The Forging of the Media Icon in the Romanian Cultural Space. Case Study: the “Liviu Mihaiu” Brand
The Forging of the Media Icon in the Romanian Cultural Space. Case Study: the “Liviu Mihaiu” Brand

Summary/Abstract: Authors: Ana-Maria Munteanu and Oana Diana Musat. The social campaigns revaluate the mechanism of production specific to the media market environment but for the reorganizing of social relations and socially redistributing moral and civic values. The iconic image of “Liviu Mihaiu” represents a center of reliability that irradiates invulnerable messages in a space defined as a system of legitimate positions (the invulnerability of integrity). We can notice the articulations at the level of the symbolic power of juste (which incorporates the marks of dissidence and anticommunism) with the “efficient” symbolic power of media corporations, these being the “territory” on which the icon will impose civic values, connected to the legitimate actors who carry this anticommunist message in post-communism and the centers of integrity that they hold in the public space imbricate in that of the market and the other way around. Therefore, anticommunism goes from a legitimating value of the Romanian society after 1989 to a solid value of the “consumerist society” which reactivates itself efficiently in the pleadings about mentality change and the strengthening of the “centers of integrity” of the memory which could be erased by the actual preponderantly mercantile orientation of the new generations that have never directly known communism. We think that the subtleties of the construction of the icon of Liviu Mihaiu in and through the campaigns of creating responsibilities and changing mentalities are emphasized by the combination of certain features that evoke the speech against the postcommunist establishment and its aspects assumed in an ironic and a playful way and which come together, according to the principle of coherence, with the senior role of the subculture and the underground. The way in which this strategy “creates a point in which the limit appears… becoming a counter-movement that contradicts the trend” can be observed in Maurice Godelier’a comment: the Western line development, far from being universal because it would find itself everywhere, appears as universal it would not be found everywhere… it is typical because in its singular development obtained an universal result…” If we associate culture with a policy of representation and, implicitly, with a production mode similar to the production of any goods, we can talk about a course towards singularity served as “difference//opposition within the temporal whirl – past, present, future,” where the present is established as point of freedom contrasting with the privative character of the past, which allows for clear distinctions, the differential mechanism being irreducible and invariant (it is not modified by means of negotiation), no matter how far the play on words, the pun, the joke, etc., may be carried.

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