The Craft of Criticism

Critical Media Studies in Practice

Michael Kackman, Mary Celeste Kearney, Michael Kackman, Mary Celeste Kearney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134749232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

With contributions from 30 leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies. Chapters address various methods of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, policy, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextuality and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses emergent technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and digital humanities. Each chapter includes an intellectual history of a particular method or approach, a discussion of why and how it was used to study a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth review of a case study drawn from the author's own research. Together, the chapters in this collection give media critics a complete toolbox of essential critical media studies methodologies.

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PART I

PRIMARY METHODS

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1.

IDEOLOGY

Ron Becker

Ideology refers to a way of thinking about the world that emerges from and reinforces a specific social order. The concept—a cornerstone of critical approaches to media—assumes that societies are structured by economic, cultural, and political systems that separate people according to their position in those systems (e.g., by economic class, racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, able-bodiedness). Such systems also work to privilege certain groups at the expense of others, distributing power, resources, and status unevenly to individuals according to their positions in those groups. From this perspective, societies are structured by systemic inequities and antagonistic social relations. Yet most societies, especially modern, capitalist societies, remain relatively stable. Disadvantaged groups do challenge the status quo, but they rarely revolt in ways that overturn the systems that work against them. Why not? The concept of ideology helps explain the relative stability of societies structured by such systems of domination and provides options for thinking about the possibilities of social change.

To examine ideology, then, is to examine how the ideas, assumptions, and logics through which we make sense of reality and live in the world help justify and reproduce systems like capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, or white supremacy. A dominant ideology—a web of beliefs that underpins a specific system of domination at a specific moment—works to make certain social arrangements, practices, and behaviors that promote the interests of some people over and against others’ seem neutral or universal. A dominant ideology can make unequal social relations that are culturally constructed and historically specific seem natural and inevitable. It can make highly politicized ways of seeing and living in the world seem commonsensical and arguments against the established social order seem illogical or impractical. When most successful, then, a dominant ideology makes the way a society operates appear inescapable, even when it isn’t and makes it difficult to imagine how else our society could be organized.

The concept of ideology fuels many scholars’ interest in studying media and plays an important role in a diverse range of research agendas, including many of those you will encounter in this volume. Its most obvious impact has been to provide justification and strategies for analyzing the vast array of media texts produced by the culture industries. Critical attention to popular culture’s texts, including those widely denigrated as artless or ephemeral, is warranted when they are reframed as artifacts through which one can glimpse a society’s ideologies. When those texts, backed by the distribution and marketing power of media institutions, are consumed by millions of people, they might not merely reflect, but also shape, reinforce, or challenge ideologies. Ideological criticism is often equated with close textual analyses that link texts’ ideas to wider systems of domination; my case study connecting family-makeover reality TV shows to the logics of neoliberalism and heteronormativity is an example of this mode.

Ideology is not only relevant to the study of media texts, however. The people and practices involved in creating, consuming, and regulating media are also deeply influenced by ideologies, making ideological analysis relevant to many other modes of criticism such as production/industry studies, ethnography, and policy. Finally, ideological analysis has implications for every mode of media criticism. Since the concept focuses our attention on the relationship between the ways we understand reality and the dynamics of social power, it can always be turned back onto our own work as critics, leading us to ask how our own motivations, methods, and analyses are shaped by ideologies and entangled with the dynamics of unevenly distributed social power.

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Intellectual History of the Concept

To offer a relatively straightforward definition of ideology as I do above is a necessary starting point but also misleading, since the concept is among the most contested in the field. The evolution of the concept has not followed a straight line or even a circuitous path. It is better to think of its history as a vast river delta with multiple converging and diverging streams of development. The result is a concept that has evolved within different intellectual traditions and acquired many different shades of meaning. Debates over its proper definition have been so intense because the concept serves as an entry point for understanding things that matter enormously. It lies at the nexus of fundamental philosophical, sociological, and moral questions involving the nature of reality and humans’ understanding of it; the origins of a person’s consciousness; the nature of social power; the possibilities for social change in complex societies; and competing visions of a just society. These issues rarely have objective answers, yet the stakes involved in them are extremely high. It isn’t surprising that scholars have struggled over the concept for more than 200 years.

