The aim of the Brasilsat series 1 and 2 is to supply telephone, television (twenty-four satellite channels allowing 12,000 simultaneous calls or the joint transmission of twenty-four television programs), and telex and data transmission services for the whole national territory (picked up wholly or partly by ten other Latin American countries). The deployment of these satellites has meant a considerable financial effort: 40 million dollars per satellite without counting launching costs. The total cost, including launching, ground control, and insurance, for Brasilsat 1 and 2 comes to 200 million dollars, equivalent to a quarter of the Brazilian debt interests for 1985. Brazil's efforts in the field of satellite technology are in keeping with its ambitions: in effect, it is planning to build its own telecommunications satellite in the near future. The network standard is today common to the five main Brazilian channels: Globo, Manchete, Bandeirantes, Brazilian Television System (Silvio Santos), and the educational public channels. According to one of the principal critics of Brazilian television, Artur de Tavola, "During the 1970s, the network strategy has overcome the formerly prevailing idea that markets were regional and resisted national programs."5

22


The irresistible rise of a multimedia group All candidates did not grasp the occasion offered by the state to operate these technological innovations with the same success. One group stands out from the others: Globo. The founder of the group, Roberto Marinho, received afranchisein December 1957 during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek, which he let lie dormant until 1962. It was then that the group began negotiations with the U.S. group Time-Life, which had previously offered its services to the daily 0 Estado de Sao Paulo and, above all, the chain Diarios e Emissoras Associadas. Both these prospective partners had declined the offer, which openly contravened an article of the Brazilian constitution prohibiting foreign firms from participating in the ownership, management and intellectual orientation of a company holding the franchise for a television channel.6 The presence of the Time-Life group in Brazil goes back to the 1950s, when, in alliance with the Civita family (which had fled the Mussolini regime before the war), it created the foundations of Abril, which was later to become one of the most powerful publishing groups in Brazil and is now also implanted in Mexico and Argentina. The direct intervention of President Castelo Branco was necessary to authorize the signature of the agreement between Globo and TimeLife in 1965. On top of an investment of 5 million dollars, Time-Life contributed its technical, administrative, and commercial know-how. In 1976, the technical director of Globo television confided: "During the first year, we worked in the mold given to us by the Americans. . . . Globo was inspired by an Indianapolis station, WFBM, and it was the engineer of this station who set up all the equipment. Here, we knew nothing."7 In 1969, Globo paid off its obligations to Time-Life and regained its independence. When Time-Life sold out its share, the representative for thefirm,Joe Wallach, nonetheless stayed on as one of the top executives in Rede Globo. At that time, Globo was already able to draw up a model for a national network with centralized production and distribution of programs throughout the country. The same year saw the transmission on a national scale of the first television news ("Jornal National"), the first program produced in Rio de Janeiro for all the country. The irresistibleriseof Globo, supported by Time-Life, went hand-inhand with the decline of other initiatives that more closely resembled the


23

entrepreneurial spirit to be found at the launching of Brazilian television. "It corresponded to what was happening in the rest of the production system, to the hegemony of interest linked to foreign capital and the internationalization of the domestic market."8 The Brazilian economy at the time was characterized by a double movement on the one hand, the reinforcement of state intervention, and on the other, the increasing penetration of foreign capital through the setting up of mixed companies with the state, associations with Brazilianfirms,or direct investment9 In the field of mass communications, Globo situates itself at the crossroads between the interests of the state and the interests of modern capitalism, directed toward external markets. The rise of Globo corresponds especially to the first decisive phase in the forming of television professionalism. Unlike its competitors (including the Assis Chateaubriand group, which at the height of its power controlled eighteen television channels, thirty-six radio stations and thirty-four newspapers), Globo studied the nature of the television market. It was the first to create research marketing and training departments. It was also the first to set up a department of international relations. At the beginning of 1981, TV Tupi, a symbol of Brazilian television's first steps, was definitively closed down. At that moment, Rede Globo was capturing between 50 and 70 percent of the audience, competed for by three other networks: Rede Bandeirantes, Sistema Brasileiro de Televisidn (SBT), and Rede Manchete. Rede Globo now comprises fifty stations that are either owned by it or affiliated to it. Its three competitors comprise twenty-six, twenty-two and nine stations, respectively. Two of these networks appeared after 1980: Manchete, linked to the Bloch press group, and SBT, belonging to the Silvio Santos group, owner of about fifty firms in various sectors of activity and which received its first broadcast franchise in 1975. The two latter groups shared out the remains of the Tupi network. The dispute that pitted the Tupi network against the government and led to the cancellation of its franchise clearly shows what model of television had the wind in its sails. As the Brazilian researcher Jose* Salomao Amorim expressed it "The search for a concentrated and efficient form of television explains the taking in hand by the government of the Tupi network's seven channels in July 1980, under pretext of irregular practices. Clearly, unlike Globo, Tupi was unable to conform to the model of modernity required of a television company in order to fulfill

24


the functions attributed to it by the strategy of capitalist development which was implemented from 1964 onwards."10 The importance of television in national life is largely vouched for by the increase in the number of television sets in Brazil: in 1965, there were only 3 million, but twenty years later, 22 million. It should be added that in a country where in 1970, 52 percent of households did not have television, watching television has long been a collective activity: "We divided ourselves into groups of 13 for each set in the towns, and in the countryside, small multitudes of 350 surrounded every set" 11 The impact of television in establishing a national advertising market is underlined by its growing share of advertising revenues: in 1962, it occupied scarcely 24 percent of advertising investment; in 1965, this figure increased to a third, and in 1976, it attained 52 percent. At the beginning of the 1980s, it had further increased to 60 percent (radio having to be content with 15 percent and the press with 18 percent). This figure is extremely high in comparison with the developed countries, where Japan is way out in front with 35 percent In 1983, in the United States, television accounted for 21.3 percent of the advertising market, in Canada, 17.4 percent and in France, 18 percent.12 Of the 850 million dollars spent annually on television by Brazilian advertisers, Globo received 60 percent.13 To put these figures into context, it should be added that even if Brazil occupies the sixth or seventh place (according to the year) in the world advertising market, in absolute terms it represents only 1.8 billion dollars annually compared to 55 billion dollars in the United States. Advertising billings represent 1 percent of the Brazilian GNP compared to 2.3 percent of the U.S. GNP. This reflects the wider social structure. "Our market is tiny and concentrated, embracing scarcely one Brazilian in three in the profile of consumption of goods and services celebrated by advertising."14 Globo is today the fourth biggest network in the world. In 1985, operating earnings totaled an estimated 120 million dollars on revenues of about 500 million dollars. It is now a full-fledged multimedia group, comprising a television network, the newspaper O Globo, a radio system, a publishing firm, an audiovisual recording company (records and videos), an electronicsfirm,an advertising production company (which, with 200 full-time workers and the most modern facilities, can produce in English at half the price of the United States), a show business promotion company, and a major art gallery.


25

Producing an average of fourteen hours of original programs a day (between 60 percent and 70 percent of its programming is nationally made), Globo has virtually all the country's acting talent under exclusive, long-term contract. This is similar to the situation of MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, Inc. in the United States film industry in the 1930s and 1940s. There is one important difference, however, between the two contexts: whereas in the United States the television industry built on a powerful film industry, in Brazil it developed apart from the film industry, which needed state support and a protectionist policy in order to emerge. Unlike the United States networks, which have been forced by the federal legislation to separate the functions of production and distribution, Globo has combined them from the beginning. As one Brazilian independent producer remarked: For a long time, the idea of the U.S. government was to protect film studios were crippled when commercial television appeared. Up until now, the film studios have fed the television channels. If we were to pass legislation of this type in Brazil, television channels would have to cease activity. For independent producers would have neither the know-how nor the equipment to maintain quality production in sufficient quantity. . . . In the Brazilian case, one remarks—this is the opinion of independent producers—a clear lack of competence in the channels competing with Globo as soon as it is a question of doing anything different. They limit themselves to imitating Globo in what is inimitable, namely the production of telenovelas.15

The Globo monopoly has thus from the start imposed itself as a vanguard model of horizontal and vertical integration. In the United States, it is only very recently—since deregulation—that the rigorous separation between broadcasters and producers has begun to become blurred, enabling the constitution of powerful integrated groups. While the three networks produced no more than three and a half hours a week and stations produced less than 10 percent of their programs in 1986, the shaking up of the entire structure of the audiovisual industries of the United States has brought about closer relations between production and broadcasting. Thus we have seen the buying up of television stations by producers to give themselves a broadcasting infrastructure comparable to that of the networks (MCA/Universal took over WOR, Fox took over Metromedia, Turner took over WTBS); concentrations linking producers

26


and syndication agents (Coca-Cola/Columbia with Embassy, Disney); the buying up of cinemas by production studios; the restructuring of the majors (begun toward the end of the 1960s) which now control the majority of outlets for audiovisual products (60 percent of network programs, 90 percent of movie theater distribution, 63 percent of video, and 69 percent of the syndication market).16 Obviously, Brazil has yet to carry out a major cinema/television integration, even if there are sporadic rumors concerning the privatization of the national film company Embrafilm and its possible takeover by the Globo group. A national symbol of the free enterprise spirit The dependence on the foreign program industry that still predominated at the beginning of the 1970s has today been completely reversed. According to the critic A. de Tavola in January 1980: "We finish the decade as one of the main centers of program production and exportation. We have overturned the tendency to import, and a high percentage of national programs are shown at a 'noble' time [i.e., prime-time viewing], as in any other developed country."17 But beyond its private enterprise status, Globo represents an idea of national identity in its modernist variant When the group bought up the Italian subsidiary of Tele-Monte Carlo in August 1985, a telegram from the Minister of Education of the Nova Republica government18 acclaimed the important event: "This courageous initiative is of the greatest importance for widening the influence of the national culture and constitutes a demonstration of the Brazilian spirit of enterprise."19 And on the occasion of 0 Globo's sixtieth anniversary, the Senate publicly paid homage to the group's founder: "The story of Roberto Marinho merges with the history of Brazil. . . . It is the Globo of the struggles against the dictatorial pruritus which day after day inflamed the executive power in the 1930s. It is the struggle against the transformation of Brazil into a communist country in 1963. It is the struggle against anarcho-syndicalism... S920 Going along with the military regime installed in 1964 in its objective of national integration, the Globo group made itself into the unofficial spokesperson for a regime for which the idea of sovereignty rivaled that of national security. The symbiosis of the Globo project with the political and economic model of the military regime was underlined on


27

numerous occasions by Globo's top executives. In a 1975 speech given to the Higher School of War, at the time the intellectual center of the politico-military system, the Director-General of Globo stated: "The aim of any television company is to do the best possible job for the largest possible audience. This rather simplistic point, however, involves all the needs and interests of the two basic areas most closely associated with television as a whole: the government and private industry. One of the fundamental tasks of the second National Development Plan is to expand the different segments of the consumer market. In this situation, a television network's job is to reach those potential segments of the market and to reveal in all its ramifications the arrival of modernity."21 The development of Globo accompanied that of the Brazilian "economic miracle," built up on an ephemeral annual growth rate of 10 percent but with a dramatic concentration of wealth. (In 1986, threequarters of the population earned the bare minimum wage, which covered no more than a sixth of the needs of a normal family.)22 Globo was at hand to communicate the idea of Brasil grande, which hid the political cost of the suppression of civil liberties and the cultural cost of censorship. From 1979, Globo followed the slow democratic opening of the military regime. Retracing these different periods during the twentieth anniversary of the Globo television network, a former Globo journalist wrote: "For Globo, everything occurred as if economic growth were really a victory for the entire Brazilian people. Praising the regime, explicitly in its news broadcasts and implicitly in the whole of its programming, Globo remained almost invariably uncritical, intoxicated perhaps by its own unquestionable success. Even when it was censored, when the regime fell into obscurantism, it never broke the 'blood pact'. . . . During the opening [after 1979], it moved progressively and discretely toward a position of 'independence' from the regime, while nevertheless proving its fidelity in crucial moments."23 On top of the image of the modern entrepreneur whose interests coincided with those of the nation, the halo of the philanthropist—the conserver of the national heritage, the promoter of education and the arts—came to be added. In 1977, the group created the Roberto Marinho Cultural Foundation. From this time, an experiment in tele-education at secondary school level, promoted by the Marinho Foundation, began through the TV Globo network. The experiment became generalized

28


throughout Brazil in July 1978 with the support of the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC). In March 1981, once again with the technical and financial support of the MEC and in coproduction with the University of Brasilia, a similar project at the elementary school level was inaugurated. On top of this can be added numerous other educational and cultural programs like Globo Ciencia (scientific popularization), Globo-Shell Profession (on the world of professions and techniques), both shown on TV Globo, and activities like the Ciranda de Livros (Ring-Around Books), a multimedia project supported by the Bank of Brazil and the pharmaceutical firm Hoechst, which supplies books to school libraries in the poorest regions and sponsors a reading promotion campaign for children (ages 7 to 12) on TV Globo.24 A veritable laboratory, the Foundation serves as a relay for opening up Globo's radio and television schedules to educational programs. As we have seen, it also serves as a relay for the financial contributions of other private companies that want to sponsor cultural innovation. The cultural foundation corresponds to a new conception of the relations between the private and public sectors. The educational project is in keeping with the desire to expand the internal market: in 1978, the Marinho Foundation was awardedfirstprize by the Brazilian Marketing Association. The acceptance speech makes explicit the complementarity between cultural patronage and the objectives of the firm: Profiting from the immense potential of television to contribute to the education of individuals is a universal theme. Today, throughout the whole world, educators, social science researchers and psychologists are debating the influence of television and its role in the development of children, as well as the possibilities of transforming it into an efficient cultural instrument. The solutions suggested are extremely varied. . . . In Brazil, we have inaugurated an imaginative formula that seems to constitute a solution unique in the world: uniting the efforts of educational television and private enterprise in order to place the technical and artistic resources of private television at the service of education, especially as our private television has attained a quality recognized the world over. One could ask why the Brazilian Marketing Association wanted to award first prize to an initiative which, whatever its merits, does not correspond at all to marketing activity. The Association defined its line of action in 1978 in the following terms: "more products for a greater number of Brazilians." It feels that the duty of each community is to contribute to the broadening of the internal market by creating new means which enable


29

an increasing share of our population to participate in the economic life of our country. Tele-education fits into this perspective and has made an important contribution to it.25

The authoritarian state, the market, and the aesthetics of the spectacle The measures of the military state during the period of dictatorship (1964-1979) designated the popular actor as an "internal enemy."26 One can gain an impression of the tension in the mass media at the time when one considers the conflict between the essentially repressive approach of the state and the need to give free rein to the forces of the market. In effect, the model of the citizen defined by the military authorities came into conflict with the concept of the citizen-consumer proposed by commercial television. In the latter concept, the "forbidden" people cease to be a potential enemy and become targets coveted and seduced. The military regime, which overthrew Joao Goulart on March 31, 1964, had the dubious honor of innovation in the field of communication with the famous Institutional Act no. 5 (better known as Al 5) promulgated in September 1969. For ten years, this act was the fundamental text of the authoritarian regime and inspired other Latin American military states. Based on the doctrine of national security, this piece of supraconstitutional legislation normalized the state of exception by eliminating parties and unions, controlling the press and quashing social and political rights. Every citizen became henceforth a suspect, a potential internal enemy in this decree-law, which also included a definition of national security and a specific mode of regulation of the media. Thus offences involving the press were transformed, like strikes, into a "political" crime. The act of "subversion" was defined as "causing moral offence to authority through a spirit of faction and social nonconformism."27 But what was really new in the situation created by the coup resided not so much in the new institutional framework given by Al 5 for public communication practices but in the methods of its application. Brazilian soldiers, trained in Western military schools, no doubt dreamed of continuing what had been partly carried out under the Vargas dictatorship twenty years previously. The idea of a super state

30


organism responsible for "information and propaganda," influenced by national-socialism and more generally by European fascism, is very much present in the doctrinaire texts by the generals of the "Brazilian Sorbonne," as the Higher School of War came to be known. This project could not but have practical consequences for strategies of media control—"this part of national psycho-social power," in the words of one of the regime's principal ideologues, General Golbery. Throughout the military dictatorship, hints were given by various governments of their desire to plan and institutionalize this direct control of the means of information and communication, to organize them explicitly in terms of coercive techniques. But even when censorship was at its most repressive, particularly under the Medici government, it cannot be said that this totalizing/totalitarian project of a "Ministry of Truth" was really concretized. This was one of the most unexpected (and paradoxically one of the least analyzed) aspects of the military regime, which on countless occasions had to depart from what should have guided its media policy, if it had followed its own doctrine. If this "failure" of a project for the total control of hearts and minds has been so little analyzed, it is because the dominant tendency has been to perceive modern authoritarian regimes in terms of older authoritarian regimes, particularly the fascist regimes of the Axis powers. The denunciation of the Brazilian authoritarianism merely reworked the semantic field of European fascism: in the militant denunciation of the "neo-fascist" regime, what exactly was the prefix "neo" supposed to clarify? During the time of the Nazi regime, Goebbels was able to close the frontiers and regiment propaganda and official culture. But times have changed. The rationality of psychological warfare which inspired Al 5 was contradicted by with the rationality of mass culture. For one, the citizen is the potential subversive; for the other, the potential consumer. Furthermore, the military dictatorship held sway at a time when the valuation of capital in the cultural industries and the internationalization of cultural commodities was much more developed than it was in the fascist times. What appeared possible at a pinch twenty-five years ago, namely closing down the "theatre of psychological operations," is no longer conceivable in a country that has entered into an accelerated phase of industrialization and where television plays a pioneering role in the conquest of new market frontiers.


31

But these differences, important as they are, should not overshadow another: the Brazilian authoritarian state was constructed on class alliances fundamentally different from those of 1940s fascism. The economic model of the dictatorship scarcely favored the construction of a vast basis of social support and hampered the project of politically mobilizing the masses. In effect, until the beginning of the 1970s, the model of capital accumulation favored essentially the 20 percent of the population who were able to profit from the extension of the domestic market. It was only later, when the "miracle" showed signs of running out of steam, as "internal demand" became saturated, that the military dictatorship tried to combine two policies, one oriented toward internal demand, the other toward exportation. The novelty of the Brazilian military regime was this: to assure a minimum of consensus for a political project that was forced to resort to coercion and police control, state power had to call in the commercial machinery of mass culture, the product of a society in which public opinion is a recognized actor in the public sphere. A mass culture linked to the idea of representative democracy and free access to the market economy of information, culture, and entertainment State power was thus forced to count on the mechanisms of societies in which "civil society" has a recognized, active institutional role, where "discipline-blockade" measures (Foucault) do not predominate. This is the paradox introduced into the traditional model of the authoritarian state by the modern phase of the market economy and its law of free flow of commodities and symbolic goods. Some analysts of authoritarianism in Latin American countries have clearly observed this "paradoxical ideological combination": an economic liberalism governed by international markets and a statism underlaid by the ideology of national security. As the Chilean Josd Joaquim Brunner put it: "The market enables the introduction of a system of regulation in the behavior of individuals without interfering in the 'disciplinization' of social relations and without changing the administrative production of meaning with its controlled space of meaning. Moreover, it helps legitimize the relations between private individuals at least in the sphere of exchange value, without tolerating the expression of collective demands in the sphere of use value. In this way, it efficiently depoliticizes a large section of social life."28 Unlike the fascism of the 1940s, which partly succeeded in creating a vast, active base of cross-class mobilization along the lines of partisan

32


politicization, modern authoritarianism is founded on depoliticization, the demobilization of the people. This fundamentally broke with the Latin American populisms that developed in the 1940s. The theoreticians of marketing and advertising have often argued that the increase in the advertising expenditures of a country is directly proportional to the health of its democracy and its standard of living. The military dictatorships have given the lie to this founding adage of free market ideology. The myth of communication is inseparable from the myth of the "Brazilian miracle" hawked around the world through substantial multinational promotional campaigns. The meteoric rise in the number of schools and faculties of communication (fifty-three in 1975: eleven state and forty-two private) went hand-in-hand with dismissals and repression in faculties of social science, philosophy, and education. To sum up, the experience of dictatorship in Brazil disrupts the axiom on the incompatibility between an authoritarian political project and the formation of hegemony. In the critical approach, it was long thought that openly disciplinary surveillance was irreconcilable with the creation of a collective will based on a painless consensus. The rules of the market, in the present phase of transnationalization, are subverting this axiom more than ever before. As Michel Foucault observed: "The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, 'political anatomy,* could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses, or institutions."29 In her study of literature and literary life under the dictatorship, Flora Sussekind definitively resumes the complexity of the modern authoritarian state's procedures of control and legitimation: Contrary to what is normally thought, censorship was neither the only, nor the most efficient strategy adopted by the military governments in the cultural field after 1964. In the same way one cannot describe these two decades as being monolithic on the political level, the cultural strategy did not remain identical. It has already been argued that this institutional flexibility was one of the main reasons for the military regime's hold on power during 20 years. . . . Up until 1968, there was, curiously enough, a certain liberty for committed cultural production. The strategy of the Castelo Branco government was, on the one hand, expansionist (over-development of the means of mass communication, especially television) and, on the other, almost liberal


33

in respect of anti-establishment art and left-wing intellectuals, as soon as their possible links with the popular strata were cut off. It was a question of limiting the field of action of intellectuals to a "confined space." At the same time, there was an extremely efficient counter-attack by the government: television for the masses. And along with the expansion of television networks granted by the state came the certitude of effective social control in every house with a television set. And the development of an aesthetic rapidly assimilated by popular taste: the spectacle. It was a well-adjusted shot, the strategy of the military government in its first years. Well-adjusted and silent: intellectuals were allowed to brandish denunciations and protests. They thought they were addressing the working and peasant masses. But their possible audience had been stolen by television.30

In the growth of professionalism and internationalization of production, this aesthetics of the spectacle has become the paragon of Brazilian modernity. Notes 1. S. Caparelli, Televisao e capitalismo no Brasil, Porto Alegre, L & PM Editores, 1982. 2. The decentralized nature of the development of radio is attested by the following data: in 1960, out of 735 stations, only 215 were situated in capitals; in 1971, out of 1,008, only 277 were in big cities (Servicp de estadistica de Educaqao e Cultura (SEEC), Ministerio de Educaqao e Cultura). 3. A. de Seguin, Brisil. Lapresse (1930-1983), Paris, L'Harmattan, 1986. 4. In passing, it is interesting to observe the mainspring role played by sport (in particular, football) in the extension of communication technologies. The importance of football in Brazil (and throughout Latin America) reflects this role. In Chile, where initiatives from the universities preceded those of the state, the television network was extended to cover the whole country on the occasion of the World Cup in Santiago in 1962. Color was introduced into Argentine television during the World Cup of 1978. In Brazil, the national network was inaugurated with great pomp and ceremony during the World Cup of 1970, played in Mexico and won by Brazil. 5. A. de Tavola, "Os anos 70, O grande salto para o sucesso," Manchete, January 12, 1980. 6. As part of its strategy of internationalization, Time-Life penetrated the television systems of Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil during the 1960s. In partnership with CBS, it managed to control 20 percent of the shares of the important television channels in Caracas and Buenos Aires. In Venezuela, it teamed up with one of the biggest national economic groups, while in Buenos

34


Aires, it associated itself with Goar Mestre, former owner of Cuban television before the revolution. Goar Mestre also owned a television channel in Peru. 7. G. Priolli, "Vinte velinhas para a Rede Globo," Lua Nova (CEDEC), vol. 1, no. 4, January-March 1985, p. 48. 8. S. Caparelli, Televisao e capitalismo no Brasil, op. cit., p. 30. 9. In 1972, the respective proportions of the three types of enterprise dominating the Brazilian economy were as follows (taking into account immediatedly realizable capital): state enterprises 35.4 percent, national private sector 24.2 percent, multinationals 40.4 percent. However, at the level of turnover, the share of the state enterprises drops to 20.7 percent and that of the multinationals rises to 55.3 percent. (C. Barros, "Le probleme de Te'tatisation et de la de'se'tatisation de Te'conomie au Br&il," fitudes Brisiliennes, Paris, August 1977, p. 41). 10. J.S. Amorim, Televisidn, crisis econdmica y cambio politico en Brasil," Communicacidn y Cultura, no. 13, March 1985, Mexico City, p. 84. Among the candidates for the takeover of the Tupi network was the Group Abril, which controls half of magazines and daily publications in Brazil. Its direct competitor, the Group Bloch, was given preference. 11. "A grande mania nacional," Veja, Sept. 10, 1975, p. 70. 12. Figures for 1983 in Mediast The World Media Today, Paris, 1985. Ibidem for Japan. For France, IREP, Le marchi public it air e franc ais 1985'1986. 13. T V Globo Is Living up to its Name," Business Week, Sept 16, 1985, p. 42. The exact figures for the turnover of Globo are difficult to obtain and are necessarily approximative. 14. J. Beting, "O s&imo mercado," O Globo, May 27, 1982. 15. A.M. Lage, "O espaco da independencia," Senhor, no. 230, August 1985, p. 71. 16. Information given by the "audiovisual correspondents" of the French embassy in the United States, Mr. Perrin de Brichambaut and Mr. Zerbib, during the symposium organized in Paris by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the 17th and 18th of November, 1986. 17. A. de Tavola, "Os anos 70. O grande salto para o sucesso," Manchete, January 12, 1980. 18. The "Nova Republica" is the regime which began with the election of a civilian, Tancredo Neves, to the presidency in March 1985. Neves died on the eve of his inauguration and was replaced by the vice-president, Jose Sarney. 19. O Globo, August 13, 1985. 20. O Globo, August 7, 1985. 21. Mercado Global, Sept. 15, 1975, cited by F. Jordao, T V Globo Rules the Brazilian Skies" in TV Globo, Brazilian Television in Context, op. cit, p. 6.


35

22. M. Raffoul, "Au Br£sil, trente-deux millions dans la rue," Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, January 1986. 23. G. Priolli, "Vinte velinhas para a Rede Globo," op. cit, p. 50. 24. The Marinho Foundation publishes a monthly bulletin on its activities which include folklore studies and the restoration of monuments. 25. Quoted in A. Mattelart and H. Schmucler, Communication and Information Technologies: Freedom of Choice for Latin America? Norwood, N.J., Ablex, 1985, p. 51. 26. During the military regime, the following marshals and generals served as president: Castelo Branco (1964-1967), Costa e Silva (1967-1969), a military junta (1969-1970), Garrastazu Medici (1970-1974), Geisel (19741978), Figueiredo (1978-1985). The most repressive period was that of Medici. The phase of "liberalization" began at the end of 1978, leading to the election of a civilian president in 1985. 27. See A. and M. Mattelart, De V usage des midias en temps de crise, Paris, Editions Alain Moreau, 1979, in particular pages 217-89 dealing with the genesis of ideologies of national security. 28. J.J. Brunner, "La cultura politica del autoritarismo," Communicaqao &. Politica, Rio de Janeiro, vol 2, no. 1-2, March-June 1984. 29. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, London, Penguin Books, 1977, p. 221. 30. F. Sussekind, Literatura e vida literaria, Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar Editor, 1985, pp. 13-14.


3

The Secrets of Production Audience management Brazilian television in the 1980s is one of the most competitive in the world. Those seeking to explain the success of Globo come up with two characteristics of its professionalism: the Globo padrao ("the Globo pattern"), that is to say, its model of quality and its ability to analyze the audience market. IBOPE (Brazilian Institute of Studies of Public Opinion and Statistics), comparable to Nielsen in the United States, rates television production in Brazil to such an extent that screenwriters and programs are evaluated in terms of their IBOPE ratings.1 The neologism "Ibopian" has been coined to describe those authors and programs that best meet the statistical demands of the Institute. In press interviews, screenwriters measure themselves in terms of their IBOPE rating for a given hourly slot. For example, Janete Clair, an author of confirmed popularity, speaking of one of her novelas "Eu Prometo" ("I promise"), slotted at 10 in the evening, said: "I'm aware of not obtaining the 80 IBOPE points achieved with the novela at 8 in the evening. Before, when I failed to attain this magic number, I considered that the novela had not caught on. Now, in this unrewarding slot, I'm satisfied with 40 points. To pretend to more is illusory."2 Television channels explain their confidence in Ivani Ribeiro by saying: "Ivani Ribeiro always has a sure IBOPE."* The tyranny that IBOPE exercises over programming is expressed by rights of life or death over any one program. A novela which fails to obtain a satisfactory IBOPE rating after a certain number of episodes

38


will be prematurely terminated, whereas a novela that maintains a high rating will see its life span increased. Globo was the first television channel to give cardinal importance to IBOPE. On top of attentively following the IBOPE ratings, Globo created its own research and analysis department. Adopting a policy of program planning and systematization as well as listening to audience feedback (a policy begun by Radio Nacional, which was the most popular radio station in the 1940s and 1950s), Globo has continually based its strategies on an analysis of the different classes and social groups. In thefirstphase, at the end of the 1960s, Globo copied a successful radio formula by adopting what Muniz Sodr£, a Brazilian media sociologist, describes as "an aesthetic of the grotesque." This involved a singular symbolic alliance between television production and poor, marginal groups in Rio and Sao Paulo.4 "It was a period marked by intensive migration, rural exodus and the illusion of a better life in the cities. Belts of misery formed around the metropolises. And these strata that marketing specialists situated as classes C and D were transformed into targets for the television networks."5 At the time, the most successful programs were variety shows featuring the big popular stars or presenters like Chacrinha the clown, Dercy Goncalves, Flavio Cavalcanti, etc., bought up by channels for enormous sums. Once the audience of these social categories had been fixed, Globo then gave preference to social categories A and B, those classes participating in the consumer market. Globo thus sought to affirm its superiority by acquiring the latest technology before its rivals. At the time, it was the only network to possess an Editec, an electronic editing machine that enabled it to perfect its famous montage technique, recognized as the "Globo pattern." Globo has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, as the present importance of its department of television engineering bears witness. With this professionalization, which unceasingly renews its technical quality, Globo is aiming beyond the well-off and middle classes of Brazil at the conquest of the international market. As Maria Elvira Bonavita, a historian of Brazilian radio and television, noted: The creation of various departments, like those of research, marketing and training, show the concern for technical rationality and the desire to widen the

The Secrets of Production

39

audience. From this time, the leitmotiv of "giving the public what they want and what they deserve" and empiricism were to be abandoned. The new formula consisted in creating new needs and to impose new models, principally through technical advances and the "packaging" of programs. Deluxe packaging and the technical pattern also foreshadowed the desire for exportation. Planning for this goal can be detected from the end of 1972 when Globo surprised everyone with new images in total harmonization with its export strategy, veritable visiting cards for Brazilian productions. The price of advertising space, especially in prime time, rose to make the quality of new products even more obvious and, at the same time, compensated for the loss of Chacrinha (the clown) and other vestiges of the former programming.6

For the executives of Globo, the Globo model is above all "an aesthetic problem, a problem of image." "Globo has attained an unmatched image of quality at the international level for its television. . . . Our obsession for the clarity of the image had led us to invest in depth in this aspect of technical quality: the aesthetic quality of television has become a part of our mentality."7 The law of IBOPE is the law of competition. This law governs the incessantfluctuationsand reorganizations of the programming schedule. It modifies the balance between genres and formats within the schedule and presides over the continual search for both points of equilibrium and for innovation. It is very interesting, in this perspective, to observe that an attempt has been made lately to fix the characteristics of various novelas to different late-afternoon and evening slots, particularly the novelas at 7, 8, and 10 in the evening. This schedule seems to have established relatively intangible categories: the novela at 7 is light, closer to comedy; at 8, more dramatic, with greater reference to everyday life; whereas at 10, it is addressed to a more adult public, with more controversial themes or a more cultural profile. Doc Comparato, one of the chief screenwriters for Globo at the moment, shows how the different styles of novela embrace the rhythms of everyday life and submit to the dividing up of activities within the domestic universe: "The novela at 6 is more for a domestic audience, women and children. At 7, the audience includes people who have just come home from work so the novela is more radio-like than visual; lighter so that people can attend to their affairs. At 8, it's drama, the dramatic novela?* This symmetry breaks down when competitors slot attractive programs into these times, especially prime time between 8 and 9. Competition can come either from Brazilian novelas written by popular authors

40


and performed by big television stars or from international series. This was the case in August 1985, when Sistema Brasileiro de Television (SBT) programmed "The Thorn Birds" at 9:20.9 Recognizing that it had made a "strategic error" by not buying this series when Warner had proposed it, Globo retaliated by changing the time of "Roque Santeiro," a novela whose first episodes had been stunningly successful. The newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo described this television war thus: "SBT is celebrating its fourth anniversary lavishly, attaining extraordinary audience ratings for a mid-week, late-night spot and forcing the Globo network to counter-attack by transgressing the rigorous punctuality its programming has accustomed us to. The cause of this shake-up: the hit U.S. miniseries "Passaros Feridos" ("The Thorn Birds") launched on SBT last Monday and which in Sao Paulo attracted twice as many viewers as its rival Globo for the 10 o'clock slot."10 The star novela of Globo—which was to finish in February 1986 with a triumphant IBOPE rating throughout its 209 episodes (100 percent for the last episodes)—normally finished at 9:55. Globo then delayed its starting time so as to handicap the beginning of its rival's series, so much so that in the television guides, one read, " *Passaros Feridos,' anticipated time 9:20, subject to alteration!" The Globo network obtains the majority of national advertising revenues, concentrates the majority of talent and production resources and captures an average of 75 percent of the audience: nevertheless, the monopoly is always naked. It is often thought that the novela is the only genre of Brazilian television production. Although the novela is the centerpiece of prime-time programming, other television formats have been created for the same slot on the Globo network. The law of competition also stimulated a policy of innovation. Thus, various forms of seriados were produced: police stories in news-report style ("Casos Especiais"); miniseries adapted from literary works ("Lampiao e Maria Bonita," adapted from the myth of the bandit of the Nordeste; "O Tempo e o Vento," from the novel of Erico Verissimo, etc.); or series like "Malu Mulher" ("Malu Woman") with a maximum of fifty self-contained episodes. Miniseries adapted from novels and seriados like "Malu Mulher" are not, on the international market, a genre specific to Brazilian television. But they have been very successful in foreign countries and have won numerous prizes: in this respect, "Malu Mulher" is a paradigmatic case. By 1983, this series, which began on Globo in 1979, had already been shown in twenty-eight


41

countries. Its feminist theme gave rise to lively discussion as much in Sweden as in Cuba, Great Britain, or the Netherlands. The history of television production and programming in Brazil shows that the development of the novela is compatible with the search for other formulas, even if the novela has always been the vital axis of the industry. For the 10 o'clock slot, which has seen the most fluctuation, the novela was begun in 1969, suspended in 1979, and reintroduced in 1983. On this occasion, the executive officers of Globo clearly explained the reasons behind its success:first,the novela costs less to produce than a series; second, it has greater export potential; third, it gives work over a longer period to the reserve army of actors, directors and production staff; and finally, it is less subject to censorship than seriados.11 An open work? "Intensive marketing has become a major driving force behind the novelas. The artistic heights of the genre were attained in the mid 1970s. Today, novelas are far from being worthless from the artistic point of view, but they no longer have the artistic intensity of the previous decade. They've experienced a shift to an industry-oriented process. They are well-produced but tend to keep trotting out the same key ingredients in the recipe for viewer satisfaction. Admittedly, the author remains a creator but is above all responsible for a product which cannot ignore the market universe it is addressed to."12 These words of the critic Arthur de Tavola in 1983 echo those of Daniel Filho, a producer and director of novelas since the rise of television in Brazil: "I feel sorry for those beginning in television now. A young person who receives the responsibility to direct a telenovela can no longer afford to make a mistake. The commercial engineering of such a program leaves no margin of error for the author, the director, or anyone. When we began, we regarded all of that as a game, with nevertheless an enormous sense of responsibility and the desire to succeed. But we were allowed to make mistakes and none reproached us for them. Thus, we were able to experiment and through successes and failures, we learned our trade."13 The production of a telenovela, although increasingly industrialized, nevertheless manifests a dialectic between the hegemonic industrial rationality and a mode of production of the script which has remained somewhat artisanal.

