Media Rituals

A Critical Approach

Nick Couldry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134490172
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media Rituals rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behaviour for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated.
Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media event; reality TV; Webcam sites; talk shows and docu-soaps; media pilgrimages; the construction of celebrity. In a final chapter, he imagines a different world where the media's ritual power is less, because the possibilities of participation in media production are more evenly shared.

Chapter 1

Media rituals

The short and the long route

… the familiar is not necessarily the known …

(Lefebvre 1991a: 15)

There is something strange, even disorienting, about the media’s impact on social life. We can recognise the reaction of Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald to Britain’s ‘inventor’ of television,¹ John Logie Baird. Macdonald thanked him for the television, this ‘wonderful miracle’ that had ‘put something in his room which would never let him forget how strange the world was – and how unknown’.² But now we can only understand that early reaction against the grain of the enormous familiarity of television, and the familiarity of the worlds that television presents to us. The strangeness lies elsewhere, in our difficulty in grasping what difference it makes to the social world that the media is there. Understanding media means remembering that the familiar is not necessarily the known, and must therefore first be made strange.

This book uses theory – not abstract theory, but theory informed by empirical research – to understand the dimension of media we find most difficult to understand: the dimension left unexplained even when we have analysed all media texts and their source in the media industries. For we would still have to explain the media’s role in ordering our lives, and organising social space. We would still have to explain those times when our attention to media seems more than casual, even necessary, and when the media appears to stand in for something essential about our lives together as social beings. To do so, we must look with a wider-angled lens than usual at how the social world is ‘mediated’³ through a media system that has very particular power-effects, and how the actions and beliefs of all of us are caught up in this process. I am introducing the term ‘media rituals’ to capture an aspect of this terrain.

By ‘media’ here, I will mean not any media, or process of mediation, but particularly those central media (primarily television, radio and the press, but sometimes film and music, and increasingly also computer-mediated communication via the Internet) through which we imagine ourselves to be connected to the social world. There is, as Todd Gitlin (2001: 10) recently argued, a dimension of our experience of media that differentiated studies of this or that medium miss: this is our sense of ‘being with media’ in their totality. This is the common sense notion of ‘the media’, although in the age of media digitalisation its precise reference point is beginning to change. It is the media (in this sense) that underlies what I will call ‘the myth of the mediated centre’: the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre. This myth underlies our orientation to television, radio and the press (and increasingly the Internet) as a social centre, and our acceptance of that centre’s position in our lives as legitimate. If symbolic power is the socially sanctioned ‘power of constructing reality’ (Bourdieu 1991: 166), then the myth I am attacking can be expressed another way: as the belief that the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions is legitimate. My claim will be that media rituals are the key mechanism through which that assumed legitimacy is reproduced.

‘Media ritual’ is a term of art. There is a short and a long route to explaining it. The long route will be developed theoretically in Chapters 2 and 3 and then explored from various specific angles in Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7. The need for a long route derives from the fact that, as the book’s subtitle, ‘A critical approach’, indicates, I will work both with and against our instinctive sense of what this term means. I want to rethink common sense notions of ‘ritual’ in order to address the complexity of contemporary media’s impact on social space. Understanding ‘media rituals’ is not simply a matter of isolating particular performances (rituals) and interpreting them; it is a matter of grasping the whole social space within which anything like ‘ritual’ in relation to media becomes possible. I call this wider space ‘the ritual space of the media’ (more on which later in the chapter).

Put more directly, ‘media rituals’ are any actions organised around key mediarelated categories and boundaries, whose performance reinforces, indeed helps legitimate, the underlying ‘value’ expressed in the idea that the media is our access point to our social centre. Through media rituals, we act out, indeed naturalise, the myth of the media’s social centrality. The term ‘media rituals’ encompasses a vast number of things: from certain ‘ritualised’ forms of television viewing, to people’s talk about appearing in the media, to our ‘automatic’ heightened attention if told that a media celebrity has just entered the room. Even this shorter route to understanding the term requires some background.

