Digital, Political, Radical

Natalie Fenton

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745650876, 9780745650869
• eBook ISBN: 9781509511709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies.

Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically emboldened. She urges us to seek out an emancipatory politics that aims to deepen our democratic horizons. To ask: how can we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? Then, what is the role of the media and how can we reclaim media, power and politics for progressive ends? Journeying through a range of protest and political movements, Fenton debunks myths of digital media along the way and points us in the direction of newly emergent politics of the Left.

Digital, Political, Radical contributes to political debate on contemporary (re)configurations of radical progressive politics through a consideration of how we experience (counter) politics in the digital age and how this may influence our being political.

1
Introduction: Sowing the Seeds of Dissent

In 2007 global capitalism cracked. A financial crash exposed the abuses of the banks and financial agencies, which had worked economic systems to their advantage until those systems fractured under the weight of debt they had created. A chink of light shone through that crack. This was the moment when the brutal and aggressive form of deregulated financial capitalism, which, vampire-like, had been sucking the blood from the body politic, saw sunrise and was rendered momentarily blind. And for a brief period the optimists among us thought that this economic crisis was a moment for radical change. Nine years on, the increased power of corporations and transnational financial agencies over public priorities continues unabated. The glorious promises of liberal democracy continue to morph into the torturous agonies of neoliberalism, where free markets and human freedom are pretty much interchangeable. Inequality has increased. The poor have become ever poorer. The rich continue to prosper. Ecological disaster looms large on the horizon. As the poor get poorer, so they also have less and less influence over policies and politicians and vote less. And democracy is undone.

But the last decade has also been marked by public manifestations of dissent, with uprisings in the Arab world and North Africa against vicious dictatorships; mass protests in Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal against an austerity politics that prioritized banks and financial agencies over people and publics; the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, heralding the rights of the 99 percent, which spread to many parts of the globe; the demonstrations in Istanbul against the urban development plans for a public park; the protests against racist police discrimination in Ferguson (Missouri), to name but a few. Yet, as if believing it were possible to deter vampires merely with the odours of garlic, dissent was met with pepper spray, batons and, in some cases, tanks and gunfire. Still, new parties on the left have begun to emerge with the electoral victory of Syriza in Greece and the rise of Podemos in Spain (see chapter 6). Other emergent publics are tussling with new forms of progressive collectivism that pitch the idea of the demos from a different vantage point, challenging many of the assumptions of liberal democracy. All the while the digital age continues to get under our skin and into our bloodstreams, as being online and ever more connected is ingrained into the rhythms and rituals of our daily lives – at once seducing us with consumer delights, capturing and selling our digital footprints, and enabling and empowering oppositional mobilization to spread far and wide.

A mediated radical politics that often circulates in online networks through social media can be understood only in relation to its non-radical counterparts – mainstream politics as well as legacy media. Mainstream politics has not escaped unscathed. With a few notable exceptions, we have seen a decline in the support of establishment political parties and in voting publics. In many places around the globe, social democratic parties have shifted their policies ever rightwards. In general, in Western democracies, party politics has shifted to a ‘consumer’ style of representation: this can be seen in terms of political parties, which in order to win elections must engage in persuasion, and impression management – what Louw (2005: 25) refers to as ‘image making, myth making and hype’ on behalf of elite political actors; in terms of the media, which, hungry for news fodder, routinely access and privilege these elite definitions of reality and are claimed to serve ruling hegemonic interests, legitimize social inequality and thwart participatory democracy; and also in terms of the citizenry, where being political now includes a vast range of social behaviours (not just campaigning, organizing, and argument, but lifestyles, consumer ethics, diet and musical taste).