42


An author is commissioned to write a novela for a given hourly slot. Such a commission means, for a novela that is favorably received, in other words, lasts at least six months on the screen, with one episode a day five days a week, that authors do nothing else during this time. They first write a batch of thirty or forty episodes that enable the television network to test the characters and the theme. If all goes well, authors must deliver one episode a day. Once the text has left the author's hands, it is delivered to the producer, the stage designer, and the director. Only the latter and the main actors get to see the script, jealously guarded to avoid any leaking of the intrigue. The sound department receives sufficient indications for it to find suitable musical accompaniment, which is a major factor in the novela's success (a novela helps sell an average of 200,000 records in Brazil, and between 600,000 and 1 million on the international market).14 The constraints of writing a novela, which force the author to follow an intense work rhythm of absolute regularity, are confirmed by all those who have undergone the experience. According to Aguinaldo Silva, author of 111 of the 209 episodes of "Roque Santeiro": "For eight months, you can't do anything else. You can't think of anything else. You can't go out to eat with your friends, nor go dancing. Nor even fall sick. Falling sick is the big fear of the author. When you can't write a chapter one day, you've got to write two the next. Writing a novela forces you to have an absolutely regular daily work schedule. I get up early in the morning and write until lunch. Then I have a siesta for one hour before going back to work. I write every day, seven hours a day. It's a restricting job. But I've always worked hard. After 'Roque Santeiro,' I think I'll rest for a year".15 Increasingly accompanied by a co-author, the author also receives the help of one or two apprentice scriptwriters and a documentalist who attends to the internal coherence of the universe represented (language, clothing, housing, etc.). This is particularly important for the impression of reality, on which the novela*s credibility is based.16 Various forms of feedback intervene in the production of a text, and it is here, no doubt, that this form of dramatic creation is unique. The first type of feedback is given by opinion poll institutes, particularly the analysis and research division of Globo. Further, groups of viewers are regularly invited to express their opinion on scripts and characters. These measurements of public reaction, some of which are extremely


43

sophisticated, are accompanied by an analysis of the large volume of letters addressed to the channel and the author. The latter loops the loop with his or her own system of feedback, a process that is much more improvised, personal, and everyday. Once again according to Aguinaldo Silva: "My cleaning woman returns home every evening to the favela. Everyday, she tells me the reactions of people from her neighborhood and on the bus to the previous evening's episode. Yesterday, for example, they told her to tell me not to banish Roque Santeiro from the town. . . ."17 The originality of this mode of writing consists, therefore, in the fact that authors produce their text while seeing it on the screen and can incorporate the reactions of the public, divert it, and correct it. In the time-space particular to the telenovela, authors count on a certain length of time to develop their characters, while the creativity of actors can lead them to modify certain characters in terms of new elements brought out by the actors' performance. This is achieved with one reservation, however: the genre is supremely codified. Almost invariably, the protagonists meet in the thirtieth episode and spend the 120 others resolving the obstacles to true love. . . . 18 This characteristic of the novela deserves, however, more attention: the public can influence the dramatic development to a certain extent. Its reactions modify the situations, characters, and the narrative thread. It is Dias Gomes who has best defined this particularity of the novela as an "open work," "that is, a work which can be altered during its realization, something which even the theatre doesn't allow. What is likely to provoke changes? Everything. From the reactions of the public to an accident to the author or one of the actors." Who, then, transmits the reactions of the public? Explains Dias Gomes: Nobody. We feel it. I sense, for example, the reactions of the people I mix with. Even in spite of myself, what they say gets into my skin, into my head. Fm a sensitive person. Fm an artist. And as I don't live in an ivory tower, I hear the opinions of various types of people. And then I get letters from people of all social classes. Generally, they're written by students or middle-class people and the popular classes. Intellectuals don't write letters. So I consider that I get information from all social classes and the repercussions and interpretations of my work have an effect on me. When I see an actor playing a role well, I get excited and feel able to deepen it. The contrary can also occur. In reality, the acting has more influence than the reactions of the

44


audience. Because that's objective, the telenovela is like a sort of laboratory where you carry out an experiment and see the result immediately.19

The novela is also open as to the length of each episode. Normally forty minutes, it is sometimes five minutes longer or two or three minutes shorter for reasons of narrative development. This relative flexibility has created export problems, and to adapt to foreign standards, Globo has had to normalize episodes for export.20 Censorship and the power of the text The multiple interactions that define the novela as a process of communication contrast with what we could call the imperative of the text: everything is timed to the last minute and written down. The spirit of planning of the industry here intertwines with the censorship constraints derived from recent history. On every script given back to directors, producers, and actors, the following words continue tofigure:"The cuts indicated in this script by the Censorship of Public Entertainment Division of the Federal Police Department must berigorouslyrespected." The political liberalization has not changed the situation, but a commission (which includes formerly censored artists and authors) has been set up. Two famous cases illustrate this history of censorship. In these two extreme cases, where the novela was to be severely mutilated by the censors, Globo preferred not to program it, although thirty-odd episodes had already been produced. These were "Roque Santeiro" by Dias Gomes, inspired by a popular folktale (cordel) from the Nordeste region, and "Despedida de Casado" by Walter George Durst.21 The case of "Roque Santeiro" is of special interest because, censored and removed from the screen in June 1975, it reappeared in a triumphal new version during the 1985-1986 season, under the New Republic. The author, Dias Gomes, who adapted the novela from a play he had written in 1965, explains its censorship in 1975: "The novela was programmed at 8. Thefirstprohibition concerned the time. Globo demanded that the novela be freed for the 10 o'clock slot. But the censorship office informed us that there would have to be numerous cuts. As we didn't know where the cuts would be, we insisted so as to know where the problem was. We were informed that only ten minutes were left in the first episode,fifteenminutes in the second, and so on. We charged back by insisting that we wanted to show it, even cut The censorship office


45

replied that it would have to be re-examined with a view to further cuts. Until we were advised not to insist anymore. . . . The exact terms of the prohibition: an offense against moral standards, public order, and good behavior."22 Globo thus lost, at the time, over one and a half million cruzeiros: the sum invested in the production of the first 31 episodes of a planned 148 episodes, expensive superproduction, for which forty actors and thirty-three technicians had already been mobilized. When the novela was allowed to go ahead in 1985, a new version was shot, written by Dias Gomes and Aguinaldo Silva, who related it more explicitly to the present situation. "Roque Santeiro" supplies a microcosm of Brazil today by showing a town which lives around a myth.23 "Ten years ago, the novela questioned the miracle of a false saint, and now it questions a miracle that never existed. In one way or another, it provokes discussion in a country which needs to free herself from her myths, like football, the Carnival, Formula One and the national lottery."24 Outside the pressures of political censorship—"What has always been prohibited on television has been the questioning of the Brazilian reality" (Dias Gomes)—there has been and continues to exist an obsession for moral censorship, directed against pornography, eroticism, sexual liberation and police violence, which was censored in the police series "Casos Especiais" and "Caso verdade."25 One of the most famous cases remains that of "Bandidos da Falange," whose twenty episodes relate the formation of a clandestine criminal organization in Rio de Janeiro prisons. In a unique measure, Globo was forced to record all the episodes in advance for the censorship division. The cuts demanded corresponded to the following specifications: an exchange of shots between the bandits and the police was allowed, but there were to be no deaths on either side. Second, dialogues and scenes involving prostitutes were to be suppressed.26 The author of a censored caso verdade, "Maria Testemunha" ("Maria Testifies") explains the double standard applied in the censorship of police series: "It's a subtle form of political censorship. In Brazil, you can't talk about killings by the police. But the censorship office gives the green light to U.S. series, which use violence as an attractive ingredient. ["Maria Testemunha"] did not stimulate violence: on the contrary."27 The impact of censorship on the production process is clarified by screenwriter Doc Comparato: "Authors have, in fact, more power than directors. How has that come about? Because in fact the dictatorship

46


imposed it. During the dictatorship, every text had to be sent to Brasilia and the censor decided what could stay and what had to be suppressed. After that, nobody had the right to change anything. Thus, the political process had a direct incidence on the process of creation and production."^ Censorship is one of the constraints that authors have learned to work with. It is a constraint against which they have invented diversion strategies like the "piranha" strategy described by Dias Gomes: "When you want to cross a river with a drove of catde, you sacrifice a cow. While the piranhas are devouring it, you cross without mishap. The idea is to concoct an episode which attracts the total attention of the censor. Censorship is a part of my professional life. It's like a woman I live with grudgingly."29 What could be more normal than a military dictatorship using its power of censorship? What could be more normal than these countertactics of ruse and circumvention? A repressive order goes necessarily hand in hand with the interiorization of new norms of the "sayable," of what can be said and what must remain unsaid. Self-censorship has undoubtedly been the most widespread form of censorship in the everyday practice of television writing. Important as it is, this aspect is, however, difficult to document because it is indistinguishable from a normalized real. If the censorship practiced by the federal authorities is easy enough to illustrate—it must give reasons and argue its grounds—the censorship practiced by Globo is almost impossible to detect, except in cases of scandal. One of the exceptional cases occurred in 1979 with the telenovela "Os Gigantes," whose love theme was influenced by Frangois Truffaut's "Jules et Jim." The writer, Lauro Cesar Muniz, situated the story, concerning the struggle between local firms and a multinational milk firm, in the interior, breaking with the usual rule of portraying urban zones. The federal censorship focused, however, on the romantic intrigue of a woman living with two men. On several occasions, the preservation of moral order required cuts to be made. But after a hundred episodes, the crucial question—which eventually forced the author to surrender—was revealed to be other than one of sexual morality. The dual pressure of advertisers and of Globo to dissuade Muniz from continuing to portray the multinational in an unfavorable light led to his dismissal. According to Muniz, who had written five of his nine novelas during the eight years spent with Globo, it was the fact that


47

he talked of these pressures in a magazine interview that provoked the immediate breaking of his contract.30 The medium is the merchandise Another constraint, this time outside the universe of political references, is that of merchandising. This consists of inserting commercial messages into the text and the image (dialogues, characters, environments), transforming everythingfillingthe space of a particular episode into a medium in itself. "Forced, so to speak, to insert commercial messages in their text, by transforming their characters into camouflaged sandwichmen (who consume such and such a brand of beer or drink, smoke such and such a brand of cigarettes, buy in this shop, ride this bicycle, pass their honeymoon on the liner of such and such a travel agency), authors are converted into subliminal advertising copywriters."31 This practice goes back to thefirstradionovela sponsored by Colgate. In Brazil, merchandising has been able to develop freely, unlike in the United States, where growing public resistance in the form of consumers' associations has frustrated its proliferation. In the beginning, in Brazil, this practice was delivered over to the wolves of clandestine advertising and considered on a par with kickbacks to authors, actors, and technicians before being rigorously codified by the television authorities who, while defining its limits, nevertheless gave it a certain legitimacy. As an executive of Globo affirmed: "We set up a police framework, because if we don't exercise control, merchandising runs the risk of being infiltrated by an inferior grade of people."32 Codification has not led to transparency. In effect, merchandising remains highly secret Although the prices of conventional advertising spots are public knowledge, the same cannot be said about the establishment of tariffs for merchandising. To eliminate the resistance of actors, directors, camera operators, and other members of the production team, payoffs are arranged for all those participating in the scene in which the product appears. Globo has become a master in the art of merchandising by creating its own merchandising agency, Apoio, where thirty staff members devote themselves daily to arranging the possibility of subtly inserting products into the script on the basis of interaction studies. Most of the information made public by the press on merchandising tariffs shows that they are 40 percent dearer than the

48


traditional advertising spot. It should, however, be added that the price varies enormously from brand to brand: a litde-known brand can pay up tofivetimes as much as an already established one. Whereas advertising isrigorouslyregulated (fifteen minutes an hour), no legislation exists to curb merchandising. Questioned about this practice, authors of novelas and series adopt three types of attitude that designate as many forms of behavior. The majority accept it as a constraint that stems from the very definition of the genre and from its insertion into the marketplace: the commercial environment of the novela does no more than reproduce the daily immersion of the public in the consumer society. As Janete Clair put it: "I find merchandising, such as it exists at the moment, practicable and natural. The novela depicts everyday situations. If a character cooks in a scene and we see the condiment he or she uses, it's fair that someone should pay for that."33 Commentaries in this direction are accompanied at the most by recommendations for prudence. The most authoritative argument remains that merchandising represents part of the financial backing for the production. The second position emphasizes that, although merchandising promotes consumer goods, it can also promote "community services": it can be used, for example, to help people correctly address a letter or change their hygiene habits. It can also serve ecological ends, like the preservation of the environment, or publicize institutions in the public interest. The third argument is rarer, exceptional even. In the history of novelas, very few authors have refused the practice of merchandising. One of these is Carlos Eduardo Novaes, director of Chega Mais (1980). Interviewed after having resisted merchandising in one of his novelas, Novaes described its effects: "One of the reasons why the quality of novelas has declined is the excessive merchandising. My novela hasn't got any. I resisted because I would have had to make concessions that implied changing the characters."34 It had been suggested that the owner of a fumigation company be transformed into a photographer because Apoio had a contract with a camera firm. Another suggestion was that a dog be introduced because a pet food manufacturer also had a contract. Novaes refused to comply. But Globo placed certain products on billboards integrated into the studio decors of the novela in question (depriving the author of royalties). Needless to say, this was Novaes' first and only novela for Globo.


49

Merchandising affects all segments of programming, except for the news and the national women's program, "TV Mulher" ("Women on TV"). An important firm like Brahma, the manufacturer of beer and carbonated drinks, has an exclusive contract with Globo that forces the latter to arrange appearances of its products in programs ranging from fiction to variety shows and comedies.35 The internationalization of novelas could amplify the practice of merchandising. Limited until recently to products on the domestic market, it could be extended through an awakening of interest by foreign firms anticipating the screening of Brazilian programs in their own countries. It was this understanding that led the Italian publishing group, Mondadori, to negotiate with Apoio. Globo's competitors also make use of merchandising. Sometimes, as much for ethical as commercial reasons, they innovate by applying concepts rather than products to merchandising (hygiene, for example: no brand name in particular is shown and all soap companies are billed). The Bandeirantes channel is fond of this type of merchandising. It also pretends to carry out "merchandising from the interior to the exterior," that is, creating consumer products through its programs and placing them on the market afterwards, selling the image of a product before it has left the factory. This reminds us of the debates in the United States in 1985 over the networks' deregulation of children's programs. Contrary to what may be thought, deregulation in the United States does not merely affect macrosystems of communication. It has a direct impact on the regulatory bodies set up to protect programming reserved for a uniquely vulnerable class of young consumers and has destabilized the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Parents' and television users' associations were disturbed by the fact that children's TV shows were becoming little more than feature-length commercials for new lines of toys. The heroes no longer are the brainchildren of cartoonists but overwhelmingly tend to be toys that firms have just launched, or will soon launch, on the market. Selling a program and a toy as a package is new. Toys are no longer spin-offs from television series or cartoons, as the Walt Disney product licensing had imagined them, but a synchronous fusion of the market and the television program, a practice hitherto prohibited by the law. Associations for the defense of children's television complained to the FCC, one of whose members declared publicly that "If the Commission blesses this practice by inaction, the vast majority of children's programming eventually will

50


be funded this way." The big toy manufacturers (such as Mattel and General Mills) quickly watered at the mouth. As an executive of General Mills argued: "Until recently, we would come out with a product, put on TV commercials, and kids would ask for the product after seeing the commercials. Now, instead of being confined to a thirty-second spot, our division weaves product-based characters, such as Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake, into half-hour animated programs. The payoff is much bigger."36 The complaints were dismissed. In spite of dissenting voices, the FCC eliminated in 1983 the programming regulations recommending the clear separation and identification of advertising. The Christmas season, a peak sales period for the toy industry, was chosen for the deregulation of children's programs. This example of the microprocess of deregulation is an image of what occurs in the very structure of the cultural industries. In the same way that the distribution sector and marketing strategies play an increasingly important role in creation, the advertising industry is becoming part of the chain seeking to control the programming industry, and vice versa. In 1983, the independent production firm Lorimar bought up the advertising agency Kenyon and Eckhardt. Sealing the contract, the director of Lorimar pointed out the extent to which these two cultural industries were destined to support each other: "We're not just a production company. We see ourselves as a communications company. Besides its advertising business, K & E meshes with Lorimar in other ways. Its overseas offices give Lorimar a local presence in selling programming—both its own and that of other producers—to foreign broadcasters. K & E also gives Lorimar a role in the barter of advertising spots for TV programming."37 Advertising and modernity The constraints of merchandising should not let us forget the more classical ones of advertising spots that interrupt a forty-minute novela four times. Every twelve minutes, the screenwriter must arrange parados dramaticas, dramatic breaks whose goal is to keep the public in suspense. The nature of the suspense demanded by advertising breaks is, according to screenwriters, different in the novela and in the series: in a novela, an expectation must be created (generally revealed to be false);


51

in the series, it is more often a question of organizing a revelation. Even a relatively brief experience of Globo television confirms that its fiction screenplays (both series and novelas) are organized around the unavoidable necessity for advertising. Television screenplays, such as they are written for Globo, proceed by modules. The story proceeds through advancing fragments. Each dramatic unity is of very short duration, alternating long sequence shots with close-ups. This organization of television discourse gives the impression of modules that advance the story in perfectly controlled periods of time. It is undoubtedly here that one finds the high modernity of Globo's conception of the narrative, which makes it one of the paragons of the cybernetic mode of industrial cultural production. Advertising modulesfitnaturally into this electronic space-time of the story. The novela thus combines two temporalities: alternating long periods and short periods. The long period is a return to one of the characteristics of the serial, a story delivered from day to day, sometimes extending over the time of a generation, but which in fact never begins and never ends. The time of the longue durie in which the aesthetics of seriality inspires the rhythm of the technical event, the synthetic rhythms of advertising. It is significant that the emblems of the internationalized programming industry of today combine the long duration of the serial with the rapid rhythm of sequences within each episode. "Dallas" is an example of this, along with the bulk of Brazilian productions.38 Novelas continue the long duration of the old melodramas from the golden age of radio, some of which lasted for several decades. But the tempo that punctuates each episode is in keeping with the age of technical modernity, an interbreeding of the old and the new. Brazilian novelas are a mixture of the traditional popular narrative and modernity. It would seem that this mix defines well that part of our symbolic needs catered to by the cultural industries. They can appear as thetimeof pathos, of emotions, of the family libido, in contrast to the elliptical, fragmented time that explodes in the video clip, for example, in the era of postmodernity. What is characteristic of the novela is the combination of a broken narrative from the point of form with the structure of long duration. The fragmented rhythm corresponds to our visual immersion in the modern world of technology and satisfies the contemporary modalities of aesthetic perception. It is a combination of an aesthetic of rhythm and speed with an aesthetic of pathos.

52


Finally, the principal product advertised by Globo is Globo itself. Flash announcements of upcoming attractions interrupt every program. One program relaunches another. Globo unceasingly sells itself.39 In Europe, Italian channels and more recently French ones have felt the need, at a time when competition between channels has become intensified, permanently to self-promote themselves. They have felt the need to develop strategies of orienting television consumption through the creation of an image of the channel. Since the beginning of the 1970s, Globo has understood—the monopoly, once again, is always naked—the importance of self-promotional spots, giving the channel an overall coherence and indicating the schedule it has set for the audience. In 1974, Globo hired Hans Jiirgen Donner, an Austrian, as artistic director. His task was to "create the Globo symbol, the Rede Globo logotype, the station identity program, the basic style conception for all graphic work of the channel, both static and in movement,"40 a task completed in time for Globo's tenth anniversary. Today the program trailers are made by a special department equipped with the latest computer technology. Since 1983, twenty-six engineers and specialists have worked in the Globo Computer Graphic (GCG) center, which has now become an independent company, although Globo remains the principal client. It is the only center of this type in Latin America. Newly installed in Europe as the director of T61d-Monte Carlo (TMC, based in the principality of Monaco), the son of the founder of the Globo empire prided himself without bragging about the Brazilian network's widespread know-how. Drawing the first conclusions from his experience in the Italian market, he noted that TMC sold commercials differently from its rivals by basing its advertising structure on target audiences: "The others sell time spots. We sell family segments, children's segments, and so on. It seems incredible, but that sales approach wasn't being used here before. We have told advertisers that we will participate in any research they undertake, any research that they request from us. This will mean a big investment for us, but we want to help Italians know their own market, which will benefit everybody."41 The situation in France is scarcely different. In May 1987, the director of one of the main media planning agencies underlined the weaknesses of the French system of commercializing television space and in particular the shortcomings in audience measurement: "What we want to buy is not a time but a particular audience, a target. Which means


53

research and precise methods for analyzing these spaces and reaching these targets. . . . A television channel is not a medium in itself. The "medium" is a combination resulting from a time, a program, and an audience on a channel at a given moment"42 A monopoly in action The television job market in Brazil is extremely concentrated. It is practically monopolized by Globo. At the end of the 1970s, the Globo network employed some 5,500 people, 1,500 of whom were permanently occupied in producing novelas. The estimated profitability in "useful time" per unit of video production is an average of thirty minutes a day. Compared to that of other television systems, this useful time, sometimes called "useful product" per day, is very high.43 This concentration of the job market reflects the technical advancement of Globo, and leaves little room for other channels and independent producers. Between 1972 and 1977 color television was gradually installed: by 1975, Globo already possessed fourteen color cameras, thirty-two black and white ones, and four video systems, and produced four episodes of novelas a day. At the time, 53 percent of its investments went into telenovelas, compared to 30 percent at the beginning of the 1970s.44 From this time on, 40 percent of its technical equipment was mobilized for novelas. For the shooting and distribution of novelas, Globo already had, at the time, twenty-four hours a day, a team of over 300 technicians, three trucks for location shooting and a minicomputer capable of finding the slightest timing flaw in the magnetic tape. The conditions of organization of the different professional and technical categories intervening in die production process also deserve mention. If the trade union tradition is weak in Brazil, apart from certain sectors like the steelworkers in Sao Paulo, it is even more fragile in the cultural industry sector, particularly television. Historically, there have been very few conflicts or strikes. In August 1985, however, conflict erupted over Globo's reluctance to improve work conditions, perhaps not unconnected with its recent foreign investments, notably in T616-Monte Carlo. The demands of Globo's workers received very little media attention. One of the few weeklies to report the event described the reaction of Globo chairman Roberto Marinho thus: "The demands of the functionaries of TV Globo have come as a big surprise to Doctor Marinho. . . . His close friends relate that after having distanced himself

54


from the demands, he became extremely irritated. To someone who argued that the affair should be dealt with as in any other industry, he retorted that, 'In an ordinary industry, employees are not applauded or recognized in every town of the country.' Negotiations then began."45 The problem of wages is real for the majority of actors and authors: there are no fixed scales of remuneration, and the amount of fees remains secret. The latter depends admittedly on the celebrity of stars and scriptwriters, but also on their negotiating ability. For scriptwriters, differences in remuneration fluctuate by a factor of one to seven; for actors playing comparable roles, one to twenty.46 Work conditions are an even more crucial question. As a rule, shooting begins at dawn and finishes late at night. Overtime is a constant practice but, until recently, was not remunerated as such. The demands supported in August 1985 by 1,200 of the 5,000 Globo employees of the Rio de Janeiro network led precisely to an agreement on overtime: Globo agreed to pay 50 percent extra for overtime and to increase the salaries of employees holding concurrent functions within the network by 40 percent47 In trade-union leaflets, it was noted that "in the sector of novela production, work days of up to eighteen hours were routine."48 Such long periods of work required uncommon energy, especially from actors playing the leading roles. In 1986, the actors' union began a particularly bitter strike whose goal was also to make the network respect the articles contained in the labor code. To decongest the flow of production and better distribute work time, the union proposed that Globo purchase new equipment. In the face of Globo's refusal and threats to di niss the strikers, all production, except for that of novelas, ceased. Globo's rival, Manchete, seized the occasion to propose contracts to the actors on strike, and Globo was forced to give in. The work rhythm imposed on the actors is inherent in the mode of production of the novela. Actors are the first to recognize that this is part and parcel of the acceleration of the industrial process, which does not prevent them from making it a subject of permanent recrimination: "We have neither the time to study the characters in depth, nor to study the text, nor to rehearse it. Working on a novela is completely industrial. Television needs everything to be done quickly. We are fighting against this work method through actors' unions and associations. We are asking that the bosses allow us to work a little more slowly, with a little more care, but they are resisting us on the basis that Globo


55

produces four novelas a day and that it is hardly possible to work more carefully. If we want to work in more depth, we know that it is only in the theater or the cinema that we can do so. There, we have the time to feel things, to propose changes, to discuss with the director, to rehearse, etc."49 Globo played on the fact that its monopoly status and its image rub off on the prestige of its actors, opening up possibilities for them in parallel artistic activities like the theatre and the cinema. A good many actors who receive their main income from Globo and are under permanent contract to it nevertheless continue with other activities. Globo allows them to absent themselves from the studios or shooting locations to fulfill other engagements, justifying in its own eyes the overtime it demands in return. The author, on the other hand, must accommodate these absences and organize his or her writing schedule in terms of the availability of actors. Gaps in the legislation for this type of work also exist in the domain of royalties. The question was raised during thefirstconference on cultural legislation in March 1985 by one of the most famous Brazilian television stars, Regina Duarte ("Malu Mulher," "Roque Santeiro"): " 'Malu Mulher' occupied me for two years and was sold in over fifty-five countries. Of the fifty-two episodes, some thirty must have been sold, and according to my calculations, Globo earned over one million dollars. As for me, I received only three million cruzeiros in royalties. It's time to stop complaining and start organizing."50 The screenwriter of "Malu Mulher," Doc Comparato, could only add to this: "The author has no control over international sales. When Globo sells a program on the international market, it gives the author a single payment of 200 dollars. Now this program is sold hundreds of times, so much so that we feel robbed because we have absolutely no control over international royalties."51 A lucrative author like Doc Comparato has an annual contract with Globo and receives a monthly salary. But his contract is renewable every year, depending on the success of his scripts. "From a purely industrial point of view, it seems to me that the concentration of production and income in Brazil has catastrophic effects. Globo is in the image of Brazil: it concentrates everything. Look what's happening at the moment on the Manchete channel: Globo is presently celebrating its twentieth anniversary and has organized a festival; Manchete is only two years old and has also organized a festival—the same thing. There's

56


nothing in common between two years and twenty years. It's just imitation, whereas something else needs to be invented. For us authors, an independent system of production would be better. For our job market today is reduced to Globo."52 The dispossession of authors' and actors' royalties goes hand-in-hand with a lack of information on program sales and international awards. Sometimes, authors or actors receive their trophies several weeks after they have been attributed. The department of international relations is undoubtedly the most closely guarded citadel of the Globo enterprise. This reflects a mode of organization that, to the fear of industrial espionage, adds an obsession with security that favors the partition of tasks and air-tight departments. The single site of communication where all information converges is the Globo headquarters, limited to the Marinho family and a small number of co-opted professionals. The crisis of a genre? The international success of Brazilian novelas and their undenied profitability cannot hide the fact that today the genre is in crisis. It was in response to this that the Casa de Criagao Janete Clair was created in January 1985, named after the network's most famous and popular novela scripter who died prematurely in 1983. This measure was taken by the Globo management to train future screenwriters and serve as a think tank. If everyone agrees that the novela is in crisis, no one can agree on the causes of this crisis. The monopolization of the job market by Globo, the consequent inexistence of independent producers, commercial pressures, and competition from miniseries are all no doubt major elements. If the creativity of Brazilian television has largely profited from the creativity of the theatre, the hold of television and especially the "Globo label of quality" is such that it tends to become a norm for all professional artistic performances. As theatre actress Irene Ravache, one of the heroines of "Beto Rockfeller" in 1968-1969, put it: "The monopoly of television affects everything. In the theatre, for example, producers propose to you a role, but you're not free, so you propose someone else. But if this someone else is not linked to Globo, your recommendation and his or her qualities don't count. Producers consider that only someone known through television can attract the public. Whether the show is good or not is of little importance. . . . In


57

Brazil, if you don't become famous through Globo, you're nothing but an artistic curiosity."53 The Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado has expressed a similar idea: "What television does to my books doesn't bother me in the slightest. One thing that does disturb me, however, is that all my woman mulattos look like Sonia Braga and all my male mulattos like Nelson Xavier. Now Sonia Braga hasn't got big hips while my woman mulattos have. And my male mulattos have a paunch while Nelson Xavier has a flat stomach."54 The exhaustion of existing authors and the patent lack of new ones are grounds for anxiety. According to Aguinaldo Silva: "The great authors of novelas have all come from radio. They were used to writing radionovelas and other programs daily. Sometimes they had to write a script in the studio half an hour before the program went on the air. These people have a professionalism and a capacity for work which no longer exists. Young people who want to write today don't have this experience. For them, writing an episode a day is something terrible. For me, it's different because I worked at a copy-desk for eighteen years. I worked seven hours a day for a Rio de Janeiro daily. I'm able, therefore, to write seven hours a day."55 The absence of a similar professional background largely explains why a screenwriter like Doc Comparato, the inseparable collaborator with Silva on a number of series, cannot keep to the work rhythm demanded by the novela. As his nickname indicates, he came from medicine, more specifically radiology. Janete Clair, who began her career at Radio Tupi in 1946, was originally a bacteriologist. Another famous screenwriter, Ivani Ribeiro, came directly from the radio: she had seventy radionovelas and thirty-three telenovelas behind her in 1984. The difficulties met in renewing the genre are almost certainly linked to the fact that the generation of authors that created the "Brazilian-ness" of the genre has no one to replace it in the medium term. The director Walter Avancini, responsible for filming the great novel of Guimaraes Rosa, Grande Sertao Veredas, screened during Globo's twentieth anniversary in 1984, interprets the crisis of the novela as the crisis of a genre weighed down by its mass audience status: "So long as we continue to live in a country where the population has only an extremely weak purchasing power, what I call 'horizontal programming,' that is extremely massified, will continue to predominate. This is die case with the novela, which imprisons because it's aimed at a population

58


which has no other cultural options. What could be told in no time is stretched out for weeks. . . . The entry of novelas onto the European market is due only to the crisis of production. The novela is a labor of Sisyphus for the author. As for the spectators, they know they're being cooked slowly. Out of 150 episodes, fifty are good; the rest is just padding."56 For Avancini, the miniseries, more dramatically dense and more developed aesthetically, is a prestige symbol that a country with such social and economic imbalances can afford only in the late evening slot. During the 1985-1986 season, the impressive success of the novela "Roque Santeiro" silenced predictions of doom and restored confidence in the future of the genre, henceforth watched over by the "Casa de Criagao." This "House of Creation" is based on an idea of Dias Gomes. It serves the strategic need for Globo to plan the creation process over the long term. But it also serves as a place where authors can get together and defend their interests. There are four sections: the first reads the synopses and works of authors, whether under contract to Globo or not, and makes recommendations. The second section then works with the authors who have been chosen. The third analyzes the problems arising from texts in productions that are being screened. The last is a theoretical section that organizes a program of studies and seminars for new authors. One of its first activities was to organize a training program in the telenovela. Scholarships are awarded to seven promising young authors to work with experienced screenwriters seven hours a day for six months. Another objective is to intensify relations with the well-known novelists who already work with Globo, and to attract others like Antonio Callado, Rubens Fonseca, Plinio Marcos, Autran Dourado, and Nelida Pinon.57 Notes 1. It was only in 1970 that Nielsen set up in Brazil. Previously, two other Americanfirmshad created bureaus, Marplan in 1958 and Gallup in 1962. This relative autonomy of marketing in Brazil, in singular contrast to the dependence of marketing institutions in other Latin American countries, is attested to by the existence of large national advertising agencies which compete with the subsidiaries of American advertising transnationals. Thus, in the 1980s, two or three (according to the year) national agencies could be found among the five biggest advertising agencies in Brazil.