THE SHORT ROUTE TO UNDERSTANDING ‘MEDIA RITUALS’

There are three broad approaches to the term ‘ritual’ in anthropology. These have understood ‘ritual’ respectively as:

1 habitual action (any habit or repeated pattern, whether or not it has a particular meaning);

2 formalised action (for example, the regular and meaningful pattern by which a table is laid for food in a particular culture);

3 action involving transcendent values (such as the Holy Communion, which in Christian contexts is understood as embodying a sense of direct contact with the ultimate value, God).

The first approach is uninteresting; sometimes in everyday language, I might talk about my ‘ritual’ of always having a drink and a snack when I get home after work, but in this case the word ‘ritual’ adds nothing to the idea of regular action or habit. The second and third approaches are more interesting and may overlap. Formalised action is much more than habit, since it implies that ‘ritual’ involves a recognisable pattern, form or shape which gives meaning to that action. To see ‘ritual’ from the third perspective – as action involving or embodying broad, even transcendent, values – is compatible with the second approach (indeed, ritual’s formality is what enables it to be associated with something transcendent), but shifts the emphasis away from questions of pure form and towards the particular values that ritual action embodies.

Why should the term ‘ritual’ in these second and third senses (or a combination of them) help us understand contemporary media? Doesn’t this fly in the face of many claims that we live in an age of ‘de-traditionalisation’ (Heelas et al. 1994)? Doesn’t it ignore the progressive multiplication and diversification of media outputs and media technologies? Isn’t it blind, finally, to the fact that in the ‘information society’ there is no possibility of anything as stable as ritual centres, only temporary regularities in a global ‘space of flows’ (Castells 1996; Lash 2002)?

To answer these questions fully is a task for the whole book, but there is a short answer for now. Just as ritualised action turns our attention to ‘something else’, a wider, transcendent pattern ‘over and above’ the details of actions,⁴ thereby raising questions of form, so too it is the media’s influence on the forms of contemporary social life – the wider transcendent patterns within which the details of social life make sense – that I intend to capture by the term ‘media rituals’. It is not enough to make finer descriptions of media practice using our existing conceptual tools; only through a new concept, or so I will argue, can we cut beneath the apparently chaotic surface of everyday media practice. Once we do so, we will find more order than we expect and in the process add something to media and social theory, and also, I hope, to anthropological theory, where not only ritual but now mediation too are central concerns.⁵

The term ‘media rituals’ refers to the whole range of situations where media themselves ‘stand in’, or appear to ‘stand in’, for something wider, something linked to the fundamental organisational level on which we are, or imagine ourselves to be, connected as members of a society. I will explore the usefulness of this term in a number of specific examples: from media events (Chapter 4) to pilgrimages to media sites (Chapter 5) to the media’s claims to represent reality (Chapter 6) to media sites for public self-disclosure (Chapter 7). What I do not want to do, however, by introducing the term ‘media rituals’ is to mystify what the media is, and its implications for questions of power. In speaking of ‘media rituals’, therefore, I intend to detach the term from its usual moorings.

‘Ritual’ has often been associated with claims that it produces, or maintains, social integration. This is a reading associated particularly with the tradition of social thought derived from the great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim was the leading French sociologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contributed more than anyone else to our understanding of how modern, complex societies hold together, if they do. He explored these questions in two contrasting books: the early The Division of Labour in Society (1984) and the late The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995). One reading of the latter has emphasised the supposed unbreakable connection in Durkheim’s thought between ritual and social integration. I will offer a different reading of why Durkheim matters. I will follow anthropological theorists such as Maurice Bloch and Pierre Bourdieu who have connected ritual not with the affirmation of what we share, but with the management of conflict and the masking of social inequality. Unfortunately, in media analysis, whenever ‘ritual’ has been introduced, it has been in the context of a rather traditional idea (derived from a particular reading of Durkheim’s sociology of religion) that rituals ‘function’ to confirm an established social order that is somehow ‘natural’ and beyond question.

Instead we need to rethink ‘ritual’, including ‘media ritual’, and Durkheim’s model of the social significance of ritual, to make room for new connections: between the power of contemporary media institutions and modern forms of government (Giddens 1985), between an understanding of ritual and the disciplinary practices of surveillance, between, that is, Durkheim and Foucault. For too long, media theorists have analysed the most dramatic examples of media power (the great media events of televised coronations and state funerals) in isolation from questions of government. As Armand Mattelart (1994) argues, the result is an impoverished account of the media’s role in modernity. By contrast, a purely Foucauldian discourse analysis with its emphasis on flow, dispersal and discontinuity might well underestimate the real and consistent pressures towards order in contemporary mediated societies. (We can only guess, since Foucault did not, any more than Durkheim and with less excuse, analyse modern media!) That is why the theoretical framework of this book will draw on both Durkheim and Foucault, and many points in between, to grasp how media are entangled in the rhetoric of the contemporary ‘social order’. It is worth saying something now about that difficult term, social order.

UNDERSTANDING THE ‘ORDER’ OF MEDIATED SOCIETIES

We cannot analyse the social impacts of contemporary media without taking a position on broader social theory. The underlying question, after all, is how are media involved in contemporary societies’ holding together, if in fact they do. The approach I take to this question will be post-Durkheimian and anti-functionalist.

What do I mean by this? First, to be ‘post-Durkheimian’ is not to abandon Durkheim’s social theory as a reference point, but to rethink our relation to Durkheim in a radical fashion; and, second, to be ‘anti-functionalist’ means opposing any form of essentialist thinking about society, not only functionalist accounts of society’s workings (and media’s role in them) but equally the idea that society is essentially disordered and chaotic. The two points are linked, since it is too weak a notion of social order that prevents some social theorists from seeing how much an anti-functionalist reading of Durkheim still has to offer in explaining contemporary media rhetorics. These points need some explanation.

Starting out from Durkheim

There are other roots than Durkheim for the study of ‘ritual’, of course, but it is Durkheim’s sociology of religion (especially in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life) which is the unavoidable reference point for any account of ritual that is interested in wider questions of social order. It was Durkheim who insisted on the need to grasp the dimension of social life that transcends the everyday. He called this ‘the serious life’, la vie sérieuse (cf. Rothenbuhler 1998: 12–13, 25), and saw religion as its main, although not its only, manifestation. Durkheim, however, understood the term ‘religion’ in a rather special sense. For him religion:

is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it.

(Durkheim 1995: 227)

Religion, then, for Durkheim is not (whatever the claims it makes for itself) about cosmic order, but about the way social beings imagine the social bond that they share as members of a group. Instead of analysing contemporary religion, Durkheim offered a speculative account of the ‘origins’ of religious practice in aboriginal societies in perhaps the most brilliant product of ‘armchair anthropology’ (Pickering 1984: 348). Durkheim argued that our experiences of being connected as members of a social world are at the root of our most important categorisations of that world (such as, but not limited to, the sacred/profane distinction, which Durkheim argues underlies all religion in the usual sense of the term).

This argument can be broken down into three stages:⁶

1 At certain key times, we experience ourselves explicitly as social beings, as members of a shared social whole.

2 What we do in those moments, at least in Durkheim’s imagined aboriginal case, is focused upon certain shared objects of attention, such as totems, and certain rituals which confirm the meaning of these ‘sacred’ objects or protect them from all other objects (the ‘profane’).

3 The distinctions around which those moments of shared experience are organised – above all, the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ – generate the most important categorisations through which social life is organised. This, in Durkheim’s view, explains the social origin of religion and religious behaviour, and the centrality of the sacred/profane distinction in social life.

Durkheim’s contemporary relevance

Why should Durkheim’s account be of any interest to us today, either generally, or in a book on contemporary media? Surely Durkheim’s method for developing his insights (if that is what they were) was neither plausible anthropology nor (even on its own terms) an analysis of modern religion.⁷ So why have Durkheim’s ideas fascinated a whole range of social analysts interested in contemporary forms of social order? The answer, paradoxically, is that Durkheim’s insight, althou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Media rituals: The short and the long route
• 2 Ritual and liminality
• 3 Ritual space: Unravelling the myth of the centre
• 4 Rethinking media events
• 5 Media ‘pilgrimages’ and everyday media boundaries
• 6 Live ‘reality’ and the future of surveillance
• 7 Mediated self-disclosure: Before and after the Internet
• 8 Beyond media rituals?
• Notes
• References
• Index