Barbara Kruger’s Postmodern Jeremiads, Pt. III
The reason for Kruger’s dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover. For though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says Kruger, we are the ones controlled: “To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control.” Sound familiar? At the heart of Kruger’s collection is the unvoiced assertion that television is the root of all contemporary American evil; TV is, to paraphrase Baudrillard, the evil demon of images. “We don’t have to think about anything once television lulls us to sleep,” Kruger drones, “and begins its dictations. Like a mad scientist of global proportions, it elects presidents, conducts diplomacy, and creates consensus: a consensus of demi-alert nappers caught halfway between the vigilance of consciousness and the fascinated numbness of stupor.”
Is it just me? I had thought the discourse about the American media, and about the reciprocal flow of ideology into and out of the TV tube, had progressed somewhat beyond this. Foucault, to take just the most prominent example, has rendered such a simplistic theory of power and hegemony entirely untenable for the contemporary culture critic. But Kruger’s hostility to popular culture is more than just a matter of an out-of-date or vulgar-Marxist theoretical apparatus. Her refusal of pop pleasures seems as willed and unrelenting, as theoretically unnecessary, as Theodor Adorno’s. In fact, I’ll bet even Adorno would have enjoyed Three’s Company more than Barbara Kruger does.
If there’s a thread that connects the writings collected in Remote Control, it’s the philosophy of social constructionism: the notion that our individual experiences are hemmed-in by the ubiquitous, often understated or implicit, narratives of our culture(s). This is a familiar theme in postmodern texts; one thinks, for instance, of Jack Gladney, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, who (believing he is about to die) wanders into his kids’ bedroom in the middle of the night to say his final goodbyes: “I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child’s warm grasp, feeling I’d wandered into a TV moment.” You think you’re feeling something, but suddenly realize that Vicks, or AT&T, or Coke, or the Carpenters have been there before you. You’re not saying your goodbyes, you’re quoting someone else’s. Quelle drag encore. In “Talk Normal,” Laurie Anderson meditates on the inconvenience of being robbed of her own identity by her media persona: “I turned the corner in Soho today and someone / Looked right at me and said: Oh No! / Another Laurie Anderson clone!” Laurie Anderson is accused of being a Laurie Anderson wannabe; DeLillo’s Jack Gladney confesses that he is “the false character that follows the name around.”
What distinguishes DeLillo’s and Anderson’s treatment of this theme from Kruger’s, however—and, I would argue, renders if far more supple and subtle—is their realization that the simple recognition of the socially constructed nature of reality doesn’t automatically produce its transcendence. In Kruger, too often, it appears to; that we are thrall to images, to narratives, is for Kruger a sign of our postmodern, almost post-Reagan/Bush, condition, and she suggests that through consciousness raising we might attain to an illusion-free Reality. “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger writes in the collection’s opening essay. “The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie. In a society rife with purported information, we know that words have power, but usually when they don’t mean anything (as Peggy Noonan and Co. have so ably demonstrated).” Though she was certainly good at it, Peggy Noonan hardly invented political rhetoric; “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger complains—but when was it? What are the good old days to which Kruger harks back? Plato didn’t believe that seeing was believing, and certainly put the notion of truth into crisis long before Nietzsche. “To put it bluntly,” Kruger continues, “no one’s home. We are literally absent from our own present. We are elsewhere, not in the real but in the represented.” Here Kruger sounds eerily like Habermas: everything was hunky dory before postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, descended upon us—the storm cloud of the late twentieth century; Kruger’s perverse twist on this all-too-well-known story is that, paradoxically, only postmodern art and theory can rescue us from the postmodern condition.
