Critical analysis of media

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Critical analysis of media

• Consensus and controversy in the wake of Marx

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• Figure 4.3 Two opposing models of media power
  (mixed versions are more likely to be encountered

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Marxs analysis of culture

• The economic base, the forces and relations of
  production determine the cultural
  superstructure of a society
• Forces and relations are mainly the technology
  and economic class relations that define an
  economic system
• Slave/owner in an ancient agricultural system
• Lord/serf in an advanced agricultural system,
  technology allowing for shared farming
• Bourgeoisie/proletariat in a capitalist system
  with the development of mechanization and factory
  production

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Marxs approach

• Marx was most concerned with identifying the laws
  of social change based on the historical
  development of societies technological and
  economic systems
• He seems to say that the superstructure
  represents a fairly mechanical reflection of the
  power held in the base
• Some argue that he simply did not have enough
  time to articulate a more sophisticated
  relationship
• Control over the media, for example, allows the
  powerful to provide a nearly uniform ideological
  presentation across the entire society

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Ideology

• Mostly imposed from above, with little attention
  to the actions of the oppressed classes
• Acceptance is fairly uniform, with the mind
  another terrain of oppression
• Elite ideologists are either members of the
  bourgeois class or employed by the class
• Though there are certain forms of conflict within
  the class, they are resolved when an issue of
  consequence for interclass relations emerges

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The outcome of determination

• For Marx, false consciousness
• The false beliefs about their real conditions
  that workers live under
• False consciousness forestalls the development of
  class consciousness, the learned
  beliefs/knowledge that allow the class member to
  see from the true perspective of his/her class
• Class consciousness leads to revolution or
  revolutionary consciousness as the classes are
  forced to recognize the irreconcilable conflict
  of their positions

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Class consciousness

• It is the role of the intelligentsia to lead the
  working class into class consciousness
• Only through training and exhortation can workers
  break through their false consciousness
• Inherent contradictions in the working of the
  base lead to crises, representing opportunities
  for the development of class consciousness

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Two trajectories

• Marxs analyses have generated two major
  contemporary schools of scholars
• Political economy
• Focus on the structure and its influence on
  culture
• Critical cultural studies
• Focus on the culture/superstructure, its relative
  independence, internal workings and influence
  over the base/structure

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Chapter 4

• Figure 4.1 Four types of relation between culture
  (media content) and society

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Issues for later theorists (neo-Marxists)

• The nature of false consciousness
• Antonio Gramsci
• Hegemony
• Subaltern classes take part in their own
  deception
• Hegemony partial, conflicted, always in flux
• Must constantly be won
• Always in danger of being undermined
• Hegemony not a uniform, leaden ideology
  representing elite interests
• Natural, common sense

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Superstructure

• Althusser outlined a number of Ideological State
  Apparatuses (ISAs) that served to reproduce the
  conditions of production--that is, the teach
  workers their place in the world and reproduce
  them as a factor in production

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Political economy

• Media are large corporations themselves
• Integration into larger corporate capitalist
  structure (Dreier)
• Effectiveness of corporate control/owners over
  media management (Murdock and Golding)
• Limited control over content exercised by media
  professionals (Tuchman, Breed)
• Professionalism not the protection against
  corporate control some think it to be
• Special condition of information producing
  corporations (Garnham, Herman and Chomsky,
  Horkheimer and Adorno)

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Role of the state

• Independent actor (Herman and Chomsky)
• Conflict with bourgeois public sphere
  (Habermas)
• Representative of elite class (Miliband)

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Imperialism

• Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of
  capitalism
• The exploitation of distant peoples, in which the
  local working class conspires, allows the working
  class to rise in relation to the conquered
  peoples
• Nationalism, etc. becomes a mainstay of hegemony,
  hiding and deflecting criticism of local elites
  or dominant classes at home
• The working class provides the army necessary to
  dominate foreign populations

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Schiller

• Imperialism remains an important influence on
  global events and trends
• Media imperialism is a subset of the general
  system of imperialism.
• the cultural and economic spheres are
  indivisible

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Schiller

• What is regarded as cultural output also is
  ideological and profit-serving to the system at
  large.
• In its latest mode of operation, in the late
  twentieth century, the corporate economy is
  increasingly dependent on the media-cultural
  sector.

