It is time, now, to look at these processes as they operate in some specific texts. What the epic poem did for ancient cultures, the romance for feudalism, and the novel for bourgeois society, the media В— and especially television В— now do for the commodified, bureaucratized world that is our present environment. This is a function performed throughout much of human history by literature and the other arts, but now, as the arts have become more estranged from their own culture and even opposed to it, the mass media have come to perform this role. This function, which operates in the ethical-political realm, is an extremely important element of video textuality and, indeed, an extremely important dimension of all the mass media. By cultural reinforcement, I mean the process through which video texts confirm viewers in their ideological positions and reassure them as to their membership in a collective cultural body. By narrativity, of course, I mean the pleasures and powers associated with the reception of stories presented in video texts. Others include narrativity and what I should like to call, at least tentatively, cultural reinforcement.

Visual fascination В— and I have mentioned only a few of its obvious forms В— is just one of the matrices of power and pleasure that are organized by video texts. Video texts, like all except the most utilitarian forms of textuality, are constructed upon a base of boredom, from which they promise us relief. Either way they offer us what is perhaps the greatest single virtue of art: change from the normal, a defense against the ever-present threat of boredom.

These derangements of normal visual processing can be seen as either constraints or extensions of visual power В— that is, as power over the viewer or as extensions of the viewer's own optical power, or both. Filters and other devices cause us to see the world through jaundiced or rose-colored optics, coloring events with emotion more effectively than verbal pathetic fallacy and less obtrusively. Slow motion allows us an extraordinary penetration into the mechanics of movement, and, combined with music lends a balletic grace to ordinary forms of locomotion.

Close-ups position us where we could never stand. We are, for instance, offered a kind of power through the enhancement of our vision. The moments of surrender proposed to us by video texts come in many forms, but all involve a complex dynamic of power and pleasure.

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