phenomena of the former public sphere itself (real people and events in your nightly news broadcast, the transformation of names into something like news logos, etc.). Many analyses have shown how the news broadcasts are structured exactly like narrative serials; meanwhile, some of us in that other precinct of an official, or 'high', culture have tried to show the waning and obsolescence of categories like 'fiction' (in the sense of something opposed to either the 'literal' or the 'factual'). But here I think a profound modification of the public sphere needs to be theorized: the emergence of a new realm of image reality which is both fictional (narrative) and factual (even the characters in the serials are grasped as real 'named' stars with external histories to read about), and which now -- like the former classical 'sphere of culture' -- becomes semi-autonomous and floats above reality, with this fundamental historical difference that in the classical period reality persisted independently of that sentimental and romantic 'cultural sphere', whereas today it seems to have lost that separate mode of existence. Today, culture impacts back on reality in ways that make any independent and, as it were, non- or extracultural form of it problematical (in a kind of Heisenberg principle of mass culture which intervenes between your eye and the thing itself), so that finally the theorists unite their voices in the new doxa that the 'referent' no longer exists.

At any rate, in this third moment the contents of the media themselves have now become commodities, which are then flung out on some wider version of the market with which they become affiliated until the two things are indistinguishable. Here, then, the media, as which the market was itself fantasized, now return into the market and, by becoming a part of it, seal and certify the formerly metaphorical or analogical identification as a 'literal' reality.

What must finally be added to these abstract discussions of the market is a pragmatic qualifier, a secret functionality such as sometimes sheds a whole new light -- striking at a lurid mid-level height -- on the ostensible discourse itself. This is what Barry, at the conclusion of his useful book, blurts out in either desperation or exasperation; namely, that the philosophical test of the various neo-liberal theories can be applied only in a single fundamental situation, which we may call (not without irony) 'the transition from socialism to capitalism'. ¹⁶ Market theories, in other words, remain Utopian in so far as they are not applicable to this fundamental process of systemic 'deregulation'. Barry himself has already illustrated the significance of the judgement in an earlier chapter when, discussing the rational choice people, he points out that the ideal market situation is for them as Utopian and unrealizable under present-day conditions as, for the Left, socialist

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