59

By 1981, the degree of professionalism of Brazilian agencies was beyond doubt: at the 28th festival of advertising films held in Cannes in June 1981, Brazil won sixteen prizes, including two golden lions, two silver and one bronze, overtaking for the first time the United States and Japan. 2. "Quatro anos depois, a volta da novela das dez," O Estado de Sao Paulo, September 18, 1983, p. 35. 3. "Gelela geral em novo rotulo," IstoE, October 7, 1981, p. 66. 4. M. Sodr£, A comunicagao do grotesco, Petropolis, Vozes, 1972. 5. S. Caparelli, Televisao e capitalismo no Brasil, Porto Alegre, L & PM Editores, p. 34. 6. M.E. Bonavita, Historia da comunicagao. Radio e TV no Brasil, Petropolis, Vozes, 1982. It was only in 1980 that the International Division of Globo was set up to cope with the increase of exports. For the record, the clown Chacrinha returned to the screens of Globo in the 1980s. 7. Declaration by the director of Globo's division of analysis and research in R. Miranda and L.A. Pereira, Televisao, As imagens e os sons no ar, O Brasil, Sao Paulo, Ed. Brasiliense, 1983, p. 36. 8. Interview with Doc Comparato in August 1985 by the authors. 9. In Brazilian "Passaros Feridos". Adapted from the novel of the Australian Colleen McCullough, this mini-series, produced by ABC, had the same directors as the famous docudrama "Roots". Its five episodes cost 20 million dollars. Through this program, Silvio Santos boasted of having also reached classes A and B: "What was most interesting for us about Tassaros Feridos' was that it enabled us to prove to the public that with a good product, we could reach all social classes. With this program, we disproved the view that Globo even tried to foist onto advertising agencies." In "O lucro do SBT 6 o prestigio," Folha de Sao Paulo, August 24, 1985. 10. "SBT provoca atrasos na Globo," Folha de Sao Paulo, August 23, 1985, p. 43. 11. "Quatro anos depois, a volta da novela das dez," O Estado de Sao Paulo, September 18, 1983, p. 35. In the magazine Amiga (specializing in television gossip and titde-tattle) of March 2, 1983> confirmation of this aspect of censorship could be found: 'The high production costs and the uncertainty stemming from the systematic censorship cuts were the reasons behind the interruption of the 'seriados' at 10 in the evening." 12. A. de Tavola, "A novela e sua intimidade," O Globo, October 11, 1983. 13. D. Filho, quoted in "A historia da telenovela," Melhores momentos da telenovela brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Gr&fica, 1980, p. 35. 14. Launched at the end of 1969 to release TV Globo's novela soundtracks on records, Som Livre Diskery, subsidiary of Globo conglomerate, has become

60


the largest Brazilian record company, with a 24 percent market share. With the increasing international success of novelas, Som Livre opened a branch in Italy in 1982. This step was followed by the opening of Globo Records, France, in 1986. France was selected as a distribution center for Europe. Gal Costa and Gilberto Gil are some of the artists under contract. Som Livre's next international project was to enter the American market with its huge Latin American audience. Som Livre is also the only Latin American studio with a full-time maintenance team of 42 people, many of them trained in Los Angeles. Variety, March 25, 1987. 15. Conversation between Aguinaldo Silva and the authors in August 1985. 16. The job of the assistant consists basically in discussing the unfolding of the plot with the author and in writing the dialogues for certain scenes already oudined by the author. Frequendy, assistants take twice as long to write as authors. In "A quatro maos," Veja, October 26, 1983. 17. Conversation with the authors cited above. 18. Here is another expression of this codification: the cast. A novela generally has 20 main characters, 20 supporting parts and about 100 walkons. 19. "Una nova linguagem para a telenovela?," roundtable discussion with Dias Gomes, playwright, Iva Cardoso, journalist and playwright, and Muniz Sodre', sociologist of communication. O Globo, July 18, 1976, p. 3. 20. M. Silverman, 'TV Globo's Foreign Sales Blazing a Bread Trail to World Program Markets," Variety, March 25, 1987, p. 133. 21. The cor del: a booklet of illustrated verse, an authentically popular genre specific to the poor regions of northeastern Brazil and recruiting its often anonymous authors from popular poets and storytellers. 22. "A volta de Roque Santeiro, O que nunca veio," Jornal do Brasil, July 16, 1979, p. 9. 23. "Roque Santeiro" was inspired by the cordel A Fabulosa Estoria de Roque Santeiro e Sua Viuva; a que era sem nunca ter sido (the fabulous story of Roque Santeiro and his widow, who was one without ever having been one), a story which is part of the heritage of Brazilian popular culture. "Roque Santeiro" tells of life in a small town in the state of Bahia named Asa Branca (White Wing). At the beginning of the story, Roque Santeiro, a skillful sculptor of figures of saints, has been tragically "murdered" by a terrible outlaw and his band who have invaded the town. While the whole population flees from the bandits, Roque Santeiro remains at the doors of the church to confront the bandit leader and is seen alive for the last time by the patriarch of the church. 17 years pass. Asa Branca has transformed the sculptor of saints into a legend and is proud of its hero and "martyr." Another sculptor becomes rich by manufacturing images of Roque Santeiro rather than saints. The town undergoes an economic boom and becomes a


61

tourist attraction. Porcina, the widow of Roque Santeiro, now married to a millionaire, lays down the law in the town. But one day, the hero reappears: indignant, he demands his share in the business. Foreseeing the consequences, the inhabitants of Asa Branca get together and kill Roque Santeiro, preferring to live in prosperity with a dead hero than see their town ruined. In the new version produced for television in 1985-1986, Roque Santeiro escapes death. 24. Aguinaldo Silva in 0 Globo, August 1, 1985, p. 2. 25. Drawing its inspiration in most cases from national news, the "Caso verdade" series generally deals with social problems. 26. "Em camara lenta," Veja, September 8, 1982. 27. A. Sirkis in Jornal do Brasil, August 19, 1985, p. 5. 28. Doc Comparato during interview with the authors cited above. 29. Dias Gomes, quoted by J.F. Lacan in Le Monde aujourd'hui, July 22-23, 1984, p. m. 30. Interview with Lauro Cesar Muniz, by J.J. Sarques, A ideologia sexual dos gig antes, Brasilia, Departamento de Comunicagao, University of Brasilia, 1981. 31. D. Aragao and A. Beuttenmuller, "As novelas estao em crise, mas faturam como nunca," Jornal do Brasil, June 15, 1980. 32. A. Solnik, "O varejao do horario nobre," Senhor, September 1, 1982, p. 51. 33. J. Clair, "Como vender de tudo atraves da novela," Jornal do Brasil, September 19, 1982. 34. D. Aragao and A. Beuttenmuller, art. cit. 35. The contract linking Globo to Brahma, a direct competitor of Coca-Cola, is a contract of the "horizontal" type. It is valid for one year and for all programs. TV Globo does not guarantee the precise number of times that the brand will appear in its programs but simply resolves to create spaces suitable for these appearances. Thus, in musical programs, Globo could for example produce sequences with barmen presenting the Brahma drinks. (A. Solnik, art. cit.) 36. "Are the Programs Your Kids Watch Simply Commercials?" Business Week, March 25, 1985, p. 66. 37. "Lorimar Scores on TV—and Wall Street," Business Week, October 22, 1984, p. 76. 38. The scriptwriters and directors of "Dallas" note: "Of course, 'Dallas' was born out of those afternoon American soap operas, shot with three video cameras, almost hand to mouth (shooting one episode would often take less than an hour), which more often than not tells a family story. Within five episodes, a whole day of life almost passes by. For the scriptwriters of 'Dallas,' the purpose was precisely to avoid this real time, this slowness. In the same way, it was necessary to reinvent the soap opera, shoot it in 35 mm,

62


no longer in video, take five days to shoot one episode in order to allow a more concise editing, shorter scenes, more action, and more rhythm. Under these conditions, we could keep the family content from the soap opera. Just as if 'Dallas' had proved that family life, which so far had been reserved to afternoon television, could become a worthy figure for the evening, when the audience is composed of more than housewives, a figure which would lead to success." S. Blum, interview with the scriptwriters of "Dallas," "Dallas ou l'univers irre'solu," Riseaux, no. 12, April 1985. 39. Of the 15 minutes of advertising alloted per hour for each episode of a telenovela, 12 are reserved to private announcers and 3 to self-promotion of the channel's programs. 40. Videographics, Globo publication, 1981. 41. Variety, October 15, 1986, p. 146. 42. Interview with D. Adam (Imedia) by P. Kieffer, Liberation, May 20, 1987. 43. The study carried out in 1982 by the Italian public service RAI on models of production and distribution showed the difference between "useful product" or "useful time" separating the different television systems and, on the other hand, within the same system, the difference in "useful time" according to the product and the type of shooting, in the studio or on location. Comparing the comparable, it seems that the useful time obtained by Globo is extremely high in comparison to, for example, that obtained by production teams of soap operas in Australia where the daily useful time is 7 minutes for shooting on location and 15 minutes for studio production. In Italy and France, for fiction series not subject to the extremely short delays between shooting and screening demanded by genres like the soap opera or the novela, and where a film camera (rather than a video camera) is used, this useful time falls to 2 or 3 minutes in Italy (optimal estimate 8 or 9 minutes) and 1 minute in France (optimal estimate 4 minutes). Studio di fattibilitd sulla produzione seriale, RAI, Rome (internal document). 44. "A grande mania nacional," Veja, September 10, 1975. 45. T. de Castro in A Final, August 20, 1985, p. 26. 46. According to the scriptwriter C.E. Novaes: "The reward for such a job, i.e. 120 pages a week, should be the salary of a super manager of Globo." in D. Arago and A. Beuttenmuller, art. cit. 47. "Acordo termina com 'operaâo padrao' no Globo," Folha de Sao Paulo, August 17, 1985, p. 53. 48. "Funcionarios de Globo vao a rua denunciar a empresa," Tribuna da Imprensa, August 14, 1985, p. 7. 49. H. Carvana de Hollanda interviewed in Tribuna del Festival, no. 12, International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, December 1986, Havana.


63

50. Testimony by Regina Duarte. International Symposium on Cultural Legislation, 1985. Reproduced in Ruthilante, June 1985. 51. Doc Comparato interviewed by the authors, August 1985. 52. Ibid. 53. Interview with Irene Ravache, Lua Nova (CEDEC), vol. 1, no. 4, January-March 1985, p. 45. 54. Conversation with Orlando Sena, December 1985. Sonia Braga and Nelson Xavier are the top stars of Brazilian TV. 55. Aguinaldo Silva interviewed by the authors, August 1985. 56. A. de Barros, "A mania das miniseries," Folha de Sdo Paulo, November 12, 1984. 57. In 1987, only two divisions remained, staffed by about a dozen people. In 1988, this enterprise was in a shaky state.


II The Social Link "The so-called Brazilian intelligentsia has begun to consider television less as a demonic machine than as a cultural industry, full of contradictions admittedly, but capable of offering work and even non-material compensations. . . . Politically, television has shown itself, more clearly than ever, to be a double-edged sword. It sold the myth of the 4economic miracle' in the 1970s but also helped the MDB (Movimento Democratico Brasileiro) to win in 1974. The young generation, our own, has won the battle against increasingly expensive imported series. A simple glance at the program schedule shows that there are very few U.S. series in prime time. Kojak has given way to Malu Mulher. Bino and Pedro, heroes of 'Carga Pesada* ('Heavy Load'), have become national idols."1 Such was the balance sheet of ten years of television drawn up by the critic of the news magazine IstoE, published in S2o Paulo in December 1979. Repressed in the theatre by an unrelenting censorship that singled out this sector of artistic creation as subversive territory, some playwrights were able to continue their portrayal of reality within television.2 At the same time, the Brazilian intellectual class, which had every reason to adhere unconditionally to Manichean critical theories of mass culture in the 1970s—was not television a private monopoly in an authoritarian regime?—was confronted with the contradiction of resolutely left-wing creators who claimed to be able to express themselves in these conditions. Equally, traditional questions about the relationship of the cultural industries to populism, and newer questions about the conditions of producing "popular art" in the age of industrialized cul-

66


ture, were no longer exclusively framed in terms of the segregation between "apocalyptic" and "integrated" intellectuals. Such a theory, which considers those working within the system as accomplices of ideological subjection, was confronted with the contradictory practice of creators posing the relation of the intellectual to society from within the "machine."

Notes 1. D. Marquez, 'Televisao, Os anos 70," IstoE, December 19, 1979. 2. Between 1964 and 1974, 452 pieces of theatre were prohibited, nine times more than in the preceding 24 years, which included the strong period of the Estado Novo. "Da ilusao do poder a uma nova esperanqa," Visao, Sao Paulo, March 11, 1974.

4 National Memory and Popular Memory

The return to use value "Consumption has its unknown producers, its silent inventors," said the French anthropologist and philosopher Michel de Certeau, whose several pages of Arts de faire, invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life) show a profound understanding of popular culture in Brazil. He continued: "It has long been evident that a certain ambiguity fissured the "success" of the Spanish colonizers with the Indians from within: subjected and even consenting, these Indians often made the liturgies, representations, or laws imposed onto them into something else from what the conquerer thought to have obtained; they subverted them not by rejecting or changing them, but by the way in which they used them for other ends and in terms of references that were foreign to the systems from which they could not escape. There were others, within the very order that assimilated them externally; they escaped it without leaving it. The force of their difference lay in the procedures of Consumption.' "* Today a wide consensus has been established on the active, productive status of the receptor/consumer. For critical analysis, the return to the audience as an actor in the communication process breaks with the tradition that focuses on power, its effects and its manifestations, rather than on those who are the object of this power. The present change of outlook goes along with the enormous epistemological shift that has affected the perception of social movements and antagonisms. The Italian economist C. Marazzirightlyrecalled in 1986 that "every struggle, every attempt at struggle, over the last ten years

68


or even longer, has consisted of struggles for the reappropriation of use value—the use value of time, space, of bodies, of social know-how—in short, the use value of life itself. . . . To understand a political analysis of the present social antagonisms, it is essential to define the concept of 'use value' correctly."2 For the neo-classical economist, use value is independent of exchange value: the subject is defined as if he or she were outside society, a totally rational homo economicus who has no need of socialization to determine choices. For structuralism also, use value is secondary. Exchange value predetermines the relation between the subject and the object: an epiphenomenon, the subject can act only as an object of use. In this perspective, what counts is only the struggle against exchange value within the domain of circulation and production. The interest in approaches underlining the reappropriation of use value lies precisely in their attempt to escape from variants of functionalism (on the Left and on the Right) which have separated social contradictions and forms of subjectivity. One can only stress the importance of this rupture. But though it has made its mark in studies of the communication process, this interest in the reappropriation of use value is, in many respects, still contradictory. For some, it seems to correspond to a progressive lack of interest in the moment of production. This has its perverse side: the return to the receiver and his or her "free" interpretation invalidates the importance of production mechanisms. Implicitly or explicidy, a certain skepticism has emerged about the very idea of the existence of power relations in television. For others, it is precisely the desire to understand more fully the circularity of the communication process by studying how the audience/sender couple is constituted that orients a return to the consumer. This research current, which attempts, far from the a priori of theories of power and macro-subjects, to intercept the unknown factors that make up the link between audiences and media, generally draws on simple ethnographic methods or, in its most advanced forms, on ethnomethodology. But studies which trace the comings and goings between the audience and the media in their reciprocal construction seem to ignore other determinations linking audiences to media. If the political economy tradition has overstated these determinations, it might equally well be asked if, in many of the studies inspired by the ethnographic approach very much in vogue at the moment, the very idea of social

National Memory and Popular Memory

69

determination is not being purely and simply abandoned. Admittedly, this micro approach can also be explained by the dissatisfaction today with globalizing theories. Under the pretext of seeking a totalizing theory, traditional materialist perspective has too often normalized from the outset the complexity of the real, the singularities of lived experience. In this sense, the form taken by ethnomethodologism today reveals more than a faint-hearted withdrawal. Does it not also express somewhere the pleasure, long denied by theoretical policing, of dismantling the communication acts of everyday life in order to re-create the real? If ethnomethodologism is one of the new expressions of empiricism, if it serves to delegitimize other levels of analysis, it also attempts, in its ambiguity, to "feel its way" into a new research domain, a new way of approaching the subject. Finally, the return to the consumer is an occasion for re-examining the class nature of communication institutions and for calling into question theories of social reproduction. It is around this latter point that discussion, as much on the sociology of culture of Pierre Bourdieu as the theory of ideology of Louis Althusser, coalesces. The latter has had its hour, at least in France where some even argue that it has become a museum piece.3 On the other hand, the Bourdieusian theory of "reproduction" is the only reference from the 1960s that has survived the epistemological ruptures that have shaken the social sciences (particularly the sciences of communication) in the 1980s. It has become a sort of common sense for analyzing the reproduction of social inequalities in the domains of culture and education. As the philosopher Jacques Rancidre observes: One thing ought to draw our attention: the present empire of this sociology is also all that remains of a drowned world. It expanded at the beginning of the 1960s with the revival of Marxist theoretical rigor and revolutionary fever . . . [and] originally accompanied the Althusserian battle for revolutionary science against ideology. The theory of reproduction combined the structuralist austerity of its axioms with accents of the Cultural Revolution and the struggle against "class education." The collapse of the theories and hopes contained in this discourse has only amplified its scope. On the one hand, it has inherited the theoretical and political heritage of the Marxist critique and has put the finishing touches to its interpretative framework. Both the university lecturer and the journalist can find the traces of social division and struggle in the tiniest prose inflection of writers or the subdest posture of politicians. For the educationalist or the youth group organizer, or the social reformer who tries

70


to resolve their problems, it explains the illusions and failures in the education of the people. But at the same time, it has absolved this interpretative capacity from the practical mortgages of Marxism and the naiveties of social expectation. It enables at one and the same time the denunciation of the mechanisms of domination and the illusion of liberation. A discourse in keeping with a time where the orphaned fervor of the denunciation of the "system" and the disenchanted or revived certainties of its durability are combined.4

Reproduction of the dominated, and distinction of the dominant: it is against this background that the history of the relations between the sociology of reproduction and a certain idea of democracy is to be read. "Distinction" is foreign to the popular classes, excludedfromall creation or cultural innovation. It reduces everything pertaining to the popular to reproduction, that is, a site which deprives the people of all access to the symbolic and freezes them in their class destiny. For, by assigning them to matter and the material, by freezing them into the "temporal immanent," it debars the popular classes from all possibility of being "elected" and condemns them to an irreversible torpor. In theories of distinction and studies of the communication process influenced by these theories, nothing is said of alternative dimensions of the popular. It is around the question of the cultural practices of the popular classes that the bases of a new paradigm will be formed, refuting the idea of a passive popular class and attempting to approach popular cultures as active producers of meaning. Writing on the Carnival and popular religion, the Brazilian anthropologist Renato Ortiz formulated one of the most concrete critiques of theories of social reproduction: For Bourdieu, the dynamic of the field necessarily tends toward recuperation. Heterodoxy, which acts in heretical fashion, does nothing more than reinforce the power of orthodoxy. We find ourselves here confronted with a cyclical history because the movement of social relations does not imply change, but on the contrary, social reproduction. . . . Bourdieu encloses us within the limits of history, seen as the repetition of the habitus. To think of popular culture in this perspective amounts to considering it simply from a cathartic point of view. The Carnival, popular religiousness, etc., would exist only insofar as they were defined as pseudo-utopias, interpreted as the equivalent of the erotic dances (lundus) of the slaves temporarily freed on feast days. The perspective of Bourdieu is analogous to the colonial policy of Count Dos Arcos, for whom social reality presented itself exclusively as a ritual of rebellion in that


71

its ultimate foundation was the reinforcement of the slavocrat order.5

A similar critique is made of Bourdieusian sociology by the anthropologist and philosopher Michel de Certeau. Criticizing what he calls "learned ignorance," de Certeau remarks: "According to this analysis, structures can change and become a principle of social mobility (even the only principle). What is acquired through experience cannot. The latter has no movement of its own. It is the site where the structures are inscribed, the marble on which their history is engraved. Nothing happens which is not the effect of its exteriority. Like the traditional image of primitive and/or peasant societies, nothing happens, no history, except what is traced onto them by a foreign order."6 These theoretical discussions on social reproduction are important from two points of view. On the one hand, they serve as a point of departure for the development of new hypotheses on the everyday consumption of television (and, for that matter, on the whole of mass cultural production). On the other, they enable the formulation of new hypotheses on the mode of production of so-called mass culture. By refusing to consider the latter exclusively as the property of a "dominant" sender, the emanation of an order, the reproduction of a structured and structuring code, the new paradigm underlines the existence of a dialectical exchange—admittedly unequal—between one and the other, between mass culture and popular culture, and that here again, the receiver is actively present. The Colombian Jesus Martin Barbero has formulated new hypotheses concerning Latin American television. Inspired by the French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne,7 Barbero stresses the ambiguity and the conflicting nature of the process from which the "popular" emerged: One could distinguish, first of all, the popular character as the memory of an alternative cultural matrix, stifled, denied, emerging from practices created in rural and even urban marketplaces, cemeteries, villages and neighborhood celebrations. These practices produce an identity through which a discourse of resistance to the dominant discourse can express itself. Class struggle, of course, but beyond that, a conflict between the economy of commodity abstraction and that of symbolic exchange. More than an alternative, these practices constitute a lesson on the impoverishment of everyday communication, a vector of the commercialization of social existence. Another aspect of the popular character can be defined as mass popular. Its mass nature should here be understood as its own negation and historical mediation. "Mass culture" is a negation of the

72


popular character to the extent that it is a culture for the mass, a producer of massification. What the "dominators" understand by "masses" is nothing other than the image they send to the masses to legitimize their domination. Nothing new here: mass culture is only the form, at the monopoly capitalism stage, of the historical project formulated by the bourgeoisie at the end of the eighteenth century. But the mass nature of the popular character is at the same time a historical mediation: popular forms and expressions, but also their hopes, systems of values, and taste are shaped by the mass nature of mass culture. As Dufrenne writes, "It is in such a culture that the masses invest their desires, it is from it that they draw their pleasures." And this is the case, even if we intellectuals and university lecturers, who camouflage too often our class tastes behind political labels, don't want to admit it: we reject mass culture in the name of the alienation it exudes, whereas in reality it is the popular classes who "like" this culture we refuse.8

Barbero's insistence on the historical mediation between mass culture and popular culture is particularly important. It is by forgetting this that a certain refuge in popular culture can take the form of a one-way celebration of a paradise regained, without contradictions, purified of all contamination from industrial and commercial production. The question of populism: The malaise of theory If there is a phenomenon that is difficult to ignore when one analyzes the formation of the mass culture apparatus, all the more so in the case of Brazil, it is that of populism. Admittedly, populism has marked very specific historical phases and is identified in Brazil essentially with the form of power incarnated in the Vargas regime, which dominated the country from 1930 to 1945. Politically based in the industrial bourgeoisie against the landowning oligarchy in the context of a new strategy of economic development—import substitution—this regime inaugurated a mass policy directed in particular at the urban proletariat. Its themes of mobilization were the struggle against foreign capital, an independent foreign policy and agrarian reform. The notion of the "people" is colored by this background of nationalism and anti-imperialism, "an apologetic and sentimental notion which englobes without distinction the mass of workers, the lumpen-proletariat, the intelligentsia, national magnates and the army."9 But beyond this, populism is also an ideology that escapes specific historical junctures to immerse itself in a given national culture, becoming—and it is here that


73

we can define the very notion of ideology—the signifying dimension of a whole series of practices, a dimension interiorized by institutions, groups and individuals over and above the space-time in which the so-called populist governments commanded and controlled the political system. Those who have sought to define Brazilian populism, or other forms of populism in Latin America for that matter, make no secret of the conceptual difficulties this presents: how does this movement rally groups and classes which, in classical terms of class struggle and class interest, ought not to rub shoulders in the same political project, still less in the same social mobilization? The difficulty experienced by critical theory in tackling populism is similar to that experienced in tackling "mass" communication. In the same way that populism succeeds in rallying groups and classes with different "objective" interests, "mass" communication succeeds in rallying spectators of all social classes around a single program. It is the difficulty, therefore, of conceptualizing the production of society beyond the exclusive determination of class that one finds in both cases. The critique of Gino Germani by Ernesto Laclau (both Argentines) is the most convincing example of a research current that advanced the analysis of populism in the 1970s.10 Gino Germani sees populism as the product of a transition stage between traditional and modern societies, a stage interpreted as a compulsory point of passage on the road to "development." These analyses, which confine the incidence of populism to a strictly determined historical moment, are interpreted by Ernesto Laclau as a new form of reductionism, as difficult to defend as class determinism. By emphasizing the fact that social struggles cannot be confined to class conflicts alone, the analyses of Laclau revive the theoretical tradition of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. The sheer diversity of popular actors is opposed to a definition of the "people" confined to the urban proletariat. The fertility of the rupture introduced by Gramsci can be seen in the usefulness of notions like hegemony, progressive democracy, the national-popular, and popular subjectivity.11 This line of investigation is all the more interesting in that it frees the field of culture and ideology from economic determinism. Although these new hypotheses on the trans-class nature of populism have already produced effects in the analysis of political discourse and ideologies (it is not for nothing that many of these analyses come from

74


structuralist linguistics), they have had very little impact on the study of media discourses. Political scientists who claim to be carrying out discourse analysis have tended to opt for the charismatic discourse of leaders but, on their own admission, have neglected the discursive strategies of media institutions.12 The return to the question of populism in the 1980s undoubtedly corresponds to the transformation of the Latin American Left. In place of single responses multiple questions arise. With the disappearance of single models of action, the popular class is redefined. In the 1960s, the left's analyses were based on industrial societies where the working class was a strategic social sector. In a situation where the major characteristics of the subordinate classes are not manufacturing work but unemployment, disguised unemployment, the shortage of land, the problems of urban migration, social marginality and ethnic minorities (and sometimes ethnic majorities), left-wing thought rediscovered the existence of "popular classes" that did not fit into the narrow definition of the "working class." As the Argentine Ricardo Sidicaro has remarked, "These key dimensions of the Latin American situation had been easily harnessed by forms of populism that were pragmatic. But for classical Marxism, they remained hidden because of its scheme of analysis specific to industrial societies."13 There are two additional points, however: 1) Although populism was more or less aware of the diversity of the "popular class," it is not so certain—precisely in the case of Brazil—that the rural countryside has ever counted for much in populist thinking; and 2) Over the past few decades, the evolution in social movements but also that of decomposition/recomposition of the working class has shaken the belief—both in developed and developing countries—in single models of action and analysis. In effect, beyond questions of chronology, who now can deny the dialectical exchange produced between the new theoretical sensibilities here and elsewhere?14 In the 1980s, reflection on "populism" and the "popular" has therefore acquired a new dimension. With the "democratic liberalization" in Brazil and the return of the question of the popular actor for the definition of democracy, a series of hypotheses on the relations between intellectuals and the people, the public and the people, and between mass culture and popular culture have emerged. This is particularly true in situations where populism has blurred both the epistemological field and the political space in which popular actors develop.


75

Such is the view of J. Martin Barbero, one of the few Latin American researchers in communication to have understood the need to return to populism in order to resituate the role of national communication systems in the formation of national states: "The national question is permanently linked to the populist question, forcing us to re-evaluate the latter, to stop seeing it solely as a state project and to study it is a class experience which has nationalized the broad masses and bestowed citizenship on them.. . . This implies an investigation of the specific modes of destruction of popular cultures in Latin America. That is to say, the modes of disintegration of the popular linked to the construction of the national, but also the ways in which the popular 'nationalizes' itself, that is, irrigates and configures, on the basis of the social movements of the 1920s and 1930s, a new project of the nation."15 In his own way, the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado (who later became Minister of Culture under the New Republic from 1986 to 1988) posed similar questions in analyzing the history of Brazilian cultural formation since the beginning of the century, a history marked by what he terms the decline of the "Bovaryist attitude" of die elites, that is, the decline of a negative opinion of the people, as a symbol of backwardness, whose cultural contribution was nil. Disparaged by the elites who turned toward the latest shows from Europe, the people continued to cultivate their regional particularities and differences. Furtado thus resumed in 1984 an examination of the contradictory factors that have favored, in his opinion, a new way of looking at popular culture and that explain the ambivalence of cultural industrialization: Urbanization made the presence of the people more visible and their cultural creativity became more difficult to ignore. A middle class, endowed with growing economic power, altered the balance of the Brazilian cultural process. Dus middle class was formed within the framework of a modernization dependent on foreign capital and supported by an industrialization based on import substitution. The vast majority of its members were too close to the people to be able to ignore their cultural significance. What is more, the mass character of the culture of the middle class meant that its relations with the people were not based on exclusion, as was the case of the Bovaryist elites, but of encirclement and penetration. Thus the rapid growth of middle-class culture meant the end of the isolation of the people but also the beginning of their "decharacterization" as a creative force.16

76


Notes 1. "Entretien avec Michel de Certeau," Le Monde, January 31, 1978. 2. C. Marazzi, "Aspects intemationaux de la recomposition de classe," Ultalie: le philosophe et le gendarme, Actes du colloque de Montreal, M.B. Tahon and A. Corten, editors, Montreal, VLB, 1986. 3. See J. Ranciere, La legon a"Althusser, Paris, Gallimard, 1974. 4. "ReVoltes logiques" Group, L'empire du sociologue, Paris, La Ddcouverte, 1984, pp. 6-7. 5. R. Ortiz, A consciencia fragmentada, Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 1980, pp. 73-74. 6. M. de Certeau, Arts de faire, I'invention du quotidien, Paris, 10/18, 1980, vol. 1, p. 119 (English translation: The Practice of Everyday Life, by Stephen F. Randall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.) 7. Notably M. Dufrenne, Subversion Perversion, Paris, PUF, 1977. 8. J. M.Barbero, "De quelques defis pour la recherche sur la communication en Ame'rique latine," Technologie, culture et communication, Rapports complementaires, Mattelart-Stourdze' Report, vol. II, Paris, La Documentation Fransaise, 1983, p. 196. 9. R. Schwarz, "Remarques sur la culture et la politique au Bre'sil (19641969)," Les Temps Modernes, Paris, July 1970. 10. See E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London, New Left Books, 1977. G. Germani, Politica y sociedad en una epoca de transicidn, Buenos Aires, Paidos, 1965. However, one of the merits of the functionalist current of sociology, which invested itself, like Gino Germani, in the study of populism, was to have noted as early as the 1960s the importance of the means of communication as instruments for the diffusion of the values derived from the "revolution of rising expectations," in other words, the aspiration to development and a consumer economy. 11. See chapters 6 and 8 (Part IE) in this book. 12. See E. de Ipola, "Populismo e ideologia," Revista mexicana de sociologia, no. 3, 1979, p. 937. 13. R. Sidicaro, 'Transformation et diversity des gauches latino-americaines," Amerique Latine, Paris, January-March 1985, p. 53. 14. For example, see J.L. Coraggio, Nicaragua: revolucidn y democracia, Mexico City, Editorial Linea/CRIES, 1985; E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, Verso, 1985. 15. J. Martin Barbero, "Communicacidn, pueblo y cultura en el tiempo de las transnacionales," in M. de Moragas (editor), Sociologia de la comunicacidn de masas, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1985, vol. IV, p. 177. Interestingly enough, these new questions have appeared especially among groups linked to the popular Church, closely associated with "liberation


77

theology" and the popular education movements in Brazil. See the monograph Populismo e Comunicagao, published by the Brazilian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies on Communication (coordinated by J. Marques de Melo), S3o Paulo, Cortez Editora, 1981. 16. C. Furtado, Cultura e desenvotvimento em epoca de crise, Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 1984.


5 The Novela and Society The impact of a genre Since "Beto Rockfeller," the novela has never ceased to refer to certain problems of Brazilian society: racial prejudice, the condition of women, the relations between Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions (Umbandismo), industrial pollution, corruption, misery, urban violence, neighborhood struggles, and so forth. It has continued to take up the challenge of realism in a genre originally devoted to love triangles and affairs of the heart The popularity attained by novelas can be measured not only by their IBOPE ratings, but also by the place they occupy in everyday conversations, arguments, and rumors, and their power to catalyze national discussion both on the ups and downs of the intrigue and on certain social questions. The novela is, in some ways, an echo chamber for a public debate that goes beyond it In the press, discussion on the novela is not limited to specialized magazines that are of minor importance in Brazil.1 All press genres—daily, weekly, monthly, for all readerships—speak abundantly of telenovelas, including interviews with authors, actors, actresses, directors, producers and viewers, roundtables on themes, reviews by specialized journalists, academic analyses, humor, and gossip in the tittle-tattle press. On top of the copious press dossiers prepared by Globo and the weekly program bulletins it publishes, most Brazilian magazines devote extensive articles to novelas that serve as veritable national events, continually reiterated. The last episodes of a successful novela generally attain 100 IBOPE points. In August 1985, when "Roque

80


Santeiro" gathered, with 80 IBOPE points,2 over 43 million viewers every evening, the entire press orchestrated an orgy of news about the periphery of the program, the little stories relating to shooting and casting, portraits of actors, and other background information. This journalistic debauchery over the novela is especially evident in the daily and periodical press in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, before being exported to the tributary dailies in the other regions. Television critics in the regional press generally refer only to what has been published in the Rio and S2o Paulo press. A history of the social impact of the novela could be written through its echo in the press. The sheer volume of articles on the novela is surely without equivalent in Europe. A crisis in the representation of the social The cathartic power of the genre and its empathy with the audience, both of which define it as an exceptional, trans-class form of communication, should not overshadow the way in which it represents social life. The Globo mold, caught up in the economic and sociocultural determinations of a project of integration based on modernization and consumption, has favored a model of Brazilian society based on the bourgeois sector of Rio de Janeiro (Ipanema Beach, Zona Sud, strongly contrasted with Rio Zona Norte,filmedin 1957 by Nelson Pereira dos Santos). This geographical enclosure is also a social one. The authordirector Walter Avancini sees in this limitation one of the profound reasons for the crisis of the novela: The novela continues to follow the language codes, the tastes, and the ambitions of the middle class, even if class conflict is more manifest in some hourly slots than it was in the past. But the working class continues to be represented in caricature. What is presented as authentic is the values of the bourgeoisie, who tell workers they must learn to live by looking at things they can't pretend to have. I've always said that you can't ask television and the novela to be what they can't. They only reflect the Brazilian situation. Television is not a factor for change. It's only what people want it to be. It's obvious that television bathes in fantasy. It avoids direct confrontation with reality because such a confrontation implies political problems. Workers are not shown on television. At a pinch, they are shown in films or plays where their situation is discussed for an audience which is scarcely interested

The Novela and Society

81

L changing things in depth. The majority of novela writers in Brazil are also art of an elite, the middle class, and reflect its values.3

Avancini is not the only one to think that if some are beginning to re of the novela's immutable stereotypes, it is because this audience spires to a less superficial vision of social life. Today, the novela's representation of social life and the television 3des it has formalized have become the object of a more open debate, ertain latent ideas are beginning to be elaborated within the circle of iithors and directors. Alternative tendencies and new television codes refindingthe present climate favorable to their development. Without jccumbing to a mechanistic interpretation of the interrelations between ultural creation and the political context, one cannot deny that the uestioning of the former model of economic development and the ofcial recognition of the need for income redistribution are in some way nked to the new legitimacy of popular expression in Brazil—violent, own-to-earth, cross-bred and multicultural. This is a Brazil in which 5 percent of the population either cannot satisfy their food needs, or annot satisfy any needs other than those of food; a Brazil in which le obsession with security makes the better-off classes barricade themslves within their neighborhoods with electronic surveillance devices, xurity guards, and private militia; a Brazil in which advertisements for partments in new residential areas stress the new security environment btained by the advanced "safety eyes system": "closed-circuit televiion linked to your television set, ultrasensitive general alarm system irectly linked to the nearest police station, telephone in the guardian's partment, latest generation electronic portal, surrounding iron wall for le whole zone, sentry box with telephone exchange and closed circuit Revision."4 In Brazilian cities today, members of the middle class, whatever leir ideology or political beliefs, have no choice but to enter into lis "security circuit" to protect themselves from the scrap-heap of the lodel of development. Paradoxically enough, Silva, one of the most progressive" screenwriters, who is the most sensitive to the reality of lis segregation, is forced to live in a residential area protected by a uarantine line and a private police force. Globo's image of consumer modernity has been the site of an official onsensus and a shared electronic bedazzlement. The novela has been le centerpiece of this unanimity in a society developing at two speeds:

