"Teledemocratic" Dictatorship

By Carlo Freccero
Le Nouvel Observateur

Week of Thursday 06 April 2006
"
History is full of regimes, in the strict sense of that term, that conquer power through force and weapons, then inundate public opinion with slogans, imperatives, and diktats. Berlusconism, on the other hand, is interesting because it reverses the usual process. At issue is not a regime that controls information once power is acquired, but rather one whose control of information leads to an assumption of political power. At issue is a dissimulated, neutral, in some respects involuntary control, a control that ensues as a collateral effect of the majority of the population's televisual choices. That's why the Berlusconi phenomenon is interesting. A beautiful old-fashioned fascism with livery and snap hooks, Billy clubs and castor oil interests no one at a theoretical level. But a popular plebiscitary consensus born of "natural" television consumption is, on the other hand, a fascinating subject for study.

For Berlusconism's strong point is not so much in the direct propaganda of right-wing values - God, family, homeland - as in the perfect implementation of audience-conditioning mechanisms. The conservative ideological imprint that characterizes RAI's present fictions, centered on the saints, the carabinieri, heroes, the family and the rereading of fascism through a more "human" angle is more the expression of other constituents of the government: the Northern League, the Alleanza Nazionale, the fundamentalist Catholicism of the remnants of the former Christian-Democrats. [RAI is the Italian state television station.]

In any case, the rhetoric, propaganda and censorship came after the electoral victory. The phenomenon to study is consequently Berlusconism as a plebiscitary political outcome of a televisual logic based on one-track thinking. Even today, the Mediaset [Berlusconi family-controlled] channels are overall more modern, more secular and more in conformity with public tastes than RAI. Their matrix is not Berlusconian rhetoric, but the deep, the true audience.

We know that television does not function like other media that have to differentiate themselves, to exalt their differences to sell. Commercial television must level, must promote equality - not of rights, but of behavior and consumption. After the introduction of commercial channels, television transformed itself into a mechanism for the production of desires. And those are desires for material consumption, since advertising is geared to that. But the mechanism instigated by the reading of the audience has quickly taken on wider and more worrying aspects, to the point of subjecting politics itself to its logic.

News broadcasts, by introducing the use of polls to comment on and evaluate problems of social importance, have rooted an equation in the public mind between majority and truth. The most worrying aspect is the tendency to give the poll the value of truth. For the first time, truth and power are expressed in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. Terms like "teledemocracy" and "videocracy," apparently opposed to one another, express a single concept. The dictatorship of the majority is realized in the video era.

Berlusconism is consequently an interesting phenomenon, not because of its repressive aspects, but to the extent it is productive of a new logic, new demands, new consumption. If it is in crisis today, it's for economic, not political reasons. Italy is experiencing serious economic stagnation. So it's the impoverishment of families and the collapse of consumption that put a perfectly consumerist televisual ideology and model to the test.

--------

Carlo Freccero is a professor of communication science.