Introduction present promise — the endlessly regressed Utopias of the future — with what is in fact happening, on the ground. Even as one says this, however, technologies of mass culture open out to new terrains of ideological operation. The model of new mass culture promises to update its ancestors in the field of popular entertainment, with an effectiveness that does not any longer, by Prasad's argument, restrict itself to a textual formalizing of the politics of 'formal' subsumption. At that time, it was possible to see that 'complete appropriation of productive forces by capital had not occurred', and most ideologies of the popular, including populist ones, could sec a kind of structured coexistence between the modern state on the one side, and precapitalist ideologies and social relations on the other. Today, instead, Prasad convincingly argues, the popular attempts an allegory for a 'real' subsumption, a 'supreme ideological reassurance ... of an other (who directs the unfolding of the new order) in whom we trust when we trust in capitalism.' The two (very different) areas that seem to repeatedly emerge as crucial in this, are those that have existed, so to speak, outside of the heartlands of dominant nationalist filmmaking and film theory. They are, in one instance, geographically located outside of the Hindi cinema — in South India, in industrial centres whose local productions have almost chronically existed as some kind of surreal counterparts to Hindi cinema's organic audiences: more 'efficient', more capable of bypassing the anonymous member of a national audience that, it was even once argued, held the country together; more able to convert their cultural domination into directly political control. And in the other instance, in the areas of cinephilia, or what Vasudevan calls 'segments of the audience' that, in some unprecedented ways, get echoed in the way Mani Ratnam's film puts together its narrative. Of the latter, Srinivas' paper opens up a remarkable new area of film-viewing: the 'organized' as opposed to the 'individual' fan, the member of the audience capable, as it were, of talking back to the image, of even creating an influential sector of organization that, at the very least, does not emanate from the film/political cultural industries and is only tenuously controlled by them. This essay can be seen to extend, specifically in film theory, the work done by Dhareshwar/Srinivasan on 'Rowdysheetcrs' (forthcoming in Subaltern Studies, No. 9). In 1994, the first ever Department of Film Studies was launched at the Jadavpur University, Calcutta. Earlier this year, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, hosted a study week on 'Making Meaning in Indian Cinema', constituting the first such conference in recent memory. Along with providing, in future issues, a dossier on recent developments in the TV industry, and allied areas, JAI hopes to present recent work in film theory as we enter an exciting, even adventurous age for the discipline, and the many new responsibilities its practitioners will have to take on in times to come. ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA Journal of Arts & Ideas