Media Culture

Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics in the Contemporary Moment

Douglas Kellner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429534447
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

In this thorough update of one of the classic texts of media and cultural studies, Douglas Kellner argues that media culture is now the dominant form of culture that socializes us and provides and plays major roles in the economy, polity, and social and cultural life.

The book includes a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and society, while providing methods of analysis, interpretation, and critique to engage contemporary U.S. culture. Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analysis and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Studies cover a wide range of topics including: Reagan and Rambo; horror and youth films; women's films, the TV series Orange is the New Black and Hulu's TV series based on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; the films of Spike Lee and African American culture; Latino films and cinematic narratives on migration; female pop icons Madonna, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga; fashion and celebrity; television news, documentary films, and the recent work of Michael Moore; fantasy and science fiction, with focus on the cinematic version of Lord of the Rings, Philip K. Dick and the Blade Runner films, and the work of David Cronenberg.

Situating the works of media culture in their social context, within political struggles, and the system of cultural production and reception, Kellner develops a multidimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disciplines. He also provides new approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and offers new perspectives for cultural studies. Anyone interested in the nature and effects of contemporary society and culture should read this book.

1
THEORY WARS, IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE, AND MEDIA/CULTURAL STUDIES

Media culture in the United States and most capitalist countries is a largely commercial form of culture, produced for profit, and disseminated in the form of commodities. The commercialization and commodification of culture has many important consequences. First of all, production for profit means that the managers of the culture industries attempt to create products that will be popular, that will sell or, in the case of radio and television, that will attract mass audiences. In many cases, this means production of lowest common denominator products that will not offend mass audiences and that will attract a maximum of consumers. Yet precisely the need to sell their productions means that the programming of the culture industries must resonate with social experience, must attract large audiences, and must thus offer enticing products, which may shock, break with conventions, contain social critique, or articulate current ideas that may be influenced by progressive social movements or creators.

Thus, while media culture largely advances the interests of the class that owns and controls the large media conglomerates, its products are also involved in social conflict between competing groups and articulate positions of opposing groups, sometimes advancing forces of resistance and progress. Consequently, media culture cannot be simply dismissed as banal instruments of the dominant ideology, but must be interpreted and contextualized within the matrix of the competing social discourses and forces which constitute it – as I attempt to do in this book.

In fact, in a certain sense, media culture is the dominant culture today, it has replaced the forms of high culture as the center of cultural attention and impact for large numbers of people. Furthermore, visual, oral, and digital forms of media culture are supplanting forms of book culture, requiring new types of critical media literacy to decode and properly interpret the emerging forms of media culture (Kellner-Share 2019). Moreover, media culture has become a dominant force of socialization, with media images, celebrities, and social media “influencers” replacing families, schools, and churches as arbitrators of taste, value, thought, and behavior, producing new models of identification and resonant images of style, fashion, and behavior.

Whatever the effects, individuals today are subjected to an unprecedented flow of sights and sounds into one’s own home and digital device, and new virtual worlds of entertainment, information, sex, and politics are reordering perceptions of space and time, erasing distinctions between reality and media spectacle, while producing novel modes of experience and subjectivity – much of which is monitored by corporations and governments. Big Data collects, stores, analyzes and sells consumer information to the highest bidders (Noble 2018).

Such emergent challenges and proliferating problems require innovative theories and political responses to interpret our current social situation and to illuminate our contemporary problems, conflicts, challenges, and possibilities. In the conjuncture in which we find ourselves today, media/cultural studies can play an important role in elucidating the significant transformations that have taken place in our culture and society. We are surrounded by new technologies, novel modes of cultural production, and ever-emerging forms of social and political life. Moreover, media culture is playing an ever more significant role in every realm of contemporary society, ranging from its multifarious functions in arenas from the economic to the social.

In the economy, seductive cultural forms shape consumer demand, produce needs, and mold a commodity self with consumerist values. In the political sphere, media images have produced an ever-changing mediascape of sound-bite politics and spectacle that places the media at the center of political life. In our social interactions, mass-produced images guide our presentation of the self in everyday life, our ways of relating to others, and the creation of our social values and goals. As work declines in importance, leisure and culture become more and more the focus of everyday life and the locus of value and importance. Of course, one must work to earn the benefits of the consumer society (or inherit sufficient wealth), but work is arguably declining in importance in the proliferating consumer societies in which individuals allegedly gain primary gratification from consuming goods and leisure activities, rather than their labor activity.¹

There have also been discussions of how labor is changing into a “gig economy” where workers take temporary positions for short-term engagements, shifting from one “gig” to another.² Thus, contemporary society and culture is in a state of ferment and change and competing theories strive to make sense of these new developments. The contested terrain of theory is accompanied by culture wars between conservatives, liberals, and progressives, with conservatives attempting to roll back the advances of the 1960s and 1970s in order to impose more traditional values and forms of culture. Throughout the Western world, from the 1980s to the present, conservatives have been aggressively attempting to gain hegemony by seizing political power and using it to carry through their economic, political, social, and cultural agendas. They have been using their political and economic power to carry through an agenda of cultural transformation, attempting to turn back the clock to an earlier era of conservative rule.

