Discussing: “The Banality in Cultural

Studies”Meaghan Morris

Communication in Contexts

Cultural Studies

By C. CHAHDI

o Meaghan Morris tries to discuss the growing banality existing in

cultural studies and she indicates a certain everydayness overlapping

arts in general.

o In our discussion, we will discuss Meaghan Morris’ irritations about

Jean Baudrillard’s notion of banality

o Meaghan Morris raises many intrinsic attitudes towards the growing

banality in cultural studies.

o Meaghan Morris expresses various frustrations vis-a-vis Jean

Baudrillard’s use of the notion of banality.

o While Jean Baudrillard develops a postmodernist mode concerning

arts in general and cultural studies in particular, other theorists, like

Meaghan Morris and Michel de Certeau claim that arts and cultural

studies become increasingly banal in its negative sense.

“One was Jean Baudrillard’s revival of the term

« banality » to frame a theory of media. It is an interesting theory that establishes a tension between everyday life and catastrophic events, banality and fatality_ using television as a metonym of the problems that result. Yet why should such a classically dismissive term as « banality » appear to establish… ?” 

o Meaghan Morris claims that media and cultural studies are now

characterized by everyday life events and hereby questions this

phenomenon.

o For her, banality is rather an open totality which has nothing to do

with our real pursuits in life; namely, interactive ideas that posit

people away from allegorical emblems imposed by banality.

o Banal cultural studies suggests an increasing interest in the daily

experienced events and mundane matters.

o Banality causes routine and useless repetitive situations in arts,

cultural studies, and media.

Banality is valorized by Baudrillard where claims that banality assumes that the ‘subject’ is more powerful than the ‘object’ and the object is always worse than the subject.

Banality explains the strength of the subject; whereas, a fatal theory suggests the strength of the object over the subject.

The subject, for Baudrillard presents ideas; whereas, the object refers to the reality and the two are inseparable since their relationship is « viral ».

Baudrillard adopts a post-modernist stand as he believes that values form an ‘integral reality’ that we cannot set them against one another.

On this basis, fatality and banality are exchangeable. Superbanality, also, becomes fatal and superfatality would be banal.

Accordingly, she refuses the British cultural studies; especially, John Fiske’s research. For her, it doesn’t differ from Baudrillard’s one since it suggests the mass audiences’ consumption of offered TV products without thought, which is merely a banality.

This gives an idea how Meaghan Morris wants to conserve a utopian and a polemological perspective instead of accepting the banality of the ideas and the fatality of events in media and cultural studies.

Meaghan considers the term ‘banality’ as negative since it suggests negative connotations.

What matters for Morris here, is that with this postmodernist mode, the aura of media, and cultural studies will be blurred.

• Unlike Baudrillard’s theories that are characterized by a lot of mise

en abyme and Jean Fiske’s popular culture marked by populism,

Meaghan Morris prefers Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday

Life.• For Michel de Cerdeau, the everyday practices suggests a

repetitive and an unconscious context created by unconscious

people who navigate everything from streets to literary texts.

• What matters is what the individuals do out of what they have and

without any repetitive political, historical, or social impositions.

• Therefore, debates, mental activities and different attitudes will take

place. People, also will benefit from the power of others in other

places and will be exposed to new possibilities.

• This for Morris creates both polemological and utopian spaces.

• Michel de Certeau, then, argues that the polemological space

creates an analysis of facts, which is interactive rather than

offering people “facts as objectively validated by a regime of

place”.

• Hence, “utopian spaces deny the immutability and authority of

facts” and of course liberate individuals as when they read, they

travel and get in touch with different experiences rather than

reading for the sake of adhering to the established order

imposing banality and fatality.

With this approach, all the marginalized and muffled can reach

emancipation from the discriminating banality imposed by the political,

patriarchal, and social system that tries to mask the values and real

intellectual tendencies.

Eventually, women can express themselves loudly, and everybody can burst out freely.