Robert Goldman, HEGEMONY AND MANAGED CRITIQUE IN PRIME-TIME TELEVISION: A Critical Reading of "Mork and Mindy". Reprinted from Theory & Society, 11 (May 1982): pp.363-388, Part 2.

One of the most popular new television shows during the 1978-1981 television seasons, M & M, tells the story of an alien being (Mork) who visits Earth from a more advanced civilization.⁵ His home planet, Ork, contains a society that has formally abolished emotions, along with play, spontaneity, sensuality, and sexuality in quest of the domination of nature. As punishment for persisting in humorous acts (deviant behavior on Ork), Mork is sent to study the Earth (American society) and its culture. Upon arriving on Earth, Mork meets Mindy, a young white female living in Boulder, Colorado, who serves as Mork's teacher in the mores and folkways of our culture. She performs as a native informant providing descriptive accounts of practices and customs. Mork takes up residence in Mindy's apartment, though their relationship has been carefully coded as platonic, asexual, and hence nonthreatening. Kissing and holding hands in a style reminiscent of Hollywood circa 1950, Mork and Mindy have a relationship that taps a central motif in affirmative culture. The combination of Mork's "superior" intelligence and his status as a "stranger" permit him to interpret and react toward our socially constructed realities with both a fundamental naiveness (that of a child) and an extrinsic mode of metaphor (an alternative, and often subversive, language of rationality). A frequent feature of Mork's portrayal combines a holistic orientation with an anarchistic strain of defiance for conventional social markers. Through a gestaltist unpacking of the metalevels of thought and action that make up even the minutest details of social interaction processes, Mork compels the native speaker to take into account the multiple and simultaneous features of social competency. Mork takes in the whole of the fabric of contemporary cultural formations and makes problematic the details of daily life from the standpoint of a detached rationality. His expansion of the details of social life lead him to consistently disregard, and hence to disclose, the conventions that guide daily life.

Always implicit and often explicit in Mork's anarchism is a call for resistance to complete socialization of behavior patterns. Contrasting spontaneity and imagination with culturally imposed restrictions on freedom, he advocates a personalized form of resistance that he refers to as keeping a little bit of the "mondo bozo. " If, on the one hand, we read this endorsement of personalized anarchism as a form of resistance against the decline of the autonomous individual in advanced capitalist society, we must also acknowledge the capacity of consumer capitalism to neutralize and assimilate this form of resistance. Because this form of personalized resistance corresponds to the practice and logic of privatized individuation built into the commodity form, Mork, the utopian individualist hero is easily transformed into a commodified representation of quirkiness and idiosyncrasy - "mondo bozo" - in which the memory and logic of protest is stripped away. Even as an instance of the offerings of the contemporary mass media, the M & M series is unusually multilayered. At one level, the series partakes of "kiddie crap," replete with goofy plot lines, insipid one-liners, and the banality of sitcom formulas. Robin Williams, the actor-comic who plays Mork, acknowledges that "the gravity of television. . . keeps pulling you down to mediocre."⁶ At another level, episodes often assume the stance and format of middle-class morality plays, overt in ideological content. And yet it is also one of the few prime time sitcoms that openly employs the language of Freud, Jung, Zen, or class struggle. Finally, in the text itself, the thematic content is frequently that of critique, satire, and parody. "At its best," says Williams, "the show could be a dynamite commentary on the way we live, the way we act - like Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth."⁷

Like an interpretive sociologist, Mork makes visible the normally hidden, socially constructed conventions that are the foundations for intersubjectivity. Through Mork's violations of conventional language use and the rules of cultural logic the veil of naturalness is raised from the processes of the social construction of reality. These violations of the deep grammars of language and culture afford the viewer the opportunity for discerning more starkly than would otherwise be possible the patterns of the generation of meaning in daily life. And this pattern of enlarging meaning dialectically demands more scrutiny than is normally allowed of the taken-for-granted structures of daily life. Thus the strength of Mork's comedy rests on this tacit revelation of the power of negation. One implication of this style of humor is the creation of a set of potentially critical-emancipatory messages, despite these messages being often sandwiched within stock narrative curves defined by the concerns of bourgeois morality. How these messages are interpreted in terms of conscious political dialogue by viewers remains a mystery. We know relatively little of the patterns of mass culture interpretation performed by various class, ethnic, and regional audiences. Hence we can only speculate about the levels of consciousness at which viewers are aware of the critical elements that underlie the juxtapositions of grammar, social structure, and symbol usage performed by Mork. What, we might speculate, would be the consequences of a generation of children growing up on a steady diet of Mork's impulsivity? Would it heighten dispositions toward anarchism, surrealism, or anti-authoritarianism? Or are the potentially critical messages so isolated in a sea of countervailing messages disseminated by television that they are negated? Will the spontaneity of Mork be transformed into its opposite? Is Mork being swallowed up in "one-dimensionality?"⁸ Television carries an uneven combination of potentially critical messages and hegemonic messages. The relationship between the cultural production apparatus of network television and the maintenance of ideological hegemony is rarely linear.

the hegemonic system is not cut-and-dried, not definitive. It has continually to be reproduced, continually superimposed, continually to be negotiated and managed, in order to override the alternative and, occasionally, the oppositional forms. To put it another way: major social conflicts are transported into the cultural system, where the hegemonic process frames them, form and content both, into compatibility with dominant systems of meaning.⁹

