Paper Tiger Television’s “It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?”

To enter this exhibition of lo-fi, punkish video essays about the corruption of US society by corporate media interests, the visitor must pass through a broken television screen. This witty bit of set design expresses both the DIY aesthetic and the guiding principle of Paper Tiger Television, a US media collective that produced over 400 public access TV programs between 1981 and 2008: if we want to regain control over the dissemination of information in our societies, then we must, in Joan Braderman’s words, “get inside the box.”1 The first step in any twentieth-century revolution, after all, was to storm the television station.

Before we take over the popular media, though, we must learn how they work. And so the earliest videos in this show, comprised of box monitors scattered through a space hung with painted backdrops from the original sets, offer sociologists a stage from which to deconstruct the most influential print publications of the day. Delivering their thirty-minute lectures to camera, Herb Schiller explains that the New York Times is not so much a newspaper as a “steering mechanism for the ruling class,” while Murray Bookchin reminds viewers that Time magazine exists to “pacify” its readers by putting distance “between me and the world, while professing to inform me about it.” Here is a short course in Marxist media theory, repackaged by Paper Tiger for the MTV generation. 

The collective’s name derives from its conviction that these mouthpieces for the corporate establishment were “paper tigers,” easily overthrown. This analysis has, in the intervening decades, been vindicated. However The New York Times roars, no one could argue today that it is guiding either the incumbent US administration or the country’s refreshed plutocratic elite, whose takeover of new media has overwhelmed the capacity of such legacy publications as Time to maintain the status quo. But if the collective was right that power in a mediated society is largely smoke and mirrors, it did not anticipate that the revolution would come from the right.

Which begs the question, how the hell did that happen? Given that the left has been diagnosing the mass media’s relationship to power at least as far back as the Frankfurt School, why has it so consistently failed to build the structures and tell the stories that would exert a comparably outsize influence? Of the many firebrands in natty cardigans who feature in the early programs, Archie Singham offers one damning diagnosis. Dissecting the journal Foreign Policy in 1983, he proposes that there was in the postwar United States a “conspiracy of knowledge” maintained by the proliferation in academic and policy-making circles of obscure language. By rendering arguments about the US government’s conduct abroad mystifying to even an educated lay reader, they excluded a wider public from any discussion about their country’s (and their own) place in the world. By this reading, it is the intellectual class—and not the proponents of “low culture”—that must take responsibility for the separation of such a large part of the US citizenry from reality. “Intellectuals,” Singham states, “are involved in the task of obscuring reality because we earn our living by being obscure.” Which might give pause to those members of the art world who would prefer to shift blame for the parlous state of American culture onto the evils of, let’s say, TikTok.

If the root of the problem was patrician intellectuals with little experience of the real world circle-jerking in academic journals, then it falls to a new wave of feminist and queer cultural theorists to open up the conversation. Rather than deconstructing the periodicals of record, Sheila Rowbotham turns her attention to a 1987 issue of the celebrity glossy Star, and freely admits to being captivated by its gossip columns. For all that she is a radical socialist historian, she tells us, she is “also very interested in tittle-tattle. In fact, a lot of history is interest in tittle-tattle given a grander name.” And here is the truth obscured by the mystificators that Singham called out: history (and culture) is not driven by the recondite ideas expressed in turgid academic theses, however much their authors would like you to believe it, but by the same unconscious desires that charge celebrity culture. Anyone who doubts that sexual fantasy, intergenerational rivalry, and petty jealousy are powerful historical motors has not read Suetonius, or the Russian novelists, or any account of the European royal families and their innumerable ludicrous wars. And how else to make sense of the United States today? 

During Paper Tiger’s mid-1980s peak, the standout programs more closely resemble performances or video art than conventional lectures, reflecting both a greater awareness of the relationship of meaning to form and a growing desire to engage audiences through the techniques of storytelling. Judith Williamson Consumes Passionately in Southern California (1987) sets the British historian’s reflections on the archetypally American confusion of “freedom” with “choice” (its preferred form of tyranny) among the strip-lit aisles of a Target department store; Martha Rosler transforms a close reading of Vogue into a brilliantly written erotic fiction—set to a collage of Chinese textile factory workers with fashion models, and soundtracked by Blondie—in which the unconscious desires on which the magazine trades are embodied in its “cunt crazy” publisher, Condé Nast.

Perhaps the most remarkable of these essays is Braderman’s Joan Does Dynasty (1986), which reads that “libidinal ode to consumption” through Foucault’s theories of spectacle and surveillance. Employing a green-screen technique that anticipates the “commentary videos” that now crowd our feeds, this is both an entertainingly catty homage to a soap watched by sixty million people and an exemplary détournement of its strategies for the capture of attention and the communication of ideology. The critique, beloved of joyless academics who have demonstrably failed to bring the revolution, would be that by reproducing the forms of the “culture industry”—because anything people might actually like doesn’t qualify as art, remember—Braderman only reinforces underlying market logics, thereby distracting its audiences from the real problems outlined by said academics in their breathtakingly dull recent paper, and so on. I no longer have any time for this argument. Shakespeare established his own company and churned out two blockbusters a year. So what?

We return to the point made by Rowbotham, namely that the fundamental desires (for pleasure, sex, power) and fears (of aging, madness, death) that drive human behavior “are not going to disappear simply by changing the nature of society.”2 And so anyone who really aspires to reform the latter must always appeal to the former. Rowbotham speaks of how the backing of “stars” such as Elvis Costello and the Rolling Stones was crucial in mobilizing public support for the miners’ strike of 1984/85, for all that the principle of celebrity endorsement “went against the grain” of an activist who cut her teeth in the Women’s Liberation Movement. Sometimes people need heroes, however insubstantial they might in reality be.

The lesson of this and other standout programs in the show is clear: if opponents of the ascendent right are to build their own “paper tigers”—illusory but at least effective— in the era of disinformation and social media, then they must not dismiss the dreams and desires of the people on whose behalf they claim to speak as ignorant, irrational, or vulgar. By recognizing that the responsibilities of mass media to educate and entertain are not mutually exclusive, the best of Paper Tiger Television offers a model of resistance.