DISPLAYING THE MODERN WOMAN 41 this persona is rooted and the relations between them. Then I will attempt to indicate the implications of these relations for the struggles the women's movement is waging over the control and production of symbolic resources, and the effects of this on our material reality as "modern" women in a "post" colonial situation, interpellated by a variety of gender ideologies in flux. Before we turn to the textual system of the advertisements inhabited by the televisual woman, let us briefly look at the genres of televisual ads and their positioning in the medium in which they occur. Television's ubiquitous position in the home, its effects upon modern life need not be separately mentioned. But the position of the advertisement, I submit, is subtly responsible for the unique characteristics of the medium itself. For one thing, the advertisement foregrounds with tremendous emphasis, and at regular intervals, the conditions of possibility of the larger narrative, and indeed of the entire gamut of what the medium itself involves. With a visual and an aural power the mere print ad cannot hope to equal, the television ad has the most privileged position in the medium. These micro narratives, intensely packed with imperatives that form a part of their generic repertoire, are positioned to disrupt and supercede any other television narrative at will, constantly reminding us, (as if we were in danger of forgetting) that it is the commercial break which makes everything else that occurs on television possible. Their intrusive nature is calculated to draw maximum attention, to echoing the Greek root of the word, 'advertere', meaning to turn, which acts as an imperious order to the viewer. If you switch channels to escape one ad, the break in a continuous narrative is achieved anyway. Either by catching the ad or by changing channels to escape the ad, you fall prey to everything that media critics hostile to the medium bemoan - truncated attention span, trivialisation of an issue due to interruptions etc. And the condensed length of the ad itself ensures that it is never interrupted, a hazard that all other television narratives have to contend with. Longer, complex and densely packed narratives lose their impact because at crucial or climatic moments, they have to bow down to the commercial break. Hence their very construction, peculiar to the televisual narrative structure, is predicated on being able to successfully negotiate these invariable breaks. So, by virtue of their positioning and their construction, television ads rule our daily visual and aural intake and are influential in shaping the medium in which they occur. Thus, I would argue, the televisual woman created by these ads has