The Reformist's Resistance Thesis

Unlike Schiller, Professor Mark Tushnet essentially denies the possibilities of first­amendment jurisprudential reform ²³ and, instead, asserts the possibilities of political reform, albeit outside of established governmental channels. Stated simply, Tushnet understands that "'people make their culture as they want to make it"' ²⁴ and that their "'deepest preferences"' ²⁵ in self­expression are not likely to be manipulated by state boards of censors or commercial captains. ²⁶ The reason, he explains, is that "the manipulative aspects of cultural productions may give rise to audience resistance to the manipulation, leading to their reinterpretation of the productions."' ²⁷ Resistance­­the popular refusal to be manipulated in a particular choice of pleasures ²⁸ ­­is a potentially liberating force for Tushnet. This resistance is what Tushnet holds out as the new first­amendment freedom.

Aldous Huxley astutely anticipated the modern and postmodern popular cultures and perceived the predicament for political resistance within them: the crisis of modernity is "the problem of happiness."' ²⁹ The central problem is one of people loving their servitude. Mindful of the Huxleyan perspective, we find Tushnet's resistance thesis troubling for at least two reasons. First, like the modernist Redish, the reformist Tushnet stands on an Orwellian platform, thereby discounting the possibility of other tyrannies. His idea of resistance is premised on the opposition of forces between the oppressed and their oppressors: the popular culture will evade domination by corporate tsars who attempt to dictate its tastes and co­opt its pleasure preferences. Tushnet's thesis implies that the new totalitarianism resembles the old. This implication, of course, is what we deny first and foremost in our article. The "'problem of happiness"' is that there is no opposition of forces, but a marriage of them. The bosses of the commercial amusement culture neither dictate nor co­opt the people's pleasures; they feed them indiscriminately and unceasingly. The new tyranny­­which is self­imposed as much as it is other­ imposed­­extols such "freedoms."' Any brand of soma is available. Consume as much as you want.

Not surprisingly, commercial television pitches its discourse in ways to please the populace, in a grammar of diverse and amusing images. This is the democracy of the senses, the language of the commercial MTV generation; this is communication by music video, by powerful pictures rather than precise words, by short and disjointed visual messages. As MTV executives realize, any other communication talks "the [w]rong [l]anguage to 'TV [b]abies." " ³⁰ To appreciate the Huxleyan tyranny in the marriage of commerce and self­ gratification, one needs only to consider the classicist protests of Bill Moyers, the media critic: "'If we continue to live in a never­never land of feeling good, . . . if every message that comes to us has a hidden message of selling us something, if we try to govern ourselves by the pleasure principle, this 200­year­old experiment is finished." " ³¹