Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity

Transdisciplinary Approaches

Susanne Foellmer, Margreth Lünenborg, Christoph Raetzsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138210134
• eBook ISBN: 9781315455914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

As individuals incorporate new forms of media into their daily routines, these media transform individuals' engagement with networks of heterogeneous actors. Using the concept of media practices, this volume looks at processes of social and political transformation in diverse regions of the world to argue that media change and social change converge on a redefinition of the relations of individuals to larger collective bodies. To this end, contributors examine new collective actors emerging in the public arena through digital media or established actors adjusting to a diversified communication environment. The book offers an important contribution to a vibrant, transdisciplinary, and international field of research emerging at the intersections of communication, performance and social movement studies.

Part I
Framing Media Practices

Theoretical Perspectives

1 From Public Sphere to Performative Publics

Developing Media Practice as an Analytic Model

Margreth Lünenborg and Christoph Raetzsch

Introduction

For media and communication studies the concept of ‘the public’ must be regarded as foundational and as highly problematic at the same time. Due to its close association with political theory, normative ideals of democracy and nationalism, the historical legacy of how publics are created, what media are used and who are its principal actors, has been a core subject of academic scholarship, especially in journalism studies. With the proliferation of digital and networked media in many different domains of public life, the concept of ‘the public’ is again challenged because public articulation is no longer an exclusive domain of journalists, politicians or institutions of civil society. The historical and theoretical legacy of the concept of ‘the public’ makes it difficult to account for publics emerging outside these established structures of public discourse. Although it is now common to identify publics by a hashtag (e.g., #blacklivesmatter, #occupy or #weareallkhaledsaid), we are still challenged to acknowledge—analytically and theoretically—that publics may not be entities (in the sense of a fixed set of actors) but continuously emerge from an ongoing process between different actors becoming aware of each other. Regarding publics as fluid, fragile and often temporally limited associations of hitherto unconnected individual actors, highlights the necessity to theorise the dynamics in which personal practices of communication become relevant and integral to the emergence of a joint interest. Such theorising should avoid perpetuating the normative doxa of deliberation or consensus in favour of an acknowledgement of the ‘agonistic’ nature of the public (Mouffe 2005), in which disjunction and oppositional forces co-exist and challenge each other rather than aiming for a common position or viewpoint. Such theorising should also address the latent contradiction between media as “institutionalized structures, forms, formats and interfaces for disseminating symbolic content” (Couldry 2012: vii) and media as an “open set of practices relating to, or oriented around, media” (Couldry 2004: 117). Along with Couldry we argue that such a theorising should acknowledge the domain of quotidian practice as a primary site of the negotiation between personal and public interests. Through practice theory, we can understand how negotiations allow different actors—let them be single actors or groups like (emerging) social movements—to participate, articulate themselves and challenge dominant viewpoints. Following Butler, we can conceive of the specific performativity of practice in analogy to the performativity of gender. Performativity then stands for “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Butler 1993: 2). As gender is performatively constructed in quotidian affairs, its practices likewise create an enduring structure of inequality. Following this line of argument, we are focusing on dynamics of gendered structures as both preconditions and effects of emerging publics.

In the first part, we review some of the criticisms of the universal idea of a public sphere. Drawing on recent scholarship in social movement studies, we will show how the dynamics of the “personalisation of contentious politics” (Bennett and Segerberg 2012) and the idea of “networked publics” (boyd 2011) stand for a drastic shift in the way publics are nowadays created. In the second part, we outline basic contours of practice theory. This part will propose that the performativity of practice itself is integral to understanding public articulations, which cannot be addressed within institutional frameworks of analysis and how changes in practices can account for changes in wider social structures. In the third part, we outline how media practice (in the singular) can be developed into an analytic model that allows understanding different levels of agency in relation to the formation of publics. We outline that media practice can account for the emergence of new actors in public discourse, as well as the adaptation of established actors to new dynamics of communication. Although individual practices are invariably prone to variance across different sets of actors, we underline that structural patterns of practice offer a novel perspective on the emergence of publics. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist media studies, the fourth part outlines the concept of ‘performative publics’. With this concept, we adopt core tenets of practice theory to analyse processes of public articulation that resist institutionalisation but that become discernible as instances in the forming of translocal, lateral and fluid publics across media platforms and established constellations of actors. In defining performative publics, we follow Hegde’s claim that today “media forms collide with established cultural practices, forcing reconfigurations of categories such as private/public, tradition/modernity, and global/local” (Hegde 2011: 5f). Rethinking publics from the perspective of practice allows us to acknowledge how such reconfigurations take place at the level of the quotidian and how these publics must be understood as processes of articulation and contestation that cross different networks of translocal actors.

