Thiruchandran, Selvy (ed.) 1994, Images. Karunaratne & Sons Ltd., Colombo. (Book Reviews).(Column)

"I think we are beginning to realise how much terror lies at the heart of the paradise of communication" (1)

Images is the result of a multi-lingual media-monitoring committee that was set up by the Women's Education and Research Centre to monitor the print and visual media for s set period. The book shows us that the media is promoting a myth. A myth is not defined by the object of its message or meaning but the way in which it is used to convey certain types of general concept. In contemporary media images women are either homemakers or seductresses. The multiplicity of women's experience is whittled down to an essentialist binary opposition. This means that the media forms part of a process of ideological naturalisation of social and sexual relationships. The media wields this ideological power because it offers a range of programs/texts but the assortment is something in which the consumer/viewer has little choice.

The message is that the media are the message. Reality vanishes in an endless spiral of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1981). Landscapes are replaced by mediascapes. The body is invaded by signs written on it by the restless forms of advertising and publicity, which present us with selves we can or cannot present in real life. (2)

Selvy Thiruchandran's introduction urges us to look at the media as a signifying system in which women function as a sign. I said earlier that the media is a myth but we must remember that the material of myths pressuposes signifying consciousness. (3) Semiology postulates a relation between two terms a signifier (sound-image) and a signified (concept). The third thing, the sign is the arbitrary linkage between the concept and the image. The political significance of the arbitrariness of the sign is something which feminists should consider. Imagine an advertisement producer wishing to convey the concept of femininity for a new soap product. The image of a mother (a beautiful lady with long hair) and her daughter washing their hands, after completing the washing up comes to mind. The analyst will distinguish between the meaning of the image - mother and daughter engaged in blissful domesticity -- and its form as a signifier, for femininity. The ordinary viewer however may not respond in either of these ways. The image may be treated as the embodiment of femininity, which will be experienced through, or embodied in this image. The signifier woman, is different from the sign since the sign only offers one aspect of the signifier. But in contemporary media discourse in Sri Lanka it is the sign of woman - either homemaker or seductress which predominates.

When people actually think about the world in terms of signs then there are problems. A sign builds on a value system or a dominant norm or social practice in a period of history, a country or social group. It is the assumed, created or mythic connotations of woman which become the sign whereas her real signification is marginalised. This is dangerous since the media only promotes certain roles for women, reminds the audience of these roles and then imposes these roles on us. In this way the media acts as an ideological channel for re-inforcing the status quo.

The Frankfurt school in a critique of the culture industry pointed out that in modernity the world becomes more what is immediately given in experience. This means that a distinction between surface understandings and depth understandings evaporates. Appearance becomes constitutive of existence. Whilst those living in liberal democracies assume that they have rights and freedoms, in practice, these are severely circumscribed by the power of the ruling class, in Marxian terms, whose values and interests are perpetuated by the mass media and the "culture industry". Through the media the concept of the new is increasingly chimerical. The Frankfurt School criticised popular culture, the media in particular since it was not democratic but a form of "stylised barbarism" Walter Benjamin felt that the cinema captures the human incapacity to return the gaze: the eyes have lost the ability to look or, as James Baldwin would write, "the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness" (4) Douglas Kellner offers a richer description arguing that it is better to see popular entertainment as a complex process of contrast moments of desire and its displacement, anticipation of hope and its repression -- access to society's dreams and nightmares. It is simultaneously an ideological celebration of the status quo and utopian moment of transcendence.

I felt that of all the articles in Images, Mala de Alwis article captures the ambiguity of the culture industry. Mala focuses on Sinhala formula films, recognising their high popularity. She draws on the work of Laleen Jayamanne to point out the predictable "scenes of attraction". The social context in text in which the films are viewed is recognised as part of courtship ritual in Sri Lanka. Yet Mala shows that the content is also important. Her aim is to understand the sociological formations of gender identity and gendered subject position through a post-structuralist feminist reading of socio cultural construction. She also makes use of Connell's discussion of a "gender order' to explore how gender identity is formed. Connell stresses the need for an historical analysis and an analysis of the institutionalisation of interests-class, gendered and ethnic. This is a "process" approach which treats the state and economic development as a "thing" which enables a focus on social practices which produce and repr oduce social structures.