82


a minority keeping up with the pace of modernization and the others trampled into an increasingly limited horizon, even if, in the search for mechanisms of survival, they produce their own forms of cultural resistance. Since the end of the 1970s, Brazilian television production has become aware of the permanent pressure of this social duality, this form of apartheid. The experimentation with mini-series, which leave the author freer to develop the universe of social realism, magical realism, police realism or poetic magic, bears witness to this new awareness.5 The risks they pose for the project of consensus have obviously not escaped the censorship office, which has continued to delay, mutilate, and most often prohibit screenings in prime time. The solution recommended by the censorship office in Brazil is also the natural formula elsewhere for relegating products of dissension to nonpeak viewing hours: aesthetic experiment, liberation of sexual morality, or political insubordination. Intellectuals, the left, and television Television welcomed, over the years, many artists, authors and journalists of the Brazilian Left who remained under the dictatorship or returned before the "liberalization." A singer like Caetano Veloso, after having experienced prison and exile in London, came back to work for Globo and produced hits that were used as themes in novelas. This type of cooperation withfilmmakershas been much rarer and more difficult. The example of Eduardo Coutinho, director of "Cabra marcado para morrer" ("A Man to Kill"),6 who worked for Globo's current affairs program "Globo Reporter" for some six years, remains exceptional. Up until now, Brazilian television has never favored screening Brazilian films, still less producing them. Between 1973 and 1981, only 376 Brazilian films were shown, scarcely 2.6 percent of allfilmsshown on television. There were two reasons for this: film censors were doubly vigilant for films programmed for television; and Brazilian films are most expensive compared to American ones already amortized elsewhere. But the relations between those who work in films and those who work in television are much more complex than this suggests. Film and television professionals have different personal trajectories, different political tendencies, and a different relationship with public and private institutions. But, above all, they have divergent aesthetic conceptions. A


83

fundamental point of Cinema Novo is to represent "the Brazilian Man," lis land, hunger, and vision of the world. The cinema also accorded nore importance to the auteur, unlike television where the mark of lie producer and the programming organizers restrains the freedom of creation. In 1979, Glauber Rocha, one of the major figures (certainly the most ;urbulent) of the Cinema Novo, expressed this antagonism radically, without pity for artists working for television and, in particular, for 31obo: "Intellectuals close to the [Communist] party, whom I won't lame because it's still illegal, are completely corrupted. Most actors, lirectors, and screenwriters, etc., went to work for Globo under the lictatorship of General Medici. . . . They were corrupted not only politically but aesthetically: a disaster. They sold themselves to Roberto Marinho for next-to-nothing."7 In the same conversation, he condemned the project for a commercial cinema, supported by the Communist party and the MDB (Movimento Democratico Brasileiro), which embodied, in his opinion, an orthodoxy opposed by his own position as afilmmakerof the "revolutionary Left." He had no hesitation in putting all Brazilian commercial films into tfie same category: pornochanchada (pornographic films), which also neans, in the use made of the term by Rocha, "degeneracy," films which surrender to commercial recipes for sex. It was also Glauber Rocha who made the most caustic critique of populism as part of a national idiosyncrasy. In his 1969 manifesto, "No :o Populism," he wrote: By refusing the cinema of imitation and choosing another form of expression, Jie Cinema Novo also refused the easy way of that typical language called lationalist art, "populism," which reflects a political attitude which is our own. Like the caudillo, the artist feels himself to be the father of the people: the slogan is "speak straightforwardly so that the people understand." In my opinion, his constitutes a lack of respect for the public, however underdeveloped it nay be: "create simple things for a simple people." But the people are not simple. Even if they are sick, starving, and illiterate, the people are complex. Hie paternalistic artist idealizes popular types as fantastic subjects who, even if in misery, have their own philosophy and have only to develop their "political consciousness" a little to be able, from one day to the next, to reverse the tiistorical process. The primitivism of this concept is even more harmful than the art of imitation, since the latter at least has the courage to recognize itself as such and justify the "industry of artistic taste" by its pursuit of profit.8

84


One of the best knownfiguresof this left attacked by Glauber Rocha, Dias Gomes has been the most creative and constant influence on the novela since the beginning of the 1960s. Born in 1923, he was a member of the Communist party for thirty years until the 1970s. Today, he claims to be an "anarcho-marxist." In 1985, Globo named him director of the Casa de Criagao, which bears the name of Janete Clair, his late wife. How can an author who has never ceased to profess left-wing ideas be the recognized pillar of fiction creation in a conglomerate like Globo? The reply of Dias Gomes, a frequently censored dramatist, is this: "The critical direction of my work comes from a conception of the writer as a witness of his or her time, a protagonist of a truly Brazilian theatre. Brazilian drama can only arise from the questioning of our society. Is there a risk that my critical vision is diluted in Globo's programming? If there's a contradiction, it lies with Roberto Marinho. I work, and no one interferes with my work. Globo has never interfered. The channel either screens it or not. But when it screens it, the ideas are mine and I don't see any contradiction there."9 A markedly similar opinion is expressed by Doc Comparato: "It's said that the Globo writers are all left-wing. Dias Gomes, Aguinaldo Silva and I have all been prohibited. Like most people here. That's why I left for England for a while. The situation is much more complex than it appears from outside. I always say this: you can't confuse authors as people with the ideological system that accommodates them. You can't say that Sophocles was a pro-slavery writer or that Moliere was a monarchist writer. He used the court in order to write. I don't exacdy write with the depth I'd like. But I never disagree with what I write. There are some things I don't write. But I never write anything that goes against what I think."10 It is interesting to complete the position of Dias Gomes with his opinion on advertising and merchandising: "Both advertising and merchandising are rules of the capitalist system and you have to accept them unless you live outside the Capitalist system. Personally, I'm against it, but I live within it, for I'm not an island."11 The links between television fiction writers and critical intellectual circles become obvious when one examines the shelves of their personal libraries. Latin American literature stands next to works by historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists of the continent. For each screenplay, documentation is carried out by a historian, a sociologist, or an anthropologist. What emerges, at least among some writers, is an


85

intellectual context nourished by the memory of oppression, a memory which cannot be understood without referring to the historical commitment of Latin American intellectuals to the people, with all the ambiguity that the very definition of the latter word supposes. Who would deny that this memory, this social consciousness, is filtered by the mediations and constraints implied by the production of texts in a particular political and industrial context? Undeniably, the text bears the trace of a calculation. But it also bears the trace of these social networks. It would be a mistake to think of the status of television writers in terms of the depreciated image of their American or European colleagues in comparison tofilmmakersor novelists. In Brazil, die television writer is not a second-class citizen among intellectuals and creators, even though the very existence of the Cinema Novo and the debates it set off did set up a hierarchy of audiovisual creation and, like anywhere else in the world, the majority of the intellectual class look down on the television sector. It is not surprising, therefore, that part of the Brazilian intellectual class contests die conception of popular art supported byfictioncreators like Dias Gomes. The debate is not a new one. Some productions had the particular distinction of giving it a public visibility. This was the case in the 1970s of "Bern Amado" ("Well Beloved," Dias Gomes), "Irmaos Coragem" ("Brothers Courageous," Janete Clair), the second adaptation of "Gabriela" (Dias Gomes, after the novel by Jorge Amado), and "Saramandaia" (Dias Gomes, 1976), the latter marked by fantastic realism and drawing its inspiration from the cordel and the myths of the Nordeste. In a country so impregnated with populist tradition, where popular culture is torn between populism and the "national popular," novelas introducing elements of popular culture and the world view of the subordinate classes catalyzed the discussion. Referring to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theories of cultural reproduction and his concept of a "legitimate culture," those who contest that one can speak of art and popular culture in respect of television emphasize that television discourse can only incorporate the "popular" after having carried out a "hygienization of content," a filtering by the norms of cultural legitimacy. Television appropriates, according to this current of thought, the expressions of popular cultures to renew its democratic alibi and nourish its aesthetic pretensions. Netto and Alonso write:

86


The presence of elements of dominated cultures or forms of popular narrative transposed on television does not necessarily mean that the conditions of domination have been surpassed or that a historically repressed culture has emerged. For popular culture, apart from being excluded, is situated in an antagonistic position to the arbitrariness of the dominant culture, representing a cultural counter-legitimacy. The emergence of a popular culture within the system would provoke contradictions which could destabilize it. The contradiction of cultural patterns would occur, constituting a threat for the edifice of dominant symbols. Popular culture, in its marginal status of cultural counter-legitimacy, invests at the same time its status of counter-institution or counter-culture, or in other words, a counter-society. The cultural industry only shows us the elements or fragments of regional cultures that have already been approved. It is only when the signification of the cordel is frozen into folklore, when it is duly classified in the universe of symbols authorized by the dominant cultural inventory, that the television author is allowed to seek inspiration in this mutilated culture.12

Contesting the idea that the novela is an "open process," Netto and Alonso here argue that all the rules have already been established: every response has already been programmed systematically, electronically, and institutionally. All language, all speech "mediatized" by television is condemned to stability, because no response is possible. Such positions, influenced by Bourdieu and also by Baudrillard, leave little place for two increasingly crucial questions. First, the history of television itself and of the development of links with the different components of civil society. Resolving the question of the relationship between television and popular culture once and for all in the negative, these "apocalyptic" positions prevent any reflection on social contradictions and the way in which they are mediated. As if in the face of the "integrated" author, they hold that the only tenable position is to remain outside as a disinterested arbiter of the uncontaminated nature of popular cultural production. The second question, intimately linked to the first, concerns the definition of art and popular culture in the age of technological reproductibility and the commercialization of culture. Certain Brazilian anthropologists have grasped the importance of these two questions: with the generalization of the media and the cultural industries as references, the relationship between popular culture and mass communication has completely changed since the end of the 1960s. Particularly interesting is the approach of Renato Ortiz: "Situating the


87

question of popular culture in terms of hegemony can advance discussion on Brazilian culture. The first problem is the relations of force with the cultural industry.. . . Everything leads us to believe that the space of cultural domination is articulated differently from in the past [written in 1978, authors' note]. For thefirsttime, at the national level, a cultural policy is being developed which associates the state and private organizations and is trying to integrate the nation within an ideology of totality. . . . Any form of popular expression tends henceforth to be inserted into a position of subordination arbitrarily imposed from above. The problem presents itself rather as a relation of force than as alienation."13 The analysis by Ortiz of the development of some popular religions, a decisive component of popular practices in Brazil, illuminates in particular the "double system of the popular": on the one hand, the reality of its folklorization, its commercialization, its transformation into "profane theatre," its reification as an exotic product for outsiders (particularly striking in the case of sects and rites of exorcism); on the other hand, the persistence of a religious rite for the community, founded on the mystical force of collective celebration and shared beliefs. According to Ortiz, the cultural industry confers a certain legitimacy on the cultural forms of the popular classes. As in the case of popular religion, it gives normally marginalized groups a public visibility that constitutes an element of affirmation, at the price, of course, of "exoticism" and "folklorization."14 Populism: Old questions, new debates The analyses of anthropologists are, in a country like Brazil, all the more important in that among intellectual circles a conception of traditional, noncommercial popular culture tends to dominate. Popular culture is seen as a free territory, where an alternative culture expresses itself spontaneously, exempt from the social contradictions that mark all forms of resistance. This conception of popular culture, described by some as "basist," is not unrelated to the enormous influence of radical Christian groups in the very formation of the concept of popular culture from the 1950s. The political opening of the 1980s shows the extent to which this conception is still latent. With the growing awareness of the limitations of the previous model of consensus, we are seeing the return of debate

88


on "the national, popular, and democratic character of culture" that the vast cultural movement of the years 1962-1964—during the left populist presidency of Joao Goulart—had put on the agenda. This movement was intimately linked to the People's Cultural Center (CPC), founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1961 and closely linked to the National Union of Students (UNE). Few would deny the excitement of this movement, which represented a new type of class alliance between intellectuals and the various popular classes. In the field of education and culture, it was responsible for Paulo Freire's methods of literacy teaching, the invention of new forms of theatre (that of Augusto Boal, for example) and cinema, a new journalism and a certain "defolklorization" of popular culture.15 Few would also deny that this movement, which once proposed a revolutionary art, has since become, without being monolithic, a sort of register for a current that "with its off-shoots and variants, continues to have a strong influence on the Brazilian cultural imagination."16 There are, nevertheless, many today critically re-examining the movement's theoretical presuppositions and analyzing its relevance for Brazil in the 1980s. Influenced by Lukacs and his concept of "false consciousness," the CPC saw the popular culture as "ontologically true, in contrast to false forms of popular expression," as "non-alienated, in contrast with the alienated culture of the dominant classes," interiorized in part by the dominated classes. A constant in the thinking of the CPC was the primacy of politics over the other dimensions of social life. Only political art could be considered legitimate because it incarnated the only possible form of retort to the process of alienation. Within the perspective of anti-imperialist struggle, which was one of the essential themes of student demonstrations and the CPC's program, "cultural dependency" was envisaged exclusively in terms of alienation. Twenty years later, the traces of this movement are still obvious. According to the critic M. A. Gongalves, in August 1985: "The traces of this movement can be detected in a romantic, naive conception of the relations between the artist and the popular classes; in the essentialist, populist idealization of the 'people' who are intrinsically 'good,' but mystified by the 'bad' exploiters; in the instrumentalization of art by politics and in the primacy of the 'content,' the 'message,' which must raise people's consciousness; and finally, in the preference for the rural world as a representation of 'Brazilian-ness,' supposedly a more 'authentic' symbolic source."17


89

The discussion on cultural policy in 1985 reinvigorated the themes of "identity" and "Brazilian-ness" at a time when a new social pact was being proposed to help the chances of democracy and ward off economic collapse. Part of the intellectual class openly accused the government of wanting to restore populism. It was quick to detect in official discourse a return to the populist rhetoric of preceding decades, which took over words like "people," "nation," "cultural colonization," and "identity." As Ortiz remarked: "A government of national union must appropriate a set of cultural themes and try to construct an identity in accordance with its interests. This is the formula that obliterates the real differences which define a modern, complex society like our own. A question remains, however: who constructs national identity? Obviously the political forces that 'operate' (a medico-scientific term) on the transition. There are some who participate actively in this construction and others who passively serve as raw material for the re-signification of what it means to be Brazilian. The ideological discourse masks this operation and sees to it that those who refuse to contribute run the risk of being considered foreigners in their own country."18 At the end of the 1950s, the French anthropologist Roger Bastide took up the concept of collective memory developed by the French sociologist Halbwachs, who defined it as a system of reminiscences periodically reactivated by the effort of rememorization. The collective memory exists as the lived experience of a group, which creates and nourishes it by reviving its tradition. In his studies on Brazil, Bastide opposed this popular collective memory to the national memory expressed in nationalism: unlike the former, which is of the order of lived experience, the latter is of the order of discourse and is situated in the ideological and political sphere. Even if its signifier is the popular collective memory, the national/nationalist memory is not the continuation of popular values: it is of the order of the conceived and the rationally constructed.19 Periodically, the authorities in Brazil have been led to gamble on a sort of compensatory equilibrium between symbolic nationalism and economic nationalization, or denationalization. If the nationalism of 1940s populism was essentially economic, that of military regime in the 1970s was essentially symbolic. Denationalization in an economy delivered over to transnational capital was accompanied by the recuperation of national identity at a symbolic level.

90


In the debate over cultural policy in 1985, the government sector was also criticized for archaism (some critics even spoke of a premegalithic conception of culture) and for being unaware that Brazil, in an age of mechanical reproducibility, could not do without modern technology to express modern reality.20 An anecdote from the 1930s shows the extent to which there exists, in statist populism, a tendency to freeze popular culture into its past expressions. When popular musical groups using samba rhythms—a musical form looked down on by the Rio de Janeiro bourgeoisie—arose, the government of the time expressly prohibited the use of wind instruments on the grounds that they damaged tradition. But in Brazil today, the question of populism cannot be reduced to the question of the state or to that of archaism. It has integrated modern technology and occupies discussions on the future of television production within the private monopoly. In 1985, the theme of the recuperation of national identity emerged in force on the screens of Globo in two simultaneous productions: "Roque Santeiro" and "Tenda dos Milagres," the latter a mini-series adapted from the novel of the same name by Jorge Amado. Interbreeding and the struggle by blacks for their integration into the hegemonic white society were symptomatically at the heart of these two works, which inaugurated—with unanimous approval—the new television of the New Republic. Whereas "Roque Santeiro" presented, in a small, reconstructed town on the outskirts of Rio, a microcosm of Brazilian popular archetypes from all regions, "Tenda dos Milagres" ('Tent of Miracles") was expressly regional in content. It was part of a trilogy of adaptations of Brazilian literature of regionalist inspiration, beginning with "O Tempo e o Vento" (inspired by the saga of the gauchos by Erico Verissimo) and ending with "Grande Sertao: Veredas," from the great novel of Guimaraes Rosa on the "primitive and magical North" of Minas Geraes state, also known as the Sertao. Regional values are counterposed to urban-cosmopolitan ones. Some intellectuals have been ironic about this return to "rurality," seen as a "more authentic source for the representation of Brazilian-ness." This argument has impregnated the "national-popular" imagination and undeniably constitutes a part of Brazilian culture, but it has been left behind by modernization.21 Concerning the television adaptation of "Tenda dos Milagres," others went so far as to speak of a "Brazil for tourists" by comparing it to the film version of the same text directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos in 1977. "Salvador at the turn of the century," wrote the critic


91

of Folha de Sdo Paulo in August 1985, "seems to be extracted from an anthropological Disneyland whose asepsis shows a miserable population with perfect teeth and refined manners. Thus, one of the qualities so well rendered by the film of Nelson Pereira dos Santos, the wretchedness and damnation expressed in black religious cults in Brazil, was completely destroyed."22 The complexity of the relationship of television to Brazilian society is far from being exhausted by this summary. In the same month, the magazine IstoE devoted an article debating the significance of "Roque Santeiro" at a time when discussions over the future constitution were beginning to get underway. While recognizing that in every novela, there is 90 percent repetition and 10 percent innovation, the authors highlighted an important new element: "Roque Santeiro corresponds, in fact, to an opening: it tears the Brazilian telenovela away from its alcove atmosphere and transports the narrative into the public place. The public square of Asa Branca [the reconstituted town of Roque Santeiro] is the privileged space of the novela and occupies a role which, in the texts of more traditional novela writers like Gilberto Braga or Manoel Carlos, was fulfilled by the matrimonial bedroom. There is still love, blackmail, treason, cynicism, and mystification. But the difference is that now these old sentiments are exposed in full daylight through the raw, ambiguous image of Roque Santeiro."23 The sociologist Muniz Sodrd went so far as to speak of an "injection of civic pride" and likened the public's relationship to the novela to its semireligious relationship with the late president-elect, Tancredo Neves. The writer Robert Drummond added, for his part: "Roque Santeiro discusses what must be discussed in the Constituinte. It indicates a path: we must know what is to be done with liberty."24 The optimism displayed in 1985 on the civic virtues of television and its role in the promotion of a new conception of democracy was to be quickly contradicted. The propositions of the Constituinte (commission preparing the new constitution) to reduce the power of communications monopolies and redefine freedom of expression were unable to resist the pressure brought by representatives of the status quo. Here is still more proof of the disproportionate social space occupied by television in Brazil. One may legitimately feel that some demand more from television than what it can structurally provide. Television is invested with demands and desires that are too incommensurate for the show-business institution it remains.

92


In the last twenty years, private television has undeniably played a compensatory role not only in relation to state institutions but also to civil society, a role that has progressively become a central role. Today its indisputable place as "organic intellectual" of Brazilian society is not unrelated to the real crisis of other collective intellectuals, like the now legalized political parties, or to the crisis of the intellectual class and critical thought. Intervening in the debate over the role of culture in the New Republic, the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Schwarz argued: It is not enough to blame the regime for the reigning intellectual stagnation, which also concerns the forces of opposition. We believed that once censorship and fear disappeared, intellectual debate and arts would enter into a new, brilliant phase. This hasn't been the case. Inexplicable? Thanks to the optical illusion created by the dictatorship, the intelligentsia have been unable to see that their place in society and their thinking are less oppositional than they appear. The Brazil revealed by the "liberalization" is more conservative than we expected. . . . The institutionalized sector of culture—the media, the university, the foundations subsidized by the government or big business—has grown (in comparison with the exceptional expansion of the cultural movement and intellectual activity during the period 1962-1964). The growth of this sector along with the practical compromises it implies are one of the causes of our present stagnation. . . . I don't think I'm wrong in thinking that the major aspiration of this sector is quantitative: more staff, more money, higher salaries. The question of democracy is not grasped in substantial terms of class or nation, but in terms of the greatest access of public servants to management functions. . . . The media, the universities, and the foundations have become as natural as public transport, primary education, or road signs. Does being against them have any meaning? To bend them toward the interests and point of view of the exploited, only the political pressure of the latter counts. But they are by definition outside these institutions, even if they have allies within them. The forces of opposition must specify what is the interest of the exploited in the field of culture: they must formulate this interest before they can begin to defend it.25

The return of emotion On the wall posters that decorate Globo's public relations office, one slogan, invented after the success of novelas in China, stands out: "In conquest, emotion is a more powerful weapon than powder." A full page in Variety declares, over a map of Latin America: "To thrill a Latin heart, only another Latin heart will do."


93

The Argentine anthropologist Anibal Ford righdy points out that these popular successes lead one to reject the contempt of the cultivated classes for "emotion," prized, however, in popular literature as well as radio, song, and television genres. He argues: What has been valued has essentially been the intellectual, the tragic, the melancholic. There is almost a contempt for joy—associated with superficiality—and the sentimental. . . . In Argentina, we use the term "sentimentality" or "mawkishness" to describe everything referring to emotions. Argentine official culture is strongly inteUectualized, more or less closed, and contemptuous of the expression of emotions. "Mawkishness" is the term most used here to describe popular culture. . . . This is an old combat, in some ways linked to the anthropological question of the definition and integration of man, a struggle which has been accentuated by our history of cultural dependence in that the forgetting of our own culture has also led to the forgetting of our biographies, the environment of childhood, our emotional life. . . . The important thing is to leave behind this depreciation. Whenever a strong communicational interaction exists, something happens.26

The polemic unleashed by the showing of Brazilian novelas in Cuba, particularly "La Escrava Isaura" ("Isaura the Slave Girl"), helps us perceive the nature of the profound interaction of the genre with audiences. Faithful to its pre-revolutionary tradition, the Cuban public remains a large consumer of radionovelas and telenovelas, and both radio and television have never ceased to produce them.27 But public debate, sustained by press critics and citizens, did not take place until 1984. The emergence of debate on television policy cannot be solely attributed to the arrival of Brazilian programs, but the latter certainly played a catalyzing role. Twenty-five years of revolution have mobilized energies and attitudes around work, production, the acquisition of fundamental goods and services for all (education, health, family planning) within an ideological framework dominated by the idea of preserving the revolution against external aggression. These have been years of constant tension and hardship accepted in sustained fervor of collective identification with the ideals of the revolution, years of accumulation that have consolidated the foundations of economic redistribution. If the objectives of the Cuban economic model are not, and will doubtless never be, those of Western consumer societies, nor those of the better-off classes in Latin America,

94


it is indisputable that in the 1980s, the Cuban citizen is wealthier, consumes more, and is less constrained by social mobilization. Today, the question of entertainment is posed differently: previously, the idea that leisure, culture, education, and organization went hand-in-hand prevailed. The result, in the domain of music for example, is that today "Cuba has an extremely well-structured organization throughout the island: numerous schools, five permanent symphony orchestras, chamber music societies in every province, electronic music studios and a festival, without mentioning uncountable folk and pop groups."28 Several signs indicate an evolution in the question of entertainment: the increase in the broadcasting time of the two television channels (now from seven in the morning); a particular effort at quality during the summer (which corresponds to the school holidays); the replacement of the former executive officers of the television system; the breaking down of the barriers between the cinema and television; the recognition of the political and economic necessity of strengthening cultural exchanges and participating in the Latin American audiovisual market as it attempts to adapt to the changes in the international technological environment;29 finally, die sacking of the party directors of propaganda, in power since the beginning of the revolution. This last point is particularly significant when one considers the strategic place occupied by departments of agitation and propaganda in the orientation of communication policies in socialist countries. The debate provoked in Cuba by the arrival of Brazilian telenovelas reawakened certain unresolved questions for the Left: Is it possible to use the traditional form of the melodrama to conquer the audience's attention for left-wing themes? Is it possible to put a "foreign" ideological content into a form inherited from capitalism? To substitute a conformist content with a progressive one, an alienated content with a non-alienating one? Doubtless, it was not these questions that advanced the debate, but rather those starting from the intuitive reactions of viewers, admitting and seeking to understand the pleasure given by Brazilian programs. Shaking off the role of ideological mentor conferred by her position as television critic of the magazine Bohemia, and writing as an ordinary viewer, Isabel Bulit confessed: Dear reader, we've known each other for several years now and I must be honest with you. I know that some of you, a minority, will intellectually excommunicate me after this confession. . . . I'm not ashamed to admit that,


95

like a 15 years old, I smiled with happiness at the first passionate kiss between Isaura and Alvaro. . . . My taste for the serial shows that despite the ups and downs of life, I'm still capable of astonishment and naivete. It's not the same thing as escaping from reality or refusing to shoulder it. I'd prefer to see this reality—my own—on the screen with the same artistic accomplishment and shown from the ideological point of view that I champion. . . . Our viewers want programs in line with their desires. And their desires are not extravagant. Viewers want their daily diet of joys and conflicts, but not falsified in a story that is afraid to call a spade a spade. And they want it in a language appropriate to the dynamic of the times. Let writers, artists, directors, sound and lighting technicians and camera operators respond with a professional and technical perfection. Let them offer us programs on modern themes without using artistic conceptions dating back 20 years. I've got sad news for you, dear reader. Cuban television has just received an injection of technical equipment. It needs more because television is a very costly sector, constantly changing at the technical level. But even if it obtained the most sophisticated tools right now, the end product wouldn't change very much. Our television urgently needs, in the medium and long term, to train a diversified artistic and technical personnel on the basis of an honest recruitment which takes productivity into account and suppresses superfluous staff. . . . The national excitement prompted by programs like Malu or Isaura . . . shows the vital importance of television and what people demand of it.30

If the recognition of the technical superiority of Brazilian programs has been at the forefront of debate on appropriateness of the genre in Cuba, it is also because of the public's strong attachment to the image. This sensitivity has been cultivated by a policy of film education undertaken by ICAIC (Institute Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica). Filmmakers from the Institute have produced programs on the cinema for television, going beyond the teaching of an "ideological reading" to encompass the techniques of montage and lighting as well as film history. In current discussions over television among the public and in specialized magazines, evaluations of actors, the montage, rhythm, narrative mechanisms, and music predominate. In dealing with serials treating a similar theme like the American series "Roots" (doubtless obtained through piracy), "Isaura," and the Cuban serial "El Sol de Batey," Cuban television criticism characteristically establishes correspondences and differences between series, each time linking them to the particularities of Cuban television production.31 But over and beyond the critical perception of professional quality, the discussion provoked by Brazilian telenovelas has above all

96


attempted to explain the exceptional popular success of the telenovela genre, after twenty-five years of socialism during which time it had been intellectually and ideologically "excommunicated." Cradle of the telenovela, Cuba has revived the memory of a genre and the collective imagination crystallized by it. This was not necessarily done with exhilaration: one does not always have an impression of reconciliation from press commentaries. The tradition denouncing the alienating character of such productions also resurfaced. As the critic Soledad Cruz wrote: ". . . . The interest created by Isaura can be explained. In our country, a strong melodramatic tradition obviously subsists. This was the 'massified' culture left to us by the capitalists, and a large part of the population formed its tastes from these models and transmitted them to their children. What is more, many national radionovelas and telenovelas have kept these models in force. . . ,"32 One major change has occurred, nevertheless: the audience now has a critical response to telenovelas, transforming the "raw data" of what critics see as "alienation." According to another critic: [Isaura] deals with a country like our America, which has emerged, as we did, from colonial structures with a similar demographic composition, with common ethnic and cultural roots, with a Cuban way of seeing things, with a common destiny. Its merit was to show us, like an old postcard, something of the soul of this people in a theme full of imagery, illusion, and sentimentality, but well-directed and full of quality both from an entertainment and a historical point of view. Our mass reaction, striking in its intelligence, would not have occurred twenty years ago. Today, after more than a quarter of a century of creative, revolutionary development, our viewers are active critics and not passive, alienated receivers. This attitude is coherent with a very different conception of the world and of life. Any theme of social injustice will always touch the sensitive fibres of our people.33

But the debate quickly escaped from the usual wooden language and quickly evolved into questions normally outside the official critical tradition. The telenovela's universe of sexual desire and passion questions the blindspots in Cuban television: "We should ask ourselves if the amorous or sentimental themes we present in our literature and means of communication in general are sufficiently gratifying for the masses."34 Beyond the question of the telenovela, as Soledad Cruz admitted in May 1985, several months after the criticism quoted above, it is the


97

status of individual conflict, of concrete human truth which is trying to find its legitimate place in television fiction. Favorably reviewing a Cuban telenovela "El Hombre que Vino con la Lluvia ("The Man Who Came with the Rain"), she wrote: "The error or weakness of most of our artistic creations comes from the tendency to make problems, situations and people uniform as if the fact that the vast majority of us are in agreement for the construction of a different society eliminated our particularities, our differences, the sheer diversity of our humanity and all the contradictions which enable it to advance in everyday life."35 An element of tension remains inherent in the television project defined within the framework of a socialist regime: the tension between entertainment and pedagogy, between the gratification given by genres with mass success and the cultivation of more advanced forms of aesthetic pleasure. The appreciation of telenovelas is necessarily bound up with this dilemma. To quote, once again, Soledad Cruz: "[Telenovelas] reinforce the taste for a single aesthetic and artistic model which dictates its norms: everything that does not resemble it is labelled as too dense, difficult, boring, a 'chore'. . . . Thus the people's aesthetic perception becomes atrophied and the cultural and spiritual development of the masses is affected."36 Notes 1. In 1981, the two television magazines published by the Abril group (TV Contigo and TV Ilusao) sold no more than 95,000 copies each, compared to 488,000 copies for the news magazine Veja. Furthermore, these magazines, totally unlike television magazines in Europe or the United States, were published twice a month. 2. 80 points during the first month is an extremely high rating that only a few novelas like "Corpo a Corpo" (about inter-racial relations) have achieved. Successful novelas like "Baila Comigo" and "Dancin' Days", which were subsequendy sold internationally, had average IBOPE scores of 60. ("Mania National," dossier on "Roque Santeiro," IstoE, August 14, 1985, p. 34). 3. Quoted by V. Magyar and A.L. Petroni, "A telenovela faz 20 anos," Jornal da Tarde, July 23, 1983. The sociologist Luis Gonzaga Motta recendy expressed a similar idea during a debate on the new cultural policy of the New Republic: "The novelas of Rede Globo have played a decisive role in the spread of new forms of behavior. Here, there has been an attempt to impose a cultural and social model in harmony with the model of development desired for Brazil. This model was identical to that of the Consumer society' where the modern is identified with

98


consumption. The inherent contradictions of this model resulted in a failure. In effect, the model excluded from the start the possibility that every Brazilian could be a consumer. A large part of Brazilian society has been marginalized. The popular classes have created forms of defense and cultural resistance as they have understood that it is not possible to live the consumption model in their everyday life." (Debate on "cultural colonization" reprinted in Tribuna da Bahia, August 17, 1985). 4. Everyday advertising in the newspapers of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The advertisement we have quoted concerns the apartment block "The Towers" in Sao Paulo and took up the whole of page 8 in the Folha de Sdo Paulo, August 22, 1985. For a well-documented study of the security market during the military regime, see C. Brigagao, A militarizagao da sociedade, Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar, 1985. 5. According to the director Daniel Filho, in a document drawn up by Globo for the launching of this new programming: "The series is also a product of the opening proposed by the country in that we have the possibility of immersing ourselves in our reality. And as each episode is complete in itself in the series, a non-romantic treatment is possible, which is not the case in the novela because of the very form of the genre. During the last ten years, novelas were practically the uncontested sovereigns of television. It is certain that they are not going to go away and that a thousand others will still be made. Through series like "Carga Pesada" ("Heavy Load"), "Malu Mulher" ("Malu Woman") and "Plantao de Policia" ("Police Beat"), the idea was to give a picture of the various aspects of Brazil every week. When we asked authors to suggest ideas for the series, we wanted them to situate their stories in a particular part of the country: "Plantao de Policia" took place in Rio seen from the point of view of a police report which enabled a lot of points to be touched on. "Carga Pesada" originated from a proposal for a series situated in the interior of Brazil. The idea of having truck drivers and heavy-duty trucks arose because of their mobility. In these two series, we looked at the rural and urban worlds. But an existential approach was lacking . . . which is where "Malu Mulher" came in with the problems of women, male-female relations, marriage, children, separation. . . . These problems are above all those of the middle class. And to speak about this class, there is nothing better than Sao Paulo, the biggest urban center of the country. In this way we are painting a picture of Brazil." (Quoted in R. Miranda and C.A. Pereira, Televisao, O nacional e 0 popular na cultura brasileira, op. cit.). 6. The starting point of "Cabra marcado para morrer" ("A Man to Kill") is the murder in 1962 of Joao Pedro Teixeira, president of the League of Peasants in the state of Paraiba. This murder was carried out by hired hands who remained unpunished and was typical of the rural violence which existed at the time.


99

The film should have been finished in 1964 but was interrupted by the military coup. Ten years later, drawing on his experience as a television news reporter, E. Coutinho returned to the region to film the story of the wife and the children of the dead union leader. The film won first prize in the documentary category at the Havana Festival in 1984, first prize at the Rio de Janeiro Festival in 1984, and first prize at the Festival of the "Cinemas du Re'el," Beaubourg, Paris, 1985. 7. Conversation with Glauber Rocha, interviewed by C.A.M. Pereira and H. Buarque de Holanda, published in Brasile "Cinema novo" e Dopo, Venice, Marsilio Editori, 1981, p. 246. 8. G. Rocha, "No al populismo," reproduced in Fundacidn del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Hojas de Cine, Mexico City-Havana, 1986. 9. Conversation with Dias Gomes in Voz de Unidade, August 3-9, 1985, p. 13. 10. Conversation between the authors and Doc Comparato. 11. J. Clair, "Como vender de tudo atraves da novela," Jornal de Brasil, September 19, 1982. 12. D. Countinho Netto and D. Alonso, "Cultura popular na TV ou a voz do dono," Movimento, July 12, 1976. 13. R. Ortiz, "Cultura popular: organizacao e ideologia," Cadernos de Opindo, no. 12, July 1979, p. 69. 14. See notably R. Ortiz, A consciencia fragmentada, Rio de Janiero, Paz e Terra, 1980. 15. At the beginning of the 1960s Brazil counted over 20 million illiterates among an adult (18 or older) population of 40 million. The Constitution excluded illiterates from the electoral process. This problem considerably strained the democratization of Brazilian society. It was in this context that extremely original attempts at an education linked to the culture and practices of the popular classes made their appearance. These attempts were to a large extent based on radio programs: in 1963, there were no less than 7,000 radio schools. The role of the Church and in particular the Union of Radical Catholic Intellectuals and Students was a determinant one. A particularly significant example is the literacy program inspired by the educational theorist Paulo Freire, based on the intervention of the people in the development of an educational program as a subject re-appropriating its lived experience and its history, linking learning and consciousness-raising. Very briefly defined, its pedagogical method is based on what Freire calls "generating words," the discussion of which enables learners to take possession of their language in a real situation, "a challenge situation." 16. M.A. Gonc,alves, "O projeto populista dita a nova cultura," Folha de Sao Paulo, August 16, 1985, p. 37. 17. Ibid.