As participation in parliamentary democratic elections declines (Sloam, 2014), we face a critical disjuncture in a deep and multifaceted crisis of our representative democratic systems, of our political systems – systems long regarded as weakened by the competitive imperatives of economic globalization and the declining counter-power of organized labour in the deliberate diminishment of the trade union movement through anti-union legislation; through the criminalization of protest and the ever-increasing attempts to de-public everything; and through the monetization of ourselves, as our citizenry becomes consumer-channelled and our common humanity is replaced with individualism and me-politics. Media institutions have been implicated in this pattern of erosion as subject and object of economic restructuring that favours elites, both through sustained messages that legitimate the upward transfer and concentration of property and wealth and through the deregulation and privatization of the media, thereby arguably placing media out of reach of democratically organized political will-formation (Calabrese and Fenton, 2015).

In this maelstrom of contradictions, how can we begin to make sense of what radical progressive politics might mean? How does a politics of emancipation form and materialize? How are the progressive political values of politics in common forged, moderated and channelled into concrete practices in the digital age? How do we work towards what E. P. Thompson (2014: 109) described as ‘the dignity of actors in the making of their own history’ – our history, our dignity – in systems where, as Brown (2015: 18) states, democracy is not only overthrown or stymied by anti-democrats but also ‘hollowed out from within’.

This book is an attempt to consider the above questions in the deep context of actually existing politics while also taking into account the pragmatic possibilities of our progressive political futures. So many scholars, who link the forms of communication, the means of organizing protest and demonstration and disseminating our political passions and desires, to claims of a revival of a counter-politics of the twenty-first century, leave the practical problem of doing politics and the dream of democracy untouched. How do we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? By focusing on the transformative potential of new technology, the concrete goals of liberatory action in all spheres (material, legal, state) are too often left out. Protest is easy to identify; how to bring about political change, less so. Too often we are left asking: What is the politics? Where is the democracy? In other words, by concentrating our gaze on the mediation of politics, we are seduced by the thrills and excitement of revolutionary prowess on offer and neglect, at our progressive peril, both the constraints that must be overcome and the concrete feasible politics that must be developed to take their place. Surely, what matters is how protest turns into the practice of politics that can redress imbalances of power. Yet too frequently we map a range of responses, we track the mobilizations, we may even spot the contradictions, but rarely do we critique the move to political power or even try to imagine what it might look like. So, we are left with political absences and political emptiness.

This book, then, starts from the simple position that we need to understand ‘the political’ if we are going to critique politics (and the mediation thereof). And, in order to do critique, we need to tackle both power and politics as concepts and as practices if a progressive politics is to move forward. The rest of this introduction sets out this foundational premise, situating the arguments in the chapters that follow within a framework that is critical, political, radical and contextual. Below, I explain the necessity of each as ballast to my thoughts.

Critical

This book takes its inspiration from the school of critical theory. As director of the Institute for Social Research (the so-called Frankfurt School) Horkheimer (1982: 244) said that a critical theory is distinguishable from traditional theory because it has a specific practical purpose: to seek human emancipation, ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. Just as there are many circumstances in this regard, so there are many theories, but all share a desire to provide the basis on which we can seek to understand forms of domination and oppression and thereby seek to increase forms of liberation and freedom.

Horkheimer also said that critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical and normative. Critical analysis must be empirical social inquiry and be framed by normative philosophical argument – such that it can explain what is wrong with current social reality, so it can evaluate society, identify the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social and political transformation. In order to do this, critical theory directs its attention to empirical analyses of the contemporary world and of those social and political movements which attempt to transform society in progressive ways (Kellner, 1990). As it is concerned with changing the conditions of suffering, a critical theory takes a materialist approach because it wishes to transform material conditions that produce suffering. Critical theory, then, must combine social theory, empirical research and radical politics in theory and in practice.

