Understanding Media Cultures

Social Theory and Mass Communication

Nick Stevenson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761973638, 9780761973621
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237045
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Praise for the First Edition:

`I can?t think of a book in media studies that handles so well the diversity of perspectives and issues that Stevenson addresses. Whether reconstructing Marxism or deconstructing postmodernism, tackling the pleasures of soap opera or the repetitive structures of daily news presentation, Stevenson is always clear and insightful? - Sociology

The Second Edition of this book provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which social theory has attempted to theorize the importance of the media in contemporary society. Now fully revised to take account of the recent theoretical developments associated with `new media? and `information society?, as well as the audience and the public sphere, Understanding Media Cultures:

- Critically examines the key social theories of mass communication

- Highlights the work of individual theorists including Fiske, Williams, Hall, Habermas, Jameson, McLuhan and Baudrillard.

- Covers the important traditions of media analysis from feminism, cultural studies and audience research.

- Now includes a discussion of recent perspectives developed by Castells, Haraway, Virilio and Schiller.

- Provides a glossary of key terms in media and social theory.

Retaining all the strengths of the previous edition, Understanding Media Cultures offers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the field. It will be essential reading for students of social theory, media and cultural studies.

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Chapter 1

Marxism and Mass Communication Research

Debates within Political Economy and Ideology:

Raymond Williams, Glasgow University Media Group and Stuart Hall

Marxism, Political Economy and Ideology

Historically Marxism has offered an analysis of the media of mass communication that has sought to emphasise their role in the social reproduction of the status quo. Whereas liberalism has argued that the mass media have an essential role to play in the maintenance of free speech, Marxism has charged that unequal social relations have helped form ideological images and representations of society. In this sense, Marxism’s strength has been to suggest that there is indeed a link between questions of ownership and the cultural content of media production. Marxists have rightly criticised liberal accounts for assuming that the free exchange of ideas could take place in conditions of class domination. However, Marxism’s limitations are also considerable. It has neglected other modes of domination not reducible to class, such as race and gender, and has under-theorised the role of the state. It was noticeable that in European state-administered, socialist societies the flow of information and civil society generally was centrally controlled. This along with Marxism’s current identity crisis poses difficult questions concerning its continued role as a critical theory. While these issues form the backcloth of our discussion, they cannot be fully debated here. Despite these limitations, British Marxist perspectives still have much to contribute to our understanding of media cultures. Raymond Williams made considerable attempts to learn from democratic liberalism by asking what a system of free communication might look like. Further, through a debate with post-structuralism, Stuart Hall sought to explain symbolic modes of domination that are not rooted in social class. Finally, the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) offers empirical examples of bias towards class perspectives in news production.

This chapter traces two central themes through contemporary debates within British Marxism on the theme of mass communication: the patterns of ownership and control evident within the cultural industries, and their role in the formation of cultural content and subjectivity. The question of political economy remains crucial to critical attempts to develop a theory of mass communication. The study of modern cultural forms, I will argue, presupposes an analysis of the institutional structures that produce and distribute them. Such theoretical manoeuvres have sought to investigate structured relations of power embedded within relations of ownership and control, place these material relations within a historical context, and unravel the impact of commercial and public institutions upon discursive practices (Golding and Murdock, 1991). Of those under review only Raymond Williams has substantively contributed to our understanding in this context. While issues of political economy engage members of the GUMG and Stuart Hall, such concerns never occupy centre stage.

If the contributions of the GUMG and Stuart Hall have little of note to offer in terms of locating the media within institutional frameworks, the same could not be said of issues related to ideology and the formation of subjectivity. The question of ideology within British Marxist mass communication research is intimately bound up with the history of Western Marxism (Anderson, 1979). Here ideological forms of analysis are employed to explain the continuation of structures of domination within late capitalism. In this respect, while it is recognised, to borrow Enzensberger’s famous phrase, that the so-called consciousness industry exhibits a certain ‘leakiness’ (Enzensberger, 1976b: 23), the emphasis is squarely placed upon forms of manipulation. In an earlier essay on this theme, Enzensberger (1976a) had claimed that the ‘mind industry’ could not be conceptualised in terms of the circulation of commodities, as its main concern was to ideologically sell the existing order. In a sharp reply to the perceived ideologism of the media analysis of much of the New Left, Dallas Smythe (1977) sought to correct the drift into Left idealism. For Smythe, the first question Marxists should ask themselves is, what economic function does the communications industry fulfil? The answer to this question can only be supplied once we grasp the economic rather than ideological dimension of capitalist cultural forms. According to Smythe, time under monopoly capitalism is separated between work (time spent in the production of commodities) and leisure (time which is sold to advertisers). Audiences are bought by advertisers on the basis of income, age, sex, ethnic and class specifications. Hence the work performed by the audience is to learn how to buy the goods on offer, thereby decisively shaping ‘free time’ in the interests of consumer capitalism. The economic foundation of contemporary culture, he concludes, remains a considerable ‘blind spot’ for Western Marxism.