100


18. R. Ortiz, "Cultura e identidade nacional," editorial in Folha de Sdo Paulo, August 6, 1985, p. 3. 19. See R. Bastide, Sociologia do folclore, Sao Paulo, Anhembi, 1958; "Me'moire collective et sociologie du bricolage," UAnnie Sociologique, vol. 21, 1970. 20. "Intelectuais criticam o populismo de Ziraldo," Folha de Sdo Paulo, August 20, 1985. 21. M.A. Gonâlves, art. cit., p. 37. 22. N. Pujol Yamamoto, "A Disneylandia Chega a Bahia," Folha de Sdo Paulo, August 9, 1985, p. 44. In its weekly programming bulletin, TV Globo tried to explain the choices made by the scriptwriter Aguinaldo Silva to adapt the novel by Jorge Amado: "Anybody who read the book may be surprised by the serial which was extracted from it. Indeed, the story suffers from many modifications. But they do not alter the content. Tenda dos milagres' still tells about Bahia, candomble, the masters of capoeira, and the preservation of a culture through the protagonist Pedro Archanjo. As Aguinaldo Silva explains, he re-created Jorge Amado's book, which was not written to become a television serial. . . . It means that characters who were hardly mentioned were turned into real dramatic nuclei. Others were made up from start to finish. . . . The structure itself was modified. A. Silva defended the half-caste, which does not invalidate the specificity of the black culture. And Tenda shows with all its magic, its rituals and its beliefs, the African heritage through the life of its characters. But the serial also shows the problems that these characters meet with in order to insist upon their rights." (Boletin de programagao, no. 655, 1985). 23. J. Castello and C. Ajuz, "Mania nacional," art. cit., p. 38. 24. Ibid, p. 38. 25. R. Schwarz, "A questao da cultura," Lua Nova (CEDEC), JanuaryMarch, 1985, pp. 27-28. 26. Interview with Anibal Ford by A. Fernandez, "Este es un pais que se desconoce a si mismo," Alternativa latinoamericana, Mendoza (Argentina), no. 2-3, 1985, p. 57. 27. The popularity of the soap opera in Cuba has been understood by Radio Marti, sponsored by the Voice of America (VOA), which has broadcast from Miami since 1984. This station makes no pretense of being modem; although aimed at a vast public, young people included, it nevertheless programs radionovelas (notably "El Derecho de Nacer") that recreate the style, atmosphere, and tone of the 1950s, before the revolution. 28. J. Lonchampt, "Les guitares de Cuba," Le Monde Aujourd'hui, May 11-12, 1986, p. IV. 29. The proposition made in December 1985 during the 7th Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana to create a film and television school goes


101

in this direction. This school, inaugurated in December 1986, is directed by an Argentine filmmaker, Fernando Birri, and receives scholarship holders from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Among the teachers is Nobel-Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is President of the Foundation for the New Latin American Cinema. Another change is that the Havana Film Festival (the biggest in Latin America after that of Rio de Janeiro) extended itself to include television and video in 1986. 30. I. Bulit, "Mi carta de libertad," Bohemia, Havana, no. 35, August 31, 1984, pp. 21-22. 31. The policy of film programming has largely favored access to films from a wide variety of different countries, despite the embargo decreed by the American majors from the beginning of the 1960s. Despite this embargo, the Cuban public has been able to see numerous American films during this period, in part through piracy, but also through the ties of friendship between the ICAIC (the Institute of Cuban Cinema Arts and Industries) and some American producers and directors. Francis Ford Coppola, for example, has often brought copies of his own films to Cuba. Today, the piracy of American cable stations and the videocassettes brought in by exiles visiting their relatives have further accentuated this exchange. 32. S. Cruz, "La esclava: victoria por forfait," Juventud Rebelde, Havana, August 26,1984, p. 5. It is also in these terms that the Nicaraguans today see the problem. Even though the number of telenovelas on their channels have been reduced and are more carefully selected, they are still immensely popular. Sporadically, articles appear in the press asking how the problem can be circumvented: "To confront the problem of telenovelas which are broadcast at the same time as Sandinista Defense Committee (CDS) meetings and which attract the neighborhood with their alienating content, many CDS have demanded thensuppression. Directors of women's organizations have done likewise because they feel that these programs have an alienating effect on Nicaraguan women. But why not bring the television along to a CDS or women's organization meeting, to watch the program together and then analyze it?" (L. Serra, "Censura o conscientizacidn: los medios de difusidn masiva en nuestra revolucidn," Cuadernos de Periodismo, Managua, August 1984, p. 24.) 33. R. Infante, "A proposito de Isaura," Tribuna, Havana, August 28, 1984. 34. Ibid. 35. S. Cruz, "Buen tiempo a pesar de la lluvia en horizontes," Juventud Rebelde, Havana, May 12, 1985, p. 4. 36. S. Cruz, "La esclava: victoria por forfait," art. cit.


in Television: The Return of Theory In the near future, when the anticipated new channels, cable-TV systems, and satellites come into being, Europe will have the biggest programming needs in the world. In April 1987, Variety estimated that these needs would be ten times greater than the total annual production of the United States (20,000 program-hours). And yet, Europe figures among the rare parts of the world judged economically sure on the program market. Along with Australia and Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy and Federal Germany represent three-quarters of the demand.1 Television channels that do not seek to meet the increased demand for fiction programs by massive imports are forced to move up to another stage of industrialized production, that of serialization, which supposes a different form of professionalism. For channels intending to fight on this terrain, the series appears as a major asset, the matrix of production and programming best adapted to the conquest of markets, both internal and external. In these new conditions, European channels are inclined to look for models: the idea of a French "Dallas" gave rise to "Chateauvallon." The idea of French "Isaura" cannot be excluded, even if U.S. models inevitably exercise greater fascination than South American ones. The process can be likened to a geometer trying to sketch out product models with the ingredients of successful formulas from successful industries: a gram of this, a chunk of that. Contrary to these calculations and dosages, both U.S. and Brazilian producers could quickly retort that, up until now, when production must be aimed at the international market, their target audience has been their own, national one. Whereas the internationalization of film and television is glorified in the Old World through coproduction

104


agreements, it is perhaps worthwhile to recall that the particular is still one way of acceding to the universal. Scouting and importing reproducible models already works to reduce the industrial production of culture to its technical and commercial dimension, and misses out on its symbolic dimension, the meaning possessed by every cultural product, however commercial it may be. To forget this dimension is to abstain from reflecting on the specificity of responses to the newly confirmed need for serialized production. It is to refuse to consider these responses within what we could call the social space of communication, the particular system of social and cultural forms in which production and consumption are managed. A genre like the novela refers us as much to a social imagination, to collective representations, to a historical memory as to the genealogy of media institutions in which the "specificities" of serialized production are anchored. This social space must be defined as a dynamic space in constant mutation, where the weight of cultural traditions coexists uneasily with the tensions between the local/national/international, between the singular and the universal. These mutations are to be found in the "popular taste," in what Raymond Williams calls "a structure of feeling," which is expressed in changes of preference from one form of television to another.2 Such mutations are also at work in the modes of interaction between programs and audience-users. In the construction of this social space, the various levels of legitimacy attached to popular genres in different contexts also intervene. These levels of legitimacy are intimately linked to the nature of the relation between creators and the industrial process, and the nature of the articulation of the intellectual class to other social groups. It is important to pinpoint the way in which a society distinguishes and identifies cultural production. The study of the forms of perception of popular genres reintroduces us into the great polemic of the whole Frankfurt School on the dichotomy between elite and popular culture. Is the reality of Brazilian television closer to European television than that of the U.S. networks ? Does the fascination exercised by the audiovisual technology and culture of the United States over Europe today prevent us from realizing this? The study of Brazilian television necessarily provokes these sorts of questions and, in thefirstplace, that of the conflicted relation between mass culture and popular cultures. The debates between certain Brazilian intellectuals call to mind the resistance of European societies (in admittedly very different circumstances) to the commercialization of the cultural domain.

Television: The Return of Theory

105

If the problems raised by Brazilian creators and intellectuals find a much wider echo, it is because Brazil brings together—and it is this which makes it so rich and disconcerting—aspects of pre-modernism, modernism, and postmodernism, incorporating elements of pre-capitalism, industrial capitalism, and post-industrial capitalism. The casual complicities between the aesthetics of the spectacle, the logic of an increasingly internationalized market and the project of an authoritarian state challenge traditional theoretical systems. Brazil forces one to refocus one's gaze in order to grasp the new mechanisms of social regulation at work in communication networks, and to understand the contradictory behavior of the professionals who function as mediators. From this point of view, one of the major interests of an analysis of Brazilian television is to help situate media culture (and more precisely, television, its mass medium par excellence) within the framework of the emergence of new forms of populism under die reign of the market. Whereas critical theories, produced in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s in a context marked by liberal democracy and public television, founded their hopes for a cultural democracy on the protective role of the state, Brazilian television creators, confronted with an authoritarian state, were forced to ponder over the cracks opened up by the market. Without being aware of it, in very particular conditions, they introduced a question which has come to the fore in Europe during die 1980s: Which, the state or the market, best caters to the needs of a popular audience? At a time when more and more theoretical positions are consecrating the decline of politics and the loss of social bonds in favor of a postmodern spontaneity, we feel it is useful to re-examine several theoretical traces so as better to grasp the profound evolution in the critical gaze on television. Notes 1. Variety, April 1, 1987, p. 73. 2. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977.


6 Television as a Mode of Organization

The blind spots of criticism In countries marked by a public service television system, critical discourse on television has long been integrated into a more general discourse on state control. The organization of television along public service lines naturally projected it into the very core of a constellation of concepts: the state (the supreme concept), culture, pluralism, the public interest, news, and censorship. A series of critical theories dominated the formalization of a corpus with pretensions to totality. The founding currents worked on the notions of social and ideological reproduction. While the various currents of critical theory did not necessarily agree on the definitions of ideology, culture, and social reproduction, all considered the dominant educational, cultural, and media institutions to be diffusers of the norms, values, models and signs of the existing system of power. With the rise of structuralism, these critical theories also found an echo in countries where the television system had always been organized along commercial lines. It was not without reason that, at the end of the 1970s, the Canadian sociologist Dallas Smythe denounced one of the "blind spots" of critical approaches to television inspired by European theories. Whereas the majority of European research persisted in seeing television only as an ideological state apparatus in line with the school and the Church, a site for the development of discursive strategies and for social reproduction, Dallas Smythe advanced the theory that television was above all a seller of audiences to advertisers.1

108


In Europe, the idea of a public service implicitly supposed the corollary idea that, to everyone's benefit, public monopolies were not under the sway of commercial pressures and that a sector on the fringe of the market could subsist. In this vision of television as an element of the political system, the television institution produces a surplus value of social consensus rather than surplus value tout court, meaning rather than value. When Dallas Smythe denounced the blindness of European critics to the economic logic of television, he himself ignored its political logic. Rightly, he was criticized for this. As three French researchers wrote in 1980: In a recent article which has sparked off numerous debates in Englishlanguage journals, Dallas Smythe shows that the audience constitutes the commodity form of communication products in contemporary capitalism. Television stations sell audiences with precise specifications to advertisers. As for the programs, "they serve only to recruit a potential audience and to maintain its attention." While this theory rightly insists on the central role of advertising in the functioning of television, while it shows that programmers seek not only to maximize their audience but also to target this audience as precisely as possible, it ignores completely, on the other hand, the political role of television. . . . Behind the purely empirical distinction between public television and private television, two different modes of articulation between two different rationalities appear. One economic, the other political and cultural. This dual character of television must be taken into account if one wants to avoid the trap of economism.2

Nevertheless, once we have recognized the need to analyze the relation between the economic and the political, the problem still remains. We must, for example, define more precisely this famous "political and cultural rationality" in order to explain why two private national television systems are at once similar and profoundly different. Each has its own way of inserting itself into the public and private mechanisms of socialization for consumers and citizens, its own way of linking up with movements of civil society, its own way of linking up with its national and international markets. The polarization of some theorists on the state and institutional discursive strategies is opposed by the polarization of others on commercial conditioning. The institutional conditions that organize communication systems continue to exercise their influence on the theoretical

Television as a Mode of Organization

109

points of view that attempt to analyze and explain them. Necessary conditions but not sufficient in themselves. The mere existence of a public service certainly does not explain why, in the majority of European critical research, there has been such a lack of curiosity about the insertion of television into a commercial and industrial context. These theories, which situated the communication apparatuses entirely in the state sphere, fitted in well with the official lines of political parties that allowed intellectuals the responsibility for reproducing concepts, allowing them also the belief that, in so doing, they were transforming the world. On the one hand were corporatist strategies in line with the economist demands of big union and party organizations; on the other was the idealism of theoretical production! On the one hand, the imaginary so present, through Lacanian references, in the scientific discourse on ideology, but split off from the world of technology and the historical modes of its own social presence; on the other, the workers' movement in which the individual was obliterated by the mass, without therightto "images, fiction, the imaginary, games and the I."3 This schizophrenic state of affairs also explains why the analysis of the tactics of resistance discussed by Michel de Certeau has so easily been ignored. Dallas Smythe's criticisms could soon be only a memory. If they still had any meaning at the beginning of the 1980s, the deregulation and privatization of European television systems is beginning to make commercial determination more and more obvious. One simple fact, striking in its familiarity, illustrates the decline of the old ways of seeing television. A technical innovation like the remotecontrol device, which enables viewers to "zap" between an increasingly saturated universe of programs, imposes a rupture with a type of critical theory at a very concrete level: Instead of searching for the royal structure of a constituted text, one now needs to consider the text and the formation of meaning as a dispersion, an incertitude, a fragmentation, and an apparently arbitrary recomposition. These singular fiddlings, these bricoleur journeys through the world of television mark in spectacular fashion the intervention of audiences in the negotiation between text and meaning. This viewer "mobility" makes nonsense of the specialist's pretension to study television texts under laboratory conditions.

110


This new situation is beyond all doubt linked to the theoretical upheaval of the question of the subject and his or her role in the process of communication and the construction of meaning. But—and it is here that the malicious interest of "zapping" resides—if the viewing subject practices this slalom through the programming schedules, it is in large part—and programmers know it—to skip advertising breaks, the multiplication of which is one indisputable feature of the new audiovisual landscape. This is itself closely linked to the increasingly intense industrial and commercial influence on television, as much in the production as the consumption process. The question of determinations The link between economic rationality and political and cultural rationality: this impossible question has haunted the contemporary history of critical theories of communication from the outset How can the means of mass diffusion—grouped in the 1940s by the Frankfurt School into the suggestive concept of cultural industry—be envisaged? How can we characterize what has become a full-fledged component of the modern industrial system but which, unlike the other branches of industry, produces meaning, ideology, and consensus as well as products and commodities? In fact, television produces so much consensus that it has become the principal site where social coexistence is managed. The diversity of theoretical responses quickly reveals that there are many different ways of postulating the fact that every product bears the traces of the productive system that has engendered it and that its nature is intelligible only in terms of the social rules governing its production. Debates concerning structural determination and social causality have occupied a strategic place in the construction of critical theories of communication and culture. Underlining the extent to which determinist models had become a real stumbling block for an understanding of the process of producing meaning, the Argentine semiologist Eliseo Veron wrote in 1978: Although it is certain that no other theory has been as decisive in this domain as Marxist theory, it must be recognized that, at the present time, it is [Marxism] which is the biggest obstacle to the development of reflection on the functioning of ideology (or at least a certain version of Marxist theory). I would


111

even add that the tendency to reify concepts has been particularly accentuated in contemporary Marxist theory, in comparison with the "classic" texts. Misplaced concreteness has wrought havoc here. The infrastructure/superstructure dichotomy, that geological, or rather pyramidal, conception of society, which sees society as being constituted of superimposed "levels," has been continually repeated. It is, of course, a metaphor, but it says a lot about the other properties of the theory in which it appears: the "base" (foreign, of course, to the ideological which is found elsewhere) is "determinant in the last instance"; the superstructure, more or less out of synch, "follows."4

From the beginning, the Frankfurt School situated the stake of this theoretical dispute in the domain of mass culture. As it was already incarnated in "really existing socialism," the mechanist interpretation could not come to terms with the questions of culture, subjectivity, and well-being. Such questions were deferred by orthodox Marxism until the day when the material conditions for the emergence of a new form of consciousnes were assembled. One of the main areas where the Frankfurt School found Marxism wanting was the theory's inability to identify the concept of well-being with anything other than economic well-being. The whole approach of the Frankfurt School, and its use of fundamental Marxist categories, is moreover an invitation to a "dialectical anti-reductionism."5 This is precisely what Antonio Gramsci had begun to put into practice in the 1920s. Opposing essentialist theories of state and class, Gramsci concentrated on the links between the state and civil society, analyzing popular cultures, the "national-popular," and the role of intellectuals and knowledge in the constitution of the hegemony of a social group. Hegemony can be defined as the capacity of a particular social group to exercise moral and intellectual direction over the whole of society, the ability to invest its own cultural modes throughout civil society in ways of life, mentaUties, attitudes, and behavior. The concept of hegemony enables one to understand the complexity of class and group alliances within an "historic bloc." In forging this key concept, Gramsci broke with established conceptions of ideology based on its functional relations to material forces. He wrote: "Structures and superstructures form an historic bloc. . . . [In this historic bloc], material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies

112


would be individual fancies without the material forces."6 Long censored by the Marxist vulgate, Gramsci's theories re-emerged during the 1970s, opening up analysis to the role of organization and social bonding assumed by the media, seen as a new "organic intellectual," one of the principal sites of social mediations where, in the playing out of social contradictions and negotiations, cultural hegemony is constructed.7 This conception is thus a refutation of both economic and class reductionism: social struggles are no longer solely reduced to class conflict. At one moment or another in their history, all the variants of critical theory have had to define themselves in relation to these questions.8 The alternate accusations of economism and idealism exchanged by political economy and discourse analysis cannot cover up the questions left dangling by both of these great traditions, which have dominated critical communications theory since the end of the 1960s. Whereas first-generation semiology, in quest of a "science of symbols," largely ignored the social conditions of symbolic production, the political economy approach could not account for the irreducible character of symbolic production in its analysis of the contingencies of its material production. Both approaches found it difficult to conceive of the imaginary as an active and essential dimension of all social practices. One has the impression that analysis stops at precisely the moment that new questions are posed. But discussions of economism should not be limited to the debates that took place within the various materialist currents of thought. "Requiem of the infra- and suprastructure," proclaimed Jean Baudrillard at the beginning of the 1970s, after having tolled the knell of the dialectic. For Baudrillard, such a mode of thought seemed all the more urgent to abandon in that it explained the refusal of the left intelligentsia to interest themselves in the question of the media, anchored as they were in their "nostalgic idealism for the infrastructure and their theoretical allergy for everything which is not 'material' production and 'productive work.'"9 Admittedly, by reducing Marxism to a metaphysic, Baudrillard supremely ignores the richness of the antagonisms that divide it. But the polemic he created against the overweening dominance on the left of the concepts of infra- and suprastructure and the productive forces, plus the precedence of certain "instances" over others, helped change the way in which the media were seen. In this respect, his critique of the instrumentalist conception of the media, limited to mere "vehicles of content," was a salutary one. Attacking a new-look Left that, already


113

at the time, did not hesitate to employ marketing techniques, he argued: "It is not as vehicles of content but in their very form and operation that the media induce a social relation." According to Baudrillard, strategies for changing the media are similar to strategies of power and the state: "According to whether [the media] are in the cluches of Capital or taken over by the people, they are emptied of, and filled with, revolutionary content, without their form ever being called into question." This reminder was important in a context dominated historically by an obsession with "content" and "the message," by an instrumentalist approach to social communication. Everything ultimately came back to a political and cultural will to show the popular classes the way and a faith in the absolute efficacy of a "true discourse." As the filmmaker and semiologist Noel Burch wrote in 1978: 'The distinction between form and content has become a veritable logocentrism. . . . It is no longer possible to continue to accord absolute priority to the power of enchantment of the Word, tirelessly repeated, whereas modes of social perception, of which television is only one particular example, are no longer regulated by this logocentrism but on the contrary proceed by all sorts of paths in which the logos is just one mode of production of meaning among others."10 In the 1980s, postmodernism was to make an essential contribution to the question of form and content by refuting the opposition made by structural linguistics between signifier and signified. We shall return to this point. The antinomy between form and content long delayed an understanding of the technological and cultural changes brought about by electronic means of information and communication. It was in this theoretical vacuum that the prospective vision of Marshall McLuhan exercised its power of seduction: one is nevertheless forced to recognize at least three great merits of McLuhan, even if one rejects his exuberant technological determinism and the mythology of the "global village" that he promoted.11 These three merits are: to have shaken up the idea of the supremacy of content; to have stressed the sensorial impact of the media rather than manipulation of minds; and finally to have insisted on the interaction which occurs between television and other media.12 Analyses of the "cultural industry" long subscribed to the idea of an inevitable process of "massification". Contemporary thought shows how this logic of massification has given way to a more complex

114


fragmentation of languages. The idea of the homogenization of cultural products, the corollary of the idea of massification (Adorno saw the future of literature, music , painting, radio, television and film in terms of uniformization), has given way to that of heterogeneity, that is, not only the coexistence of a diversity of products but the diversity of the product. The programming of a television channel offers an example of this. The same technological vector shows programs that reflect the asynchronism of the needs and desires of different audiences (rather than a "mass"), the asynchronism of "lifestyles." How else can one describe the cable-TV systems, which define themselves in relation to television, dominated by series demanding very little psychological investment, but as the universe of difference, particularity, and exclusivity? The disciplinary apparatus "The power . . . is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a 'head,' it is the apparatus as a whole that produces 'power' and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field."13 The metaphor of levels is in keeping with the pyramid-like reality of a strongly hierarchical society, governed by the principle of command. In the political, social and economic fields, it reflects a distribution of social actors separated by rigid divisions. The analyses of Michel Foucault call into question the idea of power as an attribute and property of a class. Instead, it is seen as a network of strategies, institutions, practices, and relations. The ideology of the apparatus is replaced by the observation of the dispositif, a heterogenous whole which includes discourses (said and unsaid), institutions, architectonic organizations, regulations, administrative laws and measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions. . . .; the dispositif is the network established between all these elements. This amounts to the abandonment of a conception of power as a "central core," localized in macro-subjects like the state, in favor of a microphysical conception of power, diffuse, no longer confined to the juridical instances of institutions but present in the multiplicity of disciplinary techniques and technologies. To a situation of exception where power rises up and renders itself everywhere present and visible is opposed a generalizable model of disciplinary relations, a way of


115

defining relations of power in terms of the everyday life of individuals. "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes,' it 'represses,' it 'censors,' it 'abstracts,' it 'masks,' it 'conceals.' In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth."14 Massive and compact forms of discipline oriented toward negative functions, breaking communication, suspending time, give way to flexible procedures of control, a functional dispositif. " 'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology."15 Admittedly, Foucault has scarcely touched on the genesis of the media dispositif. When he mentions the rise of disciplinary techniques in the domain of cultural transmission, he refers at most to the setting up of the pedagogical machine, productive of knowledge and aptitudes, analyzing how a defined, regulated relation of surveillance was introduced into the heart of the practice of teaching: not as something added but as an inherent mechanism which multiplied its efficiency. While Foucault said little about the audiovisual media, he spoke a lot about the visual. The exercise of discipline supposes, in effect, a dispositif thai compels by the gaze. The physics of power is effectuated according to the laws of optics, a whole play of spaces, lines, beams, and degrees. Hence his research on the gradual construction of "observatories" of human multiplicity, techniques which render those on whom they are applied clearly visible. "Side by side with the major technology of the telescope, the lens and the light beam, which were an integral part of the new physics and cosmology, there were the minor techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen; using techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation, an obscure art of light and the visible was secretly preparing a new knowledge of man."1* Foucault's insight enables us to identify the communications apparatus as a mechanism of power in its very form of organization. The model of the Panopticon characterizes the management/organizational mode of control exercised by television, or better the television dispositif: a mode of organizing space, controlling time, continually watching over the individual and assuring the positive production of behaviors, relinquishing the negative forms of repression. The architectonic figure

116


of a type of power, borrowed from the British economist Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon is a surveillance mechanism where, from a central tower, a single watchman has total visibility over a circular building composed of a honeycomb of isolated, individual cells where those under surveillance can be seen without being able to see. Adapted to television, which reverses the direction of vision, enabling the watched to see without being seen, and which functions not by disciplinary control but by fascination and seduction, television as a mode of organization becomes the reversed telepanopticon.17 One of the merits of Foucault is to have begun shifting attention within critical thought by showing that the state is nothing more than the "mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentality." Against a theory built on the essentialist idea of a stylized, globalizing model of the state, he proposes to define the ordinary functioning of the state by thinking of it in terms of its practices of adaptation, offensive and retreat, its irregularities, its bricolages. No more today, probably, than at any time in the course of its history does the state have this unity, individuality, rigorous functionality, or I would even say this importance. After all, the state is perhaps only a composite reality, a mythified abstraction, whose importance is much more limited than we think. Perhaps what is important for our modernity, that is, our topicality, is not so much the extension of the state within society but the "governmentalization" of the state. . . . [This] is a singularly paradoxical phenomenon, for if effectively the techniques of government and the problems of governmentality have become the sole political stake and the sole real space of struggle and political challenge, the governmentalization of the state has been, in spite of everything, the phenomenon that has allowed the state to survive. And it is likely that the state is what it is today above all thanks to this governmentality which is contemporaneously internal and external to the state, for it is the tactics of government which allow one to define, blow by blow, what is within the competence of the state and what is not, what is public and what is private, what is state-controlled and what is not, etc.; therefore the state, in its survival and in its limits, can only be understood on the basis of general tactics of governmentality.18

This return to the ordinariness of the state through the incessant transactions that modify and displace forms of control is particularly important for trying to situate historically the "process of privatization" that has been too quickly ascribed to an erosion of the state. What


117

the analysis of governmentality contributes compared to unifying and essentialist theories is a vast field of reflection on the materiality of the state, its procedures of population management, its techniques of government of subjects and situations, its actions but also its abstentions. This questioning of a form of thought inclined to conceive of the state as a sort of "political universal" is in phase with the decline of the great political Utopias and with the rise of an alternative idea of democracy as a form of daily construction. What the new forms of social movement refute is the idea of a project of change imposed from above by a vanguard possessing the meaning of history, the truth, and struggling to take over the state. What they express is the gradual investment in society by multiple actors and widely varying forms of individual and collective consciousness. This re-examination of the state within critical thought has broken with the wooden language of analyses of power. If this has been possible, it is because, in Foucault's own confession, "it is not so much power as the subject" which was the general theme of his research.19 The subject is no longer seen in terms of the phantasm peculiar to psychological positivism of a free individual-subject, but caught in a complex set of historical determinations. His hypotheses on procedures of individualization clarify the way in which techniques for effectively constituting individuals as correlative elements of knowledge/power are formed. As power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized. . . . All the sciences, analyses, or practices employing the root "psycho-" have their origin in this historical reversal of the procedures of individualization. The moment that saw the transition from historical-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientific-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man, that moment when the sciences of man became possible is the moment when a new technology of power and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented.20

If Foucault has helped replace the analysis of apparatuses that exercise power by that of dispositifs that have reorganized power by disseminating it, he can nevertheless be criticized for having, to some extent, succumbed to the fascination for the dismanding of the mechanisms of disciplinary rationality. Now if it is true that surveillance

118


control is being extended and made more precise, the whole of society cannot be reduced to it. One should also examine how, among users, tiny daily procedures engage with the mechanisms of discipline and how subjects react to the silent process of sociopolitical ordering. The attention given to the mode of organization has not only influenced critical theories of communication-power. Starting thistimefrom the postulates of positivism, mixed with game theory, and within the perspective of a better integration between social partners, the science of work organization has made considerable progress toward the efficient management of "the human resource" and the harmonization of the social relations of production.21 Based on the analysis of organizations as systems of action in which the strategies of different actors converge, the new logistics of communication have shown themselves to be one of the contemporary stakes for the redefinition of the technology of power. The notion of power as a relation of exchange and negotiation, rather than as an attribute of actors, is also at the forefront here but this time in a scenario played by free individual-subjects in the "brave new world." In the 1970s, the oudines of a new episteme thus took shape, traversing as much those interested in new social movements and new forms of intersubjectivity as those interested in producing more flexible modes of management and social regulation in the structural redeployment of the mode of capital accumulation. At the same time as clear-cut analyses—those of distincdy separate levels—became unstable, guidelines also became blurred. Ambiguity took root in places where only yesterday the criteria of true and false seemed to have been fixed in marble. But if this epistemological emancipation has increased the possibilities for understanding the diversity of the real and its actors, it has also permitted new forms of closure.22 The ideal of diffuse power becomes a pretext for forgetting that there is power emanating from the social system as such beyond the sum power of its "elements" or "actors," with the result that the "networks" of power become something more than the simple addition of particular relations of power. Thus are forgotten the new large-scale imbalances created by the internationalization and privatization of cultural production, leading to new forms of centralization and systemization of power. Ambivalence is inherent in the upsetting of the modes of legitimation of power that characterized the 1970s. Now that the transnationalization of economies and cultures is occurring through an accentuated financial


119

concentration and an increased centralization of strategic decisions, the legitimation of forms of power from the center is increasingly called into question. It is in this ambivalent context that one's attention is focused on the recomposition of the modalities of production and distribution of knowledge/power, linked to the development of "communication industries." Such industries cannot be reduced to what they were yesterday, namely "leisure industries": they are stimulating new professional practices and new sciences of organization and control that are leaving their mark throughout society (from work and education to leisure; from the hospital to the stock exchange; from the local to the transnational). In this increasingly capillary insertion of communication networks into social life, roles are being redistributed, the hegemony of disciplines is shifting, and a new balance of power is being formed within scientific research. Somewhat behind the other branches of the social sciences, the discipline of information and communication—still, in France at least, in search of an identity—is being called on to meet the demand of administrations for expert evaluations allowing a solution to the crisis through advanced information and communication technologies. The relations of force between disciplines have come out in the open. The new attempts to theorize communication as a mode of integration/organization call on cybernetics, thermodynamics, and biology as much as the human sciences. In France, two divergent logics have emerged in this research domain. Thefirst,dominated by systems theory and cybernetics, holds that the social is controllable, reducible to the measurable and quantifiable. The second accepts the imaginary, the subjective, and the symbolic as components of the historically real. This cleavage is not reducible to black and white, true and false. Numerous causeways between the Utopia of a new social rationality and the Utopia of a return to the subjective blur the demarcation line. The report on the sciences of communication drawn up in March 1985 by the French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) pointed out the difficulty of establishing relations between the emotional and the cognitive: "Most of the models of communication in the neurosciences, cognitive sciences and engineering sciences emphasize cognitive processes and underestimate the emotional dimension. This necessity, often of a methodological order, has theoretical consequences on the explanation of communication processes such as they function in reality. While nobody denies the role of the emotional, it is difficult to

120


arrive at a knowledge of its processes and a fortiori to formalize them. It is here that the question of links with psychoanalysis is posed and through the analysis of dysfunctionings, that of relations with psychiatry. The theoretical problem is that of the respective weight of these two dimensions in every communication situation. The difficulty consists in bringing together disciplines totally separated as much in their intellectual tradition as their social role."23 Notes 1. D. Smythe, "Communication: A Blindspot of Western Marxism," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 1, no. 3, 1977. 2. P. Be'aud, P. Flichy, M. Sauvage, "La television comme industrie culturelle," research project INA -UNESCO, typescript, 1981. Reprinted in Riseaux, CNET, no. 9, December 1984. 3. It was in these terms that the organizers of the "Second Meeting of the Audiovisual Sector and the Workers' Movement" presented their debates in January 1986. They pointed to the harrowing reappraisals being carried out in the workers' movement, and more generally, among social movements in the face of the rise of the image and the crisis of militant discourse and practice. 4. E. Veron, "Semiosis de l'ideologique et du pouvoir," Communications, no. 28, 1978, p. 13. 5. Cf. the historian of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1973, more particularly the chapter on mass culture. 6. A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Selections (by Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith), New York, International Publishers, 1971, pp. 366 and 377. 7. For an analysis of French television which takes the theory of hegemony into account, see S. Blum, La television ordinaire du pouvoir, Paris, PUF, 1982. Also see T. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1980. 8. Let us take for example one of the components of the British school (Cultural Studies). The need to return to the Marxist figure of social causality drove the sociologist Stuart Hall and the researchers gathered around him to redefine the main research line of the "Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies" of Birmingham University, founded in the early sixties by Richard Hoggart to whom we owe The Use of Literacy. For the evolution of this center, see Stuart Hall (ed.), Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, 1980. The question of determination in the field of media led to many debates. Let us quote in particular G. Murdoch and P. Golding, "Ideology and the mass


121

media: The question of determination " in Ideology and Cultural Production (under the supervision of M. Barrett and others), London, Croom-Hell, 1979. Also see the works of Nicholas Gamham. 9. J. Baudrillard, Pour une critique de I'iconomie politique du signe, Paris, Gallimard, 1972. 10. N. Burch, "Notre propagande audiovisuelle . . . Par exemple," La Nouvelle Critique, 1978. According to the author, this would explain why the Communist Party, when it was a matter of discussing an audiovisual strategy only tended to "see the thousand professionals who have an active part in media, from poster to television, as mere technocrats' always willing to favor the form instead of the content." 11. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1965. 12. It is striking to notice that, in France, the television field was practically unexamined until the 1980s, even though a critical and theoretical thinking, which quickly spread to many countries, developed very early through the impetus of the semiologist Christian Metz at the licole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, thus renewing research on the language of cinematic image. 13. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London, Penguin, 1977, p. 179. 14. Ibid., p. 196. 15. Ibid., p. 217. 16. Ibid., p. 173. 17. We must be grateful to the philosopher Etienne Allemand for that interpretation and for having extended to television Foucault's notion of the dispositif'in his book Pouvoir et television (Paris, Anthropos, 1980). The development of techniques designed to monitor the audience seems to be relating television to the panoptic model. As requested by advertising investors, audience ratings become more and more sophisticated: they do not just measure the presence rate, but also the level of attention of the viewers. Under the tide "The audience under close surveillance," a journalist at Liberation reported how, thanks to small cameras installed inside TV sets, researchers in the Oxford University Department of Sociology had studied the behavior of their fellows in front of the screen (Liberation, November 21, 1986). 18. M. Foucault, "La gouvernementalite'" (text from a lecture), Actes. Les Cahiers d'Action Juridique, no. 54, Summer 1986, pp. 14-15. Also see "La phobie de l'litat," Liberation, June 30, 1984. 19. M. Foucault in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, The University of Chicago Press, 1982. 20. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, op. cit., p. 193. 21. See M. Crozier and F. Friedberg, L'acteur et le systeme, Paris, Seuil, 1977. 22. Reporting the change which occurred in the perception of power, Lucien Sfez wrote in 1978: "That power may not have existed was an unbelievable idea until today. The question of the existence of power is today posed: is

122


it not split, in microcosm, diffuse, to such a point that some people deny its very reality?" (L. Sfez, Decision et pouvoir dans la societi frangaise, Paris, 1979, p. 25). 23. CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), "Sciences de la communication," SchSma prospect if: vingt themes strategiques pour le CNRS, Paris, 1985, p. 59.

