Michele Mattelart, Armand Mattelart-The Carnival of Images - Brazilian Television Fiction (1990)

The
Carnival
of
Images
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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 operasSocial aspectsBrazil. 2. Television
broadcastingSocial aspectsBrazil.
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. A Narrative Memory
A community of meaning
False continuities
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.
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 historiesoften ignored by concentrating discussion
on costs, techniques, and operationalitywhich 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
The
Carnival
of
Images
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 directionfrom North to South. European
The Carnival of Images
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,
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 marketwhat other country could boast of selling its series in over one hundred countriesthat 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?
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/rejectionthis 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.
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 AmericaMexico and Argentinafrom 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.
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 Panamericanafor whom it represented something mythical, what
Hollywood represented in those days for filmmakersthat 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
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.
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 remarksthis is the opinion of independent producersa 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 recentlysince deregulationthat 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 philanthropistthe
conserver of the national heritage, the promoter of education and the
artscame 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 Brsil, 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.
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
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 Globowhich 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 illustrateit must give reasons and argue its groundsthe 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 questionwhich eventually forced the author
to surrenderwas 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 programmingboth its own and that of other producersto
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 understoodthe monopoly, once again, is always
nakedthe 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 festivalthe 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 TVand 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.
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 1970swas 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

valuethe use value of time, space, of bodies, of social know-howin
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
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 exchangeadmittedly unequalbetween 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 developmentimport substitutionthis 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, becomingand it is here that
73
we can define the very notion of ideologythe 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 certainprecisely in the case of Brazilthat 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
beliefboth in developed and developing countriesin 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 genresdaily, weekly, monthly, for all readershipsspeak 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
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 Brazilviolent,
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 1962-1964during the left populist
presidency of Joao Goularthad 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 rhythmsa musical form looked down on by the Rio de Janeiro
bourgeoisiearose, 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 inauguratedwith unanimous approvalthe
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 culturethe media, the
university, the foundations subsidized by the government or big businesshas
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 joyassociated with superficialityand 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
realitymy ownon 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 togetherand it is this
which makes it so rich and disconcertingaspects 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
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. Butand
it is here that the malicious interest of "zapping" residesif the viewing
subject practices this slalom through the programming schedules, it is
in large partand programmers know itto 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 diffusiongrouped in the 1940s by the Frankfurt School
into the suggestive concept of cultural industrybe 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 analysesthose of distincdy separate levelsbecame 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 communicationstill, in France at
least, in search of an identityis 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.
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 itto
inform, educate, and entertainpublic 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 commodityin 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 conceptionit 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 programmerzapping.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 postmodernas is knownhas 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
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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 existingfor 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 factthis is the experience of my family and of many
othersthat 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. Forand this is the hidden
face of this everyday hedonismthe 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 easyand here is neither the place nor the moment to tryto
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 reterritorializationpragmatic and planetaryis 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.
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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, 14748,
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, 1034.
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, 11617
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).

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The

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BERGIN & GARVEY

New York Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

I. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A GENRE

The appropriation of a genre

The construction of the Globo network

The irresistible rise of a multimedia group

A national symbol of the free enterprise spirit

The authoritarian state, the market, and the

3. The Secrets of Production

Censorship and the power of the text

The medium is the merchandise

Advertising and modernity

The crisis of a genre?

II. THE SOCIAL LINK

The return to use value

The question of populism: The malaise of theory

5. The Novela and Society

The impact of a genre

A crisis in the representation of the social

Intellectuals, the left, and television

Populism: Old questions, new debates

The return of emotion

IH. TELEVISION: THE RETURN OF THEORY

The blind spots of criticism

The question of determinations

The disciplinary apparatus

The relation with the audience

The end of great narratives?

8. The Construction of the Popular Audience

The genre as an ethnic category

The postmodern challenge

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Television is becoming internationalized. That is to say, the norms of

beginning to glimpse the complexity of the relations between television

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The Carnival of Images

television systems first had to improve their modes of production and

The Archaeology of a Genre

Roberto Marinho, President and founder of the Globo group, made no

The Carnival of Images

The Archaeology of a Genre

However, India, which belongs to the new industrializing countries, is the

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The Carnival of Images

The Carnival of Images

advertising departments of corporations linked to the soap and detergent

The Carnival of Images

tions in respect of Brazilian novelas: "Brazil's TV Globo produces

(86 percent of the national audience) gave an ovation to the story of

The Carnival of Images

The appropriation of a genre

affirmed their autonomy in relation to imported scenarios.

Inspired by the novel of Braulio Pedroso, "Beto Rockfeller" remained

The Carnival of Images

Its characteristics were therefore: less stilted dialogues, room for

"Beto Rockfeller" coincides with the period of the so-called Brazilian

Although "Beto" was launched on TV Tupi, the lessons of its success

The Carnival of Images

The Carnival of Images