Criticising the Public Sphere: From Deliberation to Agonistic Pluralism

The historical legacy of the concept of the public sphere remains powerfully aligned with an idea of unity, cohesion and consensus. Because bourgeois publics of the 17th and 18th centuries emerged in Europe and North America as political actors in the historical process of modernisation, the association of the public sphere with a common identity foreshadows the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century (Habermas [1962] 1989). The connections of nationalism and an emerging sphere of market-oriented public communication (Anderson 2006; Schudson 1978) have contributed to a persistent ideal of deliberation in the interest of finding common grounds, collective identities and at least in normative viewpoints, foster a belief in an ideal of ‘the public’ as a privileged sphere of communication. In the twenty-first century, this traditional nation-based understanding of ‘the public’ as “a bounded political community with its own territorial state” (Fraser 2007: 8) has become problematic as a transnationalisation of public spheres can be observed.

The idea of the “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas [1962] 1989), both in its normative implications and historical ramifications, seems impossible to disentangle from a history of modernity in the West and the rise (and alleged demise) of a public sphere in the wake of capitalist commercial media (Scannell 2007; Starr 2004; Thompson 1995). The dilemma of the public sphere as an idea and as a practical reality in modern democracies is aptly summarised by Taylor, who argues that the public sphere, being a forum for deliberation “is supposed to be listened to by power, but it is not itself an exercise of power” (Taylor 2004: 89). During modernity, this speaking to power has been the core domain of journalism, which became institutionalised as a principal representative of ‘the public.’ The concept of the public sphere thus encompasses a notion of “stewardship” (Schudson 2013) in which journalists are endowed with the task of legitimising democratic structures of governance. On the other hand, the public sphere shall be open to anyone, as it “can only exist if it is imagined as such”, Taylor argues (ibid.: 85, emphasis added). The inherent tension in the concept of the public sphere thus becomes visible, as it is both an institutionalised reality and an idea that can be adopted and appropriated by each member of a public to imagine what the public sphere is for him or herself.

The dualism of the idea of the public sphere has proven exceptionally popular and problematic at the same time. Almost coinciding with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in English (Habermas 1989) and against the background of the end of the Cold War, the critical discourse about the alleged universalism of a public sphere was beginning to take shape (Calhoun 1992). For example, Fraser (Fraser 1992) and Benhabib objected to the “unexamined normative dualisms” (Benhabib 1992a: 95) that had informed Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, pointing to gendered categories of private and public that acted as tacit mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (see also Fraser 1989: 113–143). Against a universalistic theorising of such gendered divisions, scholars have retraced and critically questioned the historical legacies of categories as private and public (Elshtain 1981; Sheller and Urry 2003; Hipfl, Klaus, and Scheer 2004). The gendered legacy of ‘the public’ has obscured that ‘partial publics’ exist in society, some of which are only loosely organised but integral to social cohesion. Publics emerge at different levels of organisation, each level creating its own barrier to access. Thus, a general public is composed of different publics pertaining to different layers of society (Klaus 2001, 2004). From a gender perspective, a dichotomist distinction between private and public does not suit as an explanation for social structure but is constitutive of this very structure itself.

Against the unifying and nationally-oriented view of the public sphere, scholars have also underlined that counter-publics and deliberately oppositional social formations need to be considered as well (Couldry 2000; Warner 2002; Castells 2007). The inherent association of the public sphere with a secularised, Western notion of civil society has been a point of fervent criticism. Against the assumption of a clear cut between modern secularism and the relegation of religious piety to the domain of the private, especially scholars on Muslim publics accentuated the corporeal, ethical and religious dimensions and practices in the constitution of publics outside the European-American context (Benhabib 1992b; Hirschkind 2006; Salvatore 2007).