While I want to return to these issues later, Dallas Smythe surely bends the stick too far. As Graham Murdock (1978) points out, Dallas Smythe considerably overstates the importance of the selling of audiences to advertisers. There remain a number of cultural industries such as cinema, popular music, comic books and popular fiction, not to mention public service broadcasting, with only a minimal dependence on advertising revenue. In addition, mass communication theory not only needs to provide a critical analysis of how the dual media of money and power help shape the institutions of communication, but how these structures systematically distort society’s understanding of itself. To theoretically grasp the execution of mass forms of culture one needs to integrate an analysis of institutional power with issues related to media content and bias (GUMG) and the discursive and psychic formation of human identity (Hall). Williams, the GUMG and Hall provide essential contributions to ongoing debates between social theory and mass communications, without ever producing such a synthesis.

Raymond Williams:
Communications and the Long Revolution

The work of Raymond Williams remains one of the richest sources of cultural criticism available within British Marxism. The corpus of his writing contains substantial contributions to literary and cultural criticism and political theory, as well as mass communications. In this Williams is part of a wider change evident within Left thinking in postwar society. Along with other writers on the New Left, Williams is aware that the economism evident within Marxist thought inadequately accounts for the growth in the importance of democratic and commercial cultures. In addition, artistic practice severed from the social conditions of its production and reception by traditional criticism, was thought to contain a certain critical immanence. These concerns prompted a lifelong project that would seek to form an understanding of ordinary and aesthetic cultures, and in turn their relationship with social institutions.

His first major work, Culture and Society (1961), probably remains his best known. The term ‘culture’, within Williams’s presentation, is discussed by a historically sequenced collection of writers ranging from Burke to Orwell. Williams aims to argue, by critically tracing through a predominantly Romantic tradition around ‘culture’, that the term potentially retains both immanent and critical uses. Williams in effect merges what might be called an anthropological and an artistic definition of culture. For Williams, ‘culture’ signified the dual meaning of a ‘way of life’ (Williams, 1961: 137) and notions of human perfection that provide a critical court of appeal (Williams, 1961: 65–84). Williams writes:

A culture has two aspects; the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. We use the culture in these two senses; to mean a whole way of life – the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning – the special process of discovery and creative effort. (Williams, 1988: 4)

Williams’s book, The Long Revolution (1965), develops a more institutionally grounded approach to cultural transformations, while retaining some of his earlier leanings. The long revolution refers to the slow historical unfolding of three interrelated changes taking place in the economic, political and cultural spheres since the industrial revolution. The gradual broadening of access to the education system, along with the growth of the reading public, the popular press, and the use of standard English, provides the backcloth for a culture in common. The dialectic of the long revolution is constituted through the contradiction between the forces of production that had been liberated by capitalism and the communicative nature of human beings. The social reproduction of dominating social relations between capital and labour prevents cultural forms from being utilised in an emancipatory fashion. The realisation of the essentially learning and creative nature of the people could only be captured through a socialist transformation of society (Williams, 1965: 118). The problem Williams faced was that the labour movement, whom he had identified as the central agency for change, had become incorporated into the capitalist system.