7

Technical Thought Optimal management Deregulation has managed to destabilize the primarily "pedagogicocultural" vocation which oriented the creation and development of public service television. Of the three functions assigned to it—to inform, educate, and entertain—public television has given clear predominance to the first two. This pedagogical conception of culture was also crystallized in other institutions like, for example, cultural activities promoted by the state. Thus conceived, television relayed, in its own fashion, the mission of socialization carried out by the school. According to the specific circumstances of each country, this vocation of television was to be little by little challenged by another conception of its use, essentially determined by the function of "entertainment" Not that public television had sacrificed this function from the outset. But it preferred to assume it in terms of cultural democratization, guided by the republican ideal of making available a national cultural heritage to the citizens of all social classes. This conception was, in effect, based on an implicit social philosophy that held that cultural forms had various degrees of legitimacy and whose definition of culture was marked by an opposition between "high" culture (or legitimate culture) and "low" culture. The idea of cultural democratization also implied the implicit recognition of an inequality of access to culture, which was to be remedied. Gradually, this has been challenged by a commercial conception of entertainment, far removed from the "ascesis" of cultural education. The commercial conception also eroded the pyramidal representation

124


of society and claimed a "mass-popular" character for its audiences. Today, the function of entertainment has clearly overtaken die other functions assigned to television and the other forms of its social use. In the same way that the functions of informing and educating previously influenced the function of entertainment, the hegemony of the latter is tending increasingly to influence the others. Some time ago now, when deregulation was not yet on the agenda, we called into question the value of certain theories denouncing the increasing presence of American series on French channels. At the time, the notion of Americanization dominated the debate. In De l'usage des medias en temps de crise (1979), we wrote: Is it enough to denounce the small screen as a "faucet for images manufactured by the United States" to use the expression of [French Communist Party representative] Roland Leroy during the parliamentary debate on the state-owned television production company (Socie'te' Frangaise de Production)? Rather than reducing the analysis of Americanization to the increased presence of American products and leaving it there, would it not be better to analyze the structure of a production apparatus that inevitably has to open itself up to foreign programs just to function? This amounts to displacing the problem by examining causes rather than consequences; for the pro-rata increase of American series is only the surface indication of the acceptance of a model of television production in which the standardized series naturally finds its place. It is not the American series that is the Trojan horse of the "national alienation," but the mode of organization that privileges serialization. One must, within this perspective, consider the three fundamental elements that, over the last few years, have prepared the way for standardization and enabled television to go one step further toward the industrialization and internationalization of culture. These three elements are advertising, the massive use of public opinion polls, and the computerized management of production.1

Attempting to go beyond the polemic (always liable of falling into a gut-level anti-Americanism) on the increased foreign presence on French television, we proposed to recenter the debate around the new forms beginning to emerge in the production process. To do so, we went back to an article by Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism," in which he pointed out the difficulty of Italian workers, in spite of the efforts of Fiat, to accept the rationalized systems of work regulation applied by Ford in the United States. Gramsci noted the extent to which this system of rationalization, which in the United States determined the need to

Technical Thought

125

create a new type of human to go with a new type of work process, was a voluntarist project in Italy: "Americanism requires a particular environment, a particular social structure (or at least a determined intention to create it) and certain type of state."2 What the current process of deregulation reveals is precisely the coming to maturity of the conditions for structural redeployment. It affects, among other things, the very nature of the state, changing its relations with the private sector, modifying its relations with the market and establishing new configurations between the local, the national and the international. The allusion to the slow emergence of Fordism in the world of work and industry is today echoed in the emergence of new forms of rationalization of television production. The new rationality cannot be perceived as a series of imported recipes. It is taking root naturally and naturalizing itself as the norm of the television industry. But the comparison must stop here: first, because the culture of Fordism/Taylorism, which glorified the value of work but also hierarchy and authority, has little or no legitimacy in new conceptions of work organization that rely on flexible management methods; second, what is there in common between the Fordist/Taylorist control of workers and the new culture of social regulation identified with media culture that works by seduction? What is there in common between a culture stemming from the era of mechanics and another from the era of cybernetics? Between a culture dependent on the ideology of the nation-state and a cultural industry determined by the rationality of transnational capitalism, developing on the scale of a world economy? Between a modernist capitalism symbolized by machines in movement like the train and the airplane and a "postmodern" capitalism of flux, communication, and image networks which can only be represented in movement? The fundamental rupture resides in this: the prodigious expansion of capital toward zones that have hitherto been marginal to the rationality of the commodity—in other words, the formidable invasion of the Unconscious. If Fordism is characterized by the rationalization of the production process, based on a knowledge of the mechanics of a worker's movements and the kinetic articulation of production, cybernetic rationality mobilizes knowledge in terms of the imperatives of management, not only of production, but also of consumption. A terra incognita, the

126


consumer becomes in effect both the object and subject of research. The knowledge-action mobilized to this end seeks as much to break down his or her movements as to sound out desires and needs. Knowledge of these movements, desires and needs informs and feeds research on the circularity of programming/production/consumption, a circularity which is always unstable but aimed at the functional and emotional integration of the consumer. The irruption of the subject-consumer is relatively new for the sciences of communication. As we have already seen, consciousness of the importance of the moment of reception canrightlybe considered as a fundamental rupture. By introducing the receiver as an active subject, it enables us to understand the nature of the communication process that had been denatured by approaches inspired by the mathematical theory of information (and from which structural linguistics did not escape). At the same time, it has considerably advanced our knowledge of the stakes involved in relations of communication during an age of massive technological mediation. But when one observes the emergence of criteria for the optimal management of media space, the ambivalence of this return to the receiver, the consumer, can be considered more carefully. It is not thefirsttimethat theoretical ruptures that attempt to grasp the sheer complexity of social relations serve to feed the search for efficiency in terms of social regulation. An isolated, "clandestine" moment of intimacy, the consumption of programs appears to be a stake as much for strategies and tactics of market efficiency as for strategies and tactics of dissidence that change the meaning of the rule, refuse to take things at face value, speak when silence is demanded, destructure circularity, and deprogram the grid. The relation with the audience A programming grid is always legitimated by the plebiscite that constantly renews the adhesion of an audience. A television institution cannot function, or legitimize itself, if it is not able at least to evoke, and better, to exhibit, its audience. Responding to the audience, its needs and tastes, is the major argument that shores up programming policies in their resistance to innovation and in their openness to innovation. The needs of the audience that television pretends to interpret are in reality above all the need for an audience that the institution can incorporate structurally.3

Technical Thought

127

The epoch is decidedly one of paradoxes: whereas the return to the subject is at the heart of new critical analyses, and at a time when the neoliberal, free market doctrine asserts the return to the sovereign individual, modes of social management propose an individual entity increasingly stripped of his or her irreducible character, that inviolable something "deep down inside." In their analysis of the "Marketing Society," Romain Laufer and Catherine Paradeise clearly express the rupture between neoliberalism and liberalism contained in this point of view: "Whereas liberalism has theoretical sciences to explain social and economic relations and their consequences, cybernetic ideology has cyberneticized sciences, models and simulations. . . . Man is constructed by the bureaucracy through statistical recomposition based on the dividing up of all the symbolic elements which characterized him/her as a subject. Marketing society man is a segmented being. . . . Like the great analyst of Gombrowicz, marketing society dissolves the subject in breaking it down."4 The mode of audience management increasingly bears the mark of technical thought. Typologies of targets, constandy improved by computer technologies for the production and storage of data, show the refinement of knowledge interests mobilized around the consumer. The segmentation of audiences takes into account the new imperatives of management, which accord an increasing importance to qualified information on target groups. The battery of hypotheses set up in tests, polls, and projections, which preside over the establishment of profiles, segments and grids (terms which indicate the rise of measurement, norms and programming, the controllable and the foreseeable) propose themselves as answers as much to strategies of globalization as to strategies of personalization in the targeting of the consumer (lifestyles, sociocultural currents). Double strategies shared, in their symbiosis, by the advertising avant-garde and the media industry. This shift is perfectly coherent with the decline in the legitimacy of modes of social organization referring to the public interest and the emergence of modes of organization linked to sectorial interests. Similarly, as the concept of the "silent majority" and "the middle classes" tends to lose its relevance, the idea of an "average audience," such as it is operationalized by the media, is beginning to be displaced as the master reference. There are two important reservations, however. First, the idea of an "average audience" is far from having become inoperative. Programs for mass audiences continue to be oriented by this conception—it may even be

128


wondered whether in prime time the networks will not be increasingly responsible for managing consensus, whereas "decentralized" media are given the task of managing sectorial interests and individual desires. Second, the technical reduction carried out by advertising statistics that reduce the complexity of individuals and groups to "average" attitudes and behaviors can also be found in the segmentation of the sectorial individual in fragmented media. One thing is certain: in both approaches, the conception of the audience is a technical one. The sciences that have optimized a knowledge of audiences have traditionally been experimental psychology and social psychology. Today, neurophysiology and neuropsychology can be added. For want of being able to evaluate with precision, using quantifiable procedures, and to formalize a knowledge of emotional processes, methods of observation and measurement are concentrating on cognitive processes. Long tried and tested in the United States, as much in research laboratories for the advertising and television industries as in synergetic alliances between university and industry, these practices are only just arriving in countries where the conception of the public as citizens has prevailed over that of the target audience. Previously limited to opinion polls, this technical management of audiences now operates by the programming of effects. The organization of "technical events," designed to retain the attention of viewers, has already been well documented.5 Justified by the need constandy to stimulate the attention of the viewer through a condensation of the spectacular, it now constitutes a fundamental ground rule of the program industry and the unit of measure within programs. Today, a channel like MTV represents the optimum efficiency against the obsession of every programmer—zapping.6 MTV has staked its money on the rhythms and seduction of the rock videoclip. It has been thefirstchannel to accord fundamental importance to recent neurophysiological research on color, which is now a determining element in television form.7 NBC adapted the videoclip aesthetics to the series in "Miami Vice," one of whose attractions is the decor of pastel colors. Commenting on the new efficiency of U.S. television, the French journalist Philippe Gavi (from Liberation) wrote: "In France, unlike the United States, a television product isfirstof all a * work' that one is loath to conceive of and calibrate for consumption by the greatest number. It is therefore worked on in a different way, relying on inspiration rather than efficiency, without tests, without marketing rules, without flexibility to public reaction. Also without the army of writers and

Technical Thought

129

gagmen who apply themselves to keeping viewers spellbound within an episode."8 Two weeks later, the same journalist completely revised this opinion in writing about the new French series "Maguy," dreamed up by two advertising creative directors: "This new *boulevard' (light theater), copied from the U.S. series 'Maude,' applied all the production rules in force in the United States: three episodes were tested from the outset by three groups of ten 'televorous' viewers. Never seen before at Channel 2, this test enabled the channel to verify if people laughed more with canned laughter. . . . None of the six directors shoots more than two consecutive episodes. . . . Each character is described in a 'bible' which even notes his or her astrological sign. . . ."9 The rise of cybernetic rationality in cultural production cannot be evaluated in terms of its efficiency, which remains relative. Critical theory is now persuaded of this: it is impossible to predict the movements of consumers with certitude and thus repeat the Fordist dream of planning the movements of production in the domain of consumption. Programmers themselves recognize, when pushed, that this power still largely remains to be conquered, admitting frankly that they are nonplussed by breakdowns of technical rationality and prefer to resort to intuition, chance, and even astrology. For them, there is little doubt that the success of a product, beyond tests and other forecasts, always implies the imponderable and the uncertain.10 The rise of cybernetic rationality indicates above all the extent to which quantifiable reason has gained ground in the very heart of a domain reserved for cultural creation and aesthetic experience, a domain from which one of the richest modern theories of the subject, that of the Frankfurt School, emerged. As Jean-Franqois Lyotard, inaugurating a conference on "Art and Communication" at the Sorbonne in 1985, remarked, works produced by the new tekni inevitably bear the traces of the fact that they have been determined by calculation. The increasing tendency to integrate the audience in production logically leads to their active incorporation in the program itself to legitimate the media's conception of representativeness. This interaction between the program and the audience, favored by the growth of interactive technologies, occurs in several ways: through direct participation, for example, in games which constitute one of the main responses (along with sport and series) to the deregulation of television in Europe. Ideal spaces of consensuality, many games reward those whose answer

130


best corresponds to the opinions of the audience expressed in rapid mini-polls. In political debates, instantaneous opinion polls express the feedback of the community, certified as scientific by sampling methods. Finally, in programs organized around chitchat with show biz personalities, the audience can phone in, placing its textual fragment direcdy into the program. The media thus borrow the audience's own words to construct the program, touching up the procedures of its pragmatic legitimacy. In countries where the relation of people to television is almost a cathartic experience, the production system allows for, as we have seen in the case of Brazil, the participation of the audience in the development of a serial: the daily reactions of the audience influence the evolution of the characters and the outcome of the story. The logic of forecasting operates at all levels of television programming. The fiction series has pride of place here: a normed product, conceived of not only in terms of the global rhythm of the grid, but also in terms of the interstitial rhythms of advertising spots within programs. These characteristics make it particularly apt for programmer-advertiser strategies aimed at keeping the audience faithful. As French television director Jean-Pierre Marchand put it: "The serial has created a certain number of formal particularities, like respecting hourly slots, closely tied to advertising."11 But the legitimacy acquired by series in television programming cannot be explained merely by evoking its coherence with the logic of industrial and commercial measuring. Through its sequential reiteration, the series is admittedly a product that is particularly adapted to theriseof forecasting and organizing forms, contemporaneous with the growth of technical rationality in the production of cultural goods. The space-time of the grid is increasingly divided into smaller modules. The tendency to fragmentation can offer one explanation for this acceleration. But our analysis cannot stop here. The explanation for the privileged place of the series in television programming rests on the fundamental tension between this technical imperative and a narrative mode that has long given proof of its audience popularity. Each in its own way, the two poles of this tension participate in the legitimation of this narrative mode today. We could even say that the new mode of counting is not entirely removed from the old art of recounting. The fiction series needs to be considered as an interface of strategies for the valorization of capital in the cultural industries and the collective

Technical Thought

131

memory of narrative forms. Is not the primary symbolic logic on which serial narrative is based to be found in theritualizedrepetitiveness of everyday life? Television practicians have long been aware that the legitimity of thefictionseries must be sought elsewhere than in die logic of capital. As French television director Marcel Bluwal said: "the series is the affair of the storyteller." Between the two opinions expressed here by television professionals is to be found the heart of the debate. The end of great narratives? "Our societies are entering the 'postindustrial' age and cultures the 'postmodern' age," wrote the philosopher Jean-Frangois Lyotard in 1979. Accepting that the social foundation for the principle of division, class struggle, had blurred to the point of losing all radical potential, Lyotard deduced the end of the credibility of the grands r&its (the great narratives) and their decomposition. "The narrative function is losing its functioners, the great heroes, the great perils, the great voyages, the great goal. . . . The novelty is that in this context, the former poles of attraction formed by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions and historical traditions are losing their appeal. And it does not seem that they should be replaced, at least not on the same scale. . . . 'Identifications' with great names, with heroes of present history, are becoming more difficult."12 The thesis of the end of the grands r&its clearly indicates the rupture occasioned by the advent of the new logic of calculation in language games. It has the defect, however, of leading one to think that the hegemony of cybernetic rationality and a pragmatics of scientific knowledge has already been realized and that the traditional knowledge of "the people's history" has already been done away with. In so doing, it appears to succumb to the determinism that the evolution of technologies and sciences supposedly exercises on language modes. Paradox: whereas the postmodern thesis of the end of great narratives has attracted a large academic audience, the transnational commerce of programs operates fundamentally on the basis of narrative "software." The performance capacity of television channels on the international market is measured by their ability to produce and circulate "stories." Marked by the logic of industrial production and cybernetic research on reproducible matrices, do these "stories" not bring us back to the need for narratives?

132


Postmodern philosophy has the enormous merit of making us aware of the media supremacy of the signifier. The concept of the postmodern—as is known—has been present in architecture, aesthetics, literature, and sociology in the United States since the beginning of the 1960s. In political science, the advent of the concept of the "postindustrial society" was largely prepared by more routine theories concerning the decline of ideologies. The creator of the concept of the postindustrial society, Daniel Bell, wrote a book titled The End of Idseology in I960.13 While sociologists, following the example of Daniel Bell, dated the beginning of the postmodern age from the emergence of information technologies, other theorists in the field of aesthetics are more circumspect, deliberately trying to escape from the trap of technological determinism by refusing to reduce postmodernism to postindustrialism. Among them is Umberto Eco, who feels that postmodernism is a concept that is difficult to delimit chronologically and who interprets it rather as a "spiritual category, or better a Kunstwollen, a mode of operating: we could say that every epoch has its own postmodern."14 Among them, too, is the American critic Fredric Jameson who, contrary to Eco, proposes to situate postmodernism as an historically determined stage in the evolution of regimes of thought, a rupture in relation to modernism. Postmodernism as the cultural dominant of late capitalism is characterized by the critique of "depth models": 'The dialectic one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness) . . . the Freudian model of latent and manifest or of repression . . . the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity . . . closely related to that other great opposition between alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern period; and finally, latest in time, the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly unravelled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s."15 What replaces these "depth models" is a surface or multiple surface model. The world, according to Jameson, loses its depth and threatens to become a shining surface, a stereoscopic illusion, a flow of filmic images lacking in density. Celebrating the apotheosis of space in relation to time and the disappearance of the historical referent, this model of the surface is perfecdy coherent with the new surface area of transnational capital, its circulation in "real time" in computer networks, its flow of

Technical Thought

133

images at once universal and fragmented. It is in perfect symbiosis with strategies for overcoming the crisis shared by the large postindustrial countries, which exalt the saving value of information high technologies. Neoliberalism in theory The appreciation of international factors has been profoundly modified. When thefirststudies on the international dimension of audiovisual industries began at the end of the 1960s, the conviction that the latter were marked by relations of domination between nations and peoples was solidly anchored. Today, with the increased legitimacy of neoliberal theses of free exchange, transnational domination has become less obvious to many. And theoretical discussions bear the trace of this. Currents of thought previously unconcerned by inequality in cultural exchanges are now taking an interest in questions of internationalization in order to relativize the weight of its determination. Basing themselves on the emergence of cultural industries or even multimedia conglomerates in some newly industrializing countries, some studies are striving to show that the phenomenon of dependence does not exist16 Others are destabilizing the idea of subordination with the use of new reception theory. Briefly stated, they say this: each national audience, each particular culture has its own way of decoding imported programs. Only a victimizing vision of the host culture could imagine a passive recipient The theory of the hypodermic needle, according to which message X has the expected effect Y, cannot account for the fact that communication is a form of interaction. Only a theory of the boomerang effect can adequately describe a process in which the receptor is no longer a defenseless patient but an individual capable of reacting. One of the conclusions that follow for this sociological current, more ready to legitimize the structures in place than to question them, is relatively simple: because emitters are less than all-powerful, the question of one emitter being more powerful than another loses a good part of its relevance. Let us make ourselves quite clear: it is not the questions raised by this sociology that are disturbing. On the contrary. No one can deny the interest of analyzing specific readings of series appearing on screens all over the world by specific groups within different cultures.17 What is disturbing is that it could, pushed to its logical conclusion, divert

134


attention from the need to regulate a profoundly unequal market. For freedom cannot be reduced to the freedom to view the products of others. Ought it not also be envisaged as the freedom to view the products of cultures that are not hegemonic on the market, beginning often enough with one's own culture? It is not for nothing that "Dallas" is the most common object of research in approaches seeking to reconstitute the characteristics of this differentiated, universal link. This way of seeing things is completely coherent with neo-liberal theories on the free flow of information. It is situated in an evolutionist perspective: if there has been, and still is, dependence, it can only be transitory. Both economic and technological rationalities imply the deconcentration of audiovisual production. Redeployment will occur naturally and harmoniously. Only cultures that refuse parochialism and protectionism will be able to assert their right to participate as free actors in a cosmopolitan market.18 Classical diffusionist theories of development as a linear process of communication here find a way of boosting their fortunes. In the concrete reality of deregulation, evolutionism accompanies, in fact, discourses which deny its existence. To safeguard their national industry and domestic market from international competition, the big producing-exporting countries excel in denouncing the protectionism of others while passing over their own practices of import restriction. The natural outcome of this discourse for external use is the contesting of any governments policy seeking to guarantee the survival of local production. The whole argument rests on the never-ending contrast between the coercive state and the market that liberates the dynamic forces of technological modernization. This Manichean doctrine removes all relevance from the question of knowing what, in the demand for "cultural identity" and the strategies it inspires, results from the need to preserve the plurality of cultural expression, and what betrays the protectionist reflex of corporatism and ghetto-nationalism. Also disappearing from the analysis is the process of redefinition of the nation-state, often an active accomplice in the loss of its own cultural sovereignty. A capital question today is precisely this: Can the state assure a regulation which takes account of international factors and how?19 A corollary question: in a society where the relation between the state and civil society has become problematic, how can an active role for the different components of civil society in the democratic regulation of communication systems be envisaged?

Technical Thought

135

The debate on the intervention of the state, often shunted about between a national chauvinism and the natural cosmopolitanism of the market, prevent one from grasping the fact that the image industries have dramatically changed the process of constructing a national identity. The idea of a national movement (and above all of a nation in movement) has been a constituent part of the history of the cinema. But this has not been the case in the television industry. Jean-Luc Godard and his company Sonimage had the inspired idea offixingthe image of a nation before die television industry could interfere. In 1978, they proposed to Mozambique to make Birth of the Image of a Nation (an obvious reference to D.W. Griffith's film). In his diary, Godard wrote: The company Sonimage has proposed that Mozambique profit from its audiovisual situation to study television before it exists, before it invades, even if in 20 years* time, all of the Mozambican social and geographical space. To study the image, the desire for the image (the will to remember, to make of this memory a point of departure or arrival, a line of conduct, a moral, political guide toward a single goal: independence). To study these desires for images and their distribution by waves (or by cables). To study, once and for all, production before distribution takes charge. To study programs before they fit into a mold which enframes viewers who are not aware that they are behind television (dragged behind) and no longer in front as they believe. . . . "Birth of the Image of a Nation" will therefore relate the relations and the history of these momentary (historical) relations between a country which does not yet have television and a small video group from a country which has too much television. . . . Formation of an idea, a face, a people. Formation of new memories of this people and independence of this information.20

Debates that have taken place in critical circles in the last few years show that the international question is more complex than the neoliberal discourse leads one to believe. Need it be restated that very few countries of the South have the same potential for the production and export of television programs as newly industrializing countries like Brazil and Mexico? For many countries, the state of dependence has not yet to be significantly changed and has sometimes even worsened.21 The gaps among the cultural industries of various Third World countries have increased, smashing the unifying and monolithic concept of "dependent countries" and bringing new differentiations to the fore. But the relative diversification of actors does not override the questions posed by the new configurations of the world market. In the

136


deployment of the world-economy and world-communication, we have entered a phase in which it is not so much the process of exports and imports that defines integration into a set of values, images and symbols, as the "indigenization" of the production norms corresponding to the performance-oriented rationality of the transnational model of growth (even if this performativity continues to base its norms of excellence on those of the United States). The identification of a concrete place of origin founded in the 1970s inspired the approaches of "dependency theory." What counts now is less the original nationality of the model as its formal properties, which correspond to a new phase of capitalist penetration into everything remaining on the margins of the market (culture, communication, information, education, leisure, health, e t c . . . . ) and whose characteristics are at once international and local. The theory of dependence tended to ratify a binary vision of international space (center-periphery, core country-dependent countries), privileging the one-way analysis of the central actor. The 1980s have seen a return to the analysis of the modes of appropriation of each society of the main tendencies of the so-called technological modernity. The former approach tended to favor a linear analysis of the "deterritorialization effect" and the decomposition of the structures of the nation-state inescapably linked to the projection of singular societies in the worldcommunication economy. The new paradigms still refer to the logic of deterritorialization but in correlation with the logic of relocalization, that is, the recomposition of particular spaces (national and local) as unities of meaning for collective identities. Centrifugal in relation to the concrete realities of national territories, the Utopia marked by dependence theory sublimated their contradictions, making the "national" a natural attribute of the "popular classes." The return to the lived spaces of the national brings out the diversity of the forms of social appropriation of technologies (macro and micro) by the different components of society, and their contradictions. For this attention to a polysemic social comes at a time when we are also seeing the resurgence of nationalist metadiscourses that erect the label "nationally manufactured" into a synonym for emancipation. The realist rhetoric of industrial performance in the 1980s sought to take the place of the great narratives of cultural liberation of the 1960s. This new industrial pragmatism could overshadow an important lesson of the cultural struggles of previous decades: if the economy and culture are

Technical Thought

137

effectively intertwined, it is only a marriage of convenience, for their relation continues, nonetheless, to be one of competition and conflict. Notes 1. A. and M. Mattelart, De Vusage des midias en temps de crise, Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979. The parliamentary debates we refer to took place in 1976 and 1978. 2. A. Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism," Prison Notebooks, New York, International Publishers. 3. This is what the general manager of the BBC expressed quite well when he wrote: "In the freest existing markets, i.e., the United States, most of the time, they (the programming distributors) invest in what is already confirmed by popularity. It is said that this process consists in 'giving people what they want.' But this is because, if they were asked what they wanted, they would have no choice but to answer according to what they were already given . . . . Impossible, then, to choose what you do not have the slightest idea about." A. Milne, "L'avenir de la radiodiffusion de service public en Europe," Revue de I'UER, Geneva, September 1984, p. 23. 4. R. Laufer and C. Paradeise, Le prince bureaucrate, Paris, Flammarion, 1982, pp. 238 and 251. 5. See M. Mattelart, "Education, Television and Mass Culture. Reflections on Research about Innovation" in Television in Transition, edited by P. Drummond and R. Paterson, London, BFI Publishing, 1985. 6. Let us remember that, in order to counter zapping, the private Italian networks, at a time when, between 8:30 p.m. and 11, they would get an audience of 28 million Italians, decided by "tacit agreement" to put the advertising breaks at the same moment on all the channels so as to "constitute an impossible barrier no viewer could escape, even with a remote control." La Stampa, June 2, 1984. 7. Research in the objective and subjective field of color benefitted a lot from advances in neuropsychology. According to Francois Parra, who was one of the precursors of these studies in France, there still remains many riddles about the neuroreceptors, which question the "new frontiers of science." "We notice that the brain seems to manage processes which are unknown to us." See the proceedings of the 5th Congress of the International Association of Color, which was held in Monte Carlo from the 16th to the 22nd of June 1985. 8. P. Gavi, "France: vice de forme," Liberation, October 18, 1985, p. 13. 9. P. Gavi, "Course a Taudience: les bonnes recettes de TF1," Libiration, October 29, 1985, p. 16. 10. See T. Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, New York, Pantheon, 1983.

138


11. J.P. Marchand, quoted by J. Beaulieu, La television des rialisateurs, Paris, INA-La Documentation Franchise, 1984, p. 130. 12. J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984. 13. D. Bell, The End of Ideology, New York, Collier, 1960; The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, New York, Basic Books, i973. 14. U. Eco, "Apostilla a el nombre de la rosa," Andlisi, Barcelona, May 1984, p. 27. 15. F. Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, London, July-August 1984. 16. See C. C. Lee, Media Imperialism Reconsidered: The Homogenizing of Television Culture, Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage, 1980. 17. See notably E. Katz and T. Liebes, "Once Upon a Time, in Dallas," Intermedia, May 1984. 18. This argument is defended notably by I. de Sola Pool, "The Changing Flow of TV," Journal of Communication, no. 2, 1977. See also the contribution of the same author to K. Nordenstreng and H. Schiller (eds.), National Sovereignty and International Communication, Norwood, N.J., Ablex, 1979. 19. About the contradictions of national policies, see the Caplan-Sauvageau report, Rapport du groupe de travail sur la politique de la radiodiffusion, Ottawa, ministere des Approvisionnements et Services du Canada, 1986. These contradictions can be perceived better when the formalist nature of the definitions of the "national" that the "codes of audiovisual nationality" content themselves with, is pointed out. In March 1986, the Brazilian authorities signed a decree which clarifies the term "Brazilian film," in order to make effective a law promulgated in 1975 establishing a quota of national films for the movie theaters. To be labelled as "national," a film must be produced by a Brazilian-controlled company, or by foreigners who have been living in Brazil for more than 3 years and who registered at the Official Cinema Body. Two thirds of the technical and artistic staff must be Brazilian; the laboratory processing work must be done in Brazil. The obligation to program a certain proportion of national films only affects movie distribution networks. Television is not affected! 20. J.L. Godard, "Journal-Mozambique," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 300, September 1978. 21. The balance of programs flows speaks for itself. In Latin America, the amount of imported programs ranges from a quarter to two thirds of the total broadcasting time. On average, about half of the programs broadcasted in the area are imported. At prime time, the proportion increases. Almost half of the broadcasting time is occupied by entertainment programs. Most of the imported programs belong to this category. Among the suppliers, the United States comes in first with three quarters of the programs, the importations

Technical Thought

139

rom Latin American countries only represent 12%. As for Western Europe, t only represents 4% of the imported programs (Study carried out by T. Vaxis, The International Flow of Television Programs, Paris, Unesco, 1985). \ccording to the same source, in 1983, 17% of the programming on French channels came from abroad. In the United States, the importations only constituted 2% of the total programming, with just two exceptions: the PBS and he Spanish-speaking channel SIN.


8 The Construction of the Popular Audience The genre as an ethnic category Opinions on the tradition of French drama from foreign directors are iseful for analyzing the link between the specificity of a national ;elevision system and the givens of a national culture. The Chilean director Raoul Ruiz, engaged by the Institut National I'Audiovisuel to make a montage of die history of France as seen hrough television, was able to view, in the course of his research, nost of the historical dramas produced by French television. For Ruiz, here is no doubt that this type of program is the jewel of a television jystem that has been given an educational mission. Thefixationon the brmation of the centralized state is the main theme of this dramatic jenre. History is colonized by the discursive strategy of legitimizing he reason of state and the strong man responsible for incarnating it. Tt is always the same argument: even if die majority of the people do lot want the unity of the state, this unity is good for everyone and must )e imposed. "l The critic Serge Daney offers an opinion without complacency. Anayzing the influence of "noble language" (or what he called "Bressonian liction") in the historical series "La Camera Explore le Temps," he ivrote: "In this series, [the language] is a capital point for it also has he educational mission of not cutting a popular audience off from the nemory of its noble language, the imaginary-formation-of-the-centralstate language. As these stories nearly always take place in royal courts md casties, a form of French was created, at once drab and ceremonious, slow and declamatory, that nobody, of course, ever spoke but which

142


finished by existing—for television."2 Reason of state but also Reason, period. The state is the king of concepts, at the center of abstract thought, in opposition to popular lived experience and everyday spoken language.3 Far from being confined to a conception of historical drama, this reference to the past and to the memory of the central state weighs on the whole of French television production and fixes, outside of France, an image centered on the cultural credit of the past, chasing after its own progress. This particularity of a society and a nation expressing itself in the themes of a television production brings to mind the concept of "ethnic category."4 To define a genre as an "ethnic category" is to conjugate two aspects of the problem of genres: the first, classic, situates the genre as a set of rules of discursive production. The second refers to the fact that the genre is equally defined by the way in which a set of rules is institutionalized, codified, and made recognizable, organizing the "communicational competence" of producers and consumers, destinators and destinatees. This means that in a determined social whole, genres can function as articulated elements to the general system of knowledge of the citizens. The semio-pragmatics attached to the analysis of the production of meaning by the viewer has begun to show how, within audiovisual institutions (themselves operating within a socio-cultural space), the genre functions as a series of elements of recognition of communication acts, as an "expectation horizon," that is, as an institution creating particular psychic dispositions in the viewer, submitting him or her to the attitudes imposed by difference and repetition. In the face of the new "post-structuralist" approaches, ready to accredit the sovereign freedom of the viewer, semio-pragmatics has the merit of situating subjects-producers-of-meaning (whether director or viewer) as points of passage for a web of determinations.5 It points out that these subjects are not free to produce the discourse they want because they can only express themselves by yielding to the constraints of "discursive practice." Michel Foucault defined the latter as "the set of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in time and space, which define, for a given epoch, and for a given social, economic, geographical or linguistic area, the conditions of exercise of the enunciative function."6 The notion of discursive practice is itself indissociable from that of a "discursive formation," a space marked both technologically and sociohistorically,

The Construction of the Popular Audience

143

vhich defines a regime of truth, controlling what can be said and what nust remain unsaid. To define the genre as an "ethnic category" is to advance the >erception of the "social link," of which television reaffirms the exstence and which enables it to function as a relay in a community of neaning. At the same time, as it scrambles the field of competence of nationerritories, however, the process of internationalization introduces a lisruptive element into the landmarks of ethnocultural identities that lave historically taken form in these nation-territories. Ethnocultural lifference, such as it corresponds to an historically and geographically ietermined identity, is subjected to tension by the norm of competiiveness introduced into the market of cultural goods and the conquest >f an external audience. The batde of norms and standards, which is leveloping in the sphere of new technologies, transgresses not only lational rights but also symbolic universes. The vast study by the Italian public service television (RAI) of the r arious forms of television in market economies, evaluating the different nodes of production by giving a figure for their profitability on the nternational market, shows that henceforth the most performance-oriented is the one which establishes rules of know-how that can be appropriated by die others. The authority of know-how imposes itself as i style, and the authority of a style is its performance capacity, that is, ts superiority in the market. In this process of deterritorialization, some genres constitute potenially universal matrices, provided they combine the identifying traits of heir narrative affiliation with the new technological conditions, the seat if perpetual emulations, the producers of the effect of modernity. The endency to combine and mix genres is widely recognized as a trait of elevision pragmatics. One can, however, mention a tendency that has >een reinforced with the introduction of criteria of competitiveness and irofitability in the audiovisual product market, namely the supergenre, he crossing of elements of several genres within the same product o as to increase its commercial potential. A film like Raiders of the ôst Ark is a condensation of the whole cinema of adventure, whereas Dallas" camps at the crossroads of the soap opera, the Western, and the amily saga.7 Since the 1970s the docudrama, inaugurated by mini-series ike "Holocaust" and "Roots," manifests the symbiosis between the locumentary and variousfictiongenres.