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Schiller

• American economic dominance and corresponding
  cultural dominance remain supreme, but are
  declining in the face of transnational corporate
  cultural domination.
• However, transnational organizations are modeled
  on American PR, advertising, research, public
  opinion, cultural sponsorship, etc. model.

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System direction

• with different specific interests and
  objectives, and often rival aims, harmonization
  of the global business system is out of the
  question. Yet the generalized interest of some
  thousands of super-companies is not that
  different.

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Critical cultural studies

• Dissatisfied with Marxs cultural analysis
• Rejected the claims of positivist social science,
  embraced literary and humanist approaches in
  balance with social science methods

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Critical cultural studies

• Cultural Marxists work off Gramscis analysis
• Ideology
• Entire worldview
• Active structure for apprehending the
  worldprocessing of new information according to
  rules that seem natural or commonsensical but in
  fact represent certain interests
• Connotative definition of language (Hall)

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British Cultural Studies Birmingham School

• The British Cultural Studies group attempted to
  articulate far more fully what the nature of
  determination is
• Raymond Williams outlined a form of this in his
  famous essay
• setting limits, exerting pressures
• Williams stands in the gap between political
  economists and cultural Marxists

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Cultural analysis

• Forms of resistance
• Deviant cultures/subcultures
• Williams
• Dominant culture
• Residual culture
• Retained from earlier, effective, accepted
  practices replaced by newly effective cultural
  practices
• Emergent culture
• new meanings and values, new practices, new
  significances and experiences, are continually
  being created
• no dominant culture, in reality exhausts the
  full range of human practice, human energy, human
  intention

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The nature of ideology/hegemony

• Structured in dominance
• Beneath conscious thoughtunexamined
  presuppositions
• Common sense
• Universal truths

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Cultural analysis

• The nature of culture in a capitalist society
• Commodification (Horkheimer and Adorno)
• Cheapness/kitsch
• Destruction of the meaning of a thing through its
  repetition, shoddiness, etc.
• Drive out true beauty, uniqueness, quality with
  kitsch

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Cultural Analysis

• Role of the audience in meaning-making
• Encoding/decoding (Hall)
• Separate, but linked moments
• Nature of ideology as the apperception of real
  lived social experience
• Language as a site of class struggle

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Cultural analysis

• Gradual move away from class as the defining
  category of all social position
• Race
• Gender
• Sexual preference
• Defining the other

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Resistance

• More recent work has focused on resistance, on
  the development of cultural spaces within which
  the oppressed can resist, fight back, reclaim
  their subjectivity
• Hebdige (Subcultures)
• Style as a form of resistance
• However, style and other forms of resistance are
  drawn back into the dominant culture
• Development of a market for stylecommodification

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Style as resistance

• the challenge to hegemony which subcultures
  represent is not issued directly by them. Rather
  it is expressed obliquely, in style. The
  objections are lodged, the contradictions
  displayed (and, we shall see, magically
  resolved) at the profoundly superficial level of
  appearances that is, at the level of signs

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Recuperation

• The process of recuperation takes two
  characteristic forms
• 1. The conversion of subcultural signs (dress,
  music, etc.) into mass produced objects (i.e. the
  commodity form)
• 2. The labelling and re-definition of deviant
  behaviour by dominant groupsthe police, the
  media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form)
• (Hebdige)

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The debate
Political economists Cultural Marxists
Determination Strong, direct Uncertain, partial
Base/ Superstructure Superstructure determined by base Superstructure relatively independent, or interconnected
Base Forces and relations of production Real, historically determined social being
Superstructure Uniform, reflective of elite ideology Hegemonic, with influences from many sources inflected with ideology