In the instance of M & M, a potentially emancipatory moment emerges from Mork's practice of calling into question the taken-for-granted details of everyday life via his disruption of the otherwise "unvarying succession" that is everydayness,¹⁰ and his consequent exposure of daily life as socially constituted. The embryonic critiques of fetishism borne in Mork's reflexivity regarding matters of form, however, are consistently negated, diluted, absorbed, and reincorporated by prevailing modes of television consumption (viewing) and production. The structure of privatized television viewing tends to produce an atomized, nonreflexive (passive) interpretative procedure that is reinforced by the "formal features of prime-time network programs."¹¹ Potentially critical messages and moments are frequently dissolved by their encapsulation within the regularity and repetition of the "week-after-week angle of the show.¹² In this case, the angle (or the cumulative hardening of ideological slant) is defined by a philosophy of "enlightened" liberal and consumer reformism.

The very framework of the series is constructed so that conflicts raised within the course of an episode - conflicts that often have to do with the alienation of self-other relations - are given the appearance of resolution in Mork's "report" to Ork that punctuates each episode. Although Mork as ethno-anarchist is frequently responsible for conflicts in the main body of each episode, in the "reports" Mork also performs the hegemonic task of reframing (redefining) the form and the content of those moral conflicts. Mork "cleans up" the conflicts that he has prompted so the pieces of the prevailing moral order can be unproblematically reassembled at the end of the episode. This reframing procedure consists of a two-pronged process. First, it involves an abstraction from the textual presentation of moral conflicts to a nonreflexive capsule summary of "what's at stake here". Simultaneously, the reframing process casts the discussion of these conflicts in terms of the language, coding practices, and assumptions drawn from the conventional mythological morality promulgated by the culture industry.¹³ Constituted in this fashion as the "definition of the situation," the "report" as a reframing procedure is a necessary prelude to the task of locating and prescribing a resolution to the moral conflict of the half-hour show. The solutions that follow are generally 1) idealist - alienation is said to be overcome in thought; 2) individuated and privatized - nonstructural; 3) pluralist - rooted in the premise of fundamental social harmony; one solution fits all. These then, are imaginary solutions phrased around a set of stock humanistic homilies expressing a utopian, bourgeois-liberal credo. They are imaginary because they conceal by omission the inherent conflict between the functioning of the institutional structures of contemporary corporate capitalism (the structuring principles of commodification, privatization, rationalization, and bureaucratization) and the utopian ideals being advocated.

Built into the structure of the show is an ideological paradigm. This paradigm derives from the mode of critique embedded in the formulaic construction of the series' narrative code in combination with the reframing procedure just discussed. An episode typically begins by placing in question established forms of hegemonic values and practices; or conversely, alternative forms are introduced.¹⁴ In this fashion, problems are posed as matters of discrepancies between values and individual behaviors, and not as the manifestations of internal contradictions within social formations. This is followed by a demonstration of the negative consequences of the alternative approaches and practices. Each week a "new" situation is grounded in this formulaic repetition of critique and closure. Critique becomes not only timely to a relevant dilemma of the day, but it also becomes disposable. Like the culture industry's manufacture of celebrities so that there might be celebrities to sell, critique is weekly manufactured as a disposable commodity so that the series might be efficiently reproduced as repetition. This commodified, formulaic production of critique emerges as the television practice of managed critique. Critique in this manufactured and managed form contains and represses conflictual alternatives - guaranteeing that the tension set up between conventional forms and alternative forms is never permitted to generate oppositional forms. Instead, the momentary introduction of doubt concerning the status quo is employed to steer the viewing audience back towards the reaffirmation of established forms of conventional morality tempered by the reformist wisdom of an idealist ideology of liberal humanism and consumerism.

Managed critique thus takes the form of a stunted dialectic. The stunted dialectic is characterized by the following formulaic movement: 1) presenting the established form (e.g., a middle-class cultural code); 2) questioning the established form as a method for framing social conflicts; 3) demonstrating the negative consequences produced by deviation from established forms; and 4) the reframing procedure, in which the hegemonic code under interrogation is elevated into the means of transcending the conflict. Hence solutions are consistently presented in terms of bourgeois homilies and clichés. In this regard little has changed since Adorno, writing a quarter of a century ago, observed that "the outcome of conflicts is pre-established and all conflicts are mere sham. . . these conflicts are decided in favor of the very same conditions" that produced the conflicts.¹⁵ Managed critique is introduced primarily to "domesticate opposition" and to validate what is being critiqued. The following portion of this essay examines Mork as an interpretive sociologist who uncovers the general principles of interpretive procedures that are simultaneous to the acquisition of a sense of social structure.¹⁶ By raising the features of language competence and normative rules, Mork addresses questions of how meanings are generated and interpreted, and how typifications and contextual factors set the scene for the social construction of reality. The parallels between Mork's method and that of ethnomethodology are suggestive of the ways in which such an approach can be employed to explore the first hermeneutic moment of hegemony. Next I explore the cultural contradictions raised by the show's use of parody, satire, and critique. The final portion of the essay examines the uneven and often contradictory layering of messages generated by the M & M series. These contradictory tendencies within the show highlight television's capacity to operate as an instrument both of potential enlightenment and of domination.¹⁷