144


The supergenre multiplies indicators of difference and repetition, expectations being more and more referred to a topology, henceforth extraterritorial, of the memory of communication. This process of concentration at the symbolic level, which owes most of its efficiency to the multiplication of the "genre-effect," indicates the concrete hegemony of the Hollywood model, the best-known expression of the vast intertextuality run by the image industry. The growing deterritorialization of cultural production, increasingly subject to technical reason, strongly interpolates the notion of territory and ethnic group, which define the space-time where the identities of discursive formations are regulated. One very general point (among many others) remains in suspension: Is the image less linked to territory than language? Does it have greater potential for universality? Is the extralinguistic aspect of the new technologies essential for the opening up of communities of non-territorial memory?8 A suspect genre Internationalization promotes fiction, and within fiction, certain genres. We are not sticking out our necks in saying that the melodrama, within an industrial matrix, is increasingly revealing its potential for universality. Admittedly, the tendency is toward the cross-fertilization of genres within heavy-duty casings like those of American industry. But one thing is certain: melodrama is at the center of this syncretic recomposition. It is present in various guises which translate into so many variants: soap opera, novela, serial. A shift in meaning has meant that the term "serial" has taken on the negative connotations that Western elites have given to the melodrama, the very figure of the popular spectacle. Television has less symbolic status than the cinema, and when it shows melodramas, it is at the lowest rung of its status. The melodrama in its television forms, serials and soap operas, is returning to countries that had forgotten it in their television references. This is notably the case in France, which, because of the growing demand for entertainment programs and the creation of new private channels, has imported American soap operas and Brazilian novelas and has produced its own serials using the soap opera formula. There is a paradox here: it was France that created the serial form in popular literature last century.9 Unlike in other countries ranging from Great


145

Britain and the United States to Spain, Mexico, and Brazil, this genre has not been massively reinvested in the television medium in France. The director Yves Laumet, speaking from his own experience, insists on the failure of his efforts to promote the serial on French television: " . . . a total failure in a genre that was very important to me. . . . The serial is a vehicle which is much more important than drama because it is specifically a television form. Potentially popular." Without trying to hide the responsibilities of decision makers or the reluctance of writers to commit themselves to an "inferior" genre, Laumet oudines the social reasons that may explain the loss of legitimacy of a popular tradition of production: I have the impression that between the two wars, there was a relatively homogeneous popular milieu. And on the other side of the barrier, a bourgeois and aristocratic milieu, itself relatively homogeneous. One could see things clearly. Ideas of social injustice and pride in belonging to the working class were obvious things which found expression in chanson, among other forms. [ am struck by the fact—this is the experience of my family and of many others—that this milieu has given birth to another. What I call the "new middle class." This is an important category which supplies executives and teachers in large numbers. . . . I have the impression that the watershed is less strong. That there is a certain blurring which means that one cannot address the popular milieu like the pre-war film-makers were able to do. 10

This is no doubt a major cause of the crisis in the representation of the popular today. But Laumet passes over a little too quickly the long tradition of conflict that has marked the vision of the "people" and the "popular" in mass cultural production. In its first manifestations, the literature of the serial was regarded by socialists as being inspired by populist ideology. One has only to read the radical critique of Eugene Sue's Les Mystires de Paris by Marx and Engels.11 Using the biting irony of the pamphlet style, Marx and Engels uncovered, under the proto-socialist and humanitarian intentions of Sue, a profound divergence with the requirements of real socialism. Historically, Marxist literary criticism had great difficulty in separating the progressive aspects of realism from naturalism in the nineteenth century novel. The preferences of Lukacs went to the realism of Balzac, in spite of the latter's royalist affiliations. Regarding the work of Zola, Marx was extremely distrustful, an attitude only partly due to Zola's engagement against the Paris Commune.

146


One had to wait for Gramsci in the 1920s to see the French tradition of the popular novel valorized by Marxist thought. For Gramsci, the French tradition served as a reference for an analysis of the lack of a popular national literature in Italy, that is, literature produced by Italians and read by Italians. Unlike Marx, who saw in Sue above all the expression of "false consciousness," Gramsci saw in the serial not only the offer to live "a real dream with eyes open" but also "the background of democratic aspirations which are reflected in it."12 It was in the stride of this analysis of national popular literature that Gramsci developed his central concept of "organic intellectual" and presciendy characterized the gap between the party as a collective intellectual and the people, as being a gap between feeling and knowing. He wrote: The popular element "feels" but does not understand or does not always know; the intellectual element "knows" but does not understand and above all, does not always "feel". . . . The error of the intellectual consists in believing that one can know without understanding and above all without feeling and without being impassioned (not only for knowledge but also for the object of knowledge), that is, in believing that the intellectual can be a real intellectual (and not simply a pedant) if he is distinct and separated from the people-nation, if he does not feel the elementary passions of the people, understanding, explaining and justifying them within a determine'* historical situation, by connecting them dialectically to the laws of history, to a higher conception of the world, elaborated following a scientific and coherent method, that of "knowledge." One cannot make political history without this passion, that is, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and the peoplenation. . . . In the absence of such a nexus, the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are reduced to relations of a purely bureaucratic, formal order; intellectuals become a caste or a priesthood.13

This return to the past is important, for the persistence of the invocation of the people in media discourse indicates that the people are still, contrary to what Jean-Frangois Lyotard thinks, the citadel to take in the legitimation of powers and counter-powers; the theme of alliances and popular representativeness is still on the agenda even though its decline has been proclaimed.14 The disappearance of a certain idea of the people cannot be confused with the end of the idea of the people and its necessity. The big difference today is that the idea of the people tends to be reduced to that of the popular audience. The crisis of the idea of public service, as much in the audiovisual field as in that of


147

education, can also be interpreted as a crisis in the representation of the people and the popular. This interpretation seems justified when one observes how the relation between certain sectors of the intellectual class and the people is being recomposed in the celebration of their media marriage: previously enclosed within a cultural elitism, these intellectuals are tending to make the first steps of reconciliation with the people-audience by adhering in a loudly uncritical manner to what they no less loudly despised not so long ago.15 One thing is certain: this return to the "popular" can also be interpreted as the willingness to makerightan enormous historical error, the material trace of an immemorial bad faith. Annie Le Brun has shown how in the shadow of the Century of Enlightenment the Gothic novel gave voice to Sadien subversion and pre-revolutionary prohibitions, brandishing the unthought and the unsaid of the cultivated class: The black casde is the crystallization of desires, anguishes, and questions that those who make it their profession to think are incapable of taking up. The same thing is happening today with science fiction and the detective novel. It is there that essential problems are addressed and not in the contemporary novel. In the eighteenth century, at a time when philosophers shied away from the questions that arose with unbelief, the Gothic novel opened up a space for them, and it was within this space that for the first time, in a dramatic way, the confrontation between subject and object, the unique and the many, the lyrical and the mechanical were played out. In other words, the whole problematic of modernity.16

Historians of the melodrama who, starting with the popular adhesion to this genre, have tried to understand its symbolic functioning, have had to study, at the same time, the strategies implemented to censor it. For Jacques Goimard, the melodrama is above all the theater of desire: it gratifies drives, "the super-ego receiving from it only satisfactions of principle."17 It is largely for this reason that it was repudiated by the right-thinking elite and was only accepted briefly during the Romantic epoch. What also makes this new reading of popular genres possible is the end of an idea of politics entirely ruled from within the world of production and outside the intersubjective relations of everyday life. For a long time, the edifying, heroic, voluntarist representation of the people and the popular, conveyed by the institutions of the working class and not by its movements and oppositions, prevented the perception of a cultural

148


matrix other than the dominant "enlightened" matrix that extolled the illustration of the working class. Beside this, a symbolic-dramatic matrix developed that did not operate through concepts and generalizations but through images and situations. Rejected by educational and political institutions, it sought itsfieldof expansion in the incessant and unequal exchanges between mass culture and popular culture, between mass cultural production and popular practices. The postmodern challenge "No tangos in the den of knowledge!" Thus was the famous musician Astor Piazzola one day ushered out of the faculty of Phdosophy, where students had invited him to play, by the Rector of the University of Buenos Aires.18 How many others have known a similar bitterness? Popular culture has had to wait a long time before acquiring the slightest legitimacy in the halls of learning. Today, the themes of popular culture are becoming recognized by the academic world. Proof of this is given by the multiplication, in the United States, of studies on soap operas, sentimental literature, the Gothic novel, etc. The trajectory of the sociologist Todd Gidin, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is interesting from this point of view. After having used the concepts of ideology and hegemony in a critical study of the news strategies of the networks concerning the student movement of the 1960s, he produced a major book on the television industry and the production of series.19 In Latin America, a large number of analyses of the interaction between mass culture and popular audiences have been developed. Thanks to the upheaval in its audiovisual industry, Europe has also begun to experience a revival of reflection on television genres. Italy is doubly distinguished here: the first country to undergo deregulation, it was also thefirstto produce serious analyses of the question of seriality.20 Certain directors of the public channel (RAI) quickly discerned the prospective importance of research in this domain to face up to the challenge of internationalization.21 This new legitimacy, which remains very relative, was arrived at by sinuous, even contradictory, paths. It coincided, in fact, with a crisis in the very conception of knowledge. Deserting the analysis of largescale systems, the new sensibility that emerged in the social sciences revolutionized everyday, ordinary practices. It displaced the rationalist approach and its ideal of objectivity, its vision of a unified subject not


149

in contradiction with him or herself. It disturbed the dualism between subject and object, which, seeking a unifying signification, had cut off the social world as an external thing and had conceived of intelligibility in terms of a break with the senses. On the horizon, another paradigm is emerging: that of the relevance of a theory based on the perceptions and subjectivity of the subject, accepting waverings of meaning and perceiving communication as a dialogic process where truth, no longer unique, emerges from intersubjectivity. Against the empire of structure and the idea of permanence is ranged the status of the insignificant, the anonymous, the ephemeral, the trivial event, the instantaneous. Against the hero of theory, of production, of history is ranged the status of the man without qualities. The new legitimacy of the television spectacle as a theme of reflection and research coincides with this disaffection for ideological readings and the instrumental conception of language they supposed as well as the logic of "all or nothing," "domination or liberation" which linked them to the rationalist position, reason or the chaos of irrationality. The new approaches prefer to start from the gratification produced by popular genres, even if alienation exists underneath: no definition of popularity can omit this emotional adhesion of audiences to television. In this perspective, instead of being simply systems of ideas that structure discourses, ideologies are also envisaged as materializing in ritual practices of consumption and in institutionalized forms of production such as fiction genres. The television institution is no longer seen as an apparatus that manages one-dimensionally the social and ideological reproduction of the existing order but as a contradictory space where meaning is negotiated and cultural hegemony created and re-created in the play of mediations. The new approach to television also benefits from the crisis of a certain idea of social critique. This aspect of the new episteme is, because of its ambivalence, more difficult to grasp. Very little distance separates the contesting of certain forms that social critiques have historically assumed from the negation of their very necessity. Whether as a refusal of yesterday's forms or a rejection of the very idea of critique, this crisis takes place in a context that is profoundly influenced by scientific-technical mutations, the renewal of interest in the individual-subject in the face of the collective, the recomposition of groups and classes and new forms of competition between cultures, all this on a worldwide scale.

150


The stake here is a particularly sensitive one, favorable to the unsaid and the equivocal, for it is in terms of the social critique as a form of knowledge-power that the legitimacy of the intellectual has been constructed and defined in relation to other groups and classes. It is difficult to come back to the self when the new legitimacy is no longer founded on a critical consciousness, on negativity. If the intellectual class speaks so little today about itself and limits itself to the glamor of surfaces, is it not because, to continue to believe in its legitimacy, it has become integrated while denying its integration? For an exhibition of Brazilian television programs at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, the sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote in the document of presentation: "Rather than always shouting Alienation,' perhaps it would be better to see how, in faint dotted lines, through the intermediary of television sets, at a fixed time, a community is created.... A new deus lar, television permits at once a family cult and a universal aggregation. This analysis is, of course, a little rapid . . . but, after all, it brings out, beyond the intellectual lamentation too often heard, the fact that the people have the sense of the present; 'look on the bright side' is what every analyst not too cut off from everyday life can observe in every situation and occurrence that punctuates social life. There is a popular hedonism which, in its more or less vulgar or trivial expressions, never fails to shock numerous kind souls."22 The acceptance of the everydayness of television, well expressed by Maffesoli, surely manifests the reconciliation of intellectuals with the everyday savoir-vivre of popular audiences. But it also manifests the difficulty of going beyond the limits of the moment to think of society as i project, to think of Utopia. For—and this is the hidden face of this everyday hedonism—the episteme which returns to the ordinary consumer, insinuates at the same time, the decline of the idea of changing the world, of exercising a collective power over the production of things. The frenzy for the liberated space of savoir vivre-savoir consommer overshadows a productive system that functionalizes the space of savoir-faire more and more. Poststructuralism, postrationalism, postmodernism: these contemporary currents of philosophy, sociology and aesthetics manifest the disenchantment with ideologies that pretended to serve as guides for the reconstruction of society along more egalitarian lines. The idea of a project, the idea of progress, both sustained by a triumphant humanism, have lost their credibility and rallying power. The discourse of the


151

Enlightenment and the orthodox Marxist emancipation of the working class have also faltered. The problem is that there is only one step between remarking the end of a social project and decreeing theflimsinessof the social sphere. And it is blithely crossed when the idea of a collective project is effaced, when the intellectual is tempted by disengagement or "uncoupling" (Bardies), the atopic ideal of the theoretician: to speak from nowhere, to be no longer situated. The contribution of these currents to the development and opening up of communication problematics is a very real one. When one goes beyond the effect of fashion and sorts through the jumble of postmodernist concepts, one must admit that in the field of language (theory of knowledge, hermeneutics, and semiology), postmodernism is participating in the deconstruction of "Western logocentrism," also undertaken by other social science disciplines. Its contribution resides in the interest it manifests for other cosmovisions where the rationalist heritage is less evident, or which are marked by other types of rationality. To its credit, one must mention the search for a theory of communication that refuses the ascendancy of arigidlylogico-conceptual thinking and privileges the analysis of the interactive, verbal, and nonverbal exchange, as well as dialogical, argumentative, and analogico-persuasive thinking. Another contribution of these currents of thought is to have pointed out the importance of the hardware, the preponderance of circuits and devices over the contents of exchange and information. Against the sociological and militant tradition that attributes an absolute value to content, this new current confers value on the formal and functional aspects of communication systems. The interest of this new sensibility lies in having drawn attention to the sensorial implications of the new communications technologies, relegated by the emphasis on the idea of "social appropriation" and "participation." The children of certain of McLuhan's intuitions, these new currents of communication aesthetics enable the exploration of the contemporary imagination in a context saturated with technology. If it has contributed to freeing the approach to cultural and artistic practices from a rigid, hierarchical concept of the social and a linear concept of history, postmodernism nevertheless participates intimately in the legitimation of new schemes of power and new modes of submission. It is particularly in phase with the rise of cybernetic visions

152


of social systems and the conservatism of the return to everyone for themselves. It is not easy—and here is neither the place nor the moment to try—to separate within postmodernism the influence of the ambiant cynicism of thetimesfrom the serious efforts of intellectuals to continue their work. The most fertile debates seem to be around language practices. At the same time, this reveals one of the limitations of this current of thought, which tends to reduce the social to language practices, paradoxically after the fashion of the structuralist conception of speech and language. One of its impasses consists in limiting itself to the analysis of language practices and generally ignoring the tendencies at work in the social, economic, and political reorganization of Western societies. (When postmodernism does take this into account, it appears to subscribe to a determinist vision of scientific and technological development. Without prejudging the subsequent work of Jean-Frangois Lyotard, this is at least the impression one gets from his book on the postmodern condition.) Postmodernists excel in rejecting the misdeeds of logocentrism in their analyses of language acts. And yet, having decreed the end of the social nexus and the illusion of the socius, they cannot see how logocentrism is being recycled in the mechanisms of the socalled postindustrial revolution. Behind the back of a mode of thought self-proclaimedly liberated from modernism, behind the back of the theoretical reterritorialization based on the subjective, another reterritorialization—pragmatic and planetary—is being developed, based on a renewed dynamic of the idea of progress and modernity. Communication and information techniques are one of its privileged vectors, material and immaterial. At a time when program production is becoming international, television narratives from markedly different cultures derive part of their seduction from seemingly being responses to the tired logos of Western modernity. They appear to be an occasion offered by a liberated market of a reterritorialization of nostalgic drives for cultures distanced from analytical reason and closer to emotional life and forms of collective experience, completely unlike the hedonist isolation of the abstract individual of the great postindustrial metropolises. Implicidy, these cultures bring, in civilizations of the written word, the polysemy of magic. The eternal recycling of the projection of European desire. The West has always had trouble coming to terms with the Third World, the idea that these countries also have their everyday life and


153

ordinary human experience. Redeeming or to be redeemed: this prejudice, this cultural misunderstanding, has been perpetuated as much by revolutionary militancy as by Christian idealism and tourist exoticism. Today, in the era of serialized production, the West is confronting its mental image and latent dream in the products of the image industry. What does it discover? That countries like Brazil have an everyday life, that they live in the modernity of the image, in a technological age, with a know-how that weaves an inextricable bond between technological rationality and the collective imagination. The whole problem is to know whether the logos remains the property of the postindustrial West or whether, to hybridize its performance, it has already been crossbred elsewhere. Notes 1. "Entretien avec Raoul Ruiz," Cahiers du Cinima, Special Issue on Television, Autumn 1981, p. 42. 2. S. Daney, "Le scenario franqais, Ibid., p. 40. 3. See A. and M. Mattelart, Penser les medias, Paris, La Decouverte, 1986, (Part IV) (forthcoming in English). 4. Cf. D. Ben-Amos, "Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres," Genre, 1969; and M. Wolf, "Generos y televisidn," Andlisi, Barcelona, May 1984, p. 191. 5. See R. Odin, " Pour une semio-pragmatique du cinema," Iris, Paris, vol. 1, no. 1, 1983. In his analysis of the construction process of an audience for the cinema, Noel Burch refers to "the institutional mode of representation," that is to say, the whole standards, whether written or not, that the directors as well as the technicians or the viewers historically interiorized. See his film, Correction Please or How We Got into Pictures, made for the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1980. 6. M. Foucault, Uarchiologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1966. Against the linear paradigm of communication, many studies brought out that the audience is both the source and the arrival, that consumption lies within production. Against verticality, they claim circularity. Let us mention a notion like the "effect of recognition" by the semiologist Eliseo Veron, the notion of "communicational competence" by the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the encoding/decoding dialectic by the sociologist Stuart Hall. All these notions conspicuously show that the construction of a discursive universe can only be achieved through the linguistic and discursive forms which pre-exist in the cultural field of the user.

154


7. See M. Mattelart, "What Programs for What Internationalization?" International Image Markets: In Search of an Alternative Perspective (A. Mattelart, X. Delcourt, M. Mattelart), London, New York, Comedia-Methuen, 1984. 8. This is the question that Bernard Stiegler asks in his report Nouvelles Technologies, aspects des enjeux philosophiques, College International de Philosophic Paris, 1985. 9. In trying to write a history of their telenovela, the young Latin American television industries invariably go back to the serial, whose invention is credited to Emile de Girardin and whose writers are Eugene Sue, Balzac, Dumas, and Victor Hugo. Many articles published in Brazil as well as in Venezuela and Cuba attest to this. 10. Y. Laumet, quoted by J. Beaulieu, La television des realisateurs, Paris, INA, 1984, p. 132. 11. Cf. K. Marx and F. Engels, La Sainte Famille, Paris, Editions sociales, 1972. 12. A. Gramsci, Litteratura e vita nazionale, Turin, Einaudi, 1950. Among the popular novels mentioned by Gramsci are the works by E. Sue, A. Dumas, and Ponson du Terrail, to which works by Dickens, the Russian novelists, and the English Gothic novel must be added. 13. A. Gramsci, "Some Problems in Study of the Philosophy of Praxis," Selections from the Prison Notebooks, op. cit. 14. J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984. 15. About this particular point, see the chapter "L'evolution d'un rapport: Intellectuels/culture me'diatique," in A. and M. Mattelart, Penser les medias. 16. Interview with A. Le Brun about Les chateaux de la subversion (Gallimard, 1986) in Liberation, March 18, 1986. 17. J. Goimard, "Le mot et la chose" in Les Cahiers de la Cinematheque, Perpignan, 1980, special issue about the history of melodrama in pictures, no. 28, p. 21. 18. Interview with Astor Piazzola on the occasion of the Montreux Festival, Liberation, July 21, 1986, p. 29. 19. See T. Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, New York, Pantheon, 1983. 20. See the book Ai confini delta serialita, compiling articles and interventions of Alberto Abruzzese, Amato Lamberti, Achille Pisanti, and others, published by the Socidta Editrice Napoletana, 1984. 21. The permanent concern of the RAI for a reflection, both theoretical and practical, is illustrated by its research department which finances researchers outside the institution and publishes the collection / programmi transmessi. 22. M. Maffesoli, Presentation document of the Brazilian television retrospective, January 21st-February 3rd, 1985, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. We have mentioned this text in Penser les medias.

Selected Bibliography ABRUZZESE, A.(ed.), Ai confini della serialitd, Naples: Societa Editrice Napoletana, 1984. ADORNO, T., television and the Patterns of Mass Culture," The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no. 3, 1954. and HORKHEIMER, M., Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury, 1974. ALLEMAND, E., Pouvoir et television, Paris: Anthropos, 1980. ALLEN, R.C., Speaking of Soap Opera, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. ALTHUSSER, L., "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books, 1971. AMORIM, J.S., "Televisidn, crisis econdmica y cambio politico en Brasil," Comunicacidn y Cultura, Mexico City, no. 13, March 1985. ANG, I., Watching Dallas. Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London-New York: Methuen, 1985. APPLEBAUM, HEBERT (Chairman), Report of the Federal Cultural Policy. Ottawa, Canada: Minister of Supply and Services, 1982. ARANTES, A.A., O que e cultura popular, Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1981. AUGE, M., "H&os te'le'culturels ou une nuit a Tambassade," Le Temps et la Reflexion, Paris, Gallimard, no. 4, 1983. AYALA BLANCO, J., La aventura del cine mexicano, Mexico City: Era, 1968. BARBERO, J.M., "De quelques defis pour la recherche sur la communication en Amenque latine," Technologie, culture et communication. Rapports compiementaires. Mattelart, A. and Stourdz£, Y. (eds.), Paris: La Documentation Franchise, 1983. . "Memoria narrativa e industria cultural," Comunicacidn y Cultura, Mexico City, no. 10, August 1983. . "Comunicacidn, pueblo y cultura en el tiempo de las transnacionales,"

156


Sociologia de la comunicacidn de masas, Moragas (de) M. (ed.), Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1985. vol. IV. BARROS, C, "Le probleme de Tetatisation et de la de'se'tatisation de Te'conomie au Bresil," ttudes Bresiliennes, Paris, August 1977. BARROS PESSOA de, S., Imitagao da vida. Pesquisa exploratoria sobre a telenovela no Brasil, Sao Paulo: Universidade de Sao Paulo, Fac. Ciencias Sociais, 1974. BARTHES, R., Mythologies, New York: Hill Wang, 1972. BASTIDE, R., Bresil, terre de contrastes, Paris: Hachette, 1957. . Sociologia dofolclore, Sao Paulo: Anhembi, 1958. . "Memoire collective et sociologie du bricolage," UAnnie Sociologique, Paris, vol. 21, 1970. . The African Religions of Brazil, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. BAUDRILLARD J., The Mirror of Production, St Louis: Telos Press, 1975. . In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. BEAUD, P., La societe de connivence, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1984. , FLICHY, P., and SAUVAGE M., "La television comme industrie culturelle," Reseaux, CNET, Paris, no. 9, December 1984. BEAULIEU, J., La television des realisateurs, Paris: IN A, La Documentation Frangaise, 1984. BEISIEGEL, C. de R., Estado e educagdo popular, Sao Paulo: Biblioteca Pioneira de Ciencias Sociais, 1974. BELL, D., The End of Ideology, New York: Collier, 1960. . The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, New York: Basic Books, 1973. BELTRAN, L.R., "Alien Premises, Objects, Methods in Latin American Communication Research," Communication Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 1976. and FOX, E., La comunicacidn dominada, Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1980. BEN-AMOS, D., "Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres," Genre, 1969. BERMUDEZ, M., "La radionovela: una semidsis entre el pecado y la redencidn," Video-Forum, Caracas, no. 2, May 1979. BERNARDET, J.C., Cinema brasileiro: propostas para una historia, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979. BLUM, S., La television ordinaire du pouvoir, Paris: PUF, 1982. . "Dallas ou Tunivers irre'solu," Reseaux, CNET, Paris, April 1985. BONAVTTA FEDERICO, M.E., Historia da comunicagao Radio a TV no Brasil. Petropolis: Vozes, 1982. BONILLA, F., and GIRLING, R. (eds.), Structures of Dependency, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973.


157

BOURDIEU, P., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. BRIGAGAO, C, A militarizagdo da sociedade. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1985. BRUNDSON, C, and MORLEY, D., Everyday Television: "Nationwide;' London: BFI, 1978. BRUNNER, J.J., "La cultura politica del autoritarismo," Comunicagao & Politica, Rio de Janeiro, March-June 1984. BURCH, N., "Notre propagande audiovisuelle . . . Par exemple," La Nouvelle Critique, Paris, 1978. . Correction Please or How we Got into Pictures, London: Arts Council, 1980. . To the Distant Observer, London: Scholar Press, 1979. BURTON, J. (ed.), Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, Conversations with Filmmakers, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. BUSTAMANTE, E., and VILLAFANE, J. (eds.), La televisidn en Espana manana. Modelos televisivos y opciones ideoldgicas, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986. CAMPO, M.J., "Simplemente Mar (a" y su repercusidn entre las closes trabajadoras, Barcelona: Avance, 1975. CANTOR, M., and PINGREE, S., The Soap Opera, Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985. CAPARELLI, S., Televisao e capitalismo no Brasil, Porto Alegre: L & PM Editores, 1982. CAPLAN-SAUVAGEAU (Chairman), Report of the Task Force on Broadcasting Policy, Ottawa, Canada: Minister of Supply and Services, 1986. CARDOSO, F.H., "The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States," Latin American Research Review, vol. 12, no. 3, 1977. and FALETTO, E., Dependency and Development in Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. CASSATA, M., and SKILL, T., Life on Daytime Television, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1983. CERTEAU (de) M., "Entretien," Le Monde, Paris, January 31, 1978. , The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. CHANAN, M., The Cuban Image. Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba, London: BFI, 1985; Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985. CHAUI, M., Cultura e democracia, O discurso competente e outras falas, Sao Paulo: Ed. Modema, 1981. CIRESE, A., "Conceptions du monde, philosophic spontane'e, folklore," Dialectiques (special issue on Gramsci), Paris, no. 4-5.

158


CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Schema prospectif: vingt themes strategiques pour le CNRS, Paris: CNRS, 1985. COCCATO, M., "Apuntes para una historia de la telenovela venezolana," Video-Forum, Caracas, no. 13, 1978-1979. COLOMINA de RIVERA, M., El huisped alienante: un estudio sobre audiencia y efectos de las radio-telenovelas en Venezuela, Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 1968. COMMUNICATIONS, issue on "L'analyse des images" (1970). COMPARATO, Doc, Roteiro, Rio de Janeiro: Nordica, 1982. CORAGGIO, J.L., Nicaragua: revolucidn y democracia, Mexico City: Linea/CRIES, 1985. CORRADI, J., "Cultural Dependence and the Sociology of Knowledge: the Latin American Case," International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, vol. 8, no. 1, 1971. COUTINHO NETTO, D., and ALONSO, D., "Cultura popular na TV ou a voz do dono," Movimento, July 12, 1976. CUNHA, L. A., and GOES (de), M., El golpe na educagdo. Sao Paulo: Jorge Zahar, 1985. CURRAN, J., GUREVITCH, M., and WOOLLACOTT, J. (eds.), Mass Communication and Society, London: Open University Press, 1979. DANEY, S., "Le scenario franc, ais," Les Cahiers du Cinima, Paris, Autumn 1981. DA VIA, S.C., Televisao e consciencia de classe, Petropolis: Vozes, 1977. DAY AN, D., and KATZ, E., "Le spectacle du pouvoir, rituels publics a usage prive\" Les Annales, Paris, Spring 1983. DEB RAY, R., Teachers, Writers, Celebrities—The Intellectuals of Modern France, London: New Left Books, 1982. DE KADT, E., Catholic Radicals in Brazil, Oxford University Press, 1970. DOS SANTOS, T., Brasil: la evolucidn historica y la crisis del milagro economico, Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1978. DREYFUS, H., and RABINOW, P., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (with an afterword by Foucault), The University of Chicago Press, 1982. DRUMMOND, P., and PATERSONR. (eds.), Television inTransition, London: BFI, 1985. DUFRENNE, M., Subversion Perversion, Paris: PUF, 1977. ECO, U., "Apostilla a el nombre de la rosa," Andlisi, Barcelona, no. 9, May 1984. ESTEINOU, J., Los medios de comunicacidn y la construccidn de la hegemonia, Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1983. FARO, J.S., "A comunicagao populista no Brasil: o DIP e o SECOM," Populismo e comunicagao (Marques de Melo, J., ed.), Sao Paulo: Cortez, 1981.


159

FEJES, F., "Media Imperialism: an Assessment," Media, Culture & Society, London, vol. 3, no. 3, 1981. FERNANDES, I., Memoria da telenovela brasileira, Sao Paulo: Proposta Editorial, 1982. FERNANDEZ, F., MATTELART, M., et al., Video, cultura nacional y subdesarrollo, Mexico City: Filmoteca UNAM, 1985. FLICHY, P., Les industries de V imaginaire, Paris: INA-PUG, 1980. FORD, A. (interview with), "Este es un pais que se desconoce a si mismo," Alternativa Latinoamericana, Mendoza (Argentina), no. 2-3, 1985. FOSTER, H. (ed.,) The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983. FOUCAULT, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. . PowerIKnowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. . Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1977. . "La phobie de l'&at," Liberation, June 30, 1984. . "La gouvernementalite'," Actes. Les cahiers d'action juridique, Paris, no. 54, 1986. FOX de CARDONA, E., "American Television in Latin America," Mass Media Policies in Changing Cultures, Gerbner, G. (ed.), New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977. FRANCO, J., "From Modernization to Resistance: Latin American Literature 1959-1976," Latin American Perspectives, vol. V, no. 1, Winter 1978. FRANK, A.G., Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969. FREIRE, P., Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder & Herder, 1971. FREITAG, B., Escola, Estado e sociedade, Sao Paulo: Edart, 1977. FURTADO, C , Cultura e desenvotvimento em epoca de crise, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1984. . The Economic Growth of Brazil, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. GARCIA CANCLINI, N., Las culturas populares en el capitalismo, Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1982. GARCIA DOS SANTOS, L., Les dereglements de la rationalite. ttude sur la demarche systemique du Projet SACIIEXERN, Paris: University de Paris Vfl, 1980. GARCIA RIERA, E., Historia documental del cine mexicano, Mexico City: Era, 1969-1976 (8 volumes). GARNHAM, N., "Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass Communication," Media, Culture & Society, London, April 1979.

160


. 'Toward a Theory of Cultural Materialism," Journal of Communication, vol. 33, no. 3, Summer 1983. GERBNER, G., and SIEFFERT, M. (eds.), World Communications, New York: Longman, 1984. GERMANI, G., Politica y sociedad en una epoca de transicidn, Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1965. GITLIN, T., Inside Prime Time, New York: Pantheon, 1983. . The Whole World is Watching, Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. GODARD, J.L., "Journal-Mozambique," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 300, 1979. GOIMARD, J., "Le mot et la chose," Les Cahiers de la Cinematheque, Perpignan, 1980 (special issue on the history of melodrama). GOLBERY DO COUTO E SILVA (General), Geopolitica do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio, 1967. GOLDFEDER, M., Por trds das ondas da Radio Nacional, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1980. GOLDING, P., and MURDOCK, G., "Theories of Communication and Theories of Society," Communication Research, vol. 5, 1978. GOLDMANN, L., The Hidden God, London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1964. GONGORA, A., La tele-vision del mundo popular, Santiago de Chile: ILET, 1983. GONZALEZ, S.J., Sociologia de las culturas subalternas, Mexico City: Cuadernos del TICOM, 1982. GRAMSCI, A., Prison Notebooks: Selections (by Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith), New York: International Publishers, 1971. GUBACK, T., and VARIS, T., Transnational Communication and Cultural Industries, Paris: Unesco, 1982. HABERMAS, J., "Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence," Inquiry, no. 13, 1970. . Legitimation Crisis, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. HALBWACHS, M., La memoire collective. Paris: PUF, 1968. HALL, S. (ed.), Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson University Library, 1980. HAYE (de la), Y., Dissonances, Critique de la communication, Grenoble: La Pense Sauvage, 1984. HOGG ART, R., The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture, Fair Lawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957. HURT ADO, M. de la L, El genero telenovela: un mundo de realidades invertidas, Santiago de Chile: Escuela de Artes de la Communicacidn, Universidad Catdlica de Chile, 1973. IANNI, O., La formacidn del Estado populista en America Latina, Mexico City: Era, 1975.


161

. Imperialismo e cultura, Petropolis: Vozes, 1976. . Revolugao e cultura, Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaqao brasileira, 1983. ININCO (Instituto de investigaciones de la comunicacidn), "Crisis en la TV," (ITW with R. Chalbaud, J.I. Cabrujas, I. Martinez), Ininco, Caracas, no. 4-5, 1982. IPOLA (de), E., "Populismo e ideologia," Revista mexicana de sociologia, Mexico City, no. 3, 1979. JAMESON, F., "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, July-August 1984. JAY, M., The Dialectical Imagination, Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1973. JOHNSON, R., Cinema Novo x Five, Austin: University of Texas, 1984. and ST AM, R. (eds.), Brazilian Cinema, East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1982. KATZ, E., and LIEBES, T., "Once Upon a Time, in Dallas," Intermedia, London, May 1984. KATZ, E., and WEDELL, G., Broadcasting in the Third World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. LACLAU, E., Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London: New Left Books, 1977. and MOUFFE, C, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985. LACROIX, J. G. (ed.), "Les industries culturelles: un enjeu vital," Cahiers de recherche sociologique, Montreal, vol. 4, no. 2, Autumn 1986. LASAGNI, C, and RICHERI, G., L'altro mondo quotidiano, Telenovelas. TV brasiliana e dintorni, Rome: ERI-Teleconfronto, 1986. LAUFER, R., and PARADEISE, C , Le prince bureaucrate, Paris: Flammarion, 1982. LE BRUN, A., Les chateaux de la subversion, Paris: Gallimard, 1986. LEE, C. C, Media Imperialism Reconsidered: The Homogenizing of Television Culture, Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980. LINS DA SILVA, C.E., Muito alem do jardim botanico, Sao Paulo: Sumus, 1985. . (ed.), Comunicacao, hegemonia e contra-informagao, Sao Paulo: Cortez Ed.-Intercom, 1982. LYOTARD, J.F., The Postmodern Condition: Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984. MAGALHAES de BARROS, A.T., "As estrategias empresarias da Ultima Hora," Comunicagao e Sociedade, Sao Paulo, December 1979. MARINI, R.M., Dialectica de la dependencia, Mexico City: Era, 1973. MARQUES DE MELO, J. (ed.), Populismo e comunicagao, Sao Paulo: Cortez Ed., 1981.