Rather than sketch out a chronological account, I have organized this section around three points of divergence. I map out how different definitions of ideology have intersected with questions of determination (what factors shape a society), epistemology (what is the nature of people’s understanding of reality), and textuality (how do ideologies operate within media texts). I am less interested in adjudicating among the diverse uses of the concept than in identifying what insights the different theories and the tensions among them offer. I also hope to avoid a reductive progress narrative that implies older, misguided definitions were superseded by more accurate or sophisticated ones. Some debates have led to valuable reformulations, yet there are many points of divergence that remain. They persist less because of a failing of one theory or another and more because the issues involved are, in the end, unresolvable. Below, I provide an overview of the terrain by mapping two streams of thought that diverge around each topic.

A major point of divergence arises from competing opinions about the role ideology plays in shaping a society. One perspective gives causal priority to economic forces and sees ideology as supplementary. From this perspective, a society’s economic system—the historically specific conditions within which people pursue their most basic material needs like food, clothing, and shelter—is its defining feature; it serves as the base for everything else that happens in society and sets the conditions of human thought and existence. This historical materialist perspective emerged out of efforts in the nineteenth century to understand how societies were transformed by a new kind of economy: commodity capitalism (i.e., a system where most people meet their material needs by buying products with money they earn by selling their labor to a smaller group of people who make their money by selling the fruits of the first group’s labor). Following Karl Marx, whose critique of capitalism established the parameters within and against which most subsequent theories of ideology developed, historical materialism argues that to understand modern capitalist societies we must first recognize that this economic system divides people into classes by the way they make money and creates inequality by systematically channeling more resources to owners and less to workers. Secondly, we must trace how this economic system has a determining effect on other social institutions (e.g., systems of government, schools, family structures, religious institutions, the media).¹ A historical materialist analysis then tries to reveal how such institutions and the ideology they circulate reflect the underlying economic base and help maintain it and the unequal class relationships it generates. Here, ideologies play a role in shaping society, but one that is secondary to the economy.

Such analyses have been questioned by scholars who argue that economic forces, while important, are not the only or sometimes even the most salient determining factor. From such culturalist perspectives, a society is defined by the complex intersection of the economic with ideological systems like nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity as well as socio-cultural institutions like the family, religion, and the media. The internal dynamics of these systems and institutions also divide people into groups and channel resources to them unevenly. This tradition emerged out of the work of twentieth-century scholars like Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe who adapted Marx’s arguments to the conditions of increasingly complex and media-saturated Western capitalist societies.

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Whereas historical materialism tends to analyze ideological systems as the epiphenomena of an underlying economic base (as growing out of or reinforcing rather than intersecting or conflicting with it), culturalism insists that ideological systems have their own logics and histories. It acknowledges that ideologies may (perhaps even usually) evolve over time to align with an economic system, but it also insists that such alignments are not guaranteed—that ideologies have their own internal mechanisms (e.g., the operations of language) and their own impacts on a society’s development. Thus, an economic system might evolve in response to ideological forces. From a culturalist perspective, ideologies are no less important than economic practices. In fact, some culturalist scholars insist that ideologies shouldn’t be understood as only ideas about reality but also as the material reality that emerges from those ideas (e.g., arguing that segregated drinking fountains and the use of them are as much a part of white supremacist ideology as ideas about racial difference).

At times, the gap between historical materialist and culturalist perspectives seem merely to rest on subtle disagreements over which factor is more important; historical materialism, after all, acknowledges that ideological systems like patriarchy matter. Tensions persist, however, because of deeply held investments. Critics in the historical materialist tradition give analytic priority to the economic system in which people struggle with and against each other to meet their needs for basic physical survival, because they believe it involves matters of life and death and therefore is the place where those who want to create a better society should focus their efforts. Critics in the culturalist tradition, in contrast, argue that humans don’t survive by bread alone but have other needs—the need to communicate, develop a sense of self, build community, create order in a chaotic world, find meaning in the fragility of human existence. For culturalist critics, ideologies are the systems through which people struggle with and against each other to meet these existential needs; as such, they involve matters of life a...