Yet there are also countervailing trends. The progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s are still alive and well, and struggles for human rights, the civil liberties of oppressed people, peace and justice, ecology, and a more humane organization of society are everywhere visible. In 2011, democratic movements surged through North Africa, Europe, and the United States (see Kellner 2012) with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements throughout the Western world, followed by Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Dreamers, and the Trump Resistance. Yet many of the democratizing regimes of the Arab Spring were overthrown by reactionary forces and progressive movements in the West are countered by fierce conservative movements, making the present era a highly contested moment throughout the world. Yet, the very instability, motility, flux, and uncertainty of the present creates openings for more positive futures and possibilities for the creation of a better world out of the nightmares of the present moment. On the other hand, the penchant for micropolitics and/or identity politics fragments the progressive movements and renders many blind to the necessary linkages and interconnections with others in opposition or in counter-hegemonic struggles.

Within this context, it is therefore of vital importance to understand the role of media culture in a wide range of current social struggles, trends, and developments. It is the conviction of the studies in this book that our current local, national, and global situations are articulated through the texts of media culture, which is a contested terrain that competing social groups attempt to use to push their agendas and ideologies. Not just news and information, but entertainment and fiction articulate the conflicts, fears, hopes, and dreams of individuals and groups confronting a turbulent and uncertain world. The concrete struggles of each society are played out on the screens of media culture, especially in the commercial media of the culture industries which produce texts that must resonate with people’s concerns if they are to be popular and profitable. Culture has never been more important and never before has there been such a need for serious scrutiny of contemporary media culture and its effects.

Consequently, to understand what is going on in society and everyday life today, we need theories that will help us make sense of the changes and conflicts of the present age. Throughout this book, I will thus delineate theoretical perspectives that I find useful in grasping the vicissitudes of contemporary society and culture.³ Yet the fortunes of theory are related to their historical matrices, which shape and structure them and which in turn they attempt to illuminate. Therefore, in the following study, I will sketch the emergence and effects of some critical theories that I will make use of in this work.

Theory wars

The past decades of intense cultural, social, and political struggle since the 1960s also saw the rise of many new theories and approaches to culture and society. It is as if the tumultuous struggles of the era sought expression and replication in the realm of theory. Political passions and energies seemed to be sublimated into the discourse of theory and new theories were appropriated with the intensity that marked the absorption and use of radical political ideas and practices in the 1960s. The proliferation of new theoretical discourses first took the form of theory fever, in which each new, or newly discovered, theoretical discourse produced feverish excitement, as if a new theory virus totally took over and possessed its host. Then the proliferating theory fever took on the form of theory wars between the competing theoretical discourses.

In the United States, where forms of what Herbert Marcuse called “one-dimensional thought” reigned in the 1950s and early 1960s, Marxism and feminism were the first forms of theory fever to circulate. Experiences of the Vietnam War in the 1960s drove many in the New Left and anti-war movement to Marxist theory, tabooed during the Cold War and driven underground.⁴ Marxist discourse proliferated and a stunning variety of neo-Marxist theories from Europe and non-Western countries were imported to the United States, producing a wide range of new radical theories.

Feminism quickly became part of the new theoretical discourses throughout the world. In the late 1960s, women began revolting against what they considered oppressive practices of both contemporary patriarchal societies and their male comrades in the radical movements. The wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s discovered classics like Mary Wollstonecraft’s Declaration of the Rights of Women, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and other feminist classics, as well as a rich women’s history and the importance of women’s experience and culture for the radical project.⁵ Many, often unhappy, marriages between Marxism and feminism took place, while other varieties of feminist theory found important resources in psychoanalysis to analyze women’s oppression and experiences, and to provide for the reconstruction of more nurturing, feeling, and loving subjects. Thus, as with Marxism, a tremendous range of feminist theories emerged, that often warred with each other, as well as with other theoretical discourses (see Hammer 2001).