The historical legacy of the public sphere as an idea and reality favours a strong emphasis on rational civic discourse, idealises a sphere of disinterested debate and often sidelines aspects of power, rather than stressing dissonance or conflict. In contrast to these assumptions, Chantal Mouffe has proposed to accept “agonistic pluralism” as a ‘paradox’ of democratic societies. By realising that “‘politics’ consists in domesticating hostility” between members of society (Mouffe 2005: 101), an emphasis on conflict and dissonance as integral components of political discourse allow to dissociate publics and consensual politics. In Mouffe’s view, the traditional vision of the public ignores that “every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion” (ibid.: 104).

With the proliferation of digital and networked media (e.g., social networking sites, blogs, wikis) we are becoming increasingly aware of how such processes of inclusion and exclusion figure at the individual and quotidian level. Within a framework of the public sphere, an individual articulation of protest on a message board may be insignificant, as it is visible only to a few other individuals. But as individuals embed networked media, platforms and content in quotidian and personal communication, such individual articulations become discernible as instances in the forming of publics. We are witnessing a growing chasm between such individual articulations and the institutional structures in which political participation has traditionally been found. This growing chasm is equally acknowledged in social movement studies, where the changing dynamics of contestation and communication among protesters and activists begin to pose similar challenges to established analytic frameworks.

The Changing Practices of Social Movements

Downing has argued that media in social movement studies were for a long time regarded as “technological message channels rather than as the complex sociotechnical institutions they actually are” (Downing 2008: 41). Acknowledging the enhanced proliferation of social networking sites as platforms for mobilisation and the circulation of counter-discourse, Fenton and Barassi explained that such sites are “deeply commodified while being conducive to sociality and the facilitation of political networking” (Fenton and Barassi 2011: 193). This tension in research on social movements has been further addressed by scholars trying to critically evaluate in what ways media become useful for different actors within a movement. Mattoni and Treré have highlighted that “media practices” in social movements refer either to interactions with media technologies (‘objects’) or to practices of so-called “media people”, i.e., those who act as spokespersons or continuous producers of public messages through and to the media (Mattoni and Treré 2014: 259–260). The increasing pervasiveness of digital and networked media creates a “participatory condition” (Barney et al. 2016) for many kinds of users, thereby challenging long-held normative assumptions about political participation itself. Participation now becomes normative in the sense that it is expected rather than afforded, creating the problem that a multitude of participatory practices do not necessarily lead to a joint idea of what a movement is about or what its aims are.

This new cultural condition, which is widely embedded in consumption, exposure to news and entertainment, and forms of personal and public communication, is changing the meaning of participation itself. Participation in online communication can become part of collective processes of decision-making and negotiations of power (Jørgensen 2014), but such effects are by no means inherent in the new technological forms that public contestation now relies on and makes use of. Dahlgren argues that access to information technologies and the higher levels of interaction provided by social media are not sufficient for participation in political processes. Participation strives at “power-sharing” through a “repertoire of civic practices” which, as he claims, need to go beyond media practices alone (Dahlgren 2014: 63–64). At the same time, participation in society can take place on varying levels of organisation and in different contexts of cultural life for addressing problems of wider concern through different media (see esp. Carpentier 2016). Participation in media practices can translate into other forms of political activism, organisation and mobilisation. While participation in an online forum or a newspaper comment section can become a political act, such ritualised uses of media can simply confirm entrenched beliefs or support group identities without moving into activism offline (Cammaerts and van Audenhove 2005).

In their oft-quoted study on the Occupy Movement, Bennett and Segerberg (2012) described the new dynamics of social movements as forms of “connective action” in distinction to ‘collective action’ that stood for movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Connective action, the authors argued, was based on a “personalization of conten...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Media Practices, Social Movements and Performativity: Transdisciplinary Approaches
• PART I Framing Media Practices: Theoretical Perspectives
• PART II Approaching Media Practices: Mobilities – Movements – Interventions
• Afterword: A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality
• Notes on Contributors
• Index