The aims of the long revolution can best be highlighted by referring back to Williams’s dual definition of culture. First Williams wished to create the material conditions for an enlightened, educated, participatory democracy. This could only be carried through once the social relationships within economic, political and cultural institutions had been radically democratised. In addition, Williams argued that ‘our’ literary cultural heritage and new forms of cultural production should be opened up to the critical practice of everyone, rather than restricted to a privileged few. The dominant values of capitalism sought to promote a shallow, synthetic popular culture that either relegated ‘serious’ art to the margins, or reinforced the elitist notion that high culture ideologically belonged to the upper classes (Williams, 1962: 115). This particular perspective represents a reworking of F.R. Leavis’s notion that in all historical periods it was left to a minority to maintain, criticise and contribute to ‘culture’.¹ This is an important change of emphasis for Williams, as he had previously accepted the necessary role that certain cultural elites would play in preserving a literary culture from ‘mechanical ways of thought, feeling and conjecture’ (Williams, 1952). But Williams’s literary origins do play an important role in shaping his disposition towards the media of mass communication.

In his little classic, Communications (1962), he continues with many of the themes of the long revolution. This text was originally written by Williams to initiate discussion on future policy directions within the Labour party. Although critical debate on the future of the mass media failed to materialise, the book remains an outstanding example of what I shall call democratic realism. In proposing to reform society’s communicative structure, Williams desired to create the conditions for free, open and authentic expression. To do this one has to provide artists, commentators, performers and reviewers with a social setting that ensures their autonomous control over the means of expression. Williams offers an ‘ideal type’ of free communication when he writes:

A good society depends upon the free availability of facts and opinions, and on the growth of vision and consciousness – the articulation of what men have actually seen and known and felt. Any restriction of the freedom of individual contribution is actually a restriction of the resources of society. (Williams, 1962: 1245)

Williams outlines four brief models against which this ideal type is to be tested: (1) authoritarian, (2) paternal, (3) commercial and (4) democratic.

An authoritarian communicative institution simply transmits the instructions of ruling groups. Inherent within this approach is the undertaking as a matter of policy to exclude other or conflicting perspectives. Here Williams has in mind the mass communication systems of ‘actually existed socialism’. The transmission of electronically coded messages and the print media were largely centrally controlled by the state, which tightly restricted the expression of dissent within civil society. As Williams clearly perceived, Marxism’s emphasis upon property relations within the economic sphere led to a theoretical neglect of the relations between state and civil society. This strain within Marxism can be connected to the tendency in practice to replace civil society with the state (Keane, 1988). Any radical democratic politics worth the name, Williams insisted, would have to protect the free circulation of information from state surveillance.

Paternal social structures, on the other hand, are oriented around the desire to protect and guide, rather than the assertion of the right to rule. For example, the BBC was built upon the ideal of the maintenance of high standards, which largely reflected the ethos and taste of England’s dominant social groups. Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), defended this approach by arguing that a more democratic media would inevitably lead to lower standards. According to Williams, the Reithian public service model had an inbuilt tendency to view the people as masses (Williams, 1962: 108). The expression ‘the masses’ is used to signify a way of thinking about the people that denies their cultural plurality. Reith’s view of public service sought to educate the people into a rich, high culture away from homogeneous Americanised popular culture. For Williams, Reithian paternalism had much in common with the commercial culture it was meant to oppose. Whereas the market sought to target consumer types, the reproduction of high and low categories within paternal approaches divides ‘our culture into separate areas with no bridges between them’ (Williams, 1962: 108). Williams’s revised version of the public service model would attempt to embrace a more pluralistic model of the people, while institutionally underpinning democratic communicative relations.

Commercial cultural industries offer a certain amount of freedom in that a plurality of cultural forms can be bought and sold in the marketplace. But, as Williams (1980) makes clear in an essay on capitalism and advertising, commercial systems often obscure the distinction between human wants for goods and services and the need for democratic selfgovernment. Advertising is able to play this particular ideological trick by offering ‘magical’ solutions to the more authentic problems of ‘death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect’ (Williams, 1980: 190). In addition, commercial structures promote a further illusion in that certain exclusions are built into capitalistic methods of cultural distribution. That is, commercial forms of cultural dissemination inevitably exclude works unlikely to sell quickly and reap a profitable return.