Previously marginalized groups sought their own voices and discourses, and in the United States, new African American, Native American, Chicano, Asian-American, and other people of color produced oppositional social movements and new theories, discourses and academic studies. Gay and lesbian movements and studies problematized sexuality and provided new perspectives on gender, culture, and society, developing what became known as “queer studies,” with evolving terminology such as LGBTQ+ studies, a term I’ll use in this book.⁶ Theorists whose national origin was outside the West generated new subaltern studies, attacking Western colonization, while studies of the “post-colonial subject” and voices from newly emerged nations produced some exciting theoretical innovations and greatly expanded the terrain of critical discourses.⁷ Cumulatively, these discourses have contributed to some of the most challenging social theory and cultural criticism of the past decades and in the following studies I draw on these new oppositional studies and discourses.

Although the tumult of the 1960s passed into the more quiescent 1970s, the explosion of theories continued and theory wars intensified. An accelerating globalization of theory erupted with proliferating theoretical discourses being rapidly disseminated across borders and national cultures. Theorists throughout the world appropriated European discourses, and the resulting new critical theories were circulated in turn throughout the globalizing theory world. Discourses of race, class, ethnicity, sexual preference, and nationality challenged theoretical discourses to take account of phenomena previously ignored or underplayed. Theory wars broke out between those that privileged class with those that privileged such things as race, gender, and sexuality.

Over the past decades, it is to feminist, LGBTQ+ studies, critical race theories, and multiculturalist theories of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, ability, subalterneity, and other oppositional groups and identities that we can turn for specific critiques of oppression and theories of resistance, and these groups have made important contributions to media/cultural studies.⁸ Their discourses and theories have resonated with the struggles of oppressed people, and thus politicize theory and critique with passion and perspectives from existing political struggles. Such perspectives enlarge the field of media/cultural studies and political struggle, expanding, for instance, the concept of ideology critique to include dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, as well as class – a topic that I take up in this chapter and the following ones. These oppositional political discourses also infuse media/cultural studies with political passion and intensity, breathing new life into its projects.

Building on this work, I argue in this chapter for the need to deploy Marxian theories of class, feminist concepts of gender, critical race theories, LGBTQ+ theories of sexuality, and multicultural and social theories to articulate the full range of representations of domination and resistance that one finds structuring the terrain of media culture. The forms of media culture are intensely political and ideological, and thus those who wish to discern how it embodies political positions and has political effects should learn to read media culture politically. This means not only reading media culture in a socio-political-historical and economic context, but seeing how the internal constituents of its texts either encode relations of power and domination, serving to advance the interests of dominant groups at the expense of others, or oppose hegemonic ideologies, institutions, and practices, sometimes presenting progressive alternatives. Thus, reading media culture politically involves situating it in its historical conjuncture and analyzing how its generic codes, its positioning of viewers, its dominant images, its discourses, and its formal-aesthetic elements all embody certain political and ideological positions.

Reading culture politically also involves seeing how media culture artifacts reproduce the existing social struggles in their images, spectacle, and narrative. In Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (1988), Michael Ryan and I indicate how struggles within everyday life and the broader world of social and political struggles are articulated within popular film, which in turn are appropriated and have their effects within these contexts. We indicated how some of the most popular Hollywood films and genres from the 1960s to the late 1980s transcode contending social and political discourses and represent specific political positions within debates over the Vietnam war and the 1960s, gender and the family, class and race, the corporation and the state, U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and other issues which preoccupied U.S. society over the past decades.

The process of transcoding describes how social discourses are translated into media texts, as when Easy Rider transcodes 1960s countercultural discourses of freedom, individualism, and community in cinematic images and scenes, when, for instance, the bikers drive through nature with the soundtrack playing “Born to be Wild,” or “Wasn’t Born to Follow.” And during the highly contested Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, some U.S. films transcoded critical discourses that advanced the positions of the anti-Vietnam war movement (e.g. Vietnam: Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds), while others, like The Green Berets (1967) transcoded positive representations of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and attacked the counterculture and anti-war movement. In the contemporary era, liberal TV series like The West Wing (1999–2006), Madame Secretary (2014–2020), The Good Fight (2017–2019), and Blunt City Law (2019) present the state, politics, and the law in a favorable light in accordance with liberal political discourses, while more radical TV shows like Our Cartoon President (2018–2019), or late night talk shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015–2019), present the current presidency of Donald Trump in a completely negative light.

From the 1960s to the present, media culture in the United States has thus been a battleground between competing social groups and discourses with some texts advancing liberal or more progressive positions, while others transcode conservative or reactionary ones. Likewise, some texts of media culture advance progressive positions and representati...