162


MARTINIERE, G., Aspects de cooperation franco-bresilienne. Transplantation culturelle et strategie de la modernite. Grenoble: PUG, 1982. MARX, K., and ENGELS, F., La Sainte Famille, Paris: Editions sociales, 1972. MATTELART, A., and MATTELART, M., De Vusage des medias en temps de crise, Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979. . Penser les midias. Paris: La Decouverte, 1986 (Published in English by University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1990). MATTELART, A., MATTELART, M., and DELCOURT, X., International Images Markets. In Search of an Alternative Perspective, London: Comedia/Methuen, 1984. MATTELART, A., and SCHMUCLER, H., Communication and Information Technologies: Freedom of Choice for Latin America? Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1985. MATTELART, A., and SIEGELAUB, S. (eds.), Communication and Class Struggle: An Anthology, New York: International General Edition, 2 volumes, 1979 and 1983. MATTELART, M., "Chile: Political Formation and the Reading of Television," Communication and Class Struggle, vol. 1. . "Education, Television and Mass Culture. Reflections on Research into Innovation," Television in Transition, Drummond, P., and Paterson, R. (eds.), London: BFI, 1985. MATTOS, S., The Impact of the 1964 Revolution on Brazilian Television, San Antonio, Tex.: Klingesmith, 1982. McANANY, E., "The Logic of Cultural Industries in Latin America: the Television Industry in Brazil," Critical Communications Review 2, Mosco, V., and Wasko, J., (eds.), Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1984. and OUVEIRA, J.B., The SACIIEXERN Project in Brazil: An Analytical Case Study, Paris: Unesco, 1980. MEAR, A., et al., Le tiliroman quibicois: ilaboration d'une mithode d'analyse, Cahiers de recherches et d'e'tudes socio-culturelles, Gouvernement du Que'bec: ministere des Communications, November 1981. Melhores momentos de telenovela brasileira, Rio de Janeiro: Rio Grafica, 1980. MICELI, S., Les intellectuels et le pouvoir au Brisil (1920-1945), Grenoble: PUG, 1981. . A noite da madrinha, Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 1972. MIEGE, B., The Capitalization of Cultural Production, New York: International General Editions, 1989. MIRANDA, R., and PEREIRA, C.A., Televisao. As imagens e os sons no ar, O Brasil, Sao Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1983. MISSKA, J. L., and WOLTON, D., Lafolle du logis. La tilevision dans les sociitis dimocratiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1983. MONSTVAIS, C, "Junto contigo le doy un aplauso al placer y al amor," Textos, Jalisco, Guadalajara, no. 9-10, 1975.


163

. "Notas sobre cultura popular en Mexico," Latin American Perspectives, vol. V, no. 1, Winter,1978. MORANA, O., "Para una aproximacidn semioldgica a la telenovela," VideoForum, Caracas, no. 1-3, 1978-1979. MORIN, E., Le cinema ou I'homme imaginaire, Paris: Minuit, 1956. . Uesprit du temps, Paris: Grasset, 1962. . "Les intellectuels et la culture de masse," Communications, no. 5, 1965. MORLEY, D., Family Television. Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia, 1987. MOSTA£0, E., Teatro e politica: Arena, Ojicina e Opiniao (uma interpretagdo da cultura de esquerda), Sao Paulo: Proposta Editorial, 1982. MUNIZAGA, G., Politicas de comunicacidn bajo regimenes autoritarios: el caso de Chile, Santiago de Chile: CENECA, 1981. MURDOCK, G., "Blindspot about Western Marxism: a Reply to Dallas Smythe," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 2, no. 2, 1978. NETO, A. F., La littirature populaire en vers comme stratigie discursive des politiques institutionnelles au Nord-Est du Brisil, Paris: EHESS, 1982. NEWCOMB, H., TV: the Most Popular Art, New York: Anchor, 1974. and ALLEY, R.S., The Producers Medium. Conversations with Creators of American TV, Oxford University Press, 1983. NORDENSTRENG, K., and SCHILLER, H. (eds.), National Sovereignty and International Communication, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1979. NORDENSTRENG, K., and VARIS, T., Television Traffic—A One-Way Street? Paris: Unesco, 1974. NUEVA POLITICA, "El Estado y la television," Nueva Politica, Mexico City, vol. 1, no. 3, July-September 1976. NUOVOCINEMA/PESARO, Brasile "Cinema Novo" edopo, Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1981. ODIN, R., "Pour une semio-pragmatique du cine'ma," IRIS, Paris, vol. 1, no. 1, 1983. ORTIZ, R.A., "Cultura popular: organizaqao e ideologia," Cadernos de Opiniao, no. 12, July 1979. . A consciencia fragmentada: Ensaios de cultura popular e religido, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1980. . Cultura brasileira e identidade nacional, Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985. ORTIZ RAMOS, J.M., Cinema, Estado e lutas culturais. Anos 50/60/70, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1983. PARANAGUA, P., Cinema na America Latina, Porto Alegre: L & PM Editores, 1984.

164


. "La television bre'silienne sur le petit ecran des sciences sociales," Amirique Latine, Paris, January-March 1985. PASQUALI, A., Comunicacidn y cultura de masas. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1963. PATERSON, R. (ed.), Brazilian Television en Context. London: BFI, 1982. PEIRANO, L. (ed.), Educacidn y comunicacidn popular en el Peru. Lima: DESCO/IPAL, 1985. , and SANCHEZ LEON, A., Risa y cultura en la televisidn peruana, Lima: DESCO/YUNTA, 1984. PENACCHIONI, I., "The Reception of Popular Television in Northeast Brazil," Media, Culture & Society, vol. 6, no. 4, October 1984. PIEMME, J. M., La propagande inavouie, Paris: Coll. 10/18, 1975. . La tilivision comme on la parle, Brussels: Labor/Nathan, 1978. PIGNATARI, D., Signagem da televisao, Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984. PIMENTA de ROCHA, F.J., and NORONHA (de), R., "O imaginario televisivo ou a (re)criacao de uma identidade mineira," Geraes, Universidade federal de Minas Gerais, January 1986. PORT ALES, D., La dificultad de innovar. Un estudio sobre las empresas de televisidn en America Latina, Santiago de Chile: ILET, 1986. POULANTZAS, N., Fascism and Dictatorship, London: New Left Books, 1974. PRIOLLI, G., "Vinte velinhas para a Rede Globo," Lua Nova, Sao Paulo, vol. 1, no. 4, January-March 1985. QUERE, L., Des miroirs equivoques. Aux origines de la communication moderne, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1981. RADWAY, J.A., Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. RAI-XXXV PRIX ITALIA, CAPRI 1983, Soltanto Attualita? Rien que des Actualite? Nothing but the News? Rome: ERI/RAI, 1984. RANCIERE, J., La legon d!Althusser, Paris: Gallimard, 1974. "RgVOLTES LOGIQUES" (group), Uempire du sociologue, Paris: La D^couverte, 1984. ROGERS, E.M., and ANTOLA, L., 'Telenovelas: A Latin American Success Story," Journal of Communication, vol. 35, no. 4, Autumn 1985. ROSS, L., "Les representations du social dans les teleromans quebe'cois," Communication Information, University Laval, Quel>ec, vol. 1, no. 3, 1977. RUIZ, R. (interview with), Les Cahiers du Cinema, Paris, Autumn 1981. SANTORO, L., 'Tendencias populistas na TV brasileira," Populismo e comunicagao (Marques De Melo, J., ed.), Sao Paulo: Cortez Ed., 1981. SARQUES, J. J., A ideologia sexual dos gigantes, Brasilia: Universidade de Brasilia, Departamento de Comunicaqao, 1981. SCHILLER, H., Communication and Cultural Domination, New York: Sharpe, 1976.


165

SCHMUCLER, H., "Communication Research in Latin America during the Computer Era," New Structures of International Communication? The Role of Research. 1980 Caracas Conference IAMCR, Leicester UK: Adams, Bros & Shardlow, 1982. and ZIRES M., "El papel politico-ideoldgico de los medios de comunicacidn, Argentina, 1975: la crisis del Lopezreguismo," Comunicacidn y Cultura, Mexico City, no. 5, March 1978. SCHNITMAN, J., Film Industries in Latin America: Dependency and Development, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1983. SCHRAMM, W., "The Unique Perspective of Communication: a Retrospective View," Journal of Communication, vol. 33, no. 3, Summer 1983. SCHWARZ, R., "Remarques sur la culture et la politique au Bre'sil (19641969)," Us Temps Modernes, Paris, July 1970. . "A questao da cultura," Lua Nova, Sao Paulo, January-March 1985. SEGUIN (de) A., Brisil. La presse (1930-1983), Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986. SFEZ, L. (ed.), Decision et pouvoir dans la societe frangaise, Paris: 10/18, 1979. SIDICARO, R., "Transformation et diversity des gauches latino-americaines," Amerique Latine, Paris, January-March 1985. SLATER, D. (ed.), New Social Movements and the State in Latin America, Dordrecht, Holland: Foris, 1986. SMYTHE, D., "Communication: A Blindspot of Western Marxism," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. I, no. 3, 1977. . "Rejoinder to Graham Murdock," Ibid., vol. II, no. 2, 1978. . Dependency Road. Communications. Capitalism. Consciousness and Canada, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981. SODRE, M., A comunicagao do grotesco. Introdugdo a cultura de massa brasileira, Petropolis: Vozes, 1972. . O monopolio da fala: fungdo e linguagem da televisao no Brasil, Petropolis: Vozes, 1977. . A verdade seduzida. Por um conceito de cultura no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Codecri, 1983. SOLA POOL (de), I., 'The Changing Row of TV," Journal of Communication, no. 2, 1977. STIEGLER, B., Nouvelles technologies. Aspects des enjeux philosophiques, Paris: College International de Philosophic, 1985. STRAUBHAAR, J., 'The Development of the Telenovela as the Pre-Eminent Form of Popular Culture in Brazil," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, vol. 1, 1982. SUSSEKIND, F., Literatura e vida literaria, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1985.

166


TAPIA (de), V. (ed.), "Mexico: entre espoir et damnation," Autrement, Paris, 1986. VALLADAO, A.G. (ed.), "Bresil. Magie, jeunesse, violence," Autrement, Paris, 1982. VAN TILBURG, J.L.G., 'Texto e contexto: o estereotipo na telenovela," Vozes, no. 7, 1975. VARGAS LLOSA, M., Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, London: Picador-Pen Books, 1982. VARIS, T., International Flow of Television Programmes, Paris: Unesco, 1985. VERON, E., "Semiosis de l'iddologique et du pouvoir," Communications, Paris, no. 28, 1978. . "Le hibou," Communications, Paris, no.28, 1978. VIEIRA, AMARAL R., (ed.), Comunicagao de massa: o impasse brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Forense Universitaria, 1978. . "Notas visando i fixaqao de urn conceito de 'autoritarismo,' " Comunicagao & Politica, Rio de Janeiro, vol. 1, no. 1, 1984. . and GUIMARAES, C, A televisao brasileira na transigdo: um caso de conversdo rapida a nova ordem, Rio de Janeiro: Institute Universitario de Pesquisas (IUPERG), 1985. VOLOSINOV, V.N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York: Seminar Press, 1973. WEFFORT, F., O populismo na politica brasileira, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978. WELLS, A., Picture-Tube Imperialism? The Impact of US Television on Latin America, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1972. WERTHEIN, J. (ed.), Meios de comunicagao: realidade e mito, Sao Paulo: Ed. Nacional, 1979. WILLIAMS, R„ "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review, London, November-December 1973, no. 82. . Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana/Collins, 1974. . Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977. . Politics and Letters, London: New Left Books, 1979. WOLF, M., "Generos y televisidn," Andlisi, Barcelona, May 1984.

Index ABC (American Broadcasting Co.), 10, 59 n.9 Abril publishing group, 2, 22, 34 n.10 Adomo, Theodor, 114 Advertising: agencies, 9-10, 50, 58 n.l; Brazilian market, 24, 40; breaks, 12, 39, 50, 52-53, 62 n.39, 109-10, 130; dictatorship and, 31; modernity, 50-53; pressures by, 46. See also Merchandising Affectivity: communication sciences and, 119-20, 149; popular culture and, 7, 92-97, 146-48; reason and, 4, 152 African religious cults, 70, 80, 91, 100 n.22 Aguinaldo Silva, Carlos, 42-43, 84, 100 n.22 Alienation: cultural dependency and, 87-S8, 124; novela and, 96, 101 n.32, 150 Allende, Isabel, 11 Alonso, D., 85-S6 Althusser, Louis, 69. See also Ideological state apparatus Amado, Jorge, 57, 85, 100 n.22 Americanism and Fordism, 124-25 Americanization, 124 Amorim, Jose* Salomao, 23

Anti-imperialism, 72, 88. See also Internationalization Apoio, 47, 49. See also Merchandising Appropriation: of genres, 14-15; of technologies, 136; of use value, 68 Argentina, 7, 8, 11, 14,93 Arts defaire, invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life), 68 Assis Chateaubriand Group, 19, 23 Audiences: as commodity, 107-8; ethnography of, 68-69; interaction, 93-97; irruption of, as subject-consumer, 67-72, 126; management of, 38-41; mobility of, 109-10; participation of, 42-43; segmentation, 127-28; targets and measures, 52, 121 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1 Australia, 2, 62 n.43, 103 Avancini, Walter, 57, 80, 81 "Baila Comigo" ("Dance With Me"), 2 Balzac, Honore de, 145, 154 n.9 Bandeirantes, 21, 23, 49 "Bandidos da Falange", 45 Barbero Martin, Jesus, 71-72, 75

168

Index

Bartering system, 12, 50 Bastide, Roger, 89 Baudrillard, Jean, 86, 112-13 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 3, 137 n.3 Bell, Daniel, 132 "Bern Amado" ("Well Beloved"), 85 Benedetti, Mario, 11 Bentham, Jeremy, 116 Berlusconi, Silvio, 10 "Beto Rockfeller," 15-17, 56 Birth of the Image of a Nation, 135 Bluwal, Marcel, 131 Boal, Augusto, 88 Bohemia, 94 Bonavita, Maria Elvira, 38 Bourdieu, Pierre, 69-70, 85-86 Braga, Sonia, 57 Brahma, 49, 61 n.35. See also Merchandising Branco, Castelo (President), 22, 32, 35 n.26 Brasilsat satellites, 21 Brazilian Economic Miracle, 27, 32, 65 "Brazilian-ness," 57, 88-89 "Brilhante," 13 Brunner, Jose* Joaquim, 31 Bulit, Isabel, 94 Burch, Noel, 113, 121 n.10, 153 n.5 "Cabra Marcado para morrer" ("A Man to Kill"), 82, 98 n.6 Caignet, Felix, 9 "Camera Explore le Temps (La)," 141 Capitalism: development strategy, 23-24, 31; discipline and, 31-32; multinationals, 34 n.9, 46; postmodernism and, 105, 125, 132. See also Deterritorialization/reterritorialization; Dual society;

Internationalization "Carga Pesada" ("Heavy Load"), 65, 98 n.5 Carnival, 70 Casa de Criagao Janete Clair, 56-57, 63 n.57, 84 "Casos Especiais," 40, 45 "Caso Verdade," 45 Castro, Fidel, 13 Catharsis, 7, 70, 88, 130 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 4 n.l, 10, 33 n.6 Censorship: miniseries and, 59 n.11, 82; national security and, 30; novelas and, 41, 44-47, 84; theatre and, 65-66 n.2 Certeau, Michel (de), 68, 71, 109 "Chateauvallon," 18 n.22, 103 "Chega mais," 48 China, 12-13 Cinema Novo, 82-83, 85 Civil society: hegemony and, 111; military regimes and, 31; regulations and, 134; television and, 86, 92, 108 Clair, Janete, 9, 37, 48, 56-57, 84-85 Class: alliances, 31; audience management, 38, 59 n.9, 126-28; populism and, 72-76; theory, 69-72, 107-13. See also Mass culture; Middle class; Popular culture CMQ (Cuban Television Studios), 8, 19 CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), 119 Colgate-Palmolive, 10, 17 n.6, 47 Collective memory, 89 Colombia, 11 Communication competence, 142, 153 n.6 Communication faculties and schools, 32

Index Communication industries, 119 Communication sciences, 118-20, 126, 128, 137 n.7 Communist party, 83-84, 121 n. 10, 124 Comparato, Doc, 45, 55, 57, 84 Constituinte, 91 Consumers' associations, 47 Consumption procedures, 68. See also Audiences Content/form dichotomy, 88, 94, 111-13, 151 Cordel, 44, 85-86 Coutinho, Eduardo, 82, 98 n.6 Critical theories: on dependency, 133-37; on fascism, 29-33; on history of popular genre, 8; political economy, 107-14; on reception, 68-75. Cruz, Soledad, 96-97 Cuba, 8-9, 14, 93-97 Cultural dependency, 88. See also Theory of dependency Cultural industry, 110, 113 Cultural logic of TV, 108 Cultural policy, 89-90, 97 n.3, 134 Cybernetics, 51, 119, 127, 151 "Dallas," 12, 16, 18, 51, 61 n.38, 103, 134, 143 "Dancin* Days," 11-12 Daney, Serge, 141 Democracy: as daily construction, 117; illiteracy and, 99 n.15; mass culture and, 31; novela and, 9 1 92; public service and, 123-24 Depth models, 132-33 "Derecho de nacer (El)" ("The Right to Be Bom"), 9, 14, 100 n.27 Deregulation: of childrens' programs, 49-50; of public service, 1-2, 103-5, 123-25

169

"Despedida de casado," 44 Determinations: critical theories and, 110-14, 120 n.8; ethnography and, 68-69; internationalization and, 133-34; semio-pragmatics and, 142 Determinism, 73, 110, 113, 131-32 Deterritorialization/reterritorialization: genres and, 143-44; postmodernism and, 152; theory of dependency and, 136-37 Development: concentration and, 19, 27; as modernization, 76 n.10, 97 n.3; populism and, 73 Dias Gomes, 43-45, 58, 84-85 Dickens, Charles, 14, 154 n.12 Dictatorship. See Military regime Disciplinary techniques, 31-32, 114-18. See also Foucault, Michel Discourse analysis: idealism of, 112-14; polarization on, 107-8; populism and, 73-74; postmodernism and, 148-52; semio-pragmatics, 142 Discursive formation, 142 Dispositif, 114-18 Donner, Hans Jurgen, 52 Drummond, Robert, 91 Dual society: advertising and, 24; television and, 27, 31, 80-82, 97 n.3 Duarte, Lima, 15 Duarte, Regina, 55 Dufrenne, Mikel, 71-72 Dumas, Alexandre, 14, 154 nn.9, 12 Durst, Walter Jorge, 44 Eco, Umberto, 132 Economic logic of TV, 108 Economism, 108, 112 Embrafilm, 26

170

Index

Embratel, 20 "Em Busca da Felicidade" ("In Search of Happiness"), 9 End of Ideology (The), 132 Engels, Friedrich, 145 Enlightenment, 123-24, 147—48, 150-51 Epistemological shift: ambivalence of, 118-20, 126, 148-53; concept of power, 114-17; return to audience, 67-68. See also Critical theories "Escrava Isaura (La)" ("Isaura the Slave Girl"), 12-13, 93-95, 103 Estado de Sao Paulo, 20, 22 Ethnography, methodology of, 68 "Eu Prometo" ("I Promise"), 37 Europe: critical theories, 105, 107-9; North-South relations, 1-4, 151-52; import of novelas to, 12-13; and serialization, 103—4. See also names of specific countries "Everydayness": concept of state and, 117-18; legitimacy of, 14850; reception theory and, 67-72 See also Audiences; Certeau, Michel de False consciousness, 88, 132, 146 Fascism, 30-31 "Fatalidade," 9 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 49-50 Fernandez, Ismael, 15 Ficchera (Massimo) Report, 2, 62 n.43 Filho, Daniel, 41, 98 n.5 Film industries, 7-8, 25-26, 82 Folha de Sao Paulo, 20, 91 Ford, Anibal, 93 Fordism, 125, 129

Foro, Fernando, 16 Foucault, Michel, 31-32, 114-18, 142-43 France: audience research, 52-53; centralizing state, 141-42; communication sciences, 119-20; 121 n.12; melodrama, 144-45; program flow, 2-3, 13, 124; serialization, 62 n.43, 128-29 Frankfurt School, 104, 110-11, 129. See also Adorno, Theodor Freire, Paulo, 88, 99 n.15 Furtado, Celso, 75 "Gabriela," 13, 85 Gavi, Philippe, 128 Genre: genealogy of novela, 7-17; legitimacy of, 130, 141-48; mode of production, 37-53; social space of communication and, 103-4; supergenre, 143-44. See also Novela Germani, Gino, 73, 76 n.10 "Gigantes (Os)," 46 Gitlin, Todd, 148 Globo: computer graphics, 52; as a multimedia group, 2, 24; newspapers, 20, 24, 26; records, 11, 24, 42, 59 n.14; TV network, 2, 12, 17, 22-23 "Globo Padrao" ("Globo Pattern"), 37-39, 56, 80 Godard, Jean-Luc, 135 Goebbels, Joseph, 30 Goimard, Jacques, 147 Golbery do Couto e Silva, General, 30 Gombrowicz, Witold, 127 Gonqalves, Mario, 88 Gothic novel, 134 n.12, 147 Goulart, Joao (President), 20, 29, 88 Governmentality, 116—17

Index Gramsci, Antonio, 73, 111-12,124-25, 146 "Guiding Light," 10 Habermas, Jurgen, 153 n.6 Halbwachs, Maurice, 89 Hall, Stuart, 120 n.8, 153 n.6 Hallmark Cards, 11 Hegemony: concept, 73, 111-12; dictatorship and, 32; popular culture and, 86-87, 148. See also Gramsci, Antonio; Intellectuals High culture/low culture division, 123 "Holocaust," 143 "Hombre que Vino con la Lluvia" ("The Man Who Came with the Rain"), 97 Hong Kong, 1, 4 n.l Hugo, Victor, 12, 154 n.9 IBOPE (Brazilian Institute of Studies of Public Opinion and Statistics), 37-38, 40, 79-80 ICAIC (Institute Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica), 95, 101 n.31 Ideological state apparatus, 107 Ideology: decline of, 131-33; of national security, 29-33; populism and, 72-75; theory on, 69-70, 107-14, 149 Illiteracy, 99 n.15 INA (Institut National d'Audiovisuel), 141 Infrastructure/superstructure dichotomy, 111-12 Inravision (Colombian Radio and Television Institute), 11 Institutional Act No. 5 (AI5), 29-30 Intellectuals: apocalyptic/integrated, 66, 86; censorship and, 32-33,

171

83, 85-86; collective or organic, 2, 112, 146; hegemony and, 111; people and, 88, 104, 109, 145-48; postmodernism and, 148-52. See also Gramsci, Antonio Internationalization: centralization and, 118-19; of market, 23, 32; of television, 3, 13, 30, 33 n.6, 44; theories of reception and, 133-34. See also Deterritorialization/reterritorialization "Irmaos Coragem" ("Brothers Courageous"), 85 IstoE, 66, 91 Italy: audience research, 52; deregulation, 1-2; popular literature, 146; serialization, 62 n.43, 143, 148 Jameson, Fredric, 132 "Jornal Nacional," 22 Jules et Jim, 46 Kenyon & Eckhardt Agency, 50 Kubitschek, Juscelino (President), 22 Laclau, Ernesto, 73 "Lampiao e Maria Bonita," 40 Latin America: intellectuals, 84-85; melodrama, 7-8; newcomers in TV markets, 1; popular culture, 73-75, 148; program flow, 11-12, 138 n.21. See also names of specific countries "Latinity,"4 Laufer, Romain, 127 Laumet, Yves, 145 Le Brun, Annie, 147 Lever Brothers, 10 Liberalization, 27, 35 n.26, 74, 82, 92 Liberation, 128-29

172

Index

Liberation theology, 76 n.15 Logocentrism, 113, 151-52 Lorimar Telepictures Corp., 12, 50 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 88, 145 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 129, 131, 146, 152 Macro-subjects, 68, 114. See also State Maffesoli, Michel, 150 Magadan, Gloria, 10, 14 "Maguy," 129 "Malu Mulher" ("Malu Woman"), 40, 55, 65, 95, 98 n.5 Marazzi, Christian, 68-69 Marchand, Jean-Pierre, 130 "Maria Testemunha" ("Maria Testifies"), 45 Marinho: Cultural Foundation, 27-29,35 n.24; family, 56; Roberto, 3, 20, 22, 26, 35, 53, 84; Roberto Irineu, 3 Market: audiences as, 37-41; authoritarian state and, 31-32; domestic, 20-21, 23, 31, 134; populism and, 105 Marketing: research, 23, 37-40, 43, 58 n.l; society of, 127; teleeducation and, 28-29. See also Audiences Marx, Karl, 145 Marxism: determinations and, 11013; popular national Uterature and, 145-46; populism and, 72-74; theories of social reproduction and, 69-70 Mass culture: in Latin America, 7; popular culture and, 71-72, 147-48; psychological warfare and, 30-31. See also Popular culture; Populism "Maude," 129

McLuhan, Marshall, 113, 151 Mediations: media and, 112, 149; organization and, 118; popular culture and, 71-72, 85-86; professionals and, 105 Medici, Garrastazu (President), 30, 35 n.26, 83 Melodrama: Cuba and, 94; as genre, 144-48; Mexican films and, 17 n.2; national identity and, 7 Merchandising, 47-50, 61 n.35, 84 Mestre, Goar, 8, 34 n.6 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 25 Mexico, 1, 8, 11 "Miami Vice," 128 Middle class: people and, 16, 75, 80-82, 145; segmentation of audiences and, 127 Military regime, 26-27, 29-33, 35 n.26. See also Censorship; National security Miniseries, 57-58, 59 nn.9-11, 82. See also Seriados "Moc,a que Veio de Longe (A)" ("The Girl Who Came from Afar"), 14 Mode of organization, 115-20 Modernity: advertising, 50-51; aesthetic of spectacle and, 33; consumer society and, 81, 97 n.3 Mondadori Publishing Group, 49 Monsivais, Carlos, 7 Moravia, Alberto, 4 Movimento Democratico Brasileiro (MDB), 65, 83 Mozambique, 135 MTV (Music television), 128 Muniz, Lauro C&ar, 46 Mysteres de Paris (Les), 145 National identity: "codes of audiovisual nationality," 138 n. 19;

Index Globo and, 26; internationalization and, 135-36; melodrama and, 7; populism and, 87-89. See also Popular culture National integration, 15, 19-20, 80-S1 Nationalism, 89, 134 National-popular, theory of the, 73, 90, 111, 145-46 National security, 20, 26-27, 29-33 National Union of Students (UNE), 88 Nation-state, 4, 75, 134, 141-42 Nazism, 30 NBC (National Broadcasting Co.), 10, 128 Neoliberalism, 127, 133-35 Netto Coutinho, D., 85-86 Neves, Tancredo (President), 34 n.18, 91 New industriahzing countries, 1, 4-5 n.l, 133, 135 New world order of information and communication, 1 Nicaragua, 101 n.32 Nielsen ratings, 37, 58 n.l Novaes, Carlos Eduardo, 48 Nova Republica (New Republic), 26, 34 n.18, 90-92 Novela: history, 7-18; mode of production, 37-62; social impact, 79-97 "Ocupado 2.5499" ("2.5499 Engaged"), 14 Ortiz, Renato, 70, 86-87 Panopticon, 115-16 Paradeise, Catherine, 127 Pedroso, Braulio, 15 People. See National identity;

173

National-popular; Popular culture; Populism People's Cultural Center (CPC), 88 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson, 80, 90-91 Piazzola, Astor, 148 Pignatari, Decio, 16 "Plantao de Policia" ("Police Beat"), 98 n.5 Poland, 12-13 Popular culture: folklore and, 70-71, 86-88; legitimacy of, 145; national question and, 75; theory of reproduction and, 70-72, 85-86. See also Mass culture Populism: Cinema novo and, 83; literature and, 145; media and, 65, 73-74; national question and, 75, 89; theory on, 72-75 Portugal, 13 Postindustrial society, 132 Postmodernism, 105, 131-32, 14853 Power: legitimacy of, 118-19, 15152; theory on, 67-^8, 114-18 Procter & Gamble, 10 Professionalism, 23, 33, 37-38, 103 Programs: childrens', 49-50; cost, 5 n.3, 16, 18 nn.21-22; flow, 3^4, 12^-13, 135-36, 138 n.21; needs, 2-3, 103, 108, 123, 146; schedule, 39-41, 126-31 Protectionism, 134 Psychological warfare, 30-32 Public service, 2, 108, 123, 146 Puerto Rico, 11 Puig, Manuel, 7 Radio Caracas Television, 12 Radio nacional, 17 n.4, 38 Radionovelas: Cuba and, 93, 96, 100 n.27; history of, 9-10, 14, 47, 57;

174

Index

melodrama and, 7-8 Radio Sao Paulo, 9 Radioserials, 7, 10-11 RAI (Italian Radio Television), 2, 62 n.43, 143, 148 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 143 Ranciere, Jacques, 69 Ravache, Irene, 56 Reason, 4, 142, 148-152 Reception. See Audiences Ribeiro, Ivani, 9, 14, 37, 57 Rocha, Glauber, 83-84 "Roots," 95, 143 "Roque Santeiro," 40, 42, 44-45, 55, 60 n.23, 80, 90-91 Rosa, Guimaraes, 57, 90 Ruiz, Raoul, 141 Rulfo, Juan, 11 "Rurality," 90 Santos, Lucelia, 13 Santucci, Dulce, 9, 14 "Saramandaia," 85 Sarney, Jose\ 34 n.18 Satellite, 11,21 SBT (Silvio Santos-Brazilian System of Television), 21, 23, 40, 59 n.9 Schwarz, Roberto, 92 Screenwriting, 41-44, 56-58, 61 n.38, 128-29. See also Aguinaldo Silva, Carlos; Comparato, Doc; Dias Gomes "Search for Tomorrow," 10 Security environment, 81 Semiology, 112, 132. See also Discourse analysis Seriados, 40-41 Serial, 10, 144-45 Seriality. See Serialization Serialization: cybernetic rationality and, 126-31; deregulation and, 2, 103-4, 124; studies on, 148

Sidicaro, Ricardo, 74 Signifier/signified opposition, 113, 132, 148-49 Smythe, Dallas, 107-9 Soap opera, 10, 61 n.38, 144 Socialism, 94, 111, 143 Social movements, 74, 117, 120, 147 Social regulation: disciplinary techniques and, 114-16; epistemological shift and, 126; military regimes and, 31-33, 105; sciences of organization and, 118-20 Social space of communication, 103-4 Social struggles: cultural identity and, 92, 135-37; great narratives and, 131-32; popular culture and, 71-72; populism and class struggle, 73-74; reappropriation of use value, 67-68. See also Social movements Socio-pragmatics, 142 Sodre, Muniz, 38, 91 "Sol de Batey (El)," 95 State: central state language, 141-42; critical theories on, 114-18; doctrine of national security and, 29-33 Structuralism: audiences and, 68, 126; critical theories, 107-9, 132, 149; media discourse and, 74, 121 n.12 Subjectivity: epistemological shift, 67-69, 148-50; theory on power and, 73, 109-10, 117-18 Sue, Eugene, 145, 154 nn.9, 12 Supergenre, 143-44 Sussekind, Flora, 32 Systems theory, 119 Tavola, Artur de, 21, 26, 41 Telecommunications, 20

Index Tele-education, 27-28 Tele-Monte Carlo, 2-3, 26, 52-53 Telemundo, 11 Telenovela. See Novela Televisa (Mexican multimedia group), 11, 17 nn.9-10, 18 n.12, 19 Television job market, 25, 55-56 'Tempo e o Vento (O)," 40, 90 'Tenda dos Milagres" ('Tent of Miracles"), 90, 100 n.22 Theatre, 55-56, 65, 84 Theory of dependency, 134-37. See also Internationalization Third World, 2-4, 135 "Thorn Birds," 40 Time-Life, 4 n.l, 22, 33 n.6 Trade unions, 53-54 Truffaut, Francois, 46 TV Difusora, 19 TV Excelsior, 14-15 TV Manchete (Bloch press group), 2, 21, 23, 34 n.10, 54-55 TV Record, 14, 20 TV Tupi, 14, 20, 23 Ultima hora, 20 United States of America: cinema-

175

TV relations, 25-26; program costs, 5 n.3, 16; program flow, 3, 11, 138 n.21; serialization, 2-3, 128-29; soap opera, 10; supergenre, 143-44; TV deregulation, 49-50. See also "Dallas" Usage des medias en temps de crise (de V), 124 Use value/exchange value, 31, 68 Useful product/useful time, 53, 62 n.43 Vargas, Getulio (President), 20, 72 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 9, 19 Veloso, Caetano, 82 Venezuela, 1, 11, 17 n.6 Veron, Eliseo, 110-11, 153 n.6 Verissimo, Erico, 46, 90 Wallach, Joe, 22 Western (genre), 12, 143 Western societies, 3-4, 151-53 Williams, Raymond, 104 Work conditions, 54 World Football Cup, 21, 33 n.4 "Zapping," 109-10, 128, 137 n.6 Zola, Emile, 145


About the Authors MICHELE MATTELART is presently doing research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. From 1963 to 1973 she lived in Chile, teaching at the Catholic University of Santiago. She has written extensively on women, politics and culture, and media and COMMUNICATIONS, issue on "L'analyse des images" (1970). Disorder (1986) and International Image Markets (1985), with Armand Mattelart and Xavier Delcourt. ARMAND MATTELART is currently professor of information and communication sciences at the University of Haute Bretagne (Rennes, France). From 1962 to 1973 he taught in Chile and was involved in numerous popular communication projects. He is the author of many pioneering books on culture and communication, including How to Read Donald Duck (1975, with Ariel Dorfman), Multinationals and the Control of Culture (1979), and Transnational and the Third World (1983).

The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction

Carnival

The Carnival

The Carnival of Monsters

The Carnival Of Monsters

The Carnival Of Monsters

Social Issues in Television Fiction

Carnival

The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader

Carnival

Carnival

Carnival

Carnival of Fear

Carnival of fear

Carnival Of Souls

Images of the Past

Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Fear

Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Crime

Don't Stop The Carnival

Dark Carnival

Dark Carnival

Carnival Coast

Bitter Carnival

Documentary Screens: Non-Fiction Film and Television

American Science Fiction Film and Television

The Carnival Killer

The Carnival Master

The Carnival Master

The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction

Carnival

The Carnival

The Carnival of Monsters

The Carnival Of Monsters

The Carnival Of Monsters

Social Issues in Television Fiction

Carnival

The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader

Carnival

Carnival

Carnival

Carnival of Fear

Carnival of fear

Carnival Of Souls

Images of the Past

Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Fear

Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Crime

Don't Stop The Carnival

Dark Carnival

Dark Carnival

Carnival Coast

Bitter Carnival

Documentary Screens: Non-Fiction Film and Television

American Science Fiction Film and Television

The Carnival Killer

The Carnival Master

The Carnival Master

Recommend Documents