The democratic model of cultural production has much in common with the commercial system outlined above, given its emphasis upon free communication. However, according to Williams, certain rights of free communication should be insulated and protected from the dominance of capital in the marketplace. Williams proposes that the media of mass communications be taken out of the control of commercial and paternal institutions, such as those underwritten by capital and the state, and both democratised and decentralised. Once institutionally separate from the government and the market this would provide cultural contributors with the social context for free expression. Open democratic forms of ‘talk’ would have no necessary end point, given that all of those who contribute must remain open to ‘challenge and review’ (Williams, 1962: 134). This utopia of free communication, Williams believed, would undoubtedly promote stronger community relations and bonds. The reform of the national system of communication would also allow a democratic public forum for the presentation of previously excluded experiences and perspectives. Here in particular, Williams had in mind an emergent generation of artists, such as Tony Garnett, Ken Loach and John McGrath, all of whom were developing a new realist structure of feeling within cinema and television. Through the progression of the long revolution such contributors would eventually displace the superficiality of much popular culture. In short, Williams felt strongly that the new forms of communication (press, television, radio, cinema) could produce a democratic climate for serious engagement and the genuine attention to human needs.

Williams’s writing can be described as democratic realism not only because of his commitment to the institutional changes outlined in the long revolution, but also because of his defence of a realist aesthetic. However, unlike Lukacs’s famous remarks on realism and art, Williams does not argue that the social should be represented as though it were a reflection in a mirror (Jameson, 1977). For Williams, as we shall see in his later writing on cultural materialism, artistic practices do not reflect reality, but actively produce it through material and symbolic forms. Cultural production can be described as realist through what Williams describes as an ‘attitude to reality’ (Williams, 1989a: 228). The cultural contributor should make an attempt to capture ‘what is really going on’, while seeking to connect with the structure of feeling of the audience. For the democratic realist, communication can be conceived as successful only if social processes have been presented truthfully, and in a way in which the audience can understand. For example, Spike Lee’s recent film Malcolm X could be described as a form of democratic realism. The film portrays the radical black civil rights leader Malcolm X within a historical framework centred around black people’s struggle against racism. The narrative is evidently an attempt to symbolically reinterpret ‘real’ social processes, and to connect with the sensibilities of modern audiences. Such an approach should strive towards what Williams and Orrom (1954) call ‘total expression’. Total expression is achieved when the audience leaves a performance, or puts down a novel, with an idea of what the author intended. This is not achieved either by the denial of the importance of specific cultural forms and styles, or by retreat into a purely aesthetic disposition on the part of the artist. Instead the cultural producer is compelled to work within certain conventions and structures of feeling that best enable them to communicate with others.

Cultural Materialism and Hegemony

Raymond Williams’s later writing struck up a closer engagement with Western Marxism and post-structuralism. In response to these two theoretical trends he cultivated a more material account of cultural processes. The theory of cultural materialism was intended to critique Marxist notions of base and superstructure along with the reifying forms of abstraction he found evident in certain strands of post-structuralism (Williams, 1979b: 27).

Theoretical arguments around base and superstructure have emerged as one of the central problems in Marxist theory. This notion is usually taken to mean that the base (economy) has an explanatory priority over, or sets external limits upon, the superstructure (cultural and political institutions). Most recent Marxist analysis on this subject, usually inspired by Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1977, 1984) and Poulantzas (1978), seeks to argue that the superstructure has at least a relative autonomy from the economic base. Norman Geras (1987) best describes this phenomenon in his polemic against Post-Marxism. Geras usefully asks us to figuratively reimagine the base and superstructure model by picturing the author chained to a post. The chain does not prevent Geras from playing the violin or watching television, but it does restrain him from going shopping or attending a jazz concert. In this respect, Geras chained to a post, could be said to have a relative autonomy similar to that of the superstructure in relation to the base. Williams, on the other hand, and despite his closer association with Marxism, remains sceptical of the base and superstructure metaphor. Such an argument (1) reduces the superstructure to a reflection of the base; (2) abstracts from historical process; (3) characterises human needs as economic rather than social; and (4) isolates cultural questions from issues related to economic organisation. As I have outlined these arguments elsewhere (Stevenson, 1995), I shall concentrate upon Williams’s first and primary objection.

Williams claims that to label a phenomenon superstructural is to assign it to a lesser degree of reality. The superstructure, in this reading, becomes a dependent realm of ideas that reflects the material economic base. The diminishing of the superstructure to an idealist realm runs counter to Williams’s desire to make cultural practices ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Marxism and Mass Communication Research
• 2 Habermas, Mass Culture and the Public Sphere
• 3 Critical Perspectives within Audience Research
• 4 Marshall McLuhan and the Cultural Medium
• 5 Baudrillard’s Blizzards
• 6 New Media and the Information Society
• 7 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index