Critical theory is also multidisciplinary – it draws from political economy, cultural theory, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and history – and for good reason. Our mediated lives are not disconnected from the economy, from politics, from the social or from the philosophical. So surely it is a rather mundane point that we should seek to study them in all their (in)glorious context. Yet so often this is where we find our scholarship – trapped in disciplinary ghettoes fiercely protective of their boundaries. A critical theory should be able to reach outside of disciplinary borders and connect with the external world, including social movements and political organizations that are trying to transform society in progressive ways. When it comes to radical politics, this means understanding the individual and notions of identity that emerge from social psychology, understanding the organizational in relation to sociology and social movement studies, and the institutional in relation to political economic accounts alongside the cultural and the technological – acknowledging the complexity of the mesh that connects culture and economy, state and citizens, consciousness and society.

Crucially, a critical theory is dialectical. In other words, no one factor is determinate by virtue of being unchanging. Thus, as Horkheimer (1982: 28) states:

the development of human character … is conditioned both by the economic situation and by the individual powers of the person in question. But both these elements determine each other continuously, so that in the total development neither of them is to be presented as an effective factor without giving the other its role.

Economic determinism is shunned. Rather, the socio-material world is seen in historical context in which objective conditions (material factors) contribute towards the constitution of the subject (the human agent) and the subject, in turn, helps constitute those objective conditions. Insisting on a dialectics insists on the possibility of change. But in taking a materialist stance it also recognizes that ‘the fundamental historical role of economic relations is characteristic of the materialist position … Understanding of the present becomes more idealist, the more it avoids the economic causes of material need’ (Horkheimer, 1972: 25).

Approaching the debates in this book from a critical theory stance is a deliberate attempt to refocus our critical lenses on a politics of transformation in the field of media and communication studies. Of course, there is a rich and diverse tradition of critical research in the field, stemming from the Frankfurt School to the UK's Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, to those situated more within critical political economy. Such approaches have long embraced a historical, material, interdisciplinary critique of the political with a view to social and political transformation. But in a digital age that has left us floundering to describe what on earth it now means to talk about ‘the media’ and at a loss to explain the most basic of questions – who is saying what to whom and why it matters – where too much of our scholarship is left fumbling around in a fog of description, it seems appropriate to restate a purpose to our practice.

As we marvel at the abundance and multiplicity of platforms and communicative realms online, as we struggle to keep pace with the latest apps and the best technical widgets, as we are enthralled by the interactive capabilities and creative affordances of the latest software, too frequently we get swept along in doing no more than describing their uses and mapping their existence. Mapping and describing undoubtedly have their place. We need to know what we are dealing with. As networks proliferate and become more complex, mapping and describing their presence is necessary but will only ever take us to first base. The problem is that, as mediated spaces expand and multiply in endless reiterations, the mapping and describing take over and threaten to forever blunt our analyses, rendering them bland to the point of pointlessness. As Rod Benson (2014) puts it, with this ‘new descriptivism … the moment for explanation so often never seems to arrive.’ Being critical means moving beyond description; it means having a point. This book is at pains to be explanatory, normative and pragmatic. I am sure it fails on all three. But it is an attempt to be reconstructive as well as deconstructive.

Political

Being based in critical theory, this book also seeks to understand ‘the political’. By being normative and evaluative, it is also, itself, political in its endeavour.

There is an enormous debate on what constitutes ‘the political’, and various elements of this debate are addressed at different points throughout the book. I have approached ‘politics’ both as ordinary and as extraordinary. On a daily basis, in our ordinary lives, politics has to do with how we as individuals view our own positions in the world and how we relate to others both far and near. In dealing with our differences, it has to do with the difficulties of living together locally, nationally and on this planet. As such, politics will always involve passion, desire, antagonism, contestation and conflict. Recognizing dissymmetry and agonism (Mouffe, 2005) as crucia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction: Sowing the Seeds of Dissent
• 2: Digital Activism: A New Means of and a New Meaning of Being Political
• 3: Digital Media, Radical Politics and Counter-Public Spheres
• 4: Passion and Politics: Radical Politics and Mediated Subjects
• 5: Radical Politics and Organizational Form in Theory and in Practice
• 6: On Being Political and the Politics of Being
• 7: Conclusion: Putting Politics Back in the Picture?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement