Production Studies

Cultural Studies of Media Industries

Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, John T Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, John T Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415997959
• eBook ISBN: 9781135840150
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Behind-the-scenes" stories of ranting directors, stingy producers, temperamental actors, and the like have fascinated us since the beginnings of film and television. Today, magazines, websites, television programs, and DVDs are devoted to telling tales of trade lore—from on-set antics to labor disputes. The production of media has become as storied and mythologized as the content of the films and TV shows themselves.

Production Studies is the first volume to bring together a star-studded cast of interdisciplinary media scholars to examine the unique cultural practices of media production. The all-new essays collected here combine ethnographic, sociological, critical, material, and political-economic methods to explore a wide range of topics, from contemporary industrial trends such as new media and niche markets to gender and workplace hierarchies. Together, the contributors seek to understand how the entire span of "media producers"—ranging from high-profile producers and directors to anonymous stagehands and costume designers—work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world.

This landmark collection connects the cultural activities of media producers to our broader understanding of media practices and texts, establishing an innovative and agenda-setting approach to media industry scholarship for the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Miranda J. Banks, John T. Caldwell, Christine Cornea, Laura Grindstaff, Felicia D. Henderson, Erin Hill, Jane Landman, Elana Levine, Amanda D. Lotz, Paul Malcolm, Denise Mann, Vicki Mayer, Candace Moore, Oli Mould, Sherry B. Ortner, Matt Stahl, John L. Sullivan, Serra Tinic, Stephen Zafirau

Part I
Histories of Media Production Studies

Figure 1.1 Intellectual Property/WGA Strike. Photo by Miranda Banks, 2007.

Chapter 1
Bringing the Social Back In

Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory

Vicki Mayer

As a field of study, “production studies” captures for me the ways that power operates locally through media production to reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities at the level of daily interactions. Production studies, in other words, “ground” social theories by showing us how specific production sites, actors, or activities tell us larger lessons about workers, their practices, and the role of their labors in relation to politics, economics, and culture. It is this connection, between the micro contexts and the macro forces, which illuminates the social implications in an otherwise narrow case study and modifies the grand claims that have become commonplace regarding the role of media in society. It is also this connection between macro and micro that is so frequently lost in the efforts to describe the current media landscape, its interconnected industries, and its networks of professionals. It is ironic that as media industries continue to aggregate and dominate larger labor markets and audience shares, fewer production studies have actually addressed the real ways that local communities construct their subjectivities in the face of these consolidations of media capital and reconfigurations of media work.

Social theory was not always divorced from local realities. From the 1930s to the early 1950s, a series of international scholars, many of whom published in the United States, tried to envision how media workers experienced the growth of a cinematic industrial complex based in Hollywood, and its attempts to harness and control labor power. Written at a time when many Americans were already deeply skeptical about the growing commercialization of culture and the threats of propaganda, both political and economic, these early foci on producers and production belie the desire for a holistic sense of how production and consumption intertwined in the lives of real people. They documented how alienation, a Marxist concept found in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, operated to estrange people from the value of the things they made. For Marx, the bigger and more economically powerful a product was after its production, the more the workers who made it suffered. In the process, their work was devalued, erased by the value of a product they had no control over distributing. More importantly, Marx highlighted the fact that modern capitalist societies require workers who recognize that their physical means of subsistence depend on this political economic system of creating wealth for others. This second characteristic of alienated labor is what made Hollywood workers such an apropos case study.¹ Movies were arguably the most powerful products the United States produced through a vast economy of laborers whose existence depended upon this product, which surpassed the value of the labor and devalued the work of the laborer. Looking back on early media production studies, we can see the ways that Leo Rosten and Hortense Powdermaker in particular theorized the concept of alienation through their empirical studies of Hollywood labor, work practices, and subjective experience.

Although shifts in the global political economy from production-based to consumer-based has rendered some of Marx’s insights obsolete, it is his attempt to relate political economy to the formation of subjectivities that seems still useful to ponder today. In this chapter, I argue that we can still theorize alienation, but that it must come through empirical cases that contribute a broader understanding of work experience in light of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the “new spirit of capitalism,” the zeitgeist that encompasses the present realities of capitalist production.² To illustrate, I draw upon a single event in a longer ethnography of reality television casters as a new worker category in the television industry. The event—a casting call that failed to attract any participants—reveals some of the central ways in which local production studies might theorize forms of alienation in a grounded way, and why television industry workers labor to erase all traces of these theoretically productive moments.

Social Theory in Two Early Production Studies

Leo Rosten’s study of 1930s Hollywood begins with a simple restatement of division between superstructure and base, or the difference between the opulence of movies and the material conditions that produce them. Like other worker communities, Hollywood is a social, not geographic entity, but unlike them, the public aura of their symbolic product shadows the real processes of capital accumulation: “the public never sees [J.P.] Morgan making money or [Henry] Ford making cars; but it does see [actor] Robert Taylor making faces.”³ This equivalence, between money, cars, and faces, is the basis for the alienation, where thousands of workers are anonymous, “in the shadow” of a product with more value and power in the global economy than themselves.⁴ Hollywood merely indexed the national split between estranged labor and its objectified forms.

While certainly not radical in his deposition, Rosten was centrally concerned with the dialectic between workers’ material conditions and their subjectivities. World War II, the closure of European film markets, and the enforcement of antitrust laws laid bare a political economy that accelerated capital accumulation: “The manufacture of movies substituted the problem of selling a commodity for the problem of ‘having a wonderful time.’ Hollywood was forced—more or less—to shift its attention from the Arabian Nights to Dun and Broadstreet.”⁵ Driven by profit motives, workers now sought individualist goals that emphasized competition over solidarity and strategic alliances over organic community. The objectification of their labor extended to self-objectification, in which elites consciously realized the need to promote their own celebrity through extravagant spending and highly public conjugal relations. Elites “cease to be individuals and become business institutions,” writes Rosten, who interestingly observes them as the most alienated class.⁶ Paid far below business elites and less powerful than political elites, Hollywood elites seemed to have an “unconscious need for anxiety,” that kept them swinging between elation and despair.⁷ Unable to assess their own value except through income and status comparisons, elites worked long hours but were perennially dissatisfied and discontent.

This insight that alienation was tied to the production process over the social class of the worker continued to be a dominant theme in Hortense Powdermaker’s ethnography of Hollywood in the late 1940s. Like Rosten, Powder-maker found workers motivated first by profits, especially at the top of production hierarchies, where “the game becomes the ends and is played compulsively.”⁸ In addition, though, she spent far more time with workers at the bottom of these hierarchies, whose externalized labor rendered them as property that she compares to feudal serfs, African American slaves, prostitutes, and indentured servants.⁹ Although Marx characterizes alienation as a state of being under modern capitalism, Powdermaker’s metaphors and their accompanying biographical stories of Hollywood actors, writers, and directors seem to show that profit is not the only value in a capitalist political economy. Rather, producers and executives often rejected a profitable employee in return for an imaginary ownership over the product. In this case, the studios hid net profits of films to exert greater control over their contracted producers, allowing executives to claim the product was in fact their creation.

The key to ownership in Powdermaker’s text is the lack of freedom that workers trade for success in the industry. Freedom is not a break from alienation, in particular the estrangement that results from the division of labor, but seems to imply a role for workers to more openly collaborate in the labor process. When time rationalization, bureaucratic management, and commercial technologies displace the natural technologies of the self, “brains and talent.”¹⁰ Powdermaker claims that producers deceive themselves into thinking of themselves as autonomous competitors rather than individuals tied together by their potential for creative expression and hard work. Her assertion that freedom was not just desirable for many workers, but completely possible despite alienation seems to give insight into why some workers accepted exploitative conditions in exchange for a self-realization through “a human form of collaboration.”¹¹ This obvious contradiction, alienation but self-realization through collaboration, adds a layer to the social theories of the day, showing that capitalism would be even more effective if it allowed workers to collaborate to realize each individual’s organic talents.

Powdermaker and Rosten contribute empirical evidence to social theorizing of the era, most notably the piercing critique found in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.¹² For them, alienation connected production and consumption, succeeding in “sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.”¹³ Workers participate in an increasingly efficient industrial system of mass production and consumption, making them eventually “redundant as producers” of standardized objects and the liberal ideology of individual merit, competition, and desire.¹⁴ Elites control these processes of material and social standardization, while also reaffirming their unflinching allegiance to the system. On these points alone, Rosten’s and Powdermaker’s studies extend Horkheimer and Adorno’s perceptions of a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Histories of Media Production Studies
• Part II Producers: Selves and Others
• Part III Production Spaces: Centers and Peripheries
• Part IV Production as Lived Experience
• Select Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index